by Andrew Fish
there?’
‘No,’ said Riff. ‘It’s Nutter. He’s acting peculiar.’
Keys and Vid exchanged worried glances and followed Riff to their quarters. They found the robot standing in a corner, trying to walk into the wall.
Vid rolled up to him. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘He won’t answer,’ Riff told them. ‘I switched off his voice modulator.’
‘Why?’ Vid asked, flicking a switch at the back of Nutter’s neck.
‘I..I..I..I..I..I..I..I..,’ said Nutter. Vid switched the robot’s voice back off.
‘That’s why,’ said Riff.
‘Yes, I imagine it could get rather irritating.’
‘It does.’
‘Why? How long has it being going on?’ asked Keys.
‘About an hour.’
‘An hour? Has he been drinking?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ said Riff. ‘He’s only been up about an hour.’
‘Perhaps that’s the problem,’ said Vid. ‘I’ll get him something from the bar.’
He rolled out of the room. Keys and Riff waited in silence. Within a couple of minutes, Vid returned and passed Keys a six-pack of Lube. Keys opened a can and, steadying Nutter’s head with two of his hands, poured the contents down the robot’s throat.
Riff watched the proceedings with concern. ‘Rather early for the bar to be open,’ he noted.
‘It wasn’t,’ said Vid.
Keys paused and both he and Riff looked at the screen-headed robot. ‘You didn’t?’ said Keys.
‘I didn’t have to,’ said Vid. ‘Looks like somebody already broke the lock last night – a whole case of beer’s gone missing.’
‘How do you know what’s missing?’
‘They left the cans behind.’
Keys turned back to his labours. After the third can Nutter stopped trying to walk into the wall. Taking the can from Keys’ hand, he turned round to face the group and mouthed silently. After a few seconds his eyes registered concern. Vid reached for his neck and switched his voice back on.
‘Thanks,’ said Nutter gratefully. He finished the can and held out his hand for another.
‘What happened?’ asked Riff.
Nutter shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s never happened before.’
‘You’re getting worse,’ said Keys. ‘You need to get seen to.’
Nutter shook his head. ‘I suspect it’s just a quirk,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Don’t worry about it?’
‘I expect it’s just part of being an ex-boxer. I mean, it might have happened before and I just don’t remember it. Get beaten around the head enough and you’re bound to be a little peculiar. Speaking of which, have you seen Ben this morning?’
‘He went out first thing,’ said Riff.
‘Probably trying to catch Sheila’s attention,’ Vid added.
‘Isn’t it the wrong time of day for that?’ said Nutter.
‘I suspect her work gets in the way at night.’
‘Whose work?’ came a voice from behind them. The robots turned to see Ben walk into the room. He looked different somehow and the robots stared at him as they tried to discern how. Once they worked it they continued to stare.
It was Vid who first managed to speak. ‘What the hell have you done with your hair?’ he asked.
‘I’ve been down to the hairdressers,’ said Ben. ‘Do you like it?’
‘I think you’ve been had. My understanding of hairdressers is that they cut hair, not dump toxic waste on it.’
Ben ran his hands through it. ‘It’s only bleach,’ he said. ‘It’s all the rage downtown here. Everyone’s doing it.’
‘Probably explains the smell,’ said Riff.
‘It smells of something, but it isn’t bleach,’ said Vid.
‘What is your problem?’ Ben snapped. ‘It’s my hair and I’ll do what I want with it.’
‘You do realise that you’ll probably go bald if you pour that kind of rubbish on it?’
‘Oh, go short yourself,’ Ben retorted. ‘I should have known better to expect understanding from a soulless can.’
‘Oh we understand,’ said Keys calmingly. ‘First time away from home; you meet an attractive, seemingly sophisticated woman, – you’re bound to try to catch her eye.’
‘What do you mean seemingly sophisticated?’
‘Well, let’s face it,’ said Vid, ‘the way she earns money might be an established profession, but it’s hardly one you want your children to go into.’
Ben looked around the tableau of metal faces. If there was an expression to read it wasn’t immediately apparent, but to Ben’s eyes the expressionless faces seemed somehow mocking. He opened his mouth to make a suitably cutting remark and found that he couldn’t think of one. Instead he span on his heel and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
Vid shook his head. ‘I think before we send Nutter in for a check up, we ought to start with him. The bleach must have gone to his head.’
Keys shrugged. ‘He’s human,’ he said. ‘They get like that.’
‘Well thank the blue flame the rest of us aren’t human – if they’re all that like I don’t know how they put up with each other.’
Acrimony is a common and ancient feature of the music scene: long periods spent in proximity with other ambitious people breeds discontent in much the same way that week old bread breeds mould. Professionalism has, however, made the matter considerably worse.
To explain: when musicians were unpaid or poorly paid entertainers busking on street corners, it was relatively easy for a band to split up and go their separate ways. This ease of disengagement meant they would then often reform within a matter of days. Contracts, money, and legal red tape have, however, done for band relations what pre-nuptial agreements and alimony have done for marriages. And it’s not good.
In fact, it’s probably worse. When a marriage breaks down, there may be questions over how to divide the family cat, but nobody disputes the ownership of a name, a way of living or the family photos30 A band’s property, however, is their livelihood and disputes over what might seem worthless commodities forms a large part of the break-up procedure.
Who, after all, owns the band’s name or their logo? Who has the right to perform their back catalogue songs? Is their sound a trademark in itself? Unfortunately, as with other walks of life, the moment that lawyers get involved, such disputes invariably change from ‘who gets the money?’ to ‘who gets what’s left of the money after the lawyers have taken ninety percent of it?’ The matter of who has the legal rights to a song, a name or a logo become matters of whose lawyer is more effective at getting them for their client rather than who actually deserves them, and the bigger the band, the more lawyers are likely to smell the money and descend, complicating matters still further. Then the feeding frenzy draws in the Press and the lawyers make increasingly outrageous claims in order to supplement their meagre millions with exclusive interview rights.
Prophetically named The Divide, the hugely successful Seginusiun rock band are often cited as the gold standard of bands in crisis. The handling of their break-up is the seen by lawyers and music journalists as the yardstick by which all other disputes are measured.
Seginus was, and probably still is, one of the most overlawyered planets in the universe. The situation was so bad that people would sue butterflies for causing it to rain. This meant that, in common with everyone else on the planet, the members of the world’s most successful band were already highly paranoid. It didn’t help that a chance remark about the similarities between creating music and creating life had already put them through a three year court battle - the Church having sued them for claiming that they had usurped the authority of the creator of the universe.
That court case came to a close when the divine being failed to respond to a subpoena and the prosecution case collapsed due to the lack of their star witness. Despite their victory and the resultant album, God Off, seen as the m
ost creative expression of blasphemy in all of time and space, the ordeal left the band in meltdown. After one particularly stressful concert, lead singer Daifid Miltz let it be known that he was not only quitting the band, but retiring from the music scene in general. The news, as all news on Seginus, was met with a flurry of writs. Lawyers smelt money and, like bloodhounds, pursued its scent. A wily laywer persuaded Daifid not simply to quit the band but to sue his former friends and make good his claim to his legacy. They would, after all, sue him if he didn’t get in first.
So far, so straightforward: Daifid’s insistence that the band be banned from using the name, or at least pressured into using the name Part of the Divide and that the words Part of should be in the same font, point-size and colour as the original name was straightforward enough, but the band retaliated by claiming ownership of the songs, the sound and, ultimately, Daifid’s voice as recognisable trademarks. Since the band had always operated on a democratic basis with the money split four ways, Daifid didn’t have enough money to compete in the game of outlawyering his former colleagues and was prepared to settle, but the band’s lawyers had other ideas. In a ground-breaking move, they passed an injunction freezing Daifid’s assets, including his voice, until the matter was resolved. This proved to be the turning point: Daifid’s lawyer, skilled though he was, was unable to discuss matters with his legally muted client and sued for terms. The band kept the rights to their name and to the songs, sound and voice of their lead singer and Daifid was forced to take up a life in a silent order of monks, living off of the