by Ian McDonald
“Who?”
“Argus. That’s what he calls himself. I’ve never met him, but I’ve felt him watching. That’s what he does. He would know.”
“How can I find him?”
“Same way you found me, lady. Now. Do it.”
Grey lines mesh and twine on the small screen. The naked girl takes the multiway connector. Opens her mouth. Smiles.
Puts the connector into her mouth.
Enye does not look as she presses Enter.
And the sour, cold attic room is empty.
(Shortly after the fall of the Stone Gardanian Empire, Shane the aged aged liver and cream springer spaniel (run over by Enye on her tricycle while in his doggy prime and cursed ever after with a Richard-the-Thirdian hobble) had embarked on his last journey to the rubber-topped table. His sudden, unexpected squattings and fruitless strainings had been amusing, if puzzling, in the garden or on walks; in front of guests in the middle of the living room carpet, not once, not twice, but seven times, it had been a case for Curt Morrow MRCVS’s evening surgery.
“It’s his heart,” Curt Morrow MRCVS had said. Heart conditions show up as symptoms of trying to pass a bowling ball? They did. And suddenly Curt Morrow MRCVS was asking her mother would she like to stay while he put the poor old thing out of its misery and her mother sat too God-struck even for tears and she heard herself say yes, she would. Someone ought to be there with it. Would that be all right? She sat by the rubber-topped table and held Shane’s paw while Curt Morrow MRCVS filled the syringe and she could not tell when the paw changed from living paw to dead.
It is like that, but not exactly. No, she looks at that dead dog on the table, and herself holding its paw because someone had to do it, and it is not really like that all.)
(One blue and yellow January afternoon when she was quite young, before Somethings had started Happening at Home and the visits to Ballybrack, she had seen two boys on the beach, dense silhouettes on the hard, shining sand ripples, beating at something with sticks. She went to see what they were beating and saw it was a beached jellyfish. They split open its dome of translucent jelly, smashed the delicate indigo and violet internal organs, scattered quivering chunks of flesh, beat them into the damp January sand. Filled with righteous indignation at their joyful cruelty, she had shouted at them, “Don’t kill it. That’s cruel. Don’t hurt it!”
They had paused in their beating, beating, beating, to laugh at her.
“Stupid, don’t you know, it’s dead already!”
That is how it is. Dead already. But the unspeakable cruelty.)
She can imagine what Saul will see when he answers the door. Drained, dark, shadow-ridden, hag-ridden: she looks as if she has been to hell and back in one night, he says once he has gotten over the initial incomprehension at finding her on his doorstep on the wrong side of midnight. He is not far wrong there, she thinks.
She asks can she come in.
Come in, come in, please, come in, he says. My God, you look terrible.
She knows she looks terrible. She feels worse. Deep down, in her spirit, her Chi she feels filthied. The last few micrograms of Shekinah circling in her bloodstream feel like ash. She knows it is dangerous to have come here. She knows that her swords and computer and Shekinah capsules are in her car, knows that he is bound to ask questions, but she needs him, needs his presence, his life, his light, his warmth and energy, to rekindle her embers. She puts her arms around him and pulls him to her and buries herself in his geological mass. For the first time in a long time, it is a healing for her.
She vacuumed the apartment for his coming, put little individual shell-shaped soaps in the bathroom, polished the brass, agonised for half an hour about what to be wearing when she so casually answered the door. The little black number. It had never failed before. With the Berber silver earrings.
He came precisely at the appointed hour.
She added that to the list of things she liked about Saul Martland. Punctuality. Later, it was to become just another of the thousand thousand irritations that drove them apart. But not yet.
He was wearing jeans going going gone at the knee, battered Doc Marten’s boots, and a plaid shirt soft as a kiss from washing. His hair was swept back from his face like the bow wave of a destroyer.
He looked, Enye thought, fantastic. (Realising that this is how it progresses.) But not especially like someone on a dinner date.
He drove her in the German-something car through the darkening streets (while she began to worry if maybe the little black number with the Berber earrings was too much—she did not want to be thought of as tarty), out of the city to a country lane that ran by the threshold lights of the airport. In the yellow glide path lights Saul unloaded coolbox coolpak coolsac. They sat together on the hood of the German-something car and drank supermarket Spumante from snap-together plastic champagne flutes and Enye in her black number and Berber earrings would have remarked that a picnic at the end of runway one was not what she had had in mind when she accepted Mr. Saul Martland’s dinner invitation but for the shattering scream of a Boeing back-throttling in toward the countdown markers. She had never heard anything so loud. The roar consumed everything, filled the entire universe. The scream of the turbofans drew out all her dark and hidden emotions, all her frustrations and quiet desperations in one long, cathartic yell, screaming back at the engines. The aircraft’s belly lights swept over them; the undercarriage hung perilously close to them… And it was gone, thumping down on the tyre-streaked concrete beyond the threshold lights.
“God!” she shouted. “God God God God. That was amazing!”
“Here comes another one,” said Saul, and as it passed over them, huge as a falling moon, they both yelled and surrendered all their frustrations at being humans in a city, in a society, among other, frustrating humans, to the thunder of the engines. Beneath the belly lights of the low-flying aircraft they laughed and toasted to nothing and smashed their empty plastic champagne glasses down.
She offered Saul coffee back at her apartment, of course. Of course, Saul accepted.
She busied herself with the Mr. Coffee (a present from Jaypee’s last trip to New York—the most American thing he could find), and out of the corner of her eye watched Saul explore her apartment: squatting down to run a finger along the hard acrylic spines of her CDs, cocking head on one side to read the titles of her books, picking up her Chinese pots and Satsumaware to check the authenticity of the chops on their bases.
The aroma of Mr. Coffee doing his business drifted from the dining area into the living room.
“This is yours?”
He held the katana out before him in both hands. The companion sword rested in its wooden cradle. He made to draw the sword.
“No. Don’t…” In two steps she was beside him, taking the sword from his hands. “There’s a right way to draw a sword, and a wrong way. Saya—that is, the part of the sheath that covers the yakiba, the cutting edge, uppermost. Cup the saya with the left hand, so, with the tsuba, the guard, at the centre of the body, the Tan Tien. Thumb of the left hand secure on the tsuba. Now, as you take breath… draw, with dignity and respect.”
She brought the sword down to her right side in the position called Waki Kamae.
“Where did you learn all this?” Saul asked.
“University. I’d always been interested in Japan and Japanese culture.”
“A yen for Japan?”
“Ha ha. As soon as I got the chance, I studied kendo; there’s a good dojo at the university. I’m in a private dojo now. Bamboo sword first, then, only if the sensei thinks you are good enough, do you progress to the katana. The skill is in stopping the blade just before it cuts your enemy. So. Nihon Me. Sanbon Me. Yonhon Me. Gohon Me. Roppon Me. Nanahon Me.” The sword was a song of steel about Saul’s head, chest, arms, torso, dancing from position to position, never quite touching. The point finally came to rest on his breastbone, just touching the second button of his soft plaid shirt.
“Chudan N
o Kamae,” she whispered, and the sword was a channel between them, a conductor of sexual electricity. Her breast heaved, but her sword arm was miraculously steady. She looked at his eyes and she felt she would destroy herself in a white noiseless blast of sexual tension.
“I think your coffee’s ready,” he said. Enye bowed, resheathed the sword, and returned it to the company of the tachi.
He did not try to sleep with her. He drove off through the drizzle and the cones of damp yellow streetlight in his anonymous Teutonic car. She watched him drive away through chinked blinds. She lay on the bed with a whiskey and Sibelius’s Fifth in the machine, feeling vast, attenuated; flickering across a borderline between incredible presence and ecstatic self-loss, where the LEDs of her midi system became the riding lights of colossal, imaginary starships. Her childhood memories contained many such sacred moments of numinosity: watching from her bedroom window the silver rain of the Orionids, on the beach at sunset with Shane the dog and Paddy the dog; grey Saturday mornings, dark November afternoons, the smell of pine, Vaughn Williams’s orchestration of “The First Noel.” Her mother had had a wonderful expression for it: “Cloud-gathering.”
He had looked fantastic.
And so had she.
The sexual symbolism of the swords was a dark crimson throb behind her navel she thought invisible to all others, but which in truth could have been no less visible had it been stamped on her forehead in letters of fire.
Enye. In. Love.
She denied it. Of course.
But Jaypee read the signs. Judi-Angel from Traffic read the signs and wanted to know, under the conspiratorial roar of the hot-air hand dryer in the Ladies’ Room, Just Who He Was. The Blessèd Phaedra, while congratulating her on a particularly successful campaign for DairyCrest Creameries, saw the signs. Oscar the Bastard, too. Even Mrs. O’Verall.
Her sensei at the dojo saw it.
“The sword may be a phallic symbol, but it doesn’t mean you have to wield it like a dick,” he said. Enye, exuberant and sweating from the fight, knelt, bowed in seiza to her partner, tried not to blush. “The Way of the Sword lies in the control of energy, not spraying it around all over the place like a fire hose.” The farthest east Enye’s sensei had ever been was a European Championship in Belgium. His Zen proverbs tended to the homely.
She was last out of the dojo. The city was dark as she drove under the yellow streetlights to L’Esperanza Street. She took the car around the back to the service alley; there had been a spate of window-smashings and stereo-stealings. Mr. Antrobus’s tumbledown lockup where the black Phoenix bicycle resided between enigmatic early-morning excursions provided a small measure of security. She checked the padlock, rattled the rusted hasp, went to pick up her bag and swords. Paused. Troubled by a sense of presence she could not attribute to dogs, cats, rats, bats, or any other legitimate night-farer.
“Hello?”
The shadows around the gate into Mr. Antrobus’s garden seemed arranged differently.
“Hello?” A wait. For… nothing.
“I-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-magination,” she sang, shouldered the equipment, fumbled for the rattly gate catch, “I-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma…”
The shadows around the gate stirred.
Teeth—each the length of her own fingers—opened and snapped shut like a gin trap in her face. Fangs, claws, flaring nostrils, hair, burning eyes. Pure shock sprawled her back across the laneway among rusted sweet corn cans and crushed paper milk cartons.
Something uncoiled to its full height and stepped with dreadful ease over Mr. Antrobus’s back gate into the laneway.
Something with three heads.
Three heads. Dog heads. Rottweiler, Doberman, pit bull terrier. But it walked erect like a man: a hybrid of Cerberus and Minotaur. She scrabbled away from it in the litter and detritus and acid-rain-blighted private hedge. The fingers of her right hand closed on the leather bound habaki of the long sword.
The Cerbertaur took a step forward, dog heads gobbling and snapping.
The fingers of her left hand touched the sheath of the short sword.
She would have liked to have cast herself in the role of Righteous Avenger (Emma Peel in black leather cat suits a formative childhood media memory), but what action she took was the pure application of years of submission to the Way of the Sword. Crouching in the shadow of the mythological abomination, she flicked the sheaths from the blades. No time, no thought for the niceties of propriety and respect. The Rottweiler head lunged for the killing bite through the throat. Enye met it with a desperate cut of the katana. Neatly severed, the Rottweiler head tumbled across the rutted mud trailing gobbets of blue ichor.
Purest of spirits: spirit of instinct. The purest form of combat—that which is without conception or strategy, the strategy of strategylessness. Stunned by the unexpected resistance, the Cerbertaur hesitated. Enye cut again. It reeled barely in time—the tip of the katana shaved whiskers from the pit bull head. Composure recovered, it advanced again. The hedge-lined laneway was filled with its growlings and slobberings and Enye’s panicky swearing. She retreated behind a wall of swordplay toward the street entrance, and light, and movement, and traffic. It was never an equal contest. Mere flesh and fang, however enchanted, were no match for Murasama steel. Within metres of the street her flowing-water cut sent the last head, the pit bull one, into the darkness. Headless, the thing reached its arms helplessly toward the streetlights, toppled like a felled skyscraper. Enye waited, panting, trembling with shock and exertion, swords ready in the attitude of “open on all eight sides” Waited. Waited.
Waited.
Stepped forward to slip past, down the alleyway, into the garden (thinking: God, what do I do with this—call the police or what? Someone’s going to find it sooner or later). The fingers of the dead left hand twitched. Flexed. The headless body heaved itself up from the ground, crawled toward her on its elbows.
Enye ran.
A white Italian hatchback pulled up at the end of the entry. The passenger door opened. The driver, a faceless figure in a grubby white hooded sweat top with a Tibetan mandala on the front, shouted, “Get in!”
The voice was a man’s, though she could not make out his features beneath the pulled-up hood.
“Get the hell in, right now! It’s starting to regenerate itself.”
Unable to think of anything wiser to do, she swung into the white Italian hatchback. Before the door was even closed the driver was burning away in a melodrama of smoking radials.
“Nice work with the swords. They weren’t expecting resistance. It’ll be ready next time, though. Get a bloody move on!” The driver slammed the horn at an aged aged Ford scabbed with grey spray primer pulling slowly away from traffic lights; swung out, overtook, horn pumping. “They regenerate. It’ll take more than swords to stop them. Thankfully, you did enough damage that it will take it quite a while to regenerate a new manifestation, but it’ll be back. Bank on it. We just hope we can teach you enough so you’ll be ready for it next time.”
“Look, friend…”
“A Nimrod. Or rather, the Nimrod. As in Nimrod, the hunter. And you, the hunted.”
The white Italian hatchback stopped dead at a red light. Enye bounced her forehead painfully on the sun visor.
“Should wear a belt,” said the driver, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “Come on come on come on…”
Impaled by a fateful spike of curiosity, Enye took the moment of opportunity the lights presented to reach across and pull down the grubby white sweatshirt hood.
The face, the entire head of her rescuer, was deformed into a curve of flesh and bone, a crescent moon, a moon face. She reached for the door handle, pulled futilely. Moonface had his finger on the centralised locking button. He pulled the hood back around his features while traffic queued behind him hooted in frustration.
“Sorry sorry sorry sorry,” Enye whispered as the moonfaced man jammed the white Fiat savagely into gear and jumped the lights as they changed back to red.
“No matter. No matter. Better you’d found out when you were ready, but you had to find out eventually. I’m on your side, I promise. An ally.” The car drove away from the lights and neons and faery-light-spangled trees of the main thoroughfares into a dismal district of recession-hit video libraries, peeling posters for gigs by bands long broken up, and municipal housing. “He did mention to you about enemies and allies.”
“We’re talking about Dr. Rooke.”
“Yes. Him. I—rather, we—are the allies.”
“And that was, that is, if I take you right, the enemy?”
“Got it in one. A phagus. A few are good, some indifferent, most are bad. Well, maybe not bad. Let’s say, their concerns are not human concerns.”
“And would you count yourself one of the good ones?”
“Shit, no. We’re not phaguses. We’re humans. Most of the time. If you cut us, do we not bleed?”
“Merchant of Venice?”
“Very good. Very good. You can get out now. This is as far as we go.” The white Fiat slewed into a narrow cobbled laneway that opened into a small court half-filled with massive industrial galvanised steel garbage bins. It stank of rotting cabbage and garlic. The moonfaced man carefully dropped the keys down a drain grating. “Wouldn’t want anyone else stealing it.”
“I have been risking life and limb in a stolen car?”
“Borrowed. Liberated. All property is theft, and that kind of shit. I can get into most cars in under ten seconds. Come on, get a move on. It’ll be getting light in a few hours.”
They were six—Moonface, Lami, Sumobaby, Fingers, Cello, and Wolfwere. Collectively they were the Midnight Children, after a celebrated magic-realist novel. Fingers, it was alleged, would read anything. Their habitat was a huddle of cardboard boxes that had once held washing machines and tumble dryers roofed with plastic refuse sacks under the last arch in a brick-vaulted rail viaduct. Night freights across the border clunked ponderously overhead, shook teardrops of drip water from the little calcite stalactites that had leached from the joints in the brickwork. Their fire was a low smudge; they claimed it was a precaution against sparks igniting their flammable city of cardboard crawlways and plastic padded nests. Rather, Enye suspected, it was to conceal their presence and appearances from any other citizens of the night.