Asimov's SF, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Is that good or bad?” Patrick asked.

  “Good, I guess, provided I still have a job in the morning.”

  “If you still care about that job in the morning, I'll consider myself a total failure.” To Dixon, he said, “I know what this looks like, and you're wrong. I owe this woman ... well, just about everything.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dixon frowned.

  “You too, of course,” Patrick amended quickly. After all, Dixon was the one who had taught him how to play, and who had kept him from quitting when it got difficult.

  Patrick led Michelle outside before things could get any more embarrassing, and the two of them walked down the street toward the Starbucks on the corner. Out of habit, he slipped on his sunglasses so he wouldn't be recognized.

  While they waited for the light to change, he looked back down the blank expanse of brick wall to the spot where she'd found the disappearing shop. She'd been walking toward the music store when she'd seen it. He wondered if she shared the same interest that had led him there.

  “Do you play?” he asked.

  “Play what?” she replied suspiciously.

  “Guitar? Anything musical.”

  “Oh. I, um, I know a few chords. I can pick out the melody to ‘Stairway to Heaven.'”

  “Have you ever wanted to be in a rock band?”

  She took a few seconds to think about it. “Maybe.”

  “That'd be ‘no,’ then,” Patrick said. “Music isn't a profession for anybody who's not driven to do it.”

  “Like you were,” she said sarcastically.

  “Like I am,” he replied. “Thanks to a fortunate accident. But I was asking about you.”

  She shrugged. “I'm not driven to do it, or I suppose I would have done it by now. But yes, I've always wanted to be a musician. I just never had the patience to learn.”

  “I'm afraid that part isn't going to come any other way,” he said.

  “It did for you.”

  “No, it didn't. I took lessons for ten years. I still practice two hours a day. I may have stumbled into this life, but when I did, I got the whole package, calloused fingers and all.” He held up his left hand for her to examine. The ends of his fingers were hard as shoe leather.

  He raised his other hand, the one still holding his instruction manual. “I can't give you magic, but I can teach you how to play the guitar.”

  He could see her thinking about it while the light changed and they crossed the street. She looked back at the music store, then into his face. “You'll teach me to play the guitar. That's what I get out of all this?”

  “I'm just offering. That's one thing I can do.”

  They stood in front of the Starbucks, neither one of them reaching for the door. She shook her head, then laughed softly. “Ten minutes after I leave the magic shop, a rock star offers to take me away from my dead-end existence. And I'll still have my self-respect if I go for it, because I have to do the hard work myself. Maybe I'm getting my heart's desire after all.”

  He felt himself blushing. “So I'm just a part of your wish-fulfillment fantasy?”

  She laughed again, and took his hand. “Don't take it so hard. I get the feeling we're both going to come out of this okay.”

  Copyright © 2009 Jerry Oltion

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Poetry: THE LAST ALCHEMIST

  by Bruce Boston

  When the laws of physics

  have nailed and sealed

  the universe complete,

  down to the last stray

  molecule and rebel atom,

  when even the quarks

  Charm and Strange rise

  to a balanced breakfast,

  ontological questions

  will become passe.

  —

  When the Unified Field

  Theory is lucid fact,

  not wistful speculation,

  there will no longer

  be the barest chance

  of turning baser metals

  to golden illumination,

  and metaphysics will

  be reduced to no more

  than a bedtime game.

  —

  When the final truth has

  been signed and delivered,

  the last alchemist will

  retreat to a birdsong wood

  where green still thrives,

  near a rushing stream

  clean as a burning flame,

  clear as a lover's glance

  he has long since fathomed

  in his deepest sublimations.

  —

  —Bruce Boston

  Copyright © 2009 Bruce Boston

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Novella: BROKEN WINDCHIMES

  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch's new novel, Diving into the Wreck, which is based on two of her Asimov's Readers’ Award-winning novellas, “Diving into the Wreck” (December 2005) and “Room of Lost Souls” (April/May 2008), will be out in November from Pyr. One of the author's amazing accomplishments this year was to have her story “G-Men” selected for Gardner Dozois’ Year's Best Science Fiction as well as Jeffrey Deaver and Otto Penzler's, The Best American Mystery Stories 2009. This year, alone, Kris has sold stories to Analog, Asimov's, Jim Baen's Universe (where she also does a regular column), and EQMM. Her most recent Retrieval Artist novel, Duplicate Effort, came out in February. In her latest novella for us, Kris takes a poignant and nuanced look at a man's struggling reintegration into human society.

  I first heard non-Pane music in an alley behind an auditorium in Lhelomika. Lhelomika, the arts capitol of Djape, made me nervous. The last two times I had performed there, I shivered as I hit each note—not with cold, but with fear.

  That afternoon, I walked outside the auditorium, trying to calm myself. From a nearby building, I heard a raspy male voice—a deep unaltered adult male voice—attempting to sing a melody. Some instruments I could not identify provided a music bed behind the voice.

  The instruments were more harmonious than the voice, even though they did not hit pure tones. But the voice held me. It sang of a wonderful world, one that had beauty in its simple existence.

  Strangely, the harshness of the voice, its lack of tone and musicality, provided a contrast to the lyrics so profound that it accented them.

  I stood outside the building, listening as the song played, knowing that this was human music and it was forbidden to me. If Gibson, my manager, caught me, he would chastise me. Male sopranos who performed as long as I had—some twenty years now—were rare, a commodity worth millions.

  Each day that I survived in my rarefied position as performer—a living windchime, as the Pane called us—was a victory. I knew my time was limited.

  Maybe that was why, when I made it through that evening's performance with no mistakes, I hid in my study and searched for that song on the forbidden human databases.

  I didn't find it for months.

  When I did, I listened, rapt, as stunned as I had been the first time at the simple beauty of contrast, the way that the flaws added to the whole.

  The Pane would never accept flaws.

  I knew it, and ignored it.

  And some would argue, that was the beginning of the end.

  * * * *

  I sang my last concert before a packed hall in Tygher City. The auditorium there, made of bone and thin membranes almost like skin, had acoustics so perfect that a sigh made on stage could be heard in each seat, in every row. Only the best performers got a berth in Tygher City, and I'd played there for fifteen of my twenty-five summers.

  On this evening, I sang three solos accompanied by the Boys’ Choir, all in the second half of the concert, and all written by Tampini.

  Tampini composed for male windchimes, accenting their technique and vocal range. His work, very Pane, was rarely performed outside the Tygher City auditorium, since it was one of the few places
on Djape that had the acoustic sensitivity for his works.

  The auditorium in Tygher City made me nervous. A note missed by as little as one-one-thousandth would receive silence, the Pane version of a boo. Even timing that did not follow the score to the letter—say, a half note extended to a dotted half simply for interpretation—had gotten more than one performer thrown off the stage.

  So I had dreaded the performance for weeks, and shaved my involvement from six solos to three. Even then, I couldn't lose the feeling of impending doom.

  I had mentioned that to Gibson, and he had laughed at me, telling me I worried too much. Still, he had the on-site doctor take my temperature and give me a thorough going over to make certain there were no alien viruses coursing through my system. They couldn't give me any medication to keep my blood pressure steady because medication might make an alteration, even a slight one, in my vocal chords. Nor could they feed me to keep my blood sugar up, because food coated the throat, disturbed the stomach, and occasionally caused gas.

  More than one performer had lost his berth in Tygher City because of a nearly silent swallowed belch.

  All that preparation, all the careful rehearsal—my time monitored so that I didn't overdo—and still I approached the edge of the shell-like stage with trepidation.

  It didn't show, of course. I walked on stage with a fake confidence born of years of performing. I wore a blue robe that contrasted with the chorus's white, and reflected the natural interior light of the bone auditorium as if we were outdoors.

  The Pane crowded in their seats, squat and attentive, their heads down so that they could hear better. They were oddly malleable creatures, mostly cartilage, their skin a translucent gray that showed the shadows of their internal organs.

  Their faces, it was said, took a lot of getting used to; eyes askew, mouth hidden, and the ridges that looked like sheet wrinkles covering the bulk of their skull. The Pane looked normal to me, but I really couldn't remember the times before I arrived on Djape. Like so many of my companions, my voice came early. Someone discovered my hollow, fluted soprano before I had turned three.

  The first part of the set went well. The boys’ choir had a sweetness that the adult male sopranos lost. Or perhaps it was the innocence in their faces, the love of singing that also got lost after years of performing.

  The children took on Tampini like he was meant to be sung, with precision and grace and harmonies that sent shivers up my spine. The Pane remained motionless, so attentive that they barely seemed to breathe. I sang the first solo, the hardest of the three, with a clarity of tone that I hadn't realized I could achieve.

  The problems started in the second solo which was, really, more of a descant. I felt a thickness at the back of my throat, as if phlegm were creeping in. I had the desperate urge to cough, but consummate performer that I was, I did not. Coughing ruined the vocal chords and had to be avoided at all costs. Clearing the throat and shouting had the same effect, and I hadn't done any of those things in my memory.

  But I wanted to, right there on stage, in front of five thousand rapt Pane.

  When the second Tampini ended, and I was allowed to walk backstage before taking my second bow, I swigged the warm water Gibson kept for me. It cleared the throat slightly, refreshed me enough, and got rid of the urge to cough.

  In fact, I had forgotten all about it as I started into the third solo.

  This last, a Pane favorite, always seemed the least musical to me. The boys provided a choral backdrop, usually made up of thirds and fifths, while I let my four-octave voice explore its range. At the time, I was the only man on Djape who could hit the E above High C, and Gibson exploited that as often as he could, having me sing show-off pieces like Tampini's Aria in E Major.

  The aria had an optional arpeggio section, and Gibson always made me include it at Tygher City. To the human ear, the arpeggios sounded like little more than exercises, going from E major to Bb minor, and on through every possible variation, until the mind wearied and the human listener grew bored.

  But the Pane heard overtones and undertones we could not. A series of arpeggios like that apparently created harmonies that lingered, pleasing the Pane as no other musical trick could. Any performer who could do the Aria in E Major and do it well was a guaranteed celebrity on Djape.

  The aria had become my signature piece, much as I despised it.

  I was right in the middle of the C Major arpeggio when my voice cracked.

  It didn't break the way voices do when they change—I'd heard that a few times, and it was a horrible thing, especially the look on the boy's face when he realized his treatment was faulty, and the thing that he had lived his entire life for, the thing that defined him, was vanishing.

  No. Instead, my voice cracked with exhaustion, leaving a hole between the Gs. Even though I found High C, felt it position properly in my vocal chords, the note did not emerge. Instead, there was a wisp of air, a near-silence, almost a hiss that was audible throughout that galaxy's most sensitive auditorium.

  The audience gasped. It was a hideous, nonhuman sound. The Pane attempted to imitate us, out of a sense of courtesy, but it backfired. Their gasp was closer to a roar, emerging from the throat and not the diaphragm.

  It was a sharp, shocked sound, one in such a low register that the Pane couldn't hear it.

  But I could, and it terrified me. They had made the sound in my presence maybe a hundred times before, but never once directed at me.

  Still, my training paid off. I did not lose my place or my concentration, and when High C was part of an arpeggio again, I hit the note with the same clarity and purity that I had always had.

  I finished the piece and walked off the stage to lukewarm applause, knowing that my career was finished.

  Gibson, to his credit, tried to smooth the moment over as if it hadn't mattered at all. His puffy face looked pasty in the backstage lights, and his hair seemed even thinner than before.

  He put his fleshy hands on my back, easing me toward the dressing room.

  “No need to worry,” he said. “We'll get it checked out. You just should have told me.”

  Told him what? My voice had never broken, never failed me, not even when I'd gone on stage with fevers, and mysterious Pane-originated illnesses. I had never failed before—not in twenty-two years. I had no idea how to react. Neither did anyone else.

  * * * *

  I received three days of testing, all in the port city of Enane, as far from the Pane music scene as we could get. Enane was the site of the largest human enclave on Djape, and as such, a place that most Pane escaped as soon as they could.

  The Pane found most humans large, smelly, and loud; we had been of no use to them at all until they discovered our musical abilities, centuries ago. At first the Pane thought the abilities mindless, simple pleasant sounds that we made almost unconsciously. Over time, however, the Pane realized that we purposely made music, that we had control over the notes, the order in which they were sung or played, and the interpretation of those notes.

  Still, it took time for the Pane to understand what we were doing—and time for us to understand the Pane. Their highly evolved hearing found pleasure only in the diatonic scale, and then mostly in notes above Middle C.

  Certain instruments—the organ, for example, and the harpsichord—caused the Pane pain when played in that register. Flutes, clarinets, oboes could be tolerated, but brass instruments could not. Stringed instruments, particularly the violin, were banned on Djape. While humans heard the violin as an expressive instrument, imitative of the human voice, the Pane heard it only as a scraping of bow on string, a grating sound that was so repulsive to them that, legend has it, the first Pane who ever heard one murdered the violinist.

  Human music had strict limits, and had to remain in the human enclave. Until the Pane discovered the soprano—the male soprano.

  And the Pane were particular about their male sopranos. Falsettos, tried once and quickly abandoned, were almost as offensive as a v
iolin. Irish tenors fell into the same category. The male soprano had to have had a clear voice from boyhood, and that voice couldn't be tainted by anything that would offend the sensitive Pane ear.

  No human ever learned if the Pane were truly as sensitive as they claimed or if they were, like all true collectors, so fussy that they couldn't stand the idea of tampering with a pure voice. For the Pane were collectors of the worst sort.

  They could not create music of their own. Their vocal chords did not produce song and they could not envision music. Djape itself had many musical aspects—from the ice caves of Windsor to the Trilling Beetles of Lahonia—but nothing formal, nothing creatively musical.

  The Pane hadn't discovered that music could be created purposely until after the first humans arrived on Djape, centuries ago. I never learned how the alliance between the Pane and the humans was formed, nor did I know, then, how it was maintained.

  No one answered those questions, often pretending they didn't hear them. Instead, I got to study music management and practice my scales.

  The older I got, the less any of that appealed to me, and I could tell no one. By that point, I was Djape's biggest human star: a favorite windchime who could perform in the most difficult venues at the best hours.

  All of that ended for me with a single missed note, a crack, a lost C, scarcely noticeable to human ears, but a serious flaw to the Pane.

  I had enjoyed my success, and while I had always known that I would one day cease being the biggest star, I had hoped to remain respected—the kind of performer called out for a nostalgic review or, if my voice had suffered the effects of age, a commentary on past performances, often done before an audience.

  I had even imagined my retirement—on the rugged coastline between Enane and the Causee Mountain—where I would teach advanced students (only those who had the capability of becoming stars) and where I would occasionally deign to review an up-and-coming performer, give someone a small lift, like the one I had gotten early on, enabling him to become a performer the Pane might worship.