Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  He was clever though, and didn’t take it out. I made as much sound as I could. Somehow the howling seemed friendly to me now, like if it could find me, it could help me. I howled back.

  In response his strokes became harder and longer. He didn’t hurt me after the first one. He just took great pleasure in what he was doing and looked into my eyes until I closed them again. I could feel his stare.

  “I can see you’re not going to beg me never to stop,” he said, glancing at my gag. “And it’s not the same without that.” He took the gag out.

  I yelled as loud as I could. “Help me!”

  He came with a long, uncontrolled shudder and kissed me on the mouth. Then he got up and rearranged his clothing, bending over to kiss my thighs and between them again. Finally, he got up and looked down at me, his gaze never once leaving my face. He smiled at me, with real warmth.

  “Tell him I said hi. I’m sure if you call him”—he tapped the side of his head with one finger—“you’ll find he can hear you. You might want to ask him about that sometime.” He opened the locks and the door and went out, leaving it ajar.

  I drew my legs up close to me and tugged against my wrists but my hands were going numb and it was like pulling against iron. I managed to slide up farther so at least the tension on my arms was released.

  “Bastard, bastard,” I muttered under my breath, trying to give myself some courage. “Bastard bastardbastard.”

  Something landed against the shutters of the balcony windows with an incredibly loud clatter. I could feel the impact as a vibration coming up through the bed. It happened again almost instantly. The windows broke inwards with a huge crash of glass, the massive weight of the curtains pulling free from their hooks and tangling in a mass over the clumsy, strange shape that struggled through. It moved with a ferocious energy, like a mad dog.

  I was aware that I was screaming but it seemed far away, like someone else was doing it for me. Icy air, water and splinters of glass fell over me as the thing fought free of the fabric with two colossal explosive jerks that ripped it clear. From as far back against the headboard as I could get I saw Hyperion emerge from the rent cloth.

  His wedge-shaped head with its blunt snout full of jagged teeth came up and turned with intelligent yellow eyes to look straight at me. He stood upright on two legs and freed his long, branchlike arms, flexing his hands out of their fist shapes, showing slender eagle’s talons tipped with tough claws, some of horn and some of metal.

  Rain blew in over his wet hide and the room quickly filled with the stink of rich forest loam and animal musk. He padded to the fire and picked up my Abacand in his talons, then came to the bed and with a single knifelike claw cut through the scarves that tied me. He gave me the Abacand between his forefinger and thumb, holding it carefully. Earth trapped between scales on his arms fell over me and over the bed.

  “Gluh,” he said with difficulty from the back of his throat. “Khluh nnow.”

  He saw I couldn’t or wouldn’t, and withdrew with one of those sharp, alarming gouts of movement.

  “I gluh,” he said, struggling with speech. He expertly flipped the Abacand into emergency mode and carefully, politely, with exquisite gentleness, turned his back on me.

  I pulled the nearest pillows and cushions around me. I heard Jalaeka’s voice on the Abacand. He sounded furious. I clung to that voice. Hyperion lay down on the floor like a sphinx facing the door and put his long head on his paws. His cordlike tail flickered continually at the tip, garlanded with beautiful Tekmetal in spiral patterns that shone out through the fine grey fur as it drew the same sign in the air over and over.

  Jalaeka stepped through the broken windows from the balcony and ran to me. I burst into tears and started shrieking as soon as I saw him and it was like it had been before, like someone else doing it and me being inside them, watching and thinking—how odd, how hysterical a thing to do.

  The wind filled the room with freezing air and blew the fire to nothing in the grate.

  “Don’t ask me to tell you!” I said, grabbing hold of Jalaeka around his neck, around his back, trying to pull him closer as he embraced me, his grasp getting tighter as I clawed at his back. I wanted to climb into his skin. “Don’t ask me. Don’t ask me.”

  “It’s okay,” he said gently, his head against mine, ear to ear. “I won’t. I won’t. I’m not asking.” He was so calm. The sleet in his hair and on his face melted between us.

  “Hold me,” I begged.

  “I am holding you,” he said.

  “More.” I pushed my way in against him, shoving the cushions away, pulling at his clothes.

  He let go of me to get rid of them for me and I screamed at him and hit his shoulders with my heavy, agonized hands. I had to get out. I had to. “Do it now!” The cold air had gone bitter. The whole bed smelled of sex. I knew he must know, must guess. I hated him for it. “Get him out of me!”

  His eyes were wide. He looked scared and pale and like he was staring through me.

  I grabbed hold of him and kissed him on the mouth. “Come on,” I said, against him. “Be different. Be different.” Dark eyes, brown eyes.

  From a million miles away his gaze focused on me. He opened his mouth and kissed me back but he was far too cautious for my blood.

  I hit him across the face. “Wake up! Translate me! Do it now!”

  “All right,” he said, still quiet, contained, his true nature hidden for a final instant. “I will.”

  30 / Greg

  I came home on my own. Mandy, the Palace keeper, was waiting for me in the hallway. He stopped me, catching hold of my shoulder.

  “There’s been some trouble,” he said. His distorted features looked a thousand years old and his whole body was taut with an effort of holding back strong emotion. “Your friend is up there.”

  I stared at him for almost thirty seconds, unable to comprehend what he was talking about.

  My head was still ringing with the bright lights and polish of the Port Authority and that damned counsellor they’d had me talking to for over an hour. “If you feel the need to discuss this further with me, you can make appointments up until the end of October next year,” she’d said sweetly. “After that you’ll have to transfer to our AI system and be registered resident in the Translation Unit at Masham Abbey.”

  Meaning, after October you’ll be too far gone to be allowed near common people and we will come and take you away for their good.

  She had smiled at me, tenderly, with understanding and compassion. “It’s a very, very slow rate of translation.”

  Now I was looking at another face, which might have been as pretty as hers once, before it was made over into new Forged material, into a brute of a man with Tek adaptations and a taste in pink blouses. Mandy’s feelings were at least sincere. Looking at him was calming because of that.

  “Trouble?” I asked, starting to connect it with Jalaeka’s sudden disappearance. I’d thought he’d just lost the nerve to go in and try to face it out at the Port in case they asked him where his Tab was, though Stuffies rarely had a problem. One minute he was walking beside me, the next—gone. On the way back I’d even thought through it a bit and figured that maybe he and Francine wouldn’t be here at all; done a flit in case the Port decided to investigate the Winter Palace more thoroughly because of my state. They’re bastards like that in Immigration. Now I thought of other reasons.

  But Mandy didn’t or couldn’t say. He bowed his head like he couldn’t meet my eye anymore and let me go. I ran up the steps two at a time. Hyperion lay in the hall outside our doors and he got up when he saw me and barred the way into Jalaeka’s apartment.

  “What?” I said to him.

  “Theo came,” he said simply on audio channel broadcasting to my Tab so I didn’t have to struggle with his clumsy attempts at ordinary speech. “Attacked Francine.”

  I dropped my bag and my already-overreacting body, high on fear, went dead with shock. “What? Where is she? Is she . . .”
r />   He stared at me. “She . . . You must wait.”

  I went inside my own room in a daze and shut the door. As it clicked closed with a sound I’d known for over three years I heard the lock say-not-say, “Ktikt.”

  Something in my mind reacted instantly. It was the name of a god. Ktikt: goddess of the seconds and lives that pass without being noticed.

  She must have a billion of those things, I thought, searching frantically for alcohol. There was whiskey, half a bottle. I unscrewed the cap and took a drink out of the neck. After three or four more I felt improved.

  I sat in the armchair and had some visions of getting past Hyperion but in every one he managed to kill me convincingly and with much blood. The whiskey didn’t touch the completely shit feeling that I was a weak, useless tosser who let his friends suffer because he was too frightened to do anything. It was only good on the fear of Unity Translation. It was very good on that . . .

  “Greg?”

  I woke up with a start. It was very dark. The lights came on. Jalaeka was standing in the doorway, his hand on the switch. He was a total mess. The sight was unsettling. I’d seen him look a lot of things but never like this. He closed the door behind him.

  “Theo raped Francine.”

  I stared at him and it felt like he was a complete stranger. It took a long time for the words to sink in. I couldn’t seem to process what they meant. “What? But . . . is she all right? I mean . . . Where is she?”

  “Asleep. Safe. Physically fine. You can talk to her when she wakes up, if she wants to. Talk I mean. I came to tell you and ap . . . It’s all my fault.” He looked enviously at the bottle, a quarter full, still in my hand. “Can I have some of that?”

  “Um. Yeah.” I held it up. I thought I was very angry but I wasn’t sure.

  He took it, sat on my sofa with his knees up to his chest, barefoot and shivering in what I recognized as Francine’s oversize soft black pyjamas. They didn’t reach his wrists or ankles. He drank most of what was left and shook his head, handing it back to me. “Doesn’t work very well, does it?”

  “No.” I finished it and let my eyes water.

  I tried a lot of words in my mind but they were all rubbish. “It was a set-up,” I said, that pragmatic me.

  “I set myself up. I gave you both a choice I should never have given you. I left her when I should never have left her. What did they tell you at the Port?”

  “What do you think?” The implications of it began to sink in. My stomach burned. “Christ. Does that mean . . . am I going to, become him?”

  “Don’t know.” Jalaeka shook his head. His voice was very even and precise. He stared into the distance and rested his chin on his updrawn knees. “Think maybe . . . you already are . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I Translated Francine. She asked me to. So I did. And now I have to concentrate not to know what she’s thinking, not to feel what she’s feeling. It’s as if I have to hold up this big dam between us, and it has lots of holes that I keep on finding all the time. Thoughts. Feelings. Images. Hers, I think. I don’t know, because I can’t tell anymore. All I know is I’m leaking, being leaked, and I’m trying not to let it happen.”

  I gaped at him. “You did what?”

  He smiled, looking into a private distance. “Anyone in their right mind would say no, wouldn’t they? I always said no when they tried it on me. And then I realized there was nothing I could do to protect her if I didn’t do it and I thought that even if I was going to be like Unity, well, I’m the one in charge of me. I’m not like Theo. I could stay out and she’d never have to know. I hoped that it would never come to . . . I knew that . . . I thought . . . I think I’m going to burn her up. I can’t keep out forever. It’s too hard.” He closed his eyes, shut his jaw and bit his lips together.

  I didn’t entirely follow what he was saying but it horrified me. At the same time I admired the way he spilled his guts to me, felt a kind of honour in being so trusted. It was a hard cocktail to swallow.

  He spoke rapidly in a way that almost broke into laughter. “So my fabulous power of life, death and universal creation has let this ordinary, day-to-day evil run over her with no effort at all. And this is the entire story of my life by the way, which I hope you never learn in all its relentless re-patterned detail, like the grooves being cut back into the same bloody tyre: Live to fuck up others. Live to get fucked. Try to erase the indelible memory of getting screwed by someone you hate by violating someone you love. Or make others do it to you. I love myself. Say it and amen, brothers, I love myself. I am the god of love, so fucking help me.” He buried his face into his hands.

  After a few seconds he lifted his head. Now when his eyes met mine they were vicious. “I’ll get him,” he said softly. “Of course revenge doesn’t matter and nobody comes back or gets out, and it won’t undo what got done or save anything. It can’t unpick my stupidity. Of course not. Except, I think it might save you.” Then he looked at me and he was in control of himself again.

  My sluggish brain was insulated by the whiskey that had made it out of my gut. Things seemed less raw, conversation possible, because the alcohol had blunted them. I swallowed my anger. “How?”

  “I think Theo’s going to let you alone just enough to try and get me to the point where I take the dive to save you. He hasn’t got any other choice. He doesn’t care about you or Francine; ultimately he sees everyone as an adjunct of himself—eventually it’ll all be okay, because you will be him and vice versa. But I can’t play that way against him because it’s not his weakness. If I want him to fall on the sword and hand Unity to me, I have to change his mind another way. And in the meantime figure out how that doesn’t just turn exactly into what he wants . . . And I will.” He bit his lower lip. “Before October.” Then he laughed, suddenly and in an oddly high-pitched voice. “That was a great talk wasn’t it? So—masculine, analytic, purposeful, you know? Mmn.”

  His return to hysteria was unnerving me. I clutched the bottle more comprehensively in my hand and sucked at the dregs. “You’re talking about killing Unity. What are you? No offence, but . . . look, I’ve studied Unity for years through what it does with the Engine here in Sankhara, and I have no idea what it must be like to be two million people at once but I can’t see what you can do . . .”

  “He isn’t Unity.” Jalaeka dragged his hands through his hair and held it out of his face, staring at me like a mad, black-maned dog. “He has executive power—like me. He isn’t the whole thing. That’s what I keep trying to tell you, though you won’t fucking listen. Unity as an entity can’t exist in 4-D. It has executors, who are connected to it and enabled by it, but they are not it, and the kind of consciousness it has is not like yours and mine, because it exists where the future is not determined by the past. Imagine you having all the knowledge ever. Can you think it all right now? Can you feel all the feelings you ever felt and the experience you ever had at once? No, you’re just you and you have the mood you’ve got this instant and that’s all. You’re the constant relic of your life as it goes smashing into the past. Now Theo’s done things to me, and to other people, for aeons, but he’s never been done to really, never felt a thing because he considers himself a supreme being beyond it all. He’s a sociopath. Remind you of anyone?”

  “The Lonestar,” I said reluctantly. “Voyager Isol. The first human contact. Was he made from her? Made by . . . is that . . . ?”

  “I don’t know. Even if it was the case, it’s absolutely nothing to do with today and now.” He tore his hands through his hair and stood up. “Look, later,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything you never wanted to know later, in another life where this doesn’t matter anymore. You should rest. Sleep. You look like shit.”

  “Don’t want rest. I want to do something,” I slurred loudly. I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t forgive him for failing Francie. Weasel me said it wasn’t my place, but that was so much horseshit to cover up the fact that I didn’t feel kind
towards him. I wanted to ask him what the hell else he’d done to Francine but I couldn’t. He didn’t wait long for the forgiveness that wasn’t coming, and his look said he understood me, that he accepted my judgement, and I hated that most of all.

  He got up, unfolding like a perfect piece of robotics, and crouched next to my chair so he could look at me, no, so I could look at him. “Then go and try to convert Hyperion to rationalism. He looks like he needs a good laugh.”

  He was only trying to save us both with the needling humour we’d always used, and it had never felt so pathetic as it did to me then. Rage filled me and I hit him. It was a stupid drunk’s blow and clumsy. My hand didn’t even know the bottle was still in it until it broke across the side of his head as he ducked away. My hand hurt like lightning but my whole attention was on him as he turned back. Blood poured down through his hair and over his neck. The side of his face was gashed down his jawline and across his temple but I no sooner saw the horrible wounds than they were gone. By the time he was eye to eye with me again he was perfectly whole.

  He took my hand. I felt its cool, his calm becoming unearthly and gentle, and the pain of my feelings blurred. When I snatched my hand back it was slippery with his blood. The darshan glowed in me, making me well when I wanted to be sick.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to pull something back too late. “You should go back to her.”

  He moved his hand across his hair and face, neck and clothing, and the blood all vanished. For a second there was heat radiating on me, like I was sitting close to a fire, and then that was gone too and nothing to show it had happened. He replaced the bottle on the table by my hand, and it was whole.

  “Go on,” I said to the doubt in his face. “She might wake up.”

  “I’ll call you when she’s awake.” He turned to go.

  “Wait,” I said, fumbling to think around my revulsion at the way I’d behaved. “What’s the god of forgotten moments?”