James carefully blotted the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. He put his hands behind his back and stared at Mr. Totol.
"Is there an issue with the corn?" he asked very slowly.
"We thought you might mind. When the Germingen people came they said we had to phone you and they gave us the number," Mr. Totol held up an old-fashioned paper business card. "Right there, see? Customer issues. The governor says we got to use the seeds and we can't use no other seeds. My family's been breeding corn for years but no more. We got to plant your fancy seeds and we've got to use them and they're insured; so if there's any problems we phone you, you figure it out, and it's our money back and we get out of the agreement, right? In short, we don't want the agreement."
"Mr. Totol, we do insure all of our crops, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. We generally solve any customer issues within two weeks and no refunds or termination of agreements are necessary. Now, what is the problem you have been experiencing?"
"There's huitlacoche on the corn."
"Huitlawhat?" James asked. The man was probably speaking Nahuatl.
"Oh, the Mexicas loved it. Absolutely loved it. Moctezuma was crazy over it. Quite the eater he was, that Moctezuma. You know, every morning fish was brought from Veracruz to Mexico City by a system of relay runners. They carried the fish fresh from the coast to the emperor's table in just a few of hours."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
The man opened his knapsack. He took out a grey ear of corn with the kernels swollen ten times its normal size. It looked like the corn had a tumor. In truth, it was covered in fungus.
"Dear God!" James yelled and he began to pound frantically on his multi-text device, photos and words plopping from the little pad until it was there in red capital letters: ustilago maydis.
"It's very good in a quesadilla," Mr. Totol said nonchalantly.
"Where did you find it?" James whispered as he stared at the ugly grey and black monstrosity the man was waving at him.
"Oh, it's all over my field. It's going to fetch a good price in the market."
"You're going to eat it?"
"Sure. Delicious."
"It's a pathogenic fungus. It's a pest. How the hell did it get on our corn?"
"The Mexica ate fly larvae and axolotls."
That was not the answer James was looking for. He jammed his fingers against the screens and screens of information.
He tried to think, to formulate a plan. Evidently the corn smut had mutated and invaded their pristine, perfect corn corp.
James was sweating. He could imagine his clothes sticking to his body, even though this was impossible because they were nano-treated. But it was a day for impossibilities. This was not supposed to happen. The corn was resistant against anything and everything.
You could spray the toughest pesticide on it and it would survive. Well, the toughest Germingen pesticide, anyway. The seed contract also came with a binding, collateral pesticide agreement.
James could just imagine the look his boss would give him if James informed him they had lost a whole crop to a corn smut infestation. And what if it should spread? He could picture rows and rows of grey and black fungus-covered corn against a blue sky.
"We'll have to burn it all. I'll call in a team and we will get rid of the fungus Mr. Totol," James said, flipping through the emergency procedures manual.
"Why'd you want to burn it? It's nice to breed it. It goes well with tamales. Look, you just make a little cut at the base of the corn..."
"Mr. Totol, I don't think you understand the enormity of the issue," James muttered and after drafting a quick message, he punched in the four digit security code necessary to alert his head office of the problem.
James closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and tried to steady himself. Everything was going to be fine. The team would fly in, burn the whole thing to cinders, stomp every bit of fungus out. Then they would rescind the agreement and forget about this damn town and its rampant fungus. Blot it out. Nothing to see here.
"Bigger, better, stronger crops make a bigger, better, stronger world," James whispered.
It made him feel better. He took a deep breath and let it out.
"It's fine, Mr. Totol. We are going to contain it. After all, its not like the damn thing has legs. It can't spread that far."
"That's the issue," Mr. Totol took off his hat and scratched the back of his neck. "Remember when I told you the runners used to bring fresh fish for Moctezuma every morning?"
James looked up and stared at Mr. Totol.
"Yeah. I think that huitlacoche is all over the country by now."
Mr. Totol smiled cheerfully and put his hat on again.
"Maiz y libertad Mr. Clark," he said with a wink.
Somehow, James didn't think he'd make it to step six before December.
"I told you it had some design flaws," Audrey sighed as the city turned upside down and sank, shining, car horns blaring, into the sea.
--Paula Stiles--
At Budokan
Alastair Reynolds
Typically--I like to think--for Shine, the writer who is also the singer of a death metal band does not use heavy metal (apart from one short comparison) in his story, while the writer whose taste has developed away from heavy metal (or has become, or always was, much broader, as you will) uses it as the main stage for his story.
Irony, sweet irony.
After I met Al and Josette at a certain BeneluxCon in Belgium--where Al said they had a farm in a village that nobody of his Dutch friends knew about, after which I said the name (Zuilichem) in the proper local accent--we have been good friends, and I felt very privileged when, at the 2009 EasterCon, Al told me about the 10-year deal he had made with Gollanz, several months before the official announcement was made.
I felt even more privileged, though, when Al sent me this story for Shine: its theme is unsuspected (his story in the Paul J. McAuley/Kim Newman anthology In Dreams of 1992 was about house music), but hit all the right spots for me. In it, all the taps are spinal, the volume is turned to 11 and the special effects to 12. In this future, everybody thinking heavy metal is the dinosaur of the music scene is both right and wrong...
I'm somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk when the nightmare hits again. It's five years ago and I'm on the run after the machines went beserk. Only this time they're not just enacting wanton, random mayhem, following the scrambled choreography of a corrupted performance program. This time they're coming after me, all four of them, stomping their way down an ever-narrowing back alley as I try to get away, the machines too big to fit in that alley, but in the malleable logic of dreams somehow not too big, swinging axes and sticks rather than demolition balls, massive, indestructible guitars and drumsticks. I reach the end of the alley and start climbing up a metal ladder, a ladder that morphs into a steep metal staircase, but my limbs feel like they're moving through sludge. Then one of them has me, plucking me off the staircase with steel fingers big enough to bend girders, and I'm lifted through the air and turned around, crushed but somehow not crushed, until I'm face to face with James Hetfield out of Metallica.
"You let us down, Fox," James says, his voice a vast seismic rumble, animatronic face wide enough to headbutt a skyscraper into rubble. "You let us down, you let the fans down, and most of all you let yourself down. Hope you feel ashamed of yourself, buddy."
"I didn't mean..." I plead, pityingly, because I don't want to be crushed to death by a massive robot version of James Hetfield.
"Buddy." He starts shaking me, holding me in his metal fist like a limp rag doll.
"I'm sorry man. This wasn't how it was meant..."
"Buddy."
But it's not James Hetfield shaking me to death. It's Jake, my partner in Morbid Management. He's standing over my seat, JD bottle in one hand, shaking me awake with the other. Looking down at the pathetic, whimpering spectacle before him.
"Having it again, right?"
"You figured."
"Buddy
, it's time to let go. You fucked up big time. But no one died and no one wants to kill you about it now. Here." And he passes me the bottle, letting me take a swig of JD to settle my nerves. Doesn't help that I don't like flying much. The flashbacks usually happen in the Antonov, when there's nowhere else to run.
"Where are we?" I ask groggily.
"About three hours out."
I perk up. "From landing?"
"From departure. Got another eight, nine in the air, depending on head-winds."
I hand him back the bottle. "And you woke me up for that?"
"Couldn't stand to see you suffering like that. Who was it this time? Lars?"
"James."
Jake gives this a moment's consideration. "Figures. James is probably not the one you want to piss off. Even now."
"Thanks."
"You need to chill. I was talking to them last week." Jake gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder. "They're cool with you, buddy. Bygones be bygones. They were even talking about getting some comp seats for the next stateside show, provided we can arrange wheelchair access. Guys are keen to meet Derek. But then who isn't?"
I think back to the previous evening's show. The last night of a month-long residency at Tokyo's Budokan. Rock history. And we pulled it off. Derek and the band packed every seat in the venue, for four straight weeks. We could have stayed on another month if we didn't have bookings lined up in Europe and America.
"I guess it's working out after all," I say.
"You sound surprised."
"I had my doubts. From a musical standpoint? You had me convinced from the moment I met Derek. But turning this into a show? The logistics, the sponsorship, the legal angles? Keeping the rights activists off our back? Actually making this thing turn a profit? That I wasn't so certain about."
"Reason I had to have you onboard again, buddy. You're the numbers man, the guy with the eye for detail. And you came through."
"I guess." I stir in my seat, feeling the need to stretch my legs. "You--um--checked on Derek since the show?"
Jake shoots me a too-quick nod. "Derek's fine. Hit all his marks tonight."
Something's off, and I'm not sure what. It's been like this since we boarded the Antonov. As if something's bugging Jake and he won't come out with whatever it was.
"Killer show, by all accounts," I say.
"Best of all the whole residency. Everything went like clockwork. The lights, the back projection..."
"Not just the technical side. One of the roadies reckoned Extinction Event was amazing."
Jake nods enthusiastically. "As amazing as it ever is."
"No, he meant exceptionally amazing. As in, above and beyond the performance at any previous show."
Jake's face tightens at the corners. "I heard it too, buddy. It was fine. On the nail. The way we like it."
"I got the impression it was something more than..." But I trail off, and I'm not sure why. "You sure there's nothing we need to talk about?"
"Nothing at all."
"Fine." I give an easy smile, but there's still something unresolved, something in the air between us. "Then I guess I'll go see how the big guy's doing."
"You do that, buddy."
I unbuckle from the seat and walk along the drumming, droaning length of the Antonov's fuselage. It's an AN-225, the largest plane ever made, built fifty years ago for the Soviet space program. There are only two of them in the world, and Morbid Management and Gladius Biomech have joint ownership of both. Putting Derek's show together is so logistically complex that we need to be assembling one stage set when the other's still in use. The Antonovs leapfrog the globe, crammed to the gills with scaffolding, lighting rigs, speaker stacks, instruments, screens, the whole five hundred tonne spectacle of a modern rock show. Even Derek's cage is only a tiny part of the whole cargo.
I make my way past two guitar techs and a roadie deep into a card game, negotiate a long passage between two shipping containers, and pass the fold-down desk where Jake has his laptop set up, reviewing the concert footage, and just beyond the desk lies the cage. It's lashed down against turbulence, scuffed and scratched from where it was loaded aboard. We touch up the yellow paint before each show so it all looks gleaming and new. I brush a hand against the tubular steel framing.
Strange to think how alarmed and impressed I was the first time, when Jake threw the switch. It's not the same now. I know Derek a lot better than I did then, and I realise that a lot of his act is, well, just that. Act. He's a pussycat, really. A born showman. He knows more about image and timing than almost any rock star I've ever worked with.
Derek's finishing off his dinner. Always has a good appetite after a show, and at least it's not lines of coke and underage hookers he has a taste for.
He registers my presence and fixes me with those vicious yellow eyes.
Rumbles a query, as if to say, can I help you?
"Just stopping by, friend. I heard you went down a storm tonight. Melted some faces with Extinction Event. Bitching Rise of the Mammals, too. We'll be shifting so many downloads we may even have to start charging to cover our overheads."
Derek offers a ruminative gurgle, as if this is an angle he's never considered before.
"Just felt I ought to" And I rap a knuckle against the cage. "You know, give credit. Where it's due."
Derek looks at me for a few more seconds, then goes back to his dinner.
You can't say I don't try.
I'd been flying when Jake got back in touch. It was five years ago, just after the real-life events of my dream. I was grogged out from departure lounge vodka slammers, hoping to stay unconscious until the scramjet was wheels down and I was at least one continent away from the chaos in LA. Wasn't to be, though. The in-flight attendant insisted on waking me up and forcing me to make a choice between two meal serving options: chicken that tasted like mammoth, or mammoth that tasted like chicken.
What was it going to be?
"Give me the furry elephant," I told him. "And another vodka."
"Ice and water with that, sir?"
"Just the vodka."
The mammoth really wasn't that bad--certainly no worse than the chicken would have been--and I was doing my best to enjoy it when the incoming call icon popped into my upper right visual field. For a moment I considered ignoring it completely. What could it be about, other than the mess I'd left behind after the robots went beserk? But I guess it was my fatal weakness that I'd never been able to not take a call. I put down the cutlery and pressed a finger against the hinge of my jaw. I kept my voice low, subvocalising. Had to be my lawyer. Assuming I still had a lawyer.
"OK, lay it on me. Who's trying to sue me, how much are we looking at, and what am I going to have to do to get them off my case?"
"Fox?"
"Who else. You found me on this flight, didn't you?"
"It's Jake, man. I learned about your recent difficulties."
For a moment the vodka took the edge off my surprise. "You and the rest of the world."
Jake sounded pained. "At least make a effort to sound like you're glad to hear from me, buddy. It's been a while."
"Sorry, Jake. It's just not been the best few days of my life, you understand?"
"Rock and roll, my friend. Gotta roll with it, take the rough with the smooth. Isn't that what we always said?"
"I don't know. Did we?" Irritation boiled up inside me. "I mean, from where I'm sitting, it's not like we ever had much in common."
"Cutting, buddy. Cutting. And here I am calling you out of the blue with a business proposition. A proposition that might just dig you out of the hole you now find yourself in."
"What kind of proposition?"
"It's time to reactivate Morbid Management."
I let that sink in before responding, my mind scouting ahead through the possibilities. Morbid Management was defunct, and for good reason. We'd exhausted the possibilities of working together. Worse than that, our parting had left me with a very sour opinion of Jake Addison. Jake
had always been the tail wagging that particular dog, and I'd always been prepared to go along with his notions. But he hadn't been prepared to put his faith in me when I had the one brilliant idea of my career.
We'd started off signing conventional rock acts. Mostly they were manufactured, put together with an eye on image and merchandising. But the problem with conventional rock acts is that they start having ideas of their own. Thinking they know best. Get ideas in their head about creative independence, artistic credibility, solo careers. One by one we'd watched our money-spinners fly apart in a whirlwind of ego and ambition. We figured there had to be something better.
So we'd created it. Ghoul Group was the world's first all-dead rock act. Of course you've heard of them: who hasn't? You've probably even heard that we dug up the bodies at night, that we sucked the brains out of a failing mid-level pop act, or that they were zombies controlled by Haitian voodoo. Completely untrue, needless to say. It was all legal, all signed off and boilerplated. We kept the bodies alive using simple brain-stem implants, and we used the same technology to operate Ghoul Group on stage. Admittedly there was something Frankensteinesque about the boys and girls on stage--the dead look in their eyes, the scars and surgical stitches added for effect, the lifeless, parodic shuffle that passed for walking--but that was sort of the point.
Kids couldn't get enough of them. Merchandising went through the roof, and turned Morbid Management into a billion dollar enterprise.
Only trouble was it couldn't last. Rock promotion sucked money away as fast as it brought it in, and the only way to stay ahead of the curve was to keep manufacturing new acts. The fatal weakness of Ghoul Group was that the concept was easily imitated: anyone with access to a morgue and a good lawyer could get in on the act. We realised we had to move on.
That was when we got into robotics.
Jake and I had both been in metal acts before turning to management, and we were friendly with Metallica. The band was still successful, still touring, but they weren't getting any younger. Meanwhile a whole raft of tribute acts fed off the desire for the fans to see younger versions of the band, the way they'd been twenty or thirty years before. Yet no matter how good they were, the tribute acts were never quite realistic enough to be completely convincing. What was needed--what might fill a niche that no one yet perceived--were tribute acts that were completely indistinguishable from their models, and which could replicate them at any point in their careers. And -- most importantly -- never get tired doing it, or start demanding a raise.
Shine Page 19
