Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

The officer held out her phone to tap a copy of her report over to me.

“Non-comm,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

Silva stepped in for the first time. He hadn’t even opened his mouth to help me list stuff, but now he held up his phone. “Send it to me, officer.”

She did, with a promise to follow up as soon as she had any leads. Got in her squad car. She had to actually use the wheel and drive herself back down the rutted path; I guessed places like this were why police cars had a manual option. She had probably written us off already, either way.

I turned to Silva, but he had walked off. I followed him down the path toward an old warehouse.

“Stop!” I said, when it was clear he wasn’t going to. He turned toward me. I expected him to be as sad as me, but he looked angrier than I had ever seen him, fists clenched and jaw tight.

“Whoa,” I said. “Calm down. It’ll be okay. We’ll figure something out.”

“How? How, Luce?”

“They’ll find Daisy. Or we’ll figure something out.”

“Daisy’s just the start of it. It’s amps and records and T-shirts and everything we own. I don’t even have another pair of underwear. Do you?”

I shook my head. “We can buy…”

“We can buy underwear at the Superwally. But not all that other stuff. We can’t afford it. This is it. We’re done. Unless.”

“Unless?”

He unclenched his left fist and held out a scrap of paper. I took it from him and flattened it. Nikki Kellerman’s business card, which had been on my amp when I last saw it.

“No,” I said.

“Hear me out. We have nothing left. Nothing. You know she’d hook us up if we called now and said we’d sign. We’d get it all back. New amps, new merch, new stage clothes. And we wouldn’t need a new van if we were doing holo shows. We could take a break for a while.”

“Are you serious? You’d stay in one place and do holo shows?” I waited for an answer. He stomped at a piece of glass in the dirt, grinding it with his boot heel. “We’ve been playing together for twenty years and I wouldn’t have guessed you’d ever say yes to that.”

“Come off it, Luce. You know I don’t object the way you do. You know that, or you’d have run it past me before turning her down. I know we’re not a democracy, but you used to give me at least the illusion I had a choice.”

I bit my lip. “You’re right. I didn’t run it past you. And actually, I didn’t turn her down in the end. I didn’t say yes, but she said some stuff that confused me.”

That stopped him short. Neither of us said anything for a minute. I looked around. What a weird place to be having this fight; I always figured it would come, but in the van. I waited for a response, and when none came, I prodded. “So you’re saying that’s what you want?”

“No! Maybe. I don’t know. It doesn’t always seem like the worst idea. But now I don’t think we have another option. I think I could have kept going the way we were for a while longer, but rebuilding from scratch?” He shook his head, then turned and walked away again. I didn’t follow this time.

Back at the building where we had stayed, the bike kids had reappeared, murmuring amongst themselves. Jacky leaned against the front stoop, a few feet from them. I sat down in the grass opposite my drummer.

“What do you think of StageHolo? I mean really?”

He spit on the ground.

“Me too,” I agreed. “But given the choice between starting over with nothing, and letting them rebuild us, what would you do? If there weren’t any other options.”

He ran a hand over his braids. “If there weren’t any other options?”

I nodded.

“There are always other options, Luce. I didn’t sign up with you to do fake shows in some fake warehouse for fake audiences. I wouldn’t stay. And you wouldn’t last.”

I pulled a handful of grass and tossed it at him.

He repeated himself. “Really. I don’t know what you’d do. You wouldn’t be you anymore. You’d probably still come across to some people, but you’d have the wrong kind of anger. Anger for yourself, instead of for everybody. You’d be some hologram version of yourself. No substance.”

I stared at him.

“People always underestimate the drummer, but I get to sit behind you and watch you every night. Trust me.” He laughed, then looked over my shoulder. “I watch you, too, Silva. It goes for you, too.”

I didn’t know how long Silva had been behind me, but he sat down between us now, grunting as he lowered himself to the ground. He leaned against Jacky and put his grimy glassdust boots in my lap.

I shoved them off. “That was an old-man grunt.”

“I’m getting there, old lady, but you’ll get there first. Do you have a plan?”

I looked over where the bike kids had congregated. “Hey, guys! Do any of you have a car? Or, you know, know anybody who has a car?”

The bike kids looked horrified, then one—Dijuan?—nodded. “My sister has a Chauffeur.”

“Family sized?”

Dijuan’s face fell.

Back to the drawing board. Leaning back on my elbows, I thought about all the other bands we could maybe call on, if I knew anybody who had come off the road, who might have a van to sell if Daisy didn’t reappear. Maybe, but nobody close enough to loan one tonight. Except…

“You’re not saying you’re out, right?” I asked Silva. “You’re not saying StageHolo or nothing? ’Cause I really can’t do it. Maybe someday, on our terms, but I can’t do it yet.”

He closed his eyes. “I know you can’t. But I don’t know what else to do.”

“I do. At least for tonight.”

I told him who to call.

Truly arrived with her sister’s family-sized Chauffeur an hour later. We had to meet her up on the road.

“It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we’ll get there,” she said. The third row and all the foot space was packed tight with the Moby K. Dick amps and drums and cables.

“Thank you so much,” I said, climbing into what would be the driver’s seat if it had a wheel or pedals. It felt strange, but oddly freeing as the car navigated its way from wherever we were toward where we were going.

I was supposed to be upset. But we had a ride to the gig, and gear to play. We’d survive without merch for the time being. Somebody in Pittsburgh would help us find a way to Baltimore if Daisy hadn’t been found by then, or back to Columbus to reclaim her.

With enough time to arrange it, the other bands would let us use their drums and amps at most of the shows we had coming up, and in the meantime we still had our guitars and a little bit of cash. We’d roll on, in Daisy or a Chauffeur, or on bikes with guitars strapped to our backs. No StageHolo gig could end this badly; this was the epic, terrible, relentlessness of life on the road. We made music. We were music. We’d roll on. We’d roll on. We’d roll on.

Kelly Robson’s short fiction has been published in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny . She has been a wine and spirits writer for Chatelaine Magazine and has contributed several essays on writing to Clarkesworld ’s “Another Word” column. Her novella “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” was a finalist for the 2019 Nebula, Hugo, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, and Aurora Awards.

“A Study in Oils” is a gentle story about rehabilitation, remorse, and redemption through art.

HALFWAY UP THE WINDING cliff-side guideway, Zhang Lei turned his bike around. He was exhausted from three days of travel and nauseated, too, but that wasn’t the problem. He could always power through physical discomfort. But the trees, the rocks, the open sky above, and the mountains closing in—it was all too strange. He kept expecting something to drop on his head.