I backed off as much as the waitress would allow.

"I'm leaving. I'm leaving friend. I won't come back."

From behind a counter a woman in a white coat appeared. Second chef was my guess, but her hair was piled up in a style worthy of the Nile in its cat fearing hay-day. She opened a dishwasher and started taking out the empty racks. Strawberry voice took the knife off the chef.

"I'm sorry Stu," she syllibubed, "but you knew the risks when you took the job. This guy is an ordinary punter. There was always a risk one of them would turn up even with the restricted hours. Look at it this way, you have cooked many wonderful meals and brought a great deal of happiness into many lives, but now it's over. The man didn't pay homage and you have to pay the price. That was the deal."

At this point I was looking for the back door, so it was with a slight surreal shock I realised the chef was now in the dishwasher. All I could string together by way of coherent thought was that he was very large for such a small s.p.a.ce. The waitress placed his hat carefully on the top. The chef turned his face away and the door shut. The waitress pushed the 'on' b.u.t.ton and I backed towards the door. A steely little hand grasped my arm.

"You have to wait until it is over," said the Nile woman.

So I stood in the kitchen and waited, while the thing ran a full cycle. At one point the waitress commented that this was a good thing for Huilo's (a rival restaurant I guess) and that it was always a shame when such things happened by chance. I was beginning to get worried about the chef. He certainly couldn't drown in there, but what about air? Do dishwashers have an air intake? No-one was going to let me do anything and death by kitchen implement sounded embarra.s.sing as well as final, so I indulged in some heavy hoping.

When they opened the door there was a blast of lemon scented steam. Then a clean, polished, streakless skeleton pitched forward onto the open door and shattered into a pile of bones.

They kept their word and let me go. The last thing I saw was the Nile woman being crowned with the chef's hat, while the rest of the staff knelt in homage before her and the dishwasher.

On the way home I bought a burger from MacDonalds.

[Originally published in Kimota 3, Winter 1995].

GOOD VIBRATIONS.

by Simon Kewin.

Mark E Moon put his empty pint gla.s.s down onto the bar, looked up at the barman and said, "So, what year have we reached?"

Around him, the bar definitely seemed to be taking on the right sort of appearance. By his expert judgement they were now some time in early 1981, perhaps even late 1980. The clothes of the other people in the bar were definitely turning towards the post-punk: some chains and spiky hair visible amongst the New Romantic frippery. The music playing on the jukebox had taken on a rawer edge, more energetic and simplistic where, just earlier, it had been slower, more melodic and varied. To most people, he knew, the difference was negligible; it was all just some rhythmic-era music. The Beatles or Beethoven, something like that.

But nearly two thousand years of collecting had given him a good ear for the form, and the distinctions were clear to him. He didn't really need to ask the barman, but this highly-muscled, long-haired, gruff, tattooed figure happened to be an avatar of the ship's consciousness, as well as pulling the pints.

"December 1980. John Lennon has just been shot. Wanna start collecting?"

Moon wandered over to the jukebox. He had created a cla.s.sic, glitzy Wurlitzer model, one of the few fixed items in the room that was otherwise rigged to shift to reflect the particular era that the Motorcycle Emptiness was moving through. Other collectors he knew just used a little clock displaying the year on some screen or something. Or they actually fabricated a retro "flight-deck" with all the b.u.t.tons and flashing lights and manually controlled where the ship flew to. At least, they had the last time he had spoken to any of them. That was, admittedly, a long time ago.

He looked at the records now available on the jukebox - plenty of post-punk and ska cla.s.sics - The Teardrop Explodes, XTC, The Specials - just the sort of thing he was currently looking for. As he watched, several familiar singles by The Clash appeared in the selection, replacing those of The Human League.

To his left, The Jam were shambling onto the tiny, corner stage, Weller's battered electric guitar slung across his back, Butler holding his drumsticks up like a weapon. All three of them - Foxton, Weller and Butler - eyeing Wham!, who were making way for them, with an undisguised distaste.

"OK," said Moon to the room in general, "this is far enough. Turn us around and put the needle to the record."

Instantly, he felt the slight shifting that told him the Motorcycle Emptiness was manoeuvring, no longer just flying in a straight line away from Earth. No-one else in the bar appeared to notice, each carried on talking, laughing, drinking and singing. Just as they had been created to. Two leather-and-denim clad Heavy Metal fans whooped and shouted as they huddled around a game of s.p.a.ce Invaders near the bar.

The ship dropped out of subluminal and executed a gentle Immelmann so that it was pointing back Earthwards, allowing itself to drift away at 99.99999999999% of the speed of light. Slow enough for all of the precious s.p.a.ce-time vibrations to ebb slowly by it. The Motorcycle Emptiness began to listen, to feed. Moving along a precise, delicately controlled path, spiralling slowly outwards, it danced around the circ.u.mference of this particular stratum of Earth's electromagnetic bubble, its ghostly quantum corona. It started to sample s.p.a.ce, to taste the faint, faint fuzz of background noise, the slightest of vibrations on the atomic and subatomic level within which, painfully slowly, patterns could be discerned. Sound, pictures, music. Like recreating a painting by spraying one brushful of dots onto canvas, then another, then another. The Motorcycle Emptiness did move through normal s.p.a.ce, but only coincidentally. Really, it swam in an ocean of sound and vision - archaeological layers of musical s.p.a.ce discernible only to its amazing powers of perception.

Slowly, painfully slowly, the music began to form. Not that he was impatient. Virtual immortality gave you a wonderful sense of patience. And this was what he loved to do. There were many, he knew, that couldn't take the aimlessness and meaninglessness of their near-infinite lives, and turned destructive, or self-destructive. He had spent a week on Earth a little over three centuries earlier and felt absolutely no desire to return.

Poor, shattered, scattered Earth. Perhaps it would have been better if alien life of some sort had been encountered after all, if humanity hadn't found itself to be so alone, if it hadn't become so crushed by introspection. Only about half the people lived down on the surface now - here and there, where it was habitable. The rest lived on a rag-tag a.s.sortment of satellites and moons, both natural and human-made, or out on Ganymede, t.i.tan or Charon. Or even wandering nomadically and alone in one sort of ship or another. Back home, they listened mainly to chaotic music now. As was ever the case, it was music that suited, reflected, sprang from, the times. Most people didn't bother much with music from the rhythmic age, the cla.s.sical golden age, except perhaps for the occasional retro concert, an occasional foray for them into high culture. Most of the music broadcast to the universe now was arhythmic, deliberately confused. He listened to it himself sometimes. He could see the attraction.

But there were plenty, like him, that really cared about the golden age - enough to want to archive and capture it all, to make sure that all, or as close to all as possible, was recovered. It was reckoned that the archive now approached 96% completion for music produced during the electromagnetic age, when broadcasts were being made and thus cast out into the aether. For his particular period, say 1955-2015, the figure was reckoned to be 97%. This was a guess, of course - no-one really knew how much music was made at that time, and occasionally, previously unknown - obscure or transient - artists still turned up, to the great excitement of everyone working in the field. Perhaps a raw but enthusiastic punk band who only ever jammed together for a few sessions in someone's garage. Or someone producing some stuff in a home studio or using an early computer. Or maybe even, treasure of treasures, played a previously uncaptured live concert.

It still happened. 200 years earlier, over a period of just 12 years, on the opposite side of Earth's expanding radio-wave bubble, he, Mark E Moon, had hit a golden seam of previously lost Public Enemy, crisp and unfuzzed once enough of the signal had been collected and merged, a beautiful, perfect seam of raw 1980s music encoded into the ghostly particle vibrations of deep s.p.a.ce. The recording had turned out to be 99.99% pure - a previously lost golden age transmission from an unknown New York night club, broadcast on a small, local radio station. It had made his name. In the academic discourse, it was still referred to as the Mark E Moon session. It was generally considered, he believed, to be embryonic.

But as 100% capture was approached, the chances of finding a gap inevitably went down. Maybe they would never get there. But perhaps it didn't matter, perhaps the search, this thing that filled his infinite life, was what mattered. Or perhaps they would eventually move onto the music made prior to the electromagnetic age, from before the time when the slight vibrations in s.p.a.cetime were produced. Maverick research philosophers postulated that it would be possible to do just that - to capture music even though it had never been electromagnetically broadcast in any way. Mozart playing his own opera scores. Mozart writing those scores. The music was all there, they said, encoded into the deterministic structure of the universe, the eternal, inevitable by-product of the way creation, the universe, was, is, will be - discernible if you simply knew enough about it. Humanity simply didn't, that was all.

Maybe. Who knew? For now, he would settle for another strike like the Public Enemy one. He wasn't impatient, truly, but still, it seemed about time.

Thirty-four years later, the barman said suddenly, "Moon ... there's something out there." He was sitting at the bar, drinking beer and looking on appreciatively at Kraftwerk, who were playing a mesmeric performance on the small stage, the subsonics making the room and his ribcage boom in synchronicity. The barman's eyes seemed to be focused on infinity, even though the room was the same size as usual. "It ... moving, moving, moving on up," he continued, "I can ... swimming in the water ... there is water at the bottom of the ocean."

"What is it?" asked Moon, a little surprised at the barman's incomprehensibility. It was unheard of for ship personalities - ships - to go wrong. "What is happening?"

A new band were on the cramped, poorly-lit stage now, a physical representation of whatever musical energies the Motorcycle Emptiness was experiencing. He knew them all, knew every genre, style, form and type of rhythmic-age music. Unlike 99% of humanity, he could identify and differentiate between Motown, baroque, thrash, blues, bhangra, soul, northern soul, plainsong, surfpunk - whatever. But this new band wasn't any of those, didn't fit into any of the known categories. It wasn't even close.

It was like ...

He turned from the bar and slowly picked his way between scattered, beer-stained tables towards the corner of the room where the stage was. Behind him, the barman was muttering to himself, over and over, like endless rain, like endless rain ...

The new band were at once familiar and strange. Much about them he could recognise - the black clothes, the sungla.s.ses, the long hair - but at the same time he had absolutely no idea who they were. He recognised none of them. A new band? But there was more to it than that. It was immediately clear that the four figures standing on the cramped stage were not human. At least, not completely, not only human. They moved in new ways; the way their eyes were concealed suggests something insectoid; the drummer had six arms, a drumstick in each hand; the guitarists' hands each had 10 fingers, each digit long and delicate, with a definite claw, a talon even, at its end, like a natural plectrum. Their instruments seemed somehow to be connected to them, even a part of them, as if instrument and performer were merely parts of an old-style cyborganic ent.i.ty.

They set up, not looking at each other, saying nothing.

Moon walked up to the foot of the stage. He had to know. "Who are you? What are you doing here? What ... what are you called?"

The lead singer smiled back, a reptilian kind of smile, saying simply, "Dig the new breed!" before launching the band into their first number.

Like the band, the music was at once familiar and alien. Chord progressions and keys, riffs and vocal inflections he had heard a million times before. But the structure was fundamentally different, there was an extra dimension as if many tracks were being played simultaneously, although distinct melodies weren't discernible. They played with an inhuman intensity, Shiva on the drums maintaining a beat more complicated and intricate than any a human had ever produced. The guitarists' fingers were a blur. The total sound was bewildering, hard to grasp somehow, as if some significant part of it was inaudible to the human ear.

Then it clicked, like moving from black-and-white to colour, mono to stereo. He could suddenly hear the music. And it was wonderful - rapturous, intense, frightening, beautiful, captivating. It filled him, transported him. It was at once familiar and like nothing he had ever heard before. Everything else, the room, the Motorcycle Emptiness, the universe, his thoughts, his ident.i.ty, all started to slip away, seeming less important. This is it he thought to himself. This is the root, the essence of it all. The golden age music. This is great ... this is ... this ...

And for Mark E Moon, then, there was only the music.

The band played a short set - eight songs and no encore. Throughout, the barman, and all the other non-existent people in the room looked on as mesmerised as Moon -captivated, staring rapt and vacant at the stage. No-one moved. The Motorcycle Emptiness itself began to drift directionless in s.p.a.ce. Eventually the singer, with a final, sly "Thank you!" strode off stage, followed by the other band members walking in close formation as if they, too, were intrinsically interconnected. Everyone else in the room remained where they were - transfixed, lost. For each of them - human, ship or mannequin - there was the music, gliding and thrilling through them, and nothing else.

One hundred and twenty-three years pa.s.sed by. During this time, the new musical pattern pa.s.sed like a life-form, a virus, from the Motorcycle Emptiness, to the other nomadic ships, to Charon, to Luna, to Earth, reproducing itself electromagnetically each time it was replayed, mutating and evolving to suit each new host. And each became just as enraptured. Each forgot about everything else, became lost in music, gave their conscious and subconscious minds over to the music, the glorious, new music. Soon, humanity in its entirety stood enthralled, invaded, defeated. Civilisation stood still, apart from the occasional, indistinct tapping of a foot.

A life-form feeding on musical vibrations, evolving in an infinite environment of organised, coherent electromagnetic waves, its DNA-a.n.a.logue structures mutating in time to the harmonies it absorbed. It was what it ate; it became the music, and the music, evolving, changing, became it. Raw music, the product of human minds, transformed, sublimated, transcended like the basic chemical elements becoming complex molecules, becoming the amino-acids of life.

Like a virus, but not a virus. After another seventy-seven years, Moon emerged suddenly from his introspective fugue. The music was still there, in his mind, but so was he, his own self. Moving, he found his arms, his legs, his body flowed with the rhythm of it. The melodies twined around his thought-patterns. Its beauty was in his eyes. He could see patterns in the air, in the universe, that had never been there before.

The former human known as Mark E Moon took a deep, luxurious breath. Getting up from where he had been lying, he looked around at the scene. The barman and the others were also beginning to emerge from where they had been. Everything looked the same and yet totally different. He paused for a moment, his mind clearing, then said simply, Oh yeah!

Like a virus, but not a parasite - it was more organic than that, more of a symbiosis, a synergy. As if the A, C, G and T of human DNA had become interwoven with the A, B, C, D, E, F and G of the musical scale to spell out new words, to produce something else, something more.

Back on Earth, he knew, the music would be starting at last. The long wait was over.

The Motorcycle Emptiness turned, the new music blasting out to the universe at maximum volume, and headed for home.

[Originally published in Kimota 12, Spring 2000].

THE GREEN BELT.

by Steve Dean.

"There! What was that? No, back a bit, bit more, there!"

Two tall figures peered into a small stone bowl half filled with amber liquid. The man was pointing at an image which seemed to float just above the surface.

"No, no good, sorry! Thought we had something then, snake skin armour and a bent stick are no good for what we need."

The woman sighed "This could take weeks at the rate we're going."

She rubbed her fingers across a line of polished stones set into the side of the bowl and the image moved on.

"Let's take a bit of a breather shall we," said the man hopefully, "We've been at this for hours."

"No, not just yet, we'll try a bit longer, his majesty wouldn't like it if we failed him."

"We haven't let him down yet, have we? Anyway what grat.i.tude does he give us, ay? None that's what! Not even a thank you note or a bunch of chrysanthanumanums."

"Yes dear, but it's not just for him this time is it? The whole town has been challenged and it's up to us to provide a champion."

"And that's another thing." The tall figure stood up straight, pushed his long wavy hair out of his face and began pacing the darkened room. "Where is the mighty Thaw Axe, defender of the G.o.ds, right hand man to kings, etc. Off gallivanting I'll be bound. When did you and me get to vant our gallis ay? A long time ago, that's when."

"Wedgil do stop pacing dear, you'll ruin the glyphs, let's just get this out of the way shall we." She gave the man a sweet smile.

"Yes my little k.u.mquat, you're right as usual." Wedgil a.s.sumed a martyred expression. "Let's get on with it."

"He's at it again dear, making those funny noises in the conservatory, I can hear him from here with the window open, I wish that woman at number twenty seven would cut that tree down a bit, I could see him properly then." From the back of the room the sound of knitting needles stopped.

"I wish you would come away from that window Kenneth, I dread to think what the neighbours are making of it. They can see you, you know."

"I'm not doing any harm dear, I am just a naturally curious individual," Kenneth pushed his gla.s.ses further up his nose, looked wistfully towards the ceiling and declared, "I care for my fellow man."

"Yes dear, that's all very well, but do you have to use those step ladders in the house?"

Kenneth ignored the last comment and carried on, "He seems to be wearing some kind of white suit, and he keeps throwing his hands in the air and shouting, you don't think it could be that American bunch, the Du Lux Clan, or whatever they are called?"

The sound of knitting needles started up again, "Aren't they the ones who paint themselves white and wear silly hats?"

"No dear, you're thinking of the Masons."

"What, Audrey and Cyril Mason from the corner shop? Well I never did!"

"No dear."

"Perhaps if we adjust the seaweed a bit we can get a narrower search pattern, what do think, Pol?"

"It's worth a try, but we're straining the goat's bladder as it is, if that goes we'll be out of action for hours."

"We'll just have to risk it, that's seven of those funny green men in half an hour, did you see those little metal tubes they had? What use would they be against a sodding great man-mountain?"

"Well Wedg, if we don't summon a warrior soon it's the end of the road for us and everybody in town, we just lose by default if we don't even field a champion."

Wedgil scowled, then forcefully grabbed the seaweed and began squeezing. The image in the bowl started to whirl, the water began to steam slightly under the increased magical field.

"Careful Wedg, not too fast, things are hotting up. There what was that?" Poleyela pointed into the image suddenly, catching Wedgil off balance, he stumbled, reaching out a hand to steady himself his fingernails brushed against the internal organ of a sheep-like animal, which immediately began to leak a blue liquid.

"Oh no! Quick activate the catcher," Pol yelled in a rather shrill voice. Wedgil hesitated for a moment then stamped down on a wooden peddle beneath the plinth, which, via a thin piece of catgut, released a mauve powder into the air above the liquid.

A moment's silence was followed by a thunderous crash. About 8 cubits away on a raised platform a ring of red fire had leapt up then dropped back to a steady blue flame.

"Right. That's that then, let's wait and see what we get."

"Got, see what we have GOT," corrected Pol.

"Yes, sorry this instantaneous calling always gets me confused." Wedgil looked at Poleyela and slapped his hands against his stout belly. "Shall we go out for lunch or eat here? I've heard there's a pretty good Greek restaurant near the market."

"Yes, that sounds good, a nice skin of wine as well, we need to relax." Wedgil grinned, "I should marry you one day you know, you think just like me."

Poleyela smiled wisely, took his arm and together they walked out of the Lab.

"Look left, one two, turn head right one two, forward... d.a.m.n! Always forget the Tettsui Uchi, start again...". Stuart Bramley was practising the ancient art of Shotokan Karate.

Sometimes he would practise the art on the lawn, turning his body into a steel killing machine, but today it was raining so he was in the conservatory. There wasn't a lot of room, what with the wicker effect plastic furniture and the banana plant, but it was better than getting his pure white, immaculately ironed Karate suit, or 'Gi', dirty. Sometimes he would pretend to be Bruce Lee (who actually did Kung Fu, but h.e.l.l, it was his fantasy) kicking and chopping in a way that would have sent his wife into hysterics.

He was a slightly built man, with thining hair, a rather weak moustache his wife made him grow, large feet and no dress sense. Today he was serious, Sat.u.r.day was gradings day, the day he went from green belt to purple, if he practised enough. He was just about to execute a rather tricky Hiza Geri Uchi with Kiai when he suddenly smelt burning. Looking down he saw a thin flame run in a circle around him, the tiled floor of the conservatory turned into a stone one covered in strange symbols. As the sound and everything around him faded away, he thought he heard a rather piercing voice shout "Kenneth! Put that camera down!"

It wasn't as if it was particularly horrible being mentally ill, it was just, well, disappointing. Melanie will be so upset when she finds out, he thought. He knew he wasn't dreaming because he hadn't been asleep. He had come to the conclusion that the last Kiai or shout he did had ruptured a blood vessel in his brain causing a temporary, he hoped, mental episode. How else could you account for suddenly being ripped from the safety of one's own conservatory and being sent hurtling through a dark void?

Stuart practised a few Mawashi Geris then sat down on the surprisingly warm floor. Perhaps I ought to make the most of it he thought, Melanie always said that he needed to broaden his horizons, Wargaming and Karate are not the only things in life she would say, frequently. "Well, new experiences broaden the mind, so here I go, if only in a metaphysical sense." He said out loud.

What felt like several hours later he was woken by the sound of strange voices, he didn't know the language but he knew they were drunk, that translates every time.

"Hey! Poly-dolly, lookss liyk we got sumba'dee." Wedgil slurred loudly.

"Well it is about time too, don't you know." Poleyela was the kind of woman who got airs and graces whilst drunk. None of this common slurring for her.