Free Band of Gypsys by Gwyneth Jones Page B

boy.
    Reading Arena coverage was a bunch of old hippies, sounding off. Glasto, once the stronghold of the Extreme Celtics, now totally respectable, held his attention briefly. The Permanent Festival there had begun to host a rival Mayday event, with the Pagan bonfires and sky-clad things that weren’t allowed at Reading. But he couldn’t find any live sex… Still nobody came back. The caterers took a break, the techs were in their own world. Marlon ate some buffet, (but it was all ugly-looking, and nothing tasted right), and remembered how to find a twisted English public tv station he’d heard about from a friend. He got a Happy Beltane smiley, and the news that he would swiftly be redirected to an EB channel. Diawl y’ myto i .
    Sheep in human clothing, that’s what the English are.
    Across the hall the Few were crowded round the flat screen of a pre-Dissolution tv. They had some idea of what they were about to see, and that it was potentially very bad news, but they hadn’t been told much. Here it comes.
    Twilight in the desert, in the red waste between the Inyo and the Panamint ranges, some two hundred miles north east of LA. Two men in dusty range clothes hunkered down in the opening of a tunnel: to check their weapons and discuss mass-murder. ‘I never thought that violence was going to be phased out,’ said the tall, skinny blond. ‘I was just surprised when I got a chance to play.’
    ‘The killing makes me feel real,’ said the other, with a flashing smile—
    They slipped from their lair and set off, bent double, towards a huddle of shanty town buildings, like some quake-struck Third World village. Frequent close-ups were lit to catch the flat eyes, the tight, blunt muzzles of two conscienceless predators. In the next shot, the men had penetrated a humble schoolroom. They rifled children’s copybooks, while speaking coldly of the numbers they would have to ‘reduce’: then whirled and fired, without a moment’s hesitation—on a quartet of wide-eyed, goth and hippie types who seemed to be unarmed.
    The images and dialogue had been left to speak for themselves, in a silence broken only by gunshot, crunching bootheels, choking breath: but here commentary intervened. Over a rough search of the bodies outside the school, a mature, female voice came up. ‘Do you see any heroes here, Dan?’
    ‘No Ma’am,’ replied a male voice, sober and kindly, ‘I see a couple of burned-out young men, far from home, running around like psychopaths.’
    ‘This shouldn’t have been allowed to happen,’ declared his partner.
    ‘I think we can all agree on that, whatever our politics.’
    ‘The Lavoisier kids were misguided, sure, and they had strange beliefs, but they were trying to save the world. They didn’t deserve to be slaughtered!’
    No faces but the voices were distinctive, two high-profile mass-market tv anchorpersons. Although probably that only went for the US audience, or recent visitors. The Few watched, silent and riveted, until the picture faded to grey.
    ‘That’s why you came home from Paris?’ said Rob after a pause.
    ‘Yep,’ said Ax.
    ‘There was a letter,’ said Fiorinda, from her place in the back row, on one of the rust-red couches. ‘Which we can’t show you because we failed to stop it from shredding itself, saying if this breaks at a bad moment, it could lose Fred Eiffrich the election. He’s been looking rock solid for a second term since the A Team event and the LA quake. But he has powerful enemies, and specifically certain media barons, because of that stuff he did to them, ages ago. You’ve seen the trailer. We were told there’s a lot more.’
    ‘You saw this in March, but you’re only telling us now ?’
    ‘We’re showing it to you now,’ explained Ax, patiently, ‘because today, due to the b-loc, the flat is a fortress, impenetrable to surveillance. We are not supposed to know about this. We couldn’t take the chance of being responsible for a leak.’
    Rob