Novahead by Steve Aylett Read Free Book Online

Pentagon incident. Then he left town and there ’ s nothing solid, just more of these speculations about the thirty-seventh nisterim. Now he ’ s a blow-in. ’
    ‘ So many moral and stylistic ambiguities. He seems to have spent his life stockpiling idiocies for us to scrutinize. Cuffing him ’ d be like putting a padlock on jello. ’
    ‘ Saves himself from being a nonplussed innocent by having something always to do, anyway. This biography is unverifiable, obviously. ’
    ‘ And a profanation of all we enjoy. All those years committing crimes, and never the same one twice. So you see, Murphy? If you cooperate in a broad general way, I can make the whole thing go away like nuclear sludge. As strange and counter-intuitive as it seems, I ’ m sworn to enforcing freedom. Witness the baleful charms of gravity upon a plummeting wretch as nature behaves like disaster ’ s friend. See a seahorse smile, and then try to tell yourself you expected it. ’
    ‘ I guess, ’ said Murphy, ‘ sometimes it helps to talk. ’
    ‘ That ’ s the stuff right there. Reality is discarded from the law like the marble chipped away to reveal a statue. That chipping away is my duty. Its performance requires certain aspects of the villain - in fact all of them, really, but tilted at a surer angle. As for justice, we just make a few jocular guesses and a lot of noise. No-one minds much. ’
    My headache had gone. I felt loose and relieved, as though my head had disappeared and I saw the world through two floating eyeballs. The night sky was an open secret.
    A hooting noise to my right - the swan Strobe Talbot was tilting along the ledge toward me. Not much to look at, this white umbrella was the best urban smart drone manufactured by the Garuda Company. ‘ The targets are approaching the Gate, ’ he reported, and hopped on top of the O. He dropped a swingbar from his underside - I took hold with my good hand. Strobe blew his wings to full stretch and plunged us down Devant Street in a chronic manoeuvre that made me think, My doom isn ’ t stale after all.
     
     

7 THE BATTLE OF STINA GATE
     
    We skimmed over the warped grid of the city. They say a city is the detritus left over from a billion scams, but this was a city like broken bones, built too fast and dirty to be intentional. I was bleeding into it from the chemical pain at the end of my left arm. Then the old Trincado Tower swung by below and Stina Hang lifted at us like a diorama angled for display.
    It looked to be in uproar, and I hadn ’ t got there yet. Warning someone off is the most compelling way to inform them of an option, and sure enough a squadcar had set up in the plaza like a placard. Around it motives tangled like the tails of a king rat. It had the topological symmetry of what had yet to be learned. Dozens of parties were blasting refractive and prefig firearms across this congested arena. They were so frolicsome and serious I felt simultaneously sick and quickened.
    The Gate was closing, the old man and the blonde teen crouching against it as it boomed into place. Junco had moved his vigil to a fire drum nearer to the Gate and was now pinned down, faced away from the Gate and firing everything he had. I flew right over him and let go of Strobe, dropping perfectly into the flaming trash can. My entry forced a gout of flames up around my body, making me wonder how other people did this and similar stuff with any enthusiasm. Why anyone would accept the obliteration offered by such a disappointing arrival was an even bigger mystery. I had overbalanced the drum onto the ground and now threw myself this way and that for a while, sometimes confronting onlookers in the process. And I realised with a start that I was staring at the old man and the kid. For a moment they seemed scared of me, on account of my burning hair probably, and the particular way I was screaming. In fact I noticed that the firing had stopped as everyone watched this bewildering display.
    When I had