by Tanith Lee
Stop thinking of this.
Yes, the wine was very strong, and through the blur of it, thickening like the smoke of the lamps, the torches round the villa walls, the guests’ faces, bulbous and distorted, like fish swimming in water and seen through an amber lens—
Jula heard rain falling hard against the house. Yet through the columns, in the summer courtyard, the night was still and close and silent.
Despite the open court, the air was too thin in this room. Drained by these Roman men, this master-race, it had no substance for her heavy leaden barbarian lungs to take hold of. So she did not pull at it any more, simply let it whisper in as it would.
Bald Stirius was rubbing his hands over the body of the dancer. Drusus had had the leftovers of the peacock brought back, was selecting what he would take home with him.
Fishes, swimming … to the sea—
Out on the floor, they were fighting The Iliad now. Bizarrely, with no sound at all, mouths gaping and shutting, dumb.
Though, through the rush of the sea she had mistaken for rain, she heard the Scroll mutter: “Look, Julus, she’s nodded off. Look at that. She was cut about rather today, wasn’t she, your prize girl?”
Julus said, along the couch behind her, a mile off, “A scratch or two. Nothing to her, I promise you.”
Oh, they speak of me.
“Well, she’s tired. She’s asleep. What a fine profile she has! She should be copied in marble.”
“She isn’t asleep. Her eyes are open. Look. She’s watching our mock fight. It must amuse her. She’s smiling, aren’t you, my gladiatrix?”
THE BOAT, THE BOAT in the dark, out on the night lagoon. That of Aquila, yes Aquila, for there was the shadow of the fort, the cresset burning high over its parapet …
But a coin, did she have any to pay him?—the One who poled the boat away, away, out and out, across the water to the sea.
Save it would not be sea, not now. It would be the River.
And the night sky—no, that was not sky. It was the world above, which made the roof, without a single star.
And oh, the cresset of fire was not the beacon of Aquila either, but the last bright sunset of the funeral pyre.
5
THESE OUR ACTORS, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air …
“What, sin? What did you say to me?”
“Nothing.”
“I thought you said the air was thin. Let me assure you, the air is just perfect, signore. Nothing to worry over. Full CX maintained air function. The dome is one hundred percent safe at all times.”
Half invisible in darkness, Picaro was lit a second by the lightning flash of his smile. The one he kept for decent people, passing through.
THE WANDERLIER WAS SINGING again. It didn’t offend so much, now Picaro was drunk. To be drunk—was all that currently mattered.
At last he could really see the liquid black of the canals over which the boat glided, and the dim floating by of seemingly unanchored walls, some with lights, that glowed like the illuminations of long ago; latticed Eastern renaissance globes, oil lamps and gas lamps from the nineteenth century, candles … and these silvery-gold glimmerings, smashed, broken over and over by the oar-pole of the wanderlier.
It was beautiful, the City. But false as the set of a movie or a virtuality. Even if these buildings might be seen from all sides, lived in.
Picaro glanced at his wristecx and touched it for the time. The luminous numbers displayed for a moment the fact that it was after 4 A.M. But it wasn’t, not any more, for he had omitted to instruct the wristecx to reset to the Viorno-Votte. And he had asked the wanderlier, getting into the boat, and been told, fifty minutes earlier, that it was the twenty-fifth hour. He had let the man pole him to the Rivoalto then, to watch the moon go down behind the palace of the Ducemae.
Now, in the great loom of darkness with its gilded light-lace edges, a flotilla of salt swans moved by, long necks snakelike, black in shadow. Before, gulls had flown over. Few of these creatures were actual. But they looked entirely real, and if he had been able physically to put his hand on them, they might even have convinced him that they were, for half a second.
Was that the secret? Not alone of the undersea Venus, but of everything—of the earth—of life?
Flayd had talked so much about the woman gladiator, and Picaro had forgotten it all as soon as Flayd sank his head on his arms, on the aftermath of table, and begun softly to snore. Picaro left him there, left him and his gladiatrix and all the talk of the two dead who could be brought back. Picaro informed the waiters the meal should be charged to his account. He even left the gratuity in dollari—the coins that were still used in the City, and carried the head of the goddess Venus.
It would be necessary to tip the boatman too. Indulgent, scornful, Picaro watched him, a strong man, in costume, without a care in the world.
“Sin, there is a wanderer following my boat,” announced the wanderlier as they swung into the next turn, and above, a glistering, spectral church sailed near and then away.
“Yes,” said Picaro. “Is there?”
“Look, signore.”
Picaro, (indulgent, scornful) half turned.
As they swam on, another wanderer swam after them into the latest canal. Under the cats-eye lanterns along the church front, Picaro made out two women sitting back in the second boat, one in a crimson and one a sage-green gown.
“Sinnas,” said the wanderlier, beaming congratulatory. Picaro shrugged.
“Can you lose them?”
“Lose them, signore? Demisellas of such pulchritude—”
“Yes.”
“You’re unkind, sin. Very well. But remember, Venus is the City of Love—”
“No. Venus is the city of darkness.”
“That too,” allowed the pedantic wanderlier, guiding them suddenly away through a side channel, where the adjacent, apparently ancient buildings leaned each side close enough to finger. “That’s the old name. Ve Nera—which means ‘Going to meet the Dark.’”
Something—it was like the high-strung note of a violin—sounded kilometers up in Picaro’s brain.
“Lose the other boat,” he repeated. “Then take me to the Alchimia Canal.”
HE HAD MEANT DEATH, surely, the poet-dramatist, when he wrote about the sorcerer’s actors who were really spirits, and had vanished “into thin air.” Picaro considered this, and with surprise, saw he was still in the boat, adrift, yet now it was quite different.
That the canals of the new restored Venus were clean, and odorless, was not quite true. They had a kind of faintly laundered smell.
This water smelled ripe, nearly swampy, of rotten fruit, of fish—like the polluted seas that elsewhere hugged the coasts.
And it wasn’t, any more, a boat he was on. Now it was an island.
Picaro stood on an island in a great lagoon, and no lights showed, but the boat was coming toward him, over it, and he was waiting for the boat.
I’m dreaming.
He saw a woman in a long grayish robe stepping through the shallow surf, walking up on to the island. Her head was covered by a veil but he caught the pallid glitter of her eyes. She reeked of sulphur. She must be a sibyl from some cave of the Romans.
He confronted her on the path.
Behind her, the sky was thick with stars, but they were dull, not half so bright as her eyes.
She said, “You will meet your death at thirty.” And paused.
Picaro said, “I know. You told me this before. I was sixteen and it was in another place. You weren’t as you are tonight.”
But remorseless, the sibyl added, “You will die under water. Though not from drowning.”
“I know,” he said again.
And effortlessly woke. And in the met darkness, said once more, “I know.”
6
Please note: There will be thunder, with mostly sheet lightning, between 15 and 18 VV. No rain will fall. For locations of the most spectacular views
, activate CX option.
PICARO RAISED HIS LONG-FINGERED, calloused hand, and held it up to block out the flickering light of the CX words, which seemed engraved across the window. But they were fading anyway now, mechanically aware they had been seen.
A weather alert. Weather was controled indome, as in many places elsewhere above. Only here, weather was really superfluous, unneeded—employed for amusement, as the “literature” had said. Some days there were high seas in the lagoon and the canals foamed and—not tidal, but appearing to be—the waters flooded over by a handful of atmospheric centimeters, quite unreminiscent of the floods of long ago. Other days there were dramatic clouds, and downpours, which helped sluice the buildings. Nothing rough lasted long. The storm today was to take a full three hours, a (safe) spectacle that people would go out on their balconies, out to the hilly Equus Gardens and up the Torre dell’ Angelo of the Primo, to admire.
Behind the blackness of his hand, the letters vanished. Only the pane of perfect daylight remained.
Picaro lay staring a moment, seeing his hand, as children and mystics sometimes did, a representative of his body—familiar but abruptly alien. Was it his? Was this body lying supine on the sheet—also his? Debatable.
The pain behind his eyes though, that decidedly was his.
He hadn’t drunk like that, not for seven months. How quickly you forgot.
Feeling peeled and toxic, he left the bed, and walked into the apartment’s lavish and anachronistic bathroom.
When he came back, the window was still clear. It was now the wristecx that was twittering from the outer rooms.
Flayd? Maybe not. Flayd’s state should be worse than Picaro’s …
Picaro went and stood on the terracotta floor, looking at the squeaking wristecx. Which didn’t give up.
“Yes.”
“Sin Picaro, we have your call number from the University Coder. We wonder if you would be so kind as to visit us, at your convenience, in an hour’s time.”
“That isn’t convenient.”
“Very well. Two hours.”
“Why?” he said. (How many times had he asked that yesterday? It was becoming the Eternal Question.) He touched the wristecx to get the caller’s code and identity. It was indome—but now these were the only calls possible, according to Flayd. The locale was a building on the Blessed Maria Canal, behind the Primo. The University itself? The caller was a fussily titled S’in Chossi, of the UAS—University Auxillary Staff.
“We will of course explain fully. We can expect you then, Sin Picaro?”
“Not until I know what you want.”
“It’s routine administration, I regret, sin.”
“I never heard of it.”
“In your case, sin.”
“Why my case?”
“Your PBS.”
“That’s been cleared,” said Picaro. His heart was suddenly knocking loudly against his aching brain. “Before and when I arrived.”
“No, no, sin. The PBS is fine. But there’s a connection we wish to verify.”
The voice was nearly mechanical. They so often were. And like a machine, which these lesser bureaucrats had been trained, presumably, to mimic—in order the better to reassure and coerce—you couldn’t get much out of them, only what they were programmed to let you have—it was useless to try.
But—bloodline—connection? Then Flayd had been quite right?
Picaro said softly, clearly, “My ancestors are Furiano and Eurydiche. That’s all I have. Minor citizens during the early eighteenth century.”
“I regret, sin, we can’t deal with this via your call facility. You’ll understand, we need to speak to you in person.”
“No.”
Regardless, the “machine” said, “That’s fine, sin. We will send a boat for you at 12 VV.”
“Perhaps I won’t be around.” Picaro cut the signal.
(HE STOOD IN FRONT OF the recx mirror, ornately gilt-framed and spotted as if with age.
Those ancestors, whoever they’d been—Furian, Cloudio—they sure as hell had not looked like him. White guys. African-Italian Picaro, like one third of the present population of Europe—just as one third of Africa was European.
The black eyes looked back at him. The long white braids in the long black dreads, stared too. For live shows, he had worn black and white. He had known the story of the magpie since he was six, and his father had received the first notification of PBS, with its attached bookdisc. Picaro remembered how his father, puzzled, turned them over— “What am I supposed to do with this? What they want?” There was not, in those days, any invite to anyone to visit Venus in her preservation jar. She was still being rebuilt, and all tourism was strictly limited.
The magpie, though, caught Picaro’s imagination. It had belonged to the alchemist Shaachen. It could tell the time to the minute, and could write in ink, with its black beak. But what had the magpie been to Furian and Eurydiche? That the little bookdisc didn’t tell.
“Bird of the Virgo Maria,” said Picaro’s father, as they sat out on the high hot roof above that other city, the city where Picaro was born. They were drinking iced melon tea, and below the traffic roared and plunged in dust and smoke, like a drove of demonic cattle. It was always worse after 5 P.M.—17 hours. The period when the last traffic for the day was allowed to run, before the nighttime prohibition on anything but emergency vehicles, which came on at 19—7 P.M. And everyone wanted to get somewhere.
Picaro, thinking back to his father’s voice, heard it still above that driven rumble from the streets.
“But the magpie could write?”
“Says so here.” And then the man’s still face, turning towards him. “But you can’t have one, son. They wouldn’t allow it. Magpie’s a wild bird.”
And there had been a dream he had, the child then, of seven magpies flying, black-white-black—like something from a picture by Escher. But by now the actual image of the dream was gone, the memory remained only as words. And even the face of Picaro’s father had faded, returning solely in abrupt, surprising dazzles of recollection. He had been dead nearly sixteen years.)
PERHAPS HE WOULDN’T BE around, but when the UAS boat came, he was standing by the watersteps, by the green iron Neptune.
Not a wanderer. A stouter, Victorian boat, with a canopy to keep off the sunless heat of the sky. An official, also in Victorian dress, (a Victorian clerk) welcomed him aboard: Chossi.
“A short trip. We are permitted to use engines, you understand.”
They took off fairly rapidly, leaving a curling wake in the shiny, thick-clean water.
“There, do you see? The roofs of Santa Lala—and just there—”
“What’s this about?”
“Routine at this stage, sin. Nothing to worry you.”
Another man ran the boat, steering it through the canals and out into the sky-flamed sheet of the lagoon.
A funeral cortège was crossing the water, a tourist display only, for there was no longer any Isle of the Dead. The black angels and black, horse-headed prows eased between sparkling plates of lagoon and air, and mourners from the fifteen and 1600s posed in their black and gold. From windows and terraces and other boats, came the tiny soft blinks of a hundred camerecxi.
There was attractive merchant shipping along the quays to either side of the Primo Square, tall sails the color of tortoiseshell or iced Campari.
The Victorian boat, chugging now in keeping with its pretend-antiquity, waddled in the opposite direction and into the narrow Blessed Maria Canal. The University had not first been built quite where it was today. But it looked enough of a fixture. Gray stone levels, carven pilasters, and windows with bottle-glassed, myopic panes. They drew in under a leaning, fringed acacia whose fronds almost touched the water. Chossi took Picaro in under an arch roped with ghost-blue wisteria, up carefully cracked steps, and into a long, low-ceilinged corridor.
The shadows here by day—lacking a directional sun to cast them—were curiously luminous, ev
en inside.
Like the boat, bottom heavy, Chossi waddled before Picaro.
The room had gilding.
The man in the chair was dressed later than his clerk—from 1906, perhaps, something like that. You did not often see so recent an era represented now.
He rose and held out his manicured hand to grasp Picaro’s. “Please sit, Sin Picaro.”
Picaro, sitting.
“I believe, Sin Picaro, you know why you’re here.”
“Do I?”
“I believe, Sin Picaro, Sin Flayd let fall something about a scientific venture which has gone on here, over the past two years.”
“Did he?”
“Let’s not be too playful,” said the 1906 man. He smiled to reassure he was still Picaro’s friend.
“Then don’t,” said Picaro.
“It isn’t,” the man said, “as Sin Flayd feared, that CX vigilance was in operation during your conversations. But it was quite obvious he would tell you. He’s done nothing wrong. Flayd is always suspicious … Nothing can upset what has been achieved. Simply, perhaps, he’s saved us all a little time. But only that, of course, if you will concede you know.”
“I forget. I was pissed out of my skull.”
“Very well.” The 1906 man shrugged. He had a long sallow face.
Using its thin mouth, the long face told Picaro quickly and deftly much of what Flayd had already told him last night. At least, the things to do with the one, (the dead one) named Cloudio del Nero.
“We do think he, not the man Furiano, is your true bloodline antecedent. Of course, the genetic comparatives aren’t quite conclusive. At a distance of centuries they rarely are, despite the propaganda. But even so. There are close similarities—the female ancestress remains the same, however, Eurydiche. I hope you’re not offended by this change in circumstance.”
“Furian wasn’t supposed to be my father.”
“Naturally not. But some people do take these matters very earnestly. Now, we have a great favor to ask of you, Sin Picaro. A great favor which will also be, for you, a great favor bestowed on you, and, I trust, an exciting, astonishing event.”
