Bandwagon

as being the senior, remained silent as he sealed a small plastic bag and tucked it away into his pocket. The junior assistant looked at Vid and shrugged.

  ‘He exploded,’ he said in a heavy accent.

  ‘Exploded?’ said Vid.

  ‘Yes. He go off bang.’

  ‘I know what exploded means. What I want to know is do you know why?’

  ‘Too little to go on,’ the senior officer said gruffly. ‘It will have to go down as misadventure.’

  ‘Misadventure!’ Vid snapped. ‘You mean you aren’t going to investigate?’

  ‘He is a robot – it is not worth our time,’ the junior officer told him, ‘unless the owner makes a request we do nothing. Besides, we heard he was – how you say - defective.’ He tapped the side of his head to indicate some kind of mental aberration. To Vid this simply reinforced his view that it was only the policeman exhibiting such a fault.

  There was another loud clang and the party turned to see Ben absently kicking the cymbal aside. The human looked tired and distraught and he stared at them as unseeingly as if they were members of Invisible Eric’s backing band. The two policemen, trying to avoid further confrontation, mumbled something about work to do and left the two band members together on the stage.

  Ben watched the policemen leave the room before he spoke. Then he turned to Vid. ‘It’s my fault,’ he said. ‘If I hadn’t played that song, he’d still be here.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’ Vid rolled closer to where Nutter had been sitting and stared at the floor, almost certain there would be no clue there, but hoping nonetheless.

  ‘It was an intensive song,’ said Ben. ‘It must have taken too much out of him.’

  Vid focused on a tiny patch of white ash and studied it minutely. ‘So you’re saying that your material was more technically demanding than anything that Riff and Keys had written.’

  ‘Well it does seem to have been the end of him.’

  Vid turned on his wheel and looked back at the human. His face was drawn in stern pixels and his eyebrows were emphasised. ‘If you’d bothered to pay attention, you’d have noticed that he was getting gradually worse,’ he snapped. ‘Any song could have been his last. Trying to take credit for the death of a friend is a very odd way of blowing your own trumpet, you know.’

  ‘I’m not trying to blow my own trumpet.’ Ben ran a hand through his hair in exasperation. ‘I’m just saying that if he hadn’t played that song he’d still be here.’

  ‘Well, unless you were responsible for whatever strange stuff there was in his system, then you can stop blaming yourself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That ash down there,’ said Vid, pointing to the white patch. ‘That’s not a metal residue.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Ben asked, staring blankly at the floor. The powder could have been anything to his eyes.

  ‘Just take it from me, I know.’

  Ben wasn’t convinced. ‘Couldn’t that be plastic or something?’

  ‘Not any plastic that I know of.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I think someone intended him to blow up.’

  Ben looked at Vid scornfully. ‘Can’t you let the whole conspiracy theory go for one minute,’ he snapped. ‘That could be powdered Lube for all you know.’

  ‘It isn’t. Besides, I told you, Lube is designed to be safe.’

  ‘Safe? In those quantities? Drinking like that something was bound to give sooner or later. You trying to pin the blame on Tony isn’t going to help anyone.’

  Vid frowned. ‘Did I say it was Tony?’

  ‘No, but you were going to. You’ve got something in for him, haven’t you?’

  Rather than answer, Vid turned on his wheel and rolled away. He knew that arguing with Ben was pointless: human beings had a peculiar desire to be seen as right even when they weren’t and Vid just couldn’t cope with the confrontation at the moment. There was just too much unfiled information floating around in his brain; he needed to sleep and let it organise itself. He rolled over to where Keys was floating morosely. Riff had just returned to the room and was consoling his friend. He turned as Vid approached.

  ‘Tough break,’ he remarked.

  ‘You don’t seem too upset,’ said Vid.

  ‘I didn’t really know the guy. He could play the drums and that was kind of all that mattered to me.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess it’s put the mockers on the whole situation with Emil. We can hardly sign up for the big time without a drummer.’

  ‘That’s not the problem. Emil said that we can share a drummer with another band he’s managing.’

  ‘So what is the problem?’

  Keys looked round at Vid, noting the angry tone in his friend’s voice. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Riff said that Nutter was not the problem,’ said Vid. ‘That implies that there is a problem.’

  Riff nodded glumly. ‘He doesn’t want Ben in the band,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Basically, if we keep Ben the deal’s off.’

  Keys and Vid exchanged glances, then Vid turned back to the guitarist. ‘I’m surprised that bothers you,’ he said.

  ‘I might not get on with him, but that doesn’t mean that I want to throw him out of the band. Besides, we can’t just leave him here with Tony.’

  ‘Leave who here with Tony?’ Ben interrupted, joining the group offstage. ‘Is Vid going on about his conspiracies again?’

  Vid remained silent and looked at Riff, his expression conveying his exhaustion.

  ‘We’ve had an offer,’ Riff said simply.

  ‘An offer?’

  ‘To play across town. In a theatre.’

  ‘I can’t leave here,’ said Ben flatly.

  ‘What?’ said Vid, spinning to face the human.

  ‘I can’t leave it like this,’ Ben reiterated. ‘Not without Sheila.’

  ‘Sheila!’ Vid was incredulous. ‘Can’t you get it into your head? It isn’t going to happen. She’s not interested.’

  ‘You don’t know that! You’ve hardly even spoken to her.’

  Riff patted Vid on the shoulder. ‘It’s academic,’ he said. ‘Emil doesn’t want Ben, so it hardly matters what he wants to do.’

  ‘What?’ Ben looked at Riff.

  ‘The offer doesn’t include you,’ said Riff, trying to keep his voice calm and soothing. It didn’t seem to help.

  ‘And you just wanted to leave me here?’ snapped Ben.

  ‘No. That was the point – we don’t want to leave you on your own.’

  ‘So you want to stay here and make me feel guilty about your missed opportunity?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’m not leaving,’ said Ben. ‘If you want to take up that gig, you can, but I’m staying here.’

  ‘Ben.’ Riff’s tone stopped short of pleading, but not by very much.

  ‘Just go,’ said Ben angrily. ‘I’ll square things with Tony. I hope it works out fine for you.’

  Vid exchanged glances with Riff and shook his head before turning to Ben. ‘We don’t want to leave you, Ben,’ he said, ‘but we can’t stay here.’

  ‘I said go.’

  ‘But I don’t want to leave things like this.’

  ‘Too late, you already have.’

  ‘If you ever change your mind…’

  ‘You’ll what? You’ll beg Mr fancy manager to change his mind? I don’t need your charity.’ He turned away, making it clear that the conversation was at an end.

  The robots exchanged awkward glances. There was nothing more to be said. They collected their instruments and made their way slowly out of the door. Vid looked over his shoulder as he left, but Ben kept his gaze stolidy averted, shoulders hunched and breathing heavily. Vid looked down sorrowfully, turned back to his bandmates and rolled on.

  Once he was alone in the bar Ben sank down on a chair and put his head in his hands. Everything seemed to be falling apart.

  The Grand Theatre was in an area
of Fadora so different that it could have been another city. Here, monorail cars shuttled them over wide, well-kept streets passing between showy boutiques packed with the latest in fashions. Here, most people drove the latest in gravimagnetic cars, and despite the lack of necessity, there was a robot crew working hard replacing part of the spongy road surface.

  Vid watched the scene distractedly. Roadworks in three dimensions had their own peculiar problems. The lane was closed to wheeled traffic, but a driver of a gravicar had decided it was still possible to use it as a shortcut. A robot worker, momentarily distracted by the passing monorail, failed to see the vehicle above him and was bowled over. Unperturbed, the robot picked himself up and returned to where his colleagues were crouching and laughing at his misfortune.

  There was a monorail stop at the second storey entrance of the theatre and Emil briskly hustled his charges out of the carriage and onto the skywalk. Riff, the most relaxed of the three bandmates, took the opportunity to glance over the edge of the narrow strip of path at the traffic below. Only the telltale purple tinge of refracted light betrayed the force-field that prevented them from stepping off into oblivion. Emil, conscious of the continuing silence of the group, followed Riff’s gaze and nodded sympathetically.

  ‘It does seem like the easy way out, doesn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Riff, who hadn’t been contemplating anything so drastic, looked at Emil questioningly.

  ‘Sorry, I thought you were thinking about the drop.’

  Riff shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We don’t have these gantries back home – I was just taking in the view.’

  ‘Uptown Fadora is a fast-moving place,’ said Emil. ‘The cost of land means it’s cheaper to build tall, so it makes sense to have pedestrian walkways at different levels