Metallic Love

1 What do you do about a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end--and one day you find that the ending has altered--into a second beginning? * 1 * You're not going to like me. I apologize for that. It was Jane; she was the one you liked. I liked her, too. And I--am not Jane. Not in any single way. But one. And that one single way is perhaps the only thing you and I also have in common. Because if we liked Jane, we loved Silver. Didn't we. The temptation is to start this just as Jane did, with a description of my early life, and where I lived. Jane's mother was rich, and some of what Jane described might have been predictable--the travels, the house in the clouds. Even the way Jane came into existence--that was, selected, carried physically for five months, taken out very carefully, brought to full-term, and then nursed by machines--the Precipta method. But I was just born. I was a mistake. My mother made that very clear, apparently, when she dumped me ten months later on Grandfather. I say Grandfather. He wasn't. He was the man my mother had herself lived with when she was a child. He had sort of brought her up, but then turned her out on the street when she was fifteen. He was a believer in the Apocalyte religion, and was pretty strict, and my mother was always in trouble of some sort--drink, drugs, legal and otherwise, men. When she gave me to him, she contemptuously told him, "Maybe you can do better with this one." The Apocalytes were "charitable." So they took me in. That was the first eleven, twelve years of my life, then, that gray-white wreck of a house on Babel Boulevard. It was quite tough there. First the babies' room, which I don't remember. Then about twenty girls all ages in one dank dormitory. The roof leaked in the rain, and in summer you could hardly sleep for the scratching and shuffling of rats in the walls. Three grim, frugal meals a day in the communal hall. Lots of prayers. God was a wonderful being who wanted us to love him and sent us not only irresistible temptations we must ignore, but horrible mishaps--sickness, poverty, earthquake, and fire--to see if we would still do it. But if we did fall out of love with God, God got upset, and then he would make us burn in Hell forever. I swallowed all this along with the awful food. What else did I know? After all, the Big One was coming soon, the Day of Wrath, when the Asteroid, captured between Earth and moon about two decades before, would crash into the Earth and destroy us all, which is what had nearly happened previously. Whenever we strayed, Grandfather would take us up on the dodgy roof by night and show us the Asteroid, rising blue-green and molten over the slums. "Behold the eye of God's Destroying Angel," announced Grandfather. Hey, guys, you bet we tried to be good. There were tremors once or twice, too, (quite a bad one when I was five) to help remind us. Quake-sites still existed all over the city, except in the richest areas, where they had been put right after the initial disturbance. I suppose, growing up with this, I got used to it. Life was simple. Obey Grandfather, love God, wait for the Day of Wrath when we--the righteous ones--would be swept to Paradise on golden wings. Did I believe in Paradise? Perhaps. No, not really. Strange, maybe. I believed in all the bad things--Hell, punishment, an insecure and vengeful deity--but not in that. There was a much larger earthquake when I was nine. It happened just before dawn. I remember waking--cold, there was snow on the ground--to hear the usual small tremor stuff, creakings, grunts of timber and brick, the shift of powder-dust dislodged and falling--and that rumble under the bed like a truck was revving up right outside. Oh, it's a tremor, I thought, and nearly went back to sleep. But then the rumble rose to a bellow, the mattress leapLee, Tanith is the author of 'Metallic Love', published 2005 under ISBN 9780553584714 and ISBN 0553584715.