Archive for May, 2010
In the Troll Market
Monday, May 17th, 2010
The job was just annoying. In spite of all the things Miranda remembered about the year she’d spent here as a kid, somehow she’d forgotten the cold.
Now Riggs, the lead singer, wanted a certain sound from a David Bowie song. Couldn’t remember which one. So Miranda raided every used record store the guys from the studio could name, collected LPs, singles, Japanese-only picture disks… Somehow, this was part of the recording engineer’s job. She played them over the mixing room speakers, while Riggs drank and did crossword puzzles, badly, in pen.
Space Oddity.
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Riggs, “Thought it had spacemen or astronauts.”
He could have saved her days of effort if he’d just said that. All she said was, “It’s a Moog.”
Could she find one? asked the producer.
It took a week of asking, begging, and, at one point, recording and mixing a boys’ school choir for free to get information, but she found one. Turned out the owner both knew Miranda’s father and loved Rigg’s records.
Took another week to move, set up, tune, tweak, and generally fix it.
“No, not that sound,” said Riggs, “that little needly-needly-zuzz bit right there.”
“Stylophone,” said Miranda. “Little gadget you play by touching a pen on a wire to a metal plate keyboard to complete the circuit.” Hadn’t been made since the 60’s. In a city on an island in the arctic, it was sure to be even harder to find than the Moog.
She went to the markets, literally underground, in the now-roofed-over valleys between the mountains upon which the city was built. The troll markets, where you could find anything.
But there was too much, so she went to Arduhl, who’d been her father’s assistant twenty years before, and, she remembered, his engineer. He sent her to a man who never left his basement flat, but knew every detail of what came and went through the markets with a trainspotter’s mania for detail.
“There’s a couple of them,” said the basement guy. “I know where. But in return, you have to tell me something I don’t know. About the markets.”
She set up her Nagra under a seller’s booth, recorded 24 hours of market sounds, brought a stack of reel-to-reel tapes to the basement.
His eyes were moist as he shoved a crumpled paper into her hand and shooed her out.
The stylus wire was loose, but she fixed that. And if it gave Riggs a little shock with every note, well, she couldn’t fix everything.
For the curious, a Stylophone demo video .
Parameters of the Parametes
Friday, May 14th, 2010
by David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Luc Reid, and Trent Walters
This is an exquisite corpse. Each of us wrote 1/3 of the story.
Lost in a thought he couldn’t let go, Chet bumped into a paramete in full plumage. She reared back, inadvertently spurting a few centiliters of rainbow spores from her bejeweled gametoslits.
“Clumsy human! May cleanser grubs devour you alive!”
Chet offered the Bow of Contrition, but the paramete swept past and was gone. Chet glanced over his shoulder but saw nothing.
***
Returning home, Chet hurried to his rooftop lab. He wasn’t allowed to work in the basement since the Thousand Stenches incident. He took out the parcel he’d picked up at Thaumaturge’s Market. As he sought the proper protocol, a gust of wind ripped a page out of his lab notebook. He hoped it wasn’t crucial.
Chet ground a slice of the memory root into a fine powder. He mixed it up into the last of the lemon hummus, scraped it onto a pita chip, and ate. Trembling, he sat on the cool tar roof and waited to “meet” his father–world’s finest thaumatuge–who’d died in a horrible lab accident involving parametes when Chet was three.
Thaumaturgic symbols Chet had inscribed around him set the time frame. Touching his father’s ashes at his mother’s house was to ensure he’d see the right memories. Chet’s fingernails tickled, his nose hairs quivered, and murmuring noises burbled in his ears. This was it. This would be worth saving a year and a half to buy that memory root. A vision–bright colors writhed, bucked–came into focus:
It was a paramete pleasure nest, on a particularly pleasure-filled night. Chet realized: He had bumped into a paramete on the way home. The parametes paused in their feathered flurry and, poking their long necks out of the fray, turned to Chet. This was supposed to be a memory, Chet thought as he backed into a wall of pointy sticks. The parametes surrounded him and glared. Simultaneously, the parametes shook and ruffled their feathers, showering a cascade of cleanser grubs that inched their way toward Chet. Chet tried to leap over them, but they leapt with him, crawling up pant legs, down his shirt collar, through shirt sleeves. He weakened before he was able to strip off his shirt to peel off grubs.
***
Chet awoke on the rooftop, groggy as from a night of indulgence. It must have been one helluva night because he remembered nothing from the day before.