• 1 •
It was a night flight to Second City, six hours.
Dawn was coming up when we flew in over a new wide landscape. All night, off and on, there had been splinterings of lights below. I’d seen them because I couldn’t sleep, unlike most of the other passengers comatosely puffing and sighing around me. Now and then flyer masts gleamed up, too, like thin towers from some epic tale. But terrain hadn’t been visible.
In dawnlight I received a sense of hugeness. I’d never seen much—any—open country before. The land looked rough and tumbled, chasms, ravines, plunging to glitter-threads of river. Trees clung in sprays on rocksides, or pointed up in the dark arrow shapes of pines. Then the sky cooled and clouds lifted off, and I saw, distant yet omnipresent, the skyscrapers of mountains. You could just make out, even in the last brass burst of summer, snow on their highest peaks.
After that we were in over the city, the unknown one, and my stomach lurched, and not only from our reducing speed.
I’d come here on a compulsive whim. What the hell was I going to do now?
At the flyer station we all lined up and traipsed through the border controls, some mechanical and some human. I began to think my temporary ID, legally bought before leaving, would have something wrong with it. But it didn’t. They asked me why I was there.
“Chance of work,” I said.
They didn’t trouble about me after that. I could tell the guy who’d asked had concluded I was a hooker, useful anywhere.
Out on the flyer platform it was already hot. The alien city looked like any city, like the one I’d left last night.
Where was I headed? What was my plan?
I felt disoriented and anxious, but it was too late for that. And anyhow, you get used to knowing fear will rarely help, if you’re one of the subsistence poor. I toted my bag, left the platform, and went and had a bagel.
And outside the cafe, when I re-emerged, was a visual giving the local news. I stood watching it, in case there was anything on it. Anything about him. But nothing was. And a voice in my head told me, Maybe that old man at E.M. lied. Or was nuts. How could I have been so sure the information from him was reliable? Because, I thought, it had made sense. META was some takeover from E.M., and here was one more senatorial, governmental, or big-business plot….
I walked up through the city. Already I could see one of the better areas ahead. They had made that easy. It was a landmark, built up high and visible from the lower streets, and frosted with sparkle, just like those distant mountains. Was this what the crawling poor were meant to respect? It reminded me of a Heaven on a Hill, or castle, in reproduced Medieval pictures, a structure raised well above the peasant village that served it. And the peasants, along with gazing at this wondrous glory, would also have to watch out for marauding castle knights or chastising angels.
I climbed the sloping streets, the flights of stairs, and rode the moving ones, towards it.
At the base of Heaven lay a park of sculpted trees, fountains, flowers of incredible hothouse colors. Tame wildlife sprinted everywhere—squirrels, racoons, birds—not shy, running up to visitors to be fed. There were strollers there doing just that. But to the squirrel that weightlessly galloped up to me, I had to apologize, and it gave me quite a sniffy look before bolting up a tree.
Beyond this park expanded the shining goal I’d seen from below.
Domes like bubbles rested on milk-white walls, amid the smooth flash of polarized crystal. Behind the buildings the sky and the miles-off mountains, the real ones, fenced the horizon. The rest of the city lay far beneath.
There were high electric gates, but they stood open. Only a couple of robot patrollers were flitting up and down an avenue lined with blue cedars. A notice in dayneon gems by the gates read
There was no point in barging through the inviting entrance. I’d be stopped fairly quickly, and interrogated as to why I was there, like in all those foyers by the New River.
Someone, though, was coming, walking
Red hair. Skin like—
I forgot to breathe. A sort of blood-rush blanked my vision a moment. When it cleared, the figure was much nearer, only ten, twelve yards away. And I could see it wasn’t—wasn’t him. But it was—
…Silver’s sister came through. Her auburn hair… she looked at me, smiling. I knew what she’d say. “I’m Silver. That is S-I-L-V-E-R which stands for Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot.”
The female figure moved like a dancer. Boneless and serpentine—and strong. The blood-red hair fell over one shoulder and down to her waist, strands of it powdered a hard, scorching gold. She wore a snake’s garment, too, silver, like her skin, fronded over by violet jewels and coils of drops like rain or diamonds. Beauty? They invented the word just for her. For her and for her kind. Yeah, it
And, as Jane described, this one was smiling, right at me. And now she, too, had reached the gate of Heaven, the castle-in-the-clouds, but she was inside, and I was outside, and those few steps shut me out of Paradise forever.
“Hi,” she said to me.
Idiotically I responded. “Hi.”
“Were you wanting to come in?”
An Angel of the Portal. Or St. Peter. I shook my head, dumbest of the dumbest. Then the words opened my mouth and darted out. “Are you a silver?”
“Sure,” she said. “My name’s Glaya. Registration G. A. 2.”
Her eyes were the color of emeralds under pale blue glass. That was different. Before, their eyes—all the silvers—had been amber. Her body was perfect, her legs long, her feet in high-heeled, high-strapped sandals, silver on gold—on silver.
Another difference. They hadn’t limited her name, as had been done the first time. No, now she had a proper name. Glaya.
“If you would like to see more of me,” she said, smiling, sensual and pleased, liking my interest, blossoming in it to ever greater unlikely heights of loveliness, “contact META and repeat my registration.”
I said flatly, “I’m not M-B, actually. And anyhow, I wouldn’t be able to afford you, would I?”
She flirted her eyes in a way you couldn’t ignore, M-B or not. She said amicably, “Well, if anything changes there, maybe then. Have a sweet day.”
And she flowed by me like a metals and jewelry stream, some edge of her clinging garment somehow brushing me, her perfume stroking my face like a caressing hand. Her finger- and toenails were, each one, the color of an individual fire.
