Tanith Lee - Metallic Love

But Electronic Metals had been here originally, and the site still was. Its neon name remained, too, slightly rusted and askew, probably not working. E.M. was one of those identities Jane had never disguised. Why would she? At the time a lot of people knew about super-robots like Silver, and just who had manufactured them.

I loitered by the gate, which was still securely locked with a device that shrilled This firm has moved! everytime I approached too close.

Squinting in through holes in the securomesh, I saw a drab, glass-sprayed frontage. The spray glass had cracked. Weeds stood tall along the yard and out of holes in the walls. In a way it was odd the lock message had been left there, or that its mechanical voice bothered to insist on the obvious.

The sun moved over. Hot purple shadows spread between the buildings. I was turning away, when a man emerged abruptly out of a sort of shed I hadn’t noticed near the gate.

“You been here awhile,” he said. “What d’ya want?”

Honesty/Loren, practiced liar, replied, “Well, I knew a woman who worked here. About twelve years back.”

Always lie as near the truth as you can. I had known her—for about twenty minutes—that mad blonde on Compton.

“A lotta folk worked around here. Y’see any?”

“It was just—”

“They’re gone. Made a pack of mistakes, these guys. Senate took the business over. Set ’em straight.” I wondered why this guy lurked in a shed at the gate. As if he read my mind, he told me. “Used to work here myself. Deliveries. Now I get the job of keeping an eye out.”

“But you’ve said they’ve all gone.”

“Sure.” He was a short, not-old old little man. Intently he watched the ground, as if expecting some creature to tunnel up out of it. “They done some funny things here. Guess you know, if you knew some dame worked here.”

“She said…” I hesitated, very puzzled, “robots—like real people?”

“That was it. Was why the Senate stopped it. We had mobs here, screaming. Subsistence riots. You can’t barely get no job—you wan’ a robot get your job?”

There was no point in any more conversation. I smiled and said, “I’d better get going.”

He had strange eyes, now that he lifted them, a kind of green, and clear for a man stuck in a shed by the gate of a deserted building.

“Ever hear of META?” he asked me.

“Meta—no.”

“M-E-T-A, that is. Stands for Metals Extraordinary Trial Authority.”

The purple shadow of a block across the way had almost covered us like a pavilion. In the encroaching shade, I saw the not-old old guy was now watching me intently, as if to see what would tunnel up.

“Never heard of it,” I truthfully said.

“Not everyone has. Been an advert on the visuals today. That’s META. They say they’re bringing them back.”

“Who?” asked Honesty/Loren, stupidly.

“The robots. Your friend here, what she do?”

“Oh, this and that.”

“Ain’t this city,” he said. The shadow covered his face and his green eyes shone out of the darkness. Maybe it’s only my beginnings in the costive hive of Grandfather, which makes me continually spot omens. “Just over the state border. Northward. Mountain country there.”

“Sure,” I said.

“That’s where they are. META.”

“Why tell me?”

“It ain’t on no news yet.”

“Then how do you know?”

He turned away. “I get thirsty,” he said.

I gave him some coins. He took them. He said, “I had one once, when I—back then. I mean, I had one of the female robots. I mean, sex. A copper. That’s Copper Optimum Pre-Programmed Electronic Robot. It was to make sure she functioned. Oh, boy. She surely did.”

I took the chance. I said, “My friend did that.”

He said, “You read that book, din’ya.”

“Book?”

“You know what book. D’ya know the city I mean, where META is? They call it Second City now, since the Asteroid.”

“Really?” I said. “Nice talking to you.”

I walked quickly along the street. When I glanced back, he had vanished, perhaps only retreated into his hut, or rushed to some bar. The sky beat unkindly on the empty shell of Electronic Metals. I ran and caught the public flyer at South Arbor.

Danny gawked at me, stony as a gargoyle, while I recounted the story of a long-lost aunt who lay sick a few miles outside the state boundary. Finally he said, “Don’t lie to me, Loren. You’re a wee bitty good at it, but I know how you deal your hand. We take it as read. You wanna go someplace else.”

“I need paying, Danny. Is that okay?”

“Fine. You’ve been a great asset. Maybe you’ll come back.”

“I will—yes, of course.”

“Here.” He put a wad of bills in front of me, and I stared at them.

“You’ve earned it,” he said. “You never even hit me for dental expenses like the rest of them.”

There was quite a lot of money there.

“I’ll pay you back.”

“And I’m a panda.”

And so to the scene with Margoh. And so, much later, returning to the apartment in the bat-haunted block near the Old River and finding she’d taken my fur coat—but also left me, sneaked in among my few clothes as only a clever thief could do it, a pair of long-stem-heeled silver pumps. Silver. And exactly my size.

That sunset I caught the flyer far out of State. I’d had to stand in line about an hour to get my ticket. I had never been across any borders. But then, till I was twelve, I’d never gotten far from Grandfather’s lair. Perhaps life is all and only truly that. Incarceration, breaking free. And then the next prison.

Angels walk upon the air,

Where the sunset doors unroll,

Seen in distance, striding fair:

Hair of fire and eyes lit coal,

Heartless fusion, flesh with soul,

Wings that rake the sky’s wide bowl,

Flaming swords that pierce and tear.

It was a night flight to Second City, six hours.

Dawn was coming up when we flew in over a new wide landscape. All night, off and on, there had been splinterings of lights below. I’d seen them because I couldn’t sleep, unlike most of the other passengers comatosely puffing and sighing around me. Now and then flyer masts gleamed up, too, like thin towers from some epic tale. But terrain hadn’t been visible.

In dawnlight I received a sense of hugeness. I’d never seen much—any—open country before. The land looked rough and tumbled, chasms, ravines, plunging to glitter-threads of river. Trees clung in sprays on rocksides, or pointed up in the dark arrow shapes of pines. Then the sky cooled and clouds lifted off, and I saw, distant yet omnipresent, the skyscrapers of mountains. You could just make out, even in the last brass burst of summer, snow on their highest peaks.

After that we were in over the city, the unknown one, and my stomach lurched, and not only from our reducing speed.

I’d come here on a compulsive whim. What the hell was I going to do now?

At the flyer station we all lined up and traipsed through the border controls, some mechanical and some human. I began to think my temporary ID, legally bought before leaving, would have something wrong with it. But it didn’t. They asked me why I was there.

“Chance of work,” I said.

They didn’t trouble about me after that. I could tell the guy who’d asked had concluded I was a hooker, useful anywhere.

Out on the flyer platform it was already hot. The alien city looked like any city, like the one I’d left last night.