by Mick Farren
'Let's go and watch this.'
Reave stared across the clearing.
'Are those kids going to play some music?'
'Those kids have been playing music for maybe a hundred years. They are the best. Wait till you hear them.'
The four of them strolled across the clearing. The girl seemed to have attached herself to Billy in her strange, silent way. They settled themselves on the grass as the group of musicians started to play. The Minstrel Boy had been right. They were unnaturally good. The girl handed round the Northern Lights, and for another hour they all sat very still, completely sucked in by the beautiful, free, interweaving music. The first piece lasted for nearly an hour and a half, and when it was finished, one of the group, a tall boy of something like nineteen with a first growth of beard, walked to the front of the patio. He appeared to be the leader of the group, and he gestured towards the Minstrel Boy.
'You want to come up and join us?'
The Minstrel Boy picked up his guitar.
'I don't know if I'll be good enough.'
The leader grinned.
'Don't worry about it. Try and fit in where you can. Maybe we should play some of your songs.'
The Minstrel Boy stood up and made his way to the patio. The silver guitar was hooked into the amplification gear, and the band started again, with the Minstrel Boy tentatively fitting himself in. Billy and Reave sat and watched as the music rolled over them. Another girl came and sat down beside them. She was almost the twin of the first girl. She smiled in the same way, but she also spoke.
'You have come from the river boat?'
Billy nodded.
'That's right.'
'Are you going to stay with us?'
'Only until the boat moves on.'
'That's a pity.'
'You'd like us to stay?'
'We're pleased when anybody stays.'
The first girl turned her head and smiled at Billy and Reave. Billy stretched out on the grass and stared up at the canopy of leaves overhead. The music wound in and out of itself. Billy sighed. It was the best part of the trip so far. Dropville seemed to have been made for him. He glanced at Reave.
'This is the way to live, huh?'
Reave frowned.
'It's very nice. It's a bit spooky, though. I mean, all these people staying young for ever, and the way they killed off all the old people.'
He waved his hand at the luxuriant vegetation and the huge bright flowers that covered the jungle floor.
'It's like the whole place was rooted in death.'
Billy closed his eyes.
'That was years ago. It's long gone. This place is like fucking paradise. Listen to that music, Reave. Look at the women.'
He patted the hand of the mute girl. She smiled and. stroked his hair. Reave looked at Billy doubtfully.
'Are you thinking of staying here, Billy?'
Billy shook his head.
'No. But it sure is tempting.'
Chapter 26
She/They was everything.
She/They was the only thing that Her/Their senses, even at full stretch, could detect. The only source of energy was She/They. The only thing that existed was She/They.
She/They continued to expend energy, and She/They assumed that a forward motion was maintained. There was no edge, no boundary on the negative zone. There was nothing at all. Only the strange vision that had flown past Her/Them convinced Her/Them of the possibility of anything else existing.
She/They knew that at some point in time She/They would start to grow weak. She/They needed to expend energy just in order to maintain Her/Their existence. There was nothing in the zone to draw on. All Her/Their energy was being drawn from inside Her/Them. Her/Their energy reserves were finite. There would come a time when Her/Their resources would be exhausted and Her/Their existence would just flicker out.
She/They shut down all Her/Their functions except that which concentrated on motion. Her/Their shape flickered, wavered and ceased to be. She/They was reduced to a formless point of light that moved across empty blackness.
With nothing to relate it to, time had no meaning. She/They continued, and She/They moved. There was nothing else. Then something appeared.
The peripheral sensors that She/They had maintained during the shutdown roused the other functions and She/They grew back into the triple form. There was an object away in the distance. She/They could ascertain that the object was spherical, but beyond that it was too far away to determine any details. Gradually She/They and the object came closer together. Tentatively, She/They probed the nature of the object.
'Uniformly dense spherical body.'
'Uniform composition'
'Large body of water contained in spherical form by its own surface tension.'
The sphere floated towards Her/Them like a small planet. It appeared to Her/Their sensors like a huge blue-green ball. Faint ripples passed across the surface. As the sphere drew closer, She/They felt Her/Their self being drawn towards it. She was expending no energy. The mass of water was sucking Her/Them in.
Waves circled outwards as She/They struck the surface of the sphere. She/They felt Her/Their self drawn into the watery interior. She/They kicked with a furious jolt of energy, and began to move upwards. The sphere couldn't contain such a violent motion. The sphere broke apart and a column of water began to rush upwards carrying Her/Them with it, bouncing and buffeting Her/Them as it rushed past.
The water rushed up and up, then She/They broke surface, and found Her/Their self bobbing on the surface of a huge lake. The ripples of Her/Their arrival slowly died and She/They was partially submerged in a glassy smooth lake that appeared to stretch all the way to the horizon.
'Approach of humans monitored.'
'We are prepared for defensive action if humans prove hostile.'
The humans moved across the surface of the lake propelling a crude floating craft. No machinery of energy transfer could be detected. They appeared to attain forward motion by the use of their own bodies.
Their craft cut a long V in the surface of the lake as they moved across it. She/They watched and waited. The humans had always puzzled Her/Them. At times it almost seemed that they might have a primitive grasp of the essential con-conception of the symmetry that was Her/Their joy and being, then they would contradict the whole idea by their illogical disordered crudeness. They would swarm over Her/Their hard-won stable areas, violating them with their haphazard behaviour and rude creations.
The humans seemed to have a coarse resilience, possibly a natural compensation for their obvious stupidity, that enabled them to resist both the disruptors and even Her/Their efforts to bring a degree of order to their hideously random lives.
She/They found that there was no way in which She/They could really manipulate them. She/They could sense them totally, and at times they could perceive Her/Them. Beyond that, She/They found that She/They had no power to move them. They occupied the same stable zones. It seemed that the humans clung to stable zones, but on different levels. The levels might be close at times, and even parallel, but there was always a gulf between Her/Them and the humans. They neither aided nor threatened, they just existed. To Her/Them they appeared as a strange byproduct of the disruption.
Chapter 27
The day turned into night, and the music went on and on, complex and contorted, and then, the next minute, simple and driving. Lights appeared in the trees so the jungle looked alive and glowing. Areas of foliage had been sprayed with phosphorescent paint. It was invisible by day, but with the darkness and the black lights mounted in the trees the plants pulsed and shimmered in a riot of unearthly colours.
As the music became more loose and wild, the rapt attention dissolved into dancing and laughing. Couples and groups moved in and out of the lights and shadows. Casks of wine, narcotic fruit, bottles and pharmaceuticals from a hundred cultures were brought from the stuff machine.
Billy had lost track of Reave as he wandered along the jun
gle paths with the strange silent girl. He had been offered so many different things, strange liquors, exotic drugs, that his head was spinning and his vision played awesome, spectacular tricks on him. They passed a battery of red and green lights that pulsed on and off, and the girl's face dissolved into a glowing rainbow. Billy stood perfectly still and stared at her.
'You're fucking beautiful. This whole place is beautiful.'
The girl smiled at him. To Billy, it was a flash like the sun coming up. He hugged her, and then they walked on, across the floor of the clearing. The Minstrel Boy was still sitting in with the band. His eyes were closed in total concentration as he tried to coax more and more from the silver guitar. Sweat stood out on his forehead and he seemed totally oblivious to the dancing crowd around him. Billy and the girl stood arm in arm and watched for a while, then they moved on, out of the clearing and along the shining paths that ran through the tall trees.
They came to a smaller glade where two large U.V. generators shone down on the soft leafy jungle floor. Billy felt a new sensation in his head, and he guessed there were a couple of alphasets tuned to wide dispersal somewhere in the bushes.
A number of people were gathered in the glade. Most were naked, some had their bodies painted in colours that glowed under the ultra-violet light. Some of them sat while others lay on the ground and caressed each other. There were few couples. The naked people in the glade grouped themselves in threes, and there were two large groups of seven or eight, who laughed and writhed together in a mass experience. Billy stood at the edge of the glade and watched in fascination. The girl let go of his hand and quickly slipped out of her clothes. She held out her hand, inviting him to do the same, and join the people in the glade. Under the U-V. light her skin became very dark, while her lips and the whites of her eyes glowed an eerie blue.
Billy slowly took off his clothes, while the girl stood behind him and stroked his back. He placed his clothes beside hers and then she took his hand and led him into the glade. She sank to her knees in front of a group of three intertwined people, a boy and two girls who looked like they couldn't be more than fifteen. Billy knelt down beside the girl and the three others held out their hands in welcome. The music soared through the trees.
Billy let his mind float. The hands and lips that moved across his body, the roaring music and the shifting lights couldn't be logically put together. He just ran with it, letting himself drift in a world of sensuality, confident that nothing bad could happen to him in this place.
Hours later, Billy found himself lying on the floor of the glade staring blankly at the sky starting to become light in tiny patches between the leaves and branches. The girl was curled up with her head on his chest. His body felt totally exhausted, but the colours in his mind kept swirling and changing. Sleep was impossible. He lay on the ground, totally drained. Memories of the last few hours flooded through his mind in dislocated images of faces, bodies. They invited him, smiled intertwined with his. They distorted into their component colours, and merged back together to form something else that started the process again.
Above him, the sky grew brighter. He was aware that the music had stopped. The only sounds were the rustling in the undergrowth. The first birds were starting their morning chorus. He absently stroked the girl's smooth, golden, sleeping body. He felt totally at peace. The forest was like a huge, rambling cathedral. Thin beams of light lanced through the high ceiling of foliage and illuminated tiny bright patches of the soft moss that covered the floor of the glade.
It seemed to Billy that everywhere he looked, the forest was a bright rich mosaic. It took him a long time to realize that someone was talking to him.
'Come on, Billy. Pull yourself together. We've got to move in a while.'
He focused on the two faces that looked down on him. It was Reave and the Minstrel Boy, but their faces seemed hard and cruel and their clothes coarse and out of place after the beauty of the night before. They refused to leave him alone.
'Hey, Billy. We got to go soon. Come on, man. Get your clothes on. Move it, Billy.'
'Go?'
'Yeah, go. We got a boat to catch.'
'We don't have to catch the boat yet, do we?'
'Yeah, pretty soon.'
Billy sat up and clasped his knees to his chest.
'I'm not going.'
Reave and the Minstrel Boy looked at him in amazement.
'What do you mean, not going?'
'I want to stay here.'
'Stay here?'
'That's right, man. I'm happy here. I don't want to leave.'
'But we got to leave. That's what you always say, keep moving, keep on looking. We've got a boat to catch.'
'Fuck the boat. I want to stay here. I like it. You understand? I'm happy, I found something. I don't want to move on. I don't want to get myself together. Fuck that shit, man. I like it here.'
The Minstrel Boy stuck his hands in his pockets.
'You are crazy.'
'Why? Because I don't want to rush off into another load of trouble?'
Reave shook his head,
'All that U.V. has scrambled his brains.'
The Minstrel Boy squatted down beside Billy.
'Have you thought about what staying here really means? These people are immortal. They don't grow old. You do.'
Billy rested his chin on his knees.
'That won't matter. Not for a few years. I'll deal with that problem when it comes.'
'A few years? You won't live a few weeks.'
'What the hell are you talking about?'
'You've seen the way these people live. They load themselves up on everything they can get their hands on, and no doubt you plan to do the same. Right?'
Billy giggled.
'Sure, why not? Nothing wrong with that, or are you going to hand me some crap that being stoned is an illusion?'
'I ain't saying nothing like that. You know me, Billy. I'll get stoned any time, but I wouldn't stay here. I know I wouldn't last thirty days.'
Billy looked confused.
'There's nothing here to hurt me.'
'The whole life style would kill you. The fact that you're human would kill you.'
'I don't understand.'
'How do you feel right now?'
Billy shrugged.
'Okay. Kind of wasted. Why?'
'Think you could live like this all the time?'
'No but . . .'
'That's how life goes on here. You'd have to live like everyone else. There'd be no other way.'
Billy gestured to the sleeping girl.
'She seems to do okay on it.'
'Sure she does. She doesn't age. Her tissue regenerates, She can grow new brain cells. You can't. You live the same way as her for a couple of weeks and your brain'll be fried. It'll burn out. Your body would break down, and you'd die. Now do you understand?'
Billy put his head in his hands.
'Are you sure about this?'
The Minstrel Boy nodded.
'Quite sure. It's happened.'
'Jesus. I don't know what to do. I believe you. It's just that I still want to stay here.'
The Minstrel Boy put a hand on Billy's shoulder.
'I know how you feel, man. Think I wouldn't like to stay here and just play music with those guys? It'd be the best thing in the world, but I know it wouldn't work out.'
'I don't know. I don't know what to do.'
The Minstrel Boy stood up.
'Come along with us now. It's easier this way. If we hang around until they wake up, it'll be a whole lot more difficult.'
Slowly, as though he was in a trance, Billy got to his feet. He looked down at the girl sleeping on the moss. He sighed deeply.
'I suppose you're right.'
He picked up his shirt and slowly began to pull it on. When he was fully dressed they started to make their way down the track that led to the jetty. To their surprise, when they emerged from the forest there was no sign of the Maria Nowhere, Th
e jetty led out into an empty river. The three of them looked at each other in bewilderment.
'How did we manage to miss it?'
'It surely can't be that late.'
The Minstrel Boy shrugged.
'It's gone. That's for sure, and my partner's on it with all my money.'
Reave slapped his forehead in horror.
'Most of our money's on that fucking boat as well. Billy hid it under the mattress.'
Billy grinned.
'I suppose we'll have to spend another night in Dropville. That won't hurt us.'
Reave and the Minstrel Boy scowled at him.
'Another night there, and none of us might want to leave.'
Billy laughed.
'What else can we do?'
The Minstrel Boy pointed to the edge of the jetty. There were some canoes tied up.
'We could take one of those. It's an easy stretch of river, we could catch the Maria Nowhere when she stops over at the next town.'
Billy looked at the canoes dubiously.
'Couldn't we wait for the next boat?'
'There may not be one for a week, and we don't have any money.'
'I guess it's all down to paddling then.'
They climbed into one of the flimsy craft, settled themselves and pushed off. They found that if they kept to the middle of the river, the current carried them along at a fair speed, and they only needed to paddle when they wanted to change course. The sky was warm, and it seemed to be a not unpleasant way to spend the day. After the first novelty of riding the river had worn off, Billy announced that he was going to catch a few hours' sleep. He curled up in the stern of the canoe. The next thing he knew was the Minstrel Boy yelling at him.
'Wake up, Billy. We're in trouble, man.'
'What's the matter?'
'There seems to be a fault in the river. A big hole that's sucking us in. Paddling doesn't help, we're heading straight for it.'
Billy became aware of a deep roaring noise, and he sat up. Ahead of them was a huge circular hole, rather like they'd seen on the road out of Graveyard, only much, much bigger. All the water from the river seemed to be pouring down as though it was a huge drain. Billy grabbed a paddle and tried desperately to fight the current. Reave and the Minstrel Boy both shook their heads.