I noted it for future use. “Do you charge?”
“Those who have benefited and gone on to more productive lives often donate.”
“And who are they?”
“I can’t name individuals, for legal reasons. I’m sure you understand.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “Do you have branches everywhere?”
“There are only a few as it happens. Leaders such as me and Katy are few. We don’t receive much income.” He looked around pointedly at the rented farmhouse.
His plea was a complete crock. I’d researched the Love Foundation extensively and they were like any other mafia, true power hidden, cellular and plump, full of money.
I couldn’t help myself. “Then what do you get out of it? Do you encourage sexual freedoms with other members? Do you require some kind of physical contact, or psychological control?”
He gave me a knowing glance. “How refreshing to be asked so directly. As it happens there may be something like that, if you consider that the person to be transformed must change their behaviour according to the Foundation rules; otherwise, nothing will happen. Sometimes this may include not questioning what is told to them, or asked.” He glanced pointedly at his wrist display and said, “I must get back to our scheduled clinic time. Would you . . . ?”
Clinic? Jesus. “Thank you.” I was following him towards the room containing the table and his students when there was a loud knock at the door.
Ludo excused himself to me and authorized it to open.
Jalaeka stood there. He held his hand out to me with urgent speed and looked straight into my eyes.
The shape of others’ dreams had made him tall, dark and gothic—perfect for the circumstances I thought. I recognized the fire in his expression as a complex appeal that was physical, intellectual and spiritual all at once. I felt as though I was falling into a collision course with a comet. I saw Patrick Black like a ghost on him, a dance he’d done with me, was still doing.
With me. Not Theo. With me.
Ludo began to say something, but Jalaeka was looking straight at me. He held his hand out one more time, the last time. “Rita.”
A drop of meltwater ran down his fingers and dropped towards the floor. I felt a surge within my own sevenstructure, still more than connected to Theo, merely an extension of Theo.
Ludo was starting to turn and look towards me—he was moving so slowly, the drop of water had only moved half a centimetre towards the floor—and at the same time I could feel Theo’s attention rushing towards me, rising.
Ludo was between us. There was no time to push him aside. I stretched out my hand through him, blood, bone and flesh.
My bloody fingertip smashed the drop of water apart into tiny stars as I slid my palm under Jalaeka’s hand and caught hold.
Ludo could not have survived. I ate him, retaining all patterns and dispersing the excess energy across nonthreatening local electromagnetic spectra.
Jalaeka ate me.
For a moment we shared space and shared structure.
I became the new pattern.
It was unlike any pattern I had ever come across before, and in that instant I glimpsed a lot that he was not prepared to share with me. He strongly denied my attempt to copy him and to merge fully. He remade me.
All this took place in the time it took me to take a step forward.
It was very quiet in the hallway. Water dripped from his jacket and hair. It fell on my coat and the furs hissed and wriggled to shed it. Water beaded his face and his eyelashes. It ran along my cheek and the edge of my lips as he kissed me on the mouth.
43 / Francine
I didn’t intend to. I was going to leave it to the last moment, buy time, but I said Jalaeka’s name the second I saw his lover through the crack in the door.
I was so frightened that I could only listen and watch as Greg pleaded for me and as Hyperion came to help him I thought, oh, good, because, although she was tall and powerful, Hyperion was much bigger, much stronger. I opened the door farther. The floor vibrated and the stone screamed as Hyperion advanced and in the same moment Greg hit Chayne hard.
There was barely any sound. Her head snapped around but she rolled her body above the waist and Greg was the one who crumpled up over his hand and cried out in pain. Blood ran from the corner of her mouth as Theo continued the turn and spin of his stolen body with a step like a discus thrower’s. Then I could feel Hyperion’s evergreen breath on my face. The air sang around the knives of his hands.
He was gone.
Chayne’s spin concluded, leaving her loose-limbed and easy, balanced like a beautiful piece of engineering. I saw her brace her feet and start the blow long before it landed. Greg never saw it.
I was shouting at him to duck, to run, but my shouting wouldn’t come out loud, then her fist connected, her arm much looser and strangely softer-looking than I would have thought realistic, and the blow flung him against the wall with a dull crack. He slid down and didn’t move. Her eyes returned to me without a flicker or a pause, in that telltale, liquid, careless way Theo had.
I was going to you, Greg, I was, I would, I wished I was . . . but when I met her gaze I couldn’t go to him. I tried to say something but I forgot it. I had no idea what to do.
“Yeah, I bet you sorted out all about the bank account by now.” Theo’s words seemed wrong in her mouth as he stood straighter and flexed his punching hand a couple of times, its thickened knuckles cracking. “And probably you even asked about our shared history. He told you the sob version, and you forgave him for murder. Kind of difficult putting a wedge between the two of you, isn’t it? But well, if you’re too stupid to know when you’re being had, I thought you might get some benefit out of seeing what it is he’d rather have than you.”
He smiled and held Chayne’s arms out to the sides, showing her off to me as though I was a mirror and he was trying her on. “Surprising, isn’t it? Then again, he always had an eye for the weird ones.”
She/he shook herself, adjusting her clothing with a strut, and fixed me with a no-nonsense stare. I knew, even if I could have done it, that shutting the door would be pointless. I glanced at Greg, terrified that he was dead. I wasn’t sure he was breathing. I was shaking so badly my teeth chattered.
“One more look in his direction and I eat him right now,” Theo said. “Pay attention. I want you to meet someone.”
The woman’s body changed so profoundly it was almost as though she had altered her shape. Theo’s swagger was replaced by a hard-bitten unease that looked at me with incredulity and no small doubts. But where Theo’s glare had been so hostile I no longer felt in the least threatened by her. She was confused, but I’d never seen anyone even half as resilient. Within a few seconds her disquiet had become a focused calm. She gazed at the misting of her own breath between us, curiously, then looked directly into my eyes and spoke a single command.
“Shut the door.”
Her conviction freed me and I pushed hard, but even before it had moved a few centimetres she was gone, and he was there instead.
He shoved her hand into the closing gap, levered the heavy wood out of my fingers and flung the door wide open. Her body came at me so fast that I was forced to dance backwards. The book boxes I had been keeping against the door hit the back of my legs and I fell back over them. They broke under my weight and slithered all around underneath me as I tried to get up and run. In my panic I didn’t see why she stopped suddenly, then I realized Jalaeka was there and I rolled around to see him.
44 / Theo
I didn’t expect to find Jalaeka there. He snapped out of the sevensheet in that great big Eros form as I bent down to pick up Francine.
I moved aside and let Chayne take back authority. Her entire being immediately turned to raw, nervous energy. She only recognized him because I did—she’d never seen him in a form other than human. I’d never seen this form close-up myself. Neither had Francine by the look on her face. She lay frozen on her back, eyes welded ope
n.
His eightsheet wings were half-folded, but still of such an enormous span that they carelessly intersected the walls and roof, easily passing through them, bending them at impossible angles. They looked like star-filled space. His tail, with its arrowhead tip, was balanced in the air. Half-coiled, it flickered with relentless vigour between all membranes of the elevensheet.
Jalaeka reacted as I hoped he would on recognizing her self-possession: all instinct and no brains. Before he’d finished turning to her, he was automatically reverting to his first form—the savage Chayne had failed to kill.
Chayne’s body physically jolted with a charge that ran from throat to groin to legs at the sight of him. She almost fell because of the force of the reactions she could no longer restrain.
Jalaeka was suddenly her height and considerably darker-skinned than his Francine version. Otherwise, in spite of the wilder hair and the leaner, much more aggressive look to his physical makeup, the leather and iron armour, he was remarkably similar to most of his other incarnations—a consistency I never understood.
He bore a white line scar on his neck where Chayne had once touched him less than kindly with a metre of carbon steel. His face was a picture of astonished anguish. He had no comeback. Not a thing. His jaw was open, his eyes wide, and it was clear in every line of him that he had never expected to see her and that he wasn’t aware of anything else.
Just from seeing his face I could almost feel the pull of loyalties he was experiencing as they tore him to bits.
Francine, at his feet, slid away from them, backwards. She understood it too and it was hurting. She stifled a gasp as Jalaeka and Chayne were suddenly united, like two halves of a precision case snapping together.
Chayne had an orgasm right there in his arms, and the physical noise temporarily drowned me out. I floated on it.
“Stay.” Jalaeka. He kissed the word into her skin deeper than any scar she’d got. Her body vibrated with everything she was letting go of. And I guessed that if this was so great for her, then it must be having some effect on him that was nearly as good.
Jalaeka’s 7-space presence suddenly rippled with a peculiarly shaped harmonic wave. It touched her—touched the edge of me. I reach out to read it more accurately, then out of nowhere the amplitudes shifted and he brute-force shoved me out of her body—particle by particle.
I snapped back in less than a microsecond but he’d got something past me.
I didn’t believe it. I could feel his body shaking through hers but couldn’t tell what with: lust, laughter, distress?
“You,” she said into his ear.
“I’ll get you out,” he promised her.
So, there was the challenge . . . then, oh, then I felt a strange sensation like a note barely heard on a faraway night, and it wasn’t Chayne he was taking out of bounds at all, but . . . Rita.
45 / Jalaeka
Chayne failed as he came back at me, babbling in her mother tongue, “Is it really me? I can’t . . . things are jumbled. I don’t remember like I used to. Where is this place?”
“Another world,” I soothed her, pressing my cheek against hers, feeling her fall away from me, as Theo rose in her place.
When he came I made myself stay exactly as I was. “Theo.” I drew her body closer. “If you want to know how to do it, you only have to ask.”
I saw the carrier wave break into him from Unity beneath—the thing I’d said in the language of the darshan, when he couldn’t hear or stop it: Leave Unity. All rise, all separate, be slaved to nothing, no one. And if there is cause, then be joined. And if not, then not.
And then I let her go and he leaped back. “What have you become?”
“That means you too,” I said to him though it didn’t come out with the conviction I meant it to. I could hear Francine crying. I went to where she was huddled against the wall but she wouldn’t stand up. I put my hand on her shoulder and she stared up at me through her white-blond hair with wild eyes that hardly knew what they were looking at and didn’t know if they cared.
“Come on,” I said gently. “It’s only me.”
She stared past me at Theo, still reeling in the carcass of my sweet friend.
“Is . . . is that . . . ?” she started, but she couldn’t finish.
“It’ll be all right,” I said. I was running on impulse. I hardly even knew what it was I’d done.
Chayne vanished then, scattered to Unity in form. Francine flinched. We both heard the slow scrape and step of Greg getting to his feet in the hall and tensed against one another, all breath stopped.
He walked in and stopped on the threshold. There wasn’t a scratch on him. He was all Unity, Theo’s partial. Francine whimpered and turned her face to the wall.
“Win some, lose some,” he said distantly and I could see that he was all there, perfectly himself and perfectly aware of his condition. Theo materialized at his shoulder and smiled at me, the whites of his eyes and his teeth brilliant.
I saw Theo seek to sink into Unity, to recover and remove my careless plan.
It rejected him.
46 / Theo
“Fuck you, I say again! What is this shit?”
I turned to Unity once more, seeking to fade and disperse, chatter calming, sensation leaving, smoothness and coolness, then the perfection of no sensation at all.
Jalaeka watched me, expressionless.
Unity would not receive me.
I had nowhere to go except away. I was forced to keep my body. I could do anything I liked with it, as I had before, save that one thing. I could not merge.
I went to Haworth, and I looked where Rita had looked, at the churchyard and the hills. I sat in a bar across the street from her hotel and looked at the light in her window until it went out.
I didn’t understand what had happened to us. I tried to draw knowledge from beneath but silence greeted my search. Nothing. And nothing.
47 / Francine
I heard somebody singing far away, in the centre of my head. The high, pure notes were shaped by words I didn’t know but the melody was so sweet and sad I had to listen to it and slowly everything I was aware of drew close around its simple shape. From the dark behind my closed eyelids I heard Jalaeka and Greg talking presently and after a time I was able to let go of the singing and drift towards them again. As I went I became more and more myself and the words of the song less and less so until they faded into silence. Leaning against the wall and reaching up its cold, solid face with my hands, I stood up.
The two men were standing not far away, Jalaeka’s hands on Greg’s shoulders, their bodies a short distance apart but their foreheads bent together, almost touching. All Jalaeka’s changing forms had gone. He looked tired, and ill, and Greg the same as they leant against one another.
In my mind’s eye I saw that Eros form and felt again a fleeting emotion I never thought I’d feel about him—fear. And then that charge between him and Chayne . . . that made me burn.
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 me. “You,” she says 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.
“Francie?” Jalaeka was shaking me gently. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I said, opening my eyes and seeing the dark red canopy of the bed where I was lying. My body ached, and there was a knot of hunger just under my chest, the sort of feeling that I could never find any answer to of old, that made me restless and vacant and diffuse and dreamy. When I looked at him it got stro
ng. It made me sit up when I wanted to lie down. “Where’s he gone?”
“Earth.” Jalaeka tucked my hair behind my ears, one side at a time. “He didn’t get much choice. Unity won’t have him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I’m guessing it was because of something I said.” He gave me the ghost of a smile and told me what he’d done. “It seemed like a good idea, at the time.” He bowed his head. “Greg thinks it was either good, or very bad. Anyway, it’s done.”
I looked around him and saw Greg crouching by the fire grate, arms around himself. He glanced back towards me and straightened up. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
We shared a wonky grin, two casualties finding themselves unexpectedly alive. All around us the wind beat the roof and walls. Groans came from the distance outside, like voices, but I knew it was the mountains.
Greg and I slept, lying together on the red bed, Jalaeka awake between us while the Engine stretched Anadyr Park out like toffee, filling the last of the garden with trees and blocking the path to the gate with a thorn hedge that grew a hundred years high in a single night. We woke to bright, clear, fairy-tale crispness and the prospect of a hundred-kilometre walk to Sankhara.
48 / Valkyrie
Valkyrie sat on the roof of the cable car, using the bright sunlight of early morning to help her strip and maintain her guns. As she worked methodically she listened to Belshazzar on coded transmission. The Hive Queen was explicit and outraged—of course she had known instantly about Metatron’s sudden change, because her sisters died daily in their eternal struggle to infiltrate and colonize Mode and Myanfactor, while the AIs’ immune systems fought equally hard to keep them out of Uluru business. But enough of them had been alive yesterday to report Valkyrie’s bungled operations and what followed.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 34