Authors: Gwyneth Jones
‘Do you have a medical imager?’ said Ax, ‘Fetch it. And get a helicopter ready.’
The imager was brought, and placed over Lazarus’s chest. Roy muttered his disbelief, in a language from far away. They didn’t need to be experts, it was obvious that the heart was twice the size it should be. It looked like a crumpled blot of rubble, like an asteroid in false colour.
‘Forget the machine,’ said Sage, ‘Get the medics up here, tell them to bring heart and lung bypass, and bring a stretcher if you have one, get him to the freezer room, chill him right down. You’re not going to start that pump again.’
‘Shit,’ whispered one man, in a shaking voice. ‘We should
move
the guy?’
‘I th-think that’s kind of an academic question,’ said another. The guard who’d fired was sitting on a designer sofa, his head in his hands.
‘You better leave,’ said Roy to Ax and Sage. ‘Better you were never here.’
The cathedral hall was full of invisible bodies, a murmurous congregation just out of reach of sight and hearing, hovering all around.
On the way down to Silverlode Ax found a place to pull off, a glade for parking at the start of a hiking trail: cut out the aircon and opened the windows. The spicy, bramble scents of the sun-soaked forest reminded him of the time they’d spent at the cabin, lying by Laz Catskill’s pool. So strange, when he’d seen that girl on the slab and known it was not his baby his next thought, after the wild relief, had been that it didn’t matter if it was Fiorinda or not. She’s gone, her life cut short, despoiled of her chances and raped of her identity, and it makes no difference who she was, we are so close to each other—
He thought of Lazarus Catskill in the photos, the soul stolen by fame: but Kaya has still lost her boyfriend, and that little toddler has still lost her daddy.
‘Can they save his life?’
‘Doubt it.’
‘D’you think that was magic we just saw?’
‘Very possibly.’
‘So that was magic, Rufus O’Niall style. I wouldn’t have called it subtle.’
Sage shrugged. ‘Whoever it is is just starting out.’
‘Lazarus had been recruited, he was just a go-between. What d’you think? Was he was working for a rogue, occult division of the Defense Department?’
‘I don’t know. An’ we’re not going to find out now.’
They were silent, ideas they had not aired with the Few insistent as the heat. Ax thought of his girl, facing the dreaded whitecoats all alone to find out if she could have her baby. But she’d been convinced she was a monster, forbidden to have a child. What if the good news had sent her, cruelly conflicted, back into fugue? Where might her broken mind have taken her—?
‘Some theoretical models say we all have the potential for effective magic,’ remarked Sage. ‘The cost to
la grande illusion,
I mean normal consciousness, is too great, so our brains have evolved with blocks and checks that almost always prevent the “talent” from developing. But they could be shifted.’
‘Great prospect. Armies of magicians, competing to twist reality.’
‘That’s more or less, diluted to the n
th
, the Fusion Consciousness Theory of Everything.’
‘We don’t understand this situation,’ said Ax, leaving the Fusion Consciousness Theory of Everything to ruminate with Superstrings, the Higgs Boson, and other esoteric proposals Sage liked to bring up occasionally. ‘That’s why we can’t make a move without screwing up.’
‘We aren’t doing too well, are we?’
‘We should never have left El Pabellón. That was our big mistake.’
The fishing-camp company, cinammon buns in the misty morning; seabirds and cactus mice. Fiorinda out of her mind, and Sage so weak and ill. Ahead of them, a life spent nursing their darling through her sojourns in hell. Ax remembered it all with passionate longing. And from what grim coign, he wondered, will I look back on this sunlit clearing as some lost paradise?
Why did I let her go off alone? Why did I make myself dictator?
Why
, having broken up with the Chosen, did I immediately commit myself to
another
family band, totally essential, totally intolerable.
No cuddling in session.
I’ll have your head on a spike for that, Ms Marlowe. On Tower Bridge, yeah. But she was only trying to be cheerful… You give all your strength, steadfastly believing you will never need it again, and then you have nothing, when your need is greater than ever. Since Fiorinda vanished he had been trying in vain to find again the Ax Preston who had decided, faced with England’s descent into bloody chaos:
I am going to save this situation
.
Not because I can, but because I must
.
Nothing left but a blundering endurance—
He thought Sage had gone off into one of his mad scientist abstractions. When they’d been soldiers in Yorkshire, in the Islamic Campaign, this used to happen all the time, long before the Zen Self. Sage could go blank, pondering on some code he was writing in his head, while waiting in ambush for a bridge to blow. You found yourself crouched in peril next to a living statue. He looked around and Sage was watching him like a child. It was Ax who had gone wandering.
‘Hey,’ He held out his arms. Sage moved over, into the embrace. ‘The nearest I can come to a sexual fantasy at the moment,’ said Ax (fuck the listeners), ‘We are galley slaves. Chained to the bench together, hauling on the same oar, blisters rubbed to raw flesh, and we have to keep going, boom, crash, boom, crash—’
‘Mm.’
‘Naked. Getting whipped sometimes, and it’s always dark.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Rare occasions, we’re allowed to sleep under our bench.’
Sage heaved a sigh, ‘wonderful,’ he mumbled. They were quiet for a while.
‘Ax? We won’t come back here, will we?’
‘To Silverlode? I doubt it, not after this.’
‘This is where we lost her. Let’s take a walk in the woods.’
They left the Rat and walked, until the AI car was hidden by rising ground and a turn of the trail: then they left the path and found a boulder to sit on.
‘Shit,’ remarked Sage. ‘I forgot to ask him to take the hex off.’
And the man was dead, in all likelihood. ‘Is it going to be a problem?’
‘It’ll be okay.’
‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’
‘No… Ax, Fiorinda is not a monster. Not even if she’s out of her mind.’
‘I
know
that. I can’t help being scared, but I
know
that.’
‘That’s the first thing. The second is, there’s something I can try. Maybe I can locate her, maybe even pull her out. It’s a short cut to the information.’ Sage looked up, into the vivid blue sky criss-crossed by conifer branches, ‘The good thing is, we don’t need to know who is holding her or why, an’ we could stop trying to figure out whether we’re dealing with the CIA or the FBI, the President himself or the Ku Klux Klan. It wouldn’t matter if she was in Japan. Venezuela. Or the Anza-Borrego desert—’
‘You’ve been thinking about this for a while?’
‘Yeah.’ Sage chewed on the lower joint of his right thumb, a habit that dated from when the thumb had been a crippled stump. ‘We’d need to revive plans for the live show. It involves immix, and information space science, but not fusion.’
Ax felt the white light. He searched his pockets, found the battered pack of cigarettes he carried around for emergencies, lit one and drew on it.
‘And you had to be desperate… Okay. Explain it to me.’
Hollywood briefly affected to be shocked, when the English decided to go ahead with the Hollywood Bowl concert, while Fiorinda’s body still lay in the morgue. But sentiment covered commerce with the usual veil. It’s a celebration of her life, of course. It transpired that Harry hadn’t got round to cancelling anything, so there was no problem reinstating the gig. They all went to inspect the historic venue, with Harry and an entourage. Studio folk, Bowl staff; much security. The iconic amphitheatre had somewhat fallen on hard times in the downturn. It was almost deserted in the mid-afternoon, apart from a few stray sightseers: the great white shell like something tossed against the green cliffs and abandoned there by an ancient tsunami. Chip and Verlaine took the elevator to the top of the cheap seats, and found a view that held them astonished, in the eucalyptus-scented heat and silence.
‘This is notably beautiful,’ declared Verlaine. ‘I didn’t know they did beauty in Los Angeles. It hardly seems right.’
‘How great to see a fabulous ruin in the making. It reminds me of Epidavros,’ decided Chip. ‘You know, the big ancient theatre place in Greece?’
‘Nobody comes here for the healing dreams.’
‘Not until now, my dear Pippin. Aoxomoxoa’s going to change all that.’
They were former Zen-Self lab-rats. They understood what Sage was going to attempt, and that it was right out on the edge of possible, but they had faith. They’d never known the king of weird to fail, if he wanted to rule a crowd.
Sage walked out on the hallowed boards, dressed-down in worn jeans and a
Hello Kitty
tee, accompanied by Harry Lopez in a pink linen suit. Sage was shaking his head and looking mean. He’d been hustling to get the gig moved indoors, because he wanted to do immix. But Harry was in love with his Hollywood Bowl plan: either that, or he was determined not to let Sage do any brain-burning. Sage had tried—as Harry had discovered—going behind his back and through Julia: but no dice. Julia knew who she worked for. She’s not as ditzy as she makes out
‘Faces east, well, that’s essentially
wrong
,’ said Sage, mysteriously. He stared up at the ranks of bleachers. ‘What’s the capacity again? Eighteen k?’
‘Seventeen and a half. Or a little over.’
‘I fucking hope you can sell those tickets, Mr Loman, for a tired, oversized suburban venue with no public transport, an’ in short order. I would hate to look out there and see empty seats, on Fiorinda’s night. That would piss me off.’
‘Sage, it’s
done
, the transport’s fixed and we’ll limo the VIPs. More than done, we could sell out over and over. I’m already looking at a repeat performance-’
‘Really?’
‘It would be cool to do the twenty third of August, the actual date the Beatles played here.’
He was skewered by a vicious stare. ‘Don’t, or you’re gonna annoy me.’
‘Okay, right, sorry, I forgot. I will not mention the Beatles. Sage, why have you taken to wearing the mask? Not that I object, the mask is very cool, but—’
‘It’s because I’m fucking miserable, me,’ said the living skull, its weirdly expressive empty sockets swallowing the sunlight. ‘She’s dead, and that’s most of what I think about, and if you could see my naked face, I would feel naked. I don’t even know why I’m doing this gig, it just seems I must. I think I’m building a kind of funeral pyre. But hey, I know how much is riding on this, golden boy, with one of your stars a suicide an’ all. It’ll be a great show.’
‘You don’t
know
how sorry I am. Totally sorry about everything.’
Harry genuinely seemed to be suffering, oddly enough. His manner was distracted these days. There were hollows in his soft cheeks, he winced at sudden noises and flinched if you spoke sharply. Some
complicated
remorse that must be!
‘Do you have a virtual version of this shite bandstand on file at the studio?’
‘I’d have to look that up.’
‘I want it. I want a high-rez virtual Bowl on my board, by this evening.’
‘Okay,’ said Harry, hope dawning. ‘I can get you that. You can do the show somewhere intimate another time: invitation only, I’ll sort out venues. I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. It’s what she would have wanted.’
‘As you would know.’
‘Sorry.’
Chip and Verlaine came bounding up from the orchestra, ‘Hey, Sage, isn’t this place
fabulous
? You have to come with us to the top!’
‘You can see the Hollywood sign!’ Verlaine informed him joyously.
‘Someone put Julius Caesar on here,’ cried Chip, ‘Roman armies encamped around the canyon, fake aqueducts, fires in the night… Fantastic, like an overlay from another world. You have to come and see the view, it’s far out.’ He noticed that Harry was looking startled, and drew himself up with dignity.
‘Grief takes us this way, Harry. We can be upbeat, it’s how we keep going.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Sage, resignedly. ‘Take me to see the Hollywood sign, I suppose I need to know what the stage looks like from out there.’
‘You’ll do it?’ gasped Harry. ‘Oh, thank God.
Thank you
. You’ll have the file copy in an hour. And you’ll let me sit in on a rehearsal soon?’
Sage turned, poised to leap from the stage: the skull’s preternaturally white teeth gleaming, tiny flickers of muscle movement skipping over virtual bone; between mockery and derision. ‘Soon, yeah. You trust me, don’t you?’
Harry darkly suspected that there
was
no show.
Rob and Ax sat with Dora in the highest box seats, flanked by Doug and a couple of the lads. They didn’t go anywhere without their own security now: shutting the stable door too late, but it comforted Doug Hutton. They watched Sage and Harry on the stage. ‘They once had Captain Jean-Luc Picard from
Star Trek
as King Arthur in a firework finale,’ said Dora, reading from a souvenir leaflet. ‘And the Beatles played in 1964. I didn’t realise it was so long ago.’
‘
Don’t mention the Beatles
,’ said the others, automatically. Stupid catchphrase jokes take hold easily in dire situations.
‘1964,’ muttered Rob, ‘Has it been painted since?’ He poked at the wood of the seat, shrivelled to soft punk by Californian summers, swollen by this year’s weird storms of rain. ‘I think there’s a health and safety issue.’
‘Not required, Rob,’ said Ax. ‘It’s time to stop baiting Harry. Sage has come round to the idea.’ They all had earbeads: they could eavesdrop on anyone in the party, of course it was a safe bet they were also eavesdropped upon.
‘Will the masque be ready, Ax?’ asked Doug.
‘I’d be happier if George Merrick were here to kick him up the arse, but he can work fast when he’s desperate.’ Ax flexed his hands. ‘I’m more worried about my contribution on guitar, tell you the truth.’