Midnight Lamp (53 page)

And above us only sky… They had the cabin to themselves. Fiorinda’s nose was pressed to the window. Sage had already contrived to fall asleep. Ax set about scanning through the stack of English newspapers, e-format, that he’d picked up from an airport callpoint, (yep, I’m doing my homework on the bus,
I did not have time
.) An AI car can live, theoretically, for ninety or a hundred years, but they don’t forget. It’ll remember us, if we come back when we’re pensioners. He put the plane-safe reader down: future shock. This gadget in my hands, this plane itself, all these things must pass away, not over decades, not replaced by similar, ‘improved’ models, but
wham
,
gone
. And where is the ice-cold little girl, implacably decent and honourable, that I first took to my bed? Where is my best mate of the Islamic campaign, the drunken, brainy, skull-headed clown? They are gone. I will never see them again.

That’s the lesson of faithful love. You keep losing the same people, over and over, and it teaches you like nothing else: nothing lasts. The silver bird bucked and bounced. A chime, and a voice in his ear announced, warm and confident, ‘Hi, this is your captain. I thought I should tell you guys, since you may not have travelled by air in a storm for a while, don’t worry about the lightning. The plane itself is a lightning conductor, we’ll come to no harm.’ What lightning? He peered over Fiorinda’s shoulder and saw a magical thing, in the howling dark out there: waves of rose coloured liquid light, flowing and colliding, standing up like shimmering frost flowers, across the complex surface of the wing.

‘Isn’t it
beautiful
?’ whispered Fiorinda.

‘Yeah.’ A shock of joy went through him. Some time soon I’m going to be fucking, armed and dangerous, for the first time in my entire life!

How bad can the Green Presidency be?