Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (7 page)

“T
HEY CALLED IT
L
ETHE
, after the stream in the Greek and Roman hell, the stream men drank to forget, or to sleep.”

It was morning now, and Flayd was across the desk, nodding. Flayd knew about Lethe. Souls due to return to earth had also drunk from the stream, to forget the spiritually constipating miseries of their previous earthly lives, and the pleasures of Hades, if there were any. Flayd wasn’t sure, however, if he had ever heard of a mixture named after it.

“There was only a trace,” said Leonillo. “But naturally it was analysed. That’s what we think it was. So, our young woman didn’t die of her fighter’s wounds, as her tomb inscription tells us.”

“She was poisoned.”

“Almost definitely. I suppose it was in someone’s interests to do it, to get at her owner, Libinius Julus, possibly, or just to assist one of the betting syndicates that existed, as you know, in every Romanized town.”

Flayd thought, Yes, and it would be easy enough. House slaves or the slaves at Julus’s school could always be bribed or forced. Simple to doctor some piece of food, or drop something in one particular cup.

“She’d lived too long,” said Flayd bleakly, “she was too good.”

“Very likely. You take it to heart, I see.”

Flayd shrugged. “Sure I do. I helped dig her up.”

“She’s like a daughter to you? You were married once, I think, but no children …
Flayda
Victrix?”

Flayd pushed back his chair. He walked across the white and gilded Victorian office room, past the antique typewriting machine and the painted oil lamp, and stood glaring out at the Blessed Maria Canal.

“You think I’m an obsessive,” said Flayd. “Right. I am. My work has always been real to me. And now here it is, practice fighting in a reconstruct courtyard, and reminiscing about Century Number One. What’ya expect? Is that why you’ve picked on me, my obsession?”

“
Picked
on you?” Leonillo raised two eyebrows up his nutshell forehead.

“For these speciality-plus privileges, walking and talking with the reborn baby.”

“Something like that.”

“I have other work, you know.”

“Oh come. Please. More important, more
fascinating
than this?”

“Where’s it leading?”

“That’s what we have to see, don’t we? Where it
can
lead. What we can do with it. How did she seem to you?”

Flayd said, “Rational. She remembers a lot. She remembers things she thought she’d forgotten when she was alive before,” he added, ironically, scowling at Leonillo.

“That’s not illogical. She’s been given full access to her physical brain memory, in a way most of us never do, save under intense hypnosis.”

“But anyhow, why ask me questions,” said Flayd, “you watched it all, didn’t you? My conversation with her, if you can call it that.”

“Someone watched. What else? She is watched day and night.”

“Anyhow,” said Flayd, “I have some stuff to file.” Once more the eyebrows. “Nothing to do with Jula. A twentieth-century burial in a backyard behind the old land-site of the Primo, when it was upstairs. A Mafia killing probably.”

“Fine. When you’re done, why don’t you go down and see her again.”

Already in the doorway Flayd checked. “You are kidding me, Leonillo.”

“No, of course not. Just go to the elevator and touch in your prints, and it will take you down to the Roman Area.”

“Why me? Why not the others? Or do the others all get to do it too?”

“Your colleagues have other duties. You see, Flayd, you react to her as if she is human. The others can’t do that yet, if ever. And so for that reason we let them look and monitor and make notes. All of which have their uses. But you can forge for her a link with the outer environment. The here and now.”

“Can’t
you
?”

“
I
?” said Leonillo. He became utterly blank. The expression
clean white sheet
sprang to Flayd’s mind.

“OK,” said Flayd. “If I can make the time.”

And Leonillo smiled, at Flayd’s lying absurdity.

As he worked at the CX in his cubicle, Flayd’s mind rummaged, trying to duck the flashes of recollection. But it was in vain. In the end he sat back in the plasform chair and
thought
. Of swimming through the dimness of the mud, of the lights finding the tomb. Of the heap of treasures, the mummified victory wreathes with fragments of broken gilt on them, the Anubis lamps, the
rings. And the bones. Burnt on a funeral pyre but not entirely consumed, as the organic material, then, seldom was.

He thought of the rotted, splintered, scarlet shield with the face of Venus. The rusted sword.

And then he thought of the girl he had talked to, in the basement of the dome, so far down and away from anything genuine, and yet presumably taken by her for reality.

She had come back from nothing.

Maybe, given that, the rest of this was irrelevant. Finally he walked along the corridor, where UAS security glanced up and nodded, friendly. The videcx in the walls were clicking away, without a murmur, and the elevator came and he touched in, and the doors opened.

She was fighting in her gear today, greave, arm-protection, the closed helmet like a collared silver bullet.

He watched her a while from the colonnade.

Flayd could see why she had won so many fights and it had taken deadly poison to stop her.

Oddly, looking at her too, Flayd found himself wondering almost for the first time about the other one, the musician they had also brought back. He hadn’t been shown to Flayd, though some of the others had seen him. Cloudio del Nero was also doing well, it seemed, in his reconstruct living space.

Had
Picaro
been taken to see him? From what had originally been said, that had seemed to be the plan. In del Nero’s case, Picaro, the bloodline descendant, was to be the forging “link”?

The practice fight was over and Jula had triumphed. Flayd stood a second or so more in the fake shade of the columns. Then he turned and went away. It wasn’t the manipulation by authority that bugged him—that
was always there, in anybody’s life, even if unseen and ignored. No, it was simply what had been done. What it meant and might mean, in the ever-extraordinary future. But who could predict?

S
IMOON STOOD ON
the island.

She had come up out of the water, like before, except this time not even needing a boat.

She wore her own pale dress, but he knew her now. She was the sulphurous sibyl from the cave.

“You’ll die,” she said. “I told you that.”

“You told me. I’ll die.”

Her eyes were sulphur-colored too.

“You will meet your death at thirty.”

“You told me.”

“Believe me yet?”

“Yes. I believe you. I always believed you. After you killed my father. After you came back in my life. After the other things.”

“Die under water,” said Simoon, “though not from drowning.”

“Yes, you bitch. I
know
. Why else could I be here? Why else am I waiting here?”

“Scared?” He saw her amusement, the sibyl’s.

“Are you still alive?” he asked her. “I thought I saw to that.”

“Maybe I am. Somewhere.”

Up in the starless sky, there was a shooting star, pale topaz fire ripping through the dark.

“No.” he said, “you’re nowhere. You never were anywhere. Your kind—don’t exist.”

H
E THOUGHT THE TWO GIRLS
were back, poised outside the apartment’s main door. Not knocking, or making any sound, merely calling to him with their female minds, like cats waiting to be fed.

Picaro left the bed and walked through the rooms, his bare feet on the still-warm floor. He would tell them to go away. Probably.

But he wasn’t awake. He knew this. No longer unconscious or dreaming, but not fully back into the living world, or his body. He felt he levitated by a few inches, in the air, despite the contact with that warm floor.

The door opened over-easily.

The man stood less than two meters away. In the darkness, his pale skin was ghostly.

“Light,” Picaro said, and the CX flashed on, hard and too brilliant, illuminating the face, the figure, and clothing, of an intimately known stranger.

Picaro was now back in his body. He said, “Are you here, or is this some virtuality projection?”

Cloudio del Nero smiled his charming, long-ago smile. It wasn’t, any longer, like Picaro’s. “I think it is myself.”

“How?”

“How? How am I here? I was brought here earlier.”

“No. There was no canal traffic, no one walked by.” Picaro thought of the sounds below in the palazzo, the shouts in the alley, and the sprayed notes of a harpsichord. He said again, “So how?”

“Through passages under the City,” said del Nero idly. “There have always been hidden ways of that nature.”

“But this isn’t—” Picaro halted. He wondered how much they had told del Nero. Picaro said, “This isn’t the City as you knew it.”

And del Nero shrugged the primrose brocade shoulders of his exquisite coat. “The passages persist. That was the route by which I was brought here. They call this Palazzo Shaachen? I believe I have the apartment below your own.”

Picaro stood there.

“May I enter your rooms?” del Nero said. “Or do I disturb you?”

“It’s the middle of the night,” said Picaro.

“True,” the other said mildly. “The Prima Vigile was just rung from those churches which continue to effect it.”

Picaro stood back. As the living phantom walked past him into the vestibule, there came the flicker of something down the hall. Oh yes, someone would be near and watching. Picaro turned his back on that, shut the door. Shut del Nero and himself into the apartment, where, as Flayd would have been quick to assert, surveillance would still be going on.

Picaro touched the wall for the lamps, which lit up softly, even the oriental globe which hung from the ceiling. Cloudio del Nero glanced at it, no more than that. Presumably they had got him accustomed to some modern innovations.

He seemed taller than Picaro remembered. His eyes had a curious film across them, a type of luminous sheen—or it was a trick of the darkness and unreal light. Picaro had anyway been glad of the film. He hadn’t forgotten what he had seen inside those eyes on the last occasion—that vacant abyss of Nothingness.

Strolling, glancing about him, del Nero had reached the room with the long window and the balcony. He went
to this, and stood looking out. Maybe everything looked—as it was intended to—exactly like the eighteenth century venues del Nero recalled. Or maybe subtle, nearly incomprehensible details and flaws screamed out to del Nero alone that this was
not
the past, but some other land, some nightmare.

“How silent this world is.”

This world
. Indeed it seemed he knew it all.

“It was noisier when you were here last?”

“Much. But of course there’s something in the walls and the glass, so they tell me, to absorb external noises.”

“Yes.”

“I should like wine,” del Nero said, aristocrat still.

“No wine,” said Picaro. “Only water.”

“I think you’ll find,” said del Nero gently, “there is some wine.”

Picaro went to the cabinet. There were three bottles, old black bottles, with sealed tops. Uninvited, someone had been in to augment Picaro’s stores—unless Cora and India had brought the wine. Picaro thought the first scenario the more likely.

He uncorked one of the bottles, poured the red blood of the wine into a glass. The cabinet had correctly kept the wine room temperature, as it kept other things cool.

“Thank you,” del Nero said. “You’re not drinking?”

“Right. I’m not.”

Unphased, (of course) the aristocrat, (son of a ducca) walked across to the Africara.

“What a wonderful instrument. You play this?”

“Yes.”

“How do you name it?” Picaro told him. “But forgive me, I remember, you don’t wish to discuss your calling. May I try my hand at this Africara?”

Picaro said, “I don’t let that happen.”

“I understand.”

Picaro felt a sluice of indifference wash down him. What did it matter any more if some other—this fucking undead returnee—laid hands on the Africara? Nothing mattered. For
Nothing
reigned absolute.

“Go ahead,” Picaro said.

“I may? You’re gracious.”

Picaro watched him, jealous yet remote. Angry. But not only at, or in, this moment. The angers of several years. And the inertia of them.

Would del Nero know how to begin even, on this black bull—a music making creature so utterly unlike anything that had existed in Europe in 1700. But yes, it seemed he knew—instinctively?—and now he put his ringed slender hands on the instrument, as if on the body of a woman Picaro had once cared for as much as his own life.

A jagged spill of notes.

The hair rose along Picaro’s neck and scalp. His hands were iron fists. He felt, despite everything, a nauseous boiling rage.

And then, from the Africara—a music like a smoke, soft, half-born, uncoiling through the air. Like wings, like thoughts—almost a silence, almost far away across the sky—a music of something that had no place here, let alone there, where any eighteenth-century musician had been. A music that belonged high over any city.

All that.

More than that.

Astounded by horror, Picaro thought he had never heard its voice before, the Africara. But no, this was
not
its voice—this was …

The music stopped.

Picaro felt the room turn under him, as if he stood on some ancient canal flooding from a tidal sea.

His hands were no longer knotted into fists. His belly was cold. A dry electric tingling lay over the surface of his skin, which settled only slowly.

“You have been very generous,” said del Nero, “Signore Picaro. That means
magpie
, I think. From the Latin?”

Picaro—no words would come. He cleared his throat.

And del Nero crossed to him and handed him the goblet of wine, still half full.

And Picaro drank a mouthful of the wine.

Cloudio del Nero said, “I must leave you in peace. Good night, signore.”

Picaro stayed where he was, holding the goblet, seeing del Nero in another dimension walk away through the rooms. Hearing him at the outer door, and the door undone, and in the passageway a murmur, (as the minder stirred) and then the door shut. And the glass fell out of Picaro’s hand.

He saw it fall, catching a sparkle of light; a meteor, and knew it wouldn’t break, glasses didn’t break here, and then it hit the terracotta, and it smashed into a hundred broken stars.

A
LL NIGHT AFTER THAT
, he dreamed of falling.

Next morning, it was Cora who woke him, knocking on the door.

She was alone, and laughing, in a sky-blue gown from the 1700s, her hair ornately dressed.

“We’re going out on the canals.” When he didn’t respond, she explained, “to see the City. The UAS man is taking us.” He waited. She added, “And Cloudio. And you.”

“Not me.”

There was a little beauty mark, a tiny spangle, pasted on her left cheekbone. Her lips were rouged like strawberries.

“You must come, Magpie. Please come. It won’t be any fun without you."

“Sorry.”

“But he says you must.”

“
Who
says that?”

“Leon.”

“Who’s that? One of the UAS?”

“He’s from the project. I mean, something to do with Cloudio. We met Cloudio. He lives downstairs.”

“Do you know,” said Picaro, “who Cloudio is?”

She laughed still. He sensed she had spent the night at a party, where there had been some very strong legal highs available—hasca, something like that.

She answered, “No, Cloudio is … Cloudio. I like Cloudio. But it’s you I love.”

“That’s nice of you, thank you. Have a good time in the City.”

As he started to close the door on her, it stuck.

There was CX, and the door could not ever stick. Unless, evidently, the CX
made
it do just that.

He recollected Flayd, managing to open the palazzo’s main door. Some overriding key from the University … No doubt he could have done the same with this door, only hadn’t had the gall. The University Auxilary Staff seemed to be running things. Everything. All in the cause of their project, their experiment.

Cora, apparently not realizing the door had stuck, thinking he’d had a change of heart, reached through and caught his hand. She kissed it. “I loved our night.”

He took his hand from hers and went back into the
apartment and Cora followed him, because she thought she was invited to do so by the unclosed door.

In the room with the oriental lamp, she offered one of her surprises. She leapt at the lamp chain, gripped it, swung through space, let go and spun away, turning a somersault in the air before her perfect landing at the bedroom door.

Picaro pulled her into the bedroom, sat her on the bed. She threw herself back and lay smiling from the pillows up at him.

“Listen Cora, they’re playing games.”

“Who, most darling? Shall
we
? Let’s play games—”

“Where’s your friend India?” he asked.

Cora, enpillowed, shrugged her milk-white shoulders. He thought of del Nero, also shrugging. Shrug everything off that troubled you or might impede the progress of your desires.

“Cloudio,” said Cora. She kicked her legs. “Cloudio, Picaro, and Cora.”

Picaro could hear someone outside, in his private apartment. He went back out of the room, and saw a woman (also young and smiling) putting wine bottles into the recessed cabinet. “‘Viorno, sin,” she said.

The anger returned, but it was miles away. Picaro could feel it trampling through him, its hoofs echoing.

When it ended, he felt he didn’t care, either. Not now. Nothing could be done, it was all out of his hands, so why kick at
this
?

In the closet he found a suit of clothes from the eighteenth century. Someone else had been in—when?—all this burglary in reverse—and left them. He took them out, carried them on to the balcony, and flung them over into the canal. He wasn’t angry any more, it was simply practical.

Cora, bemused finally, stood gazing after them. But he had no intention of telling her that, in 1701, if he, a black man, had worn them, they would have been the livery of a slave.

He dressed anyway, as always, and when that was done, and he had drunk water from a fluted glass, he went out of the door, which no longer stuck.

They were waiting below in the house vestibule, three UAS that he did not recognize, another girl (also UAS) in renaissance clothes and pearled hair, and Cloudio, standing there like a tall, calm child about to be taken on an outing.

Cora darted over to Cloudio. He caught her hand, lowered his head to it and kissed the fingers. The companion gesture to Cora’s with Picaro—which had been rejected. Cloudio gave Cora his arm. His eyes had the same phosphorescent-looking film on them Picaro had imagined there last night—did he only
imagine
it now?

Picaro stared at Cloudio and found that he had moved himself towards this revenant. Moved close in, Picaro looked into Cloudio’s face, at those eyes that seemed to have changed, and to be changing, as if he had come up from the lagoon, with nacre hardening on the irises and pupils.

What do I see? You, Simoon—you’re the sibyl—tell me what I see
.

And back in his head he made out his mother’s drowsy laughter, not a bit like Cora’s.

Your appointment
.

But one of the UAS, (not the others, Chossi, or the one dressed 1906—Leon?) was shaking Picaro’s hand too vigorously. The UAS woman was fluttering them all firmly out of the building, and on the canal waited a canopied boat with velvet seating, poled by three oarsmen.