Midnight Lamp (44 page)

Ax sat cross-legged, resting his chin on his hand and his elbow on his knee. I need a shave, he thought. We are some desperados. We have set out on a journey that will end God alone knows where. It could even, just about, be literally on another world, another planet,
Insh’allah
, that we finally lay our burdens down and make our peace. But he didn’t like to think of God when he was in an altered state, it seemed a form of gatecrashing, and he was too proud to sneak in the back door. I will wait until I’m invited. Yeah, I will wait until I’m invited, and return to the abyss of non-being the old fashioned way… He was not surprised to see Sage and Fiorinda had become one person, looking at him across the ring of stones that held the crumbled white ash. He had always known that they were one person, right back when he took Aoxomoxoa’s kid-sister mascot to his bed. Or so it seemed now…and there they are, two sides of the same coin. Only their mother could tell them apart. He had an erection, but he was happy to let it simmer, and think about watching them fuck; or watch them do anything, not fussed, and possibly never move again. Yes, this would be dandy, just sitting here thinking horny thoughts about my darlings, for all eternity. But he should make them put their hats on; and we should climb higher up the mountains or find some trees or get under the earth. Sage is going to fry.

‘Sage,’ he said, ‘You’re going to fry.’

‘It’s okay Ax,’ said Fiorinda, ‘time isn’t passing. I think we should visit Vireo Lake. Do you know how to get there?’

‘Of course he does,’ said Sage. ‘He has a map in his head.’

‘Yeah, I can get us there. But put your hats on.’

‘I want to wear my new party frock.’

Sage beamed, delighted, ‘Good idea!’

They had to fetch the Rugrat, but it didn’t seem far. Before long they were driving through a different desert, a pale plain covered in golden-toned maquis; more beautiful than the one they’d come to feel was their own. Drifts of poppies, bright as egg-yolk, scattered the verges like harbingers of next year’s spring. They drove without music, Ax at the wheel of course and Fiorinda in the middle, through a rushing silence. They had the windows open; Sage leaned his elbow on the rim, smiling. ‘I keep thinking I’m listening to music,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Rock music, not ours but someone else’s. I’m about to recognise the band and then I snap back, like waking up from a microsleep.’

Ax and Sage listened intently, thinking they would name the band for her; it kept eluding them, though the music was extremely familiar. It was one of those glitches where you need to get
past
the moment, so that you can look at it again, and say, oh, yeah, that’s what it was. But they could never get past the moment. The silence roared like a distant sea. The landscape flew along with them like a magic carpet, getting more barren but more austerely beautiful, and they met intersections, at each of which Ax followed the directions on the map in his head. There was still only desert, and they hadn’t seen another car, when suddenly the lake was in front of them, a pan of silver they had glimpsed from afar and assumed must be salt.

It was Vireo Lake. They got out of the Rat, and walked by the shore. White birds rose from the water. ‘Can you drink it?’ asked Fiorinda.

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Ax. ‘It must be an extremely strange liquid.’

Sage looked up, squinting through his lashes, into a sky as white as the shore. ‘We’re walking on a seabed.’

‘We’re where it’s impossible for people to be,’ said Fiorinda.

‘On the cutting edge. This is where they’re building air for Mars.’

‘At the highest point of the high tide.’

‘You digitised a human being, Sage, and moved her through information space. Could you shift, I dunno…that rock?’

‘Totally different problem. A human being is
already
a live path in the code, conscious information. But I could only do it because it was it was Fee on the other end. Any other human being would be powers beyond—’

‘But it’s a start. The universe isn’t
really
made of binary code, is it?’

‘Nope, it’s turtles all the way down.’

‘It’s a new way of handling things,’ said Fiorinda, ‘Something we’ve missed until now, that opens a whole new area in the game.’

‘The inexhaustible sea is sliding away from us.’

Oh, that long departing roar…

They’d passed the perimeter fence without noticing it: they were now in a car park, among bunker-blank buildings, and an artificial oasis of lawn, set with small pine trees, economy size bonsai. They walked in, and explored the corridors unchallenged, feeling like official visitors—a role they’d endured so often they caught each other smiling falsely, nodding for no reason, and doing needless
how interesting
expressions. It was cool inside the buildings, but not the flamboyant indoor chill they were used to in Los Angeles. They found a neurological lab, populated with Gauss 0003/zyg series Cr/t imaging scanners: massively shielded whole-body pods, each worth more than the GNP of a small country; two short rows of them. Fiorinda and Ax stayed at the door, Sage went in, pausing to bow his head slightly at the threshold, like a martial arts student entering the dojo. He stalked around, and they saw him raise his eyebrows: he walked out again shaking his head.

‘Majestic. You wouldn’t have got me into one of those for long, though.’

Olwen’s cognitive scanners, built by her parent company in Wales, had been on a different evolutionary line, no need for the massive shielding of fMRI.

‘Did you see anything interesting?’

‘They’re linked.’

This seemed reasonable to Fiorinda and Ax. Why shouldn’t the neuronauts be linked, if they were a team? But Sage was impressed. They continued their tour, looking for the team, and found them in a cafeteria. As always at these corporate-feudalism feeding stations, there was an obvious caste system. Support staff and technicians sat below the salt, the scientists and the bureaucrats had their special areas, lords and ladies of Church and State. And then the wild cards, the jokers, who can mingle with anyone but mostly they mingle with each other. They can’t help it. Here was another surprise for Sage: a woman on the A team. She was Number One Cropped, a bodybuilder with little in the way of breasts; but obviously a woman. The A team were easy to spot. They sat together, a group within the group, and they had an aura: a no-kidding, Anne-Marie Wing, striated halo of coloured light, that glowed around them.

‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ said Fiorinda, ‘I don’t know what to do with these people. I surely don’t wish them well, but I don’t want to wish them harm.’

‘We’re tourists.’ said Sage. ‘We don’t wish them anything.’

Outside in the atrifical oasis, Fiorinda saw a little grey bird perched on a pine twig. It sang out a burst of silvery notes as she passed, and she stopped and smiled, holding out her hands. Just because it was a bird, singing in the desert.

On the drive back from Vireo they made up songs together, something they’d rarely done before, though they’d appeared on each other’s albums, helping out in the traditional fashion, in the glory days. There had never been time, and their musical lives had still been distinct: different bands. The songwriting was very good, it grounded them and made them laugh, it took the rush and raced with it. Sadly none of the songs were destined to survive except ‘Promised Land’. Sage was the scribe, leaning by that open window, and all the words and music flew away.

They left the Rugrat and headed back to camp, through the landscape that Ax had found so familiar. The heat was extraordinary, Ax kept fretting that Sage was going to fry. He’d been taking sunscreen pills for weeks, a kind his liver could deal with: but however often they told him, Ax forgot this. The trail crossed a high red plain, scattered with boulder heaps, cactus and Joshua trees.

‘How high are we?’ asked Fiorinda, holding out her iridescent skirts. The dress was
darker
than anything she’d worn in her party-frock days: but they’d remembered she hated black. She was a glittering wallflower, a pansy, a bird with smoulder-opal plumage.

With a vulture’s bare head, but that was a token price to pay.

‘Bout as high as Ben Nevis, right now.’

‘Unbelievable. My eyeballs are on toast. It’s like a sauna.’

‘You two wait here, I’ll fetch the horses.’

‘No horses.’ Fiorinda quickly thought of an excuse, ‘It’s too hot for them.’

‘You like the dress, Fee?’

‘I love it.’

‘Let’s take a break.’

They rested in a scoop of black shade and drank water. Ax rolled up spliff: Sage sat close to him. ‘We need to spy out the country we’re heading into. D’you want to come up with me?’

‘We’re good here. If we go up there, whoa, we’re in the unknown.’

‘You think we might get too far out?’

‘Yeah, that worries me.’

‘If we get too far out, well, there we’ll be.’

‘We could go very far,’ said Ax. ‘Very, very far.’

Sage filled his lungs, and leaned to pour the smoke into Ax’s mouth. Fiorinda felt that she was in the way. No girlfriends on manoeuvres, they had private things to discuss. ‘I’ll keep watch,’ she said. She took Sage’s rifle and went to the side of a tall red boulder, where she could see the trail. Nothing moved. She climbed to the top of the boulder and found a hollow where she could lie, watching over the plain. She was fascinated by the heavy hard feel of the rifle, the smell of greased metal. It gave her images of a dead, horrible, thrusting and stabbing, but she kept smelling it and feeling it until she was convinced it was harmless, though it may kill this is not a
bad
rifle, this is a friendly rifle.

Free and clear, with her bandanna tugged over her eyes, she spread herself to the sun, and the fire that burns the deserts of California ran easily in her veins. Ah, Babylon we’re not afraid. The great burning, the disaster, is our world where we will live… She had hardly been there any time when she heard scrambling and gormless laughter, and they came up the rock, rock hard, naked except for their boots, greased with sweat. ‘Why did you go away?’ demanded Ax. ‘You scared us,’ said Sage. ‘Don’t
ever
go away, don’t be out of sight.’

The rock became soft as red milk, continuous with the air. Fiorinda and Ax soul kissing, Sage between them, the black opal frock for bedding. They became a flesh machine, endlessly, brutally, working: while the sun raced to and fro, burning them to skeletons, fusing them to the rock. ‘D’you remember,’ asked Sage, when they lay worn out like fossils, hollowed and filled with gritstone. ‘Once, we were going to stay hornswoggling naked for life?’

‘Yeah, because what’s the fucking point in being near her any other way.’

‘It would have had to be in London, not Tyller Pystri, not much of a statement, there in the cottage, nobody to appreciate… What happened to that idea?’

‘Let’s do it now,’ said Ax, ‘Let’s do it, consecrate ourselves.’

‘Mine’s still longer. Isn’t it Fee? Hey, isn’t it?’

‘And mine is the tip of an iceberg, fuckface. I know this conversation, and I don’t know why you even pretend it is about me—’

‘Not by much, and mine is fatter, and that’s what counts, heheheh.’

Sage grabbed him, and they rolled together until Ax, uppermost, glanced over the side. ‘Whooo. Er, I suppose we know how to get down from here?’

They were lying in the hollow tip of a red pillar, undercut and smooth, that went vertiginous dizzying down, into the abyss. ‘It wasn’t like this,’ said Fiorinda, worriedly. ‘It was
not
like this. It has grown like a beanstalk.’

Sage grinned at the white-pricked furnace overhead. ‘I’m gonna fry!’

Memo to selves. Climbing up the beanstalk is much, much easier than climbing down, and being naked under the influence of hallucinogens is no help. Getting back to earth took them a long time: hard work in the heat of the day.

Fiorinda went into the cave, in search of supplies. The horses were in the back, where the spring stirred in its puddle like a fairy: looming with whiskers on their rubbery lips, and piano-key teeth. They seemed to her malevolent, invidious. She didn’t like the way they breathed, or the sense of their great barrel-bodied size in the dark. She brought lager and Bombay Mix to the front end. She’d changed out of her glittery dress, Sage and Ax had given up their no-pants ultimatum. They were all dressed and sensible again. The mattress lay where they had left it in the morning, the cover neatly spread by Fiorinda.

She gave them food and drink, and sat apart.

‘I can be a monster,’ she said, ‘Or I can be property. There are no other choices for a woman, no I mean an artist or a woman. I think there was another option, but the way is shut. I’m okay. If you can bite the heads off live chickens, nobody will abuse you much, but there’s no part for me as a human being in this movie. Every man, I mean every manager, that ever looked at me has wanted to piss on me, except for one who swore he wanted to be my friend, but
he was lying
.’

‘It isn’t like that,’ said Sage, miserably. ‘You once told me I wanted the Zen Self so I could have the spooky female power you have. I
wasn’t
just copying you. I can have reasons of my own. But it’s true I wanted to be with you, to be where you are. All I want is to never leave your side. It comes out not the way I meant.’

He reached out his hand, Fiorinda severed it with a glance, and the five-fingered spider wriggled around, bleeding copiously.

‘There’s supposed to be a difference between how you react to a male or a female body,’ mused Ax, trying to defuse this. ‘That’s how you know your sexual orientation, look at two bodies, which one makes you fire up? Me, I’ve always been the one saying
no, I’m sorry, I don’t see the problem.
I mainly prefer girls, whatever that means, but I don’t see the problem.’

‘Are we trying to tell me this isn’t about sex?’ inquired Fiorinda, coldly.

‘I was born at the bottom of a pit,’ said Ax. ‘I was a poor boy, no contacts, no hooks I could use. The people I can feel watching me all the time said come on Ax, don’t be such a loser, you can get out of there. So I climbed as best I could, I tried to be the best I could, and of course the fucking rocks fell on me. So here I am bleeding under these rocks, like a fucking idiot, and so
hurt
, and I can hear the people who watch me all the time saying, well, you can do anything if you really believe in yourself. It’s his own fault, he has loser genes.’