Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘The hat,’ Hoffman called after her despairingly, ‘is carried ’

She felt less self-conscious the closer the shuttles took her to the concert park. Rustic retro quaintness was definitely the look of the hour. She’d seen the same style affected by the Atomic Amish, one of the more conservative AO sects: fission freaks. The park entrance was a hundred metres from the stop. A big marquee with a stage glowed in the twilight a few hundred metres from the gate. Inside, the crowd already smelled of sweat and beer. Some people were even smoking. All part of the atmosphere. She grabbed a can of beer off a stall, fanned herself with the hat (aha!) and made her way to the front. With universal recognition, there was no ticketing. She wouldn’t even need a pass to go backstage for the after-show party. If it hadn’t been part of her conspiracy with Armand, the party would have held no attraction for her. As it was, she felt a fannish flutter in her chest at the thought. Meeting the Returner bards was important. Even her—and now Shlaim’s—abrupt drop from public attention played into her hands, galling though it was in a way. At least she still had enough cachet to be on the guest-list. The fickle folk of Eurydice had en masse turned their flash-flood attention on the musicians, enough to swamp the steadfast folkies who had turned out to actually hear them.

Armand wasn’t one of them, but he too had been invited, and had a seat in the front row, beside hers. He stood up, very formal in a facsimile of his old ESA uniform, and bowed and introduced his wife. Jeanette had overshot the temporal mark—metallic minidress and space-helmet coiff—but was elegantly insouciant about it. ‘It was a very plastic genre,’ she said, settling.

Carlyle sat down in her very plastic seat and looked around. There were plenty of rows of seats, not all occupied, but a lot of people were standing. Some of them had an intense, focused gaze. She tagged them for longtime enthusiasts of the band. The rest of the audience were a cross section of New Start, from (she guessed) a lower level of society than had been represented at her own big reception. As she scanned the rows towards the back she recognised a few faces: a news analyst, the actor Kowalsky, and a few seats away from him, Shlaim. Her former familiar hadn’t noticed her. She turned sharply away.

What the hell was he doing here? For a moment her imagination went into paranoid overdrive. Then, more calmly, she reflected that Shlaim came, after all, from the same era as Winter and Calder. Of course he’d want to see and hear people from the 2040s. The little geek might even have been a fan himself. Deep sky country—he was sad enough for it.

A man in a three-piece suit and shirt made entirely from blue denim strode on to the stage, brandished a prop mike and requested a welcome for Winter and Calder, Deceased. Everyone stood—or, if they were already standing, jumped up and down—and applauded. The two musicians walked on, carrying guitars. They waved their arms and flourished the instruments above their heads and grinned. The lighting contrast was already such that they probably couldn’t make out much of the crowd.

Winter, clad in black leather jacket, white T-shirt, grubby jeans, and brown high boots, was very tall, almost two metres, with a thin nose and a wide mouth and eyes permanently narrowed against a light brighter than the light actually was. A three-day stubble lent his features a sinister aspect; saturnine, almost satanic. He had lank hair falling to the shoulders, a broad chest. Calder was much shorter, maybe one metre fifty, because his spine curved forward between his shoulder blades. His head, held high, defied the imposed stoop, and his eyes, bright and open, glanced around with overt curiosity. His face was clean-shaven and good-looking; his arms and legs, of normal length and abnormal strength, gave an apish aspect to his posture. He wore a black suit with a collarless white cotton shirt open at the neck.

Calder vaulted on to a high stool that brought his head level with Winter’s, and both men bent for a moment to tune their guitars and fiddle with the stagey prop mikes mounted on stalks in front of them. Behind them a dozen session singers, all female, filed on stage to a further wash of applause. They were all identically dressed in silvery close-fitting outfits that resembled space suits, in striking contrast to the fans’ gear and—in the context of entertainment—paradoxically more quaint.

Winter struck up some opening bars and began to sing, his voice raw and untrained, harsh and experienced. Calder’s baritone was classically trained, the session singers’ choral warble a sweet melodious counterpart to Winter’s rasped bass.

I was the exclamation

He was the question mark

and I said damn! and he cried what?

as we fell into the dark

I was Winter, he was Calder

every time it was the same… .

The crowd laughed at the end of that verse and Carlyle smiled as she realised for the first time the awful pun in their names: winter and caulder, indeed. She couldn’t quite follow the references in the rest of the song, but a chill came through the lyrics and the sound. The song unwound a tale of rivalry between friends, over women and music and what might have been politics, and they sang it as though it were a ballad about men long dead.

I believed him, he betrayed me

in the streets o’ Polarity base.

Syrtis Major iron miner

take your vengeance in my place.

They grinned at each other and shook hands ostentatiously. Winter made some lost-in-applause pun on the city’s name. They launched into a song about the asteroid miners:

We’re the atomic blasters

the dancin’ wi’ disaster masters

the solar mirror spinners

and we’re bringin’ in the steel… .

Swung straight to one about the US Occupation soldiers called ‘Giant Lizards from Another Star,’ followed up with a few trite love-songs that seemed to mean a lot to them, and rounded off the set with a rousing rendition of the eerie Returner anthem ‘Great Old Ones’:

Do you ever feel, in your caves of steel

the chill of an ancient fear?

When you pass this way do you shudder and say:

A human once walked here?

They cut off our heads but we’re not dead

and we’re bound by an ancient vow.

That does not sleep which dreams in the deep.

We’re the Great Old Ones now!

When the stars are right there will come a night

when thunder and lightning dawn.

You’ll hear the guns of the Great Old Ones

rip the heads off your zombie spawn.

We’ll stalk you through hell and we’ll cast a spell

down your twisted logic lanes

We’ll come back and fight when the stars are right

We’ll come back and eat your brains!

Carlyle, glancing sideways, saw on Jacques Armand’s frozen features a reflection of her own response. It was dreadful, dreadful stuff. The crowd loved it. Winter and Calder took the applause, waved and strolled off, then raced back for an encore. Finally they and the session singers took a bow and the stage went dark. As the lights dimmed Winter’s gaze swept the front rows, and locked on to hers for a moment. Then they all trooped off. Recorded music, folky fiddly treacle, trickled from the speakers. It was all over but the party.

Winter doused his head in water and towelled himself dry. Beside him Calder was doing the same. They tossed the towels, looked at each other, and marched out of the tiny dressing-room as though to face the music. Here, in the back of the marquee, was a wooden-floored area with a bar and a clutter of tables, at which about a hundred people sat around smoking, steam-sniffing, and drinking. The backstage guests had been waiting about twenty minutes, plenty of time for them to get involved in their own conversations and let the musicians make an unnoticed entrance.