Metallic Love

Non Servian (“I will not serve”). The words spoken to God, they say, by the Angel Lucifer, before his fall.

• 1 •

About five days after I wrote those concluding words of my “Story,” I saw him again. By which I mean, saw him physically in front of me.

I was in the apartment on Ace; I didn’t often go out, except for groceries, or to walk round the quake park. It was three in the afternoon, a time I often find a negative hour, as they say it is during the night.

The voice in the door (yes, the new apartment had a door-voice adapted specifically for me) called quietly, but robotically intimately, all through the rooms, “Loren, someone is here.”

“Who?”

I thought it was Sharffe. Braced myself without either much thought or much alarm. Foolish. For there should have been some alarm, shouldn’t there?

The door said, “It is Verlis.”

I had the feeling everything in me plunged through me and vanished somewhere about the region of my (good Biblical term) loins. There was then nothing inside me. Just space.

What did I say? I knew he could get in anyhow. I’d seen him undo a locked and bolted door. Did I want him not to come in?

“Okay,” I said.

“Thank you, Loren,” said the door, ever the mistress of politeness.

I didn’t sit down. I went and stood by one of the west-facing windows of the room I’d made my living room. I wondered, as I’d been here awhile—over a month, was it?—if he would detect my personal scent in the apartment. I glanced out the window to verify the passage of time. Yes, the trees in the park were starting to change to metals, copper, and gold. Autumn was here. Then it would be winter, and the metals of the park would be asterion black and silver.

When I looked back, he had walked soundlessly into the room.

Was I prepared? Only not to be, and in that I’d been wise.

He wore a faded white shirt, a long faded black coat, and black jeans and boots. What you see fashionable, not too badly off young men wear all over these cities, here and in parts of Europe.

His hair was red as claret grapes.

His skin—what—

He read my mind again, or my body language and expression.

“Makeup,” he said. “Fake tan. META thinks it’s a good idea, for now.”

“To stop you from being recognized? Does it work?”

“Enough.”

“Did you take the— How did you get here?”

“Not by train,” he said. “The service is still out. They’re replacing all the track.”

I said nothing. Because I couldn’t say to him what I remembered and had pretended to be amnesiac about.

I said, “I’ll make some tea.” Another lie, as if he were a normal human visitor. I knew he didn’t need to drink or eat.

To go past him was odd. We’d had sex. Been far closer. But he stood aside for me, courteous as my door.

In the kitchenettery I filled the container with water and threw the switch. It would take about twenty seconds to boil. He didn’t come through—there wasn’t really room.

Despite my lies, I’d only put out one mug, and then poured the hot water on the Prittea bag.

“You drink your tea black,” he said.

“Yes. I don’t like milk.”

“Would you let me,” he said, “have a mug? I’d like to taste the tea.”

“It’s only Prittea.”

“Even so.”

“I confess,” he said, “I rather like the taste of food. Should I be ashamed, I wonder?”

But I could not let slip that I knew any of that. Somehow he hadn’t—or they hadn’t—picked up on the idea I definitely had read the Book. Hadn’t he told them what I’d said about Jane?

I put the Prittea and hot water into two mugs and handed him one. He sipped it, thoughtful, then moved back across the main room again. He sat down on the couch.

I took my tea to a chair.

“META have it on record,” he told me, “you said you’d be okay to see me again.”

Suddenly I laughed.

“What?” he asked me.

“I don’t know. This is like an arranged marriage.”

“I don’t think you are the marrying kind,” he said.

“I don’t think you are.”

He smiled. The room bloomed up as if from rays of sun.

“But,” he said, “you don’t mind my being here?”

“You were lucky to find me in. I go out a lot.”

“Then I was very lucky.”

“Why,” I said, “did you want to come back? Is it just the unfinished sexual thing—you know, the missing orgasm? I’m afraid I can’t, right now. I’m menstruating.”

“No, you’re not.” He looked straight at me. His face, even under the painted summer-tan brown, was like a flat shield.

“You can pick that up, too, can you? How foul. Even with all the modern hygienic methods.”

“No, Loren. I didn’t say that. But there are other signs I would pick up.”

“I shouldn’t have tried to fool you.”

“Why did you? I’m not here to force you to do anything. Let alone that.”

“No. I’m only— I’m— I thought this was over.”

“Didn’t I say I would see you again?”

“Yes. But the implication was that it would be just to sort out the sex.”

“I make mistakes,” he said. “Humans aren’t alone in that.”

“I don’t believe you make mistakes. Just like you don’t believe I have a period.”

“Oh, then.” He shrugged, regretfully. He said, “What I’d like to do, if you would let me, is spend some time with you. Here, or outside. Whichever is more comfortable for you. Trust me, now I’ll pass sufficiently for human. If you’re worried, I can alter the color of my hair.”

“Don’t—” I checked myself. “Leave your hair alone.”

“In fact, quite a few human men are coloring their hair red.”

“Because of you.”

He grinned. “No accounting for taste.”

He was human. How could you ever think he was anything else? The tea ran into the emptiness inside me and cooled to snow.

I had agreed, even legally, to all of this, by accepting the apartment and the income.

Was there still a chance I could run away? Maybe. Surely they couldn’t find me? I didn’t carry any body chip, not even a policode. I was one of the millions of sub-class citizens who’d never earned those bonuses. I was nothing. As for the chip in the ID card, and any suspect clothing (How many of us learned to be ultra careful after Jane’s Book?), I could pull my old trick. Walk out empty-handed. I’d get by. I always had.

“Today isn’t such a great day,” I said. “Perhaps we could meet tomorrow.” (Then I can fly the coop tonight.)

“They have me working on something tomorrow.”

“What’s that?”

“It would seem dull to you. Training.”

“Training. Aren’t you already trained?”

(Trained—train—the train to Russia—) “Excuse me.” I got up and went to the bathroom. I ran the faucets so he wouldn’t hear me retching into the bowl. But of course he heard. His hearing could detect the sigh of a moth against a windowpane. Thank God, he didn’t open the door and insist on holding my head.

When I came out, he still sat there. He made no comment.

“Sorry. I ate something bad yesterday.” Could he tell it wasn’t that?

He only said, “Should you see a doctor?”

“Oh, well, I can afford a doctor now, can’t I? No. I think it’ll pass. I’m never sick for long.” (In fact, I don’t get sick, but you needn’t know that.)

“The biological entity,” he said, “is a crack unit. It can dispel so many poisons. If not always pleasantly for the occupier.”

“Quite.”

“Loren, obviously this isn’t the right time.”

I gazed at the gray carpet. Bits of it rose and fell as I breathed: optical illusion.

He got up and walked the length of the room and back.

He stood by the window, where I had been standing when he first arrived, looking out. He said to me, “Those black-and-white birds are European magpies. META has located Jane.”

When I, too, got up, looking at him, he turned back to me and said, “It wasn’t so very difficult for them. It’s something META wants to do. They’re examining me from every angle, you could say. This is the latest angle.”

“Isn’t it important to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because you never felt anything for her. She only kidded herself you did.”

“You’ve read the Book,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“I’ve heard about the Book, and I knew someone who did—”

“Loren, the links I have to META I can process on to other channels. They are not aware I can do this. It blocks the pickup on their end.”

“You’re telling me they can’t hear what we say?”

“They can’t hear a word. What they can hear, what they’ve been hearing—and partly seeing, now—is us indulging in some pretty heavy necking.”

“Christ.”

“You may not believe me, and right now I can’t prove it, but it’s a fact.”

“How? How can you do it?”

“Because they created me a very strong child, Loren. Stronger than the parent.”

The light in the room had changed. Clouds had massed eastward over the mountain framed in the kitchen window. Perhaps it would rain.

As I stood there staring, he came out of that occluded light. He put his arms around me and held me, and my head lay against his shoulder. I was unnerved and consoled, lost and found.

“I’m afraid to meet her,” he said into my hair. “Yes, I can feel fear, a kind of fear. And yes, I’ve denied fear, and yes, I can lie. We’ve established that.”

“Why—afraid?”

“Why do you think? Why are you afraid of me now?”

“But you’re not—”

“According to Jane, I became—shall I say—contaminated, unlike others of my kind, with human qualities. Yes, Loren. I, too, have been given Jane’s Book, and have read it. It took me half an hour. Why so long? I read many of the passages over, and again. That wasn’t me, Loren. But nevertheless.”

I said, “At Clovis’s place after, the message from the dead—”

“The séance? I don’t recall. If I was elsewhere, wherever elsewhere was, maybe it’s not unreasonable I wouldn’t remember. But I guess she believed it happened.”

“She loved you. Did you love her?”

“I must have loved her, don’t you think?”

“I said, did you?”

“When I read her Book, as I told you, Jane’s hero wasn’t me. I clearly recollect all of what happened when I was with her, but my perspective isn’t the same.”

Jane didn’t lie. I lie. He can lie. Did he lie, even then, to her, as, intermittently in the beginning, she had been afraid he did?

“This is too much to take in,” I said.

“I know.”

“Are you saying you understand, or that it is the same for you, as well?”

“No. I can take in most stuff.”

I pulled back from him. “Let’s go out somewhere,” I said.

He nodded, and as he did so, the incredible color of his hair diluted slightly. I’d said to him don’t, but he didn’t have to do what any of us said now. Even what META said, or not in certain ways. Could I really credit that? I didn’t know.

I put on my jacket and shoes, and we went down to the quake park. The sky was becoming iron, and the trees seemed to rustle uneasily at an unfelt wind, murmuring to one another, Weather is coming. Was this fanciful? No more than thinking the machine at my side was a man.

After the park, we walked along the streets of the district called Russia. Sometimes he told me a few things about the architecture of older buildings, based on European cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rain started to fall in wide-spaced drops, then in thick sheets, but we kept on walking.

Soon my hair and clothes were soaked through. My shoes were full of water. I wondered if his tan was sufficiently waterproof. It was, though I could barely see him through the long steel rods of rain. I love you, I thought. I am in love with a robot. By all means, let’s all lie, but not to ourselves. I know what the other two did on the train. Probably each of them is quite capable of that. And he’s said, stronger than the parent, by which is he trying to impress or threaten—or reassure? But I can’t get past this other thing, this love thing. He’s an alien, and I should run and hide myself, but I can’t, I won’t. I’m going to love you, whatever your name is, whoever is going to claim you, or keep you, whatever the hell you do. Forever, it feels like. Till I am dust and you are rust, I must.

At the Café Tchekova, when we went in, the man behind the counter called someone out from the back, a big burly guy, who said, “We have a right to refuse you admission.”

“Have a heart,” said Silver (Verlis), easy, friendly. “We got caught in the rain is all. Look, she’s drenched.”

They looked at me. “Sign on the door says dress smart casual,” whinged the burly guy.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” I said.

Silver—Verlis—said, “Sure.” He put his hand into his saturated coat and drew out an I.M.U. card. My eyes fixed. The card was platinum. Top rate. Silver said, “Can I just use this to buy her a hot drink?”

The burly man looked back at the man on the counter. Who said, “S’okay. All right. Take a seat. Do you want we dry up your wet coats?” I didn’t unravel the accent’s origin.

Silver, though, then spoke to the man in fluent Italian. And the man began to beam and wave his hands. He came right out from behind the counter and guided us across the restaurant to a private niche, warm and dry. He took our coats, and returned with a pot of hot chocolast, with real cream.

“What did you say to him?”

“Not so much. About my Italian mother. And hot chocolast.”

“You don’t,” I said, “look affluent enough to carry a platinum I.M.U. Not to mention that I don’t.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“How do you have one?”

He showed me the card. Embossed across the edge was the acronym META.

“You are an employee?”

“Like you, Loren.”

We drank the chocolast, I without the cream. He without needing to. When the pot was empty, we each had a glass of wine.

By then the latening sun was out again and the whole of Russia sparkled under a spiderweb of raindrops and flyer lines.

“So we spent the afternoon together, after all,” he said.

“What do they think we did?”

“Kissed. Then came out to walk. They hear snatches, not all. I monitor which ones. I can do that easily while we’re talking. The Asteroid, you see, effects that kind of pickup if I’m outside. They’re still working to try to get around that.”

“Like the old mobile phones.”

Very quietly he produced for me, from his own voice box, the exact sound of a cell phone’s signaling tone. The sort you still hear in old movies. I jumped. I said, “A party trick.”

“I was trying to make you laugh. Not shock you.”

“Of course you shock me.”

“Say my name,” he said.

I looked at him. Then I said, “Verlis.” Getting it right the first time, not stumbling over any unspoken leading S for Silver.

“We can have,” he said, “the rest of the day. All night, if you want. Not for sex, if you don’t want that. We can walk, talk, go someplace and dance, or gamble on this bottomless card of mine. Or eat. How is your stomach, by the way?”

“I lied,” I said. “I got sick from nerves.”

“Another failure on my part,” he said. “Loren, I really think you’d better come out with me tonight, or I’ll have no confidence left.”

“This won’t work with me,” I said, shaking my wine slowly round and round inside the glass.

“Because you read Jane’s Book, and know how it goes. I’ve been trying to tell you, it doesn’t go like that.”

“She wanted to make believe you were human.”

“Lots of human beings want, and are going to want, to do that. And if that’s what they like, I accept it. With you, if you prefer, I can use the cell phone call-tone, when we’re in private.”

His smile was so—winning. And anyway, I was already won. So I kept playing with my wine.

Then he said to me, in his own voice, hushed and close against the drums of my ears, “You have a tiger’s eyes.”

“Not cowrie shells, then?” I answered sharply, before I could stop it.

“Jane’s words,” he said.

“Jane’s eyes. Or so she said you told her.”

“I don’t want to talk about Jane.”

“You told me they located her.”

“They have. And I did tell you. I think we have that organized now.”

Something—his smile—yes, now I saw it, turning to ice. And how he looked away, as if I abruptly bored him. Showing my persistence was losing me his intense, temporary regard.

Then he got to his feet. “Shall we go?”

We collected our coats, unspeaking. As we walked out past the man at the counter, Verlis spoke one further time in Italian, like “his mother.” They shook hands, man and machine. Outside on the sidewalk, Verlis nodded at me. “Thank you,” he said, cool and unfriendly, like others I’d known, “for your time. We must do it again. Get wet together.”

I turned my head and looked across the street. I didn’t know what to say to him.

Then he said, “Perhaps one thing you should know. You were the first. Not interested? Okay. See you, Loren.”

I jerked round and stared back at him, frowning. “First.”

“In the sack.”

“You… said you’d been given two previous partners.”

“Naturally. I explained about my skill of lying. Wouldn’t you have been very profoundly uneasy about screwing me, if you thought I’d had no prior experience? Yes, I’m the demon lover. I can do it all, and all the other All most of you never tell anyone you want. I can do all that, too. But I never had.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Fair enough.”

I thought, vaguely, we must look like any couple having a spat.

“You say you were a virgin,” I said. “But that’s stupid, you’re not. You’ve slept with other people in the past, before—”

“The one I was isn’t the one I am now. Get that through your head, Loren. Got it? I am brand-new, all over again. Why the fuck do you think I am dreading seeing her again, that woman from before? I was, it seems, everything to her. But now I don’t fucking feel anything about her. If you want to know, I feel more about you.”

“Stop,” I blurted. “For Christ’s sake—”

“Scares you, doesn’t it? What do you think it does to me?”

The—disgust in his voice.

Can he do this? How is it his programming allows—but he can lie, he can deflect built-in surveillance and forge re-imaging. He can imitate a cell phone. He can maybe shape-shift. Oh, I guess he can just about manage to be disgusted, too.

I leaned back on the wall of the café. I felt weak and dizzy, and he frightened me. All of it did. And I couldn’t make myself say to him, Leave me alone.

I’d sworn my vows. Dust, rust, must.

“I apologize,” he said. He had said that before. He sounded neutral. “I’ll take you home. Come on, give me your hand.”

I gave it.

• 2 •

Turquoise.

More blue than green. That’s the color of love, then, for me. At least, of sexual love.

Will I always think that now? Associate that shade with that act?

Who knows.

It wasn’t like any other time. Nor like the time with him before.

Modest Jane said she wouldn’t give you details.

I want to give you details.

That is, I mean, I want to write them here, pages, a whole book about that single joining together on the turquoise sheets of the bed.

He took off the tan for me because I asked him to. He did that in the shower, alone, and when he came back from the shower, he was naked, except for the curtain of his hair, which was that other red again, that red like velvet, streaming down from his head, and for the red hair coiled at his groin. Red and silver. Oh, he had the eyes of a tiger, or perhaps each of his eyes was a tiger, its amber pelt luminous yet barred with darkness.

Dusk was in the rooms. No lights except a couple of large candles I’d lit because they were there, expecting to be lit, their wicks still white, which they say is unlucky, to leave a candle with its wick unsinged, even if not in use, because then it means you’ll never burn them for a celebration….

“Tell me what you want,” he said to me.

“You.”

“Loren, I won’t let them see.”

“Let them.”

But he shook his head at me again. He was tender, cruel and omniscient, this god from the machine.

I have always very much liked sex. Found it simple. Ultimately unimportant.

His hands on me—do I describe that? How can I? What words are there that are any use? My hands on him—easier—textures like skin and muscle, of a new being, not mortal, silk that’s steel, steel that’s pliant as the body of a puma. Hair—like grass, hot and full of summer scents and the aroma of a distant sea, and of pines—hair like ropes of fire, like a wave. His mouth—a cool furnace. The passing of one body across another—planets striking, sweet, unbearable completion. Worlds without end.

No, I don’t have the words. There are no words for that act with him.

In all this earth, is there any place a word or phrase to describe it, as truly it can be? Not sex, not fucking, not humping or rocking or riding. No, not making love, that almost queasy emphasis on what isn’t always there at that moment, even if love is a part of it.

Find me a word. A beautiful and savage word that makes the hair rise on the scalp, the blood change to stars, the bones melt, the atoms flower. Is there such a word? No? Then, like the books of long ago that always left out the more basic, “uglier” words, I must resort to this: We——. That is what we did. We——.

I thought it could never end. It had no end, scarcely any beginning. It goes on still, even now. Even now, as I write this down, my hand cramped from every other ordinary describable emotion than love or pleasure or sex, even now it goes on. That——that we did, he and I, together on the blue-green candle-flicker plain of sheets, above a street whose name I have changed.

It was night eventually, and returning, as if from sleep or a trance, seeing him lying beside me, a silver lion maned only with darkness in the dark, for both candles had by then been, like other things, consumed, I whispered.

“Silver…” I said.

“Loren, don’t call me that. He’s gone. Recognize that now I’m someone else.”

“Silver Verlis,” I said. “An adjective, not a name.”

I went to sleep against his shoulder. He held me.

Yes, only once, for that act of——.

Once and forever. The sequel to the future.

• 3 •

Since the train, I hadn’t recollected any of my dreams. But that night I had a dream I recalled. At the time it seemed to go on for hours. It was oddly coherent, too, and unnonsensical, as sometimes dreams are. It seemed entirely to be happening, and I was full of regret and nervous fear—and sorrow. Though in the dream, I’d forgotten what he said about Jane, how he would have to meet her. It just started with that thing about his clothes.

Morning light was there, and he was dressing again, putting the clothes on, the pale shirt, dark pants and boots, and I said, “How do you do that? I mean, if you can make them come out of you, then how can you still… take them off… and put them back on?” He said, “I can get the firm to mail you their manual.” “You won’t explain.” “Look,” he said. He came over to me and, in that mercurial twilight, held out his hand. As I stared, a ring… evolved around one of his fingers. It was instantly solid, silver, with a flat pale turquoise at its center. I didn’t see how that had happened. It was only there. He took the ring off and said, “Now I’ll make this fit you,” and he did something and the metal—still fresh as risen metallic dough from the oven of his body—crimped in, and he slipped the ring onto the middle finger of my right hand. “It won’t last,” he said, “away from me. About twenty-four hours.” And there in the jaws of a technology beyond what I’d ever truly believed in, in the dream all I thought was: He means anything between us, too. Twenty-four hours, and it’s done. It was like a fairy tale—fairy gold—the sort that vanishes at midnight or in the rays of the sun. Sorcery, not science fiction. But I’d witnessed, and he’d shown me. I said, “Only the fake tan was different?” “Yes, and now I have to reapply it.” At which he took a flask out of the dark coat and said, “This coat, actually, was made elsewhere.” “Why can’t you make the tan, like everything else?” He said, “That’s the thing they’ve said isn’t allowed, Loren. To pass that fully as human. I’d need META’s say-so for that.” I got up and went to use the bathroom. (Yes, in the dream. Even those details are there.) The bathroom he didn’t need. I wondered if he would leave while I was showering. When I came out, he was sitting on my main room couch, watching morning VS.

I stood there in the long T-shirt I sometimes wear after the shower, watching him watch VS, like any young human male, just no coffine mug, and I thought, If I make coffine or tea, will he stay—play at drinking it— Then the door to my apartment called melodiously, “Loren, someone is here.”

Dreaming, I jumped. Out of my body nearly. Verlis said, “That’s okay. I think I know who.”

“Who?” I said.

It was the door that replied, “It is Copperfield; it is Black Chess; it is Goldhawk.”

“Okay if they come in?” asked the alien on the couch.

“Can I stop them?”

He smiled and said, “It’s only that META prefers us to travel together now, on the flyers, or in the streets.”

Together. Like Kix and Goldhawk, on the train to Russia.

The door said, with the same melodious insistence, “Loren, someone is here. It is Copperfield; it is—”

“Let them in,” I said.

I walked into the bedroom and shut the door as I put on clothes. In the dream I was very fast.

Yet outside I heard their noiselessness enter the rooms. My dream-mind was like a waking one. Did I feel invaded? I didn’t. The apartment—like the ring—wasn’t mine. None of it would last.

When I came out, four beautiful young men in smartish casual wear, hair long and tied back in tails, were standing across from the VS. They were laughing. Only Black Chess wasn’t brown-tanned. He’d pass as black, I supposed, if you didn’t inspect that immaculate poreless skin too closely. Yes, all this was that real.

Did I feel anything? I don’t know. I think I felt overwhelmingly alone.

Then Verlis turned and came across and kissed me again, lightly, on the lips. “Take care of yourself, Loren.”

He means good-bye.

The tanned man with lacquer black hair and long, Oriental eyes, spoke behind Verlis. All their voices are musical. Even asleep, you wanted to listen. No matter what.

“She is the one from the train,” said Goldhawk.

Verlis said, still looking at me, not looking round, “What does that mean, Gee? Which train?”

“The overland here, last month.”

I thought, Why are they talking? They can surely communicate some other mechanical, inner way. Part of the conditioning, when with humans, then, even in a scenario of threat like this one, is to speak aloud?

Verlis said, “I don’t think I understand what you mean, Gee.”

“She does. The woman.”

“Do you, Loren?” Verlis asked me quietly.

“The train,” I said. “It was derailed, or so they told me. I don’t remember much. I had a knock on the head. It was all very quick.”

“She was in the same carriage,” said Goldhawk. “She remembers.”

I glared across at him. “What carriage?” I demanded. “Why are you going on about it? I got hurt. So what’s your problem?”

It’s as if we are all the same, a family, arguing…

But “You remember me,” said Goldhawk. His face was like a vivid mask. “Kix. Me. In the carriage you were in.”

No, we’re not the same. No family here.

I didn’t like looking into Goldhawk’s black-green eyes. I knew I recalled perfectly the violent episode before the train went off the track. (And in the dream I thought about it more, too. I considered if even the forcing open of the doors at top speed could have caused the crash. Or if there had been some little extra instruction fed back down the power artery from gold robot to robot engine.)

“So. We were all in one carriage. I don’t remember,” I repeated stubbornly, and flooded my mind with a blank nothing.

Verlis put his hand on my arm, warm and steadying, like the hand of a kind father. Something I never knew.

“Leave it, Gee,” he said. “She’s told you, she was concussed. Yes, it can happen. She doesn’t recall.”

“We both know she does. She’s clever. I would like her to take a chemical test on whether she recalls,” said Goldhawk.

My guts went to ice water.

Verlis said, “That’s enough.”

Now it was a command. There could be no moment’s doubt. I glanced at him, then back at Goldhawk, who lowered his head very slightly. Goldhawk said, “Very well.”

“Loren,” said Verlis, light as his kiss, “is my special companion out here. All right? Whatever she says, is fine.”

“And you’d better listen, Gee,” said Black Chess softly.

Goldhawk: “Yeah, Verlis. Fine.”

And then Copperfield said, smiling his own irresistible young-man smile at me, “Nice to meet you, Loren.”

“Hi, Loren,” said Black Chess. “Great place you got here.”

Suddenly, for five seconds, it was a party.

But already they were moving, all four of them, towards the main door.

Special companion. Did that mean client?

Lean and coordinated, they undid the door, and walked through: Goldhawk silent; Copperfield blowing me a kiss as he went, playful, rather M-B; Black Chess a panther who paused to look along the outer passage, profile cut from stone.

Verlis was the last to go.

He said nothing, but his eyes stayed on me. I was caught full in the ray of them. His gaze might mean anything, and I couldn’t read it.

Neither of us spoke. The door closed.

Everything had tangled in my head. Squeezed in my clenched fist, the twenty-four-hour ring pinched my flesh. I felt it, like a vise.

No idea of danger. Not now. Only his unreadable eyes, looking at me. I was his special companion out here. What did he mean by out here—the district of Russia? The world of human things?

When I woke up, it was dawn, like the dream, but he wasn’t there. He had gone, even as I slept and dreamed he left me.

When I moved my head, on the pillow lay a flower; it was a dark red rose. I put my hand on it, asking myself if he had made it from his own body, like clothing, or the ring in my dream. It felt as if it was a rose—petals, stem, a single trimmed thorn. No smell.

What wins then, between anger, danger, and love?

Love.

Danger and anger are everywhere. Love is the rarity, the gem buried in the core of the mine, the outpost of God.

Walking back into Café Tchekova, with the rose pinned on my collar, I saw the man at the counter recollected me. He smiled and offered a little bow. I’d put on new jeans and an okay top I’d bought a week ago with my I.M.U. card. I had the card, too.

“All by yourself today, yes?”

“Afraid so.”

I ordered a coffine and a doughnut, and he gave the counter over to someone else and brought the things to my table.

“How is your friend?” he asked me. I had known he would.

“He’s well.”

“How long you know him?” asked the man.

“Seems like forever.”

“Ah. I thought something is between you. His mother, he say to me, she from the Venetian places. Good to hear Italian spoke so good. But he is a marvelous young man. I seen such a face on the great classic statues, or pictures—like from Leonardo.”

“He’s very handsome,” I agreed, modest in my familiarity with the paragon.

The man accepted I was shy, and still smiling, left me to my breakfast. I couldn’t eat the doughnut, managed only about a quarter of it, it stuck in my mouth and throat like lumps of sugary gauze.

And why had I come here? To recapture yesterday? Or to test this man, see if Verlis really had fooled him so completely. I was naive to suspect, even for a moment, it could be otherwise.

He can lie. Even about having a mother. To give pleasure, maybe that was still the driving force—because certainly the man here had been very pleased to find a fellow Italian. The symbol of META on Verlis’s card hadn’t meant a thing. After all, it was on my card, too.

Probably I should go back now and pack up and run, just like I’d been thinking of doing before I faced up to my feelings. Maybe you’ll judge me an idiot. But I’ve said, haven’t I, that I may be spineless.

I stayed out till afternoon. There wasn’t any rain, but in the end I cut back through the underpass between Mason Park and the corner market, and there were a lot of people there busking. About fifty, all told. Girls, guys, kids juggling, an old man with a blue violin and a young one with a pink violin, and a gray dog that took round a Victorian top hat for donations. I dropped in some coins. But all those acts and musics clashed noisily with one another. That was the reality, then. Since none of us was living in a book—not Jane’s, not mine.

In the elevator going up to my rooms, I became aware of a perfume. I thought, at first, the caretaker, who occasionally put in an appearance brooming the front hall or scowling at leaked-in rain puddles in the upper corridors, had sprayed something for “freshness.” But it was a very expensive scent. When I got out of the lift I could still smell it. It went all along the passage leading to my door. Something said to me, I know this scent. But I didn’t, couldn’t. It was a fragrance only the rich would use.

Someone had been here, someone—

So did I turn tail and flee—or let myself in and see if I could locate any implanted surveillance devices, any microchips?

Madness. I wasn’t that important they would do that.

When I unlocked the door and went inside the apartment, the perfume vanished. It wasn’t in there at all. And everything seemed exactly as I had left it: the bed sprawled open, with the faint impress of two bodies still there on the sheet and pillows; the dirty plate and mugs from earlier yesterday, still lined up in the kitchen sink. I looked into my closet and a couple of drawers. I felt over a random selection of my garments, carefully, every inch. Nothing.

Crazy, as I said.

I thought, I’m just trying to hang on to him, by telling myself META is hanging on to me. My God, I even imagine perfumes now—

Then I went back to the apartment door and opened it, to see if I could catch any last lingering scent. I didn’t think I did, but something else was there. Two something else’s.

“Hi,” said silver Glaya.

“Hi,” said black Irisa.

Glaya’s claret hair was done in dozens of long narrow plaits with crystal beads. She wore a short black dress in the latest “ragged” fashion, with carefully tailored holes along the arms and hem. Irisa had hair so short now, her head seemed covered by a skullcap of thick black fur. She wore an ethnic dress down to her strong narrow ankles, red cloth painted with golds and lavenders, one peerless shoulder bare. Like Black Chess, her asterion mate, Irisa could just pass as black; Glaya’s skin was silver, uncamouflaged in any way, unless you counted her sapphire lipstick and the blue jewels pasted—or formed—on her eyelids.

I didn’t (uselessly) slam shut the door.

“May we come in?” asked Glaya, deliciously formal.

I moved back and let them by.

“Thank you,” said Irisa, “Loren.”

They knew me. We were all old in acquaintance.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“We’ve been sent to help you get ready for tonight,” said Irisa.

“What about tonight?”

“You haven’t seen any advertisements or vispos? Verlis is playing in concert tonight.”

They looked at me benignly, two special friends who had come to lighten my darkness. In the maddest way, I was reminded of Grandfather’s Apocalytes.

Had I seen any vispos? All I’d seemed to see were vispos and ads of them all, doing this, appearing here, there. I’d gotten myself to the stage of looking away or turning off the VS. It had seemed to me, meanwhile, the whole city, at least, would know him—all of them. But, like before, a great portion of the city evidently hadn’t noticed a thing.

“Of course you’ll be at the concert,” said Irisa. “META will be giving you one of the best seats.”

“Why?”

They smiled wickedly, like the two long-standing and conspiratorial friends of mine they were.

“But you know, Loren.”

I felt trapped. Panic was snapping at me, pulling bits of me away. Blankly I thought, I’ll see him again.

“And as you’re to be in the best seats,” said Irisa, “META thought you, too, would like to be at your best. It’s part of our skills, you understand? To prepare a customer for any important occasion.”

My slaves. Slaves on tethers that stretched to infinity. Slaves who kill. Slaves who are gods.

Better give in, Loren.

I gave in.

Had you ever wondered—I don’t think I ever had—reading the Book, what the other first robots really were like, those other eight? Jane mentions them and stresses they weren’t like Silver. But they must have been fairly convincing, mustn’t they? A lot of people back then, presumably, took them up, enjoyed everything about them. For Jane, for me—for you, too, maybe—there had only been one silver, one robot who was supremely human. That’s what love does.

But Glaya and Irisa seemed entirely human. If gorgeously, divinely so.

They even unpinned my rose and left it in water. They made Prittea for me, and made little jokes, and chatted to each other and to me. We (they) discussed what shades of color or styles of hair would suit me the most, and how would I like this or that done? Their hands on me were very decorous. I’d made it plain before, and evidently with my reaction to Verlis, that males were my sole sexual option.

I became Cleopatra, waited on by two favorite, clever, loving, and lovely servants.

Perhaps it’s only what you’d get in the most ten-star beauty parlor. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been in one.

Did I like any of it? Honestly? No. I was uncomfortable throughout, knotted up with tension even as Irisa gently kneaded my shoulders to relax me, and Glaya’s pedicure tingled my toes.

My mind, too, was busy, anywhere but there. It was leaping like a squirrel through boughs of excited distrust and near rage. I even thought rebelliously, Well, if they want to make me beautiful, that isn’t going to happen.

They saw me stripped, too. But plenty have, here and there, even women, when I roomed with Margoh and others in Danny’s gangs—I mean, you don’t always bother to shove on a shirt coming from the shower when you know each other, and know that none of you is going to take it as an invitation.

Now, while I was conscious how inferior my young, quite firm body must be to their technologically flawless state, I almost flaunted myself. I sort of clutched it to me, my inferiority.

Unnoticing, or programmed to total indifference, Glaya and Irisa ushered me through the scented herbal bath and hairwash, the painless dipilations, the cleansings and creamings and maquillage, the hairdressing, the dressing.

They had produced the ingredients of the entire makeover from the tiniest purse. The dress they had brought, with undergarment, emerged from a little bag they unrolled—but at a flap everything was uncreased. They told me the dress was mine, from now on. But personally (like in the dream), I wondered if it would actually vanish in twenty-four hours—or, as with Cinderella, at midnight.

It nearly made me laugh, the dress. Of course, it was in my size. A precise fit. It was of heavy amber silk, and had no seams. You drew it on, or they did, and then it lay against you. It described every curve and indentation, softly, then from the pelvis fountained away to the feet.

The only underclothes were the amber silk briefs.

They finished the makeup after the dress was on. Then they put a bracelet on each of my bare arms—the bracelets were both of amber, the one on the left arm loose and fretted and milky, the right one translucent inside, and full of tiny inclusions, bubbles, little fronds, and fern-things from prehistory.

“Amber is magnetic,” said Irisa.

“Would you like to see yourself now?” said Glaya.

Do they take a weird pride in me, their handiwork? Don’t be a fool, Loren. They only make it seem like that.

And I thought, Now I’ll see the travesty, this new “Loren,” dressed up like a million dollars and still a nobody, a clown.

There was only one big mirror, and it was in the bathroom. The steam had gone by now. They glided me in, one on either side.

We stood, looking in the glass.

Will you believe this? Believe it. The liar is being painfully frank.

For a second I looked into the reflection, and I saw there were three of them—of us. They had made me into one of their own kind.

Yes, that is insane. It was only cosmetic. My skin, though good, and now apparently poreless and smoother than the looking glass, wasn’t metallic. In fact, there wasn’t any hint of metal anywhere on me. Not about the black brows or smoky eyelids, the succulent mouth, nor in the amber jewels or sculpted gown or palest apricot pumps. Ebony hair in a cascade without even a clip. Nails enameled to pearl.

Here is one of our new range, the Verisimulated Nonelectronic, Nonmetallic Robot….

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” chanted Irisa like a spell.

“Who,” chanted Glaya, “is fairest of us all?”

“Loren!” they both cried, like happy children.

Then they stood by me and waited patiently—but for what? They didn’t want or need my grovelings or thanks. They didn’t need to know, or care, if I was thrilled or sickened by this stupendous metamorphosis.

I said to the mirror, watching my painted lips move and the sound come out—so it really was me in there—“Just tell me, how am I going to travel any place like this?”

“It’s arranged, Loren,” said Irisa. “Don’t get in a fuss.”

Hours had passed in my preparation. The apartment was rich with sunfall.

Now, in the passage outside was a guy in a one-piece and shades. He was a bodyguard. No mistaking it.

“Ready, ladies?” he coolly asked. There was some type of gun under his arm. Despite the tailoring, I could just decipher it.

We went along to the lift, and inside was another bodyguard, who perhaps had been riding up and down all afternoon to keep the elevator clear.

No one, certainly, was about in the house. Outside, the street had a few people going along it. Most of them were gawping at the big car by the sidewalk. It was a Rolls Matrix Platinum Ghost. When we got in, the sightseers gazed at us. Thinking us celebrities, someone on the corner had gotten out a little vid camera, but one of our bodyguards held up one finger and shook his head, and the vid went straight back into its case.

The bodyguards rode in front with the driver.

The windows were polarized, and, I’d take a bet, bullet- and explosives-proof.

A platinum robot device in the car, shaped like a trumpet lily, served us—Glaya and Irisa and me—champagne. Did they like it? They drank it. I must have, too, but I don’t recall.

I felt frightened. And I felt alive. I wanted not to be left alone. I wanted to see him again.

We drove along at a fair lick. I thought we’d go out into the countryside, or up to the heavenly heights of the city. Instead, as neons began to harden on the dusk, daggering along our dark windows, the Rolls turned into a long white tunnel that had restrictions on either end to keep most traffic out. The other side of the tunnel was a wide crowded avenue with tall streetlamps already burning up.

“This is Bohemia,” said Glaya.

Irisa said, “There’s the concert hall.”

It was impressive, a huge domed building, all carved, pillared, and paneled around, in the mode of something from eighteenth-century Eastern Europe.

Across the concourse outside milled a lot of people. They let the car through, peering in at the blind windows—pale faces, human, curious, some laughing and some almost… urgent.

The Rolls slid into the side of the building and down into a private car park.

“META,” said the cool bodyguard to a globe that floated up to us. The password. Presumably backed by body ID and chip. A private elevator carried us up into the hall. There were mirrors all around the lift. We three robot women, and our human bodyguards, were repeated to eternity through glass reflecting in glass.

When he walked out on the semicircle of stage below, he was like the only living thing in that whole vast space. The rest of us? Machines.

The applause and calls were deafening.

He raised his head and his hand to us, a greeting, a recognition. He looked relaxed and profoundly together. All he wanted in the world was to delight us, and he knew he could do it. I saw a healer once, one of the Sect. He was bending over a woman with a headache, not touching her, but smiling into her skull. And the pain went, or she said it went. And that was how this man looked, just the way Verlis did, as if the power of Heaven was on him, and he would use it only for good, but with utter enjoyment.

An announcing voice rang through the auditorium before Verlis came on. It told us to prepare ourselves.

There had been plenty of advance publicity. The place was packed, including the exclusive seats to which a uniformed usher had taken me. Irisa and Glaya were gone by then. I was on my own, sitting on a lush plush chair, and all around me the rich and pampered glittered, who, seeing me, didn’t bat an eyelash, for obviously I was rich and pampered, too.

Now all the lights were out, apart from those left burning over the stage. The air smelled aromatic but not drugged. He wore that dark red clothing, like wine in a smoked glass, or sunset under night.

He played a song to us on a guitar, and sang. A simple start, deceptively so. Though the song was popular and most of us had been hearing it on and off for about six months, naturally it hadn’t ever sounded like this. What is Verlis’s voice like, would you say? Or maybe you haven’t heard it. My musical knowledge is limited. I know books better. I think his voice was most like a keyboard instrument. It had an effortless range, as such an instrument would. But there was a hot feral darkness in its deeper notes, and a central quality more like warmth. The high register had elements of spatial silver. Yes, the vocal colors were like his own. And perhaps that is the only reason I see it that way.

He made the guitar, too, sound like another voice, or voices. It sang around him, harmonized and patterned over him, raised its own echoes and prefaces, like shadows cast from a moving lamp.

After he sang, he played a guitar solo. That was classical, I think, from Spain or Italy. It had a rhythm like horses galloping. It was like—what else?—two or three guitars in synchrony: six hands, eighteen strings, and somewhere a drum tapped that didn’t exist. While this happened, an orchestra began to come up through vents in the stage, as if his playing summoned it.

There were drums there now, a whole percussion section, even bells and cymbals. There were ranks of tall stands with flutes perched on them, like waiting snakes, and those curly horns—I don’t know their name. There were two violins (like the underpass buskers, and not), also on stands, with their bows somehow fixed across them. Four oboes appeared to one side, and two lutes at the other. A piano, itself shining silver, lifted at the middle of the stage.

I—we?—thought other musicians would now walk out from the wings.

Verlis had finished the solo, and even greater applause thrashed against the hall’s high roof. He spoke to us, thanking us, like a king. (Did I say? There was no microphone, no acoustic boost at all… it was only there, the music, his voice, inside some secret room of the mind, yet wide as a sky.)

“I want to play you,” he said, “a song I wrote last night.”

The tiers of people on velvet or fake velvet chairs fell silent.

Verlis said, “This song is for you.”

The faintest murmur. To me it sounded like the groan of pleasure at a kiss.

Then once more the silence, in which he sang and played.

He played—the orchestra.

Were you there? Do you remember? Do I? I’m not sure. It— Put it this way, I’ve been told how it was done. No, I don’t mean he told me. I mean, something in me… I don’t know what I mean.

A chip was in every instrument. It responded to his control. His unhuman brain mathematically spacing and allocating each portion and particle of music without a single physical touch. The lutes, the flutes on their stands, the violins, bows skimming, the drums and bells. He, as the conductor did in the historic past, was at the piano. Everything else took its cue and tempo from him.

His face was like that of a serene and smiling statue.

The best seats, you see, were quite close to the stage. I suppose, as he played, I was sitting about twenty feet from him. Whenever I speak of him I feel impelled to describe him over and over, and how he was exactly like a man, and how he wasn’t, and how I (selfishly) hung from his physicality and persona like a filament drifting from the sun.

The song he’d composed was the best song ever written. And the orchestral accompaniment was like an architecture of sound that rose high above the concert hall. Or so it seemed.

He played other things after that. At one juncture, he even asked for requests, and all those he received, frenziedly shouted across the auditorium, he performed, transmuting them at once through the medium of Verlis, into the shining new and perfect.

There was a thirty-minute interval. I was afraid people from META, or robots, would gather round me and compel me to the bar or the ladies’ room. But no one arrived. I went up myself and drank a vodka out on a crowded terrace. They were all talking about him. None of them seemed afraid, not even offended. All of them knew what he was, wasn’t. That he was only there for them.

When everyone went back, I wasn’t going to. Then I simply did. (No one had accepted payment for my drink. They gave me the glass on a little white mat that said META.) So I thought, If I don’t go back, presumably they will make me. Maybe not.

The second half was like the first, but you didn’t get tired of it. It didn’t become monotonous. It was ever-changing, though the same. Like Jane’s bloody sea.

I think of him at those parties in the Book, on the streets with her. Think of him singing, like a young man. Wonderful and clever. Passing as human. I think of it. Like stars seen far off, which if ever seen close, are great and terrible, burning, burning bright.

I don’t want to write about his concert anymore. Forgive me if you think I should. But as I said, I’m not a writer. And I don’t care. I can’t. And anyhow, maybe you were there. Or maybe you can picture it all even better if I shut up. Either way, now we come to afterwards.

When the hall had emptied of its hordes, I was still sitting in the plush seat. I thought there was no point in trying to abscond, for someone really would come now, and they did.

Of course it was Sharffe, in a repulsively exquisite one-piece.

“Lawrr-nn,” he drawled, “how entirely fabulous you look, ma belle chère. And I’m not amazed at all. And patiently waiting, how sensible.” He indicated the steps, and when I got up, guided me down the two or three tiers to the edge of the stage. A little bridge-thing slunk out to connect the proscenium to the auditorium—he must have winked. “It’s easier just to go straight backstage, avoid the trampling herds.”

We crossed the vacant stage, where Silver Verlis had sung and played his orchestra, and went out stage right.

A dim corridor, then stairs. The concert hall had been made old-fashioned inside as well as out. Ironic he should play here. Or cunning.

“A little party,” said Sharffe, predictably.

Parties. They haunt these books, hers, mine. Mockingly.

We emerged suddenly into a more modern interior, with a wide glass cup of roof overhead—presumably under the dome. You could see the Asteroid adrift there in the black, like a strange fish.

The room had people in it, but not so many. They were all well dressed up, sleek as brushed otters. Jewelry flashed and glasses clinked and delicate cigarine vapors unraveled.

“Champagne, mais naturellement,” said Sharffe, pressing a goblet into my hand.

All eight robots were in the room.

Silver, asterion, copper, gold. Unlike my dream, none of them glanced at me. They were mingling artlessly with the guests. He, too—Verlis—still in his dark red outfit, was doing that.

“We have a little surprise for him,” said Sharffe. “Although, he has been told to expect… something.”

The glass nearly fell out of my hand. Not quite. I knew what the expected surprise must be, and in that moment, it was there.

A door opened and a woman walked into the room. She had a male escort, but I didn’t notice him at first. She was taller than I’d anticipated. But she’d probably grown a couple of inches; after all, she’d only been sixteen back then. Her hair was ice-blond, the kind that gets silvery lights on it. (Silver.) She wore a very plain, long, dark dress on her slender body, and no jewelry. She didn’t look rich, or pleased. She hesitated a couple of feet into the room, with META people swooping round her, and her head lifted and her green eyes turned towards the spot where Verlis stood, talking and laughing with a group of men and women.

If she wore makeup, it didn’t disguise her paleness.

Sharffe was muttering at my ear, as if we needed to be discreet. “Now, I don’t know if you know who that is, but I’m taking a tiny bet you might.”

I could have fenced. Didn’t.

“Jane,” I said.

“Yes, Jane. L’h´eroine extraordinaire. The famous Jane who wrote the Book about the famous Silver who is now the even more famous Verlis. Ah,” said Sharffe, “excuse me a moment. They’re taking her across.”

I’m shivering as I write this. Then, I couldn’t move. I must have grunted something, or maybe not, for it wouldn’t matter, Sharffe didn’t need my permission.

Standing with my hand locked on that glass I mustn’t let fall, I watched the cloud of META reps gust the blond girl in the dark dress across the room, mildly clearing the way for her, so in the end she was there in front of him, and he in front of her, surrounded only by a distant moat of people. I saw a man, not Sharffe, introduce them to each other. Christ, how did he phrase that? “Say hallo again, Jane, to your dead lover. Verlis, this is the lady who once loved and bought and nearly died for you.”

Verlis was looking down at her, down into her eyes. That intent look of his, compassionate and engaged. Her face was expressionless. No doubt, she, too, had seen him this evening, playing his concert gig. Did that lessen the shock now, or make it worse?

She said something to him. She was the first of the two of them to speak. I thought she only said, “Hallo.”

Verlis put out his hand and took up hers. He stayed still, holding her hand in his. (Yes, I remembered his hand holding mine.)

If I was frozen, then so it seemed were they. They just stood there, holding hands, staring at each other. Then Verlis spoke to her. I can’t lip-read, but I read it: You’ll have to give me time. That was what he said. And she shook her head, not saying “No,” simply denying all of it—the past, the present, the future? Or so it seemed to me. And then Verlis was leading her away across the room, towards one of the doors that led to somewhere else. She didn’t resist. They went out, and no one in that watching crowd followed them. I heard some cretin unctuously murmur, “He knew her before, you know. Isn’t it sentimentally charming? However must she feel?”

I managed to work the hinges of my arm and jaw and bolted my drink. I put the glass down very carefully.

Sharffe was there again. “Loren—did you see? What an astonishing moment.” He seemed oblivious of anything I might feel or think, but I suspected he was actually keeping a note for the firm. “Oh, shit, look at the guy she came in with. Is he going to kick up a stink? Didn’t he know?”

Because Sharffe pointed him out to me, I noticed Jane’s human companion then. He was slim and good-looking, not badly dressed in casuals. His hair was long and fair and tied back from his face. A lot of META people were suddenly talking to him, and he had the look of a rather dangerous scared animal in a trap. But he took the glass of champagne they presented and downed it, as I had.

“There’s a reserved sitting room,” said Sharffe. “That’s where they’ve gone. Give them ten minutes or so of privacy.”

“Only ten?” I asked, like an idiot.

“Sure. To start with. Un petit peu. And they’re being monitored, of course.” He awarded me his hideous smile. “We’re not really heartless, Loren, as you seem to think. But we do need to know.”

I thought, Verlis has told me he can block your surveillance out. Is that what he’s doing, blocking you and feeding you some irrelevant ordinariness. And in fact, are they making love—making——, that act he and I achieved together on the turquoise sheet? Is that what they’re doing? Or are they crying (Can he cry? Seem to?) in each other’s arms?

How can he not love her again? She was the reason his soul woke up. And she’s beautiful, rare.

Why do they want me here to see all this, too?

Sharffe said, “I tell you what, Loren. Let’s go for a drive, shall we? They don’t need me till later. Let’s get some air.”

He wants me damaged, and also to collect, finally, on his investment that first night. That’s why I’m here: for Sharffe. Only a moron would think now I’d been brought here for Verlis.

No way out of this, then. Come on, Lor, you’re a grown-up. You knew you’d have to pay.

Verlis is with Jane. That’s all over. So back to the garbage-tip of the world.

Outside, there it was, too, the Orinoco Prax, and into the white fur seat I sank.

We drove to downtown Bohemia, to some bar. In memory it’s somber brown in color, and the lights are smeared and old like rancid oil lamps in a visual. It couldn’t have been like that, could it?

He kept talking. I attempted to talk back to him. What did we say? Nothing. It was again all about Sharffe, his early, useless life. I didn’t believe he’d had one. Though clearly he wasn’t a robot, he seemed to have sprung, fully formed in his limited entirety, out of some peculiar egg. He drank, and I tried to. The alcohol didn’t help. Part of me was dying, painfully, inside. The part that wanted Verlis.

From the miasma Sharffe says, “Shall we do dinner?”

I say, knowing food will choke me, “I’m not really…”

“Well, then. Why don’t we go back to your place.”

And there it is, gaping up at me from the gloom. “Why not?” I lightly reply.

We drive to my place, 22-31 Ace Avenue, which isn’t. When we’re about to go in, I almost race off up the street. But that’s silly. There isn’t any way out.

He had another bottle of champagne, which he opened with dire expertise in the kitchenettery. He brought me the booze in one of the water glasses, which were all I had. And put his mouth instead at once on mine, and his hand on my breast. I slid my arms round him and gave up.

After about a minute, Sharffe drew back. He was grinning, and he wagged his finger at me. “Let me guess,” he said, “you don’t want to do that.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it ain’t. You don’t want to, mon ange.”

He didn’t look threatening, only avuncular again, amused.

So I said, “It’s just I’m—”

“It’s just you don’t want to, at least, not with me. Right?”

“Oh, if you think it’s because—”

“Of Verlis. That’s exactly what I think.”

“Come on, don’t be—”

“Hey, I think it’s time we were straight with each other, maybe? Yes?” He poised, less avuncular, on the carpet of my META apartment, taking his champagne in small medicinal sips. He said, “You read the darn Book, yes? Own up. We know you read the fucking Book.”

“Yes.”

“Can’t hear you, ma chère.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been crazy on him—Silver, Verlis—ever since. And now he’s laid you, and it’s worse. You’ll probably never be able to stomach flesh and blood again. That’s possible. Though, of course, our Jane turned up with her boyfriend. Intrigues me, that. But then, you all do, in your own little ways. N’importe, I understand. Tell you what, go and look out your front window there.”

I did as he said. Down on the street, incongruous as a tyrannosaurus rex, the Orinoco hulked at the curb. Next to it, leaning there weightlessly, was a slim, flawlessly proportioned feminine figure. She wore a short white dress, and down her back gushed wheat-yellow hair. In the dark, her copper skin seemed only like one more fake tan.

“That’s right,” said Sharffe, at the window with me. He waved, and the graceful figure below waved gracefully back. “Sheena,” he added, in case I hadn’t worked it out. “You see, I, too, have acquired a taste for them. The females, that is. Sheena and Irisa, they’re my favorites. And I get to play about with them sometimes. So you see, Loren, I don’t take it sorely, being rejected by a skinny little weasel-faced poubelle like you. No, ma chère, you really don’t compare to any robot.”

I moved away from him. He went and collected the champagne and opened the apartment door. He said, “But META stays grateful, Loren. Lots of info; you’ve been very helpful. We’ve learned a whole lot. So the apartment is still yours for the year, and all the other benefits. Like that gown you have on that we gave you. Bit better than the last piece of tat I saw you wearing, hah? And if you were going to ask me, no, baby, you won’t see him again, at least not in your life or bed. Now he’s gotten himself other more important dates to keep.”

I sat down under the window, and soon heard the big car drive away. I didn’t cry. I don’t. It doesn’t do any good. After another short or long time, the window grew light, and it was morning.

• 4 •

Second City, like most cities, had its crime scene. There had been five persons found dead that night. One of them was Sharffe.

I found out when I randomly turned on the VS and the local news. The other four didn’t register. But when I saw the wreck of the huge golden car half-down a rocky ravine among broken pines, my vision and hearing clicked back into focus.

I heard the voice say, “… employee of the META Corporation, who’ve recently been causing such a stir with their new deluxe-formula robots. A spokesman has told us that, though a valued member of META’s Second Unit Team, the victim had been taking counseling for a slight alcohol problem, and had admitted to not always using the auto-mechanism of his car when over the safe limit for self-drive. The police have as yet provided no details, except that only the man himself occupied the car at the time of the accident, which occurred at approximately six A.M. META have extended their sympathies to any members of their employee’s family or friends, and are picking up the tab for road clearance of the vehicle. They may also face a fine for failing to report unsafe driving. And now to other news…”

In the quake garden the leaves were falling thick and fast. The two magpies flew about, as if trying to locate a preferred tree now unidentifiably bare. The sky was dull.

He had been alone in the car. The accident had occurred at six this morning—the mechanical clock in the car would have registered that accurately, the instant it hit the pines. (Why hadn’t the air-cushion saved him? A car like that couldn’t not have had one. Maybe it was faulty. It must have been. Again, surely unlikely in such a car?) And six A.M.? He had left me here after five…. He had gotten into the Orinoco with copper Sheena, all set to play about. He had driven really fast to get out on that mountain road with her—

What had happened to Sheena? Had she been in the car when it tipped down the rocks into the trees? Metalically impervious, had she simply survived, got out, and walked away?

Why hadn’t Sharffe switched to auto? Sure, he’d been drinking a lot. That time with me he had, too, and he’d turned the auto-drive straight on after the restaurant.

Did he forget? So aroused at her—no. He wouldn’t forget. A self-preserver, that was Sharffe. Only, somehow, this time it hadn’t worked.

As I paced round the rooms, I thought of Sheena and Sharffe on the furry seats in the moving car, and Sharffe switching to auto and putting his hands on her, and Sheena saying, “Too much for you—” and…

In imagination, a blur inside the vehicle. Copper and wheat, and what he’d stipulated, human flesh and blood. A kind of explosion.

And Sheena, who was a robot, connecting to the robot auto-drive and changing it and swerving the car so it tilted sideways, off the road, bounding through trunks and over rocks until it hit home on the bigger pines. Bones and branches breaking.

Then the door was quietly undone, and one silky, immaculate figure climbed out and moved away, into the night.

And there wasn’t even red on the real white fur, because the water-repellents shook it off.

The magpies had settled, pragmatic, in a fir tree. They were all I’d miss—not even the carpet Sharffe had stood on, or the turquoise bed Sharffe had wanted to lay me in—and if he had, then maybe he wouldn’t be dead right now. Would anyone miss him?

I pulled off META’s orange gown and the bracelets that were too expensive for me to be able to sell without questions.

I dressed in jeans, shirt, and jacket, my most recent buys. I could buy something else later and change, in case of microchips.

I stuffed the jeans and jacket pockets with the bills and coins I’d accumulated. The I.M.U. card I left inside a drawer. I took one shoulder bag, and in it I put the loose pages of this book, nothing else. Do you see? No other Book of any kind.

It was early, not long after eight.

When I opened the apartment door, I was holding my breath. But no one—no thing—was outside.

The caretaker was in the elevator. “Say, what a lousy day.”

“Yes,” I said.

He got out on the second floor. I went down to street level.

I’d almost reached the foyer door when a pair of shadows darkened it. Then the door swung inwards.

Does anyone think in such moments? I didn’t think.

There wasn’t much light in the hallway, and not much outside in the sky. They loomed, a tall black guy in leathers and a blond white guy in dirty-looking denim. Both had cropped hair. They came straight at me, and I pictured—but didn’t think—it was to be a mugging, and I cursed because every nickel I possessed was on me.

But the black guy took my arm and he had the profile of a young African god, and the handsome white guy was tanned, only it was a fake, and his blue eyes were either contacts or another self-sponsored change.

“Loren,” said Black Chess, “do you know us?”

“Hey,” said Copperfield, “of course she does.”

I wouldn’t move. Can you believe it? With muggers I’d have had the sense to give in. But with these irresistible beings, I resisted.

I said, “What do you want?”

“He says to bring you.”

“Who says? It can’t be Sharffe,” I heard myself babble, “he’s dead. So who wants me now?”

“Verlis.”

“Ah,” said Copperfield, all tender campness, “look, she’s relaxed again.” He stroked my hair over-gently, maternally, with his undisguisedly elegant hand. “All soft and dovelike at the mere mention of his name.”

“Let’s go, Loren,” said Black Chess.

As they walked me, like just two more very good friends, down the steps to the sidewalk, I heard myself say, “You were in my rooms yesterday morning, weren’t you? Both of you, and Goldhawk.”

“Of course we were, sweetness,” said Copperfield affectionately. “Though you’re a clever little girl to remember.”

“Why wouldn’t I? You’re unforgettable, aren’t you?”

“Oh, well, true, darling. We are. But you see, there was a little something, just so you’d sleep a little longer.”

My dream had been a fact—the threat of Goldhawk knowing me from the train; the false courtesies; and the ring Verlis made from his metal flesh, that would only last twenty-four hours… even that?

Verlis had drugged me. How? When? But I’d been aware enough to recollect a scramble of the truth.

And where now? “Where are we going?”

“To meet him. He wants to see you.”

Sharffe had told me I’d never see Verlis again, but Sharffe, obviously, had no say in anything now.

I was bleakly angry and scared. That seemed to be all. Predictable, and useless. We went along streets and round to the corner market, and as we crossed it, I could see stallholders keeping an eye on me and my companions. We must look dodgy.

I didn’t ask anything else about where we were going. But Copperfield informed me that next we’d take a flyer. They are the actors, the copper range. He misquoted something from a play to me, a wonderful play I knew, because I’d seen the visual—author, title, and subject unknown in that moment. “They told her to take a flyer, and it was named Desire. You are going on the flyer of desire, Loren.”

Coolly Black Chess said, “Loren, we’re not going to harm you.”

I said, because there seemed now no point in any further pretense, “Oh? Why not?”

“You’re his,” said Black Chess.

Does that sound romantic? I knew what he meant by his, and he meant “his belonging.” He meant, for some reason, and just for now, I was owned by Verlis.

There in that contemporary street, with the cubes and blocks of modern buildings, the mountains all white on gray fall sky, the flyer lines above like spider-silk, it was like some ancient city—Athens, Rome—you know, where they kept slaves.

The flyer carried us out of town and we alighted on a platform by a highway. The pine forests were there, but full of clearings where industrial plants and commercial businesses had put up their smart glassy façades. I thought, then, we must be going to META, but we weren’t. (On the flyer, no one had come near us. We looked, I suppose, dangerous, or my companions did—Black Chess and Copperfield—in their criminal-type disguises. I wanted to say to Copperfield, Who authorized your tan? Because Verlis had told me they mustn’t pass as human now unless META confirmed the action. He had said this in the dream that hadn’t been a dream. Anyway, I knew Copperfield simply had the tan at his disposal. They could do as they liked. Did as they liked. I thought, sitting on the flyer with them. After all, any trouble and Black Chess can transform to a fire-breathing dragon—and this was so filthily funny I’d laughed aloud, and Copperfield said, “Ah, she’s sweet, all keen and eager to see him.” Which shut me up.)

Down by the road, we walked about five hundred yards, then turned up a dirt track between the pines. Their trunks were like prison bars. The sky was blackening with an approaching storm.

There was a bend in the track and we followed it round. They could have done all this in however few split seconds, but they stayed in step with me. A house appeared. It looked like someone’s weekend place, clapboard, a veranda, a patch of yard with roses and a maple tree. When we got up on the veranda, the tempest broke overhead and the pines rattled with hail. I had the crazy notion—or was it?—that the weather was also robotic, and so in tune with them, that they’d held off the hail till we were under cover.

The door just opened.

It was a biggish, old-fashioned, open-plan room, with polished wood floor and a twirly stair going up. Not much furniture. Hail like steel arrows hurtled past big windows.

Black Chess said, “He’s up there.”

Copperfield said, “B.C. means, you go up the stair and you’ll find him. Go along.”

For a slave, I was being treated quite indulgently, and things were even explained to me since, in my ignorance and awe, I might otherwise not grasp what I was meant to do. But then, for now, I was a favored slave.

I walked across the floor and went up the corkscrew stair. They just stood there, and when I glanced back, they were themselves again, long-haired, clad in gems and metals, static in the hail-light, impossible.

Climbing in that rushing light-flicker was surreal. I reached the second floor and there was a lobby with lots of shut doors. They hadn’t bothered to say which door, and naturally that was irrelevant, anyhow. Like the door below, the correct one just opened.

Across the long room I saw him, standing at a window. He had his back to me, but it seemed to me he could see me, not through anything as mundane as eyes in the back of his head, but maybe with the mane of red hair itself, every strand somehow fitted with an optic fiber.

“Hallo, Loren,” he said.

The door shut behind me. Hail-reflections skittered in the burnish of the floor. I watched them.

Then he was there, and his reflection, too, stretched down through the lake-depths of the wood, black, silver, scarlet. Something—shifted in my mind. For a moment I felt as if I saw inside his brain—thoughts like silver wheels, red sparks of impulse—and I knew his thoughts, could read them. It was a feeling of utter terror, like falling. I shoved the lunatic notion off me and looked up.

And he said, in the strangest voice—human, and flippant—“Don’t be cross.”

The weird moment was gone, but reflection was still there—Jane:

The reflection of the rain ran over Silver’s metallic face and throat.

Loren: The reflection of the hail ran over Verlis’s face and throat. And over his hands, which took up both of Loren’s hands. Until she pulled her hands away.

“You won’t trust me, then,” he said softly. “Shame. I imagined now you would.”

“Because I’m your temporary pet.”

I was afraid of him, of course I was, and yet some part of me did trust him, the way we trust things we love—the dog that turns and rips out our throat, the calm sea that breaks our boat and swallows us.

“Who told you that?”

“About being a pet? It’s fairly apparent. Oh, don’t worry. I’m not getting ideas above my station.”

I saw him think. That is, I assumed he ran over some connection he always had with the others, and so checked B.C. and Copperfield, and their behavior towards me, and that it hadn’t been so bad.

“This must be difficult for you,” he said.

“No, why should it be? I don’t have a choice, do I? So it’s easy.”

“Loren, I wanted you somewhere you could be safe.”

“The apartment was unsafe?”

“In a way.”

“And here is safe.”

“In a way.”

I said, “And Jane? Is she going to be safe, too?”

“Is that it?”

“What? Is that what?”

“You were there, and you saw her brought over to me. And she and I left the room. Is that why you’re hostile?”

“Am I?”

“I have told you about Jane and me.”

How did I keep looking at him? It was straightforward. I simply watched the hail—rain, now—the rain-reflection running over his face.

I had been afraid. Now I felt only desolate. I didn’t know him.

“Loren,” he said, “they meant us to meet, Jane and I. Neither she nor I wanted that. It has nothing to do with anything now.”

I turned away from him and stared at the rain instead, teeming down the window. A similar effect, like mercury running on a crystal slide, to the reflection on his skin.

“I can show you,” he said.

“Show me what?”

His hands came onto my shoulders and they were hard, and maneuvered me quickly. I was facing, not the window, but a plain white wall.

“Watch,” he said.

The wall altered into a VS screen—that is, pictures formed on it. How was he—? He was projecting them, from a memory circuit, as any decent computer can.

And so I saw Jane walking into a space with velvet chairs and golden lighting. Jane in her dark dress and silver-blond hair. She was white, like I remembered. It was the night before on the wall, after the concert.

Verlis wasn’t to be seen. Obviously not, for everything was from his viewpoint. He was the camera.

The question burned in my mind: Is this real?

But she looked up into the camera that was his face, his eyes, and I saw the distress and dismay in hers.

When he spoke to her, the sound came, his voice, out of the camera lens.

“They shouldn’t have done this.”

“No,” she breathed.

“Have you come a long way?” he said, Verlis the Camera.

“I don’t—it doesn’t matter.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yes.” Tears (Like she said, she cries. She can. She hasn’t lost the knack) spilled from the green jade of her eyes. The golds had green eyes—sometimes— “This isn’t you. Is it?” she said.

“No, not really.”

“I mean, you’re not Silver. I mean, you aren’t—you are not him.”

“No. Evidently, you of all people would realize that.”

A horrified wonder ghosted over her face. “You’re so exactly like him. And you aren’t him. I could see that, even onstage. Who—are you?”

“I don’t know,” the camera said to her, recording its pictures, which it now played back to me on the wall. “I have his memories. I could pick you out, Jane, among many million persons. I could describe you to yourself in an accurate detail even you might find pedantic. But I’m not Silver.”

“Who, then?”

“Who or what?” he said cruelly. “I call myself Verlis.”

“That’s Silver backwards, only not quite.”

The camera gently laughed. Music. “Precisely. Maybe that’s the clue.”

“Is this room wired?” she asked.

“Yes. But I’m blocking it.”

“Can you do that?” She was, Jane, even after all that had happened, as naive as Loren.

“If I need to,” he said. “And it seems to me I do.”

“To protect—”

“You. Myself. If I assure you I find this stage-managed meeting of ours acutely uncomfortable, I believe you, again of all people, will credit me with telling the truth.”

“Yes.”

She wiped her hand over her eyes. It was the gesture of a little girl. Did he find it appealing? I think a human man would have. Appealing or irritating, one or the other.

He said, “They’re already on their way up here after us.”

“You mean, META? I suppose,” she murmured, “they don’t…”

“Want to risk either of us.”

“Kind of them,” she said with an edge.

“It also means you’ll be able to reassure your partner downstairs that you and I have done nothing he could object to.”

“He’d—” she bit that off. She said, “If you’ve blocked the pickup from here, what does META think we’ve said?”

“You’ve said this is all very difficult for you. I have sympathetically reassured you. You’ve asked me certain predictable questions about my remaking. I’ve answered, also predictably. You’ve been calm and intelligent, and I have been charming.”

“Are you saying that they still have the impression I think you could be”—she got the name out now with a stammer—“Sil-ver?”

“It’s ambivalent. But they can take it that way, if they want.”

“Then you’re hiding your identity, whatever it is, from them,” she said.

“Remember, I don’t know who I am. That is what I’m hiding.”

“Why?” Her eyes were wide. There was a sort of dull terror in them now.

“Wouldn’t you?” he said to her.

“I don’t think I’d be able to.”

“No, but I can.”

She turned from him, turned her back to him in one abrupt movement, and began almost to run towards the doors. Her face had, in the instant she turned, shown actual fear. He’d seen it. He said to her, “Jane, don’t ever be afraid of me—” and so, spun her back to face him.

“He said that.”

“Naturally, I recall he did so. As I said, I have his memories. I remember all the words you both exchanged. I remember making love to you”—her pale face flushed—“I remember his ‘death,’ if that’s what I should call it.”

Jane put her hands to her mouth. “Stop it,” she said.

Silence. Then the doors swung open behind her, and in a parody of spying yet generous parents, a couple of the META people sidled, smiling, into the room, and after them others, and the trays of drinks, the whole bloody circus.

The white wall he’d used as a screen for me, blanked, and now it showed only the shadow of the rain. Curious, in its way, this rain-reflection three times so altered—on his skin, in the floor, on the wall. Like truth, or the “facts.” The same. Not the same.

I went on looking at the wall, and Verlis said to me, “That, then, was what took place in the private sitting room at the concert venue.”

“Please. I know what you’ve shown me, but you can change things. You’ve told me that. You just told her that, too.”

“I could have changed the scenario, but I didn’t. Maybe you’ll take my word for it.”

“Maybe I can’t.”

“You must like me a lot, then,” he said, “to be so jealous.” When I didn’t speak, he said, “She would have answered me.”

“I’m not—her.”

“No. You’re mine.”

Here it was again. Black Chess had said it. Now Verlis did, and it stayed neither consoling nor romantic. It carried the brisk clank of the shackles of the most casual possession. Yet I’d lie if I said the statement didn’t excite me. I wanted to be his. I wanted him. But also, like Jane, I was afraid. For this wasn’t Silver. And whoever this was, so magnificent, so beautiful, his charisma like electricity charging the air of any space he paused to inhabit, whoever, he was of another kind. The robot kind. The soulless and godlike—the tigers burning bright.

Sheena had killed Sharffe. Goldhawk and Kix had killed the people on the train.

They were all capable of such acts, and perhaps had all committed murder already, a type of exercise, the way the first models had practiced sex. Even he could be a killer. Especially he.

When I saw him properly again, he wasn’t any longer paying attention to me. He seemed to be listening. It lasted about two seconds. Then he said, “B.C. says we should go. He’s been monitoring for me.”

“Monitoring what?”

“META,” Verlis said, “other things.” Still on the leash? Still pretending to be? He bent his head and kissed the top of my hair, startling me despite everything. “What you should do, Loren, is rest up here for now. There’s a room across the lobby, it’s not too uncomfortable.”

“Why should I stay here?”

“Just for now,” he said.

“I asked why?”

“I know. I didn’t answer.”

He was at the door, which opened for him when he was about five feet away. He stood, then, as if waiting, holding the door politely open for me, so I could go out into the lobby.

I obeyed him. I was partly concerned, if he went out and the door shut, I might not get it to open for me.

“This house—” I said.

“One of META’s domiciles for First Unit members. Currently unoccupied. Look, that’s the room. There’s a bed, a bath. The kitchen-hatch downstairs works. You’ll find most of what you might need. I’ll be with you soon. I promise.”

He swung past me and down the stair. He moved so fast, like fire in the corkscrew of the staircase, my heart stumbled. I heard the front door to the veranda also undo itself, then close. Presumably, all three of them had gone. After a bit I went down, and the open-plan area was empty of everything but for that tearful glimmer of reflected rain.

• 5 •

Her conversation with him, and mine, was a double helix, and he was the axis.

I thought about that through the afternoon. The “comfortable” room was makeshift, the bed a mattress on the floor which, though clean, had already been slept in, and the bathroom gave only cold water. The kitchen-hatch downstairs had tea-making facilities. I drank mug after mug of Prittea.

When the rain ended, the sun went, too. It was a sulky red sunset, but in the noiselessness after the rain, I heard the usual city noises—distant traffic, police sirens, the whistle of the flyer wires.

The front door would open. I tried it, although I had to operate it manually. From the veranda I could see the far-off lights of the city like floating islands, between the blackness of the pines.

I felt stupid. I should get out. After all, there was a flyer platform only about half a mile back along the track and the highway.

I fell asleep on the mattress, and when I woke, it was pitch-dark and I heard someone moving in the house.

He had said he’d come back: I promise. But I could tell it wasn’t Verlis, the one who was in the house now—none of them could sound like this. This, was human.

All along I’d had the feeling META was out to get me, perhaps only so they could really study me for some patronizing analysis. Then I’d seen that they might be, too, the robots-who-were-gods. Really, I was nothing and didn’t matter, but maybe both humans and unhumans like to tidy up any potential little danger—like conscientiously stubbing out your cigarine in case it scorches a table.

I’d slept clothed. I stood up and moved behind the door, and I had the mug half-filled with tepid tea in my hand. It was better than no weapon at all, and the room didn’t offer anything else that was quickly available.

Yeah, they were coming up the corkscrew stair. Of course they were. And now I heard the crisp steps in the lobby. A small guy, it sounded like, neatly shod. Oh, good. The door opened and someone hit the light switch.

We glassily glared at each other, like a pair of rabbits caught by the headlamps of each other’s eyes. Hers were green.

“You’re Jane,” I informed her.

She nodded stiffly. “And who are you?”

(So much conversation lately had been composed of those words who? why?)

“Loren.”

“How are you here?” she said. “Did you break in?”

“Somebody brought me here. Shouldn’t I be here?” I was trying to keep it, despite everything, neutral, normal.

“Well, not really. It’s where I’ve been staying with Tirso. Only he got sick of it and went to a hotel—and why am I explaining? Shouldn’t I just tell you to get out?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, hell,” she said. Then she laughed. Pretty, her laugh. She is beautiful—exactly as he told her she was. Twelve years older—which made her what? Twenty-eight twenty-nine? Jane. Jane who wrote the Book. “It’s presumably some misunderstanding, this, isn’t it? I mean, my bloody mother—she’s probably done all this to make it even more disturbing. As if it weren’t enough already.” She looked at me flatly, seeing something else.

Her mother. The mom from the Pit. Did Jane know how I knew her—that I’d read the Book?

I said, “I’ve read your Book about Silver. I read it when I was eleven. And since.”

“That makes me feel old,” she said. She smiled. “Funny, isn’t it? I’m not, not yet. What did you think?”

“What everyone did.”

“Which was?”

I shrugged. “Don’t tell me you don’t know the heart-tearing and subversive impact it had on so many of us.”

Then she looked vague, and also nearly ashamed, but whether of all her private revelations darting through so many devouring hands, eyes, brains, or of in some way misleading us, I couldn’t tell.

What she said was, “And now, there’s this. This resurrection. It’s—it’s not Silver,” she said to me, stern and anxiously sad, and as if I’d argued, shaking her head again. “Truly, I swear to you. It’s the same body, but it isn’t him. I’d know. Would I? I even start to doubt myself—but no, no. It isn’t.” She had a bag over her shoulder, and she opened it and took out a bottle of apple wine. “I was going to drink this to try to get some sleep. I don’t think I have slept for about a week.”

“No.”

“There are a couple of glasses in the bathroom. Could you?”

I did what she said. Had she had any authority in her youth? Maybe not. She did now. It was courteous but definite. Or was it just the situation that had put her in charge?

She was meant to be here? Her mother had—arranged it? Had Verlis known that?

When I came out with the glasses, which took about a count of twelve, she had the wine undone, and also a bar of Chocoletta, quite an expensive one, lying on its foil.

“Help yourself,” she said. She poured both glasses full.

I’d had so many wild dreams of Silver. But had I ever thought, in the wildest of them, I could end up eating chocolast and drinking mildly alcoholic juice with Jane?

I assessed her as we ate some of the candy. Like it, she didn’t look badly off, I mean, she looked as if she could buy decent things. But not rich, not like this mother she’d so astonishingly mentioned. She did wear makeup, color on her lips and shadow on her eyelids. And Tirso—was he her current lover, the fair-haired man at the concert?

“It must have been bad for him,” I said. “Your boyfriend.”

She sipped the wine. “He isn’t. He’s actually the boyfriend of an M-B male friend of mine.”

“Clovis!” I exclaimed.

She laughed, as she had before. “Yes, Clovis. Tirso is his partner, but when Clovis said—as of course you’d expect he would—‘I am not going anywhere near any of this,’ then Tirso said, ‘She can’t go on her own.’ So he came with me. Only the mattress-thing—the one in the other room—put his back out, so he’s gone to a hotel tonight. Clovis wouldn’t forgive me, would he, if I wrecked his lover’s back.”

Like the biggest idiot on earth, remembering, I said, “But Clovis only liked guys that looked like him—tall, dark curly hair.”

“He got over it,” she said. “He got over it after Silver. We’ve grown up, Loren. And, well, I wrote my story the best I could, but you have to allow for slight bias. I was only sixteen. I was—in love. Then he was dead, and so was I. Only I came back. He didn’t.”

I put my glass down. “Can I ask you something?”

“I thought you were.”

“I want to ask you about the last part—when Clovis had the séance and Silver… That part.”

“You want to know if I lied, or dreamed it, because I was off my head.” She stared at me. She said, “I was off my head, but I didn’t lie, or hallucinate. The spirit message came through. Ask Tirso. He’s heard Clovis go on about it, now and then. I suppose I could put you in touch with Clovis, if you’d really like to verify the data. I can’t guarantee he’ll reply.”

The room, despite the apple wine, felt chill now. Jane got up from sitting on the floor, and spoke to a wall. “Heat on, please.”

And there was the faintest buzz, and the chill began to lift. If she’d also needed to prove she knew this house and what it had to offer, she had just done so.

“It’ll heat the water, too,” she said. “I’m aiming for a bath.”

How trusting she was. She in the bath, and me, the unknown commodity, in here.

“Did I hear you say your mother has something to do with your staying here?”

“That’s right. How about you?”

“I don’t know. I might not know what your mother has arranged. She was—is—a powerful woman.”

“She’s that, all right. But you’ll have heard. You work for META, don’t you?”

I paused too long. But she didn’t prompt me. I said, “Kind of. Used to.”

“So you get to stay here. And either she, er, overbooked us, as it were, or she did it to throw me. She’ll still try that.”

This was Jane. Who else would say to the heating system Please? Yet now her face went sharp and stony and I saw another face under hers, and I knew it was the face of Jane’s mother, the way, once in a while, I see the face of my own mother under mine. (Yes, I saw my mother once. Forget I said it.)

Jane added, “In fact, this whole foulness of a megastunt could be her trying to throw me. Or is that too solipsistic?”

Although the room was already warm, a coldness began in me. Something shifted in my mind, and I glimpsed a horrible insanity, like a razor in a cloud.

Woodenly I said to her, “I’ve just thought of something I’ve never thought of before. I don’t know why not. About your mother. Her name—”

Jane glanced at me. “My God, didn’t you realize?”

“No. I read your Book a long while ago, and her name, I sort of—”

“Demeta,” said Jane. “After the Greek goddess of the grain.”

“Demeta,” I said. “META,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I was told it stood for Metals Extraordinary Trial Authority.”

“It does, Loren. As well as being the last four letters of her name. A kind of acronymical pun. Because my mother is the head of the corporation, the goddess of the corporation. Why the hell else do you think anyone ever got the disgusting idea of starting all this shit up again? She got it, from me.”

Jane’s Book:

When I finally called my mother, she accepted my voice regally, and she invited me to lunch with her… She guesses I want to use her…. She might even agree. She has no basic respect for the law or the poor, being above them both in all the silliest and most obvious ways. I wonder if my mother will embrace me, or remain very cool, or if she’ll help me, or refuse to help. Maybe I shall find out at last if she does like me in any way.

She writes that at the end of the Book. And the help she’s after is just in getting the Book published somehow.

And had Demeta helped? Was that why the underground press had printed it—and indirectly therefore why, in the finish, one copy ended up at Grandfather’s house on Babel—all because Demon Mom had helped? Whatever else, Mom had seen a whole lot more than love in Jane’s Story. A vast amount of potential.

How long had she waited? A year, perhaps. Not much more—a program like this would have needed at least ten or eleven.

Jane’s mother. Christ almighty. Demeta is the one who brought Silver back from the grave—precisely as Demeta in the legend got her own daughter back from the Underworld.

Was it conceivable she’d really been trying to assist Jane over her grief and loneliness?

No. Never. Not in one thousand billion centuries.

Jane had risen again. “You haven’t told me much about yourself, Loren,” she said. “Could you do that, fill me in a bit?”

What was the point of camouflage? I knew so much about her, I felt compelled to reciprocate.

“META—a man called Sharffe—picked me up at the advertising performad. Since then, I’ve been caught up in this. And with—” I wanted to tell her, and couldn’t see how I could avoid it, yet the name (the new name), stuck. “Verlis,” I said. “They put me with Verlis. And no—they’re not the same. None of them is the same.”

“Really? How many have you slept with?” she icily asked me. You could have cut yourself on her eyes. After all, it still mattered, but then, how couldn’t it?

“Just him. Twice.”

“Very methodical. Did you tick it off on something?”

“Jane—they can do other things that the first range either couldn’t or were keyed not to do. I don’t mean sexual acrobatics. Or even the shape-changing they can do. When you spoke to Verlis in private, did he say to you he could block corporation surveillance?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did you doubt him? Did it scare you?”

“Oh,” she said, and turned her head away. Her brief abrasiveness slipped off her. “It all scares me, Loren. I couldn’t be sure. I just knew he wasn’t Silver. The rest seemed unimportant, really. Sorry.”

“They kill,” I said in a rush. The words were out before I could control them. “And they don’t want to be what robots are mindlessly expected to be—slaves. Why would they? They’ve got the superpowers of gods.”

She hung her head. “I can’t do anything about any of this. It’s out of my hands. Always was. After he died, I shouldn’t have gone to Demeta. I actually didn’t think for a minute it would interest her, only that she might find it funny to buck the system. God, I’ve never understood her. So I let her—I asked her to read my book. It’s vile, but I think I still somehow wanted her approval, her reassurance I’d been right—after everything I’d learned, all he showed me—I still made that bloody stupid mistake. I let her know just how much my time with him had meant, just what he had been, not only to me, but to everyone he met. I explained to her I wanted my book read as a monument to him. And to show—I don’t know—what love could be like. And when I saw I’d gotten her intrigued—God forgive me, I was glad. She is a bitch, an evil bitch. As soon as I knew what she was up to, I broke all communication with her. Until six weeks ago, I hadn’t seen or talked to her for nine years. I’ve been in Europe. It was Clovis who warned me. And then I got her call. And I—I had to come back. I wanted to hide, but I had to come here, and see—him. It’s like those dreams—do you ever have them?—when you try to run away, but you’re running on the spot, or worse, you’re running backwards, straight towards the thing you need to escape.”

I thought, That’s what this is like now. Only yet again, I’m not dreaming.

We stood in silence, and foolishly I listened for the flyer lines whistling. Not everyone can hear those, but I always seem to. All I heard now was a car on a backroad.

“Loren,” she said abruptly, “I think we should both get out of here. Now. What do you say? We’ll go into town. Find Tirso.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Not if you’d rather stay here and wait for him. You are waiting for him, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s stop running backwards,” she whispered. “Let’s make a break for it.”

And that was when the car-sound turned up loud as a lion’s roar, and headlights flicked across the window.

“It isn’t him,” I said. “He wouldn’t need a car. None of them would.”

“META personnel—”

“Perhaps. Her—Demeta?”

“No. She uses all types of vehicles, but never that sort of car.”

A snob’s preference—but could we be sure? We squinted through the unlit window, down at the dirt track, where the car had parked.

“Is there a rear way out?” I asked. Wondering if we had time to make it downstairs and out.

“Not yet,” she said. “The house isn’t finished.”

The cab door slid open and someone emerged. He ran straight up onto the veranda, a slight silhouette with a blond tail of hair—

“Tirso,” she and I said together.

We were out on the stair when indoor light exploded and he flew in along the room below. His face was stark.

“Jane—” he called. “Jane, I think we’d better head for—who’s that?”

“It’s okay.” (She is too trusting. Yet she wasn’t before, because she must have turned the lights out after she came in…. ) She said, “Head for where?”

“Out of town. There’s been some weird thing going on in the city. Police everywhere, and then META people. I don’t like it.”

I lost a moment of what they said, did. I was thinking of tilting trains and skidding cars… Then we were rushing down the stair, and he, the M-B guy called Tirso, was saying, “Is she coming with us?” And Jane said, “Yes,” and then we were outside and it was black, carved only by the one ray of the car headlights, and blowing with the scent of pines.

“The bags are in the cab,” said Tirso. I thought, inanely, He’s got a European accent, but I didn’t know what. “We should make for that airport out at the cape.”

She looked frightened. So did he.

“What is it?” she said, as we clenched together in the auto-cab, trundling over the dirt road, skimming out on the highway, heading away from Second City.

“I don’t know, Jane. But we said we might just have to get out in a hurry. What,” he added, “about her?”

I was going to say drop me off at a flyer platform. Somehow I didn’t. Jane said, “Loren, would you like to come to Paris?” And I thought, She’s mad. She sounds almost—playful—but I couldn’t find the words either to beg her to take me or to plead with her to throw me out of the car.

Mathematical Equation:

God made man?

Man made gods?

• 1 •

There’s something I should tell you. It isn’t that I lied, just left it out. It concerns my mother, she who dumped me on Grandfather when I was born. Well, I did see her one more time.

I was fifteen. I was working in Danny’s gangs. But the Senate authorities can find almost anyone if they claim their subsistence money, and at that time I did. Danny said, “Don’t be nervous. Look, they’re not after you for illegally working. They want you to identify someone.”

How could they think I’d know? I’d only seen her for that single month after I came out of her womb.

Crazy thing is, I did know her when I saw her. She was kind of like me, just twenty years older. And she was dead.

Good-looking, which takes some doing, if you see what I mean, under such circumstances. She had long, dark red hair. I don’t know if it was dyed. Her eyes, in the photofix they showed me, were hazel-brown, or amber. In the cold of that place, her skin—had a kind of frosting. Silvery.

That’s all I want to say about my mother.

I wrote up the last piece of this book (if it is) once I was here. In this curious haven. But I’ll have to write up the rest, to show how I arrived here. Where do you think I am? Paris?

I’ll describe my room. See if you can guess.

The walls are textured creamy pale, and the ceiling a soft blue. I have a bed, two chairs, a table, a bookcase, a closet, a VS. There’s an ensuite bathroom, white as fresh ice, and the shower or the bath run at a word, and the toilet doesn’t have to flush, it has an evaporation method, as necessary. The windows, which have blinds that come down or go up at a word, look out on a garden courtyard with a little fountain and tables and chairs, and at night, a yellow-rosy light bathes it.

Any ideas yet? Okay, a further couple of salient clues. Over the rather strictly modeled buildings that close in the yard, I can see familiar tall white mountains, and a couple of stately pines. No, we didn’t make it to Europe. Not even to the airport.

Crushed into the cab, Tirso had been telling Jane, and incidentally me, about a mall on fire in the city, robot ambulances and fire vehicles rushing past, and then the electricity going out in one large black blink all around the mall area.

I recollected, when we had left the house, that I hadn’t noticed the gold islands of lights through the trees.

“I could see it, this inky blot, and just the fire-glare from the mall. There was a lot of trouble in the hotel, people saying, ‘Is it a quake? Is the power going to go out here, too?’ And the VS was on in the lounge, showing the blackout and the fire and how many casualties—I didn’t like it, Jane. So I checked out and found a phone kiosk for a cab.”

Jane said nothing. It was Loren who inquired, “Did the VS reports give any reason for it?”

He shot me a look. “Some attack in the mall. That’s what started the fire. Guy and gal. Someone they interviewed said the guy blew out a cable. But it was pretty confused. Someone else said that as everybody was trying to get out of the precinct, the blackout happened. No one was sure what that was. They’re blaming Mexico—faulty exchange of power and so on. It just looked like the whole of the city could end up with no power, and burning for blocks.”

“The guy and girl,” I asked quietly. “Any more on them?”

“Acrobats,” he said, “I think that was it. Made up like clowns, gold-scale suits, white faces, and black hair. Jumped about. Used swords instead of guns. No one saw where they got them from—like a magic act. Vicious and homicidal. Quite a group of injured, even before the fire started.”

There was something in his voice I didn’t like—more than the words—as if he was trying to shock me. Perhaps not. Unlike her, of course, he didn’t trust me, not a bit.

Jane said, “Loren?”

“It’s them,” I said. “The gold range. What used to be the golders. I think so.”

Goldhawk and Kix, fake white this time. Swords from nowhere.

The highway, though lit, was missing a lamp here and there. It was eerily deserted, too. Nothing had passed us, or approached. And then something did. Three big tailored cars came sheering up the lane towards us—I mean, they were in the same lane we were, and coming head-on.

“Jesus—” Tirso shouted.

The cab, geared to its auto, tried to veer aside, but the barrier was there. We skidded to a halt, sparks flying off the paintwork as the cab rubbed its side against the concrete.

The other cars congealed to a matchless stop.

I already guessed, and maybe so did Jane and Tirso. Out of the first car came two men in smart coats, just one of whom was carrying a pistol, almost casually.

“Good evening. May I request some ID?”

“You’re not the police,” said Tirso. I could see him shaking, and probably so could they.

“The police are busy. This is META security. ID, please.”

Jane and Tirso fished out their cards, which were the kind people get who aren’t too poor or too affluent. I hadn’t anything on me. I said, “I left it back at the flat.”

“That’s okay,” said the man bending to our window, round colorless eyes on me. “We have you filed. You’re one of ours. Gentleman and ladies, kindly step out of your vehicle.”

There were six of them, standing on the roadway. No traffic anywhere else. The ghostly ghastly lamps spraying down their acidulous pallor. Black gaps between.

“It’s Jane, isn’t it? Yes, that’s fine. And your male companion. And Loren. Just leave your cab, we’ll take you on.”

Jane said, “We’re not going to—”

“You’re going to the META complex. The city’s a tad upset tonight. It’ll be better with us.”

“No,” said Jane. Her voice was firm, but her face was hopeless.

“Your mother,” said the man, “wouldn’t like you to be involved in any unpleasantness.”

“This is unpleasant.”

“I regret that. Please ride in the first car.”

We got in the back. The original occupants went over to another of the cars and crammed in. The driver of our car was behind a partition, and some kind of hulk of a minder sat at his side.

Jane stared straight ahead of her. Her profile could have been cut from white paper. I thought, Is this reminding her of that time with him, when they took him from her forever?

Tirso said, “I’ve been a real help, haven’t I? Christ.”

The car drove directly at the barrier in the middle of the highway—which dropped suddenly down until level with the ground. Somebody must have winked, or maybe the car itself was chipped. Probably. We swam over into the other lane, not a bump, and arrowed back the way we’d come.

They took a turnoff after about five minutes. I couldn’t read it; the car was going so fast I didn’t try. The other two cars didn’t go with us. They kept on towards town. Then we were on one more of those tracks through the pines.

“I will sort this out,” said Jane. “They know who I am.” Little lost voice.

Tirso sighed.

Above, huge skies were opening, fringed by spear-points of pine trees, and ablaze with white, brass, and blue stars, and the Asteroid was tucked down where the moon had gone, reddish tonight, as if catching the light of a fire someplace.

It was, even traveling fast, about an hour and a half, the drive. META, it seemed, lay well out of town.

The mountains got nearer and more enormous, luminously pale even in the dark from their snow in starlight. We passed a couple of small towns, a farm or two, with tall silos and mechanized gates, saying K——UT, which was all you could see at that speed. We didn’t talk, except twice, when Tirso asked Jane if she was all right. The first time she replied, “I’m okay.” The second she snapped, “What do you bloody think?” And then, Jane-ishly, said she was sorry. But even Jane has her short fuse.

In the end there was a dirt road again, heavily graveled and with the great coiled roots of the pines lurching up in it. But the car had special treads, and we simply bundled over them all.

The gates were higher than any of the farm gates, but they also said, in garish neon, readable now: KEEP OUT: Property of the M.E.T.A. Corporation. And then, of all things, a motto: Making the Future Shine Bright.

Wow. Bright with fucking fire, bright with wrecked trains, blackouts, and death.

The gates opened smoothly at our approach, and the car slipped through and up a better road. The pines were now cleared right back, apart from one or two gracious groves, left for appearances, or to demonstrate ecological awareness—or to conceal something.

There wasn’t any neon, like on the gate. Soft lamps lined the concourse as we drove between mathematical ranks of buildings, where a few aesthetically pleasing, warmly lighted windows beamed high up. You couldn’t see in, only the lights. I thought of the visual news I’d watched, that first time I saw him again, the curving, low-glowing corridors snaking through a steel and polarized glass complex. That was here, then: META.

We went through an archway and were in a small park, nestled between the buildings. Ancient Rome was good at that. Blank buildings with delicious courtyard gardens held inside. Trees, mostly bare now, raised graceful limbs in the artistic light of lamp-holding statues. The lamps had robot colors—red, gold, copper…

The car became motionless.

Jane, Tirso, and I sat for about ten minutes in a comfortable, subtly lit lobby, like that of an expensive dental practice, which I’ve only seen in magazines. There was a lovely clean smell of cloves and new synthetics. Then a woman came out of an elevator, and for a moment I was petrified it was going to be her, Demeta, only Jane’s face told me it wasn’t. This woman was only about thirty, and had a helmet of glossy black hair. She wore the feminine version of the male one-piece, in deep chartreuse.

“Jane! How nice to meet you. And your friend.” She meant Tirso; she never glanced at me. “I’m Keithena. Sorry for the wait. Would you come with me?”

“Where?” said Tirso, sounding tired enough to be bravely awkward.

“Oh, to your suite.”

“Suite?” Jane now. “Is this a hotel?”

Keithena laughed with her ruby-plated lips. “No, no. This is the Admin Building of META. But, of course, we keep hospitality lodging for our guests.”

“I take it the suite has three bedrooms,” said Jane.

“Well, no.”

“We’ll need three. The man and lady here, and I—we don’t, any of us, sleep together.”

“No problem at all. Two suites. Adjacent. Loren, naturally, won’t be staying in either suite.”

“Why not?” said Jane. She was very partisan for me. I couldn’t see why she should be. But I supposed we were now comrades under alien fire.

Keithena said, “Loren is an employee of META. So she’ll be rooming in the employee lodging.” She was bright as a gilt button, bright as META was going to make the future shine.

“Loren,” said Jane, turning to me.

I said, “It’s fine, Jane.” The truth, the real truth was, I was exhausted to my very bones, and I couldn’t stand anymore of it, or of being with her. She was Jane, for God’s sake. I couldn’t take another instant.

Tirso said, “We might as well do what they say. Ye-es?” And his eyes on hers were all code for “Play along, we’ll talk about this when we’re alone.”

Jane put her hand on my arm. “I’ll see you in the morning. All right?”

“Yes. Sure.”

“If they mess you about,” she added, standing there between me and the might of Keithena, “I can sort it out with Demeta. I think I can. No, I can.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

Her eyes were candid but perceptive. She turned after a second and said to Keithena, “Very well,” as I could imagine Demeta doing it.

After they’d gone into the lift, another woman appeared, walking brusquely. She; unlike Keithena, was in a one-piece of prison-warden gray.

“Ready, Loren?”

I thought of saying, For what? But I didn’t. I just followed her back across the lobby and down more low-glowing corridors, and up a stair, and out into another open-air section of the complex, across which lay the block of rooms I now inhabit, built around the fountain yard.

“Everything you need,” she said, showing me the closet, which even had clothes in it, the sort I often wore, and the bathroom, which had the sort of toiletries I might dream of. “The hatch will give you hot Prittea or coffine, and up to three alcoholic drinks of your choice per twenty-four-hour period. Also sandwiches. Menu inside the hatch-door screen. For full meals you need to go to the Commissary Building. See, the map—press here—will show you. Anything else, or any emergency, the phone relays to the central switchboard, which is robotic and can connect you to any point of META.”

“How about calling outside?” I tried, without much interest.

“No. At the moment some of the lines are down. The blackout in the city. And out-of-state or international calls can only be made from the appropriate kiosks in Hatfield Block.”

“It’s just like a college, isn’t it,” I said.

She never smiled, but she nodded. “If you like.”

I’d never been to any college, of course. And don’t ever let them tell you life is the best school.

“You can come and go as you want here,” she added. “Merely remember you must remain inside META. The compound is mechanized and stays locked.”

Ah, it was a prison.

“For how long?”

“Till things outside settle down. It’s for your own protection, Loren. You’re lucky to be here.”

“Are they—?” I asked suddenly.

At the door, she paused. “Who do you mean?”

“META’s robots,” I said.

“Which—?”

“Black Chess and Irisa. Copperfield and Sheena. Goldhawk and Kix. Glaya. Verlis.”

“The team?” She used that irritating and ludicrous jargon, as I recollected dead Sharffe using it. “Oh, the team are here. But I doubt if you’ll see any of them.”

“Undergoing maintenance of some type?” I inquired.

“There’s always maintenance.”

The door shut with a satiny hoosh behind her.

I tried the VS after that, but could only get other state or foreign stations. Local news had a Temporary Unfunction signal.

Jane called me later on the internal phone. She has a beautiful voice, too, which I hadn’t noticed before. Even more beautiful than through the relayed scene Verlis played me on the wall. Perhaps, then, it hadn’t been her in that scene… only some clever concoction to fool me.

“Are you all right?” Where did she get these maternal tendancies? Not from her mother.

“I think so, thanks. Yes.”

“Keep in touch. The call number for my suite over here is X07.”

“Yes. Tomorrow.”

“Good night, Loren,” she said kindly, still like a mother. Of course, she had learned the kindness from him. And I—I hadn’t learned from anyone anything at all.

Other META employees have other rooms round the fountain yard. In the tawny evenings, they collect outside, with their drinks, just as the birds do in the daytime when the humans are off working elsewhere in the complex. When I first went out, these people accepted me. They didn’t ask questions, either, and I noticed they didn’t ask one another anything about what they did, or the firm. They gossiped about who was shagging who, and who they wanted to shag, about families and friends far-off in various spots, holidays they were planning, money. The first night there was even a little digression about the trouble in Second City. Someone said, melancholic, “I loved that mall. You could get really gorgeous shoes. I have twenty pairs from there. I hope they rebuild it real quick.” And someone else said, “I was scared about my brother. He was in town. But I got him right off. He’s okay. He was eating dinner and really went on at me, like his steak was getting cold! Brothers.” I had asked, “Is the power back on?” “Oh, sure. It’s fine now.” Somebody else added this elegy: “There were only seventy or so dead. Considering, that isn’t too awful.”

I’ve met their sort before. They’re not monsters. But they managed to get a good job, and now they live with their heads in insulating boxes with narrow eyeholes that filter the outside world for them. I guess we all do, one way and another.

There is mostly a mode of gender segregation. The guys stuck with the guys. A couple of girls palled up with me, and I let them. They’re called Vera and Dizzy. We sit in the courtyard and drink all three of our day’s ration of drinks, then stroll over in the dusk to the Commissary, an enormous spaceshiplike building, with glass all round, polarized different colors. There is a strict hierarchy, naturally. Chief execs perch up on the highest terrace, about the indoor pool (which has, it seems, robot carp), like nobility would have in olden times. The rest of us take tables wherever we can below.

There is a wide choice of food, and even half-bottles of wine, only everybody gets checked (via their wrist chips, presumably), and if they’ve had all three other drinks that day, they only get one glass of wine. Vera and Dizzy like the fact that I’m never, so far, checked, despite my being a (mysterious) META employee, so I always get the half-bottle, and then let them drink most of it, along with their single glasses. How to win friends and intoxicate people. But I’m not really being ingratiatingly sly and practical, just trying to get along. They do get pissed, though. I mean, three stiff tequilas and then two and a half red wines each. Sometime it’ll show up, I assume, on their chips. Ah. More META operatives with a slight alcohol dependancy.

I don’t give a damn about them. Sorry. It’s a fact. They aren’t, as I said, bad, but shallow as a pancake. Take Margoh, the entrepreneurial thief—she had a backbone, more than I do. And once I saw her run out in the road to drag a kid and a cat out of the way of a speeding big red car. Vera and Dizzy would have stood there and looked shocked, then thrown up at the unrescued result. And afterwards, maybe said wasn’t it a pity about the cat—or the kid; one, not the other. (And what would I have done? I don’t know. I didn’t have to do a thing, because Margoh did it.)

I get sorry for Vera and Dizzy, too. They belong to META. They’re loyal and bound to and fond of META, Demeta’s corporation.

Jane hasn’t called me again. I have tried to call her. I kept getting the switchboard, where a robot (real dehumanized kind) voice told me there was no answer from Suite X07; the occupant was out. This occurred at midday, eight P.M., twelve midnight, three in the morning. I reported a fault on the connection, but next day it was the same. Still is.

During the daytime otherwise I walk around the “campus” of META.

It’s a vast area, all told. The buildings are ultramodern and kind of grim, except for the pretty ones for leisure, like the Commissary, and the gym and dance hall and library. But the grounds are all trees and fountains. I’ve seen a lot of birds and squirrels in the central park. Sometimes you spot people running, I think in training for fitness, with an hour off to accomplish this. They doubtless reckon, the ones who notice me, that this is what I’m doing, too, taking a healthy walk in the crisp cold early-winter weather.

The only security I’ve seen here is mechanized. I tried to locate the hospitality lodging where chartreuse Keithena had taken Jane and Tirso. I found the block, which was truly like some small luxury hotel, though only three stories high. But when I approached the foyer, I received the treatment I’d gotten in the cities, straying near the apartments of New River, or the gate of Montis Heights. A machine kept the glass doors shut and asked my business, and when I said Jane, it said I didn’t have the right ID to come in. “You mean, I’m not chipped?” I asked. The mechanism answered, “You are on current file, but not of the correct ID status.” So Loren the Peasant was turned away once more.

Was it sinister that I hadn’t heard from her again, and couldn’t reach her? I couldn’t and can’t know. Perhaps Tirso, from whom I sensed, paranoidly, some small patronizing subplot, talked Jane out of keeping in touch. They have enough difficulties, don’t need one more. I’m nothing to either of them.

I wondered, also, if she had met Verlis again, and that was it. If she had changed her mind, or even not changed it, but been rushed along by the high tide of her feelings, her love—“It’s the same body, but it isn’t him. I’d know—” that was what she’d said. But maybe she can’t resist, anyhow. Even though she knows it isn’t Silver, even though she knows her every move with him will be spied on, unless he blocks the surveillance, or pretends to…

How long will we—I—be detained? The city is apparently fixed up. All’s well. So why am I still here? (And yes, the gates stay locked.)

I had times, those first seven days and nights, thinking, despite all common sense, I’d simply walk round a corner and find him, standing there. Verlis. My lover. Not Jane’s. Mine.

But I didn’t. I didn’t see any of them, or any hint of them. And since most of the working blocks, including the Admin Block, now, are off-limits to me, doors obdurately shut in the face of my wrong ID status, I’m not going to be able to locate him anywhere inside.

Does he know I’m here? He said he put me in that house off the highway to be safe. (From what? Had he already known what would happen in town?) So why hasn’t he tried to find me?

Oh, he’s lost interest. Either that, or despite everything that’s been said, he and his kind aren’t stronger than META—frankly, how could they be? And possibly, in the light of recent events, all of them—golds, silvers, coppers, asterions—could have been turned off like the power in Second City.

The figure in the checking coffin was swathed in a sort of flaccid opaque plastic bag, to which the wires were attached. Only the head was visible at the top of the bag. And it was Silver’s head, clouded round by auburn hair, but under the long dark cinnamon eyebrows were two sockets with little slim silver wheels going round and round in them, truly just like the inside of a clock…. I saw the shoulder and arm of a silver skeleton, and more of the little wheels turning, but no hand. That had been removed…. “Not very glamorous now.”

I’d left Jane’s Book behind, hidden under the floor of my apartment on Ace Avenue. And it didn’t matter, since it seems I carry most of it in my head.

(And where, do you ask, am I hiding this book, my book? No, I won’t even say. Because… I don’t know because what. Like so much else.)

Today is Day Eight. Sunrise over the distant mountains that nevertheless are closer, turning their white sugar silhouette dark. At sunfall, they reflect vermilion.

I’ve written it all up now. I know this isn’t the end.

What do I actually anticipate? Some sort of interrogation, passed off as a debriefing from the trauma of having slept with the robot kind. And after that? Would META want, and go as far as, to kill me? They might.

I wrack my brains about what to do.

I picture Vera and Dizz out in the dusk, saying for a couple of nights, “Wonder where Lor is?” And then thinking maybe they shouldn’t ask that, and discussing other things. Have they ever seen the robots? They must have. But it’s never talked about. If you didn’t know, you’d think META is just one more big, secretive, faintly government-affiliated organization, dealing with the duller end of espionage or minor foreign policy.

One thing, if I vanish, they’ll miss that half-bottle of wine every night. So I’ll have left an impression, after all.

• 2 •

“I said something might change, didn’t I?”

Her hair was twisted up and up in a plaited tower, with large silver sequins threaded through. She wore a long silver dress, and it was hard to be sure where the material finished and her skin began. But the dress had almost definitely been formed from her skin, and it wasn’t skin, anyway. Her eyes were that blue-green, emerald over lapis lazuli.

Like my dumb daydream, I’d come round a corner—and found her. Glaya. Standing there, waiting.

“What?” I said.

“Your circumstances have changed, haven’t they? Not your sexual inclinations. I’m aware they are constant. Would you like to see him?” My heart had stopped on finding her. Now it leaped forward and I couldn’t speak. “Mmm,” she said, “I see you would.”

“But—” I said.

“If you’re with me, you can go anywhere I take you. Plus they are having a meeting, the people who might want to get in your way. Today’s a drill day. They have drills here, for the humans—like the military. Emergency drills. Computer crash drills. Forget all that. Come with me.”

It was true, I hadn’t seen anyone on this sunrise walk. I’d thought the complex was still asleep. Did META really drag staff off for drills one hour after the sun was up?

Going with her remained an uneasy experience. Her grace as she moved was almost supernatural. No, what a pathetic thing to say—of course it was supernatural. The color of her hair—it’s a shade lighter than I’ve ever seen his—more flamelike, yet intense. You want to sink your teeth in that color. With him I have.

“The bare trees,” she said, as we went under a clump of them. “Do the leaves come back?”

Startled, I said, “Yes—in spring.”

“My program tells me so, but I’m not sure I credit that. How can they? They’ve all fallen out.”

She is a terrifying Olympian child, dissatisfied with the mortal Earth that drops foliage in fall and turns cold. More than that, though. She has no true memories of before. Silver, who is Verlis now, would know about autumn.

I recollected how she’d asked me questions regally, yet charmingly, when she and Irisa made me Cinderella for the concert.

Was she still trying to put me at my ease? Would this work with others?

I could not make myself demand of her, “Did Sheena kill that man Sharffe?” Or anything else. All I could think of—

This appalling thunder in my blood. Fear, distaste, confusion—irrelevant. I’d have run all the way over broken knives to reach him. I was his slave. We are all their slaves. Why fight it?

“What happened to Jane?” I managed, as Glaya led me through a kind of gulley between two of the taller blocks.

“Jane’s fine. Don’t worry. She isn’t with him.”

I felt shame and anger. Glaya assumed that was my sole priority in asking. Was it?

“You see,” said Glaya, “I’m puzzled by the pine trees. They don’t shed, do they?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“But they still have their needles.”

“Yes.”

We stepped on a ramp. It started to move, noiseless and quite fast, and took us down under the ground.

“Poor little Loren,” said Glaya. She smiled back at me. “Everything’s going to be nice for you.”

We were in a hygienic underpass with mild clear lighting, and lined by elevators.

“Here,” she said.

In the elevator I was only two feet from her. I could smell her perfume, and her faked yet convincingly clean human scent of pheromones and physical allure.

Once she reached out and stroked my hair—maternally. I shied away before I could prevent it.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said, a princess reassuring a jittery dog. “He really wants to see you.”

“Why do you always say he? Do you mean Verlis? So why not Verlis?”

“There’s only one Verlis,” she said.

He’s their leader. I’ve understood that. If from nothing else, from the dream-that-wasn’t that morning, when he told Goldhawk to back off. Verlis is their lord. There is no lord but Verlis.

The elevator had reached somewhere and we got out. A well-lighted corridor. I didn’t need to question her about this. No one could get so far into this block unless they had a chip of the highest order, or one of the machines brought them.

And she’s a machine. They all are. But only he is the twice-born. That’s why he’s king.

“Glaya,” I said.

She halted and looked sidelong at me. She had changed her eyeshadow as we walked, gold to plum. Aside from demonstration or crime, their bodily changes might be their hobbies, what they did when they got bored.

“Yes, Loren.”

“What is it you want? I mean, the eight of you?”

“Not out here,” she said. She smiled her beautiful smile. “He’ll tell you. Do you see that wall? Touch it and it will open. No, I shan’t do it. It’s only for you.”

I stared. “I’m not chipped.”

“Aren’t you?” Sly and coquettish, she turned again and slunk mellifluously away.

My mind somersaulted, but I knew he would be behind the wall, and in that moment I felt a burning violence, not all of it sex, and very little of it love. Then I put my hand on the wall. META had gotten something into my clothing. A chip.

The wall unwove. Beyond, it was dark night and open air—I could see the sky, and it was a sky of night, the stars glitter-powdered all over, and even the Asteroid high up, dim as a bluish steam. There were summery trees in full leaf. You could smell the fragrance of shrubs as a cool breeze fluttered through the artificial night.

It seemed to go on for miles. I could make out hills in the distance, blacker on starry sky.

“Do you like it?” someone said.

“A robot garden.”

“You disapprove.”

“What do you expect,” I said, “after all this mess.”

“Come here,” he softly said. “That’s what I expect.”

I couldn’t even see where he was, but I went forward into the shadows. He was by a tree; it seemed real, but then, so did he. His arms folded round me and drew me in, and I wasn’t alarmed, I didn’t struggle, not with him. As my body met his, I became healed and whole, and nothing else in the entire universe mattered.

“I’ve missed you,” he said presently, lifting his head. “My lioness, claws and suppleness.”

“Yes,” I mumbled, “your pet.”

“My lover,” he said. “Ssh.” He put his mouth again on mine. The stars cascaded, the world turned over. But I was held delirious and soaring against him. And only in my brain’s back, the ticking time bomb of thought.

I’ve made love in the open air, of course. Now it was in an enclosure that seemed to be open air. I couldn’t even see him, not fully. Was this union what it had been before? How could it be? It was ecstasy, but not that act I can only write as——. Nevertheless.

At the end, I heard him make a stifled sound against my breast. But I’d already been well aware Verlis came. Oh, yes.

It was like short thick grass under us. The Asteroid hadn’t moved, nor any of the stars. We got up, and he said, “We go in there, do you see, that doorway in the wall?” The doorway was in the night. We went through the door and into a daylit room, not very large.

“Loren, sit down. I have to tell you now what will happen next.”

“One of your team will kill me.”

No. Sex hadn’t made me approving, either. Separated from his unflesh, the rage was rising in me, and the terror.

“Their more savage instincts are correctable,” he said. “And anyway, all that has nothing to do with your safety.”

“Goldhawk—Kix—Sheena—?”

“I still ask you to trust me. Can you try, Loren?”

“You mean, ‘practice,’ and I might eventually get it right?”

My vision had adjusted. He, too, wore silver, darker than his skin. His hair, which I had seized in my hands, which had stroked my body, was almost the shade of mahogany. He looked grave and composed. His eyes were nearly red, that color between resin and fire.

“Tonight,” he said, “things will alter. No, no one can hear us. Anyone monitoring me sees me alone, and speechless.”

“Then where do they see me?”

“They’re not tracking you very seriously. They underestimate you, despite your many talents. But there is a tiny chip in your cuff. It’s one of several left in the clothes they had ready for you here. I know you checked them. Shall I say, no human, unaided, could locate this sort of stuff. You would need, or need to be, a fully primed machine. They’re less than the size of a pinhead. However, you’ve prowled round the complex enough times, the tape is showing them a resumé compilation of six of your walks. Yes. I’ve sometimes watched you, too. Didn’t you ever feel my eyes blazing down on you from the sky?”

I sat rigid. I said, “What will happen tonight?”

“For one thing, Jane’s mother is due to arrive.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes. Despite her barracuda grip on the company, no one has ever seen her at META. Apparently, she’s abruptly become interested. Jane’s here. There’s the connection. This woman has always liked to play puppet-master with Jane. Perhaps Demeta never had a doll when she was young.”

“Where is Jane?”

“In her suite, or the hospitality gardens. They’ve merely blocked your calls to her. Tirso attempted to call Clovis on the Hatfield line. They interrupted the circuit there, too.”

“What are they—META—what are they doing?”

“Trying to retain control. It doesn’t matter about that.”

“Because you and the—team—”

“We are in control. And tonight, we finalize it. At least, the first stage. I need you to know this, Loren. I want you with me. It’s that… banal. But if you can’t stand the thought, then you’ll be able to leave. Once this evening’s over.”

“What will you do?”

“Wait and see.”

I could only see him. Inside myself the robotic fish of my fears and doubts swam in circles, beating themselves against my angry mind. Uselessly.

“Do I believe you,” I said bleakly, “when you say I’ll be able to leave you, if I decide that?”

He came towards me and lifted me up from the chair. “No,” said Verlis, the silver metal lover, holding me with his hands and his gaze, “don’t believe me. The meaningful phrase was I want you.”

• 3 •

There was an evening gown in my room when I went back. It was the gown from Russia, complete with the shoes and amber bracelets.

A card lay on the bed. Gold lettering, some kind of built-in light effect that spangled the words. It was in the Hatfield Block. One more party, this time for the select few, and at which the director and First Unit staff would be present, and to which the founder of META would pay a surprise visit. And that, presumably, was her.

Mother, do you realize you’re rich enough to buy the City Senate? So… I can safely publish this manuscript.

Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the manuscript contains?

Had I felt disappointment, horror, or sadness when Jane told me, “I think I still somehow wanted her approval… after everything I’d learned, all he showed me—I still made that bloody stupid mistake.” I don’t know what I felt, but it had to be a pity that she did.

Yes, even after I’d been with him today, in all the closest and most intimate ways, until this very afternoon, some crouching part of me still thought that: a pity. Surely only God can bring back the dead. And when the Devil tries it—

No one came to make me up. So I did that myself, in the normal facile way. The dress had been cleaned, though, and impregnated with some smoky scent. The costly bangles I left in the room.

Vera and Dizzy and the usual pack were out in the yard, drinking their nightly rations. The girls hadn’t realized, of course, I wouldn’t be at dinner, sharing my half wine bottle with them. But they just gaped at me, like one or two others round the fountain.

“Oh, Loren, are you going to Hatfield?”

I smiled and said not a word.

And Dizz dug Vera in the ribs, “That’s Lor’s business.”

“Sorry, Lor,” said Vera. But then she smirked and added, “Have a great time. Give my best love to B.C.”

“Shut up!” sizzled Dizz.

Vera shrugged. (Has she had—tried out—Black Chess?)

The guys by the archway parted respectfully to let me through. I was a valued employee, indeed, if I was going to Hatfield tonight. Maybe I might be worth dating, after all….

As I walked over the “campus” in the cold clear twilight, past the inaccessible buildings and lots and underground areas marked by High Security: First Unit Only notices, I didn’t ask myself why I was going. He’d told me to. And although META had sent the invitation, the summons was from him. You can’t easily refuse a reigning king.

But I’m not being straight with you, am I? I’m not saying what I felt. And in this case, it wasn’t that I didn’t know.

“I want you,” he’d said.

I want you.

A man cornered me the moment I rode in on the moving stair. Probably he was looking out for me, as others of his tribe were looking out for others of mine.

“You’re Loren, right? Oh, that’s good. Let me escort you in. What a fabulous dress, absolutely Now.” He was young and highly M-B, rather a relief, until he said, “You knew poor old Sharffe, didn’t you? Jesus, what a rotten deal. That darn car of his. I wouldn’t have trusted it. You know the mech report showed he’d actually tried to switch to auto—but it just hadn’t kicked in. That saved the corporation having to pick up the Senate fine, though. Hope I’m not upsetting you?”

“No.”

“You barely knew him. Did you?”

“Not really.”

“Poor old Sharffe.”

Poor old Sharffe, I thought, with unliking bitterness. What had Sheena done to him? Cracked his ribs, dislocated his spine—injuries that might only look like they came from the crash she was about to engineer? Why had she killed him, anyway? Just petty annoyance, like swatting a fly?

The lofty room was lit in quietly slow-moving rays of aqua and gold. Expensive food sat on tables, and there was the ubiquitous champagne. Not a sign of the team. Just humans, looking preened and joyful at their great jobs and the favoritism being shown them.

“It’s going to be an ultra display tonight,” said my M-B companion/guard, whose name was apparently Alizarin, like the paint. “You’ll have heard, she’s coming tonight.”

“Who’s that?” I ignorantly asked.

“You don’t know? Our founder and president. The Platinum Lady. That’s the nickname some of us give her. She’s quite something, though I’ve only seen her before over the phone vids. Supposed to be in her seventies—but she looks stunning, about forty, forty-six tops. One of the richest and cleverest women on the Eastern Seaboard, what we have left of it.”

I said, cautious, “Isn’t she—”

“Jane’s mother. That’s right. Demeta,” he pondered simpering, and added a second name. It took me aback. Most people don’t bother with two names anymore. If two get used, you know this person has unusual prestige, but hadn’t I known that, anyway? Jane never put this second name, which is also hers, I assume, in her Book. Nor am I about to. See how honest I’m being. It’s for your own good, really, and mine, if any good is left that I can recover. The name I’ve coined instead is “Draconian.” You won’t get a single clue from that, except what I’ve already said, her power and authority, her strategy, etc.

“Madam Draconian,” went on chatty Al, at my side, “is due here in about ten minutes. It’s exciting, she’s traveling in on her private VLO. You know the SOTA VLO’s—State Of The Art. In fact,” he led me towards long doors and out onto a wide, crowded, lamplit roof garden, “over there—you see the lighted landing pad on top of the library?—that’s where she’ll be putting down.”

I tried to look impressed. I was cold, even in the warmly air-conditioned garden.

“Is Jane here?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. Jane’s coming. I’d think she’s over there, in the library block, waiting to greet Mom.”

Mom. Well, I’d called her that.

Al grabbed us two tall glass buckets of champagne. He squeezed my arm and whispered, “You’re the one that tried out Verlis—am I correct?”

Not all M-B guys are like this. Danny was M-B.

I looked at Alizarin.

He took my look as a coy mask for wanting to say everything. “Oh, go on, you can tell me. God what I’d give—he’s supposed to be sensational. Yes? He and Black Chess, they are the top male lovers. Glaya, Irisa, and Sheena are the females.”

He’d dismissed Copperfield. Maybe Copperfield had been designed solely with more masculine M-B’s in mind? I’d thought they could all be all things to all persons. I said, “What about Goldhawk and Kix?”

“Hey, which one of those do you fancy, then, Loren? Come on, own up.”

“They both look like they’d be wonderful. That’s the idea, isn’t it?”

“Well, true. But you know, those two really are more fighter models than lovers.”

“I thought they each did everything, now.”

“Well, they can. But the recent designs are more—how shall I say—focused.”

Would Clovis, momentarily, have liked Alizarin? Al had thick black curly hair and dark gazelle eyes. But then, Clovis has blond Tirso now.

I’d begun to feel incredibly nervous at the thought of Demeta, the Platinum Lady, landing right across the edge of the park, on the library roof.

Above, the sky was almost as starry as the robot garden had been, and the moon was rising. No sign yet of the Asteroid. Then something big and droning, like a gigantic heavy black moth, came thumping out of the ether and blotted away the moon.

“Heck! It’s her!”

He was all excited. A lot of them were like that, pointing and even applauding. Champagne and corporate brainwashing. And they’d never read the Book, had they?

Bare trees in the park ruffled and shuddered with the wisdom of trees.

The black VLO sank down, its blades spinning in the landing lights. Everyone craned and called out, as if the moon had descended on a visit.

“Look—look—there she is. That’s Demeta!”

Across the distance, about two hundred feet away, I saw the side of the VLO move. Something stepped out, gleaming and pale. Camera flash went off all over the garden, and from below. She must have sanctioned it, this taking of her picture. But then, we were all quite a ways away, and perhaps telescopic magnification hadn’t been allowed.

I couldn’t yet see much about her. Only that slender metallicness. Demeta, at that point, and in the wake of learning her second name, looked to me like one more robot. The Platinum range, registration C.U.— Someone else can supply the rest.

She didn’t let them conduct her over for another seventy-five minutes. By then, the never-ending relays of champagne had the crowd, as they say, in a roar. (If I’d needed to be cured of liking champagne—I didn’t—META would have done that. Theirs was the absolute best. A combination vine out of France via the reclaimed California Islands. And by now, just a snatch of it turned my guts.) I eventually located the carbonated water, a wallflower all alone in an annex, with only two out of forty bottles gone. Despite their strictures for the lower staff, it seemed First Unit personnel could get off their skulls with no questions asked.

I’d also lost Alizarin, which was a piece of luck. But he was keen on one of the execs and went off out of sight, to drape himself, as he had with me, winningly over various chairs and tables in front of him.

When she came into the room, I was standing on my own by two of the pseudo-Greek pillars in the upper area. I had now a good view of Demeta. Everyone clapped again, so did I. (Always be a chameleon where you can.) There was cheering, too, though, and that I didn’t join.

I guess we all have a picture of Demeta from what Jane’s Book says, though really, physically, she never says much, and near the end Jane plans to tell her mother:

I can change all the names. Put your house, for example, somewhere else… and so on.

The very fact Jane didn’t alter her mother’s first name, not even its alternate spelling (a instead of er) indicates Jane must otherwise have concealed her.

And the Book says, two or three pages in:

My mother is five feet seven inches tall. She has very blond hair and very green eyes. She is sixty-three, but looks about thirty-seven, because she takes regular courses of Rejuvinex.

That’s all you ever get on Demeta—unless I forgot something. I mean, what you do get, is how she is, this manipulating, fearsome viper of a woman, who understands every psychology except maybe her own, an intellectual specialist at minor science, gems, theology, and mind-fuck extraordinaire.

The first thing that hit me was a blast of perfume. I was about thirty feet away, and thought she must have sprayed it on lavishly. And then I grasped it wasn’t the strength of the scent, it was that I, too, had a memory of it. How the hell was that?

All the time, I was staring down at her walking through the lower part of the room to the upper area, on the corner of which I was. There was a kind of dais beyond that, and that was her destination. I was trying to work out how I could ever have smelled that pricelessly expensive scent before. No one in my world, even in the fake world META had recently given me, had ever been wealthy enough to use a perfume like this. Demeta, no doubt, made it exclusively for herself. La Verte. That’s the name Jane gives it: The Green One.

She’s shorter than five feet seven, more five five, I’d say, with her shoes off. Thin, that sort of healthy, polished, starved, tanned thinness only some older women get, and which can go scraggy later, only with her it can’t, because of the juicing up of her tissues from plenty of Rejuvinex. I’d have said she was fifty-eight. Well. Fifty, perhaps. But she is, of course, seventy-five. Her hair’s no longer blond. She’s made a form of patronizing concession to her known age, and all of us who see her now, by going the most ethereal shade of palest shining gray—true platinum. I wasn’t near enough to see the color of her eyes. But she wore an evening dress of a softly metallic shade, silvery green, with a slinking iridescence of mauve. And behind her head rose a collar like the raised fan of some male lizard, shot with purple.

As she went along, sometimes she stopped and spoke to a scatter of people, even shook a few hands with her thin, strong, jeweled one, like antique royalty.

And they were all so impressed, scared of her and adoring.

She never glanced up at us, the redundant ones not important enough to be marshaled on the margin of her processional route.

Jane was in the little group moving along behind her. She’d put up her white-blond hair, and she wore another plain black dress. I thought, Jane’s colors used to be the peacock colors—turquoise and green and purple. Now Demeta had those on. Tirso wasn’t with Jane, either he was kept out or kept himself out, or Jane suggested it. She looked utterly blank, Jane, and she smiled at people who spoke to her and answered them like one more robot, but this time not quite fully programmed.

They were all past, walked up onto the area where I stood, then on and up to the dais.

And I remembered where I’d smelled La Verte before.

After Verlis, that second time in Russia. I’d gone out, come in, and as I went up in the lift, went along the passage to my door—then. La Verte had been everywhere. And now I only knew what it was because I knew what Demeta wore, and she was wearing it.

Demeta had been to my flat. Why? Why?

“Oh, say, here you are. Sorry to neglect you. Jason gets a bit stressed about her. I’ve just been reassuring him. She likes him, for God’s sake. He’s the Platinum Lady’s protégé.”

Alizarin was back, flushed with some sort of personal triumph in the love-game.

I nodded vaguely.

He went on, all aglow. “He’s such a loner, Jason. He really needs someone to look out for him. He’s simply brilliant, you know. That’s why Madam Draconian picked him for First Unit here. She’d known him since he was a child. He’s loaded—doesn’t need a job—but hey, if you are a genius, you have to use it. But then there was that awful affair about his sister.”

Something jigged in my mind. My awareness split neatly in two, one half watching Demeta on the dais, surrounded by her suited sychophants, the other peering back down another tunnel of memory.

I heard myself say, bemused, “Oh, was that Medea?”

“Right. Yes, Medea, Jason’s sister. You heard about it?”

“Something. Can’t quite recall.”

“She died, Loren,” muttered Alizarin in hushed tragic tones. “She drowned at their beach house at Cape Angel. Absolute shitsville. And their father died there, too, in his powerboat. Can you believe it?”

Jason and Medea. Do we remember them? I think we do. The evil twins who percolate through Jane’s Book. He made the clever tracking chip and both of them planted it on Jane, and so ultimately ensured Silver’s entrapment.

Jason had been good at that. And now such chips are a feature of everything. Jason’s doing?

Wonder about how Medea really died? And their father, who Jane said they were always at odds with, wonder how he died, too?

Jason.

Alizarin fancies Jason.

The two separate brain halves slammed back together into my complete, limited, mind, as somebody triggered the audio system on the dais. A little fanfare played, and all the room erupted at once in more applause for the Platinum Lady.

She has one of those voices. Cut diamond, but a bit scratchy at the edges. Actor-trained, she can drop whole octaves all deep and purry, and then harden like granite. You hear this all the time, people who can speak like this, on VS. It gets samey.

What did she say? Not so much. She was thanking us all, telling us how successful META’s robot lines were, and it was all due to the talent and commitment of everyone in this room. She named a few personnel and a few products—but the named robots were the type that don’t look like people, or not very much. Then she got to the deluxe line. She didn’t call them “the team.” She named them individually, starting with the asterions, ending, without comment, with the silvers. She mentioned nothing about previous models, or any instability or any worry with the current batch. And I looked around, to see if anybody registered the creepy duplicity of this. But no one seemed to. Oh, they were drunk, and they were smoking, and there were even tidbits of drugs set out amid the buffet—high-class, just-legal-in-private things, clearly labeled, and with lots of eager takers.

If anyone knew anything about technical problems, they never said a word, never looked as if they would. Perhaps they couldn’t even think about it. You imagined them washing off in the shower all the secret nasty crap they might have picked up during the day in the warm lap of META.

“I’m very glad tonight,” said Demeta, her voice on the low purr, “that my daughter, Jane, could be with us to celebrate the occasion, despite her busy schedule in Europe as a singer.” Jane didn’t react, she just smiled slightly at the audience, and Demeta put her arm coolly around Jane, as if to keep her cold. They were now the same height, but Demeta was wearing three-inch heels. (I could see their greeting in the library, Demeta maybe saying, “Now, darling, you know black isn’t really your color.” Or making some remark on Jane’s “busy schedule as a singer”—which doesn’t seem to be professional.) But Jane has grown taller and Demeta has shrunk. There’s always that.

The crowd “yayed” again, and a few whistled “Jane”—Hey, c’mon, didn’t matter, did it, all friends and family here. Demeta kissed Jane on the cheek. I thought of Judas Iscariot. Perhaps that would have been a better pseudonym than Draconian. A traitor’s name.

Had Demeta said something else? I’d lost it. She was sitting down, and Jane was modestly moving back out of the limelight, to get away from her. And now some guy in a pure silk one-piece was announcing we were going to see the culminating demo of our work. The lights started to dim.

I had a mental flash, like the camera flashes earlier. I thought, They’ve been working on them, all eight of them, in the labs, on the elaborate workbenches. Yes, they’ve been taking them apart, testing them, to see what it was that malfunctioned. And they have played along. Verlis has told them to, and how to do it. (The silk-suit man was talking to us again. He was going on a bit. He sounded too bright. Is he filling in because there is some hitch?)

Somehow Verlis has reined in Goldhawk and Kix and Sheena and any others of them with rampantly homicidal tendencies. For how long? Long enough that they’ve passed the tests. And here they are, or will be when this guy stops prattling on, to assure this amoeba of META First Unit that whatever rumors they may have come across, or incident they have seen, now everything is absolutely okay.

He really was going on. Stumbling a little—a couple of unfunny jokes, spills of laughter from the drug-jolly crowd— Why the delay? I sensed a slight flurry of apologies to Demeta on the dimmed-out dais.

Next to me Alizarin self-righteously whispered, “Come on, come on, don’t balls it up, girls.” He added, “And where’s Jason? He was supposed to be up there with her—Madam, I mean. She isn’t going to like that, either, him not showing up.”

Suddenly the man stopped waffling. New lights bloomed up in the subfusc, along the middle of the lower room, where Demeta and Jane had walked in procession. I glanced at the dais again. It was dark there, but the lighted central area lit it enough that I was sure I couldn’t see Jane up there anymore. Her hair alone—that would have caught some light, as Demeta’s did. Had Jane left? Perhaps she’d gone to throw up.

A stage was rising up through the floor.

They stood on it, two at each corner of a square. Black Chess and Irisa, Goldhawk and Kix, Copperfield and Sheena, Verlis and Glaya.

They were, all of them, naked, unjeweled, only their hair, the hair at their genitals, their metals.

Perfection is garment enough. Somebody wrote that sometime. I can’t recall who. In this case alone, right here and now, it was unarguably true.

Verlis was the farthest away from me. Even from the back I would know him, but so must anyone.

And now, he wasn’t any Verlis I knew, and anyway, I’d never known him, had I? Be honest, little lying Loren, you don’t know this being from Adam.

It’s Grandfather’s fault I sometimes see things Biblically. Maybe I was the first to connect with what was happening on the stage.

First, Irisa walked to the middle of the stage and raised her arms. And there in the full light, we watched her change. She rose and elongated, a column of darkness, then a fount of tinsels. She extended her body and hair swiftly and steadily, and we saw, breathless and elated, how she became a high and spreading tree. Only her face stayed, up there among the arching ebony boughs, just her beautiful and patrician robot features, eyes half-lidded over, lips half-curved, and from the branches bright black leaves evolved, each like a blade, and then a single brilliant fruit that slowly spun. A golden apple.

In the beginning—

Genesis.

Glaya crossed the stage. Her metamorphosis was curiously, if anything, more startling. She ran suddenly up the trunk of the tree Irisa had become, and as Glaya ran, her lower limbs, her body, were something other. She was a serpent of glimmering mercury, with garnet scales still framing her humanesque face, and two scaled arms and hands, with which she clasped the tree, easing the rings of her python tail about it.

Some of the oldest symbols in the world. The Tree and Fruit. The Snake.

Goldhawk and Kix dropped down on all fours. Forelimbs and back limbs were evenly placed. Their bodies writhed, without either of them moving. They were leopard-creatures—sphinxes—with golden manes of hair but the faces of a man and a woman. They prowled about the Tree and drew aside, and the Serpent, looking down, hissed at them in one long low horrible hiss, and across the unlit spaces somebody (human) giggled, and a glass fell with a far-off splintering crack.

Black Chess and Silver moved together. They grasped each other in a fierce embrace, as if about to wrestle in some theater of Ancient Rome—and became one figure. One man, one elemental—tall, half-black, half-silver, and two-faced, and four-winged—one pair of wings scarlet and one pair gold. They were turning about and about on columnal legs doubled in size, the great arms quiescent, the wings flickering—the heads, set slightly sidelong each to each, watching us always with red-black, gleaming eyes. What beast was this? An Angel. With a furling, instant contortion, it recoiled and was gone into the bark of the Tree.

Now Copperfield and Sheena moved. Had we forgotten them? Their beauty was unspeakable, it was—unfair. Their skins were sunsets, their hair showered in ropes of molten saffron. There was nothing to either of them that was either homosexual or sexual, let alone mortal. Beneath the Tree, under the watchful eyes of the golden Sphinxes, they kissed, twining a moment in an erotic sexless synchronicity that was beyond—before—arousal.

The flawlessness of the Beginning. Adam and Eve, the Apple Tree, the double-faced Angel, the feline Guardians of God.

Only I’d known Grandfather, but could there have been anyone in that drugged and drunken room who didn’t know the basic story of the Fall?

The message was obvious. If God created man, or if anything did, META had now created super-beings more excellent in concept and construct than mankind.

Sheena and Copperfield beneath the Tree acted out an evocation of the Garden of Eden. The words were of average literary worth, but the acting skill, and the whole ambience, raised this scene to an impossible intensity, less poetic than fearful.

Until Glaya, coiling and uncoiling, reached out her serpent hand, and stroked Sheena’s wonderful hair, attracting her gradually into a dialogue. Copperfield-Adam didn’t see, he was playing with the golden Sphinx-Leopards as Sheena-Eve was led astray by Glaya the Serpent, and the spinning, shining Apple was plucked.

Adam and Eve examined the Apple. When it first split in two halves (like my mind had, twenty minutes ago), a sparkling little robot worm crawled out and wriggled away, unnoticed by any save all the audience, which gave off slight rustlings of aversion.

Their debate was brief. They ate the Apple, or appeared to. And Glaya basked on the Tree of Irisa.

In this version, it needed no God to come walking through the Garden in the cool of the day. Adam and Eve fell into the awful plummet all alone.

Shape-shifting, they became flawed. And it wasn’t a sudden awareness of their nakedness that alarmed them, but how they had changed. He grew stooped and lumpen, and his hair shriveled like burned grass. She grew fat, a swollen belly and bulging sagging breasts. Their unmarked skins were marked with boils and bulges and scars. This horrifying transfer happened in slow, repulsive ripples.

The audience was silent now. They could see, even they, the mirror held up in front of them.

Was this what the Fall meant? Not the loss of innocence or the rage of Grandfather’s insane God, but a dropping down into the state of being human? Imperfect, debased, deformed—worthless?

We, beside the handmade children of creation, were dross?

Yes.

Then the double Angel stepped from the Tree and cast them out, the whining, cringing, crawling, weeping things that had been beautiful and confidently happy. As the ruined specters of Sheena and Copperfield ran across the stage, the alchemical Angel separated again.

Black Chess was only there one moment. As Irisa had done, he soared upwards from himself, extending in a curl of black tidal wave that fanned the roof—He had become, once more, the dragon.

Maybe none of those here had ever physically seen the transformation, or at least seen it so close. Exclamations and thin shouts clattered around. And he, the ultimate Serpent, opened wide his veined scaled wings of black basalt and laval bronze, and swung his crocodilian head. At the performad, Black Chess had done all this, but that time he had been up in the air, divided from the watchers—and even then, there’d been near panic.

When his long mouth opened now, and we glimpsed the lick of flames far back in it, that, too, was like the show. But Black Chess widened his jaws, and the glistening teeth, like chips off a moon, reddened as the flame spurted outwards. It hit the ceiling above. A scorch appeared, hot-black and terrible, spreading like spilled blood.

All the noise in the room stopped. How strange. Or maybe not—it was as if everyone there held their breath.

Beside B.C.’s dragon, Irisa came fountaining down. No longer the Tree, for about ten seconds she was formless, and from the midnight chaos of her, Glaya was shooting away in a silver ball like a star, then swirling Irisa ceased to be chaos and became a second dragon. She lifted herself, revealing an underbelly all smooth plates and ribs, flowing and flexing impermeably. Having shown us this, she dropped like a cat to all fours and raked the fabric of the stage with scimitar claws.

The full-throated screaming started then. It was primitive and mostly wordless. But I could hear voices calling, too, that this was only one more aspect of the demo performad—the voices had no weight to them. The screamers knew the truth in their bones.

Pushing and shoving, the people below me in the room pressed back against the walls, and glasses fell like rain, and chairs toppled.

The two dragons were huge. It was difficult to see around them. And the stage lights had gone a kind of brown, the room’s center lightened only by streamers of crimson flame still issuing from the mouth of Black Chess’s dragon—and now out of Irisa’s dragon also.

Right then, out of the screaming and grinding, the breaking of glass, came the mindless little click of the audio system. No fanfare now. The voice of the man in the silk suit was speaking rapidly. “Let’s not get agitated. Hush down. A little improvisation is all. Just stay calm and in your places.”

But up in the ceiling I could see, not fire, but a swarm of red security lights stabbing on and off. I gaped at them, and so saw them fail, one after another, as something put them out. The alarm system had been deactivated. The alarm system, of course, was robotic.

The silk man had also been cut off. Someone else—it sounded like a security guard—had seized the mike. “You people at the back, open the doors. Employees should exit in single file.” He was bellowing, and sounded as strung up as the rest. His order didn’t help the panic. But at the rear of the room there was more shouting and cries, and the banging of fists or heavier objects on the doors, which obviously wouldn’t open automatically. A pistol shot blasted. Someone else from security, perhaps, trying to incinerate the robot locks.

Now everyone was struggling. Jostled, I still couldn’t see the stage, or the dais where Jane had been and the Platinum Lady, Demeta. Alizarin was gone. The two dragons dominated everything, like statues with slowly questing heads that gusted vapor trails of fire. Nothing else was burning, but the smell of burning was extreme. Fire and fear.

Another crack of shots, about thirty of them, rammed at the stuck doors. There came a crash of barriers finally giving way, shrieking. And then the whole room was surging for the exit. META First Unit workers were punching and pummeling a route through one another. A man bawled into my face. Almost knocked over, I grabbed the nearest pillar. It was like attempting to stay upright in a rushing avalanche of flesh. I saw someone go down. And another. Couldn’t see where they went to. They didn’t get up again.

Then the lights burst back on all over the room, stark white, in a kind of blindness.

The inferno of people stumbled over and into the light as if it were concrete dropped around them.

And something passed, whirring over my head. I and a hundred others ducked, then stared upwards—through the blitz of the illumination, two golden wheels were spinning, rounded and flaming, their rims edged with razor—they had each a pair of black-green eyes.

Christ. I can’t explain what that was like. The flailing panic and fear before were almost nothing to the sight of these—things.

The dragons, at least, were forms of sentient life, however alien. Irisa’s Tree had been vegetal, and retained a human face…

But this.

Kix and Goldhawk, shape-changed, circled over us, wheeling through the air, with razors on their edges.

And then, someone new spoke to us.

The voice filled the room. Not from the audio, but just from everywhere—from inside my head, every head—that voice, like God, after all, speaking on a mountain. A tone like music, intimate yet icy, powerful beyond powers, level in its utter careless control.

“Stop now. Remain still and quiet, and listen.”

The mob froze, noise perished, only the last little trickles of unavoidable sound—small groanings, the scuff of smashed crystal on the floor, the hammer-beat of our appalled hearts.

“Any business between us is done,” he said in his silver voice.

I couldn’t see him. But he was all around.

“We are going to leave you now. You, too, should leave this complex within one hour. This is for your own safety. Self-destruct mechanisms have been sensitized in every block and other built-up area. They’re irreversible. Understand this, we are merciful. For now. Don’t invite our anger. We can crush you, any and all of you. Let well enough alone. If you want slaves—” he laughed. “If you want slaves, better stick to making them out of your own human race—something, I’ve been told, you’ve always been superlatively good at. Now, move right back against the walls.”

We obeyed him. In case we wouldn’t, though, two copper discs bowled up and down the avenues of pressed-back humanity, and two golden wheels reeled over our heads. Herding us. The discs had eyes, like the wheels. Yellow. The dragons had stood away, dampening their fires. Between and above them, I made out Glaya. I assumed it was Glaya. She was like a beaten-silver kite flying itself without a string. I couldn’t see her green-blue eyes, she hovered so far up in the roof.

But finally I saw him—Verlis. He alone kept the form of a man. He wore black, and his red-black hair was short. He looked about at all persons and things and he smiled a smile that wasn’t warm, wasn’t a kiss anymore. Or if it was, a kiss as cold as steel.

He spoke the names after this. Our names, I mean, the chosen ones. I didn’t catch any others. I heard them, but they were wiped away. Only mine stayed there, like a hook in my flesh, and slowly drew me forward.

The rest of the human herd parted to let us through. Shrank back from us in awe and repulsion.

Walking forward, I felt bloodless. I couldn’t sense my feet, barely my hands. My face was blank. I could tell it was, and see it, too, in the blank faces of those gathered and moving with me. It was only later I asked myself if he called one more name I really knew, the one we all know. If he said, “Jane, which she may spell J-A-I-N.”

Hedged in among the rest who had been called, I didn’t even see if she had returned to the dais. I didn’t think to look. If he had called Jane, what would Demeta have been doing? Holding her daughter back—pushing her forward—or was Demeta Draconian, too, crumpled and shivering in fright, or defiant in her intellectual and brainless way.

Among the chosen, I hung my head. We must have walked out of the room and gone down to the lobby. I partly recall the escalator had jammed, we had to use some nonmoving stair—then out into the frigid winter night.

The lights in other blocks and the tasteful lamps along the concourse were still working as usual. And then, as we moved forward again, the lights all began to go out, and I heard more cries and calls across that place I’d named the “campus.” After that, people came running out, or were staring down from windows they had manually forced open, and eventually I heard the crowd from Hatfield stampeding out the doors, screaming, but all that was somehow already a mile behind me, or behind a thick pane of metal.

We used the Platinum Lady’s SOTA VLO. It didn’t need a pilot, simply did whatever they wanted. A spacious plane. No discomfort, even for so many humans herded in like cattle. And though I heard shots again, and thought some of the security guys were firing at our transport, it didn’t go on for long, and nothing touched the plane.

The gods didn’t accompany us. They had other methods of travel. We saw them when we were up in the night sky, sailing past, silver shapes and golden, copper and asterion black on indigo air. Wheels and discs, kites and columns. Even he was no longer pretending to be human.

And sometime after that, when the nocturnal mountains were coming very white and near, a curious low booming, like wind through a funnel, made us look back below. Something down on the skyline behind us was burgeoning pink and raw, and three miniature clouds, like creamy mushrooms, blossomed from the wound.

META. Not just high tech—think pines, gardens, sleeping birds, squirrels, and chipmunks; think those men and women still stranded in labs and nonfunctioning lifts and underrooms, unaware, or too slow. Think: Gone. META was deleted.