Shooting Star

31

‘Proving trickier than I thought,’ said Orlovsky. ‘There’s lots of people doing bits and pieces of voice work. Most of it’s for talking to computers, asking them questions, that sort of thing.’

We were in the kitchen of the Garden House, leaning against opposite counters. I’d told him about the day: the kidnapper’s call, my conversations with Jeremy Fisher and Graham Noyce, my visit to the Altona Community Legal Centre.

‘Where’d this beer come from?’ I said.

Orlovsky drank some of his Dortmunder Pils out of the bottle. ‘A rather nice woman came in to check on the stocks and she asked if there was anything we needed. So I told her.’

‘So suddenly you’re not above eating the rich’s cream. Surprised you limited yourself to beer. Anyway, what’s wrong with typing in your questions to computers, why do you have to talk?’

He drank some more beer, all the while giving me his pitying look. ‘Say you’re being operated on, you’re hooked up to the computer, the surgeon’s got both hands inside you, he’s worried and he wants to know your vital signs. He can’t look up, so what does he do?’

‘He says: “This one’s a goner. What are you doing later, nurse?”’

‘This is post-nurse, I’m talking about the future. He asks the computer. And it answers in a way that he can’t possibly misunderstand. Same for pilots, air controllers, cops, fucking soldiers.’ He smiled his sinister smile. ‘Of course, soldiers already have robots answering their questions. Robots asking, robots answering.’

‘The dignity of the profession of arms. That escaped you, didn’t it?’

‘Must have. I didn’t notice much of your actual dignity, that could be why. Any, now that I think of it. Noticed plenty of your actual indignity.’

‘A literal mind. Best suited to buggering around with computers. So that’s the best you can do on this intonation stuff?’

‘Basically, yes. Feelers out, I stressed the urgency. There’s something, it won’t help. The voice, it’s a mixture of old Hollywood voices, John Wayne and James Stewart and Alan Ladd, actors like that. From Westerns.’

I had difficulty with this. I closed my eyes and drank some beer. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

‘I played a little compilation, carefully chosen, to this extremely advanced woman at RMIT. She did a linguistic and acoustic analysis, don’t worry about it, it’s beyond you. They’ve got a huge voice bank, the test shows the intonation of some dead Western stars. It’s all based on a mark-up language called Tone and Break Indices. She was excited, never heard it done that well before.’

‘Well, I’m excited too,’ I said. ‘I may have to leave you and go to sleep, I’m so excited. I hope you found a way to handle her excitement, channel it into something productive.’

Orlovsky smiled and shook his head.

‘And this Teutonic beer’s got an old-sock element to it,’ I said. ‘Old Prussian sock. Research at the cutting edge of technology all day and still we know sweet fanny. Correct me if I’m wrong.’

He sighed. ‘Right. But you probably don’t even know where Prussia is, never mind the taste of an old Prussian sock.’

I said, ‘Son, I’ve done my time with Prussian socks, I’ve night-jumped over the German plain, at a certain level, you get the feeling you’re falling into a cabbage, that’s the smell. Then you land on the plain the Russian tanks were supposed to come charging over to get what they didn’t get in World War Two.’

I drained the bottle. ‘But you wouldn’t know about World War Two, Mick. You’re an eighties boy. What kind of people would have a use for a voiceshake of old Western actors?’

‘Well, anyone who needs voices. I’ll show you.’

He went into the sitting room and came back with his briefcase, put it on the counter, opened it and fiddled with the computer.

The voice said:

So you think money can buy anything, don’t you? Just money, that’s what you thought, isn’t it? Don’t say NOW to me. I don’t take your orders. I don’t need your money. I’m talking to you. You don’t have the money to buy your way out of this. You’re talking to someone quite different now.

‘Okay, that’s the voice we heard,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Now listen to this.’

The voice was deep and sonorous now and the speech slower.

‘And this.’

Now the voice was feminine, light, a woman speaking quickly.

‘And so it goes on.’ He was shutting down the machine.

‘Modulate the basic voice, you can get any number of voices, male, female, young, old. Once you’d done the work, it would be the cheapest way to put a multi-voice track on anything. All it needs is one person to speak with the intonation you want.’

‘And you can’t buy it?’

‘No one’s ever heard of a commercial product like this. Or anyone working on one. This woman at RMIT, Kim Reid, Dr Reid, she says a bloke came wandering into the place a few years ago and asked a lot of intelligent questions about linguistic and acoustic patterns, about Tone and Break. Said he was working on games. But she doesn’t know his name, not sure he gave it, can’t really remember what he looked like.’

‘Anyone can just wander in? You just wandered in?’

‘No. I rang her, she invited me over, came to the office to meet me. But it’s a uni, people wandering everywhere.’

‘Why did this person pick on her?’

‘He’d read something she published about the voice bank.’

Orlovsky opened the drinks fridge, a full-size refrigerator, took out another Dortmunder, offered it to me.

‘No thanks. Was that a Miller’s I saw in there? Published where?’

‘Christ, I don’t know. I didn’t ask. What does it matter? We’ve got Miller’s in the longneck bottle, yes, imported from a country that doesn’t know good beer from fermented horse piss.’

‘Can you ring her? Got a home number?’

He closed the fridge, put the beers on the counter, studied me with his head tilted, his eyes expressing a complete lack of confidence in my state of mind. ‘To ask her what?’

‘Where the stuff was published.’

‘Jesus, Frank.’ He took a bloated wallet out of an inside pocket of his jacket, rejected half a dozen bits of paper before he found what he wanted, a business card. ‘There’s no home, there’s a mobile.’

‘Try it.’

He shook his head, left the room. I went over and uncapped the beers, rinsed my mouth with Miller’s, thinking about old Pat Carson and the crippled QC, the Carson brothers arguing in the library. Then the mind sideslipped without warning to Corin McCall, to the little garden I’d had when I was a child, to the day my mother told me I was forbidden to go next door, could not go next door ever again, could not water my garden. But everything I’d planted came up. I knew because I climbed onto the garage roof and from up there I could see my little garden, saw the peas and the pumpkins like bombs, the tops of carrots. And I saw the flowers.

Orlovsky came in, pleased, took his beer in his long-fingered hand, drank. ‘She was in a pub, very friendly. Enjoyed our encounter, she said. Mostly these balloon heads go home and eat cereal in front of the computer. I might ring her again some time.’

‘Published where?’

‘Something called JIVS. Stands for Journal of Intelligent Voice Systems, it’s published at some university in the States. To help nerds get tenure, I would think. A minimum of so many thousand words published in a refereed journal, that’s a condition of getting a permanent job. So there’s thousands of refereed journals. Six nerds get together and put out a journal and they referee each other’s stuff.’

‘Sounds like the police force. How would you get the list of subscribers?’

He looked at me, understood. ‘They put the thing on the web after the subscribers get it, the whole world can read it. Shot in a million, digger.’

‘How?’

‘Well, I don’t imagine these people are going to great lengths to hide their subscribers. There’s probably a way to get the list. An unethical way.’

‘Can you do it now?’

Orlovsky wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘You’re encouraging me to engage in unethical behaviour?’

I said, ‘No. Just to get the list.’

It took him about twenty-five minutes, then he called me over. ‘They’re sorted by postcode for the US, otherwise by country,’ he said. ‘This is Australia, about thirty subscribers, I count nine in Victoria, exactly the people you’d expect: two at RMIT, two at Defence Intelligence, three at Monash, one at Deakin, one at the eye and ear hospital. Not people working on games, I’d say. Not officially.’

‘Depending on what’s in the post, check them out tomorrow,’ I said.

Later, I showered in the slate-floored chamber where water could be commanded to come from above and below, from every side at any temperature and velocity. Then, in the big, pale room, I climbed between linen sheets that smelled of sunlight and went to sleep, instantly. And in the dog watch of the night, the dream came, the dream that was a version of reality but in which I floated freely between points of view, now myself, now a spectator.

It always began in the room in the sad little house, the odour of lifetimes held in the layers of carpet and underfelt, in the old newspapers down there on the floorboards. Seventy or eighty years or more of dust and spilt food, spilt liquids, ground-in coal ash, the urine of dozens of long-dead cats. ‘We’re going out now, Dave,’ I say. ‘Get up.’

He looks at me, wild face gone, years gone, a sad and chastened boy now. ‘They’ll kill me,’ he says.

‘No they won’t. I’ll be with you.’

‘Kill me,’ he says. ‘Won’t let me live.’

‘Not while I’m with you.’

‘Look after me?’ he says in a tiny voice.

‘Yes. I’ll look after you.’

We go down the passage. I feel the old sprung floorboards bounce, feel the rotten stumps move. Dave is ahead of me. At the front door, I say, ‘Open it.’

He opens it, stands, looks back at me. And I am seeing myself from outside, looking into the dim doorway, seeing myself, shirtless, sweat in the hollow of my throat.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It’s okay, I’m with you.’

He puts out a hand to me. I sigh and take it and we go out onto the verandah together, grown men holding hands.

It is dark, no moon, no lights on in the street. I am straining to see beyond the low hedge and front gate.

At the steps, the spotlight comes on, night sun, impossibly bright light. Dave jumps, startled, lets go of my hand, turns, tries to hug me, bury his head in my shoulder.

I hear the sound and I feel the shot hit him, feel it through his bones, feel it through his arms clinging to me.

‘Oh Jesus, no,’ I say, holding him, feeling the strength leave his body, having to hold him up, feel his warm blood on my face, taste it on my lips, go to my knees with him.

And I hear myself saying, ‘No, Dave, not me, not me.’

Then I am myself, looking into his eyes, seeing the reproach in them, no anger, just hurt and betrayal. ‘You knew,’ he says and he begins to cough, to cough up blood.

I see myself lay him down, stand up, see the blood on my bare upper body, my hands. Police are coming from everywhere. In the gate, Hepburn appears, black overalls, Kevlar vest, Fritz helmet.

I walk towards him.

He backs away. ‘

Frank, the bloke was…’ I take two big strides, get to him, grab him by the throat with both hands. I feel the squeeze, my thumbs digging into his windpipe, my will to kill him. He tries to spear my arms apart with his palms pressed together but I butt him in the face, hear the sound the cartilage in his nose makes as it is crushed.

Then I woke up, the dream always ended there, woke me. I got up, went downstairs, found Orlovsky’s no-name cigarettes, sat in the dark and smoked and brooded. Waiting for the light.