The sky was overcast, the moon invisible. The scent of cold woodsmoke, the faint stench of the campground reminded Sage of Wharfedale, and a barmy army bender that he’d shared with Ax Preston, four years and a thousand lifetimes ago. At the foot of the grassy bank below the dead cars sculpture they stopped and he began to kiss her. She opened her coat; she unfastened the fascinating hooks and eyes in the front of the stiff bodice so his clumsy, urgent hands could find her breasts. She was thinking that the dull way she felt, not aroused at all, would have been okay for Ax. Ax didn’t mind if you were a bit out of tune for sex. But Sage never wanted anything but bona fide celestial music—
‘You’re thinking about Ax.’
‘Yes.’
They parted and sat on the ground, a few feet away from each other. Fiorinda was shaking. She desperately didn’t want this, but here it was.
‘Fee. Do you love me best? Do you love me more than you love him?’
‘I loved you first, only I didn’t know it. I love him with all my heart, but I’ve never felt about Ax the way I feel about you.’
‘Then come away with me. We can’t do this. This is impossible. We have to leave, jump ship, before he gets back. I can’t lie to Ax. I can’t bear it anymore.’
‘He’s not coming back, Sage. That’s why he took the Jade. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but he’s not coming back. Fucking Romania in November, fucking Danube dams, was it likely? We accepted it, we said yes, yes, fine, fine, we paid no attention because we wanted him to go. We thought it would be a break from pretending, a nice little holiday. But he left because he knew we were cheating on him.’
‘Cheating on him? Huh? How do you—’
‘You know we were.’
‘He wouldn’t leave us like that, saying nothing. He wouldn’t just walk out—’
‘Yes he would. It’s exactly what Ax would do. Do the necessary thing, cost what it costs, and sort the details later. He decided to get out of our way.’
‘Oh, God. You’re right.’
‘I know I’m right.’
Sage gasped in agony, the recent past suddenly, horribly, irevocably present to him: Ax coming into the studio at Tyller Pystri that last morning, looking so alone, so lost. Oh God, and his father died two months ago. He made nothing of it, so neither did we. We ignored him. Clear and sharp, how callously they’d betrayed that beautiful guy, who has given his life for us, time and again. How they’d thought, we’ll have our secret life, and it will be okay because he’ll never know… As if Ax wouldn’t know that they had stopped loving him. He covered his face.
‘Oh Ax. Shit, I can hardly bear to look at you.’
Fiorinda looked at him, unflinching. ‘Yeah. You and me, we’re just fuck-buddies. It’s Ax you love, I knew that. You’d better get out of here. Go after him.’
She stood up. Sage stood too, and grabbed her. They clung to each other, bone-hard. This is it, he knew: right now, our only chance. Drive the van to Southampton Water, get a ride across to France, find a plane that’s going back to the real world. We’ll live in Alaska, up in the mountains, cabin in the forest, lose ourselves, never hear about Ax’s England again. The big crazy Englishman and his beautiful wife: I’ve dreamed of that. We’ll be happy.
Just have to make sure we never speak his name.
You have to come with me. You’re right, he knows. This is what he wanted, for us to be gone before he gets back.’
‘No!’ she sobbed, pulling away. ‘I won’t leave Ax. I won’t ever leave him.’
He wouldn’t let go. He kissed her, eyes and cheeks and hair, forcing his tongue between her teeth, mastering her body, overwhelmed by his own strength, by sheer despair. Fiorinda fought back, struggling, terrified, knowing she hadn’t a chance—
He backed off, staring at her. She pulled her dress and her coat together.
‘That’s interesting,’ she said, clipped and cold. ‘I never thought I could be afraid of you.’
‘What have you to be afraid of?’ said Sage. ‘You could fry me to a cinder in a moment.’ And where is Ax? Where is Ax to say fuck, what is this? This is a nightmare. Who started this stupid conversation? Stop this, you lunatics… Fiorinda crouched on the grass, her face on her knees. Sage knelt beside her, head bowed.
Silence.
‘What can we do?’ she whispered. ‘Tell me, please?’
‘We can go back to the way we were,’ said Sage at last. ‘You and Ax will be lovers, and I will be your best friend. It worked. All we lose is the sex, and that’s no loss. I’m not fit to be your lover. I knew I wasn’t.’
‘But what shall we tell him?’
‘That I tried to rape you? That I can never touch you again? On an open line?’
‘Sage, don’t… We could write to him. We could send a letter by courier. But oh, what if someone else read it? You can’t be sure what happens to a letter.’
‘We can’t tell him,’ said Sage. ‘Ax is flying dambuster raids in decrepit Cold War bombers, with half-trained eco-warrior pilots, and I don’t have to be there to know he’s taking insane risks with his life. We can’t tell him this.’
‘We have to wait until he comes back,’ whispered Fiorinda.
‘Yes,’ said Sage, clutching at straws. ‘We’ll tell him, best we can, on that open line, that we love him, we need him, and he should come home soon as he can.’
‘When he comes back we’ll tell him what you said, that you and I can’t be lovers anymore, he’ll understand and it will be all right.’
‘Yes. Now I’m going to the van.’
They stood up. Fiorinda, biting her lip, said, ‘Sage, don’t take it all on yourself. It was me too, never doubt that. I was in it with you, all the way.’
Cruel to be kind. He steeled himself to hold her (one last time, because from now on friends can hug Fiorinda, but not me); but she looked so forlorn. ‘It will be okay, baby. It will be all right.’ And now let go. Let your arms drop. Walk away and leave her crying. Go on, do it. You knew from the start it would come to this in the end.
Fiorinda walked into Rivermead, passing the hippy watchmen in their self-elected livery of red and blue, who had probably heard and seen most of that. So it goes. No secrets from my household guards. Stone Age Royalty. This brand new mediaeval bedroom that feels so ominous… The bed was not made up, no one had known she would sleep here. She took a quilt from one of the carved oak chests and lay under it, on the lumpy, scratchy, embroidered bedspread. We won’t fuck, and we’ll work hard. Ax will come home, and everything will be okay. She felt shattered but relieved, as if something rotten had burst open.
She was in shock. The pain didn’t start until later.
Ax did not get back for Christmas. Since all was well at home, he’d decided to stay on in Romania after the dambusting, for a fact-finding tour—then go straight to the Flood Countries Conference in Amsterdam, in January.
The Conference, which had started life as a meeting for alt.techies, had grown in the planning. It had become a major event, the first truly Pan-European gathering of Countercultural leaders and luminaries, journalists and activists and academics, since the Crisis began. A few years ago national governments would have been uniting to suppress by force. Not any more. The eco-warriors, the techno-green revolutionaries, might be the only people with any solutions.
Sage and Fiorinda were trapped: they had no plan but the one they’d formed, half-drunk and in shock, after the Blue Lagoon that night. Unjustly, irrationally, they felt abandoned. They desperately needed him and where was Ax? Too busy saving the world. You go for it, they told him, on the open line. Obviously you should be there. You do what you have to do. We miss you like hell, but we can run the show for a while longer.
Ax’s entourage came home. The Netherlands government had not been happy about having Mr Preston at the Conference as England’s Ceremonial Head of State; and that suited Ax fine. He would be travelling as a private citizen from now on. Christmas and New Year went by. There were reminders (street
-fighting, rural terrorism) of how near they were to the edge, and to what extent the stability they’d achieved rested on the personality of one man: but then the Conference began, and all was well.
It was like the Islamic Campaign, England watching Ax on the news.
The Flood Countries Conference had caught the mediafolks’ imagination, and was inspiring feats of broadcasting that hadn’t been attempted since Ivan/Lara. It was no easier to get hold of Ax in person than it’d been when he was in Romania, but his friends could follow his exploits on radio and video, and sometimes on live tv.
It was as if someone had opened a window in a stuffy room. They’d been locked in on themselves for so long. Now something was happening in Amsterdam, in the Troppenmuseum and the Lyceum, that revived the thrilling atmosphere of Dissolution Summer. Do we make through it to techno-green Utopia? Or do we fling ourselves into the dark? It seemed as if these questions were really being decided.
The Few and friends gathered at the Insanitude to watch Ax dominating the Data Qurantine debate: arguing fiercely for restored global connectivity, while roundly condemning irresponsible attempts to break out of jail. It was scary for those who knew that Ax himself had hacked the quarantine, and that there were people in his live audience in Amsterdam who could out him. But he got away with it. He had the Conference eating out of his hand. Of course.
No one would have dreamed of leaking the story, but before Ax left it had been common knowledge, among Reich watchers, that the Triumvirate was in trouble. After the Data Quarantine gig Sage took the train back to Reading alone. He’d tried staying with her in Brixton, sleeping in the music room; it didn’t work. It hurt them both too much. So, Sage and Fiorinda were separated and nobody had commented, which told you something. Public figures in disgrace have to accept tactful silences, with humility… The Heads were in Battersea. Olwen Devi was in Cardiff. He spent some hours alone in the van, brooding in shame and misery.
At four in the morning he went to the Zen Self dome and let himself in to the labs. He knew that Serendip was aware of him, but she wasn’t going to start treating him like a burglar. He thought of Ax as he prepared himself. Blood test, just for the sake of interest. He grinned sourly at the stress hormone profile that appeared on the screen. Yeah. About what he thought. You can’t use snapshot as a crystal ball. But if you give it the right type of brainstate to work on, you might get a result… That beautiful guitar-man has an amazing ability to do the right thing, the thing that will work, putting everything else aside.
Why can’t I do that? Why am I such a fuck-up?
He had noticed, over the years, that Fiorinda sometimes knew what was going to happen before it happened; without knowing that she knew it. It wasn’t a big effect. Only a nitpicking obsessive, passionately interested in the babe’s every word, would have clocked it. Fiorinda was terrified of her own power, and it could be she had good reason. He could not put her under a scanner. But he could do what he liked to himself. We thought it was all or nothing, we never thought of side-trips, interim stages. But if Fiorinda has blindsight, and if Verlaine remembered his vision—
The drug entered him. Intravenous is slower, he waited.
A moment later he was back in the lab, wide-eyed, heart pounding, bathed in sweat. ‘Well,’ he said, aloud, when he could speak. ‘That’s…quite an answer.’
When Olwen Devi came back the next day he argued his case (telling her nothing about where he’d been). He convinced her to let him take the same massive dose again, under controlled conditions. The neurological results were thrilling. It was the solution to a long impasse—and, as so often happens, devastatingly simple. But Sage was on his own. When the other labrats tried the new approach each of them in turn received a stark, imperious warning.
Go no further, or you will be destroyed.
They had reached the final engagement. There was only one champion now.
In another enclave of Ax’s England a very different feeling was stirring. Mr Preston has found a new role, on a larger stage. Of course he’ll be back, he’ll complete his five-year term, nobody doubts that! But it’s time to start thinking the unthinkable, who will come after him? Countercultural President is a post which has become—as everyone knows, though Ax has preserved the forms of democracy—the centre of all power and policy in England.
We must be ready.
A few interested parties met in Benny Preminder’s office: an eclectic mix. Four devout Celtics, gamey-smelling hippies in full neo-mediaeval drag. Two middle-aged Countercultural superstars from the Green Second Chamber. Five ‘suits’—up-and-coming mainstream government hopefuls—who had grasped that the other Counterculture was much broader-based and stronger than the rockstar version. Techno-green Utopia can’t compete with the ancient roots. Benny himself presided, and those fuckers at the Insanitude would have been surprised at how he relished the irony.
What about the Minister for Gigs? Wouldn’t he be Ax’s natural heir?
Murmurs of assent, and respect from the new radical Think Tank. Benny did not go along with the current fashion for ‘discovering’ Aoxomoxoa as an arts-science genius. Please. This is still the fellow who brought ‘The Diarrhoea Song’ to Top Of The Pops. But he was tactful.
‘I don’t think Sage is our man,’ Benny smiled discreetly. ‘He’s a very clever guy, of course, but he’s not a political animal. We must look elsewhere.’
‘Then it should be Fiorinda.’ proposed one of the hippies, a massive Amazon, her features etched from brow to chin in spirals of indigo.
Or what about Ax’s nephew, Albion Preston? An infant prince, a regency? That could be attractive, but the country isn’t ready for hereditary rule, not yet.
Rob Nelson? Who he? Not a strong enough image…
Fiorinda then. They could all live with the idea of Fiorinda.
Benny let them talk. When his expert knowledge was invoked once more, he agreed that Fiorinda was a good possibility. ‘The little lady is a realist,’ he said, with that discreet smile, ‘As long as we’re not planning a hostile takeover.’
They went on trying out ideas: cautiously, always with the proviso that Ax steps down of his own free will. Always with the assumption that the next President is close to Ax, someone who’ll keep up the good work. Benny said little: it was early days. None of them had noticed the empty chair at the head of the table—or if they’d noticed, they said nothing.
He felt like someone who has been watching a stage magician, or a trick artist. Nothing seems to be happening. Vague passes in the air, random brushstrokes. Then suddenly, from nowhere, the picture emerges and you see that every move was planned. Nothing was left to chance, you can’t believe you didn’t get it sooner… These rockstars, they’re so easy. Just set them up, and watch them fall.
The winter became very cold. Old people died in unheated rooms, recalcitrant beggars who insisted on sleeping rough froze to death. Fiorinda, who had hated the Call-up, was grateful for it now. The delightful prospect of being organised into forced labour (real soon now…) seemed to be keeping borderline cases at home. In Amsterdam the green nazis were saying, on the strength of two hard winters, that it was Die Eiszeit. Europe would die by ice, not by flood. And let Gaia’s will be done. The Conference was running well beyond schedule, but Ax had decided to stay until the end, since everything was fine at home.
Oh yes, Ax. Everything’s fine… How could he be two hundred miles away, and so totally out of reach? She dreaded the phone calls: still on an open line. The Netherlands authorities reserved the right eavesdrop on all the delegates’ telecoms, but surely Mr Preston could have fixed something. Obviously he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to talk to Fiorinda and Sage in private. But that was okay: they didn’t want to talk to him either, not until they could touch him. They longed for his return, and dreaded it.
On Ax’s birthday the Reich held a mediaeval banquet. It was supposed to be in the Quadrangle at the San, but the marquee proved to be too huge, so they’d moved it to Ho
rse Guards Parade. There were too many vegetarians to justify roasting an ox, the splendid pavilion was made of something other than painted canvas and the flaming torches were fake: but the ambience was authentic. Freezing mediaeval draughts. Jongleurs and troubadours working the crowd. Armed guards in fantastical red and blue livery. The cross-tables were packed with Insanitude staff and their families, notable Boat People, Volunteer Initiative stalwarts, exemplary crewpersons. The Few and friends had a High Table on a red and blue swathed dais, but descended from thence in fine chivalric spirit to serve the dinners.
There was an interminable award ceremony, countless prizes for Best This and Most Promising That. Trust Allie, the prizes were good and the winners were popular: the Admin Queen knows how to keep people pulling together. David Sale, as special guest, made a jolly speech about being a wannabe radical rockstar (he did not mention heroin, or Celtic blood sacrifice). Fiorinda responded, with a a few good jokes and the little wild-cat grin. She did not mention how depressing she found the company of those liveried guards; their far-from-mediaeval weapons on open display. While she was speaking Sage and the Heads turned up, skull-masked. She couldn’t help noticing that Sage was extremely smashed.
She smiled through the applause, and took her place again between Allie and Dilip. Rob and Felice had a five-month-old baby girl with them, Ferdelice: fast asleep, unbelievably beautiful. Cherry was at home in Lambeth with Dora, who was two weeks off her due date and getting pangs that might be real. Allie told the exciting story of when she’d been birth-companion to her sister. She didn’t want her own kids, she wasn’t the type, but she loved her twin niece and nephew, totally bonded to them. Chip, in tipsy solidarity, announced he was feeling broody—Fiorinda kept an eye on the Heads’ end of the High Table. Fergal was there, that was good. He wouldn’t be afraid to pitch in if there was trouble with the boss. Nor think any worse of Sage for it, alas. Hard-drinking men understand each other.
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