Authors: Gwyneth Jones
The doctor checked Sage’s temperature, and said she’d seen worse. She listened to his chest, examined his lungs with a pre-Dissolution medical imager, and the face in her voice fell. No comment on the shark-attack scars that roped the patient’s right side. Min the kitten sniffed for rats in a pile of empty seed sacks. Fiorinda stood at the window, and watched lights move in the dark of a lambing fold, on the white slope of the downs. If the ewes gave birth in February, as in the old days, they’d be in poor condition: too many would die. Tendrils reached out from her to the post-gig party at the vicarage, and to the Few in London. (But not to Reading or points between, she dared not touch that direction). Human entrails laced across the landscape, trailing blood and mucus, a track the Chinese would have to be blind not to read. I am entangled,
Hard
is about entanglement: I am wickedly tangled with this baby too, which gets more vulnerable as it gets bigger.
They’d been given the loft above a farm supplies yard, a good gaff, clean sheets on a real bed, and just the three of them. They had a supper tray, a chamber pot, a toilet in the yard; hot water in an insulated wash-stand jug, and a secret way out just in case. Every comfort, except that Ax was late.
The doctor departed, leaving a thermos of febrifuge. ‘Not bad,’ said Sage. ‘Not bad at all,’ said Fiorinda, automatically feeling that Sage ought to have only superb reviews, and the doctor must be rubbish. She checked a mug of the pungent mixture with an LFT test-strip from George’s first aid.
‘Well, it’s no worse than paracetamol.’
He held the mug, fixing her with a fevered blue glare. ‘You are
not
to worry about this, brat. Me, bodhisattva. I’m on top of it.’
‘Don’t worry about me then either,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Get into bed.’
‘Better keep an eye on that kitten,’ said Sage. ‘He might find a way out.’
Appalling if they lost Ax’s cat. ‘He’s not an idiot, it’s freezing outside.’
The candle lantern stood on the floor, making haloed shadows. Sage got into bed with his clothes on, Fiorinda walked around, and the kitten scampered. ‘I thought they were going mental,’ she said. ‘Poor kids, they were pining for tinsel. What a no good mother I’ll make. It never crossed my tiny mind I was expected to do Christmas.’
‘Nor me. Christmas is fer punters. It’d be like eating cat food.’
‘I hope this loft is not bugged by the East Sussex Gazette.’
‘Nah, I love Christmas. New Year’s Eve, that’s the one I
hate
. Hate, hate. But you can make good money.’
‘Whores that we are.’
She joined him under the quilt, bringing Min, who kicked himself free and ran off, chirruping indignantly. He put out the candle and moonlight, suddenly brilliant, flooded the dusty floor. Old dreams stirred in the unreal space of fever, she’s mine, we live in Alaska, Ax Preston, who he?; but this dream was consumed by a black hole at the centre. ‘He’s got a phone on him. Shall we try it?’
They block your number, and no matter how many identities you have they nail them all. They use a voiceprint and fake whole conversations. Telecoms under the Chinese was a paranormal phenomenon. It worked sometimes and you had no idea why, but you knew a million demons were listening.
‘If Ax is in trouble,’ said Fiorinda, as to a small child. ‘Phone in trouble too.’
‘Okay.’
I will go for a piss, he thought, an’ try my luck.
The drone of an engine entered the silence out there, grew, faded, and grew again. Someone was let into the yard, footsteps crunched on the loft steps. Fiorinda leapt up as the door creaked open, and zoomed across the room—
‘She thought you’d been eaten by bears,’ said Sage.
‘Just mildly masticated by National Railoid thing. Wrong kind of snow.’
Ax had got a shock. He’d held her only this morning: but now for the first time he felt the change, indisputable. This was a pregnant woman, full breasts, curved belly, and my God, this is a problem, but she feels so
wonderful—
He bent to kiss Sage’s brow, Fiorinda still twined around him.
‘How are you, my big cat?’
Sage grinned, but did not attempt to sit up. ‘Knackered.’
‘Yeah, I heard, you lunatic. According to my driver you were almost as knock out as Fiorinda, and
she
was nearly as good as Dave Wright.’
‘Excellent… How about you, Scheherazade? What’s the damage?’
‘Still got my head.’ Ax methodically removed hat, coat, gloves and scarf. He lit the candle and sat on the side of the bed, staring at the trembling flame.
‘What did you see?’ whispered Fiorinda: because he looked like someone returned from a place of fearful visions.
‘The first rays of the new rising sun. Is there anything to eat? There was nothing on the trains, not even hot water. Where’s Min? Min?’
The kitten came belting over, quivering with joy. Fiorinda got out the extra blankets, and the malt whisky the priest had given them. She wrapped one blanket around Ax and the other around herself, scooped the supper tray of mince pies from under the bed, and poured the Muslim warlord a healthy dram.
‘What the fuck’s in this?’ Ax peered at his pie’s dubious interior.
“Catfood,” murmured the invalid, grinning. Fiorinda gave him a dirty look.
‘I detected mutton, suet, beet molasses, calf’s foot glue, perhaps one sultana; a soupçon of currants. Please, don’t ask me if the meat is
halal
.’
‘I wasn’t planning to. Those walls are really something, close up. Nano I assume: it looks as if they’re alive, building themselves out of thin air.’
Sage hauled himself up on the pillows. ‘Any
details
on this grey goo?’
‘Didn’t see any grey. I saw a creamy white. Indigo blue, and a dark red. Mostly the cream, probably for the, the in-your-face albedo of it. They call it
di
.’ He set down the pie and mug, and wrote the character on his palm, Min following the strokes intently. ‘Meaning earth; which figures… What can I tell you? Their barracks look like upturned boats. I think it’s true that the army’s in charge. They can put anyone in uniform that they like. And I think Corny’s
Shi Huangdi
exists.’
There was a theory, unsupported by anything from official Chinese sources or the Sphere partners, that there’d been a secret PLA coup during the Crisis, leaving a façade of geezers intact. Most supporters of this scenario spoke of a ‘Gang of Four’ type group, who kept out of the public eye. But Cornelius believed there was just one man. Whom he named
Shi Huangdi
, the first emperor, for obvious reasons.
‘It was in the way Wang talks, the whole set-up. I asked him the grandfather question, and other key words. They’re Neo-Confucianists, yet Maoist in style—’
Ax saw the household gods, propped against the wall by the bed. It washed over him that they were INSANE to keep hold of those forbidden things, Sage’s board, Fiorinda’s saltbox. And the Gibson was a useless warrior, helpless to protect its proscribed companions… But that was the day he’d spent at Reading talking, and it was confusion. It was Ax who was protected, and his lovers would be the warriors, if the worst came to the worst. But so far so good.
‘
Shi Huangdi
?’ prompted Sage, gently. ‘How does that affect us?’
‘Maybe not at all. But Wang said “England has been designated a Human Treasure, First Class. I am here to preserve it, not to destroy it”.’
Sage laughed. ‘That’s out and proud.’
Put this in the equation: the Chinese might make it. They were out and proud, they meant to take over the entire world,
the whole board
, and by this stage who was going to stop them? Rightly or wrongly, the wild prospect did not fill the Triumvirate with horror. A Chinese planet? Better than some solutions that had been tried, and rockstar nature came to the fore. They hardly asked whether Shi Huangdi was a monster or a saviour. They hardly asked what kind of World State it would be, as they contemplated the sheer spectacle of this awesome fledgling—
‘It gets to the point,’ said Fiorinda, slowly. ‘Where you want them to make it just because it would be such an
amazing
stunt.’
‘Yeah.’ Ax sighed deep. The food and alcohol were kicking in, he felt steadier. ‘Okay, start again. Lemme tell you what happened, in order… I was shown around. By a high-flying young woman, Fio, you’ll be pleased to know. I was told they mean us well, but they don’t care how many hippies they have to massacre to awaken us from delusion. And in China they count population loss by the tens of millions before it makes the six o’ clock news, so don’t bother begging for mercy.’
‘Is that what Wang said?’
‘In just about so many words, yes he did.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I made ritual submission.’
A moment’s silence. They watched Min patting a bar of moonlight.
‘He showed me figures. It’s been horrible in China, if they were real. Then he walked a plan to invade Wales by me, mentioning that running sores of delusion might be lurking there, and told me they aren’t going to touch our so-called Pagan sites. He said “they might be booby-trapped”, I don’t think he meant high explosives.’
‘Fuck,’ breathed Sage.
Fiorinda stared at Ax, frozen still, her eyes wide.
‘Right, that was about my own reaction. I near as fuck absolutely panicked. But you have to remember,
they
know most of what really happened
. It’s fucking hard to keep that in mind, when they’re forcing you to lie all the time, but
they know
. They know that Rufus was a naturally occurring supernatural monster, they know that Sage had to achieve the Zen Self in order to defeat him, and they know that the Zen Self way of breaking the barrier doesn’t create an occult super-weapon… Look at it this way, by definition they now know at least as much as US intelligence knew, after our episode over there. Yet everything they’ve done says they still want to hire us. It’s a mystery, but it’s okay.’ He poured more whisky, necked half and offered the mug to Sage. ‘Oh, sorry, are you allowed spirits?’
‘I’m not pregnant. I’ll just quietly pass out, no problem.’
‘Wang was calling a deer a horse, making sure I knew the right answers to the questions on his check sheet. It was a warning of how we have to behave, the line we have to walk. I feel fucking
brainwashed,
but not threatened.’
Ax fell silent; looking at things they couldn’t see.
‘Calling a deer a horse? You’re bein’ inscrutable, babe.’
‘Oh… Zhao Gao, the chief eunuch, wanted to know if he had enough power over the officials at the court of Qin. He had a horse led past them, and announced it was a deer. The emperor said, hahaha, it’s a horse. Most of the officials agreed with Zhao Gao. The idiots who questioned his judgement were purged.’
‘But you knew the right answers,’ said Fiorinda.
‘It’s not rocket science. Okay, we still don’t know what we’re up against, we still could be
hopelessly
fucked, but our first aim was to buy some power. No doors closed today. If I’m making it sound bad; I’m tired. The news is
good
.’
‘Now you’re softening us up,’ said Fiorinda. ‘You have your softening-up voice on. What do we have to do? Don’t break it gently, please.’
Unexpectedly, alarmingly, Ax laughed. ‘How d’you want me to break it? Okay, I met Norman Soong. We’re going to work with him.’
Fiorinda struggled with this. ‘You mean, you had a video conference?’
‘No, I mean Norman Soong, stadium rock director in chief to the Great Peace Sphere, is at Reading in the flesh. He’s been there all along. Between the lines, he was kept under wraps until they knew if we three would co-operate.’
‘Good God,’ said Sage. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘I’m not. We are to be rehabilitated, and they’ve hired the great Norman Soong to do the job. He’s taking us on a goodwill mission to East Anglia, which will be recorded, view to immediate global release, with Joe Muldur, and—’
Fiorinda and Sage were gaping, bright-eyed, in relief and disbelief.
‘Wait, before you start celebrating. And Toby Starborn.’
‘
What
—?’
‘You heard me, the one and only Toby Starborn, immix artist and Fiorinda stalker. I don’t understand it either. I was spinning out by that stage,’ (he flashed on piled bodies, blots of dark blood, he was not going to share the Memorial Hall). ‘I could have missed stuff, I dunno what his role is. We’re to do concerts at a couple of the big camps, to win hearts and minds, presumably with plenty of protection but it will not be a military incursion.’
‘Is that all?’ said Sage, acutely. ‘No, er, information gathering on the side?’
‘Spying on the resistance?’ Ax shrugged. ‘Maybe. Except we’ll be on a leash, and the actives not likely to trust us. So that’s the offer. If we accept, and Norman gives us a good report, the Reich is back in business. I said yes, was I right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yes,’ said Fiorinda.
Elation quickly faded. They sat in silence, collaborators in earnest.
‘What’s he like?’ wondered Fiorinda, ‘Norman Soong?’
The good malt bubbled in Ax’s blood, he was overcome by her beauty in the moonlight, with her blanket cloaked around her. ‘Colourful. Ebullient. You’ll find out. He’s going to put you back where you deserve to be sweetheart.’
‘Oh, come on. We have other things to think about.’
Sage looked at Ax, Ax looked at Sage. Her name in lights, that’s on the list.
‘Ax,’ said Sage, earnestly. ‘She’s
pregnant
.’
‘Oh my God. You’re
not
going to leave me behind!’
‘We fucking for definite are not,’ Ax agreed, fiercely. ‘I remember what happened last time you stayed safe at home. We’ll think of something.’
‘Do we have to tell them? When does this trip happen? I don’t show yet if I dress carefully, I can wrap up warm and I’m eating like a herd of pigs. I could get away with being just fat, for a few more weeks—’
Fat
was a crazy exaggeration, but they kept quiet on that.
‘Almost at once. Within the next month, I’m sure.’
‘Then it can be done!’
‘She’ll have to skip the bikini pageant,’ said Sage, grinning.