Band of Gypsys (7 page)

No response, except a few of them reached for the earbeads.

‘The belief that using black magic
drives people crazy
is well attested in tradition. Investigators have assumed the effect was psychological: the evil magician becomes deranged by the horror of his acts. Not so. Morality doesn’t come into it. Become the Neurobomb,
this
is what will happen to your brain, and you will suffer all the agonizing and highly dangerous symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.’

The scans looked like colourful wreckage, that shuddered and squirmed.

‘It’s addictive, too.’

Mairead Culper gathered herself: a small woman, simply dressed in a brown homespun tunic, a double line of tension, or possibly eyestrain, ploughed between her brows. Every visible inch of her pale skin was tattooed.

‘Fiorinda! I am a practitioner of Wiccan magic and I will not tolerate this. The powers we summon are beyond our understanding, we give ourselves blindly into their hands,
and we fear them
. But Rufus O’Niall was the hellish personification of global consumerism. He is gone, with all he stood for.
Our
unknowing is not evil, nor insane, and none of your, your vile
labscience
will convince me—’

‘
Mairead
,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Don’t upset yourself. I’m sure anything you and your people do is perfectly harmless. You don’t have to be criminally insane to lay a mean Tarot. I’m talking about the Neurobomb.’

Rasheeda had snapped to attention. ‘You’ve
seen
those scans, ma’am?’

Fiorinda raised her brows. ‘Of course. Anyone with a public library PIN can see them. They’re in the open access section on the International Investigation Site. Along with routine scans from before the fatal experiment, for comparison.’

A pause for embarrassment. The Adjuvants grinned at the tabletop.

Rasheeda scribbled a note (lo-tech secure communication) and passed it to Jack Vries:
is she saying we don’t have a Neurobomb?
Jack put the slip of paper in his pocket, nodded slightly and spoke—

‘Ms Slater, ah, ma’am. We’re aware of the “International Investigation Site”. Some may say its usefulness it limited. It can only reveal what the US military wish to make known, about what happened at “Vireo Lake”’. The Vireo Lake Lab, in the Anza-Borrego Desert, had been the site of the A-Team experiment. ‘Your exposition has been interesting, but I’m sure you’ll understand we came here to talk about our own, English, Neurobomb: I mean Sage Pender. The so-called “A team” were chosen for “psychic potential”, despite the inevitable instability, and subjected to a regime of harmful drugs. The Zen Self route to plenitpotence works with normal, healthy brains, does it not? And “Zen Self” fusion leaves no permanent damage to brain tissue? Still, we share your reservations. One issue we wished to raise was the need for Sage to take new psyschiatric scans—’

‘That won’t be possible. Sage has given up being a lab rat.’

Jack Vries was a tall man, and very blonde, white blonde rather than vulgar Sage-like yellow. His skin had a painful, ruddy delicacy, as if protective outer layers had been peeled away. His light eyes were intent, yet she felt that he only saw the National Sweetheart, who must be handled with care. A secondary figure.

Be careful, she told herself. Don’t make the same mistake—

‘I see!’ said Jack, at last. ‘Well, Sage is a big star who writes his own er,
rider
, is it? We’ll have to find the right inducement to get him on the program!’

The Working Party recoiled again: Jack’s
faux pas
this time. You don’t sneer at the Zen Self Champion, the perfect knight who saved England in single combat.

‘I detect a misunderstanding,’ Fiorinda remarked placidly, taking no offence. ‘The Zen Self route uses heroic doses of neurosteroids to reconfigure a normal brain directly to the state of fusion, without destroying a personality and without hijacking increments of connection from a mass of other minds. That much is true—’

(The Adjuvants looked modest, they’d been among the heroic labrats on the way to Sage’s achievement. No one noticed.)

‘But breaking the barrier between mind and matter the Zen Self way is a brief event. Either you quickly return to normal, or you remain permanently—so to speak, where there is no duration—in a state of non-being, non-intent, non-action. Which some see as the goal of all endeavour, but it’s not very useful in a weapon.’

The Buddhist rep, a prim-looking middle-aged white woman, acknowledged the description with a faint smile, and resumed her air of distant disapproval.

‘“
No damage
”, Jack, means no Neurobomb either. The Zen Self route will never get you there. That’s why the Vireo Lake scientists set out to weaponise natural psychic ability, although such experiments had already been outlawed in Europe.’

Lord Vries accepted defeat, by means of a slight bow.

‘I was there when he fought Rufus, you know.’ Fiorinda had lectured standing. She sat down now, between her bodyguards: propped her chin on her hand and gazed into the past, her voice changing; off her guard.

The disappointed suits perked up—

‘The Extreme Celtics had enlisted my father to reduce population of Europe, drastically, by an act of magic. I’d been condemned to death, allegedly for witchcraft: really because I’d been helping human sacrifices to escape from the people we call the “Green Nazis”. Though of course they were as English as anyone here. Sage found out what was going on, and came back from Caer Siddi—’

‘Having achieved the Grail,’ murmured Verlaine.

‘He rescued me from the fire. I followed him to Ireland, to plead with him not to take on Rufus, because I knew what my father was. I was too late… They fought with swords, in the courtyard of Drumbeg Castle. My father liked archaic things. They were competing to see which of them had more power over the information: but the fight was part of it, the physicality. Embodiment and mind are equally important, in all magic. They say that when perfect “fusion” is reached, when a coherent,
solved
, human self becomes one with the state of all states, then the state of all states becomes a conscious mind. Or else, depending on your point of view, the mind in fusion meets a Consciousness that was always there—’

She made a slight acknowledgment of the Bio-Ethics contingent. The Bishop of Oxford, a slim, elderly gentleman with his collar on backwards over a little fuschia bib, smiled nervously in return.

‘Who knows? It’s hard to distinguish cause from effect, where there’s no time. But anyway,
if Rufus had won
, eighty or ninety percent of the people of Europe would have died at a stroke, and that’s not the half of it. He would have added Sage’s stake, so to speak, to his own. He could have reached perfect fusion, and human information space, our reality, would have become a mirror of that nightmare up there.’

She glanced behind her, at the smartboard.

‘Rufus would have been the
Fat Boy
,’ explained Chip. ‘And we’d all be living in a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare-dimension.’

“Fat Boy” was the runaway chain reaction of fusion consciousness, a magic pyschopath with limitless powers. The Lavoisiens had been trying to build one.

‘They say Rufus could, could put his enemies living into hell,’ ventured Dr Jones, in the fuschia bib. ‘Is it true, Ms Slater? Could that be
allowed
?’

The Islamic consultant smiled, enigmatically, into his beard.

‘I don’t know about
allowed
, but I know about that one. It’s an Aleister Crowley spell, that my father liked. Crowley couldn’t begin to do it: Rufus made it work. You die, but subjectively you stay conscious in your body while it rots, for all eternity. I think that’s where the real Fergal Kearney was, when Rufus inhabited his shell. There may have been others. I hope, I believe, they were freed, that night.’

The abyss between what she and Sage had done at Drumbeg, and these disconcerted, sulky suits, was threatening to unhinge her. ‘I didn’t explain that very well,’ she added, limpidly. ‘I could try again, see if I can help you all to understand?’

One of Fiorinda’s beardless counsellors kicked her under the table.

Okay, okay. Only joking.

She glanced at her slate, and stood again, for her closing remarks.

‘Well, that seems to be it. Perhaps you now realise, if you didn’t before, why the US Neurobomb research has been abandoned. A
schizophrenic
human weapon of mass destruction is untenable, there are logical constraints that mean you can’t have any other kind, and that’s the end of that. The term “Fat Boy” is a reference to the early nuclear devices, and the analogy seems apt. The weapon of all weapons has twice been demonstrated in anger. I predict it will now sink into a long, uneasy retirement. Perhaps Global Thermonuclear War wouldn’t be so bad after all, but who would like to try? The known cost is too high, even for the winners: the risk of truly awful unplanned consequences too impressive. Perhaps tactical, limited “occult” weaponry could be developed, but who would dare? My recommendation, and I speak for the Triumvirate, is that we join our neighbour nations, and support President Eiffrich’s call for a total ban.’

Wales, Ireland and Scotland supported Eiffrich, as did the Nordic countries. The EU as a body had as yet no official stance.

‘Ms Slater,’ Jack Vries stood out, in the subdued shades of the other faces, as if he drew the light. ‘With respect, isn’t there, in everything you’ve recounted, an equally strong argument for a deterrent? Though we all deeply admire—’

‘Get a grip,’ cried Chip, bouncing in his seat. ‘What are you thinking of, man?
The oil’s gone.
Doesn’t that convince you? The Hell Dimension scenario isn’t bleeding heart loony tunes. It’s hard science, a threat with teeth and hair!’

They just went on looking mildly affronted, annoyed that they’d wasted their time. The token Doves were not going to cheep, and no Hawk had been swayed by Fiorinda’s deposition. Boris the Culham physicist had been making careful notes (a flicker in the back of his eyes).

‘Ms Slater, one last couple of questions, would that be okay?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘The Reich collected data on a steep rise in reports of paranormal activity, during Ax’s so-called “dictatorship”. Is it possible to have access?’

‘I’m sorry. The records were destroyed in a police raid.’

‘Okay, but… As I understand it, Neurophysics theory says the incidence of “leaky minds” is likely to have been constant, a normal Bell curve, since soon after modern consciousness emerged. Rufus was an anomaly, the ‘A’ team was a construction, impossible in nature. I’m interested in the nuclear device analogy, in relation to a non-time-bound event. Could the rise you tracked have been objective, a “fall out” effect from the two, nominally anterior, fusion events?’

Not just a pretty face.

‘What a scary thought! I’m sorry Boris, that’s beyond me. For what it’s worth, I think cultural change accounts for the apparent increase. We did investigate, though we couldn’t keep up with it all, and never found anything in England that would stand up to scrutiny. But there’s something—’

The physicist nodded, waiting.

‘I was close to the event in Ireland. My brain is normal, what my father was doesn’t seem to be hereditary: but I
was
affected. Afterward I had awful waking nightmares, aftershocks.’

Only Fiorinda’s closest friends knew the extent of those “aftershocks”. She looked around, from face to face, not trying to address the obdurate, speaking to the ones who could be reached. ‘I get flashbacks, still. I see people dead, for instance—who would have died if there’d been a different outcome, I think. It was very disturbing, nothing so harmless as hallucinations, because these glimpses came from a place where the difference between “unreal” and “real” doesn’t mean anything. And it’s a living hell. Believe me, our information space, the world we live in and create every moment, cannot afford another of those detonations.’

Fear touched them then, or some of them. Fear not of hippie magic but of chaos: the bottomless terror implicit in those colourful images, an insane universe—

The National Sweetheart smiled bravely. Reinvented since Dissolution days: shorn of that wild cascade of hair, severely neat in a grey tailored jacket, plum shirt with a little string tie: was she beautiful? Or barely pretty? She was an icon, a legend, a beloved survivor, it would be senseless to try and bully her.

‘If this could…could be the end of it?’ suggested Wendy Carter slowly. ‘A self-correcting mechanism? Aberrant minds with this horrible potential for effective “magic”’ (Mairead glared), ‘are vanishingly rare, and can’t reach critical mass without the global audience? Which no longer exists, and may never recover in the same form? If that’s the case, perhaps the so-called Neurobomb—’

‘You’re missing the point, Wendy,’ said the arms trade man. ‘This is not about “a new Rufus”. The ‘A’ team died, sure: but now everyone knows what can be done with this new science. How far behind do you think China is, right now?’

The door opened. The session was over: Zip Crimson, their barmy dress guard, stood waiting. The Working Party rose. ‘I would
very
much like to know more about the theory,’ said His Grace Dr Jones. ‘Would…could Mr Pender himself talk to the Bio-Ethics Committee?’

‘He could,’ said Chip. ‘But I think you’ll find he won’t.’

‘He’d only advise you to chop wood and draw water,’ warned Verlaine.

‘Or tell you to eat your hat.’

‘Should you be wearing a hat.’

Fiorinda propped her head on both hands. Not bad. Told them nothing that isn’t public domaint, and didn’t answer a single dodgy question. Not that she could take much credit for the latter: the suits seemed to have forgotten they wanted answers, as soon as they saw that they hadn’t
got
Ax or Sage. I’m just the girlfriend. They have alpha females on their own team, but I’m obviously not one of those. Noted only for charity work; and getting rescued. They dismiss me, and long may that continue.

The brain in the scans was not her own, it was a textbook simulation. But it could well have been, the state she’d been in when Ax and Sage took her to Mexico last spring. Truth be known, she owed a great deal to those lunatics at Lavoisier. Shame I want to be a rockstar, she thought. There’s this angel with a fiery sword in the way, damn it. Was that the right image? Angels and fiery swords seemed associated, but she had no idea why. Have to ask the Bishop.