Variable Star (35 page)

S
o I
had his attention, finally.

Sol was knowledgeable enough to recognize circular breathing, and he was sophisticated enough about the physics of wind instruments to realize how insanely hard it must be to do it on a baritone, and he loved Anna’s voice as much as I did, and its sheer power in such a small enclosed cubic was enormous, and I was playing my heart out. I simply overwhelmed his indifference shields, denied him the power of denial, forced him to listen to what I was playing.

I was playing phrases that
did not end
.

We call them phrases because there’s only so long they can be. Some go so far as to say that the pauses between the notes are the most important parts of the music. Sooner or later even the most complex phrase dies—to be phoenix-reborn a moment later, in the next phrase. This happens even with instruments not constrained by breath or any other limitation. Most music unconsciously echoes the generational nature of human creation, death at either end of every life, an instant of silence before and after each new melody.

I played melodies and themes and motifs that did not end, but flowed endlessly, one into the next without pause, without rest, without hesitation.

At first I underlined that, by playing what first seemed to be conventional sequences, building naturally toward inevitable ending places—that always took an unexpected left turn just before they got there, and turned out to have actually been lead-ins to some
different
familiar series.

Once I saw in his eyes that he got it, I abandoned all convention and just played.

I forgot everything I knew about composition, reattained what Zen people call beginner’s mind, acquired once again the mighty power of ignorance. I shut down most of my brain, except for the part way back by the stem that knows how to make a saxophone work, and gave control of it over directly to my heart. I learned what I was going to play at the same instant Sol and the others did: as it emerged.

If what I played had had lyrics, they would have had to be “Fuck Death,” repeated in every human tongue ever spoken.

I blew phrases that
refused
to end. A structure that climbed as stubbornly and relentlessly and defiantly as the one at Babel rose up from the bell of my horn. I stated a theme that had no resolution and sought none, and proved that it needed none. George R was woven in and out of it—a face whose only expression was a smile. So was London—the London we had known, whose laugh required a baritone sax to do it justice. So were both my parents. Machinist C. Platt made an appearance.

Einstein said, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

I dispelled it.

I did not take my eyes away from those of Solomon Short once. Until I saw, in his eyes, that I had won. That I had penetrated deep enough. I had
forced
him to see that he could feel, and not die of it. It was like watching a man in agony as the morphine hits.

Have you ever had a serious fever? The misery seems not only to last forever, but to have lasted forever—and then it goes on like that for days. But there comes a point when some kind of knot inside suddenly lets go—at the base of the throat, it feels like—and something starts to ease, or melt, or release. It’s a little like drifting off to sleep, only it leaves you more conscious. At first you can’t believe it, and then for a time you’re tearful with gratitude, and about ten minutes later you’re demanding food and the remote control.

I held on until the tearful-with-gratitude stage. I’ve mentioned my unusually accurate time sense. I knew when I’d been playing for fifteen minutes. At sixteen, I yanked the mouthpiece from my lips, chopping off short in the midst of an ascending arpeggio. It took me a ridiculous number of seconds to remember how to take in air by mouth.

Sol didn’t notice. His eyes stayed closed. At the unexpected cessation of sound he first froze, then slumped slightly.

When I had enough control back, I said formally, “The name of that piece is ‘Sol keeps Shining.’”

Nobody said a word or moved a muscle. Except me, getting my breath all the way back and unkinking my neck.

For maybe thirty seconds he moved nothing but his nostrils and chest, so long that I was beginning to wonder if he had entered meditation.

He sat up straight then, and opened his eyes, and looked into mine, and said, “Okay.”

Anna and I bowed.

He turned to meet Dr. Amy’s gaze. “All right,” he told her. “I will.”

She nodded. “I know, Solomon.”

He addressed the room. “Thank you. You are all good people.” He turned back to me. “Except you. You haven’t even left us the option of saying ‘I’m breathless,’ you hammy bastard.”

“I could throttle you,” I offered.

“Well, you’re probably not the only one who’s had that idea lately,” he admitted.

“I’ve
never
been the only one with that idea,” I assured him, and noticed I was leaking tears. It didn’t seem to be a problem.

The old Solomon Short lopsided grin lit the room. “Look—”

“Yes,” I said. “We
will
excuse you. Love to Hideo.”

He nodded, and stood up. He bent slightly, looked up to me for permission, and kissed Anna on her upper lip. Then he straightened, and without asking my opinion kissed me firmly and wickedly on the mouth. Hal opened the door for him, and he left at once.

I started feeling better immediately. It took him four days to finish bringing the other three Relativists around—Peter Kindred took the longest—but the outcome was never in doubt from the moment when he told Dr. Amy, “Okay.”

W
ord got
around.

The next morning, at the Horn, I looked up from my breakfast to find a complete stranger a meter away, seeking to be noticed but looking sheepish. He wanted to know if he could have a copy of “Sol Keeps Shining.” I hadn’t thought about it, but found I didn’t need to. “You’ve come to the wrong window, cousin,” I told him. “That piece and that recording both belong to Solomon Short. It was a work-for-hire, performed in his private cubic, and I’ve waived moral rights. I don’t even have a copy myself.”

He thanked me and went away, and later that day, my mailbox began to overflow with copies of “Sol Keeps Shining,” at least half sent by people I’d never met. Over the next few days, I started hearing it played all over the ship.

Later that day, Dr. Amy came down to Rup-Tooey to hug me. She pretended not to see my tears.

Strangers stopped to bow to me in the corridors. The sets I played at the Horn became full houses, of people who had come to listen. In a musician’s ultimate wet dream, I was literally
commanded
by my community to formally release an album of my work, so that I could sign copies of it for them.

One of Kathy’s husbands, Paul Barr, recorded and mixed it. My backup was her, a bass player named Carol Gregg, Garret Amis on guitar, and a utility infielder named Doc Kuggs filling in on this and that. Richie and Jules handled the mechanics of burning, packaging, and marketing, robbing me no more than an honest ten percent. I called it
On the Road to the Stars
, and included a reinterpretation of that tune.

Shortly after that Herb came up to me, grinning like a Viking after the plunder but before the rape, to inform me that a VIP of the Apple empire back on Terra wanted to know who represented me. Badly enough to pay a fortune for telepathy rather than wait 2.85 years for an answer by laser. I got Paul Hattori to represent me, and three months later my album reached number seven in the Inner System chart, and number three in the Outer. It would have time to win one major critics’ award, as well.

I couldn’t help but wonder what Jinny thought of it. But not hard, or for long. I was busy. Come to find out, a saxophone hero in a small town has absolutely no trouble getting all the dates he wants, on whatever terms suit him. Who knew?

After a few brief holy-shit experiments, I think I did pretty well resisting the temptation to be a jerk and abuse it. I kept remembering that I was always going to live in a small glass-walled town with all these people. Leaving town or planet and reinventing myself was no longer an option.

But I did have me some fun, I did. Herb actually stopped clucking over me.

Immense wealth, creative validation, System-wide fame without any downside, personal popularity, emotional support, great sex—if I’d had any idea how much fun it would turn out to be, I’d have leaped off a cliff
years
earlier.

I
t only
underlined things when word reached us that the long-threatened trade war had finally broken out between Ganymede and Luna, and I discovered that I did not give the least particle of a damn.

Some of the more panicky newsnitwits hack there were shrilly predicting that the conflict would not only metastasize and become Systemic, but would finally trigger the “inevitable” return of armed violence to human affairs, and destroy the Covenant. Of course they’d been saying similar things as long as I could remember, and for every one of the nearly two hundred years since the last recorded shooting war. But even when I ran it through as a hypothetical—no behavior is beyond human beings—I was mildly surprised to find how little it worried me.

Was I really that self-centered and callous? Screw you, Jack, all right? I
knew
people back there. Nice people, who would feel great pain if someone shot them, and feel worse pain if they shot someone. Didn’t I care about them?

Sure. Theoretically. But I think we can only really worry about things that, deep down, we believe we could
do
something about, if we tried. I could no more affect the Solar System than I could events in Sparta, or the Land of Oz. My friends on Ganymede were going to have to look out for themselves. So were my friends on Terra, and in Luna.

I did arrange for a few musicians I knew to get their demos listened to at Apple. But I knew as I did it that it was a message in a bottle, and would probably be my last contact with the Solar System. And unless any of them could afford to spring for telepathy, it was going to be something like five years at a minimum before I could possibly hear any results. They would crawl after us at the speed of light, and we were moving at well over ninety-five percent of that ourselves by now.

Psychologically, I was already becoming a Brasil Novan.

And I wasn’t the only one. As we entered our sixth year, most of us had experienced similar changes. Hits at the ship’s System News website registered a steady decline, without reference to the juiciness of the headlines or sexual attractiveness of those depicted. Mail traffic to sternward showed a similar trend curve.

Terra, Luna, the O’Neills, Mars, Ganymede, the Belt—all of them had become The Old Country. To our children, some of them now three years old, they weren’t even going to be that. When they grew up they’d have trouble keeping them all straight. “I forget, Dad—was surfing invented on Mars, or Luna? I can never remember which one of you had to live inside of.” All but a handful of their own children would possess such information for only one week of their lives, right before final exam week, and then discard it forever with no ill effect.

We not only started to realize that, we started to be okay with it.

We began in subtle ways to function less like a collection of random refugees in a temporary shelter, and more like a community.

There was a fairly long period in its history when Canada was a collection of isolated outposts, its citizens separated by vast gulfs of uninhabitable space and incompatible regional interests, even different languages. Yet they found it possible to maintain a solid, workable sense of national identity based on little more than unusual pleasantness and a shared loathing of their national airline’s coffee.

In the
Sheffield
, it was green mist jokes and shared loathing of rabbit meat in all forms. And, eventually, all things rabbity. Any joke that ended with a bunny covered in green mist was a surefire laugh.

Nations have been founded on worse.

I don’t suppose many of us really despised rabbit as much as we affected to. But it is a virtually fatless meat, pretty boring no matter how you cook it, even in a ship with good air pressure. And rabbits lend themselves to jokes. Few of us like a coward.

And there were ancillary benefits at which one did not
have
to turn up one’s nose, for a change: if you rejected rabbit meat, you either ate syntho—unsatisfying—or you were a vegetarian until the livestock got decanted at Bravo. And while vegetarians fart twice as much as carnivores,
the farts smell ten percent as bad
, or less. There was a noticeable net improvement in…ambience, shipwide.

Things were actually starting to look pretty good, just before everything blew up.

Well, very damn near everything.

Y
ou know the date. Everyone does. Everyone always will.

If we’re lucky.

Everyone everywhere has their own story. For me, this is the way the world ended. Not with a whim, but with a banker.

P
aul Hattori
was a closet soap fiend. We had dozens of them aboard, I had been surprised to discover. But I guess Paul felt an addiction that silly was beneath his dignity as colony banker. I only knew about it because I spent more time than anyone else in Herb’s company.

The phenomenon was perfectly predictable, when you thought about it; I simply never had until I encountered it.

Imagine you are a devoted fan—a much politer term than “addict”—of a daily soap opera. One of the real classics, let’s say,
Corry
, or
The Sands of Mars
. And you happen to be on a starship, boosting at a steady one-third gee.