Living Next Door to the God of Love

by Justina Robson

  The jacket and my hands were covered in large drops of sticky darkening gore that didn’t move. I touched my face and my fingers came down streaked with vivid red. I retched again but there was nothing to come up, it only hurt. I didn’t want to move.

  There was a gasp, a wet, sucking noise and a long, hissing moan of agony. There was a merciful pause.

  “There you are.” Jalaeka squatted on his heels next to me. His skin was smeared all over with blood around his shoulders and neck and his T-shirt was solid scarlet and clung to him, but he was smiling. He peeled the shirt off and tried to use parts of the back that were still white to clean himself off. Where I expected to see burst edges of raw meat, cut deep like a medical display of tissue but mangled and distorted by hacking action and intense suction I saw only his whole neck.

  “Greg.” He put his hand on my knee with a tough grip. “Don’t freak out. No lasting damage. I’m fine. Eros snogs everybody.” He rolled his eyes in exasperation at the role. “It’s a talent. Look, let’s get this floorboard out of your hand.” He did something to my forearm with one fingertip and my hand went dead. I watched him pull shards of wood out from my broken nails and from under the skin of my left palm. I hadn’t even noticed when that had happened. He ripped a piece off the shirt to tie around that and then took his jacket back and put it on.

  I couldn’t speak because I was vainly trying to stop Theo’s thoughts running into mine. He was afraid and he was angry, yet the Engine itself was in command and clearly it didn’t agree with him. We were in.

  Damien shot me a scared look. He felt it too. “Hurry,” he said pointlessly.

  Theo felt that Unity was against him and his jealousy was growing by the second. Of me, I realized with shock. He was jealous of me.

  Jalaeka finished his care, took a painkiller patch out of his jeans pocket and slapped it on my wrist. “There shouldn’t be any more trouble like this.”

  But the reality of the violence was locked in my limbs. I was frozen to the spot. Then the vampire himself came around the corner and stood in the feeble afternoon glow.

  His plume of horsehair had become a soft chestnut. His clothing was the jewel-coloured finery of a medieval king. The stretched-out parody of a face had become broader and gentler, though no more human, and his claws were gone, replaced by Tek-tipped fingers and the silver and copper designs of Autoware. Where the spines had been on his back there was an armoured plate. He stood straight and tall. Tears streaked his face.

  “Captain,” he said—still had all his teeth—and bowed to Jalaeka, deeply, knelt and touched his head to the floor. Then he stepped over me as though I didn’t exist and walked out the door into the warm beauty of the day outside.

  I saw him jump as he reached the pavement, an easy leap upwards to touch an overhanging frond of ivy depending from a lamppost basket. Damien’s eyes followed him, then darted back to me. He watched me like a hawk with his glowing green eyes, then led us to a simple door beside the staircase, opened it using its brass handle, and we walked onto a narrow metal gantry.

  Before us, below us, above us, to all sides was a darkness, faintly echoing to the sound of our steps. A few metres away in a pool of light stood an Android. It was steel in colour and form, partly fleshed out to human design and partly left unfinished—a medley of metals, wires, arrays and plugs. It turned its burnished-steel head with a smooth and perfect movement, not bothering to process human-simulated motion like the only other one I’d seen. Its body revolved soundlessly beneath, catching up with the head, and it walked towards us. It was over half a metre taller than Jalaeka and bristled with so many clip-on tools that it seemed furred with spikes and fine strands of metal, cable and fibre.

  “Hello,” Damien said to it and gave it a kick that made no impression on it. “Take the Regulator off, will you? Open the core for this guy here. There’s a good bot.”

  It stopped a couple of feet away and its chin dropped silently. It reached out and took my left hand, briefly scanning my Tab. The smell of oil, metal and ozone was strong. It registered me and it registered Theo’s brimming presence with equal indifference before backing away a step. “The Engines are connected to, but not operational upon, human subconscious interfaces. They are retuning to your frequencies, Dr. Gregory Saxton. The Regulator function is enabled. This process is not open to veto except by your direct command. The Engines do not recognize your Stuffstructure companion, Gregory Saxton. We presume you wish to identify this anomaly and request its analysis as the reason for your visit.”

  From the hall I heard one of the remaining vampires screech horribly.

  “Sdrawkcab!” it yelled in earsplitting disharmonies.

  Sdrawkcab: god of returns, said my secret hot line to theology. I looked to Jalaeka and he smiled.

  “Say yes,” Damien said.

  “Yes,” Jalaeka and I both said.

  “Accompany me.” The Android half turned and stopped, statuelike, waiting for us.

  We went nowhere.

  An immense space, as big as Sankhara Great Stadium, boiling with steam and smoke and the cacophony of gigantic effort opened up into light around us, above and below. Vapour rose thickly and filmed on the android’s skin. A clammy, oily heat fumed around me as though we were suspended high over a cauldron and immediately I started to sweat heavily. Through mists and the glimmer of distant flames I saw cogs and wheels and pistons smoothly turning, some larger than Heavy Angels, maybe larger than planets, others small and dainty as fairy pinwheels. They loomed in and out of existence with the flutter of delicate wings.

  I felt the same forces within as without. I felt Theo with me, curious, malevolent, staying far enough away that I had no idea what he was thinking, close enough to remind me I wouldn’t be doing anything he didn’t like. Deliberately I spent myself on observation, thinking as little as possible, lest he hear.

  The Android opened his left hand and two opalescent hawkmoths flew out, their wings beating so fast they were only a humming blur. The moths zipped out into the Engine and a ringing, tinkling sound like a shower of gold came from the depths followed by an almighty grinding crunch of desynchronized gearing. Metal screamed and was fused. Silence returned and the pinwheels spun to stillness.

  I dared to look down through the grid I was standing on.

  The Engines went on forever, into blue space and black space, into nothing and everything. I looked up. One moth had returned to its owner. The Android waited as the moth extended its proboscis and connected to his finger, alighting and folding its wings.

  “We would know your instructions,” said the Android.

  Jalaeka had his hand pressed to his neck where he’d been bitten. He was breathing fast and was pale. His eyes were wide. “Merge.”

  I glanced at him. Merge what? Damien gave him a look of doubt and horror.

  “As you wish,” the Android said.

  I watched the moth sucking vigorously, or being sucked, where it sat on the Android’s hand. On its pale green wings there was a black pattern in the shape of a body lying splayed out and dead. Somewhere low and to my left, from the corner of my eye, I saw metal becoming elastic.

  I listened to the Engines working. The pressure of their unknowing growing moment by moment inside me. Their anticipation became a flavour of burned, melted candy floss on my tongue. The walls of my rib-cage felt prickly and I understood that it had begun to work on me. I looked at Jalaeka, longing for reassurance. His face didn’t fill me with hope.

  “Oh god,” I said . . . “What . . . ?”

  The fugs of the Engine furled and thinned. Gears the size of steam locomotives whirled past just above our heads, their tarry backwash almost flattening me. Damien ducked one that would have cut him in half. He dashed across the gap between himself and Jalaeka and pressed his hand against Jalaeka’s head. “Do what he wants,” Damien said.

  “Your will is becoming,” the Android said in its mild factory-settings voice.

  The moth flapped its wings slowly,
savouring something.

  There was a terrible sound from far beneath, a groan, a tearing rending rip like Hell’s Velcro bursting open.

  Damien screamed, a shriek that would have shattered a diamond. He fell.

  The moth took wing and the Android watched it go. The gantry trembled. Somewhere out there in the vastness something fragile crashed and broke. Fragments of telescreen came hurtling out of the vapour as it lit up. They were active, a billion tiny televisions, and they were all showing clips from my life. Some of them showed me doing things, and others the view from my own eyes.

  As it hurtled past one of them cut a gash open across my cheek and the bridge of my nose. Hot, burning pain flared and blinded me. I flailed out with both arms and fell, catching myself as the gantry we were standing on tipped and dropped at one side. I clung to the decking. A roaring, screaming cacophony of metal and matter being ground and folded by brute force sent pain shooting through my ears.

  I saw between my fingers that the Android had hold of Jalaeka’s head in its hands, its body and his anchored to the canting floor by clamps on its feet. Its fingertips were extruding fine wires. They ran down into his face and through the surface of his eyes. His body hung in the machine’s grip, his hands opening and closing convulsively.

  “Don’t look, Greg. You don’t have to.”

  Theo rose with the smoothness of a wave and pushed me aside. I felt him struggling within the Engine, doing something to it that was not what it was doing. There was a moment where I seemed to float free of my body and look down on it from above. Then I heard a voice rolling the names of god off like reading a list and beyond it Jalaeka’s voice, chanting his own name.

  The Engine screamed and I went blind and deaf in my body, although I could still see and hear from above it.

  The Android let go of Jalaeka almost casually. His body fell onto the decking beside mine and I saw he was still alive because he pushed his fingers through the sloping meshwork. The Android stepped back, lost its footing. It slid simply and easily through a hole in the rails, colliding with Damien’s body and dragging him with it as it fell into the machine. As it went it called out,

  “It cannot be consciously controlled. Do not worry. There is nothing you can . . .”

  I saw it mashed and minced between a pair of rolling cylinders. Springs and sprockets shot upwards in a fountain, then fell back, sparkling into firework clusters of hot iron. I didn’t see what happened to Damien. My face stung and hurt and my own blood rolled down and fell on the fractured glass an inch from my face.

  I saw myself toddling over a patch of grass, rolling a blue ball. It was at the house in Cornwall. I saw myself watching TV, listening to music, at school, at home, on the bus, with Forged in classes at college, running outside, eating, drinking, sleeping, excreting, masturbating, talking, laughing, crying, reading, scratching, staring, scuffing my feet, doing the vast billion nothings I’d ever done. I saw myself kissing Katy for the first time in the back of a bedroom at a terrible party in London. I saw her smile at me like I was worth it.

  Then I saw the layout of the Engine and superimposed on it another structure; the elevensheet, Jalaeka, Theo, Unity, me. They bloomed over one another in clouds of mesmerizing and rapidly changing pattern. I blacked out.

  The vision was gone.

  I was staring at broken glass and below and beneath it there was nothing but steam and silence.

  Slowly I got to my knees, then to my feet, wavering on the slope of the floor. Jalaeka was sprawled on his back. I felt a powerful mixture of love and resentment as I looked at him; he was my friend, my enemy, a traitor who conned me into letting him control the Engine. I was not I.

  He made Theo into me and me into Theo. He united us. We were one.

  There was only me left. Me.

  “You could have done anything you wanted,” I said.

  I felt strange, very dizzy.

  “Greg?” he said to me, quiet and concerned.

  “Fuck you!” I hissed to him. “What have you done to me, you bastard?”

  He stared into me. “What you wanted.”

  I didn’t know who he was talking to. “Don’t play that tricky word-and-intent shit with me now.”

  “Theo,” Jalaeka said. “You’ll be okay. It doesn’t have to last forever.”

  I could feel everything. Unity beneath me. Every second of every life in it, across time. It wasn’t still, like a stored record, or fixed, like a real event locked by 4-D. It sang, each mote to each mote, and it thought, if thoughts could be the shift of resonating patterns across the spectra of reason and emotion. I was part of it, one of billions of parts like me, emergent in 4-D, sustained by the mass. Inside it I could see Jalaeka’s peculiar seven-wave advertisement for a better way rippling through its entire structures, gathering vortices, creating distortions, creating turbulence.

  I was so small. I was insignificant. I was able to do whatever it could do at my own whim, but I was not it.

  I remembered meeting Francine, the way she had flicked all those half-baked statements about love away, saying, “Crap!” I remembered Katy talking about love like it was a commodity.

  I remembered taking a dive onto the sandy floor of a huge, hot stadium. The crowd bayed for my blood and my captain saved me by missing my neck when I wanted him to strike true.

  I remembered the church in Haworth and the little girl’s mittened hand on mine.

  I remembered Patrick Black, and I looked at the thing standing in front of me, whom I once called friend, though he wasn’t me at all. I felt the possibility of growing larger, to encompass him, and realized this was the charge of the seven wave: you can get bigger and be everyone, or you can get smaller, and be yourself, but you can’t be detached and you will always react to the desires of the ones who surround you.

  But I have no idea which of these things I am, or want to be.

  Beneath us something big and important broke free of its moorings in the understructure of Sankhara. It was the Engine. The Engine was of me, but not me. It had its own laws beyond my devising. It was tuned to me, unbound, and now it was listening to me.

  “Time to go.” Jalaeka held out his hand to me.

  I wanted to take it in gratitude, and to kill him. He saw a blow coming and ducked it.

  We ran out of the house and into the broken sunshine of midafternoon, him first and me after.

  The sea was going out and clouds and wind from the west were starting to scatter cold rain that was turning to sleet. I rubbed my eyes and shook my head but it made no difference. The distinctions between one thing and the next were breaking down. I couldn’t make out what was what. And inside me where Engine House had been, there was the floor falling away, into endless nothing.

  I fell. I didn’t understand.

  “Come on.” I felt him pick me up like I was a doll.

  His night wings took us both to Kodiak Aerial as the derelict house on the boardwalk collapsed.

  The Aerials were a blur to me. Up and down meant nothing. Gravity shunned my attention. I could see the molecules of things but not their wholes. I could feel the Engine, getting out of the beds that bound it and coming after me like a lost dog looking for its master.

  I heard Francine say to me, “Greg, are you there?”

  Valkyrie and Jalaeka were arguing.

  I found the touch of his stone hand. I kept imagining the Engine coming here, my convoluted will, my difficult feelings for Francine that would probably get her killed. In a lull of sanity I ordered him, “Get me out of here. Take me back to the Palace, to the Park.”

  55 / Francine

  Ironhorse Talos Pterippus Vassago and his avatar were the kind of thing that, in another life, I would have wanted to have my picture taken with so I could send it to everyone on Earth. He was named after the race of flying horses although his body, grounded on what was left of the lawn in an area of razed and blackened earth, was nothing like a horse, except that there was something about its lines that partook of t
he same beauty as a wild mustang. It was much more like a silver fish. His avatar was a thoughtful-looking young man with a rakish dress sense and a lion’s mane of hair, not unlike a demonic librarian, who told me proudly that he was the fastest Earthbound Forged ever made and that Pterippi could give even the interplanetary coursers a run for their money.

  I was missing Cadenza, worrying about Greg. I barely noticed.

  The flight to Kodiak Aerial made me feel sick.

  Over Sankhara proper the Valkyrie bound me to her with a harness and we dropped out of Vassago’s door to make the descent ourselves. The day was cloudy and bursts of ice particles kept rushing through the air, almost as though alive, stinging my face and hands.

  To my surprise Damien was there to watch our arrival. He was seated on top of one of the cable cars, whittling a green stick, and stood up as we came down beside him, the wash of Valkyrie’s jets almost blowing him away.

  He came up and undid the clips that held me to her, briskly rubbing my arms.

  “I didn’t know you knew each other,” I said, disconcerted.

  “I know everyone,” he said with the breezy speed of deceit.

  Some feeling started returning to my hands and I batted him away, almost falling over. The roof curved gently down from its apex, and we were swinging, and the line of cars was bobbing and I was never any good at board sports. My nausea returned. Damien took my arm. “Steady.” For a few moments I looked at the view.

  We hung in the bottom of a loop between Aelf 2 and the SankhaGuide Massif. I’d never been up here before and I was stunned to see hanging gardens as well as houses. All for flying people, and elves, I assumed. Great baskets of soil and hydroponic systems swung between the bubble houses, almost entirely hidden in mantles of green and flowers. There were pathways that even I could try to walk on—ones with boards and ropes. Also lights, and everywhere—absolutely everywhere—there were fetishes and charms, prayer flags, mandalas, magical symbols and small, peculiar little one-eyed dolls—gootnies, they were called. They lessened probabilities of bad fates by looking for good paths into the future.