have?’
‘I think you’re just paranoid.’
The lift stopped and the door opened. Outside, the van stood waiting in distinctly loud silence. Tony hadn’t yet arrived.
‘Oh look,’ said Vid sardonically. ‘Our van just happens to be right outside – I’m amazed the engine isn’t running.’
Ben looked the robot over thoughtfully. ‘I think you need a holiday,’ he said.
‘Yes. Do you know a nice hotel? Preferably one that you don’t have to leave before you get any sleep.’
The coastal town of Wilmethorpe was only a few hours drive from Bowing. They arrived in the early hours of the morning, winding their way nervously up the narrow cliff road in the half-darkness.
It didn’t look like a bustling site – more the aquatic equivalent of a one horse town21. A small hotel on the cliff-top offered what appeared to be the only signs of life, so Tony booked them into the available rooms before heading off on some errand of his own.
Keys and Riff found themselves sharing a room at the top of the house. Being robots, they could sleep without lying down, but after standing in their respective corners for an hour or so, both found that they couldn’t sleep at all. Riff sat down on one of the human beds, which creaked alarmingly under his weight, and picked up the acoustic guitar he’d bought during their stay in Kidney Lake. Keys watched him idly plucking.
‘Something on your mind?’
‘Too much. Let’s not talk about it.’
Riff picked a few more random strings then, as if responding to some primeval guitarist instinct, he began to strum a standard twelve bar blues. Modulating his voice to sound raspier than his usual pleasant tenor, he sang quietly to his own accompaniment.
Woke up this morning; found that I was going nowhere,
Done such a lot of travelling, don’t know if I’m here or there,
Been on the run so long, I think I’ve lost the need to care.
Keys hovered over the bed opposite him, the field from his levitators ruffling the sheets slightly. He tapped a pair of hands on the metal bedpost in time to the beat. As they approached the beginning of another verse, Riff nodded to him. Hesitantly, Keys provided the next verse.
I thought that I had settled, but I found that I was wrong,
For every town I stayed in, the drive to leave was strong,
I don’t know what I’m guilty of; Been on the run so long.
At this point he picked up Riff’s electric guitar. It wasn’t plugged into an amplifier, but its semi-acoustic body made it loud enough to accompany Riff. Keys used all four hands to add a complex solo to the guitarist’s steady backbeat.
Riff nodded at his companion approvingly. ‘I never knew you played guitar.’
‘I don’t really,’ Keys told him, ‘I just fiddle from time to time.’
‘Well, you fiddle pretty well. You ought to do it more.’
‘We don’t really have the songs for two guitars.’
‘We’ve got this one,’ said Riff. He finished the brief riff that marked the end of the solo and launched back into the verse.
If I told you that I need you, would you let me lay my head?
If I told you I was tired, would you show me to your bed?
I’ve been on the run so long now; I thought that love was dead.
Keys raised an eyebrow quizzically. ‘Human interest,’ said Riff. ‘Getting to know the market.’ He played out the rhythm to a gentle close, then silenced the strings with his right hand. The robots sat, or hovered, in silence a moment. Then Riff looked to Keys.
‘Do you think you could do that arpeggio from Rooms by the Hour on guitar?’
‘I’ll have a go,’ said Keys. He picked out a couple of notes, Riff prompting him in places. After a few false starts he nodded and gestured with a hand. ‘I think I’ve got it,’ he said.
Riff began to play a shortened version of his introductory solo. After a few bars, Keys began to accompany him.
In the next room Ben was awoken by a grating noise. He looked up to see Nutter scraping his head along the wall.
‘What are you doing?’ he hissed.
‘C-come over h-here,’ said Nutter.
Ben scrambled out of bed and yawned as he padded over to Nutter’s side. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘You stuck again?’
‘P-press your ear to the wall,’ said Nutter.
Ben shrugged, but did as was suggested. He was surprised to hear strains of Rooms by the Hour being sung by two clear voices in perfect harmony. ‘Is that…’ he began.
‘R-riff and K-keys,’ said Nutter. ‘M-makes you f-feel kind of t-talentless, doesn’t it?’
Ben pulled away from the wall, suddenly feeling unaccountably annoyed. ‘When they start attracting screaming fans I’ll start worrying,’ he snapped. Then he got back into bed and rolled over to face the wall.
Nutter watched his shoulders rising and falling heavily for a few moments, then put his ear back to the wall and carried on listening as the two robots finished Rooms by the Hour and began on Listening to Nothing.
The politics that operate within the average band may seem like the trivial and pointless bickering of spoilt rich kids, but they are in fact as phenomenally complex as those between warring nations. Add the fact that warring nations don’t – except in protracted conflicts over decades – change their line-ups particularly often, and you have the reason why more psychologists choose to study celebrities rather than try to do something to make the universe a better place.
One such psychologist was Hobbling Mis. First rising to prominence with his book I Want to Kill You - a study of whether it is logically compatible for a self-proclaimed global moral authority to pursue a foreign policy based on xenophobia - he next conducted a detailed study of the band Gemini as part of his book Double-oh-hell: The Twin Thing.
During the course of Mis’ study, the band, whose singer-songwriters were a pair of identical twins, split into two separate groups and began a protracted legal battle for both the band’s name and the rights to its back catalogue. Watching the band’s behaviour on stage and in court, Mis found himself unable to follow the psychological complexities of the situation – largely because he kept losing track of which singer was which – but he did learn a great deal about legal procedure and stress counselling.
Mis renamed his opus as Keeping Score: The Dysfunctional Band and sold the serialization rights to the national press, just as the band reformed, having managed to confuse the legal system so much that both twins ended up with vast amounts of compensation from the State without either paying a penny. Two weeks later, the band had split up again, with the twins remaining together and all the other members leaving in a dispute over pay. Mis wisely discarded his plans for a political treatise and phoned the band’s manager – one thing he had definitely learned was where the money was.
29
The morning sun shone brightly on the undulating crests of the deep blue sea. Ben hefted a stick and watched as it crashed into the waves, a crown of foam spreading briefly out before being rolled under the surface.
He sighed. This was, he realised, the first chance he’d had to relax in weeks. That being a member of a band was something of a hard day’s night he’d expected; it was that it was also a hard day’s day that had come as a surprise.
Nutter, his long career as a packer and a boxer having given him little chance to relax, watched Ben with curiosity. He was having something of a difficulty with their surroundings. The pair stood on the concrete bastion that was all that protected Wilmethorpe from the sea. Below them, a small circular robot slid along the seaward face, just above the waterline, its sensors scanning the integrity of the sea defences.
Eventually, Nutter spoke. ‘S-so, the w-water just s-stays over there.’ His tone seemed to suggest this was contrary to the laws of nature as he knew them.
‘Most of the time,’ said Ben.
‘And why does it move?’
‘That’s the pull of the moons. Don’t you h
ave the basic stuff programmed into you?’
Nutter tapped his head – a gesture Ben took to be a shorthand way of suggesting the inadequacies of his memory. He smiled sympathetically. ‘Do you find it hard to remember new things?’ he asked. ‘I mean - can you re-learn the things that were knocked out of you?’
Nutter thought about this. ‘I d-don’t know,’ was the eventual verdict.
‘But you can remember the last couple of months, can’t you?’
‘I think so. M-most of it.’
‘So you don’t remember all of it?’ Ben thought about this somewhat belatedly and frowned. ‘How do you know you can’t?’
Nutter shrugged. ‘T-there are m-moments,’ he said. ‘C-conversations with T-tony. I r-remember falling asleep.’
‘And he didn’t wake you?’
Nutter shrugged again. Ben’s eyebrows registered concern, but a yawn banished all thought of pursuing the matter. ‘Do you fancy a drink?’ he asked.
The nearest pub was typical of seaside pubs everywhere: the outside painted in bright pastel colours, the inside dark and dingy in a manner that more suggested a grotto than a hostelry. Nutter and Ben opted to drink outside in the beer garden. With winter not long past, the wind had a chill edge and Ben wore his coat wrapped tightly around him. Down on the seafront the day still seemed not to have begun: the occasional local walked past with a dog, but life, like the waves, came and went without lingering.
Nutter looked around him and back to Ben. ‘H-have you been here b-before?’ he asked Ben.
‘Not that I’m aware of,’ said Ben. ‘My parents