Those Glory Days.
Oh well, that’s the end of Paris in the the Springtime.
I’ll have to get the folks out of that fortress, right now.
“Hey, Sage? Fee? You’d better come and look at this.”
They came over, read the letter, and looked at the movie clip. “Let’s see the letter again,” said Fiorinda, calmly. Ax turned back, thinking: the implications are appalling, but with luck nobody else in Europe knows, not yet. We’re ahead of the game, there’s time for a spot of insider-trading.
‘Shit, it’s breaking up. Fuck those ubergeeks. Sage, can you rescue this—?’
TWO
The Doors Of Perception
Sage and Fiorinda had a rehearsal, at Collette House Piccadilly: where the artist who’d won the Reading Masque Prize (the “New Turner” as the mediafolk were calling it), had his studios. The Masque would debut, as was now traditional, at the Mayday Concert at Reading; one of the biggest events in Second Chamber England’s calendar. The artist was Toby Starborn, famous for his Faux-PreRaphaelite portrait of Fiorinda, back in the Reich’s glory days. A hologram copy of this masterpiece stood in the midst of Toby’s “torn out office space”—fake shards of cubicle partition sticking up from the floor, like some kind of Great Crash designer stubble.
Toby and his assistants greeted the demigods of the Old Guard with solemn indifference. The assistants wore clean-room attire, down to white caps and bootees. Toby wore a green velvet cutaway coat over a yellow waistcoat and slick, buff, cellulose breeches with a moulded crotch—an effect as if he were naked from the waist down, the way the wild lads danced in the mosh in the days of Dissolution. His springy hair was combed back, Mr Preston style, and tied with a black ribbon; he had a faun’s eyes, amber-yellow, tip-tilted. He looked (he wasn’t very tall) like a dissolute hobbit with Winnie the Pooh’s dress sense.
Fiorinda remembered meeting Starborn once before, at an artshow opening. He hadn’t had a lot to say to her then, he was no more communicative now. Subject matter should be seen and not heard. But his faun’s eyes never left her face, except to fix on some other element of her appearance: her left boot, her wrist, her elbow. Probably he was snapping her up on an eye-socket camera—
‘It’s an oratorio,’ he uttered, reluctantly. ‘Called The World Turned Upside Down. That’s all you need to know, just sing the notes, and keep still, no, er, moves. Fiorinda, you have no implants or eye-socket tech. Can you read sheet music?’
‘I’ll give it a try.’
They stood together on a flatbed scanner stage, the same kind of tech they’d met in Hollywood, where the virtual movies were made. Orchestral and chorus tracks played in their ears; the assistants chivvied around, making adjustments. The solo parts weren’t difficult, nor unpleasant. It was a strange kind of work for a rock concert, but Sage’s original masques had been strange confections, after all. Mozart opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, any old scraps. They couldn’t complain.
No friends, no hangers-on, and no refreshments, intoxicant or otherwise. After about two hours the soloists were allowed to get down. Nobody in the huge room cracked a smile, but Toby muttered that he thought that had gone all right. Sage and Fiorinda glanced at each other, wondering how to exit. They were being let know they were old meat, uninteresting, only dragged in for their curiosity value. Anyone who stays the course long enough has to face moments like this.
Fiorinda went to look at the hologram of “She Feeds And Clothes Her Demons”. Did I really dress like that? She touched the back of her head, reflexively checking that the old mass of draggled curls had gone. The Lavoisiens had shaved it off, and she felt grateful to them. The sallow, beleagured redhead in her ragged green dress stared out into the room, while the goblins she was feeding crept closer. Too many, too hungry, the nursemaid herself will be torn to pieces, to keep them alive—
If that was a prediction of my future, it nearly turned out true enough.
‘How many of these copies are there?’
‘It’s an iteration, not a copy,’ Toby corrected, still without cracking a smile. ‘Would you like to see my work in progress?’
“She Feeds And Clothes Her Demons” disappeared. It was replaced, in the shrine-like gilded frame, by a quivering mass of colour: a struggle to resolve, then oh, a blue woman, swirled with green and white, curled over so she was almost a sphere, and something bursting out of her side. Was that meant to be a child? It had the oversized eyes and naked head of a baby. It clutched something: an electric guitar.
‘Very impressive,’ said Sage, with solemn indifference.
‘Knock out,’ agreed Fiorinda, taking care not to catch her boyfriend’s eye.
‘It needs work,’ muttered Toby, head down, but seeming a little defrosted. The Earth giving birth vanished, the goblins’ nursemaid by the fallen oak returned.
Fiorinda smiled brightly. ‘What about the composer, er, Flora Morris? I know choral music is very big now. Can you tell us about her, can we meet her?’
The dissolute hobbit unbent at last, his faun’s eyes coming to life. ‘You might meet her at the opening. She’s not into, er, Rock. I knew her stuff, of course, and then I saw Sacrificial live at Wethamcote last summer, at the Festival of the Ponds. The soloists were in tiger cages, hanging over the site of the pit itself. It was immense. I knew I had to work with her after that, so I got Tim Bowery to introduce me, the impressario, you know, she’s a friend of his. What did you think of Sacrificial, Sage? I found it flawed but very honest, very moving—’
Wethamcote, in South Derbyshire, was one of the places where the Extreme Celtics had held their blood rites, in secret, before they actually took over. The Triumvirate had busted a human sacrifice rave network there. Sage shook his head.
‘Fraid I missed out.’
‘Me too,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I think we were in the US.’
‘If you didn’t see Sacrificial live, you’ll never understand it.’
‘We sort of saw the trailer live,’ said Fiorinda, straightfaced ‘I can’t claim that I understood it. Sage, we must be going. Let these people get on with their work.’
‘Fancy a quick pint?’
‘Ha. You’re incapable of having “a quick pint”.’
‘All right, a quick six, then.’
They took their leave, bestowing bland grins of goodwill.
It was the beginning of April: Fiorinda had just had a birthday, she was twenty-four. The freeze was over, replaced by a dry, chill, grey-skied Spring. Outdoors, central London was a hell’s kitchen of dust, rubble and low-tech clamour; muscular labour and fashionable passers-by: oddly recalling the Victorian Hampstead in Ford Madox Brown’s real Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, “Work”. Everything unbeautiful was being torn down, to create a mosaic of new green spaces around what was worth preserving: Inns of Court, Baroque churches, post-modern giants in the City, heritage buildings in Westminster. Every city in England was going to get the same treatment, eventually. The ancient centres cleansed and beautified, then rings of concentrated Green housing and amenities, interspersed with intensive (but Green!) market gardening. Industry would live alongside the people, profits strictly audited for sustainability; constraints enforced by lucrative government licensing.
Draconian laws would limit private car ownership, and allow no proliferation of horse-drawn vehicles. Public Transport for the less-well-connected. What about the millions who gave up and took to the roads, in the Great Crash and after? Don’t worry, that’s taken care of. The elective homeless are safely contained, and usefully occupied.
Thank God they’d as yet escaped the ignominy of ever-present minders; and thank God for the sacred immunity of licensed premises. They found a pub, not one of their old safe houses, but nobody molested them.
Fiorinda downed most of her first pint at speed. “How weird it all is. Like Ax’s dreams come true, with a Dickensian twist. Are you sure we were only away for a few months? Sure it wasn’t a hundred years?’
‘Longer than t
hat. We haven’t been payin’ attention since before Ax’s Velvet Invasion, not hardly. Plenty of time for a quantum leap.’
‘The blue woman representing Planet Earth had my face?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And she was giving birth, by Caesar section, to an alien wiv guitar? Did he stop to think I might have human feelings?’ Fiorinda glowered. ‘I don’t care. I’ll take the Small Grey if I have to. Any kind of baby’s better than none.’
‘You can’t blame the kid. He’s trying to be avant garde, and stay in fashion, when the fashion is beyond retro. Tha’s bound to lead to pompous affectation.’
‘You weren’t going to hit him, were you? I detected a twitch—’
‘Nah. I was thinking of bouncing him like a little yoyo. Seriously, no. He’s not doing it on purpose. He prob’ly doesn’t even know you want to have a baby.’
Her eyes said I’m glad you didn’t punch Toby out. I’m being an idiot…but I’m glad you thought about it. Telepathy artefacts: Sage laughed, and went to get his round in, brushing her cheek with his fingertips as he passed. My brat.
They’d returned to England immediately after the bombshell courriel, and were living again in the Triumvirate’s modest maisonette in Brixton: though how long the government would allow them to stay there was another question. Ax had told the media he felt the protest had done its work, he could now serve the camp inmates best by close consultation with Westminster. The Press had made their own cheery versions of this statement, TIRED OF DRINKING FRENCH PISS SAYS AX, and so far there was no sign of the courriel story surfacing.
It was surprisingly okay living in those rooms again, where terrible things had been said and done. The past that haunted Brixton was a defeated foe, and they don’t make bad company. Other aspects of the return were not so great. They could live with a hostile, venal government, done that trick before: but they kept falling over hints of something worse. Recalcitrant, intolerable evil that had survived, behind the Second Chamber’s “moderate” façade.
Wethamcote, being used as a place of ritual assembly again—
They drank in near silence, pondering these things. Plus the dreadful fate of all senior pop-idols: corpses in the mouths of the bourgeoisie—
‘It’s not going to work, Sage. They’re not the right next generation.’
‘They never are, sweetheart. Mm. I wish, if this Morris babe likes Elgar so much, she’d just figured out new lyrics to the actual Dream of Gerontius—’
‘Heeheehee. Tiny bit derivative?’
‘Tiny bit.’
‘The immersion effects are going to drown us, anyway.’
Sage looked into his beer. ‘You know, I take his point: Oratorio, dignified, no one jumps around. But I need to grok the idea. I wonder if Toby would give me his code to look at. Just a rough cut?’
‘Not if he has any sense, Aoxomoxoa—’
‘Who he? Oxo what? Never heard of him. I’m a harmless ignr’ant old codger. Wouldn’t know a dirty stage coup if it jumped up an’ bit me.’
They laughed, white-water fishes, alight with the joy of battle. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ suggested Fiorinda. ‘You can coach me in your wicked ways.’
In St James’s Park, the blossom trees shed petals on steely waters, the Pelicans shivered on Duck Island. It’s April and we live on the same latitude as Moscow, same as we always did. No big deal, but haven’t we done enough? Say what you will about our whacky adventures, surely the world’s carbon emissons have gone through the floor? Not so, say the scientists (as far as they can be heard, through all the rest of the clamour of bad news). Global indicators, where science gets through the NeoFeudal curtain, show no respite. Climate chaos continues and the seas are still rising. You can’t turn an aircraft carrier on a sixpence, but not to worry, the real freeze is unlikely to hit the UK this century.
‘Sage,’ said Fiorinda. ‘If I go loopy again—‘
‘You won’t.’
‘I don’t believe I will, but if… Get me away from here. And keep people like that away from me. Don’t let Toby Starborn anywhere near me.’
‘Sure thing.’
The Triumvirate resumed the quiet talks they’d begun before they left for Paris—with people in the Permanent Civil Service who’d served Ax’s cause for a long time, with Techno-Utopian campsite luminaries of the Permanent Festival; with a group of Countercultural MPs, known as “the Rebels”, who were openly at odds with NeoFeudal government policy. Meetings were hidden under the useful heading of Volunteer Initiative business, and most of the discussion genuinely was about how to feed the masses, without fossil fuel and preferably without slave labour—the same topic that was dreadfully occupying governments of good will everywhere. Much more quietly, Ax and Sage had resumed contact with the Pan-Asian Techno-Green-Utopians who’d once helped Ax to bust the Data Quarantine, on a secret remote-access trip to Hiroshima. As if overnight, the Chinese had a hugely expanded sphere of influence, known as the “Great Peace”. What was going on there? The great unknown of post-Crisis global politics, the story that Westminster didn’t seem to want the country to know, was puzzling work. Suddenly it’s brought home to you can’t take a plane-ride and find out. You have no idea what’s really out there, no idea what might be hidden. No idea, no matter how you safeguard yourselves, who that is, claiming to be an old friend, on the other end of the line.
Closer to home there was ominously named Neurobomb Working Party. The government wanted to know the truth about what had happened last summer, around the A Team event; and exactly what part the Triumvirate had played, the year before, in the assassination of the so-called “occult monster”, Rufus O’Niall. Their wish must be granted, they could not be put off forever.
The Working Party came to Buckingham Palace, and were escorted to the upper floor of the North Wing by a young man with floppy, paint-box crimson hair, wearing the dress uniform of the Barmy Army. Ax’s militarised hippies had been disbanded, but he was allowed, for the time being, to maintain a token, ceremonial force in the old Palace; otherwise known as “The Insanitude”. The ruling classes of Second Chamber England viewed the survival of the Barmy Army with horror, but in this case the visitors were relieved to see that their guide carried a holstered sidearm. The North Wing had served as emergency secure accommodation for the most dangerous ‘refugees’, in Boat People summer. The criminal refuse were still in occupation, like rats in a sewer.
The meeting room was not generously proportioned. It barely held an oval hardwood table, polished but shabby, a smart screen and a random assortment of chairs. The walls were hung in faded blue paper, with a narrow stripe; naked windows looked out on yellow coping stones and grey corners of roof slope. Oltech slates and earbeads were laid out at each place; water jugs and glasses arrayed down the centre, with small plates of macrobiotic oatcakes. Standalone imaging hardware stood beside the screen, on a trolley. Three people faced the Working Party: Fiorinda, and two of the most puzzling members of Ax’s inner circle: Chip Desmond in a crumpled metallic grey flying suit, cherub-cheeks glowing, nappy hair twisted into a golly-forest of little tails, a red silk scarf at his throat; and Kevin Hanlon, aka “Verlaine”, piratical in loose purple linen breeches, a ragged My Favourite Molecule tee, silky brown curls fringing a tight-wrapped skull and crossbones bandana. These were The Adjuvants, young “Indie” pop-stars from the original CounterCultural ThinkTank, swept into bizarre prominence beside their friend Ax Preston.
Verlaine got down from his perch on the table and took a seat, like a mildly naughty undergraduate at the start of a seminar. The visitors disposed themselves: the table was large enough, and there were sufficient chairs, for them to keep their distance. Silence prevailed. At last a voice rose from the government ranks.
‘Are the President and Mr Pender delayed?’
‘No,’ said Fiorinda. ‘They can’t make it, I’m sorry. Don’t worry, Chip and Verlaine are experts, and I’m well briefed. We’ll be able to answer your questions.’
She used no implants, no eye-socket tech, but she had a retentive memory, and could put the right names to all the faces. Wendy Carter, media-star neurologist: an obvious instant authority on the new science of “Mind/Matter Physics”. Ardhal Fitzgerald, expatriate Cambridge computer scientist, also a spy for Dublin. (cead mile failte, little brother, and you’re welcome to take good notes). Boris Anathaswamy, high energy physicist from Culham. Guilty by association presumably. Mairead Culper of Glastonbury Council; Official CounterCultural Party. Jack Vries, the Wiccan Scholar, vaguely titled Consultant to the Home Office. A Bishop, a Buddhist, and an Immam, all public figures, from the Standing Bio-Ethics Committee. Tony Burnside-Khan and Rasheeda Townsend, both from the weapons industry: and that’s a statement of intent.
Not a single actual fusion consciousness specialist, but you couldn’t blame them for that. There weren’t many experts in what Sage had done in the entire world, and none at all in England, except for a tiny handful of dilettante rockstars and lowly Welsh postdocs. Olwen Devi, genius of the Zen Self project in Reading Arena, had returned to Caer Siddi, the Company headquarters; her best people with her.
‘We can reschedule, if you wish, but it’s going to mean some delay. There are the preparations for Mayday at Reading, and then almost immediately they have several important early summer events—’
It was Jack Vries who answered, betraying himself as the leader of the group (on paper that was Mairead Culper, sharing power with the Bishop of Oxford)
‘I’m afraid some of our questions will be very sensitive for you, Fiorinda, but by all means, let’s go ahead. We can make a start at least.’
The extremist junta is cast out by force of arms. The smoke clears, you look around, and several of the worst bastards have sneaked right back into office. The last time Fiorinda had seen Jack Vries, pastel-blond dandy with the colourless, secretive eyes, he’d been a guest at Rivermead when Rufus O’Niall was reigning there, in the body of a dead man. Fiorinda, on display as “Fergal Kearney’s whore”, had found out plenty, while the bad guys let their hair down. She had saved a few lives, and she’d known which of the insiders were secretly, fearfully, friends to her cause. Jack Vries had not been among them… But a lot of people had been forced to accept invitations to Rivermead that winter; most of them ignorant of the full horrific truth. She had no damning evidence against Vries, though she was damn’ sure it existed. It’s the way of the world, there are always villains who can’t be rooted out, and at least he was being kept out of office. So far. (Though what was he doing here?)
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