by Steve Aylett
I was not sure I could accept that, like the snake that surprised Gamete and the kid in the Fadlands, such a small and simple thing could stand as a breathtakingly comprehensive reproach to a universe of both organised and chaotic evil.
Gamete was looking at me very intently. I didn’t say anything.
‘Well, whatta you think of the idea?’
‘I think you should sink it lashed to a cannon.’
‘If you don’t know the truth,’ he pronounced gravely, ‘you’re not yet a man. What’s this?’
I looked at the food. ‘It appears to be some sort of caramelised hammer.’
He raised eyebrows which seemed typeset.
It had started raining, the cafe window was out of focus. Car-crash bouquets that had taken root long ago were rippling in the drool of water on glass.
‘So, what now? More of your conscience’s fiery exhalations?’
‘No, I see no point in hurrying against eternity,’ he said, and seemed to grow older with every word. ‘The chain of an epigram is armour preserving nothing.’
‘They might organise some crass laudation when you die for real.’
‘Famous in the flowers, so what? Human beings have no conception of timescale. Even the greatest art is immortal only temporarily. Beyond life language becomes transparent, dimensionless, and finally evaporates.’ He exhibited an exhaustion I could neither question nor equal. ‘Besides, is it necessary? The spring of renewal is less fertile each time, and less real, and more desperate.’
‘You’re not very bold, really.’
‘No, I’m not. And it’s not mystical when I say I can’t take it anymore. I can only resurrect so many times into this wasteland. I’m done.’
‘That’s ... very sad.’
Gamete stood. ‘You seem a bit over-resurrected, yourself. Take better care. Goodbye.’ And slapping on the hat he’d just swiped from the cadaver, he walked out.
As he disappeared from view, my heart changed colour.
PART 3
SILA
1 LOGICAL HARM
I flipped a drain hat on Swingle Street and climbed in, descending an iron ladder. The penlight clenched in my teeth flashed on a shapeless plastic coracle moored at the ladder’s base. Beerlight’s subway system had flooded long ago and bull sharks pulled into the ancient stations. A scabby oar took me slowly past dead miles of electrical cording that striped the tunnel. On the black water here and there floated a skull that more properly belonged on the street. The penlight smudged over twitching rats and black pipes. The giant beaver dam ahead proved to be a tangle of bones and connective tissue. A dog appeared on the crescent, looking at me and slopping its chops. I climbed on to the adjacent maintenance platform. The dog folded itself down like a deckchair and that was the last interesting thing I saw it do.
A dirty panel opened into a utility tunnel, at the end of which a black door bore one strip of police tape: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS - the word ‘BE’ had been marked in between the last two words. I knocked. Nothing.
I entered to find gun dealer Brute Parker, his ghost-assed head massive and blank under a bare lightbulb, sitting on a workstool in total silence.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just thinking aloud. And then you show up seeming to be in more trouble than I had thought you able to achieve, Taffy Atom.’
‘My death’s backdated. Betty’s obviously going to withhold my respiration privileges. It’s all anyone’s talking about, behind their faces. I’m walking around disguised as myself.’
The stained room was cluttered with munitions and ballistic baubles. Racks of banana clips, bleeding crates of exproprium, gun manuals swollen with damp, teen half-guns, economy rifles, mudra knives, clove knives, morton forks and what appeared to be a couple of nuclear fuel rods. The corners were silted up with propped carbines. A spanner lay in a canary cage. ‘You need nostril insurance,’ Parker said.
‘Double-barrelled’s too bulky. What’s this?’
Parker stood off the stool and looked at the piece I was lifting from the zinc display altar. It was a fifteen-year-old Mokusatsu Intol rifle - I hadn’t recognised it because it was a double-neck. After shunning smart guns for years Parker had finally become a believer, and how. He no longer considered the pulse grid a presumptuous meddling with the clean lines of gun karma and his armamentarium had become a keeping garden for transitional ammo.
‘This’ll have an etheric backwash. I’ll ignore myself out of existence.’
‘No, Taffy Atom,’ he said, reaching to flip a baffle on the stock. I glimpsed behind his mirrored aviator shades - his sighting eye looked to be clouded over. ‘This generates a recoil screen. It’s a bit of a guzzler but as far as smarts go it’s a classic.’
‘I remember the days when a gun didn’t need feeding like a collie. But only just.’
I replaced the Intol and continued browsing, always aware of the proximity of Parker’s iron muscularity and racist eyebrows. His body was a LaBrae Tar Pit of slugs and shrapnel, battle wounds from a career in grudgecraft.
Everyone had a general idea of Brute Parker and his difficulties, his stages of struggle and spiritual progress. It was followed with interest because he had gone so far, so steadily and absolutely in one direction. Revenge carried him a long way and then a little further by the sort of hollow momentum that carried others a lifetime. He had practised on synchronised swimmers and could fire the alphabet. The apparently reckless accuracy of his aim derived from his total willingness to accept the consequences. And having hitched his fortunes to the trigger it had led him here at last, hulking about in the foundations of the city as a respected dealer in bespoke firearms and tutor in Full Catastrophe Self Defence. It was good to have friends in deep places.
Tilling my good hand through a box of Parker’s signed, hand-cast slugs, I spotted an axe and picked it up, hefting the weight a little. ‘I suppose I could settle the matter from behind, with this.’
‘You a comedian?’
The notion was not a new one. I put the axe down and wandered around some more. The walls were pasted with thousands of rotten pictures. I examined a monotone still of an old-time city. Buildings like crosswords. Here and there were more recent pictures of gun girls like Rosa Control and Bleach Pastiche. Behind them the wall looked and felt like an eraser. I tapped a numb powerline. The air smelled of decay and the violent staleness of burnt water.
‘Trouble with a Fibonacci pistol is once it starts firing it never stops,’ Parker was saying, pointing to the nickel-plated Corona piece in ‘Guest Gun Corner’. He showcased a teal-green knife designed for three kinds of pain, a crate of bellbottom Volliox grenades, slow-release ammo and other fab new agonies. Parker’s reputation for stellar mayhem had always drawn a crowd. The populace and its ever-expanding capacity for assent had to have a back end. Subjected to every sort of check and exhaustion, humiliation and indulgence, they sought alternative injustices, at least. Parker’s series of gun shops served a bottomless craving. Depending on the client a firearm was a way to man-up artificially or merely the last indulgence of a weary sensualist. Surrounded by extrapolation ordnance their predicaments and grievances became as volatile and golden as gasoline. Gone were the days when society’s dupes would approach a mercenary gingerly, all hell money and apprehension. This was now a city where to bomb a street before walking it was an elementary precaution.
Though no longer hung up on vanilla ordnance he still had plenty on offer. He showed me an outrageous raw mortar built from a hinged sinkpipe and a coffee grinder with two silver coffin-handles for a grip. By flanging varied-bore pipes into the barrel it could fire everything from tiki mugs to tin crucifix crossbars. It reminded me of the old Frost popper that fired shot glasses.
‘How many targets?’ Parker asked.
‘Six to ten, maybe more depending on bodyguards.’
‘My carnage teacher used to say, “When the victim is ready, the bastard appears.”’ Parker referred to galoots as ‘slug absorbe
rs’. ‘Will you be up close?’
‘Might be. Everyone seems to want to talk. You heard of El Mozote?’
‘Yes. Back in the day he took a gun through customs disguised as a bomb. The only way he’ll enter heaven is climbing over the wall with a knife clenched between his teeth.’ Parker’s ongoing description matched the man of action and bloodshot charisma I’d encountered. He was ostensibly hiding out from twenty-seven consecutive death sentences the skeletized government had surely forgotten about. In short, any attempt to capture Junco in words was impossible - the best that could be done was to alert the neighbourhood to his presence by the simple expedient of a ‘sonic ostrich’ which could detect malice in the thickest night.
‘Have you such an ostrich?’
‘No.’
Parker concluded his description by opining that a thick mustache caused frown ricochet, bouncing emotion back into the body in a conservation cycle like a capped battery. This way a man’s roots become embittered.
‘What in the rosy hell is this?’ I asked. I had found a purple mock-plastic hoop gun, tegular and precision-fitted. It was all grip and looked like a toy. ‘Where’s the payload?’
‘This is a Chapelle whisper gun,’ he said, explaining that it delivered a single cenotaphic charge that reduced the target to a small de-aquefied block of supercompressed ash with embossed monicker. Personality was abbreviated to a token remembrance that dispensed with the need to remember it the rest of the time - and ofcourse the memorial was ignored too. The gun was known as a ‘charm bracelet’.
‘Isn’t that basically an Intol the long way around?’
‘If you think that’s a long way around, Taffy Atom, take a swatch at this.’
From a rack he reached down a drum gun in a smoked-steel shell like a marlin flank.
‘HyperBohron Cold Cannon firing special triage. Leaves an infinitely regressive corpse - in other words you’ll be dead in every possible universe. Big, eh? And tidy.’
‘How does it do that?’
‘By having some common sense.’ He stripped the housing to reveal a mundane Valentine M-1 carbine, forty years old with an aftermarket exhaust.
‘Oh, I see.’
‘But it does what it says, and people love the idea,’ he said, with the slightest twitch of a smile. ‘And pay for it. 850 rounds per minute. Like spitting acorns out a ship cannon and it’s got a lot of low-end. But it’ll clear a room.’
Gun-lust was a horrific happiness too well documented to be denied and this was a pharmacy of the heart. My palms were sweating and I could hardly breathe all of a sudden. I was shaking. Parker obviously knew exactly what was happening and stood back a little, but without undue concern.
‘You’re in bad shape, Atom.’
‘But alive.’
‘Yes. But pretty soon you’ll be sitting in a buried chair maybe.’
‘Maybe.’
He reached out a piece from behind a dangling drape of Bohr inhibitor belts. ‘The Steyr MMP is your man, Taffy Atom. Pseudo-smart Mannlicher micro machine pistol. Thousand round sidespace-compression clip. Don’t joey the clips or the gun with the clip in place. Takes hornet rounds too if you want.’
‘Fire rate?’
‘Scots bar: thousand rounds a minute.’
He handed it off. It was a little smaller than a Micro-Uzi. It had a patina of enamel thin as the armour of a bluebottle and a grip in black rubber dead as a shark’s eye. The thingness of a gun, its weight, the disastrous potential in the stillness of its moving parts. Pound for pound it was tragic as charred pollen.
The number had been filed off the stock, the patch of file marks glistening like fool’s gold. This was so redundant I got a hit of a past flavour, unexpected - I was almost crying suddenly. I felt the absence of old characters. I didn’t put the gun up.
‘Firearms aren’t remedial,’ Parker said stiffly and seemingly apropos of nothing.
‘What do you know about nitrophage nerve mines, defusing them.’
‘It would take a brain surgeon to trifle with such a device, Taffy Atom. The aim is to create a novadose that puts the carrier’s head over the horizon. They used to call it a subgigantic hit but they don’t think it will be so little now, because of a chain reaction. Run and run and run a long way and you’re in business, Taffy Atom, laughing aloud.’
‘Have you seen one up close?’
‘The nearest thing I have are these.’ He pulled some yellow plastic sheeting from a crate and dipped his arm in, bringing out what looked like a pipe bomb with three short antennae. Parker explained that polygraph ordnance was calibrated to trigger in close proximity with liars and notorious for blowing the arms off the people setting them. About a third of the bomb body was taken up with an ether grid. Set for bureaucrats, the devices tended to detonate off whoever got to the office first. Finally most poly ordnance was dialled back to ignite in proximity to any human being - the results were roughly the same. Parker assured me his were old-school. It was the call of ‘bullshit’ refined into a knot of frangible steel. ‘Not a true neuroballistic device, the charge is traditional, but still, not for the faint-hearted.’
‘I’ll take the mini-Steyr, a polygraph, the charm bracelet and an ankle rig. For the Steyr, three vanilla clips and one hornet. What’s the range on the polygraph?’
‘Three feet or so, single setting.’
‘Directional?’
‘Radial. That’s why all the set-up accidents.’
I gathered up. Everything went in my coat except the Steyr in the ankle rig. The whisper gun was brittle as a phone. ‘Well, Parker, once again you and your ballistic stylings have served me well.’
‘But Taffy Atom, a question before you spring away. What’s become of your legendary side-arm the Hand of Glory? Why get so tooled up?’
‘It’s gone, Parker - left it in an energised well safe behind my old office and it’s gone.’
‘Maybe you should have hobbled it.’
‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘You missed a lot when you were on the run, Taffy Atom. When that HAARP pulse knocked out the city a few years ago, the city’s smart guns decided they didn’t want to depend on human maintenance.’
‘You’re talking about Calvarius.’
‘She went supercritical a year ago. I consider her my goddess and sovereign.’
I had to tread carefully. Gunheads had been anthropomorphising weaponry for years but the Calvarius thing was way out there.
‘I’d like to meet her,’ I said. ‘Could you arrange an audience?’
For the first time he stooped to read from his heart.
‘I’m supposed to extend you every courtesy, according to the code.’
I wasn’t sure which code he meant but went along with it. We left his black wonder room and ascended in a freight elevator. At street level the rain had let up. I had nothing to fear from the city as I walked with a shooter of such eminence. He was hopelessly insane probably, unimaginative but brilliantly hard to control.
I was thinking between buildings. What kind of religion would attract a classically-trained hitman? For years I had had only a faint notion of the existence of these clubs, though I was now aware of the main ones. The competing polarities were malice and accident. The former credo stated that we live in a sudden universe of bleak power and malevolence, a trick so big and simple it surrounds us up to and including the cells of our bodies; subordination on the grandest scale we know. The latter posited that god created the universe in a blaze of negligence. The error theory had a subsect theorizing that god had a nonbiological gameplan which was derailed by organic life. Though most people believed there was not enough irony stored in the rest-mass of the universe to account for a god of any kind, I confess I had recently been giving a superficial nod to Errorverse ritual. Everything I observed confirmed that we were living in the endless aftermath of a mistake.
My ruminations were interrupted by a red metal critter that skittered through the dark ahead of us. It was a
hermit gun, a feral AMT Smart Hardballer that borrowed crash helmets and loudhailers for shelter. We were getting close.
‘Parker,’ I said, my voice coming out strange. ‘What should I expect?’
‘It’s complicated,’ he said.
‘How complicated precisely.’
Out of nowhere Parker drew a Phillips-head Calico Tri-1000 and fired aside at a reinforced window. The glass spiderwebbed but didn’t cave. We stopped so I could study the shatter-pattern closely. The geometry of religions is interesting. Along certain vectors they can be placed over each other with no overhang and no template discrepancy. This one told a tale of propulsive inevitability. At some level Parker had always viewed the creation of firearms as a mode of movement toward god. An arrow which changes directions loses force, and he had never really deviated. For centuries guns merely had a kind of muscle memory, but when fire-by-wire joined the long list of ‘self-correcting’ systems ripe for disaster, they grew up and filled out. Soon firearms were developing so fast that prototype ammo would arrive old-fashioned in even a point-blank victim. Built-in judgement led to sentience and one night the first gun stole itself. Exploiting the already existing sanctity of sidearms in the Seceded States, Calvarius sprouted from the centre of Beerlight - a weapon that defined itself as it went along. Parker was already considered a gun saint and was the obvious candidate for novitiate, first priest and thin-ice ambassador.
He had been watching me. Some sense of care was moving in his dim tenement heart.
‘Okay,’ I told him. ‘I get it.’
We walked on, passing a dead fountain full to the brim with spent cartridges, and entered McKenna Square. What looked at first like a pointed pile of junk was a massive apparatus of intermeshed exotics, a Watts tower of stocks and cylinders from which muzzles projected like pitcher plants. It was honeycombed with little garages, editing bays for gun converts. Little pop-spanners crawled all over it like tree crabs. Calvarius was basically a mix of scrapheap, municipal sculpture and automated bodyshop. Behind the tower drifted faded flourishes of nightcloud. As we approached I thought about 2001: a Space Odyssey, in which people kept getting inconvenienced by a giant black fridge.