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Authors: Ken MacLeod

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BOOK: Night Sessions, The
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“Anything else?” the barmaid asked, putting the bottle down in front of him.

“Uh, one more, please,” Campbell said, suddenly clocking that one beer wouldn't last him long or quench his thirst. The barmaid gave him an impatient look and handed over another bottle. Clutching them, Campbell elbowed his way out of the crush and looked for a place to sit. No such luck; every table was taken. And every stool at the bar. As he glanced in that direction his gaze was met with a very direct look from a woman sitting on a high stool at the far end. She had a drink, but she was facing out from the bar. She had long red hair and a long green velvet dress with gold embroidery around the neckline. She stared at him, then held up a hand curled around a tall glass and crooked her index finger at him. Her smile had nothing come-hither in it, nothing seductive. It was just a smile, and she was just a woman. Bewildered, nervous, but relieved to have someone to talk to and not to be standing around on his own, Campbell walked towards her as if hauled in on an invisible thread from that beckoning, imperious finger.

“New here?” she said.

Campbell nodded, and switched off the music in his ear.

“Uh-huh,” the woman said. She sipped her drink and looked him over.

“Dave's my boyfriend,” she said.

“Dave?”

She waved a hand toward the far end. “The VJ. Dave Warsaw.”

“Oh, Dave Warsaw!” said Campbell, as if the name was familiar. The enthusiasm in his voice came from relief that the woman had a boyfriend. He could relax.

“I'm Jessica,” the woman told him, as if that too was something he should know.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Campbell. “I'm John—John Richard.”

“Well, John-John, don't let your beer get warm.”

Campbell took a slug of beer, its chill spreading from his gullet, and sighed.

“Hits the spot, huh?” said Jessica.

“Yes,” said Campbell.

“Who's the other one for?”

Campbell felt slightly abashed. “Oh,” he said, “it's for me too. Didn't want to be back in the queue too soon.”

“I guess not,” Jessica said. She gave him another appraising look. “Don't get many of your kind here.”

“New Zealanders?” Campbell said, striving for wit.

“No,” said Jessica. “Homophobes.”

“I'm not—” Campbell began hotly.

“You don't like queer folks,” Jessica said flatly. “And you're goddamn rude besides.”

“Rude? I haven't so much as spoken to anyone here, except you.”

“Exactly. Not so much as a ‘No, thank you’ to my good friend Arlene, and shocked looks for every other tranny you spotted, until you remembered to plaster on that grin of yours. Not to mention the glares you were giving to every gay couple you noticed on your way down the other side.”

Campbell recoiled. His bottles clinked in his hand. “You've been
watching
me?”

“Dave's been keeping an eye on you,” said Jessica. She flicked her ear, indicating how she knew. “He has a way of picking up on people who might be trouble.”

“I'm not here to cause trouble,” said Campbell. “Just—just—having a look, checking out the scene, you know?”

The lightness of his tone belied his dismay. “Be sure your sins will find you out,” he'd been told often enough, and that was how he felt.

“Ah!” said Jessica. She smiled again, but this time it was like she was pleased with herself for understanding something. “You were curious.”

“Yes, just curious, that's it,” said Campbell, much relieved.

“Not hostile, then?”

Campbell frowned. He couldn't lie, but he didn't want not to be off the hook.

“Not exactly,” he said. “Not to…queer folks in particular, no.”

Jessica's lip curled. “Just to us all, you mean?”

“Not even that,” said Campbell. “You're no worse than—” He couldn't think what next to say, but saw that he'd already said too much.

“I'm thinking of not calling the bouncer,” Jessica said. “If you can prove this nonspecific hostility.”

“Prove it? How?”

“You can give me that spare beer you've got there,” said a voice from behind his shoulder. “And then you can give me a dance.”

Campbell turned to find himself facing the man he'd backed off from.

“John-John, meet Arlene,” said Jessica. She nodded to Arlene and then looked pointedly at the couple on the two adjacent bar stools. The stools were abruptly vacated as the couple took the hint and headed for the floor. Arlene took the nearest, leaving Campbell to the one in the middle. The apex of an awkward triangle.

Arlene gave Campbell a wry smile and accepted the spare bottle, then fished a dinky pink Swiss Army knife from the candy-striped handbag and pried the cap off.

“Cheers,” Arlene said.

Campbell dutifully clinked bottles. Arlene put away the knife, took out a pack of cigarettes, lit up and leaned back.

“Well, John-John,” said Arlene, “to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”

“My name's John Richard,” Campbell said.

“I'm sure it is, John-John,” said Jessica. “Now answer the lady's question.”

Arlene sat wide-eyed, half smiling, waiting to hear the answer. Arlene's hair was a blue bob—a wig, Campbell thought—apparently pinned in place by a twisty arrangement of small paper flowers and a ribbon. The face the wig framed would have been rather boyish without the make-up; with it, it looked definitely girlish.

Campbell guessed that Arlene was a year or two younger than himself, and wondered what tragic circumstances or strange sins had brought this affliction on the unfortunate lad.

“All right,” said Campbell. He took another fortifying sip. “The truth is, I'm a Christian, a lay preacher. I've never been in a place like this. When I was younger, my parents would have forbidden it. At home, I wouldn't want to go, in case anyone recognised me and thought I believed it was all right, or that I was a hypocrite. But I'm on a short visit to Scotland, hardly anyone here knows me, and I was, as I said, curious as to what people do in dance clubs. That's all.”

Arlene giggled; Jessica guffawed.

“What?” said Campbell. “I've told you the truth.”

“I've heard some tales,” said Arlene, languidly waving a pink-gloved, smoke-trailing hand, “but not that one. A lay preacher!”

Campbell shook his head, wishing that his ears weren't burning. “I don't get it.”

“What she means,” said Jessica, “is that whatever you tell us, and whatever you tell yourself, the truth is that you came in here because you wanted to, and you wanted to because, whether you admit it or not, you had some idea of the scene and you liked the idea of it.”

“I think you like the idea of
me
,” added Arlene.

Campbell stared at them both, completely thrown by the suggestion. He wasn't outraged or even embarrassed by it. Nothing of the sort had ever occurred to him.

“No, it isn't that,” he said. “I know you people have your psychological theories, and maybe in some cases”—he gave a grim smile, acknowledging that they all knew the cases—“they're on the mark, but not for me and not for most people who would agree with me. We have our views, which aren't the same as yours, and that's all there is to it.”

“So what, for example,” said Arlene, “is your view of me?”

Campbell glanced at Jessica.

“We won't take offence,” she said. “I won't call the bouncer, and you won't make Arlene cry.”

“I feel sorry for you,” Campbell told Arlene.

“Boo hoo,” said Arlene. “Why?”

“Because…” Campbell paused. Quoting Leviticus wouldn't get him far. He had to put it in a way that made sense to the person he was witnessing to.

“Because,” he said, confident again, “you're not fulfilling your life, your true self. Your true self is a man. And God, if you'll indulge me far enough to say so,
made
you a man and wants you to live as a man.”

“I
do
live as a man,” said Arlene, flexing a bicep under the frill of a short puffy sleeve. “I drive a dump truck at Turnhouse. I've had girlfriends, as well as”—a sweet smile at Jessica—“
girlfriends
, and I don't feel unfulfilled at all.”

“But all this!” cried Campbell. “That can't be what God or, if you don't believe in God, then let's say for the sake of argument
nature
originally intended for you.”

Arlene lit another cigarette. “If God or nature had any plans for me, they must have included the line: ‘He'll put on women's clothing, and hang around in bars.’”

That last line was half sung, in some shared cultural reference that Campbell didn't get but was the cue for shrieks of laughter from Arlene and Jessica.

“Besides,” Arlene went on, “this is something I like doing. It's in my own time. It's fun. It harms nobody. What's wrong with it? I mean, what is your problem with it?”

“Well, I don't have a problem with it, as such,” said Campbell. “Like I said, it's nothing personal. But I'm certain God wouldn't have forbidden it if it wasn't somehow against nature. I don't know why you have these impulses, but I'm sure you weren't born with them.” He frowned. “Were you ever made to wear girls’ clothes in childhood, or something like that?”

“Chance would have been a fine thing,” said Arlene, with a lascivious shiver.

Campbell sighed. So much for appealing to the law of nature.

“I can only suggest that you read the Bible,” he said. Arlene didn't look as if that was likely any time soon.

“All right,” said Jessica. “Don't bother telling us about cross-dressing being an abomination, which is what you'd come down to at the end of all your rationalisations, and which I'd take seriously as a sincere motivation if you were just as down on prawn cocktails and cheese-and-ham sandwiches and you weren't wearing polyester-mix socks. You told me earlier that you weren't against queers specifically, you were just as much against everything that goes on here.” She waved an encompassing arm. “All this, yeah?”

“Yes,” said Campbell.

He put down his now-empty bottle. He hadn't seen Jessica order any more, but she passed him another.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Go on, lay preacher,” Jessica said. “Wet your throat and tell us what's wrong with this.”

“It stimulates lust,” said Campbell.

“You say that like it's a bad thing,” said Jessica. She shrugged. “People have needs.”

“They don't have a need to have their needs inflamed beyond what they can reasonably control,” said Campbell.

“I do,” said Jessica, with a laugh. “Are you telling me you don't?”

“That's exactly what I'm telling you.”

Jessica nodded slowly. “Yes. And that's why you'd cheerfully forbid—or dissuade—other people from coming to a dance hall. You think it's as easy for them to suppress the needs they fulfill here as it is for you. Well, it isn't. And if you think it's easy, it's because you've never allowed yourself to feel these needs, or you have different needs.”

“I never said it was easy,” said Campbell.

“But it's easy for you.”

“That,” said Campbell, “kind of contradicts what you said earlier, about how I
really
wanted to come here because deep down I'm
really
attracted to the scene, or
really
turned on by people like Arlene here.”

He leaned back, knowing that he looked smug. He was right, and he was sure of it. In a way, Jessica was right—it was easy for him. He got on well with women. Older women, married women. Girls in their early teens, or younger. Any woman at all, in fact, so long as she wasn't about his own age and unattached. Which was why it had been such a relief to learn right at the start that Jessica had a boyfriend. And this Arlene, “she” wasn't a woman in the first place, and therefore quite easy to get on with, as well as quite…Campbell felt a sudden dryness in his throat, and was overcome by a fit of coughing.

“Sorry,” he croaked, and took a long swallow of beer. “I'm not used to all this indoor smoke. It's still banned in New Zealand.”

“Banned?” said Jessica. “How very Sozi.”

“Sozi?”

Jessica waved a hand. “Old politics,” she said. “Last Scottish government after the war and before the Republic. Socialist-Nationalist-Green coalition. I was too young at the time to notice anything but the queues and the blackouts, but according to my parents it was a bit like your lot's Reign of the Saints.”

Campbell closed his eyes for a moment, smiling and shaking his head. “My lot's Reign of the Saints?”

“Puritan Parliament, 1650s,” Jessica said. “Followed, you may remember, by the Restoration, when people had tremendous fun systematically doing everything the Puritans had forbidden. Same here.”

After that, to Campbell's immense relief, the conversation turned to the differences between Scotland and New Zealand, a subject on which he could hold forth, and Jessica and Arlene could correct and contradict, without raising any disturbing thoughts. After about an hour, Campbell made to depart, but before he went Arlene insisted on the full measure of the forfeit.

The dance took ten minutes. It seemed a lot longer, but it ended at last.

“Thank you,” Arlene said, with a smirk and a curtsey.

Campbell smiled, and said his thank-you and goodbye. He turned away sharply, nodded to Jessica, still on her perch, and hurried out. Just before he reached the exit he noticed a burly man in a sharp business suit standing by the door, relaxed and alert in the standard bouncer's pose, his hands clasped lightly across his groin. It was Graham Orr.

The only consolation for Campbell, as he blundered out into the hot, wet night, was that in Orr's artificial eyes there had been not a flicker of recognition.

 

 

Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson cycled fast along the pavement of Easter Road, scattering pedestrians or swerving between them. He had an excuse. Traffic was backed up all the way to Leith Walk.

He slowed and dismounted fifty metres from the obstruction. A slope of rubble sprawled halfway across the road. The lower half of the front of a tenement block had been blasted out. Two floors had collapsed. No vehicles had been crushed, but the wreckage of several collisions remained slewed in the road. Ferguson hadn't seen anything like this in real life for a long time, and now seldom even on television. He took off his cycle clips, pushed the bike one-handed and stared ahead. After a step or two he remembered the weight on his back.

“Walk yourself,” he said.

The leki unwrapped its three jointed limbs from around Ferguson's chest and swung them one by one to the pavement, then settled into a graceful, swaying gait alongside him. The striding tripod looked like a two-metre-tall scale model of a Martian fighting machine from
War of the Worlds
. The police robot's bodywork had been designed with that in mind. It didn't have powers of arrest but it barely needed them.

“This is giving me flashbacks, boss,” said the leki.

“Later for that,” said Ferguson. “Tune them out.”

Closer to the rubble the crowd thickened. Ferguson elbowed through, waving his badge. He turned to the leki.

“Crowd-clearing unpleasant voice,” he said.

“Nothing to see here!” the leki brayed. “Move along, please! Move along!”

Ferguson felt the skin of his face, chest and upper back prickle. He wanted to cover his ears. The crowd-clearing unpleasant voice carried the timbre
of nails down a blackboard, of plastic measuring-cups rattling in a cutlery drawer, of every frequency fine-tuned to set teeth on edge.

Ferguson propped his bike. The leki high-stepped over while Ferguson ducked under the blue and white police tape around the site. Other lekis pranced across the fallen masonry, their steel tentacles swinging and probing like flies’ antennae, conducting the robot equivalent of a fingertip search. Overhead, a surveillance-midge swarm was already beginning to gather, each individual having responded to a simple flocking algorithm. Half a dozen uniformed officers maintained a cordon; others, up and down the street, took witness statements—effortlessly with their lenses and phones, and in laborious parallel with pens and paper notebooks, legally required. A detective sergeant and two detective constables muttered on their phones and swapped data with the lekis. On-site operations had shifted from rescue to investigation half an hour earlier; then, minutes later, from accident investigation to crime scene. Hence Ferguson's dash.

DS Hutchins greeted him. “Bomb Squad's on its way, sir.”

“Bomb Squad? Didn't know we still had one.”

“From the Army, sir. Redford Barracks.”

“Ah, right. Have we got a situation page up and running?”

“Of course, sir.” Hutchins tapped a thumb on her forefinger, then snapped her fingers in front of Ferguson's eyes. He winked up “New” in his contact lenses. The situation page became visible, floating above the rubble like a vivid hallucination. Ferguson scanned its columns and menus. In the bottom left corner were two wikis: one for police eyes only, one for the public. Both were being updated continuously. Ferguson ignored their scrolling flicker for now and checked the static text and pictures.

The explosion had happened about an hour earlier, at 11:05 a.m. This timing—most people out to work, morning rush-hour over—had resulted in the number of casualties being smaller than it could have been. One man, in the basement flat, dead as a direct result of the explosion (blown to bits, Ferguson concluded from the dry details); two people critically injured in the collapse of the flats above: both women, one in her mid-forties, the other a mother in her twenties who'd just returned from dropping her two kids off at the local nursery school. Dozens of major and minor injuries on the street, from flying glass or from collisions.

At first the blast had been assumed to be a gas explosion, and thus an accident. The first constable on the spot had taken only a couple of minutes to refute that. The block had no gas supply—not that it had been likely to,
but at first glance it couldn't have been ruled out. Nor did records show that the basement flat, or any other, used gas cylinders. The block had been all-electric for fifteen years. It was the first leki to arrive, though, that had raised the stakes by sniffing RDX traces in the blast residues.

“Do you detect RDX?” Ferguson asked his own leki.

The machine wafted a metal frond. “Place stinks of it, boss.”

Ferguson focused on the details of the fatality. Liam Murphy, 55, single. The woman from the flat immediately above was listed as a first contact in emergencies. The actual next of kin was a brother in Dublin, already informed. Under “Occupation” was recorded “(No Official Cognisance).” Ferguson blinked hard.

“Excuse me, Shonagh,” he said to DS Hutchins. “Off the record—what
was
the victim's occupation?”

“Don't know yet, sir.”

“Well, ask around, please. Who's the community officer?”

“I'll find out, sir.”

“And get a PC—a woman, preferably—to that injured mum's kids’ nursery while you're at it.”

“Already done, sir.”

“Good.”

Hutchins stepped away, talking on her phone. Ferguson returned his gaze to the situation page, and this time eyeballed up the civilian wiki. Someone among Murphy's neighbours would surely have taken cognisance of his occupation, even if the State didn't. Involvement in prostitution, drug-dealing, non-peer-reviewed therapies and the like could still attract criminal attention, even if no longer that of the police.

Additions to the wiki were slowing. The usual stuff had piled up, some of it useful, some not: eyewitness accounts and eyeball-video uploads of the explosion, whinges about damage to shop fronts, speculations, tributes to the injured and the deceased. Ferguson's skimming gaze didn't take long to snag on: “No one ever had a bad word for Father Liam. This is so awful.”

Startled, he scrolled on down until he had no doubt. The dead man had been a Roman Catholic priest.

Ferguson snapped away the situation page and glared around. DS Hutchins was picking her way between bits of shattered brickwork with a young constable in tow. From the dark interior of the ruined block a leki skittered over piles of rubble, carrying something small and bloody in a ziplock plastic bag. A reporter from BBC Scotland stood, back turned, on the other side of
the street, speaking to a shoulder-mounted crane-camera unit. More coverage would no doubt be on the way: Ferguson spotted Tom Mackay, a
Scotsman
journalist, among the now-small scatter of onlookers. What Ferguson had just learned wasn't the sort of thing he wanted out on the news just yet, but he was probably already too late to stop that.

“We should have known this right from the start,” Ferguson said as Hutchins and the constable joined him.

“Thought you knew, sir,” said the constable. “Everybody knew Father Murphy.”

“Everyone on this street, you mean,” said Ferguson. “And it's
Mister
Murphy to us, if you don't mind.”

“Citizen Murphy,” said DS Hutchins.

The leki with the plastic bag arrived. The three officers, and Ferguson's leki, stared at what lay within the transparent polythene. A hand.

“Body part of the deceased,” said the leki, holding it. “Traces found on it of unexploded RDX.”

“Father—
Citizen
Murphy had handled the material before the explosion?” Ferguson asked.

“That would appear to be the case,” said the leki.

“Good God,” said Ferguson. “What would a priest be doing with RDX?”

“‘Out of the ashes arose the Provisionals,’” intoned Ferguson's leki, making irritating little air-quotes with the tips of two of its three tentacles.

Ferguson turned on it. “What?”

“Christian militia slogan,” said the leki. “Mural graffiti, Belfast, British Empire, circa 1973.”

Out of the corner of his eye Ferguson saw the reporters across the road converge on the nearest length of boundary tape, waving recording devices. At the same moment he noticed a queer hush fall: voices, birds, vehicles momentarily stilled. The onrushing silence was matched by a shadow that covered him and remained as its edge raced away along the street. Ferguson glanced up and to the south. You weren't supposed to look, but he looked. Thousands of miles away, a circle of mylar thousands of miles across had eclipsed the sun. Coronae briefly flared, then the soleta's orbit took it away from the sun's face. Momentarily blinded as his contact lenses blacked out, Ferguson seized the moment to snarl to his leki:

“Shut—the fuck—up.”

Light and colour returned. Background noise resumed.

“Any comment, Inspector?”

Tom Mackay leaned across the tape, thrusting his phone in Ferguson's face. The BBC Scotland reporter craned her shoulder camera forward, just as close.

“No comment,” said Ferguson. He jerked a thumb backward. “The investigation is just starting. The Press Officer will release a statement in due course.”

“When, exactly?” demanded Mackay.

Ferguson shrugged. “If I could answer that I could answer a lot more. Meanwhile, I'd appreciate it if you'd back away from the periphery. Don't want to contaminate the site.”

“Come on, Ferguson,” said Mackay. “A priest's been blown up. That wisnae a gas explosion. So what was it?”

“I honestly can't say,” said Ferguson.

“Can't or won't?”

“Can't,” said Ferguson. “We don't have enough evidence yet. Not even to rule out a domestic accident of some kind.”

At that point a black six-wheeled armoured vehicle came down the wrong side of the road—the forward-moving traffic having more quickly cleared—and came to a halt at a perfect angle for the reporters to turn around and record the big white letters on its side: BOMB DISPOSAL. Soldiers in white isolation suits deployed from the back and hurried up, lugging sensing equipment and followed by four heavy-duty combat mechs. Ferguson could see the lekis all swivel their gazes onto the hulking machines, then turn away as if caught looking.

“Domestic accident hasn't been ruled out, you say?” said Mackay.

“No further comment,” said Ferguson.

Greensides, close to the top of Leith Walk, was fifteen years old, slabbed with obsolete fortification, pocked with likewise redundant gunports, and still referred to as “the new station.” Its upper floors commanded fine views to the west, along Queen Street to the towers and high-rise hydroponic farms of Turnhouse, and to the north across Leith Water and the Firth. So Ferguson had been told. He had never personally verified this, but had no reason to doubt it. His own office was in the middle of a long corridor on the second floor. At about 1:30 p.m. he elbowed the door handle and shouldered the door, coffee and sandwich in hand and papers in oxter. The leki ambled in behind him. They sat down, Ferguson behind the desk, the leki on a filing cabinet.

The leki plugged itself into a power socket. Ferguson broke the tab on the coffee cup and flipped the lid. He sniffed steam for a few seconds, then took a sip, winced, and unwrapped his sandwich. Ostrich tikka. Mmm.

After chewing for a bit he looked up at the leki.

“Your thoughts, Skulk?” he said.

“Skulk” was a nickname. The leki's real name, its
taken
name as its kind put it, was Skullcrusher. Neither the machine nor the man thought it politic to use the longer form in public; and, like most cops who worked with a leki, Ferguson used even the nickname with discretion.

In the dark elliptical hollow at the front of Skulk's head, a pair of red LEDs—designed to be mistaken for angry eyes—glowed.

“Sure looks like terrorism to me, boss,” Skulk said.

“Let's leave the T-word out of it for the moment,” said Ferguson.

“I can leave it out of public discourse,” said the leki. “You asked for my thoughts.”

“I appreciate that,” Ferguson mumbled around a mouthful of crust. “And I understand why you see it that way. But I have to ask, are you letting your, ah, flashbacks get the better of you? Think about it. There are plenty of levels, so to speak”—he waved his hands horizontally, one above the other—“before you get to…that. Stupidity. Psychosis. Criminality. Some family feud. Possibly even some dispute in the deceased's, uh, organisation.”

“There have been no known assassinations arising from internal Catholic Church disputes since 1982,” said Skulk.

“What was that?” asked Ferguson, diverted.

“The Calvi affair, you may recall?”

“Before my time. But a point in my favour. These things happen.”

“The deceased citizen was hardly of such importance.”

“As far as we know. This official non-cognisance stuff can be taken too far. He could have been something in the hierarchy”—Ferguson flailed, trying to recall the nomenclature—“a Monsignor or Cardinal or something.”

“Murphy was a simple parish priest,” said Skulk. “The Cardinal of Scotland resides in Glasgow. His name is—”

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