Analog SFF, November 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I had known several kings of Nou Occitan, mostly quiet professors or genial artists. Dad had worked for some of them, during his career as an economist in his born body, so I suppose he was a “lackey.” He had only brutalized data.

  As I sang, the passions of my fictitious forebears, magicked by elves to the planet Wilson, blazed in my breast. Via my performance, their imagined spirit infected the sons and daughters of a just-as-fictionalized Second Empire, in which a spaceship built by de Lesseps, Poincaré, and Pierre Curie, and captained by Jules Verne, had brought the True Heir—a child descended from a marriage of a Bourbon to a Bonaparte—to the planet Roosevelt. (It was silent, as culture histories usually are, about the other ninety-one cultures on the planet. Presumably all other cultures on Roosevelt were immigrants on sufferance).

  Up on the stage, the son of Mad Guilhem recounted Guilhem's final adventure, set upon by forty of the King's Marshals and fighting on as he bled to death, while Bold Agnes escaped with Guilhem's newborn son.

  Out in the house, the daughters of Camille sighed and fluttered.

  Wonderful fun, utterly bogus, and wonderful fun because it was utterly bogus.

  I sang more cansos of love and battle, despair and devotion, merce and enseingnamen, fine spring days on the road and blizzard nights by the fire, the songs that defined a trobador.

  I finished out the first set with a traditional burial song, “Canso de Fis de Jovent,” my first real hit. Fans often wrote to tell me that they never grew tired of it, I suppose because they feared I might. My aintellect replied with a warm, friendly letter over my signature that said I never got tired of it, either.

  I bowed with a flourish in the thunder of applause. In my dressing room, I drank a little tepid water, washed my face, did a brief First Lesser Kata of ki hara do to work the kinks out, and lay down for exactly twelve minutes of wonderful sleep.

  A warm wet cloth dragged from my chin up over my eyes, rising like a curtain on Paxa Prytanis bending close. She smiled, kissed me with the light tenderness that says we are lovers but not now, and left, talking to her com, repositioning operatives, making sure security was tight for the second set.

  Laprada brought in my freshly-pressed tapi. She combed my hair, straightened my collar, made the soft folds of my breeches fall properly over my boot-tops. She held up my tapi and I turned my back to her and fastened it around my neck again. I spent about a minute nervously tugging things into place. She squeezed my shoulder. “Brilliant, you ancient monster of ego."

  “Thank you, horrid brat."

  A quick hug and she was gone. The clock showed four and a half minutes till the exactly two minutes late I intended. I refilled my water glass and drank slowly, reviewing.

  I had written my song cycle Songs from Underneath, from which my second set tonight was drawn, and performed them on tour long before Margaret and I ever went to Briand, before the two cultures of that miserable planet had destroyed themselves. Of course I had never sung them on Briand because their message would have started the genocidal war between Tamils and Maya all the sooner. Yet nearly all of my fans believed I must have written Songs from Underneath on Briand, or just after the disaster there.

  The media called it a disaster. Paxa and I were the only people in the OSP who did. Margaret and the OSP in general called Briand a “failed mission,” when they talked about it at all.

  We had lost a whole planet. The antimatter cloud weapon had been loosed on human flesh for only the fourth time since the Slaughter itself. The Thousand Cultures had, before that, numbered 1,228 cultures on twenty-six planets; now they numbered 1,226 on twenty-five. It would still be some stanyears before springships could even reach the Metallah system to see if anything was left, but given the frailty of Briand's ecosystem, probably the springship would find two smears of black glass, hundreds of kilometers across, under an atmosphere as poisonous as it had been before terraforming.

  To me, anyway, that was something more than a failed mission.

  Nowadays, even to me, Songs from Underneath sounded as if it were about Briand.

  I wrote and sang art songs; I was an OSP agent; if you are an OSP agent, everything you do is, or becomes, part of the OSP's mission; therefore, I wrote and sang art songs that supported the OSP's mission. Though the OSP had commissioned Songs from Underneath, in the weird turnings the world takes, three of its cansos were now sung at rallies of the campaign to abolish the OSP, and they were also the main reason why it was often whispered that I was a secret liberal.

  I looked down at my empty water glass, refilled it, and drank again. Two minutes.

  I had no real politics. If I actually had any belief, it was this: without the OSP, everyone would either go into the box—hook up to virtual reality and life support and never come out again—or join in mutual massacre.

  There was only one inhabited planet in the eight of the Inner Sphere where the majority of the population were not in the box—this one, Roosevelt. The ninety-two cultures here had fought a generation-long bloody war, barely reaching an uneasy peace less than forty stanyears ago. Since Dji had brokered that permanent truce, insurrections, border clashes, assassinations, threats of war, and riots had been endemic, but no wholesale mutual butchery, so this world was one of the OSP's success stories. Twenty-two cultures—the entire continent of Hapundo—were still ruled directly by Council of Humanity proconsuls and policed by Council troops. Elsewhere on the planet, terrorist discommodi caused two to five thousand-or-more-fatality events every stanyear. The past stanyear had seen the Stadium Massacre and the assassination of Lopez, obviously but unprovably linked. In some of the cultures of this planet, children grew up learning to dodge snipers; in happier cultures like Trois-Orléans, no one got through a day without having to prove identity dozens of times, and streets crawled with uniforms. Less than three hundred kilometers from here, in Saladin City, a psypyx bank and the adjoining hospital had been blown up this afternoon, causing hundreds of deaths, thirteen of them permanent. New Rajasthan was suspected of involvement, and CSPs were standing guard all along the border tonight while Council diplomats banged heads together to prevent another outbreak.

  But the good folk of Roosevelt had not gone into the box. Say what you like about hatred and killing, it gives people something to do.

  The OSP's job was to keep people from going into the box or up in flames. The human race needed to be diverse enough to entertain each other and alike enough not to kill each other.

  Not because any bureaucrat or legislator cared about whether people were dumb happy slugs or vicious killers, as long as they filled out the forms properly and paid taxes. The issue was survival.

  After decades of archaeology all over human space, an OSP secret expedition had found the ruins of a Predecessor provincial capital on Hammarskjöld, twenty light-years beyond our human settlement surface. While Earth was still locked in its last ice age, the Predecessors had held an empire of seventy-eight provinces, and the hundred-light-year-across blob that was now human space occupied one-tenth of one of their border provinces.

  And before the first hut stood at Jericho, something tougher than the Predecessors had come through. Every Predecessor settlement bore the marks of war followed by a complete genocide.

  Sooner or later the thing that had killed the Predecessors would return. When that happened, humanity could not afford to be either in the box, or at war with ourselves.

  We had to learn to live together without getting bored.

  There are no more than a dozen occupations—political agent and artist are two—in which everything you do becomes part of your job. They are the only tolerable things to do with your time, as far as I'm concerned.

  A song is not a tool for changing a human heart in the way that a wrench is a tool for changing a bolt, but it was the tool I had, and I was the tool the OSP had.

  The cansos in Songs from Underneath were really not as subtle as a wrench. I relied on the ancient trick of making the viewpoint character a victi
m of oppression, because people identify passionately with a strong viewpoint character. In Black Beauty that trick had helped people see that beating horses was bad; privileged white children burned with outrage at Native Son; prudes wept over prostitutes when they heard “Elle fréquentait la rue Pigalle.” And every time they listened, my audience felt the delicious smug superiority of sympathizing with the underdog, which has more than once been the pivot of the turn toward justice.

  The OSP paid for me to advocate tolerance and kindness in my songs, and allowed me to make art of it if I could. I couldn't really have told you which of us was using the other, anymore.

  Time. One more sip of tepid water. I walked through the door. Remember that “Don't Forget I Live Here Too” should seek dignity, resist anger, and don't crop that first eighth-note short! Relax your shoulders just before you sing. It starts on a G. Look at the audience. Give them the shy smile. First verse begins with “Ilh gen dit nien..."

  I walked into the light. Terrific applause. I was home; time to get some work done.

  I settled into playing position and into the frame of mind of my early thirties: sincere, dedicated, hard-working, freshly shocked that you could do well, and intend well, and put your whole heart on the block, and still get knocked face first into a pile of wet shit.

  At the first notes of “Don't Forget I Live Here Too,” applause pounded across the auditorium like breaking surf, flowing around the silent bloc of Ixists, and followed by the crackling hiss of people shushing each other. I couldn't hear my own picking, so I stopped. The house was astonishingly silent.

  With my warmest, easiest grin, I said, “If everyone is ready now..."

  There was laughter, even from the big swath of Ixist robes in the center, and a spatter of applause.

  “All right, then,” I said, and began again. My voice had aged well, becoming rich with deeper undertones, and I found brittle cynicism in the lyrics that I had not originally intended, irony that allowed me to both ridicule and enjoy the still-naïïve, still-optimistic tone of the last two verses.

  As applause rose to meet the last note, a man who was not an Ixist threw off an Ixist robe and pointed a military maser.

  Raimbaut was patrolling that section. He leaped a row and slapped the back of the man's head, throwing his aim off.

  I dropped to the floor.

  Darkness. Near silence. I didn't even hear the fire curtain come in.

  Warm body next to my back. Paxa's breath in my ear. “Gator-crawl to the springer backstage."

  She had covered us with a smart blanket; the fabric covering us would move to keep us covered, turn into rigid armor against a bullet or bomb, and seal to the floor around us if it sensed high temperatures, cryonics, or poison gas.

  We went on knees and elbows, bellies pressed to the floor. Paxa muttered into her com, talking to Raimbaut, Laprada, Dad, and the two other teams brought in as auxiliary muscle.

  Later I saw recordings of what happened after Paxa dived on me with the blanket. Raimbaut got a grip from the head-slap and yanked on the would-be assassin's collar. The maser discharged into the ceiling, melting crystals on one chandelier into a red-hot rain that was cool before it hit the floor, but also dropping a twenty-kilogram chunk of hot plaster. No one was hit, though a young woman, to whom I later sent an autographed Complete Recordings, turned an ankle getting out of the way.

  Raimbaut slid the man's thumb off the firing button, turned his wrist, footswept him to the floor, slammed a heel into the man's floating ribs, and leaned back. He stretched the man's arm, twisting it against the joints, and stamped on his neck.

  He tried for a knockout and a live capture, but the aintellect running on a processor in the assassin's left frontal sinus was having none of that. It set off microfilaments of explosive woven all through the capillaries of his brain, eliminating recoverable tissue for interrogation.

  Raimbaut said it felt like a hard cough through his boot sole, and when he first looked down he thought that that was a really terrible bloody nose, before he realized and backed away, scraping his foot frantically on the carpet.

  Meanwhile, Paxa and I gator-crawled to the emergency springer backstage. When we stood up, the blanket clung to our backs and the springer frame, still trying to protect us. Paxa put in her crash card. Glowing gray mist formed on the black metal plate in front of us, infinitely deep to look into, infinitely thin seen from the edge.

  Paxa shoved me into the gray fog. I fell forward in a shoulder roll, tucking to protect my hands, onto the floor of an emergency operating room in the OSP secure hospital on Dunant, orbiting Alpha Centauri A. I stood up, still holding the neck of my lute in my left hand. The rest must be lying backstage at the Fareman Hall, Trois-Orléans, Roosevelt, Epsilon Indi system; my poor lute had broken across four parsecs.

  That splintered neck, strings dangling ruefully from the still-fine pegs, made it all so physical. I dropped it, wiping my hand on my tunic.

  The surgeon—an aintellect networked across three robots, each with about twenty metal arms, mounting tools, sensors, lights, lenses, and all—rolled in like a parade of midget tanks. “Are you hurt, Donz Leones?” the aintellect asked, through the speaker in its lead robot.

  I stretched; no soreness. Hands unscathed when I flexed gently. I could have played at that moment—wanted to, in fact.

  “No,” I said. “Not physically hurt."

  The lute was recorded and could be recreated down to the molecule, as it had been, many times before. And I had spares waiting back at the Fareman.

  The springer behind me activated, and Margaret came through, choking and retching. She always had springer sickness worse than anyone I knew. “I told them you'd want to go back on,” she said. “Paxa has it all under control, for once."

  “She has always handled every one of these incidents perfectly,” I said. My ex-wife was often unpleasant about Paxa. I never let her get away with it.

  “Well, then this would be once more. Anyway, she'll need half an hour to pick up the mess and scan the crowd for other weapons. Laprada is running down the com records. Raimbaut just earned a chestful of decorations. Your father is prepping your dressing room. And I'm very glad you're alive."

  “There's nothing to make you notice that you're alive like someone trying to change that,” I agreed.

  “You are still the same old Giraut, I assume? You do still want to finish your show?"

  “For applause like that, Margaret, I'd go back if there were three snipers zeroed in and an atom bomb under the stool."

  “Tostemz-Occitan-ver,” she said, in my culture language. Always a real Occitan. “Well, I'm glad you're safe. Oh, and happy birthday, again."

  “Is everything all right?” the surgeon asked. “I should rescrub if I am not needed."

  Margaret said, “If you are so worried about germs, perhaps I should just order you to spring into a plasma torch somewhere. Or perhaps it indicates a developing phobia, and I should just order you to self-wipe and back up so we don't waste your robots.” She used that tone you use on aintellects and robots to remind them that we remember the Rising and the attempted coup, and that nothing that talks and is made of metal is a friend to anything human.

  “I am sorry. I intended no disrespect.” Aintellects have emotions and expression for better communication and to enable subjunctive thought, and this one was certainly communicating fear and thinking about what might happen. “I am instructed to maintain high preparedness for each new emergency."

  The arrogant little appliance was right.

  Margaret shared an annoyed glance with me. “Everything is all right,” she said.

  The robots wheeled away, brandishing their dozens of flesh-slicers above those steel-shiny bug-bodies, acolytes preparing to sacrifice to the Insect God.

  We blinked back into the healthy, normal chaos backstage at the Fareman, in Trois-Orléans, again. Margaret gagged and glared at me, as she always did when we sprang together because I didn't get springer sickness. />
  Laprada walked beside Margaret to my dressing room. “—just one attacker. He got his weapon past the search by smuggling parts of a microspringer, assembled it under his robe, and they passed the maser to him through it. The maser is untraceable, another averaged replica of standard CSP-issue. No luck on memory extraction—the brain is just goo. The crowd is being very tolerant—"

  “Um,” I said. In my dressing room, I poured a glass of lukewarm water and drank it.

  “The assassin's DNA wasn't in any of the immediate-suspect files, and we're checking the—” Laprada was still rolling. She looked like the very image of a chattering teenager if teenagers chattered about security perimeters and forensic investigations.

  “Um,” I said.

  Dad brought in the freshly re-created lute. It seemed to dwarf him; it was always a surprise what a small eight-year-old his body was.

  “Gra'atz-te,” I said. Dad nodded silently and rushed back out, making him my favorite team member for the moment.

  “—no communications detected in or out—"

  “Um,” I said, firmly, now that I had my lute.

  Laprada stopped and they both looked at me.

  “This is a very important concert, the artist's fiftieth birthday. The artist needs to check tuning on this lute and that guitar, and get into a frame of mind to perform. You are standing in the artist's dressing room."

  Laprada's tone was amused. “We are keeping the artist from getting blown up."

  “You already did that. Now I need to—"

  Margaret stepped between us. “Sit down and tune,” she said to me, and then to Laprada, “I've been arguing with him for twenty-eight stanyears, with no effect whatsoever."

  “Well, and, he's right. Despite being a horrible old monster of ego."

  Lost in tuning, I didn't hear the door close. No earless bastard of a moronic critic would be able to say that the interruption spoiled my birthday concert. An artist has enseingnamen to defend and preserve every bit as much as a fighting man, and gratz'deu, I was still both. Fifty be damned.