Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  “It’s okay,” I said to her, passing the beer back. “I know how it works. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I wish you were right.”

  “I am right. We do the best we can do. Sometimes it’s appalling.”

  She turned the bottle, picked at the label, then gripped it so hard her knuckles whitened. “I always wanted you,” she said, looking down. “I just never felt good enough. And even if you think so, I can’t believe anybody else could . . . and that’s a sick old shame.”

  I heard her take another breath for the fatal question, the one I knew was coming, and not because I could hear her thinking but because it was what she was driven to ask all her life long, and mustn’t. I put my fingers over her mouth gently and my arm around her shoulders. “Yes. Yes. Yes.” I replaced my fingers with my own mouth, took one of her hands off the death grip on the bottle and placed it over my heart so she could feel what happened to it when I kissed her.

  When we were done she let her forehead rest against mine. “Why can’t I hear you? Inside? Aren’t we like Unity?”

  “I don’t really know what we’re like. I’m keeping you out as much as I can, for now.”

  She shuddered. “Not so much. I dreamed I was you. There was this horse and this black woman. You died. I didn’t dream it, did I?”

  Oh. “No.”

  We listened to the wind hurl sleet at the windows. She held my hand and I tried to explain to her that I’d never been happier in my life but it was difficult, because it was true.

  34 / Rita * Theodore * Rita

  It was one of those days, an English day, where the sky is like nothing more than a sheet of thick white plastic stretched just over the tallest thing you can see. Nothing looks good under it. Wan light struggled through the overcast, then squeezed through the intelligent glass of my window wall, trying stoically to enhance everything in spite of the conditions. At the distant foot of Aelf 2, directly below me, the river Tact surged underground into its deep roots, grey and silty and almost overflowing its banks.

  The river approached from the west—auspicious according to my feng-shui adviser on his visit yesterday. To the north the glass wall was apparently less than good, but a stand of pygmy sequoias planted in a solid clay trough blocked off the dramatic sight of the tall city centre buildings. The sequoias were my Tortoise of Protection. My huge white sofa was pushed out to the right. It was my East Dragon. There should have been a West Tiger object, but I wanted the water instead, especially now that the Tortoise was blocking the best view. The river was my Tiger, running towards me all the time.

  I stood in the middle of it and wondered if I felt any better than the day before.

  Rupes was on call waiting. I thought about lunch and going to the gym. I thought about the night before and got a glass of water, stood drinking it and looking at my Tiger. I didn’t mind Rupes, who was harmless; brainy and harmless and a bit arrogant, the sort you feel sorry for because their intelligence only goes one way and they haven’t the wit to know when they’re being done over. He’d given me the only interesting piece of news he was capable of—that Solar Security did not trust Theodore and were busy tracking him around various ’Bars. I could have had it for a lot less than an evening’s boredom, but Theo was in a vile mood, letting go of me only once it was past 3:00 A.M. and even he had grown tired of seeing what he could make me do and how it felt to be female for once.

  I minded Theodore. No feng-shui was going to stop him coming for me whenever he wanted, doing what he wanted, making me do it.

  The Tact swirled and eddied, seemed to be rushing up the long trunk of the tower, tearing up through its tough bark. But it wasn’t the river . . . it was him . . .

  I was shocked at how much Rita had changed since I was last fully her. It was like coming home and finding the whole place redecorated—I imagine. There really wasn’t time for a great reunion however, only a fast one. I had some tests to run.

  In the bathroom I looked in the medicine cabinet. It was empty except for a couple of small cubes of quartz: the reason I was here. There was sufficient energy in the structure to enable organic construction of a human form without getting into the nasty 11-D tangles I’d create if I started remodelling random bits of the local matter. I was uneasy at the prospect before me, but this was the only way to interrogate someone who has been dissolved in Unity if more was to be made of them than a simple plundering of their actual memories. They must be remade and put into their old 4-D incarnations, so that they can respond.

  I set the cube on the new wool rug and stood back, waiting for it to take shape at my command.

  The cube changed over a single Planck time. It became a young woman, slender but with an Amazonian energy stocked in her petite frame. Her hair and skin were marble white—a completely unnatural colouration for any Earth human—and her eyes were pale grey and by far the darkest thing in her face, giving her the look of a sculpture by Michelangelo animated by malevolent powers. Her clothes were the peculiar, near-shapeless veiling of the time and place she last lived in—a great Renaissance empire of her own making, on the verge of tumbling into the age of industry when she was cut short. She was afraid, but controlled herself impeccably, becoming exquisitely still.

  Kya was among the last of the renegade human-form splinters to be returned to Unity and she didn’t go willingly. Under the pressure of a deranged creation myth that had made her mad she had undergone a clean separation into two parts; one partial containing her emotion and the other her reason.

  A nice experiment as it went—astonishing in the results, to which we owe Jalaeka’s unflagging perversity—but even I don’t want to deal with the insanity of one or the other half of her on its own. I put both sides together again and hoped that her first sight of existence in a new world and in an unknown time wouldn’t make her try to jump through the plate glass before I could explain.

  From the timelessness of Unity it never seems like anything has been missed even though aeons have passed. When Kya looked around her and set her eyes on me I suddenly recalled the moment of her assumption with a kind of nostalgic glow. Of course, I wasn’t in Rita’s form then.

  I saw that there was a key difference to Kya now, an unshakeable conviction that she didn’t possess before. She knew that she was Unity, and would return to it, like it or not. She had been tested, and failed.

  Kya fixed her stare on me. “What do you want?”

  Hers was a difficult language. I wished we were back in Solar English rather than speak that tongue again, and passed her the knowledge of it. She’d spent a lifetime acquiring information by sucking it out of other people’s heads like a sponge sucking up water, so it didn’t faze her.

  “Tell me about Jalaeka.”

  “Pah!” She actually spat at me. Quite rightly, she sees him as the architect of her destruction. “Is he still alive? Send me back.”

  “He is about to end us,” I said, knowing she was never going to be persuaded for less. “Anything you can offer by way of an insight . . .”

  “Save your breath. I have no interest in whatever you do. Live, die. I don’t care.”

  Nothing had prepared me for the cool of her regard. She hadn’t moved, except the minimum requirement for speaking. Her eyes never wavered from my face.

  “I’m searching for the people who first made him,” I said. “I thought you might be the one, or one of them. I need to find out what they did and how he was made different.”

  “Then you’re unlucky this time, and a bigger idiot than I took you for. I tried to remake him, but I couldn’t do anything to him, even though he had no idea what he was or what he was capable of. Those that I used to shape him are all dead and long gone. Neither you nor he ate them, so whatever secrets they have are dust.”

  She stood up suddenly and took an instant, savouring the experience, the power of being able to act. Then she came closer and looked around the room and at me, and in particular at the window. She stood close to it and gently lifted he
r hand and put her fingertips on the pane. “This is another world,” she said, to herself. “I always thought there must be others.” She turned to me. “Who rules it?”

  “I do.”

  She smiled, and it was not a pleasant expression. “I doubt it.”

  “I ruled yours.”

  “You destroyed it,” she said. “That doesn’t make you a ruler.”

  “It’s still out there.” I glanced at the sky.

  She shrugged and dismissed her interest in it. “If it is, it’s not mine. What else must you ask? Be quick. I could never stomach you when you were one of those insufferable mercenary monks, and now you’re no improvement.”

  I was surprised that she had identified me so easily but it didn’t matter. “Who were the makers that you used?”

  “Let’s see. There was the rich little poor girl who became a courtesan—this is the wrong word and I cannot find the right one, what is the matter with this language? Geisha, companion, master . . . no, she was one of mine, the women who rule from beneath, animatrix. She was the central one. He found another, some trash from the marketplace; a consumptive tailor, I believe. They were both weak and isolated characters who longed for love, so their dreams had great power. But he accepted their direction, though he accepted no other . . . As to why that is possible you can only ask yourself and, since you have no answer, perhaps you should ask him.”

  “What’s his weakness?”

  “Empathy, of course,” she said. She stared for a moment at the sequoias; taller than her head but shorter than the ceiling. “What is this?”

  “It’s my Tortoise. Of protection.”

  She gave me another of her killing smiles. “What a brave kingdom. Little trees.”

  She knew all about ritual, psychopomp and religion of course. She’d made a career out of erasing it from existence in a spectacularly gory rationalist jihad. One of her had, anyway.

  “He loved me,” she said. “Did you know that? He was the one who put me back together first, before you came and ruined it all.”

  I found it a pretty incredible claim, knowing what I knew about her. “You tortured him.”

  “And then he ran away into the woods and went crazy,” she added. “And still. No breaks. Not a crack in the armour. Only . . .” She cast about and spoke with a complete bafflement and no little anger, “kindness.”

  I felt seasick being with her. Watching her was like looking in a mirror set at an angle to flatter least. I had the nasty suspicion I owed her more in terms of who I’d become than I owed most people eaten by Unity, as though she and Isol and those other freaks had all made more contribution by dint of their manic energy than a thousand ordinary lives of better balanced qualities.

  She glanced up at me through her colourless lashes and one-half of her mouth curled upwards knowingly. “Tortoise,” she said quietly.

  I sent her back. The quartz rock sat on the rug.

  I touched a frond of sequoia, ran it through my fingers and felt the tiny overlapping needles run smoothly under my skin. Kya had grudge reasons not to want to help me, though she had nothing to give in any case. But there were others who had known him, including one I was convinced Kya knew nothing about, even though they’d been contemporaries. Now she would be extremely difficult to handle, but maybe she would be more useful.

  I ate her after Kya, a long time in the past: if it was the past, if this was its future. It was in another universe whose path lay distinctly separated from this one, and as such the times there and here could be said to be at least as concurrent as they are different.

  I cross over to the place, to the time, to that eternal present where I am the ruthless mercenary Tyban, scourge of all lands. I am sword brother to the cash-hungry employees of a power-mad tyrant. He was a bastard in the pejorative sense, who thought himself a mage because he was a Stuffie and could use Stuff a little and to him in his ignorance it was magical. I liked him mightily, because he had extraordinary determination and the low cunning to have become anything at all.

  I ate, or will eat, five people during Tyban’s/my period of service.

  Of course, given the nature of my existence, they are still alive, not in Unity, and Unity is also somewhere not yet born.

  In that world I am still standing with the fire and the rope over Intana, Jalaeka’s doxy, asking where he is.

  In that world I am still in midair with my knife in the neck of another renegade splinter posing as a shaman, his material substance draining into my hand as he looks in my eyes and understands nothing.

  In that world I am still a dark ghast with my tendrils locked around the throat of the singing drummer girl who suppressed all her splinter visionary powers into a contemplative temple life.

  In that world I am still speaking through a winter lake to a small boy, tempting him into the icy depths where he will find the peace for his unknown splinter heart.

  In that world I am still standing looking at the empty glass coffin where Jalaeka rested last on that planet, realizing with a genuine shock that one of these wretched splinters has gone and left the entire continuum.

  I’m so surprised I’m missing the fact that I’ve been sneaked up on, and the black woman’s blade is still slicing through my heart there on that sandy dune overlooking the grey sea, and the gulls are still shrieking. Some wretched girl with long mad hair who is both the princess and witch of the place is howling like a demon. She runs around the broken battlements of her pathetic shoreline fortress as I pull the blade out of me and walk off along the shingle beach to get some peace.

  I am still returning to my attacker, standing over the smashed glass coffin and saying to her, “Where did he go?”

  She looks down at me—she’s very tall and has soon got over the shock of not slaying me. “Away. What are you? Are you one of him?”

  “No.” I feel affronted, amused, annoyed. “He’s one of me.”

  She gives me the most contemptuous gaze I’ve ever seen. It makes me feel like filth under her boot. “It’s not possible. Here.” She hands me her dagger. She’s of the same mercenary order as I am. Tyban and Chayne. We are brother and sister in cash and blood, though we’ve never met before. Still, the code of the Brotherhood answers all questions for us, and we have no interest in each other beyond our connection to the vanished Jalaeka.

  She expects me to kill her for her treachery and I am honour bound to do so. “Get on with it. I’m waiting.”

  “What did you do?” I’m going to get my answer. If death is no threat to her, maybe life is. I prod the glass coffin with the blade and it chinks and is scratched—a ridiculous Stuff fancy, a crazy thing, its totemic power effective despite the fact it’s broken.

  “What the hell is she on about?” I point the tip of the sword at the shrieking girl who is a short distance away, very angry, slightly psionic as you might expect from long, random exposure to the kinds of Stuff individuals spawned on this place.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I explain the position, since there’s no harm in telling her now.

  Chayne glances at the girl with exasperation and a clear desire to kill her. “She was in love with him and now he’s gone. She kept him in this box and was trying to use him to get through to some other world. He had power and she fancied herself the sorceress to use it. Stupid mare.”

  “I’m impressed.” I beckon to the girl. She wastes no time and runs away across the dunes. “And what about you?” I return Chayne’s weapon.

  She takes the dagger back and looks at the edge thoughtfully. My blood still smears its surface in a red slick. She glances at me, then, fast as an adder, sticks the point squarely into my belly. I grunt and gasp with the pain as she twists it experimentally before pulling it out.

  I eye her crossly, making it clear that I consider it an insult, and she thinks a bit, watching me not bleed or die, and says, “He wanted to leave, and I wished that he could go somewhere better.”

  “You wished?”

  �
��With all my heart.” A small, triumphant smile touches the corners of her lips.

  I have to have her. I take her. Her story bleeds into me in one great soak and I am starting to feel very uneasy about my missing splinter, that it inspires such peculiar and devoted behaviours.

  I am still standing there, realizing that he could be absolutely anywhere. I am tracking down the princess and eating her, and understanding that for all I’ve been serving an arch manipulator I may have met another one ten times better naturally suited to the job in Jalaeka.

  I rarely even thought of him by name then. It hadn’t got personal yet.

  As Rita standing by her Tortoise I feel like I felt as Tyban, used and abandoned. Only now I feel that I have abandoned and used myself, missed the bigger picture, made a mistake I can’t quite pin down but am now beginning to reap. The answer to it is lost somewhere inside his history, inside . . . And then it occurs to me that I may have just the thing I need to really piss him off.

  I left Rita and became taller, darker and more weary in spirit as I put on the mantle of his last friend on that world. When the body was remade I waited for the mind to be fished from its stored depths on Origin. It takes a while for something as complicated and delicate as that. Whole seconds.