Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series) by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online

high hot roof above that other city, the city where Picaro was born. They were drinking iced melon tea, and below the traffic roared and plunged in dust and smoke, like a drove of demonic cattle. It was always worse after 5 P.M .—17 hours. The period when the last traffic for the day was allowed to run, before the nighttime prohibition on anything but emergency vehicles, which came on at 19—7 P.M . And everyone wanted to get somewhere.
    Picaro, thinking back to his father’s voice, heard it still above that driven rumble from the streets.
    “But the magpie could
write
?”
    “Says so here.” And then the man’s still face, turning towards him. “But you can’t have one, son. They wouldn’t allow it. Magpie’s a wild bird.”
    And there had been a dream he had, the child then, of seven magpies flying, black-white-black—like something from a picture by Escher. But by now the actual image of the dream was gone, the memory remained only as words. And even the face of Picaro’s father had faded, returning solely in abrupt, surprising dazzles of recollection. He had been dead nearly sixteen years.)
    P ERHAPS HE WOULDN’T BE around, but when the UAS boat came, he was standing by the watersteps, by the green iron Neptune.
    Not a wanderer. A stouter, Victorian boat, with a canopy to keep off the sunless heat of the sky. An official, also in Victorian dress, (a Victorian clerk) welcomed him aboard: Chossi.
    “A short trip. We are permitted to use engines, you understand.”
    They took off fairly rapidly, leaving a curling wake in the shiny, thick-clean water.
    “There, do you see? The roofs of Santa Lala—and just there—”
    “What’s this about?”
    “Routine at this stage, sin. Nothing to worry you.”
    Another man ran the boat, steering it through the canals and out into the sky-flamed sheet of the lagoon.
    A funeral cortège was crossing the water, a tourist display only, for there was no longer any Isle of the Dead. The black angels and black, horse-headed prows eased between sparkling plates of lagoon and air, and mourners from the fifteen and 1600s posed in their black and gold. From windows and terraces and other boats, came the tiny soft blinks of a hundred camerecxi.
    There was attractive merchant shipping along thequays to either side of the Primo Square, tall sails the color of tortoiseshell or iced Campari.
    The Victorian boat, chugging now in keeping with its pretend-antiquity, waddled in the opposite direction and into the narrow Blessed Maria Canal. The University had not first been built quite where it was today. But it looked enough of a fixture. Gray stone levels, carven pilasters, and windows with bottle-glassed, myopic panes. They drew in under a leaning, fringed acacia whose fronds almost touched the water. Chossi took Picaro in under an arch roped with ghost-blue wisteria, up carefully cracked steps, and into a long, low-ceilinged corridor.
    The shadows here by day—lacking a directional sun to cast them—were curiously luminous, even inside.
    Like the boat, bottom heavy, Chossi waddled before Picaro.
    The room had gilding.
    The man in the chair was dressed later than his clerk—from 1906, perhaps, something like that. You did not often see so recent an era represented now.
    He rose and held out his manicured hand to grasp Picaro’s. “Please sit, Sin Picaro.”
    Picaro, sitting.
    “I believe, Sin Picaro, you know why you’re here.”
    “Do I?”
    “I believe, Sin Picaro, Sin Flayd let fall something about a scientific venture which has gone on here, over the past two years.”
    “Did he?”
    “Let’s not be too playful,” said the 1906 man. He smiled to reassure he was still Picaro’s friend.
    “Then don’t,” said Picaro.
    “It isn’t,” the man said, “as Sin Flayd feared, thatCX vigilance was in operation during your conversations. But it was quite obvious he would tell you. He’s done nothing wrong. Flayd is always suspicious … Nothing can upset what has been