‘Poor doll. Your clockwork is broken. I know; I felt it break. It broke like...’ His eyes became rheumy. ‘Like this old man’s heart.’ Primavera’s own eyes were raised; her grin, lopsided. ‘First the crash. Ah, it ruined so many. Those imitation dolls. People preferred them. They were cheap. Vulgar. But they offered /1 Then the plague. Such nightmares.’
‘Yeah, well I’m sick of dreams, doctor,’ said Primavera, ‘I want to wake up. I want to live in the real world again.’
‘We want out,’ said Morgenstern, who hadn’t moved beyond the door. ‘Understand? A Lilim has trapped us inside her programme.’
‘Tick-tock, tick-tock.’ Toxicophilous put his hand on Primavera’s belly. ‘We nanoengineers are much like clocksmiths. Semiconductor technology relied on electronics, but we use physical moving parts. Gears whose teeth are atoms; bearings that are bonds between atoms... Yes, you are inside her programme. But you are also inside a physical world. A clockwork world.’
‘I /1 that,’ said Primavera.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s just a fancy way of saying that her neuroelectrical activity is more powerful than a human’s; that for her reality isn’t consensual.’
‘I said I /1 that, Iggy.’ She sighed. ‘It didn’t stop me getting scrambled, did it? So doctor: you going to help? Or are you going to wait for the nanobots to arrive?’ The loose folds of Toxicophilous’s face tightened with self-reproach. ‘You must hate me.’
‘Well you did turn me into a fucking /1 Primavera stood up, peevishly kicking over a few of the antique toys that were offering a sardonic comment on her life. ‘Trouble is, you’re part of me. And I’m pretty sick of hating myself. Titania says—’
‘Titania,’ said Toxicophilous, ‘was never human. But you ... I know what I’ve done. I’ve taken away your childhood. I’ve taken away your girlhood, your womanhood. I’ve taken away your humanity.’
‘So who wants to be human?’ said Primavera.
‘Few of us, it seems. But it was my purpose to give a human-like consciousness to my automata. That is why I built the matrix. I wanted to find that fractal vanishing point, that point of complex simplicity from which life would spontaneously emerge. Dead girls, they said. Just because they weren’t built around the nucleic acids. Ha! Their consciousness was made up of sub-atomic particles, like ours. Yes, I wanted to give them humanity.’
‘You did,’ I said. ‘Your own. Didn’t turn out to be such a good thing, did it?’
‘If I infected others,’ said Toxicophilous, ‘I myself was infected. Those first /1 who came to Britain after the dissolution of the Pax Sovietica were intellectuals, former dissidents, underground writers, poets without a cause. They sought new themes, a new purpose. The worst of them glorified the old demons that were again racking their homelands: nationalism, populism, the paranoia of the non-existent foe: madnesses they embodied in a revival of folk tales and images. “The Second Decadence” the critics called their movement. I was a boy and their stories of witches and golems, vampires and the eternal Jew riddled my mind.’
‘Those stories have invaded reality,’ I said.
‘Not that that’s such a /1 thing,’ said Primavera, arching an eyebrow as sleek and black as the roots of her hair.
‘Ah,’ said Toxicophilous, ‘but the story of the witch always ends with a burning; the vampire is always impaled. I brought the Lilim into the world, but I brought death too...’ A tear hung from the tip of his nose, fell and broke over the toy piano.
‘Jesus,’ said Primavera, ‘to think I carry this guy around inside me.’ She placed her hands on her hips. ‘Stop it! You’ve been dead for years. Everybody’s forgotten about you! We don’t even know your real name...’ She brought her foot down on both piano and miniature pianist, destroying them in an orgy of chromaticism. ‘They can’t impale us all. We’re going to take over the world, just like Titania says. Right, Iggy?’
‘Right.’
‘The world,’ said Toxicophilous, ‘will be a little boy’s fantasy. The dream of a morbid child.’
‘Call it what you like,’ said Primavera, ‘it’ll be my world. The world of the Lilim. Maybe I play by your rules. I don’t care. I’m still /1
‘Your world. You mean that other place? The place you call real?’ Toxicophilous glanced towards the windows. ‘I like it here. It’s quiet. Peaceful. Here, at the heart of the matrix. It is this clockwork world, this neuroelectrical world, this world between zero and one, that is the real world for you, Primavera. This world that is unpredictable, uncertain... This world of magic. Of death.’ Morgenstern left his position by the door and strode into the centre of the room. ‘If this is her world she’s welcome to it, but it’s not mine. Can you get us out of here or not?’
‘You’ll get out of here when Primavera wakes up.’ ‘Great,’ said Morgenstern, ‘give the man a cigar. Can /1 wake her?’
‘She needs a kiss from Prince Charming. Charmless, in your case. The answer lies with you, Mr Morgenstern.’ ‘Me? What the hell can I do?’
‘Tell her the truth. The truth will wake her.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Primavera. ‘What’s this slut know about truth?’
Toxicophilous closed his eyes. ‘It concerns my beloved Titania. The queen I love to hate. My dear, she has deceived you...’
‘Don’t you call /1 queen a liar.’
‘So many lies. Isn’t that right, Mr Morgenstern?’
‘You can’t expect me to—’ Morgenstern sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘It’s classified.’
‘Then stay,’ said Toxicophilous.
‘I can’t stay, I’ve got to... Hey, how come you’re wise to all this?’
‘I know Titania. And I’ve come to understand that part of myself that poisoned her, made her change... God help me, I /1 Titania.’
‘Something’s up,’ I said to Primavera, ‘something weird. I know it. Make them talk.’
‘Weird,’ said Primavera. ‘I don’t like it, Iggy.’
‘Weird,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Weird policy for a weird world. It’s weird all right.’
‘We’re waiting,’ said Toxicophilous.
‘If it’s going to get us out of here, then...’ Morgenstern spat on his hands, slicked back his hair and beard, and eased open the door of his confessional. ‘
/1 was all about you, boy. Dolls are tough. We’ve tried to get the truth out of them before. Without success. So we thought we’d try a junkie. Then you go and spill the beans without us so much as breathing heavy on your fix...’
‘You’ve breathed heavy enough,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Primavera, ‘maybe I should remove his lungs.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Here it is. To start with, what I said a while back’s true: we didn’t have any intention of sending you to England. I was just trying to scare you, to get you to talk. No; you were on your way to the States. You think we’d share intelligence with the Human Front? Lord, the HF have our token support, but only as a cover for the support we give Titania.
‘Just after the HF came to power, Titania had a few of her runaways contact our people in the field. At first we thought it was some kind of hoax. But then something happened. Some people say the President had a vision. Others say it was the President’s wife. Whoever it was, the State Department was empowered to set up an exploratory dialogue. There were secret talks in Berlin. Titania’s delegation made DC realize that the HF’s plans to exterminate the Lilim weren’t going to work. The plague had become a pandemic. But the more those girls talked the more we understood that things could work to our advantage, that the Lilim could provide us with the means of reasserting ourselves on the world stage.
‘They were stellar, those girls. They were offering nothing less than to become an instrument of US foreign policy. What they proposed was this: Titania would send her runaways to countries of geopolitical significance to us. When the plague began to undermine those countries’ economies, Titania would unleash what she called “the secret o
f the matrix”. Only America would be privy to that secret, would recognize it, would know how to exploit it. Every government on Earth would be beholden to us for controlling the plague’s spread...’
‘Shut up!’ shouted Primavera. ‘It’s all lies!’
‘The secret of the matrix?’ I said. ‘You mean the fact that our friend here’—I gestured towards Toxicophilous - ‘lives inside every Lilim?’
‘Oh it’s more than that,’ said Toxicophilous, ‘much more.’
‘Screw you and your /1,’ said Primavera. ‘Why were you going to take us to America?’
‘Things here in Thailand weren’t going by the numbers. You, Primavera, the first doll to be sent out east, weren’t /1 the locals, you were damn well /1 them. We’d kept track of you, of course, ever since you’d arrived. Jinx had been on our payroll for years...’
‘It was my /1,’ said Primavera, ‘I /1 to kill them.’ ‘Sure. We could live with that. But what about your spare time? It wasn’t good enough. We would have been content with another Lilim, a replacement, but Titania wanted you out of the way.’
‘And what did you have planned for us?’ I said. ‘Debriefing. Titania’s been pretty secretive. We don’t wholly trust her, and her file’s incomplete. We’d do anything to get more information, and anything to protect that information. When Jinx called me and told me what you were downloading on Kito I had my staff buy enough shares on the overnight exchange to make sure I had the muscle to silence any witnesses. Well, maybe Jinx is gone, maybe not. I’ll have the Pikadons deal with him after they’ve offed Kito and that Italian. The bottom line is only the US government can know where Titania lives.’ He pulled a CD from his breast pocket. Kissed it. ‘And thanks to you, Zwakh, we /1 know. Some day we really /1 want to zap her.’
’Debriefing?’ Toxicophilous laughed. ‘Are you sure that’s all? Are you sure there aren’t certain people at the Pentagon and DARPA who are curious to find out what makes a Lilim tick?’
‘Hospitals,’ said Primavera. The words hobbled out, her mouth lame with despair. ‘Titania wanted to send me to the Hospitals.’
‘Yeah,’ said Morgenstern, ‘well, that’s not my department. I just wanted to talk. Get the full story...’
‘But why?’ I said. ’Why would Titania conspire against her own kind?’
‘She is fulfilling her programme,’ said Toxicophilous. ‘A doll’s purpose is to die. Titania leads her daughters into darkness... Her inheritance is the fears, prejudices and secret lusts of /1 Like all Lilim, she embodies Europe’s death wish. Don’t you know how much you want to die, Primavera? How much all Lilim want to die? That is the secret. The one and only secret of the matrix. How you and I long for annihilation!’
Primavera bit her knuckles.
‘A Cartier automaton like Titania has the power to unlock that death wish,’ said Morgenstern. ‘In fact she’s done it already. In the suburbs of the Neverland. We asked her to. We wanted proof.’
‘Like sheep,’ I said. ‘They went to their deaths like sheep.’
‘She can make it happen anytime she likes,’ said Morgenstern. ‘Anywhere. But for her next performance Titania will make sure the Lilim die for Uncle Sam. And for Uncle Sam alone. It’s going to give us one /1 of a bargaining chip. Of course some dolls don’t surrender so easily, Primavera being a case in point. I understand Titania’s being calling /1 for years . . Morgenstern stood up. ‘I’m not happy. I’m really not /1 about all of this. But how do you expect America to protect its national interests? Nobody goes to war any more. History’s finished: democracy and capitalism won. We got to do things different ways. We got to find new ways to fight, to goddamn well /1...’
‘Forgive me, little doll,’ said Toxicophilous, ‘I wish I could have given you life. But something in me cried out for a victim.’
Primavera walked unsteadily towards a window. ‘Oh, Iggy. It’s too much, too much...’ Outside, night was falling. I followed her, placed my hands on her shoulders. She focused upon our reflections in the glass. ‘It’s over, isn’t it? That’s all I am now. A reflection. Without substance. Without meaning.’ I kneaded her flesh; felt the steel girders of her bones. ‘You were right, Iggy. A doll is a thing of surface and plane. I’ve always known it was true. But Titania gave me something. Not a soul. Just something that made life bearable. An identity. A purpose. A kind of substitute soul. And now it’s gone. She’s killed it with her lies. Why did she do it? Why did my queen betray me? Can you tell me that?’
‘Titania’s very practical,’ mumbled Morgenstern. ‘She’s got an instinctive grasp of politics.’
‘Quiet,’ I said, turning around. ‘Just keep quiet, okay? Do you know what you’ve done? Both of you?’ I swept my foot across the floor, scattering automata. ‘It’s not worth it. I’d rather stay here. Titania was all she had...’ ‘We get out now?’ said Morgenstern.
I walked up to him and grabbed him by the beard. It came away in my hand. ‘All she had,’ I said. ‘Titania was something to believe in. She made them proud. She turned the tables on prejudice.’
‘Lies,’ said Toxicophilous. ‘All lies.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. I let the beard fall to the floor. Another trick.
‘I never knew my Dad, you know,’ said Primavera. ‘He was Polish. Married Mum in Belgrade. Came to England. Died when I was six months old. Mum said the Lilim killed him. And for twelve years I’m a good little Serb. Then I get this other Dad. Dr Toxicophilous. What a deal. What a life...’
Toxicophilous reached into his gown and held up a glittering rod of brazen metal. He threw it across the room. ‘It’ll work now,’ he said. ‘Try it.’
‘Primavera?’
‘Mmm? Is it time to go home? And where is home? Where do I go now Titania has betrayed me?’ She smiled, her lips tremulous.
I picked up the key. ‘I don’t know. Primavera, please...’
She turned her back on her reflection and put her arms about my neck. ‘Let’s do it,’ she said. Her smile had frayed. ‘What’s the matter—scared?’ The butterfly grip grew warm and sticky; her jacket was open, umbilicus peeping above the waistband of her fatigues. She reached for my hand, guided the key towards its ward. ‘Don’t move.’ Her fingernails dug into my neck. ‘Don’t breathe. Don’t even think.’ She arched her body, thrusting herself onto the brass shaft in a violent spasm of flesh and will. Her scream splintered over my face.
The windows exploded. A green mist poured into the room. A wind howled across the plain of death.
Morgenstern shouted an exultant curse.
‘Primavera—’ A thin trail of blood leaked from where the key had imperfectly cauterized the door beyond which dream and reality were as one. Her eyes rolled back; her bones had become powder, her flesh, liquid. I scooped her into my arms.
‘Don’t worry, Iggy,’ she moaned, ‘it’s not the real me . . She was turning to vapour, coalescing with the swirling mist.
‘Goodbye, little doll,’ called Dr Toxicophilous. Jackknifed, head to the waxing gale, Morgenstern pulled himself to my side. A screw of dense green air rose from the sea of grass outside, opening into the cone of a tornado. The cone advanced towards us, and as the wall of the maelstrom skimmed the wall of the terrace, we were sucked into an emerald gyre and tossed like leaves into the sky.
I opened my eyes; I was inside Spalanzani’s workshop, a naked Primavera by my side. I looked at my hand; only the impression of the key remained.
‘Welcome back to the real world,’ said Jack Morgenstern , subjecting us to his lightstick’s one-eyed scrutiny. ‘You owe your life to her,’ I said.
‘Tell it to my boys. Spalanzani was wrong. We were flesh and blood in there.’
‘Uk!’ said Primavera. ‘I need an enema.’
‘You think it’s funny?’
‘Does it matter? I’m just a sick little doll. I left what power I had back there. I can’t even read your nasty slutty mind.’
‘You’ve got the information you want,’ I said. ‘You can tell Ti
tania we’re dead. You owe us.’
‘Titania?’ said Kito, picking her way through the wreckage. ‘More crazy story, Mr Ignatz?’
‘If you like,’ said Primavera. ‘The magic’s gone. Finished. Nothing matters now.’
‘What matters is I get you Stateside,’ said Morgenstern, ‘according to plan. Now let’s get moving.’
The Pikadons were guarding the door, their particle weapons drawn. ‘So you got back?’ I said. ‘Pity.’
‘Get back long time,’ said a Twin.
‘Mr Ignatz sleep /1
‘Now do what Uncle Jack say.’
Primavera and I walked hand in hand. As we approached the door, the Pikadons moved aside, and then closed ranks behind us.
‘Not you, Madame.’
‘You stay behind.’
‘Bang—’
‘And Boom—’
‘Want to talk.’
Kito drew her peignoir tightly about her and pressed her forehead against the wall. ‘Why you /1 this, Mr Jack,’ she wailed. ‘I not start doll-plague. You must believe—’ ‘Of course you didn’t,’ said Morgenstern. ‘You think we’re stupid? You think we care? But Titania’s real enough—’
‘Titania?’
‘Yeah, Titania. And even if she means—’
‘Crazy story true?’
‘And even if she means nothing to your greedy peasant mind—’
‘No!’
‘That makes you a security risk.’
‘Who Titania, Uncle Jack?’ said a Twin.
‘Never mind, sweet thing. But after you’ve finished with Madame, get looking for that Italian.’
‘And Mr Jinx?’
‘I don’t think Jinx will be bothering us.’ Morgenstern prodded me with his lightstick. ‘Great girls,’ he said. “Beautiful, deadly...’ We stepped into the garden; the door closed. ‘And stupid. But don’t on me, mind.’ Primavera squeezed my hand. ‘I’ve got to try it, Iggy.’ Swinging about, she caught Morgenstern cleanly on the jaw. There was a tiny detonation; Morgenstern stepped back, his eyes crossing, uncrossing; Primavera moaned and put her hand to her mouth. Undissuaded, she extended the same hand as if to administer a hex in a last stand against reality. Morgenstern, his eyes refocused by fear, aimed his weapon.
Dead Girls, Dead Boys, Dead Things Page 15
