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The Arcades of Allah

[Liner Notes for LuchenkoтАЩs Third Symphony.]



by Richard Kadrey




Story Copyright (C) 2006, Richard Kadrey.
Images Copyright (C) 2006, Rudy Rucker.
2,400 Words.




In the broiling summer of 2012, a battered long-duration space transport came to rest on the dusty plains
of Hovsgol Nuruu, in the Russian zone of northern Mongolia. In the control bay of the craft rescuers
found the body of Colonel Vasily Borgov Luchenko. For months, LuchenkoтАЩs ship had been considered
lost beyond the Asteroid Belt that separates the Earth, Mercury, Venus and Mars from the outer planets.
Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, however, Russian ground crews had begun receiving signals from
the lost ship a mere forty-eight hours before it made a computer-aided emergency landing.

When the ship was down, it was plain to all that the transport had suffered great damage to both its
navigational and life support systems. When Luchenko was removed from the craft, his body temperature
was hovering near terminal hypothermia. Fortunately, members of the medical trauma team that had
treated the victims of the Stoli space station disaster were present. They succeeded in raising LuchenkoтАЩs
body temperature sufficiently to safely fly him back to the Laev Hospital in Moscow.

By the end of the week, Colonel Luchenko was pronounced out-of-danger. Six weeks later at a press
conference streamed live around the world, Luchenko spoke publicly of his encounter with the
extraterrestrials he called the Julia Set. In March of the following year, LuchenkoтАЩs First Symphony
(Songbird in the Abyss) premiered to enthusiastic reviews in Paris. It was not until his Third Symphony,
however, that Luchenko dealt directly with his strange adventure.




Vasily Borgov Luchenko, failed music student, minor poet with a handful of academic publications, was
not a man that many would have guessed could inspire such worldwide devotion as now exists. After his
dismissal from the state music academy in Leningrad, he was forced to work as an unskilled laborer,
cleaning the enormous fish tanks at the Novosk aqua farms. His devotion to music was clear even then,
however, as he somehow completed the libretto for the recently revived Faustian opera, Stalin in the
Wilderness. His first completely original large-scale work, however, appeared under the most unusual of
circumstances.
Among the patients at the Laev Hospital, was the Japanese pianist Shigeo Yomiuri, an important figure in
the first generation of so-called Prosthetic Flowers тАФ youths whose natural artistic gifts were allegedly
augmented by the use of intramuscular nanomachines and cranial chip implants. Yomiuri, it turned out,