“Dead?” I wrenched my hand free from his sticky grip. “What do you mean?”
“It’s an old snow thing. The white and the red. Blood and ice. Or possibly semen. Depends on the interpretation you know. Primal fluids. Alchemy almost definitely. Sulphur and Mercury. Passion and Life. Possibly also death. Could be she isn’t dead but poisoned or a sorceress simulating death or . . . we have to go.”
“Let me go, you thick faery!” I screamed at him at the top of my lungs.
The door crashed in. I heard the clip clop of hooves coming steadily towards us.
I heard my voice echoing. Everyone held their breath but me. I felt an icy wind rip the marrow out of my bones, felt a chill like the end of all cold, the last sun-down in creation. It wasn’t in the cathedral. It came from inside. I heard him talking to me, softly talking as if there was all the time in the world.
“It’s not him,” called a woman’s voice cleanly out over the heads of the congregation. “It’s you.” I knew she meant Cadenza Fortitude the first time. Cadenza Piacere the second.
Now or never.
You’d better come back, I said to him, into the ice.
I turned to the white horse of the west and put Damien behind me. “You,” I said to it, addressing its pale gleam and hoping that was really where it was. “Take your shedding flea-bit coat the hell out of my house.”
There was no more cold. Only quiet. Deep quiet, and the sound of sirens.
I reached back for Damien’s hand and held it tight.
It was a long night, and many long nights came after it, filled with the nightmares and the dreams the Engine left behind. On the fourth day Damien, along with every other Stuffie, vanished into thin air. He’d gone up to the roof to take his watch, but he never came back. Neither did the white horse.
After that things became harder, and more ordinary. Valkyrie and I spent our days scavenging and praying her ammunition wouldn’t be needed, nor run out. We moved out of Piacere because it was full of people who wanted to worship me. We ran, and went to live in Damien’s old place, in Low Aelf.
On the eighth day everyone who had treated with Unity in any way vanished. The only thing that stayed behind were the inert structures it had built and these, where they’d relied on any strange manipulation of matter, broke and fell apart.
Skuld had just said, “The sun’s up. Let’s go now, before too many other people get out. I think we could risk flying over to the South Shore. There may be houses over near the Dunes Park that haven’t been touched. The power’s still on in the south. There could be a lot of food.”
I was relacing my boots more tightly, focused by a gnawing hunger, when I felt the stale air stir with a sound as though Skuld had sighed heavily. I looked up. I was alone.
61 / Jalaeka
None of us has ever died. But we know the days and nights, the long hours of the suns, and all the things to do by light of moon and torch, flare, fire, bell, lamp, candle, phosphor light, flash of guns and death of stars.
Quick. Shake yourself. Pinch yourself. Wake up.
Those that are with me are of me. Those that are with me are of me.
Those that are not with me are gone.
Gone.
Spring-heeled Jack is coming. Quick. Wake up.
Hold my hand. You can’t. I understand. Your hand is my hand.
I didn’t mean it. Come back. Come back. Come back.
What is me belongs to you. Take it. Take. Close my hand.
Dreaming of a promised land, dreaming.
That the words meant something when he said, “Love conquers everything.” When he said, “Love is the highest conscious aspiration.” When he said, “If I have not love, then I am nothing.” Well I had love and this is what it brought. All of them and their ideas of love tearing me apart to make again as old clothes are made again, as things unravelled get reknit into things similar and of better fit.
The believers prayed. The summoners sat agape. Some ran away.
All eaten and their bones below, turned over by curious fingers and counted, my treasure, my hoard, my wealth, come to my heart and build a cathedral there and let your voices fill the air, what say you all, what say you, what say you all lords and ladies?
Bring me my bow. It is twangy.
Bring me my arrows. Sharp, poisoned. Just the way I like ’em.
Bring me a glamorous chariot, something made by a reputable firm, not too showy, the kind that says I have not only taste and money but the sense to keep my vanity to myself. I don’t want them to see me coming before I screw them for their lives.
Will it be parade day today? When all the old loves are set up like skittles, recriminations silent but at the ready, bayonets fixed. I’ll slam the faces on those helmets shut so the mirrors turn upon them in the dark. I’ll kiss them and beg at their knees. I’ll tie their boot-laces together. They won’t catch me.
Can a dog serve more than one master?
On either side of the equals sign the velvet river lies, the Styx, the Thames, the long, green wind of Saraswati. Searching out the level ground they lay their tresses all around and set fire to what the gods must have. Fat and bones for the fools: fat and broken bones and 36B, inboard metabolic component number 93, hair colour from the “Honey Autumn” range—we gave her enough intelligence to gain a Ph.D., Mrs. Bequerel, just as you asked, and the artistic component “Sylvia,” and the feminine quotient called “Eugenie,” which is reasonably close to the masculine mean, more than for a girl’s girl like those common “CharityFaithHopeAngel” types, laugh along with me, madam, we know their sort—and eyes designed by the brilliant Islamic artist who puts the flaw in where you can spend a lifetime looking for it or see it straightaway, your protection against the wrath of jealous gods.
In the bone cathedral the choir is singing. Incense like water and we are all out of the body and the blood, you’ll have to go elsewhere, down the road, for that kind of thing. I can’t save you. You can’t save me. There is no ever after.
Up, up get up it’s already late.
62 / Francine
Rita and I sat on the beach. In our rag clothing and with our brown arms we looked like pirate castaways, but there was never any Jolly Roger on the horizon for us, and we’d stopped looking for it months ago.
We were digging for razor clams. We had quite a few collected in an orange kids’ plastic bucket, but we needed more.
“It has to be today,” Rita said confidently, even though the last hour had added only a few hundred to the total. “Can’t be many more to make some mind up. Let’s try farther along this way.”
The crater and scatter of the Engine’s violent departure made rings of debris by which we measured our position. We were down below the high tide mark, in Chunky. Rita pointed to the damp sand of Small Chunky and I followed her down there. She was the decisive one. I’d learned to like following her.
“Hey!” a voice shouted out from far behind us.
We both spun around. I dropped the bucket. In the first instants I struggled not to get up hope.
“Francine!” the voice hollered, and I saw a man standing on the boardwalk where it stopped being orderly and became a splintered and broken mass of old planks. He jumped over the rail on the sand and began to run around Big Chunky towards us. His hair was a chestnut mass, his clothing dishevelled, his movements strangely exhilarated.
As he came forward the dead palms at the back of the boardwalk with their sand-blown leaves grew supple and green. The city shivered and burst back to life. A group of sparrows in flight exploded into existence a few yards away and scattered for the bushes of the high dunes behind us.
I ran out to meet him. The last time I’d seen him—he wasn’t even him. But this was. Exactly.
Greg picked me up and spun me round. “What is it with you and this beach?”
I couldn’t speak. I just clung to him and when he set me down I jumped about on the sand. “What happened? Where’s Jalaeka?” I couldn’t stop staring at hi
m and the sudden riot of living action that Sankhara had become, as though it had never stopped, except for the crater of Engine House.
My Abacand woke itself up and said, “SankhaGuide’s back. Says we’re reconnected to Solar Earth, time-lines converging. Gateway’s under Solar control but should soon reopen for business. Hmm. Looks like Metatron’s got some strange new thing going on—I’ll get back to you on that . . .”
Rita and Greg introduced themselves.
“Not everybody’s back,” Greg said. “Some didn’t want to. And a lot—of the Stuff things that used to live here—they didn’t get to. ’S’not exactly a democracy in there.”
Rita frowned at him. “No, I can see that.”
“Skuld?” I asked him hopefully. “Damien?”
“I don’t know.” He grinned. “Isn’t that fantastic? I don’t know! I’d have to really, really try to find out!”
“So, you know, is Jalaeka back?” I looked past him, towards the boardwalk.
“Francie.” Greg caught my arm. His face went very serious.
“What?” I thought I didn’t want to hear this.
“Did you let him go?”
“Of course I did. I mean, I got your letter but then he was talking to me and I thought I didn’t have to . . . why?”
“I think that Greg’s trying to point out that he isn’t here,” Rita said in a voice carefully balanced to be diplomatic, although it ended on a rising tone that suggested she was trying to break the bad news to me. I saw her look right through me, suppressing a smile.
Two gentle hands covered my eyes. “Gotcha. Guess who?”
About the Author
Justina Robson was born and brought up in Leeds. She studied philosophy and linguistics before settling down to write in 1992. Her earlier novels, Silver Screen (1999) and Mappa Mundi (2001), were both shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE GOD OF LOVE
A Bantam Spectra Book / April 2006
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Justina Robson
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Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Robson Justina.
Living next door to the god of love / Justina Robson.
p. cm.—(A Bantam spectra book)
I. Title
PR6118.O28L585 2006
823′.92—dc22 2005056271
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90249-5
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Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 47
