Hallucinating by Stephen Palmer

their backs, exhausted by the weight of the huge djembes, while Zhaman and Djo sit in a sunny crevice. Sperm, worried about skin cancer, removes his vest and shorts and covers himself with UV block. The sweet smell of florals wafts over the summit.
    Nulight stares into the heavens. After the aliens struck, the sky became filled with coloured lines, as if scribbled by some unruly toddler, but now the lines have faded, and it is thought that the fleet of parentships has either moved on or taken a higher orbit. Nobody in Boscastle has seen a parentship, nor even one of the mini lotuses flown by the blue, four-eared ones, but tales are sung by minstrels of black laminae drifting oh so slowly across the moors, leaving only a musk trail as a wake. Nulight believes these songs. But he is aware that he believes them because he wants to. The thought that the aliens might have nonchalantly departed to leave the Earth ruined is too awful to consider...
    After an hour of mooching about, Nulight and Zhaman unpack the shakers and experimentally give them a jiggle. Nulight frowns. A distinct odour of chemicals makes his nose twitch. A sharp, almost fungal smell. But they all like it.
    "Cool," Zhaman says. "The seeds inside must be treated."
    "You reckon?" says Nulight.
    "I know botany."
    The other three join them. Soon all five are setting up a rhythm with the African instruments, and quickly Nulight is aware of a heady scent being sent up by the shakers; his senses are becoming sharpened, deepened, as if during a mild mushroom trip. Colours and sounds are more intense and there is the feeling that his feet are just a tad above the ground.
    "Hallucinogenic seeds," Zhaman says. "So we gotta set ourselves up for the drum trance. Get ourselves shamanistically in the mood. Keep shaking! This is how we feed our heads."
    They trade cross-rhythms for half an hour. Each of them has a stack of four shakers, which they go through until they are completely tripped out and ready for djembe action.
    Nulight looks out over Bodmin Moor. With his sharpened, deepened senses he can see the softly roiling perfume wakes of parentships that have come and gone, and they look like tunnels of pastel colour pierced here and there by motes as bright as stars. He understands that this part of the moor is on the flight path of regular parentship voyages. The land behind the nearest perfume trail shifts and blurs as if in the baking desert. He looks far off, like an eagle, to the edges of physical perception, and there he sees something tiny and flat and black coming their way, gliding, its outstretched wingtips moving up and down in response to air flow.
    "One comes!" he cries.
    They set up their djembes at the lip of the ledge so that they have an uninterrupted view of the moor. But the djembes seem unhappy. They act alive. They don't want to be stood on their bases. Nulight panics and tries to force his upright, but it fights him like a cat, wriggling out of his grip and lying flat.
    Zhaman sits next to his djembe and whacks the middle of the skin. A phenomenal bass thrum leaps into the air, and suddenly Zhaman is laughing, tears streaming down his cheeks. He tells them, "They're bass projectors! Get the open ends pointing at the alien ship."
    This they do. Tentatively Zhaman starts a rhythm. The power of the bass makes the ground shake, as if a bomb has been detonated some kilometres off; a low frequency, high fidelity thrum, like the sound of woofers from hell. This is what the djembes were waiting for. They are sensitised to the alien presence. When all five sound it is like being inside a mile high bass cab. Luckily the drums are highly directional, acting as horns.
    "Calm it," Kappa warns. "We don't want to scare the aliens off."
    They pause. The parentship closes, and soon they can all see it, an irregular chunk of obsidian, edges glinting, gliding like a broken frisbee. It is soundless. Nulight thinks of a piece of vinyl 12" bobbing on the surface of a