Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

“Just to see someone. I won’t be long. Pour me another drink,” I said and went before I could change my mind. As I left I heard the Abacand chime to announce the arrival of a message.

  Everyone seemed to be in my way. It took me a few minutes to reach the spot at the Well bottom where I’d glimpsed her face and I was worried the whole time that I’d get there and she’d have gone, but when I arrived she had only moved a small distance away and was sitting alone in a relaxed, blue-toned area filled with quiet, alpha-wave-enhancing music. Her eyes skipped restlessly through the people passing, and her icy expression didn’t melt in the slightest as I stepped up to her. It would have entirely put me off if I hadn’t been protected by my dutiful research intentions.

  “Can I buy you a drink?” Not one of the best pickup lines in the world.

  She looked me over but there was no flicker of recognition in her eyes or interest in her voice to prepare me for her words. “Aren’t you with little Miss Blond IQ?”

  I digested that for a second. “She’s a friend of mine, that’s all.”

  “Then go pay her some attention.” She continued her inspection of the passers-by.

  “I wondered if I might talk to you. I’m a researcher from . . .”

  She didn’t bother to look at me again, though her eyes narrowed as she spoke to me. “You you you. The best thing you can do is get back to her while you still can. My boyfriend doesn’t like your boyfriend. Don’t you know that by now?”

  “Please, I don’t even want to ask you about that, only about . . .”

  Her brown eyes fixed me with the flattest, most dismissive look I’d ever received, one that indicated I was less interesting than secondhand chewing gum. “You don’t know when somebody’s doing you a favour. Go. Shoo.” She waved her hands at me and flicked her fingertips. “Get lost.”

  On my return journey my ruined plans were even less clear. I thought I’d ask her to be interviewed, like the rest of the Stuffies. She was a special creation, she would have to know some special things that I could have got her to reveal, in time . . .

  “You idiot!” Jalaeka appeared right in front of me and grabbed me by my shirt front. I’d never seen him angry before. His rage was electrifying. He hauled me bodily off the Hub and into the edge of the dance-floor where the crowd hid us from Francine’s direct view. “What were you doing with her?”

  I pulled away from him with a jerk. “Well, you said she’d find you and she hadn’t found you yet, so I thought it was my last chance to ask her some questions about being a partial. I was working. That’s all. She wouldn’t even know . . .”

  “Know what?” he hissed at me, face an inch from mine. “Who you are? What, is she fucking dumb, you think? Can’t smell Francine on you? Can’t smell me on you? Can’t see this—” He rapped me hard on the chest with a flick of his knuckles, then did the same to my forehead. “Come on, Greg, what were you going to ask her? Whether or not I’m real?”

  “How about whether or not you’re a liar?”

  “And what am I lying about? What have I ever lied to you about?”

  “This. Here. This soft-porn show you’re putting on for Francine and she thinks that’s all it is, nicey nicey, hot stuff. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it. The darshan isn’t it. You’re acting out some game when you should tell her that . . .”

  He cut me off. “That what? She knows all this. She knows it. I wouldn’t be here if she didn’t want me to be. I couldn’t be. Go ask her.” His dark eyes glittered, daring me.

  “Or maybe I’ll ask her what you did to her. You changed her. You know what I mean. You Translated her, didn’t you?” I was only running on empty when I said this, because I had to find something to fling. His reaction stunned me.

  A flicker of uncertainty ran through him. He stepped back involuntarily. His whole demeanour slumped.

  “What the . . . Did you?” I slapped his shoulder, made a grab for his shirt, but it was stuck to him with sweat and I couldn’t get hold of it. “Come here!”

  He didn’t back off any farther but he held his head back and away from me as I rounded on him. “What did you do to her? If you hurt her in any way, I’ll . . .”

  Then he looked down his nose at me, not just from his extra few inches of height but from a thousand dimensions of difference between us, in that second assuming all the power he never laid claim to and holding it over me. It froze me. “You’ll what?” His right eyebrow flicked upwards. He might as well have held a knife to my neck.

  I shivered, walked backwards, slowly, shaking my head, eyes downcast, my hands held out, palm up. I turned when I was clear and made my way back to the tent.

  “God, you’ve been ages. Where have you been?” Francine complained, then said with a smile, “Look, I got a note from Su. You were right. She was pleased to hear from me after all.”

  I sat down obediently to share the letter with her and tried to mask the fact that I was shaking from head to foot.

  “Are you okay?” Francine asked. She held out a full shot glass. “Come on, you’re one behind.”

  I didn’t hesitate this time. I let her pour two more for me. “Francine. I don’t know how to ask you this but . . . has Jalaeka ever hurt you?”

  “No.” She swallowed her dose of the liquor and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. I hoped she was drunk enough that it didn’t occur to her to ask or notice where my question came from but when she set her glass down she gave me a judicious glance. “Why?”

  “Nothing. I think . . . I think you should try to get away from him, that’s all.” Oh, what fount of genius was that coming from? “He’s not being entirely straight with you, I think. Something he said just now. Ask him if you won’t believe me.”

  She frowned and stood up, by some strange magic I didn’t understand more stable on her shoes than she had been when she was sober. “I will.” Her glance was uncertain and not a little betrayed. I longed to take back what I’d said.

  Through the tent doors I watched her go out into the dancers and find Damien there. She put her hands on his shoulders and they swayed to the beat, talking. Some of her gestures, quick and angry ones, came in my direction. While she was out Jalaeka came back, in a clean shirt. There was no trace of otherworldliness, godliness or anything else about him. He was as average as any Joe.

  “I’m sorry.” He sat down opposite me, where she’d sat. “That was unforgivable.”

  “I’m sorry too,” I said, mostly meaning it, though I couldn’t forget my fear of him that easily and didn’t trust myself to say anything else.

  “Fuck it all,” he said conversationally, took the open vodka bottle out of the bucket and upended it into his mouth.

  Francine came back with Damien and without another word being exchanged on our contentions we four sat down together. Damien and Francine played Go and Jalaeka and I watched. The leopard man came back with two more vodka bottles opened and a glass for the elf. They spoke to one another in whispers. Damien glanced at me with one of his inscrutable elfin smiles. Francine gave me an unmistakable glare. I nodded and bowed my head, guilty, guilty of spoiling it all, yes I was, and even so that lingering sensation of puissance went right on rolling inside my head in an endlessly confident caravan.

  When I glanced back up I saw Francine had forgiven me. She picked up my Abacand from the table where it was lying in a pool of spilled tea and was about to hand it back to me but Jalaeka intercepted it. “I’ll keep that for now.” He put it in the back pocket of his jeans, the one without the tear across it. I didn’t bother to contest it.

  Much later Damien went off somewhere, and later still the three of us went back to the suite, an opulent, modern place, entirely soulless and forgettable. Francine went ahead but Jalaeka held me back in the narrow entrance hall, where it was so badly lit it was almost dark. He put himself in front of me, with his hands out onto the walls on either side. I halted clumsily and the door swished shut at my back.

  He spoke with the careful but failing phrasing
of the self-aware drunk. “I know you’ve got good reasons to dislike me, but what you’ve got to understand is that when I look at people, animals too sometimes, but really, okay, people . . . look, can I borrow your brain for a moment? I need to show you something.”

  “Won’t that, you know, Translate me?” I slurred, trying to think of a good reason to say no, although my curiosity was uppermost.

  “No, no, no. I’ll go through your Tab. Easy. Won’t be like being me of course but good enough. What do you say? Go on. Indulge me. Just once.”

  “Can’t you tell me?”

  “If I tell you it’ll all just sound drunk and you’ll think it’s the vodka.”

  “It is the vodka.”

  “Mmn, yes it is, all right. You’re right. This is probably a very bad idea . . .”

  “Go on then,” I said, a thousand times more daring and witless than usual. I wanted to know, and the least kind part of me hoped it would be some kind of nail in the coffin of his mystique. “Should I sit down?”

  “Nah,” he said confidently. He abandoned his Samson posture on the walls and reached out for my left hand, pressing his thumb over the slim wafer of Tab beneath my skin. I felt a soft, tingling fuzz of electrical activity.

  Noise. White distortion. Impossible geometry.

  “Bloody useless technology,” I heard him say. “Can’t render the sevensheet. I’ll fake it.”

  Space. And beneath it, around it, through it, the silent music of frequency and wavelength set up in massively complex harmonics; uncountable nodes, incomprehensible webs. Here and there focused knots of activity with ordered structures and patterns.

  “Those are universal fourtime expansions,” he said and without warning we dropped a level, into just one of those. “Sankhara.”

  This was no less intricate than before and there was much more information—blinding amounts of it—but now, although I could hear the harmonic reverberations of the sevensheet, I ceased to have any visual kind of representation of it.

  Space. And scattered within it, glittering dust.

  “Galaxies.”

  We fell again. The number of musical scales exploded, dominated by the relentless seething fury of the stars in their speeding dance as they whirled around the galactic nucleus. Disk stars and gas were so loud I couldn’t stand to look at them. Halo stars sang in almost single notes by comparison—a relief.

  We saw one star.

  “Sankhara’s star.”

  Within it were all the symphonics of earlier stages. Around it Sankhara’s system revolved; the sinusoidal single tones of lone comets, the stately rhythm of the planets, the whispering chatter of rocks and dust. It had never occurred to me that Sankhara existed in a real astrological place. Somehow I had imagined that it ended at the limits of the city where the borders of the Engine’s command were delineated. The agreements with Unity had always been that no Sidebar world would ever exceed a minor Earth nation in size, and no humans had ever been beyond the edge of the consensus zone. But it was real.

  I saw the planet we were on, blue and green like Earth, a single moon in orbit. While the geology itself was as dazzling and vibrant as the rest of my vision there was another intensification here, located on the surface, almost like what I had been able to perceive had been doubled and the second pattern located here.

  “Organic life.”

  “Whoa, wait . . .” but we were falling into it. Mercifully the dual scales cut themselves short as the secondary one increased dramatically in its volume and size. I looked on a moving structure that might have been a star, so intricate and lively were its patterns. But now I could see what it really was. It was the Sidebar Envelope. The border was clear in this kind of sound and vision, a peculiar shape and sound most like the colour blue. And inside the frenetic activity of the near-blinding light of the city, I could see the contrasting, uniquely peculiar forms of something which could only be . . .

  “The Engine.”

  Tendrils stretched from it, melodies and lines, wrapping themselves around and feeding up into various regions like bacteria or viral strains, mutating rapidly, changing the micro harmonics of structures small and large. It was working.

  “Wait. Wait!” I was desperate to see it, desperate to try and get a grasp of my new ability to see and hear, but we were still falling.

  I was now orbited by completely different songs to the stars, but no less intricate, I was surrounded by webs and networks, with brilliant nodes, each one of which was a perfect microcosm, but quite different from the nuclear kinetics of stellar combustion or the swirling electromagnetic storms of the galactic clusters. People.

  Then I was looking at a single example, and it wasn’t unlike a universe in and of itself. It was so very, extraordinarily complicated, much more so than even the universes we had seen. Every chord within it was in a delicate balance, constantly changing, a unique pattern that never repeated, was never duplicated anywhere, ever . . .

  “That’s you,” I heard Jalaeka say and I was looking at the shadows of the hallway.

  “Oh god . . . can we go back? I have to see that again. It was so . . .”

  “Boring,” he said. “It was very, very boring. Now, the thing is, with people, unlike with stars and universes and planetary cores of metallic hydrogen and any number of charming chemical reactions across the elevensheet, when you do something to them, they react to you. They don’t just react like you knew they would by forming dimensional warps or mineral salts. They talk. They bitch. They moan. They sometimes long to call you a manipulative son of a bitch. They give you presents. They kiss you. They do strange physical things with you. Sometimes they kill you. But they’re not boring. Look at you. When you’re faced with that, the universe can go to hell.”

  Without warning he turned to me and kissed me, pressing me up against the wall for a second. At the same time he slid his hand down the inside of my forearm very gently and I felt him press my Abacand into my palm. He bent my fingers around it and then let go, placing both of his hands on my waist, neither pulling me into him or holding me away. There was a long, infinitely peculiar moment in which I found my mouth open, tongue against his, my body as soft and pliable as wax. I ran my hands down his back and felt him react instantly, conforming to my pressure with a delight that was tangible in his skin and breath; the most responsive person I’d ever touched.

  I pushed him away with both hands against his chest. He was as light as air. “Don’t.”

  I lay alone in one of the bedrooms with the door closed and tried to forget it. I was awake a long time and there were things I could have taken to sober me up and make me sleep but I didn’t. Night turned to day. I got up shortly after seven and walked down into the Temple District to air my hangover.

  I thought I should look at the cathedral that Hyperion had talked about and on the way there I saw the man himself, seated like an ugly grey dog at the foot of the eternally burning statue of Shiva Nataraja. The sun was bright but the air was unseasonably cool; he was warming himself in the statue’s ruddy glow.

  “Dr. Saxton,” he growled as I came up to him, standing to meet me on all fours, his snake tail uncoiling. The look in his long yellow eyes was searching and suddenly he bent his forelegs and bowed to me, although it could have been the early part of a doglike stretch. “You are graced,” Hyperion said, straightening. He seemed amused but because he had no smile it was difficult to tell.

  “I was looking for the cathedral,” I said, mustering as much dignity as possible around my headache. I actually felt reasonably sick. “Graced” was not the word.

  “Look no further.” The Salmagundi pointed to the massive structure of gothic extravagance in creamy yellow stone that had replaced the Apollo shrine. “We can sit down inside.”

  I scanned one of the pretty carvings of an antlered man on the way in. The early sun caught him at an angle that caught the tiny facets of quartz and feldspar in his structure and made his whole form glow a deep, rich amber. He was made of Flappit A
shlar (SankhaGuide told me). The fact hit my alcohol-numbed brain, but it didn’t get very far, though it did make me feel like vomiting for some reason. I passed on quickly.

  The cathedral did not follow a cross pattern. It was pentagonal, with five transepts, one aligned to magnetic north, the others at their allotted points of the compass. We sat down in front of the enormous stained-glass window of the north transept. I realized that it wasn’t a single sheet made by hand at all, but the face of a perfect crystal prism. Its structure had been manipulated so that the light that would have been ordinarily broken up into the full spectrum came through in specific wavelengths at specific points, creating a picture in pure light.

  My stomach cramped painfully as I realized I was looking at an image of Francine in a white dress with a dark-haired woman in a red dress and red shoes lying across her lap, arms outflung, possibly dead in the style of a nineteenth-century pietà. Francine looked down, not up. Her body was arched in an attitude of horrified despair. She had a knife in her hand—a big one.

  “It changes,” Hyperion told me from where he sat on the floor beside my pew. “Every night something new appears. All the glass here changes. And during the hours of darkness the gargoyles climb down from the roof and refuse to let anyone in who is human or Forged. Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

  That was the word for it. I stared at it a long time. “Do you think Unity evolves?” I asked him.

  “It lives,” Hyperion said. “Therefore it must.”

  “What do you think that would look like?”

  “Perhaps like a window in a cathedral, or a tree in the taiga or a sound where someone is there to hear it.”

  I half listened to his answer. I had no natural mysticism with which to respond, but as I was staring at the panels above us and unwillingly thinking the obvious—Snow White, Rose Red—my hand found my Abacand in my pocket. I opened the file Jalaeka had given me. Hyperion settled down onto his chest and put his head on his forefeet in silent contemplation, and I began to read. I read until the sun had passed noon, then until the red colours shone so strongly at me with the effects of the afternoon sun that I couldn’t carry on. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the pew in front of me, though I was only half-done.