Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  I know why, I shouted down the years to him as he stood there with his guts hanging out, not knowing why. She let you go because she thought she was your Jonah, your bad voodoun. But you didn’t want to be let go of. Stupid her! Stupid you!

  I picked up the can I’d rejected before and took a drink. The Valkyrie tapped her feet in time to the music she was listening to, reassembling a complicated weapon. I looked back at Greg’s letter.

  At the back of my mind the things I didn’t want to know wriggled in their shells.

  I went back into the memories. I wondered where they were located, as I went; in him or in me, or if we shared them and they were elsewhere, in places neither of us occupied.

  If he was my creation all through, as Greg seemed to suggest, then all of this must be too. Not only Jalaeka’s history, but those other people that Theo ate, they’d be mine, with no life outside me. They’d all be just Stuff, pouring itself into the moulds from my head. Only I don’t think I’d ever have thought of some of the things here because I long for them to unhappen. I could have imagined it, if I’m honest, because anyone could, but I hope it’s not so.

  After Intana refused to leave Koker with Jalaeka; and he didn’t go into it, because it caused her so much distress; when he could have read her thoughts and didn’t do that either, because it would have been an invasion of privacy; after all his consideration had got him exactly what he didn’t want, he took a small consolation and went to see Kaela.

  They were in love by now, in love like matches and rocket fuel. He couldn’t not have gone.

  When he got back, later, very late at night, into the quiet house, Kya met him and said, “You might think you got away with all that, but you didn’t.”

  A very bad thing. He could tell straightaway. He didn’t have to be psychic for that. Punishment as she had promised. And she was good at that. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to. But he had to.

  She had two guards with her. They escorted him to a room down torchlit halls. They smelled of smoke. He heard a lot of voices laughing and talking in excited, ugly tones. In the room they reached, a stone chamber with two exits, there were a stool and a swing.

  A guard stood on the far exit. Behind him the door was locked. He felt a spear tip stab through his shirt into the skin on his back.

  On the stool a girl was tied up—he recognized her, she was Intana’s friend and his friend, Tash. Her neck was in a rope noose depending from the ceiling and it was taut, tied fast to an iron ring. Behind her stood a man in a black hood, ready to kick away the stool. Tash was shaking with exhaustion from the strain of having to stand so very tall in order to breathe. Sweat made her clothes cling to her and ran down her face, along with tears. She breathed in gasps and when he got there she stared fixedly at him with desperate hope and her gasping increased.

  On the other side of the room a naked woman hung in the swing and a man, standing in front of her, his hands on the ropes, rutted fiercely and quickly inside her. There was a queue of men behind him, disorderly in places, their faces turning to him now and all of them sneering in some way, small or large. One or two turned away and put their faces behind their hands. They laughed and joked about the two women. Some of them spat on them; the naked one as they watched her, the one who might hang as they passed her on the way out. This one, finished, groped Tash, pushed his hand up between her legs with a sawing action like cutting bread, and pinched her breasts.

  “Dry as a fucking hole in the ground,” he yelled to his companions and they laughed and one of them said—

  “Get on and hang her then, she’ll soften up dead.”

  She didn’t make a sound.

  Jalaeka saw all of this in a moment. And he finally recognized who was in the swing.

  “So now you have a choice,” Kya said to him. “Which is what you wanted, isn’t it? You can choose to hang her, and send the rest of these men back out onto the streets where I found them. Or you can join the queue. What’ll it be?”

  No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Not happening. Didn’t happen. I do not accept this version of things at all. In what universe do things like this happen to people? What could it possibly be good for? What contribution does that make to the fucking meaning of anything? Who does this kind of thing?

  “Hey!” The Valkyrie was shaking me. “Stop kicking me! What’s the matter with you?”

  My feet were agony.

  “What’s the matter?” Skuld had my hands in her two enormous fists.

  I stared at her, unable to articulate anything. My body was so hot, my heart racing so fast I continued to fight her for another few seconds, then I realized where I was and lay in her old, oil-stained bedspreads and looked out towards the sea in anguish.

  It sparkled. The sky had cleared and the sun was brilliant.

  “I was dreaming,” I said, wishing I had been. “Bad dream.”

  “Must be very bad,” she said and tentatively let go of me one hand at a time. “All right now?”

  “Yeah.” I thought I’d broken my foot and I was glad for the pain of it.

  “I’ve got some meds,” she offered.

  “Thanks.” I accepted the pills she gave me but only took one. She was taking back the water she offered me—served in a thing the size of a vase—when she suddenly went very still. I saw her glaze me out as she listened to internal comms.

  “I have to go.” She pushed me and my bedclothes to the sidewall and started to slap gear on herself with incredible speed and precision, moving so fast that her arms and hands left gold trails in the air. “You’ll be all right here on your own. If anything happens, call Damien. Or go next door. She’s mad, but reliable if you can shut her up for ten seconds.”

  “What? Where are you going?”

  “Engine House,” she said, sliding the visor of her helm down over her face. She stepped onto her trapdoor and gave me a final glance which I couldn’t see.

  “What’s happening?” I shouted.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I have to find that out.” The door opened and she vanished.

  I watched her fall and speed out through the city heights trailing white and grey vapour. As she left sirens began to wail downtown and I saw police units in the Massif light up. I watched her all the way to the sea, then she was gone, descending out of my sight. The door closed itself with a hiss and clunk of the seal. The bubble swung and its charms rattled, an arid, soul-scratching sound.

  The meds were strong—they were for her, I realized stupidly as they started to take effect. I felt woozy and lay down in the quilts. The wind blew some rain against the pod’s curved surface and I saw rain underneath me, dotting the tiles of the Aelf.

  I had to find out the depth of my own trouble too. I didn’t want to, but it was too late.

  Since there was no way to run from the situation physically, Jalaeka saw a way ahead psychologically, two clear alternatives. Break up and fall apart, or go so deep that there’s no getting out though at least from down there nothing matters. But those decisions would leave Tash and Intana to their fate alone. That would mean there was nothing he could do. That way everyone lost, and he’d be the one who’d made it happen.

  He forced his belly to relax so that he could take a deep breath and let it out slowly. He ignored Tash’s pleading face, Intana’s tiny sounds, and made himself think, as fast as he could, and to ignore the emotion that threatened to make him panic this all away in the first seconds, the guilt and certainty that this was avoidable, if he hadn’t been so thoughtless and careless, if he’d loved Intana enough in the first place.

  This was punishment and it was control. If he were Kya, what would the choices mean? He put himself in her mind, in the mind of her pet, Zara, the expert on this kind of torture. He thought in the time it took to take one breath.

  Intana was there and it was promised that she would survive if he chose the former option and killed Tash. But her survival was only of any use to Kya if he valued her enough to sacrifice everything to save
her. Kya wanted to control him. She didn’t care about Intana at all. If he stopped caring enough, Intana was as good as dead.

  Hurting Intana this way, humiliating her, was to hurt him. That’s what this was for.

  He realized right then that he didn’t have the promised alternatives at all. Tash was dead, no matter what. And it was likely that Intana was dead too, unless he acted very carefully and showed that he could be genuinely hurt and that he could hurt her too. Otherwise, their relationship wouldn’t be what Kya wanted it to be—poisoned yet continuous, and therefore a source of pain—it would be intact and functional and it would have proven itself stronger than she was. That was a certain death. If she died, if he died, it wouldn’t be ruined.

  He weighed up if it was worth saving either her or himself this way. It seemed too likely that beyond this moment in time there would be nothing he could say, or do, to recover Intana or himself from the consequences of staying alive. It looked as though she was already far gone. He doubted that she could possibly see what he was about to do as anything but total complicity in her debasement.

  This left Tash. Was there a difference if Tash died at someone else’s hand, or not?

  “Time’s up.” Kya had her hand on his arm and it was cool. He could feel her like a pressure on his skull.

  One way. Or the other. There isn’t anything else.

  You are either smaller than all of these people, or larger than all of them. Even in the latter case, you can’t win and you can’t save. You can choose how everybody gets to lose.

  Jalaeka walked up to Tash and made himself look into her face.

  She was so terrified he doubted she could think anything at all. He hoped she’d been around enough to understand what the score was, but that’s all it was—a hope. Her eyes pleaded with him, brimming with tears. She was choking on fear and disbelief that he, of all people, was about to do this to her. He could feel her, as if she were him. She’d never realized that she could die this way or how frightening it could be. She expected him to kick out the stool and make the obvious save.

  “It’s my fault,” he said, although he hardly made a sound. The stool was not very tall. He glanced at the man behind her, the executioner in the hood, then stepped around her and snatched the hood off his head. The man stared back at him, struggling to conceal fear and repulsion, trying to turn defiant and cocky. Whoever he was, he didn’t have the natural stomach for this kind of thing, but he could make himself over into a man who could fake it.

  Intana was completely silent.

  If he didn’t kill Tash, said a voice in his head, there was a chance that Kya wouldn’t do it. He didn’t believe that voice, but it made him doubt.

  He joined the queue.

  “You’re that pretty bastard that Princess Shit likes to wipe her ass on, aren’t you?” said the man in front of him. He wore soldier’s kit but it fitted so badly it looked stolen. He was taller, bigger, rougher, harder in every way than Jalaeka and looked on him with an uncomplicated, easy kind of hate.

  “Yes,” Jalaeka said.

  “And who’s this whore that managed to get herself here?”

  “You’re not fit to know,” Jalaeka said. Some of that ease had crossed over.

  “Is that right?” The soldier snorted and looked him up and down. “But you’re gonna give it to her just like me. Just after me. Is that right? She fit for you?”

  Jalaeka didn’t say anything. They moved forward in line. He made himself look at Intana. She kept putting her head to one side or the other but couldn’t keep it there. She had her eyes shut and her jaws clenched together so hard that all the muscles in her neck were rigid.

  He glanced at Tash. She had reached the point where she was so tired she had to let the noose tighten now and again. When she choked she panicked. Spit coated her chin.

  It seemed a long time, and no time. He watched the soldier in front of him hurt her. He took a long time and her misery pleased him. Intana saw Jalaeka watching and turned her face as far as she could in the restraint, away. The man came and pulled out of her, wiped himself on the tail of his shirt. A foam of blood and semen ran from between her legs. “I’ve known better goats,” he said.

  Jalaeka smiled. He saw Kya watching him. He could hear the terrified whinnying of Tash’s inadequate breath. It was so loud it filled the room. Every second flowed past like a river of cold oil, with an unreal edge, but not enough of one to take it all the way over the top. He refused to escape.

  “Can’t get wood?” the false soldier said to him, starting to pick his teeth. “You pretty boys are all the damn same.”

  Don’t try to fake it. Kya knows all the fakes. She’s right there, in between every thought. He knew it.

  Anger, which had nowhere to go, started to melt down into self-hate inside him. That was useful.

  Intana looked at him. As clear as daylight he could hear her thinking, not as an intuition, but as actual words.

  Don’t let her win.

  “You never even touched her,” he said to the man, and to Kya who had walked up beside him. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  He took hold of the swing.

  “Look into his eyes,” Kya told Intana. “Let him tell you why he’s here.”

  It doesn’t matter, Intana insisted, which hid, I don’t matter. “Get off me.”

  “I met someone,” he said aloud. Don’t lie to me. Everything matters.

  “Go on,” Kya said to him, and he did.

  She glanced at the hooded man and nodded. With an effort, he kicked out the stool.

  The meds made everything duller to my mind: the way he longed to make love to her after that, to repair it, and the way she pushed him away effortlessly into other people’s arms to save herself from having to admit any of those men inside. I got stuck in that disgusting, horrible moment at the bottom of the arc of that swing, which was also a tender and adoring moment; my moment . . . The drugs left me there, not able to move a muscle, even to open my eyes. Then, far too late, they knocked me out.

  When I woke up I was lying in my own puke. The blue tablet was in it. Maybe it would have killed me if I hadn’t thrown it up.

  There was a furious noise, coming from everywhere. Both the Abacands near my head were broadcasting the Guide’s voice. Every piece of metal in the world was screaming.

  “This is a general emergency alert. Return home and secure your dwelling. The Engine Regulator is currently unable to function. Sankhara Sidebar has been temporarily detached from Solar Earth. You will not be able to leave the Sidebar. Return home and secure your dwelling. This is a general emergency alert.”

  It quieted to an average kind of alarm after a minute or two, the kind I could hear panic and shouting over from the buildings and streets below.

  I tried to clean myself, found the two Abacands and turned them down, because they wouldn’t be turned off. Then the bubble car jolted and threw me onto my hands and knees. I heard the high pitch and blast of weapons fire and the doors were all opening. In one huge indraft of cold, wet air the Valkyrie sprang up through her trap. A second later Greg and Jalaeka came sliding through the roof, almost crashing straight out of the down hatch.

  Greg was slumped in Jalaeka’s arms, his eyes rolling white, skin grey and feverish. His body jolted violently in the throes of a fit. He poured with sweat. I thought he was dying.

  Jalaeka put him down on the floor, holding his head carefully and grabbing hold of the blankets I’d been on to help cushion it and stop it slamming into the deckplates as Greg kept on convulsing. He glanced at me. “Are you all right?”

  “Me? Yeah,” I said. I knelt beside them and touched Greg’s shoulder. “Greg, are you there? Can you hear me? It’s Francine.” I glanced at Jalaeka. Everything I wanted to say, the way I wanted to touch him and tell him— “What happened?”

  “I fused him and Theo,” Jalaeka said, looking down at Greg, and I realized he was almost panicked. “I don’t know if I can undo it. I can’t. Unless he lets me. I
took a risk because I thought, well, if Theo wants to keep on eating people who like me . . . but I didn’t think it would be like this.”

  “What the fuck?” the Valkyrie panted. “Is this Theo?”

  Greg opened his eyes, saw me, ignored me, looked around like he was drowning, then grabbed hold of Jalaeka’s arm. It was only then that I noticed that Jalaeka was half-naked and streaked with blood.

  There was a strange lurch and the Aerials shook. Valkyrie was thrown against the central bulkhead of the bubble car. Jalaeka fell across Greg. I was thrown sideways. A loose toolbox crashed down from its webbing and hard metal things went everywhere, several of the lighter ones on my head. With my face to the clear deck I saw one of the other bubble houses break free and plunge down. In the aftershock I was thrown back against Jalaeka’s side and shoulder.

  I stared at him. “I saw it all,” I said. “The swing.”

  He took a deep breath and looked around with the glance that tries not to see things the mind recovers. Then he put his hand behind my neck and kissed me. He tasted metallic as he let me go. The house had calmed to a regular swing. The Valkyrie was back on her feet.

  Greg dragged Jalaeka close to him and whispered something in his ear. Jalaeka got up and pulled Greg with him. His skin ran grey and black as it started changing state into the Eros form and halted halfway, wings like imaginary film, not quite real.

  “Now what?” the Valkyrie said shakily.

  “I’m going with you,” I said, meaning both of them.

  “You’re staying here,” Jalaeka told me, opening his wings without bothering to leave the house. Air, objects and space bent around them, whining in protest. Their edges bled light. “Wait for me. You”—he glared at the Valkyrie—“make sure she’s all right.”

  “I can’t! I have to go and help secure the city! We have to leave here.”

  “Just do it.” Jalaeka lifted Greg onto the down trap and wrapped his wings around both of them before kicking the door control. They dropped.

  I saw Jalaeka change fully in the fall, becoming dark and slick with the strange surface that Greg had catalogued as the sheer-face of Love, back in the days when we thought we knew things like that because it was all about us.