Band of Gypsys Read Free Page B

—)’
    ‘Oh yes, very amusing. Mr. Preston, who needs nobody to crown him, gets the rabid dogs to come to him , so he knows exactly where they are and what they are up to, and can deal with them at leisure once he’s whipped his bureaucrats into line.’
    ‘Nah. I’m just pissing around.’
    ‘What are you doing, in God’s name? What are you achieving with this infantile, John Lennon, doll’s house game about concentration camps?’
    ‘My job, Alain. The job I was hired to do. I’m making the suits look cool, working the margins, and getting something done for my own agenda.’
    ‘Now you’re talking like a toothless human rights activist ,’ snapped Alain, and then stared. ‘ Mon Dieu . You’re reporting back to those devils in Westminster?’
    ‘Of course.’ Ax retrieved his guitar case from under a chair, and shrugged it onto his shoulders. ‘What else? I’m a Lennonist, not a Marxist, Alain.’
    ‘You’re an imbecile. They’ll make you sorry.’
    ‘I’ve been sorry. Now I’m trying what I always knew I should: the art of the possible. C’mon, Sage. Got to get the beer-money in before dark.’
    ‘Thanks fer the room, and the heavies,’ called Sage, over his shoulder.
    In the courtyard, under naked chestnut trees that stood gleaming in the frost like giant, funereal candlebra, Ax stopped dead, transfixed.
    ‘What’s up, babe?’
    ‘Sage. Could she be pregnant? Tell me, truly… So quickly?’
    Fiorinda had been chemically sterilised when she was thirteen, and had just given birth to Rufus O’Niall’s baby—O’Niall the sinister rockstar lord with a taste for young girls: who was her own father, though she didn’t know it. As long as he’d loved her, Ax had dreamed of her having a child, and been afraid it was impossible. Now it was possible, but he hadn’t expected anything more than hope. You can live on hope for years… It was dizzying. Fiorinda having a baby!
    ‘ I don’t know ,’ said Sage, with equal urgency. ‘But it does sometimes happen like that, straight off. There’s reasons why—’
    ‘Yeah, yeah, I know—’
    Naturally they’d been researching the topic.
    Alain stared at the walls of the conference room: which was for him a shrine, a time-capsule of the last days of rational materialism. Here we laid our desperate plans, while that lanky blue-eyed alchemist who has just left was turning himself into the New Prometheus, breaking the barrier between Mind and Matter. And how little we understood, then, what that would mean to the future of the world!
    What annoyed him most was that Ax Preston , of all people, the Captain Sensible of Pre-Dissolution UK radical rock, had become a perfect character in this farce. While he, “Alain Jupette” (Alain Miniskirt had been Alain’s stage name, when he fronted a politically motivated Eurotrash band called Movie Sucré ), found himself unable to mock a situation that was beyond ludicrous. A world where fossil fuel reserves had been conjured out of existence. Where so-called governments scrabbled to own the new occult superweapon, a magic planet destroyer in human form—
    Thank God for Fiorinda. She, at least, still believed in reason.
    A knot of Techno-Greens stood at the windows, looking down. He joined them and saw Ax and Sage: stalled under the sweeping branches of the chestnuts and the first difficult flakes of snow. You would stare at those two if you knew nothing, you would follow them down the street. They shone like golden armour.
    ‘What can they be talking about?’ muttered someone beside him.
    ‘Obviously, the exquisite shape of Fiorinda’s left earlobe,’ said Alain sourly.
    ‘Is it true they’re on the oxy again?’ asked the other, hopefully.
    The speaker was a government spook, here by agreement, to keep an eye on the Plantagent delegates: and on Ax Preston. Everyone wants to know how Ax is going to jump. The Techno-Greens had differences, but no major quarrel, with the current French government, a