Another not inconsiderable point: I had hired on this tub as a farmer's helper. The Colonial Council might decide to hold me to it, feeling that the colony needed shit shoveled more than it needed sax played, and until I could afford to put up enough credits for at least one Basic Share, they had as much say over my time as I did. The prudent man would divide his time between the hydroponic farm, and whatever would bring in the highest possible return in the shortest time�which did not describe sax playing in any known universe. Not even the currently most popular kinds of sax music . . . which were decidedly not what I wanted to compose.
If I did not speak up right now, these folks were going to accept me as a composer/musician. That would be awkward down the line if I ended up concluding that my life was best spent as something else altogether.
What else? I hadn't admitted it to myself until now, but what I had always been second most interested in, after music, was history, particularly PreCollapse history. Terrific. If anything, history was even less use than serious music, to a frontier society. If, after a long day in the fields, my hypothetical descendants had any curiosity at all about the planet the Old Farts were always nattering about, they would be more than satisfied with the copious data we already had aboard, and any new historical fact I could ever learn would already be over ninety years old back on Earth, already chewed to death. The Libra colony would one day be interested in its own history�presuming it survived�but not until at least two generations after we landed, which itself was decades away.
Okay, Joel, don't think about what else, now But start backtracking, right now . . . right up to the point where you'd have to commit to some other track. Otherwise you may spend the next twenty years being thought of as the composer who couldn't cut it.
"Sol and Herb spoke a little hastily without realizing it," I heard myself saying. "Music is what I have done. I'm not certain it's what I will do now, aboard the Sheffield. Or when we hit dirt at Brasil Novo either, for that matter. I'm still giving that thought."
"What other areas interest you?" Itokawa asked.
"Well, I've always wanted to try space piracy," I said.
"A step up from musician," Sol agreed drily
"Or perhaps dowsing."
London whooped with laughter, a bracing sound. "Yes, I imagine aboard a ship would be a good place to learn how to locate water. You could check your answers without having to dig all those pesky holes."
I smiled back at her. I wanted to banter with her, but also wanted this part of the conversation over as soon as possible. I had given just enough comic answers to hint that a serious one would not be forthcoming.
"You will find your path," Itokawa said. He sounded a lot more certain than I felt.
"With luck," I agreed. "Speaking of things we weren't speaking of�"
But I didn't have to manufacture a subject change, because one presented itself just then, my axe. The decision to send for it had apparently been made while I was deep in thought. Nothing for it but to play now.
But first they all had to ooh and ah, of course.
I had brought four saxophones with me, actually: soprano, tenor, alto, and baritone. (Musical instruments did not count against personal weight allowance.) But someone, almost surely Sol, had sent for my personal favorite, the one I considered my primary axe: Anna, a genuine Silver Sonic�a PreCollapse Yanigasawa B-9930 baritone, solid silver with a gold-plated hand-engraved bell and keys. The Selmer is more famous�but how often is the most famous really the best? Anna is a thing of beauty even to a layman, so elegant and precise you'd think she'd been finished by a jeweler ... and a special joy to play for those who can handle her. Featherlight keys, lightning-fast response, tone-boosted resonator pads . . . never mind, I see you yawning. Let it stand that three people who spent their working days contemplating the infinite beauty that underlies the universe thought her special enough to admire extravagantly.
Even before they'd heard a note.
The baritone sax has never been a terribly popular instrument with musicians, because it is, physically, such a screaming bitch to play. It's huge and ungainly and requires you to move an immense volume of air. But some of the greats�Gerry Mulligan, James Carter�understood that it is worth the effort. Baritone sax is probably the most powerful resonant wind instrument there is, the Paul Robeson of horns, and no other is so immediately impressive to the layman.
(A purist would note there are actually two deeper saxes, the bass and contrabass, just as there are two higher than soprano, the sopranino and soprillo, and some even recognize one lower than contrabass called the tubax�but you're unlikely ever to hear any of them.)
While I wetted up my reed, I tried to decide what to play for them. Naturally, I wanted to play them one of my own compositions. And I was reasonably sure all three were sophisticated enough to appreciate it, if only mathematically�very sure, in Sol's case. But what if they were sophisticated enough to hate it? Also, I was far less sure of everyone else in the place, and perfectly well aware that some of my work can strike a civilian as dry and complex. To pick the most polite words Jinny had used.
Okay, wrong time and place for an original Johnston. Something immediately accessible, but not crap. I reached into the air, and pulled down a tune Charlie Haden wrote to his wife Ruth called "First Song." It was the opening number of the last set Stan Getz ever played, and it always tears me up. You'd think a tenor piece wouldn't sound right on a baritone, but that one does. It snuck up on me; before long I had forgotten anyone else was listening, and played my heart out.
I hadn't played a note in weeks, hadn't even thought of it. My fingers were stiff, my embouchure weak, my wind less than optimal. I killed them, that's all. You can tell when it's working. I was playing smarter than I actually am, and could tell.
For the first three or four minutes, I was imagining accompaniment. Kenny Baron, who backed Getz by himself on that long-ago night in Copenhagen. Piano as crisp as snapping sticks.
And then suddenly the piano was really there.
I nearly clammed the phrase I was playing, and spun toward the bandstand. It was empty.
Wherever the keyboard player was, he was really good. Really good. I quartered the room without finding him, then eighthed it with no better luck. There were several side rooms and alcoves in which he might be lurking�or he could have been anywhere on the ship, listening in and tapping into the house sound system to play along. I decided to worry about it later, and put my attention back on Anna.
That piano was just the floor I'd needed to set my feet properly. We talked, briefly, and then he set me loose to wander. Before I knew it I had disappeared down the mouthpiece. When Getz played the song that night, he was saying good-bye to his life. I used it now to say good-bye to mine. God knew what new life I would build for myself, but the old one was over for good and for all, as unreachable as a moment ago, or the second before the Big Bang. Out of the bell of my Anna I blew my scholarship, and the mentor who would appear someday to nurture and teach me, and my master's, and my debut at the legendary Milkweg II in Amsterdam, and my discovery by the contemporary serious music establishment, and System-wide recognition, and the respect of an entire generation of my peers . . . I blew away my courtship with Jinny, and our marriage, and our wedding night, and our first nest, and our first child, and all our children, and their childhoods and adolescences and adult-hoods, and their children, and all the golden years she and I would have spent loving and cherishing them all . . . I blew away both my dead parents, whose widely separated graves I would never see again . . . I blew away Ganymede my home, lost to me for so long and now lost for good, and all those who still lived on her . . . and not incidentally I blew away a quantum of wealth and power that perhaps could have been expressed as a fraction of all there was using only a single digit in the denominator.
I didn't get it all out�didn't come close�but I made a start.
I actually didn't hear the applause; Herb told me about it later.
I left the Horn of Plenty that night minus about a million kilos I'd been carrying on my shoulders . . . and with a steady gig, two nights a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, for a scandalous sum, tips, and all I could eat. Plus the private phone codes of three Relativists. Four, since London and George R lived together.
On the down side, I also left without finding out who had been playing that piano. Nobody seemed to know. The sound source had apparently been the house MIDI system�but the originating keyboard might have been in a sealed booth somewhere in the Horn, or up in the Control Room, for all anyone could tell me. All I could positively rule out was a player back in the Solar System . . . because our communication had unquestionably been conducted in real-time, without any lag at all. So I didn't worry about it. I had twenty years to find him. He could hide, but he couldn't run.
On our way back to our room, I tried to thank Herb, to explain just how much he'd unwittingly done for me, but he brushed it away "I think everybody made out on that deal," he said. When I pushed it, though, he allowed me to promise to bring home a doggy bag on Tuesday and Friday nights. And perhaps a doggy bulb of good Scotch.
After half an hour at his desk, Herb gave me a data cube and suggested I play it privately. I did so at once, so I could stop thinking about it. It was little Evelyn Conrad, back in the Solar System. Audio and video, stereo both ways. She told me gravely that I was very welcome. She said she was very cross with her gran'ther for making me go away. She said she was going to marry me one day, just the same. She told me not to marry anyone else without checking with her, first. She gave me a "private" mail address, but warned me it was not totally secure. And she closed with a solemn Bon Voyage and a blown kiss. By that point I was grinning and crying at the same time. I popped out the cube, stretched out on my bunk, and slept like a stone for thirteen hours. And when I woke, rude things and implausible suggestions had been written all over my face and hands with a laundry marker. I guess I snore.
Eight
The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.
�Henry David Thoreau
The first thing I did when I woke next morning was to sit down at my desk and summon a list of Positions Available. There were a lot more than I expected. It had apparently occurred to the expedition's planners that not only could nearly all the actual useful work of preparing to start this colony be safely put off until the last few years of the voyage . . . it probably would be anyway, humans being human. Therefore, it would be good to keep them all occupied doing some damn thing or other for the first eighteen or so years. Lots of helpful suggestions had been provided. The full list of jobs the Colonial Authority was willing to pay someone to do took well over three hours just to scroll down through at normal reading speed.
But basically most of them broke down into categories you could skim in less than half an hour, if you were a fast reader. Here's a typical screen's worth, which was sent in response to my query by an astronomer named Matty Jaymes:
��Refining knowledge of the location and plasma properties of the heliopause between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, on the way out of town�and then the same for the heliopause of Immega 714 when we got there.
��Again as we were leaving, helping refine our comet map of the Oort Cloud, detecting comet nuclei with radar.
��Once we were good and gone, measuring, in situ, the density, charge, mass, species, velocity, and temperature characteristics of interstellar plasma and gas.
��Continuous measurement of the orthagonal components of the galactic magnetic field.
��Continuous monitoring of the interstellar medium for molecular species. Determination of mass, composition, size distribution, and frequency of interstellar grains. Performance of interstellar erosion experiments with various models of shield configurations.
��Using the long baseline formed by the starship and Solar System to carry out high-resolution astronomical measurements with optical and radio interferometry. Performing astrometric measurements of nearby stars, extrasolar planet detection, extrasolar planet imaging, and atmospheric spectroscopy. Using the same long-baseline techniques for astrophysical measurements, for example, to image radio galaxies, quasars, and neutron stars.
(It had long been hoped that with multiple starships under way at the same time, the capability of this long baseline interferometry could be vastly enhanced by combining their observations of distant sources. It didn't seem to be working out well: the problem in this kind of interstellar interferometry was how to agree on common time-tagging of data from probes moving in different directions at significant fractions of the speed of light.)
��Observation of low energy cosmic rays, normally excluded from the Solar System.
��Attempting detection of gravity waves from astrophysical processes such as supernovae or neutron stars, by tracking anomalies in the Doppler effect of our signals.
��Refinement of the dark matter map of the Galaxy ...
. . . and so on. Mind you, all these are from the list of jobs Dr. Jaymes figured he could train just about any chimp aboard to do satisfactorily. But before he sent me those, he sent another, shorter list of jobs for especially smart people, with specific qualifications, which I won't even bother to excerpt, because I didn't understand it.
He appeared to be saying that he wanted to make an extremely intensive examination of the sun�our sun�okay, our former sun�of Sol, all right?�even as we were leaving it behind us forever at high speed. Why, I couldn't imagine. You'd think if there was an adequately studied star in the universe, it would be Sol. Studied even from vessels receding at fractions of c, if that made some sort of difference. And information about that particular star was going to be of purely academic interest to anyone we would ever meet again. But Dr. Jaymes certainly sounded terribly concerned about it. When I told him I lacked the qualifications for his first list of jobs, he allowed his disappointment to show even through mail; whereas when I politely declined his second list, too, he didn't seem to care one way or the other.
Now, I don't know about you, but if I had been forced to pick one of those I just listed as my shipboard occupation, I think the option I'd have selected instead would have been euthanasia. Like any literate citizen, I love to read what astronomers have to say after years of patient data collection and astute analysis . . . but the actual gathering of the data was not my idea of a way to spend the next twenty years.
When I came right down to it, not much was.
It was that growing realization, about five or ten scrollings down the list, which caused me to stop and approach it from the other direction. Instead of wading through the Big List of Jobs, the sensible way to do this was to make a Small List of Jobs I would be willing to endure for twenty years, if I had to, and then see if by chance any of them were on the Big List.
By dinnertime I had settled on the following:
��Teach the saxophone. Or composition. Or music history. Or history.
But did I in fact have any pedagogic skills? Forget the skills: did I have the talent? The indefinable intangible something that would make strangers find learning from me preferable to learning by themselves? How the hell did I know?
��Conduct. Assuming an orchestra of some kind could be assembled out of five hundred people, and made good enough to be listened to by the rest.
Again: Did I possess whatever variant offshoot of charisma it was that would make musicians find watching me more helpful than listening to their own internal metronome?
��Act. An orchestra might prove to be beyond the resources at hand, but surely a theater company or trideo studio would form sooner or later.
Let's just keep assuming the unanswerable question, "But did I have a particle of talent for that endeavor?" from here on.
��Direct, either for live or canned drama.
��Write, either live, canned, or prose fiction. Or nonfiction if necessary; I'd been given to understand t
hat it did not pay a writer to be too fussy. Just possibly journalism, if it turned out that a town of five hundred souls produced enough gossip to need writing down. Herb could give me pointers.
And finally, of course:
��Play the furshlugginer saxophone. There were other venues aboard offering dining or entertainment or dancing. If I could line up enough different sorts of gigs, in different musical genres, then between that and private parties it might just be possible to make a whole entire livelihood out of my single favorite activity, pushing air out the end of a pipe.
That, God damn it, was finally something I did know I had the talent for. The crucial question however was: Did anybody care? Or rather, did enough people care that I would be able to live on my tips?
I looked back over my list gloomily, and detected a pattern. All the occupations that interested me shared two characteristics: they all might just manage to sustain me during the two decades of the voyage ... and they would all become nearly worthless when we reached Immega 714.
Pioneers don't have a lot of time or energy for art, either making it or consuming it. It was unlikely that anybody would be willing to feed me just because I made a pretty noise, or made up stories, or pretended to be someone more interesting.
But what did it matter? Doubtless I would end up scratching so hard to feed myself and get warm and dry that most of those things would lose their appeal for me, too.
I brooded about it for the rest of the evening without useful result. I was about to collapse my keypad for the night when I noticed that I had incoming mail. That was odd. Practically everyone I knew lived in my room. Surely my Relativist acquaintances were all too busy for chat. Then I saw the header title, "Where are you?" and felt my pulse begin to rise as I leaped to the conclusion that it was from Jinny.
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