by John Shirley
Quinn was crossing the street in southeastern Manhattan on a hot summer night, hands on his head, with a terrorist submachine gun at his back—when he saw the luminous skullhead of the vinyl batwinged cop-car banshee.
First he saw the PAV, the Police Assault Van, on its way to a blackout riot; it was pushing a double pool of headlight glow ahead of it as it screamed by on Delancey. Glimpsed as it flashed past, the armored cop-car was a grey blur mohawked with a streak of red glow, its cherrytop a con trail of hellish shine against the dirty darkness of the sweltering, blacked-out inner city.
And then came the hallucination, vision, or whatever it was, rising above the building the PAV had passed behind. . . . Weightless, but big as an armored car, the banshee spread its vinyl batwings and lifted its fiery head over the roof-rim; it pulled itself into the sky, and he saw that its head was a translucent-red human skull shining with the whirling electric lights that were its brains, its mouth a sirening bullhorn, its body a bulked-out pterodactyl of studded grey metal. Quinn gaped, and looked at the others . . . but their eyes were focused entirely on survival, on getting across the street. He was certain they couldn't see it.
I'm over the edge, he thought. Oh, shit.
The terrorist jabbed the gun-muzzle into Quinn's back, and he looked away from the thing in the sky; he lurched on, crossed the street.
That was on the night of the summer's third blackout, July 18, 2011. He saw the banshee at 10:10 P.M.
At 9:45 P.M., twenty-five minutes earlier, before the fabric of consensual reality began to reweave itself, he was just stepping out of the subway station . . .
Quinn and Cisco and Zizz emerged from the subway station, laughing over some inane joke. They were laughing to cover being scared, because this was sniper territory. Coming out behind them, Bowler wasn't laughing. Bowler was grim as a granite crag, disapproving of any departure from the Two-tone seriousness of Radical Purpose.
Trying not to wonder where the crosshairs were centered, they climbed gratefully from the rancid, moldering underground into the sloppy heat of the summer night. They'd walked through a pedestrian tunnel that led from the Sixth Street station to this one. The blue emergency lighting system for the subway tunnels was running, despite the blackout, so there was light down there, but it was infused with another kind of darkness: the clammy darkness of screwed-down, bridled fear. Thinking about the Fridge. And Deirdre.
They stood around in a small, worn-out park, sixty square feet of packed dirt, expiring grass, grafitti'd benches, young trees shriveled like burnt matches from acid rain. The park was in the triangle between several intersecting streets. It wasn't completely dark here; a web-gloss of light stretched from the lit-up part of the city, north of Houston. And there was a little illumination from two light-storage billboards—during the day they soaked up sun-power, gave it out at night with the brash glow of commerce—advertising the Panam low-orbit shuttle (Fifteen minutes to Paris!) and, across the square from the Panam billboard: Protect your health with Doc Johnson's Intravenous Sex: Makes partners obsolete! The shopfronts were dark. Quinn could make out a People's Republic of China Chinese food franchise, with its cartoon of a jolly Mao in a chefs hat; discount boutiques, shops selling remaindered consumer-junk; and the double-padlocked entrances to the big underground malls. He and the others leaned on the rusting iron frames of children's swings, the swing-chains missing, nearby stood metal-mesh trashcans crimped like cigarette butts, overflowing with plastic and tin and scrap-paper: the shed skins of slithery junk food.
In the distance, the sirens: rising and falling. How long before the Feds checked out Funs territory? Quinn wondered. Or before one of the blackout riots spread to this neighborhood? Maybe it depended on who had attacked the power station this time. Which Faction: Christian Funs, Moslem Funs, an-esthets, Movement, Media Thugs, whomever . . . there were conflicting rumors.
Quinn turned to Bowler, who was ostenstibly the leader of the rescue party. "What now?"
Bowler rumbled, "We have to wait here. This is the edge of the Funs territory." He nodded toward a luminous-blue Moslem Fundamentalist slogan sprayed in Arab script across the asphalt park path. "They'll contact us. Or they'll decide . . ." He let it trail off, and they knew he meant the snipers.
Looking around, Quinn spotted more of the Funs tags, fresh-looking, overtop the other graffiti, and rain-spotted postors of the boyish, spectacled Ayatollah Daseheimi slapped up with glueguns on walls, benches. He wondered where the crosshairs were now . . . on the back of his neck, on his forehead, the base of his spine?
Maybe the rescue pact had been a mistake; maybe it was childish and arrogant and unrealistic, even with the video key-cassette (thinking that, he absently touched the bulge of the little cassette in his shirt pocket), to think they could break Deirdre out of the Fridge. But anyway it was following through. It was commitment.
Quinn—tall, thin, wispy blond, big-nosed, with one green eye and one blue eye—had been inconsistent for all of twenty-four years. He tried to define himself in little ways, like dressing in monochrome; all black or all white or all red. "Start with your clothes," Quinn's Dad had always told him. "Start outside, work inward." One of his Dad's wildly superficial platitudes. (His Dad was dressed by professional designers before he hit the stage; he had a superstitious faith in costuming.) But under the threads Quinn was erratic at everything, and bitterly knew it; he was a lapsed Columbia U Video Arts student. He joined organizations in great enthusiasms and never went to the second meeting; sometimes read heaps of books in a week, other times went months without reading anything to the end; played bass in a band but never rehearsed enough. Gave up drugs but never quite gave them up. Committed himself to girls with deep, resonant, romantic conviction—sometimes three or four a month that way.
Zizz had said once, "Maybe it's the mon-eeeeey, huuuuhhh?" Maybe it was just too easy to fall back on the annuities, the money from his Dad, the retreat into the womb of his High Security Housing apartment. No motivation to follow through, because when things got hard . . .
Tonight, though, he'd made up his mind. . . . Tonight he wore all black: a black T-shirt, black guerrilla baggies tucked into black skinhead boots. The color of commitment. Because it was Deirdre who'd first made him really look at himself. It was Deirdre who had shown him what corn-mittment could be . . .
So he stayed, and waited to see if the snipers would kill him.
Zizz, whistling and talking to herself in a sing-song whisper, swinging on the postage-stamp playground's monkey bars now, seemed to have forgotten all about the snipers, and the fact that this was Moslem Funs territory. Zizz was female, but you had to look twice to see it; she was a squat, pallid an-esthet*; her hair was bleached bone-white, blown out like some hungry tidal pool creature; her eyesockets were blacked with heavy kohl. She could've co-starred in an episode of Vampire Girls. The Walkman capsule plugged into her right ear was gradually destroying auditory nerve-ends with one of the Shaped Static bands, Fucked-Up Heaven. The left ear clustered with rings and screws twisted right through the cartilage. Dangling from her left wrist was a sort of doll, four inches long, a primitive thing cunningly wrought of brightly colored electric wires and bits of circuitry; it had a little silver wire like a tongue sticking out of its mouth. . .
Under a transparent plastic skirt she wore a clinging grey body stock-ing woven with micro signal-sensitive image reactants that reproduced the imagery in TV signals randomly across her short, stocky body; a news flash about the blackout in lower Manhattan was TV-imaged across her torso, the newscaster, his head warped to the contours of her belly, was mouthing soundlessly while above him a sex-com's nude ac-tress did a comic double-take as her father came on to her.
"What do we gotta hang he-errrre for huh, Bowl-errr?" Zizz asked, pouting, sn
orting a hit of designer meth from her thumbnail-implanted stashbox; getting off, she did a few listless and abbreviated an-esthet steps to something on her ear-tape. "I mean, we can't find Deirdre like this, this is bullll-shii-iiit." Zizz was twenty; she had the squeaky voice of a seven year old.
Bowler glared at her. "You think we're going to a concert? This is Funs territory. We can't go through it till they check us out." He was big, wore an olive drab T-shirt and olive-drab fatigues and colorless boots; a bris-tling black beard spilled down over his collarbone, spread to nearly merge with his dreadlocks. Hooked nose, sunken eyes. Deep voice that went with his Rasputin look. You could see the white all the way around his bullet-hole pupils. He was forty; the others were in their twenties. Bowler rarely slept. Took too many vitamins. Saw himself as a political visionary. Had bad teeth. Read Marcuse and Das Kapital—unabridged—from midnight till dawn.
"Maybe," Cisco said, turning a frozen smile at the rooftops, wondering where the Funs were, "this isn't the time. Maybe it's, like, not the right vibe." Cisco was half-Puerto Rican, half-Israeli. He was short, stocky; big brown lady-killer eyes with thick black lashes, mouth a little too wide, lips a little too thick, curly black hair, offwhite East Indian shirt and rope-belt pants and sandals. He didn't bathe often enough but his sweat smelled like chicken soup so no one complained till it accumulated for a few weeks. He was twenty-four, a neo-beat poet, a self-styled mystic—a pain in the ass about it, too.
"The time to get Deirdre out is now. We have the in at the HopeScope tonight," Bowler said, with resonant authority. He was trying not to look directly at the rooftops. "We have to risk it because Deirdre would've done anything for us. She did do everything for us. She knew what would happen if she blew the whistle on FedControl, Cisco."
"I know, man, it's not that I don't think we owe it to her, it's just, I don't know, the aspects, the omens, they're not—"
Quinn couldn't stand any more. "Will you shut the fuck up, Cisco? If you didn't wanna risk it, you shouldn't have come."
"Who you mad at, Quii-iiinnn?" Zizz asked, grinning at him. "You mad at Cisco because you scared too huh, don't want him to talk about it huhhhh?" She put her hand on his arm. "Me too." With those two words, her vocal affectation had vanished. She had a thing for him, he knew, and thinking about the possibilities made him shudder—and at the same time it made him think: Maybe it'd be all right . . .
She irritated him. But he liked the way she made the effort, at least, to see into him. Maybe she'd understand him, if they got involved . . .
Involved? Sure. Like they were going to survive this. Breaking into the Fridge . . .
At first, Quinn and the others actually, honestly, really believed they could break Deirdre out of the country's most impregnable prison. The incandescence of their outrage at what had happened to Deirdre blotted out sweet reason with its glare. And when Bowler had come to Deirdre's friends with his plan to use the Middle Man, they'd gone for it.
Now, though . . . now, taking the first step, they began to think about it, to turn it over and over like a blind man with a 3-D puzzle; and they knew it was insane, there was no getting into the Fridge, except for the One Way entry that Deirdre had.
But no one wanted to be the first to say, Let's blow it off, this is impossible, this is the wrong way on a one-way street, Deirdre can't ask this of us . . .
Quinn said, "I'm tired of waiting. Can't we contact them or something?"
Bowler was peering into the shadows of the storefronts across the street. "We're doing that. You're supposed to stand here, in this spot, if you want to talk to them, and then their Mufti comes out. Or they snipe you."
"Or both, in proper sequence," someone said, behind them.
They turned, half expecting to be shot before they got a good look at whoever it was. But the H&K laserscope-equipped carbine hung on its strap over the little man's left shoulder, casual as a carrybag, pointed at the ground. He could afford to be casual, because of the snipers.
The Funs guerrilla was about five foot six, slender; there were sharply defined veins on his hands and forearms; he wasn't as dark as Quinn had expected. He wore a white short sleeve shirt, neatly creased black trousers. Only the boots were military. He looked like the manager of a Middle Eastern restaurant. Maybe he was that, too. He had white-metal wire rim glasses, like the boy Ayatollah—the Ayatollah didn't approve of eye implants: he believed they could be used by the implanters for mind control. The boy Ayatollah had a tradition of paranoia to live up to.
The Fun said, matter of factly: "I'm Jabbar. We were told you were coming. We were not told why. You are the children of our enemies." He looked at Zizz. A television PAV chasing a lawbreaker wound its way over her hip and across her belly; the climactic genital-slashing scene from Realm of the Senses played on her thigh. "You are decadents."
He left the implication hanging, swaying, kicking.
Jabbar, Quinn thought. It didn't feel like an Iranian name. Maybe it was true: that the boy Ayatollah had united the Arabs and Persians . . .
"We wanta get Deirdre," Zizz said. Surprisingly serious.
"The Middle Man agreed to help us," Bowler said.
"And tonight all the transport's fucked up, like," Cisco said. "We can't get through to HopeScope, where the Middle Man is, without going through your piece of things."
They were all in a hurry to explain. They could feel the crosshairs.
Jabbar made a cone of his lips. "Deirdre. You are friends of hers?"
Bowler nodded. "We work with her. For everyone in this area, against FedControl."
"You might be CIAD." Meaning CIA Domestic.
Bowler shook his head. "We're Movement."
"Anyone would say this," Jabbar pointed out.
"Deirdre used to talk about the . . . about your movement," Quinn said. Not knowing quite how it had come out of him. "She said, 'All they're doing is making the invisible injustice visible.' And she said, 'Terrorism is easy to condemn when you've got other avenues open to you.' "
Jabbar nodded, a flicker of amusement at the corners of his mouth. "The Fedayeen know this saying. We know Deirdre. We don't know you. We almost shot you. You were standing in the place, but you did not have your hands on your head. That is the rest of the signal, and it states that you are unarmed."
Instantly, Bowler, Cisco, Quinn, and Zizz put their hands on their heads.
Quinn's mouth went dry. They'd agreed to come with Bowler because he was the guy in the Movement who was supposed to know all the ins and outs over here. Only, it looked like he didn't. Great. Quinn said, "Sorry. Didn't know."
Jabbar motioned with his gun, "You'll come with me."
* "An-esthet": someone into Anarchy Esthetics.
That's when they crossed the street, heading for the store-front op-posite, where another man stood in the doorway with an auto-shotgun in his hands. Quinn was thinking: An auto-shotgun. God, what that'd do to you—and that's when the PAV went by, heading for a blackout riot, and the banshee rose over the building . . .
It came, and began to fade, like the after-image of a bright light on his retina—and then the terrorist Jabbar prodded him. They crossed the street, and entered the old storefront.
The windows of the storefront had been boarded over; its entrance was choked with trash. Inside, in the dim, waxy light of a chem-lantern, Quinn saw stacks of cardboard boxes against the flaking plaster walls; a few on the floor were open, and he saw that they contained racks of import-banned silicon wafers, chips, AI brain-units, cartons of untaxed cigarettes and syntharettes and liquors. The black market paid for the Funs' guerrilla ordnance.
Jabbar picked up the lantern and led the way; two other men came behind, herding them into a crowded back room that contained a desk, a dead computer terminal, two phones, and the accumulated reek of unfiltered cigarettes and strong coffee. The two dark men stood in the doorway, smoking.
Quinn had never had a hallucination before, and the banshee had left him shaken. But being trapped in a
small room with hostile guerrillas armed to the teeth somehow put everything but right now out of his mind. . .
Jabbar hung the lantern from a hook in the corner of a ceiling. The lntern swung slightly on its hook, making the shadows in the room leap and yaw. In the same corner, Jabbar bent to fish through a heap of posters and Arab-lettered newspapers; he drew out a flat cardboard box. He carried it to the desk and opened it, laid the contents on the desk.
It was a video painting, switched off. A rectangular chunk of glass and plastic, two feet by three feet by two inches. "Deirdre's sister was Movement, and we knew her," Jabbar said, looking up at them. "She gave us this painting. She said everyone in the Movement knew it by heart. If you are Movement, you know it."
Breathless, Quinn stared at the painting as Jabbar switched it on. There were many Movement video paintings. But there was one he knew by heart, because he'd made it himself, at NYU. And Deirdre had been a bit vain about it . . .
The painting flickered through a series of street-shots (Quinn knew immediately: it was his) outside the squat slums; high contrast images of weirdly well-dressed kids who lived in the squats gathered at oil-barrel fires; of Smoky "the Ghost" Casparino—his face hidden, but that was his spray-painted flight-jacket--buying a gun from D'Angelo, whose face was white from heavy chipping on synthcoke; a skateboard gang showing off their moves for the camera; old Mrs. Pesca with her sawed-off shotgun and collapsed grin. And paced through the loop, images of Deirdre: tall, angular, jet-black skin, cheek punctured with a stud imprinted NFC—No Federal Control—in red on black. Deirdre ministering to the kids, the black marketeers, the beleagured old ladies, talking till she was hoarse, telling them that FedControl wasn't all powerful, it was going to fail in its drive to move them out of Manhattan and into the little security-cop police states they called Highrise Relocation . . . Telling them that Federal Control had promised their boros to the wealthy development bar-ons . . . Telling them it was just plain stupid to trade home and something like freedom for a cop-haunted high rise that would slide into a slum in two years . . .