Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (16 page)

When he set his mouth down on hers, there was neither resistance nor response, in either of them.

He kissed her, noticing randomly her clean young healthy mouth that was centuries too old, too old for him, too old.

Then her arms coiled around him. She was strong, of course. She
held
him. It was familiar from a million other ordinary times, but only as if every woman he had ever embraced had been some version of this one. Yes, even that
un
woman, the evil spirit, out of whose womb he had been spat like a burned star.

“Let go,” he said.

She let him go.

“All right,” he said. “That’s enough.”

“Only my mother and father kissed me. And I’ve seen them kiss each other, as you have kissed me.”

“All right. Let’s leave it there.”

“Why?” she said. Her voice was frank, undemanding.

But now he strode off across the garden, alone.

He walked quickly, until he came up on the terrace, to the doors. She hadn’t followed. Unlike Picaro, lighter skinned, she had managed to disappear into the night. He crossed the paving, under the fluttering, guttering paper lanterns left from the ball, which, CX motivated, could never go out.

A
SMALL RIOT, ONE OF FOUR
that morning, was taking place all along the Blessed Maria Canal. The others were located, one in the silk market, another in front of the Temples of Art and Justice. The last was out on the lagoon, near the restored church of Maria Maka Selena, inside which a group of the agitators had barricaded themselves. The disturbances were all to do with those who wished to leave the City, and who had found this would not be allowed them. Soft-soap was changing in heavy hands. The main concern—at no point must any of Venus’s reconstruct buildings be damaged. Detachments of police, clad as henchmen from the times of the Borgian Alliance or the masked 1700s, their natty garments CX-proofed, armed with flecxs and cannisters of lacrimogeno, massed ready in the wings. The University Auxillary, Flayd noted, as the boat chugged slowly through police-audited channels, were not openly involved.

Jula hadn’t seemed concerned, her impartial face turned to take everything in. When he asked her what she thought, she said she had seen a riot just outside Stagna Maris. It had been brutally put down. She described legionaries from the Aquilla, shields locked, swords ready, marching forward in phalanx, to crush and slice men, women, and children, against the town walls.

She wasn’t inclement, or uninvolved, only pragmatic.

Pragmatic too about the other thing. Some turmoil he could see behind the gemstone luster of her child-perfect eyes. What was it? What had happened to her? Something had.

Aside from themselves, no other passenger was in the boat. The tourists seemed mostly off the waterways and alleys, scared of the rioting—the smashed chairs slung at CX-impervious windows, the wrecked wanderers by the Primo steps, with their swearing, raving wanderliers—either that, or they had themselves joined the riots.

Who had called them riots, anyhow?

It was just guys trying to get home.

T
HEY WENT THROUGH A CANAL
named Fulvia, for the lagoon. Under the watersteps close to the Centurion’s Bridge, their boat stilled its engine.

She had said she wanted to see the real animals, in the Equus Gardens. Flayd had been glad that she wished to do something and had told him. She’d progressed well, but he wondered how much of
that
even, was simply due to her slave’s essential ability to mimic what she was instructed to be.

They walked along an arched arcade, and went up into the Gardens. Cypresses, transplanted and tampered with, and already with a growth of several hundred years, towered from the terraces.

He spoke to her about the past—it was always mostly unavoidable, though he tried sometimes to curb it—wanting to wring every last droplet of authentic remembrance from her, then scurry to the laptop and make notes. She seemed not to mind his questioning, to expect
it. Occasionally she would add another detail she said had just come back to her. She spoke English absurdly well, along with her excellent Italian. Linguisticx could only take credit for so much. She was intelligent and versatile.

Now and then, however, in the clarity of her eyes, that newly disturbed movement came. She had said nothing about
that
.

By the groves where the lions were housed, they stood at the low, CX-protected fence.

Flayd thought her like a slim young lioness herself.

The lions, of course, were still in slavery.

She began to speak to him (without a prompting question, maybe only to please him) about the lions used in the arena. How they were kept hungry and savage—they were only for killing men, or being killed by them. Unlike these pampered icons, swishing their tails against their lean, dieted, pale flanks, a male lying on his back to sun himself, taking no notice of the human audience, which came and went at the outer limit of lion life. Then Jula told Flayd about Playful, the lioness who had survived so many fights and finally had been pensioned off in the Roman town.

Afterwards they ate ice cream at an umbrellaed table. Then they walked down and viewed the horses, trotting or galloping about a wide meadow, apparently railed off only by laurels.

The big roan horse reminded Flayd of himself, though it had not a spare molecule of fat.

He had ridden, years back. As a boy, with his mother, Rose, and then again not so long ago with his wife.

Surprising him, his eyes filled with tears.

That hadn’t happened, tears, thinking of these two women he loved, not for a decade.

She had seen. This quick, ancient Roman daughter of his.

God, Jesus, yes. Yes, she was
like
Alicia. Ali could have been her mother. Perhaps. Or was it only one more self-deception?

She looked at him, the girl. Then she touched his arm. That was all, nothing said.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I just remembered someone. Sometwo. We lose people, then we lose ourselves. All tipped down that fuck of a drain. Nowheresville, Death County.”

She was silent. He sensed her forming a question — of
him
. And he was embarrassed by himself, at speaking out in this manner. To her, of all people in the world—she had enough to deal with, without his neurotic tantrums over the Inevitable—which she, anyway, had already experienced. (He could recall what she’d said before.
I went elsewhere … yes, I know that I did
. And to his blurted
Where
? she had replied,
I don’t remember that. Only … nothingness
.)

Now she asked, (shaming him further) “Death County—is this your name for Elysium?”

“No. Not for Elysium.
Elysium
would be kind of wonderful.” She stood looking at him, as the horses bounded around, uncaring of tomorrow. Flayd said, apologetic, “I was just mouthing off, Jula. About total bloody annihilation—Elysium, Hades, afterlife—wishful thinking.”

He, now, did not meet her searching gaze.

Jula said, “But I have been in Elysium.”

Flayd shut his eyes. Opened them. Saw horses. Dully said, “What?”

“I was in Elysium. Heaven is how they say it now, is it?”

“You have been in—”

“Where else? I’d died.”

Slowly he turned and stared at her. Her face was so damned honest, so composed and—almost ordinary. “All right, Jula. OK. Tell me about—heaven.”

“But I don’t remember,” she said. She smiled. (Since that first time, she had begun to smile on occasion. Generally it would have cheered him. He wanted, now, to shake her.)

“If you don’t remember, lady, how the hell do you know?”

“Because I’ve been there, and the other places.”

“Other? No, I don’t buy this. You don’t
remember
anything else because there’s nothing out there. You went and were nowhere. Sorry.”

“Flayd,” she said, “have you never hoped for life to go on beyond this? For the
freedom
of it?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you hope?” she asked.

“I’m a coward, I guess. Can’t face personal obliteration. Like most of us.”

“No,” she said, “I mean, how do you know
how
to hope—for anything else? Fear doesn’t give hope. Fear takes hope away.”

“OK. How did I think to hope. We’ve all been told, over and over. The great blue yonder. Sure we have.”

“Who told you?”

“Priests, preachers. All the teachers they claim have lived—Christ, Mohammed, Buddha. The whole list.”

“And why did they tell it to you?”

“To manipulate—to help—who knows? Because they made it up, a nice fairy story. Or they just plain hoped for it themselves.”

“How,” she said, “did they know to make it up, or to
hope for it? How could they—
imagine
it—unless somehow it was there and they knew? Without that—such a thing—isn’t to
be
imagined.”

“Imagination is the word.”

“How can you even know to imagine,” she said quietly, “something of which you have no knowledge
at all
?”

“Riddles. We’re going round in circles.”

“Flayd, I can’t remember—that other place—because while we exist in flesh—the
flesh
of us doesn’t go there. Things here, even if we forget them, the brain memorizes everything it experienced. I’ve heard you say this. But how can the brain memorize a place it’s never been?”

Flayd heard himself breathe. “Jula. Oh lord.” He took hold of his mind. “Unrecorded data,” he said.

She said, “It’s like these languages they taught me. Until I learned them, I couldn’t make words in these languages.”

“Heaven is a language we forget how to speak,” he said, dreamily.

“And yet, something remains. The idea that Elysium is there. I can recollect,” she said, “the passage into death … It wasn’t empty, only dark, like the River they told me of—perhaps that’s why they thought it was a river. But it wasn’t a river. The light of the pyre faded behind me, and something else began—but then I was
free
. Only that freed part remembers. But it uses images I can’t see, words I don’t understand.”

Flayd thought of the teachers and saviors, of the gods. He thought of Rose and how she had
known
. And of Alicia who hadn’t. Alicia and her fear. And of a dark river that became something else, and Alicia was free, and speaking another language.

And then he took a firmer grip on his heart or mind
or, God knew, his soul. He said, “Listen to me. Don’t say any of this to any of them—Leon, that crowd. They’d never let you out of jail, even this little distance. They’d want to test you, find out a whole lot more.” And thought,
But they’ll be watching, listening in, somehow
.

“They had no interest in that,” she said. “They didn’t think of it perhaps. Only you ever asked me anything like that.”

A black and white horse, streamlined and dangerous, ran up the meadow—was it like Picaro?

“Tell me this,” Flayd said, “if you knew all this, why did you fight to stay alive in their arena? Why did you bother?”

“That’s why we come here,” she said, “to live. So we must fight to do it.”

She had been calling him Flayd. Had she done that before? She wasn’t the same as she had been. Or perhaps, rather than change, she’d simply become
more
herself.

The religious beliefs of ancient peoples—unshakable? “Jula, if—”

She interrupted him. She had
never
done
that
before. Maybe never to anyone, in her slave life.

“The man called Chossi is walking along the path toward us.”

F
ROM WHERE HE LAY
, he could see it moving about. He wondered how it had got in, but the windows at the Ca’Marrone were sometimes undone, in old-fashioned style, by the rooms’ human cleaners.

A magpie.

It must be real. Picaro thought he had seen one already somewhere else in the City.

Like Shaachen’s bird, called Beloved, or Darling, so the disc had told him when he was a child.

Darling—
Caro
.

It was a big bird, with a round solid body tapering to a long black tail that, when the light caught it, glinted with smoky green, just as the sides of the white and black wings sheened blue. Its head was all black, as if hooded, the beak black, and the eyes pale, so he remembered Coal’s jackdaw. It strutted, arrogant and unsafe, across the floor.

Picaro sat up.

(How late was it?)

He could call the room service that Brown’s supplied, ask them to catch the bird and release it back into the City.

Picaro had wanted a magpie, once, as a child.

And the magpie could write?

The murmur of his father’s voice,
Says so … but you can’t have one … magpie’s a wild bird
.

And her. Her voice—
I put shadow on you, Magpie
.

The signal went in the outer door.

At the noise, the bird spread its fans of wings and flew up through the high-ceilinged room.

Picaro thought it would be Flayd at the door. Not the Roman girl, surely not her. India?

He sat on the side of the ornate canopied bed, looking into space, considering whether to admit the insistent (still signalling) visitor. And then the door was opened. And in walked the UAS clerk, Chossi.

“I knocked,” said Chossi, uncaringly.

“So you did. But I didn’t let you in.”

“Oh, I have a key.”

“I thought that must be the case.”

Chossi scowled. His nose had entirely recovered from the blow Picaro had given it, but not his demeanor. “Leonillo sent me. I’m to give you this.”

Chossi came forward and threw a thick late-Victorian-type envelope, thinly lettered in gold, written over apparently by hand, on Picaro’s bed. Picaro left it there.

“Better open it.”

“Whatever it is, I’m not interested.”

“It’s an invitation,” said Chossi. “I’ve already hand-delivered several others, one to your friend here.”

“I have no friends here.”

“The fat archaeologist who thinks he’s so unusual. Sin Flayd.”

Picaro did nothing. Chossi stamped from one foot to the other, urgent for response. “Tonight,” Chossi said.

Picaro got up and walked across to the bathroom. He stood by the bowl, urinating, as Chossi fidgeted in the doorway. When Picaro turned to the basin, “I say
invitation,” said Chossi, “you are
requested
to be there. A gala occasion. The Orpheo Palazzo—the auditorium seats six thousand people, even allowing for the security equipment. Many more persons have been issued tickets for the square outside.”

Picaro shut off the faucet.

“What are you talking about?”

He already knew, and a sound began in his ears. It was far away. Unrecognizable, unspeakable.

“The great musician, del Nero, is to perform some of his works. That is, works written
since
his rebodiment. It should be worth an hour of your precious time. Of course, the general public aren’t aware of what he is—they believe he’s some composer who has chosen the medium of the 1700s to express his genius. None of them know what a crucial affair this is to be. The security, of course,” officiously chatty, Chossi letting go of some of his resentment now that Picaro was his audience, “the administration—we’ve had to work all nights. Indeed, ever since we were told. There’s never been anything like this. What will the music be? Astounding? Boring? What a magnificent gamble. Personally, I believe any health problems are now sorted out, and the screening is only provisional. The most up-to-date medical scans reveal nothing wrong with him. Is he a carrier? I doubt it. None of the rest of us has displayed the slightest symptom, even those who spent the most time in his vicinity. No one’s even sneezed. They were unlucky. Jenefra. The others. Whatever it was, they took the full force of it and now it’s over.”

Picaro came at Chossi suddenly. Once again, Chossi hadn’t expected it. Squawking invective, he ran away across the room toward the door.

“Leonillo—” Picaro shouted. But Chossi was through
the door and gone. To the apartment, Picaro said, “Leonillo is—he
saw
—and
that
one—
saw
—what happens—”

Then he in turn had reached the door. Two Victorian men, not UAS, police probably, stood casually just across the passage. One nodded to him.

Picaro went back in and shut the door.

Standing there, something made him look up at the plasterwork around the ceiling, the top of the bed, the carved armadio.

The magpie too had gone, though none of the windows had been opened. Perhaps it had followed Chossi, to peck out his eyes.

A
NGERS HAD BEEN REVERSED
.

“
What?
”

Flayd, a red bull of rage, bulked in the entrance of his rooms, confronting Picaro, (and the idly draped, parasol-bearing policewoman who adorned the top of the stairway.)

“Let me in, Flayd.”

“Why? What the fuck for?”

“
Do it
.”

Flayd gave up. He tramped away, beating his arms on his body. “Be my guest, buddy. Everyone welcome. Just walk all over me. What do I care?”

Picaro glanced about.

This main room was smaller than the one he had been allotted, scattered with pieces of antiquated equipment, books, box-files, discs. At the table the laptop, hot technology beyond many dreams, slender as a wafer, a fey machine crammed with a universe.

“What is the matter?” said Picaro.

“Jula,” said Flayd. He thumped on to a sofa. The
room, designed to oldness, shook. “We were in the Horse Gardens and up slides that prince nonce, Chossi. Time for her to go back to the University, it seems. Back to whatever it is they now want to do with her there.”

Picaro said, “She’ll be safer there.”

“Garbage. Out here had gotten her so she was starting to be a person. She thinks she’s
their
slave. Leon, all that shit-shower. Now she’s back in all that—slavery. And I couldn’t do a fucking thing.”

“Listen, Flayd, where did they invite you?”

“What? Invite me—oh that crap. Their other
protégé
—their musician—what’s he called? Nero—some recital. Yeah, it’d be an education. But not
now
.”

“No, not now. They haven’t told you what happened, at the Shaachen Palace—or have they?”

Flayd’s face cleared, a screen at the activation of some override.

“OK, OK. No. No one tells me a thing. So you do it.”

Picaro told him.

Flayd sat listening. The blank screen lost color, settled, heavy.

“And this was some genetic viral episode, right?”

“No.”

“But—”

“They have no control over it, whatever it is.”

“What do
you
think it is, Picaro? You tell me it killed everyone in the rooms below yours, and worked you over two floors up.”

“One woman survived. So I was told—not by Leonillo’s mob. India seems to have found out. But I don’t know why or how this woman could survive. Like me, maybe, shut enough away—insulated.”

“You know what it is.”

“I—a guess. I may be wrong. It makes no sense. Every sense.”

“Then what
is
it?”

Picaro said, “Just don’t take up their invitation.”

Flayd said, “There are going to be over six thousand human dupes crowded in that hall that do. I know the Orpheo—it’s the biggest concert hall in Venus.”

“Not limited to six thousand people.”

“You’re saying it’ll spread—
how
? This guy is going to be screened off by magna-optecx—
radiation
can’t get through that.”

“I know.”

“Then—”

“The recital is part of their experiment, Flayd. It is a
conspiracy
, Flayd. And we’re all just laboratory material. No one can intervene. The police are already in position everywhere. Hadn’t you noticed? And even they don’t know what they’re up for. Anyone’s only chance is to avoid it. Pretend you’re ill, drunk, stupid. Stay put.”

“You have to have made a mistake. If not—all I gotta do is to
stop
it.”

Picaro smiled. It was the old smile. Flayd no longer meant a thing, only someone to be polite to, from another planet. Picaro walked out.

Alone, Flayd paced. The new rage was warming, almost comforting in a foul and deranged way.

While he did this, he had no notion that Picaro was talking to the police, now three of them, hanging about on the landing. Flayd did not know Picaro was suggesting to them that Flayd might have plans to upstage the recital the University had arranged at the Orpheo. Flayd, with his crazy paranoia about conspiracies. When the policewoman asked Picaro, easy, “And are you invited, Sin? Yes? Will you attend?” Picaro said, “I play music. I’ll be there.”

A little later, when Flayd (unknowing of all this) marched to his door, mind made up, he discovered it refused to give. Though it was Victorian in several aspects, it still contained CX, and the CX was fixed. Presently a call came through to him, assuring Flayd that the “fault” in the door had registered on the main system and would soon be seen to. And much later, another call, just the same, the same as the stuck door was the same.

By then, Picaro was back in his own apartment. He had begun to drink the alcohol left there for him and to eat some of the snacks. Sometimes he considered Simoon, Simoon the sibyl.
Your appointment
she said, over and over, in the back of his mind, where she sat, reeking of sulphur, in her Dowi-chair, with her neck broken and her lemon-slice eyes.
Your appointment, baby, tonight
.

S
HE HAD SEEN TOMBS BEFORE
. Along the Graculan Way, for one. But also that time in Rome, when they had taken her down under the temple on the hill. That had been partly a columbarium, a dovecote of death, the boxes and vases of ashes arranged in their pigeonholes. But also great marble edifices were set in the walls, porticoes wreathed in cut stone, and by paint, with stone faces looking calmly on, or the gorgon’s mask set there to protect them. The area was part of a catacomb, one of many. A mystic, mysterious, and occult vault.

Who had they been, the two who brought her there? She thought now, perhaps, she knew. She was left in their house a little while, before the wagon bore her away from Rome for ever. The house with the peacock in the courtyard, which had frightened her so. But the woman had taken her hand and said, gently, in a Latin which, then, she scarcely understood, “Nothing to harm
you, little girl. See how he spreads his beautiful tail. He is the symbol of the Risen One.”

And then they had told her they dared not set her free, not from her mortal chains. But they would try to free her in another way.

And so, almost four years old, she had gone down into the stony underworld, and the old man had appeared. His skin was brown with age, and his hair clear white as the garment he wore. His color scheme had an extraordinary clarity. His eyes were shut because he was blind, yet he seemed to see. And then there had been a trickling of torchlit water poured over her, and his mild old hand, resting on her head. And he said above her, “She is yours.” But he was not giving her, she now saw, to the couple who had brought her, nor to Rome. It was to another one.

This tomb, amyway, under the University Building in domed-in Venus, was not really like the patrician tombs of her past.

This tomb was her own.

In addition to that, it could not be physically touched.

The most important master here, Leon, had told Jula, when he informed her she should visit this viewing room, and that what she would see there would be a reconstruction, a CAVE, or CX-Assisted Virtual Environment. It would appear three-dimensional from every side or angle, might be walked around, into and through, and anything there that she wished to examine would be fully displayed for her. But it was not real. The real tomb, Leonillo had said, was on the mainland, rebuilt in the Roman Museum.

All the while he spoke to her of her own burial place, explaining its technology, advising her to see it as
if conferring a special, and much-wanted favor, she sat impassive.

The facts of the technology were meaningless to her, therefore redundant. Otherwise, she knew that she was studied. Flayd had informed her of this, confirming anyway her own impressions. (As a slave before she had only been watched.) She knew too that she must do as she was told. Even after Flayd’s instruction in her own autonomy, she retained her credo that resistance to the unavoidable was as foolish and wasteful as not to resist what might be overcome.

And so she was here. Another tourist, she stood and read of her victories, inscribed on the tomb-side, and of her last fight, and the lie of how she had died. The engraved motto,
Even the gods, who grant glory, cannot hold back death
, left her unmoved. It was a truism.

Jula spent an hour inside the tomb, or its CAVE. She was rather interested to see what had been buried with her—the honors that had been shown her. What had been deemed necessary.

At one point, she puzzled over the burned remains of her own body. Fragments of charred bone were revealed to her, when she requested it, lying there spread out among the coins and lamps, and Jula leaned down to see. If they had been tactile, she would have picked them up, these pieces of herself.

Those who observed her, the advanced machines that monitored her and her reactions, and stopped short, just barely, of being able to read her mind—perhaps decided she was blasé about her own former death, since she had been brought back alive. But if she was
blasé
, and maybe she was not, it came from the knowledge that had grown in her. This was the battleground,
always
you came back.