Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘I’ll do it if you let me work with you.’

  Is that eating, or the hint of a smile? A genro may be refused no reasonable request. To do so is to compound the violation of right. Sheathe your teeth, huntress. He’s not refusing her request. Just capitalizing on it.

  ‘Why do you wish this, Mr Gillespie?’

  No word in Narha for guilt, Eamon Donnan had said, and Andy Gillespie had wanted to smash his eyeballs open for it, because he can still hear the cries in the corridor of the H-block. In the dark. Through doors. Through walls. Through time. Such strange cries.

  You should tell her this. You should tell someone this, and stop carrying it around like some precious, lovely jewel. It’s not. It was bad. It was evil. It was not your fault, but feeling guilty is all you have now. But he’s never told anyone, and he fears he never will, so he gives her another reason, a lesser reason.

  ‘The police got me as a suspect. Their prime suspect. They’ve people on me, they take shifts. There’ll be someone out there; dark blue Ford, probably. Eating chips, noting that a Shian turns up with a pizza at eleven thirty-five, leaves however long it is later. And I don’t like being a suspect. I don’t like being mistrusted. I don’t like the idea that the cops think I blew the heads off three adults and two children. Folk I worked with. Folk who gave me time when no one else would. Gave me respect. And I want the cops to know I didn’t do that to them.’

  She’s flaring her nostrils, taking scent. Finding the true trail. The genro is a lonely hunter. He remembers that, from the Maze. He remembers everything from the Maze.

  ‘The police are working for the law, but who’s working for the victims? Who’s defending their rights? Who’s hunting down justice for them, not for the law? Who’s their genro?’

  ‘You do not know what you are saying,’ Ounserrat says.

  ‘There’s a price. I know that.’

  ‘You are not prepared to pay it.’

  Pictures of the kids above the fire because that’s the most you can keep of them. Thirty-eight, still in a rented flat in student land. No car. No job. Money running out by the second. Prison record.

  ‘Oh, I think I am.’

  Ounserrat Soulereya blinks again the smile that is not a smile.

  ‘Very good. Then I shall meet you at the Welcome Centre tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock. Is this satisfactory?’ She scoops up her black and white stones of justice, uncoils from the floor and zips up her leather jacket. Fingers hook up the red helmet, like it’s the skull of some Hearthworld thing she’s run down and killed and skinned and carries for its totemic power.

  ‘Hey.’

  The door’s open. She’s half out it. She turns.

  ‘We’re supposed to be partners.’

  ‘This we agreed to. Yes.’

  ‘Partners trust each other. Give me something back.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This Sounsurresh Soulereya. What Hold did she come to visit?’

  ‘It is one in the country, not the city. It is called South Side of the Stone.’

  He doesn’t tell Ounserrat Soulereya what he knows about South Side of the Stone. Could be coincidence. There are not many Outsiders, and they like to stick together. Common adversity. Enemy of my enemy. It’s always been an inhospitable planet for settlers, Ireland of the hundred thousand welcomes. But then again, it could be something more than just coincidence. Poker could only have been invented by a species of traders and deal-makers. He won’t show his cards yet, and if the punter gets burned in the game she’ll have learned something.

  He sees the genro on to the street. She straddles the little motorbike like some devouring black insect. Imagine being sucked up into that thing. He watches her red tail lights weave down the street.

  ‘She’s gone now,’ he shouts to the unseen watcher in the dark blue Ford. ‘We didn’t fuck.’

  But when he goes back into his flat and closes the door, he kicks his half-full Guinness can into the far end of the kitchen in a comet-tail of white foam, suddenly angry because the fucking place is so small and so shabby and so empty and at the same time so full of the personal perfume of the tall, elegant alien. The ghost of her clings. He can’t even contemplate sleeping, but the only things on any channel are topless volleyball and ads for Internet sex pages and the radio doesn’t speak his language any more.

  Saturday morning-Sunday morning

  HE USED TO HAVE mates who smelled of blood this way. Well, not mates really. Acquaintances. The ones who would come into the club and everyone would pause for a moment in whatever they’d been doing. Hard lads. They’d sit in the corner with their pint and you’d nod to them and say, ‘Right, big man’, because it was their due, and you’d catch it off them, the smell of someone else’s blood. A kicking, maybe a Black and Decker job on kneecaps and elbows. Community policing, they’d call it. They sloshed on Brut for Men or Aramis their girlfriends had got them for Christmas but it couldn’t disguise it. Nothing disguises the smell of blood on a body.

  Nothing disguises the smell of blood in a building.

  The cleaners are at the back of the Welcome Centre — he can hear their radio. They’ve got the stains off the walls and carpets — hell of a job — but he can smell blood through the pine-mountain lemon-fresh spring-meadow multi-surface cleaners. It’ll never go away. It’ll be a marked house. People will buy it years from now but they won’t stay in it. Something bad about it. Vibes. Shivers. Old blood in the walls and floors.

  It’s like a physical assault on Ounserrat’s Outsider sense of smell. She stops dead in the hall, eyes wide open, teeth bared in a smile.

  ‘You should have smelled it on Monday night,’ Andy Gillespie says.

  The files are in the front room. The cleaners have made an attempt on the mess the SOCOs have left behind. The police never tidy up after themselves. They burst into your home, throw everything into a heap on the floor and then go away without an apology. You made the mess, you fucking tidy it up. Holds for everyone except the NIPS. They still have that warriorelite mentality from the Troubles. We’re the fucking samurai, we can do what the hell we like. Cut your balls off and you can’t do a thing about it, because the rules that apply to you don’t apply to us.

  Where is she this morning, faithful hound-dog?

  The people walking past in the street are glancing in. That’s the place, isn’t it? They look away when they see people in the front room — the room. They never looked before. Embarrassed by the Outsider embassy. Like folk down town who walk past sex-shop windows full of leather and lycra and pink plastic with their eyes firmly fixed on their feet. But now the weird Outsiders are gone. They’ve been murdered. So you can look up.

  Monday night, there was a body here, and one here against the chimney breast.

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Gillespie?’

  He tried to rub the memory out of his eyes.

  ‘Yeah. It’s just hard. I keep seeing things, remembering.’

  ‘I am sorry. Perhaps you should have given me the key so I could come alone.’

  ‘No. Needs doing some time.’

  He’s always been thankful that he can’t use the direct interface. Information inside him, in his head, horrifies him. Ounserrat sits down and lets the thing creep up her nose while Gillespie turns on the monitor the Centre keeps for its human visitors. The police’ll have been all through the hard drive and the disks but unless they had Littlejohn with them they won’t have been able to use the liposome memory. Ounserrat’s eyes are moving beneath her closed lids. Watching the chemicals. That’s all we are, so the scientists say. Dancing chemicals. She’s done in the time it takes Gillespie to make wee icons appear on the screen.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The wonderful-woman-in-the-crowd smell from last night is stronger today. It’s in-the-room-with-you. Sitting-next-to-you. Know it.

  ‘My clients have not approached the Centre.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘I will have to as
k around the Holds.’

  ‘I’ve done that. I went round asking about the murders here. They wouldn’t talk to me. They’re scared of something. They won’t tell me what.’

  Ounserrat Soulereya expands her pupils. Slits to circles. Cats in the moonlight.

  ‘What does that mean, what you just did?’

  ‘It is an expression of interest.’

  Andy Gillespie looks at the images on the monitor. After a time listening to the cleaners’ radio, he says, ‘There’s something we could try.’

  ‘What is that?’

  He’s already opening the icons, making the connections.

  ‘Someone like Sounsurresh coming to Belfast’ll have been noticed in, ahm, certain circles.’

  ‘Do you mean frooks?’

  ‘I mean frooks. They’ve got bulletin boards, web sites, contact points. They might have something about her.’

  As he speaks he’s flicking and clicking. Menus, sub-menus, addresses of page after page. Rubber Boys in Bondage. Crucifixion Babes. Lttp.comco@shit-eat.ftp. Pony Girls. How many teenage girls call that one up by mistake? Mr S. M. Frooks. We want frooks. We don’t want this old-shit human-on-human stuff. Or even pony-on-human. We want twenty-first-century devo. Give us frooks. Shit. There’re fifty pages of the bastards. Alien Invaders. Outsider/Insider. Alien Babes. Come on, can’t you do better than Alien Babes? Alien Gay Boys. They’re making that one up. Human body-double run through image processing software.

  He smells Ounserrat at his shoulder. He doesn’t like it. It’s not invasion of body space. He doesn’t like the way this thing that isn’t human is seeing all the tricks and treats and turns of human sexuality spread in front of it. Boys do it for us. Rubber does it for us. Rope and leather do it for us. Dogs and donkeys do it for us. Nails through the palms of the hands get us hot. We eat our lover’s shit and cream ourselves. We fuck our children. We fuck dead humans. We’ll fuck any fucking thing. Including you.

  A filter would help here, if he can remember how to do one. Belfast. Northern Ireland. Sounsurresh Soulereya. Models.

  The screen gives a choice of fifteen pages. That much. That quick. Devos don’t hang around. Always whispering to each other, sharing furtive wee things.

  He really doesn’t want Ounserrat on his shoulder when he’s looking at this stuff. Softer options first. She’s Here!!! is a file of long-lens pics taken at the City airport. See!: Sounsurresh Soulereya coming down the steps from the plane. See!: Sounsurresh Soulereya glancing behind her to make sure her kids haven’t been sucked into a jet engine. See!: Sounsurresh Soulereya asking the ground staff where’s the baggage reclaim. They get off on this, they beat the meat to a Shian bending over to ask a taxi driver how much to take her to South Side of the Stone.

  He hits target on the next file. It’s a city-web bulletin: Club Ochre. 16 North Street. Cum 2 R $1000 Opening. See London hyper-space-bay-bee Sounsurresh!!! 4 1 Nite Onlee. First drink free. Beer and aspirin promotion. There’s a little animation of a Shian in knee boots and hot pants pulling a Star Trek phaser and firing it two-fisted. Fab Feb 20. 10 ’til late. DWSAA. Dress With Style And Attitude.

  Just a themed night club. The real frook joints do only aspirin. The serious ones, the kind who buy the gear and the contact lenses and get the fingers lopped, they can actually get high on it, he’s heard.

  He’d got Junior Disprin from the Spar by the station, that night.

  ‘Was she still at South Side then?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ounserrat says.

  ‘Did they say anything about her opening a night club?’

  ‘I did not ask.’

  ‘They didn’t offer.’

  ‘Should we go there?’

  ‘Someone might know something.’

  ‘I shall try to change shifts at the pizza shop. It will not be easy.’

  ‘If you call round at the flat, I’ll book a taxi.’

  Ounserrat wrinkled her nose. Affirmation.

  ‘Have you thought what you want to ask?’

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  There’s a tap and small cough at the door: the bravest of the cleaners, come to ask for money.

  In her beige plain-clothes police person’s coat, Roisin Dunbar is as inconspicuous in the club as a papal litter on the Shankill Road. She’s going to hang Darren Healey by his balls: of all shifts to switch. It’ll be another false alarm. Funny how Andrea’s contractions start when there’s a job he doesn’t fancy. Michael was furious. What does he have to be furious about; in the warm, and the dry, with the kid? He hasn’t been twelve hours behind Andy Gillespie, with hours more to come by the look of it.

  Upstairs clubs conform to a universal condition. Too small, too hot, too loud. They’ll have turned off the taps in the bogs to sell club-brand water, which is relabelled Ballygowan at six times Ballygowan prices. The floor is so crowded there is not even room for one handbag to dance around. High density funk: little jiggings and fingers and feet.

  You spent some of the greatest nights of your life in places like this. But you could dance to the music then. This is just noise.

  It’s not even real Outsider music. A lot of that is beyond human hearing. This is two white boys with Mohawks in a bedroom with a MIDI system and more drum samples than they can shake a pair of sticks at. Fake alien. Everything about this place is fake. Fake computer animé of deep space and starships and manga characters video-jiggered into fake hahndahvi. Two fake Outsiders dancing in the shadows behind the decks, faking being DJs from another planet, man. That skin colour comes off in the shower. That height is platform soles. Baby-blue roundeyes behind those cool, cool shades. Fake punters heaving on the floor. The ones with money have bought fake Shian costumes from specialist catalogues. The rest make do with cross-dressing and mondo leather. A small group in front of the decks are wearing three-fingered white gloves. Beats amputation. They thrust their hands up into the black light. They look like fluorescent Mickey Mouses.

  Fake kesh musks. Smells a lot like girlie sweat, Chanel and dry ice to Roisin Dunbar.

  She’s amazed to see a couple of real Outsiders head and shoulders above the shove. You can tell them by the way they dance. The humans look like ironmongery next to them.

  Gillespie and the Outsider are at the bar. The barboy is pointing to a door. Jesus, they’re turning round. Hide. Hide. She takes her coat off, slips behind a group of Mohican boys passing around a bottle of club water. Their faces are ecstatic as Orthodox saints.

  One generation down, they are as alien to us as the Outsiders. When Louise hits these years, will I even recognize her? It’s 2004, citizens, do you know what your children are?

  The door opens, Gillespie and the Outsider go in. Dunbar excuse-mes her way through the bodies to the bar. The boy is checking twenties under a UV scanner. INLA have been waging economic warfare against the Imperialist Monolith of Joint Authority with fake Bank of Ireland notes. For once they’re not waging warfare against themselves. Dunbar surreptitiously slips him the warrant card. He’s already worked it out from the cut of her cloth.

  ‘I haven’t had any and I’ve no idea where they’re coming from,’ he says, fists full of notes.

  ‘Those people who were talking to you just now, what did they ask you?’

  ‘They wanted to know about the opening night.’

  ‘What about the opening night?’ She’s having to yell. Her throat’s going to punish her in the morning. If there ever is a morning after this.

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve only been here three days. I said they’d have to talk to the manager.’

  ‘Can I talk to the manager?’

  ‘Manager’s busy now.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  God, it’s hot. She can feel sweat balling up in her armpits and rolling luxuriously down her sides.

  ‘A bottle of that water, please.’

  ‘That’s five fifty.’

  ‘How much?’

  The other secr
et key of detective work, Boss Willich said on the day of her promotion, is that you pay for information, one way or the other.

  No glass. No furniture to put glasses on. She finds a place by the corner of the bar, sips her relabelled Ballygowan and watches the dancing. There’s some kind of boys-only competition going on. Boys and Outsiders. The girlies are standing in a circle, pretending they aren’t looking, but the music’s moving them. No contest, really. The Shian are moving around the wee lads like smoke. She finds her feet are twitching to the rhythm. That old dance-hall magic never dies.

  ‘Excuse me!’ A dim yell in her ear. She almost drops her water. They’ve made a covert approach through Roisin Dunbar’s wild years, Gillespie and the Outsider.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Dunbar, fancy seeing you here,’ Gillespie says. He’s smiling, and sweating heavily. ‘Really, you don’t need to do all this sneaking around. We’re on the same side, you know, like I told you when you had me in the other day.’ Dunbar notices that the Outsider’s nostrils are flared. Scenting. ‘Here, a wee proposition. Would it help convince you that I’m not the villain you think I am if I was to tell you what I’m doing here? I presume that’s why you’re here. Or maybe you like a dance on a Saturday night?

  ‘This is Ounserrat Soulereya of Not Afraid of the River Hold in Docklands.’ The Outsider blinks slowly. Dunbar remembers not to smile. ‘She delivers pizza, but she’s really a knight-advocate. A genro. You know what that is?’

  ‘A Shian lawyer.’ She’s not stupid. Except she is, getting jumped by the suspect she’s supposed to be following.

  ‘I am representing Sounsurresh Soulereya,’ the Outsider says. ‘Mr Gillespie is helping me discern why she has not returned to my Hold in fulfilment of a professional contract. We have identified that she attended the opening of this dancing club.’

  ‘We’re going to another club now,’ Gillespie says. ‘The manager here told us that Sounsurresh had an appointment with a man at this club. The man was a Mr Gerry Conlon. He seems to be big in business; some kind of biotech company called GreenGene, though I’m told it’s all ripped-off Shian technology. Incidentally, this club? It’s a frook joint. I thought you should know before you decide to follow us. If you do, you could offer us a lift, and try and look a little less police.’