Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (17 page)

H
AVING SCRUTINIZED
J
ULA
in the CAVE, looking at her own reproduced cadaver, Leonillo went up to his private rooms.

He required something, he thought, but having reached seclusion, couldn’t recall what it was.

Leonillo believed this abrupt forgetfulness, which was unlike him, had to do with the narcotics the University pharmacy had supplied. True, he had slept a great deal better than he had been for several nights. But one was left with this tendency to mislay, omit …

Tonight, of course, was important.

It was the night Cloudio del Nero would perform for a large, selected audience, his (as some poetic memo had termed it) post-awakening opus.

Apparently the sheets of (fake) parchment on which he had been writing it out had corroded in some form. But del Nero seemed confident that the notation was established, flawless, in his head. There remained the slight worry as to whether the new harpsichord supplied for his performance would hold out—none of the other instruments had. But it needed only to persist an hour or two.

No one had yet heard his music.

To those who enjoyed the arts, it would be an epic event—save that very few of those engaged to be present realized the nature of the recital, or
what
they were going to hear. Revelations would come later. When everything was finished.

Leonillo frowned at his own choice of word. Finished? There was yet a vast amount to accomplish on this project; it would not end tonight.

Really, he wouldn’t have known where to begin, left to himself. But the orders he received were unfailingly explicit.

Leonillo himself would not be attending the concert. Although naturally he would closely observe it, here, in the University, with other UAS.

The security arrangements were excessive, complex, and by now all in place.

The venue was considered charming, a palazzo itself in the mode of the 1700s, full of little curiosities and delights. The auditorium had been constructed years back. The tiers of gilded seats were of velvet. Gardens were depicted on the ceiling, which conveyed, it was well known, every whisper of sound from the performance area, even of that quietest keyboard, a harpsichord.

Though hedged in by his impenetrable screens, the magic of CX audition would ensure that none of del Nero’s score was lost.

Some of Leonillo’s staff, he had seen, were very excited.

Leonillo opened a sealed container, unwrapped a disposable syringe, and gave himself a skin-surface injection of vitamins and caffeine. Probably that was why he had come up here.

Probably also it was the sleeping-pill tiredness that made him, now he was in this private room, not wish to return below.

A
S THE TWENTIETH HOUR
of the Viorno-Votte approached, soft, along the lagoon, the canals, the sky, Venus readied herself for sunfall, and the night.

Over her lovely spires and cupolas, her walls like spice and crushed pearl, her glimmering veins of liquid, the westering of a sunless sun threw all its limpid nets. Transfixed in the fetters of this murmuring light, the City—unreal, encapsulated and immersed as it was, yet became, as always it had, feminine, and surreal.

She
then, Venus, lay dreaming below her sky, and drew the sky colors down upon her countless mirrors. Windows and canals flashed gold, sank with cinnabar and purple. Masonry, in cliffs and ravines, flushed blood-bright, and let its dyes seep down into green water. Every tower was roped by fire.

Out on the lagoon, the constructed sunset, a massed fleet of architectural clouds, scalded madder, scarlet, cochineal. And this was only like a million genuine sunsets, over which Venus had presided, bathing herself in them to gain immortality, when once she had been throned above the sea, and
only
the sea, and heaven, contained her, and the darkness which came was a
real
night, full of sighs and winds and spray, and the moon, when it rose, another lighted marble palace.

Bells rang. Birds flew. Boats folded their sails. As, in an endless past, over and over, they had.

Then the sunset fell into the sea. The sky smouldered. Stars appeared.

And night, no longer real, had come.

P
ICARO WAS STANDING
in the dusk on the wide terrace of Brown’s, which looked out along the Lion Marco Canal.

Various guests were there, going about, preparing themselves for pre-dinner drinks, or another of Brown’s nightly entertainments. One group detached itself into an arrived wanderer.

He heard one of the women cry eagerly, “But he’s the
newest
composer? The one they were talking about?” “Yes,” said one of the men. “He’s modeled his music on another man’s from the eighteenth century.” They were going to the receital at the Orpheo.

Picaro was vaguely conscious of the fashionable Victorian
lady positioned along the terrace arcade, half glancing at him, to see how he would react. He did nothing.

He
could
do nothing. And now—had no urge to.

They were all bound for the same destination, and finally, at last, he didn’t care.

Then he saw India coming briskly out from the lobby.

She wore an off-the-shoulder evening gown of darkest red, and what looked like golden chandeliers hung from her earlobes.

After all—

Picaro stepped in front of her.

“Where are you going, India?”

She halted before him. “Where do you think I am going?”

“The recital,” he said, indifference bursting apart inside him.

She said, “No, I’m not. I wasn’t asked.”

“All right.” The terrace shifted under him like a boat. He took no notice. “A lot of people were. But you won’t be missing anything.”

“Won’t I?”

He looked down at her. Her eyes were strange tonight. Perhaps she had been smoking something—something better than the clips he had consumed.

Then she turned her head and looked at the canal and said, “How bright the darkness is. I’ll see you later, Picaro.”

I doubt it
, he thought,
I doubt if you will
.

And then he saw the wanderer which had come to pick him up. There it was, slotting itself in by the terrace.

As he stepped away from her, he heard India say, “I’m sorry I was harsh. Cora always loved you. She always wanted to meet you, and to make love
with you. You made her happy, Picaro.

He hesitated. He said, “You helped her fly up on my balcony.”

“I always helped her fly,” said India. “Even the last time. We were lucky. That I was there.”

Something divided in Picaro’s brain. He saw, as if from one eye, the wanderlier ready in his unavoidable boat, saluting him, and the policewoman over there, slightly less languid, alert to see what Picaro would do next. And with the other eye he saw India behind him in her evening gown.

“You said, the last time.”

He faced the canal, lifting his arm to wave, friendly, to the waiting wanderlier. (The policewoman relaxed.)

Then he turned around to India. He took her hand, partly to demonstrate his excuse for lingering.

“What do you mean, India? After she died, in the morgue?”

“Oh, no, Picaro,” said India, “
as
she died.”

The terrace
shifted
again.

“You were in there with her?”

“I came to be.”

“You were
with
her?”

“Yes. She didn’t suffer long. Not like the rest. I held her. She trusted me. The others. They thought they were on their own. That was the terrible thing.”

“How,” he said, “if you were
there
—how—how did you—”

India regarded him with sulky gravity.

“We’ll talk later.”

“There won’t be any later, India, not for me. If you were
there
, you
know
.”

She lowered her eyes. It was very dark, despite the dawning lights of Brown’s, the profligate stars.

The other woman was beside him. “Time to get in the boat,” she said. “Or we’ll be late for the show.”

F
LAYD HAD CALLED FOR
the eighteenth time. As usual, Brown’s was apologetic. They had never known such a persistent fault, at least, not in a door. It had affected the windows too, he said? But at least the guest cabinet was full of food and drink he had previously ordered, and the air-conditioning and other CXs worked. They would of course refund his entire bill for this one Viorno-Votte.

Why had he troubled to call? He knew what had been done, probably why. Had figured it out.

He was afraid. Not for himself. For the others. The ones who would be there. For Picaro. For Jula. He tried to think of young-man ways to escape the rooms, or failing that to alert the citizens of Venus, while bypassing the UAS, the police, and any other security units now operating.

The riots had been quelled. The wall screen told him that. It was a peaceful evening.

When he got tired of pacing, he put quite a lot of chicken, sauce, and pasta in the heater, retrieved them and began to eat. The food, and the wine, helped to distance him, to make him heartless and fatalistic for all of thirty minutes.

He sat by the laptop and read over the piece of Latin he had put up there yesterday, copied with a mass of other inscriptions, years ago, from the mosaics of the Primo. On the goldleaf, Christ and the flames of seven angels, and the warning of the apocalypse.

ALBUS ADEST PRIMO MACRO PALLENTI ET OPIMO ET ASCENSORUM SEQUITUR PAR FORMA COLORUM
. The script,
when he spoke it aloud to her, had confounded Jula, because it was in medieval Latin, rather than the classical tongue of Roman times. “They’re called Leonine hexameters,” he’d added. He asked her, curious, to suggest a translation in English. She considered, and announced, “The white one is by the first, the thin one, the pale one and the fat one, and of those who mount upon their horses, there follows a like pattern in color.”

“Approximately it. But this Latin depends on the reader also looking at the mosaic picture and drawing conclusions. See these guys on horseback? They’re the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, predicted to bring war, famine, pestilence, and death. Something high on the agenda of the early Christian mindset. So, from the picture and the words together, we get, The white one stands near the black one, the pale one and the one large in size, and the same style of color holds good for the knights.”

Looking at it now, across the wine glass, something darted through Flayd’s consciousness, quick as a speeding bullet. He couldn’t catch it. It was gone.

He wondered why he had brought the words back on the screen. Solely to show Jula the discrepancy between
her
Latin and that of fourteen centuries after? No, he’d been looking for something else—the emperors, he thought now. Checking the dates of the Flavians. Though what that had to do with a Christian apocalypse he wasn’t certain.

Flayd frisked the buttons.

(This was what you had to do. Carry on with everyday matters. Research, your work. Kept you from wondering, wondering how insane Picaro was, how true what he had said, why the door had jammed, what maybe you yourself should really—)

Names appeared. Proud names redolent of Roman power: Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Narmo …

Again, something flicked at the edge of Flayd’s inner eye. Vanished.

He opened another bottle.

P
ALAZZO
O
RPHEO LAY ON THE
Canale Magnifico, which sprawled beyond the Rivoalto, in parts almost one fifth of a kilometer wide.

Orpheo had never really existed in the past. It was a modern edifice, built to resemble another of the reconstructs and recxs, and ornamented with recx artifacts, sculptures, mouldings, and art from assorted historic palazzos that had been lost to the sea. Among these was a great white marble Apollo, a re-creation of a statue located under the old Aquilla Lagoon. Birds circled his head, for he was a sky god to whom birds were sacred. But also, the brass plaque told one, it was Apollo who had invented music.

In the amphitheater, tiers of seats, their velvet midnight-blue, crimson, chartreuse, rose from the room’s center like banks of flowers. And Picaro thought of the snake, coiled under the flowers. But all that was there, poised on the flat stage, (and visible as if unscreened, through the crystalline magna-optecx) was a harpsichord, patterned over in some gold, silver, and azure design.

The audience of tourists, of PBS citizens, music-lovers, sightseers, milled leisurely up and down like creatures trapped in a tide (as if helpless), swimming into their seats and becoming anchored there. They had been gathering busily outside, too, all through the lamplit square, where the tiny speakers hung like fruit—altogether
perhaps, a second crowd two thousand strong.

Picaro hadn’t yet gone to his seat. It was far up, miles it looked from the central area where the music would be made. A bad seat, yet given the current excellence of CX audition every concert hall employed, poor only in the visual sense, for not a note would elude even these upper tiers. He had heard the audience discussing, in pockets, and with some enthrallment, the supposed importance of the optecx screening—in
perfecting
the sound system. They didn’t know the screen was to protect them from the performer. Nor that it would be useless.

Useless … Everything. Life.

The hasca and the alcohol, an opaque rough spirit mixed with Seccopesta, had blotted her away. Blotted away Simoon. So she was just a shapeless muttering amoeba, the wraith of a demon, in his brain’s back.

He no longer heard the words of her curse. No longer heard her tell him how he would die, underwater but not by drowning.

He could almost grin, almost laugh. Almost be happy. He had fled so long, fought so hard for ignorance. Now, the release of total surrender.

Yet too, having already seen it, how it must be—he was
afraid
, and only the drink and the drug had moved him slightly above his terror. But he had had enough of both. They would last another hour. And by then—nothing could make any difference.

W
AR—A FIGHTER
. Famine—a dearth. Pestilence—an unseen spy. Death—the bringer of changes.