WikiWorld

TO SEE INFINITY BARE ^{RUDY RUCKER AND PAUL DI FILIPPO}

The starspiders have plucked Anders Zilber from our midst, perhaps never to be seen again. Squealing their hypercompressed fugues of cosmic mortality and rebirth, the spiders emerged from the transfinite Wassoon spaces and harvested Anders for his greatness. I saw it; I was next to him on the stage.

Everyone mourns his loss—everyone but me, Basil Chown. Of course I’m to pay for my coldness. The idiots have convicted me of murdering him, and I’m to be executed today. As if Anders and I had been vulgar rivals in some spaceport gang—instead of the Local Cluster’s greatest metamusicians.

And what is metamusic? The one art form that ties us all together—Uppytops, Orpolese, Bulbers, the DigDawgs and the dreaded Kaang—as unalike as chalk to cheese. Thanks to the Wassoon transmitter, humanity has spread beyond the Milky Way’s swirls, encountering hundreds of other races. Some call it a pangalactic civilization—I call it a wider range of fools. But, yes, they were right to worship Anders.

Handsome, charismatic Anders. I can see the glints in his thoughtful eyes, the boyish slackness beneath his chin, the convoluted curls of his abundant hair. Generally, when out in public, a woman or gyne-poppet graced one arm, or both. Reporters and fans clustered around him, a constant retinue, endeavouring to sprinkle him with shortlife flea-cams. But despite all this worshipful attention, he, better than anyone, knew his days were numbered.

I well remember the first time he told me—I suppose that would be ten years ago by now.

We were returning from a concert tour through the Andromeda Galaxy on the far side of the Local Cluster, aboard the luxury liner Surry On Down. We’d just everted from Wassoon space into consensus reality, and I was seeing the usual post-transition shapes within the cabin walls—branched, crawling shadows like ghostly insects.

“They know my name,” remarked Anders, flicking one of the shadows with his long, crooked forefinger. His hands looked strange, but for the moment I didn’t understand why. “They want to keep me. Every time I transit, the starspiders tell me.”

“The starspiders aren’t anything real!” I exclaimed. “They’re only a post-jump hallucination. We have to believe that.”

“Cowardly foolishness, Basil. The subdimensions teem with life and history. The more we open ourselves, the richer our work.”

He pitched his voice to a cracked squeak and began jabbering at the crawling seven-pointed shapes that filled the floors, ceilings and walls. In his oddly pitched voice, Anders was telling them about—how distasteful!—an erotic hallucination he’d just had.

“I remember that!” exclaimed Mimi Ultrapower, our road agent, accompanist and—damn it all!—Anders’s lover. She was laughing as she talked. “The starspiders were inside our flesh, like giant nerve cells. I was kneading you like dough, Anders, and you were—”

“Hush now,” said he, as if rediscovering his sense of modesty. “Not in front of Basil.” He raised his hands in a cautioning gesture—and suddenly his voice broke into that higher register again, amazed and exultant. “Look what we did!”

He now had seven fingers on each hand.

It was I who’d brought Mimi to Earth from the colony world of Omega, near the very heart of our galactic core. Her mother was an astrophysicist investigating the central black hole, and Mimi was a recent university graduate. Using a Wassoon information channel, she sent me a delightful little metasonata, very much in my own style. Extremely flattering, a seductive move.

It had been a simple matter for me to get the Supreme Bonze of the Archonate to grant Mimi Ultrapower a position at court. I’d anticipated some exciting interplay with her, but as soon as she met Anders, she was lost to me.

I tried telling myself I didn’t mind—I had my own women-friends after all, and if Mimi wanted to worship Anders, surely that was her own affair. The bottom line remained: she was an excellent metamusician, a good travelling companion, and a fierce street-hassler.

On that first Andromeda Galaxy tour together, we worked up a three-way collaboration, “Earth Jam,” in which Anders beamed out something like a flute part, I a kind of cello line, and Mimi zeepcast a kind of intricate percussion that was like a pounding headache—except that it felt good.

Understand that our audiences weren’t hearing our metamusic—it’s more that they could feel it in their souls, like the emotive shades of a daydream. Our symbiotic zeep colonies project our metamusic directly into the minds of those around us.

Originally the Uppytops used the one-celled zeep critters as a coercive tool to rein in their slave races. But humans ingeniously repurposed the zeeps for benign purposes.

Metamusic is inherently at its best face to face, in a live performance, with realtime zeep signals washing over the nervous systems of the audience—be they mollusks, apes, or insect hives. Although it’s possible to Wassooncast a copy of a metamusical performance, these copies are, in my opinion, like pulpy videos of the love act, utterly lacking the ineffable tones and subliminal frissons of the real thing. Yes, the masses watch the Wassoncasts, but if you’re an accomplished metamusician, you’re forever in demand as a touring artist.

After that first Andromeda Tour, we three had our customary debriefing with the Supreme Bonze, a taut-faced young man wearing a Tibetan-style hat with a yellow fringe along its top—not that he was Tibetan. His people were from Goa, the old Portuguese colony on the west coast of India.

Mimi stared at him in fascination. “Your hat…” she managed to say.

“The Black Hat,” said the Bonze. “Woven from the hairs of a thousand and one dakinis. You know of dakinis?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mimi, a knowing look on her pleasant face. “The ineffable female demiurges attendant upon the great gurus. What mana your Black Hat must have! Wearing it would confer mystical powers upon… upon even an ape! Not that I mean…”

“No offence taken,” said the Bonze, although his face belied this. “I’m eager to hear your group’s new piece.”

The Bonze purported to be a great devotee of metamusic, and always demanded that we perform our most recent road pieces for him, not that he had the mental force to pay proper attention.

But this time he was quite piqued by Mimi’s contribution to “Earth Jam.”

“Buddoom bubba bayaya,” he sang, as if trying to echo her signal in words.

“Well put, your Emptiness,” said I, before Anders could start arguing about the Bonze’s accuracy.

“Would you like my Black Hat?” the Supreme Bonze suddenly asked Mimi with a puckish smile. From my years at court, I knew this to be a trick question—anyone who expressed a desire for the Supreme Bonze’s Tibetan hat was beheaded. And the Bonze was in any case annoyed at Mimi for her remark about the ape.

I flashed her a zeep prod of warning; she was quick enough to understand.

“No, no, honourable Bonze,” said she, bowing nearly to the floor. “The Black Hat is in its proper place. Upon the emptiest head.”

That Mimi!

With our fame growing, Anders, Mimi and I obtained apartments in the Metamusic Academy, a lavish old building in downtown Lisbon, which had become the de facto capital of Earth. Anders had the top floor, I the floor below that, and Mimi a room below me. But she spent most of her time with Anders. She was teaching him about mathematical cosmology, of all things.

Mimi showed Anders how to rig up a Wassoon generator to make his apartment infinitely large along three dimensions, without quite piercing the barrier into the hyperdimensional subspaces involved in interstellar travel.

The jury-rigged generator was a clever little thing. At its centre was a tiny fringed ring like you might use for blowing soap bubbles—although the bubble-juice for this gizmo was an endlessly subtle fluid of unbound quarks. As each bubble appeared, a magnetronic tube would set up resonant vibrations, causing the bubble’s radius to oscillate. Wassoon’s genius lay in his breakthrough notion of allowing the delicate bubbles’ radii to oscillate down below zero and into negative values. As every schoolchild knows, a simple DeSitter transformation establishes that a quark bubble with negative radius is identical to a subdimensional cavity in space itself—and a cavity of this kind can readily become a gateway to the transfinite Wassoon spaces.

Playful as newlyweds in their first home, Anders and Mimi sent hallways running through the apartment forever, lamplit by a Wassoon energy-fractionating gimmick that could divide a hundred watts among an endless number of sympathetic bulbs. Clever Mimi even devised a procedural method for decorating the infinite areas of the endless walls with seemingly non-repeating tiles.

Anders was ecstatic over the infinite spaces of his apartment, and Mimi calmly said she’d known he’d like them, because in all his works he was trying in some fashion to create a direct view of actual infinity—whether as an endless regress, as a fractal elaboration, or as an impenetrable cloud of fuzz. She said that our universe itself was in fact infinite, although people tended to ignore this, blinded as they were by the background radiation of the most recent—what was the phrase she used? Not Big Bang, something else—ah, yes, Big Flash.

Sometimes, when I was loaded on zeep toxins, I’d go upstairs and look for the two lovers, pretending I had business to discuss. More often than not, they’d evade me, and I’d wake alone and hungover in some bare inner chamber, googolplex turnings deep into Anders and Mimi’s maze.

Upon arising, I’d seem to see shapes and faces at the inconceivably distant ends of the Wassoon hallways—creatures from earlier cycles of our universe, according to Mimi. Neighbours from before the Big Flash.

In any case, finding my way out was never hard. I merely followed the scent of my personal dissatisfaction and unease back to my own floor.

The zeep germs were our owners and our lovers, our sickness and our cure, our prison and our playground—a feverish buzz to the uninitiated, a language of power to the cognoscenti.

Each strain of zeeps was custom-designed from a core of basic Uppytop wetware modded with whatever odd mitochondria and Golgi bodies the composer could be induced to purchase by zealous ribofunkateers. The zeep colonies embossed our fingers with glowing, colourful veins. But that was only the start. Every metamusician—save Anders—constantly sought improvements in his or her system, striving to push ahead to new metamusical territory, to be the first to explore and domesticate uncharted realms of multisensory rhythm space.

Most masters enhanced their personal zeep colony with a virtual menagerie of symbiotes. These add-ons were entirely different species that you took into your body’s ecosystem as a way of keeping the zeeps happy. Over the years, many of our torsos came to resemble coral reefs, encrusted with generations of living organisms.

Mimi, for instance, had a cluster of squishy sea-anemones on her left shoulder and an intimidating row of sharks’ teeth along her right forearm; I bore a mat of orange moss on my back, with purple centipedes lively in the fronds. The centipedes had an annoying habit of slipping over my shoulders to drop into my food. But I tolerated them anyway. After awhile, you weren’t sure which add-ons were potentiating what effects—so you hesitated to remove any of them.

Anders Zilber was, as I say, the great exception to these refinements. Throughout the glory years of his career, he used a single, unmodified strain of zeeps—albeit zeeps bred by the legendary tweaker Serenata Piccolisima. And his only add-on was from Serena, as well—a little loop-shaped worm, seldom seen, that moved beneath his skin like a live tattoo.

With so simple a toolkit, for a decade of wonder, Anders outshone us all.

Anders and I met as neophytes touring with a phenomenally talented martinet, Buckshot LaFunke, who was presenting an overstuffed bill of fare called “LaFunke’s Louche Lovers’ Legion.” He’d booked us into every cheap supper club across the Local Group, from Al Baardo to Yik Zubelle. Anders and I immediately established an easy camaraderie, based on our exalted ambitions, ironic worldview, and what seemed at the time to be comparable talents.

“I’m going to have LaFunke’s job one day,” Anders boasted one night back in our room, after we’d cranked up our zeep toxins. “Actually, a better one. More status, more class. The laurels of the academy, the butt-licks of the critics.”

“Buckshot made his mark with ‘The Frozen Metronome,’” I observed. “Dramatizing his first wife’s death in that rocket-sled crash on Saturn’s rings. Tough to write a piece like that. Especially since the crash was his fault.”

“That’s why we’re pros, isn’t it?” said Anders. “The public wants you to spill your guts. Hooks and riffs don’t do it, not even a recursive canon. You have to crack open the egg of your skull, and fry them a brain omelette. Every night. On a stage that smells like weasel piss.”

“It’s a dark age,” I sighed. “By rights, exemplary craftsmanship should garner acclaim on its own. Take my own ‘Ode to Charalambos’—”

Anders rattled his fingers together like sticks, sending fresh gouts of zeep juice into his bloodstream. “Come off it, Basil. I can turn out that easy-listening stuff in my sleep—and so can you. We’re in the post-Wassoon age. The only path is deeper! Give the jackals what they want! The horror of death, the ecstasy of love, the paradox of birth. And then—” He let out a strange, inward chuckle. “And then give them more.”

It was soon after this declaration that Anders took all his banked pay from the tour, and visited Serenata Piccolisima in her studio at Sadal Suud—where LaFunke’s Legion was booked for a week’s engagement at the then-seedy Café Gastropoda. Serenata, who resembled a preying mantis, cleaned out Anders’s system, zinged him with her proprietary zeeps, and gave him the add-on loop-worm.

From that moment on, Anders’s unhinderable career seemed yoked to the wheel of the Milky Way itself. One brilliant composition after another poured forth from his colourfully marbled fingers. How those early titles still resonate, conjuring up unprecedented mindscapes! “Handsome Hassan,” “Satan Sheets,” “Bulbers in Musth,” “Sweet Disdain,” “Ninety Tentacles and a Beak….”

Each song was different—nay, unique—but there were similarities as well, although it would take Mimi’s insight, two years later, to formulate the notion that Anders’s overarching theme was the corrupting and ennobling power of infinity.

But never mind the theory. Audiences loved Anders Zilber, and during his decade of miracles, all his dreams and arrogant predictions came to pass.

He was loyal—or needy—enough to bring me along for the ride, assuring my own reputation as a Zilber crony, and allowing me to amass considerable wealth in the process.

Naturally, witnessing Anders’s success, I sought covertly to obtain my own zeep culture from Piccolisima, hastening to Sadal Suud as soon as our touring schedule permitted, with a wallet stuffed with credit. Imagine my dismay to learn of Piccolisima’s recent murder by a school of anonymous gutter-squid conducting a pusillanimous smash-and-grab.

Soon after, I tried—while feigning a playful manner—to get Anders to infect me with his zeeps. But he merely stared at me, outwardly impassive, yet with his eyes conveying a frightening intensity of emotion.

“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, Basil. Least of all upon my closest friend.”

Closest friend? Perhaps, at that time, he thought of me that way. But, by the time the starspiders took him, there was no talk of friendship between us. We were touring partners, and that was all.

What drove us apart? My jealousy. I’m not a great-hearted man. First and always, I was envious of Anders’s talent. And, as it turned out, I really couldn’t get over Mimi choosing him over me.

Although Mimi Ultrapower was far from being conventionally beautiful, she was—call it mesmerizing. She had a way of catching her breath in the middle of a sentence, a penchant for using recondite words, a quirky sense of fashion, and skin so soft that…

Enough. You get the picture—as did everyone else. The public loved seeing the three of us on stage together, glowing with intrigue and sexual tension.

For our doomed final tour, we’d signed on with the Surry on Down liner again. And, as if to sweeten the gig, our old taskmaster, Buckshot LaFunke, was accompanying us… as a warm-up act.

“Squirt some oil into that ‘Frozen Metronome,’ why don’t you?” said Anders by way of greeting, when first we encountered the weathered Buckshot at the captain’s mess. Anders raised his glowing seven-fingered hands and wriggled them in the older man’s face.

“‘Ninety Beaks and a Limp Tentacle,’” snapped LaFunke, making a contemptuous gesture at Anders’s crotch. His motions were slow and stiff, as he’d saddled himself with an add-on that was something like a crab carapace. “Introduce me to the lady.”

“Mimi Ultrapower,” said Anders. “A wizard and a sharpie. She’ll make sure we all get paid. I suppose we are paying you, aren’t we Buckshot? Or are you here as an intern?”

This was a nudge too far, and from then on, Buckshot LaFunke rarely spoke to Anders—save during our shows, when, as customary, we played the part of giddy mummers who revelled in performing together.

Given that Mimi was avoiding me, and that Anders was sick of me, I myself wasn’t talking much to anyone at all. I didn’t mind. I was nastily strung-out on my zeep toxins, thanks to some new opioid vacuoles that an admirer had bioengineered into my colony. For me, time had collapsed into waiting to perform and waiting to get high. What made it complicated was that I still believed in being sober when I performed.

Fittingly enough, the end came on Sadal Suud, the former home of Serenata Piccolisima. The Café Gastropoda had gone upscale; it was the size of a Broadway theatre now, half of it underwater, and filled with artificial waves where the native cephalopods could relax. The above-ground areas were a-glitter with the glowing mantises that were the other major players in the Sadal Suud biome. Everyone was thrilled to have Anders Zilber and his cronies here, and our historic show was being Wassooncast across the galaxies.

“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.”

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.

Usually I close my eyes while performing, but tonight I was looking around, wanting to witness the effects of our unprecedented “Surprise!” At first the pseudopods below and the chitinous limbs above were waving as if beating time. But as our modalities grew ever more intricate, the audience members fell still, staring at us with avid, glittering eyes.

I’m not sure when I noticed that the room had incalculably expanded—I think it was after Mimi began mixing a keening scream into her zeep emanations, and surely it was after Anders began folding full galactic symphonies into single notes and dabs of colour. The walls of the Café Gastropoda dissolved—not so much in the sense of becoming transparent nor in the sense of being far away—but rather in the sense of being perforated with extradimensional corridors and lines of sight.

Faces floated in the far reaches of the endless hallways, just like in Anders’s Wassoon-altered apartment back in Lisbon. And now, more clearly than before, I knew that these faces came from the unreachable distances and previous cycles of our world. They crowded in upon us like memories or dreams, endless numbers of beings, each of them rapt with our metamusic, each of them intent that his or her own individual soul song be sung. And, impossibly, Buckshot, Mimi, Anders and I were giving them all voice, our minds speeding up past all finite limits, playing everything, all of it, all the stories, all the visions, all the songs.

At first I hadn’t noticed the starspiders, but at the height of our infinite fugue, I realized the creatures were everywhere—as the spaces between the faces, as the shadows among the sounds, as the background of the foreground. The Piccolisima zeeps were showing me that only the transfinite sea of starspiders was real. Everything else was, in the end, only an illusion, only Maya, only a dream.

The starspiders clustered around us, and space itself began to bulge. Mimi, then Anders, and then, very slowly, LaFunke disappeared. A starspider had hold of my leg and was tugging at me too, ever so gently, ever so irresistibly. My leg was a trillion light-years long. I was about to let go, about to zeepcast the final mantric signal that would propel our tired old world to dissolve into the cleansing light of a new Big Flash. But something hung me up.

What was it that Anders called me? A nervous Nellie. I pulled my leg back, and with a dissonant sqwonk, I changed keys and hues, turning my incantatory dirge into a kind of demented party music, a peppy ladder of shapes and chirps that led the watching minds back from the edge. I kept up the happy-tune until the drab sets of consensus reality had propped themselves back up.

I ended my solo, standing alone on a stage in a pretentious nightclub on the jerkwater planet of Sadal Suud.

A moment of stunned silence, and then the audience began to applaud, in growing waves of sound. It lasted for quite a long time. Anders had taken them into the jaws of Death—and I’d brought them back.

By the time people comprehended that Buckshot, Mimi and Anders had truly disappeared, I was already aboard the luxurious Surry On Down, bound for home.

For a few days, nobody was holding me up for blame. But then they found the Bonze’s body and head in my Lisbon apartment.

The police met me at the spaceport this morning, when we arrived. I wasn’t in the right mental shape to put together a defence. I’m too distracted by my zeeps. I’m seeing infinity everywhere, infinity bare.

Only an hour ago, I was convicted of murdering not only the Bonze, but Mimi, Buckshot and Anders as well. I’m due to be executed by plasma ionization in just a few minutes.

And so… I’ve been using my last hour to zeepcast my exemplary tale into the ever-vigilant quantum computations of the ambient air. Those who seek my story will surely find it.

And now comes the final clank of my cell door. No matter. Never mind. I’ll be with Anders and Mimi soon.