Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  And yet.

  Leonillo bent forward, squinting into that sealed room.

  What was it? What?

  Was del Nero such a large man? So tall and elongated? He seemed—but it was some trick of the fake light, the fake interposed painting, the flaws in the viewer—he seemed of a different size—almost of a different shape.

  Leonillo blinked.

  The musician had put down his pen. He got up.

  Leonillo started. He stepped back from the viewing window, sweat smearing his forehead.

  What had he seen?

  No—a distortion—something wrong with the light, of course, the light, all the sub-University CX was eccentric now—it was that.

  Look, Cloudio was only a slender short fellow, not tall, even in his own day. He paced towards the viewer—towards the painting—towards Leonillo—pedantically absorbed in deep creative thought.

  A short small man with almost feminine hands, with long dark hair and rings and a coat of buttercup satin.

  What did Leonillo see?

  There had been a swirling, and a gigantic elevation that touched the ceiling, that went—beyond the ceiling—that filled the inner rooms, that glowed.

  The illumination was at fault. The satin coat catching it, and some shadow.

  And Leonillo’s nerves. He must face it, he would need to do something about them, his nerves.

  He moved around the curve of the window, to a place which might be cleared on the viewer’s other side. Leonillo pressed for communication.

  At the intrusion, this voice over the microphonicx, del Nero looked up at him.

  His eyes—glazed with his golden dreams—were luminescent.

  Tricks of the light.

  “I am sorry to disturb you, Signorissimo Cloudio.”

  Something in the face—changing—like the uncovering of the window through which each man now could regard the other.

  “It’s almost a relief to me,” said del Nero, “to be disturbed.”

  “How is the new harpsichord?”

  “Alas. It will no longer play for me.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “You have told me. Something in my chemistry, they said. How remiss, to cause such difficulties simply by my presence.”

  Cloudio del Nero’s voice sounded now bored and distant—yes, miles off. He was uninterested, did not bother any more. Also, as his brain labored on at his music, very evidently, the rest of him flew only on automatic pilot.

  Rather like Jenefra, then. The building was lit, but this one, who was home, was locked into the attic, and did not deign to emerge for trivia.

  Leonillo said, “There are some plans for you, Signorissimo.”

  Cloudio del Nero smiled. Automatically.

  “We are thinking—we’d like you to give a recital of some of your works—whatever you wish to perform, of course.”

  Leonillo heard his own voice utter this.

  He had been told to. To arrange it. His orders.

  It was since he had had these particular orders that his nerves—

  Leonillo thought of Jula. How they had told him no black UAS members must have contact with her until she was put out into the City, which naturally had in it people of all ethnic groups. Why had that segregation been deemed appropriate? Picaro, who had been allowed to reach her, was the first of his kind in her reborn world. But she had mistaken Picaro for the one she had killed. Had that too been intended?

  Why think of this? It was not in his remit to consider mooted manipulations—leave that to the Flayds. Leonillo said to the man behind the viewer, “Your musical opus is already advanced, I think?”

  Courteous and patient now, del Nero replied, “But since I must be kept apart like this, how can I perform any music publicly, as you suggest?”

  “There’ll be tight security, and containment, I’m afraid. We intend to screen you with magna-optecx—nothing like the glass of this window. Impermeable and virtually indestructible. But an audience will be present. They will witness you clearly and hear every note in exquisite exactness. Perhaps you may by now believe, we’re able to achieve such things at a significant level.”

  As Cloudio turned, something seemed to unfurl about him, to flare in his wake—a cloak of unseen matter—magical. But not. Nothing.

  “Do you find the lighting in there deficient? I’m afraid the system’s reacting again.”

  “Oh, but recollect, I’m used to candles,” said Cloudio del Nero, almost playfully. “They would flicker and go out. How would this light, now, concern me?”

  And then he made a sort of sound, a kind of swift almost humming noise. Perhaps some element of his composition was lingering in his mind.

  Leonillo found he had danced back again. Dizzily he pressed against the farther wall.

  As if a wild animal, which had seemed tame and innocent, had suddenly lashed its tail, bared its teeth, snarling and readying itself to spring.

  Leonillo said something to the man behind the glass. What it was he could not remember, once outside. No doubt something else to do with the orders he had, the recital he had been told to organize.

  In the corridor, checking his wristecx. Signs of slight debility. Slight hyperventilation. Nothing serious. As if he had received a small personal shock, like tidings of a distant bereavement. But Leonillo had no family, no one to be bereaved of.

  Upstairs, he ordered lunch, and told others to fix the lighting in the musician’s area.

  9

  LOOK AT ME, insisted the Africara, where it stood against the wall.

  From time to time, Picaro looked at it.

  The big black pot of it, the black belly of it, strung with its silver moon-web of strings—earth and air.

  In the end, he went to it and touched the strings, and they tore. Some crumbled.

  He wasn’t phased. He had expected something like that.

  In the curve of its hip, a crack had appeared, like the tributary of some river.

  No longer his, no longer anyone’s.

  On this cooking pot with its antennae in heaven, seated on a roof, under a black sky assembled in stars, he had made, over seven nights, the Africarium. He and it, had made it. A symphony for the orchestra of one instrument alone.

  He thought, no doubt in a while it would entirely fall apart and lie in bits along the floor of the new apartment at Brown’s.

  THINGS HAPPENED DURING the remainder of the year, after he had taken the train away from Simoon.

  Once only he called Omberto, an Intel message which would chase the intended recipient until they were found. When no recipient ever was found, he called Carlo, and then Coal. Each also one time only. Carlo was high when he called, and wouldn’t talk, kept making out Picaro was someone trying to sell him something. A girl laughed in the background, foolishly. Coal said over the wires, which murmured at some Intel storm, “What ya think he done, man, huh? What he be gonna do? You saw like the rest of us. All they could give him on his med-cred was a seesaw robot’s hand. You don’t play nothing with that.”

  And in that year otherwise, korah and mandolin in a darkened barroom behind a virtuality theater, an agent dropping by on a freak whim and seeing Picaro: the beginning.

  It had been so easy. A swift ascent, and if not internationally glorious, good—good enough. So unlike the previous life as to be—sorcerous …

  And next the luxurious apartimento, with its three long chambers for living, its balcony, and the use of the pool—the decx, the handouts, the moments of adulation. Best, the channel standing wide for him to pass the music through into a big waiting world.

  Picaro was still sixteen. The very last day of sixteen. And that night he was going to another place by the sea.

  He was loitering in Alessio’s office, on the thirtieth floor, when Alessio took a call from reception.

  Alessio smiled. “I don’t know why I should tell you.”

  “What?” asked Picaro, who was looking out the high window at the rushing stream of a city and t
he polluted stream of a sky above.

  “They say there’s a fat old woman in a Dowi downstairs. She says she’s waiting for you.”

  Picaro shook his head.

  Alessio said, “Let me amend that. A fat old rich woman if she’s in a Dowi.”

  “That’s the new kind of CX chair?”

  “Yes it is. The one that can run up stairs. The one that can do everything for you that you can no longer do for yourself.”

  “A fat old rich crippled woman,” said Picaro, “in a rich disability chair.”

  “Yes,” smiled Alessio. “Can’t think how she got so far in here, though. Must have charmed her way.”

  Then something woke along Picaro’s backbone.

  He said, “Did she give a name?”

  “No name.”

  “What color,” said Picaro, “are her eyes?”

  Alessio going on smiling. He activated the discreet intercom and asked Picaro’s question. Listened. Said, “The girl says this woman’s eyes are a kind of light honey. Fanciful enough?”

  Picaro moved across the office. Stopped.

  “What is it? Is there trouble?”

  How to explain to Alessio, with his created wealth and his civility, his manicured nails and pearly ear stud and smile. How to try to convey this sensation of a building surrounded, its elevators and stairs cut off, its upper stories burning, and bomb blasts thundering at the walls.

  “I don’t want to see her.”

  “OK. Of course. I’ll get them to tell her—”

  “She won’t go. Or she’ll go—and she’ll find me somewhere else.”

  Alessio got up. His demeanor was quite changed. “Who is she, Picar? Come on, you’d better tell me. Some woman you once—”

  “No.”

  “All right. Let it go. Do you want me to contact someone from security?”

  “It won’t be any use.”

  “Yes, of course it will.”

  Picaro said, “I’ll go down by the other lifts.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll catch an earlier flight.”

  “OK. Call me from your hotel. Tell me what is going on then. I am intrigued.”

  In the lift, thinking the doors would open at some floor and there she would be.

  What was it? Some disguise? Perhaps facilitated by a spell.

  No, there were no spells, no magic. It wasn’t as normal as that.

  It was her. What she was. What she could do.

  The taxi got him back to his living complex. When Picaro reached the apartimento, it looked to him as if it belonged to some other man.

  He had left any packing, preferring to do it himself, knowing he had lots of time.

  Now, no time.

  Hastily he slung things into a bag, shoved instruments into cases as if they were not fragile or important.

  After closing the luggage and containers, a silence came in like a kind of weather.

  Picaro was ready. He activated the security systems in the room, picked up the bag and got the instrument carriers across his shoulders by their straps.

  When he opened the door, she was seated outside.

  Simoon, in her chair.

  The lift doors were statically together across the hall. She’d been there a while. Waiting for him to come out.

  Knowing what he would do.

  “Won’t you ask me in?” she said at last.

  His door stood wide behind him.

  “No,” he heard himself say. But as he said it, he stepped away, back inside the living area, and the chair, rolling forward with the softest serpent’s hiss, smoothly came after him.

  They were in the room. Both of them. With her right hand, reaching over, Simoon pushed the door. It sank against the wall and shut.

  “Surprised?” she asked. “To see me like this?”

  He thought he would never have known her. But that wasn’t true. He must always know her. Even if she had come at him in some ultimate disguise, even if she had arrived in an animal costume, hidden.

  She had become enormously fat. Not a tall woman, she must weigh around a hundred and twenty kilos. It was, too, a bizarre kind of fat, loose—yet oddly solid, hanging on her like creased padded clothing, folded in thick slops under the chin, at her wrists, along her arms.

  Most of her otherwise was concealed by the long whitish tent she wore. It cascaded down, and out of the hem of it crept a pristine tube, which fed back into the Dowi chair. She was, then, incontinent.

  Her face was round as a jet-black fruit and bulging worse even than the rest of her, swollen hard. Out of this face, the lemon slices of her eyes struggled up to see. Their color was now elusive, despite what the girl had said to Alessio. Her hair was short, gappy, and in tufts.

  Watching him look at her, Simoon somehow spread herself to let him behold it all. It was as if, ridiculously and impossibly, she derived some horrible satisfaction from his viewing her as now she was.

  Before she spoke again, she had to take a peck of water from the attachment that rose up in the chair arm. Only her right hand seemed to wish to move much.

  “Want to know what happened, baby?”

  Picaro braced himself.

  “You got big and stopped walking.”

  She laughed. He could recall her laugh, it was nearly the same, only a little raspy, like her speaking voice, somewhere at its periphery.

  “That is the result,” she said, “of what happened. Part of the result. The first moments of the result.”

  “You’re sick.” He was attempting to talk to her, as if there was some rationale to any of it. The bags weighed him down, but he dared not let go. They were like ballast in the air or anchors in water.

  “I am sick. Let me tell you about it. It has an impressive name, my sickness: SPP. That’s what they call it. Amer-jargon, like most of the scientific crap—SPP. What does that stand for? Someone …” she said, and broke off to yawn, huge and fearful, gasping, (and he saw into her mouth, pale and missing teeth, and the peridot was gone, leaving a blackened hole in the particular tooth it had occupied.) “Someone far back, in a City they are rebuilding under the sea, in some kind of oxygen jar—she had it, this gal. They called it a palsy then. She was bloodline with me. And with your father. It affected her face. So they tell me. It’s all right, unless it comes through, doesn’t always. But my pa and my ma both came down from that gal. Double-value genes. That can do it. And your daddy too, his pa. Well, maybe he never let you know he and I, cousins. But it was me it came on into. When it does that, then it’s like a weed, it gets a hold, and all the ground goes briars and tares, like some book says. I knew, when I called on you last time. I knew I had less than a single year. Did you like how I looked then? Sure you did. I was lovely. That’s what happens, at the start. The body puts up a real battle. It repairs everything it can. Over-compensation, they said. It try to push this thing, this thing with the name away. Skin firms up, hair grows thick and long, lose a little weight, feel good, look like a girl again. For a little while. But then—then the tares and thorns are seeded all through and they start in growing. Body can’t fight, not all that. Not a damn thing it or anyone can do. Tell you it’s real name? Systemic Panplegia. Ain’t that too sweetly pretty. Like the name of a dragonfly. Systemic Panplegia. Everything …” she yawned, “everything, piece by piece … muscles, skin, bones—hair go brittle, break off—can’t burn off your fat—every joint, every nerve, all useless—and then inside. Heart, guts, bladder, liver, lungs, brain. Little by little, baby. Turn you into stone.”

  Picaro dropped the bags slowly from him.

  He stared at her, into her, seeing the petrified vistas of her inner landscape, seeing it happen. It hurt him. As if he hurt for her—

  “Think they’d be able to do something,” she said, amiably. “Can’t do a thing. Make anything. CXs, virtualities. Still can’t. Not this. Found a cure for cancer back when I was a girl. Got the sexual diseases fixed. ’Long comes another new disease, can’t figure it, can’t do a thing. A
lways been there, not really showing itself anything much. Perhaps you get born with an arm won’t work, or a face, like that gal back in the past. You can live with those. But it’s grown up now, this one. This one has developed. Can’t live with this one.”

  She sighed, and the water-tube rose again at some pressure on the Dowi of her right, moveable, hand. She bent her long neck awkwardly and drank.

  “I knew,” she said, “when I came to you back then. I wanted to be happy a few months. Just a few. All I had.”

  “How could I—”

  “How could you know? Think I wanted you to know? I am ashamed of this, I am ashamed. It bring me down like no other thing ever brought me. And you. What I ask of you? Nothing. Just to be. And then for some little silly joke that you thought I did—”

  Picaro felt the blood, or a poison, flare through his veins.

  “I know what you did. I heard you tell him. I saw it happen. I was there.”

  “A light fell down and broke his hand? I did that? Coincidence, baby. Never hear of that?”

  Picaro bit the words away inside himself. He must not speak to her, this fearsome creature, beached here like a nightmare whale, dying and petrifying before him.

  “Why’d I do anything? I loved you,” she said. “I only wanted to be near. My own flesh. I loved you.” She sighed. She put up her movable hand and touched the gourd of her face. “All that bad stuff your daddy told you ’bout me—” then she laughed again. This time it was entirely her laughter. She said, “All true, baby. All true. All true.”

  The light altered in the apartimento.

  Was it darker? Or more bright? A shadow.

  A shadow that was a light.

  “Omberto. Yeah, I did it to him. He made me mad. I have done a whole lot, here and there. I can do things. Say, who helped you get your success? Who you think? Just you? Just some stroke of fortune, and you never no luck till then? Think about it. Oh I can do things, I can do everything. Save this, save get myself to cure. Only thing defeats Simoon—herself. Ain’t that a fascination. Remember that last time, baby? Remember what we did? You and I, after I saw to that white space-waste with his white hands—remember, you and me, against the wall? You and me. So good, darling. Did you love me then, or were you only thinking of him?”