Authors: Gwyneth Jones
‘So you will not see him again?’
Xifeng looked into her English tea cup. ‘Not in the way you mean.’
Wang knew he could tease her: she liked to be teased about Ax Preston. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to arrange a yearly meeting, between the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd.’
‘Nonsense. I value him purely as my guru.’ She put her head on one side and contemplated, with a reminiscent smile that broke into her three-cornered grin.
‘What is it?’
‘Little do you know. He has orgasms as long as a woman’s.’
‘Hah! I knew there was something practical in your choice!’
‘But I
do
value him as a guru,’ said Xifeng, soberly, leaning back in her chair with a sigh, the cup warming her hands. It was chilly in the Rivermead offices, as was their rule on campaign. No self-indulgent waste of power.
‘So do I,’ agreed Wang. ‘He’s a remarkable person.’
‘He has partners and he loves them, Wang. They are always on his mind. It’s better so, I need the guru far more than I need the lover.’
They spoke of Fiorinda and her Volunteer Initiative, of the Minister for Gigs and his covert work ethic; very satisfied with their protégées. A clerical officer arrived to deliver some documents. The man was respectfully keen to depart, which roused their curiosity. They told him to wait in the outer office, they might want to question him. Alone again, they frowned at each other. Hand-copied documents, kept out of the system and delivered person to person, meant something was hot.
The documents were the Pernicious Delusion Screening results for a handful of Ax’s associates. A young woman, Virginia D., had apparently been tagged for further appraisal. They looked for a reason and found it in her medical records.
‘Let’s get the clerk in here and ask him what this is about.’
‘No,’ said Xifeng, touching the thumbnail headshot of Virginia D. ‘Have you no eyes? That’s Cherry Dawkins.’
‘I see. Original name, Virginia. The Powerbabe has a sense of humour.’
Wang went to the door and told the clerical officer that he could go.
They checked the identity, in the hope of finding some trivial mistake. But it was undoubtedly Cherry Dawkins, no mere associate: one of the Few. A very pretty young woman, with velvety dark skin, fine eyes; she wore her crisp hair
au naturel
, shorn close, but not shaven. She was twenty-seven. She played saxophone in the Snake Eyes Big Band, which was lead by her boyfriend, Rob Nelson. Ax’s deputy.
Xifeng approved of the Powerbabes. They were sexy, of course, but they were hard-working, right-thinking artists, not greedy half-clad prostitutes.
The problem was a biometric scan taken covertly in London, before the Few were allowed to travel to Sussex for the Ashdown Festival. It had held bad news for Virginia D. ‘Here, our pretty black girl had the White Death,’ said Wang. ‘She was not informed, only the machines knew it. He set the second, disturbing record beside the first. ‘Here, a few weeks later, according to another scan, she didn’t.’
Biometric scans were endless, the vast majority unseen by human eye. Cherry Dawkins’ phantom tuberculosis had gone completely unnoticed until the Pernicious Delusion vetting discovered it. They noticed, belatedly, that the documents they’d been handed had no provenance. No departmental seal.
‘What’s going on here?’ demanded Wang. ‘Who among us, what kind of fool would be attempting, in this clumsy way, to discredit Ax Preston?’
They both thought of the same name.
‘Wait,’ said Xifeng. ‘We should investigate this, you and I.’
‘Shall I trace and clean up the paper trail?’
‘Yes. But let’s also make sure the trouble is not real.’
The Chinese knew precisely what had happened at Vireo Lake. Pentagon scientists, ignoring the stark implications of the new neuroscience, and the dire warnings of the Zen Self experimenters, had recruited neuronauts with measurable psychic ability (and falsely ‘testing as stable otherwise’, a contradiction in terms indeed). The A-team had, collectively, broken the mind/matter barrier, becoming plenipotent in information space, and committed a terrible yet principled act. They had paid the price predicted by the theorists and died immediately afterwards, hopelessly insane. Scans taken at the moment of their death showed the damage to the frontal lobes one would expect in savagely advanced schizophrenia.
Rufus O’Niall had been a rare monster, a threat unlikely to arise again. Vireo Lake had proved that the real danger was the slight, fickle, almost untestable ‘magic’ power that could be used to fuel another A-team. China had started screening for ‘A-team candidates’ immediately. In time Li Xifeng planned to make this screening routine for all her subjects. So far only PLA recruits, detainees, criminals, and candidates for public office were covered—apart from cases where suspicion had been aroused (recalcitrants, oracles and magicians, mediums, fortune-tellers, faith-healers). Investigation began with a thorough psychosocial vetting, and a cognitive scan hidden in a medical check-up. If cause for concern was found, objective testing was applied. Torture and forcible desexing followed a positive result, without exception: a necessary cruelty. Torture was known to bring latent psychic power out of hiding, and the link between sexual potency and ‘magic’ was proven.
Counterculturals at Reading and elsewhere had been desexed, dead or alive, as a precaution. Toby Starborn had suffered the lesser penalty. He had not, in fact, been punished for his connection with the Second Chamber. His affiliations and his artworks had given grounds for suspicion, but he’d been doomed by his brain’s response to the drug called ‘snapshot’. He was a precursor type. Psychic activity
above
the ‘precursor type’ level identified by the Pentagon meant immediate execution. This potency had never yet been found, but Xifeng would sign the order, retrospectively, without hesitation, man, woman or child, should the need arise.
There must never be another A-team.
The screening was highly sensitive. China was still claiming that the A-team event hadn’t happened: they could not admit to making use of notorious methods. Officially, precursor types were punished purely for the taint of delusion. If they survived they did not reveal the details of their interrogation, under pain of death. Of course the secret files were instantly accessible to Elder Sister. They went looking, using Wang’s desk screen.
‘Faith-healing,’ said Wang, ‘is generally innocent. Mysterious, but harmless.’
‘Spontaneous remission in TB is commonplace,’ remarked Xifeng. ‘The bacillus retreats, without antibiotics; with rest and good diet. I expect that’s what we’ll find. Either that, or a simple clerical error.’
But when they examined the evidence, it was damning.
General Wang watched her quiet profile as she read the screen and was stirred by awe. Decency and forbearance were so much the first laws of Elder Sister’s rule that one forgot this other, equally necessary face.
She is death,
he thought. She wields merciless, arbitrary power: and that’s what we need, that’s the way it has to be.
When The Map Is Unrolled, The Dagger Is Revealed
The day that Wang and Li Xifeng investigated their leaked document, there was a Techno Green Utopian Futures conference in Central Hall. It was big, it was chaotic, it was full of organisers running around panicking. It would have been making Crisis Europe veterans feel young again, except that the violence was missing: that vibrant sense of
violence
which had marked Dissolution Summer in dull little England, and even more so the legendary Flood Countries Conference, when Celtic
vs
Techno-Green fire-fights had enlivened the stolid burghers of Amsterdam.
‘Of course the absence is an illusion. Violence has simply been contained once more, packed away in olive-green uniform. It is still the spectre at our feast.’
‘You think that sounds clever, don’t you, Alain? Go on, convince me we’d get more done if there was a few mad eco-warriors with guns in here—’
Big George towered over the little Breton to the point of absurdity, as if they had been bred under different atmospheric pressures, but Alain was not intimidated.
‘It was thrilling. This is a school outing, only missing the head girl.’
‘Ah, but she’s with us in spirit,’ remarked a
Movie Sucré
hench-person. ‘Behold, the amazing guitar-man rides again.’
Ax had emerged into the foyer outside Great Hall, in conversation with Lucy Wasserman, the pair and their entourage hedged around by mediafolk. Alain watched the parade go by, with a grin of malign sympathy.
‘The stuffed and deliciously mounted Mr Preston. We should doff our hats, as to a funeral cortège. Nothing is
getting done
here, George. We are décor, we are relegated. Go on, find yourself some hymn-singing. I believe it’s in the Quiet Room.’
‘Don’t look to me for sympathy,’ said George. ‘The sound of political activists faffing around doing nothing but talk is music to my fucking ears, an’ I hope it lasts.’
‘Lie back and enjoy it, George.’
George had Peter Stannen in tow, like a basking shark attended by a solemn pilot fish. They took themselves off: Alain smiled fondly after them, and looked around for further prey. He had generously appointed himself gadfly, since Mr Preston was on prefect duty and Sage was fully occupied as a geekish handyman. The live-path for virtual delegates had been misaligned, they were trapped in the Great Hall, fighting with the fixed seating, and nobody knew how to undo the damage. The absudistes congratulated themselves on having come to London in flesh and blood. But Eurostar running again, my God. It really tells you that something is over.
Flood Country Coastlands
:
Does Time Stand Still?
Islam Without Oil
.
The Camp System: Models For Regeneration…
Haiku ac Hokku Gymraeg Gweithdy
.
Wolf Culture, Concentrated Protein Culture, Invisible Turbines Laid Bare
(likely to be a slanging match). From the mindless amorphous jiggling of this kind of soup, in times of revolution, new governance arises that may last for hundreds of years. How can it happen? Nobody knows. It’s a
where does the weirdness go
problem.
Fiorinda wandered around with Coz, pondering these mysteries and looking for a carpeted place where the baby could crawl without getting her head stepped on. Or try her new trick, which was walking. Furniture, I need furniture she can hold onto. Ruthie Maynor said,
an early walker is a peck of trouble
. Unclear if this was ancient North Cornwall lore, or simply observation. She found Allie in the Great Hall, with Walter Ridley. The Cumbrian centaur was paying his respects, in wonderfully Victorian style. For he had devoted his youth to the Cause of Science, never had a lady love. Sound in wind and limb, Shield Ring millionaire, lovely beard… She left them to it, and went looking for somebody else she knew. Allie could always walk away, what was the virtual centaur going to do? The afternoon sessions were closing, the only people trying to catch her eye were punters, and
I
think I’m on a break. Ax and Alain were sitting on the great stairs, with a bunch of Île Saint Louis Très Stupid Costumes Équipage.
‘Have you tried the Quiet Room?’ suggested Ax. ‘That might be good.’
‘Isn’t there a Methodist strand in there? Cack said there was hymn-singing.’
The Stupid Costumes sniggered, for no good reason. Cosoleth cried, ‘A’tz! A’tz! A’tz! Eh! Eh! Eh!’ (all the grasp of the English language she’ll ever need), and fought to get out of Fiorinda’s arms.
‘I’ll take her,’ said Ax. ‘She’ll be a useful accessory. But you owe me.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To break up
Islam Without Oil
. They’re talking about The Great Chastisement, which, as you know, refers to an event that didn’t happen.’
‘You’d think the mullahs could hold a simple idea like that in their heads.’
Ax left with the baby, Fiorinda sat down.
‘No wonder the English and the Chinese ended up in bed together,’ remarked Alain sweetly. ‘Our liberators could have written the book on
Alice in Wonderland
.’
Ribald speculation about Ax’s special duties was rife, and there was nothing to be done about that. The Chinese didn’t seem in the least worried, and that’s what matters, so Fiorinda was cool. Alain, you can fuck off—
‘Maybe that’s why she says we three think like Chinese.’
‘Whereas Absurdism is not nonsense. Absurdism is formal, disciplined, the Satanism of the rational, the Lord’s Prayer recited backwards—’
The crowd streamed by, in all its colourful dress codes, in and out of halls raised to celebrate the revolution of Wesleyan Methodism, a hundred-odd years ago. ‘People will look back,’ said Fiorinda softly, ‘if there are such things as people, five hundred years from now, and it will be like rings on a tree stump, always the same, always heading for this. Everything we did, everything that happened and seemed so vital, so terrifiying, so much our own, was just a last little fractal iteration on the long, long rise of the World State—’
‘Or perhaps not,’ Alain pointed out, tetchily. ‘Everybody seems to have forgotten that Antarctica exists. Nobody has convinced me that Li Xifeng is really in charge throughout Africa. Also the trifling matter of South America, and those Feds.’ He sighed, soulfully. ‘Ah, Fiorinda. If youth only knew. The opportunities we wasted! Don’t you wish this was Dissolution Summer?’
She was thinking about being a global megastar, and rejecting the idea with relief. Bird, gilded cage, had enough of that thanks. But a music career of her own design would be brilliant, was it possible?
‘No, I don’t. I thought I’d crashed a very stupid party, full of nutcases, where I didn’t belong, and it turned out to be my life. Just what happens to every teenager, except for the blood and the dead bodies. And the weird stuff that didn’t happen.’
‘Swiftly, her lyrics pass from the personal to the universal. What are you doing after this, beautiful Fiorinda?’
Uncanny. Try to flirt with her, and immediately one or other of them will materialise. The former Aoxomoxoa collapsed in a gangling heap, tipped his fleecy yellow head back and closed his eyes. ‘Thank God, geek-free. Just lemme lie here.’