Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  “She’s not available today,” Sikri repeated as Ren began to push her fingers through my tunic lacing and Myar gave my thigh a pinch. I put her hand aside, carefully. Sikri was looking for the guard, expecting trouble from me.

  I leant forward and grasped one of her wrists. “I only want to know where she is.”

  She stared at me, thinking, and then prised my grip loose. “Certainly, sir. Please come with me a moment.”

  With an imperious gesture she summoned Honay to take over for her and dismissed the girls, who sidled off. She took my arm. There were a few private rooms on the lower levels that looked out onto the garden and she steered me towards one of these, where she offered me a drink. Keeping the loser out of trouble.

  I took the helm off and saw her mouth drop open as the heavy thing slid to the carpet.

  “Jay!” she gasped when she had found her voice, sitting down on the chair behind her somewhat quicker than she expected. “What in the name of hell are you doing here? And dressed like that?” She leaped up and kicked the door closed, then dragged the curtain over the open window. “The soldiers have been for you once already. Searched the whole bloody place . . . well, they nearly tore it apart.” She shook her head. “What are you doing here?” She got up and kissed me.

  “Soldiers?” I repeated, “What for?”

  “Because of Sedrepent of course, you idiot, to arrest you. He left a letter.”

  “Arrest me?” I couldn’t think quickly enough to follow her.

  “Shhh!” she beckoned to me and I grudgingly sat down opposite her. She took my face in her hands and scanned me very thoroughly. I smelled licorice on her breath. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Sika,” I said, “where’s Intana?”

  I felt her hand stroke my hair in an absent caress. She sighed. “Why did you come back?” she said softly. “You should never, ever have come back.”

  I had no reaction at all. It was the strangest thing.

  “When?” I asked her.

  “Huh. Just yesterday,” she whispered.

  “How?” The carpet was deeply fascinating. I wondered how they got the strands of wool to twist so evenly. It must be very difficult, to get such an even twist that would stand up to being walked on without coming undone, without being tied off at the ends. And of course it wasn’t just two strands roped together but two pairs of strands all going the same way. Almost a miracle you could make something like that. Who was the first person to think of it?

  Sikri was speaking but I could hardly make it out. I looked into her face and realized that the words she was tripping over were describing what she’d seen.

  I took the memory from her in one piece and tuned her out.

  Intana was hanging from the branches of the cedar tree in the garden. Her head was at a peculiar angle because her neck was broken. The chilly light seemed to indicate dawn.

  She was naked and her skin was very white and oddly perfect—no marks at all. A line of dried blood darkened the corner of her slack mouth, which was otherwise blue. Her eyes were closed. She looked like a fresh linen sheet hung up to dry overnight, frozen as rigid as a board with frost.

  She was wearing a king’s ransom in jewellery. Imperial diamonds.

  Gently she twisted a little one way, then another and the metal and stones gleamed in the rising sun.

  It was all hers of course. She’d made so much money of her own she could have left years ago if it weren’t for me. Nobody kept cash there. You bought big hard rocks and the softest, purest gold; things that could be traded anywhere.

  I went to get her body back. I tried to remake her.

  It was a long time too late.

  No, I won’t tell you about that day.

  And finally there are only two major makers left to tell you about. I’ve known a lot of people since I started this romance with Theo, and they all had their say, but these are the two of importance. The first is someone you’ve never met and never will, and you don’t need to worry about competition. I met him in 1995—Alex Party was on the radio (you can load that off the Guide if you care). It was uncool for guys like me to like dance music but you know I’ve never been that cool.

  At that time faking an identity was a lot easier than it is now. I’d been hanging around for a few years, trying to get to grips with education and get up to speed, realizing there was another way to understand the world other than clashing heads with it. I’d got help from friends in Britain and Ireland, but things got intense between us and I worried I’d kill them the same way I thought I’d killed Kaela and Chayne (yeah, I didn’t kill her in body, but I colluded entirely in years of misery: she sent me to Earth, then she must have encountered the lovely Theo, I suppose—long story, another day). So I ended up doing this doctorate in space plasma physics at MIT although I was completely charmed by their other programs in ultracold quantum behaviour and all that gravitation thing getting off the ground (bad analogy). Patrick had just got tenure for neurobiology.

  These were the days when I used science to try and figure out what the hell I was. Science wasn’t up to it, but it was interesting.

  I’d figured out by then that I needed to know what either humans or I were technically and emotionally capable of before I did any more friend-killing grand gestures, and when I got sick of soaking up information I used to go sit in random looks-kinda-interesting lectures for light relief. On this particular day I’d been going to go to a public lunchtime lecture on the Darwinian evolution of consciousness.

  By this time I’d got to the point where eating and sleeping took up too much time and I didn’t do either anymore. I studied day and night. Anyway, this was a popular class with a big-name professor and was full already, not even standing room, so I went to the next nearest thing in the Bio block and saw Patrick talking about dopamine interactions instead.

  I’d like to say it was his fine mind and thrilling presentation that turned me on, but it was the same thing as made all the girl sophomores sit in the front row, leaning over their notebooks, chewing their Hello Kitty pencils and flicking their hair.

  Their efforts were in vain. He didn’t get distracted even once from his carefully organized slides on the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and the pathogenesis of psychotic thinking. As for me, I was starting to be able to give names to things that previously I’d thought of without names at all. I could have said to him, when I got closer to his floppy blond hair and sensible white shirt, that I seemed to be able to get voluntary control of other people’s dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, encephalin and GABA levels, although I always simply thought of it as yanking their chains.

  Not that even I was dumb enough to try that as a pickup line. It was my fantasy for a minute, until I remembered the fact that I’d sworn off relationships altogether, along with the food and sleep. No half measures. No friends. Nobody. Safe that way. The only conscious effort I made at that time to control people was to ensure that they ignored me, unless I had a pressing question about hadrons.

  Even in today’s world of well-adjusted human cocktails you can see that this behaviour didn’t exactly stand out in the circles I was moving in. I didn’t realize what it had done to me until I started feeling the effects as he talked and I watched the way his lips moved around the words.

  So, we did psychotic thinking for an hour, then he asked for questions and there were a lot of easy and stupid ones at the front. He fielded them patiently, like you do when you realize nobody’s been paying attention since slide one, and I had this urge to go out and buy a really great motorbike.

  I was sliding my notebooks together—all empty, but not having them made people take too much notice—and thinking in Ducati-rama when he looked up and clocked me. Accidentally on purpose I locked gazes with him and forgot about being ignored. He did this charming double take. I blushed. (I know, I never blush.) Then he made a big fuss over doing something on his laptop until the rest of the class left and the early birds of the next class started to trail
in. I walked down to him, all bets with myself off.

  “You’re not in this course,” he said, flicking me a glance that was both unnerved and unnerving, not sure if it was predator or prey. He had this whole youthful academic and sensitive look, like a freshman English major or historian. His hair didn’t know if it was surfing or trying to be respectable, but his eyes and eyebrows were dark and fiery and on loan from the devil.

  “What are you doing for lunch?” I said.

  He hesitated. “I eat at my desk on Thursdays. I have a lot of marking.”

  “What time do you call it a day?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  “Come to lunch.”

  On the walk to his office I learned everything about the way he moved, the care products he used, his badly mended leg break, his confidence with authority and the fact that he wasn’t out to his faculty colleagues.

  He opened his office door and locked it behind us. He put his computer and slides on the bookshelves behind him. I dropped my books on the floor and we caught hold of each other’s arms lightly in the testing measure. We spent a lot of time staring into each other’s eyes. Upwards of three seconds. I felt so lonely that it physically hurt.

  We did that thing where you don’t even kiss for a while, just move closer, looking into each other, feeling each other’s breath on your skin, just looking and in my case trying to believe your good luck and your screaming lunacy. And in those moments the surge of anticipation got so high I thought I’d pass out from the rush.

  He tasted of spearmint Life Savers and he gave me the romance kiss, the playful one, not the all-you-can-eat hard version, though I’d have taken anything. We spent time learning to kiss each other, like girls, and outside in the hall a student walked past and sat down outside another office, waiting for a tutorial. They were listening to Alex Party so loudly on their headphones that we could hear the treble line cleanly.

  Patrick broke with me to roll his eyes. “Don’t they ever turn those goddamned things off?” He wanted to talk to me because he felt safe talking, and otherwise now he didn’t feel safe at all, and neither did I.

  There was a spy-hole in his door. I turned him around to face it and put his hands on either side. I kissed the back of his neck under the long tapers of his hair, reached around him and unbuttoned his shirt while he looked out at the bored student and the hallway he knew from every ordinary day. The music was tinny and perky and annoying. The door next to ours opened and a voice said crossly, “Turn that off. People are trying to work in here.”

  The rest of the tutorial group showed up. They began to quiz each other about the set reading, and to try and make up sensible questions to hold in reserve so it looked like they’d done it.

  “Lazy little shits.” Patrick turned around. He grinned at me and chuckled self-deprecatingly, shrugged. “I can’t do this. Goddamnit. But I just can’t do it. I’m not . . . whatever the word is, used to this. I’m sorry.”

  I was so disappointed, I felt crushed. He was turning me down.

  It was brilliant. I hadn’t been anywhere but the middle of nowhere for so long.

  “Oh god!” he said, seeing my expression. “I didn’t mean it to be like that. I mean, I want to see you again. I just can’t . . . I haven’t got the . . .”

  “Shut up,” I said, taking his hand. I led him to the desk—huge, loaded with paper files—pushed stuff out of the way, sat on the desk and pulled him in between my legs, facing me. “Your noradrenaline is showing.”

  We made out on the desk. I had to put my hand over his mouth when he got so involved he forgot where he was. Without any talking we agreed to leave it at that. It was more exciting, to feel so many things still waiting to be found in the future. It was better to fool around and pretend we didn’t know the score.

  Afterwards he brought me coffee and I picked up the papers and other objects and put them back where I thought they went. He handed me somebody else’s mug with a big Yosemite decal on it and shyly asked me my name.

  We made plans to go out to dinner.

  At the door he said, “I can’t believe you’ve been here all this time. I would have noticed someone like you.”

  “I spend a lot of time in the ultracold lab messing with magnets,” I said. “You really wouldn’t.”

  “Why were you in my lecture, then?”

  “Couldn’t get into the Dennett lecture,” I told him, and left him shaking his head.

  Patrick equalized me. He never saw me as anything except someone like him, only better-looking and with faster one-liners, but not much faster. I became his friend, and his eye-candy boyfriend, on my own terms. I was off the back foot. Permanently.

  The last one is Angel #5. I don’t even know if she was Stuff or human. I never looked. She made Eros. You met him. She gave him the darshan. Until I met you she was the first person who never wanted anything of me except that I exist.

  God, it’s cold here. The Engine is tearing up the Palace, crying and groaning because it can’t find Greg there, only his echo. I can see Greg himself—Theodore—breaking through the glaciation at the epicentre of the Park. He stoops. I listen. But the temperature is falling steadily down and I’m speeding the cooling of it; yeah, that was me. Fifteen Hiroshima bombs per second; that’s how much energy I’m yanking out of the atmosphere, and that’s only in the kilometre we share. All of us are getting slower. I think that this may have been a mistake. My hand’s played out, and who knew how many aces Theo really had, or Greg for that matter?

  There’s nothing left alive in the Park now except the two of us. The white monsters of snow and ice are solid in their caves. The trees have been blasted apart by their own freeze and are falling on one another like ash. The air is completely dry and becoming dense. In a little while, when oxygen becomes liquid, I’ll have to quit this form and I’ll have to quit being anything that can talk to you.

  From then on I don’t really know what can survive this kind of cold, only that at absolute zero there is no motion and nothing possible, even for me. At least the expansion will stop though, so you don’t need to worry about the universe imploding. If we get stuck here at that point, then you’ll have to look for other ways of finding a happy truce with Unity, and hope it wasn’t all invested in Theo, its agent, and his adventures in human space.

  I’m staying because of Greg. What I did to him is unforgiveable. I know you understand.

  I told you all this and remade you for one reason only. If you don’t know what it is by now, then you’ll never know, and my winding down to nothing won’t matter. I chose you. You chose me. Everything that follows is the unfolding of this gift.

  58 / Francine

  After they’d gone, the Valkyrie stood in a terrible mass of indecision, bombarded by comms that I couldn’t hear. More shudders wracked the Aelf, flinging both of us to the floor. I slid against her helplessly and added to my pains.

  “Skuld!” But I couldn’t get her attention from the voices inside. She opened her ammunition case and started to reload. “Take me down. I can’t stay here!” She could fly out, but if the cable went I was finished.

  Behind her I could see the other inhabitants of the Aerials leaving as best they could, many winged but some clinging and weaving their way down the Arachno rigging that formed part of the Aerials’ attachment to Aelf 2 and the TacMassif. Aelf 2 began to grow. The cables stretched and shifted as its spire twisted and there was a groaning, rising, spanging sound that was no good.

  Although I thought she hadn’t heard me, Skuld abruptly lost her ordered manner and abandoned the rest of her arsenal. Perhaps she knew something I didn’t. She slammed her foot on the trap trigger, picked up a rocket launcher with one hand and fused it onto her right arm. Then she picked me up, without the benefit of the harness, and swung me over the hole. As we swung crazily sometimes it faced the earth, but mostly it faced other things.

  We fell. I screamed. I couldn’t help it. Then I felt a huge kick
and my back pressed painfully against all the spiky, hard edges of her armour and my arms burned with pain as she hung on to me more tightly. Our uncontrolled plunge became a fast but orderly descent. The wind noise was so loud I wasn’t sure but I thought I heard a weird, high-pitched shriek. Then Skuld rolled like a barrel and I faced the sky as she lay back on her solid wings and with her right arm shot out at something huge flying above us.

  The rocket left a white trail curving in the air behind it but I only saw a moment of it, then I was rolled under and saw the ground rapidly shooting towards us. There was an explosion that deafened me and shook us both. Shrapnel whined past in a deadly volley and Skuld said a peculiar and surprised, “Ha!”

  We began to rise and the pressure of her metal against my bones became agonizing. She swung hard to one side and a gigantic body went tearing past us, wing, flesh, metal and beautiful peacock colours. It was flaming and boiling with a chemical green fire and in its wake it tore the whole of the Aerial with it in a massive tangle of cable and cars, wire and glass. They smashed into the low roof of the Conservatoire exhibition hall in train and gouted with viridian flares as they demolished it completely.

  Skuld swung us over into the great, open green expanse of Pythagoras’s Circle itself and landed there, running as she came in, but her run was immediately a stagger, then a stumble onto one knee. People were all over the place. Some who had run from her ran towards her, seeing someone they thought must be in charge. Skuld let me go and I fell on my face on the slippery, wet grass. I spun around, hurting but okay, and saw her on her hands and knees. Dark liquid was pouring out of her onto the ground. There was a hole in her the size of my fist running front to back. Her jet pack steamed and smoked. Aviation fuel became a transparent, shimmering fog around her.

  “Skuld?” I said, sliding closer to her, touching the plume of her helm, afraid to go closer.

  “Stay back,” she said. “Shrapnel got me. Dammit.” She sprang a compartment in her chest open and I found I could see about halfway into the total depth of her body. She took a field dressing of some kind out of it and stiffly moved to a sitting position. She put a patch over the horrible wound and held another one out to me. “Get the back?”