Passing Through the Flame (61 page)

“Cops?” Bobby said, holding the joint.

Horvath’s eyes met Susan’s. They laughed. “These’d be pretty weird cops,” she said.

They both got up to see what was driving up.

“How do you know they’re not cops?” Mark asked.

“The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,” Horvath said over his shoulder.

“Man you two are weird,” Bobby said affectionately. “Really
weird.
”

“Toyota?” Susan said as they stepped out into the warm tropical night. If this weather held, Sunset City would have those upper California summer vibes. “Do you think it’s a Toyota, Bill?” Susan repeated.

“Huh?” Horvath switched his attention to the sound of the engine. “Don’t think so. Sounds air-cooled, probably a Volkswagen.”

“But not a bus.”

“No, it’s not straining hard enough to be a bus.”

A small blue car rounded the final turn in the drive, becoming visible for a few moments before it pulled around to park in front of the house. “A Karmann Ghia,” Horvath said. “I was right.”

“You said a Volkswagen.”

“A Karmann Ghia
is
a Volkswagen. A fancy body with VW guts.”

“Who do you know who has a car like that?”

Horvath shrugged. “Let’s find out,” he said. “At least it isn’t the cops. Or Jango.”

“Sure I remember you from the High Castle,” Susan said. “You were really freaked about losing your paper to some gangster.”

“Right,” said Barry Stein. “And you probably know who Ivan Blue is. This is Ruby Berger, the third member of the Revolutionary Action Committee.”

Susan immediately picked up on the unstable collective vibes of this “Revolutionary Action Committee.” Ruby was a plain girl, probably some kind of political activist, thought of herself as a nobody next to Ivan Blue, envied and therefore hated him; she had cringed at the way Stein introduced the two of them. From the way she sat down on the sofa next to Stein, Susan sensed that she and Stein were balling. But the aura of tension that twanged around them as a couple told her that they weren’t old man and old lady. Ivan Blue was a ball of sparky nervous energy clashing with their vibes. I don’t like this, she thought. I don’t like this at all.

“I’ve heard about this Revolutionary Action Committee,” Bobby said neutrally.

“What’ve you heard about it?” Stein almost squeaked, badly masking paranoia.

“Oh, just that there’s supposed to be some kind of heavy revolutionary action down at Sunset City. Political heavies are supposed to try and take it over.”

“Where did you hear that?”
Ruby Berger hissed, letting it all hang out.

“Oh, the word’s just drifting around,” Bobby said.

“Yeah,” said Jerry. “Some people say Jango is just gonna stage a little revolutionary helter-skelter for his movie.”

“That sure sounds like Jango,” Bill said.

“Believe me, Jango Beck isn’t staging what
we’ve
got in store for him,” Stein said.

“Oh, yeah?” said Bill. “You think you’re going to stick it to Jango Beck?” He lay back against the back of their couch like a lazy cat, pretending indifference, but Susan knew him well enough to know how he grooved behind the idea of anyone’s ripping off Jango.

“We’re going to take Sunset City away from him,” Stein said.

“How are you going to do that?” Bill said cynically. But beneath the cynicism, she felt him flashing on the fantasy.

“I don’t think you’d want to know about it,” Ivan Blue said.

“What’s that supposed to mean, man?” Bobby said, melding into Bill’s trip and giving it support. “What is all this shit? We’re rehearsing some new material here, and you’re interrupting us. Say what you came here to say or split.”

“We want your help in pulling off our action,” Ruby Berger blurted.

“Shee-yit!”

But Bill held up his hand, and Jerry and Mark subsided. Bobby was still pissed off. “Let’s hear what they have to say,” Bill said.

“Oh, man, you’re not going to get us involved in any revolutionary bullshit!”

“I just want to hear a funny story, okay, Bobby?”

Bobby nodded down and around, shrugging. “You’re the man.”

“What we plan to do is take control of the stage and the PA system and then use them to let the people take over Sunset City for themselves,” Stein said.

“How are you going to do that?” Bobby asked.

“Once we’ve got the stage, I’ll proclaim Sunset City a liberated zone,” Ivan Blue said. “Free food, free love, free dope, free air, and free the people! They can’t bust a quarter of a million of us.” Jerry and Mark began to go with the rap on a fantasy level and even Bobby lost his hostility. Susan herself felt the seductiveness of the idea. A quarter of a million people liberating a patch of earth with their bodies, creating the first free soil for the millions of strangers in their own native country, a place to work out our own self-chosen destiny. And Bill had come erect, crouching on the edge of the couch beside her like a tribal chieftain listening with decreasing skepticism to a red-hot medicine man.

“Maybe,” he said. “But what makes you think you can take the stage? Man, I know Jango Beck, he’ll probably have Nazis for security guards. And that’s if he’s in a mellow mood.”

“We’re not worried about that,” Ruby Berger said. “We’ve got that all taken care of.” Strangely, Stein seemed to blacken with a twist of pain.

“That’s not an answer,” Bobby said.

“I told you before,” Ivan Blue said, “you don’t want to know the answer. Take it from someone who knows it.”

“What is all this bullshit?” Bobby said.

“The fact is we have a detailed plan and the necessary forces to carry it out,” Stein said. “But the fewer people that know about it, the better. Too many people seem to know too much already.” He was putting out black pulses of fear, sickly fear tinted with the bile-green of jealous hate. These people are involved in something that’s twisting their karma, she thought. They wouldn’t be so out of sync with each other if they weren’t bound into something that’s out of control.

“And what do you want us to do to help this plan you won’t tell us anything about?” Bobby said. Bill just sat there drinking it in.

“We need a signal from the stage to coordinate our action,” Stein said. “A lot of people scattered around the festival will have to be able to move at the same time.”

“Is that all?” Bill said. “You just want us to like sing a certain song at a certain time?”

“Yeah, that would be great!” exclaimed Blue. “Something that would put people’s head in a revolutionary mood, and then—zap!”

“I could write something for it,” Bill said. “I’ve got a chorus of something I’m gonna call ‘New Worlds for Old’ kicking around in my head. I could make it go that way, I think. In fact, that might help me get it written.”

“Are you really thinking about doing this, Bill?” Susan said, finally breaking her silence. She could feel the lines of psychic force shift from Bill-centeredness to bipolarity, with both of them as centers.

“Why not?”

“Yeah,” said Bobby. “What the hell, we’d just be singing a song.”

“I could dig it.”

She saw that Bill had decided to do it in his own mind, that Bobby, going along with Bill, had brought Jerry and Mark with him. But she was half of the Velvet Cloud; her voice could still be decisive. Stein, Blue and Ruby Berger knew it and sensed the holding back within her.

Stein bombarded her with waves of desperate need far beyond anything implied by what he was asking; somehow this thing had filled his center and sat there vibrating his being with dread. Ruby Berger’s need was just as powerful, but it was a simple belief that she was traveling along triumph’s trajectory, her psyche skewed from reality in a mad headlong plunge to glory. Only Ivan Blue seemed to regard the whole thing as just another event in his life.

The terrible wrongness of it all tore at her. There’s no eye to this storm. There’s no center to this group, no harmony, no shared reality. They’re all on different trips. They’ll explode.

“Susan? Susan?”

Bill was looking into her eyes and talking softly, and she realized that she had been frozen there for... how long? Stein and Ruby Berger were staring at her nervously. The room had become too quiet.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I was just thinking.”

“You’re sure?” Bill said. There was a twinge of fear in his eyes, a fear colored with the memory of past anguish.

“I’m sure,” she said, unsure of anything, of what to do or say, of whether to tell Bill what she had sensed and confront him with the reality of Star or to let the wheel roll on to wherever it was taking them.

“Well, then what do you think about it, babes?”

“Could I talk to you alone for a moment, Bill?”

Flashes of Barry Stein’s fear pierced her with pain. But she wouldn’t let Bill see it. She couldn’t let him fear for her and surround them both with the aura of that fear and start again that downward spiral, the karmic tailspin that only Jango had been able to bring them out of, and then only against their will. We can’t let that happen to us again, babes. Anything would be better than that.

“We’re gonna get some air,” Bill said, taking her hand and ignoring the visible flashes of paranoia.

“What was all that, babes, are you okay?” Bill Horvath said. Susan stood with the looming darkness of the ravine below the house at her back, her green eyes phophorescing, reflecting the light of the living room at him She looks very strange, he thought. Like she’s riding the edge again.

“I just didn’t want to say what I had to say in front of them,” she said. “Why do you want to do this thing?”

Horvath hadn’t really thought about it. “It’s an easy enough thing to do, it may psych me into writing another good song, we’re not letting anyone rip us off for energy really, and... I dunno....” But he did know, when he confronted his own gut feelings. It was a way to say fuck you to Jango; it was a personal reason to go to the damn festival. And he sensed that it was the
right
thing to do, that not to move into this space in their destiny would put them back in their life-denying, self-destructive trip.

“I guess I just feel that it’s what we were meant to do,” he said. “It’s a real reason for going to Sunset City, it’s a way to really be the Velvet Cloud again, to make it mean something more than just another best-selling record album and bread in the pocket of Jango Beck. Doing this will really hold us together. And just maybe we owe it to the people.”

“I love you, babes,” Susan said.

“Does that mean you agree with me?”

She sighed. “If this can be what those people say it’s going to be, of course I want us to help them, to be a part of it. But...”

“But what?” Horvath said. What’s eating at her? What’s she scared of?

“But I just don’t like their vibes. Yeah, Bill, that’s it, I like what they want to do, but I don’t like the vibes the whole thing is giving off. I don’t know why, but I don’t trust the vibes. They’re not together people.”

“But maybe we are again,” he said. “Maybe we’re just what it takes to make this thing come together. At least we’ll find out about ourselves. About whether we can really be the Velvet Cloud again.”

“And you think we can?”

“I say let’s turn Jango’s line back on him. Let’s
really
be what we were meant to be. Not money for Beck, but energy for the people.”

She trembled for a moment, then glided forward into his arms, kissing him long and deep, riffling her hands through his hair. “What can I say except I love you, babes?”

Her eyes glowed like a cat’s in the warm summer night, beacons of their love, of her belief in what they were together, in the Velvet Cloud. We’re back together in the center of where we belong. I can feel it, and I can feel that she feels it, and doing this thing is part of it. The heat of love was in the air.

But in his arms, Susan’s body shuddered, once, twice, as if a chill breeze had blown through it.

Shaking with rage, John Horst glared at the huge black man who barred the way to the Dark Star inner offices with his seminude body like a Nubian palace guard in a Biblical epic. “I don’t care who he’s in conference with, you tell him John Horst is here and wants to see him
now.
He knows why.”

“Don’t run your dingo act on
me
, “the black man said, glaring right back with eyes that threatened physical violence. But Horst was in a state beyond physical fear, either for what he had been told such episodes could do to his heart or for what he had heard could happen to people who threatened Jango Beck.

“Then you get me someone who
can
break into his conference,” he snarled. “I’m not in the habit of arguing with people who can’t make decisions.”

“And I’m not in the habit of swallowing this kind of shit,” the black man said. “I might just decide to throw your honky ass out of here. Ask me nicely.”

“All right, I’m asking you nicely. Please get me someone with authority to break into Jango Beck’s conference.”

“That’s better,” the black man said, picking up a phone. “Sandy, we got a Mr. John Horst of Eden Pictures out here foaming at the mouth. Wants to see Jango. I told him that. Right.”

The black man relaxed, sat down behind his desk, and picked up a frayed paperback edition of
Naked Lunch.
“Sandra Bayne will be right with you,” he said. “Why don’t you feed the fish or play with the parrots?”

Horst staggered around Beck’s insane indoor jungle, listening with exaggerated sensitivity to the pounding of his heart. He had been told that his heart condition was mild, that all he had to do was watch his weight, lay off fats, and ease off a little, but how could he calm himself with those two pieces of paper roosting like carrion birds in his inside jacket pocket?

A Xerox of a bill for three million, one hundred twenty-five thousand, three hundred forty-five submitted by Mike Taub to Jango Beck as producer of
Sunset City
for film rights to
Taub’s
festival.

A Xerox of a check written by Beck as producer for Eden Pictures for three million, one hundred twenty-five thousand, three hundred forty-five dollars to Mike Taub as president of Eden Records.