by Ian McDonald
Found Sources.
A street preacher proclaiming hate in the name of love: You’re all going to hell, every one of you. The wages of sin is death! The wages of sin is death! Ye must be born again! Ye must be born again!
A lovers’ argument: she accusing him, he defending himself, he moving from defence to offence, she thrown momentarily back, she rallying with a strong counterattack, he gaining strength for a countercounteroffensive.
A conversation between two thirteen-year-old girls, a complex, utterly banal exchange of agreed allusions, themes, and references quite opaque to anyone outside their social orbit.
A drunk’s monologue, projected on the inside of his skull in full Technicolor by the Cinema Nostalgique, of an encounter with a ghostly policeman.
A business man’s oaths and imprecations as he waits for a long overdue wife to return from shopping, gathering in vehemence; then, when she finally appears, the stunning hypocrisy of his glad-to-see-you-have-you-had-a-nice-time-darling greeting.
A madwoman from a mad land reciting memorised pages from the telephone directory in a voice of prophetic hysteria.
“This is just a start,” Elliot says. “I have this grand dream of remixing reality: you have this computer program, see, that’s constantly scanning worldwide television, radio, and telecommunications, stealing samples and then mixing them down to rhythm tracks generated by a subroutine. I use a lot of computer-generated rhythm tracks; most dance music is seventy, eighty percent computer-generated. What I want to do is to take the human element out entirely to make it more human, you understand what I mean? I want the abilities of a computer to contain and express the diversity of what it means to be human. Reality, the twelve-inch version. The Happening World, Club Mix. I get invited to a sound-system party and I just plug in the computer and give them this happening world at five hundred watts per speaker. The people who go to these parties, they just want dance music as a means of escape, something to stuff their heads full of Ecstasy to, or whatever, and let the dope and the music toast their neurons. Me, I want to use dance music to explore. I want it to be dangerous, radical. I want dancing to be political.”
“The politics of dancing?” Enye asks.
Elliot looks at her as his muse rolls, sated, from him and withdraws into her divine cloud of unknowing.
“You what?”
She breaks into the dead amusement arcade through a skylight. The rotted, paint-blistered wood yields with only the faintest cry to her crowbar. It is not as great a drop as she has feared. Her red Reeboks hardly make any sound. She drags a retired one-armed-bandit across the pitted linoleum floor and stations it beneath the skylight. She may have to leave the way she entered. She cannot resist one pull, for the sake of all those fat copper pennies she slid down all those chromium gullets in all those childhood amusement arcades. The mechanism has jammed solid. Three lemons, the final payout.
It is a strange contact, the pulse of mythoconsciousness in this seaside town huddled behind its breakwaters and shingle beach against winter; a variable star in her neural constellation, at times so dim and wan as to be virtually imaginary, again, an actinic flare of nova light burning out from among the closed-down arcades and hot dog stalls and rain-washed promenades. Its variable nature and its distance from the mass of phagus activity ranked it low on the list of priorities. Now it had worked its way to the top by dint of Enye having removed all contacts more interesting than it.
She had not been surprised to find this closed-season arcade where she had rolled her pennies as a child the focus of the mythoconscious contact. As she sat in the Citroen listening to Nielsen symphonies and dripping gobbets of Thousand Island dressing onto the upholstery from the burger she bought from the sole late-night eatery on the storm-lashed seafront, she had found herself submerging into cotton-candy reverie. Days when the sun seemed brighter, hotter, cleaner than the sun that shines upon this dog-end decade; days when mothers wore slacks and fathers wore sandals and rolled up their trouser legs, and kiddies wore shorts and white knee socks and babies wore sun bonnets. Days when the souvenir shops unself-consciously gloried in their curious hybrid of naive vulgarity and patriotism. Dirty postcards cheek-to-cheek with pictures of Padre Pio bleeding all over the revolving display rack. Flags of all nations on little wooden sticks to deck the ramparts of your sand Versailles.
Rain had speckled the windshield, washing away the sand castles of other decades. Dead neon, peeling paint, swags of faery lights rattling in the wind driving the cold black breakers onto the shingle shore, graffiti felt-markered on green-painted seats and shelters. The entropy of the heart. When the teenage crew of the solitary late-night burger bar rolled down the shutters, leaving the memory of dirty grease in the morning air, she had made her move.
She slides open a lathe and glass door, enters the main body of the arcade, a long room filled with the discarded corpses of arcade games. There is enough light from the promenade for her to make out the names on the cabinets: Astroblaster, Shark Hunt, Penny Falls, Torpedo Run, Wheel of Fortune, Derby Day, The Drunkard’s Dream—she remembers that one, ghosts appearing out of barrels, trapdoors, at windows while pink elephants wheeled across the background, all for a penny—Space Invaders I, Space Invaders II. Pinball machines; an art form in themselves, tail-fin pink Thunderbirds, Caesar’s Palace hostesses winking lewdly. Space Bimbettes in bikinis and goldfish-bowl helmets wedged into the armpits of men in scarlet tights, silver boots, and improbably bulging crotches far more threatening to the marauding aliens than the mix/blend/whip/puree ray pistols in their hamlike fists. Her parents had never allowed her to play pinball. The prerogative of Bigger Boys. She pauses, turns, scans the room with her Shekinah sight. This is the heart of the enigmatic contact.
“Hello?” She unsheathes the swords slung across her back. Rain rattles on the windows.
A video game click-buzzes to itself. “God, don’t do that.”
But the power is off. She remembers noticing that as she came in. The games are all plugged into the ceiling sockets, but the master isolator is up. The power is off.
One by one the dead arcade games flash and hum into restored life. Old fluorescents flash and wink, the pinball machines chatter their counters down to zero and rattle their buffers. The video games awaken in a dawn chorus of buzzing, of buzzings, zarpings, beepings, and growlings. Somewhere, a sailor in a glass case shakes his shoulders and laughs maniacally. Sparks fly from the old “Electric Chair,” smoke rises from the jerking mannequin’s ears. Penny Falls shoves log jams of outmoded currency toward the brink.
Enye advances through the arcade, swords held in the stance of Gedan No Kame. Around her screens light with video explosions, glowing red torpedoes lurch toward their targets, wheels of fortune spin, plastic racehorses gallop.
Something.
Behind a cabinet. She turns to face it. Again—the briefest flash of something, low, scurrying, scuttling. A dart of motion. She cries out, rubs, her right ankle. Pain, like a whiplash or a cigarette burn. She sees it clearly for one instant on top of a game cabinet, a small, glowing gremlin shaped out of neon. It looks nothing more and nothing less than an archetypal Space Invader. She cuts with the katana but it is gone. She winces. Her neck stings. A second Invader crouches on top of a Teletennis cabinet, it spits a bolt of electricity at her. Enye barely parries with her tachi blade.
“Tō!” The creature leaps, too slow, too slow. The swinging blade of the katana smashes it into a puffball of bathroom pink fluorescence. Dozens now, on every vantage, spitting out their tiny shock bolts. Too many to parry; each hit is a sear and puff of scorching fabric and flesh. She retreats, they follow through, hopping from cabinet to cabinet. She sees one tearing itself free from a screen, annihilates it, but it is liking killing wasps. There are always too many of them. She takes refuge behind an Astro-tank 2000 cabinet. There is a smell of burning, of electricity, as the cabinet absorbs fire. The laughing sailor in its glass cabinet regards her with a malevolent eye. Ceases in mi
dlaugh. Turns its head toward her.
“Bet you never met one like me before,” it says. Mickey Mouse gosh-golly-wow voice. An Invader leaps down from the top of Enye’s cover, releases a bolt. Enye yelps, swears. The tachi flies from her hand, spins across the scabby linoleum. She sucks the burn on her left hand. The Invader leaps to attack again. The katana catches in it midair.
“How you like this arcade game, sunshine? This one shoots back. Adds a whole new dimension of excitement, wouldn’t you say?” says the Mickey Mouse matelot. “Tell me, gorgeous, how’s it feel to be on the receiving end for a change?”
“Spare me the clichés,” Enye says, rolling to retrieve her sword. As she hoped, the thick fabric of her parka protects her from the hail of bolts. She takes fresh cover as a wave of neon Invaders overrun the Astro-tank 2000 game. The laughing sailor tracks her with his head.
“Shaped charges,” it says. “Kind of cute, don’t you think? My own little army of phaguses. Of course, they’re not terribly robust, but they make up in numbers what they lack in individual durability.”
Enye raises the katana to smash the glass cabinet and its occupant into nothingness.
“I wouldn’t waste your time,” says the sailor. “I’m Little Mr. Everywhere, aren’t I? The Ghost in the Machine, I like to think of myself. The Faery of the VDU. Today, video games, tomorrow the banking networks, next week the defence systems. Well, you’ve got to dream, don’t you?”
“I cannot believe,” says Enye, breaking from cover behind a flickering dance of steel and electricity, “that the Mygmus ever stored a memory like you.” She backs toward the wall, trying to make her way to the sliding doors. She has an idea. The sailor’s face rezzes up on an Asteroid’s screen.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Each generation generates its own mythologies, its own gods and demons, its own imps and sprites. I am merely a response to the collective unconscious of the times. But seriously, gorgeous, have you ever considered that these creatures of the Mygmus you are battling with such zeal and determination, I must admit, might not be the hopes and fears of your so-called adversary, but your own fears and hopes, reflected back at you? Pluck out the beam from your own eye before you cast out the mote from your brother’s, and all that. It’s worth thinking about, you know.”
“Ya!” Enye plunges the katana through the screen. The tube detonates in dust and flying glass.
“Temper, temper,” says the taunting Mickey Mouse voice from a Wurlitzer jukebox. Invaders advance, formed up into ranks and files, once over each other like tiny musketeers. The death of a thousand cuts. Each tiny burn, each tiny shock might be no more than an irritation, but multiplied a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times… Seared, scarred, half-blinded. Enye cuts her way toward the glass door. Shaped charges. Ghosts in the machine. Bolt after bolt strikes home as she pulls tall cabinets around her and the junction box.
“Where is it where is it where is it.” She traces the power main, down, along. There. The fuse box. She hammers at the catch with the hilt of the tachi until the box fails open. She rips out the ceramic fuses, casts them away behind her. Disconnects the computer from the katana. A power bolt strikes the back of her neck like a whip. Tiny neon ghosts appear around the edge of her barricade, over the tops of the cabinets, squeezing between the black fabric-covered boxes. The air smells of sweat and ionisation. She jams the multiway connector into the open contacts of the master fuse.
The death cry of the phagus is terrible as silver lightning blazes from cabinet to cabinet, through every wire and microprocessor and neon of its silicon nervous system. Glyphs flock and storm like birds. Where they intersect Invaders, both are destroyed in a silent blossom of light. Enye holds the connector to the fuse box until there is silence and darkness absolute in the dead arcade. The dead videos seem like tombstones, the Wheels of Fortune and Penny Falls and pinball machines strange mausoleums. Wincing, she heaves herself onto the old fruit machine and out into the rain and the cold. Only the Lords of the Gateway remain. Most cunning of phaguses, so deeply absorbed into the life of the world she has not yet been able to pluck their signature from the sky signs. But she will. Soon.
According to the instructions, you pass the little plastic wand through your stream, place it in the indicator unit, and wait four minutes.
Four minutes, that’s two hundred forty seconds counting at one hippopotamus two hippopotamus that’s a long time and an awful lot of hippopotami (a veritable stampede, do hippopotami stampede, are there ever anything like two hundred forty of them in one place at any time?) damn, cloud-gathering again, she’s missed the four-minute mark, will that matter, will that make a difference; no, no matter, no difference; it’s blue, bright blue. Blue as the most incredibly blue thing you can think of. Bluer.
She slumps onto the toilet seat in her street-riding clothes.
“Goddamn you, Saul Martland. You finally got what you wanted from me.”
The woman who calls herself Marie, the one who was once a disaffected housewife for whom the daily barrage of Snap, Crackle, and Pop grew too much, hears her voice and looks into the cubicle. One glimpse is enough.
“Please, don’t go telling everyone,” Enye says. But they know already. Pheromones, hormones, ketones, esters; chemical semaphore. One by one they come into the women’s room, fold themselves as best they can into the cramped space. All of them, even gum-ruminating, ethnic-hatted Omry.
“Jeez, Enye, sorry…”
“Have you told him yet?”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Are you going to get married?”
“How long you going to keep working?”
“What you going to do with it?”
“Hey, like we’re here, don’t ever forget that…”
She’d skipped a period, like a faulty typewriter, hah hah, old joke, outmoded and outworn; it’s word processors now and they don’t miss a thing. And now everything is cast into the air to hang like dust. Her job with the courier company, her ability to maintain her apartment, her relationship with Saul, and Elliot, and, most important, most devastatingly, the hunt for the Lords of the Gateway. All changed, changed utterly. Changed terribly. The biological clocks are running. She has a strictly limited amount of time to find and destroy the Lords. She imagines she can feel the cells of the thing inside her dividing and re-dividing and re-re-dividing.
That last time. It must have been. But she was on progesterone. Unless the progressive doses of Shekinah she had taken to heal the scarred membrane of mythlines between Earth and Mygmus had tampered with her hormone balance. Suppositions, probabilities, improbabilities. The undeniable reality is that she is pregnant.
Out on the bike that day she feels appallingly self-conscious, as if her womb is made of glass.
As she is signing out that evening (how early the dark is drawing, how short the days) there is a polite, solicitous clearing of a throat behind her, of the kind only made by someone who is shy of a task they have been given. Sumpta, the girl who is the resting actress, hands a fat brown envelope to Enye.
“We, all the girls, us all, we talked among ourselves, you know, and we thought, we thought, in case you want to… you know, we thought this might help.”
The fat brown envelope contains a fat wad of soiled bank notes.
Until receiving the fat brown envelope from the hand of Sumpta, she had not thought of abortion.
She turns off the tape before it is one-third played through. Haydn’s disciplined, measured harmonies are thin and trivial to her tonight, like so much tinsel. They have never sounded like that before. She snatches the cassette from the desk, rips out metre after metre of brown oxide tape; rips and rips in anger and frustration as she tries to break it and the tape just reels out endlessly through her fingers, yielding, infuriatingly.
At school it had always been the fat girls, the ugly girls, the stupid girls who got pregnant, the girls who knew they could not get a man any other way, who knew their only contribution
to society was a few squirts of woman-juice in the gene pool, the ones with short short skirts and bare legs in winter, yet, in those few weeks before their mothers took them out of school, went around smirking and self-satisfied as if pregnancy had endowed them with some final and absolute authority over the thin girls, the pretty girls, the smart girls.
Smart girls pretty girls thin girls do not get caught. Smart girls pretty girls thin girls do not have stand-up quickies behind discos, or in the backseats of Fords. Smart girls pretty girls thin girls say no, and when the time does come to say yes, smart girls pretty girls thin girls know all about contraception.