Band of Gypsys

by Gwyneth Jones

  The images and dialogue had been left to speak for themselves, in a silence broken only by gunshot, crunching bootheels, choking breath: but here commentary intervened. Over a rough search of the bodies outside the school, a mature, female voice came up. ‘Do you see any heroes here, Dan?’

  ‘No Ma’am,’ replied a male voice, sober and kindly, ‘I see a couple of burned-out young men, far from home, running around like psychopaths.’

  ‘This shouldn’t have been allowed to happen,’ declared his partner.

  ‘I think we can all agree on that, whatever our politics.’

  ‘The Lavoisier kids were misguided, sure, and they had strange beliefs, but they were trying to save the world. They didn’t deserve to be slaughtered!’

  No faces but the voices were distinctive, two high-profile mass-market tv anchorpersons. Although probably that only went for the US audience, or recent visitors. The Few watched, silent and riveted, until the picture faded to grey.

  ‘That’s why you came home from Paris?’ said Rob after a pause.

  ‘Yep,’ said Ax.

  ‘There was a letter,’ said Fiorinda, from her place in the back row, on one of the rust-red couches. ‘Which we can’t show you because we failed to stop it from shredding itself, saying if this breaks at a bad moment, it could lose Fred Eiffrich the election. He’s been looking rock solid for a second term since the A Team event and the LA quake. But he has powerful enemies, and specifically certain media barons, because of that stuff he did to them, ages ago. You’ve seen the trailer. We were told there’s a lot more.’

  ‘You saw this in March, but you’re only telling us now?’

  ‘We’re showing it to you now,’ explained Ax, patiently, ‘because today, due to the b-loc, the flat is a fortress, impenetrable to surveillance. We are not supposed to know about this. We couldn’t take the chance of being responsible for a leak.’

  Rob nodded slowly. ‘Okay, okay…’

  Covert surveillance in their personal space, a novel annoyance in California, had become a hazard at home while they were away. They’d been informed that “unobtrusive security” had been installed at the Insanitude—for their protection, of course. They didn’t know if it went any further, but that was warning enough. No use taking counter-measures either, because then you’d be detected trying to detect the bugs, and that would bring on a fight Ax wasn’t ready for—

  ‘But, but it’ll be easy to prove it’s been edited and tampered to shit!’ cried Chip. ‘You could never get that quality from outdoor secret cameras!’

  ‘No reason why not,’ said Sage. ‘The Lavoisiens were part geek with money to burn, an’ low-light digital video isn’t the cutting edge of spy-tech. Yeah, of course it’s tampered, thank you very much, but it looks to us as if it’s based on genuine footage. We just never thought of this, it never crossed our tiny minds. Okay, you probably need a second look.’

  ‘No!’ wailed Allie, horrified. ‘We do not! My God, that was awful!’

  ‘Ooh, I dunno. I like the bit where he calls us “young”.’

  Allie, down on the floor in the front row, looked up and caught the bleak set of Sage’s beautiful mouth. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I was just shocked.’

  ‘’S okay.’

  ‘It’s shocking,’ agreed Ax. ‘Can’t fault them on that.’

  ‘Did you fire on anybody that was unarmed?’ asked Anne-Marie, seriously.

  Thanks, AM. That’s an excellent illustration of the problem.

  ‘It was a combat situation, Ammy, and we were insanely outnumbered. I think not, but I wouldn’t swear we always stopped to ask.’

  ‘Imagine,’ remarked Verlaine, in hollow tones of awe. ‘Imagine it’s the year 2003, and two righteous moral high ground international rockstars have been videoed live, wasting Greenpeace activists on an Natural Born Killas murder spree. Words can’t express the dynamite.’

  ‘Ideally it would be Bono and the Edge,’ added Chip, getting into the idea. ‘For the fullest outrage. And maybe they should desecrate a church—’

  From the microglance that flashed between Ax and Sage, this last ridiculous suggestion was a terrible thing to say. So terrible it almost cracked them up.

  Silence fell.

  Fiorinda broke it. ‘Proving it’s tampered won’t help, Chip. They get their shocking movie into every American home, no problem there because it’s media folk who are running this. Our side protests, the opposition admits there may have been some enhancement: and it’s immaterial, because the impression has been made.’

  ‘The bad, bad, thing,’ Ax went on, ‘is that they’ll say Fred authorised our raid. It isn’t true, he did not. But then they’ll say he knew, and didn’t stop us, and they may have some kind of evidence of that.’

  ‘Does Harry know?’ wondered DK, suddenly. ‘Does this explain his silence?’

  Harry Lopez was the virtual movie producer with White House connections, who had invited Ax and his friends to Hollywood, on the pretext that he was making a biopic about the Reich. He’d been acting as President Fred Eiffrich’s errand boy, and the real issue had been rather more serious: an outbreak of Celtic style ritual murders, a suspected rogue Pentagon project; a trail of strange events that had eventually led Ax and Sage to their assault on that desert stronghold: where the occult suicide warriors were holding Fiorinda hostage.

  The movie project had been real, though, and a vital component in Fred’s charm offensive, setting up Ax Preston, champion of the sane way to face the future, as his Poster Boy in Europe. Rivermead had been scheduled for global release, last time they’d heard. But Harry had gone very quiet, in recent weeks—

  ‘Yeah, Harry knows,’ said Sage, with resigned conviction. ‘He knows all about this fuck-up, promise you that. Poor kid.’

  ‘But those bastards were insane!’ Chip burst out.‘They were disembowelling each other, in the hope of creating a magic psychopath like Fiorinda’s dad! They were dead anyway! The US government was about to turn Lavoisier into a glassy hole in the ground! How can a video of Ax and Sage, er, okay, killing some of them, be a weapon in a smear campaign?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have worked a year ago,’ Fiorinda agreed. ‘But then the A team did what they did, and ended the oil wars at a stroke with zero US casualties. To a lot of US voters that’s a very positive image. So now the lunatics formerly known as the Profit Motive And Business as Usual Tendency have joined hands with the lunatics formerly known as the Occult Terrorists. The Lavoisiens are no longer monsters, they are practically Moral Majority. They didn’t murder anyone, their victims were volunteers. Besides, they weren’t even getting anywhere with their weird project, they were just well-meaning self-immolating fantasists… That’s the story, it’s the story we told ourselves: and if we could change it, especially the last bit, I’d rather not.’

  Sometimes Fiorinda’s trademark irony could be chilling.

  ‘The letter we can’t show you,’ said Ax, breaking another uneasy silence. ‘Claims that Baal the Black Dragon contacted Fred’s enemies months ago. They’d already spotted I was a weak link, and designed a smear campaign about Fred’s precious Ax Preston, the violent troublemaker, so they had everything in place.’

  ‘Who’s Baal?’ asked Dora. ‘Sorry, I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘One of the Lavoisien leaders, it doesn’t matter. What a gift eh? So, the only question is when. Traditionally it’ll be around the end of the summer. At least Fred’s team gets a good chance to prepare their defence.’

  ‘Okay.’ Felice rolled her eyes and counted on her fingers, ‘There’s a huge scandal, that could potentially break Fred in November. Both sides know about it. But they made this gentlemen’s agreement to keep it quiet for six months—?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ax’s eyes were fixed, absently, on the blank grey screen. ‘It’s weird, but US Presidential Campaign teams know how the monster called democracy works, if anybody does. I’m guessing that if our intelligence is reliable, neither side sees this as a surefire deat
h blow. What they see is that the odds have changed, and they both want the time to make best use of that. Sadly, it’s the bad guys who now have the edge, and Sage and I gave it to them—’

  ‘You didn’t!’ declared Verlaine, loyally. ‘Baal did that!’

  A muscle tightened, at the corner of Ax’s jaw.

  ‘Well, that’s it. That’s all we know, and probably almost certainly we’ll hear nothing more until the day story surfaces. Could be never for all we can tell.’

  ‘Maybe Fred’s already cut a deal,’ suggested Rob.

  ‘This is just another round of vicious squabbling over the deckchairs on the Titanic,’ muttered DK, rolling his eyes. ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘But Ax, what are we supposed to do?’ demanded Cherry—

  ‘Nothing. This is a need to know session only. There’s something Sage and I have to do: which is get my family out of jail, soon as we can set it up, just in case we’re extradited—’ The Few recoiled, visibly and as one: all eyes turned on him in panic and reproach. ‘Okay, okay, not that bad, but I’ll have to move things along.’ He sighed. ‘It’s the way things work. You do what you have to do, in an emergency, then later you have to answer for it, when all the rules you ignored are back in place.’

  The living room was like Fiorinda’s music room: a sketch of its old self. The same old-fashioned gas stove, same big red couches. A couple of pictures had been returned to the walls, but there were no books, no details. The Falmouth Jade, the ancient stone axe the Second Chamber had sent to California, to prove they wanted Ax to come home, stood propped on a stand on the mantelpiece.

  It looked lonely.

  ‘There goes Hollywood virtual stardom,’ murmured Verlaine.

  ‘Shit, and I was counting on that,’ Cherry complained. ‘My little copyself was all stretch limousines, botox and boob-jobs and you guys were eating my dust—’

  The Few groaned and cat-called, on auto-pilot. An hour ago, if you’d asked them, they’d have told you the support of the US President didn’t mean much. They were back in England now. Back to Crisis Management Gigs and the Volunteer Initiative; and the so-called Leader of the Free World was far away. They didn’t want to feel the shock of loss they felt. A background warmth was gone. Gone, that half-guilty feeling, (after the terrible cost of what the A Team did), that at last the very worst was over. Normal service would never be resumed, but there would be no Neurobomb. There would be no more nightmare “magic”.

  Allie cleared her throat. ‘This Black Dragon, how much did he know?’

  ‘All good,’ said Fiorinda cheerfully. ‘Okay, I’m Rufus O’Niall’s daughter, and there are quarters in which I’ll never live that down, but I’m not guilty of being a magic psychopath. The Lavoisiens tried their hardest, and they couldn’t find a trace of anything like that in my head. Hey, get a grip, people. We don’t know that Fred’s enemies would try to start the research again, much less that they’d succeed. With any luck, they just want their own bloke in the White House. They haven’t noticed that modern civilisation walked off a cliff, so they see no harm in playing good old fashioned dirty.’

  ‘Are you going to be all right, going on stage today, pet?’ asked Anne-Marie, looking up at her in unctuous concern. ‘I’m only a little bit psychic, and this has reelly upset me, that’s why I ask.’

  Ax and Sage set their teeth.

  ‘I’ll be fine, thanks.’

  ‘How will the Second Chamber react?’ asked Chip. ‘I mean, if that video does turn up on the airwaves? Have we any idea?’

  Ax shrugged. ‘Not a clue. It could even do us good if Fred publicly disowns us, as I think he must. The House would have to stop calling us dupes of Babylon—’

  ‘Shame,’ sighed DK. ‘I like “dupes of Babylon”.’ He frowned. ‘What about this Preston Family rescue operation? Can you tell us anything more?’

  ‘Only that it’ll be fine and you’re not involved,’ said Sage, with finality.

  ‘Don’t feel bad,’ Fiorinda told the room, dryly. ‘Nor am I.’

  Ax and Sage, shoulder to shoulder, looked mutinous and said nothing. Something was wrong. The bad news had been delivered. A certain edginess and gloom, that they’d noticed in their leaders since the sudden return from Paris, was explained. But that wasn’t it. Not a fabricated scandal that might never emerge. Not the return of the Neurobomb threat. What was it?

  What was bugging Ax and Sage, separating them even from Fiorinda?

  ‘Ax, you guys are not buying this shit, are you?’ began Rob, uneasily. ‘You’re not psychos, you’re not to blame. You had to do that.’

  But Rob, as everyone knew, had never picked up a lethal weapon in his life.

  The entryphone chimed, a security crew voice announced Roxane. Soon s/he was at the door, which had to be unlocked for hir, by hand. The veteran critic, post-gendered survivor of uncounted musical revolutions, entered with a sweep of hir silver and ebony cane and a swirl of Dantesque robes: raising hir eyebrows at this curious ceremony. S/he took a seat on a red couch beside Verlaine, settling hir bones with a caution that belied the rakish swagger, and the splendour of hir make-up.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, m’dears. It takes me such a time to make myself decent these days.’ S/he grimaced like a Kabuki mask at the locked door. ‘Well, is it safe?’

  ‘Safe as we know how,’ said Ax, grinning.

  He told the Reich’s court philosopher the story.

  ‘How very annoying. Am I to view the corpus delicti?’

  So Sage had his wish: it was twilight in the desert again, and the predators were hunting. Fiorinda watched her lovers. What were they looking for, when they studied this clip of tampered record, frame by frame, over and over? Some crucial detail that would promise them they were innocent?

  ‘It has a brash, synthetic, Sergio Leone appeal,’ boomed Rox, ‘but I prefer the Harry Lopez cartoon. Let me see… Clearly we need to discredit the Manson-oid cultists, who have somehow become sympathetic. Surely that won’t be difficult? At least one of their horribly tortured victims was not a volunteer, I believe?’

  Roxane had stayed at home when the rest of them went to California, and this had opened a slight distance, which didn’t seem to be growing less. It was as if s/he still believed in a world where the leaders of the revolution sat around a circle of schoolroom tables. The Three announced the latest disaster, outlined their desperate plan, and somehow another battle was won, somehow victory stayed in prospect—

  The Reich’s survival had become a war of fixed fronts. Nothing moved.

  ‘’Fraid tha’s not relevant, Rox,’ said Sage, politely. ‘It’s Fred Eiffrich’s problem, not ours. The Internet Commissioners jus’ thought we’d like to know.’

  ‘Discredit them?’ muttered Verlaine. ‘My God. Sounds like nailing Al Capone for tax fraud. Rox, you don’t get it. I still wake sweating and blubbering, from dreams where the Lavoisiens succeeded in their selfless project—’

  Ax cut him off by reaching for the remote. ‘Well, you’ve all seen it, and there’s nothing more to say, so I’m going to destroy this before it gets us into more trouble. I hope you’ve memorised your favourite moments, Sage.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  They did not step down from the train, but it was supposed to look as though they did. Their b-loc avatars arrived in a Reading Station VIP lounge, out of sight, and met the public on the forecourt. Paper-flower-bedecked open cars carried them to Richfield Avenue gate, where they disembarked and strolled through the crush, under arches twined with living vines of rose and honeysuckle. There were banners flying and drummers drumming; a cordon of minders gathered gifts and messages, and obscured the fact that the leaders of the Reich could not be touched.

  Soon all celebrities will make personal appearences this way!

  ‘Hey Ax, hey, hey, Ax! What d’you think of Glasto pre-empting you?’

  The Mayday festival at Glastonbury had opened at sunset on Beltane eve.

  ‘Dunno about the Beltane t
hing, it’s the first of May to me. But that’s Glasto: any old fakery that’ll extract money from weekend-hippies.’

  ‘Hey, hey Sage! Hey, Fio! This way! How about leaking something about Toby’s Masque??’

  Traditionally, the secrecy of the finale was fiercely protected—

  ‘Not as good jokes as mine use’ter have,’ grinned Sage.

  ‘I’m appearing a concept,’ confided Fiorinda, capriciously awarding this questioner her most fabulous smile. ‘It’s very, very moving.’

  They reached the Palace of Rivermead, multi-coloured lo-rise Gaudi cathedral, built for Ax by the Counterculture’s chief architect, in the glory days. This was Ax’s citadel, which had fallen to the enemy: occupied by Rufus through the terrible Green Nazi winter, and here were the victors, returning to their own. It seemed there should have been wild applause or a solemn fanfare. Instead there was only silence, sudden and complete, quenching that un-Reich-like pap-storm.

  The Triumvirate mounted the steps by the Dead Cars sculpture; the Few close behind. The Second Chamber couldn’t steal and rewrite everything.

  They passed through the flower-wreathed doors, masked by minders, and disappeared. Upstairs there was a VIP reception, but the b-loc avatars wouldn’t be attending due to a technical hitch in the live path. Mr Preston’s family were there instead (except for Ax’s mother, and the new baby, who had to stay back in the fortress for security reasons…) If truth be known, Ax might have conceded this point, if the suits had pushed a little harder; and if they hadn’t been so determined to rub his nose in the hostage situation. His girl had won her lonely battle. He would hate this dump forever, but he could have walked into the slimy reception smiling.

  If truth be known, he’d been tempted to ditch the whole b-loc idea, because he needed this big day. But the last thing he could afford right now was a trail of suspicious sudden concessions; so never give an inch.