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?”