He hunched up his shoulders and walked awkwardly along the stationary sidewalk. At a crowded restaurant he turned in, found a table at one side, and ordered beer. On the rear wall was an enormous visiscope screen where the Coms followed each other without interruption. Around him the other customers watched and listened while they ate. Some nodded their heads jerkily in time with the music. A few young couples were dancing on the small dance floor, skillfully changing steps as the music shifted from one Com to another.
Baque watched them sadly and thought about the way things had changed. At one time, he knew, there had been special music for dancing and special groups of instruments to play it. And people had gone to concerts by the thousands, sitting in seats with nothing to look at but the performers.
All of it had vanished. Not only the music, but art and literature and poetry. The plays he once read in his grandfather’s school books were forgotten.
James Denton’s Visiscope International decreed that people must look and listen at the same time, and that the public attention span wouldn’t tolerate long programs. So there were Coms.
Damn Coms!
When Val returned to the apartment an hour later, Baque was sitting in the corner staring at the battered plastic cabinet that held the crumbling volumes he had collected from the days when books were still printed on paper—a scattering of biographies, books on music history, and technical books about music theory and composition. Val looked twice about the room before she noticed him, and then she confronted him anxiously, stark tragedy etching her wan face.
“The man’s coming to fix the food synthesizer.”
“Good,” Baque said.
“But the landlord won’t wait. If we don’t pay him day after tomorrow—pay him everything—we’re out.”
“So we’re out.”
“Where will we go? We can’t get in anywhere without paying something in advance.”
“So we won’t get in anywhere.”
She fled sobbing into the bedroom.
THE NEXT MORNING Baque resigned from the Tunesmiths’ Guild and joined the Performers’ Guild. Hulsey’s round face drooped mournfully when he heard the news. He loaned Baque enough money to pay his guild registration fee and quiet the landlord, and he expressed his sorrow in eloquent terms as he hurried Baque out of his office. He would, Baque knew, waste no time in assigning Baque’s clients to his other tunesmiths—to men who worked faster and not so well.
Baque went to the Guild Hall, where he sat for five hours waiting for a multichord assignment. He was finally summoned to the secretary’s office and brusquely motioned into a chair. The secretary eyed him suspiciously.
“You belonged to the Performers’ Guild twenty years ago, and you left it to become a tunesmith. Right?”
“Right,” Baque said.
“You lost your seniority after three years. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“I did, but I didn’t think it mattered. There aren’t many good multichord players around.”
“There aren’t many good jobs around, either. You’ll have to start at the bottom.” He scribbled on a slip of paper and thrust it at Baque. “This one pays well, but we have a hard time keeping a man there. Lankey isn’t easy to work for. If you don’t irritate him too much—well, then we’ll see.”
Baque rode the conveyer out to the New Jersey Space Port, wandered through a rattletrap slum area getting his directions hopelessly confused, and finally found the place almost within radiation distance of the port. The sprawling building had burned at some time in the remote past. Stubbly remnants of walls rose out of the weed-choked rubble. A wall curved toward a dimly lit cavity at one corner, where steps led uncertainly downward. Overhead, an enormous sign pointed its flowing colors in the direction of the port. The LANKEY-PANK OUT.
Baque stepped through the door and faltered at the onslaught of extraterrestrial odors. Lavender-tinted tobacco smoke, the product of the enormous leaves grown in bot-domes in the Lunar Mare Crisium, hung like a limp blanket midway between floor and ceiling. The revolting, cutting fumes of blast, a whisky blended with a product of Martian lichens, staggered him. He had a glimpse of a scattered gathering of tough spacers and tougher prostitutes before the doorman planted his bulky figure and scarred caricature of a face in front of him.
“You looking for someone?”
“Mr. Lankey.”
The doorman jerked a thumb in the direction of the bar and noisily stumbled back into the shadows. Baque walked toward the bar.
He had no trouble in picking out Lankey. The proprietor sat on a tall stool behind the bar. In the dim, smoke-streaked light his taut pale face had a spectral grimness. He leaned an elbow on the bar, fingered his flattened stump of a nose with the two remaining fingers on his hairy hand, and as Baque approached he thrust his bald head forward and eyed him coldly.
“I’m Erlin Baque,” Baque said.
“Yeah. The multichord player. Can you play that multichord, fellow?”
“Why, yes, I can play—”
“That’s what they all say, and I’ve had maybe two in the last ten years that could really play. Most of them come out here figuring they’ll set the thing on automatic and fuss around with one finger. I want that multichord played, fellow, and I’ll tell you right now—if you can’t play you might as well jet for home. There isn’t any automatic on my multichord. I had it disconnected.”
“I can play,” Baque told him.
“All right. It doesn’t take more than one Com to find out. The guild rates this place as Class Four, but I pay Class One rates if you can play. If you can really play, I’ll slip you some bonuses the guild won’t know about. Hours are six P.M. to six A.M., but you get plenty of breaks, and if you get hungry or thirsty just ask for what you want. Only go easy on the hot stuff. I won’t go along with a drunk multichord player no matter how good he is. Rose!”
He bellowed the name a second time, and a woman stepped from a door at the side of the room. She wore a faded dressing gown, and her tangled hair hung untidily about her shoulders. She turned a small, pretty face toward Baque and studied him boldly.
“Multichord,” Lankey said. “Show him.”
Rose beckoned, and Baque followed her toward the rear of the room. Suddenly he halted in amazement.
“What’s the matter?” Rose asked.
“No visiscope!”
“No. Lankey says the spacers want better things to look at than soapsuds and flyers.” She giggled. “Something like me, for example.”
“I never heard of a restaurant without visiscope.”
“Neither did I, until I came here. But Lankey’s got three of us to sing the Coms, and you’re to do the multichord with us. I hope you make the grade. We haven’t had a multichord player for a week, and it’s hard singing without one.”
“I’ll make out all right,” Baque said.
A narrow platform stretched across the end of the room where any other restaurant would have had its visiscope screen. Baque could see the unpatched scars in the wall where the screen had been torn out.
“Lankey ran a joint at Port Mars back when the colony didn’t have visiscope,” Rose said. “He has his own ideas about how to entertain customers. Want to see your room?”
Baque was examining the multichord. It was a battered old instrument, and it bore the marks of more than one brawl. He fingered the filter buttons and swore softly to himself. Only the flute and violin filters clicked into place properly. So he would have to spend twelve hours a day with the twanging tones of an unfiltered multichord.
“Want to see your room?” Rose asked again. “It’s only five. You might as well relax until we have to go to work.”
Rose showed him a cramped enclosure behind the bar. He stretched out on a hard cot and tried to relax, and suddenly it was six o’clock and Lankey stood in the door beckoning to him.
He took his place at the multichord and fingered the keys impatiently. He felt no nervousness. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know
about Coms, and he knew he wouldn’t have trouble with the music, but the atmosphere disturbed him. The haze of smoke was thicker, and he blinked his smarting eyes and felt the whisky fumes tear at his nostrils when he took a deep breath.
There was still only a scattering of customers. The men were mechanics in grimy work suits, swaggering pilots, and a few civilians who liked their liquor strong and didn’t mind the surroundings. The women were—women; two of them, he guessed, for every man in the room.
Suddenly the men began an unrestrained stomping of feet accented with yelps of approval. Lankey was crossing the platform with Rose and the other singers. Baque’s first horrified impression was that the girls were nude, but as they came closer he made out their brief plastic costumes. Lankey was right, he thought. The spacers would much prefer that kind of scenery to animated Coms on a visiscope screen.
“You met Rose,” Lankey said. “This is Zanna and Mae. Let’s get going.”
He walked away, and the girls gathered about the multichord. “What Coms do you know?” Rose asked.
“I know them all.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “We sing together, and then we take turns. Are you sure you know them all?”
Baque flipped on the power and sounded a chord. “Sing any Com you want—I can handle it.”
“Well—we’ll start out with a Tasty-Malt Com. It goes like this.” She hummed softly. “Know that one?”
“I wrote it,” Baque said.
They sang better than he had expected. He followed them easily, and while he played he kept his eyes on the customers. Heads were jerking in time with the music, and he quickly caught the mood and began to experiment. His fingers shaped a rolling rhythm in the bass, fumbled with it tentatively, and then expanded it. He abandoned the melodic line, leaving the girls to carry on by themselves while he searched the entire keyboard to ornament the driving rhythm.
Feet began to stomp. The girls’ bodies were swaying wildly, and Baque felt himself rocking back and forth as the music swept on recklessly. The girls finished their lyrics, and when he did not stop playing they began again. Spacers were on their feet, now, clapping and swaying. Some seized their women and began dancing in the narrow spaces between the tables. Finally Baque forced a cadence and slumped forward, panting and mopping his forehead. One of the girls collapsed onto the stage. The others hauled her to her feet, and the three of them fled to a frenzy of applause.
Baque felt a hand on his shoulder. Lankey. His ugly, expressionless face eyed Baque, turned to study the wildly enthusiastic customers, turned back to Baque. He nodded and walked away.
Rose returned alone, still breathing heavily. “How about a Sally Ann Perfume Com?”
Baque searched his memory and was chagrined to find no recollection of Sally Ann’s Coms. “Tell me the words,” he said. She recited them tonelessly—a tragic little story about the shattered romance of a girl who did not use Sally Ann. “Now I remember,” Baque told her. “Shall we make them cry? Just concentrate on that. It’s a sad story, and we’re going to make them cry.”
She stood by the multichord and sang plaintively. Baque fashioned a muted, tremulous accompaniment, and when the second verse started he improvised a drooping countermelody. The spacers sat in hushed suspense. The men did not cry, but some of the women sniffed audibly, and when Rose finished there was a taut silence.
“Quick!” Baque hissed. “Let’s brighten things up. Sing another Com—anything!”
She launched into a Puffed Bread Com, and Baque brought the spacers to their feet with the driving rhythm of his accompaniment.
The other girls took their turns, and Baque watched the customers detachedly, bewildered at the power that surged in his fingers. He carried them from one emotional extreme to the other and back again, improvising, experimenting. And his mind fumbled haltingly with an idea.
“Time for a break,” Rose said finally. “Better get something to eat.”
An hour and a half of continuous playing had left Baque drained of strength and emotion, and he accepted his dinner tray indifferently and took it to the enclosure they called his room. He did not feel hungry. He sniffed doubtfully at the food, tasted it—and ate ravenously. Real food, after months of synthetics!
When he’d finished he sat for a time on his cot, wondering how long the girls took between appearances, and then he went looking for Lankey.
“I don’t like sitting around,” he said. “Any objection to my playing?”
“Without the girls?”
“Yes.”
Lankey planted both elbows on the bar, cupped his chin in one fist, and sat looking absently at the far wall. “You going to sing yourself?” he asked finally.
“No. Just play.”
“Without any singing? Without words?”
“Yes.”
“What’ll you play?”
“Coms. Or I might improvise something.”
A long silence. Then—“Think you could keep things moving while the girls are out?”
“Of course I could.”
Lankey continued to concentrate on the far wall. His eyebrows contracted, relaxed, contracted again. “All right,” he said. “I was just wondering why I never thought of it.”
Unnoticed, Baque took his place at the multichord. He began softly, making the music an unobtrusive background to the rollicking conversation that filled the room. As he increased the volume, faces turned in his direction.
He wondered what these people were thinking as they heard for the first time music that was not a Com, music without words. He watched intently and satisfied himself that he was holding their attention. Now—could he bring them out of their seats with nothing more than the sterile tones of a multichord? He gave the melody a rhythmic snap, and the stomping began.
As he increased the volume again, Rose came stumbling out of a doorway and hurried across the stage, perplexity written on her pert face.
“It’s all right,” Baque told her. “I’m just playing to amuse myself. Don’t come back until you’re ready.”
She nodded and walked away. A red-faced spacer near the platform looked up at the revealed outline of her young body and leered. Fascinated, Baque studied the coarse, demanding lust in his face and searched the keyboard to express it. This? Or—this? Or—
He had it. He felt himself caught up in the relentless rhythm. His foot tightened on the volume control, and he turned to watch the customers.
Every pair of eyes stared hypnotically at his corner of the room. A bartender stood at a half crouch, mouth agape. There was uneasiness, a strained shuffling of feet, a restless scraping of chairs. Baque’s foot dug harder at the volume control.
His hands played on hypnotically, and he stared in horror at the scene that erupted below him. Lasciviousness twisted every face. Men were on their feet, reaching for the women, clutching, pawing. A chair crashed to the floor, and a table, and no one noticed. A woman’s dress fluttered crazily downward, and the pursued were pursuers while Baque helplessly allowed his fingers to race onward, out of control.
With a violent effort he wrenched his hands from the keys, and the ensuing silence crashed the room like a clap of thunder. Fingers trembling, Baque began to play softly, indifferently. Order was restored when he looked again, the chair and table were upright, and the customers were seated in apparent relaxation except for one woman who struggled back into her dress in obvious embarrassment.
Baque continued to play quietly until the girls returned.
At six A.M., his body wracked with weariness, his hands aching, his legs cramped, Baque climbed down from the multichord. Lankey stood waiting for him. “Class One rates,” he said. “You’ve got a job with me as long as you want it. But take it a little easy with that stuff, will you?”
Baque remembered Val, alone in their dreary apartment and eating synthetic food. “Would I be out of order to ask for an advance?”
“No,” Lankey said. “Not out of order. I told the cashier to give you a hundred on
your way out. Call it a bonus.”
Weary from his long conveyer ride, Baque walked quietly into his dim apartment and looked about. There was no sign of Val—she would still be sleeping. He sat down at his own multichord and touched the keys.
He felt awed and humble and disbelieving. Music without Coms, without words, could make people laugh and cry, and dance and cavort madly.
And it could turn them into lewd animals.
Wonderingly he played the music that had incited such unconcealed lust, played it louder, and louder—
And felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to look into Val’s passion-twisted face.
He asked Hulsey to come and hear him that night, and later Hulsey sat slumped on the cot in his room and shuddered. “It isn’t right. No man should have that power over people. How do you do it?”
“I don’t know,” Baque said. “I saw that young couple sitting there, and they were happy, and I felt their happiness. And as I played everyone in the room was happy. And then another couple came in quarreling, and the next thing I knew I had everyone mad.”
“Almost started a fight at the next table,” Hulsey said. “And what you did after that—”
“Yes. But not as much as I did last night. You should have seen it last night.”
Hulsey shuddered again.
“I have a book about ancient Greek music,” Baque said. “They had something they called ethos. They thought that the different musical scales affected people in different ways—could make them sad, or happy, or even drive them crazy. They claimed that a musician named Orpheus could move trees and soften rocks with his music. Now listen. I’ve had a chance to experiment, and I’ve noticed that my playing is most effective when I don’t use the filters. There are only two filters that work on that multichord anyway—flute and violin—but when I use either of them the people don’t react so strongly. I’m wondering if maybe the effects the Greeks talk about were produced by their instruments, rather than their scales. I’m wondering if the tone of an unfiltered multichord might have something in common with the tones of the ancient Greek kithara or aulos.”
Hulsey grunted. “I don’t think it’s the instrument, or the scales either. I think it’s Baque, and I don’t like it. You should have stayed a tunesmith.”
Masterpieces Page 9