Hallucinating (34 page)

The stage is quite high and they have arranged their synths, computers, av links and internet rig in a semicircle, since that is a cosmically correct placement. There is a small but enthusiastic crowd, spliff-taffs mostly, but also rasta hangers-on, tipi folk, and ambient heads seething their brains in Lo-Dose and Mighty. Back somewhat, naked cooks lightly fry psilocybe caps in sunflower oil, offering up their offerings on baps of crusty whiteloaf.

It is extraordinary how the vibe of the gig affects people's behaviour. Nulight is impressed. Some of the audience are hallucinating, others are coupled in sleeping bags, while others brew tea on primus stoves or eat lettuce sandwiches. Some have had the decency to bring amp-phones, tech that allows them to experience the gig straight off the mixer in head-filling stereo. Nulight imagines their skulls as containers of liquid music, and as they begin to play he watches them fill up, sees their eyes go misty and faraway.

For an hour the gig is so-so. On the hour they happen upon a trancey riff that Zhaman modifies into a looping riff of close microtones, that, after just twenty bars, becomes hypnotic. It is as if they are all trapped in the loop, endlessly cycling, round and round, for ever and ever...

Then the audience is wide-eyed, pointing at them, applauding, grinning, laughing, freaking out with pleasure at the trance segment, and Nulight smiles with pride at his sonic accomplishment.

Except that it was not the music the audience were reacting to.

Suddenly Nulight is flying upward, something snagged on the back of his shirt, pain in his armpits from the stress, and he glances back to see alien faces.

Below him, the audience think it is part of the act, and they are well impressed.

But Nulight is being abducted. Alien faces. He wriggles, aware that he will soon die; or worse. Through the clouds he is pulled, fantastically quick, and he dares not raise his arms and slip out of his shirt because he will fall to his death. Would that be preferable to alien implantation and experimentation? Too scared to think. What to do? Wait.

Then it is all lights and his stomach flips wrongways into his mouth as if he is going over a bridge in a car, and then the lights flicker all around him, strobing, strobing bad, like a storm of fireflies inside a VR helmet. He shakes his head from side to side to remove them from his sensorium, but they will not depart. He hears echoing sound, and spookily enough it is reverberated auton music as if coming from the bottom of a well - though the well's depths seem to be up there somewhere. He tries to sense what is coming, but he is too confused. He wriggles some more. The hook, or whatever it was that caught him, has gone, and in fact he is floating free as if in a reverse draught of attar scented air, so heavy he now wants to sneeze, as if he has passed through a wall of incense. The music is losing its reverberation, coming closer, ever closer, like destiny with a capital D.

So the aliens have got him. He relaxes, defeated. Paranoia leaks out alongside fear from his mind, and he becomes limp, dejected, a failure, a man without hope, soon to die.

Now the little lights are strobing slow, like a rainbow of speckled sweets, wine gums by the look of them, soft and tangy, and they seem to infuse their essence into him. It is a miniature invasion of the human by the alien. This is no hallucination, this is real! It is happening to him. The sweets. The invasion. The reverse gravity, the up-flight into the warm centre of the mothership; and he is rising high like a spirit of the dead into some anti-heaven of the alien imagination. Buddha save him! Now!

Then it all goes woozy, he is dizzy, stomach churning, as if he is being sent down a horizontal corridor of light. Then greyness. Gravity plumping him on a floor. A warmth beside him. He is in a cell.

Chantal!

She is looking at him. "So they got you too."

"Man..." he manages to murmur, hugging her, weeping, shivering. "They got me, they got me..."

"They got me too."

They hug some more. Nulight wants to be a child, wants protection from somebody. Chantal will do.

He sobs, "Please. I don't want this to be real."

"It's real, all right," Chantal replies, gloomily.

For some minutes they remain silent in the cell. Nulight glances around. It is spacious, no, huge, with a high roof, and everything is made of brushed metal. He imagines himself flailing around as the interstellar ship manoeuvres, flung around like a rat in a cage, which is what he is.

"They done anything to you?" Nulight asks.

"Not sure."

Nulight continues, "You must've been, like, out of it. Drugged, most likely. Ain't no other explanation."

Chantal's voice becomes urgent. "If the aliens can hop from star to star, maybe galaxy to galaxy, then they can bend time, use wormholes, do whatever they like. Who are we to say? We're just animals to them. The zoo theory, ever heard of that? I'm a woman Nulight, you're a man. Maybe they want us to mate, make babies for their zoo."

Nulight is appalled. Of course he has heard of the zoo theory, but he never imagined in his worst nightmare that he would be one of the animals. With Chantal! It is just too bad to contemplate. Bitch Chantal.

"Stop bugging me," he mutters.

Chantal offers her right hand. "Forget the past. Quits?"

Nulight shrugs, but does not respond. Then he manages, "Maybe."

Chantal strokes his arm and his hand.

Suddenly he is falling. The fireflies are back, sweet as ever, landing on his tongue like flakes of fruit-coated manna, sensorium overload, synasthesia. Is he falling or rising? He feels cider, tastes gold, hears apples.

Synthesizer in front of him. He is hearing the insistent thunk of an arhythmic looped pulse, microtonal off-key auton, hissing white noise synthesizer wheezes, treated guitar breaks cut to shreds by a computer. Auton. Llangollen. He is back, and the band is all around him.

Below him, the audience are going mental. They still think it is part of the act. This all goes back to the Orb trying to induce lightning over some Glasto festi, ELO with their spaceship, the Floyd. Whatever.

"It's true!" he yells. "Don't you understand, it's true! It ain't no hallucination! It ain't funny any more and it ain't no hallucination."

The gig is over. Rapturously he is received by the hangers-on, the groupies, the crazies, the whole tripping lot of them. The others have snuck off somewhere, except Kappa. Angrily he fends the fans off and reaches out for her, and then they are away in a taxi down to Llangollen. Opposite the chapel gallery they stop, grab pasta, choc cake and chai, then hurry away to their digs. The taxi driver gets to keep his change.

At least Kappa has realised the truth; he tells his story, and she is shocked. "You must have a body scan for implants," she says, "as soon as possible."

Nulight shudders. "Man, you're right."

2: Katmandu

Nulight is mooching around joss-scented bazaars when he meets somebody he did not expect to see.

His father.

He chokes, "What the f..."

"What am I doing here?" Face turning from neutral to angry. "I've come to take you back."

"Back?"

"Home. You're not going to the West. You're returning with me to Lhasa. There's a guru I want you to see."

Nulight shakes his head. "I ain't seeing one of your-"

"You disrespect your religion! Come home with me, now, before it's too late."

"Whatcha mean, too late?"

There is a pause. It occurs to Nulight that his parents might disown him. Then he could never return to Tibet.

"Too late?" he repeats. "What the fuck d'you mean by that?"

"Don't use foul language with me. If you carry on with this ludicrous plan you'll be cast out of our house."

"Yeah, sure, like I'm really part of it now."

"This is your last chance."

Nulight feels nothing but scorn for his father. "You don't have the right to offer me a last chance. You're not even Tibetan! You're from England-"

"Britain! How many times do I have to tell you, it's Britain."

"I'm leaving. You're an emigreé, so I'm one too. I don't belong here, I'm not part of your crowd. Why can't I do what you did, why can't I leave home? Isn't that hypocrisy if you stop me?"

"Don't lecture me about hypocrisy."

Nulight groans. "Can't you see there's still revolution in Lhasa? I'm a refugee."

"No, there is a place for you at home."

Nulight is trying to control his anger. "Listen. I've got fans in Europe. I've got people there who respect me, and my music."

"Your stupid record label? Pure delusion. It's not even your music-"

"Shut up! Don't you understand? The label is underground, it's a hit." Nulight turns. He wants to see the exit to the bazaar. "Dad, there's people over there who want to meet me."

"Don't go! You won't come back!"

But Nulight turns and runs off before he can hear any more. There are tears in his eyes.

1: Lhasa

Nulight (real name unknown) is born and raised in the capital of Tibet at the height of the red hat revolution against Chinese rule. He is the only son of weird parents who, in their teens, walk from Europe to the Himalayas. Their origin, their motives, even their real names are not known. They never leave Tibet: never do anything normal. Nulight is stuck with them, as they spin their prayer wheels, chant their mantras and see their gurus.

But they do give him lots of imported substances to taste.

Life is cold, barren and freakish. Nulight becomes aware that he is a half-caste, for, while his father is a paleface, his mother is, maybe, Indian.

His parents' liberal views sit well neither with the Tibetan insurgency nor with the Chinese autocracy. They are ignored by some, avoided by a few. Hounded, occasionally. But there are others who are interested in cultural fusion, in cultural fertilisation, and who believe that the West may have something to offer Buddhist thought. So Nulight grows up in a quicksand of cultural influences.

One day, around the time testosterone begins to make a mark upon his body, Nulight is out in the fields, expanding into the sky, crows and vultures everywhere like there has been an aerial burial. An indigo sky trip. A great blue bowl leans out of the sky at him, like a lens disconnecting itself from the heavens, and it shimmers down at him, and the world seems to fold up to meet it. He wants to flee, but his motion is like paddling against the current of a river. Then tiny saucers buzz him from the centre of the clouds - many of them. Perhaps they are spherical... he can't tell because of the fantastically heavy virtualsmooth riff that pounds out of the bass bins at the bottom of each craft. And this is weird, because virtualsmooth has only just hit Europe.

Nulight is drawn into the music, which is very intense, masking some of his sight: a kind of gothic synaesthesia. Individual synthesizer notes ripple in front of everything that he can see. Naturally, he thinks  he is going to be abducted. Screaming, he runs away, but some of the craft float in front of him, as if to block his febrile escape. Then one craft opens itself out like a lotus, and inside sits a cross-legged creature, its umbilical cord going back into the craft. It has two eyes, but four ears, and pale blue skin.

Nulight freaks out. His vision is blurring, and this is making him panic. The smell of the craft is like strong incense, as if some kind of Nag Champa-esque attar has been extracted from alien flowers, then crushed and compressed for decades before being released into the air. The crafts' exhaust fumes are pure incense.

Nulight glances up at the creature. It must be an alien, it must be. Unless it is a hallucination. It certainly isn't human.

And the alien says, "We are watching you. Do not forget us. We will follow you, because you are of use to us. But do not think you are the chosen one, for you are not. Science tells us that all choice is doomed to be fragmented by the winds of chance."

Then the craft folds into itself like psychedelic origami, and the alien host drift into the sky.

Everything is whole again.

Later that day, Nulight meets one of his parents' gurus. Describing his experience he tries to make sense of it, but he cannot, for it is awesome. Then he says, "Man, I gotta recapture that virtualsmooth music... I need to find it again."

"You are now addicted to this music," the guru responds. "Any addiction will chain you to the perpetual cycle of life. You will be endlessly reborn."

"Yeah, thanks, I know what samsara is. But I've got to hear that music again."

"Virtualsmooth? This is Western talk, the chattering of self-obsessed consumers in Europe. Do not listen to them."

"Virtualsmooth's done by oceanic software systems. Virtualsmooth's got no sonic edges. It's sinuous, no distortion, no percussion - just aquatic tones, and a dance beat throb overlaid with slowed-down vocals provided by dolphins."

"This is not the music of Tibet."

Nulight stands up. He has forgotten about the guru. "Hey, what if I started my own record company? Then I could release the alien music."

"If you ever find it, which you will not. Nulight? Nulight, can you hear me?"

Nulight wanders off, heading for downtown Lhasa, where he knows somebody who might have access to the European internet...

Part Seven

So was it all a gigantic hallucination?

Nulight is uncertain, despite the certainty of his beliefs. It is not a black and white situation. It's not like any implant is found.

And then everything happens.

Surfing the internet he somehow reaches computers in which new auton music is fermenting. Immediately suspicious of the linkage, he hesitates, for it seems a fluke drop. Seeing the opportunity to wreck an alien system he goes to pull the metaphorical plug, but all of a sudden his right hand is not his own, it is controlled. He works something, and then a skin glove falls off his hand and his arm, and he at last understands the significance of Chantal.

He looks at the VDU. Instead of dying, the new music simply spreads its wings and flies.

Part Eight

And the great plan comes to its fruition, all to the beat of its own music, auton, that sonic window into the alien psyche, unhuman sounds, unhuman rhythms, the infectious, so catchy abstract germ that nobody can resist, because nobody can develop resistance to what they are fascinated by.