Solaris Rising 2 (14 page)

The obit is more a sob story than a celebration. It spends too much time sentimentalising about how the rights crash ruined Heather’s life; making the person secondary to the legal fight, the subsequent poverty and the final retreat into reclusiveness when the cancer was diagnosed. The bit that caught Paolo’s interest though is tucked away at the bottom. A sentence of speculation about how it’s believed that she kept writing, kept trying to make new music, just never released it to the public.

And that’s bollocks. No one keeps their music to themselves.
Someone
among her nearest and dearest must have copies.

They join the queue of mourners filing towards the door of the crematorium. Dinks is busy with something. Her avatar has changed to her gal-at-work one: swinging pick axe, hard hat and butt cleavage complementing the boots. In the corner of the share is a scrolling shell connection list. By the time they near the door she’s cracked over half of them. Paolo wastes no time.

It’s amazing what goes on in people’s shells. While the mourners shuffle forward, respectful and solemn faced, exchanging murmurs of condolence and regret, they’re watching news feeds, playing games, trolling creationist blogs for lulz. One fella is watching a clip of the deceased naked and grinning shyly, her fingers circling an erection, presumably the viewer’s own. Paolo wonders if this is a remembrance of a sweet, private moment or simply a spectacular display of lack of respect.

Paolo skims over all this activity without much real interest. What he wants to know is whether she shared those new songs with anyone here. He starts with the porn star: finds his music stash and starts shuffling through it. It’s no bad selection, with a fair number of artists Paolo doesn’t recognise. He instructs his shell to transfer the whole lot, and moves on to their next kind donor with relish.

Then, as he’s about to delve into the shell of an older fella – neatly trimmed white beard and one of those old fringed suede country and western jackets that were all the rage a couple of years back – three things happen almost simultaneously. The queue shuffles forward, Dinks mutters, “
aw, baws!
” and a disconnection icon starts flashing above porno boy’s transfer.

Paolo stares accusingly at the back of his neck but there’s no sign that he’s even aware of the crew’s intrusion as he ducks under the lintel and nods seriously to someone inside.

“Bastard must have disconnected himself,” Swanny says.

“Bit late for a show of respect,” Paolo replies.

He’s fervently hoping that this won’t be a trend when the queue shuffles forward again and then Victaz are the ones under the lintel and their shell-share vanishes. Their faces are still stretched in cartoonish renderings of shock when the usher inside the door asks them: “Family, friends or fans?” The usher is a soft presence but his eyes are granite. They flick to the side and they all see the neatly printed sign on the wall. They all read the words.

“Fans are in the back three rows,” the usher says. Meekly, they follow his indicating arm.

“This is no real. Bastards cannae dae that.” Swanny thinks he’s whispering, but that’s not a skill any of them has ever had much practice at. Heads turn.

“Yes they can.” Dinks is glowering. “They do it all the time during exams, don’t they?” Swanny glowers back. Even at school he never had much reason to enter an exam hall.

As one the crew glare again at the usher, at the sign next to him.

Polite notice.

Out of respect for the deceased, the bereaved have requested that shell connectivity is suppressed in the chapel of rest.

Thank you.

“What are we going to do?” Swanny’s not handling this well.

Paolo puts his hand on his arm, but the wee fella shakes it off. “We’re going to see this through,” he says. “Play our part here as we planned and then blag our way into the after party.”

“Reception lunch,” Dinks chips in.

“
Reception lunch
, whatever.” Paolo takes an angry breath. “Plenty of time to do it then.” But from the looks they’re getting, the whispers exchanged, he’s not at all sure they’ll get that opportunity. “Let’s just keep it together, eh? See what happens.”

The other two nod, and they all sit down.

The assembly of mourners takes place to the accompaniment of sobs, sniffs and a piped acoustic guitar. It sounds familiar, maybe a diluted version of one of Heather’s old hits. Then the big fella in the fringed coat steps around the coffin to get to the podium and makes a speech. Seems he was her friend and manager for thirty-five years, and now he’s assumed the mantle of being angry and bitter on her behalf. He batters on about her talent, how she could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been a global star if she hadn’t been screwed sidewise by the system.

“And no one cared.” He grips the edges of the lectern, cheeks and neck pink beneath his white beard, and casts an accusation around the room.

“Except for us.” His voice loses its bellow, as if he’s been punctured in the heart. “Her family, her friends, her fans. When she went underground and had to resort to shell hacks to retain control over her own songs, we kept faith. So we broke a few laws, but I know there’s not one soul here who would have not done at least that for her.”

While the assembly murmurs assent, Paolo sighs with frustration at the thought of years’ worth of original music sitting in these people’s shells. He’s not used to what he wants being beyond his reach.

The manager hasn’t finished. “But she never stopped writing right up until the end. And, my friends, the real scunner of this
fucking cancer
that first took away her voice, then her breath, was that she
did it
. She wrote a song that beat ICoSP, and we’d almost convinced her to go public with it.” He slumps, diminished. “But then it didn’t matter any more. It
doesn’t
matter any more. Even if Heather had given her permission there’d be no point in releasing the song now she’s not around to benefit from it. However, as final tribute to a musical genius and a true friend, my friends, I think we ought to do her the honour today of listening to Heather Gilchrist’s final song.”

The big fella steps down and his place at the podium is taken by a skinny girl with a blotchy face. She stares glassily at the audience, turns her gaze to the panelled ceiling. Then, blinking away fresh tears, she starts to sing.

The girl’s voice is soft and throaty, but the hushed space lends it body, a shiver of spiritual echoes. Not that you would recognise this as a song. Everything about it is off. The melody skitters around, continually promising to resolve into a tune but then sliding off again. The rhythm has a folky fluidity but that too strains expectations by dropping or adding beats at random intervals. Neither of these tricks is especially new; classical and jazz composers have been doing stuff like this since forever. It’s a little like mash, but more organic. The girl’s voice grows in confidence until it fills the room and, amid the continuing, soft sounds of grief, other voices pick up the melody and begin humming along.

But the music isn’t what makes the song really special.

“What’s she singing?” Swanny manages an actual whisper this time. “Is it Gaelic?”

Paolo shakes his head. The lyrics do sound familiar, but he can’t actually distinguish them as words. Which is weird because he
knows
the song is a love song. He knows it, but he doesn’t know
how
he knows.

“That’s not Gaelic.” Dinks’s whisper is even more awed than Swanny’s. “It’s –”

“Just listen,” Paolo says.

A
FTERWARDS, THEY EMERGE
into sunshine. Stand off to one side as the rest of the funeral’s attendees filter past: talking, smiling, their emotional tension discharged. The crew’s shells reconnect almost instantly.

“We ready to roll again, Dinks?” In the share, Swanny’s toon twangs his braces and hops impatiently from one brothel creeper to the other. Dinks’s gal-at-work toon says she’s busy on something. She’s slid her cans up too, which is her signal for
really,
really
, do not fucking disturb me
. Paolo looks for the list of cracked shells reappearing. The targets are already climbing into cars and driving away.

“Dinks?”

“Forget them.” Their girlslips her headphones down.

In the share, Swanny’s toon turns bronto and tries to stomp her.

“That wasn’t a real language, was it?” Paolo says.

Dinks shakes her head. She’s pretty when she twists her smile like that, and she only does it when she’s about to say something smart and is trying to find a way of saying it that the other two will understand. “According to the algorithms it’s not a
recognised
language. But I think it is a real one.”

“How did you manage to run the algorithms?” Bronto-Swanny pulls a face then shrinks back to normal. “Everyone was disconnected in there, man.”

Dinks slides a scuffed digital recorder from the pocket of her blazer. A fan-shaped shell-tech dongle is black-taped into a socket on the top. She’s recorded the song inside, then uploaded it and run the algorithms while they’ve been talking. She always did like her retro gear.

Paolo grins. “You got it all?

She grins back.

“And the language?”

She grins even wider. “It’s actually pretty neat. She invented one of her own. A collection of phonemes that don’t in themselves form actual words, but still manage to convey the sense of the song.” She looks from Swanny to him and back again. “C’mon, you understood it was a love song, right? You just didn’t need lyrics to get it. We’re so conditioned to the conventions of pop music that for the sentiments of most songs we no longer actually need the words, just their shapes. Corporate music hasn’t cared about original lyrics for decades. Gilchrist went a step further and distilled it down to a musical language.”

While she’s been talking Paolo’s done a bit of research and now pops up a Wikipedia citation on
Sigur Rós;
another on
The Cocteau Twins
. “It was a beautiful thing, but it’s hardly a unique idea.”

Swanny says. “Still passes the test. It could make someone a lot of money.”

Dinks completes the collective chain of thought. “Whoever released it first would sure as hell cash in. Gilchrist’s family are all about respecting her memory for now, but sooner or later they’ll realise what they’re sitting on.”

“So, anyone with a copy of that music would have to work fast to stake their claim.”

In the sunshine, outside the now empty crematorium, they all nod. In their shell-share, their toons do too.

O
N THE BUS
back, there are a few other passengers that under normal circumstances might be worth cracking for a look-see, but the crew have other things on their minds.

“Fuck it.” The crew look up, surprised that Paolo says this out loud. “Gilchrist’s music is cool, but what is it really? A weird shit tune that drones on forever. Might have been her idea of art but it sure as hell isn’t ours. Do we really want Victaz associated with something like that?”

Swanny grins like the bear who ate the baby. An instant later a track starts playing in their share. It’s classic Victaz mash: Swanny’s beats collaged with scraps of nineties R’n’B, sixties Northern Soul, the voice of Bob Wills, the king of Western Swing, calling out
howdy-ho!
And interspersed between these, threaded through them, snatches of Heather Gilchrist’s last song. The meaning-laden but wordless vocal lilt is the only thing in the mash that repeats and, in doing so, it becomes something pretty old-fashioned: a hook. For mash this is revolutionary.

Swanny looks at the others in turn. “Yeah?”

Paolo and Dinks both say: “Yeah.”

He pushes it global.

By the time they get off the bus the track is getting download traffic and airplay in Edinburgh, Moscow, Rio. By the time they’re home at Paolo’s flat, it’s made it onto nightclub playlists in Adelaide and Bangkok. Swanny prepares half a dozen variations, each of them mining a new facet of Gilchrist’s song for its hook and ready to roll out to up the stakes when the first of the copycats appears.

The mass-shares go mental for it. This is Victaz’s fifteen minutes global. Paolo charts their rocketing notoriety as the crew hops aboard the tube for that evening’s sourcing. Because a mash crew’s like a school of sharks. They have to keep predating or they grow old and cold. Always cracking, always sourcing, always looking for the next new thing.

There will be other songwriters’ funerals – the city once had a lot of musicians, and they’re all getting to that age – but until then who knows what else is waiting to be unearthed, cleaned up and cut into something glittering and abrasive and new.

The world tires of innovations faster than toys at Christmas. Anyone who thinks differently doesn’t know the music industry.

THE TIME GUN

NICK HARKAWAY

Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall in 1972, shortly after the Innsmouth refugees were driven out of Truro. At five, he narrowly avoided being scooped up by the government to participate in the now-notorious Project Shoggoth by concealing himself in a combine harvester, and ultimately went to school in London, where the worst that could happen to him was getting teased for his accent. He attained a middling degree at a nearby university in the study of Amoral Sciences before making the poorest decision of his life and working in the film industry. Rescued by a dedicated human rights worker, he is now the father of a disturbingly intelligent infant with webbed feet and the driver of an obsolete hybrid automobile. He lives in the ancient Borough of Camden with his wife and daughter, and has applied for a licence to flood his back garden with sea water and keep squid.

W
HEN
M
ORRIS WAS
shot with the Time Gun, it took him a moment to realise what had happened. The old man popped up from behind a bank of machines which were projecting wavy green lines into mid air and shouted “No, no, no!” and shot him, and Morris felt himself blasted backwards and thought “bugger, I’m dead.” And then he didn’t die, which was a plus.