‘Lu’loh.’ Like lots.
‘Ah?’ Then?
He touched her arm, lightly but with a touch of anxiety. ‘Ki?’ Are you feeling okay?
‘Of course I’m okay.’ At the suggestion of this particular worry, she fell fast out of the truncated emotiveness of twin-speak. ‘I’m not the one who has a problem, remember?’
‘Oh, please rub it in.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to. I just wish people would stop thinking that if I go quiet there must be something wrong with me.’
‘Gwennie, as a rule that’s the only time you ever do go quiet.’
She scowled at him, but did not argue the point. ‘I was just taking it all in, imagining what it must be like to be part of something like this. To make music on this scale.’ They stepped inside the bustling cavern of the tent. Rhys shot her an appraising look and shuffled sideways into an empty spot near the entrance, letting Mikal and Reginald plough on ahead. Gwen gazed after their receding backs, and turned to him with another twitch of lips and brow.
‘I know this isn’t the main reason we’re here, but isn’t it okay for me to get excited about it anyway? It’s what I love, Rhys, it’s what I want to do. And the reality of it is so much more …’ Her hands shaped something enormous. ‘And he’s lovely, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’
‘Lyriam, you nit.’
Rhys blinked at her. ‘He’s all right.’
‘I thought he seemed really … generous.’
‘For what?’ Rhys’ voice was dry. ‘Babysitting us when Ari had to fly off, or complimenting your singing?’
‘Oh, you pillock.’
She stared at him in dismay. It took no more than a mortified second for him to realise that he had actually hurt her feelings, confirmed when she punched him hard on the arm.
‘Ow! Gwennie, stop. Since when can’t you take a joke?’ He rubbed his arm. ‘I think he’s really nice, I just didn’t expect him not to be.’
‘Neither did I. That’s not what— Oh.’
Her eyes had picked out something in the crowd over his shoulder and Rhys turned around. An eddy in the swirl of people revealed a young woman, talking with who could only be more of Lyriam’s guests. She broke off as she saw them. Her lips tightened for a moment, before she said something to the gems she was with and headed over. She had shiny blonde hair with no gem glow.
‘Hi there.’ Her voice as she arrived was so bright and brittle that Rhys felt his own face twitch in surprise. He stilled it. ‘You two all right? Need anything? It was Rhys, wasn’t it, and – and Gwyn?’
‘Gwen,’ said Gwen. ‘We’re fine, thank you, Bethany. Everything’s wonderful.’ There was a guarded, almost formal politeness in his sister’s response that sank into Rhys’ consciousness and briskly started to link up with all the other minor peculiarities of the past few hours.
‘Where’s that guy of mine? Has he left you all alone?’ She laughed, too loudly.
‘He went to get ready for the performance,’ Gwen said quietly. She would have picked up the same cues he had from Bethany’s tone and body language, and Rhys could hear her being careful, modulating her voice for calm. ‘Da is here,’ she nodded towards the bar, ‘with Mikal. You know him too, don’t you?’
‘What?’ Bethany jerked a look in the direction Gwen had indicated. ‘Yes of course.’ She sounded more distracted than annoyed now. ‘I know him very well. I should say hello.’ She moved as though to go to the bar, then hesitated. ‘I, ah … I’d better check on Lyriam first, though. See if he needs any help. I’ll, umm,’ edging towards the door now, ‘I’ll catch up with all of you later, yeah? Have fun. See you after the show.’
‘See you,’ said Rhys as she ducked out. He turned to Gwen, and let his eyebrows rise as high as they wanted. His sister was gazing at the empty spot where Bethany had just been standing.
‘Does she seem,’ said Gwen, ‘a little stressed to you?’
‘Oh, just a bit.’
‘I wonder why. I mean she ought to be used to all this.’
Rhys opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again, shaking his head. Gwen had already turned away, making eye contact with the gems Bethany had abandoned and drifting over to introduce herself.
He knew this sister who was not a sister better than anyone else on earth; he knew that she was quite capable of simply switching off her normally razor-sharp perception when it might reveal to her things she did not particularly wish to know. It was a talent he would have liked to share. He had learned to read when best to shake her out of wilful ignorance, and when to leave her alone. She would come to her own understanding of the situation soon enough. Or not. In the meantime he had plenty to worry about.
5
The first of several opening acts were already halfway through their set when Eli flopped onto a curving grass bank with a good view of the stage. It formed a gentle rampart near the edge of the park, close to a hardtop path that had no doubt made it an easier destination for the less mobile gems, or those who for other reasons found the negotiation of a route through the packed crowd too great a challenge. There was a smattering of mobility chairs and walking aids below him, scattered among spectators with obvious abnormalities. Most passers-by gave them a wide berth and averted their eyes.
Still, it was reassuring to see how many others had congregated here, relaxed in the company of the less able. Although he had passed other gems along the way – few of whom could have been distinguished from norms were it not for their carefully coiffed hair – the highest concentration of glowing heads surrounded him.
Two of them belonged to Rhys and Gwen, and many had turned to look as they made their way across from the backstage gate. Some of the attention was no doubt due to Mikal, forging a path in front, or the curious figure of Reginald, with his fountain of white hair and shabby Remnant clothing. But much of it, Eli thought, was down to the strikingly similar beauty of the two young people who walked between them, and the unusually dark shade of their radiant hair. Reginald had emerged as the closest to an explanation of her own background that Aryel Morningstar was prepared to give, and his visits had made him familiar to both the streams and the Squats; but his other foster children had been no more than rumour, or at best stream-friends with a few of the city dwellers.
Now the old man folded easily down to the grass beside him, and dismissed Eli’s concern for his comfort with a booming laugh.
‘Lived outdoors all my life,’ he said. ‘And in the wet Welsh mountains at that. This is luxury, my friend.’
Eli suspected that this was true, although he knew that Remnant colonies like the one in the Beacons were no longer the isolated, frequently destitute groups of refugees many had been in the early days of the Syndrome. They might still live apart, but their ancestors had come in from the cold long enough to have the gene surgery that ensured their offspring would be Syndrome-safe, and they had tablets and access to the streams. It was they, self-sufficient and living close to the land, who had harboured runaways during the dark days of human gemtech, and who now mentored the new settlers of coast and countryside.
It was a paradoxical relationship: descendants of the doubters who had initially rejected modification found themselves in the end to have more in common with gems than with their homogenised, complacent norm cousins. And they were used to living on the margins. Eli wondered how much even he knew about what was really going on out there.
‘Still haven’t figured it out, have they?’
He started out of his reverie, surprised to hear his own thoughts virtually spoken out loud.
‘Sorry?’
Reginald waved an arm to take in the massed audience sprawled over every square yard of park.
‘Them. After all that work you did, after Newhope Tower, and finding out about little Gabriel and his parents. Both sets. You’d think people would have understood the lesson.’
Though the memory of Newhope Tower was seared into the very fibre of his being, Eli suspected that wh
atever lesson Reginald was referring to might have eluded him as well.
‘Integration is a slow process,’ he said carefully, against the retro wailing of a six-string guitar. ‘We always knew that some would embrace it more easily than others.’
Reginald turned and looked at him. The old man had a penetrating gaze that Eli already knew could be disconcerting. Now he had the uncomfortable feeling that he was missing something important.
‘Integration isn’t going to be a problem, but not for the reasons people like to think. I’ll tell you something, Eli, all those norms who still worry about mixing with gems, they’ve missed the point.’
So, he felt, had he – at least whatever point it was that Reginald was trying to make. Mikal, sitting near enough to have overheard, nodded thoughtfully and Eli felt even more lost. He was choosing his words to try again when there came a huge whoosh of displaced air at his back, a massive, unmistakable fluttering, and they looked around to see Aryel settling on top of the bank behind them. She must have circled in from the side, staying low and counting on the glare of the setting sun behind her and the crowd’s focus on the stage to arrive relatively unnoticed. Now she dropped down onto the turf, wings half spread both for balance and to achieve what was, for her, the complicated geometry of sitting on the ground. She flashed them a quick smile, reaching up with both hands to smooth back her chocolate-dark hair and retighten the clasp that kept it firmly away from her face. Her wings shifted and rustled with the movement.
The lump that was so often there rose in Eli’s throat, again. The pleasure he took in simply watching her seemed never to diminish. Her eyes, that astonishing midsummer blue in a delicate, pale bronze face, swept the gathering immediately around them and then further afield, checking, quartering. He could almost see her relax as she concluded that all was in order.
‘What’ve I missed?’
‘Four songs and accompanying criticism,’ floated back from Rhys, propped up on his elbows just below them on the slope. ‘They were flat, apparently.’
‘They were flat.’ Gwen, serene beside him, arms wrapped around her legs and chin on knees as she gazed at the stage. ‘Not terribly flat. But a bit.’
‘And poorly arranged, you said?’
‘Nothing wrong with the arrangement as such, they just weren’t really up to it.’
Practised chuckles from Aryel and Reginald, while Rhys arched back so they could see him roll his eyes in mock disbelief. Gwen calmly ignored them all. Rhys stopped in mid-motion, his face comically upside down for a moment, as two newcomers loomed into view behind Aryel. Sharon and Callan, Eli saw, trudging up the steep side of the bank, navigating no doubt by the twin silhouettes of Aryel and Mikal. Rhys rolled over onto his knees, Gwen swivelled gracefully, and once again onstream acquaintances finally met in person.
They settled down as the next act took to the stage, Sharon tucking herself into the crook of her husband’s arm and Callan, after an awkward moment, allowing Aryel to pull him firmly down to sit in the little cluster over which she presided.
‘I was worried you weren’t coming after all,’ she said softly, so that he had to lean in to hear her over the music. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Callan. You need to come back into the world, love.’
He pursed his lips, eyes far away on the singer, or perhaps something else. A breeze ruffled his hair, and in the deepening gloom the glow from it flickered across his face like firelight, picking out the tiny lines and hollows of damage.
‘Do I?’ he said finally. ‘I’m not sure. When I’m out I’m glad to be. Mostly. But it’s not always easy any more, Aryel. I’m never sure it’s worth the effort.’
‘It will be. Trust me. Just give it a chance.’
He nodded uncertainly and his gaze moved inward, grazing as hers had over the people around and below them, lingering a little on the darker glow of Rhys’ head, poised in a listening stillness.
*
There were two more performances to sit through before the main event: a spoken-word troupe known for their choral a cappella accompaniment to poetry both ancient and modern, and a classical quartet riding high on the current fad for instrumental music. The reason for its popularity was the young man that the thousands packed into the park, and many more watching on live streams, were waiting to see.
The quartet departed and light sculptures morphed and swirled in front of the stage, camouflaging the set change and giving an impression of a deeper darkness behind. They died down slowly, like a fountain being turned gradually off, leaving the eye blinking at a pool of black in which a tight beam appeared, borne on a single sustained note. The note rippled into a phrase, then a melody, and the beam widened with it to illuminate at first only fretwork and flashing hands. Then the other instruments came in and the light broadened and strengthened, until Lyriam sat in a golden circle in the centre of the stage, guitharp on his lap, head bent over the instrument as he built the song.
It was the one that had made him famous, the first track on a playlist that had gone viral instantly, achieving streaming numbers not seen since the halcyon days before the Syndrome. He had written it quickly, in an outpouring of horror and fury and grief, and the world had taken it to heart in an act of collective catharsis. Even now, years later, it had lost none of its power to move; and Lyriam had built a career on it, composing complex pieces for a difficult instrument, writing music only he could play.
The tale had become legend: how a gem youth picking his way through a world newly liberalised and still chaotic, lurching from one momentary, menial job to another, had been sent packing with nothing but the old wooden guitharp rescued from a crumbling warehouse, instead of the meagre credits he’d been promised; how he had kept hold of it through thick and thin, teaching himself to play during sleepless nights on the streets and discovering chords and tones no ten-fingered musician could have managed; how a precarious life of busking had been transformed, first by the norm girl who fell in love with his music and with him, and then by the searing elegy he had played for the dead after the terror of Newhope Tower.
The guitharp raged and wept through it now, and Eli could again see the blood that had washed the Squats, splashed up against the closed lids of his eyes. He blinked hard and glanced over at Aryel, and at Callan, and Sharon and Mikal with their arms twined around each other, and felt the weight of memory. And then, just as the loss and the sorrow became unbearable, the song shifted, lifting almost imperceptibly from anguish into something lighter, weary but resolute, a whisper of survival, and redemption.
The applause was rapturous.
Eli shook himself and brushed at his eyes, saw the motion repeated all around him. Below them he could see people on their feet all over the park. Reginald, sitting bolt upright, murmured, ‘Goodness me.’
Rhys muttered, ‘Oh. Wow. It’s … it’s different live, isn’t it?’ He nudged his sister. ‘Gwennie?’ After a moment she turned her head ever so slightly towards him, as if just waking up. Her face was still and solemn and she did not speak.
The music flowed on. Lyriam, always a confident player, had become a consummate performer. He spoke to the crowd, telling of the inspiration behind tunes and sharing anecdotes from the tour. Over a tinkling prelude he said, ‘I wrote this for a girl who bought me a cup of tea one day from a place that wouldn’t serve me and then stayed to listen to me play. She liked it so much she never left.’ A roar of approval welled up as the song swelled into a gloriously lush, romantic piece and he shot a quick look towards the wings. Eli glimpsed movement, saw Bethany’s blonde head over folded arms before she stepped back out of sight.
The next tune was ancient, a melody that had made the journey from orchestral to ecclesiastic and back again. It had barely begun when Eli became aware of a murmur in the crowd off to his right, a dissonant droning accompanied by a note of rising complaint. The disturbance was close enough for him to see that a group of half a dozen or so had risen from their mats and blankets, their mouths moving not quite in unison
as they appeared to sing along with the tune. As one of the press vidcams scattered throughout the park swung its light around it picked out the symbol of the United Churches, dangling from necklaces and the ropes of beads that several now carried draped over their fists.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Callan muttered.
Rhys sat up and squinted at the only one of the group not on her feet. Her fingers were racing across what must be an input screen on the small metal box resting on the mat before her. His eyes flicked from her to the singers, many of whom had bead-wrapped hands pressed to earsets.
‘Is that an amp?’ he said. ‘They’re going to hack – oh no—’
Gwen was already on her feet and halfway down the slope.
Eli swung round to look at Aryel. She had rolled forward into a crouch, one hand resting on Callan’s shoulder, for balance perhaps, or reassurance. His face had gone hard as marble. She looked ready to spring up, into the air, although how that could do other than add to the disruption Eli could not imagine. But she stayed still, watching Gwen.
The girl pushed through the crowd, closing in on the devotees now bathed in the steady illumination of the vidcam. A gaunt man stood at their head and, perhaps realising how few understood what was going on, waved his hands in the air and called out, ‘This song is in praise of God! Praise God!’ He pumped his arms up and down, as though trying to encourage others to rise and join in.
The musicians on stage seemed to be aware of something happening; they were peering over their instruments into the crowd. The sound the ragged choir was making started to leak through the speaker array, and the music began to falter. Lyriam, still playing, half rose as Gwen stepped into the midst of the UC protest. She looked up and their eyes met. Then her head jerked to the side, one hand coming smoothly up to catch her tumbling earset, the other snapping forward to pluck his from the head of the leader, her last stride taking her over the illicit amplifier as the kneeling woman reared backwards in alarm. The purloined earset slid into place as the young gem came to a halt. It had been one movement, beautiful in its coordination, and blindingly fast.
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