Even the least fanciful of theorists agreed that they might have accelerated or at least were witnesses to a universal destruction. They believed the engineers had drilled through unguessable dimensions, damaging something which had until now regulated the rate of entropy to which human senses had, over millions of years, evolved. With that control damaged and the rate accelerating to infinity, their perceptions were no longer adequate to the psychic environment.
The multiverse raced perhaps towards the creation of a new sequence of realities, perhaps towards some cold and singular conformity; perhaps towards unbridled Chaos, the end of all consciousness. This last was what drew certain people to the edge of the Fault, their fascination taking them step by relentless step to the brink, there to be consumed.
On a dance floor swept by peculiar silhouettes and shifts of light, Boudreaux Ramsadeen, who had brought his café here by rail from Meridian, encouraged the zee-band to play on while he guided his tiny partners in their Cajun steps. These professional dancers travelled from all over Arcadia to join him. Their hands on their swaying hips, their delicate feet performing figures as subtly intricate as the Terminal’s own dimensions, they danced to some other tune than the band’s.
Boudreaux’s neanderthal brows were drawn together in an expression of seraphic concentration as, keeping all his great bulk on his poised left foot, describing graceful steps with his right, he moved his partners with remarkable tenderness and delicacy.
(Jack Karaquazian deals seven hands of poker, fingering the sensors of his kayplay with deliberate slowness. Only here, on the whole planet, is there a reservoir of energy deep enough to run every machine, synthetic reasoner, or cybe in the world, but not transmittable beyond the Terminal’s peculiar boundaries. Only those with an incurable addiction to the past’s electronic luxuries come here, and they are all gamblers of some description. Weird light saturates the table; the light of hell. He is waiting for his passion, his muse.)
Colinda Dovero and Jack Karaquazian had met again across the blue, flat sheen of a mentasense and linked into the wildest, riskiest game of Slick Image anyone had ever witnessed, let alone joined. When they came out of it, Dovero was eight guineas up out of a betting range which had made psychic bids most seasoned players never cared to imagine. It had caused Boudreaux Ramsadeen to rouse himself from his mood of ugly tolerance and insist thereafter on a stakes ceiling that would protect the metaphysical integrity of his establishment. Some of the spectators had developed peculiar psychopathic obsessions, while others had merely become subject to chronic vomiting. Dovero and Karaquazian had, however, gone into spacelessness together and did not properly emerge for nine variations, while the walls expanded and turned at odd angles and the colours saturated and amplified all subtleties of sensation. There is no keener experience, they say, than the act of love during a matrix shift at the Terminal Café.
“That buzz? It’s self-knowledge,” she told the Egyptian, holding him tight as they floated in the calm between one bizarre reality and another.
“No disrespect, Jack,” she had added.
3 Il Fait Chaud
Karaquazian found her again a year later on the Princesse du Natchez. He recognised, through her veil, her honey-coloured almond eyes. She was, she said, now ready for him. They turned their stateroom into marvellous joint quarters. Her reason for parting had been a matter of private business. That business, she warned him, was not entirely resolved but he was grateful for even a hint of a future. The old Confederate autonomies were lucky if their matrixes were only threadbare. They were collapsing. There were constant minor reality meltdowns now and yet there was nothing to be done but continue as if continuation were possible. Soon the Mississippi might become one of the few geographical constants. “When we start to go,” he said, “I want to be on the river.”
“Maybe chaos is already our natural condition,” she had teased. She was always terrifyingly playful in the face of annihilation, whereas he found it difficult even to confront the idea. She still had a considerable amount of hope in reserve.
They began to travel as brother and sister. A month after they had established this relationship, there was some question of her arrest for fraud when two well-uniformed cool boys had stepped aboard at New Auschwitz on the Arkansas side as the boat was casting off and suddenly they had no authority. In midstream they made threats. They insisted on entering the ballroom where she and the Egyptian were occupied. And then Karaquazian had suffered watching her raise promising eyes to the captain who saluted, asked if she had everything she needed, ordered the boys to disembark at Greenville, and said that he might stop by later to make sure she was properly comfortable. She had told him she would greatly appreciate the attention and returned to the floor, where a lanky zee-band bounced out the old favourites. With an unsisterly flirt of her hands, she had offered herself back to her pseudo-brother.
Jack Karaquazian had felt almost sour, though gentleman enough to hide it, while he took charge of the unpleasant feelings experienced by her cynical use of a sensuality he had thought, for the present at least, his preserve. Yet that sensuality was in no way diminished by its knowing employment, and his loyalty to her remained based upon profound respect—a type of love he would cheerfully have described as feminine, and through which he experienced some slight understanding of the extraordinary individual she was. He relished her lust for freedom, her optimism, her insistence on her own right to exist beyond the destruction of their universe, her willingness to achieve some form of immortality in any terms and at any cost. She thrilled him precisely because she disturbed him. He had not known such deep excitement since his last two-and-a-half weeks before leaving Egypt and his first three weeks in America; and never because of a woman. Until then, Mr. Karaquazian had enjoyed profound emotion only for the arts of gaming and his Faith. His many liaisons, while frequently affectionate, had never been allowed to interfere with his abiding passion. At first he had been shocked by the realisation that he was more fascinated by Colinda Dovero than he had ever been by the intellectual strategies of the Terminal’s ranks of Grand Turks.
The mind which had concentrated on gambling and its attendant skills, upon self-defence and physical fitness, upon self-control, now devoted itself almost wholly to her. He was obsessed with her thoughts, her motives, her background, her story, the effect which her reality had upon his own. He was no longer the self-possessed individual he had been before he met her; and, when they had made love again that first night, he had been ready to fall in with any scheme which kept them together. Eventually, after the New Auschwitz incident, he had made some attempt to rescue his old notion of himself, but when she revealed her business had to do with a potential colour strike valuable beyond any modern hopes, he had immediately agreed to go with her to help establish the claim. In return, she promised him a percentage of the proceeds. He committed himself to her in spite of his not quite believing anything she told him. She had been working the boats for some while now, raising money to fund the expedition, ready to call it quits as soon as her luck turned bad. Since Memphis, her luck had run steadily down. This could also be why she had been so happy to seek an ally in him. The appearance of the cool boys had alarmed her: as if that evening had been the first time she had suffered any form of accusation. Besides, she told him, with the money he had they could now easily meet the top price for the land, which was only swamp anyway. She would pay the fees and expenses. There would be no trouble raising funds once the strike was claimed.
At Chickasaw, they had left the boat and set off up the Trace together.
She had laughed as she looked back at the levee and the Princesse outlined against the cold sky. “I have made an enemy, I think, of that captain.” He was touched by what he perceived as her wish to reassure him of her constancy. But in Carthage, they had been drawn into a flat game, which had developed around a random hot-spot no bigger than a penny, and played until the spot faded. When the debts were paid, they were down to a couple of guineas
between them and had gambled their emergency batteries. At this point, superstition overwhelmed them and each had seen sudden bad luck in the other.
Jack Karaquazian regretted their parting almost immediately and would have returned to her, but by the time he heard of her again she was already lost to Peabody, the planter. It had been Peabody that time who had sent his cool boys after her. She wrote once to Mr. Karaquazian, in care of the Terminal. She said she was taking a rest but would be in touch.
Meanwhile Mr. Karaquazian had a run of luck at the Terminal which, had he not cheated against himself and put the winnings back into circulation, would have brought a halt to all serious gambling for a while. Jack Karaquazian now played with his back to the Fault. The sight of that mighty appetite, that insatiable mystery, distracted him these days. He was impatient for her signal.
4 La Pointe à Pain
Sometimes Jack Karaquazian missed the ancient, exquisite colours of the Egyptian evening, where shades of yellow, red and purple touched the warm stone of magnificent ruins, flooded the desert and brought deep shadows, as black and sharp as flint, upon that richly faded landscape, one subtle tint blending into the other, one stone with the next, supernaturally married and near to their final gentle merging, in the last, sweet centuries of their material state. Here, on the old Étoile, he remembered the glories of his youth, before they drilled the Fault, and he found some consolation, if not satisfaction, in bringing back a time when he had not known much in the way of self-discipline, had gloried in his talents. When he had seemed free.
Once again, he strove to patch together some sort of consistent memory of when they had followed the map into the cypress swamp; of times when he had failed to reach the swamp. He had a sense of making progress up the Trace after he had disembarked, but he had probably never reached McClellan and had never seen the Stains again. How much of this repetition was actual experience? How much was dream?
Recently, the semi-mutable nature of the matrix meant that such questions had become increasingly common. Jack Karaquazian had countless memories of beginning this journey to join her and progressing so far (usually no closer than Vicksburg) before his recollections became uncertain, and the images isolated, giving no clue to any particular context. Now, however, he felt as if he were being carried by some wise momentum allowing his unconscious to steer a path through the million psychic turnings and culs-de-sac this environment provided. It seemed to him that his obsession with the woman, his insane association of her with his Luck, his Muse, was actually supplying the force needed to propel him back to the reality he longed to find. She was his goal, but she was also his reason.
5 Les Veuves des la Coulee
They had met for the third time while she was still with Peabody, the brute said to own half Tennessee and to possess the mortgages on the other half. Peabody’s red stone fortress lay outside Memphis. He was notorious for the cruel way in which his plantation whites were treated, but his influence among the eight states of the Confederacy meant he would inevitably be next Governor General, with the power of life and death over all but the best-protected machinoix or guild neutrals, like Jack Karaquazian and Colinda Dovero. “I am working for him,” she admitted. “As a kind of ambassador. You know how squeamish people are about dealing with the North. They lose face even by looking directly at a whitey. But I find them no different, in the main. A little feckless. Social conditioning.” She did not hold with genetic theories of race. She had chatted in this manner at a public occasion where, by coincidence, they were both guests.
“You are his property, I think,” Mr. Karaquazian had murmured without rancour. But she had shaken her head.
Whether she had become addicted to Peabody’s power or was merely deeply fascinated by it, Mr. Karaquazian never knew. For his own part, he had taken less and less pleasure in the liaison that followed while still holding profound feelings for her. Then she had come to his room one evening when he was in Memphis and she in town with Peabody, who attended some bond auction at the big hotel, and told him that she deeply desired to stay with him, but they must be so rich they would never lose their whole roll again. Mr. Karaquazian thought she was ending their affair on a graceful note. Then she produced a creased read-out which showed colour sightings in the depths of Mississippi near the Tombigbee not far from Starkville. This was the first evidence she had ever offered him, and he believed now that she was trying to demonstrate that she trusted him, that she was telling the truth. She had intercepted the report before it reached Peabody. The airship pilot who sent it had crashed in flames a day later. “This time we go straight to it.”
She had pushed him back against his cot, sniffing at his neck, licking him. Then, with sudden honesty, she told him that, through her Tarot racing, she was into Peabody for almost a million guineas, and he was going to make her go North permanently to pay him back by setting up deals with the white bosses of the so-called Insurgent Republics. “Peabody’s insults are getting bad enough. Imagine suffering worse from a white man.”
Within two weeks, they had repeated their journey up the Trace, got as far as McClellan, and taken a pirogue into the Streams, following, as best they could, the grey contours of the aerial map, heading towards a cypress swamp. It had been fall then, too, with the leaves turning; the tree-filled landscapes of browns, golds, reds and greens reflected in the cooling sheen of the water. The swamp still kept its heat during the day.
“We are the same,” he had suggested to her, to explain their love. “We have the same sense of boredom.”
“No, Jack, we have the same habits. But I arrived at mine through fear. I had to learn a courage that for you was simply an inheritance.” She had described her anxieties. “It occasionally feels like the victory of some ancient winter.”
The waterways were full of birds which always betrayed their approach. No humans came here at this time of year, but any hunters would assume them to be hunting, too. Beautiful as it was, the country was forbidding and with no trace of Indians, a sure sign that the area was considered dangerous, doubtless because of the snakes.
She foresaw a world rapidly passing from contention to warfare; from warfare to brute struggle, from that to insensate matter, and from that to nothingness. “This is the reality offered as our future,” she said. They determined they would, if only through their mutual love, resist such a future.
They had grown comfortable with one another, and when they camped at night they would remind themselves of their story, piecing it back into some sort of whole, restoring to themselves the extraordinary intensity of their long relationship. By this means, and the warmth of their sexuality, they raised a rough barrier against encroaching Chaos.
6 Mon Coeur et Mon Amour
It had been twilight, with the cedars turning black and silver, a cool mist forming on the water, when they had reached the lagoon marked on the map, poling the dugout through the shallows, breaking dark gashes in the weedy surface, the mud sucking and sighing at the pole. Each movement tired Mr. Karaquazian too much, threatening to leave him with no energy in reserve, so they chose a fairly open spot, where snakes might not find them, and, placing a variety of sonic and visual beacons, settled down to sleep. They would have slept longer had not the novelty and potential danger of their situation excited their lusts.
In the morning, sitting with the canvas folded back and the tree-studded water roseate from the emerging sun, the mist becoming golden, the white ibises and herons flapping softly amongst the glowing autumn foliage, Jack Karaquazian and Colinda Dovero breakfasted on their well-planned supplies, studying their map before continuing deeper into the beauty of that unwelcoming swamp. Then, at about noon, with a cold blue-grey sky reflected in the still surface of a broad, shallow pond, they found colour—one large Stain spread over an area almost five feet in circumference, and two smaller Stains, about a foot across, almost identical to those noted by the pilot.
From a distance, the Stains appeared to rest upon the surface of the water, bu
t as Mr. Karaquazian poled the boat closer, they saw that they had in fact penetrated deeply into the muddy bottom of the pond. The gold Stains formed a kind of membrane over the openings, effectively sealing them, and yet it was impossible to tell if the colour were solid or a kind of dense, utterly stable gas.
“Somebody drilled here years ago and then, I don’t know why, thought better of it.” Colinda looked curiously at the Stains, mistaking them for capped bores. “Yet it must be of first quality. Near pure.”
Jack Karaquazian was disappointed by what he understood to be a note of greed in her voice, but he smiled. “There was a time colour had to come out perfect,” he said. “This must have been drilled before Biloxi—or around the same time.”
“Now they’re too scared, most of them, to drill at all!” Shivering, she peered over the side of the boat, expecting to see her image in the big Stain, and instead was surprised, almost shocked.
Watching her simply for the pleasure it gave him, Jack Karaquazian was curious and moved his own body to look down. The Stain had a strangely solid, unreflective depth, like a gigantic ingot of gold hammered deep into the reality of the planet.
Both were now aware of a striking abnormality, yet neither wanted to believe anything but some simpler truth, and they entered into an unspoken bond of silence on the matter. “We must go to Jackson and make the purchase,” he said. “Then we must look for some expert engineering help. Another partner, even.”
“This will get me clear of Peabody,” she murmured, her eyes still upon the Stain, “and that’s all I care about.”
“He’ll know you double-crossed him as soon as you begin to work this.”
The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 20