A Song Called Youth (113 page)

“Yeah, well fuck off, or we
will
play!” Jerome threatened.

“Uhgitta chezick!” someone in the audience yelled in technicki. Meaning,
I’m getting chillsick,
and the rest of the audience laughed, because it was a joke, a sort of pun. Bone Music gave you the chills when you heard it, very literally sent shivers through your bones, but between bands the club played music without the shiver frequency to give you a rest, otherwise the audience got sick, “chillsick,” and to say you were chillsick while you were waiting for a band meant, essentially,
Don’t bring ’em on, I’m sick of this shit already, especially when it comes to these blokes.
Which was in fact not really an insult, just affectionate mockery, taking the piss out.

Jerome laughed, liking it. He was getting some attitude on now. He had to slip into a kind of split subpersonality, a schizy character that was all authoritative punkiness, in order to pull off a concert. It didn’t come to him naturally, not like some—not like, say, Rickenharp. Jerome had to work on getting the right attitude in a public place. It was a lot easier to do video graffiti at home alone with your minitrans and camera. He was a little embarrassed on a stage playing underground pop star. His boyhood idol had been Moby—and he found himself pretending to be Moby in his own mind. It was okay to be a pop star if you were Moby.

He checked that everyone was in place. He glanced at Andrea, who nodded to signify readiness, one spike-heeled boot poised over the sound-control box on the floor; she wore a video dress that was showing an old movie,
Apocalypse Now,
exposing her long, seashell-pink legs and tattooed shoulders; her bald head crawling with anima-tattoos. He could never quite follow the animation sequence; something about a grinning Jesus smoking a pipe and firing an AK-47. Andrea herself was smoking a glass pipe with an all-night THC/MDMA flameless-smoke capsule in it; tonight, a hot-pink smoke that matched her boots and belt. Her eyes glazed from the X-dope. She always looked as if she were going to fall over, but she never missed a note. She was a real find.

Jerome glanced back at Bettina, saw her glaring at him from hooded eyes, her silver-robed hulk of a body emitting an unexpurgated body language of angry jealousy. Evidently he’d spent too long looking at Andrea. He grinned and mouthed, “I love you” at her, and she relaxed and grinned, put on her headset mike for backup vocals.

He nodded at Bones, who hit the program for the percussion, the shivery thuds rolled out into the club like stark milestones in a sonic landscape, and the screen rolled aside and Andrea hit the bass programmer with one toe while segueing into the guitar lead with her hands. Bones shakily skrilled out his keyboard part, frowning with concentration.

Jerome hadn’t turned to the audience yet, he just stood there, back to them, looking over the band, like some kind of inspector, moving a little to the music but not acknowledging the crowd till he was good and ready. Bones was a pretty lame keyboard player, all right, but it was adequate, and when he missed, it somehow sounded like the deliberate “noise factor” that many bands used; much of it was masked by the undulating sheets of sound Aspaorto rippled out of his limbs, dancing music out of his neuromuscular impulses.

Jerome was chip-linked with Bones on the Plateau. He transmitted a readout to him that said:
Scan for surveillance.

No shit
was Bones’s reply. Smartass.

Rather tardily, the soundman did the introduction, yelling “Jerome-X!” over the house PA, but that was washed away by the torrent of sound from the stage, and the audience knew who he was anyway, they were his small but intense London cult following, and they were already shivering to the sound . . . 

As Jerome turned to them and bellowed,

The thing that lives in Washington

It’s a kind of living stone

The thing that lives in Washington

Its makes the planet groan.

Jerome letting the shivers carry him, getting into it now, letting his pelvis tell him what to do. More vigorously, as he found the groove and delivered:

The thing that lives in the temple

The temple with five sides

The thing that lives in Washington

Takes children for animal hides .
 . . 

The room itself shivered, and, on some secret molecular level, the walls themselves danced.

Bone Music always made Barrabas feel ill. But he tried to keep his expression from going sour as the shivers whirled around his stomach; as he danced with Jo Ann in a sardine press of people. Only now and then, through the churn of bodies, could he make out Jerome-X, a geeky American kid gyrating and bellowing, barely carrying a tune. A big fat Negress wobbled like jelly on a plate behind him, every so often punching through with some gospel-sounding backup singing. Something like,

Show me, show me, show me the way out

Oh show me, show me, Lord show me the way out
 . . . 

Why’d they have to use these bleeding bone-shivering frequencies? Barrabas thought crabbily. He’d read about it, but he’d been in a bone club only once before. Some people claimed the vibrations could cause bone cancer; some people claimed it
cured
bone cancer.

Whatever, it reached into you, a subsonic current that carried the music like a kind of aural flotsam; carried it into you physically, so you felt the chords shivering in your bones, in your skull, in your flesh. Some people had Bone Music receptors implanted in their skulls, in pelvic bones, in their spines, receptors that picked the music up on special frequencies others couldn’t hear, turning their whole bodies into antennas. Some people, lots of people, found it ecstatic. Sexual and hypnotic and all-involving.

“You okay?” Jo Ann yelled into his ear. Yelling loud, but he could barely hear her over the blast of the band. “You look like you wanna puke!”

“Not used to this bone stuff!”

“Come on, let’s get a drink!”

She took him by the wrist and led him into the bar. He didn’t much like being led around by girls, but he let her do it, anything to get out of that dance floor.

The bar had closed doors, the music was filtered, and the bone shivering was mostly gone in here. It was dark, like it was supposed to be, the only light coming from the bar itself, which was made of stained glass; murky, oddly shaped panels of blood red and wine purple and jade green and dull blue, some of them illuminated from within, shattering the shadowy, smoky room with random shafts of colored light. Barrabas sat on a stool in a shaft of purple; Jo Ann sat almost astraddle a beam of green, some of it streaming up her front to tint her gray eyes jade.

They ordered vodka martinis and sat hunched together between two groups of sweating, almost-naked men giggling over cocaine fizzes. Advertisements blinked up the cocktail straws; digital music groaned like a machine about to break down. On the walls, videopaintings re-creating scenes from medieval depictions of the Crucifixion and Resurrection flickered through sequence in doleful chiaroscuro; occasionally the images of Christ alternated with other figures, paintings by Paul Mavrides and other icons from the erstwhile post-Acid House era: Timothy Leary ascending into heaven, riding a CD like a flying saucer; William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson waltzing through a concentration camp while the starveling camp victims played Strauss on orchestral instruments; Kotzwinkle shooting skull-shaped dice with William Gibson; the minimono star Calais chained to Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair; Philip K. Dick with an arm growing from his forehead, arm wrestling with an arm growing from Rick Crandall’s forehead; Rickenharp falling into the rubble of the collapsing Arc de Triomphe; Ivan Stang adding twentieth-century paper money to the flames under the stake on which a grinning J.R. “Bob” Dobbs is being burned alive; David Bowie eaten cannibalistically by a demonic horde of twenty-first century pop stars; Iggy Pop having sex with Mrs. Bester, the president of the United States.

And back to the dead but numinous body of the scourged Christ, his head in Mary Magdalene’s lap.

“That loose data bothering you here?” Barrabas asked. “The Brain Bank stuff, I mean.”

Jo Ann shook her head. “Isn’t room for it with all the input here. You feel better?”

“Much. I’m sorry about the dance. I’ll get a few drinks in me and then—”

“Don’t worry about it. It was too crowded to dance anyway. What is it you do for Dr. Cooper? Video stuff, you said?”

“Documentation, editing.” He wanted to change the subject. She was frowning slightly.

Two guys behind him were talking over one another, yelling opinions that neither heard. He felt a nonmusical chill when he realized what the issue was. “The bloo’y SA Fascist barstads ’er in Parliament now, what yuh going to do, ay?” one of them, a white guy in dreadlocks, yelled. “There’s no bloo’y way we can get the Nazi barstads out without a war, a blee’in’ civil war, mate, ay?”

At the same time the other shouter—a black with a scalp-up shaped like a street scene, his home neighborhood—was saying, “Oi mean, these buggered right righ-cist barstads are everywhere, fuck me for a joke, ’ow you goin’ to fight them, bloo’y ’ell you’d arv to bust in the system, righ’?”

And, Barrabas realized with a twinge, Jo Ann was listening to them. He wondered if she knew the lab she’d done brain work for was a branch of the SA. He wondered, too, if she was politically liberal. She was, after all, an artist. She answered his unasked questions, then, when she remarked, “The SA corporation really scares me, the way it’s growing. Racism amazes me. It’s like some old superstition, like believing the world is flat and the sun rotates around the Earth!”

“What, the sun doesn’t rotate around the Earth? Go on!” he joked, hoping to kid her away from the subject.

She smiled fleetingly and then put on an expression that said,
But seriously . . . 
“I mean—what can anyone do about these racists? That dude was right. They’re a part of the system now . . . ”

He was into the system. Jerome felt it before he saw it. He was
in.

The computing work was done by the left brain—and the camouflage by the right brain. The right brain was singing. Singing the chorus to “Six Kinds of Darkness,” while the other part of his mind worked with the chip. The right lobe singing,

Six kind of darkness, spilling down over me

Six kinds of darkness, sticky with energy .
 . . 

The left lobe hacking:

London UNET: ID#4547q339. Superuser: WATSON.

The music was camouflage, cover for the mole-signals, the piggyback signals that used updated palm-pilot tech to reach out, to access . . . 

The left lobe of his brain working with the chip, which emitted a signal, interfaced with a powerful microcomputer hidden among the micalike layers of chips in the midi of Bones’s synthesizer; Jerome-X seeing the Herald on the hallucinatory LCD screen of his mind’s eye:

London UNET, ID #, date, assumed “superuser” name.

Then he ran an e-mail program that was his encryption worm, executing his diabolic algorithm, overflowing the input buffers receiving the data, the overflow carrying him into the target computer’s command center. Bypassing the passwords and security, now that he was in the computer’s brain, and then commanding:

CHANGE DIRECTORY TO ROOT.

ROOT: Superdirectory of the system. Scanning, at the root, for the branch of the system he needed.

Scanning for: Second Alliance International Security Corporation: Intelligence Security subdirectory . . . 

Watching from the audience, Patrick Barrabas remarked (and was unheard in the blare) that Jerome-X had a funny, contortionistic way of dancing as he sang. His eyes squeezed shut, his hands moving as if over typewriter keyboards . . . Not playing the “air guitar,” but typing on the air keyboard . . . 

Jerome was typing the commands out. Using a technique Bettina had taught him to implement more complex commands; sending through his aug chip by radio trans to a powerful mainframe; typing physically on a mental keyboard.

The chip fed him tactile illusions and read out his responses through its contact with the parietal lobe, reading the input from the proprioceptive sensors—sensory nerve terminals—in the muscles, and kinesthetic sensors , tactile nerves in the fingers: Jerome’s movements translated into cybernetic commands. His rapport with the aug chip essentially creating a mental data-glove, a data-glove that materialized only in the “virtual reality” holography of consciousness.

As Jerome sang,

Darkness of the Arctic

Six months into the night

Darkness of the eclipse

forgetting of all light

Six kinds of darkness

Six I cannot tell . . . 

Finding his way through the darkness in the forest of data. Taking cuttings. Taking information. Planting something of his own . . . 

• 07 •

Paris, France.

They were in Father Lespere’s flat behind the church. It was in one of the old-fashioned Parisian stone houses, with its high, narrow, rusting-iron front door; a door so tall and heavy it could almost have belonged to a cathedral. The cracked walls were brown with age and, in streaks, sepia with water stains. They’d come through the rear building, up the narrow, winding stairs. The light in the clammy, echoing stairwell, in the parsimonious French manner, turning itself off after they’d climbed a flight. The place smelled musty; its spaces were glum.

Father Lespere’s flat was a little more cheerful. It was cramped but high-ceilinged, done in off-white and pale yellow; there were some tasteful chandeliers, and an old rolltop desk, a few silk daffodils in antique Flemish vases. Lespere was one of the city’s elite, which meant he had a gas fire and electricity, a console playing music. Mozart. The furniture was simple to the point of spareness. There was a crucifix, of course, and a Mother Mary, and a wall filled with books on theology and architecture. Many books, but nothing that would make SA visitors suspicious. He had long since purged his bookshelves.