Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  The cat had slunk away out of the window. (Picaro never saw it again.) Picaro got the bus and rode across to Ethella’s in the Red House District. And three weeks later, after he could never get through on the old-fashioned call-phone at the apartment, when he was going insane over that, and Ethella trying to cheer him, and saying to her man, “Get over there, you hear me, get over there and see to it—” and he saying “Not in a thousand years, baby. Not if she there with him—” and after this, then, the incoming call, Picaro’s father telling him, “We settled it. Come home.”

  But when he got off the bus, went up in the lift, put his hand on the apartment door and it let him in; it was almost back to the first scene over again.

  Only this time she was in the cane chair by the window, sitting there in a long, pale, cotton dress, shelling blue peas, singing to herself under her breath.

  “Where is my father?”

  “At the store,” said Simoon.

  She smiled. When she did that, he saw her mouth wasn’t gorgeous, it was greedy. But he had never made a mistake about her eyes.

  She cooked a meal, good food; it smelled marvelous if not as good as the things his father could make. There was a bottle of red wine on the table, and ice-cold cola for Picaro. But his father didn’t come in.

  “I’ll go look for him,” Picaro said.

  All that while, he had sat by the wall, on the floor, watching her moving about, watching her glamorous giraffe’s neck, the curve of her backside that would have moved him if she had been anything but his mother and an evil sorceress.

  Now when he spoke, trying for ordinariness, she only said, “Fine. Your dinner will be spoiled. That’s your affair.” And she laughed. In one of her teeth was a blindingly green jewel, a peridot. His father had told him about that.

  Picaro left the apartment. Hungry and thirsty, he hadn’t wanted to take a bite or a sip of anything she had made, even touched. He ran through the hot sunless day, down to the store where his father worked, constructing lutes and sombas, sanding, polishing, twisting out the silvery strings on pegs of plastivory.

  Picaro found his father, where the others had already found him. No police or medics had yet arrived, but they knew they must not move him. He was dead anyway. Just lying there, his quiet face shut, his eyes half open, not a mark on him.

  So Picaro lay down by him and held his hand until the medics finally came through the deadly-ending traffic. And they had to strike Picaro to get him to let go.

  An aneurysm, the autopsy established, (Ethella telling him, on the crackly line). It could happen. No prologue, no illness. Like a blow, not on the head but inside it—a breakage, and explosion of blood, and nothing visible to the layman’s eye. Quick as a blink. He had not suffered.

  Picaro didn’t go back to the apartment, the “spoiled” supper, the expensive cola. Nor did he go back to his Aunt Ethella’s. He had enough money in his pocket. He ran.

  It was two more years before Simoon caught up to him.

  “CAN’T YOU SLEEP, ’Caro? Let me do something to help you sleep.”

  Cora’s silky flesh, her warm succulent mouth, wrapping about him in the dark.

  After the things he had been thinking of, that other mouth, the mouth of a toad-goddess, devouring …

  “No, Cora. Thanks. Not now.”

  In half-light, the flicker of canal reflections through the glass, her head lifting like a snake’s.

  Unresistant, she settled beside him again, and presently he heard the renewed rustle of her sleeper’s breathing.

  Outside the room, the music had ceased. India too must be alseep.

  Picaro stayed gentle with women always. Simoon had schooled him in that, in how to see women, how to react to them, despite herself. How had she done that? Through his utter antipathy to and horror of herself. For she was only something disguised as a woman, and all the others, the real ones, elicited his gallantry, his tenderness, even in indifference, because of a kind of relief that he had met only one Simoon, and perhaps she was alone of her kind.

  WHAT WOKE HIM MUCH LATER, were the vague, subtly intrusive, external sounds of movement and disturbance, which he had never heard before in any other part of the Palazzo Shaachen. He lay listening. There seemed to be a lot going on, furniture perhaps being automated up through the channels in the walls, and unloaded into chambers of the building. Once also a burst of shouting came outside, not from the canal but in the alleyway between this palace and the green one adjacent.

  Cora was already up and in the Victorian bathroom, lying to her neck in bubbles. India was nowhere to be seen.

  Picaro showered and dressed. (Cora did not speak to him, nor he to her. A sort of decorum.)

  In another of the rooms he suddenly found India, drinking Masala tea, with cardamom, cinnamon, sugar, and black pepper, all of which she must have brought with her, since he had allocated only water to the recessed store cupboard. The CX point, to which she had attached the heating container, still glowed. He wasn’t surprised when she next served herself a heap of spun eggs and rice.

  She offered him nothing. The container dish—where had she concealed it on her person yesterday?—she simply left for the taking.

  Then Cora came in and ate from the dish and drank some tea, and Picaro went to the Africara in another room, standing tuning the strings of the black-brown bull, thinking of his father tuning strings of lutes and sombas, until all at once he heard the two girls at the outer door, leaving, and the door quietly closed. Uniquely, they had gone without a single further avowal or demand.

  Soon after, from below, far down in a lower apartment, he detected the faintest jangle, some keyboard instrument, and waited, again lifting his hand from the musical bull. He could turn the noise-conditioning up. He might have to, if he, or someone else, began to produce conflicting music. Or, maybe he might listen.

  The instrument must have been taken manually into a room, too fragile, evidently, to travel all the way in the walls. An old instrument, then, a genuine Victorian piano, or even its ancestral harpsichord.

  A harpsichord was normally the quiestest of keyboards …

  All the other sounds had fallen still. In any case, he walked across and turned up the noise-conditioning.

  Yet again, even so, (near noon) as if through layers of nothingness, Picaro momentarilly heard—or thought he did—the tuning of a keyboard far down in the brickwork of the house. And then he heard Cora’s laughter, high and rippled, (like the sounds she made during sex) down where the harpsichord was, in that other room. Or only in the backrooms of his mind.

  LEONILLO STOOD IN A CHURCH, gazing up at the votive paintings by the altar. They were rich in colors, and in gold leaf, delicious recxs from the 1500s, lit now by down-hanging lamps and tall night candles.

  He tended to walk about by night, having nothing else to do when his duties were seen to. Of course, he was on call always. Usually, after his solitary perambulations over the bridges, through the alleys and inner streets of Venus, he returned to his bedroom at the University. He was still dressed as an upper clerk from 1906. His face was still a pallid nutshell.

  The votive paintings had been offered, in their original form, the text informed one, to end a plague in Venus. How simple everything was then, Leonillo believed, God in His heaven issuing His decrees, needing only to intercede, or conversely let loose a thunderbolt. It did not strike Leonillo that humanity had itself now fully taken over this role. Or that no votary on earth could stop them, probably, if the ecstatic energies of gods no longer prevailed.

  3

  “THEY CALLED IT LETHE, after the stream in the Greek and Roman hell, the stream men drank to forget, or to sleep.”

  It was morning now, and Flayd was across the desk, nodding. Flayd knew about Lethe. Souls due to return to earth had also drunk from the stream, to forget the spiritually constipating miseries of their previous earthly lives, and the pleasures of Hades, if there were any. Flayd wasn’t sure, however, if he had ever heard of a mixture nam
ed after it.

  “There was only a trace,” said Leonillo. “But naturally it was analysed. That’s what we think it was. So, our young woman didn’t die of her fighter’s wounds, as her tomb inscription tells us.”

  “She was poisoned.”

  “Almost definitely. I suppose it was in someone’s interests to do it, to get at her owner, Libinius Julus, possibly, or just to assist one of the betting syndicates that existed, as you know, in every Romanized town.”

  Flayd thought, Yes, and it would be easy enough. House slaves or the slaves at Julus’s school could always be bribed or forced. Simple to doctor some piece of food, or drop something in one particular cup.

  “She’d lived too long,” said Flayd bleakly, “she was too good.”

  “Very likely. You take it to heart, I see.”

  Flayd shrugged. “Sure I do. I helped dig her up.”

  “She’s like a daughter to you? You were married once, I think, but no children … Flayda Victrix?”

  Flayd pushed back his chair. He walked across the white and gilded Victorian office room, past the antique typewriting machine and the painted oil lamp, and stood glaring out at the Blessed Maria Canal.

  “You think I’m an obsessive,” said Flayd. “Right. I am. My work has always been real to me. And now here it is, practice fighting in a reconstruct courtyard, and reminiscing about Century Number One. What’ya expect? Is that why you’ve picked on me, my obsession?”

  “Picked on you?” Leonillo raised two eyebrows up his nutshell forehead.

  “For these speciality-plus privileges, walking and talking with the reborn baby.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I have other work, you know.”

  “Oh come. Please. More important, more fascinating than this?”

  “Where’s it leading?”

  “That’s what we have to see, don’t we? Where it can lead. What we can do with it. How did she seem to you?”

  Flayd said, “Rational. She remembers a lot. She remembers things she thought she’d forgotten when she was alive before,” he added, ironically, scowling at Leonillo.

  “That’s not illogical. She’s been given full access to her physical brain memory, in a way most of us never do, save under intense hypnosis.”

  “But anyhow, why ask me questions,” said Flayd, “you watched it all, didn’t you? My conversation with her, if you can call it that.”

  “Someone watched. What else? She is watched day and night.”

  “Anyhow,” said Flayd, “I have some stuff to file.” Once more the eyebrows. “Nothing to do with Jula. A twentieth-century burial in a backyard behind the old land-site of the Primo, when it was upstairs. A Mafia killing probably.”

  “Fine. When you’re done, why don’t you go down and see her again.”

  Already in the doorway Flayd checked. “You are kidding me, Leonillo.”

  “No, of course not. Just go to the elevator and touch in your prints, and it will take you down to the Roman Area.”

  “Why me? Why not the others? Or do the others all get to do it too?”

  “Your colleagues have other duties. You see, Flayd, you react to her as if she is human. The others can’t do that yet, if ever. And so for that reason we let them look and monitor and make notes. All of which have their uses. But you can forge for her a link with the outer environment. The here and now.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “I?” said Leonillo. He became utterly blank. The expression clean white sheet sprang to Flayd’s mind.

  “OK,” said Flayd. “If I can make the time.”

  And Leonillo smiled, at Flayd’s lying absurdity.

  As he worked at the CX in his cubicle, Flayd’s mind rummaged, trying to duck the flashes of recollection. But it was in vain. In the end he sat back in the plasform chair and thought. Of swimming through the dimness of the mud, of the lights finding the tomb. Of the heap of treasures, the mummified victory wreathes with fragments of broken gilt on them, the Anubis lamps, the rings. And the bones. Burnt on a funeral pyre but not entirely consumed, as the organic material, then, seldom was.

  He thought of the rotted, splintered, scarlet shield with the face of Venus. The rusted sword.

  And then he thought of the girl he had talked to, in the basement of the dome, so far down and away from anything genuine, and yet presumably taken by her for reality.

  She had come back from nothing.

  Maybe, given that, the rest of this was irrelevant. Finally he walked along the corridor, where UAS security glanced up and nodded, friendly. The videcx in the walls were clicking away, without a murmur, and the elevator came and he touched in, and the doors opened.

  She was fighting in her gear today, greave, arm-protection, the closed helmet like a collared silver bullet.

  He watched her a while from the colonnade.

  Flayd could see why she had won so many fights and it had taken deadly poison to stop her.

  Oddly, looking at her too, Flayd found himself wondering almost for the first time about the other one, the musician they had also brought back. He hadn’t been shown to Flayd, though some of the others had seen him. Cloudio del Nero was also doing well, it seemed, in his reconstruct living space.

  Had Picaro been taken to see him? From what had originally been said, that had seemed to be the plan. In del Nero’s case, Picaro, the bloodline descendant, was to be the forging “link”?

  The practice fight was over and Jula had triumphed. Flayd stood a second or so more in the fake shade of the columns. Then he turned and went away. It wasn’t the manipulation by authority that bugged him—that was always there, in anybody’s life, even if unseen and ignored. No, it was simply what had been done. What it meant and might mean, in the ever-extraordinary future. But who could predict?

  4

  SIMOON STOOD ON the island.

  She had come up out of the water, like before, except this time not even needing a boat.

  She wore her own pale dress, but he knew her now. She was the sulphurous sibyl from the cave.

  “You’ll die,” she said. “I told you that.”

  “You told me. I’ll die.”

  Her eyes were sulphur-colored too.

  “You will meet your death at thirty.”

  “You told me.”

  “Believe me yet?”

  “Yes. I believe you. I always believed you. After you killed my father. After you came back in my life. After the other things.”

  “Die under water,” said Simoon, “though not from drowning.”

  “Yes, you bitch. I know. Why else could I be here? Why else am I waiting here?”

  “Scared?” He saw her amusement, the sibyl’s.

  “Are you still alive?” he asked her. “I thought I saw to that.”

  “Maybe I am. Somewhere.”

  Up in the starless sky, there was a shooting star, pale topaz fire ripping through the dark.

  “No.” he said, “you’re nowhere. You never were anywhere. Your kind—don’t exist.”

  HE THOUGHT THE TWO GIRLS were back, poised outside the apartment’s main door. Not knocking, or making any sound, merely calling to him with their female minds, like cats waiting to be fed.

  Picaro left the bed and walked through the rooms, his bare feet on the still-warm floor. He would tell them to go away. Probably.

  But he wasn’t awake. He knew this. No longer unconscious or dreaming, but not fully back into the living world, or his body. He felt he levitated by a few inches, in the air, despite the contact with that warm floor.

  The door opened over-easily.

  The man stood less than two meters away. In the darkness, his pale skin was ghostly.

  “Light,” Picaro said, and the CX flashed on, hard and too brilliant, illuminating the face, the figure, and clothing, of an intimately known stranger.

  Picaro was now back in his body. He said, “Are you here, or is this some virtuality projection?”

  Cloudio del Nero smiled his char
ming, long-ago smile. It wasn’t, any longer, like Picaro’s. “I think it is myself.”

  “How?”

  “How? How am I here? I was brought here earlier.”

  “No. There was no canal traffic, no one walked by.” Picaro thought of the sounds below in the palazzo, the shouts in the alley, and the sprayed notes of a harpsichord. He said again, “So how?”

  “Through passages under the City,” said del Nero idly. “There have always been hidden ways of that nature.”

  “But this isn’t—” Picaro halted. He wondered how much they had told del Nero. Picaro said, “This isn’t the City as you knew it.”

  And del Nero shrugged the primrose brocade shoulders of his exquisite coat. “The passages persist. That was the route by which I was brought here. They call this Palazzo Shaachen? I believe I have the apartment below your own.”

  Picaro stood there.

  “May I enter your rooms?” del Nero said. “Or do I disturb you?”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” said Picaro.

  “True,” the other said mildly. “The Prima Vigile was just rung from those churches which continue to effect it.”

  Picaro stood back. As the living phantom walked past him into the vestibule, there came the flicker of something down the hall. Oh yes, someone would be near and watching. Picaro turned his back on that, shut the door. Shut del Nero and himself into the apartment, where, as Flayd would have been quick to assert, surveillance would still be going on.

  Picaro touched the wall for the lamps, which lit up softly, even the oriental globe which hung from the ceiling. Cloudio del Nero glanced at it, no more than that. Presumably they had got him accustomed to some modern innovations.

  He seemed taller than Picaro remembered. His eyes had a curious film across them, a type of luminous sheen—or it was a trick of the darkness and unreal light. Picaro had anyway been glad of the film. He hadn’t forgotten what he had seen inside those eyes on the last occasion—that vacant abyss of Nothingness.

  Strolling, glancing about him, del Nero had reached the room with the long window and the balcony. He went to this, and stood looking out. Maybe everything looked—as it was intended to—exactly like the eighteenth century venues del Nero recalled. Or maybe subtle, nearly incomprehensible details and flaws screamed out to del Nero alone that this was not the past, but some other land, some nightmare.