A light rain fell over the island city, veiling it in heavy mists. The towers of glass that held Second City's millions of inhabitants were silvery grey, damp, and gleaming eerily. A trio of satellites shot by on their way to other things, leaving smears of orange behind them in the otherwise grey world, streaks that quickly faded as the small round objects flew on, their reflections touching the glass buildings softly before they were gone.
The two-thousand-year-old city paid no heed to their departure. The waves lapped around its artificial base of metal, as though reminding it that cities had no business floating out to sea and attaching themselves to islands. Yet here the city sat, testament to the fact that all wars must end sooner or later.
The war had gone on for fourteen hundred years. The beginning of it had been a complete shock to the peaceful, and, at the time, relatively primitive Sferkkaans. The invaders had come in gleaming ships of silver, wielding weapons that shot bolts of light, and left bloodless wounds. The invaders, the Kyphisians, pillaged at will, taking advantage of the Sferkkaans, and draining their resources. They committed crimes of unspeakable horror on the gentle people of this rain-shrouded planet, including the extermination of virtually every woman and girl on the planet through specially designed poisons in the water. Natural birth became almost unheard of, and the Kyphisians kept up their supply of Sferkkaan slaves by raising embryos in labs, altering them to suit their needs. Few of the current population could boast having parents.
They advanced their sciences at the expense of the natives, but, ultimately, this proved their downfall. They created an elaborate array of gladiators for their own amusement, some huge and hulking, some delicate and lethally fast. The small warriors were called ‘Whips’, bred for beauty as well as violence, kept as pets by the upper echelon of Kyphisian society.
One night, the Whips reminded the Generals and politicians holding sway over their lives that a whip, improperly handled, could come back on its wielder. The final battle to take back their home had begun.
Even now the grand shining city bore scars, not yet cleared away by the new Emperor's diligent cleaning crews. There were still frayed edges to its base, where Kyphisian soldiers had threatened the delicate floatation devices that supported it. Many roads were still under reconstruction, and, here and there, open spaces marked the absence of a building, missing like a tooth from a mouth.
Warplanes shot by, touching the buildings with their own reflection, searching for an enemy who now no longer walked Sferkkaan shores. The slender white planes banked and wheeled, deadly silent, their underbellies painted wild colours by victorious pilots. They rolled in the sky, flashing their white and gold upper-halves, then shot straight up, out of the perpetual cloud cover and into the light of the sun, a star too deadly bright for the beings on the planet below.
Despite the reminders of war, life was good, much better than it had been for the fourteen hundred years that the Kyphisians had held reign. It was spring in ever so many ways in Second City, and the soft rain discouraged no one. People wore bright colours, and waved when they saw any of their soldiers go by.
Heavy artillery and war vehicles, once all sombre grey, now sported ridiculous colours, painted on by an adoring and relieved populace. A laser cannon of mind-boggling proportions rested passively in the square it had occupied for so long, painted various shades of blue to make a suitable background for the National flag, which was quite loud enough on its own. The flag was blood red, the field for a gold sun. In the middle of the sun sat a great creature of solid black, wings slightly raised: a Gryphon.
In the base of the cannon where fighters had once slept, a family had moved in, and now sold fruit and flowers for a living. The fifteen-year-old girl who lived there had the privilege of being able to tune in Sferkkaa's last surviving radio station, Satellite Base Four, a pirate station that had been forced to take to the outer stratosphere in order to maintain broadcast. Now she heard something no one before her generation had been able to hear on the radio: music. And if at times she played it a bit too loudly, no one in the house complained. They had heard worse.
The generally happy crew of the once-outlawed Satellite Base Four had heard worse as well, and found music a wonderful change from constant revolution literature and propaganda. Music was a huge part of Sferkkaan life and culture, and for the last five hundred years had been prohibited by the inhabiting Kyphisian government. Especially the dangerous new stuff that provoked wild excitement and reaction; the stuff that Satellite Base Four now cheerfully broadcasted to the stars as it wheeled in its orbit high above the planet’s surface, looking down upon its haze.
The origin of the music was near impossible to place. It had come into being approximately thirty years ago, discovered by a man who apparently had nothing better to do with his days than design and redesign complex monitoring systems. What he had been constructing the systems for no one had ever found out. Those who had known the man before he had been executed said that he had been a bit unstable, and had an obsession with the equipment. The man had built the monitor to find new sounds, and, in the middle of a dead still winter night, he did.
Calling in his few friends, the small group sat and listened to what emerged from the complex speakers, faint at best, decaying into a bare whisper at worst. Alien voices sang alien songs, and more alien voices spoke between the songs. The aliens called their music Ra Khan Roll, and after a few hours of rapt attention the group began finding ways to record what they were hearing. Finally they had one full song, faint but clear. They ran it through an enhancing process, and eventually had a decently audible copy of the song. They ran off copies and distributed them by the bagful. The bootlegging went on at a shameful rate, until the man who had built the monitoring device was shot for distributing material for the purpose of disrupting the peace.
The Beatles had officially invaded Sferkkaa.
The alien music provoked much feeling from the spirited Sferkkaans, and the Kyphisians wanted none of it. Anyone caught playing this new music would be shot, or worse. But despite the death of the music's founder, and the confiscation of his equipment, the music didn't go away. Instead, the music slid underground, into the darker recesses of Sferkkaan life. The music was regarded as dangerous by the Kyphisians, therefore it had to be of some value. Ra Khan Roll made its way by degrees into the heart of the Resistance Movement, into a place known as The Cylinder.
The Cylinder had originally been built as a city unto itself, a refuge for the wealthy. The upper stories remained such a place, but the underground of The Cylinder was literally and figuratively the lowest a person could go on the planet. South Continent drug dealers, chased out of their jungle market, congregated there, along with dissidents and rebels. Exotic whores roamed the corridors, hawkers set up strange shops and sold whatever the buyer wanted, while in the mushroom dens, the political and intellectual minds of the times gathered and plotted. Some were caught and taken away to the prisons on the Kyphisian moon, others simply grew old and cynical, writing political literature and strange poetry as they had all of their lives, smoking and injecting the illegal mushroom drug.
Those who were not yet dead or jaded began to play Ra Khan Roll. It became a voice for the people, a way to let themselves know that they were still alive. Those who dared to play it were held in awe by those not brave enough to do so. To be a musician was a fast way to die young, but the musicians hung in, and formed groups. Many of them were politically involved intellects, not a few were working within the groups of rebels that appeared to make life miserable for the oppressors, the `Grey Boys,' as the pale, grey-eyed oppressors were known.
Musicians had always been held in awe by the Sferkkaans: suddenly they had become revered. When the war finally ended, many of the music groups had trouble with the concept of being able to play openly, and disbanded. A few stayed around, and enjoyed the adulation and financial reward. The Emperor would have been happier without them, but had no desire to do anything about the groups. In quiet moments, which were few and far between, he often had the depressing feeling that he was the only man on the planet who hated Ra Khan Roll. He was also not thrilled about being Emperor, but did not see any point in arguing the situation at the moment. He was, after all, quite likely the descendant of the last Emperor. He was also wildly popular, and the fact that he hated Ra Khan Roll only served to make him more so.
Sferkkaan humour was like that. |
