Midnight Lamp by Gwyneth Jones Read Free Book Online

can change the world for the good, if you can end some of the horrors, why don’t you do that —?’
    ‘You don’t get it, Harry. Why don’t you eat your hat?’
    ‘Brace yourself, kid,’ said Ax. ‘To the Zen Master here, this is the best of all possible worlds, just the way things are. It’s not a bad idea about the hat though.’
    There was a piano in the back room of the disused bar. Fiorinda had found out about it from the kids, and been given a key by Señora El Pabellón, so she could practice. They locked themselves in there the next day, to discuss the unwelcome development. The room, lit by dusty sunlight falling through a row of Moorish arched windows, had the air of a despondent, derelict English village hall. A stack of Seventh Day Adventist leaflets lay on the cocktail bar in the corner, getting flyblown. Fiorinda sat at the piano, her ragdoll head bowed over the keys. She had not brushed her hair for a month, and was oblivious of this. She refused to let them touch it. She wouldn’t eat, if they didn’t put the food into her hands. Little things gave her away, though she so valiantly tried to pass for normal. Little things like the neglect of her own body, and the look in her eyes.
    They sat at a bentwood table, glancing at her often; talking it around. They had told her Harry’s story, because they would never shut her out. She’d taken it calmly, but today she was very withdrawn.
    ‘It was the b-loc,’ said Ax. ‘Fuck. I knew I should have thrown it in the sea.’
    The bizarre b-loc signal, unknown around here, would have pinpointed the English like a radio beacon, for anyone who knew what they were looking for.
    ‘Don’t beat yourself up. They’ll have tracked us since Mexico City. They probably fixed up our trip with your friend the Justice Minister. Harry’s probably listening right now,’ He poked a dead fly with his finger. ‘There you go. Surveillance is everywhere.’ He felt Ax recoil, remembered post-hostage stress, and changed his tone. ‘It’s not worth worrying about, babe. Let them listen. Fuck ’em. Insult the flag.’
    ‘I don’t think that’s going to help.’ Ax read the letter over. ‘Call me paranoid, but I think you’re right. Fred Eiffrich arranged for me to be summoned to Mexico City, so he could pull this. He was pissed off when I resigned. He wants me as his goodwill ambassador in the fuck-up that is Crisis Europe: he thinks I’m the pick of the mad dogs, which I do not consider a compliment.’
    Sage knew not to get into that conversation… ‘Well, we can’t stay here.’
    ‘’Fraid not. We can make Harry Lopez go away, but we’d just be waiting for the next gadfly. It makes you realise how atrociously vulnerable we still are.’
    ‘We’ll be old news soon. We just have to weather it.’
    They looked at Fiorinda. She plonked a piano key, and didn’t look at them.
    ‘What do you make of his story, maestro?’
    ‘Well, it’s true there’s a team of US military-financed neuroscientists trying to build a human weapon. They’re at a place called Vireo Lake, out in the desert in Southern California. Olwen’s been tracking their progress, she has contacts.’
    Olwen Devi, the Zen Self guru, had been Ax’s chief scientist in the days of the Reich; while also pursuing the goal they called fusion out here in the real world . Sage had been the first to achieve the Zen Self, and prove that the wildest of post-modern scientific ideas was absolutely true. It was possible to break the barrier between mind and matter, free a human consciousness from time and space, and fuse that four-dimensional subset with the whole of the information. Briefly, Sage had been ramped up to that state, and had possessed the power to change the code of reality; and he’d defeated Rufus, the natural-born magician. The US theory was that if you could stabilise ‘fusion’, you’d get a phenomenally powerful, clean and humane weapon of mass destruction.
    ‘This I know. But