Venera Dreams

by Claude Lalumiere

  From the outside, the boat is black and sober — an anomaly in this city that celebrates excess — with only the gold crest of the Church on each side. Despite the rain, after a cursory examination, Pietro shunned the inside and trusted his grey raincoat to protect him from the weather for the three-hour journey.

  What he really wants to do is smoke his pipe, but the Countess’s eagerness to engage his services did not include permission to light up in her vessel. In fact, he would not be able to smoke for the duration of this investigation: tobacco is strictly prohibited in Venera.

  Whatever it takes, Pietro will wrap up this case quickly.

  4. THE HIGH COUNTESS OF THE VENERA CHURCH OF MOTHER EARTH

  The High Countess of the Venera Church of Mother Earth spreads the sheets of paper on her desk, making a show of examining them, but Detective-Inspector Dovelander can see that she is not truly reading. In fact, he’s certain that she knows that he’s noticed this, that, furthermore, she wants him to know. She’s decided to make him wait; although he resents her attitude, he is trained to respect the chain of command, and for the duration he will be reporting to her. But her lack of respect irritates him. The day before, their appointment was cancelled at the last minute, with no explanation. And now, these silly head games.

  The Countess’s attire jars with her portentous title. A woman of 58, the Countess looks almost twenty years younger and dresses to flatter her relatively youthful appearance. Her skin is smooth, the colour of cream into which are diluted a few drops of dark wine. Her long hair reaches down to her breasts, which are squeezed tight, still noticeably ample, by a push-up bra. Her black dress, with low décolletage but long sleeves, reaches to just above the knee. The dress is garlanded with gold, some strands of the soft metal dyed red. Her legs are otherwise bare, and her feet shorn in high-heeled evening sandals that show off her elegant feet and vermilion-painted toes. Her fingernails, however, are not painted, nor is she wearing any jewellery. In newspaper photographs, Dovelander distinctly remembers, the High Countess is always copiously adorned. This room disturbs Pietro. In fact, every room and corridor he’s seen since his arrival in Venera yesterday has left him unsettled. For example, there are no corners as such in this room, nothing he can properly identify as a wall, no clearly defined ceiling. Pietro can discern no pattern to the network of arches and bulges, and he cannot even guess at the function of the various nooks and niches, or the purpose behind the division of space. Through stained-glass windows, from confounding angles, and reflected on haphazardly scattered mirrors, the sunlight wafts through the room like a heavy fog, challenging his sense of balance. The rainbow of bright colours, the ubiquitous decorative flourishes, the alien geometry, the way the light filters through the room — all of this combines to short-circuit his powers of observation. More than ever, he is convinced that this assignment is a mistake. He will not be able to pursue any kind of worthwhile investigation in this environment. He lacks the required knowledge and familiarity, which only a local or an expert could possess.

  At least the floor is flat, although it, too, is heavily decorated, every tile handcrafted with intricate designs, flourishes, and symbols.

  Everything is overwhelming in Venera. All of his training and experience — useless. How is he expected to know how people living in such an environment think? Or understand enough of their behaviour and customs to know how to question them? Without any frame of reference how can he possibly see the truth hidden in their lies? He’ll bungle this job, create a diplomatic mess, and his career will end just as certainly as if he’d outright refused to take the case.

  “You’re a Christian. A Catholic.”

  Her gruff voice startles him. He’d expected her to speak in a smoky voice. Instead, she barks. Not in a menacing way, but, regardless, hers is a voice that insists on being heard. Under his shirt, the crucifix hanging around his neck seems to sear his skin, as if the High Countess could see through his shirt and burn the pendant with heat vision, like an American superhero.

  It occurs to him, though, that she’s sensed his discomfort and might be offering him a graceful way to bow out. “I regret that poses a problem, Your Highness. I’m sure my government can assign another — ”

  “No. You’ll do. We need your skills. Crime is rare here, and violent crime even more so. We do not have the appropriate resources to deal with the current situation. We need this resolved before the next gibbous moon. I only bring up your religion to mention that, although Venera does not officially permit proselytizing faiths to congregate, services are held in various embassies, including that of your government. We tolerate it as long as such activity remains private, with no missionary agenda.”

  Pietro is surprised by the courtesy. His own government, undoubtedly aware of the services, never bothered to inform him. Neither did anyone at the embassy yesterday. “Thank you, Your Highness.”

  Is that almost a smile on her face?

  “Also, I hear one of the attachés at your country’s embassy has a profitable sideline procuring black-market tobacco for the diplomatic community …” — Dovelander tries but can’t contain the sigh of relief that escapes from his gut — “ … however, do make sure to contain your filthy habit to embassy grounds.” Her tone is censorious, but she makes sure that Pietro sees her grin and nod.

  Pietro jumps at the sound of someone clearing her throat behind him. He hadn’t even been aware that anyone else was in the room with them. He can’t remember the last time someone successfully snuck up on him; has it, in fact, ever happened before? Again, a disquieting feeling of inadequacy gnaws at his usually imperturbable confidence.

  The new woman, an Earth Sister, looks shaken. Despite her height — she is taller than Pietro and wearing flats — she holds herself to look small and meek, digging her shoulders into herself, her back tightly constricted. “Pardon the intrusion, Your Highness, but there have been new developments.” Her voice, at odds with her body language, is steady and emotionless, neither cold nor warm. The flash of anger on the High Countess’s face is not directed at the newcomer but at what she expects her to say. “New body parts, Sister Agnes?”

  Sister Agnes swallows before answering. This time, her voice betrays a hint of fear. “The question is, Your Highness — from what kinds of bodies?”

  5. DETECTIVE-INSPECTOR DOVELANDER INVESTIGATES

  “Isn’t anyone going to arrest that man?”

  “Why?” Sister Agnes responds to Detective-Inspector Pietro Dovelander. In a stationary boat on the Primadonna Canal, the duo is supervising the work of collecting the body parts from the water. Nine Sisters, three per boat, are doing the grunt work with nets.

  Earlier, a squad of Earth Sisters had scattered the crowd of curious onlookers, but now a tall man walks along Via Bellarossa, which borders the waterway. His gait is punctuated by random fits and starts. In a loud voice, he grunts unintelligible words and phrases, gesticulating wildly. Occasionally, he bumps into walls, or trips and falls, immediately picking himself up as if nothing had happened.

  “For one thing, he shouldn’t be here. Is no-one guarding the perimeter?” But that’s not what really bothers the detective. The intruder is entirely naked, all body hair shaved off, save for his unruly mane of dark hair and his long, wispy charcoal beard. His whole body is covered in tattoos of occult symbols. Both nipples are pierced. His long semierect penis flaps against his thigh; the tip of the stretched foreskin almost reaches his knee. “And for another …”

  Sister Agnes raises her eyebrows and looks the detective in the eye, the hint of a smirk crossing her features. Dovelander feels challenged, tested. Under his shirt, the small crucifix drags on his neck and shoulders like a heavy burden.

  “Never mind,” he says, defeated, turning his attention back to the monstrous body parts of disquieting morphology the Earth Sisters are pulling in from the water.

  Doctor Sam Tuturo is not a medical examiner, but there is no ME to be found anywhere in Venera. Tuturo is a surgeon w
orking at the ER of Venera’s only hospital. Unlike every other hospital Dovelander has ever visited, this one is remarkably quiet. “Where are all the patients?”

  “There are a dozen or so on the third floor. Doctor Mandola is in charge of resident patients. Doctor Landau is supervising the ER in my absence.” Tuturo has been assigned to assist Dovelander for the duration of the investigation. The doctor doesn’t seem overly pleased by this.

  Samuel or Samantha? Tuturo, like everything else in this damned city, confounds Dovelander. At first glance he’d assumed the doctor to be a man, but that was partly because Sams are usually men. The cut of the doctor’s eyeglasses seem unquestionably masculine, yet the doctor’s delicate wrists and smooth, fey jawline hint strongly at femininity. The doctor’s androgynous voice offers no definite clue.

  Dovelander estimates the doctor’s height at 165 centimetres, shorter than the detective by a hand. Short for a man, but not necessarily so for an Asian man, and Tuturo is at least partly Asian, probably Japanese. The doctor sports an expensive-looking trim haircut and a slick, artfully unkempt metrosexual style that, again, betrays no specific gender identity.

  The handshake, though, is female, or perhaps simply effeminate. The doctor’s hand lies in his like a cold, limp, dead fish. And the doctor has made no move to remove it; they’ve been clasping hands for nearly a minute now. Dovelander can’t tell if it’s passive-aggressive flirtation or passive-aggressive, well, aggression. Maybe both. Anyway, again, it feels like a challenge. Like he would lose face if he were the one to let go.

  You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake. Men learn to express their entire personality in the way they clasp another man’s hand. In women, though, handshakes can be misleading. Women don’t reveal their identity through their handshakes but more from their posture, including the tilt of their heads — a few degrees of angle can tell entire life stories.

  This overlong and clammy handshake, though — Dovelander can’t conclude anything from it, save for the already obvious fact that he himself is an alien here and, apparently, an unwelcome one.

  Forcing his thoughts back to the subject of the near-empty hospital, the detective comments: “But the population of Venera exceeds five hundred thousand.”

  The doctor doesn’t respond, which further irritates Dovelander. He tries not to show it, but he’s exhausted. Having to put up with passive-aggressive cooperation doesn’t make him angry at this point, it just makes him want to collapse.

  The doctor finally terminates the handshake and offers the detective coffee. “Come on. I could use one, too.”

  Coffee! At least, this damnable place doesn’t ban that as well.

  Mugs in hand, the two proceed to the doctor’s office, which turns out to be by far the most conventional room the detective has seen yet. Save for a few ornamental details, this could almost be the office of any doctor or researcher back home.

  Tuturo motions the detective to sit and hands him his report, which includes photographs.

  Quickly leafing through the folder, Dovelander’s eye catches a clue. “The flesh was tattooed?” And: “Were the previous body parts also tattooed? With similar markings?”

  Back at the Mother House, a gargantuan Earth Sister is on night duty. She is by far the fattest person Dovelander has seen yet in Venera. He had begun to suspect that fashionable slimness was mandatory in this demented, decadent city.

  He’s astonished at the elegance with which Sister Bettina, as she introduces herself, rises from her armchair. It’s a mythic moment, like the Leviathan emerging from the depths. Venera tends to imbue the simplest of acts with gratuitous gravitas.

  There’s something straightforward about the Sister that immediately endears her to Pietro. That, plus the fact the she responds to his urgent request without any hesitation or obfuscation. “I’ll be but a moment fetching Sister Agnes, detective.”

  While he waits, Pietro tries to understand the layout of the lobby, but, despite himself, his eye keeps being distracted by the sexual acts painted onto the floor. Couldn’t they have chosen Moriano for this job? He’s both an atheist and a degenerate. He’s not too bad a detective, either. So what if the High Countess had asked for Dovelander? Both his captain and his commissioner know him well enough to understand that he’s not the right man for this job. Or at least, for this place.

  “What’s the news, detective?” Sister Agnes’s long hair is dishevelled, and her shirt is tucked crookedly into her pants. She’s still wiping the sleep from her eyes.

  “We should have held that man for questioning.”

  It takes a moment for Agnes to understand. “You mean Amore?”

  “Is that his name? That crazy naked man with the tattoos?”

  “Yes. Magus Amore. Once a brilliant writer, now one of our most renowned eccentrics.”

  Magus Amore. Even Dovelander, who reads at most two or three novels a year, knows the name. Twenty years ago, Amore had been the darling of the international literary world. Winner of the Booker, the Nobel, and numerous other awards. Dovelander had tried to read one of his books, The League of Anarchy. A thriller, the cover blurb had said. Impenetrable nonsense, filled with deranged sex and cruelty, pagan mumbo-jumbo, and subversive rants, was more what Dovelander thought of it, although he’d given up on it after a few dozen pages.

  “Do you have any photos of him on file? Especially of his tattoos?”

  6. THE GARDEN OF THE GODDESSES

  In the lush garden of the Goddesses, naked, prepubescent sycophants tend to their every need. It is the night of Belinda’s initiation, her ascension to godhood; for the occasion she once more wears the body of a sixteen-year-old. Her cunt grows moist as the Goddesses’ gazes fall on her once-more ripe breasts.

  An insistent ringing interrupts the proceedings. No-one else seems to notice the jarring sound. Belinda’s concentration is shattered. Her body regains its true age. The Goddesses laugh. A loud thumping joins the ringing. Belinda grows even older, so old that all her hair falls out. Her shrivelled tits hang down to her waist.

  As the skin begins peeling off her bones, she wakes up. The doorbell is ringing. Someone’s beating hard on the door.

  She forces herself out of bed. Picking up her nightgown, she sees her 45-year-old body in the bedroom mirror and yearns for firmer years. She wraps herself in the nightgown to find out what the commotion is about. She’s certain it’s about Magus. What’s her crazy old darling done this time?

  At the door, she finds a man in a worn, grey raincoat. He fidgets too much with his hands, and he’s scowling. At his side, a tall, nervous Earth Sister avoids her gaze.

  Without greeting or preamble, the man says: “We need to talk to Magus Amore.”

  “And you would be …?”

  “My name’s Detective-Inspector Pietro Dovelander, and this is Sister Agnes from the Mother House.” The detective reaches into his raincoat. “We’re on official business, acting with full authority from the High Countess.” He shows Belinda an official document, with the holographic seal of the Church, granting him full emergency powers. “Are you Belinda Gerda?”

  “Yes. And I haven’t seen Magus for days. It’s not unusual for him to disappear for long stretches.”

  The detective seems somewhat less tense when he addresses her again: “I apologize for the intrusion at this inconvenient hour, but this is truly urgent. May we come in?”

  7. THE AUTOMATA OF HEMERO VOLKANUS

  No edifice better illustrates the fact that most buildings are machines than the home of Hemero Volkanus. The guts of the building are turned inside out, so that the plumbing and wiring are all visible, albeit protected by acrylic glass. In addition, the house moves. The many windows of various sizes are all built with photosensitive transistors that guide their frames to rotate so as to best capture the sunlight, or avoid it, depending on weather and temperature. It’s also a noisy house, as the various gears and parts are constantly in subtle motion.

  There is no doorbell and no do
orknob, and Belinda knows better than to knock. Within a few seconds the door slides open to reveal one of the Kourai Khryseai, as Hemero calls his chillingly lifelike female automata, after the mechanical servants the god Hephaestus created to help him in his Olympian smithy.

  The gynoid greets her in the nonsense language the machines have been programmed to speak. Nonsense, perhaps, but undeniably beautiful, ethereal in its musical beauty. Sometimes, Belinda is tempted to accept Hemero’s claims that it is indeed the language of the gods, unintelligible to mere mortals. Magus, who grows ever more desperately credulous, takes everything Hemero says at face value. Magus believes Hemero’s story that he did not invent these beautiful machines but found them buried deep in the bowels of Venera, among the ruins of the forgotten civilizations that once prospered on the archipelago’s main island, that they are in fact the true Kourai Khryseai of myth. The inventor may be brilliant, but his penchant for tall tales doesn’t fool Belinda.

  The gynoid guides Belinda through the house. They reach the workshop of Venera’s self-styled Hephaestus as he tinkers on a pair of mechanical legs.

  “Trying to improve on the current model, Hemero?” Volkanus, who was born in Italy, lost both his legs in a childhood automobile accident.

  “You know that for years I’ve been trying to reverse-engineer the Kourai Khryseai” — computer screens on his work table display schemata of a robot designed to look like a human female—“but I still haven’t cracked Hephaestus’s technology.”

  “Save it for Magus, Hemero. I’m not buying today.” Despite herself, her voice breaks a bit.

  Volkanus turns to look at Belinda. “Always the skeptic, eh?” Then he falls silent and scrutinizes her so intently that Belinda squirms.