Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  Well, I thought, wiping tears and water and blood off my face with my hands, maybe it’s not. I might have done a lot but I never gave him that body or that power.

  Far below us on the golden pavements of the Aelf, the little house that had fallen lay shattered and two bodies in the wreckage were still. Strange creatures had gathered around it, bristle-backed. Their powerful arms and hands flung the wreckage aside and their long, heavy snouts burrowed with the desperate violence of hunger.

  The sky darkened rapidly and the sight was lost in a deluge of hail and rain. Where the hailstones smashed apart on the bubble canopy they scattered tiny fragments of bone.

  56 / Greg/Theo

  Come on, Odin said, laughing in the thunder of theogens in my brain. Come home and we will feast all the livelong day.

  Jalaeka picked me up. My limbs felt like they were bulk-stuffed with charged nylon: full of static pins and needles. I was about half a metre to my own left and falling.

  The whole of the Aerials vibrated and all the bubble houses jounced on their wires. I was watching, in my mind’s eye, a huge plume of dust and debris billowing up from the central shore area—the seven veils of the Engine rising.

  I wished I could have told Francine I’d been wrong, so very wrong, about Unity. I was wrong about Jalaeka and my delusion of freedom—his or anybody’s—there is no freedom from the push and pull of the self and the other, the lover and the loved, all these apparent dualities that I don’t want to tell her are one. They can’t be, must never be one, if there’s to be anything at all worth a moment’s breath. But this intention and my other thoughts fell to pieces.

  I put things together. I tore them apart. Or I was put and was torn. It wasn’t important.

  Night fell and opened on the snow. The dark of Eros’s pinions folded away and left the dark of true night and the unnamed stars of Anadyr Park. There was a faint glow on the horizon, a hint of a mountain’s profile cut out of indigo. If he hadn’t put my winter clothes back on and sealed me into them, my lips, nose, teeth and eyes would have frozen with the first breath. The clothes themselves, wicking but not empty of moisture, froze solid around me in a little more time than it takes to put a body down flat.

  The Palace was far away, the border farther still, and getting farther with every second. I fancied even the stars themselves were receding and Jalaeka’s glance at them made me think he thought so too.

  The wind and light that were left moved through his hair and over his skin like water. I thought, because of a general lack of freezing, that the cold didn’t bother him. But it was more than a physical experience for him. He wasn’t on his knees beside me because he wanted to be. It hurt him very well, just differently than the way it would soon hurt me.

  “Go back,” I said. “Leave me.”

  “You fucking cowboy,” he said wearily, affectionately. Even his teeth and tongue matched the suit, inky.

  On the seven level I could see the interaction of this desert with him and it wasn’t good. The landscape the Engine was now remaking had an energy matrix that fundamentally contradicted his structure. He and this white landscape of emotional withdrawal were naturally incompatible and, forced together, the vibrations they set up inside him were distorting him. Worse still, his presence acted like an amplifier on its vibrations and the speed of cold accelerated. The energies being employed were on stellar scales.

  I was in his house now, looking around at what it was I’d made out of him. Me and the others. Our visions, our plans, our self-serving policies and our dreams of better worlds. Unity staring at the futility of everything sitting in singular glory, as boring as the end of time itself. I understood their passion for him then, one instant of eternity with him better than all of eternity without—and if not him personally, then him in principle, her, whoever the hell it was standing there.

  My clothes sent distress signals to each other, looking for more power. I started to feel cool all over.

  Way back in Sankhara the Engine broke through into the Park and began its lumbering pursuit of me. As it did so it continued to work to the demands of what Jalaeka had become, making its own journey increasingly impossible. I tried getting up but I was frozen to the ground.

  I couldn’t see Jalaeka anymore, except by the shifting starfields that showed where his wings crossed the sky.

  The worst of my chaos passed then, as what had been two people of contradictory sorts settled into an unhappy balance. Jalaeka sensed it and at that moment he left me and I pulled myself free, tearing my way out of the last warmth of the winter suit to stand on the ice in the clothes Greg had been wearing when he left home. They solidified so fast that they crackled around me, then shattered around my continued motion. Then as I stood still, their remains clung to me like iron.

  I didn’t breathe in. I didn’t breathe at all. I could get by without. Half in and half out of Unity, I wasn’t one thing or another, didn’t feel the cold freezing me except as something unimportant, a temporary anchor to a time and place. I had enough energy to run at least to the end of the time sheet.

  I was standing on the centre of the ice, alone.

  I wondered what was underneath me, below all the many miles of the glacier. Would his promise that I could forever taste sugar and know it, without being sugar, be worth it? Was there a prize there, waiting to make me into a voluntary immortal, prey to all that hearts are prey to, but without the pressure of an unlooked-for ending? The promise of death’s rest, but not its unknown axe above my head. The promise of no power beyond a human power, but enough perception to look at the beginning of the universe, and its end, to live and love, suffer, be consoled and perish. And the awareness of the others optional, and their mystic states all choices you could make. Be yourself or let it go.

  Would you take that bargain, Greg? Of course you would. And Theo, could you bear to stoop and take the chance of someone giving you a copy of an old song? Would it break you? Are you worth breaking for a melody?

  I bent down to take a closer look under the ice.

  57 / Jalaeka

  Francine. Listen. After Tash, after the day that hasn’t got another name, I didn’t do the great and noble thing and stick around. I fled town with Kaela as my hostage to a better self and closed my eyes and ears to the things that had changed and the signs that were there to see: that he had galloping TB and wouldn’t survive, that Intana needed me more than ever but had to tell me she didn’t want me at all; that I wasn’t human because I heard thoughts and knew other people’s desire because I reacted to it like paper to fire, whatever the paper said on it. Screw that metaphor, it sucks. You know what I mean. I wanted to tell you that in my time in the swing I started to figure out how all that worked, how to turn it on and off.

  Kaela died in the winter I took him into, in the forest, and as he died, he made a city out of me, he took a dream of his and made it real. Or I did. Does it matter who?

  Along the broadway of yellow sandstone the centaurs cantered past us, their holloas and shouts of excited laughter echoing as they whirled their copper whistles overhead, a cloud of birds following. I could see every thick hair in the waxed ringlets of their tails, every ridge on the feathers of the songbirds and as he turned to look down the alleyway where the pony and the children with the baskets would come out, he could see their faces clearly now, solemn and bent, nodding with the pony’s short strides as they flexed their poems into shape and stapled them in place with the sharp double thread dashes of full stops.

  Where the blank strand of the northern hills had ranged there was the golden palace that I’d first glimpsed in Capital, flecks of precious stones in its towers. Kaela wasn’t even looking at it, so familiar was its presence on that wind-scoured shale. He was dancing in the wake of the lone drummer boy who beat the living sides of a lioness into booming rhythm with batons of cherry-wood as the animal walked before him.

  I dragged after. I watched Kaela’s filthy shirt and crude leggings of leather changing. With every strike of
his feet on the golden stone the materials shivered and became light and airy veiling trails of spider silk, pieced together with their own sticky threads. The rattails of his unkempt hair rippled out into thick lustre.

  It was difficult not to find joy in this place, even distrusting it as I did, looking for the underlying frozen forest. I glanced down at myself and saw that I hadn’t changed. Over my legs the heavy, scarred leather and metal protection wasn’t beautifying itself. I was being left behind.

  “Hey,” I said lamely, intending to catch up, but my voice swallowed itself as they rounded the curve into the square by the river where tall arches led away to the depths of an unseen hall, not built or cut but grown from jutting planes of crystal. Yesterday it had been no more than a collection of vapours projecting temporal forms and fading in and out of visibility.

  The faint odour of salt and the sound of surf echoed gently through its open galleries. I ran to catch up and put my hand to Kaela’s arm where his pulse was a patter of febrile excitement. He was about to let go when a rippling laugh sounded and he was jounced from behind.

  The flower girl stopped to curtsey to him and rub her arm where a cluster of gardenias had fallen away. She dashed on, trailing petals, and in her wake the dull brother followed, glowering, his face and clothes grey, a look of determination permanently lined into his skin. Everywhere she passed began to sprout into bud and when he had passed it was gone again.

  The knock had sent Kaela against me. I smelled roses and the sweetness of freesias, tang of red currant, lilies. My body sang. I wanted him in an unholy way, in pieces, as mist, with a hunger I couldn’t address or name or deny. I frightened and revolted myself. I kept imagining myself eating him, placing him in safety and permanent security like a jewel in my cold heart. I loathed it and what I was when I felt it.

  A horse cantered past us. Its shape was lumpen and its fur like velvet, worn down to the seams. Its thick feet made no sound on the stone as it vanished between the long arches into the invisible hall. A tang of ozone flickered in its wake.

  “Let me come with you,” I said suddenly. I seemed to be looking at Kaela over a great divide. The scale of it yawed and frightened me. The sun on my neck was making me too hot and I could hear the skirl of the centaur’s pipes and whistles from far away.

  Kaela, in delicate eggshell fineries, a princess, laughed the careless three-note laugh he had had months before, when I first met him, before what I was sank its teeth in. “I don’t think you can. I wish you could.”

  He was slipping away. I could feel it. A hasty, ill-conceived idea shot into my mind. I wondered if somehow I could prevent his leaving. I had the strangest feeling that I could have picked him out of time and remade him, without his fatal disease, but that couldn’t be anything more than denial talking.

  “Listen,” Kaela said and took another step through the temple arches, peering in to the centre of the shrine through his heavy, blackened lashes, “can you hear it?”

  I was shivering. A feeling of winter cold was coming over me. I looked at Kaela’s animated, rapt face. It had been so long since I’d seen that expression turned on anything other than myself that I’d forgotten how alive Kaela had been before me. I heard the sound of breakers on a pebbled shore and the creak of timbers as they swelled and rocked with the sea. And children’s voices, echoing many times as though they were locked in a deep underground cave.

  Kaela reached into the pack he still carried and let it fall to the ground. I stared at the fragile contours of the object he held in his transfigured hands. They weren’t the frail and sickly hands of recent days, but strong hands, the nails lacquered with perfect red. They held a white-face mask I had worn in the crushed greenery of a festival day long turned behind a thousand suns. The slanted eye slits and the half-open mouth made the vague face of a daydreamer.

  Kaela lifted the mask to his face.

  The contact between us began to narrow and falter. I tried to rush in and keep hold but he slid out of my grasp like water. I touched the mask. It was smooth and perfect. I tried to hook my fingers behind it.

  Kaela twisted away from me. The sound of conch horns rang faintly along the blue corridor of the temple and the wash of the sea roared. Without walking he was vanishing down the long tunnel of archways. I ran after him. The blue walls flashed past. But however fast I went Kaela slipped farther.

  I had a glimpse of sunlight shining on a bright ocean swell. Ships with tapestry sails were riding at low anchor on waves thick with red ragweed. There was the harsh, stricken call of a gull and the body of a plush toy horse rolling in the breakers.

  I was alone. The city tore like mist.

  I picked up the light shell of Kaela’s body. Air sighed out through the mask mouth, condensing briefly on the lacquer’s chill.

  Don’t think I didn’t try to bring him back.

  I couldn’t dig the frozen ground so I put his body in the river. It still ran, although it was sluggish, thickened with grease ice, and it can’t have taken him far before it froze solid. I put the mask on my own face, and selfishly lost my mind.

  I walked on the mountain until Chayne found me, but she didn’t know me—she was on her own flight from reality. So she let me go with her, up to the monastery above the clouds, where she thought it would all soon be over for her—absolution or death waiting like the only two cards left in an opponent’s hand: two aces.

  She lasted about two months on the self-purification trip, and found me out on account of the fact I never ate, breathed or moved when accidentally set on fire, which was something of a giveaway. She tried to stab me. I objected. That became our groove.

  We had to leave the monastery because of bad behaviour. She turned drunk and I turned nasty. She didn’t do sex. I didn’t do intimacy. We were insanely jealous of each other and got ridden out of every town we came across since the mediating factor of other people made us nuts. She’d try to kill me, and I’d try to let her.

  We wandered like vagabonds for years. I got money selling myself and cheating at cards. She spent it on hooch and knives and picked fights for fun.

  You’re probably wondering how easy it was for me to forget the other Annie. Seems like I must have.

  No. I would have stayed with her even if every day had been like the last, but she turned me aside. I couldn’t. Do you understand that? She decided for me and there was nothing I could do, even after the swing when I knew how to shut the door on what other people wanted. She’d already been inside me too long by then. Anyway, I did go back for her, when I could, when it was too late.

  Koker was unusually quiet that day. I came back from the forest, leaving Chayne at the gate to wait for me. She was a deserter from the Order and they were out for her blood everywhere.

  As with this kind of memory—you always remember too much—I crossed the river and the canal hidden in a stolen helm. Beneath the bridges the ships were tied up and silent, only a few lamps swinging from their softly dipping sterns.

  The hostels that strung out of the maze towards the poor settlements around the canal basin looked alive, but their doors were closed and along the riverwalks the strings of paper lanterns that lined the water’s edge had gone out. Clusters of their abandoned shells had gathered in floating masses where the slow water eddied.

  On the paved roads dark mottles blew around my horse’s fetlocks. They seemed to be everywhere, gathering in drifts in the gutters and choking the drains so that water spilled out behind them in little lakes across the street. As I climbed through the elegant squares I saw that all the public buildings were locked and guarded by soldiers, stiff-faced in the cool evening. More of their comrades patrolled the street and where a senator’s sedan or official’s horse passed him he was briefly surrounded by clusters of spear-carriers in private livery.

  The Senate itself was draped and banded with purple and vast bunches of purple flowers clothed the steps. Their withering petals were thick here, running and trickling in tiny vortices where the circling wi
nd caught them in a dry-skin rustle. In the run of squares ahead of him all the shops and taverns had purple squares tacked to their doors.

  I stopped a woman as she hurried past and asked her who it was that had died. She paused and looked at me with more surprise than anything. “The Great Prince Sedrepent of course,” she said. “His funeral was yesterday.”

  At the club beside the house I dismounted and left the horse out front. At the top of the steps I glanced at the house guard. They’d been there as long as I could remember with their unflinching and solid limbs set ready, their gaze as patrician as any elder statesman’s, but tonight they were ordinary men. I had the feeling that if I’d touched them, they would have shrunk at the contact, shrivelled until they lay on the stairs and were blown by the vagaries of the wind into the road.

  Pink light and the scent of dense perfume floated over me in a gush of warmth from the doors. I went inside, seeing faces that didn’t recognize me but which bowed in respect away from the helm’s unspoken declaration. I took care not to brush against them as I passed.

  Sikri was at the desk. She stood up to greet me, bowing low to allow me to get an unobstructed view of her cleavage. I wondered if she’d always done that. I felt as high as a kite with my own self-importance.

  “What’s your pleasure?” she asked.

  And then I was sad. “Is Intana here?”

  A peculiar expression flitted behind her welcome. She hesitated, sitting back down with two shuffles of her bottom on the seat. “Not today,” she said. Her lips were tight against her teeth as she smiled. “We have other blondes . . .”

  “Where is she?”

  Sikri made a quick motion with one hand and two girls ran up to me real fast, one light, the other dark: Ren and Myar. They pressed themselves artfully against me with instant ardour.