Paul Minct insisted they visit the shows and understand the nature of these dramas. ‘Real or fictional, black or white, they represent a breed of our own kind that has successfully escaped the logic of the Fault, discovering new universes beyond our own. There, my dear friends, Chaos and Singularity perpetually war, are perpetually in balance. And sometimes one is no longer certain which is which. Philosophies become blurred and intermingled out there in the Second Ether. This was how I first learned that it was possible to move from one version of our universe to another and survive. We never die, my dear friends. We are, however, perpetually translated.’
What does he mean? asked Sam Oakenhurst.
He understands something of our condition, she told him, but not much of it. He is like those old South American conquistadori. All he can see of this secret is the power and wealth it will bring him. He is prepared to risk his life and soul for that.
Sam Oakenhurst grew fascinated with the legends portrayed on the stages. He talked about Pearl Peru, Corporal Pork, Little Rupoldo, Kapricom Schultz and others as if they were personally known to him. When the time came to leave Poker Flats, he bought several books of scenarios. As soon as they were back on the trail he studied them slowly, from morning to night, hoping to find clues to the versions of reality perceived both by Paul Minct and, in particular, Mrs von Bek. Perhaps the Fault was not the mouth of Hell, after all? Perhaps it was a gateway to Paradise?
Walking beside the Rose, he recounted the tale of Oxford under the Squad warlords. The alien renegades, furious at Oxford’s resistance to their philosophies, informed the citizens that unless they immediately fell to levelling their entire settlement, colleges, chapels and all, they (the Squads) would eat their first born and bugger their old folk. ‘And Oxford, Rose, went the way of St Petersburg and Washington, but not Cheltenham, which is still standing but which has lost its first born. And her old people rarely, these days, walk abroad. ‘ The Squads had come in their black deltoid aircraft. Thousands. ‘They told us they represented the Singularity and we were now their subject race. If we refused to serve them, they punished us until we accepted their mastery. They have conquered, they boast, half the known multiverse and are destined to conquer the rest. Fearless Frank Force is their greatest ace. But nobody knows or understands the loyalties of the Merchant Venturer, Pearl Peru, whom he loves to distraction. His love is not returned. Pearl’s passion is for Bullybop alone. And Bullybop is a thorn in the side of the Singularity. Nobody is sure of her secret identity. Honour demands that Frank Force issue no challenge to his rival, yet Bullybop is marked by the Singularity as an outlaw. Here now is the moral conundrum we must solve before we can proceed along a further branch. There is a road, after all, Rose. There are many roads. And crossroads. I can sense them. We can choose some which exist or we can create our own. But there’s a formula, I know, and I must learn it.’
‘This mania came over one of my men the first time we ever passed through Poker Flats.’ Paul Minct was cheerfully dismissive of the Rose’s fears. ‘They either recover or they don’t. In the end we had to shoot Peter Agoubi, poor chap. Lead on, Mrs von Bek. I’ll take care of Mr Oakenhurst.’
‘It will pass,’ she said. ‘He will regain control of himself soon, I am sure.’ For my sake, Sam, if not your own!
This demand brought him, within a reasonable period, back to his senses, but his lasting emotion was of loss, as if he had been close to the secret logic of the multiverse and able, like her, to navigate a purposeful course through those quasi-realities. He could not make himself throw away his scenarios. He buried them deep at the bottom of his knapsack.
‘It’s unflattering to have a V character for a rival,’ she pretended amusement. They had found some good beds in a ghost town about a hundred kays from San Augustine. She indulged her weariness, her poor temper. ‘What is the actuality of this Pearl Peru? She sailed by accident through the Cloud of Saffron and that made her a heroine?’
In any circumstances Sam Oakenhurst would have decided that it was impolitic to show admiration for a character with whom the Rose seemed to be on intimate terms and whom she disliked. Such experiences were not, he told himself, helping his sense of identity. Once he caught himself yearning for the familiarity of the machinoix shutterbox.
Those people were real, he knew. But what he had experienced as myth, she had experienced as history. He vowed that he must never lose her. He was prepared to change most of his life for her. His curiosity about her was as great as his love. Now, he thought, they are impossible to separate. Our shoots are interwound. Our luck is the same. We are of the Just... He had a moment’s understanding that he had given up his own madness in favour of hers. What had he accepted?
You are sworn to this, she reminded him. From now you must accept only what I determine as the truth. You will survive no other way. Any independent decision of yours could result in my death. You know this, Sam. You have dealt the hands. Now you must play the game, or we are both dead.
This is new to me, he said.
Play it anyway.
15. TWO STEP DELLA TEXAS
AFTER THEY HAD traded the Ryman’s and two samsonites for ponies at the Flooding Whisper horse ranch just west of San Augustine they made better progress into Golden Birches, where pale light shuddered and huge crows flapped amongst the black lattice of the distant treetops. They arrived in Lufkin to discover that the Pennsylvania Rooms were still run by Major Moyra Malu, the shade of an elegant old swashbuckler who had fought with K’Ond’aa Taylor at Pampam Ridge and had carried the flag to victory for Charles Deslondes in ‘07.
At Paul Minct’s suggestion she was to be their fourth, but not before another week’s gaming had all parties apparently satisfied. Then they took Major Moyra’s good Arabs and headed through the milk tides down to Livingston where Paul Minct sought out Herb Frazee. The ex-president of the Republic was giving demonstration hands of Cold Annie and telling Tarot to what was left of Livingston’s polite society. He refused Mr Minct’s invitation but suggested they look up Mrs Sally Guand’ in Houston.
The road to Houston took them through Silver Pines. The strange, frozen forest was cold as death nowadays, said Paul Minct, but once there had been fires burning on every mound. They came out into foothills above a summer valley. ‘There’s Houston.’ Paul Minct pointed. The huge city had recently melted and reformed into a baroque version of itself. Its highways made arabesques, glorious in the sunlight. Yet even here the uneasy terrain threatened to vaporize, become something else, and Sam Oakenhurst yearned for California where Pearl Peru, he had read, was a living celebrity.
They passed under Houston’s organic freeways. The Rose wanted to stay for a few days. The others insisted they find Sally Guand’ and press on to Galveston. But when Major Moyra Malu led them to Sally Guand’s old offices above the Union Station, the buildings were melted shells and the rails had twisted themselves into one vast, elongated abstract sculpture disappearing in the direction of Los Angeles. Here, as everywhere, black and white lived as best they could, equals amongst the ruins, and miscegeny was not uncommon.
They lost the road some twenty kays from Houston, used up their provisions and were forced to shoot a horse before they got on another trace full of abandoned buses and pickup trucks, which took them across to Old Galveston to find Jasmine Shah, who had been operating a bar on the harbourfront until the local vigilantes busted her huge cache of piles noires. Her dark locks hiding a long, vulpine face, she was ready, she said, to do almost anything, yet she would only come in with them after she had whispered strict conditions to each one in private. She revealed that she, like Major Moyra, was now a shade.