“He’s not going to give in to you,” Saxton said.
“Is that right? But you could talk to him. He listens to you. Maybe he will. It must be worth a try,” I suggested. “I think that Metropolis really upset him. Francine . . .”
“Don’t you even say her name!” Saxton hissed at me suddenly. “Just fucking shut up about her.”
“I can see why you’re not in the diplomatic corps. But I think that you know how to get under his skin. And you can help me now, or we can both go next door and see how Francine is doing. She’s a lovely little thing.”
Chayne, able to hear but not act, poured scorn on me like acid.
“He’ll be back any minute.”
“No, I’m not sure of that. The more I think about what’s happening to this place and the fact that you’re here the more I think this is meant to occupy me while he goes to the Engine to see if he can work out how to protect Sol, maybe even to protect you.”
Saxton flung his arms up. “What the fuck, it’s all around you. If you want a tip, I think you should go and look out, way out, under the glacier. Or in the cellar. Or in the attic. Or you should watch the paintings on the staircase roof. There, will that do? Is that enough of a tip for you?”
“I saw those things. You’ve always had a good and sheltered life, Dr. Saxton. None of those things are very interesting to people from more savage eras, concerned with more savage business.”
“Symbols aren’t the thing themselves,” Saxton whispered at my back.
I turned and walked out. Saxton followed me, saw me go to Francine’s locked door.
“Leave her alone,” he said. He forced himself to free his arms, as though he might attack me. He looked terrified, ridiculous.
“Go back inside,” I said. “You’ve been most satisfactory.”
“Please.” He said it so quietly I barely heard him.
I waved him back. “I’m not going to do anything this time. I’m just going to say hi.” I’d got him on the edge and he knew it and knew I knew it.
“Leave her alone,” said a new voice with all the lilt of axe blades on grit.
I turned around and saw Hyperion standing at the head of the stairs. It had sneaked up very well, with a stealth I wasn’t used to experiencing. It was covered in a mantle of cracked ice that scattered and broke from it with every move it made.
Chayne laughed at me so hard that some of the laugh came out of my mouth in a snorting choke of sound.
I bit this back and addressed the Forged. “All right. You can either butt out of it, like the rest of the human race, or you can become part of my army, but that’s all there is. So whoever you are, make the choice.”
“Your army?” it hissed through its reptile’s mouth. Memories of Corvax—one of the first humans I ever encountered—came back. He was someone who was made for things other than the blueprint, one with the charm to make things differently, to look in new ways. I couldn’t even tell what this creature was or what it was for.
It moved forward quickly, changing as it moved, becoming bipedal, tall, its hands full of sabres.
At that moment Francine opened her door. She looked around it, at me, at Greg, at the advance of the Forged beast and her face went the dead white of old paint.
Greg lunged forward and hit me in the side of the head. It was a good blow, hard, merciless on the knuckles of the deliverer, and painful to both of us. He shrieked in surprise and I staggered sideways, my eye on that side briefly sightless and sparking like a live wire.
The Forged sprang forward and scythed the fingers of one hand across my neck in a mortal effort I did nothing to deflect. Its yellow eyes burned with a righteous fire I found excessively objectionable.
I ate it and stood up, brushing at the blood on the front of my new parka. Inside Chayne was having a great time. She watched the Forged go past her, into Unity’s all-loving embrace, and said to me, “That was a stupid mistake. You’ve been bombed.”
For a split second her conviction made me wonder: aren’t I human enough? Is there more to it than flesh and bone, and the motivations that fight one another tooth and claw until nobody can tell who means what? Can there be any more to them than the simple gallop for power and survival? Yet this bloody woman seems to think she knows something I don’t know. As if that was possible. Well, fuck her.
I turned to Greg and gave him back his punch.
Chayne had a great arm. He went down without a sound and lay against the baseboard, snuffling red as he passed out.
That’s what I always did too, Chayne said as I turned to Francine.
She held the door in a white-fingered death grip. Her legs shook and a cold sweat stood out on her forehead. Her blue eyes were ringed in the brown exhaustion of the sleepless and paranoid. As they stared at me and knew me for what I was they recognized Chayne, and her features set like stone.
42 / Rita
The Brontë parsonage at Haworth was such a small building, so old. Its friend the church is scarcely bigger, it seems to me. Trees, which didn’t exist in the photographs of the twentieth century, were massive among the tumbled graves and shaded out most of the light, even on winter days like this one. Foggy damp clung everywhere, misty and drenching. My Abacand enumerated the family trees of the dead, and they fogged and dimmed my mind with too many empty names.
Theo would have liked it, I thought, but he wasn’t here in person, the asshole.
Inside the church I sat on a pew—not an original—and listened to an actor giving a reasonable rendition of Pastor Brontë’s sermons. In the front row the actors playing along as the three sisters and brother Branwell sat bolt upright and picked at the covers of their hymnals. It was authentically chilly for a winter’s Sunday, my Guide informed me, sotto voce. I observed the play with half my attention and with the rest watched the other tourists.
The Unevolved of Earth were all derelict. Everything left on the planet was a show, a copy or a pastime spun out, elaborated and grafted on. There was a hunger in the Unevolved, which wasn’t made well by food or education or the absorption of knowledge. I felt it myself, even though I was nothing more than a figment of a few imaginations left to run inside a make-do body. Here in the church the hunger was sharp. It felt like touching a more real, more important lifetime, standing in a moment where unknown but great things were shifting underground. All the watching faces were eager with anticipation, even the bored ones who’d already toured this world to exhaustion.
A woman almost opposite me across the aisle reminded me of myself a few days ago when I was a shopgirl. Her folded hands, so neat across her designer Abacand, spoke of a voluntary restriction suited to this place, to nuns and renunciates of all orders who have made unhappy pacts with carnal situations. By her side a bigger, more raw woman, dressed completely asexually, occupied both her own place and half of the next one by simple and unconscious placement of herself. Her arm draped this way, her legs that, knees splayed out. Her boots, sturdy and functional, pointed in two directions. Her head lolled casually as she listened.
Behind them a young man restlessly shuffled on the hard wood, his intense gaze searching the woodwork and stone for some bigger schedule of god’s works than met the eye—or so I imagined to suit myself. He was alone, but he didn’t want to be. He glanced at me for the third time, and I’d looked away like I looked away the other two times, too slowly.
In front of me a family of varied children and adults were getting up to go and find some more hospitable surroundings. Toys chirruped and squeaked as they were thrust into coats and bags.
“Excuse me,” one child said softly as she accidentally placed her mittened hand over mine on the back of their pew, just in passing. She stared at me with uncertainty, and a disapproval she hadn’t got from anywhere but her own good judgement. Admiration too. I was commanding, and she envied my power. Maybe she would end up wanting it one day, but for now she turned back to her mother and grasped that hand held out. I looked at the fingers closing on each other, s
mall in large, trust and security absolute, and around my heart envy squeezed as tightly as a corset.
I followed them out of the church and along the path at a distance until they turned from the gate and into the street, heading downhill to the cafés and shops of the town. The stone cobbles were hard to walk on in heels. I returned to the parsonage on my all-day ticket, and reexamined the notebooks and glass-fronted cabinets with their sad collection of artefacts. Everything the three girls owned seemed so small and flat.
I looked out of the upper-floor windows and over the hills. I imagined what it was to want to live so much, and to be shut up here, stifled by the church and the father and means and circumstances and shortness of time and lack of health; all those limits and only the wild land around that looks as though it has freedom, but freedom hostile to human life. I didn’t need to imagine very hard. I could see how this could lead to the sort of emotion that rises in their stories. With no other outlet than sublimation to another level what do you do? Brave girls.
I stood in what was left of Emily’s room and touched her few things, rapidly, surreptitiously, drawing myself into continuity with her. Come on, you and I, you and I, you and I . . . I was lost in summoning when the curator appeared.
“You must not touch the exhibits!”
I put down the dusty thing that was Emily’s bedcover. I could still feel its cold touch on my face and smell the linen and wool. Particles of it were inside my nose, and a giddy triumph seemed to have taken over my smiling face as I charmed my way out of it. It probably wasn’t even hers but so what? I saw the pencil scribbles of Gondal, their shared fantastic land, under my hand on the wall.
“I’m so sorry” and a lot of other words rushed out of me and my smile calmed the guard down, and my attention diverted him, because he wanted to be diverted, and I let myself change a little, to please him, and that made him courteous, but all the time I was only aware of one thing. I have touched her! Now, even when Theodore comes to take me back, I will know I have been real, for at least this minute.
In the church the young man is still waiting for revelation to hit, although the play itself has long since finished. I went and introduced myself to him. We returned to his lodging at the Black Bull, and did what everyone does when they want the illusion of intimacy without risk, then he put on some old, sad music and the words lodged inside me, like stones falling in deep water.
Outside, as the sun went down, I saw the hands of the graveyard trees holding crows up to the sky as though they were put there to illustrate my feelings, and I wondered if my expectations had changed something, shaped it, begun it, as if we were in Sankhara and not on old Earth. I thought of Patrick Black, his blond hair so bright and clean. He smelled of something that was the opposite of Emily Brontë’s long, cold bed.
His kiss was the opposite of what I’d just done too. Per-sonal.
I soaked the old music we’d listened to into my Abacand, although I hardly needed to. Ian—I did ask—was pleased that he’d found something to please me. For an instant our eyes met and I felt that sensation of mitten in mitten. I found myself believing that I could live here and find life all right, but I had to stop the idea cold and remind myself I had a purpose.
Theo would want his information. Theo would make Ian pay if I didn’t find it.
Suddenly his gift of the song seemed like far too much for me, but Ian had already gone on to ask me if I wanted dinner and I did want it. I thought I’d like to sit across from him in a public room and listen to what he’s got to say, no matter what it was, or what I thought of it. I’d like to watch him eat and know that he was well tonight. So I did.
Afterwards I made my excuses and left. I walked from the tram stop up to the student lodgings, passed by the huge forms of Herculean geology specialists on their way into the village. They were so intent on hurling boulders of snow at one another they barely noticed me at all. Their activities had cleared a reasonable path, and I took it uphill past the top of North Street.
As I reached another of those surreptitious pathways that seemed legion in Haworth, joining all points to the cemetery, I felt Theo reclaiming all his other partials. It stopped me in my tracks, shaking, but he didn’t come for me, and I supposed it was because I was still useful and they weren’t anymore. Maybe it signalled that this fight was soon to be over? And then it would be my turn for the unspeakable shore.
I glanced down at the flyer my Abacand had trawled off the local Guide—Are You Lonely and Looking for Love?—and asked it to direct me closely to the address.
I had to cross thick, rough grass and boggy ground to get to the house it specified. The door was ajar and a Herculean was cleaning the hall. He was wearing a pink silk sarong, and, although it looked completely bizarre on his muscle-bound and Tek-assisted form, it was curiously graceful. He paused in a balletic sweeping action.
“Can I help you?” His scowl was general, neutral as he looked down at me, his head almost brushing the cherry-panelled ceiling and its recessed lights.
“I’m looking for Katy Pawluk,” I said. “I heard she’s in charge.”
“She went out.” The man’s voice was growly, like a talking bear. His hands flexed on the shaft of the heavy broom he had been using.
I couldn’t be bothered with explanations that didn’t exist, so I passed him and went on inside, making sure that he forgot seeing me—very minor neural editorial, he’d hardly notice the loss of two more neurons after all that chemosurgery anyway. I could hear music and many, many voices. I listened by an inner door.
“. . . destination me . . .” someone young was saying with delight.
I realized, after a few minutes of eavesdropping, that this was going nowhere. Pawluk may be the head of this group, and they may have just recovered from an odyssey out of Sankhara, but the only thing they can talk about is how great it is to be back where the walls don’t move and the wildlife doesn’t try to eat you at every turn.
I knocked.
A dark-skinned girl with blond braids opened it after a while. She looked bored and slightly surly. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Destination Me,” I said. “Have I come to the right place?”
She glanced at my fur coat with a mixture of envy and unease. “This is a branch of the Love Foundation. I suppose maybe.”
Ah well, I thought towards her, we can’t all be rocket scientists. “You seem unsure.”
She shrugged in a way that told me she wasn’t about to make my mind up for me and opened the door wider, stepping back into a pleasant, wood-floored corridor. “Come in.”
I followed her and she led me to a small reception room, lined with a variety of chairs, some comfortable and some not. I didn’t sit down but examined the pictures they hadn’t yet put up on the walls—a set of lithographs chosen for their uplifting effects on the human mind; sunrises, arresting vistas, landscapes of Earth, Mars and the moon, cozy shots of Jupiter with the lights of Nova Venezia shining among the clouds, and a digitally enhanced shot of a formation flight of Destrier-class Aviaforms lit by the sun so that they seemed to be a flight of angels drifting over a midsummer meadow. There were no local landscapes on offer—no woods, no sheep, no deer-grazed hillocks with pretty gazebo follies on top, no cold lakes or wind-blasted stone circles—but there was an original El Greco with ragged edges tacked onto a piece of hardboard. I looked at it with curiosity.
After a minute, when no one had come, I removed one of my gloves and touched the window. I was standing there, contemplating the whorls of my fingerprint on the glass, when the door opened and a man came in whom I recognized from their ads as Katy’s group leader, Ludo.
He had a broad frame, shorter than mine, and was strong like a boxer who has only just begun to let himself go in middle years. His head was shaved bald so that his eyebrows and moustache looked slightly piratical and overblown, dark and grey together. He wore a hand-knitted sweater in rainbow colours and Relaxers trousers. The ugly fit and casual manner of all t
his did nothing to disguise a restless energy that would have been more suited to martial arts wear or the corridors of power.
He said mildly, “Rohan tells me you’re not sure if you’re here or not.” His smile told me that I could off-load any blame for his odd statement onto Rohan if I wanted to.
I thought I wouldn’t, as it was remarkably astute. I shook hands with him. He gave me the glance that all straight men give me, and I returned it in the way I’ve learned to. His grip on my hand tightened involuntarily and lingered.
I drew my hand back. “I was on the way to call on a good friend of mine, when I recognized your address from a notice on the local Guide. Normally, you must understand, I don’t discuss any personal issues outside consultations with my Abacand confidante or my psychological trainer, but I’ve come here to Haworth because of those wonderful books, and I was curious to find out if there was anything new under the sun.”
He liked my oblique references and their vague hints at entendre, I saw. He liked my girlish naïveté and the formal way I spoke to him, and he liked my lipstick.
“We are not a sect devoted to the works of the Brontë sisters exactly,” he admitted, “but we are concerned with the same areas of spiritual life and passion that they were so very adept at writing about. We’re about to have some tea. I could tell you all about our work if you like, or you might meet the other students and talk with them.”
“I’d rather ask you if you have a technique to make these people feel content with who they are and what they want.” It was only polite to ask. I put my glove back on. Why Theo cared about any of this escaped me.
“Well, it’s the conviction of the Foundation that individuals are often limited by experiences they have defined for themselves as painful and rejecting. We work through those experiences and redefine them together, then, once the individual is free to express and receive positive emotions, we aid them in reshaping their lives. No intervention of technology at all. Entirely natural.” He spoke this in a well-rehearsed manner he attempted to make fresh with easy body language.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 33