Band of Gypsys (5 page)

And he remembered, now when it was far too late, how part of him had leapt for joy when he’d heard that the black gold was gone. He’d been appalled, seen the awful cost of turning off that tap at once. Still part of him had cried
Yay! Death to the Evil Empire! The Living World strikes back…!
He understood (now when it was far too late) that every time, in his sorry career, when he had picked up the blunt instrument of violence, because it was quick and it worked, he had been part of this. The world is a palimpsest of minds, all bending each other, and Ax had been one of the hell-makers—

He’d broken eye-contact for too long. Lavoisier had vanished, replaced by his screensaver, Sage in a white singlet and tight jeans, from the “Heart On My Sleeve” video, the Mr Muscle gymnast he used to be, before his duel with O’Niall, Unmasked, smiling, crippled hands open by his sides, and clearly very pleased to see someone.

Those Glory Days.

Oh well, that’s the end of Paris in the the Springtime.

I’ll have to get the folks out of that fortress, right now.

“Hey, Sage? Fee? You’d better come and look at this.”

They came over, read the letter, and looked at the movie clip. “Let’s see the letter again,” said Fiorinda, calmly. Ax turned back, thinking: the implications are appalling, but with luck nobody else in Europe knows, not yet. We’re ahead of the game, there’s time for a spot of insider-trading.

‘Shit, it’s breaking up.
Fuck
those ubergeeks. Sage, can you rescue this—?’

Sage and Fiorinda had a rehearsal, at Collette House Piccadilly: where the artist who’d won the Reading Masque Prize (the “New Turner” as the mediafolk were calling it), had his studios. The Masque would debut, as was now traditional, at the Mayday Concert at Reading; one of the biggest events in Second Chamber England’s calendar. The artist was Toby Starborn, famous for his Faux-PreRaphaelite portrait of Fiorinda, back in the Reich’s glory days. A hologram copy of this masterpiece stood in the midst of Toby’s “torn out office space”—fake shards of cubicle partition sticking up from the floor, like some kind of Great Crash designer stubble.

Toby and his assistants greeted the demigods of the Old Guard with solemn indifference. The assistants wore clean-room attire, down to white caps and bootees. Toby wore a green velvet cutaway coat over a yellow waistcoat and slick, buff, cellulose breeches with a moulded crotch—an effect as if he were naked from the waist down, the way the wild lads danced in the mosh in the days of Dissolution. His springy hair was combed back, Mr Preston style, and tied with a black ribbon; he had a faun’s eyes, amber-yellow, tip-tilted. He looked (he wasn’t very tall) like a dissolute hobbit with Winnie the Pooh’s dress sense.

Fiorinda remembered meeting Starborn once before, at an artshow opening. He hadn’t had a lot to say to her then, he was no more communicative now. Subject matter should be seen and not heard. But his faun’s eyes never left her face, except to fix on some other element of her appearance: her left boot, her wrist, her elbow. Probably he was snapping her up on an eye-socket camera—

‘It’s an oratorio,’ he uttered, reluctantly. ‘Called
The World Turned Upside Down
. That’s all you need to know, just sing the notes, and keep still, no, er,
moves.
Fiorinda, you have no implants or eye-socket tech. Can you read sheet music?’

‘I’ll give it a try.’

They stood together on a flatbed scanner stage, the same kind of tech they’d met in Hollywood, where the virtual movies were made. Orchestral and chorus tracks played in their ears; the assistants chivvied around, making adjustments. The solo parts weren’t difficult, nor unpleasant. It was a strange kind of work for a rock concert, but Sage’s original masques had been strange confections, after all. Mozart opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, any old scraps. They couldn’t complain.

No friends, no hangers-on, and no refreshments, intoxicant or otherwise. After about two hours the soloists were allowed to get down. Nobody in the huge room cracked a smile, but Toby muttered that
he thought that had gone all right
. Sage and Fiorinda glanced at each other, wondering how to exit. They were being let know they were old meat, uninteresting, only dragged in for their curiosity value. Anyone who stays the course long enough has to face moments like this.

Fiorinda went to look at the hologram of “She Feeds And Clothes Her Demons”. Did I really dress like that? She touched the back of her head, reflexively checking that the old mass of draggled curls had gone. The Lavoisiens had shaved it off, and she felt grateful to them. The sallow, beleagured redhead in her ragged green dress stared out into the room, while the goblins she was feeding crept closer. Too many, too hungry, the nursemaid herself will be torn to pieces, to keep them alive—

If that was a prediction of my future, it nearly turned out true enough.

‘How many of these copies are there?’

‘It’s an
iteration
, not a copy,’ Toby corrected, still without cracking a smile. ‘Would you like to see my work in progress?’

“She Feeds And Clothes Her Demons” disappeared. It was replaced, in the shrine-like gilded frame, by a quivering mass of colour: a struggle to resolve, then oh, a blue woman, swirled with green and white, curled over so she was almost a sphere, and something bursting out of her side. Was that meant to be a child? It had the oversized eyes and naked head of a baby. It clutched something: an electric guitar.

‘Very impressive,’ said Sage, with solemn indifference.

‘Knock out,’ agreed Fiorinda, taking care not to catch her boyfriend’s eye.

‘It needs work,’ muttered Toby, head down, but seeming a little defrosted. The Earth giving birth vanished, the goblins’ nursemaid by the fallen oak returned.

Fiorinda smiled brightly. ‘What about the composer, er, Flora Morris? I know choral music is very big now. Can you tell us about her, can we meet her?’

The dissolute hobbit unbent at last, his faun’s eyes coming to life. ‘You might meet her at the opening. She’s not into, er, Rock. I knew her stuff, of course, and then I saw
Sacrificial
live at Wethamcote last summer, at the Festival of the Ponds. The soloists were in tiger cages, hanging over the site of the pit itself. It was immense. I knew I had to work with her after that, so I got Tim Bowery to introduce me, the impressario, you know, she’s a friend of his. What did you think of
Sacrificial,
Sage? I found it flawed but very honest, very moving—’

Wethamcote, in South Derbyshire, was one of the places where the Extreme Celtics had held their blood rites, in secret, before they actually took over. The Triumvirate had busted a human sacrifice rave network there. Sage shook his head.

‘Fraid I missed out.’

‘Me too,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I think we were in the US.’

‘If you didn’t see
Sacrificial
live, you’ll never understand it.’

‘We sort of saw the trailer live,’ said Fiorinda, straightfaced ‘I can’t claim that I understood it. Sage, we must be going. Let these people get on with their work.’

‘Fancy a quick pint?’

‘Ha. You’re incapable of having “a quick pint”.’

‘All right, a quick six, then.’

They took their leave, bestowing bland grins of goodwill.

It was the beginning of April: Fiorinda had just had a birthday, she was twenty-four. The freeze was over, replaced by a dry, chill, grey-skied Spring. Outdoors, central London was a hell’s kitchen of dust, rubble and low-tech clamour; muscular labour and fashionable passers-by: oddly recalling the Victorian Hampstead in Ford Madox Brown’s real Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece, “Work”. Everything unbeautiful was being torn down, to create a mosaic of new green spaces around what was worth preserving: Inns of Court, Baroque churches, post-modern giants in the City, heritage buildings in Westminster. Every city in England was going to get the same treatment, eventually. The ancient centres cleansed and beautified, then rings of concentrated Green housing and amenities, interspersed with intensive (but Green!) market gardening. Industry would live alongside the people, profits strictly audited for sustainability; constraints enforced by lucrative government licensing.

Draconian laws would limit private car ownership, and allow
no
proliferation of horse-drawn vehicles. Public Transport for the less-well-connected. What about the millions who gave up and took to the roads, in the Great Crash and after? Don’t worry, that’s taken care of. The elective homeless are safely contained, and usefully occupied.

Thank God they’d as yet escaped the ignominy of ever-present minders; and thank God for the sacred immunity of licensed premises. They found a pub, not one of their old safe houses, but nobody molested them.

Fiorinda downed most of her first pint at speed. “How weird it all is. Like Ax’s dreams come true, with a Dickensian twist
.
Are you sure we were only away for a few months? Sure it wasn’t a hundred years?’

‘Longer than that. We haven’t been payin’ attention since before Ax’s Velvet Invasion, not hardly. Plenty of time for a quantum leap.’

‘The blue woman representing Planet Earth had my face?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And she was giving birth, by Caesar section, to an alien wiv guitar? Did he stop to think I might have human feelings?’ Fiorinda glowered. ‘I don’t care. I’ll take the Small Grey if I have to. Any kind of baby’s better than none.’

‘You can’t blame the kid. He’s trying to be
avant garde
, and stay in fashion, when the fashion is beyond retro. Tha’s bound to lead to pompous affectation.’

‘You weren’t going to hit him, were you? I detected a twitch—’

‘Nah. I was thinking of bouncing him like a little yoyo. Seriously, no. He’s not doing it on purpose. He prob’ly doesn’t even know you want to have a baby.’

Her eyes said
I’m glad you didn’t punch Toby out. I’m being an idiot…
but
I’m glad you thought about it
. Telepathy artefacts: Sage laughed, and went to get his round in, brushing her cheek with his fingertips as he passed.
My brat
.

They’d returned to England immediately after the bombshell
courriel
, and were living again in the Triumvirate’s modest maisonette in Brixton: though how long the government would allow them to stay there was another question. Ax had told the media he felt the protest had done its work, he could now serve the camp inmates best by close consultation with Westminster. The Press had made their own cheery versions of this statement, TIRED OF DRINKING FRENCH PISS SAYS AX, and so far there was no sign of the
courriel
story surfacing.

It was surprisingly okay living in those rooms again, where terrible things had been said and done. The past that haunted Brixton was a defeated foe, and they don’t make bad company. Other aspects of the return were not so great. They could live with a hostile, venal government, done that trick before: but they kept falling over hints of something worse. Recalcitrant, intolerable evil that had survived, behind the Second Chamber’s “moderate” façade.

Wethamcote, being used as a place of ritual assembly again—

They drank in near silence, pondering these things. Plus the dreadful fate of all senior pop-idols:
corpses in the mouths of the bourgeoisie—

‘It’s not going to work, Sage. They’re not the right next generation.’

‘They never are, sweetheart. Mm. I wish, if this Morris babe likes Elgar so much, she’d just figured out new lyrics to the actual
Dream of Gerontius
—’

‘Heeheehee.
Tiny
bit derivative?’

‘Tiny bit.’

‘The immersion effects are going to drown us, anyway.’

Sage looked into his beer. ‘You know, I take his point: Oratorio, dignified, no one jumps around. But I need to grok the idea. I wonder if Toby would give me his code to look at. Just a rough cut?’

‘Not if he has any sense, Aoxomoxoa—’

‘Who he? Oxo what? Never heard of him. I’m a harmless ignr’ant old codger. Wouldn’t know a dirty stage coup if it jumped up an’ bit me.’

They laughed, white-water fishes, alight with the joy of battle. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ suggested Fiorinda. ‘You can coach me in your wicked ways.’

In St James’s Park, the blossom trees shed petals on steely waters, the Pelicans shivered on Duck Island. It’s April and we live on the same latitude as Moscow, same as we always did. No big deal, but haven’t we done enough? Say what you will about our whacky adventures, surely the world’s carbon emissons have gone through the floor? Not so, say the scientists (as far as they can be heard, through all the rest of the clamour of bad news). Global indicators, where science gets through the NeoFeudal curtain, show no respite. Climate chaos continues and the seas are still rising. You can’t turn an aircraft carrier on a sixpence, but not to worry, the
real
freeze is unlikely to hit the UK this century.

‘Sage,’ said Fiorinda. ‘If I go loopy again—‘

‘You won’t.’

‘I don’t believe I will, but
if
… Get me away from here. And keep people like that away from me. Don’t let Toby Starborn
anywhere near me
.’