We had more than our share of private detectives for a while. They always pretended to be customers and they always looked wrong, even to our girls.
Livingstone International had definitely made a connection. I think they’d found our mine and guessed what a windfall they’d lost. They didn’t seem at one with themselves over the matter. They even made veiled threats. There was some swagger came in to talk about violence but they were spotties who’d got all their language off old ’90 s TV shows. So we sweated it out and the girls took most of the heat. Those girls really didn’t know anything. They were magnificently ignorant. They had tellies with chips that switch channels as soon as they detect a news or information programme.
I’ve always had a rule. If you’re caught by the same wave twice, get out of the water.
While I didn’t blame myself for not anticipating the Great Andrew Lloyd Webber Slump, I think I should have guessed what would happen next. The tolerance of the public for bullshit had become decidedly and aggressively negative. It was like the Bone had set new standards of public aspiration as well as beauty. My dad used to say that about the Blitz. Classical music enjoyed a huge success during the Second World War. Everybody grew up at once. The Bone had made it happen again. It was a bit frightening to those of us who had always relied on a nice, passive, gullible, greedy punter for an income.
The bitter fights that had developed over graveyard and Bonefield rights and boundaries, the eagerness with which some borough councils exploited their new resource, the unseemly trade in what was, after all, human remains, the corporate involvement, the incredible profits, the hypocrisies and politics around the Bone brought us the outspoken disgust of Europe. We were used to that. In fact, we tended to cultivate it. But that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that our own public had had enough.
When the elections came round, the voters systematically booted out anyone who had supported the Bone trade. It was like the sudden rise of the antislavery vote in Lincoln’s America. They demanded an end to the commerce in London Bone. They got the Boneshops closed down. They got work on the Bonefields stopped. They got their graveyards and monuments protected and cleaned up. They got a city that started cultivating peace and security as if it was a cash crop. Which maybe it was. But it hurt me.
It was the end of my easy money, of course. I’ll admit I was glad it was stopping. It felt like they were slowing entropy, restoring the past. The quality of life improved. I began to think about letting a few rooms for company.
The mood of the country swung so far into disapproval of the Bone trade that I almost began to fear for my life. Road and anti-abortion activists switched their attention to Bone merchants. Hampstead was full of screaming lefties convinced they owned the moral high-ground just because they’d paid off their enormous mortgages. Trudi, after three months, applied for a divorce, arguing that she had not known my business when she married me. She said she was disgusted. She said I’d been living on blood-money. The courts awarded her more than half of what I’d made, but it didn’t matter any more. My investments were such that I couldn’t stop earning. Economically, I was a small oil-producing nation. I had my own international dialling code. It was horrible in a way. Unless I tried very hard, it looked like I could never be ruined again. There was no justice.
I met Bernie in the King Lyar in Old Sweden Street, a few doors down from our burned-out office. I told him what I planned to do and he shrugged.
“We both knew it was dodgy,” he told me. “It was dodgy all along, even when we thought it was mastodons. What it feels like to me, Ray, is—it feels like a sort of a massive transformation of the zeitgeist—you know, like Virginia Woolf said about the day human nature changed—something happens slowly and you’re not aware of it. Everything seems normal. Then you wake up one morning and—bingo!—it’s Nazi Germany or Bolshevik Russia or Thatcherite England or the Golden Age—and all the rôles have changed.”
“Maybe it was the Bone that did it,” I said. “Maybe it was a symbol everyone needed to rally round. You know. A focus.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Let me know when you’re doing it. I’ll give you a hand.”
About a week later we got the van backed up to the warehouse loading bay. It was three o’clock in the morning and I was chilled to the marrow. Working in silence we transferred every scrap of Bone to the van. Then we drove back to Hampstead through a freezing rain.
I don’t know why we did it the way we did it. There would have been easier solutions, I suppose. But behind the high walls of my big back garden, under the old trees and etiolated rhododendrons, we dug a pit and filled it with the glowing remains of the ancient dead.
The stuff was almost phosphorescent as we chucked the big lumps of clay back onto it. It glowed a rich amber and that faint rosemary smell came off it. I can still smell it to this day when I go in there. My soft fruit is out of this world. The whole garden’s doing wonderfully now.
In fact London’s doing wonderfully. We seem to be back on form. There’s still a bit of a Bone trade, of course, but it’s marginal.
Every so often I’m tempted to take a spade and turn over the earth again, to look at the fortune I’m hiding there. To look at the beauty of it. The strange amber glow never fades and sometimes I think the decoration on the Bone is an important message I should perhaps try to decipher.
I’m still a very rich man. Not justly so, but there it is. And, of course, I’m about as popular with the public as Percy the Paedophile. Gold the Bone King? I might as well be Gold the Graverobber. I don’t go down to Soho much. When I do make it to a show or something I try to disguise myself a bit. I don’t see anything of Bernie any more and I heard two of the stoodies topped themselves.
I do my best to make amends. I’m circulating my profits as fast as I can. Talent’s flooding into London from everywhere, making a powerful mix. They say they haven’t known a buzz like it since 1967. I’m a reliable investor in great new shows. Every year I back the Iggy Pop Awards, the most prestigious in the business. But not everybody will take my money. I am regularly reviled. That’s why some organisations receive anonymous donations. They would refuse them if they knew they were from me.
I’ve had the extremes of good and bad luck riding this particular switch in the zeitgeist and the only time I’m happy is when I wake up in the morning and I’ve forgotten who I am. It seems I share a common disgust for myself.
A few dubious customers, however, think I owe them something.
Another bloke, who used to be very rich before he made some frenetic investments after his career went down the drain, called me the other day. He knew of my interest in the theatre, that I had invested in several West End hits. He thought I’d be interested in his idea. He wanted to revive his first success, Rebecca’s Incredibly Far Out Well or something, which he described as a powerful religious rock opera guaranteed to capture the new nostalgia market. The times, he told me, they were a-changin’. His show, he continued, was full of raw old-fashioned R&B energy. Just the sort of authentic sound to attract the new no-nonsense youngsters. Wasn’t it cool that Madonna wanted to do the title rôle? And Bob Geldof would play the Spirit of the Well. Rock and roll, man! It’s all in the staging, man! Remember the boat in Phantom? I can make it look better than real. On stage, man, that well is W.E.T. WET! Rock and roll! I could see that little wizened fist punching the air in a parody of the vitality he craved and whose source had always eluded him.
I had to tell him it was a non-starter. I’d turned over a new leaf, I said. I was taking my ethics seriously.
These days I only deal in living talent.
Colour (1991)
“Colour” first appeared in New Worlds No. 217 (Gollancz), edited by David Garnett in 1991, and was very much inspired by Moorcock’s interest in chaos theory and fractal geometry, which he has since likened to his own concept of myriad layers of the “multiverse” permeating his work.
The story—revised and expanded—we
nt on to form the opening part of Blood: A Southern Fantasy (1995), but is presented here pretty much as it appeared in New Worlds.
For John Fogerty
The very nature of our dreams is changing. We have deconstructed the universe and are refusing to rebuild it. This is our madness and our glory. Now we can again begin the true course of our explorations, without preconceptions or agendas.
—Lobkowitz
1 A Victim of the Game
The heat of the New Orleans night pressed against the window like an urgent lover. Jack Karaquazian stood sleepless, naked, staring out into the sweating darkness as if he might see at last some tangible horror which he could confront and even hope to conquer.
“Tomorrow,” he told his handsome friend Sam Oakenhurst, “I shall take the Star up to Natchez and from there make my way to McClellan by way of the Trace. Will you come?”
(The vision of a sunlit bayou, recollection of an extraordinarily rich perfume, the wealth of the earth. He remembered the yellow-billed herons standing in the shadows, moving their heads to regard him with thoughtful eyes before returning their respect to the water; the grey ibises, seeming to sit in judgement of the others; the delicate egrets congregating on the old logs and branches; a cloud of monarch butterflies, black and orange, diaphanous, settling over the pale reeds and, in the dark green waters, a movement might have been copperhead or alligator, or even a pike. In that moment of silence before the invisible insects began a fresh song, her eyes were humorous, enquiring. She had worked for a while, she said, as a chanteuse at the Fallen Angel on Bourbon Street.)
Sam Oakenhurst understood the invitation to be a courtesy. “I think not, Jack. My luck has been running pretty badly lately and travelling ain’t likely to improve it much.” Wiping his ebony fingers against his undershirt, he delicately picked an ace from the baize of his folding table.
For a moment the overhead fan, fuelled by some mysterious power, stirred the cards. Pausing, Mr. Oakenhurst regarded this phenomenon with considerable satisfaction, as if his deepest faith had been confirmed. “Besides, I got me all the mung I need right now.” And he patted his belt, full of hard guineas—better than muscle.
“It looked for a moment as if our energy had come back.” Mr. Karaquazian got onto his bed and sat there undecided whether to try sleeping or to talk. “I’m also planning to give the game a rest. I swear it will be a while before I play at the Terminal.” They both smiled.
“You still looking to California, Jack?” Mr. Oakenhurst stroked down a card. “And the Free States?”
“Well, maybe eventually.” Jack Karaquazian offered his attention back to the darkness while a small, dry, controlled cough shook his body. He cursed softly and vigorously and went to pour himself a careful drink from the whiskey on the table.
“You should do it,” said Mr. Oakenhurst. “Nobody knows who you are any more.”
“I left some unfinished business between Starkville and McClellan.” Quietly satisfied by this temporary victory over his disease, the gambler drew in a heavy breath. “Anywhere’s better than this, Sam. I’ll go in the morning. As soon as they sound the up-boat siren.”
Putting down the remaining cards, his partner rose to cross, through sluggish shadows, the unpolished floor and, beneath the fluttering swampcone on the wall, pry up one of the boards. He removed a packet of money and divided it into two without counting it. “There’s your share of Texas. Brother Ignatius and I agreed, if only one of us got back, you’d have half.”
Jack Karaquazian accepted the bills and slipped them into a pocket of the black silk jacket which hung over the other chair on top of his pants, his linen and brocaded vest. “It’s rightfully all yours, Sam, and I’ll remember that. Who knows how our luck will run? But it’ll be a sad year down here, I think, win or lose.” Mr. Karaquazian found it difficult to express most emotions; for too long his trade had depended on hiding them. Yet he was able to lay a pale, fraternal hand on his friend’s shoulder, a gesture which meant a great deal more to both than any amount of conversation. His eyes, half-hidden behind long lashes, became gentle for a moment.
Both men blinked when, suddenly, the darkness outside was ripped by a burst of fire, of flickering arsenical greens and yellows, of vivid scarlet sparks. The mechanish squealed and wailed as if in torment, while other metallic lungs uttered loud, suppressed groans occasionally interrupted by an aggressive bellow, a shriek of despair from xylonite vocal cords, or a deeper, more threatening klaxon as the steel militia, their bodies identified by bubbling globules of burning, dirty orange plastic, gouting black smoke, roamed the narrow streets in search of flesh—human or otherwise—which had defied the city’s intolerable curfew. Mr. Karaquazian never slept well in New Orleans. The fundamental character of the authority appalled him.
2 Two of a Kind
At dawn, as the last of the garishly decorated, popishly baroque mechanish blundered over the cobbles of the rue Dauphine, spreading their unwholesome ichor behind them, Jack Karaquazian carried his carpetbag to the quayside, joining other men and women making haste to board L’Étoile d’Memphes, anxious to leave the oppressive terrors of a quarter where the colour-greedy machinoix, that brutal aristocracy, allowed only their engines the freedom of the streets.
Compared to the conscious barbarism of the machines, the riverboat’s cream filigree gothic was in spare good taste, and Mr. Karaquazian ascended the gangplank with his first-class ticket in his hand, briefly wishing he were going all the way to the capital, where at least some attempt was made to maintain old standards. But duty—according to Jack Karaquazian’s idiosyncratic morality, and the way in which he identified an abiding obsession—had to be served. He had sworn to himself that he must perform a particular task and obtain certain information before he could permit himself any relief, any company other than Colinda Dovero’s.
He followed an obsequious steward along a familiar colonnaded deck to the handsomely carved door of the stateroom he favoured when in funds. By way of thanks for a generous tip, he was offered a knowing leer and the murmured intelligence that a high-class snowfrail was travelling in the adjoining suite. Mr. Karaquazian rewarded this with a scowl and a sharp oath so that the steward left before, as he clearly feared, the tip was snatched back from his fingers. Shaking his head at the irredeemable vulgarity of the white race, Mr. Karaquazian unpacked his own luggage. The boat shuddered suddenly as she began to taste her steam, her paddle-wheel stirring the dark waters of the Mississippi. Compared to the big ocean-going schoomer on which, long ago, the gambler had crossed from Alexandria, the Étoile was comfortingly reliable and responsive. For him she belonged to an era when time had been measured by chronometers rather than degrees of deliquescence.
He was reminded, against his guard, of the first day he had met the adventuress, Colinda Dovero, who had been occupying those same adjoining quarters and following the same calling as himself.
(Dancing defiantly with her on deck in the summer night amongst the mosquito lamps to the tune of an accordion, a fiddle, a dobro and a bass guitar, while the Second Officer, Mr. Pitre, sang “Poor Hobo” in a sweet baritone . . . O, pauvre hobo, mon petit pierrot, ah, foolish hope, my grief, mon coeur . . . Ai-ee, no longer, no longer Houston, but our passion she never resolves. Allons dansez! Allons dansez! The old traditional elegies; the pain of inconstancy. La musique, ma tristesse . . . They were dancing, they were told in turn, with a sort of death. But the oracles whom the fashion favoured in those days, and who swarmed the same boats as Karaquazian and his kind, were of proven inaccuracy. Even had they not been, Karaquazian and Mrs. Dovero could have done nothing else than what they did, for theirs was at that time an ungovernable chemistry . . .)
As it happened, the white woman kept entirely to her stateroom and all Karaquazian knew of her existence was an occasional overheard word to her stewardess. Seemingly, her need for solitude matched his own. He spent the better part of the first forty-eight hours sleeping, his nightmares as troubled as his memories. Whe
n he woke up, he could never be sure whether he had been dreaming or remembering, but he was almost certain he had shouted out at least once. Horrified by the thought of what he might reveal, he dosed himself with laudanum until only his snores disturbed the darkness. Yet he continued to dream.
Her name, she had said, was West African or Irish in origin, she was not sure. They had met for the second time in the Terminal Café on the stablest edge of the Biloxi Fault. The café’s sharply defined walls constantly jumped and mirrored, expanding space, contracting it, slowing time, frantically dancing in and out of a thousand mirror matrixes; its neon sign (last heat on the beach), usually lavender and cerise, drawing power directly from the howling chaos a few feet away, between the white sand and the blue ocean, where all the unlikely geometries of the multiverse, all the terrible wild colours, that maelstrom of uninterpretable choices, were displayed in a smooth, perfect circle which the engineers had sliced through the core of all-time and all-space, its rim edged by a rainbow ribbon of vanilla-scented crystal. Usually, the Terminal Café occupied roughly the area of space filled by the old pier, which itself had been absorbed by the vortex during the early moments of an experiment intended to bore into the very marrow of ultra-reality and extract all the energy the planet needed.
The operation had been aborted twenty-two seconds after it began.
Since then, adventurers of many persuasions and motives had made the sidestep through the oddly coloured flames of the Fault into that inferno of a billion perishing space-time continua, drawn down into a maw which sucked to nothingness the substance of whole races and civilisations, whole planetary systems, whole histories, while Earth and sun bobbed in some awkward and perhaps temporary semi-parasitical relationship between the feeding and the food; their position in this indecipherable matrix being generally considered a fluke. (Or perhaps the planet was the actual medium of this destruction, as untouched by it as the knife which cuts the throat of the Easter lamb.)
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 19