The Demi-Monde: Winter (3 page)

MAP OF THE ROOKERIES.
PLATE I

The Demi-Monde
^®
is the first simulation product ever to be platformed on and operated by the ABBA quantum computer. ABBA is a Quanputer-based system developed and operated by ParaDigm CyberResearch Limited. ABBA, by utilising an Invent-TenN® Gravitational Condenser incorporating an Etirovac Field Suppressor®, is the only computer to achieve a full SupaUnPositioned/DisEntangled Cyber Ambiance. As a consequence ABBA is capable of prodigiously rapid analysis (a fully tethered 30 yottaQuFlops) to give the bioNeural-kinetic engineers at ParaDigm access to almost unlimited processing power.

– The Demi-Monde® Product Description Manual:
14 June 2013

Tap, tap, tap, went the General’s pencil.

Jeez, that’s a habit that could get right up your ass.

The guy was obviously mega-tense, which was odd because it was Ella who was being interviewed for the gig. It was Ella who had exactly twelve dollars in her pocket and rent of fifty dollars due tomorrow. It was Ella who would be living on air pie for the rest of the week.

And more to the point it was the General who was asking all the questions. But oddly he was the one who was uptight.
So uptight that by Ella’s reckoning if she shoved coal up his ass, a week later the guy would be shitting diamonds.

Tap, tap, tap.

The oracle spoke. ‘You sing, Miss Thomas … ?’

Dumb Question #1.

It was a weird thing to ask, decided Ella, especially as singing was all she had been doing for the last week. That and being tested all ways and sideways. Tested physically and tested mentally. She had had blood tests, genetic tests, sight tests, hearing tests, initiative tests, aptitude tests, fitness tests, Rorschach tests, IQ tests, MBTI tests and that test the doctor had done with the endoscope that she didn’t really wanna think about. Most of all she had had her patience tested.

But she’d made it through to this, the last interview. She was so close to success she could smell it. Ella Thomas took a long steadying breath; now was not the time to freak or to make waves.

Gotta stay cool.

This might have been the weirdest audition she’d ever been through and it sure as hell had been the most frustrating but she needed the gig.

Boy, she really, really needed the gig.

The rent was due tomorrow.

She gave the General her sweetest smile and batted her big brown eyes. ‘Yeah, I sing, General. The Captain over there has been listening to me doing that all week.’

All week …

They’d warned her that the Army’s recruiting procedures, in the wake of 9/11 and 12/12 and all the other terrorist outrages, were protracted and rigorous but this was ridiculous. If they hadn’t been paying her to undergo the battery of auditions and the multitude of other checks she’d have cut bait a long time ago.

Tap, tap, tap.

Ella gave the General an impish grin. ‘Would you like to hear me?’

The General shook his head. As he did so his perfectly coiffed grey hair didn’t move. He had probably ordered it not to move: the General looked like the sort of guy who when he ordered something done expected it to be done. ‘That won’t be necessary, Miss Thomas. Captain Sanderson is the US Army’s expert on all things musical.’

The General’s eyes drifted back to the report positioned exactly square in the middle of his immaculate desk.

‘Do you sing jazz, Miss Thomas?’ he asked.

Dumb Question #2.

Of course she sang jazz.

It was just that nobody wanted her to sing jazz. Not any more. Jazz was old-school. Jazz was so unhip it had a limp. Maybe, Ella wondered, this General character dug all the old stuff? He sure looked antique enough but somehow he seemed a mite too uptight and buttoned-down to be a jazzer.

Nah …

Ella couldn’t see him in a beret and bebop glasses ready to fall in and dig the happenings.

‘Yeah, I sing jazz. Jazz is my first love. My dad was a really neat horn player so he taught me everything there is to know about jazz. So yeah, General, I sing jazz, but mainly in the shower. There ain’t a lot of interest.’

Captain Sanderson intervened. ‘Miss Thomas has a wonderful voice, Sir, with a good range and an interesting timbre. Her timing is excellent. I think Miss Thomas will make a fine jazz singer.’

Ella preened and shot the Captain a smile. She liked compliments; she liked good-looking guys like the Captain telling her
she had a keen voice. And now she thought about it she realised that the Captain was cute, albeit in a tightly wrapped, cramped and stamped kinda way. She wasn’t big on crew cuts.

The General nodded his understanding, then went back to the silent perusal of Ella’s file. ‘The health checks seem satisfactory,’ he mused to no one in particular. He looked up and studied her for several silent seconds. ‘And she’s certainly pretty enough.’

It might have been a compliment but the way he said it made her feel like a cow at market. People didn’t talk about other people in such an offhand way. It wasn’t polite. Anyway, she wasn’t ‘pretty’, she was more than just ‘pretty’: she was tall and slim and beautiful. Eat your heart out, Halle Berry.

‘And she is an African-American,’ observed the General absent-mindedly.

What had that to do with the price of beans? Haven’t these guys heard of racial discrimination?

‘Miss Thomas is in first-class physical condition and, as you rightly observe, she has the correct racial antecedents,’ agreed the Captain, who made it sound as though they were discussing a second-hand car. ‘The rigours of the Demi-Monde shouldn’t pose her any problems.’

Demi-Monde? wondered Ella. Weird name for a club.

‘Psychological assessment?’

‘Excellent,’ confirmed the Captain. ‘Her profile is an almost perfect match for the psychological template developed by PsychOps. She has a robust psyche, is flexible-minded and quite pragmatic. Phlegmatic, I suppose the word is. Phlegmatic with just a dash of rebelliousness.’

Phlegmatic?

Now there was a word Ella didn’t hear every day. That was a ten-dollar word and she went to a two-bit school. To the guys
she hung with ‘phlegmatic’ was what you did when you spat on the sidewalk. She flicked through her synonyms. Phlegmatic aka cool.

Yeah, she was cool. So cool she was straight from the freezer, man.

‘Miss Thomas has almost optimum levels of both serotonin receptors and p-eleven … she should have no difficulty in coping with the stress levels extant in the Demi-Monde. She also scored very highly in both the leadership and the initiative tests … very highly.’

Yeah, if the Army ever wanted someone to organise the building of a raft from a couple of old oil drums, some drift-wood and a length of rope and use it to float across a river then Ella was their girl.

The things they’d made her do over the past week.

Ella looked to check out the two men who were discussing her in such an impersonal way but neither of them met her gaze. She had the distinct impression that they had started to talk around her, as though she wasn’t there with them in the room. It took an effort to still a feeling of irritation. She took another deep breath, reminding herself as she did of how much she needed the gig.

The rent was due tomorrow.

‘She also scored well in the IQ tests,’ added the Captain encouragingly. ‘Very well. At the upper end of the top quartile.’

The General looked up from the report and spent several long seconds silently examining Ella. He didn’t say a word: it was as though he was reluctant to speak. Finally he let out a long, doleful sigh and turned to the Captain. ‘Miss Thomas is your preferred candidate? She is very young; only eighteen last birthday.’

‘Miss Thomas is old beyond her years, Sir. She’s by far the
most impressive of all the candidates, and her resemblance to Professor Bole’s Dupe is uncanny.’

She’d got the gig!

Though this Dupe shit wasn’t strumming her strings.

The Captain noted her confusion. ‘A Dupe is our term for a cyber-duplicate of a real person.’ The General looked across the desk towards Ella, his expression hugely serious: the shadows under his eyes seemed suddenly to have got deeper and darker.

There was another long silence. Finally, reluctantly, he spoke. ‘Miss Thomas … how would you like to earn a million dollars?’

UnFunDaMentalism
is an array of political, racial, metaPhysical, sexual and social ideas and philosophies relating to the purification of the Demi-Mondian race, the triumph of the Aryan people and the rehabilitation of the semi-mythological Pre-Folk. Adopted as the state religion of the ForthRight, the ultimate aim of UnFunDaMentalism is, by a process of selective breeding and measured culling, to eliminate the contamination of the UnderMentionable races from the Demi-Monde’s Aryan stock (Aryans are generally considered to be the Anglo-Slavic races) and by doing so to return the Aryan people to the racial perfection they possessed before their ancestors – the Pre-Folk – fell from ABBA’s Grace.

– Religions of the Demi-Monde: Otto Weininger, University of Berlin Publications

Comrade Commissar Dashwood made a point of arriving at his ministry before seven. He knew that only by working fourteen hours a day would he be able to ensure that the deadline for the building of the new railway lines would be met. And as Comrade Leader Heydrich had decreed that the railway lines were vital to the success of the ForthRight’s imminent invasion of the Coven, missing the deadline would make it very much
a dead line: Comrade Leader Heydrich rewarded failure in a very uncompromising fashion.

But even as the slave-driver brought his steamer to a wheezing halt in front of the Ministry building, Dashwood knew that there was something unexpected taking place at the Ministry of Transport, that today wasn’t going to be a normal day. He had an unmistakable feeling in his water that signalled him to be extra-careful.

It might have been that the Militia officers patrolling the top of the steps leading to the Ministry’s great double doors were decidedly less sleepy than they usually were at this time of the morning. It might have been that their salute was a trifle crisper and more enthusiastic than he was used to. Tiny things but important; important to notice, that is, if you wanted to stay alive in the internecine bedlam that was the ForthRight.

Oh, please don’t let it be another purge. Surely enough of us have died already?

As Dashwood strode imperiously across the great marble floor of the Ministry he tried to distract himself from these disturbing thoughts by adding up all those who had died in the Cleansing.

A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand?

No … the Party had arrested and executed nearly a quarter of a million persons – individuals – after the Troubles, accusing them of being Royalists, Counter-Revolutionaries and Enemies of the People and sending them – Dashwood was disgusted that it had been he who had cravenly signed the transportation dockets – to the Warsaw Ghetto and to the death camps in the Hub. Overnight – and the arrests had always been made at night or when thick smog had enveloped the Rookeries – Dashwood had seen many of his friends, his relatives and members of the
Court disappear into the Checkya’s black-painted steamers, never to be seen again.

And he had been complicit in their destruction.

That had been the price the Party had demanded for his survival and that of his family: complicity in mass murder. Maybe now it was his turn to be purged? As he walked through the Ministry he racked his mind, trying to identify what infraction he might have committed that would have persuaded Beria – the head of the ForthRight’s dreaded secret police, the Checkya – to sign his death warrant. He had been so very careful.

He stopped for an instant.

Maybe Trixiebell …

Oh please, not Trixiebell. Not his precious little Trixie.

For a second he was tempted to turn on his heel and scuttle off home, collect Trixie, jump on a barge heading for the Hub and seek exile in … in where exactly? The sad truth was that there was nowhere to run to in the Demi-Monde.

The Checkya had a long reach, and, from what he had heard yesterday at the PolitBuro meeting, by the Summer the ForthRight Army would have conquered the Coven and would, in all probability, be turning its malignant attention towards the Quartier Chaud. Maybe he and Trixie should try NoirVille? Somehow though he didn’t think Trixie was cut out for a life in purdah. HimPerialism was a harsh regime and very antagonistic towards women, especially independently minded women like Trixie. No, there was nowhere to run to, and, anyway, he had other things to do, other things to organise.

Dashwood stopped before the great oak door of his office and took a moment to brush a few errant steamer cinders from his immaculate suit. He doffed his top hat, took the door’s handle in a firm grasp and entered. When he saw the man who was
sitting behind his desk, idly smoking a cigarette and very systematically scanning his correspondence, all his worst fears were realised.