From: lmhoward@mtu.edu (Birk Mackinnon)
Subject: NEW CYBERPUNK NOVEL
Date: 7 Mar 1994 14:47:46 -0500

[ Article crossposted from alt.cyberpunk.movement ]
[ Author was Olsen Lance ]
[ Posted on 5 Mar 1994 20:08:24 GMT ]


==================================
TONGUING THE ZEITGEIST
Not long ago I posted an announcement here letting you know _Tonguing the
Zeitgeist_, my cyberpunk novel about the commodification of the arts at
the turn of the millennium, would soon hit the airwaves.  Well, it's
here, and I thought some of you might be interested in a sample, so
here's chapter one . . .
===================================

KAMA QUYNTIFONIC
They send in the underfed girl, thirteen years old, maybe fourteen if you
really stretch your imagination, bald except for that filthy yellow
Plughead tassle dangling from her forehead, to pull off the final-dining.

Only the camera fails to record her as it spirals down through the
darkness toward the white flash of stage below in the Royal Albert Hall
on one of the hottest nights of the year, almost thirty degrees C and
here it is November 30, atmosphere gray and close and damp.  The camera
fails to document her elbowing toward the nearest bodyguard like some
little expressionless animal, canister cradled in her arms.

Instead it chronicles the radiant sense of promise spreading over these
people, a sheet of flames over a pool of jet fuel.  They stand in aisles.
Perch on seats frothing foam rubber. Teeter on friends' shoulders, waving
at the lens recording this event, making it part of global memory.

They're used to being filmed from above, these people, earth from the
space shuttle or GSA station, riot scenes from police VTOLs, football
throngs from low-gliding blimps.  The guy lapping air, diamond stud
flickering on his tongue.  The couple, lawyers from nine to five,
sporting lilac Aramis head-injury makeup, spinning in some magical
private dance down front.  The woman with two black eyes, a human
raccoon, hoisted between two tall thin boys dressed as late-stage AIDS
victims, laughing and rolling back her gray-knit t-shirt to reveal the
startling alabaster scars of her cosmetic mastectomy.

Post-verbalists primped in golden nose rings and prosthetic neck burns
toast the camera with Dixi-Cups of warm brown lager. Techno-goths tricked
out in crimson contacts and white sunscreen, SPF 65, swig whiskey from
plastic bottles smuggled in strapped to their ankles.  But those in the
know realize pills are the future.  Shiny pills in fluorescent colors and
useless shapes. Lime triangles. Poppy-red hexagons.  Lemon squares.
Passed from palm to palm in a chain of secret handshakes.  So you can
see, actually see, every note float into being at this concert, feel each
one clap your eardrums.

Everyone's talking at once, a rumble of language through the crammed
auditorium as the electrical crew crisscrosses the stage, checking the
relays, checking the computer terminals and projectors. As bodyguards
gather in the wings, plump hairy arms folded across chests, black
teardrops tattooed at eyecorners.  As bobbies in plastic-visored helmets,
flak jackets, and 50,000-volt stunguns on their belts line the back of
the hall by the main doors, legs slightly apart, hands on hips, fifty
ominous reminders of what can always happen.

The huge ventilation system convulses, shivers on, a monstrous fan
stirring up soggy heat, tangy perspiration and urine,  fruity perfume
teenage girls wear, strawberry and cherry, diesel exhaust drifting in
from Kensington Road, moist hair, alcohol vapors.

These people are the faithful.  TheyUve tubed from the Docklands.
Hitchhiked from Birmingham.  Trained from Newcastle.  They've stayed
awake the last seventy-two hours straight through a series of crashing
headaches, bouts with low-grade hunger-nausea, chemo-fatigue, oil-scented
rain clattering on the upper decks of ferries and car bonnets, making
connections from Amsterdam, Berlin, Corfu, finagling credit from
strangers, finessing rides from acquaintances who've owed them favors for
years now and never thought they'd have to pay up this time around.

They're a nation for which it was never a question of if they would make
it, only how.  In a sense theirs is a journey thatUs been underway for
months. They are the unwavering, working nowhere jobs to eke out a small
line of credit, cleaning tables in a Camden Town pub, collecting fares on
an Edinburgh bus.  They've been part of this process for so long it
hardly seems believable they've finally arrived, they've finally stood in
the last queue, passed through the last gate, collected with others in
this one prodigious body. They're finally where theyUve been imagining
themselves all this while.

And they're ready. Hooting, whacking their hands together, stamping their
feet.

The camera flies in, unable to capture the stark density of this
congregation, the neophilic energy swarming at its center, the passion,
the manic vortex, the bright suspense.

And then the stage goes black.


Impulses are coded, transformed into a gray haze of electricity and
computerized garble, shot into the sky.  They leap toward the Hendrix I,
satellite for Air Pyrate Muzzik rotating in geosynchronous orbit
twenty-two thousand miles above Nairobi, capitol of the United States of
Africa, hurtle down into wide-screen HDTVs across the world.
Midafternoon into Toronto, sun glistening off cool cobalt blue towers,
pith of the financial district.  Past midnight into an arid village
thirty minutes outside Milan, not a drop of precipitation in the last
five years, stars and space debris busy in the night.  Late morning into
Mexico City, stagnant sulfurous fog already brutally hot, businesspeople
in respirators crabbing down streets jammed even on this Saturday in
November, lungs aching, telltale pollution sores sprinkled around their
nostrils and on their tongues.  Excited electrons teem. Cathode-ray tubes
oscillate. Video amplifiers fire. Circuitry scintillates, decodes,
transfigures white noise into pattern and shape, chaos into cosmos.
Snowstorms bloom across screens. Ghosts flare and die.  Double images
roll, stabilize, wed.


Twenty-five meters above the stage the holounit unfolds marvelous forms
and applause lurches through the hall.

A beautiful naked woman with dark red hair and pale freckled skin,
sixteen meters tall, the mad Pre-Raphaelite dream of a haunted Rossetti,
floats over the crush. Two delicate batwings, blanched flesh and
cartilage, extend from her shoulders. She lifts her right hand, opens the
palm in which blinks a crystal blue eye, surveys her surroundings.

The eye closes.  Her palm folds.  Lowering her head, hair spreading over
her shoulders like wind, she curls into herself, rotates, loses age and
size, dissolves into a fetus, becomes a plant with short parrot-green
stems and swollen wet flowers shaped like the plum-colored lips of a
vagina. These separate slowly and release a swarm of tiny transparent
fish with blueblack wings and scarlet hearts pumping rapidly in their
chest cavities. Thousands of tiny orange bubbles swell from their gills.
They morph into copper snakes, purple geckos, angels with monkey faces,
transparent fish again, and then a young man in an olivesheen business
suit and derby sitting in the lotus position under a banyan tree.

He is speaking to a naked tanned boy with white hair and four arms who
sits across from him, also in the lotus position.

"The black box represents the small secret moments, a sense of peace, a
sense of wonder," he says.

Around the man and boy grow Venus flytraps, ferns speckled with
diamonds.  With the slender fingers of his third hand the boy toys with
what appears to be a ruby hose on the ground.

"The dream works like this," he says in an Indian accent.  "You hold a
cat on its back in your arms.  Its head wobbles and falls off.   You
stoop, pick up the head, try to attach it.  But it falls off again.  This
is a process.  You are part of this process.  This is how the process
functions."

"The end of the world is a temple," the businessman says.

The hose is an umbilical cord connecting them.  It pulses softly like the
tentacles of an anemone.

The tanned boy with four arms squeezes it.

Rich blood surges.


The first computer-enhanced chord reverberates, numbing as the blast from
a tactical nuclear warhead.

A spotlight zaps Tango Deltoid, lead guitarist for Dr. Teeth, who
launches into a speed riff.  The holounit throws his image far above the
mob, cuts to his right hand sheathed in the Fender electronic glove that
metamorphoses his gestures into complex synthetic sounds.  Cycla Propain,
female percussionist, kicks in with a power roll.  Right behind her come
bassist Kupid Zitch and keyboardist Rheum Goldbug.

The decibel level soars like fourteen military jets taking off in unison
in a one-room flat, shakes like the LA Shudder on Black Tuesday.

People don't hear Dr. Teeth.  They feel them.  They lean into the
shockwaves, surrender to the tempest of static bursts slapping their
spleens.

And they send up a great unified howl.

Begin to ululate into soundjolts.


And then she appears.

First as a sixteen-meter head levitating over the multitude, blond hair
teased like MonroeUs, features dipped in shadow like the Virgin's.

Then the face tilts up, huge and glaucous as a geisha's, to reveal the
black-and-blue splotches around her browless methyl-yellow eyes, across
her left cheek, the dried-blood look at the corners of her carmine lips,
and that world-famous patented smile aglitter with teeth filed to
wickedly sharp points.

The clamor increases.

The gigantic mouth opens and a thirty-meter-long gold-leafed cobra
springs across the ceiling. Slithers down a wall. Disappears into the
audience as on stage the real Kama Quyntifonic swoops in with the vocal,
part primal-scream, part haunting melody, part tribal chant, camera
riveted on her spectacular lingerie, raven corset rimmed in red, on those
shiny Mylar thigh-boots, real nazi, that brass chastity belt with the
medieval lock and that sexy nail-studded dog collar that just cries out
Wake up you Quayles, I'm a marketing strategy! while caving in the heart
of every male and every third female in the place.

Dancers in tattered army pants and body suits, shoeless, skin blotched
with ersatz scabs, flood around her, crawling on their knees, wriggling
on their bellies, hobbling on wooden crutches, and Tango Deltoid, velvet
hangmanUs noose around his neck whipping crazily back and forth, blue
hair spattering sweat-beads, leads into the chorus with a compu-guitar
solo electronically altered to sound more like frightened rapidfire human
cries at two a.m. on some mews in the East End than any musical notes
anyone on this planetUs ever heard.


Burn this place
Burn your face
Burn this case
Cuz I donUt care
I don't care
Cuz I been here
and I been there


Rotten has left the building
Buddha's forgot to pray
My melanomaUs spreading
And IUm not even gay


Fans charge the stage, throw themselves at the bodyguards who now begin
doing their work, unused to the sheer numbers of the devout, the sheer
concentration of their zeal.

They catch torsos in midflight and catapult them back into the rabble
thatUs become a living version of a stuntmanUs air mattress, but the fans
keep coming, they keep massing in.

Some carry brass knuckles, some sand-socks, some offerings -- jewelry,
credit slabs, cans of mace -- and they scrabble over each other, dive
from each otherUs shoulders, cast themselves headlong at the strong-armed
men who are breathless, nonplussed, increasingly agitated in the face of
this assault.

At the rear of the auditorium bobbies shout into two-way radios, secure
those flak jackets, lower those plastic visors, adjust those chin
straps.

The holounit zeros in on the woman dancer whose eyes seem to have melted
into myriad epicanthic folds, the scrawny Arab guy in seizures on the
floor, then (keep the camera on the credit, keep the camera on the
credit) Quyntifonic again whoUs begun shoving her way through these
invalids, pushing them onto their sides, kicking their crutches out from
under them while she begins the bridge to 'Happy Daze' and behind her a
ten-by-fifteen-meter screen drops and a black-and-white film, shaky,
deliberately amateurish, loops images from Epidemics Hostels around
Britain.  Rows upon rows of beds.  Skin stretched mummy-like over skulls
of the dying.  Arms the thickness of pencils. Legs the thickness of
cricket bats. Specters in wheelchairs.  IVs pumping in the morphine,
keeping the flow heavy and steady. Quick cuts to the South American war,
military jets defoliating what'd been left of the rainforest, tunnels of
napalm seething. Remains of LA the morning after the Shudder, megalithic
shards of concrete and steel and cable heaved into smoky streets, flames
from ruptured gas lines blooming around public housing projects, water
spewing from fractured mains, shirtless people in ragged jeans staring
into the camera as they stagger through the radioactive wreckage, muddled
and embarrassed at what has gone on around them, at what part they took
in all this, not even beginning to figure out yet things only get worse
after this.


But the camera fails to record the underfed girl, thirteen years old,
maybe fourteen if you really stretch your imagination, bald except for
that filthy yellow Plughead tassle dangling from her forehead, eyes the
color of Wedgwood, right ear vangoghed, hovering at the corner of the
stage, just a meter away from the nearest bodyguard, an Iraqi who's
struggling with another girl whoUs trying to shinny over him and deliver
a cluster of artificial roses to Kama Quyntifonic's feet. He's holding
her by a fistful of lavender hair as she writhes and snaps at his face
like a Diacomm Doberman-tiger chimera. The underfed girl cradles the
canister in her arms, some metallic doll, rocking it gently, scanning the
situation around her, patiently taking stock as the lavender-haired fan
bites down on the bodyguardUs hand, fiercely, for the count of three,
seven, and when he screams she bursts by him and almost attains her
goal.  Four more guards sweep her over their heads before she can reach
Quyntifonic, and they toss her into the free-for-all in the orchestra
pit. The camera catches her body spin awkwardly through the smoggy air
and land at an unnatural angle on a suddenly bare patch of concrete.


Quyntifonic's holographic head releases a ten-meter-long rat.

A bat.

A scorpion.

These creatures dive at the spectators, who send up a communal shout of
delighted horror, and then engage in fierce battle on the vaulted
ceiling, stinging, gnawing, sucking, while the film keeps looping images
of destruction behind the authentic Quyntifonic standing among staged
corpses and carving crosses and circles into her right arm with a dagger.

Dr. Teeth's in a frenzy.

Tango Deltoid's sunk deep into soundfields reminiscent of the mumbles and
fumbled words you hear during the hypnagogic span just before sleep.

Cycla Propain and Kupid Zitch're pounding out an electronic seizure, wet
hair slicked to temples.

And the temperature in the hall is rising, the air thickening, and Rheum
Goldbug's zipping along the keyboard in rill after throbbing rill of sick
sonics thatUre just pure clicking mega nazi.


The thirteen-year-old twists a valve at one end of the canister.

She eyes the spectacle before her, raises the bullet-shaped capsule above
her head.

Throws.


Thin blood zags down QuyntifonicUs right arm and Dr. Teeth has never
played better than right now, this very second, and a Virus BabyUs upper
torso loops on the screen (it'd fit comfortably in a shoebox, silently
opening and closing its mouth like some goldfish) and the bobbies enter
the rabble to retrieve the lavender-haired girl with the injured spine
and the dancers lie motionless at Quyntifonic's feet and a line of gas
jets opens at the rear of the stage freeing a hundred plumes of brilliant
combustion.


Burn this place
Burn your face
Burn this case
Cuz I donUt care
I don't care
Cuz I been here
and I been there


WeUre talking situation zero
Nothing more to lose or gain
WeUre talking Krishna's left the disco
And my progens gave me AIDS



And then: the silver glint wobbling like a football in the fracas of
laser lights, halting at the apex of its flight for the shortest period
of time you can imagine, revolving, then plummeting among the dancers and
musicians, mist from its nozzle spraying a wide white V and, just like
that, a vast wave of people rolls back from the stage and Quyntifonic's
down.

Kupid Zitch and Rheum Goldbug too.

Tango Deltoid's twitching, grand-mal-style, hugging his guitar, his glove
generating a brain-splitting screech, coiled into himself like worms when
you touch them with something hot.

Cycla Propain sprawls forward into her drumset.

The dancers try standing but are flat and still all at once.  The
bodyguards and roadies go to their knees.  The holounit shuts off.
Deafening feedback shoots through the speaker system.

For three heartbeats the audience falls silent.

Then a colossal animal sound of fear rises into the hot atmosphere, and
the stampede begins.


The bobbies barely have time to lift their stunguns before the mass belts
into them, the momentum kicking them back, someone on the PA system
pleading for calm. Feedback rams through the hall.  Shouts for help go up
everywhere.  The press of wild-eyed fans slams against the exit doors. A
Datacidist wearing small nails through her ears trips and her ribcage
implodes; her loverUs elbows crack as he bends to wrestle her up.  A guy
in LA Gear desert camouflage propels into a wall and hears his own lower
jaw disengage; a disoriented boy yanks on the complicated blue
scarab-and-iron jewelry jangling around the downed guyUs neck. An
berthrasher whoUs just lost her tongue attempts clambering over a hill of
people but slips back into the fray. Some suffocate in the immense army
of bodies surging forward.  Others lose fingers to the dying who struggle
to the very end, only dimly aware of the explosion somewhere above and
behind them as the gas jets on stage touch the screen, and the screen
ignites and touches the holounit, and a cloud thick as burning tar churns
along the ceiling, flames tonguing fuschia and tangerine, the sprinkler
system cutting in only to make the smoke thicker, like inhaling battery
acid, like drinking lye.

And all across the globe dead-channel ash rains on television screens.

===============================
If anyone's interested, and if I'm not overstaying my cyber-welcome, let
me know, and I can post more over the course of the next few months.

Or, if you'd like the hard-copy version, you can order it direct from my
indie publisher:

Permeable Press
47 Noe Street #4
San Francisco, CA 94117-1017
ISBN 1-882633-04-0, $11.95
192 pages, paper

Distributed to the trade by:
Bookpeople (800) 999-4650
Inland (800) 243-0138


--

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