Bandwagon

smiling sun through the beams of a rainbow to a sunlit vale. Butterflies flitted over the gathered heads. The effect was spoilt marginally by the neon strips around the walls, but nobody seemed to mind.

  As they moved on to Station at Dusk, Vid found his gaze travelling to the bar at the end of the room. It was odd having a bar in a concert hall, but he supposed it kept the money coming in and the venue open. Most of those at the bar were standing with their backs to it, watching the show as they waited for their drinks to be poured. One man, however, was facing away. Despite the fact he was looking at the man’s head, Vid found something oddly familiar about him.

  He defocused slightly as he turned his concentration onto the more complex bassline of the chorus. The notes swirled as they rode the beat of the drums, each somehow redolent of one of the little repetitive lives the song described. Vid drifted slightly, thinking about nothing in particular.

  The man at the bar was still looking away. His coat was quite expensive – nice material. It was a shame robots didn’t get to wear fancy clothes like that.

  Just then the man turned. Vid’s smile froze just as the man’s hardened. There was a twang as the bassist faltered and broke a string. Then, suddenly, the lights dropped and the room was plunged into near darkness. Only the strobing glow from Vid’s face penetrated the gloom.

  There was a loud report and somebody in the audience screamed. For an instant, Vid thought he saw something in the air, but all too quickly it vanished. Then, the lights returned. The audience seemed to be hurrying for the exits. The man in the expensive coat was nowhere to be seen.

  The band gathered round Vid and watched as their audience deserted. Vid switched off his projection and looked to his colleagues.

  Ben was sweating, although Vid saw nothing unusual in this – at least beyond his normal disconcertment at these strange human practices. He refrained from comment, however: this didn’t seem the time for quips. The human looked from the fleeing audience to Vid with concern.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘What was the noise?’

  Vid shook his head. ‘I thought I saw someone,’ he said. ‘Then my string broke and the lights went out.’

  ‘And the bang?’ asked Keys.

  Vid shook his head and toyed with his broken string thoughtfully. Turning his bass over so that he could restring it, he suddenly noticed that there was a small circular hole in the body of the instrument. He flipped it back to face away from him in sudden shock. As he’d feared, there was another hole on the opposite side. He looked up.

  ‘What is it?’ said Ben. Vid showed him the bass, but Ben’s face remained drawn in confusion.

  ‘Bullet holes,’ said Vid. ‘I think somebody’s trying to kill us.’

  31

  The stentorian bellow of a horn penetrated the early morning mist like a deep-throated mastodon bellowing across a primeval swamp. As the small brightly-coloured van approached the dockside, its occupants saw the dark, almost featureless hull of a vast ocean liner looming before them. Through the mists they caught glimpses of the bustle of activity as stocky, square robots unceremoniously hefted luggage onto hovering platforms, which then drifted upwards and disappeared out of sight; other, empty platforms coasting down to take their place. The scene was reminiscent of a post-modern Jacob’s ladder.

  Tony brought the van to a halt alongside a mooring post, wound down the driver’s-side window and whistled to the nearest robot. The robot took a moment to register his summons, preoccupied as it was in retrieving a rogue suitcase. The suitcase coasted along the gangway, winding its way left and right as it made its bid for freedom.

  The robot lumbered along helplessly in its wake until, its castors catching on a pothole, the case tipped over and – with a squeal – thumped down on its side. There it sat, its wheels spinning helplessly, whilst the packer bore down on it. Once the case was safely loaded onto a platform – wheels away from the floor – the robot approached the van and stared blankly at the source of his summons.

  ‘Yes,’ it intoned monotonically.

  Tony was, as usual, the master of unruffled patience. ‘Where can we find the Kamakiriad?’ he asked politely. ‘We’re booked on the seven o’clock sailing.’

  The robot stood motionless for a moment – evidence that data recall was not its primary function - then it turned and pointed along the quay. ‘That way,’ it said simply.

  ‘Thank you.’ Tony wound up his window. The robot paused momentarily to recall what it had been doing, and then prompted by the slowly spinning wheels of the suitcase on the platform, returned to his loading dues.

  Ben watched the robot from his vantage point in the back of the van. ‘Not the brightest bulb in the box, is he?’

  ‘What?’ said Vid. ‘Because he’s a robot, you mean?’

  ‘No. That’s not what I meant. I meant…’ Ben realised the futility of arguing with an already agitated robot. ‘Never mind.’

  Keys nodded toward the packing robot as they drove on. ‘Packing robot,’ he said. ‘They aren’t really designed for small talk; brute force and ignorance is all they require.’

  ‘Are you i-insinuating?’ said Nutter.

  Ben groaned. ‘What is this? Paranoiacs Anonymous – Digital Divison? Just lighten up, will you?’

  ‘I have just been shot at, you know,’ snapped Vid.

  ‘With your sunny disposition I’m not surprised.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You’ve got the dictionary files. Look it up.’

  The band sank into silence. The van passed a row of private craft. Two sloops in identical livery bobbed up and down gently on the morning tide; there was a gap between them where the third was presumably already out in the harbour. Keys caught a brief glimpse of the names John A and John C on their bows.

  ‘It is very tense, isn’t it?’ he noted.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘All the sneaking around we’re doing. Even the weather seems appropriate somehow.’

  Ben shrugged. ‘You’ve been watching too many spy films. Why aren’t you as paranoid as your mate there?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps… well, I haven’t actually been abroad before.’

  ‘It’s nothing special. The power sockets are a different shape, but you adapt.’

  ‘Where are we actually going?’

  ‘I don’t know. Could be anywhere.’

  ‘Fadora,’ said Vid.

  ‘What’s that?’ Ben looked back at the screen-faced robot. ‘Sounds like you’re still talking about spy films.’

  ‘Fadora. It’s a place.’

  Riff, reclining at the back of the van with a guitar on his knee, looked over at Vid. ‘How do you know that’s where we’re going?’ he asked.

  ‘I just checked the Net when Tony told the loader which ship we were on. Why?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Riff.

  ‘What do you mean nothing?’

  ‘I mean nothing…’ Riff looked blankly at Vid’s staring face a moment. ‘Alright,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s just that if you could find out where we were going, so could somebody else.’

  ‘That’s a great thing to tell a paranoiac,’ snapped Ben.

  Riff looked at him sharply. ‘He asked. What did you expect me to do? Lie?’

  ‘I suppose you can’t do that, can you?’

  The robot said nothing. The van interior fell silent once more.

  Vid sat, running a thoughtful finger over the hole in his bass. The damage would probably alter the sound, he considered. He tried to calculate by how much, but couldn’t concentrate.

  There was something odd about the whole thing when he considered it. If someone could aim at a stage across a crowded room, miss four robots and countless humans and get a bullet through a bass guitar, then it didn’t seem obvious to say he was a bad shot. It was too improbable. It seemed more obvious to say the man was a very good shot but that he was aiming to miss.

  The trouble was that an attempted assassination wasn’t so mu
ch an answer as a whole other question. And Vid didn’t like unanswered questions. He looked around the van, a strong urge to confide. The faces didn’t inspire confidence. He rolled his pixellated eyes and looked up at the ceiling. Perhaps he was just being paranoid.

  32

  International stardom is rather like a greased eel – very hard to catch and even harder to keep hold of. Many of the larger nations practice a perverse form of nationalism whereby, even if they will admit a foreigner can have talent, they will ignore that talent if said foreigner doesn’t spend a significant amount of time pressing the flesh in their shores. Leave and you take your hard-won victories with you. Stay, and you stand the risk of fading into obscurity back home.

  For this reason bands are frequently torn between either pursuing a punishing touring schedule or simply settling for being a success at home.

  The Sirian Peanut Troupe are perhaps unique in having found a third way to deal with the problem: after changes in international quarantine regulations essentially put paid to their world tour schedules, they realised that, since most people couldn’t tell one monkey from another, they could simply employ separate groups of monkeys to tour the countries of the world on their behalf.

  With the distinct lack of international press on Sirius, this meant that each country believed that the band thought so highly of their nation that they had chosen to stay there rather than anywhere else. As a result, they band built up an extremely loyal following across their world, to the extent they could guarantee fans would buy almost anything the band released24. The band became a phalanx