Inhalt

Leseprobe

MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH

TIME OF THE HAWKLORDS

A novel

Apex-Verlag

Content

The Book

By the same author

Note

Legend

HAWKCRAFT INVENTORY

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE: ROCKING ON THE EDGE OF TIME

BOOK TWO: TIME OF THE HAWKLORDS

BOOK THREE: THE BATTLE FOR EARTH

List of Credits

The Book

Deep at the Earth's Centre lay the Death Generator. Buried there from time immemorial by a long-dead race of aliens, it had at last been triggered into action...

For among the ruins of London, surrounded by the survivors of the recent holocaust, Hawkwind rock, their music catalysing the attacking Death Ray - a lethal concoction of high energy that insinuates its way into the mind, tormenting every sense with demonic psychic visions. With the breakdown of the barriers between nightmare and reality, Hawkwind find themselves re-enacting the stages of a war that took place thousands of years before, in which they take the role of the Hawklords - the only potential saviours of the human race otherwise doomed to extermination in an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil...

Time of the Hawklords by Michael Butterworth (born 24 April 1947 in Manchester) - based on an idea by Michael Moorcock - was first published in 1976: an echo of New Wave SF, an incomparable psychedelic rock fantasy - and a definitive cult novel!

Time of the Hawklords is published in a new edition by Apex-Verlag, reviewed by the author (and supplemented by a preface).

Copyright

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing by the publisher.

By the same author

Novels

The Time of the Hawklords

Queens of Deliria (Hawklords 2)

My Servant the Wind

Collections

Butterworth

Non-fiction

The Blue Monday Diaries: In the Studio with New Order

AC/DC: Hell Ain’t No Bad Place to Be (as by Richard Bunton)

Poetry

Complete Poems: 1965–2000

Novelisations

Space: 1999 Series Two:

Planets of Peril

Mind-Breaks of Space (with J Jeff Jones)

The Space-Jackers

The Psychomorph

The Time Fighters

The Edge of the Infinite

Space: 1999 Year Two Omnibus

Co-authored and Co-originated Works

Lord Horror (novel, main author David Britton)

Brion Gysin: Here to Go: Planet R101 (non-fiction, main author Terry Wilson)

Lord Horror: Reverbstorm (graphic novel, main authors David Britton & John Coulthart)

68 Cantos (prose-poems, main author William Weiss)

Ledge of Darkness (graphic novel, Hawklords 3, main author Bob Walker)

Return from the Wild (the story of Lassie the fox-dog, main author John Roberts Warren)

Anthologies

The Savoy Book (ed., with David Britton)

Savoy Dreams (ed., with David Britton)

Works Edited

All novels in the Lord Horror sequence:

Lord Horror

Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz

Baptised in the Blood of Millions

La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz

Invictus Horror

Razor King

Old Death

For DikMik, Terry, Del and Bob Calvert

Note

While the characters in this story are based on actual people the descriptions of these characters are entirely fictitious and based on rôles used by members of Hawkwind on stage and recorded performances.

Legend

“And in the fullness of time, the prophecy must be fulfilled and the HAWKLORDS shall return to smite the land. And the Dark Forces shall be scourged, the cities razed and made into parks. Peace shall come to everyone. For is it not written that the Sword is the key to Hell and Heaven?”

HAWKCRAFT INVENTORY

At the time of the events presented in this book, the ever-changing crew of the Hawkwind Spacecraft are:

Baron Brock – (David Brock, lead guitar, 12-string guitar, synthesizer, organ and vocals)

The Thunder Rider – (Nik Turner, sax, oboe, flute and vocals).

Count Motorhead – (Lemmy, bass and vocals)

Lord Rudolph the Black – (Paul Rudolph, bass and guitars)

The Hound Master – (Simon King, drums and percussion)

The Sonic Prince – (Simon House, keyboards, mellotron and violin)

Stacia … The Earth Mother – (Stacia, dance)

Astral Al – (Alan Powell, drums and percussion)

Liquid Len – (Jonathan Smeeton, lights)

Captain Calvert – (Bob Calvert, with Lucky Leif and The Longships)

Moorlock … The Acid Sorcerer – (Mike Moorcock, with The Deep Fix)

Actonium Doug – (Doug Smith, Manager)

INTRODUCTION

When I accepted an offer from Michael Moorcock to co-write the Hawklords novels I had reached a not very happy crossroads in my life. It was 1974, and the period known as the New Wave of Science Fiction, which had harboured my output from my first published story in New Worlds in 1966, had rolled its last, leaving me with a reputation but no market for the kind of work I was producing.

My marriage had also failed. This tragedy had unexpectedly left me with two young children to raise. Their wellbeing and my sanity were the reasons I was looking around for better-paid work. I first tried copywriting, taking on two positions at different Manchester ad agencies, but found I was not good at teamwork, an essential quality if one is to succeed in this kind of business. While waiting for a new job to turn up I tried my hand at freelance writing. Jim Cawthorn very kindly walked me round London introducing me to his hard-won contacts. For a while I sold articles to the children’s magazine Look and Learn, the soft-core Blade and others, but it did not take long until it became clear that I would need more time than I had to establish myself this way. Not caring to return to my old job as a laboratory technician, an occupation I had done ever since leaving school, and with no other job in sight, I was beginning to get desperate. It was at this point that Mike, hearing of the plight I was in with my children, made his offer.

He had signed for a three-book deal with Star Books. Did I want to write them in his stead? The arrangement would suit him, because other work had come along that he hadn’t anticipated. The books were to be about “Hawkwind rocking in the ruins of London”. I could keep all the money.

Well, yes. I couldn’t think of a better way of being a single parent. The only problem was, I had never written a novel before, let alone three. A small detail like this did not deter me. I could foresee two years’ reliable income working from home. One of my children was then aged almost five, and the other nearly three. They would need a lot of attention.

I signed contracts in May 1975 and, from Mike’s one-line brief about Hawkwind rocking in the ruins, I started writing The Time of the Hawklords. I began at my mother’s house at 10 Charter Rd, Altrincham, Manchester, and put the finishing touches to it early one sunny morning perched atop a tombstone in Kensal Green Cemetery on the Harrow Road, London.

To take the pressure off my mother I had moved together with my children to live with friends at 804 Harrow Rd. The bulk of the novel was written there, in the scant period each day after dropping Nicky off at school and taking Damon to his nursery, and in the small hours at night after they had both been put to bed. In no small way my ordeal was brightened by the friendship of Hilary Bailey, a walk down the Ladbroke Grove to Number 87a, where she lived with Mike’s and her kids – Max, their youngest child, and Sophie and Kate, both young teenagers of similar ages to one another. There was always a welcome for me, with my shopping bags and my pushchair for Damon, for a cup of tea and a natter. Hilary had her own writing to do, so it was not always convenient for her. Nevertheless, on my arrival it was usual to find a sign on her front door warning visitors, WHOEVER YOU ARE FUCK OFF EXCEPT FOR MIKE BUTTERWORTH AND HIS CHILDREN.

Mike and Hilary had separated by then, and their children were growing up, but the large flat still had the feeling of being a family home, and was nirvana for Nicky and Damon who were able to play with Max when he was there, and the mountain of toys belonging to all three of the children when he wasn’t, as well as an enclosed garden to explore at the back. The respite at Hilary’s was exactly what was needed for the three of us. While Nicky and Damon entertained themselves she and I sat in the kitchen and talked, sometimes accompanied by Jim Cawthorn (who lived nearby on Oxford Gardens) who had dreamt up the idea of music warfare in a strip in Frendz.

Once I proved I was capable of delivering a book on time, a small writing snowball started. After handing in The Time of the Hawklords my editor at Star, Piers Dudgeon, asked me whether I wanted to do six novelisations of the Space: 1999 Year Two television series, which was about to air. Seeing in my mind’s eye two more years of paying work, I agreed to this as well. Now I really was in the deep end. To keep pace with the broadcast episodes, finish-typed manuscripts of these tie-ins had to be delivered at the rate of one book per four weeks, or five books in six calendar months. And somewhere in the same period the second Hawklords novel, Queens of Deliria, also had to be delivered… I hadn’t even started on this novel!

To meet the deadlines for seven books I bought a golfball typewriter and an office photocopier, arranged for typist Sherry Gold to be on 24-hour call, farmed out one of the Space: 1999 titles to J Jeff Jones and paid for more than one sleeper train to London. In the quiet of my train cabin I was still typing away when the train docked, completing the first drafts that I then rushed across to Sherry in North London for finished typing – and breakfast.

I was now living back in Manchester, a single parent, in my former matrimonial home at 61 Seymour Street, one of the houses in a small terrace of two-up and two-downs near St Thomas’ Church in Radcliffe. The house had stubbornly resisted being sold, which gad unintentionally worked out to my advantage. Queens of Deliria was written there.

Whacked out after writing seven books I decided I would take a rest before tackling the third Hawklords volume, Ledge of Darkness. But a month became two months, and the months became a year, life intervened, and as there was no great pressure from the publishers, sadly the book never got written. A version eventually appeared as a graphic novel by Bob Walker. Idea, plot and script Bob self-confessedly ‘hi-jacked’ from a treatment by me, but added story of his own, including strikingly atmospheric scenes set at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Battle of the Beanfield.

Bob’s version has a more hardcore anarcho-punk realism than the novels, heavily coloured by his on-the-road living experiences with travellers. But it had no conclusive ending, as it was meant to have in the three-book contract I signed for. Instead, it meanders off into spectacular visual abstraction. I can remember us throwing up our hands, saying to one another, oh well, it’s an ending.

Many years later I wrote a long treatment for a fourth book for Dave Brock, with the provisional title Death to the Death Generator. Dave was looking for ideas for a new Hawkwind stage show, but he never got back to me about it. That one did have an ending, as the title implies.

My life as a paperback writer lasted shy of two years. The money it paid kept my little family going for about four years, but in the end I decided that a career writing fantasy novels wasn’t really me, any more than copywriting had been, and for similar reasons. Instead of ‘teamwork’ it was fictional characters and their motives, and providing plots for them, essential to commercial novel writing, which did not come easily to me. For a while I became Editor of New Vegetarian. Then I hooked up with David Britton and started Savoy Books. Together, Dave and I built a platform that, for our purposes, would replace New Worlds. For me, it meant I got back my ‘New Wave’ writing platform, from which I proceeded to take the New Wave in a quite different direction…

Are Hawkwind New Wave SF, and are the Hawklords novels New Wave? I am asked these questions from time to time, and my answer is usually that they are… in a way. Bob Calvert’s literary interests in writers like Ballard, Burroughs and Moorcock, who either appeared in New Worlds or, in Burroughs’ case, were championed by the magazine, meant New Wave ideas found their way into Hawkwind’s ever-evolving mythos, and ideas from my own earlier writing were recycled in The Time of the Hawklords, for instance the ‘virtual reality’ scenes inside the giant computer came from a short story unpublished at the time but later published as ‘Hey, Mr Pressman’, and original ideas like the ‘ledge’ in Ledge of Darkness built on an idea Geoff Cowie and I came up with one night – if a part of Earth goes back in time then theoretically a ledge-like ring of Earth’s mass builds up around it, because Earth was smaller in the past than it is now. If there was any feedback going on between my books and the band, then ideas like these could also have influenced them. When Dave Brock was looking about for themes, a Ledge of Darkness tour was seriously considered. An announcement was even made, which got out in the press, but it didn’t actually go ahead…

Inner-space exploration and the then-emerging media landscape were both concerns of the New Wave writers and artists in New Worlds and elsewhere. Hawkwind’s science fiction is about inner space as much as outer. Their lyrics verge towards cyberpunk, a literary genre that grew directly out of the New Wave and, who knows, their music may have helped influenced its gestation in William Gibson’s Neuromancer?

Another hallmark of the New Wave was the anxiety felt about what we were doing to the environment. My own writing grew from this, as well as my fear of atomic war, and it’s true to say environmental collapse of some kind seems to be a theme in Hawkwind’s music.

Ever since Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring – her book warning about the too-liberal use of insecticide – the thinking world has been aware of what we were doing to our ‘Blue Planet’. In the mid-to-late seventies when the Hawklords books were written, I was no exception.

Attempting to write books of entertainment I had to avoid rhetoric, and was content to express these ills through the Hawkwind Legend, which is the utopic Hippy ideal, the nirvana that all who saw themselves as ‘Children of the Sun’ aspired to in the sixties. But there are a couple of explicit moments where I state that the way forward for humanity is to rise above dualism, which has for too long predisposed us to a way of behaviour that is detrimental. After showing Hound Master how the Death Generator came to be implanted in Earth, the Hawk God tells him to find ways of transcending the tribal coding of ‘us and them’ that imprisons humanity in senseless war. In the closing paragraph of Queens of Deliria the same message is even more pronounced, this time spoken directly to the reader by the narrator.

To my shock, the books were very badly received – by critics. The Time of the Hawklords was reviewed as though it was a new Michael Moorcock novel, rather than the first novel of young writer. This unwanted baptism of fire was doubly alarming because I had achieved fame – and respect – young, as an exemplar of the New Wave. Suddenly, it seemed, this mantle had been snatched away. I had set out to write a fun but dark fantasy, with at core a serious theme. But no-one saw the qualities I had laboured long and hard over. What had I done? Was it that bad? Apparently it was.

In a two-thirds page review in the then ‘make-or-break-you’ music paper NME, Charles Shaar Murray called it “the absolute nadir”. It was fantastically uncool, incompetent and he didn’t have a good word to say for it. Brian Aldiss, in a round-up entitled ‘Astounding, but is it SF?’, in The Guardian, caught the spirit, but his review seemed like an ‘I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine’ kind of thing, addressed over my head to Mike. Missing the novel’s intentions entirely, the Science Fiction Association’s prudish Vector reviewer worried that “… some younger readers might take it seriously, swallowing the ‘Us verses Them’ propaganda wholesale.” Only one mainstream critic, writing in Time Out, bothered to read the book properly and review it for what it was. He captured my intentions. As it is only short, I will quote Steve Pinder’s review in full:

A strange novel, on the face of it a science fiction story along the normal lines, yet the underlying themes of the battle between the music of Hawkwind and the plastic pop that is the weapon of the Dark Forces, as well as the claustrophobic feel of the ever impending end, single it out.

The book is redolent with the ‘Ladbroke Grove’ feel of Moorcock’s ‘Jerry Cornelius’ works, the tackiness of the flower power that he clings to, yet this is more doom-laden and pessimistic. Certainly, if you read it, play early Hawkwind at top volume. It’s the only way to really understand.

Time Out, October 22nd–28th, 1976

I clung on to this.

Only gradually did I come to see that these voices, greatly exaggerated by their volume, appearing as they did in the national press, were not entirely representative of how the book was being received. There were others more in line with Steve Pinder’s, and these were from the legions of the novels’ many readers. Personal responses have always been savvy and appreciative, and Rick Evans, a music critic who is currently CEO at the University Corporation at CSU Northridge in Los Angeles, is no exception, emailing me as I was writing this Postscript: “I’m a huge music fan, and recently tracked down The Time of the Hawklords and Queens of Deliria. I have never seen (nor read) any thing like what you did [back in the day]; sort of companion readers to accompany listening to the music. So as I read the books, I was playing Hawkwind, thoroughly immersed in the mythology you were expanding upon.”

Reviewers for the various Hawkwind fan sites, if at times critical of a young author’s attempts at the Novel, also mostly ‘get’ the books.

I think now that the novels weren’t that badly received. I didn’t write them for critics, and if some readers perceive them as a little ‘quaint’, provided they take enjoyment from them then that is okay by me.

The new editions from Apex Verlag have given me the chance to remedy some of the perhaps over-enthusiastic descriptions, notions and inexperience of the young would-be novelist of forty-six years ago. I have finally found the time to produce belated finished drafts, denied me during the rush of tight deadlines. But not too much time – I have not re-written the books, and risked spoiling whatever poetry and charm they have. In essence they are the same books. But ones that I hope will deflect some of the harsher critical attention directed at the earlier editions.

Apex Verlag is a publishing house founded on the personal taste of its creator and chairman, Christian Dörge. From the aim of publishing authors “close to the heart”, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Marion Zimmer Bradley, his company has grown considerably and is broadly positioned thematically to include Westerns and Crime as well as Science Fiction; but the founder’s interest in my books harks back to his very early instincts as a publisher. They are books that he likes.

It was while discussing their recent German editions of The Time of the Hawklords and Queens of Deliria, translated from the English by Alfons Winkelmann, that Christian came to learn the novels were also out of print in the English language, and he offered to do these as well.

They arrive at a time when there is new interest in those far off ‘Days of the Underground’, in Hawkwind in particular as shown both by the recent definitive biography from Strange Attractor Press (2021), Joe Banks’s Hawkwind: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia, and by these books – the Space Rock novels of Hawkwind.

Michael Butterworth

The Northern Quarter

Manchester UK

2021

BOOK ONE:

ROCKING ON THE EDGE OF TIME

THE LAST OUTPOST

On the gleaming scarlet surface of the stage, crouching like wide-mouthed methedrine monsters, sat the hulks of the speaker cabinets. Little whisperings and tiny shrieks occasionally issued forth, as if they complained of the silence enforced upon them. Soon they would roar as their power was released. Above, on a platform supported by candy-striped scaffolding, were the four drum kits. All the equipment, including the eight AU516 synthesizers and the newly invented Delatron Processor, was painted with swirling colours and designs: mind-blowing.

Through screwed-up eyes the cat girl watched the shiny, garish dais being completed. It had taken the designer, Barnie Bubbles, and Hawkwind’s roadies the best part of a week so far, working slowly because of the unusually hot summer and the sheer size of the operation. Now it was ready. Now the final great rock concert – the longest-running ever to be held on earth – could start.

The cat girl closed her eyes. She retreated back into her basking slumber where she lay upon the metal roof of the truck. It was real, then, she thought.

She was roused, almost immediately, by a slight feeling of panic. Perhaps it was not panic but simply excitement that flushed through her bronzed body? The prospect of her appearing on stage again after the wasted, horrifying months between gigs suddenly made her feel tense.

All around her she could hear the subdued murmurings of the remaining population of Great Britain, about five thousand people. Like everyone else, they were still not sure if a civilised event was possible. Many of them had waited weeks for this moment. They had travelled half-starved from the northernmost wastes of Scotland, and camped out on the site in makeshift shelters and nearby derelict buildings. They had come cautiously, for the music, but also the promise of companionship with their fellows. She admired them for the faith they had managed to find.

At last the roadies finished their task. And now they jumped down, bringing an expectant hush from the sprawling rim of Children below. Cued by the subsidence of noise around the stage, and by the roar of the extra diesels starting somewhere in the distance, Stacia reluctantly sat up, rubbing her eyes with black paws that might have been polished, they shone so brightly in the sun.

Simon House, the legendary Sonic Prince, was the first of the musicians to mount the stage, moving about his synthesizers in a flashing blue silk gown, checking the links, testing the Master Console. At length, the Sonic Prince came to the shiny, ebony cube of the Delatron, and paused. The complex machine bristled with wires and jacks. With a simple, signified movement, he made his gesture of obeisance to it, then, amidst rising whistles and shouts, he arose and indicated the cube with his hand, drawing a swell of exultation from the Children.

Even as the shouting died, the Prince had vanished behind his keyboards and all that Stacia could see of him was a glint of blue silk, a lock or two of his thick black hair.

She was pulling her fishnet body stocking over her black leotard. She felt proud of the Prince. It had taken him years of research to perfect the Delatron, based on the cryptic and involved plans left behind by Dettmar, a dwarf both benevolent and cunning, who had long since left to further his studies in mystic lore.

Next came Lord Rudolph the Black, most recent champion sworn to the ranks of the Company of the Hawk. About his lips there played an eternal, mysterious smile as he adjusted the strap of his great bass called Boneshiverer, which all men feared and all women loved.

Then, following close on Lord Rudolph’s heels, appeared Simon King, known as the Hound Master, famous for his keeping of fierce, untameable beasts who obeyed none but he, and with him was the one who called himself Astral Al but was also known as Powell the Power. These two climbed long ladders to take their positions above the stage: the one with a stick-quiver bouncing on his tattooed back, the other with a white cotton suit, dark hat, and shades. Soon, through the clear morning air came the sharp explosions of practice rolls and riffs, ululations and shrieks from the synths.

The familiar sounds fired Stacia’s blood. She rose gracefully to her feet, arching her back and cupping her slender arms above her head. She struck a defiant, regal pose with her black eye-mask and straight raven-black hair falling to her shoulders. The crowd applauded wildly.

From the side door of the Mercedes truck beneath her feet there came, suddenly, a jumbled, wailing blast of sax. And now Thunder Rider emerged, bearing with him a doom and joy that was his alone, clad in a totally silver space skin to reflect the sun’s heat, adorned with clattering silver medallions and chains, copper and brass and gold bracelets on his blazing arms, his red beard and hair glowing. Amidst the riotous applause, Thunder Rider leapt on stage and loped in slow, weightless motion towards the mic, blowing for all he was worth.

Simultaneously there stepped from behind the vast mixer unit the powerful figure of that brave and sagacious champion who, with Thunder Rider, had first conceived, with noble ideas, the Company of the Hawk, Baron Brock, Lord of the Westland. He held a jack-plug in one hand, trailing yards of coiled black flex behind him as he moved. He walked casually, keeping his own counsel, in a faded T and brightly patched jeans, towards his stacks, the sleek and tawny guitar Godblaster held at his side. As he reached the towering equipment he swung Godblaster lazily over his powerful shoulders and the light flashed on his muscular, tattooed arms, his pale gold hair. He plugged in the jack and began, instinctively to play a short A Minor progression.

Then came Lemmy, Count Motorhead, almost slipping down the front of the high stage, but regaining his jack-booted footing at the last moment. He arose and looked around him, apparently dazed by the spectacle of the yelling, cheering biomass plastered against the skyline. With a grin of self-mockery he drew his heels together soundlessly and raised his arm in a salute, turning the shrieks to the friendly jeering he seemed to find more tolerable. But the enthusiastic roar returned as he bent down to retrieve his trusty Rickenbacker bass, Gutsplitter, from the blood-red panelling.

One by one the members of Hawkwind fell silent, and only the welcoming roar of the Children, now back to their usual enthusiastic selves, could be heard. Soon, that too ceased in a clatter of deafeningly sharp riffs sent up by Astral Al to command attention.

In the electric silence that followed, Thunder Rider’s freeform sax burst out once more, almost inaudibly at first, but gradually mounting in volume, climbing up and down in the air. When the squealing noise reached an unbearable pitch, he allowed it to fade away. Before it could vanish altogether, the rest of the group let out a sudden, frightening crash of blurred notes and drum rolls from which snaked low, vibrant synth sounds prolonging the roll and the ethereal high pitch of the mellotron. Just as suddenly, these sounds too faded away – this time into the echoing, clipped voice of Lemmy, who started to chant an old Calvert number, ‘Welcome to the Future’.

“Welcome to the future!” His voice boomed out, ricocheting against the walls of a million invisible canyons in the clear blue sky overhead.

“Welcome to the dehydrated land,

Welcome to the south police parade,

Welcome to the neo-golden age,

Welcome to the days you’ve made you

Welcome

You are welcome

Wel come

You are welcome

Welcome to the future.”

The introductory poem ended in a mighty, rising din of drum, gongs and synth that strained the speaker cabinets and almost rent the five thousand shuddering rib cages. Then, after a full, tortuous minute the sound gradually subsided, and the group began playing their first, mind-blasting number, ‘Psychedelic Warlords’.

Unable to express herself adequately any longer on the small, slippery roof of the Mercedes, Stacia climbed down among the parked fleet in the compound, and headed for the stage. She was now able to stretch out her limbs to their full extent, and interpret the music more freely. The Children spurred her on with their shouts. They had gone absolutely ecstatic, their shrieks and roars uncaringly trying to climb above the 50,000-watt wall of sound pumped out by the amps.

She felt pleased. The gig was going fine – fulfilling its purpose of unlocking pent-up feelings, and drowning the intense fear and excitement everyone felt in an orgy of sensual assault. After nightfall, it would be better still, when Liquid Len and the Lensmen would get the chance to set up their light machines.

The music made her feel extra good. It held an indefinable quality she couldn’t put her finger on. She knew she had never heard music like it – anywhere. She knew how well her body responded to sound, able to express even its most subtle shades. This music melted into her very being – not just her ears – becoming a symbiotic part of her. In its grip, she felt like a goddess, an all-powerful controller of Destiny.

Soon, the long, heavy organ notes of ‘Winds of Change’ were sweeping through her body, which she interpreted as a series of slow, expressive pirouettes to match the change in mood. The notes signalled an end for humankind, as well as a new beginning. Her flesh tingled with a feeling of dread mixed with a strange, unearthly bliss…

WINDS OF CHANGE

King Trash prickled to attention, his grubby hands still automatically counting the pile of bank notes.

He felt his skin crawl with dread as the temperature of the room unaccountably seemed to drop. The sound of the band playing was inaudible in here; the heavy, velvet curtains blotted out all traces of the outside world. But he knew the hippies had started something again. He could feel it in his bones.

“Rastabule!” he shouted hoarsely. In his agitation he knocked over a pile of freshly counted bank notes, spilling them into the heap that were still to be counted. “Here!”

Trying to shrug off the shakes, he reached for the elastic bands and hastily secured the remaining piles. Since the apocalypse, entropy seemed to have increased, going hand in hand with the destruction. He put the piles into cardboard boxes and then lifted them to the back of the room where he stored them, neatly. Knowing that all those crisp, blue and orange notes were arranged in fat bundles of £50,000, awaiting resumption of normalcy when law and order finally returned – and they recovered their value – and knowing that every single one of them had been lovingly counted by him – always made him glow with satisfaction.

Although only a few hundred thousand notes remained to be counted, a job he could easily finish off tomorrow, he was confident that the count would agree with the previous month’s figures. Three consecutive count figures would mean he could turn his attention to other pressing matters. The time would soon come, he felt sure, when he would be well rewarded. Then he, King Trash, would be seen as the monarch who had preserved the great royal tradition.

There was the personal sacrifice, though. During the Seventh Recounting he had been obliged to stay awake all night, and missed having kippers for breakfast! Fish was now a rarity, and by the time he got to the table the Palace cat had eaten his share, and he’d had to make do with haggis. He had lambasted the Queen, who didn’t like kippers and who had moved a tureen in the way so she couldn’t see them. The memory was still fresh in his mind, weeks later.

“Rastabule!” he roared again. “Where are you?”

“Here, Master,” came a high, timid voice. Out of breath, a thin, scrawny servant with a warty face appeared from behind the heavy oak-panelled door of the Counting House.

“Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling you for hours,” demanded King Trash, irritably.

“Sorry, Your Highness. What can I do?”

“Peep behind that curtain will you? Tell me what you can see in the park.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

Rastabule curtsied, and quickly did as he was bid.

As the curtains were drawn slightly aside the great trembling bulk of the King cowered behind the door, hiding from the glare. The awful feeling inside him was getting worse. He waited a moment, then said impatiently:

“Well, come on. Come on. What do you see?”

“Only… the park, Your Highness, and… you know, the…”

“Hippies?”

“Yes… Master.”

“Are there more of them today?”

“Many more, Your Highness.”

“What are they doing?”

Rastabule looked vainly through the King’s powerful binoculars into the crowds populating Green Park. It was difficult to say, but it seemed as though there were some sort of a concert.

“A concert?” yelled the King. “What sort of a concert? A rock concert?”

“It looks so, Your Highness.”

“By God, Rastabule… that’s what’s giving me this terrible – oh, quickly… Help me at once!”

Rastabule ran across the soft carpeting to help relieve the collapsing monarch. Shouldering part of the weight of the twitching, leaden frame, together they limped along the corridor and down several flights of stairs towards the Royal Chambers in the lower reaches of the Palace…

TOWER OF MINDS

At the Daily Mail building in the heart of London, Press Reporter Seksass had one finger poised in readiness to flick over a file on his card index. The ‘Piccadilly Gardens’ Triad Sex Affair – named after the famed Sunken Gardens of Manchester, the locality in which one of the participants had chosen to live – one the most revolting cases in his entire Press experience – was beginning to clear itself up. Only one final journey into Control’s vast computer memory – where the minds of millions of Britain’s former citizens, the Middle Classes, were stored – was necessary to wind up this horrible case, and bring these three ghostly deviants inside to justice. It was his biggest assignment, and he expected promotion.

Before his finger selected the card he felt the terrible cold feeling grip hold of him. It began in his feet and spread up his body to the back of his head, icing over his brain and making his guts heave.

“God in Heaven!” he muttered. “What’s happening to me?”

Lurching from his swivel seat, he flung himself across the room and threw open the window. He inhaled deeply from the warm, muggish air outside in the decaying City. The sickening drop to the heavily guarded forecourt below, at the foot the massive tower block, made him feel even worse.

Leaving his office, he staggered next door into the gents, clutching at his already badly stained trousers…

PLANES OF CONTINUITY

The sun tracked punishingly across the steel-blue sky above the park. Through its dazzle, and the mistiness of exhaustion and sweat, Thunder Rider watched the screaming ring of Children through expectant eyes. Together, they were speeding on a huge, never-ending trip into the future. They were delirious with happiness now. But what would happen when the music stopped?

The band had been playing for six hours almost without a break – longer than they had ever played before. They had ignored the carefully scheduled rest intervals. They had followed one request with another, as soon as the crowd had shouted it out.

Now, the music had turned into a shapeless, freeform jamming session based loosely around the last request, ‘Assault & Battery’. It went on and on, inexorably, as though no-one had the energy to stop it.

No-one wanted it to stop, because of the indescribable feelings of withdrawal they would have to bear, to recall the horror, the loneliness of the devastated Earth.

Drunkenly, Thunder Rider let the sax fall from his lips and threw back his head with mirth. Suddenly, he roared with laughter at the sheer lunacy of what was happening. No-one had expected Hawkwind music to be quite this powerful! It gripped everyone equally, inexplicably with its might, like the most lustful and enslaving woman he could imagine.

But unexpectedly, he started to stagger backward, caught off balance by the mood of paranoid hilarity. Weakly, his legs collapsed under him and he fell to the floor against one of the giant stacks, unable to move, pinned by the numbing tiredness.

The others saw him go, and immediately their last reserves of energy also ran out. Helpless, they were forced to stop playing. Dead fingers refused to move.

The music stopped.

From all about came a howl of disappointment as visions of torment formed inside each head. Sweat-soaked, Hawkwind reeled away from their positions and instruments, and started to climb down into the dizzying compound below.

After a few moments, the fallen Hawk opened his eyes. The noise, like a million shrieking seagulls, rose higher. He forced himself to his feet and half-climbed, half-fell down the stage wall.

As he caught up with the others, who were making their way to the yellow Mercedes bus, he managed to wave a leaden arm at the Children, hoping they would understand. But they didn’t. They were shouting and screaming for more. He couldn’t give them any more. Not… yet… anyway. He was almost collapsing again when he reached the bus, and flung himself through the passenger door on to the rugs.

“Had enough, then?” The mocking voice of their burly tour manager came from the driver’s seat next to him. The bearded Scot had been resting up across the front seat during the performance, together with the cans of beer, magazines and sandwiches, now half-consumed, which he had prepared for the group’s refreshment during the intervals.

“Just get us back, Higgy,” Thunder Rider’s voice was muffled by the rug.

“Dunno what you English people a’ made o’!” Higgy jibed shaking his head. “Yer poor weak, pansy minds need a good drop o’ Scots blood in yer t’ clear awl’ the fog.”

Thunder Rider sat up sluggishly, trying to think of a retort, but he couldn’t raise the energy. He noticed the beer instead, and opened a can. Gulping, he turned to watch the others as they climbed unsteadily through the door, dropping half-dead and motionless on to the heaps of rugs and clothing.

Stacia complaining of her feet; Lemmy, looking sightlessly around him like an electrocuted Hells Angel; Astral Al, still drumming mindlessly; Hound Master, shaking his head in glazed amazement; and the ever-complaining Baron: “It’s not the playing, it’s the bloody demand that gets me. The moment we stop playing and we get down off that stage, blam! It hits you like a brick in the cobblers!”

Last in was the Sonic Prince in his crumpled gown, looking strangely alert, for all the hard slogging. There was no room on the floor, so he climbed dexterously into the front. Thunder Rider pressed a can into his lap, without commenting.

Higgy started the engine. He knew better than to delay. Already, some of the Children were leaving their grassy seats and beginning to converge on the compound exit. Not that there was any harm in them – the kids were a great bunch, most of them; but as chief wet nurse to the group, he felt bound to put the interest of his charges first. Hawkwind had promised to play again after dark, to celebrate the mammoth outdoor New Worlds Party that was being arranged, and they needed all the rest he could get for them.

THE YELLOW VAN COMMUNE

The journey to Notting Hill Gate, where Hawkwind had their base, was long and straining. Slowed by obstructions, the road about them was soon thronged. The Mercedes edged its way through a mass of seemingly disjointed limbs and faces that peered in and smiled and waved. The congestion grew worse as they travelled further out from the compound into the sprawling mini-city of tents and shelters.

Thunder Rider winced unpleasantly at the sights.

The apparent cheerfulness on the faces outside was a pretence, he knew. Behind each mask was a terrified, panic-stricken gaze that stabbed him to the core. They were desperate for Hawkwind to return. But there was no way he could help until after dark when they had rested.

No-one knew what was causing the bad effects. No-one guessed at the start that the concert would have become anything other than a good, mindless freak-out to dispel bad vibrations. They noticed the strange but beautiful high effect that the music had, but they had not discovered the full extent of its power until they had tried to stop playing and rested up for a short, ten-minute breather. The effects had been instant, like the withdrawal symptoms from a highly addictive drug.

At last, the grimy, lemon-coloured Mercedes broke free of the clinging crowds, and they were speeding along the avenues forged out of the wreckage of stilled cars and other vehicles that choked Knightsbridge – and most other parts of London.

Here and there, some of the more adventurous Children had set up shop or home, trying to breathe back life into the great city. Most of the few remaining habitable buildings in this part of the city were now in fact occupied. In parts, the pavements were even starting to look familiarly crowded again, especially in the Gate itself and on the Portobello Road where the commune was situated.

There were other pockets of indigenous life remaining in London, called, simply, the ‘Others’ by the Children. These belonged to the breed that had brought the world to its present, sorry condition. Some of them were dressed in uniform and carried guns to protect themselves. But since infighting broke out among them they were few in numbers, and rarely seen. Higgy brought the van to an abrupt halt outside number 271 Portobello Road – the Yellow Van Commune.

The commune was so named in honour of the group’s first (yellow) van back in the late sixties – the decrepit vehicle which in those early days had served literally as home for most members. The group had moved in during the desperate period of fighting and dying which had taken place after the British Army had failed to bring back law and order… and after their own homes had been burnt to the ground to provide night illumination for the insane mobs that had roamed the streets.

It was situated adjacent to the burnt-out shell of the legendary Mountain Grill restaurant – the supplier of good, plentiful food to many a starving freak who roamed the inhuman streets of the period. For some unaccountable reason, 271 had always attracted people of a certain fighting kind, who pledged their lives to revolutionary causes. The previous occupants had been outlaw publishers of underground pamphlets, friends of Hawkwind who had been killed by marauding gangs of puritan vigilantes.

The entrance door was painted in Barnie’s typical, swirling colours and designs, as was every square centimetre of exterior brickwork up to the roof. It led into a long, dark hall cluttered with dusty relics of the past, and decorated with distorted pictures of cars and long-dead people painted on to the walls.

The interior of the house had remained more or less as they found it, most of its effects belonging to the luckless publishers. The walls were lined with old mirrors and hangings from different periods, collected years before from the junk stalls that once lined the street outside with thriving business life. The common room where the group usually slept and relaxed contained a similar, odd mixture of second-hand items – a long green, dusty couch, a scarred, wooden chest of drawers, a creaking wicker-basket chair, a harmonium, a bed, and on the floor, several giant cushions and striped mattresses, as well as innumerable smaller items of curiosity.

The tired band climbed out of the van and clomped upstairs, oblivious of the small group of Children who had gathered to watch their return. They threw themselves down on to the first soft surfaces that presented themselves. But sleep was hard coming. Almost immediately, the sickness started to gnaw its way up from under the layer of tiredness. It screwed up their stomachs and slid wracking pains into their heads, making them long for the hour when their bodies would be rested, and once more they could pick up their instruments and play.

Eventually, with the help of downers procured by Higgy, they managed to sink into a turbulent, delirious kind of release.

NEW WORLDS PARTY

Thunder Rider was the first to wake, opening his eyes to the weird glow of firelight coming through the holes in the curtains. Though he had been worn out, he had had an uneasy sleep. Scary dreams and unnerving physical pains and shakes, due to the depression of withdrawal, had woken him more than once. Not wanting to wake up properly, he tried to let himself drift off again. But a sudden, sharp cracking sound came at the windowpane. Then he heard the voices of the Children outside, and realised they had woken him up. They were reminding Hawkwind of their pledge. It was already night.

Noticing the walls in the room were aflicker with reflected flame, he arose stiffly, and went to the window. He pulled back the curtains and peered out at the night scene. A roaring, crackling fire had been built in the centre of the street, and a large crowd of Children had gathered.

Behind the derelict shop fronts opposite, the intense, primitive blackness of the night was waiting, pressing in on the garish assembly. He felt a mournful excitement build up inside him as he watched. Most of the Children were looking at the window, and he waved

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Texte: Copyright 1976, 1995, 2021 by Michael Butterworth. Copyright dieser Ausgabe 2021 by Michael Butterworth/Apex-Verlag.
Bildmaterialien: Christian Dörge/Apex-Graphixx.
Cover: Christian Dörge/Apex-Graphixx.
Lektorat: Dr. Birgit Rehberg.
Korrektorat: Dr. Birgit Rehberg.
Satz: Apex-Verlag.
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 09.06.2021
ISBN: 978-3-7487-8521-7

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