Novahead (11 page)

Off to our left was a jungle-gym on wheels, the low-slung scaffold car with the long fore deck. The hood puzzle-boxed open, extruding some sort of harpoon gun. The driver smiled at me with herringbone teeth. I shifted toward the left lane to increase the parallax angle on his DDs in the hope of reducing their accuracy. The black ambulance swerved with me.

The frame buggy
'
s broad wheel array was obviously designed to prevent any kind of tilt-shot from flinging the flimsy-looking car sideways onto its back. Later I wished I
'
d remembered this.

‘
You will pull over.
'

As this assumption dopplered past I realised Blince was back in the game, and then he hove into view with a Duty AMT propped awkwardly on the window
'
s gunwale.
‘
Die, Atom!
'
he yelled, a stricture I found impossible to take seriously. Afterwards, ofcourse, I saw that his plan to shoot me was a good one. At the time, his driver was socked in the head by a harpoon and dragged backward out of the car as the cable retracted. As Blince lunged at the wheel and swerved into the off, I saw the frame car driver firing at the snagged corpse on his hood with an antique automatic in the hope of freeing up the reel for another cast.

‘
You people put me to such trouble.
'

‘
What?
'
shouted Murphy above the roar of the ambulance.

Behind her I spotted a studiedly nondescript beige Chrysler flecked sparsely with ancient flakes of anti-radar and rigged with a hanger-wire fender like dental braces, probably electrified. Junco, emblematic in red and black, unpacked through a Whitman hatch and assumed the position behind a Bohr 5.56mm rifle. The Bohr looked like Murphy
'
s.

The Mantarosa was suddenly nudged from behind by the Porsche
'
s snout, forcing us further into the ambulance
'
s backblast. I broke to the left but was hedged in by a rattling jeepful of industry-standard idiots standing up and waving burning ragbottles. They were still drunk, maybe more so. Then one of them doubled over as a quantum bullet came out of superposition. Any other bullet would have done as well. His molotov exploded and the whole arrangement started crawling with flames, two more explosions putting the jeep behind us.

His outfit like a munitioned coat of arms, Junco was like an old-time fighter pilot as he fired from the rooftop sniper mount, leaning through the airborne blotting of blast-stains that were instantly left behind. He had no goggles and I realised he detected the Mantarosa only by the hysterico-gravitational behaviour of the vehicles around us. A little chaos panel beside him on the coning tower controlled his ride. Against blurring wasteland the colour of rust, he twisted the gun around at the Porsche, which instantly braked to fall out of range. I was so affected by the scene I momentarily lost control of my accent.

A car that looked like it had crawled out from under a rock broke toward us - it seemed to have been made from a dead icebox and some tractor wheels, but it locked us in against the ambulance. It jerked sideways, putting a slight smile in the Mantarosa
'
s flank. The co-pilot was stoking a fire built in a kettle drum. Murphy fired past my nose and they backed off.

The kit car shooter had cleared his tackle and now fired diagonally across our hood into the ambulance
'
s turbine, which sucked the cable in and dragged the whole spraddle car off the road like a toy - I braked as the kit car smashed past our snout and disappeared into the back of the ambulance. The whole deal exploded and everyone swerved away from the dirty maelstrom as bonus lightning flashed up through the rising cloud. All except the Porsche, which had been powering forward again, and now crunked into the wreckage. The angle of impact brought her down lights first and swung her like wedding flowers into the off. I saw bits of flaring airfoil and what looked to be a ragged driveshaft going end-to-end like a caber.

I crammed us into gear and bolted ahead. Edna swelled with imagined salvation. But there were still a dozen weaponised vehicles crowding us. This shooting gag obviously made perfect sense to them. Someone had thrown alot of money at it. A scorched dorsal arose in my rear view mirror - the White Shark brothers were back on the road.
‘
I
'
m out of ammo,
'
the Fed shouted too loud.

I told her to take the wheel, and climbed in back.
‘
Get up front, old man.
'

As Edna tried to clamber forward I pushed the kid against the window, then reached forward and deployed the etheric slant.

I walked through the peaceful house at dusk, and out onto the beach. By the tingling surface of the cooling blue water, Maddy was sat reading on a flat rock.

‘
Maddy!
'

‘
What are you doing back?
'

‘
Borrowing the Barrett! What you reading?
'

‘
The Horse
'
s Mouth!
'

‘
See you later!
'

I retrieved the Barrett Light Fifty M82A1 from the workshop and carried it through silence to the anteroom.

When I re-emerged into the car it was speeding through the blurwalls of a narrow canyon. The driver-side door sheared off, disappearing. When the car left the canyon the sunshine hit me like a curse. The Fed stared at me like I
'
d returned from the dead. Edna smiled. The kid was actually frowning at me, looking thoughtful.

The Mantarosa
'
s stern was on fire as we sped along a desert road straight and flat toward a horizon of stormclouds, pellet-pocked signs warning of the city. We were dogged by an assembly of misshapen hombres including the White Shark brothers, Junco, and a wild-eyed idealist strapped into a lemon-yellow chassis that amounted to a V6 on the halfshell. It was now undeniable that the White Sharkers were living all-out for extremity. They drove their basically totalled car with a wild frenzy that spoke volumes, their hurtling predicament converting into reckless energy. They tickled our rear fender and fired everything they had. I braced the Barrett Light Fifty against the dash, aiming it back through the smashed rear window - Edna and the kid ducked aside.

Any gun that needs a kickstand shouldn
'
t be fired this way. A Barrett is basically a semi-automatic demon from hell taking a magazine the size of a bible. It exploded at the driver, spreading him throughout the car. His extrospecs blew spinning backward as he said
‘
I
'
m hit! I still can
'
t get over it!
'
He was sat back enthroned in his own consequences.

When I fired the Barrett the Mantarosa had jerked forward a little with the recoil. I didn
'
t trouble myself over this detail as I slapped another mag and turned the gun on Junco. He was alongside us on the roof of the threadbare Chrysler, seemingly oblivious to the tilt frenzy going on around us. Bullets were winging colourless through air as he braced to leap from his car to ours. In each hand was a big half-moon crescent grapple. Murphy took no evasive manoeuvres - in fact she seemed to be holding the car steady for him. Murphy turned to see me bracing the rifle stock against the passenger door pocket and screamed a startled warning as I let rip, flipping the car to spin along a hundred yards of scrambled blacktop, its roof slicing open like tent canvas. Dangerous-looking sparks were being let in. Tropical angel
'
s-trumpet petals fell out of the glove box. Edna was screaming in a manner he had made his own. The cacophony of disaster was amplified by the car
'
s beautiful lines. The kid was looking at me the whole time with a sort of egg-eyed curiosity.

When I hit the ground all those colours that didn
'
t have a name came out of hiding. My body flushed through with a reverse-crimson-flavoured voltage that deafened me. Venom-yellow atoms were receding like quick ants around sticks and stones and weed and bones.

I was flat on my back looking straight up. There was a pain in my sky. Clouds were falling apart. The feeling was weightless and exotic. The car also lay on its back nearby: turning my head I could see through perpetually receding phosphenes into the revealed world of its engine. I took an inventory of my nostrils. One. Two. Two nostrils. So far so good. My right ear had been scraped away with alot of skin and hair. I turned my head the other way - old man Edna staggered along a tilted horizon. The kid, the Fed and everyone else had advanced further into the story without us. Edna was saying something - I tilted my good ear in time to hear him say it was
‘
Rather a curate
'
s egg of a battle, really.
'

 

 

 

Me and the old man righted the car and drove into Beerlight. The Mantarosa was now a convertible but the anti-Blakes and backseat dive were intact. Still, I had been badly frightened by the experience. I sat with Edna eating coffin cake in a drab, thwarted cafe called the Nimble Maniac. Their best coffee was nothing but tea and a diversion: in this case a slumped cadaver in a derby hat. I had a shirt wrapped round my head and the remaining ear was getting alot of action.

‘
Age isn
'
t necessarily wisdom,
'
Edna said.
‘
Nothing is older than empty space, but that doesn
'
t make it wise.
'

‘
Stop!
'

‘
Eh, what?
'

‘
Explain something to me. Ever since I fell back here a few days ago everyone
'
s been compelled to give a full writhing bloody account of themselves. I keep hearing life stories, why?
'

‘
Ah, that
'
s easy.
'
He sat back, a smile creasing his stonewashed face.
‘
Just as, when someone dies, their life is said to flash before their eyes, when a civilisation ends, everything is recapitulated. All is regurgitated and retold. Scientifically it
'
s called the eschatonic recap. Ofcourse it
'
s a babbling clamour, like the net. And it
'
s natural for people to make a grasping claim to importance for themselves or a favourite version of events.
'

‘
End times.
'

‘
A million pictures have been going dim hourly. Tomorrow is already rotten, look. But I can tell you, when Traven explained to you the trigger for Heber
'
s bomb, a chill went through me, and I began to remember. Now I remember everything. And the entire time I was wandering around with Heber I was tempting fate.
'

‘
What are you talking about?
'

‘
When I decided to let myself out the world
'
s window on a knotted sheet I wanted to leave behind a resentment so strong it gave off its own illumination. But it didn
'
t happen that way. So much of the world had already degraded to Fadland, I found I couldn
'
t avoid it. A desert of repeated particles. An unbridgeable chasm between each rare synapse. And the occasional cantankerous old shaman whose shit practical jokes people were expected to accept as wisdom. Oh, it was terrible. Five years. Attention spans so short even yesterday was instantly inscrutable. I
'
d thought I
'
d be immune, but within perhaps a year I had no clear idea of my own past. Then I met the boy, Heber. He was surviving by dealing in canned water. He was a simple white word in the darkness. We protected each other, and I could speak whatever momentary nonsense I wanted at him without consequence, or so I thought. Now when I think of the things I told him ... About a dead man who by use of a localised time-warp device had left his reflection in a mirror with a message for his wife. That the devilish hold self-contradictory positions so that people who argue against them must take up self-contradictory positions also. About the vegetarian mafia who put a head of broccoli in someone
'
s bed. How humans discovered how small the universe was when early radio signals started bouncing back. Streets that have watched pain for so long that regions of numbness have developed. That the moon landing actually happened on Mars and was toned down to conform to mediocre expectation. Common sense as a martial art, triangular language and the alphabet hidden beyond
“
Z
”
. And I would, sometimes, see a glimmer of something in his eyes. How could I have known what it meant, that he was a fissionary? Well, maybe I
'
m not as original as I thought and that saved me. Is this an indicator light or a fairycake?
'

‘
I don
'
t know.
'

He scowled at me, then bit into the object and continued.
‘
Ofcourse when I left I
'
d deleted my escape route from the web but that left a perfectly obvious gap trail.
'

‘
Yeah. And how do you fill in a hole without creating conspicuous information?
'

‘
Remember that the gap is more like a pattern of holes than a fabric - it was a case of drawing the holes closed. It created some small logic leaps and inconsistencies, but even then the average mind was so incoherent it was unlikely to be noticed. However, with Heber I
'
d wrecked my anonymity. In a vacuum society, individual expression will have about it a contrary etheric which also works against the individual - if he wants to be noticed, he won
'
t be; if he wants anonymity, he
'
ll be stared at at every turn. Occupational hazard of being always in negative. Against all odds I
'
d attached myself to a commodity being hunted by the military and other commercial concerns.
'

Ironically I had never felt less interest in the Heber kid issue than during this discussion. But I humoured him. I had no expectations. The day was an empty nut.

‘
When I wandered back in through Stina Gate like an idiot,
'
said the old man,
‘
that boundary no longer meant much. The Fadlands have taken ahold here. It
'
s no longer acceptable to appear even in private behaving as though you
'
ve a brain.
'

‘
You
'
re right,
'
I said.

I
'
d gravitated back here like it was my nature - like the human eyes of a whale, carried by evolution back into the sea. And been dismally disappointed. But I didn
'
t know yet that I was having a conversation so remarkable it would make a deep impression on me.

The old man was watching me carefully, as if for a sign.
‘
You
'
re hanging into this society like an insect leg from a toad
'
s mouth. I don
'
t know why I think that in defiance of all rationality but I do, and that makes me scared.
'

I didn
'
t know what to say. So I said:
‘
That
'
s a personal matter.
'

‘
Only a few short years after slipping my soul between these bones,
'
he said after a pause, speaking more quietly,
‘
I discovered a means of exhilaration so obscure it was yet to be deemed illegal. The whole truth is a pleasure too intricate to be popular. The dazzling pattern of catastrophe. Lives propelled weakly and only by bewilderments. A root system of acceptance. Obeying every law means submitting to chaos. And obeying only some, of course, still means submitting. They think that something looks after the world, its way garlanded with approval. A grid of guarantees given by those without the power to enforce it and derailable by a thousand inevitable contingencies.
'

I heard him. I knew what he meant. A volume of Beerlight
'
s seriously compromised promises and ultimatums were in a landfill across town.

‘
A clue,
'
he said,
‘
is the spasmodic nature of democracy, its tendency to appear and disappear like a dismal clown who thinks he
'
s funny. Inevitably the sharp articulations of the law sent people zigzagging to comply until, transfigured by exhaustion, exasperation and contempt, they disengaged from the matter entirely. Society has failed to clot.
'

‘
A collapse without a concurrent revolution you mean? No white cells?
'

‘
Holding chemically opposite resentments with complementary domains, the individual and the law went forward together. When the individual died, what happened?
'

When he said this, I experienced a strange acceleration of thought. The town had mineralised, becoming one category. Like the law, it was unable to field the sun and its shadows simultaneously. An arrangement of stale certitudes remained roughly where they had been placed. The fossil light of these inherited notions was not enough to see by. For many it was a loss of clarity, a collapse of contrasts. People
'
s coping mechanisms varied. Like anyone unable to originate their own character, the cops had joined the army. For others their determination to find it all unfathomable must have put a lot of strain on the mechanisms of dismay.

I realised at last that Jade had amped me up instead of throttling me down. It would have had a good reason.

Edna was Eddie Gamete, obviously. Traven hadn
'
t shouted
‘
damage
'
after us but
‘
Gamete
'
.

It was a stupendous kick in the pants; a contact high. Scribe of those frightening little bibles that seemed to pulse in the hand. From researching the effect of maverick verbs in harangue language, Gamete had gone on to create a frangible philosophy that exploded on impact, leaving numerous fragments around the brain. This vitalising, high-definition resentment reached one peak with
Ninja Apology
, which wound evasionomics into the form of a spring which was then released to make a meticulous maelstrom.
The Haruspex Virus
was a sort of satirical ram-scoop operating entirely on automatic by simply expelling everything through a funnel of honest mirrors. Few had any use for unique merchandise, leading his various publishers to claim that though the handle might be different the thing was the same - an assertion readers felt it safer to disbelieve. One observer complained that
‘
Gamete aims to open a terrifying depth under our steps, into which we fall like a seed.
'
His championing of human hibernation and the mastery of fruitful mischief only occasionally chanced to coincide with a shallow vogue for profane novelty. There were those who wanted to believe that his centrifugal contracts imitated the governing dynamics of fascism - an argument apparently parachuted in from the Ukraine. He slowly pulled off a joke of years, its trajectory elasticated along a course of narrative inevitability that narrowed to his promiscuous withdrawal from society and subsequent soundless fall off the world like a button off a shirt. This current stump of transcendence felt tragic to me - the man should have moved on completely. Still,
fuck
.

‘
Reality is hard to caricature,
'
Gamete was saying now.
‘
It already goes over the line. Some said that by telescoping the whole of human manipulation into a few words I thereby expelled the oxygen of lived blunder. Maybe they were right. But you can
'
t discuss
helterpolitik
without sinking up to your face in it. I never recognised the duty of literature to entertain its opponents. My penny headfuls were the last few coherent classics to be written by human beings. It
'
s an old man
'
s hobby now, like dwindling.
'

‘
Surely not. Reading is the eternal consolation of lookouts.
'

‘
No, my kind were done-for when even I started looking at the corner of a page to see the time. But I do feel alot more solid when I look at fashion and its transient venerations. For instance, the present doomed throng crave inevitable blunders involving acid spills, I believe. But I don
'
t know the passwords for this age. And what do you speak to, when the heart is artificial? Or absent? I think Heber is the only one wearing a face that is really his own.
'

‘
Because he
'
s a moron, maybe.
'

‘
That may be so. His head
'
s basically a neurological doorknob.
'

‘
Has he ever spoken?
'

‘
Once, in the Fadlands. It may seem strange, but in an environment where everything is duplication, a simple and natural novelty can be a genuine shock. We were walking along and a snake was on the ground in front of us. Instead of being alarmed Heber pointed and said
“
There. How
'
s
that
for a snake?
”
and seemed baffled at my sudden crouching-up onto a rock. Then he started to look strange, and had one of his rare fits.
'