Midnight Lamp (15 page)

‘How long did it take you to learn to use that thing?’ asked Dilip, intrigued.

‘No time at all. NME had a primitive early model when we were doing
Bridge House
. I picked it up then, nothing much has changed.’

‘Think of this, brothers and sisters,’ said Ax, ‘next time he tries to convince you he can’t remember what he was doing an hour ago-’

‘Totally different kind of memory, Sah.’

They laughed, touched beyond measure to have Sage back on form,
viscerally
reassured to have things back the way they ought to be, the tiger and the wolf teasing each other; the Triumvirate in charge.

‘But why don’t you just jam the signal?’ wondered Anne-Marie. ‘Isn’t that what people do, normally? You can get a kind of a gadget—’

‘That’s what
I
said,’ said Fiorinda. ‘You tell ’em, Ammy. They ignore me.’

‘No, no,’ said Sage. ‘This is better. This is
funny
.’

‘There’ll be continuity flaws.’ Verlaine liked to think he knew about vision-mixing. He and Chip had moved up, irrisistibly drawn to the projector, and were eyeing it with longing. They were in love with the modern world.

‘Shitloads,’ agreed Sage, cheerfully. ‘We’ll make a feature of it. We don’t expect to fool anyone for long. Just give them, er, a non-violent riposte.’

‘Won’t they notice all the cheesy
cue for a commerical
hooks?’

‘Don’t care if they do.’

There was a pause. So much to be said, where to start?

‘D’you want us to do the updates now?’ asked Allie, at last.

‘The sooner the better,’ said Fiorinda, ‘I’m not in the mood for reality tv.’

The security crew remained impassive, sure they weren’t involved (they were mistaken). Smelly Hugh cleared his throat, diffidently, ‘Uh, is this it then? We’re makin’ a video? What about the Hollywood movie deal? Did that fall through?’

‘The movie’s supposed to be happening,’ said Ax, ‘but there have been further developments. There’s a lot to discuss. Can we do this first?’

The empty spa had a desolate air, an echoing emptiness.

They were live wires, this gang, and they
loved
each other’s company. When they came home from a hard day’s night of promotion socialising (Harry Lopez was working them like dogs), they didn’t go their separate ways. They ditched their wraps and gathered in the kitchen, in the upstairs gallery outside the dance studio; but most often in the desert biosphere which they called the Cactus Room: and laughed and talked and fooled around until the early hours. Felice, the big tall caramel-complexioned beauty who plays the trumpet, always wants wants a round of
Name That Classic Video!
Her fellow “Powerbabes”, sexy little Cherry Dawkins, and the sweet one, Dora Devine, always follow Felice. Rob, the boyfriend, speak-out political brother, generally wants a discussion of Utopian politics. Fiorinda and her pal the lovely Allie Marlowe get in a girlie huddle and whisper. Mr Preston just wants to pick out a little something on his guitar, quietly in a corner… So this time Rob gets shouted down, in a verbal duel that makes political rap worth listening to: and baby-faced Chip Desmond grabs the kaleidoscope spinning top they used as a choosing-die. Sage is on, but before he can get to his feet they’re yelling
Billie Jean
and hey, no, maybe it’s
Thriller,
which is true, it always is something on those lines: Sage is a big Jacko fan—

‘It’s a shame,’ muttered one of the watchers in the van. ‘Why don’t they let him make his moves? Same reason they make Ax pick guitar in a corner. Professional jealousy, it’s a terrible thing.’

The heterosexual males on the roster wished for cameras in the bedrooms, they wanted to see Cherry Dawkins naked. Access to intimate areas would also solve the enigma of Sage and Ax, trailed incessantly on the Digital Artists’ promo channel. Sexual affection was never seen downstairs.

It’s frustrating how reserved these Brits are.

Now the cat had appeared, a white stray: the others called it Ax’s cat. Fiorinda says Ax has decided to call it Tommy. The cat steps on a house computer remote, causing the audio ambience to flip from gentle ska to rancid hardcore punk.

‘Hey-’ says Mr Preston, his head popping up from behind one of the big stone bowls. ‘If that’s how we’re choosing sounds, I want
Arbeit Macht Frei
off there.’

‘Oh!, God!’ cries elegant-Allie. ‘He’s right! Off, off, off!’

‘And
Stonefish
!’ yells Dora.

‘What’s wrong with
Stonefish?
’ demands the aggrieved Immix maestro.

‘Some bits are okay,’ concedes Dora. ‘I like the start of “Kythera”. But then, hohum, we have to have the blackened corpses swaying in the breeze-’

‘You watch your mouth, that’s my
Baudelaire
quote-’

The cat steps on the remote again, the music becomes unbelievably loud and strange. ‘Why d’you call the cat Tommy?’ shouts DK. ‘Is that an ironic Tommy?’

‘No. It’s because it’s—’

‘
WHAT
-?’

‘DEAF!’ bawls Fiorinda…but now the cat has vanished.

‘The cat’s disappeared again!’

The watcher leaned over to make a check on the Strange Cat Incidents log.

‘That cat is weird!’ shouted one of the armed guards from the cab.

‘What’s the music?’

‘The soundtrack of
Stonefish
, I think.’

Late on the third night they came in from a restaurant party (promotion gig) and went straight to their basement bunker. Technically they’d have been equally safe upstairs, but no one felt comfortable in those haunted rooms. Chip and Ver set up the projector, to find out what the unmarked van was viewing.

Hey hey, it was Cactus Room cabaret.

‘Escape from the Panopticon,’ crowed Chip, ‘Heeheehee! I love it.’

‘Like shooting fish in a barrel!’ gloated Verlaine.

‘Could you turn that thing off?’ said Ax.

They were alone, the security crew had moved into the ranchero’s gatehouse. They settled in the kidney-shaped jacuzzi, expectantly—and Ax remembered a meeting long ago, in the vandalised breakfast courtyard of a Park Lanehotel. They had survived a bloody coup, they were prisoners of the monstrous Green President Pigsty Liver. Ax had given them his Utopian manifesto, and his shattered friends had let themselves be recruited. He saw the marks of time, invisible until you’ve been away, and then leaping to the eye when you meet your friends again. There’s Rob,
paterfamilias
, thicker in the middle, soft around the jaw. Felice and Dora are plumper too, Cherry’s all grown up. Ah, those three used to be
such babes
, dooling round Lambeth in their old pink Cadillac. Allie looks worn out. Dilip has aged, suddenly. Roxane Smith, veteran music critic ought to be here, but s/he had decided hir health wasn’t up to it. Anne-Marie Wing and Smelly Hugh had still been on the bad guys’ team, that grim morning when the Reich was born.

Sometime soon he must convince them it was time to quit: stop clinging to the wreckage back in London. But not tonight.

‘Okay, we’re as secure as we can be, bar sitting out on the beach, which might not be secure at all, given the futuristic devices of the modern world—’

‘How much trouble are we in?’ asked Rob. ‘What’s this all about?’

‘More trouble than we thought,’ said Sage.

Ax sighed. ‘Well, it’s like this—’

He explained the situation they’d walked into. The President’s letter, Harry’s Fat Boy pitch. The mysterious werebears; the butcher’s shop in the wasteland. Philemon Roche’s casenotes; the secret Committee.

Sage made some additions. Fiorinda said very little.

Out in the Anza-Borrego desert, a hundred miles east of San Diego, volunteer military neuronauts were having their brains rewired, by something like the same method that had taken Sage to the Zen Self…but different in closely-guarded technical detail. In another age, the very existence of this project would have been wrapped in lead and buried deep. In post-modern America Vireo Lake had its media coverage, its camp followers, its faithful protestors: but the PR firewall was magnificent. Even President Eiffrich, expressing his distaste at the development of ‘human weapons’, never hinted at the occult connection. Of course, it helped that vanishingly few people in the USA knew about the assassination of Rufus O’Niall, or the reason for it—

Chip, Verlaine and Dilip had been Zen Self labrats along with Sage,–until he’d left them far behind. The others weren’t weird science nuts, but you could say they had a grasp of the issues.

Verlaine broke the silence first. ‘But that’s… I mean, apart from the incredible scandal if they got busted, the Vireo Lake people must know the blood sacrifices won’t work! You can’t boost a normal brain to fusion by exposing it to horrors, no matter what. Even if you were flaying people alive in the same room—’

‘Thanks for the charming image,’ said Ax.

Verlaine glanced at Fiorinda. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the rock and roll brat, haggard and bright-eyed in her dinner party finery. ‘Horrors have no effect. I’m over-conditioned.’

‘I think the Committee is ahead of you, Ver,’ said Ax. ‘The implication of everything we’ve been told, and shown, is that they believe the Vireo team has given up on rewiring normal brains. They’re trying to weaponise natural magic.’

‘Holy fuck.’

‘But if that’s so, why this pussyfoot FBI
investigation
?’ demanded Dilip. ‘Why can’t your Committee insist on seeing the experimental data?’

‘It could be they’ve found out that Vireo Lake is a blind,’ said Ax. ‘If the real business is going on elsewhere, and the Vireo team knows nothing, then raiding the labs is just going to issue a warning, and achieve nothing. I don’t know, DK. All Roche will say is there are reasons, and Fred Eiffrich will explain, when he finally finds time to have his urgent meeting with me. But maybe we’re better off finding our own answers. Put it this way, we’re not absolutely sure that we have the same agenda as the Committee.’

‘But…’ Rob rubbed his forehead. ‘This, er, Fat Boy? That’s what you get if you weaponise someone like Rufus O’Niall…? Isn’t that what they’re
supposed
to be doing at Vireo Lake? Trying to make a human magic weapon?’

‘Wash your mouth,’ said Sage, ‘Fat Boy is not what anybody wants. The official line is that they’re building a stable form of fusion consciousness, which could, say, vaporise a few Islamic missile silos, thousands of miles away, with no loss of life. It’s the clean, green future of warfare.’

‘So, really, it wouldn’t be too terrible if they were to succeed? I mean, with the official program. As weapons of mass destruction go-’

‘No, not really, because in my opinion, in many opinions, it’s impossible. If you reach the Zen Self, what they call fusion over here, Rob, then you either stay there, and you’re in no state to be nuking missile silos. Or you come back, and you very rapidly lose your ability to win an argument with Rufus O’Niall.’

‘And that’s why they gave up and started on the Fat Boy.’ said Dora.

‘And if you have a Fat Boy, then you’re into the “It’s a
Good
Life” scenario,’ explained Chip, helpfully. ‘Meltdown, hell dimension. Rufus could think nasty thoughts about you, and you’d drop dead. The Fat Boy decides Saudi Arabia is a bad place: make it gone. Gone.’

‘Could that
happen
?’

‘Anything could happen, Dor. The moon could turn to green cheese. The Fat Boy could decide to abolish electricity, and then we’d be in trouble. Mr Eiffrich’s rogue weapon-mongers cannot possibly be aiming to create the Fat Boy. They
could
be trying to create a natural magic weapon, out of some crew-cut soldier who can guess Zener cards better than chance, or make a pencil wiggle without touching it. If that’s what’s happening we’re in no danger, no matter how many blood sacrifice raves they sponsor.’

‘But if they have a candidate who can touch Fiorinda,’ said Dilip, ‘that would be different. And maybe they would not know, until too late.’

Rob shook his head. ‘Fuck. We’re a long way from building Utopia, Ax.’

‘Tell me.’

The hollow shell of the spa echoed around them. Dilip leaned back on his elbows and stared at the ceiling: imagining phantom ripples of light on water, shimmering up there. What games were played in this temple of pleasure, before the microbes of disillusion crept in? And what astonished ghosts are here, he wondered, listening to this surreal discussion? There is no way back, and no place to hide, even in the heart of empire… But I knew this.

‘I’m confused,’ said Allie, at last. ‘I thought Rufus was the only monster that there’s ever been, and there could never be another-’

‘Well, there’s me, Allie,’ Fiorinda reminded her.

‘But you’re not a monster!
Nothing
could make you into a monster!’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Fiorinda, with a wry little smile, ‘But here I sit, proving that monsters exist. I thought the way you did Allie. I’ve been trying and trying to convince myself it was over, but I’m still here, so that was a problem. Now there’s someone else. It isn’t any kind of military volunteer. I knew that the moment Ax and Sage told me Harry’s story. If there’s a Fat Boy candidate, it has to be someone
exactly
like my father: a freakishly talented natural magician, who is also the idol of millions. I’m right, aren’t I Sage?’

‘Hm…well…’

Fiorinda tugged at a lock of her ragged mass of hair. ‘Yeah, sorry: an inconvenient truth. Magicians get their power from other peoples’ arousal. It’s how conjurers work on stage, it’s what ritual magic assumes, and what happens if you have the freak wiring matches the…the instinct about “magic” that everyone has, the world over. I don’t know the information space equations for it, but I know that because I know. It’s not a strong force. You need access to a huge number of people before you achieve anything spectacular. My father was the perfect storm, in terms of “psychic powers”: but he’d have stayed a suburban monster, wrecking a few lives—except that he became a rock god, with hordes of fans, and he was up there for decades. That’s when he achieved fusion, and he never came back.’

She swallowed, as if trying to get rid of a foul taste. ‘At Rivermead, in the winter of the occupation, I used to listen to the Green Nazis saying they must get more blood sacrifices going, because this would make Rufus stronger. I’m sure he appreciated their efforts. Fear, disgust and horror pump up arousal: the occult tradition has always known that. There’s sex too, but fear and horror and disgust are much more reliable. But he didn’t need what they did. He was already weaponised. All the Celtics did was to tell him what he was capable of.’