Alyzon Whitestarr (48 page)

“What are you doing back here?”

It was a bouncer, but a lower form of the breed than the suave and suited men back in the tent area. He grasped the back of my jacket and propelled me firmly where I wanted to go before I could stammer more than a few incoherent words.

From not being able to hear the music, I went to being nearly deafened by it, because the bouncer had pushed me out virtually in front of an enormous phalanx of speakers set up to the left of the stage. There were more speakers on the other side, and a wire fence ran between them to create a no-man’s-land between stage and audience. There were a lot of bouncers here, all wearing black T-shirts with “The Big Sleep” and a moon stencilled on them. The band onstage was the same one I had seen playing silently within the tent. The set must have been almost over, because the lead singer was beginning to smash his guitar to pieces.

I was watching in bemusement when a girl bumped into me. I turned to look at her, and she beamed at me vacantly, emanating a candy and new-plastic smell, tinged with something sharp and unpleasant. She was drunk or on drugs, I thought, and wondered if she had brought her own, or whether there were people busily distributing stuff to the eager crowd. This chilled me because of Sarry’s claim that drugs lowered your resistance to the sickness.

Suddenly I felt frightened, because what if this was not just a concert to raise funds or an occasion for directors to schmooze, or even a means of gathering information that could be used to serve the sickness, but a cover for the sickness to feed and spread? There had been a rapacious anticipation in the air back in the tents, which I had been too close to recognize when I was in the midst of it; an expectancy that electrified the air. And I had left Raoul back there!

I reminded myself that, like Da, his spirit was strong and unassailable. Besides, there was nothing I could do to help him now unless I fought my way to the main gate and made enough of a fuss that someone would fetch Klara to admit me. But that would only bring me back into danger. I had to trust Raoul’s intellect and capability.

I looked at my watch and was astonished to see that it was a quarter to ten. Raoul and I had agreed to leave before eleven, because of him wanting to avoid being seen by Da, so I ought to make my way out. But it had to be nearly time for Neo Tokyo’s set, and a bit of me wanted to stay and see them, in spite of everything. I wanted to see how Da would affect all of these thousands of people; whether he would do what he had done at the Urban Dingo gig. There was no chance of him spotting me from the stage, of course, but without cell-phone reception there was no way to let Raoul know I wanted to stay.

Someone tapped my shoulder, and I turned to find myself looking at Gary Soloman. As luck would have it, the guitar was totally obliterated at that moment, and the applause
that swelled and broke all around us was loud but nowhere near as loud as the music had been.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” he shouted. I was a little startled to sense his admiration. “You here to see your dad?”

I nodded and asked what he was doing at the concert. He tapped his nose, and I knew I wouldn’t get anything out of him. “You do realize, there’s something wrong with all of this?” I tried anyway. “Something ugly and dangerous under the fun and music and people laughing.”

The journalist frowned. “Alyzon, you haven’t taken anything, have you? I know there’s a lot of stuff circulating. Booze and drugs and weird cocktails. I wouldn’t touch any of it.”

I wanted to laugh at the thought of doing anything so dumb, but it was a timely reminder that I couldn’t tell him the whole truth about what was happening—he didn’t know me at all.

Suddenly there was an ear-piercing spike of sound from the system, and everyone fell silent. An announcer began to scream that we were about to experience the incredible sound and talent of the Rak, who were the voice of their generation.

“The Rak!” he bellowed, and screams and applause rose in a thunderous wave; an apocalyptic storm of sound and adulation swelled, which would drown me if I did not find a way to rise above it. Then the music began. Earwig music full of hate and blood and violence. I clamped savagely on my senses, so that the air hissed with whispers and people became pale as ghosts, their screams no more than a faint wind.

I was only dimly aware of Gary Soloman bidding me
farewell and pushing away through the frenzied gyrations around us. A guy in a T-shirt spoke to me. I couldn’t hear his words, but he seemed to be talking slowly and carefully as if he were underwater. The whites of his eyes were threaded with veins.

“Incredible,” I said when his mouth had stopped moving. He beamed and upended a water bottle into his mouth. I sidled away from him, smiling and mouthing apologies. There seemed to me to be a madness skittering over the faces of the people I saw, tainting scents that ran the full gamut from sweet to horrible. But there was no smell of rot. No sickness. At one point, unable to move, I looked up at the stage. The Rak were clad in dark jeans and T-shirts with splattered blood prints over the front. Their faces were so pale they looked dead—even after I unclamped my senses by a fraction.

The lead singer began to make horribly realistic vomiting noises into the microphone. The people around me shrieked and stamped and cheered. He gave them the finger and closed his hand over his groin. His face was a vicious leer of triumph. He was the conquering hero of this roiling country of music and darkness.

“Isn’t he incredible?” a girl beside me screamed.

“Incredible,” I said softly, wondering if she would feel like this if she wasn’t in the midst of a crowd. I could smell the way the essence scents and the smells of excitement and madness were forming a single enormous crowd essence smell, which the Rak’s music was drawing up and shaping.

The Rak’s bass guitarist began to hammer out a screaming
riff, and I cringed as if it were an attack. But everyone around me screamed and jumped up and down, begging for more.
More
, they screamed.
More!

I tried to push sideways, but I was still caught in the press of bodies. Too late I realized that I ought to have worked my way along the stage to the other side, where the entrance gate was, in the lull between bands. The only way to move now was to dance, so I did, glad that I had taken my boots off.

I had given up the idea of waiting for Da; all I wanted to do now was escape and await Raoul at the car. He might even be there already, I realized, if Klara had let him know what I had said.

I had managed to work my way a little deeper back where the press of the crowd was not so tight, but I was sticky with sweat, my toes hurt from being stomped on, and the soles of my feet felt cold and abraded. I was now sorry I had taken off the boots, but there was no way to put them on again here; besides, if I tripped in them and fell into this sea of madness, I would be lost.

The Rak finished their song and went on to sing another. This time I managed to unscreen long enough to discern that they were singing about how Hitler and guys like him had it right because the world was full of darkness that needed letting out. I shuddered and was suddenly sure that, like Angel Blue and Oliver Spike, the Rak were infected.

Pushing and fighting and struggling to get free of that crowd, I felt as if some monstrous beast had me, and as the essence smell of the crowd darkened and thickened, I began
to feel more and more afraid. I wanted Da, and I wished Gary Soloman had stayed with me, but most of all I realized that I wanted Harrison. The warm strength of his arms and the beauty he had made me feel when he had kissed me were so much the opposite of the ugliness seething through the crowd. For a wonderful second, thinking of that kiss made me feel his mouth on mine, and this drove back the fear, reminding me that I had come tonight to see what I could learn; it was cowardly to run away when my sister’s life and maybe the safety of my family depended on me.

I turned to face the stage and saw the Rak’s lead singer gyrating and spasming in a dervish dance, his face a mask of demented hatred. Gritting my teeth, I unclamped my senses and forced myself to listen to what he was doing, because I wanted to feel what the crowd around me was feeling. The song, if it could be called a song, was all about the power of hatred, and the right of people to feel it and act it out rather than repressing it. He was sneering at love and kindness and gentleness. He was screaming that people who felt those things were fools. He asserted everyone’s right to hate and hurt and dig to the dark parts of their soul.

I looked about me and saw with a chill that people in the audience wore his expression as if he had somehow transferred it to them via the music. Eyes glittered with malice and people bared their teeth in vicious, glimmering smiles that approved every bit of pain and savagery he described. Those smiles were so like grimaces of agony that they made me flinch. People snarled and laughed and screamed for more
and more. They turned to one another to bellow how incredible, how totally, incredibly right it was. They danced in place, isolated and facing the stage, shaking their fists and raking the air with their clawed hands.

I had the surreal feeling that I was in a crowd of people going through some sort of werewolf-like change into animals, except no beast but the human beast could hate so powerfully, so deeply, so creatively.

The Rak played three more songs and then ended with a crash of sound. They were off the stage so swiftly that the audience seemed startled. Then a murmurous sound of discontent and irritation and anger rose. The announcer came on with a squall of feedback to announce Neo Tokyo.

It could not be by chance that Da had been set up to sing after the Rak. I had a sudden feeling of premonition, which my danger sense affirmed, and I began to fight my way back to the front of the audience. Pushing through, I risked becoming an easy target for the aggression rippling all around me. But Da and the two young men who must be Neo Tokyo came onstage, drawing everyone’s attention.

“Da …,” I whispered.

He walked in his long, loose-limbed way to the mike at the far left of the stage, and Neo Tokyo took the other two mikes with the same casual grace that they had to have learned from Da. They bent to rearrange several other instruments at their feet and I held my breath as they took up their first instruments; Da his guitar, and Neo Tokyo panpipes and a flat drum. There was a gentleness and a simplicity in their
movements that made me think of the old Vietnamese grocer packing his fruit away and I felt my anxiety fade. They were so different from the pounding, dizzying, nightmarish quality that the Rak had brought to the stage with their grinding, savage music, showers of sparks, gusts of fire, and puffs of smoke all lit by the frenetic whirling of laser lights. There were no special effects now. Just three men in a white light.

“Who the hell are these guys?” someone nearby asked.

I held my breath as the music began and felt a burst of relief that it was not Da’s, because offering one of his songs to this resentful, aggressive crowd would be like waving a red rag at a bull. The song was edgy enough not to oppose the potent mood the Rak had established. It was, I understood after a little, a song about confusion and the rage that comes from being lied to and kept in the dark. It was a good solid song with clever, sharp-edged lyrics and it drew up perfectly and naturally the threads left hanging by the Rak. The beast crowd calmed down and began to listen.

Athough the lyrics spoke of anger, they were analytical and clever, and the audience had to think in order to get them. I was fascinated to see how the song took all of the churning fury and aimless aggression that the Rak had woven and unwound it, seeking for the center.

Ultimately the song was about discovering the core of fury, the molten heart, and I began to understand exactly what Da liked about Neo Tokyo. It was angry but there was not a mindless rage in it, nor any desire to blame anyone. At its center was puzzlement and honest confusion.

I looked around me. I could smell and see that people were still unsettled from the Rak’s music, but the song was sucking up their raggedy energy, turning it cool and sending it back into itself. When it ended, there was a good swell of applause, although nowhere near the frenzied mania that had erupted after the Rak played.

The next song began at once without the band making any attempt to draw out more reaction from the crowd. The lyrics were about a woman trying to find a way to live in a world full of paths that all seemed wrong, and with no idea what a right path was because all ways were hemmed by rules that she did not agree with and could not obey. Again it was a song about confusion, but it was specific and compelling and veined with a yearning for something beyond confusion.

It was not one of Da’s songs, but this time he sang with the two younger men, and his influence was in the way the words came out. His older, deeper voice was the kindness and tolerance that gentled the sharp, angry voices of the two younger men.

The band played a long, looping instrumental break of competing sounds, which reiterated the theme of confusion and longing, somehow suggesting that the woman’s story was a story that was repeated again and again.