Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 5

  “Now I know where you are I can see you more often, babe,” he said, batting his eyelashes in a way that would have been coy if it wasn’t on him.

  I felt sick, and not just because of the food half-chewed sitting in my stomach. I didn’t know how to ask him, to beg him in fact, not to leave me alone again.

  He got up. “So, don’t forget you start the day after tomorrow. You gotta show up or I’m gonna get it. It was hard to slot you in there. Not that . . . well, show up, okay?”

  “I will, I will.” I nodded vehemently, knowing it could be my way out of the Foundation. “I’ll be great at it. I’ll be there.”

  He jammed the cowboy hat down as low as it would go. “Do I look stupid?”

  “Yeah.” I touched his coat, just to feel something that belonged to someone I knew close to me.

  “Good.” He stuck his hand out and ruffled my hair. “Life, volume, colour, baby,” he whispered to me, grinning. “Life, volume, colour.” And then, with a wet flick of his coat-tails, he was gone.

  I stuck around at Ran’s as long as I could until the waitress pointedly came to wipe my table for the third time. The usual collection of minor Stuffie celebrities were all hanging out at the fountains in the atrium, showing off and shopping. I passed them, feeling 6 billion years old in my faded anorak, invisible, unreal.

  The busy central streets of the Aelf broke up into a jumble of lesser zones behind the SankhaGuide Massif; another structure of awe-inspiring stupid size. I leant against the rock-face of the Massif to get warm—it always holds heat, even in winter—and pretended I was reading the map cut into it, showing all the city districts. Within the rock the obscure technical gubbins of the SankhaGuide AI itself hid, administering the Sidebar and everyone’s life in it with the cheerful good grace that Solargov likes to see in all its slaves. I had a soft spot for SankhaGuide though, because it chose not to notice me at all. Maybe it was friends with NorthNet?

  I made my way back to the Foundation’s squatted apartments in Temple slowly, kept my eyes on the pavement, hands in pockets, prayed not to be noticed by anything dangerous, though the main streets were usually perfectly safe from predators, even for single pedestrians. When I got there I lay on my bunk and flung the cover over my head. My peace lasted about thirty seconds.

  “Do you want to come and join in with the afternoon prayer?” It was Ludo, the leader of the group. His voice was rich and warm, though there was this hint of stupid-teenager-you-don’t-know-what’s-good-for-you about it that always made me want to cut his throat.

  “Go away,” I said.

  I could hear him thinking before he decided to play Mom. “Did Katy send you back here?”

  “No.” Obviously.

  “It’s not safe for you to be out on your own, young lady.”

  I could tell by the tone of his voice that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Saving people required their suffering and I wasn’t going to get away with it. I put the blanket back so I could look into his face.

  Ludo believed in his heart that he was the great benefactor and kindness to all, because he knew the right way to live and could show others how to do it; what made him happy would make them happy. Clickety click. He was ruled by Should and Ought and the moral package that came as a freebie when he bought them wholesale.

  I got up thinking that in a few days I’d be able to put his self-satisfied face out of my world forever. I concentrated on the fact that I had a job.

  I pretended to be Damien, from whom I understood how to tack on a big, shit-eating smile to my words in the knowledge that if I didn’t, worse would follow. “I’d love to join in.”

  4 / Jalaeka

  Locked into my new human 4-D, I spent some time exploring and discovered the strange compact that the true humans of Solar Earth had made with Unity.

  Were they the first humans? I used to think I came from a world like Earth, with a natural population that was unique to its surface, evolving by the normal means. Now I have no such confidence. Unbound by time and space, Unity’s only restrictions are voluntarily imposed. And does it matter who came first, or how they were made?

  This distinction was the heart of Earth’s dilemmas when they found Unity, thirty years ago. Then their new chimeric races, the Forged, went out of the system and into the tiny universe. And now, like me, some of them suspect with unshakeable paranoia that they are only an experiment in a long line of experiments, running in a laboratory as wide as the fabric of linear time can hold.

  The truth or otherwise of this is unimportant, since it is beyond analysis.

  I should have left Damien alone. Fishing the Engine’s fisher—hah! I should have stayed silent and hidden in the ways I learned in other lives, where no special tricks are required, only the desire to be ignored.

  We got drunk together. He kissed me and I kissed him by the rolling surf. I was starving.

  Then he took me through the city to the strange districts of the past, through Moorlands and Hoolerton, where council housing estates of brick and mortar, bleak grey concrete and weed-strewn paving were home to gangs of feral children who could barely speak. Along one very ordinary lane, the lengthy and twisting Crisscross Street, we took the paths and ginnels of forgotten childhoods that were never ours and emerged beneath the dark span of an industrial railway bridge. The street beyond seemed to go on forever.

  “Watch this,” he said, and took one more step.

  He vanished.

  I stepped forward after him and passed through into a universe completely contained within the Sankhara envelope—a bubble of space and time walled off by a dimensional division so thin it was as intangible as grace.

  We stood on a huge road, beneath dark overshadowing trees towering more than fifty metres high. From a greyish-white sky snow was falling, and the wind was like a whetted knife against our skins.

  “All new, this,” Damien said, shivering and holding himself in a hug for warmth. “Appeared a few weeks ago. Manufactured on a special order I thought, but I could never see how, or why. Never picked that dream up from anyone’s head. How long did you say you’d been here?”

  “Thirty days.”

  “Welcome, mate,” he said, his teeth chattering. “This is you.”

  Standing in the empty halls of the house he showed me, I remembered every damn thing I wanted to forget and, inside, I burned.

  5 / Greg

  It was raining hard outside. The sound of water flooding over the leaky guttering sill wasn’t enough to drown out my girlfriend. I glanced up from my book. “Pardon?”

  “. . . we should split up.”

  “Huh?” I heard her the first time. I just preferred reading the Last Throes column off SankhaDaily, instead of listening to someone I used to love doing a bad impression of it.

  Oh, listen to me. I’m turning into an asshole. Have turned actually. When did that happen? I’m as disappointed as she is.

  “For gods’ sakes Greg, haven’t you been listening to a bloody word? I said that tonight obviously proves we should go our separate ways,” Katy repeated. “You aren’t interested in the Foundation or what I’ve got to say about it. You never gave it a chance. I know you think I’m crazy and frankly I don’t care. When you’re here you’re not even here. You don’t live life anymore, you’re too busy making a fucking documentary about it!”

  “Break up. Finish with each other. End it. Divorce,” I said. The words popped in fits and starts. If I wrote me into my documentary I’d have a narrator voice over and call this bit of exposition a glossolalic constipation.

  Hmm. Words like glossolalic are making a bid for freedom. It’s worse than I imagined. I’m not an asshole. I’m the whole arse.

  Katy packed at a more effective languor, in stoic silence, appraising each one of our objects and picking the ones she’d decided were her due. She wrapped them in her clothes, carefully, stowing them in her holdalls like she was wrapping artefacts for a museum. “I take it from your vivid lack of shock that you agree?” />
  What could I say? The bit of me prepared to fight on the side of Our Relationship seemed to have fallen asleep or been lost. I could not compete with the religious, absolute inanity of a con doctrine like universal love.

  A huge, completely enervating calm came over me. “Yes. No. Wait. It shouldn’t be like this.”

  I stopped talking aloud and let the words run on to myself: I don’t want to remember you this way. I want to say good-bye to the enthusiastic English major who was doing Sankhara for the sake of somewhere to put on the CV that looked just a bit braver than most of the rest. She was honest, and you—you’re a different kind of honest, have in fact raised honesty up the flagpole and laid down flat before it and put your face in the sand. The Foundation has given you permission to become the painful honesty that doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up.

  I was so angry that I couldn’t say anything. I’d ruin even this awful moment and make it into a farce.

  Katy walked around and took her bag to the door. She was heading for the Love Foundation’s score of apartments in the Temple District of Absalom, where the statues of divinity talk on cue; platitudes to the wind. I’ve recorded all of them and conducted exit polls on 98 percent of their devoted servants too.

  She gave me a smile like giving out a bribe. “It’s like you’ve gone away. I don’t know who you are. You hate everything. You’re so cynical and sceptical you won’t give anything a chance. All because Gaiasol won’t listen to your paranoia about Stuff after Metropolis vanished.” She paused and when she spoke again her voice was quieter. “I feel sorry for you. I really do. You used to like Sankhara. Don’t you remember when it was different? Every day was an adventure.”

  My chest and the front of my shoulders felt very tight. I was sorry. She was right. Sankhara was paradise two years ago, when I first came here and set out my stall at the university, researching the Engine and its methods, hoping to understand the psychological substrata that made up the modern human mind . . . I thought Stuff would be the perfect toolkit: Sankhara was my laboratory, where all human imaginings (and most of them were pretty ordinary) walked the street. And then Metropolis vanished and I saw us for what we were here—only the mice in the maze, being given the runaround for tidbits.

  “Say something.” Katy glared at me. Anything I said now about the Love Foundation being only a sop to the spirits of needy people, and probably a pyramid scheme run by exploitative humans for profit; this would only send her into a fit. But even if everyone in the thing was a true believer, then they were mad.

  I wanted her to be gone, not to go.

  Katy wasn’t cross for once, only perplexed. “This is it, isn’t it? This is your whole response. Nothing. I wish I knew what went on in your head, maybe then I’d have a chance to say something that would get through.” She took a deep, harrowed breath and let it out. “I’m going then. You can come over anytime, you know.”

  It’s a bad day when your love leaves you for better loves she gets out of a handbook and the empty words of a grifter. But I hadn’t got better. I hadn’t got anything to make a counter-offer with.

  Katy picked up her bags again, taking a last lingering look around. She paused. “I wonder if you could come round later. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

  “We’re not all great talkers,” I found myself saying to her as the door opened for her. “That’s all.”

  Katy nodded gently at me. Tears, refused by my eyes, ran down my nose.

  “What time?” I asked.

  “After dinner. Eight or nine.”

  “Okay.” It was the last thing I wanted to do but I owed her. I couldn’t imagine there was any member of the Foundation I wanted to meet.

  Why say yes? You moron, Greg.

  The Love Foundation was a cult of curiously unitarian twist. It didn’t adhere to any particular religion, didn’t care if you were atheist, didn’t mind what you were in fact, as long as you were devoted in some fundamental way to recognizing all human beings as identical in their inner being. Inner here meant when all personality and other temporary encumbrances had been stripped off—taking it back to the real, as they said.

  The Foundation believed in a kind of soulless essentialism that everyone could express in any way they liked, although it was always spoken of as the Great Quest—for Love of course. Any kind of love would do, but they weren’t big on vice, so you’d be disappointed if you went in hoping for lots of free sex and drugs. They intended each person to find love from other Foundation members in the form of a noncritical acceptance. Devotional time was mandatory and group-related. There was a load of New Agey angles that were old long before I was born, and a lot of talk about a psychic heritage leading back through principal figures of the past—name one and they’d fit them into the pantheon. They were friendly like that.

  There was a further piece of good that the Foundation did for Katy—it liberated her from a lifelong dependence on her family and its corporate wealth. Finally, she got to stop being the poor little rich girl from Texas and started being Katy Pawlak, defender of the weak and unloved.

  In spite of the fact it was a load of idealistic, cloth-brained recidivist claptrap, it wasn’t a bad bargain, I thought. It certainly beat being Dr. Greg Saxton, Topographer of Sankhara, lecturer in Unity Studies. Not worth putting on a headstone, that.

  I was interrupted from self-pity by a flash from my Tab. I saw Damien’s green leaf icon blink and cued the chat channel, voice only.

  “Got something to show you,” he said. “Very peculiar. You’ll love it. Got time?”

  “How much do you want?” I asked, some little inquisitive bit of me perking up already.

  “Fifty solid honour points with SankhaGuide.”

  That was a huge price. I hesitated. “After I see it.”

  “Twenty before, thirty after. You’ll want to give me more.”

  Honour point trading was illegal, resting as it did on the Guide’s assessment of your Global Civilian Worth. It didn’t surprise me that Damien needed them. I would have to give him my points, and take a price hike on all my government purchases until I could restore them through publication or extra classes. But Damien was the only reliable source of genuinely interesting anomalies in the entire Sidebar, and he knew it. “Where shall I meet you?”

  “Crisscross Street,” he said. “Hoolerton end. By the park gates. Be here in twenty minutes.”

  I met him in the late-afternoon light on the corner. Litter blew around us and stray, sniffy dogs trotted past, one eye on us and one on the lookout for trouble. Most of the population here was Stuffie and I had extensively surveyed it the summer before, thinking I knew every alley and permutation reasonably well.

  Damien, always mobile, was more restless than ever. His strides ate the ground at such a rate I had to run one step in ten to keep up with him as we passed the rows of identical terraced houses, their pretty-flowered gardens, their concreted driveways. “Where are we going? There’s nothing down here until you reach the moors and that’s miles away . . .” I protested.

  “Set your recorder to maximum resolution and width,” he warned me. “You’ll need full capture.”

  He slowed down only when we neared the railway arches. Their dark, almost black bricks were marked with the illegible graffiti of dead and artificial languages: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Coptic, Klingon, Quenya, Sindarin, English and Cobol. SankhaGuide would do instant translations, but I liked their obscurity, and had never asked what they meant. I was too worried they would say something like Dave Is a Wanker, or be a pretentious quote from Shakespeare: after years of analyzing people’s fantasies you got a nose for that kind of thing. Damien had once brought a red paint stick and corrected a line in Sindarin with an angry swipe. I still didn’t ask . . .

  Under the archway the temperature dropped like a stone and I was shivering and gasping before I drew two breaths. I took a temp check and was watching the level when I noticed how the light had changed. I glanced up and saw Damien lookin
g knowingly at me from hooded eyes, his face brimful of anticipation, waiting for my reaction.

  “It’s very . . .” I began, glancing beyond him. Where the street should have been lying straight before me I saw a road crossing in front of me like a huge bar of stone. To either side and above me the bricks of the arch had become rotting wood, filmed with green mosses and dripping icy water onto us both. It was a tough, barbaric structure . . . I looked back. There was no sign of bricks or streets, only a graveyard behind me and the ruins of a cathedral fallen into green grassy humps among broken tombs. We were standing in a lych-gate, where the coffins stop . . .

  Flares of recording data scrolled in my vision as I cued full sensory capture. The temperature was the least of it. Snow and thin ice sheened everything, every blade of the vivid grass. And around and above us the trees—I had never seen such monstrous upgrowths of vegetable rioting, gnarled and twisted, but as lofty as spires. Their leaves were so dark green as to be almost black.

  The glade where we stood, backed by the graves, was a small pool of ex-civilization in a very large boreal forest, dotted here and there by the sword slices of vast spruce and cypress. These lined the road on either side, glowering over it with a primeval covetousness, restrained only by huge grey stone walls of granite blocks higher than a man. I could hardly think, I was so busy looking at it.

  I heard Damien laughing softly. “Do you know what this is, Dr. Saxton?” he asked me, huddling with his back to the bitter slice of the wind that tore gleefully in towards us from the funnel of the road.