Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  Ah Jalaeka, I thought, you’re used to a lot more here than you’ll ever let her know, at least you won’t let her know it if I have anything to do with it. It was strange to me but curiously important that Francine’s illusions in him not be ruined—at least, not ruined in a crass and insensitive way.

  “It has the security of old familiar places, which I always mistake for comfort,” Jalaeka said as I paused to look through one of the arches into the central well to see where the light was coming from. Its soft white gleam shone fiercely from a torrential fall of frozen water that had broken through from the well-head and was crashing down to drown everything in a mighty flood. At first I assumed it was solid but then I saw that it was flowing in obedience to gravity, albeit incredibly slowly, a mighty stalactite.

  “That’s the hourglass,” Jalaeka said, leaning out with me. “When it’s filled the pool at the bottom and gone flat and dark, then it’s closing time. They collect sunlight in it for three days out on the snow above the mountains of the moon.”

  “I thought that was a Slow Glass property.”

  “Moves fast, slow to release light. Sticky Glass.”

  “How many times have you explained that?”

  He glanced at me, well aware of my hostility. “Never. Everyone always knew, except you.”

  I ignored him, though it was reassuring that he’d gone back to baiting me. I felt him sigh heavily beside me, then he withdrew. Through the windows of the inner well I could see the plummeting depths of the nine-storey fall or look across, into other galleries and other fantasies. I saw flashes of all the things that had once been strange and had then become clichéd and then kitsch and then reinvented and cycled over so that they were all somewhere in that vicious circle: contortionist girls painted in rainbow colours twisted in knots, muscle men posing in some kind of dungeon, a huge screen playing close-ups of a man and woman kissing where occasionally the view flickered to show the interiors of their skulls, the bone and tongue and lips only, or sometimes only their faces melting into each other so the mouths were a continuous stream of muscle fascinated with its own movement.

  We drifted down and down, through Chocolate Floral, with its background of pretty landscapes and naked people sporting in various outdoor locations of healthy aspect; hayfields, bluebell woods, torrential mountain streams; through Funky Oriental full of disco dancing extras from Chinese opera, and Martial Law and Petrol Head (gayF and gayM and transexualgayF and transexualgayM and Transvestite and Celibate and Straight, each in their citrus-labelled variants of extremis—there was no limit to the kind of people who liked tinkering with engines) and Rubber Plantation and WarZone and Bunnyitis and Spacerobot and Miserable Tuesday Afternoon and Emergency Room and Ghetto and Haywain and Spooky Dookey and Normal.

  We got a drink and paused in the Library where a thin Unevolved girl in a tweed suit buttoned to the neck and heavy Bakelite-frame glasses came over and tapped me on the arm. “You’re new.” She wrinkled her nose and flickered her fake eyelashes behind their swimmingly enormous lenses. Her eyes were enlarged by the glass to the size of saucers. “Would you like to help me revise for my physics test?” She held out an Abacand in her narrow, anaemic hand. Actually she held it two inches to my left because she couldn’t see much through the glasses.

  Jalaeka and Francine were watching, trying not to laugh. I took it and saw with a solid sense of disbelief that it was displaying a treatise on optical principles. Behind her several other people were already seated between stacks, surreptitiously fumbling one another’s knees below heavy wooden study tables lit with green glass lamps. Books, pens, calculators and notepads cascaded below their intently focused faces. Beyond them great racks of volumes, decimal system markers lit in neon, stretched far away into what was the illusion of a Borgesian infinity. There was no music here. There was silence.

  “Ah, leave him alone Lizabet, he’s mine,” Jalaeka said easily and ruffled the hair on the top of my head like I was a schoolboy.

  I burned with annoyance and handed back the Abacand. Lizabet looked over her glasses at him. “What’s the smallest positive integer that could be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways?”

  “One thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine,” he said without blinking.

  She smiled at me and Francine and put her hand over her tweed chest. “Be still my beating heart. He always knows the answer. I’m gonna get him one day.”

  “What’s the last even prime number?” he asked her.

  “Oh you’re just messing with me now.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “Go and be bad somewhere else before I have you thrown out for talking.”

  I made to get up, glad to be leaving, but Jalaeka held on to my forearm and his grip was none too light.

  I twisted my arm away. “What’s the matter?”

  “Don’t make it obvious that you’re looking,” he said and indicated a tall and curving figure high up on a ladder in between the stacks to our left. Francine looked cautiously and I waited, then looked when she glanced back to him with a questioning face.

  The woman wore an even more severe tweed suit than Lizabet had, her costume completed with seamed stockings, patent black high heels with vicious winkle-picker tips and small, rimless spectacles. Her suit bore cracked elbow patches of oxblood leather and her dark hair was pulled back into an intricate bun at the nape of her neck, secured with a silver-tipped ebony spike. She was teetering on the top of the ladder’s extent, reshelving some scrolls. Even from that distance I could see the scarlet of her lipstick, so intense was its colour, and the top of one stocking where her skirt rode up. Her waist was drawn in so small that her body had assumed a cartoonish shape.

  She finished her ersatz task and climbed down with a lithe action, as though her corsets had liquidized her insides, smoothing the line of her skirt as she walked towards the Ladies’.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s what Unity’s wearing tonight,” he said. “That’s Theo’s partial in Sankhara.”

  “What?” I felt cold, jumpy. I thought it was another joke. The woman herself hadn’t even noticed us.

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “No. Theo has a long history of seeding places with particular Stuffies who are all variants of himself. They live their lives, sometimes forever, and sometimes he comes back to do some work with them. Part of what he is, his function, if you like, exploring the frontiers of whatever species Unity is surfing at the time. That is his partial, here to find me and to find you, and she will, tonight.”

  “But,” Francine started, sitting forward, her face a mask of anxieties, “I don’t understand. Why now? How could it find you now?” She put her hands on his leg, high up, a confident, possessive contact.

  “A woman I knew in Metropolis passed on a gift to me, this in fact—” Without warning he half turned towards me and placed his hand on the centre of my chest. I felt a sudden heat and saw the flesh and skin around his fingers light up red for a second and I saw, in my inward eye, myself, a long time ago, on Earth.

  It was autumn and at my North American college all the trees were in their red and yellow livery as I walked along the street. I had a half-eaten ice-cream in one hand and I was walking towards my car. It was the end of my Ph.D. year and I’d just come out of my viva exam. My professor had offered me a fellowship on the spot and my head was ringing and utterly empty, the universe of possibilities that had suddenly opened up inside it expanding all there had been inside me to the limits of my awareness, leaving a space inside that was perfectly luminous.

  The feeling returned wholesale with the memory, as these things do, but when the images and recollection faded the feeling remained as strongly as ever. I was buoyant on this resurrection and felt it settle, heard it die down to a residual harmonic like the afterglow of a great symphony in the first instant of silence, when all the music is present at once. It did not lessen. It did not fade.

  Jalaeka watched me with care. “So, how was it for
you?”

  I couldn’t speak. My suspicion of his motives hadn’t gone, I still thought his taking up with Francine, relation with Damien and appearance here was all too weird, but he’d given me this great lift of heart. He decided to mistake my conflict for curiosity—I saw him make the deal with himself quite clearly.

  “What’s that?” Francine asked, looking into my face so very hopefully that I had to show her the good side of me.

  “I’m only the conduit,” Jalaeka said evenly. “It was her power. I don’t know what you see and I don’t feel anything. Only . . .” But he glanced down to his left guiltily and didn’t finish. I stored that in my memory. He continued, “And that’s what brought the partial here. Not because my doing that vibrates in the sevensheet, which it does a little—lots of Sankhara Stuffies have that kind of effect when they’re apparently being magical—but because I traded it for cash here, because I gave it away for nothing here, before I even knew what I was doing, when I thought it was nothing more than a pat on the back, and rumour spreads, and here she is and it not far behind her.”

  “Greg, are you all right?” Francine changed seats to move beside me. I felt her hand on mine.

  I turned towards her with what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Never finer.” I tried to say a billion things but they all escaped into the perfect, beautiful space inside my head. Jalaeka watched me closely.

  One thing, I thought, one thing you haven’t lied about anyway.

  22 / Rita

  I asked the Librarian where I might find the host here who mended broken hearts. She sighed and took off her heavy glasses, wiping them on a lacy white cotton handkerchief which she drew from an inner pocket. “I’m afraid he’s not working tonight, well, he is but it’s a personal matter. So I can’t refer. Is it for yourself?”

  “Yes,” I said and it was no difficulty. I was glad of the ridiculous corset. Its bones kept me upright and the pain kept me focused. I hadn’t quite got used to gasping for breath. I had to measure it out. “But it’s no matter if it isn’t now. I wonder if you could tell me more, if I could make some appointment?”

  “I’m afraid the price has gone up terribly since he started,” she told me, replacing the glasses on her face. Her teeth were too big for her mouth. She flicked open her Abacand and showed me some numbers on its screen. “If you really have a hard time then there are ways . . .”

  “I can pay,” I said, putting the tip of my fingernail against the one with the most zeros after it. “What about tomorrow?”

  “Why don’t you come with me to the carrel and I’ll fill you in?” she said, indicating a private reading room with a graceful extension of her arm.

  “Thank you,” I said and followed her. I had no sense of Theo at all, it was as though I went through these things for myself, only I had no reason to. I wanted to tear my own hair off, but I sat down demurely in the chair and let her give me the spiel and the endorsements by all the big names and the celebrity shit that went with it. Darshan they called it. I didn’t know that word. She told me he had a rider in his contract that forbade any publicity of any kind. Days ago I would have been entranced. I paid her and I took a long look at the image of him she supplied.

  A thought rose unbidden in my mind, in a voice not my own—Don’t you ever change? And nasty words said themselves with my lips, “Does he fuck?”

  “Sure.”

  My ribs and stomach ached suddenly as though I was laughing. I felt Theo sharpen to a point of pain inside my head.

  I thanked her and made the appointment I would never keep.

  My search didn’t take long. They had said he liked to dance and they were right. I watched him for a while and I thought with jealousy of all the awful relationships I’d had for Theo’s unknown reasons, and of the blessed solitude of my single-room apartment in the Aelf. I could see that that was why he danced too. For the peace.

  He walked off the floor and directly across into the darkness near the Hub where I was standing, singling me out easily. There was no point in attempting to hide. I didn’t know what he’d do. He came up to me without hesitation and, as though we were meeting in a friendly way, caught hold of my hand and kissed the inch of air beside my face. Sweat ran off him and his T-shirt clung to him. He smelled indescribably fine. He looked into my eyes, looking for Theo . . . and he saw only me in my wretched state.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said.

  I stared at him with furious jealousy. “Will it? Who’s going to make it that way? You?” Beneath me a claw opened, a fin stirred. He might have stayed even so, with me having to endure his sympathy and Theo’s voyeurism, but we were interrupted.

  “Hey!” the tall Elf from the Surf Shack appeared from the darkness and clapped him on the shoulder. “You owe me a drink.” He pulled hard on the splinter’s arm and shot me a warning glance which made a pang of envy and resentment dart across my chest. Not for the likes of you, he was saying.

  I stared back at him with my head high. A gang of revellers pushed their way between us and I let myself be dragged along with them into another place, farther down the ramp, where I made myself busy, so that I wouldn’t have to see who else was with the splinter, or notice how much he was in love and how shockingly bad it had made his judgement.

  All these things Theo enjoyed seeing. I wanted the splinter to win, so that Theo would die. I longed for it, daring Theo to drag me back to Unity for my wanton sins against him. It would have been a welcome relief.

  He did not.

  23 / Greg

  I drifted off for a while. Other things happened, some strange, some not. I surrendered to the need to get drunk in a pretty zone named Ziggurats of Cinnamon, where I matched Francine shot for shot, alternating mint tea and her favourite cranberry vodka as we sat on a heap of cushions in a private pasha’s tent. Jalaeka went out dancing on his own to the racing Arabic music (she wouldn’t, I couldn’t). We lost track of him for a while and I wanted to go and find out what he was up to, but I stayed with Francine instead and enjoyed having her all to myself.

  She talked nostalgically about a friend of hers from home called Sula, though she was careful not to let slip where she’d come from—I only knew that it must be Earth and somewhere in the Northern European zone. I would have guessed England and close to the mouth of the Sankhara Gateway but I couldn’t be sure.

  “You must miss her,” I hazarded as we went into a tea phase. I filled her glass from the elegant bronze pot we had been left with.

  She sipped it and gazed at the steam rising. “Su wouldn’t like it here. She likes comfortable, predictable things.”

  “She might like to hear from you. You’ve got free calls all night courtesy of Jalaeka, and you don’t have to reveal where you are.” I narrowly avoided mentioning that she could call home. “You could write her a note.”

  The waiter, a man with a beautiful leopard-pattern skin, came and removed our four shot glasses, left clean and empty ones for us, and the bottle of vodka in a ceramic bucket of real ice.

  Francine, doubtful about the prospect of calling, liked the idea of the note. She borrowed my Abacand and began to compose it, cross-legged on the floor. I lay back against my emperor’s pile of silks and watched the people who had joined us in this low zone. The woman that Jalaeka had pointed out was nowhere to be seen, and, for the moment, neither was he. I Tab-accessed the Club network and asked SankhaGuide to find him for me. He was out of sight around the curve of the ramp, not far away. I didn’t bother to get up. The spacey feeling in my head was too puissant. Then I saw Francine’s friend Damien. He was hurrying down on the absolute inward edge of the Hub turn, his attention intent. He went around the curve. A minute or so later he came back towing Jalaeka by the arm and they both disappeared into the crush of dancers now packing the small arena in front of the staging area where hired professionals—like him I suppose—showed everyone what a lissome voluptuous gesture looked like when it was done properly.

  Francine finished her message. “I sen
t it,” she said, then glanced in the direction I was looking in. She saw what I saw—in the centre of the swaying mass of people Jalaeka and Damien all over each other, mouth to mouth, and their mouths alight as though they had a candle in between their teeth—a touch too exotically painful even for the likes of this place, I thought, feeling hot sparks of irritation and anger rush up and down across my shoulders.

  “Oh,” Francine said, slightly surprised.

  “Don’t you hate it?” I asked her, drink getting the better of my restraint.

  “Hm? No.” She grinned and reached for the vodka bottle. “Why would I? He’s only doing what he did for you.”

  “He didn’t do it like that.”

  “You’re not a gay elf though, are you?”

  “No.” The more closely I observed her the more certain I was that she was getting a charge from watching the two of them together. I don’t know why I should have been surprised by that. For all the shining prospect inside my mind, I was always finding these appalling moments of carping repression. I supposed that was proof that whatever he’d done to me, change me he hadn’t.

  Francine filled my glass and her own to overflowing, held mine out towards me. “Come on. You promised me.”

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Don’t be a dill.” She pushed it at my hand insistently. I set my tea glass down and took it. There was a teasing look on her face I longed for and didn’t care for at all. We drank them in one. I picked the tea glass up again and gave hers to her. She glanced nervously down at my Abacand where it lay on the low table.

  I looked back towards the dance-floor and could only see unfamiliar faces and strange bodies moving in the dim lantern glow. Then, across the Well, through two of the central windows, I saw the woman Jalaeka had pointed out, sitting alone. The partial. I got up, not even sure what I was going to do.

  “Where are you going?” Francine asked.