I’m starting to relax. I force a smile as I walk up the steps past him.
“You’re the best, Charlie.”
“Don’t I know it. Dey did manage to make off wit your hi-fl an’ your records but, hey, you can replace dose wit’out too much trouble.”
I turn toward Charlie. I feel the whole world, all the weight of time itself crashing down on me. I can’t help it. It comes unbidden, without warning. Charlie’s eyes nearly bulge out of his head as I scream a laugh in his face.
F. Paul Wilson (www.repairmanjack.com) is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of forty-plus books and many short stories spanning horror, adventure, medical thrillers, science fiction, and virtually everything between. More than nine million copies of his books are in print in the U.S. and his work has been translated into twenty-four foreign languages. He also has written for the stage, screen, and interactive media. His latest thrillers, Nightworld and Cold City, feature his urban mercenary, Repairman Jack. The author resides at the REAL Jersey Shore. Wilson’s referenced rock in other stories such as “Nyro Fiddles,” “The Last Oldies Revival,” and “The Years the Music Died.” He even touches on disco in “When He Was Fab.”
Stone
Edward Bryant
1
Up above the burning city, a woman wails the blues. How she cries out, how she moans. Flames fed by tears rake fingers across the sky.
It is an old, old song:
Fill me like the mountains
Fill me like the sea
Writhing in the heat, she stands where there is no support.
The fire licks her body.
All of me
So finely drawn, and with the glitter of ice, the manipulating wires radiate outward. Taut bonds between her body and the flickering darkness, all wires lead to the intangible overshadowing figure behind her. Without expression, Atropos gazes down at the woman.
Face contorting, she looks into the hearts of a million fires and cries out.
All of me
As Atropos raises the terrible, cold-shining blades of the Nornshears and with only the barest hesitation cuts the wires. Limbs spread-eagled to the compass points, the woman plunges into the flames. She is instantly and utterly consumed.
The face of Atropos remains shrouded in shadows.
2
ALPERTRON PRESENTS
IN CONCERT
JAIN SNOW
with
MOOG INDIGO
Sixty-track stim by RobCal
June 23, 24
One show nightly at 2100
Tickets $30, $26, $22.
Available from all Alpertron
outlets or at the door.
ROCKY MOUNTAIN
CENTRAL ARENA
DENVER
3
My name is Robert Dennis Clary and I was born twenty-three years ago in Oil City, Pennsylvania, which is also where I was raised. I’ve got a degree in electrical engineering from MIT and some grad credit at Cal Tech in electronics. “Not suitable, Mr. Clary,” said the dean. “You lack the proper team spirit. Frankly speaking, you are selfish. And a cheat.”
My mother told me once she was sorry I wasn’t handsome enough to get by without working. Listen, Ma, I’m all right. There’s nothing wrong with working the concert circuit. I’m working damned hard now. I was never genius enough that I could have got a really good job with, say, Bell Futures or one of the big space firms. But I’ve got one marketable talent—what the interviewer called a peculiarly coordinative affinity for multiplex circuitry. He looked a little stunned after I finished with the stim console. “Christ, kid, you really get into it, don’t you?”
That’s what got me the job with Alpertron, Ltd., the big promotion and booking agency. I’m on the concert tour and work their stim board, me and my console over there on the side of the stage. It isn’t that much different in principle from playing one of the instruments in the backup band, though it’s a hell of a lot more complex than even Nagami’s synthesizer. It all sounds simple enough: my console is the critical link between performer and audience. Just one glorified feedback transceiver: pick up the empathic load from Jain, pipe it into the audience, they react and add their own load, and I feed it all back to the star. And then around again as I use the sixty stim tracks, each with separate controls to balance and augment and intensify. It can get pretty hairy, which is why not just anyone can do the job. It helps that I seem to have a natural resistance to the side-band slopover radiation from the empathic transmissions. “Ever think of teaching?” said the school voc counselor. “No,” I said. “I want the action.”
And that’s why I’m on the concert circuit with Jain Snow; as far as I’m concerned, the only real blues singer and