Free Shamanspace by Steve Aylett Page A

reveals stuff because it ’ s directly connected, they haven ’ t taught you that? I used to be that way — all of six years ago. Thought truth was the stone in the snowball. Truth was really the whole shebang. ’
    ‘ Tell me. ’
    ‘ It ’ s a secret no matter how much it ’ s told. Our enemy hides in plain sight. I believe you already know that. ’
    ‘ But you found its heart. ’
    ‘ I got the coordinates, in the shabbiest way. And I went there. Jabbing a dagger at the sky. You think it ’ s cool, making me remember? Good for your rep out there? We ’ re white minutes, disposable ghosts, many per hand. We ’ re nothing. ’
    Sudden pockets of failure went geomantic, flashed into expression, twisting the moment through the room. He had abruptly opened his pain. Sig saw Alix journeying in the big huge, an electron speck on electric white.
    ‘ Yeah, it ’ s a little bit triggery, ’ Alix said. ‘ I mean it. Into every word I weave thorns. ’
     

1 CHAOS PAD
    Darkness turns on a dime
     
    The girl was surgeon and singing bird, deadly queen of sharps. Resentments at the ready, we met in a nerve storm club. I went in as an untextured nobody, walls showing through me. Scar incarnate, third generation cool and moral omitted, washing one drug down with another as the world toxified around us. Sad shadows in her hair, a slow ballet of cigarette smoke, cold bottle touch going warm as outcome diagrams traced our way. The streets, treasure lights bobbing underneath the real. Her rough ferrous oxide tongue as we went up in a cage elevator somewhere. Her hair hides the phone.
    After that I lost track of time for a while. Someone ’ s flat. I was looking at a strange box of bone parts, all hoaxed up with operation wire — an october switch, it was called. I had one of those, it was an activan machine. A what? My head frazzled through a series of pulls, releases and dissolves. The body is King on Earth, I remembered, a vital lie.
    A lightbulb was swinging like a hanged ghost as I drew a thin blade through the smudged centre of the entry stamp on my wrist. The wound pulled open, stretching gluey blood. It looked like a mainline station in there, parallel tracks converging and splitting in a soak of red light. Who was I?
    The elemental flutter of etheric draw flickered in the soda blackness to my right, barely visible through brain spuff. Outside influence, drawing like silver stage ropes.
    I was in such a bad way. Deep cover — I ’ d lost myself in it again. I was Alix the ultravivid hero or something like it. I stood up, pushing through thick space, and pull patterns shrivelled like cobwebs around me. The girl was a loft baby, rigged up in a back room, the leather cocoon of her flightbag the centre of a massive kirlian web. Transformation adjustments mashed in the dark, heroine wear backing up, discovered and obliged to die. I had to do a techie before the end. Etheric strands were still trailing into me — all the better.
    I used the blade to split the suspension bag — lengths of gelatinous activan stretched from her pale face, she didn ’ t stir. Laying on hands.
    An armchair was already dwindling into the corner as electrovistas opened up in front, the stream of cells blowing past. Bloodshot intervals of subterranean transport and the racket of magic.
    Her head was a lovely little number. Creation-fresh, her spirit entering a litter of fallen winter, momentary people reproached her angrily for delicious visions and she died a notch or two. Together the years conspired, denying eachother. Fame admiration trapped the family, their lives in dry dock. Children were plucked like pillows and shoved into formation. Surgeons hand over a mistake, culture paints leaves green which were green, complete and repeated, sickening, and mother birds drop coins into the waiting mouths of chicks. She learnt to keep her eyes closed when crying, tears flowing under the skin and over the skull. Early dreams collapsed like empires.