Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space (26 page)

‘Full moon party?’

‘Yeah. Come be part of the universal family. And here, have some floral essence to prepare for the occasion. Stick out your tongue.’

Baby stuck out her tongue. It was turquoise.

‘Oh, man. You are so cool.’ Feralette pulled out the small bottle from her basket and administered a few drops of liquid. Immediately, Baby saw a pattern of brightly coloured poppies unfold across the sky. When the poppies faded, the feral had gone and Jake was staring at Baby with amusement.

They continued up towards the beach. A van with ocean waves painted on its doors and a stack of surfboards on the roof rack chugged by, stereo blasting. ‘There goes Lati,’ said Baby, noticing two pert antennae amongst the dreads and mohawks. The twins and Henry had driven out to Nimbin to score whatever was on tap in that ripped little mountain community cum drugs bazaar. For her part Doll had abducted a board and had taken it down to the Pass, where the surf co-operatively swelled into perfect tubes for her to ride.

Byron did funny things to people. At this moment, it was doing something so funny to Jake that he actually reached out and took Baby’s hand. For one perfect second, they rose together and floated, hand in hand, high above the street. They gazed out over the ocean, where pods of dolphins frolicked in celebration. Then, ever so gently, they glided back to earth. Jake resolved to tell Baby he loved her. He would drop to his knees right there, in front of Earth & Sea Pizza, and do it. I love you, Baby.

He looked at her and opened his mouth. Come on.
You can do it, Jake. He cleared his throat. ‘Baby.’

‘Yes, Earth boy?’

Damn! It just wouldn’t come out. ‘Try one of these,’ he said instead. ‘Space cookies.’ He’d tried. He really had.

‘Do you think you can ever take too many drugs, Jake?’

‘Nah. Yeah. Depends on the timing, really.’

They’d reached the Main Beach and were climbing down the rocks to the sand. ‘What do you mean by timing?’ she asked. ‘Is it, like, take this, wait an hour, take that?’

‘I meant the timing of when you think about it, really. The morning after, when your head is full of lumberjacks cutting down trees with chainsaws, and there are little men with hammers trying to nail things into the back of your eyes, and your stomach feels like you’ve just swallowed someone else’s farts, then, yes, I think, I’ve just taken a few too many drugs. But that same amount of drugs, the night before, when they’re doing the cancan in your brain, and you’re starting to see the colours of music and you feel like a combination of Jesus Christ, Stephen Hawking and Jim Morrison, that’s just the right amount. That’s what I mean by timing.’

‘I see,’ said Baby, taking another bite of cookie. ‘Ergh. Don’t know how you palate this stuff. Spewin’. Do you have anything to take the edge off?’ Jake pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered her the foil. ‘Thanks,’ she said gratefully. Her antennae suddenly lit up like sparklers.

‘Nice place, Byron Bay,’ said Baby, looking dreamily at the sky, where the clouds were metamorphosing into while lilies and freesia. ‘What were we talking about?’

‘Can’t remember,’ said Jake, watching daisies sprout from between his toes. He was suddenly possessed by the
urgent need to figure out how the alphabet was spelt. ‘A’ wasn’t too hard—A-I-Y would do—and ‘B’—B-E-E—was easy, but what about ‘C’? S-E-E? It didn’t actually have the letter ‘c’ in it. Was that okay?
Really
okay?

Jake was still occupied by this problem as they hiked up the dunes to where the trees met the sand, and stretched their limbs across the fine white powder. Jake considered doing a line of sand. He concluded that this was probably not a good idea, rolled a joint instead, and passed it to Baby along with the bag of mushrooms.

As they sat there quietly enjoying the rush of heightened sensation, an insect debranched from one of the trees and fell with a little plop onto the sand beside them. Its head was bulbous and gold, with delicate antennae and a single, large black eye dead-centre. Its six spindly legs worked hard at hauling its wormy green body along behind it. Lest any other creature be tempted to laugh at its cycloptic head or laboured gait, it brandished a menacing spike on its arse. The contractions and expansions of its ridged exoskeleton made it look like it was pulsing with electricity. With each pulse, it grew in size until its body had expanded to the size of Jake’s leg. Baby’s heart skipped a beat. She looked at Jake, but he hadn’t seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. Sunbathers strolled by, glancing up at them but registering no particular surprise. Baby was thinking this drugs thing could get a little freaky when the creature tapped her with its antennae. ‘Pssst,’ it said. ‘It’s me. Your cousin Zyggo.’

Baby did a double take. ‘Zyg! I didn’t recognise you. Then, how could I? What are you doing here? Why are you dressed like that? How did you get here?’

She glanced nervously at Jake. He was smiling placidly
at the sky, his eyes hidden by his sunnies. ‘“H”,’ he was thinking, ‘how do you spell “H”?’

‘Whoa whoa whoa,’ laughed Zyggo. ‘One thing at a time. Doesn’t that stuff mellow you out at all? First of all, I’m not actually here. Not in the physical sense, like you are. It’s a parallel yooniverz shtick. As far as the rellies are concerned I’m still at Uncle Oyszty’s birthday barbie chowing down on a uranium-burger and paying out on a couple of Vogons who’d invited themselves over.’

‘Oh,
yum
.’ Baby’s mouth watered. ‘I’ve had such a craving for uranium since we got here, I can’t tell you. There’s supposed to be heaps of it up north. Maybe we’ can go there together. How long you here for?’

Zyggo tried to sit up. His new body was not built for vertical mobility. He only succeeded in falling over, and lay on his back flailing the air with all six of his legs until Baby reached over and flipped him onto his stomach. ‘Ta,’ he said. ‘Not long. I’ve got to get back before anyone notices that I’m just a hologram of my former self. But I’m not here on a joyride, as joyous as it is to see you, my dear. Did you get any of my messages?’

‘Messages? Where did you leave them?’

‘Where else?’ Zyggo rolled his one eye, not a pretty sight. ‘On the ether. Don’t you ever check your e-mail?’

Baby answered in an abashed tone, ‘Nup. Never even occurred to me. I’m having too much fun, Zyg. Who wants to spend all their time in front of a compu-tron anyway? I’m over compu-trons. Goodbye, geek girl. Reject the virtual, embrace the real. Besides, I never actually learned how to log on. What? What are you doing now?’

Zyggo was clawing the air with his front feet. ‘Trying to put my head in my hands to emphasise my shock and
dismay. Communications is the first thing they teach you in interstellar piloting.’

‘Zyg. They didn’t exactly give us training and hand over the manual. We stole the spaceship.’

‘So you did. Which brings me to the point. Why I’m here. It’s not for my health you know.’ With his one protuberant eye, Zyggo looked himself up and down with distaste. ‘This particular hallucination is giving me the shits. Why couldn’t you have dreamed up some giant flower or something? I just needed one good image hook to facilitate somatisation. You know how it works. A nice little goblin would have done me fine, or a sequinned kangaroo or even a bagel.’

‘I didn’t know you were coming.’

‘Never mind. Anyway, it seems the whole incident has caused quite a stir in the Leading Qohort. A mate of mine, Exl, works as a metallurgist in the Qohort kitchens. He was hanging out after hours hoping to flog a few aluminium ingots and these two bigsters came in, Qwerk and this other guy. Exl did a quick shapeshift and pretended he was a smelting pot till they left, praying that no one would light a fire under him. As a pot his hearing wasn’t brilliant, so he couldn’t quite make out everything they were saying, but it had to do with “neutralising” you and your two pals. They said you had defective genes.’

‘Defective jeans? My Levis? I just abducted them a few days ago.’

‘Genes, Einsteinette. As in chromosomes? The point is, you’re in what I believe Earthlings call “the ship”.’

Jake slowly rotated his head around, removed his sunnies, fixed his dilated pupils on Zyggo and drawled, ‘The shit, man, the shit.’ Then, with a dignified and deliberate gesture, he put his sunnies back on and passed out on the sand.

Zyggo looked at Baby in puzzlement. ‘Who’s the wasteoid?’

‘Don’t worry about him,’ said Baby. ‘He’ll be right.’

‘The point is, will
you?
They’re after you, Baby. If I were you I’d pack up and kiss your sweet Earth goodbye. Oh, don’t look so sad. I can’t bear it. There’s plenty of other planets in the yoon. New ones are coming into existence every day.’

‘Yeah, but.’ Baby’s eyes misted over.

‘But what? You saw what they did to Michelle Mabelle. And she never even stole a spaceship. Or ran away to Earth. Or, bloody Betelgeuse, formed a
rock
band. Really, Baby! Don’t you know rock n roll is dead? Ambient, trance, jungle, even dream pop or lounge I could understand—but
rock?
It’s so, so, I don’t know, passe or something. Darling, if you weren’t my cousin, I’d consider prosecuting you for fashion crimes. Oh, c’mon, I’m only joking. Look at me, Baby.’

‘Rock n roll will never die,’ Baby replied, her bottom lip quivering. ‘And I’m staying.’ She laid a hand on Jake’s leg.

Zyggo looked at Jake as though seeing him for the first time. ‘Don’t tell me you’re—’

‘No.’

‘In
love
.’

‘Love?
What’s that
got to do with it,’ she snapped. ‘Sorry, Zyg,’ she apologised, abashed, ‘it’s all a bit emotional.’ She looked up into the sky, where a lenticular cloud hovered, honking its horn. ‘Is that your ride?’

Zyggo tried to wave at it. ‘Coming!’ he shouted.

Beep beep.
The cloud, a saucer in disguise, was double parked. And everyone knew God’s attitude towards double parking.
Beep beep.

‘Zyg, I thought you were parallel yooning. What’s with the saucer?’

‘Some blokes I met from Planet X. They’re just gonna take me to a higher ground. I’ll zip off from there. Great guys, by the way. They didn’t even bat an eye at my present, uh, configuration. You should meet them Baby. Get your mind off.’

‘I’m not interested in other ayles,’ she sniffed.

Zyg was about to say something when the saucer honked again. He decided to let it rest. ‘Well, cousin, it’s been real. Chip chip.’

‘Chip chip. Oh, and thanks, Zyggo. Thanks a lot.’

Zyggo flew into the sky like a Chinese dragon kite. A door opened in the cloud, and he disappeared into it. The cloud hung a u-ee, zoomed east, shot out over Cape Byron and was gone.

There once was a captain called Qwerk

The yoon’s most silliest jerk

There’s no hair on a grey

But he’d brush every day

Fifty strokes, up and down, the big berk.

Qwerk compressed his expressionless little slit of a mouth into an even tighter slit as he scrubbed the latest graffito off the fathership’s bathroom wall. Why did they torment him like this? Was it necessary? He honestly didn’t understand why anyone did anything that did not have a safe and predictable, not to mention a sensible and constructive outcome. Besides, what was so funny about brushing? So what if he didn’t have hair? What was so good about hair?

Squeezing out the sponge, Qwerk checked his chronometer. ETA was, let’s see, about two Earth-months away. He mentally reviewed his plan for the hundredth time. First, offload the other ayles. Aliens. God, now he was even talking like them. Second, locate and capture the feral hybrids Ms Baby, Ms Parts and Ms Dohdidohdoh before they could further insanitise the planet. A
rock
band.
Really.
He’d found out about it when one of the many bots, er, robots that Nufonians planted around the world to keep an eye on Earthling affairs beamed up an excited report on their Annandale gig. Over-excited, if you asked Qwerk. Were not even robots safe from these girls’ pernicious influence? Clearly not.

Never mind. Once the girls were out of the way and they could begin to implement the Hidden Agenda, everything would straighten itself out.