Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  The living skull treated her to a hideous glare.

  ‘Fuck. Off.’

  ‘Three chillies,’ said the acting secretary. ‘One more of those, Sage, and you are out of the room.’

  ‘Fer fuck’s sake, I only told her to fuck off.’

  ‘It’s the tone of voice. You can call Andie a brownnosed interfering little cunt with stupid hair, and I wouldn’t argue. But you don’t look at her like that and you don’t use that tone. We do emotion control and we do gentleness, Sage, and don’t you fucking cross the line again.’

  ‘As I was saying. I didn’t nick anything, I didn’t create anything. I got there first, which was very cool, and me an’ the Heads then made a stack of profit, but I put the code back in the public domain because tha’s where I found it. I didn’t make Ivan/Lara happen. But I feel responsible, and tha’s why, having realised this situation, I decided I had to come to you.’

  The commissioners confered, silently: but he didn’t need to know what they were saying. They were sold. He knew they hated the fusion consciousness weapon, or there’d have been no point in trying this. No love lost between net-lovers and icky grey matter research. Better than that, it was their psychology. These were sixteen of the smartest, best informed and most successful people in the entire world, but all geeks are mischief-makers at heart.

  ‘They’ll have an answer,’ said the second woman Commissioner, and deputy chair, a NASA information systems chief: with regret. No love lost between inner space and outer space. ‘They’ll prove they’re clean.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ said someone else, gravely. ‘But we’ll have to check it out. Very carefully. It’s complex. It could take years to come to a decision.’

  ‘Yay! Let’s pull the plug on the buggers! Awesome!’

  ‘You’re the firemen,’ said Sage, limpidly. ‘You can do whatever you like.’

  He was dismissed, and left the building with Dino Logothetis. The weight of several overheated atmospheres fell on them as they stepped outdoors. Californians are from Mars, Sprawlers are from Venus.

  Dino looked at Sage, suddenly curious. ‘Have you changed the mask?’

  The living skull would have raised its eyebrows, if it had any. ‘Not recently.’

  ‘You look different somehow.’

  ‘I had my hair cut yesterday.’

  ‘Hahaha, that must be it. Share a taxi?’

  ‘No. I hate sharing taxis.’

  At Logan International he ran the gauntlet of civil unrest. One of the things that middle class Americans don’t tell you is that the price of aviation fuel is only part of it. Not only is the security horrible, but airports are where the poor gather, picketing and hustling. It’s just a miserable, humiliating experience. Safe on the other side, in echoing, melancholy halls, he found a bar, and tugged the mask button from his eyesocket. The button was new, the file copy of the mask had been downloadable from England, thank God. He couldn’t have done that pitch barefaced. It’s been confirmed, I’m not Aoxomoxoa anymore.

  He thought of the woman whose bitter brilliance had been extinguished, her cabined spirit, failing for breath. Tonight it doth inherit, The vasty hall of Death. He picked up the tiny button, and held it on his fingertip. Shall I chuck this, in memoriam? Nah, I would only buy another one next week.

  Know thyself.

  The President had been spending too much time at his beloved Bellevue this summer. His detractors were bitching; but they were going to have to shut up when the Lavoisier affair was revealed to them, so he could afford one more weekend. He held a quiet dinner party, to which Ax and Fiorinda were invited: an apology, he said, for missing both their Bowl concerts. The hostess was Cleonce Sherville, the lady quietly known to be the president’s current maîtresse du titre. Ax noted the compliment with something like dread. The meal was late, Spanish style. Coffee and liqueurs were served outdoors at midnight. Ax and the President strolled on the Japanese terrace: moonlight shining on the forested ridges, stretching away forever. ‘I always hate to leave this view,’ sighed Fred. ‘I dream about it. How’s the big guy?’

  ‘He’s okay. He won’t take care of himself, that’s all. What can I do with a man who had his liver replaced a year ago, and insists on drinking alcohol?’

  ‘You could try accepting that he’s a grown-up.’

  ‘I’ll hold that one in reserve,’ said Ax, gloomily.

  ‘What are your plans, the three of you? Where are you heading?’

  ‘I have plans,’ said Ax, with a hunted look, muscles knotting at the angle of his jaw. ‘Someone has to look after Sage, he keeps forgetting he’s not superman, and Fiorinda won’t do it, he has her hypnotised. I badly need to see more of the world; and I’m thinking I might learn to sail. I have to get those two to appreciate the Blues, that’s very important. And Beethoven. I need to convince Fiorinda to give Beethoven a second chance. She has the superficial idea that he’s some kind of shallow, megalomaniac tyrant—’

  ‘I have something for you. Shall we go along to my study?’

  Shadows followed as they walked around to the study: even here, in the heart of this armed camp. The President opened the french doors, shut them behind his friend, and drew the curtains. The lamps were lit. On a table by the hearth stood a silver tray bearing bourbon, ice and glasses.

  ‘Let me see—’

  Mr Eiffrich made a little business of looking for his gift. ‘Is that Vireo Lake?’ said Ax, looking at a glossy colour photo. Sleek block houses, bonsai pines in green lawns, all set in an unreal white plain.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Well, well, thought Ax.

  ‘Where are the faithful protestors?’

  ‘Oh, they haven’t been airbrushed. They never get beyond the perimeter fence. Nobody does, except authorised personnel. But if you’d like to make a visit I could arrange that?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Get it while you can. They’ll be shutting down, very shortly. And before they get out from under Sage’s Morpho moratorium, I’ll have disclosures I can make about the Lavoisier affair that will outlaw research of that kind forever. Fusion consciousness science may be the coming thing, I accept that. Human weapons development in the USA is down the tubes. And that means forever, I hope.’ He gave Ax a warm, firm smile. ‘For which I am eternally grateful, to you, and your lady; and to Sage.’ He was holding a dark red box, like a jewel case. What could be in there? A necklace for Fiorinda?

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ said Ax, looking at the red case.

  ‘Shall we sit down? Will you take that drink, this time?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  They went to the armchairs by the hearth, and the President poured himself a little bourbon. ‘Ax, all this time, I haven’t said a word to you about the situation with the Presidency in England.’

  ‘I noticed, and I was grateful.’

  ‘I saw the ambassador, in Washington last week. Do you know the guy? James Spencer-Mehta? He has the greatest respect for you.’

  ‘Does he? I’ve never met him.’

  ‘They want you back.’

  ‘I gather they do. Why not? I’m decorative.’

  Mr Eiffrich looked into his glass, and sighed. ‘How did it happen, Ax? How did England fall? Of all the states in Europe—’

  ‘The mother of all stock market crashes, and a mountain of consumer debt. That’s how. Millions living one pay cheque away from ruin, a government slipping into tyranny and corruption; and then ruin came. That was the situation that empowered the Green Revolution.’ Ax’s eyes flashed, ‘We did a good job, Fred. When we took over we made the revolution work: for a while, marginally, smoke and mirrors. But it was a shambles that I directed, and I always knew it. You know what that means? It means a slaughter house. What was slaughtered was a civilised nation. It’s gone. And the venal idiots who find that situation comfortable and profitable are the ones who have ended up in charge.’

  Mr Eiffrich looked guiltily alarmed—

  Ax laughed, ‘Oh, that’s not
in the movie. Don’t worry, it’s all smoothed over, practically the only on screen casualty will be the truth.’

  ‘Good.’

  Soon, thought Ax, you’ll convince yourself nothing strange happened at all, and there’ll be nobody to convince you otherwise. There was only one, and she’s dead, may the Compassionate have mercy on her. But before you know for sure, you’ll be compelled to engage with your eco-warriors. You’ll have to listen, and so will others, who would never, never have listened. I count that as a result.

  ‘Spencer-Mehta gave me this, to give to you. Ax, your brother himself knows he’s not the man for the position: and I know you’ve talked to him.’

  Ax had talked to Jordan in the end, after the pep-talk from Rob. How was it these people didn’t realise they were hammering on an open door? To go back, to try again, this time without the corruptions of power… It wasn’t something he didn’t want. It was an unbearable temptation. Mr Eiffrich gave the case to Ax. He had to take it, open it. Inside, on a bed of velvet, lay a gleaming leaf-shape of green stone, as long as a man’s hand.

  ‘It’s the Falmouth Jade,’ said the President. ‘To replace the stone axe that was lost when you quit the dictatorship. They really want you back, Ax.’

  ‘I don’t think they know what they’re asking for.’

  ‘Fiorinda will go with you. She wants to look after her drop-outs. Sage will go with you, and you could have no wiser friends.’

  You think I’ll be useful to you in Europe, he thought. The Westminster government wants to trade on the legend, and my darlings want to go home. They know we can’t live in England unless I take the Presidency. It would be Ax Preston lurking down in Cornwall, no fixed role, a focus for every plot and conspiracy. How long could that last?

  ‘Are we talking terms? Let’s talk about the way your wars are making the Islamic populations of Europe, including England, impossible to govern.’

  The President leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the bourbon glass in his hands. ‘I’m not a fool, Ax. I know what the USA looks like from Crisis Europe. I know people over there see me—maybe even you see me—as the puppet of the forces of evil. I can only tell you, it’s not true. Okay, I have to obey the secret rulers, like every Head of State, and like everyone else I have no choice about who those rulers are, my country’s history has made that choice. But I have a mandate. I intend to use it to do everything in my power to get the world out of this very frightening tailspin we are in. But I won’t waste fire in battles I can’t win. There’s things I can do for you, there’s things I can’t. Will you go back?’

  They stared at each other, and it was Ax who broke away. He stood, without a word, and walked out of the room. Fred stayed by the empty hearth. He raised his glass to the dark-haired woman above the fireplace: and grinned, as at a point well gained, in a long and still doubtful game.

  ‘Turned him!’

  * * *

  The English packed up, said goodbye to Emilia and the house at Sunset Cape, and moved into the Alisal, a historic (well, repro) Art Deco hotel in town. The day before the Few were due to leave by Htrain, for New York and the sea voyage home, they did a group interview for a movie-news channel. Harry had sprung this on them without notice, just to prove he was still Harry, and they’d said yes, for old times sake. The interview was conducted in the Triumvirate suite. There were far too many people, most of them there for no good reason, and the interviewers, who modelled their style on Dee-Dee and Bob the software bots, treated the Few like filler: blatantly only interested in the Big Three.

  Interviewer: What’s it like living with three laydees, Rob? Aren’t you everlastingly catching hell about the toilet seat?

  Felice: (Unintelligible, sound cone whisked away.)

  Interviewer: I just can’t get over the bisexual Aoxomoxoa, Sage. Don’t you find that a lot of your male fans are kind of ooooh, woooo, about that?

  Sage: ‘Who are you calling bisexual? I’m not bisexual! He’s bisexual, I’m perfectly normal, there’s nothing wrong with me.’

  Interviewer: (merrily) ‘Ax, why the fuck do you tolerate him?’

  Ax: ‘I get off on being publicly humiliated. When I was dictator I used to meet workers in the sex industry on railway concourses, and pay them to reveal disgusting details of my sex habits to the tabloids. But they always let me down.’

  Fiorinda: ‘He didn’t pay them enough. He’s incredibly stingy.’

  Ax: ‘They could have revealed I was incredibly stingy, couldn’t they?’

  Anonymous party boy: Ax, are you going to hold democratic elections?

  And so on. They stuck if for about twenty minutes, then retired unanimously to the lobby bar: a beautiful space, the walls granite boulders, huge naked beams overhead. They emptied the miniature pretzels out of the cut-crystal miniature pretzel bowl, and made a pile of the faxed checks they had received, as their movie fees, after the Second Chamber government’s deductions.

  ‘We could buy a cup of coffee each, in Shanghai,’ said Dora.

  ‘If we walked there,’ said Allie.

  ‘You have to admire Rufus,’ said Sage. ‘There he was, laying our country waste, torturing us to death and damning us to hell for all eternity, but he still took the time to wreck our income on the side. Now that is thorough.’

  He stretched and laughed. ‘Hey, if we stay on I bet I can get a better paid gig, cash only, doing a don’t call me baby set, in Vegas somewhere.’

  ‘I’d pay to see that,’ grinned Ax. He poked the checks. ‘We should set fire to them. We owe Harry at least one little rock and roll behaviour incident—’

  Harry had not turned up for the last interview circus.

  Fiorinda slipped off her shoes and tucked up her feet. ‘Get it while you can. We’re servants of the people again next week.’

  The Few glanced at Ax, with whom the decision was still a sensitive point.

  ‘I’ve been finding out about Lavoisier,’ he remarked, relaxed beside his big cat, ‘Did you know, as well as inventing modern chemistry along with our Priestley, naming oxygen and god knows what else, he discovered that breathing is form of combustion? And he once had his father carry a bowl of goldfish across France for him, not sure why. He used to get on well with his dad.’

  ‘Is that a chip memory?’ asked Sage. He worried about the way fragments from Ax’s long deceased implant archive still kept surfacing.

  Ax shrugged. ‘Probably. But life is fire, it burns, and we can’t breathe air without fire in it, that’s not a chip factoid. It’s just the truth.’

  ‘D’you know the apocryphal story about him at the guillotine?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Everyone does,’ said Verlaine, bored. ‘He told a friend of his to watch and he would blink as often as he could, after his head was chopped off. It’s a meme, a marker of something, if you know it—’

  ‘Trivia wiring.’

  ‘It was eleven times,’ said Allie.

  ‘I thought it was fifteen,’ said Dora. ‘You get about twenty seconds, max.’

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ said Chip. ‘Woo. A lot can happen in twenty seconds.’

  ‘Couldn’t possibly comment,’ mumured Verlaine.

  ‘My father lasted longer than that,’ said Fiorinda. ‘All the way home from Ireland, and then some. I thought about it a lot, when I was scared I was going to end up a head in a jar. I was wondering if I could beat my dad’s record.’

  For a moment the banter became not funny at all, they fell off a cliff and no one knew how to recover. Ax was appalled that he’d started this. But it was too much. They cracked up, all of them, giggling manically.

  Fiorinda raised her glass. ‘Long live the revolution!’

  ‘Long live the revolution!’

  Heads turned. Ax and Sage’s sofa took a little jump, as did the rest of the furniture. The Few glanced around, puzzled: who’s doing that? Fiorinda swallowed the rest of her drink, to protect it from being spilled. ‘There’s something about getting in a doorway…,’ said Ax, calmly. T
he lobby of the Alisal shifted again, lifting and flopping down, like a sailing boat bouncing over choppy swell. Other people in the bar had begun to mill around. There were voices raised, but no alarms went off. The granite boulder walls stood firm.

  ‘What are we supposed to do?’ wondered Dora.

  ‘There’ll be storm shelters, earthquake drill, they’re used to this.’

  ‘I think we should get outdoors,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Now. Quickly.’

  A lot of people had had the same idea. Outside, the traffic had backed up, sirens were wailing, the air was full of dust. The sky through the reddish cast was white, a negative white full of dancing sundogs, a storm of naked energies, with no wrapping of rain or wind. The third shock hit, buildings shook like jelly. Ax and Sage got either side of Fiorinda, but the others had disappeared, gone in the mêlée. There was a sound like thunder, a roaring like the sea in a shell, and they realised that what they could see coming over the horizon was a wall of brown, churning water rushing down the Pasadena freeway—

  Two hundred miles away, in the Anza-Borrego desert, the Vireo Lake A-team had come on line.

  As Sage had once remarked, the Zen Self experiments under Olwen Devi were really the nuclear fission of neuro-physics: a sudden breaking of barriers, an explosive release of energy. The Vireo Lake project had more in common with the old-style fusion. The ’nauts had indeed been selected for latent psi ability, besides being rigorously vetted in the usual ways. Their task was to visualise (linked and boosted, under the scanners) the molecular composition of crude oil, make a change; and fuse, or superimpose, the changed, virtual, neuron-map “oil”, onto a buried tank of the material stuff—much the same way that Sage had summoned Fiorinda to fuse with the virtual “Fiorinda”. The reservoir was shielded like a trap for neutrinos, they were expecting to measure ‘fusion’ effects in parts per trillion. After the first and last full test, scheduled to be the last test before the Internet Commissioners shut the lab down, they didn’t have to go that far. It was obvious at once that they had an tank of disordered slime. But the A team were dead. They had died, under the scanners.

  There was no smoking gun in the fault lines, linking the long-overdue LA quake to the location of the underground tank; but nobody believed it was pure coincidence. Nevertheless, as analysis of the slime went into overdrive, the Vireo Lake scientists knew they had a staggering vindication of their work. Despite the human tragedy, and the devastation, they were triumphant. A week later a note, which might be construed as a joint suicide note, was found. It had been hidden so that it would only be discovered in the course of an investigation; after their death. It began IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE COMPASSIONATE, THE MERCIFUL (none of the neuronauts had been Muslims). It ended THE LORD GIVETH AND THE LORD TAKETH AWAY, BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD. It declared they had acted for the good of humanity, and thathuman weapon building should never be repeated.