At thirteen minutes past ten, Johnny Considine, aged twenty-three years, realized that the future course of his life would be dictated by television news. It came in the last story before the break, immediately after an item on a possible United Nations embassy to the Shi’an motherworld sixty light years away.
Police today in Belfast...
‘I don’t think anyone really believes they’re from another planet,’ said Orlaith, his girlfriend of three weeks, heaving another scuttle-load of mixed coal and empty cigarette packets on to the fire. Johnny craned past her, mesmerized by the images on the screen.
...shot dead. A man and a woman arrested ...
The body, half-covered with a green wax jacket. So little blood, really. The feet, oddly splayed. Thirteen-hole Docs.
‘... their shit luck to have ended up on this of all worlds. You know, I’ll bet you they smell funny.’
Policemen. SS. RUC. Black bastards, standing around cradling their big guns like babies.
... Castlereagh holding centre. They are believed to be ...
‘Hey, Orlaith, could you move your fat ass? I’m trying to watch this.’
God-awful Photo-me mugshots. Make anyone look like a terrorist. Aoife Brennan. Charlie Fitzpatrick. No question of ‘belief’ about it, Mr Newsreader. It’s who they are.
‘They could solve all our problems, you know, if they’d shipped the lot of them over here,’ Orlaith said. ‘All eight million of them. Everyone’s a minority then, Taeg and Prod. Had the chance with the Hong Kong Chinese and they blew it; blew it again with the Sheenies
‘Shi’an. It’s pronounced Shi’an. Something to do with the dual aspects of their sexuality.’
...members of the IRA computer-terrorism squad responsible for the Brown Wednesday Stock Market mini-crash and the Northern Bank collapse ...
‘Listen to the Sheenie expert, would you? I’m putting the kettle on. Fancy a cup?’
‘What? Yes. Thanks. Black ...’
‘No sugar. I’m learning.’
... a fourth member of the gang escaped and is still at large, though police are confident of a quick arrest. In part two ...
The swelling thunder of the jug-kettle. Some boffin once proved a kettle generates as many perceived decibels as a back-throttling Boeing.
‘All right if I use your phone?’ Johnny shouted to Orlaith.
‘You know where it is.’
It was a yellow payphone, greedy of fifty pees and much scrawled with the numbers of taxi firms and pizza delivery companies. He picked up the receiver and it hit him, the nauseating panic that burned through the pit of his stomach. He reached for the bannister to keep from falling. His balls felt as tender and vulnerable as two skinned apricots. Ring ring. Be in, you bastard. Ring ring. Answer, you bastard. Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring—
‘Eugene. Listen. Just listen. They’ve lifted Aoife and Charlie. Joey’s dead. He’s dead, Eugene. They shot him.’
‘Jesus, Johnny. Oh Jesus
‘Listen. Mikey got away. I don’t know how, I don’t know where the fuck he’s gone. You know I never trusted the peelers; with Mikey out there, I trust them even less. So get what you have and go.’
‘Johnny. Fuck, Johnny ... ‘
‘Johnny?’ The voice called from the living room with its warm fire and posters of women tennis players scratching their bums and old furniture friendly and mangey as an alcoholic’s dog. Another world, Johnny. Another planet. ‘Coffee!’
‘Just be a second, Orlaith. OK?’ He jammed the mouthpiece to his lips. ‘If we don’t know each other we can’t hurt each other. So don’t come looking for me, Eugene, for old times’ sake, don’t talk about me, don’t wonder what I’m up to. Just colour me dead, Eugene.’
The coins clattered into British Telecom’s metal gullet. At the age of twenty-three, at ten o’clock and twenty-eight minutes, Johnny Considine took his best beloved black leather jacket off Orlaith Hughes’s coat rack, closed the door of 27 Malone Avenue quietly behind him and began to walk. At the cashpoint beside Simpson’s all-niter he withdrew all the money his card would allow. His outstretched thumb hooked in a passing Pandoro at the end of the West Link. Later, while the driver, rejoicing, stuck into his five a.m. Ulster fry in the truckers’ lounge, Johnny leaned against the aft rail and watched the land of his birth merge with the dawn grey as the great blue and white ship took him away into exile.
~ * ~
The laws of universal perversity demand that while the way is open for you to go back you will not, but when you want to, more than anything, you cannot. When he was eight years old Johnny Considine was sent to Florida to summer with his Uncle Ciaran, headhunted by the bran and tan cyberdweebs of Microsoft Key. Knowing eight-year-olds, Uncle Ciaran took his nephew to Disneyland. As they had snaked along the line for Space Mountain (‘Half an hour from this point’, ‘Photographic opportunity here’) Johnny had noted a number of well-labelled Chicken Gates. ‘For those who just can’t go through with it,’ Uncle Ciaran had explained. His aspirant manhood impugned, Johnny had scorned the Chicken Gates. Ten persons from the car. His resolve faltered. Five persons from the car. He panicked. No more Chicken Gates. No way back. The smiling staff lifted him, strapped him in. Johnny Considine, age eight with nowhere to run, pissed himself.
Fourteen years later the entrapment was subtler but no less sure. The disillusionments of a fresh IT graduate condemned by Dame Europa to a hand-to-mouth existence grubbing freelance subcontracts from the big SAs and GmBHs were easily bolstered. New injustices hung sweetly on ancient enemies. Men, or things that seemed men, had come from the stars to live upon the earth, but don’t you know, Johnny, the old griefs endure, the old wars never end, the old battle is unrelenting. Blandishments. Oh, Johnny, praise, Oh, Johnny Johnny rewards, Oh, Johnny Johnny Johnny. Seductions. Do this for me, Johnny, do this for us, Johnny. Hack this file, Johnny. Seed this virus, Johnny. Yet he saw the Chicken Gates. He knew what was happening to him, where he was being led, what he was being shaped into, and he consented. At any time he could have walked away. And when the time came that he wanted to, he could no longer do so.
Brown Wednesday had been amusing; a cybernetic pantomime with lots of people running around and shouting ‘Behind you! Look behind you!’ Thirty billion wiped off share values in one morning. Johnny Considine could only marvel at the miracle of Chaos Theory, by which one tiny ripple in the fiscal ocean slowly, surely, inevitably escalated into a fifty-foot tubular of cascading prices. Between coffee and lunchtime, the Irish Republican Army cost the Ould Hoor Britannia more than fifty-three years of armed struggle. By lunchtime the next day, Ould Hoor Britannia had it all back again.
The destruction of the Northern Bank PeeEllCee gave Johnny Considine great personal satisfaction. The virus systems had been immaculately designed; robust, untraceable, endlessly mutable. Within fifteen minutes of systems insertion they had spread their infection through every aspect of the bank’s operations. Sixty million pounds in personal, small business and corporate accounts vanished. After a month sterilizing the system with hunter/killers, the Data Protection Squad traced the source of the infestation to the branch that had once upon a time casually refused the account application of one Mr John Considine because, as a freelance, he was not considered to be in possession of sufficiently regular tranches of cash. The Northern Bank PeeEllCee had forgotten Mr John Considine. Mr John Considine had not forgotten the Northern Bank.
Then came the West Drayton operation and Johnny Considine came down from the high mountain with Robin Hood and Butch and Sundance and the blessed company of heroic rogues, and saw the hundreds who would die burning because of what they wanted him to do. He looked around then for the Chicken Gate and the Chicken Gates were all closed. The hands lifted him and set him in the slow climbing car. Johnny Considine waited until he reached the very top, and on the edge of the precipice into darkness he jumped.
~ * ~
At the end of the twin rivers of blacktop that pushed through the day and the night he found a London so alien it might have been a district of the Shi’an capital world. Sampan suburbs jostled on the high tide beneath Cleopatra’s Needle; it was once again possible for a latter-day Dr Johnson to cross the Pool of London dryshod. Cardboard and packing-case bashes crowded the Inns and squares, the trees reduced to dismembered trunks for firewood. A white boy with a Stanley knife tried to rob Johnny on the westbound platform of Shepherd’s Bush Central Line and fled empty-handed at the sound of an Ulster accent. When Johnny saw his first alien - buying a cheese salad mayo baguette from a stand outside King’s Cross Thameslink - he stared, disturbed in spirit, so long that he missed his bus. However frequently he was to see Shi’ an abroad in the city, they never failed to evoke that second look, and stir disquiet in his good Christian Brothers’ soul.
With the dregs of his money he put up the deposit and one month down on a flat in Limehouse. Opposite his window was a church steeple where every day the vicar would go out on to the parapet to examine the four corners of the world. Watching from his eau-de-Nil cube, Johnny imagined him deciding on the face of what he found whether to throw himself off or not. With the embers of his talent Johnny found a commission as a technical author writing User-Bibles for dismally uninspiring personal accountancy software. The tranches came no more regularly than in Belfast, but were larger.
On his fifth Sunday Johnny went out to buy a paper and met a crusty sprawling in a doorway. The crusty wore thirteen-hole Docs, splayed out at an odd angle. The paper went unbought. By the time he got back to his room Johnny was shaking so hard he needed five attempts to open the door. He found himself inexplicably prostrate across his bed, heaving terrible, shuddering, dry sobs. He had not liked Joey. He had feared Joey. In the end he had hated Joey, but Joey was dead under the paisley lining of some passerby’s green Barbour, and Johnny was an inescapable exile in an alien nation.
There was a place - modestly, and accurately, called Moe’s Diner and Bar - where he would flee the instant before the walls closed on him. It was that kind of good-food-cheap, pink-flamingos eatery that inevitably becomes fashionable through its absolute rejection of fashion. The mammoth cappuccino machine, topped by an Imperial Eagle, had been to Abyssinia with Mussolini. The records in the jukebox - coin-in-the-slot, no cards, certainly no sing-along videoke - had not been changed in forty years and could render even the most stony-hearted of patrons moist with nostalgia for an age when, in all probability, their parents had not even been conceived. Drum-head swivel stools with footrests ran along the bar for those who cared to eat publicly. For those who wished seclusion there were a number of Naugahyde booths with wipe-kleen menus, stainless steel cruets like elephantine dum-dum bullets and bottles of tomato ketchup wearing gamine paper neckerchiefs to conceal ghastly cut throats of dried drips. Moe himself was a genial bear of a man who kept a ‘98 World Series L’il Slugger above the wineglass rack for Grade One Trouble and a loaded self-targeting Fiuzzi automatic under the till for Grade Two Trouble. As a consequence he never had trouble of either grade. Moe’s front-of-house staff - friendly, well-trained, polite, efficient - numbered five: two Chinese, one West Indian, one Scot and one Shi’an.
The first time the alien came to scribble his order on a little notebook, Johnny was so stunned he could do nothing but stare. He was within touching distance of something from sixty light years away. A lifetime of accrued abstractions and informations - childhood television documentaries hastily flicked by mother to the snooker when they got on to Not Nice Stuff, school projects, National Geographic articles pasted into his Aliens Scrapbook, encyclopaedia entries, shareware research - all these were made concrete, actual, in a thousand little inhumanities. The texture of an alien skin. The strangely different cocktail of body musks and sweats. Tall - over average height, they came from a shallower gravity-well than Earth’s. Slim as a child; like a child, no external gender identifiers. Shi’an sexual identity is more pheromonal than physiological. His/her eyes were large, the oval irises almost black; nose broad - all that olfactory information, he supposed - mouth narrow, lips thin. The ears were very small, the scalp clad in a narrow strip of short, dark red fur that ran up over the centre of the skull and tapered into a spine-hugging line of soft fuzz beneath the neck of the Moe’s Diner and Bar T-shirt. Johnny was reminded of a terracotta Benin head he had once fallen in love with in an art gallery on Botanic Avenue.
‘You ordering something?’ The voice: a breathy contralto, could be either a man’s or woman’s. The accent was at once utterly unidentifiable and maddeningly familiar. The left hand keeping pen poised above pad had three fingers.
‘I’m sorry. I’ll have the... Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you a question?’
‘That depends.’
‘Are you a man or a woman?’
‘I’m a girl,’ the Shi’an said, and her answer crystallized the flux of possibilities and contradictions she had been until that second. ‘Now, what are you having?’
After she had cleared the dishes away, Johnny sat a long time in the booth, breathing in her intimate musks and perfumes and feeling things he could not quite comprehend but felt he had known all his life. She had not smiled once during the entire dining experience.
Though Johnny became a fixture, it was a brave day the Tuesday he brought his Compaqt into Moe’s Diner and Bar. He had prevaricated three weeks over the decision. The booths were private, the atmosphere vastly more conducive to technical writing than the oppressive room with its view of the melancholy vicar, but he still feared people craning over the partition and asking him if he was a writer, had he sold anything, did he write under his own name? People didn’t. She did.
‘What you writing?’ She set his customary Coors on a paper Moe’s Diner and Bar coaster, and sneaked a peek at his rollscreen. Alien kinesis: odd relaxations and attitudes that looked distinctly disjointed to Johnny.
‘Just some computer manual. MicroServe Nemesis 4.2. It’s a link-in between accountancy and legal ‘wares.’ Courage, Johnny. Make the jump from passing strangers to occasional acquaintances. ‘Actually, I suppose this is kind of Stone Age to you.’
‘Depends,’ she said, and went to attend other customers. It was half an hour before she was free to return and add, ‘I mean, it’ll be eighty years before you can even begin to understand our quantum tunnelling processors; on the other hand, we’ve never thought of computerizing our legal system. Seyamang.’
‘Johnny.’ They shook hands, the human way. At some point in the thirty minutes she had waited tables, she had ceased to be an alien, a Traveller, a Shi’an, and become a person. He had still not seen her smile.
He thought of her that night. He thought of her naked, her skin the colour and texture of Benin terracotta. He thought of the electric fuzz-prickle of her head fur against the palm of his hand. He tried to imagine her nipples, her genitals, the heat of her body orifices. The luxurious excess of his fantasy shocked him. He had only just learned her name and he was fucking her. And she was Shi’an. Not human. Inhuman. Like fucking a beautiful, glossy, rust-red Irish setter.
He did not get to Moe’s for several days. He hid in his ugly little room, terrified by the understanding that the obscure object of desire he had chased down all his fumbled relationships had been the earth-red androgyny of the Shi’an. Terrified, elated.
When at last he went back to check the fast-fading mental Seyamang against corporeal reality, she was not there. Panic-stricken, he asked where she was.
The West Indian girl, Silelé, sat down beside him in his customary booth.
‘Why do you want to know where Seyamang is?’
Caught. Crucified. He spread his hands helplessly, inviting nails.
‘Just wondering. I like her. I get on with her.’
Silelé reserved a judgemental silence, then said, ‘You some kind of frook, mister?’
‘Some kind of what?’
‘Frook. Men who get off on Shi’an. Like gays get off on other men, pederasts get off on children, rubberists get off on black latex. Frooks get off on Shi’an. We get them in here sometimes; word gets round there’s a Shi’an working here. You get them wanking under the table, stuff like that. Moe makes sure they don’t come back.’
‘Jesus God, no, I mean, no ...’ You mean yes, Johnny. It’s true, Johnny. No, it was not like that, not filthy and soiled, like that. Then what is it like, Johnny-O?
Silelé’s posture and expression had not shifted, but Johnny could see that the conviction behind his stammered denial had convinced her.
‘I believe you, Johnny. She’ll be back tomorrow. Don’t worry. If you really want to know, I think she likes you too.’
There had been a co-option at the Motherhouse down in Docklands, Seyamang told him on her return. All the Sorority were supposed to be there. They’d flown some in from Amsterdam. Somewhere between a wedding and a bar mitzvah, but a good bash, she said. Yet Johnny felt that she had not enjoyed the party and was glad to be back in her too-big Moe’s Diner and Bar T-shirt, among the humans. Screwing his courage tight, he asked her if he could buy her a drink.
‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘You have one for yourself, and I’ll have this on you.’ From the hip-pocket of her black PVC jeans she produced a dimple-pack of aspirins and popped one into her three-fingered hand. ‘Aspirin. Cheap thrills from Superdrug; pound a packet.’ Seyamang swallowed the aspirin, dry, while Johnny swilled back his beer, and the spirit of the late-night diner that lives in the spiral scratch of old black vinyl whispered in his ear that for the first time in his twenty-three years he was truly living.
Johnny Considine was in love with the alien.
~ * ~
Because word had passed, because the right periodicals had used the right degree of capital city cynicism, Moe’s Diner and Bar graduated from merely fashionable to famous. A desert storm of bright and beautiful descended upon it.
‘Jesus Christ, Moe, what happened?’ Johnny asked, pushing between besuited Friday-nighters towards his place at the bar. Moe, wiping glasses as ever, smiled ruefully.
‘We’re the place to be seen, Johnny-O. I’ll give it ten days, if we’re not deeply unfashionable by then, I’ll make us deeply unfashionable.’
‘Hiya, Johnny!’ Seyamang shouted over the din. She blinked long lashes at him: a Shi’an smile, Johnny had learned. The bared teeth of a human smile they read as a threat.
‘Hiya, Seyamang. Well, it’s off. Bit-squirted to Albuquerque off some balloon moored in the jeststream over Greenland, and the discs Fed-Exed, just to be on the safe side. I think this deserves a bottle of something good.’
‘Certainly does, Johnny.’
‘Oi!’ An overweight West Indian twentysomething in a collar so tight it squeezed out extraneous rolls of flesh, levered into Johnny’s personal space. ‘Never mind ‘im, where’s my Sloe Screw?’ As Seyamang moved to the racked bottles behind the bar, twentysomething stage-whispered, ‘Fucking Sheenies. At least they could have got someone speaks English.’
The thrilling vertigo was exactly the same one Johnny remembered feeling keying in the passwords to the Northern Bank PeeEllCee’s managerial hierarchy. He heard his voice, razor-edged and precise, say, ‘Excuse me. Don’t call her that. She’s a Shi’an. Her people were travelling between the stars while ours were eating each other’s fleas. She is no more a Sheenie than you are a nigger. Nigger.’
A blur of the hand. The beer glass, shattered on the edge of the bar, was ten centimetres from Johnny’s eyes. Behind it the livid, bestial face raged.
‘What did you call me, you paddy bastard? What you call me, fucking paddy fucking murdering fucking IRA bastard? Eh, Paddy?’
‘Johnny,’ said Johnny. His body, the body of the raging man, the entire substance of the diner and its late-nite Friday clientele, seemed to be constructed out of brightly coloured helium-inflated PVC. Rise up, and blow away. ‘My name is Johnny. Sir.’ At some great remove in this luminous void, Moe was shouting, his faithful Number One ‘98 L’il Slugger the rod of absolute justice. The vinyl universe whirled like a kaleidoscope. Faces loomed, voices boomed, and Johnny was all-alonio at the bar.
‘Johnny, by rights I should throw you out too,’ Moe said, but Seyamang, slipping in behind him, squeezed Johnny’s hand.
‘Thanks, brother.’
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Johnny said, suddenly pale and sweaty. He just made it to the cubicle.
They waited an hour and ten minutes for the Diner and Bar to close. Fatboy and six fat friends. The fat friends brought Johnny down, kept him down with a kick to the kidneys, held him down to the piss-stained concrete while Fatboy told Johnny once again just what he thought of fucking treacherous murdering paddies, underlining his comments with repeated blows from size twelves to ribs, neck and head. Fucking murdering fucking paddies.
They took his cash. They took his cards. They pissed on him and ran off.
‘Oh God,’ Johnny whispered. ‘Oh Jesus. Oh God. Oh Jesus I’m going to die.’ He retched, emptily, agonizingly. Ribs grated. He spat blood. A light shone in his eyes. Fingers of pain explored his body. Three fingers.
‘Oh fuck, Johnny.’
‘Seyamang.’
‘Don’t say anything. I’ll get an ambulance.’
‘No. No. Seyamang, no, don’t, I can’t go to hospital.’ Hospitals. Forms. Assault charges. Police investigations.
‘Johnny, come on ...’
‘I can’t tell you why, just believe me I can’t go to a hospital.’
Shadows poured out of the recesses of his skull. Red-out. Sensory shutdown. His last conscious sensation was of being lifted by strong arms, and a feeling of warmth and security he had known only in childhood.
~ * ~
Seyamang Erreth Huskravidi lived in a glassy, draughty garret flat above a Shi’an provisions store on The Mitre. Exploding from the reservation His Majesty’s government had granted them amongst the tumbled capitalist caryatids of Docklands, the Shi’ an were the latest in a succession of immigrant populations to move into the streets of Poplar and Westferry. First the European Jews, next the Chinese, then the Indo-Pakistani community, now, refugees from sixty light years away. Multiple births among the colonists - a biological modification to secure a self-sustaining genebase in the shortest time (space was large, even foreshortened by relativistic Mach drive: once down at ground zero the settlers were on their own) - sent the population soaring. To Johnny, looking down like a glass god on to the street beneath Seyamang’s light-filled flat, it seemed like a perpetual outdoor kindergarten. Tall, lithe Shi’an children dodged between the fluttering Sorority totems, chased each other around the nose-to-tailed cars, played vigorous football. Their screams and shouts and cries were oddly low-pitched and soft-edged.
‘Johnny.’
He looked around, startled, and Seyamang took his picture.
‘Nice one, Johnny.’
Waitressing for Moe was what she did, what she was was a photographer. And none of your point/squint/shoot/print videostill stuff either. Proper silver bromide, emulsion, developer and fixer photography. In black and white. ‘It’s such a beautiful medium,’ she had told him the second night, when he had gone around the flat inspecting her framed prints. ‘Absolute black, absolute white. Yet out of two irreconcilable opposites, everything can be envisioned. Lost art to us. More’s the pity. It takes us to come to Earth to rediscover it.’
Shi’an technological society, the xenologists said, was eight thousand years old.
Seyamang photographed children; her people’s children, caught unawares, spontaneous and candid, pulled out of the streets and closes of Westferry and slapped on to celluloid.
‘So?’ she had asked, fishing for compliments.
‘I like this one,’ Johnny had said, pointing out a poster-size colour still of the delicate geometry of a Shi’an interstellar ship poised against a starfield. She had wrinkled her nose: an alien moue of disappointment.
‘And this?’ Johnny had asked, picking up a piece of sculpture cast from liquid night. However he turned it in his fingers it seemed to flow sensuously into his hand, greedy for his grip.
Seyamang had swiftly snatched it from him.
‘Don’t mess with it, Johnny. It’s dangerous.’
‘What is it?’
‘Maser,’ Seyamang had said. ‘Microwave laser. The Motherhouse didn’t like the idea of me living all alone without any protection.’
‘Christ, Seyamang...’
‘I’ll never have to use it, so just forget about it, Johnny.’
He almost succeeded.
‘How are the ribs?’ Seyamang asked. Hers were the strong, secure arms that had lifted him, carried him a mile and four flights of stairs, cleaned him, tended his wounds. Tethba was the name she gave this supernatural strength and endurance: a state of controlled rage the Shi’an could temporarily summon in extreme need. It did not come without price; utterly wasted, Seyamang had lain comatose where she fell on the mattress beside Johnny for a day and night.
When Johnny winced in reply to her question, she produced a cup of coffee. She had bought it specially for him. Alcohol, most meats, certain perfumes - most notably Chanel - were deleterious to the Shi’an. But the things that took them high: Aspirin, tea, car exhaust, the smell of his best beloved leather jacket.
‘You know,’ Seyamang said, curling comfortably on to the window-seat in a way that looked extremely uncomfortable to Johnny, ‘I think we’re both exiles of a kind.’
‘What do you mean?’ Johnny’s outward innocence masked a sudden ice blue needle of fear. What might he have said while he was unconscious, stammering, drooling, shouting in his sleep?
‘Outcasts from our people. Our communities. Our nations. Nothing behind us. No wall of lives. Separate.’
Winterborn, she called herself, translating the Narha expression. A lost generation of one. She had been borm in the sixth month of the first subjective year of the World Ten Migration. Her mother, an outspace worker on the crew of Interstellar Sixty-Three, had conceived her in the last embers of the autumn sexual cycle before departure. A miscalculation. An oversight. An aberration. While her aberrant daughter rode her plastic tricycle along the gently curving corridors of Interstellar Sixty-Three and pestered the crew to play chasies with her, her father withered and grew old under eighty years of world-time.
‘I had no friends my age, no one to grow up alongside. No one to touch, no one to keep close and warm. All alone. Finding out by myself what it meant to be Shi’an. I was six Earth-years - eight of our own - before the Generation One children were born after the landing, by the time they hit puberty - we mature early, Johnny - I was old enough to be rearing a family of my own.’
‘How old are you?’
‘My years, eighteen. Yours, fourteen.’
Johnny, his childhood cluttered with siblings and life, tried to imagine Seyamang singing to herself as she steered her tricycle around the ranked and filed stasis coffins in which the settlers slept their five subjective years to World Ten. He could not encompass it.
Seyamang had never known the pubescent same-sex crushes and attractions that drew Shi’an from their birth Sororities into new bonds and family partnerships. She had been swept by the pheromonal typhoon of the spring and autumn sexual cycles into fearful, half-comprehending couplings with men much older and more experienced than herself. Feeling wrong, feeling different, feeling not Shi’an, but not knowing what else she was, Seyamang withdrew from the Traveller community. Like some closed Soviet city, she was an internal exile; contained within her own people and society yet sealed off from them. Hearing the low soft cries of the children below, Johnny thought that maybe the streets of Shi’an Westferry were not so far from the kitchen-house terraces of Andystown. He had never belonged there, where they painted the kerb stones green, white and gold. A brother internal exile. He and Seyamang had new nationalities now, one that recognized no frontiers. The country of the dispossessed. A nation of sexual searchers. He reached out his two hands to touch hers. Her body was fever-hot, her bones and muscles lay in unfamiliar configurations beneath the terracotta skin. He tried not to think of Orlaith and of course could not. She seemed brutal and bovine, cheaply jerry-built next to this economical, compact, subtle alien. They all did, all the human women.
He kissed her. Her mouth tasted of things he had only ever dreamed.
She shook him away from her mouth; a redirection, not a rejection. She lifted her T-shirt, gently steered his mouth towards her nipples. Johnny needed no further urging. She whispered in Narha. The alien syllables were as exciting to Johnny as the taste of her flesh on his tongue.
‘I do love you, Seyamang.’
‘I always knew you were more than just a frook, Johnny-O. But I don’t know if I love you.’
He pushed himself away from her flesh, like a swimmer launching into deep water.
‘I know Shi’an love, Johnny, but I don’t know human love.’
That night he brought three six-packs of Coors and a twenty-four carton of soluble aspirin from the last remaining Pakistani grocer in Westferry. He and Seyamang clinked glasses and got loud and joyful. Johnny tried to slip his hand into the waistband of Seyamang’s jeans and was firmly rebuffed.
‘I thought you loved me,’ Johnny retorted. A cowardly, man’s accusation.
‘This is difficult. Believe me, I want to fuck with you, very much, but I can’t. It’s not the right time. I’m not in season. You understand what that means?’
Johnny’s head and penis both understood, though differently.
‘I try to imagine what it might be like to be you, Johnny; this state of permanent sexuality, but I can’t feel it. I try to extend the passion the ... fire ... of kesh so that it never ends, but I can’t. I can’t imagine how you could live like that all the time. We have love and we have sex. Sex is kesh, love is ... Love is what we feel for our friends, our partners, our Sorority sisters. Love is touching, and being touched.’ Again, that wrinkle of the nose. ‘So they say, Johnny. So they say.’
Closed cities.
‘I want to love and have sex with you,’ said satyric Johnny.
‘So do I, Johnny. Believe me. I don’t want to lose you just because of sex,’ Seyamang said, soft-focused from the aspirin, dreamy. ‘Will you wait for me? Will you wait, can you wait, until I come into kesh?’
‘I will,’ he said.
When Seyamang went to Moe’s on her spluttering, clunky moped, Johnny would arrive to work in the bright, airy flat, sketching out a work-plan for a Bible on a new home-anime system between prolonged stints of daytime TV watching. It was there, in a top-of-the-hour bulletin, between an item on French manicure and a phone-in on sexual harassment, that the television news reclaimed its hold on his life. He came back with his fifth decaff of the day to see two men walking down the steps of Paddington Green police station while the BBC’s legal correspondent informed him that two men from Northern Ireland had been released from detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act without charge. Their names were given as Padraig McKeag from Lurgan and Anthony Woods from West Belfast. One of you is lying, Johnny Considine thought, because I know you are really called Mikey McDonagh. Last seen running from the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
‘What’s wrong?’ Seyamang asked, coming home late to find Johnny sitting in the unlit living room, channel-hopping between news reports on the handset.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m all right. Don’t worry. Go on, go to bed.’ He knew she knew he was lying.
He asked her if he could stay with her, that night. On the couch, on the floor, it did not matter, just that he did not want to go back to his room.
‘Fuck, Johnny,’ Seyamang said, instantly awake at the sound of her name whispered in the four a.m. darkness. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Johnny knelt penitently beside her mattress.
‘Can I move in, Seyamang? Properly?’
‘Sure, Johnny. Of course, Johnny. But in the morning, yes?’
Safe. Mikey would never look for him among the aliens.
When he went to collect his few possessions from his old flat, the street outside the church was busy with police cars and ambulances but they had come for someone other than Johnny Considine.
~ * ~
Autumn as a sexual season startled Johnny, son of streets where no leaves ever fell, where seasons came and went unmarked in redbrick anonymity. Overnight the streets of Westferry and Poplar filled with a subtle but unmistakable frisson that gave a new and exciting gloss to all the old familiar places, as if he were discovering them for the very first time. From the databases he had accessed on Shi’an physiology, he knew intellectually that human males were susceptible to the mating pheromones, but to actually feel them stir his soul, awaken daylight fantasies and dark night dreams of meat and sweat, was terrible yet liberating. His hindbrain growled. Ancient animal, awake.
When he woke in the night from his terracotta nightmares it was to the sound of music and voices from the street below. Shi’an males, battle-dancing, scoring complex coup on each other on impromptu dancefloors in highly stylized combats for sexual dominance. He would watch the leaping figures silhouetted against burning naphtha flares, unquiet in himself, feeling that here, in the trashlit street, was life, true life, life in all its fullness and his Johnny Considineness was only a pale projection on a pane of window glass.
Seyamang, too, changed with the season. Her skin darkened. She took to going about the flat stripped down to a pair of shiny black cycling shorts, asking Johnny how he could stick the heat. Her nipples were permanently erect. She was anxious, irritable, temperamental, forgetful, a whirlwind of impatience and activity, playing her incomprehensible Shi’an music far too loud, far too late, dancing edgily around the living room, smiling spasmodically at her photographs of children. She slept little, ate less. She smelled. It pervaded every corner of the apartment, part musk, part mould, part wild abandon. It lifted the hair along Johnny’s spine. He lived in a permanent state of priapism. Terrified, exhilarated, he watched Seyamang come into kesh. She had never seemed more alien. He had never desired her more.
On the ninth night of the autumn season he came back from the wee shop, as he called it, to find her swaying entranced to her favourite piece of music playing at slate-dislodging volumes. Her body was patterned with signs and symbols in lip-gloss and fluorescent felt-marker.
‘Johnny,’ she shouted over the music, reaching out to press her body against his, ‘dance with me. Please, Johnny.’ She buried her nose in the folds of his leather jacket. ‘Ooooh. Did you wear it just for me?’ Trembling, Johnny ran his hand over her head fur.
She kissed him, the mouth-kiss of humans and the nipple-kiss of the Shi’an. Her hunger simply overpowered him. His lovemaking with Orlaith, with all the girls whose panties he had fumbled his way into, was no preparation for Seyamang. He was a virgin again. Everything had to be relearned. Her desire was urgent, yet she held back so they might explore each other. The slow engorgement of his penis caused her especial surprise and delight. ‘Always exposed, always vulnerable,’ she said with child-like wonder. Similarly wonderful to him the star-shaped pucker beneath a retractable hood of freckled skin that was her vagina. Higher than a human woman’s, its lips and lining were so sensitive that a breath was enough to send her reeling and moaning in Narha. She marvelled at his pubic hair, twisted it between her fingers; she explored the curves and ridges of his erection. He slipped a moistened finger into her anus. She yelped in surprise, then crooned with pleasure; she coated him from head to toe with sweet-scented saliva. New erogenous geographies were mapped. New orientations established.
Johnny wanted to weep. Johnny wanted to crow. Sex had broken the bounds of self-consciousness that had always before constrained him. He could lose himself, he could give himself, because they were aliens to each other. He felt inebriated with freedom. Yet in the mating that night, each successive night, he knew he had only entered the shallow waters of Seyamang’s sexual hunger. And a new dread arose. Could he go back to celibacy when the season ended and the kesh energy burned itself out?
Moe had given Seyamang time off from the diner; enlightened self-interest; in her current hormonal climate she would have converted every male customer into a potential frook. Contained by the glass walls of the flat, she fretted, she fussed. Between bouts of sex she was unapproachable and moody, pressing her hands and face to the tall windows and staring at the figures in the street for hours on end.
‘Is it the dancing?’ Johnny asked, resting his hands on her shoulders. Always, the heat. She shrugged: a Shi’an yes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not you, Johnny. You’re good. You’re great. It’s me. My fucking chemicals. My hormonal destiny. I’m not as free as I like to think I am.’
‘Do you want to go?’
‘Would you mind?’
Yes. ‘No. I don’t mind.’ Liar. ‘You go, if it’ll make you happy.’
She mouth-kissed him. ‘Thank you, Johnny. Thank you.’
He watched her ride off on her moped and turn the corner into Newell Street. He raged silently around her flat filled with her smell and her pictures of unsmiling Shi’an children. Whatever was drinkable he drank. He watched the sunset. He watched the lights of aircraft coming in across Docklands on final approach to Heathrow. He listened to the distant drums from the dancefloors. Sick in his heart he went to Moe’s and his old, private, Naugahyde booth and drank until closing time.
‘Seyamang, it’s me.’ The lights were on. The music playing. The musk insistent, urgent. She was back. Why didn’t she answer? ‘Seyamang.’ Living room no kitchen no bathroom no study no. Knowing exactly what he would find behind it, he pushed open the bedroom door.
He was nothing more than a kid, spreadeagled on their mattress. Eyes closed, whimpering ecstatic Narha, she rode the Shi’an youth. Easily. Naturally. Perfectly. None of the manoeuverings and compromises of her couplings with him. It was beautiful. For one thrilling instant he could not tell them apart.
It was the Shi’an boy who saw Johnny first; his shocked freeze that alerted Seyamang.
‘Johnny ...’ She sounded like some semi-clever animal taught to mimic human speech without comprehension. Roaring incoherently, Johnny blundered into the room. The Shi’an kid fled, clutching at clothes. Somewhere in the red blur of his consciousness he heard the door slam. ‘Johnny…’ Seyamang retreated before him, hands crossed before her: the gesture of pleading. ‘Johnny, it doesn’t mean anything, honest, it doesn’t mean anything. I can’t help it. It’s my nature, it’s our nature. It’s kesh. Johnny, I need to know what I am, do you understand? It’s not like I love him or anything; it’s just ... sex, Johnny. Just fucking.’
Johnny shook his head slowly. With all his hurt and anger and betrayal and jealousy and fear balled tight in it, his fist took Seyamang across the side of her head. She sprawled against the wall, a tangle of terracotta limbs that he thought for a moment he had shattered like an Etruscan pot. She stared at the trickle of dark red blood she had wiped from her forehead.
She smiled at him.
‘Fuck you Johnny Considine, human. I hate you. With all my life, I hate you.’
He seated himself cross-legged on the bedroom floor, numb, not looking, not listening to the sounds of her throwing needful things into an overnighter. Utterly numb. He wished someone, anyone would turn that fucking music off.
For two days Johnny hung crucified on the tree of remorse while his database familiars showed him the enormity of his sin. Hideously expensive uplinks to the colonial library stored in the eighty-eight ships of the Fifteenth Interstellar Fleet out at the L5 point forced him to confront appalling conclusions. The kesh cycle with its complementary suites of matching male and female trigger chemicals meant that sex was always by female consent. Male full erection was only possible in the presence of a female hormone released during foreplay. Rape was a biochemical impossibility. Rape as a statement of male dominance was psychologically untenable; male violence against females as a power display unthinkable. Sexual violence was unknown among the Shi’an. Impossible. Seyamang could have been no more horrified had the sky fallen on her head.
On the third day Johnny rose and went to seek Seyamang, her forgiveness, and that of her people. He went not knowing if she would forgive him. He went not knowing if forgiveness had any analogue in Shi’an emotionality.
He walked along the disused Light Railway track which had become the major thoroughfare into Shi’ an town, down to Canary Wharf, the centre of the aliens’ domain. Dark-eyed androgynous children gave grudging directions: never once the slow blink of a smile. All Docklands, it seemed, knew of the star-crossed lovers. Seyamang had spoken the truth when she said she was not as free as she liked to think. Johnny Considine passed beneath the shadow of the Canada Tower and entered the heart of the Huskravidi Sorority.
The British government had never admitted that IRA bombing of Canary Wharf had been a masterstroke. Seven hundred kilos of cross-polarized DBX had shattered every window within two kilometres and stripped the skin clean off the Canada Tower. Public denouncement hid private delight: since the popping of the property bubble the Canary Wharf/Docklands complex had been a real-estate albatross. With renovation estimates far exceeding rent-per-square-metre value, it was offered to the Shi’an immigrants to do with as they would, if they could. Their engineers had slapped up a containment field of the same type that protected their Interstellars at relativistic velocities, and moved the people in.
Johnny was kept waiting by a software receptionist in a claustrophobic grey cube of a lobby with only a wall-mounted flatscreen for company. After an hour a middle-aged Shi’an - a woman, Johnny thought, learning the signs and symbols - gave him permission to enter. The Huskravidi Sorority Motherhouse occupied the twenty-fifth floor. To Johnny, stepping out of the gravshaft, it seemed as if he were standing on a great rectangle floating three hundred feet above east London. The floors ended where the horizon began. He clung to the walls like an acrophobic spider. The Shi’an woman who had told him to come up introduced herself as Manblong Erreth Huskravidi and led him by the hand to a chair one metre from the edge. Seyamang entered and seated herself in a facing chair some five metres away. The Sorority woman Manblong sat in a third such chair set at right angles to the line of communication.
‘Seyamang ...’
Manblong looked at him. Words were not his to speak.
Seyamang spoke. She spoke of the hurt he had done her, the sins he had committed upon her flesh, the pains he had inflicted, the deep wounds he had written in her. She spoke of her incomprehension and fear. She spoke of mistrust and betrayal and the natures of love, human and Shi’an. She spoke for a long time. Many aircraft slid over the top of the tower. The sun moved across the cinemascope sky. In all that she spoke there was nothing Johnny had not already heard from his own soul, yet spoken aloud, in her words, in her voice, it gutted him.
Manblong then turned to Johnny. Now he might speak. All his justifications and defences and accusations fled from him.
‘Seyamang,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ He found he was crying. Open, unashamed, free. Manblong was staring at him. The Shi’an did not believe in tears. He was beyond care. He was destroyed. Broken. He felt hands cradling his head: the most intimate of Shi’an love-touchings. Seyamang was kneeling by the side of his chair, her hands stroking his skull.
‘Johnny, I hurt you and didn’t understand.’ She rubbed the side of her face - the wounded side - against his. He sniffed. She sniffed. ‘Still wearing that wonderful leather jacket.’
Manblong left them touching. When they were ready to leave, she called them back from the gravshaft gate. A plastic vial of white capsules was clenched between her fingers.
‘You’ll need these,’ she said.
‘What are they?’ Johnny asked.
‘A synthetic hormone,’ Manblong said. ‘We women use it to experiment with sex out of season.’ The subject seemed gravely distasteful to her. Seyamang took the vial and stashed it in her pocket. Her head was lowered, her eyes were averted.
‘Will it keep me in kesh after the end of the season?’ she asked.
‘Not kesh. Something like it.’
‘Until the next season?’
‘Theoretically indefinitely. Seyamang.’
‘Yes?’
‘We have been using this drug for thousands of years, but there has never been anything like this before. Never. Do you understand?’
Seyamang made no audible reply but Johnny could see the skin darken around her eyes into a mask of emotion. The Shi’an did not believe in tears. They believed in personal darkness.
‘I can trust you not to say anything about where or who you got them from. Understand this, John Considine, we don’t die for love but we will kill for our children.’
‘I know that,’ Johnny said. As Seyamang stepped into the freefall field, he paused to add, ‘I know you used the hormone to conceive her, but if you can believe anything a human says, believe me when I say I will not let her be hurt again.’
~ * ~
The warm damp winter came. The streets emptied of children, the music fell silent. The plastic banners tore and flapped in the wind, soft-running Shi’an vehicles splashed through the gurgling gutters. The air was just air again, no more, no magic, no thrill in every breath. Rain crazed the windows of the attic flat. Behind them Seyamang Erreth Huskravidi learned love.
She tried to explain emotions utterly alien to her while the daily dose of drugs pushed her further and further into sexual terra incognita. ‘Warm, yet cool at the same time. Can you understand that, Johnny? Not the heat of the kesh, but neither the cold of the times between. I know that if I wanted to I could fuck you right now, but I also know I don’t have to, not the way I had to in kesh. Warm. Cool. At the same time.’
She took to reading all Johnny’s deck could display of human erotica and romantic love.
‘That Romeo and Juliet. That wouldn’t happen - that couldn’t happen - among us. We don’t pair-bond. But I can understand how the way I feel, the constant tension between want and frustration, might make me need someone that much.’
‘You falling in love with me?’ Johnny asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Seyamang answered, blinking her eyes in a slow, intimate smile. ‘Perhaps.’ She preferred West Side Story anyway: the Sharks and Jets dancing their way to the rumble was how her people would have settled territorial scores.
As the rain rained down and river floods drove the street people from their bashes and shacks, she reciprocated Johnny’s lessons in humanity by teaching him to be Shi ‘ an. She took him and her camera on photo-expeditions down to Docklands, seeing anew through his eyes. The truck gardens where semi-vegetative animals sucked nourishment out of the hacked-open earth. Click whirr. The titanic hulk of the lander beached in Heron Wharf. Click whirr. The stasis coffins in which her people had slept their five subjective years crossing to Earth, row upon row upon row racked up in the empty levels of Canada Tower. Click whirr. Sleepers awake.
And each time, the subtle transaction between mother and daughter of inoffensive white capsules in their clear plastic cylinder. Johnny tried to contemplate a love that loved the sinner yet hated the sin.
Seyamang pulled geographical and historical information down from the L5 point. Johnny saw the Shi’an motherworld unfold on his rollscreen, encircled by its wheel of orbital manufactories and habitats, spiked with space elevators. Motherworld’s nightside burned with the lights of ten thousand cities, its moons had long ago been reduced to massive organo-technic industrial complexes where starships reproduced themselves. He saw the nine colony planets of the Household of Worlds, where the Shi’an had walked before Rome was built.
‘I can’t take it in,’ he said. ‘It’s like an old sci-fi movie, FX by Industrial Light and Magic. It’s not real. I can’t believe in it.’
‘Nor I,’ said Seyamang Winterborn.
She attempted to teach him Narha. He could not master a language that changed inflection and gender depending on the season of the year. He attempted to teach her Irish; when that failed, Ulster English. ‘Far more expressive than the bland Standard National Curriculum shit they talk here. Some of it is pure Elizabethan. The language of Shakespeare.’
They had sex as the spirit moved them. Which was often. Always, Johnny was conscious of the price of the rough trade. The animal was gone. Never again did he experience the abandon, the self-loss, the sense of alien-to-alien that he had in the heat season.
And the television news, waiting, biding, patient in its armouring of world trivia all these weeks and months, sprang. Ambushed by the lunchtime bulletin.
Leicester police are investigating what appears to be the paramilitary-style killing of a young Belfast man outside a city-centre burger restaurant in the early hours of the morning.
Jesus fuck.
Eyewitnesses report that a motorbike with two riders drew up alongside the victim. After speaking briefly, one of them shot the victim in the head with a sawn-off shotgun before riding off. The dead man has been identified as ...
Eugene Anthony Padre Pio Brady. Twenty-four. Formerly of Ardoyne Avenue, Belfast. Currently of hell. Always was a fucking stupid name, Padre Pio. Christ have mercy on you. Christ have mercy on me.
‘Seyamang.’
She looked around from the kitchen space where she was joyfully chopping up some ghastly Shi’an vegetables that he was too polite to say gave him the shits.
‘Can I talk to you a minute?’
‘Sure, Johnny.’ She curled herself against him. Her unique musk had faded, victim of the white tablets, but her inhuman warmth comforted him.
‘Do you love me, Seyamang?’
‘Ah now, Johnny, you know better than to ask me that.’
‘Do you love me, Seyamang?’
‘Love. What is love? Love isn’t to me what it is to you.’
‘Do you love me, Seyamang?’
‘Yes, Johnny, I fucking love you, all right?’
‘Seyamang, I have to tell you something. Please don’t interrupt or say anything until I’ve finished.’
He told her everything. What he was, what he had done.
‘West Drayton is the main air traffic control centre for British airspace. Our assault programs would have rendered it and its back-up systems inoperative for at least twelve hours. Any other traffic centre that tried to take control would have been infected also. Have you any idea of how many aircraft movements there are through West Drayton’s control sector in twelve hours? How many passengers?
‘I ran simulations. The probability of at least one mid-air collision was one hundred per cent. Total fatality. Hundreds dead. Men. Women. Children. Chinese. Indian. Japanese. Fucking Togolanders. Legitimate targets. The Stock Exchange, the Northern Bank, it was only money, it was only digits on a disc. Only things. These were lives. I couldn’t have that, Seyamang. Those Japanese, those Togolanders. So I betrayed them to the RUC. I told Eugene what I was going to do because he’s said he wanted out. I told him to stay until the peelers lifted them, so they wouldn’t suspect and run. Then I called the Confidential Telephone. They pulled me in to Castlereagh interrogation centre. I told them who, where, when, what, signed the dotted line and walked. Next day they raided them. Aoife and Charlie were arrested. Joey got shot. Dead, Seyamang. I don’t know if he was armed or not, but they shot him. Mikey escaped, changed his name, his identity, hacked into the files where his previous life was stored and erased himself. All the things I should have done if I’d been wise, but wasn’t. Two months ago I saw him on the television - the peelers had pulled him in on one of their regular paddy-bashes. Last night two guys on a motorbike rode up to Eugene in Leicester and blew him away. Classic execution. They knew who he was. They knew where to find him. Things I don’t even know, they knew. It was Mikey. Evening the score. Executing the traitors.’
‘You think he’ll come for you?’
‘I know he’ll come for me. I’ve been running checks through my deck. Someone’s been leaving muddy footprints all over my bank account.’
‘But that’s in Slovakia,’ Seyamang interrupted.
‘Someone with enough nous to mount a widescale datasearch, but clumsy enough to leave prints. Mikey never could hack worth a fuck, but he knows I’m alive and sinning, and, if he follows the account code, where to find me.’
The rain rattled the big windows, reduced the visible world to rivulets of liquid grey.
‘I have to go, Seyamang. Now. Every minute I stay here puts you in danger. Mikey isn’t going to leave any witnesses. I can’t let you take that risk; you’ve no part in this. You’re innocent. Oh Jesus, what have I done, Seyamang?’
‘I don’t want you to go, Johnny.’
‘I don’t want to leave you, but I can’t take you with me. A human and a Shi’an together? He knows about us by now.’
Seyamang smiled. It chilled Johnny to the pith of his being.
‘There is a way, Johnny. We can go together. We can hide in the future. The stasis coffins. We can sleep together fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, let Mikey die and turn to dust while we wake up in another lifetime.’
‘But your family, your friends—’
‘Family? Friends? That’s you, Johnny.’
‘Do you think the Huskravidis will allow it?’ He thought of sun and seasons accelerating across the open window-wall, Canada Tower the gnomon of an insane sundial, while he and Seyamang slept in each other’s arms. Years like seconds. In fifty, a hundred years anything might happen. Even an end to his country’s long, self-mutilation.
Seyamang said she would go to her Sorority without delay. Johnny admired her faith. The Shi’an owed him nothing. Meantime Johnny, stay in the flat, don’t open the door to anyone who doesn’t say Our Day Will Come in Narha. He disobeyed her order to stay away from the windows to watch her skid off on her moped along the wet streets. Imaginings of long lenses in every door and window tormented him. He picked up the telephone and listened to the dialling tone, not reassured by its obdurate normalness. He went five times to his deck with thoughts of hunter/hunted, of simply finding and killing Mikey before he found and killed him. Each time he vanished the qwerty icons into the grubby plastic skin because he knew that was not how it was played. He was the dead man walking, the dead man talking. Nothing could change it. Another lifetime. A one way trip into the future. Only the impossibility of his situation made it thinkable.
‘They’ll put it to the Sorority Council,’ Seyamang said on her return, three fraught hours later.
‘When will that be?’ Johnny asked.
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Johnny shouted, hearing the click-clatch of shotgun hammers cocking. Seyamang cringed away from his male anger. ‘Jesus, Seyamang ... ‘
Tomorrow.
‘They’ll do it,’ Seyamang said, after another dreadful three hours out on the naked streets while Johnny sat in the exact centre of the glass flat, waiting, waiting, waiting for the silent supersonic impact of a high-velocity round in the back of his skull. ‘They’re not happy about it - the less humans know of our technology, the better, is the official line - but Manblong has some weight in the Sorority. They’re reconfiguring a stasis coffin for human biological parameters.’
‘How long?’ Always, that question.
‘Tomorrow.’ Always, that answer.
She wanted sex with him that night. He could not. He would not. Depression, dread, had unmanned him. She was hurt, she felt failed by human sexuality, but he could not help himself. No one who is to be hanged in the morning can expect a hard-on.
He dreamed that night that the lid of a stasis coffin closed on him and turned into the safety bars of the car in Space Mountain, holding him down, holding him in through the fear and the blackness and the hurtling into Christ knew what after all the Chicken Gates were passed. He had been given his ways out, his passages back; he had seen them, acknowledged them, refused them. Always Seyamang.
‘Johnny?’ Her voice. Her words, her heat, her smell. ‘You ready?’
That time already? No. Jesus, no.
‘I’m ready.’ Truth be told, after days of house arrest, keeping away from the windows - how could he? The place was all windows, it smelled of windows - he was glad to be out in the open. The rain was never-ending, the early light dirty grey, but it tasted like wine. Perhaps a touch more acidic. Child of the air-conditioning, Seyamang was engagingly gamine in layers of tights and pullovers and quilted jackets; like an orphan in too-large hand-me-downs. She locked the door and slipped the key into the store-owner’s letterbox.
‘Hope someone else is as happy as we were,’ she said, unpretentiously. Her photographs were the only thing she had chosen to take with her, packed in two black corrugated plastic A3 folios. ‘All my children. Let’s go.’
The streets were quiet and empty under the dawn rain; a few early deliverers the only traffic. Seyamang ran her finger along the rain-speckled flanks of cars parked up on the kerb. Suddenly elated, Johnny turned out of Mitre on to Newell.
They were waiting for him at the end of the street. Two green-helmeted black-visored mantises in cling leather on a black and green scrambler. The explosion of sound as the engine was kicked into life sent pigeons clattering from their roosts. Johnny threw Seyamang away from him. She sprawled across the wet tarmac. The cheap folders split open, her monochrome children scattered across the street.
‘It’s me they want, not you,’ Johnny shouted. ‘Get out of here. Go!’
He could not hope to outrun a scrambler bike, but he would try. He ran. They pursued. He led them down every alley, into every entry, through every courtyard. He darted, he dazzled, he confused. It was a game now, and both played it to the end. Out of Shi’an town, into the streets of the humans. Human landmarks: the church tower, Moe’s Diner and Bar. All Day Breakfast fluttered like a neon butterfly in his peripheral vision. Distracted, his foot caught a tilted flagstone and he fell crashing to the pavement. The motorbike screamed in triumph and the playing was ended.
The scrambler gobbled hydrocarbons across the street. From inside his black biker’s jacket the pillion passenger produced a pistol-grip shotgun. He dismounted and walked carefully, cautiously, over to the helpless Johnny.
‘In the name of the Irish Republican—’
His head exploded.
Johnny thought that the gun had gone off, that it was his body that detonated in a rain of pulverized meat and blood and bone and plastic, that his mind, at the instant of death, had frozen in terminal agony for all eternity. Then he saw the headless body topple and fall. Then he saw Seyamang at the street comer, the sensuous black Shi’an maser gripped in her two hands. She was smiling.
‘Seyamang! The bike! ‘ he shouted. Man-machine centaur, the scrambler’s rider drew a heavy revolver.
Seyamang moved an instant too slow. The bullet blew a red blossom through her layers of wool and quilting. She stared at the hideous belly wound with childlike wonder and the second shell took her in the right shoulder.
She raised the Shi’an weapon one handed and sighted it. Tethba. No human could have accepted such punishment and remained standing: again she had summoned dark rage to save Johnny.
The scrambler spun around on the rain-wet street to give its master a clearer aim. The revolver fired a third time. And the upper left quadrant of the rider’s body - chest, shoulder, upper gun-arm - erupted in a spray of boiling blood and flesh. Johnny howled. Seyamang was smashed into a metal shop shutter, shot through the belly.
The fallen motorbike spun its wheel and screamed and screamed and screamed.
A few cautious souls ventured out of Moe’s into the rain, scarcely able to believe what had happened. Belfast, England.
‘An ambulance!’ Johnny screamed at them. ‘Get a fucking ambulance!’
Seyamang sat like a broken doll against the shutter. The graffittied steel was smeared with her dark alien blood. Rain slowly washed it clean. Her face was gentle, faintly puzzled. The Shi’an weapon fell from her gloved fingers. Human gloves. One finger on each hand dangled uselessly. Dabbing at the pumping blood, not knowing what else to do, Johnny took her hand. Beneath the knitted wool it felt as fragile as sparrow bones.
‘So, was I a good human, then, Johnny? See, we can do it when we have to. Sharks and Jets. Kill for love, die for love. Oh fuck, Johnny, it hurts.’
‘Sh sh sh, don’t try to speak, Seyamang. Help’s coming.’ Sirens, fast approaching. Ambulances. Peelers.
‘Go Johnny. The police—’
‘Fuck the police.’
‘I think I understand now, Johnny.’ Her voice was failing, her impossible tethba strength leaking out of her. Candy-striped ambulances arrived in a Doppler-wail of sirens and strobing electric blue. The police came after. The police always come after. ‘How it works. Human love. How can you live that way, Johnny Considine, you lucky, lucky thing?’
Green coveralled paramedics swept in with their chrome things and plastic things and things that made ominous electronic noises, and pushed Johnny gently away.
‘Oh Jesus, a Sheenie,’ said a female medic.
‘Let me in with her!’ Johnny screamed as they loaded Seyamang tubed and taped and tapped into the back of the mobile trauma unit. ‘I have to be with her, I love her.’
She died in the ambulance.
~ * ~
The police held Johnny Considine for three days under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Legally they were entitled to hold him for seven days pending charges, but on the third day Knock Headquarters Belfast sent over the Judas contract he had signed with the RUC and they turned him out on to the streets.
‘Get out of here, Paddy,’ they told him. ‘Go back to your own people.’
He did. He hoped they would accept him. He hoped they could forgive him, though his sin was mighty.
The bus went by ways too close and painful for one who had betrayed the only promise he had ever held dear. He closed his eyes until the distant rush of Boeing engines told him it was safe to open them. The navigation beacons burned atop the mirrored obelisk of Canada Tower; aircraft lights formed strange, brief constellations, like the riding lights of interstellar vessels.
The freefall shaft took him up. He walked among the stasis coffins, touching their cool, smooth skins. Easy, so easy to step out of his clothes, slip inside, awake in another lifetime.
He had always refused the Chicken Gates.
Beyond, the aliens were waiting.