Venus Preserved

Tanith Lee concludes the compelling Secret Books of Venus quartet with a haunting and suspenseful tale set in her brilliantly re-imagined alternate Venice. Centuries into the future, the sunken city of Venus has been rebuilt beneath the sea, under a dome, where it is supported by a vast network of advanced computers that control everything from the diurnal cycle to virtual projections of authentic wildlife, regulating weather, noise, and the most precious undersea commodity of all - air. It is here that a macabre experiment takes place: conducted by geneticists at the University, it consists of the resurrection of two lost souls, both murdered in their times - Jula, a beautiful first-century gladiatrix, and Cloudio Del Niro, the 18th-century composer who met his fate in Lee's acclaimed Faces Under Water, the first volume of the Venus series.
Picaro, a traveler from the surface, has come via submarine to Venus, chasing the evil prophecy that has cast a shadow over his entire life. As rumors of a conspiracy to isolate the domed city from the surface emerge, an unexplained catastrophe occurs, claiming several lives, from which Picaro narrowly escapes. Was it merely an accident, computer failure, or has the experiment unleashed an airborne virus? Or is there an even more sinister danger afoot, a force from beyond that threatens the survival of Venus itself? Picaro finds that the only way to answer these questions is to confront mysteries of his own that have long remained buried, and to reveal the connection that ties his past to that of the unavenged spirits wreaking havoc on the doomed city.