The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  He shrugged. “You might be surprised. It’s been twelve years. We’re talking some very serious money—that always helps. The fact you’re not playing actually helps.”

  That hurt, which surprised me. “If you think they’d be interested.”

  “Let me see what I can do.” He scratched his beard again. “I’ll look around for a guitarist.” He grinned at me. “This might be fun.”

  The four of us met on neutral territory: dinner at Chang Sho’s down in Van Nuys. I was as nervous as a cat. Jess ordered. I fumbled with my chopsticks. We had scallion pie and dumplings for appetizers but I could barely taste them.

  Jess sat back and kept largely quiet. Calm poured off him in waves. Whatever would happen he would let happen. That had always been his nature. Olive was still tiny and thin—she could see five feet tall from where she stood but she’d never reach it. She watched all of us. Off stage, Olive was as quiet as I remembered, watching, always in motion, sipping water, fiddling with her chopsticks, pouring tea. On stage she had always been electric, bouncing from one keyboard to another, fingers blurred. She and I had always gotten along—except, of course, those times we didn’t. The same could be said of all of them.

  Obi kept giving me a smoldering stare. He had thinned down, hands and wrists muscular and supple as he ate. Very different from the bear I had known. Obi and I had always fought. He gave every indication tonight wasn’t going to be any different.

  Over the entrées: “Jess says you’re not playing with us.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who’s playing guitar?”

  I pushed around a dumpling. I found I wasn’t hungry. “I don’t know. Jess, you didn’t find anybody yet, did you?”

  “Not yet,” Jess said serenely.

  Obi didn’t turn towards Jess. “Are you going to stand in until we get somebody?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. Or Dot can synthesize it while you learn the material.”

  He leaned forward. “Who’s going to be in charge?”

  I met his glance. “Me.”

  Obi nodded and didn’t say anything for a few minutes. He speared a dumpling and picked it up. “Who owns the music?”

  “Hitachi,” I said. I knew what he was getting at but I wasn’t going to bring it up.

  “Good.” He gave me a venomous glance. “None of us own a thing.”

  He pissed me off—like he always did. I met his glare with my own. “You have something to say?” To Hell with good intentions.

  “You screwed us out of the ‘Don’t Make Me Cry’ money. It’s good to see you getting screwed for once.”

  I started to say something I would regret, saw Jess watching me and stopped. “I was an asshole in Denver,” I said slowly. “I regret that. But I never screwed you out of a dime. You got every penny you were entitled to.”

  “We deserved a share of the royalties—”

  “Bullshit,” I said flatly. “You got every penny of the collection and performance royalties—”

  “You poisoned the performances. Nobody wanted to see us after you said fuck you to the Denver audience. The collection died. The only consolation I had was watching you piss away all the money.” He pointed at me. “I enjoyed that. Especially the trip to the ER. That was a laugh riot.”

  I watched my plate as I took deep breaths. Emulate Jess’s Buddha nature. I realized Obi had come to Van Nuys for no other purpose than to tell me something he’d been holding in for twelve years. “If you don’t want the gig, fine.”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  “If you want it, shut up. I’m sorry I screwed up in Denver. You’ve had your say. You have your apology. That money is twelve years gone. This gig is now and I’m in charge. It’s good money and it’ll be exciting work but if you can’t handle working for me I’ll understand. Take it or leave it.”

  Obi leaned back in his chair. “I’m in.”

  Olive nodded.

  Jess smiled as if nothing had happened. “Now, all we need is a guitarist.”

  Rosie flashed instantly to what was going on. “You’re going to bring back Persons Unknown?”

  Dot sat at her table watching us, saying nothing.

  “Of course not.”

  “Out of the question. You can’t use my project to stage a comeback.”

  I stared at her. “A comeback? You think I want a comeback? Why the hell would I ever want to do that? I’m not even playing. I’m doing this concert because of the contract. No more. No less.”

  Rosie wavered. “Then why the old band?”

  “Because they are really, really good. They always were. Jess can play anything with strings better than anyone—better than me, and I’m damned good. Olive is a wizard on the keyboard.”

  “What about Obi? You hated Obi?”

  “I didn’t hate him.”

  “Yeah.” Rosie said scornfully. “Slow Obi, you called him.”

  “He’s a complete pain in the ass and the best drummer I ever worked with.” I took a deep breath. “What’s the problem?”

  Rosie stared at me, tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to watch Denver all over again.” She rose and left the room.

  I heard her say it as clearly as if she’d said it aloud: Or Saint Louis.

  Dot inspected her hands, holding up her hand and looked at her nails. “Tom Schneider is the guitarist for my band. He’s free. He can come by.”

  “I thought you didn’t want your old band in on this.”

  Dot gave me an inscrutable look—as if any of her looks were ever scrutable. “You can’t always get what you want.”

  I looked up Schneider on the net and watched some video. He was an accomplished technician. He played the guitar like he was wielding a pickaxe but there wasn’t much he couldn’t do. I told myself he’d be fine.

  All four of them were scheduled to show up at the house the following week. The instruments came and I set them up down next to the wall. It was a miserable week. Dot and I put final touches on the music but to call things frosty between us gave the impression of too much warmth. Rosie and I were brittle with little explosive disagreements that would have flared into vicious fights but for sheer will. When the band showed up it was a positive relief.

  Schneider was a tall red haired kid from, of all places, Oklahoma. He spoke with a deep and nasal twang deep but sang in a rough blues voice. As soon as he came in he asked for music. Failing in that, he wanted demos or techno tablature. He wanted something to work with.

  And with that the whole “let the band figure out their own parts” sermon I had given Dot when we first started fell completely on its face.

  Schneider set the tone and suddenly what had been Persons Unknown were now paycheck studio musicians. I had Dot put back the notation I had asked her to remove.

  I mean they all learned the songs competently enough. Schneider, especially. He practiced his part backwards and forwards until it was burned into his memory. I asked him why.

  He chuckled. “You never performed with Dot before, have you?”

  “No.”

  “If you don’t know the material you’ll never keep pace with the change ups.”

  “Ah. Introduces a lot of changes at the last minute?”

  “No.” Schneider shook his head. “She changes things during the performance. Quicker. Slower. Pauses. Broaden out this bit. Shorten that bit. All to get the audience.”

  Dot was standing next to me.

  “Is that right?” I said to her.

  She didn’t crack a smile. “You have no idea.”

  * * *

  We were lying in bed next to one another. Talking—well, trying to talk, anyway. We took turns. Rosie told me what was on her mind:

  “Nothing’s happening!” she said in a low, furious tone. “She’s not creating anything. She’s not doing anything. I mean she’s performing—the performance engine is doing fine. But that’s old news. I thought I had it weeks back. A big block of self-modified code but when I teased it apart it was
only a set of utility functions. Where is it?”

  I had no idea.

  My turn:

  “It’s like trying to fit a key in a lock,” I said to her. “By feel. In a dark night. Wearing mittens. When the key is made of gelatin. The guts of the music are terrific but when the band plays it there’s no heart to it. I keep moving things around. Try this faster. Slower. Change keys. Try with the bass. Change the keyboard. They do it—they’re professionals. But it doesn’t help. Nothing’s happening.”

  A depressed silence fell over us.

  I felt queasy with what I said next. “Can you change parameters on Dot or something? Make her more involved? Maybe that would help.” I held up my hands. “I’m at my wit’s end.” I had a sudden flash of a concert gig in Nebraska, beyond strung out. The roadie pulled out a pharmacopeia from inside his jacket. Anything to get me on stage and coherent.

  “It doesn’t seem to matter.” Rosie shrugged. “I’ve tried changing all sorts of things but they seem to have no effect. Maybe she’s figured out a way to just absorb the changes so they have no effect. Or whatever was working before isn’t now and the parameters are just turning knobs on an empty box. I was hoping you could do something. Set fire to her like you did the first day.”

  Silence fell again.

  “It’s going to be a miserable concert,” I said.

  Rosie shook her head. “No, it’ll be a fine Dot concert. Dot’s performance engine will kick in and she’ll take them for a ride. At the end of the concert that’s all I’ll be able to show Hitachi: a good concert with some new material. Maybe they can salvage a song writing program out of it.”

  I turned out the light and we nestled together, taking comfort from our mutual unhappiness.

  We were going through some of Dot’s old songs to include in the concert. In “Sexual Girl,” Schneider had this run up the scale and then this hop-step rhythm he was supposed to keep for Dot as she came in on the chorus. I had an idea and stopped them.

  “Look,” I said. “Let’s try something different. Instead you doing the ascending scale and the rhythm, let Olive do it and then take over the rhythm. Then, when Dot starts coming down you repeat the same ascending scale when Dot comes in on the chorus.”

  “I can do that.” The first words I’d heard from Olive in two days.

  Tom looked stubborn. “That’s not how it’s written.”

  “Oh, for the love—give me that.” I took the guitar from him. “Pick it up from the end of the melody and lead into the bridge.” The guitar was glittering and alive in my hands. When Olive handled the scale, I held back puttering around in the low notes and adding a little light harmony to Jess’s bass line. Then, at the top of Olive’s scale when Dot came in I cranked up my own run, playing counterpoint to Dot’s singing and ending up high at the top of the chorus.

  But I didn’t stop there. As we went on I couldn’t help adding flourishes and ornaments, a little harmony on Jess’s work, a quick beat on the strings to match Obi’s transition into the second bridge and always making sure I caught my notes just on the heels of Jess’s bass work.

  In a heartbeat, we changed from a collection of people playing the notes to a band: one organism, ten hands. I looked up. Dot was grinning as she sang, bouncing from one foot to the other.

  It was like breathing again.

  When we stopped the silence echoed.

  Tom was watching me, a sad, half smile on his face. The rest were watching me—even Obi.

  “Okay,” I said. “One concert.”

  Dot laughed and clapped her hands.

  I walked Tom outside. It must have been close to a hundred degrees. Bright as if the sun were just down the street. I felt as if I had been inside for my whole life and just now emerging into sunlight. I took the pole I always had leaning against the front door and poked around under his car. This time of year there were always a few rattlesnakes desperate for shade. Sure enough, there was one fat one next to the back tire. I poked at it until it reluctantly moved into the sun.

  “You forget such things exist,” he said tensely as it disappeared into the scrub.

  “Not out here. At least not more than once.”

  I helped him load his gear into his car. Tom closed the trunk. He got into the driver’s side and checked the charge. Van Nuys wasn’t that far away and L. A. just past it. Even so, this was not a place to break down.

  “You’re not upset,” I said after we had put his guitar case on top of everything else.

  “It was part of the deal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gave me that slow smile again. “Dot said that it might be temporary.”

  I didn’t say anything. Had she planned this?

  He stretched out his back before he folded himself into the tiny car. It clicked on. “Remember what I said about her performance. Be ready for anything.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  With that he drove down the hill to the highway. I went back inside.

  Rosie was waiting for me. She kissed me. “Everything’s going to be fine, now.”

  “Right.”

  We sat around and planned the concert. The first problems were technical. How was Dot going to be displayed?

  Divaloids were usually projected into a tank built on the spot. They erect a frame and enclose it in a plastic so transparent you can barely see it. Then, they fill it with gaseous mixture of hydrocarbons and catalysts so toxic they have to clear the building in case of a leak. They line up a bank of lasers and fire them through the gas. Pure diamond polymerizes in the beam and you have a rigid wire barely a nanometer thick. Do this in two directions and you have a cross hatch of wires far too thin to see. Crystalline circuits hardened on each of the nodes, each with a random address and the gas is drained away. After a couple of hours of node discovery and you had a tank of pixels, each of which is individually addressable, directional, and transparent until triggered. It took almost a day to put up and a second day to redissolve the lattice and take it down: a three day commitment.

  Usually, the tanks were painted on the backside to prevent light interference and to center audience attention on the divaloid. But Dot wanted to interact with the band.

  It would be like Dot singing on the wall, interacting with us. Until then, we used the wall as a stand in.

  The next question was whether Dot would be physically there or not.

  We did some experiments at a rented hall in Camarillo simulating the tank to see if Dot could operate it remotely over the net or if she actually had to be there. When we added in the processing of the FLIR cameras, LIDAR and other sensors Dot needed to track audience involvement it was clear the net latency was too great. She was going to have to be there. That meant carefully packing her up, driving her down there, booting her for the concert and then repacking her—to go where? Rosie’s lab? Hitachi? We carefully didn’t ask that question.

  Instead, we concentrated on the concert itself.

  We went over the play list. There are a lot ways to organize a show. Traditionally they are divided into two acts. Act One can serve to push out new material, Act Two can present previous work. Or the reverse. Or it can be mixed up according to style or any of a hundred different ways.

  Dot was insistent that the first act present the old material to lead into the new material in the second act. She said all of her models indicated that acceptance of Dot 2.0 hinged on showing the transformation—in fact, that would be the theme of the concert. Dot and I came up with an arrangement of “Stardust” that would knock them dead at the beginning. We didn’t want to leave them drooling at the end of Act One and disappoint them in Act Two or disappoint them so much in Act One they wouldn’t stay to be struck dumb with wonder in Act Two. Balance.

  We were arguing over it, sheets of music all over the wall. Obi had been quiet, watching us. Finally, he stood up. We fell silent, watching him.

  “You’re all wrong,” he said. “Think bigger. Look, we have the order of the first act fig
ured out.” He drew a hand across the wall and a sheaf of song sheets followed them. “We don’t need to play all of each song. We play enough to cover the intent of the song and then proceed to the next.”

  “Christ!” I shook my head in disgust. “You want to do a medly—”

  “No!” Obi shook his head. “A soundscape. Look: The arc of Act One starts with ‘Stardust’—excitement of the possibility of young love without the knowledge of how to proceed. Think of this as Dot at fourteen. Each song gets a little older and we finish Act One with ‘Sexual Girl.’ Almost an adult. No problem. It’s an arc of growth and it sets us up for the transformation of the second act. But—” He held up his hand. “The problem is we’re talking about the songs as if they are separate things. This is Dot’s history: four years of crowdsourced fanboy concert material. The audience knows it better than she does. They don’t need to hear a reprise of every song she’s done—they’ve heard it all. What they haven’t heard is that music tied together into the history of a person. The naïve young girl in ‘Stardust’ is disappointed in ‘Losing Love Twice’ and a near adult in ‘Sexual Girl.’ The music has to show that ‘Sexual Girl’ has her roots in ‘Stardust.’ Look. Here’s what I mean.” He expanded the music for “Sexual Girl” and “Stardust.” “ ‘Stardust’ and ‘Sexual Girl’ are in the same key. The harmony of ‘Sexual Girl’ isn’t that far off from the chorus in ‘Losing Love Twice.’ We tie all three together into one story. And that’s one example.”

  I saw it then. I could hear it. Each song standing in for its part in the story we were trying to tell. The harmony or bridge or back beat or bass line serving one song then carrying the story forward and serving as harmony or bridge or back beat or bass line in the next. Until, in “Sexual Girl,” we would expose the bass line of “Stardust” as the harmony of “Sexual Girl,” saying this is the same girl, grown older, at the cusp of transformation. We would lead the audience towards the new material and add the edge in on the way.

  “That,” I said slowly. “Is brilliant. Come here.”

  Obi stepped forward to where I was sitting.

  I pulled him down and kissed his forehead. “You are Slow Obi no more. I name you . . . Obi!”