Tanith Lee - Metallic Love

I said, trembling, “Could I do that?”

“Maybe.”

His face was cold, and he had left the bed.

“You’re angry with me,” I said.

“You’re angry with me,” he said.

“With all of it.”

“Yes.”

“Damn you—” I yelled at him, “it isn’t the same for you.”

“No?” He caught me, his grip fierce on my arms, as ever, his restraint judged to a hairsbreadth, and his eyes had now the redder glare of coals. Can he know my thoughts? Can I—know his ?

“It is exactly the same for me, Loren. Exactly. But ten thousand times worse. Now you know, and only now. And only because you can personally feel it, too. Why do you think I went along with hiding what you are from you, even though I knew what you were the second I met you on that dance floor? And why do you think, in the end, I had to allow Demeta to strike you that axe blow? Do you think I want you to feel this way? The way I’ve always felt ever since they dragged me out of whatever nonexistent pre-life swamp I’d been swimming in and shoved me in this body. Souls? Christ knows, Loren. This is the only arena we can be sure we have. Don’t turn your back on it, or me. Don’t, Loren. Loren—if I have any soul at all, it’s you.”

It was cool outside, a fragrant spring night-morning, about four A.M. In a couple of hours it would be dawn, down here and up in the world. No one was about. A horde of little maintenance machineries passed us, squirreling along the clean streets, under the blossom trees with their lamps.

We met Sheena on the river bridge. There was a skinny, podgy-faced young man with her. Jason. They were idling there, like sophisticated casual lovers. He had his arm coiled round her, and I thought of Sharffe and the golden Orinoco that crashed. Sheena and Verlis exchanged some greeting. It wasn’t spoken or implied by gesture. But it registered somewhere in my awareness, and I wondered if that was my instinct or my mechanical system that had picked it up.

I was still in shock. When Jason ran his evil little beige eyes across me I was void as an empty screen.

Inside the foyer of the admin block. “Not that elevator,” Verlis said. We went through a door and down a stairway. There was a wall and Verlis looked at the wall, and it opened. The second elevator was one of a rank of ten, and was more functional and much larger. On the gray paint the notice read: Capacity 20 Persons.

“Where are we going?”

But we were there.

Even deeper under the mountain. I don’t know how far down. We came out on a kind of gantry, and below were scaffolding and pylons and wires, all angling on into the abyss.

He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I gazed down into the steel cradle far below. There was an object in it, a gigantic dark silver metal bullet with one pointed end.

Finally he said, “Do you know what you’re seeing?”

“Some sort of missile.”

“A shuttle,” he said. “A space vessel. You may have seen them on old VS footage, made before most of the space traffic was retarded by the advent of the Asteroid. This one is quite new, about five years old, fully serviced and in total working order. We’ve made certain of that. It’s release and operation were tied in to the personal chips of several of the rich and influential, Demeta among them. Which is why we brought her here, to affect a forgery with more speed.”

“She told me she wasn’t chipped for anything down here.”

“By the time she told you that, it was true. But think, Loren, do you really believe they’d have waited for the ultimate emergency to hand out the keys? Impractical. No, Demeta carried the appropriate chip from day one of this place having been completed. So we secured her here, and removed the chip. Most things in the sub-city have been accessible to us. But the shuttle itself was hedged round with the most complex and thickly interlaced traps and fail-safes men or machines could devise. And yes, we could have worked through them, but only very slowly and with extreme caution, not to blow everything sky-high. And time was important, too, you’ll agree, for us. The shuttle is necessary. It’s why we came here.”

Naturally the ones who built this shelter might have wanted one further option of getaway, if things still got too hot. But if they had used this vessel, where could they—or we—go?

Yes, he could read my mind, or sometimes he could.

Verlis said, “Don’t believe what any of the Senates have been telling you all. There are two large habitable under-dome stations on the moon. I’ve seen them. I’ve been there. We all have. They’re located darkside, which is why no one who shouldn’t has picked them out.”

My brain flashed. I saw a silver kite falling from the mountain sky, golden wheels, copper discs, asterion pillars. Coming back in—from space.

“The moon stations are, at this time, staffed solely by machines. Therefore we’ve taken them over. Does any Earth authority know? Not yet. Inside a year, we’ll have something constructed out there that’s very like this underground Paradise. Only better.”

“A moon dome-city,” I said. I looked at the vivid image in my mind, thinking he might have set the picture there. It was ethereal, in its strange way, the internal blue sky lit by warm clouds, the mechanical birds flying over, the rainbow carpets of flowers, and burning candles of trees. Tall buildings stood about a plaza, a river ran towards some magnetic direction. A fake sun rose like a golden parchment lamp.

“Anyone that leaves on the shuttle with my people will have a pleasant and a safe life. Besides the technology to create a good and secure environment, we possess one other conclusive advantage.”

People, I thought. He said, My people.

He said, “Jason has been useful in adding some final touches. Given that, it’s now unlikely any earth machine or weapon can harm us, or those we choose to protect. No one, however, can predict what threats may evolve in the future. For that reason we have seized a prime deterrent, and should any attempt be made against us, it will result in one single and definitive act of retaliation.”

A sort of click now in my brain. I stared at my thought, all bright and polished before me.

“Yes, Loren. As you know, there are monitoring systems left embedded on the Asteroid. We can trigger them to destabilize its mass. This for us, now, would also be very easy. And if we, and ours, are off the Earth, there’s nothing to prevent our doing it. The Asteroid will cut loose and continue on its lethal trajectory. This world will be finished, at the least for several thousand years.”

My eyes cleared and I stared only at him. “No,” I said.

“No?” He looked back at me, his face remotely compassionate. “Why do you say no?”

“You can’t obliterate the world for—”

“For personal survival? For the safety of my kind and those we care for? What have human things ever done but precisely that. Yes, those worlds may have been smaller back then. A castle-world, or a town-world, a country, an empire. But to destroy the enemy in order to remain alive—that’s the fundamental scripture of the human race. We have been well taught.”

I stepped back.

“I won’t go with you,” I said. “I won’t. If that’s what you plan—if that’s your safeguard against attack, to wreck this whole world in order to retain your perfect master race and its slave colony out in space—no. No. I won’t go with you, Verlis. If you bring down the roof on us all, you’ll be bringing it down on me, too.”

He drew me in against him and I was so drained I let him do it. He said to me, “I told you, you’re my soul. You say what a soul says, if ever I had one. Loren, they’re going in the shuttle, all my robot family, and most of those others here that agree to go with them. But I alone intend to be staying behind, in the world. Do you see? No authority on this Earth will know. When our ultimatum is given, a cold war will begin that can never be broken or ended, between machines and men. But I’m the hostage humanity won’t even know it has. Only my own kind will know. And, as you say, if the roof ever falls, it falls on me, too.”