Ink (10 page)

skim the skybike low over the chimney stacks of the Circus, slaloming between the chi-blasts from the thopters overhead. The cross-fire of the gun emplacements pounds the sky all around me as I dive right down through it into the inner circle of the terrace, with its tarmac road and little grassy park where SS analysts are tucking into their packed lunches. The SS info-monkeys scatter, dive for cover as, chi-lance held out at right angles, I strafe each Georgian town house in passing, shattering windows, splintering doors, scarring sandstone with the blue-green beam of jizz-juice. I rip through the terrace, round and round again. It's neat. The thopters’ blasts cause almost as much damage as I do, melting tarmac, torching trees and bushes with each near-hit. Some of them spear parked aircars, the shrill alarm of one going off like an air-raid shelter suffering an anxiety attack. Woop! Woop! Woop! Five minutes to self-destruct, I think. But isn't there always?

With the blackshirts pouring from the doors of offices all round the terrace now, firing from windows, roofs, I reckon that it's getting a little hot for comfort. Time to call it quits while I'm ahead. I lock the chi-lance into its holder and hit the brakes to spin the skybike up and round, like some latter-day black knight's steed rearing in evil fury. Orgone vapor spumes from the lateral vents like steam from flaring nostrils as I turn her on a button, riding one-handed so I can quick-draw my Curzon-Youngblood, carve a lightning flash above the doorway marked as Central Office, and holster it with a twirl in one swift motion. I kick the brakes off and lean forward as the bike rockets up in a sixty-degree climb aimed straight at the lead ornithopter.

——

Man, I could count the beads of sweat on the thopter pilot's forehead, I swear, as he bucks his vehicle out of the way and I zip past him, close enough to shower sparks where my ray tank clips his wing. I roll with the bump, let it add a little extra chaos to my naturally erratic flight path. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee? Fuck that, I'm a dragonfly on speedballs, a psychotic midge kneecapping every fucking daddy longlegs dumb enough to be in my way. I break right, roll and come up headed straight for the white tower of the old church that holds the easternmost gun emplacement of the Circus complex. Brilliant blues and greens whiz past my head, pretty fireworks for this winter's night. I love these fuckers. Really, honestly. They make a pyromaniac feel so welcome.

All the little hellhounds well and truly on my trail now, I rip open the throttle on the bike and give it full jets on. It's straight ahead from here, next stop Charing Cross, and the City Centre after that, beyond the blossoms of chi-blasts that light my path, left, right, up, down and shaking my ass all round about.

I reckon it's only a matter of time now. There's a fuckload more chaos still to be caused, but my little wake-up call on the Circus should be more than enough to get their arses in gear and their fingers out (not the best metaphors to mix in terms of savory images, perhaps, but what the hell). Yes, I suspect that very soon somebody's going to be looking at that lightning flash over the Central Office's burnt and splintered door and figuring out exactly what it means.

Excuse me, Mrs. Police State, can Joey come out and play?

Joey stalks the boards of the stage. It's still two hours till the curtains go up, but already he's getting into character and that means it's best not to go near him. Jack's on the roof of the wagon practicing his flips and flops, Don's setting up the SFX, and Guy is sitting on the wagon's steps, head in his hands and muttering about the younger generation, philistines and, in particular, those of us with the voice of an angel and the attention span of a gnat.

“OK,” I say. “OK, I'm sorry. It's just—how does anything
call like a frieze?
It doesn't make sense.”

“It's not meant to,” he says. “You're in love with Harlequin, delirious, mad with love for him, your reason gone.”

“My reason for what?”

“Just sing the bloody line,” he says.

I shrug.

He sighs.

“OK. Let's take it from
Come, come, you timeless golden pride”
he says.

“Come, come, you timeless golden pride,” I sing. “Run, dance into delirium! Dance to the thunder of the drum that beats in time with pounding feet, and sing the praises of your spirit, joy. Call like a frieze across the centuries, sing out your ancient songs in answer to the holy flute that calls you out to play with sweet sad song. A colt in pasture at its mother's side bounding along, joy in its heart—this is the song that tears the world apart.”

And whirling, twirling, birling, furling and unfurling from a pirouette that spins on like a skater on the ice—how does he do that?—Jack breaks out of it into a sweeping bow.

“The song that tears the world apart?”
says Joey.

He comes striding to the stage's edge, steps off and lands soft, almost silent on the stone floor. He's in character all right now.

“You don't think the Duke will read that as a reference to the Cant?” he says. “You don't think that's a little fucking obvious? Hey there, unkin fucker, we know all about you and your language. You don't think that's just asking for trouble?”

You can see it in his narrowed eyes, the quiver of jaw muscle as he grits his teeth. Guy stands up from the wagon steps, hands up, placatory.

“Joey, it's a metaphor for love.”

Joey holds the psycho stare for a second then blinks and rolls his shoulders in a visible release. It's like someone threw a switch.

“Forget it,” he says [shakes his head with a wry smile]. ‘As you were.”

Bloody method actors, I think. Guy sits back down, gives a nod to me to start again. I watch as Joey climbs back up onto the stage.

“O Themes,” I sing …

“O Themes,” I sing, “you gardeners of Simile, garland yourself with ivy. Burst and bloom with blossoms of lush green bryony and bring boughs of oak and pine to join the revels. Put on your motley coat of fawn skin trimmed with tufts of silver fur, and sport your wands with wild devotion.”

I skip this way, that way, cross the stage, hands reaching out, calling the audience themselves to join me in my madness: Duke and Princess; courtiers and serfs.

“We'll have the whole land dancing to the Harlequin's hail,” I sing. “Come, come with us into the hills where mobs of maidens leave the spinning and the weaving of the loom to spin and weave instead in frenzied dance, caught in the frantic and frenetic, schizophrenic trance of Harlequin.”

And I whirl off the stage, to leave an emptiness, a pause, a smattering of confused applause.

Joey lets the silence hold for a few seconds.

“So you have a problem,” he says eventually, walking to the window.

“Jack Flash,” says the Minister. “We need him … laid to rest.

” Through the dim reflection in the glass, Joey tries to pick out shapes he recognizes out past the perimeter wall—concrete, tall and buttressed—arcing around the brow of the hill on which the Circus sits. Just past the wall, and lit up now and then by its swinging searchlights, a pedestaled statue of some general on horseback stands at the edge of where the park slopes down into darkness, looking out like a lone sentinel across the park to the old tower that dominates the Rookery's silhouetted skyline. To the north, the tenemented streets of merchants are lit by halogen streetlights. To the south, by the river and near the monolithic, hulking husk of the old granary, the bombed-out wreck of the old Imperial Chi Industries works lies sunken among the skeleton cranes and warehouse shells of the airshipyards and docklands, concrete ruins on the skyline still burning, belching out blue-green orgone smoke from broken chimneys, like some dragon necropolis. Twenty years ago it was the largest orgone manufactory in all of Albion, before it was pounded into rubble; it still smolders, might do so forever, the undying flame of a failed rebellion. The undying legend.

“We believe you're the person for the job, Agent Pechorin.”

Joey gathers his long dark hair behind his head into a ponytail, slides an elastic tie over it. In the glass, his own pale face stares back at him, the Minister just a faint shape over his right shoulder.

Jack Flash, he thinks. It's a name that holds a lot of history to Joey. The spark of a Zippo, the glow of its flame in eyes wide and black with chemical zeal. Punk hair the color of the Molotov in his hand. Midnight raves in the subway system, decks and amps pounding, FAST PUCK tagged on every train in the depot, Joey's hold-all stuffed with drugs, then money and drugs, and then just money. Militia
raids and mobs in riot, petrol bombs splattering flame on dank brickwork behind them as they splash through tunnels. Wild nights in Rookery clubs.
You've got to meet these guys
, says Jack.
Here. Fast Puck. Guy Fox. This is my main man, Joey. Joey Narcosis.

Then cons and hustles, deals and heists. They made a good team, Guy and Puck, Jack and Joey, every job done with the Thieves Guild seal of quality. Bigger and bigger scores, jackings of airtrains, whole wireliners. But it had to get political, had to turn into a revolution, and Joey, always on backup and contingency, the Flawfinder General watching their asses for reality's bite, Joey saw the end of it right from the start. A cigarette flicked down in disgust as he walks out of a room, shaking his head, rebel against rebellion itself. They were a good team. But every team has to have its traitor.

“Jack Flash is dead,” he says. “He's just a memory, a symbol.”

“The people have enough
symbols
without this Jack Flash,” says the Minister. “This city has always been a troublesome place. We don't want another King Finn.”

Joey studies the gray-suited shade in the reflection, as the man straightens his armband nervously—the circle of white on red, the black swastika, corporate logo of Albion PLC. The Minister drones on about the stability of the realm, the danger of another Shabti Uprising out in the fields beyond the city, heroic myth patterns and memetic threats, Futurist plots. Joey's eyes drift from the shade of the man to the bars that crisscross the window, black with paint peeling here and there to rust beneath. Stability has never been his big concern. He wonders how many of these new-generation blackshirts are really just conservatives living in the world made for them, quoting Mosley, Powell and Thatcher, listening to Wagner, reading Tolkien, worrying about the death of rural Albion and all the heritage and tradition of its folk but, really, more concerned about the FTSE than the Thousand-Year Realm. Pen-pusher fascists signing off on the terminations of dissidents because that's just what their nine-to-five entails. If it wasn't for the North Sea chi-wells, Albion would have fallen to the Futurists long ago. ft might have been the first nation to turn the black oil into blue-green light, but the Age of Industry has kept rolling on since then. And there are still fuck-wits who think of the chi, of orgone energy, this power of sex and death, as
magic.