Novahead by Steve Aylett Page B

infringement almost simultaneously attained classical heights, the two disciplines operating in lively counterpoint. For a while they had been adding to crime ’ s table of elements at a rate of one a day. Now, without critics wily enough to grasp it, conceptual crime was not processed or appreciated, rotting on the branch. Its special innocence was an obsolete phenomenon. I ’ d read about some of the final bank heists and the sense of cheerless inhibition those reports conveyed had depressed the hell out of me.
    ‘ Betty still working offset? ’
    ‘ Yeah. Violence longs to be repeated merely - somehow it ’ s never bored. ’
    ‘ Stand under the light, ’ I told the kid, and took a good look at him. For miles behind his face there was nothing but blue sky. His energy was smooth as cream. The edges were microscopically frilled and ticklish. I looked away, the marrow in my bones zinging. The kid had the purest vibe I ’ d ever felt. I stubbed my brain against it, couldn ’ t think about it directly.
    Neither the kid nor the old trout said anything, and staring at me seemed to be the only amusement they required. They seemed light-headed at being alive at all.
    ‘ Mix everyone a Lively Green, ’ I told Toto, and showed him a few places where structural alterations to the basement were necessary. He told me rats would soon be using my ribcage as a jungle gym.
    ‘ Get out of here! ’ he shouted, and after making me repeat the instruction carefully back to him, bid me farewell.
    As I drove to Betty ’ s Fort I saw my reflection - I was a kind of living scarecrow. I was feeling more acclimatised to the city, its resonances dyeing my mind dark red. Beyond the windshield, the endlessly intricate dance of bastards. Kids pouring acid on the hood of a stranded copcar. A ghost marketeer pushing a warhead in a baby carriage. Hardshell idiots, braying failures and abandoned dogs rotted on the chain. The air was criss-crossed with a density of laws that could strip the skin off a man ’ s head for a moment ’ s inattention. A shriek, a violation, a delectation. Humanity was a species tested so long it should have fallen into baffled despair rather than its present million contradictory positions of utter certainty.
    I approached the long Fort under the open muzzle of the moon.
     
     

PART 2
SAMADHI
     
     

1 HIGH ROLLER
     
    Betty ’ s Fort was a midtown apartment knock-through with outer walls thicker than blood. Workers had dug up several ranks of ancient terra cotta protesters during the extension and Betty saved a couple for her hallway. She ran this town now, if anyone did. Some say she always had, and since Thermidor was ventilated by Cortez and Cortez was hit by both ends of a truck, she ’ d become fully evident. In the face of moral teachings many people offset their murders by paying a potential murderer to keep his urges in check, and apparently this was still Betty ’ s main stream of income. The quietest people sometimes rise. Even the infamous mooncow Leon Wardial was circling the world in an armed blimp.
    I shot some Jade, left the car and approached this urban keep that had grown while everyone was looking the other way. There was a graded richness across the tarmac that tried to fill me with trance geometries - this was here for the purpose, to waste my time. I ’ d told her I was coming. I made the sign of the Errorverse, and entered.
    Two gunsels braced me for charm in a corridor lined sarcastically with racks of carbines. Then I walked through some notched plastic vegetation and between Chinese door gods into a windowless chamber of blazing black and red decor. Years of accumulated obtainium lined the walls. And between two pyramidal gun drones Betty Criterion sat in a glinting leather armchair black as a beetle, stroking some sort of crustacean that had a knuckleduster for a backbone. She was cartoonish royalty. A face like a saddle bore a mouth unnaturally large like a peony, conflict diamond