The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2)

by Michael Stiles

  “You’re overlooking one important thing, Ed. You stand out. There is a light about you that is obvious to those of us who know how to look. The moment you step inside his sanctum, unless you hide your light, Urizen will know you’re there.”

  “Isn’t there a way to hide it?”

  Jonathan considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “There may be a way, but it’s not safe. You’re too valuable.”

  “I’m supposed to break the Cycle. You can’t keep me safe forever.”

  Mason gazed up at the clouds, looking troubled. Finally he sighed and closed his eyes. “It’s hopeless. You know me; I always have hope, even when there’s no reason to. But this… it’s worse than I thought.” He looked Ed gravely in the eye. “Tell you what. I’ll show you how to hide your light, to disguise yourself. Then I will take you to Washington to see things for yourself. You can be my scout—observe, report, but do not put yourself in harm’s way. In return, I want your promise that you’ll limit your time inside. We have no idea how long it takes to become infected by the smoke. Promise me you’ll do exactly as I say.”

  “Pinky swear,” Ed said, holding out his pinky to seal the pact. Mason merely stared at it, baffled, until Ed put it away. “All right,” he said, “I promise.” As he said this, he kept his fingers crossed behind his back.

  23

  Starlight Audio Magic

  Sarah tried to hide her yawn, but Mr. Allen noticed and smiled. “I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s boring, but it’s got to be done.”

  They were seated across from each other at a dented and heavily-used meeting table in a tiny office. The room was on the second floor of an ugly industrial building just outside Seattle. The table was covered with stacks of papers—copies of the contract they were negotiating. Sarah thought she could recite all fifteen pages from memory by now. There was soft music playing in the background, which Sarah recognized as a track from Hitler Soup.

  Next to Mr. Allen sat another man who had introduced himself as Carlton Webster. Carlton’s fine pinstriped suit clashed with Allen’s casual shirt, blue jeans, and denim jacket. Sarah had chosen a conservative business suit for the meeting, paid for by a wardrobe bonus Lester Myles had provided along with her new title.

  “You’re the head of my A&R department now,” he had said, “and you will have to dress the part.” In fact, Sarah was the entire A&R department. There was no one else. She had taken Lester’s check and gone on a wild shopping spree in Chicago, buying business outfits that she wouldn’t have imagined wearing just a few months ago. As she had walked down Michigan Avenue with a dozen shopping bags in her hands, it had suddenly struck her that she’d done the one thing Sarah Greenbaum had sworn never, ever to do. She had sold out.

  In the middle of the table was a speaker. Myles was participating in this meeting by phone, and the speaker in the middle of the table was a technological representation of the man Sarah had never met face to face. Everyone conversed with the speaker as if they were speaking directly to Lester Myles.

  The walls were painted a sickly shade of light green. The only decoration on the wall was a hand-painted sign bearing the logo of Starlight Audio Magic, Incorporated: a single shining star above a stylized outline of an electric guitar. Starlight was the brainchild of John Allen, who was perhaps the most unassuming man Sarah had ever met. John was a soft-spoken black man who couldn’t be more than thirty, in Sarah’s estimation, and he certainly didn’t strike her as the kind of person who would want to be president of a company. Then again, Ron Nightfinger didn’t come across as a typical business executive either.

  Her mind was wandering again. The lawyer, Carlton Webster, had just said something to her. She blinked a little of the tiredness out of her eyes and said, “Hmm?”

  “I said clause eighteen in section twelve needs to go,” Carlton said. “Nightfinger can’t have final approval authority over any tapes; that has to be us. And two weeks isn’t enough time to submit proper notice of a change.”

  “We need to verify content,” Sarah said. She and Lester had discussed this just before the meeting. “If Nightfinger signs an enhanced-promotion contract with an artist, we need to be able to verify that Starlight is distributing their work. Otherwise we’ll end up liable for violating artist agreements.”

  Carlton Webster shook his head. “Starlight needs four weeks’ lead time, and we have to have ultimate control over the content. Your contracts are not our concern.”

  “But―”

  Lester Myles interrupted from his speaker on the table. “That’s fine. Clause eighteen can be struck.”

  Sarah was always irritated when Mr. Myles overrode her. They had just agreed four hours ago that this particular clause was critical to reduce their own exposure in the event that Starlight under-distributed Nightfinger recordings. Sarah gritted her teeth but kept silent.

  The idea behind Starlight was one that she found quite novel. It had started when John Allen had grown tired of Muzak. “It’s everywhere,” he had told Sarah during their first meeting, “and it’s horrible. They take perfectly good songs and turn them into quiet background music that works its way into your brain. You can’t escape it… it’s in elevators, department stores, doctor’s offices.” The last straw, he had told her, was when he’d heard a Jimi Hendrix song converted into a soft Muzak mix. “You don’t do that to The Wind Cries Mary. You don’t do that to Jimi.” That same evening, back in 1969, Allen had come up with the idea for a new kind of Muzak. “It’s the real thing. Not an orchestral remake, but the real song. Businesses subscribe to our service and we send them tapes of songs by up-and-coming bands.” The tapes would play on an infinite loop, and every month the subscribers would receive a new tape and send back the old one. “Muzak will be dead in five years,” Allen had predicted.

  “Very good,” said Carlton, bringing Sarah’s attention back to the here-and-now. “Good.” He flipped to the next page of the contract, read for a moment, then frowned. “Nope. No good. Section fifteen is no good. Starlight has standard terms for handling returned tapes. We’ll have to insert our own language in here.”

  “That’s an intellectual property matter,” Sarah said. She had discussed that section with Myles as well. “Pirating is a serious risk to our business, and if any of these tapes were to make it out to the public―”

  “Nightfinger artists aren’t exactly in high demand,” the lawyer said. “That’s why you’re coming to us in the first place, right? People aren’t buying Nightfinger records. Pegasus is the biggest seller you’ve got, and I’m pretty sure there’s no market for bootlegged Pegasus albums. As for the rest, nobody outside of Greenwich Village has even heard of Sister Chlamydia or Seventh Planet. Piracy is not your problem. Your problem is obscurity.”

  “Pegasus had a gold record last year,” Sarah protested lamely. The lawyer was getting on her nerves, and she was too tired to pretend to be patient.

  The speaker crackled as Lester spoke again. “It’s all right, Sarah. Let’s take a look at Mr. Webster’s boilerplate and see what’s in it. I’m sure we can come to a compromise.”

  “We handle returned tapes very carefully,” John Allen told her with a jovial twinkle in his eye. “The last thing Starlight wants is to let our tapes out to the public.” Webster nodded vigorously in agreement.

  Lester Myles had met John Allen at a business convention in Dallas. The idea of Starlight had impressed Myles, and had given him an idea at the same time. “Our business is all about accumulated impressions,” he had told Sarah by phone the following evening. “When you hear a song for the first time, it may be the best song you’ve ever heard, but you’ll forget it as soon as the next song comes on. A one-hit wonder may sell a million 45s based on a great hook, but you don’t build a brand on one-hit wonders. For that, you have to build up an impression in the minds of your audience over time.”

  “Isn’t that what radio is for?” Sarah asked.

  “A radio requires you to tune in to a station
. This concept pushes the music out to people who aren’t tuned in. Think of this: Nightfinger strikes a deal with Starlight. We get them to place Nightfinger artists on their tapes, so our acts get played everywhere. You won’t just hear Pegasus on the radio; you’ll hear Pegasus at the clothing store and at the dentist. Pegasus songs will be so embedded in your musical subconscious that by the time you hear the lead single from their next album six months from now, they’re a familiar quantity. You feel like you’ve heard their songs a thousand times before… because you have.”

  That conversation had led them to this meeting room in Seattle. As Carlton Webster wrote on the pages and dug through filing cabinet drawers for copies of existing contracts, Sarah looked up at the Starlight logo on the wall and wondered how she had arrived so suddenly at this strange place in her life. A year ago she’d been living with Ed and helping him come up with a plan to save the world. And now… she was in a vomit-green room negotiating a contract to make Ron Nightfinger as rich as possible. She heaved a sigh, which turned into another yawn.

  * * *

  Carlton Webster jogged to catch up with her in the corridor after the meeting was over. “You really held your own in there,” he said.

  “I don’t know why I bother,” Sarah grumbled. “He just ignores everything I say.”

  “Your boss really wanted the deal. I figured out exactly how much he wanted it, and I pushed for everything I could.” The smile he gave her was not like the one he had used inside during the meeting. That had evidently been his corporate smile; this one was his personal smile. She wondered how many other smiles he had in his repertoire. “It’s all part of negotiation.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes at him and headed toward the stairs. Carlton followed her with no regard for her personal space.

  “I’m not all business, you know,” he said as they went outside. Dusk was approaching. Sarah paused just outside the building, remembering too late that she had come to this meeting in a taxi and had no transportation back to her hotel. The Starlight office was far away from the part of Seattle she would have preferred to be in.

  “Do you need a ride?” Carlton offered. “My car’s around back.”

  She looked up at the sky, which was a very off-putting shade of gray.

  “See,” he said, “it’s going to start pouring in a few minutes. Just let me give you a ride. I won’t try any funny stuff.”

  “If you do,” Sarah said, “I’ll kill you.”

  The rain started coming down only a few minutes after she got into his rusty old Volkswagen Beetle. Carlton reached behind his seat, pulled out a handful of old rags, and handed two of them to her. “Stuff these around the top of the window,” he explained, demonstrating by jamming one of the rags into the gap above his own window. She did the same, and soon saw that the rags were rapidly absorbing an alarming amount of water that otherwise would have drained directly onto her seat. They headed west, chugging slowly up each hill and speeding down the other side. Seattle had a lot more hills than Sarah had expected.

  “All the metal rusts away in the salty air,” said Carlton. “Cars last about three years here at best.”

  “Doesn’t Mr. Allen pay you enough to get a real car?”

  “Zis is das national auto von Deutschland!” Carlton said with great zeal. “Don’t criticize the German engineering.” Sarah couldn’t help but smile.

  Carlton was true to his word. He did not try any funny stuff on the way into the city. But they had only gotten halfway there when they found themselves stuck in heavy traffic. Carlton tapped the wheel impatiently. “There’s a great Chinese place not far from here,” he said. “You like Chinese?”

  “Anything except oxtail soup,” she said.

  “Sehr gut!” Carlton exclaimed, zipping into the shoulder to speed ahead to the exit lane. Sarah gripped the edges of her seat in fear, but they survived the maneuver and were soon speeding along deserted side streets. The Chinese restaurant looked like the sort of place Sarah would normally have avoided, but Carlton vouched for its safety and cleanliness.

  “Your boss should’ve told you his final position ahead of time,” Carlton said later, as they chatted after dinner and several beers. The food had been quite good, if a little salty for Sarah’s taste. “That’s why it was frustrating for you. Never go into a business negotiation without knowing exactly what the boss is going to say.”

  Sarah was enjoying a considerable buzz from the exotic Chinese beer. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, waving off the thought as if it was a mosquito flitting around her head. “I’ll be quitting in a couple months. As soon as my contract’s up.”

  “Contract?” Carlton leaned forward in his seat. “You signed a contract with Nightfinger? Did you have an attorney look at it?”

  Sarah laughed deeply. “Attorneys cost money.”

  “Bad contracts cost even more.”

  “It’s all right. My year is almost up. Then I’m leaving.”

  “You don’t like your job?”

  She picked up one of the beer bottles and began peeling off the corner of the label. “I don’t like what it’s turning me into,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  She looked into his eyes. “A stooge!” She practically shouted the word, and several patrons turned to see what the commotion was about. Lowering her voice, she said, “This isn’t me. I’m a jeans girl, not a business-suit girl.”

  Carlton looked down at her clothes for a long moment, until Sarah realized it wasn’t just her clothes he was looking at. He looked up when she crossed her arms to block his view. “Do you know what Starlight does?” he asked.

  “Sure. Music distribution to businesses and retail outlets. It’s all we’ve been talking about all day.”

  “I think there’s something you should see,” he said quietly.

  “I’m not that kind of girl, either.”

  He held up his hands. “No! I wouldn’t dream of… well, I would. But this is something you need to see.”

  “I want to go back to my hotel now.”

  “Please,” he said. “This isn’t a trick. If Lester Myles hasn’t told you the truth about Starlight… well, you’d better come with me and see for yourself.”

  Carlton paid the bill and led her back out to his car. She had to take her time because her high-heels were a bit wobbly. The rain had eased from a downpour to a light drizzle. “Where are we going?”

  “Back to Starlight.”

  Ten minutes later they pulled up to the Starlight building once again. Carlton parked illegally in front of the entrance and came around to help her get out. He produced a key ring from his pocket, on which he kept a large key and a small one. He used the large one to unlock the front door.

  “The tapes are made in the back,” he explained, leading her upstairs and past the green meeting room. There was a door at the end of the hallway which he opened with the small key. Sarah followed him into the back room, ignoring the voice in the back of her head that told her this was a terrible idea. She had ways to defend herself, if it came to that.

  The room was perfectly dark until Carlton flipped a switch, igniting a long row of fluorescent lights. Sarah gasped in surprise when she saw what lay before her. She had envisioned a small room with some tape recorders in it. But the room she found herself in must have taken up most of the three-story building, if not all of it. It was nearly a city-block long, with ceilings thirty feet high. She and Carlton stood on a catwalk that ran all the way around the outer wall. Below them and to the left side was an enclosed room with big windows that resembled a soundproof control booth in a recording studio. To their right was a stairway down to the bottom level. The whole place was filled with electronic equipment: reel-to-reel tape machines, huge boxes with blinking lights and complicated control panels, glassed-in listening stations with bulky headphones. At the far end, a large portion of the room was walled off as a separate chamber with sturdy-looking door and one small, dark window.

  “You can’t get to
the production floor from street level,” Carlton explained. “This is the only way in.”

  He started down the metal stairway. Sarah, concerned about the excessive wobbliness of her heels, took off her shoes and carried them in one hand. The metal steps were cold under her feet.

  “Over here,” Carlton said, “is where the music tracks are laid down.” He took her over to a row of tape machines. “That’s the easy part. We load source tapes here, and an engineer dubs them onto one-inch master tapes in our own Starlight format. That’s the first security measure: even if someone got their hands on one of our tapes, they wouldn’t be able to play it.”

  Sarah thought there must be people out there who could figure out a way, but she kept that thought to herself.

  “The masters are all custom, four hours long, tailor-made for every client. Dr. Lowenstein the orthodontist gets a different mix than the Super Mart down the street. Retailers want to set a slow pace to keep customers inside the store for as long as possible, so they want all mid-tempo songs. Office managers want songs that increase in energy level throughout the day so their employees don’t fall asleep. Everything has to be custom-made, so we categorize all songs by tempo, major or minor key, male or female vocalist, and so on. You get it?”

  Sarah got it. “But what’s all this other equipment for? Once the music is on the tapes, what else is there to do?”

  Carlton took her by the hand to lead her to the next set of machines. “The music is the easy part. That’s nothing. Here is where it gets interesting.” He sat her down at one of the listening stations and put a set of headphones in her hands. “Put those on.”

  She examined the headphones to see if they were clean. They weren’t.

  “Don’t be squeamish,” Carlton said. He took them out of her hands and put them firmly on her ears. The soft background noises of the room were blocked out, and all she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. Carlton said something else, but she couldn’t hear him. He took a reel of tape out of a box and threaded it into the machine. Then he leaned over to the console, turned a dial, and flipped a few switches. The spools began to turn.