Free States

20. AIMER ET PERDRE

IT HAD NEVER been in Sam Oakenhurst’s nature to decide the first move. Paul Minct had relied on that while certain the Rose would not make a play before Mr Oakenhurst. But now, equally unpredictable, Paul Minct produced the little OK9 he had once recommended to Mrs von Bek and he took a step back to cover them both. ‘This is not my style, either, as you know. But I’m willing to change if you are. That’s the basis of a relationship, as I tell my wife. No wands now, Mrs von Bek. This beam is wide and I will resort to brute murder if I must. I have a vocation to fulfil. An oath.’

‘Ah!’ exclaimed the Rose in surprise. ‘This one has a conscience!’

‘I had such hopes for your death, Mrs von Bek. Mr Oakenhurst would have appreciated what I made of you. We have a little time before we prepare the sacrifice. Not much, but we must make the best of what God sends us.’ He signalled to Major Moyra and Jasmine Shah. Then suddenly he was still again, as if stabbed.

‘That is the one,’ said Sam Oakenhurst to the machinoix. ‘He is not my friend.’ He watched incuriously as one oddly jointed jewelled hand closed over Paul Minct’s wrist and squeezed the gun free while fingers felt through the beads deep into his mouth and throat.

Rose von Bek looked away from Paul Minct and, with Swift Thom, brought Major Moyra and Jasmine Shah merciful deaths. In the last moments the game had been unpleasantly easy as often happens in a spontaneous end-move. When the Rose looked back she saw that Paul Minct had been returned to his seat. He was not dead, but his cold eyes begged for her mercy. The rest of him had been expertly snapped here and there. He was little more than a heap of broken bones but he would live indefinitely.

Mr Oakenhurst bowed low before his invisible kin.

The voice which came from the folds of drapery behind the table was musical but oddly diffident. ‘We shall put those two with the other meat.’ There was a long pause, then: ‘The broken one is yours, if you wish.’

‘Thank you,’ said the Rose.

‘No thankings, no,’ said the machinoix. ‘Not need. I am the same. Same. You. You.’ In the following silence the Rose said: ‘Where has she gone?’

‘To rest,’ Sam Oakenhurst told her. ‘She has used up pretty much all her strength for a year. What will you do with him?’

‘Eventually I must kill him. I have that much compassion left. But it will take me a while to find the necessary resolution.’

Sam Oakenhurst stepped aside to let the whiteys drag the corpses off. ‘Nature resists linearity. Why didn’t you understand that, Paul Minct? What was your plan? What did you intend to sacrifice and to whom?’ Approaching the couch he reached to Paul Minct’s head and touched it in a certain way, allowing the lips to move.

‘The meat was for the Fault.’ His suffering made Paul Minct obedient now. ‘The Fault is a sentient creature. Five times I fed it. This sixth time was to bring me my reward, for I would be sacrificing the Rose, my mortal enemy, body and soul! And what rarer sacrifice? For the Rose is both the last and the first of her kind. Then I should have been permitted to sail through the golden branches into the Great Cup and know my whole power!’

‘You must tell me the truth,’ she said. ‘It will make me more merciful. How did you plan to take over this boat?’

‘I placed no faith in bribes or whitey revolt. I simply made adjustments to the steering gear. That is why this boat is now on inevitable course for the Fault, under full sail. We shall keep our original bargain, ma’am. But you never did confront me, Sam. Not really.’

Mr Oakenhurst silenced Paul Minct’s mouth. The man’s bravery was more impressive than his judgement. ‘We are to be your sacrifices, still? I think not. Eh, Mrs von Bek?’

The Rose frowned at him. ‘It is either the Fault or drown. Have you no curiosity, Sam?’

‘There are innocent lives in this!’

‘They will not die, Sam. That’s merely a conception of the Singularity. You have already discovered the benefits of mutability. The Fault will either translate us or reject us, but it will not kill us. And there’s every chance we’ll remain together. We must have the will for it and the courage to follow our instincts.’

‘I must return to New Orleans,’ said Mr Oakenhurst. ‘There is a debt outstanding.’ He looked with hatred into Paul Minct’s agonized eyes.

Again, he began to doubt his judgement. What good had his decisions been now they were heading helplessly into the Biloxi Fault? He turned to ask her how much time she thought they had, when the whitey bos’un shuffled down the companionway and crossed to the door, kneeling with bowed head before Sam Oakenhurst and the Rose and not speaking until Mr Oakenhurst gave permission.

‘Respectfully, master, our meat boat is about to be a-swallered by the Biloxi Fault.’

‘Remember!’ she called, as she followed him up the narrow ladders towards the bridge, ‘It is only a matter of scale and experience. You are not a fraction of the whole. You are a version of the whole! Time will seem to eddy and stall. This is scale. Everything is sentient, but scale alters perception. The time of a tree is not your time.’ It was as if she shouted to him all she had meant to teach him before this moment. ‘To the snail the foot which comes from nowhere and crushes him is as natural a disaster as a hurricane and as impossible to anticipate. The time of a star is not our time. Equity is the natural condition of the multiverse. There are things to fear in the colour fields, but not the fields themselves!’

Now he was on the top deck, heading for the bridge, the vast black sails bulging overhead as the freak wind took them more rapidly towards the Fault than ever Paul Minct had planned. The massive presence of the Biloxi Fault filled their horizon, all bruised colours and sharded light, yelping and gulping the ruins of star systems and galaxies as the meat boat sailed inexorably towards the lava-red glow of Ketchup Cave.

‘I will remember all your lessons!’ He took the wheel from the terrified whitey, but it would not respond to his straining movements. The boat dipped and rose on a sudden tide while the wind threatened to tear the sheets from her masts. ‘Help me,’ he said, as the whitey ran below. She came towards him. Then something soft had batted the meat boat into the middle of the bloody blossoming field. Yet the vessel maintained her original momentum, travelling steadily under sail. They could see nothing but the surrounding scarlet. When they spoke their voices were unfamiliar and used new but coherent languages. Sam Oakenhurst felt his stomach peeling open, his entire flesh and bones skinless to the flame. He fell backwards.

He tried to look up beyond the sails and saw something moving against the scarlet. A huge owl. He shuddered.

Now the Rose had her hands upon the useless wheel. Mammalian only in broad outline, she appeared to curl her limbs and cast roots into the steering machinery, as if seeking the whereabouts of Paul Minct’s tamperings. Her scent enraptured him. It was thicker than smoke. Something vicious and insistent threatened nearby and was dangerous, some version of Paul Minct. The Rose pulled mightily on the wheel and this time the meat boat responded, gliding into a sudden field of blue populated with the black silhouettes of mountains shifting constantly in perspective, and then descending into a maelstrom of purple and white, soaring into field upon field of the vast spectrum, turning and wheeling until Sam Oakenhurst had to take his eyes from her to lean over the side and throw up into an infinity of lemon yellow spheres and witness his own vomit becoming another universe in which uncountable souls would live, suffer and die until the end of time, while the sounds that he made would eventually be interpreted by them as evidence of a Guiding Principle.

The Rose was laughing. Sam Oakenhurst had never seen a creature so filled with joy, with the rage of risk and skill which marked the greatest jugaderos. He had never known a creature so daring, so wise. And it seemed to him that some new strength bound him to her, through all the colour-flooded fields of the multiverse. And then she began to sing.

The beauty of her song was almost unbearable. He began to weep and his tears were blinding quicksilver. It was as if she had summoned a wind and the wind was her voice calling to him.

‘Look up, Sam! There, beyond the colour fields! It’s the Grail, Sam. It’s the great Grail itself!’

But when his eyes were clear of tears Sam Oakenhurst looked up and all he saw was a lattice of light, like roots and branches, twisting around them on every side, a kind of nest made of curled gold and silver rays. And through this, with happy ease, the Rose steered the machinoix meat boat. Her hair was wild around her head, like flames; her limbs a haze of petals and brambles; and her song seemed to fill the multiverse.

The meat boat was a fat brazen lizard crawling over the surfaces of the vast fields, following the complex river systems which united them, replenished them, blending with new multihued mercury fractures running through a million dimensions and remaking themselves, fold upon fold, scale upon scale, until they merged again with the great main trunks, ancient beyond calculation, where (legend insisted) they would find the final scale and return, as was their destiny, to their original being: reunited with their archetype; no longer echoes. ‘And this shall be called the Time of Conference,’ said the Rose, bringing the meat boat down into a clover field of white and green. ‘The Time of Reckoning. That, Sam, is the fate of the Just.’

He had managed to reach her and now sat at her feet with his arms around the stem of the wheel. He watched her as a new force took hold of the boat. A sudden stench came up from the holds, as if something had ruptured. She struggled with the wheel. He tried to help her. She sang to whatever elements would hear her but she was suddenly powerless. She shook her head and gestured for him to relax. There was nothing more they could do.

‘We can’t go any further now, Sam,’ she said. ‘We’re not ready, I guess.’

‘Not you yet. No, no, no.’

Turning with sudden recollection they saw oddly shaped jewelled hands disappearing below. How long had the machinoix been with them?

‘She must be close to death,’ said Sam Oakenhurst.

‘Can you help her?’ asked the Rose.

It was only then that they saw the shapeless ruin of Paul Minct, its upturned mask a blazing battleground of brands, its eyes enlivened at last with the fires of hell.

The Rose made a movement with Swift Thom. There came a jolt, like a mild shockwave. Sam Oakenhurst felt water wash up his legs and reach his back.

He heard the sound of a tide as it retreated from the shore and he smelled the salt, the oily air of the coast. He opened his eyes. The boat was gone.

Eventually his vision adjusted. He understood what had happened. He lay on his side in the water, as if left there by a wave. A little above him, on the beach, the Rose was calling his name. ‘Sam! The Fault has taken the meat boat.’

‘Maybe Paul Minct achieved his ambition?’ Away in the distance were the tranquil skies which marked the Biloxi Fault. Mr Oakenhurst turned on to his back. He began to get to his feet. He shuddered at the state of his clothing and was glad there were no witnesses to their coming ashore. The Rose appeared unaffected by their adventure. Taking his hand she waded briskly through the shallows and brought them up to the tufted dunes. A light wind blew the sand in rivulets through the grass.

‘The meat boat was accepted and we were not. Whose sacrifice?’ She pointed. ‘See! We have Biloxi that way, New Orleans the other! We shall go to the Terminal, Sam. I have a purpose there.’

‘I cannot go there yet,’ he told her. ‘I must go to New Orleans. Is it too much for me to learn? Too much that is novel and incomprehensible?’

‘Ah, no, Sam. You already know it in your bones. Come on to Biloxi, mon brave. Later, maybe, you go to New Orleans, when I can come with you.’ Standing against the yellow dunes, her hair still wild, a red haze in the wind, human in form but radiating the quintessence of the rose, all its exquisite beauty, Mrs von Bek made no indirect attempt to persuade him, either by gesture or word, and for that he loved her without reserve.

‘You must go alone to Biloxi,’ he said. ‘There is a price for our salvation and I return to New Orleans to pay it.’

‘Oh, don’t go, Sam.’ Clearly she found this request almost distasteful, though she had to make it. ‘Are you sure this is nothing more than your own addiction?’

‘On my honour, I swore to help you. On my honour, I must keep my bargain with those who helped me fulfil that pledge to you.’

She accepted this in silence, but it seemed to him that he had wounded her or that she disbelieved him. He said more softly:

‘I will meet you at the Terminal. It is not my life I owe them, but my respect. I must acknowledge their sacrifice. Courageously they defied their most powerful taboos to do what I asked of them. And here we are, Rose, thanks to their courage.’

‘And ours, Sam. I would return with you now, but I, too, am bound to a promise. If I lived after my business with Mr Minct I said I would deliver a message to Mr Jack Karaquazian at the Terminal Café. So I must make my way there and, yes, I will wait for you, Sam, at least until the boredom grows intolerable.’ She smiled. ‘Yes, I will meet you again, whenever our luck will have it so. Then, I hope, you will want to come with me beyond the colour fields, beyond the universe known as The Grail, to the wonders of the Second Ether, where plurality forever holds sway. There you will discover what it is to be jugaderos and paramours, Sam. What it is to be alive! There’s more than me in this for you, Sam.’ Her lips released a sigh.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think you will not forget me, Rose. You know who I am.’

‘By and large, Sam.’ She turned away.

As he put the Rose, the ocean and the dunes at his back and took the broken old road towards Louisiana, her voice returned to him on the wind.

‘Ma romance, nouvelle romance. Ma romancier, muy necromancier. Ma histoire, muy histoire nouvelle. Joli boys all dansez. Joli boys all dansez. Sing for me, ole, ole. But they shall not have muy vieux carre. Joli garçon sans merci. Pauvre pierrot, mon vieux, mon brave. Petitpierrot, mon sweet savage. Le monde estfou. El mundo c’est moi.’

There was to be a final miracle: It seemed to him that the distant yell of the Biloxi Fault took fresh harmonics from the Rose’s song and amplified and modified it until for a while a vast unearthly orchestra played the old tune, told the old story of lies and truth, of betrayals and sacrifices, of quests and oaths, of love and loss and resolutions that are not always tragic. The old story which is echoed by our own.

This sequence began with Colour and will end with Routes. Thanks to Los Tigres del Norte (Musivisa), Mamou (MCA Records), The Movies Sound Orchestra (Yel) and the bands at Michaux’s, New Orleans.