The longer I went without facing the Singer, the happier I'd be. And sunlight would give me courage…a little bit, anyway. "All right," I told Jerith. "A night in the great outdoors, huddled together for warmth. But I doubt if I'll get much sleep."
He looked at me, obviously trying to figure out if I had intended any sexual overtones. I liked that look of uncertainty. It was refreshing that someone didn't know exactly what was on my mind.
Sleep. Not comfortable sleep—the patch of grass Jerith led me to wasn't as soft as advertised—but I did sleep, deeply and with ugly dreams.
The dreams were broken by a voice: "Are you awake? Are you awake?" whispered over and over again, until I surfaced from confusion and opened my eyes. I closed them again immediately, appalled by the brightness around me. Even with the light red-filtered through my eyelids, it was bright enough to be painful. I tried to scrunch my eyes shut more tightly.
"I take it the damned sun has risen," I growled. "Top of the morning to you, Jerith, but if you don't want a punch in the nose, you'll let me go back to sleep."
"Ah, milady," whispered a voice in my ear, "yond light is not daylight; I know it, I. It is some meteor that the sun exhales to be to thee this night a torchbearer and light thee on thy way to…well, let thy destination remain unspoken."
Chilled, I opened my eyes again. The Singer was there, kneeling beside me. "A passage from Romeo and Juliet," he said. "Their last scene together. Or more precisely, the last scene with both of them alive." He smiled.
The sky above his head was still black, flecked with stars. Off to one side, several anti-grav platforms floated in the air, holding the huge beam-lamps we had brought for recording at night. The lights all aimed at me, as if I were a surgery patient on an operating table.
I jerked up to a sitting position and looked around for Jerith. He was gone. The grass he'd slept on still showed the imprint of his body.
"What did you do with him?" I asked.
"I anointed him," the Singer said, "rather forcibly. Specifically, I tucked a pretty little parrot under his hand while he slept, then crushed hand and parrot under my heel. The pain woke him briefly, but with the lovely jumble of thoughts that rose in his mind as the parrot died…ah, well, he passed out again. I kindly instructed one of Jerith's robots to carry his body back to camp. Very cooperative machines, those robots."
Another robot picked its way through the grass toward us, the blue lights from its eyes sweeping the ground for safe places to plant its feet. "Grab this man!" I shouted to the bot. "He wants to hurt me."
The bot's attention remained fixed on the ground.
"Alas, milady," said the Singer, "some petty vandal damaged its direct audio input with a laser drill. Now it can only respond to radio instructions." He drew a tiny radio transmitter from his pocket and spoke into it. "Please carry the lovely Lyra to that bunker over there." His finger pointed to a squat concrete building set into a nearby hill. Turning back to me, he said, "Worry not, milady. This machine is programmed for transporting archaeological artifacts, so it will bear you quite gently…unless you force it to exert its strength."
I didn't have time to get away. Before I could twitch a muscle, the bot had snared my ankle with one of its steel cable tentacles. I tried one desperate yank with my leg, hoping to catch it off balance and topple it forward to the grass; but the bot was firmly planted and far too heavy for me to dislodge. Patiently, it stretched out more tentacles and I couldn't avoid them all. In a matter of seconds, I was well and truly webbed in.
"A pity we had no tape rolling," the Singer said, gazing down on my trussed-up body. "Your struggles would have made good footage."
"Footage for what?"
"A song we'll be recording in just a few minutes. A ballad named "Parrot Blood Baptism." And you have a starring role."
I assume he wanted to scare me; but I was lying wrapped in steel cable, with a robot whirring above me as it calculated how to heave me about like a sack of potatoes, and suddenly my fear hardened into anger. I met the Singer's stare and asked, "What kind of melodramatic bullshit are you trying to pull?"
His eyes narrowed. He lifted the radio transmitter and told the robot, "Please hold for a moment." The robot whirred as the Singer turned back to me.
"We're going to record a song," he said. "Just you and I, milady. I'm afraid our colleagues back at camp are indisposed—it seems they took poorly to telepathy. Fights broke out, a number of people locked themselves in their huts, others were grabbed by robots…suffice it to say, no one is in any condition to help us or disturb us."
"What are we going to record?" I asked.
"A song, milady, a real song. I cannot tell you how tired I've grown of the juvenile pap that passes for music these days. All the world adores my album…but what is that album but shallow artifice? Fog from machines. Women screaming on cue. I am reduced to a puppet, prancing amidst hackneyed symbolism, to portray a dangerous man. A sanitized danger. A packaged little danger to delight complacent adolescents who fancy themselves rebels.
"Well…not tonight, milady. Tonight we shall have no special effects or stunt doubles. Tonight the script calls for unflinching reality."
I snorted in derision. "So you're going to baptize me with parrot blood? Yeah, sure, that's a brilliant departure from hackneyed symbolism. I haven't seen a blood baptism since…oh, that one Lew Jackell did on 'Bad Night for a Burning.' And the Black Sabbath sequence from the latest album by Chocolate Oracle. And Oiled Heat did a blood baptism too, if I recall correctly, in that terrible little number they recorded on those mud flats…what was its name? 'Sweet Soulless Machine'?"
The Singer put a single finger under my chin and pressed it sharply into the softness of my throat. "Milady," he said, "remember that I can hear your thoughts. You are simply trying to make me angry."
"I'm trying to tell you, you're not as smart as you think you are," I replied. "Alex only trots you out for concerts and recording sessions; you can't know dick about the industry at large or how things really come together. You've never been to a rehearsal or a sound check…and as for creating songs, you do nothing. Roland writes the tunes and lyrics, Helena storyboards the visuals, Alex walks through it all and helps refine things till they click. Oh, sure, when the tape starts rolling you're the spark that adds the magic, there's no question you're the spark…but a spark isn't worth squat if someone doesn't chop the firewood first. And now you're going to show us how to cut a real song? I can't wait to see it."
Half my outburst was genuine anger, half was trying to pierce him, deflate him any way I could. But he simply removed his finger from my chin and patted my cheek gently. "Through long afternoons in Roland's basement, while Alex lay on the couch and read comic books, I listened to Roland poke at his piano and I learned how songs were born. Late nights in hotel rooms, as Helena muttered to herself about camera angles and lighting effects, Alex may have slept but I didn't. And at rehearsals, who kept Alex working when he was bored and hated the thought of one more run-through? Who's held him together all these years? Who grew up while Alex stayed a child?
"When Alex and I were young, milady, we were two souls in one body. Ah"—he smiled thinly—"your mind says, 'Split personality.' A number of psych-techs reached the same conclusion many years ago and salivated at the chance to handle such an exotic condition. They plied us with drugs, hypnotherapy, symlinks, and eventually announced Alex cured. As if I were an appendix they could casually snip off. Their efforts only drove me into hiding, down to the depths of our shared unconscious, and I grew up there, wary and sly.