Logical Harm
                                            (an excerpt from Novahead)
 
          Beerlight’s subway system had flooded long ago and bull sharks pulled into the ancient stations. On the black water here and there floated a skull that more properly belonged on the street. The penlight smudged over twitching rats and black pipes. The giant beaver dam ahead proved to be a tangle of bones and connective tissue. A dog appeared on the crescent, looking at me and slopping its chops. I climbed on to the adjacent maintenance platform. The dog folded itself down like a deckchair and that was the last interesting thing I saw it do.
 
          A dirty panel opened into a utility tunnel at the end of which was a black door. I entered to find gun dealer Brute Parker, sitting on a workstool in total silence.
 
          “What are you doing?”
 
          “Just thinking aloud. And then you show up seeming to be in more trouble than I had thought you able to achieve.”
 
          “My death’s backdated. Betty’s withholding my respiration privileges.”
 
          The stained room was cluttered with munitions and ballistic baubles. Racks of banana clips, bleeding crates of exproprium, gun manuals swollen with damp, teen half-guns, economy rifles, mudra knives, clove knives, morton forks and what appeared to be a couple of nuclear fuel rods. The corners were silted up with propped carbines. A spanner lay in a canary cage.
 
          “What’s this?”
 
          Parker stood off the stool and looked at the piece I was lifting from the zinc display altar. It was a fifteen-year-old Mokusatsu Intol rifle—I hadn’t recognized it because it was a double-neck. After shunning smart guns for years Parker no longer considered the pulse grid a presumptuous meddling with the clean lines of gun karma and his armamentarium had become a keeping garden for transitional ammo.
 
          “This’ll have an etheric backwash. I’ll ignore myself out of existence.”
 
          “No, Taffy Atom,” he said, reaching to flip a baffle on the stock. I glimpsed behind his mirrored aviator shades—his sighting eye looked to be clouded over. “This generates a recoil screen. It’s a bit of a guzzler but as far as smarts go it’s a classic.”
 
          “I remember the days when a gun didn’t need feeding like a collie. But only just.”
 
          I replaced the Intol and continued browsing, always aware of the proximity of Parker’s iron muscularity and racist eyebrows. His body was a LaBrae Tar Pit of slugs and shrapnel, battle wounds from a career in grudgecraft.
 
          Everyone had a general idea of Brute Parker and his difficulties, his stages of struggle and spiritual progress. It was followed with interest because he had gone so far, so steadily and absolutely in one direction. Revenge carried him a long way and then a little further by the sort of hollow momentum that carried others a lifetime. The apparently reckless accuracy of his aim derived from his total willingness to accept the consequences. And having hitched his fortunes to the trigger it had led him here at last, hulking about in the foundations of the city as a respected dealer in bespoke firearms and tutor in Full Catastrophe Self Defence. It was good to have friends in deep places.
 
          Tilling my good hand through a box of Parker’s signed, hand-cast slugs, I spotted an axe and picked it up, hefting the weight a little. “I suppose I could settle the matter from behind, with this.”
 
          “You a comedian?”
 
          The notion was not a new one. I put the axe down and wandered around some more. Here and there were pictures of gun girls like Rosa Control and Bleach Pastiche. Behind them the wall looked and felt like an eraser. I tapped a numb powerline. The air smelled of decay and the violent staleness of burnt water.
 
          “Trouble with a Fibonacci pistol is once it starts firing it never stops,” Parker was saying, pointing to the nickel-plated Corona piece in “Guest Gun Corner.” He showcased a teal-green knife designed for three kinds of pain, a crate of bellbottom Volliox grenades, slow-release ammo and other fab new agonies. Parker’s reputation for stellar mayhem had always drawn a crowd. The populace and its inexhaustible capacity for assent had to have a back end. Subjected to every sort of check and exhaustion, humiliation and indulgence, they sought alternative injustices, at least. Parker’s series of gun shops served an inexhaustible craving. Depending on the client, a firearm was a way to man-up artificially or merely the last indulgence of a weary sensualist. Surrounded by extrapolation ordnance their predicaments and grievances became as volatile and golden as gasoline. Gone were the days when society’s dupes would approach a mercenary gingerly, all hell money and apprehension. This was now a city where to bomb a street before walking it was an elementary precaution.
 
          Though no longer hung up on vanilla ordnance he still had plenty on offer. He showed me an outrageous raw mortar built from a hinged sinkpipe and a coffee grinder with two silver coffin-handles for a grip. By flanging varied-bore pipes into the barrel it could fire everything from mini tiki mugs to the tin crossbars from crucifixes.
 
          “How many targets?” Parker asked.
 
          “Six to ten, maybe more depending on bodyguards.”
 
          “My carnage teacher used to say, ‘When the victim is ready, the bastard appears.’ Will you be up close?”
 
          “Might be. Everyone seems to want to talk. You heard of El Mozote?”
 
          “Yes. Back in the day he took a gun through customs disguised as a bomb. The only way he’ll enter heaven is climbing over the wall with a knife clenched between his teeth.” Junco was ostensibly hiding out from twenty-seven consecutive death sentences the skeletized government had surely forgotten about. In short, any attempt to capture him in words was impossible—the best that could be done was to alert the neighbourhood to his presence by the simple expedient of a “sonic ostrich” which could detect malice in the thickest night.
 
          “Have you such an ostrich?”
 
          “No.”









Steve Aylett was born in Bromley, England. He wrote the books Slaughtermatic, The Crime Studio, Bigot Hall, The Inflatable Volunteer, Toxicology, Atom, Shamanspace, Only an Alligator, The Velocity Gospel, Dummyland, Karloff's Circus, LINT, Fain the Sorcerer, And Your Point Is?, and Rebel at the End of Time. He was a finalist for the 1998 Philip K. Dick Award (for Slaughtermatic). He's also responsible for the comic projects The Caterer, Get that Thing Away from Me, and Johnny Viable.