The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  Several things were apparent about him; most blatantly, he was not a fashionable man. Shoes had been virtually extinct for over a century for the simple reason that there was nothing to walk on but padded floors. However, current fashion decreed that Shoes Are Worn.

  The man was young-looking, having halted his growth at around twenty years. He was dressed in a holo suit, a generated illusion of flowing color that refused to stay in one spot or take on a definite form. Under the suit he might well have been nude, but Barnum couldn’t tell.

  “You’re Barnum and Bailey, right?” the man said.

  “Yes. And you’re Tympani?”

  “Ragtime. Tympani will be here later. I’m pleased to meet you. Have any trouble on the way down? This is your first visit, I think you said.”

  “Yes, it is. No trouble. And thank you, incidentally, for the ferry fee.”

  He waved it away. “Don’t concern yourself. It’s all in the overhead. We’re taking a chance that you’ll be good enough to repay that many times over. We’re right enough times that we don’t lose money on it. Most of your people out there can’t afford being landed on Janus, and then where would we be? We’d have to go out to you. Cheaper this way.”

  “I suppose it is.” He was silent again. He noticed that his throat was beginning to get sore with the unaccustomed effort of talking. No sooner had the thought been formed than he felt Bailey go into action. The internal tendril that had been withdrawn flicked up out of his stomach and lubricated his larynx. The pain died away as the nerve endings were suppressed. It’s all in your head, anyway, he told himself.

  “Who recommended us to you?” Ragtime said.

  “Who . . . Oh, it was . . . Who was it, Bailey?” He realized too late that he had spoken it aloud. He hadn’t wanted to, he had a vague feeling that it might be impolite to speak to his symb that way. Ragtime wouldn’t hear the answer, of course.

  “It was Antigone,” Bailey supplied.

  “Thanks,” Barnum said, silently this time. “A man named Antigone,” he told Ragtime.

  The man made a note of that, and looked up again, smiling.

  “Well now. What is it you wanted to show us?”

  Barnum was about to describe their work to Ragtime when the door burst open and a woman sailed in. She sailed in the literal sense, banking off the door-jamb, grabbing at the door with her left ped and slamming it shut in one smooth motion, then spinning in the air to kiss the floor with the tips of her fingers, using them to slow her speed until she was stopped in front of the desk, leaning over it and talking excitedly to Ragtime. Barnum was surprised that she had peds instead of feet; he had thought that no one used them in Pearly Gates. They made walking awkward. But she didn’t seem interested in walking.

  “Wait till you hear what Myers has done now!” she said, almost levitating in her enthusiasm. Her ped-fingers worked in the carpet as she talked. “He realigned the sensors in the right anterior ganglia, and you won’t believe what it does to the—”

  “We have a client, Tympani.”

  She turned and saw the symb-human pair sitting behind her. She put her hand to her mouth as if to hush herself, but she was smiling behind it. She moved over to them (it couldn’t be called walking in the low gravity; she seemed to accomplish it by perching on two fingers of each of her peds and walking on them, which made it look like she was floating). She reached them and extended her hand.

  She was wearing a holo suit like Ragtime’s but instead of wearing the projector around her waist, as he did, she had it mounted on a ring. When she extended her hand, the holo generator had to compensate by weaving larger and thinner webs of light around her body. It looked like an explosion of pastels, and left her body barely covered. What Barnum saw could have been a girl of sixteen: lanky, thin hips and breasts, and two blonde braids that reached to her waist. But her movements belied that. There was no adolescent awkwardness there.

  “I’m Tympani,” she said, taking his hand. Bailey was taken by surprise and didn’t know whether to bare his hand or not. So what she grasped was Barnum’s hand covered by the three-centimeter padding of Bailey. She didn’t seem to mind.

  “You must be Barnum and Bailey. Do you know who the original Barnum and Bailey were?”

  “Yes, they’re the people who built your big calliope outside.”

  She laughed. “The place is a kind of a circus, until you get used to it. Rag tells me you have something to sell us.”

  “I hope so.”

  “You’ve come to the right place. Rag’s the business side of the company; I’m the talent. So I’m the one you’ll be selling to. I don’t suppose you have anything written down?”

  He made a wry face, then remembered she couldn’t see anything but a blank stretch of green with a hole for his mouth. It took some time to get used to dealing with people again.

  “I don’t even know how to read music.”

  She sighed, but didn’t seem unhappy. “I figured as much. So few of you Ringers do. Honestly, if I could ever figure out what it is that turns you people into artists I could get rich.”

  “The only way to do that is to go out in the Ring and see for yourself.”

  “Right,” she said, a little embarrassed. She looked away from the misshapen thing sitting in the chair. The only way to discover the magic of a life in the Ring was to go out there, and the only way to do that was to adopt a symb. Forever give up your individuality and become a part of a team. Not many people could do that.

  “We might as well get started,” she said, standing and patting her thighs to cover her nervousness. “The practice room is through that door.”

  He followed her into a dimly lit room that seemed to be half-buried in paper. He hadn’t realized that any business could require so much paper. Their policy seemed to be to stack it up and when the stack go too high and tumbled into a landslide, to kick it back into a corner. Sheets of music crunched under his peds as he followed her to the corner of the room where the synthesizer keyboard stood beneath a lamp. The rest of the room was in shadows, but the keys gleamed brightly in their ancient array of black and white.

  Tympani took off her ring and sat at the keyboard. “The damn holo gets in my way,” she explained. “I can’t see the keys.” Barnum noticed for the first time that there was another keyboard on the floor, down in the shadows, and her peds were poised over it. He wondered if that was the only reason she wore them. Having seen her walk, he doubted it.

  She sat still for a moment, then looked over to him expectantly.

  “Tell me about it,” she said in a whisper.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “Tell you about it? Just tell you?”

  She laughed and relaxed again, hands in her lap.

  “I was kidding. But we have to get the music out of your head and onto that tape some way. How would you prefer? I heard that a Beethoven symphony was once written out in English, each chord and run described in detail. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to, but someone did. It made quite a thick book. We can do it that way. Or surely you can think of another.” He was silent. Until she sat at the keyboard, he hadn’t really thought about that part of it. He knew his music, knew it to the last hemi-semi-demi-quaver. How to get it out?

  “What’s the first note?” she prompted.

  He was ashamed again. “I don’t even know the names of the notes,” he confessed.

  She was not surprised. “Sing it.”

  “I . . . I’ve never tried to sing it.”

  “Try now.” She sat up straight, looking at him with a friendly smile, not coaxing, but encouraging.

  “I can hear it,” he said, desperately. “Every note, every dissonance—is that the right word?”

  She grinned. “It’s a right word, but I don’t know if you know what it means. It’s the quality of sound produced when the vibrations don’t mesh harmoniously: dis-chord, it doesn’t produce a sonically pleasing chord. Like this,” and she pressed two keys close together, trie
d several others, then played with the knobs mounted over the keyboard until the two notes were only a few vibrations apart and wavered sinuously. “They don’t automatically please the ear, but in the right context they can make you sit up and take notice. Is your music discordant?”

  “Some places. Is that bad?”

  “Not at all. Used right, it’s . . . well, not pleasing exactly . . .” She spread her arms helplessly. “Talking about music is a pretty frustrating business, at best. Singing’s much friendlier. Are you going to sing for me, love, or must I try to wade through your descriptions?”

  Hesitantly, he sang the first three notes of his piece, knowing that they sounded nothing like the orchestra that crashed through his head, but desperate to try something. She took it up, playing the three unmodulated tones on the synthesizer: three pure sounds that were pretty, but lifeless and light-years away from what he wanted.

  “No, no, it has to be richer.”

  “All right, I’ll play what I think of as richer, and we’ll see if we speak the same language.” She turned some knobs and played the three notes again, this time giving them the modulations of a string bass.

  “That’s closer. But it’s still not there.”

  “Don’t despair,” she said, waving her hand at the bank of dials before her. “Each of these will produce a different effect, singly or in combination. I’m reliably informed that the permutations are infinite. So somewhere in there we’ll find your tune. Now. Which way should we go; this way, or this?”

  Twisting the knob she touched in one direction made the sound become tinnier; the other, brassier, with a hint of trumpets.

  He sat up. That was getting closer still, but it lacked the richness of the sounds in his brain. He had her turn the knob back and forth, finally settled on the place that most nearly approached his phantom tune. She tried another knob, and the result was an even closer approach. But it lacked something.

  Getting more and more involved, Barnum found himself standing over her shoulder as she tried another knob. That was closer still, but . . .

  Feverishly, he sat beside her on the bench and reached out for the knob. He tuned it carefully, then realized what he had done.

  “Do you mind?” he asked. “It’s so much easier sitting here and turning them myself.”

  She slapped him on the shoulder. “You dope,” she laughed, “I’ve been trying to get you over here for the last fifteen minutes. Do you think I could really do this by myself? That Beethoven story was a lie.”

  “What will we do, then?”

  “What you’ll do is fiddle with this machine, with me here to help you and tell you how to get what you want. When you get it right, I’ll play it for you. Believe me, I’ve done this too many times to think you could sit over there and describe it to me. Now sing!”

  He sang. Eight hours later Ragtime came quietly into the room and put a plate of sandwiches and a pot of coffee on the table beside them. Barnum was still singing, and the synthesizer was singing along with him.

  Barnum came swimming out of his creative fog, aware that something was hovering in his field of vision, interfering with his view of the keyboard. Something white and steaming, at the end of a long . . .

  It was a coffee cup, held in Tympani’s hand. He looked at her face and she tactfully said nothing.

  While working at the synthesizer, Barnum and Bailey had virtually fused into a single being. That was appropriate, since the music Barnum was trying to sell was the product of their joint mind. It belonged to both of them. Now he wrenched himself away from his partner, far enough away that talking to him became a little more than talking to himself.

  “How about it, Bailey? Should we have some?”

  “I don’t see why not. I’ve had to expend quite a bit of water vapor to keep you cool in this place. It could stand replenishing.”

  “Listen, why don’t you roll back from my hands? It would make it easier to handle those controls; give me finer manipulation, see? Besides, I’m not sure if it’s polite to shake hands with her without actually touching flesh.”

  Bailey said nothing, but his fluid body drew back quickly from Barnum’s hands. Barnum reached out and took the offered cup, starting at the unfamiliar sensation of heat in his own nerve endings. Tympani was unaware of the discussion; it had taken only a second.

  The sensation was explosive when it went down his throat. He gasped, and Tympani looked worried.

  “Take it easy there, friend. You’ve got to get your nerves back in shape for something as hot as that.” She took a careful sip and turned back to the keyboard. Barnum set his cup down and joined her. But it seemed like time for a recess and he couldn’t get back into the music. She recognized this and relaxed, taking a sandwich and eating it as if she were starving.

  “She is starving, you dope,” Bailey said. “Or at least very hungry. She hasn’t had anything to eat for eight hours, and she doesn’t have a symb recycling her wastes into food and dripping it into her veins. So she gets hungry. Remember?”

  “I remember. I’d forgotten.” He looked at the pile of sandwiches. “I wonder what it would feel like to eat one of those?”

  “Like this.” Barnum’s mouth was flooded with the taste of a tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat. Bailey produced this trick, like all his others, by direct stimulation of the sensorium. With no trouble at all he could produce completely new sensations simply by shorting one sector of Barnum’s brain into another. If Barnum wanted to know what the taste of a tuna sandwich sounded like, Bailey could let him hear.

  “All right. And I won’t protest that I didn’t feel the bite of it against my teeth, because I know you can produce that, too. And all the sensations of chewing and swallowing it, and much more besides. Still,” and his thoughts took on a tone that Bailey wasn’t sure he liked, “I wonder if it would be the polite thing to eat one of them?”

  “What’s all this politeness all of a sudden?” Bailey exploded. “Eat it if you like, but I’ll never know why. Be a carnivorous animal and see if I care.”

  “Temper, temper,” Barnum chided, with tenderness in his voice. “Settle down, chum. I’m not going anywhere without you. But we have to get along with these people. I’m just trying to be diplomatic.”

  “Eat it, then,” Bailey sighed. “You’ll ruin my ecology schedules for months—what’ll I do with all that extra protein?—but why should you care about that?”

  Barnum laughed silently. He knew that Bailey could do anything he liked with it: ingest it, refine it, burn it, or simply contain it and expel it at the first opportunity. He reached for a sandwich and felt the thick substance of Bailey’s skin draw back from his face as he raised it to his mouth.

  He had expected a brighter light, but he shouldn’t have. He was using his own retinas to see with for the first time in years, but it was no different from the cortex-induced pictures Bailey had shown him all that time.

  “You have a nice face,” Tympani said, around a mouthful of sandwich. “I thought you would have. You painted a very nice picture of yourself.”

  “I did?” Barnum asked, intrigued. “What do you mean?”

  “Your music. It reflects you. Oh, I don’t see everything in your eyes that I saw in the music, but I never do. The rest of it is Bailey, your friend. And I can’t read his expression.”

  “No, I guess you couldn’t. But can you tell anything about him?”

  She thought about it, then turned to the keyboard. She picked out a theme they had worried out a few hours before, played it a little faster and with subtle alterations in the tonality. It was a happy fragment, with a hint of something just out of reach.

  “That’s Bailey. He’s worried about something. If experience is any guide, it’s being here at Pearly Gates. Symbs don’t like to come here, or anywhere there’s gravity. It makes them feel not needed.”

  “Hear that?” he asked his silent partner.

  “Umm.”

  “And that’s so silly,” she went on. “I don’t
know about it firsthand, obviously, but I’ve met and talked to a lot of pairs. As far as I can see, the bond between a human and a symb is . . . well, it makes a mother cat dying to defend her kittens seem like a case of casual affection. I guess you know that better than I could ever say, though.”

  “You stated it well,” he said.

  Bailey made a grudging sign of approval, a mental sheepish grin. “She’s outpointed me, meat-eater. I’ll shut up and let you two talk without me intruding my baseless insecurities.”

  “You relaxed him,” Barnum told her, happily. “You’ve even got him making jokes about himself. That’s no small accomplishment, because he takes himself pretty seriously.”

  “That’s not fair, I can’t defend myself.”

  “I thought you were going to be quiet?”

  The work proceeded smoothly, though it was running longer than Bailey would have liked. After three days of transcribing, the music was beginning to take shape. A time came when Tympani could press a button and have the machine play it back: it was much more than the skeletal outline they had evolved on the first day but still needed finishing touches.

  “How about ‘Contrapunctual Cantata’?” Tympani asked.

  “What?”

  “For a title. It has to have a title. I’ve been thinking about it, and coined that word. It fits, because the piece is very metrical in construction: tight, on time, on the beat. Yet it has a strong counterpoint in the woodwinds.”

  “That’s the reedy sections, right?”

  “Yes. What do you think?”

  “Bailey wants to know what a cantata is.”

  Tympani shrugged her shoulders, but looked guilty. “To tell you the truth, I stuck that in for alliteration. Maybe as a selling point. Actually, a cantata is sung, and you don’t have anything like voices in this. You sure you couldn’t work some in?”