The Music of the Spheres

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The Music of the Spheres Page 23

by Allister Thompson


  Thus far, there had been little discussion of the shadow that had hung over their heads, and as far as almost all of them were concerned, still did. Only Hastings and Marty knew the truth, and it caused them sharp pricks of conscience to see their friends occasionally glancing nervously over their shoulders as they exited the vans. On the way to Germany, they talked about the situation again. They were sitting behind the seats in the van on their amplifiers. Hastings was reading the latest Moorhen, The Golden Void, and The Fairport Convention’s version of a bawdy traditional song, “Fly Up My Cock,” was droning on the tape player.

  “Well, we’re in bloody Germany now, aren’t we?” Marty said quietly. They had been through the border crossing a half hour before.

  “You retain a shocking gift for recognizing the obvious.” Hastings rubbed the new creases on his forehead. He felt he had aged about twenty years in the last couple of months.

  “Any more bright ideas?”

  He stared at Marty for a moment before answering. Could he confide his plan in his free-swinging, loose-lipped pal? There was no doubt that Marty would insist on going with him. He didn’t like to play second fiddle where there was drama to be had. But clandestine activity wasn’t exactly Marty’s forte, and allowing him to come on a mission of espionage could be fatal for both of them. “We’re not going to do anything,” he said finally.

  Marty’s mouth fell open. “What?”

  “Well, what can we do? You want to go to the gates and ask if they could surrender Fräu Schmidt to our custody, pretty please?”

  “We have to do something!”

  Hastings (partially) feigned exasperation. “Look, we’ll figure it out when we get back. We can’t spoil the tour for everyone by getting into trouble.”

  Marty looked very confused. “You’re very prudent all of a sudden. Aren’t you the chap who jetted off to Colombia on the spur of the moment? But you’re probably right. I suppose we’re not in any more danger — yet.”

  *

  The first stop in Germany was Düsseldorf, an industrial city, where they observed a street battle between anarchist and skinhead gangs. This was a regular occurrence in central Germany, an area of political ferment and the historical home of the legendary Engels. The nation’s twenty-year-old democracy was still experiencing growing pains, and street fights between political factions were one obvious sign of it. Düsseldorf was not as prosperous as Bonn and Frankfurt and was home to much of the country’s intellectual counterculture outside of Berlin. The situation in the downtown core was much like that in London, with a large bohemian population constantly being forced to defend itself against attacks by groups of right-wing thugs, mostly young men from poor backgrounds. Rick Farren was naturally in his element and went to participate in the fight, getting a nasty cut on his arm in the process. The pain from his wound served to keep him quiet for much of the southbound trip.

  The bands stayed over an extra night in the city to catch their friends Aluminum Can playing a gig at the Rockpalast, the largest club in town. They felt right at home, both with the band’s hypnotically rhythmic music (they were known for their pioneering use of electronics as well) and with the crowd of local freaks, some of whom were wearing only black clothing and had a strange, jerky way of dancing. It was explained to Hastings that these were members of a new religious cult based in the industrial cradle of central Germany’s Rhineland that worshipped machines as the future rulers of the Earth and believed that rock and roll was the sacred music of this evolving master species. When computers were finished their evolution, they would miniaturize into hand-held devices, take over the minds of men and women, and establish a new world order. The cult members’ dance was a tribute to their future masters, with whom they hoped to gain favor. The whole thing sounded crackers.

  He avoided taking any drugs, but Marty had now fallen back into his old habits, buying a large vial of Peking Sunrise and consuming the whole thing over the course of the evenings; at least it was a legit product that wouldn’t kill him. Farren and Mo Wyatt split the two remaining bottles of absinthe and disappeared until the next morning, when they were discovered by two members of the local constabulary asleep in the alley behind the club. The two musicians had no idea where they were, so the unusually jocular polizei drove them back to the hotel.

  A short drive the next day through miles of industrial parks and belching smokestacks brought them to Bonn, which had been almost destroyed by aerial bombing during the Great War and then completely rebuilt. The architectural firm that was responsible for the erection of the Bogota dome had also done much of the rebuilding here, so miniature versions of that construction were popular as greenhouses and garden sheds to shut out the palpable pall of smog. The local affection for glass exteriors had created a city that could be seen gleaming from miles away, a forest of glinting skyscrapers; even the opera house was roofed with shingles of clear Plexiglas.

  The city looked like an exotic, mysterious vision from a science fiction novel, but the truth is more prosaic; Bonn is the business center of Germany, and the population is primarily made up of one class: the financial office worker. The Spheres possessed only a small following in that strange, shining, soulless epitome of the future city, so the gig took place in a small club, even smaller than the hall in Nouveau Paris. The audience of a hundred or so watched the set dispassionately, sipping schnapps and beer in cushioned seats, then clapped politely but half-heartedly at the end of each number. It was something of a mystery why these people bothered to come at all.

  When they stopped in the next city, Stuttgart, an unremarkable commercial metropolis also built on Great War ruins, Hastings quietly popped into the local mega-department store to buy supplies for his mission. He picked up a length of rope, which he stowed in the tire compartment of the van. He also bought a change of black clothing and a black balaclava. A small bag that could be worn around the waist under his clothes and a sharp hunting knife would complete the ensemble. He asked the wide-eyed clerk if he had heard of the impending reign of the machines, and if he was ready for it. That kept the lad’s questions at bay. He already had his deadly sonic hairdryer, which he sincerely hoped he would not have to use again — not even on Schmidt.

  In Stuttgart they saw for the first time on this tour the refugees of the atomic wars. A group of young people aged well beyond their years, dressed in the rags of once-respectable clothing, lay shivering listlessly on the pavement of Palace Square, their faces sunken and pale, marked by tragedy and a lack of care about whether they lived or died. When Hastings stopped to offer them a little money, they told in cracked voices and broken English of the horrors they had witnessed, of the black marks on the ruined buildings that showed where a person had once stood, of the radiation-wasted corpses lying by the thousands covered in their own vomit in the ruins of Sofia, of wandering through a wasteland where no houses stood, where the trees were blasted into charcoal, where no birds sang and the voices of children playing were silenced forever. The comfortable modern burghers of Stuttgart paid little heed to the refugees, who would soon continue their laborious journey northward, their only goal getting as far away as possible from the hell that was their former home before they died.

  The musicians were all glad to leave this characterless town and head for the hills and peaks of Bavaria, except for Hastings and Marty. Their apprehension grew with every mile that brought them closer to their nemesis.

  Munich was to be the last stop in Germany before the tour moved on to Italy and then to Vienna. The city was actually farther than Augsburg, which they would narrowly pass on their southward journey, but Hastings thought it would be wise not to make his break if they stopped there; Marty would realize right away what had happened, and the others would come after him, thus ruining his plan and quite possibly putting all their lives in jeopardy. Instead, he would wait until after the Munich show to disappear and make his way northward by train or coach. A phone call to the bus station in Munich confirmed that an overnight
coach leaving the terminal at eleven thirty would take him to Augsburg within a couple of hours.

  His friends noticed his unusual silence but attributed it to road-weariness and left him alone. The landscape was becoming quite hilly, and there was some snow on the ground. The scenery possessed a Gothic quality, with the crags and ominous castles clinging to the hillsides, looming over the villages as a grim reminder of the peasants’ former overlords. The sky had been overcast for days; the London weather seemed to be following them as they went farther into the heart of the continent. Hastings found himself wishing that their tour had focused instead on the Riviera and Southern Italy.

  In the afternoon, he awoke groggily in the back of the van, flipping his body-heat-warmed blanket away from his face. His back was sore and stiff from the van’s poor suspension and the bumps of the autobahn. Marty had been pulling the overnight driving shift, and Hastings went forward to visit him.

  “Near Augsburg,” Marty said, rubbing a reddened eye with one hand.

  “Hmmm,” Hastings answered sleepily. Not far now. “Why don’t you go and get some sleep in the back? I’ll take over. We’ll stop for some food when some more of us are up.”

  Marty grinned. “All right, then.”

  “Shut the hell up!” Teresa growled from where she reclined awkwardly in the seat behind them.

  Marty pulled gently over to the shoulder, and they exchanged places. He too was soon snoring away by the back doors with his feet stuck in Basil’s face. Hastings had an excellent view of the historic town of Augsburg in the few golden rays that penetrated cracks in the gloom. This ancient town had been transformed over the previous decade into the model of the twenty-first-century corporate city, devoted almost entirely to the activities of KässelPharma. The company’s childless founder, Bernhard Kässel, had originally based the company in Munich, but after her takeover, Schmidt had preferred the isolation of the hills and refused to move the headquarters somewhere more convenient to the world’s business community.

  The actual company headquarters were outside the town proper, a typical small European city of stone houses and old churches, and, as Henry had described, the company property was a heavily guarded community unto itself. Kässel provided schooling, shops, and basic social services, so that a worker and his family could hypothetically spend their entire lives within the gates without wanting for any of the basic amenities or comforts of life. This new system of absolute corporate governance of employees’ lives caused people like Hastings to shudder, but the idea had become very popular and has unfortunately become even more so over the last few years. Hastings’ personal theory was that the state would eventually become so impotent, it would wither away, but not to be replaced with a people’s republic like Engels, the prophet of socialism, had predicted. The rulers of the future would be the oligarchical spawn of an unholy union between capital and government, with eternal expansion the only goal of the state. Corporations already possessed such economic power in theory, which transcended all borders, that governments were powerless to stop them from doing whatever they wanted or effectively regulating their activities. Humanity would become enslaved again, tranquilized by recreational pharmaceuticals and television while the Earth’s rulers, corporations like Kässel, Common Motor Vehicles, and the Microware Corporation fought larger-than-life battles over market territory with no regard for the human or ecological cost.

  And Kässel was to a great extent the very prototype of this sort of arrangement.

  Hastings could see the compound in the distance, built mostly of shining glass and white brick low-rises in elaborate, curvy, but utilitarian modern styles, dozens of buildings, dwellings, and warehouses, its acres surrounded by a fence, which he hoped was not electrified. The pharma companies guarded their secrets jealously.

  The castle where Helga Schmidt resided poked out like a sore thumb in the middle of this scene, a sixteenth-century leviathan of pointed spires and wind-worn brown stone built onto the side of a small hill. It was said that she now never left the castle for any reason and that many of her chief executives had not so much as glimpsed her face in years. Well, she might be receiving a new visitor very soon, he thought grimly. An unhappy visitor — and a very frightened one too.

  TWent y-six

  Hastings was a fast driver, and they pulled into Munich within half an hour of his taking over the wheel. The others had slept through the rest of the journey while he chain-smoked and pondered his impossible task. When he pulled into Ludwigstrasse near the club they were booked into, he roused the van’s bedraggled inhabitants and bundled the groggy sleepers into the nearest café. As always, there were no signs of the other two vans, which would likely arrive a few hours later.

  After checking into the cheap hotel, they spent the rest of the day exploring the city, as they usually did. Hastings and Teresa enjoyed visiting historic sites, but Farren, Marty, and Basil preferred to spend the day sampling the city’s bars and beer gardens, so they split into two groups.

  The city’s beauty had sustained very little bombing during the Great War, but it was still at that time filled with a shocking amount of atomic refugees who had entered illegally via the Austria-Hungary border. They saw dozens huddled begging on street corners, hiding in alleys or shuffling across streets, men, women, and a few children in rags of formerly respectable clothing. Most were grotesquely thin and deathly pale, some hairless and constantly coughing as radiation sickness slowly consumed them. The citizens ignored them with a determination born of discomfort and pity; there were so many refugees that they could not all be assisted, a sight to pain anyone with the slightest amount of compassion. So much for the League of Nations, which in several years had done little to alleviate the suffering caused by the wars.

  Despite his near-suicidal plan for that night and the pathetic presence of these exiles, Hastings spent with Teresa what he later remembered as his last happy day. The shadow of Rosas seemed far from her mind as they strode along the cobblestone byways, talking carelessly of their future. Until a couple of months before, though neither of them had been with another person, there had been no declarations of fidelity or permanence. Teresa had never seemed like a very permanent woman, likely to suddenly decide upon waking up one morning that she was off to join the freedom fighters of Mexico, and no one could stop her when she made a decision. But the tragedies that had befallen them had brought them closer, and she now spoke only about the things that they would do together. And after that evening, he realized there was a good chance she would never see him again.

  He was strongly tempted to tell her the truth about what had happened and what was to come, but he knew that, like Marty, she would want to participate, and there was no way he was going to put her in danger. He also briefly considered giving up, running as far away from KässelPharma as possible, taking Teresa away to some isolated Arctic cabin where no assassin could ever find them. But no. For too long he had hollowly preached the language of revolution while actually doing very little about the issues that angered him. He had been directly confronted with a real evil, and he must now react as an equal force; he would bring down Helga Schmidt, at the price of his life.

  And he already had two deaths on his conscience. Why not another? The inevitability of someone not making it out of this alive was starting to feel palpable.

  *

  The rest of the day and evening went by in a blur. Hastings sleepwalked his way through the gig at a dingy church hall, although no one seemed to notice that he wasn’t mentally quite there. Astronomy played the first set, which they hadn’t done yet on the tour. He had suggested it earlier that day, saying it was not really democratic for the amiably pliant Wylde Flowers to be taking the first spot all the time. This meant his own set would end at ten thirty, giving him ample time to retrieve his supplies from the van and make his way to the bus station before he was missed. He hoped that when the others found out he was gone, Marty wouldn’t clue in immediately what his destination was. They would
probably assume he’d been kidnapped. It was painful to think of their suffering, but there was no alternative. He would contact them as soon as he could.

  When it was all over, he slipped away through the backstage door and into the night. Retrieving his supplies and placing them in his bag, he hailed a taxi and asked in his halting German to be taken to the station.

  Once on the bus, which was only half full of mostly sleeping people, he pulled his hat down low and pretended to be dozing for the rest of the journey. It would not do to be recognized anywhere in the close orbit of Helga Schmidt. He wondered what had become of Ricardo Alvarez’s hint of assistance; he had kept his eyes open for suspicious characters but had been approached by no one. Perhaps the Cartels’ reach was not as far-ranging as the security director would have had him believe. He saw nothing through the window of the bus as he sat alone with his fears, his hands shaking slightly.

  At twelve fifteen, the bus pulled into Augsburg’s high street. Hastings looked around him warily as he disembarked. He had only a rough sense of direction, but there were plenty of signs pointing the way to KässelPharma, the pride of the town. For a Saturday night, the streets were remarkably quiet, the only sounds faint laughter and clattering from the pubs, the barking of distant dogs, and the whistle of the wind through the eaves of darkened buildings. A fine layer of new snow covered the ground, and it lay largely undisturbed.

  Hastings made his way through the sloping side streets for about fifteen minutes until he came to the edge of the old town. Off to his left he could see a large, spotlit main gate dominated by a guard tower. There were about fifty meters of snow-covered lawn between him and the fence, which stretched toward him and off into the distance on his right. The fence was roughly ten feet high and was illuminated by spotlights every few meters. It would be risky to try to scale the fence at any point, and he had no idea how well the area was patrolled.

 

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