Silver Metal Lover Part 26

"But I-"

Eerie reddish-ochre light appeared under the curtain as it rose. We fell silent, I with my mind boiling.

A homing device? Patience Maidel Bridge, Jason running by me, and Medea-I needed to go on thinking about this, but then the bare stage yawned before me, clothed only in drifting, bloodstained smoke. And out of the smoke, along a raised platform, walked Egyptia, stiff and blind-eyed, glittering in her metals.

For a second, I wondered what would become of her. But what had become of her was Antektra, and all at once I knew it. She seemed like a lunatic escaped from the site of an explosion, deafened, dehumanized. Her awful beauty hit the eyes. She lifted her hands and held out a blood-daubed (this was going to be a very gory production) drapery.

"Bow your neck," she said to us, "bow your neck," and in the midst of everything else, my heart turned over, for she'd repeated her lines. And then the hair rose on my scalp, as I deduced hair might be doing all over the reasonably well-filled theatre. For her voice dropped like a singer's, seemingly one whole octave: "Bow your neck to the b.l.o.o.d.y dust. Kneel to the yoke, humiliated land."

She stood there, melodramatic, insane, and we hung on her words, breathless.

"This is not the world. The G.o.ds are dead."

I s.h.i.+vered. She had come from the grave.

Of course she would behave as if no other actor existed. They didn't. They were shades. Only Antektra lived in her burning agony, her broken landscape.

"Relinquish pride, and kneel."

I sat there, mesmerized, as before. There was no sound anywhere until the raucous clash and clatter of arms. The ten warriors galloped down the aisles, and the audience reacted now with approving squeaks.

"Weep, you skies," Egyptia cried out, over the noise of war. "Weep blood and flame."

The warriors converged before her. Thunder banged. Lightning raged across the stage. Caught in its glare upon the platform, Egyptia herself seemed on fire.

"Goon ," Clovis muttered.

"What?"

"Get out, you fool."

"Oh-" I stumbled up and almost fell out into the aisle. Under cover of strobe-lighted fire and fury, I ran for the exit and out into the sanity and freezing truth of the city night.

I only had enough coins to take the downtown bus, and it came very late. When I reached the stop and got off, it was already one twenty-six A.M. by the bus's own clock. I had been gone over ten hours.

Clovis hadn't thought of my leaving a man waiting, only a machine. Even though Clovis didn't really believe that anymore. Had I, however helpless I was in the clutches of my friends, basically thought the same? Of course he would be calm, unperturbed, reasonable about my long, long, inexplicable absence, when I had previously stressed to him the danger I reckoned we were in. Of course he would.

Mechanically reasonable.

I ran along the streets, and it was like running through solid dark water, the night was so curiously intense.

When I ran into the room of our flat, he was standing in the middle of the rainbow carpet. The overhead light was on and I saw him very clearly. Seeing him was like seeing the Earth's center, finding my equilibrium again, landfall. But he stood completely still, completely expressionless.

"Are you," he said to me, "all right?"

"Yes."

"Lucky you caught me in," he said, "I've been out since seven, trying to find you. I was just going out again."

"Out? But we agreed-"

"I thought you might have been hurt," he said gently. "Or killed."

The way he said it, for which I can't find words, rocked me, numbed me like a blow, driving all the words and thought out of my head. And because the words and thought and the events of the evening were so important, I immediately began to push my way back through the numbness toward them, not waiting to a.n.a.lyze his reaction and my reaction to it.

"No. Listen. I'll tell you what happened," I said prosaically, as if in answer to the question I had, I suppose, expected from the rational, unperturbed machine.

So I told him, rapidly, all of it. He listened as I'd asked. After a moment, he sat down on the couch and bowed his head, and I sat beside him to finish the story.

"I couldn't get away. I didn't dare. Even to call you-I wasn't sure of the number of the phone downstairs-and then I had to wait for Clovis. It seems so crazy, but are we going to do it? Leave tomorrow, go somewhere else? Like two escaping spies. I think we have to."

"You're so scared of this city and what you think it can do," he said. "To get out is the only thing possible to us."

"You're blaming me? Don't. Iam scared, with good reason. I've been scared that way all afternoon, all night."

He put his arm round me, and I lay against him. And sensed a profound reticence. He might have been a mile off.

"Egyptia," I said, slowly, testing, but I wasn't certain for what. "Egyptia is astonis.h.i.+ng. I only saw her speak a few lines-Silver, what's the matter? I don't even know if you can be angry, but don't be. It wasn't my fault. Icouldn't come here. And if you think that was being stupid and panicking, at least believe it was sincere panic, not just stupidity. And after what Clovis said about homing devices... Oh, G.o.d, I'd better check-"

But his arm tightened, and I knew I wasn't supposed to move, and I kept still, and silent, and I waited.

Presently he began to speak to me, quietly and fluently. There was scarcely a trace of anything in that musical singer's voice of his, except maybe the slightest salt of humor.

"On one or two occasions, I can recollect saying to you that you were trying to get me to investigate myself emotionally, something that I wasn't geared to do. It turns out I was wrong. Or else I've learned to do it, the way I've learnt a number of other things, purely human knacks. When you were gone-"

I whispered, "I reallycouldn't -"

"I know. I also know you're alive and intact. I didn't know it until you came through that door.If I were human, Jane, I'd be shaking. If I were human, I'd have walked into every free hospital this side of the city and hurled chairs about till someone said you weren't there."

"I'm so sorry. I am, I am."

"Strangest of all was the inner process through which I put myself. During which I imagined that, since you were dead somewhere, I would never be with you again. And I saw how that was, and how I'd be.

You asked if I could be afraid. I can. You'll have to believe, with no evidence, that inside this body which doesn't shake, doesn't sweat, doesn't shed tears, there really is a three-year-old child doing all of those, at full stretch, right now."

His head was bowed, so I couldn't see his face.

I put my arms around him and held him tightly, tightly.

Rather than joy in his need, I felt a sort of shame. I knew I'd inadvertently done a final and unforgivable thing to him. For I had, ultimately and utterly, proved him human at last: I had shown him he was dependent on his own species.

The earthquake struck the city at a few minutes after five that morning.

I woke, because the bra.s.s bed was moving. Silver, who could put himself into a kind of psychosthetic trance, not sleep but apparently restful and timeless, came out of it before I did. I thought I'd been dreaming. It was dark, except for the faint sheen of snowlight coming through the half-open curtains.

Then I saw the curtains were drawingthemselves open, a few inches at a time.

"It's an earth tremor," he said to me. "But not a bad one from the feel of it."

"It's bad enough," I cried, sitting up.

The bed had slid over the floor about a foot. Vibrations were running up through the building. I became aware of a weird external noise, a sort of creaking and groaning and cracking, and a screeching I took at first for cries of terror from the city.

"Should we run down into the street?" I asked him.

"No. It's already settling. The foreshock was about ten minutes ahead of this one, hardly noticeable. It didn't even wake you."

A candle fell off a shelf.

"Oh Silver! Where's the cat?"

"Not here, remember?"

"Yes. I'm going to miss that cat... How can I talk about that in the middle of this?"

He laughed softly, and drew me down into the bed.

"You're not really afraid, that's why."

"No, I'm not.Why not?"

"You're with me and you trust me. And I told you it was all right."

"I love you," I said.

Something heavy and soft hit the window. Then everything settled with a sharp jarring rattle, as if the city were a truck pulling up with a load of cutlery.

Obliquely fascinated, then, I got out of bed and went to the window. The quake had indeed been minor, yet I'd never experienced one before. Part of me expected to see the distant skyline of the city flattened and engulfed by flames-substance of so many tremor-casts on the news channels. But I could no longer see the city skyline at all. Like monstrous snakes, three of the girders in the subsidence had reared up, sloughing their skins of snow in all directions and with great force, like catapults. Some of this snow had thumped the window. Now the girders blocked the view of the city, leaning together in a grotesque parody of their former positions. It was a kind of omen.

Dimly, I could hear a sort of humming and calling.

People running out on the street to discuss what had happened. Then a robot ambulance went by, unseen but wailing; then another and another. There had been casualties, despite the comparative mildness of the shock. I thought of them with compa.s.sion, cut off from them, because we were safe. I remember being glad that Egyptia's play would have finished before the quake. She and Clovis seemed invulnerable.

Only when we were back in bed again, sharing the last tired apple, did I think of my mother's house on its tall legs of steel. Should I go down to the foyer and call her? But the foyer would probably be full of relatives calling up relatives. What did I really feel?

I told Silver.

"The house felt pretty safe," he said. "It was well-stabilized. The only problem would be the height, but there'd be compensations for that in the supports."

"I think I'd know, wouldn't I? If anything had happened to her. Or would I?"

"Maybe you would."

"I wonder if she's concerned for me. She might be. I don't know. Oh, Silver, I don't know. I was with her all my life, and I don't know if she'd be worried for me. But I know you would have been."

"Yes, you worry me a lot."

Later on, the caretaker patted on our door and asked if we were okay. I called that we were, and asked after him and the white cat.

"Cat never batted an eyelid. That's how you can tell, animals. If they don't take off, you know it's not going to be a bad one."

When he left, I felt mean, not telling him we were going. We'd leave what we could for the rent, most of it, in fact, as far as the month had gone. I wanted to say goodbye to the cat. Demeta had always said that cats were difficult to keep in a domestic situation, that they clawed things and got hair on the pillows, and she was right and what the h.e.l.l did it matter?

I fell asleep against Silver, and dreamed Chez Stratos had fallen out of the sky. There was wreckage and rubble everywhere, and the s.p.a.cemen picked about in it, incongruously holding trays of tea and toast.

"Mother?" I asked the wreckage. "Mother, where are you?"

"Come here, darling," said my mother. She was standing on a small hill, and wearing golden armor. I saw, with brief horror, that her left hand had been severed, but one of the robot machines was re- attaching it. I went to her, and she embraced me, but the armor was hard and I couldn't get through it to her, and I wasn't comforted.

"Your brother's dead, I'm afraid," she said, smiling at me kindly.

"My-brother-"

"Yes, dear. And your father, too."

I wept, because I didn't know who they were.

"You must put this onto a tape," said Demeta. "I'll play it when I come back."

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm going to make farm machinery. I told you."

"I don't remember."

"That's because you don't want to. Come along, Jane. Let go of my armor."

The Baxter Empire rose into the dusty sky out of the ruins, flattening all of us to the earth with the gale of its ascent. A dismembered monkey lay on the ground where my mother had been standing, and I wondered if this was my brother. Then the monkey changed into Jason, and he wasn't dismembered, and he said to me, "Hallo, Medea. I put a homing device into a peac.o.c.k. Wasn't that fun?"

I woke, and it was getting light. Silver was in the shower, I could hear the cascade of water. I lay and looked at the blue sky of our ceiling as it came clear, and the clouds and the birds and the rainbow. I let the tears go on rolling out of my eyes. I'd never see this ceiling again.

Along with the other things, I'd have to leave my peac.o.c.k jacket behind too. Were peac.o.c.ks cursed birds? My mother's dress, Egyptia's play, my jacket. I'd have to leave the dress I'd worn under the jacket, too, the dress I'd worn that night we met Jason and Medea as we came off the bridge. I recalled how Jason brushed against me as he ran away. Maybe to run away like that was partly deliberate. They were both good pickpockets, excellent kleptomaniacs-it would have been easy for either of them to slip something adhesive into the fabric. But at two-thirty this morning I'd turned the clothing of that night inside out, and found nothing. Maybe the gadget had fallen out, which could explain how they'd almost traced me but not quite. The thing might have been lying about somewhere in the vicinity, misleading them. On the other hand the gadget might be so cunning that it was invisible to me, but still lodged, and Jason's failure to get to me due only to some weakness in the device which, given time, he could correct.

The micro-magnet in Clovis's seance gla.s.s was almost invisible, and highly accurate, and Jason had worked on that a year ago. They must have sat there by the bridge, just waiting for someone interesting to come along that they could bug, and who should appear but idiotic Jane.

Whatever else, I wouldn't risk taking that clothing with me. I'd even leave my boots worn that night-I had another shabby, fascinating green pair-I'd even leave my lingerie. I knew the device couldn't have gone that deep, but I wasn't taking any chances.

When Silver came out of the shower, I got up, and, very businesslike, used it. I allowed myself only three minutes to lie under the spray and cry at the crimson ceiling and the blue walls and the aeronautic whale.

Dressed, we left the portion of rent money, and the last can of Keep-Kold-Kitty-Meat on the bra.s.s bed.

Silver wrote the caretaker a note saying a friend was offering us work in a drama in the east. We'd already decided by then to go westward. We'd even talked about Paris, for the future.

I'd packed our clothes into various cloth bags, some of the shawls from the bed, towels, oddments, and, in some curious superst.i.tious urge, the three then currently complete chapters of this. I think I had the notion of putting on our escape as an addendum to the history. Or just of keeping a journal, like lady travelers of old.

Silver carried all the bags and his guitar. I had been entrusted with the blue and gold umbrella.

A little before nine, we sneaked out of the building. The white cat was jauntily stalking its shadow in the street, and ran over to meet us. I nearly suffocated it, holding back my tears.