Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  A small soft light had come on in one wall. A small soft voice, like a woman’s, called to Picaro gently that he was welcome. A panel then opened under the light, a function of the house’s hidden CXs, and drew the bags and the crate away to their destination by a concealed route.

  Yet, when he had gone up a few steps, and glanced back, the wall was only a spotted-brown expanse, centuries old, and the water-glimmer through the windows flickered timeless on the tiles.

  He passed no one in the corridors. Gaining his personal door, he reached into his sleeve pocket for the required key. Had he ever used a key on a door in his life, before this moment? Picaro thought he had not. But he was thirty. Others here wouldn’t find keys so peculiar. It worked, anyway, as well as CX.

  And beyond the second door was the apartment.

  It resembled precisely the disced recx he had been sent. It was also utterly different. Here the sunlight and the shade were not merely virtual. There was a smell of things too, of the various materials, and faint dampness (fake?) he had detected in the rest of the palace, of newness and great age, weirdly commingled. Of emptiness.

  A ripe red terracotta floor. A window, there, with amber glass bottles and glasses like jade, and a magenta stained-glass jewel. An unlit lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling, round as a latticed moon, oriental and from long ago, reconstructed, durable, and charming.

  He walked from room to room. Each was vacant but for its occasional enhancing detail: a narrow, carved black wood cupboard in a corner, with a skull—very real and not real, re-created—on its top. A red embroidered rug, fresh and new and old once, and no doubt from fabled Candisi. Such things.

  Already invisibly deposited in place, the luggage balanced against one of the walls, which themselves had a color like dark honey and glowed in slots of light.

  In the last room of the seven, a long window gave on a balcony. Walking into this room, Picaro halted. Outside, perched on the balcony’s outer ledge, and clinging one-handed to the ornamental iron, like a mad, wild human bird, was one of the girls from below.

  Picaro undid the ancient bolt mechanism of the window. He went out on the balcony, and the girl regarded him with bright eyes. How had she got up here? Perhaps the other one, still standing on the terrace by the canal, helped hoist her aloft—awkward enough in their tight-waisted, swirling dresses.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  The girl below had a somber skin and looked sullenly up at him. This one was pale, with a storm cloud of dark hair.

  “I love your music,” she said, “Magpie.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have all your decx, every one. And a music file of the notation. Everything you’ve composed, everything you’ve played and sung. I love you,” she added.

  “Thank you,” he said again.

  He wondered how to get rid of her. He hadn’t expected this, of all things, not here.

  “I’m Cora,” she said. She jerked her head at the girl left on the terrace, “She is India.”

  “What nice names. But I think you ought to get down.” Even as he said it, his heart sinking, thinking of having to escort her into, before out of, the rooms.

  But Cora said, “Please, your autograph.”

  “All right.”

  He went over to just within a meter of her, no closer. He set the wristecx swiftly, and waited, and she pointed to the bodice of her dress. “Here.” The wristecx fired a tiny flick of compressed energy. Together he and she watched the miniscule spangle form on the cloth, above her breast. “Does it,” she said, “speak in your voice? What does it say? Does it play music?”

  “My voice. It will say, Picaro to Cora, and then it’ll play you three bars of the Africarium.”

  “I love the Africarium.”

  “Good. Now—”

  “Don’t trouble,” said Cora, the mad, wild, wingless bird, and winglessly she flew off the balcony, so his sunken heart leapt into his throat instead. But a second later she had landed, without a hitch, flawless, back on the terrace in the arms of her unfaltering friend. Both girls then turned adjacent cartwheels, revealing their modern briefs and white lace stockings. Acrobats? He laughed despite himself, despite everything. And then they laughed too and ran away, back through the alley by the green palazzo. They had been young; neither, he guessed, more than nineteen.

  They were cute enough. He hoped they wouldn’t return.

  PICARO, THE MAGPIE, sat on the floor, in the hot, sweet stillness of Viorno-Votte afternoon.

  Sometimes he drank water from a tall emerald flagon. He watched unsunned sunlight make patterns.

  She had had a harpsichord here, he knew that, Eurydiche, but that was then. No harpsichord now, not even a recx harpsichord. Instead the Africara stood, potbellied, horned, and brown-black as a bull, against the wall. Sometimes the rich clear light seemed to flutter its strings, as if bees went over them. Illusion.

  How noiseless the palazzo was, each apartment CX-insulated. But outside the open window there had been intermittent footfalls, notes of other laughter, music, shouts even at one point, some dispute along the Canale Alchimia. An hour changed, then another, and bells rang from all the churches as they had rung from these churches always, before the sea came in.

  Then the wristecx rang like a tinier non-bell. Angry a moment, Picaro took it off and shut it in the carved cupboard under the skull. Let the skull keep it quiet.

  No matter how you obscured your tracks, in this present world, people could always find you. Even here, where a private wristecx, ruled by the City’s machines, was not supposed to be capable, of relaying incoming calls, unless you applied for an override.

  The call signal was silenced.

  He stretched out his body full-length and slept, head pillowed only on the many braids of his hair.

  “WHO THE FUCK is this?”

  “Flayd—it’s Flayd. We met on the plane.”

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  Pointless to ask how Flayd had found the call number. And no wish to ask why he had kept on signaling until the skull cupboard rattled.

  “I’m at the University Building,” said Flayd. “Come and have a drink with me.”

  “No. Pleasure meeting you and good-bye. Chi’ciao, Sin Flayd. Don’t use this signal again.”

  Outside, sourceless sunset now spilled over the canal and the coppery roofs and the palazzos. On a slight rise, a church flashed a gold spire. The sky became sand pink and geranium red.

  And then a wanderer being poled along the canal was stopping, the male passenger scrambling out and up the watersteps, a tumble of muscle and weight and hair the color of the roofs.

  As had the autograph hunters, Flayd the archaeologist now stood below the balcony, beady eyes upon it.

  “Don’t lose your cool,” cautioned Flayd. “I have to talk to you.”

  “Is this a sexual proposition?”

  “Christ, no.” Flayd grinned suddenly. “Sorry to disappoint.” Then his face fell heavily. “Come down, or do I come up.”

  “Tell me what you want?”

  “That’d be telling the whole block, wouldn’t it. Come down then, I’ll wait. We can go visit Phiarello’s—Victorian ice cream—I have to talk about something. I mean it, Magpie.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It’s your professional name.”

  A terrible rage, evil and sentient of itself, took Picaro’s face. He felt it do so, felt it remake him, and turned to Flayd in obscuration the profile that had once been described by Magpie admirers as “chisled by a sculptor from black coal.” Picaro thought about that, until he became only one more re-created carving. Then he glanced down at Flayd, bulky, immovable, still staring.

  “Goodnight,” said Picaro. He shut the Amerian, and Venus, out behind the shatterproof glass of Shaachen’s window.

  2

  THAT NIGHT, UNDER THE CURSE of the dead Ethiopian warrior, Jula had considered her first memories. They were very spare.

  Houses
built of packed earth and branches—huts, a Roman would say—woodsmoke and half dark, the shadows of trees in mist. And that was all. No recollection survived of the destruction of this place, the crying and blood. Nothing either of how she, presumably with other infants, was taken away.

  She thought next of the Ethiopian, his homeland. (That was while they were sewing her up under the arena, the gut thread pulling like the biting of ants.) What had his homeland been? Lush, with a river of crocodile green—or some desert?

  It was a while before the surgeon had finished with the long gash in her left arm, the wound below her ribs—the Ethiopian had just missed her intestines. Yes, in the end Phaetho had fought well—few others had, in recent years, come so close. But the crowd had not seen his skill or valor, because he had delayed at the start, and by the finish they hated him.

  When she went up into the ending afternoon, the last matches in the arena were over, the horns silent, the crowds dispersed, the corpses carted away. The victors, with their palm leaves, or—as she had been—crowned with laurel from the precincts of Apollo, were taking up their evening lives.

  Tonight she would not be going back to the school to sleep. Her owner would be showing her off, with some of his other successes. In the arena baths she had become clean and scented, been skilfully shaved of all bodily hairs but for the hair on her head; this, kept short and waxed to spikes when she fought, freshly hennaed. Jula Flammifer they called her, Fiery Jula, for her combats and her hair. But in reality she was a blonde from the backlands of Gallia. None of her was really quite her own belonging. She was a slave. Even her forename came from that of her owner, Marcus Libinius Julus, though she had been titled by him, in recognition of her worth, as his daughter would have been, if he had ever had a legal one.

  In the tradition of what she was, a gladiatrix, off-stage as it were, she still wore the garb of a man, a rich actor’s clothes, of course without the town toga, or ring of citizenship.

  Four bodyguards attended her, also gladiators, now freed. They never spoke to her, nor she to them. Their instructions had always already been given.

  There was a litter. She got into it and the curtains fell, and the bearers began to run, her escort trotting to keep pace.

  Her thoughts were slow and obstinate tonight. They kept going back to the man she had killed.

  In Rome, generally, women were not matched with men. But here in the provinces, it was different. She was a secutor, a pursuer, and she was paired always with men. In Rome too, she had heard, women fighters were sometimes mocked, or brought on for a laugh, like the clowns who entertained the crowd between the serious matches. But there were famous women fighters in Rome, too. One of these was the Emperor Narmo’s favorite.

  Jula started. She had half fallen asleep on the cushions, lulled by the throp-throp of running feet. The fight with Phaetho, the loss of blood, had wearied her. But it would be a long evening, Julus’s dinner starting late and going on probably until the sixth hour. She parted the curtains and looked out. The Via Gracula, a fine road closely paved with mathematically cut and placed stones, ran from the stadium to the town gates. It passed through woodland at first, cleared back a hundred paces on both sides, and here and there a marble tomb stood, catching, as the woods did, the slanting westering light. Behind, the other way, lay the sea, dark blue in its readiness for evening.

  Julus’s villa reclined just off the Graculan Way, where the woods mantled rising land.

  A pillar marked the entry to her master’s estate. From here a track ran up the slope, wide enough to take two chariots, and lined with the same stone pines that clustered around the stadium.

  The sun was very low now, red and flashing like a tarnished sword between each tree.

  They passed the little temple to Temidis, goddess of prosperity-through-chance. The escorting gladiators sang out to Temidis some raucous salute of their own, in their secret jargon.

  Beyond the temple the land leveled, and over the brow of the hill, the villa gardens appeared below, basking in sunfall among olive orchards and vineyards. The villa itself, long and scarlet roofed, showed vivid lights. The guests would already have arrived.

  A waft of music blew up the hill.

  Jula left the litter. It was Julus’s wish that she approach on foot, with only two of her escort.

  As they stood a moment, one of the men swore softly. Across the deepening upper sky, a shooting star traced like a runner’s torch, high over Stagna Maris. The Romans were made uneasy by such stars. The Christiani would say, however, such a falling flame was something to do with angels …

  This Jula knew. But she thought the fallen star marked the Ethiopian’s death. Maybe he had been royal in his own land. Perhaps his own gods, that he did not deign to pray to before the mob, had honored him instead.

  He had left an impression on Jula. She had made an offering for him at the altar of Judging Fate, in the stadium precinct. There was nothing else she could do. He would not even be given burial rites, for he had lost his first fight. With the bodyguard swaggering behind her, she strode down the track towards the lamplit villa, and the wine and feasting of her glamorous, victorious slavery.

  3

  ELEVEN MINUTES AFTER PICARO had shut the balcony window, fists hammered heavily on the reinforced wood of the apartment door. He knew who it was. He did not respond. The hammering of the fists stopped.

  Presently Flayd called through the door.

  His voice was muffled somewhat by the noise-conditioning, but that was mainly in the walls; the door necessarily would let sounds through.

  “Picaro—listen—this is serious—” on and on.

  Picaro flung open the door.

  In the dimming of the daylight, unlit, he confronted Flayd who burned there in the corridor like the last of sunset.

  “What?”

  Flayd shook his head and raised one hand in a pacific gesture. “Sorry. But let me borrow your wristecx, will you.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to call the mainland.”

  “Use your own wristecx, on your wrist.”

  “She don’t work, Picaro.”

  “Then find a public CX—”

  “Just—just let me try and make this call.”

  Picaro relaxed. He was bored with the rage, it now seemed meaningless. He let it go, snapped off the wristecx and held it out to Flayd, no longer caring very much what he did with it.

  As Picaro walked off across the dark red floor, Flayd stepped into the apartment and shut the outer door. Then he activated the call reflex. Leaning on a wall, Flayd tried for some while to make a call with the wristecx. (He must otherwise be agile with CX—he’d fixed the one on the palace’s main door and got in.)

  Picaro watched, sitting now on a table in one corner of the wide vestibule, drinking water from the emerald flagon.

  Eventually Flayd left off tapping combinations.

  “Yours is the same as the rest. You can’t call out. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Only in-dome calls either way. Nothing to or from anywhere else.” Flayd heaved a sigh. “Same with the three public CX I tried. All of them I guess.”

  Picaro said, “So what.”

  “So, this is new, Picaro. Last month, yesterday, anyone could call out-dome if they wanted. And now none of us can.”

  Picaro raised his head. Lazily he said, again, “So what.”

  “I gotta talk to you,” said Flayd. “The rest of them—shit, I can’t. But let’s get out of here first.”

  “There is a conspiracy,” said Picaro flatly, “and the CXs are wired to pick up what we say.”

  “Yeah, I know. To people like me there is always some conspiracy. Come out,” said Flayd. “Let me tell you about this one.”

  “Why would I want to know?”

  Flayd said, “Why the hell wouldn’t you?”

  Picaro shrugged.

  Flayd opened the door again. “Last chance.”

  Picaro sat on the table. T
hen slowly he got up. For a moment, he saw it in Flayd’s eyes, the Amerian thought he had finally gone too far, and Picaro might leap suddenly for his throat like a cat. Flayd could handle himself, so much was obvious. But Picaro was the unknown quantity.

  When Picaro did not attack him, Flayd moved off along the corridor. By the time they reached the stone stair, they walked side by side, and Flayd was saying, “I took your call number from the coder at the University. It registers everyone in the City. Like the archives. You should see those. Room after room. Everything, dating back to tribal times here.”

  Outside, the wanderer Flayd had brought waited on the water. Evening stars were threading in chains across the long lingering of fake sunset.

  PHIARELLO’S LAY TO ONE SIDE of the Primo Square. In the dusk, outdoor tables under candy-striped umbrellas surrounded the restaurant, full of tourists and locals, who had come to drink alcohol and coffee, and eat dinner, or the strawberry or damson or mint ice cream.

  The Primo’s lunar dome floated above the square as the goldwork of its walls faded. The great Angel Tower lifted its russet arm to the sky-that-wasn’t. Even this basilica had gone under the sea, before the rescue operations began. Parts of the building, both inside and out, like so much here, were architectural recxs, and parts exact reconstructs in the original materials. But you would never know. It was as real, composite and eternal as any human thing felt itself to be, in the beginning.

  Pigeons and doves flew back and forth to their roosts. They were, mostly, living birds—only some of the more exotic species of Venus-creatures were mechanical recxs. And the dome had fooled the pigeons and the doves. They thought the sun had set now, and it was time for bed.

  Everyone was fooled. They strolled across the square arm in arm, or took off in wanderers, heading for the Bridge of Lies—which had lost its true legend of torture victims who lied to stay alive, and gained a romantic legend instead of the lies that lovers told. They stared, the people, up at the hardening stars, and waited to swoon at the moon.