Band of Gypsys (8 page)

Chip and Verlaine watched her, and waited until she looked up.

‘They could have asked
us
for a briefing on fusion theory,’ complained Chip.

‘Nah,’ said Fiorinda. ‘I mean, look at you. D’you think they got the message?’

‘About the big nasty Black Hole nibbling at our toes? Wendy Carter, yeah, and maybe Boris,’ said Chip. ‘But they won’t be making the decisions. That weapons trade pair were scary. They don’t give a toss.’

‘What if they want
you
to take a scan?,’ wondered Verlaine

‘No problem. They won’t ask, but it wouldn’t matter.’ Fiorinda sat back, pulled out a springy red curl and picked at the end of it.

Chip surveyed the empty table. ‘This Crisis. We thought we knew what a Global Crisis was, but then you get magic psychopaths, you get concentration camps in Norfolk, Paranormal Thermonuclear war, you get… Well, you see what I mean?’

‘There’ll be no Paranormal Thermonuclear war,’ said Verlaine, gloomily. ‘No Techno-Magical Utopia either. The bad guys will turn the weirdness into field guns and nerve gas, same as they always do. People like us will be suppressed out of existence, and the doors of perception will be slammed shut,
same as it ever was
.’

Fiorinda laughed. ‘You’re probably right. We’ve consistently been afraid of the wrong thing, every time: I’ve noticed that. We won’t get no Hell dimension, something much worse and totally unexpected will come along instead.’

There were snow flurries in Berkshire on the eve, but Mayday itself dawned chilly, bright and fair. To the Second Chamber’s chagrin, President Ax and his inner circle—the radical rockstars known as “The Few”—would not be appearing live on Main Stage at Reading. Instead they converged on Brixton: Allie Marlowe and Dilip Krishnachandran by taxi, from their amicable separation at the Insanitude; Chip and Verlaine on their bikes from Notting Hill; Rob Nelson and the Powerbabes from Lambeth, in the Snake Eyes’ Big Band’s minibus—bringing with them Anne-Marie Wing, Smelly Hugh and their kids, who’d all come up from the Rivermead Permanent Festival site, the day before. Ironically, considering the Second Chamber’s Green pretensions, there was no public transport on the public holiday.

By nine am everyone was in Fiorinda’s music room, watching State Event prelims with the helpless fascination of long habit, while a crew of Aoxomoxoa and the Heads techies set the place up as a b-loc studio. Countless street party committees were setting out chairs, crowds in sleeping bags huddled at Big Screen locations. Church bells were swinging, the ropes pumped by hearty and broad-minded Christian-Pagans. Hawthorn blossom unfurled in the hedgerows (CGI, because the flowers were being sulky). Maypole ribbons whirled and wove, last year’s organic bunting fluttered again. In Reading town the route of the motorcade was thronged, although the public knew that Ax and his courtiers weren’t actually going to pass by in the flesh.

Here they were again, back to where it all began! The Festival Site by the Thames at Rivermead, where thirty thousand “staybehinds” were still encamped, faithful to the wild ideals of Dissolution summer—

The children had been banished downstairs, with a posse of babysitters: except for Sage’s teenage son from a long defunct relationship, who had an exeat from his boarding school for the holiday weekend. The b-loc techies communed in Geekish with Sage; and with George Merrick, Sage’s second in command, who was running the remote site at Reading. The Few gazed at their former selves in old news footage, with the inevitable feelings of psychic dislocation and style-related distress. The stats on the sidebar were impressive. Apparently this State Event was already being watched by 96% of those people who could get to a screen, and who couldn’t get to Reading.

Wow. Joe Stalin couldn’t have bettered those figures, with a sky-hook.

‘I hope the Stonehenge ceremony comes on again,’ said Anne-Marie. ‘I’ve kept missing it. I was up at six, but it was already over.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Felice, senior Powerbabe, assured her. ‘it’ll be back.’

—
known as the Few, to discriminate them from Ax’s original group, the Chosen Few
,
they followed his star to fame and fortune, as the social leaders of the Revolution’s youth culture
—

Fame of a kind, okay, but fortune? Now that is a JOKE.

Jeers and groans fell silent when the cameras turned to Reading Arena: the lost heartland. ‘The old home town looks the same,’ crooned Chip, soulfully
sotto voce
. ‘As they step down from the train…” His friends advised him to shut up.

“Okay, okay, I didn’t mean anything…
Will
we step down from the train?’

‘Nope,’ said Sage. ‘Too complicated.’

‘Time is a helix of semi-precious stages,’ sighed Kevin Verlaine. ‘We’re not even going to be there, but we
still
keep going back. It’s like
Groundhog Day
.’

‘I wish someone would tell me what we have to do to escape,’ muttered Dora, the middle Babe. ‘Does anyone get the feeling we should have stayed in California?’

‘Something would’ve stopped us. We can’t break out of this attractor.’

Smelly Hugh frowned, working hard. ‘It oughter be July, shouldn’ it?’ It had been a wet and muddy July, in the last year of the United Kingdom’s existence, when the festival that ignited a revolution had gathered by that riverside, and a handful of young Indie hopefuls had stumbled into the maw of history.

‘Ah, the slip from July back to May,
that’s
the tachyon shift, Hugh.’

‘You have to watch out for those.’

‘It’s an instance of rock-sidereal precession.’

Hugh joined the Adjuvants’ laughter, pleased that he’d said something funny. He’d been trying for
clever
, but you could never tell. Funny was good, anyway.

‘Of course this is ass-backwards,’ said Rob. ‘Physically we should be in Reading, where the work is, bi-locating back here to have fun. Isn’t that the idea?’

‘Hey, I have fun on stage, mister,’ Felice protested. ‘What are you
saying
?’

‘Figure of speech, I was thinking of grunt work.’

‘In principle,’ agreed Ax. ‘When we have b-loc factories, b-loc farm labour. Right now, it’s our flesh they want: and they are not going to get. We are
not
their indentured labour.’

Greg Mursal’s financial lawyers had admitted that the charges on the Few’s professional earnings, imposed by the Green Nazi regime, were illegal (Ax and Sage were not so lucky): but nothing further had happened yet. No payouts.

The Few glanced at each other. Much as they’d like to see their money, they didn’t like the way Ax seemed set on confronting the Second Chamber.

‘It’s the way to go with novel tech,’ Ax added, responding to the atmosphere. ‘I might have done this stunt anyway. We make b-loc famous, we won’t need the government to pitch in. Private sector support for industrial applications will follow.’

The techies grinned at each other, appreciating Ax Preston’s famous bloody-mindedness. They were happy because they were putting on a huge, weird, never-tried-before spectacle with Sage again. The boss had been away too fucking long.

‘Except who needs mass b-loc,’ mused Fiorinda, ‘when labour camps are so much more organic. I’m with F’lice. I hate modern drugs.’

‘B-loc’s not a
drug
, Fee,’ corrected Sage, his attention on the the 10
²⁸
closure figures for the superposition. ‘Wash your mouth. Absolutely nothen’ scary, unnatural or invasive goin’ on here.’ Bi-location was a Zen Self spin-off. In the experimental stages it’d needed nasty spinal injections, and heavy neurosteroids. The set-up they were using today was third generation, and Scottish, which was galling, but too bad—

‘Don’t listen to him. He loves his altered states,’ crowed Marlon. ‘He lies about it, ’cos he’s an addict, and he can’t help it.’

This pallid, sarcastic youth, barely recognisable as the teenage form of a sweet little boy called Marlon Williams, wanted to quit school and continue his education (if his estranged parents insisted) in London. He didn’t seem to realise that needling his dad was not the way forward: Sage was amazingly patient with him.

The caterers arrived. The Few gazed at the giant screen: an oddly Californian feeling, as if the Austerity-living Triumvirate had suddenly decided they needed a private cinema. A buzz like headphone-leak emitted from Smelly Hugh,
hair of gold and lips like cherries…
Dilip sighed and stretched. In golden California, nearly a year ago, he’d been sure he was developing AIDS. Here he was still, in reasonable health: and single again, to his regret but it was something he couldn’t explain to her. Half a life spent dedicated to
the fun
, and waiting to die. You glimpse, in a moment of weakness maybe, the fun of taking control of your own death, and the idea won’t go away…
He lives alone
, thought Allie, across the room. Everybody’s wondering, but nothing went wrong. DK’s a good friend, great in bed, but he lives alone, end of story. She was becoming someone she hated, the well-groomed woman who gets middle-aged giving her life to an organisation.
I want to be loved
.

Out of old habit she reviewed everything that could go wrong with this day, and shuddered. With this day, or with this return to England?

Rob, Felice and Dora were glad to be home. Things had settled down. The long-running Radical Rock commune on the Lambeth Road had lost its scuzz of White-Refugee desperanto violence. They were sure Ax could do business with the CounterCultural Rebel MPs, and a workable future could be hammered out. But the old fault-lines re-asserted themselves. This b-loc stunt, bound to upset the moderates, the element we should be wooing, was it really a good ploy? Ax was always too much influenced by the weird scientists, DK, Chip and Verlaine, Sage and his band. They exchanged a sad and furtive grin, because Cherry Dawkins, junior Babe, was with Chip and Ver again: not sitting with us. She’s turning into Geek-Girl, crossing the divide, over there rubbernecking the tech operation.

Chip missed Fiorinda’s favourite party frocks, always previously displayed on the music room walls. In fact none of her totems were visible, not the sacred scruffy secondhand Martin, or her red boots. Even her piano was shrouded in midnight velvet.

‘Fiorinda-space has stripped down and gone public.’

‘But we’re not allowed to access her secret keys,’ noted Cherry. ‘The message is conflicted. She lets us common folk in, yet she denies us access.’

‘Idiots. The semiotics will change when I unpack.’

Ax sat crosslegged on a rug that belonged elsewhere, the music room carpet hadn’t come out of storage, rolling up Bristol Bud. He’d never get used to buying marijuana cigarettes in a packet, with mild government health warning attached. He lined up the neat spliffs in his smokes tin: and sighed. Can’t put this off any longer.

‘Can we leave you guys to it for a while?’

‘Yeah, fine Ax,’ said the b-loc gaffer. ‘We won’t need you for another two hours.’ They never do. They just like to make you get out of bed.

Everyone stood up, including Marlon. ‘No,’ said Sage. ‘Not you, Mar.’

‘But Dad—’

‘You heard me. Stay here and keep an eye on the fest tv for us.’

The boy subsided, muttering
don’t talk to me as if I was a fucking pet animal
. But he said this in Welsh, a language his father (allegedly) did not understand.

Marlon cruised, while the caterers plated up and the technicians did whatever they did at desks and boards. Every choice just bounced him back to the four EB channels: English Broadcasting, Government tv. He lingered a while with a programme on the history of the Rock and Roll Reich. It was one long rock festival, apparently. Ax, Fiorinda, his dad and their mates rocking and rolling in various fields and ramshackle venues: far away from anything like civil unrest. Usually it was pissing down. Some bad guys called ‘the green nazis’ were defeated in a voiceover, ‘in the last days of the chaotic years of transition’. Then the Second Chamber, religious and natural leaders of the native English Counterculture restored England to peace and plenty, and elected ‘rockstar radical Ax Preston’ as funky President, because they were in touch with the people, for whom Ax was a popular romantic figure—

Unbelievable
, muttered the boy.

Reading Arena coverage was a bunch of old hippies, sounding off. Glasto, once the stronghold of the Extreme Celtics, now totally respectable, held his attention briefly. The Permanent Festival there had begun to host a rival Mayday event, with the Pagan bonfires and sky-clad things that weren’t allowed at Reading. But he couldn’t find any live sex… Still nobody came back. The caterers took a break, the techs were in their own world. Marlon ate some buffet, (but it was all ugly-looking, and nothing tasted right), and remembered how to find a twisted English public tv station he’d heard about from a friend. He got a Happy Beltane smiley, and the news that he would swiftly be redirected to an EB channel.
Diawl y’ myto i
.

Sheep in human clothing, that’s what the English are.

Across the hall the Few were crowded round the flat screen of a pre-Dissolution tv. They had some idea of what they were about to see, and that it was potentially very bad news, but they hadn’t been told much. Here it comes.

Twilight in the desert, in the red waste between the Inyo and the Panamint ranges, some two hundred miles north east of LA. Two men in dusty range clothes hunkered down in the opening of a tunnel: to check their weapons and discuss mass-murder. ‘I never thought that violence was going to be phased out,’ said the tall, skinny blond. ‘I was just surprised when
I
got a chance to play.’

‘The killing makes me feel real,’ said the other, with a flashing smile—

They slipped from their lair and set off, bent double, towards a huddle of shanty town buildings, like some quake-struck Third World village. Frequent close-ups were lit to catch the flat eyes, the tight, blunt muzzles of two conscienceless predators. In the next shot, the men had penetrated a humble schoolroom. They rifled children’s copybooks, while speaking coldly of the numbers they would have to ‘reduce’: then whirled and fired, without a moment’s hesitation—on a quartet of wide-eyed, goth and hippie types who seemed to be unarmed.