took inventory before replying. They were all multistrapped but I could only see a few of their flaws. The speaker was dressed in brown, with yellow gloves. He had a Stigmata Hardball in an oxblood boast pocket and a few throwing knives in a waist sheath. The big guy was a bullet-banded jack of clubs - he was stroking a Kingmaker pistol like a pet and had something that might have been a Failsafe bar in a shoulder rig. The third guy appeared to be playing air-dagger. He had hair the appearance and cost of tobacco and an irregular object in the centre of his face. I could only explain it as some sort of nostril array. He favoured a Calico mini sub with a helical magazine. It was unlikely any of them had sidespace holsters.
‘The name’s Atom.’
Telling him this was like interrupting a Kamikaze pilot as he straps on his alice band. He frowned, making a notch between his eyes like a trigger guard. ‘You and your bloodcurdling calm are well known to me. Gumshoe analog. Gun in cookie jar etc. Thought you were dead.’
‘Sure, dead like a fox.’
‘They say you have blank hands and that you killed a President with the one and only Siri gun.’
‘Unavoidable I’m afraid,’ I said, pursuing a course of mildness with utmost resolution.
He thought that over without reaching any apparent conclusion. Then he smiled benignly. ‘As to that, this round man is Jose,’ he said, indicating the bewigged guy with the knife. ‘This rocklike man is Junco, known as El Mozote.’ That was the squarejaw jack with the chest fence and heavy sender. ‘And I am Alfonso.’ He gave a ghastly grin.
‘Well, now I can put names to faces.’
He looked as if he were tasting his own teeth. ‘Ach, you strike a nerve. Look at Jose’s face. There’s not one feature you can name with any certainty. He looks like he began as a man and then Mother Nature lost her nerve. Nose like a chicken bone and downhill from there. And El Mozote - his face, apparently through the workings of sheer chance, has gathered into this pattern while standing fast against the eroding forces of the sea. I make no great claims for mine either. It is just a nose surrounded by other features that swirl around for lack of clear instruction.’
‘Well, if we’re comparing, how about my own face - fixed-wing ears, a snap-brim forehead and forty-calibre tearducts.’ I indicated Jose’s legs. ‘What manner of things are these?’
‘His legs. And now you know everything. Ach, look at their faces. And look at yours. And mine.’
‘How long would that be fun? No, gentlemen, I think it’s time we admitted we’ve sealed our fates by being born behind these distortions.’
We continued the small-talk, air phrases melting before they were received, and touched lightly on politics, agreeing that several well-known figures should be destroyed.
Alfonso ritually offered up the old story of Roni Loveless, the boxer who, ordered to throw a fight, beat not only his opponent but everyone in the arena and its locality in an outward-blooming explosion of violence against enforced mediocrity. Protocol demanded I counter, so I laid out the story of the guy who had quietly killed and disposed of a delegation of government agents visiting his home in Atlanta. A follow-up posse sent to investigate were also quietly disappeared. A subsequent arrest crew were soon missing in action. Word got out and hundreds, then thousands of people flocked to his door seeking a way out. The address was eventually posited as a method of population control. Maybe this last was only legend. My audience sat thoughtfully around the mothering pot.
I was silent for a while, idly painspotting. A moon covered in vaccination scars had ignited Beerlight’s cordite borealis, forming concentric rings of death-smoke. Winged spiders with loose legs wove feebly around in the air. Stina Gate itself was like the gate in King Kong but without the tiki styling. Old code graffiti covered the dented metal behind which stretched a desert consisting not of sand particles but of those sleep-crumbs people roll out of their eyes - the baked flats of the Fadlands. This gap in the world was the endplace of a culture pumping nothingness into a chick-mouthed vacuum. It was artificial, this absence - I knew the difference between it and the tilted fertility exposed when a civilisation is scored back to its bedrock of illusion and doom. There was something honest about the latter’s unrealistic hope. The Fadlands were about cowardice, the denial of anything intense or specific. It had spread like a stain without detail, a blandness its inhabitants had subdivided to keep themselves busy.
Stina Gate was not the portal for contraband notions.
‘What was the man’s name, senor.’
‘Which man?’
‘The man in Atlanta. Who disappeared the killers.’
‘I don’t remember.’
Like a police statement, why did it seem more unlikely once it was said? Because something couldn’t be defined as a lie until it was stated aloud.
‘Why did he do it?’
‘Well, the term “altruism” springs to mind. You familiar with it? European folk tales are full of this sort of thing, where someone will do something for no visible reason.’
Apparently I wasn’t supposed to know the answer, so when I supplied it I was surprised by the outbreak of evasive fronting-off it provoked. I was still evaluating normalcy here and seeking a baseline in case I decided to comply.
I was worried the Jade had slowed my reflexes, so I popped the pin off a pocket time cap, putting a three-second gain on my existence - I was three seconds into their future. If necessary I would fake a response delay.
‘What’s in the cooking pot?’
‘Know them for what they are: beans. You want?’
‘No, thanks.’ If he’d handed me the ladle it would have gone out of time-phase and given the game away.
‘True. Our short acquaintance ought not to be themed around beans. Never trouble anyone else with what you can hate fully yourself, eh?’
I was starting to think he had a point when a movement at the Gate drew my eye. The Gate slowly opened a crack, allowing through a couple of ragged figures in a puff of dust. A door of those proportions should be approached with a frown of survival. But the kid possessed the sort of face that looked as if it had just that instant run out of ideas. He stood there with no method or disguise, his shapeless kecks flapping up a storm. Next to him an old man with a sharkskin face was wearing a jellycoat flushing from cyan to orange to purple.
I didn’t remark on them, and they were almost out of the plaza when Jose noticed them with a start. Without even standing he pulled a stained-glass grenade from somewhere and pulled the pin, throwing it over-arm at the retreating figures. The air around them scrambled and they blipped out of sight. It was a chronobomb.
Jose explained the situation to the others while betraying no anxiety. They responded likewise, and the three began unhurriedly to check and load their weapons, lumbering to their feet and stretching. They turned their attention to the Gate. The corroded doors were shut. For one who had been so ferociously open about his shortcomings and those of his gang, Alfonso was a confident guy.
Everyone had set to sharpening their spare keys since America went full-scarcity, and the philosopher Merk Duidelijkop had thought it would be alright to create an extensive measurement system of dismay, the Merk Scale, which escalated through 32 million increments. Over the next twenty minutes I watched the three Mexicans climb this scale until they were in a state of savage melancholy. They had sat back down, and were looking angrily at the closed Gate. Their time bomb was mis-firing, maybe. My little delay switch wasn’t strong enough to intersect. Depending on the wiring it could have been a simple expiation misfire. I’d have to ask Maddy later on.
‘This is getting a little creepy now, Alfonso. I like it.’
He seemed not to hear, smoking a shock absorber.
‘You should try nicotine patches.’
He looked at me with