Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  That night Francine left the Foundation and moved in with her new boyfriend. After a couple of days I followed, invited by Jalaeka to take up any room I wanted, free to wander and to have Francine’s help in taking down all the documentary evidence I could wish for. I liked to think that the biggest reason for my going was to look out for Francine, because I didn’t trust either Jalaeka or Damien, but I’m not sure it was.

  In a pocket of quiet on my first night there, when the wind died down for a few moments, I heard Francine’s voice through the wall—their apartments and mine were side by side. They were thick walls and there wasn’t much leak, but when it came through the rising and falling tones were distinct. I heard her laugh. She sounded so happy.

  Weeks later, we sat in my apartment, a dinner eaten, drinks long finished, the preambles of his getting to know my business in Sankhara and the Park and with Francine all done with. It was late—Engine Time—and the attics above us were filled with skittery sound, like dry windblown leaves on an autumn day, or the hundred feet of an unkindness of ravens, made from the dust by the Engine’s sculpting fingers.

  Jalaeka sat with his legs curled under him on my modern sofa, Francine lying with her head in his lap, asleep. Outside, the wind that had spent the best part of a fortnight seething restlessly through the taiga had died down to breezy murmurs, leaving cloudless skies, and the Palace was quiet, except for the attics.

  “I can’t prove it,” he said in reply to my questioning him through his claim as to how he had got here. He spoke following a minute of silence and my minute of silence followed in train, as minutes had been following and lengthening our conversation since it started hours before.

  Francine, who had been an active participant, had long since tired of both sides, but her sleeping presence—if she was really asleep—reminded me to watch my words. She’d turned to Jalaeka with all the convert’s zeal she so loathed in Katy and I didn’t want to do anything to upset the now-delicate balance that existed between the three of us. I turned my empty glass in my hand and watched the final drop of scotch in it run to nothing against its wall. “That’s a great story.”

  “It’s a pathetic story,” he said, dismissing its colossal central claims—about Metropolis, and himself—with what I was learning to see as a peculiar pragmatics born of despair. He looked into my fireplace where the logs had burned themselves down to embers and glowed alternately red and pink in gentle movements of the air towards the flue. The room was pleasantly warm and the atmosphere docile.

  He’d said a lot of very interesting things, wild claims about being hunted down by Unity, through its human agent, Theo. He’d said that Theo, “who Unity thinks it is when it’s human,” ate Metropolis—an assertion anyone could have read as speculation in a hundred net magazines and the answer I had most dreaded.

  I asked if he might repeat such behaviour and he said, “Theodore never does the same thing twice. Metropolis was a calculated risk, it failed. Next time . . .” but he hadn’t finished that statement. His dark minotaur eyes looked at me, hard and calculating for an instant, and he drew and let out a breath in a very measured way but didn’t finish.

  “Unity . . .” I said, turning my glass over but the drop had evaporated, “is powerful beyond comprehension. It closes and expands space-time, it processes matter as easily as thinking.” I was trying to imagine what such an entity might be interested in, concerning either Jalaeka or Theodore, and I wasn’t having a lot of luck, although for all that I had witnessed and recorded across the years this approach to discovery seemed perfectly in tune with all of its previous strategies, for many of them were beyond my ability to fathom. Perhaps there was no underlying grand plan. Jalaeka seemed to want to say there wasn’t. But could such a being arise purely by accident on the churn of chance?

  “Dull, isn’t it?” Jalaeka looked down at Francine with a tenderness that made a pang of envy shoot under my sternum. I took it that he meant such omnipotence was dull, and it seemed like it must be for the wielder, and that he included himself. If he really did have comparable power, then he was certainly long bored by it.

  “So, how exactly did you escape from Metropolis again?”

  He gestured vaguely with his free hand, conducting his own lines as he spoke in a mild singsong that affectionately mocked my doubts. “I created a temporary universe, connected it to this one, as the Park connects to Sankhara, walked across, here I am, closed it after me.” He was already laughing at himself as he finished talking.

  I nodded. “Why come to another Unity world? One so chock-full of Stuffies and interference?”

  He fixed me with an amused, tired, long-suffering look and his fingertips stroked Francine’s shoulder, back and forth, back and forth. “Do you know of any other kind?”

  Hyperion, the Forged shaman, met me on the steps as I was leaving for the University, Francine and Jalaeka still asleep on my furniture, buried to the nose beneath a soft heap of down comforter. The air had a cold bite to it on this sunless side of the building and the formal gardens before the railings shimmered with a sparkling rime of frost. I locked the small access door behind me and was carefully negotiating the icy stone steps with my eyes to the ground when the sound of feet on gravel made me look up sharply and almost slip.

  Hyperion had sneaked up on me. He was a Salmagundi—the Forged term for “salad.” He referred to himself as a Greenjack when asked his class, but this returned no data on any Guide check I was able to perform. He rose up to his impressive grizzly-bear bipedal height as I noticed him, so that he could offer me his hand to shake. The many bone, metal and wood charms that he wore in necklaces, braces and piercings tinkled and clattered as he moved. He was wearing his skin coat—the hides of a wolf and a deer sewn roughly together, though it couldn’t have provided any warmth. He spoke via Tablink. “Dr. Saxton. I was waiting to see you.”

  I descended to the height of three steps from the ground and shook his hand. It was like grasping a cluster of metal bars. “How are you keeping?”

  “The forest grows apace,” he said. He rarely made any statements about himself, always deferring to the landscapes and creatures he lived with, because they were what he was made of, in his mind, and so their welfare was always the matter of his concern. “The Engine has extended it east and west to cover even the moorland beyond the first hills. If you look to the south you will see it creep up the mountains until the air and soil are too thin even for enchanted trees.” Steam from his breath gouted from his mouth and long, narrow nostrils.

  “You want to speak to me?”

  “I had a vision,” he informed me.

  Hyperion was a scholar of Unity and his studies were of the direct kind, among its creations. He had become, over the last fifteen years, a kind of legend in his own right among the Stuffies of Sankhara. Rarely seen and greatly venerated, he was a kind of spiritual leader, though he wasn’t interested in any kind of ministry and his insights were “the results of simple observation and meditation, no more,” in his own words. His rituals and fetishes were the necessary accoutrements of his work, building as they did great psychological architectures of mastery over himself and his knowledge. He was mystical, and he was utterly rational. We met in the Park, its first two explorers, and had become colleagues and friends in a distant, cordial fashion.

  “It was not a prophecy,” Hyperion continued, dropping slowly to all fours with the hydraulic grace of a machine so that his head and mine might be at less unequal heights. He began to pace with me towards the gates. “It was a revelation. Unity was the greatest of all oceans and I was a fish within it. Through the crashing of waves on distant shores it sang Ariel’s song to me, through the growing trees that were made from the wind—do you know this song, Dr. Saxton?”

  I was pleased to quote it to him:

  Full fathom five thy father lies:

  Of his bones are coral made:

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade

&
nbsp; But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  “That is the song,” Hyperion said. “Though I fancy Unity must have heard it long ago, when Isol first encountered it. She carried it with her and must have known it well. It is a spacefarer’s favourite, though they often change the words—a crime for which they ought to drown in vacuum. I heard this song and then, yesterday, I came across a new structure down in the Temple District where they say the Engine most likes to listen to the minds of the prayerful, though you and I both know that cannot be.” His yellow, goat-pupilled eyes swivelled to me with a wink. “The temple of Apollo has been levelled. Upon it stands a cathedral, on one side beautiful and ornate, on the other side raw and crudely carved. It is still under construction. SankhaGuide has not yet enabled reporting, since its origins defy analysis. I wonder if you would care to meet me there sometime.”

  We had reached the frozen agony of the gates and he stopped there, showing no inclination to leave the Park yet. Between the pale trunks of the trees behind him and to his right I saw the grey forms of timber wolves slipping back into shadow and inside my coat pocket my hand tightened around the pepper spray canister I carried. “I will,” I said.

  “Until then,” he agreed and without another glance or word turned to jog off into the trees at exactly the point where the wolves had been watching us a second before. His bounding, elastic gait covered the distance in seconds and I ducked through the holes and into the road. Verkhoyansk Boulevard’s empty grandeur was too big for me. I was glad when I could enter the warm, balmy, filthy air of Hoolerton and Sankhara proper.

  After I filed all my research and caught up with my work, I met Hyperion as he’d offered. The cathedral was as he said but the Engine had formed it in a state of construction and there was nothing to indicate that it was also related to Jalaeka. I looked at Hyperion’s discovery and Jalaeka’s appearance as two sides of an equation. The numbers didn’t look right to me but I thought of it too often for my liking, and when I factored in the timing of the day Jalaeka met Francine and looked again at the cathedral’s half-built exaltation I didn’t like it at all.

  12 / Francine

  I lay under the comforter, completely covered by it; the bed and the room both felt dangerously large to me and also, Greg had come by to offer us both coffee in a gesture that was as touching as it was interfering, and I was hiding. I felt unspeakably embarrassed to be caught like this, alongside Jalaeka, who was genuinely asleep, or doing a better job of faking it than I was. We were both naked, last night’s laughter having given way to lengthy petting and the very thought of Greg even knowing about it made me blush from head to foot. That made me even hotter and I listened, longing for his quiet effort to be gone and to see a look on his face that wasn’t condemning.

  I wanted to see him later, to hand in my work, to study, to sit and plan our expedition into the vast expanses of untracked Palace grounds. I wanted everything to stay normal between us but I was nagged by this annoying conviction that he would disapprove and be displeased with me, but he wouldn’t be able to show it and so it would just sit there like a half-visible snarling gargoyle between us.

  Jalaeka’s foot slid back and stopped when it touched mine.

  Greg moved with deliberate efforts to be quiet that drove me crazy. He put the drinks on the floor close to me, then went out and I heard the apartment door close with a click.

  Why should I be guilty? I hated that I felt it. I didn’t even understand who was being crossed.

  I flung back a half metre of covers as soon as the door had closed and took a deep breath of the cold air. Jalaeka, perfectly content as long as he was in physical contact, didn’t move. The smell of the coffee cut through the air to me and I was suddenly awake and hungry. I sat up and reached for one of the cups.

  Jalaeka rolled over as I slid away from him and murmured without opening his eyes, “Where are you going?”

  “Drink,” I said. He reduced me to monosyllables. Glancing at him now, I felt myself flood with the kind of desire so physical and immediate that it threatened to burn me alive if I didn’t do something about it, right now. I took a deep breath and held on to the coffee. Much as I wanted to do something about it, I was scared to.

  I tasted the coffee and didn’t want it.

  Jalaeka moaned softly, a pining noise. I wriggled back down beside him and we turned to face one another. He let one eye open a fraction.

  “God, it’s blue in here,” he muttered and closed it again. He stroked the side of my face with his hand, unerringly light and sensitive, tracing my features as though he was blind. “That’s better. Now I only see you.”

  “Those things you said last night, were they true?” I asked him, looking at his exposed head, neck and shoulders with the distinct pleasure of gazing over a full box of chocolates, trying to decide what to have first.

  “My life story? All factually accurate. Short on detail. Mmn.” The last hum was slightly discomforted.

  “Tell me?” I brushed some of his thick hair away from his face and neck where it lay in a heavy tangle. I bent over him and put my mouth against the exposed skin just below his ear. It was very warm and smooth under my tongue, deliciously forbidden and at the same time completely mine. I felt that I could do anything I wanted and he’d never turn to me with the cold face that lets you know you’ve gone too far and fallen off the invisible pedestal you never knew that you were on.

  “Nnuh,” he said, rubbing his head deeper into the pillow and moving it so that I could get to more of him. “If I do, you might stop.”

  “Why?”

  He rolled onto his back, arms flung relaxed to either side. I ran my tongue along the curve of his collarbone and kissed the hollow of his throat at the end of it.

  “I haven’t always been yours.”

  I placed small, quick kisses up his neck, around to his jaw, across his forehead. “Haven’t you?”

  He glanced at me, eyes open. “I don’t think so.” Genuine confusion shone there. “I’m secondhand. Well, more like sixth hand . . .”

  “That’s not bothering me. But something bothers you. All last night there was something you didn’t say to me.” I lay down, pulling the covers to me, shy to be seen because he was unearthly beautiful and I wasn’t.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m worried that Theo will find you and kill you.” He rolled back to face me, on his side, putting his hands under his head. “It was careless and stupid of me to let you in. But I wasn’t paying attention and I opened my eyes and there you were and then . . . it was already too late.”

  Of course he had told me what he was, and who Theo was . . . but I still couldn’t really believe it. “You could stop him. Why not? You’re equals.”

  “At the speed he can move I can’t stop him. I could only . . . pre-empt him . . .” He became thoughtful suddenly. “There is one thing . . .”

  “What?” I tickled his chin with the ends of his own hair. “Don’t you ever shave? No stubble.”

  “Androgyne tendencies,” he said. “Assimilation. Translation. You into me. But I never did that. I don’t know what happens. I don’t want to be you. I don’t want you to be me. But in the past I could have done it and I didn’t.”

  He was serious. He turned his face away from me to hide a sudden expression of grief. I left off tickling him and laid my head on his shoulder. I felt his arms slide around me and hold me close, as though we were meant to fit together, two halves of one nut.

  I considered it. Leaving aside the complete terror of such a suggestion I said, “But isn’t that a 7-D move?”

  “Yes. It would reveal me instantly. And possibly annihilate you.”

  “And you?”

  “Don’t know. I can’t think of a way to separate you out. I just have no idea how it works at all.” His voice was bleak now. “It’s everything I hated about Unity in the first place. Only Theo knows, and he isn’t telling. Why should he? He wants me to go back to the great o
ne. I don’t believe him when he says it won’t finish me. He has no ethic, only a mission. But I could do that, if he threatened you.”

  “Assimilate me?”

  “No. Let him take me back. And I will. If it comes to that. Don’t worry.” He squeezed me and rubbed my shoulders as if I were cold.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t you dare.”

  “It’s all I can do,” he said. “If he finds you. When.”

  “No. I forbid you.”

  “Francine, don’t . . .”

  “Do the other thing instead.”

  “Please . . .” He started trembling suddenly. “You don’t know what you’re asking. It’s not a human thing. I can’t explain it.”

  “If those are the choices . . .”

  “You don’t understand the choices!” His hands were hurting my arms.

  “I could,” I said quietly. “If you let me. Do it.”

  “No,” he said, in a voice very much like his earlier moan. “Then where will the difference be between me and it? No.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.” I meant it. I felt nothing for him except passion, lust, love, trust.

  “Yeah, but you ought to be,” he said. He took a deep breath and became still as he let it out. His grip softened. “That’s the trouble. You don’t understand, and I can’t explain. This thrall you feel for me, even that’s a product of what I’ve become. Isn’t that dangerous enough for you?”

  “I’m a Sankhara girl,” I said. “I got used to that kind of thing. It’s why I came here.”

  He laughed and relaxed and rolled over onto me and for a second the sharp gaze of a master calculator was on his face, but then it disappeared into a mischievous grin. He took my hands and put them on the pillow above my head, pinning them down with one hand. I tried to pull free but he was strong enough that I couldn’t budge them a millimetre. The feel of his naked body on mine and his hold sent a hot electric thrill through me that shorted out my thoughts. My body, left to react without a mind in charge of it, bucked and tingled as he deftly pushed one of his legs between mine, then the other. He held my gaze with his infinitely dark one and with his free hand turned my face to one side so that the arm holding my hands could stretch out against my neck without pressing against it. Then he slid downwards and began to kiss and lick my breasts.