out they can’t eat or drink. Other half can’t sleep. Most of ’em can’t screw worth a damn.’ She sighed. ‘But what do you expect, you can’t lock a guy up like an animal and then expect him to come out still human. Take you, for instance. You don’t feel very human, do you?’
‘You really understand me, Ida.’
The deep laugh. ‘Lover, that’s my job. Which reminds me, I better circulate. Thanks for the beer.’ She stood up, adding, ‘Don’t forget, if you need a favour. I’m always around this joint.’
She drifted away. Later Roderick noticed her talking to a battered-looking man in a bowling shirt. She was drinking a champagne cocktail. Then he lost sight of her because the place was filling up with a new crowd, mostly young people dressed in white.
The white seemed to be a kind of uniform for both boys and girls, some of whom had bleached white hair and white makeup Roderick began to feel out of place in his old hand-me-down suit.
The lunching trio left and three young men in white began setting up some complex equipment. Roderick drifted over to the bandstand to watch.
‘Jeez,’ said one, ‘didn’t anybody check out the co-inverter? The Peabody drift is over 178 how can I patch anything in to that? Barry, you check that out?’
‘Yeah it was okay. Wasn’t it, Gary, you was there.’
‘Was I? Yeah well in that case okay, what’s the problem? Just patch it in, Larry.’
‘Like hell I will, you wanna blow the whole psychofugal synch box?’
‘We could run on 19th-channel syntonics, just until—’
‘Oh listen to the expert, will ya? You hearing this Gary, our boy here thinks he can play it all by ear, he’s the big electronics expert all of a sudden. Only he don’t know how to check out the equipment, a simple drift-check and he—’
Roderick said, ‘Maybe I can help.’
Larry threw up his hands. ‘Why not? Let everybody be a damn expert, why not?’
‘Well you see I couldn’t help noticing you’ve got a Pressler-Joad co-inverter there, if it’s one of the early models A300 through A329 you can make it into an obvolute paraverter with harmony-split interfeed, see? All you do is take off the back — hand me that screwdriver, will you Larry? — and then you just change this pink wire and this green wire around. Now you got full refractal phonation with no drift, see?’
‘Hey you know you’re right? Great!’ said Larry.
‘Hey thanks man,’ said Barry.
‘Yeah man, thanks. Listen here’s a pass, anyplace we play, you get in free, okay?’ said Gary.
As soon as Roderick got down from the platform, a girl grabbed his arm. ‘Hey you know them, personally? You a friend of the Auks?’
‘Well no, not exactly.’
The girl wore white, her hair was bleached, and her eyes decorated with gold crow’s feet. Her earrings were tiny integrated circuits, also in gold.
‘God, I really like them, I think they’re real other-world, you know?’
‘Other-world.’
‘Who do you like best, Larry, Barry or Gary?’
‘I’m not uh sure — who do
‘Oh, Barry. I mean when he gr-rinds that synthesizer, I just — ohhh!’ She rolled her eyes.
‘Oh?’
‘He was my favourite back when there were the original six, even back then, before Harry and Cary and Jerry dropped out.’
‘Oh.’ Roderick was spared further conversation by the other-world Auks. One of them (they all three looked alike to Roderick) grabbed a microphone and growled into it:
‘Okay now, robots! Let’s do that raunchy robot!’
Roderick quickly got out of the way of the dancers, who were doing an odd, jerky walk. Now he began to understand the uniforms and makeup: they were imitating some fictional robots.
The music was traditional rock, though generated by a complex of electronic instruments. Every now and then, one of the Auks would seize a microphone and growl a few words:
Roderick found it too loud, too cheerless. But he politely remained standing in front of the giant speakers throughout the rest of the set. The girl who liked Barry best seemed to be dancing at Roderick, or at least keeping an eye on him as she jerk-walked through numbers like ‘R.U.R. My Baby’ and the Palindromic tune ‘Ratstar’.
At the end of the set, when Roderick started making his way towards the exit, the girl followed. She was still walking like someone with spine damage, and her face was expressionless. When a white-haired boy tried to stop her, she pointed to Roderick, saying:
‘I… am… under… his command… I… obey!’
‘Now look,’ Roderick said, to the circle of white-haired boys who were closing in on him. ‘Now look, I don’t know what this is all ab—’
Someone screamed, and he saw a folding chair coming at his head. He ducked, and suddenly fists and feet were after him, driving him into the floor. He fell, took a kick under the nose and rolled away into another kick.
Then he wasn’t the centre of it any more. Youths were chopping and kicking each other as though a mass tantrum had spread through the crowd. Roderick saw blood on white shirts, faces twisted with rage, folded chairs spinning through the air. Then someone grabbed his collar and dragged him through the forest of struggling legs to the exit.
‘Ida!’
‘Outside, kid, quick.’ They raced across the dark parking lot, hailed a taxi and were away from it, safe.
‘Jeez, Ida, thanks. Thanks a lot.’
‘You need taking care of,’ she said. ‘But then don’t we all?’
It was not the worst of times. It was not the best of times.
V
The tone arm hesitated as though judging distance, made the leap and lowered safely on twelve-string guitar music. Leadbelly sang:
There was a cat in Ida’s cramped little apartment, a fat Persian that blinked and yawned until she shooed it off the sofa, but there was no room for a sewing machine.
‘Make yourself comfy, Roderick. Why don’t you take a bath and a slug of bourbon and say we take it from there?’
‘No but wait, wait. I don’t drink, and I don’t need baths. And it’s kind of you, Ida, but I don’t think I could
