Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘I hear you. I’ll be grown-up.’

  For a year, Ax had lived chained to a wall in a single room, never alone. The constant feeling of being watched still plagued him.

  ‘What shall we do now?’

  ‘The hired car wouldn’t do back roads,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Let’s explore.’

  Their country lane headed into the mountain spine of the peninsula, swiftly becoming abomniable, but the Rugrat didn’t mind. It danced over washed out river beds, floated over boulders. Ax started to grin. Sage and Fiorinda, beside him on the front bench, stopped thinking that the crash bar was absurd. When the road gave up entirely, without warning in the middle of an uphill corniche switchback, Ax just laughed, shifted the stick and the Rugrat hit the chasm brim careening along on half its wheelbase, the bench and bar morphing to compensate, Sage and Fiorinda yelling—

  ‘That’s rugged terrain extra,’ said the demon behind the wheel, placidly. ‘Mind if I put on some proper speed?’

  At a high pass they stopped: alone in a sun-seared, wind-ripped landscape of rocks and fragile flowers. ‘You know what,’ said Fiorinda, when the adrenalin had let go of her windpipe. ‘Every family in the American suburbs has one of these, and they use them to drive to Asda and back.’

  ‘Walmart,’ said Sage.

  ‘Wear your anorak with pride.’

  ‘She’s right. What a crime! Anyone else want a turn?’ asked Ax, nobly.

  ‘Hahaha. No, no, my dear. This is your present.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Fiorinda compromised, ‘We take turns tomorrow.’

  The jagged landscape fell away, wilder and wilder into the distance on every side, painted shades of red against a parchment haze; a sharp-edged, impossible and dreamlike terrain, cliffs and peaks, boulder fields, plunging chasms.

  ‘There’s a whole world, Ax,’ whispered Fiorinda. ‘That I’ve never seen.’

  Sage was reading the manual on the dash screen. ‘It can climb out of a pit, ten to fifteen metres vertical,’ he remarked. ‘Tha’ sounds like a good trick. Hm, it says here can be linked to a range of personal digital devices. Hey, I could slave the AI to my mask!’ He’d given up the living skull mask, but he kept the button in his eyesocket, for old sake’s sake. ‘It’s sittin’ there, stacks of spare capacity—’

  ‘So you could drive by thinking about it?,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Oh no. No, no. You’d forget what you were doing, and tell the car to stand on its head.’

  ‘Would not.’

  ‘I’m in love with the modern world,’ said Ax. ‘Leave my Rugrat alone. I’m gonna get a new implant, and commune with it myself. Digital Artists can pay.’

  The kidnappers had taken his old brain implant, a primitive and dangerous data-warehouse that he’d had fitted before the Dissolution. He’d been told the bastards had probably saved his life, because the thing had been in an advanced state of decay. But his chip had been dear to him, and he missed it.

  Sage went white, the colour plummeting from under his tan—

  ‘You will not!’

  ‘Huh?’’

  ‘You can’t have another implant, Ax. Fuck, I saw your scans. Don’t even—’

  ‘Is that an order? Listen, Sage, I think it’s my business, and what d’you mean, you saw my scans? That’s confidential information.’

  ‘Confidential from me? Well, thanks. Look, forget that. Implants are fucking stupid an’ obsolete, why don’t you get an eye-socket device?’

  ‘I don’t like putting things in my eye.’

  ‘No, you’d rather have dodgy open-brain surgery. Fuck’s sake—’

  ‘Could you both stop it?’ demanded Fiorinda.

  They looked at each other, and how strange, how many aeons since they’d had this problem, the meeting of lovers’ glances, so much more complex between three. Not daring to say a word, Ax put the Rugrat in gear, and they drove on.

  Towards sunset they found a campsite in a conifer forest: stone empty. When the culture of plenty withers and fuel prices rocket, only kings and queens, soldiers and gypsies, get to sleep in the woods. Leaving the Rugrat parked on a flat pitch they walked into the rustling flowers of an alpine meadow, and sat there quietly for a long time: Sage becoming so still you knew he wasn’t there, only cosmic reality was there.

  ‘We could stay here,’ said Fiorinda.

  ‘Overnight, anyway,’ agreed Ax.

  ‘Mon auberge était a la Grande Ourse,’ said Sage. ‘There will be great stars.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Sage murmured to Ax, as they reviewed the remains of the El Pabellón food while Fiorinda collected kindling. There was already a stack of heavier wood, left behind by other campers, plenty for one night. There were frozen steaks and tubs of ice cream in the Rugrat’s lockers, but steak and ice cream would make Sage throw up; and anyway they weren’t in the mood. Two peppers, a potato, a head of garlic, a couple of wizened carrots, can of tomatoes, can of chickpeas—

  ‘Hollywood will be good, not quiet, but when people say ‘quiet’ what they mean is no stress… Bright lights, fun, admiration, all the stuff she fuckin’ deserves an’ she’s never had. The other business will be our gig, we’ll take care of it, she won’t have to worry. I like getting the Few over, as well. She’s had enough of us. She needs her friends, the ones who came through it with her—’

  ‘They’ll hear from Harry. Will they know we want them to come?’

  ‘I said pack.’

  ‘What d’you think we should tell them about her being in a bad state?’

  ‘I think they know, Ax. They’re not stupid, an’ they love her. What d’you think we should tell ‘em about the Fat Boy?’

  ‘What is there to say? Let’s wait until we know what Fred Eiffrich wants, which is not very clear as yet. In ways,’ he added, ruefully, ‘I now realise we should have taken up the movie offer, straight off. I didn’t realise it was a ticket to California for everyone. The way things are shaping at home, I’ll be glad to have my most high-profile friends where I can see them.’

  ‘Yeah, but what about telling Allie she’s going to be in a virtual movie? How do you want this carrot? Slices, chunks, chips, sticks?’

  ‘I don’t know, she’s a fashionista. Maybe she thinks they’re wonderful. I’d like round slices two oh oh five millimetres thick. Just chop it, Sage, fuck’s sake.’

  ‘I’m not used to having hands.’

  ‘Bullshit. You were better at the domestic when you had fewer fingers.’

  That teeshirt is a disgrace, thought Ax. But he doesn’t care. Tees, pants, socks, the raggier the are, the better he’s pleased. He’s the original absent minded professor… Disguised as this slender, graceful, beautiful guy, with the artist’s hands, who used to be my big cat. Sage looked up, caught Ax’s eye and smiled.

  A blue jay landed on a fir branch, and squawked at them.

  ‘I’ll get some water.’

  Sage went off to find a standpipe. Soldiers and gypsies use their own supplies only in emergency. Ax sighed, and indulged in a secret tryst with the little girl on the Morton’s Salt canister, as he chopped the veg. In her yellow smock with her big lilac umbrella, striding bravely…When it rains it pours. Sometimes his heart was visited, best way to put it, by the spirit of a child who would probably never be. A gallant little girl, dark hair and Fiorinda’s smile—

  Fiorinda had lit the fire, using the flint and tinder from the base of her saltbox. She knelt and watched the new flames, while two walking corpses went about their chores, grotesquely dressed in shabby camping clothes. Sage was ten months dead, Ax almost mummified, the handcuff slack on his dry wrist, strands of dark hair clinging around the dried, open hole in his skull. In another scene, equally present, they were freshly killed: sliding, tumbling, endlessly, from two body-bags onto a rug, in a room she didn’t recognise.

  Get used to it. The flashes will come, quite long-lasting ‘flashes’, when you are feeling nearly normal, to remind you of the truth. You may safely ignore them, you aren’t going to forget that ev
erything is a fake you invented.

  ‘You okay, little cat?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Shall I brush your hair?’ suggested Ax, casually. ‘Sage can handle this.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my hair. I just brushed it.’

  They spread their sleeping bags on a rug at the edge of the meadow, with Fiorinda’s newspapers underneath for insulation. It would be chilly, but they’d known worse. The sky was clear. They lay and gazed, into the stars that thickly powdered the deep, until up became out and they could feel the world turning.

  ‘What say we take the Rugrat and run?’ murmured Ax. ‘Mexico’s a big place.’

  ‘The repo man would come after us,’ sighed Fiorinda. ‘I know he would.’

  She retired into her cocoon, curled up between these two big male animals, Sage the tiger, Ax the wolf. Usually she didn’t like sleeping in the middle, but tonight it was comfort mode. She fell asleep while they were still talking: woke and slept again. At last she woke and realised she was listening to the sound of heedless movement, somewhere in the trees—and that the tiger and the wolf were already sitting up, sharply alert.

  ‘What is it?’, she whispered. ‘D’you think it’s a bear?’

  ‘More like Harry’s back-up,’ said Ax. ‘Discreetly checking up on us.’

  ‘I think it’s a bear,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I’m afraid of bears. I’ve read about them, they come after food, but then they attack people.’

  ‘D’you get bears in Mexico?’ wondered Sage. ‘I thought they were extinct.’

  ‘There are bear-notices at the Oficina here, and the dumpsters have special bear-proof lids that you have to open a trick way.’

  ‘Everything’s locked in the Rat,’ said Ax, soothingly. ‘I read the notices. We’re okay, Fee, they’re not aggressive. It’s just walking around, being a bear.’

  They lay down again.

  ‘There’s more than one,’ remarked Ax. ‘I think there’s several.’

  ‘Well, then Fiorinda can relax,’ mumbled Sage, turning his back. ‘It’s probably range cattle, an’ we can go to sleep because bears do not hunt in packs—’

  There was a loud crack from much closer at hand, a rush of movement. The bears were in the clearing: a gestalt flip, from noises in the dark to shaggy limber bodies, right there, arm’s reach—

  ‘They do now!’ cried Fiorinda.

  The men shot to their feet, astonished, very glad they’d been sufficiently on guard not to crawl into their bags. Pale eyes shone with a light from God knows where, one of the beasts rose, tall as a man. It opened its mouth, the teeth and tongue glistening. It seemed to speak—

  ‘No!’ shouted Fiorinda.

  ‘My God!’ yelled Ax. ‘Fee, get to the car!’ He raced for the woodstack, grabbed a branch and threw another to Sage. But the bears were everywhere, eyes blazing lambent white, there seemed to be ten, twenty of them. Sage and Ax, back to back, flailed their branches. Fiorinda crouched in the tumbled bedding at their feet. The beasts backed off and rushed in, again and again, what the fuck is this, what’s got into them? Is this a nightmare? Ax used his arm to fend off a snarling maw and staggered, the shoulder seam of his leather jacket parting. A bear fell back but immediately there was another one, and what is that light in their eyes, why the fuck are they attacking us—?

  ‘FIORINDA!’ howled Sage, swinging his futile club, ‘DO something, babe!’

  ‘I’m trying to think! I’m trying to think!’ She scrabbled in her sleeping bag. She never slept without her saltbox, but where is it, what can I do? Here’s the saltbox…brain won’t work. What can I do? Oh, fuck, someone’s fighting me!

  Oh no you don’t, try a taste of this, wham.

  White crystals flew out, curling through the dark like ribbon. Where they landed they burst into flame, blue and orange flame like a wall, that split to make a corridor. The three of them ran, walls of flame twisting with them, across the clearing to the Rugrat: grabbed the door, and leapt inside-

  Fire stood around the car in a seething curtain: then it vanished.

  ‘Don’t touch me for a moment,’ whispered Fiorinda, huddled against the driver’s door. The bears seemed to have gone.

  ‘What d’you think?’ breathed Ax.

  ‘I think she saw them off.’

  They took flashlights, and went out to investigate. There were solid physical traces of the attack. Clawmarks, torn earth, one torn sleeping bag: splintered and toothmarked remnants of firewood. Sage found the sleeve from Ax’s jacket, sliced as if with knife blades.

  ‘Shit… Did that reach you?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Ax investigated, and discovered four parallel scratches on his upper arm. No serious damage, but a little blood. ‘Fuck, I hope I’m not going to be a werebear. What the hell was all that about?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Fiorinda had got out of the car. They joined her at the picnic table and switched off the flashlights, needless exposure in this starlit darkness. Ax had given up smoking, but he kept a pack for use in emergencies. He lit one now.

  ‘Well,’ he said, to break their silence. ‘The world gets stranger.’

  The commonsense theory said that the increase in “strange phenomena” was an illusion: just that more people were likely to believe, and therefore more daft stuff likely to get reported. Commonsense, however, might well have become obsolete. Maybe it was some kind of fall-out from the Zen Self experiments, maybe it was Gaia, finally found a voice at last, and signalling her displeasure. Ax believed, with reservations, in Gaia theory: not in the nature deity. Maybe fusion consciousness theory would tell him what to think about random ghostly werebears, once the theory had settled down.

  ‘Ax,’ announced Sage, off on his own angle. ‘We have to get sorted. I know you don’t like guns, but it’s not sensible to wander around over here unarmed.’

  ‘We’d look a little conspicuous loaded for bear, on the streets of Los Angeles.’

  ‘Sage,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Someone was fighting me.’

  ‘What—?’ said Sage, snapping to attention.

  ‘The bears,’ said Ax. ‘Look, I think we should get out of here. I don’t know what that was, maybe we found out why this place is deserted, but whatever causes that kind of effect we should leave, before they come back.’

  ‘Not the bears,’ said Fiorinda to Sage. ‘Someone was fighting me. I wasn’t remotely in trouble, just off guard, but someone was there.’

  ‘Fiorinda!’

  ‘Huh? What are you two talking about?’

  ‘How many bears were there, Ax?’ asked Fiorinda sharply.

  ‘How many? I don’t know. I’m not sure, it seemed like dozens.’

  ‘There was one. I was fooled myself at first, but think about it.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Sage, after a moment.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ax, wonderingly, short term memory recovering from its confusion, revealing the shadowy beast that had flashed around him.

  ‘There was one real bear, the rest of them we hallucinated? But not you?’

  ‘Someone set a real bear on us,’ cried Fiorinda. ‘And made it seem like a pack of them! Catch up, Ax! God knows what a bear means, but Harry the repo man was right. There’s another Rufus. Not as strong as me, not yet, no way, but strong enough. Oh, shit, and whoever it is knows about us!’

  ‘Hey,’ said Ax, ‘Slow down, sweetheart, don’t panic, you did good, don’t—’

  ‘The bear spoke to me!’

  ‘What did it say?’ asked Sage, adding carefully; ‘For me that didn’t happen.’

  ‘It said, kill me,’ breathed Fiorinda. ‘And I know why. It’s a monster. It wants to die. I would want to die if that were me—’ She broke off, exasperated. ‘You think I’m having a paranoid delusion. You think I did the bear thing myself.’

  ‘No!’ they cried, appalled. But they were lying.

  Fiorinda’s head started to spin. She clutched at her hair, feeling the wadded thickness, close-packed scenes of horro
r, collapsing in on her—

  ‘Sage! I’m trying to do what you said, believe everything’s real, and the bear makes sense if this world is real! Oh, God, don’t take this from me—!’

  Sage jumped up, zoomed around the table, grabbed her and hugged her tight.

  ‘Sweetheart, listen, listen. I won’t lie, I think you could be wrong. Not crazy, wrong. Weird things happen for all kinds of reasons. Don’t be scared, darling, you’re just leapin’ ahead, this does not have to mean there’s a Fat Boy.’

  A shudder went through her. ‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘That’s doable. I c-can handle “I could be wrong”.’

  Ax took her hand, and stroked her hair. ‘You could be wrong, but you’re not, usually. What do you want to do? Quit this stupid gig? You just say the word.’

  ‘No,’ she said, her face very white and eyes dark pits in the starlight. ‘You don’t either of you get it. We can’t quit, not if there’s another one. This is our business. We’ll have to go to Hollywood, and promote the virtual movie. That’ll be our cover, while we f-figure out what’s going on.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Sage rocked her like a baby, giving Ax the message over her head. Softly. One step forward, two steps back… ‘Okay, we’ll do that.’

  They became aware of a strange sound. Ax shone a flashlight on the Rugrat. It was moving, bouncing and quivering on its mars-buggy axles.

  ‘What’s going on there? More weird phenomena?’

  Fiorinda shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘The car is scared,’ Sage informed them.

  ‘How can in be anything?’ protested Fiorinda, ‘Everything’s switched off.’

  ‘You can’t switch off an AI, you’d have to re-install. They’re on permanent standby, it’s never totally unconscious.’

  The Rugrat’s security package had the capacity to ‘recognise threatening behaviour’ directed against itself or its personalised owners. It had shields it could raise, heightened responses and of course a siren. Ax and Sage had disabled the lot, forseeing incessant false positives. When they looked up ‘shaking’ in the manual, they discovered that the car might ‘experience an analogue of disappointment’, if it felt it had failed in its duty.