Tanith Lee: The Silver Metal Lover

Anyway, I raced off the terrace, and to Clovis.

Clovis’s apartment overlooks a stretch of the New River, which is clean and sparkling. People who live along the banks can open their windows on it, unlike the people who live along the banks of the polluted Old River, who have to use the filtered air-conditioning even in winter. Every apartment there has a warning notice cut into the window frame, which says: The Surgeon General has established that to open this window for more than ten minutes every day can seriously damage your health. Clovis has friends on the Old River who leave their windows open all the time. “Will you look at the muck on the buildings,” they say. “Why don’t the Godawful Surgeon General and the Goddamn City Marshal clean up the air and the traffic fumes before going dippy over the Godball river?” Clovis also asserts that he never opens his own windows as the view of the New River is too hygienic and bores him. But so far he hasn’t moved.

When I arrived on the fifteenth gallery and spoke to Clovis’s door, it wouldn’t let me in for a long time. When it did, I found Clovis was in the process of trying to get rid of a live-in lover by holding a seance.

Clovis doesn’t like relationships, except sometimes with women, and they are non-sexual. He once shared his apartment with Chloe for ten months, but his boyfriends come and go like days of the week. Actually, the term Mirror-Biased really applies to Clovis. He doesn’t just sleep with his own sex, his lovers always look like him. This one was no exception. Tall and slim, with dark curly hair, the young man lay on the couch among the jet black cushions, eyeing me solemnly.

“This is Austin,” said Clovis.

“Hallo,” said Austin.

I remembered the robot saying “Hallo” to me in his smiling, musical voice. I wished I hadn’t come here.

“And this is Jane,” said Clovis to Austin. “Jane is really a boy in drag. Awfully effective, isn’t it?”

Austin blinked. He looked rather slow-witted, and I felt sorry for him, trying to cope with Clovis.

Clovis finished arranging the plastic cards with letters, basic punctuation and numbers one to ten around the seance table.

“Get up and come and sit down, Austin. And Jane, since you’re there, come here.”

This playful phraseology showed Clovis was in a deadly mood. He seated himself cross-legged on the rug before the table.

“Oh, Clo,” said Austin in a whine, “what ever do you think you can pick up in a modern building like this?”

“You’d be surprised what I’ve picked up here,” said Clovis.

Austin didn’t get this. But he slunk over to the table.

“But the apartment is so new ,” whined Austin.

“Siddown,” barked Clovis.

“Oh all right. If you’re going to go all brutal. I’ll sit down. But it’s infantile.”

He folded himself on the rug like a rope. I went over and sat on the other side. A cut-glass goblet, that had been chipped a year ago when one of Clovis’s lovers had thrown it at him, rested in the table’s center. We each put a finger on it.

“This is so childish,” said Austin. “If it does move, it’s just pressure. Your hand trembling.”

“My hand doesn’t tremble,” said Clovis.

“Oh, I know , dear,” said Austin.

I felt very alone, and I began to cry again, but neither of them noticed me. By lowering my head, I could let the tears just fall straight out of my eyes onto my lap, where they made a strange abstract pattern of dark polka dots. It became quite interesting, wondering where the next tear would land.

“Oh, dear,” said Austin. “This is dull.”

“I do it all the time,” said Clovis.

“How dull of you.”

“I am dull.”

“I just hate dull men.”

The glass began quite suddenly to move. It glided across the table and back again, and started a liquid circling motion around the fringe of letters and numbers.

“Ooh,” said Austin. “ You’re doing it.”

Clovis took his finger off the glass. The glass, with Austin and me still adhering, went on.

“ She’s doing it,” sneered Austin. “I might have known.”

“Take your finger off the glass, Jane,” said Clovis.

I did. The glass went on twirling with Austin still attached.

“Ah!” screamed Austin. He let go as if it had bitten him. Undeterred, the glass swirled about the table.

“Oh God,” said Austin.

“I don’t think it’s actually God. You could ask.”

“ I’m not speaking to it.”

“Everyone,” said Clovis, as if addressing a crowd of thirty people, “put your fingers back on. First Jane, then Austin. Then I will.”

I did as Clovis said, and Austin anxiously followed suit, yelping as he touched the glass. Clovis put his finger on the glass and Austin said, “Has someone died in this room?”

“Not yet,” said Clovis.

“Then how can it get anything?”

“People have died everywhere. And don’t forget, twenty years before this block went up, there was a condominium on the site. It fell down with a massive loss of life. And we are sitting, as it were, on the rubble and the bones.”

“You do have a horrible turn of phrase. Why did it fall down anyway?”

“Did you not,” said Clovis patiently, “ever hear of the earthquakes, tsunamis and geological collapses that occurred when we captured the Haemeroid?” (The Haemeroid is Clovis’s name for the Asteroid.) “When a third of Eastern Europe sank and North America gained seventy-two Pacific islands it hadn’t had before. Little, easily overlooked things like that.”

“Oh,” said Austin. “Is this a history lesson?”

The glass jumped up from the table and came down again with a noisy crack.

I thought of all the people dying in the earthquakes, and swept away, shrieking, in the seas, and tried not to sob aloud. I had seen lots of ruins, lots of swamps, but I had been too young and didn’t remember them. I saw Chez Stratos falling out of the sky. I saw the city tilt into the purple river and the clean river, and Silver lying trapped under the water, not dead because water couldn’t kill him, but rusting away, and my tears joined together in the lap of my dress, making the map of a weird new continent.

“What do we do now?” said Austin, as the glass made bullfrog leaps all over the table.

“Ask it something.”

“Um. Is there anyone there?”

“Obviously there isn’t,” said Clovis.

“Oh. Er, well. Who are you?”

The glass rushed to the letter N, and then to the letter O.

“In other words,” said Clovis sternly, “mind your own damn business. Do you have,” Clovis demanded of the energetic glass, “a message for someone here?”

The glass flew to the letter A, letter U, letter S, letter T—

“Ooh!”

“Sit down, Austin.”

“But it’s—”

“Yes, Austin. Austin would like to know what the message is.”

“No,” cried Austin, alarmed. “I don’t want to know.”

“Too late,” said Clovis with great satisfaction.

Swiftly the glass spelled out, Clovis reading off the letters and then the words: There is a negative influence about you. You must take a risk. Excitement is waiting for you, but not here. Be warned .

“Well, thanks ,” said Clovis.

The glass shuddered to a halt.

“You’ve frightened it off,” complained Austin.

“Well, you saw what it said. I’m supposed to be a negative influence. Bloody thing. Comes into my home and insults me. Where are you going?”

Austin had risen and sauntered to the apartment door.

“I need some cigarines,” said Austin.

“I thought you gave them up.”