Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

“Ah, my apologies, dominus,” I said, backing away.

But what I’d said to him seemed to have touched him in some way.

He sighed. “No you’re right. I can’t hide anything from you, Felix. That’s the Athenian quality, right there. Give me a moment to cover up my arse and we’ll talk.”

We walked through the gardens listening to a lyre player. Directly above us a ship with Saturnian insignia fragmented into being, a good fourteen miles from the nearest skyport. Normally Magnus would lose his temper at such poor use of mathematics, but not today. He merely smiled at the error and continued through the gardens as the ship’s engines flamed and burned the sky, turning the vessel in a slow arc to the north. There came a sudden peace after it had left, and the purpling sky settled calmly into its previous state. The lyre player continued. The faint contrails left from other, slower ships could be seen extending through to the horizon.

“Her name was Cornelia,” Magus breathed.

“The woman in bed, dominus?”

“No. Gods, no. That was just one of the actresses from the theatre. No, Cornelia… she was, is, the reason for all of this. You know as well as I do how little money this place makes.”

“I believe it has yielded a four billion pound loss thus far, dominus.” There had been opportunities for it to make more revenue◦– anyone could see that◦– but here, for just this property, Magnus seemed content that the project be about something else, something other than the balance sheet.

Waving away my reminder, he paused and smiled. “I keep thinking about her, when we talk of the old days. You helped me do that, our little conversations now and then, when we revisit the past◦– well, when I speak of the old days.”

“I merely stirred the thoughts, dominus.”

“Well, that may be. But the fountains, the courtyards, the recreations of the battles, the simulations of culture, the replications and the museum pieces… They’re all because of her.”

“She admired these things?”

“Cornelia used to love them, back on Earth. We were young, but she adored that era◦– not the fashionable end of the Republic days, but later, y’know? The later emperors, Nerva. Hadrian and even that guy he was fucking, Antinous. Cornelia was besotted by the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius◦– bit of a cliché looking back, but still.”

“Do you think she has heard of Orbis Romanus?”

“Given the amount of advertising I’ve spent on Earth in the past year, I would be impressed if she hadn’t. Every time she read an article on her tab she’d see a personalized ad from me, expanding upon the delights of this place. ‘Relive life under the Five Good Emperors, Cornelia’, he quoted, ‘accommodation included’. ‘Do you have the nerve for Nerva?’.”

He and Cornelia had been childhood sweethearts. She had been a vatted child, grown for an older, very wealthy childless couple. Magnus had come from a poor family. But his brains and his talent marked him for a brilliant career and he had won scholarships to the same academy as Cornelia. They met for the first time, so he said, whilst reaching for the same copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations in the school library. They had an intense romance in their final year. He had even saved up part of his scholarship money to purchase her a fountain pen constructed from genuine melted Roman denarii. She wept after she had unwrapped it, and later, in the dark, they made love in the library, just beneath the Ovids

He wanted to marry her but, because of Magnus’ poor background and family status, Cornelia’s father would not let them. Magnus made desperate overtures, of course, but his persistence annoyed her father and eventually he was forbidden from ever seeing her again. Under the portico of her family mansion he said farewell to her one last time, quietly vowing that some day he would earn enough money to please her father.

Later, he learned that she had married a banker.

“So you see, I want her back, Felix. I’ve managed to track her down◦– easy enough to do when you pay the right people. She’s divorced now, as it turns out. The time is ripe.”

“I have heard talk among humans of the ‘one that got away’. Is this just such an example?”

A wry smile upon his face, emotions that, despite my programming, I could not fathom. “Something like that.”

“Why now?” I asked.

“I have everything I could possibly want. I’m still not happy.”

“Perhaps, if it is happiness you seek, then you will forever be disappointed.”

“You’ve not been programmed a Stoic, have you?”

I inclined my head. “Not unless you requested. All I can say then is that you are very persistent, dominus.”

“That’s why I’ve got where I have today, Felix.” He seemed to regret his words immediately but, instead of offering an apology, he merely slid the garden wall up and stormed off into the kitchen. The lyre player stuttered and blacked out, and I made a note to recharge it overnight. As a matter of fact, I felt as if I needed to recharge myself.

It was not long, a mere thirty days until after that conversation, when we heard from one of the human operators at the skyport that Cornelia was on her way to Orbis Romanus.

The messages came through the mansion information system, relayed in every room, streaming down the windowscreens like green neon rain.

Her ship will materialise 15 miles away within 50 minutes.

Could someone please pick her up from the skyport at Hadrian’s Island?

Rarely have I seen such urgency from Magnus. Following his initial excitement he managed to control himself and got dressed. Then he spent some time rehearsing lines, while he paced back and forth in the atrium, waiting for me to bring the horses around the front. He preferred tradition and insisted on horses to greet her.

Because we needed to move with urgency, I brought the horses into the atrium and moved them over what would normally have been the impluvium, a slightly sunken rectangle in the centre of the room. We couldn’t make the skies rain on this moon, despite Magnus’ best efforts, so such drains were useless. Magnus merely used the impluvium to disguise our fastmat. He thumbed in the precise co-ordinates of the skyport on Hadrian’s Island, booked us in with the receivers, and we mounted our horses.

Moments later, reality flickered, and a new and expensive kind of physics opened up space like a network of aqueducts.

We slipped into a new locale.

We rode our horses out of a large metal cylinder at Hadrian Island Skyport, a structure built in the classical style, but from toughened glass. The gathered throng◦– some in period dress, others in contemporary clothing as was the curious mix of citizens on Orbis Romanus◦– gawped as we rode our splendid mares through the chrome-lined port building, the vast windows looking out across the partial sunset.

We waited, of course.

Magnus grew impatient.

Then Cornelia’s ship arrived, the screen above flickered with the image of the passengers disembarking.

I knew it must be she from Magnus’ response◦– a woman with long, chestnut hair that seemed to bounce lightly with every step. In fact, she took each step cautiously, which surprised me, as her figure suggested she may have possessed a certain level of athletic skill. Her light blue dress clung to her frame, and a delicately laced white shawl covered her shoulders. She was not alone: a tall man walked beside her, dressed smartly in a black shirt, trousers and grey waistcoat◦– a style that contrasted harshly with her soft fashion. He possessed a broad and weathered face, though his expression was mild.

Magnus’ countenance grew sterner upon seeing him, but he need not have worried: this other man, we soon learned, was no suitor, but her protector. Mind you, one could tell that by the way he moved around her, never touching her.