Free Sacrifice of Fools by Ian McDonald Page A

half a mile or so, then offers, ‘Want me to lose her?’
    The cab driver’s Number Two Dream. After follow that car; lose that tail.
    ‘I do not. I want her to see where I’m going, and what I do when I get there, who I talk to, what I find out, and then I want her to follow me all the way back to my front door. I want her to see that I have absolutely nothing to hide from her.’
    She clings close as a condom over the twisting switchback drumlin roads along Strangford Lough, across the bridges and causeways linking the drowned hillocks to the shore. The long tide is out, flocks of over-wintering geese are moving over the chilly mud flats, dark speckles in the glare of the low sun from the wet silt. Yachts stand keel-down in the shallows; burgees and sheets rattle against the aluminium masts in the northerly wind. In the huge car park opposite the beached Ballyhornan lightship two cars and only two cars are parked, nose to nose outside the public toilets.
    Jesus, it must be grim to be queer out here, Andy Gillespie thinks.
    ‘Left. Here.’ He almost missed the turning. The driver turns on to the single-track causeway to Sketrick Island. At the end of the causeway is the tumbledown stone tower of Sketrick Castle. Used to climb all over it when I was a wee kid, Gillespie thinks. Always loved it down here, those rare days out when the car was actually working and we’d stuff in a picnic and Coke and just go off. Never liked the beaches, got bored on beaches; just sun, sea and sand. A good castle to climb up; forests, hills, somewhere you could push with your imagination into something like those sword ’n’ sorcery books I used to love when I was wee: that was my kind of day out. Changed a bit since then; in a direction outside my imagination. Or anyone’s imagination.
    There’s a gateway and cattle grid. The gateposts are old country style: whitewashed round pillars of stone capped with angled slates. Fourfold yin-yangs have been set in coloured pebbles on each post; the most ancient and powerful of Shian symbols. Every Shian is two selves, the everyday, and the burning self of kesh. Male, female, cold, hot. Gillespie directs the taxi driver between the gateposts, down a rutted track that runs at the edge of the water. Bladder wrack is heaped on the seaward side of the lane; it crackles and pops beneath the taxi’s tyres.
    South Side of the Stone has grown around a farmhouse, yard and outbuildings overlooking the open water. ‘Grown’ is the best word for it, Gillespie thinks. The constructions that surround the old limewashed farmhouse look as if they have sprung from the ground in a single night, or been spun in the darkness by something best not seen by daylight. Nothing is straight, nothing is level. The Shian abhor the straight line: roofs dip and wing like birds in flight; walls slope and curve, annexes bubble out of each other, windows blister. Surfaces are as smooth and perfect as the skin of a chestnut racehorse or the shell of a porcelain vase. To the left of the farmyard entrance a number of tall, slender objects shoot from the roof of a tent-like building. Smooth boles rise twenty feet, then unfold into a green-yellow tiger-striped parasol. They look like kiddy-book giant mushrooms in the enchanted forest. It would take a motherfucker of a leprechaun to sit on top of one, Gillespie thinks. But they contain magic more mighty than faery gold. Real alchemy: the transmutation of the elements. They’re machines; nanofacturers, processing atoms, taking things apart and knitting them into something new. They can make you anything. You want a car engine that’ll never wear out, an artificial heart valve, a jet engine, half a kilo of Colombian? In goes the shit, out comes the gold. And they’ll customize it, shape it to fit, personalize it for you and none other. It’s just putting the atoms together in the right order.
    Might as well be magic for what Andy Gillespie understands of it. But it scares the