by Steve Aylett
At that moment a volley of cop triage fire diverged into five paths like jets at an airshow, then recombined and headed as one in my direction. It’s difficult to think while lugging a gun the size of a scooter, but I aimed it into the air and fired off a blazing round, neutralising the triage ammo’s criteria. They started twirling around randomly like fleas.
The Perm muzzle was fizzling, it shouldn’t do that. It was weeping etheric accelerant. I dumped it in disgust and it lay smouldering like a jammed SA-80.
A waiter appeared in front of me with a potbellied pan gun firing hot plastic, his face lambent with disinterest. There was a sad pop like a cheap firework and his eyes turned inward. Instead of giving a single cough and falling, he blotted his copybook by revealing a dynamite vest and exploding into white ash which swirled a little and blew away, some flying into my face and mouth. Murphy the Fed stood on a bit of tilted concrete, her blunt body a silhouette against spilt fire. Smoking in her hand was a little plastic pistol of a simple design that appealed to me. This must have been the girly gun she’d shown Blince. I suspected it had no more weight than its reflection in a mirror. The cylinder looked like a toy Curta calculator. No smarts. Then I noticed the novelty lucite handle containing jelly-eating ants, a practice I believe is cruel and unimaginative.
‘You know, Colt is a gateway to other guns.’
‘Where’s the kid and the oldster?’ she asked, walking down the slope with the gun raised. We were having to shout over the mayhem.
‘To think I brought that funny dog to your attention - the one that wasn’t there when you looked. Now you want to postmark my head with a glint pistol. You lied and I burned my throat swallowing it. But I swallowed it, I did that.’
‘Why d’you think I lied?’
‘Came on like a religion.’
‘How?’
‘Told me a little truth while leaving out some of the things I already knew, then added aliens.’
‘I didn’t lie.’
‘You gave me up.’
‘No. They found your rail gun. It was under your pillow.’
I had put it under the pillow, that much was true.
‘Think you’ll find them with your showy little cowgirl pistol?’
She thought that over without any obvious embarrassment. ‘You denied them,’ she concluded.
She glanced around while still trying to cover me. I didn’t make a break for it. I wanted to watch her eyes as she tried to work out what she was evading. What true thing couldn’t she afford to believe? It was interesting. She advanced on me, the gun still raised. ‘Where are they?’
I opened the front passenger door so she would experience the precision vertigo of seeing a gullwing gap in the centre of a blind spot. ‘Quick,’ I said.
She ducked into the passenger seat and I settled behind the wheel. I took my slimline Armani out the glove box and handed it to the Fed. ‘Give me the purse gun.’
She frowned. ‘You kidding?’
‘I’ll tell you when I am.’
She gave me the toon pistol. Leaning out the door, I smashed the butt against the ground until the lucite cracked, and mixed the jelly and ants in with the dirt. I sealed the doors and turned back to the old man and the kid. ‘Are you Heber?’ I asked the kid. He looked to the old man, turned back to me and nodded, simple. ‘And you?’ I asked the old man.
‘No.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Ed Novalis.’
‘Edna Valis. Never heard the name Edna on a man before.’
I scrutinised him. His sunburned face was delirium stretched over bone. ‘Yes, my skull’s a barely adequate frame to contain it,’ he said, startling the hell out of me. But he was amused. It seemed after too long under the bland sun his brain had turned to varnish. He had one of those long white beards they call a wizard’s tail, which he had roped around and around his neck like a scarf.
‘When Strobe gets here for cover, we’re leaving,’ I told them all, and sure enough the security swan swooped in over the battleground, cutting through towers of smoke and releasing a gold polyhedron before peeling away. The holographic claymore unpacked as it fell, each of a hundred fragments expanding into a hundred identical fragments that contained a hundred more unto infinity. Below a certain scale these particles were harmless but even without compression the device created a ricocheting chaos of metal pellets that had everyone pinned down. Everything was coated in dust, dirt and ash the same grey as my Faraday shades as I drove away over breakables and jettisoned ordnance.
I was disappointed to have encountered something as violent and conventional as tonight’s exchange. It didn’t have the charm of the frenzies of legend, but the resentment that comes from having to pit one’s wits against well-armed stupidity persisted. That these short and occasional moments of match and mayhem were a sort of communication - the only form to fully convey certain aspects of the denizens’ resentment - I had no doubt. But to deny them their resentment was never seriously considered. In truth the polarising effect of death never helped at all in sorting out a dispute with any finality.
So went my diagnosis at the time. But I wondered then, and wonder now, if part of my lack of enthusiasm was due simply to knowing that this was work already done. Was the uproar acted out every night?
I parked up outside the Reaction and took them inside. ‘Toto’s an old friend. He’s got a sort of hen, out back. It’s what he uses for a conscience. It’s probably not much good.’
‘Well at least they don’t bother anyone,’ said Murphy.
The bar was empty, only Toto at his post behind the loss counter. He had an all-or-nothing Pound rifle stripped to its threefold form and was reading the obscure scripture on the side of the ammo box. The Pound worked on a principle of motive momentum, taking intention at face value and inducing the physical locality to join in. He looked up, happy.
‘There he is,’ I hailed. ‘What are you so cheerful about, Toto?’
‘Oh I just found a raisin, take a look.’
‘That’s a spider. And this is Toto, everyone. We can only guess at what hatred and revenge smoulders in his heart. Comes of peering at the world from the wrong side of an intake fan.’
‘You’ll be bloated and venting methane before you know it, Atom.’
I asked for the use of his basement and he led us back to a rear door covered in decals with relic irony from a decade ago. Down some steps was a chamber containing a table made of a giant cable spool. The chairs were car seats on bricks. The black walls looked acrylic, the floor plastered in obsolete wolf tickets and cain dollars. The only decoration was a small framed painting of a starling with a tiny machine gun. What I at first took for a pile of coal was actually a heap of huge meaty flies. It wasn’t too different from the bar. Murphy looked around the room as if it was beyond help. ‘There’s antifreeze,’ I told them, ‘shockers, a bathful of monitor lizards, a flying insect with legs like whiskers, Jade works if you need them. Even a little Gamete, like the best hotels.’
‘If these walls could scream,’ Toto chuckled. ‘This is the very basement where they tied Brute Parker to a chair thinking he was John Stoop impersonating Brute Parker. Those were the town’s salad days eh Taff? And locks you could pick with cotton wool.’
We got into some headcrime nostalgia. Whatever happened to Rosa Control? To Findley Taz, born predefeated and honest about it? Gone surely as all those scenes and conversations lost through web decay. It had been a time in which crime and legislative infringement almost simultaneously attained classical heights, the two disciplines operating in lively counterpoint. For a while they had been adding to crime’s table of elements at a rate of one a day. Now, without critics wily enough to grasp it, conceptual crime was not processed or appreciated, rotting on the branch. Its special innocence was an obsolete phenomenon. I’d read about some of the final bank heists and the sense of cheerless inhibition those reports conveyed had depressed the hell out of me.
‘Betty still working off
set?’
‘Yeah. Violence longs to be repeated merely - somehow it’s never bored.’
‘Stand under the light,’ I told the kid, and took a good look at him. For miles behind his face there was nothing but blue sky. His energy was smooth as cream. The edges were microscopically frilled and ticklish. I looked away, the marrow in my bones zinging. The kid had the purest vibe I’d ever felt. I stubbed my brain against it, couldn’t think about it directly.
Neither the kid nor the old trout said anything, and staring at me seemed to be the only amusement they required. They seemed light-headed at being alive at all.
‘Mix everyone a Lively Green,’ I told Toto, and showed him a few places where structural alterations to the basement were necessary. He told me rats would soon be using my ribcage as a jungle gym.
‘Get out of here!’ he shouted, and after making me repeat the instruction carefully back to him, bid me farewell.
As I drove to Betty’s Fort I saw my reflection - I was a kind of living scarecrow. I was feeling more acclimatised to the city, its resonances dyeing my mind dark red. Beyond the windshield, the endlessly intricate dance of bastards. Kids pouring acid on the hood of a stranded copcar. A ghost marketeer pushing a warhead in a baby carriage. Hardshell idiots, braying failures and abandoned dogs rotted on the chain. The air was criss-crossed with a density of laws that could strip the skin off a man’s head for a moment’s inattention. A shriek, a violation, a delectation. Humanity was a species tested so long it should have fallen into baffled despair rather than its present million contradictory positions of utter certainty.
I approached the long Fort under the open muzzle of the moon.
PART 2
SAMADHI
1 HIGH ROLLER
Betty’s Fort was a midtown apartment knock-through with outer walls thicker than blood. Workers had dug up several ranks of ancient terra cotta protesters during the extension and Betty saved a couple for her hallway. She ran this town now, if anyone did. Some say she always had, and since Thermidor was ventilated by Cortez and Cortez was hit by both ends of a truck, she’d become fully evident. In the face of moral teachings many people offset their murders by paying a potential murderer to keep his urges in check, and apparently this was still Betty’s main stream of income. The quietest people sometimes rise. Even the infamous mooncow Leon Wardial was circling the world in an armed blimp.
I shot some Jade, left the car and approached this urban keep that had grown while everyone was looking the other way. There was a graded richness across the tarmac that tried to fill me with trance geometries - this was here for the purpose, to waste my time. I’d told her I was coming. I made the sign of the Errorverse, and entered.
Two gunsels braced me for charm in a corridor lined sarcastically with racks of carbines. Then I walked through some notched plastic vegetation and between Chinese door gods into a windowless chamber of blazing black and red decor. Years of accumulated obtainium lined the walls. And between two pyramidal gun drones Betty Criterion sat in a glinting leather armchair black as a beetle, stroking some sort of crustacean that had a knuckleduster for a backbone. She was cartoonish royalty. A face like a saddle bore a mouth unnaturally large like a peony, conflict diamond eyes and ears that wouldn’t quit. She was dressed like one of those toys you got as a prize in a claw machine. But despite it all, here was an intelligence that was menacingly still. I felt a mother-of-pearl discomfort.
‘There you are, dangling from your head,’ she said. ‘Been in the wars, I think. Look like a zombie covered in flour.’
‘My appearance tells a story. One of panic and failure. The sooner I’m replaced by my corpse-in-waiting the better.’
‘Cushioned in loose worms.’
‘In a coffin, adjusting to my remains.’
‘And for my part, I expect to find my final resting place in a gravel separation plant.’
Courtesies fulfilled, she stood, placed her pet ganglion on her throne and gestured to a kevlar couch. ‘Siddown and rest your sense of mystery, Mr Atom.’
I sat. It was nothing I hadn’t been subjected to a hundred times. She joined me on the couch. The less pig-like of the guards who had frisked me placed a jetbone tea service on a coffee table built over an antique Hotchkiss Knee cannon, and left quietly. Betty herself poured black pearl tea from a pot with a pearlite grip. On her wrist was an iwatch in the form of a midnight butterfly. ‘You’re not here to say goodbye, so ask me. Safe conduct?’
‘There was an Abrams battle tank at the Gate party tonight. Seems to me you’re the only non-brotherhood who can rustle up a tank these days.’
‘So?’
‘So what’s with the Heber kid? He looks blank to me, but everyone’s up on their hind legs. What do you know about him?’
‘I’ve never heard of Heber Partenheimer.’
‘I didn’t tell you his second name.’
‘How careless of me. I have given something away.’ She didn’t look atall upset. ‘But identity’s a strange one. The necessity for extraneous measures has been forced upon us by law, Mr Atom. To operate in this acquisitive world we require many IDs, or none - whatever is needed to avoid being owned. Do you know that it was once common for people to use the name of their pets as a decoy? There was an entire generation of hounds who went about with full and human-sounding names. Frank Murkowski. Richard B. Myers. Senorita Clemencia Arango. There is even a Professor Traven who lives in the Terminal suburbs, who named his pet Heber Partenheimer.’
I sipped the sweet tea and gazed at her antique jukeboxes and a couple of those automated ammo dispensers they used to have in malls. Two boosted paintings hung on opposite walls. Here was Ernst’s Numb Town, its alien architecture of massive pillars slathered in spinach and bat anatomy. And there was Frances Castle’s Cowgirl, a bullseye of a red inflatable sheriff about to duel sans gun or clothing, covertly crossing her fingers.
‘You enabled the retirement of two of my Mexicans,’ Betty stated mildly.
‘They were yours?’
That was awkward. I was going to die here obviously.
‘Nice work,’ she said. ‘They were about to betray me. Junco has.’
‘The Thistle. He’s good, actually. Pulled a blocker on a truck, point-blank. Never seen anything like it.’
‘Hmm. Well, he’s Pivot’s man now. I may have to arrange to have him shot a little.’
‘Pivot wants the kid?’
‘Not exactly. For reasons of his own he wants him to run free.’
‘And Chief Blince?’
‘One should not expect a coherent ideology from a pullulating blob of junk DNA.’ Betty repeated the general opinion that Blince was so like a massive amoeba he could reproduce by binary fission. ‘And is therefore a surprisingly self-sufficient man,’ she added. ‘And his implied claim to at least one of the attributes of god was endorsed the first time he punished an innocent man.’
‘I heard he’s named his jowls Terry and Christopher.’
‘That is true,’ she said solemnly.
‘What’s this religion Parker’s fallen for?’
‘A goddess with a thousand arms, a gun in every one. He has suffered the failure of purpose all men are heir to.’
‘And you?’
‘I believe there’s no act so terrible that god won’t forgive it if it has time in its busy schedule. And nothing it hasn’t done itself, obviously.’
‘That why you can’t wait to finish one murder before starting the next one?’
‘I haven’t murdered in years,’ she said in mock outrage. ‘Not since Cortez, actually.’
‘A murder so sweet it had a rose named after it.’
‘Yes, it was recorded for training purposes. He couldn’t really handle heading the mob, that man. Spent the average evening snorting his Ma’s ashes off his own bicep. In fact his stance of avoidance had provided his right arm so much exercise in repeatedly covering his eyes that it had grown outsize and beefy, the bicep thick as a steering column. I ran him o
ver with a monster truck and he offered no resistance. In his defence, he hasn’t died one iota since. But they made to take the accomplishment from me by declaring it a crime and, all being innocent until proven guilty, I was “free to leave”. I’m still here, naturally. Murders should be acts of definition, not of criticism.’
It was all very civilised. I couldn’t tell if the Jade was throttling or dialling up - maybe the latter. She was a big glass of smarts.
‘People still try to avoid understanding how I got here, but corrosion is detailed, not vague. Born into bad times, graffiti on the incubator, umbilical tied with accident tape. Did you know I worked in the water cannery, swimming through the most mundane of public reflexes? Bullets have all the qualities of hysteria, Mr Atom - they’re fast, go where they’re pointed, and travel in herds. But then I thought, well, people do fire bullets, and other people receive them, so who am I to stand in the way? Flying bullets were just like please and thankyou in such circles, even then. Say the right thing and they’d fire ten, eleven of them - as many as you like. All close together like demands for cash. And no foreign travel. I saw it could make more money than war. Knowing that “Money can’t buy happiness” is said either honestly by the stupid or falsely by the smart. Murder, in old currency. I merely committed the crime, I don’t claim to have originated it.’
She was looking me in the face as if peering around a corner – trying to see something.
‘After a while you get to know things, Mr Atom. The different shades of red according to the wound location. That winging someone is like an affair - they get to thinking it’s more serious than you do. And like a marriage, a murder happens on a burst of enthusiasm - the regret comes later. A fired bullet operates in one direction, like destruction. Lower killing upper class is unnatural murder, upper killing lower is execution or excusable error.’