Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (19 page)

Once they had put on bodies to conceal the nudity of their souls. Now they pulled them off, cast them away—

There was no pain, but the joy
was
pain. It was a glory beyond expression or endurance.

And the light. Alabaster, aureum, jasper, orichalc, sard …

Through the pulses of it, Picaro, no longer Picaro, no longer a man, or anything at all, saw out to where a towering burning creature was, making from
itself
the outspinning gold of

The music.

That then, Cloudio. This the true essence that had filled him. Not himself in any way. Not human. Another element, which had entered his regrown, vacant flesh.

The opened door.

Love, love—greatest of all—this was what the music was. The love that cannot, (here) be understood. Or borne. Yet here it was.

There was no pain. No fear. Nothing mattered. Only the music.

Picaro saw, through his lids, without sight, the creature that lifted now, up on its titanic wings.

It was too large for the auditorium. Too large for the City or the world.

Its beauty more burnished than the morning star, called Lucifer, or Venus.

The wings spread.

Not like any bird.

Picaro heard, the length of the earth away, his own screaming—orgasmic, joyous, blessed—one solitary crying among thousands, as the roof became undone, and the end began.

T
HEY WERE ALMOST AT
the Rivoalto.

The speeding wanderer had jetted through a maelstrom of shouts and maledictions, water syphoned, stars
in streaks. And then—a kind of silence was there, beyond all speed, all noise.

“Cut the engine,” Flayd yelled.

The wanderlier obeyed.

Suddenly they were in an ink-pool of utter stillness. And through the still came a wire of sweetest agony that pierced to the brain—

They stood upright in the boat.

Everywhere around—

A sort of unheard humming, a sort of image that was invisible—

An assortment of boats were standing also stock still in the channel, and somehow no lamplight was anywhere, the fake gas-globes along the arcaded bank all out, the wind blowing buffets and yet—

Not a hair that stirred.

There were no people. All these boats, these walks, were empty.

Where had the curses and the laughter gone?

Abruptly, up there in some palazzo, a window shattered to a puff of glittering spores.

And then a score of others.

And then—

They were lying in the boat, where they had been standing.

Flayd, Jula, the wanderlier, all clutched together, like frightened children—Blood, in the mouth—a smell of blood—

But another sound was coming.

It was like thunder. Then like water.

Then like light. It was the
noise
of
light
.

The sky went white as snow.

From everywhere came a gush and sigh, a falling of things like soot from the darkness that the whiteness made.

After that, something was, which rose up into the air.

It was the yellow enormity of a dawn. All they could see of its shape, to recognize, was the gigantic outspreading of its wings, one behind another, and another, and another. And yet, they could see it smiled.

The canal heaved. It threw the wanderer, and all the other little empty craft, upward, threw them at the sky, after the angel. But even as they were flung against the stars, the stars went out. The sky went out. And the shrieking screaming they had never heard was finished.

L
EONILLO RAN
. A man of straw inside his nutshell.

He had seen—he had seen—

For an instant, before the sound relay failed, the CX exploding outwards in razorblades, he had
heard
—

Blood, that was the color, the splashing redness, all the blood, and the yellow of the light—

Even in the screen room, the screaming, crying, the vomiting—

Noises in the ear—

Leonillo ran against the elevators, which would not respond. The doors stood wide, and down the shaft he saw a cage, with something smashed in it.

Leonillo ran up the stairs.

He knew why he ran, and to what, he hadn’t forgotten. To the sleeping tablets in his room. He could taste them already, each of those sugar-coated pills he must swallow quickly, quickly, before he no longer could.

S
OMETIMES SLEEP WAS
as nourishing as food. You woke, and for a moment a great happiness and serenity were all there was to know. But then, you remembered all the rest. The balance tilted. A kind of fear commenced to flood, unencumbered and swift, familiar with its way—the hollows of the mind.

Picaro’s eyes had opened this time on an unexpected height. It was unaccountable and rich with color.

For a while he lay still, gazing up at the vivid yet inexplicit chaos of it. Until gradually its structure and explanation became apparent.

It was an exceptionally high, vaulted ceiling, which in one area had parted, revealing another, less solid, ceiling beyond. The first and nearer ceiling had painted figures on it, dancers and garlands, but the rich panoply of red, black, and a curious, pinkish ochre, had been flung across it, so that very little now of the painting might be seen. Glad faces, robust limbs and floating draperies, were stranded among banks of abstract color. As for the second ceiling, it was dull, less dark than obscure. It seemed perhaps to tremble a little, Picaro wasn’t sure.

He was lying on a jumble of something, uncomfortable, a soft rubble he did not identify.

He could hear a slow thick dripping noise. At first
he was used to it, and then he realized he was not. But he wasn’t ready, as yet, to turn his head, or to sit up.

What came last to him (unbelievably, considering its omnipresence and intensity) was the smell. A stench so horrible, so noxious and indescribable yet—
describable
—that in the instant his brain accepted awareness of it, Picaro choked, started violently to gag. The spasm tossed him after all off his back. As this happened, he felt a looseness all through him, vertigo and misplacement. But then he was kneeling, and, amazingly, the sickness retreated utterly. And then he saw, without even the armor of animal nausea between him and it, what he had woken to.

This was some cathedral in Hell. Its walls were built of freshly torn flesh and offal, of intestines and hearts and bones. Its floor was really paved, just as, in painted form, the ceiling was, with scattered faces, limbs, torsoes, pieces of cloth, all under a coverlet of blood, and of every liquid eruption that bodies, so volcanically discharged inside out, could eject. It was this too, this bomb-blast of evisceration, which had splashed over the ceiling fresco. But it was the Creature that had risen up, that had melted and next fused the palazzo roof, passing through like a plume of white-hot gas into a darkness now also despoiled.

Picaro stood. He stood on faces and breasts. On the body of the policewoman who had flirted with him, what was left of her—but he couldn’t even ascertain that much. Only here and there the edges of the gilt and velvet chairs, midnight, crimson, chartreuse—torn open also, broken, caved-in, half dissolved, like the tiers which had supported them.

Where the sunken stage had been was a twisted shapeless place. Nothing remained of the instrument.

Music.

It was the music.

Am I alive? How can I be? Am I imagining it? Am I really down there, under my own feet? Are all of them standing here as I am, each of us unseen by the others
—

Over the clangor of silence, the dripping, the creak of some disarranged masonry preparing to give way, Picaro heard an unconscionable noise. Like footsteps.

At the rim of the melted ceiling, a woman’s face appeared, not painted on plaster, not dislocated, inverted, and dead. A tail of blue-black hair hung down through the opening as she peered through it. She still wore her sumptuous evening gown of red, but now she seemed designed to match the cathedral of Hell.

India saw him there. He saw her see him.

Then she swung right over the opening, fearless, indifferent, and set her narrow bare feet against the brickwork.

Picaro watched as India, one hand holding back the hem of her gown, walked easy as a fly down the wall of Hell.

“T
AKE MY HAND
.”

He took her hand.

Her hand was slim and cool, the nails very pale and clean.

Picaro, holding her hand, turned to look around him, to look and look, and then he turned himself bodily around, (still holding her hand, so she moved after him, like one of the dancers from the fresco.) He didn’t care that she could walk down walls.

“We should go now,” she said.

“Why?” he said. “Where are we expected?”

“Somewhere.”

“In a minute,” he said, “something will give way.”

“Yes. The ceiling will come down soon.”

“No. I meant myself. I meant—this—will happen to me.”

“If it were to happen, it would have done so.” India pursed her lips, impatient now as a busy mother with a toddler who delayed. “Come.”

She helped him climb over the soft rubble.

He didn’t know how she did this, either. Most of the tiers had dropped inwards.

At a pair of doors that were melded together, she turned aside and offered him a broad, cracked-open slice through the plaster.

He did not want to leave Hell.

Hell was where he belonged.

But she wouldn’t let go of his hand, and he knew, if he failed to go out, she would have to stay here too.

Behind them, as they maneuvered into the invented tunnel, came a sound of slapping hands, one last commotion of applause—

Picaro craned back.

He saw, circling through the pinkish dust, against the bled-dead sky, a black-and-white bird, its wings and tail luminous with peacock green and blue.

Then the roof began to crumble and crash in, and the magpie, like a cast spear, hard and invulnerable, flew upward and was lost in the nothingness beyond the nothingness.

O
UT IN THE BODY
of the Palazzo Orpheo, the dead lay around. Their state was not quite so complete as that of the dead in the auditorium. Most were almost recognizable as human. Some were worse than others. Perhaps they had possessed better hearing.

India and Picaro, hand in hand, picked across them.

He was crying, and his nose ran, and he wiped it on his sleeve, which was stained and ruined like everything else.

Once he stopped, he tried again to throw up. But he wasn’t sick now. It wasn’t that. Nor so simple to be rid of.

There were stains like acid on the walls. Vats of acid.

Near another smeared door something lay jerking.

“
No
,” said India sharply as he tried to go to it.

Then he pushed her off. He stumbled to the flapping squeaking thing and stamped down upon it, where the neck must be.

“I couldn’t—” he said—“leave—”

“Very well.”

“Not like that.”

“I understand. Give me your hand again, Picaro.”

He cried, now and then making a wrenching stupid sound that filled the total dripping, shifting silence like the gulping of an engine. Through room upon room.

“Here is a way out,” she said. “The square’s outside.”

“Yes.”

“The square is also very bad. And the canals.”

“Yes.”

They went out.

The square was bad. And the canals.

In the middle of the square he halted. She tried to pull him on, she was extremely strong for so slender and unmuscular a young woman. Not like Cora, who had been so tender, a blithe featherweight.

But he refused to move.

He looked up at the sky. It truly was no longer a sky. The lights had all gone out. No stars hovered, no daylight came.

Only there, out across the static roofs, hung a vague reddish smoking ball, which was Venus’s fake moon, glued to the horizon; like him, currently unable to move on.

“Why am I alive?” he said. “Am I the only one alive?”

“From this area, yes. Beyond the radius of the music, ninety percent have survived, but everything is touched a little.”

“Why not me, why not you?”

“Come with me, Picaro, and I’ll tell you.”

“Promises,” he said.

They went on over the square, teetered over the stacked-up bodies in the canal, not needing the small collapsed bridge. Fragments of window-glass lay sparkling everywhere, as if all the faked stars, which had gone out, had shed their dying tears on the City.

H
ERE, THE WANDERLIER SAID
, they must leave his boat. He was sorry, they must find another route. He could go no further.

He wanted, he said, to get out to the La’la district, where his wife and baby were, and his uncle and grandfather and aunts.

He shook Flayd’s hand. Then they embraced each other. The wanderlier hugged Jula. “Take care, sinna—for the love of Jesu Christ—take care of her, sin, and you, sinna—you take care of
him
—I must go back.”

They had all clung together in the narrowness of the boat, and become married in some infallible, perhaps not enduring fashion.

Obviously the outboard motor no longer functioned. As he poled the wanderer off, back across the Rivoalto, he shouted, “I am called Chuseppe! Remember! I’ll give you free rides—” Ludicrous. Who could ride the wanderers now? But they waved him off, Flayd and Jula, standing on the watersteps, under the stone sky.

Then they climbed up to the doorway of a dark, dumb house.

“It’s that way,” Jula said.

“Yes.” He didn’t ask how she knew, she who had seen such a limited amount of Venus. Anyone would
know, as if arrows of icy uranium pointed in that direction. Towards the Orpheo.

The door of the house, when they thrust at it, gave way, as they had both known it would. No one seemed to have been there, or they found no one. They ran through a lobby, a court yard where a frothy acacia tree had bent over in a tortured bow, its black leaves out on the paving. Loose cobbles, and bits that gushed from walls, impeded them only momentarily.

On the far side of the house, was one of Venus’s compressed squares, where a fountain played, still played, dismal and bereft. The roof of a building had come down across the square, but it was negotiable.

Flayd thought, as if logic had, at all costs, to be fumbled for, some things resisted, were able to, tougher in construction or in some other manner.

Everywhere, intermittently, the irritating flashing of CXs jabbed the eyes, smashed or shorting out. Sometimes bizarre and eerie sounds echoed out from houses or streets, yet none of these were human, surely, but high-tech indestructible mechanical systems going all to shit. There was only slight evidence of human curtailment, some of this easy to overlook, others—

They raced from the square and out into the tangle of alleys beyond.

At the end of a corkscrew of walls, where Flayd glimpsed the bloody-colored moon stalled at the sky’s edge, they reached the fringe of the ZMI—the Zone of Maximum Impact.

Presently Flayd puked, leaning one hand on a wall that for some reason did not collapse.

Jula waited.

Unspeaking, they went on.

They didn’t need to cover all the distance to the Orpheo.

Through the fogged miasma of dusts, and cold dry stinking smokes, suddenly the only impossible and insane thing: two figures upright, alive, and walking towards them.

Jula was gone.

Nonplussed Flayd came to a stop, and watched her, self-fired, like a flexible dart, landing on the ground only a meter from her target, Picaro.

He was covered in filth, in the debris—of what had once been human.

Jula held out both her hands, and Picaro was fixed there, staring at her. Then Jula took hold of him.

Despite her smallness against his height, his thin, wide-boned body, she seemed the greater. She wrapped her arms about him and held him close as her own skin, looking up into his face until he put it down to rest, forehead to forehead with her.

That was all. They were motionless, seemed likely to stay that way.

Only then Flayd began properly to see India, the Asian girl he had met at Brown’s. He noticed that she alone, in all the shambles, was entirely unmarked.
Clean
in her
clean
evening dress, clean in her
expression
, which was temple-carved, like that of a kind yet sullen god.

T
HE JANGLE AND WAIL
of sirens and emergency vehicles began to come when they were some way down the wider canal, leading out on to the lagoon.

India had found a boat, a tourist vessel, with non-CX engine, left at a quay as if waiting for them. But there were boats everywhere, many empty, and, by that station
in their journey, some not. Flayd noted methodically at last the intactness of these bodies, though blood and excrement attended them. The empty boats provided the other clue that probably their occupants had fallen or jumped into the water. There were people lying on the streets, also. And at one palazzo, they hung from the balconies, a score of them, like gaudy washing. But by then none of the four in India’s found boat gave any sign of reaction.

Beyond the major zone, and its lesser rings, they went through an area where no one, again, seemed to remain. But here and there Flayd spotted momentary, shadowy figures, wandering, half-glimpsed, aimlessly. He didn’t see enough to know what state they were in. Perhaps they were merely stunned and could survive once the medics reached them.

Then India’s boat was among high, standing walls, still whole and solid, with no view or intimation of damage. Here, instead of dead or dying or dazed human things, they began to see dead animals and birds. Flayd debated why they had come across none before. Soon it occurred to him that these creatures had
known
, as the human animal had not, apparently until too late, and tried to get away. (There were no projected recx birds either. The CX capacity of the City was well and truly down.)

In the end it was Jula who first made out the black gulls, hundreds of them, crowded on the roofs, hustled in with pigeons and doves, all alive, none of them avoiding or seeming to mind the other species.

They had gained the borders of the ZASP—the Zone of Anticipated Survivor Potential.

And Flayd saw he was using war-room terminology. And that it seemed applicable.

Picaro and Jula sat, side by side, their arms pressed together, otherwise not touching. It was India who steered the boat through the water and the desperate obstacles, although Flayd had put himself forward to do it.

Finally they could see the walls opening out, and the broad sheet of motionless stone that was now the lagoon.

And that was when they began to hear the sirens.

It was at first a relief to Flayd. Had he thought, despite what India had earlier said to them, that no one else was alive in Venus?

F
ROM THE LAGOON
, they had a sort of sidelong overview of the City. But in the dull and dispirited twilight, every lamp was out, save for the flash of wrecked CX systems. Though seemingly standing, the City looked bomb-struck, and lost.

(Flayd had thought they might try to make the subvenerines out by Maria Maka Selena—but his wristecx too was dead, and the dome locks, already shut down, were doubtless now doubly impassable.)

Jula spoke. “I’ve heard this described. The lull.”

Flayd glanced at her. “I guess. Then we’re in the eye of the tempest, whatever the tempest is.”

India had cut the manual motors of the boat.

They sat, in the leaden, re-gathering silence.

Flayd said, “I saw it. I thought it was an explosion. A firestorm. But it wasn’t. I don’t know what it was. But I do know, don’t I? You just know. Something I’ve heard of. Something I reckoned just can’t exist. I—
recognized
it. Christ, that’s how. I
knew
it, the minute I saw. And not from any picture, not from any statue.”

“The Christiani called them the messengers,” said
Jula. “When I was a child, I heard some of them speak of this once. Angelos, or angelus.”

“Angel,” said Flayd. “They exist in every religion, in every mythology, in some form or other, thinly disguised. Angels, and demons.”

“They are the same,” said India.

As if none of them had expected her to speak again, they all stared at her. Even Picaro did this. But India now was once more silent as the pervading silence. Her eyes were down. She might have said nothing.

“Maybe,” said Flayd. “OK. Whatever it is—that thing—it could cause all this by
sound
—”

“Music.” Now it was Picaro who coolly spoke. “It was the music. Anyone who heard, anything in its path—and then the shock-wave spreading.”

“Listen,” said Flayd, “am I being too basic if I feel the need to ask—
where is it
? Where’d it
go
?”

And then Picaro, who was evidently in the cool and level stages of madness, stood up in the boat. Staring at Flayd from a face hard as a rock, Picaro lifted his right arm, and pointed, straight up, into the granite sky.

“Up there. Where else? That’s where they go, where they fall from.
There
.”

Silence again. And from the City emerged a low slow booming that swelled and died. Nothing was visible of what it was, or had been. Only the distant mindless cries of sirens that were themselves growing infrequent now.

Flayd said, “But that
isn’t
a
sky
—are you saying it’s gone?”

Picaro laughed.

At the blinding, insulting whiteness of his teeth, Flayd wanted only to kill this laughing man, but there were enough dead already.

“No,” Picaro said then. “Not gone.”

And then India spoke again. “It’s lying up under the dome, above the sky. It lies dreaming and brooding on its game. That’s what the lull is, and the storm’s eye. Soon it will begin to play again, with the new toys.”

Picaro sat down.

The water seemed so congealed, the boat scarcely reacted.

But unheralded, across heaven, there wavered the glorious flambeaux of morning, yellow-gold.

The City was made golden too, waning lights drained to nothing, the laguna an animate floor of flame—over the water the other way, the church of Maka Selena blazed like a rising sun.

Everything held its breath. The City. The unknowing world above and beyond.

The dawnlight flickered, curdled, and was folded in behind the costive darkness of the unreal sky.

Flayd found he was shuddering.

Jula reached across now and pressed his hand. Her eyes were steady still, over the rim of the shield she had been so wise never fully to lay down.

India said, “Don’t be afraid. Not yet. After such pleasure, it will wait a while. It needs no rest, but has learned of rest, as it’s learned music. And so it rests.”

“That was the angel,” said Flayd. “That light.”

“That was the angel,” said Picaro, “turning over on its bed of sky. Because angels live above sky, somehow, and they’re evil, and they fall. I found that out when I was sixteen.”

Flayd said, “When it starts up again—”

“The rest will go,” said Picaro. “What the fuck else, do you think? Maybe even me, next time. Good.”

“No,” said India, “not you.”

She had raised her head, and once more they all looked at her, as if at a signal. And Flayd, not seeing why he did, pulled from his jacket the paper notebook always kept there, the outdated pen. For it seemed India was ready now, to tell them all she knew.