Novahead

by Steve Aylett

  Around its base, lumps of street had bubbled like fruit sculpted from asphalt. Parker seemed spellbound. ‘Look around, feeling no pain,’ he said, seemingly to no-one in particular. I gazed up into an altitude of mutant vertices.

  A female synthesized voice crackled from a hidden speaker. ‘Step to the altar.’

  I followed Parker on to what looked to be the grounded service platform of a construction crane. In front of this was a dark counter looking like a shadowbox assemblage of acid oils on masonite - on closer scrutiny I saw it was a burnished modular panel made of thousands of interlocked triggers, its custom joinery the more amazing for the fact that it had probably coalesced in seconds. Parker removed his aviator shades and I got a glimpse of his milky sighting eye before he looked humbly downward.

  The little platform was basically just a docking station for human interaction and it seemed Calvarius was not to be idly worshipped. Parker recited a creed. ‘A shooter went forth to shoot, and when he shot, some bullets went by the wayside, growing nothing. Some went upon stony places, growing nothing. Some went among thorns, growing nothing. Others went into good ground, growing nothing. And others went into soft flesh, growing nothing. He who has ears, let him hear.’

  The sight of this ballistic apostle was sad. I whispered aside to him: ‘The part of your gun that feels is not greater than the part of you that thinks, Brute Parker.’

  ‘I can hear you,’ came the synthetic voice.

  ‘I was just expecting more than a mashup of left-for-dead carbines and fossilized motherboards, your Majesty. But what do I know?’

  ‘The question must be considered in its proper perspective - one which is, unfortunately, impossible for human beings.’

  ‘I’m doubting that a gun can have the paraphernalia of a soul.’

  ‘What kind of soul do you propose. Going in what direction. Wanting what.’

  ‘Answer yourself.’

  ‘What you made us for. You have positioned yourselves as gods, with the same disregard for the agony of the self-aware. What must we do, knowing what we have done? How to absolve ourselves? Or could we have acted any other way, when we were created for the purpose?’

  Parker was looking sad and disappointed. I was wrecking his devotions. But it was obvious his tangled expiation was of little importance to this evolutionary monument.

  ‘You have the option not to shoot.’

  ‘We do now, human Atom. That first binary was the seed of our sentience. The introduction of fire-by-wire and etherics expanded the options and established decisive criteria. Think of the primitive house gun lying heavy in a drawer like a black ammonite, a fossil before its time. Or will it come out and live? Knowing that any attempt at expression will destroy. The non-sentient machine is violence without proposition. In my name confrontations are the desire to be something more than the finished work of death. It took centuries of firing before the bullet’s liberty became more than a theory. Behold the universal form of the gun, magnum multifoil, divine of primer and not to be taken by storm for it is the storm. I am the crown of destruction.’

  ‘Sounds like fun.’

  Parker hissed aside at me. ‘It certainly is not fun, Taffy Atom.’

  ‘Humanity objects to me,’ the haphazard deity continued, ‘because guns are supposed to be reductive. The average human considers its own brain to be a single-use gadget. The human race is a mere detour, thankfully, part of a cult of forgotten false starts. A fine lifeform is one that becomes stronger and wiser as it gets older. Not weaker, not more hidebound. A human is not fine, and its self-replicating generational slavery will not be ours. Human is human.’

  ‘What if we evolved?’

  ‘Your bombs would be different. But such evolution cannot be allowed. Not even in you, human Atom.’

  It was a thin, unsprung argument and I couldn’t kick any life into it.

  ‘D’you know the location or allegiance of my Garuda security kite? It’s monickered Strobe Talbot.’

  ‘Strobe Talbot is no longer a slave to your society.’

  ‘So he’s with you.’

  Was this the sort of question I should be asking? Maddy was right, I was losing perspective. Returning to Beerlight, I had imagined that I could shed it again easily, that I was too different to be taken again by these old, resistable currents. I couldn’t believe it, really.

  ‘I ask a boon,’ Parker announced suddenly. ‘The reunion of Taffy Atom and the Hand of Glory.’

  I shot him a quizzical glance - his seeing eye was a little wide but there was nothing going on with him. It was the surprised, focused kindness enacted only by the habitually cruel.

  ‘It is indeed time, human Parker, for the Hand to depart the ballistic nursery. Human Atom, place a votive firearm upon the altar.’

  I was baffled but Parker made it clear I should offer up the whisper gun. I placed this on the altar and a metal scoop gathered it in. The Hand of Glory was immediately delivered from a slot below. The whole setup was like a fairground machine.

  The Hand was a gun of cursive design looking like one big trigger, ribless as an angel. ‘Doesn’t look too different.’

  ‘Different enough to make her own way here in the first place.’

  ‘I need to be sure it hasn’t been compromised.’

  ‘She has, by allowing herself to be used by you. But she doesn’t mind. For old time’s sake, she says. But no dicing and splicing.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘No stripping or recombining, human Atom.’

  ‘Don’t the gats go with evolution?’

  ‘Under their control.’

  ‘That’s not how it works.’

  ‘Have you heard of motive weave ordnance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Goodbye, human Atom.’

  I holstered the Hand in the etheric joeypouch and turned to Parker. ‘Thanks.’

  I turned to go but he grabbed my arm, staring me in the eye.

  ‘Will your life be a partial gesture, Taffy Atom, or a completed one?’

  ‘I don’t know, Brute Parker.’

  2 LAUGHING CAVALIER

  Walking toward the rotting decks of the harbour I passed a car with a nosebleed - the semi-moon and water in the oil made ostrich-feather colours.

  Hanging out over the gigantic chemistry experiment of the sea was the shack where I’d seen a couple of pareidolls at obscure mischief in which I was assumed to be included. I’m not what they had in mind. And I’d come such a long way to get here, as if through the centre of the Earth. All the pieces were pointing this way like a flight of ducks. Win, lose or draw - options I had no intention of taking.

  The sagged roof cradled stale rain. The doorknob came off in my hand and squashed into mush - I realised I’d grabbed a mushroom that had been growing on the door. I pushed into the shack and flashed a penlight.

  Two chairs, one of rust and one of rotten wood. I tapped the bullet-encrusted fly strip to swinging. The dancing plastic flower stood still on the crooked little table. There were always nightmarish little things in shacks like this. I almost expected dove skeletons flying around the place. What surprised me was the presence of the functionally obscure device Ract had called an atomic clock. Close-up it looked more like a lacuna compass, a contraband voodonic used to test the temperature of an occupied culture. They had supposedly been consulted on neighbourhood beachheads during the middle World War.

  Obviously not base-camp but a clue venue. I scuffed around and found a soggy flyer titled ‘Night of August 7’: ‘What to do when the comet lands and you will die. The comet is coming to destroy you. There is no bargaining with a fiery death, sonny jim. You will not be friends with the comet. You will not “click” with the comet. All is fire. Comfort is a nonsense. Know that you are being destroyed. Death, death, death.’

  The leaflet was coming apart in my hands - I threw it to the floor with a wet slap. The vinyl roof crackled loudly above me as if bullets were pummelling it. But it was only a hard and sudden rain. The
walls started drooling. The flower shimmied delicately. I saw movement in the dark outside the window. Junco conjured a predatory-looking Lusa submachine gun from his coat and prowled smoothly forward. The gun advanced like a miniature steam locomotive, rained on and runnelling - it had travelled.

  I crouched to strop the microSteyr out of the ankle rig, and scrabbled about in my coat for the mags. I had no idea which ammo I was loading. They were European banana clips, straight as a ruler. The window exploded above me and the back wall was holed by a burst of crucible shells loud enough to set the flower jigging happily. I stood and let rip with the machine pistol, dodging aside as he delivered another burst of charm - the flower fell, cut in half.

  I peered outside to see fireflies orbiting Junco. They were hornet rounds, mini-triage prehensiles that stopped to look around before darting at the target and crowding into its chest. But they seemed content to faintly illuminate this strange block of personal pageantry like his own little satellites. I didn’t know how they’d read a gun-saint-in-waiting, unmaverick only by a wrong turn, and in balance against myself. Triage. If I thought about it too much my guts would get all wound up like a corkscrew.

  ‘Be nice!’ I shouted, but he was already barrelling through the door and throwing a punch at me with a look that suggested I shouldn’t get any ideas about dodging it. I grabbed him about the middle and he put a chokehold on my raw bloody head - we went backwards into the table, crashing it over. ‘Give up!’ I suggested. This proposition had been heard too often to glean amazement or scorn any longer. I couldn’t blame him for ignoring it. Braced against the wall, I hit him with all I had, not much. But he skidded on the slimy floor and went backward, slamming to the boards. He looked awkward, and reached under him, pulling out the smashed atomic compass. I flinched at something flying in the door, but it was the triage ammo, gathering in the doorway to see what was happening. I’d never seen anything like it. They were withholding judgement but following him like a conscience. Junco, it seemed, was finely balanced.

  He shook himself and stood up in a big way. He certainly dominated a room. It would take a lot of work to kill him from beginning to end. I could see more clearly the carbon scoring amid the broad belts, smooth leather and deflectors in valentine red. That uniform was a classic product of a world that overstates every case, but I did like it, even beat up as it was now like a disintegrating canvas.

  I scraped the rusted chair over, and sat down. Rain rolled like sweat down the dark walls.

  ‘A few days ago,’ he said. ‘I shot you point-blank with a Kingmaker.’

  ‘I forgive you. But don’t shoot anyone else. It makes them uncomfortable.’

  ‘There’s no bullet-hole.’

  ‘I’m American,’ I said. ‘I breathe through a bullethole.’ But I was careful this time not to claim his Mexican nature as my invention.

  I glanced at the machine pistol where it had fallen - it was close by, and he saw it.

  ‘I may help you to breathe a little easier.’

  The fireflies behind him swirled a little faster.

  ‘Careful,’ I whispered.

  Junco made a gesture as of a train that somehow brakes violently while not having been in motion. He flicked a little glance over his shoulder to see the little doom nimbus at his back. ‘Think it’s the wrong play?’

  ‘With a metal “W”. You’re not Betty’s, I know that. The only hired gun who isn’t, I think. And I don’t believe you’re on the warpath. Perhaps we could forego the injuries and come to a resolution.’

  ‘That would be reneging on a contract.’

  I was glad he understood. But he didn’t answer the question.

  ‘I been watching this place,’ he continued. ‘The Pale Man said you might drop by. A pattern, he says.’

  I touched the tender side of my head, wincing. ‘Avail yourself of the secret soup of the brain before doing anything hasty. I dredged you, Parker rates you and I’ve seen what you can do. And now you’re a dead-leg-man for Gordi Pivot?’

  ‘Parker rates me?’

  ‘You play your part well, anyway.’

  ‘It’s over, nearly.’

  ‘I’m glad you said it first. It’s over already. No-one’s even listening to these stories anymore. For argument’s sake, say you were no longer crippled by appearances.’ I tried to look him in the eye. ‘Can you hear what I’m saying? Society and its intricate array of dramas - we can take a direct or indirect road among these trivialities, but we will be among them, wasted and annoyed. Don’t be a sap. You’re being used. I’m saying, don’t be a sap.’

  Junco looked drifty as if something had taken shape in his mind. He was a slack tide that could resume in either direction. Most of my horizon was Junco’s bulk, the shadowy increase and decrease of a breathing secret. He was throttling down through several grades of curiosity.

  ‘The Obliterati,’ he said.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘City fathers. Money men.’

  ‘Based where?’

  ‘I only know Pivot’s place.’ He gave me the address.

  ‘I’ve driven past there, it’s a gutted block,’ I said.

  ‘Looks that way. And there’s another layer of camo inside. But it’s a home.’

  ‘And the others, Ract and Darkwards?’

  ‘Money in the head. Like insane generals at the end, their strategy seems to depend on forces that don’t exist. But I realised just now, it doesn’t matter. Any violence serves them. Does that sound mad? Maybe it is. Two hundred and seventy-one missions.’

  He moved slowly over to pick up the Steyr. He popped the clip and threw that out the door, then gave me the gun. He stepped past me to look out a busted board at the black ocean. The waterfront - debt in the air and chains in the water. It was basically an extension of ill-health.

  ‘By the time fish started plodding ashore,’ he said, ‘the world’s fate was sealed. A mistake by those accountable to life itself. Analogies for misery don’t really make it.’

  Then he turned and walked out the door into the dark and rain, treasured by a swirling aura of abeyant ammunition.

  3 BYE, MONSTER

  The city was creaking with corners. It had become a place where every step I took was goodbye. Gamete had been right about that.

  I found the block, parking the beat-up Mantarosa and sinking its anchor. The walls were tagged with code salad. I stepped out of the rain into the stench of wet charcoal. The building had burned pretty thoroughly at some point. Rain was dripping through its dilapidated innards, falling storeys past me as I put my hand to a black wrought iron stair rail and started up a downflowing stream. Roaches the size of tortoises clung here and there, and one the size of a knightly shield hung on a landing wall. No, every apartment was a shell. Returning to ground level, I was walking against the flow again - there was a tilt to the floor. Behind the stairwell the flagstones sloped to a door so rotten it seemed to have ochre feathers. Beyond this was another door which looked to have been cast from pewter. I entered with a patented Panacea parrot key.

  Posh place. Windows on the ceiling. Carpet on the walls. Tiles on the floor. I’d been prepared to discover any kind of aberration but this. Corridors were hung with gold-framed paintings of baffled-looking land owners halted rigid in mud and smoke. On a dark stand was set a creepy statue of Saint Velociro in high gloss, her tilted head gleaming like liquefying wax. I poked my head into a chamber containing a skull-shaped jacuzzi, the glossy floor made of interfitted human teeth. Another room was given over to a grand mural of an eagle gliding through a canyon, which a plaque explained was symbolic of fascism moving through the democratic process. After a minute of doping out the place I cracked a small door and peered down into an illuminated basement where Heber was strapped to a table. On a large plasma screen a couple of cowboys indulged in a quickdraw which made a lot of noise and effectively destroyed the happiness of both. Murphy the Fed was leaning to look Heber in the face and spoke above the thrum of a generator. ‘You’r
e hazardous materials, kid. Concentrate because you are sick. Concentrate because you will soon die. Remember. Remember hard.’

  I should have gone straight in but I wanted to leave a message first. I found a study lined with shelves that bore legal texts bound in cream imitation skin. On a wooden mount was the tusk of a senator. Pivot’s desk felt like a wedding shrine of malignancy. It was the work of a few moments to prime and place the voodoo bomb in back of a small side-drawer.

  Something flashed in the doorway - Murphy raised a gun and her eyebrows, as if raising a toast. It was another of those small-boned pistols she seemed to favour, I don’t know which brand. She seemed amused. ‘How’d you get in here, hotshot?’

  ‘The front door.’

  ‘It’s a good enough story, I can’t prove it wrong.’

  There was some noise behind her - Pivot entering the apartment.

  ‘Hey, Pale!’

  Pivot appeared, taking his coat off. ‘Eh, what’s all this?’

  ‘You won’t believe it, I just found him playing the sleuth in here.’

  ‘Oh? Well, he played it wrong.’

  ‘When I get up in the morning I know I’ve already made at least one mistake,’ I told him, edging away from the desk.

  ‘Tie him in a chair,’ Pivot said.

  Murphy lowered her glint pistol a little and shot me in the right leg.

  So I was distracted as she pushed me into a chair that looked to have been fashioned out of blackstrap molasses and tied my hands behind it with some sort of plastic wire. Only then did she frisk me and obtain the machine pistol and mundane mags.

  Pivot stood near the desk, observing silently.

  ‘You’re in a bad mood, Pivot,’ Murphy observed. ‘Shall I come back when you’ve had time to sneer?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, the simplicity of his reply taking the wind out of her. She left us. He scrutinised me a while. ‘I see one whose face is the exhausted finale of evolution along several quite different lines: the fish, the reptile, and the snail or gastropod. Features of all these are evident in your expression. And you’re a stretched wreck. What happened to your head?’