Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  “Trouble gets a kicking,” he said, counting the coins.

  The stairway was new and had been widened from the days when single slaves would trot in and out with sacks on their shoulders, but Jalaeka still had to duck to get in. The rooms below were several conical brick-lined chambers, joined by wide, arched doorways. The light was dim candle and firelight. There were dancing girls in cheap costumes, and performing monkeys who balanced and jumped through hoops, but the band wasn’t bad. The wine was terrible, the water was worse, but in the quietest of the old domes there was a shadowy place to sit with your back to the wall, so he didn’t mind.

  Kaela was there because it was one of those places that nobody cared much who or what you were and didn’t ask questions. He was diffident, lonely, young, transsexual and simply out because it was an improvement on looking at the four walls where he lived. He expected nothing although he hoped to meet a couple of friends there later on. He had a talent for seeing Changelings, which was the Koker name for anyone marked with magical or supernatural powers: the type of people you saw less of now, because of the executions. He tripped over Jalaeka’s outstretched legs in the gloomiest part of the curve as he looked for a seat, the legs being longer than he thought and the curve itself cluttered with too many bags and packs brought in by a group of out-of-towners who didn’t want to trust the doorman with their tents.

  Annoyed and frightened by the possible threat all strangers represented—plenty of people didn’t like realizing he was not a girl—Kaela apologized profusely.

  “Forget it,” Jalaeka said. He was surprised to find the girl looking straight at him, because he was sitting in darkness and what light there was from the candles was prevented from falling across him by a strange concoction of shadows.

  “You’re one of them,” Kaela said, against his better judgement, all mouth running off with him as he panicked double on realizing his mistake. “I mean. I don’t mean . . .”

  “One of who?” But the girl backed away from him and with a few quick and much more precise steps, vanished into the crowd. Jalaeka wasn’t used to being feared. At least, not recently. He watched her, then paid one of the servers to send her a drink.

  He stayed sitting in darkness and she came back, driven by politeness and cautious curiosity. He felt a thousand years old, too old for a game, but he played it anyway. When she agreed to sit down with him she sat bolt upright and kept glancing around her. Within a few minutes Jalaeka realized she was a man. It was a good change. It was almost perfect.

  “You’re one of us,” Jalaeka said, meaning deceivers.

  His new drinking partner stared at him. Huge blue eyes. Dark hair. Red mouth. Pretty. Very. “I haven’t got any talent for magic,” he said.

  “Me neither, luckily for us, so you can tell me your name without fear of sorcery.”

  “When I see your face.”

  “You can see my face if you tell me my name.”

  “I don’t know the name for what you are,” Kaela said quietly, his voice almost completely lost in the growing din of the night’s celebrants. “Your ghost looks like the white stone woman, and I don’t know the name for what she is either.”

  “I do,” Jalaeka said. “It doesn’t bear repeating.”

  “I really should go,” Kaela said, putting his glass down half-full. His hand shook and it rattled on the table. “You seem like you’d rather be alone.”

  “Stay.” Jalaeka leant forward to put his hand out and catch hold of Kaela’s hand. It brought them unexpectedly close together and into the light. They were only inches apart. “I haven’t talked to anyone real in a million years.” He said it because it was cued up to be said, but he wasn’t paying attention to it anymore. He was looking into the blue eyes and aware of the hand under his, shaking, and of the other’s surprised, slackened mouth. “Wake me up,” he said, leant farther forward and put his own mouth over it, like sleepwalking off a cliff.

  I opened my eyes into the balmy air of our apartment. It looked artificial. I felt feverish and sick and exhausted by the colour and strangeness of the memories. I sat up straight and pushed my hair back.

  “That place,” I said to Cadenza, stunned by how relentlessly human and normal it had been, how real. But I knew without a doubt. “You loved him. More than anybody. More than . . .” Don’t say me Francine, you moron, I thought. Even if it is true. “What happened to him?”

  “Another time,” Cadenza said. She was staring straight ahead, into nothing. I guessed that Greg had gone to sleep in our dressing room.

  I felt too dizzy to stand up. I looked at Cadenza, really looked, and realized what I was seeing. Cadenza is an altar. “Oh god.”

  “He wasn’t anything like this,” she snapped, wrapping her arms around herself tightly. “Nothing like it at all.”

  “No,” I said, meaning sorry. “Of course not. I remember . . . I think. I think it was a stupid wish, wanting to be . . . to know you. Like this. You were right. I totally get it now. I think . . .” His aching sadness hurt me. I could feel it. But I still wanted to know what he’d meant on the first day we met when he said, You saw what I should have been. “Did I make you?”

  “What?” Cadenza snapped out of her reverie and looked me in the eye. She snorted and smiled. “You? No sweetie. You didn’t do a thing. I just liked the look of what I saw in your face.”

  “So, you’re not . . . and I’m not responsible for all of this?” I asked.

  “For this perfect situation? Give me some credit, darling. I may not be the manliest vision of conquering supremacy that ever sashayed down the pike, but that world and its works were made of more dreams than yours alone. I’m my own girl these days, and even in those days. I could have found myself some misogynist death squad soldiers to give me some backbone if I wanted to, but I never cared for the uniforms. Making takes but an instant, character—forever.”

  I kissed her cheek, the moment as sweetly surreal as any I ever shared with Jalaeka. “Have you been reading Oscar Wilde?”

  “Reading it? Honey, I am the living embodiment of the eternal struggle to become as trivial and superficial as possible, a thing that cannot be highly recommended enough as proof against the various Earthly agonies. I should think not. You must be confusing me with somebody far more serious, such as yourself.”

  “But if I didn’t do it then why . . .”

  “Because it’s your birthday, I will forgo observing that you are being less than perspicacious. Shh. You talk entirely too much.”

  “I love you, I love you, I love you . . .” I repeated into her ear, stroking her beautiful hair.

  53 / Jalaeka

  And while telling Francie the truth, I was meanwhile lying to Greg.

  After copying Mode and Myanfactor’s patterns, after watching my own memories start to blur in Francine’s keeping, after seeing Rita . . . I had an idea. It was risky, very, and it made me nauseous, but I couldn’t imagine another way that I could get Theo to buckle. He still hadn’t come back, and that meant he wasn’t going to give up so easily, on the promise of a freedom he already had and probably didn’t like.

  If I got it wrong, Greg wouldn’t know ever, and I’d have done worse than simply kill him outright. I didn’t hold out any convictions about Damien’s claims that the Stuffies of the universe would tip any balances. Theo might have been given his orders by Unity, but he was its sole agent.

  It was hard to lie to Greg. I’ve made so many mistakes in my life. In the past I erred on the side of caution. Now, the other way beckons. Nothing seems right. I don’t know if I can trust myself to do it. I don’t know if it’s possible. It’s just the only thing left.

  I opened up the expansion gradient on the Winter Palace sheet, using the energy already present in the foursheet to fuel the expansion. The temperature, barely warmed by Francine’s presence, began to fall.

  54 / Greg

  Maramunumu, god of eavesdropping, whispered in my ear, vibrated through the plates of my skull, urging me to try har
der to hear Jalaeka and Francine, though I didn’t obey. I was Maramunumu’s heretic. I didn’t want to know what they were saying.

  While Jalaeka went out with Francine this evening he also stayed in with me, in spite of my protests.

  He said it was a valid separation, not a divorce.

  We watched TV and drank beer and I slowly got used to the idea that I couldn’t detect any noticeable differences about myself, in spite of the fact that when Theo had stood beside me it had seemed he stood inside me, and I was all his.

  “You must have known all the answers to the things I was working on,” I said at one point in the early evening, and I couldn’t help the resentment that leaked into my words. “You knew about Metropolis all this time. How Sankhara is made. The way the Engine works. You knew everything.”

  We were sitting up on the bed, our backs to the headboard against all the cushions in the room. My Abacand’s screen system was set up at its foot, showing Sankha Jukebox on the wall, to which neither of us was paying a lot of attention.

  “I don’t know any more about the way that Sankhara is made than you do. I’m not the same as Theo. I’m not Unity. I don’t know everything, only what I learned the ordinary way, in my own time,” he said.

  I thought of Hyperion and his yellow eyes, his odd body vanishing as it touched Theo’s stolen shape. In the TV singer’s voice I heard several names: Mstaka, Ilit, Esriel—gods of spiritual forgetting, regress and denial. “How come you never Translated Intana or Kaela? You could have.”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t know I could. I didn’t know anything in those days, not about what I was, or Unity, or the Mystery.”

  “Do you think you’re part of Unity trying to solve the Mystery?”

  “Huh?” He turned to look at me and smiled, shaking his head at me as though at a schoolboy who hadn’t understood anything. “No, no. Unity doesn’t want to solve it, it wants to find it. That’s what this is all about. Its efforts, its searches, everything it does. Matter, space and time are solved problems. But you and me and living conscious creatures—you saw their different kinds of complexities. That’s why Unity was made in the first place. To escape the ennui of the physical, and the boredom of a domesticated, easy life. It was meant to decipher the patterns of complexity that defy entropy. Went a bit wrong, although it might be too early to call it.”

  “And what will it do when it finds it?”

  “Eat it,” he said. “Sadly. Because that’s its design, its nature. Which never works because the Mystery it wants can’t be found in unpicking things like that. It’s like taking a car to bits, then wondering why it doesn’t roar along the roads anymore. But they got one thing right. To really understand something you must become one with it. And with that insight Unity will carry on searching every living thing it finds in the hope of picking it apart to build itself a nifty little number that can drive to Nirvana.”

  I thought about it, trying for dispassion, trying to find some hope somewhere to commute my sentence. “If everything became Unity, would it matter?”

  Jalaeka looked me in the eye for a long while, during which his smile grew and grew until I had to smile back at him, in that way you do when you’re waiting for some very funny punch line. “Matter to whom?”

  Oh. “I see what you mean.”

  “Shit, Greg, I don’t know if it matters whether you’re a free and independent creature or just think you are. I don’t care myself. Why don’t you ask the Forged? I’m sure they’ve got a long line of philosophy on it, certificates and everything.”

  “I was agreeing with you, no need to get stroppy.”

  “I’m not stroppy,” he snapped, then caught himself and shook his head apologetically. “I’m frightened.”

  There was a pause. I could tell he wanted to laugh. I was sure I did.

  “Maybe it’s not that bad,” I said. “You know . . .”

  “Maybe,” he said slowly. “Let’s see, millions dead and incalculable suffering undergone, friends lost forever. You eaten. Why, you’re right, it’s not even as bad as this beer. The things you want to change never change. Just the wolves at the door and the nightmares you can’t face giving birth to each other in the ice, and the ice coming closer and the city being pushed away to the edges at a speed that is exponentially increasing night on night. Greg, listen, this really isn’t about your work or some experiment to plumb the depths of human experience.”

  He picked at the label on his bottle and peeled it off in a single sheet, suddenly self-conscious. “I hate people who do this, but I can’t stop myself doing it if the corner’s loose, do you find that?”

  He screwed the paper up and flicked it away. “Listen, if we stay here tomorrow night then the only way to get back into Central Sankhara will have gone. Do you understand? It used to be a hundred metres from the gates of the Park to the rest of the Sidebar. Now it’s a hundred klicks. After tonight it will be a thousand. Then ten thousand. By this time next week there will be no Forged human capable of reaching you and no machine capable of carrying you back either, because the land will grow faster than they can travel. Shortly after that it will reach an expansion that equals the speed of light, if it gets that far, and the temperature will fall to near absolute zero.”

  “What?” That was ridiculous.

  “But I’ll be able to reach you. As long as I live. Which is something I wanted to talk to you about, actually. Have you got a minute?”

  “No. Call me Thorsday.”

  “Okay, Thorsday. I need you to come with me to Engine House. You and Damien. I need you to believe that I can defeat Theo. I need him to take off the Regulator and use the Engine to intercede on the remaking, because the Stuff of which I am made is not reactive in the same way that Unity Stuff is reactive. I don’t just respond like putty anymore since Francine did me over. I need it to change me. Will you do it?”

  “How could that work? You just told me about it. Unity . . .”

  “I’d have to tell you at one point, wouldn’t I? The time it takes Unity to steal thoughts out of your head, make a counterplan and put it into action is marginally less time than it takes you to blink. Telling you now is fine. Won’t make any difference. If it wants to try and stop me, it can do it at any point. But Theo’s the thinker, and he isn’t here thinking in your grey matter. He’s licking himself down over in another universe, though that won’t last. And to be honest, I don’t have any other ideas left.”

  “What about Francine?”

  “I don’t want her anywhere near this.”

  “I mean, she’s the more credible witness. She made you . . .”

  “She’s been through enough. We can’t just walk into Engine House. You know how Sankhara is. There’ll be some price to getting in, not to mention the Engine’s own defensive systems. I can take care of those, but not if I have to watch out for both of you as well. Anyway, look on the bright side. You get to see the Engine at work.”

  I finished my drink and closed my eyes. I dared myself to look down, inside. It occurred to me that I was now a Stuffie. Running out of excuses. “The thing is, I don’t know if I believe. Damien . . .” Damien switched beliefs with the ease of switching underwear . . .

  “Wish then. You can do that, right? You do want to get out of there?”

  “Yeah.”

  There had been something very wrong about that conversation. Later, when I went to bed, exhausted, and wrote my journal entry, I noted it down as closely as I could in the hope that I could discern what bothered me so much about it—not the prospect of going to Engine House, even, because I no longer felt afraid for my life as I would have at the same idea a few days ago. The whole thing seemed odd. But I had to believe him, because he knew more than I did, even if he had learned it the hard way. He was the real thing.

  I lay in their bed in the old dressing room and wondered what was happening to the rest of the Palace. The third time I opened my eyes it was daylight and the apartment was incredibly cold. I was shivering before I go
t through to the living room. They were packing.

  Jalaeka threw a rucksack down on the floor and said to Francine, “That’s it. Greg, what do you need?”

  “Just my Abacand,” I said, yawning and feeling for its familiar shape in my pocket.

  “Okay.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked Francine.

  “We’re leaving.”

  “We’re not walking?” I asked.

  “You’re not,” said a new voice I didn’t recognize at all. It was gritty and low-pitched but feminine.

  I started, then looked questioningly at Francine. Behind her I saw a giant figure stand up from where it had been seated on the floor near the fire.

  “This is the Light Angel Valkyrie Skuld,” Francine said. “She’s come to arrest you.”

  “Protective custodial care,” said the Valkyrie. Her servo-motors hummed sweetly, like distant bees, as she walked forward. “I regret any inconvenience, Dr. Saxton, but Belshazzar has instructed me to look after you until this situation is resolved.” Military Forged were frequently less than lovely to Unevolved eyes but she had a Palladian elegance, a classical bearing that made me instantly think of Athena. Maybe it was the helm.

  Jalaeka walked back in. “You need more clothes,” he said to me and picked up wrapped packs of new gear, tore them open and flung the contents at me. “Get dressed. Here’s breakfast,” and he passed Francine a can of that multinutrient gop they issue to Forged in jobs where eating wasn’t always a priority. It was sealed with the name of the intended recipient—Valkyrie Skuld.

  “Thanks,” I said to her.

  “Tastes like shit anyway,” she replied and I saw two empty cans already on the mantelpiece.

  “The vanilla is okay,” Francine said.

  I looked at mine. Original. It tasted like—brown things and maybe a bit like earth. The gritty bits were peculiar. I thought maybe Skuld had an iron filings supplement. “She was right the first time,” I said and the Valkyrie smiled grimly at me.