Rock On

by Howard Waldrop

  Stella enfolds Jain in her protection like a raincape. It sometimes amuses Jain; I can see that. Stella, get Alpertron on the phone for me. Stella? Can you score a couple grams? Stella, check out the dudes in the hall. Stella— It never stops.

  When I first met her, I thought that Stella was the coldest person I’d ever encountered. And in Des Moines I saw her crying alone in a darkened phone booth—Jain had awakened her and told her to take a walk for a couple hours while she screwed some rube she’d picked up in the hotel bar. I tapped on the glass; Stella ignored me.

  Stella, do you want her as much as I?

  So there we are—a nice symbolic obtuse triangle. And yet— We’re all just one happy show-biz family.

  4

  This is Alpertron, Ltd.’s, own chartered jet, flying at 37,000 feet above western Kansas. Stella and Jain are sitting across the aisle from me. It’s a long flight and there’s been a lull in the usually boisterous flight conversation. Jain flips through a current Neiman-Marcus catalogue; exclusive mail order listings are her present passion.

  I look up as she bursts into raucous laughter. “I’ll be goddamned. Will you look at this?” She points at the open catalogue on her lap.

  Hollis, Moog Indigo’s color operator, is seated behind her. She leans forward and cranes her neck over Jain’s shoulder. “Which?”

  “That,” she says. “The VTP.”

  “What’s VTP?” says Stella.

  Hollis says, “Video tape playback.”

  “Hey, everybody!” Jain raises her voice, cutting stridently trough everyone else’s conversations. “Get this. For a small fee, these folks’ll put a videotape gadget in my tombstone. It’s got everything—stereo sound and color. All I’ve got to do is go in before I die and cut the tape.”

  “Terrific!” Hollis says. “You could leave an album of greatest hits. You know, for posterity. Free concerts on the grass every Sunday.”

  “That’s really sick,” Stella says.

  “Free, hell.” Jain grins. “Anybody who wants to catch the show can put a dollar in the slot.”

  Stella stares disgustedly out the window.

  Hollis says, “Do you want one of those units for your birthday?”

  “Nope.” Jain shakes her head, “I’m not going to need one.”

  “Never?”

  “Well . . . not for a long time.” But I think her words sound unsure.

  Then I only half listen as I look out from the plane across the scattered cloud banks and the Rockies looming to the west of us. Tomorrow night we play Denver. “It’s about as close to home as I’m gonna get,” Jain had said in New Orleans when we found out Denver was booked.

  “A what?” Jain’s voice is puzzled.

  “A cenotaph,” says Hollis.

  “Shut up,” Stella says. “Damn it.”

  5

  We’re in the Central Arena, the architectural pride of Denver District. This is the largest gathering place in all of Rocky Mountain, that heterogeneous, anachronistic strip-city clinging to the front ranges of the continental divide all the way from Billings down to the southern suburb of El Paso.

  The dome stretches up beyond the range of the house lights, if it were rigid, there could never be a Rocky Mountain Central Arena. But it’s made of a flexible plastic-variant and blowers funnel up heated air to keep it buoyant. We’re on the inner skin of a giant balloon. When the arena’s full, the body heat from the audience keeps the dome aloft, and the arena crew turns off the blowers.

  I killed time earlier tonight reading the promo pamphlet on this place. As the designer says, the combination of arena and spectators turns the dome into one sustaining organism. At first I misread it as “orgasm.”

  I monitor crossflow conversations through plugs inserted in both ears as set-up people check out the lights, sound, color, and all the rest of the systems. Finally some nameless tech comes on circuit to give my stim console a run-through.

  “Okay, Rob, I’m up in the booth above the east aisle. Give me just a tickle.” My nipples were sensitized to her tongue, rough as a cat’s.

  I’m wired to a test set fully as powerful as the costume Jain’ll wear later—just not as exotic. I slide a track control forward until it reaches the five-position on a scale calibrated to one hundred.

  “Five?” the tech says.

  “Reading’s dead-on. Give me a few more tracks.”

  I comply. She kisses me with lips and tongue, working down across my belly.

  “A little higher, please.”

  I push the tracks to fifteen.

  “You’re really in a mood, Rob.”

  “So what do you want me to think?” I say.

  “Jesus,” says the tech. “You ought to be performing. The crowd would love it.”

  “They pay Jain. She’s the star.” I tried to get on top; she wouldn’t let me. A moment later it didn’t matter.

  “Did you just push the board to thirty?” The tech’s voice sounds strange.

  “No. Did you read that?”

  “Negative, but for a moment it felt like it.” He pauses. “You’re not allowing your emotional life to get in the way of your work, are you?”

  “Screw off,” I answer. “None of your business.”

  “No threats,” says the tech. “Just a suggestion.”

  “Stick it.”

  “Okay, okay. She’s a lovely girl, Rob. And like you say, she’s the star.”

  “I know.”

  “Fine. Feed me another five tracks, Rob; broad spectrum this time.”

  I do so and the tech is satisfied with the results. “That ought to do it,” he says. “I’ll get back to you later.” He breaks off the circuit. All checks are done; there’s nothing now on the circuits but a background scratch like insects climbing over old newspapers. She will not allow me to be exhausted for long.

  Noisily, the crowd is starting to file into the Arena.

  I wait for the concert.

  6

  There’s never before been a stim star of the magnitude of Jain Snow. Yet somehow the concert tonight fails. Somewhere the chemistry goes wrong. The faces out there are as always—yet somehow they are not involved. They care, but not enough.

  I don’t think the fault’s in Jain. I detect no significant difference from other concerts. Her skin still tantalizes the audience as nakedly, only occasionally obscured by the cloudy metal mesh that transforms her entire body into a single antenna. I’ve been there when she’s performed a hell of a lot better, maybe, but I’ve also seen her perform worse and still come off the stage happy.

  It isn’t Moog Indigo; they’re laying down the sound and light patterns behind Jain as expertly as always.

  Maybe it’s me, but I don’t think I’m handling the stim console badly. If I were, the nameless tech would be on my ass over the com circuit.

  Jain goes into her final number. It does not work. The audience is enthusiastic and they want an encore, but that’s just it: they shouldn’t want one. They shouldn’t need one.

  She comes off the stage crying. I touch her arm as she walks past my console. Jain stops and rubs her eyes and asks me if I’ll go back to the hotel with her.

  7

  It seems like the first time I was in Jain Snow’s bed. Jain keeps the room dark and says nothing as we go through the positions. Her breathing grows a little ragged; that is all. And yet she is more demanding of me than ever before.

  When it’s done, she holds me close and very tightly. Her rate of breathing slows and becomes regular. I wonder if she is asleep.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “What?” She slurs the word sleepily.

  “I’m sorry about tonight.”

  “ . . . Not your fault.”

  “I love you very much.”

  She rolls to face me. “Huh?”

  “I love you.”

  “No, babe. Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true,” I say.

  “Won’t work.”

  ”Doesn’t matter,�
�� I say.

  “It can’t work.”

  I know I don’t have any right to feel this, but I’m pissed, and so I move away in the bed. “I don’t care.” The first time: “Such a goddamned adolescent, Rob.”

  After a while, she says, “Robbie, I’m cold,” and so I move back to her and hold her and say nothing. I realize, rubbing against her hip, that I’m hard again; she doesn’t object as I pour back into her all the frustration she unloaded in me earlier.

  Neither of us sleeps much the rest of the night. Sometime before dawn I doze briefly and awaken from a nightmare. I am disoriented and can’t remember the entirety of the dream, but I do remember hard wires and soft flows of electrons. My eyes suddenly focus and I see her face inches away from mine. Somehow she knows what I am thinking. “Whose turn is it?” she says. The antenna.

  8

  At least a thousand hired kids are there setting up chairs in the arena this morning, but it’s still hard to feel I’m not alone. The dome is that big. Voices get lost here. Even thoughts echo.

  “It’s gonna be a hell of a concert tonight. I know it.” Jain had said that and smiled at me when she came through here about ten. She’d swept down the center aisle in a flurry of feathers and shimmering red strips, leaving all the civilians stunned and quivering.

  God only knows why she was up this early; over the last eight months, I’ve never seen her get up before noon on a concert day. That kind of sleep-in routine would kill me. I was out of bed by eight this morning, partly because I’ve got to get this console modified by show-time, and partly because I didn’t feel like being in the star’s bed when she woke up.

  “The gate’s going to be a lot bigger than last night,” Jain had said. “Can you handle it?”

  “Sure. Can you?”

  Jain had flashed me another brilliant smile and left. And so I sit here substituting circuit chips.

  A couple kids climb on stage and pull breakfasts out of their backpacks. “You ever read this?” says one, pulling a tattered paperback from his hip pocket. His friend shakes her head. “You?” He turns the book in my direction; I recognize the cover.

  It was two, maybe three months ago in Memphis, in a studio just before rehearsal. Jain had been sitting and reading. She reads quite a lot, though the promotional people downplay it—Alpertron, Ltd., likes to suck the country-girl image for all it’s worth.

  “What’s that?” Stella says.

  “A book.” Jain holds up the book so she can see.

  “I know that.” Stella reads the title: Receptacle. “Isn’t that the—”

  “Yeah,” says Jain.

  Everybody knows about Receptacle—the best-seller of the year. It’s all fact, about the guy who went to Prague to have a dozen artificial vaginas implanted all over his body. Nerve grafts, neural rerouting, the works. I’d seen him interviewed on some talk show where he’d worn a jumpsuit zipped to the neck.

  “It’s grotesque,” Stella says.

  Jain takes back the book and shrugs.

  “Would you try something like this?”

  “Maybe I’m way beyond it.” A receptacle works only one way.

  Stella goes white and bites off whatever it is she was about to say.

  “Oh, baby, I’m sorry.” Jain smiles and looks fourteen again. Then she stands and gives Stella a quick hug. She glances over at me and winks, and my face starts to flush. One-way.

  Now, months later, I remember it and my skin again goes warm. “Get out of here,” I say to the kids. “I’m trying to concentrate.” They look irritated, but they leave.

  I’m done with the circuit chips. Now the easy stuff. I wryly note the male and female plugs I’m connecting. Jain . . . The com circuit buzzes peremptorily and Jain’s voice says, “Robbie? Can you meet me outside?”

  I hesitate, then say, “Sure, I’m almost done with the board.”

  “I’ve got a car; we’re going away.”

  “What?”

  “Just for the afternoon.”

  “Listen, Jain—”

  She says, “Hurry,” and cuts off.

  It’s gonna be a hell of a concert.

  9

  Tonight’s crowd strains even the capacity of the Rocky Mountain Central Arena. The gate people say there are more than nine hundred thousand people packed into the smoky recesses of the dome. It’s not just hard to believe; it’s scary. But computer ticket-totes don’t lie.

  I look out at the crowd and it’s like staring at the Pacific after dark; the gray waves march out to the horizon until you can’t tell one from the other. Here on the stage, the crowd-mutter even sounds like the sea, exactly as though I was on the beach trying to hear in an eighteen-foot surf. It all washes around me and I’m grateful for the twin earpieces, reassured to hear the usual check-down lists on the in-house com circuit.

  I notice that the blowers have cut off. It’s earlier than usual, but obviously there’s enough body heat to keep the dome buoyed aloft. I imagine the Central Arena drifting away like that floating city they want to make out of Venice, California. There is something appealing about the thought of this dome floating away like dandelion fluff. But now the massive air-conditioning units hum on and the fantasy dies.

  The house lights momentarily dim and the crowd noise raises a few decibels. I realize I can’t see features or faces or even separate bodies. There are simply too many people to comprehend. The crowd has fused into one huge tectonic slab of flesh.

  “Rob, are you ready?” The tech’s soft voice in my earpiece.

  “Ready.”

  “It’s a big gate tonight. Can you do it?”

  Sixty overlay tracks and one com board between Jain and maybe a cool million horny, sweating spectators? “Sure,” I say. “Easy.” But momentarily I’m not sure and I realize how tightly I’m gripping the ends of the console. I consciously will my fingers to loosen.

  “Okay,” the tech says. “But if anything goes wrong, cut it. Right? Damp it completely.”

  “Got it.”

  “Fine,” he says. “About a minute, stand by. Ms. Snow wants to say hello.”

  “Hello, Robbie?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Good luck.”

  Interference crackles and what she says is too soft to hear. I tell her, “Repeat, please.”

  “Stone don’t break. At least not easy.” She cuts off the circuit.

  I’ve got ten seconds to stare out at that vast crowd. Where, I wonder, did the arena logistics people scrape up almost a million in/out headbands? I know I’m hallucinating, but for just a moment I see the scarlet webwork of broadcast power reaching out from my console to those million skulls. I don’t know why; I find myself reaching for the shield that covers the emergency total cutoff. I stop my hand.

  The house lights go all the way down; the only illumination comes from a thousand exit signs and the equipment lights. Then Moog Indigo troops onstage as the crowd begins to scream in anticipation. The group finds their instruments in the familiar darkness. The crowd is already going crazy.

  Hollis strokes her color board and shoots concentric spheres of hard primaries expanding through the arena; red, yellow, blue. Start with the basics. Red.

  Nagami’s synthesizer spews a volcanic flow of notes like burning magma.

  And then Jain is there. Center stage.

  “Damn it,” says the tech in my ear. “Level’s too low. Bring it up in back.” I must have been dreaming. I am performing stupidly, like an amateur. Gently I bring up two stim balance slides.

  “—love you. Every single one of you.”

  The crowd roars back. The filling begins. I cut in four more low-level tracks.

  “—ready. How about you?”

  They’re ready. I cut in another dozen tracks, then mute two. Things are building just a little too fast. The fine mesh around Jain’s body seems to glitter with more than reflected light. Her skin already gleams with moisture.

  “—get started easy. And then things’ll get hard. Yeah?”

 
“YEAH!” from thousands of throats simultaneously.

  I see her stagger slightly. I don’t think I am feeding her too much too fast, but mute another pair of tracks anyway. Moog Indigo takes their cue and begins to play. Hollis gives the dome the smoky pallor of slow-burning leaves, Then Jain Snow sings.

  And I fill her with them. And give her back to them.

  space and time

  measured in my heart

  10

  In the afternoon:

  Jain gestures in an expansive circle. “This is where I grew up.”

  The mountains awe me. “Right here?”

  She shakes her head. “It was a lot like this. My pa ran sheep. Maybe a hundred miles north.”

  “But in the mountains?”

  “Yeah. Really isolated. My pa convinced himself he was one of the original settlers. He was actually a laid-off aerospace engineer out of Seattle.”

  The wind flays us for a moment; Jain’s hair whips and she shakes it back from her eyes. I pull her into the shelter of my arms, wrapping my coat around us both. “Do you want to go back down to the car?”

  “Hell, no,” she says. “A mountain zephyr can’t scare me off.”

  I’m not used to this much open space; it scares me a little, though I’m not going to admit that to Jain. We’re above timberline, and the mountainside is too stark for my taste. I suddenly miss the rounded, wooded hills of Pennsylvania. Jain surveys the rocky fields rubbed raw by wind and snow, and I have a quick feeling she’s scared too. “Something wrong?”

  “Nope. Just remembering.”

  “What’s it like on a ranch?”

  “Okay, if you don’t like people,” she says slowly, obviously recalling details. “My pa didn’t.”

  “No neighbors?”

  “Not a one in twenty miles.”

  “Brothers?” I say. “Sisters?”

  She shakes her head. “Just my pa.” I guess I look curious because she looks away and adds, “My mother died of tetanus right after I was born. It was a freak thing.”

  I try to change the subject. “Your father didn’t come down to the first concert, did he? Is he coming tonight?”

  “No way,” she says. “He didn’t and he won’t. He doesn’t like what I do.” I can’t think of anything to say now. After a while Jain rescues me. “It isn’t your hassle, and it isn’t mine anymore.”