Novahead

by Steve Aylett

  A tired dog wandered in and collapsed, perhaps dead. What I’d thought was a cicada was a little geigercounter it wore on its collar.

  ‘Why install it so young?’

  ‘Kids are very conformist, I mean to peer pressure, the crowd. They’re taught ideopathic history - no known cause. At best they can have a philosophy made from found objects. It was felt that in a child the slightest hint of the original would set it off. But that one, we weren’t sure what was going wrong with it. He was an orphan, and now seemed as good a time as any to make him into a walking advertisement for devastation. Partenheimer’s head or “stupidity turret” seemed perfect for our purposes. We tested him at a field station in an abandoned missile silo. He was behind a blast-proofed screen and we piped in a series of ideas and images, waiting for the one that would tip him over, a fertile singularity. We termed it “rich zero”. At first he was too toddly and bright to be observed with any accuracy. But he began to show evidence of saintliness, even boredom. Meanwhile our computer models suggested that the detonation would be massive, unmanageable.’

  ‘Did you ever work it out?’

  The Professor sat down. ‘Theories. Mine was that he was compartmentalising - storing any originality away in a mental vault. If that was so, god help us if it burst its hinges.’

  I thought about the kid, his face filled with a calm, quietly radiant disinclination.

  ‘Was he always like this?’ Murphy asked. ‘Kinda simple-minded?’

  ‘I could never really tell. He was quiet.’

  ‘Is it possible he stays this way as a defence mechanism, to prevent his realising anything?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps. To evade is a bedrock instruction humanity must follow, even when all else has been discarded. In his case it would be a means of self-preservation. In any case the government contractors ordered Heber to be disposed of. I wasn’t happy with it, and also knew if he died the separation barrier would dissolve, resulting in ignition. I had taken on the protective colouration of hypocrisy, more in sorrow than in anger.’

  I watched Traven, the rods and cones of his morality pointing in different directions. In an earlier age he would have been an honest man, maybe.

  ‘Imagine my annoyance at being saddled with such a serious matter. Yes I was in a tight corner, a very tight corner indeed.’

  ‘Have you heard of open corners? Looks like a corner but it actually flutes open into a sort of exit.’

  ‘Hell of a thing, it was,’ said Traven as though he hadn’t heard. ‘I had to keep him alive with a margin of safety. But even today it’s possible to blunder into an idea now and again. Then I hit on it.’

  ‘The Fadlands,’ I said.

  All at once he surged to his feet, taking me by surprise. ‘It was perfect! Under a rigor mortis sky lay an entire chunk of landmass so lacking in real mental sustenance it had surpassed blandness and gone into reverse, denuded of refusal or examination, sap or invention! Nothingness repeated across the flavourless drifts of a trend desert! Epidemic technology and lack of independent imagination keep things fast and hollow. It’s really only a rather terminal version of the general way we avoid saying anything interesting because we know it upsets people. But Heber would be completely safe among flocking re-run heads. So I abducted him and set him loose in the vacuum.

  ‘The project went belly-up, obviously. The team was disbanded. There was even an internal enquiry at which the board were carefully shocked in chorus. I told them exactly what I’d done and they had no trouble believing me. I consulted a law book, the contents of which I found to resemble the ravings of a lone crackpot. Do you understand that when a collective identity is formed it has a very distinctive intelligence of its own, always lower than the average among its individuals? My guilt was cushioned by the condemnation of others and the bonanza of justification that provoked. I was ordered to confine my attention to areas of research that had already been exhausted. For millennia humanity’s been learning with the handbrake on, after all - that was the argument. But a stopped clock never boils, Mr Atom. No matter how unpopular and sensible it may appear, science has created the misery and systems of drainage that separate us from the barbarians. Humanity is capable of amazing, even useless things, and many people worship science from the same general tiredness as others attend church.’

  ‘Church?’ asked Murphy.

  ‘Ancestral buildings purporting to act as a dimensional propellant,’ I explained.

  ‘I quit, Mr Atom. And for a while nobody seemed to care. But when an explosion levelled the Pentagon, maps got a terrific shock. And the militia decided the Medulla Obliterata was an idea parted too young from its mother. What will evil not do, when circumstances make extraordinary demands of it? I found myself on a high security prison island, in a cell so quiet I could hear myself bleeding. A mental breakdown landed on me like a shrieking chimp. My madness has been reconsecrated five times since then, as every year the performance is repeated by one party or another. I tell them I left the apocalypse in my other coat.’

  ‘We’ve noticed the various interested parties. Even Chief Blince.’

  ‘Oh, that one. He’s essentially a giant gauge boson for the force of ignorant action, with a spin value of one. I argued he had nothing on me because it was impossible to prove a negative. You can imagine how well that was received.’ As he cradled his false arm, his face bore a series of taboo expressions, ending in grief.

  ‘Interrogations aren’t all bad. Sometimes it’s nice to have someone else take charge and tell you what to do.’

  ‘Indeed. The electrode has become my most particular friend. Meeting with your life takes years, an accidental meeting - it won’t let you get away soon unless you’re firm with it. As a scientist I wanted to emerge nuclear from something horribly grand. Certainly I expected rather more than a walk-on part in my own life. But I never regretted the decision to free that exploited child. It was a crowning experience for me. In that act I defined myself’ - he spread his arms - ‘and became the chubby pariah you see before you.’

  ‘You’re not chubby.’

  ‘So they’ve taken even that from me.’ His arms flapped to his sides and he hung his head. ‘I’ve been here since the Time of Dead Birds, getting mopey and meaningful. All I do now is dick around. I’ve worked as a pin chimp at the bowling alley, then taking aerial photos of people’s cats by just standing over them and taking a picture, then making wigs for ghosts, and some of those interim professions that sprung up briefly - I was a printbleacher for a while, and a battery man until the scavenging went dry. Have you heard of the Turing test, Mr Atom - to determine if someone is a real human being?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘If they try and convict you for no crime, chemically castrate you and drive you to suicide despite your being instrumental in winning their war, they’re human.’

  ‘What’s your advice on the kid?’

  ‘Don’t say or do anything interesting, don’t let him read, and for god’s sake keep him off Jade.’

  In the silence that followed I noticed old man Edna was stood in the doorway. He looked as disconcerted as a pig on a Ferris wheel.

  3 NOT WAVING BUT COOKING

  Traven made us some sort of stone stew out of nettles, mushrooms and cigarettes. There was also tea made apparently from eyeshadow. To me he supplied bandages. My hand wound zinged like sweetened lightning. We were invited to stay the night. An obscure room held alot of apparatus but didn’t look to have been used in a long while. Traven rummaged through the equipment. ‘I’ve been cataloguing meaningless changes on the inner surface of this funnel, do you see? I have less and less conviction that the exercise is worth it.’

  ‘It’s not, obviously.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m all washed up.’

  In an open barn what we’d thought was the fore of a train was a dead turbine. We looked it over for kit, found nothing usable.

  This house of used retorts was tragic. When darkness fell I head
ed out to the car. The street night was a black magnet dragging downwards. Trees hissed like dissolving codeine and dim tumbleweeds blew by in a creepy way. The kid was sat on the kerb, his head bent over Schottner Kier. Maybe it was like I told Betty, books only inoculate against ideas’ real effect. We all compartmentalise so as not to have to freak out. ‘How’s the book?’

  The kid looked up, eyes like a cartoon.

  I left him to it. I got in the car, locked it, pulled the scale gear and clambered into the back as the stepdown initiated. The back seat of Planckward planks elongated into a staircase etherically canted to form a slant entry into sidespace. I let go and quickly hit a chicane, a fold where reality had been dodged. The world was full of them now, billions to any geographical instant, and the trained sense could feel them out like the ridges in a lenticular print. I teased the crack a little wider and went through, hidden by locating myself amid the matter the world hid from itself. The concomitant drench of truth was both refreshing and ugly, blazing and muted, a very particular quality of bright sourness. I flew through discarded fact, strong and strongly denied; over history, its blurring ranks of petrified reprisal speeding into concurrent strips. You know something is not physical when it has no temperature. The shadow of a flower doesn’t hold its colour.

  Then the almost unbearable temporal thickening as I valved into the small anteroom we called ‘the concourse’. After a few minutes curled up like a fist, I stood unsteadily and pushed the door into Madison’s safe house, far from morality’s equator. It was designed like a hotel at the bottom of the sea, all blue domed ceilings, thermal mass walls, pillars of poured white glass, arched doors and round windows that brought in the sun. Beyond the frontage of one-way camouflage glass and past the gleaming white-sand beach was the gently rippled amethyst of the ocean. Why be awed by the immensity of obstacles and not by the immensity of nature? Sometimes we cannot fully respond to a new dimension - the less adjacent ones can feel incongruent and may vibrate quite a bit even when idling. But I’ve found the present works better in territories that don’t mirror the rest of the world.

  ‘Maddy?’

  ‘Taff? I’m in the bath.’

  I went in, took off my burnt rags and got in opposite her.

  ‘What the hell happened to your hair?’

  I ruffled my own scalp happily. ‘You like it? It caught on fire.’

  ‘And third-degree burns, missing fingers, flesh-wounds. Are you in pain?’

  ‘Don’t get me started. They’re all hepped up on ritual and mutual surveillance over there.’

  We looked at each other between her legs. It was like driving down the Golden Gate Bridge. Her breasts loved each other.

  ‘How is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s their last chance not to do anything right and they’re taking full advantage. Some are claiming civilisation is on the mend asymmetrically. There are still millions of contrahuman, contranatural and contradictory laws sloshing around, and barely enough healthy land into which to push a pin. Nobody really knows what day of the week it is and there hasn’t been a decent burial anywhere in years.’

  ‘How’s the tech?’

  I told her about the hardscrabble cannibalism and systematic avoidance at large. Most potential tech had died by humanity’s shortfall, as people found themselves less and less concerned with artificial longevity and neural interfacing, and more concerned with finding something - anything - to eat.

  ‘But there’s an exception. Remember when guns got smart? Fire-by-wire. Only enhancements really, we still directed them. But by introducing the etheric pulse grid and a set of criteria we gave them philosophy and they really flowered.’

  ‘The Lotus Gun.’

  ‘The first really sentient one supposedly, yeah. And people thought the issue of gun rights had come too late because most guns still piggy-backed humanity and humanity was finished. But there’s been some sort of leap beyond the days of non-aspirational firearms. Apparently this Calvarius construct has developed way beyond single precept guns. It’s worshipped, even by Parker.’

  ‘The man who holds god’s bullet in his mouth.’

  ‘Who’d always been vanilla, mainly.’

  Maddy was smiling lazily. I wanted to eat the top of her head like a chocolate egg; live in the palm of her hand; dive into her blue swimming pool heart. ‘Ah, Maddy. I met you in a sniper’s nest and you never let up.’

  ‘I should think not, you dumb goose.’

  ‘That reminds me, Strobe’s gone AWOL. His signal’s disappeared.’

  ‘Probably off breaking someone’s arm with his wing. We all need some downtime. I don’t understand why you’re still using the Atom personality.’

  ‘It still blends a little. They’re cocooned in noir over there, even now. Though they seem to get more elaborately curt every day. I still haven’t completely aligned to the indigenous fanatical traditions. I’m not that smart Maddy but surrounded by them it’s like running in one-quarter gravity. I’ve taken so much Jade my head feels like a medicine ball.’

  ‘You’re talking as if you’re going back.’

  ‘I am.’

  After a silence, Maddy stood up and stepped out of the bath. I’d need a siege ladder to reach her ass. Towelling off, she resumed in tirade mode. ‘I gave you permission for your final fling or whatever it is. To get it out of your system and get back.’

  ‘Permission?’

  She stared candidly at me.

  ‘Okay, permission. But I’m completely gay for you Maddy, you know that.’

  ‘Come on Taff, we so busted our asses getting this place set up during the slow apocalypse and all. We’re safe here. History doesn’t have the momentum to climb our stairs.’

  When we’d left Beerlight way back, the President of China had just broken up the Great Wall so that when viewed from space it said I’M WITH STUPID and pointed across the Pacific. America was no longer viewed as a forgivable adolescent but as an embarrassingly challenged adult.

  ‘You’ve already done sansara, baby. Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over. Forgive them and don’t let them stand in your way. ‘

  ‘That’s what I’m going to do now.’

  ‘It’ll be like one of those nightmares, Taff - where you can’t find your way back to the beer garden.’

  ‘I feel like I got unfinished business there. Closure.’

  ‘Closure already happened. There’s only other people’s business in Beerlight.’

  ‘I’m not in Beerlight, I’m in the Terminal burbs. Deep masks and chainlink families. It’s becoming Fadland, with everything else.’

  ‘Is Beerlight a hold-out?’

  ‘Only just. It’s thin. Right now I could fashion a better city out of snot.’

  She pulled on her pants. ‘Is it suicide by cop, Taff, like Jesus?’

  ‘I’m coming back. It’s a final fling, like you said.’

  ‘Morbid curiosity’s what it is. It can’t be pretty.’

  ‘I saw a nice bird over there, a white one.’

  ‘A dove?’

  ‘It was made of pipe cleaners and had a beer cap for an eye. In the Delayed Reaction Bar. But it was pretty.’

  ‘The Reaction, that old place?’

  She put a watch on each wrist, set to two different times.

  ‘Toto was right, bars burn last. I need a gun. Can’t find the Glory.’

  ‘I’m not your armourer anymore, Taff.’

  She walked out. I got out of the bath and followed her into the workshop. ‘Toolmaker then.’

  ‘Inventor. Researcher. You’re dragging us backward into the ball pit with those children.’

  ‘What do you know about cortexial payloads?’

  She sighed. ‘Fissionaries. A myth, basically. The holy grail of the MK-Ultra crowd for a while - Medulla Ballistica. But it’s an urban legend as far as I know.’

  I thought about that a while. ‘I need a sidearm and a sidespace holster.’

  ‘I can make a pouch but subcached ordnance
won’t make it through the valve. It’ll fuse inside you.’

  She was looking through tools, and turfed out a blowtorch.

  ‘Just the joeypouch then.’

  ‘Ask Parker’s gun god where the Glory’s gone. From what you’ve been saying it’s probably taken the opportunity to evolve. Now put your left hand on the worktop and count to three.’

  ‘One.’

  I woke in the bedroom staring at the jungle-painted ceiling and hearing the waves. I held my left hand in front of my face. It was black and pink and sealed over.

  Maddy walked in. The gravity used from the soles of her feet to the top of her head was a holy sacrament, in my opinion. But still I began evasive manoeuvres. Why?

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘I started to blather about them who settle for the golden mean between propaganda and actuality, clueless and painless. You’re right, it’s deader than charcoal. So I’ll ride a coffin as it’s lowered into the grave, whooping like a cowboy.’

  ‘How much Jade are you on Taff?’

  ‘I dreamt you’d come and make my excuses for me.’