Midnight Lamp (14 page)

‘Is it true?’

‘Not anymore.’

Eventually they recovered from the missed exit, and reached another beach enclave a few miles south; called Sunset Cape. Not as A-list as the Rosa, where Puusi had her mansion and Janelle Firdous her little cottage, but it didn’t have toxic algae, you could walk and swim. Harry, Ax and Puusi Meera, accompanied by an awesomely well-preserved real-estate matron, were waiting at the house: a cinnamon-washed ranchero in a Mission style courtyard. The street address was on Hunter Thompson Drive, but the house was down a public access road, right on the beach. It came furnished, with a full staff.

They knew within about a minute (going by the tone of voice), that this was the house they were supposed to take, for some reason they might never learn; and accepted fate, despite the news that the spa in the basement couldn’t be used, as there was typhus in the pool water supply. They hadn’t come to California to assert themselves. On the upper floor there was a dance studio, facing the ocean. Sage took off his shoes and walked into the light-filled space, while the rest of the party stayed at the door.

‘Is this okay?’ asked Harry, solicitously, ‘Is this place really okay for you?’

‘It’s big enough,’ Fiorinda saw no need to grovel. ‘That’s the main thing.’

She watched Sage as he stalked about, soft-footed and curious. He’d bounced right back after the Pergola party incident. He isn’t an invalid anymore, she realised. He is well.
This is Sage
: all better, and more fucking gorgeous than ever. She glanced at Ax, and caught the same thought in his eyes.

Ax grinned, a little sheepishly.

Oh, what a spark of memory kindled between them… She looked away, the blood thrumming in her veins, frightened and confused.

The Triumvirate had come in by the back door. The Revolutionary Tribunal flew from Liverpool on a private charter, and crossed the continent by Htrain. Their arrival at the Digital Artists studio village was a circus:
Stop the Neurobomb
protestors,
Plague Ship Europe Go Home
protestors, Celtic wannabes in full regalia, (confused about the Reich’s allegiance); a bountiful largesse of mediafolk, and lines of studio police to hold back the crowds. The Few spontaneously went walkabout, as arranged: while airborne cams dodged around them and the scene was replicated on big floating screens, with live commentary from a chirpy Digital Artist softbot-couple…

Here’s Allie Marlowe, the guitar-man King’s admin queen,
sooo
elegant in a silver tunic and black quilted pants, her black curls caught up in a snooty Directoire knot (I want to look like that right now!, squealed DeeDee, the girl-half of the promotions software). That guy in the dhoti, tossing virtual flowers from his fingertips, it’s Dilip Krishnachandran, the superstar DJ who brought Immix to the mass market! There’s Anne-Marie Wing the hot folk-violinist, and her partner ‘Smelly’ Hugh Raven; (wow,
they
brought the whole hairy band along!)… There’s ‘Chip and Verlaine’, the kooky Adjuvants (what did
they
do in the revolution, Bob? No idea, Deedee, but don’t they look cute!). That’s Rob Nelson and the Powerbabes in the sassy Prince of Wales chequers, costers’ caps with pearl buttons—from England’s favourite big band, the Snake Eyes Family.

Isn’t it sexist for a guy to have three laydees, DeeDee?

No Bob, that’s
polyamory
, all the kids are doing it, it’s the mini-skirt of our times-

And these are the people who were caught up into history? Yep, these are the very people. One day they were aspiring rockstars, next moment, they were riding the thunder.

Just the way we do it in California?

You betcha, Bob! Like President Eiffrich says, no way round this, got to go through it, stick together, ride out the storm, and always do the best we can!

Chip and Verlaine had been shopping in New York. They merrily videoed the more mundane reprorters with monocole eyecams, and handed out instant clips.

‘Why are you all in black and white?’ asked a laughing journalist.

‘So we can take on local colour,’ explained Chip.

‘It’s a reference tone,’ said Ver, doffing his rebel black beret, and tossing a mop of silky brown curls flirtatiously. ‘Recorded at our operating level.’

‘It symbolises our openness to the cosmic rainbow.’

Fiorinda cursed everyone who annoyed her; which kept her busy.

Crowds are cheap in a downturn, the colourful protestors had provided themselves. The media storm had gathered because the lords of that great industry intended to punish Fred Eiffrich a little, in the person of his protégé. You have to set them up before you knock them down. Prepare to be flavour of the month, Mr Preston!

The circus outside the gates, the studio execs inside, the lino ride to Sunset Cape, the A-List studded reception. It was hours before the Few experienced the bliss of seeing the last of their guests depart. Ears ringing and smiles aching, but stone cold sober (they had an aversion to getting drunk at public parties) they were alone at last, with their lost leaders.

‘Aren’t they all fucking wonderful people?’ demanded the impossibly tall and slender fashionplate, who barely even looked like Sage. ‘Ain’t you fucking glad we made you change your minds?’

‘I keep telling you to watch that mouth,’ said Californian Ax, arrogant and unnerving in his draped pastel gangster suit. ‘Harry’s had several kindly complaints about your language.’

‘That would have to be my
fucking
language, would it not, Sah?’

The Few looked to Fiorinda for guidance. Ax and Sage had both been away a long time. But Californian Fiorinda, her skeletal thinness glamourized by a couture teeshirt, and dark red toreador pants with garnets sewn along the seams, was smiling very strangely.

‘Let’s have some Immix,’ she cried. ‘Make it something from
Arbeit
, Sage, that really audits the cost of living. You know my taste.’

‘Great idea.’

The catering staff could be heard clearing away, carrying stuff to their van. Sage must have the entertainment system slaved to his mask button, or his phone implant. He didn’t touch anything, but a deep, disquieting pulse welled up, filling the air-

‘Hey-’ began Rob, uncertainly, ‘if we have a voice in this, I think-’

Too late. The pulse became a harsh bassline with a hook like barbed wire, and they were engulfed. You see grey, you feel cold, you see a tall fence, there’s a stink, your skin is crawling. You have the shock of realising you are
not in control
of the images the beat conjures up. You may hear, (some do, some don’t) an urgent, fragmented whispering, in many languages at once: Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Arabic, Armenian, to name but a few, over which you might make out the English words
please no
.
Don’t make me see
. You have the second shock of realising that the enforced perceptions aren’t inside your head, they
surround
you, you are immersed in, you glimpse the bodies first in disbelief and then, glimpse them turning, falling, shovelled up and falling, you are immersed in a tumble of slack leathery limbs: the complete, gagging, synasthesia conviction that you are
experiencing
this fall of bulldozed corpses, and you’re never going to be able to stop, the beat has its hooks so deep-

And that’s just the intro. It was ‘C20’, from
Arbeit Macht Frei,
popularly known as
The Pit
, a track adored and dreaded, as the ultimate horrible ride, by hardcore Heads’ fans: a textbook of what could be done with immersion code at the time; maybe not as compassionate or as wise as Aoxomoxoa had once believed—

Stunned by the onslaught, completely unprepared for immix, the Few were further outraged to feel hands tugging at them. They were led, stumbling and bewildered, out of the immix and down some stairs into a calm, blue-painted hall, where plaster statues posed and potted palms rose from big planters, around an empty swimming pool.

‘Sadly,’ said Fiorinda. ‘We can’t use this. Puusi says there’s typhus in the pipes. Sorry about the immix. There’s a reason, honest.’

Sage and Ax were stripping the plastic dustcover from a smaller, kidney shaped jacuzzi pool: to reveal a blue floor littered with books, rugs, wine-bottles, ashtrays. ‘You can’t get the help,’ apologised Sage. ‘Well, truth is we
had
servants, but Ax fired ’em. He’s in
imagine no possessions
mode.’

‘Who’s idea was the black and white?’ asked Ax. ‘It was very good.’

‘Allie, of course,’ said Felice, senior Powerbabe. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

Allie had collapsed on the moulded bench around the side of the dry pool squatters’ camp. ‘
The Pit
. Why did it have to be ‘The Pit’, Sage, you bastard?’

She wasn’t likely to have an epileptic fit, but she was one of those people who just cannot endure immersions.

‘I’m sorry, Allie,’ said Fiorinda. ‘It wasn’t aimed at you, it was aimed at the shits in the unmarked van. We’re trying to scare them off.’

‘
What
“unmarked van”?’

‘The one that’s been sitting in the car park at the end of the beach access road, since we moved in. We call it
the unmarked van
, actually it’s posing as a van full of paparazzi. They still have those, over here. We hope they think immix causes irreversible brain damage. They’ll have had the statutory warning.’

Allie looked blank. The hairy hippie musicians of Anne-Marie’s folk ensemble stood apart from the rest, unphased. The rest of the Revolutionary Triubunal looked as if they were thinking of making a bolt for the exit.

Ax laughed. ‘Start again…’ He sat at the top of the kidney pool steps. ‘Okay, the house is wired. That’s why we’ve been living in the spa, under a ton of brain-burning sensitive political comment on genocide from the young Aoxomoxoa. No one’s going to get anything intelligible out of here while
Arbeit
is running in the front room. But we can’t keep doing that, and we can’t lurk in the basement openly, so to speak. We have to behave as if nothing’s wrong.’

‘We think we’ve nailed most of the cameras,’ said Fiorinda. ‘The spa, bedrooms and bathrooms seem clear, except there’s one old camera in our bathroom, but we hang things in front of it. Of course we can’t be sure—’

‘The house is
wired
?’ exclaimed Rob. ‘Wait a minute, the house is
wired
? Shit! Who by? What are we going to do? Have you told the studio?’

‘Cameras in the
bathrooms
—’ howled Dora, the middle Babe. ‘What is this? A Soho peepshow? That’s outrageous!’

‘I don’t think so,’ Ax reassured her. ‘That would be hostile, and illegal without a warrant. Living space is grey area. We’re sure it’s purely business, probably a friend of ours, and we have a plan. We were just waiting for you guys.’

‘A
friend
??? Some friends you have!’, snapped Rob.

One of the hairy hippies took hold of his moustache and peeled it off: removed bushy eyebrows, excavated the gel pads that had given him lugubrious jowls, and was revealed as Doug Hutton, chief of the Few’s personal security.

‘Hi Doug,’ said Ax. ‘Good to have you with us.’

‘It’s good to be with you and Fiorinda again,’ said Doug, with feeling. ‘You too Sage.’ The rest of the ‘hippy musicians’ voiced emotional agreement.

The studio had insisted on bodyguards: Ax had insisted on having his own people. The ‘hippy musicians’ ploy had made entry easier, but Doug his crew were not contraband. They were recognised as private police by LA County, with conditional immunity, should they be obliged to use lethal force.

‘What about this van, then?’ asked Doug. ‘You want us to see to it?’

‘Nah,’ said Sage. ‘There’s a better way. Sit down, that means everyone: security ought to hear this too.’

They sat around the dry pool, Sage and Ax on either side of Fiorinda, unconsciously taking up the same positions as if they were meeting in the Office.

‘We’re not going to tell the studio,’ said Ax. ‘Nor are we going to call the anti-bugging firm, with whom we have a contract that came with the lease.’

‘They probably installed the cameras,’ put in Fiorinda.

‘Yeah… It’s like this, Rob. Dirty tricks are part of the lifestyle. If we complain, we lose face. We deal with it, without saying a word; we show that we can look after ourselves, and our friends might kindly leave us alone… We’re going to do like the Romans do. Sage, your movie.’

Sage rifled the litter and produced a new toy, a digital editing projector, US style. He pasted a white screen on the blue wall of the spa, they shifted until they all had a view…and the Few saw themselves, in crystalline resolution, chatting and laughing (no sound), in a sunny room walled in angled glass, scattered with ‘Aztec sculptures’; giant cacti planted in great stone bowls.

‘They want home videos,’ said Ax, vindictively. ‘We’ll give ’em home videos.’

‘That’s this house,’ said Allie, bemused. ‘How did you do that?’

‘It’s the Bridge House Tapes,’ explained Sage. ‘I had a copy in my board’s archive. I cut us out of there, reformatted an’ pasted us into the estate agent’s distinctly fictional video of the ranchero—’

Bridge House, the Preston family home in Taunton, had been the venue for a residency in the Reich’s glory days, before everything went to hell. The house had been (selectively!) wired: they’d been on live tv, with a stream of illustrious visitors, making music, discussing Utopia, living the life. The result had become a Gulag Europe classic, but it was not well known outside Gulag Europe.

‘The idea is, I hack their system,’ Sage went on. ‘Intercept the output and replace it with my chimera. It’s all wireless, no pulling up floorboards, an’ I’ve figured most the snags. What d’you think?’

The Few watched the remix: it was curiously compelling; intensely nostalgic.

‘We’re wearing the wrong clothes,’ said Dora, at last.

‘Well spotted, Dor. Plus, one of us is half the size he was then, has different hands and never wears a skull mask. And some of us,’ Sage shook his head at Chip, whose nappy hair was ferociously straightened, and combed shiny-flat from a centre parting. ‘Are surely wearing the wrong hair. All fixable. All I need is a little clip of each of you, a little work on the dialogue—’