Complete Stories (137 page)

In other words, the Bonze was arguing for the immediate cancellation of our performance. And that disturbed me. We would surely have to pay back our advance from the promoters, and I’d already spent mine.

“I’m really not so sure that—” I began.

“I brook no contradiction!” screamed the Bonze, heedless of who might overhear. “I rely not only on the
terma
of the Karmapa, but also upon the Black Hat itself! Remember that it’s woven of dakini hairs! Information leaks into my skull! The sweet whispers of a thousand and one dakinis!”

The Supreme Bonze clutched the hat to his head with an expression of anguished ecstasy, as if someone had just nailed the headgear in place, and I pretended to believe him—although, deep down, I’d always suspected the Black Hat to be made of Kaangian snow-camel hair. But it would be too dangerous to argue any further with this powerful man.

“Very well, then,” I said placatingly. “Let’s confront my partners.”

I moved to brush my fingertips against the lips of the lock-licker on Anders’s room, counting on access being keyed to my biochem signature too, but the door was already swinging wide.

In the portal stood Mimi Ultrapower.

As I mentioned before, one of her zeeply teratologies consisted of a sawtooth row of calcifications running along the outer edge of her right forearm. Now, without any warning save an evil grin, she swung her right arm with superhuman strength, driving the tiburon teeth of her forearm into the neck of the Bonze and on through to the other side, decapitating him. Utterly unfazed by the blood gusher, she smoothly plucked his falling head from mid-air with her left hand.

The body of the Bonze collapsed to the corridor floor, and I found myself pulled into the Green Room.

Mimi triumphantly snatched the cap from the Bonze’s head, then tossed the pitifully wide-eyed and silent head into the open maw of a small Wassoon transmitter that led I knew not where. She closed her eyes, plonked the Black Hat atop her own head, and let out a deep, happy sigh.

“Ah, my sisters! Your reclaimed voices call me home!”

Anders approached Mimi from behind and clasped her lustily around the waist. He seemed totally at ease with her murderous actions.

“I can feel them too, babe! It’s like hugging a thousand and two dominatrixes at once!”

Mimi had no time for grab-ass playfulness. All her submissive acolyte worship had evaporated in the heat of her conquest. “Haul the body of that deified goofball in here, and feed him into the Wassoon thingie too. And dump some zyme-critters from the wastebasket onto the blood pools in the hall. Quick!”

Anders complied with Mimi’s orders.

“Where are you sending the Bonze’s corpse?” I had to ask.

“You don’t want to know,” said Mimi with an evil snicker. And then she chucked me under the chin. “Listen good, sweetie. Our jam is gonna happen tonight, no matter what. We’ll be laying down the template for the next reboot of the universe. ‘Surprise!’ It’s an unbroken line of information, stretching from the transfinite past to this instant’s click. Our metamusic will contain the compressed and encoded lineage of all alef-one instantiations of the cosmos, Gödelized into riffs. Call it the kickstart heart-beep of the new Big-Flash Frankenstein. The Om-seed mantra that sends a fresh monster lurching from the lab. That’s how us starspiders and dakinis have always ensured cosmic continuity, and we’re not gonna change now, you wave? Don’t look so freaked, it’s an honor to purvey the Heavy Hum. Your name will live in starspider history!”

Anders stepped up to me and threw an arm around my shoulder, awkwardly compressing my various colonies and protuberances. “Basil, buddy, I know you’ve always been a nervous Nellie, too busy vacillating and shucking and conniving to follow the white rabbit all the way down the black hole. But I never let your jealous, greedy, shithead ways get me down, ‘cuz we were best buds, and I always vibed your essential devotion to the art. But now comes the moment of true choice and decision, your chance to give it up for the metamusic. Grab your balls and wail!”

“But—”

“It takes four separate metamusicians to lay down the plectic vibes for this particular kind of chaos,” said Anders, his arm still tight around me. “That’s a theorem Mimi proved. There’s no way we can do it without you and LaFunke.”

All the time Anders was talking, I was feeling a wetness along my shoulders that I attributed to my own colonies seepage. But with a start, I suddenly realized what was up.

“You’re infusing me with your own zeeps!”

Anders removed his arm. “All done now, Basil, my boy! You always wanted the genuine Serenata Piccolisima germline, and now you’ve got ‘em. You’re dosed and ready to kick ass!”

“And by the way,” added Mimi. “If you try to play the hero, I’ll just puppeteer your corpse.”

A knock sounded at the door of the Green Room, and the jubilant voice of Buckshot LaFunke sang, “We’re on!”

-----

Our stage was a metal mesh construction, cantilevered out from one wall of the Café Gastropoda. The bottom part of the room was essentially an aquarium, thronged with the dregs of Sadal Suud: gutter-squid, dreck-cuttles, and muck-octopi, all of them peering up through the interstices of the platform supporting us. The room’s three other walls were lined with boxes and balconies, a-twitter with mantises, ridge-roaches and crystal-ants—the cream of this world’s high society. Crab-like waiters scuttled this way and that, stoking the audience with their favorite fuels.

“I’ll stand in front tonight,” said Mimi as we stepped onto the satisfyingly solid platform.

“And you pair up with me, Basil,” instructed Anders. “We’ll be in center stage.”

“I’m good with sitting on that chair over there,” said Buckshot. “I already wore out my legs warming up this crowd.”

“You did a great job,” said Mimi, favoring him with one of her fetching smiles. “And now we’ll bring ‘em to a boil.” She raised her arms high and strode to the front of the stage, teetering on the very edge as if tempted to jump into the massed tentacles waving from the water, all pink and mauve and green. Slowly she lowered her arms, starting a fierce zeeply beat of polyrhythmic mental percussion.

Off to the side of the stage, Buckshot chimed in with a psychic wail like a blues harmonica, a little voice wandering among the trunks of Mimi’s sound-trees.

Anders elbowed me in the ribs. My cue. Feeling the power of the Piccolisima zeeps, I began flashing a series of three-dimensional mandalas into the room—glowing ghost-spheres that all but reached the walls. My zeepcast orbs were stained in red and sketchily patterned with images that were abstract echoes of the dead Bonze’s face. They vibrated with the sound of cellos and organ-music at a funeral mass.

Anders was at my side, casually leaning his elbow on my shoulder, nodding and smiling as Mimi, Buckshot and I jammed together, feeling our way, blending and bending our soundshapes towards a perfect fit. And then our leader started in.

He’d opened his mouth nearly wide enough to break his face, as if wanting to vomit up his heart intact. His metamusic began with a cloud of chicken-scratch guitar pops, each pop a tiny world. Each worldlet contained, incredibly, a mosaic mural of all that lay within some known planet. Sphere upon sphere appeared, the little balls clumping to form spiral skeins—and soon Anders was zeeping a full galactic roar. We three others were playing like never before, beaming our support, filling in Anders’s vision with gravity waves, stars and novae, and the planets’ living nöospheres.

There’s no question that my mind was functioning at higher levels than ever before. Each time I thought we’d brought our metamusic as high as it could possibly go, the cloud of sight and sound would fold over on itself, leaving gaps for us to fill with still more voices of our frantic chorus.

Usually I close my eyes while performing, but tonight I was looking around, wanting to witness the effects of our unprecedented “Surprise!” At first the pseudopods below and the chitinous limbs above were waving as if beating time. But as our modalities grew ever more intricate, the audience members fell still, staring at us with avid, glittering eyes.

I’m not sure when I noticed that the room had incalculably expanded—I think it was after Mimi began mixing a keening scream into her zeep emanations, and surely it was after Anders began folding full galactic symphonies into single notes and dabs of color. The walls of the Café Gastropoda dissolved—not so much in the sense of becoming transparent nor in the sense of being far away—but rather in the sense of being perforated with extradimensional corridors and lines of sight.

Faces floated in the far reaches of the endless hallways, just like in Anders’s Wassoon-altered apartment back in Lisbon. And now, more clearly than before, I knew that these faces came from the unreachable distances and previous cycles of our world. They crowded in upon us like memories or dreams, endless numbers of beings, each of them rapt with our metamusic, each of them intent that his or her own individual soul song be sung. And, impossibly, Buckshot, Mimi, Anders and I were giving them all voice, our minds speeding up past all finite limits, playing everything, all of it, all the stories, all the visions, all the songs.

At first I hadn’t noticed the starspiders, but at the height of our infinite fugue, I realized the creatures were everywhere—as the spaces between the faces, as the shadows among the sounds, as the background of the foreground. The Piccolisima zeeps were showing me that only the transfinite sea of starspiders was real. Everything else was, in the end, only an illusion, only Maya, only a dream.

The starspiders clustered around us, and space itself began to bulge. Mimi, then Anders, and then, very slowly, LaFunke disappeared. A starspider had hold of my leg and was tugging at me too, ever so gently, ever so irresistibly. My leg was a trillion light-years long. I was about to let go, about zeepcast the final mantric signal that would propel our tired old world dissolve into the cleansing light of a new Big Flash. But something hung me up.

What was it that Anders called me? A nervous Nellie. I pulled my leg back, and with a dissonant
sqwonk
, I changed keys and hues, turning my incantatory dirge into a kind of demented party music, a peppy ladder of shapes and chirps that led the watching minds back from the edge. I kept up the happy-tune until the drab sets of consensus reality had propped themselves back up.

I ended my solo, standing alone on a stage in a pretentious nightclub on the jerkwater planet of Sadal Suud.

A moment of stunned silence, and then the audience began to applaud, in growing waves of sound. It lasted for quite a long time. Anders had taken them into the jaws of Death—and I’d brought them back.

-----

By the time people comprehended that Buckshot, Mimi and Anders had truly disappeared, I was already aboard the luxurious
Surry On Down
, bound for home.

For a few days, nobody was holding me up for blame. But then they found the Bonze’s body and head in my Lisbon apartment.

The police met me at the spaceport this morning, when we arrived. I wasn’t in the right mental shape to put together a defense. I’m too distracted by my zeeps. I’m seeing infinity everywhere, infinity bare.

Only an hour ago, I was convicted of murdering not only the Bonze, but Mimi, Buckshot and Anders as well. I’m due to be executed by plasma ionization in just a few minutes.

And so…I’ve been using my last hour to zeepcast my exemplary tale into the ever-vigilant quantum computations of the ambient air. Those who seek my story will surely find it.

And now comes the final clank of my cell door. No matter. Never mind. I’ll be with Anders and Mimi soon.

============

Written March, 2009.

PostScripts
magazine, 2011.

One of my inspirations for this story was the movie
Amadeus
, in which the elder composer Salieri resents the young genius Mozart. Another influence is the 1954 story, “Beep,” by James Blish—in which the characters find information about the future encoded with the seemingly extraneous beeps found in their faster-than-light communications. I was, once again, trying to make actual infinities seem real. Paul Di Filippo, one of my favorite collaborators, thickened up the story line with betrayals, and added a rich texture to the musical scenes.

One rainy, early-dark January evening, Bea Malo was sitting on a rickety couch in the tiny living-room of the cottage near San Francisco that she and her husband Nils Mundal rented. She was drinking a cup of chamomile tea, watching a broadcast of a ballet, relaxing from her day at work, letting her mind drift with the music and the shapes. The room was cozy from the wood-burning stove.

Bea freelanced as a Spanish-English interpreter for the state courts, mostly working with deportation cases. She was fond of her clients, but not of the lawyers—in general she disliked officials of any kind. They frightened her. A mean dancer with a bone-white face chased the ingénue across the screen.

Bea’s Wyoming rancher parents hadn’t spoken Spanish—far from it. She’d learned the language at college, and then from living in Seville for a year. She’d fantasized that she might find her way into the bright little world of flamenco dancing, that charmed eggshell of scorn and abandon. She’d made some inroads—she was beautiful, bright, sensitive. But she’d been thrown off-stride by an unexpected pregnancy.

She’d fled home to the ranch for help, somehow forgetting just how judgmental her parents were. Dourly, they watched Bea reach her term and give birth in her old bedroom at the ranch. The golden afternoon hour of her son’ s delivery had been lovely—Bea had felt like a star in a Fellini movie, with the radio’s tinkling sounding like a worldly Nina Rota score. But a week later, she’d given the boy up for adoption. She was, when it came down to it, unwilling to try and make it as a single mother.

Readily forgiving herself, and out for more adventure, Bea became a cross-country skier, drifting across the Western states, working low-end jobs, spending her free hours on winding forest trails, loving the rhythm of the path. She met Nils while waitressing at a Nordic ski resort in Montana—Nils was a low-paid guide, a recent immigrant from Finland. For Bea he came as a relief from the penny-pinching resort owners and the yuppie guests. Nils had hardly gone to school, and he’d never learned proper English. It didn’t matter. He was a wonderful man with a brilliant soul, tall and lanky with a friendly mustache.