FLAYD HAD CALLED FOR the eighteenth time. As usual, Brown’s was apologetic. They had never known such a persistent fault, at least, not in a door. It had affected the windows too, he said? But at least the guest cabinet was full of food and drink he had previously ordered, and the air-conditioning and other CXs worked. They would of course refund his entire bill for this one Viorno-Votte.
Why had he troubled to call? He knew what had been done, probably why. Had figured it out.
He was afraid. Not for himself. For the others. The ones who would be there. For Picaro. For Jula. He tried to think of young-man ways to escape the rooms, or failing that to alert the citizens of Venus, while bypassing the UAS, the police, and any other security units now operating.
The riots had been quelled. The wall screen told him that. It was a peaceful evening.
When he got tired of pacing, he put quite a lot of chicken, sauce, and pasta in the heater, retrieved them and began to eat. The food, and the wine, helped to distance him, to make him heartless and fatalistic for all of thirty minutes.
He sat by the laptop and read over the piece of Latin he had put up there yesterday, copied with a mass of other inscriptions, years ago, from the mosaics of the Primo. On the goldleaf, Christ and the flames of seven angels, and the warning of the apocalypse.
ALBUS ADEST PRIMO MACRO PALLENTI ET OPIMO ET ASCENSORUM SEQUITUR PAR FORMA COLORUM. The script, when he spoke it aloud to her, had confounded Jula, because it was in medieval Latin, rather than the classical tongue of Roman times. “They’re called Leonine hexameters,” he’d added. He asked her, curious, to suggest a translation in English. She considered, and announced, “The white one is by the first, the thin one, the pale one and the fat one, and of those who mount upon their horses, there follows a like pattern in color.”
“Approximately it. But this Latin depends on the reader also looking at the mosaic picture and drawing conclusions. See these guys on horseback? They’re the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, predicted to bring war, famine, pestilence, and death. Something high on the agenda of the early Christian mindset. So, from the picture and the words together, we get, The white one stands near the black one, the pale one and the one large in size, and the same style of color holds good for the knights.”
Looking at it now, across the wine glass, something darted through Flayd’s consciousness, quick as a speeding bullet. He couldn’t catch it. It was gone.
He wondered why he had brought the words back on the screen. Solely to show Jula the discrepancy between her Latin and that of fourteen centuries after? No, he’d been looking for something else—the emperors, he thought now. Checking the dates of the Flavians. Though what that had to do with a Christian apocalypse he wasn’t certain.
Flayd frisked the buttons.
(This was what you had to do. Carry on with everyday matters. Research, your work. Kept you from wondering, wondering how insane Picaro was, how true what he had said, why the door had jammed, what maybe you yourself should really—)
Names appeared. Proud names redolent of Roman power: Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Narmo …
Again, something flicked at the edge of Flayd’s inner eye. Vanished.
He opened another bottle.
PALAZZO ORPHEO LAY ON THE Canale Magnifico, which sprawled beyond the Rivoalto, in parts almost one fifth of a kilometer wide.
Orpheo had never really existed in the past. It was a modern edifice, built to resemble another of the reconstructs and recxs, and ornamented with recx artifacts, sculptures, mouldings, and art from assorted historic palazzos that had been lost to the sea. Among these was a great white marble Apollo, a re-creation of a statue located under the old Aquilla Lagoon. Birds circled his head, for he was a sky god to whom birds were sacred. But also, the brass plaque told one, it was Apollo who had invented music.
In the amphitheater, tiers of seats, their velvet midnight-blue, crimson, chartreuse, rose from the room’s center like banks of flowers. And Picaro thought of the snake, coiled under the flowers. But all that was there, poised on the flat stage, (and visible as if unscreened, through the crystalline magna-optecx) was a harpsichord, patterned over in some gold, silver, and azure design.
The audience of tourists, of PBS citizens, music-lovers, sightseers, milled leisurely up and down like creatures trapped in a tide (as if helpless), swimming into their seats and becoming anchored there. They had been gathering busily outside, too, all through the lamplit square, where the tiny speakers hung like fruit—altogether perhaps, a second crowd two thousand strong.
Picaro hadn’t yet gone to his seat. It was far up, miles it looked from the central area where the music would be made. A bad seat, yet given the current excellence of CX audition every concert hall employed, poor only in the visual sense, for not a note would elude even these upper tiers. He had heard the audience discussing, in pockets, and with some enthrallment, the supposed importance of the optecx screening—in perfecting the sound system. They didn’t know the screen was to protect them from the performer. Nor that it would be useless.
Useless … Everything. Life.
The hasca and the alcohol, an opaque rough spirit mixed with Seccopesta, had blotted her away. Blotted away Simoon. So she was just a shapeless muttering amoeba, the wraith of a demon, in his brain’s back.
He no longer heard the words of her curse. No longer heard her tell him how he would die, underwater but not by drowning.
He could almost grin, almost laugh. Almost be happy. He had fled so long, fought so hard for ignorance. Now, the release of total surrender.
Yet too, having already seen it, how it must be—he was afraid, and only the drink and the drug had moved him slightly above his terror. But he had had enough of both. They would last another hour. And by then—nothing could make any difference.
WAR—A FIGHTER. Famine—a dearth. Pestilence—an unseen spy. Death—the bringer of changes.
SOMEHOW HE HAD HIT the wrong button. Flayd gazed tipsily while the list of emperors elongated, incorporating now the forerunners of the Flavians, the Julio-Claudian Caesars.
Almost amused.
Almost convinced. Picaro was nuts and had either hallucinated events at the Shaachen palace … or exaggerated.
Flayd had his own detection to do anyhow: Why he seemed to have connected up the Roman state with a medieval interpretation of World’s End.
Using voice, he told the laptop’s CX to correlate the listed emperors with the apocalypse. If there was any link, CX would suss this. He sat back and drank his wine, ready to be intrigued.
JULA HAD SAT DOWN by the door of her tomb.
Tonight, very few human staff were at their posts to watch her. Most had gone to the other larger-screen monitors, to enjoy the relayed recital at the Orpheo.
In any case, she appeared to be doing nothing much. She wasn’t upset or nervous.
She only sat there.
Her hair was no longer hennaed, and the red was fading out to a Gallic blondness.
None of her small audience thought her attractive, or even a woman. She was an exhibit, a canny white rat in the lab.
THE LARGE AUDIENCE WAS settling now, all seated on the glamorous velvet chairs. They rustled programs, chattered. The noiseless air-conditioning filled the atmosphere with meadow fragrances, to compliment their perfumes.
Picaro looked at them, these people about, as he was, to die horribly and in immeasurable pain.
They were nothing to him. Less than flowers scattered on the flowerlike seats. A cast of extras.
And then something—the gleam of a woman’s silver dress, a man’s quiet laughter—something, unbearably and unforgivably, made them all real.
Each a living thing. Each trapped in his or her vessel of being, a body which moved and talked, and thought and felt, and might be needful or loved.
Not flowers. Not actors given only minor parts.
They, each one, as he was, hero of their own life.
Something leapt inside Picaro, clawing and r
ending him with its teeth and very nearly he stood up, to shout, to scream at them, to grab their hands, their arms, to push and force and throw them out into the night. To send them running as far as the prison of the dome allowed.
“Why, you’re crying, Sin Picaro,” said the flirtatious policewoman beside him, “and it hasn’t even begun.”
And then a storm of applause rose all around them. And she too, poor living heroine, clapped, smiling. And of them all, only Picaro was not applauding. And Cloudio del Nero had appeared, rising upward in the bubble of the optecx, stepping out of some contraption, through the opened floor of the stage, bowing through the invisible screen, in the manner of 1701, elegant and handsome in his aristocrat’s coat of white brocade.
FLAYD’S LAPTOP HAD STARTED to tick. He wasn’t sure why this should be. (Maybe breathing on it had gotten the damn thing drunk.)
It had been shuffling a kaleidoscope of data across the screen. Now the soup dispersed. Decided as a mathematical equation, it showed this:
Re: Emperors of Rome connect Apocalypse.
Nota: Revelation of St. John the Divine, disciple of Jesus Christ.
Forecast of destruction of the earth. Rev. 12: The Beast, generally supposed to be the fallen angel Lucifer, or Satan.
Nota: The Number of the Beast, which is remarked as follows: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man: and his number is six hundred threescore and six. That being more simply rendered as 666.
Nota: The early Christians, who were savagely persecuted during the reigns of several of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian Emperors, ascribed this number to one of their most ardent persecutors, the Emperor Nero, who is said to have ordered the crucifixion, upside down, of the Apostle Peter.
This emperor then assumed, both in the then-contemporary Christian mind, and in some later medieval theology, the status of Antichrist, potential destroyer of the Kingdom of God on earth, and subsequently of all things.
Nota: The number 666, however, refers less to a man than specifically to the name NERO.
A block of numerals and letters in Greek and Latin foll owed, demonstrating the interpretation of the name Nero as the number 666, the Number of the Beast. From the advent of which being must proceed the end of the world.
JULA HAD LEFT THE AREA of the CAVE, and travelled up in one of the lifts. Hardly anyone was about in the sub-or higher corridors of the University. She understood, from Leonillo’s earlier words, they had gone to witness the relay of some entertainment.
Something drew Jula up through the building. It was a definite and concrete urge—perhaps only to reach the open air. Even though Flayd had told her about the air, and the dome that held it in.
When she emerged from the University Building, she stood a short while on the terrace of the Blessed Maria Canal. Honeycombs of ancient palazzos lined the water. Small lamplit craft were going up and down.
Above, the sky was darkest blue and radiant with stars, the moon not yet up.
She had grasped all this was a counterfeit. But might not anything be that, for all she knew. And a freshening wind blew in from the lagoon, bringing with it a spiky and electric smell, as if a storm were coming, unannounced, to thrill the City.
LEONILLO SAT BEFORE THE enormous CX viewer, behind and about him, his staff, fired up and high with expectation. There were some two hundred people crammed in the room, which was authorized, as a rule, to hold only one hundred. Due to the shortage of seating, they perched on stools, crouched on the floor—willingly.
As in a virtuality theater, the lights had been dimmed, to maximize the effect of the screen.
Again he was reminded of the theatrical aspect of life.
FLAYD WAS ON HIS FEET. The chair had gone over. He lurched toward the laptop, glaring at it.
He was still drunk enough that his head was muzzy, but the wine had also released him. It was as if abruptly he could see. His brain sped, running with the bullets now.
If anyone had been watching, which probably, right at that instant they were not, he might have given cause for alarm. Justified.
Without any other preamble, he picked up the table. All the way up. And hoisted it over his head.
Strong, Flayd.
His face engorged with blood, the laptop, the books cascading away in a shower of paper and sparks, the green flare of some socket detached.
With a smack that rocked the whole apartment, and caused some comment on lower floors, thrown furniture slammed into the shut-stuck balcony windows.
The optecx glass rippled. But didn’t give.
Then Flayd roared, a brazen boom of wrath, frustration, and despair, like the sounding of trumpets.
PICARO CLOSED HIS EYES.
Others did the same.
It was so silent now, in the Orpheo.
Like an opened door.
“A CARNATION OF AN EVENING, sinna,” crooned the wanderlier. “Are you off to a party? There’s a big event on at the Orpheo. But not for everyone, signorina. Not everyone likes such formal music. Me, I like the Victorian songs. Or the songs from the south.”
He began to sing to Jula.
He had a fine voice.
She looked away along the canal. They had come some distance. She had said she wanted to go to Brown’s guest palace. He had been surprised, seeing her modern clothes, shaken his head, informed her such a pretty sinna should wear the historical dresses, they would suit her so.
Jula thought perhaps she had worn them, such dresses, somewhere, but not truly here, garments from the renaissance, or skirts that had ended far above the knee … and other things. At other times.
The moon was coming up, blonde as her mother’s hair.
THE FIRST PHRASE, tinkling like silver coins, delicate as raindrops dappling metal. A million drops, upon a million knives of steel—
Was it only a harpsichord? These diverse and mingling sounds, this harmony—surely some orchestral overlay began, unless—
SINCE IT WAS THE NINETEENTH call he had made out to them, he thought they might not take it. They took it.
“I need help—” he groaned. To pant and sweat was easy, after the table. Possibly he’d even given himself what he was describing. “’S bad—heart attack I think—I need someone—real quick—”
And cutting it off right there.
Crashing back, so the voices gabbled, and then a light starred on in the wall.
Flayd, not lying dying on the carpet, rolled over, in case any unseen close-up camera might reveal the faults in his acting skills. And the notebook always kept in his jacket pocket stabbed him in the ribs.
THE FIRST TIME HE HAD ever heard …
Music.
When, where, had that been?
Only a nothing surrounded it, yet out of the nothing, which perhaps was night, this incredible element had drifted, like water, like smoke, like air—and made from the nothing, as fire was struck with an old-fashioned match. And, as he later thought, as pleasure and orgasm were created inside a woman’s body. Touch—friction—magic. Something miraculous which came—from nowhere.
Like life itself.
Music.
SO MANY LIGHTS IN this City, so bright. Not like the Roman town, with its intermittent candles, torches, beads of flame in oil, ordinary stars.
Snatches of sound. Scents.
The glutinous, caressive clokking of the oar through water, wanderliers hailing each other, lit boats out on the lagoon, the jewels of churches …
Wind blew back her hair.
“Rough weather coming,” said the wanderlier, and winked, for here rough weather never came at all, unless intended and authorized.
AS THE MEDICS BENT over him, Flayd parted them like curtains. Across their toppling, he lunged at the two security men, punch ing one out cold, cranking his elbow back into the other guy’s middle hard enough to remove him from the action.
Out in the corridor, a girl with a flecx.
“Pardon me,” said Flayd and knocked
her hand, and the gun, separated, ceilingward. He hoped he hadn’t hurt her.
He could almost hear Ali laughing. Yeah, baby, you don’t expect this kinda stuff from some big fat slob works all day at his desk.
They forgot the excavations, the aqua-diving. The fury.
Ignoring the elevators, filled up anyway with over-dressed guests going down to dine, Flayd took the stairs. Leaped them, one stack of steps at a leap.
IT WAS BEAUTIFUL. He had not thought—it could be—
Beautiful.
So—
Beautiful.
It
Was like
It
was like—
This sound, this
Music
It
It was
Was—
AFFRONTED, THE wanderlier protested.
“Sin—signore—what are you doing—my boat! You could have upset her, and the lady—”
The large man, his hair a fiery banner, had erupted from the doors of the Ca’Marrone, pounded across the terrace, and jumped straight down into the wanderer.
“Jula—” said Flayd, “you’re perfect. She’s my pickup,” he added to the wanderlier. “We’re late. The Orpheo. Fast. Get going.”
“But signore—”
“Can it, buster. Use your fucking engine.”
“Engine, signore? But this is a wand—”
“I know you got concealed fucking engines, buddy, you all do. I’m UAS, that OK for you? Now rev her up.”
The wanderlier pulled a face, reached down along one side of the boat.
The roar of an outboard CX split the electric night.
“Hold tight, Jula. Oh Christ am I glad to see you. I thought you might be there—”
Up on the terrace, disapproving or tickled guests watched the slender wanderer shoot away along the Canale Leone Marco, at the end of which it left the water to leapfrog a jam of boats, before plunging on, missile-like, into the water ways beyond.
PICARO OPENED HIS EYES.
Unless, by now, he could see through the closed lids.