Authors: Gwyneth Jones
Rainbow Bridge
CopyrightCopyright © Gwyneth Jones 2006, 2011
All rights reserved
The right of Gwyneth Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,
London WC2H 9EA
This edition published in Great Britain in 2007 by Gollancz
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 13: 978 0 57507 976 2
ISBN 10: 0 57507 976 2
Printed and bound at Mackays of Chatham plc,
Chatham, Kent
The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Many thanks as always to my editor, Jo Fletcher, my agent, Anthony Goff; and to Peter Gwilliam and Gabriel Jones for their support, especially on the last burn. Thanks also to Richard Gwilliam, prince of geeks; to Li Li and Teng Hui (Jamie) for calligraphy, and for vetting my use of Chinese characters, history, literature and legends. Any daft mistakes that survived are entirely my responsibility. Thanks to the Sussex Wildlife Trust, the Fenland Lighter Project, the staff of Brantwood, Coniston, the Wasdale Web; and Sellafield Visitors Centre. Apologies: if a quotation from any source is deemed to exceed fair-dealing use this is entirely unintentional, and copyright holders should contact the author. This book is dedicated to all melodramatic fools, rockstars or not.
For full credits, booklists, out-takes, pictures, confessions, see the Rainbow Bridge feature at
http://www.boldaslove.co.uk
Not To Touch The Earth, Not To See The Sky
Golden Abalone
All true fairytales are spun from the golden thread of a young girl’s beauty, at that precious moment when she has just become a woman… It was a pity, thought General Wang, that the heroine of the tale he had entered had long passed that perfect moment. He would have liked to meet Frances Slater, known as Fiorinda, when she was the fiery teenager of legend, in all her angry pride. He had no complaints, however, about the grown-up woman with him tonight: white skinned, divinely tall, sumptuously bosomed, and with the most amazing emerald eyes. Her blatant use of cosmetic ‘enhancements’, one of the pernicious habits he was here to root out, didn’t worry him. She was splendid.
An array of supper dishes covered the low table between himself and his guest. She had eaten hungrily, when she’d recovered from her awe at the spread—which he found promising. Wang liked a woman who could eat. He sat at his ease, his arm along the back of the sofa. He’d seen her eyes widen when she took in the pictures of Fiorinda, which lined this pretty room, but she had made no comment.
‘Do you like my place?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s
very
cool.’
‘I like to think it has the air of a haven given over to secret pleasure.’ He smiled, and she smiled obediently. ‘But I interrupted. Please, go on.’
Dian Buckley had been the country’s top music journalist, she was the author of best-selling books on the phenomenon of the Rock and Roll Reich. She’d known Ax Preston personally, intimately. The General knew that Dian’s actual part in the lives of the radical rockstars had been much smaller than she told it; but the facts he could get anywhere, fact was immaterial this evening. He was collecting impressions.
‘What you need to understand—’ said Dian, earnestly, alight with wine. ‘I was a total insider, most favoured media-person, I saw it from the beginning—What you need to
get
is that it wasn’t hype. They were our good luck, ever since Massacre Night. You know? When the hippies took over, our violent Green coup?’
‘I know.’
‘Whatever disasters happened, people felt that if the Few were okay, we’d all be okay. It was more than celeb culture, it was totally
genuine
. When I had my own tv show, which I did, very young, and it was essential viewing, I wouldn’t talk to anyone, no matter how big they were, if I knew they were bores. You’d dread spending five minutes with some of the megastars, trust me.
They
were incredible
.
All of them, not just the Triumvirate. Allie, Dilip, Rob and the Babes. Chip Desmond, Verlaine. And George Merrick, Bill Trevor, Cack Stannen—that’s Sage’s band.’
Wang’s tame goddess counted on her fingers, listing her totems.
‘Ax’s band, the Preston family band, he left behind a long time ago. You don’t have to worry about
them
. Fiorinda never had a band of her own, of course. Those names, those names I just told you,
they were the core
. If they talked to you, everything sparkled. The world had fallen apart, but the Few were still hot. You wanted to look like them, be near them, be in the gang—’
The General had a malicious impulse to inquire if Fiorinda Slater was one of the wonderful, light-the-room people, despite never having had her own band? The Chinese had made it clear that Ax and his partners were not war criminals and were not to be vilified. But Dian could not hide her reservations about the young woman whose harsh fairytale had been so strangely woven into Ax Preston’s Utopian dream.
The psychology of the
Dians
of this world is the same in any culture!
‘Tell me about the Triumvirate.’
Her eyes darted to the photos—framed publicity stills—and to Wang’s face, seeking guidance. ‘Ax was lovely: a total star. So unassuming. And S—’ Dian laughed. ‘Aoxomoxoa: we were once very close, more than good friends, you know?’
‘I can believe it.’
Aoxomoxoa
was “Sage Pender”, also known as “The Zen Self champion”. A violent bully, involved in highly suspect pseudo-mystical technology; a notorious womaniser; and a hero tortured by the evil regime. An interesting character!
‘In the end I had to tell him to cool off. Fio’s so possessive.’
‘Ah, I sense you were not entirely smitten with the rock and roll princess?’
Another wary saccade. ‘Some of us saw through her a little. She was an operator. Like, when she did that “
unknown teen waif, coming off the streets
”, she used the fact that everyone in the biz knew who she really was—’
The General raised his elegant brows. ‘She traded on her father’s name?’
Dian affected to be horrified. As well she might, considering the relationship between Fiorinda and her father, the wicked megastar Rufus O’ Niall.
‘Oh, God, no! But she definitely knew how to work the system.’
Wang felt kinship with the child of rotten privilege (untold generations of it, on the mother’s side). It’s a difficult burden. But his heart was touched by this other Englishwoman: thoroughly immoral, yet so gallantly determined to make the best of things. The press release folder that he’d provided lay in her lap, like a last scrap of decency. He saw her glance at the cover page, and shiver away.
In the cities, flower gardens; in the countryside, cultivated land.
The Chinese characters would mean nothing to her, she was no scholar. Nor the translation: she was no analyst. But not even a superstar journalist, about to become a courtesan, likes to face the fact that her country has been conquered.
He refilled Dian’s glass with the Pouilly Fumé. She smiled, and nodded.
‘The Reich was a
feeling
. They were never a government, they never tried to be, that’s all wrong. It was who they were, it was the way they made us feel, I mean
us
, the media. The mediators. We passed that feeling on to the masses.’
‘Allie Marlowe, she was Preston’s chief administrator?’
‘Allie was the only non-musician. But she had it, she had the glow—’
‘What about Hugh Raven? Sometimes known as “Smelly Hugh”?’
Dian shook her head so the blunt-cut blonde wings of hair flew. ‘I never, ever knew him. Smelly was marginal to the Few: he was a leftover from the Pigsty regime, the hippies.
None
of the people I knew were Counterculturals.’
‘Of course not,’ murmured the General. No one who insisted on professing that deluded faith had been spared during the invasion; nor would they be spared. ‘What about Dilip Krishnachandran? What were his responsibilities?’
‘Oh, DK was the DJ. He was
Mixmaster
. He
invented
the mass-market form of Sage’s immix tracks, he brought immix to the dance floor—’ Dian caught herself. ‘Immix’ or immersion code, the software of direct cortical stimulation, was one of the
serious
pernicious absurdities, even saying the word could be instant death. She stared at him, transfixed by terror. ‘I
hated
that stuff myself. I wouldn’t go near it. Such a horrible idea, building fake perceptions and zapping them into people’s brains through their eyes. How can something f-fake be good?’
Wang frowned, not letting her off the hook.
‘By “Sage”, you mean Aoxomoxoa?’
She giggled and covered her mouth, turning the laugh into a cough.
‘I meant Aoxomoxoa. Sorry… Dilip’s responsibilities? He didn’t have any. That’s not how it worked. The Few were called “Ax’s rock and roll Cabinet”, it’s misleading, they had no c-conventional posts, except S—
hahaha
, Aoxomoxoa was called the Minister for Gigs, but that was more or less a joke—’
A pause, Wang giving no clues. Dian reached her chopsticks, with careful bravado, for a piece of lobster meat.
‘Do you mind if I ask a question?’
‘Please do.’
‘Why did you come here,
really
? Why England?’
Ah, he thought, she’s quick. She has realised she already knows how to please and intrigue a powerful man. Be bold, Dian; but not too bold.
He laughed, so that Dian had to laugh too. ‘We came for your gold. We have an insatiable lust for gold, in China.’
Dian licked fiery, sticky sauce from her chopsticks. ‘But there isn’t any. British gold’s in Ireland, and Wales, and there’s not much of it.’
The Celtic nations had not yet been touched.
‘Ah, but we have our methods, and we are connoisseurs. Small amounts of a distinctive, native gold can be very precious.’
‘Now you’re teasing me.’
A cheeky, coquettish grin, a weapon from the armoury of a tv journalist, turning the interview into a flirtation. Suddenly her face changed. The English roses fled from her cheeks, leaving her chalk-pale, in panic.
‘Excuse, sorry—’
In the space-capsule bathroom Dian threw up briskly, rinsed her mouth; applied breath spray and sat on the toilet seat looking at her watch. Two minutes for recovery time: it’s always worth the investment. She had eaten more of the show-off food than her stomach would bear. Unbelievable, the seafood especially. White flesh of squid and abalone, swimmy pools of oysters in the shell on crushed ice, all sprinkled with yellow glitter, Hong Kong millionaire chic. She’d been hoping for fragrant rice, or bread. Everybody longed for bread; instead she’d been eating metal. And now she’d lost the lot, fuck, fuck. She
could not afford
to be thin in post-invasion London. It would brand her, it would make her look a failure.
Could he be serious about the gold? She imagined Snowdonia strip-mined, ground to dust, isn’t there some gold in Cumbria? Ireland and Scotland were supposed to be safe, they’d capitulated to all the Chinese demands. Some of Dian’s friends had fled there, but she hadn’t seen herself as a destitute asylum seeker.
I was right to stay put. Nowhere is safe now.
I am going to survive.
The 20
th
September, the day the Chinese had hit Cornwall with their staggering sub-orbital ships, was six weeks in the past. The four ‘Commanding Generals’ had parcelled out England between them, but everything had stopped dead after the 18
th
October executions. Sheng of the North East had taken a few major cities, hammered the Islamics in Bradford-Halifax, and retired to build a fortress in Newcastle. In the South West, where Wang himself was in charge, crops rotted in the fields. The South East General had established a cordon round East Sussex for some reason: but was doing
nothing
to restore the movement of vital food supplies. Londoners saw themselves facing starvation, as winter closed down. Hu Qinfu, Commanding General In Charge Of Subduing The Capital, responded to pleas for action with brute force and bewilderment.
