by Ian McDonald
“I suppose I’d better go see him.”
The great amoebic party animal stirs.
“Just to say…”Omry shouts across the heads and the EmCee announcing the next band, “… he’s yours. I relinquish all claims. Wipe my fingerprints off his ass. I was no good for him. We didn’t commune at all. You and he, you commune all right. You have great spirits.”
Enye understands how much it has cost Omry to say those words. She shouts thanks and gratitude but they are shattered to dust by the first power chords ripping out from the new act. She slips down her mask again. She had glimpsed Phaedra, head tossed back in jewelled laughter behind an ermine domino mask on a stick. Buttons, beads, bows; Marie Antoinette. A liaison hunting for danger.
It takes the two black girls in the mandatory leather microskirts sitting on his arms and Enye sitting on his chest (Hey, what am I doing?) pouring antihistamines and cans of lager down his throat to convince Elliot that he is going to be, not fair, not average, not good, not great, but mega-great, superhyperterrabevagreat. Five minutes to showtime, the penultimate set of the year has ended, the hits of the past decade come right up-to-date, the faithful roadies have moved all his keyboards and rhythm generators and sampling computers onstage, the Linn programmer he has found from somewhere is posing about studying output levels and wave forms and harmonic profiles and the EmCee has the microphone in his hand and is trying to make himself heard over the general party clamour.
Elliot falls back to the floor. Enye draws the tachi.
“If you do not go up on that stage, I will kill you,” she says.
“That sword real?” asks one of the black girls.
“Laydees and gennelmen, nonsexist persons, let’s dance the old year out with…”
Strange. As she drew the sword, she felt, like quicksilver along her spine, the old black magic tingle of mythoconscious contact.
Mask down, she goes front-of-house to hear the set. The entire warehouse is dancing. Tight and righteous, one KW per channel, beaming out on the adrenaline frequency. Behind her mask, she smiles. He is good. She recognises her own “I could get to like this” woven into the fabric of rhythms and samples.
“Enye!” The voice shouting in her ear over the digi-beat and processed orgasmic sobs of the black girls is like a pistol shot. She whirls: eyehole to eye.
Him.
“I recognised the swords, Enye.”
“Saul! Shit, Saul…”
“You look… you look… you look.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Can’t hear you. Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
They go somewhere they can talk, out into the cold of the end of the year, into the frost and moonshine on the fire escape. The wrought-iron vibrates in sympathy with Elliot’s transcription of reality.
“Not quite the St. Matthew Passion,” Saul says.
“If you give it enough time, you can get to like it.”
“I’d heard you were slumming it,” Saul says. “What, bicycle courier company?”
Now she sees what has always been obvious: that he wanted to possess her so badly only so that he might have a mirror in which to see himself reflected. Enye wants to hurt him with weapons duller and cruder than her swords. She wants to punish him for his sins in a way that is endlessly cruel and goes on forever and ever and ever.
“It has its compensations as a job,” she says. “All those tight little backsides. Spoiled for choice, really. I must introduce you to Elliot. He’s onstage right now; he comes off at the end of the year. You should meet. You’ve absolutely nothing in common.”
Saul stiffens. He is dressed as Rhett Butler. Stick-on moustache and suave hat. Like Percy Perinov. Look what happened to him. Should she tell him about the baby? Dandle it in front of him, then snatch it back inside her life forever?
“We’re finished, Saul. We outgrew each other. Can’t you understand that? You are so stupid. Stupid stupid stupid man. Go away, won’t you? Let’s consent to be pieces of each other’s histories.”
She can feel the old year straining at the boundaries of time, eager to be gone, heigh-ho heigh-ho. And something more: the distant, panicky nausea of mythlines gathering and gyring. A sudden wave of vertigo sends her reaching for the cold iron banister. She wants him gone. Gone now. Gone for good.
“Why did you come here? You hate things like this; you always did. You never came to any of the parties I invited you to because you hate people. You hate people because you are afraid of people. You fear the other, anything but yourself. You always did, Saul. Go away. I am me, understand. Me.”
“Let me see your face. Take off the mask, please.”
“Go away, Saul.”
He goes. And she is alone on the fire escape. And she feels very much like crying. And she feels very much like running her sword through the first person she meets on the other side of the door. And while she feels these feelings, the old year dies and the new enters in.
She returns to the party. Balloons have cascaded from the ceiling. Bryghte Thynges and Bootifuls and the Mandarins of Fashion are shrieking and spraying polymer string and champagne over each other. Ritual ejaculation. Girls with gelled hair, blue mint lip gloss, and ludicrous skirts are jumping up and down screaming while the men they came with are kissing other women altogether. The EmCee has cleared the stage after Elliot’s set; as Auld Acquaintance Is Forgot and Never Brought to Mind, he tries to make himself heard over the drunken singing.
“Citizens, comrades, people people people, let’s welcome in the next decade” (“It doesn’t start till next year!” followed immediately by the meaty knock of fist on flesh) “with an act that we know is going to be just enormous. When we saw them first on the streets of our fair city, we knew that they had to be the act to open the new decade.”
A guitar power chord, long on the sustain, fading away in a feedback howl. Pin spots wheels, searching for a target. An urgent, insistent guitar riff, repeated as a theme through a processor over which is laid layers of improvisation. The spots swivel, snap, and focus. A girt with a starburst of gelled hair and Morticia Adams makeup dives from the top of a speaker stack into the lights as the guitar theme lifts in resolution. And explodes. Floods up: the crowd roars and applauds the boy with the mirror shades and the electric guitar and the amp-pack on his back and the mad dancer with the ripped leotard.
At the foot of the stage, a long silver needle of pain drives through Enye MacColl’s brain.
“Comrades, citizens,” bellows the disembodied voice of the EmCee, “please put various parts of yours and anyone else’s anatomy together to welcome The Lords of the Gateway!”
In the same instant she knows them, they know her. The guitar hesitates in the middle of a chord progression, the dancer falters in her cascade of liquid movement for a second, for an eigenblink.
The girl dancer dives to the front of the stage, lowers herself to floor level. Kohled eyes make contact with Enye’s behind the Kabuki mask. Then she backflips dazzlingly to the rear of the stage. The parrrrtyers roar. Behind the roar, Enye hears the guitar chords take a new, dangerous cadence. The boy smiles. And the familiar, feared sensation of the bottom falling out of reality gnaws like a cancer at her spirit: mythlines caught up in a fist and moulded together.
And she understands the nature of their gift. Theirs is the power of breaching at will the membrane between Earth and Mygmus, of letting the chaotic images and half-formed archetypes fountain out into quotidian expression. And she understands in that same beat of her mind that here under the spots and strobes, before the Bryghtes and Bootifuls and Socially Credible of the city, they are going to smash the sluice gates of reality.
Enye bulls her way through the transfixed Bryghtes and Bootifuls and Socially Credibles to the fire exit. Temporarily heedless of the new life inside her, she takes the ice-slick iron steps three at a time. The cars are parked so close together she has to run along the fenders to reach her Citroen, so tight-packed she cannot open the door.
She draws her tachi and cuts her way in through the sunroof. The Shekinah is in its hiding place under the driver’s seat, the personal organiser thrown into the back with empty Diet Coke cans. No time for refinements. She gulps down two tabs of Shekinah. She is halfway up the fire escape when it hits. The lift into mythoconsciousness almost sends her over the handrail two storeys to the cars below. The warehouse is the focus of a hurricane of mythlines; a celebration of derangement. The pull of them is almost enough to tear her from her grip on the emergency exit push-down handle. Dorothy and the tornado. The dance floor is a bedlam of slashing FX beams and mythlines. We certainly aren’t in Kansas anymore. No time for strategy. The Gateway has formed. The mouth in the air hovers over the backstage, given phantasmal solidity by the lighting rig. Shapes move through it toward the edge of her world—shapes like dolls’ prams that push themselves along with two hairy arms. Shapes like tangles of movie celluloid with an eye in each frame. Shapes like a lung bifurcated at the bottom, shuffling toward the edge of Earth in a way that can never, never be thought of as walking, its yellow crow’s beak clacking and snapping. The crammed slammed jammed people clap and cheer—they think it is special effects trickery. And the guitar hammers hammers hammers and the dancer dances like nothing has ever danced before.
She stands by the emergency exit, unable to act. Her hand rests on a rectangular protrusion on the wall. What? In case of fire…
It had worked for Paul Newman in Torn Curtain.
She whips out the tachi, shatters the glass with a blow of the tsuba.
Never underestimate the power of fear. Spirits are contagious, Sleeping may be passed on. Yawning may be passed on, Fear may be passed on.
“Fire! Fire!” Bells begin to ring. “Fire!”
The crowd shrieks and surges, wheels to look at itself, ask itself questions, wheels again toward the exits.
“Fire! Fire!” The warehouse goes up in one great scream as the spirit of panic passes from person to person: Fire! Fire! They scream, pointing at flames that do not exist yet which they can clearly see. She sees Saul’s face swirled away through the storm of mythlines in the blind rush for the exits, sees feet catch on Phaedra’s Marie Antoinette crinoline and pull her down, down, under the trampling feet. The alarm bells ring and ring and ring and ring and ring and ring. Enye leaps up onto the stage, fastens the computer to her obi, draws the katana.
The girl dancer applauds slowly.
Enye pushes up her mask.
The guitarist sets down his backpack. Behind him, the Warped Ones fret at their confinement. The stage area is the dead eye of a cyclone of mythlines. The guitarist takes off his mirror shades.
Pale skin covers the sockets where eyes should be.
She understands why she could not find them. She could not find them because, like her, their control is conscious. They leave no footprints in the unsurface of the Mygmus, set no mythlines trembling with their passage because they are so fully subsumed into the world.
The warehouse is empty. Even the crushed and trampled have been taken away.
Enye shifts her hold on the katana to the light, floating, intentionless grip taught by the Masters.
In that momentary shift of spirits, the gateway opens. The Things spill out onto Earth. And the girl attacks. Fast. So fast. Cartwheeling across the stage. Enye cuts, grip still unsettled. The sword draws blood only from air. The dancer tucks and tumbles over the blade. A blast of pain, a kick, the tachi goes spinning from her hand.
The dancer lands on her feet, hands on hips.
Enye thinks her wrist is broken.
The falling shadow alerts her. She rolls for the tachi as the guitar falls. It strikes splinters from the wooden staging. The guitar has extruded blue steel blades from its body.
She barely sees the kick coming, rolls with it just fast enough to avoid a broken neck. Stomach. She must protect her stomach, protect the child. She slashes out with the katana. Never slash. Cutting is strong, slashing is weak, desperate. A crash. A detonation of two hundred-watt bulbs. She must have knocked over a stage-level lighting battery. A smell of burning: hot bulb, the usual back-of-the-monitors litter of paper cups, burger boxes, is smouldering. Wielding the blade-studded guitar like an axe by its machine-head, the eyeless boy advances on her. He does not need eyes to see. He can see her quite clearly by the light of the Mygmus. Blade rings on steel. Enye recovers, uses the Body Strike to fling the eyeless one back across the stage. The pin spots swing and play across the battle. Enye reaches out for her tachi. A bare foot deftly kicks the short sword away, comes down on her wrist. Framed by the shock of peroxide hair, the girl looks down at Enye with immense curiosity. Bare foot draws back for killing kick to neck… She back-flips away from the blade in Enye’s free hand, singing down through the air, crouches, hands and feet flat on the staging, like an animal. The blind guitarist has regained his feet. Enye stands between them.
Across the abandoned dance floor, between the drinkables eatables sniffables smokables, the Things move: things like an ambulatory toadstool covered in hair. Things like a woman dressed in the severely cut grey suit Kim Novak wore in Vertigo, except that where Kim Novak’s head should be is a single enormous eyeball. Things that look like a dwarf in chain mail with a cannon for a head. Things like a pair of bagpipes walking upon three grasshopper legs… From another world entirely, the Doppler wail of fast-approaching fire engine sirens. The smell of burning is no wishful thinking. A wisp of smoke. A tongue of flame. Fire. Real fire.
Enye uncoils the computer lead from her obi, connects it to the katana.
The girl dancer grins and purses her lips in poisoned kisses at the sight of the disruptor glyphs anointing the sword.
The eyeless boy launches himself across the stage.
“Tō!” She gathers her spirit into one Void-timed “fire and stones” cut: hands, body, spirit, blade, all cutting strongly, rhythmically together. The katana shears through the neck of the guitar, encounters the truss rod and is blocked. The back-shock almost knocks the blade from Enye’s grip. Glyphs fountain into the neon air. Enye struggles to extricate her weapon. The blind one grins, moves his guitar to trap her blade. She feels the displaced air as the dancer comes tumbling toward her. The girl catches hold of a lighting boom, swings, lands legs locked around Enye’s neck. Nylon-smooth thighs crush her windpipe. Enye can hear the girl’s breath, panting, excited, in her ears as long, chrome-polished nails seek out the pressure points in her neck and squeeze.
White pain fountains up through her brain; flame, smoke spins around her, but the dumb, mindless motor nerves keep tugging tugging tugging, trying to tear her katana free. The air is fire in her lungs. Her blood is molten lead. She can feel the neurons burning and snapping, one by one. She is dying…
With the end of her strength she tears the katana free from the guitar. The blind one swings his axe in the middle attitude cut. With the dancer choking the last scraps of life from her, Enye reverses her grip on the katana.
“Ya!”
She drives the blade upward, at her enemy’s head. Howling, the dancer grabs a roof-mounted fold-back monitor and swings away. The warehouse is ringed by the woo-woo sirens and pulsing blue lights of Emergency Services. Cutting to left and right, Enye leaps from the stage into the roaring wall of mythlines, darts between the shuffling Things to recover the tachi. The dancer crouches on top of a speaker stack. From her hair, where they have been acting as ornaments, she produces two sets of blades connected to a bar gripped in the fist. Twenty centimetres of steel times six glitters between her knuckles.
With a bird cry, she leaps from the stack over the burning front of the stage, arms spread, blades poised.
And with the perfect timelessness of the masters, Enye cuts her in two with the middle attitude stroke. One cut.
You can win with certainty with the spirit of one cut, for it is the strategy that comes from the heart.
Before the radiance of the dancer’s dissolution has died away, Enye has vaulted onto the st
age. The Shekinah is a great anthem within. She advances through the whirlwind of mythlines. The blind guitarist raises his weapon, but Enye can see his spirit. He retreats before her until he reaches the other speaker stack. Then he can retreat no farther. Enye rests, reading the time, reading her body and spirit. She disconnects the computer. The glyphs fail and fade. She hefts the katana in her left hand. Hurls it.
The guitarist moves to deflect the blow.
Slow. Too slow. Too, too slow.
The sword pins him to a speaker, the blade a line of steel entering just to the left of his nose, exiting through the back of the skull. The thin ichor of the Mygmus-born leaks from the hideous wound, but still he does not die. He does not die because he has never lived. Enye is upon him in a flicker of movement. Short and quick. She can hear the firemen and policemen taking up station around the warehouse. Glyph-light and fireglow illuminate the faces of the woman and the phagus. She plugs the lead from the Sony-Nihon Mark 19 Hakudachi into the socket mounted on the katana, poises her finger over the Enter key. The flames go up behind her.
“Do not think that because we are the last, we are the only ones,” he whispers. “Others will come; others will always come, until you face the Adversary. You have won the battle, but the war is not yet ended.”
“Nice speech,” says Enye. The blast momentarily outshines the light of the fire and the banked spots and strobes.
The fire burns hot. The windows crack and shatter in the heat. The smoke tries to choke her, but the Shekinah burns hotter. It touches the edge of her talent and ignites it. With its vision she sees her talent go forth from her, like a great breaking wave, like the ever-breaking hollow of the Deep Sea Wave in the print by Hokusai. She sees the disease-coloured light from that other place beyond the gateway break against it, and fail, and fade. Her talent goes forth from her and it is like a wall, or a rushing mighty wind, halting the Warped Ones in their advance, driving them back, centimetre by centimetre, driving against the power thundering from the Gateway. Its power seems irresistible but little by little, centimetre by centimetre, she drives them back, the Kim Novak thing and the lung thing and the dwarf thing and all the other things that lie within the imagining of humanity, back into the Gateway, back out of the world into the place they have come from.