Glam and glister had swept over the continent just the year before. The most famous bands in the world all of a sudden seemed deader than Tosca and Toscanini. That was a big part of the change. Stars who’d been huge, selling millions of albums and filling the biggest stadiums, looked old and sounded fake. But there was more to it than just new bands with wild hair and capes, kids wearing turquoise amulets and gobs of purple makeup.
Mostly it was signs. In the ancient High Church days, people saw them in the heavens. The sun would turn blood-red, comets would appear as warnings of war or disaster, stars would fall, wailing from the sky. It was like that, but not exactly, because no one knew how to interpret these new signs. I heard rumors of winds from the eastern deserts carrying poisonous dust. What did that mean? No one could say for sure. The dolphins in the Fountain of Poseidon, in the grand piazza, turned overnight from bright bronze to charred black. No explanation made sense. Messages and quavering pictures—like something seen under water—appeared on people’s TV screens. The Great Zeppelin of the North was blown off course by an icy December storm and disappeared. The Apollonauts had landed on the moon, harvested their magic rocks, and headed back. This world where I lived would never be the same once boots had walked in the lunar dust and gloved hands had poked in the piles of moon rubble.
At least that’s how it felt the night we all stayed up until three o’clock to see the silver machine come down from blackness and settle in that stony crater. Most people had gathered together for parties, watching the final approach and moon landing on big screens. My father had put on a huge celebration in the hotel ballroom. Champagne flowed and cigars made a swirling blue cloud. Sabina had gone with her friends to see actors put on a show of the landing on the Maxima stage, exactly as it was happening two hundred thousand miles away. I’d stayed in my room and watched it all by myself. I turned the sound on the TV off and put on the Starry Crowns’ first album. Exactly as the lander’s retro-fires hit the lunar surface, my favorite song broke from the speakers. Cold ringing gamba-riffs and the girl-boy voice filled my room and my brain as the six metal feet touched down on the moon.
And the next day, when the Apollonauts finally opened up the hatch and stepped out, was the first time I heard the Witch-Babies’ new song “Raving and Craving.” I was looking out my window, over the city, when the song’s riff came churning through my headphones. The sun was out, bright and hot, but I was safe inside my room, standing behind the curtains.
The change began before the sun had gone down. There was a new guy telling the news, or maybe it was the old one, but they’d done something to make him look different. His hair was darker and longer. His eyes were a sharp, metallic green. He even talked in a different way, using some words that I’d never heard before: parallax, widdershins, sidereal. There were commercials for brand new products with connections to the Apollonaut mission. Astro-foods, cosmic drinks, a hairstyle called the Artemis (named after the ancient goddess of the moon).
And Django Conn came like a comet streaking across the sky. The biggest, the brightest, the best thing I’d ever seen.