Slaughtermatic (14 page)

And a bank of Gamete mindmaulers in hardcopy. He flipped down
Reality Scare
and read aloud: “‘Crime and legality - if one is not satisfied, the other will be indulged.”’

‘
The other will always be indulged,’ Gamete stated, standing beside him. He handed Dante a glass of grail.

‘
So Eddie Gamete, no less.’

‘
Are you really surprised?’

‘
Yeah. To be honest? Yeah.’

‘
There’s a need to discard our old selves surely as a snake discards its skin - as a headcrime adept you should understand that. But then I can scarcely blame you. Come on to the terrace here - we can’t be seen from outside, and it’s pleasant.’

Dante slipped
Reality Scare
into his coat - he had left the dead e-reader on the warehouse floor - and followed Gamete into a glass-enclosed balcony garden. They sat in seats amid the uneventful air and lazy hum of synthesizer bees. Drinking, Dante noticed a moss-furred astrolabe, a pond of holographic goldfish and, on the inner wall near the conservatory entrance, the American flag.

‘
Think it’s out of place?’ asked Gamete, scrutinizing him over his glass with a hint of mischief. ‘It has everything to do with my story, and my time. Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog’s repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty per cent of people’s earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive. Humour and style together made a sandwich one molecule thick. It was known the populace would never berserk
en masse
– they didn’t like each other enough. But advisers hadn’t considered that the populace would berserk
en masse
by coincidence.’

‘
Didn’t the authorities swatch the problem?’

‘
But of course they understood it perfectly, and continued as they’d always done. The red of the blood, the whites of their eyes, the blue of the sea. You’ve heard of subliminals?’

The flag frilled like a Venetian blind, revealing a skull and crossbones.

Harpoon Specter was sitting dejected on the Dump rim when Blince approached. Khaki drool glazed the lawyer’s chin and black birds fussed around him. ‘Lookin’ good, Harpo,’ Blince remarked, setting down heavily at his side and opening a Nimble Maniac take-out. ‘Cubit ain’t on the register, eh? Slippery customer.’ He gestured, grinning and suggestive, at the Dump. ‘Speakin’ o’ which - ha ha ha! I know I shouldn’t say it about these dead guys.’ Blince wiped tears of hilarity from the pockets of his eyes. ‘Gloatin’ I guess, know what I mean?’

Specter turned and gave him a small, glum look.

Blince surveyed the putrescent desolation and nodded his head. ‘I take a swatch at this place and figure hell I must be doin’
somethin’
right. Take a hotdog, Harpo. No? I hope and pray y’ain’t on the cream horns o’ some dilemma, Harp. Messes with your centre o’ gravity. You consider yourself a bigot, Harpo? Y’ain’t been a bigot over rough terrain, in hostile territory - the mettle o’ your prejudices ain’t been tested. You don’t grow a face like mine sittin’ home eatin’ asparagus, I’ll tell you that. Guess you’d argue you kept your bigotry in the shinin’ trim o’ lovin’ attention. Sorry to be the one to tell ya it don’t work that way - a tool’s there to be utilized, not hung on the wall like some faggot bangle. Are these crows singin’ in tune, Harpo? What is this racket?’

Specter glanced at him gloomily.

‘
Did I tell ya Benny’s deserted? A turncoat! Benny! Greyest day for this community since the explosion at the brain storage facility. To think Benny’s out on them mean streets feedin’ alka seltzer into cash machines like some smalltime speed urchin. I used to think there was somethin’ sacred but the gods guffawed from on high. You know somethin’s newted every computer in the city? The boys are havin’ to use Hecklers. I’m not makin’ this up, Harpo, I wish I was.’ He picked up a lilac piece of Dump meat and let it drool through his fingers. ‘Yeah, to be a real man’s bigot you gotta know which side you’re on and stick there till the crack o’ doom, and I guess your profession puts the mockers on, right, Harpo? You’re the shyster’s shyster, I’ll give you that.’

Some of Blince’s words were beginning to reach him, as though through a thick green slick. A favourite memory - Specter defending a hold-up man. He had cited the quantum hypothesis that in an infinite universe everything will happen eventually, so the bank should have known the guy would rob them sooner or later. When in a subsequent case he was confronted with opposing counsel’s defence of a hold-up man, Specter witheringly stated that in an infinite argument, every position would eventually be adopted.

‘
Well - can’t linger, Harpo. Me and the boys are headed out to the Rose’s known domicile - first name on the rapsheet. No positive ID at the flashpoint - guess if Cubit ain’t checked in here we got two on the loose, you beat that? See ya on the merry-go-round.’

Blince raised himself wheezing, and lumbered off through clapping clouds of winged vermin.

Presently, Specter stood and began shuffling tortuously in the direction of the Deal Street Highrise.

2

GAMETE’S STORY

Gamete’s story was the expected fender bender but had such implications for Dante the younger man listened with acute attention.

‘
We’re talking about a time when the activity of swapping one addiction for another was the only example of fair barter remaining in the Western world. The new century had begun, in a thunderclap of generalizations. Wonderful opportunity for media bicthought, the millennium - a horse pill. And these rigorously imposed banalities were a perfect grey against which to caper. I knew I owed no morality to those who would extort it by force, but I was driven by the desire to push
beyond
the self-evident. In those days I was interested in the notion of innocence as a form of aggression against society. I had irony in the soul. Of course this was a turbine which propelled me into trouble.

‘
I was staying at the Crisco Correctional Institute for Wiseguys. I’d been told it was for my own good and I wasted two years searching for a way to believe this. When by means of a ladder of bored-rigid guards bolted together I finished staying there, I cradled within me the bud of a headcrime.

‘
Maybe you’re familiar with neuro-linguistic programming. The most commonly known principle is that our eyes will look in a particular direction depending on our mental activity. You can determine from this whether someone’s remembering, calculating, imagining, in reverie or whatever. And it’s possible to reproduce those states by consciously adopting the relevant eye-position, posture and so on. I’d noticed something when dealing with authority figures such as the clench guards, whom I’d banter with on the thorny issue of the law cartel. Their reasoning, where detectable, was often flawed, but when I pointed out their simple errors, they’d blank over. It was a very particular act of staring away at a certain angle in stony silence. I experimented with dozens of guards - it was only a matter of speaking a pertinent truth - and obtained consistent results. After my escape I kidnapped a string of cops - this was before the cop-army merger - and tested them in the neurofeedback chair you saw downstairs. The head-vice and visor work on the same principle as a motion-control camera, recording and repeating movement and position - thus I was able to seat myself and model a bigot precisely. More importantly, I could program the device to model the mirror image of this, and thus place me in a state which was the diametric opposite of bigoted denial.

‘
How can I describe the explosion this induced? It was like perceiving everything in the world from the inside out as though it were coloured glass. Millions of simple but extraordinary ideas flared through the canyons of my brainfolds and expressed themselves as geometric shapes which bloomed and shrank in mid air. The faces of swine mouthed silently at me from the walls. It was touch and go, I can tell you.

‘
So I’d breached a state in which it seemed I could accomplish miracles of reason and creativity. Anyone with two barrels to their nose could have recognized its potential in the real world - but to me that was fathomlessly abstract. My character was flawed with an ambition. Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination. My brain thirsted in my head. And now that it was nourished into florid activity I began writing it all down. Speed-of-consciousness books, treason synthetics, resemblist rants, torrentials and traumatism - within a year I’d written a dozen books on truculence alone. I completed
The Gobsmacker
while walking through a revolving door.

‘
Of course there was no money in books - they were outlawed unofficially enough for no black market to exist as yet. And as I mentioned, the honest living had been legislated to extinction, though many still pursued the wraith. Justice was starved to a vestigial irrelevance. Even that armature of the law which protected the criminal from its victim was busted. The powers were convinced the populace could live this way if they had to, and inhumanities accumulated like layers of volcanic ash. People’s poverty, not their will, consented to this inarticulate nightmare. It was so intricately foolish I became convinced it was consciously planned. Someone must have a watchmaker’s skill in perdition. And I began piecing together the arcane and contraband knowledge I’d amassed since childhood. I decided to have fun with it.

‘
Already for years happiness had been clandestine, relegated to the tangential trespasses of vortexans, recidivisionaries and carrion angels - denizens with their veins twisted amid subterranean wiring. Horror among thieves, you know the sort. This was merely clever then.’

‘
Socketeers,’ Dante said.

‘
Exactly. Made illegal the same year as dimes. They took me in, really, under their artificial wing. I’d read a shrill news piece asking what were the solutions to all these various problems in the world, and used neurofeedback to obtain the solutions. I hadn’t realized the article was just noise, rhetorical. I think I actually wasted time posting the answers. I was soon shown my error amid much hilarity, as you can imagine. Finally I fed those answers into a codified novel. Instead of binary it was encrypted in psychohistorical repetition patterns. This screened out those who’d detected so little pattern in past events they couldn’t predict the future. Almost everyone thought it was gibberish.

‘
Another brief interest of mine was killing. Murder’s the taking of one man’s life by another - war’s the other way around. This uniformity led me to seek the
real
differences between the two activities. I found only one - the flow of the material gain. With murder it’s more direct. I made it known to the authorities that they could cut out the middle man by doing it themselves. But once again I wasn’t thinking practically and hadn’t taken into account that servicemen don’t take a cut of the spoils. I had to admit I didn’t know how a government could run a war without loss of life and still make a profit. I really didn’t have all the answers.

‘
Oh, I was doing all this only out of laziness, and out of honour to the laziness in me. The notion of effectiveness - I could no longer extend the courtesy of respect to that illusion.

‘
Postmodernism was the line of retreat for the ineffectual in those days, but once again the law was there first. Law always shunned the factual pursuit. Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, which has freed the dreamer from the necessities of common logic and enabled him to compress all phases of hype, hearsay and happenstance into a circular design of which every part is beginning, middle and end. Its enforcement had recently been re-asserted in a volley of vagueries no one had taken the initiative to ignore. You’ll find the average legislator is driven by the desire to cool his molten ignorance into some lasting obstacle, a monument if you like. The crime crisis made the powers nervous because it wasn’t one they’d manufactured. I can’t say I didn’t sometimes want to scorch their authority in a blaze of indifference, but in truth I ducked out of the game because I was weary of reasoning with people who couldn’t think without screaming. I was grey at twenty-one.

‘
For three years I was out of commission except for the kind of penny
-ante pranks we’re all familiar with. Digitally altered the major soaps and tapped into a carrier wave, broadcasting shows in which everyone cut out the bullshit - the story strands concluded within minutes. Chaos at the networks.

‘
But for the most part I was growing tomatoes, to be honest. Until the books, these deep contrivances I’d frankly forgotten about, began to kick in. Textropists, the black market, information salvage - I’d been a commodity there for a little while. But certain criminals had been making confessions in which my name figured prominently as a creative influence and the press went to work with pinsharp inaccuracy, their conclusions meticulously unsound. I was hauled in by the brotherhood. Torture made my throat close on the truth. It seemed small enough revenge to withhold it. However, the whole thing distracted me. Should have disappeared again at once, but I had to be clever. Years wasted. More books, the fact network, that prank with the dateline - lateral stunts for which I was lionized while feeling increasingly that life was a mere exercise in exhaustion.

‘
It was the glamour - which thankfully wears off quicker these days. A part of me knew it was time I returned to myself and left my farewell
. The Impossible Plot
was a rock soup containing everything I’d written in a rom stack which hubbed at a satire interactive - a sub-entry maze you could wander for years. Hit the end and you’re rebounded to the middle. And throughout it were clues to what I was planning - death scene and this irony tower of mine, the Villanelle. The book was a sort of schematic lament, but it somehow got a reputation as the philosopher’s stone of transgression. Only one copy existed - in a safe bang in the middle of town. A gauntlet, I guess, for the young. Know my name. Earn it. I’ve my own monitor in the bank and saw that parodic little heist of yours. Carrying a thesaurus into a raid.’