“Look, everyone,” said the star, “I’m burning so bright.” And then it went nova. And when the light faded, the star was nowhere to be seen. The moral of this story is obvious.

• 1 •

My whole arm hurts too much for me to write this. I don’t know why I’m trying to. Is there any point? Is it a sort of therapy? I’m not writing it for a record, anymore. How childish. But then, if I’m not writing it, childishly, for anyone else, I must be writing it for me. And it won’t help me, so that’s that.

No. I have to write it.

It will be easier if I just start. Just go on. From those words—I’m happy. But I can’t.

I’m happy. I’m burning so bright.

Ohgodiwishiwasdeadandthewholebloodyworldwasdeadwithme.

No. I have to write it, so I will. And I don’t wish the world were dead. But I won’t even cross that out, or tear it up. I’ll just go on. Please help me, someone. Jain, please help me.

The snow became porcelain under a pane of blue sky. The weather was exquisite, the cold like diamond. After a couple of days, the wine and the raisins ran out, and we emerged again. We opted for most of the indoor pitches, particularly Musicord-Ectrica, on the corner of Green and Grande. If you don’t know, Musicord is the biggest all-day, all-night instrumental store that side of the city, and caters to the rich from the center as well as the starving dreams of the poor from the Arbors. There are so many anti-vandal and anti-thief devices in the shop, the decor mostly consists of them, and they hire their own robot poliguard. Silver was welcome because he could play any instrument in the store and make it sound its full worth and something extra, a wonderful inducement to customers to buy. Rather than take coins here, Musicord offered us a fee, and now and then a free late dinner in the lush restaurant above.

At first, I thought we’d keep meeting people I knew in the store, and wondered uneasily how I’d deal with them in my new persona. But my friends aren’t musical, knowing little except for the most recent songs and the odd snob-value bit of Mozart.

There were a couple of meetings, though, with musicians who came in and fell in love with Silver’s musicianship. Jealous and elated and intrigued, I’d listen to the oddest conversations, as they tried to find out what band he’d been with, why he wasn’t professional, and so on. As a liar, this creature who’d told me he couldn’t lie, proved most accomplished. I watched him languish esoterically over his escape from the rat race of the professional stage in some far-off city, I heard him invent curious debilities of the wrist or spinal cord that would let him down and so prohibited full-time public playing. Of course I came to realize these weren’t actually lies. He improvised, just as he did with songs. But a handful of musical evenings followed, extraordinary firework displays of talent, invention and good humor, in damp basement rooms or craning attics or quasi-derelict lofts. They played and he played. The excitement generated was insane and wonderful. Only his brilliance made them wary, and occasionally stumble. But I used to sit through these sessions and think: I like this. This is so good. And then I’d think, quite consciously, just as I wrote it down: I’m happy.

We came out of Musicord-Ectrica about two in the morning, then, and stood in the golden snow where the glow of the store lights was falling. We looked, from the outside, back in at the scarlet pianos, one of which Silver had been playing most of the afternoon and evening. A large visual screen, with a loudspeaker wired out to the street, blared in the adjoining window, and I glanced and saw reports of an earth tremor somewhere, and looked away.

“Are you tired?” I asked him.

“You always ask me that, mad lady.”

“Sorry. You’re not tired. You don’t get tired.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“We could walk over to the Parlor, then, and you could make yourself sick on lemon fudge ice cream again.”

“Or go home and see if the cat’s eaten any more candles.”

“I told you, if you bought the cat a bone, it would stop.”

We stood in the snow. I wished I could buy him a scarlet piano.

“Did you write out the words of the new song you were working on in there?” he asked me.

“Not yet. But I told you and you’ll remember it. I do, too. White fire—God—it’s a weird song. The ideas keep coming. Maybe it won’t last. I’ll dry up. What would you do if I dried up?”

“Water you.”

The visual screen switched channels automatically, and the sound stepped up. We’d have to move. But my eye slid back to it involuntarily. I saw a rainbow neon in front of a drab glass-sprayed frontage, and the neon read ELECTRONIC METALS LTD. For a second it meant absolutely nothing. And then the sign went out, the letters became just a black skeleton, and I heard the news reader’s voice over the loudspeaker say: “Tonight, E.M. switches off its lights for the last time. The firm that wanted to make robot dolls as good as men finally admitted there’s no substitute for a human after all.”

“Silver,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

We waited there, watching, and the snow drummed slowly under my feet with the pulse of my blood.

Now the screen showed a small blank room with leather chairs. Someone was facing out at me. He had tinted glasses, and this time, a five-piece suit, trousers, jacket, waistcoat, shirt and cravat, all of cream wool. Swohnson. The front man. I recognized the stance. His easy affable charm, his relaxed willingness to give information, and the two manicured hands holding on tight to each other.

“It was a great idea we had,” he said. “Ultimate service to the customer. Robots, not only aesthetically pleasing, but a source of constant domestic entertainment. Singers, dancers, conversationalists. Companions. But it’s a fact, there’s only so much you can program into a chunk of metal.”

The screen flicked. Swohnson was gone, and there was a line of yellow metal boxes with smiling humanoid faces. “Good day,” they sang out like canaries. “Good day. Welcome aboard. May I take your fare?”

The screen flicked. Swohnson was back.

“That line isn’t, er, too bad,” he said. “More welcoming than just a slot. They’ve caught on quite well. The Flyer Company is considering installation. We, ah, we recognized our limitations, there…”

Flick. A grey metal box with a friendly head, and two pretty girl’s hands. “Good morning, madam. How would you like your hair styled today?”

Flick. “Where we came unstuck,” said Swohnson, “was in trying to create a thing which could rival the human artist. The creative individual. Our Sophisticated Formats. Of course, computers have been fooling with that for years. And we all know, it just doesn’t work. Man is inspirational. Unpredictable. He, ah, he has the genius a machine can never have.”

Flick. A young woman was standing on a stage a long way off. The camera glided toward her slowly, and as it did so, highlights gleamed and flowed across her white-wine-colored gown, her copper skin, her wheat yellow hair. Her sweet and musical voice said effortlessly and surely: “Gallop apace, you fiery footed steeds—” And said again: “Gallop apace, you fiery footed steeds—” and again and again and again. And every time with the same inflexion.

“A perfect performance,” Swohnson said, as the camera glided about her, “and the same every time. No variation. No—um—no ingenuity.”

Flick. Swohnson sat, beaming, holding his hand.

“But very lifelike,” said an invisible interviewer, subtle and insinuating. He was accusing Swohnson of something. Swohnson knew it.

Swohnson beamed, broader and broader, as if exercising his facial muscles.

“Verisimulated,” said Swohnson.

“Could be mistaken for human,” accused the newsman.

“Well, yes, ah, from a distance.”

Flick. A golden man in black oriental garb sewn with greengage daggers swung a curved sword into the air, and was transfixed. The camera raced to him. At about four feet away, he ceased being a man. You saw the impervious metal of his skin—which was hard as the veneer of a heatproof saucepan.

“The skin is always the giveaway,” said Swohnson, as the camera slid along the canyon of a metallic eyelid, its lashes like black lacquer spikes. “And, although they looked quite real at their routines, the head movements, the walk, always let them down.”

Flick. A copper-skinned man in yellow velvet strode across the screen. You could just see it, the stiltedness, and once having seen it, you could see nothing else.

“The crazy thing is,” said Swohnson, “the public hysteria that got stirred up, the day we introduced these robots to the city. A publicity gimmick—but what a surprise—”

“Yes, indeed.” (The interviewer.) “A kind of myth was created, wasn’t it? Totally autonomous robots who could find their own way about.”

“Naturally,” (Swohnson) “every robot had a human attendant, however circumspect. They could hardly have managed otherwise. Absurd, the things people actually credited our robots with. Oh, yes, er, they were clever, the best yet—but no machine can do the things our robots were supposed to have done. Traveled on flyers alone, taken ferries, subways—”

Flick. Old film, and I knew it. A crowd of demonstrators in East Arbor, the police lights playing over them. Someone threw a bottle. The camera followed it. It hit the facade of Electronic Metals and shattered.

I must have made a sound. Silver took my palm between his cool fingers, which felt of human skin.

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t. Don’t you see—wait,” I said.

Swohnson was back on the screen.

“Whatever else, the final failure of E.M. will please those people out there who got scared by what we did—or what they thought we did.”

“E.M. has egg on its face, then?” The newsman. Pleased. Congratulatory.

“A lot of egg. We found out the hard way. These ultra-sophisticated machines use up so much energy, they just short out.”

Flick. A golden girl, dancing. A spray of electric static. A metal statue, poised at an unearthly angle, one leg extended, her hair in her eyes. Stupid, ungainly. Laughable. A machine that couldn’t be as good as any human, that couldn’t even finish its act.

(“Some run-down heap,” said Clovis, “that will probably permanently seize up as it walks through the door. Or at some other, more poignant, crucial moment.”)

As if he read my mind, the interviewer said: “And surely, how shall I put it, these things had a friendly social function as well. A stand-in for a girlfriend, perhaps. Awkward if your girlfriend seized up like that.”

“Um. It could have happened.”

“Oh, dear,” said the interviewer.

Swohnson grinned. The grin said: Hit me again, I love it.

“So I guess we remain,” said the interviewer, “the superior species, to date. Man stays at the top of the heap as artist and thinker. And lover?”

“Um,” said Swohnson.

“And dare I ask, what are E.M.’s plans for the future?”

“Ah. We’re thinking of moving out of state. Somewhere east. Farm machinery for derelict agricultural areas.”

“And will any of your tractors have a winning smile?”

“Only if some maniac paints one on.”

And flick, there was a cartoon filling the screen. It showed a metal tractor with a great big smile, eyelashes and long, long golden hair.

I shut my eyes and opened them. The snow dazzled, and I turned in fear to see if anyone but us had stopped to watch the local news broadcast. A drunk rolled across the street, oblivious, slipping. In the sky high above, a distant string of jewels revealed the approach of a flyer. The city roared gently to itself on every side. But it didn’t really matter who had seen the visual here. All over the city people had seen it. Seen it, but believed it?

“Very strange,” Silver murmured.

“I’m scared.”

“I know you are. Why?”

“Don’t you see?”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s go home,” I said. “Please. Quickly.”

We walked in silence, cloaks brushing the snow, like two Renaissance princes. And every time we had to pass someone, I was afraid. Will they recognize him? Will they confront us?

But how could they? Hadn’t the news bulletin just told them that a robot can never be mistaken for a human? Go close, you’ll see the skin like a saucepan, hard, hard metal. (I had lain closer than any camera, or treated still shot designed to deceive. Skin which was poreless, yet not lifeless, smooth but not hard. Metallic, but not metal…) And the walk, disjointed, a little stiff, and the ungainly gestures which always gave them away—a puppet, slightly out of control. And the inability to find its own way about the city. To decide for itself. All those of us who saw those robots that day when they walked among us, did we all now believe that we’d made a great big silly mistake? Yes. Why not? We believe what we want to, don’t we. And no one wants to believe the machines that take the jobs away from those of us that need jobs could also take our songs away, our fantasies, our lovers.

Someone had told Electronic Metals what it had to do and what it had to say. And Swohnson, as ever in the hot seat, had done it and said it. Lies. Logical, credible, soothing lies. How much compensation had the City Marshal been authorized to pay E.M.? A lot. They’d had to take their most exciting product off the market. They’d had to mess about with it until it gave an efficient display of being useless, for the benefit of the visual cameras. And then—and then, no doubt, they’d dismantled it. Golden torsos dismembered, golden wheels turning where black eyes had looked out, or copper wheels, where golden eyes had looked out.

“Your teeth are chattering,” he said to me.

“I know. Please don’t let’s stop.”

The visual hadn’t shown any of the silver range. The silver girl at the piano, the silver man (Silver’s brother and sister), neither of these. Why was that? So as not to remind anyone there was a Silver Format? Tell the people that our robots, which they’ve seen to be exactly human, are really shambling bumbling automatons. And they’ll accept that. Tell the people, by omission, that the only robots they saw were gold or copper. And they’ll forget the silver range. The Silvers with their burgundy hair and auburn eyes. But why, Mr. City Marshal, Mr. Director of E.M., do they have to forget about the Silvers? Why? Because one of the damn things is still at large. Out there in the city. One flawless, human, better-than-human, godlike, beautiful, genius of a creative inspired robot. And if they realize, the citizens may lynch us all.

I thought I’d been living in the real world, bravely coming to terms with the truth of life. But I hadn’t. I’d missed all the upheaval that must have been happening, somehow, all about us. The apartment on Tolerance Street, our pitches, our romantic, poetic existence. How far from life they really were. Only another cocoon. But now the axe blow of fact had broken through.

I’d told no one where I was. No one knew. Therefore, no one knew where Silver was. Had they been looking? No, that was insane.

We were in our block, going up the stairs. I imagined shadows looming up from the dark by the door. But no shadows loomed. We opened the door. Lights would flare, a voice would shout: Surrender yourselves! But the room was empty. Even the cat had let itself out through the flap. (Remember when he cut the flap, efficient and stylish? “I just read the instructions.”)

He guided me over to the wall heater, switched it on, and together we watched the heat come up like dawn.

“Silver,” I said, “we won’t go out.”

“Jane,” he said. “This has been going on some while, and we never knew. And we never had any trouble. Did we?”

“Luck. We were lucky.”

“I was bought and paid for,” he said. “They’ve probably written me off.”

“They can’t write you off. The City Senate has done a deal with them. They can’t just leave you loose.” I stared at him, his profile drawn on the dark by the heater’s soft fire. “Aren’t you afraid, too?”

“No, I’m not. I don’t think I can get to be afraid. You’ve taught me several emotions, but not that one. Like pain, fear is defensive. I don’t feel pain, or fear. I’m not intended, perhaps, to defend myself, beyond a very basic point.”

“Don’t,” I said. “That makes it much worse.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

“We won’t go out,” I said again.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Food,” he said. “Rent money.”

“Then I’ll go alone.”

I grasped his wrists, lace and skin. Skin. The fluid movement of the strong fingers, shifting, returning my grip.

“Please don’t argue with me,” I said.

“I’m not arguing,” he said. His face was grave.

We stood there, motionless in the firelit darkness, a long while.

Gone to earth, we stayed in the flat five days. It was a fearsome, banal, claustrophobic existence. We discussed strange topics, as for example that he could protect me from attack, and maybe not himself, the distances between certain types of stars, what the insides of the walls were like. We also talked of constitutionals through the subsidence—but didn’t risk them. I lived on apples and crackers. It was hopeless, since there was no foreseeable end. Finally something embarrassing and embarrassingly simple drove me out on the street. As I’d missed my contraceptive shots, I began again to menstruate, as I had at twelve and thirteen. I’d been aware it might happen, but never got around to more than the most cursory of the provisionings against the event. So, rather than starvation, hygiene forced me back into the unsafe world.

I ran along Tolerance, along the boulevard. Eyes everywhere accused me. Under the elevated a woman stepped out of a shed and caught me eagerly by the arm. “You’re the bitch who sleeps with a robot!” But she didn’t say that. She said: “We missed you at the market. People asked after you both. Where’s he? Not sick, is he?”

“Oh, no. It’s just so cold out.”

I forget what else we said. Something, and then she let me go. When I got back into the apartment, I was shaking. But later I realized, and Silver explained to me, over and over, that all this proved nothing had changed.

Next day, I went out alone again. I walked through the streets, through the stores. A couple of times people said hallo to me. No one accused me. Something inside me, a tense wire, sagged and slackened. E.M.’s retraction was a tiny little wave, which had hit the beach of the city, and passed unnoticed.

He sat cross-legged on the brass bed, playing the guitar softly, and said to me, “Go out again tomorrow, and if nothing happens, we’ll go out together tomorrow night. One pitch only. An experiment.”

“No—”

“Yes. Or you’ll be down to eating the poor cat’s candles.”

So the next day I went out, about three in the afternoon. I walked along the frozen sidewalks and around into the arcade where he’d sung the first time and I’d been so afraid of singing myself. As if to sing were something to fear. To sing.

I glanced around the arcade. No one was in the archway, but people trotted to and fro and in and out of the shops. A long translucent icicle hung down from one of the ledges above, pointing like an arrow to the spot on the snow beneath, where Jason and Medea stood and looked back at me, with two tight little matching smiles.

• 2 •

“Hallo, Jane.”

“Hallo, Jane.”

“Ooh, what a silver face you’ve got.”

“Yes, Jane, it is rather silver. Makeup, or did you catch it off him?”

I’d forgotten, my heart hammering its way through my ribs, my breath snarled up in my throat, forgotten that when you learn to sing you learn to control your voice. But I was doing it anyway.

“Catch what off whom?” I said.

“Gosh,” said Jason, “what impeccable grammar. Off that peculiar actor friend of yours.”

Do they know? How can they be here? As if they’re waiting for me—

Don’t answer. Switch. Throw them.

“Isn’t it cold?” I said.

“Not for you in that lovely green cloak.”

“Is that his?” Medea inquired.

“Whose?”

“Your rude friend.”

“I have a lot of rude friends.”

“Oh,” said Medea. “Does she mean us?”

“She doesn’t want to talk about him. Obviously had a lovers’ tiff. What a shame, when you’re living here in the slums to be with him.”

They know. I think they know it all. Do they know where I live? Where Silver is? How can they…

“If you mean the man with the red hair you saw on the bridge,” I said, “we’ve split up, yes. He’s gone east.”

“East?”

“Out of state.” (Like Swohnson and E.M. and their new line in farm machines.) “There’s the chance of a good part there, in a drama.”

“And left you all alone? In this slummy bit of the city?”

“Jason,” I said, “what gave you the idea that I live around here?”

“Well. You’ve left your mother, and your mother’s stopped your credit and your policode and all that. Then we asked around rather. Described you very accurately—diet-conscious, bleached hair—And we heard about how you sang in the street with your friend who’s gone east. How brave, when you can’t sing. Do you do it the way we do? Someone said you come here, to this arcade.”

They’d been searching for me. It couldn’t be for any reason but pure nosiness and spite. And today was the day Silver and I used to come to the arcade—they’d found that out too, and stationed themselves here, waiting. And, used to coming to this spot at this time, on this day, I’d done it without considering. And walked right into them. (They know he’s a robot, they’ve spoken to Egyptia, or Clovis. They know.) But—they hadn’t found out where we were living—or they’d have turned up there. (I can just imagine their smiling faces in the doorway.) Of course. Nobody did know where we lived, we’d never told anyone, even the musicians whose lofts we’d visited had never yet been invited back.

“Well actually,” I said, “I don’t live this end, at all. It’s sheer chance we met.”

“Ah. A Dickensian coincidence,” said Jason.

“Where do you live, Jane?” asked Medea, smiling, her eyes like thin slices of cobra. How I hated her, and her awful crimped blue hair.

“Where do I live? Near the Old River.”

“And you never open the windows.”

“Not often.”

“It’s interesting there.”

“Yes. Anyway, I must go. Good-bye,” I said.

“Good-bye, Jane.”

“Good-bye, Jane.”

They stood totally static as I walked out of the arcade, and I almost turned and ran for home. But as the cold of the open street breathed over me and my boots crunched in the deeper snow, I suddenly understood I’d escaped too easily. With a queasy, dizzying sensation I walked over the road and into Kacey’s Kitchens, and straight down an aisle of servicery fixtures. Pausing before a chromium in-sta-mix I saw, reflected in its curved surface, a distorted runny image of Jason and Medea flowing in at the door.

Pretend not to be aware. Find a crowd, lose them.

Oh God. There may not be a crowd. It’s cold, and cash is low.

There has to be a crowd.

There wasn’t.

Not in Kacey’s, not in the Cookery. Not in the dozen or so stores and shops I walked through. I tried to lose them in alleyways, too, twisting and turning, going along walks I only knew because of going along them with him. Darting across hurtling roads, trying to get ahead of them—or perhaps, get them run over. But somehow they kept after me. I’d see their storefront reflections melt in, a few yards behind mine.

The sun went. The streets darkened with dusk and brightened with extra lighting. It was getting late, and I couldn’t go home. I ached with the cold, and with hunger, and with anger and fear. I hurried into a second owner clothing store, and tried to shake them off among the moth-eaten fur coats. I almost thought I had, and then, going through the hats toward the other door, most horribly I heard Jason give a raucous hoarse sneeze. It went through me like a bullet, and then I ran. I ran out of the store, and down the street outside, skidding and sliding, clutching at intermittent lampposts to steady myself. Would they run too? Oh let them fall over and break all their legs—

They ran. They must have. I didn’t hear them, they ran like weasels, better than me. Without knowing quite how, I’d reached the square that led to the all-night market with the fish-oil flares. As I stopped, panting and gasping, with a stitch jabbing in my stomach, they came up, one on either side of me, like the slatey shadows.

“Jane, whyever were you running?”

“Are you following me?” I cried.

“Are we?” Medea asked Jason.

“Sort of,” he said reasonably. “We thought we’d walk you home.”

“Only, the river isn’t in this direction at all, Jane.”

What now? I let myself gasp for breath, because it gave me time to think, if only I could. I mustn’t go toward Silver and the apartment on Tolerance. Nor must I go toward the Old River, since they would go with me right to the door, and I didn’t own a door over there.

“I don’t need you to walk me home,” I said.

“We think you do,” said Medea.

“We were certain, with your policode not working and everything, it might be dangerous for you.”

“You were certain you wanted to see where I lived.”

“Is there some reason you don’t want us to?”

“Why could that be, Jane?”

“We’re your friends.”

Where could I go? Where could I take them, so they’d get bored and leave me alone? I had hardly any cash on me, a few coins, no more. I couldn’t go and sit in a restaurant. And I had to get out of the cold, somehow, I couldn’t stand it anymore. My hands had no feeling, or my feet. Perhaps I’d broken all my toes as I ran and just couldn’t feel it yet—My eyes were burning. And they’d say, You’re frozen, you want to go home—why won’t you, if you’ve got nothing to hide, and no robots stashed there?

“I’m not going home,” I blurted out.

“Why not, Jane?”

“I’m going to see Egyptia.”

“Oh.” Both their faces fell. I’d scored, and I wasn’t sure how and then, “You mean that utterly abysmal moronic play she’s in.”

“She kept saying,” said Medea, “Jane’s got to come to my first night. Jane’s got to be there, or I’ll die. How could she abandon me like this?” Medea frowned slightly. “But you aren’t.”

It sounded very like Egyptia when Medea said it, only without Egyptia’s beautiful voice. And in the midst of panic I felt a stab of guilt. Egyptia had been wonderful to me, and I’d never called her to tell her she was wonderful, and that she would be safe. Hoping she’d now lost all interest in me and in him, my love who was her gadget, I’d shut her from my mind, as if to make it happen by sympathetic magic. But she’d shown me no malice. She’d been gloriously, sweetly kind. And tonight was her first night as Antektra, asking the peacock about brothers and dust. Through my own sick fear, I could just visualize her agonies.

“Oh, well,” said Jason, “we’d better go with you. We thought of going, actually. At least over to The Island first.”

We were walking, the three of us. Their policodes glinted, his on a necklet, and hers on a bangle, and I wished there were no such things and I could kill them. The tremor sites had snow on them. The sky was snowing out stars. Silver! Silver!

Egyptia, I’m sorry, but if I get the chance to get away from these creatures, I don’t care about you—Oh, God, give me the chance—

“We’ll go over to South Arbor and take the flyer,” said Jason.

The Asteroid rose over the broken buildings. In the icy air, it seemed larger than ever, and touched the faces of my escort with a green-blue glaze, but probably it was an optical illusion.

We walked. They didn’t speak to me any more. Now and then they said things to each other, sometimes about me.

“Actors are awfully stupid.”

“Yes, it will be a revolting night. But if Jane wants to.”

“Isn’t she thin now? Not right for her bone structure.”

“Wonder what Mother would say.”

They knew they were my jailers. But they’d still failed, so far. They hadn’t been led to my home. I’d provided a legitimate excuse for not going there, and so they couldn’t be certain I was shielding anyone, or anything, from them. Not certain.

We got to the flyer platform in time to catch the four-thirty P.M. As they clambered and clambered me into the lighted pumpkin, I tried halfheartedly to fall back, but they wouldn’t let me.

“Come on, Jane.”

“I just remembered, I haven’t got the fare.”

Jason hesitated. They’re very mean, despite their riches and their thievery, and I wondered for a second if they’d abandon me after all. But then he said to Medea, “You can pay for her, can’t you?”

And Medea, expressionless and hateful, said: “Yes, I’ll pay. I’ll pay for her on the ferry, too. Jane’s one of the poor, now.”

“Do you remember,” said Jason, “when she offered to pay our bill in Jagged’s, and then didn’t, and they got on to Daddy and asked him for it? That was ever so funny.”

We sat down. The flyer, a golden champagne bubble, drifted forward into the city sky, and I could have wept, from the pain of my thawing fingers, and from despair.

Silver would be expecting me. The streets were dangerous. I had no policode. Would he, even though he couldn’t seem to be afraid for himself, be afraid for me? Silver.

“Don’t the buildings look interesting from here?” said Jason. “Just imagine, if we had some little bombs we could drop on them. Bang. Bang.”

“They’d look more interesting then,” said Medea complacently. “On fire.”

Damn the pair of them. I wish there were a hell, and they could be there forever, screaming and screaming—

No, I don’t wish that either. That wouldn’t make any difference, now.

There was a crowd waiting for the reservoir ferry, and Jason held my arm. He’s scarcely taller than me. I thought of trying to push him in the water off the pier. But he’d only swim back.

The ferry came and we got on it. It curved through the water and around the trees to The Island.

“The play doesn’t start until midnight,” lamented Jason. “But Jane knows that. Over six hours of listening to Egyptia carrying on.”

“Do you think,” said Medea, “we could do something to make Egyptia amused? Like putting some small creepy insects in her makeup boxes?”

“Ssh,” said Jason. “If you tell Jane, Jane will tell Egyptia. And that would ruin the surprise.”

“Or we could put glue into her stockings.”

“What an intimate idea. I wonder what it’s like to be intimate with Egyptia?”

“Oh, Jason,” moaned Medea, “please kiss my little toe—it’s ecstasy, and it makes me feel like a woman.”

I stood by the rail, the water coiling by, not really listening. Somehow I recollect all they said. But it’s irrelevant. And presently we reached The Island pier, the landscaped gardens, and got off and walked up to the lift, and rose in it to Egyptia’s apartment.

It was deadlock until then.

By the time Jason spoke to Egyptia’s door, saying he and Medea were there, and not mentioning me, I was feeling violently nauseated and no longer really cared.

All around the dead pot-plants pointed at us with their petrified claws. The night was strange and glistening and terrible. I recalled how I’d come here last and bit my tongue, the only way I could keep any control over myself. It seemed to me that if Lord came to the door again, it would be the end.

When the door opened, no one was there but ourselves reflected in the mirrors as we trooped inside. It was also very silent, though I could smell incense and cigarines and the warm resinous scent of Egyptia’s entirely convincing pine-cone fire.

No one seemed to be in the vast salon, either, though yellow candles were burning everywhere. It looked so cozy, so beautiful, so sumptuously welcoming, my illness began inadvertently to lift. Then I almost screamed.

The fire had been put in the middle of the floor, and in one of the big shadowy chairs, three-quarters onto it, a head turned, and the flames outlined a crimson halo along dark red hair. It was Silver. It was—

“If you stole anything from the hall on your way in,” said Clovis, “please replace it. This advice is for your own sakes. Egyptia, who is putting the finishing touches to her makeup this very minute, is liable to return in the person of Antektra, or—worse—in hysterics yet again. And much as I’d love to see someone murder the two of you—Good God Almighty!”

I swallowed.

“Hallo, Clovis.”

Having turned elegantly and slowly, caught sight of me and leapt to his feet, he was now transfixed, and I could see why I’d made the mistake. Clovis’s curling hair had been grown to shoulder length and lightly tinted red. To copy Silver? Mirror-Bias in reverse? The room shimmered. We’d parted in unfriendship, yet seeing him again I felt such a shock of relief I was ready to collapse on the floor.

“Jane. That is you? I mean, under that blond wig and the silver skin?”

“It isn’t a wig. It’s my natural unmolecularized color. Yes, it’s me.” I felt blazingly hot now, and unfastened the cloak and held it drooping away from me.

“My God. Let me look at you.”

He came across the room, stopped about a yard from me, gazed at me and said, “Jane, you’ve lost about thirty pounds. I always knew it. You’re really a beautiful boy, circa fifteen hundred. With breasts.”

At which I burst into uncontrollable tears.

Jason tittered, and Clovis said, “You two can go through into the servicery and dial the cellar for some wine. A dry, full-bodied red—Slaumot, if there’s any left.”

“Are we supposed to do what you tell us?” asked Medea.

“I think you are,” said Clovis. “Unless you’d like me to let your daddy know what you did last week. Again.”

“Daddy doesn’t care,” said Medea.

“There you are wrong. Daddy does care,” said Clovis. “Your daddy was talking to my daddy the other day, and both daddies agreed you would profit by instruction. Your daddy was brooding on the notion of sending both of you off on a study course similar to Davideed’s undertaking. Silt. Or something of a reminiscent color and consistency, though a rather nastier odor.”

“You’re lying,” said Jason.

“About the subject for study, possibly. Not about anything else. Don’t get the wine and prove it.”

Like a lizard, Medea slithered abruptly away through the salon. Jason, impelled by the invisible bit of string which connected them, peering back at Clovis, went after her.

My crying, to my surprise, had been tearless, and almost immediately stopped. To see the terrible twins reduced to such an unimportant role dumbfounded me.

“What on earth did they do, to give you that hold on them?” I said.

“Shoplifting and minor arson. I happen to have paid the fine before it got round to their father, who really is thinking of sending them into exile.”

“Why?”

“Why not? I felt generous. And now I can blackmail them. I shall need a new seance arrangement, post darling Austin, who, by the way, is a homicidal maniac. I’m trusting Jason will fix it, and not booby-trap the rest of the furniture at the same time, which is the price I had to pay before. And now. What about you?”

“For one thing, how did you know to come here tonight? Did you see the horrendous Ask My Brother To Dust The Peacock advertised somewhere? On a police-wanted placard, for example. Not that I’m arguing with your arrival. Egyptia has been driving herself and everyone else mad for the past three weeks. None of her fellow Thespians will talk to her anymore. I’m wondering if they’ll even consent to talk the lines to her on stage tonight. But at least her wails of ‘Oh why isn’t Jane with me?’ will be appeased.”

“Clovis.”

“Yes, Jane?”

I looked at him, at this handsome face I’d grown up seeing grow up, Clovis, the last remnant of my past. Was he my enemy? I thought so when he called me and took Silver away from me. I thought so when he blushed, and sneered at me, and I slapped his face. But not anymore. Could I trust him and would he help me? As, originally, he already had.

“Clovis, I have to leave at once.”

“If you do, Egyptia’s death may well be on your conscience. Not to mention mine.”

“I have to leave, and I need you to stop the twins from coming after me.”

“Are they likely to?”

“They hunted me down, somehow, and they’ve been following me all afternoon, and I couldn’t get rid of them. I couldn’t go home.” Not crying, I nevertheless was crying, tearlessly again, and desperately, and waving my hands at him because I knew he didn’t like to be handled and some part of me kept physically reaching out to him for support.

“Jane, obviously I’m being unforgivably obtuse. But why couldn’t you go home?”

“Clovis, don’t you know?”

“Let me see. You split with Demeta. You’re living in a hovel somewhere. Or you’re a professional damisella della nuita. Why should any of that—”

“Did you see the Electronic Metals newscast?”

“I never watch newscasts. If you mean, do I know, by a process of imperceptible osmosis, that E.M. is out of business, yes I do. And if ever I saw a senatorial blindfold, that was it. Anything to keep the masses from revolution, I suppose.”

I was calmer. I watched him closely.

“How,” I said, “did Egyptia make out, as legal owner of one of their discontinued robots?”

“How steely-eyed and measuring you’ve become suddenly. Quite unlike the dear little Jane I used to know. Egyptia? Oh, they called her. They said would she care to return her robot as it was faulty and might set fire to the rugs. They’d refund her the cash, plus a bonus as compensation.”

There was a long silence, and I began to wonder if he was playing with me.

“And what,” I prompted, “did Egyptia reply?”

“Egyptia replied: ‘Which robot?’ and, when they’d told her, announced that the robot had been in storage for weeks, and she was too busy to be bothered with fishing it out. As for the bonus, money didn’t concern her anymore. Self-knowledge through art was what concerned her. She would be happy to eat wild figs in the desert wilderness, etc., etc.—And Electronic Metals backed away and switched off the phone. Since then no further calls, apparently. No doubt they concluded that one unused, forgotten robot in the cupboard of an eccentric, amnesiac and very rich actress was nothing to lose sleep over. Or else they didn’t want to increase the wrong kind of public tension by making a scene.”

My eyes were helplessly wide.

“That was what she said?”

“That was exactly what she said. I know, because I had the misfortune of being with her when she took the call and said it.” Clovis nodded. “When she turned from the video, of course,” he murmured, “I said, with some astonishment, ‘But didn’t Jane ever come and demand the robot from you on the grounds of hard cash and true love?’ And Egyptia widened her topaz eyes, just as you’re doing with your jade green ones. ‘Oh! Yes!’ she exclaimed. I’d forgotten about that. Jane’s got him.’ Interesting, isn’t it.”

“She’d forgotten—”

“You know what she’s like. Completely and enduringly self-centered. Nothing is real to Egyptia, except for herself, and the savage gods who may either uplift or destroy her. You were in love with him, Jane. But Egyptia’s only in love with Egyptia.”

“And did you call E.M., Clovis, and tell them the mistake?”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Malevolence,” I said.

Astonishing me somewhat, he grinned, and lowered his eyes.

“Hmm. You’ll never let me off that one, will you?”

“You haven’t let yourself off. Your hair—”

“Jane. I had him. I’ll admit, a special experience. Shakespeare would have flung off a couple of sonnets. But it just made me aware, for the eighty millionth time, what a pile of gormless garbage most of humanity is. What you really want to know is, did I or will I tell E.M. Ltd. that you and he—Silver—still cohabit. Which is what I astoundedly presume you are still doing. And what I also presume our own little arsonists in the servicery have found out. J. and M. Investigators Inc.”

I drew in a long trembling breath. My voice came out sure and steady and clear.

“Yes, Clovis.”

“The answer is No. Ah, what a relief.”

“Yes. E.M. means business. If they think he’s still walking about—”

“He’d be back to cogs and clockwork status.”

To hear him say it, even though I knew it to be so, stunned me, filled me with fresh sickness and horror. And at any moment, the two monsters would be back.

“You know,” Clovis began to say, “I have an awful theory about how Jason tracked you down.”

But I broke in: “Clovis, can you lend me some money. Or give me some? I don’t know if I can ever repay it. But if we could get away from the city, go upstate…”

“That could be a good idea. You can have the money. But just suppose, melodramatic as it sounds, that E.M., or the Senate, have a secret check going on the highways or out-of-state flyer terminals.”

I stared at him and through him.

“Oh, God. I didn’t think of that.”

“Don’t go to pieces. I’m inventing an alternative plan. You’ll have to stay around a while. I’ll need to make a call.”

“Clovis.”

“Yes. That’s my name. Not Judas Iscariot, so relax.”

“What plan?”

“Well, just like your appalling mother—”

A voice shattered like glass against my ears, staggering me.

“Jane! Jane!”

I turned as if through treacle. Egyptia stood on the little stair that led down from the bedroom half-floor above. I had an impression of flashing lights and foaming darkness, a kind of storm, as she launched herself at me. She fell against me lightly, but with a passionate, almost-violence. She clung to me, pent, intense, not letting go. “Jane, Jane, Jane. I knew you’d come. I knew you’d understand and come, because I needed you. Oh Jane—I’m so afraid.”

I felt I was drowning and my impulse was very nearly to thrust her off. But she was familiar as a lover, and her terror communicated itself, a strange, high inaudible singing and sizzling, like tension in wires.

“We’ll go on later,” said Clovis.

“Clovis—”

“Later, trust me. You know you do.” He walked away toward the servicery. “I’ll go and see how the Slaumot’s coming.”

Egyptia clung to me like a serpent. Her perfume flooded over me, and despite everything, my own panic began to leave me.

My lover was not a hysteric, as I was. He would wait for me, without fear, thinking I’d stopped to talk to people we knew, perhaps to eat with them. And Clovis would help us. Help us leave our beautiful home, our friend the white cat.

“Egyptia,” I said, and the tears tried to come again. “Don’t be afraid. It’s going to be fine. It is, it is.”

Then she drew away from me, smiling bravely, and I burst into bubbling laughter, as I’d burst into dry tears.

Egyptia was stricken.

“Why are you laughing at me?”

“Because, in the middle of utter chaos—you’re so beautiful!”

She stood there, her skin like a warm peach with an overall theatrical makeup, her eyelids terracotta and golden spangles, gold spangles also massed thickly on her breasts, which otherwise appeared to be bare. Her hair had been streaked with pale blue, and tortured into long elaborate ringlets, and she had a little gold crown on it. She had a skirt of alternating gold and silver scales, and on her flexible arms were dark blue clockwork snakes with ruby eyes, that continuously coiled round and round.

What was most laughable of all was that, as she stood facing me in her costume, facing me through her terror and her ridiculous egomania, and her vulnerability, I sensed again the greatness in her that she sensed in herself. And I laughed more wildly and harder, until she, with offended puzzlement, began to laugh too.

Impatience, scorn and fondness, and love. Struck together like matches, igniting. Giggling helplessly, we fell onto a couch, and her layered scaled skirt made the noise of tin cans rolling down stairs, and we shrieked, our arms flailing, and her oriental slippers flying off across the salon.

• 3 •

There were three bottles of Slaumot and Clovis, Egyptia and I sat and drank them in the fire and candlelight. Jason and Medea drank coffipop, which, when I was fifteen, always gave me instant hiccups. The twins sat on the floor across the big room from us, playing a macabre version of chess Jason had invented. They might steal some of the pieces, but Egyptia wouldn’t care. She knew she wouldn’t live beyond this night. She had two visions of her death. One was when she first entered on the stage. Her heart would burst. Or she might die at the end, the strain having been too much for her. It wasn’t at all funny. She meant it, and she was scared. But, more than all else, she was scared of the fact that she was to dramatize Antektra before an audience. It wasn’t an enormous theatre, and it might not fill. A couple of critics might be there, and a visual crew would film a shot or so, as a matter of course, and then probably not show it. But to Egyptia, it was more than all this—which, if it had been me, would have terrified me sufficiently—although, far less than it would have done before my debut in the streets. It was her fear of failing herself that gnawed on Egyptia. Or, as she put it, of failing Antektra. She would say portions of her lines, pace about the salon, sink on the couch, laugh madly, weep—her dramatic makeup was genuinely tear-proof, fortunately. She sipped the Slaumot, and left butterfly wings of gilt from her lips on the glass.

“She’s a virgin. Her sexual electricity has turned in on itself. She is driven by grief, anguish and fury. She is haunted by the demons of her fury.” How odd she should sound so cognizant of these emotions which truly I don’t think she’d ever felt. And the descriptions of Antektra’s state, obviously footnotes, learnt off like her lines—“A whirlwind of passion. Am I capable of doing this? Sometimes I’ve felt that the power of this part is inside me, like a volcano. But now… Have I the strength?”

“Yes,” said Clovis.

“Yes,” I said.

“My rook tortures your rook to death,” said Jason across the room.

“The power,” said Egyptia, prowling like a leopardess between the candles, “may consume me. I don’t mind, I truly don’t mind if I die, if it kills me. So long as I can die with this task accomplished—Oh, Jane. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes, Egyptia.”

Clovis yawned, hiding in his longer hair as he did so, and I thought of Silver. Not that I’d stopped thinking of Silver. When I was twelve, I had a psychosomatic toothache for months in one of my back teeth. I took painkillers every three hours, which dulled the pain but didn’t get rid of it. The nag of it went on and on, and so I got used to it, and only thought about it at the end of each three-hour unit when it would flare up to new violence. This was how I felt now. My awareness of danger and distress, my concern for Silver’s concern at my absence, the hopeless trap I was in and apparently couldn’t move out of—these were the dull pain. The wine, the familiarity, Egyptia’s fear were the painkillers. The pain was slight and bearable and I could almost put it from my mind. But then the light moved on Clovis’s hair—red—and the pain flared. I almost rushed, each time, from the apartment and away into the night. Clovis could surely contain the twins. But they would know they’d been right. And Clovis’s unspecified help would be lost to me.

He wore an embroidered shirt, too, under the silk and velour jacket. He was so rational about Silver, yet the copied influence was there. Could I trust Clovis? Well, I had trusted Clovis, if not with my address, with everything else.

“My queen buys her freedom by allowing your knight to cut off her left hand,” said Medea.

“I do hope,” said Clovis, “they’re not actually inflicting these injuries on your chess set, Egyptia.”

“The world’s a chess set,” said Egyptia. (A quote?) “Oh, bow your neck to the bloody dust. Kneel to the yoke, humiliated land. This is not the world. The gods are dead. Kneel, for you must. Relinquish pride, and kneel.”

“My knight castrates your knight.”

“He can’t. My knight’s in full armor.”

“Well. There’s a weak link.”

“The floor over there must be strewn with severed members,” said Clovis.

I couldn’t even call Silver. There was the phone in the foyer, which the caretaker might answer, but I couldn’t remember the number. And even if I did, to call would be, again, to reveal there was somebody at home I wanted to reach. Perhaps, if I excused myself to use the bathroom, I could call on one of Egyptia’s extensions upstairs, experimenting till I got the number right—no. A blue call-light came on in every other phone console when one was operational. Jason and Medea would see it. They’d be watching for it.

Chloe couldn’t be here tonight because Chloe had a virus. Why hadn’t I had a virus?

“Women of the palace,” said Egyptia, “my brother was a god to you. Yet to these beasts he is carrion. He is left for the kites to chew upon—”

“Oh my,” said Clovis, “now the play’s getting to sound like the chess game. Do you think my weak stomach is up to this drama?”

“Don’t mock me, Clovis,” shouted Egyptia in despair.

“It’s half past ten P.M.,” said Clovis. “I’m going to call the taxi.”

“Oh God,” cried Egyptia, “is it time to leave?”

“Getting that way. Jane, pour her another drink.”

I wasn’t sure about that, although she seemed incapable of drunkenness in her frenzy. She had dressed in her costume and put on her makeup here because of her emotional rift with the rest of the company. “They give me nothing!” she said. To Egyptia, of course, the rest of the cast were the support mechanism to carry her, and sadly they hadn’t realized it. Or else they had.

Now I fetched her grey-blue fur cape coat, on the inside of which some of the body makeup was sure to rub off. She’d bought that coat the day I took Silver with me to Chez Stratos.

“Oh, Jane. Oh—Jane—”

“I’m here.” I sounded mature and patient. Concerned, kind. Just a touch compassionately amused. I sounded like Silver.

“Ja-aaaa-nnne—”

She stared at me. The guillotine awaited her, and soon the tumbrel would be at the door.

“You are going to be so good,” I said to her. “So good, the Asteroid will probably fall on the Theatra Concordacis.”

Clovis came in again in a little while.

“Months to get through,” he said. “It’ll be by the pier in half an hour.” He looked at me, and added, sotto voce, “The cab rank was the second call.”

“Clovis—” I said, realizing he’d put his unspecified plan into action.

“Later.” He glanced at Jason and Medea, who were thoughtfully watching us. “Better kill everyone else on the board off quickly, pets, we leave in ten minutes.”

“Oh. The awful play,” said Jason.

“You don’t have to come,” Clovis said.

“We do,” said Medea. “We want to be with Jane. We haven’t seen her for so long.”

“Christ, what a strange night,” Clovis said to it, as we stepped out into the enclosure before the lift shaft.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Jason.

“How should I know?” said Clovis.

The lift came, and Egyptia trembled in my arms. As we went down to the ferry, the night rose up the jewelry buildings. There was a great stillness, but that was only the coldness of the snow. The ferry was deserted, and the cab was waiting at the other side of the water.

We reached the Theatra about eleven-fifteen P.M., after walking up the Grand Stairway and by the tunnel foun-tain, which didn’t play in winter. But it was the exact spot where I had first seen Silver.

There were quite a lot of people about the main facade. We went around the side, and into the bleak backstage, and into Egyptia’s bleaker dressing room. When the reluctant wall heater had been activated, Egyptia stood shuddering.

“My father slain, my brother slaughtered. Death is the legacy of this House of the Peacock. Everyone go out. Everyone but Jane. Jane, don’t leave me.”

“We’ll wait outside,” said Medea. I knew they’d watch the door.

I had to stay, anyway, now, for Clovis’s news. Whatever it was. I was really past caring. Schizophrenic, as before, I existed here, and I existed in a sort of precognitive limbo of rushing home to the flat on Tolerance.

In the corridor, the young man I remembered was called Corinth clumped past in metal toeless boots and a metal scaled cloak, eating a chicken leg morosely.

The handsome thin man, who had directed the drama, looked in twenty minutes later, flustered and chilly.

“Oh, so you got here,” he said to Egyptia. Her eyes implored him, but he was finished with her. There would be no other productions for Egyptia here, despite her handy wealth. One could see that in his face. “Just a last piece of advice, dear,” he said. “Try to recall there are a couple of other people with you in the cast.”

She opened her lips, and he walked out, banging the door so it almost fell off. The place was not in good repair.

“They hate me,” she whispered, stunned. “I was generous to them, I shared my home with them, my love. I was part of them. And they hate me.”

It wasn’t the hour for truth. Or at least, for only one kind.

“They’re jealous,” I said. “They know they’ll be out-shone. Anyway, everyone was against Antektra, too, apparently. It might be helpful.”

“The screech of the peacock,” she said, “the bird of ill-omened and curse-laden death.”

I retouched her body makeup. I wondered if I could have done what she would have to do, and some part of me began to tell me I could, and to visualize I’d be just as scared as she was, and maybe more.

“Jane, you’ve changed so much,” she said, staring at me in the smeary mirror, seeing me for the first time. “You’re beautiful. And fey. And so calm. So wise.”

“It’s the company I keep,” I said before I could stop myself.

“Is it?” She was vague. She’d forgotten, just as Clovis reported. “Do you have a lover, Jane?”

Yes, Egyptia. A silver metal lover.

“Maybe.”

And then, startling me: “What happened with the robot, Jane?”

“Well.” I steeled myself. “He’s wonderful. Now and then.”

“Yes,” she said wistfully, “more beautiful and more clever than any man. And more gentle. Did you find that? And those songs. He sang me love songs. He knew how I needed love, that I live on love… Wonderful songs. And his touch—he could touch me, and—”

Just as I felt I could no longer bear it, shocked to find the old wound still raw, she was silenced. A dreadful siren squealed over our heads and we flew together in mindless fright.

A tinny laugh followed the siren. Patently it was a “joke” they’d rigged for her benefit. “Five minutes to curtain-up, Egypt.”

I thought she might have a fit. But instead, suddenly she was altered.

“Please go now, Jane,” she said. “I must be alone.”

Outside, Jason and Medea fell in beside me.

“We have seats in the third row. How bourgeois of Clovis to ask for those. You’ve got Chloe’s seat, which is the least good. Funny you didn’t have a seat of your own, if you knew you were coming here.”

But in fact, funnier still, for Clovis had done a juggling act and changed the seats around. To their consternation, the twins found they were in the first row; alone—not even seated together.

“What a shame,” said Clovis. “There’s been some kind of mix-up. Doubtless part of the theatre’s vendetta against all of us.”

The twins would now have to sit through the whole play getting cricked necks from turning to see if I was still there, two rows behind them.

As Clovis and I sat down on the end of the row, he said, “I suggest you leave after Egyptia’s first speech. I gather ten idiots rush down the aisles, and when they reach the stage, there’s a storm. The special effects are rather gruesome. Eyes and intestines unsurgically removed. I shall look the other way, but Jason and Medea will be riveted. I think you should go then. If they notice, it’ll take them half an hour to fight their way out, and with luck they’ll collide with the second relay down the aisle, which is a procession of some sort.” Jason and Medea had turned around and looked at us, and Clovis waved at them. “If they ask me, I’ll say you left to be sick.”

“They’ll know that isn’t true.”

“Of course. I’d forgotten your reputation for implacable indifference. It still won’t help them very much.”

“Clovis, you said you would let me have some cash.”

“Tomorrow, you and he take a cab along the highway to route eighty-three. Can you get the fare for that?”

“Yes.”

“Leave the cab at eighty-three and walk down to the Fall Side of the Canyon. Be there by noon.”

“That’s only a few miles from my mother’s house.”

“Is that important? I doubt if you’ll meet her. The spot was decided on because it’s clear of the city and inside the state line, which should mean no observers, official or otherwise. And because Gem can land the VLO there.”

“What?”

“Vertical lift-off plane. Those nasty noisy odorous flying machines, like the Baxter your mother so prizes. Gem is a test engineer and pilot for the Historica Antiqua Corporation. He will borrow a crate from the museum sheds, as he often does, land in the Canyon, and take you wherever you want to be. He said he would, about an hour ago when I called him. He’s relatively imbecilic, by the way, so if you don’t tell him your boyfriend is a robot, Gem will never guess, which may prove rather a bore for Silver. However, Gem will bumble you along and you’ll arrive somewhere. Then he’ll come back and spend the evening with me, God help me. Honestly, Jane, the things I suffer for you.”

“Clovis, I—”

“Take whatever luggage you want, short of a grand piano. There’s plenty of room in those things. There’ll be a piece of hand-luggage in the cabin, with some money. Units, and some bills if I have the time to crack them down at a bank. Aren’t you going to cry, fling yourself on the carpet—if there is one in here, oh, yes—go into a paroxysm of gratitude? Fawn on me? Faint?”

“No. But I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me. Never.”

“Gem will be pleased, too. But I’ll try not to think about that.”

“I wish—”

“You wish I were heterosexual so we could run away together instead.”

“I wish I could thank you properly, but there isn’t any way.”

“I can’t even be godfather to your kids, can I? Since you won’t have any.”

“I might. The way Demeta had me. Silver would make an amazing adoptive father, I should think. I never had a father.”

“You didn’t miss a thing,” said Clovis. And the lights, with no subtlety, either due to incompetence, poor equipment, or would-be brilliant innovation, went suddenly out.

The audience exclaimed, vaguely disapproving.

“Jane,” he said then, “there’s one damned important thing I forgot—have to be shorthand. Listen: Jason finding you—a homemade device of his—a homing device. Check any clothing you might have met him in before today. Look for something small.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me. It’s obviously not wonderfully accurate, but that is how they got as close as they did. It’s been their new game for a month.”

“But I—”

Eerie reddish-ochre light appeared under the curtain as it rose. We fell silent, I with my mind boiling.

A homing device? Patience Maidel Bridge, Jason running by me, and Medea—I needed to go on thinking about this, but then the bare stage yawned before me, clothed only in drifting, bloodstained smoke. And out of the smoke, along a raised platform, walked Egyptia, stiff and blind-eyed, glittering in her metals.

For a second, I wondered what would become of her. But what had become of her was Antektra, and all at once I knew it. She seemed like a lunatic escaped from the site of an explosion, deafened, dehumanized. Her awful beauty hit the eyes. She lifted her hands and held out a blood-daubed (this was going to be a very gory production) drapery.

“Bow your neck,” she said to us, “bow your neck,” and in the midst of everything else, my heart turned over, for she’d repeated her lines. And then the hair rose on my scalp, as I deduced hair might be doing all over the reasonably well-filled theatre. For her voice dropped like a singer’s, seemingly one whole octave: “Bow your neck to the bloody dust. Kneel to the yoke, humiliated land.”

She stood there, melodramatic, insane, and we hung on her words, breathless.

“This is not the world. The gods are dead.”

I shivered. She had come from the grave.

Of course she would behave as if no other actor existed. They didn’t. They were shades. Only Antektra lived in her burning agony, her broken landscape.

“Relinquish pride, and kneel.”

I sat there, mesmerized, as before. There was no sound anywhere until the raucous clash and clatter of arms. The ten warriors galloped down the aisles, and the audience reacted now with approving squeaks.

“Weep, you skies,” Egyptia cried out, over the noise of war. “Weep blood and flame.”

The warriors converged before her. Thunder banged. Lightning raged across the stage. Caught in its glare upon the platform, Egyptia herself seemed on fire.

“Go on,” Clovis muttered.

“What?”

“Get out, you fool.”

“Oh—” I stumbled up and almost fell out into the aisle. Under cover of strobe-lighted fire and fury, I ran for the exit and out into the sanity and freezing truth of the city night.

I only had enough coins to take the downtown bus, and it came very late. When I reached the stop and got off, it was already one twenty-six A.M. by the bus’s own clock. I had been gone over ten hours. Clovis hadn’t thought of my leaving a man waiting, only a machine. Even though Clovis didn’t really believe that anymore. Had I, however helpless I was in the clutches of my friends, basically thought the same? Of course he would be calm, unperturbed, reasonable about my long, long, inexplicable absence, when I had previously stressed to him the danger I reckoned we were in. Of course he would. Mechanically reasonable.

I ran along the streets, and it was like running through solid dark water, the night was so curiously intense.

When I ran into the room of our flat, he was standing in the middle of the rainbow carpet. The overhead light was on and I saw him very clearly. Seeing him was like seeing the Earth’s center, finding my equilibrium again, landfall. But he stood completely still, completely expressionless.

“Are you,” he said to me, “all right?”

“Yes.”

“Lucky you caught me in,” he said, “I’ve been out since seven, trying to find you. I was just going out again.”

“Out? But we agreed—”

“I thought you might have been hurt,” he said gently. “Or killed.”

The way he said it, for which I can’t find words, rocked me, numbed me like a blow, driving all the words and thought out of my head. And because the words and thought and the events of the evening were so important, I immediately began to push my way back through the numbness toward them, not waiting to analyze his reaction and my reaction to it.

“No. Listen. I’ll tell you what happened,” I said prosaically, as if in answer to the question I had, I suppose, expected from the rational, unperturbed machine.

So I told him, rapidly, all of it. He listened as I’d asked. After a moment, he sat down on the couch and bowed his head, and I sat beside him to finish the story.

“I couldn’t get away. I didn’t dare. Even to call you—I wasn’t sure of the number of the phone downstairs—and then I had to wait for Clovis. It seems so crazy, but are we going to do it? Leave tomorrow, go somewhere else? Like two escaping spies. I think we have to.”

“You’re so scared of this city and what you think it can do,” he said. “To get out is the only thing possible to us.”

“You’re blaming me? Don’t. I am scared, with good reason. I’ve been scared that way all afternoon, all night.”

He put his arm round me, and I lay against him. And sensed a profound reticence. He might have been a mile off.

“Egyptia,” I said, slowly, testing, but I wasn’t certain for what. “Egyptia is astonishing. I only saw her speak a few lines—Silver, what’s the matter? I don’t even know if you can be angry, but don’t be. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t come here. And if you think that was being stupid and panicking, at least believe it was sincere panic, not just stupidity. And after what Clovis said about homing devices… Oh, God, I’d better check—”

But his arm tightened, and I knew I wasn’t supposed to move, and I kept still, and silent, and I waited.

Presently he began to speak to me, quietly and fluently. There was scarcely a trace of anything in that musical singer’s voice of his, except maybe the slightest salt of humor.

“On one or two occasions, I can recollect saying to you that you were trying to get me to investigate myself emotionally, something that I wasn’t geared to do. It turns out I was wrong. Or else I’ve learned to do it, the way I’ve learnt a number of other things, purely human knacks. When you were gone—”

I whispered, “I really couldn’t—”

“I know. I also know you’re alive and intact. I didn’t know it until you came through that door. If I were human, Jane, I’d be shaking. If I were human, I’d have walked into every free hospital this side of the city and hurled chairs about till someone said you weren’t there.”

“I’m so sorry. I am, I am.”

“Strangest of all was the inner process through which I put myself. During which I imagined that, since you were dead somewhere, I would never be with you again. And I saw how that was, and how I’d be. You asked if I could be afraid. I can. You’ll have to believe, with no evidence, that inside this body which doesn’t shake, doesn’t sweat, doesn’t shed tears, there really is a three-year-old child doing all of those, at full stretch, right now.”

His head was bowed, so I couldn’t see his face.

I put my arms around him and held him tightly, tightly.

Rather than joy in his need, I felt a sort of shame. I knew I’d inadvertently done a final and unforgivable thing to him. For I had, ultimately and utterly, proved him human at last: I had shown him he was dependent on his own species.

• 4 •

The earthquake struck the city at a few minutes after five that morning.

I woke, because the brass bed was moving. Silver, who could put himself into a kind of psychosthetic trance, not sleep but apparently restful and timeless, came out of it before I did. I thought I’d been dreaming. It was dark, except for the faint sheen of snowlight coming through the half-open curtains. Then I saw the curtains were drawing themselves open, a few inches at a time.

“It’s an earth tremor,” he said to me. “But not a bad one from the feel of it.”

“It’s bad enough,” I cried, sitting up.

The bed had slid over the floor about a foot. Vibrations were running up through the building. I became aware of a weird external noise, a sort of creaking and groaning and cracking, and a screeching I took at first for cries of terror from the city.

“Should we run down into the street?” I asked him.

“No. It’s already settling. The foreshock was about ten minutes ahead of this one, hardly noticeable. It didn’t even wake you.”

A candle fell off a shelf.

“Oh Silver! Where’s the cat?”

“Not here, remember?”

“Yes. I’m going to miss that cat… How can I talk about that in the middle of this?”

He laughed softly, and drew me down into the bed.

“You’re not really afraid, that’s why.”

“No, I’m not. Why not?”

“You’re with me and you trust me. And I told you it was all right.”

“I love you,” I said.

Something heavy and soft hit the window. Then everything settled with a sharp jarring rattle, as if the city were a truck pulling up with a load of cutlery.

Obliquely fascinated, then, I got out of bed and went to the window. The quake had indeed been minor, yet I’d never experienced one before. Part of me expected to see the distant skyline of the city flattened and engulfed by flames—substance of so many tremor-casts on the news channels. But I could no longer see the city skyline at all. Like monstrous snakes, three of the girders in the subsidence had reared up, sloughing their skins of snow in all directions and with great force, like catapults. Some of this snow had thumped the window. Now the girders blocked the view of the city, leaning together in a grotesque parody of their former positions. It was a kind of omen.

Dimly, I could hear a sort of humming and calling.

People running out on the street to discuss what had happened. Then a robot ambulance went by, unseen but wailing; then another and another. There had been casualties, despite the comparative mildness of the shock. I thought of them with compassion, cut off from them, because we were safe. I remember being glad that Egyptia’s play would have finished before the quake. She and Clovis seemed invulnerable.

Only when we were back in bed again, sharing the last tired apple, did I think of my mother’s house on its tall legs of steel. Should I go down to the foyer and call her? But the foyer would probably be full of relatives calling up relatives. What did I really feel?

I told Silver.

“The house felt pretty safe,” he said. “It was well-stabilized. The only problem would be the height, but there’d be compensations for that in the supports.”

“I think I’d know, wouldn’t I? If anything had happened to her. Or would I?”

“Maybe you would.”

“I wonder if she’s concerned for me. She might be. I don’t know. Oh, Silver, I don’t know. I was with her all my life, and I don’t know if she’d be worried for me. But I know you would have been.”

“Yes, you worry me a lot.”

Later on, the caretaker patted on our door and asked if we were okay. I called that we were, and asked after him and the white cat.

“Cat never batted an eyelid. That’s how you can tell, animals. If they don’t take off, you know it’s not going to be a bad one.”

When he left, I felt mean, not telling him we were going. We’d leave what we could for the rent, most of it, in fact, as far as the month had gone. I wanted to say goodbye to the cat. Demeta had always said that cats were difficult to keep in a domestic situation, that they clawed things and got hair on the pillows, and she was right and what the hell did it matter?

I fell asleep against Silver, and dreamed Chez Stratos had fallen out of the sky. There was wreckage and rubble everywhere, and the spacemen picked about in it, incongruously holding trays of tea and toast. “Mother?” I asked the wreckage. “Mother, where are you?”

“Come here, darling,” said my mother. She was standing on a small hill, and wearing golden armor. I saw, with brief horror, that her left hand had been severed, but one of the robot machines was re-attaching it. I went to her, and she embraced me, but the armor was hard and I couldn’t get through it to her, and I wasn’t comforted.

“Your brother’s dead, I’m afraid,” she said, smiling at me kindly.

“My—brother—”

“Yes, dear. And your father, too.”

I wept, because I didn’t know who they were.

“You must put this onto a tape,” said Demeta. “I’ll play it when I come back.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m going to make farm machinery. I told you.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s because you don’t want to. Come along, Jane. Let go of my armor.”

The Baxter Empire rose into the dusty sky out of the ruins, flattening all of us to the earth with the gale of its ascent. A dismembered monkey lay on the ground where my mother had been standing, and I wondered if this was my brother. Then the monkey changed into Jason, and he wasn’t dismembered, and he said to me, “Hallo, Medea. I put a homing device into a peacock. Wasn’t that fun?”

I woke, and it was getting light. Silver was in the shower, I could hear the cascade of water. I lay and looked at the blue sky of our ceiling as it came clear, and the clouds and the birds and the rainbow. I let the tears go on rolling out of my eyes. I’d never see this ceiling again.

Along with the other things, I’d have to leave my peacock jacket behind too. Were peacocks cursed birds? My mother’s dress, Egyptia’s play, my jacket. I’d have to leave the dress I’d worn under the jacket, too, the dress I’d worn that night we met Jason and Medea as we came off the bridge. I recalled how Jason brushed against me as he ran away. Maybe to run away like that was partly deliberate. They were both good pickpockets, excellent kleptomaniacs—it would have been easy for either of them to slip something adhesive into the fabric. But at two-thirty this morning I’d turned the clothing of that night inside out, and found nothing. Maybe the gadget had fallen out, which could explain how they’d almost traced me but not quite. The thing might have been lying about somewhere in the vicinity, misleading them. On the other hand the gadget might be so cunning that it was invisible to me, but still lodged, and Jason’s failure to get to me due only to some weakness in the device which, given time, he could correct. The micro-magnet in Clovis’s seance glass was almost invisible, and highly accurate, and Jason had worked on that a year ago. They must have sat there by the bridge, just waiting for someone interesting to come along that they could bug, and who should appear but idiotic Jane.

Whatever else, I wouldn’t risk taking that clothing with me. I’d even leave my boots worn that night—I had another shabby, fascinating green pair—I’d even leave my lingerie. I knew the device couldn’t have gone that deep, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

When Silver came out of the shower, I got up, and, very businesslike, used it. I allowed myself only three minutes to lie under the spray and cry at the crimson ceiling and the blue walls and the aeronautic whale.

Dressed, we left the portion of rent money, and the last can of Keep-Kold-Kitty-Meat on the brass bed. Silver wrote the caretaker a note saying a friend was offering us work in a drama in the east. We’d already decided by then to go westward. We’d even talked about Paris, for the future.

I’d packed our clothes into various cloth bags, some of the shawls from the bed, towels, oddments, and, in some curious superstitious urge, the three then currently complete chapters of this. I think I had the notion of putting on our escape as an addendum to the history. Or just of keeping a journal, like lady travelers of old.

Silver carried all the bags and his guitar. I had been entrusted with the blue and gold umbrella.

A little before nine, we sneaked out of the building. The white cat was jauntily stalking its shadow in the street, and ran over to meet us. I nearly suffocated it, holding back my tears.

“If only we could take her with us.”

“The old man needs her more than we do. He’s very fond of her.”

“Yes, I know.”

“We’ll buy a cat.”

“Can we?”

“We might even train it to sing.”

A tear fell, despite my efforts, on the cat’s nose, and it sprang away in disgust, awarding me an accidental parting claw on the wrist.

“There you are,” he said. “A farewell present.”

We planned to walk into the center of the city. To get a cab from this area to the outskirts was almost impossible.

As we turned into the boulevard, I saw our estimation of the quake had been premature.

Buckled and humped like a child’s maltreated nondurable toy, the elevated dominated the air and, in surging over, had made havoc of the street below. As I looked at it, I remembered the awful creaking and squealing noises I had heard and then put down to the shifting girders. Being downtown, not a lot was being done about the elevated, though a couple of private demolition vans were cruising about. The vehicular road, however, was closed.

We bought doughnuts at one of the stalls that had missed the eruption of the rusty tracks. The woman stared at us through the steam of her urn.

“Jack’s lost all his glass. All smashed.”

We told her we were sorry, and drank tea and went on.

The quake had not been so very violent in itself, but hitting those areas still weakened and faulted by previous tremors, had taken its toll. It seemed to have come back to collect dues missed twenty years before.

At the first intersection, we came on the confusion that the diversion from the road on the boulevard had caused, jams of vehicles hooting vilely and pointlessly at each other like demented beasts. Farther on, a group of earlier tremor-wrecks twenty-five stories high had given up and collapsed across the street; this road, too, was closed, and more pandemonium had resulted.

As we neared the Arbors, we ourselves were diverted by robot patrols into side streets and alleys. A line of cars had crashed, one after the other, off a fly-over, when it shifted like a sail in the wind.

“This is horrible,” I said inanely.

“Look at that building,” he said.

I looked. There seemed nothing wrong with it. It only occurred to me ten minutes later he’d been directing my eyes away from something lying in the gutter, something I’d only taken for a blown-away bag…

By the time we reached the Beech subway, I was frightened. The tremor, low on the scale, but delving to find any flaw, and split and chew and rend it, had left nightmarish evidence that Tolerance had been lucky.

“From the look of things,” Silver said, “the main force channeled away from the direction of your mother’s house.”

“Yes. And Clovis was in the middle.”

“Do you want to go over to New River and see?”

“No. I feel we’re so conspicuous. But I’ll call him.”

I went into a kiosk and dialed Clovis’s number. Nothing happened, then there was a click. I thought I’d get the sodomy tape, but instead a mechanical voice said: “Owing to seismic disturbance, these lines are temporarily on hold. We stress this does not mean your party is in an affected area, merely that the connecting video and audio links to this kiosk have been impaired.”

I stood there, trembling. I was afraid, for Clovis, and for both of us. Callously, I was frantically asking myself if this would affect our plan. And I had a mental picture of the unknown Gem who was going to fly us, buried under a collapsed tower, or the Historica VLOs in fragments.

Before I came out, I dialed for the time. It was twenty-two minutes to eleven, and we had to be down at Fall Side by twelve—if the plan was still on. We’d just have to act as though it was.

“Silver, the lines are out.”

“That was a chance.”

“How much money have we got?”

He told me.

“We can phone a cab here. They’ll do pickups from Beech, even this end, I think.”

“You could,” he said, “get it to detour past the New River blocks and see what shape they’re in. If there’s a way through.”

That made things easier all around. For one thing, the cab company might be reluctant to make a pickup at lower Beech for out of town. Sometimes cabs are hired, directed out onto the plain, and vandalized. But I added the detour to opulent New River, implying another pickup there, and they agreed.

The cab came in five minutes.

It shot up unusual side roads. Two or three one-way systems had been provisionally dualized. Robot police were everywhere. I was depressed and awed by the way in which the city had been demoralized. Relief fought with panic inside me. The plan might be in ruins, too, but even so, with all this going on, who would be looking out for a stray silver-skinned man?

As we came around from Racine and then up through a previously pedestrians-only subway, and the New River appeared, I caught my breath. Davideed, the studier of silt, could have had a field day here. It looked as if someone had turned the river over with an enormous spatula. Shining icy mud lay in big curls against the banks and on the street, and spattered the fronts of the buildings. But every block was standing. We went by Clovis’s block. Not a brick was out of place, and though some of the air-conditioning boxes on the ground gallery looked askew, none of the upper ones had shifted.

“I think the river provided a pressure outlet,” Silver said.

“He must be safe, then.”

He had to be. As my mother had to be. There wasn’t time to investigate or to worry any further.

The cab spun around the city like a piece of flotsam, catching in jams, getting out of them, for thirty-five minutes before it emerged onto the highway. Then we went slowly for another ten, since, for the few cars trying to get out, hundreds of others were trying to get in. People had come from everywhere, looking for relations and friends in the aftermath, or to sightsee. The local news channel would have carried the news of the quake and excitement, adding the normal useless proviso: Please keep out, which no one, obviously, would attend.

The taxi had a glass-faced clock.

“It’s almost ten to twelve. We’re not going to make it,” I said.

We had come this way a century ago, the road clear save for a purple storm brewing, I with a silver nail through my heart, afraid to speak to him or keep silent.

“Jane, if a man comes over in a VLO and lands the thing, I think you can assume he’ll maybe hang about for a few minutes.”

The cab suddenly detoured on to a side turning.

“Where’s it going?”

“Straight on to route eighty-three, at a guess.”

“How do you know?”

“My city geography program extends several miles beyond the outskirts. Do you realize, in a new city, I’ll be as lost as you will?” A moment later, he said gently to me, “Jane, look.”

I looked out of the window, and far away over the snow-sheeted lines of the land, across the gash of the highway, poised at the topmost mouth of the Canyon, where the flyer air lines glinted like golden cotton, other vertical lines of glitter went up. And in the sky there was a tiny cloud, cool, blue and unmoving. Chez Stratos, that ridiculous house, was still standing, still intact.

Something broke and ebbed away inside me.

“Oh, Silver. After all, I’m so glad.”

“I know.”

A minute more and we plunged down a slope to the ragged ravine that leads into the Fall Side of the Canyon. The cab, not intended to risk its treads, stopped.

It took every coin and bill we had, to pay it the balance. But, in a way, that was ethical.

Soon we were walking down between walls of the frozen earth, he carrying the bags, the guitar, I, the umbrella, to the place where the steps are cut.

The Canyon, which had been created by an ancient quake prior even to the Asteroid, hadn’t been touched by the new one. At the bottom, between the tumbled blocks that give this end its name and close it on three sides, there was a ballroom floor of smooth treeless, rockless snow, hard and bluish as a sort of aluminum. A lovely place for a VLO landing. Secretive, and negotiable only in such a way, or on foot.

The last time on the clock had read as six minutes past noon.

“Have we missed it?” I asked. But I smiled at myself. We would have seen it going over if we had, we had been close enough.

“Oh, I should think so.”

It was very very cold in the Fall. It was like standing in the bowl of a metal spoon. Strange echoes came and whispers went. The growl of the plane, when it arrived, would be deafening.

“He is, of course, late,” I said.

“Five minutes.”

“Eight minutes. What do we do if he doesn’t come?”

“You’ll curse him. I’ll carry you back to the city.”

“You’ll what?”

“Carry you. The whole twenty, thirty miles. Running at eighty miles an hour all the way, if you like. The highway is comparatively flat.”

I laughed, and my laugh rang around the silver spoon.

“If he doesn’t, I dare you to.”

“No dare. It’s easy.”

“And terribly inconspicuous.”

And then I heard the plane.

“Oh, Silver. Isn’t it wonderful? It’s going to work.”

I stared into the sky, but all I saw was its lavender-blue wintryness.

“Can you see the plane, Silver?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t. And the reason for that is, I think, that there isn’t one. The Canyon sides are distorting some other sound.”

“Then what?”

“A car. Yes, listen. Brakes.”

“Why would a car stop here?”

“Clovis?”

“Then something has gone wrong.”

I can only describe the feeling this way: It was as though someone loosened a valve in each of my limbs simultaneously, and some precious vital juice ran out of me. I felt it go with an actual physical ache, sickening and final. My lips were frozen, my tongue was wood, but I managed to make them move. “Silver… The rocks behind us. I can’t get by them, but you can. You can run over them, jump them, and go down the other side. And up the Canyon. I won’t come because, if you carry me, it would have to slow you, make it that much more awkward. Because the surface—isn’t flat. You said, a flat surface.”

He turned and looked at me. His face was attentive, the eyes flattening out, cold gold-red fires.

“It wouldn’t be so easy over rocks, no. Much, much slower.”

“You’ll need to be fast.”

“What is it?”

“It’s—I don’t know. But I know you have to run. Now, Silver.”

“Not without you.”

“They can’t do anything to me.”

“They can do everything to you. You’re no longer coded. If someone wants me, and I’m no longer here.”

It came to me he knew what I meant before even I knew it. He had always known then, better than I, that they—that they—

“I don’t care, Silver. Please, please run away.”

He didn’t move, except he turned to face the way we had come, and I, helpless, powerless, turned to do the same. As we did so, he said, “And anyway, my love, they’d have, I think, some means of stopping me from getting very far.”

They. Five figures were coming down the steps onto the ballroom floor. They all wore fur coats, fur hats. They looked like bears. They were funny.

They came toward us quite slowly. I don’t think it was deliberate. They were cold, and the way was slippery. I didn’t know any of them, and then the snow-light slicked across two panes of glass.

The VLO wasn’t coming. It didn’t exist. Electronic Metals existed. Clovis had betrayed us, after all.

“There’s still time,” I tried to say.

“Not really,” he said. He turned away from them again and stood in front of me so I wouldn’t see them. He blotted them out, as long ago he’d blotted out the harsh light and fear of the world, so I could learn to bear it. “Listen,” he said. “None of this matters. What we’ve had matters—listen to me. I love you. You’re a part of me. I’m a part of you. You can’t ever lose that. I’m with you the rest of your life.”

“No Silver—Silver—”

“Yes. Trust me. It’s true. And I’m not afraid of this. I was only afraid for you. Do you understand?”

I shook my head. He took my hands and held them against his face, and he looked at me, and he smiled at me. And then he glanced back again, and they were very close.

Swohnson was in the lead.

“You’ve been a bit of a silly girl,” he said to me, “creeping off with your friend’s property. It isn’t, ah, legal, you know.”

I don’t think he recognized me, but he disliked me just the same. I’d made him come out in the cold. He always got the rotten jobs—placating the mob and irate callers, shutting the gate, doing the visual interviews and acting dumb, chasing runaway machines and female children across the winter countryside.

I couldn’t say a word that would alter anything, but the words tried to come, and Swohnson showed his teeth at me and said, “You’re lucky if no one lodges charges. Not that that’s our business. Our business is this, here. Didn’t you know how dangerous these things can be? They can short out at a second’s, er, notice. A faulty line. Yes, you’ve been bloody lucky.”

I started to plead, and then I stopped. Silver was standing by me, looking at them silently. None of them looked in his eyes.

“Er, yes. Give us the lady’s bags,” said Swohnson. “Um, you take the guitar, will you,” he added to one of the other four bears. “That’s E.M. property.”

Silver put down the bags quietly. Men picked them up. He handed the guitar to the elected man, who said, “Thanks—Oh, shit,” and bit his mouth.

“Yes, they’re convincing,” Swohnson said. “Till they blow a gasket. Now, young lady. We stopped your cab on the road. It’ll take you back to the city.”

“She hasn’t,” Silver said, “got the fare.”

They all started. Swohnson coughed. He swung around on another bear. “Go and put some, ah, cash in the damn cab. Enough for the ride.”

The bear hurried off. They were obedient henchmen. If Silver resisted them, would they be enough to stop him? And then I saw something come out of Swohnson’s pocket, in his gloved paw. He toyed with it, so I could see the buttons.

“Don’t,” Silver said, “do it in front of her.”

Swohnson coughed again. His breath fluffed through the air. The Canyon vibrated.

“Oh, don’t worry. You don’t think we’d carry you to the car when you can walk? Start walking now. Left, right. Left, right.”

Silver walked, and I walked. The men walked with us. No one spoke. We went up the steps and came out in the ravine. When we got to the top, the cab was back, a bear leaning on one side.

“All paid up and primed for the city center,” he said, quite cheerfully. “All right? Mr. Swohnson?”

“Fine.”

Swohnson walked on, and Silver walked, and I tried to and one of the bears caught my arm and prevented me. My bags were lying by the taxi.

“Here’s your cab, now, please.”

“Let me,” I said. “Let me come with you. As far as—the center.”

“Sorry, madam. No.”

“Let me. Please. I won’t do anything.”

Silver was taller than they were. He walked like an actor playing a young king. The cloak flared from his shoulders. His hair blazed through the monochrome white-blueness of the day, as he walked away from me toward the long black car like an ancient hearse.

“You see,” I said to the man, smiling, plucking at his sleeve, “you see I’d much rather.”

He shook me off. Agitated, he said, “It’s only a bit of metal. I know it looks—but it isn’t. Let it go, can’t you. They’re dangerous. It could hurt you. We just take them apart. Melt it down. It’ll be over in another hour. That’s no time, is it. Nothing to fret about.”

I held out my hands to him and he backed away.

Silver moved in a graceful bow to get into the car. The windows were tinted like Swohnson’s spectacles, and I couldn’t see him anymore, not even the fire of his hair, his hair, his hair.

Swohnson got into the car. The others called. The man who had stopped me ran up the road to them, slipping once and almost going down.

“Please,” I said to the empty distance between us.

Their car started. Snow fanned away from it. It moved powerfully. It raced and dwindled.

“Please,” I said.

It was gone.

Automatically, I fumbled to open the taxi door, and one by one I loaded the bags into it, and the umbrella. Then I got in and shut the door.

I sat in the taxi. I wasn’t crying. I was making a little noise, very low, I can’t describe it. I couldn’t seem to stop. I think I may have been trying still to say “Please.” I sat and watched the clock in the taxi.

I didn’t even think of going after them. They had, at least, taught me that.

It’ll be over in another hour.

When you leave me, there’s nothing.

There’s all the world.

It’ll be over, in another hour.

Where the cat had scratched me, my wrist hurt.

I watched the clock. I didn’t visualize any of what they did to him. I didn’t wonder about it. I didn’t feel him die.

“Jack’s lost all his glass. All smashed.”

When the hour was up, I took off my left boot and smashed the glass over the taxi clock, and taking up the largest shard I could find I cut my wrists with it.

Blood is very red. I began to feel warm. Everything grew dark. But in the dark, little bright silver flames were turning and burning…

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

Somewhere there was a great rushing and roaring. The sky was falling. The sky with its Silver stars, his hands, his feet, his limbs, his torso, even his genitals scattered to give light, dismembered like Osiris, Romeo, Dionysos.

The sky fell in the Canyon.

Later, the door of the cab was wrenched open.

“Oh, Jesus,” someone said to me. I heard this someone retching and fighting to control the spasms. But I closed my eyes and slept.

• 5 •

I remember the hospital in little blurred white flashes, like damaged film. I needn’t describe that. Or the pain, which didn’t stay in any part of me, but ran through all over me, so that even to turn was awful. I remember being helped to use the lavatory, moaning with pain. All these pains were physical. Below, beneath, beside them all, a thin grey pain that was not physical ran on and on like a tape. I dreamed sometimes. I was a child, and someone had thrown my black fur bear into a fire. It was coming apart and melting and I screamed with horror. I also dreamed that I was taken to meet my father, the man who had supplied the sperm for me to be born. But whenever I arrived where he was supposed to be, he wasn’t there anymore. These are symbols. I didn’t dream—I didn’t dream of him.

I didn’t come fully conscious until I was in a room I knew, and for a moment couldn’t identify. Then I moved a little, and my foot skidded. The sheets were dark green satin. And then Clovis was sitting on the arm of a chair, looking at me.

Two things. His hair was still long, but dark now, not dark red, de-molecularized. And his face was hollow, which made him look oddly holy.

“I’m sorry about the sheets,” he said. “I forgot. I can change them tomorrow.”

Clovis. I was in Clovis’s spare bed, in Clovis’s apartment. I was with Clovis. Who had betrayed us. My mouth was dry. I said softly, “Hallo, Judas.”

He slowly shook his head, as if he knew fast gestures made me giddy.

“No, Jane. Not me.”

Did I feel anything? Did I want to hurt him, to kill him? No. I didn’t want anything. I didn’t even want to die anymore. It was too much trouble. But I was obliged, having started the conversation, to go on with it.

“You called E.M. You told them where we’d be.”

“I did not.”

“Where you knew we’d be, because you’d promised me the VLO would come.”

“It did come. Who do you think found you? The hapless Gem. He put a tourniquet on you and got you in the plane. He then flew that impossible crate over the city, which is strictly illegal, and landed on the roof of State Imperial Hospital. The place was packed with quake casualties stacked like sardines, but he wouldn’t move off until they took you in as well. I never knew he had it in him. I don’t think he did. He is now on opium-based tranquilizers, which are not going to put the color back in his cheeks. Christ, Jane, what a bloody foul thing to do to yourself.”

“If it came, it came too late. You made sure E.M. would get to us first.”

“It was late because half the Historica sheds collapsed in the tremor. Gem got the VLO out past security as soon as he could.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to be here.”

“All right. I know you think I’m the villain of this rather sordid plot. I’ll leave you alone. Just stay put until you’re stronger, and then you can go.”

He got up and walked away into the blur that misted the edges of my vision. When the blur had almost swallowed him, he said, “Your mother called. She calls every hour. Do you want her to come over?”

I suddenly began to try to cry. It was very difficult. The tears wouldn’t come. It was like trying to give birth to a stone. When I stopped trying, my heart was thundering, and Clovis was standing over me again.

“Jane—”

“No. I don’t want my mother.” I shut my mouth.

Presently Clovis went out. Then I tried to get out of the bed. The last thing I remember is that I couldn’t.

There were large white sealed and waterproof bandages on my wrists. In another month, I would go back to have the stitches out, and then I could book up for the treatment that would take the scars away. Clovis wrote to tell me this in a note he left lying on the coffee table. He said he would pay for the treatment. Or Demeta would. He’d gone out and left the place to me on the day he thought I was strong enough to get up. He seemed to trust me. He seemed to know I wouldn’t repeat my earlier performance. Why should I? I hadn’t the energy. It takes a lot of determination to die. A lot of conviction. Unless someone helps.

The note also said he’d asked Demeta not to phone, but a couple of times the phone sounded, and I knew it was her. The second time I reached out blindly and switched it on.

“Hallo, Mother,” I said.

“Whoops.” A male voice, laughing. “I may not be enormously butch, but I’ve never been mistaken for anyone’s mother before.”

I sighed. I thought about being polite. At last I said, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. Any chance of Clovis being there?”

“No. He’s out.”

“Dammit. Would you tell him Leo rang?”

Would I?

“All right.”

“Leo. L as in Love. E as in Edible. O as in Oh my God why doesn’t this M-B idiot get off the line.”

“Leo,” I said dully, missing his wit, I suppose offensively.

“Good-bye,” he said, and switched off.

I scribbled across the bottom of Clovis’s note to me: LEO CALLED.

I went into the green bathroom and lay in the bath three or four hours. Sometimes I would try to cry. My mind went plodding on and on. It’s wrong to repress grief. Was I repressing grief? I thought about Silver. I tried to cry. No tears would come. I’d cried for so many trivial reasons, over visuals, dramas, books, out of embarrassment and childish fear. Now I couldn’t cry.

When I heard the lift come up, I was glad, with a sort of deadly gladness, not to be alone anymore. I heard Clovis come into the apartment, and move about there, and once he whistled a snatch of tune, and then stopped himself suddenly.

Perverseness made me go out of the bathroom, carrying my robe, naked, and walk across the room in front of him to the bedroom. He stared at me as I passed, then turned away.

I got back into the spare bed and lay there, and eventually he came in.

“Are you hungry? The servicery is bursting with food. Truffles, pâté, eggs angéliques, roast beef… mince on toast.”

I became aware it gave me a horrible relief to ignore him, providing he was there to be ignored.

Then suddenly he yelled at me.

“Christ, Jane, it wasn’t me. Do you want me to tell you what happened?”

I didn’t reply and he began to curse me. Then he went out again. I lay a long while, and then my stomach began to growl with avid hunger. My hunger was far away but insistent. Finally I got up, and opened the guest closet where he’d neatly hung all my few clothes out of the bags. My stomach growled and gurgled, and I touched my clothes, and remembered how I had worn them with Silver, and I tried to cry, and the tears wouldn’t come. The black, paint-spotted scruffy jeans, taken in so badly at hips and waist and taken in so much. The fur jacket. The embroidered wool dress. The Renaissance dress. The emerald cloak, its hem stained by melted snow, and here, at the back, this dress I’d never actually worn in the slums, this black dress I’d worn the night I went to Electronic Metals and saw all the robots perform, all but Silver. For Silver, who was too human to check out, was in the cubicle, eyeless, handless—I opened my mouth to scream, but I didn’t scream. What use was grief or terror or rage? Who would they move? Who would set things right? The law?

The Senate? God? But I pulled the black dress from the closet and held it up before me, and saw with uncaring surprise that one of the sleeves was ripped out.

I stood there a moment, then I let the dress fall. I picked up my robe and put it on again. I walked out. Clovis was reclining on the couch among the black cushions, drinking applewine.

“I see Leo called,” said Clovis. “What it is to be irresistible.”

“It was Jason and Medea,” I said.

“Your note says Leo.”

“You know what I mean. It was Jason and Medea.”

“It was Jason and Medea seems grammatically unsound. They were Jason and Medea, perhaps? It was Jason, and also it was Medea.”

“Stop it, Clovis. Just answer.”

“Would you believe me?”

“The sleeve in the black dress.”

“Jason’s device was stuck on the fabric. Color absorbent, so almost invisible. About the size of your little fingernail. But very adhesive. I didn’t think you’d want it in your clothes anymore. I put it in the garbage disposal. If you want to go on being poor, I’ll buy you a new dress. Or a new sleeve.”

I went into the servicery and made instant toasts and ham and eggs and ate them standing by the hatches, greedily. I didn’t think of Silver as I ate. Or of Jason. Or of Medea.

Clovis had put some Mozart on the player. When I came into the room again, he was sketching something, I don’t know what it was.

“If you’d like to know the truth,” he said, “I will tell you.”

“Does it matter?”

“I think so. To me. I don’t like this idea you have that I’m the modern miniaturized version of the Black Death.”

I stood at the window and looked out at the river. The light was going, and a tin-foil of ice glimmered on the water. The mud was long gone, cleaned away. Jewels lit the buildings. So what?

“Did you know, Egyptia has become a star?”

“At the Theatra?” I asked.

“Not precisely. Most of the Theatra fell down in the tremor. An antiquated shed indeed. A lovely line for the visuals, though. They called her The Girl Who Rocked The City. And what was the other one? Oh, yes, how could I forget? The Girl Who Brought The House Down.”

“I’m glad,” I said, parroting, minus feeling, my earlier thought, “that it didn’t happen when the play was on.”

“No. It happened during the party afterward. Oh, yes, we were all in the auditorium at five past five, drinking some rather filthy champagne, when the bloody roof fell in on us. It was a damn silly evening anyway. The drama. Egyptia. She can’t act, you know. She just is. But the magic of Egyptia consists of her own self-hypnosis. She believes in herself, despite what she says, and it’s catching. She’s a star all right. There are contracts signed for a visual. They’ll be shooting in Africa. She’s already over there. I’m telling you all this for a reason,” he said. “You may abruptly want to know where she is.”

I had been at this window, I had said to the reflection: I love you. And he had known. A pain came through me so vast, incapable of expression. I pressed my forehead to the glass. Why hadn’t they let me die? I would be in blackness now, or in some spiritual state which no longer cared, no longer had any links with a soulless robot. For he had been only the sum of his metals, his mechanisms. Soulless, timeless.

“Jane, are you listening?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Had he been afraid? Despite what he said to console me? He’d virtually pretended he disbelieved in pursuit, when he reckoned it a fact, to console me. Had it been like pain for him to die that way, although he couldn’t feel pain? I’d taught him to feel pleasure, or rather, he’d taught himself, through me. But if pleasure, why not agony? I’d let him learn fear and need. And he’d let me learn to live. And all I wanted was to die.

“Oh, Jane,” said Clovis. He was standing by me, and awkwardly, with none of his normal elegance, he took my hand. “Please, Jane. You have to get over it. No. You won’t ever get over it. But you have to get over this.”

“Why?” I asked. I think I wanted to know.

“Because—Oh God, I don’t know. Why do you?”

“Because,” I said, “he told me there was all the world. Because he told me he was a part of me, that he’d be with me all my life and that nothing could change that. Because now I’m the only part of him that’s left. They took him to pieces and put him in a fire.”

“I know,” Clovis said. He held my hand.

“Melted down. Scrap metal.”

“I know.”

“I’m all of him that’s left. All of him there’ll ever be anymore.”

And the tears came and I cried tears. And Clovis, not wanting to, but amazingly gentle, held me.

I cried then, and now I don’t think I’ll ever cry again, the rest of my life.

Much later, he told me how E.M. had known about us, and how to find us.

I’d left the theatre and the play had gone through to more and more enthusiastic responses from the audience.

Egyptia had held them, and gradually most of the cast gave up trying to bulldoze her from the limelight. This was their livelihood, and a winner is a winner. By the second interval, the actors were in and out of her dressing room, having frozen roses sent in and making love to her. And she, generous, vulnerable Egyptia, had taken them all back into her heart. In the last scene, Antektra stabs herself, a libation of blood to appease the rampaging shade of her brother. It went on film, with everything else. The visual crew, overcome, were fighting to push out shots on the three A.M. local newscast. In the wake of all this, the party was riotous. Clovis, whose inclination was to leave, was cornered by Leo, an actor-manager from a rival company who had come to sneer and stayed to cheer. He was playfully trying to persuade Clovis to act Hamlet in a new skit version of the play called Bloody Elsinor when the tremor hit the building. At first it looked like nothing, and then the ceiling cracked in half and lumps of plaster and cement crashed into the auditorium.

Nobody was killed, but casualties were various, and this time the blood was real.

Clovis, unscathed, emerged from shelter to discover Egyptia standing up on the stage, white even under her makeup, rigid, in a sort of catatonic trance.

She’d always been so afraid of earthquakes. Her dreams and her fantasies of death and destruction had prepared her for this moment. She knew she had reached a pinnacle, and she knew the gods could sweep her from it. But she stood in the middle of carnage and she had survived. She hadn’t apparently noticed until then I wasn’t there. But when she started to come back from her trance she asked where I was. And Jason, mopping up his own blood from sundry cuts, said, “Jane’s gone back to the slum to play with her robot lover.” And, in the face of her non-comprehension, he had elaborated on his magical device and how he’d almost tracked us. I can see now, Jason and Medea would never have told any authority about us. It was more fun to have us to themselves; they didn’t want to end the game. But Egyptia—I think I know what went through her head.

She must have heard and been aware, unconsciously, of what had been said about E.M.’s Sophisticated Formats. She must have been consciously aware from her own experience that it was more than true. The wonderful lover, the wonderful musician. Men could become redundant, she’d said. And of course that really meant, humans could become redundant. And I think, just the way the mob of unemployed hate the machines that take their work away from them, Egyptia knew the terror of losing what she had only just got hold of. She was a genius. She had sensed it in herself. Now everyone knew it, and fell before her feet, and her Destiny opened in front of her like a shining road. But what if a machine had more genius than she did? Oh, I don’t suppose she thought it through. Egyptia doesn’t think, she feels. As Clovis said, she just is. Probably, at the beginning, after the Babylon party, the actors had talked a lot about Silver, and how clever he was. Maybe they talked about the other robots, too, the ones that could act. Sometime, some seed had been planted in her. The earth tremor was like an after-image—or a fore-image. It had been for her the omen it had seemed for me. She was still half Antektra, and Antektra was good at reading portents. It shook her, liberated her even as it threatened her, into the grisly savagery of the id. She went home, still mainly in her trance, and Corinth went with her. Perhaps she made another kind of comparison that night, and it clinched matters. For if Silver was superior in her bed, he might also, so easily, be superior in her profession. About nine A.M., as Silver and I were walking up through the city, she called Electronic Metals. Legally she owned him.

Illegally, I had him. But they could probably find me. Someone had me tabbed. Then she gave them the address of Jason and Medea.

Jason wouldn’t have wanted to cooperate, but E.M. had the City Senate behind them, pushing. Arms were twisted. I hope it hurt a lot. E.M. took Jason’s homing transmitter, and their luck was in. Medea told Clovis all this later, including Egyptia’s part. Especially Egyptia’s part. Corinth, wandering from Egyptia’s bed, had spread the tale by then anyway.

That night I came away from Electronic Metals, twenty-five years old, self-assured, knowing I didn’t love him, that a piece of electric equipment meant nothing to me, and I walked into Jagged’s restaurant and I sat drinking coffine through a chocolate-flavored straw—Jason, or Medea, had pinched me on the arm. A ferocious pinch. It was typical of them. I hadn’t even choked on my drink. What the pinch was, however, rather than a cheery social opening gambit, was the gadget being stuck firmly on my sleeve. Tiny, camouflaged, not detected. I thought they’d done it the night on the bridge, but it was that earlier night, in Jagged’s, that they’d been waiting for prey, and rejoiced when I was it.

I must have bored them at first. I went to Clovis, and then I went to Chez Stratos—they could guess my goals from the directions the trace ran to. And then I went, what a surprise, to the slums. And stayed there.

(Having taken it off, why did I pack that dress to take with me into exile? There were others. I never even wore it. A symbol, perhaps, that I had redeemed him from death, that first time. It was that dress which killed him.)

They’d really tried quite hard, the twins, to find me. I think even that night we met them on Patience Maidel Bridge, they’d been working their way around, portioning the area, looking. The weakness of the homing device was that it faded off inside a building. It had been easy for them to deduce that if I went to New River and the trace failed, I was in Clovis’s apartment block. Or if I went out toward the Canyon and it failed, then I was at my mother’s. But in the slum, intrigued, they’d hunted up and down, never quite able to unearth my location, near, never near enough. And then, when it really did matter, Silver and I left the block on Tolerance, with the black dress packed into one of the cloth bags, and the signal came up like a star. By the time E.M. had confiscated and begun to operate the pickup of the transmitter, there was only the thin shell of a taxi to blur the trace. They found it simple to come after us, even allowing for the post-tremor traffic and diversions. Simple to catch up with us at the Fall Side. And the VLO was late.

So that was how it was. I shan’t comment on it anymore. It’s done.

And I think I can stop writing now, I think so.

Maybe my arms will ache less when the stitches come out, or it might be a psychosomatic pain, and will last months or years, or all the rest of my life.

I’m glad it wasn’t Clovis. I’m glad that time Jason called, Clovis switched the phone off at once. Egyptia is like a story someone told me. I don’t even hate her. You need energy for hatred, too. My mother called and I spoke to her. It was like speaking to someone I don’t know. We were polite. She says my I.M.U. card works again, two thousand a month. And my policode’s being renewed. I thanked her. I won’t use her money. Somehow, I’ll find a way not to. The policode I left behind at the apartment on Tolerance. Clovis mutters about providing me with one when the new coding comes through. Chloe came to see me. She didn’t know what to say. Leo came in with Clovis the other night, and stayed two days. Clovis is beginning to look hunted.

I still wish I’d died. That’s a fact. But I couldn’t do it again. I’m too afraid to do it now. That horrible, creeping, deadly warmth, like freezing to death. The gathering dark, the stars of my lover whirling in it.

Sometimes now I dream of him. I dream of him as he was when I saw him that time, eyeless, the clockwork interior exposed. Great hammers pound on him. Furnaces dissolve him. He seems to feel nothing. When I wake up, I lie and stare into the darkness of Clovis’s spare room.

A night or so ago, after one of these dreams, I got up and put on the light and started to write this last chapter.

I told Clovis about this writing. It’s a book now. An autobiography. Or is it a Greek Tragedy? Clovis said, “Don’t try and publish it, for heaven’s sake. They’ll throw you in jail. I hear the food is awful.”

Somehow, I never thought of publishing. Only of someone coming on the pages, years from now, buried in the ground in a moistureproof container, say, or hidden under a random floorboard in the slum.

But it’s pointless. There isn’t any reason. Reasonless. All of it.

It’s strange. I didn’t want to start writing this last part, and now I can’t seem to stop. You see, when I stop, I break my last link with him. With my love. Yes, he’ll always be with me, but not him. I’ll be alone. I’ll be alone.

But I am alone. These pieces of paper can’t help me.

And so I’ll stop writing.