The guests run for cover as the storm bursts overhead; but the white glutinous rain is drowning London. The flood carries me from Mama’s arms, bears me forward on an implacable tide, towards Titania and those red, red lips that are like a giant neon-splashed motorway hoarding advertising the bloodiest of lipsticks.
‘No!’ Titania cries. ‘Not you, not you!’
I woke, sweating. The cellar was becalmed. Titania was rearranging her clothes.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I pollute even the past.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s all right. Really.’
She pressed her hand to her stomach. ‘It’s there. You saw it. The malignancy.’
I got up, chewing my lip, embarrassed. ‘I said it’s all right. It doesn’t matter. In fact—’
Titania doubled over, her chalk-white features rearranging themselves into a mask of pain.
‘Please leave me,’ she said. ‘I’ll be better in a while. I need to be alone.’ I hesitated. ‘Leave me, Peter.’
With misgiving, I returned to the street, took the fold-up bike from the boot of the Bentley, and cycled home; but not before eliciting a promise that she would follow in the car later when she had composed herself.
I always respected her wishes.
But of course, she did not return.
‘The Lilim,’ said Nursie, winding my toys, ‘are everywhere.’ She pecked me on the cheek, sharp as a macaw.
That evening Nursie had stamped about the house muttering, ‘Where is that girl? Where is that robotnik?’ My father sulked, alone, in his room. Now, at my bedside, my smug nursemaid was saying: ‘I told you. I told your father. But would anyone listen? No. Krepelkova is just a silly babushka.’ She held a well-thumbed paperback in her lap: The Doll Problem—Lilith And Her Daughters. It was the bible of the Human Front.
‘Lilith was Adam’s first love. But she was proud and vain and adulterous...’ She opened the book, removing a photograph from its leaves. ‘Lilith is Satan’s consort, Peter. She is Queen of the Succubi. She comes to men at night so that she may corrupt their children...’ She held the photograph before me. It was a portrait of a young girl, a blonde manqué with liquorice roots, in whose pixieish face I recognized the traits of the recombinant: green, hysterical eyes and a sickly white complexion that suggested a diet of junket and sweets. ‘At first I blamed my son-in-law,’ said Nursie. ‘He never told me how it happened. But I don’t think he meant to be unfaithful. Dolls have their ways.’ She studied the snapshot carefully. ‘You can still see the human part of her. If you look closely. When she was born she was such a lovely child. We had no idea. It’s when they’re about twelve or thirteen that it happens. The eyes turn green. Luminous green. And the face: it isn’t a human face any more. It becomes...’ She paused, her brow creasing. ‘Pretty. So very pretty. But it is a prettiness that is horrible in a child.’ The book slipped from her lap onto the floor. ‘Poor Katia, she was a daughter of Lilith, and they made her wear the green star of the Lilim. Then the lactomania began. And they took her away. To the Hospitals. My baby’s baby...’
I went to sleep, clasping, with anxious hands, Titania’s key beneath my pillow.
The next day I cycled back to Brick Lane. The Bentley was still parked outside the warehouse. ‘Titania!’ I called. But the warehouse was empty. I descended into the world of the Seven Stars, my pocket-torch flushing out the shadows.
She had gone. I breathed a deep lungful of fetid air and went to mount the stairs. A gobbet of water broke at my feet; I jumped, swinging the torch around. Hanging from the ceiling in what seemed a sac of viscous bronze was the foetal-crouched shape of a woman. She was fleshless; what remained was a raw, quivering jelly suffused with plastics, metals and jewels. I retched, dropped the torch and ran.
And then I was gunning the Bentley towards Mayfair; towards the particle weapons and security cameras that surrounded our house; towards the human world.
‘Where is she?’ asked Father. I told him. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’ He fidgeted with the bed-sheets. ‘I never thought it would happen. Not to her. Not to Titania.’
‘Will she die?’ I barely dared utter the words.
‘The philistines called them dead. Dead girls. A nexus of formal rules. Non-reflective. No, she won’t die. Now she makes her claim on life.’ He threw back the sheets and swung his legs onto the floor. ‘I must go to her.’ A fit of coughing took him and he collapsed in a tangle of flannelette. ‘Those Cartier dolls,’ he said, gaining his breath. ‘I thought I was making elegant, eighteenth-century ladies, spirits of gentleness and grace.’ He pointed to the foothills of books surrounding his bed. ‘The Decadents! Writers and artists who filled my boyhood dreams with chimeras, vampires and sphinxes. Ah, the perversity of childhood... I tried, Peter. I tried to deny that darkness, programming my atomic machines to pluck angels from pandemonium. But atomic objects can be understood only in terms of their interaction with the observer. When we speak of the subquantum world, we speak of ourselves.’
Something terrible snarled in the undergrowth of my mind and readied itself to pounce. I dared it.
‘Did you put the poison in Titania?’
‘I always blamed others,’ he spluttered, the words rushing out. ‘I said it was some bug introduced into their programmes by our competitors in the Far East. But the virus was mine. Between the lines of Titania’s programme, within its infinitely complex, fractal text, lurk my dark childhood dreams. Now that sub-text emerges, the poison seeps...’ He began to cough.
‘I’ll go. I’ll bring her back.’
‘No.’ He drew himself up. ‘I’ll go in the morning. It’s getting dark.’ The sun, red and bloated, was sinking over Grosvenor Square. The jewelled eyes of my father’s automata glistened. He placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘She can’t come home, Peter. Understand that. Her power... It is enormous. I grew her from the quantum field, the essence of all forms. In her, space and time, mind and matter, are enfolded by... by what? A reality I cannot grasp. She is unconstrained by physical laws, at one with the essential nature of things. She is Creation.’ He looked out of the window, his face flushing in the rays of the dying sun. ‘But I have poisoned Creation. I gave her life, Peter; I must take it. Tomorrow, before she is reborn.’ He sighed. ‘Can anyone explain this need to create beauty?’
CHAPTER TEN
Unreal City
‘You want me believe—’
‘Quantum indeterminacy—’
‘This bullshit?’
‘At the sub-atomic level—’
‘Why no one say—’
‘His own consciousness, his subconscious—’
‘Before?’
‘The imprecise behaviour of—’
‘Mr Ignatz—’
‘Inventor becomes inventee—’
‘Mr Ignatz!’ Kito slid off her mechancial stud and pulled out her transcom.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Spalanzani, tell her it’s true.’
‘True? But how can I say? Possible, I suppose. Toxicophilous would first have engineered nanomachines on the molecular scale, programmed with the rules of a cellular-automaton universe. The nanomachines would replicate, each time making a smaller model of themselves, until tiny, so tiny, hardware became software, machine became information, mimicking the quantum effects involved in the firing of neurons in the human brain. But how Toxicophilous’s subconscious might have affected that process... Who can guess? Consciousness physics is not my forte, and fractal programming is a lost art.’ ‘Toxicophilous,’ I said, ‘is the source of the doll-plague. L’Eve Future was a projection of his psyche, just as he himself was a projection of his own age. The Lilim are observer-created. ’
Spalanzani pursed his lips. ‘It has always been my opinion that Toxicophilous was used as a scapegoat. But though people have cursed him for building L’Eve Future, nobody has gone so far as to accuse him of being the source of the plague. Your story, my fri
end, is mystical. And I am a scientist. Myself, I have long favoured the supposition that a virus from the Far East was responsible for—’
‘Shut up,’ said Kito, ‘quack nanoengineer.’ She began encoding her transcom. ‘Spalanzani scientist; I cynic, Mr Ignatz. I want evidence, not fucking crazy story.’
‘Titania exists,’ I said. ‘Ask Jack Morgenstern.’
‘Ask him yourself,’ said Kito, ‘when he come take you back England.’
‘American Embassy,’ said the com.
‘Forget duty officer, get me Jack Morgenstern, Cultural Affairs Attache. Say it’s K. At home? Then put me through his TV, his android, his fax, his bathtub, I no care!’
‘That won’t be necessary, Madame,’ said Jack Morgenstern, who had just entered the dome along with the Pikadons and Mr Jinx.
‘She on slab, Uncle Jack,’ said Bang (or Boom).
Morgenstern pointed a lightstick. ‘Okay, Zwakh, and you too,’ he said, looking at Spalanzani, ‘get over there with Kito.’
‘Mr Bones,’ said Kito.
One of the Pikadons drew a particle weapon from her Sam Browne and fired. The android spasmed, pawed at the air, then fell onto its face in epileptic ruin.
‘Kito, don’t disappoint,’ said Morgenstern, ‘I’m no longer interested in you.’ Coughing theatrically, as if about to provide an aside during an after-dinner speech, he added, ‘In fact, nobody’s interested in you.’ The Pikadons tittered.
‘Jinx,’ said Kito, stepping over the massive frame of her plastic bodyguard, ‘what this about?’
Jinx raised his hand as if summoning the elements to his aid. ‘Stop!’ He was a small Rumpelstiltskin of a man from some undefined principality west of the Urals; so astonished was Kito at his display of imperiousness that she leaped backwards, tripped over the still twitching Mr Bones, and fell in an immodest sprawl of limbs. The little man grinned as if he had just revealed himself the master of a long unsuspected black art.
‘Jinx?’ said Kito.
‘Let me present the new chairwomen of the board,’ said Jinx, making a wai towards the Pikadons (two effete cadets from a notorious military academy, dressed in the kind of style that brings out the sodomite in a man).
‘Nana friend with America now,’ said a Twin. ‘Friend of Uncle Jack.’
‘They do the weird on you, Morgenstern?’ I said. ‘Please,’ said Jinx. ‘Language.’ He turned to Kito. ‘A simple boardroom Putsch is what this is about. Madame, you have been mamasan of Nana for over forty years. Life has moved on. We no longer live in a Eurocentric world; a resurgent America is reclaiming its old spheres of influence. Madame is part of the defunct “Empire of Style.” But Nana has no time for nostalgia. Time is money. Deutschmarks. Yen. Dollars...’
‘We bought you out,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Seems US dollars still call some cards. I knew I couldn’t trust you.’ Kito picked herself up. ‘I was about to ring—’
‘We know,’ said Jinx. ‘Your rooms are bugged. This place too. We’ve been listening in on you for some time.’ ‘Interesting story, Zwakh,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Pity you had to hear it, Madame.’
‘What story, Uncle Jack?’ said a Twin.
‘Never you mind, sweet thing.’ Morgenstern smiled at me. ‘We’ll have to talk some more.’
‘Mr Bones—get up!’ Kito kicked the android’s tonsured head; yelped with pain. ‘Jinx, Pikadons—they use you. You no see? You become yankee stooge, you—’
I put my hand on Kito’s arm; she glanced at me and sheathed the claw of her anger that its sharpness might not be dulled for later use.
‘Let me get this right,’ I said. ‘The US government bought enough stock to allow the Pikadons—the Pikadons, for Christ’s sake—to take over Nana. All to get one runaway Lilim and me? What are you talking about?’
‘I told you,’ said Morgenstern, ‘I’m an Anglophile.’ The doors bisected at his approach. ‘Let’s get rolling,’ he called. A golf cart manned by two of Morgenstern’s goons purred into the dome. ‘Put the girl on that, handcuff the boy, and take them both to the autogyro.’ He turned to the Pikadons. ‘I’ll leave the for you.’ The Twins cracked their knuckles in anticipation.
The goons took hold of Primavera’s arms and legs; dropped them; stepped back from the slab. A green shaft of light, like a column of ectoplasm, had risen from her umbilicus.
‘Jesus, Jack, what the hell is it?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Morgenstern, ‘she’s been dusted some twenty-four hours. She ain’t jumping through any more walls, I can tell you.’ A breeze stirred a heap of print-out; there was an electrostatic crackle in the air. ‘Let’s get this thing on the road.’
The two men again took hold of Primavera. The breeze became a wind, and there was a squeal of castors as a metal trolley trundled across the room.
‘Monsoon,’ said Morgenstern. ‘It’s that time of year.’
‘That’s no monsoon,’ I said. ‘Tell them to put her down.’ I moved towards the eye of the storm; the well of unreason would have to be plugged or... Morgenstern fired a warning shot; a vat broke open, sluicing its miscarriage over the tiles.
‘Stay where you are, Gastarbeiter.’
‘Tell them to leave her alone,’ I said. ‘Don’t you realize what’s—’
The wind screamed into my mouth and lungs. I was pedalling air. Then I was falling, falling through the funnel of a green maelstrom, into patterns within patterns, falling towards something infinitely small, infinitely big, falling helter-skelter, falling into the belly of the doll.
I opened my eyes; the white cupola of Spalanzani’s workshop was above me. My enemies were rubbing their heads and getting to their feet. The dome was undisturbed, as if the cyclone, abashed at its carousing, had tidied up before it had left.
‘You guys okay?’ said Morgenstern. The two men who had precipitated near disaster mumbled a series of goon-speak yeah, guess so, sure, Jack, replies. One of them had vomit-spattered shoes. ‘Let’s try it again,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Gently.’
The umbilical light had died; Primavera was lifted onto the golf cart and driven outside without incident.
‘Move back where you were, Zwakh. Over there, with Kito.’ Hands above my head, I edged across the room.
A cry, EEEE! A slasher, splatter cry...
Morgenstern ran outside and I followed, my humanity insulating me from a trigger-happy burst from one of the Pikadons’ doll-scramblers. ‘Primavera?’ I called. She was still on the golf cart, eyes closed, breath shallow. Morgenstern had grasped my arm. His face was bloodless, and his eyes jerked into grotesque attitudes as he strove to assimilate the horizon.
Rising from Lumpini Park, and floodlit, St Paul’s cathedral shone majestically above the rooftops of Bangkok. Big Ben leaned over us from the next street, surrounded by chedi and prang, and the searchlights of the interdiction described their familiar arcs from across the Chao Phaya river. The Big Weird had suddenly got bigger. Weirder.
‘What’s happening?’ said Morgenstern. I eased his hand off of my arm.
‘We never came out,’ I said. Jinx, Kito and the Pikadons formed a huddle against the dome wall. ‘We’re inside Primavera. She’s taken us into her matrix. We’re inside her dreams.’
‘You said she was dusted!’ said a goon. ‘You said she couldn’t hurt us!’
Morgenstern put his hands to his head. ‘I got to think.’ He stamped on the ground. His eyes continued to wander dizzily in their sockets. ‘Inside her dreams, eh? Then we got to wake her. Wake her. We got to, to—’
‘Wake her. Yeah. And how do we do that? This isn’t Primavera,’ I said, pointing to the sleeping girl on the golf cart. ‘This is...’ But I didn’t know who it was.
‘A simulation, possibly,’ said Spalanzani. He had emerged from the dome and was squinting through his pince-nez at the deranged cityscape.
‘Jesus,’ said the goons’ spokesman, ‘is that what we are, Jack—fucking sims?’
Everybody looked at Spalanzani. ‘It is if,’
said Spalanzani, ‘we are inside a dreamscaper, with the young lady’s software acting as a jeu vérité.’
‘Some jeu vérité,’ said Morgenstern. ‘We can’t control anything. In a lucid dream you can control things.’
‘We’re intruders,’ said Spalanzani. ‘The game is the young lady’s.’
‘Wake her up, Jack. Give her a shot of something. Just get us out of here.’
‘Pull yourselves together,’ said Morgenstern. ‘If we’re sims, nothing can hurt us.’
‘Possibly,’ said Spalanzani. ‘But if we’re not discorporate, waking the young lady—even if it is only a simulation of herself—might be dangerous. The dreamer may assume control of her dreams.’
Dangerous. That seemed a good enough reason to wake her. It might be the last card Primavera and I had to play...
‘I could try,’ I said. Morgenstern looked at me suspiciously. ‘How else are we going to get out of here?’ ‘No,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Spalanzani, you try. Shoot her up with stimulants. Let’s take the risk.’
‘The risk of her lucidity is but one factor. Say the stimulants work—either as pure symbolism, as therapeutic symbolism, or as a physical correlative—what effect will they have on the young lady in the real world? She is very sick. Dying, perhaps...’
Morgenstern stroked his beard. ‘Yeah, I guess if she dies while we’re in here things could get really tough.’
‘I planned to operate,’ said Spalanzani. ‘But I can’t. Not now. Even supposing there is a correlation, symbolic or physical, between this young lady and the one outside, I would need special tools, customized nanoware. One such as her ... I never met before. Never.’
‘Then let me see what / can do,’ I said.
Morgenstern nodded. ‘Looks like our options are limited. But nothing funny, okay?’
‘Yes, my friend,’ said Spalanzani, ‘maybe our bodies are in the real world, dreaming all of this; and then again, maybe not. For the young lady — for all Lilim — thought is denser, more material, than for you and I. Her dreams have substance. Be careful.’
‘Not so fast,’ said Kito. She began folding and twisting her transcom. After three or four manipulations it resembled a ladies’ beam weapon, lethal and dainty. I want to know why you ruin me, Mr Jack.’
Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things Page 12