He held my hand. We were the best of friends. This was a fact, like it was a fact that water flowed and fire was hot.
“This can’t be real,” I said, mostly to myself, in case I’d fallen asleep and was right now lying on a park bench somewhere else.
“I say that all the time,” he replied. A sadness passed through him but it was gone before I could see it properly. He looked down at me, quiet now that we had left the building, all inertia balanced on the point of my attention. “Where should we go?”
There were more than a thousand doors. Their count was beyond number.
I led him into one of the small cafés that litter the roads around Pythagoras’s Circle and the Forum. I sat in the window beside the radiant heater and ordered a hot chocolate with a double cream top. That was stupid because I was sacked by now—Damien was going to be really mad. I suddenly realized I was still wearing my tabard, quickly took it off and pushed it down the side of the seat.
I watched people just walk up off the street and stare in the windows at him. They were drawn from a distance and seemed surprised to find themselves looking in, puzzled as though they had forgotten the reason they were there until they saw him properly, at which time they relaxed quite profoundly so that bags on their shoulders slid off and cases in their hands dropped to the pavement. They stood around as if they were in a museum looking at a fabulous and inexplicable thing, an idol from an unknown continent. They smiled, expressions dreamy and distant, content.
I would have been afraid, if I hadn’t known why they were doing it.
Jalaeka noticed them and gave a funny kind of shrug. They drifted away almost immediately, picking themselves up with their belongings, and it didn’t happen again, but the noise in the café slowly increased all the time we were there, voices becoming more animated and volatile, laughter suddenly bursting out with greater frequency, happy sounds erupting spontaneously, conversations rippling with affection that was as tangible as a tide rolling in.
I nudged his knee with mine and he smiled at me, and we grinned and started laughing because it was funny to be secret friends like this, with nobody knowing what just happened or how we met. It was funny to feel no fear.
“Why?” I asked him, from the new calm inside my head. I knew his name without knowing how I knew it. “How?”
“You saw what I ought to have been,” he told me.
“What kind of crazy answer is that?”
He dipped his finger into the cream on the top of my drink and wiped it with careful precision onto the tip of my nose. Then he grinned and leant across the table and kissed it off.
7 / Rita
“That is such a beautiful coat,” said the Earth woman as we both looked into the clear plastic display cabinet at the full-length voluptuousness of silver fox, its inner white hairs glazed over by the fine blue-grey outer pelt, so that their thick fullness seemed deeper, their downy inner hair purer than the pearls cascading from the neck of the headless display model that wore them. “Can I try it?”
“Of course,” I said and thumb-keyed the case at its lock. I smiled in spite of my aching feet and my longing to go home at the end of a day that had been average in every possible way. As I passed her I saw that her shoes were a good copy of a designer I knew, and her bag was last season’s. She twitched the bag out of my way apologetically and gave me a nervous, hopeful smile. I stepped inside the case and lifted the fur down, laying it carefully across my arms to keep it placid while I carried it to the full-length mirrors.
The customer trotted after me and put her own coat down over her bag on one of the courtesy chairs. She brushed and groomed herself with darting pats of her hands across her blouse and the top of her trousers as I approached her. I held out the coat and she slid her arms into the satin linings before I settled it on her shoulders. I smoothed the upper pelts gently with flat hands and she gave a nervous giggle as she felt the barely sentient response of the coat moving of its own accord around her, discovering her shape and smell. It was all but asleep, fortunately.
I told her all about the care and maintenance of such living coats—things she would never need to know—for I was sick of the alarmed reactions and squeals and occasional nasty scenes that followed these moments of guilty customer fantasy when the coat was wakeful and they would catch sight of its eyes watching them, or feel its feet burrow about against them, searching blindly for another foot to hold on to and grasp in comforting security. Calming the coat after it had been flung off was a lengthy business, involving a lot of grooming. As a bonus however, this shop floor in the Embargo was so expensive that few people came here, and if they did, they only wanted to browse and shake their heads at the stupid things that rich people were prepared to pay for.
My customer admired herself, turning this way a little, then that way, and I purposely stepped out of her range of vision so that she could enjoy her stolen moments alone. I was pointlessly adjusting the lapel of an ordinary, vat-grown rabbit jacket when a trace of a vibration—the tread of a distant leviathan or the first erotic quiver of a significant earthquake—ran through me. I put my hand out and held the coat rail, my other hand to my heart, because that was where it had come from.
I saw the other woman’s feet turning, stepping, beneath the mirrors’ lower edge; neat and careful, turning her ankle this way, that way. Across the floor I looked for my colleagues and saw them going about their business as though nothing had happened, checking and rehanging items, brushing and cleaning, making things ready for the change to the night staff.
It came again.
God, no, I thought. It can’t be. It can’t be now. Haven’t I done enough for you on Earth—all those businessmen and scientists, all that lying and stealing? Your sleeper, then your spy. Years and years. Leave me alone! You promised that was the end!
A fine membrane below my sternum broke and from the gap came flying an immaterial gossamer net that spread out and rippled across the simple space and time of my own moment and around all the corners of that moment, into the hidden sevensheet, giving me a vertigo so extreme that I lost my balance and fell. Clutching at anything, I dragged the coats over me in a wave of soft, heavy deadness.
I lay on the carpet, drowning in darkness, my senses opened up in ways I’d never wanted to experience again, the whole of Sankhara screaming into my brain as it rose from beneath me; the fundamental ocean, the dust come to claim its payment for my existence. Unity’s agent looked through my eyes, my ears, my body as I struggled to cry out for help. At the edge of vision, far out, I saw a shimmer of the sevensheet that wasn’t part of us, nor the Stuffie collective, nor the fabrications of the Sidebar or any other structure in the known. I saw, I heard, I felt movement that wasn’t me: Us. I tried to snatch it, but it was gone in the storm of presence . . .
Then came the voice I’d never wanted to hear again. Theodore.
Get up, he said, get up . . . ! and his voice was changing as it came, rising from the infinite depth of Unity like a shark barrelling to the surface of the sea: jaws. Within the instant I was his puppet, my thoughts and my actions lost to his.
I flung the coats aside and got to my feet, staggering on my high heels for a moment as the woman in the silver fox bent down to help me up, saying, “Oh, are you all right?”
I pushed her aside and started to run. Spikes of pain, the legacy of the day’s standing around, drilled through the balls of my feet as I flung my hands out to brace myself against displays that were in my way, specifically designed as they were to prevent anyone leaving with products unseen in a straight dash. In my wake millions of credits’ worth of jewellery and clothing went tumbling, and customers and colleagues alike stood still as statues, their mouths hanging agape or with indrawn breaths ready to call out, raising their hands to stop me from metres and tens of metres away.
I wanted to stop. These were not my hands. They were not my feet.
I made the fire escape and ran down it, jumping two and three steps at a time, which hurt so
that I gasped and my pencil skirt seam tore with the force of my running. I slid and fell at the penultimate flight, going over on my ankle, lungs heaving, the sound of my own blood singing in my ears, my own heartbeat like a jackhammer in my temples. I got up and ran on, out the exits and into the streets, where I turned without a second thought into the great Forum and across it, scattering early-evening shoppers, running through the ground-level jets of the Aelf 1 fountains as though they weren’t there. I ran as I could never have run without hell inside me, following the look of a vague alien shape, that form that defied my sight.
On the far side of the Forum a café window stood in the torchlight of one of Aelf 1’s massive structural legs, lit within by a variety of candles and gaslights. It was packed, and I had to step over bags and children and push my way to get to the front, where I could look in. I found myself with my hands against the glass. Voices surrounded me. Someone smiled at me and pointed and I saw my reflection in the glass for an instant, a madwoman, soaked to the skin, hair in rats’ tails. I tried to walk away but went inside. I shoved my way between chair backs and tables, losing a shoe, sloughing off the other one as I reached the empty table by the window. I sat down in one of the empty seats. It was still warm.
Here, said Theo in my head—Theo who made me and whom I never wanted back. His voice was calm and thoughtful as he receded from me, the sort of voice that would have been comfortable walking in the park, speaking of genteel affairs as it meandered into the distance. It’s gone now, but it was here. You’ll find it, Rita. You’ll find it for me. You and I, we’ll do it together.
I sat alone at the table, dripping, gulping air, shaking compulsively with a violence I couldn’t stop, even when I held the table with both my hands. When Theo abandoned me there I tried looking on my own for the thing he had pursued and lost. But without him I was only human. My feet were agony. Before me lay an empty cup, dried frothed milk and chocolate on its sides clinging in patterns like clouds.
8 / Jalaeka
Francine and I were sitting on the tailgate of the Hoolerton tram, feet hanging a few inches above the road, ignoring the patient AI voice telling us calmly that we should ride safely inside. The broad avenue with its central reservation of grass and tall palms unspooled beneath us, pushing the huge triple fortress of the Massif and the Aelf away until they became a single three-pronged spire of light against the pitch-black perfection of the night sky, stars blotted out by the fairy dust glow that shone off every roof and shallow plane in the city so that every building from the greatest to the most humble was limned in a pale golden shimmer like ancient glory. Then we turned, following the line of the Purbright river towards the docks, and everything but the triple spire was lost to sight, hidden by the close brick walls of the warehouses and yards, their sides peeling with the eczema of old bill posters proclaiming legendary DJs, obscure political agendas and the return of the Justified Ancients of Muu Muu. From beyond the broken bottles that topped their ramparts came the sound and flare of forges working, metal being hammered and cut and moulded and melted. A heavy chemical flux lay on the air, fighting with the odour of fish and a dank smell rising from the gutters.
Her hand in mine.
“So what were you doing last night?” Francine asked.
“Obliterating myself.”
“Why?”
I shrugged, slightly embarrassed. Why does anyone?
I glanced at her. She was watching the street and being careful not to stare at me. I longed not to be the pathetic old veteran who stares with a doggy, washed-up gaze that sees shrapnel ripping into everything he looks at. But I know Theo and I know myself, and so I am that guy.
She leant against me with a very slight exaggeration of her position at my side and I leant back much more strongly, accepting her invitation. Sick and tired, because she let me be, I rested my head on her shoulder and let her support me. She wasn’t confident enough to put her arm around me, though I wished she would. After a moment I felt her hand stroking my hair where it fell across the back of my shoulders, so lightly that if I’d been human I might not have noticed.
Farther on, as Hoolerton proper began, the brickworks broke into smaller units, the factories becoming shops and houses, clustered close in ranks of terraces like ordered troops. We passed two concrete tower blocks and I wanted to tell Francine that I used to know people who lived in places like this and had even seen them and been inside their homes less than a decade before in my time, but that was ancient history to her. Nonetheless I watched the ugly towers’ pattern of window lights with a horrible affection, and then their punch card faces bent away from us and drifted away to the left behind the mountainous bulk of a stone mill, all its windows bricked up across five storeys of machinework floors. Above its gates the name Lazarus Works was carved into the archstones, but beneath them more bricks blocked the entrance. It became the side of a canyon, while on the right a municipal park stretched out in damp, recently rain-drenched dark, the swings and slides in its deserted playground moving silently, gently, as though they’d been left only minutes ago.
I tightened my hold on Francine’s hand. “Get ready. Jump!”
We ran ourselves to a standstill at the corner of the street where an all-night store and a pub, cast in the Tudorbethan mould, glowed brightly with light and the promise of civilization. A sign swung outside the pub’s Herculean-scaled black and white slice of old England—the Pig and Piper. The air even smelled like Earth’s Western urban nineteen eighties; car exhaust, stale beer, burgers, cigarettes.
I led her through the maze Damien had shown me: along several narrow ginnels, muddy underfoot and thick with nettles. They were in white flower and their herbal scent was sickly sweet as we brushed through them, hands high to avoid getting stung. It was still hours until Engine Time.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Crisscross Street,” I said, as we emerged onto it. If there was a more ordinary place in Sankhara, I couldn’t think of it.
“These are houses?”
“Yes.”
“Monsters here?”
“Only yourself.”
She laughed and everything became light to me.
“Stop.”
“What?”
I took off my jacket and gave it to her.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Put it on.”
She hesitated, but then slid her arms into it. It was too big for her, but the man’s cologne on it smelled better now that she wore it. I took her hand back and led her under the railway arch. As soon as we were through she gasped with the cold and surprise and pressed against my side. I put my arm around her shoulders.
“This is where you live?” she asked after she had taken a moment to look around. She swallowed and her face was ashen. “When you said we could go to your place I . . .”
“Not out here!” I smiled at her. “Come on.”
She turned to look back through the lych-gate’s suppurating arch. “But where . . . ?”
“It’s there. Less than a moment away. All still there. I promise.”
Her face showed all her doubt, and the moment she discarded it.
She was dwarfed by the trees rearing huge and black over us, their boughs stirring restlessly in a strong wind. She clutched the jacket close around her with her free hand, the other hand holding mine tightly, and walked over the rough faces of the black granite slabs that paved the road as if she was walking on glass. An icy gleam sparkled on puddles of recent rain shivering in twin grooves where the wheels of great carriages were supposed to run. She looked at these lines in both directions. Their silver ran out to our right for miles, but to our left sank almost immediately into an overgrown penumbra where the walls had been brought down by fallen titans, their rotting bodies stretched out and blocking the way. She was careful not to tread near them.
I led her a short distance, right, to the other side of the road, where the wall dropped to a quarter of its former height and was topped with bla
ck iron railings, each the width of a forearm and the height of two tall men. They were bent into soft wavy shapes that coiled around each other as though they were snakes crawling up the vertical face of the air. Halfway along their span a great pair of gates were set between raw megaliths of the same material.
Francine halted of her own accord and stared at the gates. They were almost unrecognizable as gates; had suffered a terrible and catastrophic assault at some time in the past, their bars frozen so that they looked like a 3-dimensional drawing of a missile strike wake. Their anguish spoke volumes about the force used against them, though not one that had struggled to gain entrance to the Park they guarded—they had been devastated by something that wanted to get out.
I followed Francine in picking my way through them, my feet splashing in rusty water where one had worn a shallow quarter-circle depression in the paving.
Beyond the rails and gates a broad gravel expanse swept directly to the central door in a colossal and beautifully proportioned palace, almost a perfect copy of its Earthly Baroque antecedent, Rastrelli’s Winter Palace. In the light of the full moon overhead its white columns, window-frames, apexes and statuary glowed with a ghostly radiance, the stucco between them a flat grey that made them seem to float in thin air, as though there were no walls. It must have been more than a couple of hundred metres wide. Of its three storeys, all the windows were black except for one I had lit earlier in the day. I could see the hint of that room’s flamboyant, wildly coloured wallpaper.
“Is this . . . it?” she whispered.
“The light,” I said.
“Oh.”
Wings crossed the moon, vast wings of taut skin that let the light show their veins and cartilage and the long body between them, diamond-headed.
“Is this . . . yours. Is it yours?”
“So I’m told.”
Francine turned and looked at me, her mouth twitched up at the corners. She reached into her pocket, dug around and handed me a piece of flimsy paper. I glanced at her questioningly, saw her nervousness and concern, and then obediently read it.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 8
