Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space
ROCK N ROLL BABES
FROM OUTER SPACE
Linda Jaivin is a Sydney
writer of alien origin.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fiction
Eat Me
Non-fiction
New Ghosts, Old Dreams:
Chinese Rebel Voices
(co-editor with Geremie Barmé)
Linda Jaivin
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House, 22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Linda Jaivin 1996
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published 1996 Printed and bound by McPherson’s Printing Group Typeset by Lynne Hamilton
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Jaivin, Linda
Rock n roll babes from outer space
ISBN 9781875847334
I. Title.
A823.3
Ebook ISBN 9781921799938
All the characters in this book are fictional. No resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is intended.
for my parents
Big thanks to Geoffy Weffy Hinchcliffe and Mikel ‘Mickey Boy’ Simic of Prik Harness for agreeing to appear in the novel and for permission to reprint the lyrics of ‘The Slacker Song’. Mickey Boy drew the psycho-mutant cryptograms that are the script for Nufonian speech on p. 222. Kisses also to David, Gabrielle, Paul, and Pete the Hat, to angelic flatmates Danny, Greg and Jonathan, to the beautiful Troy, and, of course, my rockin’ editor Michael Heyward and everyone else in the mothership of Text Publishing.
The author is grateful for permission to reproduce lines from the following:
‘Laid’, James A Bush, © Polygram Music Publishing Pty Ltd. ‘La Di Doh’, Ed Kuepper, © Polygram Music Publishing Pty Ltd. ‘Twenty-first Century Digital Boy’, Brett Gurewitz, © Mushroom Music Pty Ltd. ‘Drive My Car’, Lennon/McCartney, © Northern Music Publishing and EMI Music Publishing Australia Pty Ltd. ‘Your Eyes’, Giarrusso/Bennie, © Polygram Music Publishing Pty Ltd. ‘Roadhouse Blues’, J Morrison/R Krieger/J Densmore/R Manzarek, © Rondor Music (Aust) Pty Ltd. ‘Love Street’, J Morrison, © Rondor Music (Aust) Pty Ltd. ‘Til There Was You’, Lennon/McCartney, © Northern Music Publishing and EMI Music Publishing Australia Pty Ltd. ‘Violets’, Courtney Love and Eric Erlandson, © Polygram Music Publishing Pty Ltd. All the above permissions granted by Music Sales Pty Limited. ‘Smelly’, Ben Green, © Ben Green. ‘Majik’, Susie Schlesinger, © Susie Schlesinger. ‘Oopsy Daisy’, Geoff Hinchcliffe/Mikel Simic, © Geoff Hinchcliffe and Mikel Simic. ‘The Slacker Song’, Geoff Hinchcliffe/Mikel Simic, © Geoff Hinchcliffe and Mikel Simic. ‘There’s A Kind of Hush’, Stephens/Reed, © Reprinted with permission of J. Albert & Son Pty Ltd. ‘All God’s Children’, Michael Moriarty, performed by The Gadflys, © and published by Phantom Music/admin. Leosong Music Pty Ltd.
Every effort has been made to obtain necessary permissions with reference to copyright material. The publishers apologise if any sources remain inadvertently unacknowledged.
T
onight’s my first night on Earth. It’s been a big one so far. I’ve been out on the town, I’ve been to a gig, I’ve even abducted my first Earthling. That’s you, of course. Yeah, it’s the whole alien catastrophe and you’re part of it. Ready to rock n roll?
Me? I’m Baby.
Baby Baby. Sound familiar? I got it from the lyrics of my favourite rock song. You know the one. My real name, well, I don’t think I’ll even bother telling you. You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it anyway. You need at least two extra tongues and another set of denticles. Teeth. Whatever. Yeah. Baby Baby, that’s me—extraterrestrial extraordinaire, alien sex fiend, wannabe rock star, designated driver on the highway to hell. Leader of the pack. Don’t always look before I lead, but there you go.
It’s not a big pack I lead. There’s just Lati and Doll and me. Lati’s a turbo-chick, full-on, fun, always looking for a good time. Her energy levels are near-on nuclear. You
never know what Lati’s gonna do next. Lati is the butterfly wing fluttering through all your chaos theories. Doll’s another kettle of badfish altogether. Bit of a punk too, our Doll, and when she’s mad, she’s bad. Keeps Lati and me in line. Underneath all that attitude, she’s actually quite sweet. But don’t tell her I said so. She’d kill me.
We blew in this afternoon on Galgal, our flying saucer. Finding a park for a saucer is no easy feat in Sydney. It took us as long to find this parking space as it did to get to Earth from the dark side of the moon. That’s where we ditched Mum. The mothership.
Doll handled the landing. She’s the only one who managed to pass the perpendicular parking test back home. I never got a licence. While doing my test I managed to trash three landing pods and take out a control tower. Nearly wiped the examiner too. Oh, it wasn’t
that
bad. He was just a borg. You know, a cyborg. They were able to fix him up with a brand new face and limbs. But they banned me from driving for life. Nufonians have a
very
limited sense of humour.
Nufon? That’s the planet we’re from. Don’t get me started on Nufon and Nufonians. I know I shouldn’t bag them all the time, but then I do a lot of things I shouldn’t.
Anyway, we were stoked to land on Earth. First off, we turned our four-fingered little alien hands to shape-shifting. We wanted to take on Earth girl form. To get some credit in the straight world. You know, Earthling world. Straight means something different here, does it? Oh, right. You see, space is so bent that even though Earth is round it’s still sorta straight by comparison. Know what I mean? Never mind.
It took us a while to get the hang of shapeshifting. On the first try, we all came out looking like Keith Richards.
That was
scary.
Yeah. We eventually got it right. Well, as right as we could under the circs. For one thing, we can’t seem to make the damn antennae go away. Still, they’ve got their uses. For another—well, you’ll see.
Or course, we didn’t have a
thing
to wear. So we scored a few jars of Enigma Cream from Galgal’s Special FX room and hit the consumption centres. Enigma Cream? It’s concealer. A drop or two will cover up the odd zit or love bite. But if you’re having a
really
bad hair day you slather it all over and disappear for a while. Disguise-o-rama. We acquired some top gear. Like this orange PVC mini. You think it’s filthy, do you? Really? I didn’t notice any stains. What? Oh, I
see.
Fucken Transling-a-tron. Translation chip technology never keeps up with the lingo. Filthy, eh? Cool. Anyway, Lati went straight for your classic Bonds tees and jeans, and Doll hit up some shop on Oxford Street for leather trousers and boots. We also managed to flog a whopping great stack of CDs. How? Easy. We just used your standard off-the-shelf Abduct-o-matic, you know, the mini-model you can buy in any supermarket. I see. Any supermarket on Nufon anyway. With the Abduct-o-matic, you just zap what you want, and what you want is yours. Ching ching! Instant gratification. Just what the doctor ordered—retail atrophy. What? Therapy. Whatever.
You understand. We’d been cooped up in a spaceship for what seemed like eons without even a shopping channel. I can tell you, we were pretty keen to cut loose. Mum isn’t bad as motherships go. But let’s face it, it’s still basically a tin fucken can with boosters. Lati, Doll and I are the best of mates and we’ve known each other since we were only knee high to a mushroom spore. Still, put us in a flying antennae-spray container for that
long and we can really get on each other’s tits.
It doesn’t help that by nature we’re not much inclined to dormition. When you’re awake most of the time like we are, you want to be entertained. The recreational facilities on board wer
e pathetic.
Fully tragic actually, considering how many trips to Earth the craft had made before we came along and borrowed it. Stole it. Whatever. On the other hand, our fellow Nufonians being what they are, and being that what they are is terminally fucken boring, I suppose it shouldn’t have been
that
much of a surprise. Anyway, there was one Scrabble set, a selection of non-violent computer games, a collection of CDs that consisted entirely of recordings by Bing Crosby, one copy of
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
and, dig this,
heaps
of stamp albums. Of all the things in the yoon that you could collect, Nufonians
would
concentrate on postage stamps. You can see why we had to get away from that planet. Absolute dweebsville. Bogans of the yooniverz. You want to know what Nufonians are like? All you need to know is this—they wear trek-suits in public.
Sorry. I won’t go on.
There just aren’t that many places you can stop off at on the way here, either. On the advice of the
Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
we tried the Restaurant at the End of the Yooniverz. That guidebook was published years ago and the restaurant must’ve changed hands or something, cuz it had been turned into a Sizzler. Family fucken restaurants. They’re
everywhere.
Plague-o-rama.
We managed somehow. Doll amused herself by putting Mum on manual, taking over the controls and playing chicken with asteroids. Scared the living nightlights out of us a few times. There was this one asteroid, don’t know
his name, but he was a
big
mother. Doll took us close enough to see the dust on his nose. You should have seen the look on his face when we zipped by! Anyway, we had fun with him. We all blew kisses and Lati mooned him. Lati will moon anything. Even moons, though that joke wore pretty thin after a while. As for me, I just played a lot of air guitar.
I
love
rock music. We all do.
Thankfully, we’d managed to smuggle an Intergalactic Yaddayadda Receiver on board, so at least we could tune into some decent music and keep up with
The Simpsons
and
X-Files.
We ayles love
The X-Files,
by the way. It’s much more popular in the outer than
The Twilight Zone
or
My Favourite Martian
ever was. There’s a huge
X-Files
fan club based on a planet near Alpha Centauri. The Sirians threw a fabulous party there shortly before we left. All the ayles got dressed up as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. You gotta meet the Sirians some day. They’re full-on space trash. We love ‘em. Anyway, we thought of having an
X-Files
party during the trip. But it wouldn’t have been much of an event with just the three of us. Well, four, if you count Revor.
Revor is our pet. See him? He sees you now. Isn’t he cute? Haha. Stop that, Revor. Heh. Stop it. Ha! C’mon, Revor, lay off. You’re making the Earthling nervous. Oops. Don’t worry. You should be able to wash that out. When he cums that fast it’s usually pretty watery. At least on Earth it doesn’t float around like it did when we were up in the zero. What d’ya mean, what is it? It’s only an oioi. Don’t you have them on Earth? Funny little creatures. They’re hybrids actually. Half Madagascan aye-aye, half space elefent. You know space elefents? They’re teeny weeny little pink things not much bigger than a quark
with long noses and excellent mammaries. Oh, look. I said ‘
only
an oioi’ and now he’s acting all hurt. Oh, Revvywevvy. Don’t be like that.
Come here, Revor. Come here. That’s right. Oooh. What
are
you doing? Get outta there! Oooh. Whoawhoawhoa. No! Don’t do that! Well, oooh, maybe do that. Yes, do that. Oh, yes. Oooh,
Rev.
Oooh. What have you found there? Mmmmm. Oh, Revor,
baby.
Yeahhhhhhh. Bit to the left. That’s it. Ohhhhh. Don’t stop. Good boy. Goooood boy.
Mmmmmmmm.
What’s wrong, Earth boy? You’re looking a trifle on the pale side. Isn’t sex what life on Earth is all about? I’ve seen Earth movies. I read
Cosmo.
I listen to rock songs. You know, this bed is on fire, I wanna rock you all night long, asking for it, the birds and the goats. Oh, man. Whatd’ya mean, it’s slightly more complicated than that? How complicated could it be?
By the way, is that a rocket in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? I’m pretty happy to see you, actually. Very happy. There’s definitely something about you, Earth boy. Something I want. Something I just might take.
Oh, look at Revor, chasing his stupid tail again. He did that a lot up in the outer. That’s a sight in the zero, I can tell you. Yeah, Revor was definitely an oioi on the verge. When he wasn’t chasing his tail, he was howling at comets or sucking the knobs off the control panel. Can’t blame him, really. We were all bouncing off the walls. I remember how excited we were just to see some dumb NASA space probe. Lati mooned it.
I shouldn’t complain. Space travel is a breeze compared to what it used to be in the bad old days of arkships. I couldn’t deal with an arkship myself. You know, get on
board as a yunggin, grow up, progenerate, watch your own yunggins grow up, and expire knowing that their yunggins will probably still be alive when the ship finally gets where it’s going. Boring, boring, boring! I’m an instant grat girl myself. The old deep-freeze concept was pretty poxy too. People were always waking up in the Hiber-pod with their ears or eyebrows on the pillow next to them. Spewsville.
The discovery of wormholes has done a lot to make the yoon a smaller place, if something infinite can ever really be made smaller, that is. Wormholes are the autobahns of the cosmos. You know black holes, right? Picture one shaped like a cigarette. That’s a wormhole. Imagine going in a strand of dried tobacco at one end and coming out the other as smoke. Which is the only problem with wormholes. They tend to rearrange your molecules. You wouldn’t want to have seen the casualty wards up on Nufon when they first began testing wormholes for intergalactic travel. There was this one guy who came out with his nose where his—oh, you really don’t want to know the details. Trust me. I’m an alien.
Anyway, we managed to arrive with all our molecules more or less in place. And, following an arvo of top shopping, there we were, ready to
party
when we clapped oculi on a poster advertising that Agent Mulder gig. Sweet! We’d caught some of the band’s vids on the Yaddayadda on the way over. Besides liking the name, of course, we’re fully into that sort of indie music. Well,
great,
we thought—serendipity city!
We knew then for sure that we’d come to the right place. Sydney! The Big Toke. Smoke. Whatever. We checked out quite a few different cities on the way. We went to New York first, it being the self-advertised centre
of the yoon and all. Just as we were coasting in on the saucer for a closer look, this crazy little bean suddenly pulled an Uzi out of his jacket, aimed it at us and began firing. You’ve
never
seen a warp drive reverse so fast. We left skid marks on the
air.
We weren’t sure where to go next. We’d caught the Eurovision Song Contest on the Yaddayadda, so continental Europe was out. Out out out. That’s scary stuff. We like African and South American music, but it’s not rock, and we
detest
Canto-pop, so Asia was out as well. The skies over Seattle and London, meanwhile, were grey as a Nufonian’s tit and wet as a Sirian’s sense of humour. And, well, you do hear so much in the outer about the Opera House and Bondi Beach and that cute little band, whatchamacallit, tinstool. What? Oh, right. Anyway, to make a long story short, here we are.
Yeah, I know, I know, silverchair’s not really from Sydney. But look at it this way—when you’re a billion trillion light years away from Earth to begin with, a few hundred kilometres here or there is spitting distance.
Go ahead, have a good look around. Groovy little pad, ain’t it? Bit of a mess-o-rama, sure, but life’s about more than just keeping your room clean, hey? We call this funky piece of furniture the Voodoo Lounge Suite. Abducted it this afternoon too. Galgal came with the most poxy furnishings. We trashed ‘em all on the way over. Had to. They were all covered in beige ultrasuede. That about sums up Nufonian taste. Just cuz it was once featured in
Saucer Beautiful,
they all have to have it. Jeez. You getting a sense of what we’re running away from? Anyway, the saucer itself’s not too shabby. Don’t know if you know much about spacecraft, but Galgal is your typical bi-convex domed disk model. She’s got some history, does the old Galgal. You know Ezekiel? No, not the heavy metal band.
The prophet. Anyway, the Cherubim—they’re another species of alien—did a big fly-by on Ezekiel in Galgal. Made quite an impression, it did. He raved about ‘wheels of fire’ this, ‘wheels of fire’ that for ages.
Galgal inspired the first mirror ball in the 1920s when she performed a spinning loop-the-loop in full sunlight with all her laser beams firing. Isn’t that cool? Oh, and she pulled some spectacular wheelies over Tahiti a few years ago. People assumed it was the after-effects of French nuclear testing in the Pacific. Sparked renewed protests and all. We were pretty chuffed about that.
Environmental issues tend to be fairly high on the extraterrestrial agenda. But you probably know that from
Millennium Watch
and
UFO Quarterly.
You’ve never heard of those magazines? Oh, you’re not missing much. They’re just full of long articles on how ayles supervised the construction of the pyramids and shit like that. That’s news? Give me
Rolling Stone
any day.