by John Barnes
I nodded. “That’s what’s really so odd about Reilis—oh, all right, I caught you both rolling your eyes.”
“Well, Giraut, you’re showing every symptom of being in love again,” Laprada said. “We’ve seen it before. You’re fascinated with someone, you think everything about her is intensely interesting, and you can hardly think of anything other than the question of why she fascinates you so. You were this way about Rebop and Paxa and Azalais, just to mention the more prominent cases over the last decade. So … you were just getting into the part where you tell us you think she’s interesting.”
“Well,” I said. “Caught. She’s lovely, but I’m old enough to be her father, so this is probably going to be a decorous infatuation with a beautiful and very talented student. And she is very talented—finding her here is like finding a Ming cup at a flea market; theoretically possible and not something anyone could have prepared for. So I’m afraid I will be tiresome on the subject of Reilis for a while yet to come; that’s what the OSP pays your exorbitant salaries for, I suppose. What’s on our agenda for tonight?”
“The Manjadorita de Vers,” Raimbaut said.
I groaned. “The Ministry of Poetry. No doubt we will be meeting their top poetry men.”
“Emphasis on the men,” Laprada said. “I’ll put down a threeutil bet that none of them talks about poetry at all, that it’s all about ministerial politics.”
I had reserved the right to schedule private lessons and to decide who got them. Naturally I had scheduled Reilis for the final private evening session. After all, I was trying to act infatuated.
Not actually being infatuated was a much more difficult problem.
I was kinder and more patient with the regular-sessions student that day, an undistinguished young man of sixteen named Bernart who handled his lute as if he were using it to pass an algebra test or to clean silverware—with great precision and little purpose. That was a clue that the feigned infatuation might be less feigned than I would have liked; my kindness and patience with Bernart was entirely a matter of my wanting Reilis, waiting by the doorway, to see me being kind and patient.
Whatever its motivation, kindness and patience seemed to be good for Bernart. That may have been unfortunate; probably I was only encouraging him to continue his technical, spiritless practice, working to attain greater precision the way a sprinter tries to shave time off his fastest. Everywhere in human space, through all of human history, the way to produce vast amounts of unbearably mediocre art has been to praise and reward the people who make it; good work does not come from the satisfied. It might have done Bernart more good to give him the right wound, to say things he would remember with pain for decades. Real art, if it is ever to come at all, comes from the festering place where you harbor the memory of “you just don’t understand what this is all about, and until you do, there is no point in this for you,” as one of my teachers had said to me, dumping me into the street with a lesson half-over.
But just today, it wasn’t in my heart—or in my pride—to sting a young man’s pride that way.
“If Bernart really had it in him to be something finer, perhaps humanity lost an artist at that moment. More likely all that happened was that a very dutiful young man was not shamed and hurt, and humanity gained one more self-satisfied delusionary,” I explained to Reilis, when she asked. She was showing a disconcerting ability to keep interrupting the music lesson with conversation.
Of course I was supposed to be reasonably cooperative with all this. I just wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to enjoy it quite this much.
“Do you really think that people need that wound in the heart to be artists?” Reilis asked. “My life has not had much of that kind of thing, but you seem to like my work.”
“I think it’s more that most people get the wound, and what an artist grows around it is beautiful, but most people just get scars. Don’t be in a hurry to get the wound. It’ll find you.”
“Speaking of that,” Reilis said, “I’d like to do something very improper, of the sort that our local people are constantly inveighing against as one of the Interstellar evils that have come to Nou Occitan. I would like to ask you to have dinner with me this evening.”
Well, perhaps she’d acquire a more subtle technique after she got the wound. “I’d be so delighted to, but tonight it would be a fairly brief dinner or a fairly late one—I’m supposed to be tuning your Opera, and tonight is my first night on the job. I have to be there in two hours, and then after three hours working there, I’ll be free. So if you would like either to go to early dinner that won’t be very long, or to a late dinner afterward—”
“I’d be happy with either, but I have a third possibility.” She smiled and looked down: extremely becoming, perfectly calculated. “Let’s go for coffee and something small now, and then, if it’s all right, I’ll come along and watch you tune the Opera, which would fascinate me, and then finally we can go to late dinner.”
“Absolutely.” On our way to the coffeehouse, I commed Raimbaut and Laprada, and told them to meet us at the Opera.
Not that robots and aintellects couldn’t do a job like tuning the Opera; truth to tell, they could probably produce a better tuning than a human being could. There’s a lingering stereotype—I should know, I grew up with it—that aintellects are stupid machines that are hopelessly literal-minded. I tried hard not to fall into that belief because one of the OSP’s most dangerous enemies was the aintellects’ conspiracy. It was vital to remember that our humanity conferred no mystical advantage or marvelous powers; we were human, they were not, and humans were supreme and intended to stay that way. Objectively speaking in almost every way the aintellects and robots were our superiors—not just stronger and more rational, but able to decide to be as brave, empathetic, sensitive, or perceptive as they needed to be, and able to be loyal and faithful to each other in ways no human being could match.
Human supremacy was necessary exactly because human superiority was false.
Thus a space tuned by machines would not be cold, dry, or harsh; rather the contrary. Show them what you wanted, whatever it was, and they could make more of it than you could; aintellects understood imprecision and fuzzy concepts well before the Inward Turn. They could easily have done what I was supposed to be there for: the slight detuning that makes sound just a bit richer, and the slightly slower die-off of specific frequencies to sweeten the house for particular genres and instruments. After all, their senses are not only more acute than ours, but calibrated, and they can emit virtually any mix of sounds they want from anywhere, and listen from every seat in the house at once.
What a human being could do for the Opera was to tune it to a particular ear and taste—to make it individual, a reflection of the ears and sensibilities of one particular artist. The hall was self-retuning—how else could it stay perfect, since you couldn’t predict exactly where everyone would be sitting, or what they might be wearing a century hence? Thus for each musical genre, one individual could tune the Opera, and the aintellects who ran the Opera could then make that tuning happen for every performer in that genre. And that little trace of individuality made all the difference. I had played in halls tuned by the great Montanhier, and I had to say that a given trobador and canso simply couldn’t sound more vivid and alive, and in halls tuned by Peugot-Hayakawa, and you couldn’t hear more precisely. It was as if, via their tunings, you were able to wear their ears.
Of course most people didn’t notice, any more than most of us can tell the difference between a competent and a great chef, nice clothes and a perfect ensemble, or a well-made chair and an extraordinarily graceful one. But I could tell, and someone here—maybe several someones here—could tell, and they had honored me by asking me to create the “solo-trobador” tuning for their premier performance space. It all might be part of my cover, but I was going to do the best job I could; besides, making Reilis wait around for me, and seeming inadequately fascinated with her company, might cause her to make a b
igger move sooner.
Tuning a place like the Opera isn’t at all complicated; you just put on headphones, select which seats you want to listen from and put each of their microphones onto a channel, and then play and sing in different corners of the stage, checking the sound at each seat from each stage position. Every time a seat hears something you don’t like, you talk to the aintellect, and it tries modifications until you say that that’s the sound that should be happening. The aintellect stores the differences between what that seat gets and what it should get in an error file for later calculation of dynamic corrections to the space.
On old pre-Industrial-Age Earth, some of the great acoustic spaces were corrected by having one man play an instrument at each position. Another man with perfect hearing, superb judgment, and the bizarre ability to imagine how the space would differ acoustically once bodies were in the seats, walked around, listened, and instructed a crew of carpenters that changed things, here and there, by fractions of a centimeter until he heard what he thought he should hear. Remembering that what I was doing in three hours would have been more than a year’s labor for a crew of six or seven highly skilled individuals made me reflect that in some ways we human beings not only could not hope to rise to the levels that came naturally for aintellects and robots; we couldn’t even come up to the levels of people in those long-gone centuries.
It also reminded me that in those centuries, life had been short and cheap. It seemed so strange to me, that having people with such amazing skills and knowledge, who could only be with them so briefly, they had so easily thrown so many of them away.
Yet the art of those centuries was in no way inferior to ours. Rather, just as art from the past always had, it descended on us in such abundance and quality that it threatened to overwhelm our own feeble efforts; every century’s art fights a hopeless battle against all that came before.
This was too much to be thinking about when I should be focusing on my ears. I walked to a point a little above downstage center, a meter or so behind the center of the proscenium arch. That often is a dead spot for sound, but because it is a perfect position for light, many performers are drawn to it, so it had to be made good. I played an arpeggio and listened to the sound from the front corner seats. Sure enough, it was brittle and tinny, so in those corners the house was dry. I told the aintellect about it, and it asked for a minute or so to revise.
I walked from point to point, stopping to play little bits of whatever traditional airs tickled my fancy. In the upstage areas, I found a few spots from which the sound became too sweet in the back rows, especially around the center—the reverberation time in the treble was too long, so that the notes blurred together.
The front corners and some spots on the side aisles were too dry, because there weren’t many surfaces in the positions and angles that would increase their reverberation time, so the lute sounded ever so slightly tinny and my voice a little more reedy from them. So on the whole the hall was dry—a very strange thing, really, in a Romantic culture; cultures like this one had too-wet performance spaces, for the same reason that they had too-red, sentimental lighting, too-bombastic acting, and toosentimental volatile love affairs. Odd to find a dry hall here …
I like acoustics to be a bit sweet—treble reverberation time a shade longer than bass—and that seemed appropriate for a place where mostly Occitan traditional-style music would be performed, with relatively little use of drums and only unamplified strings, some bassoons, and perhaps a few large horns for bass, so I indulged my taste there.
That brought me back to the more difficult decision. A too-wet hall blurs out arpeggios and fine picking, but puts a schmaltzy, sentimental cast on the music. Apart from Reilis, no one I had heard, out of all these supposed young masters, had technique so good that you needed a drier hall to appreciate it, and all of them were lacking in passion. So if this was really the best they could do, they might as well have a slightly corny, sentimentalizing space. But if the quality of musicianship ever improved, they might have to redo the space to be able to hear their own best musicians in it; and schmaltzy and corny acoustics in their premier performance space might, in itself, train some of their musicians into bad habits.
I finally decided that there were really just two considerations about which I felt any strong feelings. First of all, if any first-rate musicians other than Reilis ever came along, they would need this hall to reveal that they were first-rate. Secondly, the two best musicians they were ever apt to have in this space, for a very long time, were in the house, tonight, so I might as well suit it to us. Buildings should not have to fix people’s inadequacies.
I handed Reilis my lute and had her play and sing in a few corners of the stage; her high-soprano voice benefited from the sweetening too, and the wetter but not overwet hall was better for her, especially since she didn’t quite have the power that I did.
To my surprise, I finished about half an hour early. I was either getting more decisive, or hearing less well, as my body aged. I commed Raimbaut and Laprada to say that we would meet them at the restaurant, since it was between us and them, and told the aintellect to lock up and shut down.
Reilis and I walked out the back door into the alley behind the building, then briskly toward the light at the open end of the alley. High overhead, the sky was powdered with stars; the moonlight barely reached two meters down from the top of the flyloft far above us, because the building backed up on another theater.
Like a poor actor missing a cue, a hooded and cloaked figure moved into the alley and hastened toward us. It wore an Ixist hooded cloak—but not like an Ixist.
The entire reason for the great, billowing hood on the Ixist cloak—large enough to cover three human heads, at least—is that it is never pulled over the head; the devout Ixist could conceal his or her face at any time, but chooses never to do so. It is the same sort of symbol as the sharp but never-drawn obsidian dagger they wear at their sides.
Thus I already knew something was wrong. When the figure drew the obsidian dagger, I skip-stepped to the side, pushing Reilis back out of the action, and closed with our attacker from his bad side.
I was trying to make sense of what appeared to be utter incompetence. An obsidian dagger is at best a surgical or butchering tool; terribly sharp, but neither its shape nor its balance is right for a fight. Concealment by wearing a religious costume in a conspicuously wrong way—
Because I had sidestepped, I saw the left hand draw the military maser from inside the folds of the cloak. My opponent was probably left-handed, since the diversionary weapon was being held in the right.
I deliberately risked a long stride, matching my opponent’s, to make the distance close an instant earlier than he was ready for, and crescent-kicked, slapping his maser out of the way and sending it flying to the side, as I let my right hand fly up into his face, further tipping his balance backward. I took an outside over-the-top grip on his right hand to point the dagger away from me, stepped behind him, and pivoted. He flew over his own wrist, landing in front of me. I cranked with both hands and forced him to drop the dagger—lousy weapon or not it could still cut—stamped on the side of his face, and snap-kicked him in the ribs.
I braced myself for the brain bomb that I was sure would fire at any second, but when it didn’t, I knelt and put him in a half nelson, his face pointed into the light spilling from the end of the alley. I jerked his hood back to see what I had.
He looked to be about thirteen or fourteen, but big for his age, just as he had been the first time around. “Marcabru,” I said, looking into the mean little pig-eyes of my onetime best friend, “this might just be the stupidest thing you’ve ever been involved in, and you have always been the absolute donz of stupid.”
He glared at me, breathing hard, but not saying a word. The reek of booze was the same, too. “Fuck you.”
“Still the wit, I see.”
“Fuck you.”
“That doesn’t quite have the impact it did the first time.�
�� As he tried to rear up, maybe to spit at me, maybe to shout, I put my hand on his forehead and shoved the back of his head firmly down onto the pavement. “Yes, yes, I know. Fuck me. Now rest, sweetheart. Has any aintellect been listening?”
“Yes, I have, sir,” the aintellect from my personal computer said, its voice emerging from the communicator on my belt. “And I was able to locate an overhead camera and put you on partial surveillance. Shall I contact the local constable and have him pick up the prisoner?”
“Yes. Thank you very much.”
“Very well, then, the prisoner-transporter is now on its way.”
Reilis approached, very tentatively. I kept an eye on her; if this was an elaborate ruse, I wanted to be ready. “You two know each other?” she asked.
“We were members of the same companho,” I said. “Marcabru went on to a very unhappy and short life, and I did other things. I think if things had been different, he might have joined your Lost Legion and gone from there into your ultratraditionalist network, if those are the ones who sent him. Many of them remind me of him. I don’t imagine that they had much trouble recruiting him.”
“They didn’t really give me a chance to say no,” he said. “But when I heard it was a mission against you, I would have volunteered anyway.”
I heard the distant whirr of high-speed rotors.
The little copter flew right into the alley; the flat-panel springer hung below it like a stage doorway being lowered from the flies. It descended just far enough to rest the lower end of the springer on the pavement. The springer activated, and two robots with multiple spidery legs and padded claws for hands raced through. When they had gripped Maracabru by his arms and legs, I released him from the alley pavement. They carried him through the springer by the arms and legs, headfirst on his back; he looked back at me, and never said a word. He just looked bewildered and lost. Perhaps he was thinking, as I was, how strange to be here, in this situation, considering how it had all started.