Michael Moorcock
Free States
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
1. LLAMADA DE LAS LEJANAS COLINOS
‘YOU’RE LOOKING BETTER, Jack.’ Sam Oakenhurst has recovered from the machinoix torments. ‘Your old self.’
Jack Karaquazian deals seven hands of poker. His skin reflects a million cultures given up to the pit long before their time; his green eyes reveal a new kind of courtesy. Coolly amiable in his black silk and white linen, his raven hair hanging straight to his shoulders, his back set firmly against that howling triumph of Satan, he is content.
‘I’m feeling it, Sam,’ he says.
Mr Oakenhurst picks up his bags. All around him the outlines and shadows of the Terminal Café shift and caper while Boudreaux Ramsadeen practises a graceful figure with Fathima Panosh, the tiny dancer currently favoured by the Terminal’s regulars who come to hear real old-fashioned zee and witness the purity of the high games. Only at Biloxi, where the Fault yells and ululates, can enough colour be tapped to push new limits. And for those who lose too much, there is always the Fault itself, restless and demanding, greedy for energy and offering, perhaps, an ultimate wisdom.
‘On your way, Sam?’ Jack Karaquazian sits back from his game. His fellow players know him as Al-Q’areen. They are shades, men and women ready to risk everything to win nothing but the approval of their peers. They have the dedicated, ascetic appearance of a strict order. The Egyptian smiles, a kindly jackal.
‘On my way.’ Mr Oakenhurst sets his broad-brimmed pale Panama, dusts at his fine cord travelling coat, his buckskin riding boots, his blue cotton shirt and breeches. ‘So long.’
‘Nobody knows what’s going on up there now,’ says Boudreaux Ramsadeen from the dance floor, his brutish face clouded with concern. ‘They say it’s nothing but vapour up in the Frees. Turned all to steam, mon ami. You be better off staying here.’
Mr Oakenhurst lifts a hand to show appreciation. ‘Estrella errante, vieux pard. You know how it is.’
But Boudreaux Ramsadeen will never know how that is. He brought his Café on the train from Meridian to take advantage of the tourist trade. Now he and the Terminal are married to the Fault until the end of time.
(We are all echoes of some lost original, she would tell him. But we are not diminished by this knowledge. Rather, we are strengthened by it.)
2. SE ERES RAPIDO DISPARA
WHEN MR SAM Oakenhurst took off for the Free States he had it in mind to heal the memories and still the cravings of his last six seasons at the mercy of New Orleans’ infamous machinoix, whose final act of trust was to introduce him to the long, complex mutilation rituals they believed to be the guarantee of continuing existence in the afterlife.
Ending his stopover at the Terminal Café, where Jack Karaquazian still wagered the highest psychic stakes from what had become known as the Dead King’s Chair, his stoic back against the whirling patterns of Chaos ceaselessly forming and reforming, Mr Oakenhurst was at last able to ask his old friend how things went for him.
‘Not so bad now, Sam, pretty good.’
‘You’re looking better, Jack. Your old self.’
‘I’m feeling it, Sam.’ Jack Karaquazian’s fingers moved abstractedly around the dormant dimensions of a waiting flat game. The other players were unhappy with this interruption but unwilling to risk the Egyptian’s displeasure. He toyed with the dealing plates, himself anxious to begin the next hand. And his eyes looked upon so many simultaneous memories.
Before he walked to the door, Sam Oakenhurst said: ‘Come up there with me, Jack. They got some famous spots in Texas and New Mexico. They’re finding colour every day in California. Don’t you want to visit San Diego while she’s still burning? They say you can walk in and out of those flames and feel no heat at all. There’s people still living in the city, completely unhurt. That’s something to see, Jack.’
Mr Karaquazian wished his friend luck in the West but reckoned he had a game or two left to play at the Terminal. In answer to Sam Oakenhurst’s glare of honest surprise, he recalled the old intimacy of their friendship and said, in words only Mr Oakenhurst heard, ‘I can’t go yet.’ He was not ready to speak of his reasons but if his friend were to ride by again at a later time he promised he would tell what happened after they had parted in the Quarter, when the Egyptian had gone upriver on the Memphis boat.
Mr Oakenhurst tipped his hat to his friend and went to collect his horse from Boudreaux’s makeshift stables.
(Have you heard of the conspiracy of the Just? she would ask. Once the likes of us becomes aware of this conspiracy, we are part of it. There’s no choice in the matter. We are, after all, what we are. And you and I, Sam, are of the Just. You don’t have to like it.)
In common with most who chanced their luck at the gambling trade, Sam Oakenhurst had left his will with the Terminal’s neanderthal proprietor. He took the one good horse he had ridden in on, the sound of Boudreaux’s zeeband still marking the rhythm of his actions.
He was almost in the ruins of Picayune before the tunes had left his head. On his way up, he had seen two corpses, a man’s and a woman’s, half buried in the shallows of the beach; behind them was the distant wall of the Biloxi Fault, howling and groaning and never still.
Picayune was the closest Mr Oakenhurst would let himself get to New Orleans. He had no fear of machinoix enmity. They regarded him as one of their own. But he had found a dark new greed in himself which tempted him back to their stronghold.
Mr Oakenhurst did not feel in any way free of the hunger until he entered the twilight fern forests beyond Nouveaux Iberie. His horse followed a broad, dry road, well-marked and patrolled by the local security committees who guaranteed the safety of all who lived there, or passed through peacefully, and swift death to any aggressor.
Sam Oakenhurst’s plan was to take the road right up past Sulphur. He stopped for the night at a lodging house just above Lake Charles where he was met by the landlord, a veteran of the First Psychic War, his skin scaled with pale unstable colour. Lieutenant Twist said that the road now ran up to De Quincey, beside the Texas Waters, a recent series of connected lochs populated by islands stretching almost as far as Houston and nearly up to Dallas. There were a few paddle-wheelers carrying passengers through the lakes but they were infrequent and unscheduled. Mr Oakenhurst was advised to return to New Orleans and buy a ticket on a coastal schoomer to Corpus Cristi. ‘There’s a weekly run. Calmest and safest waters in the world now. They say all the ocean around the Fault’s like that.’
Mr Oakenhurst said he had decided to take his chances. ‘In that case,’ said Lieutenant Twist, ‘you would be better trying for De Quincey and hope a boat or a colour-rider come in soon.’ He shook his head in admiration of what he understood to be Mr Oakenhurst’s bravery. ‘Somebody help me get out of Louisiana, help me get to Houston town!’ Whistling, he led Sam Oakenhurst to the choice individual accommodation behind the old main building.