Paul Di Filippo - WikiWorld

In other words, the Bonze was arguing for the immediate cancellation of our performance. And that disturbed me. We would surely have to pay back our advance from the promoters, and I’d already spent mine.

“I’m really not so sure that—” I began.

“I brook no contradiction!” screamed the Bonze, heedless of who might overhear. “I rely not only on the terma of the Karmapa, but also upon the Black Hat itself! Remember that it’s woven of dakini hairs! Information leaks into my skull! The sweet whispers of a thousand and one dakinis!”

The Supreme Bonze clutched the hat to his head with an expression of anguished ecstasy, as if someone had just nailed the headgear in place, and I pretended to believe him—although, deep down, I’d always suspected the Black Hat to be made of Kaangian snow-camel hair. But it would be too dangerous to argue any further with this powerful man.

“Very well, then,” I said placatingly. “Let’s confront my partners.”

I moved to brush my fingertips against the lips of the lock-licker on Anders’s room, counting on access being keyed to my biochem signature too, but the door was already swinging wide.

In the portal stood Mimi Ultrapower.

As I mentioned before, one of her zeeply teratologies consisted of a sawtooth row of calcifications running along the outer edge of her right forearm. Now, without any warning save an evil grin, she swung her right arm with superhuman strength, driving the tiburon teeth of her forearm into the neck of the Bonze and on through to the other side, decapitating him. Utterly unfazed by the blood gusher, she smoothly plucked his falling head from mid-air with her left hand.

The body of the Bonze collapsed to the corridor floor, and I found myself pulled into the Green Room.

Mimi triumphantly snatched the cap from the Bonze’s head, then tossed the pitifully wide-eyed and silent head into the open maw of a small Wassoon transmitter that led I knew not where. She closed her eyes, plonked the Black Hat atop her own head, and let out a deep, happy sigh.

“Ah, my sisters! Your reclaimed voices call me home!”

Anders approached Mimi from behind and clasped her lustily around the waist. He seemed totally at ease with her murderous actions.

“I can feel them too, babe! It’s like hugging a thousand and two dominatrixes at once!”

Mimi had no time for grab-ass playfulness. All her submissive acolyte worship had evaporated in the heat of her conquest. “Haul the body of that deified goofball in here, and feed him into the Wassoon thingie too. And dump some zyme-critters from the wastebasket onto the blood pools in the hall. Quick!”

Anders complied with Mimi’s orders.

“Where are you sending the Bonze’s corpse?” I had to ask.

“You don’t want to know,” said Mimi with an evil snicker. And then she chucked me under the chin. “Listen good, sweetie. Our jam is gonna happen tonight, no matter what. We’ll be laying down the template for the next reboot of the universe. ‘Surprise!’ It’s an unbroken line of information, stretching from the transfinite past to this instant’s click. Our metamusic will contain the compressed and encoded lineage of all alef-one instantiations of the cosmos, Gödelized into riffs. Call it the kickstart heart-beep of the new Big-Flash Frankenstein. The Om-seed mantra that sends a fresh monster lurching from the lab. That’s how us starspiders and dakinis have always ensured cosmic continuity, and we’re not gonna change now, you wave? Don’t look so freaked, it’s an honour to purvey the Heavy Hum. Your name will live in starspider history!”

Anders stepped up to me and threw an arm around my shoulder, awkwardly compressing my various colonies and protuberances. “Basil, buddy, I know you’ve always been a nervous Nellie, too busy vacillating and shucking and conniving to follow the white rabbit all the way down the black hole. But I never let your jealous, greedy, shithead ways get me down, ‘cuz we were best buds, and I always vibed your essential devotion to the art. But now comes the moment of true choice and decision, your chance to give it up for the metamusic. Grab your balls and wail!”

“But—”

“It takes four separate metamusicians to lay down the plectic vibes for this particular kind of chaos,” said Anders, his arm still tight around me. “That’s a theorem Mimi proved. There’s no way we can do it without you and LaFunke.”

All the time Anders was talking, I was feeling a wetness along my shoulders that I attributed to my own colonies seepage. But with a start, I suddenly realized what was up.

“You’re infusing me with your own zeeps!”

Anders removed his arm. “All done now, Basil, my boy! You always wanted the genuine Serenata Piccolisima germline, and now you’ve got ’em. You’re dosed and ready to kick ass!”

“And by the way,” added Mimi. “If you try to play the hero, I’ll just puppeteer your corpse.”

A knock sounded at the door of the Green Room, and the jubilant voice of Buckshot LaFunke sang, “We’re on!”

Our stage was a metal mesh construction, cantilevered out from one wall of the Café Gastropoda. The bottom part of the room was essentially an aquarium, thronged with the dregs of Sadal Suud: gutter-squid, dreck-cuttles, and muck-octopi, all of them peering up through the interstices of the platform supporting us. The room’s three other walls were lined with boxes and balconies, a-twitter with mantises, ridge-roaches and crystal-ants—the cream of this world’s high society. Crab-like waiters scuttled this way and that, stoking the audience with their favourite fuels.

“I’ll stand in front tonight,” said Mimi as we stepped onto the satisfyingly solid platform.

“And you pair up with me, Basil,” instructed Anders. “We’ll be in centre stage.”

“I’m good with sitting on that chair over there,” said Buckshot. “I already wore out my legs warming up this crowd.”

“You did a great job,” said Mimi, favouring him with one of her fetching smiles. “And now we’ll bring ’em to a boil.” She raised her arms high and strode to the front of the stage, teetering on the very edge as if tempted to jump into the massed tentacles waving from the water, all pink and mauve and green. Slowly she lowered her arms, starting a fierce zeeply beat of polyrhythmic mental percussion.

Off to the side of the stage, Buckshot chimed in with a psychic wail like a blues harmonica, a little voice wandering among the trunks of Mimi’s sound-trees.

Anders elbowed me in the ribs. My cue. Feeling the power of the Piccolisima zeeps, I began flashing a series of three-dimensional mandalas into the room—glowing ghost-spheres that all but reached the walls. My zeepcast orbs were stained in red and sketchily patterned with images that were abstract echoes of the dead Bonze’s face. They vibrated with the sound of cellos and organ-music at a funeral mass.

Anders was at my side, casually leaning his elbow on my shoulder, nodding and smiling as Mimi, Buckshot and I jammed together, feeling our way, blending and bending our soundshapes towards a perfect fit. And then our leader started in.

He’d opened his mouth nearly wide enough to break his face, as if wanting to vomit up his heart intact. His metamusic began with a cloud of chicken-scratch guitar pops, each pop a tiny world. Each worldlet contained, incredibly, a mosaic mural of all that lay within some known planet. Sphere upon sphere appeared, the little balls clumping to form spiral skeins—and soon Anders was zeeping a full galactic roar. We three others were playing like never before, beaming our support, filling in Anders’s vision with gravity waves, stars and novae, and the planets’ living nöospheres.

There’s no question that my mind was functioning at higher levels than ever before. Each time I thought we’d brought our metamusic as high as it could possibly go, the cloud of sight and sound would fold over on itself, leaving gaps for us to fill with still more voices of our frantic chorus.