Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (11 page)

B
ECAUSE HE WASN’T UNCOMFORTABLE
, he stayed, lying flat, for some while. He thought that was why. But when he moved, the pain stabbed hard through his guts, and Picaro saw he had instinctively kept still only to avoid it. Muscular, outside and in, the pain. Where she had punched him. Who? Why? Surely, that had been a dream—or he was remembering that other time, that time when he was sixteen. With Simoon.

Somehow he saw his father, sitting across from him, frowning. “You never hit out at a woman, son. No matter what she does.” But it was only a memory, sitting in the chair. It was an apology also, for Picaro’s father had never struck the witch either—and was that ethics or terror?

“This is another kind of woman, Papa,” said the child in Picaro’s mind. “I never had a chance. Look what she did to me.”

But it hadn’t only been that. It was the sickness which had filled the Palazzo Shaachen, the thing they had said was faulty CX, bad air—that first.
Then
her.

Her … Who? … What had he done?

Picaro sat up, spat like a cat at the deadly wrench of pain, and swung off the bunk. A light melted up in the wall. Someone would be coming.

He tapped his wristecx for the time. It gave him 16
VV
.

They had been observing him since they brought him in. They had performed various medical checks, not particularly intrusive—blood count, tissue sample, urine, shining pins of brilliance through his eyes, a flash scan in a medibooth. They told him he was in faultless health. And then they gave him something, some drug they said was necessary, an insurance against any future problems. And he had slept after that. Deep, so deep, like …

Like death.

And after—or in?—the sleep, he now remembered, thought he did, (was that yesterday?) getting up and leaving this clean antiseptic cubicle, and walking down a long hall, and a few people were there but no one stopped him. A door opened by itself, and he came into another area, and then … now a kind of blank was in front of him, with the thinnest razor cuts in it, through which he could almost see things, and one of these things was a woman with red hair and in a red dress, and he had meant—but she—

Picaro put his hand flat on the wall.

He looked at his hand. It was his.

The hand, and the wall, felt real. But … his hand a little less so.

Then the cubicle opened and the 1906 man walked in.

“You’re back,” said Leon-Leonillo.

“Am I?”

“Always a question for a question. Your life is made of questions. Back after your adventure.”

“Which one?”

Leonillo smiled. To an unseen audience, aware of both their performances, he could not resist awarding a tiny nod. Then he sat down cozily in the chair Picaro’s father had for a moment occupied. “There’s a slight disorientation? That is the medication. It will wear off
quickly. You’d be feeling much better already if you hadn’t tried to take on the fabulous Jula.”

“Not Jula,” Picaro heard himself say. “Cora.”

“Cora. Ah. The young woman who—”

“Yes. In the palazzo. Like the rest of them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t,” said Picaro, “from a fault in the CX system, was it?”

“No.”

“It’s something to do with him—with the musician.”

“Yes, I am afraid so.”

“Where is he?”

“Safe, Picaro.
Not
dead. Better concealed from you than Jula, I can assure you. Jula doesn’t seem to present the same difficulty.”

“Which is?”

“As yet,” Leonillo flicked his hands, “the most likely cause is a form of carried germ—something latent in del Nero’s bodily make-up, usual and unremarked on during his own era, not affecting his, or anyone’s normal well-being, but now inimical to the contemporary immune system. He, you understand, shows no symptom of anything, except unimpaired vitality.”

“How about he shows distress?”

“One must expect he would, under the circumstances. He saw them dying all around him and was powerless. Of course he is dismayed. It was very awful. Even you, isolated above, were involved. As you know only too well. And of course many of us have had continuous and direct contact with him, and so we are all being most carefully monitored. But it would seem, that particular evening at the Shaachen Palace, unfortunately—some sort of surge took place.”

“Yes. Unfortunate.”

“Jula Victrix, however, aside from her fighting ability, is not apparently harmful. Nothing has happened to anyone, even those most often in close proximity. Something of a mystery there. Why one and not the other one? But meanwhile, why exactly did
you
go after her?”

“Is that what I did?”

“Some of our surveillance was out of order for a while. They say it can’t happen, but evidently it does. And when everything was rather lax, you left the medical area. They let you because you are free to go about as you wish. Besides which, certain parts of the section are theoretically sealed to anyone not authorized. But the inoperative CX again—you were let through into the second area, Jula’s.”

“Jula.”

“Yes. Her master in Roman times, Julus, gave her his name, a great honor, to show her value.”

“She is your female gladiator.”

“What else.”

Picaro said, “I can’t remember. What did I do?”

“Nothing much. Rushed her with obvious murderous intent, having announced she would be better dead—like the “other one.” Innocently forgetting that she had been trained to fight since the age of five in one of the most exacting sword schools of Rome’s provinces. She’d slaughtered over a hundred and twenty armed men. You were rather lucky.”

Staring into the mental blank, trying to pull the thin cuts in it open, and see.

Picaro said, “I actually wanted del Nero. He was the one I was looking for. I found her instead. But she is the same, even if she isn’t a plague carrier. Your clever resurrection that’s gone wrong. Perhaps I thought I could make do. If I killed her at least. Sent her
back
. Cleaned up your filth.”

“Well,” said Leonillo. “You had an added disadvantage, it seems. She thought you were the last man she dispatched in the arena. His name was Phaetho. A black man from the Africas, a Roman slave as she was. She finished him, but he had hacked her about. She was said to have died of the wounds. In fact she was poisoned, or so we now suspect.”

The blank would not give way. Even the woman in red he could glimpse there, had no visible face.

Leonillo rambled on. “Both deaths are rather a puzzle. Del Nero, you may have heard, died from the action of an alchemically poisoned mask—how it worked none of the team has any idea, and in his case, no trace of a venom remains. We do know, however, it was a
beautiful
mask, half-face but with a sculpted nose, made after the likeness of a statue of Apollo. Pure white with black brows and luxuriant black hair attached. We have a written record of that, although the mask itself has never been found. What a challenge it would be if it were …”

Picaro, ignoring this, hearing it on some other mental level only, could feel instead the shift of new questions inside his brain.
How
had he found the way to the second area? And the faulty door that failed to keep him out—and no one trying to prevent him or even ask him what he was at—
free
to go about? Never, not in this sort of establishment. A kind of sleepwalking, perhaps induced, and
choreographed
?

Conspiracy. Plot.

He thought of Flayd.

But the drug they said would help him lined his veins heavy as lead. And then he thought, maybe
not
the drug. Not the drug, or Cora dying, or any waft of disease brought back from 1701. Not even the punch of the
gladiatrix, who thought she had killed him once before. Maybe none of that.

Maybe only—
it was beginning
.

And the world opened, and nothing lay there, gaping wide.

Leonillo had finished his lecture on the mask.

“I want to leave now,” Picaro said.

“There’s no reason to keep you. I’m afraid, though, you can’t return to the Palazzo. We can’t be sure it would be safe. Your clothes and other belongings, and your musical instruments, have been moved to—let me see,” Leonillo listened to his wristecx, “Brown’s Guest Palace on the Lion Marco Canal. Someone will see that a boat is waiting for you by the University steps.”

Behold me, the mighty lion named Marcus. Whoever resists me I will bring low
.

T
HE TIME HE HAD MOVED
into the room, doing that hadn’t seemed so curious. It was a large, wide, airy loft, high over the streets. The walls were painted white, and there were deep red furnishings, and a splash of blue flowers in a bowl that never died. The band seemed envious. “Stick with that one,” Coal said, “she got money.” But that was not so. The room was rented, she had only had it, she told him, a month.

She kept her bed in a little annex, where her make-up mirror was, ringed in soft rosy lights like an actress’s from fifty years before. There was still old-style electricity in the building, but sometimes, when the weather got very hot, or stormy, the lights flickered and the Intel-V screen broke up any picture into stripes. There was a wall-bed Picaro slept on, when he was there. And down the hall there was a bathroom, exclusive to this room, which Simoon had maintained, and to the door of which, as to the door of the room, she had had fixed an expensive lock that could be undone only by a personal CX-key. She gave Picaro a copy of the key. When he said he couldn’t pay her for that, or put much toward the room, she laughed. “Who cares. When my credit runs out we have to move, that’s all.”

He hardly ever saw her use paper money. She employed plastic, like the rich. But she showed him her
account statement on the Intel-V, and it contained only her large debt.

Picaro thought that perhaps she had found out how to commit fraud, running away when she was too over-drawn and her purchases were refused. But somehow she never was refused, or warned. That had impressed him. He had thought her clever in some way.

Spending time with her, even sleeping under the same roof as Simoon, seemed good. More—it was nearly exciting. It was like going traveling, or being on a stage, forming the first chord and feeling the watching listeners stir. Always a bit like that. Or, it was like a brand new kind of sexual relationship where there was no sex.

She was his mother, and he had, for two years—and more, from the first times his father spoke of her—been wrong about Simoon.

She was amusing and easygoing, and she saw things in a different way. She was young-looking, young enough, and glamorous. Beautiful. Why had he never liked her eyes? They were beautiful eyes, colored like Saké. There was white blood back when, it was that which had changed their color. In a woman less dark, her eyes might have looked less unusual. But that was all they were,
unusual
.

The flowers that never died fascinated Picaro, and also other members of the band, on the rare occasions they were in the loft. “Where you get these?” Coal asked. “A special store,” said Simoon. She was frequently mysterious. And Picaro thought her mystery always alluring. She was his mother.

None of the rest of them knew this. He never said, nor she. They thought she was a wealthy older woman and they had taken up together for a while. The band was jealous, admiring, slightly uneasy.

But she wasn’t
like
a mother. She never asked him to do anything, never demanded or requested him to, or interrogated him on where he had been, even when he was gone a month or more. She didn’t inquire about women, or the band. If he told her about them, she listened, nodding, and if she said anything, it was light and casual and noncommittal. There were no traps. He woke up sometimes on the wall-bed and wondered why she had ever freaked him out, and why his father had been irrational in this one area alone. Anything he asked
her
, she answered. She always had an answer. She seemed to conceal nothing, only her body, modestly closing the annex door, wearing a robe to the bathroom. Somehow, Picaro found he did not observe this modesty himself. He even sunbathed naked on the high-up balcony, and when she brought him tea or a beer or a clip of hasca, neither of them paid any attention to it, his nakedness, her enclosure.

One morning he woke up and saw her shaking off something from her hand into the bowl of blue flowers.

“What are you doing, Simoon?” He liked her name, to use it.

She said, “Giving them breakfast. They’re my babies too.”

When she went into the gallery where the cookery was done, Picaro got up and stood over the flower bowl and saw in the water, not quite yet dissolved, a little coil of red.

“Looks like blood.”

“That’s what I give them. How else do they live on and on.”

And Picaro had not minded.

Oh God, he’d probably thought she meant she bought it somewhere, the blood, ready-dried, to feed plants.

One night, when she had been to watch the band in a bar in a street named for an arrow, he met her by chance after, on the pavement walk. She wasn’t always there to watch, nor available afterwards. He would look up and see her, part of the audience, often with some man paying her court, or he’d catch the firefly spark of the jewel in her mouth.

On Arrow Street he had come out with a black girl, and Simoon stood there drinking a glass of grappa, and she smiled her smile, but not showing the peridot.

For a moment he spoke to her, and the girl, his own age, young and ready for the night, stood with them, leaning on his shoulder.

“The room will be empty tonight,” said Simoon, though she was standing alone, “so why don’t you use the big bed? If you want. That’s fine.”

Picaro thought nothing much of it, except it was a generous offer. There were other places to go, but the loft was very private, and cool after dark.

“Thanks, Simoon.”

When he and the girl were walking on, swinging their hands together, she said, “Who was that?” And Picaro had said, “She owns the block where I room. Sometimes I can use this apartment, if it’s vacant.” And realized how tactfully Simoon had chosen her words, not to alarm the girl, and now he colluded with the lie. Simoon—his landlady. (She had never offered him use of her bed before—the big bed—that would be good, with the girl.)

They had a few drinks. Only presently, when they were strolling back to the loft, did the girl say, “You got a thing with her?”

“No,” he said. “With you.”

The moment they stepped into the loft, something
happened. It was like—a change in the tint of the air.

He thought at first the girl was impressed by the vast room, the furniture, the fact that there were drinks of all kinds in the coldbocx, and so many music decx. Simoon’s bed was large, clean, with white sheets that smelled faintly of spices.

“I got to go to the bathroom,” said the girl. He showed her in past the private CX lock. “Whose is all this?” said the girl. And Picaro found he said, “She keeps it for special times.”

When the girl came back, like the air tint, her face was subtly altered.

“It’s her’s, this crash?”

“Yes, I told you.”

“No,
only
hers?”

“Maybe.”

“Who is she?”

“I told you that too. She owns all the rooms.” Simoon had looked sufficiently well-off for this to be true.

“What’s her game?” said the girl.

Picaro laughed. He put his arms around the girl and kissed her, as they had been kissing all evening. “Forget that. Think about you and me.”

But again, in the bed, she said to him, “Are you and she making a decx of this?”

“
What?
”

“I mean, things in the walls—making some movie of this, with me.”

“No,” Picaro said. “You’ve seen the Intel and the electrics—we’re not up to
that
standard.” He was repulsed that she could suspect him of being a pornographing her. And seeing his repulsion, the girl relented, and they made love, but not quite as they might have done, if they hadn’t had that conversation.

Later on, they sat out in the loft, and Picaro played for the girl on the luta-guitar, the only instrument he kept there. But she wasn’t listening. She kept looking around.

“What is it?” he said.

“Is someone in here?”

He told her no one was there but for themselves.

“How can you be sure,” she said, “if you never been here before?”

“I have,” he said. He frowned at her. She knew theirs was not a long-term alliance, the perfume and suppliance of a minute, as the poet said.

She didn’t want to go back to the bed. They had sex on the floor, Picaro underneath, to cushion her. Midway, she stopped moving. Again she started staring round. “There some animal in here,” she said. “A rat.”

“No,” he said. “They’re careful with that.”

“How? You say it’s not that modern, this building, with the electrics and the unstyle screen. So how they keep rats out, huh?”

“I’ve never seen a rat in this building.”

His erection was gone, and so was her arousal. They separated, and moodily he lay there and watched the girl begin to dress.

“I really like you,” she said, contrite. “Come with me.”

“You have a room?”

“Part of one. They won’t mind.”

“No,” Picaro said. He got up and padded to the coldbocx and the girl screeched, a high narrow wavering shriek, so he spun toward her—“What the hell is the matter?”

“Someone’s here,” she said. She seemed terrified, so he thought her wild on a drug, or off her head. “Someone. Something.”

“Only me. Me and you.”

“She—she’s put something here. It looks at me. I can see its eyes—
goat’s eyes
—” yelled the girl, “like she got!”

And then she ran over the loft and out the door, and he heard her feet skidding and pattering along the hall. And then the hiss of the old lift, taking her down to the street.

He went on thinking she was out of her mind. He said nothing to Simoon the next day, had only remade her bed with fresh sheets, (afterwards she said that wouldn’t have mattered, what did she care?) He had never taken a woman up to the loft before. He never would again.

T
HE LONG, HOT SUMMER
came to an end. Autumn filled the city with its smoky nostalgias. The Soundless Band met at Gotto’s Bar, and discussed moving on.

“Maybe,” said Picaro.

“You not gonna come, man? Come on. What’s keeping you?”

“That woman is keeping him,” said Coal.

Picaro said, “You don’t know a thing.”

“I know you’re not one of us no more.”

Omberto said, “Leave it.”

Picaro said, “Let’s move on then. City to city, nowhere to nowhere. How many decx we made this year?”

“Seven,” said Omberto concisely.

“And with which company was that?” asked Picaro.

Coal said, “You know we don’t have no backers. But we sell on the Intel.”

“We have a
big
small minority that follows us,” announced Carlo, primly.

The jackdaw, which was standing on Omberto’s beer jug, made a cackling sound.

A few nights before, coming in around three in the morning, Picaro had found Simoon sitting on the floor in the middle of the loft. He had never previously met her in the room at that hour.

There was no light beyond the fat purple candle standing on its bronze dish. The candle, which no matter how often it was lit, or for how long it burned, never seemed to burn away.

“Chi’, Simoon,” he said. “What are you doing?”

On the floor, in the vague mauve light, a scatter of tiny things that looked nearly like a necklace of whitish beads come undone. She put out her hand and swept them up, and slipped them into the pocket of her robe.

“Just playing a little,” she said. Then she said, “What do you want to happen for you?”

He hadn’t thought, perhaps. Only expected it. Day by day, hour by hour. Some glowing answer, all the best that he was due. He was sixteen.

Picaro shook his head.

She said to him, “I hear you with the citarra, and with those instruments in the band. I hear you singing. You’re so good.”

Her praise, for some reason (like that first time) made him restless, uncomfortable.

She said, “You’re better than the others. Did you know?”

“That’s you talking. You’re biased.”

“Where do you get these words? Oh, he had you educated nicely. From there. I’m not biased—that’s the way cloth is cut. Help me up,” she murmured, “I sat here so long my legs are already in the bed asleep.

Somewhere in the dark of dreaming it occurred to him she had been making magic after all, there in the night, for him. He wasn’t offended. It seemed more—touching.

But when the Band talked of moving on, he decided he didn’t want that. And then he saw he was too settled. It
was
time to go, to get away from her. She was his mother. He could always come back.

A
ND SO THE DAY
, scarlet flowers on the balcony throwing open their shutters to the cooling sun. What else happened? Afterwards he could never recall, only those flowers opening, and then sunset, and then going out to play the set in the street named for the Arrow.

He started with the korah, that night, but then Omberto took that up, his fingers spangling quick as rain across the frets. And Picaro switched to the s’tha. He chose this, he later believed, for the roundness of its hipline under the long, long neck. In origin, it had come from the East, and the seven strings were resined to silk—but it was a new instrument, younger than Picaro. When he glanced up, during one of the prolonged breathless races of the music, when the audience no longer made any noise, did not breathe, or blink, eyes fixed on the band as if hypnotized, he saw Simoon out there, sitting in her pale frock, watching with the rest, looking hungry and enslaved as the rest.

At the interval she came up, when they were standing at the bar, and the drinks were coming for them. She seemed to brush by no one, was only there.

In the bar on Arrow Street, the lights were chemical, high-up mercury-colored globes, but at this time of night they were dimmed. Simoon had brought the darkness with her.

“What will you have, lady?” asked Coal. (Had he ever used her name? No, very likely he hadn’t.)

Simoon smiled, and said she would have a grappa.
The drinks were free for them, of course, or she would have paid, with cash not plastic.

Carlo didn’t look at her tonight, and perhaps she noticed that. Coal was as courteous with her as he always was when she was there. Omberto drank half his glass, then put it down and spoke to her.