Читать книгу Shamanspace - Steve Aylett - Страница 4

Inconsistencies are shown to be limbs on the same creature

The Internecine pulled me in immediately, my headshout summoning a unit before the Prevail swung by in response to the girl’s phonecall. I was ghostburnt, in mourning and voiding lumps of the cover personality.

After a few days in my cell at the Keep, I went to see Lockhart in his study, a room tumoured with statuary and patched with a lot of detail. Chairs of red leather polished like cherry skin, floors of heart pine, fruit hugged in a bowl and a fire the colour of drugs. Here we sat and talked in the utter sadness and treasuring of golden mischief which came of knowing it was all for nothing. The Keepworks cloaking system rendered everything ironic instantly; and all the while we meant it.

‘You know this bit of barefaced enlightenment could have smashed the neighbourhood?’ Lockhart said, his face full of the vitality of old wisdom. Misery glows better with fibres of experience.

‘I got sloppy, then lucked out—that’s all.’ I was healthier. Matter felt right. ‘Where’s Melody?’

‘Paris, sidebanding the Prevail motherhouse. She sends her congratulations. She was interested to hear the Prevail have located the heart of god and this assassin girl of theirs happened to know about it. So you’re to do the job.’

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it? Slingshot into the monster’s eye. Why shouldn’t it be me. A crack in the furnace may be fiercer than the mouth.’

‘Quite. But I’ve been wondering, if the Prevail have the location, why haven’t they carried out the hit?’

‘They’re limousine rebels. Riddles retreat, if they’re weak. This one keeps staring until they look away.’

‘We don’t. You don’t. You’re getting faster. If anything you’re overconfident. We bleed outside the history books, Alix. However tempting to scorn through victory and leave it wrapped in whispers. Don’t become so attached to your rep that you delay the final act forever. Allow for etheric wind-sheer—and that of cowardice.’

‘What the hell does that mean.’

Lockhart’s face congested with concern. ‘People, unlike our target, can give way to pity. I believe the Prevail feel something like that. Individual versus society, or versus god. Either way it’s the resistance to absorption. Independence of spirit. Pause any country and you’ll spot subliminal torture in the frame. The sky of culture looks downward, obstructive and unambitious. The edgemen are a circus of parallel citizenry. So we sometimes forget the pain that drove us here in the first place.’

‘God, camouflaged by sheer familiarity, different to nothing, essence of agony.’ This was re-examined rote, out of an old but good edgemen book called The Ultimate Midnight.

‘The debate is: Destroy the universe entire? Or cut god out like a cancer? We in the Internecine believe that in destroying god, we’ll bring everything to an end—that it runs through all matter. Because the Prevail believe the universe will continue after god’s destruction, their considerations are entirely different from ours. When men assume they’ll continue, responsibility is postponed.’

‘Listen, what if it made no difference, neither ended it all nor made it better—why do the hit?’

‘At the simplest level? Revenge, and honour satisfied.’

‘Then death wouldn’t be punishment enough, would it?’

Lockhart twitched a small smile. ‘You and old Quinas have a lot to talk about.’

I didn’t like the sound of this—Quinas was a charred moon dropped from the sky, yesterday’s hero gone to margin remnants and remains. ‘I’ve met shamanic burnouts. Some shivering leftover with weird eyes? I haven’t got the patience to hear about some gold-rimmed yesterday.’

‘He’s rather younger than I am,’ Lockhart muttered tersely, and I felt like the idiot I was. I loved this kindly gentleman who had been born in the days before our enemy’s existence had even been verified. ‘In any case it’s important you meet him before the big push. And be surprised by nothing you see or hear. He’s ... on the night side of right.’

I decided I needed a little more recovery time. I’d stripped my gears being something deliberately counterclockwise to my idea of myself—someone out of control. Hip discord wasted my time. But I was the great age for edgework—faced with truth, the young merely fizzed with its acid clarity. They weren’t crippled—they were connoisseurs of the delicate tension between alive and nonalive, the sweet halfway.

In my cell I watched the colloidal motion in the wall, and asked for stories. I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell. Here were stored Arabian secrets uncynical and sensate, books tattooed in pain-ink, buds turning open, suburb flagstones, broken down gardens, a tin barrow red hot in the sun, insects in the dusk-fluctuating wind flying against shallow water, a mind where river floor scenes flutter unseen, all in the worming walls of the Keep. I treasured the safety here. Dead entrances withstood storms and there were aimless stains of music on the air. Outer platitude galaxies tapped ineffectual at the door. Kneeling to see along two thousand miles of architectonics I found the accumulated density of civilisation, the food chain binding scraps of posterity. Society flowed along the vibration, unchallenged and unchallenging. What kind of world was that for a growing lad?