Outrageous Fortune

by Tim Scott

  A great rocket-propelled grenade of adrenaline smashed into the base of my stomach.

  There was a gun at my head.

  And there was a Rider leering at me.

  Fuck.

  I didn’t see Mat and Teb. I expected they were just sleeping elsewhere in the apartment, oblivious, as the Rider dragged me out and downstairs to where the others were waiting.

  “Ah-ha! Ah-ha! Haaaa!” he called, sailing across the entrance hall.

  “Oh God,” said the bearded one. “He was right. Now we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “I have the Package. I told you! Didn’t I?” said the one dragging me. “Didn’t I?”

  “You have cost us a lot of time,” said one of the others to me.

  “Didn’t really mean to escape,” I mumbled vaguely. “Someone tried to sell me some encyclopedias,” I added, fighting the fact that the inside of my head had decided to do an impression of a bass drum with such fervor it made some imaginary metal garage door, located somewhere else in my head, continually vibrate.

  “I knew he’d be there,” continued the jumpy Rider. “I had a weird sense of it.”

  “Yeah, last time you had a sense of something we knocked off a pet shop because you thought there were diamonds stashed in the kangaroo pen,” spat another Rider.

  “I was misinformed. I explained it.”

  “I tell you, if another kangaroo ever punches me, I’m going to blow his fucking head off,” spat the first one again.

  “Get going. Come on,” nodded the bearded one, and he gestured I should get onto the bike. I eased myself on gingerly; the crash suit slipped around me, and we all cruised off. No doubt we would be breaking more speed limits and as I was the only one with a C-4 Charlie, it would once more look to the sensors as if I were driving.

  I really hoped the clever thing Caroline had done with my C-4 was still in force; otherwise, I could just see Zone Securities taking great pleasure in throwing the book at me.

  Followed by the shelves.

  Then probably the whole wall.

  The crash suit had a blacked-out visor so I couldn’t see where we were going. Not that it bothered me a great deal, because my head was seriously throbbing now from my hangover. Part of me insisted I was still actually lying down in Teb’s flat and that this was a drunken dream, but a superior part of me knew that was a lie and it was all very real. I had no idea where we were and didn’t especially care, but I did once hear a loud stern “Shhhhhh!” as we hammered along, and that had to mean we were in Classical and breaking the noise restrictions. That always triggered the huge “Please be quiet” signs they had everywhere.

  We cruised on for a long time after that, so it didn’t make a slither of difference. I couldn’t mentally try to follow the route and, besides, I couldn’t shake my headache. It felt like being closely followed by the entire percussion section of the San Diego Philharmonic.

  After they had taken speed.

  And then smack.

  And then found out they had won the lottery.

  I tried to think about other things but any fresh thoughts kept getting drowned out. Pain has a way of invading every nook of your soul so there’s nowhere else in your head to go. It’s like someone coming into your house and throwing all your things out of the window. In the end, no matter how hard you try to block it out, it gets to you.

  So I just took every moment that went by as another one I had got through, and I knew if I strung enough of these moments together, eventually things would change. It doesn’t sound a big deal, I know, but believe me—in the shape I was in, it was.

  After an eternity of cambered bends and long open-throttle freeways, we slowed, meandering through tiny corners and finally climbing some bumps, which felt like a flight of small steps. At a snail’s pace, we lurched over a much larger hump, circled slowly, and stopped. I guessed we were here, wherever that was.

  A huge bell struck somewhere overhead, beating out long, slow seconds, and the echo rang around like an energetic terrier. The vibrations resonated deep within my throbbing temples, expanding my skull, it seemed, to three times its actual size. The bell tolled a final stroke, and the note slipped about me before retreating to some distant corner to curl up.

  I felt hands on the crash suit and guessed the Riders were now about to ask me to assassinate God.

  26

  I wanted to lie down and turn my life off for an hour or so until my head stopped giving me such a hard time, but the Riders were already bundling me out of the crash suit and across the hard, uneven stone floor. The air was cool and I wondered where the hell we were. Around me seemed to be huge, squat stone columns, ragged with age, that sat belligerently in this silent, dingy half-light.

  I looked up and, despite the pounding behind my eyes, took in the vaulted ceiling rearing above us, supported on a babble of ever-more-slender stone columns. The roof was falling into ruin, and great jagged edges of stone were silhouetted against the sky like biting mouths.

  I tripped over a pile of masonry on the floor. It molted dust and I stumbled on through pale, slanting fissures of light that fell through the stained glass. I was in one of the replicas of Lincoln Cathedral, England. It had to be. There were about twenty of them in Plain Song, in various states of disrepair—put up by some property speculator a hundred years earlier who’d bought the franchise rights to the design. He’d created a whole heap of them before the bottom fell out of religion and he went bust.

  Religion had hung in there, though, and I knew parts of Plain Song were in revival now.

  Buddhism had been the first of the new religions to sweep America in the last century, but it came as a feeble orange color wash—a pale shade of its true self. And other religions had followed in its wake, spreading out like weakening ripples on a pond.

  A new religion, launched with much publicity and pizzazz, didn’t make much of a lasting mark in the end. It was called The Temple of Profound Pauses and they said God existed only in pauses. And so they spent their time “shaping pauses,” whatever that meant. There were five hundred thousand followers in Milwaukee for a time, but it lost its appeal when the central minister was found to be using the money to fuel a heady cocktail of prostitutes, snowboarding holidays, and a rare collection of Victorian military cap-badges. Sometimes, he pursued all three at the same time, the papers had claimed.

  Generally, though, religion remained a backwater because it seemed that somehow, all at once, people cottoned on to a feeling that it was religion that had caused so much of the pain and war in the world by putting such an emphasis on secularizing different peoples.

  Or maybe it had been the well-publicized note from one leader to another that simply read: “Think the ‘eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth’ policy isn’t working. Say we both ditch it?”

  Now the emphasis was on seeking peace rather than clinging to spurious explanations for our existence—and once the focus moved toward peace, religion seemed to lose a lot of its hold over the masses. Religions never had been interested in peace that much, anyway.

  The Riders pushed me past more collapsed brick clutter until we reached a tiny set of rickety spiral stairs, near the organ. The whole contraption looked rusted as hell. Many of the fixings had wormed their way out of the wood, so that a few of the huge pipes leaned forward precariously, like they were standing on a precipice and peeking over the edge. I guessed the thing hadn’t been played in years.

  We trooped on upward past shining steel girders that lay hidden from down below and were clearly not part of the original eleventh-century design, and I guessed they’d cut corners in these cathedrals to make them cheaper to build. My mouth cried impatiently for water as we finally reached a level above the organ and an unexpectedly large carpeted gallery that had a view of the whole cathedral on either side. It was surprisingly well organized, with settees, a couple of computers, and some familiar-looking equipment that jolted away the pain from my head with a jab.

  That was a dream-making
machine. The La Poderosa model—exactly the one I used at work, and they weren’t that easy to get hold of now. Mostly because they were made in Miami, which was one of the entirely Spanish-speaking cities. The Mayor of Miami had, in fact, recently passed a local law there declaring no one was allowed to speak any English at all. Not that that would have been a problem, but they had developed a unique Spanish dialect that confused casual visitors. The Spanish government had tried to sue the inhabitants for intellectual property mis-appropriation or something—and had, in fact, received some form of compensation. But the upshot of it all was that it was now extremely hard for anyone to make any form of meaningful communication with anyone in Miami now.

  We opened one of our orders for dream-making machines a few months back and found a selection of prime alfalfa and a variety of multisized joist noggins, along with a note that no one could decipher. Maybe they were just fooling with us; it seems the most likely explanation. But either way, Habakkuk went through the roof and immediately got someone on the inside up there. She secretly speaks English as well as their weird Spanish, but it’s all a bit risky because she‘ll get a three-year statutory prison term if she’s caught.

  “Right,” said the lead Rider to me, and I sensed he was about to launch off into some complicated explanation of everything. While this is exactly what I had been craving for some time, when the moment finally came I had other things on my mind.

  “One moment, OK?” I said, holding up my hand. “You get me a pitcher of water the size of a Scottish loch, or I swear I’ll throw up over this console.” I was aware it wasn’t the best bargaining threat that had ever been made. Normally, people suggest they’ll blow up buildings or shoot people; but it was all I had. The Rider paused, shook his head in a tired way I couldn’t help sympathizing with, and gestured to one of the others to get it for me.

  “OK, Jonny-fucking-X. Business.”

  “Assassinating God,” said War, distracting himself by balancing his shotgun on two fingers. “Blowing up His Holiness into oblivion,” he added.

  “We’re not mad. I can see you think we’re mad,” the one with the beard went on.

  “Apart from him. He is fucking mad,” said the chirpy one, nodding. “He likes the Bee Gees. Always playing the fucking Bee Gees. Drives me insane.”

  “The first album is unsurpassed in modern music,” said Famine.

  “Shut up,” said the leader. “This is business.”

  “Yeah, but it’s Death. All right?” said the chirpy one.

  “For fuck’s sake. Then shut up, Death!” cried the leader.

  “Yeah that’s me.” Death smiled. “He’s the Pestilence thing now. Death,” he said, straightening his shoulders. “Mr. Death, when I’m in a more formal situation.”

  “Do you want me to fucking shoot you? Right. Can we do the business, then? Right, Jonny X, you are going to write a dream on that thing, in which the dreamer believes God doesn’t exist. OK?”

  “How does that assassinate God?”

  “Obvious, isn’t it? Now, get on with it.”

  “There,” said Famine, presenting me with what appeared to be a huge glass flower vase full of water. I didn’t argue with him about the cleanliness of it. I was way too thirsty, so I just took it and drained the thing, feeling the water hit my stomach in a block, which made me unusually aware of its shape and position in my body. It gave me an instant kick and I offered it back.

  “More…if that’s doable,” I added, and he took the vase back. I sat down at the desk and sorted out the computer, finding a sheet of stuff on the desk with a list of things I was supposed to put into the dream, and it was quite well thought out. Sometimes, when people ask for various stuff to put in dreams, you have to explain why it won’t work. It usually comes down to cost. For example, there are oddities like—the color purple is expensive to use in dream architecture, and it’s difficult to get horses looking right—but this brief had been done by someone who really seemed to know what they were doing.

  I settled down to work.

  None of the shortcuts were programmed into the console, and none of the virtual tools were personalized, which was a pain. I realized it was going to take a good few hours to get anywhere. The Rider brought back the vase full of water. I took it from him and stood it on the corner of the desk, sipping it gratefully now and again, feeling the life ebb back into me as the ball of pain in my head began to smooth away.

  I get quite absorbed in designing dreams, and even now I found myself immersed in a bubble of concentration, working out the initial framework, the dream parameters, the color hues, and animating the basic blocks. As dreams go, it was quite an interesting one to design, and only once did I wonder why they had chosen me. There were loads of dream architects in the business, and most of them were more efficient and more dependable than I was. I was way too prone to disappear off in some curious, unexplained alley of dream theory and waste a surprising amount of time and clients’ money. I put their choice down to their ineptitude, and lack of research.

  Quite how they thought this dream was going to assassinate God, though, was beyond me. Sure, people might believe a dream they have now and again. Maybe if they had a dream that God doesn’t exist night after night, maybe eventually they would come to believe it. But how you would get people to swallow the dreams, I couldn’t really tell.

  Did they intend to give this to some prominent person like the president, perhaps?

  Then I threw away the thought and just beetled on, and after working for maybe four or five hours, I had got the dream into a basic shape. There was still a great deal of detail to put in, and all of the sound to mix—and I figured they’d want music, which makes a good impact but requires skill so it’s not too intrusive. But I was exhausted and needed a break. “I need five minutes to stretch my legs and have a cigarette,” I said, trying to make my voice sound smooth and controlled.

  “OK. No more than five.” The lead Rider nodded. I pushed my chair back from the table and stood slowly, suddenly aware of the heaviness in my stomach.

  “Want to hit some golf, X?” War eyed me, jabbing a golf club in my direction, and I stared at him.

  Call me old-fashioned, but golf wasn’t the thing I most craved at that moment. In fact, golf wasn’t something I craved, ever. Golf is a game of constant boredom, punctuated first by moments of alarming surprise at the state of the clothing worn by everyone, and second with guffaws of derision at the idea of women using the clubhouse bar.

  Most golfers probably still had a secret belief William Wilberforce had helped outlaw slavery rather too hastily, and that the American Revolution wasn’t actually over as historians claimed, but merely pausing for halftime. Even leaving all that aside, a tired, crumbling cathedral wasn’t the setting I normally associated with the game.

  “No,” I said. “Definitely no golf.” He shrugged, unperturbed, set a ball up, and smashed it with the club from the gallery into the grainy darkness of the nave below.

  There was a pause and a tiny smash of glass a second later. He turned and smiled.

  “Nice swing,” I said, imagining that was the sort of thing golfy people say.

  He shrugged, set up another ball, and hit that out into the nothingness too. A second later, there was a clang. I leaned over the balcony, massaging my forehead gently, wondering if I would ever get to sleep in a warm bed again.

  Somewhere, something had happened—like a shear in normality, or a tear in my life that had left the ends floundering. I looked around at these guys and realized they had a total belief in this cause that was actually quite impressive, and in many ways enviable. And, when I thought about it, it seemed that way with so many people I knew; they felt comfortable committing to something. Mat to his surfing, Teb to Natasha and his mad schemes. I felt too confused to do that, preferring the warm comfort of a beer in Inconvenient and a haphazard see-what-happens sort of approach to life. Maybe it was even deeper than that, I thought. Maybe I wasn’t even committed to who I was.
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  It was a cold, unpleasant thought, and I wished I hadn’t disturbed it. Maybe I was holding the real truth back for some reason—perhaps alarmed that who I was wouldn’t fit in, and in the end I had completely lost track of who I was myself. I had got tangled in a web of false habits and torpid reruns of the past, just like that girl Tanya who had been Sarah’s roommate, and maybe that’s why she had made such an impression on me.

  I didn’t like the way these thoughts resonated about my head. Who the fuck was I exactly? “Do you have a cigarette?” I asked War, trying to distract myself from all this, and found he was in midswing. He stopped with the club at its highest point of the backswing.

  “How am I ever going to get my pro tour card if no one gives me any fucking peace?” he said. “I need one thousand percent concentration!” I held up my hands in apology and he settled again and drew back for the swing.

  The bell above us struck like a cannon with impeccable timing and the whole gallery vibrated. He spun in anger, raising his club as the other Riders doubled up with laughter, but the repeated clanging of the giant bell drowned out all noise, so all I saw were their animated faces. The bell chimed its way through the hours, then stopped, leaving the echo of the last ring to scurry this way and that like a frightened mouse looking for a way out.

  I walked over and pulled the chair back, settled down at the comfort of the desk, and carried on with the design of the dream. The clock in this cathedral was fucked, I thought. It hadn’t struck anything for hours, and now it had just struck fourteen. I began sorting out the audio tracks on the dream, only vaguely annoyed by the constant thwacking noise as the Rider resumed smashing golf balls into the chasm below. I prefer to work in silence rather than the atmosphere of the eighteenth tee when the green has been stacked full of crockery. Still, I added the music, tidied up the detail in the images, and made sure the whole thing didn’t have any glitches.