“Damien’s being an absolute wanker; some Navy friend knew he was on the planet so he couldn’t get out of it and he’s bored shitless. He persists in talking about his research partner, who I do not know and have not the slightest interest in, and no matter how much I drink I cannot get drunk! Will you dance with me for the rest of the night so I can ignore him properly?” Miles knew these posh lads were handy; most of them could box before they could count, but a Garden Girl had summoned him and he was powerless to disobey. Once inside he noticed a tall pale youth with dark hair swept back in a widow’s peak, leaning against the far wall and eyeballing them with a sour expression.
“Is Damien the one who looks like a vampire?” Miles hisses in Anna’s ear; she laughs.
“It’s worse than that; he looks like a Fältskog but I know what you mean.” The next time Miles clocked him he’d found a new partner, and beyond that Miles only had eyes for Anna. He came to realise not only did he love this woman, but had loved her from the day he was born; they just hadn’t met until now. The caterers ejected them in the early hours but a parting of the ways never occurred, and as he unlocked his door he noticed they’d been hand in hand; he couldn’t remember when that had happened.
The next day she stayed. He’d honestly expected her to dress in a hurry and leave a wrong number but here she was, gone noon on the Lord’s Day, grazing his fridge like it was ever thus. Over the next few weeks there was a steady trickle of Anna gear turning up around the place, and the Housing Allocator eventually rang to ask if she wasn’t setting foot in her shared house again would she mind awfully if they squeeze someone else in there? As time went by there was nevertheless a feeling of impermanence; an indefinable something looming some way off which would inevitably separate them. Their relationship, for want of a better word, was never defined by Anna, and Miles felt it unwise to rock the boat by blurting out his devotion. Every day was a blessing.
Britannia Mining Company Band Hall
Second Tuesday of the Month
For every Origin of Species there is a Piltdown Man. The speed of light used to be constant, but anything’s constant if you arbitrarily change everything else to keep it that way; it’s the exact same process by which all sentient beings judge their position the inviolate centre of the universe, and where would we be without that?
In the dying days of the twenty first century, the faith which gave us the Big Bang theory reached critical mass; seventeen hundred years of hoarded wealth and arcane sciences sent the great starship Deus Vult to Barnard’s Star in a shade under fifty years, leaving the Roman Catholic Church penniless and exhausted but incredibly pleased with themselves. On arrival at Planet Van de Kamp these missionaries found air, water and to their joy and amazement a race even the most devout had given up to myth. The dwindling tribe of flame haired giants went by many names wherever they were briefly encountered; you can talk about your Bigfoot, Sasquatch or Abominable Snowman, but anyone with half a lifetime in a vast interstellar ecclesiastical library knows a dirty great נְפִילִים when they see one. Despite being technically immortal, the colossi endured a kind of Karmic countdown so sin literally robbed them of lifespan; there had been enemies of God and mankind equally among their number once, but those still standing were by definition of a gentler nature. Over time the Nephilim again interacted with Homo sapiens and many migrated to the mines of Alpha Centauri Bd, where big strong lads and lasses were always welcome.
There were Nefs on Miles’ team; they cleaned each new cavern, hacking a snowstorm of loose rock with steel demolition spikes and loading it into red carts, dragging them two at a time to be winched to the surface for crushing and sorting; when humans did the job they drove haulers. It is impossible to perform a three point turn in a stope tunnel so the driver of these squat double ended barrows sits at a right angle to the direction of travel, making it equally awkward to see in either direction. Ore doesn’t get the bends, so the hoistman can open her up once the workers are safely underground and the lift cages are full of rubble; it’s a point of honour to get the hauler to the hoist before it returns.
Second and fourth Tuesday of the month is band practise. Most are here because you still get paid and it makes a change from risking life and limb in a sweltering homage to Dante, but the pits had always maintained bands and fielded competitions. Along with football it was a way of proving you were better than the other companies without a street fight; if it didn’t go your way there was always the option of a brawl, so win-win. The bandleader is arguing with a Nephilim who has arrived with a burnt out three ton AC generator on a cart. The maestro is one of those leaders of men with small round glasses and a neat moustache, and such people are not easily cowed when the interests of those they represent are challenged.
“Yes I can see how it would be in the way, because it’s also in the way here! The bay doors are open because we back onto a furnace, and not as an open invitation for the disposal of unwanted and still smoking megastructures!” The Nef turns to follow the bandleaders’ glare, extinguishes the offending wisp with a quick blast of dry powder and sighs.
“Tell you what. Give me ‘til you finish and I’ll radio through again; odds are they’ll have the new one off the wagon by then.” After practise Miles has the hall for a side project so takes the keys on the understanding both generator and Nephilim will be gone before he locks up, even if he has to sleep there. He’s attached the guts of three microphones to his guitar, and wires snake through a repurposed CCTV fader box into a five hundred watt home cinema amplifier with matching speakers. Anna’s not going to be best pleased when she gets home to unwind with another six straight hours of Alpha Kush and long form programming. He thrashes out a few sequences on the instrument, but opinion is mixed.
“So what is this again, and how do you expect to play it with only four of us?” asks Lenny Deadman, a young percussionist. They all have a certain look about them; Miles doesn’t know for certain what this music should sound like, but he knows exactly what it should look like.
“It’s the new sound in the new style! We’ve been playing the music of Earth our whole lives; this is the music of the mines! It doesn’t need as many players.”
“I like it” approves Jenny, dwarfed by her double bass “I can imagine women dancing suggestively to it.” Deadman snorts.
“Means nothing; I imagine women dancing suggestively if the microwave goes ping!” James ‘Jimbob’ Roberts emerges from the confines of an old baby grand piano, tuning wrench in hand.
“Sorry Miles I missed all that; what was Deadman saying about suggestive women?”
“It’s only rock n’ roll.” Miles turns slowly and raises his line of vision to the source of the unexpected rumble.
“You’ve heard this sound before?” The giant nods; Miles reaches for his guitar as a ghost hunter may reach for his camera upon spotting a class V full roaming vapour. “So you can remember what this music sounds like?” the Nef rubs his chin and exhales.
“Well… I can hum bits of it, maybe got the words to some of the choruses” Miles gives a ragged flourish in E major and grins.
“You hum it son, I’ll play it!” Over the next couple of hours they jam; the Nefs’ quaking sub bass needed jacking up a few octaves to fit on a fretboard and sometimes it took a few attempts, but eventually he’d give a thumbs up and rumble out another riff. These half forgotten fragments built a map in Miles’ mind; the minor pentatonic scale with an elusive sixth note which eventually had to be a diminished fifth, staccato double string melodies, solos even, on a bloody guitar of all things like it was a real instrument! Everything imbued with rhythm, the relentless heartbeat of the 4/4 time signature, twelve bars and round again, scream if you want to go faster! Jenny and Jimbob are music history geeks; even if they’ve never heard of rock & roll they know something like it with rolling basslines eight to the bar and the high keys stabbing like knives. Miles pushes Anna’s amp into the red to be heard as they try the parts together, faster and with
more urgency each time; Deadman doesn’t seem convinced but at least twats his snare in time and smacks a cymbal every few bars. Could it really be this easy? Miles remembered the guys on the record sleeve; yes, in all probability you’d have to say it could. A recyc truck pulls up for the dead generator and then, like so many fine musicians before them, they go to the pub.
Miles gets them in and ushers their new friend through to the back; Nephilim become as talkative as the next higher Mommal after a couple of pints, and Miles hangs on his every word.
“I was in Texas late in the nineteenth century. A lot of us were; the industries of the New World didn’t care what you were as long as you worked. There were slaves then, African men building the railroads. The way a steam locomotive sounds, it gets inside your head with the rhythm of your hammer and you could hear it in the work songs; they were changing. After emancipation these men migrated north to the new industrial cities and took the music with them; it survived through the Great Depression and two world wars and by 1965 the economy was booming. Four out of ten Americans were under the age of twenty, which is an awful lot of bored kids looking for something to get excited about. I’ve seen music do incredible things; I’ve seen it lift two hundred ton blocks of limestone and I’ve seen it kill and when rock & roll happened I saw it break down racial divides and spread new ideologies across continents.”
“It sounds beautiful; what happened?”
“The audience got old and died; their children and grandchildren were fewer and didn’t have it so good. You can make the best record in the world, but if there’s not a whole bunch of youngsters with money in their pockets nobody’s going to buy it.”
“I can’t believe we forgot about this if it was so big.” The Nephilim drained his glass and shrugged.
“Happens all the time. Music hall went the same way, and some of those performers were so famous their names are still adjectives; it only takes a couple of generations. A century after bears and wolves were wiped out in England, everyone thought they were just fairy tales.”
“Were there Nephilim bands?”
“Oh we were well underground by then lad; stuff of myth and legend and generally keeping our heads down. Doesn’t matter how big you are when the other bloke’s got a tank, and we thought you’d blow yourselves up sooner or later like those bloody Sumerians; I have to say you’ve all hung on remarkably well. The transmissions were everywhere though; if you wanted to know about the little people you could always find out, and I did love bad music.”
“Could we still pick up those old broadcasts? People say analogue signals go on forever, and we’re a long way from Earth.”
“They lose power as they go; if an old radio wave is passing right now there’s nothing sensitive enough to hear it, certainly not a home receiver.” Miles gets another round in and addresses the group.
“We need a name! It should mark us out as a new kind of music, something explosive. What about the Igniters, after our bike gang?” Jimbob looks put out.
“Is that what we are? I always thought of us as noble sportsmen of the highways.” Jimbob wore a white silk scarf which streamed out behind him as he rode like a flying ace, an impression further compounded by the aviators’ goggles they all wore against road grit. They daubed Igniters M.C. on the black vinyl shoulder panels of their work-issue donkey jackets, but only Jimbob’s was even vaguely symmetrical. As other racing gangs formed the Igniters added ornate Britannia patches, which were in reality bar towels pinched from the social club; who you worked for trumped even species out here, as those born in the colonies took the nationality of the company. Miles knew he was British, but that meant a bunch of domes and a spaceport; he found it difficult to relate to a mythical island on a world he’d probably never visit. A fierce patriotism nevertheless reigned, as the Igniters wanted to draw deep divisions between themselves and the Johnny-come-latelies from the Philharmoniker[**] and Liberty mines on their quieter but undeniably more agile hover bikes.
From the Igniters point of view, you see, space was British. Britain alone made first contact, and established the colonies at a time when other nations (rightly as it happens) would find their bladders curiously empty should Britain happen to be on fire. When the mind boggling possibilities of interstellar trade sank in a grove of olive branches were offered, many with state of the art olive oil processing plants attached.
Nuking Brussels? Water under the bridge, old man; after all, the US fried Japan twice and nobody minds them. Obviously they didn’t precipitate a nuclear winter which very nearly wiped out mankind, but hey! We got through it didn’t we, and here we all are again, old friends ready to help out old friends with maybe a licensed route to, say, the unfeasibly resource rich asteroid belts of Barnards Star? Oh, those sanctions and trade embargoes? Gone already, Minister; can’t think what the previous administration ever saw in them.
Back in the bar, Zed offers further information.
“A lot of those combos had a frontman, generally the singer. They’d be called so-and-so and the whatevers.”
“Miles and the Igniters! I like it!”
“Never gonna happen” states Deadman; Miles rolls his eyes.
“OK, how about Count Scion and the Igniters?”
“After the movie guy?”
“I was thinking of my bike but yeah, that makes more sense.”
Consciousness is like an iceberg; less than a tenth of it is above water at the best of times, and Miles was so deep in thought he didn’t even register the screams until his key was nearly in the door. Panicked into action, he shouldered it open and burst into the kitchen brandishing a chair leg he kept in the hallway. The room is empty but for his live-in significant something or other backed into a corner, eyes fixed on a spot in the middle of the floor.
“What is wrong with you?! I’ve been yelling my head off since I saw you turn the corner!” Miles sighs, and scoops up the Purple Arsed Spider.[††]
“Open the window.”
“Hell no! Kill the fucker!” The spider is making tickly assaults on Miles’ palms; Miles has been bitten once or twice by these things, and it throbs for days.
“Open the window or so help me I will release it into your hair!” Anna clutches her do in horror.
“You wouldn’t!” Miles chances a peep at the beast held captive in his cupped hands.
“I think this one’s pregnant; you’d have to shave it all off to be sure.” Anna relents, and the intruder is ejected.
“Many spiders are dangerous, so it’s you being irrational! You surely don’t expect me to memorise some sort of Encyclopaedia Arachnus?” Miles shoves the door back into its splintered frame and jams a broomstick under the handle.
“If I was going to cause this much fuss I’d make it a lifetimes study for the sake of public decency!”
“Ugh no! I just couldn’t! They’re horrible and spindly.”
“This proves it’s just another irrational fear in a long series, like your poltergeist.”
“I saw a bed move by itself – you didn’t! Oh; and where are my speakers?” Miles mumbles an apology with a vague assurance he’ll return it tomorrow.
“I’ve found something in the ground cellar which I was hoping to show you when you’d been good and hadn’t stolen any of my belongings, but today will have to do.” They occupied a one bed flat in a large converted house with a long history of supernatural activity. Props and decorations still hung in situ courtesy of the previous owners, a firm specialising in ghost hunting overnighters. Older buildings like this were built above earlier underground bunkers; the first level down was originally an airlock where settlers would remove their heavy hazmat suits, and the remaining levels would be living and sleeping quarters. Right at the bottom was a machine which regarded them with huge baleful eyes and gritted teeth, but as Miles drew near he saw the eyes for spools carrying a wide tape from one to the other and the teeth a matrix of chunky square push buttons. Anna flicked a switch and the spools rotated hypnotically; as she
plugged in and handed Miles a set of headphones he saw there was a row of such sockets, each with individual controls. Near silence was recorded on the tape; background hiss and the odd pod going past, a distant siren or voices in the street outside, the regular background static of the city at night but nothing more. Anna manipulates the pots and faders and the perspective changes; he’s taken on an anticlockwise circuit of the building. He removes the headphones and looks to her quizzically.
“It’s going to be the same on all these” she indicates a stack of flat square boxes “this machine was built to record every room simultaneously on analogue tape; ghost people love physical evidence. It must have been left behind when Haunted Sleepovers went bust.” The possibilities for musical composition are not lost on Miles. You can talk about notation, but the new sound couldn’t always be neatly nailed to a stave;[‡‡] if he could only get it out of his head and onto a music player it would blow the guys’ minds.
“I could mic everything to this; I suppose you could record a part on your own, then rewind and record another part on the next rooms’ channel and so on…” Anna left him to it. She was awoken once or twice during the night as he attempted to retrieve something noisy from the darkened room without waking her. When she rises he’s waiting in the kitchen, red eyed with a small but powerful music player on his lap; he presses play and a drumbeat like radioactive sex is joined by what could once have been a double bass, but is now the soundtrack to an Hieronymus Bosch painting. When had he done the drums she wondered? She must have been really zonked by then. The aim when recording a guitar had long been to make it sound as natural as possible, but this close miked high gain fuzz was about as electric as it was possible to get. It imbued her with an unexpected desire to get naked and shimmy, not usually an option before coffee and a cigarette; shivers ran down her spine and the meaningless lyrics bypassed language, conversing directly with her Parts. She looked at her forearms; covered in goosebumps.
The Only War Page 3