Midnight Lamp
Page 41
The note was suppressed. The neurological data was re-examined. It was discovered that the neuronauts might have reached the Fat Boy state together, for an instant, at the moment of their death. By that time, a handful of people already knew what the A team had done.
The rest of the world would find out by degrees, as the ruin spread.
Coda
At The Gate Of The Year
It was the end of October, a cool rainy day in Washington DC. In California LA was struggling back to life, with what aid their state and nation, and the crippled International Community, could muster. Not many lives had been lost but treasured landmarks were gone, food and water were in short supply; epidemic disease threatened and a lot of people would be homeless for months, or years. The Few had returned to England. The Triumvirate had stayed in California, and Fiorinda had managed to turn the balance at 110lb, more than she’d ever weighed in her life, counting when she was pregnant. She’d had the treatment to reverse the sterilisation, since Dr Trigos’ clinic was still operational. Chaos had seemed a fitting setting, and she’d been scared she’d never get another chance.
They were on their way home now. Ax was doing a last, live global tv appearance with Fred Eiffrich: morale booster for a frightened and frightening new world. The White House Media Office had been surprised to find they couldn’t have all the Big Three, but you have to draw a line and stick to it. It had been established long ago that Sage and Fiorinda didn’t have to do politics.
They went to Rock Creek Cemetery: Sage wanted to see the Adams Memorial, setting of the only scene Jan had shown him, from her dreamchild movie.
Janelle Firdous had been cremated quickly and privately, with no religious rite; as had been her wish. Ax had been there, and Harry. There’d been a memorial service after the quake, and Jan would have said, be proud, because in spite of the situation everybody who mattered turned out. Sage and Fiorinda had stayed away from both ceremonies: this was the place where they would pay their respects, this lonely arbour, where a woman of genius, barred from power, called Eleanor Roosevelt, had struggled with her broken heart more than a hundred years ago. The shrouded figure of Grief, head bowed in the sombre peace of exhaustion, held their gaze and quieted them. They stayed until another lone woman visitor arrived, then they walked away.
‘Did you know,’ said Sage, ‘there’s a demographic time bomb ticking in the US? When choosing the sex of your child became routine, the middle classes all started voting for daughters, like China reversed. Fake equality will be replaced by real equality in a few years. The glass ceiling is finally toast.’
‘Meanwhile the ghettos fill up with dispossessed young men. Great.’
‘Oh.’
Fiorinda slipped her arm in his. ‘We drop the subject. Now is not the time to debate sexual politics: leave it to the mills of God.’
‘May I quote you?’
‘If you feel lucky.’
They dismissed their cab and walked beside the Tidal Basin, where red and yellow rags of leaves fluttered on the famous cherry trees. Fiorinda got up on the barrier wall, and sat crosslegged: Sage leaning beside her. The sky was grey and low, scattering cool drops on the pewter mirror of the water. Fiorinda now had a working womb, a menstrual cycle, and one functioning ovary. Dr Trigos had warned her, at their final interview, she should forget about natural childbirth, owing to the cervical scarring; for which she didn’t recommend reconstructive surgery. This warning kept returning to her, with a shiver down her spine. If the doctor says that, she really thinks I could get pregnant.
‘Fee?’
‘Mm?’
‘What was your baby called, the little boy who died? I don’t remember.’
‘You don’t remember because I never told you, or Ax, for a good reason. I was a pre-teen Aoxomoxoa fan, remember? I named him Stephen, Sage. After you.’
‘Oh.’ He stared at the water. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know that when—’
‘When you killed his father.’ Fiorinda sighed. ‘Shit. Maybe dysfunctional rockstars with hideous family backgrounds should be banned from having children. Of the three of us only Ax is even partly normal, and he’s a borderline megalomaniac.’
‘I’ve been thinking… Maybe it’s pure superstition saying this, but your child and mine might be very, very strange.’
‘I’ve been thinking that too. On the plus side, she probably wouldn’t be alone. In the world she’ll live in, she could seem quite normal.’
‘If there is a world. If we aren’t all soup, by next week.’
Since August, the world had been living as if in the shadow of the asteroid strike—the one that won’t be announced because there’s nothing to be done—; except that nobody had attempted a media blackout. There were millions upon millions outside the tv coverage, who maybe still didn’t understand what the fuck had happened, but that wasn’t planned.
All the oil and coal reserves in the ground, everywhere seemed to be gone. Stockpiles of crude were infected. Processed petroleum fuels seemed safe so far, but fusion consciousness experts predicted (this had not been announced) that coal-tar derived liquid fuels and gas would inevitably follow the crude. Where would the collapse end? No one knew, and no one had yet dared to try and reverse the process, not even in a test-tube. A handful of global experts in the new sciences were furiously analysing the data, trying to establish the A-team’s precise intentionality. Is oxygen a fossil fuel?
Nothing to do but wait, and live every moment.
‘There’s an easy answer. Only Ax gets unsterilised.’
‘Don’t be such a wuss. One for each of you, we agreed.’
‘If it works. And for you?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve had my baby, I’ll never forget him. Two’s enough.’
He turned, struck by a sudden realisation. Fiorinda’s hair clustered over her head in springy little corkscrews, the colour of a copper beech in April. Her skin glowed fallow-gold, her eyes were calm and bright. She looked amazing.
‘What?’
‘You said “she”? I thought we were going to leave that to chance.’
‘Of course we are. Oh. I did, didn’t I?’ She frowned and then grinned, ravishing sweet. ‘Nah, doesn’t mean anything. Come on, let’s go and find Ax.’
Leaving the USA in wartime, on one of the last transatlantic jet flights for the forseeable future. Last time he’d flown out of Dulles Ax been oblivious. This time, as he said goodbye to Fred and Harry, and once more extracted from Kathryn the solemn promise that she would never sell the Rat, he had a feeling of valediction. The Atlantic’s not so wide, but I don’t think I’m coming back here.
Their plane, borrowed from the presidential fleet, rose and headed into a cracking set of electrical storms. Gusts of wind buffeted them, rain hammered, and there was the interesting possibility that the fuel in their tanks would collapse. But that last was not a serious threat. The experts said refined fuel could not be affected, and Ax had two of those experts sitting beside him. This silver bird would touch down safe in John Lennon airport.
And above us only sky… They had the cabin to themselves. Fiorinda’s nose was pressed to the window. Sage had already contrived to fall asleep. Ax set about scanning through the stack of English newspapers, e-format, that he’d picked up from an airport callpoint, (yep, I’m doing my homework on the bus, I did not have time.) An AI car can live, theoretically, for ninety or a hundred years, but they don’t forget. It’ll remember us, if we come back when we’re pensioners. He put the plane-safe reader down: future shock. This gadget in my hands, this plane itself, all these things must pass away, not over decades, not replaced by similar, ‘improved’ models, but wham, gone. And where is the ice-cold little girl, implacably decent and honourable, that I first took to my bed? Where is my best mate of the Islamic campaign, the drunken, brainy, skull-headed clown? They are gone. I will never see them again.
That’s the lesson of faithful love. You keep losing the same people, over and over, and it teaches
you like nothing else: nothing lasts. The silver bird bucked and bounced. A chime, and a voice in his ear announced, warm and confident, ‘Hi, this is your captain. I thought I should tell you guys, since you may not have travelled by air in a storm for a while, don’t worry about the lightning. The plane itself is a lightning conductor, we’ll come to no harm.’ What lightning? He peered over Fiorinda’s shoulder and saw a magical thing, in the howling dark out there: waves of rose coloured liquid light, flowing and colliding, standing up like shimmering frost flowers, across the complex surface of the wing.
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ whispered Fiorinda.
‘Yeah.’ A shock of joy went through him. Some time soon I’m going to be fucking, armed and dangerous, for the first time in my entire life!
How bad can the Green Presidency be?
Table of Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Contents
Prologue: Harry’s Pitch
1 Something In The Way
London, without Ax
2 Bears Discover Fire
3 Dead From The Waist Down #1: Bandit Queens
4 Dead From The Waist Down #2: Equally Cursed And Blessed
5 November Rain
6 The Scientist
7 Desperados
∞ Fiorinda’s House
9 Precious Bane
Coda At The Gate Of The Year