Metallic Love

I felt weak, as if I’d run twenty miles, or lain sick a long while.

One of the robot avenue patrollers had now slid to the gates.

“Who is here?” it asked.

“No one,” I said.

“You have no business here?”

“No.”

“Please descend to the lower level,” it suggested.

My own suggestion was less urbane. “Please fuck yourself.”

I saw the vispos that evening. They were all over the city, came out of nowhere, as adverts usually do. People were staring at them, or ignoring them. How could they have ignored them? The earth rocks and you are standing, clinging to the edge of nothing, and you don’t notice at all? I guess that is life.

I recall the first vispo I ever saw in the other city, with the group, when I was about eight. Posters that sound and move, almost real. Samuel slapped me for looking.

Now the slap came again, but another kind.

I stood on a street and saw this pyrotechnic display rise like a phoenix out of the dusty lower city.

The experience of the century! META presents The Show. You know we have them—you know you can see them—even touch— Why wait? Face your future with META!

A woman appeared on the vis-screen. No, a robot appeared. Not Glaya, who was a silver. This was a copper, with skin like creamy electric sunfall, and hair like wheat. She wore a snakeskin of topaz and amethyst, and was smiling her ice-white teeth. She imitated a singing bird, trills of liquid strangeness—a canary? A man took her place, golden skinned, black-haired. He was an acrobat, turning the most unbelievable cartwheels in midair. He had green eyes. And behind him another man arrived, black as jet—a new range, as a banner across the screen told me, asterion metal, from the Asteroid itself—his hair was black also, but long and plaited with gold, and his eyes were rimmed with gold, and he was dressed in black scales. And there was a woman of black asterion, in transparent white, standing, it seemed, in fire that the man had somehow conjured for her. And then a man with silver skin, with amber eyes, with burgundy hair. They had all spoken or sung or fluently called something, or moved in some unexpected and marvelous contortion…. This one, the silver one, was playing a mandolin, softly singing a descant to the music.

Near me, one of my fellow watchers said, “Are they machines?”

“No, just computer effects,” said another voice. “It’s some movie.”

The little crowd was drifting away.

I stared up into the filmic eyes of the silver man. It was him. Or would I know? He wore a shirt like bright coins. Even through the visuality, his eyes seemed to see me.

Then the screen blinked and switched, and I was shown instead a huge car rampaging over desert. Another advertising vispo for another company.

Where was The Show? Had I grasped that? Yes. Some recreational public garden. META had organized it. META, the firm of the future we must face.

Had it been him? He was part of a range. Originally there had been three sets of three, hadn’t there. In his set another male, a female. But now? They had extended the prototypes, changed them. A black range had been activated, asterion metal, to go with the golds, silvers, and coppers. And eye colors in some cases altered. Blue- green-eyed Glaya… Had she been in the vispo? Yes, I had seen her, but couldn’t recapture what she had done…. And a female gold, too—jumping high, spinning…

And already they were being hired out. For that was why Glaya had been on Montis Heights. Some rich female M-B client, or a rich straight man, wanting her.

Maybe they all… all of them… already.

They were all up for grabs. For grabs.

Now the other vispo was showing a new line in SOTA VLO’s, the vehicles springing, with absurd weightlessness, out of a cornfield, above which halifropters chugged and buzzed like flies.

The apartment house on West Larch was like a million others, but it had a veranda out front, which was strung with pink neon lamps. In the dusk, my fellow house-residents sat about there and eyed me like hyenas.

They gazed even more dangerously when I emerged again an hour later.

I had used the tenants-only house-shower, where all the stalls were empty that evening. I’d washed my hair. I had a single “good” dress, found in a third-owner store one evening of extravagance a year ago. It was white Egyptian silk, or so the label said, shot with faint flakes of gilt. I’d gone without dinner for two weeks to make up the money. Never knew why I bought it, as if, in the end, there would be a reason. It clung, the dress, just right, not tightly but describingly, and it was sleeveless and low of neck, and the hem—because short dresses are in—was just above the knee. And there were the silver shoes Margoh had given me, too. I was made-up, all my twenty nails painted palest coffine. And my hair hung down my back.

One thing I hadn’t done. I hadn’t read any of Jane’s Book. I remember Grandfather, always with a little pocket Bible. We only got rationed bits of it, but he constantly read it to himself, poring over the tiny print with a magnifying glass that seemed to swell his red eye into that of some terrifying outer-space creature. Jane’s Book was, I guess, like a Bible for me. Though I hadn’t read it for years, it always went along with me. It was the first thing I’d take out in a new apartment, and hide. This time I’d worked a loose panel out of the back of the rickety closet, and put the Book, still in its waterproof overcoat, in there, held against the wall. Then I glued the panel into place. But I hadn’t read a line. Hadn’t even undone the cover.

Someone whistled, raucously approving, as I swung off down West Larch towards Main Boulevard.

It was full dark by then. The moon was up over Second City, faded by streetlamps, and the Asteroid was lurking in the east, the baleful eye of God’s Destroying Angel.

They stopped running the subways after the first quakes, before I’d even been born. But Second City had an overland system.

I got on the train bound for Russia—struck by the European name of the district. That’s where the public gardens were. The Show.

The car was full, standing room only. Were all these other people going there, just like me?

I stood rocking, holding onto the strap, watching lighted stations sizzle by, the train not bothering to stop now that it was full, and no one’s coin in the machine had showed they wanted those places. In all this crowd, would I even be able to see any stage, let alone anyone on it?

The train’s mechanism was noisy, but I caught snatches of talk around me.

“They banned them years ago, those things. Now it’s been regularized. You can always tell one of them. Couldn’t mistake it for anything human. They ain’t ever allowed normal work.”

“I saw the advert on the VS. Oh, I’ve been dreaming of him ever since.”

“Me, too. I love the black guy—”

“Ain’t no guy, you dope.”

“Guess not.”

“You’re crazy. You wanna do that—with that?”

“They can do anything.”

“They’re built for entertainment and sex. But they’re expensive.”

“Two thousand I.M.U. for one half hour. So I heard.”

Surreal.

Had Jane ever felt this way, lurched and pulled forward, part of a curious herd, towards this unobtainable yet obsessive Grail? But Jane wasn’t me. She, I knew, was uncertain and timid, with a brave, steadfast core. I’m hard as nails, Jell-O on the inside, shivering away under the armor. Spineless, probably.

The motion of the overland train made me queasy, and I was glad when it stopped and we all got out.

The next bit reminded me of pilgrims in some Babel tract illustration, approaching a holy shrine, the way the great crowd I was now a tiny part of poured eagerly up the sloping street towards the powerfully lit walls of the Katerina Gardens. The street illumination was all glowing beautifully here, not a single pole not working, and the wall-tops were garlanded with strings of lamps. Every so often a shower of colored rays frayed up into the air over