Hallucinating (11 page)

CHAPTER TEN

...the Plan commences...

When Kappa arrives in Glastonbury she has come off the anger trip and regrets some of the things she said to Nulight. But she is convinced of the truth of Master Sengel's plan and she is convinced that Nulight has an attitude problem, one that might be assuaged by a temporary sundering. With Sperm settled in the pad of a friend, she walks down to the Chalice Well, where she passes the entrance barrier with only a hint of pheromone manipulation, as if some dark memory is returning to trouble her. But she is now only one step away from the Master's inner circle—she is becoming immune to the smell of fear.

Today Master Sengel is dark haired and thin cheeked, like a recovering TB victim. After peppermint tea and cider-snap biscuits he takes her into the heart of his base, passing along the way the chamber in which the captured black ship still resides. The walls and ceilings of the base remain shiny, but everywhere the floor is wearing away, and there are hints of algae and damp. All the computer rooms, however, are fitted with dehumidifiers and enviro-control packages. They are safe.

They settle in comfy chairs and take more peppermint tea. "So how is the plan going?" Kappa asks.

"We are almost ready," replies Master Sengel. "All that remains to do is to decide which seven ineffable melodies will be mixed together to form the magick bullet. Tru-Rah is ready to be the carrier wave, though as yet its natural form is still not quite bassy enough. But we will tweak sub-bass vibes. And our Mac rigs have modelled
just
enough of the alien knowledge systems for us to hope that, when the aliens hear the magick bullet, their systems will take it in and rebroadcast it to themselves."

At this point Kappa hands over the agreed vote of the MaxNeefers.

"This is interesting," remarks Master Sengel, reading it. "Four of these melodies are high on our own list."

"Which four?"

"Nimrod and Greensleeves, the McCartney song, and the Yes tune."

"Isn't it interesting how nothing from the twenty first century has made it?"

"Interesting," says Master Sengel, "but not unexpected." He glances up, then continues, "In the two decades either side of the millenium, the takeover of music production by the computer squeezed melody from song. A stripping of meaning took place that was first noticed by independent commentators in the early 1990's. Rave was the first human music that lacked meaning. Therefore it lacked melody. That oeuvre has been the benchmark for most subsequent popular musics."

Kappa nods, forgiving him the micro-lecture. "When will the final list be ready?"

"In a few days. You will be present at the mixdown."

Kappa is surprised. Hand on heart, she says, "Me?"

In response, Master Sengel rises from his seat and gestures her into an ante-chamber. It is a louche variety of kitchenette. On a stained bench lie a kettle, some cups, and an Indian sandalwood box overflowing with herbal teabags.

"It is time for you to join my inner circle," says Master Sengel in a kindly voice. "You have earned the right."

Kappa finds herself breathing fast. "Thank you! I'll serve the cause as best I can."

"This is expected. There are four others, of whom you know two, the Harley dude and Sir Trance-alot. You will be the fifth."

"I'm delighted!"

Master Sengel clicks his fingers at the kettle, which in response begins to boil. He gazes out of the tiny circular window that looks up at the Tor, and murmurs, "When will we be free, I wonder?"

Kappa nods.

With the herbal tea brewing, Kappa begins to feel spaced out and drowsy on its steam. "It's just the effect of the chemicals," says Master Sengel. He jiggles the teabags about, then chucks them into the wormy-bin and offers her one of the cups. Kappa drinks. He does, too. The brew is bitter, mushroomy, with a hint of the joss stick about it. "Now you will be able to detect the highest level scents," he explains, "and you will be able to master the lower order scents, such as the limbic system manipulators that form the boundary of this place."

Kappa nods. Her head is clearing, though there remains an ache behind her eyes.

"Sit down. Let your brain sort itself out." Master Sengel laughs and adds, "It is performing the olfactory equivalent to making sense of a stereogram."

Kappa follows this advice. For a few minutes she is swimming in a cloudy sea, just about afloat, fuzzy knowledge in her brain. And then, in a moment, in a flash, in the briefest of eyeblinks, she
understands
who she is looking at. This is Master Sengel. He is DJ Merlin. He is Robin Hood. He is the magical minister of the forthcoming revolution, a sonic wizard, a scientist, a socialist, a green-styler, a recycler, a scholar... all these things—a man of profound belief. And she is at one with his vibe.

He is
not
a saviour. He is a man who suggests how people might save themselves, but he illustrates by example, not by dogma, and that is his genius.

...mixdown...

So the time comes when the seven most ineffable and mysterious melodies thought to exist are finalised. Some on Kappa's list make it to the final placings. To these is added Let It Be in place of the other McCartney tune. The final list is:

1. Nimrod.

2. Greensleeves.

3. Let It Be. (The Beatles)

4. Soon.

5. Air On A G String.

6. Brooklyn Owes The Charmer Under Me. (Steely Dan, Can't Buy A Thrill)

7. You On My Sleep In My Mind.

Of course, there is no telling what element of personal favour enters this list, since ultimately it comes from a small number of human minds. But Kappa is pleased, even though she is unfamiliar with the Steely Dan song off 'Thrill'. She understands that there could be endless debates over which tracks are missed out, over which ones simply aren't ineffable enough. Most contentious is Let It Be, oddly. When, alone, she thinks about the plan, she wonders if this contention perhaps suggests a fatal flaw—the appearance of subjectivity. But then she decides, why not? They are trying to overcome alienness with pure humanity. Why not use a subjective choice? Isn't beauty in the ear of the beholder? Consensus that these are the most achingly beautiful melodies should be enough.

At the appointed hour, with a full moon rising over the Tor (they are influenced by Steve Hillage's Lunar Musick Suite) and faeries out in force upon the green and pleasant sward, four people gather in the basement sound studio: Master Sengel, Kappa, Sir Trance-alot and one of the missing inner circle, the woman known as van der Woofer, tall, dyed orange long hair, pierced nose and ears, a thin woman with red nails and a melancholy grin. She is perhaps forty, this weatherbeaten hipster in a tie-dye sarong and baggy woolly. Archetypal Glasto resident. The Harley dude and the other unknown are out on shroom patrol.

Kappa surveys the studio. She has never seen anything like it. This is serious kit.

The hub is an Apple Macintosh Phase9 UltraTower fitted with a K-GLASS chip running at about ninety thousand Gigahertz. The 47" Yamaha flatscreen monitor glows blue and green like an illuminated forest at night. Software is by VirtStudX, kinked by Master Sengel so that it can run 4096 separate audio channels. The main mixer is not virtual, rather a 2048 channel semi-intelligent SoundCraft with voice controls and a stereo buss in the terabyte range. In the dim studio, this glittering focus has an architectural quality, as if it was constructed by some divine yet technological sculptor.

The outboard kit is arranged in three stacks adhering to the 19" standard, a mess of black spaghetti coiling from one to next to last, bound cables also leading to and from the central gear. Most of the kit is MIDI sound modules, but there are also noise generators, samplers, and even a few effects units. And through the smoked glass behind all this Kappa can see the alien craft, multicoloured cables sprouting from holes drilled in its obsidian sides, cables leading to junction boxes, from which smaller optical fibres emerge.

Because the studio Mac is unable to interface with the AI that has been modelling the alien knowledge systems, an interpreter has been constructed, and this is the pale computer on the floor by the spacecraft looking like a travel bag full of optical hairs.

Master Sengel explains the set-up. On the monitor comes what at first seems to be a Mandelbrot fractal, but this soon resolves into seven 3-D solids that blur at the edges, as if moisture is making them melt into one another. "These are representations of the seven melodies that will comprise the magick bullet," says Master Sengel. "Van der Woofer is our engineer and mixer, and her ears will be responsible for the ultimate mix. When we're happy with our recording, we'll send it down to Tintagel and let the Tru-Rah scene do the last bit of work for us."

Kappa nods. "Who's down there working for you?"

"Various of my inner circle."

Kappa nods once more. She is cool with this.

So the mixdown begins. Since a serial recording is useless—the point of the magick bullet is to freak out the aliens with concentrated humanity—van der Woofer will have to make a recording using all seven tracks in parallel. So for a start they have to be in the same key, since Western music is strong on harmony and will not tolerate deviations from the even tempered scale. This means a certain amount of poetic licence. But Master Sengel and van der Woofer are okay with this, since it is human beings who are making the decisions and doing the deeds, not computers. At all costs they want to avoid a technological fix.

The seven spheres are their interface; visual for ease of manipulation. Altering the hue, saturation, position and contrast of one sphere, and then all four of these qualities with the others, alters the relative timbres, positions and volumes of the seven melodies, so that an organic whole, distilled, as it were, from the very heart of the human melodic experience, is brought into being. Van der Woofer has to be very careful that she is not merely using one song as a harmonic accompaniment for another. She must somehow grasp the ineffable beauty of these melodies and synthesize them into a whole never heard, let alone conceived before.

The first mixes focus too much on the Tchaikovsky and the McCartney, though an interesting combination of the first four notes of the former and the fourth and fifth notes of the latter is created. But as yet nobody has the sensation of their emotions being wrung by the new music.

They break for herbal tea and plates of tofu with fresh salad. Kappa plays with the various Indian instruments that lie around the common room, tabla, mridangam, a black surbahar, and a techno-jantra with curved carbonfibre bow and GloBox electric pickups. Then they return to the studio.

After a couple of hours van der Woofer picks up a mix of five of the tracks, and then they are on a roll, adding the last two, altering the volumes and relative positions of the notes, until a beautiful whole emerges, damp and dewy and fresh like new leaves in spring, and they all
know
they have their mix. Van der Woofer nods as the Mac stores this wonder on its hard drive, then makes a number of copies to various optical backup units.

"We have it!" says Master Sengel.

Kappa grins. The mix is way too ineffable for her to get a handle on—and that's a good thing. If they can describe it, if they can describe their feelings, it ain't good enough.

Of course, this is new music, and new music is notoriously hard to judge. So they decide to sleep on it. Next day they are again amazed by the beauty of their mix, and they decide this is the one.
It feels so right.
CDs are burned in various timbres (they use every sound module they have) and under various EQ maps, and then the leather dude revs up his Harley, drops the disks into his top pocket, and with a roar is off west to the remains of the M5.

Now Kappa spends some time chilling out, listening to Pierre Schaeffer, Eno and the early Mystery Trend albums, circumnavigating the Tor as the stars shine down from a sky oh so bereft of sodium glow. Daytime, she strolls into Glastonbury and works as Dean of the Faculty of Avalon, straightening out a few problems, making a commitment here, finding a connection there, debugging the SubNet and getting it back into tip-top order.

Then something weird. A report comes through from Sir Trance-alot: he says the Tru-Rah moment is ready. But Master Sengel is uncertain and he decides to wait a few days. "It's a cosmic thing," he says offhandedly. "New moon might be a better time."

To Kappa this means there is a problem. She expected him to fire the magick bullet as soon as everything was sorted, not hang around like a bored cat with no place to go. She is spooked. When she learns that the Harley dude is about to make another round trip to Tintagel—suspicious sign?—she asks him to deliver a confidential letter to Nulight.

...Nulight is spooked too...

One misty morning a manilla envelope addressed to Nulight is thrust through the cobwebby letterbox of the farm, where, for the moment, Nulight is still staying. The mellow aura induced by his dawn listening of Rag Jog is blown away as if by a gale of malevolence.

"Better read it," he mutters to himself, recognising Kappa's handwriting.

'Sweets—I'm fine up here, though it's a bit odd without you and the others. I want you to seriously consider coming up here. Something's wrong (well, I don't know for sure, but I'm getting a vibe) with Master Sengel's plan, and I'm worried you might be in danger (don't know if you are or not, honest). Come up as soon as you can, but definitely before the new moon. Please believe me. Your light and love, K. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'

This letter disconcerts Nulight; that's alot of kissing there at the end. He takes a walk up Forrabury hill, across the Stitches, then down the cliff path to the harbour. All the time he is thinking of Kappa, whether she is playing mind games or not; wondering if Master Sengel is behind it. Something in the tone of her sign-off confuses him. She has not mentioned light and love for some time—since their relationship started going downhill, in fact. It's almost like a plea.

Seems genuine. Nulight confronts his doubt, makes a decision, then chats to Djo and Zhaman. Djo is slightly freaked by Kappa's tone and so she agrees to move, but Zhaman, who is romancing a local woman, decides to stay in Boscastle. So Djo and Nulight pop down to the Wellington Inn to sup cider and decide how to make the journey. Pushbikes are their only option. It will be a three day trip. Well, Nulight's had worse.