by John Varley
Some groups came preformed, they’d worked together before their mandatory enlistment, but that was fairly rare. It’s an axiom in the trade that pop bands have an average life of about six months before “artistic differences” tear them apart. Artistic differences usually means that all the other people in the group are behaving like assholes. Trust me, I’ve seen it many times. (Me? An asshole? I prefer “perfectionist,” but it’s possible some others might use a more powerful word.)
You didn’t have forever to accomplish this. In fact, you had thirty days before you had to come before the auditioning board, rehearsed and ready to boogie, for a thumbs-up or a one-way ticket back to your old posting.
I had arrived at Pavonis with the intention of going solo. Me, a piano, a bar, and endless requests for “Melancholy Baby” and “Send in the Clowns” and “The Phobos Blues.” I was informed within the hour that there were no openings for such an act. Come back in a year and try again. Pismo, here I come.
I was good enough to join one of the touring companies that were assembled at Pavonis. There were call sheets out for Aida and The Mikado, and I knew I could easily find work as either Amneris or Katisha (in suitable makeup). There was also Sweeney Todd—I’d always wanted to play Mrs. Lovett—and a new musical, something called Work in Progress, based on Finnegans Wake. I’d listened to some downloads of the West End version, and knew I could really own the part of Anna Livia Plurabelle.
But these were all migratory assignments, hopping from Mercury to Sedna and all the rocks in between. I’d have to give up my Europa posting, and I wasn’t about to do that. If I wanted to sing opera or Broadway, Europa had resident amateur groups I could join … but first I had to get to Europa, and with each passing day that was seeming harder and harder. Just getting the posting was easy. Nepotism, pure and simple. But Uncle Admiral couldn’t help me when it came to the qualifying round.
IT WAS QUINN who brought us together. There were six of us at first, and we knew each other from the jams and solos we’d all attended and participated in, trying to make something work. It had been two weeks, and several bands had already formed and shipped out. The other four were Cassandra, Joey, and Jim Hartman—a fiddle player who specialized in bluegrass and zydeco, but who Quinn judged was adaptable enough for what he had in mind—and Meiko Miyazaki …
… a singer. It was obvious one of us had to die. We hated each other at first sight, and so behaved with every possible show of friendliness. I don’t think any of the guys were fooled. She sang in that nasal soprano characteristic of nip-pop of the last two decades.
“Jim, who are your influences?” Quinn asked, when we were all settled around a table at the canteen with coffee and munchies.
“Well, Clifton Chenier, of course.” He thought about it, his fingertips idly moving over his violin strings. “Boozoo Chavis. Buckwheat. Leftover. Rockin’ Sydney. Soilent Green.” Quinn nodded at each name. I knew about half of them, and it was clear nobody else there knew any of them. “Cedric Rainwater, Flatt and Scruggs, Vassar Clements, Kentucky Thunder, Yonder Mountain. Is that enough?”
“That’ll do. What about you, Meiko?”
“The Usual Suspects,” she said.
“No, be specific,” Cassandra said.
“I am. That’s a band.” Meiko looked a little miffed. “They started the Okinawa pentatonic rock movement ten, fifteen years ago. Other influences … Happy End, Sandii and the Sunsetz, The 5.6.7.8’s, Aushvitz, Green Milk From the Planet Orange, Michelle Gun Elephant, The Termites …” She rambled on in that vein for a while, and all of us but Quinn were googling as fast as we could key in the names. All head-banger bands, every one of them. I never did find out for sure if Quinn knew all of those groups, but his knowledge of the music of the last century and a half was encyclopedic, so he may have.
When she was finished, Quinn turned to me.
“Podkayne? Influences?”
I didn’t like the way this was going. I felt sure Quinn wanted to put together a band that would specialize in more current pop, which wasn’t my strength at all. But I forged ahead, trotting out my own list of the usual suspects.
“Barbra, of course, and Ella and Billie. And—”
“Billy who?” Meiko asked. “I don’t know any solo guy named Billy. Who does he sing with?”
There was a silence, which stretched out uncomfortably. Joey broke it.
“I think she means Billie Holiday,” he said.
“Lady Day?” Vanessa prompted. Meiko shrugged.
“Natalie Appleton,” I went on. “Sinatra … Frank, not Nancy. David Crosby. Anita O’Day, Baako Williams, Janis Siegel, Anita Baker, The Roches, Janis Ian, Feminem, Beyoncé, Siobhann Heidenreich, Art Garfunkel … is that enough?”
Meiko was looking cross-eyed, obviously scanning the information she was googling. I don’t think she knew much about any of the people I had mentioned.
“Sinatra? How can this man be an influence on you? He is a baritone!”
I thought of saying “phrasing,” but I wasn’t sure she’d be familiar with the term.
I’m being catty here, I know it. Meiko had a narrow range and limited knowledge of those who came before her, but she was very good at what she did … if that was your cup of sake. Personally, I think sake tastes like warm piss.
Joey’s influences: the entire Marsalis family, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Bird, Louis Armstrong, Artie Shaw, Rolf Smedvig, Michelle Perry. And so on through Cassandra (Thelonious Sphere Monk and Dave Brubeck—interesting combination—and Glenn Gould) and Quinn (Sandy Nelson, Art Blakely, Evelyn Glennie, Willie Bobo).
So at last we were all waiting to see what Quinn had to say. And it was this:
“I’m going to say just one word to start. That word is jazz.”
A pause while we all chewed that over. It was an incredibly juicy word, jazz, and one that worked fine for me.
“Miles?” Joey asked. “Bill Evans? Chick Corea? Bop?”
“A little cooler than that. Brubeck, Sinatra, scat, torch songs.”
“Pop jazz?” Cassandra suggested.
“And some rock. I don’t want to categorize too much. Here’s the deal. We don’t have to specialize too much. Pop music was in the doldrums for a long time. Rap eliminated melody, videos made it big business, downloads gave it back to the people, and the people haven’t come up with anything that interests me for a long time. I don’t like the formless stuff going down now; we’ve got melody back now, but it’s nonlinear and random, and I miss the beat.”
“I guess a drummer would miss it,” I said.
“I do, too,” Cassandra said.
“And me,” said Jim.
“Back then they were using drum machines,” Quinn said, in the tone of voice you might use to say “infected hemorrhoids.” I didn’t have anything to say to that. All singers have used synthesized backup at one time or another.
“Anyway,” he went on, “most musicians I know feel that popular music has been in one of its periodic downswings.”
Meiko looked like she was going to say something, then decided not to.
“Not all of them,” Quinn acknowledged. “But a lot, and I agree with them. So there’s that, and there’s the well-known fact that the type of music most people will enjoy throughout their lives is set, sort of programmed in, by the time they’re in their midtwenties.”
“Exactly,” said Meiko. “So take that, and add it to the fact that the bulk of Navy audiences are eighteen to twenty-one, serving out their hitches, and it seems to me we ought to be talking modern contemporary.”
“Makes sense,” Joey said.
“It does,” Quinn said, “and that’s why most everybody’s doing it. But there’s two things they haven’t thought about, and one thing you all haven’t thought about. One is that, on the outer-planet stations, the ratio of draftees to lifers is a lot lower. A lot lower. Most draftees serve dirt-side, redside, or IP Patrol.” That was Navy for Earth, Mars, or aboard a ship on customs patrol in the I
nner Planets Naval Military Region, where the vast bulk of humanity resides: between Mercury and the asteroid belt.
“Now, I know none of you want that. So Podkayne’s got a ticket to Europa, and anybody who joins in a group with her can hitch a ride.”
Several eyebrows went up. He was right. None of the others had a secure posting, and they might end up in a much less interesting assignment. None of them were forgetting that they needed Madmen and Madams on the far-flung outposts of the dwarf planets, too, like Pluto, Eris, Sedna, Nanook, Tulugaak, Pukkeenegaak … all the way out to the edges of the Oort Cloud. These were widely considered to be hardship posts where a MADDMN troupe would spend most of its time aboard supply scows going from one long-period comet research facility to another.
My ticket to Europa. My ticket. I suddenly felt a lot better about things, to the point I might even consider bringing along a second singer. I could be magnanimous.
Meiko didn’t look like she could be.
“So our audience ain’t gonna be just people our age, that’s number one,” he said. He was doing a pretty good selling job. He had our complete attention. “Podkayne’s got a posting to Europa. And even with our generation, musical tastes are broader than they’ve been in years. Our moms and dads, they grew up in a creative musical era, they look back on it with nostalgia, they want to hear that music … and more, because it was a time of fusion and retrospection. Influences from way back were being felt. Oldies were being dragged out of the closet and getting a lot of downloads. And it’s kept up now that things are in a period of consolidation. Used to be, each generation had its own music, and the stuff that came before … that was squaresville, man. That’s a term from a century ago. Much less so today. Now that everything, and I mean everything, can be ordered and downloaded, people’s tastes are more eclectic. One person’s music stash might have a bit of opera, a bit of ragtime, Sinatra, Foo Fighters, Sex Pistols, the Termites, the Beatles, Graham Nash, Gregorian chants, Miles Davis … people are at least open to listening to just about anything. And if you’re good, really good, they’ll come back.”
“I don’t see it,” Meiko said.
“Maybe I do.” That was Cassandra. I kept my mouth shut.
“I’ve done research on this, believe me,” Quinn went on. “I’ve studied music history and the evolution of musical taste for a long time, and I can show you the data. But what you want to know is the bottom line. Can we form a group around Podkayne? Can we cover half a dozen styles but stay away from the easy, sure things that the great majority of the groups here at Pavonis are going to gig with? Can we bring this stuff to a new audience? Can we be really, really good at what we do?”
Meiko and I stared at each other, but neither of us said anything. Then she got up and left, without a word to any of us. The silence stretched out, and I kept my mouth shut.
“What I can’t figure,” Cassandra said, at last, “is what she was doing here in the first place.”
Joey had been intently studying his shoes, or the floor, or something down there between his knees as he slumped in his chair. He raised his hand.
“That would be me,” he admitted. “She and I … we’ve been … thought she might be able to fit in …”
“And she’s really good in bed, right?” Cassandra asked.
He looked up, and his expression was so sorrowful that we all laughed, and pretty soon he did, too.
Jim said he was looking for something deeper in his musical roots, and we all wished him well, and that’s how Podkayne and the Pod People was born.
And we were good. We were really, really good.
DESPITE ALL MY misgivings, Karma and I quickly became best friends, the Mutt and Jeff of the Swamp.
In addition to our height, we had a lot of other things in common:
Karma was tone-deaf, couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow. I have perfect pitch and a four-octave vocal range.
She was one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen, and a gymnast and acrobat of no mean skills. She had almost made the Martian Olympic team. I am a total klutz, can’t walk across a room without stumbling over my own feet.
She was a chatterbox, never at a loss for words. I am what you might call reserved unless the talk is about music.
She was instantly at home in any social situation, without inhibitions, modesty, self-doubt, or the slightest inkling of inferiority. I’m … reserved.
I like anchovies on my pizza, and she likes artichoke hearts. I say to-may-to and she says to-maah-to.
We both, however, love to shop.
That first day she dragged me to the mall. First stop: Bed, Bath, and Way Beyond. We spent a few hours arguing amiably about sheets and towels and things like that, settling on a color scheme for each room of my new home. Over lunch at Pablo’s Mexican Grill—chosen because it did not feature a view of Jupiter and the surface—we debated the relative merits of paint and wallpaper. She favored smart paper because you could dial up any color or pattern you wanted; I told her I’d had it in my room at home on Mars, and years went by without my changing the color by a single wavelength. So we went to the hardware store and bought a few pints of eight different colors to try out.
During that day we learned a lot about each other. She was delighted but not overawed to learn who my family was.
“I’ve eaten a few times at your mom’s restaurant. Wonderful stuff, but a bit spendy for my family. And both my parents voted for your grandmother.”
She came from the middle class of Mars. Both her parents were Earth-born, naturally, the two of them managing a small ski resort on Olympus Mons.
“I could ski before I could walk,” she said.
She had made one trip to Earth, when she was fifteen, a month of vacation with her family.
“I loved it!” she said. “I mean, I loved the Earth; nobody likes Earthies. But I didn’t see a lot of them.”
“What about the gravity?”
“Didn’t bother me after the first day. We shorties deal with it better than you tall folks. We went up the Amazon, up to where there’s still jungle. It was all the life! An explosion of life, everywhere I looked. We went for hikes in the jungle and I realized that everything I was seeing was alive. On Mars, everywhere you look, everything is dead.”
“Sounds like maybe you should have been an Earthie.”
She withered me with a look.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it as an insult.”
“No, you’ve got a point. I’ve even thought about it, after my hitch is up. I thought about going to school and being an entomologist.”
“What’s that?”
“Somebody who studies insects.”
Bugs! Oh, yuck! She was smiling at me.
“Okay, we’re even. I’m an agoraphobe, but you’re an entomophobe. Both very Martian things to be.”
“Something I don’t get,” I said. “If you’re afraid of open spaces, how did you manage it on Earth?”
“I don’t get it, either,” she admitted. “I was real worried before we went, and I didn’t do too well in the cities. I didn’t like to get out of the car or the train. I wanted a roof over my head! But when we got to the jungle, it just all went away. You ever been in a jungle?”
I shook my head. I guess it would be better than a walk in my underwear from Pavonis to Olympus, but not by much. A bug under every leaf …
“Something about it. Pretty soon I loved it.”
She was an apprentice agronomist here on Europa, looking to learn all she could in the ultracontrolled environments of the hydroponic and dirt farms, orchards, and municipal parks, so that when her hitch was over she could go to Brazil and get her degree. I wished her well.
8
EXCERPTS FROM PODKAYNE’S JOVIAN DIARY:
Saturday, November 9
Hindu Festival of Light. Día de Caman in Peru. Cambodian National Independence Day. Día de Virgen de la Almudena in Spain.
Rehearsing heavily for big opening at Rick’s next week. Karma helped wi
th preparations for the housewarming party. Got all the painting and most of the decorating done just in time. Made 6 of Grandfather Jim’s pecan pies and gallons of Uncle Jubal’s jambalaya recipe, also lots of Mom’s canapes. All got snarfed down in the first hour, had to send out for cold cuts and pizza. Most of the Swamp critters showed up for at least a few minutes, plus the band and all their friends, and Karma’s friends from all over Clarke Centre. People spilled out into the hallway and neighbor Chan opened the adjoining door to his apartment to take the excess; must find a way to pay him back, nice man. Sang a few songs near the end of the evening, got some people to sing along. Must find a way to discourage Karma from singing. Horrible!
Sunday, November 10
Cry of Independence in Palau. Maputo City Day in Mozambique. Militsiya Day in Russia. Potosi Festival in Bolivia. Sadie Hawkins Day in East and Western America and Second Republic of Texas.
First thought: seal door, abandon apartment, live in basement. But Quinn and Karma helped, and in an hour the place looked habitable again. And I didn’t even have to do the dishes!
Thursday, November 14
Readjustment Day in Guinea Bissau and Algeria. Birthday of Hussein I in Jordan. National Day of Mourning in Germany.
I don’t know if Kahlua has adopted me or if he feels he owns my apartment. Either way, he spends a lot of time here. I never wanted a cat, but he’s not bad. Doesn’t jump up on the counters, never pesters me for food. I know he can get a meal at any of a few dozen places in the Swamp. Spends his nights here, at the foot of the bed or sometimes snuggled up beside me. When I go out he follows, jumps up and pushes the elevator button, looks back at me smugly. He has other tricks. Once downstairs he might go with me, might not. No telling where he goes on his own, but he always finds his way back. Cats and dogs have the run of the place here except for some off-limits areas. Not like at home, no leash laws. Problem dogs get shipped out at once! No territory marking allowed! All are spayed or neutered, naturally. If a mouse or a rat got loose in Clarke Centre, he’d live about 5 seconds.