“Valkyrie Skuld,” she said. “I haven’t got anything to donate—except that I came across a patch of sky that I couldn’t cross the other day.”
“You think there’s a hidden pocket? Wouldn’t be the first time you get worlds within worlds in one of these Sidebars.”
“It’s what I think too,” she agreed, “and I’ve been looking for the entrance. It’s not in the air and not to the north. I’m thinking it must be somewhere in Hoolerton.”
“Ah, Hoolerton, paradise of industrial-world fantasy, highly romantic in a squalid way, neighbourly with the Hinterland. Could be. Not many people like it there.” He nodded and seemed well satisfied. “I’ll search the interiors, ask the inhabitants. You do the streets. We’re best suited that way.” He glanced up at her. “No offence.”
“None taken.”
“Another?”
“I can stand another.”
“Good.” He gave another toothy grin and sat down beside her.
14 / Greg
A couple of weeks later the seasons in Sankhara had turned to an idyllic summer of long days, warm nights and higher sea temperatures, drawing everyone towards the miles of gold and white sand that marked the city shoreline from the mouth of the Purbright to the far rocky headlands of Suski-ashokton. Late afternoon on Thorsday found me with Jalaeka sitting with our backs to the shadow of the boardwalk a half klick from Engine House.
We were discussing the nature of reality and Unity’s position in it. It was the one place we really disagreed. He said we didn’t. But we did, because deep down I didn’t believe he was anything more than another Stuffie. But that wasn’t why he was losing his temper with me. That was because I would not give up my conviction that there was a reality which was singular, verifiable and fundamental. The real world operated according to scientific laws that were discoverable. It did not, except through the intervention of Unity in the case of the Sidebars, react in any way to what the inhabitants thought about it. Whether I could discover this reality and its workings or not, it was there. And the same thing is true of individuals. Whatever story they make up about who they are, they are what they are what they are.
Jalaeka was talking crossly. He did not see that it was possible to call any version of reality, or oneself, the Real Thing. “Why can’t you give up this bloody notion that there is an underlying capital T Truth superior to the one you made up?”
“It’s the touchstone of my faith in science,” I said.
“You believe that if you can only find it then all your problems will go away,” Jalaeka said. “Unity talks about the Mystery, you know, when Theo decides to talk about why it made all these worlds for you to play in. He says that’s why it made me. At first I used to think it was true—that if it assimilated all things that they’d somehow sum up to an Answer. But later, after I changed and saw how hungry it always was, I realized that Unity isn’t searching for the Mystery through these ’Bars and all the rest of it, Greg, like you’re searching for human nature. It’s trying to create it. It knows all about fundamental reality, and the answer to why life exists and what it means and what it’s worth is not in there.”
The sea had made his long hair into salty dreadlocks. He brushed them out of his face and flicked a piece of seaweed at me. He snorted. “So now it’s sifting through meaning. Unity eats the things that matter, always. It rips them apart to see what it is they’ve got that’s so good.”
We were both hot and getting hotter in our wetsuits as the sun came around the corner of Buddy’s Surf Shack and started to bake us. The sea was warm, but not that warm. Sankhara was a northern latitude.
Jalaeka snorted and drew circles in the sand with his bare heels. I became uncomfortably aware, as I often did, of his proximity and of my curiosity about what it would be like to touch him. He flirted with me continuously, even this argument was a kind of flirtation, and I couldn’t help overhearing occasional times when he and Francine were making love. I thought she had a burning quality, now it was incandescent.
Suddenly he gave up on me. Abrupt withdrawals were common with him after he’d presented his case. He got up and picked up his skimboard, turned and started walking back towards the waves. I added the gist of his conversation to my Abacand’s file, placing it alongside a recording I made of him yesterday, which I didn’t need to play back to remember.
He’d said, very uneasily, “I should leave Francine. I should go. But then again, can’t run forever. Greg, I think I made a big mistake.”
“What mistake?” I’d asked.
“Getting lost. Finding you,” he said and went quiet again.
“Talk to me,” I’d suggested, but he wouldn’t.
I watched his easy run down the gentle slope of beach where the water sucked back slowly and reflected the sky like mirrors. He threw the board and jumped on it. His effortless skim into the whitewater of an inrushing breaker was the sort of poetry in motion you only get when you’re relaxed, when you don’t care one way or the other, you’re just boarding. He let the water take him out a short way, turned in the wave’s death and slid back onto the sand. At the end he stepped off and flicked the board up with a simple motion of one foot, catching it single-handed. He walked back up onto the hard, dark line just beyond the reach of the white foam, stepping over shells and stranded jellyfish.
I envied him, and I didn’t. I wanted to be like him with all his ease and charm, but I didn’t, not with all that hid behind the breakwater of his silences. I listened like he said I should, inside, and heard, without believing that I heard, the soft, rich click and almost-silent roll of tick following tock downtime.
I made a note about it.
I recalled that he’d once said that Francine made him, that he belonged to her. He’d said it with a serious expression, as a literal truth. These occasional statements worried me deeply, and other things about him worried me more and kept me awake nights writing imaginary reports to Solargov Intelligence; for instance his claim that there was no such thing as an Engine, only a belief in them, whose power would vanish like smoke the moment it stopped being a complete conviction. He said that the Engines weren’t made by Unity at all, and the entire edifice of the Sidebars was a myth Theo planted in our minds, and which we sustained effortlessly when no Unity power could have made it without us.
Nobody would buy that. I kept it out of my reports.
Jalaeka skimmed another wave in his absent way. I stood up, too hot to stay put another minute, and walked out into the sea, then back again when I saw through the clear, shallow bay to where the pale bank of the sand tumbled slowly to a shelf’s edge and fell towards deep water: sinuous, finny shapes were gliding there. Some of them were black and some were silvered, some long and winding like animated hawsers: Ootoos. Some were emerald green, red as jasper or sapphire blue and they were attached to human torsos: mermaids, tritons.
Jalaeka jogged back to me as I walked back up the beach and laid his arm across my shoulders. “I’ve annoyed you,” he said sadly, freed me and slapped me in a flamboyant blow that didn’t hurt. “Stupid me. Let’s get a drink.”
We left our boards under the wooden walkway in a shadow, relying on luck to preserve them from thieves. He swung himself up onto the walk and through the railings. I climbed carefully over to where he waited for me, too self-conscious so that I wasn’t able to copy him in any way. I stood with my back to him as we showered off the worst of the seawater at the main entrance to the sands. He bought me a coke at Buddy’s and we sat on the shack’s worn benches, resting our feet on the rail where the Shack faced the south shore. Pleasant, vapid and energetic pop tunes played in the background—his favourite. The sea wind blew gently in our faces, making them saltier and more clingy and sticky than ever.
“Why do you carry on working at that club?” I asked him, feeling that I could ask anything for a while, as though a tide of largesse had swung in between us and I could state what had been on my mind unsaid for a long time. Work was a bit of a euphemism. Aft
er arriving in Sankhara, Damien had got him a job in The Italian Well, a nightspot which left no imagination unplundered in its efforts to offer unlimited pleasures. A miniature town of unbridled hedonism and sensual excess, it was known throughout the ’Bars for its dangers and delights: he had fitted in perfectly and was soon top of the payroll. I had only a vague notion of what he did, but for some time rumours had circulated that illegal Translatory procedures were available there and who better to administer that kind of thing than someone who claimed to be a second Unity?
I had long since figured out he was one of several variations on the Love God theme. For Francine’s sake I had hoped he would be less second rate.
“What do you do there, exactly?” I added.
He leant back in his chair and rubbed sand off the side of his foot onto the worn wooden upright next to it. “Come with me tonight and find out. Don’t worry about the cost. You can write it off, call it research.”
“Are you being a condescending wanker by any chance?”
His dark eyes flicked sideways and fixed on mine. His look was canny. “You think it makes me a bad boyfriend. A cheat.”
“That crossed my mind.” He had been perfectly accurate. “Francine might put up with it but I’m sure she doesn’t like it.”
“You don’t like it,” he said with quiet precision, and his candour and my transparency felt lethal.
“Francine deserves better than that.”
“Ouch,” he said, perfectly relaxed, utterly unconcerned.
“It makes me angry that you treat it all so casually.”
“It? I treat it casually? The sacred dance of true intimacy, one of the great roads to self-knowledge, the path of which I am master . . . I treat it like the rest of you, like a bodily function, like a whore?” The lightness of his sarcasm was withering.
“I’m not moralizing about whatever you do. I don’t care what you do. I’m worried that Francine will end up being badly hurt by you.” Master? What new flight of ego was this?
“Me too. But it won’t be because I do strangers for cash.” He let the last of his breath go in a sigh that was exasperated with itself. Then he leant forward and undid the neck flap on his ’suit, pulled the zip down his back and shucked it from his torso. He let it hang round his waist as he sat back and took another drink.
I watched the sun going down, the high delta shapes of Forged Gliders mingling with the twin arrows of seagull wings over the ocean, their shape and colour echoing the white sails of the day’s boats heading for the marina. He bought more drinks. We got a pack of cards from the bar and played gin. More people came into the bar. I watched him acknowledge their interest and pass on it, with care, with some kind of grace that left them unhurt so that they didn’t feel bad for looking and noticing him or for him not wanting to notice them. I paused and wrote some notes about it.
Jalaeka watched me—he was always patient for this kind of task, which distracted me often—and then asked, “Can I write something?”
“Okay.” I passed him my Abacand. He wrote on the screen, the tip of his long index finger making rapid symbols, occasionally pausing, then dashing on again just when I thought he must have finished. It took a while. I shuffled the cards and went back to the endless game of picking Stuffies from real people, watching the more colourful characters walk by on the pier; a mermaid pulling herself out of the sea onto dry sand where her tail became long, bronzed legs. A friend on the shore gave her a towel and they walked to the shower stand. A few minutes later both women stood at the bar in long white cotton dresses, mermaid barefoot, her girlfriend in sandals.
They noticed Jalaeka in an instant, disregarded me immediately, and after a few mutual nudges the mermaid came across and sat beside him. She gave me a polite smile, friendly and interested to know who I was, then she said, “Eros?”
“Just a minute,” Jalaeka said, writing faster.
Why would she call him that?
The mermaid gave me another once-over. She had a hungry look underneath her poise and prettiness, and I felt myself assessed as something more akin to dinner than date.
“Here,” Jalaeka folded my Abacand into a small cube and handed it back.
I looked at the file briefly, then back up towards him. The Mermaid was saying something about darshan, a word I’d heard recently somewhere but couldn’t place where.
“What did you call him?” I asked her, interrupting them both.
“It’s a nickname, like ‘wanker,’ only more so,” Jalaeka said in a quick dismissive snap, before she could open her full and glossy lips over her pointed teeth.
She looked at him more thoughtfully now. “Sorry,” she said under her breath. She nodded and got up and gave me an apologetic glance and a tiny nod, suddenly respectful and not at all planning to do me the least harm.
As she left the restless unease that had made him talk me into coming out ’boarding in the first place washed through him again. He reached across and took the cards from beside my elbow, began practicing flicking them into a fan like a street conjuror.
I tried to read what he’d put and I couldn’t. It was all in maths. “What is this?”
“Gift aid,” he said. He smiled, leant across the space between us over the bench and kissed me on the lips. He waited just long enough to see if I was going to respond but I was too surprised. He sat back and returned to flicking the cards into a smooth semicircle and back again as though nothing had happened.
I stared into space, about to ask him what . . . but then not able to. Instead I asked my Abacand what the maths meant. It told me it was an 11-dimensional transform with unusual torsional constraints which made it unique in M-theoretical supersymmetrical analysis. “It’s a way of bending 4-D,” it said, rendering unto English that which was ill-suited to it. “If you could get at it from the back, as it were. Haven’t seen one of them before. Can I use it to trade through Teragate? I bet it’s worth a fortune.”
Proof, that’s what it was.
“Nah, it was a present,” I said, and Jalaeka glanced at me and winked.
I made the excuse of going to change out of my wetsuit and sent a surreptitious message asking my ultimate boss, Belshazzar, if she knew the connection between Eros and Metropolis: the mermaid’s name and his claims of history. She replied almost immediately, before I’d even got out of the shower and towelled dry, and the Abacand transmitted her voice silently through my Tab into my head.
“There is no record of that name on the Metropolis Roll of Heros nor the Roll of Antiheroes or on any listing of registered Villains, Criminals, and Wild Cards. But there is an entry. MetroGuide wasn’t limited to official populations of Stuffies or humans, it counted bodies, and it made entries for those who didn’t write their own. Like all the Guides, it had a collector’s passion for records.
“Eros. Designation: Love, Son of Night, the first darkness before all things. Creator of worlds. ‘Whoever judges not Eros to be a mighty god is either stupid or, having no experience of good things, knows not of the god who is the mightiest power to men.’ Status: active. Allegiance: not applicable. Advisory: for legal reasons no advice can be offered for this entry.
“A full and comprehensive standard disclaimer follows with which I will not bore you. May I ask as to your interest?”
“Just something I heard,” I said, pulling my street clothes back on as fast as I could.
“Stay in touch,” she ended the call.
Back at the beachfront I watched Jalaeka get bored with the cards and staring to the horizon over the water, though he made no move to go. I guessed he was waiting for me to come to some decision.
Eros was the primary meta-fict in certain branches of narrative studies; desire itself viewed as the ultimate creative and destructive impulse, the thing that turned Unity on in the first place. Eros had no entry in MetroGuide’s categories because he was a god and, I would have bet anything, the only such listing. It was widely assumed that Theo, having all of Unity’s capacities, was akin
to a god, but nobody talked about him in public like that. Nobody wanted to admit certain basic and grisly truths to themselves or anyone else, especially in Sankhara.
No wonder Belshazzar was personally involved in seeking silence on this one, even if it was no more than a misunderstanding of some kind. I began to wonder if my impulsive enquiry to her was really so intelligent after all, and to doubt my immediate trust in her claim to sympathize with my suspicion about the Sankhara Engine, our AI and the allegedly missing light. In my confused state, angry with Katy, tired of being overlooked, I’d swallowed her every word with great relief. But what else would she have said if I had just given her worthwhile evidence and she wanted me to continue? Nothing. She wouldn’t alert me to it.
Jalaeka turned his head towards me. “So, are you coming?”
I had to know the truth, no matter how awful it was going to be. God or not. Transform or not. Truth or dare. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
15 / Jalaeka
As I’m waiting for his answer to my question about going to the club I’m within one breath of telling him my entire story. I ought to tell him. I should give him the opportunity to opt out now, but I know that if I try to explain everything, he’ll almost certainly not believe me, and it still won’t make any difference to the outcome.
I imagine that I am telling him, and even in the privacy of my own head it has a nasty, self-regarding desperation:
“I was thinking about running away, leaving. I thought it would be honest, because it would rule you and Francine out of the equation. Theo’s tried to eat me and he’s tried to kill me, but it looks like we’re an even match on every single front. The only way left to him is to force a submission and the only leverage that exists is you and Francine.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 15