A voice announced that the closing bell would ring in five minutes. Those of us in the gallery all looked to the balcony with the cage for the bell that started and ended trading, and beside it the chair where the chairman would sit for the ringing. The chair was a wooden effigy of Rebecca Rainbow sitting on a large stone. Her torso and head formed the chair back, her arms stretched forward for arm rests, her lap would give the chairman his seat. From the literature given to visitors I knew that the eyes of the effigy looked directly at Rainbow herself, in her glass coffin, thirty-six feet above the floor.
On the floor no one looked up at the bell at all. They were all working the phones or computers, shouting at each other, running from one place to the next, gesturing with their hands—all but those who had stopped work ahead of time and now were gathered in small clusters, chanting and setting out representation dolls and other equipment for their own enactments before the main event. It struck me suddenly what they were doing—trying to ensure that when the time came for the Choir of Angels to bless a handful of traders, they would insert themselves into the company of the chosen.
I closed my eyes and put my hand over my face, not wanting to see. I felt like some Speaker who could see the whole event ahead of time. Right then I wished that Alison had left me alone that day in Miracle Park. I wished I could go back and change the sequence of events, so that I would not have to stand alone in that crowded room, waiting for a disaster. Someone touched my arm. I turned to see a man in a pale blue suit, holding out a white handkerchief with red stripes. “Here,” he said, “are you all right?”
Somehow, all I could think of was that I hadn’t met anyone who used handkerchiefs in about twenty years. “Thanks,” I said, taking hold of it. Before I could say I was fine or that I really hadn’t been crying he smiled at me, then turned and moved away again into the crowd. To my amazement I found myself crying after all. As I wiped the cloth against my face, I whispered, “Thank you. Whoever you are…thanks.”
As if someone had turned up a rheostat, the noise shrieked up another level. It took me a moment to realize that while people on the floor were getting in their last licks, everyone in the gallery had turned towards the balcony, where the chairman of the Exchange, dressed in a gold-leaf business suit, had sat down in his Rebecca Rainbow chair with a gloved hand poised over the button that would set off the bell. It was two hours before closing time and I thought how that alone should have persuaded Timmerman that someone was setting him up, that the coven who ran the Exchange would give up two full hours of trading to make room for this outsider’s “enactment of financial renewal”.
The blue finger of the glove came down and the bell sounded, a low gong followed immediately by a wild cawing and screeching of birds, the artbirds calling on the Living World to witness the end of trading. In the gallery, everyone around me applauded; down in the “snake pit” (Li Ku Unquenchable Fire’s term for the Exchange, on the one occasion she visited it), people kneeled or even fell to the floor, spreading out their arms and fingers to give back the sacred energy of finance built up over the course of the day.
More than I would have thought possible, I wished for Alison beside me. I knew she had to make that final try, those last phone calls. But I just wanted her holding my hand, standing with me, the only two people who knew what Margaret Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel was going to do to those suckers on the floor, all in the sincere yearning to liberate humanity.
Recorded voices mixed in with the continuing cries of the birds, as Timmerman’s theme sounded, distorted by the loudspeakers blaring it to the huge room. “If not now, when? If not here, where? And if not us, who?”
And then Great Brother Alex himself came in, entering through the doors on the side of the Exchange (carved in the shape of a giant mouth), flanked by security agents in wolf masks and bullet-proof vests (as if Timmerman had nothing to fear but bullets) and Timmerman’s own mud-covered assistants, a whole group of them this time. Are they all going to burst into flames? I wondered, remembering the stunt in Miracle Park. But this time Timmerman was the star all by himself. The others crouched down, transforming themselves into mounds of dirt, while Timmerman stood above them, wearing, as well as his bird headdress, a multi-layered paper robe, formed, as far as I could see, from a mixture of newsprint and notarized documents. One of the mudpeople must have set a match to the robe, for flames leapt up from below, to the cheers and whistles of the crowd. Timmerman seemed to step out of the thing while it was still burning still upright behind him, like some other identity he were leaving to its own destruction. He was wearing his trademark grey suit now, treated, I assumed, against fire, as were the mask and any exposed skin. I thought, so this is how they got you, you stupid bastard. You just couldn’t resist putting on a show.
The burn sacrifice had taken place in the centre of the floor and the crowd, with people just about climbing each other’s backs for a better view. Now, however, the wolfmen escorted Timmerman to a wooden platform towards the side, where he could stand above everybody. Microphones waited for his speech.
But first…
Just as in Miracle Park, they came out of the crowd, this time wearing the yellow blazers of brokers. Albert Comfort the Children 6 and Jeannette Benevolent Fire 31. And if the people in the park had fought each other to get closer, this crowd acted like rival hives of bees fighting over the carcass of some dead bull. You might have thought they could kill each other and expect the Benign Ones to reward them for their sincerity and dedication. Those who had given up trading to do enactments now waved the dolls or other tools they’d used. The others just shoved. Engrossed in their struggles, they didn’t even stop to call out the Formula. The people around me in the gallery did it for them.
While the other visitors shouted their gratitude, I stood there, my hands tight on the railing, my eyes fixed on the Happy Twins themselves. How? I wondered. How were they going to do it? What would they do to make this event, this “liberation” so much greater than all the others? Would they just count on the ferocity of the audience itself, or would they do something special to increase the voltage of their blessing?
It took me a moment to realize that the Twins were not actually touching anyone, but instead were just standing there, one on either side of Timmerman, while the wolf agents kept back the traders. They were going to have to do something else, the old touching wasn’t going to be enough, they couldn’t count on the TV cameras simply picking up the liberation of a few people, they wanted to reach everybody who was there, really send out a message. And the world had to see. That was the point. Looking down at the floor, I noticed that the TV cameras from the networks were unmanned, set up on signal-controlled rotating platforms. Had Channing warned them, told the news people, “Don’t put your crews on the floor, you’ll do better with cameras you can control from far away”?
TV. Videos. The small screens that came out on their insect arms from the larger monitors above the trading posts—they reached down to a height where anyone could touch them. That’s it, I thought. That’s how they can reach all of them, give them all the full dose without having to touch them. The Twins were holding microphones and whispering or maybe singing, crooning, into them. It was such a low hum, almost like a modulated feedback, except that I could feel it all through my spine, a tiny crackling at every nerve ending. All around me, the people in the gallery were gasping, or laughing, hugging each other in astonishment, or closing their eyes to sway from side to side.