Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  India had found a boat, a tourist vessel, with non-CX engine, left at a quay as if waiting for them. But there were boats everywhere, many empty, and, by that station in their journey, some not. Flayd noted methodically at last the intactness of these bodies, though blood and excrement attended them. The empty boats provided the other clue that probably their occupants had fallen or jumped into the water. There were people lying on the streets, also. And at one palazzo, they hung from the balconies, a score of them, like gaudy washing. But by then none of the four in India’s found boat gave any sign of reaction.

  Beyond the major zone, and its lesser rings, they went through an area where no one, again, seemed to remain. But here and there Flayd spotted momentary, shadowy figures, wandering, half-glimpsed, aimlessly. He didn’t see enough to know what state they were in. Perhaps they were merely stunned and could survive once the medics reached them.

  Then India’s boat was among high, standing walls, still whole and solid, with no view or intimation of damage. Here, instead of dead or dying or dazed human things, they began to see dead animals and birds. Flayd debated why they had come across none before. Soon it occurred to him that these creatures had known, as the human animal had not, apparently until too late, and tried to get away. (There were no projected recx birds either. The CX capacity of the City was well and truly down.)

  In the end it was Jula who first made out the black gulls, hundreds of them, crowded on the roofs, hustled in with pigeons and doves, all alive, none of them avoiding or seeming to mind the other species.

  They had gained the borders of the ZASP—the Zone of Anticipated Survivor Potential.

  And Flayd saw he was using war-room terminology. And that it seemed applicable.

  Picaro and Jula sat, side by side, their arms pressed together, otherwise not touching. It was India who steered the boat through the water and the desperate obstacles, although Flayd had put himself forward to do it.

  Finally they could see the walls opening out, and the broad sheet of motionless stone that was now the lagoon.

  And that was when they began to hear the sirens.

  It was at first a relief to Flayd. Had he thought, despite what India had earlier said to them, that no one else was alive in Venus?

  FROM THE LAGOON, they had a sort of sidelong overview of the City. But in the dull and dispirited twilight, every lamp was out, save for the flash of wrecked CX systems. Though seemingly standing, the City looked bomb-struck, and lost.

  (Flayd had thought they might try to make the subvenerines out by Maria Maka Selena—but his wristecx too was dead, and the dome locks, already shut down, were doubtless now doubly impassable.)

  Jula spoke. “I’ve heard this described. The lull.”

  Flayd glanced at her. “I guess. Then we’re in the eye of the tempest, whatever the tempest is.”

  India had cut the manual motors of the boat.

  They sat, in the leaden, re-gathering silence.

  Flayd said, “I saw it. I thought it was an explosion. A firestorm. But it wasn’t. I don’t know what it was. But I do know, don’t I? You just know. Something I’ve heard of. Something I reckoned just can’t exist. I—recognized it. Christ, that’s how. I knew it, the minute I saw. And not from any picture, not from any statue.”

  “The Christiani called them the messengers,” said Jula. “When I was a child, I heard some of them speak of this once. Angelos, or angelus.”

  “Angel,” said Flayd. “They exist in every religion, in every mythology, in some form or other, thinly disguised. Angels, and demons.”

  “They are the same,” said India.

  As if none of them had expected her to speak again, they all stared at her. Even Picaro did this. But India now was once more silent as the pervading silence. Her eyes were down. She might have said nothing.

  “Maybe,” said Flayd. “OK. Whatever it is—that thing—it could cause all this by sound—”

  “Music.” Now it was Picaro who coolly spoke. “It was the music. Anyone who heard, anything in its path—and then the shock-wave spreading.”

  “Listen,” said Flayd, “am I being too basic if I feel the need to ask—where is it? Where’d it go?”

  And then Picaro, who was evidently in the cool and level stages of madness, stood up in the boat. Staring at Flayd from a face hard as a rock, Picaro lifted his right arm, and pointed, straight up, into the granite sky.

  “Up there. Where else? That’s where they go, where they fall from. There.”

  Silence again. And from the City emerged a low slow booming that swelled and died. Nothing was visible of what it was, or had been. Only the distant mindless cries of sirens that were themselves growing infrequent now.

  Flayd said, “But that isn’t a sky—are you saying it’s gone?”

  Picaro laughed.

  At the blinding, insulting whiteness of his teeth, Flayd wanted only to kill this laughing man, but there were enough dead already.

  “No,” Picaro said then. “Not gone.”

  And then India spoke again. “It’s lying up under the dome, above the sky. It lies dreaming and brooding on its game. That’s what the lull is, and the storm’s eye. Soon it will begin to play again, with the new toys.”

  Picaro sat down.

  The water seemed so congealed, the boat scarcely reacted.

  But unheralded, across heaven, there wavered the glorious flambeaux of morning, yellow-gold.

  The City was made golden too, waning lights drained to nothing, the laguna an animate floor of flame—over the water the other way, the church of Maka Selena blazed like a rising sun.

  Everything held its breath. The City. The unknowing world above and beyond.

  The dawnlight flickered, curdled, and was folded in behind the costive darkness of the unreal sky.

  Flayd found he was shuddering.

  Jula reached across now and pressed his hand. Her eyes were steady still, over the rim of the shield she had been so wise never fully to lay down.

  India said, “Don’t be afraid. Not yet. After such pleasure, it will wait a while. It needs no rest, but has learned of rest, as it’s learned music. And so it rests.”

  “That was the angel,” said Flayd. “That light.”

  “That was the angel,” said Picaro, “turning over on its bed of sky. Because angels live above sky, somehow, and they’re evil, and they fall. I found that out when I was sixteen.”

  Flayd said, “When it starts up again—”

  “The rest will go,” said Picaro. “What the fuck else, do you think? Maybe even me, next time. Good.”

  “No,” said India, “not you.”

  She had raised her head, and once more they all looked at her, as if at a signal. And Flayd, not seeing why he did, pulled from his jacket the paper notebook always kept there, the outdated pen. For it seemed India was ready now, to tell them all she knew.

  3

  “WE ARE THE fallen angels.”

  India, her words, there in the boat upon the water.

  As Flayd wrote them in the book, end to end:

  This is not Hell, yet Hell is here, nor are we out of it.

  You must understand this. The story of a rebellion in some upper sphere is a mistranslation current everywhere. God is not rebelled against, for God is all things, even rebellion. So how would it be possible?

  It was a departure then, not a rebellion, which drove us out. A decision. Our own, which naturally was allowed us, since God is also freedom and we are free to choose.

  So then, some of us came to live in the world. Not where we fell, for the Kingdom of Heaven is not above any sky, but, as we are told, within us. (Which, while we are here, is no more explicable than to explain the shape of the wind.)

  In this way, those who live in the flesh, as they have chosen to do, carry their muddled memory of a fall from grace or from sky, which is untrue, but inevitable, for symbolically we have descended.

  Also, you will recognize angels, if ever they are seen. How could it
be otherwise? Although their form, on earth, even if etheric, is changed, yet they are analogous to what they are when elsewhere. And this other actual image is that which belongs to all of us, when we have left the flesh behind. And of course, they appear winged, too, for how else can they fly?—except that, there, they and we need no wings to fly, and so that as well is the translation of a truth, its analogy.

  You must understand …

  Among our kind, yours and mine, there are two races.

  There are those who come out to the earth often, and enter in, are born, grow, live, and die, in the flesh.

  And there are those who seldom come to the earth save in invisible ways, to solace those who, living their earthly lives, so often fail to see us, or, without physical sight of us, to remember.

  To that first category, the three of you, mostly, belong.

  To the second category, I.

  But sometimes, my kind do come here in the flesh, are born and grow and live a selected time as human—almost as human, for special abilities remain to us, though at a glance we seem the same as any fleshly other.

  For myself, I was born here to be with the woman we call Cora. I did not want her to live all her earthly lives without me, for she and I are like two unmatched twins, in that other place I cannot begin to describe to you, since there are no words for it.

  So Cora was born, and so was I, and I lived as a baby in the very apartment that lay next to Cora’s own. When Cora baby cried, India baby cried. When Cora child began to play, India child went to play beside her. There was never any need to tell her who or what I was. She always knew me. Even at her life’s end, when I had walked up the walls, slid through the pipes of the air-conditioning, when I had reached her—I had only to be seen by her and she knew. She went from me smiling, back to the lands within. Where all of us go, where all go, all. And though I must wait now in this body, until my day comes to return, I know her to be safe. I am glad that I was here. Glad, for I have seen so many die that think they are alone, and in terror, but they are not.

  There are others of my kind, among your kind.

  Our kinds are the same, in the end, when we are gone from here. And there, our powers, of your kind and mine, are those of angels.

  But among our two races also, there is another kind.

  They too have come down in flesh. And they have learned to love that better than all else, even better than the other worlds beyond. The pleasures of the physical sphere ensnare them. They are tempted not by demons, but by their own demonic greeds. And so, they become demons, to fulfill their wants.

  The man we call Picaro, listen now. Your mother was one of these, the woman we call Simoon. A fallen angel in the truest sense, for she dashed herself to earth and took on a physical life, while refusing to forego her spirit powers. And it has never usually been the aim of physical life to live by the magical powers of spirit—or why else are mankind born to and limited by flesh? But these others, they wish the most to combine flesh with uncanny power, and enter this world to play here, like greedy and cruel children.

  Even so, the action of birth, infancy, childhood; of confinement and growing in the flesh, still constrain them nevertheless. They are kept by it small. It curbs their liberty and their sorcery. Rarely do they recall they are unhuman. Even the woman we call Simoon did not. And for this reason, their abilities, although sometimes supernatural and very great, are ultimately rendered down, as Simoon’s were rendered down. Indeed, they turned upon her and became disease. And since her body itself could also die, death threw her away, back to her own country—which is also ours. Though if you were to compare them, her homeland with mine and yours, though they are the same, they would seem as unlike as light to shadow. (And from this recollection come the two notions of a Heaven and a Hell.) For her kind color what surrounds them. Just as that one, who is lying in the upper dome, colors the make-believe sky.

  You must understand …

  Never before have any come here, into flesh, who did not have first to be born. Who did not have to grow into flesh, constrained by it, and kept within bounds, so even Simoon, a spirit of vast and cunning malignity, as she—it—has come to be, was held in chains by her body, and could not do even seven sevenths of what otherwise she might have done. While, when in purely etheric form, none of us, we, or her kind, beyond a given effect, can tamper with the physical world. It is less we must not than that we do not, not even the ones like Simoon. If you like, it is a law of balance, God’s law, for God is also balance, as God is everything.

  Yet now, your people have themselves made flesh in this world. They have made it, like a cup. Not born, nor grown through a time of years, with the angel which is called Soul inside it, but instead created fully grown, adult, strong, and unoccupied. And to this vacant casket, an invitation issued.

  You must understand that never before has such a thing ever been.

  Now I will tell you this. To the full-grown body of the woman who fights, and that we call Jula, her own soul, which is her angel, came back. It came freely, since it was not elsewhere here in the flesh. The woman Jula has lived many lives in the world between the time of her first incarnation as a gladiatrix, and these, a little, she recalls now in fragments, as many do. Although the life between lives remains always generally unknowable. So she has secured her own body, for a second term, as is proper and lawful, in the sense of True Law. Also she brings back to it all that was learned since by her, recovering it piece by piece, as she becomes accustomed to her flesh, gained in such a sudden and preempted way.

  Jula, and the man we call Flayd, know too the legend of Lethe, whose water is drunk to take away the memory of our other life in Elysium. Though Lethe is a cipher, still to forget is necessary, for without forgetfulness, what human would otherwise stay in the physical world until their purpose was accomplished? Only my race, when we are here, linger in partial recollection, which makes us sometimes sad. But such is our payment to ourselves, for giving up the greater worlds to be with those we love.

  For this world that is the world, is required. See it how you will, as the only paradise, as exile from a garden, as a harsh school or a battleground, we come to it for our own purposes, and of our own choice, and for this it was created.

  Now as with Jula, if that soul too, which had been the man we call Cloudio, if that, as I say, had been enabled to re-enter its former body, no awful harm would have come of it. But that soul is engaged elsewhere in this world. And therefore, the flesh of that made body stood empty. Then that which fell, or came outward, it went into the man we call Cloudio, whose other name is Nero, But Cloudio it was not. That one which came is one like the mother of Picaro. It is of her same type, though less wicked than she. For it was more curiosity, more a selfish, grasping innocence, which drew it in, irresistibly, to assume the body of Cloudio, and to pretend to itself and others a while that it was he, even as it forgot, and so remembered what truly it was.

  For the flesh could not restrain it. It had not grown to and with the flesh. Had not selected the flesh, only been offered it and tempted in. It was as if a night-flying moth beheld a candle, and must rush into the flame. But in this case it is the flame that flies, and the candle that is the moth and is burned up.

  It is, in the terminology of the earth, air, this thing, sheer air from the worlds beyond worlds. Air like fire, like radiation, and like everlasting night.

  It has played that it is human, as do we all, but it is unrestrained and has come to relish, more than usually, the being of itself as a man, adoring to eat and drink, to sleep. But more than all else, to make music.

  For in the physical brain of Cloudio, which had been the brain of a genius, this angel found great skills, and learned them in a second. How it loves to make his music—but the music which it makes is also its own, a music translated in this instance in absolute exactitude from the music that is not music, but the essence of its own supernal elements.

  You must understand …

  It is as if a sea
were poured into a jar, or the whirlwind poured there. And the jar bursts to let out the tidal wave and storm.

  And now it lies overhead, resting because Cloudio would rest after a performance, readying itself the while to play once more, out of itself, the detonation of its melody, its harmony, the symphonic of the power of a soul made just barely present in the physical world through flesh, and made also fatal by its raw link to the psychosmal Heart. An angel-soul that has no empathy with mortal man, and does not see the horror it has unleashed. It will not stop.

  There are so many stories of this. Babel fell, Phaethon plunged into the sun. Semele was consumed. It is not possible for human things to look on the face of God unless that Face itself is shielded from them by the mask of human flesh. Nor to hear the Voice of God, unless it speaks in a wind, or a lightning-bolt, or from the made-mortal lips of messiahs.

  And now, a splinter of that Voice is heard.

  Do not suppose it spells destruction solely for this city. It spells the destruction of all the physical world.

  Nothing human or animal can stand against this thing. Only my kind can stand, and I, because I am of the second race, may not, for my kind, beyond a certain point, must never actually engage in war.

  However …

  The man we call Flayd, who believes always in conspiracy, may perhaps observe that a psychic conspiracy has also been at work, to bring to this place at this time the three of you.

  Jula, the fighter, who has come back as others do not, equipped with forethought from many lives. Flayd, the guide and anchor, whose mother was a psychic, and who is able to write down now, therefore, what I say. And Picaro, who is the half-child of the demon-angel Simoon.

  Picaro must closely listen again, now.

  That which is above the sky has recognized, in turn, him.

  By which I mean the angel loves Picaro, as brother loves brother, or father loves son. For Picaro, to this thing, is partly of its own kind.