Everything had become sound.
Everything had become the music.
He sensed, but did not see, a rustling undertow, like leaves driven by a wind—
Or the sea, coming in.
But what he heard, heard in completion, and what he saw, and what he smelled and sensed and felt, and had become part of—
Was—the music.
And it was the music, not of earth, but of the outer spheres, the music of a world beyond worlds.
Its beauty and eloquence showed not only in the plangent ecstasy of its sounds, but in the shifting rays of a supernal light, now white, now gold, now topaz.
The music was full of wings, and it carried him upward as it must carry everything, up where the heart knows it must fly, and tries to, and never can—
But now, it could.
The sheer beauty was its joy. Joy beyond belief and hope and dream, joy that had no place in an earthly world.
It was the music
of the sky, and of the realm the sky signified. Of the blue vast airs, thin as gossamer, strung with planets and clouds, where images came and went, and which, no longer, had any end.
It was the music of Eternity.
It was the music that played about the Entity of God, when the stars sang together.
Picaro knew.
No wonder it killed.
How could flesh and blood withstand it? They were not equipped to sustane this flame-struck and orgasmic fire from heaven. From Heaven.
There was no pain.
Peeled like the apple of knowing, the soul was drawn from its skin. Naked, and without thought or word, it stood in the sky and did not care for the dropped soiled costume it had left behind.
Once they had put on bodies to conceal the nudity of their souls. Now they pulled them off, cast them away—
There was no pain, but the joy was pain. It was a glory beyond expression or endurance.
And the light. Alabaster, aureum, jasper, orichalc, sard …
Through the pulses of it, Picaro, no longer Picaro, no longer a man, or anything at all, saw out to where a towering burning creature was, making from itself the outspinning gold of
The music.
That then, Cloudio. This the true essence that had filled him. Not himself in any way. Not human. Another element, which had entered his regrown, vacant flesh.
The opened door.
Love, love—greatest of all—this was what the music was. The love that cannot, (here) be understood. Or borne. Yet here it was.
There was no pain. No fear. Nothing mattered. Only the music.
Picaro saw, through his lids, without sight, the creature that lifted now, up on its titanic wings.
It was too large for the auditorium. Too large for the City or the world.
Its beauty more burnished than the morning star, called Lucifer, or Venus.
The wings spread.
Not like any bird.
Picaro heard, the length of the earth away, his own screaming—orgasmic, joyous, blessed—one solitary crying among thousands, as the roof became undone, and the end began.
THEY WERE ALMOST AT the Rivoalto.
The speeding wanderer had jetted through a maelstrom of shouts and maledictions, water syphoned, stars in streaks. And then—a kind of silence was there, beyond all speed, all noise.
“Cut the engine,” Flayd yelled.
The wanderlier obeyed.
Suddenly they were in an ink-pool of utter stillness. And through the still came a wire of sweetest agony that pierced to the brain—
They stood upright in the boat.
Everywhere around—
A sort of unheard humming, a sort of image that was invisible—
An assortment of boats were standing also stock still in the channel, and somehow no lamplight was anywhere, the fake gas-globes along the arcaded bank all out, the wind blowing buffets and yet—
Not a hair that stirred.
There were no people. All these boats, these walks, were empty.
Where had the curses and the laughter gone?
Abruptly, up there in some palazzo, a window shattered to a puff of glittering spores.
And then a score of others.
And then—
They were lying in the boat, where they had been standing.
Flayd, Jula, the wanderlier, all clutched together, like frightened children—Blood, in the mouth—a smell of blood—
But another sound was coming.
It was like thunder. Then like water.
Then like light. It was the noise of light.
The sky went white as snow.
From everywhere came a gush and sigh, a falling of things like soot from the darkness that the whiteness made.
After that, something was, which rose up into the air.
It was the yellow enormity of a dawn. All they could see of its shape, to recognize, was the gigantic outspreading of its wings, one behind another, and another, and another. And yet, they could see it smiled.
The canal heaved. It threw the wanderer, and all the other little empty craft, upward, threw them at the sky, after the angel. But even as they were flung against the stars, the stars went out. The sky went out. And the shrieking screaming they had never heard was finished.
LEONILLO RAN. A man of straw inside his nutshell.
He had seen—he had seen—
For an instant, before the sound relay failed, the CX exploding outwards in razorblades, he had heard—
Blood, that was the color, the splashing redness, all the blood, and the yellow of the light—
Even in the screen room, the screaming, crying, the vomiting—
Noises in the ear—
Leonillo ran against the elevators, which would not respond. The doors stood wide, and down the shaft he saw a cage, with something smashed in it.
Leonillo ran up the stairs.
He knew why he ran, and to what, he hadn’t forgotten. To the sleeping tablets in his room. He could taste them already, each of those sugar-coated pills he must swallow quickly, quickly, before he no longer could.
PART FOUR
The Gorgeous Palaces
1
SOMETIMES SLEEP WAS as nourishing as food. You woke, and for a moment a great happiness and serenity were all there was to know. But then, you remembered all the rest. The balance tilted. A kind of fear commenced to flood, unencumbered and swift, familiar with its way—the hollows of the mind.
Picaro’s eyes had opened this time on an unexpected height. It was unaccountable and rich with color.
For a while he lay still, gazing up at the vivid yet inexplicit chaos of it. Until gradually its structure and explanation became apparent.
It was an exceptionally high, vaulted ceiling, which in one area had parted, revealing another, less solid, ceiling beyond. The first and nearer ceiling had painted figures on it, dancers and garlands, but the rich panoply of red, black, and a curious, pinkish ochre, had been flung across it, so that very little now of the painting might be seen. Glad faces, robust limbs and floating draperies, were stranded among banks of abstract color. As for the second ceiling, it was dull, less dark than obscure. It seemed perhaps to tremble a little, Picaro wasn’t sure.
He was lying on a jumble of something, uncomfortable, a soft rubble he did not identify.
He could hear a slow thick dripping noise. At first he was used to it, and then he realized he was not. But he wasn’t ready, as yet, to turn his head, or to sit up.
What came last to him (unbelievably, considering its omnipresence and intensity) was the smell. A stench so horrible, so noxious and indescribable yet—describable—that in the instant his brain accepted awareness of it, Picaro choked, started violently to gag. The spasm tossed him after all off his back. As this happened, he felt a looseness all through him, vertigo and misplacement. But then he was kneeling, and, amazingly, the sickness retreated utterly. And then he saw, without even the armor of animal nausea between him and it, what he had woken to.
This was some cathedral in Hell. Its walls were built of freshly torn flesh and offal, of intestines and hearts and bones. Its floor was really paved, just as, in painted form, the ceiling was, with scattered faces, limbs, torsoes, pieces of cloth, all under a coverlet of blood, and of every liquid eruption that bodies, so volcanically discharged inside out, could eject. It was this too, this bomb-blast of evisceration, which had splashed over the ceiling fresco. But it was the Creature that had risen up, that had melted and next fused the palazzo roof, passing through like a plume of white-hot gas into a darkness now also despoiled.
Picaro stood. He stood on faces and breasts. On the body of the policewoman who had flirted with him, what was left of her—but he couldn’t even ascertain that much. Only here and there the edges of the gilt and velvet chairs, midnight, crimson, chartreuse—torn open also, broken, caved-in, half dissolved, like the tiers which had supported them.
Where the sunken stage had been was a twisted shapeless place. Nothing remained of the instrument.
Music.
It was the music.
Am I alive? How can I be? Am I imagining it? Am I really down there, under my own feet? Are all of them standing here as I am, each of us unseen by the others—
Over the clangor of silence, the dripping, the creak of some disarranged masonry preparing to give way, Picaro heard an unconscionable noise. Like footsteps.
At the rim of the melted ceiling, a woman’s face appeared, not painted on plaster, not dislocated, inverted, and dead. A tail of blue-black hair hung down through the opening as she peered through it. She still wore her sumptuous evening gown of red, but now she seemed designed to match the cathedral of Hell.
India saw him there. He saw her see him.
Then she swung right over the opening, fearless, indifferent, and set her narrow bare feet against the brickwork.
Picaro watched as India, one hand holding back the hem of her gown, walked easy as a fly down the wall of Hell.
“TAKE MY HAND.”
He took her hand.
Her hand was slim and cool, the nails very pale and clean.
Picaro, holding her hand, turned to look around him, to look and look, and then he turned himself bodily around, (still holding her hand, so she moved after him, like one of the dancers from the fresco.) He didn’t care that she could walk down walls.
“We should go now,” she said.
“Why?” he said. “Where are we expected?”
“Somewhere.”
“In a minute,” he said, “something will give way.”
“Yes. The ceiling will come down soon.”
“No. I meant myself. I meant—this—will happen to me.”
“If it were to happen, it would have done so.” India pursed her lips, impatient now as a busy mother with a toddler who delayed. “Come.”
She helped him climb over the soft rubble.
He didn’t know how she did this, either. Most of the tiers had dropped inwards.
At a pair of doors that were melded together, she turned aside and offered him a broad, cracked-open slice through the plaster.
He did not want to leave Hell.
Hell was where he belonged.
But she wouldn’t let go of his hand, and he knew, if he failed to go out, she would have to stay here too.
Behind them, as they maneuvered into the invented tunnel, came a sound of slapping hands, one last commotion of applause—
Picaro craned back.
He saw, circling through the pinkish dust, against the bled-dead sky, a black-and-white bird, its wings and tail luminous with peacock green and blue.
Then the roof began to crumble and crash in, and the magpie, like a cast spear, hard and invulnerable, flew upward and was lost in the nothingness beyond the nothingness.
OUT IN THE BODY of the Palazzo Orpheo, the dead lay around. Their state was not quite so complete as that of the dead in the auditorium. Most were almost recognizable as human. Some were worse than others. Perhaps they had possessed better hearing.
India and Picaro, hand in hand, picked across them.
He was crying, and his nose ran, and he wiped it on his sleeve, which was stained and ruined like everything else.
Once he stopped, he tried again to throw up. But he wasn’t sick now. It wasn’t that. Nor so simple to be rid of.
There were stains like acid on the walls. Vats of acid.
Near another smeared door something lay jerking.
“No,” said India sharply as he tried to go to it.
Then he pushed her off. He stumbled to the flapping squeaking thing and stamped down upon it, where the neck must be.
“I couldn’t—” he said—“leave—”
“Very well.”
“Not like that.”
“I understand. Give me your hand again, Picaro.”
He cried, now and then making a wrenching stupid sound that filled the total dripping, shifting silence like the gulping of an engine. Through room upon room.
“Here is a way out,” she said. “The square’s outside.”
“Yes.”
“The square is also very bad. And the canals.”
“Yes.”
They went out.
The square was bad. And the canals.
In the middle of the square he halted. She tried to pull him on, she was extremely strong for so slender and unmuscular a young woman. Not like Cora, who had been so tender, a blithe featherweight.
But he refused to move.
He looked up at the sky. It truly was no longer a sky. The lights had all gone out. No stars hovered, no daylight came.
Only there, out across the static roofs, hung a vague reddish smoking ball, which was Venus’s fake moon, glued to the horizon; like him, currently unable to move on.
“Why am I alive?” he said. “Am I the only one alive?”
“From this area, yes. Beyond the radius of the music, ninety percent have survived, but everything is touched a little.”
“Why not me, why not you?”
“Come with me, Picaro, and I’ll tell you.”
“Promises,” he said.
They went on over the square, teetered over the stacked-up bodies in the canal, not needing the small collapsed bridge. Fragments of window-glass lay sparkling everywhere, as if all the faked stars, which had gone out, had shed their dying tears on the City.
2
HERE, THE WANDERLIER SAID, they must leave his boat. He was sorry, they must find another route. He could go no further.
He wanted, he said, to get out to the La’la district, where his wife and baby were, and his uncle and grandfather and aunts.
He shook Flayd’s hand. Then they embraced each other. The wanderlier hugged Jula. “Take care, sinna—for the love of Jesu Christ—take care of her, sin, and you, sinna—you take care of him—I must go back.”
They had all clung together in the narrowness of the boat, and become married in some infallible, perhaps not enduring fashion.
Obviously the outboard motor no longer functioned. As he poled the wanderer off, back across the Rivoalto, he shouted, “I am called Chuseppe! Remember! I’ll give you free rides—” Ludicrous. Who could ride the wanderers now? But they waved him off, Flayd and Jula, standing on the watersteps, under the stone sky.
Then they climbed up to the doorway of a dark, dumb house.
“It’s that way,” Jula said.
“Yes.” He didn’t ask how she knew, she who had seen such a limited amount of Venus. Anyone would know, as if arrows of icy uranium pointed in that direction. Towards the Orpheo.
The door of the house, when they thrust at it, gave way, as they had both known it would. No one seemed to have been there, or they found no one. They ran through a lobby, a court yard where a frothy acacia tree had bent over in a tortured bow, its black leaves out on the paving. Loose cobbles, and bits that gushed from walls, impeded them only momentarily.
On the far side of the house, was one of Venus’s compressed squares, whe
re a fountain played, still played, dismal and bereft. The roof of a building had come down across the square, but it was negotiable.
Flayd thought, as if logic had, at all costs, to be fumbled for, some things resisted, were able to, tougher in construction or in some other manner.
Everywhere, intermittently, the irritating flashing of CXs jabbed the eyes, smashed or shorting out. Sometimes bizarre and eerie sounds echoed out from houses or streets, yet none of these were human, surely, but high-tech indestructible mechanical systems going all to shit. There was only slight evidence of human curtailment, some of this easy to overlook, others—
They raced from the square and out into the tangle of alleys beyond.
At the end of a corkscrew of walls, where Flayd glimpsed the bloody-colored moon stalled at the sky’s edge, they reached the fringe of the ZMI—the Zone of Maximum Impact.
Presently Flayd puked, leaning one hand on a wall that for some reason did not collapse.
Jula waited.
Unspeaking, they went on.
They didn’t need to cover all the distance to the Orpheo.
Through the fogged miasma of dusts, and cold dry stinking smokes, suddenly the only impossible and insane thing: two figures upright, alive, and walking towards them.
Jula was gone.
Nonplussed Flayd came to a stop, and watched her, self-fired, like a flexible dart, landing on the ground only a meter from her target, Picaro.
He was covered in filth, in the debris—of what had once been human.
Jula held out both her hands, and Picaro was fixed there, staring at her. Then Jula took hold of him.
Despite her smallness against his height, his thin, wide-boned body, she seemed the greater. She wrapped her arms about him and held him close as her own skin, looking up into his face until he put it down to rest, forehead to forehead with her.
That was all. They were motionless, seemed likely to stay that way.
Only then Flayd began properly to see India, the Asian girl he had met at Brown’s. He noticed that she alone, in all the shambles, was entirely unmarked. Clean in her clean evening dress, clean in her expression, which was temple-carved, like that of a kind yet sullen god.
THE JANGLE AND WAIL of sirens and emergency vehicles began to come when they were some way down the wider canal, leading out on to the lagoon.