One night, eight months after the robbery, she found she could no longer recall the alchemical cipher of the golden cryptograph. The space in her mind formerly occupied by that memory was now a bland emptiness. The Detective of Desire was no more. She wondered for a moment if she should feel sad for the loss, but the truth was that she no longer cared.
Tomorrow’s Yesterdays had also lost the charm that had once fulfilled her so. Since the robbery, her attachment to it had been damaged. For years now, a friendly competitor had been dropping hints that she would like to acquire Patricia’s business.
So Patricia sold the shop for a hefty sum. At the age of 36 she retired to a modest rural home in Portugal, where she spent the rest of her days in comfortable solitude, painting surreal scenes populated by animate objects involved in strange rituals.
PART 3: THE ULTIMATE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN CRYPTOGRAPH
The thief who stole, among other things, the golden cryptograph from the office safe of Tomorrow’s Yesterdays was not specifically seeking the alchemical treasure. Also, the thief did not want to tarry. Once he cracked the safe, he crammed all of its contents into a gym bag and was quickly away to his next target.
Ensconced in his apartment he examined the haul from his raid on the businesses of Bohemia Avenue. The thief made out well that night, but the golden cryptograph presented a conundrum. In the course of his versatile career the thief had dealt with stolen art before; although he had no clue what the strangely luminescent object truly was, he recognized that the golden cryptograph was a unique piece made of gold of uncommon purity, its value inestimable. Experience taught him, however, that the uniqueness that made the golden cryptograph so valuable would also make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to sell. By tomorrow, the theft would be reported and the police would immediately be on the lookout for the art treasure. Unless …
What if the vintage shop had itself acquired the piece through less than honest means? The theft would then go unreported, and he would be free to profit from his acquisition.
Over the next few weeks, the thief scanned the news with meticulous care. Not one word about the golden greeting card appeared anywhere. His one-night raid on Bohemia Avenue was only ever covered for the two days following the event on the local news, and no report made any mention of the art object.
The thief was a patient man who lived modestly. With his profits from that one night’s work, he could subsist comfortably for two or three years. He would wait a few months before deciding what to do with the golden cryptograph. Melt it? Fence it? Sell it directly?
Finally, six months later, satisfied that there was no alert in regards to the object, the thief contacted a collector in Genoa he’d dealt with before and offered him the piece. The transaction was concluded to each party’s satisfaction.
The collector, like the thief, was not a key who could unlock the golden cryptograph; however, someone in the collector’s household was: his teenage daughter.
As soon as the collector’s daughter unlocked the mysteries of the golden cryptograph — approximately eight months after its theft — the alchemical formula vanished from the mind of Patricia Alexandria and she lost the abilities of the Detective of Desire. The collector’s daughter decrypted the golden cryptograph in her own way — everything and everyone she touched turned to gold: her house, her cats, her father, her mother, her collection of antique dollhouses. She could not turn the power off. She fled her father’s country estate, now a house of gold inhabited by golden statues. She cursed the golden cryptograph and tried to destroy it. But it was resistant to her efforts. Finally, she simply discarded it as she ran in the woods — every tree she brushed against turned to gold. Even without the golden cryptograph in her possession, the power did not leave her. Within a week, she was dead of dehydration and starvation, as nothing could come into contact with her without transmuting into gold.
Over the next few years, the golden cryptograph changed owners frequently — sometimes lost and found, sometimes discarded and discovered, sometimes stolen, sometimes bequeathed — and every so often would find itself in the hands of a key. Always, once a new key decoded the golden cryptograph, the previous key (should they still be alive) would forget the alchemical message that had been revealed to them and lose any power, abilities, or curse that knowledge had conferred upon them.
Thanks to the golden cryptograph: archaeologist Carter Adams grew wings that allowed him to fly; attorney Barbara Grey learned the languages of every animal on Earth; at every sunset, taxi dispatcher Isabel Vega changed into a fox (and back to her human self at sunrise, always naked and often in embarrassing situations); farmhand Hugo Philips gained omniscient knowledge, but his mind was unable to cope and he became quite insane; nightclub owner Ken Gibson adopted the identity of the Savage Shadow and fought crime with a variety of exotic weapons fashioned alchemically; botanist Reed Hughes was transformed into an amnesiac centaur who roamed the great deserts of the American southwest, until he was killed by a shotgun-wielding drunken widower; department store manager Steve Drake enjoyed a brief career as the world’s greatest stage magician; chiropractor Max Tanaka was granted the ability to control any motor vehicle with his mind; librarian Kimberley Lee’s body dissolved into a wisp of near-nothingness, and her ghostly self eventually dissipated when she had been forgotten by all those who had known her.
The golden cryptograph wound up in a thrift store in Newfoundland, where it caught the eye of an elderly man who thought it would make an attractive gift for his equally elderly wife. He purchased it, along with some tools and kitchenware, and got in his pickup truck to drive back to his house. He never made it home.
En route, his truck was hit by what witnesses would later call a meteor. The impact resulted in a glow of golden light that shone like a miniature sun. Federal investigators did nothing to contradict those reports of a meteor being responsible for the accident, although they concluded from the wreckage that what had killed the old man and destroyed his vehicle was not a chunk of rock, but a spaceship. A small spaceship.
The investigators, whose real findings were kept from the public, detected no trace of a pilot or other occupant. All the remains that were found at the crash site belonged to the old man. No connection was ever made between that incident and the superbeing who would, in later years, forever alter the course of human history.
The vessel from the stars had brought a visitor to Earth: a baby boy — an alien infant whose original shape and form were discarded upon impact, when the golden cryptograph reacted to coming into contact with its ultimate key. This key — the baby from the stars — was perfectly attuned to the golden cryptograph. This time, for its ultimate decryption, the golden cryptograph did not simply grant a revelation of power to the key; it merged with the key.
The alchemical gold of the golden cryptograph enveloped the infant and moulded the alien into human shape. The cryptograph took on the appearance of a skin-tight uniform in various shades of gold, from near-white to deep yellow. The uniform’s cape was gilded with the same flourishes that the golden cryptograph had sported on its front page; embossed on the chest of the uniform was the circular crest that had adorned the back page.
For twenty years, the golden cryptograph and its ultimate key floated invisibly in the sky, orbiting the Earth, feeding on sunlight. For twenty years, the golden cryptograph, whose tendrils of alchemical gold had melded with the key’s anatomy, uploaded into the alien’s mind every bit of information it contained.
Once the key had learned all he could from the golden cryptograph, he floated down to Earth. He called himself The Ultimate. Unlike the previous keys, he was not merely a conduit for this or that aspect of the knowledge gleaned from the golden cryptograph. The Ultimate was the incarnation of everything the golden cryptograph could be, as perceived by an infinite number of consciousnesses. He mastered all the powers of every previous key and all the powers of all the keys that could be. And all that power was tempered by the compassion that came w
ith ultimate knowledge.
The Ultimate possessed, of course, ultimate charisma, ultimate might, and ultimate wisdom. It would have been within his power to reshape the world in a single day and to bend the population of the Earth to his utopian vision, but he sought to recruit everyone to his cause of their free will. After all, he was blessed with ultimate patience.
Most were easily convinced, but a few were immune to the lure of utopia, those for whom the light would never be a source of comfort and joy but something to fear and loathe. The Ultimate’s enemies took on gaudy identities in their struggle to thwart his utopian dreams: Lord X, Big Brain Boy, the Laser Leech, the Radioactive Heart, the Anti-Ultimate League, the Vampire Family, the Nomad of the Stars, the Rainbow Squad, the Amazon Dominatrix. He defeated them all and banished them to a parallel version of the Earth, one that forever revelled in dystopian misery.
After a decade of The Ultimate’s unerring guidance, Earth achieved utopia. His task accomplished, The Ultimate left the planet. His goal was not to rule; his only desire was to transform the crypto-alchemical message of the golden cryptograph into utopian reality. The mistakes of human history and development had been corrected and Earth had been granted utopia, but it was up to its people to sustain it.
And so The Ultimate, in his eternal wanderings through the cosmos, spread the word of the golden cryptograph to every inhabited planet he encountered. And he saw that it was good.
THE THIRTEENTH GODDESS
1. THE BLOOD OF THE EARTH
Come the gibbous moon, the waters of Venera start to flow red with the blood the Earth. By the time of the full moon, the water coursing through the city’s waterways is of a burnt-red hue. As the moon begins to wane, so does the colour of the water. By the next day — today — all traces of Mother Earth’s monthly cycle have vanished. Such are the tenets of the Venera Church of Mother Earth, which has held power in the city-state since the aftermath of the Nazi occupation.
Sister Agnes takes off her shoes and, pulling up her skirt, walks down three steps on the stairs by the Via Gaia. The now-clear water caresses her toes, her feet, her freshly shaved calves. She delights in the briny smell of the salt water now that the pungency of the blood of the Earth has been washed away. Not for the first time, she dreads rather than welcomes the thought of having to bathe in the menses of the Goddess when next they flow. Not for the first time, she questions her life in the inner circles of the Church.
As Agnes begins to climb back up to the street, something bumps against her leg. At first, she can’t identify what she sees. But then her mind starts to make sense of the bloated, sickly object: it’s a severed arm, cut — no, torn — at the shoulder and the wrist.
She steps out of the water and stares quietly at the gruesome piece of flotsam.
2. GODDESSES OF LUST
Naked, the sweat and ichors of sex drying on her skin, Belinda Gerda applies paint to the canvas before her. The thirteenth and final canvas in her current project. She paints in watercolours; she rejects oils as too garish, too harsh. For this series, which is scheduled to hang in ten days at Tito Bronze’s Velvet Bronzemine, the nexus of the Venera arts scene, the artist has perfected a solution to add depth and texture to her hues. Red is the dominant scheme throughout the Goddesses of Lust tableaux; every colour must also possess a hint of red — and so she has blended the watery menses of the Goddess into her colours. Included, too, to give the paint a fecund texture, are her own vaginal juices, blended with the spunk of her mad lover, Magus Amore, who is at this moment lying on the floor of her studio, writhing in a post-coital fit of delirium.
As he rubbed his engorged cock all over her body, as he repeatedly penetrated her every orifice until she could not tell where she ended and he began, he described the thirteenth goddess. By fucking her, he worshipped at the altars of the goddess’s body.
And so it had been with every previous goddess in this series: Magus’s insane, lustful ravings inspiring Belinda to bring her lover’s erotic visions to life. But Magus had revealed to her the names of the others, all of them goddesses of antiquity: Ninlil, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Kali, Isis, Aphrodite, Athena, Hecate, Demeter, Venus, Gaia …
This strange, anonymous goddess of Magus’s is unlike any deity Belinda has ever beheld. She has decided to call this painting The Thirteenth Goddess. There is no doubt in Belinda’s mind that this thirteenth goddess is in all ways a creation of her lover’s demented genius. The pomp and garishness of the goddess’s clothes remind Belinda of a superhero costume, but her body, although mostly humanoid, is disquietingly alien in many subtle details. She sits on a throne of organic technology, surrounded by glowing technovegetation. The goddess holds a picture frame against her chest. In that embedded picture, the naked goddess, her skin tattooed with the same patterns as Magus himself, is attended to by monstrous multi-limbed creatures who lick and caress her face, her breasts, her feet, and her dripping cunt.
Belinda loses herself in her work. She does not notice when Magus rises from the floor and peers behind her shoulder at her work, his eyes gleaming with fascination and admiration.
After a while, he turns away, though, and leaves the room. Through the door that leads to the basement of Belinda’s apartment, he climbs down the stairs. He lifts a metal slab from the floor of the lower level, revealing a dark chasm. He slides into that darkness, downward into the bowels of Venera.
The Goddess calls; Magus Amore descends, through the mysterious and confounding vestiges of Veneras past. Ancient, buried Venera is not draped in absolute darkness. A rusty gold-red glow emanates from veins in the walls, from rivulets of unknown origins that flow on and off through some of the most decrepit ruins. Here, in the subterranean world of the main island of the archipelago of Venera, he has been able to explore the ineffable mythologies of his imagination. The deeper he descends, the closer he gets to the core of his own primordial ur-story. To the archetypal narrative through which he makes sense of the world. Book after book, the writer had tried in vain to achieve such transcendent self-knowledge. Until his life’s quest took him, here, to Venera. To the drug vermilion, and to the deities, creatures, and realms it has revealed to him. Climbing down through the ever-changing ruins of Veneran history that hint at a panoply of divergent and improbable timelines, he reaches the whirlpool of iridescent vermilion, the sacred portal that delivers him into her presence. Never in the same location, the whirlpool appears to him at the end of his every subterranean odyssey. Magus Amore enters the glittering eddy, downward into mystery, and surrenders himself to the inscrutable whims of his most beloved and terrifying deity.
3. THE UNVEILING OF VENERA
The sun rises, and Venera slowly, teasingly reveals itself, sensuously slipping off one thin layer of dawn mist at a time. It is as if it were freshly born this very morning, complete and perfect, like Venus from the half-shell. This is Detective-Inspector Pietro Dovelander’s first trip to the city-state, and, despite himself, he is awed by the otherworldly sight of this notorious metropolis. None of those ubiquitous photographs do justice to its weird magnificence.
First, there are the rows of lights emerging from the water: markers to guide the archipelagic city’s heavy boat traffic. Their glow, made ambiguous by the mist, imbues the air with an ethereal atmosphere. With precise determination, the gulls fly through this ether, miniature angels single-mindedly performing ineffable duties. The countless small boats busily but unhurriedly navigating the waters seem like phantasms of long-dead vessels floating on a ghostly sea. Then a few buildings can be vaguely discerned — bizarre apparitions of utterly alien architecture to the detective’s gaze. Suddenly, the cityscape is visible: breastlike domes and serpentine elevated walkways; bulbous walls and strangely sinuous towers; vegetation suggestively entwined with wood and masonry; bright, childlike colours; pagan ornaments and monuments, at once playful and terrifying; giant sculptures of mythic beasts, voluptuous women, and intimidatingly endowed men, often engaged in prurient acts; gargoyles jutting
out from walls and roofs at unexpected and menacing angles; numerous staircases leading down from the streets to the waterways that crisscross the city; tendrils of seaweed crawling up the masonry from the water to the surface; dogs trotting through the narrow streets, crossing the ornate mossy bridges, or simply staring out at the passing maritime traffic; cats and birds calmly perched on or nestled in the various nooks and ledges offered by the architecture that refuses boxlike construction and eschews right angles.
Unsettling beauty, tantalizing opulence, unfettered imagination, unabashed eroticism … wild nature enmeshed with sophisticated civilization … Venera, Pietro surmises, is the woman every man secretly yearns for and even more secretly fears.
Regardless — he did not request this assignment, nor does he want it. Venera is not in his jurisdiction, and the detective resents being taken away from his own city to deal with someone else’s problem. But celebrity has its costs. Credited for the safe return of the triplets in the Sanangelo kidnapping and with the collar of two serial killers, Pietro is uncomfortable with his fame. It hinders his work that his face is so well-known now, and he resents that simply doing his job and doing it well is somehow newsworthy.
And now this! The High Countess of the Venera Church of Mother Earth has personally requested that he — and only he — be assigned to the macabre case besetting the insular city-state, and his government, sensing a diplomatic coup, did not give him a choice. Not if he wanted to continue working as a detective.
The boat bringing him from the mainland to Venera is the High Countess’s own official state vessel. The domelike interior of the cabin forms one continuous fresco: a sea of naked women of all shapes and sizes with limbs entwined like vines, the women’s nipples ripe like succulent grapes, menstrual blood flowing from between their legs into a rust-red backdrop. The joints, cabinets, doors, and window frames are all adorned with totemic gilded sculptures of exaggeratedly voluptuous women.
Venera Dreams Page 21
