Tanith Lee - Metallic Love

I stared up into the filmic eyes of the silver man. It was him. Or would I know? He wore a shirt like bright coins. Even through the visuality, his eyes seemed to see me.

Then the screen blinked and switched, and I was shown instead a huge car rampaging over desert. Another advertising vispo for another company.

Where was The Show? Had I grasped that? Yes. Some recreational public garden. META had organized it. META, the firm of the future we must face.

Had it been him? He was part of a range. Originally there had been three sets of three, hadn’t there. In his set another male, a female. But now? They had extended the prototypes, changed them. A black range had been activated, asterion metal, to go with the golds, silvers, and coppers. And eye colors in some cases altered. Blue-green-eyed Glaya… Had she been in the vispo? Yes, I had seen her, but couldn’t recapture what she had done…. And a female gold, too—jumping high, spinning…

And already they were being hired out. For that was why Glaya had been on Montis Heights. Some rich female M-B client, or a rich straight man, wanting her.

Maybe they all… all of them… already.

They were all up for grabs. For grabs.

Now the other vispo was showing a new line in SOTA VLO’s, the vehicles springing, with absurd weightlessness, out of a cornfield, above which halifropters chugged and buzzed like flies.

The apartment house on West Larch was like a million others, but it had a veranda out front, which was strung with pink neon lamps. In the dusk, my fellow house-residents sat about there and eyed me like hyenas.

They gazed even more dangerously when I emerged again an hour later.

I had used the tenants-only house-shower, where all the stalls were empty that evening. I’d washed my hair. I had a single “good” dress, found in a third-owner store one evening of extravagance a year ago. It was white Egyptian silk, or so the label said, shot with faint flakes of gilt. I’d gone without dinner for two weeks to make up the money. Never knew why I bought it, as if, in the end, there would be a reason. It clung, the dress, just right, not tightly but describingly, and it was sleeveless and low of neck, and the hem—because short dresses are in—was just above the knee. And there were the silver shoes Margoh had given me, too. I was made-up, all my twenty nails painted palest coffine. And my hair hung down my back.

One thing I hadn’t done. I hadn’t read any of Jane’s Book. I remember Grandfather, always with a little pocket Bible. We only got rationed bits of it, but he constantly read it to himself, poring over the tiny print with a magnifying glass that seemed to swell his red eye into that of some terrifying outer-space creature. Jane’s Book was, I guess, like a Bible for me. Though I hadn’t read it for years, it always went along with me. It was the first thing I’d take out in a new apartment, and hide. This time I’d worked a loose panel out of the back of the rickety closet, and put the Book, still in its waterproof overcoat, in there, held against the wall. Then I glued the panel into place. But I hadn’t read a line. Hadn’t even undone the cover.

Someone whistled, raucously approving, as I swung off down West Larch towards Main Boulevard.

It was full dark by then. The moon was up over Second City, faded by streetlamps, and the Asteroid was lurking in the east, the baleful eye of God’s Destroying Angel.

They stopped running the subways after the first quakes, before I’d even been born. But Second City had an overland system.

I got on the train bound for Russia—struck by the European name of the district. That’s where the public gardens were. The Show.

The car was full, standing room only. Were all these other people going there, just like me?

I stood rocking, holding onto the strap, watching lighted stations sizzle by, the train not bothering to stop now that it was full, and no one’s coin in the machine had showed they wanted those places. In all this crowd, would I even be able to see any stage, let alone anyone on it?

The train’s mechanism was noisy, but I caught snatches of talk around me.

“They banned them years ago, those things. Now it’s been regularized. You can always tell one of them. Couldn’t mistake it for anything human. They ain’t ever allowed normal work.”

“I saw the advert on the VS. Oh, I’ve been dreaming of him ever since.”

“Me, too. I love the black guy—”

“Ain’t no guy, you dope.”

“Guess not.”

“You’re crazy. You wanna do that —with that ?”

“They can do anything.”

“They’re built for entertainment and sex. But they’re expensive.”

“Two thousand I.M.U. for one half hour. So I heard.”

Surreal.

Had Jane ever felt this way, lurched and pulled forward, part of a curious herd, towards this unobtainable yet obsessive Grail? But Jane wasn’t me. She, I knew, was uncertain and timid, with a brave, steadfast core. I’m hard as nails, Jell-O on the inside, shivering away under the armor. Spineless, probably.

The motion of the overland train made me queasy, and I was glad when it stopped and we all got out.

The next bit reminded me of pilgrims in some Babel tract illustration, approaching a holy shrine, the way the great crowd I was now a tiny part of poured eagerly up the sloping street towards the powerfully lit walls of the Katerina Gardens. The street illumination was all glowing beautifully here, not a single pole not working, and the wall-tops were garlanded with strings of lamps. Every so often a shower of colored rays frayed up into the air over the park. The crowd liked this. They were excited, their faces burnished gold, nearly metallic. I suppose mine was, too.

There were plenty of gates, all fitted with pay-boxes. It only cost ten to get in, which surprised me, but then, going on the volume of the crowd, both META and the Second City Senate were gulping in the loot. As for the rich, they wouldn’t be here. They’d have had some private show.

The gardens rose in lawns and terraces, thick with huge trees successfully forced to size. The fire-rays feathered over, and now and then a trail of fireworks crackled their stitching up the sky.

I just went with the crowd, which seemed to know exactly where it was collectively going. I expected we’d eventually reach the highest point and crane over to the corresponding depths of some arena, a bowl of sound with the performance-area minuscule and far below. But instead, the ascent ended on a vast open plateau of short turf, raised like a table under the night. Distant as the rings of some other world, the vague glow of the city was visible at its edges.

Where was the stage?

Others were confused, too. I heard my own question asked aloud several times.

Someone said, “Only one stage I can see.”

“Well, where?”

“Look up.”

We looked. Up into the parallel black plain of night, where the moon was, and the passing light-rays. Another firework opened a mimosa parasol, and silver stars rained harmlessly down.

When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night….

A kind of soft roaring began in the crowd, peaked with isolated shrieks and cries.

I saw a movie once, not a visual, but one of the old celluloid kind. There was a scene where all these people stood on a mountain staring up and watching a glinting chandelier of an extraterrestrial ship sinking down to them from heaven. UFO’s went out of favor about the time the Asteroid spoiled the idea of outer space, and everything else. This was like that film. Like people standing, waiting for a UFO. Or—waiting for the gods of the old mythologies to descend from the upper air.