Sacrifice of Fools (8 page)

Where to start?

The one who found the body. Ongserrang Huskravidi.

And after that?

Make it up as you go along. It’s done you all right so far.

Then his emotions see the three bodies in the crowded front office, and the two smaller ones curled in an innocent parody of soixante-neuf in the back room, and he falls into his chair and shudders and heaves and cries out aloud in his small, smelly flat.

H
E’S NOTICED THIS THING
about the weather. Every time he goes out of the city it stops raining. This isn’t to say that it rains all the time in the city
—
it just seems that way
—
but he’s never seen it rain in the country. Sort of a miniature arse-up of the dumb Loyalist slogan you’d see painted on gable ends:
We Will Not Surrender the Blue Skies of Freedom for the Grey Clouds of an Irish Republic.
Usually spelled wrong somewhere.
Surender. Blue Skys.
Grey Clouds of Belfast. Blue Skies of Everybloodywhere Else.

It’s not court, so the taxi driver can talk this time, and he talks. Gillespie doesn’t want to talk, but taxi drivers are skilled at circumventing the silence of fares.

‘Not a bad day.’

‘Not bad at all.’

‘Wettest winter I can remember.’

‘Wettest I can remember too.’

‘I reckon it’s those big ships of theirs, coming and going all the time. I reckon it’s putting holes in the ozone, all that coming and going. Can’t be doing any good, and all that messing around with weight and things. Not natural.’

‘Gravity.’ He’s not going to explain Mach’s Principle to a city cab driver, especially because he doesn’t understand it himself.

‘Yuh. That.’

They go another couple of miles and the driver tries again.

‘What’s this place you’re going to?’

‘It’s called South Side of the Stone. On Sketrick Island. You go down to Whiterock, and it’s just before you get there.’

‘Oh, I know where it is all right. Used to be a good pub on Sketrick, before.’ Gillespie makes no response. ‘So is it the Outsider place you’re going to?’

‘It is.’

They’re into the country now. Green fields, cows, bare trees, tractors ploughing. Black crows pick over the fresh furrows, like fragments of broken storm.

‘Bad do back in the city, that Outsider murder. The whole family, Jesus.’

‘Bad do.’

‘Said on the news that they’d used some kind of gun makes heads blow up. The bodies had no heads, can you imagine that? Even the kids. What kind of person would do a thing like that?’

‘Lot of sick people about.’

‘Had this man on, some kind of expert, Jesus, they have experts on everything these days; anyway, he says that it’s impossible for these Outsiders to kill each other. Says it’s like impossible for their chemistry or something for them to do something like that. I don’t know, I mean, what do we know about them? What do we really know about them? Not exactly like they’ve gone out of their way to be friendly, you know, living out there in their weird hippy communes. Not that I’m saying they don’t have the right to believe what they want to believe, have their own religion or whatever, but they’ve not exactly gone out of their way to adopt our customs and ways and all, you know; live like us, be like us.’

‘I don’t think it’s that they don’t want to, but that they can’t.’

‘I’m telling you, they had that McIvor Kyle, the one gets on like he’s the new Paisley; I’m telling you, that man made a lot of sense to me. A lot of sense. I mean, what do experts know? You can’t believe them, I mean, what if they’re wrong? What if these Outsiders all of a sudden come out with guns and they start shooting everyone and everything? They don’t know, so I think it would be better to take them and put them all on some wee island where they can keep an eye on them until they’re sure they’re safe to be let loose on society. Better safe than sorry.’

‘This is that wee island.’

The next mile is passed in silence. Gillespie notices the driver glancing repeatedly in his mirror.

‘Something the matter?’

‘You upset someone?’

‘Why?’

‘There’s a blue Ford Escort been behind us since the city centre. Woman driver.’

Gillespie looks out of the rear window. Blue Ford Escort. No danglies from the mirror. No trims, no direction finders stuck to the dash, no whip aerials. Mrs Beige Coat Lady Detective from last night at the wheel. Serious expression.

‘Slow down,’ he says to the driver. ‘About twenty.’

The taxi slows to a crawl. The blue Ford drops gears to match.

‘She’s not going past,’ the taxi driver says.

‘Didn’t think she would,’ Gillespie says. ‘Looks like I’ve picked up a police tail.’

‘No shit?’ The taxi driver can’t keep the note of interest out of his voice. A real hood. In my cab. ‘What are they after you for?’

‘Those murders you were talking about.’

‘The Outsiders?’

‘With no heads. They think I did it.’

A real multiple murderer. In your cab.

The driver’s not quite so voluble after that, but he does dare to ask, ‘Did you do it?’

‘Think I’d tell you if I did?’

The driver thinks about that for half a mile or so, then offers, ‘Want me to lose her?’

The cab driver’s Number Two Dream. After
follow that car; lose that tail.

‘I do not. I want her to see where I’m going, and what I do when I get there, who I talk to, what I find out, and then I want her to follow me all the way back to my front door. I want her to see that I have absolutely nothing to hide from her.’

She clings close as a condom over the twisting switchback drumlin roads along Strangford Lough, across the bridges and causeways linking the drowned hillocks to the shore. The long tide is out, flocks of over-wintering geese are moving over the chilly mud flats, dark speckles in the glare of the low sun from the wet silt. Yachts stand keel-down in the shallows; burgees and sheets rattle against the aluminium masts in the northerly wind. In the huge car park opposite the beached Ballyhornan lightship two cars and only two cars are parked, nose to nose outside the public toilets.

Jesus, it must be grim to be queer out here, Andy Gillespie thinks.

‘Left. Here.’ He almost missed the turning. The driver turns on to the single-track causeway to Sketrick Island. At the end of the causeway is the tumbledown stone tower of Sketrick Castle. Used to climb all over it when I was a wee kid, Gillespie thinks. Always loved it down here, those rare days out when the car was actually working and we’d stuff in a picnic and Coke and just go off. Never liked the beaches, got bored on beaches; just sun, sea and sand. A good castle to climb up; forests, hills, somewhere you could push with your imagination into something like those sword ’n’ sorcery books I used to love when I was wee: that was my kind of day out. Changed a bit since then; in a direction outside my imagination. Or anyone’s imagination.

There’s a gateway and cattle grid. The gateposts are old country style: whitewashed round pillars of stone capped with angled slates. Fourfold yin-yangs have been set in coloured pebbles on each post; the most ancient and powerful of Shian symbols. Every Shian is two selves, the everyday, and the burning self of
kesh.
Male, female, cold, hot. Gillespie directs the taxi driver between the gateposts, down a rutted track that runs at the edge of the water. Bladder wrack is heaped on the seaward side of the lane; it crackles and pops beneath the taxi’s tyres.

South Side of the Stone has grown around a farmhouse, yard and outbuildings overlooking the open water. ‘Grown’ is the best word for it, Gillespie thinks. The constructions that surround the old limewashed farmhouse look as if they have sprung from the ground in a single night, or been spun in the darkness by something best not seen by daylight. Nothing is straight, nothing is level. The Shian abhor the straight line: roofs dip and wing like birds in flight; walls slope and curve, annexes bubble out of each other, windows blister. Surfaces are as smooth and perfect as the skin of a chestnut racehorse or the shell of a porcelain vase. To the left of the farmyard entrance a number of tall, slender objects shoot from the roof of a tent-like building. Smooth boles rise twenty feet, then unfold into a green-yellow tiger-striped parasol. They look like kiddy-book giant mushrooms in the enchanted forest. It would take a motherfucker of a leprechaun to sit on top of one, Gillespie thinks. But they contain magic more mighty than faery gold. Real alchemy: the transmutation of the elements. They’re machines; nanofacturers, processing atoms, taking things apart and knitting them into something new. They can make you anything. You want a car engine that’ll never wear out, an artificial heart valve, a jet engine, half a kilo of Colombian? In goes the shit, out comes the gold. And they’ll customize it, shape it to fit, personalize it for you and none other. It’s just putting the atoms together in the right order.

Might as well be magic for what Andy Gillespie understands of it. But it scares the hell out of the big chemical and manufacturing companies. Who’s going to buy their goods when anyone can get whatever they want built just down the street, in their own back gardens? We were so desperate to get what you had; your starships, your zero-point energy, your nanofacthingies; come to us, stay with us, have some land, have some money, have whatever you want but don’t forget to bring your technology with you; and now we’ve got it and the people who wanted it have realized that it’s a gun down their throats. Wam! and they’re blown to fucking pieces.

All be better with a hell of a lot less people controlling things, Andy Gillespie thinks.

‘You can drop me here,’ he tells the taxi driver and gets out in front of the farmhouse. ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to be. If you get bored you can always have a chat with the copper. She might even buy you a cup of coffee. Where is she, by the way?’

‘She pulled in back down the lane.’

Probably got the high-powered glasses in the glove box, or is she going to risk getting her good shoes muddy and follow me on foot?

The driver settles down with today’s
Sun.
Not a soul else in the farmyard. Must be off doing whatever rural Shian do. Andy Gillespie goes over to the big mushroom farm. There’s a white BMW parked outside
—
a customer, no Shian would drive a white BMW. The skin of the big tent-like construction is translucent; a golden glow fills the interior of the factory. The air smells rich, soily, musky, as if it’s been put through the molecule-weaving machine and come out with added value. The stems of the processors hold up the roof like the poles of a big top, the bases flare out like whiskey stills. They can probably make you that too. There are two figures at the end processor. One is tall, the other is wearing a Pringle sweater. No difficulty spotting the BMW driver.

‘Looking for Ongserrang Huskravidi,’ Gillespie calls.

‘Who’s looking?’ the Shian says.

‘Andy Gillespie.’

‘Are you from the police?’

‘No, I’m from the Welcome Centre.’

‘I will see.’ The Shian goes out a back door.

Pringle sweater has had a golf club made. Looks like some kind of driver to Gillespie, who’s more a football man. He practises his swing in the golden light of the nanofactory.

‘Look at that,’ he says, shoving the grip end in Gillespie’s face. His eyes are shining with delight. ‘Custom made. Built to fit my grip. Do you know what it’s made out of? Diamond. They take carbon fibres and they weave them into diamond. If this was a jewel, it would be about fifty thousand carats, but it’s only cost me a hundred quid. Incredible.’

‘Incredible,’ Gillespie agrees.

The Shian returns with two others, both males, one older than the other. They sniff, lick, do the greeting thing with Gillespie.

‘This is Ongserrang Huskravidi,’ the older one says. He is carrying a staff taller than even his tall self. Gillespie recognizes the insignia of a
genro.
‘I am Saipanang Harridi, of this Hold. I have been appointed to protect the rights and interests of Ongserrang Huskravidi. Shall we go somewhere we may talk in more privacy?’

They walk down to the shore. The tide has turned and is advancing around the keels of the stranded yachts and orange anchor buoys in little fondlings of foam.

‘I thought you people were suspicious of water,’ Gillespie says.

‘The Harridis are a coastal Nation,’ the
genro
Saipanang says. ‘Many do not trust us for that reason. Too much water in our blood.’

Gillespie finds a rock and sits down. He pulls his jacket tight. The wind is finding every crack and gap in it. It’s always cold or wet. Or both. The Shian look comfortable in T-shirts and skirts. Higher body temperature. He used to be able to warm himself by the University Street Harridis. Those high-output metabolic furnaces need stoking with big food every couple of hours.

‘I don’t see why we need your lawyer here,’ Gillespie says to the younger Outsider. ‘I’m just going to ask you a couple of wee questions.’

‘With respect, Mr Gillespie, that is what the police said,’ Saipanang says. ‘Whatever your judicial system, your investigative process makes a presumption of guilt in those it turns its attention on.’

Don’t I know it, lawyer.

‘There are a few things I want to find out for myself,’ Gillespie says. ‘You could say I’m a sort of
genro,
for them. The victims. My friends.’

‘My client has given a comprehensive statement to the police,’ Saipanang says. ‘You could have saved yourself a journey by consulting it. My client will not be telling you anything that is not already contained in it.’

‘I’d like to hear Ongserrang’s version of it.’

‘My client had arrived in Belfast on the airport bus after travelling from the Occasional Aurora Hold in Reykjavik in Iceland. He is on his
gensoon.
I believe your expression is
wanderjahr.’

This thing in a T-shirt, a foot taller than you, Gillespie, is eleven years old. He’s come all the way from Iceland, and before that a planet sixty light years away. Where’s the furthest you’ve been? Glasgow. What were you doing when you were eleven? Wondering what an erection meant, and if Liverpool were going to do the League-Cup Double. That white blur was childhood, that sonic boom was puberty.