Ink

by Hal Duncan

  And I whirl off the stage, to leave an emptiness, a pause, a smattering of confused applause.

  THE UNDYING FLAME

  Joey lets the silence hold for a few seconds.

  “So you have a problem,” he says eventually, walking to the window.

  “Jack Flash,” says the Minister. “We need him … laid to rest.

  ” Through the dim reflection in the glass, Joey tries to pick out shapes he recognizes out past the perimeter wall—concrete, tall and buttressed—arcing around the brow of the hill on which the Circus sits. Just past the wall, and lit up now and then by its swinging searchlights, a pedestaled statue of some general on horseback stands at the edge of where the park slopes down into darkness, looking out like a lone sentinel across the park to the old tower that dominates the Rookery's silhouetted skyline. To the north, the tenemented streets of merchants are lit by halogen streetlights. To the south, by the river and near the monolithic, hulking husk of the old granary, the bombed-out wreck of the old Imperial Chi Industries works lies sunken among the skeleton cranes and warehouse shells of the airshipyards and docklands, concrete ruins on the skyline still burning, belching out blue-green orgone smoke from broken chimneys, like some dragon necropolis. Twenty years ago it was the largest orgone manufactory in all of Albion, before it was pounded into rubble; it still smolders, might do so forever, the undying flame of a failed rebellion. The undying legend.

  “We believe you're the person for the job, Agent Pechorin.”

  Joey gathers his long dark hair behind his head into a ponytail, slides an elastic tie over it. In the glass, his own pale face stares back at him, the Minister just a faint shape over his right shoulder.

  Jack Flash, he thinks. It's a name that holds a lot of history to Joey. The spark of a Zippo, the glow of its flame in eyes wide and black with chemical zeal. Punk hair the color of the Molotov in his hand. Midnight raves in the subway system, decks and amps pounding, FAST PUCK tagged on every train in the depot, Joey's hold-all stuffed with drugs, then money and drugs, and then just money. Militia raids and mobs in riot, petrol bombs splattering flame on dank brickwork behind them as they splash through tunnels. Wild nights in Rookery clubs. You've got to meet these guys, says Jack. Here. Fast Puck. Guy Fox. This is my main man, Joey. Joey Narcosis.

  Then cons and hustles, deals and heists. They made a good team, Guy and Puck, Jack and Joey, every job done with the Thieves Guild seal of quality. Bigger and bigger scores, jackings of airtrains, whole wireliners. But it had to get political, had to turn into a revolution, and Joey, always on backup and contingency, the Flawfinder General watching their asses for reality's bite, Joey saw the end of it right from the start. A cigarette flicked down in disgust as he walks out of a room, shaking his head, rebel against rebellion itself. They were a good team. But every team has to have its traitor.

  “Jack Flash is dead,” he says. “He's just a memory, a symbol.”

  “The people have enough symbols without this Jack Flash,” says the Minister. “This city has always been a troublesome place. We don't want another King Finn.”

  Joey studies the gray-suited shade in the reflection, as the man straightens his armband nervously—the circle of white on red, the black swastika, corporate logo of Albion PLC. The Minister drones on about the stability of the realm, the danger of another Shabti Uprising out in the fields beyond the city, heroic myth patterns and memetic threats, Futurist plots. Joey's eyes drift from the shade of the man to the bars that crisscross the window, black with paint peeling here and there to rust beneath. Stability has never been his big concern. He wonders how many of these new-generation blackshirts are really just conservatives living in the world made for them, quoting Mosley, Powell and Thatcher, listening to Wagner, reading Tolkien, worrying about the death of rural Albion and all the heritage and tradition of its folk but, really, more concerned about the FTSE than the Thousand-Year Realm. Pen-pusher fascists signing off on the terminations of dissidents because that's just what their nine-to-five entails. If it wasn't for the North Sea chi-wells, Albion would have fallen to the Futurists long ago. ft might have been the first nation to turn the black oil into blue-green light, but the Age of Industry has kept rolling on since then. And there are still fuck-wits who think of the chi, of orgone energy, this power of sex and death, as magic.

  Joey stops paying attention to the Minister's voice, a pirate broadcast on the ether catching his attention.

  ——

  “Jack Flash. Yes. Well, here's a little history lesson for those of you who weren't listening the day they burned the textbooks at your school. Now we all know about the ‘79 Rebellion and the destruction of the ICI plant, that little psychoactive wasteland in the city's heart. You've heard ‘The Ballad of King Finn.’ And you may well have heard a whisper or two about the hero of that uprising, the Man with the Plan, the Spirit of St. Louis Louis, the Three-Minute Hero, known to us all as Jack Flash.”

  Bullshit, thinks Joey. The plan was Fox's all along.

  “Some say he struck a blow for liberty, a martyr for the cause. Others say that he just got a lot of people killed. Whatever you think about it, as the story goes, Jack Flash was blown to kingdom come, and with his death, the revolution died. I know I cried.”

  You cried, thinks Joey. I was his fucking friend. I was the one who fucking killed him.

  But Jack was on self-destruct from the first time they met, two Rookery rats both on the wrong side of some gang of razor kids, forced back-to-back against the little mob.

  “Crash and burn, baby,” said Jack. “Crash and burn.”

  The Great Traditions of Our Elders

  And with a casual somersault straight out of his low bow, Jack flips forward to the edge of wagon's roof and slips off—to the gasps of the shocked audience— only to grab the hidden rail of scaffolding that he was aiming for. He swings forward and back over the stage, forward again, and flips, his knees curled up, to twist and land so gracefully—so gorgeously—in repose, draped like a queen of the cabaret upon a grand piano, elbow and fist supporting chin. Now that— hot damn—is what I call a Harlequin.

  Guy walks into the silence, stroking the whiskers of his fake beard, a gray fox of a Scaramouche, his sword-stick cane wound round with greenery, like Harlequin's flute. He shouts:

  “Gatekeepers! Call old Pantaloon out of his house. Yes, Pantaloon who left the city of salt to found this town of Themes. Go tell him Scaramouche is here to see him; he knows why. There's an agreement he and I have made, now that we're getting on in years, to wrap our walking sticks with leaves and wear the fawn skin, crown our heads with ivy.”

  Pantaloon appears, half buried in what looks like half a shrub, and Jack as Harlequin mugs his hilarity at the sight of aged idiocy.

  “Old friend,” says Pantaloon. “I heard your voice from well inside my house, a voice wise as its owner. See, I do come prepared, dressed for the dance. ‘Tis only right that I should magnify with all my might my darling daughter's son, this Harlequin, who's shown us all just what enthusiasm means. Now … where do we go to join the dance? Where do I stand and shake my hoary head? You'll be my guide, old Scaramouche. You know much more about these things than I who, as an aged man, shall be quite easily led.”

  Pantaloon, pompous and proud, whacks at the earth with his vine-covered walking stick, and says:

  “It's such a joy to, for a little while, recall your younger days. You know, I'll never weary, night or day, of beating my staff”

  Guy arches an eyebrow, hints a smile.

  “Looks like we're both in our second childhoods then,” he says. “Come on, let's give this dancing thing a whirl.”

  Old Pantaloon looks off stage right and upward, leans back on a prop of polystyrene rock.

  “I'll get a car, I think,” he says, “to take us up the hill.”

  “We'd certainly arrive in style,” says Scaramouche. “But we don't want to look too … out of place.”

  “Then I shall lead you, age before … age.�
��

  ‘And we'll be there in no time, I'm quite sure,” says Scaramouche. “The spirit of tomfoolery leads us both.”

  “We will not be the only ones up there?” asks Pantaloon. “I would not want to look … you know …”

  “If we alone are wise,” Guy reassures, “the rest are fools.”

  But there's a mischief in his Scarmouche's eyes, a wink to audience, laughing and cruel.

  “Then let us go,” says Pantaloon. “Give me a hand.”

  So, with a flourish, Scaramouche holds out a hand, says, “Get a grip.”

  “I may be old,” says Pantaloon, “but I can still be hip.”

  “You know,” says Scaramouche, our wily Guy. “Who cares what all these intellectuals say? With all their sophistry and jests they can deny the old ways are the best. Maybe some youth will say that you have no respect for your gray hair in wearing ivy in it, that you shouldn't dance. Old man, they're wrong. The great traditions of our elders don't distinguish between old or young. From ancient times there's never been a soul immune to Harlequin's desire for song. We all dance to his tune.”

  “Does that make sense to you?” I hear the Duke say to his consul. “They just told us that this Harlequin is new in town, so how can his traditions be the old ways? This is nonsense, man.”

  The consul looks uncomfortable; it's clear the Duke has his idea of what tradition is, and that our kind of fun is not a part of it.

  Tradition, I think. Saturnalia is tradition, winter festivals and fools made king for just one day. We've traveled far and wide across the Hinter of the Vellum, putting on these mummers’ plays. I understand exactly what Guy's trying to say; for all those solemn ceremonies that are different in each place, for all the smashing plates at weddings or ash smeared upon a face, for all the torn lapels and vows and rings, the real traditions are much deeper things. Not every wedding has a cake but all of them have tears, and after any funeral there may be no official wake but still the grief is washed away with beer.

  The Duke shakes his gray head.

  “The old man must be senile if—”

  “Look, Scaramouche,” says Don as Pantaloon. “I see somebody coming. Pierrot is hurrying back to his palace. Yes, it's Pierrot, who I gave all my power to. He looks quite pained. He must have bad news.”

  DELUSIONS OF RESISTANCE

  The Minister is still rambling on, not facing him now but pacing and turning, talking to the room in general, to the gridwork of bookshelves that lines the Circus cell, as if The Complete History of Futurism, or Doom in the Duma, or Wormwood's Roots might be more open to persuasion than this black-suited, blackhearted traitor standing silent at the window. As if somewhere among all the biographies of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries, among the histories of the Russo-Japanese War complete with glossy black-and-whites showing the scorched earth stretching from the Urals to Tunguska, among the studies of German society after Versailles and the Deunification, as if somewhere in there something might just nod and say, ah yes, I see, Joey tries not to smile. Given the subject matter of most of the books, a sympathetic hearing for this blackshirt doesn't seem terribly likely.

  Most of the books are on the Burn List, far too objective in their studies of the Russo-Prussian enemy for the liking of the Home Office, far too perceptive in their tales of bitter Prussians ranting in Bierhalles against the Jews, the gypsies and the homosexuals, these petty paranoids who remade Germany only to lose it to the Futurists, just like the communists with Russia. If there's a single tale told by these texts it's one of paranoia as a passion, as a path to power, and as a weakness in the face of cold, clinical Futurism. That's not a tale the Home Office wants told.

  So Joey's library exists, like himself, only as long as they require his purchased loyalty. They keep him well fed and well read here in the Circus. And well guarded.

  He's not so different from the defiant deviants of the Rookery, he thinks. Not really. He was born and bred in there, just like Jack, among the thieves and murderers. He knows every inch of it as well as anyone, the old sandstone tenements that are its bones, the way the houses spill out into the streets in extensions of scaffolding and Portakabin, linked by labyrinths of wooden walkways and steel ladders, new walls and roofs made of whatever material comes to hand.

  He knows the Street of Wheel Men just inside the heavy fortifications of the Great Western Gate, how it seems like just a tunnel till you spot the side alleys with the mounted machine guns, and all the speedy, stolen aircars parked along them waiting for a bank job. He knows Pyro Road, a once-wide street of supermarkets and solicitors, estate agents and charity shops, now a narrow passage filled with crates of ammo and explosives, territories demarcated by their proprietors’ stevedores and watchmen. He knows the Gauntlet and King Finn Street. He knows the white tile and green slop of the Algae Gardens—a municipal swimming pool turned hydroponics plant. He knows Forger Street and the Cattle Market, the Avenue of the Dead, and Old Cloister Square, where he killed his first man, deciding that no, he really didn't need to pay protection money.

  He knows the prison of his past as well as he knows his Circus cell.

  He peers up into the green-smudged crimson murk of the night sky, searching for the source of the pirate radio broadcast, some cloudlurker hidden up there probably among the freighter airtrains and the wireliners.

  “And then one day,” the voice is saying, “I'm going to let you into a little secret, mis amigos … I was there the day that Jack came back. Yes, I was there, that Bloody Friday in George Square, at the Tax Riot of ‘89, a humble reporter over from the States, a pen and paper in my hand and looking for the secret stories of the Motherland. I saw the strikers and the protesters, and I saw the batons and the rubber bullets. I saw the blood on the streets and the tanks in the Square, ten years ago this very day.”

  Ten years, thinks Joey. Fucking hell, ten years, and ten before that. Christ, how long has he spent in the cold storage of the Circus, letting the days and weeks slip by in the chemical cryogenics of the soul? They have the best drugs here, uppers and downers, drugs to make you feel more alive than you've ever felt before and drugs to make you sleep forever. Drugs to make you feel nothing at all.

  Ten years ago. Joey was in George Square that day. No one had ever rumbled that it was him who killed Jack, sold out King Finn, put the knife in the back of their whole fucking revolution; so he'd been turning a tidy profit, still in tight with Fox and Puck, playing them and the rest of the survivors for his SS handlers. It was a long-term, deep-cover game, a Straussian thought war designed to keep the insurgents as a visible threat but no real danger. The fascists do like a permanent state of emergency.

  And then, ten years ago …

  A militia ornithopter flutters batlike across the sky above the Rookery, searchlight flashing over the corrugated iron rooftops and around the jutting tower of the abandoned University building. All Joey feels now is a brooding, sick contempt for it, for its inhabitants and all their infantile illusions, their delusions of resistance, of revolution. The only reason their safe haven is allowed to stand is that it serves the Empire to have an enemy within to match the Futurist enemy without. The Rookery is an underworld in all senses, its inhabitants there by choice, perhaps, but still trapped, bound in a hell of their own making and fulfilling the function of every demon, every bogeyman—to instil fear and to serve as an example. Hell's Vatican, the Devil's Alamo, the Rookery is a fortress city within the city, and needless to say, it's got some serious defenses, but even so, the fascists could destroy it in a second if it posed any real threat.

  “Ten years ago today I saw the black shirts of the RCC and the leather longcoats of the Security Service men behind them. I saw the wasted body of King Finn raised up above the crowd, up on the Cenotaph, a warning sign hung high. Yes sir, I saw a lot of people die that day, might even say I saw the last hope of a nation die before my very eyes. But there was something else I saw that day…”

  One day, thinks Joey. One day …<
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  The Burden of His Tyranny

  “They'll fucking kill us all,” says Joey. “This is—

  ” “Isn't that—?

  ” “What?” he snaps.

  “Your cue?”

  “Fuck!”

  Joey strides onto the stage again, a panther Pierrot.

  “I leave you people on your own for a few days. What do I find when I come back?”

  A prowling prince, he punches words out as he walks, fist tight with anger, voice tight—strangely—more with sorrow. He's rightly proud of being the best actor in the troupe, is Joey. Takes more skill to get under the villain's skin, he says, than prance and posture as a Harlequin. Ah, but he can't dance like Jack, I say.

  “I hear our womenfolk have left their homes on some pretense of ‘spiritual exploration,’ sneaking away to quiet, hidden spots, to fuck, to dance like wild things on the wooded hills, following this Harlequin, whoever he is. I've heard tales of revels and of riots, all centerd around wine. They claim they're ‘priestesses,’ I hear. So are they sacrificing their virginity, then?”

  He rounds upon the audience itself.

  “Well then, I'll chase them from the hills, all of them. There are some in prison even now, safe and secure. I swear, I'll put an end to these outrageous orgies, if I have to throw them all in irons, every daughter, every mother in this town …”

  He pauses, soft and sad.

  ‘And I'll chain Columbine herself.”

  He turns. He hasn't seen old Pantaloon and Scaramouche yet. They watch him from the other side of the stage.

  “I hear,” he says…

  A pause.

  “I hear a stranger has arrived in town,” he says, “with magic tricks, from ludic lands, with golden, perfumed hair, a goatskin mask over his face, but glowing in his eyes such grace as a goddess of love would give. He spends his days and nights with virgins, teaching them his ‘mysteries.’ If I catch him within these walls, I'll put an end to all his beating wands and tossing hair. I'll have his head.”