It had been going on now for almost two hours. Uninterrupted drumming. Interminable drumming, as far as Wanda Ases was concerned. With nothing but a canteen full of septic water and a handbag stuffed with Shlemmer’s automatic pistol and every round of ammunition she could find, she’d plunged off through the jungle; in the direction she knew S’pense to be.
Her head was a clutter of noise and frustration and the drumming only magnified the pain. Her presence here in Buena Salida, the kidnapping, the fevers, the loss of Shlemmer, the relentless indignity of it all seemed to be inextricably interwoven with the mad endless trundle of drums. And, though she could find no actual rationale for it, Wanda Ases had come to believe that it all had to be under the specific direction of one Brian S’pense.
She found herself on one side of a chain-link fence, latticed with ivy and crowned with looped skeins of wire that looked like a shrapnel bomb exploded in freeze-frame. From her bag, Wanda pulled the cutting pliers she’d rummaged from the jeep’s toolkit. It proved harder to cut the vines than to clip her way through the wire.
She was only slightly annoyed that no-one appeared to try and interfere with her. She would have liked to be tested by the circumstance; to discover if she had the ability, when forced to it, of finally completing the mission Shlemmer’d assigned to her so long ago. But, to her continuing bewilderment, Wanda was able to make her way through the compound and to the very back of the stage without seeing or being seen by anyone.
In the vast hollow that had been carved from the jungle, in this natural bowl that had once, nearly two million years ago, been the fuming mouth of a tremendous volcano, a multitude of native Salidans had gathered; were still gathering. The drums had exploded out of S’pense’s enormous speakers, stacked totemlike, fifty feet high. The lights and the color organs had begun to blaze.
Almost at the same instant, and not without the complete foreknowledge of Colonel Tidbits, an almost invisible moon slid herself across the face of the sun, sending the valley into a murky semi-darkness. Although the effect was almost mystical, Tidbits swore and snapped a pencil in half.
“The eclipse wasn’t supposed to happen til ten minutes into the second movement! Damn you, S’pense, we’re falling farther behind.”
But Brian S’pense had lost any ability to hear the hypertussive Colonel. For the first time in years, he felt a nervous giddiness charging his synapses. Whatever the effect that Project Rock’n’Roll might be having on the assembled throng of native Salidans, it was certainly finding in S’pense a most enthusiastic audience.
Almost as soon as the music had begun, S’pense had lapsed into a deep Alpha brainwave state. The drumming came in waves of fifths, eighths, fifteenths, seventeenths, eighteenths and twenty-seconds, layered and played against each other to a poly-rhythmic melange approximating something one might hear at an open air bowling alley by the seashore that was also in the flight path of a major metropolitan airport.
S’pense’s heartbeat found a cadence with which to resonate, his breathing found another, and before he could think to himself, “Gee, I feel good!”, his eyes were tricked by the light-show into a mime of the same Rapid Eye Movements associated with dream-state activity.
Then suddenly the Salidans answered back. Perhaps as many as fifteen-thousand drummers in the valley and further back in the jungle set their mallets to wood or hide or bone and in an instant, the noise had modulated to a ferocious new plane. Tidbits grabbed a gain control and screamed at a bewildered roadie. In the chaos, nobody noticed that the door was opening, or that Wanda Ases had found her way in.
Main image: Photo by Abed Ismail on Unsplash.