Authors: Gwyneth Jones
‘It’s okay. I got scared and decided not to bother.’
With the door flaps of their shelter tightly laced, the Triumvirate held a birthday celebration, having banished Joe to sleep with Norman and Toby for a change. They presented Ax with a mink-lined parka, loving gift from Warren Fen, and a willow-weaving from the children, appliquéd with animals and birds. Sage gave him a little hare, carved from a hazel root (in Chinese astrology the big cat was a rabbit; or hare). Fiorinda gave him an amber and gold dragon, no bigger than the first joint of her thumb. It was ancient, Inner Asian, and undoubtedly plunder. (The battered streets of London were littered with plunder-sellers; how else do you spend your Chinese pocket money?) They dreamed they were in Sage’s cottage in Cornwall, a fire burning low in the hearth; sweet lost things. ‘One day it’ll happen,’ said Fiorinda, darkly. We’ll settle down to live happily ever after, and then we’ll
really
fall apart.’
The baby seemed to be trampling itself a clearing in the forest of her belly. ‘Will somebody please, please take a piss for me?’ The brutes would not stir, though Sage sleepily offered to fetch the pot into bed. Eech, I have my standards.
She crept out wearing Ax’s jumper, touched the visionboard, touched the Gibson’s case, clutched a handful of her bag to feel the saltbox. Ah, civilised values, a pisspot with a lid. Out there in the cold, a glimmer attracted her. She groped to the door flaps and made a peephole. One of the missionaries was sitting outside their shelter, serene bulwark against a frieze of burning stars. He seemed to be reading a scroll, by means of a tiny light fastened next to his eye. Was that a Chinese Martial Arts Telepathy Headset. Wonder what kind of weapons they keep under those robes?
What if Ax was right, about who they were and why they were here?
What the fuck would that imply?
The monk turned and looked her way. His head was Ax’s head, a long dead Ax, with a hole in his dry skull.
Nonsense,
murmured Fiorinda, and crept back to the warm burrow. The inside world invades the outside; so what, I’m not impressed.
They passed between shards of the broken road bridge on the A10, left the empty quarter and entered a populated countryside above the floods—where ordinary people were trying to live normal lives, and the Chinese invasion was a distant disaster. Here Swamp MC divided themselves between the gangs. The passengers and the military stayed out of sight: the soldiers crouched like potatoes under stretched tarps, Peace Tour personnel barricaded behind boxes in the night shelters. Norman handed over wads of money to the native guides, and bitched about it. The Triumvirate reminisced about how Volunteer Initiative labour had rescued the waterways, including managed rivers like the Little Ouse, under very difficult conditions. The Flood Countries Conference. The Sea Defence works of David Sale’s government; running battles with the Gaians who felt nature must take its course.
Brandon and Thetford were traversed, with no worse trouble than a few free enterprise ‘checkpoints’. At Rushford junction they joined the Redgrave Cut, another Reich project, the missing link in the all-England navigable network. Ah, glory days.
Maybe the Chinese were impressed. The Swamp kids, when they popped into the shelters for a warm, were indifferent. They lived in the present, a world where water was the normal way to travel, ten klicks an hour was racy, and energy audit was the unalterable law. ‘Did you know,’ said Nel, importantly. ‘We’re comin’ up to a weird place where, when you get close to it, Diss appears.’
By the fourth nightfall they had reached the Waveney river. The kids strapped the lighters to dead stumps in a stand of alders, made the horses comfortable as possible, and consulted earnestly with Chin, the pilot of the soldiers’ gang. They had only a few words of common language, but he was a river man. Swamp’s almanac of marks and distances for had no entries for Rainbow Bridge, though the camp was there on the map. No times, no tides, nothing. It was worrying. Norman and Toby hid in their shelter to eat delicacies (the others presumed). The rest of the company, including the monks, messed on ancient tinned food, heated up and served with sweet black tea: almost relaxed with each other in the camaraderie of the shared epic.
Sage went out to stretch his legs, not an idle expression on this trip. The long hours of being squashed like a bug in that shelter had driven him nuts. In the gleam of light from the boats he saw Toby, with his fur rug, crouched on a shelf of roots above the water. He would have retreated, not to intrude on a desolate privacy, but the attraction between the unlucky genius and the river was palpable. Sage hunkered on his heels under the tree. I’m sorry, he thought, and I don’t pretend I can help, but right now it would be plain fucking awkward if you went over the side.
‘Hey, Toby.’
Toby looked round. ‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing, really. Mind if I join you?’
‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ whispered Toby, his profile traced by the polished blackness of the water. ‘Immix is all I lived for, I should have died.’
‘You don’t need immix. You can still be a digital artist, tha’s not banned.’
‘Fuck off. What do
you
know.’
You’re absolutely right, thought Sage. He stayed where he was, however, offering a couple more inane gambits, until Toby grasped that he was not going to be left alone with his thoughts, gathered his rug around him and returned to the boats.
In the middle of the night, or so it seemed, Swamp MC were shaking everyone awake. No, bad guys had not arrived. The tide was about to turn, with a breeze off the land. There was a free ride! The kids’ urgency infected even Norman and Toby. Shelters were stowed, belongings secured, space cleared for the horses. Masts were shipped, tackle freed, lanterns hoisted; snowflakes blundered like moths into the light. Gator was led on board, and undertook the manoeuvre with calm. The bay resisted, soldiers hauling and yelling at him in Cantonese and
putonghua
that he surely didn’t want to be left behind; he gave way in the end. Frosty cast off, Nel steered for midstream. The kids and Sage raised the square sails in the first two lighters, behind them the soldiers were doing the same. A red sun rose in an ochre sky, scattering the veil of snow. Suddenly the river was alive, no longer passive as asphalt. They flew along, maybe breaking the ten klicks barrier, in a cacophony of rollicking chains.
Rationally it wasn’t much of a return for the upheaval and the loss of sleep, emotionally it was a fine charge—
‘Do they know how to stop?’
Norman was hopping at Ax’s shoulder in the lead boat: hands tucked into his cuffs, the scarf wrapped round his raincape snood giving him a head the size of a pumpkin. ‘What?’ yelled Ax. ‘Nah, the only way to put the brake on these things is by leaping onto the bank and hauling backwards, haven’t you noticed?’
‘But, but what are we going to do? We’ve passed the marker!’
‘What marker?’
‘
There it is
! There’s another one! We’ll miss the creek!’
Someone had installed a sign on the bank of the Waveney: a hoop of coloured bands rising high above the reeds. Ax laughed. ‘Far out, man! I don’t know. I’ve no idea, Norman. You better talk to your native guides.’
Swamp MC had spotted the rainbows. Loryan galloped to the back of the gang, waving and yelling at the soldiers, some distance behind. The sails tumbled, Nel swung the lead boat broadside, Bone and Frosty raced up and down, clearing the thwarts like hurdlers, fending off. The teenagers raised a cheer when the turn was made. The boats kept on moving fast, there was a current. The landscape had blurred into white.
‘How far is it along?’ shouted Frosty. ‘Where can we strap, what do we do?’
Norman shook his pumpkin head.
‘Oh, shit, there’s a lock, the gates are open, fuck, it’s a fucking
weir
!’
The lead boat tipped and fell as if it was falling over the edge of the world.
Nothing to do but fling yourself down and hold on, praying that nothing precious had been left loose in that pre-dawn scramble. A thundering, elephantine, white-water rafting moment, and they had survived. Shadow fell across them, the soldiers’ gang poured down the weir: engulfing them, the boats sloshing with icy water, dismasted, fouling each other. The lower level of the creek was a fast-moving drain, and dead ahead this drain was rushing under a raised barrier in a wall of concrete. They barely had time to register a painted rainbow, springing from cloud to cloud, or the merry welcome message looping over it: MAY CONTAIN NUTS. Darkness engulfed them. A clangour of metal and the light behind was cut off.
Haha!
HAHAHAHA!
Giant laughter grew and echoed, disembodied faces bobbed about, luminous green and orange, flickering red eyes and mouths. Lights leapt up, big blazing white electric lamps that had to cost a fortune. They were in a channel cut through the floor of a blood-stained concrete cave: set with pillars, decorated with faded numerals. Ax took hold of his Gibson, and caught Sage and Fiorinda doing the same, getting a grip on the household gods. He glanced towards the tunnel entrance, yeah, the barrier had been dropped into place.
Monks, rockstars, teenagers stared at each other.
Masked revellers, directed by roars from a loudhailer, gaffed Swamp’s lighters to the side. Chin’s gang had not been so lucky. They had two boats capsized, the other two in confusion; soldiers struggling in the water. But the crowd was all over the Peace Tour, there was nothing they could do for their escort ‘Thank you all!’ cried Norman. ‘What a wonderful entrance, superb, we thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Let’s all calm down,
briefly—
’ His attitude was a credit to him, but it was far too late. The mad crowd seemed friendly, but they were in charge. Gator was led off, despite Frosty’s frantic protests. Boxes and cases were tossed from hand to hand and vanished. The last that Norman’s company saw of their soldiers, a huge character in a scarlet tutu, leather gaiters and a gimp mask, was taking a fire-axe to Chin’s bowsprit chains, his strokes guided by a screaming, giggling posse of gauze-winged fairies.
Rainbow Bridge Q&A
Where is the Arena?
The Arena’s on the top floor
You get on stage naked or not at all.
You will NOT be sky-clad, decorations will be worn
If your décor looks like clothing you won’t get on.
If you aren’t stupidly cool you won’t get on.
If you don’t go on stage you are nothing.
Nobody will listen, nobody will believe in you.
Sage and Fiorinda had left Ax and Norman negotiating over the fate of the soldiers, and changed into rockstar finery. They went walkabout, checking out the populace. Rainbow Bridge, if this floor was typical, was even more crowded than Warren Fen—and the campers liked to be out and about, in their bedraggled indoor world. They edged through a
Night Of The Zombies
crowd: flashing smiles, fielding personal questions, pressing flesh, and signing anything thrust at them; mainly anatomy. The advertising hadn’t lied, it was permanent party time here. Fiorinda’s cloth of gold, Sage’s sharp suit, half-hidden under winter coats, were matched by jumble sale pizzazz on every side: lurid feather boas and glitter body paint. Codpieces, penis gourds, tasselled pasties; ghoulish adornment for slack flesh and booze-scoured faces. Somehow it didn’t help that the temple of consumerism had been ruthlessly knocked out of shape, the wide malls overwhelmed by clumsy partitioning, the acres of plate glass vanished. The floor was sticky and thick with evil wastes, the chill, stuffy air smelled of a defeated municipal swimming pool: disinfectant, faeces and urine.
You had to be glad there were very few kids around. Unless there was some really hideous reason for that…
‘It’s functional,’ said Fiorinda, thinking positive. ‘They have light and power. And they don’t seem to be starving. I wonder how they’re supplied.’
The Chinese military authorities had been co-operating with the Volunteer Initiative, to get basic provisions to the state camps. But Rainbow Bridge had been private sector, and it was a long way from the Occupied Zone.
‘I could hazard a guess… How were they supposed to support themselves, I mean originally? What did they do?’
‘Nothing much. My father didn’t expect his camps to be viable, remember.’
They had reached a food court. They bought black tea at the counter, found a table, and looked at the flyer that had been handed to them, very earnestly, by a sagging Miss Whiplash. They couldn’t figure out what it meant. All they could do was stare at the drop-out hordes problem, in its intractable ugliness. So many people, millions of them, over the whole of Europe; fallen out of the world in the Economic Crash, and unable to find their way back. Scholars of these years compared the phenomenon to the scourge of the Black Death. Utterly different from the tides of purposeful flight, South to North, East to West, the drop-outs weren’t struggling, they were lost. No nation wanted them, no state needed them, there was no teat of cheap food and finery for them to suck at anymore, and maybe never would be again. No model of recovery had the age of surplus coming back.
Warren Fen seemed like a perfect toy town from this vantage. The tea was sweet and foul. Nihilism rose up, hard to resist. ‘Maybe this is what
we
looked like to the suits,’ mused Fiorinda. ‘Back in Dissolution Summer, when we were running around trashing supermarkets and fast food joints, hooked on rebellion.’
‘You could be right.’
‘At last I understand why they were
scared
of us.’ She smiled for the faces, the eager hungry faces, the demons she couldn’t feed, doomed hecatombs of them. ‘You know what I’m thinking, Sage?’
‘Yeah,’ said the bodhisattva, with a bleak, evil grin worthy of the living skull. ‘We should have just let Rufus get on with it.’
who would have thought death had undone so many…
Joe Muldur appeared, seeming like an optical illusion, as if all the faces that stare at you so avidly must start to look familiar. ‘My oh my, you two look cheerful.’ He dragged up a chair. The food court was stuffed, but Sage and Fiorinda were getting respect, they had space. ‘What a place… I met an old-timer who told me it’s never been right. It’s built on a old native graveyard, you know.’