Novahead

by Steve Aylett

  I was point-blank in her precious stone stare.

  ‘You trying to corrupt my morals?’ I said with a little irony.

  ‘I can’t corrupt or install what you don’t have. What you call your virtue is someone else’s. You just shrugged it on like a coat.’

  ‘No. You’re not seeing me clearly enough.’

  There were a thousand folds in the air between us where meaning could get caught and flipped around. Was the tea drugged?

  I coughed.

  ‘You don’t go with the favour system?’

  ‘As far back as I can recall I was frightened of favours,’ she said. ‘To owe something, to be owed, it’s terrible. I mix my personality with yours and we get a third one I’m not in control of. Too messy. I never had the sort of complacency required to put myself unreservedly at the disposal of the law. You shouldn’t mind - you who seem to give off rays of inconvenience. You know, I respect that.’

  The space in here was untranslatable. No visitor could go off and reproduce the specific emphases. She’d probably installed a contradiction in the room that slipped observers down a precise evasion vector like a trapdoor and chute. I mentally repeated the local zenbit for clearing the mind, ‘Anything a potato is wrong about...’

  ‘Your approval is an imposition.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she nodded. ‘I apologise.’

  I put down the teacup and stood, going over to look at a teak cabinet displaying a set of Turkish plague knives and an ordeal mask with inner blades. The pause allowed me to circumnavigate her arguments and look back at my own - the entire vista left a lot to be desired. I was some sort of clog-wearing hen. Again I wondered what the hell I was doing here.

  ‘I’m a winter wasp already,’ I said, peering at some glass coins. ‘I should be out of Beerlight. This place is dying, I’ve warned about it before.’

  Betty laughed. ‘I’ve been pegging away at the task of bleeding it dry for years now, and the street’s still full of bastards and ballistic neurasthenics.’

  ‘Amid denial things seem to run out slowly, so when things finally run out altogether, well - it’ll seem kinda sudden. I probably shouldn’t have come back.’

  ‘Why’d you leave in the first place?’

  ‘Got tired of forever waking up with bits of puzzle stuck to my face. That and the sheer boredom of warehouse standoffs.’

  ‘And where have you been?’

  ‘Maybe I’ve been living as a penniless sponge-diver. I’m only flesh and blood, as far as you know.’

  ‘Ofcourse. I appreciate you telling me yourself.’

  Above the black marble fireplace hung crossed foils. ‘You can fence?’

  ‘I learnt when I was angry.’

  ‘You’re not like the old mob. Don’t so obviously throw your weight around.’

  ‘Remind you of anything?’ she asked, pouring more tea. ‘Neither of us is so involved, Mr Atom. I stay above it by seeming to run it. You stay aside from it by being ... what was it they said about you? You’re not all there.’

  I’d started studying the hardcopy bookshelves that stood between the recessed lighting. Eddie Gamete ran through them like a rash. ‘You’re a Gamete fan.’

  ‘I thought it was a real philosophy until I tried to holster my gun in it. I think his insights were dangerous to no-one and quite forgettable among the people it would attack. Why expose an edifice that’s already been reduced to its reinforcement rods?’

  ‘So why keep these?’

  ‘Sentiment. I like that he was a variable value that threw everything off its centre for a moment. Dead for five years. Not always an easy time for an artist. What about you?’

  ‘I think it’s sad that he’s hotel-standard now. That kind of acceptance inoculates people against his effects. It brings tears to the surface of my head.’

  I thought of people’s strange reactions to the oldster who’d long since shucked his shell after apparently flouncing off in a sort of creative tantrum. He flourished ideas from air that people preferred to remain empty. His relentless lack of duplication went far beyond the perverse. Many felt a mental revulsion, the perilous essence of the original as radioactively terrifying as an angel.

  ‘You’ve got The World Cup Ordination of Schottner Kier.’

  ‘Yes. Borrow it if you like.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it. It’s totally rare.’

  ‘It’s yours. Now sit down. I’d like to read your future in the cards.’

  She opened a Russian malachite jewellery box and removed a block of gypsy fortune-telling cards. As I returned to the couch she was laying the square cards on the coffee table - they were black lacquer-painted with a load of Palekh-style symbols I didn’t understand.

  ‘Luck - it grants and dispossesses, aids and forsakes. This it does with formidable precision and force, yet - many would insist - without emotion or malice. What do you think of the idea?’

  ‘It’s very nice, what I can see of it.’

  ‘Don’t you believe?’

  ‘I suppose everyone grieves in a different way.’

  ‘That sort of fixed-blade logic’ll tear up your pants. Bad luck is the shadow of a thing too cowardly to show itself from head to tail. Isn’t it interesting that government will operate in the same way? Its crime is concealed from end to end by the “common good”. Now, let’s see what we have here. Stars: blindness to what is before you. Distraction will force you to make a series of mistakes. Anchor: you have put down your anchor in the wrong place, a mistake difficult to correct. Book: a secret disclosed to you will become public knowledge. This should not concern you if you have conducted your affairs honestly. Fire: fire will envelop your heart.” It looks bad for you, Mr Atom.’

  I suppose I disliked it. ‘Seems kinda nebulous. Everything needs a context, after all.’

  ‘“Everything” is the one thing that doesn’t.’

  I stared at her.

  She seemed amused. ‘Well, it’s after all no business of mine.’

  ‘I guess I better fill my pockets with excuses and jump in the river,’ I said, standing to go. I remembered to take the book.

  ‘Atom,’ she called out. I turned at the door. She was standing by one of the ammo dispensers. ‘I know you’ve got tiny dynamind. For a shamus you seem particularly clueless. Don’t throw out the baby to spite your own face.’

  It was daylight when I emerged from that strange meeting. I capped it feeling I even liked her a little. It surprised me. I’d heard she was just a fat bitch.

  I felt drunk, seeing symbols in the sky, plus a few clouds that were apparently no longer in use. And I knew someone was following me - pointlessly, as it turned out.

  2 HAMMER INTO ANVIL

  ‘Engage windshield display.’

  Heading back to the Reaction, I checked the gap and dredge. There was no mention of Heber Partenheimer. Or Edna Valis. In Beerlight innocence is a worthless commodity. Since meeting the kid I’d been assuming he was a decoy and that it was all about the old man, but there was nothing. I took a look at Parker and his gun god, and a closer look at Pivot. He was ultrajincho, and longterm in the law racket. While mayors were propelled upward by a hybrid of chance and stupefying pliancy, DAs ascended by an insular revelling in expedience and personal enrichment and there was a legal ritual where it had to appear that a really first-rate thing had been allowed. Generally neither lasted longer than a radish, but Pivot had been up for months. I did not understand what had happened to make the difference. My little reverse engine was scrambling over unlabelled groupings and incoherent hierarchies. I scratched around for Betty’s lead. Professor Traven turned out to be the scientist author of a psychological study Beyond Indignation and was living in a Terminal suburb called Longreen. We’d be fine if we avoided the madmaxers.

  When I got to the Delayed Reaction I entered the building by the back door and descended to the basement to find the kid and the old man playing cards amid strange cargo. The kid looked up in honest and open wonder, his face pal
e as an aspirin and his blonde hair curly like an ice cream. He had a Jade needle hanging from the middle of his forehead and Old Man Valis had five crowded round his nose like a starnose badger. ‘This basement isn’t for the faint-hearted, Mr Atom,’ said the oldster, and pointed to Murphy. ‘That one’s been on some mad crusade to get us talking. Boy, she hit me upside the head eleven times before I even guessed what she wanted.’

  Murphy stubbed her cigarette on the wall with a fierce gesture. Her hair was jagged. She was burnt around the edges. ‘You left me here like a prisoner, Atom. With that Toto creature as a guard. I could spit.’

  ‘Don’t - you can’t afford to lose any weight.’

  ‘She’s a live one alright,’ chuckled the old man. ‘Plaguing me with questions. Guess we know who wears the pants in this barn!’

  ‘Did you attack these two?’

  ‘Honestly I had no sense of punching them very hard.’

  I was bored. Believing she could have no idea why, I explained it in finely-crafted detail, after which I was astonished to see her anger increase.

  The kid and the old man exchanged cards like the common cold.

  ‘Gather all you’ve decided to make yours, take the back way out and gather in the alley, with some clothes on.’

  I went back upstairs and approached the saloon bar. Someone was talking to Toto. I cracked the door a little and peered in. One of Betty’s men had him covered with a La France automatic rifle. The piglike gunsel had a flat nose and wide flesh-tunnelled piercings so his earlobes resembled trigger guards.

  Toto stood there evading, obfuscating, sneering, shouting and doing whatever else entered his mind. He didn’t turn into a quivering balloon animal - I would have been surprised if he had. But he did a good job of spreading his arms to indicate the liquor bottles behind him. ‘All this can be yours.’

  ‘Are you calling me fat, you bastard? You’re the fat bastard.’

  Toto struck what he probably thought was a chastened pose but succeeded only in looking like an ape.

  ‘Where’s Atom? Where’s the kid?’

  In answer to his enquiry Toto gave a gesture of dismissal into which he managed to invest a wholly inappropriate quality of saintliness, enraging the gunsel instantly. ‘Doing me a hard favour are you?’ the pigman asked, ‘by deigning to ignore me? You imperious -’

  Toto produced the Pound gun, firing and ducking instantly behind the bar. The gun’s pulse grid mapped the room and propelled every local unfixed object after the bullet. Bottles, glasses, knives, guns, chairs and beernuts stormed at the gunsel in a deafening thunderclap of blood and splinters. Before he hit the floor I had slammed the door and run out back.

  I piled the old man, the kid and the girl into the Mantarosa. Edna was cheerful, the bone-haired loon. ‘Curiosity is honest or it is inoperative,’ he crooned. It was a Gamete cliche - apparently there were fans even in the Fadlands. That reminded me, and I flung the Gamete book at the back seat before peeling out.

  Through the Portis Thruway and out of Beerlight into the fringes of Our Fair State. Fewer street skulls and more voodoo masts as we approached the Terminal state line. Next to me Murphy put her bare feet up on the dash and injected the inside of her thigh, tarpaper shacks and derelict emplacements blurring by behind her. We were crossing through intermediate jurisdictions of lopsided shelters, dry irrigation canals and telegraph poles stumped for fuel or barricades. The road fed into the hood like accelerated information. In the back seat the kid and the old man fixed some Jade, for which they seemed to have got a taste, and the kid was looking at Schottner Kier. It occurred to me that, by a number of astounding twists of fate, he had at some point learned to read. Where? Compared to the Fadlands and its hollowphernalia, even this burning distance of waste was a fertile paradise.

  Murphy had apparently sauntered all over these two in the basement. If they knew something considered of value, the smart play was to ditch them in this bayonet wasteland. But the kid looked guileless, the greenest kid since Leon Wardial whose reference to a ‘plural-barrelled shotgun’ had provoked near-lethal scorn.

  Peroxide clouds in a sky the colour of stonewashed jeans. We rolled through marooned neighborhoods sentried by creosote plants. Lux Murphy’s canary-yellow hair flickered in desert wind. We were shot at only once. ‘Got my good side?’ Murphy yelled at the hidden sniper. Then we hit an atoll of part-inhabited houses, a surprise district of shattered answering machines and little black gardens. The suburbs: every car looks satisfied. Dust-covered trees like antique furniture, open tanks of iron-grey water and the churn of generators. Here and there I saw gun barrels and silencers, hidden in plain view as wind chimes. Some of the windows had glass.

  We parked up outside number 12 and walked across a little square yard of dead devil grass to the bleached and crumbling facade of Traven’s house. The doorknocker was a ring in the mouth of a German. ‘Let me do the braying,’ I whispered, and knocked. No reply. We stalked cautiously around back, past a mushroom hut made from the buried shell of a VW microbus. A glassless conservatory was fronted by decking, design of the damned. Skirting it, we found a rear door. ‘Anyone home?’

  The middle-aged man who appeared at the door had estranged hair, potato-coloured clothes and legs that met several times before reaching his waist. His right arm was made of white plastic and with his left he aimed at me a summer savings semi-automatic. ‘What name are you using?’ he demanded, and waved the gun at the others. ‘And you.’ Then he stopped, seeing the kid, and lowered the weapon.

  ‘I’m called Atom,’ I said. ‘Do you use the name B. Traven?’

  ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, still staring dazedly at the kid.

  ‘Be more specific.’

  He considered a moment. ‘For that you’ll have to come in. But leave that,’ and he pointed at the kid, ‘outside if you don’t mind.’

  The old man elected to stay in the yard with Heber. Traven frowned at Edna as me and Murphy entered, then seemed to dismiss whatever was bothering him and closed the door.

  It was a dim room of tattooed curtains and undead armchairs. Stubborn old moments in frames intervened in the walls. There was a dead fakewood TV with a tweed jacket over its shoulders. The only sound was a single daytime cicada and a copper orrery in the form of an ammonite that ticked away the weight of ages. Murphy and I placed aside old copies of Tentative magazine and sat in a couple of chairs that seemed to have been sewn out of dust.

  ‘I don’t get many visitors except a few book exorcists and the occasional dismal raiding party,’ Traven said. He had an Irish accent and a nervous energy about him. He put the Daewoo on a coffee table and did not sit down. ‘You know there’s alot of gas bandits belting around the local desert in feral cars with Jesus piranhas on their fenders. Who sent you?’

  ‘Nobody sends me anywhere.’

  ‘Not if you’re aware of it anyway. Who’s the girl?’

  ‘Murphy. Coke train.’

  ‘I haven’t had great experiences with Feds,’ he said, gesturing to his right arm.

  ‘I’m a free agent now,’ said Murphy.

  ‘Your course of exhaustion was science, is that right?’ I asked him.

  ‘If you’re here about the kid out there, you know that already. I could relate the story wittily, emotionally, even accurately if need be.’

  ‘We’ll take the accurate version.’

  ‘As you wish. But don’t tell this to a living soul.’

  ‘Can I tell Download Jones?’

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s fine. I worked at the Armstrong Death Labs at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. Top-secret crypto clearance. Psychological warfare and chemical grudgecraft. Slapping folk with campaign pins doped with sodium fluoride. Crazy savages ate that election. One day I thought I’d leapfrog an anxious meeting. I was reading Bleak House and burst out laughing as everyone does when that fella spontaneously combusts for no reason.’

  ‘Oh, I know what you
mean. It’s like that thing at the end of Forster’s vampire novel Howards End.’

  The Fed girl brightened, surprising me. ‘When that guy gets flattened by the wardrobe?’

  ‘And nobody cares, that’s right!’ Traven said. ‘A comic masterstroke at the end of a dreary ordeal.’

  ‘I wonder if he planned towards it,’ I said, ‘or just gave up and threw caution to the wind, exploding with laughter at his own mischief?’

  ‘I don’t know. But in any case, the Dickens thing got me thinking. We’re all just bags of chemicals basically, and a bomb operates when a barrier between two chemicals is removed. Since the delineation between civilians and combatants became meaningless - a drift led by our own armies abroad - we’d been exploring ways to give everyone a combat role, to win the masses to their destruction. A conjuror’s dependence on the credulous doesn’t have a military behind it, but I did. Apart from the towering number of moral objections, why not flood the limbic-diencephalic system with nitrophagal propellants - this becomes the primary neurotransmitter at the reasoning centres of the brain. The bomb is primed. It also aids the transmission of ideas and optimises the conditions for detonation.’

  ‘Sounds slow.’

  ‘You bet it was trash. I wanted something as immediate as an impact bomb, which relies on resistance. The very fact that a building wishes to remain standing is kinetic justification for it to fall upon impact. It’s the resistance principle. Extended to people, it allows us to claim that those who resist violence are provoking a violent response. Those who resist being killed will likely end up dead - isn’t it often so? I removed a sample of fissionary diatoms from a four-foot-long rootmouth jellyfish with a view to placing a little metanovic filament in that grey nothing-spider which is the calyx of the brain. Everyone said “You can’t do that.” Ofcourse when people claim something is impossible they usually mean they believe you shouldn’t do it, and sure enough when I tried I found it was perfectly possible, even easy. The theory was that when our chemical met one of the more mundane chemicals in the brain - norepinephrine, for instance - it would start off a biochemical chain reaction that led quickly to a detonation. You could x-ray the head and not detect a thing. The only problem was the trigger, the means of breaking the separating barrier. We worked on it for years, staying awake so as to miss nothing. We had hamster cages bedded with shredded Canadian holocaust documents and the most sarcastic computer since Flowers built the first. Orgies figured minimally during the research. In fact we didn’t have any. It was one of those phases when the government experienced such a surfeit of misery they had to ship a lot of it to the Middle East, and the pressure was on. What breaks through mental barriers? Originality, ofcourse. Was this an unfortunate answer? Not really. It was something prohibited and deplored to the point that an accidental trigger was pretty unlikely. But you never know...’