Rock On (40 page)

They were never better. Small change getting a glimpse of what it was like to be big bucks. Hadn’t been for Featherweight, they might have gotten all the way there. More groups now than ever there was, all of them sure that if they just got the right sinner with them, they’d rock the moon down out of the sky.

We maybe vibrated it a little before we were done. Poor old Featherweight.

I gave them better than they deserved, and they knew that too. So when I begged out, they showed me respect at last and went. Their techies were gentle with me, taking the plugs from my head, my poor old throbbing abused brokenhearted sinning head, and covered up the sockets. I had to sleep and they let me. I hear the man say, “That’s a take, righteously. We’ll rush it into distribution. Where in
hell,
did you find that sinner?”

“Synthesizer,” I muttered, already asleep. “The actual word, my boy, is
synthesizer.
”

Crazy old dreams. I was back with Man-O-War in the big CA, leaving him again, and it was mostly as it happened, but you know dreams. His living room was half outdoors, half indoors, the walls all busted out. You know dreams; I didn’t think it was strange.

Man-O-War was mostly undressed, like he’d forgotten to finish. Oh, that never happened. Man-O-War forget a sequin or a bead? He loved to act it out, just like the Krait.

“No more,” I was saying, and he was saying, “But you don’t know anything else, you shitting?” Nobody in the big CA kids, they all shit; loose juice.

“Your contract goes another two and I get the option, I always get the option. And you love it, Gina, you know that, you’re no good without it.”

And then it was flashback time and I was in the pod with all my sockets plugged, rocking Man-O-War through the wires, giving him the meat and bone that made him Man-O-War and the machines picking it up, sound and vision, so all the tube babies all around the world could play it on their screens whenever they wanted. Forget the road, forget the shows, too much trouble, and it wasn’t like the tapes, not as exciting, even with the biggest FX, lasers, spaceships, explosions, no good. And the tapes weren’t as good as the stuff in the head, rock ’n’ roll visions straight from the brain. No hours of setup and hours more doctoring in the lab. But you had to get everyone in the group dreaming the same way. You needed a synthesis, and for that you got a synthesizer, not the old kind, the musical instrument, but something—somebody—to channel your group through, to bump up their tube-fed little souls, to rock them and roll them the way they couldn’t do themselves. And anyone could be a rock ’n’ roll hero then. Anyone!

In the end, they didn’t have to play instruments unless they really wanted to, and why bother? Let the synthesizer take their imaginings and boost them up to Mount Olympus.

Synthesizer. Synner. Sinner.

Not just anyone can do that, sin for rock ’n’ roll. I can.

But it’s not the same as jumping all night to some bar band nobody knows yet . . . Man-O-War and his blown-out living room came back, and he said, “You rocked the walls right out of my house. I’ll never let you go.”

And I said, “I’m gone.”

Then I was out, going fast at first because. I thought he’d be hot behind me. But I must have lost him and then somebody grabbed my ankle.

Featherweight had a tray, he was Mr. Nursie-Angel-of-Mercy. Nudged the foot of the bed with his knee, and it sat me up slow. She rises from the grave, you can’t keep a good sinner down.

“Here.” He set the tray over my lap, pulled up a chair. Some kind of thick soup in a bowl he’d given me, with veg wafers to break up and put in. “Thought you’d want something soft and easy.” He put his left foot up on his right leg and had a good look at it. “I
never
been rocked like that before.”

“You don’t have it, no matter who rocks you ever in this world. Cut and run, go into management. The
big
Big Money’s in management.”

He snacked on his thumbnail. “Can you always tell?”

“If the Stones came back tomorrow, you couldn’t even tap your toes.”

“What if you took my place?”

“I’m a sinner, not a clown. You can’t sin and do the dance. It’s been tried.”

“
You
could do it. If anyone could.”

“No.”

His stringy cornsilk fell over his face and he tossed it back. “Eat your soup. They want to go again shortly.”

“No.” I touched my lower lip, thickened to sausage size. “I won’t sin for Man-O-War and I won’t sin for you. You want to pop me one again, go to. Shake a socket loose, give me aphasia.”

So he left and came back with a whole bunch of them, techies and do-kids, and they poured the soup down my throat and gave me a poke and carried me out to the pod so I could make Misbegotten this year’s firestorm.

I knew as soon as the first tape got out, Man-O-War would pick up the scent. They were already starting the machine to get me away from him. And they kept me good in the room—where their old sinner had done penance, the lady told me. Their sinner came to see me, too. I thought, poison dripping from his fangs, death threats. But he was just a guy about my age with a lot of hair to hide his sockets (I never bothered, didn’t care if they showed). Just came to pay his respects, how’d I ever learn to rock the way I did?

Fool.

They kept me good in the room; drinks when I wanted them and a poke to get sober again, a poke for vitamins, a poke to lose the bad dreams. Poke; poke, pig in a poke. I had tracks like the old B&O, and they didn’t even know what I meant by that. They lost Featherweight, got themselves someone a little more righteous, someone who could go with it and work out, sixteen-year-old snip girl with a face like a praying mantis. But she rocked and they rocked and we all rocked until Man-O-War came to take me home. Strutted into my room in full plumage with his hair all fanned out (hiding the sockets) and said, “Did you want to press charges, Gina darling?”

Well, they fought it out over my bed. When Misbegotten said I was theirs now, Man-O-War smiled and said, “Yeah, and I bought
you.
You’re
all
mine now, you
and
your sinner. My sinner.” That was truth. Man-O-War had his conglomerate start to buy Misbegotten right after the first tape came out. Deal all done by the time we’d finished the third one, and they never knew. Conglomerates buy and sell all the time. Everybody was in trouble but Man-O-War. And me, he said. He made them all leave and sat down on my bed to re-lay claim to me.

“Gina.” Ever see honey poured over the edge of a sawtooth blade? Every hear it? He couldn’t sing without hurting someone bad and he couldn’t dance, but inside, he rocked. If I rocked him.

“I don’t want to be a sinner, not for you or anyone.”

“It’ll all look different when I get you back to Cee-Ay.”

“I want to go to a cheesy bar and boogie my brains till they leak out the sockets.”

“No more, darling. That was why you came here, wasn’t it? But all the bars are gone and all the bands. Last call was years ago; it’s all up here now. All up here.” He tapped his temple. “You’re an old lady, no matter how much I spend keeping your bod young. And don’t I give you everything? And didn’t you say I had it?”

“It’s not the same. It wasn’t meant to be put on a tube for people to
watch.
”

“But it’s not as though rock ’n’ roll is dead, lover.”

“You’re killing it.”

“Not me. You’re trying to bury it alive. But I’ll keep you going for a long, long time.”

“I’ll get away again. You’ll either rock ’n’ roll on your own or give it up, but you won’t be taking it out of me any more. This ain’t my way, it ain’t my time. Like the man said, ‘I don’t live today.’ ”

Man-O-War grinned. “And like the other man said, ‘Rock ’n’ roll never forgets.’ ”

He called in his do-kids and took me home.

Pat Cadigan
sold her first professional science fiction story in 1980 and became a full-time writer in 1987. She is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of
Lost in Space
and
The Mummy,
one young adult novel, and the two Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novels:
Synners
and
Fools.
(The genesis of
Synners
can be found in “Rock On.”) She has lectured at universities, literary festivals, and cultural gatherings around the world, including M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, PopTech in Camden, Maine, Utopiales in France, and Argonauts of the Noosphere in Rimini, Italy. She can be found on Facebook and Pinterest, tweets as @cadigan, and lives in North London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler. Most of her books are available electronically via SF Gateway, the ambitious electronic publishing program from Gollancz.

Arise

Poppy Z. Brite

Nightfall in Gabon
,
and the bush was the darkest thing Cobb had ever seen. It rambled along the edge of the little beachside town and stretched away into the West African hills. If you stood at the edge of the bush and looked out at night, you could see dozens of little fires flickering in the distance, giving off less illumination than lighters in a darkened stadium, accentuating the blackness more than relieving it. These were not the fires of poachers (for there was nothing left to kill nearby), but of straggling nomads on their way into or out of town.

Cobb sat in the tin-sided bar as he did most nights, drinking African beer lightly chilled by the bar’s refrigerator. This was to Cobb’s taste, for he had once been an Englishman. Now he was a citizen of nowhere on earth. He drank his beer and rolled his fat cigars of African ganja and fixed his rust-colored eyes on the TV set in the corner, and it was very seldom anyone spoke to him. This, too, was as he preferred it.

When the police came by, Cobb would give them money to go away. When the television broke, Cobb paid for a new one. Though everyone in the town knew this man was very rich, no one cared whether he was alive, dead, or famous. The only conceivable reason he could have come here was to be left alone, and so he was.

He watched the television, mostly American cop shows and softcore porn from France. When the news came on, he ignored it. He had seen coverage of war, every kind of natural and man-made disaster, the assassination of one American and countless African presidents, the dissolution of the same Soviet Union he’d once written a satirical song about. But he never reacted to anything he saw on the TV.

Tonight, he saw a thing that made him react.

It began with the music: a few bars of a song by the Kydds, one of the really huge hits, one of Matty’s. That was familiar enough, you couldn’t watch TV or listen to the radio anywhere on earth without hearing the Kydds, and Cobb ignored it. Then the reporter’s voice broke in: “Dead at forty-five, Eric Matthew, founding member and driving force behind the most successful pop group of all time . . . ”

Cobb looked up. Matty’s face filled the screen, an old picture. That girly smile, those fuck-me eyes that hid a will of steel. Then the screen switched to a picture of the four of them in concert, 1969, all long stringy hair and, Jesus Christ, velvet suits.

“ . . . suicide at his New York apartment. Eric Matthew is the second member of the Kydds to die; guitarist and singer Terry Cobb was killed in a plane crash in 1985. All the details coming up on CNN.”

Cobb didn’t go to the bar for a week, but stayed in his house drinking whiskey. On the eighth day, a young African showed up at his door with a Federal Express box addressed to William Van Duyk, the name that had appeared on Cobb’s passport for the past ten years.

The box was heavy, ten or twelve pounds at least. The return addressee was someone or something called Gallagher, Gallagher, Campbell on the Upper West Side of New York. Cobb found a knife and opened the box. Inside was a cream-colored envelope and a heavy plastic bag full of what looked like coarse sand.

He stuck a long forefinger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. A key fell out, and he let it lie on the floor for now. Inside the envelope were some folded sheets of creamy paper. “Terry,” the first line read—

Cobb dropped the paper. No one had addressed him by that name in over a decade.

His hand shaking a little, he picked up the letter. “Terry,” he read again, and this time he realized it was Matty’s handwriting. He knew that neat schoolboy script well enough, had seen plenty of first-draft lyrics and signatures on contracts and bossy notes in that same hand. Matty knew where he was—had known where he was. Had known all this time. It was like one of the morbid jokes Cobb had always collected: Matty had known he wasn’t dead, and now Matty was dead.

“Terry, you always said I had to have the last word, and it looks like you were right. I’ve found the most private place in the world. It wasn’t enough to save me, but I think it might be just the thing for you. Get the fuck out of Africa at any rate—it’s unhealthy for a Manchester boy. The house is yours. Do whatever you like with the other. Peace & Love—MATTY.”

Cobb flipped through the other papers. One was a deed to an estate in North Carolina, ownership of which had been signed over by Eric James Matthew to William Van Duyk. Another was a hand-drawn map of the estate and its environs.

He swore and threw the papers on the floor, then glanced at the box again, remembering the plastic bag inside. He knew it wasn’t sand. He slit the heavy plastic with his knife, took a handful of the contents and let them sift through his fingers onto the wooden floor. Most of the material was pulverized, but here and there Cobb saw recognizable bits of calcined bone.

“Bastard,” he said.

The flight from Port-Gentil to London was terrifying. Aside from the fact that he hadn’t ridden in anything larger than a taxi in years, he had no idea how recognizable he might be. He couldn’t wear dark glasses, for they had been one of his trademarks in the old days, tripped-out mirror lenses spinning daisy wheels of light. Despite a steady intake of two vodka tonics per hour, he was shaking when he deplaned at Gatwick, was certain he looked like a drug mule or worse, was shocked when he was waved through Customs without delay. Having been out of the loop for so long, Cobb didn’t realize that in the one suit he’d managed to salvage—crumpled but classically cut black linen, with a gray T-shirt underneath—he simply looked like a disheveled jetsetter returning from a particularly strenuous holiday.