Band of Gypsys (19 page)

‘I never hated her, you know. I hated mum, because she was always miserable. I knew gran was wicked and I didn’t care. She was
interesting
. Even long afterwards, when Rufus was fucking me, dressed in Feargal Karney’s corpse, and gran knew all about it, and she was
on his side
, I still didn’t hate her. There was no point. You’d do your head in trying to talk about right and wrong to my gran. The expression
beyond good and evil
was made for people like her… But you don’t get it.’ Her calm broke down again. ‘It’s the baby. We have to stop this. How can I dare have another baby, knowing what I am? What might it,
what I am
, do to a baby?’

Ax was paralysed, terrified of doing the wrong thing: Sage grabbed her and swept her into his arms, rocking her while she shoved her face against his shoulder.

‘Leave it out. Tha’s bullshit, my brat, and you know it.’

‘It’s
not
bullshit.’

‘Yes it is,
nyah, nyah, nyah
—’

‘Why shouldn’t you have a baby?’ said Ax. ‘You’ve been proved in the fire, Protector of the Poor. Whereas heartless selfish bastards who don’t know what is in them, and are not fit to be parents, have kids all the time.’

‘Think of my fucking dad,’ suggested Sage.

Fiorinda covertly turned her face and glanced at Ax. Not to mention your fucking mother, they thought: but they wouldn’t say it. Sage’s mother was a sacred icon. Ax cleared his throat. For hours they hadn’t known where she was. Sage had been sure she was fine, but Ax had been very scared; and was ashamed of himself.

‘Does this fear of babies imply you didn’t bleed yet?’

‘No blood, but I’m sure it’s coming, I can feel it.’

‘Meanwhile “the scare” continues.’

Late periods were called “scares” to confuse any prowling demons.

She freed herself from Sage’s arms: they shifted until they were sitting in a row, their backs to dank, peeling wallpaper, Fiorinda in the middle.

‘All right, I’m okay now… Did anything happen?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Sage. ‘We’ve been off the radar, looking for you.’

Flagship Fiorinda had not been called back to base because her gran was finally dying (that was a bonus). She’d been recalled because Ax and Sage thought something was up. An increase in traffic on Greg Mursal’s insider network: the Reich couldn’t access these communications, but they kept track of the activity. The Royal Academy interview; Jack Vries appearing in places where he had no business to be. Minor harrassment. A posse of Reich youth had been picked up in Hyde Park by uniformed Met, for public drinking. Nothing wrong with that, except the kids complained it was one of many incidents, and that they’d been taken from inside the boundary of the Permanent Festival site. The Met ought not to do that…

Straws in the wind, nothing definite, but it began to mount up—

‘We left Marlon handcuffed and locked in a cupboard.’

‘I hope you gagged him too. Or he might plead with Doug and get out.’

‘You can laugh,’ said Sage. ‘I just know he’s not streetwise, he’s spent his life in darkest Mid-Wales or at boarding school—’

After the police round up, Marlon had slipped his surveillance and been missing for hours. He said he’d decided to walk home, why not? It was true, the kids walked everywhere. It was a craze with them: no mobile phones, no passing through Tube gates or waving chip-cards at bus sensors. To move around without a trace.

‘What a fun visit for him,’ said Ax, unhappily.

‘It’s not your doing, babe.’

They were silent, thinking of the countless small and not so small annoyances of this life: resentment softened by the fact that right now they were alone together in a secret place; and Fiorinda still just might be pregnant.

‘We’re going to have to tell the Rebels,’ said Fiorinda.

‘You could be right.’ Sage tipped his head back, frowning. ‘They’ve co-opted you in their plan to replace Mursal, Ax. That was inevitable, given they have a plan, but it puts us in a false position, with the Lavoisier thing hanging over us. It might never happen, or be completely harmless, but we
know
about it—‘

‘Snapshot visions can easily mean the opposite of what they seem to say.’

‘Yeah, but, mm… I don’t like the way the suits never asked us for another Neurobomb meeting. It’s not nat’ural. I can’t believe they’ve given up the idea of building themselves an ‘A’ team…’

‘Maybe they’ve given up asking the Lennonist pacifists to help out.’

‘Mm.’ Sage withheld judgement.

‘I don’t think
you
should have talked to them at all, Fiorinda,’ said Ax.

‘Someone had to, and I’m not on their map.’

They’d begged her not to come near the Wallingham stunt, yet they didn’t seem to have a clue why she’d insisted that she would deal with the Neurobomb Working Party. They went through the motions, but they simply didn’t see risk in the same way when applied to themselves: it must be genetic, a male thing. How else would soldiers go off to war so cheerfully? So Fiorinda has to be the pushy brat, determined to make her mark with a fancy government committee—

Ah well, fair enough. She had been that brat, long ago, often enough.

They reached Brixton Hill in starry summer night, footsteps sounding in the quiet, through the elven streetlighting of SW2. Downturned golden flowers welling open before them, dwindling into candles again behind; unless other late passers-by triggered another wave. They had no premonition. The guard let them in, and Allie was in the front hall, in her office clothes: big-eyed, pale and frantic.

‘Where the fuck have you been! Why couldn’t I call you?’

‘Neasden,’ said Fiorinda. ‘My fault, I got pissed off waiting for gran to die, so I did a pilgrimage to the old homestead. I’m
sorry
Allie. Did they call? Is she dead?’

‘
What
?’ snapped Allie. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Is she dead?’

‘Who?’ Allie recovered her wits, shocked at the way she’d spoken to her leaders: but they didn’t seem to have noticed. ‘Oh, your grandmother. I don’t know, Fio. That’s not why I’m here. You’d better come upstairs. Faud’s seen it.’

Ax gave her a look of quiet concentration. Sage nodded.

They went upstairs. Faud Hassim, in his customary white shalwar kameez, rich hair rebellious under a close little cap, rose and bowed when the Triumvirate entered the living room. He had seen the Lavoisier video. Early this morning he’d been asked to join the Prime Minister and certain close advisors, for an emergency meeting. A shocking scandal was just breaking in the US—

After a while they moved to the square oak dinner table. It was weirdly as if they were in conference with their defence lawyer, who’d already identified the questions he would not ask. No reproaches, no demand to know what they’d known about this bombshell. The PM wanted a televised debate on the issue, irrespective of whatever happened in America. The venue would be the Lower Chamber, Ax and Sage would answer to the House, Jack Vries would take the chair—

Quick work. This hadn’t been figured out in a day. The snapshot message had been reliable:
They’ve known all along
. We are screwed—

So this is how they live, thought Faud, who had never been inside these rooms before; never come close to being a personal friend of the three. He was impressed. by their spare and modest dwelling.

‘We couldn’t reach you, so we’ve spent the time consulting with the CCM, the Permanent Festival Councils, significant Urban Communards, all of them your friends. We, the so-called “Rebels”, want you to accept the government’s challenge, and every party we consulted agrees it’s what should be done.”

‘Who was at the briefing this morning?’ asked Ax.

Faud hesitated. ‘The PM, Jack… Actually, it was a small meeting.’

‘Actually it was just those two?’ said Ax, acutely.

‘Yes.’

Well, that’s interesting. That’s a telling piece of information.

‘What
is
the issue?’ Sage asked. ‘Do they accept the video as genuine?’

‘Greg Mursal wants the issue to be your raid on Lavoisier,’ said Faud, slowly. ‘He wants the House to decide if Ax Preson, as titular leader of the English Countercultural Movement, had the right to decide, without consultation, to make a savage attack those people, devout Gaians, arguably our allies—’

Fiorinda nodded. ‘But what are Jack and the PM hoping to achieve?’

Faud and Allie were drawn to stare at each other, across the table: Allie bit her lip. ‘
We
will make this a debate about what the Lavoisiens were trying to do, what nobody denies they were trying to do. Our national stance on Fusion Consciousness Weapons will be, will be aired,’ said Faud, as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘
Ultimately
, it will be about the future of this new country. A trial of strength between the Countercultural Movement as it was originally conceived, and corrupt NeoFeudalism at the top.’ He was fiercely earnest now. The video had shocked him, they could see that: but he was unshaken. ‘Ax, we
need
you to do this. We have to welcome the confrontation, sieze it as our opportunity. You can’t refuse.’

They’re going for impeachment, thought Ax. That’s why the reenactment nuts want to hold this farce in the House of Commons, where their faces have barely been seen since Dissolution. Before turning us over to the Second Chamber for trial. We should skip the poisoned chalice, resign right now.

But the trap had closed, and he could see no way out.

Fiorinda’s grandmother died in the night. When she’d taken the message she went to the toilet, and confirmed what she already knew: blood, a few little bloody tears. It was a relief to feel the familiar sad weight, settling back on her heart.

One shock at a time, please.

By the next day, ‘The Lavoisier Video’ was all over the shredded but indomitable global village. Citizens of the Great Peace, in Ulan Bator, were probably shaking their heads over the wicked antics of the famous rockstar warlord and his champion. The full-length video was hard to come by, but within forty-eight hours of the breaking news, a remastered, feature-length version of the trailer appeared, complete with a soundtrack of Ax, Sage and Fiorinda’s greatest hits. It was an explosive success.

In the US, long-prepared moves of formalised violence were exchanged, like the opening of a giant chess game. Crisis Europe’s response was guarded, at least at first. The Lavoisier affair had been swamped by the A Team event, that had swiftly followed: European authorities didn’t know
what
to think. In England, the popular media swiftly grasped that Ax’n’Sage had either saved the world (again). Or they’d been turned into psychopaths by the Pentagon, and ought to be locked up. The government was doing the right thing; or the Rebels were forcing the government to do the right thing. Questions must be asked, it was probably a Constitutional Crisis—

Ax went to see Joss Pender in Holland Park.

Social niceties didn’t detain them long. They left Joss’s wife (his first wife; he and Beth Loern had never married) and retired to Joss’s den, a fortress where they could speak freely, if you could speak freely anywhere—

‘How long had you known?’

Joss glared, fury barely tamped down, from behind his oversized Italian car-designer’s desk: defended by a barricade of congential untidiness; papers, random souvenirs, dead gadgets, digital art.

‘March.’

‘And told no one.’

‘Couldn’t risk it. It wasn’t ours to leak.’

‘I’ve seen the “video”. The whole thing, although neither you nor my son thought to provide me with a copy. D’you mind if I say it’s appalling?’

‘We never had a copy of the whole thing, I only just saw it myself,’ said Ax. Suppressing a desire to yell, what did you all
think
we’ve been doing? What did you think we were doing to the Islamic separatists in Yorkshire? Playing guitar at them?

‘What they’ve done too you is
outrageous
…and very clever. Have you considered memory-retrieval imaging?’

‘Nothing like that’s going to work, Joss. The courts tear brainscan evidence to pieces, whenever it’s presented. The bad guys are no longer disputing the video’s manipulated: they’re just saying no one can tell by how much. Why wouldn’t the same go for the images we stored in our heads?’

Sage’s father looked like Marlon Williams grown old: slight and energetic, the same cocky, wary, golden-hazel eyes. Same jet black hair, in Joss’s case thickly powdered with silver. Normally you’d never guess he was nearly eighty. Today the years had fallen on him, an old man’s impotence flaring in anger—

‘My son was
eighteen months old
when he lost the use of his hands. By the time he was four I knew it wouldn’t ever slow him down. He could write code you couldn’t fathom in a lifetime, before he could dress himself unaided.
My son
is one of those rare people who could have done
anything
he chose—
’

Whereas instead he had to end up the bumboy of a rockstar warlord, starring in a cowboy snuff orgy… Ax’s relationship with Joss had been fine, until Sage had insisted his dad had to know they were lovers. Difficult ever since. As Fiorinda’s other boyfriend Ax’d been fine. Now he was a rival, and you’d get your head in your hands if you called Joss homophobic but there was that too: a bit of distaste.

We always use a proper condom, he thought. You won’t catch anything.

No, no. Keep your temper.

He could see a framed photo of Stevie, aged about six, in the part-geek, part-bowerbird nest that was so disconcertingly familiar. It had slipped sideways behind a perspex block that enshrined a dab of pioneering photonic crystal:
eks, not fade away.
Gurning for the camera. Little hands, that had lost several fingers to infant-meningitis septecemia, buried deep in his dungaree pockets. Ax remembered that gesture. He remembered Aoxomoxoa’s daily struggle, often in pain, so well hidden until you knew him, making sure disability didn’t ever slow him down—

‘He’s Leonardo da Vinci, Joss. I know it, I’m not arguing.’

It’s not my fault he never wanted to be king of the hill.