Castles Made of Sand

by Gwyneth Jones

  ‘Yeah. He’s seventy-five.’

  ‘He doesn’t look it!’

  Sage’s dad was five foot eight or so, olive skin, silver-dusted jet-black hair: you could see he’d been the spit of Marlon Williams when he was a kid.

  ‘Mm,’ agreed Sage gloomily. ‘He doesn’t, does he? People will be taking him for my younger brother in a year or two.’

  Ax grinned at the sea. ‘Fancy a fuck?’

  Sage glanced at him sidelong, looked at the sky and laughed, glittering with mischief. ‘Shit. I was planning to jump on you.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Too late. It wouldn’t be the same. Well. There’s a mattress in the loft.’

  The mattress was very seedy. The icy dark air wrapped them round. They lay together afterwards, intertwined, unwilling to move; while the cold crept over their sweated skin, and breathing slowed—

  ‘D’you think we’re taking this too seriously?’ whispered Ax.

  ‘No baby, I don’t. I never would have believed I’d end up in bed with a bloke, but you’re the love of my life. You and Fiorinda, both. Nothing else matters.’

  ‘I meant, the way she’s behaving. As if she’s really fucked off with us—’

  ‘Oh. Hahaha… Well, maybe. Maybe we just have to stop being boring.’

  ‘But you’re the love of my life too. You and Fiorinda. Nothing else matters.’

  ‘All we need to do is remember that.’

  They pulled a disreputable rug over themselves, slept for an hour and zoomed back to London in the dark of dawn, a steady hundred and forty klicks around the potholes and the surface breaks. Sage, curled up in the passenger seat, opened an eye and mumbled plaintively, do you have to drive so fast?

  ‘Yeah.’

  She was home before them. She came out into the stairwell as they let themselves in down below.

  ‘Hi,’ said Sage, ‘did you fuck your pretty Chinese kid?’

  They stood looking up: eyes shining, purely delighted to see her back safe.

  Her heart turned over. She couldn’t believe she had been trying to hurt them. She realised that the words that might have burst from her…I think my father is trying to make me pregnant again… were completely and utterly mad, and there was no way in the world she would ever speak them—

  ‘Yes I did,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘But I don’t know why. I’m an idiot.’

  They bounded up the stairs and hugged her. ‘I don’t mind if you want to fuck other people,’ said Sage. ‘Well, I do, but that’s my business. As long as you come home—’

  ‘You missed a great night out,’ Ax told her, between kisses. ‘Stick with us, sweetheart. We’re not dead yet. We’ll show you a good time.’

  And everything was good and wonderful again, for a while.

  In March Kevin Verlaine had a bad snapshot trip. This was a first. The rest of them had all taken a hammering, despite the most careful mood-control and pre-medication. The afterburn from a bad one was horrendous, though you lost the actual memory very quickly. (In a way, Ax had been lucky. Physical symptoms meant you just must not touch the stuff.) Only Ver had escaped. They’d teased him about the purity of his life; but now no longer.

  He was so distressed they had to keep him in the recovery room, deep inside the eau-de-Nil dome. Sage sat up with him (Ver couldn’t bear to have anyone else): wearing the living skull mask; which the patient found comforting. Hour on hour, listening to the kid’s incoherent despair, and telling him, over and over, there’s no new bad news. Whatever you saw, it’s always been there. The world is the same as it was yesterday. You lived with it then, you can live with it now…

  By morning Ver was calm and Sage was exhausted. They ate breakfast together, alone, because the patient was still fragile—Rivermead yoghurt, Welsh honey, fresh bread; and the weak malted ale that was the current romantic alternative to coffee: Staybehind breakfast beverage of choice.

  ‘Sage,’ said Verlaine, ‘does Ax know about the Flowers for Algernon scenario?’

  Flowers for Algernon was the nethead term for what might happen—if you kept a primitive pre-Crisis chip in your head for too long. Yes, Ax knew the risks. No, he would not consider getting rid of the thing. He needed his chip. Sage felt a prickle of unease… Verlaine had cut his long hair recently, not short enough to be an annoying imitation of his idol; but getting there. Silky brown curls clustered close around his head. He looked innocent as a child.

  ‘He knows. Tell me about it. Fucker thinks he’s the exception to every rule. What put that into your head, Ver?’

  ‘Something I saw on the snapshot. I don’t think his chip had failed, that wasn’t what gave me the horrors, but something—’

  This was another first. It was nearly twenty hours since Kevin Verlaine had taken the neural aligner and made his brief, elliptical voyage to the State of All States. He wasn’t supposed to remember a thing by this time—and it didn’t matter, anyway. Everything they knew said the snapshot ‘visions’ were noise, not signal. They were not glimpses of the actual future (if there is such a thing); or past, or present. You wake up from sobbing at your lover’s deathbed, with a host of circumstantial detail, but it doesn’t mean you were there, it’s some kind of metaphor the neurons have invented.

  No one here gets out alive, we knew that already—

  ‘Oh really?’ Sage, zinging to full attention, kept his tone perfectly casual. Fuck. If only Verlaine were still hooked up. This we have to see, it could mean nothing, but I need to know what is going on inside that curly head, right now—

  At that moment something came into the sunlit green honeycomb cell, filling every angle of the walls, every atom of the air. A limitless sweetness, bathing all of existence; an intensity, a perfume, a sound, a delicious taste. Synasthesia. Sage and Verlaine smiled at each other, involuntarily, more tender than lovers.

  The world is terrible: and yet when we have approached the whole of all that is, the penumbra of that contact falls on us as this ravishing delight—

  That’s the Zen Self. That’s what keeps people addicted to the quest.

  The visitation passed. ‘Shall we log that?’ asked Verlaine.

  ‘Yeah. How d’you feel now?’

  ‘Oh, better.’

  ‘D’you remember what you were just saying?’

  ‘No… What was I saying?’

  ‘I can’t remember either,’ Sage lied. ‘Come on, let’s check you out.’

  He found nothing, not a trace of whatever had been going on: and the kid was fine. No problems, no damage, cleared A1 for more devastating neuronautical adventures, lucky lad. When Verlaine had gone back to London, Sage went over Verlaine’s trip again, with Serendip. It turned out that the young Adjuvant had been given a double dose of snapshot. Olwen had discovered that the capsules were going walkabout, so she’d changed the system: the new delivery method had been subverted by human error. Oh, fuck, so much for our health and safety standards, thank God he took no harm, better keep him on the bench for a while.

  Later, Olwen was intrigued by Sage’s report: but by then Verlaine no longer remembered remembering anything, and his scans showed no confirmation. She suggested a telepathy artefact (they happened all the time, a useless irritation). Sage could have been worrying about Ax’s chip himself.

  Consciousness and memory are worse than DNA for contamination errors, said the guru. We have to be very, very careful not to be fooled. And no, Sage, you will not up your own dosage. We’re making progress. Just be patient.

  Fiorinda went to the Benelux with DARK, crossing by sea through mean spring weather, as the tunnels were completely out of commission. Their set featured the new DARK album Safo; and the debut of some songs from Yellow Girl. The flood countries were not calm: they had an interesting time, dodging riots and living on their wits. Meanwhile Unmasked, the first album to escape from Gulag Europe (legitimately, through a mathematically-proven virus-free Swedish transcript) had scarfed up five Grammys. The Heads had official confirmation via t
he Internet Commissioners: plus a disc of the award ceremony, which Sage and George had to convert, with a lot of hassle, to a format that would run on their quarantined hardware: already obsolete, frozen in time—

  It was April. The Few went down for a preview of the new Rivermead Palace, before the Mayday opening ceremony. Fiorinda the no-fixed-abode brat was about to have a place of her own at last, the royal suite on the upper floor. The main room was huge, with vast rectilinear windows (justified as solar-collectors, really there because Topsy the architect was a closet sixties fan). The party settled there, after the obligatory tour, when they’d sent the architect away, to watch the Grammy show on Fiorinda’s neo-arts-and-crafts pewter framed wall screen.

  The Heads were playing it down, ashamed to have been singled out. ‘It’s the Apocalypse Now awards,’ growled Sage. ‘First they machine-gun you, then they give you a bandaid.’

  ‘Don’t I remember,’ said Ax, ‘You were the one who thought the Internet Commission ought to take us out and shoot us, after Ivan/Lara?’

  ‘That was before I knew they were going to make their sanctions permanent.’

  ‘Fucking typical,’ complained Bill. ‘First time ’e lets us make a mass-market record, and he has to wait until we’re stuck in the gulag with our assets frozen.’

  Aoxomoxoa’s fans in England must have greeted the revelation of ‘Unmasked’ much as the crowd at Newport greeted Bob Dylan with his electric guitar—

  Aoxomoxoa’s friends cheered and jeered. Bob Dylan! How’re we going to keep him down on the farm now—?

  Silver and Pearl Wing, leaders of the rugrat-pack had retired to Fiorinda’s neo-arts-and-crafts bedchamber, to share a spliff; sitting on a roll of leftover rush matting. ‘When you look in a mirror,’ said Silver, ‘does the person feel like you?’

  ‘No. Because it’s a reflection.’ Pearl liked to cut the crap.

  ‘Think about it. Does it match the person you think you are inside? It doesn’t. That’s because your body image inside your brain has no face.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ Silver paused for a thoughtful draw, spliff clamped elegantly between her fourth and fifth fingers. ‘Just something Sage was saying to me.’

  Beside them on the floor lay a package of mottled bark-paper. They were planting a charm, which they intended to retrieve when loaded with psycho-sexual power, and use for business purposes.

  ‘We’ll put it in the middle. That’s where Fiorinda sleeps and female sex energy is stronger.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Mum says so. Don’t you ever listen, cloth ears? Male sex energy is piddling.’

  ‘No, I mean how do you know Fiorinda sleeps in the middle?’

  ‘Easy. Just watch them. She’s always in the middle.’

  ‘How can you tell where the middle of the bed’s going to be? It isn’t here yet.’

  ‘Feng Shui.’

  Downstairs Ruby and Jet, Anne-Marie’s three-year-old and five-year-old, wandered around, tugging at wall hangings, clambering on artistic furniture. Smelly Hugh, AM’s villainous-looking but gentle partner, nursed Safire, the new baby, while AM gave the Powerbabes a herbalist consultation. Felice was pregnant at last, after years of sorrow. Rob was ecstatic, glowing like a pregnant girl himself. He had longed for children, but Dora and Cherry had been adamant: it had to be Felice’s baby first, or no babies at all…

  Roxane presided, magisterial, over the happy, homely court; from one of the Roman cross-framed storm-timber chairs. If Ax is a shameless socialist, and Sage is passionately conservative, that leaves Fiorinda to lead the party of Gladstone. Fiorinda a Liberal? That doesn’t sound right. S/he smiled at hir mistake. Of course. Our young queen, compassionate nihilist, is above politics, and served with equal devotion by her government and her loyal opposition.

  Long may the coalition endure!

  I hate rush matting, thought Fiorinda. It hurts your feet, and food gets stuck in it. Thank God I’ll never actually have to live here. Is it crazy to feel nostalgic for a sign that says AUTOMATIC DOOR NOT WORKING? For the smell of carpet glue? Bitter malaise possessed her, this is not my world… Fergal Kearney, over the other side of the great sunlit hall, watched her with puzzled sympathy. She rearranged her face. Look happy: that’s your job. Stone Age Royalty.

  ‘Tell us what’s going on with the Zen Self, Sage,’ suggested Cherry, tickling Safire’s chin. ‘Like when you told us about quantum cryptography that time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Felice, ‘That was cool. Eve was the bad guy.’

  ‘What is consciousness?’ suggested Rob, trying to sound scientific.

  The weird science cabal, Dilip and the Heads, Chip and Ver, grinned at each other. ‘Ah…’ said Sage. ‘How long is a piece of string? Consciousness is different things to different people. It depends on the situation. It depends what you’re trying to measure. It’s not a very useful concept—’

  ‘Okay, he doesn’t know the answer,’ said Ax. ‘Better try another question.’

  ‘Every moment of perception has its global brain state: perceptions, recall, emotions, sensations, all bound together. Your sense of your self is formed by a crucial collection of these brain states, stored in memory. It’s a blurred template, just enough for us to get by. But all those global states are also real objects in information-space, also known as the sum of all possible states, and there the record is perfect. Achieving the Zen Self, which means gaining unlimited access to the State of all States, would incidentally include the entire past, present and future, of the information-states that make you, you. What we’re doing is rewiring our brains to take that weight. If we dope your firing patterns right, under certain conditions, you move into phase with information-space for a very short time. Every time you repeat the experiment there’s a lasting physical effect, tiny but real. Your brain gets closer to being able to process your 4-D awareness.’

  ‘And that would be the Zen Self?’ suggested Dora.

  ‘Er, no. Zen Self, stable fusion with the State of all States, is another huge scale-up. But achieving the first level might trigger the second. That’s what we hope will happen.’

  ‘So what do we get out of this?’ asked Ax. ‘Time travel? Psychic powers?’

  Sage shook his head, smiling with wondrous sweetness; and so did the other labrats: a very strange effect. Peter Stannen, who was now learning to live without the veil, was particularly beatific.

  ‘The Zen Self is an end in itself. If you were doing it you’d understand. But trust me, Ax, there’ll be applications. One day, my lord, you will tax the stuff.’

  ‘You get visions of the future,’ said Allie. ‘I saw about that on Channel Seven.’

  ‘Nah, total rubbish. Popular misconception.’

  (AX MUST GET THAT CHIP FIXED!)

  Allie looked bemused. ‘But the drug, snapshot, does give you visions?’

  ‘Information-space is sort of an eleven-dimensional kaleidoscope,’ explained Verlaine helpfully. ‘Or, um, it might be sixteen. Are we on eleven, fifteen or sixteen currently, Sage? There’s no way of knowing that what you see under snap is, uh, real, so to speak, or just an aspect.’

  ‘It’s all real, really,’ murmured Chip. ‘And nothing is real, too—’

  ‘Snapshot’s a nickname,’ said the boss. ‘The drug’s a neural aligner. Snapshot” is what the scanner does. In case something falls off the edge while you’re out-of-body, like vision or motor control or whatever, Olwen’s scanner has a rescue me snapshot of your last normal state, so she can re-install—’

  He realised, a little too far into this cheery description of routine brain death, that some of his friends, including his girlfriend, were staring in horror.

  Hmm. Maybe I better back-pedal.

  ‘Of course, it’s never happened.’

  ‘You LIAR!’ shouted Fiorinda, jumping up. ‘You bastard!’ She stormed out.

  ‘You’d better go after her,’ said Allie, ‘and
by the way, if you’ve really been doing what that sounded like, risking your life and, and your faculties like that, and not telling her, you are a bastard.’

  Sage went after Fiorinda. Ax looked at the weird scientists. ‘Has it?’

  ‘Not seriously,’ said Dilip, caught between two awesome fires.

  ‘We’re talking picoseconds,’ said George. ‘No danger. An’ Olwen’s in charge.’

  ‘Like hell.’ It was well known that Sage could wrap Olwen Devi round his crooked little finger. Ax pulled the Les Paul, which he’d brought with him on this auspicious day, into his lap, and plucked a couple of softly zinging chords.

  ‘Information-space, mm… Pity that stuff does not agree with me.’

  Fiorinda was sitting on the plinth of the dead-cars sculpture at the main entrance. She looked up as Sage joined her. She wasn’t angry. ‘Don’t worry, I know I can’t stop you. I wouldn’t try.’ He sat beside her. ‘When we first met, you were like Einstein in a hamster cage. I remember thinking, after I’d talked to you a couple of times, fuck, no wonder he has to sedate himself with alcohol. He’d go bonkers in this biz, otherwise.’

  ‘I felt much the same about you, my brat.’

  ‘Huh. Very funny.’

  This tired-eyed, secretive, twenty-year-old girl is almost singlehandedly directing the drop-out hordes operation, an economy of four millions. People, that is, not currency. When the media folk want to know what’s her role in the Triumvirate she says, I’m the girl. I do the housework, of course.

  Some household.

  ‘I wish I could stop you from dismissing what you do. What’s the VI budget at the moment? A rough estimate?’

  ‘I never think of it like that. Think about the money and you’re lost, I think of it as a shape,’ said Fiorinda. ‘A four-dimensional puzzle: everything has fit inside the envelope and everything has to keep moving… Okay, I love Ax’s England, I love my fascinating hobby. But it isn’t what I want.’

  ‘Fiorinda, what’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong. I know you’re not happy.’

  ‘I can’t begin to tell you how fake it felt, on tour with DARK, pretending I was still a musician.’