The Music of the Spheres

by Allister Thompson

  The Spheres had toured Europe only twice, once as an unknown beat group called Hadrian’s Wall when they were just out of their teenage years, and again after their first album was released many years later. Around the time Guy died, they had been planning to launch a worldwide tour, at least of radiation-free areas, including their first-ever trip to Tasman’s Land/New Wales, the giant island continent and British colony in the South Pacific. During their last tour, the Hammer had been arrested for disorderly conduct in New Paris, Hamburg, and Rome, and they had seriously considered sacking him. Hastings had also lost his prized Rick Booker fourteen-string guitar. Nonetheless, he retained fond memories of the continent. The cities were still mostly small and had kept something of their ancient flavor, but most of the societies there were more open in their approach to modern culture, and the band had received a hero’s welcome in the towns they had visited. It was certainly preferable to touring the garish new neon conurbations of Virginia or the dreary, crumbling mill towns of England’s north.

  Germany, Vienna, and northern Italy could, however also be extremely depressing to visit. In addition to a permanently thick cloud cover that had still not quite cleared up, the fallout from the Eastern European nuclear war had left many of the inhabitants and refugees with disturbing and grotesque medical conditions. This pathetic group was mostly made up of those who had refused to be evacuated to the giant refugee camps in Normandy and Cornwall during the war and were now paying the price for their obstinance. But there was little sympathy to be found for these people in their own countries, and little had been done by their governments to provide for their needs. However, the land was now reinhabited by mostly healthy occupants and was considered safe for travel. There was no reason to discriminate against the people of those regions because they had suffered past misfortune, as long as the discerning, health-conscious traveller ate only in newer establishments offering imported food and bottled water.

  They spent the rest of the night resting to save energy for the long journey and turned in early, all except Marty the night owl, who went to sit up on the balcony, smoke a joint, and gaze at the cloud formations and the few visible stars.

  Hastings was troubled by a vivid dream from which he could not wake, no matter how desperately he tried to wrench himself back to consciousness. He was lost on a battlefield, the turf torn and mauled beyond recognition into an endless waste of mud stretching from one horizon to the other. Corpses, some with olive skin and some pale northern European white, were strewn around in the thousands, though none showed any sign of serious trauma. They lay quite at peace, each with a red mark, a puncture standing out on their arm. Suddenly, this misty dream landscape was illuminated by a flash off to his right, followed by a huge, blossoming mushroom cloud. In the blinding light, he saw that the nearest corpses were those of Guy Calvert, Hunter Burlington, Ed Barrett, Ramón Rosas, and Miguel Gonzalez. As he looked at each in turn, the dead faces broke out into sickening grins, but the bodies stayed inert. He turned away and began to run, but after a few paces he found himself caught in the center of a raging hand-to-hand battle between Zoot-suited Colombians and stone-faced Teutons. Both sides wielded the dreaded sonic gun and a small amplifier that played the latest bubblegum pop hits. As a giant Aryan lunged at him, he saw the gun brought up to the level of his head, and he woke with a scream.

  He sat up, shaking and sweating profusely. Teresa hadn’t stirred at his wail; she still lay snoring beside him like a jackhammer (this had taken some getting used to at the beginning). After a couple of minutes, he lay back down to try to resume sleeping, but he was too upset. He got up and went to the medicine cabinet for a sleeping pill. He flipped the cap off the bottle and was about to pop a bright blue tablet into his mouth when he caught sight of the label: A product of KässelPharma UK.

  Disgusted, he tossed the half-full bottle in the rubbish and went upstairs to look for Marty. No matter what further tragedies occurred, it was unlikely he’d ever recapture the peace of mind he had once been so close to attaining, only a few months before.

  twent y-four

  After an early and very grumpy start in the chill morning air, the vans left in a modern nomadic caravan for the coast. None of the vehicles were in very good shape — each was cramped, uncomfortable, and at least ten years old — but they should at least last the length of the tour. Three hours later, Hastings’ van rumbled out of the mouth of the Calais-Dover Tunnel (which, it bears pointing out, since it seems to have been forgotten, was built by legions of Indian and Algerian laborers in the 1950s who suffered a fifty percent mortality rate on the job) and onto the roads of France. The three bands had attempted to follow one another in a cordon when they left that morning, but Teresa’s aggressive Virginian driving had quickly left the others in the dust. The long vehicle was crowded, with Hastings, Marty, Basil, Jerzy, and Farren all taking turns on the seats; the others perched on pieces of equipment and luggage in the rear. They had hidden Farren under a seat when passing the border checkpoint at the entrance to the tunnel, and he had nearly been crushed by Jerzy’s weight positioned like a mountain on the cushions above him. However, the border check was uneventful, with the guards cheerily waving them through. This was at least a heartening sign that not everyone in Britain found the sight of a busload of longhairs repulsive.

  All through the journey to Paris, the van’s inhabitants were in good spirits, aside from a few fights over which cassettes would be played on the van’s unreliable player. Basil and Rick indulged heavily in various kinds of recreational drugs, much to the displeasure of Teresa and the big Pole. Hastings and Marty would normally have joined in with abandon, but ever since learning the identity of their would-be murderer, neither of them had felt the slightest appetite for any kind of chemical stimulation. They had naively purchased products of massive corporations for years, never bothering to consider who was manufacturing them or how they ran their businesses. Now they had discovered that one of their favorite suppliers was run by oligarchs who employed thugs and assassins to terrorize their own people, and the other by a maniac who wanted them dead for no good reason. They could have resorted to some Chinese Chemical products, but the chances seemed pretty good that the third competitor was no more ethical in running its affairs.

  They confided sheepishly in each other that they actually felt physically better than they had in years, more clear-headed and in control of their actions. Though recreational pharmaceuticals were supposedly tested for their capacity to cause physical addiction, there was nothing that could be done about the inevitability of a user developing a psychological dependency to the respite from cold, harsh reality that the drugs provided. Almost all of The Spheres’ music had been produced under the influence of one chemical or another, and there is no doubt that not as much of their creative output would have emerged from their minds or have been quite the same without the aid of drugs.

  But those days were over. As far as Hastings was concerned, no organization designed for the sole purpose of profit could be trusted; you could only put faith in people you knew personally. Big record companies, drug companies, governments, they had all betrayed the trust of the people who looked to them for enlightenment in what had been heralded as a brand new age of freedom. In the shadows behind all of them lurked the leering face of base human instincts, the desire for power, money, and control.

  Teresa was very happy with Hastings’ new cleaner lifestyle. Though she did not side with those who demanded recreational pharmaceuticals be banned again, she scorned them as artificial props that did more to block a person’s thinking than inspire it; drugs were the tools of lesser people. When she asked him why he suddenly decided to stop using, he told her that his experiences in Colombia had convinced him that you never knew who your supplier was or what they were like, and he thought it best to stop supporting the industry. It wasn’t a lie, after all. She accepted this in her frank, open way, which caused him a pang of guilt.

  They finally reached Paris in the af
ternoon. The drive had been a peaceful one through soothing farmland of timeless meadows and quaint stone houses. Only the sight of tractors in the fields spewing black exhaust, cars racing down the motorway, and the endless ropes of power lines gave evidence that they had not travelled back to the nineteenth century. The transition between country and city was sudden. Paris, unlike London, is of course no longer the industrial and financial center of its nation; that is currently located in Lyon, and the endless, thoughtless expansion that has permanently defaced London has not occurred there. Paris retains an old-world charm and a relatively small population, and it is home to a thriving bohemian community. The Spheres had been through Paris twice on tour and had always been received well in this old center of the arts, home of the Impressionists, Expressionists, Primitivists, and the infamous Scatologists of the thirties, who employed human and animal fecal matter as their painting materials. The hostility that faced them in most of London was nowhere to be found; France is on the whole a more culturally open-minded place.

  Nevertheless, there is of course a great sense of natural friendliness and brotherhood between these two Imperial powers and longtime allies: we can only speculate how different the world would be today if France and Britain had indeed united their empires in one world super-state, as was recommend by M. Gabriel Yacoub, the French premier, after the First Great War. This empire would today cover more than half of the globe. It was pride that killed this possibility, and perhaps it is for the best. As we have already seen, large structures rarely remain free from the vagaries of corruption and the lust for power.

  The band reunited with their friends at Club Jump, where Daevid Mallorn had once played a two-week solo stand during his happy time spent living in the city. His van was an hour late for the rendezvous; he had stopped at several farms along the way to ask if he could halt and “reflect” on the property for a while to gather up nature’s vibes, and he had (he claimed) been turned away only once. His group had bought several baskets of fruit and a dozen bottles of wine along the way and drunk half of them.

  The British all-star triple bill caused a sensation, and the club filled quickly, even though the show was only announced the day before. Hastings was astonished at the French audience’s fervor. They clustered around the stage, waving their hands. They seemed to know the words to many songs, not bad for an album that had been released only a few days before. All three sets were ecstatically received, and they were even asked for autographs afterward. Because of Mallorn’s former residency in the city, The Flying Teapots headlined and were treated like returning heroes by the audience, with whom he amiably exchanged French wisecracks. The only blot on the evening’s vibes was Rick Farren’s first experience with absinthe, which caused him to go into something of a fit in which he declared himself the Angel of Death and tried to jump several unsuspecting Parisians whose hair was too short for his liking. He was restrained with some difficulty before passing out.

  They left Paris with regret after sleeping in the club’s dirty guest quarters and hit the road again in a fine drizzle at midmorning for Nouveau Paris. Farren was fortunately sleeping off an experience that he had called “fantastic” but which had been a nightmare for everyone else, so they were all able to sleep as well. He had laid in a supply of several more bottles of absinthe, so there would be rocky times ahead.

  The uncharacteristic quiet in the van gave Hastings, who was driving, a chance to think about what he would do when the tour reached Germany. Nothing would probably be the prudent thing to do, since one man could do very little against such a power. He knew, however, that he would have to make something happen soon. It was too much of a coincidence that the tour should be scheduled to pass so close to the home of their nemesis. He did not want, for the sake of their safety, to ask for the assistance of his friends, and besides, there was little they could do as a group except be beaten up and/or captured by the security forces he had seen in his nightmare (which recurred nightly) and which no doubt existed in the real world. There was really only one proper response to the situation, and once more it was like something from a thriller film: he, Simon Hastings, armed with fully loaded sonic gun, would attempt an act of espionage. He would try to gain entry to the castle and find evidence, if he could, of Schmidt’s plan for the assassination of his friends.

  It was a slim chance, but there had been no further word from Alvarez, who was untrustworthy anyway. He toyed briefly with the fanciful idea of trying to hire some kind of mercenary group to combat Schmidt openly, but that was ridiculous. Where would he find one? And what would happen if the German government got involved?

  He sighed and looked over at Teresa, who grinned back sleepily, mistaking his hangdog expression for someone jonesing for a hit.

  “Don’t worry, sweetie, it won’t be long before you forget you ever took that nasty stuff.”

  He took out a cigarette (those he still allowed himself) and steeled himself for the task ahead. There was no more point in debating it. This business would have to be taken care of, and he was, once more, the only one in a position to do it.

  “The Ruined City” by Astronomy

  Lyrics by Simon Hastings

  Black rain invades through broken windows

  It washes some more of the paint away

  A mound of earth covers all the signs

  Of the countless lives spent in this place

  They are gone now

  A murder of crows wheels across gray sky

  They’ve never seen anything move on two legs

  They perch on the steeples of our arrogance

  We cast the gods in our image, such folly

  They are gone now

  The road, though broken, still wanders

  Leading nowhere, it fades into tall grass

  The forests stretch on unharmed and unrazed

  No one to take and to hate and to hurt

  To destroy everything

  They are gone now

  The earth reclaims what they stole from it

  The earth has forgotten they ever lived here

  They are gone now

  TWent y-five

  Another hard day of driving brought them to the old Belgian capital of Nouveau Paris, from which the former Belgian empire’s African possessions had been governed. Visitors to this small lowland province were surprised that a peaceful idyll of polite, quiet people and moist, emerald-hued meadows could be the same land that held the entire west coast of Africa in thrall under the most brutal oppression for a century, until the peaceful annexation of Belgium by France in 1948. There is, however, even in this land of traditionally conservative, suspicious people, a small bohemian counterculture centered in the oldest quarter of Nouveau Paris, which is ignored and tolerated by the city government as inconsequential, although there is no doubt that it would react quickly against any dangerous, widespread movement should it arise. Nevertheless, there were enough fans in the city to justify a visit by the tour.

  Like Paris, Nouveau Paris retains a wonderful flavor of old Brussels, with its cobblestones, tiny churches, and legions of rusty bicycles. Great strides have been taken in racial relations as well, and the city’s population of African immigrants, though most must unfairly work in menial occupations, coexists peacefully with the town’s stolid French and Flemish citizens.

  Though the show they played at the Château de Rock, a new club, in no way equaled the Paris set, the smaller audience was enthused. All went well until halfway through Astronomy’s closing set. They had just begun the final chorus of “The Misanthrope” when the power was suddenly shut off. A group of black-clad policemen armed with nightsticks burst in and violently cleared the room, telling the musicians only that the timing of the show had gone well past the city’s curfew. The bands knew full well that this early closing was meant as a warning to the citizens. There was nothing they could do about it, so, forfeiting their pay, they bundled into their vans and drove on in the middle of the night to Amsterdam.

  Th
ey had all been looking forward to this stage of the tour; the city is one of the finest and most beautiful in Europe. Ever since the socialist government had been elected in the 1940s and granted independence to most of the imperial possessions, the Netherlands had been the subject of intense international bureaucratic disapproval, even economic and diplomatic sanctions, from other nations throughout the continent. The city of Amsterdam was renowned as a meeting place for bohemians and anarchists from around the world long before the scenes in London and Paris developed. Even before they had ever played there, Guy, Marty, and Hastings had spent many a pleasant weekend trip exploring the city’s delights.

  In Amsterdam, they were again received like old friends, and indeed, the members of all three of the bands had friends in the city. Rick Farren disappeared, absinthe in hand, with a group of anarchist associates from Siberia, no doubt to plot a statue theft or three in London or Petrograd.

  The show at the Royal Concert Hall was even taped for state television and was to be broadcast on the radio the following week. This was the largest venue the band had played since its formation, and it was nearly sold out. Though he almost choked on the massive clouds of pot smoke that filled the room like the pall of a giant forest fire, Hastings greatly enjoyed the party atmosphere of the gig, which was attended not only by the city’s colorfully dressed bohemians, but also by the town’s thirty-something deputy mayor, who came up to shake his hand (Hastings couldn’t believe it). Franklin Ferris, who had been traveling in the Teapots’ van, reported after meeting with the Dutch distributor of the record that they had already sold more copies of the record per capita in the Netherlands than anywhere else. Teresa advised that they really ought to consider, for the sake of their mental and financial health, a permanent move to the country, the current climate at home being so unfriendly.