Out on Blue Six (14 page)

“Who you pointing at? I’m too tired to get up.”

“Thunderheart. The … trog, is it?”

Kansas Byrne sighed. “All right, but don’t be expecting anything too grandiose, I’m all in. Thunderheart, in three lines: Born to two wingers, co-opted into the Grundy Street clan of the trog caste after adaptive surgery. Like most ’postles, the MiniPain got him all wrong and put him in the wrong clan; something to do with his tail, I don’t know what, I’m not terribly up on trog philosophies; whatever, it got him three months counseling, then he appealed to the Ministry for relocation. Now, that’s always fatal, and one day we were doing a show near his roost, and after we’d packed up, there was this shy-looking trog standing there twisting his tail over his hands, saying, ‘Do you, er, think it might be possible for me to join?’

“Know how he got his name? First thing the clan Eldest Namer saw when he took Thundie-junior up onto the high steel to show him the world. Good thing it wasn’t a Thursday; there’s a pair of wingers in the apt across the alleyway, and when they get together on their little Thursday trysts they always keep the curtains open. Lucky not to have had a much shorter name altogether. Hell of a system, isn’t it?”

“And him, Devadip, the zook, isn’t he?”

“Fashion fever, Kaydoubleyou. Cardinal rule of zookhood is never fall out of step with the herd. Our Deva was the exception to the rule; one day he decided to flush all his designer’s threads down the john and turn up at the local Salsa Klub in a little Latino number he’d run up himself. Got him barred from every danceria on the Chinzo Strip, between outrageous fashions, and dancing his own dance, and drinking his own cocktails, and deliberately talking about anything except what was that week’s fashionable topic. Half the club teraphim in the prefecture have him memorized, and barred. Bounced more times than a racketball. Finally it got so even his famulus, a slouch hat, would you believe—zooks are always getting new famuluses assigned to them because the fashion changes so fast—was giving him such a pain that he flushed the thing down the john—and came and joined us.”

“And him? Your twin, is it?”

“Ah. Special story, my twin. It was ultimately impossible that the Compassionate Society could keep us apart. I had always felt him as some unknown presence in my soul, the feeling of another of whom I wasn’t quite certain, and anyway, we were two of a kind. It was inevitable that we would both rebel, and the rebel run is so tightly constrained that of course we would meet.”

“So, what was his story?”

“Sonatas, études, chamber studies. He’s the best chamber music composer this city’s known in centuries. No exaggeration. But the Department of Arts and Crafts does not like chamber music. It likes great symphonic works. It likes towering oratorios. It likes music that hymns the nobility of mass man. It likes music in which the individual submits his will and expression to the corporate body. And Kelso’s music creates space for the expression of individuality and character. The Department hated Kelso’s music. Worse, Kelso’s
patrone
hated Kelso’s music.”

“Pardon?”

“A witness, like Winston. They support tlakhs financially, but they are not allowed to create for themselves. They take their satisfaction from the creations of others.”

“Not like Winston.”

“Dear Winston, he suffers from frustration. Being Joshua’s
patrone
, what else could you expect? Kelso tried to get his music approved for public performance, but the Department would return his manuscripts all stamped
UNLICENSED FOR PUBLIC PERFORMANCE
. So he had to go underground, literally. Into the
pneumatique
stations. Tremendous acoustics, all that polished marble. And I saw him there, one day as I was scouting out a site for a new performance, playing this incredible music all on his ownsome, and I knew then what I’d always felt: that I had never been alone, that there was another me, a presence always beside me, and that other me was him, my twin. I’m not sure I can explain it properly unless you’re a twin and have felt it yourself. Anyway, I went back to the others—we were Josh, the Doctor, and Winston in those days—and we did what I used to do in the old Total Media days, we made him the unique audience. And we hit him. All alone one night, as the last train was pulling out. We hit. And he was beautiful. I knew then he was my brother if there had been any doubts before, because he didn’t fall on his knees or run away or gape like anyone else would, he plugged in his keyboard and joined in. He wrapped himself around that performance and made the whole thing complete. As I’d hoped he would all along. Well, of course he joined us; wasn’t he ever surprised to find he had a twin sister?”

Kilimanjaro West pondered upon the stories he had heard. “It seems to me,” he said carefully, “that you are right to call yourselves Raging Apostles. There is so much hurt and anger and hope and frustration that you feel you have to show to everyone.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Kansas Byrne. “Okay, comrade, dinnertime. More hot tofu soup, yum yum yum. Still, it beats working …”

And at last …

“All right, all right, all right! Stop whatever you’re doing, put down your things, this is it! It’s showtime,
mes amis
! Let’s take Wheldon!”

The wave of cheering voices carried Kilimanjaro West down the rickety back stairs into the alleyway by the dying canal and into the Raging Apostles ’lectrovan (which had changed color in the night—“security precaution” exclaimed Witness Winston, gunning the ceramic engine for all it was worth). Wedged in the front bench seat between driver and director, Kilimanjaro West tried to recite his moves to Joshua Drumm, while in the back V. S. Pyar led the rest of the ensemble through a series of energy-channeling exercises and chants, and the whole improbable circus went careening through the streets of Pendelburg; sending the exotically clad, half-clad, unclad wingers scattering and diving for their doorways, waving fierce
nona dolorosas
in their wake. And in the midst of all the madness and beautiful mayhem, Kilimanjaro West realized with some hitherto undiscovered faculty of himself that he was having the time of his life.

The ’lectrovan slewed out of Pendelburg into Ranves and thence into Wheldon, a prefecture predominantly populated by prollets, a caste somewhere between trogs and zooks/zillies in that they practiced the former’s familial (in their case, sept) bonding and also the latter’s subjection of the individual to the group will. The Seven Servants employed them in droves; they made a perfect work force. The ’lectrovan whined forward between passing multitudes of visitors; Winston’s swearing was almost as loud as his constantly pumping horn. An excited group of migros were enthusiastically blowing kazoos beside the open window. The van slid into the slipstream of a strolling mariachi band and let the musicians clear a path through the crowd. Finally the density of bodies was too great for any further penetration.

“Look at that—solid,” said Winston, throwing up his/hands in exasperation. “We’ll have to make it to the target on foot.”

“Synchronize timepieces!” reminded Joshua Drumm, opening doors. “Back here no later than sixteen hundred.” The Raging Apostles prepared to swing into anonymity in the manswarm.

“Bror, you come with me.” Dr. M’kuba snagged Kilimanjaro West by the collar of his street jellaba. “Stick closer’n this ’hugger, mah man.” The crowd swallowed the performers as entirely as an ocean does raindrops. The Scorpio wove his apprentice through the spectators like some devious silver snake—’scuse me, cizzens; apologies, bror; so sorry, sib—to the front where lines of Love Police held the people apart from the parading prollets. The two Raging Apostles went slipping up the face of the audience in the gap between people and policepersons. The prollet septs jogged past, chanting, sweating. Kilimanjaro West paused to watch.

Diversity and uniformity. In dress, decoration, even physical and facial features, the septs were all markedly different from each other: red-haired, black-haired, olive-skinned, black, yellow, short, tall. Some carried banners, some paper dragons, some chains of flowers hundreds of meters long, some played instruments, some marched in rapt silence. Some were dressed in costumes of such brilliance that they made Devadip Samdhavi’s creations seem dowdy, others wore sober hoods and habits, others drab work coveralls, others still what looked like blue-and-yellow sports outfits with knee-high stockings and long-billed caps, others yet in black bodysuits painted with mambo-mama skeletons; all different, yet all the same. Within each sept was a rigid uniformity of physical appearance, of costume, of voice, of movement. Even the bearers of the sacred litters (florid juggernauts encrusted with gilt gingerbread and squabbling plastic santrels clambering over each other for the attention of the multilimbed siddhi hovering in freegee fields surrounded by candle flames and stone oil-lamps) all jogged and sweated in unison and wore identical expressions of agonized rapture on their faces.

“Come on, man!” M’kuba tugged Kilimanjaro West away from the Festival of the Flames. “Like we have this performance, nah? In ten minutes, nah?” They continued to snake along the face of the crowd and the saints, santrels, and siddhi jounced past on their biers.

The table at the street café on the Plaza Veneziano had been prebooked for the personal use of one Citizen Kilimanjaro West and guest. His had been the safest name to lynk through the public dataweb. The cafes were popular vantages for the race; small bribes to the Love Police ensured the view went uninterrupted, and at the Festival no one thought anything of citizens of different castes sharing a table. His cup of chocolate sat ignored and solidifying as Kilimanjaro West, suddenly smitten with stage fright, found he could not remember how to work the catches of the synthesizer case.

“Relax, mah man. Cultivate peace of mind.” Dr. M’kuba rocked back on his chair.

“But what if I do it wrong?”

“You not do it wrong.”

“But what if I do?”

“Welcome to the Compassionate Society, mah man.”

Kilimanjaro West could think of nothing but the time on his wrist. Mrmeemrmeemrmee and suddenly it was time, and in a sudden surge of panic he stood up, took the synthesizer out of its case, and walked out into the Plaza Veneziano.

Amazing how the panic evaporated! Do not count the eyes. Do not count the faces. They will only bring it back again. Just do what you have to do.

He did.

And bursting out of the crowd at exactly their prearranged places came the Raging Apostles. And it all came together as it had in the beginning, out of chaos, out of nothing. He was no longer alone. Kelso Byrne and Winston were beside him, picking up his backbeat and ramming it through their machines and hurling it in dripping chords and sequences and arpeggios at the crowd as the power-wheelers came scorching in round and round and round, in and out and high and low, weaving smoke and sparks and fire and flashing silver fans like blades, like knives, like light, crossing and recrossing and crisscrossing and crosscrissing trading fans, throw and flash and pass and catch at speeds just under lightspeed, scooping up the music on their metal fans and tossing it high in the air, and Kilimanjaro West saw Kelso Byrne grinning at him through the sweat and the concentration and he grinned back and concluded that this was the time mrmee mrmee mrmee of his life, count one minute forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, and
change
and half the power-wheelers dived into human-wheelers, cartwheelers, kicking off their machine wheels, becoming tumbler-jumblers dangerous dancers as their street clothes, their ragamuffin slubberdegullion rags and tags and bags dissolved (exactly as Devadip Samdhavi had programmed the time-lock fibers), and they were transformed into light and gold and sun in the Golden Section, they were fast, fast fast, faster than reason or criticism or appreciation, blazing along the lightspeed horizon; rolls and spins and dives and lifts and drops so fast it numbed the senses into pure spectating: the people watched, they could do nothing else as the dance became the spin and the spin the spiral and the spiral reached out into a revolving chain of humanity anchored in V. S. Pyar’s mastodon musculature and terminating in Kansas Byrne’s whirling, burling round and round and round and round and round, power-wheels screaming until they became just a function between centripetal and centrifugal forces, the illusion of the defiance of gravity, burning past in a blaze of fans and blue-silver centimeters from the faces of the people who had been expecting to see the Festival of the Flames two-eighteen, two-nineteen, two-twenty … the whole trio of musicians were linked into the rotating, arms to arm to arm, the machines playing themselves as the chant rose: Yan Tra Yan Tra Om Ray Toe Shay, voice to voice to voice down the chain: Om Ray Toe Shay Yan Tra Yan Tra, and it was flung off into the crowds who picked it up piece by broken piece, led by the music and the great spiral, they moved to the rhythm of the galaxy and chanted the mantra: Yan Tra Yan Tra Om Ray Toe Shay, trogs and georges and yulps and tlakhs and wingers and bowlerboys and Scorpios and didakoi and migros: Om Ray Toe Shay, even the Love Policemen all in black and silver and a caste all of their own: Om Ray Toe Shay Yan Tra Tram! eight thousand, nine thousand, ten thousand voices, two minutes thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, and …

… and, “This piece of performance art, entitled ‘Sounding the Ritual Echo,’ has been brought to you by Raging Apostles, a multicaste, nonauthorized alternative arts group comprising of independent artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and writers. We thank you for your participation in this event, and Raging Apostles hopes that it has in some small way brightened your day,” and as they were unfolding from their bows and the applause was being passed from hand to hand to hand, the first prollet sept entered the Plaza Veneziano.

“Follow that,” whispered a breathless, sweating Dr. M’kuba to Kilimanjaro West. While the applause rang on and on and on, the Raging Apostles vanished.

Even the Love Policemen were banging their mock-leather gauntlets together.

Back at the van: jubilation, congratulations. And boundless laughter as each member surfaced out of the soulswarm. All sweat and exhaustion and high high high on applause. Last of all, Dr. M’kuba Mig-15 and Kilimanjaro West came ducking around a Food Corps hot-pancakes stand into the ’lectrovan.