Complete Stories (135 page)

But there was more. Roberto could see into the minds of those around him—into the heads of Breeze and Paco and brother Leon upstairs. A new energy was flowing through him, chilling down Paco who was—after all—just another frightened guy with his own constellation of personal problems. Paco was beginning to smile, like he was just starting to get the point of a joke. He put the gun back in his pocket.

Meanwhile Breeze was staring at Roberto like a cellist awaited a cue in the music. Connecting with her via his exquisite new cognition, Roberto mapped out the physical moves he’d made to get all hangy. As smoothly as an accompanist playing the transcendent theme that tied two lesser melodies together, Breeze transformed his contortions into—a sound. A little musical phrase. She sang it to him, merrily waving her bow. And now Breeze was all hangy too, dancing beside him on the ceiling.

In unison, they sang the phrase to Paco and, yes, now he fully understood. He shrank to a quarter inch in height, and buzzed around the parlor like a happy horsefly. Reaching further, Roberto passed the spell to his unseen brother Leon upstairs. In response, a cosmic power chord to reverberated through the co-op, turning the wood and brick and mortar into singing dust that settled to the ground, leaving the building’s occupants all hangy in the air. The chord built and reverberated like Gabriel’s trumpet call, spreading the news across the planet, helping every living being to become all hangy.

As if in nostalgia for the fading old order, Roberto and Breeze jointly visualized the man-and-woman-shaped tube of story that would surely have culminated in a harmonically perfect moment when the two them made love. Holding hands, they shared this knowing—and squeezed a full courtship into a single moment of the foreshortened Earthly time that remained.

And now their eyes turned to the heavens. Wing Wah, Lulu and Vulu were up there, beckoning in the sky, joined by ever-more of the uplifted multitudes, all hangy and dancing a pattern of physical summoning.

Still higher, the clouds were thinning, with the blue showing through—and set in the blue was a light that was no mere Sun. It was a living light, a Being ushered in by this world that had gone all hangy, this old world of souls who’d found the door and opened it to the inevitable next level.

\

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

Written January, 2009.

Flurb
#7, 2009

John and I wrote this story very quickly, basing it on a dream that he’d had— a dream that involved the phrase, “All Hangy.” John brought a warm and strong emotional texture to the story. I like working with him because he writes so freely, and with such spontaneity.

The starspiders have plucked Anders Zilber from our midst, perhaps neverto be seen again. Squealing their hypercompressed fugues of cosmic mortality and rebirth, the spiders emerged from the transfinite Wassoon spaces and harvested Anders for his greatness. I saw it; I was next to him on the stage.

Everyone mourns his loss—everyone but me, Basil Chown. Of course I’m to pay for my coldness. The idiots have convicted me of murdering him, and I’m to be executed today. As if Anders and I hadbeen vulgar rivals in some spaceport gang—instead of the Local Cluster’sgreatest metamusicians.

And what is metamusic? The one art form that ties us all together— Uppytops, Orpolese, Bulbers, the DigDawgs and the dreaded Kaang—as unalike as chalk to cheese. Thanks to the Wassoon transmitter, humanity has spread beyondthe Milky Way’s swirls, encountering hundreds of other races. Some call it a pangalactic civilization—I call it a wider range of fools. But, yes, they were right to worship Anders.

-----

Handsome, charismatic Anders. I can see the glints in his thoughtful eyes, the boyish slackness beneath his chin, the convoluted curls of his abundant hair. Generally, when out in public, a woman or gyne-poppet graced one arm, or both. Reporters and fans clustered around him, a constant retinue, endeavoring to sprinkle him with shortlife flea-cams. But despite all this worshipful attention, he, better than anyone, knew his days were numbered.

I well remember the first time he told me—I suppose that would be ten years ago by now.

We were returning from a concert tour through the Andromeda Galaxy on the far side of the Local Cluster, aboard the luxury liner
Surry On Down
. We’d just everted from Wassoon space into consensus reality, and I was seeing the usual post-transition shapes within the cabin walls—branched, crawling shadows like ghostly insects.

“They know my name,” remarked Anders, flicking one of the shadows with his long, crooked forefinger. His hands looked strange, but for the moment I didn’t understand why. “They want to keep me. Every time I transit, the starspiders tell me.”

“The starspiders aren’t anything real!” I exclaimed. “They’re only a post-jump hallucination. We have to believe that.”

“Cowardly foolishness, Basil. The subdimensions teem with life and history. The more we open ourselves, the richer our work.”

He pitched his voice to a cracked squeak and began jabbering at the crawling seven-pointed shapes that filled the floors, ceilings and walls. In his oddly pitched voice, Anders was telling them about—how distasteful!—an erotic hallucination he’d just had.

“I remember that!” exclaimed Mimi Ultrapower, our road agent, accompanist and—damn it all!—Anders’s lover. She was laughing as she talked. “The starspiders were inside our flesh, like giant nerve cells. I was kneading you like dough, Anders, and you were—”

“Hush now,” said he, as if rediscovering his sense of modesty. “Not in front of Basil.” He raised his hands in a cautioning gesture—and suddenly his voice broke into that higher register again, amazed and exultant. “Look what we did!”

He now had seven fingers on each hand.

-----

It was I who’d brought Mimi to Earth from the colony world of Omega, near the very heart of our galactic core. Her mother was an astrophysicist investigating the central black hole, and Mimi was a recent university graduate. Using a Wassoon information channel, she sent me a delightful little metasonata, very much in my own style. Extremely flattering, a seductive move.

It had been a simple matter for me to get the Supreme Bonze of the Archonate to grant Mimi Ultrapower a position at court. I’d anticipated some exciting interplay with her, but as soon as she met Anders, she was lost to me.

I tried telling myself I didn’t mind—I had my own women-friends after all, and if Mimi wanted to worship Anders, surely that was her own affair. The bottom line remained: she was an excellent metamusician, a good traveling companion, and a fierce street-hassler.

On that first Andromeda Galaxy tour together, we worked up a three-way collaboration, “Earth Jam,” in which Anders beamed out something like a flute part, I a kind of cello line, and Mimi zeepcast a kind of intricate percussion that was like a pounding headache—except that it felt good.

Understand that our audiences weren’t
hearing
our metamusic—it’s more that they could feel it in their souls, like the emotive shades of a daydream. Our symbiotic zeep colonies project our metamusic directly into the minds of those around us.

Originally the Uppytops used the one-celled zeep critters as a coercive tool to rein in their slave races. But humans ingeniously repurposed the zeeps for benign purposes.

Metamusic is inherently at its best face to face, in a live performance, with realtime zeep signals washing over the nervous systems of the audience—be they mollusks, apes, or insect hives. Although it’s possible to Wassooncast a copy of a metamusical performance, these copies are, in my opinion, like pulpy videos of the love act, utterly lacking the ineffable tones and subliminal frissons of the real thing. Yes, the masses watch the Wassoncasts, but if you’re an accomplished metamusician, you’re forever in demand as a touring artist.

-----

After that first Andromeda Tour, we three had our customary debriefing with the Supreme Bonze, a taut-faced young man wearing a Tibetan-style hat with a yellow fringe along its top—not that he was Tibetan. His people were from Goa, the old Portuguese colony on the west coast of India.

Mimi stared at him in fascination. “Your hat…” she managed to say.

“The Black Hat,” said the Bonze. “Woven from the hairs of a thousand and one dakinis. You know of dakinis?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mimi, a knowing look on her pleasant face. “The ineffable female demiurges attendant upon the great gurus. What mana your Black Hat must have! Wearing it would confer mystical powers upon…upon even an ape! Not that I mean…”

“No offense taken,” said the Bonze, although his face belied this. “I’m eager to hear your group’s new piece.”

The Bonze purported to be a great devotee of metamusic, and always demanded that we perform our most recent road pieces for him, not that he had the mental force to pay proper attention.

But this time he was quite piqued by Mimi’s contribution to “Earth Jam.”

“
Buddoom bubba bayaya
,” he sang, as if trying to echo her signal in words.

“Well put, your Emptiness,” said I, before Anders could start arguing about the Bonze’s accuracy.

“Would you like my Black Hat?” the Supreme Bonze suddenly asked Mimi with a puckish smile. From my years at court, I knew this to be a trick question—anyone who expressed a desire for the Supreme Bonze’s Tibetan hat was beheaded. And the Bonze was in any case annoyed at Mimi for her remark about the ape.

I flashed her a zeep prod of warning; she was quick enough to understand.

“No, no, honorable Bonze,” said she, bowing nearly to the floor. “The Black Hat is in its proper place. Upon the emptiest head.”

That Mimi!

-----

With our fame growing, Anders, Mimi and I obtained apartments in the Metamusic Academy, a lavish old building in downtown Lisbon, which had become the
de facto
capital of Earth. Anders had the top floor, I the floor below that, and Mimi a room below me. But she spent most of her time with Anders. She was teaching him about mathematical cosmology, of all things.

Mimi showed Anders how to rig up a Wassoon generator to made his apartment infinitely large along three dimensions, without quite piercing the barrier into the hyperdimensional subspaces involved in interstellar travel.

The jury-rigged generator was a clever little thing. At its center was a tiny fringed ring like you might use for blowing soap bubbles—although the bubble-juice for this gizmo was an endlessly subtle fluid of unbound quarks. As each bubble appeared, a magnetronic tube would set up resonant vibrations, causing the bubble’s radius to oscillate. Wassoon’s genius lay in his breakthrough notion of allowing the delicate bubbles’ radii to oscillate down below zero and into negative values. As every schoolchild knows, a simple DeSitter transformation establishes that a quark bubble with negative radius is identical to a subdimensional cavity in space itself—and a cavity of this kind can readily become a gateway to the transfinite Wassoon spaces.

Playful as newlyweds in their first home, Anders and Mimi sent hallways running through the apartment forever, lamplit by a Wassoon energy-fractionating gimmick that could divide a hundred watts among an endless number of sympathetic bulbs. Clever Mimi even devised a procedural method for decorating the infinite areas of the endless walls with seemingly non-repeating tiles.

Anders was ecstatic over the infinite spaces of his apartment, and Mimi calmly said she’d known he’d like them, because in all his works he was trying in some fashion to create a direct view of actual infinity—whether as an endless regress, as a fractal elaboration, or as an impenetrable cloud of fuzz. She said that our universe itself was in fact infinite, although people tended to ignore this, blinded as they were by the background radiation of the most recent—what was the phrase she used? Not Big Bang, something else—ah, yes, Big Flash.

Sometimes, when I was loaded on zeep toxins, I’d go upstairs and look for the two lovers, pretending I had business to discuss. More often than not, they’d evade me, and I’d wake alone and hungover in some bare inner chamber, googolplex turnings deep into Anders and Mimi’s maze.

Upon arising, I’d seem to see shapes and faces at the inconceivably distant ends of the Wassoon hallways—creatures from earlier cycles of our universe, according to Mimi. Neighbors from before the Big Flash.

In any case, finding my way out was never hard. I merely followed the scent of my personal dissatisfaction and unease back to my own floor.

-----

The zeep germs were our owners and our lovers, our sickness and our cure, our prison and our playground—a feverish buzz to the uninitiated, a language of power to the cognoscenti.

Each strain of zeeps was custom-designed from a core of basic Uppytop wetware modded with whatever odd mitochondria and Golgi bodies the composer could be induced to purchase by zealous ribofunkateers. The zeep colonies embossed our fingers with glowing, colorful veins. But that was only the start. Every metamusician—save Anders—constantly sought improvements in his or her system, striving to push ahead to new metamusical territory, to be the first to explore and domesticate uncharted realms of multisensory rhythm space.

Most masters enhanced their personal zeep colony with a virtual menagerie of symbiotes. These add-ons were entirely different species that you took into your body’s ecosystem as a way of keeping the zeeps happy. Over the years, many of our torsos came to resemble coral reefs, encrusted with generations of living organisms.

Mimi, for instance, had a cluster of squishy sea-anemones on her left shoulder and an intimidating row of sharks’ teeth along her right forearm; I bore a mat of orange moss on my back, with purple centipedes lively in the fronds. The centipedes had an annoying habit of slipping over my shoulders to drop into my food. But I tolerated them anyway. After awhile, you weren’t sure which add-ons were potentiating what effects—so you hesitated to remove any of them.

Anders Zilber was, as I say, the great exception to these refinements. Throughout the glory years of his career, he used a single, unmodified strain of zeeps—albeit zeeps bred by the legendary tweaker Serenata Piccolisima. And his only add-on was from Serena, as well—a little loop-shaped worm, seldom seen, that moved beneath his skin like a live tattoo.