The Metallic Muse (2 page)

“You give them about thirty seconds of that ‘sudsy’ for background. They can cut it if they don’t like it.” Baque nodded, scribbling a note on the manuscript. “And the arrangement,” Hulsey went on. “Sorry, Erlin, but we can’t get a French horn player. You’ll have to do something else with that part.” “No horn player? What’s wrong with Rankin?” “Blacklisted. The Performers’ Guild nixed him permanently. He went out to the West Coast and played for nothing. Even paid his own expenses. The guild can’t tolerate that sort of thing.” “I remember,” Baque said softly. “The Monuments of Art Society. He played a Mozart horn concerto for them. Their final concert, too. Wish I could have heard it, even if it was with multichord.” “He can play it all he wants to now, but he’ll never get paid for playing again. You can work that horn part into the multichord line, or I might be able to get you a trumpet player. He could use a converter.” “It’ll ruin the effect.” Hulsey chuckled. “Sounds the same to everyone but you, my boy. I can’t tell the difference. We got your violins and a cello player. What more do you want?” “Doesn’t the London Guild have a horn player?” “You want me to bring him over for one three-minute Com? Be reasonable, Erlin! Can I pick this up tomorrow?” “Yes. I’ll have it ready in the morning.” Hulsey reached for his briefcase, dropped it again, leaned forward scowling. “Erlin, I’m worried about you. I have twenty-seven tunesmiths in my agency. You’re the best by far. Hell, you’re the best in the world, and you make the least money of any of them. Your net last year was twenty-two hundred. None of the others netted less than eleven thousand.” “That isn’t news to me,” Baque said. “This may be. You have as many accounts as any of them. Did you know that?” Baque shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.” “You have as many accounts, but you don’t make any money. Want to know why? Two reasons. You spend too much time on a Com, and you write it too well. Sponsors can use one of your Coms for months—or sometimes even years, like that Tamper Cheese thing. People like to hear them. Now if you just didn’t write so damned well, you could work faster, and the sponsors would have to use more of your Coms, and you could turn out more.“ ”I’ve thought about that. Even if I didn’t, Val would keep reminding me. But it’s no use. That’s the way I have to work. If there was some way to get the sponsors to pay more for a good Com—“ ”There isn’t. The guild wouldn’t stand for it, because good Coms mean less work, and most tunesmiths couldn’t write a really good Com. Now don’t think I’m concerned about my agency. Of course I make more money when you make more, but I’m doing well enough with my other tunesmiths. I just hate to see my best man making so little money. You’re a throwback, Erlin. You waste time and money collecting those antique—what do you call them?“ ”Phonograph records.“ ”Yes. And those moldy old books about music. I don’t doubt that you know more about music than anyone alive, and what does it get you? Not money, certainly. You’re the best there is, and you keep trying to be better, and the better you get the less money you make. Your income drops lower every year. Couldn’t you manage just an average Com now and then?“ ”No,“ Baque said brusquely. ”I couldn’t manage it.“ ”Think it over.“ ”These accounts I have. Some of the sponsors really like my work. They’d pay more if the guild would let them. Supposing I left the guild?“ ”You can’t, my boy. I couldn’t handle your stuff—not and stay in business long. The Tunesmiths’ Guild would turn on the pressure, and the Performers’ and Lyric Writers’ Guilds would blacklist you. Jimmy Denton plays along with the guilds and he’d bar your stuff from visiscope. You’d lose all your accounts, and fast. No sponsor is big enough to fight all that trouble, and none of them would want to bother. So just try to be average now and then. Think about it.“ Baque sat staring at the floor. ”I’ll think about it.” Hulsey struggled to his feet, clasped Baque’s hand briefly, and waddled out. Baque closed the door behind him and went to the drawer where he kept his meager collection of old phonograph records. Strange and wonderful music. Three times in his career Baque had written Coms that were a full half-hour in length. On rare occasions he got an order for fifteen minutes. Usually he was limited to five or less. But composers like the B-A-C-H; Baque wrote things that lasted an hour or more—even wrote them without lyrics. And they wrote for real instruments, among them amazing-sounding things that no one played anymore, like bassoons, piccolos and pianos. “Damn Denton. Damn visiscope. Damn guilds.” Baque rummaged tenderly among the discs until he found one bearing Bach’s name. Magnificat. Then, because he felt too despondent to listen, he pushed it away. Earlier that year the Performers’ Guild had blacklisted its last oboe player. Now its last horn player, and there just weren’t any young people learning to play instruments. Why should they, when there were so many marvelous contraptions that ground out the Coms without any effort on the part of the performer? Even multichord players were becoming scarce, and if one wasn’t particular about how well it was done, a multichord could practically play itself. The door jerked open, and Val hurried in. “Did Hulsey—” Baque handed her the check. She took it eagerly, glanced at it, and looked up in dismay. “My guild dues,” he said. “I was behind.” “Oh. Well, it’s a help, anyway.” Her voice was flat, emotionless, as though one more disappointment really didn’t matter. They stood facing each other awkwardly. “I watched part of Morning with Marigold,” Val said. “She talked about your Coms.” “I should hear soon on that Slo-Smoke Com,” Baque said. “Maybe we can hold the landlord off for another week. Right now I’m going to walk around a little.” “You should get out more—” He closed the door behind him, slicing her sentence off neatly. He knew what followed. Get a job somewhere. It’d be good for your health to get out of the apartment a few hours a day. Write Coms in your spare time—they don’t bring in more than a part-time income anyway. At least do it until we get caught up. All right, if you won’t, I will. But she never did. A prospective employer never wanted more than one look at her slight body and her worn, sullen face. And Baque doubted that he would receive any better treatment. He could get work as a multichord player and make a good income—but if he did he’d have to join the Performers’ Guild, which meant that he’d have to resign from the Tunesmiths’ Guild. So the choice was between performing and composing; the guilds wouldn’t let him do both. “Damn the guilds! Damn Coms!” When he reached the street, he stood for a moment watching the crowds shooting past on the swiftly moving conveyer. A few people glanced at him and saw a tall, gawky, balding man in a frayed, badly fitting suit. They would consider him just another derelict from a shabby neighborhood, he knew, and they would quickly look the other way while they hummed a snatch from one of his Coms. He hunched up his shoulders and walked awkwardly along the stationary sidewalk. At a crowded restaurant he turned in, found a table at one side, and ordered beer. On the rear wall was an enormous visiscope screen where the Coms followed each other without interruption. Around him the other customers watched and listened while they ate. Some nodded their heads jerkily in time with the music. A few young couples were dancing on the small dance floor, skillfully changing steps as the music shifted from one Com to another. Baque watched them sadly and thought about the way things had changed. At one time, he knew, there had been special music for dancing and special groups of instruments to play it. And people had gone to concerts by the thousands, sitting in seats with nothing to look at but the performers. All of it had vanished. Not only the music, but art and literature and poetry. The plays he once read in his grandfather’s school books were forgotten. James Denton’s Visiscope International decreed that people must look and listen at the same time, and that the public attention span wouldn’t tolerate long programs. So there were Coms. Damn Coms! When Val returned to the apartment an hour later, Baque was sitting in the corner staring at the battered plastic cabinet that held the crumbling volumes he had collected from the days when books were still printed on paper—a scattering of biographies, books on music history, and technical books about music theory and composition. Val looked twice about the room before she noticed him, and then she confronted him anxiously, stark tragedy etching her wan face. “The man’s coming to fix the food synthesizer.”

“Good,“ Baque said. ”But the landlord won’t wait. If we don’t pay him day after tomorrow—pay him everything—we’re out.“ ”So we’re out.“ ”Where will we go? We can’t get in anywhere without paying something in advance.“ ”So we won’t get in anywhere.“ She fled sobbing into the bedroom.

The next morning Baque resigned from the Tunesmiths’ Guild and joined the Performers’ Guild. Hulsey’s round face drooped mournfully when he heard the news. He loaned Baque enough money to pay his guild registration fee and quiet the landlord, and he expressed his sorrow in eloquent terms as he hurried Baque out of his office. He would, Baque knew, waste no time in assigning Baque’s clients to his other tunesmiths—to men who worked faster and not so well. Baque went to the Guild Hall, where he sat for five hours waiting for a multichord assignment. He was finally summoned to the secretary’s office and brusquely motioned into a chair. The secretary eyed him suspiciously. ”You belonged to the Performers’ Guild twenty years ago, and you left it to become a tunesmith. Right?“ ”Right,“ Baque said. ”You lost your seniority after three years. You knew that, didn’t you?“ ”I did, but I didn’t think it mattered. There aren’t many good multichord players around.“ ”There aren’t many good jobs around, either. You’ll have to start at the bottom.“ He scribbled on a slip of paper and thrust it at Baque. ”This one pays well, but we have a hard time keeping a man there. Lankey isn’t easy to work for. If you don’t irritate him too much—well, then we’ll see.” Baque rode the conveyer out to the New Jersey Space Port, wandered through a rattletrap slum area getting his directions hopelessly confused, and finally found the place almost within radiation distance of the port. The sprawling building had burned at some time in the remote past. Stubbly remnants of walls rose out of the weed-choked rubble. A wall curved toward a dimly lit cavity at one corner, where steps led uncertainly downward. Overhead, an enormous sign pointed its flowing colors in the direction of the port. The LANKEY-PANK OUT.

Baque stepped through the door and faltered at the onslaught of extraterrestrial odors. Lavender-tinted tobacco smoke, the product of the enormous leaves grown in bot-domes in the Lunar Mare Crisium, hung like a limp blanket midway between floor and ceiling. The revolting, cutting fumes of blast, a whisky blended with a product of Martian lichens, staggered him. He had a glimpse of a scattered gathering of tough spacers and tougher prostitutes before the doorman planted his bulky figure and scarred caricature of a face in front of him. “You looking for someone?” “Mr. Lankey.” The doorman jerked a thumb in the direction of the bar and noisily stumbled back into the shadows. Baque walked toward the bar. He had no trouble in picking out Lankey. The proprietor sat on a tall stool behind the bar. In the dim, smoke-streaked light his taut pale face had a spectral grimness. He leaned an elbow on the bar, fingered his flattened stump of a nose with the two remaining fingers on his hairy hand, and as Baque approached he thrust his bald head forward and eyed him coldly. “I’m Erlin Baque,” Baque said. “Yeah. The multichord player. Can you play that multichord, fellow?” “Why, yes, I can play—” “That’s what they all say, and I’ve had maybe two in the last ten years that could really play. Most of them come out here figuring they’ll set the thing on automatic and fuss around with one finger. I want that multichord played, fellow, and I’ll tell you right now—if you can’t play you might as well jet for home. There isn’t any automatic on my multichord. I had it disconnected.” “I can play,” Baque told him. “All right. It doesn’t take more than one Com to find out. The guild rates this place as Class Four, but I pay Class One rates if you can play. If you can really play, I’ll slip you some bonuses the guild won’t know about. Hours are six P.M. to six A.M., but you get plenty of breaks, and if you get hungry or thirsty just ask for what you want. Only go easy on the hot stuff. I won’t go along with a drunk multichord player no matter how good he is. Rose!” He bellowed the name a second time, and a woman stepped from a door at the side of the room. She wore a faded dressing gown, and her tangled hair hung untidily about her shoulders. She turned a small, pretty face

toward Baque and studied him boldly. “Multichord,” Lankey said. “Show him.” Rose beckoned, and Baque followed her toward the rear of the room. Suddenly he halted in amazement. “What’s the matter?” Rose asked. “No visiscope!” “No. Lankey says the spacers want better things to look at than soapsuds and flyers.” She giggled. “Something like me, for example.” “I never heard of a restaurant without visiscope.” “Neither did I, until I came here. But Lankey’s got three of us to sing the Coms, and you’re to do the multichord with us. I hope you make the grade. We haven’t had a multichord player for a week, and it’s hard singing without one.” “I’ll make out all right,” Baque said. A narrow platform stretched across the end of the room where any other restaurant would have had its visiscope screen. Baque could see the unpatched scars in the wall where the screen had been torn out. “Lankey ran a joint at Port Mars back when the colony didn’t have visiscope,” Rose said. “He has his own ideas about how to entertain customers. Want to see your room?” Baque was examining the multichord. It was a battered old instrument, and it bore the marks of more than one brawl. He fingered the filter buttons and swore softly to himself. Only the flute and violin filters clicked into place properly. So he would have to spend twelve hours a day with the twanging tones of an unfiltered multichord. “Want to see your room?” Rose asked again. “It’s only five. You might as well relax until we have to go to work.” Rose showed him a cramped enclosure behind the bar. He stretched out on a hard cot and tried to relax, and suddenly it was six o’clock and Lankey stood in the door beckoning to him. He took his place at the multichord and fingered the keys impatiently. He felt no nervousness. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know about Coms, and he knew he wouldn’t have trouble with the music, but the atmosphere disturbed him. The haze of smoke was thicker, and he blinked his smarting eyes and felt the whisky fumes tear at his nostrils when he took a deep breath.