Passing Through the Flame (90 page)

“This isn’t funny, Sargent. We’re right on the front line.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t have arranged for you to watch on closed-circuit TV in the Pentagon, Stein. I didn’t know you were a general.” Sargent and Pulaski shook their heads. “Jesus Christ,” Sargent said, “these nerds are all alike.”

He turned and disappeared into the crowd.

Standing in the narrow arc of shade at the western foot of the stage tower, Paul Conrad ran out the rest of the magazine panning across a slow hundred-and-twenty-degree panoramic sweep of the colorful crowd tiered on the hillsides, pausing every twenty degrees or so to zoom in on a face, a bit of detail—a boy and a girl sharing a big cantaloupe, a joint being passed, three guys in army shirts leaving a wake of angry faces in the crowd.

This stuff’ll make good cutaways, he thought as the magazine ran out. Editing all this footage into something coherent is going to be some job, an embarrassment of riches. It felt good to realize that he was looking ahead to the editing, that he probably had enough in the can already. Just about everything he needed from Rick and Velva was already shot, and the newsreel crews had shot about umpteen million feet of everything conceivable. From here on in, he could concentrate on getting the really
great
festival footage. And he sensed that the great footage was yet to come. Star... Susan... had promised him an event, and he believed she would deliver. She
was
an event when she appeared in public. The newsreel rushes he had seen were full of incredible footage of her.

He took another magazine from Emmett Francis, who was carrying his preloaded film as well as the radio, and loaded it into the camera. “Are we all set up yet?” he asked.

“Number one and two crews are moving around the audience, three and four are up on top of the ridge, and six is holding on for dear life,” Emmett said, pointing almost straight up into the sun at one of the light towers rising from the stage, at the tiny figure of a man outlined against the flash.

“Five?”

“Just a minute.” Emmett raised the number five crew on the radio. “They’re in the campground area behind the Garden of Eden.”

“That’s a waste,” Paul said. “Move them over to the south slope of the amphitheater; we might as well have one more crew in the crowd.”

Emmett nodded and relayed the orders. Directing six camera crews (seven counting himself) at once was something of which he had never conceived. He couldn’t call shots or even subjects; all he could do was call positions and change them as the situation warranted. Jango Beck had been dead right to hire newsreel people for the crews, cameramen used to reacting instantly on their own to unfolding events. The personal touch, the footage that told story, that revealed character, that could organize the newsreel footage into feature film material, he was counting on getting himself, in here where the human dimension of the day’s performances would be.

An undulating roar rumbled through the crowd, and the beat of rotors thrummed above it as a helicopter flew out over the lip of the amphitheater from the direction of the performers’ compound. Paul followed it with the camera as it flew above the heads of the crowd, ruffling swaths of long hair with its hurricane wind as it dipped low and thunk-thunked in toward the stage compound like a giant metal dragonfly. He came in for a tighter shot as it landed about twenty yards northeast of him in a fountain of dust and was met by four armed guards. The door opened, and he zoomed in on Star and Bill Horvath, as they stepped out straight into the cordon of guards. His face was tense, drawn, and a little gray-looking; her eyes were feverish and shiny. Neither of them seemed to notice the rentacops. Their eyes were drawn in and up toward the platform of the stage, high above them. Paul panned along their line of sight up at the stage from a low angle, catching the sun flashing through the metal grill work of a light tower, an explosion of gold that filled the frame.

Chris Sargent squinted at the helicopter as it flew directly overhead back over the ridgeline and resisted the fantasy urge to bring out his M-16 and get rid of the mother while it was presenting such a fat target. If the people flying Beck’s goddamn copters had any combat experience, they could be trouble, even if the things weren’t armored. True, they’re nothing our firepower can’t handle unless they’ve got a lot more than the handguns we’ve seen, but still, it would be nice to blow away this son of a bitch now and have one less copter to worry about. But of course only a berserker like Bellows would even think of pulling a stunt like that now.

Which was one of the reasons he had stationed Bellows’ group right next to his, just in case Bellows got some crazy idea. The next ten minutes called for precise timing and maneuvering, and no fuck-ups.

Each of the boys except Pulaski had a squad of five of the more reliable recruits, all armed with cheap pistols, six squads in all, seated here side by side in a tight wedge about ten yards from the fence, screened from the guards inside by the kids between them and the stage compound.

Sargent checked his watch. Twelve six. If those asshole revolutionaries weren’t really as hopeless as Pulaski had groused they were, the Molotovs should be starting to fly at the People’s World’s Fair just about now. He nodded to Bellows to his right, Baum to his left. He leaned over forward, feeling the comforting hardness of the M-16 in the bag on his lap, and whispered to his own crazies. “Go minus nine, boys. We’re starting to move.”

Two of the nerds reached into their pockets and felt up their new toys. Jesus Christ! “Keep your hands off your iron until you’re ready to use it, goddamn it! And that’s not until I tell you to, got that?”

Spaced-out eyes glared at him in defiance—these troops were fried to the eyeballs. But they could be handled, if you had no illusions. Sargent stroked the package on his lap as those red-rimmed, freaked-out eyes stared at him in wounded outrage. Once they were reminded who really packed the firepower, they lost interest in the staring contest.

Paul backed away from the stage tower, out toward the perimeter fencing, so as to get a better angle on the stage when the performance began, and Emmett Francis stayed to his right rear, ready to hand him new film magazines and relay orders on the radio. A school of fluffy white clouds drifted across the big blue sky, dappling the vast meadow of people with an ever-shifting camouflage pattern of light and shade, turning their faces, hair, and clothes into a happy abstract butterfly dance of bright colors. Paul decided to shoot a few feet of it, just for the hell of it—

“Something happening, Paul!” Emmett said sharply in his ear. “Number four reports a fire by the Coke pavilion.”

“Might as well get them down there to cover it—”

The radio crackled, and Paul heard an excited voice over the static. “...number three, there’s smoke and flame inside the Ecoenvironment Dome, repeat, smoke and flame at the Ecoenvironment Dome, bright orange flame....”

“Get him down there—no, wait a minute!”

“...a small fire burning behind the GM exhibit, I can see a security helicopter...”

“... and another one in a row of stands... just burst into flame like it was hit with a Molotov cocktail....”

Time seemed to slow down in Paul’s mind. He could visualize fires burning all up and down the People’s World’s Fair, someone must be setting them! This is it! This is what she wouldn’t tell me! My God....

“Get the helicopter in the air,” he told Emmett, “have them land in the campgrounds and pick up number five to cover the fires. And get number four down there to get what they can on the ground.”

As the orders were relayed, Paul kept his camera ready and his eyes on the tranquil, happy-days crowd sweeping up to the southern ridgeline, basking in the sun, passing their dope around, drinking wine, enjoying the pleasure of their own company while they waited for the music. A meadow of human flowers sucking up the good vibes, unaware that just over the hill was the smoke and fire of burning buildings, of what in their minds might be the revolution, of what might just be the real thing itself.

“...three more cars of security guards entering the area....”

The cheery crowd goofing in the sun seemed sinister now in its very good times spirit—how much longer would that ignorant bliss last? A thin wisp of smoke was already curling up over the horizon.

Bill Horvath could see uniformed guards scurrying around the recording shack toward the gate in the fence as the booming voice of the announcer finished its hype. “...and now—the Velvet Cloud!” The crowd began to roar.

“Here we go!” he said, and he lei Bobby, Mark, and Jerry up the steel stairway from the foot of the recording shack to the stage, the stairs ringing backing for the voice of the crowd.

They bounced up onto the stage to a sudden increase in noise level, out of the shade of the tower structure and into the blaze of high noon. Into a caldron of incredible white noise, shouting faces, blinding sunlight, and shimmering heat waves. Heat energy, light energy, sound energy, and human energy cascaded from the sky and hillsides, a Niagara of all-spectrum vibrations that just about blew Horvath’s mind. Like trying to breathe in a roomful of amyl nitrate!

He adjusted to the light first and saw the smear of shouting humanity as a great saucer of individual faces filling his field of vision, a gigantic audience maybe, but an audience: a collection of all different kinds of people on all different kinds of trips high on all different kinds of dope, all gathered together to have the same good time. Once the people became human to him, the cheers too became human, became the applause of one hell of a lot of people who were going to make this place their own.

But he could see currents in the crowd, whole sections of people in the middle distance in mad motion like a kicked-over anthill, and a stream of uniformed men grunting their way through the crowd from the gate in the stage compound fence, a moving scar of bad vibes—

Then Susan stepped up onto the stage.

Through the viewfinder of his camera, Paul saw a figure radiating quicksilver shards of light rise into sight in the center of the stage: Star, wearing a suit of black and gold that flashed as she moved from the dozens of mirrors sewn into it, a vision of unreal intensity. But gloriously real enough to record itself on film!

“...lunatics running around down here waving guns around... we’re getting out of here, crew one over....”

The noise of the crowd almost died for a beat, then rose again as she drifted across the stage, shedding beams of rainbow sunlight.

“Paul—”

“Hold it, Emmett—”

“Paul—”

A cloud passed over the stage, throwing her into shadow. “Okay, Emmett, what is it?”

“Seems like we got a little war going on out there.”

“Get ready!” Pulaski shouted, springing into a crouch, pulling wire cutters out of his package, and clutching the bag tightly to him. “On my command!”

Barry Stein shivered with dread as the dude beside him pulled out his own wire cutters, snipping the air with them and laughing, and then with his other hand drew out his gun.

Chris Sargent forced himself to concentrate on Star, walking slowly around the stage, then spiraling in toward the center while the musicians tuned up. There was nothing he could do now until she began to sing. He had no way of accurately judging what was going on in the far reaches of the human jungle behind him. But thirty or so rentacops
had
been drawn out of the stage compound to deal with the crazies in the crowd, so the diversions couldn’t be total flops.

He waited for the sound of Star’s voice to trigger the carefully shaped charges, to ignite the rest of his chain of controlled explosions.

She
felt the tension building in her from her toes to her lips, from the marrow of her bones to the tiny golden hairs on her skin, from her loins to the hardened tips of her nipples, from a sickening fear inside to an ecstatic desire to fling her being into the roaring crowd, into the body of the people, into the winds of unknown fate, and
get it out,
be wherever she was going.

Bill’s hand poised over the opening chord of the song, and their eyes met and held, and worlds passed between them. An eternity of their love in that strobe-flash moment, and a million years of shared and yet unshared pain. Her loneliness out here in this place to which he could not follow, this reality which he could neither comprehend nor entirely believe, and her joy at the way his being embraced and enfolded her still, even knowing that there was a part of her beyond his acceptance or understanding. His fear for her sanity, and his greater fear of losing her to something beyond sanity or madness. But most of all, their love, which yet survived, flowing through her in a great golden tide, giving her its strength, and lighting the way home.

They silently flashed good luck at each other, and Bill’s hand came down, fracturing the blue sky and the dying roar of the crowd with a flare of music.

The sound rippled through the great saucer of people like a circular wave front of transformation, transmuting the energy of their voices into the motion of their bodies, as they silenced and seated themselves around the pivot of the stage. She felt as if she were standing in the middle of a choppy, shimmering sea; a sea that she could swirl into a storm with the finger of her hand, a sea that could rise with the suddenness of a tidal wave to engulf her.

The voices of the Cloud began the ominous, keening opening chorus, and she saw the black vibrations radiating from the stage, mirrored by whirling vortices of darkness in the body of the crowd, whirlpools marring the surface of the sea, as if some huge monster had been summoned from the stygian depths and was surfacing in a ghastly bubble of black foam from the ocean floor.

New worlds for old,

Warm worlds for cold

Bright worlds I’m told

Brighter than gold

New worlds for old....

Then the words came rising up out of her, bubbles of sound called up by that same siren call from the ocean floor of her soul, bursting through her lips into sound with the power of a thousand fathoms of released pressure, an orgasm spasm of unchained karma exploding her into the unfolding now.