At the end of the live session ‘Sparrow Child’ played her out: one of her own, oldest songs. (a recording: Fiorinda didn’t sing a note, for contractual reasons). She’d have prefered ‘Stonecold’, but punk aggression was not the message. We must not accuse, we must smile, and just keep on nagging… Oh my darling Ax, have you turned me? Stonecold for years to your vision of Techno-Green Utopia by stealth, your puny plans for improving the situation when the situation has blatantly gone to hell and is not coming back, suddenly I’m believing in it all, what’s come over me?
And so to her desk, remote-accessed at the Volunteer Initiative Office in London; still housed, for a while longer, in the building once known as Buckingham Palace. Here the Volunteer Initiative managed supplies for the drop out hordes, as far as they were still allowed. Scraping the barrels of over-production, tracking down strange customers for strange lost wares; with a view to ending up with five clean litres of water and fifteen hundred calories a day for every man, woman and child, where and when it was needed. Or near as they could make it. They also supplied the camps, as far as they were allowed. Thus Fiorinda, like any starry-eyed high-earning radical rockstar in the past, helps the evil system to function; while protesting against its existence. Nice to know she was keeping up all the old traditions.
Obsolete Sanitary-ware mountain in Bulgaria, I have a customer, powdered porcelain is a soil-cleanser, powdering can be done by hand, doesn’t need machines. More Libyan military apricot jam? Ooh, I’ll have some of that… Oh NO, it’s already gone! So unfair, this was our idea, now everybody’s doing it, and can’t complain about other aid agencies, but private brokers, scrabbling for futures in grey-bloomed chocolate bar hoards, have they no fucking shame?
Once, Fiorinda had believed that the end of the world was an event. A spray of bullets at a political reception, red flowers blooming on swanky evening clothes, the smoke of cordite. The Hyde Park Massacre, which she had survived. For years she had looked back on that night as the lethal blow: death was instantaneous.
No, no, not at all.
>Ruin is the devil’s work, consecutive and slow.
Fail in a moment no man did—
We fell into dark water, now we go on swimming across the river, into which the modern world stumbled way back then. Getting weaker, getting chilled, long ago lost our footing. Tasting the salt on our lips, guessing the awful truth but keeping on, as if we still believe in the other shore, because what else is there to do?
Europe is going to starve. Not this year, not next year; but soon.
Dread grew as she worked, the dry mouth, hollow stomach, the tingling of nerves demanding emergency action, fight or flight: and she wondered why. This was a good time. They had made their peace with the Burning World, the Freezing World: someone had to live in times like these, turns out it’s us. You balance like a dancer en pointe, and hell dimensions have no power, all is well. Things had been good, despite all disasters, since that other night, under desert stars, after the Lavoisier Raid. The chill of the air, the red rocks beating out the furnace heat of the day; Fiorinda reunited with her lovers. The charged, miraculous sex, sweeping them up into a nameless immensity: no answers, no promises, no duration, only the white-out, luminous complexity of what is, that opens and opens, and draws you into itself—
She was glad when her token (but functional) hours at her VI desk were over. Maybe it was the callous market-manipulation of capitalism’s leftovers that was stressing her. So this is how I spend my days, while the tiger and the wolf patrol our boundaries. Showing-off and shopping, just like a real airhead girly-rockstar. How shall I spend the afternoon? Well, it’s very cold in here, and I don’t want to go out. I have nothing to do out there. I do b’lieve I’ll go back to bed. You’re supposed to rest.
Fiorinda knew she was pregnant. One of the emergency luxuries they’d allowed themselves was Sage’s First Aid kit, with all its futuristic resources (from a time when the future wasn’t a black chute back to the Stone Age). She’d secretly given herself a blood and urine test a week ago, and she was pregnant. She was even planning to give her pregnancy a DNA test, soon as it was viable: just out of curiosity. But Ax and Sage would not think of the white box. It could be taken as cheating, and besides they were blokes, bless them, entranced by the mystery of women’s business.
(What do you say, when you go in to the chemists?)
She’d have known she was pregnant anyway. She could feel the changes in her body and mind, subtle but commanding. This lethargy, her unwillingness to leave the den. She’d meant to stay in denial for a while (denial is safer). But they were onto it, and now the secret was burning a hole in her belly too, a tiny wormhole to another universe. How long were you planning for us to annoy the suits like this, Ax?
Weeks? Months? It could become more of a statement than we planned.
Maybe she’d tell them this evening.
She retired under the covers with her camp-ration lunch, a small lump of cheese and two aged, sticky, dried bananas. Plus Peter Straub’s Koko, from a box of English storybooks donated by a thoughtful Parisian secondhand bookseller. The gruesome, maybe-supernatural, plot was right up Fiorinda’s street; the setting was so alien and entrancing that she started to imagine an alternate reality for herself. Where the world had not ended, and she was someone with a loft in SoHo. She had two boyfriends, (call them Richard and Stephen, hahaha). They dated her separately, except occasionally they would turn up together, as if by accident. Then they’d all end up in bed, but nobody would say anything about it afterwards. Frances (the normal person: Fiorinda was the rockstar) was never sure what was going on, and tormented herself over the relationship between the two men. They pretended not to know each other, but did they have a complete life together, that she knew nothing about? Was it all a cruel game? Or were they as confused as she was? She would not dare to ask. She’d try to find out, playing detective, uncovering disquieting secrets, but saying nothing; and still fucking them both, separately and together, mmm—
How great, what a blessed respite, to have sexual fantasies. And how different from the sexual fantasies of her loved ones! Once it had been handcuffs. They’d liked the idea of being handcuffed together in bed (as indeed they were, in a sense). That one seemed to have permanently retired, since Ax’s grim experience as a hostage. Then they were galley-slaves; still a favourite. What’s this about Ax the pimp, Sage the rentboy? Creepy. Although she could see where it was coming from—
They never seemed to want to act out their ideas. (Probably as well, what’s the betting some ingenious pap would have caught them dressed up, acting like idiots on camera). They liked to talk, mulling over the details, elaborating the scenario. And keeping score, of course, on who’s the first to break and make an actual move. The tiger and the wolf, they always keep score.
If I ever find that little black book—
The endless conversation of those two soft, West Country voices, reeling out for years, right back to that sacred water meadow by the Thames at Reading, in the Year of Dissolution: it was the ground under her feet. The rush of Main Stage, the raging crowd, the smell of rain, a stubborn, self-obssessed, oblivious little girl: looking for her father, finding instead these compadres, these brothers—
Someday, she thought, I want to go back. They’ve finished with being rockstars, I haven’t. No industrial-sized arenas, no nazi-type rallies, but I’m only twenty three! How would she break this news to her lovers, her friends? She could hear them wailing, oh, but Fiorinda, you’re so fragile, you won’t be able to take it. The risk, the terrible risks… Started a bad train of thought. Dread buckled her stomach, Koko slipped from her hands. The room was very still. There was ice in the air, and her belly was cramping. She drew her knees to her chin, her eyes wide and wary: where are you, what are you, go away, go away, leave my baby alone—
Why is this happening? This is a good time—
Outside the pharmacist on the Avenue de Clichy, Sage bent over Ax’s hands, blowing
warmth onto the busker’s fingers. ‘Good luck—’
‘You’re really not coming into the shop with me?’
‘N-no,’ said Sage. ‘I don’t need to. Gimme the guitar, I’ll be out here.’
He walked away, immediately bewildered and bereft without Ax by his side, but that’s the price you pay for being madly in love, and he didn’t want to lose the feeling. The beaten copper of Ax’s naked shoulders, the sweet column of her throat, the safety of her, the electric shock when he reaches out to touch me. The thrill of permission. The moment when the world says yes!, to something they told you was impossible, was forbidden. Will I ever get used to having them both? I hope not.
He almost walked into the first little bar he passed, before he remembered he had no money, not a cent. Ax was holding the beer-money. Besides, sitting in a bar could be regarded as cheating. He stood in a shop doorway, reading placards, watching the snow clear the foot-traffic, thinking of the mysterious way Fiorinda’s grey eyes changed colour when her skin turned winter-pale.
Shattered gold and green striations.
Re-ignite the Nuclear Stations—
But nobody would dare, not now. He tried to remember what Paris had been like when he was young. There were cars, cars stacked everywhere, and the air was poison. He couldn’t picture it. Is it snowing today in Cornwall? Is my little river frozen between its granite boulders, except for that deep pool under the hollies? Sometimes he felt like a little boy, pining for home. But they would be back in England soon, he had no doubt: what worried him was the effect of the Second Chamber on Ax. He thinks he can hack it, but he’s promising himself he can escape, and he can’t. How can he ever quit? The world won’t let him, there’ll always be another turn of the screw. The dancing flakes and the shadowed air said, you too. You will never be free, you’re in this for the cold and dark duration. He smiled, Ax’s guitar on his shoulder; thinking of her eyes. I knew that.
Ax waited, lurking around the shelves with his woolly cap pulled well down, while other people were served. The closer you get to someone, the more you know the child in them. Sage is scared, and so am I. I feel about twelve years old. Shampoo, soap, herbal extracts, food supplements. All bio, but of course. All claiming to have been hand-milled by virgins with the moon in Aries, or some such nonsense: but only the packaging had changed. All else was reassuringly the same.
It would have been more discreet to look further afield, but there was only one duty chemist open for miles. And the place seemed friendly, just because they’d often walked past the door. He fingered the coins in his pocket: slim pickings, hope it’s enough. Trouble is, the punters don’t believe it. They think we’re making a video. Or so he told himself… He was on. Something for the weekend?
He swallowed laughter, fright griping his belly, and advanced. The woman wore a proper white coat, which he liked; not young, dark hair pulled back into a twist. Touched by his errand, she tried to convince him he wanted a greener, more Gaian product. Ax stood firm. He wanted something old school.
‘There are better ways to divine a pregnancy now,’ she sighed, fetching the goods from a drawer. ‘Your girlfriend might prefer something more harmonious.’
‘Thanks. This’ll do fine.’
Suddenly she frowned. He turned to see Sage, his face beautifully framed in the snow-speckled collar of his coat, in the glass door. The pharmacist looked from rockstar-features out there to Ax: from Ax to Sage, strangely amazed. In a flash he understood that she recognised them, not as celebrity protesters, but as that English busker guy-couple, the tall blond and the mixed-race one with the guitar—
‘But, excuse me, this is for you two?’
‘Miracles of modern medicine,’ choked Ax, cracking up; and fled.
They came into the garret laughing, brushing snow from each other. Fiorinda was waiting for them: a covered dish in the microwave, their bowls and spoons laid out on the plastic pallet they used for a table. All in public, it was the evening live session. They had to go through with it, the stunned, blank look in the back of her eyes would have to wait. What are we eating? It’s tomato soup, the genuine Heinz, how about that, and only a decade or so past its best-by date. For dessert, steamed jam pudding with powdered-milk custard; neither item quite so fresh.
Is this really what they eat in the farm camps?
‘Yes it is, I keep telling you. The fresh produce goes straight out the gates. The custard’s so old the yellow has worn out, but hey, it’s genuine Birds—’
The jam on the jam pudding was a kind of jellified glue, on top of a shrunken thing like a chunk of old loofah. Not much of it either, between three. But it was sugar and other quick-release carbs, which is the right stuff for manual labour.
‘This stylish food is sent to us under guard, in a diplomatic bag. Only joking, but would you believe there’s now a black market in slave-camp supplies? Which definitely does not help—’
When they’d eaten, they had to look at the collection plate. If nothing else, their stunt was generating useful and generous donations. They read gems from the daily print-out, keeping up the banter. Fiorinda laughing and joking, the men paralysed, nobody able to say switch the fucking cams off. What had gone wrong? Was she in fugue again, horrors crawling out of the walls?
At last, thank God, the ceremony was over. They were off the air.
Fiorinda went to kneel by the window, looking out. Snow was falling fast, you could hear big flakes tapping on the glass, though all you could see was the room reflected, lit by their single ATP battery lamp; dimly painted on the blackness.
‘I was pregnant,’ she said. ‘I was a little bit pregnant. I did a test last week, with the First Aid kit. I’m not any more, I started to bleed this afternoon. I’m sorry, but I did warn you. Leave me alone for a minute or two, please.’
Sage went and sat on the floor by his belongings: stared at nothing.
Ax decided, his head ringing, shocked and gutted beyond reason, he might as well look at the courriel Alain de Corlay had passed him. There was nothing he could do for Fiorinda until he’d swallowed his own distess. The envelope looked like a short stick of liquorice, or a scrap of black, narrow-gauge cable sheathing. It was a shape-memory polymer. You could pulverise this, reduce it to its component atoms: it would reveal nothing. Match it with the right male partner, it would remember its former state, and the message would reassemble. Alain hadn’t said, but no secret where it was from. The overdetermined gadgetry had Internet Commission written all over it… Must be something unpleasant. Ever since Data Quarantine—when Europe had been cut off from the digital world, to contain a killer virus—the all-powerful Commissioners had made sure Ax knew anything that was going to depress him.
Oh well, it couldn’t spoil the mood.
He dug out a tiny baggie of cypher-jacks, from the toolbox in the base of his phone, screwed one into the tube and jacked the stick into a port. Only good for one use, but cryptographers love that kind of thing. His password went to work, decoding.
I’ll have to get rid of that stupid pregnancy test, he thought, tucking a sound bead into his ear and staring at the blank, virtual screen that blossomed on the air. The message was a big fucker, and heavily encrypted: what the hell could it be? Oh, here it comes. An email on the virtual screen and a movie clip attachment. He read the letter, without taking it in: watched a little of the clip and froze.
So this is it, he thought, intuition working faster than his understanding.
This is what they did—
Just a year after Sage Pender’s brief success in breaking the mind/matter barrier, a team of US military neuronauts had reached fusion consciousness by a different route. Their project had involved a tank of raw petroleum buried under the desert. They were supposed to be attempting to disrupt its chemisty, by mind-power. Instead,—having achieved, it seemed, a state perilously far beyond the experiment’s limits—they had willed the destruction of the world’s fossil fuel reserves: and died in the act. Later, a suicide note (which
they had planted where it must be found and could not be suppressed) had explained why they’d done it, and urged that all further development of the so-called Neurobomb should be abandoned.
The A-Team’s motives had been pure, their sacrifice selfless. They’d put an end to the Oil Wars, all right. Caused severe disruption to the Water Wars, and all the other ongoing scrabble of climate change wars: but they’d also caused the death of millions. Hospital lights had gone out, schools collapsed, industries foundered. World energy supplies, just about recovering from the Crisis, had fallen into chaos.
But all that was nothing. Nothing compared to the fear that had hovered over the world, through this long strange winter, while the future circled darkly above.
Not a single reaction to the Neurobomb, not a single countermove…
Ax had a feeling like talons thumping, bang into the back of his neck. This is it, he thought, while the bodies of Gaian martyrs tumbled in the ghost-glow of his screen. This is what the A Team achieved… Losing the oil was nothing, this is what they did. We had a chance of escape, but now those occult lunatics in the desert have joined hands with the bastards in the mainstream, and God help us all.
And he remembered, now when it was far too late, how part of him had leapt for joy when he’d heard that the black gold was gone. He’d been appalled, seen the awful cost of turning off that tap at once. Still part of him had cried Yay! Death to the Evil Empire! The Living World strikes back…! He understood (now when it was far too late) that every time, in his sorry career, when he had picked up the blunt instrument of violence, because it was quick and it worked, he had been part of this. The world is a palimpsest of minds, all bending each other, and Ax had been one of the hell-makers—
He’d broken eye-contact for too long. Lavoisier had vanished, replaced by his screensaver, Sage in a white singlet and tight jeans, from the “Heart On My Sleeve” video, the Mr Muscle gymnast he used to be, before his duel with O’Niall, Unmasked, smiling, crippled hands open by his sides, and clearly very pleased to see someone.
Band of Gypsys Page 3