by John Varley
Some of them died. The Rings, after all, were hazardous. These people had no way of learning how to survive out there except by trying and succeeding. But most came back. And they came back with pictures and songs and stories.
Agentry was the only industry on Janus. It took a special kind of agent, because few Ringers could walk into an office and present a finished work of any kind. A literary agent had the easiest job. But a tinpanalleycat had to be ready to teach some rudiments of music to the composer who knew nothing about notation.
The rewards were high. Ringer art was statistically about ten times more likely to sell than art from anywhere else in the system. Better yet, the agent took nearly all the profits instead of a commission, and the artists were never pressuring for more. Ringers had little use for money. Often, an agent could retire on the proceeds of one successful sale.
But the fundamental question of why Ringers produced art was unanswered.
Barnum didn’t know. He had some ideas, partially confirmed by Bailey. It was tied up in the blending of the human and symb mind. A Ringer was more than a human, and yet still human. When combined with a symb, something else was created. It was not under their control. The best way Barnum had been able to express it to himself was by saying that this meeting of two different kinds of mind set up a tension at the junction. It was like the addition of amplitudes when two waves meet head on. That tension was mental, and fleshed itself with the symbols that were lying around for the taking in the mind of the human. It had to use human symbols because the intellectual life of a symb starts at the moment it comes in contact with a human brain. The symb has no brain of its own and has to make do with using the human brain on a timesharing basis.
Barnum and Bailey did not worry about the source of their inspiration. Tympani worried about it a lot. She resented the fact that the muse which had always eluded her paid such indiscriminate visits to human-symb pairs. She admitted to them that she thought it unfair, but refused to give them an answer when asked why she would not take the step pairing herself.
But Barnum and Bailey were offering her an alternative, a way to sample what it was like to be paired without actually taking that final step.
In the end, her curiosity defeated her caution. She agreed to make love with them, with Bailey functioning as a living synapticon.
Barnum and Bailey reached Tympani’s apartment and she held the door for them. Inside, she dialed all the furniture into the floor, leaving a large, bare room with white walls.
“What do I do?” she asked in a small voice. Barnum reached out and took her hand, which melted into the substance of Bailey.
“Give me your other hand.” She did so, and watched stoically as the green stuff crept up her hands and arms. “Don’t look at it,” Barnum advised, and she obeyed.
He felt air next to his skin as Bailey began manufacturing an atmosphere inside himself and inflating like a balloon. The green sphere got larger, hiding Barnum completely and gradually absorbing Tympani. In five minutes the featureless green ball filled the room.
“I’d never seen that,” she said, as they stood holding hands.
“Usually we do it only in space.”
“What comes next?”
“Just hold still.” She saw him glance over her shoulder, and started to turn. She thought better of it and tensed, knowing what was coming.
A slim tendril had grown out of the inner surface of the symb and groped its way toward the computer terminal at the back of her head. She cringed as it touched her, then relaxed as it wormed its way in.
“How’s the contact?” Barnum asked Bailey.
“Just a minute. I’m still feeling it out.” The symb had oozed through the microscopic entry points at the rear of the terminal and was following the network of filaments that extended through her cerebrum. Reaching the end of one, Bailey would probe further, searching for the loci he knew so well in Barnum.
“They’re slightly different,” he told Barnum. “I’ll have to do a little testing to be sure I’m at the right spots.”
Tympani jumped, then looked down in horror as her arms and legs did a dance without her volition.
“Tell him to stop that!” she shrieked, then gasped as Bailey ran through a rapid series of memory-sensory loci; in almost instantaneous succession she experienced the smell of an orange blossom, the void of the womb, an embarrassing incident as a child, her first free fall. She tasted a meal eaten fifteen years ago. It was like spinning a radio dial through the frequencies, getting fragments of a thousand unrelated songs, and yet being able to hear each of them in its entirety. It lasted less than a second and left her weak. But the weakness was illusory, too, and she recovered and found herself in Barnum’s arms.
“Make him stop it,” she demanded, struggling away from him.
“It’s over,” he said.
“Well, almost,” Bailey said. The rest of the process was conducted beneath her conscious level. “I’m in,” he told Barnum. “I can’t guarantee how well this will work. I wasn’t built for this sort of thing, you know. I need a larger entry point than that terminal, more like the one I sank into the top of your head.”
“Is there any danger to her?”
“Nope, but there’s a chance I’ll get overloaded and have to halt the whole thing. There’s going to be a lot of traffic over that little tendril and I can’t be sure it’ll handle the load.”
“We’ll just have to do our best.”
They faced each other. Tympani was tense and stony-eyed.
“What’s next?” she asked again, planting her feet on the thin but springy and warm surface of Bailey.
“I was hoping you’d do the opening bars. Give me a lead to follow. You’ve done this once, even if it didn’t work.”
“All right. Take my hands . . .”
Barnum had no idea how the composition would start. She chose a very subdued tempo. It was not a dirge; in fact, in the beginning it had no tempo at all. It was a free-form tone poem. She moved with a glacial slowness that had none of the loose sexuality he had expected. Barnum watched, and heard a deep undertone develop and knew it as the awakening awareness in his own mind. It was his first response.
Gradually, as she began to move in his direction, he essayed some movement. His music added itself to hers but it remained separate and did not harmonize. They were sitting in different rooms, hearing each other through the walls.
She reached down and touched his leg with her fingertips. She drew her hand slowly along him and the sound was like fingernails rasping on a blackboard. It clashed, it grated, it tore at his nerves. It left him shaken, but he continued with the dance.
Again she touched him, and the theme repeated itself. A third time, with the same results. He relaxed into it, understood it as a part of their music, harsh as it was. It was her tension.
He knelt in front of her and put his hands to her waist. She turned, slowly, making a sound like a rusty metal plate rolling along a concrete floor. She kept spinning and the tone began to modulate and acquire a rhythm. It throbbed, syncopated, as a function of their heartbeats. Gradually the tones began to soften and blend. Tympani’s skin was glistening with sweat as she turned faster. Then, at a signal he never consciously received, Barnum lifted her in the air and the sounds cascaded around them as they embraced. She kicked her legs joyously and it combined with the thunderous bass protest of his straining leg muscles to produce an airborne series of chromatics. It reached a crescendo that was impossible to sustain, then tapered off as her feet touched the floor and they collapsed into each other. The sounds muttered to themselves, unresolved, as they cradled each other and caught their breath.
“Now we’re in tune, at least,” Tympani whispered, and the symb-synapticon picked up the nerve impulses in her mouth and ears and tongue as she said it and heard it, and mixed it with the impulses from Barnum’s ears. The result was a vanishing series of arpeggios constructed around each word that echoed around them for minutes. She laughed to hear
it, and that was music even without the dressings.
The music had never stopped. It still inhabited the space around them, gathering itself into dark pools around their feet and pulsing in a diminishing allegretto with their hissing breath.
“It’s gotten dark,” she whispered, afraid to brave the intensity of sound if she were to speak aloud. Her words wove around Barnum’s head as he lifted his eyes to look around them. “There are things moving around out there,” she said. The tempo increased slightly as her heart caught on the dark-on-dark outlines she sensed.
“The sounds are taking shape,” Barnum said. “Don’t be afraid of them. It’s in your mind.”
“I’m not sure I want to see that deeply into my mind.”
As the second movement started, stars began to appear over their heads. Tympani lay supine on a surface that was beginning to yield beneath her, like sand or some thick liquid. She accepted it. She let it conform to her shoulder blades as Barnum coaxed music from her body with his hands. He found handfuls of pure, bell-like tones, unencumbered with timbre or resonance, existing by themselves. Putting his lips to her, he sucked out a mouthful of chords which he blew out one by one, where they clustered like bees around his nonsense words, ringing change after change on the harmonies in his voice.
She stretched her arms over her head and bared her teeth, grabbing at the sand that was now as real to her touch as her own body was. Here was the sexuality Barnum had sought. Brash and libidinous as a goddess in the Hindu pantheon, her body shouted like a Dixieland clarinet and the sounds caught on the waving tree limbs overhead and thrashed about like tattered sheets. Laughing, she held her hands before her face and watched as sparks of blue and white fire arced across her fingertips. The sparks leaped out to Barnum and he glowed where they touched him.
The universe they were visiting was an extraordinarily cooperative one. When the sparks jumped from Tympani’s hand into the dark, cloud-streaked sky, bolts of lightning came skittering back at her. They were awesome, but not fearsome. Tympani knew them to be productions of Bailey’s mind. But she liked them. When the tornadoes formed above her and writhed in a dance around her head, she liked that, too.
The gathering storm increased as the tempo of their music increased, in perfect step. Gradually, Tympani lost track of what was happening. The fire in her body was transformed into madness: a piano rolling down a hillside or a harp being used as a trampoline. There was the drunken looseness of a slide trombone played at the bottom of a well. She ran her tongue over his cheek and it was the sound of beads of oil falling on a snare drum. Barnum sought entrance to the concert hall, sounding like a head-on collision of harpsichords.
Then someone pulled the plug on the turntable motor and the tape was left to thread its way through the heads at a slowly diminishing speed as they rested. The music gabbled insistently at them, reminding them that this could only be a brief intermission, that they were in the command of forces beyond themselves. They accepted it, Tympani sitting lightly in Barnum’s lap, facing him, and allowing herself to be cradled in his arms.
“Why the pause?” Tympani asked, and was delighted to see her words escape her mouth not in sound, but in print. She touched the small letters as they fluttered to the ground.
“Bailey requested it,” Barnum said, also in print. “His circuits are overloading.” His words orbited twice around his head, then vanished.
“And why the skywriting?”
“So as not to foul the music with more words.”
She nodded, and rested her head on his shoulder again.
Barnum was happy. He gently stroked her back, producing a warm, fuzzy rumble. He shaped the contours of the sound with his fingertips. Living in the Ring, he was used to the feeling of triumphing over something infinitely vast. With the aid of Bailey he could scale down the mighty Ring until it was within the scope of a human mind. But nothing he had ever experienced rivaled the sense of power he felt in touching Tympani and getting music.
A breeze was starting to eddy around them. It rippled the leaves of the tree that arched over them. The lovers had stayed planted on the ground during the height of the storm; now the breeze lifted them into the air and wafted them into the gray clouds.
Tympani had not noticed it. When she opened her eyes, all she knew was that they were back in limbo again, alone with the music. And the music was beginning to build.
The last movement was both more harmonious and less varied. They were finally in tune, acknowledging the baton of the same conductor. The piece they were extemporizing was jubilant. It was noisy and broad, and gave signs of becoming Wagnerian. But somewhere the gods were laughing.
Tympani flowed with it, letting it become her. Barnum was sketching out the melody line while she was content to supply the occasional appogiatura, the haunting nuance that prevented it from becoming ponderous.
The clouds began to withdraw, slowly revealing the new illusion that Bailey had moved them to. It was hazy. But it was vast. Tympani opened her eyes and saw—the view from the Upper Half, only a few kilometers above the plane of the Rings. Below her was an infinite golden surface and above her were stars. Her eyes were drawn to the plane, down there. . . . It was thin. Insubstantial. One could see right through it. Shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun (and introducing a forlorn minor theme into the music) she peered into the whirling marvel they had taken her out here to see, and her ears were filled with the shrieks of her unspoken fear as Bailey picked it up. There were stars down there, all around her and moving toward her, and she was moving through them, and they were beginning to revolve, and—the inner surface of Bailey. Above her unseeing eyes, a slim green tendril, severed, was writhing back into the wall. It disappeared.
“Burnt out.”
“Are you all right?” Barnum asked him.
“I’m all right. Burnt out. You felt it. I warned you the connection might not handle the traffic.”
Barnum consoled him. “We never expected that intensity.” He shook his head, trying to clear the memory of that awful moment. He had his fears, but evidently no phobias. Nothing had ever gripped him the way the Rings had gripped Tympani. He gratefully felt Bailey slip in and ease the pain back into a corner of his mind where he needn’t look at it. Plenty of time for that later, on the long, silent orbits they would soon be following. . . .
Tympani was sitting up, puzzled, but beginning to smile. Barnum wished Bailey could give him a report on her mental condition, but the connection was broken. Shock? He’d forgotten the symptoms.
“I’ll have to find out for myself,” he told Bailey.
“She looks all right to me,” Bailey said. “I was calming her as the contact was breaking. She might not remember much.”
She didn’t. Mercifully, she remembered the happiness but had only a vague impression of the fear at the end. She didn’t want to look at it, which was just as well. There was no need for her to be tantalized or taunted by something she could never have.
They made love there inside Bailey. It was quiet and deep, and lasted a long time. What lingering hurts there were found healing in that gentle silence, punctuated only by the music of their breathing.
Then Bailey slowly retracted around Barnum, contracting their universe down to man-size and forever excluding Tympani.
It was an awkward time for them. Barnum and Bailey were due at the catapult in an hour. All three knew that Tympani could never follow them, but they didn’t speak of it. They promised to remain friends, and knew it was empty.
Tympani had a financial statement which she handed to Barnum.
“Two thousand, minus nineteen ninety-five for the pills.” She dropped the dozen small pellets into his other hand. They contained the trace elements the pair could not obtain in the Rings, and constituted the only reason they ever needed to visit Janus.
“Is that enough?” Tympani asked, anxiously.
Barnum looked at the sheet of paper. He had to think hard to recall how important money was to single h
umans. He had little use for it. His bank balance would keep him in supplement pills for thousands of years if he could live that long, even if he never came back to sell another song. And he understood now why there was so little repeat business on Janus. Pairs and humans could not mix. The only common ground was art, and even there the single humans were driven by monetary pressures alien to pairs.
“Sure, that’s fine,” he said, and tossed the paper aside. “It’s more than I need.”
Tympani was relieved.
“I know that of course,” she said, feeling guilty. “But I always feel like an exploiter. It’s not very much. Rag says this one could really take off and we could get rich. And that’s all you’ll ever get out of it.”
Barnum knew that, and didn’t care. “It’s really all we need,” he repeated. “I’ve already been paid in the only coin I value, which is the privilege of knowing you.”
They left it at that.
The countdown wasn’t a long one. The operators of the cannon tended to herd the pairs through the machine like cattle through a gate. But it was plenty of time for Barnum and Bailey, on stretched-time, to embed Tympani in amber.
“Why?” Barnum asked at one point. “Why her? Where does the fear come from?”
“I saw some things,” Bailey said, thoughtfully. “I was going to probe, but then I hated myself for it. I decided to leave her private traumas alone.”
The count was ticking slowly down to the firing signal, and a bass, mushy music began to play in Barnum’s ears.
“Do you still love her?” Barnum asked.
“More than ever.”
“So do I. It feels good, and it hurts. I suppose we’ll get over it. But from now on, we’d better keep our world down to a size we can handle. What is that music, anyway?”