Hallucinating (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

...the bust-up, and what happens after that...

The day after they down the parentship there is a massive argument between Nulight, who is supported by Kappa's parents, old-fashioned but cool with it, and the other four. It concerns what to do with the three lotus vehicles. Zhaman leads the foursome, Kappa, Djo supporting him, while Sperm, silent as usual, gives support to the pro-lotus faction with nods of his head.

After the main barney is over, Nulight encapsulates his position. "We're human, man. They're alien. They trashed our planet, millions—hey, billions—must've died. You don't suffer that, then pinch a few of their bikes and go for a spin over the moors, do you? It ain't natural."

"No way have billions died," Zhaman replies. "Three billion people live in China and India, and the aliens wouldn't have touched them. They only trashed computer economies."

"Man, are we gonna argue over megadeaths, or what?" Nulight demands.

Zhaman now concludes his argument. "We need all the help we can get. We've proved to ourselves that we can stuff the aliens if we need to—with music. Our music is maybe the only thing they can't stand. We mustn't just sit here in this farmhouse and moan about how awful it all is. We've got to get active. Lively ourselves up! We need those little craft to transport ourselves about."

"We've got to take a pragmatic view of this," Kappa says. "We're here. The aliens are here too, but we've discovered they're vulnerable. Let's use that, eh?"

The discussion disintegrates into bad tempered retorts. Suddenly Sperm says, "Why don't we go see the parentship? We need to investigate it before the aliens find it."

That's true. Nulight sighs, then agrees to the request. "This bitching ain't doing us no good. C'mon, let's hit the moors."

"Walk or fly?" Zhaman asks.

"I'm walking."

In the end they realise the only way to decide is to toss for it. The atmosphere is too tense for rational discussion. Nulight puts an old Ozrics CD into the laptop and sets it to random.

"Tracks one to six we all walk, tracks seven to twelve you fly and I walk."

"Bloody martyr to the end," Zhaman mutters.

Suddenly Nulight laughs, tension released, seeing the silly side of it. "I don't care, man. I ain't gonna argue with you. You're too good a keyboardist to lose."

Zhaman, disarmed, remains silent. The CD comes up with the track 'Crackerblocks', and so they must all walk. They leave five minutes later, once the glorious track is finished.

But on the moor an amazing thing has occurred. The black parentship is gone. All that is left is piles of rocks and grass and reeds, and a huge gash in the earth where the lamina hit. Nulight, pretty scared, walks around the site, but the thing has definitely vanished, although the broken lotuses and the corpses remain where they were dumped. In silence the five cluster around the gash, looking down, wondering what could have happened. Then Nulight sees a black patch on the grass, circular, and he kneels down to check out what it is.

"Oil," he says. "Oil?"

"Leather man," Kappa says. "He's been here on his Harley."

"How could he already know what we did?" Djo asks.

Nulight glances around the moor. A touch of paranoia creeps over his shoulders. "We're being watched," he mutters. "We're tools of Master Sengel."

The others don't reply, and Nulight takes this as tacit agreement.

"What do we do?" Djo asks. She seems spooked, looking around the ghostly moor as if for incoming lotuses.

Nulight takes an executive decision. "Okay, we gotta get in touch with Master Sengel. It's a bad deal just sitting here waiting for him to send the leather dude. Sengel's the boss dude, he knows what's going on." He tries to laugh. "Like, maybe leather guy strapped the parentship on his Harley and rode off."

Djo titters. "Us walk all the way to Glastonbury? That's a hundred and fifty miles easy. It'll take a fortnight."

Nulight turns away so they won't see his face. "We got three lotuses. I want you, Kappa and Zhaman to fly up and find the Master. We gotta know what to do, what's going on. We can't just sit here like dummies, however cool the plans are. Y'agree?"

They do.

Nulight scorns himself. He's turning into a fucking
pragmatist
already, just because he's frightened. Sad, sad bastard.

...Chalice in Wonderland...

Kappa it is who leads the trio, on account of her relationship with Master Sengel.

It has been some time, now, since restarting her love affair with Nulight in the fields of Cymru, and this is the first time they have parted since the abortive Berlin hit. She is nervous. She loves Nulight, despite his prickly paranoia, and she knows he loves her. So it is a bit of a wrench to make the risky trip on alien floaters up to Glasto. But it must be done. She knows they cannot stay isolated in Boscastle.

Zhaman it is who trips on the chemically depleted shaker seeds. (They need one flyer hallucinating because it is the only way they know to spot parentships at a distance.)

Outside the farmhouse, Kappa sits yoga stylee on her lotus and looks at the controls. It is weird to think that these things buzzed them at Stonehenge. A single finger like a plastic iris is all she can see; no displays, no other panels. Zhaman has already deduced how to move up, down, left, right and forward, but so far he has not worked out how to go fast. Kappa lifts the lotus by pulling gently on the finger. Woah! The lotus wobbles. She rebalances herself. It's a bit like riding a bike. She tries to intuitively balance, and suddenly she is able to move anywhere, left, right, forward, all by balance and nudges of the control finger. She tries a few alternative motions. Then she has it.

"Watch!" she calls. "You go faster by squeezing. C'mon!"

And they are away. She glances back to see Nulight, Sperm, and her parents waving. She is twenty feet up, Djo and Zhaman behind her. She turns the lotus east, and squeezes.

What a bizarre journey it is...

They have to avoid towns. The Wellington Inn minstrels sing of armed gangs and the rule of the gun, of crazed lords, of collapsing buildings, of glass and rubble and metal on the streets, of a desperate scrabble for non-perishable food while farming options are begun. The rusting hulks of tens of thousands of cars litter the Cornish countryside, and, because they see no bodies, this is the most eloquent, the most dreadful manifestation of civilisation's collapse. Flying at thirty feet, they see the sun glitter off innumerable smashed windscreens. The erstwhile farmland around them is overgrown or already transforming into meadows. Foxes and badgers roam free. There are many ducks in the rivers, harrassed by packs of feral dogs.

The minor roads are just about visible between grassy verges, like winding strings of tarmac. The larger roads are clearer, though strewn with car wrecks. They make for the A30 because they have no maps. Launceston consists of blasted outer roads and a central zone surrounded by a huge wall. This they avoid. They neither see nor hear anything human.

The A30 takes them into Devon. The tarmac bubbles. The higgledy-piggledy cars have a layer of dust and grime on them. Unwashed, they rust in groups. Rubble and fragments of metal and glass litter the dual carriageway.

The only sound is the whooshing of the wind. They fly east at forty kph in single file, Kappa first, Zhaman next, peering this way and that for black laminae, Djo bringing up the rear. When occasionally they slow, the silence is unnerving. The sun is high. The breeze cools them as they fly. A surreal peace comes over Kappa as they pass the Exeter interchange and start flying north up the M5, and she feels that she is hyper relaxed, cooled by nature, warmed by nature, amidst nature. A revitalised nature. For a moment she relishes what the aliens have done, before guilt makes her suppress the thought. Not even the dippiest New Age dogma can justify the invasion.

At junction 23 they head east again. They can see Glastonbury Tor, just fifteen miles away. Kappa again feels her nervousness as she wonders what they will find. Before the invasion, Glastonbury was a haven of green peace and cool vibes. What now? More guns? Eco-fascists? Or will she find Master Sengel king of a new Avalon?

A couple of miles out they land the lotuses and hide them in the brambly depths of a copse. Kappa listens. On a light breeze she can hear music, strummed guitar chords, bansuri flutes, zils and hands clapping. Sounds good. Peace still reigns in Glasto, she is certain of that, and she leads the other two forward.

But some things have changed. The town has fragmented into communities. Knowing they will be seen as outsiders, and thus dangerous, they proceed with care. The first people they meet are locals from the Street Community. The town of Street itself is ruined, but its name lives on.

Two men in flowing white robes challenge them. "Who are you?" one shouts. "Don't come any nearer."

Kappa holds up her hands. By good fortune this is one of her ex-students. "It's me, the Dean." She pulls her flaming dreads out of their rasta-hat and adds, "Kappa Smythe. I know you, Robbie Blacksword."

"Dean! But... but what..."

"Never mind all that. What's going down here? Is the Avalon Fac still standing?"

"Last I heard, yes."

"Everything's split?"

Robbie explains that Glastonbury is now ten communities. Its population is a fiftieth of what it was. The town is run by the Avalon Parliament; three reps from each community. The Faculty is a separate body, now more of an advisor to locals, especially to those of the High Street Community, in whose patch it resides. The Tor People freak on, but they send nobody to the Parliament. They are separate. There is trade, however.

Pondering this, Kappa lifts her gaze to the Tor. As ever it is a patchwork of green and brown, but some parts have been terraced for maximum use of the land, and there are more peace engines, and a sprouting of windmills on top of St Michael's. People crawl up and down and across like tie-dyed ants. The effect is not unlike an animated Seurat painting.

"Is it safe in the centre of town?" she asks.

"Sure. People won't have forgotten you."

So the trio walk into the town centre, up Magdalene Street and right into the High Street. Folks drinking and smoking joints watch, but nobody stops them, or even speaks. It is trial by stare. Kappa feels like a total outsider. She sees people she knows, Helios, Matey, Dreadboy, Frank the Manc, even Slim Ciggie who used to be her factotum. She stops.

"Hey, it's me," she says. "Don't you recognise me?"

The atmosphere is broken. Kappa understands what suspicion has fallen across the land—she only needed to recognise it. They smile and stand and come to her, alternately hugging her, taking her hand, offering her weed, saying 'Hi!' and 'Peace!' to Djo and Zhaman. Zhaman, a tad wrecked, flops into a seat with some ancient hippy, and Kappa is left to enter the Courtyard and then the Faculty with Djo. There is a crowd, and, bizarrely, she thinks of Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. She smiles. They smile back.

Slim Ciggie (not so slim now as she is a few months pregnant) takes her and Djo into the Library. There sit more people that she knows, her colleagues and friends from just a year back when the Faculty was the hub of the town. They smile when they see her, and there is an empty chair waiting for her. She sits.

A smell tugs at her unconscious. She turns, sniffs the headrest, then looks at them all. "So, he is around," she murmurs.

An embarrassment. Do they know who she is referring to?

"Am I still Dean?" she asks.

Slim Ciggie replies, "Of course. Why shouldn't you be?"

"I feel like a stranger here."

A tall dude she doesn't recognise asks her, "How did you get here?"

"Is there something going on?" she replies. "I know I must have weirded you out appearing so sudden, but please tell me if there's a problem."

Tall dude repeats his question.

Kappa replies with a question of her own. "How did you know I've been living away?"

That ruffles them. The tall dude leans forward to shake her hand, then says, "It's not that. There's deeds going on at the edge of town. We thought you might have something to do with them, what with the Nulight incident last year."

"Nothing's changed," Kappa says, "and Nulight's cool." She indicates Djo. "You know the sort of people we hang out with. Cool bands." She pauses, then says, "When you say deeds, what do you mean?"

"Chalice Well hassle."

Kappa nods. "I can help you with that. I think the problem here is we've lost our focus. We're now a pimple on a small community. We need town-wide focus. We need a rep in the Parliament, for a start. Maybe an ambassador to the Tor People. Maybe... maybe the Faculty is more than just an advisor."

They nod. Kappa feels she has already woken them up.

"Okay," she says, getting up briskly. "Chop, chop. We're off to the Chalice Well to find Robin Hood."

"Robin Hood?"

"You'll see." She hesitates. "I
am
still Dean, aren't I?"

They chorus, "Yeah!"

"One final thing. Is the our SubNet still active?"

Slim Ciggie replies, "Sure, but it's not linked to anything outside."

They depart for the Chalice Well. As they walk, Kappa asks the tall dude who he is.

"I used to be DJ Human, but now I'm not so sure. Slim's carrying our child."

Kappa nods. "How did you get here? You're not a local."

"After I left the Nouveau Liverpool scene I drfited south. Then the aliens came. That day I was with a mate in a glider, writing some new choons, and we crashed in Pilton, on the Festival site ironically enough. The locals took me in. My mate died later, he broke his neck. Now I'm one of the reps to Glasto Parliament for the High Street Community."

"And one final thing. This hassle...?"

"Somebody has set up at the Chalice Well. Nobody from the Torside Community, that's for sure. Everybody's frightened, worried too—although whoever's there doesn't actually bother us..."

"Don't you know it's Robin Hood?" Kappa asks.

"Can't be him... who?"

"I'd bet my dreads on it. So nobody's gone to parley with him?"