Novahead

by Steve Aylett

‘I asked a question. What are you on?’

  ‘Today?’

  I thought about it.

  ‘Jade, Edenblood. Er, Piracetam. Jade. Inverse agonized Suritozole. Rolipram. Soup made of cigarettes and a Jade chaser. Then a little Jade. And I took some Jade.’

  ‘You said Jade before. How much are you taking?’

  ‘Mushrooms?’

  ‘Jade.’

  As with a billion other matters, I didn’t have a clue. Flying shrapnel had allowed me scant opportunity to think about it or anything. ‘It’s not that easy.’

  ‘It’s not that hard.’

  ‘Time for me to go,’ I told her, sitting up. I found and pulled on some unburned clothes. At a sudden thought, I felt around the area of my appendix, where my hand slipped ghostly inside me as if into empty air. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And meanwhile I’ll just be looking good by the window.’

  I kissed her, and started toward the door.

  ‘A pipe-cleaner bird, Taff? Really?’

  I turned and looked at her. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘They’re done, Taff. It’s all just about done.’

  ‘I have to see it through,’ I told her. I looked at my left half-hand and held it up. ‘Thanks for mending me, baby.’

  I returned to the anteroom, approaching the far wall and its window to nowhere like the collar of a well. I emerged from the etheric crawlspace into the Mantarosa, parked in the suburban night.

  Everyone was asleep but Traven. I found him in the smashed conservatory, smoking a nylon cigarette. Desperation was stretched over his life like skullskin. Broken glass crunched under my boots. ‘You disturb my ongoing adaptation to defeat,’ he said. ‘They said it would pass. But ofcourse it doesn’t, as you probably know. People forgive themselves too readily.’

  ‘You can’t run while you’re kicking yourself.’

  Forgotten people get complicated in different ways. Some become compassionate and amoral. Others evince the vegetable rectitude of statues. Traven’s soul seemed clearcut by exhaustion. He had cooled off enough to reflect upon his circumstances but this had not readied him for the sudden reality of the kid’s return.

  ‘Who’s the old man?’

  ‘Edna. He’s been out in the wilderness living off Skittles and wild honey. Takes care of little Johnny Warhead.’

  Traven frowned. Then he resumed smoking.

  ‘We’re heading back to Beerlight tomorrow,’ I told him.

  ‘Maybe he’ll be as safe amid that mummified mobsterism as in the Fadlands. I was interested to see the shard of apparently non-predatory propulsion you’re using for a car. How’s it work?’

  ‘It’s basically a rolling evasion amplifier. Operates by deceiving the road, refusing to admit to a geographical position. If you’re precise in your aversions you’re precise in your navigation.’

  ‘Yes, though at the beck of every circumstance.’

  ‘Unlimited context obliterates any argument. The dimensions are all of a flowing piece, but we partition it up, number these partitions and limit ourselves to three or four.’

  ‘I know. But I’m increasingly convinced that this space-time axis is entirely ornamental. What happens here is not meant to be taken seriously. My life has been a daily halloween of patience and postponement. Academia’s attempts to prove otherwise have wasted their time and yours.’

  ‘You put it much better than I could,’ I said in appeasement.

  Traven raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s big of you.’

  I left him in the lonely lighthouse of his head. It was only later that I felt the respect due him. He had seen the car.

  4 THE BATTLE OF SOKO INTERSTATE

  Morning light went about switching on parts of the room. I went out to find the others gathering at the parking gap. The Fed was acting shifty. Here’s where I noticed her nose at last. It was nothing special.

  A halo outlined Heber’s moving figure like a victim chalkline. This celestial conduct unnerved one and all, but Edna still smiled at everything. ‘As the rhyme goes: “We’re all still here, no-one has gone away, waiting.’” He got into the back of the car, then poked his head out. ‘“Acting much too well and procrastinating.”’ Then he added, more quietly, ‘We eat hours and vomit hours,’ and dodged his head back in again. The last part was Gamete. The kid got in beside him as Professor Traven emerged from the house, his failures trailing behind him like a dead parachute.

  ‘I want to give you something,’ Traven said, then looked vaguely about him. Spotting a snail on the bleached picket fence, he detached this with an audible pop and handed it to me. ‘Use it wisely.’

  I made to go but he grasped my arm and leant in confidentially, breathing hard.

  ‘In studying cortexotics I have detected a straight line from personal differentiation to life power. Meanwhile the military have disengaged the axis of reason, like so many others, but stowed it so far beyond use or memory that they can annex pacifism in support of their chosen carnage. Only the angel of detachment protects me, dolled up as a spaniel.’

  ‘Break it down, people, we’re outta here!’

  I had managed to sneak the snail back onto the fence but Traven noticed and gave it to me again. ‘You forgot this.’

  ‘Thanks. I’d forget my head if it weren’t attached by a system of tendons and ligaments.’

  I decided I would fling the snail directly upward at the sky and quickly run away before it returned. It was not impossible that it would land before we were out of sight, but I would deal with that when the time arrived.

  Murphy climbed into the passenger seat like she was trying to hide.

  I hurled the snail upward and bolted for the car, slamming in and tearing away in a screech of rubber. Traven was running after us, pointing at the car and mouthing something with startled and sudden urgency. It seemed out of proportion to the snail affair, but I considered that a scientist might have a different set of priorities from the common herd.

  Highway heat distortion under exaggerated skies. The speeding road unravelled toward the eye. We were all pretty quiet during the drive. Edna was thoughtful, the kid was cherubically blank and the Fed was clammed-up and wary. I don’t know what I was - pugnacious I suppose.

  The timing for that pugnacity couldn’t have been worse. Out of the vapourized horizon a delegation of feral cars was approaching, along with several more nearing from behind and both flanks. I suppose it couldn’t be called a pincer movement as there were at least four opposing digits involved. On our left a desert flycar was amazingly close already. A flycar was basically a roll cage with wheels and a V8 converted to run on grain alcohol. It zipped up to us like a bug, scarily untroubled. At the helm was a paid stranger in a watermelon helmet, grinning as he kept dead level and raised a Glock 23 at my face. That should have rung alarm bells. His own face caved and he spun out, all teeth and chrome tubing. My window was gone and the Fed had the slimline Armani raised and smoking. The Armani resembled a slat of ebony shelving with a trigger but was okay for close use. She’d fired right past me, very close.

  The oncomers had one-eightied and now shoaled with the rest, parading their exhilarations like returning heroes.

  ‘Gas bandits?’

  But included were a handful of military franchises including the city brotherhood - Chief Blince himself hove up in the passenger seat of a cop car covered in roll bars and graffiti. He and his driver were wearing denial-deny goggles, the Mantarosa completely visible to them. Blince had the face and spirit of someone both overfed and undernourished, and a bullhorn modified so he could smoke a cigar through it. ‘God wants you for a scarf, Atom.’

  I fished a retort bugle from the glove box and raised it at the open window. ‘This from a cop with a tropical-weight brain. You’ll be gone, uncoffined and pretty ineffective.’

  ‘A roof over your head to stop the worms getting in.’

  ‘Death? I’ve been hearing about that daunting transition for so long, I hope my boredom has been worth it.’<
br />
  Courtesies taken care of, Blince urged us to relinquish our instinct for self-preservation. ‘You have the right to remain silent. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘You want my misgivings to remain undeclared, so that would be the right you allow.’

  ‘Its unfortunate the idea is “sweet” - it makes people think it probably isn’t true. I’ve yet to hear a lament of any consequence, I must say. I look forward to it though, I do. I really do. Stop the car.’

  ‘I thought a lot about what you said, and it’s not a solution because it’s posited in a ridiculously low dimensional ambient space which does not allow for reality or human behaviour - as a theory it at best describes and models what might happen but doesn’t explain why.’ This was a slogan bandied about a great deal at the time.

  Blince blew smoke through the bullhorn. ‘Hello again, Miss Murphy.’ The Fed did not look at him. ‘These folk take their responsibilities seriously, and they’re all bein’ paid. Look at their faces, if the term is applicable to such as these.’

  I saw beyond him a spraddle-wheeled frame buggy, its wheel array so projected it looked like a spider in the nest of its own legs. The driver was caked in dust and looking glum against the speeding wastes. Behind us was a candy-apple red Porsche 996 turbo with hell plates, etheric airfoils and rocket dagmars. The priority would be keeping it on the ground - it was probably four-cornered with gyrostabilizers. Composed in the clawed frame of its wraparound windshield was a cropped soldier girl in blue leather who should have known better than to skim bone china over hard ground. Crossing lanes was an ambulance painted in black primer, driven by what appeared to be a tormented clown. But is there any other kind, I wondered. Then glancing over what I could see of the rest, it occurred to me that they were all wearing DD goggles. In fact the goggles were the same brand, as if they’d been distributed to this disparate horde. I turned the squelch knob on the antiBlake unit but there was no real way to phase sideways across bandwidths of mental evasion.

  Meanwhile I was running off something like this: ‘That only goes to your mitigating chaos of mind. A truly moral man tolerates the law, at most. Its arbitrary edicts are an insult to any man who wears his own clothes. With public confidence in killers’ self-regulation at an all-time low, you’re in a hell that no amount of topsoil can conceal.’

  He contrived not to understand. ‘People need heroes,’ he said, seeming to suggest he might fit the bill in any case.

  ‘I’m not above praying to a moth, are you?’

  ‘Eh?’

  I reached the flaregun from under the seat and let him have it, first shot out of the box. It’s not every day you shoot the Chief of Police in the shoulder. He dropped the bullhorn and yelled a bit, still unconvinced that I was not under his authority. He was gouting flame and smoke like a toy volcano and collapsed back into the cage car as it peeled off, threading through several scavenge-title vehicles apparently cobbled together on the hoof. A couple-dozen mercenary factions were switching wildly across the defunct lane system and letting out glad cries. Way off behind the throng was a fishtail hearse, yellowed like a tooth. A saloon made from a saloon and the fossil of a Stegosaurus erupted outward as the poison apple Porsche accelerated through it, emerging from the wreckage like a butterfly from a pupa. She’d used the dagmar rockets, leaving two empty sockets in the fender.

  Narrowing the gap to our tail was an infected-looking car covered in faded kaleidocyclic dazzle-patterns and on the roof a Confederate flag in negative. In the Sparco buckets were what looked like a family of zombies in race harnesses. And I realised that skeletons are classically American - scary and scared at the same time. The front passenger unstrapped, flipped the dirty plastic windshield up and clambered onto the hood with a compressed-air bolt-gun slung over his shoulder. He swung the cattle dropper down and around as if to fire, then stumbled, briefly horsing around on the hood before falling off. The driver raised an old Mauser snub and without even really aiming blew out our rear window. Non-safety glass ricocheted around the cab. Murphy popped her window and leaned out with the slab gun. She left behind a dozen bullets and the zombies drove into some of them. Number two son fired back to the old ‘shave and a haircut’ rhythm. The Mantarosa started coughing. I flashed on the Professor shouting after us - did he shout ‘damage’?

  An army jeep full of hysterically laughing mercenaries veered toward me on the right shoulder and I accelerated - standing drunkenly to throw molotovs they crossed between my tail and the zombie crew, sinking suddenly off the road without a sound and no explosion.

  The kid woke up. He’d had his face against the AC grill so long his forehead was ridged like a cracker.

  I turned to watch the flight of a visceral-looking vehicle made of two fused chassis halves and the fin of a Great White Shark. The co-pilot had climbed the chicken-wired roof and stood in a charcoal duster that flapped behind him as he tipped a bright red jerry can at a funnel, loading precious liquor into the car while on the blur. The driver shot at me but his sightline was cut off as the black ambulance boiled past, with a motor that whirred like an airplane’s turbofan. As it pulled ahead of us it became obvious the rear doors had been removed to extrude what appeared to be a turbine from a passenger plane.

  ‘I just had an idea,’ said Edna, ‘but I don’t think it hit anything.’

  Hung out the passenger window firing at the shark car, Murphy was getting thrown around as we were blasted by the prop-wash of the black ambulance. The White Sharks had been hit and ploughed off the road, belching black smoke and expressing in many little ways their dissatisfaction with the way things stood. I braked a short car length from the giant fan, and fell back three. Murphy emptied the clip uselessly into the prop and ducked in to get another from the glove box.

  The gaunt desert family, their skin grey as mushrooms, were burning and stalling behind us. I saw the wife in the dead dress pull a blue metal keg onto her lap. The jagged jalopy exploded, springing momentarily off the ground. The flaming chassis tacked this way and that, finally locking into a hood-roll that almost overtook us. Burts of machine-pistol fire emerged from the smoke and the Porsche accelerated into view, the driver resting the muzzle in the crook of her wing mirror. More rounds pelleted our flanks as other ragged parties veered in at us. Bullets populated the space between us, some smart and some sent in the clear. I braked to avoid hitting the ambulance. A kid in a little twin-engine hoop car fired apologetically, as if he didn’t like to dictate, and was clipped into a spin by the Porsche.

  Off to our left was a jungle-gym on wheels, the low-slung scaffold car with the long fore deck. The hood puzzle-boxed open, extruding some sort of harpoon gun. The driver smiled at me with herringbone teeth. I shifted toward the left lane to increase the parallax angle on his DDs in the hope of reducing their accuracy. The black ambulance swerved with me.

  The frame buggy’s broad wheel array was obviously designed to prevent any kind of tilt-shot from flinging the flimsy-looking car sideways onto its back. Later I wished I’d remembered this.

  ‘You will pull over.’

  As this assumption dopplered past I realised Blince was back in the game, and then he hove into view with a Duty AMT propped awkwardly on the window’s gunwale. ‘Die, Atom!’ he yelled, a stricture I found impossible to take seriously. Afterwards, ofcourse, I saw that his plan to shoot me was a good one. At the time, his driver was socked in the head by a harpoon and dragged backward out of the car as the cable retracted. As Blince lunged at the wheel and swerved into the off, I saw the frame car driver firing at the snagged corpse on his hood with an antique automatic in the hope of freeing up the reel for another cast.

  ‘You people put me to such trouble.’

  ‘What?’ shouted Murphy above the roar of the ambulance.

  Behind her I spotted a studiedly nondescript beige Chrysler flecked sparsely with ancient flakes of anti-radar and rigged with a hanger-wire fender like dental braces, probably electrified. Junco, emblematic in red and black, unpac
ked through a Whitman hatch and assumed the position behind a Bohr 5.56mm rifle. The Bohr looked like Murphy’s.

  The Mantarosa was suddenly nudged from behind by the Porsche’s snout, forcing us further into the ambulance’s backblast. I broke to the left but was hedged in by a rattling jeepful of industry-standard idiots standing up and waving burning ragbottles. They were still drunk, maybe more so. Then one of them doubled over as a quantum bullet came out of superposition. Any other bullet would have done as well. His molotov exploded and the whole arrangement started crawling with flames, two more explosions putting the jeep behind us.

  His outfit like a munitioned coat of arms, Junco was like an old-time fighter pilot as he fired from the rooftop sniper mount, leaning through the airborne blotting of blast-stains that were instantly left behind. He had no goggles and I realised he detected the Mantarosa only by the hysterico-gravitational behaviour of the vehicles around us. A little chaos panel beside him on the coning tower controlled his ride. Against blurring wasteland the colour of rust, he twisted the gun around at the Porsche, which instantly braked to fall out of range. I was so affected by the scene I momentarily lost control of my accent.

  A car that looked like it had crawled out from under a rock broke toward us - it seemed to have been made from a dead icebox and some tractor wheels, but it locked us in against the ambulance. It jerked sideways, putting a slight smile in the Mantarosa’s flank. The co-pilot was stoking a fire built in a kettle drum. Murphy fired past my nose and they backed off.

  The kit car shooter had cleared his tackle and now fired diagonally across our hood into the ambulance’s turbine, which sucked the cable in and dragged the whole spraddle car off the road like a toy - I braked as the kit car smashed past our snout and disappeared into the back of the ambulance. The whole deal exploded and everyone swerved away from the dirty maelstrom as bonus lightning flashed up through the rising cloud. All except the Porsche, which had been powering forward again, and now crunked into the wreckage. The angle of impact brought her down lights first and swung her like wedding flowers into the off. I saw bits of flaring airfoil and what looked to be a ragged driveshaft going end-to-end like a caber.