Midnight Lamp (47 page)

‘Did you get through?’

‘No messages. I’ll try again later.’

‘Shit. And I probably only convinced him to stick around, and wait for the best chance to shoot me with a poison dart.’

They were still sitting against that tree, with the music of the North Fork rushing beside them, the towering grandeur of the Palisade massif above, when a party on horseback arrived. ‘Good morning,’ said Stu Meredith, at the head of the posse, in some amazement. ‘Ax told me you were over here, and we should fetch you back to Bighorn. What’s been going on?’

‘You’re a little late,’ complained Sage.

Fiorinda stood up: Stu got down, and held out his hand. ‘Well, you must be Fiorinda. I’m very pleased to meet you, very pleased indeed. Has this daddy-long-legs fellow been bothering you? I’d offer to give him some lessons in how to treat a lady, but it looks like you have that under control. You pack a punch.’

‘We had to deal with some bad guys, leftovers. Sage got into a bit of a fight.’

‘Mm. He likes to do that, I recall.’

The ranch hands dismounted, Sage was given First Aid. A pot of coffee was brewed, and breakfast shared: Stu, his posse and the English couple sitting together on the mossy boulders by the creek ‘We had a call from Ax,’ said Stu. ‘He told us you two were in Big Pine, or on your way there, and I should find you and bring you back. He’ll meet us at the ranch, he expects to be free by evening. I understand he’s discussing your desert trip, Sage.’

‘Is he in any difficulty over that?’ asked Sage, cautiously.

‘I don’t believe so.’ The ranch hands glanced at each other, grinning slightly. They felt this was a great story, a worthy addition to their rockstar antics repertoire. ‘It’s been quiet, since you left, on our side of the Valley.’

The Bighorn ranch was very quiet, late that night. The Noise Hotel was still between bookings, the younger generation had gone out to a hell-raising dive in Lone Pine (a much hipper burg, not to be confused with
Big
Pine). Sage and Ax sat with their hosts on the back porch, looking out on stableyards and corrals; and the dim black mass of the mountains, against the starry sky. Ludmilla and Stu were drinking bourbon, Ax and Sage preferred tequila, cool but not frosty. A long silence had settled, because Fiorinda had decided to go to bed, and for Stu and Ludmilla she had left an unearthly, dazzling space in the company.

They would get over it. They’d often shared their daily life with the real megastars. You talk and laugh and sit down to eat with the idol of billions, a face and voice that have been so
multiplied;
and soon it doesn’t bother you. You forget the extraordinary and relate to the person, just as you forget the bizarre miracles that are going on far inside the hardware, and use the machine. But just now, tonight, it was as if a goddess had risen and walked away from them.

Sage’s nose had been taped. He was lying in a long chair, mouth breathing, occasionally touching the dressing, tenderly.

‘Your girlfriend’s an extraordinary young woman, Ax,’ said Ludmilla at last.

‘Yeah. Luckily for me, I have Sage to help me keep her in line.’

The seniors nodded politely. They hadn’t quite got the hang of the threesome.

Fiorinda walked down past the bunkhouse to where the Rugrat was parked; and leaned on the rail of an empty corral. She liked to see the Rugrat there, but she was homesick for the desert; for the burning world. Memories and impressions rose, and drifted on the night breeze. What the bear had said, and the challenge ahead of her. But live for the moment. Right here, right now, all okay.

A gleam of movement caught her eye, down at her feet. She crouched, very quietly, and saw a small animal with pale brown fur and black, shining dewdrop eyes. It hopped towards her, unafraid, and stood on its hind legs. For a moment Fiorinda and the kangeroo rat, the desert creature than needs no water, looked at each other: a pure encounter with the living world. Then it whisked away, and vanished into shadow.

The heat that drenched the forest haunted the chill of Mr Eiffrich’s study at Camp Bellevue, where Sage and the President were investigating a legal question. Mr Eiffrich wanted to get a handle on Sage’s ingenious idea for himself, before it went further: he had a couple of law degrees in his portfolio (though he’d never practiced). They were using the President’s standalone e-library, and refering to arcane sources Sage had collected through his UCLA contacts: but chiefly they were looking things up in books and weatherbeaten files.

‘You’re not offended that I couldn’t let you guys join the investigators?’ wondered Mr Eiffrich. ‘It’s not that we don’t value your expertise—’

‘Tha’s awrig’,’ Sage assured him, stacking loose document pages neatly as he scanned through them. He found the schoolmaster glances over the spectacles more intimidating than the presidential rank. ‘We reckon we done Lavoisier.’

‘Mmmph.’ The fractured syntax comes and goes, thought Fred. Likewise the bumpkin vowels. I don’t believe Cornish can possibly be his first language: wonder what’s going on there? Accents interested him. ‘Your captain having applied his telescope to the wrong eye, in a noble tradition of Br- er, English insubordination-’

Sage kept his eyes on the print. ‘Telescope? Huh? You lost me.’

The President gave him the schoolmaster look. ‘In matters of United States national security, I thought I was the one giving the orders… But I’m glad it worked out, and thank God Almighty the worst threat was a bad dream.’

Ax had reported, and the scientists had confirmed, that there’d never been a chance of the occult training camp producing another Rufus O’Niall. The ritual murders had lost their aura of mighty dread: there were no Defense Department renegades, no Fat Boy candidate, and welcome doubts were now being cast on the “chimera” corpse. What remained was bad enough. The covert network of high-rolling active supporters, the implication that the most dangerous eco-warriors and his own political enemies might even make common cause—

He laid down his smartboard, and contemplated the middle distance for a minute or so. ‘Sage, d’you remember, last time you were in this room, you gave me a sample of organic cocaine, for investigation?’

‘I remember that interview.’

‘I have a result for you. You were right, it was from the same vinyard. It’s circumstantial, but O’Niall and the hostage-takers were connected that far. I’ve nothing more to tell you yet, but the case is not closed.’

So you didn’t fall, my guitar-man. You were hunted down. But meanwhile Ax had found other ways to leave defeat behind. Sage nodded, not wishing to discuss O’Niall right now.

‘Thanks for letting me know.’

They studied without diversion for a while, Mr Eiffrich unconsciously and naturally using the former Aoxomoxoa as an extension of his reach: search this, copy that for me, fetch me the ’97 box; and finding Sage surprisingly adept.

‘You’ve had some experience with our Intellectual Property law?’

‘We spent eight years getting bludgeoned into the ground by Ms Ciccione’s lawyers, when we quit Maverick.’

‘I remember something about that… How’s the racial situation in England since the Dissolution?’

Ooh, and how did we get from Madonna onto English efnic tensions? But he answered without comment. ‘Horrible. The Celtic nations have us f- er, surrounded. The British Resistance are mad dogs, the rural whites are starving savages. Our Countercultural masses, the drop-out hordes, have to be kept in camps for their own protection while they do our slave labour. The Boat People drive us all nuts, the hippies are barking, the Islamics think they are God’s gift, and east of the river, from Essex up to Ely, has mostly become a no-go area, which is a serious problem that we don’t shout about—’

‘
The River
would always be the Thames?’

‘Yeah, generally.’

Mr Eiffrich stored away this tidbit of Englandiana, and they continued their search. ‘You rockstars should get on well with the Black population?’

‘No, that didn’t happen, due to historical accident. Back in Dissolution summer most of the MOBO activist scene selected itself out of the famous popstar Think Tank: perceived as too gun-crazy. The government had their own plans for violence, see. Or else, other version, Allie did the paperwork an’ she carn’ abide hip hop. Allie’s a closet feminist you know. Very dangerous woman.’

‘Don’t get too baroque, Sage. I might think you’re winding me up.’

‘Right.’ Sage chewed his thumbjoint, frowning over a stack of withered fanfold documentation for the World Wide Web, University of Hawaii, circa 1994. ‘Mr Eiffrich, I need to phone a friend.’

‘Who’s the friend?’

‘My dad. It’s going to be reasonably secure.’

This would be Joss Pender, of eks.photonics, European software baron: one of the awesome few businessmen to thrive in the Crisis. ‘Okay.’

Sage tapped his wrist, no reaction: and for a moment looked stricken, the cyborg reduced to mere humanity. He slapped his pockets and found a Krypton satellite mobile. Fred Eiffrich listened, with fellow feeling for the man at the other end: overjoyed to be accosted at five am by his vanished, adult child.

‘No one can get on with the Black politicos,’ continued Sage, breaking the connection (voice only, no picture for his old dad, and not a word of affection, ah, I have been there, thought Fred) and looking around for a discarded file. ‘They’re like the Boat People, f-er, gangstas: there’s no continuity, you talk to someone and blam, he’s dead, have to start again. Rob gets on best with ’em.’ Sage grinned, affectionately. ‘Unlike me an’ Ax, he can’t be mistaken for a rival gangsta as he refuses to pick up a gun. Rob’s our token genuine radical: non-violence, minimum wage, free health and education, votes fer women, the whole weird package. He’s a throwback.’

‘Did you get what you wanted from your dad? I only heard the one side.’

‘Yeah. I’ll show you in a minute.’

‘And the Hindus?’

‘They run the place. All the top suits are Hindu, or married into Hindu families. Like the Jews and Hollywood, you know.’

Mr Eiffrich peered over his spectacles. ‘Do you do a lot of public speaking?’

‘Only in times of acute national emergency, sir. Then I go on the telly and talk about rescuing kittens from trees.’ Sage delivered a jolt of blue and a puckish grin. ‘It’s okay, Mr President. He keeps me on a short leash.’

The President took off his eye glasses, used them for a bookmark, (he was examining a tome of IP case reports) and looked around the booklined room. The western light had mellowed, giving life to the eyes of the dark-haired woman in the portrait over the fireplace. ‘It always seems to me to be winter in here,’ he murmured. ‘Not in a bad way. I mean, there’s a feeling of shelter.’ They had been speaking of the English situation in the present tense, and, joking apart, he knew that Ax Preston’s Minister (the word lover seemed an impertinence), understood what was going on.

‘Sage, last time we met, I said you were messing with Ax’s girl, because I hadn’t grasped the situation between you three. I’m personally fond of your boss. I count him a friend, I believe he’s a figure of vital influence, and… I jumped in too fast. I do that, sometimes. I apologise. Are we square?’

Sage shrugged. ‘Of course.’

‘Good, because there’s something I have to ask. If Ax were to accept the Presidency would you go with him, and take up that burden again?’

According to the media-news, US and imported, the problem of the English Presidency was settled. Jordan was taking his brother’s place as Ceremonial Head of State, and the delay was just bureaucracy. Sage and the President knew better. The Second Chamber Government wanted the legend, not the substitute; the brother approved by the most powerful man in the world, not the nobody. They’d dump Jordan on the day of his Cornonation in the Abbey (or whatever circus event they were planning); if they could get Ax.

There was a long silence. With the damn-your-eyes mischief turned off and the blue eyes lowered, that much-photoed, oddly attractive face looked strained and weary, thought Fred. Ax seemed fine, but that Lavoisier adventure had left its marks on the bodhisattva.

‘The trouble with Ax is he doesn’t let the bastards grind him down.’

‘And there’s no attitude more calculated to get those bastards grinding. Yeah, I hear you. It wouldn’t be an easy ride, I know. He’d be no man’s puppet, and I see why his friends and, er, anyone close to him as you are would hesitate—’

‘What did Fiorinda say?’

‘Right now I’m asking
you
.’

‘Ax left me, once.’

Sage reached for his notepad and looked for another of the boxfiles.

‘But that was my fault. You called me a soldier, the first time we met. I didn’t like it, but it works. Maybe I signed up for the duration, and Ax is in charge of whatever it is we do, what it is I signed for. He’s far from eager for the job, and I won’t influence him: but yes, I would go with him. I’ll never leave him.’

‘That’s all I wanted to know.’ The President recovered his eyeglasses, marked the place with a feather from the jar of owl feathers he kept for this purpose, and said, ‘I believe this works, Sage. I want to share your idea with some of my staff, let them play Devil’s Advocate. A false start is something to avoid at all costs. Will you
please
, this time, wait until I give the word?’