Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  Picaro came at Chossi suddenly. Once again, Chossi hadn’t expected it. Squawking invective, he ran away across the room toward the door.

  “Leonillo—” Picaro shouted. But Chossi was through the door and gone. To the apartment, Picaro said, “Leonillo is—he saw—and that one—saw—what happens—”

  Then he in turn had reached the door. Two Victorian men, not UAS, police probably, stood casually just across the passage. One nodded to him.

  Picaro went back in and shut the door.

  Standing there, something made him look up at the plasterwork around the ceiling, the top of the bed, the carved armadio.

  The magpie too had gone, though none of the windows had been opened. Perhaps it had followed Chossi, to peck out his eyes.

  ANGERS HAD BEEN REVERSED.

  “What?”

  Flayd, a red bull of rage, bulked in the entrance of his rooms, confronting Picaro, (and the idly draped, parasol-bearing policewoman who adorned the top of the stairway.)

  “Let me in, Flayd.”

  “Why? What the fuck for?”

  “Do it.”

  Flayd gave up. He tramped away, beating his arms on his body. “Be my guest, buddy. Everyone welcome. Just walk all over me. What do I care?”

  Picaro glanced about.

  This main room was smaller than the one he had been allotted, scattered with pieces of antiquated equipment, books, box-files, discs. At the table the laptop, hot technology beyond many dreams, slender as a wafer, a fey machine crammed with a universe.

  “What is the matter?” said Picaro.

  “Jula,” said Flayd. He thumped on to a sofa. The room, designed to oldness, shook. “We were in the Horse Gardens and up slides that prince nonce, Chossi. Time for her to go back to the University, it seems. Back to whatever it is they now want to do with her there.”

  Picaro said, “She’ll be safer there.”

  “Garbage. Out here had gotten her so she was starting to be a person. She thinks she’s their slave. Leon, all that shit-shower. Now she’s back in all that—slavery. And I couldn’t do a fucking thing.”

  “Listen, Flayd, where did they invite you?”

  “What? Invite me—oh that crap. Their other protégé—their musician—what’s he called? Nero—some recital. Yeah, it’d be an education. But not now.”

  “No, not now. They haven’t told you what happened, at the Shaachen Palace—or have they?”

  Flayd’s face cleared, a screen at the activation of some override.

  “OK, OK. No. No one tells me a thing. So you do it.”

  Picaro told him.

  Flayd sat listening. The blank screen lost color, settled, heavy.

  “And this was some genetic viral episode, right?”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “They have no control over it, whatever it is.”

  “What do you think it is, Picaro? You tell me it killed everyone in the rooms below yours, and worked you over two floors up.”

  “One woman survived. So I was told—not by Leonillo’s mob. India seems to have found out. But I don’t know why or how this woman could survive. Like me, maybe, shut enough away—insulated.”

  “You know what it is.”

  “I—a guess. I may be wrong. It makes no sense. Every sense.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Picaro said, “Just don’t take up their invitation.”

  Flayd said, “There are going to be over six thousand human dupes crowded in that hall that do. I know the Orpheo—it’s the biggest concert hall in Venus.”

  “Not limited to six thousand people.”

  “You’re saying it’ll spread—how? This guy is going to be screened off by magna-optecx—radiation can’t get through that.”

  “I know.”

  “Then—”

  “The recital is part of their experiment, Flayd. It is a conspiracy, Flayd. And we’re all just laboratory material. No one can intervene. The police are already in position everywhere. Hadn’t you noticed? And even they don’t know what they’re up for. Anyone’s only chance is to avoid it. Pretend you’re ill, drunk, stupid. Stay put.”

  “You have to have made a mistake. If not—all I gotta do is to stop it.”

  Picaro smiled. It was the old smile. Flayd no longer meant a thing, only someone to be polite to, from another planet. Picaro walked out.

  Alone, Flayd paced. The new rage was warming, almost comforting in a foul and deranged way.

  While he did this, he had no notion that Picaro was talking to the police, now three of them, hanging about on the landing. Flayd did not know Picaro was suggesting to them that Flayd might have plans to upstage the recital the University had arranged at the Orpheo. Flayd, with his crazy paranoia about conspiracies. When the policewoman asked Picaro, easy, “And are you invited, Sin? Yes? Will you attend?” Picaro said, “I play music. I’ll be there.”

  A little later, when Flayd (unknowing of all this) marched to his door, mind made up, he discovered it refused to give. Though it was Victorian in several aspects, it still contained CX, and the CX was fixed. Presently a call came through to him, assuring Flayd that the “fault” in the door had registered on the main system and would soon be seen to. And much later, another call, just the same, the same as the stuck door was the same.

  By then, Picaro was back in his own apartment. He had begun to drink the alcohol left there for him and to eat some of the snacks. Sometimes he considered Simoon, Simoon the sibyl. Your appointment she said, over and over, in the back of his mind, where she sat, reeking of sulphur, in her Dowi-chair, with her neck broken and her lemon-slice eyes. Your appointment, baby, tonight.

  SHE HAD SEEN TOMBS BEFORE. Along the Graculan Way, for one. But also that time in Rome, when they had taken her down under the temple on the hill. That had been partly a columbarium, a dovecote of death, the boxes and vases of ashes arranged in their pigeonholes. But also great marble edifices were set in the walls, porticoes wreathed in cut stone, and by paint, with stone faces looking calmly on, or the gorgon’s mask set there to protect them. The area was part of a catacomb, one of many. A mystic, mysterious, and occult vault.

  Who had they been, the two who brought her there? She thought now, perhaps, she knew. She was left in their house a little while, before the wagon bore her away from Rome for ever. The house with the peacock in the courtyard, which had frightened her so. But the woman had taken her hand and said, gently, in a Latin which, then, she scarcely understood, “Nothing to harm you, little girl. See how he spreads his beautiful tail. He is the symbol of the Risen One.”

  And then they had told her they dared not set her free, not from her mortal chains. But they would try to free her in another way.

  And so, almost four years old, she had gone down into the stony underworld, and the old man had appeared. His skin was brown with age, and his hair clear white as the garment he wore. His color scheme had an extraordinary clarity. His eyes were shut because he was blind, yet he seemed to see. And then there had been a trickling of torchlit water poured over her, and his mild old hand, resting on her head. And he said above her, “She is yours.” But he was not giving her, she now saw, to the couple who had brought her, nor to Rome. It was to another one.

  This tomb, amyway, under the University Building in domed-in Venus, was not really like the patrician tombs of her past.

  This tomb was her own.

  In addition to that, it could not be physically touched.

  The most important master here, Leon, had told Jula, when he informed her she should visit this viewing room, and that what she would see there would be a reconstruction, a CAVE, or CX-Assisted Virtual Environment. It would appear three-dimensional from every side or angle, might be walked around, into and through, and anything there that she wished to examine would be fully displayed for her. But it was not real. The real tomb, Leonillo had said, was on the mainland, rebuilt in the Roman Museum.

  All the while he spoke to her of her own bur
ial place, explaining its technology, advising her to see it as if conferring a special, and much-wanted favor, she sat impassive.

  The facts of the technology were meaningless to her, therefore redundant. Otherwise, she knew that she was studied. Flayd had informed her of this, confirming anyway her own impressions. (As a slave before she had only been watched.) She knew too that she must do as she was told. Even after Flayd’s instruction in her own autonomy, she retained her credo that resistance to the unavoidable was as foolish and wasteful as not to resist what might be overcome.

  And so she was here. Another tourist, she stood and read of her victories, inscribed on the tomb-side, and of her last fight, and the lie of how she had died. The engraved motto, Even the gods, who grant glory, cannot hold back death, left her unmoved. It was a truism.

  Jula spent an hour inside the tomb, or its CAVE. She was rather interested to see what had been buried with her—the honors that had been shown her. What had been deemed necessary.

  At one point, she puzzled over the burned remains of her own body. Fragments of charred bone were revealed to her, when she requested it, lying there spread out among the coins and lamps, and Jula leaned down to see. If they had been tactile, she would have picked them up, these pieces of herself.

  Those who observed her, the advanced machines that monitored her and her reactions, and stopped short, just barely, of being able to read her mind—perhaps decided she was blasé about her own former death, since she had been brought back alive. But if she was blasé, and maybe she was not, it came from the knowledge that had grown in her. This was the battleground, always you came back.

  HAVING SCRUTINIZED JULA in the CAVE, looking at her own reproduced cadaver, Leonillo went up to his private rooms.

  He required something, he thought, but having reached seclusion, couldn’t recall what it was.

  Leonillo believed this abrupt forgetfulness, which was unlike him, had to do with the narcotics the University pharmacy had supplied. True, he had slept a great deal better than he had been for several nights. But one was left with this tendency to mislay, omit …

  Tonight, of course, was important.

  It was the night Cloudio del Nero would perform for a large, selected audience, his (as some poetic memo had termed it) post-awakening opus.

  Apparently the sheets of (fake) parchment on which he had been writing it out had corroded in some form. But del Nero seemed confident that the notation was established, flawless, in his head. There remained the slight worry as to whether the new harpsichord supplied for his performance would hold out—none of the other instruments had. But it needed only to persist an hour or two.

  No one had yet heard his music.

  To those who enjoyed the arts, it would be an epic event—save that very few of those engaged to be present realized the nature of the recital, or what they were going to hear. Revelations would come later. When everything was finished.

  Leonillo frowned at his own choice of word. Finished? There was yet a vast amount to accomplish on this project; it would not end tonight.

  Really, he wouldn’t have known where to begin, left to himself. But the orders he received were unfailingly explicit.

  Leonillo himself would not be attending the concert. Although naturally he would closely observe it, here, in the University, with other UAS.

  The security arrangements were excessive, complex, and by now all in place.

  The venue was considered charming, a palazzo itself in the mode of the 1700s, full of little curiosities and delights. The auditorium had been constructed years back. The tiers of gilded seats were of velvet. Gardens were depicted on the ceiling, which conveyed, it was well known, every whisper of sound from the performance area, even of that quietest keyboard, a harpsichord.

  Though hedged in by his impenetrable screens, the magic of CX audition would ensure that none of del Nero’s score was lost.

  Some of Leonillo’s staff, he had seen, were very excited.

  Leonillo opened a sealed container, unwrapped a disposable syringe, and gave himself a skin-surface injection of vitamins and caffeine. Probably that was why he had come up here.

  Probably also it was the sleeping-pill tiredness that made him, now he was in this private room, not wish to return below.

  AS THE TWENTIETH HOUR of the Viorno-Votte approached, soft, along the lagoon, the canals, the sky, Venus readied herself for sunfall, and the night.

  Over her lovely spires and cupolas, her walls like spice and crushed pearl, her glimmering veins of liquid, the westering of a sunless sun threw all its limpid nets. Transfixed in the fetters of this murmuring light, the City—unreal, encapsulated and immersed as it was, yet became, as always it had, feminine, and surreal.

  She then, Venus, lay dreaming below her sky, and drew the sky colors down upon her countless mirrors. Windows and canals flashed gold, sank with cinnabar and purple. Masonry, in cliffs and ravines, flushed blood-bright, and let its dyes seep down into green water. Every tower was roped by fire.

  Out on the lagoon, the constructed sunset, a massed fleet of architectural clouds, scalded madder, scarlet, cochineal. And this was only like a million genuine sunsets, over which Venus had presided, bathing herself in them to gain immortality, when once she had been throned above the sea, and only the sea, and heaven, contained her, and the darkness which came was a real night, full of sighs and winds and spray, and the moon, when it rose, another lighted marble palace.

  Bells rang. Birds flew. Boats folded their sails. As, in an endless past, over and over, they had.

  Then the sunset fell into the sea. The sky smouldered. Stars appeared.

  And night, no longer real, had come.

  PICARO WAS STANDING in the dusk on the wide terrace of Brown’s, which looked out along the Lion Marco Canal.

  Various guests were there, going about, preparing themselves for pre-dinner drinks, or another of Brown’s nightly entertainments. One group detached itself into an arrived wanderer.

  He heard one of the women cry eagerly, “But he’s the newest composer? The one they were talking about?” “Yes,” said one of the men. “He’s modeled his music on another man’s from the eighteenth century.” They were going to the receital at the Orpheo.

  Picaro was vaguely conscious of the fashionable Victorian lady positioned along the terrace arcade, half glancing at him, to see how he would react. He did nothing.

  He could do nothing. And now—had no urge to.

  They were all bound for the same destination, and finally, at last, he didn’t care.

  Then he saw India coming briskly out from the lobby.

  She wore an off-the-shoulder evening gown of darkest red, and what looked like golden chandeliers hung from her earlobes.

  After all—

  Picaro stepped in front of her.

  “Where are you going, India?”

  She halted before him. “Where do you think I am going?”

  “The recital,” he said, indifference bursting apart inside him.

  She said, “No, I’m not. I wasn’t asked.”

  “All right.” The terrace shifted under him like a boat. He took no notice. “A lot of people were. But you won’t be missing anything.”

  “Won’t I?”

  He looked down at her. Her eyes were strange tonight. Perhaps she had been smoking something—something better than the clips he had consumed.

  Then she turned her head and looked at the canal and said, “How bright the darkness is. I’ll see you later, Picaro.”

  I doubt it, he thought, I doubt if you will.

  And then he saw the wanderer which had come to pick him up. There it was, slotting itself in by the terrace.

  As he stepped away from her, he heard India say, “I’m sorry I was harsh. Cora always loved you. She always wanted to meet you, and to make love with you. You made her happy, Picaro.

  He hesitated. He said, “You helped her fly up on my balcony.”

  “I always helped her fly,” said India.
“Even the last time. We were lucky. That I was there.”

  Something divided in Picaro’s brain. He saw, as if from one eye, the wanderlier ready in his unavoidable boat, saluting him, and the policewoman over there, slightly less languid, alert to see what Picaro would do next. And with the other eye he saw India behind him in her evening gown.

  “You said, the last time.”

  He faced the canal, lifting his arm to wave, friendly, to the waiting wanderlier. (The policewoman relaxed.)

  Then he turned around to India. He took her hand, partly to demonstrate his excuse for lingering.

  “What do you mean, India? After she died, in the morgue?”

  “Oh, no, Picaro,” said India, “as she died.”

  The terrace shifted again.

  “You were in there with her?”

  “I came to be.”

  “You were with her?”

  “Yes. She didn’t suffer long. Not like the rest. I held her. She trusted me. The others. They thought they were on their own. That was the terrible thing.”

  “How,” he said, “if you were there—how—how did you—”

  India regarded him with sulky gravity.

  “We’ll talk later.”

  “There won’t be any later, India, not for me. If you were there, you know.”

  She lowered her eyes. It was very dark, despite the dawning lights of Brown’s, the profligate stars.

  The other woman was beside him. “Time to get in the boat,” she said. “Or we’ll be late for the show.”