Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  Strange Kisses

  You are so beautiful and strange to me, I can’t believe this could be love

  If this were heaven I’d be dancing here, There is nothing more I want-

  Send

  Our

  Defiance

  To the

  World

  Out There,

  There is no fear of dying—

  In this game,

  In this game,

  In this game—

  Sage had reduced his fx to a pulse and flow of coloured light, everything was in the rhythm, the voices, and the euphoria that possessed the crowd as it peaked, and peaked: until Ax and Sage stepped back, and Fiorinda, without a pause, broke into the swinging, sturdy dance that went with ‘Chocobo’, from her first solo album, Friction. The crowd didn’t know this one, it was Eurotrash, poppy sound and absurd lyrics about a big happy bird from a fantasy game; but they were with her. She danced, while her recorded voice blended with her lovers’ backing, rainbows whirling around her, arms and legs like pistons. She just went on dancing: while the thousands danced in place, until they could feel the world turning under them, until they never wanted to stop, just let Ax go on playing that guitar, let Fiorinda’s beat never stop, let the light and sound and colour never end. Go with it, take it away—

  It must have ended somehow.

  The venue must have been cleared. Sober uniformed phalanxes must have marshalled the crowd. Shards of memory, when she left the stage did she tear off the hateful wig and stamp on it, yelling never, never never? Were there blurred faces, swelling and shrinking? Was there a carpark, black in driving rain? The sound of wind. The fractured galaxies of the freeway lights.

  Wake in darkness, naked, shocked and jolted, oh, God, what did I do?

  ‘Oh, God. What did I do?’

  ‘Hush, ssh. You did nothing bad. It’s okay, Fee, lie down again.’

  ‘You’re safe in bed, my little cat, you’re safe with us.’

  ‘It’s over,’ she whispered, ‘It’s over now.’

  Janelle had said no visitors, but he knew he was expected. Behind the cottage her car was parked out on the asphalt, debris from last night’s rainstorm plastered against the wheels. He unlatched the screen door, the inner door opened when he tried the handle. The blue and white paint in the hallway was peeling, invaded by ocean damp. He passed through the living room, with its seen-better-days good taste: beach sculptures, a stone hearth, black and white landscape photos by major artists. She was in her studio, lying on a couch with a knitted comforter pulled over her, her very professional projector silently running: watching a movie on an irregular shaped décor-screen, (the only fashion item in this room). ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi.’

  He folded down beside her, on the rug. The movie was European, from the last century. He remembered that Jan worshipped this director, he even remembered her passionate commentary when they’d watched this very movie together. Things like that stay with you, nineteen year old sex vanishes. Subtitles tracked the sonorous, lilting language, words he recognised (Europe’s a small place) rising like waveforms… We draw the theatre around us, said a young woman in scarlet and gold, The dressing rooms are warm and brightly lit, people sit out there in the dark, liking us—

  ‘D’you know what it is?’

  ‘It’s Fanny and Alexander.’

  ‘Congratulations, grasshopper. The best movie ever made, bar none, fuck the tech. Hey, the pilgrim’s progess of the mind’s predicament, what else should art express?’ She kept her eyes on the screen. ‘So now you know. Sometimes, like when you gave me the lesson on Zen Self, when you told me how you beat Rufus, I was afraid you knew everything and you were playing with me.’

  ‘I didn’t know. I have blindsight. It’s not like suspecting the truth. It’s like walking in complete darkness, and stepping around things you don’t know are there. Fiorinda was looking for a big mean megastar, Fred Eiffrich thought the Pentagon had gone feral, but I kept coming back here. I kept thinking of you.’

  ‘And I kidded myself it was fond memories.’

  ‘It was fond memories.’ He took her hand, her dark skin was dry and hot. Janelle was burning up. ‘We were looking for a megastar, but the logic said it must be someone close, someone we knew or would get to know. You are the star of the virtual movies, Jan. The celebrities are just publicity, those thirty code-people are it and you’re the one who blended them. You were the single mind, giving those fragments meaning, expressing your vision through them.’

  ‘It’s what a director does. Who figured it out?’

  ‘Fiorinda did, when we knew you had to be the Fat Boy.’

  ‘She’s a smart cookie, your girlfriend. Ironic, or what? If Digital Artists had let me make the movies I wanted, I would never have got weaponised. I drowned other people’s crap in crude arousal triggers, and the demon juice came gushing into my tanks. I didn’t know how it worked, I never heard of the Hollywood Conjecture until near the end. But I guess I knew what I was doing. The code-bunnies tempted me, and I did fall.’

  The movie continued, and they watched it for a while—

  ‘I met Rufus once,’ said Janelle. ‘Right here in Hollywood, before you were famous, Aoxomoxoa, at one of those fucking miscegenation rock-movie parties. He looked me dead in the eye, I looked at him, and I got out of that room as fast as I could. I didn’t know what the fuck had hit me, I was shitting myself… He didn’t touch me. He just gave me that I know you look, and I knew never, never, never go near that guy again. I didn’t tell a soul, and he didn’t come after me. He wasn’t interested (the wistful tone was chilling). I wasn’t hot enough.’

  ‘You weren’t his daughter.’

  ‘Maybe I was his sister. I was Shakespeare’s sister of the occult. Maybe we were descended from the same Mandingo sorcerer-king. I like to think that magic comes out of blackness, out of negritude, hahaha, to blast the fucking smug white world. That would be my desire.’

  ‘Mm.’

  She gripped his hand. ‘I don’t mean that… I don’t think like that. I have never used my power for gain, Sage. Well, okay, maybe, gain like, boosting things, fixing parking tickets, High School grades, making people who annoyed me have a shitty day. It was my dirty secret. No one knew: I was smart enough to realise, from when I was a kid, that no one must ever know… But I never used it to further my career, because I was proud, and I was honest. I wanted real success.’

  ‘What made you decide to work for the Counterculture?’

  ‘I won’t try and tell you I started worshipping Gaia-’

  He grinned faintly. ‘I didn’t think so.’

  ‘The environment is fucked to shit, no one has to convince me of that, I live in LA. There is no answer, we’re on our way out and we deserve it… I got approached by Laz Catskill. I don’t know why he had me down as a potential eco-warrior, but it was very cool. We were this secret club, names that would surprise you. Behind all the scenes; into fusion consciousness, Vireo Lake, the revolution in Europe. We knew what the real news was.’

  She sighed. ‘They were looking for magic, I had magic. I wouldn’t go to the desert, that sounded too fucking weird; and later they didn’t want me too. But I let them persuade me to try their exercises. I didn’t know I was any good, that’s the funny thing. The way they talked, I thought shit, they won’t be impressed. But it was all bullshit. I was the only one.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They had scraps. Auto-suggestion. With me, it was this geyser inside me, powers beyond what I’d known was there. The worse stuff I let them do for me, the better it got; and everything I did for them, fixing their problems, was a sweeter taste. Before you know it, I was—’ She broke off in mid sentence and he felt something looking at him, some limitless, hair-trigger malevolence. He turned his head, and she had also turned from the screen. He looked into dark eyes. The blood chilled and stopped in his veins, his balls tried to crawl into his belly, his mouth dried—

  ‘I was a mons
ter.’

  ‘But you’re okay now,’ he said, gentle and steady.

  ‘Yes. I called the destroyer of worlds on myself, and she came.’

  She laid her head back. ‘I called destruction, but the monster didn’t. Using the magic opens oh, God, a pit inside, you don’t tell the pit what to do. I was going all the way, last night. I thought I could win, for once in my fucking life. But nah, I was screwed. I had to take my medicine, I’ve taken it and I’m glad.’

  She gripped his hand. A shock swept over her face, as if something behind the flesh would break out: but the spasm passed.

  ‘Hey, bodhisattva, you got a cigarette for an old lady?’

  He found a crumpled pack on her workdesk and sat on the couch beside her while they shared the last one, turn about. She looked up at him, tears starting, like a little girl.

  ‘They wouldn’t let me in, Sage. The bastards wouldn’t let me in. Because I’m Black, because I’m a woman, because I wasn’t going to bow down before the gilded turds. If something was shit, I would say it was shit… But the fucking sad thing is, I’m the same as them. I’m their kind. If they would have let me in, I would have bowed down before anything.’

  A little later she said, ‘I’m dying. Will you come with me? I’m scared.’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for, sweetheart.’

  It wasn’t easy. The thing she’d been trying to become was appalling even in defeat. But he got her past the pit, into the cascade of neurological events that would lead to peace, and returned to find that the children in the Bergman movie had been rescued too: they were safe in the red-shadowed house of curios and marionettes. The old Jew, Isak, read to them.

  I myself am on my way to the forests and the springs.

  I was there once when I was young,

  and now I’m trying to find my way back.

  He watched to the end of the scene. Then he left Fanny and Alexander to run, left the cottage and returned to Fiorinda and Ax, who were waiting in a public car park that overlooked the white, tainted sands of the Rosa Peninsula. He got into the Rugrat, and they drove away.

  It was cancer. The doctors told her she had mild pneumonia, and all the time it was the most awful systemic cancer. Poor Janelle, she was riddled with it. Found by the cleaning lady, isn’t that the death we all fear? Virtual Hollywood was cast into mourning and struck by dread, the idols and the money-men, golden boys and studio executives, looking in their mirrors and thinking, that’s how it will happen to me. The former Aoxomoxoa took a ride in one of those endangered-species silver birds, across the continent to Massachusetts. He had to meet some people, and he couldn’t put them off. You don’t make excuses if you’ve been granted an audience with the Internet Commissioners.

  By tradition there were sixteen of them. When one of their number had cause to drop out the team chose and appointed a replacement. Repeated attempts had been made to suborn this process, by government, military or business interests; without success. They brooked no interference. Their ages at present ranged from seventy to twenty four, sexuality various; two women and fourteen men. By their internal standards they were riven by huge ideological differences, generation gaps, theory feuds. To the rest of the world they were a hive-mind.

  They liked to meet in person (which tells you something); they were indifferent to terrorist threats, and the expense of travel was not a concern. The case of some hermit nethead who belonged on the team but travelled by bicycle was theoretically possible, but it hadn’t arisen yet. They weren’t paid for being Internet Commissioners, but they were all in the extremely high income bracket, one way or another. They sometimes met in Seattle, sometimes in New York State, or Texas: this time it was the Sprawl.

  Outdoors, in a select node of Boston’s silicon valley, the trees pressed like rampant weeds around clearings hacked for digital business and plush suburban dwellings. Humidity was so high you could take a handful of air and wring water out of it, and the heat was scalding. The conference room, on the upper floor of a blank, gold glass blockhouse, was dry and austere: bathed in cool neutral light. The netheads sat around an oval table. The table and their persons were snootily devoid of visible tech, but Sage wore the living skull; the file copy. It was the right touch. Some of the Commissioners knew him as the renegade son of one of their own; all of them knew Aoxomoxoa, at least by repute. It wasn’t the moment to try out new material.

  He told them they had to call a halt to the experiments at Vireo Lake, because the weapons-builders were using code from Morpho, the first immersion album in the world, which Sage Pender had authored seventeen years ago.

  They took his news as a joke in poor taste.

  ‘I’m personally opposed to remote controlled weapons of mass destruction,’ said the chairperson, at last—a gigantically obese fellow in a floppy pale suit, with a leonine head of curly grey hair. ‘Of any variety. But open source is something I hold sacred. What the hell are you talking about Sage? You made immersion code public domain. Are you trying to have us claw it back for you? It’s a long time too late for that, young man.’

  ‘I’m not trying anything.’ said Sage, ‘It’s your rules. Morpho code was used in creating the Ivan/Lara virus. You’ve banned the use of any scrap of live viral material, in any public funded application, an’ as yer may recall, Ivan/Lara was the bug that killed the European net.’

  There was a gratifying silence.

  ‘So this is what Fred’s come up with,’ mused the chairperson.

  ‘Did he fuck. This is my idea. I thought of it all by myself.’

  The razor-cut, nose-to-ear-chain biker lady next to the chairperson rolled her eyes. ‘C’mon, Sage. Don’t bullshit us. We know that desert nest was a sideshow. We know Fred Eiffrich hired you guys to help him screw the Pentagon.’

  ‘How is Ax? Is he going to take the English President job?’

  ‘How’s he planning to deal with the Second Chamber?’

  ‘Will he hold democratic elections?’

  Sage sat back and folded his arms, the living skull disgusted. ‘I’m not here to talk about Ax Preston. If you want me to divulge politically sensitive information it will cost you, an’ you can see me after. I’m here to talk about my idea.’

  ‘Me, fucking me. You haven’t changed.’

  ‘When Ax last came over, you bastards shoved him off to a subcommittee, just to insult him, until Fred kicked you into line. I’ve got no time for your personal comments. Are you interested or are you not? I can leave. I can walk out now.’

  They were interested. Sage showed them (everyone had implants, or eye socket tech) what he was talking about: the code he had authored, so long ago, and the indisputable role it had played in the virus that had come near to destroying modern civilisation. The demonstration itself raised a frisson of dread: Ivan/Lara had been the doomspell of all doomspells.

  ‘I mention this in passing,’ said the youngest Commissioners, slender fashion victim, Japanese eyejob, ‘Not that I give a shit, but you happen to know, line by line, the software our top-secret weapons developers are using?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the living skull. ‘Use yer head, Dino. This is neuroscience, not the fucking recipe for Cocacola. The labrats have to be trained on immersions. That’s how you get the neuronal architecture for handling multiple virtual worlds, an’ you have to have that in place, or you carn get anything from hitting information space, which is the set of all virtual worlds including this one here. That’s how me and my mates got into the Zen Self. We were immix trained, had the onboard equipment that Olwen Devi needed in her test pilots.’

  ‘You’re admitting your stuff really does burn peoples’ brains?’

  ‘So does learning to read. Your point is?’

  The netheads were not fully informed on fusion consciousness. A few people around the table became abstracted, glazing over while they went scurrying after a crash course for the collective, in the privacy of their heads. One of them came out of his trance, impressed, but shaking his head.
‘Sage, okay, how can I put this, have you talked to the band? You’re already on the index in fifteen states. Now you want to announce to the world that classic immersion code contains the seed of a deadly virus?’

  ‘It’s Morpho, not immersion code. We don’t care what happens to Morpho. We lost the rights, remember? Like everyone in Europe knows, I re-authored: everything after Morpho is in Mark II. Vireo Lake is using Mark I, which is tainted. Check it out… I don’t know why it would be a public scandal. I’d think it’d be something to keep quiet. But if our sales took a dip, we can weather it.’

  He didn’t explain it would be the Second Chamber government’s loss.

  The leonine chairperson said, thoughtfully, ‘Can it be argued that this viral infringement happens specifically at Vireo Lake?’

  The living skull grinned. Well, of course. We don’t want to pick a fight with any other users, such as the virtual movie industry; or medicine. The time he’d spent with Fred Eiffrich had been spent laboriously tracing a path that would single out the weapons developers.

  ‘The lawyers in the President’s camp say a case can be made.’

  The chairperson nodded. ‘Mm.’

  ‘Immersion code was never my property, see. All I did was I went looking for what I needed, picked it from the bough, made it do my will. I didn’t nick anything—not besides crunching time, which I was siphoning off my dad’s machines, without his knowledge—’

  ‘You can’t still believe Joss didn’t know what you were doing,’ broke in the woman with the razor cut. ‘Grow up, Sage. Get past the emotional block.’

  ‘Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t know this was the Joss Pender fanclub.’

  ‘Your dad was caring for you. He was giving you what you needed most, the only way that you would let him—’