But at the end of that hallway, when we came through the second door, you know what we found? Can you guess?
The whole place was done up like a big-assed hotel or cruise ship or something. There was this huge-assed lobby and ballroom, and main stairs leading up and down. One whole wall of the lobby was transparent, you could see right through it to the stars. Frogs wandered every which way, a few cats and fine skinny women of every colour here and there, all of them dressed bad, real hip.
“Welcome on board The Mmmhumhhunah!” Ship name sounded something like that, like how people would talk if they had socks in their mouth or something. That was what the Frogs’ language sounded like to me, at least at first. He tried to make it sound like we were guests. “Your navigation stubs should guide you to your places of accommodation. Should you have any questions, please feel free to ask any passing staff member, who can be identified by the subordinate rank uniforms they are required to wear, and which have been modeled on uniforms denoting similar positions in your culture. We will begin preparations tomorrow, and the tour will commence a week henceforth.”
“What’s he talking about, man?” J.J. asked. His eyes were wide, like he’d seen his grandmama’s ghost.
“Follow the little arrow thing to your room,” I explained. “If you need help with your bass, ask a bellboy. First rehearsal’s tomorrow.”
“And please give me your instruments,” added the Frog. “They need to be treated specially to withstand both repeated decoherence and space travel.”
“Deco-what?” J.J. was very protective of Big Mama, which was what he liked to call his bass. “Hey, can you put one of them self-amplifiers into her?”
“Yes, of course, that was already planned,” the alien said, and its eyes went round in circles. “Everyone else, also, we must collect your instruments. They will be returned to you tomorrow.”
“Awright,” J.J. said, twisting his head to one aside and the other as he leaned on Big Mama in her carrying case, gave the bass one last hug.
I handed them my tenor sax, but I wasn’t happy about it. I didn’t know what the hell they was going to do to it, but it was a Conn and had cost me an arm and a leg to get. But I handed it over. I already had the serial numbers written on a piece of paper in my shoe, just in case.
Now, listen up: I know me some drugs. I seen what heroin does to a cat, how it robs him of his soul, turns him into a pathetic junkie. I even tried it once or twice. And I know how spun-around a cat can get on bennies, ’cause I’ve done lots of them too. I’ve drunk every goddamn thing a man can drink, a lot of drinks at the same time, even. I’ve been so fucked up I didn’t know what planet I was on. But nothing fucks you up like the drugs they gave us on the ships.
I first tried them at that first rehearsal, day after we arrived on the cruise ship, but before we got our own horns back. Me and J.J. showed up at the same time, and met the cat who was running the music program. He was a fat old brother with a trumpet style nobody ever copied right, nobody ever beat, and his name was Carl Thorton, but everyone called him Big C. He gave us these pills to swallow. Three of them, each one a different colour.
“Yellow one’s so you can blur, the way they like. Blue one fixes you up with a better memory, so you can call up everything you ever heard. That one takes a while to kick in. Last one, the green one, that one’s for programming memory of all those licks you memorize into your muscles and shit, instant super-chops. That one comes in real quick. You gotta take these sons-a-bitches every day for six months. Don’t forget, or you’ll turn your own ass so inside-out it ain’t even funny. Got it?”
“Uh huh,” me and J.J. said, and took the pills with a big glass of water. Water didn’t taste quite right, wasn’t nice and a little sweet like back in New York.
Big C, he had a bunch of us new guys – enough to play in a big band. He had us all sit down and listen to the old band, outgoing band, who wouldn’t be leaving for a couple of days, so we could listen to them and get the hang of things. He told us big bands only went on tour on the Frogships for a year at a time, most times. Man, I didn’t know they was looking to make a big band. I hadn’t played in one for years, but whatever. I sat and listened. Didn’t figure I could back out then, it was too late.
Well, they started to play – some old Basie tune, I think it was, but they were playing it so fast I couldn’t tell which one. Badass, these cats – they didn’t drop a beat, not a squeak anywhere. They played the head perfectly at what was definitely 300 beats a minute or more.
But when the solo section came, I rubbed my eyes and starting worrying about them drugs Big C had gave us. Big C, I could see him fine and clear, but the lead alto saxman, when he stood up and started playing a solo, he started to blur, and he wasn’t playing one solo, it was two solos at once. And then four solos, and five, all of them going in different directions at the same time. He had his horn all the way up, leaning back and screeching altissimo, and he was hunched forward and honking at the low end of his horn. All of that at the same time, fast lines and slow lines together. He was like a dozen saxophonists in one.
The drummer was slowly going out of sync with himself, blurring into a smear of sticks and flashing cymbals, and when I looked close, I could see the cymbals moving, and staying still, all at the same time. It was one hell of a sight to see, believe me. I tapped J.J. on the shoulder, told him to check that shit out, and he nodded, so I knew I wasn’t crazy. It was like ten drummers all playing at once, almost all the same thing, but a little bit off, each one a little bit different. Different cymbal crashes at different times, the downbeat pushed a little forward and a little back all at the same time. But if you listened, in a way, it all ft together somehow. That blew me away.
The rest of the band started playing backgrounds, but they weren’t blurry, so the shout chorus came in together – a few beats quiet, then, in unison, bop!, then a few bars, then ba-doo-BOP! The alto player was playing three-octave unisons with himself. I swear I could see his right hand on the bottom keys, fingers moving and totally still at the same time.
And then the head of the tune came back, but the whole band was a blur, and everything was craziness, like ten, twenty, a hundred big bands trying to play together and coming close but never lining up the downbeats, pushing them forward and back all at the same time, clashing and smashing – it was something else!
It was a new kind of music, man. Real out. Like hearing bebop again for the first time, but multiplied by all the dope in the world.
“Them pills we took, they gonna let us play like that?”
“I suppose so, J.J.”
“Goddamn!” he hollered, and “Sheeeeeeeeee-it!” and “Check these cats out!” all at once, in three different voices, and he started clapping his hands and not-clapping his hands all at the same time.
“Brother, I been living with these Frog-head bastards a long goddamn time, and trust me, shit ain’t right with them. You ever look at one closely?” That was Big C.
“Well, yeah,” I answered, looking around his room. “They’re blurry. Too many eyes.”
“Too many eyes? You ever stop and think that we don’t have enough eyes?” He squinted at me the way Monk used to do to people. “But that blur . . . ! Now, that’s what I’m talking about!” he said, waving his hands at me. “They’re all blurred up, it’s like there’s a hundred Frogs inside every one of them cats, walking around, doing things. They can’t squash themselves into just one person, the way we all just do naturally.”
He wiggled his fingers in front of his face like he was showing me what he meant. “And if they’re listening to a band, they need the band to blur too, or they just get bored. That’s why they like jazz so much! Best goddamn music in the world. ’Cause we make shit up – we improvise. Can’t do that with no goddamn Mozart, now can you? Classical music, that just bores these Frogs to death, everything all written out and the same every time, the same even when you blur it.”
I was staring at my hands, watching t
hem blur and unblur. It was kind of like taking a piss, you could control it just by thinking about it. Except I was like a little kid, I didn’t know exactly how to control it yet, just that I could kind of make it happen.
“You’re getting it, Robbie, just relax into it, man. It’ll be like natural soon.”
“So how long you been on these ships, Big C?” I asked.
He scratched under his chin, back up where his beard was shaved off, and made a face at me. “What year’s it now?”
“Nineteen forty-eight.”
“Goddamn,” he said. “God-damn!” And he got real quiet, and turned his head away so I wouldn’t see him cry.
Our schedule for those first few weeks was crazy, all day practicing and then all night jamming our asses off and hanging out in one another’s rooms, horns in our hands, LPs going.
One of the craziest things the drugs did was they let us memorize any kind of music we heard. Hearing it was all it took to program it into our heads, well, except it was more like your fingers would remember the tune.
So we would sit there listening to all kinds of LPs, bebop and swing and ragtime and Bach and Stravinsky and Indian music and whatever, and since we all had good ears, and since we could blur ourselves, each blurred self could listen to a different part of the music – the bass line, harmony lines, and the solo on top of it all – so we could come to the end of a record with the whole thing in our heads.
Now, this wasn’t so new: I could listen to a solo a couple of times and hold it in my head, but what was strange was that, after a couple of weeks on them alien drugs, I found I could remember any damn tune I wanted, note-for-note. I could call up any one of Bird’s recorded solos on “Anthropology”; I could call up a big band playing Monk’s arrangement of “Epistrophy” and play the second trombone line on my sax if I wanted. Every line was right there in my head, and in the muscles of my arms and fingers and lips, and if I blurred out and played back that line even once, I could play it again and again, forever, just by deciding to, without even having to think it through.
In other words, them alien drugs made each and every one of us into one-man jazz record machines.
That was why we spent so much time sitting around listening to everyone else’s LPs and crystals, a bunch of us cats blurred out of our minds, laughing and telling ourselves to shut up and soaking that shit up, all of it. There were some bootlegs, too, and man, some of them were amazing: “Bird on Mars,” one of them was labelled, and that was some crazy, hip, bad music. I could listen to that shit all day long.
But you know, eventually, a cat gets tired of just being around musicians, and he starts wanting himself some jelly. Me, I never had no problem getting me some, women like me and I like them, but it had been a couple of weeks since I’d gotten any, so I decided to go look up them can-can girls and get me some.
I took the elevator down a floor at a time, wandered around till I found them. I saw some crazy-assed sights on the way, too: in one room, there was some kind of Russian circus with these huge blurred-up clowns juggling fire-sticks on the backs of blurry elephants who were dancing to the beat of the some scary Russian music. There were all these bears, too, just as blurred as anything, marching around them all. In another room, I saw those rodeo cowboys again, too, riding on blurred-up horses and swinging lassos in a hundred directions at once. But this one guy I saw, he wasn’t just blurred, he split from himselves, ran in ten different directions at once after a bull that blurred and split up in the same damn way. Some of him caught the bull and roped it, and some of him got stomped by it. One of him even got gored in the stomach by its horns, poor bean-eating bastard.
But finally, I got down about ten floors below our floor, which was under the big-assed lobby. All the signs there were in French, so I knew I was in the right place. I went from room to room, saw a bunch of them blurry Frogs in these salons, smoking their cigarettes and talking in their weird voices while skinny East Indian girls in old-fashioned oriental clothing served them dainty little white teacups full of funky tea and whatever else Frogs drank.
But finally, I found the auditorium where the girls danced the can-can. That was the orchestra’s night off, so the girls were practicing to these crazy recordings of blurred-up can-can music. When I walked in, they were dancing, those French can-can girls, and they was fine, all long strong legs going up and down, arms on each other’s shoulders. Ain’t nothing in the world turns a cat on like seeing women touch each other, except seeing their legs up in the air.
So I sat there and watched their legs go up and down, down and up, scissoring blurs, and I blurred myself too so I could see them clearly. I scanned up and down the line of them, until I found the one I remembered from the elevator, and let her faces burn into my mind.
After they finished, I went and found my way backstage. There was a bunch of green rooms. It was crazy – every girl had her own little green room on that floor. But I didn’t know which one she was in, that fine-built woman I picked out from the can-can lineup, so I blurred myself and went up to all the green rooms I could, knocked on every one of them at once.
The door where she answered, I unblurred myself over to that one, and smiled at her with that innocent-country-boy smile like I always used to use on women. She was wearing some kind of silk kimono, you know, one of them Japanese-type housecoats, and her hair was down, and I could hear jazz wafting out from behind. Heard that jazz and I knew that I was in.
“You’re the one I ’ave seen in the elevator, oui? The one who kept looking at me? But why ’ave you come ’ere?”
“Well, I thought about it, and decided I missed you.”
She mumbled something in French, something that sounded a little like I’d be needing to try some other can-can girl next, but then she opened the door wide and smiled at me. “Come in, Monsieur . . .”
“Coolidge,” I said, and took off my fedora to bow to her all charming, the way women like when you first meet them. “Robbie Coolidge.” I stepped into the room, and could hear the music clearly: it was Nat King Cole, “Stardust.” Her can-can outfit was draped over the makeup mirror with the light bulbs all around it, huge peacock feathers sticking up above our heads, and I could smell mentholated smoke in the air.
“I am called Monique,” she said. No last name then, just Monique. Then she asked, “You would like some coffee?”
“Mmm, yeah, coffee sounds good.”
She excused herself for a minute, and when she came back, she had two cups of coffee in her hands.
“You ’ave cigarette?” she asked.
I nodded. “Got a whole pack,” I said, and I fished it out of my coat pocket and set it on the table with a pack of matches on top. They were Mercury Barron’s Ultras, the new kind that were supposed to make you live longer if you smoked three a day. “Want one?”
“Non,” she said, and smiled. “Maybe later.”
The coffee was fine, really good French coffee, steaming. Even the goddamn steam smelled good. I held the cup and breathed deep and looked at her sipping from her own cup.
“So where you from?” I asked, and she stared at me for a few minutes. She rubbed an eyelid, and a little of the makeup smudged.
“I don’t t’ink you really care, do you?” she asked, and sipped her coffee.
“Sure, girl, I care,” I lied, and she leaned forward, and blurred herself, and a million breathy whispers of gay Pa-ree tickled in my ear.
That ended up being the night the ship took off for Mars, though Monique and I were too busy to notice. We only found out later, when one of the guys in the band ended up wandering into the lobby and noticing the stars were moving, nice and slow, but still moving.
It was a couple of weeks before Monique was in the habit of coming up and listening to the band play, and some of the guys didn’t like it. That was when some of the cats in the band were starting to act all high-and-mighty, turning into what my father used to call “political negroes,” and taking it upon themselves to tell everyone el
se how a black man oughtta live.
What made me real sad was that J.J. had fallen in with that pack of nuts. He used to be real nice, real cool and thoughtful. He’d always been a soulful kind of cat, but when he was with them space-Muslim gum-flappers, talking all that nonsense about how the black man was supposed to colonize the solar system for Allah’s glory and to show the devil white man and all that, I couldn’t stand to be around him. I hated it when he talked that bullshit.
So this one day, between sets, I’m sitting there at one of the tables with Monique and having a nice time. She’s drinking wine and I’m having a cigarette and we’re talking, and J.J. comes up with this look on his face. I knew it was trouble, that look, and I stood up before he got close, and said, “J.J., I already got one daddy, and he’s in Philly, so I don’t need you to . . .”
“Robbie, goddamn it, you listen to me,” he said, and glanced at Monique as if she might leave if he glanced at her the right way.
“Who is ’e?” she asked, standing up.
“Sit down, Monique,” I said firmly, and she instantly got that look on her face. You know the look: the one women get when you tell them what to do for their own good.
“Robbie, something’s going on round here! We gotta cut out, brother! Them Frogs, they been in my room, man! They put something inside my stomach. Like a worm. No, a woman. Yeah, a woman worm! She been crawling inside my stomach, screamin’, like, ‘J.J.! J.J.! Gimme some ice cream!’ Help me, Robbie! I’m fuckin’ dying here, man!” he screamed and blurred before my eyes, all his voices screaming at me at once. Poor cat was scared shitless, and he scared the shit out of me, too.
I pushed Monique off to the side and blurred myself, and each of me reached out to one of them blurs of J.J.
“J.J.,” each of me said, all together. “Listen, J.J., you sick or something, man. You need to cool it. Cool it right now.”
He screamed louder, each of him started to shake, and his blurred selves started moving farther and farther apart. I didn’t want him to pull me apart like that too, so I quickly unblurred myself, relaxed back into one, and stepped back from him.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection Page 102