Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  Ax was looking at his food in deep dismay.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Fuck. I thought seaweed meant that nice dry shredded cabbage.’

  His noodles had been buried under a mound of steaming kelp, actual yards of slick, disgusting marine leather. ‘The bastard, he knew I didn’t know what he was talking about—’

  ‘So chuck it.’

  ‘I can’t do that. There’s no bin. I can’t chuck it on the ground. What d’you think this place would look like, if people just chucked stuff on the ground?’

  Like it does, thought Fiorinda. ‘Don’t panic. I’ll have it.’

  They did the transfer. Fiorinda burrowed in her underskirts and brought out the saltbox: balancing her biodegradable soupbowl deftly on her wrist while she opened it. ‘Want some?’

  He frowned at the twinkling white powder. ‘Bit early for me, thanks.’

  ‘It’s salt.’

  ‘You’re going to put salt on seaweed and miso?’

  ‘I like salt. Anyway, seaweed doesn’t taste salty, it tastes of iodine.’

  He’d been hoping for a chance to talk to her in a neutral context. He’d talked to everybody else, except that fucker Sage: just making himself known at this stage. But the times he’d been private with Fio he’d been sidetracked by the sexual opportunity. She wasn’t physically his type, and she was fucked up as hell, poor kid, but somehow he kept wanting more.

  Maybe it was the challenge to his manhood. Getting Fiorinda to come wasn’t the problem, oh no. Getting Fiorinda to respond emotionally to sex: that was a project.

  ‘What about this Think Tank? I notice you’re still up for it.’

  Fiorinda was hungry. The Festival of Dissolution had given up providing free food for its artists, and the government perdiems were useless. She was trying not to waste her cash reserves on stupid bodyfuel. She chewed kelp doggedly before she answered.

  ‘I think it’s obscurely addictive. Like watching a dull arthouse movie, that is somehow quirky enough to hold your attention. I suppose the media exposure has to be good.’

  There had been a steady flow of attention. Pigsty was most in demand. Ax and Sage and Fiorinda were also popular, but media people were wary of Sage. He had no respect for them whatever, and could be murder to interview.

  ‘They like you, because of your accent.’

  ‘Mmm. I know. It cracks people up. They like you because you give good one-liners.’

  ‘And the dresses. The mediafolk like your dresses. So do I. That’s a good look.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s my one idea. I buy evening gowns from charity shops, and wear them on top of each other. It’s not original but it’s flashy: and cheap, as long as you’re fairly little and thin.’

  ‘The website’s crap though.’

  Fiorinda hadn’t seen it. She shrugged, indifferently.

  They ate and walked, catching the occasional nudge and glance from the sparse morning crowd. ‘A dull black and white movie. It’s a point of view. What’re your plans after the end of the Festival? You going back north with DARK?’

  ‘No,’ said Fiorinda, sorry he’d raised the subject. She’d been enjoying talking to someone who didn’t know about her plight. It made a nice change.

  ‘You could move in at Snake Eyes. Should be more space there soon.’

  ‘Thanks, but I think I’ll stay here. The campground isn’t going to break up. A lot of people are planning on staying until Dissolution Day, that’s the idea. Our landlords are letting it happen, and the Thames Valley police aren’t going to interfere. They reckon we’ll float away of our own accord when the weather turns nasty. I expect they’re right.’

  HurdyGurdy, a hippie consortium that had bought the Rivermead site when the previous owners went belly-up, had vowed that they intended preserving it ‘for the Countecultural nation’. The River had other ideas.

  ‘Hmm.’ Ax came to a stand, annoyed that he hadn’t heard this news himself. They’d reached a rubbish point, a hive of open mouthed black bin bags in a wash of faultily aimed garbage. He took Fiorinda’s bowl and chucked them both, making sure he did not miss. ‘I hope you keep coming to watch the movie, anyway. I’ve got plans for this Think Tank, Fiorinda. I believe we could make a good team. You and me, and Sage. I’d value Sage’s input, though he might be surprised to hear it; and the others. We could make a difference to this country’s future.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind,’ said Fio. ‘You’re a rock star, not a politician.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a politician. The time for politics is past.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I go this way.’

  Ax was heading for the Roving Presence Pavilion, in the opposite direction. ‘I’m meeting people in China. Can I persuade you to join me?’

  ‘No thanks. See you later, then.’

  ‘Yeah, later.’

  Fiorinda didn’t have anything special to do, she’d simply felt that the conversation was getting awkward. There was also the problem of having slept with someone a couple of times, and not being sure if it’s going to happen again. The moment she’d left him, standing there looking a little forlorn, she wanted to turn back. She resisted the impulse, and decided to investigate the Zen Self tent. According to Luke and Cack it had excellent rides: good as the zorbsperience, which was the best thing in Violet Alley, the arena’s official playground.

  The tent was bigger than it had seemed from the outside. She looked into the booths around the inner walls and was disappointed to find that most of the things you could try involved getting hooked up to computers. Fiorinda liked playing fantasy games, but on the whole information technology had passed her by. Her childhood in the cold house had left her convinced that she could never catch up. A few people were examining a coffin sized cigar-shaped cylinder on a giant swivel arrangement.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked the Zen Selfer who seemed to be in charge.

  ‘It’s a centrifuge,’ said the young man briskly. ‘You get in there. We subject your body to stresses equivalent to several gravities. You lose consciousness.’

  ‘Is that fun?’

  ‘Well, it’s interesting, because on the way out you will have a Near Death Experience. Anyone can have a Near Death Experience. There doesn’t have to be a pathological reason. As the blood leaves your brain you get the tunnel vision, you see the bright light, you feel you’re floating, you seem to be outside your body. You reach a beautiful place, you may feel you are being judged, you’ll meet the people you love most, you won’t want to come back. The whole thing. It’s simply what G-LOC does to the Cephalic Nervous System. Want to have a go?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘We give you a medical check first.’

  ‘What’s it about, though?’

  ‘It’s about consciousness. That’s what all our stuff’s about. You can get your brain imaged in action, you can get hooked up and see your own 40hertz oscillations. You can see a real time simulation of the information-loading in the hydrophobic protein sacs of the neuronic cytoskeleton; or you can try the blindsight experiment. Over there, you can get the two halves of your brain virtually dissociated and experience being two people: try to contact your right—brain self. Or you could do the collapsed wave-function experiment—’

  ‘Thanks for explaining everything. I think I’ll just—’

  ‘Most people,’ said the young man, ‘do the reductionist things first. Then they listen to Olwen. That’s also somewhere to start. There’s a workshop beginning now.’

  In the centre of the tent there was a low, circular wooden staging. A woman in a yellow sari and a crimson blouse was walking about on this stage in front of a projection screen, fussing with her laser pointer and checking over her props: an amaryllis lily in a tall glass vase, a cage of white rats on a table, graduated plastic models of animal brains; a detailed plastic human brain that came apart. That must be Olwen Devi, the Zen Self guru. Fiorinda moved inward, as ready to listen to a lecture on the science of consciousness as she was to
do anything. She sat on the grass, which here around the stage was uncovered, and remarkably green.

  Olwen Devi led the group, which had grown to about fifty people, through some relaxation exercises, designed to be performed by a close—ranked, seated audience. She talked about the extraordinary range of things we do, in which intentionality does not play the part we imagine: courtship, friendship, decision making, learning, ambition; then about the animals that do things we would call human. Ant farmers, bird artists, altruistic vampire bats, duplicitous monkeys. ‘It seems we must either award self-awareness to the ants,’ said Olwen Devi, ‘or accept that hominids may have practiced agriculture, and buried their dead with ceremony, before they reached the threshold that we have crossed—the state of being conscious of being conscious. Think of this. When you decide to perform an action (reach out your hand) the neuro-muscular preparation for that movement has already begun: around 350 milliseconds before the onset of volition. We act first, then we decide to act. We ‘think’ first, then we know we are thinking, This can be shown by experiment. Perhaps our self awareness is merely an observer, after the fact.’

  Someone raised a hand. ‘But couldn’t that reversal mean, guruji, that self-consciousness is a quantum effect, and not controlled by the time’s arrow illusion?’

  ‘It could be.’

  Many of the students, or punters, had adopted the lotus posture. Fiorinda knelt, sitting back on her heels, her thoughts reverting to the hard lesson that Rufus wasn’t here, that he wasn’t going to turn up and she might as well leave. Part of her still didn’t believe it. She was irrationally convinced that staying on would somehow make him appear.

  ‘It could be that consciousness, the experience of being conscious, puts us in touch with a plenum, the sum of all states, where the arrow’s direction is lost. Erwin Schrodinger once said, if we cannot find ourselves in our world picture—meaning that image of the world which is the work we do in our brains—it is because the sentient self is itself the world picture.’

  What’s all this to me? wondered Fio. As for Near Death Experiences, she’d had one, without any help from a centrifuge. It had happened when the baby was born. And slipping into no-time, leaving her body to take care of itself, was something she had learned to do at will. She could easily slip away while she was kneeling here. Perhaps that was what you were supposed to do, let the words wash over and meditate. Just look at that green, glossy blade of grass… Olwen Devi was right. She’d never thought of it before but going into no-time did feel like two planes aligning together, two slides from a kaleidescope lining up. The world that Fio perceived moved into phase with this thing, Fio, that was doing the perceiving, so you couldn’t tell the two of them apart. She could well and happily believe that the effect was caused by something chemical going on in her neurons, but it still felt numinous and…an impossible perspective, like an Escher sort of thing. Now she was looking through the tent wall, and looking back to that moment in time where Ax stood, slightly lost in his shabby leather coat, nothing like Rufus O’Niall’s. Ax became a focus point, a point on a disc, and from this point sprang lines of sight, which reached to another disc, another section through the helix of time and here was Ax again, in a different place, in that same old coat, around him a huge crowd. She had the impression he was selling tickets for something, or handing out flyers. They were going like hotcakes (where are these cakes, why are they hot?): and here he was again, an even bigger crowd, a flag with a red cross, people cheering, a knowledge of terrible events, (an intense, violent feeling that she didn’t want to look any closer at that information…) behind the stark, resolute triumph on his familar face—

  Good heavens!

  Fiorinda’s eyes flew open. The Zen Self lecture was still going on. The lotus—kneed people around her were quiet. For a moment a smooth, brown, oval, middle-aged face filled her view, like a close-up on a tv screen. It was as if Olwen was looking straight at her, and knew what had happened to her. Distance reasserted itself. Olwen Devi was far away on her little stage: Fiorinda got up and hurriedly left the tent.

  Back at the van, Sage was standing half naked beside the corpse of a sheep, which hung by its heels from a framework of raw timber. His slick black dungarees were twisted around his hips, blood drizzled over them and his lean, white, muscle-raked torso as if he’d been spattered by a fountain; the whole scene gleaming in sunlight. His unmasked hands, surprisingly deft despite their deformity, were absolutely covered in blood, he was flensing the animal with a long thin knife. The young sheep’s head, adorned with a cute pair of sprouting horns, stood on the grass, gazing at Fiorinda with smothered, yellow eyes.

  ‘Good grief. Where did you get that?’

  ‘Farmer’s market, up the road. We’ve been pursuing the feasibility study: bought this as a sign of good faith. It costs nothing, meat on the hoof. Got some potatoes too.’

  ‘Did you kill it just now?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He stretched his blood-streaked arms to heaven. ‘Yeah!’

  ‘You are as a god,’ said Fio. She sat on the grass to watch. ‘I met Ax. Sage, you know him, sort of. Do you have any idea why he is the way he is?’

  ‘You mean, why does the miserable sod think he has to rule the world?’ The sheep’s hide slithered free and fell in a heap beside the shit bucket, which had been co-opted to hold its innards. ‘Well, I did ask him that question, more or less, one aberrant occasion when we were chatting. Far as I recall, the explanation is…’ Changing to a different knife, he cut some generous collops of bluish-red flesh and laid them on the inner face of the fresh skin. Still life. ‘Mmm, his dad’s a bit of a shite, and he loves his mum but the tv she likes to watch makes him puke. So, he needs to rule the world because he has a normal family background. Make of it what you will—’

  ‘It’s probably genetic.’

  Sage grinned at her, went to the back of the van, and emptied several buckets of water over himself from their rain butt. When he returned, masked and wearing a shirt of homespun grey under the dungarees, he had a yellow ribbon tied around one sleeve.

  ‘Why are you suddenly wearing that?’

  The skull smiled enigmatically. Neat trick.

  ‘Felt like it.’

  Fiorinda suspected some oblique, sarcastic reference to the Ax Preston development. She was sleeping with the enemy and she was sure Sage was pissed off, though he hadn’t said a word. But the skull looked innocent, and the meat, raw and bloody as it was, worked on her salivary glands. She attempted, for pride’s sake, an assault on Head Ideology. ‘Let me cook? C’mon, you bought it, you butchered it. If I don’t cook it, how can I eat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please, please, I won’t do anything frilly, I swear.’

  ‘Nah,’ said George, coming out of the van bearing an iceberg lettuce wrapped in clingfilm and a blackened cooking pot; a litre of tequila from the Heads’ vast store of alcohol tucked under his arm. ‘You won’t do it right, Fio. You know you won’t. Look, we got you a lettuce. You could have ten sheep for the price of this.’

  The barbecue was laden with charcoal: the charcoal soused with paraffin and lighter fuel. Cack commenced the cooking by hurling a lighted match and leaping backwards, and the chops were thrown onto the flames. George dealt with the potatoes: Fiorinda was ordered to sit down quiet and stop fussin’ around.

  ‘No, no, don’t let her sit down! We’re not ready! Shit, we gotta get genteel with this babe. We gotta get suburban, she’s not rock-brat trash no more—’

  Sage and Bill rushed up. Bill spread a clean sheet of newspaper with a flourish, and arranged a square of cardboard beside it. Sage dropped to his knees and presented a pastel-patterned serviette, rolled up in a napkin ring. ‘Lunch is served, Mrs Preston, ma’am.’

  ‘You bastards.’

  ‘Hahaha,’

  ‘You are so full of shit, Sage. Lay off!’

  But she felt forgiven.

  Soon everyone was sitting around the barbecue, gnawing meat and passing t
he lettuce from hand to hand. Fio brought out her saltbox, which all the Heads except Sage shared with an air of guilty indulgence: and it was surprising how good the meal tasted, although Luke did complain that the lettuce was chewy. However this was found to be the result of his taking bites out of the side still wrapped in clingfilm. Bill put the kettle on for tea, while the potatoes bubbled sulkily. Potatoes always take too long. Fiorinda lay in the grass under the oaktree that she thought of as their own, (dapple leaves on the annexe roof); and smiled to notice the blackened kettle sitting among the greasy flames, beside the blackened cooking pot. That strange experience in the Zen tent kept repeating on her, loaded with a dread so large and vague she couldn’t get a handle on it…something about, my whole life, gone? What, gone? She willed it away. This was life, good as it gets: dejeuner sur l’herbe, complete with amiably sexist male company, mutton fat, tequila, paraffin and bruised grass—

  ‘We could have a sheep every day,’ mused George. ‘Except they shit a lot in the van.’

  ‘Except we don’t need it,’ Cack pointed out. ‘You should only kill what you need. We don’t fucking need to eat meat. It’s cruel. There’s plenty of calories in alcohol.’

  ‘What are you going to do with the rest, Sage? It won’t fit in your fridge.’

  ‘Sell it, trade it, give it away.’ They finished the tequila. Sage, who had eaten enough to build up his energy but not to repletion, started rifling in a Japanese incense box with the letters NDogs burned into the lid, standing for endogenous psychotropics. ‘I feel like bein’ overwhelmed by emotion. I’m gonna do some oxytocin, go down the arena and pair-bond with something.’

  ‘But Sage, you’re wearing the yellow ribbon. You can’t pair-bond without sex. That’s silly.’

  ‘You’re true, Fio, you’re true. Fuck, I’ll take something else. What’s the rest of you having?’

  ‘I hate modern drugs,’ said Fio. ‘I want to do some whizz, get pissed and go dancing.’