Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (26 page)

The man held his arm toward Jimmy, pointing a finger. From the shadow at the edge of the stage, it appeared ominous, like the specter of Christmas Future pointing toward Scrooge’s grave. “Anything you’ve heard is a gift to you, young man. Leave it be. Music isn’t to be trifled with. You’re either a musician or you’re not. You either do it for a life, or you mock it by making it a hobby.”

“I didn’t say—”

“Didn’t have to,” Jensen cut in. “Listen if you will. No harm there. But let the music rest. For heaven’s sake, just let it rest.”

Then the man stepped behind the curtain, and Jimmy was alone with the ghost light.

As night
closed in, a glorious sunset erupted over the western horizon. Crimson skies lit across the water, turning the ocean a thousand shades of red. Some few tourists and locals trod the beach, heading for their cars or home, and Jimmy, headphones firmly in place, sat watching it all, listening to his recordings from the night before.

Something strange in them.

The melodies were beautiful, haunting, but oddly never repeated. It was as though the trumpeter had no song in mind but simply played on and on, forever defining a new phrase, a new melody.

Some of them fast.

Others languorous, creeping slowly and marking out a passage of aching beauty.

Jimmy tried to chart it at first, replaying sections over and over. His theory was rusty, but he managed to define a few note progressions before combinations of complexity went beyond him.

The sun disappeared, and almost immediately the wind came in, cold, whispering across the sands.

The longer he listened, the less Jimmy thought he understood the music. At times, he wasn’t sure it was music at all. Among other things, he couldn’t find any definite rhythm. The time signature eluded him, so that he could never identify individual phrases.

Finally he stopped, putting his headphones aside and dropping to his elbows to watch the light go completely out of the sky. For a moment, he lost himself in the reassuring sound of waves upon the sand—something he hadn’t done once in all the time he’d been tracking the movements of the great ocean.

…learning the sounds of the earth, the sounds of nature, writing it down, learning the patterns…There’s power in that, my friend. The power to undo.

Jimmy’s gift had always been a very good ear. Any sound man worth his salt had one. Consumers rarely heard the difference, which explained the popularity of digital song downloads, in which compression technology had removed so much of the acoustic information.

Jimmy hated those. Not because they were free. Because they sounded thin.

Not like this.

The almost laughing sound of water rolling toward the beach came full-bellied, rich and strident every time. If the earth had a voice, this was surely it, and no place more certainly than this strip of sand on the Oregon coast.

But still something in it evaded him. If he could just understand.

Stories of vaudevillians, old instruments, and warnings about his own musical incompetence only made him more eager to understand what it was he heard in his recordings. They might not want to see him profiting from the music of their beach here, but they wouldn’t run him off with creepy stories. The thought of it made him laugh.

Hell, he’d lived in Los Angeles for eight years; nothing was creepier than that.

Then it happened.

Just reclining there on the beach, he began to count.

Simple eighth notes.

Seven of them.

Then again.

Jimmy sat up straight, staring at the water as if he expected it to talk. With alarming regularity, the water tumbled and fell to a beat of seven. The time signature carried its own power, but could scarcely be handled by most musicians. Standard time, swing time, the three-count of a waltz, each of them could be danced to, internalized without training. Even phrases of two and five and nine fell more frequently in the music pantheon, adopted often by classical composers, used in songs with regularity.

But seven.

Jimmy counted, and counted.

When night had descended in full, something occurred to him. He quickly got his recording equipment from the car and set it up. This time, he dialed the frequency only halfway in, and listened.

There it was.

The languished melody of the horn came in musical phrases to the beat of the surf. Jimmy now heard them together as he hadn’t before, and in a flurry, he began to scribble out bars of seven, transcribing the song as it wafted and sang across the great timekeeper.

So busy was he at his transcription that he did not hear the rumblings deep in the earth. He exulted at the possibility that he might put definition to something that had never been written down.

He owed it all to the bugling of a horn. He owed it to George Henry.

The sky suddenly darkened and crackled with lightning. The waves swelled; a flurry of wind swept down upon the dunes.

All in perfect seven time.

Jimmy madly went on, oblivious to the changes around him.

Soon the tumult of thunder and pounding surf and shrieking wind became a chorus he might never have imagined. His papers riffled in his hand, but he held them tight, penning the sound in his ears, marking a great melody in bars of seven.

He knew instinctively that he’d become a conductor, and his orchestra was nothing less than the elements themselves.

He held the key.

He was unlocking the sounds of heaven.

Just like a vaudevillian with a Gillespie horn.

In a fury, he put his pen back to the paper, marking out notes with haste, his hand flying across the page. The maelstrom whipped and churned, but all he heard was sevens, beautiful, indecipherable sevens.

Then he came to the end of his sheet, a single phrase yet to write, and paused as at the climax of a symphony, holding a great note before the finale.

And again he heard the old man, the minor thespian.
There’s power in that, my friend. The power to undo.

With a single beat of his heart, he knew that to decipher the song would make him forever a part of it.

Like a horn joined forever in the waves.

Jimmy shook with the feverish desire to unlock the mystery, to see his finding through to its conclusion.

As the wind lashed and the water churned, he listened to another measure of seven.

And dropped his pen.

In moments the sea and air calmed.

Jimmy loosened his grip on his opus, the pages scattering about him, carried on mild breezes to the water’s edge. He fell back and grabbed fists full of sand, imagining the difference between heaven and earth.

In the moments that followed, he could no longer count the rhythms of the ocean, its voice become again a mystery to him. But gentle it came, and it lulled his senses, like any good jazz music should.

Afterword by Peter Orullian

A few years ago, I attended a writing workshop on the Oregon coast. One of the themes of the two-week boot camp was: Write fast and get out of your own way. The idea is that too many writers allow their critical voice to impede their creative voice, the result being diminished productivity.

To that end, many of our assignments were given late in the day with an early-next-morning deadline. What I learned is that most writers can do roughly a thousand words an hour. So, do the math. In three months, you should be able to write a novel—and that’s if you write just an hour a day, and you’re slow.

Anyway, on this particular short story assignment, I was asked to do two things: use a sleepy coastal town as my setting (part of the über assignment given to everyone) and work on “voice” (an exercise for me, in particular).

Each of the attending writers scurried into town to consider locations, gather details, look for inspiration. I hadn’t needed to; I’d seen mine already.

A music store.

Which was perfect, since it got me to the second part of the assignment: voice. For me, the easiest way into voice was to go to music. I’m a musician, and for those of you who are, too, you’ve no need of an explanation here. For the rest of you, I’ll paraphrase by saying it involves things like timbre, phrasing, dynamics, note selection. All of which should be internalized and forgotten before you try to perform; just like studying the craft of writing, internalizing it, then allowing it to come out (subconsciously) through your fingers as you pound the keyboard.

Back to the music store. There was this great place right on Highway 101 that captured my imagination. I’d thought to myself on first seeing it: How does a music store thrive in such a small community? In point of fact, the place didn’t appear to be thriving. But amazingly, it had this whole large, dusty, neglected room of old pianos.

I was in heaven thinking of the possibilities for stories out of this corner of the world.

The other thing I should mention is that I’m taken with odd time signatures in music. It ain’t easy to dance to something written in 7/8 or 11/8, but I don’t dance much anyway.

All these things coalesced for me, as I imagined a sound engineer doing cheesy ocean-wave recordings (you see these in spas and New Age shops all the time) because he can’t get another gig and is tired of the overcommercialization (and dilution) of jazz music.

Now I just needed to write it all down.

In about three hours I’d finished my story; it’s really rather short. But it felt complete, as it had allowed me to get to the heart of a few things. I was happy with the cadence and the character voices, too. Plus, I’d managed to underscore my own feelings about the power of music.

How do
you systematically destroy a child with love? It’s not something that any parent aspires to do, yet a surprising number come perilously close to achieving it. Many a child escapes destruction only through his own disbelief in his parents’ worship. If I am a god, these children say, then there are no gods, or such gods as there be are weak and feeble things.

In short, it is their own depressive personalities that save them. They are self-atheists.

You know you have begun badly when you parents name you Bonito—“Pretty Boy.”

Well, perhaps they named you after a species of tuna. But when you are pampered and coddled and adored, you soon become quite sure that the tuna was named after you, and not the other way around.

In the cathedral in Toledo, he was baptized with the name Tomás Benedito Bonito de Madrid y Valencia.

“An alliance between two cities!” his father proclaimed, though everyone knew that to have two cities in your name was a sign of low, not high, pedigree. Only if his ancestors had been lords of those cities would the names have meant anything except that somebody’s ancestors were a butcher from Madrid and an orange picker from Valencia who moved somewhere else and came to be known by their city of origin.

But in truth Bonito’s father, Amaro, did not care for his ancestry, or at least not his specific ancestry. It was enough for him to claim Spain as his family.

“We are a people who were once conquered by Islam, and yet we would not stay conquered,” he would say—often. “Look at other lands that were once more civilized than we. Egypt! Asia Minor! Syria! Phoenicia! The Arabs came with their big black rock god that they pretended was not idolatry, and what happened? The Egyptians became so Muslim that they called themselves Arab and forgot their own language. So did the Syrians! So did the Lebanese! So did ancient Carthage and Lydia and Phrygia, Pontus and Macedonia! They gave up. They
converted
.” He always said that word as if it were a mouthful of mud.

“But Spain—we retreated up into the Pyrenees. Navarre, Aragon, León, Galicia. They could not get us out of the hills. And slowly, year by year, city by city, village by village, orchard by orchard, we won it back. 1492. We drove the last of the Moors out of Spain, we purified the Spanish civilization, and then we went out and conquered a world!”

To goad him, friends would remind him that Columbus was Italian. “Yes, but he had to come to
Spain
before he accomplished a damn thing! It was Spanish money and Spanish bottoms that floated him west, and we all know it was really Spanish sailors who did the navigation and discovered the new world. It was Spaniards who in their dozens conquered armies that numbered in the millions!”

“So,” the daring ones would say, “so what happened? Why did Spain topple from its place?”

“
Spain
never toppled.
Spain
had the tragic misfortune to get captured by foreign kings. A pawn of the miserable Hapsburgs. Austrians!
Germans
. They spent the blood and treasure of Spain on what? Dynastic wars! Squabbles in the Netherlands. What a waste! We should have been conquering China. China would have been better off speaking Spanish like Peru and Mexico. They’d have an alphabet! They’d eat with forks! They’d pray to the god on the cross!”

“But
you
don’t pray to the god on the cross.”

“Si, pero yo lo respecto! Yo lo adoro! Es muerto, pero es verdaderamente mi redentor ainda lo mismo!” I respect him, I worship him. He’s dead, but he’s truly my redeemer all the same.

Don’t ever get Amaro de Madrid started on religion. “The people must have their god, or they’ll make gods of whatever you give them. Look at the environmentalists, serving the god Gaia, sacrificing the prosperity of the world on her altar of compost! Cristo is a good god, he makes people peaceful with each other but fierce with their enemies.”

No point in arguing when Amaro had a case to make. For he was a lawyer. No, he was a poet who was licensed and paid as a lawyer. His perorations in court were legendary. People would come to boring court actions just to hear him—not a lot of people, but most of them other lawyers or idealistic citizens or women held spellbound by his fire and the flood of words that sounded like wisdom and sometimes were. Enough that he was something of a celebrity in Toledo. Enough that his house was always full of people wanting to engage him in conversation.

This was the father at whose knee the pampered Bonito would sit, listening wide-eyed as pilgrims came to this living shrine to the lost religion of Spanish patriotism. Only gradually did Bonito come to realize that his father was not just its prophet, but its sole communicant as well.

Except, of course, Bonito. He was a remarkably bright child, verbal before he was a year old, and Amaro swore that his son understood every word he said before he was eighteen months old.

Not every word, but close enough. Word spread, as it always did, about this infant who listened to his brilliant father and was not merely dazzled, but seemed to understand.

So before Bonito was two years old, they came from the International Fleet to begin their tests. “You would steal my son from me? More importantly, you would steal him from
Spain
?”

The young officer patiently explained to him that Spain was, in fact, part of the human race, and the whole human race was searching among its children to find the most brilliant military minds to lead the struggle for survival against the Formics, that hideous race that had come two generations before and scoured humans out of the way like mildew until great heroes destroyed them. “It was a near thing,” said the officer. “What if your son is the next Mazer Rackham, only you withhold him? Do you think the Formics will stop at the border of Spain?”

“We will do as we did before,” said Amaro. “We will hide in our mountain fortresses and then come back to reclaim Earth, city by city, village by village, until—”

But this young officer had studied history and only smiled. “The Moors captured the villages of Spain and ruled over them. The Formics would obliterate them; what then will you recapture? Christians remained in Spain for your ancestors to liberate. Will you convert Formics to rebel against their hive queen and join your struggle? You might as well try to persuade a man’s hands to rebel against his brain.”

To which Amaro only laughed and said, “I know many a man whose hands rebelled against him—and other parts as well!”

Amaro was a lawyer. More to the point, he was not stupid. So he knew the futility of trying to resist the IF. Nor was he insensitive to the great honor of having a son that the IF wanted to take away from him. In fact, when he railed to everyone about the tyranny of these “child-stealing internationalists,” it was really his way of boasting that he had spawned a possible savior of the world. The tiny blinking monitor implanted in his son’s spine just below the skull was a badge for his father.

Then Amaro set about destroying his son with love.

Nothing was to be denied this boy that the world wanted to take away from Amaro. He went with his father everywhere—as soon as he could walk and use a toilet, so there was no burden or mess to deal with. And when Amaro was at home, young Bonito was indulged in all his whims. “The boy wants to play in the trees, so let him.”

“But he’s so little, and he climbs so high, the fall would be so far.”

“Boys climb, they fall. Do you think my Bonito is not tough enough to deal with it? How else will he learn?”

When Bonito refused to go to bed, or to turn his light out when he finally did, because he wanted to read, then Amaro said, “Will you stifle genius? If nighttime is when his mind is active, then you no more curtail him than you would demand that an owl can only hunt in the day!”

And when Bonito demanded sweets, well, Amaro made sure that there was an endless supply of them in the house. “He’ll get tired of them,” said Amaro.

But these things did not always lead where one might have thought, for Bonito, without knowing it, was determined to rescue himself from his father’s love. Listening to his father and understanding more than even Amaro guessed, Bonito realized that getting tired of sweets was what his father expected—so he no longer asked for them. The boxes of candy languished and were finally contributed to a local orphanage.

Likewise, Bonito deliberately fell from trees—low branches at first, then higher and higher ones, learning to overcome his fear of falling and to avoid injury. And he began to understand later that he was not nocturnal, that what he read in the daze of sleepiness was ill-remembered by morning, but what he read by daylight after a good night of sleep stayed with him.

For Bonito was, in fact, born to be a disciple, and if his mentor imposed no discipline on him, Bonito would find it in his teachings all the same. Bonito heard everything, even that which was not actually said.

When Bonito was five, he finally became aware of his mother.

Oh, he had known her all along. He had run to her with his scrapes and his hungers. Her hands had been on him, caressing him, her soft voice also a caress, all the days of his life. She was like the air he breathed. Father was the dazzling sun in the bright blue sky; Mother was the earth beneath his feet. Everything came from her, but he did not see her, he was so dazzled.

Until one day, Bonito’s attention wandered from one of his father’s familiar sermons to one of the visitors who had come to hear him. Mother had brought in a tray of simple food—cut-up fruits and raw vegetables. But she had included a plate of the sweet orange flatbread she sometimes made, and it happened that Bonito noticed the moment when the visitor picked up one of the crackers and broke off a piece and put it in his mouth.

The visitor had been nodding at the things that Father was saying. But he stopped. Stopped chewing, as well. For a moment, Bonito thought the man intended to take the bite of flatbread out of his mouth. But no, he was savoring it. His eyebrows rose. He looked at the flatbread that remained in his hand, and there was reverence in his attitude when he put another piece in his mouth.

Bonito watched the man’s face. Ecstasy? No, perhaps mere delight.

And when the man left, he stepped apart from the circle of admirers around his father and went to the kitchen.

Bonito followed him, leaving his father’s conversation behind in order to hear this one:

“Señora, may I take more of this flatbread with me?”

Mother blushed and smiled shyly. “Did you like it?”

“I will not insult you by asking for the recipe,” the man said. “I know that no description can capture what you put into this bread. But I beg you to let me carry some away so I can eat it in my own garden and share it with my wife.”

With a sweet eagerness, Mother wrapped up most of what remained and gave it to the man, who bowed over the paper bag as she handed it to him. “You,” the man said, “are the secret treasure of this house.”

At those words, Mother’s shyness became cold. Bonito realized at once that the man had crossed some invisible line; the man realized it as well. “Señora, I am not flirting with you. I spoke from the heart. What your husband says, I could read, or hear from others. What you have made here, I can have only from your hand.” Then he bowed again, and left.

Bonito knew the orange flatbread was delicious. What he had not realized till now was that it was unusually so. That strangers would value it.

Mother began to sing a little song in the kitchen after the man left the room.

Bonito went back out into the salon to see how the man merely waved a brief good-bye to Father and then rushed away clutching his prize, the bag of flatbread.

A tiny part of Bonito was jealous. That flatbread would have been his to eat all through the next day.

But another part of Bonito was proud. Proud
of his mother.
It had never happened before. It was Father one was supposed to be proud of. He understood that instinctively, and it had been reinforced by so many visitors who had turned to him, while waiting for their chance to say good-bye to Father, and said something like this: “You’re so lucky to live in the house of this great man.” Or, more obliquely, “You live here in the heartbeat of Spain.” But always, it was about Father.

Not this time.

From that moment, Bonito began to be aware of his mother. He actually noticed the work she did to make Father’s life happen. The way she dealt with all the tradesmen, the gardener, and the maid who also helped her in the kitchen. How she shopped in the market, how she talked with the neighbors, graciously making their house a part of the neighborhood. The world came to their house to see Father; Mother went out and blessed the neighborhood with kindness and concern. Father talked. Mother listened. Father was admired. Mother was loved and trusted and needed.

It took a while for Father to notice that Bonito was not always with him anymore, that he sometimes did not
want
to go. “Of course,” he said, laughing. “Court must be boring for you!” But he was a little disappointed; Bonito saw it; he was sorry for it. But he got as much pleasure from going about with his mother, for now he saw what an artist she was in her own right.

Father spoke to rooms of people—let them take him how they would, he amused, delighted, roused, even enraged them. Mother spoke with one person at a time, and when she left, they were, however temporarily, content.

“What did you do today?” Father asked him.

Bonito made the mistake of answering candidly. “I went to market with Mama,” he said. “We visited with Mrs. Ferreira, the Portuguese lady? Her daughter has been making her very unhappy but Mother told her all the ways that the girl was showing good sense after all. Then we came home and Mother and Nita made the noodles for our soup, and I helped with the dusting of flour because I’m very good and I don’t get tired of sifting it. Then I sang songs to her while she did the bills. I have a very sweet voice, Papa.”

“I know you do,” he said. But he looked puzzled. “Today I argued a very important case. I won a poor family back the land that had been unjustly taken by a bank because the bankers would not have the patience with the poor that they show to the wealthy. I made six rich men testify about the favors they had received from the bank, the overdrafts, the late payments that had been tolerated, and it did not even go to judgment. The bankers backed down and restored the land and forgave the back interest.”