Star Song and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  "Right."

  I headed down the corridor past the passenger cabin, noting the closed hatchway and wondering if our esteemed scholar might be having a touch of mal de faux-g.

  I could almost hope she was; in a Universe of oppressively strict class distinctions, nausea remained as one of the great social levelers.

  Still, if she missed the bag, I was the one who'd have to clean it up. All things considered, I decided to hope she wasn't sick. Passing her hatchway, I continued another five meters aft and turned into the musicmaster's cabin.

  I've already mentioned that Jimmy was a kid of nineteen. What I haven't mentioned was all the irritating peripherals that went along with that. His hair, for one thing, which hadn't been cut for at least five planets, and the mostly random tufts of scraggly facial fuzz he referred to in all seriousness as a beard. In a profession that seemed to take a perverse pride in its lack of a

  dress code, his wardrobe was probably still a standout of strange taste, consisting today of a flaming pais-plaid shirt that had been out of style for at least ten years and a pair of faded jeans that looked like they'd started their fade ten years before that. His official musicmaster scarf clashed violently with the shirt, and was sloppily knotted besides. His shoes, propped up on the corner of his desk, were indescribable.

  As usual, he twitched sharply as I swung around the hatchway into view.

  Rhonda had mostly convinced me it was nothing more than the fact that he was always too preoccupied to hear me coming, but I couldn't completely shake the feeling that the twitch was based on guilt. Though what specifically he might feel guilty about I didn't know. "Captain," he said, the word coming out halfway between a

  startled statement and a startled gasp. "I was just working up the program."

  "Yeah," I said, throwing a look at the shoes propped up on the desk and then deliberately looking away. He knew I didn't like him doing that, but since it was his desk and there were no specific regulations against it he'd long since decided to make it a point of defiance. I'd always suspected Bilko of egging him on in that, but had never uncovered any actual proof of it. "Did First Officer Hobson send you the mass numbers?"

  "Yes, sir," Jimmy said. "I was thinking we ought to go with a Blue, just to be on the safe side."

  "Sounds good," I grunted, carefully not mentioning that a Blue meant Romantic Era or folk music, both of which I preferred to the Baroque or Classical Era that we would need to attract a Green. It wouldn't do for Jimmy to think he was doing me a favor; he'd just want something in return somewhere down the line.

  "What have you got planned?"

  "I thought we'd start with the Brahms Double Concerto," he said, raising his reader from his lap and peering at his list. "That's thirty-two point seven eight minutes. Dvorak's Carnival Overture will add another nine point five two, the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony will clock in at thirty-two point six seven, and the Berlioz Requiem will add seventy-six minutes even. Then we'll go to Grieg's Peer Gynt at forty-eight point three, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at twenty-four point two four, and Massenet's Scenes Alsaciennes at twenty-two point eight two."

  He probably thought that throwing the numbers at me rapid-fire like that would have me completely lost. If so, he was in for a disappointment. "I read that as four hours six point three three minutes," I said. "You're six minutes overdue for a break."

  "Oh, come on," he said scornfully. "I can handle an extra six minutes."

  "The rules say four hours, max, and then a half-hour break," I countered.

  "You know that."

  "The rules were invented by senile old conservatory professors who could barely stay awake for four hours," he shot back. "I did eight hours straight once back at OSU—I can sure do four hours six."

  "I'm sure you can," I said. "But not on my transport. Change the program."

  "Look, Captain—"

  "Change the program," I cut him off. Spinning around, I strode out the hatchway and headed back down the corridor, seething silently to myself. Now he was going to have to find something else to fill in the last part of the program; and knowing Jimmy, he'd try to run it right up to the four-hour limit. Finding the right piece of music would take time; and in this business, time was most definitely money.

  I was still seething when I reached the flight deck. "How's the vector?" I demanded, squeezing past Bilko to my seat.

  "Looks clean," he said, throwing me a sideways look as I sat down. "Trouble with Jimmy?"

  "No more than usual," I growled, jabbing my main display for a status review.

  "How close to time margin are we running?"

  He shrugged. "Not too bad—"

  "Bilko?" Jimmy's voice came over the intercom. "I'm ready to go."

  Bilko looked at me, raised his eyebrows. I waved disgustedly at the intercom—I sure didn't want to talk to him. "OK, Jimmy," Bilko told him. "Go ahead."

  "Right. Here we go."

  The intercom keyed off. "What was that about the time margin?" Bilko asked.

  "Never mind," I gritted. The damn kid must have had an alternative program figured out and ready to go before I even got there. Which meant the whole argument had been nothing more than him pushing me on the time rule, just to see if I'd bend. No absolutes; no rules; do whatever works or whatever you can get away with. Typical underbaked juvenile nonsense.

  A deep C-sharp note sounded, and I felt my chair shaking slightly as the hull vibrated with the pre-music call. I shifted my attention to the forward viewport, staring unblinkingly out at the distant stars, and waited. Ten seconds later the C-sharp was replaced by the opening notes of the Brahms Double Concerto— And with breathtaking suddenness the stars vanished.

  I looked back down at my control board, disappointment mixing into my already irritated mood. Only once had I ever actually seen a flapblack as it came in, and I'd been trying ever since to repeat the experience. Not this time.

  "We've got a good wrap," Bilko reported, peering at his displays. "Inertial confirms four point six one light-years per hour."

  "Definitely a Blue, then."

  "Or a real slow Green," Bilko said. "Computer's still running the spectrum."

  I nodded, listening to the music and gazing out at the nothingness outside.

  And marveling as always at this strange symbiosis that humanity had found.

  They were called flapblacks. Not a very imaginative name, and one which subsequent study had shown to be inaccurate anyway, but it had stuck now for five decades and there was no reason to assume it would ever get changed to something better. The first crew to run into one of the things had overscrubbed their meager sensor data until the creature had looked like a giant pancake shape wrapping itself around their ship and blocking off the starlight.

  At which point, to their stunned amazement, it had picked up their ship and moved it.

  As far as I knew, we still didn't have the faintest idea how the flapblacks did what they did. The idea that an essentially insubstantial being that apparently lived its entire life in deep space could physically carry multiple tons of star transport across multiple light-years at rates of up to five light-years per hour was utterly absurd. We didn't know what they were made of, how they lived, what they ate, what else they did, how they reproduced, or how many of them per cubic light-year there were. In fact, when you boiled it down, there was virtually only one thing we did know about them.

  And that was that they loved music. All kinds of music: modern, classical, folk melodies, Gregorian chants—you name it, some flapblack out there loved it.

  Play a clean musical tone through your hull and within seconds you'd have flapblacks crowding around like seagulls at a fish market. Start the music itself, and one of them would instantly wrap itself around the transport, and you'd be off for the stars.

  "Spectrum's coming up," Bilko reported. "Yep—definitely a Blue."

  I nodded again in acknowledgment. The flapblacks themselves showed little internal structure, and of course no actual colo
r at all. But it hadn't taken long for someone to notice that, just as the transport was being wrapped, the incoming starlight experienced a brief moment of interference. Subsequent study had shown that the interference pattern looked and behaved like an absorption spectrum, with the lines from any given flapblack grouped together in a particular color of the spectrum.

  That had been the key that had turned the original musical-shotgun approach into something more scientific. Flapblacks whose lines were in the red part of the spectrum were fairly slow, were apparently not strong enough to wrap transports above a certain mass, and came when you played musicals or opera. Orange flapblacks were faster and stronger and liked modern music—any kind—and Gregorian chants. I'd yet to figure that one out. Yellows were faster and stronger yet and liked jazz and classical rock/roll. Greens were still stronger, but now a little slower, and liked Baroque and Mozartian classical. Blues were the strongest of all, though slower than any of the others except Reds, and liked 19th century romantic and any kind of folk melody.

  It was the flapblacks and their love of our music which had finally freed humanity from Sol and allowed us to stretch out to the stars. More personally, of course, space travel was what provided me with my job, for which I was mostly grateful.

  The catch was that it wasn't just the music they needed. Or rather, it wasn't the music alone. Which was, unfortunately, where musicmasters like Jimmy came in.

  You see, you couldn't just play the music straight for them. That would have been too easy. What you had to have was someone aboard the transport listening to the music as you pumped it out through the hull.

  And not just listening; I mean listening. He had to sit there doing nothing the whole time, following every note and rest and crescendo, letting his emotions swell and ebb with the flow. Basically, just really getting into the music.

  The experts called it psycho-stereo, which like most fancy words was probably created to cover up the fact that they didn't know any more about this than they did anything else about the flapblacks. Best guess—heavy emphasis on guess—was that what the flapblacks actually liked was getting the music straight while at the same time hearing it filtered through a human mind. They almost certainly were getting the pre-music call telepathically—until they wrapped, there was no other way for them to pick up the sound in the vacuum of space.

  However it worked, the bottom line was that I couldn't handle the job.

  Neither could Bilko or Rhonda. Sure, we all liked music, but we also all had other duties and responsibilities to attend to during the flight. Even if we hadn't, I

  doubt any of us had the kind of single-track mind that would let us do something that rigid for hours at a time. And you had to keep it up—one slip and your flapblack would be long gone and you'd have to stop and pull in another one.

  That wasn't a problem in itself, of course; there were always flapblacks hanging around waiting to be entertained. The problem came in not knowing to the microsecond exactly how long you'd been traveling. At flapblack speeds, a second's worth of error translated into a lot of undershoot or overshoot on your target planet.

  And even apart from all that, I personally still wouldn't have wanted the job.

  I've always considered my emotions to be my own business, and the thought of letting some alien will-o'-the-wisp listen in was right next to chewing sand on my list of things I didn't like to think about.

  Enter Jimmy and the rest of the musicmaster corps. They were the ones who actually made star travel possible. People like Bilko, Rhonda, and me were just here to keep them alive along the way, and to handle the paperwork at the end of the trip.

  It was a train of thought I'd been running along quite a lot lately, more or less beginning with our previous musicmaster's departure two months ago and Jimmy's arrival. My digestion was definitely the worse for it.

  "Looks like everything's smooth here," Bilko commented, pulling his lucky deck of cards from his shirt pocket. "Quick game?"

  "No, thanks," I said, looking at the cards with distaste. Considering that it purported to be a lucky deck, those cards had gotten Bilko into more trouble over the years. I'd lost track of how many times I'd had to pacify some pick-up game partner who refused to believe that Bilko's winnings were due solely to skill.

  "Okay," he said equably, fanning the deck. "Want to draw cards for first turn in the dayroom, then?"

  Mentally, I shook my head. For all his angling, Bilko could be so transparent sometimes. "No, you go ahead," I told him, keying in the autosystem and giving the status lights a final check. The dayroom, situated across the main corridor from the passenger cabin, was our off-duty spot. On the bigger long-range transports dayroom facilities were pretty extensive; all ours offered was stale snacks, marginal holotape entertainment, and legroom.

  "Okay," he said, unstrapping. "I'll be back in an hour."

  "Just be sure you spend that hour in the dayroom," I added. "Not poking around Scholar Kulasawa's luggage."

  His face fell, just a bit. Just enough to show me I'd hit the target dead center. "What makes you think—?"

  The intercom beeped. "Captain Smith?" a female voice asked.

  I grimaced, tapping the key. "This is Smith, Scholar Kulasawa," I said.

  "I'd like to see you," she said. "At your earliest convenience, of course."

  A nice, polite, upper-class phrase. Completely meaningless here, of course; what she meant was now. "Certainly," I said. "I'll be right there."

  I keyed off the intercom and looked at Bilko. "You see?" I told him. "She read your mind. The upper classes can do that."

  "I wouldn't put it past them," he grumbled, strapping himself back down. "I hope your bowing and cringing is up to par."

  "I guess I'll find out," I said, getting up. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes, dream up a crisis or something, will you?"

  "I thought you said she could read minds."

  "I'll risk it."

  Scholar Kulasawa was waiting when I arrived in our nine-person passenger cabin, sitting in the center seat in a stiff posture that reminded me somehow of old portraits of European royalty. "Thank you for being so prompt, Captain," she said as I stepped inside. "Please sit down."

  "Thank you," I said automatically, as if being allowed to sit in my own transport was something I needed her permission to do. Swiveling one of the other seats around to face her, I sat down. "What can I do for you?"

  "How much is your current cargo worth?" she asked.

  I blinked. "What?" "You heard me," she said. "I want to know the full value of your cargo. And add in all the shipping fees and any nondelivery penalties."

  What I should have done—what my first impulse was to do—was find a properly respectful way to say it was none of her business and get back to the flight deck. But the sheer unexpectedness of the question froze me to my seat. "Can you tell me why that information should be any of your business?" I asked instead.

  "I want to buy out this trip," she said calmly. "I'll pay all associated costs, including penalties, add in your standard fee for the side trip I want to make, and throw in a little something extra as a bonus."

  I shook my head. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Scholar," I said, "but this run is already spoken for. If you want to charter a special trip at Parex, I'm sure you'll be able to find a transport willing to take you."

  She favored me with a smile that didn't have a single calorie of warmth anywhere in it. "Meaning you wouldn't take me?"

  "Meaning if you wish to discuss it after we've offloaded at Parex I'll be willing to listen," I said, standing up. I had it now: her scholarhood was in psychology, and this was all part of some stupid study on bribery and ethics.

  "But thank you for the offer—"

  "I'll pay you three hundred thousand neumarks," she said, the smile gone now.

  "Cash."

  I stared at her. The power lifters and gourmet food we were carrying were worth maybe two hundred thousand, max, with everything else adding no more than another thi
rty. Which left the little bonus she'd mentioned at somewhere around seventy thousand neumarks.

  Seventy thousand neumarks...

  "You don't think I'm serious," she went on into my sudden silence, reaching into her jacket and pulling out what looked like a pre-paid money card. "Go on," she invited, holding it out toward me. "Check it."

  Carefully, suspiciously, I reached out and took the card. Pulling out my reader, I slid it in.

  As the owner of a transport plying some of the admittedly less-than-plum lanes, I had long ago decided that buying cut-rate document software would ultimately cost me more than it would save. Consequently, I'd made sure that the Sergei Rock's legal and financial authenticators were the best that money could buy.

  Scholar Kulasawa's money card was completely legitimate. And it did indeed have three hundred thousand neumarks on it.

  "You must be crazy to carry this around," I told her, pulling the card out of my reader as if it was made of thousand-year-old crystal. "Where in the worlds did you get this kind of money, anyway?"

  "From my university, of course. No—keep it," she added, waving the card back as I held it out to her. "I prefer payment in advance."

  With a sigh, I stood up and set the card down on the seat next to her. Seventy thousand neumarks... "I already told you this trip's been contracted for," I said. "Talk to me when we reach Parex." I turned to go—

  "Wait."

  I turned back. For a moment she studied my face, with something that might have been grudging admiration in her expression. "I misjudged you," she said. "My apologies. Allow me to try a different approach."

  I shook my head. "I already said—"

  "Would you accept my offer," she cut me off, "if it would also mean helping people desperately in need of our assistance?"

  I shook my head. "The Patrol's got an office on Parex," I said. "You want help, talk to them."

  "I can't." Her carefully jeweled lip twisted, just slightly. "For one thing, they have no one equipped to deal with the situation. For another, if I called them in they'd take it over and shut me out completely."