Midnight Lamp (4 page)

Close up,
of course
it’s Fiorinda, and
of course
that’s Ax Preston, the rockstar warlord with the boy-next-door charm. He lingered over Sage, the only one of the three who’d been global before the UK collapsed. Aoxomoxoa and the Heads used to wear digital skull masks, not just on stage but on all public sightings. Sage Pender, aka Aoxomoxoa, had worn a designer ‘living skull’model that he’d coded himself. He’d kept his hands masked too, to hide the fact that he’d lost several fingers to infant meningitis.

There were no deletions, and no sign reconstruction, regrowth or scar tissue on the hands and wrists that Harry studied now. Not at any magnification. And the technical data says that’s no kind of digital veiling, that’s flesh and blood.

The hairs on the back of Harry’s neck prickled.

What the hell happened to you,
he thought.
What was it LIKE, Sage?’

The rings intrigued him: Ax had one too.

The Angel next door nudged him with a quart of mezcalito.

‘This is incredible,’ whispered Harry, fumbling it back untouched.

‘Shit. Guess you’re too young to have ever been at a
Yes
concert. Still.’ The geezer downed an inch or few of rotgut, ‘They’re good… Are you a talent scout?’

Harry furtively tapped, restoring normal vision. ‘Uh, you could say so.’

‘Well, walk on by, mother. What can you give them that they ain’t got? Don’t ruin their lives. Those.’ He gestured with the quart, ‘are free people.’

You are as wrong as you can be, thought Harry. But you are so right. I’m the
last
person they want to meet. For a second or two he felt like a butterfly hunter, greedy and guilty… But the three were saying they’d do one last song and goodnight. It was ‘Heart On My Sleeve,’ the Aoxomoxoa and the Heads dance track, a major European hit at the time of the Floods Conference, album release on
Hedonastick.
This was an
a capella
version, the three voices blended in mesmerising harmony. The clue-free campers went utterly silent and chills crept up Harry’s spine, at the purity of that homage.

He probably didn’t draw breath himself until the music ended.

The Angel dug him in the ribs again. ‘Couldn’t help but notice you have a concealed weapon, sir. Don’t you know an alien carrying a firearm is illegal in Mexico?’

‘Yeah, but I have a… Hey, I’m just doing the same as everyone else.’

Outlaws are all alike. He was morally certain there’d be enough illicit weaponry in this seaside dug-out to mount an assault on Camp Bellevue.

‘But no one else is wearing a hat like yours. You’ve been acting kind of suspicious, young man, and those are neighbours of mine.’ Suddenly, the old guy fixed a hefty grip on Harry’s shoulder. ‘Tell me straight. Are you the law?’

They were leaving. They were walking away, laughing and shaking their heads at the applause, Ax and Fiorinda shouldering their guitars. Shit!

‘I am not the law! I’m their biggest fan! Lemme go!’

He dashed around the fire, in time to cut them off.

‘Hi! My name’s Harry Lopez and—’

‘Hi,’ said Ax, in a cool, negative, English tone of voice.

‘I wanted to say, uh… Was that your own arrangement on “Heart”?’

‘Yeah,’ said Sage, in the same tone but frostier.

‘It was, uh, excellent. Very, um, original idea.’

‘Thanks.’

Fiorinda, between her bodyguards, was almost invisible in shadow. If I tried to touch her, he thought—reeling before a blast of inexplicable, over the top hostility. If I even look at her hard, they’ll rip me to shreds. He was terrified. If he let them go, he might never dare to get near them again.

‘Have you ever been offered a recording contract? I mean, in the US?’

‘Can’t say as I have,’ said Mr Preston. ‘Excuse us. It’s late.’

Sage was officially allowed to work for an hour in the afternoons. It was still the immix tracks for
Unmasked
, which he’d been tinkering with for so long, sometimes convinced he was achieving something new and brilliant; sometimes just bored by the relentless
difficulty
of the task
.
After forty minutes weaving the loom of firings and partial firings, edge and hue and limbic routed emotion, he knew he was flogging dead meat. He kept going, obstinately, until the hour: zipped down the code to be fired off to his collaborator when the satellite window opened, and dressed for a cold swim. Peter (Cack) Stannen didn’t like b-loc: which was fine. They’d never worked in the same office. Poor Peter, some things you just can’t explain to him, like why did the boss go away, and if we beat the bad guys, why isn’t everything like before—

He missed his band. He missed England, and the Atlantic. But here is an ocean that makes the Atlantic look
parochial
. Out in the California Current he dived: into the blue, into the immense smooth masses of movement. I have to get them down here, he thought. It is NOT too cold. A decent dry suit is all you need, and the rental ones here are good. A pod of dolphins barrelled up and he broke the surface with them, in a rush of bubbles, feeling gloriously, momentarily, completely himself. But he’d swum too far. He plodded back, stroke by stroke, stumbled out and fell crushed on the slope of a dune.

Ax, who had been running, came up and sat down, shaking his head.

‘I saw that, you lunatic. Are you
trying
to set yourself back?’

‘Fuck off,’ mumbled Sage. ‘I’m okay.’ He forced himself to sit up, ‘I get
tired
, that’s all. I’m not sick, nothing hurts, I’m just
fucking exhausted
, the whole fucking time
.’

‘Doctor, doctor. I had my liver and half my right lung torn out ten months ago, and now I can’t swim a mile in freezing cold water without feeling poorly.’

‘Half a mile.’

‘Yeah, really? A country half-mile. You’re unreasonable… How’s “Relax”?’

The
Unmasked
concept was brain-burning immix applied to golden oldies, a simple idea that had turned out to be a bugger to implement.

‘Not,’ said Sage. ‘I should call Holly, tell him it isn’t going to happen.’

‘Nah, don’t do that. You’ll get there.’

The mist had descended. Fiorinda, the Nevada kids and the Pabellón kids played rounders down the shore, dim figures wavering in cloud.

‘What do you think of her now?’ asked Ax, quietly.

‘She’s…okay. No better, not much worse.’

‘I think she’s better, Sage. Look at her, she’s
playing
. It’s like the childhood she never had. I think she had a nervous breakdown and she’s coming out of it.’

On the beach at Drumbeg, Fiorinda’s father had used his last breath to promise Sage that neither he nor Ax Preston would
enjoy her
again. Sage had been convinced (he was in no position to doubt Rufus O’Niall’s power to make a prophecy stick) that this meant he would die, and they would blame themselves and split up. Or else he’d linger on, a hopeless invalid, and ruin their lives. You can reach technologically-mediated Nirvana, and your life can still be a fuck-up. But O’Niall had cursed his daughter, not his rivals. Sage crept back to health and strength, it was Fiorinda who was lost.

No one at home knew what what had happened at Tyller Pystri, but everyone who knew her had seen Fiorinda was in trouble. She had seemed to make an incredible recovery from her ordeal, but as fear for Sage’s life had receded, she’d begun to fall apart: quietly, day by day, and at last the collapse had come. It was natural, maybe even cleansing…

‘She isn’t having a nervous breakdown,’ said Sage, breaking in on Ax’s hopeful reasoning. ‘Psychologically, she’s in amazing shape.’

‘Are you
kidding
?’

‘I am not kidding. You and I both deserted her. Her bastard of a father raped her for seven months in the body of a dead man, the English tried to burn her for a witch, she helped me to kill Rufus, and she came out of all that emotionally intact, because she is our babe, and there is no one like her. The damage is to the hardware.’ Sage pulled back the hood of his drysuit, and rubbed at the drying salt on his forehead. ‘She has frontal lobe trauma. I’d need a scan to give you the details: but it wouldn’t make any odds, there’s nothing anyone could do. Fiorinda’s brain is too weird, nobody would dare to contemplate surgery.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying, prolonged mental or physical torture will make people schizophrenic. It will do that. It’s a syndrome, not a disease, and once the damage is done, doesn’t matter a fuck how it was induced.’ He held out his tanned right hand, and spread the long, strong, square-tipped fingers. ‘You know the world is nothing but virtual particles, popping in an’ out of existence, don’t you Ax? You know technically you could be dreaming, right now, because everything you perceive, sleeping or waking, is just firing neurons? It doesn’t bother you, it feels okay, because of a trick your brain does. That’s what Fiorinda has lost. She can’t distinguish internal and external stimuli. She’s lost the illusion of a single reality, and all her horrors rush in to fill the gap.’

‘You’re telling me that Fiorinda is crazy.’

‘No, I’m telling you she has neurological damage and her brain chemistry is fucked, and unfixable. But in Fiorinda’s case there’s an extra twist.
She knows what she is
, she knows what her father was. It’s not just that the world doesn’t feel real. She
knows
… She’s changed the code: and so have I, or I wouldn’t be here. I can deal with the situation, because of the techno-route I took to reach the Zen Self. She doesn’t have that protection. It’s no wonder all the anecdotal evidence says people with innate magic power are unstable. It’s a fucking impossible psychological platform.’

If Sage had been delivering this relentless message with buddhalike-calm, Ax would have hated him. But no, that was not what was happening. They stared at each other: ah, God, unbearable.

Fiorinda ran and laughed, playing with the children-

‘Is she dangerous?’ said Ax, at last.

He had encountered Fiorinda’s magic for the first time, that night at Tyller Pystri. He didn’t remember much.

‘No—!’ gasped Sage. He recovered. ‘She’s not dangerous because she’s still
our babe.
I couldn’t help what happened in Cornwall, I was too weak and it caught me off guard. In future we’ll always be looking after her.’

‘I get it,’ said Ax, white-lipped. ‘I did this. I set off the bastard’s time bomb.’

In a moment of weakness, Sage had told Ax about Rufus O’Niall’s last words. He wished to God he hadn’t. He shrugged. Pleading with Ax not to blame himself would just have them both sobbing. ‘Nah… There was no curse. Rufus said that because he knew what he’d done to her. And because
even then
he was trying to fuck me up, what a guy, eh?’

He decided to withhold Fiorinda’s ghost story. Enough is enough.

Ax reserved the right to hate himself, but he wasn’t going to argue.

‘So,’ he said, ‘Okay, let’s engage. What are we looking at?’

‘We can’t hand her over to the whitecoats—’

‘God, no. She’d be terrified. And we can’t let them lock her up.’

‘Good, I’m glad we’re agreed. And no medication, by the way, it wouldn’t be safe: but that’s okay. The drugs don’t work, they just damp things down, nanosurgery’s the only answer and not for her. Well, untreated schizophrenia. It’s doable. With luck we’re looking at an intermittent fault. I think we can forget about sex, or children—’

‘I’d worked that out, thanks.’

‘Not because of the damage, more because of how she feels. I’m afraid things are almost certain to get worse, but they’ll get better, too… Okay, we nurse her through the bad patches, a stable routine, all our love; these things help. We could hope for periods of years, maybe, with her as calm as she is now.’

‘Other times when she’s in hell, and there’s nothing we can do.’

The mist had closed around them. Children’s voices were like seagulls’ cries; the great ocean almost silenced. They looked at the life ahead of them, and shouldered the burden gladly. But what did
Fiorinda
do, to deserve such a fate?

‘Hey.
It isn’t going to happen, Ax
. I won’t let it happen. I can break her out of this, I’m the boddhisattva remember, I just need to be a little
stronger
, get rid of this fucking stupid
tiredness
—’

Ax nodded, compassionately.

‘I can take her. You don’t believe me but I can. I’m no magician, but I can make it okay. The problem.’ Sage had to stop, and knuckle his eyes: he tried again. ‘The problem is that she’d have to trust me, absolutely, with her life and sanity. And I’m the bastard who left her to face Rufus O’Niall, all alone.’

‘We both left her.
We
are the bastards who left her all alone.’

Ax gripped his friend’s hand. They rarely touched each other now, because they’d been lovers and that was over. The bisexual threesome had always been for her sake. They both knew this, though there’d been no discussion; and it was fine, but the past, at this painful moment, rose up unexpectedly—

Someone was coming out of the mist. Fuck, it’s the A&R man.

The handclasp was dropped, abruptly.

‘Shit,’ muttered Sage. ‘Are we going to have to leave?’

‘No way,’ said Ax, through gritted teeth. ‘We’re staying, he’s going. Fiorinda
likes
it here. Hey, I have friends. The Justice Minister says he’s a great admirer of Ax Preston: he should be good for a few parking tickets, or making the bastard in the stupid hat vanish. I have no shame. I’d hustle a favour from the Emperor, if I had to.’

‘The Emperor’ was Fred Eiffrich, President of the United States, one of the useful personal contacts Ax had racked up in his glory days. But meanwhile the bastard in the stupid hat was coming up fast. Ax gave Sage a guilty look.

‘Well, I’ll do another couple of miles. See you back at the cabin.’

Ax jumped up and bolted. The A&R man stopped, nonplussed; then came on again. He wore black golf shorts, a mauve Hawaiian shirt and a football jacket, and of course the hat. He was very young: his complexion amazingly soft and pink, with a tiny moustache like a line of felt-tip. He sat down, a respectful distance away, but close enough to converse. The ballgame had broken up, the children had vanished, there was no one in sight. Sage and this gadfly were alone on a mist-shouded sandbank.