Flight of the Vajra (33 page)

Cioran’s group was typically never more than a four-man
outfit: one percussion player, two melodic, one harmonic. No supporting or
accompanying singer, though. Cioran would supply that all by himself before
long.

Our road just stopped unfolding

Now that we’re at this place we know

Too well—too well

The CL mix pushed the audience’s shockwave of
screaming out to the sides and edges of one’s “hearing”, and kept Cioran and
his band front and center. You could always switch away from the standard mix
and create your own—knock out the audience entirely, for instance, or route in
feeds from specific people you knew. You could switch your perspective to any
of the dozens of sensory surfaces around the arena, or use your buddy’s eyes
and ears (provided he’d allowed you to).

Or you could just sit back and let the party
happen.

I sat back and let the party happen.

I don’t know what it is

You’ve been seeking all this time

I just know you’ve been seeking

Even if it’s nothing I can help you find,

Let me help—let me help

At the chorus, the audience hoisted thousands of souvenir
fans, like blades of grass growing in timelapse:

No runaway, no pilgrim

No wanderer, no refugee

You’re just a traveler on a mission

With everywhere left to be

I didn’t recognize this song, but hadn’t expected
to. Every Cioran concert opened with one or two new songs, sometimes composed
in the bare minutes before he’d taken the stage—one of the many reasons people
emptied their pockets to come here. I wondered if his aborted lunch meeting had
been intended to produce just such a thing, but when the band fell silent and
the crowd roared to fill the space it left behind, I decided he wasn’t any the
worse off for not having new material.

“Kathayagara!” Cioran flung his arms up and shouted
that name into the sky over the ‘Drome. “Hello, Kathayagara! I haven’t seen you
in . . . well, not all
that
long, actually!” (Laughter.) “I’m
sorry I always give you such short notice for one of these little visits, but let’s
face it—you love being surprised, don’t you?”

The ‘Drome’s overhead canopy began to close—not
because of the weather (the sky was cloudless and bright), but as a way to further
control the environment. If Cioran’s previous concerts were any model to
follow, there would be a mix of CL and live effects. With some of the songs,
some of the songs used direct CL effects: the lighting, the mix, and many other
things were piped directly into the audience via CL. But then sometimes, for
contrast, the CL effects would be cut off—
wham
—and for a crucial moment your
senses would be naked and shivering in front of the real thing.

“Surprises I do have for you, in abundance,” Cioran
went on. “Surprises for some newly-made friends of mine, for instance—”
Don’t
you dare,
I thought, even if part of me was laughing as he said it. “—who
have shown up in person, much to my delight. There’s always something about an
audience where you know at least one person in it . . . you tend to
be, well, a little more
ambitious,
just to show them what you can do!”

The booth around us dissolved. So did the rest of
the audience—all that I saw was myself, Enid, and the band, as if we’d been
deposited on the lip of the stage and given a performance for us alone. Why
Enid? I thought. I tentatively toggled in a connection with Kallhander just to
see if there was any contrast from his POV, and saw instead the two of us,
Kallhander and I, on the edge of the stage, with absolutely no one else in
sight. Looked like it was currently set to provide that effect for you plus
whoever you had connected to last, one of a variety of effects the concert’s
feed had implicit permission to set up when you connected to it.

The song Cioran picked was as intimate as this new
environment I found myself in. It was a slower and leaner tune than the opening
romp, but there was no lethargy: it bumped and grinded and writhed. And it gave
Cioran a showcase for one of his big crowd-pleasing acts: when he sang

All that separates us

Is a moment and a thought

he looked as he normally did, but then in the next
verse, for

I’m only like you

In the mind you want to have

his hair lengthened, his voice tightened (without
actually rising an octave), and his chest swelled. A one-person male/female
ballad, with him trading verses with himself: it was one of the niftier tricks
a Formynxi could pull, but Cioran was one of the few of his kind—maybe the
only
one—who used it not as a demarcation of maturity but instead for sheer showmanship.
He wore his m(ale)-gender-mutable side as dashingly as his f(emale)-gendermute
side, and on stage he had an unprecedented arena for doing both at once.

Enid, kneeling on what she thought was the edge of
the stage but was in fact just the bench in the booth, slowly rose to her feet.
It wasn’t until she’d dissolved the real door to the real outside and stepped
through it that I myself began to move. No warning from her, either—although I
had the feeling even if she
had
CLed me and told me what she was going
to do, I wouldn’t have believed it. I tried to connect to her, but got
rebuffed.

The crowd outside almost drove me back in, but the
door melded shut behind me before that could happen. Enid was already far
enough away that I couldn’t follow, and in the next second I saw her jump, land
with one foot on someone’s shoulders, and leap across the crowd—from one
shoulder to the next—until she ended up at the foot of the stage. There, she
should have slammed into the shield that could be thrown up explosively to keep
people from doing exactly that, but nothing of the kind happened. She stepped
right onto the stage, and for a half a moment both Cioran and the audience just
blinked
. No, it was more the audience than Cioran. He was, I’m sure of
it, the one who let the shield stay down; he’d been gambling on whether or not
she was going to attempt climbing up there with him.

Cioran didn’t miss a bar with his singing, and in
that same unmissed bar Enid turned in place, threw her arms back and began
extruding her sleeves in the same way they had been when she’d asked me for my
opinion about them back in the hotel room. Head thrown back, sleeve slowly
draping across her face . . . and on that sleeve you could see
another face at first projected over her own and then eclipsing it completely.
I recognized that new face right away: it was a variation on my own.

There was a part of me that suspected, as I
watched her dart and float between and behind Cioran and the other band
members, that her participation in the show was being scripted and controlled.
Between each line, between every verse, in the moments before and after he
filled his lungs, Cioran was privately telling her where she needed to be—when
the music would swell, when it was recede and leave behind a silence to breathe
in, where he would leave space for her to rush in and where she could stop and
turn so that she would abruptly be face-to-face with him when he stepped next
to her—just as he did for his own bandmates at every show, and just as many
other performers did in their own concerts.

And there was another part of me that believed
nothing of the kind was happening. That other night, when they’d danced together,
they had shared something that couldn’t be sent across a CL link anyway,
because it didn’t consist of something that could be communicated that way. It
could only be communicated in how each of them inhabited, changed, and adorned
the spaces between them, the way it had always been between every dancer and their
partner.

The drawn-out coda to the song collapsed under a
bomb pattern of drumbeats. Enid produced ribbon sticks from behind her sleeves
(which were now trimming themselves back a bit) and slashed the air around and
behind Cioran.

What’s that? It’s just a rumor

Another false awakening

Another fine weakness in the making

The platforms on which the other band-members were
mounted began to move towards a catwalk that extruded itself down the middle of
the orchestra. Enid strutted into place and led them like a majorette, the
fabric of the ribbon sticks now blazing as she turned up their reflectivity and
bounced back the lights overhead as comet’s tails of pinpoint stars. The grin
on her face—it was the same one Cioran had worn before when I’d first met him,
the eager tease of someone who’d pulled off the greatest of all pranks.

“You hadn’t been expecting that,”
Kallhander told me when we stepped back into the underground VIP tunnel. He’d
taken one look at my face when I’d walked back into the booth—their booth this
time—and figured all that out just from the dazed, dazzled look I still wore. I
shook my head to answer him: no, I had not, in fact, been expecting that.

Enid hadn’t come back into the booth; she’d gone
straight backstage after the show, and after taking I don’t remember how many
bows and curtain calls hand-in-hand with Cioran. I’d tried to CL her
repeatedly, but I kept getting rebuffed. I wasn’t panicking, though; if I had
been her, I would have shut that damn thing off, too.

Our backstage passes provided us—Kallhander, Ioné,
Angharad and I—with entry through the underground tunnels to the backstage area.
That felt at first like we were being asked to walk straight into a wall, but I
was used to such security measures; said wall divided as soon as we approached
it. Given that Angharad was with us, it brought to mind the parting of the
proverbial waters. I finally got a good look at her as the backstage tunnel
door dilated open: she almost never looked like there was anything to get her
down for starters, but she now looked like she was positively hopping from one
cloud to the next.

“I didn’t think that would have been your kind of thing,”
I said to her. “Especially since half of it was in the CL.”

“But the half that was not was also impressive.”

“True. Nobody ever complained about Cioran putting
on a boring show.”

“He was also only half of why I was there,”
Angharad went on. “The other half was the audience. I imagine many of them are
Old Way, if only provisionally so—but I also imagine they are far more inclined
to visit a concert like this than attend a Lantern Cycle ceremony. If they do,
it is not because we failed to make the Lantern Cycle into a spectacle on this
order. It is because there is a need here which is being that much more
completely addressed than anything we can provide.”

“How do you know it’s not just a distraction away
from their real needs?” So this is what she also hired me for, I thought: devil’s
advocacy.

“He brings them a sense of belonging. Perhaps it
is not the kind of belonging I advocated, but it is belonging all the same. I
wonder if, for all our attempts at same, we have still not provided it properly
. . . ”

There was enough sadness in her voice to tell me
she didn’t know how to provide it. There was also enough steel to tell me she
was
absolutely
going to look for a way to do just that. I knew by now
where to listen for each.

“Backstage” was closer to the hotel room we’d just
vacated than it was anything utilitarian. Couches ringed the far walls; a door
curtained with strips of protomic film led off to a bathroom. On a table in the
middle was a buffet with all the dishes still sealed and untouched.

“Hey!” Enid came up off the couch immediately to
the left of the door and wrapped her arms around my chest from one side. “Was I
good—or—
what
!”

One arm still encircling me, she waved to the
others, rotating us this way and that. I picked up the towel that was draped
around her neck and mussed her hair with it. She was vibrating in place, like a
hummingbird.

“That was an inspired and beautiful performance,”
Angharad told her.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She let go; my
body felt like it was still buzzing on its own. “And if I’m lucky and I read
him right, this isn’t gonna be the last time, either.”

“Just so we know,” I asked. “Was all that
your
idea or
his
idea?”

“Both. Well, my idea first. Well—okay. The other
night, right before we left, he said something to me real fast—one of those things
that happens so fast you’re not even sure if it happened, you know? He said, ‘Come
to the show and you’ve got a spot on stage.’ That was how he put it. So—well,
you know the rest now.”

She threw herself back onto the couch and reached
eagerly for one of the wrapped-up plates that was nearest to her. Stuffed grape
leaves, it looked like. To me those things looked even worse than the bottom
tier of the meals from on board the
Vajra
, but I imagined even chewing
on a corner of that towel would have tasted good to her right then.

“Still.
Some
warning would have been nice,”
I said, trying not to sound petty.

“Well, I’m thorry! I had a onth-in-a-lifethime
opporthunity; I’m not going to metth that up.” She swallowed and then looked
all the sorrier for having done so. If the smell from the plate had been any
hint, I wouldn’t have swallowed either.

“Where is Mister Once-In-A-Lifetime-Opportunity
anyway?” I sat down, seeing now that Angharad had chosen to seat herself
(flanked by her new honor guard) on one of the corner couches. No Cioran, and
no bandmates either. That last part made me wonder: wasn’t Cioran’s standing
deal with his pick-up bands to hang out with them for an indefinite amount of
time, post-gig?