Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (4 page)

P
ICARO RAISED HIS LONG-FINGERED
, calloused hand, and held it up to block out the flickering light of the CX words, which seemed engraved across the window. But they were fading anyway now, mechanically aware they had been seen.

A weather alert. Weather was controled indome, as in many places elsewhere above. Only here,
weather
was really superfluous, unneeded—employed for amusement, as the “literature” had said. Some days there were high seas in the lagoon and the canals foamed and—not tidal, but appearing to be—the waters flooded over by a handful of atmospheric centimeters, quite unreminiscent of the floods of long ago. Other days there were dramatic clouds, and downpours, which helped sluice the buildings. Nothing rough lasted long. The storm today was to take a full three hours, a (safe) spectacle that people would go out on their balconies, out to the hilly Equus Gardens and up the Torre dell’ Angelo of the Primo, to admire.

Behind the blackness of his hand, the letters vanished. Only the pane of perfect daylight remained.

Picaro lay staring a moment,
seeing
his hand, as children and mystics sometimes did, a representative of his body—familiar but abruptly alien. Was it his? Was this body lying supine on the sheet—also his? Debatable.

The pain behind his eyes though, that decidedly
was
his.

He hadn’t drunk like that, not for seven months. How quickly you forgot.

Feeling peeled and toxic, he left the bed, and walked into the apartment’s lavish and anachronistic bathroom.

When he came back, the window was still clear. It was now the wristecx that was twittering from the outer rooms.

Flayd? Maybe not. Flayd’s state should be worse than Picaro’s …

Picaro went and stood on the terracotta floor, looking at the squeaking wristecx. Which didn’t give up.

“Yes.”

“Sin Picaro, we have your call number from the University Coder. We wonder if you would be so kind as to visit us, at your convenience, in an hour’s time.”

“That isn’t convenient.”

“Very well. Two hours.”

“Why?” he said. (How many times had he asked that yesterday? It was becoming the Eternal Question.) He touched the wristecx to get the caller’s code and identity. It was indome—but now these were the only calls possible, according to Flayd. The locale was a building on the Blessed Maria Canal, behind the Primo. The University itself? The caller was a fussily titled S’in Chossi, of the UAS—University Auxillary Staff.

“We will of course explain fully. We can expect you then, Sin Picaro?”

“Not until I know what you want.”

“It’s routine administration, I regret, sin.”

“I never heard of it.”

“In your case, sin.”

“Why my case?”

“Your PBS.”

“That’s been cleared,” said Picaro. His heart was suddenly knocking loudly against his aching brain. “Before and when I arrived.”

“No, no, sin. The PBS is fine. But there’s a connection we wish to verify.”

The voice was nearly mechanical. They so often were. And like a machine, which these lesser bureaucrats had been trained, presumably, to mimic—in order the better to reassure and coerce—you couldn’t get much out of them, only what they were programmed to let you have—it was useless to try.

But—bloodline—
connection
? Then Flayd had been quite right?

Picaro said softly, clearly, “My ancestors are Furiano and Eurydiche. That’s all I have. Minor citizens during the early eighteenth century.”

“I regret, sin, we can’t deal with this via your call facility. You’ll understand, we need to speak to you in person.”

“No.”

Regardless, the “machine” said, “That’s fine, sin. We will send a boat for you at 12 VV.”

“Perhaps I won’t be around.” Picaro cut the signal.

(H
E STOOD IN FRONT OF
the recx mirror, ornately gilt-framed and spotted as if with age.

Those ancestors, whoever they’d been—Furian,
Cloudio—they sure as hell had not looked like him. White guys. African-Italian Picaro, like one third of the present population of Europe—just as one third of Africa was European.

The black eyes looked back at him. The long white braids in the long black dreads, stared too. For live shows, he had worn black and white. He had known the story of the magpie since he was six, and his father had received the first notification of PBS, with its attached bookdisc. Picaro remembered how his father, puzzled, turned them over— “What am I supposed to do with this? What they want?” There was not, in those days, any invite to anyone to visit Venus in her preservation jar. She was still being rebuilt, and all tourism was strictly limited.

The magpie, though, caught Picaro’s imagination. It had belonged to the alchemist Shaachen. It could tell the time to the minute, and could write in ink, with its black beak. But what had the magpie been to Furian and Eurydiche? That the little bookdisc didn’t tell.

“Bird of the Virgo Maria,” said Picaro’s father, as they sat out on the high hot roof above that other city, the city where Picaro was born. They were drinking iced melon tea, and below the traffic roared and plunged in dust and smoke, like a drove of demonic cattle. It was always worse after 5
P.M
.—17 hours. The period when the last traffic for the day was allowed to run, before the nighttime prohibition on anything but emergency vehicles, which came on at 19—7
P.M
. And everyone wanted to get somewhere.

Picaro, thinking back to his father’s voice, heard it still above that driven rumble from the streets.

“But the magpie could
write
?”

“Says so here.” And then the man’s still face, turning towards him. “But you can’t have one, son. They wouldn’t allow it. Magpie’s a wild bird.”

And there had been a dream he had, the child then, of seven magpies flying, black-white-black—like something from a picture by Escher. But by now the actual image of the dream was gone, the memory remained only as words. And even the face of Picaro’s father had faded, returning solely in abrupt, surprising dazzles of recollection. He had been dead nearly sixteen years.)

P
ERHAPS HE WOULDN’T BE
around, but when the UAS boat came, he was standing by the watersteps, by the green iron Neptune.

Not a wanderer. A stouter, Victorian boat, with a canopy to keep off the sunless heat of the sky. An official, also in Victorian dress, (a Victorian clerk) welcomed him aboard: Chossi.

“A short trip. We are permitted to use engines, you understand.”

They took off fairly rapidly, leaving a curling wake in the shiny, thick-clean water.

“There, do you see? The roofs of Santa Lala—and just there—”

“What’s this about?”

“Routine at this stage, sin. Nothing to worry you.”

Another man ran the boat, steering it through the canals and out into the sky-flamed sheet of the lagoon.

A funeral cortège was crossing the water, a tourist display only, for there was no longer any Isle of the Dead. The black angels and black, horse-headed prows eased between sparkling plates of lagoon and air, and mourners from the fifteen and 1600s posed in their black and gold. From windows and terraces and other boats, came the tiny soft blinks of a hundred camerecxi.

There was attractive merchant shipping along the
quays to either side of the Primo Square, tall sails the color of tortoiseshell or iced Campari.

The Victorian boat, chugging now in keeping with its pretend-antiquity, waddled in the opposite direction and into the narrow Blessed Maria Canal. The University had not first been built quite where it was today. But it looked enough of a fixture. Gray stone levels, carven pilasters, and windows with bottle-glassed, myopic panes. They drew in under a leaning, fringed acacia whose fronds almost touched the water. Chossi took Picaro in under an arch roped with ghost-blue wisteria, up carefully cracked steps, and into a long, low-ceilinged corridor.

The shadows here by day—lacking a directional sun to cast them—were curiously luminous, even inside.

Like the boat, bottom heavy, Chossi waddled before Picaro.

The room had gilding.

The man in the chair was dressed later than his clerk—from 1906, perhaps, something like that. You did not often see so recent an era represented now.

He rose and held out his manicured hand to grasp Picaro’s. “Please sit, Sin Picaro.”

Picaro, sitting.

“I believe, Sin Picaro, you know why you’re here.”

“Do I?”

“I believe, Sin Picaro, Sin Flayd let fall something about a scientific venture which has gone on here, over the past two years.”

“Did he?”

“Let’s not be too playful,” said the 1906 man. He smiled to reassure he was still Picaro’s friend.

“Then don’t,” said Picaro.

“It isn’t,” the man said, “as Sin Flayd feared, that
CX vigilance was in operation during your conversations. But it was quite obvious he would tell you. He’s done nothing wrong. Flayd is always suspicious … Nothing can upset what has been achieved. Simply, perhaps, he’s saved us all a little time. But only that, of course, if you will concede you know.”

“I forget. I was pissed out of my skull.”

“Very well.” The 1906 man shrugged. He had a long sallow face.

Using its thin mouth, the long face told Picaro quickly and deftly much of what Flayd had already told him last night. At least, the things to do with the one, (the
dead
one) named Cloudio del Nero.

“We do think he, not the man Furiano, is your true bloodline antecedent. Of course, the genetic comparatives aren’t quite conclusive. At a distance of centuries they rarely are, despite the propaganda. But even so. There are close similarities—the female ancestress remains the same, however, Eurydiche. I hope you’re not offended by this change in circumstance.”

“Furian wasn’t supposed to be my father.”

“Naturally not. But some people do take these matters very earnestly. Now, we have a great favor to ask of you, Sin Picaro. A great favor which will also be, for you, a great favor bestowed on you, and, I trust, an exciting, astonishing event.”

T
HERE WAS AN ELEVATOR
. It was Victorian, but not in its mechanism. They descended into the subsurface warren beneath the University. And so came to another room.

The room was full of sunlight, and the sunlight appeared as entirely real as it did above in the City, and was equally false.

This
man sat in a carved chair, before a window that looked out on eighteenth-century palaces lining a long canal—a virtuality without recx. But a virtuality so superlative that breezes blew up from it. And they smelled, if only faintly, of an earlier time, fetid with summer water.

He wore, this man, pale, elegant silk clothes fashionable among the rich in 1701. There were rings on his fingers.

He had long, dark hair. His eyes were dark, and his face pale. Sitting so stilly, it was all—he, the room, the view—a painting.

Then he turned his head and saw them, and he rose graciously to his feet—and he smiled the smile. That was, he smiled as Picaro did, for the decent, irrelevant strangers who passed like shadows through his life.

“Signorissimo del Nero,” said the 1906 man, bowing, “may I present to you Signore Picaro, the musician?”

A
S PROMISED, THE STORM
began at 15
VV
.

Picaro watched it, from a terrace in the Equus Gardens.

He was surrounded by tourists.

“Ooh!” they shrieked, as the show intensified.

Pink sudden flutters of light spasmed through the cloud banks, slender forks slit the dark masses of a cumulus that resembled the smoke from volcanoes. Then the sky went white. A laser-web of fires surged from the horizon’s hem to the treed summits of the park, and beyond. Every tower and dome of Venus became a cutout of bleached paper. A rogue silver bolt hit the apex of the Primo’s Angel Tower. Though harmless, it did not
look it. Then the thunder bellowed, and the angry roaring of the park lions was silenced. A wind blew, smelling of ozone and electricity.

Everywhere people stood, watching.

Beside Picaro, Cora, holding fast to his arm, gazed in bacchic ecstasy at the sky.

He had found the two young women—or they had found him—as he entered the Gardens. They were today in eighteenth-century garb, (he seemed the only one in Venus in contemporary clothes) their dark hair powdered, and each wearing, though it was not either of the carnival times, sequinned half-masks. Picaro had looked at them, and when they turned toward him, held out his hands to both.

India did not speak. Cora did not say much. India was not demonstrative. Cora snuggled close, and never moved further away than the length of their arms.

He had not meant to annex them, but they were always there.

As he too watched the storm display, and the Gardens rocked as if to the wildest music and drums, he would not think about the man he had met in the subsurface room.

In any case, Picaro had not been given very long with him. The dialogue had been stilted, guided by the UAS personnel—the 1906 man and two others—who had taken Picaro down.

It hadn’t been an interesting conversation, either. Or productive. Or—only once. Picaro had said little. And the man—del Nero—also little. He spoke with the accent of a previous time, and in somehow different phrases, but any accomplished actor who had studied del Nero’s century could surely have managed that. Perhaps Cloudio del Nero then, was as much a fake as all the rest of it. And if he
was
real, he was of course rebuilt, like the City, and not as he had been. Not the same.

For God’s sake—what did he think, behind that gracious and polished veneer? How did he think he was here? That there had been some mistake—he’d merely been unconscious a moment from drowning (they said he had died partly, too, of that) and then come to his senses and now was healthy, and well—