Shamanspace

by Steve Aylett

  The buildings drained out as I braced for takeoff, the horizon flashing into negative. Pain rained through my head and new silence poured over me.

  6 STITCH THIS

  Gold can’t answer, it wonders why the fuss

  An edit can contain infinities. I was aware of a sleek void. I could sense little more than gravity hurtling the world, and a smaller nausea of motion. I was in an enclosed space about the size of a coffin and restrained by an etheric body buckle. I’d been knocked out from behind at the hotel, the Prevail’s unsubtle handiwork.

  They wouldn’t kill me—that would be like driving me to the launchpad with songs and champagne. But the ghost belt and shielded casket limited me to re-runs, math and anger—the pulpy gut in the head. They’d locked the door to the etheric.

  Edgemen recover by accepting our cages over and over. Muscles shut. In blackness I observed the faint geometrical directions of my own thoughts—all I was allowed. Back at the Prevail motherhouse, Casolaro had mentioned their sub, the Bluetooth. I laid bets I was aboard. Serves me right for getting ambitious.

  I used the time to sort the sawdust from the glass. Why do this if they believed they were right? Were they doubting now that the time was nigh, was that why they hadn’t used the information themselves? We were gunning for the same enemy—a creature which did nothing but explode continually in every direction. Hell, I could do that. In an infinite universe, virtue was bound to happen—accidentally unearthed and resembling intestines and veins. And so we became inevitably better than our creator—or a better limb of it than had existed before.

  I didn’t think it was possible for burnouts to recover. They were terminal, chained to the centreweight which draws down, taking walls chairs books people like a hole in the floor under sagging carpet—step on the sag and disappear, sucking everything with you. It was the exhaustion of pretending we weren’t in a universe which had curdled immediately. Quinas was too well shielded to tell. He seemed involved in the mere spectacle of darkness but burnouts haven’t even the energy for that. And he’d sided with Casolaro, a bloated aesthete with as much sense of humour as a cat. Lockhart at least was like a father—one who was good but not weak, wise but alive.

  Retinal darkshapes blooming into absence, I passed days or hours watching scenes from this one-horse planet and listening to head music. Chewing the trance slow. Peekaboos of clarity like mint. I passed through the sea watching mental recordings of black lava beds, forests which lapped and rushed in gales, close-ups of aged, scarred wood. Willing castles into urgent detail. Symphonies from start to finish. Walking through cities. And I began drowsing, losing my conclusions. That all of us are the subconscious thought impulses of a shabby god. That many of us want to die. These were the truth-halves of one picture. I was dreaming of purple pastures and captivity kept me warm. I’d diminished to a mere mood.

  I could hear techies talking outside—clamour sounds like a factory. The vessel had docked. I rushed to get alert. Etheric fuses were banging open, arm restraints slapping automatically aside, but I was still locked down at the chest and legs. The sarcophagus lid cracked and opened—I thumped up with both arms, connecting with Wireless’s puzzlesuited chest, and valved into him. His body flew to pieces around me, leaving me stood in blood on the jetty. England, it had to be.

  Techies were staring like cod on the slab. The sub was nestled into a roofed dock, a giant gasometer in a dirty swimming pool. I ran down a disused abduction tunnel, new pants winding up my legs like a graphics restart. The exit lintel still bore the dialist inscription ‘Euphoric corpses look to no saviour.’

  The clamber tunnel opened on to a sinkland paved with grey hardpan. Song in the wind hit me like a bottle. Right in front of my face a blown candy wrapper rattled against a vent. Half a ferris wheel was buried in the horizon. Hydraulic London was occupied.

  The stars hurt like needles as I walked to the Internecine motherhouse. Rains varnished the street and raised dirt in acid walls. Resurrection is an encore uncalled-for, and as mortifying. To be young and full of poison in streets raining strychnine, moving through tilted shadows past all-night chemists and locked launderettes. Even the creator could do nothing more than adequate with this red liquid. Here a small dark door from the street, fizzing with rain. Valving through, a short walk up a path and into a grey textureless house like a church.

  Lockhart wasn’t in his study but I could feel a token energy signature through my exhaustion. I had a look at the stuff on the shelves—a tobacco-coloured photo of a young Lockhart at the base of a jungle temple; a small ikon of St Isidore hunched under popular forgiveness, wanting out; a Turkish shrike lamp as dusty as a railroad radio; sigil ammunition. I trusted Lockhart more than anyone. Certainly since he’d learnt to manage his mysteries some action had dimmed in him, died. But as mentors went he was impeccable.

  I threw myself into a leather swivel chair and half-dozed. The downpour was like heavy static on the window. I opened my eyes as Lockhart sauntered into the room and halted. He was clearly less than impressed with my dulled condition, and seemed strangely uncomfortable. I began spilling my Prevail theory before I forgot it or fell asleep again.

  ‘They think we’re out to stage-manage the death of the universe whether it ensues naturally from god’s death or not. Why they call us ashers isn’t it? Flattering that they think we’re capable of it. But you see what the effect is? Even though both groups are out to assassinate the same target, it still has us arguing and delaying eachother. The last little uncertainty’s manifesting—does the creator want to obliterate completely, or does it want to leave its works and deeds intact, in testament?’

  A cold twist of air came in as the other door opened behind me. I read the vibe before turning—an almost-flatness swerved out of true. It was Casolaro.

  And looking to Lockhart in simple surprise, I saw something in his eyes. An impossible flicker of retreat.

  7 SUICIDE CELLS

  Let my heart loose on the authorities—distant laughter

  Suppressed practicality will out. ‘Careful, gentlemen. I’ve watched him play hopscotch on the ceiling.’

  I was a bit punchy but I could still talk bollocks as they forced me down the short flight of steps to the basement. ‘Your etheric stylings are not welcome here, Casolaro.’

  If I’d been healthy I’d branch into a wall, ghost up a structure and exit via the guttering, merge with a stranger and split out later without making a huge fuss about it. We’ve all done that, watched a room thrown into bright constellations as the washing machine changed cycles. But then it was too late—they were fastening me to an upright aurarack at the far end of the chamber. The motherhouse basement was an etheric runway. The old ascension containment cross had been dragged out of storage and stood on the cocoon platform between amplifier housings. The cross was an ancient but effective trip preventer which worked in part by keeping the subject spread and unable to focus inward—like trying to sing low with your head high. An electrostatic discharge closed the etheric airlocks and threw me back against the main spar. It was Saturday morning.

  I was looking at a large room coated in dust, rust and groundwater. Three figures stood against the darkness of the generator—Lockhart, Casolaro and Dreva, a young Prevail techy and strongarm. I was about to say something clever when Quinas ducked under an oppressive stone lintel, stepping into the light. He looked smart and healthy in a white leather coat, his death-hair slicked back to the skull.

  It seemed they’d agreed it would be braver to sacrifice their principles than their present circumstances. I was positively relieved I was alone—that I wasn’t quitting anything of value after all. I was sneering with bitter mirth. ‘So the gang’s all here. You’re all cowards after all? Even you, Lockhart. I admired you like a boy should love a father—is this it?’

  Lockhart was staring at the floor. People forget how powerful he was, the grand old man. He seemed as harmlessly proud as a library lion but he could pour iceflame from his mind and freeze a
moment for inspection, the air ghostly as cathode light. He’d been the first to give me a demonstration of etheric cocooning, enamel shine flowing over him in ectoplasmic encapsulation. Freaking me into hope. He looked terribly abashed now.

  ‘You know what he thinks, your ironhaired mentor?’ Quinas asked—ofcourse, the albino could read me. ‘He thinks of great years, dust justice in oxblood rooms. Ageing and drumming the clock like he’s okay with it. Night growing in his mouth.’

  Lockhart glanced up and muttered gruffly, ‘Sorry if they hurt you.’

  ‘They can’t hurt me.’

  ‘Fetters are not toys,’ said Quinas, and the boy Dreva smiled behind him. ‘Your St Sebastian fantasy’s getting real and Casolaro’s getting a hard-on.’

  ‘Let’s get on with this,’ rumbled Casolaro, not one for wit or theatrics.

  ‘I was careless enough to be born in England,’ I said. ‘I’m not about to compound the error by dying here at your hands.’ And I began wondering why they hadn’t just plastered me with sigils; why they hadn’t killed me by remote inside the containment coffin, dropped it in a sinkhole.

  Casolaro stepped forward, looking grim. Never having had an original idea, he’d never gotten a taste for them. ‘You killed three of my people without a second thought.’

  ‘Oh yes as slaughter goes I’m the blue ribbon winner round here. For the sheer eloquence of the thing. And I don’t need a trip cocoon like your little girl assassin, Casolaro. Flightbags are for fucking amateurs who can’t believe anything’s an entry point.’ I was letting them know I could take off from anywhere without preparation, boasting as if things weren’t bad enough. ‘First thing I learnt. Honesty is the voice that is acceptable in every matter.’

  Quinas sniggered. ‘The universal assassin quoting edgeman writ from the cross—this is priceless.’

  What they had duct-taped to this cross was a body bleached with ghostburns and dissolve scars. It was my ghost which pulled to lose it across to a hyperdimensional location triangulated upon by the input of hundreds of edgemen. To face an enemy covering so much ground the beginning of its definiton differed from the end. We’d been hung out to dry by our leaders.

  ‘He misses nothing, this one,’ chuckled Quinas, picking up my thoughts easier than dropped change. ‘You think it’s coincidental that at precisely the time the greatest number of people feel indignant at god’s works, the fewest ever people believe in it? It’s ducking for cover, denying its own existence. If its works are separate from it—if it is not everywhere and everything—then our desire for its death is not its desire.’

  ‘So you’re bone scared, plain and simple. Afraid you’ll make the big enemy mad. You want it to like you?’

  Quinas quoted sarcastically. ‘Hate adds only to hate. Cross through the angel of death and you give it extra wings.’

  I was catching featherweight visions, apple green skies, a pink and black chessboard. Yes, I could remain here a mummified potential. That tranced laziness was in me. So the plan would be buried and they’d all begin to live happily ever after?

  ‘I expect status will go with everything else, eh? You’re terrified of our little one-step peace process aren’t you?’

  Casolaro was indignant. ‘You’ve an eye to status yourself, ultimately—won’t your memory be regarded with awe by everyone?’

  ‘Only if you’re right.’

  But this was all ridiculous.

  ‘We’re talking here like a fucking debating school. Denounce the sky like it gives a fuck. D’you realise this isn’t theory?’ My mind twisted useless at the restraint—I saw myself kicking my legs to crash it off. ‘You realise you take these ghost locks off me, I go and do it? For real? You’re late for this? We’re cornered, bracketed in comparisons. Let’s cut the crap, shall we? The Prevail are withered, diminished, and you took the Internecine with you. We’re reduced to stupid intrigues, hitting eachother round the head in hotel rooms—the First Mystic Renegades would be ashamed.’

  The edgemen were mystic rebels from worm one, building observatory cathedrals and arcana grenades covered in spines like the black hands of a clock. All that righteous dying, for what—sacrifice swings the spotlight onto absence.

  ‘Diminished,’ said Casolaro sourly. The man was little more than a sack stuffed with chains. ‘No, reconciled to our level. And you. Resigned to your mind, stuck to a face, and called finally to the solo, there you hang. Your vanilla calculations, these naiveties—they can’t serve you. What you do in your head, you do in your head. You’re weak.’

  ‘Yeah, as water.’

  ‘And the Prevail didn’t hit you in the hotel—it was your girl Melody.’

  Melody appeared at that moment, framed in the door like a thought of escape. She’d trailed in with one of my old books and seen me, nailed to their cross-purposes. And I’d thought I’d been alone before. I thought of the hotel: Melody whumps her hot face into the pillow and grinces her expression. People think there are limits to betrayal because they see it all black and white, onion layers—the skin, the skull, the brain, the thought. Cliches.

  Quinas was delighted. ‘Agonising isn’t it, the terror of the expected?’

  8 SMILE

  When do you know finally that a secret’s successful?

  She stood frozen, eyes ticking across the scene. And I thought, I’m a better man than her by far. ‘You all report to the specimen above as surely as churchmen.’

  Casolaro looked grim. ‘You’re alone, Alix. Nobody knows you’re here.’

  ‘Then I can do whatever I want to you.’

  Quinas gave a contemptuous snort and shook his big, crafty head. ‘Always the next trip, eh? Which of us here withholds the most power through prevarication? Louder concerns are not necessarily deeper. You’re still part of a population that’s been craving more vacuum and less content every hour—sanity its madness, song its science, fashion some right-hand nothing. Tedious repetition is exalted and boredom is a sign of sweetness. For brains I fear this is more than an interlude.’ How could eyes of dead silver be so full of humour?

  Within this device I couldn’t project an etheric image of my view and so had to use the arcane code of words. What was I doing here anyway? Tuning up for silence?

  ‘I feel awkward watching while you sort the pottery shards of your justification. If you’re the spokesmen for god’s niggling doubts, I think I can deduce that it’s ready and waiting.’

  ‘It probably is. If it created our nature to rebel against force, our nature not to submit, will it be surprised? Can it be, on any score? Heaven and hell—both offer immortality, which ultimately doesn’t get us very far. All is one, as they say. So why not be at peace, Alix, with what you have. It won’t go unrecognised.’

  ‘What, smart job on the train? Neon headstone? The only real peace is a defeat you cowards intend never to concede—an admission of reality. The refusal to help it pretend we’ve every reason to be grateful. Through inventing justice we’ve earned the knowledge that we hate the constancy of our suffering. Crimes against humanity.’ Yes, the revenge was self-destructive, nuclear. The only act of dignity left to us. All great events close as many doors as they open. Open as many doors as they close. Fear the less-than-great. Does Spring smash Winter? ‘I can’t help you feel anything better. Fuck you old men, it’s the golden mischief—this if nothing else. I complied with myself. Do better, if you can.’

  I even suspected it was a dare, a set-up. Sainthood, you could feel it coming up like dust. Escape.

  Casolaro stepped up with a hypodermic. ‘Death in etheric containment,’ he said coldly. ‘Very nasty.’

  ‘Sometimes the needle hurts most when they pull it out,’ Quinas called, enjoying himself.

  Casolaro looked me in the face. ‘It’s not personal.’

  ‘Everything’s personal.’

  Technology masked the old blade.

  Melody had handed Quinas the bound book. ‘I found this in his hotel room.’

  Quinas looked at it vag
uely, lump-fanned it open—Melody had put the mirror book into an old cover. A scream tore in half as Quinas was drawn eyes-first into the object, a cloud of blood sizzling across the floor and ceiling, drenching the onlookers. Casolaro looked back as Melody whacked down the generator switch, breaking the current to the rack.

  Ah! Melody.

  ‘I’ve lost all feeling in my gob, gentlemen. Time to go.’ A shiver of static trailed away from me and everyone stepped back in panic—like they’d no idea I could be this far into the countdown. My teeth powdered in my mouth as I slipped the lifeline. Sparks of nervous system rushed shooting past my release.

  I felt like a white maggot as I pulled out of my skin. Neat as the meat from a lobster.

  9 IT’S PRETTY BUT IT’S VERY VERY HEAVY

  Chains live without air

  I left the body on the ground like an old cracked shoe. The onlookers’ faces were turning to porcelain, then to thin paper masks on the surface of flowing film—still shielded, then irrelevant as I swept behind the pasteboard stage of architecture and on into the airwaves.

  The end—every tiny hero, remember their story. The end—every history. The end—every youth in the adventure street. The end —every lover. If you won’t do it, then I will.

  Men’s fields were old rags of land, the setting sun was enraptured, a huge edge and wheel, fire descending a sky covered in bruises. Intersecting dimensional sightlines tangled the continents, a mountain was a green city of things, stone depths.

  A little air high in the sky singing as the universe flew into my eyes. I was a single monochrome cell accelerating through kidstuff and clashing superstorms. A squall of ultraviolet geometrics and other junk intended to distract. Red gold elements and shifting clarity.