‘Fucking typical,’ said Jordan, bitterly. ‘The US, it’s what we always wanted. Why now? What the fuck’s he playing at? Why just him?’
Between Fiorinda and Sage there passed a long, strange look. Yes. Good morning heartbreak, come in, sit down. This empty world is ours.
‘Well,’ said Fiorinda, with a glance around, gathering the Few, ‘So Ax has gone to America. Good for him. It’s about time the Rock and Roll Reich had a US tour. We’ll just have to hold the fort for a while longer.’
The punters were given a cover story about further important travels, and they accepted it: the Floods Countries Conference had put them in an international mood. They wanted Ax back, but they liked the idea of him out there conquering the world. David Sale was thrilled. Like Jordan, he had a knee-jerk reaction to the letters U S A. The Few were shattered. Ax had been away for nearly six months. How could he not come home? How could they go on managing without him?
Jordan was even worse off. He stayed in London, at the Snake Eyes house on the Lambeth Road: a lost soul. When he tried to get himself sorted in a gangsta pub, the South London Yardies turned him over to the barmy army for correction. Fergal brought the miscreant to Battersea Reach, where Sage had been living since Ax failed to turn up: taking a break from the quest for Fiorinda and the Reich; although he couldn’t be near her—
‘If you want to stay in this town,’ Sage told him, ‘get yourself a street map. There are places I wouldn’t go without an invite, an’ I’ve been living here off an’ on for years. Also, do you really have a use for a firearm—?’
Jordan said he knew about Sage and guns. Everyone knew about Aoxomoxoa on the Islamic Campaign. Fucking war hero. You think that makes you—
‘That?’ said Sage, starting to get irritated. ‘That wasn’t a war. One shopping mall bomb in Leeds took out worse casualties than most of our pitched battles. I’ve been in videos with more risk to life and limb.’
‘Yeah. But then there was Yap Moss.’
Sage recalled arriving at Easton Friars with Ax, after the battle. We handed the French girl over to Intelligence, and then we were told the casualties. Nearly three hundred dead, on that stretch of winter moorland, and that was when the army was just guessing about the Islamists… He remembered the shock, the feeling that he had crossed over, that he was no longer human, by any terms I used to know. Don’t envy me, he thought. Don’t you dare envy me, where I am now and how I got here. I’ll take a lot from Ax’s brother, but I won’t take that.
‘You’re right. Yap Moss was different. That’s why that’s where it stopped.’
He pushed back from his desk, tugged open a drawer and took out an automatic pistol, checked the clip and held it out. ‘Go on, take it. Go and blow someone away in an alley, find out what it feels like. Go ahead. But don’t come back to Ax afterwards.’
‘Ax isn’t coming back,’ said Jordan, furiously. ‘He’s quit. He’s left us all stranded, you and Fiorinda know why, and no one knows what the fuck’s going to happen now.’
In the background, Fergal sighed.
Jordan glared, Sage stared, and it was Sage who gave way.
Jordan was an idiot, but he was wise enough to see what it might mean, for him and his family, if the struggling knife-edge Utopia started to break up—
‘Nothing’s going to happen. Ax will come home, everything will be fine. Take the gun. Learn how to use it. You’re right, you should do that. Just in case.’
Jordan shook his head. He looked strangely satisfied, as if all he’d wanted was to see that gesture. The gun pulled, some acknowledgement of the way things really were, the other face of Ax’s England.
‘I’ve changed my mind. Milly wouldn’t have one in the house.’
‘Tell her I say so.’
‘Ax fucking hates those things, I know he does. I reckon I’ll leave the rock and roll gangster stuff to you, white boy. It’s more your style.’
Jordan left. At a glance from the living skull, Fergal stayed.
Sage removed the clip, shoved clip and automatic back into the drawer and stared at the clutter of his room. All this life, dry and dead, like a worn out carapace, like an exoskeleton ready to be shed. Must think about Taunton. Can Bridge House be made safe? Milly will not like armed protection. Not at all. I’ll get my head in my hands. Maybe not tell her. Be discreet.
‘Was it about the rat-catching?’ prompted Fergal.
He wondered how long he’d been silent.
People were dying of typhus in Central London, the first notable outbreak of disease in the capital (by some miracle) since the cholera in Boat People summer. The London barmies were busy decimating rodents with glee and megadeath efficiency: something someone should have thought of long ago.
‘No…something else. Fergal, you come from West Cork, don’t you?’
‘Aye,’ said Fergal, ‘Skibbereen. I haven’t been there in a while.’
‘That’s where Rufus O’Niall lives, isn’t it?’
‘In Cork? Aye. In his bran’ new ancestral castle, on his fockin’ private island.’
‘You had any personal dealing with him? I mean, in recent years?’
The Irishman’s sea-green eyes studied Sage, with reserve. ‘I’ve niver been back to Cork in many years, an’ I don’t move in them circles. He was a Belfast lad when I knew him, I wouldn’t say personally. I hear he’s an ill feller to cross.’
‘So they say. What happens to people who cross Rufus? Exactly?’
‘Oh,’ said Fergal, getting to his feet; definitely uneasy. ‘Ye’ll probly’ know all my stories of him. He’s that sort of feller, that’s all.’ He cleared his throat, ‘I’ll be on me way, an’ leave yez to the computer work.’
Sage looked up and the room was empty. Who was here just now? Oh yeah, Fergal. Fergal, and Jordan Preston. Something about a gun. He checked the drawer, automatic still there. Who took out the clip? Was that me? Shit. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and slowly, doggedly, recreated the last ten, fifteen minutes. He was used to the aphasia now, intermittent fault, he could work around it. Stone-cold-sober blanks in business hours were something else: with the authority I have, the responsibility, oh shit. But he wasn’t going to stop. He groped for a pack of Anandas, struggled to take out a cigarette and failed. I will forget her name. And I cannot tell her why. The blood thrummed in his veins, oh Fiorinda…
But he wasn’t going to stop.
A late Easter. April well begun, and it was only the fifth Sunday of Lent. Roxane Smith, in hir role as post-gendered Christian (otherness was the theme for this Lenten season) gave the homily at the evening service at St Martin’s in the Fields. S/he was very surprised to spot Aoxomoxoa, standing in the shadows at the back. He returned with hir in hir taxi to the rooms s/he now occupied in a service block on Queen Anne Street. S/he lit the stove in hir living room—the central heating was minimal—and opened a bottle of wine. Sage, fists buried in the pockets of his leather jacket, sat in an armchair, taking in the book-lined room: the awards, the netsuke, a few good prints, a few cheap gewgaws that meant much. His natural face had been his face for months, a long time. S/he realised s/he’d been missing the mask. It’s a strange and very beautiful thing.
‘Well, Lord Jim. What can I do you for?’
‘Oh? When did I stop being Mikhail Lvovich?’
Years ago, in the lost world, Roxane had made a game of calling Aoxomoxoa after various high-culture fictional characters. The next time their paths crossed, s/he would know that Sage’s ’satiable curiosity (‘The Elephant’s Child’, Rudyard Kipling) had forced him to track down the reference. And s/he would smile. It was a good joke on the king of the lads. Mikhail Lvovich Astrov was a character in a Chekov play. Tree-hugging conservative, daydreamer doomed to slave at the grindstone, takes his vodka without bread, indulges in a pointless flirtation with another man’s wife. (But that last was unintentional comment: Sage had been Mikhail Lvovich since Dissolution Summer.)
‘I don’t know,’ s/
he said, pouring wine. ‘You tell me.’
‘Put me out of my misery. What did Lord Jim do?’
‘He’s someone in a Conrad story. He ruined his life by jumping ship in the midst of a disaster, leaving a crowd of hapless punters, as he thought, to drown.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Sage nodded. There was a lengthy silence.
‘I need to ask you something. It’s about the Zen Self project.’
Roxane sat in the opposite armchair, and sipped hir wine. ‘If you must.’
‘Okay, so, I’ll try to be brief. You’ll have heard about the visions, where you might think we can get previews of the future, but in fact we don’t.’
‘Yes. I saw a programme about that, quite recently.’
‘You see, the time you spend in phase with information-space is infinitesimal. You bring back a whole story, and it’s bullshit. Emotional truth, that’s what we say. We can tell when someone’s reached phase from the physical record, but it’s impossible to tell whether you visited the future, the present or the past. There’s no difference; there’s a difference but it’s very complex, so complex it’s invisible. You have visited the whole, and every point is interconnected, over and over, with every other point. You may assume you, so to speak, visited the future if you come back remembering something about your son grown up, but you could be wrong. Are you following this?’
Roxane shook hir head.
‘It doesn’t matter. This is not the question. Anyway, that’s how it was. Then I had the idea, because of something that happened to Ver, that if you took a lot more snapshot you could stay in phase longer, deeper. More would stick and it would speed things up. Nobody believed me, because the science says it shouldn’t work, but it does. I’m the only one who does it. No one else is nuts enough.’ Ghosts of tiny muscle-movement braided and flickered across the planes of virtual bone: the skull is grinning ruefully.
‘Yes, I heard about that.’
‘You see I asked a question, back in February, which is something else that’s not supposed to work, but it did. I visited a very revealing moment… Snapshot goes for the jugular, if it gets a chance. You may have heard that. You must be calm when you take it because if you’re full of adrenalin and corticosteroids, stressed is the term, you’ll see stuff that matches. I did that, and I got my answer, but now I’m not sure.’
A pause that lasted, longer and longer.
‘Can you tell Fiorinda about this?’ Rox asked gently.
‘If I could tell Fiorinda, do you think I would be here?’
‘So you’re going to tell me?’
‘No. Okay, now here’s the issue where I need advice. I want to achieve the Zen Self for myself. I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but once you’ve seen that you could be complete, once you’ve seen it’s possible to be complete, it’s a goal that’s irresistible.’
Roxane nodded. ‘Yes. You came to the right place. I understand.’
‘Huh? Oh, you mean your surgery? I never thought of that. Well, good, maybe you do understand. So there’s two reasons for me to achieve the Zen Self. One is that it’s something I must do, or things will turn out very badly. For my Fiorinda, and my Ax, and, fuck, generally. The other is my own salvation. So why do I do it? This is the problem. This is very fucking important, Ax, sorry, I mean Rox. If I choose the wrong motive then I won’t achieve the Zen Self, it’s as simple as that. I know I won’t, because I will falter, I will fall, unless I’m absolutely certain.’ The skull laughed silently, in breathtaking detail: the naked minutiae of a human expression.‘Please tell me. Should I be thinking selfish, or stupid?’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
There was another long silence.
‘The details are useless. Like a memory that you cling to, and it was never really like that, you know what I mean… But not the significance. That’s real. When your firing pattern is in phase with information-space you’re there, wherever you landed, and it’s from the brain state of there that your mind constructs the visions. Emotional truth. So I can’t be wrong. I can be wrong in every detail, but I can’t be wrong in what I know. I’m not trying to change the future. You can’t change the future, and it’s changing all the time anyway: that’s simultaneity. It’s a paradox. Eleven-dimensional kaleidescope, like Ver said. But if I don’t choose right, it will be disastrous. Yeah, it’s confusing. Tell me.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t see how I can help.’
The skull grinned at hir, not very pleasantly this time.
‘You know, you saved my life once. You remember the Africa Tour? “Mba Kyere”, I am passed over? Mary had told me she was getting married, and her bloke would adopt Marlon and I would never see him again. Bullshit, but I believed it. I was trying to kill myself. Not smack, alcohol, much more efficient. George said to me, you know, if you die now, Roxane Smith’s gonna to write your obituary. Kept me alive.’
Who’d be a critic.
‘I am glad to have been of service. There are few rockstars I’d rather keep alive.’
‘Hahaha. All I want is an answer. Just say what you think.’
I genuinely didn’t understand the question, s/he thought. But s/he was moved to pity, and by the memory of what Sage had been to them, through this long dangerous journey. S/he remembered Massacre Night, blood seeping from the mask. Pigsty’s goons had to rough him up: it didn’t bother him at all, he was thinking only of how to protect us. Sage dead calm and rock-steady, from the moment the shit hit the fan. Our tower of strength.
‘Do what seems right to you, Sage. We’ve trusted you all this time. Trust yourself.’
The skull looked amused, and then cast down. ‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘Oh fuck. That’s a challenge. Okay. Thanks.’
Silence again. S/he realised Sage was not aware of these silences, which were curiously infectious. The two of them might have gone on sitting for hours, in this anonymous room laden with mementoes.
At last he shifted in the chair and said anxiously, ‘I hope… It wasn’t because you fell out with Chip and Ver over the Zen Self that you left Notting Hill—?’
Roxane set hir wine glass on the small Afghan table at hir elbow and folded hir elegant, aged hands around one knee. ‘No, Sage,’ s/he said with dignity, chin up. ‘I found myself de trop. The boys would not have banished me; I withdrew.’
‘Oh. Right.’ A little crooked smile of fellow-feeling.
‘It doesn’t matter. My relationship with Kevin was always based more on love than on sex, and the love is still there.’
‘Well, I think I’ll go now.’
S/he went with him to the door of the room. ‘Sage. When I feel the need to call on supernatural power, I get on my knees—which is not so easy as it used to be—and I perform an arcane invocation that begins, Our father in heaven… As you say, every detail may be fucked up; the significance is not. I have been young, I am now old, and I have never found, or heard of, any tech fix or psychoactive drug that bettered my results.’
The skull looked at hir, almost as blank as a Hallowe’en mask. S/he was suddenly very disconcerted. Has Aoxomoxoa really visited eternity? Does he know the truth about what lies there? Know it, beyond argument, beyond faith? Don’t tell me, s/he thought. Please, let me cling to my illusions. But Sage was on another tack.
‘Did the punters drown?’
S/he shook hir head. ‘They didn’t. They survived. But I’m afraid it didn’t do Lord Jim a lot of good.’
‘Figures.’
S/he offered hir hand. He took it and bowed over it, the mask vanishing so that it was his natural hand s/he held; his natural face that smiled at hir, as he went out the door. Roxane was left wondering if the whole strange, unconversation s/he’d just had with the Few’s mad scientist might possibly be under the seal of the confessional.
Perhaps so.
As soon as they knew what had happened to Ax, Fiorinda went north for a meeting with DARK. She had to resign from the band: she was unavailable, from now until don’t know when. It was
hard. She hadn’t known it would be hard, she’d thought this was the least of her worries: but she was giving up her life. This is how Ax felt, she thought. At least she wasn’t taking their lead guitarist away. Drums, bass, keyboards, two guitars, and everyone could sing if pushed. Charm said, yeah, and we’ll change our knickers frequently, bossyboots. Fuck off, this is my band: but what’s this in the tiny polecat eyes of the dike-rock empress? Could it be sympathy? They did a last gig, live at the lambtonworm headquarters in Middlesborough-on-Tees, and she left for London.
Ax had disappeared off the face of the earth. There was no mention of his ‘undercover meeting’ on the Internet Commissioners’ quarantined satellite link, and they couldn’t ask, because they had no way of knowing who was in on the secret. They might not hear from him for weeks; or months.
Sage might be dead by then.
The weird science cabal couldn’t help her. The Heads, Sage’s band, had given up on him. Dilip and Chip and Ver were as bad as the punteres, still in thrall to the fucking quest: they knew what Sage was doing was insane, and incredibly dangerous, but they admired him madly and they wouldn’t stop him if they could. At Reading Mayday concert the Heads did an Unmasked set, and the mosh roared Zen Self Zen Self Go For It Sage! as if he’d invented a new way of juggling with chainsaws. Fiorinda, watching from the side, because she had not been able to stay away, saw how the dancing had been reduced to what he could manage (muscle weakness), and her world darkened. She had already seen Aoxomoxoa on stage for the last time. Gone. Never no more.
She went to Olwen, feeling scared because she was afraid of Olwen Devi. The meeting turned out to be tough in a different way from what she’d expected. Fiorinda had friends she loved that she had also fucked, but she had never fucked anyone for love except Ax and Sage. She’d thought other people were the same, and she hadn’t realised how Olwen felt. It was awful. Olwen didn’t say a word of reproach, but they both knew it was all Fiorinda’s fault for not being content with one boyfriend.
But Olwen was helpless too, and that was Fiorinda’s last card.
Castles Made of Sand Page 25