Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  She heard the quiet sound of the door a few moments later.

  Valkyrie could not equate him with her image of Theodore. The shadows in the corners began to lengthen and take on the shape of hands. She left the Palace by the front door as quickly as she could and returned to the warmer, less charged air of the greater Sankhara night. Saxton would have to wait. She could not face the dark touch.

  As soon as she made Crisscross Street she took to the sky. From five hundred metres up she gazed down. Crisscross ran under the bridge and along for another half a mile. There was no trace of the huge landscape she had been in, no sign of the enormous Palace. There were only the houses, then the small stores, the businesses that organized their freight using Crisscross Canal, boats drawn tight against their moorings, night-lights in their bows bouncing in the gale.

  She descended and set her foot to ground at Temple. Everything was bright here, grandly proportioned, roads full of the regalia of a dozen religions each with their own festivals and rites. The sacred market ran all night on Wednesdays. Braziers burned bones and fat, giving off filthy, stinking smoke. As she passed it a wandering dog from one of the stalls pissed briefly but confidently on the plinth of Odin’s shrine. Rats scuttled, then leaped like gazelles as the dog spotted them and attacked.

  Valkyrie bought a posy of dried flowers and walked past the ramparts of the newly built Saint Cadenza Piacere to the Uluru Temple House Gardens. It was a modest place with winding paths which were lit at night by paper lanterns. Most of these had blown down. Valkyrie did not mind the rain and weather and she didn’t want to sit with anyone. She stood in the lee of the summerhouse, turned her sensory repertoire over to automatic and locked her exoskeleton in position so that she could rest standing up, knees slightly bent, ready to go.

  The warm and gaudy colour of Uluru’s virtual perfection was a shock. She stood and rubbed her face with dirty hands until she was used to it. Tom Corvax the silver aeroplane was still there in his eternal bed of grass, and she ran up to the empty shell and looked quickly for Metatron in the polish, calling him with an impatient tapping of her fingers on one of the aerofoils.

  The avatar climbed out of the cockpit wearing blue overalls and a cap. He walked down the angle of the wing and sat down on it beside her. “Who can I get for you?”

  “That person I spoke to before. The gryphon,” Valkyrie said, biting her thumbnail.

  “He isn’t here.” Metatron shrugged. “Anyone else?”

  Valkyrie gripped the grass with her toes. It was cool under the wing. “I’d like . . . I wonder if—can you connect me to Tupac?”

  “I will ask,” the avatar said and became transparent to indicate that he was busy and not able to talk to her. He stayed that way some time.

  Valkyrie looked around. She liked the park here, the statues of the heroes and the bodies of the dead avatars. Elinor and she used to come here when they were young. Like the children playing through the castle mazes of the long-gone Terraforms, they ran everywhere unburdened.

  Valkyrie pinched the knee of Metatron’s overalls fiercely and felt nothing between her thumb and forefinger. He returned.

  “She says later.”

  Valkyrie spun around and slammed her hand on the smooth metal curve of the wing in frustration. She would not discover the strange Salmagundi’s identity today. “Then take me to Elinor.”

  “As you wish,” said Metatron. He held out his hand and she took it, watching her small fingers be folded into his large ones. He slid off the wing and as he stood his wings unfolded in swan’s white flights, not one but six pairs, including one pair from his head.

  Valkyrie became as light as down and the wings beat once, shifting the world to night, then to day again. When they came to rest she was in another region of Uluru, a deeper region, where the permanent residents had no other form and no other world but Uluru; where they had gone beyond the body. Valkyrie wanted to sit with Elinor, or what was left of her, but the hand she held on her own kept fading and, inside the visor of her shattered helm, Elinor had no face at all.

  32 / Francine

  Jalaeka slid out of bed at about 3:00 A.M. and went to see Greg. I lay in the dark, curled up as tightly as I could, and fell into an uneasy half sleep to the sound of the wind battering the old/new windows. The old ones moved in a certain way, made a kind of knocking now and again like nervous guests. The new ones were silent. I fell asleep again and dreamed. It was unusually vivid, and had the quality of memory, not dream. It wasn’t my memory.

  Blood. Death. War.

  Everything is fucked.

  Everyone around me is dead and these bastards in the faceplates and armour are on horses.I can’t reach all of them at once. Those who stood by me are bodies at my feet. As the last one falls with his throat cut, his faith in me is the thing that gives him solace, as far as solace can get him through pain, which isn’t far.

  One of the fuckers is going to get me. There are too many.

  My arm won’t work properly, I don’t know why.

  Shield’s gone.

  Slam into horse with spear. It falls and twists. Spear breaks. Shit.

  I reach up for the rider and pull him down as the horse groans and comes rolling down over its knees, a plummeting ton of dead meat. Kick off the bastard’s faceplate. A black woman is staring right up into my eyes. Her head’s filled with a vision of the ghosts of her dead family. They’re crowding around her, whispering to her about me, telling her something she can’t really hear for the battle noise. But I can hear them. They’re talking about their eaten souls.

  At the same instant she’s looking at me and seeing the man who’s about to kill her. Part of her is looking forward to it, and part of her is massively disappointed that this has been all there is and all there was, and that she has unfinished business. Part of her wants me to be what she has hunted for, longed to become, longed to exist, so that her life will not be wasted.

  But it has been.

  Her understanding hurts me with a shocking, visceral, indescribable pain.

  It changes me.

  This distracts me totally so that when some freak comes riding up with his arm in full swing . . .

  I can’t see for the blood in my eyes.

  On my knees in the mud. Can’t get up. My head doesn’t work.

  I’m spun around by something that hits my hip.

  I can sense the final blow coming. If I could just turn, then I’d have him but I can’t turn. I can’t breathe. Time slows as it begins its fall into ever.

  Suddenly, I start to wonder what’s going on.

  None of this makes the slightest sense. Hang on a moment, I wasn’t even here a few minutes ago.

  Didn’t I have a . . . ?

  Wasn’t I a . . . ?

  What am I doing here?

  Who are these people? Why am I fighting them? Why am I one of them?

  Who the hell am I?

  The axe hits me with the speed of a blink. I hear bone splintering but don’t feel a thing except the shock of impact as I land face-down over the dead horse. Its sweat is incredibly salty, like the ocean.

  Hands pick me up and put me so I’m looking up into the sky. What a fabulous colour.

  The black woman warrior looks down close to my face and her sweat drips on my nose. “You,” she says hoarsely, and I can see that she knows who I am.

  But I’ve let out my last breath.

  Blue. Black. I want to kill them all. I want to hold them in my arms and ask them questions but instead I’m falling into a deep sea, where dark horses with no master carry me away.

  I struggled to wake up properly and when I did I lay and shivered uncontrollably, unable to speak, convinced I had died.

  33 / Jalaeka

  When I got back upstairs Francine was asleep, the lights on, her clothes on, the comforter wrapping her into a tight chrysalis. I turned the lights off and glanced through the restored balcony windows. The wolves outside watched me and spoke among themselves quietly, wondering i
f Hyperion was right, and that there might be no gods at all. It was a new idea to them, and it kept them awake and troubled. They believed in soul but not souls. They sang about it until they heard elk or thought of elk and went off into the trees in silent files.

  I listened to Greg for a few moments: drunk and mostly asleep, he kept on nodding awake to another heart surge of horror, then would catch himself and think about me, and pray and catch himself praying and loathe the idea of it and his own weakness, then he’d fall unconscious.

  The Light Angel Valkyrie left quickly through the snow. I wished she reminded me more of Angel #5—for a second I’d hoped Damien had found her in me and the Engine spit her out again—but that was too much to ask of any pattern.

  I walked back to our bed and watched Francine sleeping. I sat on the floor next to her, listened to the wind, thought about how easily Theo had tricked me. I felt thoroughly miserable and sick, realizing my great selfish stupidity, for hanging on to my own prized integrity out of fear and uncertainty, allowing this to happen because I was too precious about myself and would not dare to change. I was sorry for the first time I defied Unity, and so agreed to our war. I was sorry for each one of us in our “Hotel California” predicament: you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. You are what you are.

  Since Theo knew all about us there was no point in holding back any longer.

  I made another physical form, exactly the same as my own. Looking into the face of my clone partial was simply like looking at a reversed mirror. I realized instantly why Theo used partials the way he did, with their distinct forms and their independent conscious lives—doing it my way meant I had to become two separate instances of myself, with diverging futures. I reintegrated.

  It wasn’t so bad though I could see how major changes could easily accrue with time, and that after a day or more it would become quite impossible to say with confidence that the alternate version was anything less than an individual in his own right. And if my copy was a true copy of me, it was unlikely he’d want to return . . .

  All the thinking was getting me nowhere. I remade the copy. Our thoughts ran seamlessly together, perfectly easy to access, rather harder to block out, like Francine had been difficult to separate out and keep out. I/we didn’t need to think to one another however; we were in perfect accord for the time being.

  I went down the hall into Greg’s room, where he was sleeping, and picked him carefully off the chair before laying him gently on his own bed. I took his boots off, covered him over and lay down beside him so that he did not have to be alone.

  In Francine’s room the other one of me put on what I’d come to think of as my Greg-head. Although I couldn’t prove anything right now I suspected that neither Unity nor I were remotely like Theo’s visions—ultimate being and ultimate individualist. I would bet almost anything on the fact that neither it nor I nor he nor any of our details existed at all until Isol met Stuff. Not that it matters where reality does its business because the “Hotel California” condition holds regardless. I didn’t care one way or the other who was to blame. I only wanted justice.

  I waited for Francine to wake up. I needed inspiration.

  When she opened her eyes the first thing she whispered was, “Where are you?”

  “Right here,” I said and put my hand up. She caught hold of it in hers.

  She paused, then struggled halfway out of the comforter. “What time is it?”

  “Nearly dawn.”

  “Oh.” She lay down again reluctantly.

  “Katy’s mate, Ludo, was round. Earlier today, I mean. Before Theo came,” she said, opening my hand out and placing hers against it, palm to palm and finger along finger.

  “What did he want?”

  “To give me some counselling and under the cover of care tell me that I should go back to the group and leave you. He said that relationships are the inverse of loneliness because they only mask it. The love you need is from yourself.” She sighed.

  I wondered if she was going anywhere with it. She often started out from a tangent. “What did you say?”

  “I said it was a half-truth at best. People don’t exist in isolation, do they? And then he said that I couldn’t even get started on my journey because I wouldn’t listen. He said I should look within myself and see that loving others was a step to loving myself, and that listening was part of loving, and I should listen to people who could really care about what was best for me because they had objectivity, and not to needy people like you who were only going to trap me in the cycle of dependency.”

  I hardly dared breathe. I imagined slaughtering Ludo with a blunt nail file.

  She took her hand away from mine, holding my wrist with one hand and my fingertips with the other. I felt her breath across my skin. “I said I had listened to him, but I didn’t agree with him and agreeing with someone wasn’t compulsory even if you did love them, especially if they were mouthing a lot of platitudes in order to avoid having to face the fact that things hurt and can’t be mended. And then he said that it was by embracing hurt we learned to be lonely yet sufficient. I said nobody here is lonely anyway, they’re all surfing for answers to existential questions, which is spiritual enquiry not misery. The really lonely ones are out there actually being lonely, so who are you talking to? And he said that everyone here was lonely in the end because they didn’t have perfect self-realization, which is the essence of being one with yourself. I asked if he wanted to go to the pub, have a drink on it, no hard feelings, and he said that was typical of people who are trapped by self-protection, that they always try to distract you back to the mundane things that chain you into the slavery of attachment and eternal misery. But if we had gone to the pub, then Theo wouldn’t have . . .” She took a deep breath. “Then I told him to piss off.” She kissed my palm and I couldn’t do anything for a few seconds until she stopped.

  “You’re too patient,” I said as gently as I could. “I don’t know why you keep letting them in.”

  She sighed and closed my fingers for me, let me go. “They’re lonely.” Then she curled up on her side. “I can’t feel you anymore, but I think I’m starting to remember things that are really your memories and not mine.”

  “I can try to take that away . . .”

  “No. That is, if you don’t mind.”

  I owed her that, although my guts turned over with nausea at the thought of what she would discover. It was one thing to gift it all to Greg as a history, facts divorced from their reality, another to reveal it to her as an experience. He was much older than she was, and much less innocent. “Okay.”

  “Thanks for not asking how I am.”

  “Figure of discretion, model of sensitivity, me,” I said.

  “Thank you.” Her brittle lightness of tone was like a thin glass.

  I played it even more casual. “Can I get you anything?”

  “I want a sandwich. And something to drink. Beer. Chocolate.”

  I got up. “I’ll have to go out and deal with the pollution of material things to satisfy your gross dependencies on sugar, fat and alcohol. We’re all out.”

  “That’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay with me, but my solution to the problem of leaving her unguarded wasn’t something I wanted to tax her with now. “Hyperion’s still hall monitor. Want me to ask him to wait with you?”

  “No need.” She had reached a gay, airy tone as though she was happy and I knew it was time to go.

  “Okay. Be back soon.” I went directly outside to where Hyperion was standing restlessly in the corridor, his head tilted, listening to the sound of finger cymbals and repeated mantras from the Foundation apartments. His tail was twitching fiercely and he jolted with surprise as I duplicated myself and divided on the spot. Getting to be a habit suddenly.

  “Mind if this one of me waits with you on kill duty?” I said, sitting down beside him where his claws had dug great gouges in the carpet.

  “Certainly not.” The Cylenchar sett
led again in front of the statue of Achilles on its pretty white plinth as though this was standard procedure, only his large, tufted ears turning now and again at some noise outside. As my other self walked away from him he spoke a word to my back.

  “What’s that?” seated me asked.

  “A lucky charm,” he said, with the candid and atavistic expression of an owl strangling a stoat. “In case you meet your adversary.”

  “Thanks,” I said to him, doubled. He was smarter than he looked.

  In my third (or first, it didn’t pay to think about that) form I deferred my errands for Francie and walked, transmolecular, through the world to Greg’s office. I saw the invader immediately, right there on his desk, a small pink quartz heart.

  The DNA in the dead skin cells trapped on its surface told me it had been handled by several people; Greg obviously, and others I didn’t know. But I recognized one individual’s trace elements. It took a minute to place them, the memory rising out of my left hand where the initial pickup of their information had taken place—at Ziggurats of Cinnamon that night I’d been there with Greg and Francine. Theo’s partial, Rita.

  I went out onto the roof and assumed my old Metropolis identity, wings, tail and all. Far, far above me I heard Forged Glider chatter on the AM band. I soared upwards into the icy night on one of the impressive thermals rising out of the University heating substation.

  Even at this early hour there were Gliders riding the city plumes, unhurriedly taking on enough height to cross from Sankhara through the Gateway into Blackpool airspace, and from there on and on across the planet and its ’Bars, never touching earth, never touching water.

  “You’ve come a long way,” the first one said as I circled below her. We banked at the same moment, moving back into rising air as we crossed the Purbright river south of town. The whole city was a map stitched in lights beneath us, SankhaGuide Massif a black block like negative space. She let me hear the Forgebeat music she was listening to and the beautiful sounds made the windriding a weaving dance.