Kind of Fairy Tale was published earlier this year. See www.grahamjoyce.co.uk for more information.
Freezone
John Shirley
Freezone floated in the Atlantic Ocean, a city afloat in the wash of international cultural confluence.
The city was anchored about a hundred miles north of Sidi Ifni, a drowsy city on the coast of Morocco in a warm, gentle current, and in a sector of the sea only rarely troubled by large storms. What storms arose here spent their fury on the maze of concrete wave-baffles Freezone Admin had spent years building up around the artificial island.
But the affluent could feel the crumbling of their kingdom. They didn’t feel safe in the States. They needed someplace outside, somewhere controlled. Europe was out now; Central and South America, too risky. The Pacific theater was another war zone.
So that’s where Freezone came in.
The community was now seventeen square miles of urban raft protected with one of the meanest security forces in the world. Freezone dealt in pleasant distractions for the rich in the exclusive section and—in the second-string places around the edge—for technickis from the drill rigs. And the second-string places sheltered a few thousand semi-illicit hangers-on, and a few hundred performers.
Like Rickenharp.
Rick Rickenharp stood against the south wall of the Semiconductor, letting the club’s glare and blare wash over him, and mentally writing a song. The song went something like, “Glaring blare, lightning stare/Nostalgia for the electric chair.”
Then he thought, Fucking drivel.
All the while he was doing his best to look cool but vulnerable, hoping one of the girls flashing through the crowd would remember having seen him in the band the night before, would try to chat him up, play groupie. But they were mostly into wifi dancers.
And no fucking way Rickenharp was going to wire into minimono.
Rickenharp was a rock classicist; he was retro. He wore a black leather motorcycle jacket that was some seventy-some years old, said to have been worn by John Cale when he was still in the Velvet Underground. The seams were beginning to pop for the third time; three studs were missing from the chrome trimming. The elbows and collar edges were worn through the black dye to the brown animal the leather had come from. But the leather was second skin to Rickenharp. He wore nothing under it. His bony, hairless chest showed translucent-bluewhite between the broken zippers. He wore blue jeans that were only ten years old but looked older than the coat; he wore genuine Harley Davidson boots. Earrings clustered up and down his long, slightly too prominent ears, and his rusty brown hair looked like a cannon-shell explosion.
And he wore dark glasses.
And he did all this because it was gratingly unfashionable.
His band hassled him about it. They wanted their lead-git and frontman minimono.
“If we’re gonna go minimono, we oughta just sell the fucking guitars and go wires,” Rickenharp had told them.
And the drummer had been stupid and tactless enough to say, “Well, fuck, man, maybe we should go to wires.”
Rickenharp had said, “Maybe we should get a fucking drum machine, too, you fucking Neanderthal!” and kicked the drum seat over, sending Murch into the cymbals with a fine crashing, so that Rickenharp added, “you should get that good a sound outta those cymbals on stage. Now we know how to do it.”
Murch had started to throw his sticks at him, but then he’d remembered how you had to have them lathed up special because they didn’t make them anymore, so he’d said, “Suck my ass, big shot,” and got up and walked out, not the first time. But that was the first time it meant anything, and only some heavy ambassadorial action on the part of Ponce had kept Murch from leaving the band.
The call from their agent had set the whole thing off. That’s what it really was. Agency was streamlining its clientele. The band was out. The last two albums hadn’t sold, and in fact the engineers claimed that live drums didn’t digitize well onto the miniaturized soundcaps that passed for CDs now. Rickenharp’s holovid and the videos weren’t getting much airplay.
Anyway, Vid-Co was probably going out of business. Another business sucked into the black hole of the depression. “So it ain’t our fault the stuff’s not selling,” Rickenharp said. “We got fans but we can’t get the distribution to reach ’em.”
Mose had said, “Bullshit, we’re out of the Grid, and you know it. All that was carrying us was the nostalgia wave anyway. You can’t get more’n two bits out of a revival,