The Condition of Muzak

by Michael Moorcock

  Bishop Beesley waddled in. “What a lovely home. I’ll just leave the boys outside, shall I? Mitzi! You don’t mind if my daughter joins us?”

  Mitzi Beesley was wearing a rather cheap rayon ensemble, loose sailor blouse and wide, baggy trousers, almost certainly a bad Schiaparelli copy of the sort obtainable from any second-rate tailor’s shop in Bombay or Calcutta. Even the shade of pink was slightly off. Her golden hair was waved tightly against her mean little skull. She placed her small tongue on her thin lower lip and smiled at Una. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

  Una released Jerry’s arm. “I don’t think I’d be likely to remember,” she said innocently. “How do you do, Miss Beesley?”

  Mitzi sniffed. “Not bad. Not now. But times have been a bit chaotic until recently, when Daddy got this new job.” She removed her Remington from her shoulder and looked around for somewhere to put it.

  “I’ll take it,” said Una hospitably.

  Mitzi handed her the gun and Una crossed the mosaic to the large Ming ceramic umbrella stand, dropping the rifle, barrel first, among the walking sticks, sunshades and riding crops. “It’ll be all right there, will it?”

  “Fine,” said Mitzi absently.

  Bishop Beesley raised beringed fingers to his rosebud lips and uttered a little wind. “I hear they do a very pleasant dish in these parts. A local version of the baklava, eh?”

  “I think there are a few cold ones in the storeroom,” Jerry looked towards the door under the staircase. “Shall I show you where it is?”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr Cornelius. You seem, rather cleverly, to have adopted the manners as well as the style of a gentleman. Congratulations!”

  “You’re too kind.”

  “Standards are slipping everywhere. Credit where credit’s due, sir. And, of course, I bear no grudges.” His breathing became deeper. He was almost snoring by the time he had waddled to the door to the lower regions. “This is deliciously opulent, isn’t it? The barbaric splendour of the East. You must feel much more at home.”

  “I can’t complain, bishop.”

  “Is Miss Brunner with you?” asked Una suddenly of Mitzi Beesley. It was as if she had remembered a name and nothing else.

  “Not this trip.” Mitzi moved closer to her. “That’s a nice dressing gown. Is it a man’s?”

  “I’m not sure.” The two women followed Jerry and Bishop Beesley through the door and down stone steps cut from the living rock. It was suddenly much cooler.

  “And as for Frank,” continued Mitzi intimately, “Jerry’s brother, you know—we couldn’t get him to do a thing. It’s as if there’s a spell on everybody. Almost. You’ve met Doktor von Krupp, too, have you?”

  “I think I might have…”

  “She’s almost completely retired, now. Gave herself to the cause body and soul. Bishop Beesley has had to continue the work virtually single-handed. I help as best I can, of course, but he complains that I don’t really understand the importance of it all. He thinks my loyalties are sometimes divided.” They were quite a long way behind the men. Mitzi smirked. “Of course, that’s impossible. I haven’t any loyalties at all.”

  “What a relief.” Spasmodically, Una smiled down on the minx. She found that she was lying and enjoying the sensation. “How refreshing.”

  The minx began to stroke her exposed ribs.

  The party descended still deeper into the darkness. From the gloom ahead Una could hear the sound of Bishop Beesley’s awful breath.

  “It’s high time you were back in harness, Mr C.”

  4. CROSS COUNTRY RAPE AND SLAY SPREE OF THE FRUSTRATED BONDAGE FREAK

  “There’s still a touch of vulgarity about you which I like,” said Bishop Beesley. His marines had taken up permanent positions within the palace grounds and the bishop had almost completed his inventory of the building’s contents. The two of them strolled between peacocks and birds of paradise and pedigree Sinhalese bantams, over the lawn towards the larger fountains which cast faint, flickering arabesques everywhere on grass and shrubs. The bishop was eating something sticky from one of Jerry’s silver plates, holding the plate in his left hand while with his right he lifted the honey-flavoured food to his glistening lips. “What a riot of colour, those flowers and shrubs!” Flies were settling hopefully on his mitre. “America and Europe are getting along famously again. Say what you will about President Boyle, he’s a dedicated internationalist. He’s given the British authorities his whole support.”

  “It’s the Islamic influence, I suppose,” murmured Jerry. “I’ve always been a bit prone…”

  “Security is at a premium, Mr Cornelius. Of course, it’s given a tremendous boost to the navy. Britannia Resurgent!”

  “We’re a bit behind the times here.” Jerry prised a determined mosquito from his cheek. “I’m afraid.”

  “How we’d all love to live in the past, particularly a past so splendid.” Bishop Beesley expressed sympathy. He waved a cake. No-one understands all this better than I.”

  Jerry was doing his best to remember what had been going on. “I don’t think I could go back to Britain,” he said. “Not now.”

  “I would be the first to admit that there are, for certain people, difficulties. But with the proper papers you’d be quite safe. Restrictions aren’t merely negative, you know. They work for you, too.”

  “They don’t like me over there any more.” He made a vague gesture towards the West. “Do they?”

  “Nonsense. You can prove a change of heart!”

  Jerry laughed. He put both his hands into a lattice of water, causing the fountain to alter its note. “That’s the only thing that hasn’t changed, vicar.”

  “Come, come, come.” Bishop Beesley clapped him on the back. For a few moments his fingers adhered to the silk of Jerry’s pale blue kurta then came away with a small sucking sound. “You must be positive!”

  Jerry said doubtfully: “I’ll try. I have tried.”

  “I’ll get my daughter to have a chat with you. She’s helped you in the past, hasn’t she?”

  “I can’t recall…”

  “It will come back.” Bishop Beesley looked around for somewhere to put his empty plate. In the end he found a green soapstone sundial. “There isn’t a great deal of time to spare. The box is still in England, I take it.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jerry dreamily, to be agreeable. He was incapable, just now, of thinking that far ahead.

  “And with the box in the right hands, mankind will prosper again. A major war will be averted. The world will greet you as a saviour!”

  “I thought I’d already turned the job down.” Jerry found some seed in his pockets and began to throw it to the birds. From one of the upper floors of the palace came the strains of King Pleasure singing ‘Golden Days’. “That’s a bit anachronistic, isn’t it? Or is it me?”

  For a moment Bishop Beesley’s huge face became sober. “There is no need…”

  “Well, that’s a relief, at any rate.” Jerry rambled on. Ahead of him, on the other side of an ornamental hedge, two sailor hats drew down for cover. “What does Una say?” He sniffed a sweet magnolia blossom. “She’s the brains of the outfit.”

  “I don’t know how she feels but, as you say, she’s an intelligent woman. My daughter’s dealing with her. They are more sympatico.”

  “She’d feel all right about going back to Blighty. She wants to. Maybe you should just take her.”

  “Does she know where the box is?”

  “I’m sure she does.”

  Bishop Beesley wiped his face with a red spotted handkerchief. He flicked at the flies and returned it to his back pocket. He inspected his left gaiter. “Is that a scorpion?” He pointed to the small insect crawling up his leg.

  Gently, Jerry cupped his hand around the creature and held it on his palm, looking down at it. “It seems to be a wingless butterfly. Isn’t that odd?”

  Bishop Beesley glared around him. “Where’s Mitzi?”

  “Ups
tairs somewhere, with Una. Can’t you hear the music?” King Pleasure was now singing his own ‘Little Boy, Don’t Get Scared’. Little fellow, don’t get yellow and blue, he sang.

  Bishop Beesley smiled to himself. Jerry was still looking at the butterfly. “Hadn’t you better kill it?” said the bishop. “I mean, it can’t be happy.”

  “It doesn’t look too unhappy, though.” Jerry’s hand shook a little. “I shouldn’t worry.” He placed the insect inside a scarlet rhododendron flower. “It might as well enjoy the time it’s got.”

  Bishop Beesley evidently disapproved of these sentiments. He was about to speak when his small ears caught a sound from on high. Jerry heard it too and they both looked up.

  Through the shimmering, heated sky there came a large, dark shape and, for some reason, Jerry became immediately more cheerful, even as he felt his last grip on consecutive thought slipping. “Well, well, well. An airship. From Rowe Island, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Airships are—” Bishop Beesley clutched at his jowls. “Airships are—” His hand went to his back. His brow contorted. “Ah!”

  Jerry began to jump about on the lawn, waving mindlessly to the massive black ship with its crimson markings. Disturbed, the peacocks and the bantams scattered screaming and clucking. Macaws filled the air, red, yellow, blue and green, shrieking.

  “My back! Back!” moaned Bishop Beesley.

  “It’s tensions, I expect,” suggested Jerry, turning for a moment, but the bishop was already hobbling for the house. Jerry sat down on the lawn. There was a silly grin on his face. “Gosh! I never thought I’d be glad to see one of those buggers again!”

  5. SPIRIT VOICES HELP ME–PETER SELLERS TALKS ABOUT THE STRANGE POWER THAT HAS ENTERED HIS LIFE

  King Pleasure was doing ‘Tomorrow is Another Day’ as, half his togs abandoned, his mitre over one sticky eye, Bishop Beesley rolled out of the palace, dragging Mitzi. His daughter was soft and naked, reluctant to leave, trying to work the bolt on her Remington, to remove a malacca cane from the barrel, slapping at his hands which seemed to be covered with feathers from a pillow. “Okay!” her father shouted to the marines. “Okay!”

  Bishop Beesley dragged Mitzi past Jerry. Her heels were making unsightly scars in the gravel. “I hope to God, Mr Cornelius, none of this ever gets into the primary zone! I would like to remind you that this is the seventies.”

  “Almost a hundred, I’d have said. Phew, what a scorcher!” Jerry had begun to pick himself a bunch of flowers. “Blip,” he added.

  “It’s all your fault,” wailed Mitzi at him. “You and your rotten engines!”

  “Blip!”

  The dark shadow of the circling airship passed over them for the fifth time. The birds of paradise were particularly disturbed by the commotion, running this way and that. The macaws and the bantams had completely disappeared. Only the peacocks had settled down and were screeching aggressively at the big vessel. For a moment or two Jerry imitated them, evidently for the fun of it, then he began to mumble, dropping his flowers. “Five. Birds. Water. Messiah. Ice.”

  Una emerged, in trench coat and khaki, buckling on the heavy military holster containing her S&W .45. “That airship’s come for us. Somebody’s running a horrible risk. We’d better bloody take advantage while we can. I’m pissed off. What’s Beesley got to do with me?”

  “I’d thought airships were extinct,” said Jerry. “Or not invented yet. I’m slipping. Blip.”

  “We’re all slipping. Everybody’s slipping,” screamed Bishop Beesley, untangling his daughter from a jacaranda. “Monstrous anachronisms! Come along, Mitzi, please. The co-ordinates haven’t jelled yet, so there’s a chance we can escape before complete chaos results. Men! Men! Men!” The marines began to emerge from peculiar hiding places, like children interrupted in a game. “Deviants!”

  “It’s not my fault,” said Jerry, “about Rowe Island. At least, I don’t think it is.” His vacant eyes glanced questioningly at Una Persson. “Is it? It was dormant.”

  Her smile was brave and reassuring. “You’ll be all right, I expect.”

  Tomorrow is the magic word. It’s full of hopes and dreams…

  “Lovely.” Jerry turned a seraphic face upwards. “I’ve always thought they were, thought they were, thought they were, thought they were, thought they were, thought they were. Thought they were…”

  A long rope ladder fell from the centre section of the gondola and almost hit him on his poor head. He continued to stand there, mumbling, even as, from the other side of the wall, rifles began to bark. “Get up it, you silly little bugger!” shouted Una Persson. The Smith and Wesson was now in her hand. For the moment the marines were contenting themselves with potshots at the hull as they retreated down the road and back through the town. “Get up! Get up!”

  “Yes, mum.” He grinned a daft grin. He wondered why he felt so happy. “What about you? Ladies first?”

  “You’ve got a job to do, sonny jim,” said Una grimly and slapped him on the bottom. “Go on!”

  He took hold of the rungs and began to climb the swaying ladder, chuckling childishly. The airship’s engines shouted and screamed as her crew manoeuvred her to maintain their position in the air over the garden. Like the Dornier, she had forward and backward facing engines, the nacelles capable of turning through ninety degrees. A late mark O’Bean, thought Jerry, as he lived and breathed, but he did not know what he meant by the thought. He was almost halfway up the ladder, giggling to himself, when he looked down. The golden dome, main roof of the palace, half-blinded him. “Get up!” cried a determined voice. With one arm hooked in the rungs, Una Persson was sighting along her revolver, picking off marines in the white, tree-lined road below. She called to the riggers peering at her from the open hatch through which the ladder had been lowered: “Take her up. Lift. I’ll be fine.” A winch creaked. The ladder rose a foot or two.

  Jerry felt the wind in his hair. He had never had a better view of the island. “This is heavenly,” he said. “What a smashing way to finish. Or begin.” The rope swayed wildly. He almost fell off as he neared the top and the waiting gondola.

  Hands found him: it was a disapproving Sebastian Auchinek, all scowls and moody, who hauled him in the last few feet. “You’ve got a long way to go yet, Mr Cornelius.” There were a number of dark figures in the bare aluminium interior, evidently a storage hatch. It reeked of high-octane fuel. Through the gloom Jerry crawled towards the nearest bench, also of aluminium, bolted to the bulkhead. Out of the fresh air his high spirits had dropped away again and he was mumbling. “Airships. Human remains. Empires. War. Ideals. Science…”

  As Una Persson was dragged in, firing a last round or two at the marines, Prinz Lobkowitz sprang into the light from the entrance, reaching for the lever, closing the hatch-doors. “Thank God.” He and Auchinek embraced the woman they loved. Lobkowitz wore riding britches, brown boots, spurs, a white roll-neck sweater, as if he had been taken away suddenly from a polo match. Auchinek wore a rather loud check suit that seemed to belong to the turn of the century.

  Una frowned at them. “Should you be here, at all?”

  There was a movement above and a pair of thin legs in dark green trousers with a red stripe climbed down the metal ladder into the hold. “We shouldn’t.” Major Nye was in the uniform of the 3rd Infantry, Punjab Irregular Force, rifle-green with black lace and red facings. “It’s more comfortable above, by the way. This is just for stores, and we haven’t any, of course.” He looked over to Jerry, who drooled and simpered. “Poor old lad. We’re dodging and weaving a bit, hoping for the best. He was due in England weeks before the Teddy Bear, you know. Everyone was contacted at very short notice, had to down tools and jump to it. Shoulders to the wheel, lads, shoulders to the wheel…”

  “What else could we do?” Gently Lobkowitz stroked Jerry’s bewildered head. “Besides, he won’t remember a lot. Neither shall we, for that matter. We’ll drop him off in London and hope for the best.”

  Auchinek
was sullen. Evidently he had taken part in the raid against his will.

  “But California first stop. It’s important that we all check our bearings again before we progress any further.”

  “Are you sure it’s in California?” said Major Nye. “I thought it was in London, now.”

  “Not at the present,” said Auchinek.

  “Blip.”

  Tom McCarthy’s patrol was supposed to round up a group of Rhodesian African guerillas. Instead, he claims, it wiped out a village. There were about sixty victims—the entire population of a tiny village near the Mozambique border. McCarthy, a 22-year-old Londoner, who served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, told the full story of the atrocity for the first time yesterday. McCarthy himself confessed that he shot a young terrorist as he lay wounded. He was ordered by an officer to shoot the boy. The death-mission began when the Rhodesian Special Branch was given a tip-off that the guerillas would be slipping into the village to collect £1000 towards their “funds”. McCarthy and his patrol, including black scouts and members of the Rhodesian Special Air Service, were ordered from their base at Mount Darwin in the troubled border area north of Salisbury. They arrived at the village below the Mavuradonha mountain range, about 30 miles away, in darkness. Through their “night-sights” they saw 17 guerillas arrive. But the Rhodesian soldiers did not move into the village to arrest them. Instead they illuminated the village with flares. Then they bombarded the huts with automatic fire and rockets. McCarthy maintained he could hear the screams of the villagers 300 yards away. Then he was called in to help with the “mopping-up operations”. Thirteen of the terrorists died with the villagers. Four escaped but three were picked up later. McCarthy went into graphic detail of the alleged murder rampage by the Rhodesian troops. He said: “We were told that the only prisoners we wanted were the terrorists. We were also told we were after the money. There was this boy of about seventeen. There was no doubt he was one of the guerillas because I recognised him from the night-sight. He had been shot but he wasn’t too bad and the medic was working on him. Someone must have decided that he knew nothing because the medic was told to move away.” McCarthy was sending a radio message when an officer called him over and ordered him to shoot the youth. “I was frightened and asked if he wouldn’t be any good. I was told: ‘Certainly not.’ I was shaking quite a bit and the officer said: ‘Are you worried?’ I knew that if I disobeyed a lawful command in an operational area I faced four years in the stockade. I remember putting the safety catch to ‘rapid fire’ and put my rifle to my shoulder. But I turned my face away before I fired. I missed by a foot—that will tell you how bad I was. He just lay there and put his arms up against his chest. I don’t know why but he didn’t say a word. He just looked at me and I’ll always remember that as if it were just this morning.” The officer then came behind McCarthy, grasped his head in both his hands and said: “You useless——bastard.” McCarthy continued: “He forced my head down to look at the man on the ground and said: ‘Now shoot the bastard.’ This time I hit him between the nose and the mouth and his face just seemed to cave in.”