Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) Read Free

emptiness.
    A ripe red terracotta floor. A window, there, with amber glass bottles and glasses like jade, and a magenta stained-glass jewel. An unlit lamp hung from a hook in the ceiling, round as a latticed moon, oriental and from long ago, reconstructed, durable, and charming.
    He walked from room to room. Each was vacant but for its occasional enhancing detail: a narrow, carved black wood cupboard in a corner, with a skull—very real and
not
real, re-created—on its top. A red embroidered rug, fresh and new and old
once
, and no doubt from fabled Candisi. Such things.
    Already invisibly deposited in place, the luggage balanced against one of the walls, which themselves had a color like dark honey and glowed in slots of light.
    In the last room of the seven, a long window gave on a balcony. Walking into this room, Picaro halted. Outside, perched on the balcony’s outer ledge, and clinging one-handed to the ornamental iron, like a mad, wild human bird, was one of the girls from below.
    Picaro undid the ancient bolt mechanism of the window. He went out on the balcony, and the girl regarded him with bright eyes. How had she got up here? Perhaps the other one, still standing on the terrace by the canal, helped hoist her aloft—awkward enough in their tight-waisted, swirling dresses.
    “What are you doing?” he said.
    The girl below had a somber skin and looked sullenly up at him. This one was pale, with a storm cloud of dark hair.
    “I love your music,” she said, “Magpie.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I have all your decx, every one. And a music file of the notation. Everything you’ve composed, everything you’ve played and sung. I love you,” she added.
    “Thank you,” he said again.
    He wondered how to get rid of her. He hadn’t expected this, of all things, not here.
    “I’m Cora,” she said. She jerked her head at the girl left on the terrace, “She is India.”
    “What nice names. But I think you ought to get down.” Even as he said it, his heart sinking, thinking of having to escort her into, before out of, the rooms.
    But Cora said, “Please, your autograph.”
    “All right.”
    He went over to just within a meter of her, no closer.He set the wristecx swiftly, and waited, and she pointed to the bodice of her dress. “Here.” The wristecx fired a tiny flick of compressed energy. Together he and she watched the miniscule spangle form on the cloth, above her breast. “Does it,” she said, “speak in your voice? What does it say? Does it play music?”
    “My voice. It will say,
Picaro to Cora
, and then it’ll play you three bars of the Africarium.”
    “I love the Africarium.”
    “Good. Now—”
    “Don’t trouble,” said Cora, the mad, wild, wingless bird, and winglessly she flew off the balcony, so his sunken heart leapt into his throat instead. But a second later she had landed, without a hitch, flawless, back on the terrace in the arms of her unfaltering friend. Both girls then turned adjacent cartwheels, revealing their modern briefs and white lace stockings. Acrobats? He laughed despite himself, despite everything. And then they laughed too and ran away, back through the alley by the green palazzo. They had been young; neither, he guessed, more than nineteen.
    They were cute enough. He hoped they wouldn’t return.
    P ICARO, THE M AGPIE , sat on the floor, in the hot, sweet stillness of Viorno-Votte afternoon.
    Sometimes he drank water from a tall emerald flagon. He watched unsunned sunlight make patterns.
    She had had a harpsichord here, he knew that, Eurydiche, but that was then. No harpsichord now, not even a recx harpsichord. Instead the Africara stood, potbellied, horned, and brown-black as a bull, against the wall. Sometimes the rich clear light seemed to flutter its strings, as if bees went over them. Illusion.
    How noiseless the palazzo was, each apartment CX-insulated. But outside the open window there had been intermittent footfalls, notes of other laughter, music, shouts