I took the thing—it was heavy and floppy like jelly, and it squirmed against my hands when it felt my skin and the warmth there. I plastered it down over the hole without looking too closely, although I had enough of an impression of burned flesh and bubbled metal.
“Strip off the backing,” she commanded.
I did and the surface immediately crystallized and started to darken. By the time I’d pulled off the entire sheet it was almost indistinguishable from her armour.
“Thanks.” She got to her feet and the small crowd around her stared. SankhaGuide’s alarms had stopped by now. I saw her making calls by the inward look of her gaze, then she glanced at me. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Police vehicles and other Light Angel and Herculean officers had begun arriving in the Circle. Skuld did some fast work on her jet fuel lines and looked at me with misgiving. “I don’t know what to do with you. I should go and assist with the casualties from the Aerial.”
“I can do that,” I said. “I have Med Zero Twenty.” I took it when I was still attending school and thought I might want to be a doctor. It had proven to me that I didn’t.
“All right,” she said and I thought I heard the first signs of approval in her voice. “Let’s go.”
I went with her through the milling, frightened people, back to where smoke and dust were rising into the darkening sky. Aelf 2 had stopped its rise. It had become silver in the last light of the sun and it seemed so tall and fine as it stretched up to the clouds. At the foot of it the wreckage of Kodiak Aerial was a steaming mass of flesh and rubble.
“So,” Skuld said, surveying with her sight on varied spectra, looking for things that might be saved as we advanced and tried to steel our nerves. “Tell me more about this boyfriend of yours.”
I did, as I heard him talking to me.
59 / Greg-Theodore
In a state of superfluidity two surfaces travel along each other without resistance: endless flow.
Perhaps the cold started with Francine’s isolation, with Greg’s disillusion, with Sankhara’s entire freight of loneliness, searching for its answer. I expanded it, pressing Jalaeka against his love of the world to see which would break first. He pushed it colder, so that the temperature will ruin the Engine, stop the expansion and hold me fast.
As solid-state physics it’s a fair trial. As the metaphor of our situation, again, fair. To try to use it as a weapon against me, even though Unity seems to have temporarily . . . ah, it isn’t temporary. I am out in the cold. I am on my own. Whichever way I look at it, from the inside or the outside, the real or the symbolic, I can’t but argue that it’s poetic justice—the only satisfying kind.
I spent a lifetime searching for the elusive definition of what Unity might consider mystery, beyond physics and energy. The closest thing is poetry, of a kind, the poetry of leaps of faith and identity, without which nothing at all can be distinguished from anything else, not valued and not kept or cast.
My divergent histories of Greg and Theo make me what Unity always claimed it was, but secretly wasn’t—a completely new individual composed of all those who went into it. I am not Unity either now, although I can see it from here and I know it waits for me to make my decision before it jumps. I am made in the splinter’s image and it is within my ability to step free of both of them and become completely separate. Or to join either. Or I can end.
I think about going back—it’s instinctive, to want to rush to the safe place, the old familiar routines and assumptions and what we used to know. But which way?
No, better to dig in the ice, using my hands to shake it apart with subsonics and throw it aside. The act of moving, even against the immense and growing inertia of the cold, is better. It’s a long way down.
I don’t know how cold it is now but it’s very hard to keep my body going. Heat leaves it almost as fast as I can supply myself. Blue oxygen rain has fallen, has frozen. The hydrogen came last though it’s frozen solid now. The atmosphere is gone. No clouds. No sun. The stars are incredibly bright.
Another couple of K down and I think I should be at rock.
Yes. There is something. In the dark I can only go by touch.
A wooden mask. A human face. I can feel both sides smooth, but the back of the mask is a peculiar, exceptional surface. The back is destroyed when I touch it, although it recovers when I don’t.
I have to develop new fingers that don’t give off heat, although there’s no such thing as the entropyless gesture, and the atoms of the mask are severely agitated by my looking at them. They shuffle off, spread out, diffuse and disperse and lose their organization, what it was, in a pique of fundamental uncertainty.
The back of this mask is a Bose-Einstein condensate, barely above absolute zero, made out of oxygen. Where I touch it, I introduce massive vortices. It already had its own. This is where the cold is going, onto the back of this face I can’t see, made of the great reactive element that drives life and poisons it.
I hold it by the other side and feel myself slow down. The face traps the few starlight photons that arrive here and holds them for its own. It gives nothing away. I get the impression that we won’t reach absolute zero without an effort. Like all good Stuff, even splinter stuff, the Engine won’t finish the job without my moral input. Do or do not, or sit here on your ass and freeze for eternity. It doesn’t care.
Emily Brontë on the couch. Patrick Black’s golden hair. Francie-Francine—a difficult girl, in the best sense of difficult.
On the ice at the Palace, on its ash heap some several billion kilometres away from me, Jalaeka is almost completely inert, as close to dead as I’ve ever seen a Stuff object, though part of that’s bloody-mindedness. Absolute zero is where we all stop, but those of us with things to do in 4-D will stop long before that. It is now almost twenty Kelvin. Thinking takes a long time, although it doesn’t feel like a long time.
I went up to him with the mask in my hand.
“I think this is yours.”
“I left it there a while ago,” he said and didn’t take it. “Finders keepers.”
“It’s yours, if you want it.” I meant Unity. He knew it.
“I don’t want it,” he said. “I believe that’s the point.”
I held it out in my hand and he took it.
60 / Francine
There wasn’t that much to do at the foot of the SankhaGuide Massif. I pulled a couple of people out of a wrecked car along with some others as Valkyrie used her equipment to cut metal and lift cable around us. Then the creatures I’d seen before came back. They slunk through the crowd with blood on their muzzles, quiet and human in their movements so they were barely noticeable for what they were. When people did see who had passed they shrank back and a fresh riffle of panic ran through the lines. Occasionally a tile from Aelf 2 would come down, a silent, deadly missile from above, and smash close by. Fragments of one had already claimed a victim. The sight of the gore-mouthed creatures did the rest and those who had been standing around, either to help or because they didn’t know what else to do, scattered.
I was holding the hand of someone who was trapped beneath part of a cable car door. Beside me two uniformed police officers were fighting to support Valkyrie as she leant down across unstable fractured bubble plastic to attach a line to the door so she could lift it free.
“Skuld,” I said loudly, nervously, as the creatures dropped onto all fours. They were as big as she was, Herculean-sized, and although they weren’t clothed, they were covered in a thick, rufous fur. Their heads were long and bearlike, with tiny, round ears and mobile, narrow snouts that seemed perfectly formed to grub in dangerous ruins. Their teeth were sharp and piercing at the front, where they bared them to sniff and flash their tongues. At the back they had hugely muscled jaws and teeth to shear rock with. Their front limbs had hands, and as they searched, they picked up items from the wreckage: straw dolls, charms, the feather and bone and occult paraphernalia—an incense burner . . . Each of
them carried a leather satchel and into the satchel went the findings.
The Valkyrie looked back and groaned. “Gleaners,” she said. “Try and keep them away.”
“How?”
She was too busy to answer. The blue flame of her torch glowed and metal spat and ran. The police officers were nervous too. In my hand the weak grip of the survivor held fast.
The closest gleaner methodically sifted its way closer. They didn’t seem that frightening on closer inspection. They were too obviously intelligent, I thought. Then the creature smelled blood close by and was transformed with a sudden rush of savagery. It leaped in among the lancing sharpness of glass and metal and tore things apart, pushing and driving its way forward with powerful hindquarters until the top half of its body had penetrated the pile. I could feel the shift of the whole mass as it worked, then heard the grind and champ of its jaws and snuffling.
The others abandoned their own searches, dropping the trinkets, and went barrelling in after it.
Valkyrie had the line. The hand in mine went suddenly slack. I squeezed. Nothing. “Skuld, I think it’s too late.”
She bent down beside me and a needle from her gauntlet slid into the soft, unprotected flesh. I was as appalled by this as by the entire Aerial’s fall, the sight went right to my gut. Then there was a grunt by my ear. I turned and looked into the most massive set of teeth and got a wash of hot breath on my skin. At the same moment Skuld grabbed my arm and hauled me aside, at the same moment firing off a huge number of rounds.
The gleaner and its closest rival exploded in a frenzy of fur, bone and blood. The others howled and rushed in. Valkyrie shot them all, then half carried, half ran with me off the pile as yet more of them arrived, slinking in from side streets, running in. The hand I’d been holding, wondering who, feeling such hope, vanished in one of their mouths.
“Can’t you stop them?” I whispered.
“Can’t shoot them all,” Skuld said, letting me go as another tile of Aelf came hurtling down and shattered. “Usually you only get a few at a time. Never seen this many at once and I want to keep some shells. Whoever’s still in there has had it.” She shrugged. “That’s the way it is here. Worse now the Engine’s running off and everyone’s frightened. So much for the drill. Stay calm. Think happy thoughts. Keep everyone safe. How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” I said, feeling a wave of exhaustion that was almost strong enough to knock me off my feet.
It began to rain and this time there was no hail of bone, only saltwater rain.
Valkyrie said, “Let’s risk the Aelf. It seems to have stabilized for now. Whatever happens, try not to overreact. It’ll only feed the Engine. And don’t do too much wondering. Keep it dull.” She was almost cheerful.
I followed her lead, running to keep up with her huge strides. I heard awful sounds but didn’t look back and didn’t think about what they meant.
Aelf 2 was a fabulous structure, even in the early days of Sankhara when I first got here, but although its crystal and stone, wood and ivory were unsurpassably lovely, they had a sadness about them which was so well-known it was called the Elegy. You couldn’t stand in its huge halls or towers without feeling the draw of the years. Some places were worse than others. Fortunately the Great Hall wasn’t near Sweet Sorrow Falls or the Lost Histories Unit. But it was close enough. Only a few frightened people gathered here, hugging the walls and their Abacands, looking as though they expected to witness the end of civilization.
“Gothic crap,” Valkyrie said with determined good cheer as we stood on the crystal floor amid the rainbow refraction of a billion charmed facets.
I felt a nudge on my arm and looked to find Damien at my elbow. “Thought you were dead,” he murmured to me.
“Oh my god, I thought you were!” I hugged him and felt his narrow arms around me. Then the doors at the far end of the hall opened. Behind them a green darkness. All faces turned, not knowing what was coming, ready for almost anything. There was silence, then a faint sound of trumpets.
White horses came galloping through the gap, more than forty abreast, filling the doorway. They poured in a damburst of snorting, dark-eyed mayhem, straight down the length of the enormous room, and their hooves made high-pitched screaming sounds on the floor, striking silver sparks.
Two small figures in their way vanished without a trace. Everyone plastered themselves closer to the physical substance of the Aelf’s walls and the horses came on wall to wall in a single tide. The building shook with their passage. They passed so close that I could see the detail of their white hair and the flow and dash of their tails. I reached out, sure I could touch them, and Damien’s hand snatched mine back.
I looked across into Damien’s face, seeing it made ugly by fear. “Very bad idea,” he whispered. “Don’t you know anything about anything? These are the white horses of the west.” And then he glanced down and saw the single white hair between our fingers.
The swell and press of horse moved on, except for one animal, which had stopped and turned, impossibly, against the surge.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“We’re going to die after all,” Damien said, surprised and disappointed.
The horse came to face us. Its brothers departed and left it alone there. When I looked at it I could see that the outer shape was a flimsy cover over the creature inside. It was not really a horse. It was shadow, contained in a shell. It blew through its nostrils and the one tiny hair lifted off our hands and fell away into the air. I thought Damien would let go and run for it, but he didn’t. He held tighter to me instead.
I tried to be rational, hard enough at the best of times. “We can’t die just for touching a horse. We didn’t even. It was an accident.”
“That’s written on every dry bone in Sankhara,” Damien snorted. His knuckles hurt mine and he shook as the horse stepped forward, its proud head bending low, for all the world like it was going to drink from a puddle. It didn’t even look particularly frightening.
“You could try running,” Skuld said from behind me, putting her huge metal hand on my shoulder and giving me a push. “I’ll cover you. Have faith.” And she put herself between us and the shadow. I heard the sound of one of her weapons that spat light winding itself up.
I dragged Damien the first stride, then he picked up and ran faster than me, taking me up a path I would never have seen on my own—it was transparent and it ran up the side of the Aelf wall more like a decoration than a footpath. Behind us there was a snort and the high pitch of the energy weapon discharging. The crystal hallway lit up with a blaze of white light. It was blinding. I ran with my arm across my face, my arm pulled out of its socket, until there was nothing but running and pain.
“That was good,” Damien said as he made me stop somewhere with cold wind on my face. “Won’t stop it, but really piss it off. Can you see?”
I tried. “No. Nothing.”
“You will.” He seemed confident. “Never mind now. Just follow me.”
We crossed open space. “Paving,” he said intermittently. “Grass. Steps. Mind out. Duck this branch. Okay, cobbles. Shit.”
“What!”
“It’s locked. Can’t be locked. Some bugger on the inside.” He was hammering on a door.
He turned me to put my back to it and the door fell inward.
“Oh. Great.” I followed him into another big interior, but this one felt much quieter and darker than Aelf 2. I heard him shut the door and we sat down on a soft, velvety seat of some kind and caught our breath.
“Fuck,” I heard him whisper. “It’s coming. Stay here. I’m going to look for other ways out.” He let go of me.
“Damien?” Nothing. “Damien! Jalaeka!” I shouted. My voice echoed back to me along stone galleries. From the cobblestones outside and the general journey I guessed that I was in the fabled Cathedral of Cadenza Piacere Greg had told me about. I could just make out bulky shadows amid a general afterimage that was faintly red.
; “Shut up, girl!” hissed a man somewhere to my left. “Stay quiet and pray for good. Or you’ll bring them all in on us.”
I doubted the horse needed a sound. There was a splintering bang that resounded through the vaults. Hooves on wood.
I heard them muttering, whispers quickly spreading among many:
“It’s her.”
“Her and the elf. We were fine until they came.”
“You should go back outside.”
“You brought it. You go and take it away.”
“Let’s put her out.”
“We’ll take her out. It must be her Stuffie.”
“Where did he go?”
“Has to be hers.”
“No, we shouldn’t. Look where we are. It won’t make it.”
“This is only a building . . .”
“No, wait. We really shouldn’t. Look at her. Look at her face.”
Even though I couldn’t see enough to save myself, I stood up and stumbled away from them, hands out in front of me. I meant to find the wall, and then a door, either out or farther in, away from them. I tried to run.
“It’s her.”
“No it’s not.”
“It is!”
Then more and more excited voices joined the throng.
“She’s in the window! She’s the one!”
Someone sweaty and lightweight grabbed me around the shoulders. I struggled.
“Let’s get the Jesus-freak out of here,” Damien hissed in my ear.
“Wait a second,” I said.
“What? They’re crazy.”
Blam. The splintering bashing noises got more insistent. I heard a silvery tinkling and thought—chandeliers.
“What am I doing in the window?”
“You . . . oh.” He stopped. “You’re in a big white dress and there’s this sexy dark chick in a red dress lying across your lap looking dead. Didn’t you come here when they had the tour on?”
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 46
