“None of this would matter much and I wouldn’t burden you with it or spend time getting to know you in the hope that you could help me out, if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s close to finding me because it’s just not that hard to do. He finds me, he finds you, he finds Francine.” Fuck.
Then Greg would say something like, “You must have known this right from the start.” He’d be right and I’d be the stupid bastard I am, thinking I can hide when I can’t.
So I don’t tell him anything, just like every other time the opportunity came up, ever since we first talked and I tried to tell the truth. I can’t tell him the truth because he’s too clever and I like him too much, even though I know I’m going to regret it if I don’t. I know Damien put us together too, though I don’t know why. I think Damien knows a lot more than he’s letting on and, him being the Engine’s minion, I don’t like that.
“Yeah, let’s go,” Greg said finally, resigned to testing me one more time.
I put my hand out and stopped him with a touch on his arm. “Wait a minute, sit back down, I’ve got something to tell you.” And I did, everything on my mind.
16 / Greg
When Jalaeka was done talking, the sun had gone down and a crescent moon shone across the bay. Sand midges and mosquitoes hurled themselves towards the lights and were annihilated by the Zap geckos perched in the rafters below Buddy’s imported banana-leaf roof. I listened to a few more of them get ingested as the impact of what he had said soaked into me. There were two of him in my mind now, one a person and one a thing. I couldn’t put them both together.
“You’ve got to be joking,” I said though I knew he wasn’t. He nodded.
Below and in front of us on the high, dry sand the early-evening calypso band lit up a fire and settled around it, starting to play. The twinkle of fire at the beach head, where the pitiful scatter of homeless huddled under the lee of the cliffs, glinted far off in the corner of my right eye: Francine’s old home. The wash and draw of low tide sounded as a fuzzy, continual backdrop, the beats of its slow retreat almost regular, yet impossible to anticipate. “Theo . . . and you. Two. In the end, that’s my choice? You’re saying I don’t get to escape? Unity . . . but it has always left us alone.”
He got up. “I’m going to change. Then we should go meet Francine. After that, you can tell me if you think I should take the fall for you.”
He greeted about fifteen people on the way to the locker room, some with words, others with handslaps in various surfing codes or simple nods. Everyone, particularly the Stuffies, seemed to know him. I saw Damien among them. He spoke quickly to Jalaeka, who rested a hand on his shoulder in passing.
I went up to the bar and bought Damien a drink. “Don’t see you here very often.”
“You know what they say about elves and the sea,” he said, twitching one ear towards me as he accepted the drink.
“No.”
“Well, something to do with seagulls anyway,” he said. “Never could stand them myself. How’s the darling girl? I heard she quit my fabulous introduction to the world of entrepreneurial high jinks.”
“She gave up the job?”
“After three days.” He pretended surprise at my ignorance. “Said she was going to spend more time on your fool of a project scanning the Palace bubble, Anadyr Park. She told me you thought it was a metastructure built from non-Guide mind-fucking. Apparently the idea excites her as much as I can see it does you, so much so she asked me to look into getting her a Tab again. I don’t suppose you have an official line on that, Dr. Saxton? The mind-fucking I mean.” He glanced quickly at me and I could tell he was enjoying his superior knowledge and the fact that he was letting me know I wasn’t the only friend Francine had around the place.
I decided to humour him. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you something and you tell me . . .”
“I already told you plenty.”
I pointed at his drink and he rolled his eyes at me in an oh-please way but shrugged at the same time because he was already well satisfied with baiting me. “Tell you what?”
“Something about Jalaeka. What’s got you so manipulative, Damien? Here you are, making eyes at him, pushing me off Francine, always you everywhere I look. What gives?”
He gazed into the distances of the spirits optics thoughtfully as though he was considering his next point, but his ears flattened against his head and his fluid body language became stiff and unforgiving. “I’m gonna pass on that one. Stakes too high this time, baby. Some of us are superstitious about that kind of thing.”
“Why? He’s only another one of you.”
“You you you,” Damien repeated, contemptuous. He turned to me. “You Stuffies. You things. Toys.”
“Ah come on, stop it with the racist accusations, you know that’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what you said.” His narrow, long eyes were incredibly green. “And I always take that as a token of what’s meant. But since you asked me so very nicely”—he pushed his nearly full glass away from him with his fingertips—“and since you have been so good to Francine, I will give you a piece of information. Whatever you think you’ve found in Anadyr Park, you should go and see the completed cathedral in Temple District.”
“You’re the second person to mention it.”
“Then I must be right and you’re overdue.”
Jalaeka came back, carrying his wetsuit in one hand. He dropped it on the floor, paused behind Damien and put his hands over the elf’s eyes.
“The Count of Monte Cristo,” Damien said with bland rapidity. “Zorro. Luka Frikazik. Conan the Barbarian. Space Leader Zero. Death. Multiple Beast Tribe Boy. Thunder Road. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Reyku Queen of Ancients. Pippi Longstocking. Oh, I give up.”
“And you said you’d know me anywhere.” Jalaeka dropped his hands and picked the ’suit up. He put his free arm around Damien’s neck and pulled their heads together, turning to whisper something into the elf’s ear with a jackal-like grin, fierce and canny. Damien grinned. His arm went around Jalaeka’s waist, hand slid into the back pocket of his jeans. They both looked up at me at the same instant, and separated. Are they . . . ? I thought, mind flinching somehow at the conclusion—lovers. Damien’s look to me was distinctly sly, but Jalaeka was blithe as he picked up my bag.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ll be late.”
“See you there,” Damien said to me, turning back to the bar.
Outside Jalaeka took a slip of paper out of his back pocket and read the name on the fold. “It’s for Francine.” He didn’t open it up.
I was so busy watching him that I stumbled and almost tripped over a woman coming the other way as we turned the corner around the Shack and onto the dimly lit stretch of walk that led to the tram stop at Engine House.
“Sorry.” I reached out automatically, but she was already apologizing to me. Her fur coat was soft as it brushed past me but I could have sworn I heard it snarl.
17 / Rita
I stumbled with my heel caught in one of the gaps between the boards. As I was falling time slowed right down so that my fall took minutes rather than moments. My recovery was lent a treacly elegance and importance that was quite out of keeping with its reality. I tried to run.
“I’m . . .” I began saying to someone I had nearly knocked over, but Theo rose close to the surface of me, his senses painfully accelerating my human normal until I felt as though the whole of me had been stretched into a thin skin, drum tight, close to splitting. My vision became acute, my hearing impeccable. “. . . sorry . . .”
Then ordinary speeds and processes resumed, as though nothing had happened. Theo was gone and I was already past the man I’d touched. I caught up with myself, heart pounding, hardly able to think straight at all, praying that Theo wouldn’t come back—look, I was doing what he told me to, wasn’t I?
I saw the target from the street as I approached—the Shack sides were open to the warm night air and its colourful lights shone out cleanly, s
urrounded by only a few other open stores. I walked up to the bar and asked for the strongest thing I could think of. I had no idea how I was going to achieve what I was supposed to. The obvious thing had crossed my mind but now that I was beside him it was instantly clear to me that he wasn’t into women. I sat down and took my coat off, laying it carefully on my lap. Its noses sniffed the air, searching out the hormonal markers of potential hostility and, when they found none, became calm.
“Nasty coat,” said the Elf.
“Thank you.” The bartender—Buddy I supposed—came and refilled my glass. I risked a glance sideways. “I heard . . . that is, I heard that you knew something about the darshan. Am I saying it right? I don’t even know if it’s a real word.” I wanted to get it all over with as fast as possible, I couldn’t even think of a way of lying about how I knew anything in the first place—because Theo told me.
“Then how do you know that you want to know about it?” he asked smoothly.
“I lost my friend,” I said. “And someone at work said they’d heard of this thing, downtown, that there was one of us who was different. They said you hung around here and I’ve been here a lot of times looking for you.” I spoke tonelessly and the despair on my face was real enough as I begged him to give me some clue, any clue at all, so that I could keep Theo at arm’s length and retain just a fraction of control.
“It’s nothing to me.” He glanced up left, looking at his own internally displayed Tabtime. “I don’t own it.”
“Where should I go? Who should I ask?” I grabbed his hand compulsively, scared of touching him in case I felt Theo there as well, because he could be in any of us and here testing me. I was also scared of him generally. I didn’t know the elf and this dealing with the underground world of Sankhara was well outside my experience.
I offered him money on my Tab and he picked up the contact transaction: two hundred credits passed between us and he didn’t even blink. I gripped my refilled glass with both hands, staring at the amber liquid inside it. If I drank it, I was sure I would be sick. I had no idea what Theo wanted, only that I must find out about this darshan. I had to locate the giver. I had to get it from them.
The elf was watching me closely, though an outsider would never have thought so from his demeanour, which had become casually disconnected from me, his face angled slightly away, as though he was observing the room over my shoulder. “You’re very beautiful,”—he was only taking a note of it. “Are you going to drink that?”
I gave a minute shake of my head. What if he didn’t tell me? Then what would I do? Theo would come back and I wouldn’t know anything. I longed to ask why Theo didn’t simply read this one’s head like he read mine and take what he wanted to know, but I daren’t because I had no idea what Theo could hear, even my innermost thoughts maybe, as I treacherously thought them. No doubt. No doubt. I thought he enjoyed my predicament, that was why. He liked to watch me running, and I was nothing to him, and he liked that too.
“I could help you maybe, if you could tell me the truth,” the Elf said. He gently pressed his hand over the back of mine and opened the financial transaction ports again. The money hung suspended between us in nowhere. “I trade information, prefer it to money. I like stories.”
I jerked aside in a panic and knocked the glass over. The money jumped back to him. I found myself standing up, the coat in my arms suddenly alive and hissing, made fierce by my fear. “This isn’t me,” I said. “I work in the Embargo. I don’t care about any of this.” I backed up a step and hit the woman behind me, almost knocking her off her stool. She turned in anger.
“Hey . . .” she snarled at me and my coat snarled at her. She laughed. “That’s a cool coat.” She put her hand out fearlessly, silvered with scales on its back, and stroked the fox-furs. They redoubled their efforts to bite, though it didn’t put her off. She let one of the little heads fix its jaws on the pearlescent talon of her right index finger and played tug of war with it, smiling softly. “If the elf doesn’t help you, follow me when I leave here.”
“Take my arm,” the elf said, at my shoulder suddenly, and I had to because otherwise I would have fallen down with shock at the speed and silence of his move. He steered us both out of the bar and down the steps that led past the dripping shower stalls onto the beach. Soon we were beyond the reach of all the voices, except those of the calypso singer and the sea.
“That is one desperate mermaid,” he said lightly, releasing his hold on me bit by bit.
I leant on him to take off my shoes and held them on the same side as the coat. We walked a few hundred metres and stopped when I decided to. The slope of the beach was shallow and the water distant. There was a moon and its light brought out the hidden runes in his skin so that he seemed to be aglow with secret writing—at least he hadn’t lied about the stories. I saw traces of them running into him like tendrils of vapour, from everywhere, from all the real humans in the area. I was glad I was no magical creation. It looked weird.
“Do you ever hear it?” I asked him, calmer now that we were alone, though I had to whisper. It meant Unity. All Stuffies knew that.
“I thought I did the other day, actually,” he said in a conversational tone. “But it was gone before I was sure. Could have been the Engine doing something—you know how that is.”
I nodded, eager for any sense of companionship. I did know what he meant. All Stuffies were always subject to the Engine, though as one who had assumed herself to be simply filler I’d never expected to be important to the humans who lived here. Filler was filler, a sketch and nothing else, even filler that was purpose-made for Unity to take head trips in. I didn’t understand why it didn’t trip everywhere, in every vehicle. But I wasn’t Unity, so what did I know?
He held my arm a moment longer in sympathy and I held on to him, as if by holding one another we could preserve ourselves from Unity’s rewriting and all the other subtle erosions that came from beneath. He squeezed harder.
“You’re a partial,” he said. It was clear in his voice and the sudden upward movement of his head that he’d only just figured this out.
“I don’t want to be.”
He took a deep breath and let it out in an unhappy sigh. “Shit.” He was afraid of me now, but he still didn’t let go of my arm. “I can’t feel anything. Are you reading me?”
“No,” I said, sniffing back tears. “He—it’s not here now. I don’t think so. I don’t know . . . you never fucking know, do you?”
“I do,” he said. “I can usually see it . . . I would help you, but there’s a reason . . .” He detached himself from me, taking my hand away from him and gently placing it back at my side.
I watched him do it, unable to stop him. “Please don’t go.”
“I have to.” He began to back away from me. “I’m sorry. If you can—I can’t tell you why but—if you can, don’t pursue this thing. Let it go. It’s important. If you meant what you said about wanting to be free.” By the time he said the last words he was in the shadow of the boardwalk, and when he stopped speaking he had simply merged with the night. I saw a trace of movement against the tall pillars of the supports running under the pier, then I knew myself completely alone.
I looked up at the stars, the constellations whose names I didn’t know. “I hate you,” I whispered to them and, when nothing happened, I screamed, “I hate you! I hate you!”
There was no answer.
18 / Valkyrie: Sankhara
The operation took a lot of time to show any fruit. Valkyrie had walked most of Dogwood and Hoolerton several times over before she decided it was time to spread her search pattern farther afield, and take into account the transitional areas between Hoolerton’s uneasy border with the Hinterland and its steady meandering into the uninhabited slag-heaps of the Ablates, where wild grasses and rotten shale rolled in orange and black hillsides until they met the banks of the Purbright and fed their iron-loaded springwaters into its dark rush.
She flew to the top of Moorla
nd Towers, one of a twin pair of concrete blocks whose tired apartments stared out towards the sea on one side and at Dogwood on the other. A few streets away, near the bulbous shape of the gasometer that marked the beginning of the Hinterland, there was a public house, the Pig and Piper. It sat among streets of brick-built terrace housing, its faux Tudor timberwork exterior masking a Herculean-scaled interior, panelled in dark oak with Vicwardian stained-glass booths and tiles all around. Valkyrie found it both hideous and comforting. All her work had been wasted to its left—revealing nothing; now she looked over the right side.
Most of the space within the walls of the Hinterland was taken up by the steelworks industry and her eye was drawn for a moment by the flash and fire inside one of the huge black sheds, but she made herself concentrate on the long lanes that ran westwards. The brick terraces of tiny houses there gave way quickly to stone terraces of wider and more pleasant aspects. There was a vast stone mill, Lazarus Works, which she understood to be mostly empty. It had a massive tower of its own, concealing a chimney-stack at its heart. This was taller than Moorland Towers and, on a whim, she jetted across to it and cautiously landed upon the stone of the viewing platform near the top.
Many buildings in Sankhara were unstable, and she didn’t know the story of the Works or what pocket of the deep human memory it had sprung from, so she kept her senses tuned for any disturbance. The flagstones beneath her bronze boots were sturdy, enormous and well made. They were the summit of a long, steep climb by ramp, which wound around the inner core of the tower and was broad enough to have driven a coach and six up. Wind blasted down the throat of the chimney, and things far distant in the mill clanged and rang in reply.
Valkyrie saw that some of the tangled streets that wound throughout Hoolerton actually had narrow, overgrown paths running among them, between buildings and across bits of land that ran wild. One track along these snickelways looked particularly well used. It stretched from a narrow lane running beside the pub into the long tedium of Crisscross Street.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 16