Castles Made of Sand (32 page)

Partly, George blamed Ax. You can’t fucking treat the boss like that, no matter what he did. Tell him that you love him, and then walk off and leave him. He’s the sweetest-natured bloke that ever breathed, but he’s not the most steady character. You have to know that, and you have to accept it.

Townies and Staybehinds strolled by, oars stroked the water. Silver and Pearl, with their little brother Ruby had got themselves a skiff and were flailing around in mid-stream, a danger to traffic. ‘Those Wing kids,’ said George. ‘They are a liability. I ought to warn you, by the way… Smelly told me he and AM are planning to ask you to take Silver off their hands.’

‘Hnh?’

‘Well, she’s got her periods. She’s coming up on eleven or twelve. They’re thinking, they couldn’t do much better than see her set up as junior wife to the Minister for Gigs. ’Long as Fiorinda approves, of course.’

‘
What?
’

Ha. That fetched him out of Neverland. But George’s satisfaction was shortlived, the boss looked so utterly horrified, so
desolate
.

‘This is it. This is the world Fiorinda saw, and we wouldn’t believe her.’

‘Don’t take on. It’s just hippy nonsense. I’m not proposin’ you accept the offer.’

‘Oh, fuck, George. This situation gets worse and worse.
I want out of it.
’

George sighed. He stood up and reached a hand to pull tall Sage to his feet. ‘Don’t we all. C’m on. Let’s get to London. And thank God Ax is back.’

Ax was in England, but nobody had yet spoken to him, not even his partners. Apparently he’d spent the night in Taunton (according to a garbled message from the Welsh media-folk with the plane), and he’d be at the Insanitude today. But he wasn’t answering his phone, and they hadn’t been able to get through to Bridge House, either. Allie had left several messages, to no avail. Fiorinda came to the Office straight from a Volunteer Initiative hospital shift. The room was empty except for the Few, who were standing together beside those schoolroom tables. ‘Don’t come too close,’ she said cheerfully, feeling so uncertain (oh, what will I say to him?). ‘I’m harmless, but I stink of disinfectant. We have a typhus outbreak on our hands, fucking hell.’

For a moment she saw Ax in the middle of the group of people, but he had changed. His body had thickened, shoulders bulked; his hair was cut short. Something odd about the way he was standing.

The man turned, and it was Jordan Preston.

‘Where’s Ax?’ she said.

Sage shook his head.

‘He isn’t here,’ said Dilip.

‘He isn’t back,’ said Allie, tight-lipped. ‘We didn’t understand the messages.’

‘He’s gone to America,’ said Jordan. ‘He sent a scrambled video, with that Welsh crew. They delivered it to us: we’ve decrypted it. D’you want to see?’

No intro, straight to Ax on the screen. He was in a room that looked like an open-plan office—worn, grey, utilitarian carpet and ranks of windows—that had been turned into a dosshouse. He sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette, his guitar-case and a backpack beside him, a paper cup serving as an ashtray. He looked very like himself, which was a shock, somehow. His hair in sleek wings, the carnelian ring on his finger, eyes that smiled, but didn’t quite face the camera. Figures crossed in the background, out of focus. ‘Hi,’ said Ax. ‘I’ll make this short. I’ve been offered a meeting with the Internet Commissioners. It means I have to go to the States, undercover. I have to leave at once. I’m afraid I can’t pass this up. If we don’t shift that fucking quarantine soon, the breach could become permanent. I’m not sure when I’ll be back, depends how it goes. I’m glad everything’s okay. I know you’ll be fine, and, well, remember you’re volunteers, you’re always free to quit, and thanks for everything. Sorry about the cloak and dagger stuff.’

Someone off screen said, ‘Hey, Ax—’

He said, ‘Yeah, in a moment.

‘Sorry this is so rushed. I’ll be in touch when I can.’

Something in the recording triggered a wallpaper effect. Briefly, Ax’s face was in every cell of the fly-eye wall, smiling and turning away. Then he was gone.

‘Fucking typical,’ said Jordan, bitterly. ‘The US, it’s what we always wanted. Why now? What the fuck’s he playing at? Why just
him
?’

Between Fiorinda and Sage there passed a long, strange look. Yes. Good morning heartbreak, come in, sit down. This empty world is ours.

‘Well,’ said Fiorinda, with a glance around, gathering the Few, ‘So Ax has gone to America. Good for him. It’s about time the Rock and Roll Reich had a US tour. We’ll just have to hold the fort for a while longer.’

The punters were given a cover story about further important travels, and they accepted it: the Floods Countries Conference had put them in an international mood. They wanted Ax back, but they liked the idea of him out there conquering the world. David Sale was thrilled. Like Jordan, he had a knee-jerk reaction to the letters U S A. The Few were shattered. Ax had been away for nearly six months. How
could
he not come home? How could they go on managing without him?

Jordan was even worse off. He stayed in London, at the Snake Eyes house on the Lambeth Road: a lost soul. When he tried to get himself sorted in a gangsta pub, the South London Yardies turned him over to the barmy army for correction. Fergal brought the miscreant to Battersea Reach, where Sage had been living since Ax failed to turn up: taking a break from the quest for Fiorinda and the Reich; although he couldn’t be near her—

‘If you want to stay in this town,’ Sage told him, ‘get yourself a street map. There are places I wouldn’t go without an invite, an’ I’ve been living here off an’ on for years. Also, do you
really
have a use for a firearm—?’

Jordan said he knew about Sage and guns. Everyone knew about Aoxomoxoa on the Islamic Campaign. Fucking war hero. You think that makes you—

‘That?’ said Sage, starting to get irritated. ‘That wasn’t a war. One shopping mall bomb in Leeds took out worse casualties than most of our pitched battles. I’ve been in videos with more risk to life and limb.’

‘Yeah. But then there was Yap Moss.’

Sage recalled arriving at Easton Friars with Ax, after the battle. We handed the French girl over to Intelligence, and then we were told the casualties. Nearly three hundred dead, on that stretch of winter moorland, and that was when the army was just guessing about the Islamists… He remembered the shock, the feeling that he had crossed over, that he was no longer human, by any terms I used to know. Don’t envy me, he thought. Don’t you dare
envy me
, where I am now and how I got here. I’ll take a lot from Ax’s brother, but I won’t take that.

‘You’re right. Yap Moss was different. That’s why that’s where it stopped.’

He pushed back from his desk, tugged open a drawer and took out an automatic pistol, checked the clip and held it out. ‘Go on, take it. Go and blow someone away in an alley, find out what it feels like. Go ahead. But don’t come back to Ax afterwards.’

‘Ax isn’t coming back,’ said Jordan, furiously. ‘He’s quit. He’s left us all stranded, you and Fiorinda know why, and no one knows what the fuck’s going to happen now.’

In the background, Fergal sighed.

Jordan glared, Sage stared, and it was Sage who gave way.

Jordan was an idiot, but he was wise enough to see what it might mean, for him and his family, if the struggling knife-edge Utopia started to break up—

‘Nothing’s going to happen. Ax will come home, everything will be fine. Take the gun. Learn how to use it. You’re right, you should do that. Just in case.’

Jordan shook his head. He looked strangely satisfied, as if all he’d wanted was to see that gesture. The gun pulled, some acknowledgement of the way things really were, the other face of Ax’s England.

‘I’ve changed my mind. Milly wouldn’t have one in the house.’

‘Tell her I say so.’

‘Ax fucking hates those things, I know he does. I reckon I’ll leave the rock and roll gangster stuff to you, white boy. It’s more your style.’

Jordan left. At a glance from the living skull, Fergal stayed.

Sage removed the clip, shoved clip and automatic back into the drawer and stared at the clutter of his room. All this life, dry and dead, like a worn out carapace, like an exoskeleton ready to be shed. Must think about Taunton. Can Bridge House be made safe? Milly will not like armed protection. Not at all. I’ll get my head in my hands. Maybe not tell her. Be discreet.

‘Was it about the rat-catching?’ prompted Fergal.

He wondered how long he’d been silent.

People were dying of typhus in Central London, the first notable outbreak of disease in the capital (by some miracle) since the cholera in Boat People summer. The London barmies were busy decimating rodents with glee and megadeath efficiency: something someone should have thought of long ago.

‘No…something else. Fergal, you come from West Cork, don’t you?’

‘Aye,’ said Fergal, ‘Skibbereen. I haven’t been there in a while.’

‘That’s where Rufus O’Niall lives, isn’t it?’

‘In Cork? Aye. In his bran’ new ancestral castle, on his fockin’ private island.’

‘You had any personal dealing with him? I mean, in recent years?’

The Irishman’s sea-green eyes studied Sage, with reserve. ‘I’ve niver been back to Cork in many years, an’ I don’t move in them circles. He was a Belfast lad when I knew him, I wouldn’t say personally. I hear he’s an ill feller to cross.’

‘So they say. What happens to people who cross Rufus? Exactly?’

‘Oh,’ said Fergal, getting to his feet; definitely uneasy. ‘Ye’ll probly’ know all my stories of him. He’s that sort of feller, that’s all.’ He cleared his throat, ‘I’ll be on me way, an’ leave yez to the computer work.’

Sage looked up and the room was empty. Who was here just now? Oh yeah, Fergal. Fergal, and Jordan Preston. Something about a gun. He checked the drawer, automatic still there. Who took out the clip? Was that me?
Shit
. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and slowly, doggedly, recreated the last ten, fifteen minutes. He was used to the aphasia now, intermittent fault, he could work around it. Stone-cold-sober blanks in business hours were something else: with the authority I have, the responsibility,
oh shit
. But he wasn’t going to stop. He groped for a pack of Anandas, struggled to take out a cigarette and failed. I will forget her name. And I cannot tell her why. The blood thrummed in his veins,
oh Fiorinda…

But he wasn’t going to stop.

A late Easter. April well begun, and it was only the fifth Sunday of Lent. Roxane Smith, in hir role as post-gendered Christian (otherness was the theme for this Lenten season) gave the homily at the evening service at St Martin’s in the Fields. S/he was very surprised to spot Aoxomoxoa, standing in the shadows at the back. He returned with hir in hir taxi to the rooms s/he now occupied in a service block on Queen Anne Street. S/he lit the stove in hir living room—the central heating was minimal—and opened a bottle of wine. Sage, fists buried in the pockets of his leather jacket, sat in an armchair, taking in the book-lined room: the awards, the netsuke, a few good prints, a few cheap gewgaws that meant much. His natural face had been his face for months, a long time. S/he realised s/he’d been missing the mask. It’s a strange and very beautiful thing.

‘Well, Lord Jim. What can I do you for?’

‘Oh? When did I stop being Mikhail Lvovich?’

Years ago, in the lost world, Roxane had made a game of calling Aoxomoxoa after various high-culture fictional characters. The next time their paths crossed, s/he would
know
that Sage’s ’satiable curiosity (‘The Elephant’s Child’, Rudyard Kipling) had forced him to track down the reference. And s/he would smile. It was a good joke on the king of the lads. Mikhail Lvovich Astrov was a character in a Chekov play. Tree-hugging conservative, daydreamer doomed to slave at the grindstone, takes his vodka without bread, indulges in a pointless flirtation with another man’s wife. (But that last was unintentional comment: Sage had been Mikhail Lvovich since Dissolution Summer.)

‘I don’t know,’ s/he said, pouring wine. ‘You tell me.’

‘Put me out of my misery. What did Lord Jim do?’

‘He’s someone in a Conrad story. He ruined his life by jumping ship in the midst of a disaster, leaving a crowd of hapless punters, as he thought, to drown.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Sage nodded. There was a lengthy silence.

‘I need to ask you something. It’s about the Zen Self project.’

Roxane sat in the opposite armchair, and sipped hir wine. ‘If you must.’

‘Okay, so, I’ll try to be brief. You’ll have heard about the visions, where you might think we can get previews of the future, but in fact we don’t.’

‘Yes. I saw a programme about that, quite recently.’

‘You see, the time you spend in phase with information-space is infinitesimal. You bring back a whole story, and it’s bullshit. Emotional truth, that’s what we say. We can tell when someone’s reached phase from the physical record, but it’s impossible to tell whether you visited the future, the present or the past. There’s no difference; there’s a difference but it’s very complex, so complex it’s invisible. You have visited
the whole
, and every point is interconnected, over and over, with every other point. You may assume you, so to speak, visited the future if you come back remembering something about your son grown up, but you could be wrong. Are you following this?’

Roxane shook hir head.

‘It doesn’t matter. This is not the question. Anyway, that’s how it was. Then I had the idea, because of something that happened to Ver, that if you took a lot more snapshot you could stay in phase longer, deeper. More would stick and it would speed things up. Nobody believed me, because the science says it shouldn’t work, but it does. I’m the only one who does it. No one else is nuts enough.’ Ghosts of tiny muscle-movement braided and flickered across the planes of virtual bone: the skull is grinning ruefully.

‘Yes, I heard about that.’

‘You see I asked a question, back in February, which is something else that’s not supposed to work, but it did. I visited a very revealing moment… Snapshot goes for the jugular, if it gets a chance. You may have heard that. You must be calm when you take it because if you’re full of adrenalin and corticosteroids, stressed is the term, you’ll see stuff that matches. I did that, and I got my answer, but now I’m not sure.’