Newton's Wake

Winter, clad in black leather jacket, white T-shirt, grubby jeans, and brown high boots, was very tall, almost two metres, with a thin nose and a wide mouth and eyes permanently narrowed against a light brighter than the light actually was. A three-day stubble lent his features a sinister aspect; saturnine, almost satanic. He had lank hair falling to the shoulders, a broad chest. Calder was much shorter, maybe one metre fifty, because his spine curved forward between his shoulder blades. His head, held high, defied the imposed stoop, and his eyes, bright and open, glanced around with overt curiosity. His face was clean-shaven and good-looking; his arms and legs, of normal length and abnormal strength, gave an apish aspect to his posture. He wore a black suit with a collarless white cotton shirt open at the neck.

Calder vaulted on to a high stool that brought his head level with Winter’s, and both men bent for a moment to tune their guitars and fiddle with the stagey prop mikes mounted on stalks in front of them. Behind them a dozen session singers, all female, filed on stage to a further wash of applause. They were all identically dressed in silvery close-fitting outfits that resembled space suits, in striking contrast to the fans’ gear and—in the context of entertainment—paradoxically more quaint.

Winter struck up some opening bars and began to sing, his voice raw and untrained, harsh and experienced. Calder’s baritone was classically trained, the session singers’ choral warble a sweet melodious counterpart to Winter’s rasped bass.

I was the exclamation

He was the question mark

and I said damn! and he cried what?

as we fell into the dark

I was Winter, he was Calder

every time it was the same… .

The crowd laughed at the end of that verse and Carlyle smiled as she realised for the first time the awful pun in their names: winter and caulder, indeed. She couldn’t quite follow the references in the rest of the song, but a chill came through the lyrics and the sound. The song unwound a tale of rivalry between friends, over women and music and what might have been politics, and they sang it as though it were a ballad about men long dead.

I believed him, he betrayed me

in the streets o’ Polarity base.

Syrtis Major iron miner

take your vengeance in my place.

They grinned at each other and shook hands ostentatiously. Winter made some lost-in-applause pun on the city’s name. They launched into a song about the asteroid miners:

We’re the atomic blasters

the dancin’ wi’ disaster masters

the solar mirror spinners

and we’re bringin’ in the steel… .

Swung straight to one about the US Occupation soldiers called ‘Giant Lizards from Another Star,’ followed up with a few trite love-songs that seemed to mean a lot to them, and rounded off the set with a rousing rendition of the eerie Returner anthem ‘Great Old Ones’:

Do you ever feel, in your caves of steel

the chill of an ancient fear?

When you pass this way do you shudder and say:

A human once walked here?

They cut off our heads but we’re not dead

and we’re bound by an ancient vow.

That does not sleep which dreams in the deep.

We’re the Great Old Ones now!

When the stars are right there will come a night

when thunder and lightning dawn.

You’ll hear the guns of the Great Old Ones

rip the heads off your zombie spawn.

We’ll stalk you through hell and we’ll cast a spell

down your twisted logic lanes

We’ll come back and fight when the stars are right

We’ll come back and eat your brains!

Carlyle, glancing sideways, saw on Jacques Armand’s frozen features a reflection of her own response. It was dreadful, dreadful stuff. The crowd loved it. Winter and Calder took the applause, waved and strolled off, then raced back for an encore. Finally they and the session singers took a bow and the stage went dark. As the lights dimmed Winter’s gaze swept the front rows, and locked on to hers for a moment. Then they all trooped off. Recorded music, folky fiddly treacle, trickled from the speakers. It was all over but the party.

Winter doused his head in water and towelled himself dry. Beside him Calder was doing the same. They tossed the towels, looked at each other, and marched out of the tiny dressing-room as though to face the music. Here, in the back of the marquee, was a wooden-floored area with a bar and a clutter of tables, at which about a hundred people sat around smoking, steam-sniffing, and drinking. The backstage guests had been waiting about twenty minutes, plenty of time for them to get involved in their own conversations and let the musicians make an unnoticed entrance.

They stepped up to the first table and took the seats they were eagerly offered. Three men, two women, in outfits that had stepped straight off one of the old album covers. Winter looked across at Calder for a moment, returned his eyelash hint of a wink, and then settled in to the serious business of keeping the loyal happy. As he sipped beer and answered earnest questions he’d heard a thousand times before, and asked questions whose answers he forgot before they were finished, he began to enjoy himself. Back in the early days, the after-show party had been a way to relax among friends and relatives. Later it had become more of a strain, a meeting with strangers who presumed an acquaintance, but it remained a necessary decompression after the gig. If he and Calder had just walked away, they’d have ended up roaming drunk and alone, or together and knocking lumps out of each other. It had happened.