Ivoria Read online

  IVORIA

  Tanith Lee

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Last Chapter: 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Bookmark

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Website

  Also by Tanith Lee

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Passenger becomes the Stranger when he leaves the ship and steps ashore.

  English Spoken

  John Kaiine

  Last Chapter

  1

  Nick opens his eyes and sees the eight-sided moon of the window floating in the dusk above him.

  The window always pleases him.

  Seeing it first, from outside in the strange, busy little cul-de-sac, had made him want this flat.

  But the phone is going. Not his mobile, the landline. He gets up and walks barefoot through the shadowy room. “Hi.”

  “Nick, I need to talk to you. What are you doing tonight?”

  Idly, Nick responds, “Who is this?”

  “Oh, for… your brother, Nicolas. Who do you think.”

  “OK. It’s a bad line. Did you say tonight?”

  “I’m at Euston.”

  “Right,” says Nick. He leaves a gap.

  “Well, where can I meet you? How about your place?”

  “Ah. It’s a bit…”

  “It’s always a bit. I said, this is important, Nicky.”

  “I’m meeting someone, Laurence. In about an hour.”

  “Can’t she wait? Can’t you? I only need to take up your precious time for twenty minutes.”

  Nick sighs, quietly, and measures the narrowing perspective stretching from here to the connection with Jazz at 8 p.m. Which is in fact almost three hours off.

  “All right. You can come up here,” he concedes. “Have a drink and unburden yourself of whatever awful crime you’ve now committed. Do I take it you’re driving?”

  “You can bet I am.”

  No delay for Laurence then to wait for a cab. He will, as usual, have left his car in the long-stay car park. Consumption of alcohol will not deter him either - unless of course some miraculous good-citizenesque conversion has taken place. Then again, the background now sounds like a pub or wine-bar.

  “Fifteen minutes,” says Laurence.

  Phone put down, Nick pads over the faintly warm, ever-smooth polished wood of the floor, and up the pair of shallow steps into the kitchen. He turns on the light, (nice, that, turning on a light - so what happened? You touched the switch and it got a snort of cocaine, or fell in love with you… make a note of this). He takes the vodka out of the fridge and opens a bottle of Casey’s Orange Dry. It will be fine. Laurence never stays here that long, though generally longer than promised. And Jazz will be late anyway. She inevitably is.

  Having also drugged or seduced the side lamps in the main room, Nick surveys the flat a moment. He keeps it in condition himself, all but the floor, which a firm regularly attends to. Spare and clean, it shines, but the best thing is the moon of window; that goes without saying. The real moon will appear in a while, sliding into the right hand frame, full tonight, cold golden white in the clear November evening.

  Laurence sits on the couch. He has removed his scarf, cashmere-mix overcoat, even his jacket, since the faultless heating makes the flat softly, airily warm. He is now in trousers and a thick-stripe shirt of slaty blues, staring at his shoes, which are leather lace-ups. In his hand the drink, his second, is already half full, or rather, half empty. “What am I going to do, Nick?”

  Nick, still on his first glass of Sauvignon, pauses thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”

  “No, no. Of course not. Oh shit,” says Laurence, “it’s a bloody mess.” And drains the glass. He gets up. “Can I use your lavvy?”

  Nick nods, and also gets up, still shoeless, and goes to fetch the vodka and dry orange. He refills his brother’s glass. Now it is full again, as Laurence returns from the bathroom.

  “It’s not that I did anything heinous, quite the reverse,” says Laurence, reassured by the drink’s restoration and therefore not yet tasting it.

  “No.”

  “Oh yeah. You’ll say I never do.”

  “You never do.”

  “Ha. But I have to finish this damn book. I’m already late for the deadline by months, and God knows I need the cash input. And then there’s the other programme, on the Roman site at Coreley. I have to start that in another ten days.”

  “Yes.”

  “God, Nick.” After all, a gulp of drink. “Sometimes I really envy you.”

  “I thought you always did.”

  “Yes, you little bastard. I bet you do.” Laurence sends Nick a wan smile. Laurence, in his forties, is black-haired, good-looking, tall, slim and not badly built, because along with the well-selling history books he writes, he still ranges out on digs, especially when cameras attend him. His series Going Rome which recreated, past the nine o’clock watershed, a great deal of sex and violence, has been extremely popular, almost as good as his (even more gruesome and lubricious) Conquered Britain: 1066, which was first shown in 2006. “Cheers,” says Laurence.

  Nick sits back. The moon window is now black, though furred slightly by the glare of street lights. The real moon has edged into the glass, but is quickly rising, going beyond them all. He would like to watch the moon, but Laurence, with his tale of enraging some female TV producer, is taking up a lot of viewing time.

  “Why don’t you,” says Nick, cautiously.

  “What?”

  “Well. Fuck her.”

  “Oh, right,” says Laurence.

  “Well presumably that was what she thought you wanted, and what she does want…”

  “You’re not
kidding.”

  “And she is, you said, attractive.”

  “Excessively.”

  “It isn’t that you haven’t, now and then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And if she’s as significant as you seem to think, can make the show go the way you want it…”

  “Christ,” says Laurence, “you’re absolutely right. Of course. That’s the easiest, not to say most pleasant option. But it’s Angie.”

  “Yes.”

  “If she finds out again.”

  “Then don’t let her.”

  Laurence gets up and walks up and down the main room. It is a large room, not much impeded by furniture - two couches, a triple of tables, a tall bookcase, a cabinet, music centre, TV. The ceiling stretches up fifteen feet, and even the octagonal window only begins around six feet up. Nothing much then to interrupt Laurence in his prowling. Which is what Laurence would term it: “I prowl about… I had a prowl over to Chelsea… Damned train, four hours to Coreley, no room to prowl around….” (He hates flying, Laurence. Even less prowl space?)

  Nick watches his brother, familiar with his procedures, not exactly irritated but by now thinking of other things. Of Jazz and how the evening will be. Of the cold moon on the city.

  “So well, maybe,” says Laurence, “I’ll call her.”

  Nick grasps Laurence means the female TV producer, not Angela, his wife. And, as if to confirm this, suddenly Laurence gives a short throaty laugh. It has an undeniable sexual overtone, yet too a kind of childish excitement. Then he puts down his drink and, swearing, takes the smart dark watch off his left wrist.

  “I almost forgot to put the damn thing back on last week. Got in from Manchester at about 2 a.m., just remembered as I got out of the car. And Ange wakes up on the sofa where’s she’s been lying in wait, and she coyly says, “I see you still have on the watch.” He is pulling on this other watch now. It is trendy, a wind-up that he forgets to wind up. Angela’s present for their anniversary last May. “Well, that’s seen to. All ready for battle now. Thanks for the chat.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “What about your date? Or will she hang on?”

  “I hope so. I called her,” Nick lies.

  Laurence seems incredibly relieved, not about Nick’s love life, but his own, yet out of all proportion to what has been said, admitted, done. He is over ten years Nick’s senior. He considers Nick, too, as has often been made evident, a fool and mental itinerant, ineffectual, irrelevant - if lucky far beyond his deserving. So why does Laurence, whose name is respected and now and then mentioned, not normally unfavourably, in the Press, in need of coming to his useless young sibling for consolation, let alone advice?

  “I’d better get going,” says Laurence. He seems to have shed a decade - the decade between them? “Ange is going to want to go out to some bloody place for dinner. I’ve been away a week. She always acts as if it’s a year.”

  “You shouldn’t be so loveable.”

  Laurence misses this or else merely fields it, all alight (turned on?) by his new irresponsible glee. Yes, he will have sex with the producer and so get in her good books along with her thong. Yes, he need not have a care in the world. Will he still be like this when he is fifty-six?

  Swinging up the marvel of his dark overcoat, Laurence realises something has been swept off one of the tables by it.

  “What was that?”

  Nick does not tend to ornaments, or objects d’art. A few prints and photographs, a knick-nack or two; a fruit bowl with a single orange left in it, that sort of stuff.

  “Don’t worry,” says Nick. In fact he had been unaware, or forgotten, there was anything there on the table, apart from the book he was reading, a paperback, some of Chekov’s short stories.

  “But what was it - ah, here it is.” Laurence fishes under the edge of the couch and brings it out. And Nick remembers. A small slab of whitish material, smooth to the touch, but only about twenty millimetres square. Curious it hadn’t broken or chipped, really, dashed to the wooden floor like that.

  Laurence examines the little slab.

  “Ivory?” he asks.

  Nick assumes Laurence should know. But the light is low and sidelong, and Laurence has consumed about six vodkas, plus anything else he had on the train and/or at some bar near Euston.

  “If you say so,” says Nick.

  “It’s got a feel to it,” says Laurence, running it through his fingers, thinking of Angie, maybe. Or the producer.

  “Well, I’d put it down if I were you,” quietly says Nick.

  “What? Why?”

  “Supposed to be… what was it the guy said? A carrier of bad fortune,” Nick says. He looks away modestly at his bare feet. “Probably rubbish,” he adds. He glances up at Laurence and smiles. “But, just in case, better safe than sad.”

  After dinner at l’lnde, the restaurant Jazz prefers, they go to the club she knows, to dance. This is really to dance, or to sort-of-dance, as Jazz puts it, not the strides, leaps, spins and struts of TV-fashionable, or professional ballroom, but the cheek to cheek clinging of nice old-fashioned American dancing, with a backdrop of Ray Ellington, Sinatra, or Ella Fitzgerald. Nick likes dancing with Jazz. She moves gracefully and lightly, obeying his signals. A career woman with high prospects, she generally seems to prefer that he take the lead, which their moves on the dance floor exemplify. They sip iced Cokes in between. Cola is Jazz’s stay-up-late drink, rather than coffee or booze. Later, about 1 a.m., the cab takes them to Jazz’s apartment, the top floor of a tall house in Bayswater.

  “Did you like my dress?” she asks as she takes it off.

  Nick, of course, had already told her that he did, and that she looked wonderful, which she had and does.

  “Marvellous. You’re better, though.”

  “So are you,” she says, wrapping her arms round him, warm flesh and two cool silver bangles. She tends to keep her jewellery on when naked. As he kneels over her on the round bed, her earrings flash and sometimes tinkle when, restless with mounting arousal, she wriggles.

  Her dark hair spills over the cushions. She tastes sweet and fresh. She is about thirty-five, slim and silky. Even her pubic hair, neatly trimmed, has a soft powdery hint of perfume.

  Nick enjoys making love to Jazz. But then he tends to like making love to any hygienic and attractive woman. He is very skilled too, not only in the - for want of a better word -technical sense, but in those instinctive ways without which the whole exercise can become merely athletic or worse, mathematical, even squalid.

  When they have concluded two prolonged and successful sessions, she goes to sleep, curled up happily as a child. He checks she has what she may want for the last of the night, and that her alarm clock has been reset for midmorning; once she had forgotten and it roused her at the usual time of seven-fifteen, after only two hours’ sleep. He removes a bottle of water from the fridge and leaves it on the floor by the bed, where she can easily find it when she wakes. She has never asked for these attentions, but she appreciates them, he knows. Sometimes, if meeting her here, he brings her flowers, or a bottle of good wine. He likes to do this too.

  When he has dressed, first light is just beginning to thin the blind. He moves quietly out into the hallway, takes up the envelope from the table and lets himself out. (These envelopes always fascinate him. They are never there when he arrives, but at some point she must put them there - only he has never seen that happen. A sort of magic trick then, of Jazz’s.)

  The cab is already waiting, as always. The streets are not fully awake yet, the ride is short. When he is back in his flat the envelope, marked in Jazz’s coiled hand-writing, Darling xxx, reveals rather more than usual, but all in the accustomed crisp twenty pound notes.

  Nick showers. He is wide awake, and makes coffee. He watches a few moments of early TV, then takes a notebook and writes in a couple of ideas, images, things he may like to use for the short story he is currently writing. He probably will not try to sleep until after lunch, catc
h an hour then, maybe.

  He turns off, (that phrase again, now in reverse) the TV and lies back in the chair, looking at a pale uncertain sky which now absorbs the window.

  He thinks suddenly about what he said to Laurence, the business about the ivory counter, how it is supposed to be a ‘carrier of bad fortune’.

  Laurence had offered a sneering grin to that, naturally. Laurence has not studied ancient history for nothing, he knows the value of any curse - which must be inevitably powerless, its pretentions only sometimes randomly supported by coincidence or over-active imagination.

  “Don’t tell me you buy that?” he had said at once.

  “No, not really.”

  “Oh, I bet you do, Nicky. It’s just what you would believe. You’re superstitious. Credulous. Why hang on to it, then? Scared to pass it on?”

  All this, while Laurence had settled himself in his over-coat.

  “Apparently it’s harmless, unless you keep touching it, or looking at it,” Nick had mildly elaborated.

  Laurence, who even while juggling his coat, had kept hold of the white counter, now again scrutinised it. “Like this, you mean? Can I feel an uncanny vibration? A peculiar heat? No, don’t think I can. Is it ivory?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “So… Where does it come from?”

  “A few days ago.” Nick had looked considering, and Laurence dropped the counter abruptly back on the table. It had made a sharp little click, rather like the noise of one key of an outdated manual typewriter. Nick had thought that too, he recalled, when he had dropped it on the table himself. Or - wherever he had first put it down. Where had that been? “I had lunch somewhere,” Nick had continued.

  “With some bird,” said Laurence, who was capable also of historical recourse to antique slang. He had sounded rather disapproving. He has generally, seemingly, got the notion that Nick sees a lot of women. Obviously not quite the real circumstances of such meetings.

  “Yes, I was with someone.” Nick had paused again, reflectively. “The waiter came by and put this on the table with the coffee.”