Midnight Lamp (34 page)

‘Okay. Sage, if you can use a b-loc phone to facet someone from England to the Pacific coast, why can’t you use b-loc to get Olwen in on this? It would be as secure as you’re going to get.’

‘Totally different kind of…oh, well, maybe. Where is the b-loc?’

‘I’ll find it. Are twelve brainstate maps going to be enough?’

What Sage was doing, ironically, was something like reverse-engineering a virtual movie avatar. He had nobody to dunk in a tank, no living presence to scan with the lasers, instead he was trying to map from perception—the effect that the information space object
Fiorinda
had, on the brains of people who knew her very well—through a digital entertainment code artefact, to the real woman, wherever she was. The masque needed to be a showstopper, so there would be spectacle, but in the centre of it he would be trying to
conjure
her, something far trickier than fooling the punters’ brains into believing in the ravening werevoles, the bulldozed corpses, the tidal waves, the chomping sharks. Dimly he was aware that if this were possible then at some point, it’s going to be
possible
, the non-local, realtime reading of the full deck, that we’ve fantasised about for—

He’d been very annoyed, when he’d come to California and found that Janelle Firdous was already doing the lesser trick that had been such a tussle for him, natural realism. Now he was profoundly grateful for their trading sessions, and the ideas he could use for this further leap, right off the scale. Thank you Jan, an’ it’s a crying shame they won’t let you use your powers in the movies… We build her like a hologram, the way a scene recalled from memory is built in the non-existent space inside the brain; by Fourier analysis of orientation, spatial frequencies, troughs and peaks. We do this for emotions, cognition, everything. Right down among the fractional firings, take ’em map by map, there’s no problem, it’s as clear as print…but so fucking impossibly interwoven,
so many connections
. He didn’t have the heart to explain to Ax that a secure mega-bandwidth phonecall was not the answer, because he was on his own. There was only one person he knew of who could have followed what he was doing, (well, maybe a few pure scientists, but I don’t know them and I doubt it) and no, I can’t ask Jan, if there was time. Trust no one, means no one.

The guitar sang on the edge of his concentration-

‘What did you say? It’s thirteen, with Doug. Yeah, I think it works. Hundreds, thousands of different brain-state maps wouldn’t be a significant degree nearer to the full picture. I’m sampling, this will be enough… She is there, she exists, she’s a term in the immense mass of the code for now: and unlike most people, unlike anybody else alive maybe, she’s got a big open pipe to information space. She may not be using it, but she can’t switch it off. Is that mixed metaphors? Sorry. And we’ll have the crowd, many with their own percept of Fiorinda. I can take what they give me in feedback, and use it as amplification—’

‘Sage?’

‘Mm?’

‘If she’s dead, will this stunt of yours call up her ghost?’

‘No. This is the wilder shores of information tech, not necromancy. Put it like this: I can reach her, if I can reach her, because what makes
Fiorinda
there for us is part of this material present. If she’s dead, the matching real
Fiorinda
isn’t there to be found, and to reach her I would have to go beyond fusion. But I would not find her, she isn’t there. I would be lost myself, in non-being.’

He felt Ax’s silent, shuddering recoil.

Ah, talking on automatic pilot while working, never a good idea-

He peeled off the eyewrap. ‘Ax looks into the abyss. I’m tired. I shouldn’t have said that. I won’t try to convince you that the abyss is a good thing.’

‘Not right at this moment, Sage. Nirvana is just not my drug.’

‘Nor me. That’s why I’m still here, remember. Having such a great time.’

They laughed, helplessly: and for an instant she was with them, in their illusory minds, in the illusory locus of this Californian bedroom suite. A trembling of the air, a fleeting touch: then she was gone.

‘Ah, God.’ Sage took a slim dark box, identical to the others as far as Ax could see, and bowed over it, hugging it tight in his arms. ‘Ax. I don’t like the future, it’s worse than Yorkshire. Why can’t we go home?’

In a corner of the room was an outfit they were collecting, and trying to compact into two military backpacks. It was vital they should be ready to go.

The evening of the concert the skies over Hollywood were thick with haze, but there was promise of a clear night. Around eighteen thousand people (capacity and a little more) streamed from the limos to the VIP areas, from the parking lots and the park and ride buses into the picnic grounds. The atmosphere was of excitement, not of mourning. Along with the curious, the sentimental, and the Digital Artists’s hired seat-fillers, there were thousands who felt that being here was a statement. The rockstar king of England had given Los Angelenos a sense of the bigger picture on this global crisis, a feeling of common effort in adversity: something that they felt was none too far from their own lives right now.

There will be wars and rumours of wars, there will be signs and wonders.

The warm-up and the opening act were A-grade filler. There were carnival costumed dancers, a full orchestra; the contentious ‘DJs’ dressed as tranced-out hippies ‘largeing’ behind a row of decks. The Few were backstage with the VIPs, surrounded by ‘discreet’ plainclothes men and women with guns under their coats: accepting brash and callous remarks about their loss, along with the kindest expressions of sympathy or praise, with the same total absence of mind; sharing a profound hallucinogenic experience, in which famous faces loomed out of a fog. Was a lady of immortal years, cool as ice in a long silver fox coat, for pure swank in the July temperature, really seen addressing Aoxomoxoa, maybe saying to him, break a leg? Nah, that can’t have been real.

Ax was numb, dead level, watching the rest of them getting sky-high on adrenalin. He counted the extra minders, and trailed Allie and Dilip, hoping to catch them getting physical so he could say,
no cuddling in session
. He wouldn’t have had the heart, DK was looking so fragile… But he’d become an expert at compartmentalising the fears, when he was dictator, and it’s not a bad trick. At sunset he went off with the Muslims to pray. By the time he came back the Few were on: Rob and Sage at the mics, Felice’s trumpet soaring, Dora and Cherry leaping about, blowing their horns. The rhythm section in this version of the supergroup provided by The Sidemen, LA jazz musicians Rob and the Babes had bonded with; plus Smelly Hugh on bass. Ammy’s fiddle wandered merrily, Dilip and the Adjuvants jived the sound and vision.

It was a long time since they’d played a make-do for a big crowd, but they’d put this sort of patchwork thing together so often in their day, they were fine. When he was sure it was good, and that the crowd was taking off, Ax went to join the legendary Stu Meredith, presiding over the onstage sound.

Stu, an ancient monument with a grey pigtail, ropy arms laden with turquoise and silver, who’d worked with all the gods you could name, was very kindly: greeting Ax like an old friend, though as far as Ax could recall they’d never met. The big band numbers ended. Sage was duetting with Rob, singing Bob Marley, great voices and the best songs: a surefire combination.

If it works, don’t get bored with it, they’d learned that lesson.

‘You know,’ remarked the grizzled engineer, ‘I sure never figured Aoxomoxoa for one of the survivors.’

‘Sage?’ said Ax, absently, ‘Yeah, he should be dead many times over.’

‘I’m not surprised he came out the other side of the smack and the booze. Whatever you rockstars have, the docs oughter bottle it and vaccinate kids at birth. You’re all fuckin’ survivors in that sense, you can count the casualties on one hand. Jim Morrison, Janis, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt, I s’pose you could add Elvis, and Garcia. I meant, survival as a human being. When he was here last he was bouncing off the walls. His band fuckin’ worshiped him, but nobody else could stand the guy, even if we knew he was a genius. Even the ladies, and they loved his dick, couldn’t take much; aside from Janelle. He was a spoilt fuckin’ disaster, heading for bedbug superstar crazyland.’ Stu handed a spliff, with a fatherly smile of approbation. ‘Someone must’ve turned him right around.’

It wasn’t me, thought Ax. I think it was a certain red-headed babe.

Yet something rose in him, something he badly needed tonight. He’d always wondered why Sage loved him. He was sitting a few metres from the stage, back to the action, listening to his earbead and watching a screen, and it crossed his mind that they could be thousands of miles away from the actual musicians. The sound at a gig like this had been digitised, managed, subjected to fractional distillation, culverted like a river in a pipe, rebuilt, and delivered back to the performers brand new, for decades… This made him think of what Sage was going to try and do, and he felt a distant thrill, a distant memory of the time when he had been excited by futuristic tech. When he’d thought it worth any sacrifice to ensure that the marvels continued, and didn’t go down into the dark.

High-tech is magic that works.

And the future is what happens while your life gets in the way.

‘D’you ever worry that we’ll be out of a job, Stu? The way the technology is heading, who’s going to need an old-fashioned guitarist or a sound engineer-?’

Then he was afraid he’d been tactless, talking to a veteran like that.

‘I’ve worried about many things, over the last eight, ten years,’ said Stu, accepting the good grass again. ‘You hear about what happened to Europe, you see it starting here. You see your kids get used to doing without things you took for granted. Fuck, my kids don’t even
notice
there’s no such thing as just taking a plane to another city anymore. They have no sense of loss. And there’s worse things. It wakes you up in the middle of the night.’

He took a couple of steady draws, mashed the roach between his fingers and replaced it in his smokes tin.

‘But someone turned me around. I believe we can beat this Crisis, and come out with something different but better. No, I don’t worry I’ll be out of a job. I’ll work for the love of it, the way I always did… I was at the Islamic Centre in East LA,’ he added, ‘I heard you speak. I’d never been in a mosque before.’ He held out his large, gnarled hand, laden with rings. ‘It’s been an honour to meet you, Mr Preston, and a privilege to talk with you. It’s meant a great deal to me.’

Ax shook Stu Meredith’s hand, wondering what he had said at the Islamic Centre: just now he couldn’t remember a word. There’d been a time when he had worked, constantly, to elicit this response in every person he met; and he had come to hate that in himself. But it isn’t what you do. It’s what you are to people, and you just walk along behind it, like a man with a sandwich board.

Now Sage was down the front, singing “The Ballad Of The Big Tattoo”, a humorous number he’d done live for many years, with different idiotic verses every time, finally released on
Headonastic.
He’d shed his suit jacket: he was a blond Freddie Mercury in white singlet and white trousers, shoulders and arms gleaming in the stage lights, blue eyes sparkling. He tossed his radio mic, which vanished because of course it was only virtual, and went into some fuck-you gymnastic clowning, to the delight of the mosh (or posh Hollywood Bowl equivalent). Ax had such memories, his eyes dazzled—

Fiorinda, Fiorinda, Aoxomoxoa’s back, but where are you?

‘I think you’re on, son—’

He joined the matrix of light and darkness, into the hands of a competent stage crew: took the Les Paul and looked out. Strange to see them piling up in raked rows in the out-of-doors, you don’t get that in England. But it could be anywhere… Oh shit,
Sage forgot to get Laz to take off the hex.
He had a premonition of doom, but now he must play.

Thoughts of her, rising through the music.

The day I bought her those red cowboy boots. It was September, the leaves were turning on the horse chestnut trees. I had known her for two months, we had slept together four or five times. Oh, remember the quality of those early days. We were walking along the Kings’ Road together, and stopped to look into a shop window, I saw her drooling, ragamuffin punk diva, for the red boots, so I took her in there and bought them. So then she bought me the beaded belt, instantly: no idea how to do it gracefully, matching my price to the cent, because she had to restore the balance. I knew she had no money, and I felt terrible.

But the boots had worked out. Fiorinda had loved those boots to death, and Ax had watched them become treasured with a feeling of profound relief. Years later, when that edgy little babe had become the woman he would love forever, he would still look at them and thought
whew, that was a close one…

just to do it all again—

Harry was in the Garden seats, with the studio execs party. A pawn in his boss’s entourage, as the Few would have it, and he felt wronged by the accusation. If things had been different, if Fiorinda had been up on that stage, he’d have been with Kathryn and her pals: but she wasn’t here tonight and he could understand why. He didn’t know why he was here himself; or maybe he did. Some deep primordial stupidity in him was still impressed he’d been able to do this, to reach out and make a dream come true, what awesome power is that? ‘That guy was one of the greatest living guitarists,’ intoned his neighbour, a direct competitor if Harry had any rivals, ‘It’s a fucking crime he got mixed up in politics, and ended up selling out, doing this kind of variety show.’

‘I have all his records,’ Harry replied, riveted by the tiger and the wolf in their electric
pas des deux
. He knew for a fact this colleague had never heard of Ax Preston before Harry’s project started the movement. The night air was cool, and he wished he was at El Pabellón, and nothing had gone wrong. ‘I bought the teeshirt.’

He was in awe of their professionalism, knowing the furious reality of their mood. He did not understand why they were doing this gig, but he was in awe. Did they know the truth? When Harry let himself think about the truth, fear and dread threatened to overwhelm him. He kept going through the motions, but at any moment he thought he might start start screaming and never stop—