Tanith Lee: Metallic Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She writes:

He came within three feet of me, and he smiled at me. Total coordination… He seemed perfectly human, utterly natural, except he was too beautiful to be either.

“Hallo,” he said.

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

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

That was all.

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

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

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

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

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

It was as if I never heard anything before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

At last I went into one of the small stores.

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

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

“No. I meant from the faucet.”

“Get out, you crazy.”

I got out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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