Rock On (9 page)

“I really do.”

“What would you do for me, if I asked you?”

“Anything.”

“Would you kill for me?”

I say, “Sure.”

“Really?”

“Of course.” I smile. I know how to play.

“This is no game.”

My face must betray my confusion. I don’t know how I should react.

Her expression mercurially alters to sadness. “You’re scissors, Robbie. All shiny cold metal. How can you ever hope to cut stone?”

Would I want to?

11

Things get worse.

Is it simply that I’m screwing up on my own hook, or is it because we’re exploring a place no performance has ever been? I don’t have time to worry about it; I play the console like it was the keyboard on Nagami’s synthesizer.

Take it

When you can get it

Where you can get it

Jain sways and the crowd sways; she thrusts and the crowd thrusts. It is one gigantic act. It is as though a temblor shakes the Front Range.

Insect chittering in my earpiece: “What the hell’s going on, Rob? I’m monitoring the stim feed. You’re oscillating from hell to fade-out.”

“I’m trying to balance.” I juggle slides. “Any better?”

“At least it’s no worse,” says the tech. He pauses. “Can you manage the payoff?”

The payoff. The precision-engineered and carefully timed upslope leading to climax. The Big Number. I’ve kept the slim tracks plateaued for the past three sets. “Coming,” I say. It’s coming. There’s time.

“You’re in bad trouble with New York if there isn’t,” says the tech. “I want to register a jag. Now.”

“Okay,” I say.

Love me

Eat me

All of me

“Better,” the tech says. “But keep it rising. I’m still only registering a sixty percent.”

Sure, bastard. It isn’t your brain burning with the output of these million strangers.
My violence surprises me. But I push the slim up to seventy. Then Nagami goes into a synthesizer riff, and Jain sags back against a vertical rank of amps.

“Robbie?” It comes into my left ear, on the in-house com circuit reserved for performer and me alone.

“I’m here, Jain.”

“You’re not trying, babe.”

I stare across the stage and she’s looking back at me. Her eyes flash emerald in the wave from Hollis’s color generator. She subvocalizes so her lips don’t move.

“I mean it.”

“This is new territory,” I answer. “We never had a million before.” I know she thinks it’s an excuse.

“This is it, babe,” she says. “It’s tonight. Will you help me?”

I’ve known the question would come, though I hadn’t known who’d articulate it—her or me. My hesitation stretches much longer in my head than it does in realtime.
So much passion, Rob . . . It seems to build. Would you kill for me?

“Yes,” I say.

“Then I love you,” and breaks off as the riff ends and she struts back out into the light. I reluctantly touch the console and push the stim to seventy-five. Fifty tracks are in.
Jain, will you love me if I don’t?

A bitter look

Eighty. I engage five more tracks. Five to go. The crowd’s getting damn near all of her. And, of course, the opposite’s true.

A flattering word

Since I first heard her in Washington, I’ve loved this song the best. I push more keys. Eighty-two. Eighty-five. I know the tech’s happily watching the meters.

A kiss

The last tracks cut in.
Okay, you’re getting everything from the decaying food in her gut to her deepest buried childhood fears of an empty echoing house.

Ninety.

A sword

And the song ends, one last diminishing chord, but her body continues to move. For her there is still music.

On the com circuit the tech yells: “Idiot! I’m already reading ninety. Ninety, damn it. There’s still one number to go.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. Just . . . trying to make up for previous lag-lime.”

He continues to shout and I don’t answer. On the stage Nagarni and Hollis look at each other and at the rest of the group, and then Moog Indigo slides into the last number with scarcely a pause. Jain turns toward my side of the stage and gives me a soft smile. And then it’s back to the audience and into the song she always tops her concerts with, the number that really made her.

Fill me like the mountains

Ninety-five. There’s only a little travel left in the console slides.

The tech’s voice is aghast. “Are you out of your mind, Rob? I’ve got a ninety-five here—damned needle’s about to peg. Back off to ninety.”

“Say again?” I say. “Interference. Repeat, please.”

“I said back off! We don’t want her higher than ninety.”

Fill me like the sea

Jain soars to the climax. I shove the slides all the way forward. The crowd is on its feet; I have never been so frightened in my life.

“Rob! I swear to God you’re canned, you—”

Somehow Stella’s on the com line too: “You son of a bitch! You hurt her—”

Jain flings her arms wide. Her back arches impossibly.

All of me

One hundred.

I cannot rationalize electronically what happens. I cannot imagine the affection and hate and lust and fear cascading into her and pouring back out. But I see the antenna mesh around her naked body glowing suddenly whiter until it flares in an actinic flash and I shut my eyes.

When I open them again, Jain is a blackened husk tottering toward the front of the stage. Her body falls over the edge into the first rows of spectators.

The crowd still thinks this is part of the set, and they love it.

12

No good-byes. I know I’m canned. When I go into the Denver Alpertron office in another day and a half to pick up my final check, some subordinate I’ve never seen before gives me the envelope.

“Thanks,” I say. He stares at me and says nothing.

I turn to leave and meet Stella in the hall. The top of her head comes only to my shoulders, and so she has to tilt her face up to glare at me. She says, “You’re not going to be working for any promoter in the business. New York says so.”

“Fine,” I say. I walk past her.

Before I reach the door, she stops me by saying, “The initial report is in already.”

I turn. “And?”

“The verdict will probably end up accidental death. Everybody’s bonded. Jain was insured for millions. Everything will turn out all right for everyone.” She stares at me for several seconds. “Except Jain. You bastard.”

We have our congruencies.

The package comes later, along with a stiff legal letter from a firm of attorneys. The substance of the message is this: “Jain Snow wished you to have possession of this. She informed you prior to her demise of her desires; please carry them out accordingly.” The package contains a chrome cylinder with a screw cap. The cylinder contains ashes; ashes and a few bone fragments. I check. Jain’s ashes, unclaimed by father, friends, or employer.

I drive West, away from the soiled towers of the strip-city. I drive beyond the coal strip pits and into the mountains until the paved highway becomes narrow asphalt and then rutted earth and then only a trace, and the car can go no further. With the metal cylinder in one hand I flee on foot until I no longer hear sounds of city or human beings.

At last the trees end and I climb over bare mountain grades. I rest briefly when the pain in my lungs is too sharp. to ignore. At last I reach the summit.

I scatter Jain’s ashes on the wind.

Then I hurl the empty cylinder down toward the timberline; it rolls and clatters and finally is only a distant glitter on the talus slope.

“Jain!” I scream at the sky until my voice is gone and vertigo destroys my balance. The echoes die. As Jain died.

I lie down unpeacefully—exhausted—and sleep, and my dreams are of weathered stone. And I awake empty.

Edward Bryant
has had more than a dozen books published as well as numerous short stories. This story, “Stone,” garnered Bryant a Hugo nomination and the first of his two Nebula Awards. Of it, and music, he writes: “Long, long ago, on a highway far away, I was roadtripping to the east and woke up in an Interstate rest area just outside Des Moines, Iowa. I rolled down the window to Midwestern mugginess and flipped on the radio. An AM station was playing a Janis Joplin set. I’d loved her from her albums and had seen her live at the Family Dog in Denver. Damn. ‘Stone’ pretty much came to me whole cloth. Me, I’m no musician. But I love to use music in my stories. If I weren’t a writer, I’d love to be a musician—professional or amateur. At this moment I’m trying to compose a symphony, a giant retrospective of my short fiction for Arkham House.”

Mercenary

Lawrence C. Connolly

I got lost on my way home from a failed audition, took a bad turn near the East End, and wound up in a district of dark streets and derelict buildings. It was the last place you’d expect to find traffic, but suddenly there it was, closing in around me, streaming from all directions until I was bumper to bumper on a congested backstreet.

A biker roared past me, advanced a little ways ahead, then stopped to light a cigarette as the traffic crawled past her.

I rolled down my window, called to her. “Hey? Where’s everyone headed?”

She had this black thing going: jacket, eyes, gages—all jet black. Only a streak of silver in her tied-back hair and the pale skin of her face broke the gloom. And there was something alluring about her, and something faintly familiar in her voice as she said: “What? You lost?”

“Yeah. Looks that way.”

Ahead of us, the traffic inched forward. Behind, horns blared.

She ignored them. “So you’re not here for the show?”

“What show?”

“Bobbie Quicksilver. Heard of him?”

“No.”

“Well, now you have. Come on.” She put the bike in gear. “There’s a spot up ahead.”

She swung into the space, then pulled onto the sidewalk to give me room. But it wasn’t a parking zone. I saw that when I was halfway in.

“Come on!” She waved, urging me to take it. “Screw the hydrant! You won’t be here long.”

I angled in, turned off the car.

“Five minutes,” she said. “Ten max. The traffic will clear out. You can turn around then. Be out of here in no time.”

I got out of the car, turning to keep my left side toward her, the way I still do when I meet a woman I’m attracted to. It’s not that I’m self-conscious. I just like making clean first impressions. “You said these people are here for a show?”

“Yeah. Curious?”

“You could say that.”

“Want to come with me? I could give you a lift if you don’t mind parking here.” She took a last drag on her cigarette, then flicked it away. “Actually . . . truth is . . . if the cops come by, I don’t think they’ll be writing tickets.”

A moment later I was sitting behind her, hugging her waist as she eased between the cars. She told me that her name was Ariana. She was a blogger, not a
Silverhead.

“What’s a Silverhead?”

“That’s the obvious question, isn’t it?”

A warehouse appeared at the end of the street, standing in a concrete lot that had crumbled into something resembling gravel. Cars were parked everywhere, wedged in tight around walls covered with boards, no-trespassing signs, and a fresh layer of graffiti reading:

Bobbie Quicksilver Jams Tonight

Ariana stopped her bike, got off, and looked around at the crowd. “What do you think? A thousand people?”

“Maybe.”

“That’s a lot for one of these, though the one in Allentown was supposedly bigger.”

I considered the graffiti. “So Bobbie Quicksilver? He’s some kind of performer?”

“Yeah.
Some
kind. Performs all over. Rust-belt towns mostly.”

“He’s on tour?”

“Not exactly. He only does guerilla shows. No advance notice, flash-media announcements only. The time and location for this gig went out less than two hours ago.” She unzipped her jacket, took out a palm-size Nikon. “Stay close.” She took my arm, pulling me in tight beside her. “Silverheads don’t like having their events recorded.” She held the camera between us, clicking the shutter. “Don’t look at the camera. We’re just two Silverheads hanging out before the show. Talk to me.”

“Okay.”

“Does that pass for talk where you come from?”

“No. Sorry. Uh . . . who do you write for?”

“I’m independent.” She stopped snapping pictures, put the camera back in her pocket, took out a Sharpie. “Here.” She wrote a URL on my palm. “Check this out when you get home.” She folded my hand closed as if to keep me from dropping the address. “What about you? What do you do?”

There were two answers to that. I gave her the safe one. “I’m a musician.” I was looking directly at her now, the right side of my face fully in view.

“Really?” She studied the scars running like train tracks along my neck and jaw. “You didn’t get those playing ‘Free Bird.’ ”

“No.” I laughed. It was genuine. She had put me at ease. “The scars are from another life. It’s behind me now.” I had a few business cards in my wallet, printed out at home from a design template and featuring a photo taken with my iPhone. I’d made them special for my audition earlier that afternoon, had given one to the band manager, and was prepared to offer the rest to the other musicians if they’d seemed interested. They hadn’t. I had plenty to spare. “This is what I do now.”

She took it, tilting it toward the evening light. “Lorcan? What kind of name—”

“Irish.”

“You Irish?”

“No, just Lorcan.”

“You live on Spahr Street? I know that neighborhood.” She put the card in her pocket. “Listen, would you want to maybe do an interview, give me a musician’s assessment of Bobbie Quicksilver.”