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 offence 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, honourable 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 make 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 centre 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. Neighbours 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, colourful 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.
With so simple a toolkit, for a decade of wonder, Anders outshone us all.
Anders and I met as neophytes touring with a phenomenally talented martinet, Buckshot LaFunke, who was presenting an overstuffed bill of fare called “LaFunke’s Louche Lovers’ Legion.” He’d booked us into every cheap supper club across the Local Group, from Al Baardo to Yik Zubelle. Anders and I immediately established an easy camaraderie, based on our exalted ambitions, ironic worldview, and what seemed at the time to be comparable talents.
“I’m going to have LaFunke’s job one day,” Anders boasted one night back in our room, after we’d cranked up our zeep toxins. “Actually, a better one. More status, more class. The laurels of the academy, the butt-licks of the critics.”
“Buckshot made his mark with ‘The Frozen Metronome,’” I observed. “Dramatizing his first wife’s death in that rocket-sled crash on Saturn’s rings. Tough to write a piece like that. Especially since the crash was his fault.”
“That’s why we’re pros, isn’t it?” said Anders. “The public wants you to spill your guts. Hooks and riffs don’t do it, not even a recursive canon. You have to crack open the egg of your skull, and fry them a brain omelette. Every night. On a stage that smells like weasel piss.”
“It’s a dark age,” I sighed. “By rights, exemplary craftsmanship should garner acclaim on its own. Take my own ‘Ode to Charalambos’—”
Anders rattled his fingers together like sticks, sending fresh gouts of zeep juice into his bloodstream. “Come off it, Basil. I can turn out that easy-listening stuff in my sleep—and so can you. We’re in the post-Wassoon age. The only path is deeper! Give the jackals what they
want! The horror of death, the ecstasy of love, the paradox of birth. And then—” He let out a strange, inward chuckle. “And then give them more.”
It was soon after this declaration that Anders took all his banked pay from the tour, and visited Serenata Piccolisima in her studio at Sadal Suud—where LaFunke’s Legion was booked for a week’s engagement at the then-seedy Café Gastropoda. Serenata, who resembled a preying mantis, cleaned out Anders’s system, zinged him with her proprietary zeeps, and gave him the add-on loop-worm.
From that moment on, Anders’s unhinderable career seemed yoked to the wheel of the Milky Way itself. One brilliant composition after another poured forth from his colourfully marbled fingers. How those early titles still resonate, conjuring up unprecedented mindscapes! “Handsome Hassan,” “Satan Sheets,” “Bulbers in Musth,” “Sweet Disdain,” “Ninety Tentacles and a Beak….”
Each song was different—nay, unique—but there were similarities as well, although it would take Mimi’s insight, two years later, to formulate the notion that Anders’s overarching theme was the corrupting and ennobling power of infinity.
But never mind the theory. Audiences loved Anders Zilber, and during his decade of miracles, all his dreams and arrogant predictions came to pass.
He was loyal—or needy—enough to bring me along for the ride, assuring my own reputation as a Zilber crony, and allowing me to amass considerable wealth in the process.
Naturally, witnessing Anders’s success, I sought covertly to obtain my own zeep culture from Piccolisima, hastening to Sadal Suud as soon as our touring schedule permitted, with a wallet stuffed with credit. Imagine my dismay to learn of Piccolisima’s recent murder by a school of anonymous gutter-squid conducting a pusillanimous smash-and-grab.
Soon after, I tried—while feigning a playful manner—to get Anders to infect me with his zeeps. But he merely stared at me, outwardly impassive, yet with his eyes conveying a frightening intensity of emotion.
“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, Basil. Least of all upon my closest friend.”
Closest friend? Perhaps, at that time, he thought of me that way. But, by the time the starspiders took him, there was no talk of friendship between us. We were touring partners, and that was all.
What drove us apart? My jealousy. I’m not a great-hearted man. First and always, I was envious of Anders’s talent. And, as it turned out, I really couldn’t get over Mimi choosing him over me.
Although Mimi Ultrapower was far from being conventionally beautiful, she was—call it mesmerizing. She had a way of catching her breath in the middle of a sentence, a penchant for using recondite words, a quirky sense of fashion, and skin so soft that…
Enough. You get the picture—as did everyone else. The public loved seeing the three of us on stage together, glowing with intrigue and sexual tension.
For our doomed final tour, we’d signed on with the Surry on Down liner again. And, as if to sweeten the gig, our old taskmaster, Buckshot LaFunke, was accompanying us… as a warm-up act.
“Squirt some oil into that ‘Frozen Metronome,’ why don’t you?” said Anders by way of greeting, when first we encountered the weathered Buckshot at the captain’s mess. Anders raised his glowing seven-fingered hands and wriggled them in the older man’s face.
“‘Ninety Beaks and a Limp Tentacle,’” snapped LaFunke, making a contemptuous gesture at Anders’s crotch. His motions were slow and stiff, as he’d saddled himself with an add-on that was something like a crab carapace. “Introduce me to the lady.”
“Mimi Ultrapower,” said Anders. “A wizard and a sharpie. She’ll make sure we all get paid. I suppose we are paying you, aren’t we Buckshot? Or are you here as an intern?”
This was a nudge too far, and from then on, Buckshot LaFunke rarely spoke to Anders—save during our shows, when, as customary, we played the part of giddy mummers who revelled in performing together.
Given that Mimi was avoiding me, and that Anders was sick of me, I myself wasn’t talking much to anyone at all. I didn’t mind. I was nastily strung-out on my zeep toxins, thanks to some new opioid vacuoles that an admirer had bioengineered into my colony. For me, time had collapsed into waiting to perform and waiting to get high. What made it complicated was that I still believed in being sober when I performed.
Fittingly enough, the end came on Sadal Suud, the former home of Serenata Piccolisima. The Café Gastropoda had gone upscale; it was the size of a Broadway theatre now, half of it underwater, and filled with artificial waves where the native cephalopods could relax. The above-ground areas were a-glitter with the glowing mantises that were the other major players in the Sadal Suud biome. Everyone was thrilled to have Anders Zilber and his cronies here, and our historic show was being Wassooncast across the galaxies.
“We’re doing a new piece tonight,” Anders told me about half an hour before we went on. He looked flushed and elated. “A really long improvised jam instead of our regular show. My farewell.”
“What!” I’d already calculated to the minute how long it would be until tonight’s show would end—how long, that is, until I could get blasted backstage. The proposed change stood to throw off my schedule.
“Mimi and I have been talking about it, Basil. Even Buckshot’s gonna jam in. Mimi won him over. Don’t look so worried. All you have to do is beam out some snootster cello-style routine. Like a row of blossoms floating above the primeval sea where I’m honking the roarasaurus, while Mimi’s peppering us with crunkadelic fungus globs, and Buckshot’s channeling the moans of the worldsnake who bites his tail. It’s gonna be my best jam ever. The last jam of all.”
“Um, can you zeep me a preview? Some kind of sketch?” Working with Anders, I’d had to improvise new pieces on lesser notice than this. But normally he gave me a little something to go on.
“I want to stay away from previsualizations, Basil. We’ll let this emerge in real time. As a matter of fact, forget what I said about the row of blossoms and the roarasaurus and the world snake and the fungus turds. Just play like—like you’re in a Wassoon bubble with a negative radius.”
“I was looking forward to finishing early and getting high,” I grumbled. “Do you even have a title?”
“Oh, sure,” said Anders with an odd smile. “It’s called ‘Surprise!’ You just have to relax and zeepcast like I know you can. And, hell, it’s okay if you’re loaded for this show. Buckshot will be, that’s for true. You can lie down on the frikkin’ stage for all I care, Basil. Never mind what these Sadal Suud squids and bugs think of you. Shit—they killed Serenata Piccolisima! And—I might as well tell you—it’s not like I plan to be performing anymore. Tonight we wrap it up. Tonight we let it all come down.”
A purple centipede dribbled down off my shoulder into my lap. I flipped it over my shoulder into the moss on my back. Reaching within myself, I emptied an opioid vacuole into my bloodstream. The emptiness in my chest melted, the trembling in my legs went away. As of this moment, all was well.
“You’re okay, Anders. You really are.”
From backstage I watched the aged but dauntingly spry Buckshot LaFunke perform his corroded and never-to-be-replicated hit, “Mango Tango Django.” Some metamusicians maintain a serene spiritual composure as they beam out their invisible and inaudible zeeply harmonics. Others whirl like the betranced dervishes of Manly’s Star IV. Nothing about zeep invocation or reception demands any particular mode of exhibition; the performers freely groove in whatever fashion they’ve personally developed for dredging up deep gutbucket visionary resonances for the broadcast pleasures of the crowd.
LaFunke was a Holy Roller, a showstopping showoff, an acrobatic ants-in-his-pantser. Filled with opiods as I was, watching him cavort under the wide-spectrum spotlights amused me, and I was pleased to think that, before too long, LaFunke would help us perform a “Surprise!” sprung from the unknowably antic mind of Anders Zilber.
The management of the Café Gastropoda had provided fine amenities for the talent: a buffet of m
arine exotica, drinks from every eco-crevice of the Cosmic Curtainwall—and a bevy of gyne- and andro- and hermaphro-poppets for the relaxation of the nerves of high-strung geniuses. Knowing LaFunke would be hogging centre stage for another half-hour yet at least, I swept up three of the willing pleasure creatures and retreated into my private Green Room, seeking to fully enjoy my medications. Yet as I made these obedient fluffers lave and caress my zeeply excrescences and baseline privates with every organ they owned, I failed to derive the complete satisfaction I had anticipated. Partly that was because I was bombed, and partly it was because my mind still churned with thorny unanswered questions.
Why was Anders planning to end his career? What terminal artistic revelation had he fallen heir to? What manifestation would it take? How did the numinous, apocryphal starspiders figure into Anders’s fancies? How might I access his new secret and make it my own? What kind of profits could it earn for me? What role did Mimi play in all this? I pictured Mimi and Anders in their own exclusive Green Room, much nicer than mine, sensually and soulfully soothing each other in a manner more richly meaningful than anything my sordid poppets and symbiotes could provide.
As my slaved centipedes, trailing commingled juices, returned from their poppet-explorations to my secure epidermal folds, I resolved to have my answers by bearding Anders in his den and shaking him down, if need be, for the whole truth. I was no mere hireling to be kept in the dark! I was his equal, his peer, a genius in my own right!
How poorly I understood matters, I was soon to realize, and how greatly I was to suffer from my ignorance.
Dressed and self-possessed, I hastened to the nearby Green Room that housed my rival and his lover. To my amazement, I found the giggling, giddy, gaudy Supreme Bonze converging on the same spot! His miraculous Black Hat seemed newly negatively effulgent, as if pouring forth some kind of anti-light blacker than black.
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