Alyzon Whitestarr

by Isobelle Carmody

  The Rak finished their song and went on to sing another. This time I managed to unscreen long enough to discern that they were singing about how Hitler and guys like him had it right because the world was full of darkness that needed letting out. I shuddered and was suddenly sure that, like Angel Blue and Oliver Spike, the Rak were infected.

  Pushing and fighting and struggling to get free of that crowd, I felt as if some monstrous beast had me, and as the essence smell of the crowd darkened and thickened, I began to feel more and more afraid. I wanted Da, and I wished Gary Soloman had stayed with me, but most of all I realized that I wanted Harrison. The warm strength of his arms and the beauty he had made me feel when he had kissed me were so much the opposite of the ugliness seething through the crowd. For a wonderful second, thinking of that kiss made me feel his mouth on mine, and this drove back the fear, reminding me that I had come tonight to see what I could learn; it was cowardly to run away when my sister’s life and maybe the safety of my family depended on me.

  I turned to face the stage and saw the Rak’s lead singer gyrating and spasming in a dervish dance, his face a mask of demented hatred. Gritting my teeth, I unclamped my senses and forced myself to listen to what he was doing, because I wanted to feel what the crowd around me was feeling. The song, if it could be called a song, was all about the power of hatred, and the right of people to feel it and act it out rather than repressing it. He was sneering at love and kindness and gentleness. He was screaming that people who felt those things were fools. He asserted everyone’s right to hate and hurt and dig to the dark parts of their soul.

  I looked about me and saw with a chill that people in the audience wore his expression as if he had somehow transferred it to them via the music. Eyes glittered with malice and people bared their teeth in vicious, glimmering smiles that approved every bit of pain and savagery he described. Those smiles were so like grimaces of agony that they made me flinch. People snarled and laughed and screamed for more and more. They turned to one another to bellow how incredible, how totally, incredibly right it was. They danced in place, isolated and facing the stage, shaking their fists and raking the air with their clawed hands.

  I had the surreal feeling that I was in a crowd of people going through some sort of werewolf-like change into animals, except no beast but the human beast could hate so powerfully, so deeply, so creatively.

  The Rak played three more songs and then ended with a crash of sound. They were off the stage so swiftly that the audience seemed startled. Then a murmurous sound of discontent and irritation and anger rose. The announcer came on with a squall of feedback to announce Neo Tokyo.

  It could not be by chance that Da had been set up to sing after the Rak. I had a sudden feeling of premonition, which my danger sense affirmed, and I began to fight my way back to the front of the audience. Pushing through, I risked becoming an easy target for the aggression rippling all around me. But Da and the two young men who must be Neo Tokyo came onstage, drawing everyone’s attention.

  “Da …,” I whispered.

  He walked in his long, loose-limbed way to the mike at the far left of the stage, and Neo Tokyo took the other two mikes with the same casual grace that they had to have learned from Da. They bent to rearrange several other instruments at their feet and I held my breath as they took up their first instruments; Da his guitar, and Neo Tokyo panpipes and a flat drum. There was a gentleness and a simplicity in their movements that made me think of the old Vietnamese grocer packing his fruit away and I felt my anxiety fade. They were so different from the pounding, dizzying, nightmarish quality that the Rak had brought to the stage with their grinding, savage music, showers of sparks, gusts of fire, and puffs of smoke all lit by the frenetic whirling of laser lights. There were no special effects now. Just three men in a white light.

  “Who the hell are these guys?” someone nearby asked.

  I held my breath as the music began and felt a burst of relief that it was not Da’s, because offering one of his songs to this resentful, aggressive crowd would be like waving a red rag at a bull. The song was edgy enough not to oppose the potent mood the Rak had established. It was, I understood after a little, a song about confusion and the rage that comes from being lied to and kept in the dark. It was a good solid song with clever, sharp-edged lyrics and it drew up perfectly and naturally the threads left hanging by the Rak. The beast crowd calmed down and began to listen.

  Athough the lyrics spoke of anger, they were analytical and clever, and the audience had to think in order to get them. I was fascinated to see how the song took all of the churning fury and aimless aggression that the Rak had woven and unwound it, seeking for the center.

  Ultimately the song was about discovering the core of fury, the molten heart, and I began to understand exactly what Da liked about Neo Tokyo. It was angry but there was not a mindless rage in it, nor any desire to blame anyone. At its center was puzzlement and honest confusion.

  I looked around me. I could smell and see that people were still unsettled from the Rak’s music, but the song was sucking up their raggedy energy, turning it cool and sending it back into itself. When it ended, there was a good swell of applause, although nowhere near the frenzied mania that had erupted after the Rak played.

  The next song began at once without the band making any attempt to draw out more reaction from the crowd. The lyrics were about a woman trying to find a way to live in a world full of paths that all seemed wrong, and with no idea what a right path was because all ways were hemmed by rules that she did not agree with and could not obey. Again it was a song about confusion, but it was specific and compelling and veined with a yearning for something beyond confusion.

  It was not one of Da’s songs, but this time he sang with the two younger men, and his influence was in the way the words came out. His older, deeper voice was the kindness and tolerance that gentled the sharp, angry voices of the two younger men.

  The band played a long, looping instrumental break of competing sounds, which reiterated the theme of confusion and longing, somehow suggesting that the woman’s story was a story that was repeated again and again.

  I looked around and extended my senses. Tension and aggression were still flickering in people’s faces, but there was puzzlement, too. I felt a stab of triumph. If Aaron Rayc had set the crowd up to reject Da, then he had miscalculated both the malevolent power of the Rak and Da’s own radiant ability. Because even without singing any of his own songs, Da had brought Neo Tokyo to the point where they could defuse the anger and aggression wrought by the earlier band.

  And yet, even thinking this, I felt unease snake through me. Because Aaron Rayc had seen Da perform the night of the Urban Dingo gig. He knew what Da could do to an audience. He must have realized that Da was likely to affect Neo Tokyo in a positive way. So why had he allowed them to invite Da to join them?

  I had come far enough forward that I was only two-deep from the wire barrier keeping the crowd out of no-man’s-land and away from the stage. That was when I saw her standing in the fenced-off area between the stage and the audience. Sylvia Yarrow. There were security guards close enough to make it clear she had permission to be there. She was just standing still and watching, but my danger sense went mad.

  The night suddenly got brighter, and through the three-story-high scaffolding that had been set up to back the stage, I saw that the clouds clogging the sky had parted and the moon was shining down.

  Then it hit me. It was a full moon, and Davey had told me that this made those who were infected hungry!

  I looked back at Sylvia and saw her lift something to her face. My heart gave a great sickening lurch of terror, because it was a video camera.

  I began to fight and shove my way toward her.

  “Watch out!” someone said indignantly.

  “I’m going to be sick,” I shouted. Miraculously, the crowd parted. But even when I reached the wire fence and shouted her name, Sylvia did not hear me. I threw a leg over the barrier and half
fell over into the ground on the other side.

  “Hey!” someone cried.

  I ignored them, making for Sylvia; again I shouted out her name, but the noise from the amplifiers obliterated my voice.

  At last I reached her. I grabbed her shoulder and wrenched her round to face me. “Sylvia, why are you filming my father? What is supposed to happen to him?”

  “Your father?” She looked so baffled that I had to believe she didn’t know that Macoll was my da.

  “What are you supposed to film?” I yelled, beginning to feel frantic. “Tell me before it’s too late!”

  Sylvia stared at me like a person waking from a ghastly, compelling dream. The blood drained from her face and she turned her head down to look at the camera she was holding. She looked at the red record light, glowing like a ruby. The horror in her eyes was no less than if she had discovered she was holding a severed head.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a voice growled, and one of the security guards was pulling me away from Sylvia. Released, she reeled back toward one of the enormous amplifiers and I saw the camera fall from her hand. I screamed out to her to tell me what was supposed to happen, but she was staring down at the camera.

  I twisted in the guard’s grasp and saw he was a burly older man with sandy hair. He smelled of soap and fresh tomatoes.

  “Please, you have to help me,” I yelled over the music. “That’s my da up there on the stage. He … he’s going to be hurt. That girl was supposed to film it.”

  “You’ve seen too many movies, girlie,” he said. “Now you just calm down and maybe I won’t throw you out.”

  “Please!” I screamed. “I have to get to the stage.”

  “OK, out you go,” the guard said decisively. I struggled in his grip like a mad thing, trying to focus enough to use my mental voice on him. I dug my toes into the soggy earth but he was too strong and his hand was against my wrist, forcing his weariness and boredom and disgust into me. Desperately I thought of Harrison, seeking the courage I had found earlier in the memory of his kiss. But it was too hard with the guard touching my skin.

  “Harrison, help me,” I screamed, and wrenched my arm to stop our skins touching. I felt my thought form about the shout and fly out into the dark troubled night. The guard’s grip had slackened in surprise and, taking the only chance that might come, I wrenched myself out of his grasp and ran back toward the stage. But I tripped over one of the snaking lumps of cord on the ground and fell hard. I was still gasping and winded when the security man dragged me roughly to my feet and shook me like a rag doll.

  “One more stunt like that and you’ll be sorry,” he snarled.

  Then I heard Da’s voice coming from all around me, saying softly that the next song had been inspired by one of his daughters and written for another. For Serenity.

  I turned to the guard. “Please,” I said into his face. “Help me. That’s my father and he’s in danger.”

  He frowned. “Girlie, if that is your dad, which I doubt, he won’t thank you for interrupting him right now.”

  “But you don’t understand ….” I stopped because Da had begun to sing without any instrumentation, and his voice was so strong and strange and pure in that first soaring note that even the guard turned to look at him.

  “It is our soul that makes us yearn,” Da sang, little shimmers of light beginning to drift from him and hover above the crowd. “That spark in us which cares not for what is but only for what might be, what could be, what should be. That dreaming spark which, if it is not extinguished, will blaze and sing to the universe, the song it sings as painfully beautiful and ephemeral as life.”

  “Now that man has a voice,” the security guard said. He sighed and began to shepherd me away.

  “Let her go!” Harrison ordered, and suddenly he was there, pulling the guard’s arm away, freeing me. I didn’t stop to wonder how or why he had come there. I ran toward the stage, dodging cords and security guards, trying not to move too fast in case one of them instinctively grabbed me. Trying to get close enough that Da would hear me.

  He was singing now about the courage that lay at the heart of the soul spark that made us all yearn for love, for happiness, for beauty, for purpose, for immortality in a world that seemed sometimes to be so dark and hopeless. I waited, knowing that there would be a break any moment, and that I must make him hear me. But midsentence, midword, his voice faltered. I looked up and saw that he was looking up, too, and back.

  Then I saw her. Serenity, standing high in the web of scaffolding that was both the backdrop to the stage and the support for most of the effects and light boxes and cables. The ominous white eye of the moon had gone behind the clouds again and she would have been invisible against the blackness of night and shadow, if not for the lights trained on her, revealing a too-thin girl in black with lank, heavy hair hanging in rat’s tails around her shoulders.

  “Serenity?” Da’s amplified voice filled the air.

  “My name is Sybl,” Serenity hissed.

  I could hear her perfectly, although she spoke in a low, venomous voice.

  Please, I thought. Please don’t hurt him. Don’t hurt all of us.

  “What the hell is this?” someone cried near me. I turned to see that it was another security guard. “How the hell did that kid get up there?”

  “What is she doing?” one security guard asked another.

  “Maybe she’s part of the act,” someone on the other side of the barrier suggested.

  That stopped all the guards.

  “A stunt?” someone else said. The guards nodded, but they kept their eyes on Serenity.

  I looked at her, too, and noticed what I had not noticed before with a swooning rush of relief. Her hands were clenched into fists, but she had no gun and nowhere to conceal one. Mad as it seemed, my first thought had been that she meant to shoot Da. But maybe she only meant to make some sort of accusing speech that was supposed to humiliate him.

  “Come down, honey,” Da called softly.

  The crowd beast listened, half enchanted by the gentle plea and love in that deep, beautifully textured voice.

  But Serenity shook her head, and that was when I realized her hair was not just lank. It was wet. Her clothes were, too. But how on earth had she got so wet?

  Serenity laughed, a high, cold sound without mirth or brightness. “Come down to what, Da? To this filthy, ugly world full of hate and cruelty? To you and your cowardice? Your stupid, pointless songs that don’t help anyone? Your fiddling while Rome burns? I don’t think so. I don’t think there are many people my age who would want to come down to that. And you know what? Maybe we won’t. Because we have a choice. We can accept you and your foul world and become like you. Or we can have the courage to turn our backs on it all. Wasn’t that what you were just singing about, Da? Courage? I don’t think you know the meaning of the word. Well, I will show you what it is, and maybe I will be the first of many to show it to you and to all of those people like you. We will show you what we think of your world, your dreams, your failures!”

  I was confused. She had no weapon, but there was a terrible threat in her voice.

  Without warning, a hand closed over my mouth and someone pressed their face to mine, their skin against my cheek and bare neck. I almost fainted then, because the touch opened me up to some sliding black force that oozed at me and sought to pour itself into me. It was Harlen. I saw the torn fragments that were all that remained of the Harlen that had once been, all that had not been devoured by the sickness that drove him now. And then I felt the sickness itself. The wrongness, Sarry had called it. I felt the vast screaming hunger that motivated it and I clamped myself shut, rejecting it with every ounce of my being. But it was like a hurricane, battering and tearing at my defenses.

  Distantly, I heard Da telling Serenity he loved her and asking her again to come down so they could talk, but I dared not turn to see what was happening for I was locked in a deadly struggle. I had never imagined that th
e sickness would be so strong, so powerful, so voracious.

  And then I saw what I was doing wrong.

  I summoned all of my will, all of my extended senses, all of the parts of me, known and unknown, and relaxed into Harlen’s grip.

  He had not expected it and he staggered a little and loosened his hold, letting me turn so that I could see his face. It was no longer handsome. It was distorted with what I read as madness. I pressed my hands to his face and called to Harlen with my mind and voice. And for one long minute visions snapped and fluttered into me like bits of paper shredded by the wind. Harlen as a small dark-haired boy, weeping at a funeral beside a cold-faced, beautiful mother; Harlen trying to hug Dita, who pushed him away and told him to be a man. Then he was smiling at an older man with dark hair and a hawkish nose. The man was in a classroom, surrounded by boys with instruments. The music teacher from Shaletown Boys Academy! I was startled to feel Harlen’s love for him, and then I saw Aaron Rayc, smiling too, offering admiration and gifts. Then his mother kissing Rayc and the boy’s scalding jealousy. Then Harlen was older, creeping along a corridor and entering a boiler room. He was altering settings on the instrument panel, looking over his shoulder with a mixture of bravado, fear, and anguish. Then he was in court, his face blank and cold. Aaron Rayc was smiling at him, and his face grew larger and larger, distorting and swelling.

  Then the visions that were all that remained of Harlen were swept aside by a dark tide that flowed inexorably toward me: the thing inhabiting him, hungering and vast.

  I was afraid, but I knew what to do. I did not try to pull away or close myself to it. I stayed open and I let the radiance of my love for Da and for Luke and Harrison and Gilly and for Serenity and Mum blaze out at it.

  Somewhere in the depths of my mind, I seemed to hear the howling of a wolf.

  Harlen screamed and flung me away from himself. There was blank terror in his eyes. He fled into the crowd. I swung back to the stage and my mind reeled to find that Da was standing there still, looking up into the scaffolding where Serenity stood. The deadly struggle with Harlen had taken only seconds.