Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  The club had paid out over a million credits in the last two months, all into the same unnamed account in the unattainable mysteries of the Uluru banking service. It was split up in uneven amounts across nine separate entries. Next to every entry, labelling the transaction, was the single word—darshan. She’d looked that up long ago. It meant the grace of god, bestowed by a glance.

  Prior to these transactions there were other colossal payouts, all unmarked, to the same destination account. It was the kind of money that usually signalled criminal work, but the blatant disclosure of it in the books and the fact that it had been legally submitted for tax inspection puzzled Valkyrie mightily. The first dated suspect transaction was a few days after the fall of Metropolis.

  But Bob had testimony, albeit from an unreliable source. Bob’s source inside the club said that it was some Stuffie deal, and although it was peddled alongside the more usual sexual or pharmaceutical experiences on offer it wasn’t either of those things. And they only sometimes paid. Sometimes, for reasons nobody understood, it was free. Whatever it was, people came out of it changed.

  There was a file of anecdotal evidence on that, culled from the most exclusive parts of the healthy/wealthy net groups. They said it did your head in, a brainmelt of the highest order, and that it was worth whatever it cost and that it lasted and lasted and lasted. Personal ecstasy, salvation, rebirth . . .

  No, Valkyrie didn’t want to risk that. She folded Elinor’s picture in her hand. “Where would you go then,” she whispered to it, “if I became content, and forgot about you?” And then again, perhaps Elinor would be there, but Valkyrie could never afford such a price and she didn’t want to have to look at people who got what she could never have.

  The wind got up later in the night. The horse bone beads tinkled against the gris-gris. Valkyrie, sleepless and heartsore, looked up and saw the smiley face twirling around and around. There were two wrinkles in the chin, which looked like another pair of eyes when it was upside down. Happy sad, happy sad.

  19 / Greg

  We met Francine at the Palace gates. She was carrying a bag with transmitter markers in it, the surveying type for long-term, wide-area data capture. The bag was almost empty and she looked flushed and was out of breath.

  “Hey.” Francine waved to us and I raised my hand briefly, Jalaeka jogging ahead of me. He caught Francine’s hands and pushed his head through the bars to kiss her.

  She glanced at me proudly. “The forest gets five metres closer every morning,” she said. “I put out markers, you know, like you said you would but . . .”

  “Never got round to it,” I finished for her. “That’s dangerous. I don’t like the idea of you being out and about round here on your own.”

  “I’ve seen the wolves, they don’t come near, if that’s what’s worrying you. And I don’t just put out markers. I put out special things too, presents. Always gone in the morning.”

  That explained where my blue china cup had gone. “Oh well then, straight up to the attic for you as soon as we get in.” The attic was a place neither of us was keen to explore and we’d made a running joke of putting it off.

  She let go of my hand. “You first.”

  “I think he should go. If he’s anything like he claims, he’ll be quite safe.”

  Jalaeka opened the door and stood back to let Francine and me go through first. “I’ll go while you two get changed. Give me the machines.” He held his hand out for my Abacand and the bag of markers.

  I gave it to him. “I’m not scared.” I stepped over the lintel and waited for him in the hall. Mandy Before, the Palace keeper, had been around and lit the lamps. To our left and right the galleries glowed gently in their light, columns like orderly rows of ice soldiers, arches white and cold. I glanced up at the ceiling mural.

  The helicopters and their sunset were gone. On a still river between jungle banks a small row-boat was floating in midstream, a thin rope trailing behind it. The boat was empty. Thick mist veiled everything around it. There were hints of faces under the water and in the shadows between the trees at the water’s edge, but when I looked for them the illusion vanished. There was nothing there.

  “Oh, that’s much better,” Francine said as she studied it.

  “Was it like that when we left?” I asked Jalaeka.

  “I don’t know.” He took a recording of it for me with my Abacand, as if he’d done it all his life. In one of those moments that seem to stand out in time I saw the black fall of his hair against the soft white and grey lines of the hall, the bronze line of his throat, his beautiful hands with the silver Abacand resting on them, and I saw how inhuman he was. He wasn’t looking at a picture. He was looking at me; the intuition I had about it was too strong to resist. He was thinking. I remembered the calculations on my Abacand, the mathematics of existence. What was I in that? He was deciding somehow, and looking at that picture and . . . I lost it, as though my insight had evaporated.

  As he turned to speak to me, he’d never looked less idealized, his expression one of slight surprise and great pain, the kind of expression that would come from the betrayal of an old friend or a knife in the back.

  He was already hiding his expression as he turned to me but he wasn’t fast enough. I wanted to touch him, examine him, interrogate him, demand to know what he was thinking. His pain was replaced by a strange, ancient weariness that made him look as though the gaslight itself was strong enough to white him out. Our gazes locked as he spoke lightly, “Murderer goes up the river to kill the old king in his den, kills him, becomes king, son replaces father, mothers become wives and sisters daughters . . . that what you’re thinking?”

  Did he read my mind? “Something like that.” I sounded colder than I thought I would.

  “Look, murdering son already got out of the boat.” He pointed at the image, at the boat and rope’s wake, as caught on my Abacand’s screen. “It’s drifting back downstream.” I felt his gaze as if it were a kiss on my face. The ghost of a smile moved his mouth. “Then again, maybe it’s only a boat. Maybe whoever was in the boat forgot to tie it up, or they got taken by pirates.”

  “Maybe you’re only some guy,” I suggested.

  “Maybe.” He held my gaze and its challenge.

  Francine had spent this time staring up at the ceiling but she looked back at both of us now. “Stop it. I already want to slam your heads together, and it’s not even nine o’clock. Why are we changing clothes?”

  “Going out,” Jalaeka said with an easy shrug and a smile. “I promised Greg I’d do whatever filthy porno it is that I do for you both, so that he can pass final judgement and shop me to Solargov Security. You’re my guests.”

  “And you were going to ask me when?” She put her hands on her hips in pretend anger.

  “Francine—would you like to come out to the club tonight?”

  She was so happy. I was such a fool.

  20 / Jalaeka

  I didn’t like the boat picture. I wanted to go back to Francine’s apartment and watch her taking her clothes off, then watch her getting dressed. I wanted to brush her hair and put on her makeup for her, lose myself in all the trivial perfections of small moments in which there was nothing but love.

  I went to the end of the gallery where apartments had surrendered a coffinated corner space to a simple, white-painted stair. I kept thinking about the things I’d tried to explain to Greg in the plainest words I knew, and how those words had built a wall between us that our sniping jokes didn’t quite manage to vault. I knew that I needed him in the coming storm, and I didn’t like to speculate on the how and why of it. I knew it in my bones, in the angles of my superstructures across all seven hidden corners. I didn’t like being at his mercy, though every time we came close to a moment of connection I knew he was someone who could imagine me a better way. He could make me stronger. But sometimes he wanted a friend and sometimes he wanted to finish me, and I was never sure which one was going to win. And I didn’t like the boat picture.
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  At the top of the white staircase a narrow door with an iron ring handle opened onto a dim and shadowy world, floored by regular boards hammered in place by iron nails, lit by small, floor-level windows of plain glass set at regular intervals to left and right. Although it was dark outside the rest of the Palace, the windows here let in a sepulchral, sepia-toned light, just bright enough to illumine the empty spaces and the even scatter of dried brown leaves covering the floor. Their untouched carpet stretched from where I stood to a point that must have been an unlikely several kilometres away, all relationship to the Palace lost. At this false horizon the wooden floor was still a long way from meeting the roof, from which hung suspended an entire dead forest. A leaf fell from the canopy of a thick, faded red beech tree above me. I watched its fluttering descent through the motionless air, and listened to the tiny sound it made as it touched the floor.

  I looked up to where it had come from. Bats hung in the topmost branches of a withered oak, its highest twigs a few metres above my head like rigid fingers stretching out in space to touch anything, touching nothing. The bats were sleeping with their wings wrapped around them, vibrating in space to the measure of their rapid heartbeats, their slight motion making the curled brown leaves shiver around them. Farther above me, beyond the bats, where the trees were rooted in sandy yellow earth, a road wound through the dells. I saw a tiny man on horseback riding there, dirt brown in an empire of dirt greys, the mane and tail of the horse and the hair of the man hanging down towards me. The sound of the horse’s hooves was like the patter of mouse feet. Dust and sand filtered down in a shower where they’d passed and sparkled in the air.

  I walked for about a hundred metres. Everything was very dusty, as though most of it had been stored up here for decades. After a short distance the leaves at my feet and on the trees changed. They were much older, most no more than skeletons. The ochre dust that lay thickly around each one was the dust it had crumbled to.

  I crushed a few deliberately under the sole of my shoe and ground them into the planks of the floor.

  Some distance beyond me a breath of air stirred some of the deadfall into a small circle, lifting the leaves up an inch or two, then letting them go. Their rustling was exactly the sound that the pages of a heavy book makes when someone riffles through it, not the sound of leaves at all. I saw other patches move and slither in the thick fall and the syrupy, leaden air stirred against my face. From the vanishing point ahead a figure arose, building itself rapidly out of branches, fleshing itself with the fallen leaves. A wicker golem, it came towards me slowly, though I soon realized that the apparent speed was an illusion caused by the distance. It was travelling fast, and in its wake the dead leaves and dust rose in a storm.

  I glanced down at the picture of the boat shining in artificial light from the machine in my hand. I didn’t feel afraid of whatever Unity’s Engine had created here, though its creations were often worth being afraid of. I felt tired. I knew the boat. It had been my boat, once. I knew the old flaking rusty-coloured paint of its prow and the uneven action of the left rowlock and how it always felt like it was listing when it wasn’t because the seats were warped. It currently rotted at the bottom of a river delta on a planet a very long way from this one, which was in turn a very long way from Sankhara’s appropriated world and, from Earth, not even visible on a clear night or from a telescope stationed out at the system’s edge.

  I lost my patience with this dead inverted world—at that second something in me snapped—and I was done with hiding and done with waiting and—just done. I set down one of the markers, turned my back on the storm of leaves and whatever rode it, and walked back to the attic door. A tornado whipped into life behind me, roaring like a train. I closed the door on it.

  For a moment I waited on the other side. An already-weak breath of air pushed some dust out between the door and the frame. Leaves battered and skittered against the panels, not even enough to shake the latch. A pathetic, lost scratching noise grated across the floorboards and up the other side of the door itself so that I seemed to feel a weak, trembling hunger scrabbling up the wood, scratching the paint with its fingernails. After a few seconds it stopped. It had no power beyond the dead wood and it would never get out without somebody else’s fear to animate it. I pitied it for a split second.

  I went into Greg’s apartment without knocking and returned the Abacand. He was in the shower. I left it on his kitchen table and called out, “Nothing to worry over up there. Come next door, when you’re ready.”

  Francine was in the middle of getting dressed. I fantasized that when I sealed the seams on her clothes and slid the boots onto her feet I was touching the people I loved in the world of the row-boat, even though the youngest of them was three hundred years lost in time and the others lost beyond reckoning altogether, whichever universe was on either side of the equals sign. I want to think that they live on in me, but that’s not the kind of living on that counts. I want to see them again. I want to hold their hands like I hold hers. I want the first Francine, so that I can tell her she can have all of me, for nothing, for nothing.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Francine said. “What was up there?”

  “Nothing.” I crossed the room to her. She was wearing a silvery-grey top and leggings so tight they looked shrink-wrapped to fit, and over them a translucent dress whose seams looked like white line drawings of suggested outer clothes. Her transparent pink high heels sparkled with glitter. “Wish I were you.”

  She wrapped her arms around me, pressing her body against me, drugging me with it. “I want to be you,” she whispered.

  I kissed her vamp-red mouth. I got slightly lost in it, and when she pushed me gently away I was dizzy with the heady sensation that I could cross over.

  21 / Greg

  Jalaeka dressed down, in filthy ripped jeans and a white T-shirt, the training shoes on his feet smeared with the ashy-grey soil and needle leaves of his last run out through the boreal forests of Anadyr Park. Always running, always dancing. He affected an air of happy nonchalance, but I remembered his face when he’d looked up at the boat as I watched him with Francine and the way they both changed in the other’s presence: two poles, magnetism.

  He noticed me watching him as we made the short journey out to Sankhara Central to the club but he didn’t say anything until we were at the door, when he lost his patience. “Oh for hell’s sake, stop staring at me, I’ve known you about a thousand years. Let’s go analyze everything until it hurts.”

  “Damn,” I said. “And there was I hoping for the fantasy vampire figure from the Love-Craft romance novel who was working here as a stripper in order to suck the life out of everyone’s minds with his telepathic exchange system while they’re in some kind of neurological love catatonia checking out his artificially pumped-up man-magic.”

  “That’s somebody else’s act. He’s only in on Truesday. And am I the only person ever to come here who hates the cute Sankhara days of the week?” He took Francine’s hand and led the way.

  “I hate them,” Francine said.

  “Me too. Me first actually,” I added as we passed through an ordinary door and onto a long, candlelit ramp. “I hated them long before you got here.”

  “Well, I hated them since they were made,” Francine said over her shoulder in the blackness. “And even before.”

  “Okay,” Jalaeka said. “As long as we all hate them, then everything’s okay. I could never love someone who thought in their heart of hearts that Truesday was cute.”

  “Technically speaking it should be Marsday,” I said. “If Wednesday became Wotansday and Thursday is Thorsday. But there’s still no accounting for Satyrday.”

  “You could start a campaign, sign a petition,” Jalaeka called back to me as we continued.

  “You could get a real job.” My bitching annoyed me, but I kept thinking that he was hiding far too much and expecting too much from us in return. I didn’t have that much faith that the evening would be more than smo
ke and mirrors. I was ready to be disappointed.

  The ramp pitched at a mild angle until we had dropped about one storey in height and then emerged into a large, cavernous space.

  The club was every bit as depressing as I suspected, but architecturally interesting at least. Though topped with a reasonably sized building, the venue itself was sunk deep into the ground, as its name promised. A circular well roughly the diameter of a football pitch had been built of stone, with a solid wall outer skin and at its centre an inner skin of equally massive blocks bordering an open drop shaft some fifteen metres across. The inner wall was punctured at regular intervals with gothic arches, heavily barred against would-be suicides or acts of casual murder, which let in light from the middle well.

  Between the two skins the club itself spread out in two broad helical ramps, one that led patrons down to the bottom, the other, beneath and above it, winding them back up to the top and the exits to the street. The gangway lay next to the inner wall, on our right, giving views across the great drop, while to the left pie-slice zones of ramp had been roughly divided into different areas with different themes and entertainment.

  “This is hellish,” I said, as our cheerful introductory pop became the softly burbling jazz of an early-twentieth-century gentlemen’s club, and suddenly there was wood panelling and cigar smoke everywhere.

  “Nine turns of the screw,” Jalaeka agreed.

  “I thought you liked it here,” Francine said, catching hold of the velvet rope, which marked the edge of the gangway and relative safety. She gazed around her with obvious excitement and pleasure and I felt every one of my years. She didn’t seem to care that Jalaeka had agreed with me. He exuded a deep comfort as I watched him scan the almost empty spaces, the same kind of look that Hyperion’s lead wolf occasionally wore on her face when she scented the air prior to hunting.