Castles Made of Sand (25 page)

He found nothing, not a trace of whatever had been going on: and the kid was fine. No problems, no damage, cleared A1 for more devastating neuronautical adventures, lucky lad. When Verlaine had gone back to London, Sage went over Verlaine’s trip again, with Serendip. It turned out that the young Adjuvant had been given a double dose of snapshot. Olwen had discovered that the capsules were going walkabout, so she’d changed the system: the new delivery method had been subverted by human error. Oh, fuck, so much for our health and safety standards, thank God he took no harm, better keep him on the bench for a while.

Later, Olwen was intrigued by Sage’s report: but by then Verlaine no longer remembered remembering anything, and his scans showed no confirmation. She suggested a telepathy artefact (they happened all the time, a useless irritation). Sage could have been worrying about Ax’s chip himself.

Consciousness and memory are worse than DNA for contamination errors, said the guru. We have to be very, very careful not to be fooled. And no, Sage,
you will not
up your own dosage. We’re making progress. Just be patient.

Fiorinda went to the Benelux with DARK, crossing by sea through mean spring weather, as the tunnels were completely out of commission. Their set featured the new DARK album
Safo
; and the debut of some songs from
Yellow Girl
. The flood countries were not calm: they had an interesting time, dodging riots and living on their wits. Meanwhile
Unmasked
, the first album to escape from Gulag Europe (legitimately, through a mathematically-proven virus-free Swedish transcript) had scarfed up five Grammys. The Heads had official confirmation via the Internet Commissioners: plus a disc of the award ceremony, which Sage and George had to convert, with a lot of hassle, to a format that would run on their quarantined hardware: already obsolete, frozen in time—

It was April. The Few went down for a preview of the new Rivermead Palace, before the Mayday opening ceremony. Fiorinda the no-fixed-abode brat was about to have a place of her own at last, the royal suite on the upper floor. The main room was huge, with vast rectilinear windows (justified as solar-collectors, really there because Topsy the architect was a closet sixties fan). The party settled there, after the obligatory tour, when they’d sent the architect away, to watch the Grammy show on Fiorinda’s neo-arts-and-crafts pewter framed wall screen.

The Heads were playing it down, ashamed to have been singled out. ‘It’s the Apocalypse Now awards,’ growled Sage. ‘First they machine-gun you, then they give you a bandaid.’

‘Don’t I remember,’ said Ax, ‘You were the one who thought the Internet Commission ought to take us out and shoot us, after Ivan/Lara?’

‘That was before I knew they were going to make their sanctions permanent.’

‘Fucking typical,’ complained Bill. ‘First time ’e lets us make a mass-market record, and he has to wait until we’re stuck in the gulag with our assets frozen.’

Aoxomoxoa’s fans in England must have greeted the revelation of ‘Unmasked’ much as the crowd at Newport greeted Bob Dylan with his electric guitar—

Aoxomoxoa’s friends cheered and jeered.
Bob Dylan!
How’re we going to keep him down on the farm now—?

Silver and Pearl Wing, leaders of the rugrat-pack had retired to Fiorinda’s neo-arts-and-crafts bedchamber, to share a spliff; sitting on a roll of leftover rush matting. ‘When you look in a mirror,’ said Silver, ‘does the person feel like you?’

‘No. Because it’s a reflection.’ Pearl liked to cut the crap.

‘Think about it. Does it match the person you think you are inside? It doesn’t. That’s because your body image inside your brain has no face.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, nothing.’ Silver paused for a thoughtful draw, spliff clamped elegantly between her fourth and fifth fingers. ‘Just something Sage was saying to me.’

Beside them on the floor lay a package of mottled bark-paper. They were planting a charm, which they intended to retrieve when loaded with psycho-sexual power, and use for business purposes.

‘We’ll put it in the middle. That’s where Fiorinda sleeps and female sex energy is stronger.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Mum says so. Don’t you ever listen, cloth ears? Male sex energy is piddling.’

‘No, I mean how do you know Fiorinda sleeps in the middle?’

‘Easy. Just watch them. She’s always in the middle.’

‘How can you tell where the middle of the bed’s going to be? It isn’t here yet.’

‘Feng Shui.’

Downstairs Ruby and Jet, Anne-Marie’s three-year-old and five-year-old, wandered around, tugging at wall hangings, clambering on artistic furniture. Smelly Hugh, AM’s villainous-looking but gentle partner, nursed Safire, the new baby, while AM gave the Powerbabes a herbalist consultation. Felice was pregnant at last, after years of sorrow. Rob was ecstatic, glowing like a pregnant girl himself. He had longed for children, but Dora and Cherry had been adamant: it had to be Felice’s baby first, or no babies at all…

Roxane presided, magisterial, over the happy, homely court; from one of the Roman cross-framed storm-timber chairs. If Ax is a shameless socialist, and Sage is passionately conservative, that leaves Fiorinda to lead the party of Gladstone. Fiorinda a Liberal? That doesn’t sound right. S/he smiled at hir mistake. Of course. Our young queen, compassionate nihilist, is above politics, and served with equal devotion by her government and her loyal opposition.

Long may the coalition endure!

I hate rush matting, thought Fiorinda. It hurts your feet, and food gets stuck in it. Thank God I’ll never actually have to
live
here. Is it crazy to feel nostalgic for a sign that says AUTOMATIC DOOR NOT WORKING? For the smell of carpet glue? Bitter malaise possessed her,
this is not my world…
Fergal Kearney, over the other side of the great sunlit hall, watched her with puzzled sympathy. She rearranged her face. Look happy: that’s your job. Stone Age Royalty.

‘Tell us what’s going on with the Zen Self, Sage,’ suggested Cherry, tickling Safire’s chin. ‘Like when you told us about quantum cryptography that time.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Felice, ‘That was cool. Eve was the bad guy.’

‘What is consciousness?’ suggested Rob, trying to sound scientific.

The weird science cabal, Dilip and the Heads, Chip and Ver, grinned at each other. ‘Ah…’ said Sage. ‘How long is a piece of string?
Consciousness
is different things to different people. It depends on the situation. It depends what you’re trying to measure. It’s not a very useful concept—’

‘Okay, he doesn’t know the answer,’ said Ax. ‘Better try another question.’

‘Every moment of perception has its global brain state: perceptions, recall, emotions, sensations, all bound together. Your sense of your self is formed by a crucial collection of these brain states, stored in memory. It’s a blurred template, just enough for us to get by. But all those global states are also real objects in information-space, also known as the sum of all possible states, and there the record is perfect. Achieving the Zen Self, which means gaining unlimited access to the State of all States, would
incidentally
include the entire past, present and future, of the information-states that make you, you. What we’re doing is rewiring our brains to take that weight. If we dope your firing patterns right, under certain conditions, you move into phase with information-space for a very short time. Every time you repeat the experiment there’s a lasting physical effect, tiny but real. Your brain gets closer to being able to process your 4-D awareness.’

‘And that would be the Zen Self?’ suggested Dora.

‘Er, no. Zen Self, stable fusion with the State of all States, is another huge scale-up. But achieving the first level might trigger the second. That’s what we hope will happen.’

‘So what do we get out of this?’ asked Ax. ‘Time travel? Psychic powers?’

Sage shook his head, smiling with wondrous sweetness; and so did the other labrats: a very strange effect. Peter Stannen, who was now learning to live without the veil, was particularly beatific.

‘The Zen Self is an end in itself. If you were doing it you’d understand. But trust me, Ax, there’ll be applications. One day, my lord, you will tax the stuff.’

‘You get visions of the future,’ said Allie. ‘I saw about that on Channel Seven.’

‘Nah, total rubbish. Popular misconception.’

(AX MUST GET THAT CHIP FIXED!)

Allie looked bemused. ‘But the drug, snapshot, does give you visions?’

‘Information-space is sort of an eleven-dimensional kaleidoscope,’ explained Verlaine helpfully. ‘Or, um, it might be sixteen. Are we on eleven, fifteen or sixteen currently, Sage? There’s no way of knowing that what you see under snap is, uh, real, so to speak, or just an aspect.’

‘It’s all real, really,’ murmured Chip. ‘And nothing is real, too—’

‘Snapshot’s a nickname,’ said the boss. ‘The drug’s a neural aligner. Snapshot” is what the scanner does. In case something falls off the edge while you’re out-of-body, like vision or motor control or whatever, Olwen’s scanner has a
rescue me
snapshot of your last normal state, so she can re-install—’

He realised, a little too far into this cheery description of routine brain death, that some of his friends, including his girlfriend, were staring in horror.

Hmm. Maybe I better back-pedal.

‘Of course, it’s never happened.’

‘You LIAR!’ shouted Fiorinda, jumping up. ‘You
bastard
!’ She stormed out.

‘You’d better go after her,’ said Allie, ‘and by the way, if you’ve really been doing what that sounded like, risking your life and, and your faculties like that, and not telling her, you
are
a bastard.’

Sage went after Fiorinda. Ax looked at the weird scientists. ‘Has it?’

‘Not seriously,’ said Dilip, caught between two awesome fires.

‘We’re talking picoseconds,’ said George. ‘No danger. An’ Olwen’s in charge.’

‘Like hell.’ It was well known that Sage could wrap Olwen Devi round his crooked little finger. Ax pulled the Les Paul, which he’d brought with him on this auspicious day, into his lap, and plucked a couple of softly zinging chords.

‘Information-space, mm… Pity that stuff does not agree with me.’

Fiorinda was sitting on the plinth of the dead-cars sculpture at the main entrance. She looked up as Sage joined her. She wasn’t angry. ‘Don’t worry, I know I can’t stop you. I wouldn’t try.’ He sat beside her. ‘When we first met, you were like Einstein in a hamster cage. I remember thinking, after I’d talked to you a couple of times, fuck, no wonder he has to sedate himself with alcohol. He’d go bonkers in this biz, otherwise.’

‘I felt much the same about you, my brat.’

‘Huh. Very funny.’

This tired-eyed, secretive, twenty-year-old girl is almost singlehandedly directing the drop-out hordes operation, an economy of four millions. People, that is, not currency. When the media folk want to know what’s her role in the Triumvirate she says,
I’m the girl. I do the housework, of course
.

Some household.

‘I wish I could stop you from dismissing what you do. What’s the VI budget at the moment? A rough estimate?’

‘I never think of it like that. Think about the money and you’re lost, I think of it as a shape,’ said Fiorinda. ‘A four-dimensional puzzle: everything has fit inside the envelope and everything has to keep moving… Okay, I love Ax’s England, I love my fascinating hobby. But it isn’t what I want.’

‘Fiorinda, what’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong. I know you’re not happy.’

‘I can’t begin to tell you how fake it felt, on tour with DARK, pretending I was still a musician.’

He knew she was lying: expertly, instantly protecting one secret with another. But what could he say? The light of spring was so beautiful. Beyond the tented town, a mist of colour moved like smoke through the budding trees on the other side of the river. She turned to him. No words, just a look, a sad gaze in which both of them were drowning—

‘Excuse me.’

Pearl Wing had appeared. Silver and Pearl were in principle pretty children, sweet oval faces, soft, pale brown hair and Chinese black eyes: but temperament came shining through. Pearl stood four-square, arms folded, tenacious: a bulldog puppy in a smocked dress.

‘Can I ask you something about your sex life?’

‘Go ahead,’ said Fiorinda, ‘if you feel lucky, punk. Try it.’

Pearl skipped a step backwards. ‘Who sleeps in the middle?’

‘Hahaha. Usually I do,’ said Sage. ‘Now clear off.’

Mary Williams was sending Marlon to boarding school, and Sage was
over my dead body
… Mary got her way, but as a trade-off Mar was allowed to visit Brixton. He developed a huge crush on his dad’s girlfriend: dropping her name all over the place, as he cut a swathe through the young scene at the Insanitude.
My sort of step-mother, you know, Fiorinda…
Sage hadn’t been allowed to have his son on a visit since Mar was four. The improvement in relations with his ex was a profound relief: ironic that it should come when his miraculous new happiness was running into trouble.

Fiorinda is unhappy: Ax is burying himself in his work.

And Sage is conflicted, seeing both sides.

One day he met Fergal Kearney in the Mall, Sage coming away from a meeting in Whitehall; Fergal from the Insanitude. The Irishman was heading for St James’s Park, to feed the ducks. Sage had been wanting to talk to Fergal. A problem was developing between the London barmies and the Kilburn Celtic street-gangs. The ‘Celtics’ were not necessarily Celtic Nations-origin, but the Few’s certified native Irish rockstar would impress them. Fergal had a lot of clout with the barmies as well. He’d been formally inducted, after Spitall’s Farm, with the proper militarised hippy ceremony: something Ax and Sage had never achieved. And probably they’d better not—

They strolled by the lake, and discussed Fergal’s possible role.

‘How are you keeping? You’re looking better.’

‘Fer a man with cirrhosis and a cancer fighting over his bones,’ said Fergal, ruefully, I’m in fine shape. A fine fockin’ defector I’ve turned out to be… I’m a crock, Sage, me darling. Some days, I’m jest incapable of rising from me bed.’