“But—we can’t do it all,” Ereza said, appalled at the thought of all the children, talented or untalented, forced to sit through lessons in music. Every child had to know something about drill and survival techniques; Cravor’s World, even in peacetime, could be dangerous. But music? You couldn’t save yourself in a sandstorm or grass fire by knowing who wrote which pretty tune, or how to read musical notation. “We found you teachers who did—”
“Whom you treated like idiots,” Arla said. “Remember the time Professor Rizvi came over, and talked to Grandmother after my lesson? No—of course you wouldn’t; you were in survival training right then, climbing up cliffs or something like that. But it was just about the time the second Gavalan rebellion was heating up, and he told Grandmother the sanctions against the colonists just made things worse. She got that tone in her voice—you know what I mean—and silenced him. After that he wouldn’t come to the house; I went into the city for my lessons. She told the story to Father, and they laughed together about the silly, ineffectual musician who wouldn’t stand a chance against real power—with me standing there—and then they said ‘But you’re a gifted child, Arlashi, and we love it.’“
“They’re right.” Ereza leaned forward. “What would a composer and musician know about war? And it doesn’t take much of a weapon to smash that cello you’re so fond of.” She knew that much, whatever she didn’t know about music. To her surprise, Arla gave a harsh laugh.
“Of course it doesn’t take much weaponry to smash a cello. It doesn’t take a weapon at all. I could trip going down the stairs and fall on it; I could leave it flat on the floor and step on it. You don’t need to be a skilled soldier to destroy beauty: any clumsy fool can manage that.”
“But—”
Arla interrupted her. “That’s my point. You take pride in your skill, in your special, wonderful knowledge. And all you can accomplish with it is what carelessness or stupidity or even the normal path of entropy will do by itself. If you want a cello smashed, you don’t need an army: just turn it over to a preschool class without a teacher present. If you want to ruin a fine garden, you don’t have to march an expensive army through it—just let it alone. If you want someone to die, you don’t have to kill them: just wait. We’ll all die, Ereza. We don’t need your help.”
“It’s not about that!” But Ereza felt a cold chill. If Arla could think that.… “It’s not about killing. It’s protecting—”
“You keep saying that, but—did you ever consider asking me? Asking any artist, any writer, any musician? Did you ever consider learning enough of our arts to guess how we might feel?”
Ereza stared at her, puzzled. “But we did protect you. We let you study music from the beginning; we’ve never pushed you into the military. What more do you want, Arlashi?”
“To be myself, to be a musician just because I am, not because you needed someone to prove that you weren’t all killers.”
That was ridiculous. Ereza stared at her twin, wondering if someone had mindwiped her. Would one of the political fringe groups have thought to embarrass the Pennaris family, with its rich military history, by recruiting its one musician? “I don’t understand,” she said, aware of the stiffness in her voice. She would have to tell Grandmother as soon as she got out of here, and find out if anyone else had noticed how strange Arla had become.
Arla leaned forward. “Ereza, you cannot have me as a tame conscience…someone to feel noble about. I am not a simple musician, all full of sweet melody, to soothe your melancholy hours after battle.” She plucked a sequence of notes, pleasant to the ear.
“Not that I mind your being soldiers,” Arla went on, now looking past Ereza’s head into some distance that didn’t belong in that small room. Ereza had seen that look on soldiers; it shocked her on Arla’s face. “It’s not that I’m a pacifist, you see. It’s more complicated than that. I want you to be honest soldiers. If you like war, admit it. If you like killing, admit that. Don’t make me the bearer of your nobility, and steal my own dark initiative. I am a person—a whole person—with my own kind of violence.”
“Of course you’re a whole person—everyone is—”
“No. You aren’t. You aren’t because you know nothing about something you claim is important to you.”
“What do you want me to do?” Ereza asked. She felt grumpy. Her stump hurt, now, and she wanted to be back with people who didn’t make ridiculous emotional arguments or confuse her.
“Quit thinking of me as sweet little Arlashi, your pet twin, harmless and fragile and impractical. Learn a little music, so you’ll know what discipline really is. Or admit you don’t really care, and quit condescending to me.”
“Of course I care.” She cared that her sister had gone crazy, at least. Then a thought occurred to her. “Tell me—do the other musicians feel as you do?”
Arla cocked her head and gave her an unreadable look. “Come to the concert tomorrow, Eri.”
“I don’t know if I can—” She didn’t know if she wanted to. A long journey into the city, hours crammed into a seat with others, listening to music that didn’t (if she was honest) interest her that much. She’d already heard it, parts of it over and over. “How about tomorrow’s rehearsal?”
“No. The concert. I can get you in. If you want to know how musicians think, and why…then come.”
“Are the others—?”
“I don’t know. Grandmother usually comes to my performances, but the others less often. I wish you would, Eri.”
* * * *
Ereza sat in the back row of the concert hall, surrounded by people in formal clothes and dress uniforms. Onstage the orchestra waited, in formal black and white, for the soloist and conductor. She saw a stir at the edge of the stage. Arla, in her long swirling dress, with the cello. The conductor—she looked quickly at her program for his name. Mikailos Bogdan.
Applause, which settled quickly as the house lights went down. Now the clear dome showed a dark night sky with a thick wedge of stars, the edge of the Cursai Cluster. The conductor lifted his arms. Ereza watched; the musicians did not stir. His arms came down.
Noise burst from speakers around the hall. As if conducting music, Bogdan’s arms moved, but the noise had nothing to do with his direction. Grinding, squealing, exploding—all the noises that Ereza finally recognized as belonging to an armored ground unit in battle. Rattle and clank of treads, grinding roar of engines, tiny voices yelling, screaming, the heavy thump of artillery and lighter crackling of small arms. Around her the others stirred, looked at each other in amazement, then horror.
Onstage, no one moved. The musicians stared ahead, oblivious to the noise; Ereza, having heard the rehearsal, wondered how they could stand it. And why? Why work so for perfection in rehearsal if they never meant to play? Toward the front, someone stood—someone in uniform—and yelled. Ereza could not hear it over the shattering roar that came from the speakers then—low-level aircraft strafing, she thought. She remembered that sound. Another two or three people stood up; the first to stand began to push his way out of his row. One of the others was hauled back down by those sitting near him.
The sound changed, this time to the repetitive crump-crump-crump-crump of bombardment. Vague, near-human sounds, too…Ereza shivered, knowing before it came clear what that would be. Screams, moans, sobs…it went on far too long. She wanted to get up and leave, but she had no strength.
Silence, when it finally came, was welcome. Ereza could hear, as her ears regained their balance, the ragged breathing of the audience. Silence continued, the conductor still moving his arms as if the orchestra were responding. Finally, he brought the unnerving performance to a close, turned and bowed to them. A few people clapped, uncertainly; no one else joined them and the sound died away.
“Disgracefully bad taste,” said someone to Ereza’s right. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing.”
“Getting us ready to be ravished by Fennaris, no doubt. Have you heard her before?”
“She’s worth it. I heard her first in a chamber group two years ago, and—” The conductor beckoned, and Arla stood; the gossipers quieted. Intent curiosity crackled around the hall, silent but alive.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Arla said. She had an untrained voice, but even so it carried to the back of the hall. “You may be wondering what happened to the Goldieri Concerto. We chose to make another statement about music.”
The conductor bowed to her, and signaled the orchestra. Each musician held an instrument at arm’s length; at the flick of his baton they all dropped to the floor, the light rattling cases of violins, the softer boom of violas, the clatter and thud and tinkle of woodwinds, brasses, percussion. A tiny round drum rolled along the floor until it ran into someone’s leg and fell over with a final loud tap. Louder than that was the indrawn breath of the audience.
“I’m Arla,” she said, standing alone, facing a crowd whose confusion was slowly turning to hostility. Ereza felt her skin tingling. “Most of you know me as Arla Fennaris, but tonight I’m changing my name. I want you to know why.”
She turned and picked up her cello, which she had left leaning against her chair. No, Ereza thought, don’t do it. Not that one. Please.
“You think of me as a cellist,” Arla said, and plucked three notes with one hand. “A cellist is a musician, and a musician—I have this from my own sister, a wounded veteran, as many of you know—a musician is to most of you an impractical child. A fool.” She ran her hand down the strings, and the sound echoed in Ereza’s bones. She shivered, and so did the people sitting next to her. “She tells me, my sister, that the reason we’re at war right now—the reason she lost her arm—is that I am a mere musician, and need protection. I can’t protect myself; I send others out to die, to keep me and my music alive.” Another sweeping move across the strings, and a sound that went through Ereza like a jagged blade. All she could think was No, no, don’t…no… but she recognized the look on Arla’s face, the tone of her voice. Here was someone committed beyond reason to whatever she was doing.
But Arla had turned, and found her chair again. She was sitting as she would for any performance, the cello nestled in the hollow of her skirt, the bow in her right hand. “It is easy to make noise,” Arla said. With a move Ereza did not understand, she made an ugly noise explode from the cello. “It takes skill to make music.” She played a short phrase as sweet as spring sunshine. “It is easy to destroy—” She held the cello up, as if to throw it, and again Ereza heard the indrawn breath as the audience waited. Then she put it down. “It takes skill to make—in this case, millenia of instrument designers, and Barrahesh, here on Cravor’s World, with a passion for the re-creation of classic instruments. I have no right to destroy his work—but it would be easy.” She tapped the cello’s side, and the resonant sound expressed fragility. “As with my cello, with everything. It is easy to kill; it takes skill to nurture life.” Again she played a short phrase, this one a familiar child’s song about planting flower seeds in the desert.
“My sister,” Arla said, and her eyes found Ereza’s, and locked onto them. “My sister is a soldier, a brave soldier, who was wounded…she would say protecting me. Protection I never asked for, and did not need. Her arm the price of this one—” She held up her right arm. “It is difficult to make music when you are using your sister’s arm. An arm taught to make war, not music. An arm which does not respect music.”
She lowered her arm. “I can make music only with my own arm, because it’s my arm that learned it. And to play with my arm means throwing away my sister’s sacrifice. Denying it. Repudiating it.” No, Ereza thought at her again. Don’t do this. I will understand; I will change. Please. But she knew it was too late, as it had been too late to change things when she woke after surgery and found her own arm gone. “If my sister wants music, she must learn to make it. If you want music, you must learn to make it. We will teach you; we will play with you—but we will not play for you. Good evening.”
Again the conductor signaled; the musicians picked up their instruments from the floor, stood, and walked out. For a moment, the shuffling of their feet onstage was the only sound, as shock held the audience motionless. Ereza felt the same confusion, the same hurt, the same realization that they would get no music. Then the catcalls began, the hissing, the programs balled up angrily and thrown; some hit the stage and a few hit a musician. But none of them hurried, none of them looked back. Arla and the conductor waited, side by side, as the orchestra cleared the stage. Ereza sat frozen, unable to move even as people pushed past her, clambered over her legs. She wanted to go and talk to Arla; she knew it would do no good. She did not speak Arla’s language. She never had. Now she knew what Arla meant: she had never respected her sister before. Now she did. Too late, too late cried her mind, struggling to remember something, anything, of the music.
* * * *
Copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Moon.
JAMES MORROW
(1947– )
Born in Philadelphia and educated at Penn (a BA in English in creative writing) and Harvard (an MA in teaching in visual studies), James Morrow taught film before turning to writing utopian satires; his first book was Moviemaking Illustrated: The Comicbook Filmbook (1973). Morrow’s first SF novel was The Wine of Violence (1981), a satirical story about human visitors on an alien planet of cannibals, but he’s best known for his Godhead Trilogy (Towing Jehovah 1994, Blameless in Abaddon 1996, and The Eternal Footman 1999), where God dies and falls into the sea, leaving the world to cope with His absence.
Morrow lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Kathryn Ann Smith. They have two children.
Morrow won his second Nebula for “City of Truth”. (He also has two World Fantasy Awards to his credit.) There’s a shorter version of the novella floating around, but this, the original version, is my favorite (and maybe the funniest) Morrow story.
CITY OF TRUTH, by James Morrow
First published as a chapterbook in January, 1991
One
I no longer live in the City of Truth. I have exiled myself from Veritas, from all cities—from the world. The room in which I’m writing is cramped as a county jail and moist as the inside of a lung, but I’m learning to call it home. My only light is a candle, a fat, butter-colored stalk from which nets of melted wax hang like cobwebs. I wonder what it would be like to live in that candle—in the translucent crannies that surround the flame: a fine abode, warm, safe, and snug. I imagine myself spending each day wandering waxen passageways and sitting in paraffin parlors, each night lying in bed listening to the steady drip-drip-drip of my home consuming itself.
My name is Jack Sperry, and I am thirty-eight years old. I was born in truth’s own city, Veritas, on the last day of its bicentennial year. Like many boys of my generation, I dreamed of becoming an art critic one day: the pure primal thrill of attacking a painting, the sheer visceral kick of savaging a movie or a poem. In my case, however, the dream turned into reality, for by my twenty-second year I was employed as a deconstructionist down at the Wittgenstein Museum in Plato Borough, giving illusion its due.
Other dreams—wife, children, happy home—came harder. From the very first Helen and I wrestled with the thorny Veritasian question of whether love was a truthful term for how we felt about each other—such a misused notion, love, a kind of one-word lie—a problem we began ignoring once a more concrete crisis had taken its place.
His sperm are lazy, she thought. Her eggs are duds, I decided. But at last we found the right doctor, the proper pill, and suddenly there was Toby, flourishing inside Helen’s redeemed womb: Toby the embryo; Toby the baby; Toby the toddler; Toby the preschool carpenter, forever churning out crooked birdhouses, lopsided napkin holders, and asymmetrical bookends; Toby the boy naturalist, befriending every slithery, slimy, misbegotten creature ever to wriggle across the face of the Earth. This was a child with a maggot farm. A roach ranch
. A pet slug. “I think I love him,” I told Helen one day. “Let’s not get carried away,” she replied.
The morning I met Martina Coventry, Toby was off at Camp Ditch-the-Kids in the untamed outskirts of Kant Borough. He sent us a picture postcard every day, a routine that, I realize in retrospect, was a kind of smuggling operation; once Toby got home, the postcards would all be there, waiting to join his vast collection.
To wit:
Dear Mom and Dad: Today we learned how to survive in case we’re ever lost in the woods—what kind of bark to eat and stuff. Counselor Rick says he never heard of anybody actually using these skills. Your son, Toby.
And also:
Dear Mom and Dad: There’s a big rat trap in the pantry here, and guess who always sneaks in at night and finds out what animal got caught and then sets it free? Me! Counselor Rick says we’re boring. Your son, Toby.
It was early, barely 7 A.M., but already Booze Before Breakfast was jammed to its crumbling brick walls. I made my way through a conglomeration of cigarette smoke and beer fumes, through frank sweat and honest halitosis. A jukebox thumped out Probity singing “Copingly Ever After.” The saloon keeper, Jimmy Breeze, brought me the usual—a raspberry Danish and a Bloody Mary—setting them on the splintery cedar bar. I told him I had no cash but would pay him tomorrow. This was Veritas. I would.
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