The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  Barnum considered it. “No.”

  “It’s your decision, of course.” She seemed about to say something else but decided against it.

  “Look, I don’t care too much about the title,” Barnum said. “Will it help you to sell it, naming it that?”

  “Might.”

  “Then do as you please.”

  “Thanks. I’ve got Rag working on some preliminary publicity. We both think this has possibilities. He liked the title, and he’s pretty good at knowing what will sell. He likes the piece, too.”

  “How much longer before we’ll have it ready?”

  “Not too long. Two more days. Are you getting tired of it?”

  “A little. I’d like to get back to the Ring. So would Bailey.”

  She frowned at him, pouting her lower lip. “That means I won’t be seeing you for ten years. This sure can be a slow business. It takes forever to develop new talent.”

  “Why are you in it?”

  She thought about it. “I guess because music is what I like, and Janus is where the most innovative music in the system is born and bred. No one else can compete with you Ringers.”

  He was about to ask her why she didn’t pair up and see what it was like, firsthand. But something held him back, some unspoken taboo she had set up; or perhaps it was him. Truthfully, he could no longer understand why everyone didn’t pair with a symb. It seemed the only sane way to live. But he knew that many found the idea unattractive, even repugnant.

  After the fourth recording session Tympani relaxed by playing the synthesizer for the pair. They had known she was good, and their opinion was confirmed by the artistry she displayed at the keyboard.

  Tympani had made a study of musical history. She could play Bach or Beethoven as easily as the works of the modern composers like Barnum. She performed Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, first movement. With her two hands and two peds she had no trouble at all in making an exact reproduction of a full symphony orchestra. But she didn’t limit herself to that. The music would segue imperceptibly from the traditional strings into the concrete sounds that only an electronic instrument could produce.

  She followed it with something by Ravel that Barnum had never heard, then an early composition by Riker. After that, she amused him with some Joplin rags and a march by John Philip Sousa. She allowed herself no license on these, playing them with the exact instrumentation indicated by the composer.

  Then she moved into another march. This one was incredibly lively, full of chromatic runs that soared and swooped. She played it with a precision in the bass parts that the old musicians could never have achieved. Barnum was reminded of old films seen as a child, films full of snarling lions in cages and elephants bedecked with feathers.

  “What was that?” he asked when she was through.

  “Funny you should ask, Mr. Barnum. That was an old circus march called ‘Thunder and Blazes.’ Or some call it ‘Entry of the Gladiators.’ There’s some confusion among the scholars. Some say it had a third title, ‘Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite, ’ but the majority think that was another one. If it was, it’s lost, and too bad. But everyone is sure that Barnum and Bailey liked this one, too. What do you think of it?”

  “I like it. Would you play it again?”

  She did, and later a third time, because Bailey wanted to be sure it was safe in Barnum’s memory where they could replay it later.

  Tympani turned the machine off and rested her elbows on the keyboard.

  “When you go back out,” she said, “why don’t you give some thought to working in a synapticon part for your next work?”

  “What’s a synapticon?”

  She stared at him, not believing what she had heard. Then her expression changed to one of delight.

  “You really don’t know? Then you have something to learn.” And she bounced over to her desk, grabbed something with her peds, and hopped back to the synthesizer. It was a small black box with a strap and a wire with an input jack at one end. She turned her back to him and parted her hair at the base of her skull.

  “Will you plug me in?” she asked.

  Barnum saw the tiny gold socket buried in her hair, the kind that enabled one to interface directly with a computer. He inserted the plug into it and she strapped the box around her neck. It was severely functional, and had an improvised, bread-boarded look about it, scarred with tool marks and chipped paint. It gave the impression of having been tinkered with almost daily.

  “It’s still in the development process,” she said. “Myers—he’s the guy who invented it—has been playing with it, adding things. When we get it right we’ll market it as a necklace. The circuitry can be compacted quite a bit. The first one had a wire that connected it to the speaker, which hampered my style considerably. But this one has a transmitter. You’ll see what I mean. Come on, there isn’t room in here.”

  She led the way back to the outer office and turned on a big speaker against the wall.

  “What it does,” she said, standing in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides, “is translate body motion into music. It measures the tensions in the body nerve network, amplifies them, and . . . well, I’ll show you what I mean. This position is null; no sound is produced.” She was standing straight, but relaxed, peds together, hands at her sides, head slightly lowered.

  She brought her arm up in front of her, reaching with her hand, and the speaker behind her made a swooping sound up the scale, breaking into a chord as her fingers closed on the invisible tone in the air. She bent her knee forward and a soft bass note crept in, strengthening as she tensed the muscles in her thighs. She added more harmonics with her other hand, then abruptly cocked her body to one side, exploding the sound into a cascade of chords. Barnum sat up straight, the hairs on his arms and spine sitting up with him.

  Tympani couldn’t see him. She was lost in a world that existed slightly out of phase with the real one, a world where dance was music and her body was the instrument. Her eyeblinks became staccato punctuating phrases and her breathing provided a solid rhythmic base for the nets of sound her arms and legs and fingers were weaving.

  To Barnum and Bailey the beauty of it lay in the perfect fitting together of movement and sound. The pair had thought it would be just a novelty, that she would be sweating to twist her body into shapes that were awkward and unnatural to reach the notes she was after. But it wasn’t like that. Each element shaped the other. Both the music and the dance were improvised as she went along and were subordinate to no rules but her own internal ones.

  When she finally came to rest, balancing on the tips of her peds and letting the sound die away to nothingness, Barnum was almost numb. And he was surprised to hear the sound of hands clapping. He realized it was his own hands, but he wasn’t clapping them. It was Bailey. Bailey had never taken over motor control.

  They had to have all the details. Bailey was overwhelmed by the new art form and grew so impatient with relaying questions through Barnum that he almost asked to take over Barnum’s vocal cords for a while.

  Tympani was surprised at the degree of enthusiasm. She was a strong proponent of the synapticon but had not met much success in her efforts to popularize it. It had its limitations, and was viewed as an interesting but passing fad.

  “What limitations?” Bailey asked, and Barnum vocalized.

  “Basically, it needs free-fall performance to be fully effective. There are residual tones that can’t be eliminated when you’re standing up in gravity, even on Janus. And I can’t stay in the air long enough here. You evidently didn’t notice it, but I was unable to introduce many variations under these conditions.”

  Barnum saw something at once. “Then I should have one installed. That way I can play it as I move through the Ring.”

  Tympani brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. She was covered in sweat from her fifteen-minute performance, and her face was flushed. Barnum almost didn’t hear her reply, he was so intent on the harmony of motion in that simple mov
ement. And the synapticon was turned off.

  “Maybe you should. But I’d wait if I were you.” Barnum was about to ask why but she went on quickly. “It isn’t an exact instrument yet, but we’re working on it, refining it every day. Part of the problem, you see, is that it takes special training to operate it so it produces more than white noise. I wasn’t strictly truthful with you when I told you how it works.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I said it measures tensions in nerves and translates it. Where are most of the nerves in the body?”

  Barnum saw it then. “In the brain.”

  “Right. So mood is even more important in this than in most music. Have you ever worked with an alpha-wave device? By listening to a tone you can control certain functions of your brain. It takes practice. The brain provides the reservoir of tone for the synapticon, modulates the whole composition. If you aren’t in control of it, it comes out as noise.”

  “How long have you been working with it?”

  “About three years.”

  While Barnum and Bailey were working with her, Tympani had to adjust her day and night cycles to fit with his biological processes. The pair spent the periods of sunlight stretched out in Janus’s municipal kitchen.

  The kitchen was a free service provided by the community, one that was well worth the cost, since without it paired humans would find it impossible to remain on Janus for more than a few days. It was a bulldozed plain, three kilometers square, marked off in a grid with sections one hundred meters on an edge. Barnum and Bailey didn’t care for it—none of the pairs liked it much—but it was the best they could do in a gravity field.

  No closed ecology is truly closed. The same heat cannot be reused endlessly, as raw materials can. Heat must be added, energy must be pumped in somewhere along the line to enable the plant component of the pair to synthesize the carbohydrates needed by the animal component. Bailey could use some of the low-level heat generated when Barnum’s body broke down these molecules, but that process would soon lead to ecological bankruptcy.

  The symb’s solution was photosynthesis, like any other plant’s, though the chemicals Bailey employed for it bore only a vague resemblance to chlorophyll. Photosynthesis requires large amounts of plant surface, much more than is available on an area the size of a human. And the intensity of sunlight at Saturn’s orbit was only one hundredth what it was at Earth’s.

  Barnum walked carefully along one of the white lines of the grid. To his left and right, humans were reclining in the centers of the large squares. They were enclosed in only the thinnest coating of symb; the rest of the symb’s mass was spread in a sheet of living film, almost invisible except as a sheen on the flat ground. In space, this sunflower was formed by spinning slowly and letting centrifugal force form the large parabolic organ. Here it lay inert on the ground, pulled out by mechanical devices at the corners of the square. Symbs did not have the musculature to do it themselves.

  No part of their stay on Janus made them yearn for the Rings as much as the kitchen. Barnum reclined in the middle of an empty square and let the mechanical claws fit themselves to Bailey’s outer tegument. They began to pull, slowly, and Bailey was stretched.

  In the Ring they were never more than ten kilometers from the Upper Half. They could drift up there and deploy the sunflower, dream away a few hours, then use the light pressure to push them back into the shaded parts of the Ring. It was nice; it was not exactly sleep, not exactly anything in human experience. It was plant consciousness, a dreamless, simple awareness of the universe, unencumbered with thought processes.

  Barnum grumbled now as the sunflower was spread on the ground around them. Though the energy-intake phase of their existence was not sleep, several days of trying to accomplish it in gravity left Barnum with symptoms very like lack of sleep. They were both getting irritable. They were eager to return to weightlessness.

  He felt the pleasant lethargy creep over him. Beneath him, Bailey was extending powerful rootlets into the naked rock, using acid compounds to eat into it and obtain the small amounts of replacement mass the pair needed.

  “So when are we going?” Bailey asked, quietly.

  “Any day, now. Any day.” Barnum was drowsy. He could feel the sun starting to heat the fluid in Bailey’s sunflower. He was like a daisy nodding lazily in a green pasture.

  “I guess I don’t need to point it out, but the transcription is complete. There’s no need for us to stay.”

  “I know.”

  That night Tympani danced again. She made it slow, with none of the flying leaps and swelling crescendos of the first time. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, a theme crept in. It was changed, rearranged; it was a run here and a phrase there. It never quite became melodic, as it was on the tape, but that was only right. It had been scored for strings, brass, and many other instruments but they hadn’t written in a tympani part. She had to transpose for her instrument. It was still contra-punctual.

  When she was done she told them of her most successful concert, the one that had almost captured the public fancy. It had been a duet, she and her partner playing the same synapticon while they made love.

  The first and second movements had been well received.

  “Then we reached the finale,” she remembered, wryly, “and we suddenly lost sight of the harmonies and it sounded like, well, one reviewer mentioned ‘the death agonies of a hyena.’ I’m afraid we didn’t hear it.”

  “Who was it? Ragtime?”

  She laughed. “Him? No, he doesn’t know anything about music. He makes love all right, but he couldn’t do it in three-quarter time. It was Myers, the guy who invented the synapticon. But he’s more of an engineer than a musician. I haven’t really found a good partner for that, and anyway, I wouldn’t do it in public again. Those reviews hurt.”

  “But I get the idea you feel the ideal conditions for making music with it would be a duet, in free fall, while making love.”

  She snorted. “Did I say that?” She was quiet for a long time.

  “Maybe it is,” she finally conceded. She sighed. “The nature of the instrument is such that the most powerful music is made when the body is most in tune with its surroundings, and I can’t think of a better time than when I’m approaching an orgasm.”

  “Why didn’t it work, then?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but Myers blew it. He got excited, which is the whole point, of course, but he couldn’t control it. There I was, tuned like a Stradivarius, feeling heavenly harps playing inside me, and he starts blasting out a jungle rhythm on a kazoo. I’m not going through that again. I’ll stick to the traditional ballet like I did tonight.”

  “Tympani,” Barnum blurted, “I could make love in three-quarter time.”

  She got up and paced around the room, looking at him from time to time. He couldn’t see through her eyes, but felt uncomfortably aware that she saw a grotesque green blob with a human face set high up in a mass of putty. He felt a twinge of resentment for Bailey’s exterior. Why couldn’t she see him? He was in there, buried alive. For the first time he felt almost imprisoned. Bailey cringed away from the feeling.

  “Is that an invitation?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t have a synapticon.”

  “Me and Bailey talked it over. He thinks he can function as one. After all, he does much the same thing every second of our lives. He’s very adept at rearranging nerve impulses, both in my brain and my body. He more or less lives in my nervous system.”

  She was momentarily speechless.

  “You say you can make music . . . and hear it, without an instrument at all? Bailey does this for you?”

  “Sure. We just hadn’t thought of routing body movements through the auditory part of the brain. That’s what you’re doing.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She seemed undecided about what to do.

  “Tympani, why don’t you pair up and go out into the Ring? Wait a mi
nute; hear us out. You told me that my music was great and you think it might even sell. How did I do that? Do you ever think about it?”

  “I think about it a lot,” she muttered, looking away from him.

  “When I came here I didn’t even know the names of the notes that were in my head. I was ignorant. I still don’t know much. But I write music. And you, you know more about music than anyone I’ve ever met; you love it, you play it with beauty and skill. But what do you create?”

  “I’ve written things,” she said, defensively. “Oh, all right. They weren’t any good. I don’t seem to have the talent in that direction.”

  “But I’m proof that you don’t need it. I didn’t write that music; neither did Bailey. We watched it and listened to it happening all around us. You can’t imagine what it’s like out there. It’s all the music you ever heard.”

  At first consideration it seemed logical to many that the best art in the system should issue from the Rings of Saturn. Not until humanity reaches Beta Lyrae or farther will a more beautiful place to live be found. Surely an artist could draw endless inspiration from the sights to be seen in the Ring. But artists are rare. How could the Ring produce art in every human who lived there?

  The artistic life of the solar system had been dominated by Ringers for over a century. If it was the heroic scale of the Rings and their superb beauty that had caused this, one might expect the art produced to be mainly heroic in nature and beautiful in tone and execution. Such had never been the case. The paintings, poetry, writing, and music of the Ringers covered the entire range of human experience and then went a step beyond.

  A man or a woman would arrive at Janus for any of a variety of reasons, determined to abandon his or her former life and pair with a symb. About a dozen people departed like that each day, not to be heard of for up to a decade. They were a reasonable cross section of the race, ranging from the capable to the helpless, some of them kind and others cruel. There were geniuses among them, and idiots. They were precisely as young, old, sympathetic, callous, talented, useless, vulnerable, and fallible as any random sample of humanity must be. Few of them had any training or inclination in the fields of painting or music or writing.