Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) (18 page)

S
OMEHOW HE HAD HIT
the wrong button. Flayd gazed tipsily while the list of emperors elongated, incorporating now the forerunners of the Flavians, the Julio-Claudian Caesars.

Almost amused.

Almost convinced. Picaro was nuts and had either hallucinated events at the Shaachen palace … or exaggerated.

Flayd had his own detection to do anyhow: Why he seemed to have connected up the Roman state with a medieval interpretation of World’s End.

Using
voice
, he told the laptop’s CX to correlate the listed emperors with the apocalypse. If there was any link, CX would suss this. He sat back and drank his wine, ready to be intrigued.

J
ULA HAD SAT DOWN
by the door of her tomb.

Tonight, very few human staff were at their posts to watch her. Most had gone to the other larger-screen monitors, to enjoy the relayed recital at the Orpheo.

In any case, she appeared to be doing nothing much. She wasn’t upset or nervous.

She only sat there.

Her hair was no longer hennaed, and the red was fading out to a Gallic blondness.

None of her small audience thought her attractive, or even a woman. She was an exhibit, a canny white rat in the lab.

T
HE LARGE AUDIENCE WAS
settling now, all seated on the glamorous velvet chairs. They rustled programs, chattered.
The noiseless air-conditioning filled the atmosphere with meadow fragrances, to compliment their perfumes.

Picaro looked at them, these people about, as he was, to die horribly and in immeasurable pain.

They were nothing to him. Less than flowers scattered on the flowerlike seats. A cast of extras.

And then something—the gleam of a woman’s silver dress, a man’s quiet laughter—something, unbearably and unforgivably, made them all
real
.

Each a living thing. Each trapped in his or her vessel of being, a body which moved and talked, and thought and felt, and might be needful or loved.

Not flowers. Not actors given only minor parts.

They, each one, as he was, hero of their own life.

Something leapt inside Picaro, clawing and rending him with its teeth and very nearly he stood up, to shout, to scream at them, to grab their hands, their arms, to push and force and throw them out into the night. To send them running as far as the prison of the dome allowed.

“Why, you’re crying, Sin Picaro,” said the flirtatious policewoman beside him, “and it hasn’t even begun.”

And then a storm of applause rose all around them. And she too, poor living heroine, clapped, smiling. And of them all, only Picaro was not applauding. And Cloudio del Nero had appeared, rising upward in the bubble of the optecx, stepping out of some contraption, through the opened floor of the stage, bowing through the invisible screen, in the manner of 1701, elegant and handsome in his aristocrat’s coat of white brocade.

F
LAYD’S LAPTOP HAD STARTED
to tick. He wasn’t sure why this should be. (Maybe breathing on it had gotten the damn thing drunk.)

It had been shuffling a kaleidoscope of data across the screen. Now the soup dispersed. Decided as a mathematical equation, it showed this:

A block of numerals and letters in Greek and Latin foll owed, demonstrating the interpretation of the name
Nero
as the number 666, the Number of the Beast. From the advent of which being must proceed the end of the world.

J
ULA HAD LEFT THE AREA
of the CAVE, and travelled up in one of the lifts. Hardly anyone was about in the sub-or higher corridors of the University. She understood, from Leonillo’s earlier words, they had gone to witness the relay of some entertainment.

Something drew Jula up through the building. It was a definite and concrete urge—perhaps only to reach the open air. Even though Flayd had told her about the air, and the dome that held it in.

When she emerged from the University Building, she stood a short while on the terrace of the Blessed Maria Canal. Honeycombs of ancient palazzos lined the water. Small lamplit craft were going up and down.

Above, the sky was darkest blue and radiant with stars, the moon not yet up.

She had grasped all this was a counterfeit. But might not anything be that, for all she knew. And a freshening wind blew in from the lagoon, bringing with it a spiky and electric smell, as if a storm were coming, unannounced, to thrill the City.

L
EONILLO SAT BEFORE THE
enormous CX viewer, behind and about him, his staff, fired up and high with expectation. There were some two hundred people crammed in the room, which was authorized, as a rule, to hold only one hundred. Due to the shortage of seating, they perched on stools, crouched on the floor—willingly.

As in a virtuality theater, the lights had been dimmed, to maximize the effect of the screen.

Again he was reminded of the theatrical aspect of life.

F
LAYD WAS ON HIS FEET
. The chair had gone over. He lurched toward the laptop, glaring at it.

He was still drunk enough that his head was muzzy, but the wine had also released him. It was as if abruptly he could
see
. His brain sped, running with the bullets now.

If anyone had been watching, which probably, right at that instant they were not, he might have given cause for alarm. Justified.

Without any other preamble, he picked up the table. All the way up. And hoisted it over his head.

Strong, Flayd.

His face engorged with blood, the laptop, the books cascading away in a shower of paper and sparks, the green flare of some socket detached.

With a smack that rocked the whole apartment, and caused some comment on lower floors, thrown furniture slammed into the shut-stuck balcony windows.

The optecx glass rippled. But didn’t give.

Then Flayd roared, a brazen boom of wrath, frustration, and despair, like the sounding of trumpets.

P
ICARO CLOSED HIS EYES
.

Others did the same.

It was so silent now, in the Orpheo.

Like an opened door.

“A
CARNATION OF AN EVENING
, sinna,” crooned the wanderlier. “Are you off to a party? There’s a big event on at the Orpheo. But not for everyone, signorina. Not everyone likes such formal music. Me, I like the Victorian songs. Or the songs from the south.”

He began to sing to Jula.

He had a fine voice.

She looked away along the canal. They had come some distance. She had said she wanted to go to Brown’s guest palace. He had been surprised, seeing her modern clothes, shaken his head, informed her such a pretty sinna should wear the historical dresses, they would suit her so.

Jula thought perhaps she had worn them, such dresses, somewhere, but not truly here, garments from the renaissance, or skirts that had ended far above the knee … and other things. At other times.

The moon was coming up, blonde as her mother’s hair.

T
HE FIRST PHRASE
, tinkling like silver coins, delicate as raindrops dappling metal. A million drops, upon a million knives of steel—

Was it only a harpsichord? These diverse and mingling sounds, this harmony—surely some orchestral overlay began, unless—

S
INCE IT WAS THE NINETEENTH
call he had made out to them, he thought they might not take it. They took it.

“I need help—” he groaned. To pant and sweat was easy, after the table. Possibly he’d even given himself what he was describing. “’S bad—heart attack I think—I need someone—real quick—”

And cutting it off right there.

Crashing back, so the voices gabbled, and then a light starred on in the wall.

Flayd, not lying dying on the carpet, rolled over, in case any unseen close-up camera might reveal the faults
in his acting skills. And the notebook always kept in his jacket pocket stabbed him in the ribs.

T
HE FIRST TIME HE HAD
ever heard …

Music.

When, where, had that been?

Only a nothing surrounded it, yet out of the nothing, which perhaps was night, this incredible element had drifted, like water, like smoke, like air—and
made
from the nothing, as fire was struck with an old-fashioned match. And, as he later thought, as pleasure and orgasm were created inside a woman’s body. Touch—friction—magic. Something miraculous which came—from nowhere.

Like life itself.

Music.

S
O MANY LIGHTS IN
this City, so bright. Not like the Roman town, with its intermittent candles, torches, beads of flame in oil, ordinary stars.

Snatches of sound. Scents.

The glutinous, caressive
clokking
of the oar through water, wanderliers hailing each other, lit boats out on the lagoon, the jewels of churches …

Wind blew back her hair.

“Rough weather coming,” said the wanderlier, and winked, for here rough weather never came at all, unless intended and authorized.

A
S THE MEDICS BENT
over him, Flayd parted them like curtains. Across their toppling, he lunged at the two security men, punch ing one out cold, cranking his elbow
back into the other guy’s middle hard enough to remove him from the action.

Out in the corridor, a girl with a flecx.

“Pardon me,” said Flayd and knocked her hand, and the gun, separated, ceilingward. He hoped he hadn’t hurt her.

He could almost hear Ali laughing. Yeah, baby, you don’t expect this kinda stuff from some big fat slob works all day at his desk.

They forgot the excavations, the aqua-diving. The fury.

Ignoring the elevators, filled up anyway with over-dressed guests going down to dine, Flayd took the stairs. Leaped them, one stack of steps at a leap.

I
T WAS BEAUTIFUL
. He had not thought—it could be—

Beautiful.

So—

Beautiful.

It

Was like

It

was like—

This sound, this

Music

It

It was

Was—

A
FFRONTED, THE
wanderlier protested.

“Sin—signore—what are you doing—my
boat!
You could have upset her, and the lady—”

The large man, his hair a fiery banner, had erupted from the doors of the Ca’Marrone, pounded across the terrace, and jumped straight down into the wanderer.

“Jula—” said Flayd, “you’re perfect. She’s my pickup,” he added to the wanderlier. “We’re late. The Orpheo. Fast. Get going.”

“But signore—”

“Can it, buster. Use your fucking engine.”

“
Engine
, signore? But this is a wand—”

“I know you got concealed fucking engines, buddy, you all do. I’m UAS, that OK for you? Now rev her up.”

The wanderlier pulled a face, reached down along one side of the boat.

The roar of an outboard CX split the electric night.

“Hold tight, Jula. Oh Christ am I glad to see you. I thought you might be
there
—”

Up on the terrace, disapproving or tickled guests watched the slender wanderer shoot away along the Canale Leone Marco, at the end of which it left the water to leapfrog a jam of boats, before plunging on, missile-like, into the water ways beyond.

P
ICARO OPENED HIS EYES
.

Unless, by now, he could see through the closed lids.

Everything had become sound.

Everything had become the music.

He sensed, but did not see, a rustling undertow, like leaves driven by a wind—

Or the sea, coming in.

But what he heard, heard in completion, and what he saw, and what he smelled and sensed and felt, and had become part of—

Was
—the music.

And it was the music, not of earth, but of the outer spheres, the music of a world beyond worlds.

Its beauty and eloquence showed not only in the plangent ecstasy of its sounds, but in the shifting rays of a supernal light, now white, now gold, now topaz.

The music was full of wings, and it carried him upward as it must carry everything, up where the heart knows it must fly, and tries to, and never can—

But now, it could.

The sheer beauty was its joy. Joy beyond belief and hope and dream, joy that had no place in an earthly world.

It was the music

of the sky, and of the realm the sky signified. Of the blue vast airs, thin as gossamer, strung with planets and clouds, where images came and went, and which, no longer, had any end.

It was the music of Eternity.

It was the music that played about the Entity of God, when the stars sang together.

Picaro knew.

No wonder it killed.

How could flesh and blood withstand it? They were not equipped to sustane this flame-struck and orgasmic fire from heaven. From Heaven.

There was no pain.

Peeled like the apple of knowing, the soul was drawn from its skin. Naked, and without thought or word, it stood in the sky and did not care for the dropped soiled costume it had left behind.