Rainbow Bridge (46 page)

Irresistibly, and maybe because they did not use the archaic
thees
and
thas
, the women had seemed like pawns in this game, dressing up to please their menfolk, living in the real world in their heads. Not so. Louisa, the stately matron with her crown of neo-Victorian braids, trembled with proud emotion.

‘Incidentally, we found vital armament workers among your drop-outs, Ms Slater… Oh, believe me, we understand your tactics. The first objective is to get the 2
^nd
AMID army off our soil, and you are
magnificently
close to achieving that. When that goal is achieved, we can start to fight back.
That’s
why we didn’t shut down: no time must be lost, and we knew they could not penetrate the sleeve. They have seemed invincible, but they are not. In the name of God, your God and mine, Mr Preston, we shall make a stand. Allies will gather. We can defeat her!’

Ax realised, astonished, that he was tearing-up. The dank closet with its stained wallpaper, the great fission plant out there, had taken on a piercing, doubled, meaning. The skin around his left eye stung as if the inkwork was fresh, the shame and pain of the invasion raw again. This room was England, and Louisa looked like England, a madwoman locked up in this dirty place, imagining paradise. He had no choice, he had to desert her, leave her to die alone. It’s the grief I must not feel. It’s the b-loc, it’s emotional stuff when you’re not accustomed—

‘Well, you’ll have to shut down now,’ he said. ‘We’re about to do something that will blow your cover wide open. And there are other considerations. We’ll explain, but can we get out of b-loc? I think we’ve seen enough.’

‘Could we make that soon?’ whispered Allie. Commercial b-loc masks the virtual self with an avatar hologram, but this was the raw version. The Allie in the Sellafield corridor was losing it. She was going to revert to the naked goblin of the somato-sensory cortex. The others would see her swelling and shrinking, huge lips and tongue and genitals, a humiliation she couldn’t stand.

‘
Creation itself will be set free
,’ murmured Julius, gazing at the glory of his garden, his old brain slow to catch up with immediate events, ‘
from its bondage to decay, and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God
.
In this hope we are saved
.’ He looked around, blinking. ‘Aren’t we going in? So much to show them.’

‘Not right now,’ said Sage, compassionately. ‘Maybe another time.’

They left the contraband in its hiding place. When the closet was closed the wall was blank, not a hairline: which was probably another
sleeve
effect, direct cortical illusion. Simon took up the lamp, and led the way downstairs. An anxious servant was waiting in the hall. Ax glimpsed the rest of the pack, peeping through a half-open door. He saw that bonded or not they were in the loop, and ready to die for the Shield Ring right now, if need be. So shame on you, Ax Preston.

‘All’s well,’ said Louisa. ‘I think we won’t eat dinner, Thomas, I’m so sorry, but it’s rather late. Could you bring coffee, the liqueur trolley, and the second dessert?’

‘Right away, Mrs Hartsfern.’

Walter handed liqueurs, specially attentive to Ms Marlowe, his gazelle; who did not notice him. The Shield Ring conspirators still had their death or glory eyes on, when the explanations started, but they became impressed. Especially when Sage reached the part about the Chinese
hacking b-loc
, an idea to strike terror here.

They agreed to comply. They would provide the tech the Triumvirate needed, and put the plant back into hibernation. They gave an estimate of how long it would take to do this safely.

‘Will tha be staying to see that we do it?’ asked Walter, on his dignity.

‘No,’ said Fiorinda, with a bleak look. ‘You’re on your own.’

They nodded, sobered. They understood.

Ax went to debrief the Chinese Observers, who were still on the Moor, occupying a fine Shield Ring pavilion. He told them the dinner party had gone well, great progress had been made. The Shield Ring leaders were reconciled to the changes they’d have to accept. In fact the masses had already been pressing them to embrace the new order… He was consumed with guilty knowledge, bristling with obvious lies, but the Chinese were fine. These guys weren’t heavyweights, they were running a PR exercise. They were expected to deliver success, and they were very happy with Ax because he had provided it. They brought out their hard liquor stash and he had to drink a few toasts: to the Landsturm, to the future of Europe. To Elder Sister, to Ax himself and his partners, to the Duck; etc.

The hardcore walkers had set out on their return journey. The last campers were enjoying goodbye parties, silly drunken games; a final round of banner fights. Sage went to pass the word to the Few. Fiorinda and Allie waited for him and Ax, in a private partition of the bar tent. A bowl of living waterlilies stood on the bentwood and wicker table, coaxed to stay open at night by the purity of the electric light, and a GM switch in their internal clocks. The Shield Ring had the power to indulge the most beautiful whims—

‘D’you remember that time?’ murmured Allie: eyes down, tracing abstracted patterns in the woven willow. ‘When no one outside our little band seemed
human
? After what we’d been through, because of the situation we were in? The group marriage, that was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke? We never talked about why, but I think it was the same for him. We were the only possible option, you know? I’d seen one boyfriend get his head blown off, I was with someone under a death sentence, but it didn’t seem like that. We were friends, not lovers. Although he was a very good lover, slick and experienced, but warm too. Really nice.’

Fiorinda nodded, and then caught herself, shamefaced.

‘’S’okay. You, Ax. He’d have loved to have sex with everyone, and all at once, that was DK. He had a collecting streak. When we split up, I was knocked out. When he was killed I was devastated. Now I don’t know what I feel.’

Ax and Sage came in. The two women looked up, their formal dresses a glowing composition: summer green and autumn wine.

‘All’s well,’ said Ax, quickly. ‘Weng Jiang had to captain a midnight volley ball team, or I’d still be necking Pearl River
bai jiu
.’

Allie stared at him, pale as Famine indeed. ‘I’m blank in my head,’ she said. ‘But my body knows. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, until I find out what happened to him. Shit, am I being a fucking nuisance? You three don’t need this.’

‘Yes we do,’ said Sage. ‘It’s your show, Allie.’

The purity of the lilies was unearthly, a message from a world that could not exist: where exquisite plenty could be had without cost, love without loss.

SHU

Conflict Gems

A first floor room in a derelict building, South London. The ground floor had once been an electrical shop, long vanished generic; long boarded up. The first floor had been occupied fairly recently. A grubby patterned rug covered the floor in the front room. There was a grill-pan that had been used as a brazier, a sack of kindling, a down-at-heel three-piece suite; tattered bedspreads tacked for curtains over the windows. The venue had no connection with the Reich. Bill and George had picked it out for anonymity, and certain digital landscape advantages. If you peered from behind the left-hand bedspread you could see a scrap of Crystal Palace Park.

‘Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant and Vengeance… My arse in butter, who started that, I would like to know, are you trying to get us busted?’

‘V
_1,
V
_2,
V
_3,
V
_4,
oh, yeah, I remember I did it, well I meant to change them.’

‘If anyone’s picking up we’re screwed anyway, Sage.’

‘Okay, so, non-random codenames are go.’

Allie watched the Heads crew setting up for the break-in; Sage in their midst, his presence distanced by the immix buffer field, and by the silver blizzard of his eyes. Wearing the coding lenses he’d brought back from Hollywood, he looked like eerily like a giant sci-fi doll. She remembered how that deliberately slowed-down Cornish accent used to set her teeth on edge. Arrogant and hammered, a prince among his courtiers, he plays the lout,
occasionally
letting slip that this is the only way he can communicate with mortal meat puppets. How I used to
hate
him. Jargon washed over her, peppered by fragments of banter in English… Fiorinda sat across from Allie, in the other armchair: feet tucked up, a gold and brown shawl wrapped round her baggy shorts and tee-shirt, untouchable as her boyfriend. She didn’t seem to know it, she would smile and talk as if she thought she was normal, but the same look of horror and bliss that she’d worn on the mountain was in her eyes. She was in that chair and also somewhere else, riding shotgun for the geeks at a speed nothing could beat; their final defence. She would be somewhere else until this was over, for better or for worse. Cosoleth slept in her basket at Fiorinda’s feet. Allie huddled her Gucci jacket around her, rubbed her cheek against the antique red leather that she loved, and thought of Virginia Woolf, hearing the sparrows talk in Greek.

DK…?

Is that you…?

The über-geeks were convinced, from the information-space evidence Sage had recovered, that Dilip had been calling Allie, person-to-person, at the moment when his b-loc signal was captured. When they’d said this meant they could send her, virtually, to wherever ‘virtual Dilip’ was being held, she had been terrified it would be Xi’an. But everything had pointed to England. This was
forbidden
, the hell-stuff the Sphere must never dare to contemplate. Elder Sister was going to have this project in her immediate control. So the geeks had invaded the AMID’s datasphere, under Fiorinda’s protection, and pinpointed a physical location.

Dilip was at Ground Zero (Dilip on a memory stick, Dilip on a hard drive?). Ax had said it would be Reading. Where else? She’s a frontline General, she does her own dirty work. Here, in England, the bodies will be buried. Sage and his brother Heads speculated casually as they worked. Can we really
blackmail
the Chinese, will they cut a deal? If they’d massacred Counterculturals anywhere else they’d kept it quiet. But they’d imposed the mind/matter tech ban globally, ripping out whole sections of new industry; and the Sphere had complied, trusting souls.

This story’s got to be a major embarrassment—

‘We was robbed,’ said Bill Trevor, Bill without Clio round his neck for a change. ‘Fuckin’ wankers, ripped us off and trashed us. If there was any justice!’

‘It would be a
Reich
fucking world right now,’ agreed George.

Cheers and applause from the crew.

‘They can live it down,’ the Minister for Gigs gave his judgement, from far away. ‘I see the propaganda campaign: Elder Sister can be trusted with forbidden tech, so China was allowed to use it, secretly, but no one else.’

‘They could make that work,’ agreed Bill.

‘Or else they play the military deterrent card,’ suggested George. ‘Easy.’

‘They can do what the fuck they like, this changes nothing about their actual position, actual dominance. It’s an issue of style. But will they shoot the messengers, or invite us onto the board? Depends how cynical you are about Elder Sister—’

‘No offence to Ax, but I am cynical as shit,’ declared Bill.

Ax was off his own mission. Rob and the Babes and the kids, Chip and Verlaine, were well away from London. It would be hard to protect them if things went badly wrong, alibi or no alibi, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, and it’s not going to happen. Cosoleth was here because there was no safer place.

All this wicked free speech… Everything we say is heard, but it doesn’t matter anymore, tonight we share the licence of the dead. Allie closed her eyes.

It wasn’t Xi’an. She concentrated on feeling relieved.

Peter left his desk. He sat on the saggy sofa and asked Fiorinda what if she spotted something that had already slipped.

‘Could fix it retroactively? Make it so it hadn’t happened?’