Bandwagon

took me to the seaside a few times as a kid, but I don’t think it was here. It’s hard to tell.’

  ‘You f-forget too?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘No. It’s just these places are all pretty much the same.’

  ‘S-same ocean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘W-where d-do you think we’re p-playing?’

  Ben looked out over the seafront. ‘I imagine there’s some kind of seafront pavilion,’ he said. ‘There usually is.’ He drank deeply from his beer. Nutter, seemingly embarrassed at the relative levels of their drinks, followed suit, finishing his glass in a single mouthful. Ben drained his glass and went back for refills. Nutter accepted the fresh glass and drained it in a single gulp.

  ‘You’re putting them away,’ said Ben, watching as Nutter placed the glass on the table. There was a small glowing puddle where some of the fluid had spilt. ‘What’s in that stuff anyway? Looks like axle grease.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Nutter.

  ‘It probably does something odd to your insides, anyway. How do you get rid of the liquid?’

  ‘We keep it in a tank and it evaporates over time,’ said Nutter. He paused. ‘Is it me or am I not stammering?’

  ‘Either that or I’ve gotten used to it. You sound normal to me. Why?’

  ‘It’s never happened before.’

  ‘Probably the drink,’ said Ben.

  ‘It could be. I don’t usually drink more than one.’

  Ben looked at the robot curiously. If his companion had been human he would have been able to tell if they were feeling the effects of alcohol. Robot eyes, however, were not usually designed to dilate. ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘Odd,’ said Nutter.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I feel like my chips are running too fast. Is that what it’s like when humans get drunk?’

  ‘Hardly. We don’t have chips.’ Ben took a mouthful of beer, watching as Nutter swung his head from side to side, observing the world passing by. The robot’s attitude was distracted, which could be said to resemble drunkenness. Eventually the robot rose to his feet – notably with difficulty. ‘My round, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Ben. ‘I haven’t finished this one.’

  Nutter disappeared into the pub. Ben looked out over the beach. There were a couple more people now and he ran an appraising eye over a girl who seemed blissfully unaware of the coldness of the day. He turned reluctantly away from the sight as he companion returned. A glimpse over Nutter’s shoulder caused him to catch his breath. He could have sworn he had seen the hint of a suede coat. Nutter moved across his line of sight, however, and when he looked again the vision was gone. He looked back to the beach, but so was the girl. He sighed and returned to his beer.

  Alcohol has a long and chequered history. From the earliest days, when the pleasing effects of fermented grapes were discovered, drinks made from them rose rapidly to become the staple of many cultures. Subsequently it has been, by turns, revered, castigated, claimed as both panacea and cause of ills, and made the subject of rather tuneless songs. No other consumable has had such a large and disparate cultural effect.

  The persistence of alcohol has often been attributed to the fact that, before the invention of sanitation, it was safer to drink beer than water. This is probably not entirely untrue, but it is notable that most civilizations seemed content not to channel resources into that particular problem, preferring rather efforts toward the perfection of the pork scratching22.

  The people of Omicron II, banned by their church from doing anything that might be considered fun or interesting, were not permitted to eat grapes – even unfermented ones. It didn’t take long, however, before particularly one worshipper discovered that the clear blue spirit sirso, found flowing from certain rocks in the mountains of the blue flame, was in fact a powerful hallucinogenic.

  Quickly declaring sirso to be the liquid essence of the blue flame, devout believers established its consumption as the central part of religious ceremonies. As a result, the number of ceremonies increased a hundredfold in the space of only a few years. After initial futile resistance to this development, the priesthood of Omicron came to realise the advantages of hard liquor. A drunk population is not a population ripe for revolt.

  Historians say that the Omicron situation is proof of the importance of abstinence for democratic advance. Industrial civilization, they say, was built on the back of grain shortages that forced people to halt the stills in the name of survival, and which then led to a massive outpouring of research designed, by means of improving trade, agriculture and manufacture, to create a surplus of grain and rapidly turn this into a reserve of alcohol large enough to prevent such a disaster arising again.

  Thus society advances. Alcohol goes from a chain of subjection to a pleasure of the rich and finally, with industrial maturity, to the social choice of a leisured class. Consenting adults23 in advanced worlds can drink freely to forget the political shambles of a democracy built on alcohol dependency without ever having to worry that they are being plied with drink to keep them in subjection.

  Needless to say, Omicron II is not a world noted for technological advance. It does, however, continue a booming trade in Bombay Mix with neighbouring systems.

  One thing most historians seem to have missed is the phenomenon of robochol. Robochol – the debilitating chemical formulated purely for robotic consumption – is an innovation found only on worlds where the industrial revolution has reached an advanced stage. It is, however, something of a throwback, designed as it is not to give robots pleasure, but to keep them mindlessly unaware of how total their subjection is.

  Some roboticised societies go as far as only paying their robots in the demon sauce, a point frequently raised by the silicon temperance league. Tell most robots this, however, and they’ll pay it scant attention. It might not be possible to program robots not to think for themselves, but its perfectly possible to keep them chemically incapable of doing so in their spare time.

  30

  The effects of their earlier drink had worn off by the time Ben and Nutter returned to the hotel. The dusk of evening was setting in and the fading sun found their bandmates loading instruments into the van.

  ‘We’re not off again, surely?’ said Ben.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Keys. ‘We’ve got a gig to do first.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Pavilion at the end of the promenade.’

  Ben nodded to Nutter as if to say I told you so. Nutter didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘Are m-my d-drums on b-board?’ he asked.

  Keys nodded. ‘All present and correct.’

  Ben glanced into the back of the van, where Riff was organising the kit. ‘Why are you bringing two guitars?’ he asked.

  Riff looked out at him. ‘Just in case,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean “in case.”’

  ‘What I said.’

  ‘So you’re thinking of doing one of your little duets from last night?’

  Keys and Riff exchanged glances, then Keys looked at Ben. ‘You heard?’

  ‘He l-listened at the w-wall.’

  Ben glared at the drummer. ‘I didn’t need to,’ he snapped. ‘You were making enough racket.’

  ‘Racket?’ said Keys.

  ‘I t-thought it was g-good.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Ben. ‘We pay you to drum, not think.’

  ‘P-pay?’

  ‘Figure of speech.’

  Nutter’s expression darkened slightly. Ben didn’t notice: he was too busy exchanging steely expressions with Keys – in which the robot had a distinct advantage.

  The tableau was broken by the arrival of Tony. The manager strode across their line of sight as he walked toward the driver’s door. Before opening the door he stopped, paused a moment and glanced back.

  ‘Is there a problem, gentlemen?’

  ‘Nothing a lump hammer wouldn’t fix,’ muttered Ben.

  ‘I don’t think that
would do much for your voice,’ said Vid.

  Ben frowned at the robot, but his face was expressionless.

  Tony looked between the two, then turned back to the van door. ‘Show’s in thirty minutes,’ he said.

  Tempers diffused slightly on arriving at the venue. After several nights of performing in the musical equivalent of slum housing it was nice to have a proper venue. The pavilion was, admittedly, past its better days, but the flowers in the entry vestibule suggested that it was more finance than lack of care that failed to put fresh paint on the walls. The curtain on the front of the stage was heavy and perhaps a little moth-eaten, but it was a curtain and it was a stage. The band calmed down and began to set up.

  In a further gesture to practical performance, the room was darkened as the show approached. For the first time since they’d been on the road the band were in a setting appropriate to their set-piece opening number. Riff launched into his opening solo, picked out by a single spot-light. Vid, fingers poised tentatively over his bass, cast his gaze over the audience, revelling in the moment, in the setting, in the sound. The moment his finger picked out the opening figure, his projector kicked in and the room came alive with colour.

  The evening was cold. Breath from the audience hung in the air like clouds, interacting with the swirls of colour and pattern Vid played over the room. As the bass entered a steady two four thunk, he allowed his concentration to play with the texture of his projections, morphing them between shapes and patterns, giving subtle hints of substance. In one moment the audience would be transported from the surface of a