‘Oh? But the man in the hat said the Pentagon is building a Fat Boy.’
‘He said something like that,’ admitted Sage. ‘It can’t be true. You’d need to start with a phenomenal natural magician—’
‘I know,’ snapped Fiorinda. ‘I haven’t been in a coma.’ She stared at them, pushing back the clotted masses of her hair with both hands, the pupils of her grey eyes wildly dilated. ‘Just nuts. I’ve been trying to protect you,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘To reach a place of safety, but I could not get there. Oh my God, and maybe now I know why!’
Electrified, they realised it was Fiorinda looking at them, speaking to them. Fiorinda, back from wherever she’d been wandering-
‘You don’t need to protect us,’ said Sage, intensely still, as if an unwary breath might send this bird out into the dark again. ‘It’s over, babe. You did it. You protected everybody. You did brilliantly, and now you’re safe with us.’
Fiorinda’s pupils snapped back, and she let go of her hair. ‘Safe…?’ The clipped, crystalline vowels of her childhood, always well to the fore when she was exasperated, had never sounded so sweet- ‘Is that what you call it? Look. Ax can never touch me sexually, because next time I might strike him dead. I don’t believe I could harm you, Sage, but I’m not mad about the idea of therapeutic rape, and I think you know it. We should go to Hollywood. What’s the alternative?’
‘We don’t have to go back to England,’ said Ax, quickly. ‘We’ll find somewhere else—’
‘What, another beach where we can be nice to each other, get excited about shellfish and tick off the bird book? How long’s that going to last? You two feel sorry for me now, but you’ll get bored, Ax. You’ll dump us and run away, like you did before—’
‘Fiorinda, how can you say that? I did not dump you. You were miserable, Sage hated me, I was in the way. I left because I wanted you two to be happy.’
‘Did you fuck want us to be happy. You wanted us to come running after you, and it backfired, because you’d forgotten you had us so well trained we would never dare. All right, you couldn’t have known you would be kidnapped, but walking out like that was a cry for help, in an unbelievably stupid form—’
Sage was staring at Ax in naked hurt. ‘I’d follow you anywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do, be whatever you want me to be. Fiorinda was unhappy, that’s all I knew, that’s what you saw in me. I never hated you.’
‘Could we stop this?’ said Ax, ‘Please could we stop this? It does no good.’
‘We could stop,’ offered Fiorinda, after a moment.
She crossed the room, pulled up a chair at their table: took Ax’s hand and reached out to Sage. The rings they wore, braided white and red and yellow British gold, gleamed in the dusty sunlight. They weren’t wedding rings, perish the thought, but they were a declaration. We are not going to break up again. We’ve tried that solution, and it is worse than the problem.
‘I’ve been giving you hell, haven’t I?’
‘No!’
‘You give us heaven,’ said Sage, passionately.
‘Idiot… I know I’m in a bad state, all right? But I think we have to say yes. We have to go to Hollywood. Look at it this way. Our pension fund is fucked, and we can’t live happily ever after. We might as well get back in the game.’
‘You’d better tell Harry,’ said Sage to Ax. ‘He’ll be thrilled.’
There were two beds in the cabin, a single and a double. The single was Fiorinda’s. Sage and Ax slept on the double in their sleeping bags, like soldiers in a bivvy. On the shelf by her head, Fiorinda could see the outlines of her best shells, and the ‘Ax n’ Sage n’ Fiorinda’ miniatures that Ax had bought when he was in the US for the data quarantine deal; which had been returned to him, along with his other belongings, after he was rescued. Her saltbox wasn’t there: her heart jumped, then she realised it was beside her. She tucked her hand around the polished wooden apple, the talisman of her hated magic, which she did not dare to part with, how irrational can you get. The door of the cabin was open, and Sage was sitting there. Moonlight gleamed on his close-cropped head, and caught the wide, pared-down angles of his cheek and jaw.
‘Sage?’ She wrapped a shawl over the big teeshirt she was using as a nightgown, and went to join him. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d sit up, in case Fergal needed back up.’ He leaned his head against the wall. She saw the glint of tears in his thick golden lashes.
‘You believe in Fergal?’
‘Why not? The world’s a strange place.’ He sighed. ‘Our Willy Loman is afraid of me…ain’t that a joke. I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do.’
‘You could use sarcasm,’ said Fiorinda. ‘You’re good at that.’
She wanted to tell him that he was beautiful, and strong, without the bulging muscles, and she loved him just as much. She knew he wouldn’t listen. They were all clinging to their separate hurts, even the bodhisattva.
‘I’m sorry about therapeutic rape. That was horrible. Forget I said that.’
He wiped his eyes. ‘I’ll try to put it out of my mind.’
They watched the moonlight and listened to the ocean.
‘I will never forget El Pabellón,’ whispered Fiorinda.
‘Fiorinda, listen to me. I know what’s happening to you, and I can help.’
‘Don’t. Stop it.’
‘Listen. I know what it’s like to be aware that all the horror is still going on, and you are still there in it, still doing the worst things you did, and bearing the worst things you had to bear. And I have done some bad, bad things… I can help you to the other side, I can take you to guai-yi. It’s the only way, my baby. You’ve travelled too far. You have to reach shelter now.’
‘I keep trying to remember things from before,’ she said, avoiding his eyes. ‘I keep thinking if I could remember being normal, I would get better from being…being in a bad state, and we would be happy. It doesn’t work, because one thing I always know is that if my magic doesn’t exist then you’re dead, Sage. You died on the beach at Drumbeg. I go round and round, I have some hateful imaginings, but it doesn’t matter how I figure it, none of this is real. It’s a toy I made. That’s what I have to learn to live with.’
‘Fee. That’s not how it is. You’ve forgotten. Let me show you.’
There was a pulse in the air, stronger than the murmur of the Pacific. She found herself thinking, dare I take my life from this man’s hands? Dare I let him pick me up and carry me? It’s not for nothing that one of his best mates, his collaborator, has Asperger’s so bad that… Peter Stannen couldn’t survive in the normal world, without the Heads to look after him. And it’s not just that he’s male to the point of screwy. Sage was strange before he went near the Zen Self: liable to go off into obsessions, and drug himself insensible because he can’t resist the way it soothes his racing brain… The more she thought of his strangeness, the more she pitied him; and the more she loved him.
But oh no. I want my life to be my own.
‘Oh no,’ she said, smiling into his eyes. ‘No you don’t, Sage. You are not going to talk me down from this. I shall make my own way. This is mine.’
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll respect that, but I’m here. Whenever you need me.’
Ax stirred, and sat up. ‘Are you two okay?’
‘Yes,’ said Sage.
‘Very okay,’ said Fiorinda.
‘Come back to bed.’
They kept Harry waiting a day, and then they wanted to leave at once. It was agreed that they would drive down to El Rosario, the three in their Mexican hired car, Harry in his Compact. They would meet there, do the business, and Harry would explain how they were going to cross the border. They did not have visas. They had not intended to visit the States. For the former rulers of the Reich to try and get into the US as tourists would have been embarrassing all round. But that was all fixed, apparently. Ax and Sage kept asking each other, in glance
s they hoped she didn’t see, are we doing the right thing? But Harry’s news had snapped her back into herself, and anything that did that had to be pursued. If Hollywood turned out to be a bad move, then fuck it. We’ll have three first class tickets home, please… They didn’t think very hard about Harry’s pitch.
They packed up early in the morning. Fiorinda found the hermit crab and took it down to the sea. Bon voyage, little ragged claw: and there go the pelicans…one, two, and goodbye. I’m going to the USA, she thought, frightened because she knew Ax and Sage were not frightened, and they ought to be.
Maybe America will make me free.
Harry came to the cabin, while Fiorinda was on the beach and Ax was at the Oficina. He was still wearing the hat, but with a visible air of defiance. Sage had a mean impulse to start on the moustache. He had to remind himself that this pink-cheeked young man had no idea what he’d done to offend. He knew nothing about Fiorinda’s state of mental health, and he wasn’t going to find out from Sage; or Ax. She won’t break down. She’s a trouper. What’s going on with her will be our private nightmare.
‘Sage,’ said Harry, ‘I should mention to you about the back up. There’ll be an escort. The guys will be discreet, but they’ll never be far away, from now on.’
Sage was absurdly pleased to have been cast as the hulking minder. But no thanks, Harry. We don’t like to have other people’s servants hanging around us. Especially not if they’re armed. ‘We don’t need that. Call them off.’
‘Huh? Look, there’s not going to be trouble, but the studio would feel better, it’s customary on a journey of this kind.’
‘The times we live in. I said no. It’s not the right message, we’re supposed to be pacifists, are we not? We drove across Mexico alone, we’re not scared.’
‘Okay,’ said Harry, ‘Well, that’s, I guess that will be all right.’
He glanced in bemusement at the Triumvirate’s backpacker bundles, and around the bare cabin. There were a few sketches still taped to the back wall. Sage had decided to leave them there, they weren’t good enough to keep and he hadn’t the heart to throw them away. Harry stepped over, and carefully took down a Costa’s humming bird.
‘May I keep this?’
‘Sure.’
‘Will you sign it?’
‘No.’
London, without Ax
The Rock and Roll Reich was over but the organisation struggled along, sorely hampered by mainstream government ‘assistance’. They looked after the drop-out hordes, the frightening masses of people who had simply given up, in the economic crash or later on: taken to the roads and never gone home. They had a first class, means-tested arts and alt.tech hedgeschool education scheme, for the Countercultural nation and anyone else, young or old, who met the criteria (or blagged their way in). They were committed to running a programme of free events, not exclusively but predominantly rock and roll, known as the ‘Crisis Management Gigs’—which had become a beloved tradition, vital for public morale. They had to keep going. Ax had left them with the responsibility, and with or without belief, it was all that survived of the place they’d once lived: up high, electrified and terrified, on the wings of the storm.
They couldn’t think of anything else to do with themselves.
One rainy morning in a grey and thankless springtime, Allie Marlowe arrived first in the Office at the Insanitude, and swopped the bowl under the leak by the Balcony doors for an empty pan. The windows rattled in their peeling frames, blossom streamed away from the trees in St James’s Park. She looked out on the Victoria Monument. Well, here I am in Buckingham Palace, running a rockstar charity for the government. Was this what I wanted out of life? The room was freezing, and for no very green reason. They were well in the black on the Central London energy audit: it was just another petty ordinance. She wrapped herself in an old cardie of Fiorinda’s, that she kept at the San for this purpose, sat down and switched on her machine.
—the minor donations; the surviving on a shoestring-
Maybe it would be better if they all quit, let the younger cadres take over. Before she’d become, through no fault of her own, Ax’s Lord Chancellor, Allie Marlowe had been a rock music socialite whose “career” took the form of going to the right parties, and promoting the coolest clubs. None of the Few had any more convincing qualifications. They were just friends-of-Ax-Preston, who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, a few years ago. They all ought to quit, let the devoted Reich Youth take over. We should go before they appoint a new President. If it’s Jordan, I can’t stand the idea anyway. How dare he.
But she knew she didn’t have the resolution to walk away.
The Reich Youth ambled in, put something annoying on the sound system and milled around chatting. Allie encountered the scan of a dog-eared Cornish holiday postcard, in her personal email. A cartoon of a bearded seaman in a sou’wester:
Fishin’ Scat
Farmin’ Scat
Tourists Scat… Back To Wreckin’, Me Hearties!
She flipped the card over, as she checked its provenance. It was from Mexico, of course. Something wrong with their phone? Anxiety levels leapt. She’d been terrified since the day they left: that they would be kidnapped the way Ax had been before; that they’s be shot in the street, killed in an earthquake. The Reich was over, she must let these people go, but she just couldn’t… It was Sage’s handwriting, barely legible. Apparently being hard to read was natural to Sage, the new hands made no difference. I’ll go along with that, thought Allie, a diehard Ax and Fiorinda loyalist, and always would be.
Hi Allie, she made out. We’re on our way to Hollywood. Get ready to pack. Talk to you soon.
Nothing else, except a threefold monogram, in the form that said: trouble but nothing we can’t handle.
The rain beat on the Victoria Monument, post-Ax pop-music ravaged the Office air.
2
Bears Discover Fire
After they’d parted company from Harry they pulled off the Mex1 at the first opportunity, on a country road; in a valley chequer-squared with grapevines, bright with new leaf. They’d eaten lobster burritos at a restaurant once favoured by Steve McQueen. They’d graciously accepted Digital Studios credit cards; they’d insisted on making their own way to the border, and arranged to meet Harry there in a few days’ time. A few days was arbitrary, a last taste of freedom.
They were suspicious about the ease of all this.
The car was not instantly impressive. It was a chunky off roader, on the same lines as Harry’s Compact, in light brown with a scarlet trim and silver wheels; called a Toyota Rugrat. It was box fresh, hinting at machinations behind the A&R man: no one had driven this car from the US. They’d personalised it, eyes, voiceprint, touch, but that didn’t guarantee they were the master’s voice.
‘Okay,’ said Ax, ‘Let’s check it out.’
Fiorinda left this mechanical and geeky activity to the menfolk, and sat by the road dissecting the US English language newspapers they’d bought in El Rosario. California norté is having a water crisis, (you don’t say). Also a power crisis, but that isn’t real, it is trumped up by monopolies (well, what changes?). Mr Eiffrich is widely held to be set for his second term, despite the continued Downturn—meaning, crash deeper than the nineteen thirties, when ‘Depression’ was the favoured euphemism. She read an article about how in hard times the country likes a Democrat in the White House, but Republican control of Congress and the Senate; an essay on the psychology of the Oil Wars. A Big Name’s new album signals he is heading for politics (copycat!). Moviestar has double platinum hit with novelty song. Tuh. Never heard of her. Nothing about a project at Vireo Lake.
Witchcraft and magic were dealt with pleasantly under Lifestyle.
She read the cartoon strips, the funny pages, until Ax and Sage came to join her.
‘If it’s wired, we can’t find it,’ said Sage, folding down on the stony ground. ‘Couldn’t find the weapons cache either, or the drugs. A piss-poor rock
mobile. But we have camping gear you could use on Mars, and a water distillation plant.’
‘La mordida reina,’ said Ax, mordida being a bribe. ‘It doesn’t look like much, but it drives sweetly, for a brick on stilts. We’ve disabled the nauseating baby voice, sorry Fio. Thank God it has a steering wheel. I don’t see driving by holding fake conversations with a car’s software. It’s a ridiculous idea.’
‘You’d feel different if you’d ever had fucked-up hands.’
‘Harry said it was a fat ride,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Meaning wicked, I presume, same as in England. How clever is it, really?’ They looked at the Toyota. It was watching them, with the red cam-eyes above its headlamps. ‘Can it understand what we’re saying?’
‘It can hear us.’ Sage lay back and gazed at the sky. ‘It recognises a few words, not sure what it understands. I don’t think there’s anything going on to upset the Turing Police, but it’s emotional. Maybe like a dog or a cat.’
‘Now that’s something we’re missing out on in Crisis Europe,’ remarked Ax. ‘The emergence of consumer durables as an oppressed underclass.’
‘It could have the sentience of a grey parrot. Or even a small child.’
‘I hope you’re kidding,’ said Fiorinda.
She thought of Serendip, the mainframe computer Olwen Devi wore as a jewel in a ring on her finger. But Serendip was a divinity, not a slave.
‘Can we turn the feelings-feature off?’
‘No, that would make it dead. Too bound up in the motor cortex.’
‘Fred Eiffrich was planning to give limited AIs animal welfare rights,’ said Ax. ‘We better treat it nicely, or we’ll get pulled over.’
‘Maybe we should give it a name.’
‘Right of veto,’ said Ax. ‘I will not ride in a car called Tiddles.’
Sage grinned. ‘Ruggy the Rugrat it is then. Ax, I don’t believe we’re under surveillance, except in the strictly formal sense that you never can tell. Could we forget about that wire?’
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