Read Online The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross - Free Book Online

begin to slide south. He grabs them: for a moment he keeps his grip, but then the fabric rips and they fly away. “Oh my,” I mouth, nearly losing my fingering. The spangle and flicker of camera flashes rises to a manic intensity: I know
exactly
what’s going to be on the front page of all the newspapers tomorrow. Then I turn back towards my target.
    â€œLend me your vision,”
I instruct Lecter as I stare across the bridge of my instrument. My vision grays out for a moment and then returns. Some colors are emphasized: there’s a strange lambency to the air between the horse’s hooves, and it slowly resolves into the shape of a seated human figure.
    ***Can I eat him?***
    â€œNo,”
I convey through the tension of my fingertips.
“Mine, not yours.”
    ***Hungry!***
    â€œNevertheless.”
I tighten my grip and draw on the violin’s power. Bach, I decide, is inappropriate. This calls for something more contemporary. I segue into a different form, a more rhythmic, sinister melody wrapped around an implicit beat: “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” for solo improv violin values of mortality.
“Now . . .”
    I relax my grip on Lecter’s appetite and he strains forward eagerly,sucking on the energy source in front of him. The blind spot twists and twitches slightly, then begins to shrink. Arms and legs slide into view. Hands move, agitated: Laughing Boy has finally begun to realize that something is wrong.
    Out of the corner of my eye I spot the Mayor standing on top of the pile of naked bodies on the other plinth; he’s waving and gesticulating in my direction.
Is he a sensitive? Shit.
There’s nothing to be done about it if he is: I press on. Raising the bow for a second I flip the switch on my violin’s pre-amp. It’s not an audio amplifier, and those aren’t electronic pickups. I started subtle, but now it’s time to party.
The bats have left the belfry—
    â€”And I’m almost airborne.
Whoops.
My ward buzzes angrily and I hastily squirt juice into it, juice sucked from the joker on the plinth who has taken aim at me. I land with a painful jolt but manage to absorb the drop with my knees. I’ll feel them tomorrow but I’m rooted to the ground for now. I increase both volume and tempo, whirling into a screaming blur as the song rises: the strings begin to glow and now I reach out with Lecter’s power and wrap my will around my target.
The victims have been bled—
    Got you.
    He struggles as I lift him into the air, stabbing at me with pulses of near-solid air that would rupture eardrums and break bones if I didn’t have a ward in place, drawing on the near-infinite depths of the violin’s power. I stare at him as he screams obscenities and lashes out at me: for a moment I wonder if I’ve caught a giant frog. Then I realize he’s just a little overweight—beer guts and Lycra body stockings really don’t play well together.
    â€œPut me down you motherfucking hippie bitch! Put me down or I will rape you so hard you’ll walk bow-legged for a month!”
    I tighten my grip on him and he shuts up, unable to draw breath. I see red: heart pounding and head throbbing in time to the beat I’m imagining. Laughing Boy likes to strip the clothes off young women in public as he adds them to the pornographic sculpture he’s building on the empty plinth? Laughing Boy thinks rape jokes are funny?Laughing Boy thinks it’s all fun and games until a motherfucking hippie bitch turns his own mojo back on him, does he?
I’ll show him, I’ll squeeze him until his guts explode—
    â€œStop that,”
I tell Lecter. Laughing Boy is turning blue in the face, eyes bulging as I dangle him above the heads of the crowd. Almost like the bodies on the giant gallows in Vakilabad—
    I let him down gently, in the middle of a knot of riot police, then stop the music dead and lower my instrument.