Living Next Door to the God of Love Read online

  “Francine? What are you doing?”

  Leaving you, you stupid AI.

  Oh god it hurts.

  I look around the warning notices at what I’m doing, but it doesn’t help much because everything is lost in a huge upwelling of blood. I put the blade down with a hand that can’t stop shaking, pick up the first swab set and wipe the loose skin to the side, blotting the ooze at the same time; an action which is ten times more agonizing. Blinking away tears, I pick up my eyebrow tweezers, get a hold of the slippery fish scale of a chip and rip it out of my hand.

  There’s a black moment. I open my eyes and gasp with pain so awful that I pass out for a second or two. I’m dimly aware of my head hitting the wall on the way down and briefly I really do see stars. I thought that was just a saying.

  I wake up on the tiles, my hand a hot, burning fury. The surgical patch that cost me two months’ allowance is lying on the floor with me—I can see it on the white tile, yellow and flesh-coloured, face-down. I’m glad I didn’t strip the backing off before because I could have ruined it. Now I grab it and peel it. I flip the skin flaps back into place over the wound and slap the patch on. Immediately the pain lessens to a bearable degree and I get up.

  Everything is covered in smears of blood and the more I wipe it up with the cheap tissues the more it spreads around.

  The chip itself, the Tab, which has connected me to NorthNet and LeedsGuide and all the pearl-strung AIs of the Solarverse since I was six years old, is a square of gold, floppy at the edges and carrying the residue of my nerves, damaged as they are. I still have the skullware in my head naturally, but I won’t be getting that out. And it won’t work without the Tab. Well, people get it to work in spy films by using devious bodily infiltration robotics, but I don’t think that’s what the Police do here and I can’t.

  I feel very clear, very pure, suddenly weightless. The silence . . . hard to describe it. I didn’t know the world was so empty. When I look at things the knowledge about them that used to sit behind my mind isn’t there. The world has become meaningless, open wide, nothing to tell me where to go, what I can do, what I can’t. If I think about this anymore, I’ll become too scared to go on.

  I take off my shoe and smash the Tab with the heel. It cracks and flattens on the white tile, becoming a pink and gold mess. I pick it up in another bit of tissue and flush it all away, then get out the can of NanoMom I brought with me for the purpose and clean up the cubicle. Maybe it’s forensically good enough to cover my tracks and maybe it isn’t, but I won’t be here long enough to find out. I clean the can and my fingers and stuff the tissue and can into the bin. In my bag are my toiletries and the few bits of tradable stuff I could lift from home. At the last minute, I change my heels for running shoes.

  My hand no longer hurts, it simply fizzes with the patch’s work. I feel drunk and giddy on one level, but the queen of truant cool, who has been waiting a lifetime in the wings, takes her cue inside me. Out of the door, out of the toilets, along the club wall at a normal pace. I pretend to be Sula.

  I’m smiling. It’s impossible not to. I think I could fly.

  Sula doesn’t even see me as I circle around the back of her. Then I’m in the street, walking fast, like I’ve somewhere important to be, and for the first time I can remember there are no words or pictures superimposed on my vision, no voice in my head to tell me where I am. I glance left and right and no information appears. I look up, look down—nobody calls and I can’t hear anything except the drizzle and the wash of water in the street as cars pass.

  I start to run, don’t mean to, just have to, and beneath every light and sign I say silently sorry, sorry, sorry to the Guide AIs, and to all my friends who can no longer hear me. Talking to the dead. But I’m the one who died.

  As I pass the closed shop windows the holopeople in the adverts running on the glass stop their promotions and turn to watch me. They move into close shot and crane their necks to see me go. The ProHair lady with her mermaid curls waves uncertainly at me and I know it’s really NorthNet, forsaken, looking through her useless eyes of light. I skip sideways and point myself at the street eyes above the storefronts and I wave as I skip, both arms overhead like I’m signalling aircraft or leading a cheer. Good-bye. I said I was going. I wrote it in my diary to you, NNet, and you know, and you’re going to let me go . . . I know.

  The dapper young man who puts his perfectly tailored suit jacket on a thousand times a day in the display window of Tinker Tailor, and a thousand unseen times in the night, leaves it hanging on the back of his chair and blows me a kiss.

  I turn into a no-holo, eyeless street—St. Paul’s—and slow down under the lights, barely recognizing anything without its overtype of map data. I make myself walk because I’ve got all the time in the world now that nobody and nothing knows where I am, or what, or who.

  I need an out-of-state taxicab now. Sympathetic cabbies hang at certain locations—vendor pads where they park up to take a rest. If there are any of them willing to take an illegal passenger, they’ll leave their doors unlocked. It’s half an hour before most of the club-goers will be heading home, so there should be some cabs nearby.

  I find the coffee bar on St. Paul’s easily enough, and the taxi rank. Some of the cars are parked in bright light. They have their warning flashes bright on their flanks—out of service, do not attempt entry. They shock to stun.

  In the darker areas outside the streetlights most of the taxis are similar. No, they say in Technicolor that even the un-Tabbed can read. NO. In fact, there’s only one that displays nothing and has no driver. My heart sinks as I see its registration plates and billboard; it’s an out-world taxi and it’s from the Stuff Universe called Dindsenchas.

  Dind is a historical Sidebar, devoted to all things Celtic, “the premier destination of the true Briton.” Dind shops are full of hand-beaten gold and rough textiles, stinky cheeses and soil-caked old vegetables, pottery figurines of tough pre-domesticated pigs and bags of strange dried herbs. I don’t want to go there and live by farming the land and riding around on a horse like a peasant of old, which is what I will be. Or worse.

  But you have to be prepared to go anywhere to get out of range of your home Guide and away from obvious trails. NorthNet wouldn’t stand in the way of a police pickup if they found me, no matter how deep we were down with each other.

  There are two officers standing at the coffee-house doorway, chatting. One of them is a Tek, all armour plate and rocket packs. I walk past. That’s it. I can’t go past again or they’ll suspect. But I can’t face Dindsenchas. My mother is into all that Faerie and Celt stuff. She collects figurines and has her runes cast once a week. It would be like getting stuck in our living room forever.

  I keep walking. Crap. Now what am I going to do? Hang and hope the cops move? Sod’s Law says they won’t. I dawdle as much as I can without looking like I don’t know what I’m doing.

  To my right in a narrow alley the minor streetlights flicker suddenly, as though they were lanterns blown in a sudden gust of wind: signals. I automatically look that way. One of the lights winks again. There, half on the pavement and half off, is a taxi.

  The sound of a car on the main street seems too loud and acute suddenly, the swish of its tyres on the wet road hissing like it’s trying to call me back from a dangerous mis-step. The taxi’s plate says Sankhara.

  Sankhara is as frightening as Dindsenchas is boring. It’s a High Interaction Universe, although I can’t remember much more about it than that. Sankhara is quite a long way out from here—a hundred miles overland to the Gateway, plus who knows how many light-years after that? I have no idea what it’s really like, but I remember watching a documentary about it once with Mom’s boyfriend, Darren. He turned it off after five minutes, saying, “Bloody lunatics. What do they want to go and live there for? Asking for it. Alien shit. Cuh.”

  So it’ll do.

  The car is dark. I tap the lid of the trunk on its sensor strip and it opens. I glance back to
wards the coffee shop and see two shadows approaching along the pavement. One is bulky and tall—Tek. I drop into the trunk and close the lid. It shuts silently then an interior light comes on, a tiny glow.

  “This taxi’s next destination is Actaeon Parkway, Sankhara,” the taxi AI told me in precise English with a strange accent. “If you, illegal person of no means, do not wish to enter Sankhara, please exit now. Journey time will be fifty-one minutes and fifty-eight seconds. This message and your travel have been sponsored by the Free Agents of Infinite Time. Please remember, and give generously.”

  The light dimmed and went out. I had to put my hand over my mouth to stop myself laughing. It had never occurred to me that the refugee underground was a commercial enterprise. Who in Solaverse were the Free Agents of Infinite Time?

  I didn’t laugh long. Rain beat on the lid. It was very quiet. The car was well looked after. Its tough nylon fabrics were hard and scratchy and hot, but not dirty. After a while I got used to being curled up and found a way of resting my head on my arm. When the journey finally started I ignored the pang in my chest where I took the bullet of Sula’s hurt, and concentrated on the soft, floaty suspension rocking me. I fell asleep soon after I tried to count the junctions we stopped at on the M62 motorway, picking up cars in our snaking landtrain. And that was it. Really pretty easy, for leaving life behind; disappointing that nothing came after me, that instantly I missed none of the things that had filled my waking days before this moment.

  2 / Jalaeka

  The Infinite Strand—that straight stretch of shoreline between Desolation and Unforgettable Beach—was always marked with wreckage. Most of it was of the usual kind, pots and boxes, barrels and crates of wood and leather broken by the ferocity of the offshore currents and vomited onto the edge of civilization like so much bad food. Occasionally a metal container came intact and sank into the soft sucking mud of the shallow bay, but it wasn’t this that interested me.

  I was watching a Stuffie. Most of Sankhara was populated by Stuffies of one sort or another. The 4-D fabric of the world was built of Stuff, everything, every person and animal, except for the immigrating humans who had come here from the Sol universe. But this one was unusual. Stuffies of Sankhara and the other Sidebars were isolated from Unity. Locked into the ordinary constraints of 4-D living like the humans. Architecture and geography insensible. Vegetable awareness barely a shimmer. Animal senses no wider than their doppelgänger range permitted. And other beings, magical or otherwise, all shut away from Unity into the lockbox of linear time and single-minded awareness. Not him though. He was like me, a little. He could see Stuff. He knew what he was made of and like me he could trawl the awareness of the human race, tracking their thoughts like a hunter on the trail of easy prey.

  As I watched him do what I’d sworn off forever, I was struck with longing so fierce it hurt like a knife blade under the ribs.

  I’d first noticed him purely by accident as I sat overlooking the early-morning ocean. He had come along the beach, combing the tideline with slowed footsteps and a bowed head, dredging the sleep of the human booty who lived in tents at the strand’s end. I saw the humans changing, stirring in their unquiet dreams as the images and thoughts darted out of their heads; shoals into his net. And I knew him then for what he was, a part of the Sankhara Engine itself.

  He was strong and young, light and agile as only creatures of his race could be, but more than usually alert. Once he had pulled himself carefully onto the hard, cold steel frame of the container he had coveted he sat down and looked about him for signs of sea snakes, the Ootoo, whose beautiful voices could sing him to sleep before he had a chance to run away.

  There was one not far away, its silvery and tourmaline scales shining in the gentle morning sunlight, but the tide was out and it was in danger of beaching itself if it came for him, so he turned his back to it and placed his hands down on the heavy hinges of the container’s sky-facing door.

  Confident he would not notice me, I walked to the edge of the high cliff and jumped down into a deep tidal pool, soaking up its fatal impact energy and using it to warm me as I swam out towards him through the cold currents. I drifted there and watched, transfixed by the sight of another Stuff anomaly—the only one I had ever known before being that Paladin of Unity, Theodore, killer of my friends, destroyer of worlds.

  Cool, grey water furled and foamed around a metre below the elf but he didn’t mind water, nor beasts, nor anything much that would have worried a human beachcomber. From the tips of his long, pointed ears to the soles of his enchanted boots he manifested restlessness, anxiety and determination. I watched him immerse his attention into the locks, the substance of the metal container itself. He persuaded certain strong bonds to change their strength and shape . . . he asked it to become brittle, to wither and become fine like ashes. Because he had the Engine’s mandate and some of Stuff’s immeasurable powers granted to him, the steel obeyed him. It snatched oxygen from the air, crumbled under his fingers like dry biscuit and fell into the sea where it stained the water brown and red.

  The elf slid away from his post and back into the shallow water, treading it at a safe distance as he heated the seawater inside the container enough to create a sufficient pressure differential to fling the door open in a single blast of steam. Concentrating so hard was exhausting, and climbing up the side and into the hot container must have been unpleasant but he went to it with nervy grace. I swam closer, ignoring the Ootoo, which, after a brief attempt at serenading me, followed a more interesting vibration into deeper water.

  He had found sugar, but not the kind that sweetened tea. This kind of sugar was deadly material and the trade in it within the precincts of the city was ferocious and lucrative. Candygirls could ingest it and convert it into alchemical drugs. They could manufacture almost any biochemical compound from it, and many with the pseudo-magical properties that made Sankhara the playground for the daring and suicidal. Candygirl sweets were almost guaranteed to contain enough Stuff interactions to send any Solar human over the side into Translation, the cells and molecules of their bodies slowly converting over time into Stuff itself, until they had painlessly bled away into its alien continuum. They were highly prized in spite of, and because of, this danger. I couldn’t understand what this Engine sprite wanted with it though . . . his obsessive stuffing of the packs into his bag, risking his life, was fascinating. I thought I would follow him.

  Then the weight of his body and the continued refilling by the sea through the container’s various loose joints told on its position. The pile of slippery packages shifted under him as the whole container tipped a few degrees and, with a tug of one particularly large wave, settled much more deeply into the velvety soft silts beneath it. He stuffed two more packs into his bag and clipped it shut, leaped up to catch the rim of the doorway with his fingers, and missed.

  He landed unluckily and packets slid from under him, making him twist his knee and stumble into the lowest corner. The sea boomed against the side of the container and the liquid mud took another gulp. The top of the container where it leant lowest slid below the waterline and a thick torrent of hungry ocean seethed eagerly down on top of his head. He was strong but hardly invulnerable, able but mortal. Maybe the Engine would remake him, I thought, if he died here. Maybe not. Stuff wasn’t known for restoration.

  The elf braced himself against the container wall and waited for the water to fill up the empty space but the uneven angle was increasing rapidly as the weight tipped the heavy box over onto its side.

  The Ootoo, attracted by the vibrations and the curious sounds of the container’s fall, returned from deep water. I heard his angry prayer to the Engine, trying to summon its occasional mercy.

  He asked for a gift of Banishing, begged it to consume the Ootoo, let him escape the humiliation of ending this way. He begged for intercession, debased himself, promised his slavery . . . eternally, but the Engine did not turn for him. He began to drown.

  The problem of a Stu
ffverse is that I can’t do anything to it, like I could to normal matter, not without summoning the attention of Theo’s ever-vigilant pack of hounds.

  The Ootoo’s song had sent the elf to sleep. Water filled his lungs.

  By any sensible margin I should let him drown.

  I shockwaved the Ootoo into unconsciousness—it was no more able to resist a precision pressure wave than any other living creature—then dove past it. I swam forward to the elf’s floating body, grabbed the tough fabric of his tunic and pulled him rapidly up to the surface, where I towed him towards the beach.

  In the shallows I was able to get my footing on soft sand instead of muddy fines. Using the basic first aid of my long years in worlds where medicine was unknown, I turned him on his stomach and pumped his lungs out, trying not to crack his ribs. He vomited, coughed and lay panting there for a minute. I watched him get to his hands and knees, then sit back on his heels.

  He turned to look at me and his glance, ready to be grateful, became the long stare of the unbeliever. At first surprise, then incredulity, then a strange, canny smile crossed his features. His emerald eyes narrowed slightly and even a child could have seen that he was thinking fast. I found a ridiculous grin on my face.

  “Wha—” he began but got no further, his mouth hanging open as he tried so hard to see what I was made of.

  “I know,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting his confusion. “This hero shit is really addictive. Sorry. I should already have run away, but I missed my cue.”

  “What are you?”

  I put my hand out to him. He looked at it for a moment, then took it and pulled himself to his feet. “Jalaeka.”

  “Damien,” he said.

  I cracked up laughing.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It could have been worse!” he objected, a grin stretching across his agile face and making it wicked. He started to laugh too. “Steve . . . Bobby . . .”