Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘We’ve been hoping you would come and see us. We would have sought you out, but we felt that might be tactless. Everyone knows that you have defended the country’s science base wherever you could, but still, you are dux bellorum of the CCM.’

  Ax didn’t know what a dux bellorum was. But he thought of the Tour, and what these people were, and their position at Reading. It was something he hadn’t considered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Olwen, calmly. ‘And yet we’ve chosen to stay on. Scotland has already made the transition, it’s a European state. Ireland is an independent power. Wales is small, confused and vulnerable. We have our skill resources, our software, and pockets of highly developed sustainable technology: but the way things are going, very little will stay in Welsh hands. It’s a gold rush, since Dissolution. We saw what was coming and decided to leave. Our parent company stayed behind: but we believe that our work is safer here, in the heart of the Countecultural movement and its anti-science fury: because of you. Because we are under your protection.’

  ‘My protection.’ Fucking ironic, indeed.

  ‘As for payment, we consider ourselves well rewarded for the moment, and we plan to make our own fortunes. But if you could look out for Wales, when you come into your kingdom, Ax…that would be a bonus.’

  Ax had never before had anyone speak to him as if they shared his sense of destiny. He was amazed, and a little frightened.

  ‘What about your, um, parent company?’

  She shook her head. ‘Oh, they won’t be cherrypicked. They are not vulnerable.’

  He felt that the subject was closed. Okay, forget the parent company.

  ‘This ATP. Could you do…stage lighting?’

  ‘Fuck shit,’ muttered one of the Zen Selfers. ‘Sudden death.’

  ‘I can’t see that, at present,’ said Olwen sedately.

  ‘What about, say, really heavy computing power? Where’s your mainframe?’

  She raised her right hand. On the middle finger she was wearing a ring with a large, golden-white stone, brilliant cut but slightly cloudy within. Not a diamond, maybe a white topaz? He’d noticed it already.

  ‘Here she is.’

  ‘I see. Does the ring come off?’

  The Zen Selfers grinned some more. ‘Not easily,’ said Olwen. ‘Serendip and I are very close.’ She eased the gold band aside. Sunlight falling through the dome was caught, glittering, in a barely visible filigree, like spiderweb, between the jewel and her skin.

  Ax thought of the meeting in Shanghai. High tech is magic that works.

  ‘What about the actual Zen Self shit? Does that have some alt.tech rationale?’

  ‘The ATP development is an aspect of the Zen Self project. We are looking at all the ways in which Self and the world are connected, and how those connections can be reconfigured towards our final goal. If you mean, could you use the science of consciousness for your revolution, I don’t know. But there is surely a synchronicity. When technology—applied science—becomes magical, what does science become?’

  The Zen Selfers had dispersed, at some signal Ax hadn’t noticed. Olwen stepped down from the deck, and made for the tent entrance. Ax followed. She was right, they’d said all that could be said, for the moment.

  ‘Did you know, the Upanishads were first translated in Europe during the French Revolution?’ She turned to him: absurdly symmetrical dark brows raised in mild inquiry.

  ‘I never knew that.’

  ‘I see mysticism is not for you. But we understand each other?’

  He had no way of knowing what this ATP technology was worth. The Welsh can be plausible buggers, adept at making fuck-all sound good, they have to be don’t they. He’d need to try and find out more about it, from an independent source. But he was sure Olwen Devi was a valuable acquisition, some way or other. Without knowing it he’d been looking for someone like this.

  ‘Yeah. Done deal. You work for me, I look out for you. And for Wales, if that’s ever an issue.’

  They shook hands like market traders. The ring on her middle finger felt warm as flesh.

  The Pig’s hotel was a blank white tower on Park Lane. It had been empty with a skeleton staff, due to lack of trade, when Pigsty decided he wanted to move in. The foreign owners had made no problem over leasing their place as a Presidential Palace, as long as someone would someday pay the bill. As soon Ax was back in town, Pigsty called a meeting of the Counter Cultural Think Tank, in one of the conference rooms. This turned out to be a grotesque replication of the old conditions. No eighteenth century pictures, no ornate white plaster ceiling high overhead. But here was Pigsty, flanked by his drinking buddies, at the head of the table, where Paul used to be. Here was Benny Preminder taking notes, and here were the radical rockstars, wondering why they’d ever signed up for this charade. Some significant gaps in the ranks, otherwise no change.

  The President hadn’t done this before, he said, because he hadn’t wanted to take Ax away from the Tour. From now on they would meet often. ‘You’re my Cabinet,’ he told them affectionately. ‘The government can do the government shit. You work for me. Ax is Prime Minister, ’course, an’ I hereby appoint Sage my Minister for Gigs. The people want that roadshow Paul was promising, I want you onto it, Sage. We’re gonna lose all artistic credibility if we don’t get touring soon. The rest of you can have titles when I think of ’em.’

  It lasted a couple of hours. They were all still alive at the end.

  Downstairs, three Eyes, four Heads and three Chosen were anxiously waiting. They’d been required to turn up, but President Saul aka Pig had decided at the last minute that they were not allowed into the meeting. The hotel lobby was noisy and chaotic, full of Pigsty entourage and hangers—on: stray campers from the Park, hippie goons from the barmy army; fresh-faced teenagers who’d run away from home to join the circus of the hour, and having reached it sat giggling or ready to weep on the stained and ripely hungover luxury-hotel upholstery—might as well have signs hung around their necks reading Please Kill Me And Eat Me. If the foreign owners could have seen the state of their public rooms, (where the cleaners had abandoned a losing battle) they would have had qualms about that lease. But they couldn’t check it out easily, owing to Pigsty having made a clean sweep of webcam eyes.

  The Pig’s Cabinet—Ax and Sage and Fiorinda, Rob and DK, Chip and Verlaine and Roxane; Fereshteh in her enveloping veil—joined the others. It was the first time they’d all been together since Massacre Night.

  No one spoke for a long time.

  The body count after that night had ended up lower than first estimates, only twenty three actually dead. The English nation, including the government, seemed to feel that was a reasonable price to pay for the taming of the CCM, especially since most of the fatalities had been out-and-proud Green Nazis: advocates if not perpetrators of the most murderous eco-terrorism. The funky new President was fine. Even the Tour had been fine, now it was over.

  The day after the Dissolution ceremonies Ax had had a phone call, an invitation to lunch at a gentlemen’s club in the West End. He’d gone along, and found himself sitting opposite… Was it someone from the Home Office? MI6? He wasn’t told, didn’t ask. No labels, just someone who wanted to talk to Ax. A middle aged Asian guy, very well-dressed, thick silver grey hair brushed straight back, giving Ax to understand that the facts were known and the situation, Paul Javert murdered and Pigsty for President, was something the country could live with. He’d talked about youth and age. How young people, if they are of any worth, are convinced that what they do is important. Older people come to understand that there are no new moves. Everything that we do has been done before time and time again, it’s what you are that matters, the unique personality brought to bear on these inevitable actions. Ax had listened, having difficulty just chewing and swallowing, thinking about ethnic origins, and how he didn’t have one, himself. If I’m not English, I’m not from anywhere.

  What had shaken him was the way this well-
rooted, well-finished someone had waited, after he’d described the situation everyone could live with. Watching Ax’s face with a deeply disturbing kind of respect. The unsaid words had hung between them: that if Ax planned to change the situation, then that would be okay too, because he, Ax, was too dangerous to be messed with.

  So he had what he’d wanted. Already, right now. Reach out and take it.

  He hadn’t known that it would feel like this.

  He twisted his Dissolution Fest wristband around: clear plastic, with a shimmering rainbow border. Everyone was still wearing them, probably end up like the Masons, shoot your cuff and obstacles disappear, oh, I see you’re wearing a Reading DY wristie, and with all the colours, access all areas, oh well that’s different… His head was full of cottonwool. How long since he’d managed to cop any REM sleep? About a year, it felt like. His hands were cold as ice. He put his coat back on and stuck them in the pockets, felt marginally better inside the trusty leather armour…‘Is there somewhere we can go and talk?’

  ‘What about the Garden Room?’ said Fereshteh.

  They trooped through the lobby to the hotel’s breakfast buffet and coffee shop, where there was a garden courtyard—formerly glassed over, now open to the cold sky after some hippie prank. It was sad and empty, big hothouse plants quietly dying in their pots and troughs. The broken glass had been cleared away, but there was a scum of litter over the marble pavement, empty cans and bottles in the water feature.

  Ax sat on the steps by the pool, where a clogged fountain struggled to rise, and looked around. Three brave, beautiful Eyes in bright wool coats, fuchsia, emerald and tangerine, fun feather plumes at the wrists and throat. Their stocky plum-dark beau. DK the party animal, his receding hair tied back in a ponytail, big sunken circles under his pretty eyes, far strayed from the dao of fun. Roxane Smith, flamboyant ex-man, veteran of God knows how many waves of rock idealism: looking like shit, the damage only emphasised by a Chinese Opera scale slap-job. Rox’s young boyfriend Verlaine (aka Kevin Hanlon); and Verlaine’s other significant other, Chip Desmond.

  Shane and Jordan and Milly, Fereshteh the ghazal singer, five skull-masked Heads; and Fiorinda in one of her party dresses under a drab, matted sweater, looking even more shit than Rox. Walking wounded, all of them. Only Fereshteh, alert and composed in her burqa, seemed relatively okay—and the kids, Chip and Verlaine, who were just too fucking childish to stay shattered for more than five minutes at a time.

  ‘Well,’ said Ax, at last. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. Most of you were at the LSE that day, and I don’t believe any of you were there by accident.’

  ‘What d’you mean by that?’ said Sage.

  That amazing mask had maintained a merry and even-tempered grin through the Cabinet meeting. It was now a bleak closed door, and what the fuck made the difference Ax couldn’t begin to tell, only it was there. Sage and the Heads had spent the three months of the Tour with rural divisions of the barmy army, killing surplus farm animals and stuff like that, and behaved so well they’d earned the privilege of visiting their families.

  Sage had been to Wales, to see his ex-girlfriend and his kid. Ax wanted to know how that had been, now Wales was a foreign country, and especially in the light of his talk with Olwen Devi: but it would wait. Anything to do with Sage’s kid was territory where the guy’s worst enemy might fear to tread.

  ‘I mean, some of us may not like to admit it, but we all have the agenda.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rob, elbows on his knees, the coal black fake-astrakhan lining of his coat a rich frame to the lemon yellow of his suit. ‘We wanted to make a difference, got snared into that shit-for-brains Think Tank because we hoped it would come to something. But what the fuck do we do now?’

  ‘This thing has turned truly hateful,’ murmured Felice, ‘As bad as it gets. I’m scared. I’m like, I’d leave the country, but it’s my country.’

  ‘I think we’re all scared,’ said Ax, ‘but I’m afraid this isn’t as bad as it gets. Unless we’re very, very lucky, we’ll lose a lot more ground before we come to the bottom of this slide.’

  ‘Just a harmless little market adjustment,’ remarked Verlaine cheerfully. ‘Or the end of the world as we know it. Whichever label sells best will win out.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s about it. You know the story. According the hardline CCM we’ve reached the limit of what this planet will stand. We all ought to commit suicide but we’re doomed anyway. Far as I can tell, the grim truth in real terms is that things could get a lot worse for the lesser spotted flycatchers and the Bangladeshis, without the future of several billion humans being much compromised. But there’s such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and being in the middle of the crash at the end of the longest economic boom in modern history doesn’t help.

  ‘We’re in real trouble, and we’re not alone. One reason why the English government is happy to settle for Pigsty, is that they see what’s happening in Italy, and France, and Germany and the Benelux. They know we’re better off than we might have been.’

  ‘Aside from a few dead bodies,’ murmured Fiorinda.

  Ax sighed. ‘Aside from a few dead bodies, yeah. I haven’t forgotten them. I’m saying that since what happened, happened, we haven’t come out of it too badly so far. But because this is so widespread, and because we are pushing the limits, in terms of numbers versus resources, in the short term, things are likely to get much worse right here in England now the shit has hit the fan, in ways we can’t avoid. If you need convincing, I could give you detail—’

  This offer brought back, with vividness, the relentless grey hours of that night. Everyone recoiled.

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Sage hurriedly.

  ‘We believe you.’

  ‘Not necessary, Ax,’

  ‘You’re the man with the plan.’

  ‘Just tell us what you want us to do—’

  He had not understood that they would be waiting for him. He had hardly thought about them while he was on the Tour, except for praying to God he would see Fiorinda again; and except that their faces would come to him sometimes, vividly, on the edge of the sleep that eluded him. Faces around a table, willing him to carry on, keep going, we’re with you, Ax. But here they were, still with him: and he hated what he had to tell them.

  ‘We have to concentrate on doing what we can. First off, that means tackling the masses. Getting rid of the leaders of the Extreme Greens hasn’t solved that problem, no way, because the real problem is not the proverbial minority of troublemakers, stirring up civil unrest. The problem is millions of angry, confused citizens who have spent the last few years seeing their savings wiped out, their prospects vanish and their self-esteem destroyed. And unlike Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the people of England don’t have the lovely feeling that the world is young and early struggles will bring success… Misery. Normal, gut-wrenching human unhappiness. That’s what fuels the drop-out hordes, that’s what will keep on feeding the CCM, and keep Pigsty’s barmy army dangerous. Fact is, I think one of our major concerns as a culture, if we get through this rough patch, is going to be finding new ways to make terms with normal unhappiness, because the ways that used to work, such as wage slavery, will be gone forever. But right now, we’re talking about crisis control.’

  It was strange how these successful rocksters—all of them at the sweet end of a monstrously unfair system, if only the Heads were in the superleague—had started listening, really listening, when he mentioned the gut-wrenching unhappiness of the human condition. How Fiorinda and Sage especially had lifted their heads, like they had heard some distant, magical, inevitable summons. Shame he had to bring them back to earth.

  ‘We have to manage the masses, keep them from breaking the place up, stop this revolution from turning into a reign of terror. How can we achieve this?’

  ‘Shoot more people,’ suggested Fiorinda. At least she cracked a tiny smile.

  ‘Thanks Fio. I’ll hold that one in reserve… No, I think the best thing
we can do, for the moment, is carry on with the Paul Javert job. Accept President Pig. Work with him, around him, get on the road. Free concerts, big ones.’

  They stared at him blankly.

  ‘You mean we hang on,’ suggested Verlaine, hopefully, ‘In deep cover? Limit the damage best we can, and wait for our chance to take over the government?’

  ‘Er…no. I am not planning to take over the government. Wouldn’t do me any good. I agree with Pigsty, let the suits run the bureaucracy. It’s the function of any government to be disliked, and people have to like us, or we won’t be able to do what I want us to do.’

  Ax picked up a stem of dry bamboo, debris from one of the neglected plant troughs, and began to poke at the fountain, to give them something to look at while they thought it over. To work for the Pig. To endure him and his hippie goons, and look as if they liked it. It was a tough offer.

  ‘Is any one going to pay us?’ asked Rob. ‘Just out of interest.’

  ‘I doubt it. No one was offering to pay us for the Think Tank stuff. Financially, the whole thing is a bust, I admit. But the media exposure should be good.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Chip. ‘No probs. We have Aoxomoxoa to bankroll us! If I run short, I shall come straight to you Sage.’

  The skull gave him a dour look, (crushing Chip utterly, for a minute or two).

  ‘I’d have to decide if it was a worthy cause.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Ax. ‘I didn’t expect the Pig’s coup. I didn’t see it coming, my fault entirely, and for the record I feel like shit about that. But we’re on the other side. We have to start from where we are and work with what we’ve got and I don’t want any more violence. Pigsty is convinced that he needs us, convinced that we are his best mates, weird as his reasoning on that may seem. And he’s the President. That gives us leverage, some power for good in a bad situation. I want to use it. Will you help me?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Sage. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  The others all nodded.

  ‘I think I see it,’ said DK. ‘Catharsis, joy: the power of the everlasting beat. Yes, for sure, the best of drugs, a drug that truly heals. But no one can rave twenty four hours a day, Ax. Not without dedication, and the dedicated are not your problem. The barmy army recruits will flock to your gigs, and then they’ll go out and break the place up.’