Midnight Lamp (7 page)

‘Okay,’ said Harry, ‘Well, that’s, I guess that will be all right.’

He glanced in bemusement at the Triumvirate’s backpacker bundles, and around the bare cabin. There were a few sketches still taped to the back wall. Sage had decided to leave them there, they weren’t good enough to keep and he hadn’t the heart to throw them away. Harry stepped over, and carefully took down a Costa’s humming bird.

‘May I keep this?’

‘Sure.’

‘Will you sign it?’

‘No.’

London, without Ax

The Rock and Roll Reich was over but the organisation struggled along, sorely hampered by mainstream government ‘assistance’. They looked after the drop-out hordes, the frightening masses of people who had simply given up, in the economic crash or later on: taken to the roads and never gone home. They had a first class, means-tested arts and alt.tech hedgeschool education scheme, for the Countercultural nation and anyone else, young or old, who met the criteria (or blagged their way in). They were committed to running a programme of free events, not exclusively but predominantly rock and roll, known as the ‘Crisis Management Gigs’—which had become a beloved tradition, vital for public morale. They had to keep going. Ax had left them with the responsibility, and with or without belief, it was all that survived of the place they’d once lived: up high, electrified and terrified, on the wings of the storm.

They couldn’t think of anything else to do with themselves.

One rainy morning in a grey and thankless springtime, Allie Marlowe arrived first in the Office at the Insanitude, and swopped the bowl under the leak by the Balcony doors for an empty pan. The windows rattled in their peeling frames, blossom streamed away from the trees in St James’s Park. She looked out on the Victoria Monument. Well, here I am in Buckingham Palace, running a rockstar charity for the government. Was this what I wanted out of life? The room was freezing, and for no very green reason. They were well in the black on the Central London energy audit: it was just another petty ordinance. She wrapped herself in an old cardie of Fiorinda’s, that she kept at the San for this purpose, sat down and switched on her machine.

—the minor donations; the surviving on a shoestring-

Maybe it would be better if they all quit, let the younger cadres take over. Before she’d become, through no fault of her own, Ax’s Lord Chancellor, Allie Marlowe had been a rock music socialite whose “career” took the form of going to the right parties, and promoting the coolest clubs. None of the Few had any more convincing qualifications. They were just friends-of-Ax-Preston, who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, a few years ago. They all ought to quit, let the devoted Reich Youth take over. We should go before they appoint a new President. If it’s Jordan, I can’t stand the idea anyway. How dare he.

But she knew she didn’t have the resolution to walk away.

The Reich Youth ambled in, put something annoying on the sound system and milled around chatting. Allie encountered the scan of a dog-eared Cornish holiday postcard, in her personal email. A cartoon of a bearded seaman in a sou’wester:

Fishin’ Scat

Farmin’ Scat

Tourists Scat… Back To Wreckin’, Me Hearties!

She flipped the card over, as she checked its provenance. It was from Mexico, of course. Something wrong with their phone? Anxiety levels leapt. She’d been terrified since the day they left: that they would be kidnapped the way Ax had been before; that they’s be shot in the street, killed in an earthquake. The Reich was over, she must let these people go, but she just couldn’t… It was Sage’s handwriting, barely legible. Apparently being hard to read was natural to Sage, the new hands made no difference. I’ll go along with that, thought Allie, a diehard Ax and Fiorinda loyalist, and always would be.

Hi Allie,
she made out.
We’re on our way to Hollywood. Get ready to pack. Talk to you soon.

Nothing else, except a threefold monogram, in the form that said: trouble but nothing we can’t handle.

The rain beat on the Victoria Monument, post-Ax pop-music ravaged the Office air.

After they’d parted company from Harry they pulled off the Mex1 at the first opportunity, on a country road; in a valley chequer-squared with grapevines, bright with new leaf. They’d eaten lobster burritos at a restaurant once favoured by Steve McQueen. They’d graciously accepted Digital Studios credit cards; they’d insisted on making their own way to the border, and arranged to meet Harry there in a few days’ time.
A few days
was arbitrary, a last taste of freedom.

They were suspicious about the ease of all this.

The car was not instantly impressive. It was a chunky off roader, on the same lines as Harry’s Compact, in light brown with a scarlet trim and silver wheels; called a Toyota Rugrat. It was box fresh, hinting at machinations behind the A&R man: no one had
driven
this car from the US. They’d personalised it, eyes, voiceprint, touch, but that didn’t guarantee they were the master’s voice.

‘Okay,’ said Ax, ‘Let’s check it out.’

Fiorinda left this mechanical and geeky activity to the menfolk, and sat by the road dissecting the US English language newspapers they’d bought in El Rosario. California
norté
is having a water crisis, (you don’t say). Also a power crisis, but that isn’t real, it is trumped up by monopolies (well, what changes?). Mr Eiffrich is widely held to be set for his second term, despite the continued Downturn—meaning, crash deeper than the nineteen thirties, when ‘Depression’ was the favoured euphemism. She read an article about how in hard times the country likes a Democrat in the White House, but Republican control of Congress and the Senate; an essay on the psychology of the Oil Wars. A Big Name’s new album signals he is heading for politics (copycat!). Moviestar has double platinum hit with novelty song. Tuh. Never heard of her. Nothing about a project at Vireo Lake.

Witchcraft and magic were dealt with pleasantly under Lifestyle.

She read the cartoon strips,
the funny pages,
until Ax and Sage came to join her.

‘If it’s wired, we can’t find it,’ said Sage, folding down on the stony ground. ‘Couldn’t find the weapons cache either, or the drugs. A piss-poor rockmobile. But we have camping gear you could use on Mars,
and
a water distillation plant.’

‘
La mordida reina
,’ said Ax, mordida being a bribe. ‘It doesn’t look like much, but it drives sweetly, for a brick on stilts. We’ve disabled the nauseating baby voice, sorry Fio. Thank God it has a steering wheel. I don’t see driving by holding fake conversations with a car’s software. It’s a ridiculous idea.’

‘You’d feel different if you’d ever had fucked-up hands.’

‘Harry said it was a fat ride,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Meaning wicked, I presume, same as in England. How clever is it, really?’ They looked at the Toyota. It was
watching
them, with the red cam-eyes above its headlamps. ‘Can it understand what we’re saying?’

‘It can hear us.’ Sage lay back and gazed at the sky. ‘It recognises a few words, not sure what it understands
.
I don’t think there’s anything going on to upset the Turing Police, but it’s emotional. Maybe like a dog or a cat.’

‘Now that’s something we’re missing out on in Crisis Europe,’ remarked Ax. ‘The emergence of consumer durables as an oppressed underclass.’

‘It could have the sentience of a grey parrot. Or even a small child.’

‘I hope you’re kidding,’ said Fiorinda.

She thought of Serendip, the mainframe computer Olwen Devi wore as a jewel in a ring on her finger. But Serendip was a divinity, not a slave.

‘Can we turn the feelings-feature off?’

‘No, that would make it dead. Too bound up in the motor cortex.’

‘Fred Eiffrich was planning to give limited AIs animal welfare rights,’ said Ax. ‘We better treat it nicely, or we’ll get pulled over.’

‘Maybe we should give it a name.’

‘Right of veto,’ said Ax. ‘I will not ride in a car called Tiddles.’

Sage grinned. ‘Ruggy the Rugrat it is then. Ax, I don’t believe we’re under surveillance, except in the strictly formal sense that you never can tell. Could we forget about that wire?’

‘I hear you. I’ll be grown-up.’

For a year, Ax had lived chained to a wall in a single room, never alone. The constant feeling of being watched still plagued him.

‘What shall we do now?’

‘The hired car wouldn’t do back roads,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Let’s explore.’

Their country lane headed into the mountain spine of the peninsula, swiftly becoming abomniable, but the Rugrat didn’t mind. It danced over washed out river beds, floated over boulders. Ax started to grin. Sage and Fiorinda, beside him on the front bench, stopped thinking that the crash bar was absurd. When the road gave up entirely, without warning in the middle of an uphill corniche switchback, Ax just laughed, shifted the stick and the Rugrat hit the chasm brim careening along on half its wheelbase, the bench and bar morphing to compensate, Sage and Fiorinda yelling—

‘That’s rugged terrain extra,’ said the demon behind the wheel, placidly. ‘Mind if I put on some proper speed?’

At a high pass they stopped: alone in a sun-seared, wind-ripped landscape of rocks and fragile flowers. ‘You know what,’ said Fiorinda, when the adrenalin had let go of her windpipe. ‘Every family in the American suburbs has one of these, and they use them to drive to Asda and back.’

‘Walmart,’ said Sage.

‘Wear your anorak with pride.’

‘She’s right. What a crime! Anyone else want a turn?’ asked Ax, nobly.

‘Hahaha. No, no, my dear. This is
your
present.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Fiorinda compromised, ‘We take turns tomorrow.’

The jagged landscape fell away, wilder and wilder into the distance on every side, painted shades of red against a parchment haze; a sharp-edged, impossible and dreamlike terrain, cliffs and peaks, boulder fields, plunging chasms.

‘There’s a whole
world
, Ax,’ whispered Fiorinda. ‘That I’ve never seen.’

Sage was reading the manual on the dash screen. ‘It can climb out of a pit, ten to fifteen metres vertical,’ he remarked. ‘Tha’ sounds like a good trick. Hm, it says here
can be linked to a range of personal digital devices
. Hey, I could slave the AI to my mask!’ He’d given up the living skull mask, but he kept the button in his eyesocket, for old sake’s sake. ‘It’s sittin’ there, stacks of spare capacity—’

‘So you could drive by thinking about it?,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Oh no. No, no. You’d forget what you were doing, and tell the car to stand on its head.’

‘Would not.’

‘I’m in love with the modern world,’ said Ax. ‘Leave my Rugrat alone. I’m gonna get a new implant, and commune with it myself. Digital Artists can pay.’

The kidnappers had taken his old brain implant, a primitive and dangerous data-warehouse that he’d had fitted before the Dissolution. He’d been told the bastards had probably saved his life, because the thing had been in an advanced state of decay. But his chip had been dear to him, and he missed it.

Sage went
white
, the colour plummeting from under his tan—

‘You will not!’

‘Huh?’’

‘You can’t have another implant, Ax. Fuck, I saw your scans. Don’t even—’

‘Is that an order? Listen, Sage, I think it’s my business, and what d’you mean, you saw my scans? That’s confidential information.’

‘Confidential from
me
? Well, thanks. Look, forget that. Implants are fucking stupid an’ obsolete, why don’t you get an eye-socket device?’

‘I don’t like putting things in my eye.’

‘No, you’d rather have dodgy open-brain surgery. Fuck’s sake—’

‘Could you both
stop
it?’ demanded Fiorinda.

They looked at each other, and how strange, how many
aeons
since they’d had this problem, the meeting of lovers’ glances, so much more complex between three. Not daring to say a word, Ax put the Rugrat in gear, and they drove on.

Towards sunset they found a campsite in a conifer forest: stone empty. When the culture of plenty withers and fuel prices rocket, only kings and queens, soldiers and gypsies, get to sleep in the woods. Leaving the Rugrat parked on a flat pitch they walked into the rustling flowers of an alpine meadow, and sat there quietly for a long time: Sage becoming so still you knew he wasn’t there, only cosmic reality was there.

‘We could stay here,’ said Fiorinda.

‘Overnight, anyway,’ agreed Ax.

‘
Mon auberge était a la Grande Ourse
,’ said Sage. ‘There will be great stars.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ Sage murmured to Ax, as they reviewed the remains of the El Pabellón food while Fiorinda collected kindling. There was already a stack of heavier wood, left behind by other campers, plenty for one night. There were frozen steaks and tubs of ice cream in the Rugrat’s lockers, but steak and ice cream would make Sage throw up; and anyway they weren’t in the mood. Two peppers, a potato, a head of garlic, a couple of wizened carrots, can of tomatoes, can of chickpeas—