by Steve Aylett
‘But meanwhile years of my life were run under those wheels. I’d earned the wrong things, obviously. Even my compromises are in ruins. I want to live the sort of life that’ll have consequences, Atom. A free agent.’
There was something in back of her explanation but I didn’t know what it was. I watched the smoke pirouette upward from my gasper. ‘Or maybe you’re keeping their deals warm for them.’
She stood up and started moving with a sort of evasive aimlessness. She was a bullet of a girl, a design classic. Her weight would have doubled if she grew her hair. She lifted the cover of the Gamete book with the tip of a finger. ‘What’s the book about?’
‘Amnesia conceals a killing, as usual,’ I lied.
‘Why does humanity always err to the boring,’ she said, turning to me. ‘To such extremes that it seems to want to be dead, or appear dead? Like an insect that looks like a dead twig so it’s passed over by predators. Maybe humanity’s instinctively doing the same, to be passed over by hostile aliens or something.’
I flashed on sacrificial spatial topology, the notion that the existence of a dense idea-space requires the sacrifice of a large adjacent near-vacuum. It was based on the unproven premise that there were a limited number of ideas and was fashionable because humanity wanted to believe that premise. ‘Come on, we’re too far along for that. Crappy’s the default, so what.’
She stood close, looking into my face. Her hair solarised under the room’s single lightbulb. But she smelt red as an aniseed ball. ‘You’re not like that, are you.’
It didn’t seem like a question.
‘I don’t overlap. I’m old-fashioned.’
‘I heard otherwise, lots.’
‘Evolution, you mean.’
‘What could be more old-fashioned?’
‘Don’t click on an empty gun. It’s unattractive.’
She slapped me, twice. The first slap knocked the cigarette out of my mouth, the second put it back. ‘I want to believe that,’ I said. ‘I really do.’
Someone was stumping sloppily up the hotel’s bent stairs to our atrophied door. ‘Doors come toward and around me without great effort on my part,’ a voice rumbled from the other side. ‘This much I know.’ Behind the warped wood hung a heart black as an antique telephone. Blince was so fat he’d never heard it beating.
‘Out the window,’ the girl hissed. ‘On the ledge.’
‘You’re making a simple deal very complicated,’ I whispered, but I did as she said, sitting out of the window on to the flaked paint of the concrete ledge as Blince entered with a parrot key. I shuffled aside a little until I was within the O of the dead neon HOTEL. Night was creeping in and the air smelt of fresh sulphur. Behind me they were speaking, each smithereen to the other.
‘Hands up,’ said the chubby enforcer. ’Obvious, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded. Pivot, this is Lux Murphy, a Fed, such as they are. Murphy, you did the right thing calling me.’
‘I didn’t call you.’
‘Then you’re under arrest. Pivot, give her some cheese or whatever these things eat.’
Pivot sighed.
‘And frisk her. Dollars to donuts she’s flawed.’
‘Let’s both of us humour him, Miss Murphy,’ said Pivot in a tone flat as a Cuban steak.
I watched the jagged distance of the skyline, the pinlight of guns firing like synapses across the city surface. A murder of squad cars was parked below, rooflights pulsing. It was summertime, I think. I looked to my wrist and remembered the beamer was gone.
Then the tangled noise of their speech continued. Pivot sounded indifferent.
‘Girly gun with a joke grip. Ammo in her coat.’
‘Gun used to be a heavy black oily concern like a carburetor,’ Blince remarked. ‘Now it’s like a toy, looka this. What’s it fire, mink-lined bullets? Entry wounds probably dotted with little hearts, I right?’
I hadn’t seen Murphy stow the Bohr or the judex broom. She was good.
‘This ammo’s got a frog on the label. What kinda pills people firin’ these days?’
‘I was taught by my mother it was impolite to talk about one’s ammunition.’
‘You talk with the safety on. Kinda passive aggressive.’
‘You wouldn’t like the alternative.’
‘Yeah? We saw you with Atom, grinning like a gash and firing a bigger piece than this. That’s the stuff eh - bullets galore and cordite blowing up your pants leg. So what happened? It was all going dandy then you withdrew your participation.’
‘It seemed to be doing you good.’
‘You’re like a spy in a colouring book aint ya Murphy? Cuter’n a glue-eyed baby sloth I reckon. What’d Atom do, give you a single longstem silencer? Watch out, he’ll make a fridge magnet of your nose.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘Well, Murphy, ah, this aint so good, this is looking pretty bad. You conspired with a known ... well, we better decide. What’s his form, Pivot?’
Pivot, whoever the guy was, tapped at a handset. I heard my biography. Hours of legend were absent but some of it was true. Pivot’s voice was diffident and dignified. ‘His correlated intel jacket starts in mid-air. Nothing early on, no birth record, blank as Sanctus. Travelled under a false flag. Known aliases: Atman, The Malamatic, Man of the Blank Hands -’
‘Acid dabs,’ Blince commented.
‘Probably. He’s described as a luftmenschen, man of air, an interbeing, creature of absolute activity, lungs like a helicopter, living purely by his wits. He acknowledged no sanction or hierarchy.’
‘Not unusual.’
‘These days. But that stuff was still in play, back when the remark went in. His file is annotated with a considerable number of ideas and stupid drawings, such as this one of a pig watching a butterfly in a sunbeam - notice the pig has a placid smile on his face. Drives a Sarfatti Mantarosa with an anti-Blake motor.’
‘The pig does the driving?’
‘Atom, Chief. Got the skull of a smiley on the hood and some lightning. Portholes like a Thunderbird. He fits the four-point profile for a total bastard. Frequented the Fist of Irony and dated the Caere Twins. For a while he settled on a campaign of chakric sarcasm using a sleuth cover. There’s this stuff about the stolen brain and the Presidential assassination, and Atom was interrogated. Claimed he was in Washington “visiting his rights”. And the notes start getting quite strange later on. His mere face at the window not uncommonly leads to mayhem.’
For a moment I thought he’d seen me, but it was just words. Still, a wave of strangeness had drawn over me like polyester film. They knew more than I had realised. It seemed someone was quite taken with me and my successes. The vaunt song from inside had moved on.
‘... with the backing of Madison Drowner who was nominally his armourer. The seventh difference is how light spilled out of the bloodstream. And even this jacket turns out to be a cypher describing various full-denial covert ops in perfect sequence.’
‘But we compiled the jacket, pink-eye.’
‘You bet. And I added to it after today’s encounter. It resulted in three more pieces of classified information being found encoded into the files.’
‘A real glory boy, eh?’
‘Purportedly prophesied the Pentagon incident. Then he left town and there’s nothing solid, just more of these speculations about the thirty-seventh nisterim. Now he’s a blow-in.’
‘So many moral and stylistic ambiguities. He seems to have spent his life stockpiling idiocies for us to scrutinize. Cuffing him’d be like putting a padlock on jello.’
‘Saves himself from being a nonplussed innocent by having something always to do, anyway. This biography is unverifiable, obviously.’
‘And a profanation of all we enjoy. All those years committing crimes, and never the same one twice. So you see, Murphy? If you cooperate in a broad general way, I can make the whole thing go away like nuclear sludge. As strange and counter-intuitive as it seems, I’m sworn to enforcing freedom. Witness
the baleful charms of gravity upon a plummeting wretch as nature behaves like disaster’s friend. See a seahorse smile, and then try to tell yourself you expected it.’
‘I guess,’ said Murphy, ‘sometimes it helps to talk.’
‘That’s the stuff right there. Reality is discarded from the law like the marble chipped away to reveal a statue. That chipping away is my duty. Its performance requires certain aspects of the villain - in fact all of them, really, but tilted at a surer angle. As for justice, we just make a few jocular guesses and a lot of noise. No-one minds much.’
My headache had gone. I felt loose and relieved, as though my head had disappeared and I saw the world through two floating eyeballs. The night sky was an open secret.
A hooting noise to my right - the swan Strobe Talbot was tilting along the ledge toward me. Not much to look at, this white umbrella was the best urban smart drone manufactured by the Garuda Company. ‘The targets are approaching the Gate,’ he reported, and hopped on top of the O. He dropped a swingbar from his underside - I took hold with my good hand. Strobe blew his wings to full stretch and plunged us down Devant Street in a chronic manoeuvre that made me think, My doom isn’t stale after all.
7 THE BATTLE OF STINA GATE
We skimmed over the warped grid of the city. They say a city is the detritus left over from a billion scams, but this was a city like broken bones, built too fast and dirty to be intentional. I was bleeding into it from the chemical pain at the end of my left arm. Then the old Trincado Tower swung by below and Stina Hang lifted at us like a diorama angled for display.
It looked to be in uproar, and I hadn’t got there yet. Warning someone off is the most compelling way to inform them of an option, and sure enough a squadcar had set up in the plaza like a placard. Around it motives tangled like the tails of a king rat. It had the topological symmetry of what had yet to be learned. Dozens of parties were blasting refractive and prefig firearms across this congested arena. They were so frolicsome and serious I felt simultaneously sick and quickened.
The Gate was closing, the old man and the blonde teen crouching against it as it boomed into place. Junco had moved his vigil to a fire drum nearer to the Gate and was now pinned down, faced away from the Gate and firing everything he had. I flew right over him and let go of Strobe, dropping perfectly into the flaming trash can. My entry forced a gout of flames up around my body, making me wonder how other people did this and similar stuff with any enthusiasm. Why anyone would accept the obliteration offered by such a disappointing arrival was an even bigger mystery. I had overbalanced the drum onto the ground and now threw myself this way and that for a while, sometimes confronting onlookers in the process. And I realised with a start that I was staring at the old man and the kid. For a moment they seemed scared of me, on account of my burning hair probably, and the particular way I was screaming. In fact I noticed that the firing had stopped as everyone watched this bewildering display.
When I had the fire out and sat breathing at the ground, the battle gradually stuttered back into play. My bloody paw had been cauterized, anyway. The kid and the old man had recovered and were now merely looking at me like dogs with nothing to lose. Heber was wearing a cheap suit like a kid at a wedding. It was battered and too small, and he hadn’t even the sense to jettison the tie. He looked about seventeen. The old man was conspicuous in a defective chameleon coat that consistently flushed through with the opposite colour from its background. I pushed the pair into a crouch behind the fire drum.
Assault rifle charm and the swerving tracer wake of Kurras triage ammo crisscrossed the field of battle, illuminating a dimestore apocalypse. Seemed several parties had shown up wanting to do all their dying in one day, firing everything from rag-and-bone voodonics to Styx cannons to tat guns that fired embarrassing Mom tattoos. A chef was recklessly feeding an etheric belt through an old Vickers machine gun while giving out about this and that in a mixture of English, Behlta and Harangue. A mime in a half-car drawn by three lawyers was taking pot-shots with a Tuesday Afternoon Special. A frazzled clown brought down a nun with a flying tackle, and both instantly flared into a blot of dirty orange flame - one or the other must have been a bomb zombie. There was even an uncooked monkey scampering over the hardscrabble and busted blacktop. It seemed like every time I went into town, all hell broke loose.
The smaller detonations sounded like bad edits but a thermobaric shell blew open so close and loud I briefly forgot my current name. Through swirling smoke and particulates I saw something like a bandoliered picture card - Junco was holding a bulky strata gun showing several tiers of add-ons and no sign of its original identity. A Saab? He fired a salvo at the cop car, which seemed to go wide, and racked another shell into the gun’s chamber. He tilted at an olive-drab Abrams tank covered in random insignia. A life lesson: tanks are faster than you think. This was speeding across the plaza until a vague auroral blackness peeled away behind it and it seemed to lose direction, plunging into a corrugated ammo hut. An eye-blinding fireball lit a group of roller-caged prowlcars as they took up position. Their deployment appeared incredibly unsophisticated, a staggered formation expressing an irregular equation with multiple values. Blince emerged from one into a speaker cage to spout unfathomable courtesies through a bullhorn. There was no pause in the charm bonanza and he had to holler above the blast of war. ‘This is the police. None of us are remotely qualified to understand what is taking place here. Here’s the crux of the nutshell - I propose a suspension of law until this outrageous state of affairs has been explained.’
I extrapolated nothing of interest from this and nobody took it more seriously than it deserved. Blince’s mentality hadn’t changed, though to me it seemed he was alone in not getting any thinner over the years. What with the current lack of new food supplies, I suspected an autopsy might find other people’s bones in his body. Leon Wardial once argued that Blince shouldn’t be allowed to live because gravitational force had infinite range. Blince continued, the cops to either side of him already firing trad and triage into the field.
‘Now a word from the acting DA, Gordi Pivot, who has a warrant for search and seizure on your broken bodies. I’m proud to tell lies shoulder-to-shoulder with this man, whose jurisdictional fiending would steal the wounds off a dead man.’
Blince signalled that this was all he knew or was willing to say by applying himself to the task of handing the bullhorn to Pivot and disappearing inside the armoured roller. Pivot was colourless, white-haired, an albino in cream. He took the bullhorn as he rose without enthusiasm or change of expression. ‘Thank you Chief. I’m legally allowed not to understand what you’re talking about, and you’re legally required to support my position. Your own position within the law has clearly freed you from the necessities of common decency, and you are riding it bareback. This statement notwithstanding, I intend tonight to unspool the law’s comic masterpiece, “disorder”. In fact discord is not understood here as there is no condition with which to contrast it. But procedure must be fulfilled.’
The idea seemed to have no structure, only position and duration. Not that any crime-related arrest would occur here anyway: no money or barter had changed hands. Ammo darted away from the citizenry like rabbits released and again the cops reacted as if this mutuality was unforeseen.
Sheets of smoke rushed by wind revealed glimpses of cops locked in shame, craters smeared with matter and tagged with blossoms of fire, and dodging cage cars driven by jubilant kids. Flames balled skyward. Shots spanged off the fire drum, a recurring problem.
I’d got Strobe to signal the jalopy on the way over and now it was bumping over the fire-spotted moonscape toward me. Multiple onlookers made the car’s cloaking muddled and flickery but most of them still managed to ignore it even after they’d bounced off the hood. When it pulled up I hauled the kid and the old man over and crammed them inside, being careful not to touch the scale gear.
Before I could climb in after them I saw another vehicle approaching. It was an old b
oilerplate truck once used to haul cannery water, and in the cab was the galoot who’d fronted off in my office. He seemed intent on flattening Junco. As the truck bore down on him El Mozote had ditched his shoulder cannon in my direction and was priming something that resembled a saw handle - I realised it was a Failsafe borderbar.
Before the breakup of states Johnny Failsafe had crossed numerous state borders to see if he could detect the subtle sensations of laws changing around his body - after all, laws were either real or they weren’t. He had in fact found a microscopic transition point where no laws existed and extracted core-sheets for use as wall projections in clubs. But subsequent research had also revealed a small halting effect as one set of laws ceased and another set came into power. The momentary braking required to re-orient oneself had the same quality at every border, and by overlaying dozens of examples of this modality, technicians created an archetypal suprastate they termed ‘whipped’ - a condition in which the victim’s progress is completely blocked by external decree. Now as the truck was about to smack him Junco stood with the borderbar in his left hand, took hold of it with his right and whipped it open like a chest expander. The truckfront crumpled like a beer can as it pounded to a stop, the rear lifting behind it as if the whole thing would flip ass-over-head.
Junco ducked out on the far side as the truck poised a while on its face like it was showing off a tricky headstand. In the cab the ape was fumbling to fire the same Birch gun he’d shown me in the office, but the Failsafe state backfired it. I couldn’t tell if the galoot himself stopped because of the Failsafe or because he was painted over the cab windows. The motor howling in frictionless outrage, the ancient machine finally went over, slamming to the ground and blocking the Gate closed. Junco seemed to have an epic skill set.
I salvaged his discarded stack cannon - what had seemed like a salvage title Saab actually looked to have been built around a barebook basic and massively elaborated with silver gridpulse hoops, ribbed ceramic cowling, a white shoulderbone grip that housed the gun’s limbic system and bull bars like heavy sideburns. The pulse array tipped me that this was a firearm so powerful they advised you not to fire it without a helmet - a Permutation gun, which in an instant runs the victim’s consciousness through every life state with the intelligence to collate its summation, as a result of which its victim chooses death.
