Midnight Lamp (52 page)

And so on. They stuck if for about twenty minutes, then retired unanimously to the lobby bar: a beautiful space, the walls granite boulders, huge naked beams overhead. They emptied the miniature pretzels out of the cut-crystal miniature pretzel bowl, and made a pile of the faxed checks they had received, as their movie fees, after the Second Chamber government’s deductions.

‘We could buy a cup of coffee each, in Shanghai,’ said Dora.

‘If we walked there,’ said Allie.

‘You have to admire Rufus,’ said Sage. ‘There he was, laying our country waste, torturing us to death and damning us to hell for all eternity, but he still took the time to wreck our income on the side. Now that is
thorough
.’

He stretched and laughed. ‘Hey, if we stay on I bet I can get a better paid gig, cash only, doing a
don’t call me baby
set, in Vegas somewhere.’

‘I’d pay to see that,’ grinned Ax. He poked the checks. ‘We should set fire to them. We owe Harry at least one little rock and roll behaviour incident—’

Harry had not turned up for the last interview circus.

Fiorinda slipped off her shoes and tucked up her feet. ‘Get it while you can. We’re servants of the people again next week.’

The Few glanced at Ax, with whom the decision was still a sensitive point.

‘I’ve been finding out about Lavoisier,’ he remarked, relaxed beside his big cat, ‘Did you know, as well as inventing modern chemistry along with our Priestley, naming oxygen and god knows what else, he discovered that breathing is form of combustion? And he once had his father carry a bowl of goldfish across France for him, not sure why. He used to get on well with his dad.’

‘Is that a chip memory?’ asked Sage. He worried about the way fragments from Ax’s long deceased implant archive still kept surfacing.

Ax shrugged. ‘Probably. But life is fire, it burns, and we can’t breathe air without fire in it, that’s not a chip factoid. It’s just the truth.’

‘D’you know the apocryphal story about him at the guillotine?’ asked Rob.

‘Everyone does,’ said Verlaine, bored. ‘He told a friend of his to watch and he would blink as often as he could, after his head was chopped off. It’s a meme, a marker of something, if you know it—’

‘Trivia wiring.’

‘It was eleven times,’ said Allie.

‘I thought it was fifteen,’ said Dora. ‘You get about twenty seconds, max.’

‘Twenty seconds,’ said Chip. ‘Woo. A lot can happen in twenty seconds.’

‘Couldn’t possibly comment,’ mumured Verlaine.

‘My father lasted longer than that,’ said Fiorinda. ‘All the way home from Ireland, and then some. I thought about it a lot, when I was scared I was going to end up a head in a jar. I was wondering if I could beat my dad’s record.’

For a moment the banter became
not funny at all
, they fell off a cliff and no one knew how to recover. Ax was appalled that he’d started this. But it was too much. They cracked up, all of them, giggling manically.

Fiorinda raised her glass. ‘Long live the revolution!’

‘
Long live the revolution!
’

Heads turned. Ax and Sage’s sofa took a little jump, as did the rest of the furniture. The Few glanced around, puzzled: who’s doing that? Fiorinda swallowed the rest of her drink, to protect it from being spilled. ‘There’s something about getting in a doorway…,’ said Ax, calmly. The lobby of the Alisal shifted again, lifting and flopping down, like a sailing boat bouncing over choppy swell. Other people in the bar had begun to mill around. There were voices raised, but no alarms went off. The granite boulder walls stood firm.

‘What are we supposed to do?’ wondered Dora.

‘There’ll be storm shelters, earthquake drill, they’re used to this.’

‘I think we should get outdoors,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Now. Quickly.’

A lot of people had had the same idea. Outside, the traffic had backed up, sirens were wailing, the air was full of dust. The sky through the reddish cast was white, a negative white full of dancing sundogs, a storm of naked energies, with no wrapping of rain or wind. The third shock hit, buildings shook like jelly. Ax and Sage got either side of Fiorinda, but the others had disappeared, gone in the mêlée. There was a sound like thunder, a roaring like the sea in a shell, and they realised that what they could see coming over the horizon was a wall of brown, churning water rushing down the Pasadena freeway—

Two hundred miles away, in the Anza-Borrego desert, the Vireo Lake A-team had come on line.

As Sage had once remarked, the Zen Self experiments under Olwen Devi were really the nuclear fission of neuro-physics: a sudden breaking of barriers, an explosive release of energy. The Vireo Lake project had more in common with the old-style fusion. The ’nauts had indeed been selected for latent psi ability, besides being rigorously vetted in the usual ways. Their task was to visualise (linked and boosted, under the scanners) the molecular composition of crude oil, make a change; and fuse, or superimpose, the changed, virtual, neuron-map “oil”, onto a buried tank of the material stuff—much the same way that Sage had summoned Fiorinda to fuse with the virtual “Fiorinda”. The reservoir was shielded like a trap for neutrinos, they were expecting to measure ‘fusion’ effects in parts per trillion. After the first and last full test, scheduled to be the last test before the Internet Commissioners shut the lab down, they didn’t have to go that far. It was obvious at once that they had an tank of disordered slime. But the A team were dead. They had died, under the scanners.

There was no smoking gun in the fault lines, linking the long-overdue LA quake to the location of the underground tank; but nobody believed it was pure coincidence. Nevertheless, as analysis of the slime went into overdrive, the Vireo Lake scientists knew they had a staggering vindication of their work. Despite the human tragedy, and the devastation, they were triumphant. A week later a note, which might be construed as a joint suicide note, was found. It had been hidden so that it would only be discovered in the course of an investigation; after their death. It began IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE COMPASSIONATE, THE MERCIFUL (none of the neuronauts had been Muslims). It ended THE LORD GIVETH AND THE LORD TAKETH AWAY, BLESSED BE THE NAME OF THE LORD. It declared they had acted for the good of humanity, and thathuman weapon building should never be repeated.

The note was suppressed. The neurological data was re-examined. It was discovered that the neuronauts might have reached the Fat Boy state together, for an instant, at the moment of their death. By that time, a handful of people already knew what the A team had done.

The rest of the world would find out by degrees, as the ruin spread.

It was the end of October, a cool rainy day in Washington DC. In California LA was struggling back to life, with what aid their state and nation, and the crippled International Community, could muster. Not many lives had been lost but treasured landmarks were gone, food and water were in short supply; epidemic disease threatened and a lot of people would be homeless for months, or years. The Few had returned to England. The Triumvirate had stayed in California, and Fiorinda had managed to turn the balance at 110lb, more than she’d ever weighed in her life, counting when she was pregnant. She’d had the treatment to reverse the sterilisation, since Dr Trigos’ clinic was still operational. Chaos had seemed a fitting setting, and she’d been scared she’d never get another chance.

They were on their way home now. Ax was doing a last, live global tv appearance with Fred Eiffrich: morale booster for a frightened and frightening new world. The White House Media Office had been surprised to find they couldn’t have all the Big Three, but you have to draw a line and stick to it. It had been established long ago that Sage and Fiorinda didn’t have to do politics.

They went to Rock Creek Cemetery: Sage wanted to see the Adams Memorial, setting of the only scene Jan had shown him, from her dreamchild movie.

Janelle Firdous had been cremated quickly and privately, with no religious rite; as had been her wish. Ax had been there, and Harry. There’d been a memorial service after the quake, and Jan would have said,
be proud,
because in spite of the situation everybody who mattered turned out. Sage and Fiorinda had stayed away from both ceremonies: this was the place where they would pay their respects, this lonely arbour, where a woman of genius, barred from power, called Eleanor Roosevelt, had struggled with her broken heart more than a hundred years ago. The shrouded figure of
Grief
, head bowed in the sombre peace of exhaustion, held their gaze and quieted them. They stayed until another lone woman visitor arrived, then they walked away.

‘Did you know,’ said Sage, ‘there’s a demographic time bomb ticking in the US? When choosing the sex of your child became routine, the middle classes all started voting for daughters, like China reversed. Fake equality will be replaced by real equality in a few years. The glass ceiling is finally toast.’

‘Meanwhile the ghettos fill up with dispossessed young men. Great.’

‘Oh.’

Fiorinda slipped her arm in his. ‘We drop the subject. Now is not the time to debate sexual politics: leave it to the mills of God.’

‘May I quote you?’

‘If you feel lucky.’

They dismissed their cab and walked beside the Tidal Basin, where red and yellow rags of leaves fluttered on the famous cherry trees. Fiorinda got up on the barrier wall, and sat crosslegged: Sage leaning beside her. The sky was grey and low, scattering cool drops on the pewter mirror of the water. Fiorinda now had a working womb, a menstrual cycle, and one functioning ovary. Dr Trigos had warned her, at their final interview, she should
forget
about natural childbirth, owing to the cervical scarring; for which she didn’t recommend reconstructive surgery. This warning kept returning to her, with a shiver down her spine. If the doctor says that, she really thinks I could get pregnant.

‘Fee?’

‘Mm?’

‘What was your baby called, the little boy who died? I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember because I never told you, or Ax, for a good reason. I was a pre-teen Aoxomoxoa fan, remember? I named him Stephen, Sage. After you.’

‘Oh.’ He stared at the water. ‘I’m glad I didn’t know that when—’

‘When you killed his father.’ Fiorinda sighed. ‘Shit. Maybe dysfunctional rockstars with hideous family backgrounds should be banned from having children. Of the three of us only Ax is even partly normal, and he’s a borderline megalomaniac.’

‘I’ve been thinking… Maybe it’s pure superstition saying this, but your child and mine might be very, very strange.’

‘I’ve been thinking that too. On the plus side, she probably wouldn’t be alone. In the world she’ll live in, she could seem quite normal.’

‘If there is a world. If we aren’t all soup, by next week.’

Since August, the world had been living as if in the shadow of the asteroid strike—the one that won’t be announced because there’s nothing to be done—; except that nobody had attempted a media blackout. There were millions upon millions outside the tv coverage, who maybe still didn’t understand what the fuck had happened, but that wasn’t planned.

All
the oil and coal reserves in the ground,
everywhere
seemed to be gone. Stockpiles of crude were infected. Processed petroleum fuels seemed safe so far, but fusion consciousness experts predicted (this had not been announced) that coal-tar derived liquid fuels and gas would inevitably follow the crude. Where would the collapse end? No one knew, and no one had yet dared to try and reverse the process, not even in a test-tube. A handful of global experts in the new sciences were furiously analysing the data, trying to establish the A-team’s precise intentionality. Is
oxygen
a fossil fuel?

Nothing to do but wait, and live every moment.

‘There’s an easy answer. Only Ax gets unsterilised.’

‘Don’t be such a wuss. One for each of you, we agreed.’

‘If it works. And for you?’

She shook her head. ‘I’ve had my baby, I’ll never forget him. Two’s enough.’

He turned, struck by a sudden realisation. Fiorinda’s hair clustered over her head in springy little corkscrews, the colour of a copper beech in April. Her skin glowed fallow-gold, her eyes were calm and bright. She looked
amazing
.

‘What?’

‘You said “she”? I thought we were going to leave that to chance.’

‘Of course we are. Oh. I did, didn’t I?’ She frowned and then grinned, ravishing sweet. ‘Nah, doesn’t mean anything. Come on, let’s go and find Ax.’

Leaving the USA in wartime, on one of the last transatlantic jet flights for the forseeable future. Last time he’d flown out of Dulles Ax been oblivious. This time, as he said goodbye to Fred and Harry, and once more extracted from Kathryn the solemn promise that she would
never sell the Rat
, he had a feeling of valediction. The Atlantic’s not so wide, but I don’t think I’m coming back here.

Their plane, borrowed from the presidential fleet, rose and headed into a cracking set of electrical storms. Gusts of wind buffeted them, rain hammered, and there was the interesting possibility that the fuel in their tanks would collapse. But that last was not a serious threat. The experts said refined fuel could not be affected, and Ax had two of those experts sitting beside him. This silver bird would touch down safe in John Lennon airport.