Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

“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 marine 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.

“I’ve just been to see my higher-up, the Karmapa,” said the Bonze. “He uncovered a new terma , that is, an esoteric teaching from the dead. Your friend Mimi Ultrapower is a dakini temporarily incarnate in human form. And the dakinis are in alliance with the starspiders. She’s been leading Anders down a garden path to the nest of those Wassoon-dwellers. Playing on his lust for forbidden knowledge. He’s going to use this last jam to convey a message so awful that it will unhinge anyone who experiences it—or worse. Depictions of infinity unclothed, with the possible summoning of a colliding brane.”

“Uh—you’re talking about spacetime branes, Your Emptiness?” I essayed, fastening on the final word of his farrago. “Remember, I’m no scientist.”

“It’s grade-school cosmology, you ignoramus! Our visible universe is a single brane leaf in a meta-cosmic puff pastry. Picture a toffee-filled croissant with a sugar crystal upon the outermost layer of glazed dough. That crystal is our galaxy, and the toffee is the divine no-mind of the None.”

I knew of the Bonze’s childlike fondness for sweets, so his laboured analogy came as no surprise. “Uh-huh,” I said, inwardly treating myself to another opioid vacuole.

“Multiple branes exist,” ranted the Bonze. “There are an infinity of infinite universes, stacked not in space, but in time. And the sheets move in meta-time! Think of huge, supple chocolate shavings melting into a pool of butterscotch sauce! When a pair of white-chocolate and a dark-chocolate shavings intersect and interpenetrate in a toothsome moiré overlay, the sweetness becomes dodecaduplicated into an instant high-energy death and slate-wiped-clean rebirth for us all. Like a candied clove digging into the rotten core of a blackened molar, auugh ! I’m speaking of the Big Flash!”

He’d seized my shoulders and was shaking me. I did my best to give him a coherent response. “You say that Anders Zilber has been shown all this first-hand, through the intercession of Mimi the dakini? That he has attained an incontestable vision of deep reality denied even to the most advanced cosmologists? And that the actualization of this revelation will form the substance of our ‘Surprise!’ jam?”

“Yes, yes, and yes! And this is why we must stop him. At the very worst, he brings our cycle of the universe to an end. At the very least, the pangalactic audience faces the inevitable reality of doom, in a personal and existential way—and our edifice of civilization collapses in despair.”