The Silver Metal Lover s-1

by Tanith Lee

  Nobody was killed, but casualties were various, and this time the blood was real.

  Clovis, unscathed, emerged from shelter to discover Egyptia standing up on the stage, white even under her makeup, rigid, in a sort of catatonic trance.

  She’d always been so afraid of earthquakes. Her dreams and her fantasies of death and destruction had prepared her for this moment. She knew she had reached a pinnacle, and she knew the gods could sweep her from it. But she stood in the middle of carnage and she had survived. She hadn’t apparently noticed until then I wasn’t there. But when she started to come back from her trance she asked where I was. And Jason, mopping up his own blood from sundry cuts, said, “Jane’s gone back to the slum to play with her robot lover.” And, in the face of her non-comprehension, he had elaborated on his magical device and how he’d almost tracked us. I can see now, Jason and Medea would never have told any authority about us. It was more fun to have us to themselves; they didn’t want to end the game. But Egyptia—I think I know what went through her head.

  She must have heard and been aware, unconsciously, of what had been said about E.M.’s Sophisticated Formats. She must have been consciously aware from her own experience that it was more than true. The wonderful lover, the wonderful musician. Men could become redundant, she’d said. And of course that really meant, humans could become redundant. And I think, just the way the mob of unemployed hate the machines that take their work away from them, Egyptia knew the terror of losing what she had only just got hold of. She was a genius. She had sensed it in herself. Now everyone knew it, and fell before her feet, and her Destiny opened in front of her like a shining road. But what if a machine had more genius than she did? Oh, I don’t suppose she thought it through. Egyptia doesn’t think, she feels. As Clovis said, she just is. Probably, at the beginning, after the Babylon party, the actors had talked a lot about Silver, and how clever he was. Maybe they talked about the other robots, too, the ones that could act. Sometime, some seed had been planted in her. The earth tremor was like an after-image—or a fore-image. It had been for her the omen it had seemed for me. She was still half Antektra, and Antektra was good at reading portents. It shook her, liberated her even as it threatened her, into the grisly savagery of the id. She went home, still mainly in her trance, and Corinth went with her. Perhaps she made another kind of comparison that night, and it clinched matters. For if Silver was superior in her bed, he might also, so easily, be superior in her profession. About nine A.M., as Silver and I were walking up through the city, she called Electronic Metals. Legally she owned him.

  Illegally, I had him. But they could probably find me. Someone had me tabbed. Then she gave them the address of Jason and Medea.

  Jason wouldn’t have wanted to cooperate, but E.M. had the City Senate behind them, pushing. Arms were twisted. I hope it hurt a lot. E.M. took Jason’s homing transmitter, and their luck was in. Medea told Clovis all this later, including Egyptia’s part. Especially Egyptia’s part. Corinth, wandering from Egyptia’s bed, had spread the tale by then anyway.

  That night I came away from Electronic Metals, twenty-five years old, self-assured, knowing I didn’t love him, that a piece of electric equipment meant nothing to me, and I walked into Jagged’s restaurant and I sat drinking coffine through a chocolate-flavored straw—Jason, or Medea, had pinched me on the arm. A ferocious pinch. It was typical of them. I hadn’t even choked on my drink. What the pinch was, however, rather than a cheery social opening gambit, was the gadget being stuck firmly on my sleeve. Tiny, camouflaged, not detected. I thought they’d done it the night on the bridge, but it was that earlier night, in Jagged’s, that they’d been waiting for prey, and rejoiced when I was it.

  I must have bored them at first. I went to Clovis, and then I went to Chez Stratos—they could guess my goals from the directions the trace ran to. And then I went, what a surprise, to the slums. And stayed there.

  (Having taken it off, why did I pack that dress to take with me into exile? There were others. I never even wore it. A symbol, perhaps, that I had redeemed him from death, that first time. It was that dress which killed him.)

  They’d really tried quite hard, the twins, to find me. I think even that night we met them on Patience Maidel Bridge, they’d been working their way around, portioning the area, looking. The weakness of the homing device was that it faded off inside a building. It had been easy for them to deduce that if I went to New River and the trace failed, I was in Clovis’s apartment block. Or if I went out toward the Canyon and it failed, then I was at my mother’s. But in the slum, intrigued, they’d hunted up and down, never quite able to unearth my location, near, never near enough. And then, when it really did matter, Silver and I left the block on Tolerance, with the black dress packed into one of the cloth bags, and the signal came up like a star. By the time E.M. had confiscated and begun to operate the pickup of the transmitter, there was only the thin shell of a taxi to blur the trace. They found it simple to come after us, even allowing for the post-tremor traffic and diversions. Simple to catch up with us at the Fall Side. And the VLO was late.

  So that was how it was. I shan’t comment on it anymore. It’s done.

  And I think I can stop writing now, I think so.

  Maybe my arms will ache less when the stitches come out, or it might be a psychosomatic pain, and will last months or years, or all the rest of my life.

  I’m glad it wasn’t Clovis. I’m glad that time Jason called, Clovis switched the phone off at once. Egyptia is like a story someone told me. I don’t even hate her. You need energy for hatred, too. My mother called and I spoke to her. It was like speaking to someone I don’t know. We were polite. She says my I.M.U. card works again, two thousand a month. And my policode’s being renewed. I thanked her. I won’t use her money. Somehow, I’ll find a way not to. The policode I left behind at the apartment on Tolerance. Clovis mutters about providing me with one when the new coding comes through. Chloe came to see me. She didn’t know what to say. Leo came in with Clovis the other night, and stayed two days. Clovis is beginning to look hunted.

  I still wish I’d died. That’s a fact. But I couldn’t do it again. I’m too afraid to do it now. That horrible, creeping, deadly warmth, like freezing to death. The gathering dark, the stars of my lover whirling in it.

  Sometimes now I dream of him. I dream of him as he was when I saw him that time, eyeless, the clockwork interior exposed. Great hammers pound on him. Furnaces dissolve him. He seems to feel nothing. When I wake up, I lie and stare into the darkness of Clovis’s spare room.

  A night or so ago, after one of these dreams, I got up and put on the light and started to write this last chapter.

  I told Clovis about this writing. It’s a book now. An autobiography. Or is it a Greek Tragedy? Clovis said, “Don’t try and publish it, for heaven’s sake. They’ll throw you in jail. I hear the food is awful.”

  Somehow, I never thought of publishing. Only of someone coming on the pages, years from now, buried in the ground in a moistureproof container, say, or hidden under a random floorboard in the slum.

  But it’s pointless. There isn’t any reason. Reasonless. All of it.

  It’s strange. I didn’t want to start writing this last part, and now I can’t seem to stop. You see, when I stop, I break my last link with him. With my love. Yes, he’ll always be with me, but not him. I’ll be alone. I’ll be alone.

  But I am alone. These pieces of paper can’t help me.

  And so I’ll stop writing.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mother. Do you realize you’re rich enough to buy the City Senate?

  Yes, Jane. A number of times over.

  I’m so glad, Mother, because that’s exactly what I want you to do.

  Jane, I don’t understand you at all.

  No, Mother. You never understood me. But let’s be adult about this.

  That would be an excellent plan, dear.

  The reason I want you to buy the Senate, Mother, is so that I can safe
ly publish this manuscript.

  Perhaps you’d like to tell me what the manuscript contains?

  You’re quite right, Mother, it mentions you. Not in a very luminous light. However, I can change all the names. Put your house, for example, somewhere else, instead of where it is. And so on.

  Jane. I should like to know why you want to publish.

  Not to make money. Not to discredit anyone. Not to inflame the poor, of whom I’m now one. In fact, I really don’t know. It isn’t melancholia, either, or bitterness. Even exhibitionism. But this crazy thing happened. You’d react to the last chapter, Mother, really you would. Perhaps you ought to read it…

  • 1 •

  By the time they’d taken the stitches out, and I’d had my first descarring treatment (“Jane, you can’t go about looking like a walking advert for Nihilism”), Leo had made his third and most successful attempt to move into Clovis’s apartment. Of course, Clovis’s apartment was three hundred times better than Leo’s. But mostly it was infatuation. Leo, dark-haired, tall and slim, as usual, would loll about the place, unable to take his eyes off Clovis. Leo would actually spill tea and wine from looking at Clovis instead of at what he was doing. And once Leo had an attack of migraine, the kind that affects the sight, and as he sat there with his hands over his eyes, waiting for his pills to get rid of it, he quaveringly said, “I always panic it’ll never go, that I’ll stay blind. And then I’d never see you again.”

  “How true,” said Clovis unkindly. “You wouldn’t see me for dust.”

  I rather liked Leo. He didn’t seem to resent my presence in the apartment, and even flirted with me: “My goodness, why isn’t she a boy?” I never knew if it was tact or ignorance that kept him from commenting on my state.

  Clovis, though, became restless, and went out a lot, leaving Leo in possession but unhappily unpossessed.

  I was trying by then to think what I was going to do with the rest of my empty life. A labor card would be out of the question, my mother had seen to that, reestablishing my credit rating, even if I wouldn’t use it. So I couldn’t hope for legal work, even if I could do anything. And I couldn’t go on living off Clovis—I didn’t want to do Chloe’s trick and stay there ten months. But then, I didn’t know what I wanted, or rather, I wanted nothing at all.

  “The way you now look,” said Clovis, “you could model.”

  But there are models by the hundred and my strange face would never fit, even if my body now did.

  “Why don’t you write something again, this time commercial?”

  “I’d have to pay for the first printing.”

  “I’d give you the money.”

  So I did try to write, a couple of stories, but nothing would come. The characters were always the same, people I know—Clovis, Demeta, Egyptia. And I could never get past the first page. Forty or so first pages. I didn’t try to write about Silver. I’d said all there was I could say, and it hadn’t been enough.

  Involved in myself, I didn’t take any notice of the inevitable trend in the Clovis-Leo situation. Then one afternoon Clovis stalked in glittering with the rain which had replaced the snow. He flung his nineteenth-century coat at the closet, which caught it, and announced: “This morning I got a hideous rambling letter from Egyptia. Someone took her up to a tomb in the desert on the pretext she looked like some princess out of antiquity. And as they stood there on the moonlit sand, next to a handy sphinx, a slender ghost is supposed to have flitted by.”

  “You don’t believe in ghosts?” said Leo.

  “Do you?”

  “I’m superstitious. Most actors are. Yes, I believe in them. My theatre over on Star is supposed to be haunted. If you’d come and be my Hamlet there, you might see the haunt—”

  “You give me a good idea,” said Clovis. “We can hold a seance here.”

  Leo laughed. “Here? You’re joking.”

  “Am I?”

  Clovis produced the seance table and the glass and the plastic cards with letters and numbers up to ten.

  “Well, it’s supposed to be bad luck, isn’t it?”

  “Lucky for some,” said Clovis.

  He began to set out the cards.

  “I think I’d rather go for a walk,” said Leo.

  “Fine. Jane and I will have the seance without you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Won’t we, Jane?” Clovis didn’t look at me. Part of me wanted to say: “Do your own dirty work,” but it was less complicated to say, however listlessly, “All right.”

  “Jane doesn’t like the idea either,” said Leo.

  “Yes she does. She adores the idea. Don’t you, Jane?”

  “Yes, Clovis.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Dear me,” said Clovis, “are you having a migraine attack in the ears, now?”

  Clovis sat cross-legged on the rug. A little dull pain went through and through me. I thought of the seance with Austin directly after I had seen Silver for the very first time.

  “Jane,” said Clovis, “do come here and show Leo there’s really nothing to be afraid of.”

  I got up and went over, and sat down. I looked at the cut-glass goblet. Leo had moved to the window. Clovis said to me, extra quietly, “Don’t ask me why, but push a bit, will you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I did say don’t—”

  “Oh, hell,” said Leo. “All right.” He came over and sat down with us, running his hand over Clovis’s hair as he did so, and I saw Clovis wince.

  We all put one finger on the glass. Inside me, the pain swelled on a long slow chord. But I had no urge to do anything about it, for there was nothing to be done. My eyes unfocused. I seemed to retreat inside myself, somewhere distant. I ignored the tiny voice which cried: If only this were the first time again. If only I could go back.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Clovis, far away, but in a tone of abject awe, “it’s moving.”

  No, I really couldn’t stay with Clovis anymore. I really couldn’t take any more of this sort of thing, this game. His dishonesty, this fear of his of being loved, of loving—

  The glass moved steadily and strongly.

  “It’s spelling something,” said Leo.

  You fool. It’s spelling Leo, get lost.

  “J.,” said Leo, “A.—Jane it’s for you—”

  “Special delivery,” said Clovis. His voice cracked. He was overdoing it.

  “I.,” said Leo. “I.? And N.” There was a pause and then the glass moved again. “Same thing all over,” said Leo. “J.A.I.N. A spirit that can’t spell. Damn. It’s getting stronger. There’s something really here, Clovis.”

  “I know,” Clovis said. He cleared his throat. “And it wants Jane. Jane? Wake up. You’ve got a caller. There it is again. Jain. Who spells your name that way?”

  I blinked. The room came back, hurtfully bright with rainy light and sharp with other lives.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Who spells Jane J.A.I.N.?”

  “No one.”

  The glass moved.

  “It’s going somewhere else,” said Leo, the faithful commentator, as though he were broadcasting for a performance where the visual had blacked out and everything must be described. “Y.O… U.”

  “You,” said Clovis.

  “I don’t exactly—” said Leo.

  “I do,” said Clovis. “Jane says no one spells her name with an I., and it said: You do.”

  “I don’t,” said Leo.

  “Oh for God’s sake,” said Clovis. “She does.”

  “This is turning into farce,” said Leo.

  “J.A.I.N.” said Clovis. The glass flew. “T.H.E. S.O.U.N.D.O.F.R.A.I.N.F.A.L.L.I.N.G.S.I.L.K.E.N. G.R.A.I.N.P.A.L.E.C.H.A.I.N.—this is gibberish—the sound of rain falling? Silk? Grain? Wholewheat bloody bread—”

  The glass stopped under our fingers.

  I shut my eyes.

  “Clovis,” I said, “when did you go through my things and read my manuscrip
t?”

  “With your writing, reading any manuscript of yours would be unlikely.”

  I opened my eyes and made myself look at him. His face was terribly white, unlike Leo’s, which was flushed and excited.

  “Clovis, why are you doing this? Is it spite? Or are you trying to help in some stupid tactless—”

  The glass moved. I saw Clovis’s face drain even whiter; he stared back at it as if it had loudly spoken to him.

  “It isn’t me,” he said.

  “It’s you.”

  “It says,” said Leo, “The idea is—the idea is for me—for me to—A.M.U.S.—”

  “Amuse you,” said Clovis, anticipating.

  The glass shot across the table.

  “T.H.A.N.K.—Thanks,” said Leo, disbelievingly. “Clovis, have you rigged this table?”

  “Not recently,” said Clovis. He took his hand away from the glass, and lay down full length on the rug. “We know who it is. Don’t we, Jane?”

  “Jane, don’t leave me alone with this thing,” said Leo, as I moved my own hand away.

  “You can take your hand off, too, Leo,” I said. “It can go on moving without any help.” I was angry. The first emotion I’d felt for centuries. “There’s a magnet in the glass and wires in the table. And you can set up a program.”

  Clovis gave a croaking laugh.

  “How would a program know when to say “Thank you” so sarcastically?” he said. “Jane, you think too much.”

  The glass spun under Leo’s hand.

  “C,” he said, “O.—” and presently: “Cogito ergo—I think, therefore I am—no. What’s this? Cogito ergo oops!” Leo laughed. “How true.” He lifted his hand gingerly from the glass. The glass raced around the table. Leo watched it admiringly. I watched with hard lumps of fury in my mind and heart. “P.R.O.O.F.,” said Leo. “Proof—for—Jain. S.O.N.G. Song.”

  I turned away, and Leo read out to me painstakingly, letter by letter, and then word by word, and with pride: “Inside the pillar of white fire,