Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  My head ached. My chest felt tight, my back unbearably sore. I was no longer convinced that Jalaeka was a Stuffie fragment of Francine’s, nor human—no certainly not—but not entirely alien either. At last his story persuaded me that I was foolish to be jealous of what I hadn’t known.

  Hyperion looked up at my change of position. “You are sober, Doctor.”

  “Ah, so that’s what it is,” I said to him, tempted to pat him as if he were a dog, but fortunately remembering not to.

  “You are troubled.”

  “As usual.” I didn’t know how to tell Francine any of Jalaeka’s history as I’d read it, or that I should. Everything had changed. I wanted to apologize to him. I had absolutely no idea what I would or could say. “I have to go home.”

  “I will walk with you, if I may.”

  “Please yourself.” I turned back at the door and looked at the window again. It was clear to me that the window, and its changing fortunes, could only be about one thing—an event that had not yet taken place.

  24 / Rita

  I picked up the heart-shaped lump of rose quartz at a shop in the Embargo where a tiny gnomelike woman, who looked half hedgehog if her whiskers were anything to go by, spent her days chiselling sculptures with her teeth. She sold a lot of quartz, as kitsch presents for Earth tourists. My bit was quite ordinary, until I wrapped Theo’s hand around it and turned it into Stuff.

  At the University I went to the Casual Classes office and enrolled in a ceramics group. My pass let me into the main buildings and Theo-in-my-hand opened the doors for me thereafter. I left the heart at the bottom of the dish on a desk where a lot of other quartz mementoes lay collecting dust. It was a tidy office. I had no idea who it belonged to and I didn’t want to know, even when I was almost falling over all the evidence I needed. There were photographs on the wall but I didn’t look at them.

  I left everything else exactly as it was and went home.

  All day the decorators come and go, the builder, the plasterer, the power technician, the designer worried about this and that in a raucous Earther accent that spits at me with all the vitriol of someone who despises professionals and longs to be doing the apartments of celebrities in Lalaland and other Sidebars of that kind. I make them drinks. I read fashion journals. I do my nails. I listen to Theo beneath me, talking at me, passing the time as he waits for Jalaeka to get to a point where Theo can make him suffer. His voice is like my own voice in my head, so similar sometimes that I’m not sure it isn’t me, taking over when he stops, although he never stops. I drag the file across my nails.

  Unity—from which I arose, to which I will return, in which I am buried as the arrow the target, and which is buried in me as the corpse the grave and the treasure hoard within its unbreachable chest.

  He aspires to be human. Compared to that kind of pathetic ambition . . . ah no, they always say this, don’t they? Those great villains of melodrama. And then someone will always speak up, some hero, and say that righteousness and kindness and compassion are universal and the greatest good that overcomes all. They won’t even acknowledge that this is a fallacy invented by the weak, to enable them to mass together and become strong enough to conquer in blood like every other conqueror. They believe it’s an actual sodding principle of existence. We are living among beings who believe in universal justice, Rita. That’s the level of what we’re dealing with. Spatiotemporally bonded pond scum.

  We could leave now, you and I, we could let this system rot in its own entropy. The Mystery continues everywhere, in all places and at all moments. Why stick this out and call it important over any other waste of time?

  Test. Test test test. Testing. One two three. He said I was a test that hadn’t finished running yet.

  Where are all the great thinkers that surge in the wave beneath me? Why can’t they just give me a straight answer and be done with it? All that intellect, all those human hours embedded in the meat: they must know everything between them. But here we are. Here we are.

  Do not let that Glaswegian pansy put the yellow wallpaper in the bedroom.

  I’m no more than a servant. It’s not for me to question why I’m still here. Maybe I’ve been alive too long, and it’s destroyed the purity of my being, as dirt accretes on all things and entropy discomposes.

  I didn’t used to feel this way. I didn’t feel much at all until he came that bloody day, a billion light-years from here, when I fought him to the ground and put my sword through his heart and left him for dead, thinking this was it, this was my time come. I waited for the second of bliss where I would be reclaimed along with him, back to the completion of Unity. And stood there.

  And stood there.

  And cut his fucking head off, and stood there . . .

  A year of anguish followed: his body in the glass coffin, attended by the princess of the sea who dressed him in her clothes and tried to raise him like a necromancer, sacrificing chickens. I abandoned him there, before she annoyed him out of death. I had a lot to think on.

  I think I have it out now. Stuff reacts to dreams. He did it by surfing for the right kind of mind, and he had the good fortune to be cast at the outset by someone who wanted a smart hero. Slight drawback with the doomed love angle on that one, but hell, worth the breaks. They were so needy, so dreamy, so desperate—like you, Rita, wanting eight place settings of the black lacquer dinnerware when you will never invite more than one person at a time to eat with you; because you dream of having that many friends. He was only made of Stuff. What can it do but acquiesce to people who pursue the Mystery with such passion? They all longed for it and they all made him. And when he found out that’s how it worked, he went looking for dreamers with specific kinds of ideas and began to make himself, through them, into the figure of their desire.

  And one of those devious little sods had the idea that he should be invulnerable. That’s all it took. They decided that he was going to live no matter what, and the Stuff that he was made of, knowing that the greatest threat to him was Unity, changed. It altered the fundamental nature of what it was.

  Hence Metropolis—let the physics do the dirty work, I thought; we wouldn’t survive this kind of compression, so he won’t either. Even if he sees it coming, there’ll be nowhere to go. I had everything covered.

  Elevenspace. I don’t think you understand what it means to make more of it. There isn’t anything outside it. All 4-D expansions abut on the same other seven. Elevenspace is the fabric of them all. Do you see where this is going? Every Sidebar is just a 4-D bubble, like every other universe, like a string of beads—all on the same string. The ones with which we live in comfort share our 7-D and they can get close to one another, even touch, but not cross. He made a new eleven. He made the stuff into which universes are born. He used it to drop next door, into Sankhara.

  And now he’s our enemy, because he has the potential to destroy us and outreach us, creating being so much harder than going with the thermodynamic flow. I have to assume he could snap us shut—no problem. But he’s not of the same value as we are, Rita. He is one. He never consumed anyone or anything. He is unique and alone. We are multitude. To exterminate us would be to lose more raw information than he would come across in a billion years. And not information like those dead packets shooting back and forth on the nets the machines here bat around, but living things, people and parts of people, dreams and visions, the whole nine yards of life as it is lived, the entire Mystery. You, me, everyone.

  He’s got to go.

  Theo shut up after a while. My initial horror had subsided now and was slumped comatose in the dull ache of his nagging whine. Despising him was better than fearing him. I was too tired of him to care anymore.

  I made the designer go out and fetch me another set of curtain swatches, another crate of tile samples for the bathroom. I like terra-cotta, but I have this feeling that Theo is in the mood for black marble. I don’t want to live in the hell of his bad loser–dom, and I sure as hell don’t want to wash in it.
/>   25 / Jalaeka

  Francine and Greg were working on the smaller rooms today, so they could be in any number of places. I went in through the main entrance and ran through the Military Gallery, between the portraits of great generals where the sunlight filtered down like spear shafts from the high skylights. I slowed down to pass the great doors at the end, and glanced left towards the cathedral.

  In the real Palace, in St. Petersburg, I had seen the cathedral floored with beautiful marquetry, but in our Palace it was made of flowers and perfectly impossible to walk on without destroying. Many footprints of dead brown petals and crushed stalks testified to less careful visits, but it was still an incredible sight, and smell. The walls and columns were all covered in white lily petals, their decoration, sculptures and curlicues gilded not with gold but honey that dripped from their overhangs in slow time. The cathedral thrummed with a constant litany of bees.

  Francine and Greg were not there.

  I found them at last in the Bone Room. It manifested all the proportion and charm of the rest of the Palace, and all the skills that had gone into the manufacture of other marvels, such as the Malachite Room, but as it promised in its name, everything was made from bone; animal and human. A lot of human.

  I heard Greg’s voice first, saying, “. . . quite a bit of architectural humour in this pelvic archway. Look, all fashioned from . . . Jalaeka, hey, what do you think this is all about?”

  Since the night at the club and the personal history I’d given him, he was both more respectful of me and less friendly. It hurt, but I couldn’t blame him.

  “War,” I said, walking over the skulls and leg bones that had been cut to lie face upwards and end on, giving a strange surface of worn domes and gaps, like cobbles. Francine was sitting on the edge of one of the more robust chairs. She was fingering its arm with an amusing mixture of fascination and revulsion on her face. The radius and ulna of the chair were the same size as her own.

  I pushed my face against her neck and nuzzled her, stealing that second to imagine myself making love to her. I wanted to, and it must have been obvious to Greg because he gave her a knowing look she didn’t quite catch as she turned away from me. He waved at her, his shoulders lifting with tension. “Go on, Francie. I’ll finish it.”

  “It’s okay, I came to help you,” I said.

  “Look.” Francine pulled me forward by my hand. “Look at this.”

  Beyond the arch they had been admiring lay a boudoirlike space, a secluded area just big enough for a small gathering. It had no windows and was intended to be candlelit. Francine picked up Greg’s Abacand and used its light to illumine the walls as she drew me closer. It smelled odd here, mustiness unable to mask the sweetish stink of ongoing decay. She didn’t seem to notice it as she ran her fingertips over the rougher bones. I saw that all of them bore score marks, some from edged weapons and some from teeth.

  “I’ve seen this motif before, in the Aelf,” she said, pointing out the design. “Greg says it’s a symbol of the Valar. And this one is . . .”

  “I know what it is,” I said, glancing at the swastika.

  “And these are linked in to fairy-tales.” She showed me more of them. “And look here, between these knuckles.” She put out her finger, ready to stick it into a gap, a keyhole. I grabbed her hand before she could complete the action, sweat breaking out across my back. “But no door.”

  There was a door, but I wasn’t about to show it to her. I saw a lot more signs and symbols in there than I liked, some that weren’t even of Earth. I didn’t want Greg asking me about them. I didn’t want to know about them myself, thinking that Hyperion was right when he said this place was mine, the Engine building old pieces of me into the solid world. That it reacted to me was the proof Greg didn’t like to acknowledge, that I was not identical with Unity. Then I saw a scratch mark in the corner that made me go cold—the old symbol that used to be on my door, when I lived somewhere a very long way away from here.

  “Francine,” I said, to soften my own shock and to fix myself in place and time.

  She glanced back to ensure that she was hidden from Greg, then kissed me.

  “Not here,” I said. “It’s a very bad place for this.”

  “Are you afraid?” she taunted me, pleased with her boldness at even being in the room, in the alcove, delighted with finding the keyhole and in the mystery of the whole place.

  “Very.” When she stood back to go ahead of me I had the distinct feeling that the front of my body had adhered to her like thin tissue and was now tearing itself off. I had to follow her closely.

  Greg glanced at me, a mixture of envy and resignation on his face. I rested my hand on his arm. “Let’s go. You shouldn’t spend too long in here. It’s not only walls and floors.”

  He didn’t meet my gaze but his voice was clipped. “Then what is it?”

  “Everything here died by violence and in anger,” I said.

  “How would you know that?”

  “All the marks. I was only guessing about the anger,” I said. “I’d be angry, if it happened to me.”

  A long moment passed between the three of us, Greg making notes, Francine watching, biting her thumb, me with my mouth full of . . . “There are things in here that belong to me.”

  He glanced up at me, his face heavy with the suspended weight of all that lay unresolved between us. With Unity, and Theo. “What?”

  I took him towards the back, where the door was, which I vowed he would never pass through, and showed him a panel. Made entirely of rib bones slotted together, it looked like narrow, wavy planking, stained brown. I touched three of them, two splintered, one shattered between them. “This is what happens when you get stabbed by a full-force blow dealt by a broad-bladed iron sword with a dull point. This is the first time someone tried to kill me.”

  He looked at it doubtfully and poked me in the ribs. “You seem okay.”

  I showed him the lyrical mark of the calligrapher who had devised a new character to represent my name. It had been scratched on a scapula and stained with black inks. “What does that say?”

  His Abacand came up blank. He gazed stubbornly at me.

  “That’s my name. Why won’t you let me save you?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Gloves are off now. Theo knows. The longer you insist it’s not going to happen the less chance I have. Come on. You know it’s the only way.”

  Greg looked towards Francine but she had opened one of the books he had given her—so many of them, history, novels, scientific scripts—and she read out of it, the vellum pages rustling under her fingertips:

  “Unity: Machine-biological entity of unknown structure existing in 7-space . . . blah blah blah . . .

  “Although 7-space is contiguous with 4-space it does not include a real time dimension. It does have imaginary time and other, pseudo-temporal membranes but these are not linear or expanded. This means that events in 7-space are not bound to time’s arrow—the future is not dependent upon the present and the past is not indifferent to future events. All human notions of planning, intentionality and meaning pretty much fly out the window at this point.” She looked up at him. “You wrote that. Last year.”

  Greg folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve written a lot of things. It’s the way I think, by putting them down. It’s not necessarily true.”

  She frowned in concentration and read on. “Unity in 7-space exists outside human perceptions of time. It cannot perform operations that depend on linear time; this includes ALL actions in 4-space, since they are all bound by RealTime. If it thinks or acts it must do these things in a 4-space structure inside 4-D. It is possible, and theoretically it must be certain (because we know that Unity does act and something must impel this action), that Unity must have an awareness within 7-space that is not temporal nor empty, but this cannot be perceived by any 4-D limited being (all humans).”

  “Yes, all right. It needs a bit of work on this awareness thing,”
he said, clearly irritated.

  I added quietly, “It uses everything and everyone it touches, as a matter of fact, though it isn’t always conscious, even if they are.” I watched Francine reading, thought that if I ate Francine I could see through her eyes, feel what she feels, know what she knows. I could be her. It’s only a heartbeat away.

  She moved uncomfortably under Greg’s scrutiny and her voice cracked a little. “Unity interacts with living 4-D conscious beings by becoming the stuff of their desires. It assimilates them piecemeal, becomes them, records them, consumes them. It is possible that Unity only has consciousness when it is involved with being somebody else.”

  Greg turned to me. “If the Engine made this, and this was you, then that isn’t the same as what it supposedly does here in Sankhara. It was never permitted to drink memories or remake them. So Belshazzar insisted. I always thought it must do, though, but I could never find a direct link—one memory to equal one object. And you have two, right here in this room. But how do I know you didn’t make them up? If you are truthful, then what the hell does a creature like you want with the two of us, here, now? And if you want us, then why don’t you just take us? You don’t even have to bother doing it bit by bit like Stuff does when it Translates people, waiting for them to lead it on by using it more and more. You could just do it now.”

  Francine folded the book closed. They gazed at me silently.

  I shrugged. “It’s like that old poet of Hyperion’s, Ramprasad, said: I want to taste sugar. I don’t want to be sugar. I don’t know how or even if that kind of experience is possible to maintain as a Unity-type structure. If I eat Francine, what will we be? And if I eat you, what will we three be? And if I ate you without asking I’d be a fucking troll, Greg. Not your friend. So stop talking to me like you fell to Earth in the last shower.”