Band of Gypsys

by Gwyneth Jones

  The split-screen effect wasn’t painful. It was hardly noticeable, because consciousness is a point, not a line: still there was a collective sigh of relief as the Few lost the remote site. Rob and Felice reached to tug off their headsets.

  ‘Sorry,’ came Sage’s voice in their ears. ‘No pass-outs.’

  Their other selves had warped to a different location on the live-path. They were in Reading arena, standing on uncannily green grass, in the central piazza of some fairground, outdoors, Bohemian city. The air smelt of spilled beer and burned beet-sugar plastic, and roiled with conflicting musics. Hordes of campers, plus further hordes of ticketed punters, swirled around: body paint and fancy-dress glowing in the cool sunshine. There stood Red Stage with its towers, and the tiny figures of some hapless early band. Orange Stage, Yellow Stage (also known as Scary Stage, because of its accident record); the cobalt cone of the Blue Lagoon. Violet Alley with a new crop of rides, the Green Room where the comics must still be standing up; the smoky, jazzy, Mood Indigo tent. Only the eau-de-nil geodesic dome of the Zen Self tent was missing—its conspicuous absence dispelling a fleeting, rather horrifying, impression that they’d died, and this was their eternal home. The avatars looked around, and saw that they were visible. Heads were turning, elbows nudging. They saw each other, just slightly transparent, clothed in stagecraft holograms; in characteristic finery.

  The dress-up was necessary. Unless you took some vicious drugs, your b-loc appearance at the remote site could revert to the self-image held in the somatosensory cortex, in a lapse of concentration: a goblin shape, all hands and mouth and genitals.

  Sage wore his sand-coloured suit, with the glitter of gold in it (in reality, long defunct), and Aoxomoxoa’s living skull mask. He felt the ethereal tug of the mask’s presence, and saw beside him a sixteen year old boy, not very tall, Celtic tattooing around his left eye. Making a touching, futile effort to look like he did this all the time… A familiar joy rushed upon him: the sheer delight of seeing those mountains of crunched numbers turned inside out, all this… The freedom to play with these momentous toys! Did I say my rockstar career was over? Musta been on drugs.

  ‘Now, where’s my band?’ drawled Aoxomoxoa, hands in his pockets, plunging gladly into the forgotten mode. ‘I know I left them round here somewhere.’

  The Heads, who were hovering around the mark, counting everybody safely in, and shielding their arrival, grinned broadly. Skull masked, they couldn’t help it.

  They were not free. A shimmer in the air, on either side of their remote-site field of view, warned them of their limits. Anyone who strayed was liable to vanish. But the live path was cunningly constructed: it looked as if they were. They mingled with the crowds in graded backstage corrals, strolled across the arena, joined the camp-councillors in the Blue Lagoon. Their touch was thistledown, they could neither eat nor drink; their mood had a tendency to break up, like a bad phone signal, into uncertainty and dread—but they leant on Aoxomoxoa’s exuberant energy, just like long ago, until confidence and ease became genuine.

  The backstage B-Z listers were very touched that Ax and the Few were socialising with them instead of the grandees: and making a stand for creative rights. The techno-hippie camp councillors were thrilled, and talked of having the whole site live for next year. Ax enlightened them firmly about the cost, and was taken aback by the starry-eyed gaze of a certain hairy apparatchik—

  ‘What’s up with you, Joffrey—?’

  ‘You sound just like Ax,’ exclaimed the editor of Weal, proud-to-be-annoying hippie vidzine. He must have missed Ax terribly: the Second Chamber simply ignored opposition in the media, except when arresting journalists or destroying an issue.

  ‘Well, thanks. Oh, yeah, and while I remember. I saw “Ax is back and he has a little (hit) list”. With the border of thorny roses, SA80s and the coffins? Fucking cut that out. I have no hit list. And don’t give me any arse about the “freedom of the Press”. I don’t believe in it. Not until, if ever, you lot grow up—’

  ‘JUST like Ax,’ sighed Joffrey, dewy as a kid meeting Santa.

  They’d been looking forward to this b-loc Mayday with varying degrees of tech-failure terror, existential unease, and bitter resentment of the Second Chamber. But the blow they’d just suffered, that nobody else knew about, ignited them. They were manic: lucid dreamers, riding the wild disaster-wave as they had so often done before. They were deep in the past, bemoaning the terrible fate of having to go on stage in this crap novelty form: hologram shadows playing virtual instruments, probably get canned, and serve us right—

  Chip, Verlaine and Cherry lay on their backs, gazing up at the sky, insouciantly indifferent to the fascinated glances of the crowd. ‘That thing Fiorinda said about the Drumbeg event?’ remarked Chip. ‘At the Neurobomb meeting?’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘I shall quote. When perfect “fusion” is reached, when a coherent, solved, human self becomes one with the state of all states, then it cuts both ways, and the state of all states becomes a conscious mind. And it’s none time-bound, and the person reaching fusion was you know who. Does that mean Aoxomoxoa now actually is God? Always has been God, as of that night at Drumbeg?’

  ‘That is a very cool idea,’ murmured Verlaine.

  ‘I see a difficulty,’ drawled Cherry, slow Cornish. She could really do the Sage voice now, better than either Chip or Ver. ‘Sage didn’t make it all the way.’

  ‘Oh, right. He didn’t. Shit, tha’s a shame.’

  ‘The big job may still be vacant!’

  ‘Wait a minute. I thought you guys believed in Jesus-God.’

  ‘We do,’ explained Verlaine, patiently. ‘Emotionally. But we can fool around with the concept, conceptually, when it’s interesting—’

  ‘Whoever first reaches total fusion,’ Cherry murmured, half closing her eyes against the split-screen; Mayday sun pinwheeling through her virtual lashes. ‘That person becomes God and creates the universe. Wow.’

  They took the stage together, just before the Masque. It was liquid night, the cold spring stars washed out by rape-oil fueled stage lights, a sea of round eyes and mouths catching gleams, in the gulf beyond the security cordon. They understood that this compressed, “supergroup set” was a put-down, meant to diminish “Ax and his Few”: but the Reading crowd didn’t see it that way. They yelled Ax’s name insanely, louder and louder, until they realised he was waiting for them to shut up. Ax was on stage, and equally back in Brixton consulting with the techs, watching himself on a monitor, saying yeah, that’s it, give me those values. So bizarre, such a new feeling—

  ‘You know,’ he remarked, head bent over the neck of his Fender, a sleek wing of dark hair falling forward, the sleeves of his dark red suit jacket pushed up, Keef Richard style. ‘I thought I was done with this. Almost cut my hair, if you know what I mean. Thought it was time to become a proper President, and do nothing meaningful for the rest of my entire life. I thought, tonight, I’d go through the motions, and you’d be nice, for old time’s sake. But I dunno. Maybe what we need is not less rock and roll around here. Maybe we need…more.’

  Knowing as he spoke, sudden certainty, that this was the last time. Never again. Whereever he would be next Mayday, he would not be standing here—

  Fuck tomorrow, that’s my crowd, you bastards.

  The Fender screamed. Ax swung around to face Fiorinda, and they fell on the music with utter, brilliant savagery, such a pas de deux between punk diva and guitar-man, as no one had seen in their lives before—

  Back in Brixton as they lost the remote site, Dora lunged for the baby-alarm, which had been flashing for some time. She held the ancient plastic brick out to Anne-Marie.

  ‘It’s for you, Ammy.’

  It was late, and the babysitters were losing it. Anne-Marie’s bender-rats did not know the meaning of the word bedtime. They just got more and more tired and hateful, until they fell over. AM believed this was the natural way.

  ‘Hey, Ammy—!’


  Ammy blinked, and gazed at the brick. ‘I don’t like to be with my babies when I’m on drugs. I’m too sensitive, I can’t relate to them. You better go.’

  Smelly Hugh was nodding, eyes shut and a beatific smile, probably jamming with old Tom again: but he never did childcare, anyway. Meanwhile, thought Ax, marvelling at the selfishness, it’s my office the little darlings are trashing. He felt he ought to practice fatherhood, and get good at it. He moved, and realised he was soaked in sweat: glanced at his watch, and found it was past midnight.

  Where the fuck was I? Where did the time go?

  ‘Don’t worry, Dor. I’ll sort them out.’

  ‘No, no. It’s okay.’

  Dora gave AM a smouldering glare (entirely useless) and touched Ax’s shoulder as she passed, briefly bewildered at the solidity of her own smooth brown hand, seeing the sheeny red of Ax’s old best suit, imposed on a scruffy brown KEEP THINGS COMPLICATED sweater.

  Is real me here? Or has real me just vanished? What does b-loc mean—

  She left the room. ‘Dora has left the room,’ announced Kevin Verlaine, softly.

  Everyone laughed, for no reason. B-loc sets were tugged off and heaped in a victorious pyramid among the tired buffet plates. They’d forgotten what it was like to play the Reading crowd, to feel that whoosh of history coming back at you. Wine was poured, food attacked, they were ravenous, hey it’s so quiet, let’s have some music—

  Fiorinda and Sage stayed put. The Oratorio had struck the crowd as a little slow, after the Reich’s set. That was their poor taste, no doubt to be firmly corrected when the reviews came out. The soloists themselves still felt the resonance of that music, solemn and self-satisfied and innocent, and in a moment its banality would return to them, but just now it seemed in context: powerful, sad and true. Banal as the National Anthem, after Ax’s wailing Hendrixed-solo, traditional now as God Save The Queen: when the hush fell, when it was time to sing. Sixty thousand voices, millions more at the Big Screen locations, pleading for what we wish we were. For an impossible mercy: word perfect and as tuneful as the English can ever get.

  Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering…

  And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,

  And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

  They touched fingertips: Sage grinning fit to split his beautiful face. Fiorinda looked down at her skirts, surprised that the silver and blue and green costume she’d been wearing for The World had disappeared, and the smoky-opal party dress her avatar had been wearing gone too. Dammit, I swore I’d never do costume changes.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Sage. ‘It’s a psychedelic drug. Tell me, did we execute our stage coup? I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Me too. Short term memory waits for no one. Oh, wait, I think we decided it would be more fun to play it straight, the way we were told. And pre-emptively drown it, with a howling rock and roll set right before…’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re true, now I remember.’

  B-loc is a drug. You don’t notice the effect with a phone call, but significant activity and it’s a riot. I suppose people will get used to it, if we ever develop those industrial applications. Or there will be a lite version, for everyday.

  ‘Tastes and smells, Fiorinda?’

  Roxane was watching her with acute, forensic interest…

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Is ethereal b-loc communal-stardom going to be enough?’

  ‘It’s better than feeding on human flesh, Rox.’

  The party broke up. The Few headed off in their different directions, the techs took their leave. Rox, who didn’t leave a comfortable chair lightly, lingered, waiting for hir taxi to be announced. Ax and Sage sat on either side the babe, plying her with buffet tidbits in distinctly sexual foreplay. If you hang out with rockstars, you get used to being bathed in post-performance pheromones.

  ‘I hate to interupt,’ said Rox. ‘But congratulations on another triumph… Yet some might say you delivered a dangerous snub to the Second Chamber today, Ax. Mr Preston comes to Reading, but he won’t touch his guitar, and he forces an Ultra Green Neo-Feudalist government to accept his futuristic tech.’

  ‘We’ve done b-loc on stage before. We did it in California.’

  ‘Ax, don’t be obtuse. That was the Chosen Few, bi-locating briefly to the Hollywood Bowl, run by I-Systems US. A very different kettle of fx.’

  Ax ate a forkful of chicken. ‘What are you getting at, Rox?’

  ‘I know the cover story, but many observers who analyse Mayday won’t be dwelling on a contractual dispute. They assume you are above such things. Some will say today was your Presidency in a nutshell. You’re determined to make trouble, but you have no hands-on power. Literally, no muscle. Is that really what you want?’

  ‘Am I supposed to practice the answer I’d give in public? Okay, I’d say…damn right. I want to be insubstantial. It’s my intention to leave government to the government, encourage good practice in social welfare by gentle persuasion, and put my influence behind techno-green lifestyle choices—’

  ‘Very good. And the trouble-making?’

  Ax looked up: a gleam of grim amusement. ‘I hadn’t finished. That’s my agenda, which I mean to follow. But not straight off… Ooh, there goes the entry phone. It must be your taxi.’

  Marlon had dropped out of b-loc during The World, felled by slumber, and had stumbled off to bed as soon as the show was over. When Rox finally condescended to leave, that was the lot of them, thank God.

  ‘It went well,’ said Ax. ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Weird being so old, and how I still love it.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Fiorinda reappeared, having shown their last guest to the door. The men were sitting quietly, hands clasped, enjoying the silence. Sage knew she would make straight for Ax, and she did: her whole body alive with single-minded hunger. Ah, female choice. It’s a fabulous thing to watch. Even better when you know you’re next.

  THREE

  Small Ax

  The stately home was quite a pile. It stretched interminable, crusted with artistic fortifications, along the base of a low green hill; a red-brick Gormenghast. From the South Terrace formal lawns extended to a drop like a tank trap, a tree-scattered park and woodland beyond. The turrets of a gatehouse could be glimpsed in the distance; through fresh young foliage. The village, Wallingham Camp, was a mile or so off to the west. A drive, or private road, crossed the park, before sweeping around to join the main approach: bounded by deer fences so tall they were an eyesore. Must be some well-hard three-day-eventer stags around these parts.

  A few sheep, rare breed pet animals, were grazing.

  Make a list

  Identify somewhere the folks would like to live. Forget Bridge House, it’s too late to move them back there, it has a blue plaque and a carpark. (NB. That car park has to go. Okay, it’s reserved for essential private transport, but what that means is, one law for the elite, one for the rest. The people don’t know I had no control over what happened to my childhood home, so it makes me look like a right hypocrite.)

  ‘I always thought of Kent as flat,’ he remarked.

  ‘It’s flatter by the sea,’ said his companion, a fleshy man, in Islamic dress but bareheaded, about Ax’s own age: his red mouth like a fruit in the middle of a full set beard, waves of thick dark hair crowding round his face. This was Faud Hassim, once the front man of an Islamic guitar band from Bridgwater called The Assassins.

  The Assassins had been very encouraging company for a mixed race outfit from Taunton called The Chosen Few—a year or so behind them on the trail. It had all gone sour in the days of Dissolution, after Ax converted, and Faud found himself in the stinging position of being the other Radical Islamic Rockstar, not the famous one. There had been nasty scenes, dirty acts of sabotage: a night at Reading, hard to forget, that had ended in a planned and ugly free-for-all. Yet it was Ax Preston who’d paved the w
ay for Faud’s present success, ironically enough. He’d left the music and gone into politics. Currently he was a leading “Rebel” MP, who also filled the post of the Government’s Adviser on Countercultural Affairs: vacated after the fall of the Green Nazis by the unlamented Benny Preminder.

  He wasn’t a big fan of Ax Preston; still carried a rancorous loser’s attitude around, with absolutely bugger all justification. But Ax had more tolerance for the resentment these days. He could see that from Faz’s point of view, fate had just been damned unfair.

  They were on the terrace together because it was Ramadan, and the rest of the party was eating lunch. Ax’s minders—barmy squaddies from the Insanitude—sat placid on the low wall a few yards away, modestly armed. They were a compromise. Ax liked to drive his car alone, walk down the street alone, and in England who had ever been able to stop him? But these days he was forced to provide his own security, just to keep an eye on the inevitable government spooks.

  The barmies had a Shakespearian look: sitting there patiently idle.

  ‘When are you three planning to move in here?’

  ‘Not immediately.’ Ax left the balustrade and strolled.

  Faud kept pace beside the President, maintaining a slightly surly air. ‘This place isn’t big enough?,’ he inquired. ‘You’re holding out for a private castle?’

  ‘Nah. We’re urbanites. Don’t want to leave London.’

  The terrace was a lengthy stroll. It was the kind of house that you might never leave, thought Ax, as he kept up his side of a stilted conversation. The women, naturally, would rarely get further than that tank-trap. Indoors there would be long expeditions for little serving girls with coals. Well, scratch the coals… He glanced at his watch, an equally fogeyish replacement for his moon phase Seiko, the one the kidnappers had nicked: old friend that he still missed. He never felt hunger pangs in Ramadan, he just started to get the running on empty feeling, that Sage found so addictive. Sharp set, as the old phrase goes. The fasting gives you an edge.