Free States

16. J’AI PASSE DEVANTTA PORTE

THE MACHINOIX HAD sniffed his coming. Sam Oakenhurst stood at the rail of the great triple-hulled schoomer and saw through Major Moyra’s glass that his brothers and sisters had assembled to greet him.

Their snorting, half-organic vehicles, dark green and brown with senility, drooled and defecated on the quayside while neither citizen nor armed militia dare show disgust or objection. In their city, the machinoix were ignored for the same reason quakes were ignored in Los Angeles. They were unavoidable and unpredictable.

Mr Sam Oakenhurst tasted their power as greedily as he embraced their kinship. His veins thrilled with the memory of his long courtships under the shutterbox, his lingering initiations, his education in seduction. Beware, he signalled the Rose, for I am enraptured already. I love you, Rose. Only you.

The Rose held fast to him and gave him the strength she could spare. He knew there was no physical danger. Any decision of his would be accepted, for he threatened nothing the machinoix valued. This knowledge was insufficient to steady his nerve. He had to call on his every resource and never reveal a hint of his condition to Paul Minct and his colleagues. The Rose, understanding the importance of this deception to her own interests, gave him more support. She had no choice. He was her only ally and while he lived so did she. And she loved him, she said.

By the time they had clambered down the gangway to the lighter, he was scarcely able to disguise the signs of his massive emotional conflict.

With her help, however, he succeeded. He at last stood four square on the quayside, clutching her arm once before advancing towards the middle vehicle from which oddly tattooed hands beckoned, their fingers fractured and re-set at peculiar angles with inserted precious stones and gold. Gnarled as old hedges, the hands had the appearance of eccentrically made robot digits, jointed and decorated for their beauty rather than their function.

The Rose was casual enough as she turned to inform a nervous Mr Minct that Sam Oakenhurst spoke machinoix perfectly. ‘He is the only possible interpreter. He will get us swift passage to Biloxi’

‘It must be the meat boat.’ Paul Minct was wheezing from his recent climb up the iron waterstair. ‘I know they reserve it for themselves but it is what we must have.’

By arrangement with the ship’s captain they were to stay in Rue Dauphine at the Hotel Audobon, a collection of old iron slave shacks turned into elegant cabines à la mode. The uniformed whiteys who greeted them at the gates were not permitted to take the little luggage the gamblers brought.

These were cabins of choice, let only to passing visitors of their own high persuasion. When they were settled, Paul Minct told them, they must assemble at Brown’s Bar Vieux on Royale, where he would hire the backroom and a couple of simul-bottles. They could thus link up for a rough and ready run-through of their plan to enter the Fault aboard the meat boat. ‘We’ll be going in through Mustard Splash or Ketchup Cave.’

The bottles were the best quality the Rose had ever seen. Major Moyra and Jasmine Shah were experts at handling and conducting them, massaging unstable gases, nursing their milky energy into responsive motes.

Before they had arrived, Paul Minct had refused to tell her why they must go to this trouble when the Terminal’s huge V resource was at anyone’s disposal. He appeared to have reasons for not alerting the people at the Terminal to his intentions.

Her instincts told her that this whole charade was part of a complicated plot to trap her before killing her. It was unnecessarily elaborate, she thought.

But it was that which convinced her. Elaboration was Paul Minct’s trademark. It was characteristic of his whole game thus to hide a simple brute intention.

Had he known she was in Guadalajara? If so, even Paul Minct’s affectation for M&E was a part of his plot against her. She was admiring of his mind for detail. She had known him in many roles, but usually he had not recognized her so quickly.

When Mr Oakenhurst rejoined them at Brown’s he seemed introspective but carefree enough, almost euphoric. He told them that they had the machinoix blessing to take the meat boat to Biloxi. This was, they must all understand, a considerable privilege. Moyra Malu said she appreciated the implications. Only Paul Minct accepted the news casually, as if Mr Oakenhurst had done no more than act as a go-between. ‘And how much do these great barons charge us, Mr Oakenhurst, for the privilege?’

‘Nothing, Mr Minct. They act upon my word alone.’

‘Flimsy enough, then?’

Sam Oakenhurst took a glaring interest in the screens, his mood threatening.

‘I am not sure I can stand that smell for such a long voyage,’ said Jasmine Shah. She had changed to red satin, she said, in honour of the occasion. She sported a feathery fan.

‘We must endure it until Biloxi,’ murmured Paul Minct, looking up from the bottles and retorts of his quasi-V, his mask reflecting the brilliant, ever-changing rhythms of the angry pastels. ‘They are unpredictable, are they not, sir, these psychics? Sometimes they seem to need us more than we need them. But I expect they are agreeable people, by and large.’

Sam Oakenhurst knew he had nothing much more to fear until they were actually aboard the meat boat. He took his place with the other four around the viewing bowls which flooded them now in bright blues and vivid pinks, adjusting to a formal plum colour as Paul Minct stroked his backupper to make shapes from the enlivened dust. Some of the images were familiar but many were not. Sam Oakenhurst found them obscene.

‘We have agreed a common principle, my dears,’ Paul Minct seemed a little sanctimonious. ‘And must stick to the rules we form here tonight. Or we shall be lost.’

‘Do we need to be reminded of that?’ Sam Oakenhurst was almost irritable as he studied the bowl, finding some strands on the screen he could use. He wove a showy, challenging pattern.

‘We are a team, Mr Oakenhurst.’ Paul Minct seemed pleased by this offhand display. ‘We can afford no weak links. No, as it were, anti-socialism.’ Sam Oakenhurst guessed Mr Minct had found a tune which he must now rehearse for a while. Mr Minct searched under his veil and plucked at his hideous jowls.

Unusually alert, Sam Oakenhurst studied Paul Minct’s companions and detected a tremor of victorious malice in Major Moyra’s face. The Rose’s warning was confirmed. Certain of his allies, Paul Minct was celebrating a premature triumph.

It will be on board the meat boat. That has always featured in his scenario, I think. I don’t know why, save that he follows a personal aesthetic. Mrs von Bek gave her own attention to the bowls and began a detailed weaving, a story of a planet and its doom, a wonderful miniature. Sam Oakenhurst understood that now she, too, had issued a challenge to Paul Minct. These were the gentle beginnings, the courteous preliminaries of the game.

Upon Mr Minct’s irrational insistence they began the first stage of their simulation, producing a reasonable version of the Biloxi Fault and some sort of boat in which to brave these self-created dangers. ‘Now we sail into Mustard Splash!’ declared Paul Minct, their captain. ‘These murky walls will part, thus!’ A magician, he revealed the blinding azure of a vast colour field. ‘We shall follow a river - thus –-’ A hazier network of silver streams which, with his characteristic crudity, he made into one wide road. ‘This line will respond to the meat boat’s unique geometry. And now we must do our best, dear friends, and make the most of our creative imaginations, for our quest lies even beyond the fields of colour - to find eternal life, limitless wealth! There one shall come in to one’s true power at last!’

Later, in their cabin, Sam Oakenhurst and the Rose agreed that the exercise had been a complicated sham, a violent and exhausting process with no other purpose, as far as they could tell, than to display Paul Minct’s artistic skills. ‘That was not the Fault,’ she said. ‘Merely a surface impression and a bad projection. It was an arcadium, no more. Almost an insult. I wonder why? To convince us? To confuse us? To terrify us? He knows in his heart what truly lies beyond the Fault.’

They were lying together on the wide bed, the light from the swamp-cone turning her brown skin into semi-stable green and giving her face a deep flush. ‘He still needs our good will, Sam. He had expected your challenge no more than had I.’

It had hardly been a challenge. Mr Oakenhurst, hyped on the sensations of his reunion, had merely wished to show that he no longer feared Paul Minct. He had risked their lives on a vulgar display and he now admitted it.

She began to laugh with quiet spontaneity. ‘I have a feeling he did not care to notice, anyway. He was preparing his talents for his demo. Let that hand ride for a while, Sam, and we’ll see what happens.’

He marvelled at her beauty, the peerless texture of her skin, her natural, sweet scent, the ever-changing colours of her flesh, and he knew that his feeling for her was stronger than his bond with the machinoix. Stronger than with his own species.

‘We are defenceless if he decides to take us before the meat boat leaves,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty scared, Rose.’

‘The best way to get out of trouble is to take a risk based on your judgement. You know that, Sam.’ Her touch was a petal on his thigh. ‘Take another risk. An informed one, this time. Make a change. What can you ever lose? Not me, Sam.’

She began to notice the tiny, symmetrical marks on his stomach, like stylized drops of blood.

He refused to tell her what they were.