“You’re a . . . DJ?”
“You think these headphones is just to make me look like science fiction, bro?” the Yellow One replies.
I gesture to Saint George and Sting.
“You’re in with these guys?”
“For real.”
“Ali is perhaps the most powerful of all of us, Zephyr,” Harrison says. “He is an infopath.”
“De data master,” Ali says in his weird, probably contrived British gangsta voice which is part West Indies, part Upper Shrewesbury, both filtered through a public education system ruled by fat children stuffed full of crisps and red cordial keeping the teachers at bay with raised chairs.
“So . . . information,” I say in that hesitant voice I just can’t shake. “You’re like the human Internet or something?”
The DJ smiles. His expression is suddenly less ridiculous and more sinister. He steeples his ring-heavy fingers together.
“Lesson one.”
That said, he vanishes again from view. Moments later, he re-appears alongside me. I do not flinch, even when Sting and the other even older codger break into grim chuckles.
“Lesson two. Close your eyes.”
I look between him and the others for a second and shrug and do as he asks. There’s a feeling, perhaps a butterfly caressing my face, and when Ali says to open them again I am astonished to find my nose bleeding quite heavily. George hurries across the room and gestures at my face, telekinetically staunching the blood flow and unbeknownst to me repatching the capillaries at the cellular level. I wipe off the excess flow with the back of my hand and calmly take a napkin from a little silver roll of them on the mantelpiece.
“What was that?”
“I’m guessing Ali suppressed the flow of information between your nerve endings and your face,” Sting says from near the billiards table now. “As I understand it, he could make the information flow fatal. The slap was . . . pure theatrics.”
“Do you have to ask many of your opponents to close their eyes before you can get the better of them?” I ask coldly.
The DJ shrugs cartoonishly. “Lesson three.”
He snaps his fingers and I go blind.
Great.
*
THE TECHNICAL EXPLANATION barely registers as I suppress the nearly incoherent urge to level the mansion and DJ Ali with it. It’s only knowing I’m in such august company that I’m able to restrain myself. The info-mage in leisure wear can clearly read my intent – this information flow, into which he is globally connected, is also an extension of his powers – and he’s obviously not that all-powerful that he can shrug off the prospect of copping a flogging from yours truly. I sense he’s more like the kooky eccentric or the nerd in the wheelchair or the cutesy nerd/goth girl in this team, rather than one of the front-line hitters, no matter how easily he managed to bloody my nose.
I absorb a few more lines from Sting and Mr Harrison as they explain how DJ Ali invited himself on to the team after Saint George’s UK-wide telekinetic radar came to the attention of his world-spanning psionic information-processing powers.
“TK-UK,” Ali says from the other side of the room and snaps his fingers again, this time nothing happening except an emphasis to his words. “It’s the best brand name you ain’t never heard of.”
“So between the three of you, you’re keeping the whole UK under wraps?”
“Between my telekinetic far-sensing, Ali’s real-time information flow, and Sting’s global telepathic abilities, we have the place wrapped up pretty tight,” Harrison nods.
“Tighter’n a nun’s ass,” the Yellow One says.
“Let me guess,” I say to him. “You’re in on this yoga schtick too?”
“Na, man,” he says and lifts his second snifter of brandy. “Me ain’t into tha’ sort of beeswax.”
“Actually, he did ask us if he’d be able to suck his own dick,” Sting laughs.
The other Brits redden, Ali responding with, “Oh yeah, man,” in an irate and defensive voice. “You is always goin’ on about how you is makin’ the sexual moves wiv your old lady for days on end. Don’t tell me you ain’t tried lickin’ da winkie.”
I can only shake my head at this. While I sympathize with his feelings on the yogic arts, the stupid soap opera I’ve quite literally landed in’s been going on long enough.
“Well look,” I say a tad louder than I need to, just to derail the argument I sense about to begin. “I’ll think about what you’ve said to me, and your offer. It’s very good of you to consider me, even if mind-controlling me halfway across the countryside seems a little extreme.”
“Don’t go yet, Zephyr,” Sting says.
“I’m on my way to find my half-brother, Julian,” I reply. “I understand he’s got a castle in Normandy. Not bad, eh?”
“Aren’t you just going to Julian to find your father, Zephyr?” Sting asks.
“Not entirely,” I say, on the defensive again. “Though I get the feeling you’ve already reamed me enough to know my reasons.”
“You are after your father,” Sting says slowly.
He’s not asking, but confirming what we both know to be true.
“Your daughter encouraged you, didn’t she? But you also want to meet your brother. The brother you never had, growing up in that lonely house.”
“Please,” I say in a stiff voice.
I don’t know if it’s because he’s left the door open on his way out of my brain or what, but the tears don’t feel too far away.
“Go to your brother then, Zephyr, and good luck to you,” Saint George says from the opposite side of the room. “Go to your brother and when you have an answer to our . . . invitation . . . come back.”
“I will,” I reply, not really meaning it until their next words come.
“And then we will tell you where to find your father.”
Zephyr 4.13 “Clandestine”
IT’S UNNERVING THAT Sting insists on seeing me out. We walk side-by-side through several rooms of the mansion, me consciously aware this is a superbeing who has influenced so much about the way dudes in spandex do business today. Yet he is curiously devoid of spandex or any suggestion such fabric has ever been necessary. He’s a handsome man, even up close and in person, and yet something ageless about him also gives the impression of a mummy or a preserved cadaver. A cadaver in peak physical health.
“So where the hell did you dredge up that fucking DJ?” I ask candidly.
Sting raises a wan smile. There’s affection there for the freak, I know it.
“His real name’s Sasha. Go easy on him. I don’t think … I think his powers, you know, gaining them, may have pitched him off his axis a little.”
“Christ.”
“I hope you can understand what we’re trying to offer you, Zephyr,” the Englishman says. “I know you’re a skeptical chap. You probably think I’m fluffing you if I said we were thrilled to have the chance to meet you. We really admire what you’ve done.”
“Yeah, I’m finding that a bit hard to believe.”
“No, really, mate,” he says and shrugs as we move through a French doorway and out onto an internal deck, Persian rugs the dominant flavor. “It’s possible to admire something without seeking to emulate it. You’ve been on the frontline for so long, when George and me, we just pick and choose.”
“If you say so.”
“What I want you to understand . . . what I really want you to take away from this meeting, Zephyr, is that we’re not just asking for your help. Your compliance. We’re offering the keys to the kingdom. Do you understand?”
“Um, possibly not.”
We halt. The sinewy blonde puts his hand on my leather-clad shoulder. We’re the same height and his vibrant blue eyes bore into mine with a power that is more than a mere suggestion of aesthetics.
“I’m talking about immortality.”
I have nothing to say to this. Dying is not something I fixate on. Based on some of the things I have seen, while I am one hund
red per cent convinced there’s no real afterlife as people see it in standard religious terms, I also know or at least wouldn’t be surprised to know we live on in some form, however unpredictable or intangible or abstract. It’s never what you’d expect and yet the end results are roughly the same: that’s what I’ve learnt so much about life, and I guess death’s the same.
“Uh, really? That’s cool. Yeah, that’s cool, Sting.”
“We know the pathway. I’m living proof of it. George is living proof of it. He should be dead at least twice over now, some of the problems he’s had. But we’ve conquered it in the same way we’ve expanded our powers. And honestly, I don’t think there is an end to that escalator, Zephyr. It’s not a stairway to Heaven. It’s an endless path. And we’ll happily deal you in, if you throw in with us.”
“I’ll, um . . . there’s a lot to think about.”
“Of course. And your father, of course.”
“Well, yeah.”
Sting nods, encouraged, and we’re distracted from our serious conversation by a metallic voice. A big shiny robot with an even bigger metal face and glowing blue ears comes hitching around the corner. It’s voice is weird: deep and ululating.
“What the. . . ?”
Sting’s hand is gentle on my arm and for the first time I wonder if it’s possible he’s gay.
“Shhh,” he says. “We’re a bit of an old people’s home for lost souls around here. This is Metal Mickey. I don’t suppose the name means much to you as an American.”
“Can’t say it does,” I agree.
“Poor bugger,” Sting says.
We watch as the robot swivels its bits and steers off across the open space and finally stops before a glass doorway, perhaps incapable of negotiating the sliding door to the outside.
“He was one of the first machine heroes of the early 1980s. Perhaps the first self-aware cybernetic organism in the recorded world. Fought with the Union Jacks, the Freedom Front, even partnered with Champion for a bit when he came out of retirement.”
“Name doesn’t ring a bell,” I say. “What’s his problem?”
“Ran out of memory,” Sting replies.
I nod and he gives a sad smile and that seems about all there is to say.
*
I LEAVE THE meeting with a bad taste in my mouth, mitigated by neither the fine brandy nor the flavor of my own blood. I expected more from an encounter I never expected in the first place and the only thing that can come of such a situation is disappointment.
I have a GPS on my belt and DJ Ali gave precise co-ordinates to Julian Lennon’s address. In a lazy twenty minutes I have passed over the Jersey islands and battered the crusty Norman coastline with the sonic signature of my passing. Big seabirds cavort in the foam thrown up by the rough Atlantic, and as I vector across the silent moonlit townships of the Normandy uplands, the damask’d fields, the post-medieval steeples, the silent barns, the slumbering horses, cows and tractors, the cobbled town centers which betray precious few indicators of the passage of time other than electric lights, the odd late-looming French hoodie checking in with maman on the cell. A weird peacefulness enters my chest and I slow, still faster than a speeding bullet, but able to drink in the gallant breeze and the normally imperceptible echo of the land in its barometric shadow, bubbles of sensory data which burst and are absorbed through my chest as I crest each hill and rise. I wonder if this is any part the serenity my yet-stranger half-brother feels in the place that he makes it his own. As the shape of a giant chess piece looms silhouetted on the moon-brilliant horizon, I know I will soon have the chance to find out for myself first hand.
Chez Lennon is a single-tower reconstructed fourteenth century motte-and-bailey castle which has been gentrified over the years and then given a clandestine sweep of genuine twenty-first century tech. State-of-the-art security systems give me the once-over as I land in the big walled courtyard, now big enough to house ten times as many of the vehicles that are parked there: a restored antique Bentley and a carbon black BMW. Two-hundred years back they built a superstructure connecting the stone tower and the Seventeenth Century stables, incorporating the two in a piece of bastard architecture that is one part manor house and three parts observatory. Athwart where the horses would’ve once been, there is now a dome, repository for all that tech as well as the forty-foot telescope jutting from the mechanized opening.
Lights burn in the house and within the observatory too, I am willing to wager. Seconds after I arrive – just long enough for security personnel to confirm the electronic gates have not been activated despite the registered intruder – the main doors of the house open and two men in butlers’ garb descend cautiously with submachineguns in their gloved hands.
“Attendez! Comment vous appellez-vous?”
“Shit guys, my high school French really isn’t anything to brag about.”
I hear one of the dudes mutter Americaine and the other dutifully slaps his forehead.
“My name is Zephyr. I’m here to see the boss. Julian.”
The two butlers reach the crunchy white gravel of the carpark now and they advance toward me with their guns still handy. Quite possibly they have no idea who I am. I find the idea vaguely thrilling, though it’s not a feeling that will last long.
“American?” the lead butler asks.
He is a smallish man with a bald spot, a goatee, a Muppet nose. All in all he resembles a boiled egg decorated for Bastille Day.
“How did you get here without triggerin’ the perimeter defenses?”
I stare at him a minute, conscious of the other guy moving to a better angle for shooting me, and just when I am about to answer, another heavily-accented voice does it for me.
“He didn’t trigger ze perimeter because he flew, Robilliard.”
I look up to see Julian Lennon in a wheelchair on the small landing in front of the main house doors, a checkered blankie across his lap. He stares at me without a moment’s recognition and continues in perhaps the most atrociously fake French accent I have ever heard.
“You are ze superhero Zephyr, non? Please. Come forward. Jacques and Robilliard will not ‘arm you.”
I swallow hard on the smartass reply and curl my shoulders, fingers forming thoughtlessly into fists as I nod to the nearest guard and start stiffly up the steps to the manor. From his motorized wheelchair, my half-brother adopts a bemused expression and actually steeples his fingers in anticipation of my advance.
It occurs to me I have absolutely no idea what to say to him.
*
MY BROTHER ROLLS his wheelchair in ignorance back through the manor doors, allowing me to follow as I finish trudging up the elaborate steps and then pass on in to a scene of glowing splendor, two big Irish wolfhounds disinterested near a roaring fire, leather couches set for guests across a costly imported rug, a side table with freshly-decantered wine, nearby an armoire with an expensive-looking game of chess in progress. Tapestries of the vintage of Bayeux are fixed to the walls. Julian has a bit more flesh on him and just a little less hair than last time I looked, which was on Google images, admittedly, and the whole wheelchair things is new to me. He moves the machine deftly, using hands rather than the controls, taking up a position on the middle of the rug across from the fire. I give the briefest glance to a curving marble staircase heading to upper rooms, the doors to an elevator built beneath them.
He doesn’t say, “I am Julian Lennon.” Oh no. It comes out more like Zhou-whee-enne, though contract the whole damn thing and then stretch it out like taffy. Imagine the effect with the ridiculous French brogue, the weird formality. He wears a cravat. There is a poppy in the buttonhole of the black corduroy coat he wears. I am not mistaken to think there is more than a hint of rouge on his cheeks, a chap stick in his pocket to keep his lips fresh and shiny.
“This is weird,” I say loudly.
My faux pas echoes off the stonework, the living room basically a two-storey chamber given the internal balustrade above. My half-brother onl
y readjusts himself in the chair and pouts, looking at me with more than a hint of there being something wrong with more than just his legs.
“Maybe you would like to explain yourself, M’sieu Zephyr,” he says.
Or it’s more like mebbe you oold lark to ezplain yourseff, m’sieu zeffer.
“Um, I thought you were British. Your dad was a Brit. From Britain.”
“I have renounced l’Angleterre, m’sieu.”
“It’s Zephyr,” I say. “Please. Just Zephyr.”
If I had thought I was going to come here and unmask myself, on eggshells hoping to receive my half-brother’s acceptance – and let’s face it, I am lucky I even flew here in costume, such was my lack of caution – here’s another example of how life sometimes likes to fuck you sideways just to keep things interesting. Zhweeun rolls his pebbly little eyes at me and slowly reaches into his blanket to retrieve a pair of ornate pinz-nez glasses which he now slides onto the bridge of his long nose.
“What is your business here in France tonight, Zephyr?” he asks.
“I have come to see you,” I reply. “I am . . . I am looking for your father.”
“L’homme Doomsday.”
“If he still goes by that moniker, which frankly I doubt,” I say, hoping my voice sounds sympathetic.
It doesn’t help. Any kind of empathy swiftly departs as Julian’s face shuts up shop.
“I am afraid I cannot ‘elp you, m’sieu,” he replies and does not bother to meet my gaze. “If I was of any concern to my father, I would be dead instead of crippled. You will forgive me if I do not sound like a very good son. Being nearly killed by my father has made that quite difficult.”
“Your father . . . attacked you?”
“I am sorry,” he says in that stiff French voice of his. “I thought you ‘ad ‘eard, my father is a, how d’you say, homicidal maniac?”
“Well, yes,” I respond. “But to attack his own son?”
“I should consider myself lucky, I suppose,” Julian says with a fey laugh. “Un apéritif, Zephyr?”
Zephyr II Page 9