Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Like death,’ Ounserrat Soulereya whispers in Andy Gillespie’s ear.

  ‘You got no word for guilt, but you sure as hell got one for shame.’ The fingers are at his neck again, pushing out the male rage. ‘We watched him will himself to death. He didn’t seem to be in any pain, most of the time he looked like he was somewhere else, inside his head. Talking with the hahndahvi, picking one to guide him to his next life. I don’t know. Anyway, one night, way about two o’clock in the morning, I get banged up out of my bunk by a warder. Seems Mehishhan Harridi wants to talk to me. Two o’clock in the morning. I’m there and Eamon Donnan’s there and in we go and he’s sitting there in that pile of blankets like a skeleton wrapped in old leather stinking like God knows. Jesus, one look, we knew it wasn’t long. He can hardly talk, but he tells us he has something he wants to give us, something important, something rare and valuable. He asks us to kneel in front of him, and then he bends forward and kisses us, on the mouth. I feel something slip into my mouth but before I can spit it out or boke it up, it’s shot up the back of my nose and I’m trying to sneeze the thing out but it’s like it’s clinging up there, in my sinuses. I’m thinking, what the fuck?, but he sits back and closes his eyes and never moves again, He dies a couple of hours later. Next morning I wake up, and there’re words in my head. More than words, sentences, grammar; a whole fucking language. Narha. He’s given me and Donnan his language.’

  And that’s the tale of how Andy Gillespie learned Narha. It ends there, but it’s not complete. There’s much more to it, but the for ever after is made up of guilt and regret and things for which there are no words in Narha. And there is much more in it, but they’re things you can’t say to an Outsider even if she is running her fingers over your skin, so close you can taste her breath. A species born to just walk away won’t understand the long ache of a man who either loses or gives away every valuable thing he ever had. Forgive me for this, forgive me for being a mad bad bastard, forgive me for getting into these things I have to get out of. But you can’t. To you it’s nothing wrong to lose partner, child, family, home, friends, jobs, ambitions. Just walk out on to the hunting path and turn your face to the north wind. But I can’t live that free. I walk, but I’m guilty. Every footstep says, this man done wrong. The five people who were the nearest thing I have to a family are dead, and this time I’m not going to walk away. I’m going to stay, and this man’ll do right, this time.

  ‘Except that he didn’t give you and Eamon Donnan the whole fucking language,’ Ounserrat Soulereya says. Her voice is very quiet, but her words shatter Andy Gillespie’s reflection.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You only have half the language. This is why I asked you how you learned to speak Narha. You speak it as well as any human might, for you learned it the way we learn it, through the chemicals, but you only learned part of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Kesh changes everything. Our bodies, our minds, our relationships, our society, the words on our tongues. We have two Narhas. One is the language of every day, of the cool seasons, the other is the language of kesh. The names for things change, sometimes the name remains the same but the thing changes. Grammars change, tenses change. We have genders for things in Hot Narha that we do not in Cool Narha. He, she, his, hers. Chair: she. Light: he. Floor: he. Walls: she. Food: she. Drink: he. The kesh hormones change the words in our heads; one set of chemicals is reinforced, the other suppressed. The genro Mehishhan was out of season when he secreted a souljok, therefore what he gave you was Cool Narha. A week before — even a few days — and he would have given you Hot Narha.’

  Half a language. All the time walking around thinking he knew it all, he could say anything to anyone, and he was speaking with forked tongue. But how could you know? How can you think about language, except in language?

  ‘That’s what Graceland is burbling on in. That’s why I can’t understand half of what you and Ananturievo say to each other,’ Andy Gillespie says, but he is thinking about language again. He is thinking about the Insufficient Vocabulary mode Eamon Donnan used in the Queen’s Island sacred space, when he said that Littlejohn was a fool. He would have learned to speak with a whole tongue. Hot and Cold. Maybe the thing he couldn’t translate was something that can only be said in Hot Narha.

  He knows what the next question has to be, and he knows in his gut and in his balls what the answer will be, but he must ask it.

  ‘How do I learn Hot Narha?’

  ‘From me.’

  Suddenly he realizes he isn’t cold any more. He can hear music, distant drums. Like a far-off Orange parade. No flutes massacring great tunes. The dancing’s started. On the other side of the river a lone car alarm is yelling.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Like a child.’

  How else? It won’t mean anything. None of it has, or will. She can’t help it, and you won’t make something of it that it isn’t.

  ‘Teach me.’

  Ounserrat sits back. She slips her arms out of the green body suit, pulls it down to her waist. Her breast is swollen, leaking milk and wisdom from the teat. She presses her body close against Gillespie’s. Her meat is fever-hot. Gillespie lifts the long, thin breast and gently takes the nipple in his mouth.

  Monday-Tuesday morning

  ROISIN DUNBAR HAS A professional resolution never to be murdered. It’s not the thought of dying violently she hates — she hates the thought of dying in any way. It’s ending up on the pure Protestant porcelain of Belfast City Morgue. Indignity enough to have died violently and been taken away by the police in a black bag, like so much rubbish. Post mortem is the second indignity, the second death. Naked, vulnerable, helpless, you lie under the lights, open for examination. In the first death you might have tried to stop your killer, fight him off, put up a struggle. In the first death all he did was kill you. In the second death they come with their power saws and scalpels and forceps and they do whatever they want for as long as they want. And when they are satisfied, they bag you, tag you, slide you into a hole in the wall and sluice your juice away with the overhead shower sprays. Spiral pinkly down the plughole. Like the shower in the Bates Motel. This is no chocolate sauce.

  Dear Police God, let me die a copper’s death: fat and fermented and boozy, with a margarita slipping from my fingers to smash on the sun terrace of the sea-view retirement haciendas in the hills behind Fuengirola. Let twenty grandchildren fly in for the funeral, let them weep, let them curse me to hell when they find out I’ve spent their inheritance on drink and golf lessons. Grant me a gentleman’s death, not a player’s.

  Funny; Michael doesn’t feature in this memento mori.

  ‘Absolutely no other possibility?’

  Barbara Hendron unpeels her rubber gloves with sharp, sadomasochistic twackings. She gives Willich the same look of expert condescension Littlejohn uses. They must read the same crime books.

  ‘Unless we’ve just discovered spontaneous detonation. Like spontaneous combustion, only more dramatic. And whoever did this knows about the mutilations you wanted kept secret.’

  The green-scrubbed assistants smirk as they do their things with trolleys and sacks.

  ‘They’d been dead how long when we found them?’

  ‘Couple of hours. They’d hardly even started to cool. It’ll all be in the report.’

  ‘Sunday evening, people everybloody where and no one sees a thing? Who is this, the invisible fucking man?’

  ‘We’ve checked the door-dog’s memory,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘Nothing on it, or the security cameras.’

  ‘Except the bastard walked right into their conservatory and blew their heads off.’

  ‘We think we have footprints. Forensic is running them through a neural net.’

  ‘Littlejohn, are you absolutely sure that an Outsider couldn’t have done this?’ Willich asks.

  Grasping at straws. Willich may not be Roisin Dunbar’s contender for the police brain of the century, but she doesn’t like seei
ng her boss have to eat Littlejohn’s shit by admitting that the weapons-running theory is as fucked as Pastor McIvor Kyle.

  ‘I keep telling you: their biology makes them incapable of this kind of sexually motivated violence. They’re peaceable non-aggressive folk, unless you threaten their children.’

  ‘Maybe Kyle knocked a kiddy off his tricycle or something,’ Dunbar says. She needs to be flip in this Godawful place.

  ‘A human did this. A human male. The most dangerous creature on the planet, or any other for that matter, is the young, unattached human male.’

  ‘Like Mr Andrew Gillespie,’ Roisin Dunbar says. Littlejohn looks at her. That smarter-than-thou look again.

  ‘The Amazing Invisible Mr Andrew Gillespie?’ he says. ‘Who, despite getting the tripe knocked out of him, manages to haul himself up the Antrim Road, slip, unseen by half a dozen security devices, into the house, and blow the entire family away?’

  ‘But it’s not the entire family.’ Barbara Hendron’s voice is as shocking as a concrete slab falling from a roof. ‘There’s a son. He’s at university.’

  ‘McIvor Junior.’ Roisin Dunbar remembers reading about it in a Pro-Union free sheet she can’t stop dropping through her door five mornings a week. ‘He’s up at Coleraine.’

  ‘Media studies. My daughter’s on the course with him. He’s got a room in the same unit as her.’

  Dunbar’s mobile is already open.

  Chief Inspector Willich is driving back to the station like a maniac. He insisted. He’s got a police licence, Roisin hasn’t. His woo-woos are on and his lights are flashing, but Belfast traffic has no respect for police sirens. Too many times they put them on to get to the burger shop quicker. Belted in in the front, Roisin Dunbar’s got cramp in her left foot from stamping on brakes that aren’t there. Road kill is an alternative route to the big porcelain slab. Littlejohn in the back is wearing exactly the expression Woody Allen wears in Annie Hall when spooky Christopher Walken drives him to the airport.

  Roisin Dunbar’s mobile rings. Willich switches off the woo-woos. Roisin Dunbar says, ‘Ah-hah’ and ‘Uh-huh’ and ‘OK’ and ‘You do that’. Then she folds up her mobile and puts it on the dash.

  ‘Michael,’ she says to the pale faces. ‘Louise is running a bit of a temperature and he’s calling the doctor.’

  Shit shit shit shit shit.

  Willich switches the sirens on again, but the traffic down the Ormeau Road still won’t take him seriously.

  The mobile rings again.

  ‘Yah.’ The sirens go off, again. ‘Ah-hah.’ Littlejohn is leaning forward, trying to overhear the twitter in Dunbar’s ear. ‘Uh-huh.’ Long silence. Big twitter. ‘OK. Thanks.’ She sighs and seems to crumple in the front seat. She very slowly puts the mobile back in its place on the dash.

  ‘They got him too,’ she says. ‘The Coleraine force went to his room. It was locked, they broke it down. Exactly the same.’

  ‘Hell,’ Willich says. ‘And let me guess, a student hall of residence, and no one saw anything or heard anything.’

  ‘The others on the corridor reckoned he was late back from the weekend or something. Scene of crime reckon he’d been there two days.’

  ‘Two days?’ Littlejohn says. ‘When two days ago, morning, evening, night?’

  ‘They won’t know until they’ve done a pm,’ Roisin Dunbar says. I know what you’re driving at Littledick, because I’m there with you. While party unknown was blowing McIvor Jnr’s skull up like a dropped melon, prime suspect Andy Gillespie’s every movement was being observed and recorded and they did not include day excursions to Coleraine.

  ‘Littlejohn,’ Willich says, ‘I need a suspect.’

  ‘Eamon Donnan.’

  ‘The one’s gone Sheenie, over in Queen’s Island?’ They stop at the lights on the Ormeau Bridge. The pedestrian light is green, foot traffic is crossing. An Outsider passes in front of the car from the park gate side, with a back pack inside which things seem to be moving like fighting rats.

  ‘He was in the Maze with Gillespie, and Gavin Peterson. I’ve been doing some research into what went on in there. You might remember — it made the news — that a Shian lawyer — a genro — fell foul of the majesty of law pursuing personal justice for his client a tad over-zealously and got sent down for six months. He was a Harridi, same sept as the University Street ones. Gillespie and Donnan befriended him, they got close. In Donnan’s case, maybe too close. Maybe a little over-enamoured with the condition of being alien. Anyway, there was an incident — kesh chemicals in a confined environment, the place was like a pressure cooker full of testosterone — and the Shian died. There was an inquiry. It’s different nowadays, but they’d only been here a couple of years and none of us really knew anything.’

  The lights have changed and the car is on the bridge now. Dunbar glances out of her window at the flags and emblems flying from Annadale Hold. Whole family murder; the horrifying, implacable premeditation of the hunter. The thing that will not stop until it has completed its task.

  ‘You think this Eamon Donnan is getting his own back?’ Willich asks.

  ‘Nothing so simple. Human male sexuality is a fragile and frightening thing. Bend it out of shape, everything else bends with it.’

  Willich drives up the tail of a pony and trap laden with old forklift pallets and flashes his lights to intimidate the tinker holding the reins.

  ‘All right. Eamon Donnan is now our prime suspect.’

  They can see the crowd from the bottom of the Pass. Up at the station both sides of the street are lined with bodies. Light glints from lenses: journalists. Uniforms clear the hacks from the car park gates. Hands wave tape recorders at the windows. Voices are shouting about confirmation of rumours and Antrim Road.

  ‘Well, someone’s found something out from somewhere,’ Willich says as the uniform swings the barrier down behind the car. The press mobs them across the road from the car park. First time Roisin Dunbar’s had fifty men barking after her. And women too. They’re waving machinery in her face and shouting the same question in different phrasings: can she confirm that police raids on premises and property of the Dissenting Presbyterian Church are connected with the University Street killings?

  ‘Sergeant Dunbar, can you confirm that you’re investigating Pastor McIvor Kyle in connection with the Outsider Welcome Centre murders? Is he in custody?’

  No, he’s lying in the mortuary up at Foster Green Hospital. His wife’s on one side of him, his daughter’s on the other. Just like all those photographs you took of him on the steps of Faith Cathedral. Family values unto the last. She puts her head down, Diana style, walks on. Willich stops at the security gate and turns to talk to the news.

  ‘I can confirm that we are holding Gavin Peterson, Rev Kyle’s Security agent, pending further inquiries,’ he says. ‘We will be making a full press statement later today clarifying the situation.’ As he follows Dunbar and Littlejohn into the station he adds sotto voce, ‘When we’ve got Eamon Donnan’s backside in the next cell down.’

  The cars are going out again from Donegal Pass. The usual agents of the law are in them — even Darren Healey. EU paternity leave bows to police expedience. There are vans this time, with uniforms in them. Queen’s Island Hold is a big, alien country, with many places to hide between the detritus of failed heavy industry and the new habitations and agri-industrial plants. They go by a back gate; they are halfway down to the Ormeau Road by the time the journalists realize something is happening without them. The press breaks camp and gives chase in a flotilla of hatchbacks. Potential scandals involving ministers of God, born-again terrorists and aliens are unmissable copy.

  The line of cars goes along Cromac Street into Victoria Street. But this time it does not shed cars at each junction. This time all the vehicles go over the bridge to the quay. They’re driving fast. They like the speed that pushes everything from in front of them, that asserts the implacability of law. Human, Shian, just move it. They slam to a stop all
around the sacred space. The Volkswagen kids throw up their hands in surrender, but the police storm past them and their camp-fire and their wet wool and their hash and their busting bass. It’s Go Go Go time.

  It’s not like your ordinary church, Littlejohn told them at the briefing. Unlike any other kind of religious architecture you’ve ever seen, this works. It’s like an acid trip. Be warned. They listened carefully, they made notes, and now they’re ignoring him. There’s a fucker to grab. One team for each entrance. If he’s in there, they’ll get him out. No bother. Some Sheenie in a frock comes out flapping its hands and jabbering. Someone grab hold of the bastard, keep it out of our way, right? If it make a fuss, charge it with obstruction. There’s work to be done. Right. In.

  ‘What the hell do they think they’re playing at?’ Littlejohn says, in the passenger seat of Roisin Dunbar’s car. ‘I told them go by the north entrance. Can you people not follow simple instructions?’

  Littlejohn and Dunbar and the rest of the police watch and wait. They watch and wait much longer than they expect.

  ‘Right,’ Littlejohn says. Roisin Dunbar thinks of Basil Fawlty. He takes a small jar of Vick vapour rub out of his pocket, rubs a dab under each nostril, offers the jar to Dunbar. ‘It’s difficult enough keeping a clear head without kesh chemicals turning you into a slobbering pussy-fiend.’ She puts a smear on her upper lip. Woof. Goodbye sinusitis. They get out of the car. ‘I’ll handle this,’ Littlejohn shouts to Willich. The uniforms and detectives stand down.

  Littlejohn goes to speak with the Shian — the keeper of the sacred space, he tells her; more a curator than a priest. Janitor of the mysteries. Dunbar realizes that this is the first time she has seen the consultant xenologist with an Outsider. A live one. A complete one. That’s the thing about academics. Everything’s abstracted, removed from source. The second-hand is better than direct experience. Like Michael and his virtual newsgroups and virtual communities and virtual friends. The empire of the fake. Like the dance club: appearance, seeming. God, is this all we have, a choice of surfacings?