Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  She said, “I was brought here.”

  That, of course, was the whole of this particular question and answer, wasn’t it?

  Involuntarily, so it seemed to him, his grip on her wrist must have tightened. Abruptly her other hand had hold of his own wrist. She was viper-quick. Though her fingers couldn’t encircle it, they were pressing in at some strategic point, numbing his thumb and forefinger.

  He glared into her eyes and saw waters tumbling.

  Flayd got up again. A waiter was also standing there absurdly with a heron coffeepot, saying, “No trouble, please. Or security will arrive.”

  “All right.” Picaro let go of her wrist.

  As she released him in turn from her gem-hard fingers, he too got up again.

  “Let’s stroll in the garden, Sinna Jula Victrix.”

  Flayd said to the waiter, “It’s OK, I’ll—”

  Picaro said, “Keep out of it.” And to her, “Let’s be Victorian. Take my arm.”

  Jula too had risen. She faced him. He could see her thinking, deciding to do what he said.

  She was a slave. Everyone else was master or mistress.

  He was afraid of her.

  She reminded him—no, not of that. Not of that one.

  She took his arm lightly. They walked along a path through the banks of stocks and roses, to a flight of steps flanked by two carved urns with lavender.

  “A blonde wig,” he said. “Romans wore wigs. But how is the corset?”

  “No worse,” she said, “than the straps that bound me when I fought.”

  “You’re a dangerous woman. A live-dead woman who can fight. Do you still think I’m that other man you killed?”

  “I know you are not.”

  “Oh, how’s that?”

  “I remembered him, and when I saw him first. I remember things now I had always forgotten.”

  Picaro saw Flayd’s responsible face peering at them through the flowers. Suddenly Picaro laughed.

  He drew her down the steps into the lower garden, where there was a lily pond with golden carp.

  She took her hand from his arm, and said gravely, “If you try to harm me, I’ll prevent you. That’s my right.”

  “I know that. I’m not violent.”

  Her eyes. She didn’t look away, or lower them, as Flayd had complained she always did.

  Picaro then was not a master? Still a slave? One of her own kind—what kind was that?

  She said to him, without preface, “Why won’t you fight?”

  “What?”

  “To survive you must fight. It’s all we have. You’re not Phaetho, not like him. Yet you are exactly like him. He wouldn’t fight, even to live. They’d have let him live, maybe honored him, crowned him with laurel,” she lapsed into Latin. He couldn’t follow, heard the word missio—she was frowning, with thought and determination, not anger. She spoke to him as directly as a young man his own age, not like a woman, not like a slave to a slave. They were two soldiers, in a lull between the yammering rushes of some unending war. She put her hand up and on his shoulder—he almost recoiled. It was what del Nero had done, but her hand wasn’t fire-hot, it was cool. “Let go,” said Jula, in her strangely accented Italian, “of death.”

  “That’s what you think I’m doing. Holding on to it?”

  “Fast,” she said. “With both your arms.”

  He turned away from her and her hand’s touch was gone.

  I’m already dead, Jula Victrix, said his thoughts.

  Carp glittered in the pool. As they swam under the lilies, her reflection failed to reform itself, her translucent shadow had vanished from the afternoon grass.

  Two children came running out of a shrubbery. (Alien beings, like every other living thing.) They glanced at Picaro, diverted a moment by his height and looks. But he was stone and, unmirroring, gave back nothing, and they bounded away.

  How had she known? Perhaps it was how her Roman school had trained her, to guess such states in others. Had she never been afraid, the moronic bitch? “Fight,” “let go,” these meaningless phrases of one who never hesitated. The brink for her had always been there, and so—always forgotten.

  8

  THIS FILING MACHINE CONSTANTLY clicked now. It was an irritating noise, stupidly like that of some big, old-fashioned clock exploited in the City. Maintenance had overhauled the machine. Nothing seemed wrong with it, but in the light of the CX malfunctions of the other day, it too was now being monitored.

  As he walked through into the outer room, the one kept for period display, with its gilded plasterwork and typewriter, Leonillo checked his wristecx. He was due for a vitamin capsule. He took one from a pack, swallowed it with fresh apricot juice.

  After a moment the hit of the vitamins would sharpen him. He stood waiting for that, gazing from the window into a courtyard with a plane tree.

  There had been a lot to do this Viorno morning. Another batch of visitors wishing to leave the dome, and finding out the exit terminals were shut. They would have to be persuaded, disuaded, or bribed. In more intransigent cases, detained. Those who lived here as their privilege seldom departed the City (a few who had, and were now currently unable to re-enter, were the problem of the authorities on the mainland.) Most of the tourists had been entranced to find they were allowed extra holiday time in the City of Wonders, as the “literature” called it. They had only needed their tour agencies to reassure them that relevant employers above had no qualms. This too was taken care of. Therefore, only a minority kicked up a fuss, usually those with freelance lives, who had planned to be elsewhere. Some of those easily settled, of course still wanted to call outdome. The legend of temporary faults in the call facilities eventually had to be dispensed with. Then calls were placed with them via controlled circuits, or, in many instances, pretended to, with faked voices, digitally reproduced, and undetectable. (Such procedures were normally illegal.)

  All this could eventually be tidied up. Which would not be Leonillo’s job. He was only the one who received orders, then gave orders, obedient and obeyed. That was his function, not generally obvious through his veneer. He was good at it.

  However, yesterday there had been three groups indome who had refused to accept the bonus of remaining in Venus. One of these groups had commitments both monetary and civilian that required their immediate return above. Fortunately some of the group were heavy drinkers, and so had enabled themselves to be made a target for false arrest. The remainder of the group were then caught up in the net. The plainclothes police—that is, they were clothed as theatrically as everyone else—were always reliable in such matters, and the incarceration facilities both escape-proof, and tolerable for any but the most criminal captives. Again, it would all be smoothed over when the time came, compensation paid, bureaucratic “mix-ups” apologized for.

  Only two persons, so far, had needed broader measures. One of these had been munificently paid off. He had also been guaranteed first rights in telling his “story” to an influential mainland journal. The other, staying unamenable, had unluckily had to be hospitalized. Probably, when it was all over, and the dome open again, he would never remember exactly what it was they had had to do to him.

  The nature of what went on here, the Experiment, was so monumental that almost any means were excusable. They stopped short of execution. Other governments and authorities, as Leonillo understood, would not have been so squeamish, or so careful.

  Altogether, Leonillo had no quarrel with any of it. It was merely that somehow (and he would have been hard put to it to say quite how, or when) he had begun to evaluate, in his well-trained, regimented, quite near-horizoned mind, not only the enormity of what had been done, but its outlandishness.

  Its terror.

  He hadn’t admitted this to himself. Would not. Could not. And so the creature of the terror made itself visible to Leonillo just on the edges of his close-circuited awareness—by the brooding shape of a tree that somehow upset his mood, the annoying ticking of a machine whic
h shouldn’t tick.

  Leonillo obeyed orders. He kept his own life very private, clutterlessly barren. He had no one to turn to, not even a priest, for he had been born into a world where God or Spirit remained only as fashion accessories to certain psychic cravings. Among all the beautiful churches of Venus, which rang their bells and sometimes swelled with praiseful masses in the tradition of pure drama, Leonillo, on his lone nighttime promenades, was never alerted. He lived by rule of thumb. It had always been enough, and now was not.

  Descending in the elevator, Leonillo compressed his thin lips. He was unaware of this additional gesture of zipping up.

  “Yes, Chossi. And how do we find her?”

  “The same, Leon. It’s—pitiful.”

  Such an emotive word from Chossi surprised Leonillo—not that the heartless clerk should say it, but say it to his superior.

  Leonillo walked through into the peculiar, dimly-lit bubble, which contained what could only be called the remains of UAS Jenefra 19B.

  The door hissed shut. Leonillo was alone with her.

  He walked forward, and looked down at the narrow optecx support capsule, in shape not unlike the vitamin capsule from earlier, save this was filled by a woman’s body.

  Tubes and lines went in and out. Aside from the security, it was not unlike something one could find in most main hospitals.

  Without the apparatus, what was left of her would not be able to exist. The support assisted her to breathe, injected her with basic nutrients, cleansed her delicately at planned intervals. Sometimes her eyes moved under the lids, but nothing else. And apparently these eye-movements might not indicate anything more than muscular spasm.

  The capsule also supplied coda-morphine. She could feel nothing. That was necessary. It was all that could be done for her.

  The irony was that, superficially, she did not seem to the casual eye, aside from the little medical attachments, so horribly injured. Some bruising, an ominous darkening here and there of her skin.

  Leonillo did not study her in great physical detail. Again, it was not his job. He had the reports.

  It was an astonishment she had survived, and soon what was left of her body would simply cease to function, despite the care it received.

  Most of her bones were broken. That was, they were splintered, in some areas, powdered. This had happened at the scene, and also when the UAS team had moved her from the Palazzo Shaachen, despite every extreme precaution. All the corpses had been the same.

  Aside from the bones, most internal organs had extravagantly ruptured. Leonillo had heard one of the surgical team remark that the inside of each of the victims, as flash scan revealed it, was like the map of a perfectly laid railway after a small nuclear device had detonated nearby. Another one said bitterly, “Jam—mush and jam, polenta. God in heaven.”

  Everything had given way.

  This was so with Jenefra, as with the rest. Everyone who had been in those rooms, on that starry bon’Votte. All the same.

  She seemed to have survived the fraction she had because she had gone to the lavatory to be sick.

  Plenty of them had vomited, evacuated bowel and bladder—no amazement there, the stomach lining, colon, the liver, all of it, all, all coming undone. It had been sudden, too. But Jenefra seemed to have felt it the first, and gone to the bathroom and shut herself in—and so not caught the full final brunt of—whatever it had been.

  (The musician, Picaro, in the apartment above, separated by two solid floors, and the mesh of air- and noise-conditioning systems, had received only the most brushing dose. His inner body showed a very little minor, just-observable, scarring—nothing worse than if he had had a serious alcohol dependence or spent some time as a maltreated prisoner of some harsh regime, a common enough fate elsewhere. Picaro had therefore been lucky.)

  Jenefra had neither Picaro’s luck, nor the luck to be killed outright.

  Leonillo looked at her. He was not callous, only without imagination.

  CX activated in the dimmed-out wall, lights flying up. Another door opened. Three medical staff ran in in contemporary plascord uniforms.

  The woman spoke hurriedly. “Step back, please, Sin Leon. She’s about to experience seizure.”

  Reading body signs without pause, the machines could predict this with a fifty-second margin. Now the team were adjusting the capsule lid, switching on preparatory restraints.

  Leonillo stood back. Waiting, as the team waited.

  He recalled how, when they had smashed in the doors of the Palazzo Shaachen, most of the windows had shattered too. Like brittle sugar. Like these bones. (Some of the brickwork, wood and stone showed, it seemed, unusual erosions.)

  He thought of the other girl, what was her name? Cora? She had been the most favored by death, which had bludgeoned her heart before anything else. Her wrist bone pulverized into more than seventy-six pieces.

  Seizure began in the capsule.

  The team worked there, springing about, barking to each other hoarsely. Lights stabbed and poured across the walls.

  Then it was over.

  He returned to the capsule side as the medical staff moved away.

  “Her eyes are open,” he said.

  “Yes,” said one of the men. “That happens. There is some brain activity.”

  “You’ve told me,” said Leonillo.

  He looked down into Jenefra’s eyes. They were massively bloodshot, and blind, he thought, but they slowly moved. For a moment they were precisely on his face. She returned his gaze—Leonillo saw, without any doubt, that though what was left of her brain had been kept alive, along with the ruined sack of flesh, Jenefra herself wasn’t there inside. This was a zombie. For in these eyes, already, was nothing—As they had been wont to say, the building was lighted, but no one home.

  BEFORE DESCENDING THE FINAL LEVEL (to the area some of the staff jokingly called Hell) Leonillo made time to look in on the screen room.

  Everything under scrutiny was proceeding. Putting the four of them together had been sensible and saved some time, unless one or more of them should go out, which perhaps, at least in Picaro’s case, didn’t seem very likely.

  He had had a dialogue with the Roman woman. Having watched a recording of this, Leonillo had found its strangeness banal, only what he would have expected. The black singer was talented but off his head. The girl thought in the manner of her former barbaric times. Flayd, the archaeologist placed within their orbit, had become almost a referee—like one of Jula’s own stick-weilding “sticklers” from the arena. He trampled doggedly along, causing no lesions. The little girl of eighteen—India?—appeared to be the only composed one. There was nothing to her, he suspected, but they kept a provisional eye on her. She was enigmatic—or dumb, as Chossi had concluded.

  Leonillo glanced in at them all now. Flayd working with laptop CX, Jula sitting by the window of his apartment, Picaro standing elsewhere at the window of his. India was in her own room, turning slow cartwheels, her twilight body naked as a pin, unconscious of, or indifferent to, the feasting eyes of the surveillance crew.

  They all played their parts. The four at Brown’s, the staff here, the population of the City. Actors. That was how Leonillo truly saw most others. Sometimes their performances pleased him—as when Flayd had inadvertantly, taking Jula from the University, done exactly what was wanted of him. Or if, conversely, they provided some informative diversion. But generally their acting was pedestrian and poor. Amateurs on the stage of life.

  Leonillo drank caffelatte before going down to Hell. The vitamins hadn’t boosted his mood, as he had hoped they would. And he was uneasy at what must be done next, and, not being uneasy very often, not handling it well.

  THE LOWEST COMPLEX WAS THICK with safeguards. Vid banked on vid, CX thrummed, check lights flicked, and human security posed tensely, flecxs on hips and eyes wide.

  The observation room, though, was empty, which was partly precautionary. It was long and circular; it ran right around another set of rooms enti
rely, and looked into them from windows that, from the inside, were not always visible. In the same fashion, no sound traveled either way, without instigation this side.

  The decor of the inner rooms was gracious enough, but of a quickly thrown together type. Silk-upholstered chairs and brocaded drapes, the recxs of old paintings … a decorated harpsichord reflected in the tiled floor. It was the third harpsichord in as many days. Things—broke. Strings, keys, utensils. The plaster on the walls was faintly marked again as if by smoke.

  A virus? One which destroyed human tissue, and also bricks and mortar, stone and plasteel and optecx glass? One which effected also CX function?

  He sat there now, at the table, writing on a sheet of apparent parchment, musical notations from the 1700s, with a pen that dispensed black ink slimly, better, he had said, than a quill, which spat, needed constant dipping, snapped in moments of composing excitement.

  This was mostly what he did, del Nero. Wrote his music. The weaknesses in the harpsichords, the cittaras and mandolins—he used them up, then had to manage without them.

  Leonillo looked at Cloudio del Nero through a piece of window which, from the inner side, was an opaque painting. It was just possible to trace the design of the painting on this outer side, vague delineation, as if a ghost stood there, between them. But also, there were hair-fine cracks beginning in one portion of the viewer. Again.

  Everything here had to be stabilized, then restabilized. And while it was done, del Nero had to be shut into another area of the inner rooms, and besides, no one went into them without protective clothing or stayed there individually for more than ten minutes. Even ten minutes, of course, was probably too long.

  They had explained it to del Nero. Some of it. Had had to.

  Now he poised in front of the watcher (unaware?) scribbling away at the notation. He had that look in his eyes Leonillo had seen before in the eyes of creative artists. He was miles off—in fact, not all there. Despising it, Leonillo didn’t find it peculiar. He himself, having no fundamental use for music, literature, art, film—any alternative reality—was quite comfortable with the Artistic Race. He knew where they belonged, and that Cloudio del Nero, despite his dangerous genetic geography, carried otherwise the correct label.