Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (8 page)

T
HERE WAS A LIGHT MIST
that morning, which smoothed the water and the buildings with melted pearl. In the mist perished the last traces of a lingering false dawn. The City was dreamlike, and in its dreaminess more convincingly real than ever. So it must have looked uncountable mornings in the past, when it was fully actual and stood above the sea. Truth and Time had been an antique allegory of this place, depicted over and over in sculpture and painting. But the facsimile had become Truth, and Time had stopped. And through the resulting legacy, the boat slid like a stiletto.

As Venus woke (it was very early, not yet seven) images, sudden views, mobile tableaux containing moving human beings, leapt against Picaro’s eyes. He saw them with an abnormal acuity, as if to make up for lost visual opportunities: heaps of golden oranges and apricots on stalls along the banks; green melons on a pale violet wall of some shadow palace, gothic, with thin, pointed arches; traceried balconies that seemed made of lace; hanging lanterns, catching the lit sky. Flotillas of masonry came always drifting towards them. The dagger of boat slit purely through. Under arcades that had been raised (once) in the 1300s, under the galleries of renaissance palazzos. Churches of marble and domes covered
in silver foil floated on thin lines of light. Tenements towered up on rotting green stems which could never, now, rot, and unfurled a bunting of colored washing between the wisteria.

Fishing boats passed them on the surface of the lagoon. The sailors hailed each other through the mist, coral sails rigged as if on bent bows. In a great open space before the church of Maria Domina (an indigo box decorated with Byzantine goldwork from the ancient East), a puppet-show had begun. Figures danced on their little stage, from the Skilful Comedy. They looked living and animate, as the entranced crowd perhaps no longer did.

Picaro saw … glimpses of streets funneling through the blocks of houses, salad-green gardens that spilled over walls. Every alley, every canal, had its pet Virgin Maria, or its guarding Neptune. And the banners among the roofs were mingling with spires and conical chimney pots, flags painted with the City’s Zodians, the Fishes, the Scorpion, the Crab.

All this, Picaro saw, just as he heard the soundtrack of the City, its harmony and discords.

Otherwise, in their boat, no one spoke, or hardly at all. Dividing the silk water between the banks of brickwork, stone and mist, they might have been sailing down the Styx, astonished and agog at the sights of the underworld. And Picaro thought that now Venus was, after all, a kind of Hades, for she lay under the sea, as the Greek and Roman hell had lain under the earth.

Del Nero was seated across from Picaro.

Now and then, against his own will, Picaro looked at him. And then, Picaro saw this: the City reflected in the looking-glass eyes of the great musician. And could not see, any more,
into
the eyes.

Only now and then some little murmur from the UAS people. Was everyone comfortable? (Incredible notion.) Would they care for this or that? (Yes, children taken on an outing, spoiled kids who might have anything they wanted.) Cora liking to go over to a bakery, and sweet cakes being handed down, still hot and sticky—even Cloudio taking a bite, another, smiling—and later there were almonds dipped in caramel.

In backwaters, where the shade of palaces dropped ink-purple in the wafered jade of the canals, noticing the phantoms of people behind thick-eyed windows, or white hands opening a pair of crimson shutters bright as wings.

Sometimes Picaro thought he should speak after all, though not to was so restful—to give in, to accept—restful. But besides he couldn’t be bothered, hadn’t the energy, lulled and mesmerized by all of this, reflecting in the water and in the eyes of a dead man who was alive.

So the morning became late, and became noon, and they left the boat, walked across the Primo Square, ate a meal in the Greek Room of Phiarello’s, (where a table had been booked) under the murals of nymphs. It was food partly from the 1700s. There were pancakes, dumplings, no potatoes, and dishes of chocolated fruits. They drank an old red wine, then champagne. All of them drank this, including the four UAS. They were such a happy little party, Cora bubbling away, flirting with everyone, the UAS woman—Jenefra?—telling some story, as if she were only another careless member of their kind, something about her studies and misfortunes in some other city, when she was sixteen. (See, I was sixteen once, and made mistakes, just like you were and have.)

What did the dead man say.

Had he said anything?

His slender hands, almost feminine, yet steely strong, delicate on the fine frosted glasses, the napery. You couldn’t see through his hands. But then, you couldn’t see through his eyes. There was nothing in his eyes. That was, Nothing. And the Nothing had soaked outward, forming a sort of phosphorescent shine. And so you saw that.

A Victorian brass band was playing in the square after lunch.

“I love Picaro’s music,” said Cora.

“Oh yes,” said one of the UAS men, “the Africarium—I’ve always admired that—”

Picaro heard them as if from beyond an egg of glass, a
dome
with which he had surrounded himself.

Why was that?

Neurasthenia perhaps.

Or the wine. Or something, something …

After the sociable meal they went, the happy party, to see the reconstructed Rivoalto, no longer really islanded. They rode in their boat under the Bridge of Lies, and cried out lying things, (had Picaro too? Del Nero?) and Cora cried out, “I
hate
Picaro—loathe his music!” And laughed. And beyond the Liar’s Bridge, other bridges, bridge on bridge, reflections again, of each, and each also making a perfect circle with its canal self, until the boat shattered them all in fragments. The mist was gone. The City was vibrant, no longer pearl, hard-cut opal.

In the afternoon, the Palace of the Ducemae lifted its patterned walls for their inspection, its pillars ending upward in keylike traceries. It had courtyards like books of gold and gardens full of singing birds. Was del Nero to be taken to visit the palace? He had been there, presumably, off and on, when he lived. But they didn’t pause. Instead, there was another palace they went to, with a ceiling ten meters high. In its center a void of sunny sky
(painted) filled by winged figures, in turn surrounded by painted statuary and painted mauve vases of flowers. A chandelier hung down, every prism coiled by flowers of stained glass. Beneath that there were little colored-in creatures of plaster, hares and ducks, parrots and tortoises. They too looked real, like the painted sculpture, the flowers. Venus then had always been this way. Venus, who showed Time and Truth fondling each other, an old man and a lush young woman—which perhaps made Truth a whore after all. Venus, which had paintings of the goddess Venus herself, holding up her mirror. Venus, which displayed the Apocryphal Lion of the City, in cream stone, lying down, and upright, and high among the roofs on backdrops of Heaven—blue and sunburst stars and wheels of the Zodiac, or else presented the Lion with a sword in one paw, declaring on the carved banner that uncoiled from its lips:
BEHOLD ME, THE MIGHTY LION NAMED MARCUS. WHOEVER RESISTS ME I WILL BRING LOW
. And in the Setapassa—the market of silks—was a column stolen from Egypt, crowned by a black basalt sphinx, and nearby another one, dredged up from the lagoons, crowned by a sphinx that was white.

Picaro found himself then standing with Cloudio del Nero in the late afternoon, under the flaming gold dome inside the Primo.

They stood side by side, gazing up, and the four UAS were far off, and Cora had gone with them. How had they got here, Picaro and del Nero? As if a
scene
had been
changed
—even time—for hadn’t they come here this morning?

The basilica was filled by people, but also by carvings, by
painted
crowds. By columns of marble and porphyry and serpentine, inlay of alabaster, sardonic agate and jaspers looted from the East. Christ stood among
seven flames to open the seven seals of world destruction, against mosaics of goldleaf in molten vitreous—and a jeweled vine that represented his own Mystery. While below circled four colored horses.

Elsewhere,
KARITAS
read the inlaid words, (Love) and
SPES
(Hope) and
MISERICORDIA
(Mercy). As if these things existed. But they were in Venus, City of Stopped Time and Truth-the-Whore, who stole and lied and brought low—and here anyway rode the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

“This is a city of the damned,” softly said Picaro, taken aback to hear himself talk, and by what he said.

“Always it was,” said the other. The other one, who had been dead.

“So, tell me about damnation,” Picaro said.

Up there, Christ, a beautiful white man, Lord of Kindness, unleashing the last annihilation on mankind. (The horses seemed to move.)

Del Nero now didn’t speak.

Picaro said, “How do you feel about it, what’s been done to you?”

And then he found too he no longer looked at the Christ but at Cloudio del Nero, and the musician looked back at him, and there was a dazzle on his eyes now, so Picaro could not keep his own eyes on them. He reached out, the dead man, and placed his hand gently on Picaro’s shoulder.

The touch felt at first warm, and then, abruptly, scalding hot. Picaro did not flinch aside or shove him off. He waited there, thinking about the weightless fiery pressure of the hand.

“Soon there’ll be no more to say,” said del Nero. His voice was not as it had been. Its
music
was different. Picaro was unsure how or in what way.

“Do you remember?” Picaro said, “anything?
Anything?
”

The hand on his shoulder was now so hot it burned him like frostbite.

Cloudio said, “I am beginning to remember. Inside my mind, it was like the mist this morning. But it begins to clear.”

Then the hand lifted from him and a pain went through Picaro’s arm, all of it, across his chest, seeming to hit his heart. And then that vanished, there was no pain, no heat or cold. Picaro found that he stared upward again, into the dome, reading over and over a line of Latin he could not understand.

And the UAS woman was there, and she was saying something about the way the westering sunlight (that was what she said, “the westering sunlight”) slanted across into the Primo, and the whole structure looked as if it might suddenly fly upwards on the wings of an angel.

Picaro thought,
He
does this. He makes us high as kites. Do they know
they
are now part of their own experiment?

But Cora was there then too, taking Picaro’s hand.

It seemed there was to be another treat for the happy party. Drinks somewhere in the City, and then back to the Palazzo Shaachen. An informal concert—just between friends, for they were all friends, and it had been a lovely summer’s day, and sunset was still before them.

A
ND THE SUNSET WAS
, of course, spectacular. Picaro watched it from his balcony, the whole sky in flames beyond and above the City. He watched the wanderers arriving too, five or six of them, along the Alchimia
Canal, each with about five occupants. Who got out wearing the bright festive clothes of many eras, and streamed in at the door of the Shaachen Palace. Going to the party downstairs.

Wasn’t he tempted? Cora had asked him that, persuasive, adorable Cora, sweeter than almonds dipped in caramel.

But he had detached himself relatively easily from the University people—they were high enough, they didn’t seem to bother now if this one subject of their study escaped them for a time. And Cora alone could not make him go.

“But it will be wonderful. He’ll play for us—he’ll play that old song Jenefra said “made a sensation
then
.” (Jenefra—the UAS woman.) “And—he’s been working on something new. And what they say he is—is he truly? Oh Picaro, aren’t you interested?”

“I’m tired.”

She did not accuse him of envy. Perhaps, being Cora, she didn’t even think of that. But she was sorry he would not go downstairs to the party in the apartment of Signorissimo Cloudio.

Probably, in any other season, she would herself have preferred to stay with him. Maybe if he had asked her, but he didn’t want her with him, that was the difficulty. Then again, some chemical sorcery was in progress. Having got away from it, Picaro viewed del Nero’s attractiveness with distaste. It was more than history, more than charisma, or pheromones. What it was Picaro did not care. He wanted only to avoid it, for it had rendered him entranced, a prisoner, in a way only one other creature had ever done.

But even Cloudio wasn’t like her. No one ever was.

When the sun had gone, and no more wanderers
appeared along the waterway, Picaro shut the windows. He turned up the air-conditioning, and the noise-conditioning, though already scarcely any external sound could get in.

The apartment cupboard was filled (by others) to bursting with foods, snacks, wines, aperitifs, and liqeurs. He should ask Flayd over, get Flayd to eat and drink all this.

Picaro drank water until his body seemed to him semi-transparent, just one more of the black, Venusian drinking vessels.

Outside, yellow lamplight fell like chrysanthemums on the canal.

P
ICARO DREAMED OF A LINE
of Latin floating on gold:
Albus adest primo
… and then, knowing that he dreamed, that the harpsichord stood in one of his rooms. It was playing by itself, a ripple of notes too quiet to be heard, yet each note tapped in along his bones, and he became the keyboard.

He wanted it to stop.

How to stop it?

He had to get up, go out, violently slam down the lid of the harpsichord, which would be a priceless actuality, not a recx or reconstruct.

Dreaming and asleep, Picaro left the bed and walked out into the room, which had become far larger. The black cupboard with the skull was here, and he saw that first, the yellowish mask balanced up on its black perch and clung with shadow—a tall emblem of Death.