Tanith Lee - Metallic Love

Where was I headed? What was my plan?

I felt disoriented and anxious, but it was too late for that. And anyhow, you get used to knowing fear will rarely help, if you’re one of the subsistence poor. I toted my bag, left the platform, and went and had a bagel.

And outside the café, when I re-emerged, was a visual giving the local news. I stood watching it, in case there was anything on it. Anything about him. But nothing was. And a voice in my head told me, Maybe that old man at E.M. lied. Or was nuts. How could I have been so sure the information from him was reliable? Because, I thought, it had made sense. META was some takeover from E.M., and here was one more senatorial, governmental, or big-business plot….

I walked up through the city. Already I could see one of the better areas ahead. They had made that easy. It was a landmark, built up high and visible from the lower streets, and frosted with sparkle, just like those distant mountains. Was this what the crawling poor were meant to respect? It reminded me of a Heaven on a Hill, or castle, in reproduced Medieval pictures, a structure raised well above the peasant village that served it. And the peasants, along with gazing at this wondrous glory, would also have to watch out for marauding castle knights or chastising angels.

I climbed the sloping streets, the flights of stairs, and rode the moving ones, towards it.

At the base of Heaven lay a park of sculpted trees, fountains, flowers of incredible hothouse colors. Tame wildlife sprinted everywhere—squirrels, racoons, birds—not shy, running up to visitors to be fed. There were strollers there doing just that. But to the squirrel that weightlessly galloped up to me, I had to apologize, and it gave me quite a sniffy look before bolting up a tree.

Beyond this park expanded the shining goal I’d seen from below.

Domes like bubbles rested on milk-white walls, amid the smooth flash of polarized crystal. Behind the buildings the sky and the miles-off mountains, the real ones, fenced the horizon. The rest of the city lay far beneath.

There were high electric gates, but they stood open. Only a couple of robot patrollers were flitting up and down an avenue lined with blue cedars. A notice in dayneon gems by the gates read Montis Heights.

There was no point in barging through the inviting entrance. I’d be stopped fairly quickly, and interrogated as to why I was there, like in all those foyers by the New River.

Someone, though, was coming, walking out of Montis Heights and along the avenue to the gates, under the cool blue cedar trees. In alternating tree-shade and bright morning sun, I noted fluid tallness, a sheen like water. Silver, sapphire, and a burning deepest red.

Red hair. Skin like—

I forgot to breathe. A sort of blood-rush blanked my vision a moment. When it cleared, the figure was much nearer, only ten, twelve yards away. And I could see it wasn’t—wasn’t him. But it was— one of his kind.

…Silver’s sister came through. Her auburn hair… she looked at me, smiling. I knew what she’d say. “I’m Silver. That is S-I-L-V-E-R which stands for Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot.”

The female figure moved like a dancer. Boneless and serpentine—and strong. The blood-red hair fell over one shoulder and down to her waist, strands of it powdered a hard, scorching gold. She wore a snake’s garment, too, silver, like her skin, fronded over by violet jewels and coils of drops like rain or diamonds. Beauty? They invented the word just for her. For her and for her kind. Yeah, it was Heaven. Angels walked here.

And, as Jane described, this one was smiling, right at me. And now she, too, had reached the gate of Heaven, the castle-in-the-clouds, but she was inside, and I was outside, and those few steps shut me out of Paradise forever.

“Hi,” she said to me.

Idiotically I responded. “Hi.”

“Were you wanting to come in?”

An Angel of the Portal. Or St. Peter. I shook my head, dumbest of the dumbest. Then the words opened my mouth and darted out. “Are you a silver?”

“Sure,” she said. “My name’s Glaya. Registration G. A. 2.”

Her eyes were the color of emeralds under pale blue glass. That was different. Before, their eyes—all the silvers—had been amber. Her body was perfect, her legs long, her feet in high-heeled, high-strapped sandals, silver on gold—on silver.

Another difference. They hadn’t limited her name, as had been done the first time. No, now she had a proper name. Glaya.

“If you would like to see more of me,” she said, smiling, sensual and pleased, liking my interest, blossoming in it to ever greater unlikely heights of loveliness, “contact META and repeat my registration.”

I said flatly, “I’m not M-B, actually. And anyhow, I wouldn’t be able to afford you, would I?”

She flirted her eyes in a way you couldn’t ignore, M-B or not. She said amicably, “Well, if anything changes there, maybe then. Have a sweet day.”

And she flowed by me like a metals and jewelry stream, some edge of her clinging garment somehow brushing me, her perfume stroking my face like a caressing hand. Her finger- and toenails were, each one, the color of an individual fire.

I felt weak, as if I’d run twenty miles, or lain sick a long while.

One of the robot avenue patrollers had now slid to the gates.

“Who is here?” it asked.

“No one,” I said.

“You have no business here?”

“No.”

“Please descend to the lower level,” it suggested.

My own suggestion was less urbane. “Please fuck yourself.”

I saw the vispos that evening. They were all over the city, came out of nowhere, as adverts usually do. People were staring at them, or ignoring them. How could they have ignored them? The earth rocks and you are standing, clinging to the edge of nothing, and you don’t notice at all? I guess that is life.

I recall the first vispo I ever saw in the other city, with the group, when I was about eight. Posters that sound and move, almost real. Samuel slapped me for looking.

Now the slap came again, but another kind.

I stood on a street and saw this pyrotechnic display rise like a phoenix out of the dusty lower city.

The experience of the century! META presents The Show. You know we have them—you know you can see them—even touch— Why wait? Face your future with META!

A woman appeared on the vis-screen. No, a robot appeared. Not Glaya, who was a silver. This was a copper, with skin like creamy electric sunfall, and hair like wheat. She wore a snakeskin of topaz and amethyst, and was smiling her ice-white teeth. She imitated a singing bird, trills of liquid strangeness—a canary? A man took her place, golden skinned, black-haired. He was an acrobat, turning the most unbelievable cartwheels in midair. He had green eyes. And behind him another man arrived, black as jet—a new range, as a banner across the screen told me, asterion metal, from the Asteroid itself—his hair was black also, but long and plaited with gold, and his eyes were rimmed with gold, and he was dressed in black scales. And there was a woman of black asterion, in transparent white, standing, it seemed, in fire that the man had somehow conjured for her. And then a man with silver skin, with amber eyes, with burgundy hair. They had all spoken or sung or fluently called something, or moved in some unexpected and marvelous contortion…. This one, the silver one, was playing a mandolin, softly singing a descant to the music.

Near me, one of my fellow watchers said, “Are they machines?”

“No, just computer effects,” said another voice. “It’s some movie.”

The little crowd was drifting away.