Over by the beer taps were a dozen or so clubbers, looking lost and embarrassed in all the empty space. Someone was tending bar, of course, but bartenders were not included in Robert’s or my tally. At the other end of the room up by the screens, a tall wooden ladder, spraddle-legged and spindly, stuck its head up into the confusing darkness of the rigging. A beam of light on the dance floor changed color and position. A monotonous stream of comment and obscenity rolled gently down from the ladder top.
Robert tilted his chin toward the ladder and grinned. “He’s been at it since before sundown.”
“I’ll go see,” I said. “It always makes him feel better if someone asks.”
I walked to the bottom of the ladder, warily; solid objects had been known, at moments like this, to follow the stream of sound that fell from the ladder. “Hullo, Spangler. What’s it this time?”
“Oh, nothing, we just lost another fresnel, that’s all, there’s no goddamn fucking way in the world I can get it working by showtime, if ever, and the whole lighting balance is fucked at this end of the room because we’re running out of goddamn units I can fill in with.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Shows what you know.” He did, in fact, drop a crescent wrench, but on the other side of the ladder. By the time his feet were on the rungs at my eye level, my heart rate was almost back to normal.
“I take it you don’t want to say something like ‘Hi, Sparrow, how’s it been?’ ”
He jumped the last three feet to the floor and gave me a disgusted look. Spangler was not exactly the youngest crew member, but he claimed the distinction, and it would have been counterproductive to contest it. Half his brown hair was long and worn braided beneath his ear; the rest of his head, from forehead to nape of neck, was shaved clean and tattooed with Japanese carp and water lilies. Whenever the shaved part went to stubble, it looked as if the pond had an algae problem. “I know how it’s been,” he said. “Wonderful. You never have anything go wrong.”
“Not a thing. If you like, I’ll try to trip on my way upstairs.” I wasn’t in the habit of airing the details of my life here, either.
Spangler shook his head, even more disgusted. “Help me with this fucking ladder first.”
I did; then I pulled myself a beer and took the stairs behind the bar two at a time to the sound balcony.
“Robby?” Theo’s voice came around the door as I opened it.
“Nope. Me.”
“Sparrow!” he said, surprised and pleased. “What’re you doing here?”
He’d been cleaning one of the cassette decks; a stick with cotton wadded around it was in his right hand, straight up like a little torch. There was a hand-rolled cigarette balanced and glowing in one corner of his mouth, and I could smell Theo’s mixture of tobacco and marijuana. The air itself seemed to tremble, full of the light of the dozen mismatched candles that he always lit on the balcony.
“I’m watching you undo your work,” I replied.
He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, and grimaced. “Well, that’s why I’m cleaning the thing.”
“If I answered that, this conversation would get damned recursive.”
“Instead of just redundant. Glad you’re here, man. We should be able to do some groovy stuff tonight, if we get the crowd.”
Theo’s favorite movies were Wild in the Streets, The Dagger and the Rose, Easy Rider, and Leary. They’d affected his vocabulary. He seemed to glow a little in the semi-gloom; he was wearing a white cotton jacket whose previous owner had been either a waiter or an orderly at an asylum, and a collared knit shirt under it. The VU meters from two tape decks and the mixing board reflected in his wire-rimmed glasses, and Spangler’s floor lights turned his brown bob to auburn. I found myself wondering what less appropriate things shone on him when he wasn’t working. I’d known Theo for about four years, and I had no idea where he lived, or what he did before the moon was up. I hadn’t seen anything strange in that before, but suddenly I was aware of it, and it bothered me. Paranoia, maybe — downtime erasures, walking dead men, vampire hunters, and why shouldn’t I wonder who my acquaintances were when I wasn’t there?
“I may not stay the whole night,” I warned him.
“That’s okay. Maybe Liz’ll come ’round later to fill in.” One of his heels tapped furiously at the leg of the chair he sat in; he seemed unaware of it, as if it were run by a second brain.
After a moment I said, “Also — sometime — some people may come looking for me.” Well, spit it out. “I’m in a little trouble.”
He closed the door on the tape transport and stared at me. It was unnerving to find myself the single focus of all that energy. “Somebody noticed you? Sorry,” he said, in response to my expression, no doubt. “Bad trouble?”
“No, no. Annoying. I just don’t want to be found.”
“Nothin’ easier.” Theo stood up, ambled past me to the door at the top of the stairs, and kicked it shut with a crash. The candle flames leaned wildly. “You’re working, man. Can’t be disturbed.”
“That’s the idea, anyway. But these people may have connections beyond those of mortal men.”
“City connections?” He was rolling the cotton swab hard between his fingers.
“I was thinking of the kind that are supposed to result from sacrificing small animals. But yeah,” I said, remembering Dana’s apartment, “there may be one or two of those, as well.”
Theo nibbled his lower lip. “That’s not good. If it was just the brujo, you hire another brujo. But we bugger the City over here and we’re done, you know that.”
I sat down at the console and powered up the two video decks and the A/B switcher. “They need us. We’re part of the circuses side of the equation.”
He sat down next to me and stared into my face. “What we have here,” he said in the voice of the warden in Cool Hand Luke, “is a failure to think straight. We generate electricity by the grace of God and A. A. Albrecht. I don’t know about God, but Albrecht can shut us down anytime he wants.”
“Theo, what can they do to us? Reroute the river?”
Theo shook his head, sadly. “The City controllers license the hardware, sell the fuel, own twenty-five percent of the metered output and tax the rest, no matter how you make it. What do we do if the inspectors confiscate the generators?” He waved a hand at the quaking flames around the balcony. “Light candles and sing?”
I knew all that. It was why the wind turbine on my roof was disguised as a vent, after all. But the Underbridge had seemed — still seemed — too big, too important, too visible to be at the mercy of the City. “There’d be a stink if we closed.”
“There’s people lined up to run places like this. If the City closes us, they just hand our permit to the next guy, who’ll keep his nose cleaner than we did. And the nightbabies all just move on down the block. Be damned hard on Robby, man.”
I knew all that, too, I suppose. “It’s okay,” I said. Outside the windows, the moon had drowned in the cloud bank. I felt — it took me a moment to figure it out. Lonely. “If anything happens, I’ll keep it away from here.”
“Sorry, Sparrito,” said Theo.
I shrugged. “Maybe nothing will happen. Let’s do some good.”
I had color bars on monitors one and two, and zip-all on number three, which meant that either the third monitor was evil-eyed or the camera in the rigging was. I hoped it was the monitor. The camera was one of maybe five I’d seen in my life, and that only because I’d been looking. It had full remote capabilities and a twenty-X zoom, and I suspected it of having been made to military specs and used to spy on SouthAm dictators. But who am I to judge?