New Venice 02 - Luminous Chaos

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  Gabriel blinked and wondered where he was. A faint realization of what he had just done slowly crept into his mind, and a near-retch coated his mouth with bile.

  Thoughtful and nauseated, he walked back to the bedroom through the dark passageway, finding his way as usual by trawling his hand to read the bas-reliefs. The Twins were already in their bed, and, he could tell, pretending to sleep. He sat down beside them gently, neatly tucked them in and whispered, “I missed you so much.” They did not answer, and so he merely leaned down to put a kiss on each of their foreheads.

  Afterwards, feeling very lonely, he walked back to the door, where he noticed a faint glow from the umbrella stand. It was the Kiggertarpoq cane. How could he have forgotten? He took it with a wink to the Polar Kangaroo and walked out of the room.

  Lemminkainen saw the blood on his coat immediately. “Don’t worry,” Gabriel told him reassuringly. “It’s mine. We were just playing around.”

  At the bottom of the canal, his body bobbed gently like seaweed, shreds of torn skin and thin filaments of blood streaming from his broken face, his ankle anchored to the silt by the terrestrial globe.

  IV

  The Second Death of Brentford Orsini

  Brentford couldn’t believe that he was back in New Venice.

  After leaving Gabriel, he’d hung around for a while in the deserted late-night streets, occasionally bending down and touching the cobblestones to convince himself that they were real. Their materiality left him elated. Even the filth and grime and litter of the streets filled him with a sort of well-being, as tokens of the history New Venice didn’t want but still had. It all made the city older, and dirtier, but also more human. He understood what Savnock had been trying to get across—that the city was not a negation of nature but the crystal prism through which its rays burned more gloriously.

  Around him, New Venice throbbed and hummed in its muted nighttime fashion, vibrating with a nervous energy as if to hide the fact that it was so close to the bone of the world. Somewhere under the hum, Brentford could almost feel the work of the dreamers as they patched the rents of the day and wove the city anew, for it was true that Sleepers, Too, Are the Craftsmen of the World, as the motto carved onto the Seven Sleepers’ cenotaph observed. And with the satisfaction that everything here seemed to be in order, even if that order was little more than a frail truce with the primeval gods of Chaos, came the realization that for a few days he was still Regent-Doge.

  That he also was to be the murderer of a Regent-Doge, however, brought him up short. Do All, Be All, indeed. But as Gabriel had said, it all stayed in the family. Speaking of which, he put a note he had written earlier into a nearby dustbin, where he knew the Scavengers would get it quickly. They really were family.

  Incognito under his muffler, Brentford continued on, taking a late gondola to the Orsini House, a small-scale but credible three-story replica of a Venetian palazzo hidden behind a nondescript façade. Slipping through the rear entrance just off the canal, he stepped softly, careful not to wake up old Roggero, even if normally the only thing to fear from his faithful servant was that his snoring might collapse the building and crush them all.

  Upstairs in his office, however, he knew that the master did not sleep. Brentford remembered how, on this very night, he had stayed up late, working on files and notes and decrees and legislation, as he always did, even though he knew that with only seven days remaining in office these efforts would be wasted, as most of his efforts had been. Brave Brentford, he thought, for whom power just meant more horsepower for more hard work.

  Step after step he climbed the stairs to the office, vaguely entertaining the notion that he didn’t have to do this. What would happen if he didn’t kill the Regent-Doge—who after all had done nothing to deserve death? What would happen if he walked in with his own eyes open? Innocence would happen, he knew—deaths and wrongs would be forgotten. But so would his meetings with the Sleepers and the time he had spent with friends. Even if Lavis, Blankbate, Tuluk, or Thomas had not truly died, they had died a human death, and they should be remembered for the sacrifice that they had accepted. And, for himself, he could not, would not, give up the least part of what had been his life, or renounce even a single memory. And so he was to become a murderer.

  He found himself on the landing, his hand trembling on the doorknob.

  “Now,” he told himself, “close your eyes.”

  He pushed the door open quickly and heard a rustle of paper. It took him a few moments to find the nerve to open his eyes, and when he did so, he found himself facing himself. Death had been quick and merciful. The late Regent-Doge sat seemingly comfortably in his chair, amazement frozen on his face forever. He still had his pen in his hand, as if about to sign his name, and looked more like a wax figure than a corpse. It was not a pretty sight, but Brentford found it curiously attractive.

  He carefully closed the door behind him, and as he passed a model of the city on a nearby table, he thought, “What did I tell you? All right … it was more than one minute—or maybe not.”

  He sat in front of his dead self and simply stared at himself, stuck signing papers for eternity. He imagined his mind and that of his doppelganger’s to be about equally blank just then. Finally, when the clock struck two, he stood up and pulled together the papers that he had been working on one week ago. There was still time before the Scavengers arrived.

  An idea dawned on him. Of course the elections were lost, and de Lanternois out of the way, but there might be something he could devise to make Peterswarden pay for his conspiracy. Though he had himself destroyed all the proofs of a scheme that had not yet happened, he wondered if he might find something useful in the ledgers of the Academy of Arctic Anthropology, as he had a hunch that this budget had been used to bribe some electors. As he was making a note to his staff about it, he noticed the shadows in the opposite corner of the room forming a shape that reminded him of Helen’s profile. He sighed and put down his pen.

  “All right,” he said softly to himself. “I won’t become like him …”

  Instead of charging Peterswarden, he wrote two notes: One asking the Bureau of Buildings to check in their archives for any blueprints regarding a building known as “The Tower of the Sun.” The second note was to Lilian, asking her to dinner. He sent them off on his pneu machine, and then, as the clock struck three, prepared himself to meet the Scavengers.

  He quickly realized that you can’t really prepare yourself for carrying your own corpse around on your back, especially down dark stairs and along windswept canals, but that it helps if you can turn it into some sort of allegory. But breathless and trembling from the wind swooshing along the canal, with his own dead body slumped next to him like a drunken tramp, he was still wondering what the hell it all meant when he saw the barge finally gliding towards him.

  As the Scavengers moored in front of the palazzo, Brentford recognized Blankbate’s bulk. He immediately jumped onto the barge and hugged the Scavenger, until they both found themselves embarrassed.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Brentford explained.

  “I saw you last just two days ago,” Blankbate replied, puzzled.

  “They have been two … long days,” Brentford stammered.

  “Your note said you have a Monster?” Blankbate asked mercifully.

  It was the code name among Scavengers for all sorts of especially cumbersome rubbish, including human bodies. The story went that it came from the fact that the first Scavengers of New Venice had found a century-old corpse made of stitched and patched human remains not very far from the city.

  “A sort of Monster, yes,” Brentford said, indicating the shape leaning against the wall.

  They climbed up the embankment and Blankbate took a closer look. He turned towards Brentford, the bird mask hiding any expression of surprise or disgust.

  “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  With a nod, he invited the others to join them, and taking up the corpse with probably more pre
cautions than they would have used if Brentford had not been watching, two of the Scavengers carried it back to the barge. A third had already opened the trash compactor in the middle of the deck. It gaped open, dark and humid, emitting a heady whiff of greenhouse compost and half-rotten food. Brentford remembered his days as a novice, when the Scavengers had initiated him in the mysteries of filth—by smothering him under a heap of it. It was one way of getting acquainted with the city in a most intimate sense. He also recalled the night when he had seen his archenemy, Delwit Faber, paddling in this filthy muck and pleading for his life before being mercilessly crushed by Blankbate. It all seemed such a long time ago, but he could still appreciate the poetic justice.

  “You don’t have to look,” Blankbate said.

  Brentford nodded but found he could not turn his head away.

  His body was thrown into the compactor, like a dead dog, and it bobbed on the rubbish as the hydraulic walls of the compactor slowly closed, engulfing it with a nauseating squash. Now, his corpse would be turned to plant food for the greenhouses he had once run. He heard the bones crack, like eggs hatching.

  The allegory had finally come to him.

  V

  The Thirteenth Returns

  On that sunny St. Mark’s day in 1907 A.B.—After Backwards—the white Buildings of New Venice bristled with flags and were heavy with banners, while all along the thronged embankments a cheering crowd waved through a colourful whirlwind of streamers and confetti. As far as the eye could see, a canalcade of ribboned gondolas paraded under draped bridges, crushing brittle pancakes of ice with their gleaming gilded prows.

  It was a great day for New Venice, and even Brentford Orsini, the fallen Regent-Doge, seemed to enjoy the occasion.

  He sat under a canopy in the leading gondola, observing with a half-smile the crowd above him, perhaps looking for some friends of his in the noisy colourful blur. Sometimes he glanced at Peterswarden, who, totally unaware that his plot had ever existed, now offered him, instead of real threats, a Machiavellian pantomime of cunning smiles and sly looks that Brentford found amusingly grotesque.

  It had been strangely soothing to relive these last three days, knowing all the time that the outcome would be a happy ending; deeply soothing to see again people he had seen die or had himself sent to their death, like meeting your loved ones in some crystal corner of the New Jerusalem. They had given the word holidays its true meaning, these missing pages from the Penny Dreadful of Time.

  The gondola glided away from the shadows and Brentford closed his eyes to the sudden rush of daylight: it was only the pale, feeble Arctic sun, but trapped under his eyelids, it roared with a golden glow. The city persisted for a while, a purple vision that he tried to hold back from the devouring light, but it faded out in the flames, atom after atom, and finally dissolved.

  As such, it would be, in any case, a large tax upon the gullibility of readers outside the back streets of Paris.

  A. E. Waite, Devil Worship in France, 1896

  JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VALTAT is the author of Aurorarama, the first book in the Mysteries of New Venice series. Born in 1968 and educated at the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne, he lives in Montpelier, where he teaches comparative literature. He has also written a book of short stories, Album, and two other novels, Exes and 03 (published in English), as well as award-winning radio plays and the screenplay for Augustine (2003), which he also codirected.

  READ BOOK ONE IN THE STEAMPUNK TRILOGY

  THE MYSTERIES OF NEW VENICE

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  —THE GUARDIAN

  “Combining Arctic adventure with Victorian fantasy, this page-turner is as sparkling and colorful as the northern lights.”

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