Tanith Lee: Metallic Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No earthly way,” said Jizzle, righteously.

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

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

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

“Why, what’ve you done?”

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

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

“You’re fading,” whined Jizzle.

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

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

Any damage. Oh, God.

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

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

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

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

No one came, so I tried shouting.

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

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

“I tell you, Lor, she’s off her—”

“All right. Let me get by.”

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

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

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

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

Yes. She was mad. She must be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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