The Metallic Muse (3 page)

There was still only a scattering of customers. The men were mechanics in grimy work suits, swaggering pilots, and a few civilians who liked their liquor strong and didn’t mind the surroundings. The women were—women; two of them, he guessed, for every man in the room. Suddenly the men began an unrestrained stomping of feet accented with yelps of approval. Lankey was crossing the platform with Rose and the other singers. Baque’s first horrified impression was that the girls were nude, but as they came closer he made out their brief plastic costumes. Lankey was right, he thought. The spacers would much prefer that kind of scenery to animated Coms on a visiscope screen. “You met Rose,” Lankey said. “This is Zanna and Mae. Let’s get going.” He walked away, and the girls gathered about the multichord. “What Coms do you know?” Rose asked. “I know them all.” She looked at him doubtfully. “We sing together, and then we take turns. Are you sure you know them all?” Baque flipped on the power and sounded a chord. “Sing any Com you want—I can handle it.” “Well—we’ll start out with a Tasty-Malt Com. It goes like this.” She hummed softly. “Know that one?” “I wrote it,” Baque said. They sang better than he had expected. He followed them easily, and while he played he kept his eyes on the customers. Heads were jerking in time with the music, and he quickly caught the mood and began to experiment. His fingers shaped a rolling rhythm in the bass, fumbled with it tentatively, and then expanded it. He abandoned the melodic line, leaving the girls to carry on by themselves while he searched the entire keyboard to ornament the driving rhythm. Feet began to stomp. The girls’ bodies were swaying wildly, and Baque felt himself rocking back and forth as the music swept on recklessly. The girls finished their lyrics, and when he did not stop playing they began again. Spacers were on their feet, now, clapping and swaying. Some seized their women and began dancing in the narrow spaces between the tables. Finally Baque forced a cadence and slumped forward, panting and mopping his forehead. One of the girls collapsed onto the stage. The others hauled her to her feet, and the three of them fled to a frenzy of applause. Baque felt a hand on his shoulder. Lankey. His ugly, expressionless face eyed Baque, turned to study the wildly enthusiastic customers, turned back to Baque. He nodded and walked away. Rose returned alone, still breathing heavily. “How about a Sally Ann Perfume Com?” Baque searched his memory and was chagrined to find no recollection of Sally Ann’s Coms. “Tell me the words,” he said. She recited them tonelessly—a tragic little story about the shattered romance of a girl who did not use Sally Ann. “Now I remember,” Baque told her. “Shall we make them cry? Just concentrate on that. It’s a sad story, and we’re going to make them cry.” She stood by the multichord and sang plaintively. Baque fashioned a muted, tremulous accompaniment, and when the second verse started he improvised a drooping countermelody. The spacers sat in hushed suspense. The men did not cry, but some of the women sniffed audibly, and when Rose finished there was a taut silence. “Quick!” Baque hissed. “Let’s brighten things up. Sing another Com—anything!” She launched into a Puffed Bread Com, and Baque brought the spacers to their feet with the driving rhythm of his accompaniment. The other girls took their turns, and Baque watched the customers detachedly, bewildered at the power that surged in his fingers. He carried them from one emotional extreme to the other and back again, improvising, experimenting. And his mind fumbled haltingly with an idea. “Time for a break,” Rose said finally. “Better get something to eat.” An hour and a half of continuous playing had left Baque drained of strength and emotion, and he accepted his dinner tray indifferently and took it to the enclosure they called his room. He did not feel hungry. He sniffed doubtfully at the food, tasted it—and ate ravenously. Real food, after months of synthetics! When he’d finished he sat for a time on his cot, wondering how long the girls took between appearances, and then he went looking for Lankey. “I don’t like sitting around,” he said. “Any objection to my playing?” “Without the girls?” “Yes.” Lankey planted both elbows on the bar, cupped his chin in one fist, and sat looking absently at the far wall. “You going to sing yourself?” he asked finally. “No. Just play.”

“Without any singing? Without words?” “Yes.” “What’ll you play?” “Coms. Or I might improvise something.” A long silence. Then—“Think you could keep things moving while the girls are out?” “Of course I could.” Lankey continued to concentrate on the far wall. His eyebrows contracted, relaxed, contracted again. “All right,” he said. “I was just wondering why I never thought of it.” Unnoticed, Baque took his place at the multichord. He began softly, making the music an unobtrusive background to the rollicking conversation that filled the room. As he increased the volume, faces turned in his direction. He wondered what these people were thinking as they heard for the first time music that was not a Com, music without words. He watched intently and satisfied himself that he was holding their attention. Now—could he bring them out of their seats with nothing more than the sterile tones of a multichord? He gave the melody a rhythmic snap, and the stomping began. As he increased the volume again, Rose came stumbling out of a doorway and hurried across the stage, perplexity written on her pert face. “It’s all right,” Baque told her. “I’m just playing to amuse myself. Don’t come back until you’re ready.” She nodded and walked away. A red-faced spacer near the platform looked up at the revealed outline of her young body and leered. Fascinated, Baque studied the coarse, demanding lust in his face and searched the keyboard to express it. This? Or— this? Or— He had it. He felt himself caught up in the relentless rhythm. His foot tightened on the volume control, and he turned to watch the customers. Every pair of eyes stared hypnotically at his corner of the room. A bartender stood at a half crouch, mouth agape. There was uneasiness, a strained shuffling of feet, a restless scraping of chairs. Baque’s foot dug harder at the volume control. His hands played on hypnotically, and he stared in horror at the scene that erupted below him. Lasciviousness twisted every face. Men were on their feet, reaching for the women, clutching, pawing. A chair crashed to the floor, and a table, and no one noticed. A woman’s dress fluttered crazily downward, and the pursued were pursuers while Baque helplessly allowed his fingers to race onward, out of control. With a violent effort he wrenched his hands from the keys, and the ensuing silence crashed the room like a clap of thunder. Fingers trembling, Baque began to play softly, indifferently. Order was restored when he looked again, the chair and table were upright, and the customers were seated in apparent relaxation except for one woman who struggled back into her dress in obvious embarrassment. Baque continued to play quietly until the girls returned. At six A.M., his body wracked with weariness, his hands aching, his legs cramped, Baque climbed down from the multichord. Lankey stood waiting for him. “Class One rates,” he said. “You’ve got a job with me as long as you want it. But take it a little easy with that stuff, will you?” Baque remembered Val, alone in their dreary apartment and eating synthetic food. “Would I be out of order to ask for an advance?” “No,” Lankey said. “Not out of order. I told the cashier to give you a hundred on your way out. Call it a bonus.” Weary from his long conveyer ride, Baque walked quietly into his dim apartment and looked about. There was no sign of Val—she would still be sleeping. He sat down at his own multichord and touched the keys. He felt awed and humble and disbelieving. Music without Coms, without words, could make people laugh and cry, and dance and cavort madly. And it could turn them into lewd animals. Wonderingly he played the music that had incited such unconcealed lust, played it louder, and louder— And felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to look into Val’s passion-twisted face. He asked Hulsey to come and hear him that night, and later Hulsey sat slumped on the cot in his room and shuddered. “It isn’t right. No man should have that power over people. How do you do it?” “I don’t know,” Baque said. “I saw that young couple sitting there, and they were happy, and I felt their happiness. And as I played everyone in the room was happy. And then another couple came in quarreling, and the next thing I knew I had everyone mad.” “Almost started a fight at the next table,” Hulsey said. “And what you did after that—“ ”Yes. But not as much as I did last night. You should have seen it last night.“ Hulsey shuddered again. ”I have a book about ancient Greek music,“ Baque said. ”They had something they called ethos. They thought that the different musical scales affected people in different ways—could make them sad, or happy, or even drive them crazy. They claimed that a musician named Orpheus could move trees and soften rocks with his music. Now listen. I’ve had a chance to experiment, and I’ve noticed that my playing is most effective when I don’t use the filters. There are only two filters that work on that multichord anyway—flute and violin—but when I use either of them the people don’t react so strongly. I’m wondering if maybe the effects the Greeks talk about were produced by their instruments, rather than their scales. I’m wondering if the tone of an unfiltered multichord might have something in common with the tones of the ancient Greek kithara or aulos.“ Hulsey grunted. ”I don’t think it’s the instrument, or the scales either. I think it’s Baque, and I don’t like it. You should have stayed a tunesmith.“ ”I want you to help me,“ Baque said. ”I want to find a place where we can put a lot of people—a thousand, at least—not to eat, or watch Coms, but just to listen to one man play on a multichord.“ Hulsey got up abruptly. ”Baque, you’re a dangerous man. I’m damned if I’ll trust any man who can make me feel the way you made me feel tonight. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but I won’t have any part of it.“ He stomped away in the manner of a man about to slam a door, but the room of a male multichordist at the Lankey-Pank Out did not rate that luxury. Hulsey paused uncertainly in the doorway, gave Baque a parting glare, and disappeared. Baque followed him as far as the main room and stood watching him weave his way impatiently past the tables to the exit. From his place behind the bar, Lankey looked at Baque and then glanced after the disappearing Hulsey. ”Troubles?“ he asked. Baque turned away wearily. ”I’ve known that man for twenty years. I never thought he was my friend. But then—I never thought he was my enemy, either.“ ”Sometimes it works out that way,“ Lankey said. Baque shook his head. ”I’d like to try some Martian whisky. I’ve never tasted the stuff.”

Two weeks made Baque an institution, and the Lankey-Pank Out was jammed to capacity from the time he went to work until he left the next morning. When he performed alone, he forgot about Coms and played whatever he wanted. He even performed short pieces by Bach for the customers, and received generous applause, but the reaction was nothing like the tumultuous enthusiasm that followed his improvisations. Sitting behind the bar, eating his evening meal and watching the impacted mass of customers, Baque felt vaguely happy. He was enjoying the work he was doing. For the first time in his life he had more money than he needed. For the first time in his life he had a definite goal and a vague notion of a plan that would accomplish it—would eliminate the Coms altogether. As Baque pushed his tray aside, he saw Biff the doorman step forward to greet a pair of newcomers, halt suddenly, and back away in stupefied amazement. And no wonder—evening clothes at the Lankey-Pank Out! The couple halted near the door, blinking uncertainly in the dim, smoke-tinted light. The man was bronzed and handsome, but no one noticed him. The woman’s beauty flashed like a meteor against the drab surroundings. She moved in an aura of shining loveliness, with her hair gleaming golden, her shimmering, flowing gown clinging seductively to her voluptuous figure, and her fragrance routing the foul tobacco and whisky odors. In an instant all eyes were fixed on her, and a collective gasp encircled the room. Baque stared with the others and finally recognized her: Marigold, of Morning with Marigold. Worshiped around the Solar System by the millions of devotees to her visiscope program. Mistress, it was said, to James Denton, the czar of visiscope. Marigold Manning. She raised a hand to her mouth in mock horror, and the bright tones of her laughter dropped tantalizingly among the spellbound spacers. “What an odd place! Where’d you ever hear about a place like this?” “I need some Martian whisky, damn it,” the man said. “So stupid of the port bar to run out. With all those ships from Mars coming in, too. Are you sure we can get back in time? Jimmy’ll raise hell if we aren’t there when he lands.” Lankey touched Baque’s arm. “After six,” he said, without taking his eyes from Marigold Manning. “They’ll be getting impatient.” Baque nodded and started for the multichord. The tumult began the moment the customers saw him. They abandoned Marigold Manning, leaped to their feet, and began a stomping, howling ovation. When Baque paused to acknowledge it, Marigold and her escort were staring openmouthed at the nondescript man who could inspire such undignified enthusiasm. Her exclamation rang out sharply as Baque seated himself at the multichord and the ovation faded to an expectant silence. “What the hell!” Baque shrugged and started to play. When Marigold finally left, after a brief conference with Lankey, her escort still hadn’t got his Martian whisky. The next evening Lankey greeted Baque with both fists full of telenotes. “What a hell of a mess this is! You see this Marigold dame’s program this morning?” Baque shook his head. “I haven’t watched visiscope since I came to work here.” “In case it interests you, you were—what does she call it?—a ‘Marigold Exclusive’ on visiscope this morning. Erlin Baque, the famous tunesmith, is now playing the multichord in a queer little restaurant called the Lankey-Pank Out. If you want to hear some amazing music, wander out to the New Jersey Space Port and listen to Baque. Don’t miss it. The experience of a lifetime.” Lankey swore and waved the telenotes. “Queer, she calls us. Now I’ve got ten thousand requests for reservations, some from as far away as Budapest and Shanghai. And our capacity is five hundred, counting standing room. Damn that woman! We already had all the business we could handle.” “You need a bigger place,” Baque said. “Yes. Well, confidentially, I’ve got my eye on a big warehouse. It’ll seat a thousand, at least. We’ll clean up. I’ll give you a contract to take charge of the music.” Baque shook his head. “How about opening a big place uptown? Attract people that have more money to spend. You run it, and I’ll bring in the customers.” Lankey caressed his flattened nose thoughtfully. “How do we split?” “Fifty-fifty,” Baque said. “No,” Lankey said, shaking his head slowly. “I play fair, Baque, but fifty-fifty wouldn’t be right on a deal like that. I’d have to put up all the money myself. I’ll give you one-third to handle the music.”