Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  Sage did not protest. The world turned, the three of them just breathing watching the jack rabbits; glad to have survived, one more time.

  ‘It was when we saw the body that we knew you were alive,’ said Ax.

  ‘Yes… The volunteer wasn’t the best match. They went with her because the willingness is all. They had my hair, they hadh my DNA, (the famous imprinting didn’t seem to bother them), they cooked it all up with pan-occultist ritual. But it was the candidate who made it work, in so far as it did… They’re a broad church, did I mention? The Pagans and Satanists share power, because they have the numbers, but there’s all sorts. Digital based new religions; Celtics of course. I didn’t have to meet my proxy, I am glad to say. I only know about all that because Elaine insisted I had to “preside”over the church meetings. I gathered it hadn’t been a total success, but the real hard core didn’t care. Whatever happened was the right thing to happen, because we’re in the endgame now.’

  Ax stared. ‘The dead woman in your dress had volunteered?’

  ‘All the victims were volunteers,’ said Fiorinda.

  ‘My God.’

  ‘I really believe they were: or thought they were. Dying in agony for love of Gaia. They’d have been tanked to the eyeballs, I hope.’

  ‘Who did the killing?’ asked Sage, quietly.

  ‘Other members of the suicide squad.’

  ‘And Billy the Whizz?’

  She hesitated, something going on that Ax didn’t quite follow. ‘I don’t know Sage… She chatted you up at parties. I thought she was okay, but I never talked to her. I don’t know if she was secretly, deep down, a suicidal eco-warrior. But I’ve a bad feeling that she wasn’t. I think Billy was the exception.’

  Sage nodded, and stared at the fire, his beautiful mouth downturned.

  ‘What if none of us had thought of turning up at the Silver Mule?’ wondered Ax. ‘Weren’t they leaving a lot to chance, there?’

  ‘No, Ax,’ said Fiorinda, patiently. ‘They were leaving it to magic.’

  ‘Does iron block it? I know it’s a persistent tradition.’

  ‘Nah, it’s nonsense. But I wasn’t going to do any tricks for them, so it blocked me all right… Well, where was I? Oh yes. Two, no, three nights ago, I had a strange dream, involving a techno wizard and a guitar man, and some kind of dsigraceful, hired orchestra, groovilicious, stadium rock farrago—’

  Sage came out of his bleak moment, and laughed.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Ax. ‘It was all his idea.’

  ‘What happened here?’ asked the mad scientist, clearly been burning to know.

  ‘I’m not sure. I may have vanished, briefly. There were some funny looks.’

  ‘Only for milliseconds.’

  ‘And I came back, from wherever I went on the way to get to you two on stage, knowing who the Fat Boy had to be.’

  Sage nodded.

  Ax sighed. ‘Are you two going to tell me?’

  Fiorinda looked into the fire, thin flames, almost invisible in the morning sun. ‘Not right now. Just believe me, I can do what I have to do; if I have to. It’s strange. All the time since Baja I was thinking, how can I win another boss fight, if I’m also crazy? But it was a loop. Because of the Fat Boy I had to sort myself out, which I’d been frantically avoiding… I still don’t like magic, sorry I mean mind/matter manipulation, what a relief to have a technical term. Other than “Zen Self”, which was never me… I think it will unravel civilisation. But I’ve found my guai-yi, Sage. I can live with being me.’

  ‘Very Californian,’ said Sage. ‘See. I knew this place would suit you.’

  ‘Nyah—’

  They pulled faces and giggled, while Ax took to heart the things Fiorinda wasn’t saying, including details about the Countercultural Underground. She had to get away from us to heal herself, he thought, and we’ll have to live with that. He wondered if he could work out the identity of the Fat Boy candidate. Maybe it would come to him when he put the inferences together.

  ‘There was a third man.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fiorinda. ‘That was me.’

  He had hardly needed to be told. After what she’d done in the church, he understood what the ghost of Rufus had meant, all along. Why does she do that? She does it because in a sense that’s Rufus O’Niall, the unstoppable magician, sitting opposite me, looking like a grey-eyed girl… But these aren’t things to talk about. Let them be. In his present state of mind, he wasn’t worried. Fiorinda and Sage were on the case. Hey, why am I not touching them? He shifted the frying pan, moved over and kissed the big cat: his soft mouth, his eyes, his golden brows. ‘I lost my mask,’ Sage recalled, piteously, ‘Ax, I lost my mask.’

  ‘You’ve got it on file, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, but I haven’t updated it in years—’

  ‘Look on the bright side. You can be a living skull who doesn’t look a day over twenty-five. Shall we talk about the baby? Is this the right time?’

  ‘Let’s tell her, anyway.’

  They faced her, nervously. ‘Fiorinda,’ said Ax, ‘Maybe. We…er, you should know, we’re very, very happy about—’

  ‘Oh.’ Fiorinda coloured up, carmine through the gold. Her eyes shone, her mouth trembled. ‘Oh, but you don’t know the worst. You don’t know that horrible woman said I couldn’t come back until I’m monstrously overweight.’

  ‘Better get going on the ice cream then, soon as we’re through with this.’

  The horses stood quietly. The jackrabbits had retreated; a lizard with a very long tail stalked out from under a rock. Ax went to seek his jacket in the cave, took Fiorinda’s hand, slipped the braided ring onto her finger and kissed it. He sat down and started rolling up a spliff, into which he shook a fine powder from a twist of feed-sack paper.

  ‘What’s going in there?’ asked Sage.

  ‘Peyote, I think.’

  ‘Where’d you get that?’

  ‘Stu’s ranch: from Cheyne, the horse-lady.’ His eyes were wet, he wiped them with the side of his hand. ‘I thought, fuck, think positive. We three might want to do some mindbending drugs, under the desert sun. And here we are.’

  The fire burned to white ash. They sat around it at the points of a triangle, smoked the spliff; and then one more for luck. The sky, above the undulating rim of the red bowl, was a dome so transparent you could see the pinpricks of stars. Fiorinda said, ‘Shouldn’t you put the horses away, or, er, tie them up?’

  ‘There’s water and feed in the cave,’ said Ax. ‘They know they can retire in there. They seem fairly fixed on us, I don’t think they’ll wander off.’

  The men took on their animal shapes, and lay watching her. Their eyes, blue and brown, fused into a steady, greenish gold: the pupils were gleaming vertical slits through which something unknown looked out. The tiger and the wolf, blended into one, with wonderfully soft barred and brindled fur, were a very beautiful creature. She could still see them both, but the mingled beast was dominant. When she looked up its muzzle was leaning down, covering the sky like the limb of a giant planet, to take her in its mouth and carry her. The unknown thing that looked through its eyes was now overwhelmingly huge. She spread her thighs and took it inside, all the fifteen dimensions, a web, an atom; and swelled up like a balloon, a thin but unbreakable membrane, interpenetrated by galaxies. I am the thing behind their eyes she realised, and shrank into her body again, like a hermit crab.

  Ax sat cross-legged, resting his chin on his hand and his elbow on his knee. I need a shave, he thought. We are some desperados. We have set out on a journey that will end God alone knows where. It could even, just about, be literally on another world, another planet, Insh’allah, that we finally lay our burdens down and make our peace. But he didn’t like to think of God when he was in an altered state, it seemed a form of gatecrashing, and he was too proud to sneak in the back door. I will wait until I’m invited. Yeah, I will wait until I’m invited, and return to the abyss of non-being the old fashioned way… He
was not surprised to see Sage and Fiorinda had become one person, looking at him across the ring of stones that held the crumbled white ash. He had always known that they were one person, right back when he took Aoxomoxoa’s kid-sister mascot to his bed. Or so it seemed now…and there they are, two sides of the same coin. Only their mother could tell them apart. He had an erection, but he was happy to let it simmer, and think about watching them fuck; or watch them do anything, not fussed, and possibly never move again. Yes, this would be dandy, just sitting here thinking horny thoughts about my darlings, for all eternity. But he should make them put their hats on; and we should climb higher up the mountains or find some trees or get under the earth. Sage is going to fry.

  ‘Sage,’ he said, ‘You’re going to fry.’

  ‘It’s okay Ax,’ said Fiorinda, ‘time isn’t passing. I think we should visit Vireo Lake. Do you know how to get there?’

  ‘Of course he does,’ said Sage. ‘He has a map in his head.’

  ‘Yeah, I can get us there. But put your hats on.’

  ‘I want to wear my new party frock.’

  Sage beamed, delighted, ‘Good idea!’

  They had to fetch the Rugrat, but it didn’t seem far. Before long they were driving through a different desert, a pale plain covered in golden-toned maquis; more beautiful than the one they’d come to feel was their own. Drifts of poppies, bright as egg-yolk, scattered the verges like harbingers of next year’s spring. They drove without music, Ax at the wheel of course and Fiorinda in the middle, through a rushing silence. They had the windows open; Sage leaned his elbow on the rim, smiling. ‘I keep thinking I’m listening to music,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Rock music, not ours but someone else’s. I’m about to recognise the band and then I snap back, like waking up from a microsleep.’

  Ax and Sage listened intently, thinking they would name the band for her; it kept eluding them, though the music was extremely familiar. It was one of those glitches where you need to get past the moment, so that you can look at it again, and say, oh, yeah, that’s what it was. But they could never get past the moment. The silence roared like a distant sea. The landscape flew along with them like a magic carpet, getting more barren but more austerely beautiful, and they met intersections, at each of which Ax followed the directions on the map in his head. There was still only desert, and they hadn’t seen another car, when suddenly the lake was in front of them, a pan of silver they had glimpsed from afar and assumed must be salt.

  It was Vireo Lake. They got out of the Rat, and walked by the shore. White birds rose from the water. ‘Can you drink it?’ asked Fiorinda.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Ax. ‘It must be an extremely strange liquid.’

  Sage looked up, squinting through his lashes, into a sky as white as the shore. ‘We’re walking on a seabed.’

  ‘We’re where it’s impossible for people to be,’ said Fiorinda.

  ‘On the cutting edge. This is where they’re building air for Mars.’

  ‘At the highest point of the high tide.’

  ‘You digitised a human being, Sage, and moved her through information space. Could you shift, I dunno…that rock?’

  ‘Totally different problem. A human being is already a live path in the code, conscious information. But I could only do it because it was it was Fee on the other end. Any other human being would be powers beyond—’

  ‘But it’s a start. The universe isn’t really made of binary code, is it?’

  ‘Nope, it’s turtles all the way down.’

  ‘It’s a new way of handling things,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Something we’ve missed until now, that opens a whole new area in the game.’

  ‘The inexhaustible sea is sliding away from us.’

  Oh, that long departing roar…

  They’d passed the perimeter fence without noticing it: they were now in a car park, among bunker-blank buildings, and an artificial oasis of lawn, set with small pine trees, economy size bonsai. They walked in, and explored the corridors unchallenged, feeling like official visitors—a role they’d endured so often they caught each other smiling falsely, nodding for no reason, and doing needless how interesting expressions. It was cool inside the buildings, but not the flamboyant indoor chill they were used to in Los Angeles. They found a neurological lab, populated with Gauss 0003/zyg series Cr/t imaging scanners: massively shielded whole-body pods, each worth more than the GNP of a small country; two short rows of them. Fiorinda and Ax stayed at the door, Sage went in, pausing to bow his head slightly at the threshold, like a martial arts student entering the dojo. He stalked around, and they saw him raise his eyebrows: he walked out again shaking his head.

  ‘Majestic. You wouldn’t have got me into one of those for long, though.’

  Olwen’s cognitive scanners, built by her parent company in Wales, had been on a different evolutionary line, no need for the massive shielding of fMRI.

  ‘Did you see anything interesting?’

  ‘They’re linked.’

  This seemed reasonable to Fiorinda and Ax. Why shouldn’t the neuronauts be linked, if they were a team? But Sage was impressed. They continued their tour, looking for the team, and found them in a cafeteria. As always at these corporate-feudalism feeding stations, there was an obvious caste system. Support staff and technicians sat below the salt, the scientists and the bureaucrats had their special areas, lords and ladies of Church and State. And then the wild cards, the jokers, who can mingle with anyone but mostly they mingle with each other. They can’t help it. Here was another surprise for Sage: a woman on the A team. She was Number One Cropped, a bodybuilder with little in the way of breasts; but obviously a woman. The A team were easy to spot. They sat together, a group within the group, and they had an aura: a no-kidding, Anne-Marie Wing, striated halo of coloured light, that glowed around them.

  ‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ said Fiorinda, ‘I don’t know what to do with these people. I surely don’t wish them well, but I don’t want to wish them harm.’

  ‘We’re tourists.’ said Sage. ‘We don’t wish them anything.’

  Outside in the atrifical oasis, Fiorinda saw a little grey bird perched on a pine twig. It sang out a burst of silvery notes as she passed, and she stopped and smiled, holding out her hands. Just because it was a bird, singing in the desert.

  Rivers of light

  Scarlet and white

  Sink into the sand

  But this is our…promised land

  On the drive back from Vireo they made up songs together, something they’d rarely done before, though they’d appeared on each other’s albums, helping out in the traditional fashion, in the glory days. There had never been time, and their musical lives had still been distinct: different bands. The songwriting was very good, it grounded them and made them laugh, it took the rush and raced with it. Sadly none of the songs were destined to survive except ‘Promised Land’. Sage was the scribe, leaning by that open window, and all the words and music flew away.

  They left the Rugrat and headed back to camp, through the landscape that Ax had found so familiar. The heat was extraordinary, Ax kept fretting that Sage was going to fry. He’d been taking sunscreen pills for weeks, a kind his liver could deal with: but however often they told him, Ax forgot this. The trail crossed a high red plain, scattered with boulder heaps, cactus and Joshua trees.

  ‘How high are we?’ asked Fiorinda, holding out her iridescent skirts. The dress was darker than anything she’d worn in her party-frock days: but they’d remembered she hated black. She was a glittering wallflower, a pansy, a bird with smoulder-opal plumage.

  With a vulture’s bare head, but that was a token price to pay.

  ‘Bout as high as Ben Nevis, right now.’

  ‘Unbelievable. My eyeballs are on toast. It’s like a sauna.’

  ‘You two wait here, I’ll fetch the horses.’

  ‘No horses.’ Fiorinda quickly thought of an excuse, ‘It’s too hot for them.’

  ‘You like the dress, Fee?’

&nb
sp; ‘I love it.’

  ‘Let’s take a break.’

  They rested in a scoop of black shade and drank water. Ax rolled up spliff: Sage sat close to him. ‘We need to spy out the country we’re heading into. D’you want to come up with me?’

  ‘We’re good here. If we go up there, whoa, we’re in the unknown.’

  ‘You think we might get too far out?’

  ‘Yeah, that worries me.’

  ‘If we get too far out, well, there we’ll be.’

  ‘We could go very far,’ said Ax. ‘Very, very far.’

  Sage filled his lungs, and leaned to pour the smoke into Ax’s mouth. Fiorinda felt that she was in the way. No girlfriends on manoeuvres, they had private things to discuss. ‘I’ll keep watch,’ she said. She took Sage’s rifle and went to the side of a tall red boulder, where she could see the trail. Nothing moved. She climbed to the top of the boulder and found a hollow where she could lie, watching over the plain. She was fascinated by the heavy hard feel of the rifle, the smell of greased metal. It gave her images of a dead, horrible, thrusting and stabbing, but she kept smelling it and feeling it until she was convinced it was harmless, though it may kill this is not a bad rifle, this is a friendly rifle.

  Free and clear, with her bandanna tugged over her eyes, she spread herself to the sun, and the fire that burns the deserts of California ran easily in her veins. Ah, Babylon we’re not afraid. The great burning, the disaster, is our world where we will live… She had hardly been there any time when she heard scrambling and gormless laughter, and they came up the rock, rock hard, naked except for their boots, greased with sweat. ‘Why did you go away?’ demanded Ax. ‘You scared us,’ said Sage. ‘Don’t ever go away, don’t be out of sight.’

  The rock became soft as red milk, continuous with the air. Fiorinda and Ax soul kissing, Sage between them, the black opal frock for bedding. They became a flesh machine, endlessly, brutally, working: while the sun raced to and fro, burning them to skeletons, fusing them to the rock. ‘D’you remember,’ asked Sage, when they lay worn out like fossils, hollowed and filled with gritstone. ‘Once, we were going to stay hornswoggling naked for life?’