Rock On (7 page)

“Hey, Jonson!” he says. “Where da hell ya been? Da cops is lookin’ all ova for ya!”

I freeze on the bottom step.

“I’ve been working—all night.”

“Sheesh, whatta night. First dat broad overdoses an’ dies right downa street, and now dis! Anyway, da cops is in your place. Better go talk to ’em.”

As much as I want to run, I don’t. I can get out of this. Somebody probably saw us together, that’s all. I can get out of this.

“I don’t know anything about an overdose,” I say. It’s a form of practice. I figure I’m going to have to say it a lot of times before the cops leave.

“Not dat!” Charlie says. “About your apartment. You was broken into a few hours ago. I t’ought I heard glass break so’s I come downstairs to check. Dey got in t’rough your back window, but I scared ’em off afore dey got much.” He grins and slaps me on the shoulder. “You owe me one, kid. How many landlords is security guards, too?”

I’m starting to relax. I force a smile as I walk up the steps past him.

“You’re the best, Charlie.”

“Don’t I know it. Dey did manage to make off wit your hi-fl an’ your records but, hey, you can replace dose wit’out too much trouble.”

I turn toward Charlie. I feel the whole world, all the weight of time itself crashing down on me. I can’t help it. It comes unbidden, without warning. Charlie’s eyes nearly bulge out of his head as I scream a laugh in his face.

F. Paul Wilson
(www.repairmanjack.com) is the award-winning,
New York Times
bestselling author of forty-plus books and many short stories spanning horror, adventure, medical thrillers, science fiction, and virtually everything between. More than nine million copies of his books are in print in the U.S. and his work has been translated into twenty-four foreign languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers,
Nightworld
and
Cold City,
feature his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. The author resides at the REAL Jersey Shore. Wilson’s referenced rock in other stories such as “Nyro Fiddles,” “The Last Oldies Revival,” and “The Years the Music Died.” He even touches on disco in “When He Was Fab.”

Stone

Edward Bryant

1

Up above the burning city, a woman wails the blues. How she cries out, how she moans. Flames fed by tears rake fingers across the sky.

It is an old, old song:

Fill me like the mountains

Fill me like the sea

Writhing in the heat, she stands where there is no support.

The fire licks her body.

All of me

So finely drawn, and with the glitter of ice, the manipulating wires radiate outward. Taut bonds between her body and the flickering darkness, all wires lead to the intangible overshadowing figure behind her. Without expression, Atropos gazes down at the woman.

Face contorting, she looks into the hearts of a million fires and cries out.

All of me

As Atropos raises the terrible, cold-shining blades of the Nornshears and with only the barest hesitation cuts the wires. Limbs spread-eagled to the compass points, the woman plunges into the flames. She is instantly and utterly consumed.

The face of Atropos remains shrouded in shadows.

2

ALPERTRON PRESENTS

IN CONCERT

JAIN SNOW

with

MOOG INDIGO

Sixty-track stim by RobCal

June 23, 24

One show nightly at 2100

Tickets $30, $26, $22.

Available from all Alpertron

outlets or at the door.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN

CENTRAL ARENA

DENVER

3

My name is Robert Dennis Clary and I was born twenty-three years ago in Oil City, Pennsylvania, which is also where I was raised. I’ve got a degree in electrical engineering from MIT and some grad credit at Cal Tech in electronics.
“Not suitable, Mr. Clary,” said the dean. “You lack the proper team spirit. Frankly speaking, you are selfish. And a cheat.”

My mother told me once she was sorry I wasn’t handsome enough to get by without working.
Listen, Ma, I’m all right. There’s nothing wrong with working the concert circuit. I’m working damned hard now.
I was never genius enough that I could have got a really good job with, say, Bell Futures or one of the big space firms. But I’ve got one marketable talent—what the interviewer called a peculiarly coordinative affinity for multiplex circuitry.
He looked a little stunned after I finished with the stim console. “Christ, kid, you really get into it, don’t you?”

That’s what got me the job with Alpertron, Ltd., the big promotion and booking agency. I’m on the concert tour and work their stim board, me and my console over there on the side of the stage. It isn’t that much different in principle from playing one of the instruments in the backup band, though it’s a hell of a lot more complex than even Nagami’s synthesizer. It all sounds simple enough: my console is the critical link between performer and audience. Just one glorified feedback transceiver: pick up the empathic load from Jain, pipe it into the audience, they react and add their own load, and I feed it all back to the star. And then around again as I use the sixty stim tracks, each with separate controls to balance and augment and intensify. It can get pretty hairy, which is why not just anyone can do the job. It helps that I seem to have a natural resistance to the side-band slopover radiation from the empathic transmissions. “Ever think of teaching?” said the school voc counselor. “No,” I said. “I want the action.”

And that’s why I’m on the concert circuit with Jain Snow; as far as I’m concerned, the only real blues singer and stim star.

Jain Snow, my intermittent unrequited love.
Her voice is shagreen-rough; you hear it smooth until it tears you to shreds.

She’s older than I am, four, maybe five years; but she looks like she’s in her middle teens. Jain’s tall, with a tumbleweed bush of red hair; her face isn’t so much pretty as it is intense. I’ve never known anyone who didn’t want to make love to her.
“When you’re a star,” she said once, half drunk, “you’re not hung up about taking the last cookie on the plate.”

That includes me, and sometimes she’s let me come into her bed. But not often.
“You like it?” she said. I answered sleepily, “You’re really good.” “Not me,” she said. “I mean being in a star’s bed.” I told her she was a bitch and she laughed.
Not often enough.

I know I don’t dare force the issue; even if I did, there would still be Stella.

Stella Vanilla—I’ve never learned exactly what her real last name is—is Jain’s bodyguard. Other stim stars have whole platoons of karate-trained killers for protection. Jain needs only Stella.
“Stella, pick me up a fifth? Yeah, Irish. Scotch if they don’t.”

She’s shorter than I am, tiny and dark with curly chestnut hair. She’s also proficient in any martial art I can think of. And if all else fails, in her handbag she carries a .357 Colt Python with a four-inch barrel. When I first saw that bastard, I didn’t believe she could even lift it.

But she can. I watched Stella outside Bradley Arena in L.A. when some overanxious bikers wanted to get a little too close to Jain.
“Back off, creeps.” “So who’s tellin’ us?”
She had to hold the Python with both hands, but the muzzle didn’t waver. Stella fired once; the slug tore the guts out of a parked Harley-Wankel. The bikers backed off very quickly.

Stella enfolds Jain in her protection like a raincape. It sometimes amuses Jain; I can see that.
Stella, get Alpertron on the phone for me. Stella? Can you score a couple grams? Stella, check out the dudes in the hall. Stella—
It never stops.

When I first met her, I thought that Stella was the coldest person I’d ever encountered.
And in Des Moines I saw her crying alone in a darkened phone booth—Jain had awakened her and told her to take a walk for a couple hours while she screwed some rube she’d picked up in the hotel bar. I tapped on the glass; Stella ignored me.

Stella, do you want her as much as I?

So there we are—a nice symbolic obtuse triangle. And yet— We’re all just one happy show-biz family.

4

This is Alpertron, Ltd.’s, own chartered jet, flying at 37,000 feet above western Kansas. Stella and Jain are sitting across the aisle from me. It’s a long flight and there’s been a lull in the usually boisterous flight conversation. Jain flips through a current Neiman-Marcus catalogue; exclusive mail order listings are her present passion.

I look up as she bursts into raucous laughter. “I’ll be goddamned. Will you look at this?” She points at the open catalogue on her lap.

Hollis, Moog Indigo’s color operator, is seated behind her. She leans forward and cranes her neck over Jain’s shoulder. “Which?”

“That,” she says. “The VTP.”

“What’s VTP?” says Stella.

Hollis says, “Video tape playback.”

“Hey, everybody!” Jain raises her voice, cutting stridently trough everyone else’s conversations. “Get this. For a small fee, these folks’ll put a videotape gadget in my tombstone. It’s got everything—stereo sound and color. All I’ve got to do is go in before I die and cut the tape.”

“Terrific!” Hollis says. “You could leave an album of greatest hits. You know, for posterity. Free concerts on the grass every Sunday.”

“That’s really sick,” Stella says.

“Free, hell.” Jain grins. “Anybody who wants to catch the show can put a dollar in the slot.”

Stella stares disgustedly out the window.

Hollis says, “Do you want one of those units for your birthday?”

“Nope.” Jain shakes her head, “I’m not going to need one.”

“Never?”

“Well . . . not for a long time.” But I think her words sound unsure.

Then I only half listen as I look out from the plane across the scattered cloud banks and the Rockies looming to the west of us. Tomorrow night we play Denver.
“It’s about as close to home as I’m gonna get,” Jain had said in New Orleans when we found out Denver was booked.

“A what?” Jain’s voice is puzzled.

“A cenotaph,” says Hollis.

“Shut up,” Stella says. “Damn it.”

5

We’re in the Central Arena, the architectural pride of Denver District. This is the largest gathering place in all of Rocky Mountain, that heterogeneous, anachronistic strip-city clinging to the front ranges of the continental divide all the way from Billings down to the southern suburb of El Paso.

The dome stretches up beyond the range of the house lights, if it were rigid, there could never be a Rocky Mountain Central Arena. But it’s made of a flexible plastic-variant and blowers funnel up heated air to keep it buoyant. We’re on the inner skin of a giant balloon. When the arena’s full, the body heat from the audience keeps the dome aloft, and the arena crew turns off the blowers.

I killed time earlier tonight reading the promo pamphlet on this place. As the designer says, the combination of arena and spectators turns the dome into one sustaining organism. At first I misread it as “orgasm.”

I monitor crossflow conversations through plugs inserted in both ears as set-up people check out the lights, sound, color, and all the rest of the systems. Finally some nameless tech comes on circuit to give my stim console a run-through.

“Okay, Rob, I’m up in the booth above the east aisle. Give me just a tickle.”
My nipples were sensitized to her tongue, rough as a cat’s.

I’m wired to a test set fully as powerful as the costume Jain’ll wear later—just not as exotic. I slide a track control forward until it reaches the five-position on a scale calibrated to one hundred.

“Five?” the tech says.

“Reading’s dead-on. Give me a few more tracks.”

I comply.
She kisses me with lips and tongue, working down across my belly.

“A little higher, please.”

I push the tracks to fifteen.

“You’re really in a mood, Rob.”

“So what do you want me to think?” I say.

“Jesus,” says the tech. “You ought to be performing. The crowd would love it.”

“They pay Jain. She’s the star.”
I tried to get on top; she wouldn’t let me. A moment later it didn’t matter.

“Did you just push the board to thirty?” The tech’s voice sounds strange.

“No. Did you read that?”

“Negative, but for a moment it felt like it.” He pauses. “You’re not allowing your emotional life to get in the way of your work, are you?”

“Screw off,” I answer. “None of your business.”

“No threats,” says the tech. “Just a suggestion.”

“Stick it.”

“Okay, okay. She’s a lovely girl, Rob. And like you say, she’s the star.”

“I know.”

“Fine. Feed me another five tracks, Rob; broad spectrum this time.”

I do so and the tech is satisfied with the results. “That ought to do it,” he says. “I’ll get back to you later.” He breaks off the circuit. All checks are done; there’s nothing now on the circuits but a background scratch like insects climbing over old newspapers.
She will not allow me to be exhausted for long.

Noisily, the crowd is starting to file into the Arena.

I wait for the concert.

6

There’s never before been a stim star of the magnitude of Jain Snow. Yet somehow the concert tonight fails. Somewhere the chemistry goes wrong. The faces out there are as always—yet somehow they are not involved. They care, but not enough.

I don’t think the fault’s in Jain. I detect no significant difference from other concerts. Her skin still tantalizes the audience as nakedly, only occasionally obscured by the cloudy metal mesh that transforms her entire body into a single antenna. I’ve been there when she’s performed a hell of a lot better, maybe, but I’ve also seen her perform worse and still come off the stage happy.