by Steve Aylett
‘When your plant called you and everyone else cottoned on, it was a regular jawcar jamboree.’
‘Well, you’ve caused me considerable trouble. The round in your thigh from the purse gun, it’s pocket ammo, what do the hard men call it ...?’
‘A placeholder.’
‘Placeholder ammo, that’s it. But we could do something more permanent. My coke girl keeps her finger off the trigger only by effort of will. Her philosophy is “Don’t think of it as losing a life, but as gaining a bullet.” Or you could be strangled until you have the blue face of a Vedic deity. I could afford either.’
He was stood there with his hands in his pockets, wondering what to do with me. He combined stillness with precision in a way that creeped me out by suggesting he was forever held in readiness for something.
Fear - I’d forgotten what it was like, that it wasn’t a decision. I tested whether I could discreetly shift the chair back by degrees. Maybe the desk itself would direct the blast the other way. I was sat hostage to Pivot and his suction-mounted morality. ‘Siddown, Pivot, you’re straining my neck.’
‘I won’t, for the moment. My ass was removed in childhood. On the plus side, the acuity of my remaining senses has increased a hundredfold. I read the gap better than almost anyone. Pattern recognition.’
‘I wondered how you’d got where you are.’
‘Yes, I don’t really have anything else when it comes down to it. Ract has an art-collection marriage and two full-blown sons. Darkwards has his ballroom dancing or whatever he calls it. They go along that way and ignore the little jump to either side that would take them into a joke. While I have a silence barely worth coming home to, and not a ray of suspicion to enliven me.’
‘All this dead stock,’ I said, shucking my head at the surlyguy busts and books ignored by the yard. These vacuum-sealed keepsakes were markers of a sense of entitlement, though I’d never seen the effect in so pronounced a form. Pivot was beside himself with it. ‘Nice home for the ornaments. Where do you live?’
‘Exactly. No-one suspects a living creature could dwell in such a museum. So I’m at peace outside the narrowly seething bandwidth of bomb-zombies and perseverants. I wouldn’t usually discuss it with someone who behaves as you have. There are two types of people in the world, Atom.’
‘Two? Used to be there was over a thousand; then twelve; pretty soon they’ll have it down to one. For damn sure it’s America.’
‘Oh, you’re breaking my heart,’ he said, going around the desk and sitting down. ‘Are you alright? You look almost scared. Not what I expected. Your intel jacket implies you’ve been translated through several dimensions side-on to ours and are probably a much more exotic creature than we can see, the Atom we all know being its prick, merely.’
‘I’ve been described as a prick, that’s true.’
‘Well I don’t hold with urban legends about interbeings and so forth. At this stage people will claim anything.’
‘I’ve said nothing about it either way.’
He casually shunted a drawer on the opposite side from the primed one and retrieved a Bernardelli P-018 pistol which he pointed negligently in my general direction, his hand resting on the desk. He looked odd with a sender, like he didn’t know which end went in his gob. ‘This is not really a necessary preface to what I have to do, but you’ll hear me out, I know it.’
I was nauseous from the new wound and the stress of waiting for the two face salute. I’d been hoping it would be over quickly but the bastard was eloquent.
‘I was unconnected, pigmentless and poor in Beerlight, which is a textbook debtropolis if you take out the headcrime. Here’s a rule for remembering numbers: if it’s high, it’s a bill and beyond you; if it’s low, it’s a wage and perhaps within your grasp. The devil; the police - I could not take one and leave the other. I could have gone the British route of guns and whisky - but why not go direct? Why not trade in money? It’s prestige without content but that only means you can fill in the details according to your taste.’
‘Did you do anything interesting with it?’
‘Ofcourse not - look around you - nobody does when it actually comes to it. By the time I realised with horror that life was no mere passing fancy, I’d grown attached to its compensatory malices. It’s easiest to boost from above, and it gave me a very special feeling when I made my first bet - on a company called Ramatagen which sold novelty gun grips and textured gripcovers cloned from the owner’s skin, or the owner’s lover’s or enemy’s skin. And other stuff like hammerless placebo guns and T-shirts bearing random phrases in a language few could read. One of them said “Mind the gap”, I remember.’ He chuckled.
‘We all find our consolation somewhere.’
‘Then I needed a legitimate front, but not so legitimate that I’d seem unbelievable. At first the law and its frankly incalculable demands upon the people seemed merely another arena for career ambition. I moved among senators, semi-local officials, military generals and others in on the deception, attempting to emulate their moral words and immoral acts, and finally achieved this balance by trial and error. Out winning claws and minds, demanding money, naming for it destinations which were not always false but which never justified its source. Civilisation had purported to regard crime as a disease rather than a part of its metabolism. It was never outwardly acknowledged that certain acts might be a reasoned response. For centuries authority had thought to collapse the calculus of crime by pressing the centre of its gravity, until it realised this was also its own centre of gravity. This is only one challenge of fighting something that travels like a sand-dune, shedding cells constantly. Optimists viewed the law as no more than a desperate measure of continuity, until it began changing every week. Most then assumed the law was capricious because it varied with time, geography, funds, influence, interpretation and so on from one day to the next. But the motives for law are common and unchanging - that’s the continuity. Take, sympathise, control. But the middle one has become a luxury. It gives nothing back.’
The play of light and shadow over his ignorance wasn’t very entertaining, but so far it seemed he believed what he was saying.
‘A society stemming from these principles will demand more from its people than they can give.’
‘Nonsense. Each crucible of cowardice is taxed according to its compliance. And it’s a good ferment for discipline. Vulgarity ties the doubtful to the state’s crimes - that and the social contract, a deal made on unequal terms. Stagnation as policy - a surrogate freedom, carefully posed. Admittedly it was a society that operated well but was so finely balanced it left no room for error.’
I interrupted before anything more could emerge from the pale valve he had for a mouth. ‘You’re stalling for time,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘There’s a schedule,’ he said, with an almost coy smile. After a moment’s reflection, he continued. I think he’d forgotten the gun. ‘As a protection at street level the law is a rumour, a phantom - ghostly until invoked, and invoked only after the harm has been done. Well, you know all this. It cuts off the tail, not realising where the heart and brain are located.’
‘In the cautious man, they’re in the tail.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant. In any case, to write a law is much easier to do than explain what you mean by it. That’s part of what it’s for. I experimented with explaining and found I need give a reason convincing only to the simple-minded. Selling jargon as fact. Well, pretty soon lawyers outnumbered people by two to one. By this time a hundred-weight of hokum was being transferred into statute every day. Humanity, the eternally narrowing mind. I’m proud to have been present at that supreme moment when everything was illegal at last. Law was perfected - on paper, anyway. It was strange, that day. An eclipse clicked into place like an optician’s test lens.’
‘I remember that eclipse.’
I had been walking through a field with an antique Walther P38 in my right hand. It stung as if stuck to my hand by the blowback. Th
en the gun and everything else chilled. That German pistol unglued from my palm as though what I had just done was no longer my responsibility. I felt insulted, resentful. Looking back and to the left, I watched the whispering field darken as the sun closed out. I was seventeen.
‘Was that the day, then?’
‘I don’t believe nature was aware of what had been done, but it was a hard coincidence.’
‘Got bone-cold for a while.’
‘The Project of the Law was completed the only way it could be. The only way the clear-eyed had ever foreseen.’
Through a yard of pain I focused on Pivot. It was like making eye-contact with a hen.
‘Maybe we should empty our minds and meditate on a simple image such as a geranium.’
His silver eyebrows rose as slowly and steadily as the mercury in a thermometer. ‘You are deceiving no-one, Atom.’
‘Damn right.’
‘Tell me then - do you believe in the hour of inferno? The end of civilization?’
‘I can’t imagine why anyone would believe otherwise.’
‘Dull though you are, I don’t believe you can’t imagine that.’
‘How about you?’
‘I believe it alright. Ract, Darkwards and myself have an intricate and friendly rivalry of long standing. We all three had invested in a few wildcat nerve gas stocks, and it struck us all at once that menacing a foreign country is ideal, whether it’s baffled, ready or both. To wax profit from catastrophe. Once you’ve made a beginning, the rest generally follows on its own. We’d wager on outcomes, too. But that gets boring, and we could see where things were going. Ract and Darkwards don’t have my intuition - they use a little gizmo, a fissure shunt that probes the etheric gap and extrapolates its progress. Fissure science - which isn’t really prediction. Most things are obvious, really. So-called “prophecy” is easy. Optimism is the chief thing that prevents it. People can barely see the present because of that, let alone the future. And I know the medievalists determined the end of everything at 19,683 but nobody believes we’ll last that long. The only variable is the method.’
Pivot was hauling several unseen planes of motivation with him like aerials, but he was unaware of them. They were notes he’d pinned to his own back. He had succumbed to the complexities of his own evasions, writhing inward like a spiral. It would be a challenge to bullseye the golden section of artifice.
‘What else to do? The murder of civilization is not even a very interesting spectacle. We see the future as a box of accidents - a terrible thing - intrusions ready to be let loose. Darkwards foresees a comet - or asteroid, I forget which. Ract finally settled on the CERN loop, cliche though it is. I can’t believe in Darkwards’s impending visitor. Honestly, a comet? Why accuse minerals of fate? I confidently predicted some pretty large floods. Eels and economics make strange bedfellows and my other speculations soon seemed fatuous.’
I was sure he didn’t feel the reality of the enterprise, a state allowed by his belief that most facts were mere guests. ‘Volcanoes aren’t done for practice, you nimrod. You’d put fruit on a chain, wouldn’t you?’
Pivot frowned. ‘Let me pay you the courtesy of being blunt - we live in the World to End All Worlds. Earth connects little pains, and the last few connections are being made. Let’s think big. The kid - Partenheimer. I heard about him before the others. I thought “Let me not repeat the sins of my forefathers, but innovate.” So I bet on the kid. I couldn’t leave this match of Jericho lying around. But a thing like that, there was a fierce temptation to interfere with the unfortunate creature to influence the outcome. I include myself in this. Have you guessed the odds? What, honestly, are the chances of Partenheimer ever stumbling upon an original idea, even in this city? I realised that rather quickly. So how big do I win if I force it?’
‘Why win a bet that’ll kill you?’
Pivot seemed despondent at having but one mouth with which to sigh. ‘Why lose one that’ll kill you? There’s a theory I don’t believe, that gamblers want the worst to happen, a covert suicide. But every habit started with nature. Addiction is basically anything you can’t stop doing.’
‘Breathing?’
‘And any addiction can be ended. Life itself is a tolerated defeat. Our greatest enemy in ourselves is the wish to be alive, though in others it has worked in our favour as a handle with which to manipulate. The point is this planet’s circling the drain, so ofcourse we opened a book on it. We met amid the shuffling of taxation, war and other forms of speculation but those dabblings in the unseen are completely over now, since the economy went the way of all flesh. I’ve got money orbiting the globe in five marked satellite accounts and it’s all worthless, dead. There are no commercial vices anymore, not really. But operationally, the habit remains. You think things can ever be twisted into a neat little bundle and disposed of? Things are messy.’
‘Someone else told me that recently.’
‘You know that story about Charles Jamison in Atlanta, who disposed of all those invading his home?’
‘Everyone knows that story.’
‘Well, remember toward the end, the people going in knew they were never coming out. You’ve seen an animal die, Atom. You can see from its eyes, near the end, that it knows it’s dying. There’s an acceptance, finally. Well, here we are. At the acceptance. A prosperous doom is all we demand of the immediate future. That apocaleptic young man I have in my wine cellar - that’s the doom I favour. A win is just the icing on the coffin. There. Now you know everything about me.’
‘I don’t buy it. I’ve looked at the kid. His etheric’s like Hawking radiation, carrying no information.’
‘I’ll take that gamble. Do you know the blast radius on him?’
‘But hardly the end of everything.’
‘Really. No chain reaction then, all those heads? You’re a scientist now? When you connected with the kid we resolved to keep you under observation, a task which alarmed and exhausted us more than we could have expected.’
‘That hitman of yours,’ I said, meaning the galoot, ‘he wasn’t any good. He’s dead now.’
‘I know it,’ he said sadly, and that’s all.
‘I predicted the collapse ten years ago. It’s on record. I don’t see why my involvement now would make any difference.’
‘Yes, there would seem no reason not to kill you at once, what do you think?’
‘I agree.’
‘But I’m not going to do that,’ he said with a quiet, careful quality. ‘No, I’m going to lock you in with the mooncow and see how you get along. I might even leave you there and wait on the other side of town.’ He handed it over like there was a bomb at the centre of the answer.
‘What do you expect me to do?’
‘Whatever comes to mind. Something original, even.’
The setup was iterating an infinite array of new edges as I looked at it.
‘Until something happens,’ he went on with a bland expression. ‘The world can be decided in the middle of a moment where an insect stops. Just like that - generation dismissed.’
I was disgusted. ‘What good are you, really?’
‘Oh, come on. Can you really mourn the passing of this country, its pea-sized minds and planet-sized children? One half of the truth is that humanity is inescapably and demonically evil. The other half doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Pivot’s face was blank. But he was grinning just beyond the edge of what I could see. I braced too late for the blast, a cobalt flare leaving a fuzzy blot in mid-air, haloed pink with blood particulates. I had something painful in my eye. The shelves were burning. I was laying back on my tied hands and pieces of chair. Everything was jumbled up. The scorch was quickly overcome with the sick sweetness of black blood and offal.
Murphy the Fed leaned in very close, her yellow corona of hair zinging my skin as she cooed, ‘Oh, baby, you lost an eye.’
She was trying to stand me up, cutting the bindings. Poisonous pain flashed up and down the left side of m
y done-for body. At the moment of eruption Pivot had reflexively squeezed the trigger, smacking a traditional round into my left shoulder. I had almost zero articulation in the left arm and a swollen half-hand on the end of it. Presumably I had taken a bit of desk in my left eye. With the right I saw some of Pivot behind the charred desk. He was burst like a popped corn. A portion of him was dashed up the wall. His ribs were blown open in a way that made him resemble a stamped centipede.
Murphy was wagging her chibi gun at the door. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because I’m worth it.’
I was walking busted and hunched. ‘You called Pivot in.’
‘So? And everyone else followed, but we got him.’
‘Everyone else is Betty.’
‘Eh? Why?’
‘The DD goggles, as standard. The rally attack was one group, apart from Pivot’s Mexican. The cops couldn’t draw the factions together - Betty’s my bet.’
She thought about that. ‘Alright. Probably right. So what.’
I was done. She brought the kid up and led us out the sculpted door and the rotten one and then into the morning rain. My last Jade shot was fading and I was throttling either down or up - probably up. The day was working me over with white skies.
Out of the vanishing point a skimming chevron was shadowing the road. I thought it was something stuck on my remaining eye, but it grew to become Strobe the security swan. Murphy saw it a second after me and fired two shots with the purse pistol. I was about to push the kid behind the Mantarosa, invisible to the Fed. But before I could flinch in that direction, the swan swooped over, dropping a gold holographic bomb through the car’s torn roof. The windows clouded and the car disappeared. This wasn’t a fractal evaporation - it had switched off like a light. I realised it was a cloaking effect, but denial had never worked in me.
