Band of Gypsys (10 page)

Roxane had stayed at home when the rest of them went to California, and this had opened a slight distance, which didn’t seem to be growing less. It was as if s/he still believed in a world where the leaders of the revolution sat around a circle of schoolroom tables. The Three announced the latest disaster, outlined their desperate plan, and somehow another battle was won, somehow victory stayed in prospect—

The Reich’s survival had become a war of fixed fronts. Nothing moved.

‘’Fraid tha’s not relevant, Rox,’ said Sage, politely. ‘It’s Fred Eiffrich’s problem, not ours. The Internet Commissioners jus’ thought we’d like to know.’

‘
Discredit
them?’ muttered Verlaine. ‘My God. Sounds like nailing Al Capone for tax fraud. Rox, you don’t get it. I still wake sweating and blubbering, from dreams where the Lavoisiens succeeded in their selfless project—’

Ax cut him off by reaching for the remote. ‘Well, you’ve all seen it, and there’s nothing more to say, so I’m going to destroy this before it gets us into more trouble. I hope you’ve memorised your favourite moments, Sage.’

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

They did not step down from the train, but it was supposed to look as though they did. Their b-loc avatars arrived in a Reading Station VIP lounge, out of sight, and met the public on the forecourt. Paper-flower-bedecked open cars carried them to Richfield Avenue gate, where they disembarked and strolled through the crush, under arches twined with living vines of rose and honeysuckle. There were banners flying and drummers drumming; a cordon of minders gathered gifts and messages, and obscured the fact that the leaders of the Reich could not be touched.

Soon all celebrities will make personal appearences this way!

‘
Hey Ax, hey, hey, Ax
! What d’you think of Glasto pre-empting you?’

The Mayday festival at Glastonbury had opened at sunset on Beltane eve.

‘Dunno about the Beltane thing, it’s the first of May to me. But that’s Glasto: any old fakery that’ll extract money from weekend-hippies.’

‘
Hey, hey Sage! Hey, Fio!
This way!
How about leaking something about Toby’s Masque??’

Traditionally, the secrecy of the finale was fiercely protected—

‘Not as good jokes as mine use’ter have,’ grinned Sage.

‘I’m appearing a concept,’ confided Fiorinda, capriciously awarding this questioner her most fabulous smile. ‘It’s very, very moving.’

They reached the Palace of Rivermead, multi-coloured lo-rise Gaudi cathedral, built for Ax by the Counterculture’s chief architect, in the glory days. This was Ax’s citadel, which had fallen to the enemy: occupied by Rufus through the terrible Green Nazi winter, and here were the victors, returning to their own. It seemed there should have been wild applause or a solemn fanfare. Instead there was only silence, sudden and complete, quenching that un-Reich-like pap-storm.

The Triumvirate mounted the steps by the Dead Cars sculpture; the Few close behind. The Second Chamber couldn’t steal and rewrite everything.

They passed through the flower-wreathed doors, masked by minders, and disappeared. Upstairs there was a VIP reception, but the b-loc avatars wouldn’t be attending due to a technical hitch in the live path. Mr Preston’s family were there instead (except for Ax’s mother, and the new baby, who had to stay back in the fortress for security reasons…) If truth be known, Ax might have conceded this point, if the suits had pushed a little harder; and if they hadn’t been so determined to rub his nose in the hostage situation. His girl had won her lonely battle. He would hate this dump forever, but he could have walked into the slimy reception smiling.

If truth be known, he’d been tempted to ditch the whole b-loc idea, because he
needed
this big day. But the last thing he could afford right now was a trail of suspicious sudden concessions; so never give an inch.

The split-screen effect wasn’t painful. It was hardly noticeable, because consciousness is a point, not a line: still there was a collective sigh of relief as the Few lost the remote site. Rob and Felice reached to tug off their headsets.

‘Sorry,’ came Sage’s voice in their ears. ‘No pass-outs.’

Their other selves had warped to a different location on the live-path. They were in Reading arena, standing on uncannily green grass, in the central piazza of some fairground, outdoors, Bohemian city. The air smelt of spilled beer and burned beet-sugar plastic, and roiled with conflicting musics. Hordes of campers, plus further hordes of ticketed punters, swirled around: body paint and fancy-dress glowing in the cool sunshine. There stood Red Stage with its towers, and the tiny figures of some hapless early band. Orange Stage, Yellow Stage (also known as Scary Stage, because of its accident record); the cobalt cone of the Blue Lagoon. Violet Alley with a new crop of rides, the Green Room where the comics must still be standing up; the smoky, jazzy, Mood Indigo tent. Only the eau-de-nil geodesic dome of the Zen Self tent was missing—its conspicuous absence dispelling a fleeting, rather horrifying, impression that they’d died, and this was their eternal home. The avatars looked around, and saw that they were visible. Heads were turning, elbows nudging. They saw each other, just slightly transparent, clothed in stagecraft holograms; in characteristic finery.

The dress-up was necessary. Unless you took some vicious drugs, your b-loc appearance at the remote site could revert to the self-image held in the somatosensory cortex, in a lapse of concentration: a goblin shape, all hands and mouth and genitals.

Sage wore his sand-coloured suit, with the glitter of gold in it (in reality, long defunct), and Aoxomoxoa’s living skull mask. He felt the ethereal tug of the mask’s presence, and saw beside him a sixteen year old boy, not very tall, Celtic tattooing around his left eye. Making a touching, futile effort to look like he did this all the time… A familiar joy rushed upon him: the sheer delight of seeing those mountains of crunched numbers turned inside out,
all this
… The freedom to
play
with these momentous toys! Did I say my rockstar career was over? Musta been on drugs.

‘Now, where’s my band?’ drawled Aoxomoxoa, hands in his pockets, plunging gladly into the forgotten mode. ‘I
know
I left them round here somewhere.’

The Heads, who were hovering around the mark, counting everybody safely in, and shielding their arrival, grinned broadly. Skull masked, they couldn’t help it.

They were not free. A shimmer in the air, on either side of their remote-site field of view, warned them of their limits. Anyone who strayed was liable to vanish. But the live path was cunningly constructed: it looked as if they were. They mingled with the crowds in graded backstage corrals, strolled across the arena, joined the camp-councillors in the Blue Lagoon. Their touch was thistledown, they could neither eat nor drink; their mood had a tendency to break up, like a bad phone signal, into uncertainty and dread—but they leant on Aoxomoxoa’s exuberant energy, just like long ago, until confidence and ease became genuine.

The backstage B-Z listers were very touched that Ax and the Few were socialising with them instead of the grandees:
and
making a stand for creative rights. The techno-hippie camp councillors were thrilled, and talked of having the whole site live for next year. Ax enlightened them firmly about the cost, and was taken aback by the starry-eyed gaze of a certain hairy apparatchik—

‘What’s up with you, Joffrey—?’

‘You sound
just like Ax
,’ exclaimed the editor of
Weal
, proud-to-be-annoying hippie vidzine. He must have missed Ax terribly: the Second Chamber simply ignored opposition in the media, except when arresting journalists or destroying an issue.

‘Well, thanks. Oh, yeah, and while I remember. I saw “
Ax is back and he has a little (hit) list
”. With the border of thorny roses, SA80s and the coffins? Fucking cut that out. I have no hit list. And don’t give me any arse about the “freedom of the Press”. I don’t believe in it. Not until, if ever, you lot grow up—’

‘JUST like Ax,’ sighed Joffrey, dewy as a kid meeting Santa.

They’d been looking forward to this b-loc Mayday with varying degrees of tech-failure terror, existential unease, and bitter resentment of the Second Chamber. But the blow they’d just suffered, that nobody else knew about, ignited them. They were manic: lucid dreamers, riding the wild disaster-wave as they had so often done before. They were deep in the past, bemoaning the terrible fate of having to go on stage in this crap novelty form: hologram shadows playing virtual instruments, probably get
canned,
and serve us right—

Chip, Verlaine and Cherry lay on their backs, gazing up at the sky, insouciantly indifferent to the fascinated glances of the crowd. ‘That thing Fiorinda said about the Drumbeg event?’ remarked Chip. ‘At the Neurobomb meeting?’

‘What thing?’

‘I shall quote.
When perfect “fusion” is reached, when a coherent, solved, human self becomes one with the state of all states, then it cuts both ways, and the state of all states becomes a conscious mind
. And it’s none time-bound, and the person reaching fusion was you know who. Does that mean Aoxomoxoa now actually
is
God?
Always has been
God, as of that night at Drumbeg?’

‘That is a
very
cool idea,’ murmured Verlaine.

‘
I see a difficulty
,’ drawled Cherry, slow Cornish. She could really do the Sage voice now, better than either Chip or Ver. ‘Sage didn’t make it all the way.’

‘Oh, right. He didn’t. Shit,
tha’s a shame
.’

‘The big job may still be vacant!’

‘Wait a minute. I thought you guys believed in Jesus-God.’

‘We do,’ explained Verlaine, patiently. ‘
Emotionally
. But we can fool around with the concept, conceptually, when it’s interesting—’

‘Whoever first reaches total fusion,’ Cherry murmured, half closing her eyes against the split-screen; Mayday sun pinwheeling through her virtual lashes. ‘That person becomes God and creates the universe. Wow.’

They took the stage together, just before the Masque. It was liquid night, the cold spring stars washed out by rape-oil fueled stage lights, a sea of round eyes and mouths catching gleams, in the gulf beyond the security cordon. They understood that this compressed, “supergroup set” was a put-down, meant to diminish “Ax and his Few”: but the Reading crowd didn’t see it that way. They yelled Ax’s name insanely, louder and louder, until they realised he was waiting for them to shut up. Ax was on stage, and equally back in Brixton consulting with the techs, watching himself on a monitor, saying yeah, that’s it, give me those values. So bizarre, such a new feeling—

‘You know,’ he remarked, head bent over the neck of his Fender, a sleek wing of dark hair falling forward, the sleeves of his dark red suit jacket pushed up, Keef Richard style. ‘I thought I was done with this.
Almost cut my hair
, if you know what I mean. Thought it was time to become a proper President, and do nothing meaningful for the rest of my entire life. I thought, tonight, I’d go through the motions, and you’d be nice, for old time’s sake. But I dunno. Maybe what we need is not
less
rock and roll around here. Maybe we need…
more
.’

Knowing as he spoke, sudden certainty, that this was the last time. Never again. Whereever he would be next Mayday, he would not be standing here—

Fuck tomorrow, that’s
my
crowd, you bastards.

The Fender screamed. Ax swung around to face Fiorinda, and they fell on the music with utter, brilliant savagery, such a
pas de deux
between punk diva and guitar-man, as no one had seen in their lives before—

Back in Brixton as they lost the remote site, Dora lunged for the baby-alarm, which had been flashing for some time. She held the ancient plastic brick out to Anne-Marie.

‘It’s for you, Ammy.’

It was late, and the babysitters were losing it. Anne-Marie’s bender-rats did not know the meaning of the word bedtime. They just got more and more tired and hateful, until they fell over. AM believed this was the natural way.

‘Hey,
Ammy—
!’

Ammy blinked, and gazed at the brick. ‘I don’t like to be with my babies when I’m on drugs. I’m too sensitive, I can’t relate to them. You better go.’

Smelly Hugh was nodding, eyes shut and a beatific smile, probably jamming with old Tom again: but he never did childcare, anyway. Meanwhile, thought Ax, marvelling at the selfishness, it’s my office the little darlings are trashing. He felt he ought to practice fatherhood, and get good at it. He moved, and realised he was soaked in sweat: glanced at his watch, and found it was past midnight.

Where the fuck
was I
? Where did the time go?

‘Don’t worry, Dor. I’ll sort them out.’

‘No, no. It’s okay.’

Dora gave AM a smouldering glare (entirely useless) and touched Ax’s shoulder as she passed, briefly bewildered at the solidity of her own smooth brown hand, seeing the sheeny red of Ax’s old best suit, imposed on a scruffy brown KEEP THINGS COMPLICATED sweater.

Is real me here? Or has real me just vanished? What does b-loc
mean
—

She left the room. ‘Dora has left the room,’ announced Kevin Verlaine, softly.

Everyone laughed, for no reason. B-loc sets were tugged off and heaped in a victorious pyramid among the tired buffet plates. They’d forgotten what it was like to play the Reading crowd, to feel that whoosh of history coming back at you. Wine was poured, food attacked, they were ravenous, hey it’s so quiet, let’s have some music—

Fiorinda and Sage stayed put. The Oratorio had struck the crowd as a little slow, after the Reich’s set. That was their poor taste, no doubt to be firmly corrected when the reviews came out. The soloists themselves still felt the resonance of that music, solemn and self-satisfied and innocent, and in a moment its banality would return to them, but just now it seemed in context: powerful, sad and true. Banal as the National Anthem, after Ax’s wailing Hendrixed-solo, traditional now as
God Save The Queen
: when the hush fell, when it was time to sing. Sixty thousand voices, millions more at the Big Screen locations, pleading for what we wish we were. For an impossible mercy: word perfect and as tuneful as the English can ever get.