I coughed a little but the tears had dried up already. “Shit, Calla, what are we going to do now?”
She leaned against the sloping, non-rectilinear wall and rested her eyes on her hand. She looked remarkably undebauched given last night’s events. Her blonde hair gelled into a neat twist and her face fresh and make-up free above her resort-issue bathrobe. She was a double-x realgirl, like me, her eyelashes blonde in the artifi cial light. “Did you guys have a fight?”
“Yesterday. Twice. You were there.”
It had started out a bitch session and ended up a screaming fit for Glory. She’d been going on and on about how a gig on Autarie was the ultimate ignominy. I’d tried to point out, as our booking agent had, that doing orbital simulcast was economical and easier on us. “But Autarie!” she’d screamed. “It’s like fucking Vegas!” At the time I’d assumed that “Vegaz”, as she said it in her Saturnal accent, was an ex-lover of hers who’d sucked in bed. Now little pieces of rock and roll history bounced through my moon-raised brain and I recalled an old interview I’d read with Mick Jagger — or was it Sting? — saying he’d never play Las Vegas and the meaning came clear: home of the has-beens. No one had been listening to her but me. Once she would start to go hysterical the others would tune her out. I suppose I only listened because I was the one trying to argue with her. “Oh, fuck,” I murmured. Even if I had caught the reference, though, what good would it have done? I couldn’t have stopped her, could I? She was gone.
Calla went over and knelt in front of the body. “It looks like she just. . lay down and died.”
“She did.”
“What do you mean?” Calla had been with us a year, a great bass player, but neither Glory nor I had been sure she would stick with us. So she didn’t know about the Spark.
“I don’t know,” I lied.
“Well, we have to get a doctor in here, find out what happened. .”
I held up my hand. “No, no doctors.”
“But Luna. .”
“Not yet.” My mind tried to come up to speed, but last night’s party and the shock of seeing her there like that kept me partly paralysed. “Huiper. First call Huiper and figure out what to say about it.”
I put my head against the doorjamb and sighed. It was the end of Glory, the end of the Seekers in all likelihood, possibly the end of all our careers. Replacing a drummer or back-up singer is one thing, replacing the lead singer and founder is another thing entirely. I felt cold and lonely and sick and I sank down there in the doorway and almost wished it could have been me instead of her.
Basil almost tripped over me when she came in waving hard copy of a review of last night’s show. I liked Basil, even if I wasn’t sure if she was a double-x or some form of genderqueer. Those things never mattered to the omnivorous Glory. For me it was good enough that she used a female pronoun. She was about to begin crowing the good bits of it aloud when she caught sight of the spectacle on the table. I couldn’t bear to watch her face crumble into grief. So, I looked at my own whiter-than-white hands, and at Glory’s, still streaked with the indigo and violet of last night’s stage make-up, clamped tight around the neck of the guitar. I supposed that the Walker was mine now, but I couldn’t bring myself to prise it out of her grip.
I heard my own voice. “We can’t have her photographed like this, like some funeral or something.” Oh Glory, couldn’t you have lived up to your name and gone out with a blaze of it?
Calla did not turn around, but said in a weak voice “Was she. . with anyone last night?”
I looked up at the two of them. Basil was taking it well. If anything she looked a little pissed off, and when she heard Calla’s question she stiffened. Young and spurned. “Not me. She took off during the party and didn’t come back. .”
Until after we were all unconscious. Poor Basil, the newest of us, she’d only been playing with the Seekers for about six months and Glory had been leading her on for most of it. She cursed under her breath. Glory had liked her youthful fire, her defi ance. Perhaps she saw a little of herself there, or perhaps someone else she knew. She would have been a good vessel for the Spark, too, but Glory had held back passing it on. “Baz, could you get Huiper on a secure channel?”
“I’ll try,” she said, and went into her room to boot up a terminal.
Calla had left the room, too, leaving me alone with my dead lover. Ex-lover in any case now, I supposed. Although neither of us had taken up with someone else — we hadn’t “broken up” — we hadn’t had sex in a long time. A year, maybe two. And the fights recently had been worse, hadn’t they? I’d wanted to believe that Glory’s irritability, irrationality, and general out-of-control bitchiness was just a periodic magnifi cation of her lead-singer prima donna persona, just a phase that we’d work out. But all along she had been suffering. The burning out. The end.
And I hadn’t even felt it. Could I have helped her? Saved her? She’d been so distant from me, I doubted it. When the Spark is lost, there’s no getting it back.
The first one I’d ever seen was just a month after I’d joined the group. Glory’s ex-lover Saffron had split off to form his own band, but he came back once in a while to jam with us. His band wasn’t doing very well. The critics were lambasting them for repeating the formulas of the past, and even I thought his music was kind of dull. He went out with a super cocktail of drugs and stims. Repeating the formulas of the past, as it were. We found him with the injector still in his hand at one of Glory’s penthouse suites on Triton.
That one was easy for me to handle. I didn’t know him that well, I was in love with Glory, and I was so young and new to the Spark that I didn’t really connect Saffron’s fate with mine. Huiper, our publicist, did a pretty good job of spreading the dirt around about the wild rock and roll boy who didn’t know when to stop, and even made him into a kind of small-time martyr among his few but loyal fans. That was Huiper’s job. But what would he say when he heard about Glory?
He would, of course, look for an angle that would generate maximum publicity and make Glory into a posthumous legend. That wouldn’t be hard since she was already a legend when she was alive. We all were. It was all a part of the Spark, the magic. We were stars in the celebrity skies of the whole solar system. But Huiper didn’t know why or how she really died and this time I didn’t have a story to feed him. Mysterious cause of death unknown is what the headlines would have to say. The powers that be took her too soon, they’d lament. Or, maybe she died of a broken heart? Had our love really died? I shuddered at the thought. Huiper wouldn’t implicate me in such a thing, would he? A sordid affair of lost love and betrayal?
The first fight we’d had yesterday was at sound check. The kind of spat that turned the mills of tabloid rumour, and all too typical. One of those fights that started as a bad mood, became a disagreement, then a full-fl edged argument, and finally that hands and skin and bodies roughness that comes all too naturally with those who have been lovers. I had been tuning my guitar while she picked at the catered food backstage. Artifi cial gravity always screwed up her stomach for a couple of days but I didn’t see as how that was any excuse for her to treat us all like shit. So when she brushed past me and bumped my tuner I griped at her loud enough for everyone to hear. I would have, stupidly, made even more of it if Maynard, our stage manager, hadn’t called for everyone to take places for sound check.
Glory was the first one out of the room but the last one to climb on to the riser and sling her guitar over her shoulder. We were only on the second verse of “Tears” when Glory called for a halt. “I need this monitor up, less rhythm guitar.”
I tried to talk into my mic but it was off. I waved at Maynard to up it and everyone heard me say “. . can’t do that. I won’t be able to hear myself and you’ll get off strum and you know it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She put her hands on her hips, the guitar hanging loose over her middle. Even under the house lights her skin had some hints of the lavender and blue that were her trademark colours. “You’re so loud I can’t hear the backing vox.”