Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  Do you thirst for more than an ordinary life?

  It was lilac paper, with pink hearts.

  Despite your job and family, is there something missing, deep inside?

  Do you ever wonder what the point of life is now that you can be young, beautiful, wealthy, educated and long-lived?

  Do you feel that science and technology have discovered all there is to know?

  Do you find no pleasure in wealth and in possessions anymore?

  If you think there’s more than meets the eye, come to a meeting where your local Guide shows the symbol of the heart.

  I looked down into her hopeful face. “You think I need help?”

  She took the paper from my hand and screwed it up, letting it fall on the ground, where it blew away. We were close to one another in a way that seems to come up by accident, until you notice it and the pull of one hand to another—my hand to her cheek, her hands to my waist, her legs to my legs, my face to her face, her mouth to mine—takes on its own magnetism, slow enough to taste and soft enough to slide down through like new snow; but I fell harder than that as her body pressed against me. Her lips were cold and tasted of the freezing air. She treated me so carefully, she broke me.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked when she finally drew back. The moonlight made her face white, her eyes and mouth blue bruises like watercolour splashes.

  “I should be on my knees,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Show me inside.”

  We walked up the left-hand curve of the outer staircase to reach the palace door, a single piece of oak, studded with iron and carved with deep recesses in Celtic knots that no Russian palace ever boasted. Set within the door was a smaller door, which opened to the touch of my hand.

  “Things live out there,” I said self-consciously, locking it after us by the same act of will. My voice echoed and revealed the size of the hall in which we stood even more effectively than the gleaming electric light that came on to her touch. “Wolves, tigers, bears . . . other things.”

  I barely noticed the splendour of the place this time; there were some marble stairs, white, and a carpet in bloody red and statues in niches and pillars that dripped gilded decoration, balustrades like entire ski slopes, pillars of blue stone, and great archways that led into darkened galleries and halls receding beyond sight, all that kind of thing. I glanced at the roof because Francine gave it a fearful look as she walked up the first flight of steps. She stood on the landing beside the tortured figure of Laocoön wrapped in snakes and stared at it.

  “Huey Cobras,” I said, staring at the meticulously rendered details of a mural depicting helicopter gunships over a burning jungle of gruesome orange and grey. The light from the pendant crystal chandeliers gave it a flat, decomposing look.

  “You what?”

  “It’s from an old film about a war. It changes now and again.”

  Vietnam. Apocalypse Now. You wouldn’t know it. You were born hundreds of years too late. Last time I saw that film was in the house of somebody I thought I would be with forever.

  The place didn’t echo, didn’t mutter. It was as quiet as a tomb. I listened to her fill it up. I took her to my room, smaller than the rest, its lamps lit to show its hot red/pink brocade walls, damask curtains, impossible, vast bed. The fire in the hearth burned on logs that would last the night, big enough to roast an ox on. It was hot in there. I moved some of my books, worried in case they were going to catch fire where I’d left them piled on the rugs so close to the heat.

  “You live here? Sleep . . .” she looked at the untouched plains of the bed, “here?”

  “I don’t need sleep,” I admitted.

  “But you might like it,” she said. “It’s nice. To get away, for a while, sometimes. I like it.” She took off my jacket, then her coat and came closer. I sat down on the floor to let her do what she liked and when she sat near me, lay down on my side, looking into the flames. After a while I rolled onto my back and caught her looking at me. She was biting her nails and snatched them away from her mouth instantly, pushing her hands into her pockets.

  “Touch me,” I said. “Please.”

  PART TWO

  Earth

  9 / Valkyrie

  Valkyrie was standing in the Field Stores warehouse, strip-checking an Eberstark Volsungshammer sniper rifle when GovGuide intruded on her peace and quiet by playing the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. She finished gazing through the long barrel she held and adjusted the sensitivity of her vision to normal before allowing the Guide to deliver its alarm report. She’d hoped for at least another day of silence, but Guide Alarms overrode her compassionate leave.

  The message wasn’t even voice-delivered. It was flagged with Solargov security codes and in plain text:

  MetroGuide offlined—Metropolis Gateway shut down—all contact lost—emergency quarantine procedures enforced Earthside—GovNet awaits official instruction.

  As Valkyrie read she felt only a momentary rise of interest. Ah Apocalypse. She wanted to go back to the smooth simplicity of the gun and feel its interlocking pieces moving together in her hands until the thing was whole and could be put back beside its fifty brothers on the rack. A second message followed in a bright flash of intimate urgency protocols. They overrode her normal function and flooded her sluggish endocrine system with artificial enthusiasm.

  My office: now.

  Valkyrie placed the gun barrel down onto the workbench in front of her and laid her oilcloth over its unfinished business. She turned and strode the length of the warehouse, passing its racks of firearms, missile launchers, gas grenades and sonic devices in quick time. As she passed she saw herself dimly reflected for an instant in each of the burnished dark metal curves of the weapons, a dull yellow blur of android motion. Her armoured boots made dull thuds on the concrete. She turned, taking a short-cut to the emergency exit through the medical section, and narrowed her vision to a tunnelled shape so that she didn’t have to look at the beautiful white and green ranks of field dressings and surgical patches. She’d seen enough of them to last a lifetime.

  The emergency door opened for her as she reached it; closed and locked itself after her. The pavement was relatively deserted near the armoury. There was nobody by the yard gates but a pair of engineers taking a rest in the late-morning sunshine to see her step away from the building, open her wings, ignite her rockets and take to the sky.

  As she ascended into the aerial lanes over London she saw thousands of others dropping out of the sky—small craft and individuals, Forged flying forms and the small robot drones of the Guide systems, all of them ordered to land to clear the air for the emergency and governmental services. They fell smoothly and gracefully, like a swarm of locusts seen from far off. Valkyrie, connected to GovNet, was able to make a beeline across the miles to Unity House, where her boss worked, and where the alien entity maintained its ambassador.

  Valkyrie flew as fast as she could. Insects smashed against her visor. Beneath her the city visibly quavered as the information shock of MetroGuide’s disappearance spread from node to node. People turned to one another with bewildered faces and Valkyrie imagined that she heard a collective intake of breath. They were all thinking what she had first thought—this could be no more than a temporary fault of some kind. But when she set her feet onto the roof and exchanged credentials with the building’s security guards she lost her reasonable doubts. Their faces were ashy and bleary as though they had been woken from a bad dream. Their expressions prompted her to renew her contacts with the newswires and networks she’d cut herself off from. Every one was error-clogged with excessive traffic.

  Valkyrie began to accelerate. Earthside staffers moved aside to let her through, both there and in the lift and in the lower corridors, flattening themselves against the walls as Valkyrie moved in an uncomfortable crouch with her arms jammed against her sides. Eight feet of bulky, metal-clad aerial Forged moving fast in a confined space had that kind of effect generally, but today Valkyr
ie saw the regular staff let her pass without their standard expressions of mild annoyance that field agents should come in making a mess of their beautiful, serene existence. Instead they seemed almost glad to see her. So it must be very bad.

  She went straight in to her boss’s rooms and joined the queue of agents waiting for attention. When her turn came the under-secretary seemed so flustered, she gave her name to him with formal politeness. “Light Angel Valkyrie Skuld, tactical intelligence support.”

  He glanced up and smiled for a fleeting instant. “Hi, Valkyrie,” he said. “You can go on past this lot. Go right to the desk. She’s waiting for you.”

  “Jensen.” She said his name to him as thanks, and turned to excuse-me and pardon her way through the outer offices.

  The doors to the Queen’s inner sanctum opened for her, but not quickly enough. She caught one of her shoulder guards on the doorframe and tore a long splinter of the beautiful polished hardwood free. The rip and crack of it was ignored, despite the room’s near silence. Nobody took any notice as she picked up the broken wood and screwed it up into a ball in the palm of her hand. Inexplicably she found herself holding back tears. She flicked the splinters into the closest trash can.

  Valkyrie had occasionally had cause to regret her low level of AI systems compared with other Forged and Tek personnel, but as she stood and watched her boss now, she felt no regret at all. The Micro Ticktock Hive Belshazzar was holding a perfectly adequate conversation with her principal secretary, who was also in the room with her, and four other simultaneous discussions which Valkyrie could see logged on the wall where a projected layout of all her current communications was permanently on show. She was talking to the Guide AIs of two other Sidebar Universes as well as with the out-world AIs, Mode and Myanfactor, who hosted the entire Solar Virtual Community and the Forged Dreamstate of Uluru and with the Solargov Emergency Actions Unit. She was also conducting over two thousand other more minor discussions, the subject of which repeated across the board endlessly—Metropolis Sidebar.

  The volatile smell of kerosene made Valkyrie look down automatically, running an internal check. One of her fuel lines was leaky. A fine film of pungent discharge was creeping, translucent, down her bronze leg, evaporating, hazing the air. She took a patch of trouble-gum out of her chest compartment and did her best to seal it temporarily. Belshazzar glanced at her with the briefest flicker of acknowledgement as Valkyrie leant over to the desk and whisked a couple of paper tissues out of the pretty floral pack beside the coffee-pot and its discarded cups.

  Valkyrie rubbed at the kerosene and was glad she didn’t have billions of sisters calling on her attention. Every second they blurted and babbled their news into the Hive Queen’s waking mind; those scattered sisters who spied upon and tinkered in the innards of machines across the entire Solar System. Witnessing so much cognitive power held in the form of an ordinary human woman with no outward sign of Forging (though every inward one) was, at best, awe-inspiring. Usually Valkyrie found it intimidating, and today it was simply beyond her.

  She used the solvent and tissues to rub a few crusty insect bodies off the polish of her arms although it was a feeble effort and the tissues soon disintegrated.

  Belshazzar shut down one conversation and took the opportunity to smile warmly at Valkyrie. “Skuld, a moment please and I’ll be with you.” Her words came via short-range radio because her mouth was still issuing instructions for the day’s rescheduling to the secretary.

  Valkyrie gave a tight smile and moved left to place the wad of tissue in the bin with the piece of doorway. No one except Belshazzar had called her by her personal name since Elinor had died. She felt the absence of her old partner on her right side; a commonplace emptiness that did not lessen as the days passed. Elinor would have laughed at the fuel line and the door incident. They would both be smiling now, if she were here. Valkyrie’s face set like stone.

  “Tell them the truth, then,” Belshazzar was saying angrily. “Tell them we have no idea.”

  At that, with the suddenness of lightning, everyone seemed to wrap their business to a conclusion. Within seconds the room was deserted except for Valkyrie and Belshazzar. The wall, hitherto streaming with information in a waterfall of complaints and demands, shut down silently and became nothing but a wall.

  Belshazzar, middle-aged and dusky, her cropped black hair half-silvered—pushed back her chair and stood up. She lifted her chin to take in Valkyrie, and her dark eyes brimmed with a mixture of determination and anger. The cessation of the wall’s coverage was a sign that they might speak freely, cut off from contact with the outside world for a time. It gave Valkyrie a momentary sensation of intimacy and trust which unclamped the stern discipline keeping her jaw shut.

  “It’s gone for good?” Valkyrie asked.

  Belshazzar beckoned with one hand for Valkyrie to follow her, and spoke as she walked. “Theodore has an explanation. I want you to hear it.”

  Valkyrie didn’t move. She glanced involuntarily at the doors behind Belshazzar, far off across metres of pale government carpet, and framed by detection technology as powerful as that used at any of the Sidebar Universe Port Authorities for the detection of Stuff particle contamination.

  “What’s the matter?” Belshazzar asked, turning back towards her when Valkyrie did not come.

  Valkyrie knew that time was of the essence but it was easy for Belshazzar. She talked to—the thing—every day. It must seem normal, Valkyrie thought, as though it was just another man, but to her Theodore, Unity’s ambassador, was nothing of the kind. There was a dream-sim of Unity in Uluru. Everyone’s minds were run together in one undifferentiated soup, not even parallel, but volatile. Valkyrie detested it. Things emerged from it that . . . she didn’t even have the mental tools to think about it or the words to express it. And that was only a bunch of human minds.

  “I don’t want to . . . that is . . . I don’t think I can . . . I mean, I don’t want to see . . .” Valkyrie had never knowingly come across anything of Unity, not even a piece of Stuff in a lab. She’d hoped that she would never have to reveal her opinions about it publicly. She wished it had never been found.

  “Skuld.” The Hive Queen saw what was wrong and spoke quietly, though there was nobody to overhear them. “He’s bound to be human, just like the rest of us. It’s like talking to anybody else. Form determines. Experience and perception follow as the night the day.”

  “He’ll hear what I’m thinking,” Valkyrie said. She didn’t want to say that she was too low in the hierarchy, that Belshazzar was making some mistake, surely, in taking someone like her into The Presence. She longed for an adequate excuse.

  Belshazzar shrugged. “I doubt he’ll bother. I used to assume that about him myself, but if he does pick my brain, then he doesn’t use his knowledge to any advantage I can make out.” She beckoned again, with quick, practical fingers that clearly would have liked to snap with impatience. “You can stomach this. I wouldn’t have called you in for the assignment otherwise. The long and the short of it is that you’re the only agent I consider capable enough to send on this particular mission. You’ve got the field time, you’ve got the right kind of mind—frankly, you lack imagination, which is essential—and you’re strong. I need you to be my eyes and ears and big stick when you go in on this joint action with Earth Security. Their field agents won’t last five seconds if things get out of hand. Too clever and too jumpy for it, and I want someone who doesn’t get easily distracted doing my business. You’ve got nothing else to do. You’re the one.”

  Valkyrie knew she’d been expertly railroaded. How could she show her cowardice after a peculiar accolade like that? She took a deep breath, brought her chin down and circled the elegant desk, giving it a wide berth so she didn’t damage it.

  “Good.” Belshazzar took Valkyrie to the double doors of the ambassador’s office and preceded her inside. Valkyrie had to duck to get through.

  Theodore was sitting in an executive lounge seat in the other
wise empty room and he didn’t get up as they entered, although he did give Belshazzar a deep nod of acknowledgment. Superficially he looked like an ordinary human, Valkyrie saw: his body was the Apollo type, that tall and tanned and handsome look, with its yellow hair and its agile, athletic strength. But he hadn’t personalized it one jot from what Valkyrie knew to be the baseline stereotype as defined in Ryanson & Sinha’s DNA Boilerplates for Fashion and Design, it was simply copied from that Genie catalogue. As he continued to sit motionlessly in his easy chair and stare into the distance he gave off all the charismatic charm of a plastic mannequin.

  Valkyrie could hear Belshazzar’s frustration with Theodore as she introduced them to each other, voice taut as a high wire. Theo didn’t spare Valkyrie a glance. He looked at Belshazzar with amber eyes whose expression was quite detached.

  “Metropolis has gone,” he said, as though continuing a pre-existing conversation that was taxing his patience. He placed his hands together in front of him in what might have been a sign of namaste, signalling peace in deference to Belshazzar, or showing that he had nothing more to add, or both, or neither. “Everyone who lived in it has been Translated.”

  He made this latter statement so gently that Valkyrie found herself floating in a dissociated clarity of mind, as if she weren’t really there at all.

  She wondered if worlds fell this way all the time. Not with a bang but a whisper. No, not even a whisper. With no sound at all.

  She knew what Translated meant. It meant made into Unity, assimilated into that being, like Corvax and Isol and Zephyr Duquesne had been, the first humans to interact with Unity; like people were today, if they became infected with Stuff—through trafficking with it unwisely, occasionally voluntarily. But those who wanted to cross over could never have amounted to millions of individuals, not without warning, or asking, or . . . any reason at all.