Band of Gypsys (38 page)

‘It’s a Reich issue,’ Chip informed the new recruit, helpfully. ‘Ming the Magnificent might even now be attacking Roumania, and we’re not “queer for Brussels” but the Dacians are our ancient allies.’

‘Ming?’

‘The Emperor of China. Playfully identified with vintage scifi fictional alien despot. You
must
have heard of
Flash Gordon
?’

‘N-no?’

Wish Fiorinda was here, thought Chip. Jokes are wasted on this infant.

‘It’s Ming the
Merciless
,’ corrected Allie’s assistant, from his hole in the corner.

‘Whatever turns you on, Charlie—’

‘Sit up straight and pay attention, my child,’ said Verlaine to Nathalie. ‘If you want to join the gang, these things you must know. The Roumanians, and we use the ‘u’ spelling so as not to confuse them with the Roms, who are different, are in trouble because some of their guerrillas, that’s g u e, r, not g,o, were aiding the Uzbeks. We are their allies ever since Ax went to Bucharest, and arbitrated for some other vampire hippies to blow up the Danube dams. This makes us responsible for their fate—’

‘Ax blew up the dams! That’s not
true
, is it?’

‘Of course it is, Nathalie. We are ruthless eco-warriors.’

The little Vietmamese looked terrified: Dilip hugged her.

‘Ignore them.’

Chip and Ver turned Allie’s upright desk screen to face the room, touched it on and found the Channel Seven News. Chip whooped. ‘Hey, this is the UFOs! Pay attention, this is so cool! Someone videoed a flock of UFOs, leapt on a motorbike and zoomed out of the mystery zone at dawn. Nothing has escaped from there since—’

‘If you’re going to talk about UFOs, I’m
really
thowing you out
—’

Verlaine checked the bikes again. ‘Here’s Rob and the Babes. Plus babies. Cool beenz! We can play with Mamba, he’s such a great kid—’

‘Anything, so long as it gets you out of my office.’

Rob, Felice, Dora and Cherry came rapidly into the room. Dora held Mamba in her arms. The toddler was looking sullen and tearful, a child who has been frightened by adult disarray. Ferdelice, the tall, slim four year old, caramel complexioned like her mother, clung to Chez’s dark hand. Felice checked the company and said urgently, ‘Someone ought to call Rox.’

‘Oh shit,’ gasped Chip, instantly sober. ‘What’s happened?’

It was the end. So they are dead. Fiorinda’s dead.

On Allie’s screen, a spray of purple teardrops flew across the ocean, looking like nothing on earth. Rob assaulted the touchpad. A vintage movie mix of Liszt’s ‘Les Preludes’ leaped to ear-shattering volume—

‘Fuck, sorry, how d’you change channel?’

‘I don’t, I don’t watch tv on my machine. Try the number keys.’

‘Got it.’

A row of men and women in olive green uniforms, sitting on a stage under a ribbed, shiny, purple dome. They looked pleased with themselves and serious, as if posing for a proud school photograph. In front of them a tall, good looking man, in similar uniform but smarter, stood at a rostrum. A mixed crowd looking up, with blank faces.

What’s wrong with this picture? The audience looked English, all ages, all dresscodes: some in military uniform. The people on the stage didn’t look English at all… Chip and Verlaine, Allie and DK were silent in bewilderment, slowly noticing the text that ran across the bottom of the screen; slowly grasping that the tall man wasn’t actually speaking English, it was instantaneous translation, following his words like an echo—

The invasion was eight hours old at this time. The airships had arrived in waves, in rapid succession, each wave bringing thousands of troops: plus political officers, support staff, and the technicians who had instantly assembled mobile fuel generators, armoured transports, and armoured shelters like the purple dome. Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset were overrun, Bristol and Bath had been taken.

‘Is this real?’ said Allie. ‘Are you saying this is
real
?

‘He’s called Wang Xili,’ said Felice grimly. ‘He’s the General in Command of Subduing the South West.’

‘It’s real,’ said Dora. ‘It’s an invasion. The dome is in Bristol, they pulled people off the street to listen to them and this is live.’

General Wang was telling the masses that they were in no danger. The Chinese Commanders would not target civilian populations, they respected non-combatants and had vowed never to deploy immoral weapons. He listed the immoral weapons, starting at the top with strategic or tactical nuclear devices. Nerve gas, biological weapons, chemical weapons other than crowd dispersing tear gas, several of the more vicious ‘non-lethals’. Weapons of direct cortical illusion using the forbidden “immix” code—

‘But how?’ demanded Allie. ‘How do you mean,
an invasion
?’

Mamba began to cry, in piercing wails.

Nathalie pressed white-knuckled fists to her mouth.

—Expressed solidarity with the English people, and assured them they would be freed from oppression, disorder, torture and tyranny. Freed from the delusions of the Counterculture, free to practice in any style the three Approved Monotheisms, or the five Approved Pantheisms; or to practice Principled Atheism.

‘What’ll we do?’ cried Chip. ‘What are we supposed to do?’

‘Get hold of
Rox
,’ insisted Felice, as if this were the vital move that would annihilate the Chinese Expeditionary Force.

‘You’d better go home, Charlie,’ said Allie, hearing her own words time-delayed, echoey; like someone talking in a dream. ‘Tell anyone else who’s working today they should go home too. It’s going to be chaos.’

Charlie got his things together and left. Who said, but
we
should all stay at the San? Maybe nobody said it: it was so obvious. This was where they had always gathered to face trouble. They had to stick together, how could they not? Dora and Chez took Chip and Verlaine back to Notting Hill, in the Snake Eyes people-van. They loaded up, then they drove to Lambeth, loaded up again, and said goodbye to the communards. The round trip took hours. Anyone who had wheels in London had scrounged some kind of fuel. There was a mass epidemic unauthorised personal transport hypocrisy, with hardly any police, and the added value of a generation of drivers who’d never had to deal with traffic before.

Rox wasn’t answering hir phone. They swung by Queen Anne Street on the way back, but s/he wasn’t there.

By the time they reached Buckingham Palace Road again it was dark. The concourse around the Victoria Monument was heaving. The permanent campground in Hyde Park had broken up, and many of the campers were trying to take refuge inside the Insanitude. A crowd of them, laden with hippie regalia, banners and bundles, besieged the Building Management Office. Further crowds had flocked to the old Reich Headquarters as if to a Big Screen, convinced that here, somehow, they would get the real news.

It was a humid, autumnal night, the air was still, noise deadened. A handful of mounted police with lanterns appeared and disappeared, like rocks emerging from the choppy human sea. Police on foot were holding a lane open for authorised vehicles to enter the Courtyard; with great difficulty. As Dora inched through the turmoil, and the two Snake Eyes cats yowled, distressed to be uprooted, it may have crossed the party’s minds that this was not the best idea they’d ever had. But once they were inside it was okay. A bunker mentality took over, they felt safe.

Allie secured a good set of rooms for Rob and the Babes and the kids and the cats. Chip and Verlaine had a room to share with a window facing an inside courtyard (thinking ahead, don’t want to be on an outer wall); it was reasonable sized and had a decent bed. They could use Allie’s bathroom and kitchen. Nathalie would stay with Dilip. She was afraid to go back to her place. She believed the Chinese would be in London in a day. She would be picked up for re-education; and she was terrified
.

Which did not bode well.

If they’d expected to be in charge they’d have been disappointed: but it hadn’t crossed their minds. The Few had never been in charge, and they knew they would never sit around that circle of schoolroom tables again, giving advice and consent. The Balcony Room had become an emergency shelter for Hyde Park campers. They made Allie’s office their headquarters and spent most of their time in there, kids and cats underfoot, watching the disaster unfold. Allie moved into the new general office on the first floor, for the Reich work she needed to do: closing things down, wiping hard drives, making sure paper was shredded. No one had been able to locate Rox.

They watched Australian channels, and the Radio Delhi webcast, to find out what was really happening, more or less: English State tv for loony disinformation. They found out about the beachheads, and spluttered at President Fred’s perfidy. They heard Crisis Europe described, from all sides, as ‘a tragic and violent backwater’—which warned them not to expect much from the international community; and they saw the most momentous event of the world’s recent history calmly airbrushed out of existence.

The Chinese did not believe in the ‘A-team’. The few and vague statements that had come out of China in the past year had cast doubt on the nature of the event—without going into specifics. Now they had their story sorted out. The ‘so-called event’ was an ‘absurd mystification’ of the simple fact that the world’s reserves of polluting fuels had collapsed more steeply than Western forecasts had expected. The Chinese people, who had already made a successful transition to the post-fossil-fuel era, saw no need to attribute the decline to black magic! US science colleagues had admitted the shameful truth, Chinese investigators having uncovered irrefutable evidence of how the Big Lie had been perpetrated. Absurd “Neurobomb” research had been abandoned, as Mr Eiffrich had wisely decreed.

Aoxomoxoa’s so-called, pseudo-spiritual ‘Zen Self achievement’, wasn’t even worth discussing, and the Reich had more or less disappeared. Wang Xili, when asked directly about the fate of Ax Preston, had difficulty placing the name. The English President?, prompted the interviewer. Famous guitarist, former ‘rockstar dictator’? Last heard of under house arrest?

‘Mr Preston has nothing to fear from us,’ said Wang Xili. ‘He will be treated like any other private citizen.’

The goodlooking South West General was spokesperson for the invading forces, the one you usually saw on camera. Which didn’t mean he was in charge but it was a start. Get an impression of the guy, thought Rob. Ax would be taking in everything. But he felt that the task was hopeless, the Reich was nowhere, this disaster was too huge. Ax Preston, who he?

The Few, naturally, made no attempt to contact Greg Mursal, or Faz Hassim. Before the invasion was a day old you’d have had to be mad to want to be associated with the government. For about forty eight hours, after that casual aside from Wang, they really hoped that the Triumvirate would be released by the Chinese and allowed to join them. Then the lightning strike reached London. Hu Qinfu, the General in Command of Subduing the Capital, made his first appearences—and there was a broadcast from Wallingham. It went out live (allegedly) on all the State-controlled media. Ax spoke to the nation from the Yellow Drawing Room, Sage and Fiorinda silent on either side. He praised the English people for their calm, and the armed forces for their courage. Lord Mursal walked into the shot to join him. The two men clasped hands, and looked soulfully into each other’s eyes.

Sage and Fiorinda sat and smiled.

The Few, who had not known what to expect, moaned in horror.

‘Oh, God,’ whispered Allie, ‘Oh
shit
. The bastards!’

‘I can’t look, I can’t look,’ wailed Chip.

The door of Allie’s office burst open. A wild-eyed heavily-stubbled North Wing Desperanto marched in. He wore dirty urban-camo ‘fatigues’ from a defunct fashion chain; homemade Roumanian colours, blue and yellow and red, roughly stitched onto the breast.

‘You!’ he yelled at Rob. ‘You, you you…!’ He jerked his rifle at the other males. ‘Out! Report for duty.’

You don’t argue with an armed ex-Boat Person gangster.

‘Okay, but what’s going on?’ asked Rob, politely. ‘Who are you?’

‘The Insanititude has become a Republic.’

London had fallen. The Countercultural rebel MPs had fled to Reading, where they would form an emergency government in the Palace of Rivermead. The ‘ringleaders’ of the Second Chamber regime were in custody. Hu Qinfu was arranging to accept Mayor’s surrender, in Central Hall. The former Buckingham Palace had become a magnet for every diehard partisan, and the Few were trapped.

In the quiet of the Forest at sundown Ax stood barefoot, having washed in a pan of stream water; recited the praises of the Lord of the World, prostrated himself and twice repeated the Sura.
Guide us on the straight path
… The fifth day of the invasion begun the best he could, he climbed into the fork of the sycamore tree by the East Gable, with his guitar. The stars came out in a tender depth of sky; bats flickered, a hunting owl cried. Ax touched the strings of the Les Paul, composing images of Yap Moss, that winter battlefield. The empty spaces of blonde dead grass, the clusters of scuffling men; orange darts of fire, cordite smoke. All the men had Ax’s face, because who else can you really speak for? They stopped firing, they laid down their arms. In other parts of the moor the shooting, fighting, dying, would go on. You can only speak for yourself make your point and leave thes stage.

On the sixth day of the invasion, the former staff officers of the barmy army convened at their old Yorkshire HQ. Easton Friars, outside Harrogate, had been derelict long ago, when it was taken over by the militarised hippies. It was derelict again. Plans for its restoration, and the creation of an Islamic Campaign Experience, had been shelved at an early stage.

Nobody had ever bothered to remove the furniture. The Council of War was held in a common-room where someone’s Victorian ancestors still looked down, pockmarked by barmy darts games, spotted with damp, on mildewed leather sofas and chairs. Richard Kent, the former British Army Major who’d commanded Ax’s army during the dictatorship, presided. West African by ethnicity, Midlands born, he was thicker round the middle than he used to be, but still in trim. Beside him was Cornelius Sampson, another retired soldier, Richard’s lover of many years—