Metallic Love

What do you do about a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end—and one day you find that the ending has altered—into a second beginning?

• 1 •

You’re not going to like me.

I apologize for that.

It was Jane; she was the one you liked. I liked her, too.

And I—am not Jane. Not in any single way. But one.

And that one single way is perhaps the only thing you and I also have in common.

Because if we liked Jane, we loved Silver.

Didn’t we.

The temptation is to start this just as Jane did, with a description of my early life, and where I lived. Jane’s mother was rich, and some of what Jane described might have been predictable—the travels, the house in the clouds. Even the way Jane came into existence—that was, selected, carried physically for five months, taken out very carefully, brought to full-term, and then nursed by machines—the Precipta method. But I was just born. I was a mistake. My mother made that very clear, apparently, when she dumped me ten months later on Grandfather.

I say Grandfather. He wasn’t. He was the man my mother had herself lived with when she was a child. He had sort of brought her up, but then turned her out on the street when she was fifteen. He was a believer in the Apocalyte religion, and was pretty strict, and my mother was always in trouble of some sort—drink, drugs, legal and otherwise, men. When she gave me to him, she contemptuously told him, “Maybe you can do better with this one.” The Apocalytes were “charitable.” So they took me in. That was the first eleven, twelve years of my life, then, that gray-white wreck of a house on Babel Boulevard.

It was quite tough there. First the babies’ room, which I don’t remember. Then about twenty girls all ages in one dank dormitory. The roof leaked in the rain, and in summer you could hardly sleep for the scratching and shuffling of rats in the walls. Three grim, frugal meals a day in the communal hall. Lots of prayers. God was a wonderful being who wanted us to love him and sent us not only irresistible temptations we must ignore, but horrible mishaps—sickness, poverty, earthquake, and fire—to see if we would still do it. But if we did fall out of love with God, God got upset, and then he would make us burn in Hell forever. I swallowed all this along with the awful food. What else did I know? After all, the Big One was coming soon, the Day of Wrath, when the Asteroid, captured between Earth and moon about two decades before, would crash into the Earth and destroy us all, which is what had nearly happened previously. Whenever we strayed, Grandfather would take us up on the dodgy roof by night and show us the Asteroid, rising blue-green and molten over the slums. “Behold the eye of God’s Destroying Angel,” announced Grandfather. Hey, guys, you bet we tried to be good.

There were tremors once or twice, too, (quite a bad one when I was five) to help remind us. Quake-sites still existed all over the city, except in the richest areas, where they had been put right after the initial disturbance.

I suppose, growing up with this, I got used to it. Life was simple. Obey Grandfather, love God, wait for the Day of Wrath when we—the righteous ones—would be swept to Paradise on golden wings. Did I believe in Paradise? Perhaps. No, not really. Strange, maybe. I believed in all the bad things—Hell, punishment, an insecure and vengeful deity—but not in that.

There was a much larger earthquake when I was nine. It happened just before dawn. I remember waking—cold, there was snow on the ground—to hear the usual small tremor stuff, creakings, grunts of timber and brick, the shift of powder-dust dislodged and falling—and that rumble under the bed like a truck was revving up right outside. Oh, it’s a tremor, I thought, and nearly went back to sleep. But then the rumble rose to a bellow, the mattress leapt, and part of the wonky ceiling dropped into the dorm and landed with a crash between the beds. Something even hit my legs—bounced off—I wasn’t hurt. The girls started screaming then. Me, too. We pelted out of the room and tried to go downstairs, but some of the staircase had come apart. So someone said we should crawl up the swaying upper steps to the other end of the roof, the sounder reinforced area over Grandfather’s room.

When we’d gotten up there—I’ll never forget the roar and boom that was surging out of a city gone almost black but for the sprays of appalling lights like fireworks, which were flyer cables snapping, and power and electricity wires breaking and catching on fire. And next it was brighter because the sun was coming up, but also a couple of buildings were alight. Was it now? Was this it?

Then everything settled with a disgusting grinding crump. And Grandfather appeared up the fire escape, which was somehow still in one piece. Plaster dust in his iron hair only made him more apocalyptic. He led us at once in prayers of thankfulness to God, who had spared us even while he chastised the unholy city.

We were put on the lower floor for months, above the boys’ dormitory, where there were only three or four weedy male kids, until some members of another house of the Order finally came and fixed the stairs and the roof a bit. Then we moved back to our own dorm. We couldn’t sleep for a long time—too scared—but we were mostly children, and in the end we did. The aftershocks were slight, but a great deal of damage had been done in the city from the new quake.

A week after the quake anyhow, I was ten. My birthday was marked by a solemn blessing, and I had the special birthday privilege of washing the others’ feet.

It was next year that I found the Book.

It was my week for washing dishes and I was down in the basement, doing just that. Outside it was dull and close, thundery, and through the very tops of the windows all I could see was a jagged line of brassy overcast above a broken wall. The water heater didn’t work properly (not auto), and half the time I had to boil jugs on the nonauto electric stove. I was very hot and yawning so much with tiredness and boredom, I was nearly insane.

Then, crossing back to the stove for yet another jug, I trod on a slab of floor that shifted under me. I yelled, but there was no one else to hear. I thought the floor was giving way and I was going to fall down into a (Hellish?) abyss. But it wasn’t that at all. When I righted myself, I saw that only a small square part of the floor had tilted, revealing a small dark slot beneath.

I—and countless others—had stumped over that floor a thousand times and never disturbed it. But one of the recent minor tremors must have loosened something, some glue or padding that had been used to close the little hatchway tight. And now it had only taken my narrow just-eleven-years-old foot, with about sixty-six pounds behind it, to tip the hatch open.

Of course I kneeled down and peered in. I didn’t see what was there for a minute, because it was wrapped in a worn dark scarf. When finally I realized and pulled it out, the scarf itself tore at once in a ragged hole. I’d heard of people hiding money in old houses—obviously not I.M.U. cards, but nickels and dimes, or whole fortunes in antique gold. My heart stood still, and when I saw what was wrapped in the scarf was only a battered paper book, I felt a wrench of bitter disappointment. Maybe that was itself my first true whiff of rebellion—for I know, if it had been money, I’d never have told the Apocalytes. To them, to have wealth of any sort was just one more sinful Hell-deserving giving-in-to-temptation.

The cover of the book was plain resined black paper. Not knowing what else to do with it, I opened it. Which is what you do with a book, except I’d never had a chance to open anything but an improving religious tract. (Even the Bible was generally kept from us by Grandfather, who only occasionally read us alarming snippets.)

And the book’s title seemed depressingly like those of some of the lesser religious works: Jane’s Story. Under that, however, was this: Published by Catch-Us-If-You-Can Press. Be advised, to possess this book is to risk intimidation and possible prosecution by the City Senate. Do not read this book in any public place—you have been warned!

I sat on my heels, gaping at the book, and in the background the jug was boiling dry on the stove.

Then I heard someone descending the stairs. I could tell from the flump of the footfall it was Big Joy, the oldest girl, who was in charge of the rest of us.

I found I’d gotten up and pushed the book in the pocket of my dishwashing overall. I kicked the hatch-thing back into place and ran for the jug. When Big Joy came in, I was lugging it over to the sink like a virtuous little Apocalyte. Joy was a bully, and perhaps, if it had been one of the others, I might have shared my discovery. I’ll never be sure.

Someone else stumbled on the hatch, and hurt her ankle, a few days later. Obviously there was nothing in there by then.

Rather curiously I’d thought the book was ancient. (Like the fortune I’d hoped for?) But naturally it had been published by an underground press only a few years before I found it. I assume someone from outside, but still from our own beloved Order—one of the ones, probably, who came to fix the stair and roof—managed to set it in under the basement floor on Babel Boulevard. Either they were hiding it for their own safety, or they were passing on the Book, covertly, knowing that sometime it would again come to light, and then another person might read it. I think there was a lot of that with Jane and Silver’s Book, as maybe you know. A whole kind of secret club, reading it, whispering about it, moving it along for others to read and whisper over. If you’re reading this now, I guess you were part of that shining, shadowy chain.

I read it, too. Cover to cover.

What do I say to you, then, about reading that Book?

What would you say to me?

But maybe I presume. Maybe you didn’t.

Okay. Plotline: There’s this girl of sixteen (Jane), rich and naive, and under the thumb of her tyrannical, bloody, mind-fucking bitch of a mother—only Jane innocently doesn’t know how terrible Mom is—but one day the girl meets a robot. Now we’ve had robots for ages, right. They do most of the jobs people used to—and so create a permanent underclass of unemployed subsistence plebs, like me. But anyway, we’re accustomed to machines, and they are simply machines—boxes, tubes on wheels, faceplates that look as real as a badly made statue. Only this one is different. He’s part of a new line designed for pleasure—of all and every sort. And he looks just like a man—a beautiful one. He’s tall, strong, elegant, and handsome. A musician, a lover—and his skin is silver, his hair russet, his eyes amber. He truly does appear and feel—if you touch him, which is all you want to do—human. But he is to humanity what sunlight is to a low-wattage bulb. He is—indescribably—wonderful.

And Jane falls in love with him. And, knowing that no human could be allowed to love a robot—still she can’t stop herself. So she leaves Dire Momma, and goes to live with Silver in the pits and craters of the slums. And he makes her life heaven on earth. And for the first time ever, she’s—happy.

But then the firm that created him calls back all the robots of that special super-deluxe line. Something wrong with them, they say. But we all know, we who are reading Jane’s Story of Silver, that all that’s wrong in Silver’s case, is he’s too right.

She tries her damnedest to save him. Gets betrayed—her evil little friends, Jason and Medea, her lunatic friend Egyptia. Life intervenes—earthquake, muddle. He’s caught. They dismantle him. They kill him.

And she…

Jane tried to commit suicide. Didn’t make it. But then she received a message from beyond the gate of death. Without a doubt it’s him. He tells her things only she could know. Proves he is still alive after death… somewhere, out of the world. And proves, too, by doing the rest, that inside the robot body there had been a soul.

So then Jane tries to go on living, living both her own life and his, knowing that one day, far, far off (for the rich can survive to be a hundred and fifty years of age) she will see him again.

That’s the plot in the most crass terms, of Jane and Silver’s Story.

Well. It changed my life.

I used to read it in the eye-aching half-dark of stubs of candles—in the basement at one A.M., the yard where the chickens were kept, on one of the lavatories, with people banging on the door and me calling, “I got sick!” and retching to show I needed to stay there. Chasing the truth of love.

Oh, Silver.

Silver.

When I finished that Book, I started again at the beginning.

I read it twelve times, that year between eleven and twelve.

Was apprehended only once.

“What are you doing reading, girl? You should be at prayers.” “Sorry. Only this—” proffering the religious leaflet in which I had wrapped Jane’s Book—and getting away with only a slap across my head.

I loved him. I loved him so. And through his strength and compassionate sweetness, I learned a lesson none of them had ever tried to teach me. That God might not be fire and hell and horror. That God was love. And so sometimes, here in this vicious world, love was to be found, too.

That was the lesson.

At twelve years old I had it—by heart.

• 2 •

We went into the city quite often. An aspect of the Apocalytes’ “mission” was to knock on doors or talk to people on the street and try and pin them down to a long old natter about the deity—i.e. how rotten the world was, how sinful they were, and that ours was the only means of salvation.

After the quake when I was nine/ten, we’d even made a bit of progress. A couple of scared citizens signed up for our regime of total self-denial and utter hatred of all physical enjoyments. No drink, no cigarines, no painkillers even—sex only in the effort to construct one more little Apocalyte. But strangely, not everyone was keen.

I recall a woman saying exasperatedly, as our group hemmed her in at the corner of Lilac and Dyle, “But Jesus Christ drank wine!” “A mistranslation,” announced our group leader, a big bald man called Samuel. “What was he drinking, then?” demanded the woman, trying to push us away. “A type of herbal tea,” declared Samuel knowingly. But the woman managed to escape just after this, and bolted off up the street—even grabbing others en route and alerting them to our menacing presence.

As a kid I, too, evidently, accepted all this. Along with being hauled about with the adults. They felt, Grandfather’s troops, that having a few young children with the preaching band might both attract custom and deter abuse. But frequently it didn’t. “Eff off, you buggers!” was a common greeting to us as we trudged the streets and markets.

Very occasionally, we even penetrated some of the richer areas, up by the New River, for example (yes, where Jane’s M-B friend Clovis once lived), or Honeybloom Condominiae.

Here the speaking door-mechanisms themselves saw us off with threats of mild electric shocks.

Why did we do it at all? Hope, I suppose, sprang eternal that even among the rich and therefore contentedly life-loving, we might get a bite. We never did that I ever saw.

However, I, in this way, did see a lot of the city. I learned its ups and downs, geographic and financial. By the summer when I was twelve years old, I knew my way around.

That morning, I’d been given the chore of making the beds, which included Big Joy’s, Samuel’s, and even Grandfather’s.

I had done it all before, and only been punched by Big Joy, who hit me more for the virtue of refining me through blows than because I’d messed her blankets up.

In Grandfather’s room the door had a lock. And Grandfather was away at some street-preaching. I locked the door and sat down on his unmade bed, and started reading Jane’s Story for the thirteenth time.

She writes:

“Hallo,” he said.

My own eyes swam, my own heart pounded like the servogenerator in the basement, which never properly worked. My mouth was dry.

Suddenly I thought, I don’t want any more of this—other stuff.

That was all.

I thrust the book in the pocket of my everyday dress, and left the unmade bed of Grandfather. I unlocked the door, and went out, down the stairs to the front of the house.

No one stopped me. I didn’t take a single other thing with me.

I think, in fact, I just believed I’d risk a day on my own in the city, and lie about it when I got back. Lie—and be disbelieved, and thrashed with the leather belt kept for such purposes.

I think I did reckon I’d have to come back.

Outside, it was a hot summer day. The streets smelled of corn gasoline, the inferior gas most used in the slums of every city from there to Mexico. Also of faint cooking, and of scald-green weeds baking in the pavement cracks. Sounds—distant cars, flyers far overhead on the whistling wires, voices, pigeons.

It was as if I never heard anything before.

The sky was white-blue. It was about nine A.M. I walked along the street and turned left towards Hammit and the day market.

When I reached the market I went on walking, straight through, frowned at now and then by uneasy, Apocalyte-recognizing traders. And then still on, into the city.

I didn’t have any money, of course. I.M.U., as we all know, is the method the rich or lucky use. A few bills and coins get pushed about in the slums. But even those were never allowed us. Grandfather and Samuel had charge of all funds.

But I never ate much, never being given much, never stayed still much, seldom being able to stay still. Walked virtually everywhere I’d ever been. As for things, I mean goods in shops and on stalls, they were as glamorously alien to me as the sky—I could look, but neither have nor touch.

I walked for nearly four hours, wandering, staring at everything, and soon I was fairly sure I, on my own, was no longer identified as anything other than an impoverished slum kid. Oh, the freedom merely of that.

The only problem was, I became furiously thirsty. That was one thing we were permitted at the house on Babel, several drinks of water from the faucet per day—though even there they’d ask you how many you’d had, if you went to the tap too often. Now, no faucet. In the windows of little shops, bottled water looked back at me with green and blue eyes. I think they were what made me so aware of the thirst—normally I could last most days with very little liquid, going for a drink only to give myself a brief break.

At last I went into one of the small stores.

“Can I have a drink of water, please?”

“Can you pay for it?” The woman balked behind the cold box with the bottles, glaring.

“No. I meant from the faucet.”

“Get out, you crazy.”

I got out.

I stood on the street, watching people going by. No one looked well-off here, but neither did they look like they were dying of thirst as I was now convinced I was.

My dreamy plan—vague enough—had been to try to locate some of the streets Jane describes in her Book. Tolerance, for example, where she and Silver lived those handful of years earlier, through fall into winter. I hadn’t so far been able to find Tolerance, in the company of the group. Nor had I ever heard anyone speak of the place. I decided then, standing parched as one more dying weed on the sidewalk, perhaps Jane had invented the name of the street. I mean—Tolerance—the one thing she and he didn’t receive.

A man brushed by me, careless. He walked into the shop with the woman and the water bottles. I watched him through the open door. He bought cheese and ham from the chill cabinet, and a bottle of beer.

When he came out, again he nearly walked right through me, but his insensitivity also extended to something else. I don’t know how it happened exactly, and for a minute I didn’t accept it had. But he dropped a coin. It was silver, and it fell brightly—there, by me. Silver. Then he ambled off and I put my foot over the silver coin.

I didn’t go back in that shop. I walked on till I found another, tiny, like a cave, off an underpass. I didn’t buy water, either, but a shiny orange can of carbonated juice.

The taste of it. I’ll never forget. Saccharine as poison, with stinging bubbles that made me cough. To me, champagne. I was drunk on it. Someone told me sternly since, a guy I dated, that I would have been thirsty again in about two minutes flat—only worse. But he was wrong.

I staggered, inebriated and lubricated, away, and spent the rest of that day still trying to find the elusive streets Jane had named, and not finding any.

About seven P.M. the sunset was powdering the buildings ruby, and the elevated at Tyrone, which still ran three times a day, was sponsoring a train across the sky, black as a dragon, with thirty glittering eyes.

I ought to go back now. Face the music and the leather belt.

But I sat down instead near the iron struts of the elevated, and watched the darkness arrive, like smoke from the setting sun. Perhaps I’d have had to go back in the end. But that was when Danny found me.

Really, I don’t want to say too much about Danny.

He was then about forty, maybe. He looked younger, but that’s all I’ll say. Just in case. What he does, you see, is illegal.

Without any hesitation, he sat down about four feet from me on the pavement. When he spoke, he took me by surprise—not only that he was talking to me, but what he said.

“See these yellow-red flowers—fireweeds. Notice how they were withered up, lying all flat on the ground? But look, now the dark’s come and it’s a bit cooler, they’re getting right up again.”

It was true. The drained weeds were standing now, their flowers at half-mast. Even as I glanced, one whole flower jerked and raised its trumpet victoriously to the neon-lit sky.

“People can be that way,” said Danny, who I didn’t yet know to be Danny. “Crush ’em—sometimes they just get back up.”

I gazed at him sidelong. Grandfather, with all his snarling about sin, had never directed that sex should be interpreted to any of us—ignorance being, seemingly, safer. Nor, therefore, had anyone warned me about men who prey on girls or children. Nevertheless, I was wary. The very fact this man had talked to me, me, less than the dust or the weeds that could rise from the dead—maybe I was cautious even of that, for was he another religious maniac?

So I didn’t answer at all.

Then he said, “I’m Danny. Who are you?” Like a kid might.

Only I wouldn’t have answered someone my own age right then, either.

He shrugged. “You’ve run away, I guess. Yeah? Some old feller mistreating you, yeah?”

Yes, I said in my skull, thinking of Grandfather with abrupt belligerence.

“Well, look here, little lady. I have a kind of little gang of girls, some of them a tad older’n you, and some your age—eleven, right?”

Wrong, I thought, twelve-years-old affronted. I said nothing.

“There’s not a lot of work you can get without your labor card, and I guess you don’t have one. But this might suit you.”

I blinked at him. Then I said softly, “What do you want me to do?”

I asked mostly in total ignorance, as I’ve explained. Yet I sounded uneasy and guarded, and he laughed.

“Hey, hey, no, I don’t mean anything like that, honey.” He shook his head, as I sat there wondering what that meant. He said, “The rich folks, they got all the robot cleaners—automatic little dinkies that run up the walls, scrub out the toilet, that kinda thing. But round here, well, we got a few people can afford a human to do all that—if’n they can’t afford an automatic. They like girls best; they like young fit girls who can do the work. Think us fellers make a mess more’n we clean up. So I’ve gotten together my gang. Fifty of ’em. Fifty-one, if you care to join. It’ll mean a bit of money. You won’t get rich. What do you say?”

Much of what I’d done on Babel Boulevard had been in the cleaning department, and I hadn’t received a quarter for it. It had had to be done for God.

Now I equated that version of God with Grandfather. An old, gaunt, ranting man with angry red eyes. The other sort of God, glimpsed by then, however obliquely, through the pages of Jane’s Book, had no face I knew. He was like the white light Jane had written about. And He didn’t need a bloody maid.

I was still cogitating, the sidewalk hard on my backside, when my stomach growled at the top of its intestinal lungs.

It startled me. The starvation-training I’d had seemed to have ensured I was never really hungry. Maybe now my body only missed its usual thin soup and half-slice of bread the Apocalytes served up at sunfall.

But Danny rose to his feet and said to me, “C’mon. I’ll buy you a hamburger.”

And in a kind of trance, like Eve enticed by the serpent to the forbidden fruit, I, too, got up and followed where he led.

This, then, was the next five years of my life.

As part of Danny’s “gang” (no, his name isn’t Danny, either), I lived in various places, always sharing with two or three other girls of the cleaning teams. We got along, or we didn’t. But there was no Big Joy. No Grandfather. No glowering, unreasonable God. (I confess, once or twice I got scared the Apocalytes might find me, drag me back. So I used to imagine I was invisible to any pursuer. I initiated a sort of mantra I’d say over and over if I felt weird, stuck hard at it. Guess it worked.)

I changed my name, too, when I was about fifteen and a half. What had I been called on Babel Boulevard? Honesty. That had been my name. Maybe why I learned so quickly to lie. However, at fifteen and a half, I altered to Loren. I’d heard it somewhere, and it made an impression. It seemed to fit me, too. A dark name like my hair, my tawny skin, which is what they used to call “olive,” my light brown eyes.

The best of Danny’s flats I stayed in was the last one, situated in a partly ruinous apartment block near the Old River. At night, bats flew out of the top stories—which was where they alone roomed. They circled and flittered round and round through the blue-going-gray dusk, and the first stars came out, pale cold-gold embers, just visible above the haze of river pollution, for this wasn’t a well-lit area.

The cleaning work was always okay. That is, it was dull and repetitive—once you’ve cleaned one really filthy apartment, you have, with a few disgusting variations, cleaned them all. None of the areas we went were rich, of course. There were a multitude of mossy, green-veined baths and cracked lavatories, carpetless stairways of broken tiles, walls mottled by damp like the pelts of leopards, and rat-riddled kitchen-hatches.

But we got paid. (Any trouble of any kind, there was always backup from Danny’s male contingent.) And sometimes, off the nastier employers, we took the odd goody—a glass of cheap sherry, a cigarine from a two-thirds full packet that usually wouldn’t be missed, one go from a bottle of nail polish, if the resident was out, or a box of eye makeup. Sometimes some of us stole things, too. There was a girl called Margoh (how she spelled it, though it was all she could write). She was a genius at petty theft. A knife here, a fork there—a neglected lipstick from the back of a drawer—sets matched up from endless visits to different apartments, put together and flogged to the less moral-conscious markets. Margoh also utilized an actorish streak. Sometimes she would thieve something very missable, like a string of glass beads, or a lightbulb. Then she would go sniveling at once to the person renting our services. “Oh, I’m so worried—I knocked those beads of yours behind the couch—can’t find them, I’ve looked—maybe the sweeper sucked them up—” She’d have the owner, as well as the rest of us, searching everywhere. Margoh became so upset they rarely docked her money. The lightbulbs, etc: she had always broken. Then she wept copiously and offered to pay. Again, it was a harsh employer who turned on her. Rarely did anyone complain to Danny. Most clients thought Margoh a bit dim and felt sorry for her. After all, among the poor, they weren’t doing too badly, and she was a much lower life-form.

I never copied Margoh’s antics. This wasn’t scruples. I didn’t think I had her talent. But no doubt, she taught me something about deceit.

Other than flats and bats and thefts, by the time I was fifteen going on sixteen, I had become, I believed, me. There’d been a couple of, well, shocks. Unnerving experiences. I don’t really want—I won’t itemize those. But I’d held together. I had gotten through. And I went out on dates with boys from my own walk of life, saved enough money for contraceptive protection, had my first sexual experience in the back of a dumped car. Sound bad? Hey, it was quite a decent car, still. And I thought how clever I was, proud of my achievement. Forgetting Jane the Virgin’s words to her lover:

Forgetting, actually, a lot about Jane, and Silver, too. They were my gods, but they were far off. They’d led me to a better life. But now I was grown-up.

Even the Book—I’d not read it again. It lay in my portable luggage wrapped up in a plastic overcoat. Mind you, I hadn’t thought to pass it on.

You don’t need love to have terrific sex. You need a couple of drinks, a packet of two—contraceptive shots being too expensive—and a guy who (a) you didn’t find repulsive, and (b) knew his way around.

Cynical? Sure. Sure as the stars are fire.

When I think back, even now, I see how brave Jane was, that sheltered, self-esteem-drained child, older than me only in years, risking everything. But I was a slum cat and I didn’t mind, not now, not since I was free.

At sixteen, I, like several other girls, had my own little cleaner gang of seven, under Danny’s overall authority. Some days I didn’t even need to work, could go to a visual or a concert, could loiter through the streets, ride the public flyers, idle two hours over coffine at the Chocolite.

I was Loren, adult, dressed cheaply but to the best of her range, strong nails long and unbroken and painted gold from someone else’s polish, a handful of cash in her pocket, a decent bed under a roof to sleep in. I was me. No ambitions. I was young. A visual producer might spot me and grab me for a movie. I couldn’t sing, or act, but what the hell. I might even write a novel—I read plenty. (Ironic, it had been Grandfather, crusher of delights, who had taught me, along with all his charges, how to read. And so opened the way to fantasy, dreams, and otherness. Without him, bizarrely, I’d never have been able to understand Jane’s Book.)

I never found, and now no longer looked for, any of the streets Jane had written of. Some of the restaurants she mentioned I’d glimpsed, but mostly they were too upmarket for me. I did once see Egyptia, Jane’s demented, beautiful, once-friend, on-screen in a visual, but it was in an obscure theater, and all in some different language—Greek, I think. Even Egyptia spoke Greek in it, or she’d been faultlessly dubbed. They could have dubbed the film, too, in to English, but hadn’t, in order to be impressively foreign—it was that sort of visual theater. Not even subtitles. I only went because I saw her name on the vispo advertising. But she was a big star by then in Europe—what was left, that was, of Europe, after the Asteroid.

Nevertheless, there was a kind of flicker inside me when I watched Egyptia. She, too, had touched Silver. Slept with him in the carnal sense. Damned him, finally.

But by then the flicker was also distant, deep down inside the obscure ocean that fills up every one of us. I felt it move, the flicker. Felt it ebb away. I had a date that night, up on the hills above the city, where the landscape was somewhat altered from the quake when I was nearly ten. Under the trees, the warm summer breeze blowing strong, someone lying against me. Not Silver—as Silver had lain, of course, in my earliest and most innocently sexual dreams. Not Silver. Silver was long dead. And this was a man. And I was Loren.

• 3 •

My gang, the Dust Babes, were over on Compton with a new client, when I got a call at the rooms in the bat-block. I was seventeen by now, and it was summer again, late summer, and I’d had a wild night. I was asleep. Nor was I alone.

“Lor—Lor, wake up. We got some difficulties.”

“What? Can’t you deal with it, Jizzle?”

“No earthly way,” said Jizzle, righteously.

“Jesus,” said my companion, burrowing into the pillow. “I need my sleep.”

I got up and took my personal handheld house phone outside, into the communal room. The other sharer—Margoh—was out. It was about midday.

“There’s this cracked old woman going nuts here, Lor.”

“Why, what’ve you done?”

“Me? Nothing. She’s a crazy old bag, is all.”

I stood, naked and young and thinking, pushing back my hair in the hot room. But the heat was beginning to bother the phone, it was chuntering away to itself and would soon cut us off. There used to be cell phones once, “mobiles,” but the magnetic interference from the Asteroid put paid to those, and it didn’t take much to spoil any other type, especially in subsistence areas.

“You’re fading,” whined Jizzle.

“Okay. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Give me the address.”

My date cursed me as I ran about my room. He hadn’t been that great. I told him he and I were through, and if he wanted to stay in the bed beyond one P.M., I’d call the police, who owed me a big favor. A lie. But he sat up, all hurt and furious, and I rushed off. “Any damage to my stuff,” I precautionarily added at the door, “you’ll be oh so sorry, baby.”

Any damage. Oh, God.

What does a bed matter, or a few ornaments and clothes. It’s your heart and your soul that matter. Only these.

I ran up the stairs of the building on Compton. The elevator there was broken, but the very fact they had one showed this district wasn’t too bad.

This should have been a nice job. The woman even had some robot cleaner gadgets she’d been prepared to let us run for her. What had my Dust Babes done? Smashed one of the machines?

Her flat was at the very top—six stories. A window on a landing looked at summer-dry coppery trees and a quake-site with clematis growing. I hit the door—no auto-panel, but a bell, at least.

No one came, so I tried shouting.

Then Jizzle let me in. She looked mournful, her gamboge hair in extra spikes.

There was a bit of noise. I hadn’t heard it outside, the door was that sturdy. A faint buzz of talk—male voices, then the sound of something going over, bang, and splintering.

“I tell you, Lor, she’s off her—”

“All right. Let me get by.”

I padded down the short passage and came out in a biggish main room. The VS was on—and it was a great visual set, this one, with four-point surround-sound, and flawless steady color. Part of what I’d been hearing at the door was in fact voices talking on a newscast. It was just a group of guys in fashionable one-piece suits, jawing on. Then I saw the woman, our client.

She wasn’t old, not really. A well-faked blonde, about forty, or else fifty and taking some Rejuvinex—which would make her monetarily better-off than we’d thought. She was in a state, though. She was crying, and she’d just thrown a small table at the wall.

“Excuse me,” I said, trying to sound both placatory and firm.

She rounded on me at once. “Come here,” she screeched. “Come here, and sit down. God, you’re only a kid. Come here and sit and learn about this—this bloody abomination!” The last two words sawed out in a scream.

Yes. She was mad. She must be.

“I need to know,” I said coolly, “what the difficulty is you’re having.” I’d meant with the Dust Babes. (The three of them, Jizzle foremost, were now gathered in the hall doorway, looking scared at me, three little children whose mother has arrived to sort out the danger. After all, none of them was older than fifteen.) “Do you have a problem with my girls?”

“It’s not your girls,” our client spat. What was her name? I couldn’t recall. “It’s this.” She pointed at the VS screen.

Exactly then, one of the men on the screen walked forward and filled it up. He addressed us all in a charming actorly way. “And now, watchers, I’d like you to come with me and take a look at these amazing creations. I want you to judge for yourselves. Understand, what you are about to see is for real. No computer trickery. Check us against your advertising code unit. And if you have a virtual on your set, believe me, now is the time to turn it on.”

“A virtual—” the client ranted. “Christ. Christ!”

I assumed she didn’t have one. It seemed unlikely, even on Compton Street. The cities have only just gotten that kind of technology up and running again after the first Asteroid disaster, and so far only the very rich can fill their private rooms with virtual reality images at the flip of a switch.

The screen was showing curving, low-glowing corridors snaking through some sort of steel and polarized glass complex. Not highly mind-blowing.

Our client folded down on her couch. “Watch,” she roared at us all. “My God,” she cawed, “is there a devil in Hell?”

I hadn’t heard anyone say anything like that for years, not since Babel Boulevard.

It made the short hair rise on my neck.

I was thinking, in the pragmatic region of my mind, Just gather up the girls, tell this nutter Danny will settle what she owes for any work done, and get out of here.

Then a white, wide chamber opened out on the screen. And there in the middle of it was an old-style chair, simulated carved wood, like something from a play written about 1515. On the chair a man sat, his long legs stretched out, one arm gracefully raised a little, so a big, black-striped bird—a falcon, maybe—could sit in turn on his wrist. He was dressed, approximately, in how we—I—think of Italian Renaissance clothes. A dark red silk doublet, almost black, white linen shirt, lace cuffs—but also black jeans, and black-red boots. His hair was long. Long red hair.

I’d never seen him before in my life.

I’d seen him a million times, in my brain, in my dreams.

It was him.

It was Silver.

I was seeing Silver.

My legs, as they say they do, went to water. (Had only happened to me once before.) Water. That’s what it feels like. I gripped the back of the client’s couch to keep myself up, and heard her say, deadly and miles off, “It’s time this world ended. It’s really time now. Come on. It’s time.”

I thought, confusedly, does she know him—did she know him—?

Then the red-haired man got up out of the chair and walked easy and relaxed towards the camera. He smiled at us with his white, perfect teeth. His skin—silver. Amber-eyed.

“I’m here for you,” he said. That was all. And your insides dissolved.

I never heard a voice so musical, so unarrogantly confident, so calm, so gentle. So sensual. So personal. But no, of course I had. In my mind. In my dreams.

The bird flapped its wings. Was it a robot, too?

The camera had gone in very close, and every feather was visible. And every feature of his face. The skin was poreless, yet real. It was both matte and burnished. Metallic—but only as if under first-class silver body makeup. Just as Jane described.

This wasn’t any robot. This was a man, cunningly made up to look as if he maybe could be. What a low-down trick.

The woman in the chair muttered.

“He’s the same. Only—I’d forgotten how… special. Just that one time. In the room off the lab. They let it happen—just that one time.”

The man on the screen turned from us. He picked up a slender, carved wooden pipe. Setting his mouth to it, he produced music. I didn’t know what the melody was, but it was fast and complex and ornamental—surely impossible to play so many runs and curlicues at such a speed.

I heard her mutter again: “Turkish Rondo.” Then, “No, even a virtuoso can’t go that quick. What is it? Approximately three times faster than the best. But there’s expression, too, tonal color. It used to be a guitar. Or a piano. Now it’s a flute. Does he still play guitar? Does the new program allow for it?”

The screen blinked out. And I nearly passed out. The small shock so sudden, right against the initial shock of seeing him.

She’d hit the remote and cut the image off. She was crying, and she raised two inflamed eyes to me. “I fucked him,” she whispered. It wasn’t an obscenity, not the way she said it. When she said “fucked,” it was as if she said, “I died awhile and was in Paradise.” Then she said, “But you, you ignorant bloody bitch, what do you know about it? You’ll never be able to afford a go at him. Nor will I. Funny that. Just lucky, that one time, just lucky they tried him out on me—me and several others. Electronic Metals. Anything for the shitty firm.”

Jizzle was viciously clawing and tugging at me, trying to pull me away. I could smell Jizzle’s perfume, slightly expensive, one thorough dousing stolen from a previous client. But I only leaned over this blond woman’s couch, staring in her feral eyes.

According to Jane, he had said he’d been tested on women—and men, presumably—before they let him, and the others of his tribe, loose in the city. How not—he’d been a pleasure robot.

Jizzle squealed, “Come on, Lor—she’s cracked. Let’s go—let’s get out—”

And the woman shrieked, “Yes go, you filthy little whores. Run off and dream about a man you can’t have. What they did to him—oh, Christ—and now they’ve brought him back like it doesn’t matter.”

She was staggering up. Jizzle and Coo and Daph were yanking me by my arms and hair towards the apartment door. As I reeled backwards with them, the woman’s coffine mug went straight in through the VS screen. Which shattered like thin ice. A cheap, inferior set, after all.

Margoh said to me, husky with frankness, “I stole that pendant of yours. Never sold it yet. Do you wan’ it back?”

“Which pendant?”

“One like a snake’s head holding a glass bead.”

“Oh, yes… I thought I couldn’t find it. No, it’s okay, Margoh. You keep it—or sell it. Whichever. Farewell present.”

“You’re a doll, Loren.”

“Like anything else?”

“Well. Your last winter coat, the fake fur. That’d really fetch a price.”

“If you say so. It’s full of holes. Take it anyhow.”

“Er…” Margoh looked shifty and sly. I’d never seen her look like that. When she lied to the people she stole from, she was up-front and passionate with distress at their loss. I cottoned on. I said, “Well, why don’t I just leave it in the closet, and you can kind of take it sometime today, before I go. Surprise me!”

We laughed. Like old friends. Which I guess we were.

Me leaving. That’s the reason she owned up.

But there had been half a day more before I knew I was.

Out on Compton Street I had turned and slapped clinging, clutching Daphnia away from me. That wasn’t fair. I said I was sorry. She started to cry, and I started to shake, and Jizzle said, “I got some brandy in this cola bottle,” and passed it round.

“What the hell was wrong with that old bat?” they asked.

They invented possibilities, giggling at the brandy and the stress of escape.

I said, “Okay, girls. Why don’t you go and buy a sandwich. Something nice. Here’s the money. Then move on to the next job. That’s over on Marbella, isn’t it? I’ll square all this with Danny.”

They went off, tweeting at my handout, which was quite generous. I walked slowly, somewhere. I couldn’t tell you where, but hours slid over me and away. All I saw, all I thought of, was him.

You see, if I’d ever met him when he was with Jane, I couldn’t have helped being insane over him, but I would have dragged a steel lid down on it. Unlike Margoh, I don’t steal from my friends. But this—what had the blonde on Compton said? And now they’ve brought him back.

Can you raise the dead? Apparently Christ could, I didn’t and don’t see why not, if it was Christ doing it.

But surely, too, a scientist could re-create a machine. Even—especially—Silver.

I thought, naturally, all this was down to Electronic Metals, the company Jane talks about, the ones who made him in the first place. The raging blonde had mentioned them, as well. She had worked there. You could understand why she wouldn’t forget.

She must have been really afraid, told to go and have—my God—sex with a robot. Then. Then she met him.

Guess where I found myself at seven P.M.? Over on East Arbor. Where E.M. had been situated, according to the Book. Number 21⁄2.

The third shock. The building was there. Jane reports E.M. went east, but even so, we know that’s some sort of lie. Maybe it was strange I’d never tried to find this one venue, of all those in the Book I had tried to locate—and hadn’t—except the rich landmarks like the New River apartment blocks (Clovis) and The Island (Egyptia). Though even there, I had never discovered their exact flats. Aside from anything else, general surveillance and security around such residences would begin to question me as soon as I walked in a lobby, or, as with The Island, the instant I stepped off the ferry.

But Electronic Metals had been here originally, and the site still was. Its neon name remained, too, slightly rusted and askew, probably not working. E.M. was one of those identities Jane had never disguised. Why would she? At the time a lot of people knew about super-robots like Silver, and just who had manufactured them.

I loitered by the gate, which was still securely locked with a device that shrilled This firm has moved! everytime I approached too close.

Squinting in through holes in the securomesh, I saw a drab, glass-sprayed frontage. The spray glass had cracked. Weeds stood tall along the yard and out of holes in the walls. In a way it was odd the lock message had been left there, or that its mechanical voice bothered to insist on the obvious.

The sun moved over. Hot purple shadows spread between the buildings. I was turning away, when a man emerged abruptly out of a sort of shed I hadn’t noticed near the gate.

“You been here awhile,” he said. “What d’ya want?”

Honesty/Loren, practiced liar, replied, “Well, I knew a woman who worked here. About twelve years back.”

Always lie as near the truth as you can. I had known her—for about twenty minutes—that mad blonde on Compton.

“A lotta folk worked around here. Y’see any?”

“It was just—”

“They’re gone. Made a pack of mistakes, these guys. Senate took the business over. Set ’em straight.” I wondered why this guy lurked in a shed at the gate. As if he read my mind, he told me. “Used to work here myself. Deliveries. Now I get the job of keeping an eye out.”

“But you’ve said they’ve all gone.”

“Sure.” He was a short, not-old old little man. Intently he watched the ground, as if expecting some creature to tunnel up out of it. “They done some funny things here. Guess you know, if you knew some dame worked here.”

“She said…” I hesitated, very puzzled, “robots—like real people?”

“That was it. Was why the Senate stopped it. We had mobs here, screaming. Subsistence riots. You can’t barely get no job—you wan’ a robot get your job?”

There was no point in any more conversation. I smiled and said, “I’d better get going.”

He had strange eyes, now that he lifted them, a kind of green, and clear for a man stuck in a shed by the gate of a deserted building.

“Ever hear of META?” he asked me.

“Meta—no.”

“M-E-T-A, that is. Stands for Metals Extraordinary Trial Authority.”

The purple shadow of a block across the way had almost covered us like a pavilion. In the encroaching shade, I saw the not-old old guy was now watching me intently, as if to see what would tunnel up.

“Never heard of it,” I truthfully said.

“Not everyone has. Been an advert on the visuals today. That’s META. They say they’re bringing them back.”

“Who?” asked Honesty/Loren, stupidly.

“The robots. Your friend here, what she do?”

“Oh, this and that.”

“Ain’t this city,” he said. The shadow covered his face and his green eyes shone out of the darkness. Maybe it’s only my beginnings in the costive hive of Grandfather, which makes me continually spot omens. “Just over the state border. Northward. Mountain country there.”

“Sure,” I said.

“That’s where they are. META.”

“Why tell me?”

“It ain’t on no news yet.”

“Then how do you know?”

He turned away. “I get thirsty,” he said.

I gave him some coins. He took them. He said, “I had one once, when I—back then. I mean, I had one of the female robots. I mean, sex. A copper. That’s Copper Optimum Pre-Programmed Electronic Robot. It was to make sure she functioned. Oh, boy. She surely did.”

I took the chance. I said, “My friend did that.”

He said, “You read that book, din’ya.”

“Book?”

“You know what book. D’ya know the city I mean, where META is? They call it Second City now, since the Asteroid.”

“Really?” I said. “Nice talking to you.”

I walked quickly along the street. When I glanced back, he had vanished, perhaps only retreated into his hut, or rushed to some bar. The sky beat unkindly on the empty shell of Electronic Metals. I ran and caught the public flyer at South Arbor.

Danny gawked at me, stony as a gargoyle, while I recounted the story of a long-lost aunt who lay sick a few miles outside the state boundary. Finally he said, “Don’t lie to me, Loren. You’re a wee bitty good at it, but I know how you deal your hand. We take it as read. You wanna go someplace else.”

“I need paying, Danny. Is that okay?”

“Fine. You’ve been a great asset. Maybe you’ll come back.”

“I will—yes, of course.”

“Here.” He put a wad of bills in front of me, and I stared at them.

“You’ve earned it,” he said. “You never even hit me for dental expenses like the rest of them.”

There was quite a lot of money there.

“I’ll pay you back.”

“And I’m a panda.”

And so to the scene with Margoh. And so, much later, returning to the apartment in the bat-haunted block near the Old River and finding she’d taken my fur coat—but also left me, sneaked in among my few clothes as only a clever thief could do it, a pair of long-stem-heeled silver pumps. Silver. And exactly my size.

That sunset I caught the flyer far out of State. I’d had to stand in line about an hour to get my ticket. I had never been across any borders. But then, till I was twelve, I’d never gotten far from Grandfather’s lair. Perhaps life is all and only truly that. Incarceration, breaking free. And then the next prison.

Angels walk upon the air,

Where the sunset doors unroll,

Seen in distance, striding fair:

Hair of fire and eyes lit coal,

Heartless fusion, flesh with soul,

Wings that rake the sky’s wide bowl,

Flaming swords that pierce and tear.

• 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 café, 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 Montis Heights.

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 out of Montis Heights and along the avenue to the gates, under the cool blue cedar trees. In alternating tree-shade and bright morning sun, I noted fluid tallness, a sheen like water. Silver, sapphire, and a burning deepest red.

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—one of his kind.

…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 was Heaven. Angels walked here.

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.

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 the park. The crowd liked this. They were excited, their faces burnished gold, nearly metallic. I suppose mine was, too.

There were plenty of gates, all fitted with pay-boxes. It only cost ten to get in, which surprised me, but then, going on the volume of the crowd, both META and the Second City Senate were gulping in the loot. As for the rich, they wouldn’t be here. They’d have had some private show.

The gardens rose in lawns and terraces, thick with huge trees successfully forced to size. The fire-rays feathered over, and now and then a trail of fireworks crackled their stitching up the sky.

I just went with the crowd, which seemed to know exactly where it was collectively going. I expected we’d eventually reach the highest point and crane over to the corresponding depths of some arena, a bowl of sound with the performance-area minuscule and far below. But instead, the ascent ended on a vast open plateau of short turf, raised like a table under the night. Distant as the rings of some other world, the vague glow of the city was visible at its edges.

Where was the stage?

Others were confused, too. I heard my own question asked aloud several times.

Someone said, “Only one stage I can see.”

“Well, where?”

“Look up.”

We looked. Up into the parallel black plain of night, where the moon was, and the passing light-rays. Another firework opened a mimosa parasol, and silver stars rained harmlessly down.

When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night….

A kind of soft roaring began in the crowd, peaked with isolated shrieks and cries.

I saw a movie once, not a visual, but one of the old celluloid kind. There was a scene where all these people stood on a mountain staring up and watching a glinting chandelier of an extraterrestrial ship sinking down to them from heaven. UFO’s went out of favor about the time the Asteroid spoiled the idea of outer space, and everything else. This was like that film. Like people standing, waiting for a UFO. Or—waiting for the gods of the old mythologies to descend from the upper air.

The crowd’s roaring anyway told you something was happening. Something was coming. As everyone did in the film, we all raised our heads, bent up our necks, and scanned the sky.

It was magical. Clever, cunning, manipulative. But still magical.

What was arriving was a golden raft that floated in from the east like a sunrise and crossed over the face of the moon and the inflamed eye of the Asteroid. I reckoned it was on wires, fixed high up to invisible masts, this raft. But it looked like a vessel from some supernatural sphere.

They were on it. Though at first high above, you could see them because of how they were lighted, how they were clothed, and how they were. Eight of them. Two golds, two coppers, two of the new asterion line, two silvers. Each set comprised one male and one female.

They were dressed, aside from the metallic carapaces of their skins, the long cascades of their flaming, smoldering hair, in second skins of gems, scales, sequins. They were like fabulous insects, and as they drew closer, you caught the radiance of their eyes, watching back at you.

God, how had I ever thought it credible to love a creature like this? Worship, yes, self-sacrifice—too likely. But not love. How can you love something so perfect you can scarcely bear to look at it? Like staring into the heart of the sun. You go blind.

But the crowd, eager always for sensation, for something other than the boring drudgery of reality, called and applauded.

My neck already ached from craning back at that angle. So what.

The raft sank lower, nearer. Now surely it would be possible, if you were very tall, to put a finger’s tip against its underside.

I could see him. Silver. He stood above the low golden rail, looking down, his wonderful eyes moving over all of us, without any sign of demand, doubt, or dismay, only that nonhuman confidence that had no pride in its composition. His eyes were like malted fire. His long hair, thick, wavered as running water, garnet-red. He wore black blacker than any night.

It was the black asterions who wore red. I glimpsed them across the raft. I saw Glaya, too, wearing gold, tuning a lute long-necked as a swan. The two golden-skinned ones, in silver, stood first on their hands, motionless, then on one finger each, waving to us with their other arms, laughing, and in total equilibrium. The coppers were dressed in peacock green. They threw flowers to us all, but the flowers dissolved before anyone could catch them.

I saw him. I saw him as if everything else were only partly there, but he was more there than anything on earth had ever been.

His eyes passed over mine. I felt them—like a touch. Did he see me? A tall, slim, ordinary girl in third-hand white, with tawny skin and dark hair. Human. One more human, with eyes only for him and his kind.

Of course he didn’t see me. But I felt, too, at his eyes’ touch, my spirit drawn out of me and into his look, and as his (unseeing) eyes moved on, my spirit and I stayed adrift from each other.

The Show began soon after that.

I think they let loose a few authorized drugs over the park. There was a sultry incense smell that reminded me of those church services Grandfather had declared offices of the damned. And the rays crossing and recrossing, maybe they weren’t only color and light.

The ache in my neck went away. It didn’t matter, as I no longer had a body, only this adrift spirit, hung like flimsy washing from the rim of the raft.

They sang to us, and acted sudden dramas, fought, and played. There had been unconscionable improvements made to their skills, for now, it seemed, it was legally imperative that none of these creatures ever pass, even for a second, as human. And they didn’t. They’d become magicians.

Of course, you couldn’t for a moment mistake them for anything mortal—if they could do this—and this…

Jane said the coppers were actors. Now they acted with more than mere apparent flair. Something in the voice boxes—the singers had this, too—you heard the words up there overhead, as the raft cruised up and down over the plateau of the park, but you heard them, too, as if they spoke inside your ear, for you alone. Such voices. Every word like a drop of light or darkness. But there was more. What the coppers acted was an old play, I don’t know from where—ancient Greek, maybe? She and he—as they stepped forward, they changed. I mean, their clothes changed, in front of our eyes.

Their green panoply had been modern. But suddenly her breasts were bare, exquisite copper half-globes tipped with red buds. She wore a flounced metal skirt, dull gold, and in her flowing lemon hair, snakes were plaited. All this happened meltingly, unassisted, and unobscurely, as we all watched. The copper male had also changed his garments to a kilt of metal scales, his arms bound with bronze rings, a crown of some sort of pale flower on his yellow hair.

The flowers, the metal and clothing, had emanated from their nonfleshly flesh, replacing the original clothing, which had melted into nothing.

The audience applauded this magical action as much as they did the subsequent drama, a brief, weird exchange, sexual and disturbing, yet unexplicit.

After the coppers, the silvers sang and played instruments. Quake-rock was what the silvers gave us. One-handed, he slammed rhythm from a drum, and it sounded like two drummers, four hands. She sang, her range incredible, unassailable, thin, almost whistling notes dropping to a dark purr in the lower registers. But she also had two voices. And next her second voice sang a harmony to her first.

Then he played the flute. He did it this way: placing the flute almost sexually between his lips, then taking up the lute Glaya had tuned for him. As with the drum, he played the lute one-handed, and it had a sound as if three hands were on it, his fingers a silvery blur. The lute also raced in quake-rock, but the flute he played more classically, its slender tones silking over the lute’s galloping, as he held the flute in his white teeth, somehow working it with his tongue…. All the while, his other hand still beat sharp thunders from the drum.

After the coppers and silvers, the golds fenced. He and she. They leapt yards upwards, somersaulted and spun in the air, sprang up cliffs of nothingness and catapulted back. But again, more than this.

The golds had two fencing swords, which had slid out from their arms. I mean, out of the muscle and the skin of them. Obviously it wasn’t muscle and skin, but it looked as if it were, and the swords were simply—born out of it. And when they had grown all the way out, they sheered off, soft as snow, forming their shapes as they went, hardening, to nestle, flexed and inimitable, in the hands of what had birthed them.

No. Humans couldn’t do this. No one could mistake one of these for anything human ever again.

(I put this down as if I had lost sight of him, forgotten him. I hadn’t. I saw him, as if I saw him through their bodies. But I saw all the rest, and what they did. They were all one thing, the eight beings on the raft. And even though right then I didn’t know it, to love him now was to be in thrall to each and everyone of them.)

Last were the asterions. We were to see why. She stepped forward, and became altogether something else. Like the double voices, triple playing, extraction of clothes and weapons, but again, more than that.

The crowd in the hot night garden, in the district called Russia, made a low, primal noise.

The black woman had become, literally, a pillar of black glass. Obsidian. You could really see through her. At the pillar’s top, her lovely face, classic African, but still, and also glass, also semitransparent. Only her eyes moved. Other galaxies danced, slow and calm, in those eyes.

But then he, the asterion man, he—

The crowd shrieked in five thousand voices—pleasure and thrill, or terror?

Did I shriek, too?

I couldn’t hear if I screamed, couldn’t hear my heart. Perhaps I was dead. Perhaps we all were, and that wouldn’t be a problem now, for here the new race was. God had given up on flesh and blood. He wouldn’t fuss with a flood now, no ultimate apocalyptic quake. Now God had just made robots.

There in full view of every one of us, the asterion male changed into a dragon. He was the prehistoric demon of our dreams. Scaled and sheened and glorious, and terrible, gold-washed over jet, towering and coiling there with its head against the sky, suns streaming in its glances, fire glinting far back in its jaws.

How excellently judged.

The crowd on the brink of panic, swirling, ready to stampede (How many would die?), and all at once, everything again altered, as if some switch had been thrown inside the vast machine of the night.

No dragon. No pillar. No miracles. All gone.

Had it been an illusion? Had we collectively imagined everything we’d seen?

A kind of cooling spray of no-fire fireworks were softly detonating over our heads.

The beings from Olympus smiled upon us, all now formed in our image, only so much better.

I thought, Drugs—that’s what made it seem like that—even a robot can’t…

Normalcy was being made to break out. Not only the pretty lights, but warm rain was raining down. The crowd, contained again, scattering about, defused, giggling.

Had they made the rain, too, whoever they were, these people who had acted God, and called it The Show?

Pushing, the crowd forced me back, and I saw through the rainy, fiery air, the golden raft-boat of God-made gods flying low and away over the park. Nearly two hours had gone by. It had seemed much less. Much more.

Someone else bumped into me from behind. This time a firm hand steadied me.

“Quelle joie. This is all going a bit out of control,” he said. “I thought it might.”

I half-turned. I didn’t know him. Then I did.

“You are getting so wet,” he observed sympathetically. “And in your attractive dress. Are you with someone?”

“No,” I said.

“Well,” he said kindly, under the racket of the crowd, “perhaps I can amend that.”

He was the guy from the visual I’d seen back in the city, on the blonde’s VS. The guy with the actor’s voice, who had helped advertise META and all META’s works.

“My name’s Sharffe.”

“Loren.”

“Pleased to acquaint avec toi, ma chère.”

I don’t run to much French, but got the gist. It seemed he liked me somewhat.

We had already moved out of the worst crush, he weaving us with the knack of practice through the wet but now partying crowd, upon which little painted balloons with cans of alcohol and bags of chocolate-type candy attached, were coming down in the rain. “All free gifts courtesy of META,” he told me. “Do you want any of those?” I said, “Maybe not.” “A woman of taste,” he decided. By then we’d reached a stand of big trees and he drew me under. There was a dim-lit mesh wall with a small gate. It only looked like some private maintenance area of the gardens. Sharffe unlocked the gate by winking one eye at it. It’s true, plenty of people are partly robot, at least among the tech-protected plutocracy. He must have an eye-code booster override built in somewhere, which gives him, as it were, the keys to the city, or some of them.

The other side of the gate was a gravel path. And then a steel-brick wall. A door opened for him in this wall, too. We went through to a lot with several large cars exclusively parked.

“Mine’s that one,” he said.

I looked at his car. It was a reverse auto self-drive Orinoco Prax, glimmering gold like nail polish… or a G.O.L.D. E.R. robot.

Drunk on possible hallucinogens and desolate, unnameable emotions, Loren the Liar looked dewily from her (actually) mad eyes and told him, “What a beautiful car.”

The rain didn’t fall so fiercely here. Either there was a partial shield up over the lot, or the storm was ebbing. I glanced at him, and away. He was definitely the one from the VS news. And he was here at The Show, seemed to know all about it, and to be wealthy enough to own this vulgar vehicle.

“Shall I take you for a drive?” he asked me, winningly, aware he was quite young and sort of handsome, as well as stinking rich.

“Why me?” I innocently asked.

“Oh, I was watching you from the control center back there. We were supposed to be monitoring not only how our team performed but also the crowd, to gauge reactions, that kind of thing. But then I spotted you. I had my eyes on you quite a bit after that. Did you enjoy them, the team? What did you think?”

The team. He meant the robots. The gods.

“They were spectacular.”

“Good. That’s exactly the reaction we want.”

We walked over to the Orinoco. God, the seats were white fake fur; they’d be soft as toy Siberian tigers.

“Come for a drive,” he said. “Then dinner? I’m quite in love with you, Loren, you know—amour fou, coup de foudre—all of that. It can happen. Or don’t intelligent young women like you believe in that—love at first sight?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Quelle joie. Get in. The seats are fun. You sink for miles. Fur’s real, by the way. Don’t tell anyone.”

He could have been a psychopath. And I suppose he is, really. But in this instance, he seemed just some man pleased with himself and expecting a bonus from his bosses, therefore sexed-up and eager to take any nice-looking, half-okay pleb to bed.

How did he think anyone would look at him after—them?

How could he look at a woman, after them? Well, the car-seat fur was real. Maybe that explained quite a bit.

I didn’t hesitate, or only long enough to fuel his fire.

I’d never been a professional, a prostitute. I had sex randomly because I wanted to, and earned cash by work. Of course, it wasn’t cash I was after now.

Though the fur was real, it had been carefully treated and didn’t mind my wet dress or the drops he shook off his tailored one-piece suit. The light jacket, shirt and pants combo were all linked by zippers, whose metal was solid silver. (Silver.) He also had a diamond ring, a rock, polished, not cut. But it might have been a cultured diamond, after all, never mined.

The ghastly car ripped through the city like a missile. It went so fast I couldn’t see anything, except in the distance—humps of architecture, veiled heights, and garish city valleys. On the horizon, the ghosts of mountains were drawn in by their edges of moonlit snow. It had stopped raining—if it had ever started, out here.

I itched and howled to ask him questions about the robots. I kept quiet. Almost certainly he’d start to gabble, if not now, then if we got to the dinner date.

There were a lot of parks, especially in the district called Russia, and the next one over called Bohemia. “Used to be a Romania, too, once,” he said. “Burnt down—power main blew.”

I wondered if he’d just pull over and begin mauling me. But he didn’t. He was high as that moon. Who’s a clever boy, then?

He was ready to muse aloud by the time we were nearing some out-of-town restaurant he knew of. He abruptly switched the car to auto, and sat back.

“It’s been quite a month, I can tell you, getting The Show ready. Advance publicity and so on. Then the performad—jargon, I mean the advertising performance tonight. Everyone seemed to like it, didn’t they? There was all that talk before—people getting scared robots’d take over all the available work—but that’s never been what they’re for. I take it you know all this was already tried, twelve years back?”

I looked vague. “I was only a kid then.”

“Sure. Mais naturellement. Just a little girl, five or six. You must tell me all about that—” But he didn’t pause, so I didn’t have to. “You see, they are purely recreational, these robots. The first outfit, E.M., they did the whole damn thing all wrong. Then had to recall every single model. There were nine of them. I think I have that right…. Nine deluxe, plus some cute semi-humanoid stuff—nothing astounding there, boxes with humanized heads, that kind of junk. We only have eight deluxe models now. Four men. Four gals. Neat.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Which was your favorite at the performad?” he asked me suddenly, turning his face hard as the edge of a blade towards me. No fool, then. Or not the sort you could necessarily handle.

“I kind of liked the asterions best.”

“Yeah! Aren’t they divine. Shape-changers. Like magicians in old novels. But I’ll tell you, they can all do that, to a limited extent. You saw the golds produce weaponry out of their arms and hands? They can do that all over, even out the chest cavity, or the skull. And the coppers altered their clothes out in plain view. But you see, again, they can all do that—alter clothing, produce weapons. I hasten to add, in case I’m scaring you, they can produce nothing in the weapon line that actually can work, except for the purposes of display. No chance of firing off a real gun at anybody, or throwing a knife. They just can’t do that. Back with E.M., the golds were marketed as bodyguards. No one’s going to allow that now. To take any sort of work away from real people is off the menu.” He cogitated, looking abruptly middle-aged and smug. He probably was, just had access to plenty of Rejuvinex. The car swam slower now down a side track, curtained by pines. “But tell me,” he said, gazing away through the windshield, “what did you think of the silvers?”

Specific. He knows something. But what? And how can he? I said, “They were wonderful.”

“The male,” he said. “What did you think of him?”

“Gorgeous,” I said.

“But I forgot, you liked the asterion male best, didn’t you?”

I simpered. I suppose that was what it was.

“Yeah,” said Sharffe. “You ain’t alone there. They are one heck of a big hit, those two. Have to admit that. But the reason I asked about the silvers, especially the male—” (Yes, what is your reason, Mr. Sharffe?) “Well, he has kind of a personal history. Not the others, only that one. He’s called Verlis, by the way.”

Something jumped in my brain. No—he’s called Silver. I didn’t say a word. And the name Verlis slipped across my inner eye until its letters repositioned. Verlis was an anagram of Silver.

Sharffe said, “What we did there, we reforged from the original model. He was first made, and extant, over twelve years ago, and though the other eight basically got smelted down for scrap, the company didn’t do that with him. There was something about Verlis that had never checked out. They dismantled him, but still kept on trying to find what it was that made him tick differently. Didn’t manage to. And then they just kept him in store. So when META took over the commission, we broke him out first and rebuilt him. He’s the same model, like he was back then. With, of course, the latest improvements the others have. I personally never see anything that weird about him. He’s just like the others, for my money. Too handsome to live, and he don’t live, ma chère. So that’s okay.”

Up ahead, the pines withdrew about a gracious lawn, above which stood a type of Roman temple, its façade bearing the legend O’Pine.

“Hey,” said my happy escort, “how do you rate that name?”

“They’re Irish?”

“Oh, Loren, I thought you’d see the pun.” He explained to me: restaurant in pine forest and the word opine—to hope. I pretended I hadn’t gotten any of that till he said it.

As we were defurring out of the car, he turned to me and said in a hoarse aside, “Jaybeeh.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jaybeeh. You don’t know. Sure you don’t?”

“What is it? Somewhere to eat?”

“Maybe,” he said, amused. We walked up the steps to the doors.

Over my mind the new sound Jaybeeh floated. He had uttered it like a password. In some quarters it was. On the top step, the sound translated in my head to symbols. He had spoken the phonetic of the two letters J-B. Jane’s Book. I nearly missed the last step, but didn’t. Gambled he’d make nothing of it.

I have absolutely no recollection of what we ate. We drank wine with the meal, and liqueurs at the end. We talked about him, I generally think. But I can’t recall much of what he had to say, only those parts about working for META. And that was fairly guarded. This work, plainly, was Senate-sponsored, if not directly government-sponsored. He would keep saying, coyly, “Ah, but I can’t blab about that. Top secret. Commercial spies are everywhere. Do you realize how many other countries are trying to perfect these things? And not all of them, I may add, for peaceful purposes.”

He said nothing targeted again about the silvers. But he did tell me all the robots’ new names. The silvers were Verlis and Glaya; the coppers, Copperfield and Sheena; the golds, Goldhawk and Kix; and the asterions, Black Chess and Irisa. It struck me that every one of the males carried a reference in his name to his metal, even Verlis in anagram. The females did not.

After the meal we left and got back in the car. He switched on the auto at once, saying he’d been drinking a lot. Deep in the fur, we drove off the beaten track and in among the pines, then he put his arm around me, and I thought, This is it, now. This is where I perform my role. So I cuddled up, and when he kissed me, I played along.

I’d never before had sex with anyone I didn’t fancy. I’d been lucky there. The few who tried that I hadn’t wanted, had been easy to put off with words or deeds—like the guy I kicked that time in the underpass, as it were.

But Sharffe was ultrahygienic and unnervingly presentable, and I wouldn’t even need protection. The ones who can afford it take their contraception shots by law.

Nevertheless, when he leaned back from me, his hand still on my breast but both of us still clothed, and not even at first base, I felt a wave of shattering relief.

“Hey, Loren, ma petite chère, you really like human men, too, don’t you, n’est-ce pas?”

“How did you guess?”

“Mmm. Sometime soon we must entirely investigate this. But for now—” What had I done wrong? He wasn’t going to dump me, was he? The next installment of relief cascaded as he said, “I think you should come to the party tonight.”

“Party?”

“It’s a good one, baby. Gargantuan apartment, gold-plated everything, and champagne flowing like piss. Up on the top of the city. Montis Heights. Heard of it?”

As we drove on, he asked me what birth sign I was.

“Scorpio.”

“Oh, my. I should have known from your eyes.”

• 2 •

Above, in the city half-dark, the apartment domes were golden or milky indigo or translucent scarlet spaceships, resting on snow-walls softly stained with revolving rainbows.

The park below was lamplighted to a blazing green fire, and birds sang wildly in the trees. (“They never get to sleep,” Sharffe remarked, “think it’s day all the time.”) A racoon had bounded onto the car roof and off, its natural fur shining like—silver.

He hadn’t exaggerated about the apartment. He winked us in, like he had at the gates in Russia, and then we stepped into an outside elevator made of frost-patterned glass. Rising up and up, we reached a dome like a damson’s heart. The city lay below, like all the kingdoms of the world.

There was a roof terrace garden, running all around the dome. A round door undid itself, glass into glass. He looked peculiar in the magenta light inside. No doubt we both did. I know my dress looked cheap in it.

The corridor was tiled in veined black marble. That is, real marble, nothing fake. “From Italy,” he told me, waving at the walls. I’d have hated him if I’d had time, but I hadn’t, and my heart was going for a drum solo in virtuoso rapid tempo. Then we were at the next door, trimmed and paneled in white marble and gold. I think he said the gold was forty carats, and the door was opened, not by automatics, but two sort of butlers in Victorian gear. And my heart was lost in the tumult of quake-rock.

All the rooms were lit in different colors. There were plenty of colors/rooms. The foyer was pink. The next room yellow like wine, and the next red like wine. Then we went through an iceberg-blue conservatory, crowded by plants and by people, as the other rooms had been. Then the biggest room yet was in front of us, coolest gold—in fact, only the best sort of panelectric light, but spilling from crystal fixtures in the domed ceiling and marble walls. Everywhere were champagne fountains; you know, the thing where the drink sprays from the bottle and pours down and over to fill a pyramid of goblets. But here it just kept pouring down endlessly from inexhaustible “bottles,” over the goblets, splashing on, sparkling, into basins of marble so white it ached.

I said there were people everywhere. Sharffe greeted lots of them with cheery intimacy. I noted randomly that not all of them responded.

In the champagne room people were dancing the Chaste, the two-together dance where you keep both your upper bodies plastered on each other by sheer ability or determination, not touching with hands or arms.

I stared at this. Maybe I was a little drunk from the previous wine and liqueurs, or the pine forest, or even the sharp, airborne fizzle of excessive champagne—but I had one of those revelations they say kids get. I watched all these people dancing the Chaste, and suddenly I saw them as if I were an alien from another planet, the kind that’s a giant ant, or an amoeba, something like that. Because I could see how foreign, in turn, it was, to have this shape—a head and neck and torso, two arms, two legs—all that, strange to me, as if I were of quite another kind.

And then, through the alien humans, I glimpsed a silky furl of wheat-gold, and a shiver of shoulders and arms with highlights that were molten. Coppery Sheena was dancing with a human man, keeping their bodies supernaturally adhered, their legs and arms quite free. Her dress now was short, primrose satin.

And Black Chess was there, also dancing in flawless connection with a woman whose eyes were lambent, hypnotized, gazing into his—where a dragon lay, waiting.

And Glaya, in jade spirals, danced with another woman, breast to breast.

“Now, Loren,” said Sharffe. Someone was there, a smiling human alien, with a tray of champagne tinted like strawberries. Obedient, I took one of the tall thin goblets. “Come with me,” said Sharffe.

We walked out across the floor. I thought he was going to dance the Chaste with me. I decided he’d be a rotten dancer.

No, I didn’t think we’d dance.

I knew what it was. I’d known since he said that password to me. Jaybeeh.

“Here you are. How are you doing?”

Sharffe spoke not even self-consciously. He was actor-exact again, and practiced. He addressed the figure as if he approached a fellow mortal—friendly, if not quite a friend.

And the man, who had not been dancing but standing there by one long window, looking down to the forgotten kingdoms of the world… this man, who wasn’t alien, but much more, since he was an angel—he turned to look at us. His clothes were white as ice. His red hair was longer than it had been earlier. It ran right down his back. He smiled. Calm as silence.

“Hallo, Sharffe,” he said. He looked, then, at me.

He was about half a foot taller. I’m quite tall, you see.

His eyes were like…

I stood, looking up at him.

Sharffe said, pleased to introduce us, “Verlis, this is Loren. Why don’t you two dance awhile? The floor’s great, they tell me. I just have to find somebody—business, always business. Okay? See you, Loren. Soon.”

His eyes—I have to know what his eyes are like. I have to compare them to something I can recognize.

Her words flood through me, (Jane’s written paragraphs):

His eyes were like two russet stars. Yes… exactly like stars. And his skin seemed only pale, as if there were an actor’s makeup on it…. It was silver… that flushed into almost natural shadings and colors against the bones, the lips, the nails. But silver. Silver.

He was Silver.

“Would you like to dance with me?” he asked.

My lips parted. No sound came out.

His eyes were not stars. They were suns. I couldn’t look into them; they’d blind me. I couldn’t look away.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he asked softly. Under the racket of the quake-rock, where almost everyone was shouting that wanted to be heard, his adapted voice entered my hearing with the politest, most musical intimacy.

“Yes,” I said. “Shouldn’t I be?”

“Not at all. Really, I’m not that bad a dancer.”

I laughed. It was bitter and rasped my throat. He could see I wasn’t tickled by his irony. That I didn’t want to play that he was only a man.

He said, “I apologize for Sharffe. He should have found out first whether or not you wanted to try this.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Many reasons. But I’m sure you’re the best judge.”

I said, finding my voice properly at last, tempering it, “And of course, you want to dance with me.”

“Of course.”

I was speaking, so nearly, Jane’s dialogue. Some figment of me said, “Don’t you remember?”

His smile now was quizzical, beautiful. Unfazed. “I have memories, yes.”

But I reckoned I couldn’t say the rest to him. How could I? I’d have burned alive, spontaneous human combustion, from shame.

After a moment he moved forward, and his body touched against mine, though not his hands or arms. I, the automaton, and he, the angel, began to dance, reflexively, because what else was there to do?

You are so close, self-evidently, in this dance. His breath was occasional and clean on my face. He breathed as a dancer would, as if he had to breathe. His body on mine felt firm and coordinated, amorous yet decorous. And humanly warm—surely an innovation. He smelled, too, of cleanness and health, and some unidentifiable male scent… and sex. Just as Jane described. But his hair had a scent of pine forests.

His lashes were thick and long, dark cinnamon—do you recall what she said?

Nothing can be so beautiful and live.

And, as Sharffe had delightedly announced, Silver—Verlis—didn’t live, so that was okay.

“You dance well,” he said.

“Thank you. Yes, I can dance.”

He’d died. They’d killed him. Now he had risen from the dead. Oh, not like Christ raised Lazarus. And… even Christ had become a human man.

My body against this body. I couldn’t think anymore. I wanted to fall unconscious against him, and let the sea wash in, the tidal rollers of pleasure and oblivion.

Something happened—what? He had taken my hand. He led me aside, and the window opened—he, like Sharffe (more than Sharffe ever could), would be able to undo any door, even without knocking on it.

We were outside, standing on the area of another roof terrace. Way up, the magenta bubble, and behind us the champagne light, and below, the neon world.

“Loren,” he said. “I like your name.”

“Verlis,” I said, “why have they altered yours?”

“Didn’t you alter your own?” he asked me.

Something like a thin spear dashed through me.

“How would you know that? Can you read minds?”

He said, “But it’s very usual, to change your name, isn’t it, with—”

“With human beings? Yes, maybe.”

“You don’t trust me,” he said. “The idea is very much that you can.”

“Because you’re not human?”

“Of course.”

“A machine.”

He shrugged. “A new sort of machine, Loren.”

“Stop saying my name.”

He lifted my hand to his lips. Brushed my fingers with his mouth. “Again, I apologize. What would you prefer to do? He’ll cause trouble for you, will he, Sharffe, if you don’t go on with this?”

Even in my bewilderment at his talking to me like this, one human to another—crazy, though inevitable, for I knew his beginnings, that this was what he did the best, that is, be human—I finally understood something else.

No, I wasn’t to be Jane, was I. It was the other one I was being. The blonde on Compton Street. My God, I was to be one of the ones who were the guinea pigs.

“I’m meant to fuck you,” I said. “Right?”

“I’m afraid so. But we can always pretend.”

“You can lie to them?” I asked.

“Yes, about something like that. My goal isn’t to distress or harm you. I know they’re keen, but I’ve already had two partners. They’ve seen I work.” He raised one eyebrow at me. “But if not doing what they expect will provoke problems for you, maybe we should act as if we’re both doing precisely what they’d like.”

“Wouldn’t they be tracking us—somehow watch us—”

“Not exactly. It’s nothing so basic as surveillance. The physical responses I can program and register in myself. Enough to convince them. And then you just tell them I am—”

“The ultimate demon lover.”

“Yes. Because, without at all deserving to be, I am.”

“I know you are. And autonomous, it seems. How can that be?”

“It’s fundamental stuff. I need to be autonomous to some extent. Or how could I operate?”

“So we slip off someplace, make out we rutted like rabbits, and you provide some process so they believe we did.”

“That’s it. Would you prefer that?”

“What would you prefer?”

Light in his eyes. Suns rose within suns. No protest from him now, like to Jane: No one asks a robot what he wants. “I’d prefer to make love with you.”

“Why’s that?”

“I like sex. Probably not quite in the way humans do, or for quite the same reasons.”

“I like sex with men.”

He nodded. “That reaction is the one they might need to know about. Or else they can’t test how worthwhile this team will be.”

“This team—is you.”

“All eight of us.”

“Has anyone else been reluctant?”

“One or two.”

“I’d better be truthful, then, hadn’t I?”

Without warning he moved towards me. He set his hands weightlessly on my shoulders. He lowered his face to mine. His mane of hair, like thick smoke on fire, tented us in… exactly as she told us.

“Maybe, Loren, just in case, we should make sure that this is really hopeless.”

Is he kissing me? His mouth is on mine? It’s as if—

I fell through space, or through the world, deep down. Through earth and sea and galaxies. I wasn’t frightened. It was all I wanted.

Had I never in my life before ever fully let go of myself? Is this letting go—of self?

It lasted seconds, years.

The kiss hadn’t been intrusive. Just his mouth on my mouth.

I hadn’t even taken hold of him. Now I did. Under my palms, the smooth leopard muscles of his back. My eyes were shut. He held me there, the kiss over, held me as I went on falling through outer space.

“I think, perhaps?” he said against my closed eyes.

“Where are we to go?” I heard the Loren voice ask.

“There are private rooms here.”

“Must it be here?”

“No. We can go anywhere you’d like.”

He’s a slave. Tethered like a dog. It’s merely that the chain will stretch to infinity, until they want to pull him back to them.

“I have a room,” I said. “Downtown.”

My eyes didn’t open. I thought of Jane and the coat-of-many-colors carpeted apartment on Tolerance, which I’d never found, never could find, as Tolerance hadn’t been its real name.

“Let’s go, then,” he said. “Only, you may need to see your way. Open your eyes, Loren.”

I opened my eyes. He took my hand once more, like any captivated new lover. We walked steadily out of the champagne room, and the azure conservatory, the rooms of red wine and white wine, and the sugar-pink foyer, where the two butlers, not needing to, whisked wide the white-and-gold double doors.

No one gazed at us or communicated with us, tried to encourage or prevent us. We were just one more couple who’d made the right connection, off to fornicate and be glad.

Because I had no car, we took a late-night flyer. There were people on the flyer, up in the glass pumpkin with us, sad workers going in to deathly jobs they must struggle to retain, tired girls who had been out hooking. Someone muttered behind us, “See him? It’s one of the actors off the vispos. Why does he need to take a flyer? Slumming. Bastard.”

Silver put his arm around me, that was all. No one came up to start a fight.

(I wondered what he would do if they did? Magic a gun out of his arm and threaten them? How far did that slave’s autonomy stretch? To what level, in the matter of defense, could he, or any of them, go?)

Certainly, it wasn’t like it had been with Jane, those twelve years ago. This time he couldn’t pass anywhere as mortal. That really wasn’t allowed anymore.

It was almost light when we walked along West Larch to the apartment house. The distant mountains were reappearing from the dark.

What did I feel? Bodiless. Like I wasn’t there.

How could I be there? This was a dream.

The key I’d been given didn’t work. This wasn’t a chipped or electronic door, but obviously somebody bolted it after one or two A.M. Anyone out later than that had to kick their heels on the veranda.

But he put his hand over the lock, then the edges of the door. I heard a faint sliding inside—the lock unkeying, the bolts going home into their sockets.

You couldn’t keep him out, then. Or, presumably, any of them. I said, “Isn’t that illegal?”

“No. We’re only authorized to use key-coding to assist a human companion.”

“Suppose the human companion just happens to be a thief or murderer?”

He shook his head. “No one gets use of us who is anything like those. All customers are carefully checked.”

We went into the dim predawn building. He walked quietly up the stairs behind me. There were four flights. He could, I thought, equally noiselessly have raced up all four at a hundred miles an hour.

We went into my flat. As I let up the skimpy blind, he looked around him, like any unexceptional visitor. “You haven’t been here long.”

“How do you know?” I was only curious, not surprised.

He said, “This room has no smell of you.”

Jane:

He said, “What perfume have you got on?” “Nothing…” “Then it must be you.” “Human flesh must seem disgusting to you, if you can smell us.” “Extremely seductive…”

And I heard myself say, defensively, “Human habitations have a human stench, do you mean?”

And Silver-who-was-Verlis said, “Sometimes. But that isn’t what I mean. You have your own unique personal perfume. You, Loren, smell good. Young, fresh, and alluring. This room would smell of that, if you’d been here more than forty-eight hours.”

“What if I smoke a lot of cigarines?”

“Then of you, plus a lot of cigarines.”

I stood by the window looking back at him. He seemed in no hurry—how much time was allowed us for this test-situation carnal act?

“I’m quite experienced,” I said. Also defensive?

“Yes, Loren—I’ve been using your name again; are you okay with that? Thank you. You see, they were overviewing the whole crowd in the gardens for suitable candidates. Then they activated, in each case, a quick scan. You know this can be done?”

“I thought it was prohibited, except for the police, military, and hospitals.”

“Sure. META is affiliated to those first two, being Senate-sponsored. However, let me reassure you, by law they have to destroy any scan the moment they’ve seen the data.”

“What did it say?”

“They didn’t tell me. One moment.”

I watched him—he wasn’t thinking, although it looked like that. He was running some computerized result across some inner mind-screen.

“If you can read it over,” I said, “then it hasn’t been deleted, has it?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I can still read it.”

“How?”

“Machine to machine, Loren. Simple as that.”

“What did it say?” I demanded again.

He said, “Age approximately seventeen. Healthy and reasonably well-nourished. Non-intacta and sexually active. No sign of disease, terminations, or pregnancies. A couple of other comments. Those are less physical than technical.”

I lowered my eyes.

He said, “So you are experienced and fit, which I’d be able to guess anyway, wouldn’t I, since they picked you? But you’re still very nervous.”

“You noticed.”

“Perhaps I would expect you to be. You seem also intelligent and imaginative, and unease tends to come with both those territories.”

“But not for you, of course.”

“Unease? No. Never for me.”

“Fearless,” I said. “Omnipotent. Perfect.”

“And eager,” he said, “to please.”

Something in his voice—what was it—irony—or something stronger and more loaded?

I walked across the room and stood in front of him. Did I even believe we were together?

“Listen,” I said, “I have— I want to say one more thing.”

“Of course.”

Gentle. His eyes interested and amused. Tender. A lover’s eyes. A friend’s.

I wet my lips and said the name, like one bead of water falling into the light. “Jane.”

Only one reaction. Slowly his face became serious and intent. He responded, but only by repeating that single name again. “Jane.” No question. No reply.

“Yes. Jane. Do you recollect Jane?”

“I have memories. I told you that soon after we met.”

“Memories of Jane.”

“Among other people and events, I have memories of Jane.”

“Among other—but she,” I said, “she was more than simply people and events. Wasn’t she? I thought she was—” I’d been convinced I’d be ashamed to say it. Now, though, there was passion, outrage in my voice that startled me. Let’s be honest. I’d meant to have him. Yes, even though it would make Sharffe and META happy. And yet—

He said, “There was a book written, I believe. Maybe you read it? If you did, Loren, I have to say to you that sometimes one person’s view of events is at variance with what someone else, whether human or not, may or may not have seen, experienced, or concluded.”

“Are you telling me—”

“I’m telling you that those things belong in another life. And that, just possibly, what Jane innocently wrote in her book wasn’t entirely either what anyone else supposed had happened, or what in fact did happen. The one she thought she knew as Silver—isn’t necessarily who I am.”

A surge of actual nausea punched through my guts. Perhaps you will feel it, too.

I scrabbled at my thoughts. Was he saying to me that Jane had invented it, her colossal, luminous love of him—worse—his awakening to blatant humanity through her love, and his? Was he saying that he never loved, and that she was a blind idiot who lied—to herself, to all the rest of us?

Outside, the sky was yellowing. A ray of infant sun tilted down into the room, and burnished the silver of his cheekbone to orichalc-gold.

He put out one hand and ran over my hair a light caress like electric fire.

“It’s better to forget Jane,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “But one other thing.” Patiently, his hands already resting on me, molten through my flesh into my bones. “Did you send a message to her from—I mean, when you were dead?”

He shook his head. The long, long hair flamed, shadowed. “Loren,” he said regretfully, “how could I? I wasn’t dead, only switched off and dismantled. Death is for humans. Souls, if they exist, are for humans.”

The sunray struck over my eyes as his first deep kiss bent back my head on his arm. I sealed my eyelids tight.

I am with the demon lover.

I am making love with the statue of a god cast in metal, and Jane’s Book was a lie.

Without excuses, I have to tell you, I still wanted him. Desired and yearned to make love with him. For if he was the statue of a god, it was one of the gods of love, so how could I—anyone (almost anyone)—resist? I tingled with need—with lust.

Do I quote her again now, our lying, self-deceiving little Jane? (Yes, a liar. She lied about the names of streets, didn’t she? Other things. She even hinted she was going to, to protect certain people, her god-awful mother, and so on…. )

She said:

But he was beautiful and silver, with the blaze of a fire at his groin. All of him was beautiful. All. His hair swept me like a tide. No part of him is like metal, except to look at. To touch, like skin… without unevenness or flaw.

No lie there. None.

He stripped us both with a deft and gracious economy. Then we were naked, moving over each other, searching, amalgamating, linked. Everything he did to me was exquisite, unbearably so. I felt a hundred times glorious annihilation plunge towards me along a tunnel of lightning—but, just like Jane the Virgin, in the very end, I knew I couldn’t dive off that final precipice.

I didn’t confess. He knew, anyway. He tried, resourceful and tactful, to make it happen for me. With Jane (unless it was another lie) the

rollers of ecstasy

rushed in and claimed her. But not me.

She’d been innocent, as he said. And I, who’d climaxed so mundanely and successfully and often in the arms of lesser creatures like myself, lay at last numbed by struggle—and a type of frightened boredom.

Then, at my laxity and unwillingness, my stasis, he drew away.

“Can I do something else? Is there anything special you would like?” (His library of abilities must also include, naturally, our kinks and perversions.)

“No. I’m only tired. Human, you see. A nontechnical fault in my libido.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you needed. Perhaps,” he said, as he put on his clothes again, pristine still, no sweat, no need to shower or shave or eat or sleep, “we might try this again. In the future.”

“Yes,” I said. But I didn’t know what I said.

I wanted him to stay with me. I wanted him—oh, yes—I wanted him gone.

It was I who’d failed the bloody test, not this angel of the fiery firmament.

“I have to go,” he said. “I’m registering they want me home.” He said that quirkily. He grinned at me his fantastic grin. No confidence lost by this missed hit. Why would there be, for him?

Don’t leave me.

Leave me—go—hurry.

He leaned over me. For the last? He kissed me on the mouth. “Ah, Loren,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Next time.”

“Will there be one?”

He stood against the light. His white clothes had changed to dusty gray denim. I hadn’t noticed him do that, but it would have taken only seconds. Yet how had he done it? They had been removable garments—I’d seen them lying on the floor.

Whatever, it seemed he’d been aware of the unpopularity of the rich or famous on the lower streets, after all. His personal colors and his metal, though, were the same. Would mere denim be enough?

The morning window was behind him. I couldn’t see his face anymore, only the gleam at an eye’s corner, the whiteness of his teeth.

“Ah, Loren,” he said again. “I do so want to take you there. Carry you up and throw you off into the stars. That’s built into me. So, I insist. There’ll be a next time. You and me. Believe it.”

I lay there and he went out the door, which he closed. Noiselessly he descended the apartment house stairs. Should I creep to the window and watch him stride off along the street?

I turned onto my stomach, and slept like the soulless human dead.

• 3 •

Those two magpies that live in the quake-site garden out back are dipping around today like crazy. There’s that bronzy burnish on the trees down there, still green, but getting ready to turn for the fall. It’s warm, but clear. This afternoon you can just see the ghostly shape of the Asteroid, as sometimes you can when the moon, also a ghost, visits the daytime sky. Men have walked on both. And then, as we know, governments around the world decided that to blast the Asteroid to “safer” smaller bits, or try to shift it off orbit and back into space, were both too risky. Instead they rigged up some kind of early warning on it, about the time they collected stones, and carefully mined a little surface metal (asterion). The idea of the warning is so we’d all know if it ever goes ballistic again and starts to drop the conclusive miles right on top of us. But, of course, they’d never tell us. Only the so-called important ones would scuttle down into their huge secret shelters, about which, over the years, quite a mythology has been invented. Some are supposed to be no better than deep dungeons. Others the apex of fantastic luxury. Not that this will be of any use to the rest of us. We’ll find out as soon as the damn thing hits us, and that will be that. You’d think, wouldn’t you, nobody could go on living a quarter-way normal life with that kind of Damocletian Sword hanging over our heads. But we do, don’t we? People always have. Humans are survivors. We have to be, or we wouldn’t put up with a single minute in this place. I remember Danny used to say that babies cried, not to get air into their lungs, but to say, “Oh, God, I’m not here again!” Danny believed in reincarnation and rebirth. So did I, once.

When I woke up again that day in the apartment house, it wasn’t day, it was sunset, day was done.

I’d slept all that while, apparently, lying on my arms, and both had gone to sleep.

Silly, that. I found it quite awkward to get myself off my face, being used to at least one working arm for a lever. I started laughing, then I made it.

Then the depression came down like the cloud of polluted night.

Unlike the babies, I don’t cry. Jane said, and I believe this part of her story still, that she often cried. She judged she did it too much. At Grandfather’s Hell-house, if you shed tears, you got whupped. He beat it out of us, at least out of me. And anyhow, there’s always so much to cry at. Why waste the time.

But the depression was like a fog.

I got up and went down the hall and used the showers. No one in there again. Either they all got clean in the mornings, or they were a filthy lot on West Larch.

After I was back in my room, I sorted my possessions and began to pack up. I could see no point in staying there now. I’d found what I’d come to find and never knew I really could. And it was—or wasn’t—it was nothing I recognized. I hated what I’d found.

Despite that, did I take the panel out of the closet and retrieve the Book? Oh, yes.

I was going to sling the silver shoes and the dress in the waste chute. A life of being mostly on subsistence made me aware I’d much rather sell them. So then I put on jeans and a top, and with the dress and shoes in a bag, went out to look for a fourth-owner store, of which, downtown, there were plenty.

Off Main Boulevard is an eatery called Gobbles. Someone stepped out of the lighted foyer into my path.

“Pardon me. Are you the young woman known as Loren?”

He looked official, like a plainclothes cop. He’d only need to ask for my ID, and if I couldn’t or wouldn’t produce one, arrest me.

So “Yes,” I said.

“I was headed for your flat.”

“Really.”

“Sharffe—you remember him? He’s just in that car over there.”

I glanced and saw, not the appalling Orinoco Prax, but something discreetly sleeker and more businesslike, parked at the sidewalk. Even as I looked, a polarized black window went down. Sharffe, in a cream one-piece, put out his head and arm, and waved to me like my friendliest and most trustworthy uncle.

The cop-man walked me across. It was casual and relaxed. I didn’t make any fuss.

“Bonsoir, Loren, ma chère. How are you?”

“Great, thanks. And you?”

“Couldn’t be better. Why don’t you allez in?”

At that, I hesitated. He watched me with his bright eyes. I said, “I have to meet—”

“That’s fine. I won’t keep you more than twenty minutes. Have to be back at META HQ myself.”

What did he want? To collect on his dinner? I thought he’d done that already, since I hadn’t been picked up for his delectation but a robot’s. But the door was opening and the cop-man assisted me in. What was going to happen? Everything went too fast to really panic.

I was in the car. The cop hadn’t gotten in. There was a driver, human, in the front, shut off from us by a watery dark partition.

The car smelled expensive, even more than the Orinoco with its rain-resistant fur.

We drove off slowly. There wasn’t much traffic, certainly nothing much of the caliber of this car.

“We’ll take a run or two around the block, Loren, if that’s okay? I just wanted to thank you.” I turned and looked right at him. “Yes,” he said. “I know. I wasn’t really fair to you, was I. But you’ve come out of it splendidly. You cooperated like a soldat en combat.”

“Like—what?”

“Pardonez. A real trooper, shall I say. Not everyone we selected was as reliable, or as brave. Or as sane. Oh, my, do we have a nice little batch of funks and stalkers.” He smacked his lips. “And it wasn’t quite as you may have expected?”

He knew all about it. All?

Perhaps he read my brain, perhaps the override chip in back of his eye could sometimes sift the thoughts of others; the scare-mongers say they can. He said, “Obviously, each of our team reported in to us.”

“Then you know.”

“Not quite compatible. It can happen. You prefer a human man. You’re lucky, Loren. These things—well, some people have no option but to hire a machine. You’ll have plenty of real-life choice for a long while. Nevertheless, you put him through his paces. We are impressed by the readings. What did you think of him, really?” Sharffe, though seated, advanced forward, prurient with—not voyeurism—but scientific demand. “When it came to it, forgive the indelicacy, but were you put off that he was what he actually is?”

“No.”

“Then it was something else.”

“Yes?”

“Perhaps you are a romantic.”

I smiled. Loren, the romantic. “Sure,” I said. “Maybe.”

“And anyway, you preferred Black Chess, didn’t you? Pity about that. Perhaps… but I can’t promise.”

The car was doing what he’d said it would, idling round the three blocks between Main and Correlli, reaching the beginning and idling round again.

“Listen, Loren. Whatever else, we’re very appreciative. We’d like to offer you a small reward, if you’ll allow us to.”

“You mean, META.”

“That’s it. It’s a big company, and likes to look after its own. Put it this way, you were kind of a company employee last night, albeit volunteer class.” He put a steel-colored paper packet into my lap. “You’ll find all the documents there. Only one minor thing. We want you to keep quiet for now about all this. I don’t just mean not run off and tell a vid reporter. I mean, don’t even tell your friends.”

“I haven’t.”

“I know you haven’t,” he said.

They had somehow been watching the apartment house? Even in my room? What else. Watching till I came out. Silver—Verlis—must have left something there to connect them up… or did it, with the type of hi-tech he now was, happen automatically? (Had they watched us having sex? Oh, very likely.)

I inspected the packet without opening it. Sharffe was putting something else on the seat between us, a tiny wafer of some obscure material.

“I’ve keyed the pad. If you’d just put your voice-print on that—simple to do. Lay your finger here, see, then speak.”

He had picked up my left hand, and put my index finger on the wafer.

“What do I say?”

“That’s swell, Loren.”

Saying What do I say had of course been enough.

“And I know you’ll keep your side of the bargain,” he added flirtatiously. “The print is only, well, red tape.”

Red in tooth and tape. Red in hair and claw—

“One evening,” he said, as the car drew in again to the sidewalk outside Gobbles and slowed to a halt, “maybe you and I can take another private drive. It really was such a pleasure. I was cursing I had to let you go.” The door opened at a blink of his eyes. As I was getting out, he said, “It’s just possible, Loren, we might ask you to see him again. Would that be unreasonable of us?”

Reflected neons littered over the pavement. People hurried by. The night’s aroma was gasoline (affluent, reliable pear-oil from the META car), hot food, perfume, the far away cold mountains.

“Why?” I said.

“He seems to have become interested in you.”

I said, toneless, “He’s a robot.”

“Precisely. Isn’t it fascinating? That is what it is with him. He’s not like the rest.”

I know.

I shrugged. I was shaking, as I hadn’t until now. But chilled air was blowing up from an outlet in the wall, I could pretend it was that.

“Whatever,” I said. “Yes. Okay.”

“Good girl. Take care of yourself now. I think”—the door was closing him back in like a thing in a shell—“you’ll be happy about what’s in that packet. A bientot, petite.” The car drove away.

When I looked about, the cop had gone. But anyone might be in their pay. Conspiracy was all around, wearing a million masks.

So I walked into Gobbles and ordered a mineral water I couldn’t drink, and sat at a table in the bar area, moving the unopened packet about on the tabletop.

It was only later I recalled the bag with my dress and shoes. I must have left them in his car. More evidence for them, conceivably, those pieces of plastic, lamé, and silk that had recorded every crash and leap of my heart.

There were four printed reinforced-paper documents in the envelope.

One was an address, and included transport information and map, with an old-fashioned set of nickel keys attached. The agent’s report, printed below, read: “Pre-Asteroid but relatively undamaged and well-maintained apartment. Comprises three living rooms, bathroom, and full kitchenettery, with water, and some power on reliable meter. Situated in the lower-middle income area of Russia, noted for its quaint allocations, and several, mostly quake-cleared parks.”

There was no rent listed. Across the bottom of the paper had been stamped, in angular purple, SOLD. Care of META Staffing Provision.

The second document carried my name and a number I assume had now been given to me (like a robot’s registration?), and the declaration that I owned, through the META Corporation, the apartment described on the previous page. The third document stipulated an income I would be entitled to draw from any accredited banking station, or in goods from any large store, for one year, on production of the attached card, which bore the paramount symbol I’d only ever seen in visuals: I.M.U. The amount wasn’t high, but it represented twice the maximum I had ever earned in any one year, and I could draw on it every month.

The fourth paper confirmed the itinerary of the others. It added that, as a trusted former employee of META Corp, I would, when current funds ended, be able to apply, through the company, for a labor card. This would then entitle me to some quite lucrative jobs, such as a sales assistant in a second-owner store, or various training schemes that could lead to work in cosmetics, computer engineering, even the study of outer space.

The fourth paper also advised me to keep a note of my personal number, safeguard my I.M.U. card, and adhere to all terms agreed to with META’s representative.

That night I lay on my bed at the apartment house, not sleeping, thinking of Silver. Now and then I got up and drank some of the rusty-tasting water from the room faucet. There was doubtless better-tasting water over at the apartment in Russia.

What was I going to do? It would be more sensible to do what they wanted. Wouldn’t it?

And then, kept like the secret mistress of some deranged prince, I’d be there in Russia, waiting for my beautiful and nonhuman lover. Waiting on and on.

He was interested in me?

How could he be? If Jane lied, then he wasn’t going to be interested in humans. Not like that.

They just wanted to see if I could get over my strange frigidity that had prevented orgasm. Everything was an ongoing test of robotic skills, even though, already, these beings had been unleashed on the city. We few must matter to META, the ones (unlike the funks and stalkers Sharffe mentioned) who went along then shied away, or couldn’t come. Then again, maybe I’d never see him again. I’d been paid off, after all, like the blonde on Compton Street.

These thoughts—although they flitted batlike through my skull—never lasted long. I knew I’d take advantage of the proffered apartment, and the card. Because I knew I’d go there anyway and wait. For him. Despite all of it.

Silver—Verlis—God, what am I to call you?

And what about Jane? Hadn’t META ever thought about enticing her into this experiment?

How to get to Russia. As already stipulated, you take the train, as I had that night a hundred years ago and a couple of evenings earlier.

The unwashed hyenas glared at me from the veranda as I went off up the street with my packed bag.

It was less crowded on the train in the late afternoon. There was to be no Show. The passengers were workers going in to their shifts, or people from that lower-middle income group—of whom I was now one?—trekking home.

I put the coin in the box and the ticket flipped up, with the destination sculpted into it—Russia: Katerina Stop. I sat down with my bag on my knees. There were lots of spare seats.

For a time the train grunted and rattled forward, noisy like I remembered, with no stop registered or therefore halted at. Then we drew into a station called Winscop. The doors sluggishly churned open, and two figures darted on.

We were (having looked at the directional map on the agent’s report, I now know), on the outskirts of Bohemia, where Russia begins. The afternoon sky beyond the platform was darkly brazen, and pasted over with modern buildings, low spires, cones, triangles. They came from that, moving with a grace that could never be banal or weary, a panache that never needed to wonder at itself.

A young man and a young woman, in jeans and sleeveless tight shirts, walking shoes on their feet. Nothing notable there. His hair was black, length about midshoulder, drawn back into a tail wrapped round with a black band. She had short hair, spikey, like Jizzle wore it, and it was the palest verdigris green. Also nothing there, really. Even low-income people use hair colorants. So what. Even skin makeup in that gold shade. They use that. I’ve seen it, only… it doesn’t look quite the same. It’s the sheer poreless balanced miracle of them, that’s what gives them away. Twelve years ago, yes, maybe human things could still kid themselves that their own impoverished and muddy genetic pools could, once in a sky-blue moon, evolve humans this astounding. But now, perhaps we have faced up to what we are. Crap, basically. And the very best of us can’t ever be as they are.

They. Them. Those. These.

The robots. The golds, who now had names like Goldhawk and Kix.

On two spare seats they sat, serene and silent.

What had they been doing? Somebody with cash lived out this way? Or was this some further trial of their robot powers, walking among humankind…

A discrepancy, for though their garments were ordinary, they must now never be allowed to attempt to pass in ability as human. That was the law.

And people had seen them on the vispos, the news ads, all of that. If humankind didn’t know they were strictly mechanical, they knew at least these two were from a higher sphere, actors, the favored ones, and had no rights to be riding a railcar.

I’d been afraid it would happen on the flyer that other night, with him. Nothing had.

Now, to start, it wasn’t aggressive.

It was a woman who went to them first.

“Say—are you? Are you the ones from The Show in the park? Yes, you are. I saw you there.”

Heads turning in the rumbling, galloping carriage.

He turned to the woman. He looked at her, measured and long. His eyes weren’t green, but a green so filtered they were like jet. He spoke. “Yes. We were in a performad.”

“And I saw you on a vispo.” Another woman had come up, craning forward eagerly, gripping one of the straps rather than sit down. “But they said you ain’t human?”

“No,” he said.

He—Goldhawk—looked back up at her, totally relaxed, uncaring, unflawed. There was no contempt in his face, but oh, it was there. It breathed from him, like a scented poison. No, I am not human, but you, thing, are.

She didn’t get it, yet she did. She still hung over him, her ugly poor body bouncing at the motion of the train, cheerful, but something gone out of her, like a fruit with the pith sucked away.

Nevertheless, other people were getting up and crowding over. There was quite a little audience there now, across the aisle.

A man bent right down and grinned into the face of the golden woman, Kix.

“How much it cost, one of ya, eh?”

“A lot,” she said. “Too much for you.”

The same uncaring disdain. As if they were, these two supreme beings, momentarily bothered by flies.

“Yeah,” the man said. He was obese, almost certainly not from overeating, but from a medication, perhaps. “Yeah, couldn’t afford you, could I. So how about one on the fucking house?”

She just looked up at him, Kix. Just looked up. And I, across the aisle, only seeing her green eyes rest on him, I shriveled.

His face went darkish, and he rocked back. “You ain’t no machine,” he said. “She ain’t no fucking machine,” he added to the rest of us. “She’s a whore, and she ain’t no good.”

Another man, young and thin and hard, pushed by the sick-fat man and said to the two golden ones, “Get off the train. Train isn’t for you. Get off.”

Kix and Goldhawk didn’t even argue. Nor did they move. They sat there in their seats, and all at once, turning to each other, they smiled briefly into each other’s eyes.

That was when the young man drew his knife.

He shoved it forward, against the base of Goldhawk’s column of neck.

Goldhawk told him, lazily, “That won’t work, will it?”

“Who says?”

The thin man drew back his arm and brought it in again, slashing at the robot’s face. That took about three seconds.

I don’t know if it would have caused any temporary damage to the metallic skin. Maybe not. It didn’t, anyway, even at three-second speed, get the chance.

Goldhawk was standing, so quick he was a scintillant blur. In that instant, too, his clothing entirely altered. He was clad in black armor, something between that of a Samurai and a Medieval European knight. His hand, now in a gleaming, coal-black gauntlet, met the edge of the knife and it went reeling away. Then Goldhawk took hold of his thin human assailant, and lifted him swiftly up and up, and bashed his head against the roof of the carriage. Even over the noise of the train, we heard a horrible crack.

I thought, He’s broken his neck, or the skull—

Near me, a young woman leaned over and threw up on the aisle.

Goldhawk let go, and the body toppled back down to our level. It lay there, sprawled. The thin face astonished.

The male gold looked around at us. He said smoothly, that intimate voice that entered the ear and brain, “There.”

That was all.

Beside him, the female, Kix, was also on her feet and armored, but in light, insectile mail.

Neither of them now had any expressions.

What happens in this sort of situation? People cower, or run away as far as they can. Or they shout. Do they?

None of that.

It was the fat man who threw himself onto Goldhawk. And the rest of the passengers seemed to be pulled forward, as if they were tied to the fat man—and where he went they must, and what he did they must do—a mob.

Slabs of humanity—arms flailing, blows—thuds and yells now, a sort of stampede. Even the two or three women were part of it—wrenching, wrenching at black and green hair.

Only the sick girl and I stayed back. She was moaning, “I wan’ out—” lying on the arm of the seat, and throwing up again.

I thought, They’ll tear them in pieces.

Who did I mean? I think I meant the human mob would rend Goldhawk and Kix apart, like furious beaten children ripping up two dolls.

Or did I think that?

Can’t remember.

There’s a kind of gap there in my head, where thought might have been. No words had come out, nothing coherent. Only the pictures.

I saw Kix first. She jumped. Right up in the air, over their heads— How high was the car? Maybe seven feet. No one could jump clear up like that—yet she did. She was like a gold-black ball, curling over, compressing, and then again extending out. She had slewed her head and neck and upper torso—spine made of rubber-steel—over against the roof. Impossible. But I saw it. The lower part of her body was also busy. She was crouching on the shoulders of a woman—the woman who’d cried, “Say—are you the ones?” and who now buckled as if a ton of weight had slammed onto and was crushing her, not this slender, lightly armored, elongate and extraordinarily crouched-over insect, which next seized the woman’s head between its ankles.

“Oh, Christ,” hummed the girl lying on the seat near me. She was watching, no longer vomiting.

Both of us watched. The human woman, bleeding (ears, nose, mouth), sank right down. Her body was on the floor, lying over that of two men, dead, or unconscious.

For Goldhawk, too, had sprung impossibly high, compressed more like a muscular cube, angled, compact, before concertina-ing back to shape. And in the middle of the maneuver, he’d kicked the two men, and, as I saw, a second woman, over and down. It looked very simple—horrifyingly natural—everything the golds did. As if anyone could have done it, if they’d been athletic and trained enough. And murderous enough.

Now they stood off, balletically poised. They’d always been the fighters and acrobats. Hired for bodyguards. Now illegal.

From Goldhawk’s right hand a long dagger slid like a shining tongue. Even this was an englamored thing. The hilt was gold and had a black jewel in it. Why did I notice, at such a time? Because the gold and the jewel were all one and the same thing with the rest. Beauty and horror, inseparable.

The remainder of the people in the carriage—not many now—had at last pressed back.

So Goldhawk and Kix, free as birds, walked over to the doors, he with the blade swishing, like a walking cane.

All this while the train had been bolting on, going to Russia like it was scheduled to, not stopping anywhere, since no one had paid for those stations in between.

There was an emergency button by the doors. Not all trains have these. It’s to signal the main power artery if the doors jam. The message runs to the control cabin and the train—itself a robot—returns the proper answering signal that opens the doors. This can only happen while a train is at a standstill.

Kix put her delicate finger with its peridot nail on the door button.

If a human did that, it wouldn’t work. The safety override would snap in and stop it.

But the train was a robot, and so was Kix, and something occurred between them, some sympathetic communication.

Both doors shot open wide.

The train was going at about a hundred and thirty. When the doors unsealed, a kind of solid air, like chunks of matter, banged into the car. Against the unraveling turbulence of it, the two gold-black-green insect-reptiles were posed a moment, as if to take a bow. Then they flashed away. They were gone, jumped facile and secure off onto the track below. You knew they hadn’t lost their footing.

Down the whole length of the train wracked a raucous, deafening, terrifying squealing. Our car bumped as if it ran upward over big rocks.

This bit is difficult for me to recount. I saw—we were putting our hands over our ears—someone was at the doors trying to make them close, but because of the bumping he, too, fell away, outward, but not as the two robots had done. A woman was shrieking. Everyone was calling out. The girl next to me, her face white, took hold of me. The train was going upward, up a mountain—it was going—

There was a long sound. I don’t know what. Where I have only pictures just before, for this I only have a word: “sound.” I remember then it was like when you blink your eyes and for a second everything isn’t there, and then it comes back.

Something hit me across the shoulders. Then my head, but quite soft—

I lay there, and it was so quiet. It seemed to be about sixty seconds before any noises began again. It was almost peaceful, to lie there, on the motionless surface.

But then again there began to be continual screams and cries, and a drumming kicking, and a strange creaking juddering, on and on, and on and on.

The auto-medic ran its scanner over me quickly and told me I was fine. Nothing broken, some bruises, some shock. Here are some painkillers. Go home and rest.

I didn’t know what had happened to the others in my car, or on the remainder of the train. I really don’t recall what state the train was in. I saw it later on a VS. Not so bad, really.

They’d portioned us out, the seriously injured going in one set of robot ambulances, the lesser in others, a larger group—my own, the most minor—dealt with on the next station.

I’ve heard and seen since, on the local news channel, delivered via that VS (mine), that there were seven dead. I think these seven were all in my carriage. I don’t think the derailment killed them. I think they were the ones Goldhawk and Kix killed. No one reported anything about that. The doors flying open while the train was at full speed—that was put down to a mechanical fault. Old rolling stock, bad track. Second City is still mad about it, ranting at the Senate, who looked upset and empathically sad, and will do nothing much.

When they said go home and rest, the only place it seemed I had to go was the unseen apartment in Russia. A cab took me. It was free, courtesy of the rail company. The medic had organized it, had only needed the address.

Gray-brown building, part of a long terrace. Decisive architecture, Gothic perhaps. A couple of gargoyles leaned out into the cool tangerine sunset that was beginning. There was a lift. It worked. I was on the top floor.

When I let myself in, the apartment was furnished. The windows were clean, and some faced west, and outside, in the sunfall, the magpies were flying about over a little park that had a gulf in it that the very first quake must have caused, all grown over and attractive now.

I sat in a padded chair by the window and watched the magpies. My body hurt. I took a couple of the pills.

That’s all I remember about that day, or the next.

What happened after? Sharffe. He called me.

By then, I’d located a bed and lain down on it. When the phone rang I thought I was back in the bat-block with Margoh, but coming out, I was somewhere else, alone.

“How are you, Loren?” he asked joyfully. “How is the apartment?”

“I was on the train,” I said.

“Train?” he said, puzzled.

“The train that derailed.”

“Good God! Loren—are you quite okay?”

Something in my mind, fuddled by analgesics, shock, and many other things, stirred in me like a cold voice hissing in one ear. Be wary.

I said, “I think so. I don’t remember much about it. I hit my head. Not serious. Only, I don’t.”

The smallest pause, during which Sharffe perhaps thinks, She has forgotten about any robots on the train. Or was she in another carriage?

He said, “Well, you must take it easy. I’m sorry to hear that happened to you, when you were all excited about your new place.”

All excited.

He said some stuff. I didn’t hear. I acted even more spaced-out and bewildered than I was. But I was pretty much both.

(Had they gone to all of them? Traced them, the other passengers? What happened with anyone who recalled the events on the train to Russia before the “accident”?)

Next day, a basket of fruit, cheeses, flowers, and wine arrived. It was a lovely basket, tied with tinsel ribbons, and the most fragrant apples and greenest figs, and French Brie and Camembert, and Favo from one of the last great vineries in Italy, and heliotropes.

The card said META. Nothing else.

I believed somebody, Sharffe or someone, would come to see me, to check I really hadn’t seen, or had forgotten, anything awkward or incriminating. No one came. Days and nights passed.

Odd. Thought I’d have nightmares. Don’t. But also, I don’t remember any of my dreams at all.

The blow on the head wasn’t bad. I didn’t even have a headache. Any bruises faded fast, the way they do with me. In fact, I’d been cushioned. I fell with my head on the thigh of that girl, the sick girl who’d grabbed me. She said, when the train settled, and all the rest were calling and howling in horror and pain, and the static carriage vibrated on this other journey of suffering, “I’m okay. You okay? You didn’t hurt me. You hurt? Oh, hey, my leg’s bruk.”

I didn’t eat any of the fruit or cheese, or drink the wine. That wasn’t a precaution in case they’d doped it. I just didn’t want it. I put the blue-violet flowers in water, because I felt sorry about them. They lasted nearly fifteen days. By then, I’d come out of it. I think so. I think I am out of it.

I have an income and a flat, then. The address is 22-31 Ace Avenue. You can decide if that is the real address, or if, like careful Jane, lying Jane, I’m using a fake street name and number here.

The thing I like most is that the rooms have drapes on all the windows, a type of warm gray silky material; the drop goes right down to the deep gray carpet on the floor. The couches and chairs are tawny or dark green. Yellow cushions. The bathroom is clean, and I keep it clean, because I have been a professional cleaner, and may well be one again. The kitchenettery is five feet by five. I never knew such kitchens were left anywhere for us wee plebs. It has clean running water and a little freezer that stores power for when the meter runs down. But the meter is usually sprinting along because I feed it lots of coins, and though the notice on it warns there may sometimes be a power shortage, it hasn’t happened yet.

There were even new sheets, turquoise ones, or white, in celloplas, for the bed.

I wander about this apartment as if I am looking for something, and maybe I am, or I was. In the end, I went and bought a whole stack of paper and some pens from the corner store, and I wrote this. (Quite a lot of paper left. Probably sell it on again, because this is nearly done now.)

So, it’s my sequel to Jane’s Book. But I don’t want to call it Loren’s Story. I’ve scribbled a title across a single page and stuck it on the front. The title of this sequel is: The Train to Russia.

By now I’ve been here about a month. Fall is preparing to descend on Second City. I can see the mountains from one window, the small one in the kitchenettery, which looks approximately east. They have quite a lot of snow already.

I see him, I mean Silver—or do I mean Verlis—almost every day now.

Ha! Gotcha, didn’t I? (I said you wouldn’t like me.)

No, I don’t see him here, in the silver unflesh. I see him on the VS, on the screen, in news and ads, like all of them: Sheena and Copperfield, Black Chess and Irisa, and Glaya. And Goldhawk. And Kix. And you see them, I imagine, too.

They are the talk of the town.

I have tried to find out if the girl whose thigh I broke when I was flung down on her—though I have tough bones, maybe she saved me from fracturing my skull—is all right. But all the casualties seem to have vanished away.

I’ll stash this under the floorboards sometime. Where I put Jane’s Book a couple of weeks ago. It’s an old house, nearly two centuries. The boards should come up again easily if I work at them like before, with a fruit knife and a spanner. I’ll leave my manuscript with hers for whoever comes after. If that is you, be sure and read Jane’s Story first. Or last.

Please accept my abject regrets that I can’t terminate my own little contribution to the subversive (in my case, unpublished) literature of this world, on a triumphant and beautiful, hopeful note. Don’t blame me. Blame corporations. Blame governments. Or people. Or blame Grandfather’s bloody God. Perhaps he is in charge, after all.