The Silver Metal Lover (19 page)

The taxi had a glass-faced clock.

“It’s almost ten to twelve. We’re not going to make it,” I said.

We had come this way a century ago, the road clear save for a purple storm brewing, I with a silver nail through my heart, afraid to speak to him or keep silent.

“Jane, if a man comes over in a VLO and lands the thing, I think you can assume he’ll maybe hang about for a few minutes.”

The cab suddenly detoured on to a side turning.

“Where’s it going?”

“Straight on to route eighty-three, at a guess.”

“How do you know?”

“My city geography program extends several miles beyond the outskirts. Do you realize, in a new city, I’ll be as lost as you will?” A moment later, he said gently to me, “Jane, look.”

I looked out of the window, and far away over the snow-sheeted lines of the land, across the gash of the highway, poised at the topmost mouth of the Canyon, where the flyer air lines glinted like golden cotton, other vertical lines of glitter went up. And in the sky there was a tiny cloud, cool, blue and unmoving. Chez Stratos, that ridiculous house, was still standing, still intact.

Something broke and ebbed away inside me.

“Oh, Silver. After all, I’m so glad.”

“I know.”

A minute more and we plunged down a slope to the ragged ravine that leads into the Fall Side of the Canyon. The cab, not intended to risk its treads, stopped.

It took every coin and bill we had, to pay it the balance. But, in a way, that was ethical.

Soon we were walking down between walls of the frozen earth, he carrying the bags, the guitar, I, the umbrella, to the place where the steps are cut.

The Canyon, which had been created by an ancient quake prior even to the Asteroid, hadn’t been touched by the new one. At the bottom, between the tumbled blocks that give this end its name and close it on three sides, there was a ballroom floor of smooth treeless, rockless snow, hard and bluish as a sort of aluminum. A lovely place for a VLO landing. Secretive, and negotiable only in such a way, or on foot.

The last time on the clock had read as six minutes past noon.

“Have we missed it?” I asked. But I smiled at myself. We would have seen it going over if we had, we had been close enough.

“Oh, I should think so.”

It was very very cold in the Fall. It was like standing in the bowl of a metal spoon. Strange echoes came and whispers went. The growl of the plane, when it arrived, would be deafening.

“He is, of course, late,” I said.

“Five minutes.”

“Eight minutes. What do we do if he doesn’t come?”

“You’ll curse him. I’ll carry you back to the city.”

“You’ll what?”

“Carry you. The whole twenty, thirty miles. Running at eighty miles an hour all the way, if you like. The highway is comparatively flat.”

I laughed, and my laugh rang around the silver spoon.

“If he doesn’t, I dare you to.”

“No dare. It’s easy.”

“And terribly inconspicuous.”

And then I heard the plane.

“Oh, Silver. Isn’t it wonderful? It’s going to work.”

I stared into the sky, but all I saw was its lavender-blue wintryness.

“Can you see the plane, Silver?”

“No,” he said, “I can’t. And the reason for that is, I think, that there isn’t one. The Canyon sides are distorting some other sound.”

“Then what?”

“A car. Yes, listen. Brakes.”

“Why would a car stop here?”

“Clovis?”

“Then something has gone wrong.”

I can only describe the feeling this way: It was as though someone loosened a valve in each of my limbs simultaneously, and some precious vital juice ran out of me. I felt it go with an actual physical ache, sickening and final. My lips were frozen, my tongue was wood, but I managed to make them move. “Silver… The rocks behind us. I can’t get by them, but you can. You can run over them, jump them, and go down the other side. And up the Canyon. I won’t come because, if you carry me, it would have to slow you, make it that much more awkward. Because the surface—isn’t flat. You said, a flat surface.”

He turned and looked at me. His face was attentive, the eyes flattening out, cold gold-red fires.

“It wouldn’t be so easy over rocks, no. Much, much slower.”

“You’ll need to be fast.”

“What is it?”

“It’s—I don’t know. But I know you have to run. Now, Silver.”

“Not without you.”

“They can’t do anything to me.”

“They can do everything to you. You’re no longer coded. If someone wants me, and I’m no longer here.”

It came to me he knew what I meant before even I knew it. He had always known then, better than I, that they—that they—

“I don’t care, Silver. Please, please run away.”

He didn’t move, except he turned to face the way we had come, and I, helpless, powerless, turned to do the same. As we did so, he said, “And anyway, my love, they’d have, I think, some means of stopping me from getting very far.”

They. Five figures were coming down the steps onto the ballroom floor. They all wore fur coats, fur hats. They looked like bears. They were funny.

They came toward us quite slowly. I don’t think it was deliberate. They were cold, and the way was slippery. I didn’t know any of them, and then the snowlight slicked across two panes of glass.

The VLO wasn’t coming. It didn’t exist. Electronic Metals existed. Clovis had betrayed us, after all.

“There’s still time,” I tried to say.

“Not really,” he said. He turned away from them again and stood in front of me so I wouldn’t see them. He blotted them out, as long ago he’d blotted out the harsh light and fear of the world, so I could learn to bear it. “Listen,” he said. “None of this matters. What we’ve had matters—
listen
to me. I love you. You’re a part of me. I’m a part of you. You can’t ever lose that. I’m with you the rest of your life.”

“No Silver—Silver—”

“Yes. Trust me. It’s true. And I’m not afraid of this. I was only afraid for you. Do you understand?”

I shook my head. He took my hands and held them against his face, and he looked at me, and he smiled at me. And then he glanced back again, and they were very close.

Swohnson was in the lead.

“You’ve been a bit of a silly girl,” he said to me, “creeping off with your friend’s property. It isn’t, ah, legal, you know.”

I don’t think he recognized me, but he disliked me just the same. I’d made him come out in the cold. He always got the rotten jobs—placating the mob and irate callers, shutting the gate, doing the visual interviews and acting dumb, chasing runaway machines and female children across the winter countryside.

I couldn’t say a word that would alter anything, but the words tried to come, and Swohnson showed his teeth at me and said, “You’re lucky if no one lodges charges. Not that that’s our business. Our business is this, here. Didn’t you know how dangerous these things can be? They can short out at a second’s, er, notice. A faulty line. Yes, you’ve been bloody lucky.”

I started to plead, and then I stopped. Silver was standing by me, looking at them silently. None of them looked in his eyes.

“Er, yes. Give us the lady’s bags,” said Swohnson. “Um, you take the guitar, will you,” he added to one of the other four bears. “That’s E.M. property.”

Silver put down the bags quietly. Men picked them up. He handed the guitar to the elected man, who said, “Thanks—Oh, shit,” and bit his mouth.

“Yes, they’re convincing,” Swohnson said. “Till they blow a gasket. Now, young lady. We stopped your cab on the road. It’ll take you back to the city.”

“She hasn’t,” Silver said, “got the fare.”

They all started. Swohnson coughed. He swung around on another bear. “Go and put some, ah, cash in the damn cab. Enough for the ride.”

The bear hurried off. They were obedient henchmen. If Silver resisted them, would they be enough to stop him? And then I saw something come out of Swohnson’s pocket, in his gloved paw. He toyed with it, so I could see the buttons.

“Don’t,” Silver said, “do it in front of her.”

Swohnson coughed again. His breath fluffed through the air. The Canyon vibrated.

“Oh, don’t worry. You don’t think we’d carry you to the car when you can walk? Start walking now. Left, right. Left, right.”

Silver walked, and I walked. The men walked with us. No one spoke. We went up the steps and came out in the ravine. When we got to the top, the cab was back, a bear leaning on one side.

“All paid up and primed for the city center,” he said, quite cheerfully. “All right? Mr. Swohnson?”

“Fine.”

Swohnson walked on, and Silver walked, and I tried to and one of the bears caught my arm and prevented me. My bags were lying by the taxi.

“Here’s your cab, now, please.”

“Let me,” I said. “Let me come with you. As far as—the center.”

“Sorry, madam. No.”

“Let me. Please. I won’t do anything.”

Silver was taller than they were. He walked like an actor playing a young king. The cloak flared from his shoulders. His hair blazed through the monochrome white-blueness of the day, as he walked away from me toward the long black car like an ancient hearse.

“You see,” I said to the man, smiling, plucking at his sleeve, “you see I’d much rather.”

He shook me off. Agitated, he said, “It’s only a bit of metal. I know it looks—but it isn’t. Let it go, can’t you. They’re dangerous. It could hurt you. We just take them apart. Melt it down. It’ll be over in another hour. That’s no time, is it. Nothing to fret about.”

I held out my hands to him and he backed away.

Silver moved in a graceful bow to get into the car. The windows were tinted like Swohnson’s spectacles, and I couldn’t see him anymore, not even the fire of his hair, his hair, his hair.

Swohnson got into the car. The others called. The man who had stopped me ran up the road to them, slipping once and almost going down.

“Please,” I said to the empty distance between us.

Their car started. Snow fanned away from it. It moved powerfully. It raced and dwindled.

“Please,” I said.

It was gone.

Automatically, I fumbled to open the taxi door, and one by one I loaded the bags into it, and the umbrella. Then I got in and shut the door.

I sat in the taxi. I wasn’t crying. I was making a little noise, very low, I can’t describe it. I couldn’t seem to stop. I think I may have been trying still to say “Please.” I sat and watched the clock in the taxi.

I didn’t even think of going after them. They had, at least, taught me that.

It’ll be over in another hour.

When you leave me, there’s nothing.

There’s all the world.

It’ll be over, in another hour.

Where the cat had scratched me, my wrist hurt.

I watched the clock. I didn’t visualize any of what they did to him. I didn’t wonder about it. I didn’t feel him die.

“Jack’s lost all his glass. All smashed.”

When the hour was up, I took off my left boot and smashed the glass over the taxi clock, and taking up the largest shard I could find I cut my wrists with it.

Blood is very red. I began to feel warm. Everything grew dark. But in the dark, little bright silver flames were turning and burning…

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

Somewhere there was a great rushing and roaring. The sky was falling. The sky with its Silver stars, his hands, his feet, his limbs, his torso, even his genitals scattered to give light, dismembered like Osiris, Romeo, Dionysos.

The sky fell in the Canyon.

Later, the door of the cab was wrenched open.

“Oh, Jesus,” someone said to me. I heard this someone retching and fighting to control the spasms. But I closed my eyes and slept.

I remember the hospital in little blurred white flashes, like damaged film. I needn’t describe that. Or the pain, which didn’t stay in any part of me, but ran through all over me, so that even to turn was awful. I remember being helped to use the lavatory, moaning with pain. All these pains were physical. Below, beneath, beside them all, a thin grey pain that was not physical ran on and on like a tape. I dreamed sometimes. I was a child, and someone had thrown my black fur bear into a fire. It was coming apart and melting and I screamed with horror. I also dreamed that I was taken to meet my father, the man who had supplied the sperm for me to be born. But whenever I arrived where he was supposed to be, he wasn’t there anymore. These are symbols. I didn’t dream—I didn’t dream of him.

I didn’t come fully conscious until I was in a room I knew, and for a moment couldn’t identify. Then I moved a little, and my foot skidded. The sheets were dark green satin. And then Clovis was sitting on the arm of a chair, looking at me.

Two things. His hair was still long, but dark now, not dark red, de-molecularized. And his face was hollow, which made him look oddly holy.

“I’m sorry about the sheets,” he said. “I forgot. I can change them tomorrow.”

Clovis. I was in Clovis’s spare bed, in Clovis’s apartment. I was with Clovis. Who had betrayed us. My mouth was dry. I said softly, “Hallo, Judas.”

He slowly shook his head, as if he knew fast gestures made me giddy.

“No, Jane. Not me.”

Did I feel anything? Did I want to hurt him, to kill him? No. I didn’t want anything. I didn’t even want to die anymore. It was too much trouble. But I was obliged, having started the conversation, to go on with it.

“You called E.M. You told them where we’d be.”

“I did not.”

“Where you knew we’d be, because you’d promised me the VLO would come.”

“It did come. Who do you think found you? The hapless Gem. He put a tourniquet on you and got you in the plane. He then flew that impossible crate over the city, which is strictly illegal, and landed on the roof of State Imperial Hospital. The place was packed with quake casualties stacked like sardines, but he wouldn’t move off until they took you in as well. I never knew he had it in him. I don’t think he did. He is now on opium-based tranquilizers, which are not going to put the color back in his cheeks. Christ, Jane, what a bloody foul thing to do to yourself.”

“If it came, it came too late. You made sure E.M. would get to us first.”

“It was late because half the Historica sheds collapsed in the tremor. Gem got the VLO out past security as soon as he could.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to be here.”

“All right. I know you think I’m the villain of this rather sordid plot. I’ll leave you alone. Just stay put until you’re stronger, and then you can go.”

He got up and walked away into the blur that misted the edges of my vision. When the blur had almost swallowed him, he said, “Your mother called. She calls every hour. Do you want her to come over?”

I suddenly began to try to cry. It was very difficult. The tears wouldn’t come. It was like trying to give birth to a stone. When I stopped trying, my heart was thundering, and Clovis was standing over me again.

“Jane—”

“No. I don’t want my mother.” I shut my mouth.

Presently Clovis went out. Then I tried to get out of the bed. The last thing I remember is that I couldn’t.

There were large white sealed and waterproof bandages on my wrists. In another month, I would go back to have the stitches out, and then I could book up for the treatment that would take the scars away. Clovis wrote to tell me this in a note he left lying on the coffee table. He said he would pay for the treatment. Or Demeta would. He’d gone out and left the place to me on the day he thought I was strong enough to get up. He seemed to trust me. He seemed to know I wouldn’t repeat my earlier performance. Why should I? I hadn’t the energy. It takes a lot of determination to die. A lot of conviction. Unless someone helps.

The note also said he’d asked Demeta not to phone, but a couple of times the phone sounded, and I knew it was her. The second time I reached out blindly and switched it on.

“Hallo, Mother,” I said.

“Whoops.” A male voice, laughing. “I may not be enormously butch, but I’ve never been mistaken for anyone’s
mother
before.”

I sighed. I thought about being polite. At last I said, “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. Any chance of Clovis being there?”

“No. He’s out.”

“Dammit. Would you tell him Leo rang?”

Would I?

“All right.”

“Leo. L as in Love. E as in Edible. O as in Oh my God why doesn’t this M-B idiot get off the line.”

“Leo,” I said dully, missing his wit, I suppose offensively.

“Goodbye,” he said, and switched off.

I scribbled across the bottom of Clovis’s note to me: LEO CALLED.

I went into the green bathroom and lay in the bath three or four hours. Sometimes I would try to cry. My mind went plodding on and on. It’s wrong to repress grief. Was I repressing grief? I thought about Silver. I tried to cry. No tears would come. I’d cried for so many trivial reasons, over visuals, dramas, books, out of embarrassment and childish fear. Now I couldn’t cry.

When I heard the lift come up, I was glad, with a sort of deadly gladness, not to be alone anymore. I heard Clovis come into the apartment, and move about there, and once he whistled a snatch of tune, and then stopped himself suddenly.

Perverseness made me go out of the bathroom, carrying my robe, naked, and walk across the room in front of him to the bedroom. He stared at me as I passed, then turned away.

I got back into the spare bed and lay there, and eventually he came in.

“Are you hungry? The servicery is bursting with food. Truffles, pâté, eggs angéliques, roast beef… mince on toast.”

I became aware it gave me a horrible relief to ignore him, providing he was there to be ignored.

Then suddenly he yelled at me.

“Christ, Jane, it wasn’t
me
. Do you want me to tell you what happened?”

I didn’t reply and he began to curse me. Then he went out again. I lay a long while, and then my stomach began to growl with avid hunger. My hunger was far away but insistent. Finally I got up, and opened the guest closet where he’d neatly hung all my few clothes out of the bags. My stomach growled and gurgled, and I touched my clothes, and remembered how I had worn them with Silver, and I tried to cry, and the tears wouldn’t come. The black, paint-spotted scruffy jeans, taken in so badly at hips and waist and taken in so much. The fur jacket. The embroidered wool dress. The Renaissance dress. The emerald cloak, its hem stained by melted snow, and here, at the back, this dress I’d never actually worn in the slums, this black dress I’d worn the night I went to Electronic Metals and saw all the robots perform, all but Silver. For Silver, who was too human to check out, was in the cubicle, eyeless, handless—I opened my mouth to scream, but I didn’t scream. What use was grief or terror or rage? Who would they move? Who would set things right? The law?

The Senate? God? But I pulled the black dress from the closet and held it up before me, and saw with uncaring surprise that one of the sleeves was ripped out.

I stood there a moment, then I let the dress fall. I picked up my robe and put it on again. I walked out. Clovis was reclining on the couch among the black cushions, drinking applewine.

“I see Leo called,” said Clovis. “What it is to be irresistible.”

“It was Jason and Medea,” I said.

“Your note says Leo.”

“You know what I mean. It was Jason and Medea.”

“
It was Jason and Medea
seems grammatically unsound.
They
were Jason and Medea, perhaps? It was Jason, and also it was Medea.”

“Stop it, Clovis. Just answer.”

“Would you believe me?”

“The sleeve in the black dress.”

“Jason’s device was stuck on the fabric. Color absorbent, so almost invisible. About the size of your little fingernail. But very adhesive. I didn’t think you’d want it in your clothes anymore. I put it in the garbage disposal. If you want to go on being poor, I’ll buy you a new dress. Or a new sleeve.”

I went into the servicery and made instant toasts and ham and eggs and ate them standing by the hatches, greedily. I didn’t think of Silver as I ate. Or of Jason. Or of Medea.

Clovis had put some Mozart on the player. When I came into the room again, he was sketching something, I don’t know what it was.

“If you’d like to know the truth,” he said, “I will tell you.”

“Does it matter?”

“I think so. To me. I don’t like this idea you have that I’m the modern miniaturized version of the Black Death.”

I stood at the window and looked out at the river. The light was going, and a tin-foil of ice glimmered on the water. The mud was long gone, cleaned away. Jewels lit the buildings. So what?

“Did you know, Egyptia has become a star?”

“At the Theatra?” I asked.

“Not precisely. Most of the Theatra fell down in the tremor. An antiquated shed indeed. A lovely line for the visuals, though. They called her The Girl Who Rocked The City. And what was the other one? Oh, yes, how could I forget? The Girl Who Brought The House Down.”

“I’m glad,” I said, parroting, minus feeling, my earlier thought, “that it didn’t happen when the play was on.”

“No. It happened during the party afterward. Oh, yes, we were all in the auditorium at five past five, drinking some rather filthy champagne, when the bloody roof fell in on us. It was a damn silly evening anyway. The drama. Egyptia. She can’t act, you know. She just
is
. But the magic of Egyptia consists of her own self-hypnosis. She believes in herself, despite what she says, and it’s catching. She’s a star all right. There are contracts signed for a visual. They’ll be shooting in Africa. She’s already over there. I’m telling you all this for a reason,” he said. “You may abruptly want to know where she is.”

I had been at this window, I had said to the reflection: I love you. And he had known. A pain came through me so vast, incapable of expression. I pressed my forehead to the glass. Why hadn’t they let me die? I would be in blackness now, or in some spiritual state which no longer cared, no longer had any links with a soulless robot. For he had been only the sum of his metals, his mechanisms. Soulless, timeless.

“Jane, are you listening?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Had he been afraid? Despite what he said to console me? He’d virtually pretended he disbelieved in pursuit, when he reckoned it a fact, to console me. Had it been like pain for him to die that way, although he couldn’t feel pain? I’d taught him to feel pleasure, or rather, he’d taught himself, through me. But if pleasure, why not agony? I’d let him learn fear and need. And he’d let me learn to live. And all I wanted was to die.

“Oh, Jane,” said Clovis. He was standing by me, and awkwardly, with none of his normal elegance, he took my hand. “Please, Jane. You have to get over it. No. You won’t ever get over it. But you have to get over
this
.”

“Why?” I asked. I think I wanted to know.

“Because—Oh God, I don’t know. Why do you?”

“Because,” I said, “he told me there was all the world. Because he told me he was a part of me, that he’d be with me all my life and that nothing could change that. Because now I’m the only part of him that’s left. They took him to pieces and put him in a fire.”

“I know,” Clovis said. He held my hand.

“Melted down. Scrap metal.”

“I know.”

“I’m all of him that’s left. All of him there’ll ever be anymore.”

And the tears came and I cried tears. And Clovis, not wanting to, but amazingly gentle, held me.

I cried then, and now I don’t think I’ll ever cry again, the rest of my life.

Much later, he told me how E.M. had known about us, and how to find us.

I’d left the theatre and the play had gone through to more and more enthusiastic responses from the audience.

Egyptia had held them, and gradually most of the cast gave up trying to bulldoze her from the limelight. This was their livelihood, and a winner is a winner. By the second interval, the actors were in and out of her dressing room, having frozen roses sent in and making love to her. And she, generous, vulnerable Egyptia, had taken them all back into her heart. In the last scene, Antektra stabs herself, a libation of blood to appease the rampaging shade of her brother. It went on film, with everything else. The visual crew, overcome, were fighting to push out shots on the three A.M. local newscast. In the wake of all this, the party was riotous. Clovis, whose inclination was to leave, was cornered by Leo, an actor-manager from a rival company who had come to sneer and stayed to cheer. He was playfully trying to persuade Clovis to act Hamlet in a new skit version of the play called
Bloody Elsinor
when the tremor hit the building. At first it looked like nothing, and then the ceiling cracked in half and lumps of plaster and cement crashed into the auditorium.

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.