Hallucinating (15 page)

"Will she survive? I know scent technology."

"She will go mad from heartbreak."

Nulight and Kappa look down at the dishevelled figure sprawling in the mud. Celeste is sobbing still, a little calmer, maybe, but beyond consolation. Then Kappa says, "There is a possible solution. Because scent technology is sourced in the limbic system, we have to work at that level—the oldest part of the limbic system is the olfactory cortex."

"Smell," Nulight says, nodding.

"Are you suggesting surgery?" Inamorata asks.

"No! I'm suggesting we use certain chemicals that also work at the limbic level. We send Celeste on a trip. We create a new environment for her, one she's never seen before, that she'll be transfixed by during her trip. And when she comes back, she'll be in a new mental place, and her craving for Nulight may be gone."

"And these chemicals?"

Kappa glances at the night sky. "It's the season. We need psilocybin."

Inamorata nods. "In the morning you will meet Maya, our ethnobotanist."

Then Kappa reaches down, as if to comfort Celeste, but Inamorata stops her. "Leave her to grieve. Her emotion must play itself out."

"But she'll freeze out here."

"Such is nature." She glances at Nulight. "Cruel, like the Lady Chance."

...we're all going on a magic mushroom hunt, a magic mushroom hunt...

It is Samhain, but the festi does not begin until sunset, the time every Celtic day begins: New Year's Day is, oh, about four o'clock in the afternoon. Celeste has dragged herself into a little hut, where her sobs can still be heard. She is devastated at the deepest level—a glitch in programming between the Nulight promised by scent and the absence of Nulight in reality. For her, it is an error that cannot be computed. Nulight too is upset, despite what he knows about Josh Spink's dastardly plan, for Celeste's cries rend the heart, and it's very hard for him to use logic and say
it wasn't my fault.
He feels guilty.

But Josh Spink thought Nulight would be trapped in Ruyton-XI-Towns. This is not to be.

Sperm is the expert on all things shroomy, so he and Maya lead the others out into the grasslands to either side of the river, where, after an hour, they find a patch of magic mushrooms on a hilly site. They are of species
psilocybe semilanceata,
viz. the Liberty Cap. Gathering fifty of them, they return to the village, where they enter Celeste's place and dose her up with shrooms—she's keen to eat. They wait for half an hour, preparing lights, these mostly lanterns, also a varied collection of green things, for they want to impress upon Celeste the greatness and beauty of green. In this way they hope to dispel all thought of Nulight-programme and inculcate Gaian wonder.

After an hour Celeste has begun her trip, as the psilocybin makes its way through her brain. A four hour vigil begins in which they play ambient music on a solar-powered CD player, and with their lights and greenery offer a flickering, almost elemental evocation of the natural world. In this way Celeste is rescued from desolation. By the time sunset is near she has forgotten Nulight, except in that he is a visitor who claims to be on a quest. Her lust is becalmed.

The entire village, one hundred and four inhabitants, gathers for the start of Samhain. A ceremonial fire is lit, blessings are said for all, and a celebration is made of the wonder of the natural world. Nulight is intrigued however to hear that this particular coven does not believe in the concept of spirit. They revere the Goddess as an abstract form, an aspect of culture, not as an actual presence of spirital potency. None of the witches believe in spirit or soul.

That night, as is traditional for Samhain, stories are told of ancestors and their value to culture. Because it is known that the visitors are departing soon, they are all required to tell a story from their own lives. Everyone is relaxing in the largest Anglo-Saxon-style building, with a terrific, and thanks to the addition of Nag Champa incense, perfumed fire blazing in the centre, sending up its smoke to the hole at the top of the roof. Sperm, ironically, is asked to go first, and this makes Nulight feel uncomfortable, for his guitarist friend is no talker. Sperm glances at the assembled company, then clears his throat.

"I'll just say this," he says.

"Speak up!"

In a slightly louder voice he says, "I was tripping on DMT and that's when I saw the pooks, as I call them, flying around me, with my parents' faces, and I realised that they weren't spirits at all, as I'd thought before, they were aliens, the four-eared ones, and so that's when I realised." He stops, looks down at the floor. "Thank you very much."

Inamorata can sense his shyness and she says, "Thank you. Now I think it's your turn, Nulight."

Nulight says, "My tale concerns my parents, yeah? I don't often talk about them because I had a pretty weird upbringing, you know, in Tibet. My mother was a Welsh hippy who went to live in Lhasa in 2005, where she met my dad, who was native there. I think she was freaked out by the faze scene, which was sweeping Britain that year, she hated that music. So I was, like, born in Lhasa. I saw my first aliens over there, yeah, I remember it, when I was about six or seven, and man that freaked me out. It was after that visitation that I began to wonder about spirits and beings and everything, so my parents took me out into the fields one day and my mum pulled up a dead plant. Then she went to a living one—which she left alone, of course. She said to me, do you see that one plant is alive and one is dead? So I said, yes, mum, I see. Then she said, do you see that there is nothing in the living plant that vanishes when it dies, except its physical form, its juices, sugars and chlorophyll? So of course I said yes to that as well. Okay, she said, well, it's the same with the animal kingdom. There is no soul or spirit. We are constructs of accumulated experience, mental models in our brains. Fine, I said, but then I added, so, these aliens... of course, she said they were probably a hallucination. It was easy to accidentally pick up acid or mushrooms in our house. So I kind of grew up wondering if they were real or a hallucination, you see, because I knew they weren't spirits of anything like that. My dad was a chemist and my mum was a pagan ecologist. I'm so grateful they were scientists and not anything else. My theory is—if you don't believe in an afterlife, you have far more respect for life and for the living."

There is a ripple of applause as Nulight finishes, for this is quite a heavy tale, despite its suitability for Samhain. People are smiling and nodding at him. Inamorata then turns to Kappa and says, "Now it is your turn."

Kappa seems unfazed by what she has been asked to do, and Nulight is limp with relief at this, for although she is quite the orator, she is less confident in intimate spaces. He regards Kappa with pride.

Kappa begins, "I was ten when my younger brother died. He was eight. My parents were big in the alternative community around Glastonbury—though they never lived there. They put on drumming-and-belly-dancing gigs at the Assembly Halls, that kind of thing. They were devastated when Delta was run over by a four-by-four, the whole family was. Then a week later we had to go to the funeral, which was a humanist affair with a cardboard coffin and a plot of land by a wood. I'll never forget standing between my parents that morning—but the thing was, I was expecting a little, soft white ghost to rise up out of the coffin, like you see in kids' cartoons, and I was really disappointed when it never happened. It was that day, that evening, probably, after I'd sat down and thought about it, that I realised there was nothing inside Delta to come up and rise to heaven. And that's when the penny dropped. I cried then, I remember, on my own. Very, very disappointed..."

This time there is no applause. After a brief silence, Inamorata turns to Djo and says, "Yours will be the final story tonight."

Djo shrugs. "Mine kind of finishes this all off," she says, with a smile. "It was only because of a book I read—you know, that 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell. Funny how we're kids when we realise stuff—like Kappa said. I was ten, maybe twelve, I don't recall, but I was reading it, and really into it, but then at the end Boxer, the tough old working horse who has saved Animal Farm loads of times, he gets taken off by the unscrupulous pigs to be made into glue. And though that was sad, I suddenly realised that he wasn't going to 'be all right', that he was going to die, horribly as it happened, and without dignity. And because I lived in a community, a smallholding which tried to be self-sufficient but which
respected
its animals, I suddenly became aware of this whole other attitude, epitomised by the pigs, how can I put it, throwing Boxer
away.
I was depressed for weeks, if I could use that word. It's sad that there's nothing after death, but it really helps knowing the truth—like Nulight said."

Inamorata considers this, then says, "We like strangers appearing at Samhain. The duty of people like us is to nurture cultural diversity, and this is what you have done tonight. Though Kappa's was the most heart-wringing tale, Nulight's was the most germane." She turns to face Nulight and continues, "There is a nascent culture in Britain, and I think you four can sense it, or perhaps you can sense the shoots from which it could rise. Your musical quest convinces me that a good and humane culture could arise from pagan roots."

Nulight says, "Man, there's a diversity too in us four. Djo thinks change is unlikely, but I think it's gonna happen!"

"Me too," Kappa adds.

Sperm shrugs.

"But we all agree that music and culture are closely linked," Inamorata asserts. "Are you familiar with Van Straten's Convergence Theory of European Trance?"

"No," Nulight says, intrigued.

"The theory is as follows. After the computer became the dominant force in popular music, the opportunity arose for musical forms to propagate—almost like creatures—in a way quite unlike before, when it was musical
genres
that were the defining characteristics. A particular song would break through, and then a host of similarly formed songs would arise. Maria Van Straten postulated that in time all songs of the generic type European Trance would converge to a single song, created over a period of decades by the various particular song forms that had emerged before, evolving, if you like, to a single immutable form of the type European Trance."

"Fascinating," Nulight says.

"This song would then appear in the pop charts time after time, differently titled, of course, and 'performed' by a different, though always thin and attractive female 'singer'. Computers being central to the creation of music, Van Straten postulated that there would be literally no opportunity for new songs to arise. It would be like living inside a musical black hole. No new European Trance song could ever again be made unless it conformed to the form of the standard."

Kappa breaks in here. "Of course," she remarks, "Van Straten modelled her theory on Björn Eriksson's Convergence Theory of the Eurovision Song Contest. He hypothesised, from three decade's worth of observations of that event, that within his lifetime—this was in '37 by the way—all songs performed at the Eurovision Song Contest would be indistinguishable from each other. In other words, as the meaning was slowly wrung out of the music by the unstoppable, kitch, almost rococo meaninglessness of the contest, the selection panels would inevitably converge on one single form, a single song, which, regardless of country of origin, would win every year." She pauses to collect her thoughts, then adds, "Frankly, I think that by 2049 he had proved his case."

There are nodding heads and mutterings of "She's right," and, "She's got a point," and, "Rococo meaninglessness."

Then Inamorata says, "I don't think it's necessarily music alone that was stripped of meaning by the computer. Music is in the end a cultural form—it's supported by culture. Computers stripped meaning from culture itself. The blanding out of all commercial music was just one symptom of our loss of culture here in the West."

Everyone nods.

Then Nulight says, "You know, without a monolithic music weighing down on us, there'd never have been a counter-culture as strong as the one I got my record label hooked up to. There'd never have been an underground. Man, I thank Buddah for bland, meaningless music. Bland, meaningless music made me and my bands and my record label. It made my life. That sounds shit, but it's true. What a fucked up world, where you can only find good by rebelling against bad."

More nods, and more agreement.

Then come the wine and cakes and the sweet bread and dried fruit. The time for stories and discussion is over; time to get wreeeeeeecked! Nulight sips red wine, not wanting to get pissed on what is for him still foreign ground, but Kappa is less restrained, and soon she is laughing and joking. Sperm gets his flatback and begins strumming with other villagers, while Djo finds herself a fit young bloke and disappears for a bit of night life. Nulight watches like a hawk. He quite likes this place, it's both pagan and intellectual, harsh and yet free, and mercifully lacking food problems. He could imagine living this way.

Then from the free-form melee of songs and strummings, cackles and slurred lyrics comes a tune. He perks up. Something deep inside him has been waiting for this moment, not predicting it, no, but hoping it would appear. This is a cultural song of the witches, a gorgeous melody floating just above Sperm's chords, which, because he is playing to another song, are not quite right—but, hey, Sperm has noticed Nulight's face, and he has heard the song, run over to sit near and begun finding new chords while Nulight hums the repeating melody. And Nulight hasn't even spotted the owners of the two or three voices that are singing... but
what
a tune.

Inamorata is at his side. "You like?"

"Yeah, man. I love."

"It is Samhain Memories, a song dedicated to the memory of ancestors. Not to their souls, you understand..."

"No."

"... but to their memory, to the permanence they bring, to what they are—history."

Nulight nods. "Right on."

"You can take it with you. I value your quest. Nobody wants to live under thralldom."