The Metallic Muse

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  I glanced sideways at Beyers. He’d lost interest in the proceedings already—he’d seated himself in the corner and was staring across the room at a full-length photo of Sharon. I thought to myself, in a few more years that girl will be a beauty, and woe to any young man who tries to court her!

  Wilbur bustled about nervously, measuring the professor and fussing with the dials on the back of the robot. He adjusted the screen to the professor’s eye level and moved him forward until his shoes slipped into recesses in a protrusion of the robot’s base. Then he ducked behind the robot.

  “Beginner?” he giggled.

  “Anything you like,” the professor said.

  “We’ll call you advanced,” Wilbur announced. He threw a switch, and the robot hummed quietly. The word TUNE flashed onto the screen.

  The professor scornfully plucked his strings, one at a time, and a green light flashed as each tone sounded. Wilbur stood staring at the robot.

  “Wow!” he exclaimed. “Most of the kids take ten minutes to get green on that!”

  “I believe you,” the professor told him.

  Music flashed on the screen, but he made no motion to raise his violin to playing position. The tentacles suddenly encircled him. As I watched in amazement, the robot gently positioned the violin for him, eased his elbows to the proper angle and raised his bow. The violin tone filled the room, a brittle, mechanical tone. I knew it was not the professor playing.

  He called out above the music, “I am completely relaxed. I do nothing at all, and still the robot makes me play. You see, Johnnie?”

  “Incredible!” I breathed.

  Sam Beyers chuckled quietly.

  “Now I play myself,” the professor said. Instantly the tone was warm and expressive. “Now the robot relaxes. But supposing I try to make a mistake. There, you see? No mistake. And this fortissimo passage—supposing I try to play pianissimo. And I can’t—you see? If I relax, the robot puts the necessary pressure on the bow.”

  “Incredible,” I said again.

  The music flowed on to the end of the exercise. Sometimes it was the professor I heard, sometimes the robot, and the professor kept up a running comment on what was happening. Then the tentacles dropped away, the screen went blank, and the word TUNE appeared. The professor stepped back.

  Wilbur Beyers giggled proudly. Sam Beyers walked over and started to place his hand on the professor’s shoulder. Then he changed his mind. His smile appeared to be normal, but there was a vindictive gleam in his eyes.

  “Are you willing to admit that my robot can teach you a few things?” he asked.

  “But certainly! It’s already given me an idea or two. I’m not satisfied with the response, though. Would you mind if I change strings?”

  “Of course not. Go right ahead.”

  As the professor took new strings from his violin case, voices drifted in from the waiting room. Mrs. Karl Anderson stuck her blonde head through the door. “Is it time for Carol’s lesson? Oh!” She stared at the professor.

  “Bring Carol in, Mrs. Anderson,” the professor said. She has her lesson as soon as I finish mine.” He turned to Wilbur. “Right?”

  “Right,” Wilbur giggled. He winked at Carol, and that young lady blushed and scurried over to seat herself very primly beside her mother.

  “It won’t take much longer,” the professor said. “I’ll try maybe one more exercise. Does it have something difficult?”

  “Sure,” Wilbur said. “I’ll give you something good and hard. It’s pretty good stuff. I was playing it myself yesterday.”

  The professor moved back to the robot, took his position, and plucked his strings. The green lights flashed and the music appeared.

  “Ah!” the professor said. “Paganini. So you play Paganini, Wilbur. That’s wonderful!”

  “Never had a lesson in my life, except from the robot.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “Sharon plays Paganini, too,” Beyers blurted.

  The professor smiled but said nothing—the tentacles, were already embracing him. I leaned forward, waiting to see which would do the playing—the professor or the robot.

  It was neither. After the first few notes even Sam Beyers realized that something was wrong. He bounded to his feet and raced across the room. The sounds limped on, distorted beyond any resemblance to music. Red lights crackled on and off. The robot’s faint hum became louder. Wilbur buried his face in the control panel, mouth agape.

  “Something’s wrong,” Beyers said. “What’d you do, Wilbur?”

  “Nothing—there’s nothing wrong here,” Wilbur gasped.

  The hum became rumbling thunder punctuated with thuds. As the violin labored on, the robot produced a shuddering vibration that shook the room. A thin ribbon of smoke curled from its base.

  “Turn it off!” Beyers shouted.

  Wilbur reached for the switch—too late. The robot’s lights went off, the screen went blank, and the tentacle released the professor and drooped downward, shaken by an occasional spasm.

  “What happened?” the professor asked innocently. I glanced at him and saw him working hard to suppress a grin.

  Beyers ignored the question. “Wilbur,” he snapped, “get Ed up here to take a look at this thing.”

  Wilbur scampered away. Smoke continued to pour from the base of the robot, and Beyers went from room to room opening all the windows.

  “Doesn’t Carol get her lesson?” Mrs. Anderson asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Beyers said. “We’ll have to wait until Ed— Here he is. Ed, what’s got into this thing?”

  Ed shrugged his massive shoulders, dropped a box of tools onto the floor, and went to work on the robot’s backplate. Beyers bent over him, watching. “Ed’s really handy with robots,” he said. “He can fix just about anything.”

  Ed twisted off the plate, flashed a light into the opening, and whistled. “Can’t fix that,” he said. “What happened? This thing’s really burned out.”

  “What’s that?” Beyers demanded incredulously. “You can’t fix it?”

  “Have to send it back to the factory. Needs a whole new unit in there.”

  “Doesn’t Carol get her lesson?” Mrs. Anderson demanded.

  Beyers gestured helplessly. “I guess not. As soon as I get it fixed, I’ll let you know.”

  “Well, I like that!” she said indignantly. “How is Carol going to learn to play if she can’t depend on her teacher? Professor, can you give her a lesson today?”

  “You call Hilda,” the professor said. “She makes the appointments.”

  “Now just a minute,” Beyers protested. “It’ll only take a few days.”

  Mrs. Anderson stared him down. “The professor charges for his lessons,” she said, “but at least he’s dependable.”

  “That’s right, Mrs. Anderson,” the professor said. “I take cold shots and allergy shots and vitamin pills, and now and then maybe I have a sprained ankle or a cut finger. But never yet have I missed a lesson because of a blown fuse.”

  Mrs. Anderson left with Carol firmly in tow. I started after her and waited in the doorway for the professor, who had gone over to pat Wilbur on the back consolingly.

  “Such a pity, Wilbur. Maybe you wore the robot out playing too much Paganini. You let me know when you get it fixed and I’ll finish my lesson.”

  Sam Beyers reared back and pointed a trembling finger. “You’re responsible for this, Perkins. I don’t know what you did, but I’m going to find out, and then I’ll sue you for everything you’ve got. I know it isn’t much, but I’ll sue you for it!”

  “Mr. Beyers,” the professor said gently, “I’ll give you some friendly advice. Send the robot back and forget, about it. It’s a wonderful machine, but it can never be a music teacher. I’ve been playing for nearly sixty years and teaching for fifty, and I know. Robot or human being, there can be no violin teacher without a sense of humor. Shall we go, Johnnie?”

  We went down the stairway and walked along Ma
in Street. The professor was smiling faintly and humming a little tune. If I hadn’t been so curious, I could have done some singing myself.

  “All right,“I said, when I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Just how did you manage that?”

  “Tricks, Johnnie. In fifty years of teaching the violin to children, I’ve learned trick’s no robot will ever know. I even remember a few tricks from the time when I was a little boy.”

  “That I can believe,” I said. “What particular trick did you pull on the robot?”

  “I studied at a conservatory when I was young. Boys will play pranks, you know, and one day they played a prank on me. I was to perform a little solo in a recital and just before I went on they took my violin and switched all the strings around. The strings have been in the same order on the violin probably from the time violins were first made—from lowest to highest, G,D,A,E. The boys switched my strings around and put the highest where the lowest should have been, and the lowest in between somewhere, and when they got through none of the strings was where it was supposed to be.

  “As soon as I got onstage and started to tune I knew what they’d done, but there I was—already in front of the audience. The piece I was to play wasn’t difficult, so I tried to go ahead. I couldn’t even play the first measure! I stopped and made a little speech explaining what had happened, and I changed the strings back to where they belonged. The audience enjoyed it, and I got a lot of applause, and afterward the boys took up a collection and bought me a little medal for courage under duress. I still have it.”

  “Then when you put on new strings—”

  “I changed them around. Instead of G,D,A,E, I made them E,A,D,G. A human being is the most adaptable thing there is, but not even an expert human musician could adapt to that. The robot didn’t have a chance. Its instruments told it the strings were in tune, but wherever it directed my fingers, the wrong notes came out. All it could do was break down. Mavbe I cost Beyers a lot of money, but I’m not really sorry. The robot isn’t good for the students. With it doing everything for them, they could never learn.”

  “Oh, it won’t cost Beyers anything,” I said. “He’s too clever for that. He’ll have a guarantee on the thing, and probably he only bought it on approval. But he’ll get the robot fixed and try again, and he certainly won’t give you another chance to mess it up.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the professor said. “All I really did was speed things up a little. It would have happened anyway, sooner or later. The boys will have their little tricks, and it would have been the filed strings, or someone with vaseline on the bow, the way you did once—no, I haven’t forgotten—or a violin with the sound post removed, or the strings in all different kinds of wrong order, and the robot would have gone back to the factory. If the boys run out of tricks, I can always make a little whisper to one of Beyers’s students. ‘What would happen if you did this? The robot won’t have to go back to the factory many times before the parents get disgusted with it. A violin teacher—”

  “I know,” I said. “A violin teacher has to have a sense of humor.”

  He stopped and grabbed my arm. “Johnnie, we rushed things too much. We should have waited.”

  “How’s that?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

  He looked at me slyly, his eyes sparkling, his face wrinkled into a mischievous smile—the smile of a small boy who’s been bad and knows he won’t be spanked. Suddenly be had me feeling chagrined about all the worrying I’d wasted. The professor was a match for any robot and he knew it. He hoped Beyers would get the thing fixed so he could have another crack at it. I could imagine him getting together with some of his boys and saying, “This time we’ll try—” No wonder the kids loved him!

  He turned away and shook his head sadly. “We should have waited. I’d give anything to know what the robot would have done with Pinky Jones’s trained cricket.”

  Orphan Of The Void

  ( Introduction )

  Erlin Baque, in “The Tunesmith,” read a description of Greek ethos in an ancient book about music. Paul Henry Ling’s Music in Western Civilization (which in Erlin Baque’s time will be an ancient book) explains ethos like this: “According to their writers the will can be decisively influenced by music in three ways. It can spur to action; it can lead to the strengthening of the whole being, just as it can undermine mental balance; and finally, it is capable of suspending entirely the normal will power, so as to render the doer unconscious of his acts.”

  Orpheus is said to have moved rocks and trees with his music, but even apart from the Orpheus myth it is evident that the ancient Greeks were obsessed with the power of music, and their comments about it have fascinated students of music and music history ever since. (Until the twentieth century, the Greek musical instrument, the aulos, was erroneously thought to be a type of flute—actually it was a double oboe with a strident, piercing tone similar to that of a bagpipe—and professors of Greek were fond of pointing out to their awed students that the soft, ethereal tones of the flute could drive the sensitive Greeks to frenzy and were even employed for martial music, whereas modern man is so degenerate that an entire Wagnerian symphony orchestra fails to move him.)

  Were the Greeks really that susceptible to music (or was their music really that powerful?)? Lang says wisely, “According to their writers …” What their writers said about music may have borne no more similarity to its actual effects than today’s patent medicine ads bear to the actual effects of the nostrums they describe.

  * Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization. Copyright © 1941 by W. W. Norton.

  Future archaeologists may be as hard put to explain alleged potency of a certain mouthwash as we are to plain Greek ethos.

  And yet—would writers such as Plato and Aristotle have spoken at such length and with such precision about ethos if it were entirely theoretical?

  When, as a young student of music history, I had my turn at attempting to make sense of this subject, I found to my amazement that musical scholars tended to formulate their own theories and then ignore any part of the Greek testimony that was not in agreement. When I wandered somewhat afield from the usual musicologic sources, I discovered that there was also an ethos of the rhythm and subject matter of Greek poetry, apparently as unknown to musical scholars as the numerous commentaries on the ethos of musical scales and rhythms were unknown to scholars of Greek literature. Music is music, and literature is literature, and as far as I was able to determine the scholars of the twain had never met. I was left wondering to what extent the classic Greek concept of ethos could have been based upon music and poetry: upon song. I’m still wondering.

  But I feel that Plato would have understood perfectly the potency of a song that could fire a wandering orphan with an irrepressible yearning for home. On a somewhat lower level the urge might even be understood—just a little—by those contemporary couples who wax nostalgic over a trite bit of nonsense known to them—privately—as “our song.”

  page 93

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Orphan of the Void

  Prologue

  Harg stooped low, pushed the skin aside, and stepped through the narrow opening into his smoke-filled hut. His wife, Onga, straightened up from the clay stove, pushed the stringy black hair back from her face, and looked at him anxiously.

  “What’d the sky-man want?”

  “He says Zerg must have a party.”

  She gazed at him blankly. “What’s a party?”

  “It’s eating things, mostly.”

  She paled and walked toward him with small, frightened steps. “They think we don’t give Zerg enough to eat? Is that why they take him?”

  “No. It’s—” He gestured helplessly. “I don’t know what it is. Like a Star Festival, maybe, but with just us. And there are gifts, the sky-man said. We must make joy.”

  “Joy!” she moaned. She sank to the floor, and sobs shook her frail body. Finally she controlled her grief and stared up at him, eyes wide with horror.
“They take Zerg, and we must make joy?”

  He turned away and stood peering through a window slot. “The sky-man said he would send the things—the party things. We must make the party at the dawn, and then we must take Zerg to the River.”

  She did not answer. After a time he turned and bent over her and gently raised her to her feet. “At the dawn—” he began.

  “We will make the party. I do not know how, but we will make it. We will take Zerg to the River because we must. But we will not make joy.” There was savage determination in her face, and Harg, who had no conception of beauty, thought her beautiful.

  An ominous rumbling sounded in the distance, Harg whirled and hurried to a window slot. One of the sky-men’s strange things-that-crawl came rocking down the path from the River. He watched it with mouth agape as it swirled along, sending clouds of dust high into the air. It veered suddenly and roared straight toward the hut. Harg stood his ground fearsomely, but Onga fled moaning toward the mat where little Rirga lay sleeping. The thing-that-crawls slowed with a clanking of tracks and came to a halt by the hut.

  There was only one of the sky-men riding in it, and he jumped down and looked about. Harg stooped through the door and approached him humbly.

  “Harg?” the sky-man said, speaking so strangely that Harg almost failed to recognize his name.

  “Yes. Harg.”

  The sky-man turned, picked up a box, and set it Harg’s feet. And another, and still a third. “Par-ty,” he said, mouthing the word strangely. “For par-ty.”

  “I understand,” Harg said. “We will make the party.”

  The sky-man nodded, vaulted aboard his thing-that crawls, and thundered away toward the River. Dust whirled about Harg, choking him, but he stood his ground until the sky-man had vanished over a distant hill. Then he turned slowly and carried the boxes into the hut. He placed them in a corner, stacking them carefully, and neither he nor Onga touched them again. When Zerg came strutting in waving an ornt he had caught, radiant with the frank pride of his three summers, he approached the boxes curiously, and Onga shouted him away.