Rainbow Bridge (12 page)

‘He’s recanted.’

Toby Starborn was obsessed with Fiorinda. His celebrated portraits of her, created with forbidden tech, betrayed a sinister, dangerous subtext. Ax wasn’t going to tolerate having him around. ‘For fuck’s sake…excuse my rockstar language. He was the Second Chamber government’s favourite artist, their digital laureate!’

‘So were you,’ said Norman. ‘You were their darling. They made you President, didn’t they? The Second Chamber wanted you for team captain, Fred Eiffrich brokered the deal. And
you
are back from the brink, look at you.’

Ah.

You forget it’s there and then the hellish stress trips you up when you least expect it,
after
the difficult passage, over something you should have handled easily. His blood ran cold, shit, what was I thinking—

Norman mistook silence for resistance. ‘What do you
really
want to do right now, Ax? Don’t tell me, let me guess. You want to strip the dreadful actives of their support, and convince them to give up the struggle. Am I there or thereabouts?’

‘You are there,’ said Ax, grimly. ‘But I’ve recanted, Lieutenant Colonel Soong. I know that’s somebody else’s job. I’m just a rock musician.’

‘And I’m a music director. Every job is our job now, we are the liturgy of history, and
you
helped to make that so. What would you say if I told you stripping the actives of the support most crucial to them is exactly our project? And we will do it with the music. And the way we get there will be strange and difficult and mysterious, but you and I, and Toby and Joe, Fiorinda and Aoxomoxoa, will reach a momentous, epochal, rock apotheosis together?’

Ax lost his grip on time, under the hammer blow of inexorable destiny. Past, present and future became one, as in that moment in Wang’s office. Simultaneity took him in its sway: the intense feeling that all this had happened already almost knocked him to his knees. He knew that Norman Soong’s plan, whatever it involved, was a
disaster
, but he saw the white light. No fighting it.

‘Tell me more.’

Eventually Norman and Toby took themselves off. Ax and Joe were left in the solar, waiting to be collected. Joe was heading for Reading station, Ax would be returned to the Line. ‘You couldn’t make it for the press conference?’ said Joe.

‘Too early for me,’ explained Ax, hazarding a guess. Press conference, what press conference. ‘How was it?’

‘What d’you think? Selected media persons get invited to Rivermead, to find out that the weird and wonderful Norman Soong is here. He’s been here all the time, and the Triumvirate are going to work with him. We were fantastically excited.’

‘I’ll bet you were.’

Joe swallowed, and nodded. ‘I didn’t get a chance to say, at Ashdown: it’s so great that you came through, you three. So great to have you back.’ He had kept his coat on, he huddled deeper into it, dug his hands into his pockets and shivered. ‘I never expected this… How’s Fiorinda? I kind of got an inkling, from the teetotal thing. If I’m right, many many congratulations—’

Mr Preston stared. Everything we say is heard, Joe.

‘Oh fuck,’ breathed Joe. ‘Oh,
sorry
!’

Happily Wang Xili appeared before the silence that followed could become embarrassing; with Lieutenant Chu, who was bearing Ax’s greatcoat.

The General walked Ax through foyer, very pleased with himself. All that you want you can have, Mr Preston; as long as you accept you are our creature.

‘Do you have any
ideas
, Ax? Anyone I should know about?’

‘People you should appoint?’

‘Yes. As outgoing President, who would you favour for the next PM?’

Ax thought about it, he took a woman’s life in his hands. ‘Lucy Wasserman.’

‘Ah. Is she in this country at the moment?’

‘No. She could be contacted, ask around.’

‘This is the bio-fuel crops in underground car parks with grolamps, woman?’

‘You’re well informed,’ said Ax. They stepped out into winter dusk, and the contours of Rivermead tugged at a grief he must not show. Pray God he would never have to come here again. But there’s always another turn of the screw. ‘It works. I mean the grolamps, in a small way; a net gain. Piecemeal solutions suit us.’

‘What’s your best overground crop?’

‘I don’t know that we have a
best
. Grain’s a big issue. Cash-crop wheat-farming soils here in the south just gave up on us. We have superb grazing in the Midlands; we do well on meat. Could be self-sustaining on dairy, root crops, market garden, with more cuts in housing and more urban farms.’ A car was waiting, he didn’t have to walk to the helicopter (an upgrade on the return trip, good sign). ‘The real problem is space for bio fuels, which we have to find because H just is not the answer. You Chinese don’t seem to use any ethanols, or H. How do you manage?’

General Wang laughed heartily. ‘Don’t be afraid to ask a bold question! There’s no mystery. China had been secretly preparing for the post-petroleum age since the Burma Road was closed, in 1942. We were simply far ahead of the game. When our lower grade fossil fuels proved worthless, a perfectly natural phenomenon, we turned to safe, powerful, sustainable alternatives, that’s the whole story.’

The Burma Road, take that last word away with you. It was supposed to be Fred Eiffrich who had started the World War Two refs, a code uniting the people who understood that the Crisis was a fight for the survival of civilisation. A global war, against no human enemy. Put that into the equation, it’s surely not an accident. Along with,
human treasure, first class
…
my beloved grandfather
…
they could be booby-trapped (
shit, that’s a bad one). Through the long cold journey home to his lovers he ran the permutations, the volume of his mind trying to hold a whole world, like that art screen in the gatehouse; reforming, reforming, reforming forever.

The Few were in London, well-treated apparently but back in General Hu’s custody. The Reich-in-Hiding had been on tour around Sussex villages and small towns since Ashdown: very low profile, but practising for a greater destiny. Their base was a derelict racing stables on the flank of the South Downs. No running water indoors, most of the ground floor uninhabitable and few ceilings that didn’t leak. Crew and roadies, engineers, techies and performers, slept in bed-roll dorms. At least they were eating well. In a cluttered kitchen, stacked with tour hampers, the walls smoke-stained by vagrant fires and papered with rags of horsey memorabilia, Fiorinda cut slices of yesterday’s porridge for Marlon, Silver and Pearl, and fried them in cinnamon-sugar ghee—from the same dry goods store in Uckfield that had provided the dried peas for the infamous garlic mush. She’d done two shifts of breakfasts already; this afternoon she’d be giving a performance. Did it occur to the
jeunesse dorée
that they might lend a hand? It did not. Silver took her plate and stared at the food in dumb misery. Pearl picked her nose, frowning. ‘Has Father Christmas come yet?’

Pearl was behaving like a child half her age. Wish we could get her to a neuro unit. George’s first aid box said her skull was doing fine, but it didn’t do brain scans.

‘No. Eat your breakfast: here, have some condensed milk.’

‘Is it organic?’ asked Marlon. ‘I know the oats came out of a
packet
.’

‘Of course it’s not fucking organic, it is forty years old. It’s what we have.’

Marlon spoke sotto voce to Silver:
it’s the Fiorinda Slater miracle diet, you can eat what you like, as long as it’s called porridge and tastes like sheep shit
. He used their secret Welsh-English pidgin: Silver ignored him, too sunk in her personal despair to make trouble. Fiorinda caught the drift.

‘Marlon, there’s something we need to straighten out. It was your dad and Ax who took the non-violence pledge.
Not me
. Do not push your luck.’

‘I’m eating it. Look at me, diwl, I’m
eating
it, for—’

‘Father Christmas might bring me something,’ Pearl began brightly; but lost the thread. ‘Might bring me something, might bring me something, might, might.’

Augh. Out of here, before one of them ends up sliced and fried.

Sage found her in the stable block, grooming one of the pack ponies, and propped himself in the doorway to watch his living goddess. When she was off guard like this he and Ax could see the scars left by the Green Nazi time, drawn around her lovely reckless mouth and shadowed eyes.
Nazi
hardly covered it. The games her father had played with her, using that animated corpse, had been unmatched at Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor. Where did she find the brute courage to survive that sojourn in hell? Not only to survive but to outwit the bastard, to save lives—

You’re knocking on an open door, Chinese persons. You
could not
be worse than the fate we were circling around, helpless to escape, before you arrived. You would not believe how eager we are to help you stuff the fucking genie back in the bottle. The pony dropped its head, eyes half shut, as Fiorinda’s curry comb worked on the cusp of its shoulders, where the scraggy black mane ran out into winter coat.

‘That horse is going to be your slave.’

She glanced round, shrugged and went on working. ‘A lot of people seem to like me now. It’s funny, nobody ever did when I was on my way up.’

‘You’re not so terrifying as you were when you were fourteen. We’ve resigned ourselves, we’re no longer thinking, God, why do I even bother.’

The pony tried to shove its big head under her arm. She shoved back. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, sunshine. I’m just doing what has to be done.’ Fiorinda did not see horses as romantic, she saw them as a marker on the descent back to the Stone Age.

‘They never ask themselves whether
I
like
them
. I fucking don’t. I’m as self-obsessed and cold hearted as I ever was. I just cover it up. You ought to be in bed.’

‘It’s not a tempting prospect. I’m fine.’

Sage had pneumonia. It wasn’t a dangerous kind, but his liver was a regen, the original having been a casualty of the assassination of Rufus O’Niall. They were having trouble finding drugs he could tolerate, to hold the disease down while he threw it off. Meanwhile Sage functioned under the influence, performing stupid feats.

‘You’re not,’ said Fiorinda. ‘You’re leaning on things.’ He quickly stood up straight, the clown. She sighed in exasperation. ‘You need bed-rest and real antibiotics, which we don’t have.’

‘Nyah. Antibiotics are bad for you.
You
should be resting.’

‘Can’t.’

Ax had gone to Reading. They were not afraid for him, much, but they were raw with his absence. In this relationship,
I need you always to be there
had stopped being a pious exaggeration several hideous separation episodes ago. Fiorinda ditched her comb and walked into Sage’s arms in the horse-smelling gloom, frankly burrowing for bare, heated skin.

‘Mm…nice. You sayin’ you’d like a fuck, pregnant lady?’

Privacy was hard to come by. The Triumvirate shared their dorm with three deranged teenagers, George and Bill, and sometimes others. Only Peter had a cubby-hole of his own, but that was fair: communal bunking would be very hard on him.

‘How about in here?’ said Fiorinda, without hesitation.

‘Sod’s law, some fucker would walk in on us.’

They went around the back, to a yard where snow crusted the shattered puddles, the tumbledown walls; the ivy tangled in the trees leaning crazed branches over them. An icy breeze bit their cheeks and teared their eyes: he stooped, trying to mould his height to her body, trying to be even with her the way Ax could be.

‘Are you too tall, are you feeling too tall, my baby?’

‘Too fucking tall,
hate
being so tall. Oh, I want Ax.’

‘Me too, whisper to me about him,
please
—’ She jumped him, legs locked around his waist, trying not to dig army boots into his spine, snow on her hair and melting down her back: oh but it was still good, stone age sex for stone age royalty. Body heat and slick inside surfaces clumsily shared, the infinitely reassuring smell of each other’s musk.
My little pony
, he mumbled, wondering when he would see her naked again.
I hope I didn’t hear that right,
growled Fiorinda,
I do not find that idea erotic
; but she did. Close your eyes, get up a sweat together, reach a peak and float—

They slid down the wall, back to earth. Sage tipped his face to the sky, relishing her warm weight in his glassy, fevered world; his cock melting into her like contented candle wax, my girlfriend, my girlfriend…and the baby moved between them, a tiny stir; someone talking softly in another room. Fiorinda pushed herself away from him, and crouched on her heels, arms wrapped around her head.

‘Babies are like aliens,’ she said. ‘Unreal until they arrive.’

Sage zipped up. He didn’t touch her, he knew better than that, been with this damaged, amazing Fiorinda long enough. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet an alien.’

‘When I was pregnant before, that time in Paris when I only managed to stay pregnant about ten days, it was like a wormhole from my belly to another universe, now there’s a worm in the hole, oh I didn’t mean to say that. I have these creepy thoughts, they come into my head and I deal with it, I’m okay.’

‘I know you are,’ said Sage, and she came back to him.

‘Will you say,
everything’s going to be all right
?’

‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

He soothed her, murmuring nonsense, thoroughly alarmed.

The trains were running, a mad survival in this mad world. Berkshire was only hours away. Get home on time, Ax. Don’t make her wait. Please.

The pews and cross-stitched hassocks had been removed to safety, the altar was screened by a green stage curtain. Perhaps in mediaeval times they’d left His Lordship presiding over the drunken commons, but the set-up crew had decided to err on the side of decorum. It’s not a mosque, but you wouldn’t want to risk committing sacrilege on Ax Preston’s manor. The bar was in the foot of the tower at the west end, with a burner for mulled ale. Brass and wood had been polished, stone and tile scrubbed. Boughs of holly and ivy had been raised to the rooftree, by tackle formerly used in the mighty spectacle of an Aoxomoxoa and the Heads gig.