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  ‘I know all that,’ I told him. A lot of edgemen contracted that turn of the head that got them talking weird—past and future helixed together.

  ‘But do you see that even genuine power may have something to hide? Too inquisitive and it pulls rank. Always that in the end. It seems that whenever god has a fight with us it’s never over what he’s really angry about.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘You’re right, that’s more of a girl thing. But we’re living amid its moulted material, including the hothouse-cultivated hell some call civilisation. Democracy, for want of a better word, denies the song every day with a din of affairs, our opinions yelled above the sound of hope scratching in the dust, all in faith eyes and alarm. Though hysterical, folk are proud—and it’s hard for people to stampede when they’re strutting. Genocide, a million jet-trail outcries, easily ignored. Unconcerned we are not awakened—are we perfect or imperfect? Public fountains haven’t answered us in years. And all the while a thin film of identity separates you and oblivion.’

  By now bored and languid, I hadn’t the patience for this crumb-cupboard past. The twists of tacking convention are pretty to some, not me. ‘This is alot of damp news.’

  ‘Yes—I apologise. You need to know about the Internecine’s failed attempts, these things our own people bet their shirts on. Let’s see then. Did you know they tried a sort of MK Ultra programmed agent scheme? But ofcourse it could sense something—everything, in fact. They decided the only hope was to operate in a way about which it didn’t care. We knew there’s a vast percentage of events about which it doesn’t especially care, and those involving human suffering seemed a safe bet—so we raised an agent from scratch. Lived in a monastery and so on, and died unaware he was a virus—to sneak him into heaven. He’d then be activated and do the hit. But they found the heart of the creature wasn’t there—this “heaven” was just a place to get people squared away, one of countless infinite bandwidths for etheric soul material.’

  This story was brand new to me. I couldn’t quite believe it, but Quinas was transparent. I should have known a blaze of honesty is a fine decoy.

  ‘I used to be the bigshot like yourself, but I believed a quick hit wasn’t enough, I thought the creator should be tortured beforehand. I loaded our pain—guided crawling to the only choice, deference to the lucky, extorted worship, full-body entropy, incinerative powerlessness, the medicinal smell of lies—in to a million etheric traps throughout subspace. If one was tripped they’d all tip at once in to god’s mind. But like a clumsy poacher, I managed to trip it myself.’

  ‘If you survived, god certainly would have.’

  ‘But it would have suffered more—with it being the source, the experience would have been a feedback loop. Torture was the point. Anyway, I realised it had delayed me from the inside. The sheer bravura of that, the regard the project would get me. Yes, I should have just gone for the hit. You see, we’re part of our enemy. It hides by walking in its own footprints. It’s everything. Luckily this means anywhere’s an entrance to it, in fact we’re already there. The question is, how to reach a vital organ.’

  ‘Well I’ve found that, and you’re wasting my time. All I want to do is say goodbye to a few people, let them know it’s about to end, and do the job.’

  ‘The stars of reason corrupt your sky, Alix. You’re too coolheaded. You’ll need anger that would turn sand to glass. God depends on our becoming distracted—as you have, with your style, as the Prevail have, with their politics. It knows you’re coming.’

  ‘We take precautions—we’re hidden here.’

  ‘The Keep’s made of anglematter—antimatter reversed through its own dimensions to make a near-neutral greyspace. Tied off sidelong to society with false entrances of whole years. Normally the body eats space equal to its size. Not here. The Keep’s not camouflaged. In fact it stands out like a scar that won’t tan.’

  ‘If it knows, why doesn’t it stop us?’

  Quinas smiled winterly. Geometrics whirled through the albescent walls. He was a fine one to accuse me of a lack of passion. The man had been ghostburnt to ice.

  ‘Without consciousness there’s no cruelty—only objects without pain. God made us conscious for a reason. It knew that when its cells became self-aware, they’d experience a pitch of pain that’d send them for revenge. We’re nano-assassins. It just takes one of us little viruses to get to the right place. In our capacity as god’s suicidal impulse the idea’s always been to work covert, like a drink habit—god’s cowardly, it doesn’t want to know or take responsibility for what it’s doing. That’s why it delegated in the first place, yes? A part of it knows what we’re doing, because we are that part of it. Just don’t make too much noise. It’ll let us sneak up. A telescope is god looking at itself. We are god cursing at itself. When we kill it, we’ll be god killing itself.’

  Behind him was the image of a nerve in earth growing a grassblade thin and already dying.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s been good, Mr Quinas.’ I stood, feeling headachy. Not good.

  ‘You like books—let me give you a going-away gift,’ he said, standing as an opalescent shelf extruded from the wall. Amid the junk I noticed curse needles and a very rare spinelight camera. He took down a book of mirrors, flipping through it in an absorbed sort of way—I thought he’d forgotten me. Then he handed it over, his dead silver eyes knowing exactly where I stood. ‘Acqueville’s Flightless Land Without Clouds. It’s said this book learned the ultimate secret, lain in sun on the tiles for a million years—the pages extracting a store of the mystery, closing. Truth revealed, the sky one big X-ray.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Quinas. Goodbye.’

  I passed through the security sweetwall and glanced back. Quinas was flickering, his body fading to a tintype image. His voice rasped right against my ear. ‘Maybe you didn’t hear me. You expect the stars to know you? We’re nothing, snuff-zeroes in a vacuum.’

  I knew it—he was creating a diversion. An etheric exertion was throbbing in the air. ‘What’s this,’ I said, stupid. Quinas was a red electric outline scrambling from the mirror book—I dropped it as he formed up with a sort of dazed laugh and sprang toward a fast clearing in the outer sweetwall. He hung aside from the crackling gap, behind him a city glittering distant as beads. Phenomenal effects banged past him—he winked his eye and let go, vanishing. The wall closed.

  So it was to be human drama and delay after all.

  4 ETHERIC SPEEDWAY

  The threat of ending has been taken as a promise

  Quinas valved down in Paris and this suggested he had some business with the Prevail. I should have known when he called the world god’s ‘moulted material’—Prevail philosophy. Lockhart was saying I should regenerate and keep my powder dry, whatever the hell that meant. But there was a chance I could stop Quinas from blowing the surprise. I joined Melody in a safe house in the rue Fromentin, loving her but weirding on the city—my nerves sang sickly with the lefthanded landscapes and cathedrals brittle as candy. The style layer was so thick it put a two minute delay on the registration of actual flesh. Melody tried to distract me in a skirt made of brain skin. ‘What’s this?’ she asked, holding the mirror book.

  ‘Quinas gave it me.’

  The only words were an inscription etched on the cover. Mirrors are roots—buried here with us. What they feed is elsewhere. We are a mirror to show god its cruelty. Did Quinas give me this thing to root me deeper into the world? If so it wouldn’t make it.

  I asked Melody for directions to the Prevail motherhouse and she pointed in the ninth direction. I took that very deliberate half-turning step which tilted an edge in the air, showing me a dense cross-section of several etheric miles. A bright band of rich rubine red was immediately noticeable, not far away. I raised an arm toward it, the funhouse-mirror limb stretching to infinity, and let it draw the rest of me into subspace like an elastic band. The room started to funnel and I gained a sense or two, then blurred through a wedding-arch of cobalt flam
e. Vision wedges cut in, passing. Ahead was an audio hole surrounded by warp, liquid voices stretching. Subfrequencies coalesced and sharpened.

  ‘... A society will manufacture an image of progress and locate it in the direction it wishes to take us.’

  ‘Enough smalltalk.’

  It was a typical motherhouse, all mystery windows and trees in the attic. And here was an arcane basement—broad steps and a massive wall into which was set an impressive geomantic gateway. Moving through solid air, my angle cut the visible bodies into edges—aligning a little, they swelled from blood buttons to focused form. Drifting unseen and insulated, outside the colour, I peered in.

  Here was Casolaro, head of the Prevail, gravitational decades telling on his body and no humour to shore him up. ‘You’re here under heavy manners, Quinas.’

  ‘It’s a fragile conquest that bad manners can undo.’

  ‘Amusing, such language.’

  Quinas, his head like a birdcage and one song, made a fluttering gesture of dismissal. ‘I’m a sixty-two year old edgeman, Casolaro. I’ve spent life watching the truth going in and out of focus. I’m no longer holding out for happiness, just a better turn of phrase.’

  This continued a negotiation in the spirit of sinking hoods and strange smiles, all that elite malarkey. Everyone here was shielded, all but Moon, a blond kid about my age. I could see sideways in him like a sandwich man. He pretended he was already what he planned to be, a display fragile as a scale model. Casolaro’s partner Wireless hung back. He wore a uniform that looked like a done puzzle, joins worming in the surface. The pattern continued in tattoo across his sleek bald head.

  ‘I’m aware you’re a burnout—I see it in your eyes. As it were. You’ve run with the ashers a long time—why trap you behind the planets if you weren’t dangerous?’

  ‘They think I’m insane.’

  ‘What does that mean, in this context? Your bargaining position consists precisely and entirely of your being insane and capable of anything.’

  ‘Very flattering, I’m sure.’

  ‘Your bullethead—Alix—he’s not a mere technical instrument, no? Individuality’s not the problem?’

  ‘No, to go all out for differences, that’s us. He’s the etheric surfer boy in the summer of his stardom. Playing a swiss army harp. Getting high on what’s meant to kill him. A certain style, that’s all—the bud’s brittle and dry, it’ll never open.’

  ‘The funeral’s still young. And the Bluetooth’s in ready dock. You’re right that a valve journey’s too great an escape risk. What’s your strategy up front?’

  ‘Forgetting, with all the comforts and drawbacks of addiction.’

  ‘The girl we sent, he got what was in her head?’

  ‘I told you he was a brain bandit, Casolaro. Ofcourse, he’s curious as to why you haven’t initiated the hit.’

  ‘And Lockhart?’

  The young guy Moon stepped toward my view with a jugular gun, his face curious. He was better than I thought—he was sensing me. And the other two stopped, darkness between them. A secret had been taught.

  Moon started crossing over, leaving his outline. I recoiled through the etheric, allowed him to dwindle in the middle distance, a nearly-nothing pinned on the air. He was tracing me even as I entered my body in the safe house, a sticky settling of form. ‘Get a hotel,’ I told Melody, ‘we’re rumbled.’

  We made the street and split up, falling in with shadows. Streets and acres of slick rain, the night black with astral smoke. A six-gun-signature body fell in behind me, Moon treading the length of silence. You can tell an edgeman—his shadow’s strongest furthest away from him. He was smiling already, ahead of himself.

  Passing the mouth of an alley, I folded down to a single element and streamed sideways into the architecture—what a clever evening this was turning out to be. Moon sifted in also and we were fleshtones flushing through the walls on either side of the alley—branching up into roofs and undoing bundles of air before dipping into masonry again. I was rushing through a distinct room of carpet and woodwork, then skeins of bloodlace and a realm of flurrying protoplasmic urgency. I’d merged with a stranger, a librarian unkissed and professional, her accomplishments trim in misery, prayer-pecking and mean. Feathery snowbursts took me out and an armchair went on forever. Before realising it I had left the end of the block and slid through a parked car, which baulked sideways into the road in an explosion of glass. Moon was right behind me as I blurred through a car park, a whole row of vehicles shattering with etheric drag. Then I slammed to a stop inside a car, slipped upward through the roof and apported, jumping down to the tarmac. Moon materialised too fast, merging with a Volvo—the windows were instantly painted red from the inside and then shattered as metal warped out. Elbowed armatures punched out of the chassis and gut lava tumbled out the headlamps. The scene settled down.

  I was stood in an alarm-hooting hypermarket car park like a failed angel, wearing a simplistic memory approximation of my clothes. I don’t know anything about fashion.

  5 VAMPIRES OF PARIS

  The world began as an insurrection—but later joined the vacuum

  It’s said that all societies contain a finite number of persona—those left over merely have fun and good ideas. But our little heads suck in questions like air. I lay in Melody’s hotel room, half my insides phantomburnt by the scrap with Moon. I’d been stupid caning it at a time like this—I should hibernate, heal, say goodbye, do it, whether god knew I was coming or not. A pretty poor virus. The running dematerialisation and rebuild had healed my arm, at least. What a strange and total vocation, blotting the sky.

  Distance in the windows.

  ‘Don’t turn a corner in the air and go all angel on me Alix.’ The way she said it, with honey somewhere behind the word.

  ‘Just outside. Books.’

  She made a face.

  The delicate old city was beyond price—birds immediately felt faster, fish like flitting gems, waters opened the flowers, students my age and older, platinum skies, the stale subway sound of ghosts coming on like cigarette fog. This was the tying of emotional loose ends, saying goodbye before the push—if the Internecine were right, everything and everyone would vaporize moments after the hit.

  I took the mirror book into an antique bookshop on the rue de la Bûcherie, a place to all appearances the victory of habit and knee-jerk illumination. Yet here and there were books produced by cabinetmakers, passwords under the blurb. Lies flowed into their diaries and they died pure, leaving behind cure documents white as cream. Spreading the mirror pages to those of the old books, reflections showed the snail trail left by the author’s bile, invisible behind print. ‘Our secret broken law’, a law so irretrievably broken its existence had to be retroactively denied. ‘Medicine is the slightest species of magic’, the true title of a treatise on the Napoleonic wars. ‘The Dictionary of Endless Independence.’ ‘Perhaps theology is dwelling in hell,’ began another. Tasting hidden chapter names behind the visible.

  I felt like I was returning to my own vomit. This was old, frustrating stuff. God, I was itching to go on.

  It was like a dream, that day. I was picking up history like coloured flavours. Railway furnaces, chestnut ancience, pistol cloaks, hooded horses in a dark tunnel, a symphony of something through long corridors of wide avenues, a slow viscous sky. A white drunkenness in tails and waving coats, galleries murmur and sermon in a scene ceremonious and moving, infinite standing landscapes waltzing under olive trees, openair festivity walking away. A seat by the shore of these things, chairflap beaches of afternoons. Pierview figures stroll at the rail, children at a distance change, yellowing, momentariness. The streets speeding over land. My eyes felt innocent.

  The hotel was a practical hard station, I needed it.

  Melody, her coal eyes far away, told me about a boy using some kind of reverse philtre. ‘When more of his body was drug than human, the drug became hungry for humanity and went out night after night, addicted. This is how v
ampires are born, when a drug ventures out in the shell of a man or woman, trying to re-establish the biological balance. But he fed on a girl who was like him, a drug, and left all humanity behind. The girl lay in piss and blood staring up at the night against which he was shrinking like breath on a mirror. It was the first time she’d met one like herself, and in seconds he was nothing more than a ghost fading from her eye.’

  Melody drew tears into a syringe. Pure among edgemen, it was an intimate act to taste one-another’s protest. Minutes cancered, infrared lightning running up our arms. Pinlights were scrambling over the furniture. Space rushed like the scorched air of a man’s damnation gathering speed, and then the neon dust thrown slowed and stopped. Grief had ploughed us into a seventh heaven where penny wishes rusted. Bloodtime passed in satellite colours and secret deeps, seeing radio species like grain electrons. Little burdens like kisses. Marble holes in the clouds, the journey finishing in other colours, blurring and clamorous, a waterfall of tears.

  A hate girl, sunken pain, a climb through the thirst world, every compromise. A blood father in work glasses. A million miserable mirrors and all was worn. Scarred sighs. Gathering a hole among sheets, dying in a hug. She was so beautiful.

  By windowlight snowstyle bodies entangled ... hissgravel cars ... boiling parks ... big flapping days of lawns ... slow shifts ... breasts flatten to a young stretch ... yawns falling among moments ... brushing all things an hour away ...

  ‘Alix.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait till I’m asleep. Do it when I’m asleep.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Soon she was sleeping, her jet black hair fallen over her face, and I went quietly on to the balcony to drink tea, say goodbye to the sky and obliterate the creator. There were coppery clouds out there, a sunset the colour of ale. I apologised to my victims, expecting no forgiveness. Moon, the hot wind bending his scream. The Prevail’s London assassin. And we won’t be long in getting to heaven from here, whispered the girl with the white skin and thin blade. Two signposts had led through the girl’s head. Anything in life can serve as a doorway to understanding. Dimensionally, a sure way of being everywhere is to exist in time. I finish my tea. The view is done. Like hell I’m not alone.