Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (9 page)

In the dark floor swirled watery reflections. The harpsichord vibrated. The melody was curious, unlike anything ever heard. But it scraped against his viscera, the inside of his brain. It made him nauseous.

He walked forward and the floor gave way and he plunged through into something bottomless and whirling—

And woke, shouting out.

Picaro turned, groaning, on the bed. As he did so, he heard the music in the outer room,
heard
it, strings not the keys of the harpsichord, and a rift of gray sickness opened inside his guts.

He swung off the bed. As he stumbled forward he saw, in the outer room, the Africara, its strings trembling,
sounding
, not in melody but at some weird disturbance of the air, which also he felt in the soles of his feet and the length of his spine. Then he was kneeling blind and deaf by the toilet bowl, vomiting, vomiting, choking and vomiting more, his whole body trying to turn itself inside out and expel him, with the sickness, into the void.

A
ND THE MORNING LIGHT
made a noise, tinkling and smashing all over the bloody floor. But worse than that, the moronic knocking, thumping, the banging of a door, voices calling, feet heavy as the tramp of a mob—

Angry with it. This shaking, this fucking smell, like iodine.

The man he hit on the side of his face skidded backward and crashed against a wall.

“Now—softly, sin. Sin Picaro—can you hear me? Yes, he couldn’t have struck you so hard, Chossi, if he were too bad. Can you sit up? Good,
good
, Picaro—”

He was standing.

He thought of standing in the Primo, staring up into its vaulted upside-down golden cup. His head rang, then cleared, abrupt, as if a shackle of stars had dropped away.

“What is it?”

They had broken in, through the door. That didn’t make sense. Aside from Picaro, they and they alone could undo the door, or even CX-block it. What had gone wrong with the door that it required breaking? And the window—all the windows were shattered—why had they done that?

“Get dressed if you would, Picaro.”

Picaro glanced at him. It was the 1906 man, the one called Leon, or Leonillo. And it was Chossi with a bruised cheek and bleeding nose.

Picaro didn’t move. Not yet. He was enjoying, (strangely?) the feeling of easement—no sickness now, no writhing like a snake through his muscles and intestines. Room quite steady.

“Something happened,” he said.

Leonillo said reasonably, “I’m afraid there’s been a problem with the air and drainage circuits in this building. You’ve been throwing up? Passed out—yes. Poisonous fumes, something CX usually tackles, but this one failed. It should never occur, they tell us, indome.”

“The dome is a hundred percent safe,” said Picaro. “A wanderlier told me.”

“The
dome
is fine. Just this one unlucky building. Get dressed, please. We want you out of here as soon as we can manage, and into medical observation.”

Picaro saw some of the men had on protective visors. Leonillo did not, but kept taking a reading from his wristecx. Noting Picaro’s scrutiny, Leonillo added, “All CX has been turned off here, and the whole structure flooded independently with clean air. Even so, we’ll get going, shall we.”

Picaro dressed.

They waited, the five men in the apartment, then went out with him. In the corridor were others. Below there came the sound of hurrying footsteps, noises reminiscent of the lugging of heavy crates, and voices buzzed, busy as a hive. And there was the whine of the flushing air, oxygenated and over-rich, going to the head like wine.

Outside his room, Picaro realized he had not seen the Africara. Had they also brought it out, another casualty?
But he didn’t care about it. It was no longer his.

Then he started to recall, as if after a year, long ago, the Happy Party in the lower apartment, the chrysanthemum lamps and the song. All those people. Cora.

Picaro grabbed Chossi’s arm. Chossi, stuffing gauze up his leaking nose, thrust him off. Another man pulled Picaro aside.

“What about the others?” Picaro said. He felt nothing, wondered why he had asked.

The man said, “We don’t go that way.”

Picaro took hold of the man and flung him somewhere and there was yelling and cursing; it was funny, like the puppet theater (yesterday?) when the Commedia had been more lifelike than its audience.

Picaro ran. He jumped one by one the three narrow flights of stairs downward, veered into the secondary passageway that would lead him to the other apartment, the one they had given Cloudio del Nero.

The passage was clotted up by people. Picaro moved them out of his way and they careered back swearing. Then a man had a flecx automatic pressed into Picaro’s ribs. Picaro took no notice.

He had halted at the second open, smashed-in doorway, ejected CX spangles littered winking under his feet.

Chossi spoke, as if through a terrible headcold. “Let him see, the bastard. If he wants.”

The pressure of the flecx lifted out of Picaro’s back.

He walked forward slowly, considering idly why he did this, what he was doing. What was the point of it?

There were men and women all over the room, and through doorways in other rooms, stranded on the wide red floor, all dressed up in glamorous costumes, from the junctures of five centuries. Also there was vomit, and
there was blood. Even the red floors did not hide very much.

He looked down into their upturned faces, which stared back at him, eyelids burst open like the doors, as if from the bottom of the lagoon.

Their positions varied slightly. Where the blood had come from them—their mouths, ears, nostrils, other parts of their bodies—also varied. But their eyes were all the same. Surprised—was it that? A question—that was what was in their eyes—was it?

Otherwise the faces were blank as the most obscure, flat carnival masks.

Cloudio was not among the people lying there. Cora was. She lay across a dainty gilded chair. She alone looked still nearly happy, yet also impendingly sad. As if she saw all at once the party had come to an end. She had not bled, she hadn’t been sick. Only her slim right hand, curled deftly about the stem of a cracked goblet, seemed to have been snapped at the wrist, doubtless when she collapsed, and was, doll-like, lying back-to-front.

I
T WAS BREATHTAKINGLY
obvious something was amiss. Something had happened they hadn’t anticipated. And their shifty, bland exteriors nearly amused Flayd, even as he tensely stood there in reception, watching how they changed when they came through and changed again, a second or so too quickly, as they hurried out.

“Yes, Sin Flayd. Please go along to the elevators, as you wish.”

So his bizarre clearance at least hadn’t altered. He was still permitted access. Something loosened a little inside him then. For whatever the panic was, it did not seem to involve her.

He tried again, almost lightheartedly now, with the security people along the corridor, of whom, today, there were only two.

“Keeping you busy.”

“Yes,” they agreed.

“What’s cooking?”

“Excuse me?”

“You seem to have a kind of a flap on.”

“Not at all.”

Ah. Then he’d
imagined
the flurry, the running forms in the distance, the agitated sound of calls coming
in, one on another, and once or twice a voice raised, sounding scared and too shrill.

Out on the canals there had been some traffic diversions, too. CX notices gleaming in the walls reassured the City that a small drainage section had somehow been damaged, there was a little minor flooding, under control naturally, and everything would be normal by 14
VV
. But the wanderlier sucked his lip, shook his head. “Never before, signore, in my experience. We’re clean here. What are things coming to?”

Then, as Flayd drew closer to the University Building, in the slow-as-treacle wanderer, he spotted a thinly disguised emergency crew, the kind he hadn’t
ever
seen in action
inside
Venus’s dome, packing itself on one of the few motorized boats. UAS? He couldn’t be sure.

But what in hell had gone awry? The alarm he felt had driven Flayd into the University fast, and down to Leonillo’s quaint office—vacant and inaccessible—and so finally towards the girl, his “gladiatrix”—and: no, no, Sin Flayd. Everything is fine. I will just check for you, whether you can ride straight down. And in the background, someone shouting, “
Close
the area off! Do you hear? Keep that area
closed!
”

It was a small toxic flood. That was all. Happened every hour somewhere or other up top. He was paranoid, he knew that. It had no bearing on any of
this
. On her.

The elevator reached the Roman level, and Flayd got out.

He halted, astounded.

The place had altered.

It looked—medieval, perhaps, or like something from the Age they still called Dark. Yawning pale blanks of walls, squat pillars, some lingering Roman elements, leftovers. They were bringing her up to date?

Flayd strode through the recx movie set and found a lawn where the courtyard had been. All this was more a sort of cloister now, a sheet of apparently scythed turf, with little flowers, and a basil flowering white in a tub. No more Samian pot.

Then he got the other shock. A woman came out between the pillars across the way, dressed in a dark ruby-red dress of around the 1490s, high-waisted, with heavy embroidery. There was a gold net over her hair, which was ruby like the dress, and short. She had gold lion earrings.

“Jula—”

She raised her eyes. Lowered them to his upper lip. That at least, goddamn it, hadn’t altered.

W
HAT HAD IT EVER BEEN
for her but the life of a slave, where nothing at all was in her power, nor ever could be, where chaos was everywhere about her, her only
constant
being discontinuity. Her childhood had been severed, and never resumed. She was brought to Italy, to Rome, then north to the Roman town behind the sea lagoons, where the Eagles’ Castellum stood, and the amphitheater. She was taught to be what she was intended to be, a clever animal that fought. She was offered the hope of survival through fighting. And about this rigid post the plant of her existence twined. The only say she had in anything was her right to try to live. Not everyone had even that.

So, waking under the blue ceiling, the man asking her in his peculiar Latin if she could say her own name, and finding she could not speak—or move—a state which had persisted several days—Jula was deeply afraid. But, she knew fear well. There had always been fear. It was the spur to endurance. A friend.

And this—this now? This place, the villa or school that looked so awkward and strange—these persons in their extraordinary garments—she was nearly indifferent. Her earliest memories had been of places incredible and architecture unrecognizable, and people in outlandish garb who could or would not speak her tongue, so she had to learn theirs, and learn it under beatings. She had immediately and always to do what they wanted. She was their property. And this,
now
, therefore—was precisely the same.

Thus she knew it all. She had died. They told her—she had realized before that. She knew of death—had never thought of it as an end of
being
, only another metamorphosis. And then, reborn into physical life again, it was to her only the same life, the one she had had from the age of four. Although, like the people in it, it wore eccentric apparel.

At least this time they did not threaten her with a stick to make her get their language. No, they had an uncanny method, playing words and phrases, as they explained, while she slept. And when she learned swiftly (she had always been good at that) they were pleased with her. To her, this method was almost familiar, being a kind of sorcery. She had, in her first life, seen around her constantly spells and magical rites, which apparently worked. Even the gods must be approached via a type of magic, which was chant and prayer, and the making of offerings and promises, this for that, that for this. Accordingly, the murmur of the little pearls in her ears as she slept, sometimes half-noticed in dreams, was
usual
, though in unusual form.

She saw quickly her superiors were greatly advanced. She did not equate this with cleverness on their part, only with dominion. (As she had in Stagna Maris.)

She expected only upheaval among these rulers, as always. And that they did not seem to want her to fight in public did not disillusion her—for she sensed they
would
want this, or why else did they present the opportunity of practice for her skills, and why else did they watch her—not only in the flesh, but by some other (also uncanny) means they now possessed.

When the unconvincing villa or school changed its appearance, Jula was not vastly amazed, or interested.

Then, that morning, they brought the new clothes, and left them there for her to choose.

None of these clothes looked accustomed to her, except that she had seen some of her “visitors” dressed in similar things.

Before the clothes came in, they had also begun to modify her diet. At first the food had been like a (rather invented, slapdash) version of the meals she had eaten at the Julus school: dark bread, lentil soups and pork stews prepared with garlic, fruit, cheese, olives, a kind of wine. Then the dishes became gradually more elaborate, like failures sent her from some feast. There were spices she had never tasted, grains and vegetables she had never seen. She did not dislike them, nor even mistrust or specifically avoid them—what would have been the use? One night there had been a wine that was pink and nearly clear, and had in it a little rod with cherries stuck on it. The drink was very sweet and made her drunk after a mouthful—this then she left unfinished and afterwards seldom even tried the alcohols with which they plied her in various goblets of fantastic glass. Otherwise, the drink they told her they called
caffelatte
she did not like either. The herbal teas, rather to
their
bemusement, she intimated she already knew, dried mint or rosehips distilled with hot water were likely to be consumed in many Romanized provinces.

But the clothes were not really like this. Nor like any of it. They were
female
clothes. And until then, in the first installment of her existence as Jula Flammifer, she had been clothed always as a male.

The materials—which were luscious velvets, silks—neither attracted nor repelled her. She fingered them, found out how they fastened.

Conscious she was watched, she partly guessed they might be taking bets on her (she had always been bet upon) as to what she would select, and if she would then be able to get into it,
wear
it.

Included among the stuffs were quite simple flowing tunics, from post-Flavian Byzantium, or the Easternized chlamys.

Jula instead drew up this blood-red dress which had been designed some eleven centuries later.

Did the color persuade her? All the new clothes were highly colored, magenta, purples, flame orange, emerald. But then again, she was red-haired Jula, Fiery Jula—was it that? Some latent wish to affirm her personality? No, for Jula was not Jula, nor red-haired. She herself was well aware, even in this
second
installment of her existence as Jula, that this had not been her true name, and that her hair was, unhennaed, not red.

Why then? Why this one?

She liked it, perhaps? Just as she left the drinks that went too uncomfortably to her head and that therefore she
dis
liked. Yet was it not strange? Had she ever, in adult life before, dressed as a
woman
?

The watchers must have seen, she had negligible trouble with the renaissance dress, the same with the undergarments that accompanied it. Astonishment? Bets lost?

She put the gold net over her short hair, not spiked
up today lying smooth. And then she took the lion earrings, both of them, and slipped them into her ears.

She had worn the earrings often, one, or the pair. They were a symbol of her status as Valuable. She had got used to them.

At first, walking and sitting in the dress, there was a slight awkwardness. It soon went. By the time she walked out between the pillars and saw the tall heavy man standing on the lawn, Jula had mastered the dress entirely and barely noticed it. Or the effect it made.

And when he strode towards her, she only stopped. And when he asked, “Why are you wearing that?” she only replied, “They gave it me to wear.”

“You mean,” said Flayd, angry again at all of it, “they took your other clothes away and said put on this?”

“No. There was a choice of many garments.”

“But—” he said.

Suddenly something in his face, tanned and glaring under its flopping mane of auburn hair, made Jula smile. At once, alarmed, she snatched the smile back. He too seemed startled.

Why the dress? Unanswered to Flayd’s satisfaction.

Why the smile? Unanswered to hers. Worse, dangerous. You did not smile at them, your masters. And he was not, as she was, a slave, at whom anyway she would not smile either. Perhaps, past the age of four, she had never smiled at all, save in secret, when still very young. At some unexpected beauty of weather, or some victory she had not anticipated, some
feeling
even, inseparable only from the springs of youth. Fleeting, all these, and never wise; doubtless hidden.

“What’s funny?” said Flayd. His voice was mild, carefully receptive.

She heard the coaxing quality and noted her worsening
mistake. Once or twice, some man, some patrician, thinking she made up to him.

At her fellow warriors certainly she had never ever smiled. A smile or laugh could, there, be interpreted a hundred wrong ways—as mockery, boasting, as ingratiation from cowardice, as madness.

She was silent.

“OK, no, I don’t think you meant to be amused. I guess you do find me funny. And you speak Amerian English now. How’s that?”

“The round pearls that talk in my ears.”

“Linguisticx. What else?”

She stood waiting on him, politely observing his upper lip.

Flayd said, “You’re not a slave. Haven’t they told you that still? Look at me. When you did, you smiled. Is that so bad?”

Again she said nothing.

He thought, I guess it’s bad. Lowering the shield. Being one human with another. Or are we just creatures from another world to her, as she is to
them
?

A capital offense, equally, to murder anyone, or to bring anyone back from the dead
.

He thought, What in hell do I want to do about this? What can I do?

There was a sound behind him, someone coming through the cloister, the slapping of a skirt or sleeve.

The girl looked up. Lagoon eyes—seeing something
above
Flayd’s head—

He dived around, and saw it too.

It flew towards them, an impossible undone, done-up jigsaw of black and white. Then swooped down on to the lawn between them, its perfect, somehow Egyptian markings like some hieroglyph meaning
flight
or
eye
.

“Pica,” said Jula.

“Magpie, yeah. That one ain’t real, ’s only thing. A recx or even VP—virtuality projection. What the heck. It looks good.” What am I saying? Nervous as a boy on his first date, no, not that. A guy with a brand-new daughter sprung on him when he was young enough to reel, old enough to wonder—No, nor that. Not everything was that neat.

The magpie picked through the tiny flowers, its black legs, the black knife of a beak, questing delicately. On its back, among the so-white, jet-black feathers, the elusive water glimmer of alien blue.

Someone else came out of the pillared cloister.

Flayd goggled at him. Too many surprises now.

He
was wearing one more set of his non-Venus black jeans and a poured dark green shirt. His body was excellent, but for God’s sake, the guy was only thirty or so. He had that look he always had, so cool it froze you, so far off no use to shout, and so courteous you wanted to punch him in the kisser. But the eyes … they seemed a bit—dazed.

How had he got here, and again
why
?

The woman was saying something. It was Latin. Flayd understood her and turned back to gaze at her instead.

“O di magni, obsecro, intercedite pro me contra istrum—”