Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  Just feeling the possibility is so hypnotically, mindfuckingly enticing I feel myself beginning to topple in. I’m tired of running and tired of the whole damn thing where I fight to stay free and it keeps on coming. It would be so easy . . .

  Angel #5 collects a tear from my eye on the tip of her finger, and the spell breaks with her touch. I’m so grateful I kiss her, because it’s the next thing I want to do, and if there has to be a last thing I do then I can’t think of anything better than that.

  She tugs my long hair playfully. She isn’t dumb enough to let me look through her eyes in a direct stare, like I let her do to me for the first time just now, although I can see all her intentions even without doing that. I see what’s in people’s hearts clearer than I see my own night-black hand in front of my face.

  “You don’t want me to go,” she says in her educated Southern accent, staring right into my soul. Uh-oh. My need to be close to her has let her get too close for her own good. She starts to realize that I haven’t always been entirely straight with her. She sees, without understanding what it is that she’s seeing, that I am not human but that I am not a Unity creation either. She starts to form a question and her delicate eyebrows begin to frown.

  I wish she could be seeing something better. Looking at the inside of my soul must be akin to watching slasher horror—so it feels to me, anyway.

  “You have to go!” I finally find my guts as her halo becomes diffuse with confusion, and I try to wrestle her bodily off the parapet. It’s a no-contest and she goes easily, absorbing my energy. She falls a few metres and rises again with her arms folded definitively beneath her breasts, gold strands of ambrosial fragrance twisting off her like smoke. She hovers in front of me and fans me with a breeze that smells of Estée Lauder’s Beautiful Springtime and a hint of the burned flesh of sinners in hell. Angel #5 fights Wing Tsun style and she accessorizes with a razor-sharp sense of irony.

  I am utterly frozen with adoration. And . . .

  “What’s the matter?” she demands. When I don’t answer she tries to compel me to reply by directing the interrogative beam of her halo at me, but I’m out beyond its reach.

  The Unity agent within my space just noticed Angel #5 talking to nobody, making love to nobody, on this slaughterhouse roof. As have several other heroes currently out hoping for trouble.

  Something strong, slender, like a thorn, tries to hook onto the inside of me. It searches for an opening through which it can transform me and remake my substance into ordinary Stuff.

  The human heroes become wary, disgusted, intrigued and afraid, as they see my form flicker like a candleflame. They have no trouble identifying me once they know where to look. Even through all the Forging and the MekTek, humans are a bipolar gender species, and twelve-foot-tall naked hermaphrodites with demon tails mostly give them the heebie-jeebies. Some of them try and claim their whole costume and identity good/bad thing isn’t linked to their sex lives but they’re lying out their ass.

  As Unity attempts to drag me into 7-space unsuccessfully and I try to think of any way to save Angel #5, one of the Silver Surfers floats past, idly leaning around the buildings. He’s a MegaCity man but he’s very keen on Angel #5—you rarely see him far from her. He whistles at her and she blesses him. He does a backflip with ecstasy and I look away.

  Unity cannot eat me. I knew this before. That’s how I knew there had to be another game on tonight—a poker hand of persuasion that will almost certainly suck Angel into its trouble. I still can’t see the strategy though: what the hell is it going to do? Something very bad.

  I try to disconnect its hold on me where it surrounds me in complete 11-dimensional stickiness, but the fucker is really tricky. Every transform in 7-space that I use to repel it takes too much time. It’s faster on the draw than I am. It fights Wing Tsun style too, and when I break its grip it just gets a new one.

  I suspected that this time it might try to finish me off. We’ve done the dance of all seven veils and there was no nice bedroom routine at the end of any of those, so now all that remains, if it’s serious, is to go for the knockout in some way that doesn’t involve eating me.

  And then, at last, it shows me the gun.

  There’s a new wall around Metropolis through which I can’t see, hear, feel, taste or touch anything on any level. The pinnacles of the Bates Motel range are winking out of my sight in the far distance and I can tell that the darkness falling over them isn’t light being taken away—it’s everything being taken away. Laughing and crying and joyful and hurting people are falling off my barometer by the hundred thousand and it’s like I’m going emotionally blind. The Metropolis Engine is undoing the world.

  I didn’t think Unity would go this far, but obviously I’m wrong. This universe and everything in it will soon be over. In the time it takes my slow brain to figure this out the giant harbour is consumed by nothingness. A final shadow drapes Gotham. A curtain drifts gently across the top of the park, silent and blank.

  I wrap the end of my tail around Angel #5’s ankle, preparing to fling her, but I don’t know where I can send her to. There really is nowhere, because their plan is simply to close Metropolis altogether, to end this 4-D, and me with it. If I stay fully 4-D I am dead; and if I try to go through the 7-D I can easily be smashed in the colossal gravitational tides that this destruction is creating. Desperation makes me hesitate. I think I can save myself through a complete 11-D shift, but she can’t come with me. Well she can, but only through the same mechanism that I’ve fought against all my life, through the same mechanism by which Unity has become what it’s become.

  I can save her, if I eat her.

  People who are eaten do not come back the same, if they come back at all, and I’m not sure that ever happens. There’s no time to think it through. I wish I could explain it to her, but all I can do is love her with all my heart.

  “Eros?” Angel’s cross with my stupid behaviour now, but ready to be friendly. She zaps my tail with a Purity charge, but, thanks to the literal rules of combat here, I don’t have to let her go because I don’t mean to hurt her.

  That doesn’t make it painless however. Her energy bolt seeks out the deaths on my conscience and burns me for all of them. I hiss at the horrible sensation but tighten my hold on her and snatch her back to me for one last instant.

  Her face darkens with suspicion and she cries out angrily. Her blue eyes try to read my intentions, but I’m watching that wall of silence whip around both of us, watching the stupid glory of this place vanishing as time catches up with it and knots itself to an end. To her credit I can feel the shift in her emotion fix itself on steely determination as Angel #5 gets a bearing on what’s going down.

  My Vicky Vale is already the history of a world that will have no histories.

  All of my friends, except Angel here, are dead. There are no more Angels.

  I fling her through one of the holes in the Marvel building, one that leads to another world, maybe. I have no idea. It could simply be a hole with nothing behind it except a singularity and nothing in front of it but my bad decision, but there’s not enough time to find out.

  As she flies away from me at close to the speed of sound Angel opens her arms and her heart towards me. A sphere of white light emerges from the centre of her chest, so bright I have to close my eyes. The light hits me in the solar plexus. All Angel’s power and dreams, the love and the anger she feels for me for not explaining why this is happening to her, bury themselves in my heart.

  I spread my wings and fold myself inside them, into a new universe.

  1 / Francine

  “ ’S’not like Ashley is even that nice a guy,” Sula said, tipping the last of her Slingshot into her mouth and swallowing thoughtfully with only a slight wince. “I mean, he went out with Miki on all those not-really-cheating dates during your open-relationship phase.”

  “It was allowed,” I said, looking at my empty glass. I had drunk three cocktails and was feeling pleasantly venomous with re
gard to Ashley; also brave, also sloshy.

  “Don’ defend him,” Sula admonished me in a single slur. She signalled for another drink with a flourish of her perfectly manicured hand. (Oh the endless hours of preening we did and the money we spent just to keep up, not even winning, only staying in the game.)

  She added without grammar, “Spent five bloody months doing that. Where it got you? Nothing.”

  “Nowhere,” I agreed with drunk logic. I’d planned to tell her about several other men I’d had take an interest in me. I always planned to, but never got around to it, as if there was going to be a future time in which she wouldn’t be surprised to find that her quiet and studious best mate had an alter ego whose agenda was a hundred times more out of control than she let on. Popular, cheerful, happy Sula was the defender and social saviour of quirky, geeky, quiet Francine, who’d rather hole up with an interface than face people all the time, head-on. Those were our professions at school, our stock-in-trade outside. But anyway, Ashley was an asshole, I had to admit it, although I hated to admit it because of the time and energy already wasted in being in love with him for so long and taking all the:

  You could make more of yourself; and the

  Why don’t you dress more like Su; and the

  I can’t stand it when you start arguing; and the

  Don’t talk about the generation of Forged Class Orders and other smart stuff in front of my parents, okay? They don’t like weird people; and especially the

  You look better when you smile.

  “There comes a point when you stay because you’ve invested too heavily to face buying yourself out. You have to pay yourself back, with interest, and you pay everyone you know, in the currency of their dismay at your deceptions . . . And then, the gambling . . .”

  “Francine!” Su shook me by the shoulder. “You’re talking to yourself.”

  “I know,” I said crossly, because I hadn’t realized I was doing it. A jolt of fear at my own behaviour ricocheted off the inside of my sternum and it was so alarming that I giggled. Always the girls with the inappropriate laughs . . .

  “Here, have a cocktail.” Sula pushed another glass at me as the waiter came over and delivered two of the pretty yellow and orange drinks to our table. “God this’ll finish my allowance. Never mind. I’ll tell some sob story to Dad when he gets back from Ingeborg or whatever he’s doing and that’ll sort it out.” She batted big eyelashes at me, grinning, and I watched the lights sparkle off her eye glitter with the cold beauty of frost. Sula twisted all men around her fingers, dazzled them with the flash of her inconstant eyes, the strange flicker of her attention that gave her commonplace engineered beauty an indefinable eroticism. I longed to have her power.

  “I was seeing Roni Vance in secret and two days ago he came on to me and we had sex at school in the games lock-up,” I said. It came out sounding a lot flatter and nastier than I intended. I didn’t recognize my own voice.

  In the mini-movie of me giving this speech I had been a lot more amusing. But now I’ve got the voice of the tougher and more real me who’s been living inside Francine recently. She’s my disappointed half, the part who wanted to feel warmth, see colour, hear the world as if it was an instrument she could play. She went out with her sign turned to say Open, had no door policy and . . . well, that Francine’s not so nice now.

  “Va-va Vance?” Sula gave him his classroom nickname. He was the sports teacher at our school, and by the way he dressed you could see he considered himself quite the hunk. He was good-looking, but around girls he had the careful attentiveness of a pit viper.

  I’d thought . . . I don’t know what I thought to be honest. There wasn’t much thinking. Using him was like test-driving a disappointing sports car. It goes for sure, fast—and that’s when you realize that not only haven’t you got anywhere to go in it, there aren’t even any roads out of town.

  “He Va-va-vooms through it like a train,” I said in a sudden need to explain, excuse, get free of the horrible gaze we were sharing that told me (contrary to my expectations) that Sula was appalled. She should be laughing. I want to make her laugh. I want to stop her staring at me as though I spat on god. I want to fabricate a joke, but the truth will do as it happens. “Va-va . . . and then he’s like giving me all this dross about his girlfriend getting on his case while he wipes himself off on one of the basketball bibs.” I took half my drink in one go. “It’s the one at the bottom of the red pile, so don’t be point guard next week.”

  “Frannie?” Sula said softly, her shock evident by the paling of her face.

  She’s not angry with me because she thinks I’m bad. She’s distraught because she can see that . . . (and suddenly I can see that) . . . I’m hurt. Really hurt. I did it to myself and I don’t know why.

  I want to vomit on her lap but I don’t. I pick up my Slingshot with easy grace and look at the shine on my chromed nails. I list a few of the boys in the senior year and a bunch of names she’s never heard of, all men old enough to be one of our fathers. Well, if we had any idea who my father actually was. It’s hard to say and, after the chromosomal tracking and filtering is all done does it really matter who’s what? I have thirty fathers, all their strengths, none of their digressive mutations . . . and one mother, who spent all her student years designing me over and over on the page decades before I was born.

  I tell her about the men’s various styles, their habits, their ways, all of which involve dumping me in one way or another. I have a worldly air that is supposed to be sophisticated but somehow, although it is on other people, it’s not on me. I tell her about Dix Clarke, the small-time LeedsGuide show host who picked me up last Tuesday with a lot of lines about how he liked intelligent girls and dropped me off at my house with a packet of candy and a thumbprint on my Abacand that gets me half price of whatever shit they’re promoting this week, all in return for a hand job.

  “Be glad they only show him from the waist up,” I said, admiring my cool, my stony delivery of a nice line. It’s bullshit. He was nothing out of the ordinary as far as I can remember, which isn’t far, but I need to hate him—that sad, lonely, wretched, awful man who wanted me to cuddle him after. “He took my number. Didn’t call. I call that rude.”

  “Frannie,” Su was quieter now. She put her drink down. “Are you serious?” But she doesn’t need the answer. Francine is always serious about whatever it is. “Are you okay?”

  “You know what Darren calls me?” Darren is my mother’s boyfriend. He lives with us, and has done for five years. He’s big in the design of disposable tableware for spaceflight catering; ergonomic handles, nutritionally enhanced plastics, all that. “Hive Spawn. Because I’m like those Forged, to him. The ones that think and live inside machines. He has a thing about insects too, which makes that all the nicer. Allergic to bee-stings. You should see him when one comes in the house.” I flip and flap my hands, dodge the imaginary bee, squeal like a kid and laugh. I want to die.

  “Frannie.”

  “What?”

  “You’re scaring me.” Su isn’t drinking.

  “Don’t worry,” I assure her. “I’m probably just acting out some desperate need for love. Not to mention issues at home; dingbat ex-model mother losing her looks and getting old, devious stepfather bent on social climbing into the stratospheric heights of county politics. Nobody who understands me. You could do me as a project in Psych in ten minutes.” My self-pity made me nauseous.

  “Here,” Sula said sharply, taking two fluorescent tubes of Hydro out of her bag. She cracked the tops and handed me one as she tipped her head back and sucked the liquid out of hers. With a cough she flicked the empty tube onto the floor under the table, not even glancing to see if anybody noticed. She paused and closed her eyes as the soft drug brought on its temporary calming, alcohol-neutralizing glow.

  “Do you hate me?” I knocked back my tube, tasting the sharp lime flavour, feeling the almost instant rush fade into a dreamy sense of princess-wellness in about two seconds.r />
  “Of course not.” Sula hesitated, then took a tissue out of her bag and wiped her eyes with it carefully, under the mascara line, blotting the moisture. She checked the white paper for smudges before she put it away. “But holy shit, Annie, you know how to drop the bloody bombshell. I’m the Slut With Problems. Me. Not you. You’re the smart homework girl. You’re the all-A girl who was going to do something extraordinary one day long after I was some big sassy momma eating brown rice and bringing up a thousand kids nobody else could be bothered to have . . . fuck!”

  I can’t stand looking at her face anymore. I get up, full of determination, and make for the Ladies. Inside the light is too bright and the tiles are too shiny. I lock myself into one of the cubicles, put the seat lid down, sit and open my bag. I’ve thought of this day a long time. Kind of surprised it’s today.

  I put the pathetic little first-aid numbing patch on the back of my left hand and trigger it. It probably won’t go deep enough, but it’s all that was in the medicine cabinet.

  I yank a load of tissue out of the dispenser and spread that under my left hand, and some within easy reach of my right, balanced on the top of the paper-holder to keep it clean. I know if I think about this at all I won’t do it. Four Slingshots is about enough to get there, not too many to make me shaky, and the Hydro has taken off the worst of the motor-neuron interference from the alcohol. I’ve practiced with a piece of card dozens of times; hundreds of times with a stylus. A designer’s knife is lot like that.

  With my index finger I trace the outline of the Tab chip in the back of my hand and use an eye pencil to mark the corners. I overdo the pressure on the first pass and feel the blade snick into and drag the stupid chip, cutting its surface so that my vision instantly fogs up with red warnings from NorthNet, advising me that I may be experiencing technical difficulties with my Tabacand, telling me to get some advice on how to fix it and would I like to know about special offers on replacement models? I get NorthNet itself talking to me a second later. It speaks with the voice of an angel, Michael or Raphael, always gentle, as if it cared. And I used to confide in it, as if it cared.