Bold as Love

by Gwyneth Jones

  Straight up, being good to others is the light relief. It’s a rest cure.

  Though not, of course, if you do it for nothing without a break at home, or sixty hours a week in a dump like this; for shit money with no respite. After his shift he sat in the staff lounge with other volunteers and the regular screws, (everyone enjoying telling him he couldn’t smoke his cigarette) and was asked How long is the volunteer thing going to last?

  I don’t know, he said. As long as you all want it to go on.

  But is there still a Crisis?

  Is there? he asked them. And refused to say more.

  After Luke’s birthday, the Heads moved in on the Office computer network. They’d been shocked at the state of affairs they’d discovered, when they got involved in organising the May concert; and had decided they’d better sort it. Three days into this operation Sage was in the Insanitude canteen, alone: an untouched cup of coffee in front of him. Just drifting, thinking about the software he’d been installing, Allie Marlowe’s attitude problem. The tender, gravity-defying undercurve of Fiorinda’s breast, held in green silk, as she stood up beside him in the boneyard—

  Benny Preminder came along and said, ‘Ah, Sage, I was looking for someone to consult. Could I have a word with you?’

  Benny Prem, the suit that wouldn’t die. They wanted to get rid of him but Ax said, ominously, that it might not be easy. Better work around him, just don’t tell him anything. On the public record Benny had been innocent of any involvement in the Pigsty coup, and he had friends. So here he was, with his rambling, post-Dissolution Government job-title, Parliamentary Secretary With Responsibility for Countercultural Liasion, still playing Mr Jones. He’d reinvented his appearence: lost the flab, grown out that thick, shiny black hair and had it styled, got himself some sharp threads. Good looking dude, in principle, but repellent.

  Sure, anything I can do. Except I was about to leave.

  ‘It’s a little problem of etiquette,’ Benny explained. ‘How to get rid of Albert.’

  This was strange enough to be followed up. They crossed the Quadrangle and into the State Apartments, the night club venue, that gilded bordello staircase ugly by daylight. It was mid-afternoon, the place was empty. They stood in front of the statue of Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, with bare legs and what looks like a marble nappy, seemingly they had an interesting private life, those two. It was about the only original objet d’art left behind by the Royals. Apparently, some unnamed people wanted it thrown out.

  Benny Prem felt it wasn’t cool to dump Albert on a skip. He had alternative suggestions, and somehow this became a chat about the way Ax keeps giving Worthy Farm the cold shoulder. Why is Ax so down on Glastonbury?

  ‘Ancient Britons,’ explained Sage. ‘You know about all that.’

  ‘But there wouldn’t be a problem for you, Sage? Being a Celt yourself.’

  ‘Yes there would. I hate ’em, crystal swinging faggots, Bronze Age dikey matriarchs with their fuckwit psychic powers. Sooner they get wiped out by that organic cholera epidemic they are asking for, the better I will be pleased.’

  Benny laughed uneasily, a nostalgic touch from Think Tank days.

  The Ancient British Tendency were aggressively anti-science and covertly white supremacist. They weren’t going to swear allegiance. They wanted a controlling share of the action and they couldn’t be allowed to have it. So what was going on here?

  ‘You, ah, you don’t like the idea of power-sharing?’

  ‘Nah,’ sez Sage beginning to get the idea. ‘Got to have it all, me.’

  They left Albert to his fate and strolled. The former owners had been good about leaving fixtures and fittings. There were carpets and curtains; even furniture here and there, left over from when the tourists used to pay a tenner to trot around. In the Throne Room, Prem decided they would stop. He sat on the red carpeted steps to the dais, where two frumpy embroidered chairs were still standing in front of a swag of red curtain.

  Sage folded down beside him. Prem started to play, in fun of course, with this idea of Sage being a Celt, and having such charisma, such a great populist following; generally being, amusingly enough, so much more like the natural leader of the CCM. So they went a few rounds, how would Sage like to be the Duke of Cornwall hahaha, until at last Prem came out far as he was likely to come, with the remark that if anything were to happen, there’d be no need to worry about the government. They’d turn a blind eye to a little powershifting within the funky parallel establishment, long as the CCM was happy.

  So now I’m Pigsty, thought Sage. Well, well, well. The skull doing cautious, guilty speculation, with a touch of naively impressed.

  Prem (not very flattering, this) seeming readily convinced.

  ‘Uh, this is a good game, Benny. I’m enjoying it. But you’ve missed out something. You’ve missed out…yeah, got it: there has to be a reason why I would do this. Why would I want to be the leader of the CCM? I’m rich an’ famous already, an’ I don’t need the aggravation. You’ll have to think of something that would turn me on. What would be the inducement? Not that it’s a serious option.’

  ‘All in jest, but suppose I say: you get Fiorinda.’

  ‘Oooh. You’re saying you could, er, deliver Fiorinda?’

  ‘Well, all in jest: but I think she’d follow the money. The little lady is a realist. Remember the murdered children? Frankly, I admire her for it: but the first thing she saw in that affair was an opportunity for her boyfriend.’

  ‘It’s a point of view.’

  ‘But if she didn’t er, follow the money, that could be fixed.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Hypothetically,’ Benny twinkled, a coy smile twitching at his well-cut lips.

  Sage began to laugh. Laughed uproariously, overcome with merriment. Prem sat there, nonplussed, absurdly offended. ‘Nah,’ said Sage, when he could speak. ‘It doesn’t appeal.’ He leaned forward, ‘A piece of advice: you’ll have to look farther afield. You won’t get anywhere with the Few. It’s not that we’re incorruptible, everybody has a price. It’s to do with what happened one night, and I don’t believe you’re going to get past it.’

  The night was Massacre Night, but Prem didn’t catch the reference. He’d probably forgotten the whole thing: politicians will do that.

  ‘I think I’ve been misunderstood.’

  ‘I think you haven’t. Forget it, Benny. Attractive as your offer might otherwise seem, someone I have to trust has warned me never to trust you.’

  ‘Sage, you’re taking this far too seriously,’ Benny was smiling, keeping his temper, ‘It was a joke, nothing more. But I’d like to know, who told you not to trust me? In all fairness, I think you should tell me that.’

  ‘It was Paul Javert. Remember him? Guy who got his head shot off by your last protege.’

  Everyone was out in the gardens. Dilip came into the empty canteen and found Sage there, the skull looking very glum. He helped himself to a bowl of salad and some camomile tea, and sat opposite.

  ‘Hey, Sage. What’s wrong?’

  ‘I just made an enemy.’

  ‘Around here? You? I can’t think of anyone, aside from Allie.’ He grinned.

  ‘Benny Prem.’

  ‘Oh? What did you do?’

  ‘Laughed at him. Over a ridiculous proposal he made to me.’

  He recounted the pitch Benny had made: oh, purely in jest. Suppressing the Fiorinda part.

  ‘You think it’s serious?’

  ‘Why would he talk like that if not? Yes, I think it’s serious, and I shouldn’t have called him on it. Unfortunately the fucker made me lose my temper.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Dilip stirred the salad for which he now had no appetite.

  Sage rubbed the skull’s browbone with his masked fingers. ‘I told him I already have a life, and he should look for a struggling outdated instrumentalist in need of a part-time job… But he might do that. There’s no shortage of them around here; and our friends in the suits can�
�t be trusted. Prem, and whoever is backing him, offer the Westminster Government a more malleable leader for the CCM, they’d probably jump at the chance.’

  ‘Fuck. Are you going to tell Ax?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘I hope he pays attention.’

  They both knew Ax would not pay attention. Ax would continue to come and go as he pleased, drive around alone in that instantly recognisable black Volvo, park it wherever he liked. Unarmed. No bodyguards. He would go on treating Benny Prem like a difficult sessions musician with an unlovely personality, who sadly can’t be fired. Go on living his fearfully public life in this fearfully changed world as if he was a private person with no enemies, and the date some mythical year in the early nineteen sixties.

  Fiorinda needed a new publishing strategy. She’d decided she hated the idea of being a solo artist, dancers and costume-changes, yuck, disgusting. Playing with DARK at the May concert had reminded her how much she missed the band, and in some weird way the aftermath of that concert had made her realise what she must do. Simple: accept that the band would always belong to Charm, and convince Charm to take her on again as an associate, songwriter and vocalist. No control-struggle, no more fist-fights, just sometimes I play with DARK, sometimes I don’t. However, if she was going to do this, she had to detach herself from lambtonworm.com, the North-East artists’ co-op that had brought out both No Reason, the DARK album, and Fiorinda’s solo album, Friction. There was nothing wrong with lambtonworm, but the co-op was run by Charm Dudley’s best mates, and that wasn’t going to work. She had to take her solo work elsewhere. Production, publishing, marketing, all of that. How do you begin?

  Life goes on. Career decisions have to be made. On the night of the twenty-fourth of May she was alone in the new place in Brixton. They had two floors, the ground floor was going to be studio and offices. There were two more floors above, flats belonging to other folk. It was late, Ax was playing with the band somewhere: she was sitting up with a spliff and a bottle of red wine, surrounded by unpacking debris, secretly plotting. What, me set up my own cyberspace company? Before she’d tackled the Volunteer Initiative she wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing: but she’d had to learn. She was more confident with information technology now.

  There were plenty of Fiorinda sites (most of them best ignored), and of course she was on DARKspace, but she’d never had an internet presence of her own. She still didn’t want one. She liked being mysterious, being difficult to access. Okay, without the web they’d all be either corporate slaves or nowhere. She’d had that lecture. The Heads, needless to say, had been in this business since it was born… But without exactly yearning to be one of those dreadful corporate slaves (perish the thought), she couldn’t help thinking, surely all this part, shopfront, sales and marketing, is somebody else’s job?

  I’m a child of capitalism. I don’t want to be Renaissance Girl.

  So, find another co-op. But that seemed kind of a wussy option.

  She clicked around, looking at SweetTrack. (the Chosen); Tone. the Somerset artists’ outfit started-up by the Preston brothers, now run by other people. Whitemusic.com, which was the Heads, and Tide. (Sage). Amused by the different personalities, thinking, I could talk to Chip and Verlaine, or even Shane Preston, get some advice. NOT Sage. Not the Heads. Couldn’t have those heavyweights taking charge, that would never do. Pity there were no women she could ask. But the only female nethead in the Counter Cultural Think Tank had been killed on Massacre Night.

  Tiring of the investigation, she sneaked a guilty look at some of the stranger Fiorinda stuff: and some rather unbalanced DARK/Fiorinda fanpages. Bit unfortunate for the project of disarming Charm Dudley’s resentment. Well, I can’t help it, she thought. I didn’t plan to be the fucking Crisis Sweetheart.

  Benny Prem’s approach to Sage had scared her. Maybe Prem had scared himself, too. Today at the San, he’d come sidling up to her and asked, ‘Fiorinda, what does PoMo mean? Does that stand for post modern?’

  ‘Black music, lot of people on the stage, lot of four beat melody. It stands for Post Motown.’ She’d returned his trademark uneasy smile, blandly. ‘That’s an old name for Detroit. Mo town, Motor Town.’

  ‘I find it difficult to keep the jargon straight, I’m afraid I give offence.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she’d said. ‘No one expects you to understand.’

  No, Benny, there’ll be no repercussions. You just make my flesh creep, same as you always did. Ax had displayed complete lack of interest in Prem’s wooing of the Cornish Pretender. This casual attitude, my dear Ax, will bear further discussion… But now Fiorinda had crashed.

  She wasn’t surprised. The internet was always crashing. She wasn’t alarmed, only annoyed, when she found she couldn’t shut the screen down. Shook the remote control, considered throwing it against a wall or dropping it hard onto the uncarpeted floor. Better not. Finally she unplugged at the wall and booted up again. Same screen, still frozen. A message in gothic font slowly growing in size.

  GOD MUST BE A MUSCOVITE.

  Fiorinda got stubborn, and decided to call the Heads, in Battersea. They’d know about GOD MUST BE A MUSCOVITE, how bad it was and how to fix it. Unfortunately, her phone wasn’t working. Typical. The maisonette didn’t have a landline connection yet, so that was about it… She tried a couple of cable channels, to make sure the tv reception wasn’t buggered. Normal rubbish.

  Went to bed and read a book.

  One of the two viruses involved in what happened on the night of the 24th came out of the Polish Counterculture. Its name was Ivan, it was supposed to attack Russian sites, as a protest against one of the ongoing Russian Federation wars. The other was English, she was called Lara, and she meant no harm to anyone, she was just expert at getting around and exploring places. On the night of the 24th, Lara escaped from a hackers’ meet, and she and Ivan got together. Within minutes, Ivan/Lara had wrecked Euronet leisure-and-reference: had destroyed huge swathes of big science, research and academia; had been downloaded into the cellphone system, and was doing appalling scary things like crashing air traffic control, power-station and water-pumping software.

  A few years before the effect would have gone global in no time, but the internet, or nets, had been re-engineered with exactly this situation in mind. Between the virtual boundaries of the signatories of the World Internet Commission there were complex, fractal bulkheads, designed (among other policing functions) to contain infection. The people of Europe, from Belarus to Portugal, from Sicily to the Baltic, were the ones who woke up with a real problem.

  Ironically, apparently Ivan never made it into Russian cyberspace.

  The English public didn’t panic, not even when certain hardliners eagerly claimed responsibility on Gaia’s behalf, and promised Worse To Come. There’d been so many demon viruses that fizzled out, so many cataclysms that had turned out to be not so bad (such as the Tour). Emergency preparations went into gear, but most people assumed it would be over soon.

  On the afternoon of the fifth day, Ax went to check how Sage was getting on.

  Ax had been helping to nail the myriad ways Ivan/Lara could fuck the infrastructure of English civilisation: getting to some of them in time, others not. Thank God the Internet Commission had forced its signatories to maintain a worst-case scenario drill. At least they had a plan… Nothing had been said, but he was sure the high-powered bureaucrats he was dealing with must know he had a warehouse implant. Did that matter? He was too tired to think about it.

  Sage had been drafted onto the assault team—a European network of legendary hackers, academic and state security cryptographers, robotics experts; modern artists, even rockstars. Ax knew very little about this effort, except that he’d heard one of them say, on a podcast, that Ivan/Lara would be defeated within ten days, or it would be beyond control. The limit seemed arbitrary, but it had stuck in the mind. So this was half way.

  The Heads’ studio was a converted warehouse, right by the river.
George answered the entryphone. Peter and Bill were off on volunteer shifts, the show must go on. Ax went up to the impossibly cluttered room with the wide windows overlooking Battersea Reach, where Sage was working on his piece of the puzzle: Sage with a wireless wrap around his eyes, lying in a big, heavily designed-looking padded chair, a bank of monitor screens in front of him, his masked hands moving over the boards. He’d been at it for ten hours this session, George had said: catheter-job, as they called it. But Sage was like that when he got stuck into something: incapable of taking a break. It wasn’t a bad sign.

  Ax stood and watched. The first time he’d known there must be something more than a giant drunken toddler behind the skull-mask, had been when he noticed (ignorant as he was), the complexity of those immersions. That flood of weirdly sensual, brain-battering sound and light was built, bit by fucking bit. Listening to Sage and Peter Stannen talking about what they did: shooting strings of code at each other, computing the rainbow, could be chilling. It made you think that this was how Sage handled the skull’s beautiful repertoire of emotions: shuffling telephone numbers. But it was impressive.

  Maybe they’ll sort it, he thought. We could get lucky.

  ‘Hi, rockstar.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Have a look.’ The masked little finger of Sage’s right hand moved a slide: a dizzying landscape of hills and valleys appeared on the centre screen, faux-3D: a cratered plain, an array of glassy smooth volcanic cones, the impression of immeasurable vastness.

  ‘You any the wiser?’ inquired the skull, malignly.

  ‘Something to do with probabilities, statistically preferred solutions.’

  ‘Well done.’

  Ax peered at another monitor. ‘Who’s Theodosius the Dacian?’

  ‘Romanian bloke. We met ’im when we did the East Bloc tour. Computer artist, good one. He’s bonded labour to some division of World Entertainment: they bought him, they own everything he does, and they do nothing, just sit on it… Is he bitter? Very. He ripped us off…can’t remember how. Tickets? Venues that didn’t exist?’ Skeletal fingers kept tapping keys, shifting slides and toggles, but the landscape didn’t change, that Ax could see. ‘George doesn’t like him. I got into a correspondence, never sure whether it was friendly, always, you can fuck off rich lucky crass no-talent, I’m better than you…which you endure because, you know why… And here we are, talking about how to fuck Ivan. He’s my cellmate, him and Arek. You know Arek Wojnar?’