Midnight Lamp

Book 0: GOLLANCZ S.F.

by Gwyneth Jones

Genres: Arthurian; Contemporary Fantasy; Science Fiction

Synopsis

Recovering from the events of CASTLES MADE OF SAND, the leaders of the Rock-n-Roll Reich travel across the Atlantic. The USA has not suffered from the technological losses which transformed the UK, so the Triumvirate find themselves in a glossy Hollywood where actors are virtual, cars are intelligent, and they aren't worshipped as they are back home. Ax, Sage and Fi are trying to cope with their recent losses, and reflect on where their relationship now stands.

Meanwhile, there are groups of magic users trying to gain power through human sacrifice, threatening the stability of society. When Fiorinda goes missing, the worst is feared...



This is book three in Gwyneth Jones' critically-acclaimed BOLD AS LOVE series.

Release date: February 18, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

From: Harry Lopez

To:     Marshall Morgan

Cc:     Julia

Hey, Marsh, Thanks for lunch, thanks for the green light, and you want something in writing. This is not a pitch. I don’t do pitches. I want to tell you a story. Have patience if I ramble.

In the beginning there was the crash, (which is my Big Bang, I cannot know what was before). Over here, our problems were and remain plain old economic. Anyone over twenty-five thinks the price of gas is a crime against humanity, and poor people try to club you to death as you scurry from your cab into the airport. In Western Europe it went into a runaway chain reaction. They had penniless crash victims, mom and pop types included, hordes of them, turned nomadic, wandering around like lemmings. They had the anti-capitalist, anti-GM, pro-Gaia, pro-paganism, magic-murky, Save Our Planet thing growing into a monster volk movement: shaping up to be the Green Nazis. They had a’lootin’ and a shootin’ and mad dog migrants from the poisoned lands. Governments fell. Armed forces and teachers and other useful persons just upped and quit. That’s the bgd. Then the story begins. It’s the story of the man who would be king. He’s called Ax Preston. He was recruited, along with several other rather amazing people, to what the British government called their Countercultural Think Tank. He was a guitarist, at the time, with a chipper little band called the Chosen Few from Taunton, Somerset (=deep in the sticks). He was twenty-six. Next thing you know there was a blood-spattered coup, a veritable massacre in one of the royal parks, and Ax and his pals were hostages of the deranged hippie regime that had taken over England. They were kid rock musicians. One minute they were dreaming of a record deal, next thing, they were doused in the blood of revolution. But they were patriots. Ax told them they could use the music, and turn the awful situation round. And they did it! The catalogue of disasters that they beat would be unbelievable except it was all part of the same thing: collapse of the card house. It took Ax two years. When he was twenty-eight he was the ruler of England, by the will of the people. I want to tell the story of how that happened. Ax Preston is a phenomenon of our times. I want to show him making hedonism and free will work, in a tsunami of brutish violence. But what makes it Fabulous is that it was all done with the music.

Ax would be king: but there’s more. There’s Fiorinda, the scary-smart babe-rocker with the abusive megastar dad. There’s Sage Pender, aka Aoxomoxoa, who needs no introduction. (Okay, you twisted my arm: introducing Sage. He’s the demon techno whose very existence irradiated my youth. He’s regarded as the Antichrist, in many parts of the USA. He invented immersion code. He’s God, in my opinion). There’s the relationship between these three, which is very slippery. Suffice it to say, the guys compete like wolverines disputing a kill, they share the girl and that’s not all they share. I love it when beautiful guys love each other passionately, but they’re not gay (this is not a proposition, btb). It’s very rock and roll, very glamorous and it gives me an immense Jungian thrill, a masculine romance with girls in it.

And with guitar!

No, we’re not going to go into what happened to them last summer. Nor what’s happening in England now. I want to end on a note of valedictory glory, a triumph that foreknows its fall, a sense that great deeds are evanescent as a dream, and that’s the way greatness should be. The Japanese have a word for it, Bushido. Ax’s England blossomed and died, it was brief and perfect.

I’m sending you Unmasked, and Yellow Girl, and Sweet Track, Ax’s only solo album, and not easy to get, even tho’ the fucking data quarantine has supposedly given up trying to isolate us from European Revolutionary Culture. (I’ve sent them, they’re on this letter, just press and play). You also have to hear the Aoxomoxoa and the Heads mix of ‘Little Wing’, which came about because one day Sage said to Ax, the reason why Jimi Hendrix is not revered like Beethoven, is because the mass market has to be turned on to something or it doesn’t survive, and you can’t dance to ‘Little Wing’. It is BLAZING. It explains our whole global culture.

Please Marsh, let me make this movie in style, no scrimping, c’mon, c’mon. It’s surefire, fantastically good looking, and the best idea I ever had.

Yours, most respectfully and sincerely,

Harry

Enrico Ernesto Fortunato Curtis-Lopez de la Concha

  From: Harry Lopez

To:   Marshall Morgan

Cc:   Julia

It’s not a problem. I know he hasn’t returned a call since he resigned. I’m onto it. I can get hold of him. Don’t ask me how, because I can’t tell you, just trust me. Mr Preston is coming to Hollywood. It can be done, it will be done. I have an offer he can’t refuse, right here in my pocket.

Harry

On a beach on the Pacific coast of Baja, Mexico, two small boys were exercising the tourist-horses. Shore birds in bewildering variety played chicken with the waves, racing in and out above their reflections in the wet sand; over the dunes a turkey vulture coasted on broad black wings. All else was lost in a shining, opalescent haze. Into this stainless world there came a young woman, emerging from the mist as a stick-thin figure with a raggedy cloud of red hair, yellow suntan that gave up at the base of her throat, and an expression of dogged, mutinous calm. The boys galloped towards her, shouting in Spanish as they drew level, did she want a ride? ‘No!’ she shouted back, in English. ‘Not now, and not the other fifty times you asked me.’ The boys laughed, the big brown horses danced on the spot, wheeled around and thundered away.

Fiorinda continued her promenade, noting sandpipers, sanderlings, busy little dunlins, elegant terns, whimbrels, dowitchers and curlews; ooh, possibly a marbled godwit. The mist, parting ahead of her, disclosed three fishermen in shortie dry suits and parkas, hauling on a net. A handful of flip-flopping things glittered in the long expanse. Plenty more fish in the sea, she thought, is a concept to bemuse the children of this century.

Ideas and memories rose up and fell away like the spindrift. The pale sweep of the sands reminded her of Tyne and Wear, the cold north east coast of England, where she had found friends, acceptance, a reason for living; after she’d escaped from her hateful childhood. This beach at the end of the Western World was more beautiful and more desolate: and there went the pelicans, one, two, eight… fourteen of them today, in stately procession just above the blunt sawteeth, out where the ocean turned navy blue and solid. South in the morning, north in the evening, regl’r as clockwork. What do they do down there, she wondered? When I’ve lived here a thousand years, I’ll take my shoes and follow them. But now she’d reached the upturned, derelict fishing boat which marked the end of her habitual stroll. She sat down in its shelter, and rubbed her cold bare toes.

So here I am back in the modern world, after seven years in fairyland. Traffic fumes, cable tv, air travel, internet connections, swimming pools, movies—and everything that happened to us vanishes like a dream. It must have been a dream. Our Crisis was real, part of the Global-Economic-Meltdown, but my boyfriend, my guitar-man with delusions of responsibility for everything in the world, ever, was never the king of England. My father didn’t rip Sage to pieces, on the beach at Roaring Water Bay.

She debated with herself whether Ax had been celebrity enough to be a terrorist target, whether he’d really spent a year as the hostage of a “drug cartel” (clueless bunch of crazies) in the Yucatán; and decided maybe yes, because here she was in Mexico, and she distinctly remembered the big aeroplane (first time she’d been on a big plane in her life). So Ax had made his deposition in Mexico City, and here they were on the Baja, very broke, having wandered across Mexico because Sage remembered surfing on this coast, long ago. There was no surf at this season. No swimming, because the water was ice cold. No scenery, and April weather like a chilly Spring in Margate, except for the fearsome UV.

But here they had come to rest.

Were we really the leaders of the Rock and Roll Reich? Did we hold all England, and then the whole world itself, in the palm of our scrawny, calloused, Indie-musician hands?

Nah. That’s a nonsense story.

The flank of the old boat had sucked heat from the fierce morning sun, it was warm against her spine though the air was cold. She leaned back, with a sigh of deliberate content. A glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, forced itself on her attention. She must turn her head. She must see a crumpled heap lying on the sand, which had been smooth a moment before. It was her green and white kimono, which she’d worn the night she gave herself to the dead man, in trade for her friends’ lives. She was sure that gown had been burned, but there it was, large as life, sand clogging the skirts. The sight of it made her feel as if someone was pouring concrete down her throat.

The kimono turned into another beach, under a dark sky. It turned into the weight of Sage’s body, dead in her arms. A hundred perceptions rose up: a thousand, uncountable, each with its specific freight of sensation and emotion, far too many of them vile, horrible… and oh, God, I’m not in Mexico. I am with the dead man. The very bad thing is happening to me right now, and this beach is me, right now, me blanking it out…

She set her teeth, breathing shallow until the sea and sky returned. The hallucination was nothing, she could live with hallucinations, but the world was made of paper. If she moved her head, it was like trying to see into the corners of a room in a dream. Now she remembered … something had happened at Tyller Pystri. She had been getting better, Sage had been getting better, so they’d moved down to Cornwall, for the quiet convalescence meant to be the first installment of their happy ever after. But something bad happened, and she couldn’t remember what, but since then she’d been living in the paper world. Not raving, tearing her hair or shitting herself (much, she hoped… couldn’t be completely sure), just horribly sure that nothing was real. That this beach on the Baja, like anything else that had happened since she hit paper, was an escape from the choking horror of her reality.

When she was thirteen, in her first really awful trouble, Fiorinda had discovered, or invented, a place where she could go, and be safe: hiding in the aeons between one moment and the next. She couldn’t get there now. Therefore, she must already be hiding. Therefore, she had to believe that Ax was dead (she held his chip in her hands, stinking little shards of brain tissue and dried goop sticking to the sliver of silicon), Sage gone forever, and Fiorinda was in hell, gazing at sea and sky while the dead man fucked her: keeping her bargain, protecting her people

One day I’ll wake up from this, in bed with your carrion disguise, dear father, and only seconds will have passed. One day you’ll defeat me, and we’ll all be in hell together, I know that. But until then, fuck you.

Ha. Other alternative: I’m in a padded cell. Just a little mixed-race girl from Neasden, whose absent father came back to get her pregnant, and she wasn’t tough enough to get over it, so in the end she lost her mind. She got up and started walking back, reflecting detachedly that she couldn’t make herself believe the padded cell option. She felt this was a plus. All you can go on is what makes a situation bearable. I’m sure I’m better off convinced that I had wonderful lovers once, and that I’m serving a cause.

The fishermen had gone. Three dolphins leapt where the nets had been: Fiorinda paddled in the punishing cold water, and saw a round flat purple furry thing, scuffling by her toes. Hey, it’s a sand-dollar! This is what they look like when they are alive! She picked it up. A myriad bewildered little fingers wriggled: the purple fur was made of tiny tentacles. It was like a … a flattened- out sea urchin, a fused starfish. How cool! She set the creature back in its watery home, and watched it drift to the sand; feeling like a gentle god. I’ll never tell them. If they are dead, at least they don’t have to know it. She straightened, looked up: and there, not on the painted sky but far, far off in the darkness of her soul, she glimpsed the shining limb of a different answer, which for a moment she knew was real, but she could never reach it.

Something in the way—

Ax was also on the beach. He’d been talking to Smelly Hugh about Para, Smelly’s oldest daughter (named Paralytic, as that’s what her father had been the night she was born). She now called herself Paradoxa, sensibly enough. She’d dropped out of Hedgeschool baccalaureat and was joining a hardline Gaian group. She would no longer be using clothes, tools, or articulate language. She’d told her bewildered parents she wanted to recover from the disease of being human. ‘She loves animals,’ said poor Smelly. ‘An’ she’s dead clever. Me and Ammy, we thought she might be a vet. I get what she’s thinking. That we rebelled an’ everything, an’ now we’re telling her she can’t. But it’s different times. Everyone’s gotta be responsible, and the way we’re placed, we havta set an example. I just want you to tell her. I’m not bein’ a fascist dad, Ax. I jus’ want her to do somethink worfwhile, not sittin’ on her bum-’

Ax knew Para quite well, and doubted if anything would deflect her least of all words of wisdom from an ageing rockstar Godfather. But he’d made soothing noises, and Smelly had seemed comforted.

‘You din’t mind me calling? Ammy said I shouldn’t. She says, they’re on holiday, leave them in peace. But I thought, Ax won’t mind—’

Smelly Hugh was a punk philosopher. He didn’t think twice about the miracles of futuristic technology. He zoomed over to Mexico on the astral plane, smelt the ocean, and winked out of sight, right back to London—

Doubtless he’d pop up again, next time he had a worry.

Thanks for trying, AM.

Alone on the water margin Ax sat turning the b-loc headset in his hands, wondering if he should chuck it in the sea, wondering how much more he could take of Smelly Hugh. Who brought with him, mercilessly, the taste of failure, like bile in his mouth. He would never be free of it.

Back in England, the suits seemed to have accepted that he wasn’t going to change his mind. He had been a dictator, a temporary measure. He wasn’t going to stay on as “Green President”. The current cabal of closet Neo-Feudalists were now approaching Ax’s brother Jordan, as the obvious alternative, only easier to handle. Jor was reportedly tempted.

He’d already taken over the band. All their lives, anything Ax had, Jordan thought it was owed him. Reportedly, he was holding out for Ax’s approval. And Ax (who hadn’t spoken to his brother) knew all this because he was such a damned fool, he couldn’t quite let go—

He had to drop that stupid train of thought, because Fiorinda had appeared. They walked towards each other, herding scurrying shore birds, and met in a whirling crown of silver wings.

‘Hi,’ she said, with the far away eyes and otherworldly smile that cut his heart in two. ‘What are you doing out so early, mister?’

‘Smelly Hugh decided to give us a wake up call. Sage was asleep, so I came out here. Fuck. I told them, don’t call us, we’ll call Allie, once a week, to prove we haven’t been kidnapped. I should chuck the thing.’

The bi-location phone was a spin off from the Zen Self quest. The technology was unknown in Mexico, making the only phone they possessed useless for anything except satellite-phreaking: but that was no loss. There was noone they wanted to talk to in the New World.

‘Don’t. There might be a real emergency at home and we wouldn’t know. You should have come beachcombing. I found a live sand dollar, and I think I saw a marbled godwit-’

‘You’re kidding. Sure it wasn’t a Common Loon?’

They followed their own footprints through the dunes to the fishing camp called El Pabellón. They’d been staying in one of the cabins for a week or so. It was off season, and sports fishing in steep decline: hard to say what the other campers were doing here, other than hiding from creditors; or the police. The painter lady was under her awning, catching the morning light like Monet. Nothing moved in the township of middleaged bikers. The teenage runaways’ little tent had collapsed again, leaving them shrouded in green nylon like dead bodies. The Clam Diggers, (locals, here to harvest shellfish for the restaurant trade) were monopolising the standpipe. Nevada and his old lady, proprietors of a wagon-ring of assorted, half-derelict vehicles, were up and about, toting shotguns. The kids were not in sight. The Nevada dogs stood up and woofed.

‘Hi, youse guys,’ called Nevada’s buckskinned and gypsy-bloused old lady. ‘You been on the beach already? How’s the world looking?’

‘Same as yesterday,’ Fiorinda called back. ‘Sand. Birds. Sky. Sea.’

‘She’s a poet, and she don’t know it,’ remarked snaggle-toothed, draggle-haired Nevada, grinning his shit-eating grin. ‘Hope she don’t blow it. You guys coming to the shindig tonight? You’d be very welcome.’

They laughed and said maybe, and passed on.

Sage lay on the cabin’s only sunbed, with a sketchpad: but he’d made the coffee and beaten the eggs. They berated him, and agreed between them silently he mustn’t be left alone. The moment you leave him alone he starts doing too much. And so another quietly busy day begins. That’s the last of the cinnamon buns: better review the exchequer. Would you care to initial these accounts for me, Mr Preston? Why certainly, Ms Slater…

Later, Ax walked up to the Transpeninsular Highway; to the little shack-store beside the Church of the Holy Family. The cinder cones of San Quintín floated over the north west, the cows in the beaten-earth field were contemplating a vivid load of surplus tomatoes that had been dumped for them. Now that’s something you don’t see every day… Wonder if they like the taste? Of course, if you tried to buy tomatoes for human consumption around here it cost an arm and a leg. The death-wish contortions of post-modern agribusiness were no longer Ax’s concern, but he stopped to stare: thinking about a yacht called the Lorien. What a boat, thirty knots under sail, as if it was nothing, endless other passionate details, whispered through the long hospital nights (the Intensive Care Unit in Cardiff, the setting he remembered)…

I want Sage to have his yacht.

I’d buy you a jet-plane, baby, I’ve had it with green austerity—

But they had no money, and soon Ax must address this problem. Sage and Fiorinda couldn’t be asked to make a living. What are my skills? Some experience of organised violence, not-bad guitarist, horrendously in debt.

This needs thought.

Make a list: One pack flour tortillas (NB, not the brand that tastes of soap). Maize meal for Fiorinda’s excellent stove-top corn bread; eggs. Veg, whatever they have fresh. Tinned fruit, any kind but pineapple which we all hate, the cinnamon buns she likes. Little elastic bands to mend the Nevada kids’ stunt kite. What’s the Spanish for that?

I wonder how much a boat like the Lorien would cost? Fuck it. We won’t starve. We can live on clams and steal the cows’ tomatoes.

He’d started to think, hardly admitting it to himself, in terms of never going back to England. What, just vanish …? He turned his head, to avoid getting choked by dust as a blue off-roader Compact rumbled by, and looked after it; idly curious. US plates, surfie stickers in the rear window, longboards on the roof. There aren’t any waves, he thought.

New campers? They better fit in with the ambience.

The driver of the Compact pulled up at the entrance to the fishing camp, and got out. Above the gateway, which possessed no gates, a marlin leapt in blue and white mosaic: leprous with deleted pixels, flanked by red and yellow butterflies. A hand-painted sign advertised cabins, RV hook-ups, cocktails, firewood, surf-fishing, dry suit hire and Horse rides. Beyond the gateway a row of battered talapas, straw thatched beach umbrellas, stood outside a flat-roofed, pastel building; possibly a bar. Nothing stirred when he peered into the dark interior.

‘Anyone home?’

No answer, only the sound of the ocean.

Cautiously, he explored. The scurvy RV camp was noontide silent. There were dish-aerials, most of them big enough to be illegal; a recycling plant beside a midden of scrap plastic and metals. Stacks of desiccated clam shells, pyramids of beer bottles, a skeletal thing made of thousands of old pens: ballpoints, felt-tips, gel-tips, rollerballs. A large grey iguana stared him out, sideways, from under one of the trailers; everything had an air of post-futuristic dereliction and outlawry. Two of the dogs in the big compound, (command post?) stood up, rattling their chains: a German Shepherd and something like an Irish Setter, but bigger, and having deeply malevolent yellow eyes. He retreated.

Beyond a giant mutant tamarisk hedge, festooned with sun-drained rainbow pennants, he found a row of cabins. The first had a shiny jeep and a boat trailer outside. The rest were padlocked and clearly unoccupied, except for the one at the end. He listened, glanced around, and moved closer. A towel hanging from a line, a dishpan of murky water, full of submerged underwear. A sketchpad, held down by a slab of plastic-cased hardware, lay on a trailer-park sunbed that had seen better days.

Doubt assailed him. Why would they be living like this?

He bent over the pad, careful to touch nothing. On the top leaf he saw an unfinished portrait, male, half profile… and the hardware was a portable videographics desk, of alien but hi-spec design.

Oh yes. What do the English say?

Gotcha.

Out on the beach, beyond the gap in the dunes, there were figures in the landscape. Kids ran around, local people were digging clams. He tipped his straw hat to the back of his head and strolled. A tall, very slender white guy was playing a ball game, with a young woman whose ragged red hair whipped to and fro like the pennants on the tamarisk hedge. She wore a body glove and knee length denims. The man wore a loose white shirt and pants that accentuated his willowy height and languid movements. His hair was cropped yellow curls, eyes invisible behind aviator shades. Each had a ring on the third finger of the left hand, which was intriguing: but he couldn’t get a good look. He watched the game.

They ignored him, but not in an unfriendly way.

‘D’you mind if I ask a question?’

The woman turned on him a mask of beaten gold, pierced by eyes like clear grey stones, so like the cover image on her second solo album that his mouth went dry with excitement. Yellow Girl. It’s really her!

‘Go ahead. It’d better not be difficult. We have no brains.’

‘Why are you playing cricket, with a softball and a baseball bat?’

He was pleased with himself for spotting the game.

‘Oh, tha’s easy,’ said the languid giant, planting the bat in front of his stumps—stalks of bleached tamarisk root, capped by clam-shell bails. ‘We don’t have a cricket bat, an’ if we used a smaller ball I would never hit it. I’m useless.’

‘He’s lying,’ said Fiorinda. ‘We found the bat. We had a proper baseball, which we bought in Ensenada, but our demon bowler, er, pitcher, buried it in the Pacific. It’s over there. If you’d like to fetch it for us, we’d be grateful.’ She pointed out into the ocean, smiling at him with great charm, and chilling strangeness.

‘You guys are English, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I recognised the accent. We haven’t seen many tourists from Crisis Europe, the last few years. Things have quieted down over there, I guess?’

‘Much quieter,’ she agreed. ‘Practically back to business as usual. Except for Italy and, um, a few other hot spots.’

‘England’s still revolutionary, isn’t it. But you’re allowed to travel?’

‘As long as we promise not to eat at McDonalds.’

‘Okay,’ he said, nodding politely. ‘The name’s Harry. Harry Lopez.’ He held out his hand. They smiled, but didn’t take it.

He went back to the campground, and looked into one of the toilet blocks. The showers and stalls had plastic curtains, no doors, but everything was clean. He tried a faucet and leapt back, cursing. The water was boiling. A little Mexican girl had appeared at the uncurtained door to the outside, with a black and tan puppy in her arms. She stared at him, scandalised.

‘These are dire and troubled times,’ he said to her, shaking his scalded fingers. ‘This could be the end of days. Do you believe that?’

He tried the other. Something about F and C… Fuck! Also boiling.

‘This is the ladies room,’ said the little girl, in Spanish.

‘Do you have an office? Oficina?’

‘Strange bloke,’ said Fiorinda, meaning the man in the straw hat.

She had called a halt. Sage was obediently lying on their rug, while she sat beside him on the sand. They watched the world go by.

‘I dreamed of Fergal again last night.’

‘Oh yes?’

Fergal Kearney was the Irish musician, casualty of the lifestyle, whose dead body had been used by Fiorinda’s father as his instrument of torture. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened to her, she’d never known the real Fergal, why had she suddenly started talking about him?

‘He was sitting by my bed,’ said Fiorinda softly. ‘I didn’t see him, but he was there. It wasn’t a nightmare, Sage. He was on guard, keeping bad at bay. The strange thing is, I still knew he was really my father: and in my dream I didn’t mind. You know how all the people around you are really just patterns created by firing neurons in your head?’

‘Mm,’ said Sage, doubtfully.

She laughed, cold and sweet, and took his hand with chilling deliberation.

‘Hey, I’m not saying you don’t exist. I’m just saying, obviously that’s what ghosts of the dead are, too. My father is dead, and I killed him—’

‘Er, as I recall, I killed Rufus, babe.’

‘I helped to kill him, and I bloody well think I had a right. But I believe I want him to forgive me. I think when I imagine Fergal by my bed, on guard, it’s my mind’s way of telling me we did okay, that night at Drumbeg. We rescued Fergal from his private hell, and he’s grateful, and we even did Rufus some good, somehow. It’s my closet soppiness, sneaking out.’

‘Fee, you are amazing.’

‘Thank you… Sage, what’ll I do about not wanting to be famous any more? All the time we were trapped being leaders of the revolution I was secretly thinking, fuck this, I need to tour Japan. Now I can’t stand the idea, and I’m scared to have no grand plan.’

‘Nyah. Remember what you told me, when I was grieving about being old, invalided-out, and never being Aoxomoxoa again? People talk a lot of crap about facing up to big life changes. Why bother? Spend a few years in denial, then accept the obvious when it’s old news, and hurts less.’

‘Did I? I’m a vicious brat.’ She sighed, ‘Well, benign neglect. That’s how I’m dealing with the other major problem, never having a baby—’

She’d been sterilised when she was thirteen, after she’d given birth to her father’s child, the little boy who died at three months.

‘You don’t know you’re never going to have a baby.’

‘Yes I do, Sage. How could a creature like me have a baby? It was okay when I thought my father was just some bastard megastar who didn’t mind seducing his own daughter. Now I know what he really was, what does it matter if there’s a way? How could I contemplate passing on those genes?’ She frowned at the sparkling ocean. ‘Unless, um, unless as I sometimes think, I imagined the whole thing? I don’t mean the Crisis, or running the revolution, I mean, the rest of it?’

She’d let go of his hand. He took hers, and she didn’t flinch.

‘Sorry, babe. It was all real. I was there, trust me.’

‘What crocks we are,’ said Fiorinda, after a moment. ‘The three of us. Me with my gross memories and my monster of a dead dad. You, had to turn back at the threshold of heaven, and never going to be the king of the lads again. Ax, with his post-traumatic hostage stress, and what’s worse, he doesn’t believe in saving the world anymore. Sage, can we make him happy? Just you and me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did I say, also penniless?’

‘I don’t mind being broke. I like it.’

‘Oh sure, my one-bowl, one-robe pilgrim. What about the yacht, hm?’

‘Tha’s different.’

She smiled at him tenderly, and took his hand to her face, rubbing her cold cheek against his knuckles. My darling, he thought. You put on a good act, but you don’t even know I’m here. They folded the rug, collected their bat and the softball, and went to look for Ax.

On quiet nights they would play and sing on their terrace after dark; for their own amusement. The shindig drove them indoors, but then the hermit crab, which had been lost in the cabin for days, started to make excruciating ragged-claw noises. The whole Baja heaves with geo-thermal power, but the fishing camp electric light was low and peevish. They searched under beds a