Asimov's SF, September 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Good morning to you, too, Elise."

  Soon the hallway filled with sleepy kids. Cowdrey greeted them each in turn as they passed. Most smiled. He glanced at their eyes. The red-rimmed ones would be a worry, but they had been fewer and fewer as the weeks since their arrival turned into months. At first there had been nightmares, a reliving of the night they'd been taken. He'd had a few himself: the bus's wheels humming through the night, Junior High Band Management open on his lap, and then the growing brightness out the bus windows, the high screech that seemed to emanate in the middle of his head before the short soft shock of waking on the fishbowl auditorium's floor with their equipment and everything else from the bus scattered about. (No bus driver, though!) Those dreams had tapered off through the months. He thought, kids are resilient—if they have a structure, that is.

  Thomas came by last. A short boy who played in the band because his parents told him it would look good on a college application, he'd never been an inspired musician, but he was competent enough. Thomas kept his head down as he passed. “Good morning,” he mumbled.

  “Can I speak to you a moment?” Cowdrey moved away from the wall to block his path.

  “Sir.” The boy didn't meet Cowdrey's gaze, but even his head held low couldn't hide the bruise that glowered on his cheek.

  “How'd that happen?"

  Thomas glanced up, frightened for an instant, then his expression went bland and unassuming. “I fell in the shower. Slipped."

  The instruments tuning up in the practice rooms filled the silence between them.

  Finally, Thomas said, “Look, I want to get away from here as much as the next person. If playing on pitch, on tune and to the beat is what it's going to take, then I'll do that."

  Cowdrey heard the Perfectionists echo in Thomas's speech. “There is no such thing as a perfect performance, Thomas.” He thought about Elise's perfect pebble. Perfect because there were no pebbles here, nor weeds or malls or bicycles. No families. Nothing but each other and that day's playing.

  Thomas shrugged. “Yeah, well, maybe not, but I can be better. I don't want it to be my fault the lights don't flicker."

  “We don't even know what that means, son. Flickering lights may not be their applause."

  The boy's eyes revealed nothing, and for a moment he didn't appear seventeen at all. He looked adult and tired and cursed with a terrible burden.

  “Thomas, if someone is threatening you or hurting you, I need to know about it. That's my job. You don't have to play solo."

  Thomas studied the hallway beyond Cowdrey's shoulder. A few steps past them, the hallway branched to the auditorium with its enigmatic windows. “My mom told me once that the world is a big place, and I could become anything I wanted to, but it's not. It's no bigger than the people you know and the places you go. It's a small world here, Mr. Cowdrey, and I don't have any place to hide in it, so I'm going to go to the practice room to see if I can't get my act together a little better.” He pushed past the director.

  The director threw himself into the morning's work. Teaching is time management, he thought, and staying on task. He moved from student to student, checking intonation and technique. “It's not all about the notes,” he said to a clarinet player. “Once you know the music, it's about feeling the sound from your own instrument and your section. The song becomes more about heart than head.” The player nodded and replayed the piece.

  For a time, mid-morning, Cowdrey sat in the practice room with the brass section. The leaders paced the group through their pieces, focusing on problems from yesterday's session. Each had Elise Morgan's suggestions to consult. Cowdrey watched Taylor Beau and Liz Waters, the numbers three and four chairs among the cornets. The couple wore matching silver crosses on chains around their necks. He wondered if they had given them to each other. Liz kept her red hair in a pony tail, and when she finished a long run of notes, her skin flushed, chasing her freckles to the surface. Taylor often played with his eyes closed, the music consigned to memory well before the other players. Although he wasn't first chair, the section elected him for solos frequently, which he played with lighthearted enthusiasm. The director thought about Elise's question on the marriage, and he remembered the duet Taylor and Liz worked up for the state competition. They played “Ode to Joy,” and when they finished, they hugged. Now that he thought about it, he should have seen the budding relationship in the hug. You can't rehearse so often with the same person that you don't start having feelings about how they play. The breathing. The fingerings. The careful attention to each other's rhythm and tone. Harmonizing. Cowdrey shivered, thinking about music's sensuous nature.

  The trombone section leader gave instruction. Cowdrey half listened while thinking about his first year in college, when he'd added the teaching certification program to his music major. Just for something to fall back on, he'd thought at the time. But when graduation came around, he'd found he liked teaching as much as he liked music, so moving into the schools didn't feel like settling for less. The kids in the room laughed, breaking Cowdrey from his reverie. The section leader was part way through an old band joke that Cowdrey couldn't remember the punchline for. The leader said, “So she dated a tuba player next, and her girlfriend asks how the date went. She says his embouchure was big and sloppy. It was like kissing a jellyfish.” Most laughed, even the tuba player. “So, she says she went out with a French horn player next. How'd the date go? asks her friend, and the girl says he barely could kiss at all, his lips were so close together, but she liked the way he held her.” A couple kids reacted right away, and ten seconds later, almost all laughed. Some looked embarrassed. “I hope that wasn't inappropriate, Mr. Cowdrey,” said the section leader.

  Cowdrey smiled. “Maybe you could go through those opening notes again. If you don't come in crisply, the back half flounders.” He noticed Taylor and Liz held hands. Thomas, however, wasn't laughing. He clutched his horn close to his chest, his arms crossed over it like a shield. No one seemed to be paying special attention to Thomas. Whoever the Perfectionists were, they hid well. Thomas thought about Elise's suggestion that the band needed a distraction, something else to think about besides a perfect performance. Could that be a way to protect Thomas?

  The section leader directed the brass back to the first movement. Pages turned. Instruments came up, and the group launched into the beginning measures. Cowdrey stepped back to watch and listen. They didn't look so young to him anymore. Beneath their long hair or ragged haircuts, their faces had lost the babyish look he associated with fifteen-year-olds. Just two years’ difference, but he could see they'd changed. Their clothes strained to contain them. Their hands had grown so that no one stretched anymore to reach their instruments’ keys. Their breath control had improved since they'd arrived, the improvement that came with maturity. A ninth grader couldn't hold a note the way an older musician could. A fifteen-year-old couldn't hit the high parts with the same confidence as these kids could.

  How long would they stay here?

  Cowdrey walked behind the players. The wall cooled his back when he rested against it. What existed on the other side? Rooms filled with the brown smoke that eddied beyond the windows in the performance hall? He tried to imagine what creatures lurked in the brown smoke. Tentacles? Claws? Amorphous blobs? Or did he lean against a metal shell, inches from interstellar space? Maybe they had arrived on the creatures’ home world and an entirely alien landscape waited beyond. Maybe, even, they had never left Earth, a few steps from home, hidden for their captors’ amusement. (What did they want?)

  But the question remained, how long would they stay? What if they would never leave?

  Cowdrey frowned. A veteran teacher had told him, “When you teach, your life becomes the kids and the classroom. If there's anything else distracting you, then you're not doing the job.” Of course, another teacher, equally experienced, countered, “Teaching is what you do. Life is why you do it."

  He left the practice room. Pulsing sound greeted him wh
en he opened the door into the percussionists’ area. Their eyes didn't leave their music, and at the place where the bass drums kicked in, with the snares beating out a complicated counter-rhythm, he could feel his heart's pounding change to match it. Watching their hands blur to follow the music, seeing the vibrations from the instruments’ side, he noticed for the first time how thick-wristed the drummers had become, like tennis pros who gained an over-developed forearm on their racket side, except for them both arms bulged. When Cowdrey had been in college, he went out to dinner with a long-time drummer. On a bet, the fellow had grabbed one table edge with his fingertips, and lifted it, drinks and dinner plates and all by the strength of his hands and wrists. “Years and years working a drum set, and look what it got me, a party trick.” The drummer laughed.

  Once again, Cowdrey saw that the kids weren't ninth graders any more. When it ended, the section leader turned to him. “I thought these changes in the backbeat Elise wrote were wonky when I saw them on the page, but once we got going on them, wow!” Others in the section nodded.

  The morning unfolded. Session after session, the kids’ growth struck him. They weren't in any real sense a school band anymore. They had evolved into something that had never existed in humanity before, because where before in human history had these conditions existed?

  But it wasn't until he stood outside his room before lunch that he made up his mind. Elise turned the corner with her clipboard in hand, her notes for the day covering the top sheet. Instead of showing them to him, she stopped to look at the blank wall where Ms. Rhodes's door once had been. Clearly she hadn't noticed the disparity in the hallway. Elise touched the wall. For a second, Cowdrey worried she pictured what he had seen when he raised the nerve to go into Rhodes's room uninvited: the sheet twisted into a rope, the cloth cutting into her neck, the pathetic letters home she'd been writing since the first day they'd arrived.

  Elise placed her palm flat on the wall where the door used to be. “It's adapt or die all the time, isn't it?"

  Her crooked glasses made her look childish, but the top of her head stood almost level with his chin. He remembered when she'd been just a tiny seventh grader who handled her flute with an older musician's authority, but whose feet didn't reach the ground when she sat to play. Cowdrey knew then that Elise had become the band's heart. She drew the thread that kept them together so far—not his efforts, but hers. She held the late-night meetings with the section leaders to go over changes in music. She organized the informal ensembles. She had the energy others could draw on, including himself.

  “Yes, it is.” He took a deep breath. Cowdrey could feel the shift in his thinking happen. Suddenly, he wasn't a junior high band director. He was an older adult trapped with fifty competent young adults, if he could let them be that. If he could adapt to change. “Let's get them ready for the practice this evening, shall we?"

  Elise raised her eyebrows.

  That evening, Cowdrey took the podium. Under his hands, he held the music for the practice and his baton. Paper-clipped to the top sheet were his notes for areas to emphasize along with Elise's comments. The group fidgeted and chattered as they always did before practice. Cowdrey liked standing before the full band, when the day's work came together and he could measure the progress, and even though he hated the circumstances, he had to admit he'd never had a better performance facility. The light. The sound. The way the space flowed around them. Only the smoky windows and the hidden audience jarred.

  He picked up the baton. They looked at him expectantly. “Breathing first, Cougars. I'll count off the seconds. Inhale.” He tapped eight seconds with the baton while they filled their lungs. “Hold.” With metronomic regularity he tapped out twenty-four more beats. They exhaled for eight, relaxed for ten, and then repeated twice more. At the end, the percussionists finished their set-up and the band waited. Breathing exercises calmed them, put them into the right mind. In his classroom at the junior high, which he could barely picture now, he'd hung a banner at the front: ALL MUSIC BEGINS WITH A GOOD BREATH (AND DIES WITH A LACK THEREOF).

  Now they were ready. “An issue has come up that I think needs to be addressed. As most of you know, Taylor Beau and Liz Waters have asked my permission to marry.” Whatever whispering that might have been going on when he started the speech lapsed into silence. For an instance, Cowdrey pictured the school board and all the parents sitting in the back. What would they say at this announcement? Would they understand? He brushed aside the image, then plunged ahead. “I have thought about the request for a long time. Considering our situation and Taylor and Liz's characters, I think they would make a fine married couple."

  Before the last syllable had time to fade, the band erupted into cheers and gleeful laughter. The attention at first focused on Liz and Taylor, who cried and hugged awkwardly from their chairs, their cornets still in hand, but soon Cowdrey saw a good number had surrounded Elise, shaking her hand and clapping her on the back. Cowdrey's jaw dropped. He had, in every sense, been orchestrated. Finally, in the midst of the uproar, Elise caught his eye and mouthed, “Thank you.” He touched his forehead in rueful respect.

  Thomas put his French horn on his chair, waiting his chance to congratulate the happy couple. A trombone player stood beside him, and they smiled as they chatted. It seemed as if it had been weeks since Cowdrey could remember Thomas looking relaxed. Cowdrey thought, a good decision and a distraction in one move. He smiled too.

  Elise worked her way over to him. “We'll need a wedding march."

  “I think Mendelssohn's is in my books. That would be traditional. Besides, it would be appropriate. He was seventeen when he wrote it.” Cowdrey reached past her to high five a couple of flute players who had joined a conga line.

  Elise shook her head. “That's a myth, I think. He wrote it later. Anyway, I have something I've been working on. Something of my own.” Her eyes lowered.

  “Why am I not surprised?"

  It took the band a half hour to settle down. They cut the practice short after just two run throughs of the Beatles medley.

  For the first time in two years, Cowdrey didn't walk the halls before going to bed. We are adults here, he thought. The paradigm has shifted. He sighed as he lay down, believing when he went to sleep his dreams would be undisturbed and packed with beautifully played music, but after an hour trying to convince himself he'd changed, he rose, dressed, and walked the hall, listening at each door. Satisfied at last, he went back to his room, and his dreams played undisturbed with flawless performances.

  In the morning, he found a note pushed under his door. “A wedding will not get us home. They want a perfect performance! Get us home!” Cowdrey snorted in disgust. Nobody could know what they wanted. They might not want anything. He folded the note in half and put it inside his band management book. Even the Perfectionists couldn't bother him today, and they wouldn't, at least until after the wedding. And who knows, he thought, sometimes the best way to a long term goal is to focus on a short term one.

  Elise distributed the new march to the section leaders, who organized a music-transcribing session. For over an hour, the band met in the auditorium to make their copies. “You'd think if aliens could snatch us up to play concerts, they could at least provide a decent photocopier,” grumbled the oboist, who had several dozen bars of sixteenths and two key changes to write for herself.

  A clarinet player finished, then studied the music. “This is cool. If I knew half as much as Elise does, I'd count myself a genius."

  Cowdrey waited for someone to laugh. It wasn't the kind of comment kids make about each other. Someone else said, “Really!"

  The rest continued to write. Cowdrey said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Maybe what they want is a well-played new piece. Soon as we finish here, break into your sections and work on this."

  For the next three days leading to the Friday concert and wedding, practice went better than Cowdrey could have imagined, and not just on the new piece either. They ascended to new hei
ghts during “March of the Irish Dragoons,” and they suddenly mastered the eighth-note quintuplets and the bi-tonal passages in “Ascensions” they'd fumbled before. Elise popped up everywhere, tweaking the music, erasing notes and rewriting passages, so every time Cowdrey rehearsed a section she had changed his pages.

  On concert day, Cowdrey went to the auditorium early. He'd already realigned the chairs and moved the sections about to get the best sound balance for the new arrangements. The director's platform could accommodate Taylor and Liz when they exchanged vows. He put his hands behind his back and circled the room. Even shoes clicking on the floor sounded beautiful in the auditorium's acoustics. He paused at the window, which cast no reflection. Behind it, the auditorium light penetrated a couple of feet into the swirling brown cloud. Cowdrey cupped his hands around his eyes and leaned against the window to peer out. At first he'd been afraid to get against the glass. What if something horrible stepped forward, resolving itself from the smoke? He couldn't imagine an event more startling, but over the years the band had played in this room, no one had ever seen anything. Now the sinuous smoke's motion soothed him, as if he looked into ocean waves. It was meditative.

  Elise cleared her throat when she entered. She wore her marching uniform, the most formal outfit anyone in the band had. Soon, the other members filtered in, filled with anticipation, gaily bedecked in their uniforms. A grinning Taylor and bashful Liz came in last, music tucked under their arms.