Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [21]
“How are you, Nicky?” he asked the thin, round-headed man who never seemed to grow old.
“Hey, Mr. d’Allier, you’re asking? You’ve heard about that last decree?”
“Which one? Decrees come in droves, these days.”
“The one that forbids us to sell sand in the City Centre.”
“Oh, that one. It’s a tough one, isn’t it?”
“It’s a rabid sled bitch, that’s what it is. Doctors passing decrees and police acting in the name of Health, what bell does it ring?”
“Same as for you, I’d say. The Silver Age of the Silver Surgeons.”
“Exactly,” Nicholas said, wincing. “You’ve been there, haven’t you? You know what I’m talking about. Except the Silver Surgeons, they were against the Council then, and now, those phoque-in-iceholes work hand in hand.”
Gabriel nodded, thinking of the innuendos the Gentlemen of the Night had been making about his own consumption. When Transpherence—a trick that made it possible to charge a dead arcticocrat’s memory into that of his heir, thereby ensuring the continuity of the ruling elite—was one of the pillars on which the City was founded, the drug that allowed it, Pineapples and Plums, had proved so useful in asserting the Council’s power that the whole city had become a testing ground for it, the federal capital of Altered States. Accordingly, all sorts of other substances had been tolerated, with the view that they helped keep suicide rates during the Wintering Weeks down to a reasonable level (only a paltry eleven times the Canadian rate), or on the premise that a drugged people is a happy or at least a quiet people. Gabriel had been subjected to Transpherence, and remembered it, literally, with mixed feelings, but the drug part had been the best, no doubt about that. But now those days were over, and even if the Council still managed to seem publicly tolerant on the matter, it obviously wanted to curb drug use one way or another, for some reason that eluded him.
“And you know why?” said Nicholas, whose train of thought had obviously closely followed Gabriel’s. “Because they want to destroy the local production.”
“What would be the point? The damned demand would still be huge.”
“Yes, but prohibition of the local product means real drug lords from the outside coming into the game and taking over from us. Which means money, and on quite another scale. And for everyone, if you get my meaning. Because no drug lord would ever work without giving a modicum of, you know, sweetener to the authorities to ensure his own safety.”
“Bribery? Is that what you mean?” Gabriel said doubtfully. He knew from Brentford how much the city needed money, but for the Council there certainly was some distance between going through hard times and organizing drug traffic for a profit. Despite his appreciation of Nicholas’s work, Gabriel could trace in him the paranoid, obsessive streak that characterized drug dealers and users across the whole known pluriverse. On the other hand, he knew equally well that those who feel persecuted are right half the time and that is much too often. Twice too often, actually, concluded Gabriel, whose maths were rather idiosyncratic.
“Me? I’ve said nothing,” answered Nicholas, with a wink.
Gabriel said good-bye and went back to the table, through a crowd that was thicker and rougher and mostly indifferent to his Mosaic attempts at parting its crashing waves. There was still no Phoebe to be seen, but he noticed a girl who he thought was watching him, and he tried to get closer to her, but in the middle of that thick, lazy crowd, it was like trying to reach the stars through the trees of a forest. He renounced the struggle and went back to the table, where John Linko, the métis music critic, had joined Bob. Judging by his gestures, the journalist was visibly excited about something that Gabriel could not quite grasp, except maybe the name Sandy Lake, but he could have misheard that completely, as the Sun Dogs were now storming the stage.
This band, thanks partly to Linko’s relentless propaganda, was supposed to