by Damon Knight
“He better come back,” I said. “Shit. Here it is the biggest day in our lives and you guys don’t even have the sense to stay in one spot.”
“Don’t worry,” Crazy said. “Things’ll go fine, I’ll see to it.”
I took one of the slow cars through the track-webbed space between our hotel and the Tower of Bible. The Tower is one of Titania’s biggest experiments in Neo-Archeo-Ritualism, sometimes called Participatory Art. Within the huge structure, set right against the wall of the Titania Gap, the setting for every chapter in the Bible is contained, which means you can participate in a wide variety of activities. The lobby of the Tower was unusually crowded for the early hours of the dayshift, but it was Performance Day, I remembered, and people were starting early. I worked from ramp to ramp, trying to make my way through the oddly assorted crowd to the elevator that would take me to Sodom and Gomorrah. Finally I slid through the closing doors and took my place in the mass of future Sodomites.
“What I want to know,” one of them said happily, “is do they periodically sulfurize everyone in the room?”
“Every two hours,” a woman with round eyes replied, “and does it feel real! But then they unfreeze you and you get to begin again!” She laughed.
“Oh,” said the man, blinking.
The elevator opened and the group surged past me toward Costumes. I stood and looked down some of the smoky streets of Gomorrah, hoping to see my brother in the crowd. Just as I decided to get one of the costumes and start searching, I saw him coming out of the door marked JEZEBELS, one arm wrapped around a veiled woman.
“Why, he must have just got here,” I said aloud, and took off after him. “Hook!” I called. “Hook!”
He heard me and quickly steered the woman into a side street. I started running. Sure enough, when I rounded the corner they had disappeared; I made a lucky guess and opened the door to a house made of sediments, and caught up with them moving up the narrow stairs. “Hook, God damn it,” I said.
“Later,” he mumbled back at me, face buried in the Jezebel’s neck.
“Hook, it’s important.”
He waved his right arm back at me in a brush-away motion, and the metal rods of his hand flashed in my face. “Not important!” he bellowed. I grabbed his arm and pulled on it.
“How can you say that?” I cried. “Today’s the day! The six bands those judges pick today get to go to Earth and everywhere—”
He finally stopped dragging us all up the stairs. “I know all that, Shaky, but that don’t happen for a few hours yet, so why don’t you go down to Psalms or Proverbs and calm down some? No reason for you to be so anxious.”
“Yes, there is,” I said, “a real good reason. Sidney’s gone.”
Hook tucked his chin into his neck. “Sidney’s gone?” he repeated.
“Nobody’s seen him all shift.”
His three metal fingers waved up and down, scissoring the air; it was the same nervous sign of thought he’d made when he had his hand, and played the trumpet. “Did you search the hotel good?” he said after a bit. “I don’t think he’d leave the hotel.”
I shook my head. “I came here, I thought you’d know where he is.”
“Well, he’s probably in the hotel somewhere, take a look why don’t you?”
“What if he’s not there? Come on, Hook, if we don’t find him we’re sunk.”
“All right,” he said. “Shit. You’re as bad as Sidney. I’ve been playing with that man near twenty years, and I never seen him so scared.”
“You think he’s scared?” That had never occurred to me. Sidney was quiet, not too forward, but I’d never seen him scared of playing music.
“Sure he’s scared.” He looked at the Jezebel, who hadn’t made a sound so far. “I got to find Sidney,” he explained. “I’ll be back to celebrate tomorrow.”
Her veiled head nodded, and I could see the flash of teeth. “We better hurry,” Hook said. “We’re due to be turned into a pillar of salt any minute now.” We ran back and dived into the elevator, just behind the man who had been asking questions on the way up. Down in the lobby we dodged through a group of wide-eyed Venusian monks, and then through a stumbling crowd of wet people from one of the aquatic scenes. Then we made it to the exit, jumped in a car, and popped out into the Gap.
“That Participatory Art,” Hook said, “is really something.”
“Sidney’s probably hiding in the hotel somewhere, the bar or maybe the baggage rooms,” Hook said as we neared our hotel.
I could see that he was as worried as I was. Despite his easygoing speculations, his nervous trumpet fingering gave him away. Sidney’s absence was a serious matter, partly because it was so unexpected; Sidney was never gone, never sick, never hurt; there was nothing that could keep Sidney from playing. And how he could play that clarinet! It was more than notes, it had to do with what was inside the man, the strength and the feeling; there’s no way I can describe it to you but by telling a story here; a little blues:
After the long shift’s ending, when I was just a kid and still working the sheds, I’d go down to the Heel Bar to sip beer and listen to Sidney play his clarinet. At this time he was playing with just Washboard and a piano man, Christy Morton (who later got killed in the big tunnel collapse on Troilus); and they were working out all the old tunes he’d discovered in the Benson Curtis tapes.
Sidney was as quiet and unassuming then as always. It didn’t matter how much stomping and shouting he stirred up, or how much Washboard and Christy sang into the tune; old Sidney would stand there, head bowed, horn cradled in his arm when he wasn't playing, as silent and bashful as a child. Then he’d raise that horn to his mouth, and when he played it was clear he’d found his way of talking to the world. All the clamoring in the room channeled into him, he was transformed, and, sweat-bright with the effort, he’d wrench those songs into a sound as clean and live as a welding arc. Listening to him my cheeks would flush with blood, my heart would pound like Washboard’s cowbell.
One time, late in the graveyard shift, I was joined at my front table by a Metis mute, one of the miners whose vocal cords had been ruined by the zinc blowout on Metis. Between sets Sidney sat with us, asked me how Hook was doing (this was right after his accident), and talked about Earth. He told us about New Orleans in the old times, when the jazz bands played in the streets. Telling it, he got so excited I didn’t need to prod him with questions; he spoke on his own, even told us his one childhood memory of Earth: “That ocean, it was like a flat blue plate, big as Jupiter from Io, speckled with shadows from clouds; and the horizon was straight as a rail, edge to edge, cutting off a sky that was a blue I can’t describe.” When he went back to play I was under the spell of Dixieland; and by the gleam in the mute’s eye I could tell he felt it too. When Sidney played a good break the mute would put back his head and laugh, mouth split wide open, silent as space.
So when Sidney was done we decided to take the mute along to his place, to give the mute some floor to sleep on; he didn’t have any money or anywhere to go. Now at this time (this was on Achilles) Sidney lived in a cubbyhole behind one of the Supervisors’ big homes. When we got there Sidney wanted us to hold back, while he went to check if his sister-in-law was awake—she didn’t like him bringing folks home. Sidney explained this, but the mute didn’t appear to understand; he must have thought he was being left, because every time Sidney walked a few steps and turned around, he found the mute right behind him, grinning and dragging me along. So there was a lot of waving and explaining going on when the JM police suddenly appeared; we didn’t even have time to run.
“Where you going?” one of them asked.
“Home,” Sidney said.
“I suppose you live here?” the cop said, pointing at the Supervisor’s place.
“Yeah,” Sidney said, and before he had time to explain, they were taking us off to jail.
We were hardly inside the jail door when they went to work on the Metis mute. Kicked him and beat him till he c
ouldn’t stand. His face was so bloody. Sidney and I stood shaking against the wall, expecting we’d be next, but they let us alone. Turned out one of the cop’s wives had been killed on Metis, and he’d been after the mutes ever since. So when they were done with him they slammed us all into the bullpen.
There’s not much JM can do to make its jails any worse than its mines, but what they can do they have done. The cell we were in was cold and dark, like a tunnel in a power breakdown, except for the gravity, which felt like it was over 1.00.1 crawled over the rock floor, unable to see, and quietly called Sidney’s name.
“Steve?” his voice said. “Where you gone to?” His hand caught my arm, and he set me down beside him.
“Quit that snuffling,” he said to me. “This your first time in jail? Is that right? Well, it won’t be your last, no, not a miner kid like you. They’ll put you here many times before you’re done.” He paused. “Look at all these folks.”
A dim light gleamed through the door grating, and when my eyes adjusted I saw shapes huddled on the floor. They were gathered in knots, feet in each other’s stomachs, using the survival techniques JM had taught them.
“They going to let us die?” I asked fearfully; the only times I had seen men curled together like that was when they carried the bodies, two by two, out of breakdowns.
“No, no,” he said. “They just like us, just put in here for nothing, to be cold and hungry and heavy for a shift or two, to remind them who’s boss on these rocks.” He sounded old and tired; and yet when I looked up at him, I saw that he was pulling the parts of his clarinet out of his big old coat and putting them together. He was sitting against the rock wall of the cell, with the mute propped up beside him. When his horn was together he put it to his mouth, gave the reed a lick, commenced to play.
He started soft, barely sounding the notes, and played Burgundy Street Blues all the way through without raising his voice. As he played What Did I Do some of the huddled figures slowly sat up and listened, backs and heads to the wall, looking up at the ceiling or the yellow squares of the grate.
Then he played the new songs, written by miners’ bands and only heard in the bars scattered through their asteroids. He played Ceres, and Hidalgo; and Vesta Joys; he played his Shaft Bucket Blues and I Got Me a Feeling. Then he played Don't God Live Out
This Far, one of the first of the miner blues, which made it about twenty years old; and people began to join in. These were miners, men who seldom sang in the bars, seldom did more than stomp their boots or shout something between phrases; and at first their singing was an awkward sort of growl, barely in tune or time with Sidney. But he picked them up and more joined in, hesitantly, till you could make out the words of the refrain:
Up at the shift-start, Down in the mine shaft, Spend my life throwing dirt on a car—
Ain’t got nothing to do But sing me the blues—
Hey, don’t God live out this far.
There were about thirty verses to the song. It was about a miner who keeps getting in trouble, till JM decides to finish him: “Super comes at shift-start for me to be hung, on account of something that I hadn’t done.” The Supervisor believes he’s innocent, but there’s no proof. It was the same old, old thing.
When the singing got loud enough Sidney took off from the melody and floated up above it. And they sang! There was something in it that seemed to take my lungs away, so I could only breathe quick and shallow; it was what they had of the music inside themselves. Just hearing someone’s voice in the dark, and knowing his life has a long way to go . . .
The light from the door just caught the plumes of breath frosting out from the men singing. I looked over at the mute. His eyes were open, staring out somewhere in space. As I watched he lifted up his hands and started a little syncopated clap, very soft, giving as much to the music as he could. When Sidney heard it he looked down at him, then looked back up; he played louder, filling the room with his sound, till the clarinet was all we heard or needed to hear, and the last verse came to its end.
“Oh yeah," said a quiet voice.
Sidney looked at the mute, smiled, shook his head. “A little blues for us, eh, brother?” he said. “A little slave music.”
The mute nodded and grinned, which made his lip crack open again and spill blood down his chin.
Sidney laughed at him and wiped some of the blood from the mute’s face. “Oh yeah,” he said softly, “a little miner music.”
We found Sidney just where Hook guessed he might be, huddled in the room where our baggage and instruments were stored. He was perched up on the box that Crazy’s tuba traveled in, with his shoulders hunched and his legs crossed. When we burst into the room he jumped and then settled back, head down, staring sullenly across at us. His clarinet lay fitted in his arms. We all stood still, barred and hidden in the shadows thrown by the single bulb behind us, waiting for somebody to say something. The wisps of hair Sidney combed across his head looked thicker because of the shadows they cast on his bald pate. He looked like one of the tunnel-gnomes men claim to see on Pallas; creatures who were once men maybe, who escaped JM by living in the old shafts. I had never noticed how small he was.
“You scared?” Hook asked.
Sidney raised his head to stare at Hook better. “Yeah, I am,” he said suddenly, loud in the dim room, “shouldn’t I be?”
“Hey, Sidney.” I said, “you don’t got no reason to be scared—”
“Don’t got no reason!” He pointed at me, clarinet still in hand. “Don’t you say that shit to me, Shaky. I got the best reason possible to be scared.” He jumped down from the box. “The best reason possible. This is a contest, boy, we ain’t playing to please these folks, we playing to show them that we better musicianers than all them others! And if we don’t show them that, if we don’t win one of them grants, we gone. We back to the mines, boy, and we’ll work in those shafts until JM has broke us so we can’t work no more, and we’ll never get to see the Earth. So don’t tell me I got no reason to be scared.”
“Come on, Sidney, you can’t think like that,” I said, searching for something I could say to him. “It ain’t so bad as—”
“Sidney,” Hook said, like I hadn’t been talking at all (suddenly I see a picture in my head, of Sidney crouched down and shifting through a four-foot-high tunnel, Hook straddled senseless across his back, one of his hands clamped white around Hook’s wrist, which ended in a tangle of bloody filaments; shouting instructions in a furious fearful high voice to the men trying to get the airlock opened); I stepped back and let Hook talk to him.
“Sidney,” he said, “you ain’t thought this out. They been putting one over on you. You’re talking like this contest is a big vital thing, like we got some chance of going out there and winning one of them grants. Sidney, we got no chance, don’t you realize that?”
“Hook—” I objected.
"No, you listen to me, we got no chance. You seen all those other musicianers here—those folks been doing nothing but play music all their lives, they playing all those fancy machines and doing things with music we don’t even know about! And we just a bunch of miners playing some old Earth-type of music that just showed up a few years back, and only ’cause JM salvaged a ship full of band instruments and give them to us so we’d stay out of fights! And you still think we got a chance?”
Sidney and I stared at him.
“No way,” he continued grimly, “no more’n there’s a chance that JM will retire us at forty and send us to Mars. They got us here just so they can say they got folks from everywhere, even the rocks, and they going to give the grants to those fancy-ass musicianers, not us. So just exactly what you said is going to happen, Sidney, when this thing is over they going to send us back to the rocks to work and work, every third shift, till some equipment catches you or some tunnel collapses”—waving his hooks so they flashed silver in front of us—” and then, if you’re still alive, they’ll dump you on Vesta rock and wait for you to die.
“An
d the only way you got to show how you feel about that, Sidney, is through that horn, through that skinny black horn of yours. When you get out there they going to be looking down on you, just like they always have, and all you can do about it is to play that thing! play it so hard they got to see you! play it and show them what kind of music a man plays when he works all his life digging in those fucking rocks!”
He stopped, gulped in some air. Sidney and I didn’t make a sound. Suddenly he turned and walked over to the baggage, rummaged around a bit, then found the trunk he wanted and pulled it around so he could unstrap it and fling it open. He reached in and pulled out a long white bottle, held it high in the dim light while he unscrewed it. He turned it upside down to his mouth and took a long pull.
“Eeeow!” he whooped. He held it out toward Sidney. “So what say we have a drink of the White Brother, brother, and then go play us some music.”
I looked at Sidney. I don’t think I’d ever seen him indulge in the White Brother; he hardly even drank beer.
“I believe I will,” Sidney said, and swallowed near half the bottle.
Back up in our rooms Crazy was leading Fingers and Washboard in the Emperor Norton Stomp, running up the walls as high as he could and then diving off onto the unmade and trampled beds. He saw us standing in the doorway and from his position high on the wall he dived straight for us and bounced on the floor.
“Crazy,” Hook said cheerfully, “you are crazy.” He stepped over him and made his way through the stuff heaped on the floor. He pulled his trombone out of the pile beside his bed.
“Let’s roll,” he said.
“Wait!” Crazy cried. He poured some White Brother into cups and passed them around. When Sidney took one he didn’t say a word, just grinned and pointed. Sidney paid him no attention.
We raised our cups in the air. “To the Hot Six,” I said. “Play that thing!” We downed the Brother; I could feel him slide into my stomach and explode there, making my blood pound and my vision jump.