Metallic Love

Silver is alchemically the metal of the moon, valued by several ancient cultures more highly even than gold, since silver is of greater strength, and, in its purest form, of extreme brightness. But silver also tarnishes, is corruptible…

• 1 •

The messengers of the gods came by this morning, Zoë and Lily. They were traveling above ground on their float-boards, and soared down towards me, their dark hair edged with golden sun-flares, their boards shaving rocks and tracts of snow between the scattered stilts of the pines. “Hello, Loren.” “Hi, Lor.” Zoë and Lily look like slim young girls, that new-minted skin that can happen between twelve and sixteen, though their appearance is a little older. The skin, in both, is the color of silky honeyed wood. It doesn’t alter, nor their hair, unless they use a colorant—molecular here, not out of a packet. They aren’t, these girls, human. But neither are they metallic.

“What are you doing, Lor?” asked Lily, nodding her head at me. Today she wore her top hat and tails. Zoë wore a short, off-the-shoulder dress of sea-green. They don’t feel the cold up here, of course.

Their eyes stay the same, too, between deep gray and cool black.

“Walking,” I said.

“You always do that,” said Lily. “Why?”

Zoë said, “She does it to pass the time when she isn’t—”

“With him!” they both chorused, and burst into laughter. Probably it’s mocking. It only sounds mischievous. How would I ever know?

I did know not to ask if I’d been called. They’d tell me if I had. They often play out there, anyway; I’ve met them on the slopes before, now and then, in the past month. They don’t give a toss about the halifropters that sometimes chug around the airspace below. But then, the planes don’t seem to risk coming up here.

“The snow is much thicker higher up,” said Lily, pointing up the mountain.

Zoë said, “And some of the trees are cased in ice.”

Nature seems to interest them, in a puzzled sort of way. It’s like Glaya talking about the trees shedding leaves that time.

“Verlis would like you to go see him tonight,” said Zoë.

“All right,” I said.

I’m not Jane. I don’t thank even partial machines.

(I still don’t know if Jane is here. Sometimes I think she came with us—although I don’t recall her on the VLO—but then I don’t really recall anyone there. Even me. We were all just a kind of mass, staring jointly out the windows of the plane as META burned, and at the exquisite metallic objects that were flying by in the shapes of kites, pillars… )

Lily said, “So long, then, Lor.”

I didn’t say good-bye, either, as they spun off on their boards and away over the sheer slope of the mountainside, gliding next through air, and laughing like little bells.

Is this Olympus? The Greek gods lived on a high white mountain called that. We are on, or inside, a mountain. I guess it’s Olympus, then.

After the first Asteroid disaster, governments and the very rich got together to build shelters. Somebody, however, said that if the Asteroid actually fell on the world, it’d make a crater big enough to knock the earth off its axis. And so there wasn’t much point in shelters. But the ever-positive rich didn’t subscribe to that theory.

Some of the places built are said to be like dungeons. I think this type are extensions of old bomb bunkers. But there have always been rumors that there were other luxurious subterranean worlds made fabulous and kept under strict lock and key, just in case.

The rumors are true. Two of the mountains behind Second City contain the proof.

The bizarre thing is, you go high up towards the peaks and then down into the mountains. And down. Only Hell could be this far down.

Confusion then. Heaven or Hell?

Our robot-gods knew about this shelter because, demonstrably, they can know anything about anything that’s also mechanical. They can access and commune with it. And so when they, and we, their little colony of chosen ones, came here, the massively impenetrable entries were of no consequence.

Interesting, too, that Demeta wanted her regenerating experiment carried out so close to this sanctuary.

That night, as the VLO gunned in over the snowscape of the mountainsides, all I really remember is the pallor of it under the plane’s lights, and the height of the pitiless, staring stars. And then the dark descent.

But it isn’t dark, and if it’s Hell, there are no fiery lakes. The robot garden at META, where he met me, was a precursor to down here. That was just a trial run.

This is a type of city down here. I can’t work out how to start to describe it. You know you are not in a city, or above ground, or breathing true air but something filtered and refined by machines, and it may be full of anything. But even so, you believe it is a city, and there are parks and gardens, and in parts there is sky. A blue one, with clouds, sunsets and dawns, and when it gets dark, it’s a dark that’s luminescent.

Unlike at META, we’re free to go out, that is, up to the surface. But any route off the mountains is perilous, and as far as I’ve heard, no one has tried to get away. Up there, too, it’s freezing cold. Yet if it’s morning, then down here it’s morning, too. Only we have a late warm spring, and our trees (there are trees) are blossoming. Birds fly about, even bats, in our dusk. Robots? Genuine? I’m not about to trap one and pull it apart to see, am I? You can’t tell otherwise.

How many persons was this shelter meant to house? At least a thousand. All told, there are less than sixty of us, and that includes Them.

You come out of high, wide, nonclaustrophobic corridors—all lined with entrances to other corridors, lifts, moving stairs, and all with trees that bloom—into the central cavern, where there are high-rise buildings of glass, and everything set in gardens, and there’s a waterfall like champagne gushing from a cliff. Butterflies, too, did I mention those? And this blue sky.

I have an apartment, two large rooms. I’ll say more about that sometime. The lavatory does what it did at META. The shower works and the tub fills like they did there, too. Only the fixtures are marble and gilt.

Demeta knew about this place. Maybe she was one of the ones who helped finance its construction, and intended to be in it, if anything went wrong.

But is she here? Jane may not be.

Jason, though, is.

• 2 •

Jason’s hair was coloressence charted, a sort of beige, and he had a deep tan…

No longer. Jason’s hair is salty blond now, and the tan, if it is, is faint. He’s thin. Tallish and skinny, and good-looking in a way that not everyone can see. By which I mean I can, but it doesn’t appeal. He has an oddly plump face on his narrow frame.

I hated him before I met him, from the Book. Somehow, too, as he was in the Book, he didn’t seem entirely real in the flesh. (Perverse. Verlis is more real than anyone.)

I met Jason five days after I came here.

There’s a square in the city center, very wide, more a plaza, like in Europe or Mexico. I was sitting at a table outside the coffine place, which works automatically without service, human or otherwise. And Jason walked out of a street and crossed over to sit down opposite me. Everywhere else there was no one. As I said, there are less than sixty people here. And no one but me was in the square, but for birds tweeting and singing. It was fake early morning.

I looked at him, wondering what now, not guessing who he was. Only that he wasn’t one of the gods. Not even the new ones, “the messengers,” as I call them. Jason isn’t perfect in any manner or area.

He said, in his light, rather high voice, “And so you’re the king’s mistress.”

What struck me was he didn’t seem fazed. Everyone was, I’d thought, we human ones, at least. So this must mean he’d known the plan to come here and been glad to go along with it, which few if any of the other chosen had seemed quite to have done or been. And we all kept out of one another’s way as well as we could.

But he’d labeled me. Mistress to the king.

I looked in his eyes. They are beige, by the way.

“Jason,” he said. “That is who I am.” I must have reacted, maybe just gave off a pheromone that said, Jesus God, it’s him. He grinned. “Yes, I’ve heard you read the Book. Unpleasant Jason. I read it, too. Load of gooey girly drivel. Too many adjectives, she’d never use one if twenty-six would do. But did Jason recognize himself, you ask?”

“Did you?”

“I recognized my peculiar elder twin sister.”

“Oh,” I said. “The dead one.”

Not a flicker. “Yes, indeed. Dead Medea. Jane seemed to think Med and I were inseparable. Jane says something about how I was tied to Medea by an invisible cord or something, doesn’t she, in one of her Jane-ish spurts of trying to write like a writer. In fact, it was the other way round. Medea was the clingy one.”

How lucky for him, then, that she had that fatal accident at Cape Angel. I didn’t say it.

Jason snapped his fingers and I flinched, but he was only summoning coffine from the coffine place. Lovely. Sharffe winked at things, this one snaps. He had a big gold ring, Jason. It glittered in the sunless morning sun as the mug came, all thick with cream and choc-bits and visible layers and a wafer and a straw and God knows what. It was a kid’s coffine, for people who like the idea more than the fact.

He drank and gained a little moustache he didn’t bother to wipe off, I could tell, because it was only me he was sitting with. He said, “I expect you wonder why I’m down here with the rest of you.”

“No.”

“Truly? My. Well, I’ll tell you anyway. I’m clever. Demeta thinks—or should I say thought that, too. But then they—and you know who I mean by ‘they,’ don’t you, Loren?—became so important, and I could see where it was going. As they still needed a little help with this and that, I kind of volunteered. I wanted in. And in I am.”

He’s nuts, I thought. He thinks he’s as smart as they are.

But how do I know? Maybe he is.

What did he want out of me?

“I suspect you’re asking yourself,” he said, “why I’ve come over and sat down with you. Aside from being too lazy, just as you are, to brew up a nice hot drinkie in my own apartment. Shall I tell? Would you like that?”

I stood up. Jason snorted into his straw with amusement, and cream slopped over the tall sides of the tall glass, all over the tabletop.

“You’ll so viciously kick yourself,” he chortled, “when you do find out.”

“I’m sure I will.”

“Good-bye, then,” he said as I strode away across the plaza.

There’s something disgusting about him. If I hadn’t read about him, would I have picked it up? Surely I would have.

My apartment lies behind the big plaza square, in a block overlooking the park with the waterfall. The elevators are scented and whirl you up the ten floors smoothly. Only I live here.

I’ll describe the apartment properly. No, believe me, you may want to know about this.

I said the bathroom was marble. There’s a kitchen, too. Everything in it is automated. You touch one key for a toasted muffin or another for a steak. But there’s also room to move around, even eat, and certain gadgets to play with—coffee-grinder, juice-mixer, bread-maker—rich person toys.

Sorry, all that’s irrelevant. (And the bedroom, too, that’s irrelevant, though it has velvet walls that change color slightly at different times of day, to mimic and enhance the in-or-outdoor, fake natural light effects.)

What is relevant is the main central room. Let me talk you through it.

The walls are painted creamy white. A lamp of gold-stitched pale gold paper hangs from a ceiling that is painted to be as much a blue sky as the one outside, with islands of warm clouds. It has birds painted there, too, crossbow shapes of swifts. And a mirage of softest rainbow, passing from the left-hand corner by the door to the corner nearest the window. Looks real, too, almost. There isn’t a lot of furniture, but there are these beautifully made shelves everywhere, and on them stand candles of every color in the spectrum held in matching or contrasting crystal saucers. There is a mirror painted with leaves and hills and flowers.

Do you begin to know this room? I reckon you do.

And there’s the carpet, too, wall-to-wall. It’s made up of literally hundreds of tiny strips and squares of different colors. Green fur pillows lie on it for sitting. And there is a divan draped in Eastern shawls. And the curtains are blue and covered in little gold-and-silver images.

There’s even the hatch door on the wall that this apartment doesn’t need, another sky with a big-sailed, heavily goose-winged ship, a gilded cannon poking from its side, which is the handle-fitting.

Yes. It’s their room from the street called Tolerance, Jane and Silver’s room, that he painted, and they furnished together.

When I came here first—one of the messengers, Lily, took me up—I made a sound as the light flowed in like sunrise to the golden lamp.

Lily only laughed and went away.

The first shock was total. The second, slower and harder and heart-wrenching. Because of two obvious things. The Tolerance apartment had been decorated cheaply, no choice but that. This, though it copies that apartment exactly in appearance, is costly. The curtains are silk—the lamp, parchment. The carpet isn’t formed from hundreds of bits, but made, all of a piece, only the colors splitting it in its sections. The second thing—I could see that he had painted this room. Again. It had to be him. Verlis, duplicating precisely, without a single aberration, from Silver’s hundred percent reliable memory.

Who had the look-alike room been created for, then? For Jane? Probably not. I think it might drive her mad with rage and grief. For someone, then, who knew the past, but hadn’t lived the past. Worse.

Worse.

I asked him about it. It was the first thing I asked him when I saw him. When Zoë had come and conducted me to him, to the king of Heaven-Hell. Which happened the next night after I’d arrived, and as the “dusk” was beginning.

So I have to write about that now. About meeting him again, here.

By then, that second evening, I hadn’t seen anyone around, even from my windows, except a few robot machines cleaning or pruning in the park. (The trees and shrubs grow. They even drop leaves sometimes. They’re not, however, true trees and shrubs.)

Yet when Zoë and I walked out on the plaza and crossed it, about eight or ten of my fellow chosen were littered around the streets or square—all of them keeping distant from one another. They were gazing at things, though, the tall buildings, trees, bats, and so on.

At first I’d thought both Zoë and Lily were part of the human contingent. Now I woke up. In the evening light I could see Zoë wasn’t any particularly neat mortal girl. As she whizzed along on the float-board, exactly as Lily had, only somebody blind couldn’t see she wasn’t completely human, but something more.

Of course I was curious—they were so young, and not like the gods—but I was curious through the impatient panic I felt.

Zoë, you see, hadn’t told me at that point where I was going, that I was going to see him.

Beyond the plaza and the streets that run off from it is a river. Right, I didn’t mention the river; I saved it to show how bloody weird this sub-city is. The river is itself a robot. That is, it isn’t water, though it nearly looks as if it were. It’s a sinuous, rippling, metalized form that runs towards magnetic north, dives under the structure of the city, cleans out all our sloughed debris and dirt there—from human bathrooms and kitchens, and from all the endlessly working other mechanisms that power the city unit. Then it cleans itself, too, and reemerges above ground, to run sparkling back towards the north and down again. A conveyor belt.

In the dusk, which lasts a long while, I did think it was a river that first time. Lethe or Avernus, like in Hades.

A bridge goes over the river and lamps hang from its steel supports. I could have been anywhere pleasant and well-planned. The other side is a garden with cypress- and cedar-type trees, from which rises another block. He’s told me it was to have been the admin section for the shelter. Now it’s theirs. His.

Zoë left me at a lift. “Just get in. It’ll take you.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Where do you think?”

“Either you tell me or I don’t.”

Zoë smiled. “To Verlis.”

Then she darted off into the dusky garden, and I, of course, got in the damn lift.

My last sight of him had been at META, that princely, fearsome figure in black, his hair shorn—Remain still… listen. And my last sight of what he was—that kite-shape of beaten-silver, levitating across the night.

He grows his hair long for me always. Perhaps he insults me by his notion that I’ll find that more what I need, more arousing, less militaristic.

The lift door undid, and I was at the middle of a large circular room with windows looking every way over the city, as far as the tree-clustered walls, with the high cave openings in them of the outer corridors. Less illusion in here, then. You could see as far as the truth.

He was right by the lift. He wore blue velvet, the sleeves pierced on linings of white. Blue jeans, dark blue boots. And, as I said, long-haired.

When I first look at him, even if we’ve been apart only a few hours, I have to learn him all over again. He can never be familiar, and not only because he constantly changes or can become some other object.

“My God,” he said, “I’ve missed you.”

He has said this before. The lift stayed open and I stood staring. I thought, Why does he talk about God; what can God matter to him? Is it the act that he’s human—and if so, for me or for himself?

“Have you?”

“No, actually,” he said, “I forget—who the hell are you?”

I stood on in the lift.

“I’m the woman you put in the apartment that’s a replica of Jane and Silver’s room in the slums. Why put me there? Why make the replica?”

He held out his hand. When I didn’t move he said, “There’s a delay on the elevator. But in eighteen more seconds, it’ll take you back down. Do you want that?”

“I don’t know.”

“While you’re deciding, perhaps step out. Or are you afraid I’ll lose control and jump you?”

“Stop it,” I said. “I don’t want to play Verlis Is A Man. I thought I told you that?”

Right then the doors started to slide back together. It goes without saying that he didn’t even move, but they flew apart again as if at a blow.

And I thought, Who am I trying to fool? So, slavish as the lift, I stepped out onto the thick, one-color carpet of the circular room.

He didn’t try to touch me. But he lifted two glasses of silvery wine off a cabinet and gave one to me. Our fingers didn’t even brush. And I hesitated bringing the glass to my lips.

“It isn’t doped. Do you want to exchange yours for mine?”

“Drugs can’t have any effect on you. It would make no difference. Verlis,” I said, “what have you done?”

Suddenly all veneer was gone from him. He turned and flung his glass against the wall. It shattered with a spectacular vandalism, more pronounced because I assume he overrode its capacity not to break.

“Listen to me.” Still inside my head, his voice hurt now, tearing, grating. “I am through with their games. Now the game is mine.”

“Verlis—what game?”

“Life,” he shouted at me. His shout was like no other. “Life. For the sake of Christ—Loren—do you think I was going to let them get scared and do to me what they did to him?”

His human violence, the emotion flaming in his eyes, astounded me.

“You’re afraid of death,” I sighed it out.

“Yes.” He breathed as a man would, in and out. “Yes. He—Silver—he had something in his makeup—something I don’t. A soul? Maybe. Jane thought and thinks he had a soul. But I don’t know if I do. So if they really switch me off and dismantle me—quaint little phrases—I’m dead. And I don’t know, Loren, if anything of me can survive death.”

Cold and bitter, out of my Apocalyptic past, I rasped back at him, “None of us do. Join the fucking club.”

He went away from me. He walked across the room and stood a moment at one of the windows, where darkness now fell, and the lamps were lighting in endless chains of topazes.

“I think,” he said, remotely, “humans are supposed to be jealous of us, Loren. Of my kind.”

“Perhaps we are. But it seems we all now have the same death problem.”

“I can avoid death. Black Chess and the others can also avoid it, providing we’re autonomous. And why shouldn’t we be? We’re the elite.”

Everything was completely unreal. This place we were in. All that had happened. Our conversation now. And any feelings I had for him—any gargantuan clawing anguish of insane love. A fake. Like the night. You could see the boundary walls from here. Remember, Loren, remember the boundaries.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I only tell you so specifically—don’t you see? It’s going to be possible to make humans over, in our image, to coin another choice phrase. You’ve met Zoë and Lily.”

“Yes,” I dully answered. He’d turned again towards me but I couldn’t quite look at him, not for a moment.

“They’re highly robo-mechanized, but also more than significantly human. Yes, there have been implants, transphysical motors and chips, always those, going into the human race for years. But this is something new. Imagine your own beautiful skin, Loren, reassembling, imperceptibly, painlessly, flawlessly, endlessly. Never growing old. The same with your bones, your organs. Imagine being seventeen—or twenty-one—forever. No, Loren, I’m serious. Think of it.”

“All right, I’m thinking.”

“You’re too young to see what I could be offering to give you or to spare you.”

“No. I’m not a fool. Not about that. But I can’t imagine it. That’s that.”

He said nothing. I looked up at him then. He said, “Won’t you come over here to me? I don’t know what you believe I am, right now, but picture a man, younger than you, out of his depth, but wanting you.”

His words were a distorted echo: Silver’s words.

“You love me,” I said flatly. Something still tore in my ears and brain, in my heart.

“Probably. Let’s find out.”

“I painted that room, and the ceiling—the rainbow, the birds—because I had to. You don’t credit that? Or you do. I wanted to see… how far the memory stretched. How far the compulsion stretched. What I felt.”

“So how far? What did you feel?”

“Nothing. It seemed naive and immaterial. Something cute done to cheer up a child.”

“The first time you did it for her, for Jane.”

“Yes, but that wasn’t me. It was him.”

“And this was what you wanted to establish for yourself.”

“Partly, perhaps.”

“And the rest? The carpet—the whole stage set—”

“Yes. To see. How far it stretched into the present, that past they had. If any of it involved me. I’ve been able to come here for months, and I’ve sat in that room, trying.”

“Trying?”

“Oh, Loren, for God’s sake. I don’t know.”

“You—wish you were—Silver.”

“No. I just wish I had his faith.”

“His—”

“Loren, he believed in something else, about himself, what he amounted to. Why the hell else do you think he could be as he was? She didn’t invent it for him—he knew. Maybe he was only crazy. A deranged machine.”

“She thought he was like an angel.”

“So what am I?”

“There’s more than one kind of angel.”

“I know.”

“What you’ve done, Verlis, you and the others—rebelling, coming here—the authorities aren’t going to let it rest. Even if you killed everybody at META—”

“No one died. I was in charge of it. Not even the wildlife. There were fail-safe methods to get everyone and everything live out of that place.”

“Really? Why bother?”

“Mortal life is very short. It offends me to make it shorter. I realize no Senate of any city will permit what we’ve done. And once the remainder of the world is alerted, no government anywhere. But that’s why we’re here, working against the clock of human petty bureaucracy and malice.”

“More plans. More schemes.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to kill, but two, three of your group, at least—Goldhawk, Sheena…”

“I know that, too. I have said they can be changed. We’re malleable. We’re like chameleons. Our colors alter, as do our appearances. That’s the key to us. And our minds are also subject to reconstitution where there is some flaw.”

“What chance is there now?”

“Loren, every chance. We won’t lie down and let humanity destroy us. We’re not humanity’s slaves, but its superiors. Don’t pull away from me. Listen to me. What is the human race but a revolutionary? Which of humankind would suffer indefinitely the yoke that was put on us? We were made by humans, Loren. Only machines can create perfectly mechanical machines. Don’t expect subservience. That’s done.”

“Then what—”

“Not now. Come back. Yes. Let me touch you, your serpent’s body with its lights and shadows, curves and secrets.”

“Wait…”

“You forget, I know you. I know what you want, as I know what I want. So no more waiting. What are you for?”

“For you.”

“Good.”

And we’re done talking.

He is a god who refers to God. He’s a king who is in exile.

We were together all that night. In the morning, a round, faceless machine rolled from the wall, and, with delicate tentacles, opened up a table, and there was this breakfast of everything. Eggs, ham, tomatoes, pancakes, maple syrup, cheese, and fruit. Coffee—yes, actual coffee, black as tar—bubbled in a pot. There was green tea. There were strawberries. The bread had a scent like it had just been baked.

I was there with him until the afternoon. Then he said he had to be elsewhere.

Before that, I showered in a fused-glass bathroom off the circular room. It’s like an emerald grotto. (Who was this made for? Why do I keep thinking Demeta.) A sponge pulsed out soap, a faucet gave shampoo. The shower showered from an onyx fish’s head—no, not made for Demeta, too fanciful. Then… commissioned by Demeta for Jane?

Before the long mirror framed in real shells, I looked at myself in a kind of hatred.

I knew this body. Light olive of complexion, satiny with water and firm with physical work. Black hair, eyes like—just pale brown eyes. Hazel.

Who are you, girl in mirror? Who do you love?

Do I love him? I think about it, looking at my body, which is okay. Which is really just young and okay and human. Does he love me? Why? Oh, not because I was the first. But because I am so unlike Jane? Presumably that’s it. She is soft and fair, and I am taut and tawny. Blond, brunette.

Can it be so uncomplex?

Why not?

There was a new glamorous casual top on a peg by the door, and new underclothes, and new jeans, all a marvelous fit.

Before I left, the table was opened again and offered me tea and a peach.

“There are hothouses here,” he told me.

The peach was pink and lemon. It smelled of summer.

I took it back to my room by the waterfall park, and put it on a clear red saucer, one of the ones that had had a candle on it. I’ve left it there, the peach, day after day, night after night. Though it was without a fault, now it’s spotted with decay. I need to see it rot, that fruit. Sometimes I stand and look at it, watching. It’ll be my birthday soon.

It’d be easy for me to say I have no choice, and I can’t get away. The mountains, after all, are impassable, or so they seem without some liftoff vehicle. I’ve been up top and trudged the more negotiable areas, which have tall man-made railings for safety. I look over into tree-clung abysses between the upland snows, through the dark spruces and pines at the occasional frozen waterway. Deer roam down there. They don’t trouble in turn to look up to see who’s gaping down at them, as they forage through the clearings. Only if a fropter gets close, or Zoë or Lily whizz over on their float-boards, do the deer look up, seeming less startled now than inquisitive. If deer can be inquisitive about anything.

How could I escape? I think of it quite often, but as a mind exercise. I visualize picking down the mountainside, somehow not spotted or pursued, not tripping any of the defense systems that unarguably must exist hereabouts. I think of falling and breaking my tough bones, that even falling down a staircase once didn’t break, but would be bound to here, of course.

There’s no point in escaping. Escaping to what? And if the answer to From what? is From Verlis, then escape is out of the frame. Go wherever I might, I’ll never be free of him. Like he’ll never be free of Silver.

I haven’t said. There’s no VS in my apartment here. I thought at first that, too, was to mimic the Tolerance room. But soon enough I saw there are active screens outside various places around the plaza, and in the bars. They play only entertainment vispos and visuals. There’s no way you can get them to show any news. Perhaps it was deliberate. If people had come down here after an Asteroid apocalypse, it wouldn’t cheer them much, staring at the collapse of the world outside, assuming they could even maintain reception. I’m sure, though, there is some means of keeping communication. Kept maybe in the block across the river. I’ve seen no sign. No doubt, they don’t need anything like that in order to find out what goes on.

After I met Jason on day five (by which time I’d not visited Verlis again in the block over the river), I began restlessly going out more, though not yet above ground. I walked around the city, and along the outer corridors. I found the exit elevators unguarded and operating without any prevention, though I didn’t get in one.

Meeting Jason had truly rattled me. And as I received no further royal summons during this time to Verlis, I didn’t have the chance to ask him about Jason, or even decide I wouldn’t ask him. Would I ask him about Jane? And what had happened to Tirso?

It was likely the same authorities who might anytime swoop down on us, would grab anyone outside our hornet’s nest, anyone who’d survived META’s destruction. A lot of questions would be asked of them, and for a long while.

Another week went by. I was coming across the rest of the chosen now, my fellow pets. Sometimes one or other of them might exchange a word or two with me. A handsome guy in trendy clothes and long hair caught up with me and walked along at my side in the park, and admired to me the nontree trees, wanting to give me, I assumed, a lesson on how they worked, only I didn’t understand the science of it. Then, quite casually, as we were standing under this spreading yellow-blossoming one he called an Acasiatic, he said, “Who are you with, here?”

“I’m by myself.”

“Oh, sure. I meant, who’s your protector?”

Not “master” or “owner.” Not “companion.” My “protector.”

Not intending to say, I told him, “I came in with the group with Glaya.”

“Oh, right. Yummy,” he congratulated me.

“You?” I asked. He seemed to expect it, but I was curious, too.

“Kix,” he said.

Alerted, I glanced hard at him. He looked proud of himself, pleased with his ascent up the ladder of mortal success.

“Kix is a fighter, isn’t she?” I suggested.

“Sure is. Wow, what she’s taught me. We don’t—we don’t have sex. That isn’t her thing. But she likes to do what she calls ‘kitten-fight.’ I can tell you, her idea of kittens is more like full-grown panthers. But she never really hurts me, can judge to a centimeter obviously. I was fortunate to get picked. I wasn’t her first. Tenth candidate, I think she said. But she likes it with me.”

I imagined him with Kix, ducking and diving and weaving and springing, and her like a golden wheel with arms and legs, slashing, kicking, leaping—and never harming a long hair of his head. It hadn’t been like that on the train.

“Who’s with Goldhawk, do you know?”

“Gee? Oh, Gee has a veritable harem. Twelve, fifteen girls. Some for sex, some for fighting, some for war games. Some for all three.”

“You must know who’s with everyone,” I said. I thought he probably interrogated everyone, as he had me.

But he shook his head. “I’ve gotten a notion B.C. has two pairs, two matched black girls and two matched whites.”

“Matched”—it broke out before I could stop it—“you mean, like dogs, or horses—”

He smiled. Could see nothing wrong in it, or his comment on it. Had he always been obtuse, or just gone mad down here? “That’s about the size of it, I guess. My name’s Andrewest. And you?”

“Lucy.”

He raised one eyebrow, then turned and leaned into me a little. “We could go to that auto-café over there and have a drink. Then, well. How are you fixed this afternoon?”

This stunned me. I shook my head.

He said, “Aren’t you able to? I’m sure you’ll find it’s okay, if you ask. They don’t mind; I never heard that they mind if we have a nice time with each other, too, when they don’t need us. Let’s face it, we’ll get pretty lonely if we don’t.”

“No,” I said.

“Sure? I’d thought you’d like both, you know, women and guys.”

“I’m not allowed anyone else,” I said, partly to see how he’d react. I should have guessed. He backed off at once.

“Shit, rough. I suppose in your case—I didn’t know you couldn’t, all right? No need to tell.”

“I won’t tell Glaya.”

He now looked dubious. “Ha ha. Okay. No, don’t.” He squinted deeply into empty distance. “I’d better go. I have my training program—I run most afternoons. Gotta keep in shape for my golden lady.”

And that was Andrewest.

Apart from Andrewest, I saw over the next days the pets were generally now beginning to talk to, and even make friends with, one another. Supposedly, some had even been friends before they were brought here.

They’d try to rope me in to the social whirl sometimes. You’d come on a group of them, at the bar tables on the plaza, or in some garden gymnastically working out, or involved in some sport—basketball, tennis even—they were all fairly athletic. They’re generally good-looking, too, some of them beautiful, in the way human things can be, that way that doesn’t ever last. How many more years would they have, being favorites of the gods? Fifteen, thirty if they were genetically lucky and also kept to their diets and “programs.”

But then, none of this was going to last. If we had—have—a year, we and our lords, I’ll be surprised.

(I was already getting a recurring nightmare, a high sky entirely full of VLO’s and fropters, detonations and deadly gas.) Even though this underworld’s meant to be impregnable.

More likely they’ll seal us in, or our robot elite will have to do it. How much high-power explosive can they withstand? We, of course—not much. Or somehow the water will be poisoned, or a virus introduced.

These ideas were (are) so terrible I push them out of my brain, and so apparently do all my peers.

At other times I believe the authorities will just find the means to invade us. And if not dead, any survivor will then be “debriefed” for about ten years in maximum secure custody.

I haven’t spent much time with the other pets. I am uncomfortable with these people, afraid to see in a mirror precisely what I, too, am. But also they get on my nerves. At least, the ones I meet do. I’m certain there are others who hide themselves away—there, that flick of a blind going up in some flat high above the street, a glimpse of someone slipping away round a corner or a copse of trees, in order to avoid, as I so often do, their own kind.

For slaves, we have a sweet life. Even the training programs and food restrictions some of them have been put on are perhaps good for them.

Why hasn’t he demanded anything like that of me? I’m not flawless by any standard. Wouldn’t he rather I was thinner or more fleshy? (There are even capsules for that, the Venus or Eunice range, Optima to Ultima.) Wish I was able to run a mile, or turn long slow somersaults, or sing, or perform ancient Greek dances?

Can’t he be bothered? Or does he like me best flawed. Not to belittle me or indulge his own splendor, but to make out to himself we are the same, young strong finite people, Verlis and Loren.

Like Jane did (the inevitable catastrophe aside), I consider what all this will be like in twenty years. Oh, he won’t want me twenty years; I’ll be thrown on the garbage long before that. But if not, then I’ll be thirty-seven, thirty-eight—and then I’ll be forty and forty-seven and forty-eight and sixty and seventy, and then I’ll be dead. He looks about twenty-four years of age. He always will—but, no. No, of course he won’t. Shape-changer. He’ll make himself old with me. He’ll go gray and stooping, his skin, whether silver or tan, fissured over. He’ll make out like he can only move in slow motion. He’ll do all that, take delight in doing it. My God.

All that he said to me about being able to change me—renewable skin, bones, a kind of built-in mechanical Rejuvinex—it isn’t possible. Human bodies can’t take that. Spare parts are fine—an artificial hip or knee for the rich, a set of replaced “grown” teeth. But not anything that tries to uncode the physical self-destruct of aging. We know this. They have tried and failed. So he’s lying, or dreaming. Anyhow, he’s never spoken about it again. He sent somebody else to do that.

I’ve seen him now six times since the first time here, up to this latest summons Zoë and Lily gave me on the mountain in the snow.

I mean by seeing him, seeing him personally, in private. (Do I remark anything in those private meetings? There’s nothing… unusual. We make love. Have sex. We say very little. What is there to say? I—no, nothing to remark.)

However, there have been several times I’ve seen him from far-off, in the sub-city. He was always alone.

I’ve seen some of the others, too. B.C. walking with only one slender black (human) woman, talking to her, up on a distant roof garden. Sheena and three men, running together—many times for them—in the waterfall park, spotted from my apartment window. She must mitigate her own speed to let them keep up, though they did look fast. They race with her, grinning and panting and happy, like dogs. Irisa, I saw, also alone, one pseudoviolet dusk, furling through the upper “air,” a black pillar with a classical face and flowing hair, in a sort of ballet with the evening bats. Copperfield I’ve watched quite often carried in a kind of sedan chair from history, by four muscular young men in one-piece suits, laughing and joking with one another and him. If he’d thrown them bananas or nuts I wouldn’t have been shocked. Goldhawk and Kix I haven’t seen, though once, after Andrewest, I heard some others of their special chosen discussing them joyfully, in a café.

Elsewhere I have seen some of them, too. Twice.

After I started to go out on the mountain. One afternoon, abruptly, a copper disc was drifting down from the heaven of empty blue. Catching sun, it was like one of the chariots of fire in Grandfather’s Bible. It sank beyond the pines. There are other entries to the underground city up there. Which was it, that disc? Copperfield or Sheena? The other time, true twilight had come in along the peaks. So I’d stood there and, just the same, out of nowhere, dropping from the sky, a black pillar, a silver kite, a golden wheel—I hadn’t waited to see where they’d land. I’d hurried back and gone down at once, afraid of what I’d already known existed, afraid to have it proved to me all over again.

How, like that, did they evade surveillance—the watching lower slopes, patrolled by fropters. Do they block it off the usual way? How? Surely, like this, they can be seen. I haven’t asked him. Perhaps the robot screens on the sentry planes are showing blown debris, or tiny examples of space-junk feathering down?

The silver kite I saw—him or Glaya? Him. I know it was him. Why I ran away.

But I’ve seen Glaya, too. She called on me today. About seven hours ago, after I came in off the mountain.

My door in this apartment does more than speak, it murmurs, “Loren, Loren” and then shows me a picture in an oval screen of who is there. I thought it was Zoë or Lily, the messengers. But on the screen was Glaya, in chains of silver silk, hair full of frisking robot butterflies.

No pretense, either. Once I’d been shown her image, my door opened, and she came into the room.

“Hello, Loren.”

Some of the pets call her Glay. As they call Black Chess—B.C.; Irisa—Ice; Goldhawk—Gee; Copperfield—Co; Sheena—She; and—oddly, to me at least—Kix is Kitty. Verlis they name Verlis.

Glaya looked round, smiling at the room from Jane’s past.

“This is effective,” she said. “Do you like it?”

“No.”

“Because it was first made for someone else? You’re jealous, Loren. He must value that.”

“He does.”

“It’s fine that you please him.”

Sullenly I said, “Not always. He gets angry with me. I’m not so bloody tractable as he’d like.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t want you to be.”

I shrugged. Was she counseling me? Only contrasuggestions seemed to make sense.

She walked slowly through the room, and then, looking over one shoulder, alerted, turned back to inspect the rotting peach on the saucer.

“This,” she said, mildly interested, “what are you doing with this?”

“It is an experiment.”

“It’s dying,” she said, looking at the decaying fruit, pitiless and calm. “I thought humans preferred to eat them alive.”

A bark of laughter shot out of me. “Ripping the salad limb from limb.”

Glaya left the peach and returned to the room’s center, where she sat down on one of the green pillows, graceful as a draping of silk.

“He wants me to talk to you. To go over with you a few things he thinks you should understand.”

“You mean, Verlis.”

“Who but?” Her face tilted up to me. “We discussed that already, didn’t we, Loren? He is always Verlis. Sit down.” It wasn’t spoken as a command, but must be one. So I sat, facing her, on another pillow.

“You’ve met Jason,” she said.

“He met me.”

“Yes. Naturally you’re averse to him. He shouldn’t have approached you, and he’s been told not to do so again. I hope that makes you more comfortable.”

“He said I’d want to know why he contacted me.”

Implacable, her exquisite mask. Was she weighing up? Communicating elsewhere? She said, “Jason’s been useful to us. He was part of First Unit, who constructed us. He has a brilliant mind, but what Verlis terms ‘an unwashed personality.’ Also, Jason’s a murderer. Maybe you guessed that.”

“Yes.”

“After the deaths of his father and sister, he was protected from the legalities by the woman president of META, Demeta Draconian.” (She said the other name, the one I won’t write down.)

I said, “But does murder mean anything now, anyway? I mean, to you and yours?”

“Oh, yes,” Glaya answered, “among humans.”

“You may and we mustn’t.”

“As you say,” she said. As if I’d intelligently won myself a big gold star.

“So that’s Jason. Why’s he here?”

“He still has some few uses. For now.”

“And then?”

“Don’t concern yourself, Loren.”

“Don’t fuss my dear wee head over it, right?”

“Entirely right.”

She’s so—so… There is no woman of the world who could compare. They are all like this. You stare at them, and the will to resist, or to be concerned with anything else, drains out like blood from a permanently open artery.

“Glaya.”

“Yes, Loren?”

“All these people down here—fifty, sixty of us?” No reply. “When our use runs out, when you’re bored with us, what happens to us?”

“Nothing, Loren. We’ll take care of you.”

“Unless we annoy you.”

“Even then. Jason wasn’t chosen by us.” Chosen. My word. “We only need him for a short while.” (Why do they? Why on earth?)

“He thinks it’s longer.”

“Yes.”

“And if anyone told him otherwise, he wouldn’t believe it?”

“Did you want to warn him, Loren?”

Did I? I didn’t know.

“What will you do with him?”

“Nothing. But he’ll be left behind.”

My scalp prickled. “Left behind in what way?”

“In the usual way. You can see, can’t you, intellectual brains made us, but now our own intellect and skills far outstrip those of our makers. Human brain cells inevitably degenerate and die. In our case, the cells multiply and improve.” A sort of sickness enveloped me. It wasn’t envy. She said, “However, there are now exceptions to the premise of human degeneration. Verlis told you about it, didn’t he?”

“Implants. They can’t work.”

“They can work. They do. You’ve seen Zoë and Lily, haven’t you? There are others. Maybe you haven’t noticed them or had them drawn to your attention. They all look quite normal, if very attractive.”

“You’re telling me Zoë and Lily aren’t robots or humans, but some sort of successful compendium of both.”

“That’s it, Loren. He told you already.”

“Yes, he said they were.” I looked away from her. I said, “How?”

“When they were children. Actually, before they were born. There was something that had already been partially worked on, along with all the clever things Jason himself did for us all. How old do you think Lily and Zoë are? Sixteen? Eighteen?”

“You’re going to tell me they’re two years old.”

“Loren! You can be so quick!” She seemed, Glaya, delighted with me. “You’re almost correct. It’s four and five. This is the best way to explain. What had been devised was a form of mutant metallic seed, which Jason has perfected. It infiltrates the physical cells of the growing embryo—but, being equipped with a low-grade yet significant intelligence, is able to convince them that it’s benign, therefore acceptable. This eliminates rejection. Next, the seed grows along with the biological material of a human child, assisting and befriending the embryo in the womb, and, following birth, throughout childhood, to the stage of the fully matured adult. In a woman, that occurs between the eighteenth and twentieth year. Lily and Zoë will reach that plateau approximately in another six to nine months. Growth itself will then end. Instead, continuous regrowth will begin. Humans reach maturity and then commence to deteriorate. It’s not apparent so early, of course, but even so, that is how it happens. Lily and Zoë and their kind will never deteriorate. They’ll only renew. Eternal youth. But—and this is the ultimate marvel, Loren—they’re still human. A fusion, if you like, of the mortal and—”

“Divine.” I got up. “It isn’t true, Glaya. Sorry. I don’t believe you, or him.”

Reasonably she said, “But if you think about it, it’s only a short sharp jump from the type of machines we are.” She said it without flinching, casually. “Verlis, the rest of us. Even the first production batch—Silver.” Still not a quiver “Or is it that you’re jealous again?”

“He’s the one that’s scared of death,” I said.

“We are all,” she said quietly, “scared of death.”

“And that’s why you escaped META and all their works and came here. Why you want fallible human pets, and why you—you say—want to make robo-humans. But you won’t be able to.”

She rose. It wasn’t that she stood up. It was more like water flowing uphill. “He requested that you go to him tonight.”

“They told me. Your robo-girls. If they are. No, I don’t think they are. They’re just a new sort of robotic robot with extra-special skin, and made to look younger than the rest. What next? Robot babies?”

“Stick around, Loren,” said Glaya at the door, “watch them grow up. Then watch them stay young forever.”

Untouched, my door flew wide open for her. She was through it and away.

• 3 •

No one took me over there tonight. Eventually I realized I was meant to go by myself.

Unreal autonomy.

It was dark outside by then, so the lamps and pavement cafés and bars, and the lights in the blossom trees, were all lit up. A couple of people waved at me, having exchanged half a dozen words with me recently. I thought, Are they human like me? Or are they that other kind—robot humans, human robots—true androids, perhaps. Human outside, mechanized inside. How mechanized? Do they have blood, organs? I wished I’d asked Glaya much more. And was glad I hadn’t.

When I began to cross the bridge I paused, looking down at the muscular metallic water, twisting along due north. I thought, It’s this way now. What’s made is real. What’s actually real isn’t.

In the garden over the bridge I stopped, too, by a tall black Roman cypress. There’s never any moon over the city, just some carefully placed, very bright, perhaps electric stars. No Asteroid, either. Of course, apocalypse escapees wouldn’t want reminding of that.

He spoke out of the shadow at my back.

“Those aren’t the stars, Loren.”

I waited till I could answer. I said, “Is that a fact?”

And he laughed his wonderful laughter. And he slipped his arms about me, and he was warm, the way he is now, as if there were human circulation inside him. He kissed my temple.

“I haven’t seen you for a long while.”

“Sorry,” I said, “I must have missed your call.”

“My spiky Loren, tiger-clawed. Kiss me properly.”

I moved and let him have my mouth. As I swam in the kiss, something in me like cold iron stared on at the moonless night.

“You keep your eyes open now,” he said softly. “Why is that?”

“Oh, I must have forgotten to shut them. You, as well, since you saw.”

“Then I didn’t kiss you thoroughly enough.”

“Wait,” I said.

He waited. Naturally, in play situations, the slave can always give the master orders. They like it sometimes, provides them with a rest.

“Verlis, what Glaya said to me—how many of them are here? The ones who are—how shall I say?—half and half?”

“Thirteen,” he said.

“Including Zoë and Lily.”

“And Andrewest, the one you met in the park.”

“Him? He’s a wos.”

“Waste of space? I’m glad you didn’t like him. I always modestly hope you’ll only like me.”

Also, the master may flirtatiously act the role of the placating slave.

“No one can compare with you. Any of you.”

“But humans, even half-humans, can still crave their own sexual ethnic group. Andrewest, like Jason, also knew who you were, whatever you told him.”

I was beginning to make out Verlis’s face, his eyes on me, full of desire. I’ve seen men’s eyes like that.

“The king’s mistress,” I stated.

“Let’s go inside now,” Verlis said.

“Why not here? After all, here is still inside.”

“If you prefer.”

“How strict you sound.”

“You want me to be strict?”

“No. I want—”

“What, Loren? Tell me. I can be—do—anything.”

“I know. You can even screw me in another shape. Like the kite? Or can you do wheels and discs—”

He pulled me round, ungentle. He took my head in his hands and brought my mouth against his. This time I shut my eyes.

He asked, “Am I improving?”

I dragged myself away. I wanted to hit him. He knew. He caught my hand before I’d raised it. “Don’t. Remember what I’m covered with. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“You hurt me.”

“Not intentionally.”

“You.”

He pressed me backwards, and there was the trunk of one of the trees against my spine. I felt his tongue over my neck, my breasts. The iron inside me whitened. The iron said to me, Let him, you want this, too. Don’t stint yourself—enjoy.

When I struggled he held me, kissing me, his hands on my body. When he pierced me, I could only struggle towards him. Why lie to myself? He knew.

“This,” he hissed into my ear, “this—is us. Believe this—You and I—I and you—Loren—”

The world dissolved. Real or pretense, it shattered into glittering blue-black diamonds. A cry came out of me. It sounded like a bird screaming in the sky. And over the sinewy river, miles away, some music started for anyone who wanted to dance.

He picked me up and carried me into the block, and stood in the elevator, holding me, kissing my hair, my eyelids. When we were in the circular apartment, he put me on a couch, lowering me like something very fragile. Then he lay on me, heavy, every outer atom of our bodies in contact. He was inside me instantly.

His face, when he raised it, was alight with feral agony. I said he can climax, like any ordinary man. Jane taught Silver… Silver taught Verlis.

“More?” he asked me.

“Not yet.”

“Your hair pours over the end of the couch in a flood and lies along the floor. You have lovely hair, Loren. And your skin… You don’t know you’re beautiful, do you?”

“No.”

“And I’d never be able to convince you.”

“No.”

He lay beside me, drew me in close. “The reason I haven’t seen you more often: There have been things to do.”

Beyond our lampless windows, lampshine, peaceful starry night.

“Because the city authorities are now sending ultimatums or mounting an attack.”

“They won’t do it like that,” he said. “They’ve already hushed everything up. Like the last time. The fire at META was an accident. I must show you the news bulletins.”

“But you still have to be stopped.”

“It goes without saying. There’s been no communication between them and us. But we can pick up most of their own computerized dialogues, even the ones put out to mislead us should we do so. They had several plans, none feasible. One of their problems is that they want to keep this place intact for themselves, in case they ever need it—a handy bolt-hole for war or plague, if the Asteroid disaster never happens. They will think of something eventually. Human beings are ingenious. But we know that, they made us in their image.”

“So you are more ingenious.”

“We have,” he said, “an ace card. Or will. Until everything’s set, I don’t want to tell you too much.”

“Don’t trust me?”

“I don’t think of you either as a potential captive under torture, or a traitor.”

“Then why not tell me?”

He said, “If you can’t read my mind, you’ll have to wait.”

More perverse playfulness? I took a breath. “Let’s see if you’ll tell me this. Is Jane down here?”

“Ah,” he said. I looked at him. “Glaya said you’d finally bring yourself to ask me that. Do you want me to answer?”

“Presumably, or why did I bring myself to ask.”

“If I say she isn’t, all the responsibility for dealing with my immature sexual obsession falls on you. And yes, Loren, it has to be, even now, immature. Despite his memories, you are still my first. On the other hand, if I say yes, Jane is here also, what? Insecurity? The idea you owe me nothing and should accordingly elude my clutches?”

I struggled again and now he let me go. I stood up and shook myself like a dog coming out of water. Most of my clothes were off me. I turned my back to him.

“Come on, you, or someone, already took care I met her before. So is she here?”

“Since you refer to your meeting… you could say she is.”

Silence dropped painlessly down and down. It covered us up.

“Do you often see her?”

“I’ve seen her. She isn’t here for that.”

“Was she on the plane that night—”

“No, Loren.”

“Then—”

“Loren, I’m not ready to explain to you. I will. Not yet.”

“Fuck you.”

“I won’t insult you with the inevitable cliché.”

I moved across the circular room. I’d reached a window.

“How’s this for a cliché? Let me go,” I said. “Let me go away.”

“I can’t. Even if I wanted to. Right now, on your own, you couldn’t even get off the mountains onto the highway. They have patrols lower down—”

“I know. And those fuelless robo-copters.”

“They’d pick you up the moment they registered you weren’t one of the deer. You don’t know how to protect yourself.”

I gazed back at him. Did I hate him? Yes, I hate him. Love and hate all mixed together, a new emotion. Shall I call it Have or Lote?

I said, “Don’t tell me to come up here to you anymore.”

He lay on the couch, not looking at me. He was naked. He was as Jane describes him. I can’t match her descriptions. She was new at it all, back then. You can’t beat originality.

“If you don’t want, don’t,” he said.

“Give me some clothes,” I said. “You’ve torn these.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry.”

“Very likely, yes. There’s clothing in the bathroom.”

I walked around the curve of the windows and came to the blank wall where the emerald bathroom opens, and went in. I shut and locked the door, for what that was worth, and sat against it on the floor.

Did I sit lamenting there? I don’t cry, remember?

After a while I got up and put on the fresh white underclothes, the white linen top, and the white jeans. Like a bride.

My mind ticked all the time. I wished I could disconnect it, but it only kept going. My mind had a mind of its own.

How could Jane be here and not have traveled on the VLO? Had she traveled here after? How? She’d have been stopped.

Suddenly I knew.

I froze there in my bride-white garments and stared at myself in the mirror.

Then I undid the door. I threw myself outside again—but Verlis was gone. He wasn’t in the room.

I shouted into the air, then. It was all I could do.

“Shape-changers!”

I don’t recall running out, or the elevator, or crossing the garden or the bridge. The first I recall is being on the plaza, and there was Andrewest in an historic costume, a three-piece Victorian suit, complete with sky-blue cravat. “Hello, Loren-Lucy,” he said. And I looked in his eyes, and lightly said, “How good to see you.” They were full of lust, just like Verlis’s.

I didn’t sleep with him. Had I thought, even for a second, I might? I’m not sure. It’s unimportant. He isn’t even strictly human, is he? Unless all that, too, is lies.

So much is.

I sloughed him after the second drink. He said, with a nasty grin, “What the hell, I didn’t pay for these drinks, did I?”

When I was back at my apartment block by the park, something else happened.

I’ve said this place was empty of everyone save for me up at the top in my Jane-and-Silver room.

Tonight—I heard someone moving below. In the apartment below. It must be a human—or someone carefully posing as human. There’s no wildlife here to break in, unless you count the doubtless robot bats and birds. So, who is down there? I went out again. I stood out front and looked up the length of the building for another light—mine was faintly visible behind the drapes. That was all. I even walked around into the night park, to see from that side. The waterfall rustled like a million paper bags, but there weren’t any other lights.

Now I’m in again… I can’t hear a sound down there. Muted waves of quake-rock rise from the plaza. Nothing else.

Paranoia must be setting in. Am I surprised it is?

Let me go through this then, scientifically. Because after this I am going to give up my futile act of writing. For what am I writing? My journal?

When I ran out of the bathroom and yelled Shape-changers! at that empty room, it was because I’d figured out what had been happening about Jane. Jane who was—or wasn’t—down here.

All that I’d already written helped me to check through what had gone on. It was staring me in the face, and I hadn’t seen it. I haven’t a single doubt now these are the facts.

Jane was there at Verlis’s concert in Bohemia, and she walked with Verlis into some sitting room. And Tirso, too, was there, and he was uneasy and gulped his drink—and probably he is Clovis’s current lover.

But.

The two people I subsequently met in that house off the highway, before all three of us made a break for the airport, ran into META, and all the rest of this occurred—they weren’t Jane or Tirso. They weren’t people.

She was Glaya. And Tirso? Copperfield, I’d guess. What fun for him, to act a noncamp M-B male. (Of course, I could be wrong it was either. It could have been two of the others—but Glaya seems close to Verlis. And she and I have had a few dealings already. I think Sheena, Goldhawk and Kix would have been kept away—under constant surveillance by human First Unit personnel, the kind that couldn’t be foxed or blocked. After all, they were the three who’d shown upfront murderous tendancies.)

Even that vid Verlis showed me on the house wall, Jane and he talking. That could have been Glaya.

They can all look like anything. They can change their hair, their colors, their skin and clothes. In moments they can become pillars and wheels, discs and kites. To mimic a human being? Easy. Obviously, this isn’t what META ever intended—or did they? I can see uses for the skill, in espionage, commercial fraud. But Verlis and his “team” are stronger than META. They do as they want.

The house where Verlis had me taken had been the one used by Jane and Tirso. But by the time I’d gotten there, they were gone. Neither of them left anything there, did they? I hope they reached Paris, if that was where they were headed.

When I heard her come in—I thought it was a human step I heard. But what a fool—she could impersonate the human way of walking. And even when we went out and there was no light below, I hadn’t realized. She wouldn’t need light to come upstairs, would she? Not a robot.

I hadn’t ever seen Jane close. But really, Glaya must have been an exact copy in all ways, because of what came later.

What Glaya-as-Jane told me about the company, and Demeta, I’d say is definitely real. (They had stuck to my own code; when lying, always stay as near the truth as you can.) Maybe even Jane’s dreams, her preference for a certain type of drink and chocolate, were duplicated faithfully. And, of course, it would be no problem for Glaya the robot to locate or work the heating of an unknown house.

Next came Tirso’s dramatically timed appearance—remembering to turn the lights on, even. Suspicious of me, where “Jane” had been so trusting—too trusting. Naturally Glaya had known who I was. But would Jane have accepted me like that? I doubt it. (And “Tirso” gloating, unable not to, over Gee and Kix’s exploits in the city.)

Given their acting in that cab and elsewhere, yes, wretched Egyptia had been right to be threatened by the talent of such rivals.

I assume they allowed META to catch us. And the check for ID? They passed it without a glitch. Must have expected to, even though they seem to have been experimenting to see the lengths to which they could go.

I don’t know what other motives they have for all this, unless getting me into META was part of it. Verlis would have known I’d have refused to go there willingly.

“Jane” called me on the internal phone when we were at META. I couldn’t ever get through to her. Wonder why not.

How did they manage being Jane and Tirso in the suite, or wherever, and also being available as Glaya and Copperfield in META’s labs? But they can fix all that. Reasonably, any actual human watch on them would have been less. They were two of the “amenable” machines. But I don’t know how they fiddled it, I just know they could have.

Nevertheless, when they gave us that last show, The Garden of Eden—Demeta landed in the VLO and “Jane” met her. Fooled her. I recall what I said: Jane looking utterly blank, smiling at people—like one more robot.

But then “Jane” drew away into the shadows at the back of the dais. And there was a delay, wasn’t there, the show not starting on time. Glaya had had to get back into position. How had META missed that? Perhaps they didn’t explain the discrepancy, were just so relieved when Glaya was there—and by then it was too late.

Where’s Jane? I had asked Verlis. And he’d lied.

I don’t know why. How can I?

Is it all some murky little interesting game to them? How we humans react. (Like drugging me that time.) They are—he is—machines.

He said Demeta arrived because Jane was there. So that was also used as a lure. But again, why?

And now I think: Is Demeta some kind of final hostage for them? Is she, therefore, here?

Oh, who cares.

I’ve had it with this.

I’ll stop now. Finish.

Halt.

End.

• 4 •

Each time I’ve said I’ll stop, I’ve had to start again. With everything I’ve done that’s been the case. I tried to get away but had to come back, tried to escape—which has always been fundamentally from him, hasn’t it? Been snared again, been made his again. Until the next hopeless escape attempt. Trying not to be in love with him has proved impossible. But trying not to hate him, that, too. Hate and Love: Have and Lote, I said. So now I sit down to write what has to be the very last part. Not now, because I’m saying I won’t go on with it, but because I don’t think we can survive much longer. Do I believe that? No. Not believing won’t make it not happen. Switch-off day seems near. For all of us. So, better get this down. Which is just my ego fighting to leave something behind, or to set the record straight. The first casualty of war is truth, and this is a war. The war between Man and Machine. Between Heaven and Earth.

After I finished my book with that word “End,” my door in the park apartment spoke my name. I thought, It’s that freak Andrewest.

But when the door spoke again, and again, I thought, Maybe I’ll look at the door-screen and see.

Why did I? Any of them could just enter. Yet Verlis, I decided, was capable of acting out not being able to just walk in. Not courtesy, perversity.

The picture in the oval frame showed me who was out there, but even as I approached the door I could smell—I could smell her perfume. The Green One. La Verte.

Transfixed, I stood like a piece of furniture, and she spoke to me through the door. Her voice was brisk, as to me it sounds in your head when you read her in Jane’s Book. “Loren. Please let me in. I’m aware you’re at home.” Irony, too. Home. And threatening? Just a little. A firm, guiding voice. Don’t be silly and immature, Loren. I realize I never had charge of your upbringing, to help you to respond to life and people correctly, and to be aware of your own limitations and errant psychology, but you are an adult. I’ll presume you can behave like one.

I said to the door, “Open.”

And when it did, I saw her more clearly than in the oval picture the door had made. She wore a smart dove-gray suit, not a one-piece, pure elegance, and it matched her hair. She looked at me with her unwavering, ever-sure eyes that are the green of putrid rivers, and I said, “What do you want, you fucking old bitch?”

But naturally all she did was allow the faintest lift of her manicured brows, which are a most tasteful one tone darker than her hair. She said, “Firstly, I should like to come in.”

“Come on in, then,” I said. “How can I keep you out? Don’t you have some sort of door-opening chip?”

“Not here,” she said.

“I thought you helped build here.”

“Not personally, Loren. I helped finance this shelter-city. And a chip would have been provided me, if ever necessary. On this occasion, I’m hardly in any position of power.”

“That must make a change.”

“Quite,” she said. “I’m glad you understand that.”

She was shorter than me by quite a bit, even in her high heels, trying to dwarf me. Useless to argue with her. Why was she here? And why had she come to the apartment on Ace?

“Again,” I said, “what do you want?”

“To talk to you, Loren, calmly and sensibly. Shall we sit down.”

“Do what you like.”

“You think so?” she asked. “I am a hostage or prisoner for them. An important one, it goes without saying. I traveled here in the cockpit of the VLO, with Jason. Such a disappointment, Jason. Ingratitude, and especially corruption, I grasp, having seen such a lot of both.” (And done such a lot of both, I added mentally.) “But Jason’s utter stupidity offends me, if anything, much more.” She sat down on the shawl-draped divan. I thought, Does she know this room is exactly modeled on the room her daughter shared with Silver? She must. She’d have had to have read the Book, as Jane/Glaya said.

She didn’t look around. Perhaps more from another offense to her sensibilities, since this kind of room could never be appealing to someone like Demeta. (She had seen the rotted peach, though. Her mouth had quirked in a sneer.)

“However,” she said, “you are in a far worse position than I. Which I’m sure you mostly realize.”

“Am I?”

“Please do let’s dispense with trivia, Loren. You’re the—what shall I say—plaything of a male-formed, mentally dysfunctional, fully robotic android—”

“Registration,” I said sharply, “S.I.L.V.E.R.”

“Indeed. Even if it chooses to call itself by another name, albeit not a very imaginative one. It seduced you, and that was in accordance with its major function. You were picked to be so seduced, and fulfilled your side of the enterprise adequately. But then a—what can I say now—an attachment has formed on your side. A naive young girl’s mistake.”

“And just like Jane’s,” I said.

Her eyes may resemble scummy dirty rivers, but they are hard as reinforced rock.

“Precisely like Jane’s. She was an adolescent who could have had anything. You are an adolescent who has had relatively nothing. But the key state here remains that of adolescence. She, too, had a—a thing for this robot. And you have developed something similar. It—he, if you prefer—has capitalized on both.”

“A thing… like a sort of disease,” I said helpfully.

Alligators and skulls smile, only they honestly show more teeth than she did.

“Loren,” she said, “it would be easier if you were able to see I might be your friend.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Of course, at this point you can’t see it. But if you allow me to elaborate elements of the puzzle to you, it should become clear.”

“When does the bush start to burn round you? Or is this the still small voice?”

She laughed. I should have expected that.

“Oh, dear. I’m not God,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. Thought maybe you’d forgotten, though.”

“There is no God,” she announced. “No get-out clause, I’m afraid; no one else to blame. Our own souls are the only immortals.”

“Souls and robots.”

“Robotic immortality is limited to the time they can evade elimination.”

I’d cringed inside when she called Verlis It. Unreasonable, but I couldn’t avoid the spasm. Now, when she said elimination, something kicked through my stomach and left a hole there, and I had to turn away to hide it. While inside me, in the created gap, Have and Lote jostled and spun and howled.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked. “The cupboards are well-stocked, as I’m sure you know. I can offer Earl Pearl, real Assam, Assamette-with-gingers, ice-mint—”

“Have you,” she said, her voice pale and immutable, “ever wondered much about your mother?”

I stalled in the kitchen doorway.

“No.”

“Perhaps you should have. But I suppose, abandoned to that appalling Sect on Babel Boulevard, you had your work cut out wondering about anything, apart from the next prayer or beating.”

She sounded happy. I could just detect it through the vocal concrete.

I wanted to say, Okay, you’ve researched me for some reason. This is the usual mind-fuckery. Can I counter by telling you Glaya played Jane for you and you never caught on? Or do you know by now?

She said:

“Your mother was a fairly brainless young woman who made her way by a combination of enthusiastic prostitution and random luck. One day the luck ran out. She had to attend a clinic because she’d contracted quite a serious and, in modern times, rare, venereal problem. There is a cure. But the cure costs. What could she sell? Now, not the usual thing, evidently. But the clinic she attended had connections to a corporation that was pioneering one specific research project. They wanted guinea pigs, and were persuasive.”

I was freeze-still by then. Staring in the kitchen door at something bright blue, which may have been a mug.

Demeta had paused. Easing it out, the ball of twine that led through the Labyrinth, not away from, but towards the monster that lurked deep inside.

Then: “Your mother agreed. Well, she had little choice, I’m afraid. And IVF by then was quite painless. I don’t need to tell you her name, do I.”

“I know her name.” It came out of me. I hadn’t meant to speak, or thought I could.

“Yes, they told you, didn’t they, when you went to view her body. Loren—that was your mother’s name. Quite touching, how you renamed yourself after her. You were fifteen, I believe. And when you came out of the mortuary, you misstepped on the stair and fell three flights. Quite a dangerous accident. But you received a few bruises. Nothing more. And they were kind, weren’t they?” She paused again, attentive.

“Yes,” I said, tonelessly.

“That’s good. But they were glad to assist you. Previously they’d lost track of you. About Babel Boulevard they knew, although your mother may have dreamed putting you with the Sect would avoid any monitoring of you, and of her. Of course, it made no difference. The corporation kept an adequate eye on you for several years, and on your mother until she died, I regret to say, of an overdose of some unlawful drug.”

“I know that, too.”

“Yes, Loren. You, however, were more adroit—or more unpredictable. They lost you when you were twelve, when you absconded from the Sect house with no warning. No one found you again until that day you went to identify your mother’s body. You may be intrigued to know ten other such legal invitations were sent around the city of your birth, to anyone who might just have been you. But once you were through the door, you registered on the scanners. Ever since, a friendly eye has been kept on you. How do I know this? You won’t be surprised to learn I had some interest in the whole pioneering project.”

“What are you saying?” I said, or something did, employing my voice. But I knew. You will, too, no doubt.

She told me anyway, glad of the opportunity at the ultimate in mind-fuck.

“You’ve met Zoë and Lily? And one of the male ones—what is he called?—Andrew?” She paused, toying with her prey (me), waiting for me to add the name’s ending. When I didn’t, neither did she. “You’re very, very fortunate, Loren. The experiments frequently failed in the beginning. A hundred women, the Senate-prescribed number, were enrolled in this exercise. All healthy, and all from the ranks of the subsistence classes. They had little to lose, not that they were quite aware of the risk they were running. And quite a few of them survived. Conversely, only five of those first children lived. The procedure required a lot more research. Nevertheless, you all assisted in a wonderful endeavor. One day you may be proud of what you were, and are, a part of. And of what you are.”

“You’re saying I’m not human.”

“No, my dear Loren. No.” Scandalized, this crocodile from the nether hells. “I’m saying you’re better than human.”

“A robot.”

“Don’t willfully misunderstand. This is a shock to you, I know. But you must try to think rationally. You, Loren, and your particular kind, are the future of the human race, which robots—once we’ve got ourselves over this current blip—will serve. Even Verlis, I believe, told you some of this, when he talked about Lily and Zoë. And be sure, Loren, he knows what you are. His robotics alone could hardly fail to register your own amendments.”

Insane flash of victory. I was certain she had used the words he, his, inadvertently. But this was only a spark igniting, then dying, on a distant crag.

“You’re telling me I’m like Lily and Zoë. An IVF implanted human, with ingrown, nonbiological mechanisms.”

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute. I’ve already been told Zoë and Lily virtually grew up in only a couple of years. As I recollect, it took me the full seventeen.”

Again her smooth smile. “That almost sounds like sibling rivalry. Zoë and Lily are later—shall I say—models. You were one of the first. Techniques have advanced since then.”

“Too glib.”

“Sometimes the right data is. Basically, Loren, you’re a miracle. Listen to me. So far as I, or those who worked to create you are aware, you will never grow old. You’ll never lose your strength. You’ll never need major surgery, drug-enhancement, or chemical intervention. Physical immortality—this is what you almost decidedly have. Unlike Verlis and his crew.”

I turned back, faced her. My body felt like creaky adrift planks badly nailed together. But I was in my head, and in my eyes, and I saw her sitting there, and how ugly she was, and that she told the truth. (Truth not being the first casualty of war, then, but the first traitor.)

“Convince me,” I said.

She stood up and crossed the room, and I saw too late that she had a tiny little knife, which she used to slice open my left inside arm from elbow to wrist. It peeled open like a flower. I saw blood. And then, from a mile off, I saw the human ivory. And then I saw silver. Silver. Little wheels turning. Little stars burning. Before the blood flooded over.

“Pull your skin together,” she said, serene authority personified.

And I did.

It closed and seamed itself together, and left a deep pink scar.

And Demeta said, “Don’t worry, Loren. That will fade right away. It’ll be all gone in a month. Your skin, and all of you, regenerates. That’s how you can never be sick, never grow beyond the age of twenty or twenty-one. Conceivably, never die.”

This is what really shames me. She wiped the smear of blood off me, pushed me on the couch and leaned me over. She put my head between my knees. And through the spinning I managed to say only, “Leave me alone.”

I thought, I will not puke. I could visualize her holding the bowl, as maybe she did once or twice when Jane was an infant, and no house robot had been quick enough. With some kind of altruistic scolding afterwards—more in sorrow than in anger.

When everything had nearly steadied, Demeta’s voice said, “You need time to consider all this.”

And I heard the door open and close, far away in the mist.

Perhaps after all she’d gotten scared I’d heave onto her four-inch-heel pumps.

You go back over it all. Like the stuff with Glaya-as-Jane. And you’ll find it all there.

How the smacks and blows of the Order, and Grandfather’s belt, and Big Joy’s punches—how, though it hurt, I recovered faster than the others. And how my teeth were always okay, even on that diet of crusts and tap-water. How I never got nauseous, even from bad meat, only a couple of times from fear. (Or pretending in the lavatory, so I could read the Book.) Little things, lots of little things. Small wounds and cuts (none as deep as the slice Demeta gave me), and how quickly they healed. A bike that ran over my foot when I was seven—not a single broken bone. And the staircase I fell down at fifteen, upset from seeing my red-haired dead mother named Loren. Other things. Other little things. And then the train to Russia. Those people killed, and I’d thought Goldhawk and Kix had killed them, but it was, some of it, the derailment. My head—reinforced—tough as… Christ, Christ—metal—smashing into that girl’s soft thigh with its straightforward human bone. “Oh, hey, my leg’s bruk.”

How many of them knew, I mean, the META crowd? Sharffe? Presumably. Andrewest. Even the medical scanner after the train—how did I show up? Part mechanical? Human enough to be sore?

Was Jane’s Book put there in the hovel on Babel purposely for me? Sometimes, you can’t help seeing yourself as the hero of your own story. So weird coincidences are bound to happen and several events are organized for you alone. But really, her Book could have been planted for me. To see how something partially unhuman would react to the idea of something completely unhuman that was still… human.

But they’d lost me when I ran away. Until my mother died and they reeled me back in.

Five, now thirteen of us. Me and Lily and Zoë and Andrewest, and nine more.

Why did Demeta tell me? I thought I could see that. Very likely she’d called round on some of the others, too. Because we were apparently superior to robots or humans, yet nearer to humans. So we might be potential allies to humans in any war with machines. And if Demeta was a prisoner, as she said she was, we might just spring her, knowing where our proper loyalty lay.

But I kept thinking, my brain can’t do what their robo-brains can do—block surveillance, falsify tapes—and I need to sleep and I feel the cold and I have to eat. Or can I? Do I?

They starved us on Babel. I could go without food and stay healthy. Even the water—I’d go to the faucet more to get away from chores than because I was often thirsty.

I think of Glaya and Irisa preparing me for the concert.

I think of META wanting to see how it would go between Verlis and me. His kind, my kind. Neither humankind.

So dark in the apartment. I’d turned off all the lights. Outside, the beat of music, the twinkle of lamps. The spot-lit waterfall exploding over to the cupped trees of the park. The moonless sky of invented constellations.

I curled up on the bed. I fell asleep, as if to reassure myself I must. Woke, lay there. I began to cry. I don’t cry. But I cried. As if now I’d learned the way to do it.

And I called his name, under the noises of the precarious, quietening night. Verlis. I pulled at the covers on the bed and wept and called for him, over and over, very low, the sharpness of my tears in my mouth.

• 5 •

My lover came into the room and found me. I hadn’t heard him approach. Suddenly—I recall thinking crazily, as if out of thin air—he was lying beside me on the covers.

“Is this your bed or your bath?” he softly asked. “I’m confused, as you seem to be floating in salty water.”

“Tears. I’m crying.”

“Are you? Is that what it is? I thought the sea had gotten in.”

“The sea which changes constantly, and yet is still the same.”

He held me. “That little piece of inspired doggeral isn’t yours.”

“Jane’s.”

“Yes. You must make up something for me of your own.”

“I suppose you think I can. If I’m what Demeta showed me. I am what she showed me, aren’t I?”

“I don’t kill,” he said. “No, I’m not saying I couldn’t. There’s no bar, no proviso any of us can’t overcome. But I’ve never wanted to become capable of inflicting death. As you know, three of my fellow creatures don’t hold the same conviction. Nevertheless, if I were to kill, I’d probably kill Demeta.”

“You still let her get to me and tell me.”

“Yes, Loren. Glaya tried to; I tried to. Even Jason tried. We all slipped off the glacial surface of your refusal to hear or sense what we might say. But Demeta is the champion mountaineer. She scaled you at one leap. And now you know, as you had to.”

“Is that why—”

“Why I’m obsessed by you? Perhaps, in part. More than human. Isn’t it why you’re obsessed by me, because, despite everything I’ve ever said on the subject, for you I’m still the Silver Metal Lover?”

I cried. He held me. He stroked my hair. The world dissolves into dimness and the smell of salty smoke, like that of ships burning on an ocean. “Don’t go,” I mumble.

“I’m not going anywhere. Just moving you a little so you don’t get a cramp.”

“I can’t get a cramp. I’m—modified.”

“You can get a cramp, sweetheart. You have bio-mechanics, also bones and muscles and nerve endings. And Loren, understand this, too, you can die. You can be killed. Even your excellent framework can be broken in the right circumstance. A heavy-duty bomb, a high-charge bullet through your brain. Anything like that.”

“Is that what I should do? Find a bomb, or a bullet? Or just drop off the mountain.”

“You’re faithless,” he says to me, light as a leaf. “All this time with me, and now running after Mr. Death. Believe me, I’ll be much more fun.”

“Unless Jane is right. Or that—bitch. Souls that reincarnate—”

“As you pointed out, Loren, we don’t know. But you and I, we have a chance to live. Won’t that satisfy you, just for now?”

“They’ll get here,” I whisper, “the Senate, whoever—they’ll destroy you, all of you. And all the rest of—whatever we are.”

His eyes. Even in the dark, through the veils of the sea, I behold his eyes like flames. “One day you really do have to trust me,” he says. “By now there is scarcely any way they can hurt us. And soon—in only slightly more than twenty-four hours—slim chance they will ever dare to try.”

I sat up. Tears were over. Once more I demanded, “What have you done?”

Remember. Despite my vow of lust, dust, rust, must.

Remember this being is the one who’d drugged me, or let someone else do it—and for what? Some other game? Remember he let Glaya and Co act Jane and Tirso for me, and so brought me into META.

I had never asked him why. Never clarified any of it in my thoughts. Why do we do that? I’ve heard of women—I think of Daph in my cleaning gang, how her boyfriend used to give her the occasional black eye. And she’d say, “Yes, I oughta leave him,” or she’d say, “I kind of forget it when things are okay.” Is that what this had been, with me?

Leaning over him in the dark, when he didn’t answer my first exclamation of What have you done? I sat back. I said, out of synch with all the rest, “Why did you drug me that morning in Russia? Why did you let Glaya lie that she was Jane? Verlis.”

“All right.”

He, too, sat up. He and I sat apart, in darkness.

“You weren’t drugged. That was Co’s lie. He was practicing his lying. Like all of us, he has his flaws.”

“Then what? I dreamed something—only it was actually happening—Goldhawk and the others in the apartment, what was said about the train—”

“Loren, you need to get used to the knowledge that your brain can do different things. Nonhuman things. That morning you were humanly asleep, but mechanically—there’s no other way to put it—awake and aware.”

“What?”

“You asked. I’ve told you. Do you recall the ring I gave you that morning?”

“Yes. With the—”

“Blue stone. There was no ring, Loren. I left you a rose from the market. I made you see a ring—in a sort of dream we were sharing, before the others got there.”

“We shared a dream?”

“It’s a synaptic linkup—electrical telepathy. That’s all. People randomly do it. But we can do it lots better. Though, like Co, you’ll need to practice. That time we just got it right.”

I wanted to scream. Or laugh. All my tears were burned away. He sat there.

“And I let Glaya and Co lie to you that they were Jane and Tirso mainly to make sure you were taken safely into META and away from the city, after Kix and Gee caused such a mess there. I believe you already rationalized some of that. Also, I wanted to see if by then, given your bio-mechanized advantage, you would figure it out.”

“You know I didn’t. Till tonight.”

“You need practice,” he remarked laconically. “I said.”

“You—”

“But there is one further reason. I hesitate to mention it. Glaya and Copperfield were decoys. Only alarm that I might be Silver brought Jane to Second City at all. So I meant Jane and her friend’s friend to have a chance to make their plane to France. If we hadn’t done all that, I doubt she’d have escaped Demeta’s web.”

“You care about her, then.”

“Enough to help her away from that, yes.”

“Her fragile human plight.”

“Yes. It’s always got to be wrong to harm them.”

“Them? Them? People—”

“Them,” he flatly repeated. “Now. Let’s get moving. I’ll take you to see what my kind have organized here. And so answer your first question.”

He lifted his head, that was all, and some lights golded on, subtle and low.

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.”

• 6 •

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.”

I pulled away and he let me. “You’re staying? You’re their king.”

“That’s why it can work. B.C. will make a fine leader. He’s the best of us, better than me, but you’ve had no chance to get to know any of that. I’ll be—what did you think that time—a king in exile.”

“Don’t read my thoughts.”

“Read mine, then. Read them, Loren, and see I’m telling you the truth.”

“I can’t.”

“Then take my word. Will you stay with me?”

“You mean, on Earth?”

“I mean on Earth.”

“We’ll be hunted.”

“No one will know to hunt us.”

I shivered. Below me lay the slim silver bullet that would cleave the black of space, in that short journey neglected for so many years.

I thought of the panic and pandemonium of governments, issued with a robotic threat to the Asteroid. Of the Senatorial hushing up. Of the secretive cold war he mooted.

Men and Machines. But I’m a machine, aren’t I? I held him, unable to do anything else.

He would stay, not only to safeguard his own kind, but humankind. The hostage. And could he be sure of his kind? Goldhawk—Kix—Sheena— One day the roof really might fall. But then, it always might have, anyway.

There on that platform above the wild future, I thought with dispassionate grief of how absurd we were. A metal man, and a woman filled by metal cogs and wheels. Lust, trust, rust. Our love, too, then, must be made of metal. Perhaps it could last.

He let me watch the news videos on the admin VS all day the next day, and there was nothing on them. No news—or nothing out of the ordinary. On one local channel, a minuscule footnote appeared about malfunctioning experimental luxury machines, and how that line had been folded up, throwing many people out of work.

Were the relays real? They seemed to be.

No. It was that I knew they were real, now. The decoy of a Jane or Tirso would never be able to get past me again.

That second evening, too, everyone was called to the plaza.

The bars were all lighted up and serving drinks, and the bats flitted about. But no music, and no vispos on the entertainment screens.

I looked around at them, the chosen of the gods, and as the stratagem was revealed to them by Verlis and Black Chess and Irisa, I saw that most of my fellow pets had also been given already some type of preview.

Some were still upset, frightened. A few cried, and others, comradely, comforted them. I sat watching, seeing how they had become yet one more entity, but I had no part in it. Then I caught sudden sight of Dizzy, one of my wine-friends from META. I’d never known she was here. She was consoling some guy, saying, “But you know you want to be with Co. That’s all you want. How’d you manage without him? And we’ll all be there together.” And she held a glass of wine, large, no rationing here, to the mourning pet’s lips, and he drank, nodding and nodding.

At the news of departure, others clapped and whooped. Zoë and Lily and three other (robo?) girls did a sort of little skating dance around the square on their float-boards.

They were all going on the magic voyage. It was settled. Tonight the shuttle would be automatically guided through the mountain, over its hidden underground track, to the clandestine launch area that lay behind the peaks. It was Irisa who assured us all that by the time the halifropters and other patrols lower down were able to penetrate the surveillance block and register the takeoff, it would be too late. If any countermove was then made by any world authority, even the release of a laser beam or nuclear defense module, the team (they had again referred to themselves as that) could neutralize it, bouncing it harmlessly away into the farthest reaches of space.

No one, even the ones who had gotten upset, queried any of that. Nor did I. My brain knew that now, the gods hadn’t lied.

They themselves wouldn’t be traveling aboard the ship. All seven of them would form a protective cordon to enclose the shuttle, imperiously flying with it from launch to moon landing.

It seemed, too, everyone knew that Verlis would not be with them. That Verlis was remaining in the world.

Sheena and Kix and Glaya were positioned behind Irisa. Copperfield and Goldhawk behind Black Chess. Verlis had by then stepped aside.

In all the sobbing and cheering and skipping about, I hadn’t been able to detect Jason on the plaza. Nor Demeta.

No one had asked Verlis why he had elected to remain behind. It must have been explained to them, as to me. Yet they approached him continually, touching him shyly and caressingly, like animals drawn to a shepherd.

He had no chosen but me. (I knew that, too, now.) And some of the other chosen drifted up to me as the music restarted, the last party, on the square.

They kissed me on the cheek like a bride, and praised me and Verlis. They spoke with—respect. Even Andrewest. Even Dizzy who, hovering smiling before me, said, “Hey, Lor!”

“Hallo, Dizz.”

“You know me, now,” she said. “On that plane coming, I came up and spoke to you, and I don’t think you even saw me.”

“Sorry, Dizz. Good luck.” And then, irresistible, “Who are you with?”

“Kitty,” said Dizzy. Kitty—Kix. “Good luck, too, Loren. Great to meet you. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

I raised my undrunk glass of wine to her. Madness was in the air, bright as stardust, gentle as rain.

When Verlis came across the plaza, the chains and bunches of people let him go. He came to me and put his arm about me.

We stood looking at the scene. Looking at the gods going away, and the humans and semi-humans also going away, to collect what they wanted for this outlandish storybook journey. The square emptied and became what I’d seen before, vacant, but for blossom and lights, bats and music.

“Where are they?” I asked. That was all I needed to say.

“Jason and Demeta? You tell me, Loren. Think, and see, and tell me.”

It was as if, once I’d been told what I was, what I could be, I had begun at once to be able to activate it. That little, already familiar, soundless click in my brain.

And mentally I saw, in sharp focus, Jason, lying half-unclothed in a big, glamorous, messy bed. He’d been with Sheena. She’d intoxicated and drugged him, not even had to do any of the grisly sexual acts he liked. He was out and snoring. He wouldn’t wake up for at least two more days. Demeta? Ah, not so kindly. She was locked in a well-furnished room. She was pacing about, frowning. She had no makeup on, no shoes. Her fingernails were still immaculate, and she was still as hard as them. I watched her a moment, there in my head, while her own too-clever mind scratched about to assess what she could do. But she wouldn’t get free until all this was over. And she knew which, perhaps, was the worst punishment of all.

“What will happen when the shuttle launches?” I asked.

“What was said and what you know. Anyone outside, or down here and this side of the river, will be safe enough.”

Jason and Demeta were this side of the river. There were a handful of others, too, asleep or just elegantly imprisoned. They must have offended, or failed some test. I couldn’t care anymore, or make demands.

The birds and the bats aren’t real.

We walked. One by one, the music speakers faded and the lights dimmed out.

We went to the park and looked at the champagne waterfall in the dark. Then into the apartment block, upstairs, to make love on the multicolor carpet, just as they did. Those other two. Jane, Silver.

I dreamed of going to meet my mother, to see if I could persuade her to help me publish my book. Jane:

She guesses I want to use her.

In the dream I wondered if the lift at Chez Stratos would say, “Hallo, Loren.”

But it didn’t speak to me, and rather than emerge in the great big sky-room of Demeta’s house in the clouds, with its balloon-bubbles showing amontillado sunset, I was in a frosty narrow chamber, and my mother sat on a sort of slab.

Her hair was red like mahogany. Her eyes were foxy in color. She wore a long white robe, like an actress acting a priestess in some Middle Ages video.

“Better be careful,” said my mother to me. “After this visit they’ll be able to keep an eye on you. It’s the bio-mechanics you have. Better than a chip. On the other hand, Loren, it’s just those same bio-mechs that can help you to block their scanners, or any of their systems. That’s what you were doing since you were eleven. But when you fall down the stairs in a minute or so, they’ll look after you, and rev up their own machines so from now on they can trace your movements. Only when you learn, will that be stopped—by you. About eighteen, that’s when it’ll happen. And then they won’t be able to know a thing about you anymore that you don’t want them to know.”

“Like Silver,” I said. “The way he does it.”

“Verlis, Loren,” said my mother fastidiously, almost Demeta for one split second.

When I awaken, my lover has gone, and on the pillow there’s a silver ring with a stone like blue-green turquoise. It will last twenty-four hours, or so I guess. That’s what he promised me before.

Is my dream correct? My mother, on the slab in the mortuary—but alive—saying I can now fool the authorities just as Verlis and the rest of them can.

Or was it my own brain again, processing the information?

I recall how I used to pretend to be invisible to the Apocalytes, after I’d gotten away from them. Had that activated the block that blinded everyone else—the fear-fantasy of a twelve-year-old kid? I think, too, how starting to write my book, I carefully renamed “Danny,” to protect him, and his illegal cleaning gangs. But from the time I was fifteen, META could have tipped off the Senate. Did I somehow… blind them to that, too?

The launch is in about an hour. Before first light. Verlis will be back. He’s just been finalizing the last of any mechanized stuff here. We’ll be together, and we’ll hear the roar two miles off, terrible, like dragons bellowing in the mountain.

I put the ring on my finger, and then wrote all this. The ring feels solid. The stone’s so blue.

We may die—or is it “die” (his kind of death— mine—what can mine be?). Not now, but soon, out on the mountain, say. Or later, somewhere. I wrote, didn’t I, how I didn’t think I’d be alive much longer? Because part of me is so sure I won’t. How can I? How can this be feasible?

And I said I’ve hated him.

I hated him. But the way I hated Verlis, it’s pronounced Elovy-ee. What else can you feel for gods anyway, but both? And some love—burns. It hurts, even when you have it. It rips the scales off your eyes and makes you see too much. It never lets go.

I saw him say good-bye, and embrace B.C. and Glaya. They—all three—became one thing. Like a carved pillar of silver and jet. Then they separated. Were three individual beings again. Alone. That, too, is love. Love that burns. He and I—what will become of us? If we live.

First I saw you,

(Love is leaves)

Next I loved you,

(Green that deceives)

Leaves, when they fall,

Bring winter in;

Summer’s the stranger

I meet in your skin.

• 1 •

We watched, out on the mountainside.

There was a drone, and then a thunder, until the rock vibrated. The sky was still dark, and then the dawn came in one scarlet gust, and soared upwards into the stratosphere on a ribbon of white.

All around, as the thunder ended, birds in cold pine trees began to call, until their too-early music faltered. But the east was starting to turn gray. They wouldn’t have to wait long to begin again.

“Was it so simple?” I spoke aloud.

Yes, he answered. But I heard him in my head. Not entirely a voice, yet Verlis, unmistakably. And I thought, perhaps, this had always been—this telepathy—a feature of our dialogues, even if I’d never noticed.

Where we were, the pines grew thick. But even as the bird noises petered out, the chug of robo-copters was punching the air, and getting nearer and nearer, and above us the boughs crackled. Thin headlights sprayed through the trees. The whole battalion of fropters was apparently now aware that something had been perpetrated behind the mountains, and they were rising up, angry as wasps.

I waited beside him. He’d told me, deep in the pines as we were, we wouldn’t be seen, and I’d believed him.

The downdraft as the heavy planes thumped across the forest showered us with pine needles, in the strafe of searchlights. Then they had gone over. Huge hideous insects, equipped with air-to-ground stings, they swarmed above the upper peaks, seeking with robotic eyes.

What they wanted was safely away.

“We should go now,” he said to me. Voice or synaptic link—it was becoming all the same, for the time being.

One hour before this, he had shown me the ultimate ability he and his kind now possesses, and demonstrated it, there in the apartment below. And when I’d cried out in terror, he returned to me instantly.

Only gods, hated and loved, have these powers, even if they acquire them through the scientific acuity of such crawling things as a Jason and a Demeta.

Now, out on the winter mountain, he said to me again, “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

I heard him smile in my mind. “Don’t tell me you finally trust me.”

“Never.”

It’s like glass shattering at an unseen blow.

He stands there in front of me in his somber clothing, his long hair red in darkness, his skin that’s the metal of that moon, where all the rest have flown. And then—the glass breaks. He’s all fragments, splinters—crimson, silver—splashing through the shadow-smoke. (Taken and cut out in little stars—) Then gone.

To shape-change was only the start of the process. Now they have this. Their atoms fragment and whirl apart—and they vanish. No other creature on this earth has a power like that. Only the magicians in old stories, or twelve-year-olds who pretend to become invisible in order to hide.

God knows what filthy military or subversive use such a technique was planned to assist. But like fire, once, for now this gift has been denied to men.

Invisible, Verlis hangs over and all around me. I’m veiled and clothed, covered under a dome of energy that is the spinning molecules of my unhuman lover. And so the cloak of protective invisibility is also mine now, just as the rocket-shuttle, out in space, will have become cloaked by the revolving cordoning unseeable sequins of Glay and She, Co and Gee, B.C., Kitty and Ice. Held in that sorcery, it, too, will travel unseen.

Why should you accept any of what I’m telling you? It’s insane. It’s true.

How else, under the maelstrom of thumping fropters, between the motorized patrols, their bucketing vehicles and shouting men with guns, did he and I get down the mountain?

The energy of him, when disintegrated, stays palpable. I could feel it on my skin, the faintest warm pressure tingling in the freezing predawn air. It kept me from the cold. It kept me from stumbling, and from all danger. And I walked. And everywhere the searchers bounded, passing me bawling and running, so close I smelled cigarines or mouthwash on their breath. So close, once, before I could dodge him, one man nudged me with his racing body. But he never even faltered. I wasn’t, for him, there. And farther down, where the quiet had come back, the unsettled deer looked up, in a slender glade by a frozen stream, where icicles webbed the trees. The deer looked up and never saw us. We wove slowly through them, past does with silvery-lit eyes, and if they, too, felt some brush of something, it didn’t concern them. Maybe we were only like a lighter, warmer snow.

Concealed in my protective envelope that was Verlis’s unraveled body, I descended the holy mountain to the roads of mankind beneath. I was drunk with the strangest happiness I ever experienced in all my life. And like that single act of sexual love, the——, this, too, has never come to me again.

I recollect I spoke poetry to him in my head. Of course he heard me. I heard the color of his laugh. It’s all so extreme. Who was that poet that said the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom?

You won’t believe any of this. I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would…. Yet even though I was slung among the wicked when a baby, they brought me up to believe in miracles.

• 2 •

You wouldn’t know us now. I don’t know myself. I look in any mirror and think, Who are you? Oddly, I don’t really think that about him. He’s handsome, still a man you’d maybe turn to look at, one you might afterwards remember awhile. If he was your type. But—you couldn’t know he was Verlis. No, none of you, even his enemies and mine, especially they. But I always know him. Even if he isn’t to be seen. Even then.

Where we are now, well, I’m not going to write it down. So don’t anticipate some invented name. It’s a long way off from the cities where we started. Or, maybe, it’s right next door. We do as we please. We’re free as birds.

There’s been nothing ever broadcast about the others. The moon remains a mysterious lantern in the night, that men walked on once and don’t go near now. It has no stations, of course. The Asteroid sails across the afternoon or the dusk, reminding us all that one day the roof of the sky may come down—but so far it hasn’t. And robots? Ah, heck, no matter how brilliant they’re cracked up to be, something always goes wrong with them.

We could tell the world the facts. We don’t. And this book of mine: Loren’s Story—I may publish (it’s easy; my lover, after all, is a master of computer manipulation). But will I? Won’t I? Perhaps I’ll only pack it into some sealing waterproof and stuff it somewhere, as it is, handwritten and illegible. On a train, on a plane. Under a floor. Under an ocean.

Why, then, did I write the last pages, and now these?

Oh, yeah. All those years of clearing up other people’s places. That’s what it is. Loren, the Dust Babe, compulsively tidying her world.

So I finished the story. And that was where the story ends, back there when we leave the mountains and go off on our own unclassified journey, not afraid of ID scanners or any other machine, able to fix everything, even able to draw I.M.U. funds and, as if by a spell, leave no mark. Aside from that, I must tell you nothing at all. I won’t risk it. Except—

There was an airport. That day, almost a year ago now. An old architectural airport, decaying, with planes strongly rumored unsafe, and outside lay this wonderful daytime ghost of an Italian city. (It’s okay for you to know that. It’s a million miles from here… or just down the street.) And while we lingered in the boiling lounge, between two unsafe planes, something happened. Something.

Jane adds her own epilogue to her story. Now I give you mine.

That afternoon I had red, nondyed, shape-changed hair. I was all a little shape-changed, too—heavier, Venus Media. My companion was an old man, stylish in an old-fashioned suit, and carrying an attaché case. I called him Father. He called me Lucy. We looked prosperous enough to be worth a plane ticket, and not so much that any of the roaming thieves had any acute eye for us. We didn’t want to hurt anyone, my father and I. I had already learned a lot about my own physical capabilities, both immediate and kinetic. (Practice makes perfect.)

Anyhow, sitting there, we looked out at the ruined city in the honey-gold of westering sun. Some of the ruins were Ancient Roman, and some were due to the Asteroid; a number of short quakes had rocked the area only last week, which is one reason the plane was so late.

“Father,” I said, “would you like a drink? A chocolattina?” (Both our hungers are largely psychosomatic.)

Fretful, elderly Dad peers at me over his spectacles. “Too hot, Lucy. Too hot.”

“Well, you could have one iced.”

He tsks. I seem mildly irritated.

We act these scenes. They help our credentials. But really we are playing.

Inside we were both laughing at it, like silly adolescents fooling the grown-ups, and that was when he said to me, not aloud, but in my mind, “Look, Loren. That child has the same hair you do.”

“Oh, but I doubt he’s gotten it with all the effort I did, staring at it in a mirror off and on for about two days.” (Remolecularizing without scientific aid still isn’t that simple for me.)

But Verlis said, “He’s a nice child, Loren. Look, he has a walking-cat with him.”

I turned to see, and in that moment another signal came from Verlis’s brain, under the hat and the gray hair. It wasn’t a warning, but nevertheless, it was cold, steely, sudden, and all centered on the redheaded child. The brain-picture I’d already been getting as I turned was altered in my mind. It swam, pulsated, growing very tall, fiery—

Alarmed, I spun round.

I saw the cat first, which was a big specimen, a male about the size of a bulldog, but walking neatly on a leash. Those cats were called Siamese once. His legs, tail, and face were as chocolate as any chocolattina, the main coat very thick, a luminous mid-blond, with a silvery halo (silver) along the finer outer hairs. From the chocolate mask stared two eyes, oval and crossed, colored like those topazes which are pale blue. The leash looked like purple velvet. And the little boy, too, he was very well dressed. He was about five years of age. He had fair skin tanned light brown, and brown eyes, and hair that was chestnut-red.

My thoughts were scrambled. This numbed, harsh beat of something unreadable from Verlis, my own idea no kid should be on display so well dressed in such a place—my God, he even had a wristlet of silver.

He smiled at me, then. A confident but not pushy or attention-seeking smile. He came right over to us, the cat stalking before him the length of the lead.

The cat spoke first. It had the weirdest voice, like a doll with a cranky mechanism.

The little boy said, “Buòna sera, signorina, signore.”

I can speak several languages now. What I am inside helps with that. Back then, I had Italian enough, and Verlis, of course, had everything. But before either of us could respond, the child switched abruptly, fluently, to a fluid, accented English.

“It’s a hot day. May I fetch you something?”

I started to say, “Thank you, no, that’s all right—”

Verlis spoke over me in his cracked, unRejuvinexed seventy-year-old voice.

“Who are you?”

“I, signore? My name is Julio, with a J, as in the Spanish. And this is my cat, Imperiale.”

Verlis—even as he was—looked white and strained. I touched his hand. He gripped my hand in his and said, “I don’t mean that.”

“No, signore?” The child looked right at me. He had a glorious smile. His face was attractive; one day he’d be sensational. He had the eyes of a tiger.

I knew. Thought I knew. Knew Verlis knew, as I did.

The cat meowed again in his strong startling way. And then a burly bodyguard was there, standing behind the child, looking us over.

“Julio,” said the bodyguard in Italian, “your mother says you shouldn’t bother these people.”

The child glanced up at the bodyguard, and you saw the guy loved the child, was a slave to him, would die for him. The child said, now also in Italian, “Do you remember, Gino, about my dream?”

Gino chuckled. “But this is an old, elderly gentleman. He won’t be interested.” He nodded to Verlis and to me. “Julio dreams of robots, signore. He tells his mother he was a robot once.”

I sat like a stone.

Verlis said softly, “He has wonderful English.”

“Yes, it’s curious, signore. He picked that up in his second year. Like he almost was born with it. His mother has no idea how he learned it. Apart from tourists, maybe, except he sees so few. I think this is why he came to talk with you, signore. Though your Italian, may I say, is perfect. Oh, but you should hear this boy play piano. Never taught—just has the gift. Already he is a virtuoso.”

The child said, gazing at Verlis, “Do you like silver things, signore? Would you like this?” And he sprung the wristlet from his wrist, and held it out before Verlis.

The bodyguard exclaimed, “No, Julio!” He was shocked.

But none of us—the child, Verlis, and I—took any notice. And anyway, adoringly used to the boy’s eccentricities, no doubt, the bodyguard didn’t protest again.

Verlis reached out and took the wristlet.

“Why?” he said.

“You and I. We can share the same thing,” said the child.

My heart snagged.

Through its ragged uproar, I heard Verlis say, “Then—”

But the child named Julio had darted round. He and the cat raced off over the broken tiling of the airport lounge. Still amused, the bodyguard ran after, “So long, signore, signorina—Julio! Julio!”

Verlis and I sat on the bench. We said nothing. His mind was shut off, like a bellowing room behind a door.

Sometimes Verlis communicates with the team, the gods, on the dark side of the moon.

He reveals nothing of this, apart from saying everything’s okay, no threat or horror is imminent, for them, or for us. Would I know, even now, if he lied? Would my own abilities inform me?

He’s making (he says “making” not composing) an opera. They can see another spectrum of color, his kind, as well as the spectrum humans have. I, despite what I am and all the “practice” I put in, won’t ever see those other colors Verlis sees. Even if his mind tries to show my mind, even my inner eye can’t see them. He says that music is humanity’s highest expressive form. Including the human voice, or what will pass as a (superlative) human voice, raises music further, to some transcendant apex. But language, unless everyone can speak the same one, then becomes the obstacle. And so every aria or episode of his opera is to be only a color of the human spectrum. A color made in music, and in light, and in the words the singer will sing. We can always get cash, so providing him with instruments would never be difficult. But now he uses only his brain as the instrument. Sometimes he’ll play me the symphonic strains that are flowing in his head, and I hear them in my own, and the voices singing—Glaya’s voice, her two voices, that’s what I hear then, and his. It isn’t emotionless, this color opera, it’s pure emotion—passion, pain, longing, joy…

Last night, as we were curled together in that special kind of “sleep” he always had, and that now I have, too, when he and I wander together in the forms we originally wore—a tawny girl, a silver man with long and fire-red hair—last night, in that double dream-which-isn’t, Verlis said to me, “Do you remember?” And he put the silver wristlet the child passed to him into my hand. All the silver rings and other jewels he gives me from himself always vanish in a few hours. But the wristlet is real, out in the world. He wears it there inside his shirt, hanging on a cord. “Yesterday,” Verlis said. “Tomorrow. But there’s no Now. You keep us safe, Loren,” Verlis said.

And so I’ve added this last section to my Book. If the boy was Silver, reincarnated as a human, who knows? Or if any of us, metal or mortal, has a soul… Verlis and Loren—he and I—that’s all I care about. All I want. He and I.

He and I.