Castles Made of Sand

by Gwyneth Jones

  The Zen Self tent, eau-de-Nil geodesic dome that seemed curiously larger on the inside than on the outside, had its usual crowd of staybehinds and day-trippers, trying out the neuroscience rides. Zen Selfers in Welsh red and green moved among them, offering help and advice. He passed through and found Olwen Devi in one of the inner labs: immaculate lab coat over a festive sari of gleaming emerald silk, a scarlet tilka mark on her smooth, ageless brow, and flowers in her hair. She looked as if she’d been called from a wedding to attend some kind of medical emergency: she was probably getting ready for a workshop. Olwen was a performer, in her way. She knew the value of looking the part, and Ax liked that. No use having the big idea if you’re not prepared to go out and sell it.

  She had been running her experiments in human consciousness in Reading arena since Dissolution summer, and lately providing Ax Preston with alt.tech spin-offs from the Zen Self quest, in return for his protection from the anti-science mob. He did not fully understand why she had decided to work for him, or why she had left Wales, where her parent company was still based. But she had believed in his vision of the future, when his career was at a very low ebb, and he counted her among his most trusted allies.

  They discussed the ATP situation. Cell-metabolism energy sourcing was a success. The punters, Countercultural and otherwise, were lining up to find out if they had the right genes for the treatment. (For a percentage of the population the gene-manipulation didn’t work in its present form.) But they must not move too fast. The aim was to get these new and strange developments out into the world, but do it quietly. Take no risks. They agreed they would pull back. No more new treatment centres, no more high-profile projects like the Brighton street lighting: not right now.

  Moving on to Olwen’s new baby, the bi-location phone, which thankfully involved no transgenic tissue infusions. Ax—who had never taken the ATP treatment and never would—had his demo, and enjoyed the bizarre experience of being in two places at once: slightly like looking into a mirror, and also being the person looking out… In the long term, he was dreaming of industrial-scale applications for this one. Your muscle power and part of your conscious attention can be in one place, doing some kind of necessary work, while you are somewhere else, having fun. (His imagination baulked at the idea of more than one dopplegänger, though Olwen said there was theoretically no limit.) But that was far in the future. In the meantime they had a medical application, and an intriguing novelty mobile phone.

  Olwen had a handful of severely disabled people (whose health otherwise checked out A1, a rare breed) signed up for the trials. Other white labels would go to influential hippies, mainstream opinion-formers with the right sympathies, and trusted media folk. She advised against the term ‘living ghost’. No ‘clones’ either. Definitely not!

  ‘Okay, so what are we calling it? Bi-location presence is a mouthful.’

  She showed him her right hand, and the ring with a large milky-golden stone that she wore on the middle finger. It looked like a jewel; in fact it was the Zen Self mainframe computer. ‘Serendip can make copies of herself—apparently physically separate copies—that remain entangled with her so there is still just one Serendip. We call that a facet. Something logically similar is happening in the bi-location phenomenon. It’s a possibility that’s long been implied in the theory of memory transcription, where we know that in effect a different virtual self is created for every moment—’

  ‘Right,’ said Ax, cutting it short before she lost him completely. ‘Facets it is. Nice and neutral.’

  He looked around the green-tinged, light-filled cell, vaguely recognising brain science equipment. What goes on in the Zen Self experiments? Sage and the Heads were deeply involved, along with Chip and Verlaine and Dilip: Olwen’s rockstar labrats. Ax had never been interested. Know your limits. Seeking for some kind of technologically mediated Nirvana was not for him. But Sage was a fool for all that. He wanted to use the bi-location trick for cheap space travel. Send your little receiver off to the moons of Jupiter, and bi-locate to it, why not? A facet doesn’t need life support—

  He’d been silent too long. He thought he could read, in Olwen’s kindly eyes, that she knew all about the bust-up. The Zen Self guru and her A student had had a brief fling at one time, and they’d stayed very close. Olwen probably knew more than Ax did, about what had gone wrong at Tyller Pystri…

  He’d been planning to linger, in the hope that Sage would turn up. Instead, he left quickly. In the outer tent he spotted Kevin Verlaine, parting company from a couple of Selfers, and on an impulse followed him into the arena.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Oh, hi Ax.’

  ‘What’re you up to?’

  ‘Buying illicit drugs,’ said Verlaine proudly. ‘Well, not exactly buying—’

  Neurologically active experimental compounds sometimes exited the Zen Self tent without Olwen Devi’s cognizance, and Olwen wouldn’t strictly approve. Verlaine left the sentence hanging and discreetly showed Ax his loot: half a dozen translucent golden capsules in a twist of green paper.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Snapshot. It’s something we use in the experiments. It aligns your firing patterns so that the scanner can take a snapshot of the global state of your brain. But when it does that, for an instant your mind gets freed from the middle dimensions, you flash on the sum of all possible states—’

  ‘Right, I see,’ said Ax, grinning. ‘So what’s in it?’

  ‘—and you get these amazing visions. What’s in it? Well, acetylcholine, I know that.’ The labrat looked a little crestfallen. ‘Er, a lot of things. Cadherins. I don’t really know.’ He brightened. ‘You want some? It doesn’t take any time, not normal time. You’re Whoosh! Pssht! You’re there, then you’re back.’

  Ax was not a hardened NDogs (endogenous psychotropics) abuser. He preferred classic drugs: but he hesitated only briefly. Talking to Olwen had left him feeling embittered, sidelined and reckless, and anyway acetylcholine sounded okay. Sage used that stuff all the time.

  ‘Go on then.’

  It was mid-afternoon. The towered stages were bare, the marquees empty or playing host to staybehind concerns. They had stopped under one of the camp council’s THIS IS A SPACESHIP banners, behind the main sound stage. LITTER LOUTS WILL BE KILLED. Ax saw the young man’s face, its frame of light brown ringlets, wisp of brown moustache, the kid’s last-moment uneasiness. He was suddenly sharply aware that he didn’t have a guitar case over his shoulder. See Ax Preston, see guitar, Fiorinda used to say. He’d given up the habit, afraid it was getting to be an affectation, but he missed that weight—

  ‘Are you feeling calm? You’re supposed to be calm.’

  ‘Hit me.’

  Two young hands, bitten nails and puzzle rings, snapping the capsule under his nose…and he was wakening from sleep, with Fiorinda beside him. But what’s this? Fiorinda is sixtyish, the dark red curls all silvered. Feeling very peaceful and blissfully happy, he propped himself on one elbow to look at her. She’s still too thin, his little cat still not wasting her time on stupid body-fuel, but God, how beautiful she has become. He realised that the change was in himself, not in his girl. For Sage, Fiorinda had always been beautiful (they’d never talked about this, but Ax knew). For Ax, dearly, dearly as he loved her, she had stayed the skinny white girl, not his physical type, that he’d first taken to his bed. Occasionally he’d catch a glimpse of what other people were seeing: but now he could see it clear. Her soul, her courage, her steadfast heart, all the perfection of his darling, in the curve of her mouth, the level brows, the strong bones. Well, he thought, with great joy, I will get there. I will have it all. But how pale she is. She’s white as paper, and what’s this sticky wetness seeping from her place in the bed? Has she pissed herself? Can’t be. Fiorinda never sleeps that deeply, no matter how smashed she gets. He moved, and felt a strange reluctance in his joints (but that makes sense because if Fiorinda is sixtyish Ax is over seventy). Not really frightened yet, but… Hey, Fi
orinda? Oh God, she’s not breathing. OH GOD. OH GOD. NO!

  —and he was staggering on the green grass, under the THIS IS A SPACESHIP banner, his body thundering, a steel claw clutching his chest, the arena exactly as before, the whole vision having taken less time than it takes to say cardiac arrhythmia—

  ‘Ax! Oh, shit. Ax, are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ The world was dark and shaking, he could hardly focus on the kid’s scared face. ‘I know what I meant to ask you. D’you know where Sage is?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Verlaine, eyes big as saucers. ‘Sage. I better get Sage, I’ll get him. He’s teaching. You stay—’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll find him myself.’

  Aoxomoxoa, in sharp black and white as if for a stage performance, the skull at high contrast, was holding his class in a quiet spot by the Blue Lagoon marquee, a slwe of wireless hardware spread around him. He had the kids looking at animation on their cellulose-based-plastic slates, while he talked to them about how their brains worked.

  What a privilege to minister to the awakening of these young minds.

  ‘You see, whatever you “see”, whatever you “hear”, whatever you “touch”, et cetera, what your brain experiences is a pattern of fire. See that? How it washes over the whole brain, like, mm, a cloud of sparks? When I write my immersions I copy those patterns, and make your brains believe they’ve had the experience. I do it visually, and I’ll explain why that works best in a moment. I write the code, and I deliver it on a carrier wave of visible light. I don’t even have to fake the patterns very well, because brains love being fooled, yeah, what?’

  ‘Did you always want to be a rockstar?’

  ‘No. I wanted to be a dancer, or a gymnast. But I’m too tall, and I have weird hands, so I had to give up the idea.’

  So much for delusions of grandeur. This was not an Aoxomoxoa masterclass. He gave those as well and they were hard work, but this here was just a celebrity warm-up. No one expected him to teach the kids anything. He only had to turn up, looking like Aoxomoxoa, move the mouth, do some tricks: make the children (and the hedgeschool teachers) feel included in the new idea. And he was doing it. He wasn’t going to let Ax down, just because they’d broken up. He’d carry on with everything that was asked of him, though it was cinders and ashes.

  Ah, well. Back to the Sanskrit.

  ‘Okay, now all the visual information that registers in your eyes, mostly at this little spot called the fovea, goes to the back of yer head and then ends up here, in the middle temporal cortex, which is right in the middle, conveniently, of where the rest of your senses are handled. When I send the fake information on my carrier wave, the MT starts thinking it’s having an experience. It goes through its cache, looking for a real experience it might be having. This alerts the hippocampus (little thing allegedly shaped like a seahorse, down in here), and triggers the whole brain to get involved, whoosh, with emotions, sensations, the whole thing. That’s when the punters at my gigs get convinced that what’s happening is totally real, because insofar as a brain knows reality, it is real. Sharks biting them, clouds of butterflies, flocks of seagulls, ravening werevoles, whatever. It isn’t incredibly hard, if you use the right hooks—’

  The children gazed at him like sponges. ‘Oh,’ said a girl in the front row, about ten years’ old, a toddler dozing on her knees, ‘MT. That says Em Tee! Is that why the other track on Morpho, besides ‘Morpho’, is called ‘The Empty Zone’?’

  Morpho was the Heads’ first album, the first immersion record in the world. They’d lost the rights when they broke up with their record company, which had for years been a very sore point. But eventually you see reason. Morpho had been written and released before this child was born.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you got it—’ suddenly feeling that this was indeed a privilege, and also feeling like a, a talking trilobite. I am ancient. They know nothing before: I am the first page of their history books. Or would be, except most of them can’t read… Over the kids’ heads he saw Ax coming towards him. No way to escape so he waited in silence: while Mr Dictator came ambling around the children.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ said Ax, ‘I need your teacher. Sage, do you mind?’

  Not ambling, stumbling. As was grey in the face, hands visibly shaking.

  ‘Okay, class dismissed.’

  The children scattered, Ax sat down. ‘Sage. Do you think you’ll live to be old?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Sage, judging that live fast die young was not what Ax was looking for. ‘Very old.’ He spoke slowly, gently taking Ax’s wrist in his left hand. ‘I reckon I’ll quit gigging when I’m a hundred, before it gets undignified, an’ I’ll take up gardening. Or I’ll keep koi. I like fish. Ax, what the fuck have you been doing to yourself?’

  The pulse was not good.

  ‘I met Verlaine. He gave me a, stuff called snapshot. Oh God, Sage—’

  ‘Sssh. Let’s see.’ Sage touched his righthand fingertips to the sweat on Ax’s upper lip and put the taste in his mouth. He had enough of the drug in his system that he might get some idea of what had happened—

  ‘Oh,’ he said, sombrely, a moment later. ‘Unlucky, Ax. You have to be careful with Snap. It goes for the jugular, if you give it a chance. Well, it seems I can tell you two things. What you saw is further off than you think. And I will be there.’

  Ax’s heart gave another terrible leap. He was in a garden, and this old man was crying in this other old man’s arms. Oh God, those arms, still hard and taut, carrying with them such a freight of memory, of decades, of conviction, of reality, oh God, unbearable—

  Wrong thing to say… Sage saw Ax’s eyes burst wide in horror and had to catch the falling body. ‘Ah, no. Ax, babe, I didn’t mean to sound like that, I’m a bastard, you caught me off guard. Hey, it doesn’t last, it’s a bad dream, it’ll be gone, few seconds, hang on—’

  But Ax was out. Sage laid him down, slapping his phone implant—

  ‘George! George, get over here. Now. Bring the First Aid…Shit. Where is that little fucker? I will kill him.’

  Ax came to lying in an outdoor passageway backstage of the Blue Lagoon. George Merrick was beside him, the white picnic hamper that was the Heads’ First Aid kit open on the grass. Bill Trevor was sitting in a plastic chair, between the two of them and the world, casually on guard. There was no one else around. He took a deep breath and sat up. Had he walked here or been carried here? Some fleeting memory of a dream, gone the instant he tried to focus on it, and what happened? I took some brain candy from Verlaine, that nearly gave me a heart attack.

  ‘Hi, George,’ he said. ‘What’s the screen say?’

  George took a pull on a fat joint, and handed it. ‘Sez you’ll do.’ He peeled a telltale from the back of Ax’s hand, stowed it and shut the box. ‘Looks like snapshot’s not your drug.’

  ‘I would agree,’ said Ax, with feeling. ‘Ah, shit, my head. Got any painkillers?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to take that stuff except in lab conditions. You c’n have a half an aspirin. Pain is a warning, Ax. It’s there ’cos you need it. You driving?’

  Head Ideology occasionally bears a suspicious resemblance to Primitive Methodism at its most hardnosed. If you’re meant to suffer you suffer, fuck it. But George and Ax had had that conversation. Never argue with a Cornishman about his religion.

  ‘No, I’m not driving. Think I’ll pass on the aspirin. Where’s Sage?’

  George and Bill exchanged a glance. George decided Ax didn’t need to know what was probably happening to Kevin Verlaine right at this moment.

  ‘I think ’e went back to his class.’

  ‘Right,’ said Ax, who had clocked the glance. He leaned over to give the joint to Bill: and decided he would make no more pathetic attempts at reconciliation. Enough is enough. In future he would play this exactly the way Sage wanted it.

  Life goes on. Fiorinda recorded her vocals for the Heads’new album (still under tight wraps) at the Battersea studi
o, and though she didn’t pretend she was having fun you’d never have known it from her singing. Sage and Ax went to Yorkshire with the Chosen for a one-off gig at Bradford Civic Centre, where they debuted the immersions (diluted to visuals for the concert hall) that Sage had written for ‘Blues In C#’; and for the Ax and Jordan Preston classic ‘Dark They Were And Golden Eyed’. Sayyid Mohammad Zayid, premier leader of English Islam was there—the man who’d received Ax into the Faith, the conversion that had ended the Islamic Separatist War. The Dictator and his Minister also met with the Islamic leaders, reinforcing the peace; as if nothing was wrong. Sage also went on working with Ax on a secret and delicate investigation of the strength of the quarantin

  But the rift showed no sign of healing. At the Reading Mayday concert the crowds went crazy for the Heads’ dance mix of ‘Little Wing’, featuring Ax Preston on guitar. Silver and Pearl Wing, Anne-Marie’s nine-year-old and seven-year-old little girls, whirled around on stage, dressed as butterflies, each convinced that Ax Preston had written this song, and Aoxomoxoa had mixed it, just for them. Celtic bonfires were discouraged. Techno-Green Utopia was talked-up. At the end of Sage’s masque (Sage’s masques were Reading tradition) the Dictator and his Minister did Hendrix’s ‘Third Stone From The Sun’, with the spaceship dialogue and some truly amazing immersion effects…and then walked off stage in opposite directions, without having exchanged a word that wasn’t scripted.

  Fiorinda was having nothing to do with either of them. If rumour could be trusted, she spent the night in a hospitality benders, with Cafren Free of DARK and/or three or four husky and thrilled male crewpersons.

  It could only be a matter of time before things went horribly public.

  The last Saturday of May was invite-only Dance Night at the Blue Lagoon. Snake Eyes were playing, the Few were to be there in force. It would be a private gala, and everyone was hoping it would be more fun than Mayday. In the afternoon Ax called Fiorinda to say he couldn’t make it. She decided to go by herself, took the train and flagged a taxi at Reading station, dressed in her best and feeling defiant.