CHAPTER FIVE
...dogtastic...
Nulight takes a leafbuster (ie. non-UK) train from Bath up to the big smoke, where he walks pale pavements all the way from the railway station to a basement office half way down Denmark Street. The front door of this office features an air-brushed mutt with spiral eyes. Moss, leaves and rusty guitar strings clutter the narrow space in front of the door. He plays knockety-knock, then waits.
An old man opens the door. He looks at Nulight.
"Yo, Michael," Nulight says, offering his hand.
The pair shake hands. "Come in stranger," Michael says, leading him indoors.
The Dog's office is open-plan, one huge room filled with computers, papers, CDs and such. "Been a while," Nulight remarks. "Two years?"
"Make it ten."
Nulight's eyes widen. "Buddah, that long? What you been up to?"
"Feeding my head."
Nulight nods, then pulls out a packet of minibongs and offers Michael one. "Okay, so you wanna know why I turned up?"
Michael nods. They sit down in canvas-covered easy chairs.
Nulight continues, "I need a job doing in Berlin. No blood, no mess—that's why I first thought of you—but the squad has to be good. Like, no tech footprints, right?"
Michael puffs maryjane. "You came to the right man. Peace and tranquillity is what I deal in."
Nulight chuckles. "Bancoesque. But I'm afraid ground zero is the Gesang Der Junglinge."
Michael raises his eyebrows. "That's going to cost you, Nulight." He leans forward to add, "What have you done to upset Dieter?"
Nulight replies in a cold voice, "Actually it's the other way around. And it isn't just me."
Michael relaxes into his chair. "Dieter's no pushover." He glances at Nulight. "Well, I know the perfect squad, but I'll want my cash up front."
Nulight shrugs. "I'm not playing monopoly here," he says. "The money's yours, we'll sort out the details later."
"Are you sure you want to go ahead with this? There might be consequences for you—I want to be certain that this is what you want."
"Good and bad consequences. I dig."
Michael nods. "Well, there won't be any mess, don't worry about that. I vet all my coverts. It's politics, you see?"
Nulight understands. "Peaceniks forever, and the green revolution." He grins. "Everybody knows you ain't no gangster."
Michael takes a piece of paper and writes on it.
EUFemism.
Nulight smiles. "I've heard good things about these people."
"They're quick, they're quiet. Ned Ludd would be proud of them."
...Danish pastries...
In Copenhagen, Nulight contacts the European Underground Foundation. He explains the task to the hit squad. There is to be no thuggery, no murder, just computer destruction. The squad understand this as they are influenced by the Zen Artisans of the Pacific Rim, pacifists who loathe technology. Also, Michael Dog has primed them. But the price agreed is large, and Nulight begins to wonder how much he has left of the label funds. He has kinda lost track...
Arriving 9pm Berlin Airport, the team walk through alleys into the city so as to avoid the urban securicam system. There are four of them, plus Nulight: Franc, Zipperdie, Kermita and Gloria. Despite the season it is freezing, and they splash along the pot-holed streets wearing hooded anoraks and greased boots. The gap between public and private in the neu Deutschland is great, and landlords have turfed out all those who cannot pay. As a result street culture is based around the tent and the black market, a mini-environment of claustrophobic poverty; tents ruined by acid rain, grime-streaked, packed tight, leaving only narrow channels through which people must risk walking. In streets with car access it is worse, as there are running battles between beggar gangs and alky-taxi gunpersons, with many people wearing the new fashions, the bulletproof vest and the helmet. Unfortunately even this protection is no protection when you are up against Far Eastern coherent energy weapons.
So the five scramble through the morass. Nulight, knowing private alleys, takes them through passages devoid of tents, but since some of these are gang haunts and drug thoroughfares he carries that symbol of local protection the analogue synthesizer (genuine, eighty years old) so people realise they are coolstuff and not to be molested.
About eleven they approach the alley in which the Gesang Der Junglinge lies. It is time for the hit.
"Remember," Nulight says, "no violence to people. Such violence is uncool. We're hitting the basement computers. There's to be no deviation from the plan."
The four have put on their UHF helmets. Laser-wiggles flash before their stern faces. It is like dealing with robots. Kermita nods at Nulight and says, "Sure," but with trepidation he sees her fiddling with the semtex croissants in her pockets.
Nulight jacks the UHF lines into his headset, then pulls tight his anorak hood. "OK," he says, "go for it!"
The four run down the alley, Nulight following just behind. They duck under the club door and enter reception. Telemusik just has time to draw breath to scream before a gob-rag is flung into her face, and she falls to the floor. The rest of the hallway is empty. Nulight watches from the front door as Gloria bungs the interior doorway with Almax, the glitter paste frothing up then setting like rock.
So far so good.
But then two men clatter up from the basement. Their heads appear over the top of the stairs. Franc hits them with gas helmets that shrink over their heads like suicide bags, but then he attaches O2 capsules. Nulight nods.
Franc, Kermita and Gloria descend the stairs at top speed, Nulight following, while Zipperdie is left to deny entrance to new clubbers. He is wearing a Schulze Audentity T-shirt, so he looks the part. Down one flight they encounter resistance, the first of the Zyklus Mensch, and Franc is wounded in the arm by a gunshot. Gloria takes out both guys with her Blinderama, but the lasertube wheeze alerts others, and they can hear Teutonic yelling. Franc bags the ZM pair, then they all crouch down to wait.
After a few seconds it goes quiet. The music upstairs is in spaced-out mode, no beats, so down here in the stairwell they can hear enough to make them worry. A lacuna seems to have developed.
Nulight orders them, "Down, now. Go get 'em."
The trio go forward into the dark. A shot. Another. They reply. In a few flicker frame seconds Gloria has been shot in the thigh, but the Zyklus Mensch are all on the floor. Gloria slaps a morphinoplug on her wound, grunting as the chemsoup kicks in. Then they go forward, and see at last the door to the computer nest.
Inside is not what Nulight expected. It is lit green—Evil Dead style—and spooky, with lots of cables and hardware arranged around the walls. But centrally a crouched figure watches him. At first Nulight thinks it is the last of the Zyklus Mensch, but then he sees movements that suggest... maybe not human? He falls back, uncertain of what he is seeing, freaking out. Hallucinating?
"No, no!"
The figure is floating towards him.
He orders the others, "Get outa here!"
Paranoia grips his mind like a clammy hand on his scalp. The person, creature, whatever it is, speaks over the frantic noise of the others escaping. Nulight cannot see much as it has gone quite dark, but he glimpses a mouth moving in a blue head.
"Nulight, this is not for you. This is ours. If you remember anything at all, remember our compassion, our concern for you back in Tibet. Do not annoy us any more."
Raving, drooling, Nulight staggers back to the stairs; then he runs up, shrieking. An alien! Fear and pain and trippy paranoia make his limbs as efficient as a robot's. In seconds he is topside, out in the streets. The others have vanished. Makes sense.
Nulight runs down the alley. He passes people. Some of them seem to be aliens and they laugh at him, high-pitched sniggering that seems to accentuate his loss, his failure. Ha ha ha ha! they go, as he goes.
...doing the free festi circuit...
Summer.
Wales, Scotland, bits of England.
It is hot and it is the time for psychedelic bands to come out of their mushroom-fuelled studios and stand, or more often lie down, in the sunshine. This is the great rhythm of the passing years for many such, overwintering technopolitan style, summering out in the open. An Earth rhythm, Celtic, natural, perfect. Release an album once a year just like plants release seeds.
(Not so Mystery Trend. They have legal hassles.)
(Just so Henge Of Astral Stone. They have completed "and then we picked up our musical instruments and really played them, until they bled, and their blood drops dripped over the staves and became notes that were all the better for being yellow," which is the long-awaited follow-up to the difficult third album "The Difficult Third Album".)
The failure of the Berlin hit makes Nulight think long on what course of action to take, until, after many cups of herbal tea, smokes and freakwater, he has a brilliant idea. It is summer. The weather is greenhousing. Why not form a band?
This scheme is augmented when, one evening, as Nulight and Kappa are drinking in a Glasto watering hole, none other than Zhaman arrives, his dreads filthy, his clothes dusty, his boots holed. Nulight at first shies away from him, for this is the keyboard maestro of Mystery Trend—the enemy—and maybe a battle is in the offing. But Zhaman grins and raises his hands, and they are empty.
"Peace," he says. "They've sacked me."
Nulight grabs Zhaman and sits him down with a pint of Crippledick. The music of Henge Of Astral Stone is on the jukebox, and all is cool.
"So spill the beans," Kappa says, rather suspicious.
Zhaman grins his disarming grin, tying his dreads into a bundle with a ribbon. "It's all getting a bit heavy," he says. "Chantal threw a wobbly and I got sacked. She says you're going to drop them from the label?"
Nulight shrugs. "There's been mentions."
"Hey, I hope you do let go. She's obsessed with this alien stuff, like she's been hypnotised. The rumours that are going around..."
Nulight has taken a decision. "Rumours, rumours. Look, Zhaman, this is what we'll do. My LA people will nullify the Mystery Trend contract then let Chantal know. I'm starting a band to play festi music. Wanna join?"
"Hey, yeah," Zhaman says.
Nulight is pleased. It was Zhaman and Morwenna Icecool Flak who wrote most of the Mystery Trend tunes, though Chantal orchestrated them, and provided the lyrics. Zhaman is a muso, head high in the sky, in fact, way out into space, as he is a disciple of T McKenna. Nulight continues, "Me and Kappa are in already, and now you. There's a rasta dude called Partzephanaiah who I'm gonna ask. It'll be heavy auton music."
"But all our keys will be wrong—"
Nulight raises his hands. "Like... you know Terry Riley's "Shri Camel" from nineteen eighty? He retuned an old Yamaha keyboard to Indian scales. We'll get some electronics geezer to do the same. I got the frequencies, man. It'll be easy. We just go out and slay them."
"Sounds a tad freaky to be true," Zhaman remarks, "but I'm in. All my 'boards are in Zurich, but I can haul them over—"
"I'm flush, leave it to me," Nulight says. Kappa looks worried, but Nulight ignores her expression, saying, "Don't worry, I'm not on self destruct, it'll all work out."
"And the Berlin computers?" Zhaman asks, "won't they stop you?"
"That's the point, man. They won't know at the start. The idea is to attract the attention of certain people, maybe get them in a position where we can trap them, but at the very least expose them."
"You mean aliens?"
"It's true, man. We did it at Stonehenge." Nulight decides not to mention the fact that the alien told him not to be so annoying. He needs action, he needs a resolution.
"I heard gossip on the net," says Zhaman, "and I've seen the vidclips, but I wondered if some sadboy had rendered up some fake footage. In fact, that's what everybody is saying, that it's a classic hoax—"
"It's as true as you're sitting here," Nulight says with considerable emotion.
Zhaman is stunned. He is a big bloke, but sitting back in his chair he seems crumpled. "Hey, that's, that's..."
"Save your head," Nulight says. "You'll need energy when you play. We gotta be perfect, man, just perfect."
Suddenly Zhaman is animated. "I'm totally in with you, but, listen up, the aliens won't just arrive when we gig. They'll have a plan. They'll be subtle."
"They've got high technology," Kappa remarks.
Nulight shakes his head. "We've gotta draw them down, we've gotta make them appear so nobody can deny they exist—even more than we did at Stonehenge. Then we've really blown their cover. Then they can't do what they wanna do. You hear about the Gesang Der Junglinge? That was us too. The aliens are protecting their own, that's why we couldn't complete the hit. That music is about to explode out of its basement, you get it? So we gotta force the alien hand."
Zhaman nods, seduced by Nulight's verbosity. Nulight, when he is on form, has the gift of the gab.
So the plan is put into action. Over the next few weeks Nulight calls in all his favours, contacts all his friends, all the organisers of free festivals, all those in co-operatives and musicians' matrices and free information nets, and after only a week has put together a tour of fifteen dates, from the first to the thirtieth of September. The band are to be called SemiAutonatic. It is a dreadful pun, but it says what is meant to be said. And it says, 'We are here again'.
All the band's keyboards are set to respond to the alien music scale. This is a difficult job and it costs Nulight dear. He is trying to forget that the Mystery Trend album that was meant to pay for all of Marcia E's creative accounting is now dead. He realises that they must record their early gigs and release a livemix album, since there is no time to sit down and record stuff. The publicity will need to be steaming, however, or else the sales won't cover the deficit.
But there is hope in that direction. Just before the first gig Kappa turns up a software defector from Ukraine, a tall, thin, pale dude called Grigory, who is cool enough to have heard of Hanging Gardens Of Fungus. Grigory claims he can design them a soft pack that will mutate their initial auton riffs and store them as multitracked AIFF's, so that with just the flick of a virtual mixer they can create a master file with all their live tracks done studio quality. In other words, live feel plus studio sound. This is most pleasing. Nulight feels he can go ahead with confidence.
Some of the final year students at the Avalon Faculty have been persuaded by Kappa to design viruses that will harmlessly but forcefully advertise the new album. One such lady, Vanquara de Musique Nouveau, a mixed up freak who only wears green, makes a Celtic pack that can infiltrate the British Underground via the net. It is a leap forward. Sales projections are eight thousand. With luck, enough revenue will be generated to keep Marcia happy while they find the rest of the cash.
But that is all breadhead stuff. Nulight has a thousand other things to attend to.
The gigs begin. The weather holds. Thousands of merry undergrounders come out and have a great time. Nulight gives away one-track mini-CDs as a taster of the album, which is to be called "Auton de Musique Nouveau" in honour of the virus lady.
The music papers have all picked up on the new development. They say SemiAutonatic's gigs are impure because it is well known that only computers can compose auton, but they applaud Nulight for his audacity, and as a result sales of other Voiceoftibet albums pick up. The news that Mystery Trend have been dropped is suppressed for a week, and then some hacker kid breaks the news over the net, an event that makes Nulight furious, despite that fact that he expected it.
Near the end of the month, with three gigs to go and still no aliens, they release the album. It charts indie at number twenty-one. This is fantastic. First week sales are somewhere between four and five thousand. If they can keep this up then the gamble will have paid off.
Their penultimate gig is at The Other Eisteddfod, just outside Llangollen in Wales. Nulight expects it to be a stormer. It is an apt metaphor.
The stage is quite high and they have arranged their keyboards, computers, av links and internet rig in a semicircle, as usual, since that is a cosmically correct setting. 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. Set back somewhat, naked cooks fry psilocybe caps in sunflower oil, offering up their offerings on baps of crusty whiteloaf. There are large amounts of cider available under the monicker Jerry's Strangely Apple Brew.
Iechyd Da!
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 the band begins to play he watches them fill up, sees their eyes go misty and faraway.
For half an hour the gig is relaxed, but then they happen upon a trancey blip that Zhaman modifies into a looping riff of close microtones, that, after only forty bars, becomes hypnotic at 144 bpm. It is as if they are all trapped inside 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 accomplishment.
But it was not the music that 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. Below him the audience think it is part of the act, and they are well impressed.
But he is being abducted. He wriggles, aware that he will shortly die... he supposes. 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 approaching, 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 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. Buddah save him! Now!
Then 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 near him. He is in a cell alongside a person.
Chantal!
She is looking at him. "So they got you too."
"Man..." he murmurs, hugging her. "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 tell me I'm hallucinating. Please. I don't want this to be real."
"It's real, all right," Chantal replies.
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 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 out of it. Drugged, most likely. Ain't no other explanation—"
"It is Einstein, isn't it?"
"Einsten? What, number three?"
Chantal's voice becomes urgent. "Time dilation. Whatever. 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.
"Stop bugging me," he mutters.
Chantal proffers her hand. "Forget the past. Quits?"
Nulight shrugs, but does not respond. Then he manages, "Maybe."
"I was a pain in the neck to the aliens," Chantal muses. "I was investigating them, not as efficiently as you were, no, but hey... they grabbed you and me because we were the ones that got obsessed by them."
"Uh-huh?"
Chantal nods. "Don't you believe me?"
"Nah."
"It's why we were abducted, Nulight." She touches his right hand, and there is a sensation of mild electricity, like a 9 volt battery on the tongue.
But suddenly Nulight 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.
Mixer console in front of him. He hears the insistent thunk of a 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 think the abduction is part of the act. Nulight groans. This all goes back to The Orb trying to induce lightning over some Glasto fest, 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. But Zhaman and Partzephanaiah have snuck off somewhere, leaving nobody to protect him from his adoring fans.
Nulight is surrounded by people and he is getting smothered. The roadies—hired meat—have already forgotten about him. Then a dude in a rocking chair barges his way through the throng, an oldster wearing a faded red T-shirt emblazoned with the legend Jerry's Strangely Apple Brew.
It's Jerry Kranitz, thank Buddah. The psych cider supremo grabs him, as the rocking chair lifts a tad and forges a way through the screaming fans, who move back in response. Nulight is pulled through the throng, his body vibrating as he is crushed into the rocking chair engine, until the fans are left behind and there is the welcome sight of the cider tent up ahead. Into this haven they whizz.
"Okay, we got a few moments," Jerry says. His American accent sounds odd, sure, but it is most welcome.
"You saved my skin, man," Nulight replies.
"Leave my tent out of the back while I hold them off," Jerry replies. "I think I saw Kappa running down to the railway line."
"Right. Nice one."
Jerry leans back in his rocking chair and raises a pint of the golden stuff. "I discovered this is Canterbury," he says, "and I've never been the same since. It's a strange brew—like life."
Nulight shakes Jerry's hand, says, "See ya later," then runs out of the tent. He finds Kappa by the railway, and soon they are away in a taxi down to Llangollen town centre.
Kappa alone has realised the truth about the abduction. He tells his story and she is shocked.
He was not hallucinating.
It was real.
...ambient music and world domination...
So was it all a gigantic hallucination?
Nulight is uncertain, despite the certainty of his beliefs. It is not a black and white situation.
And then everything happens.
Surfing the internet, he hits Berlin and reaches the computers in which the semi-autonomous music is fermenting. Immediately suspicious of the linkage, he hesitates, for it seems a fluke drop. Maybe Master Sengel is somewhere electronically near, like a guardian devil. But seeing the opportunity to wreck the alien system he moves in to pull the metaphorical plug.
And then his right hand is not his own. It is controlled. He works something, some simple cutting device, and then a skin glove falls off his hand and he understands the significance of Chantal in the mothership.
He looks at the VDU. Instead of dying, the Berlin music simply spreads its wings and flies.
And over a few days the great plan comes to its fruition, all to the beat of its own new 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.
First affected is the German economy, or meta-economy as it has become since parallel computers linked by optical nets recreated it. The software running the stock market is a mathematical model of capitalist thought, and it is easily recast in the alien mode. The autonomous music, existing alive like a protoplasm in the European net, remixes the economy. All the data relating to company shares, capital, stock, all the governmental data regarding contracts, fiscal law, relations with the rest of the world, and the entire softsys running the European Community, all these are lost. In its place a warped model appears.
People can go to cashbooths and withdraw ten billion euros, not in cash, but virtually. It seems chaotic, illogical, but there is a pattern. Unfortunately that pattern, being alien, cannot be analysed.
The Berlin stock market crash is nothing, however, compared to the events of the following day. London crashes. No economic business can be done. Computers ruled everything. Now they have gone alien. The pulsating interchange of electronic data has lost its human shape.
Then Wall Street crashes, then Tokyo, and the world is lost.
Economic activity on the global scale becomes impossible to understand. It is happening, but it is alien. How can anybody live a sane life when companies go bust in seconds and beggars become billionaires?
This is how the invasion succeeds. Global electronic economic activity was an ugly music for the aliens. They have substituted their own. They could not help it.
...Cornish gentle...
Only the economically self-sufficient survive. Kappa takes Nulight away to recuperate—they head southwest. Zhaman comes along, also Djo and Sperm. The aliens do not pursue them. The group head for the farm owned by Kappa's parents in Boscastle, Cornwall, and there they set up an agrarian collective.
The Boscastle collective is named MaxNeef, after a visionary.
It seems that the aliens are only bothered with the so-called civilised regions: urban Europe and North America, Japan and the Tiger Economies, Australia, Singapore. They ignore South America, much of India, Oceania. In Britain most of Scotland and Wales is ignored, as is Northumberland and the Westcountry. The Island of Ireland too is ignored. In these places people are left free to live, since they in the past partook so little of the computerised, too-large, mathematical, inhumane capitalist economic system.
In short, everybody previously economically insignificant remains alive.
One evening, Nulight and Kappa are down at Boscastle harbour. The smell of wild garlic from the hill lane wafts down, mixing with the salt of the sea. The village is almost empty, just a hundred or so inhabitants now, and all non-human scale farming has ceased. At the moment it is every collective for themselves. Later, perhaps, some will link up. There is no danger of Government.
Nulight looks up. In a dark sky he sees coloured lines.
Later, he hears footsteps on the paved harbour surface, clattering above the chattering Valency River. He turns. It is Zhaman, carrying a small package.
"Hey," Zhaman says through his new growth of beard.
"Man, what is it?"
Zhaman hands over the package. "Came by special delivery. Some leather dude on a Harley."
Nulight is spooked. "Man, who knows we're down here?"
Zhaman shrugs.
On account of cowardice Nulight makes Kappa open it. The item is a CD. Nulight takes it, looks at the cover, which shows an artistic interpretation of Karl Marx. Weirder and weirder. This is "A Few Golden Animals" by a band called Hedge Wine Of The Rebirth Tool, and what's more it is on the Voiceoftibet label. Is it a promo? Maybe Morwenna has started a new band without Chantal and Zhaman, and this is her first effort. But they have no right to use his label identity.
The ten tracks are not named, but they are identified by small scratch'n'sniff squares. "Something like Regrow's "Simoona" album," Nulight comments, "where the tracks were identified by patches of differently saturated red. Not to mention the Aphex Twin before that. Man, it's been done before."
He scratches the ten panels in turn. Apple, cinnamon... yeah, yeah... later on a burst of lemon. But the last one is unidentifiable, and he finds himself looking around, as if for a ghostly somebody. It is an unconscious reaction.
"Master Sengel," Kappa says, taking the CD and sniffing it. "He must've sent it."
Nulight looks at the CD with new interest. Back home, they locate a CD-ROM sidetrack which begins, 'Forward the Revolution...'