None of that was possible now. I knew it, and my assistants knew it. One afternoon, I caught Gibson leaving the compound in the company of a boy. The boy, at that indeterminate age between twelve and twenty, had a softness that belonged only to the human musicians on Djape. When he saw me, he flushed.
If I had needed confirmation of the severity of my situation, I had it then. Gibson—who only handled the best—was looking for a new client. As soon as he found the boy he could develop into a star, Gibson would be gone.
I fled to the garden, pushing my way past the leafy foliage until I found my favorite stone bench. It was tucked into a side corner, not tended often, because the small lemon and orange trees didn't need as much day-to-day care. I huddled on the bench, put my hands behind me, and turned my face to Djape's hot sun. I wasn't supposed to do that either—something about the light and my skin—but I didn't have to listen to Gibson any more.
He was leaving. And I was shaking. I had never before been on my own.
* * * *
He caught me, hours later, in the study, listening to the song I had heard in the alley so long ago. I had been startled at its age. The singer was a twentieth century American composer and trumpeter named Louis Armstrong. Until that evening, I'd always listened to Armstrong on headphones, secretly, hiding him. He was a revelation in surround sound—a gravelly voice that would make the Pane recoil in fear.
Gibson acted as if he were still my manager, as if he were not going to leave me at all. “What's this?”
I hadn't heard him come in. I had been lost in the archaic slang of the Armstrong.
My back had been to Gibson, but I did not whirl to face him as I would have done just the day before. Instead, I waited until the end of the phrase, then touched the sound file built into my desk. The music paused mid-note.
“Is that what destroyed your voice? That garbage?” Gibson had apparently continued speaking over the music, and I hadn't noticed. Now that the music was off, his voice was much too loud.
I turned, as I would toward a fan, folding my hands together over my robe.
“Have you noticed,” I asked, keeping my voice at its usual whisper, “that we listen to very little music in this house?”
“Pane-inspired music is not restful to human ears,” Gibson snapped. “When you are not performing or practicing, you need to relax.”
He had said that a thousand times, maybe more. I nodded. “How is the new client?”
Gibson's eyes narrowed. I had never spoken to him like that before. “It was a lunch.”
“It was an audition,” I said. “We've been together for twenty-two years. You owe me the courtesy of honesty.”
He glanced at the sound file and I knew what he was going to say. He was going to make this about me, about my words, about my problems. Did you imitate this so-called singer? What were you thinking?
In the past, I would have answered him humbly. I would have let him take my music away.
He turned away from me, but not before I saw guilt cross his face. He sank into the couch and put his feet on the ottoman. He seemed relaxed, but he was not. The fingers of his left hand drummed against the multi-lined Pane-made upholstery.
“I only move up,” he said. “The moment I start the spiral downward, even with a client I care about, I lose my clout.”
I crossed my arms, hiding my clenched fists beneath my biceps. Spiral downward. Loss of clout.
Loss of everything.
Not only would I lose my career and my dreamed-of future, I also would lose the only family I had ever known.
Perhaps, deep down, I had felt that I could hold him here, with guilt, with logic, with sheer affection.
Even with a client I care about. Client. Care. Not friend. Not love.
He had held himself distant from me, even when I was a three-year-old prodigy with a spectacular voice. Even then he had evaluated my every note, my every performance, and if he hadn't felt I was on an upward path, he would have left.
I was shaking, but I tried to control it. I did not want him to see the effect his words were having on me.
“You have enough money, you know that. You don't have to work again, if you don't want to. That's why I taught you how to handle and understand finances. That's more than most managers would have done for you.”
He sounded defensive. He was defensive. But he was also right. He had forced me to study things I had not wanted to learn. Money, business, even booking schedules.
Teaching me how to survive the inevitable decline. Always with an eye toward the next client, the next project. Remaining on the upward spiral.
“You can retire now,” he said. “If you don't go back on the stage, no one will remember that moment of silence. No one will think you left because of the mistake.”
“You don't need to lie to me,” I said, not bothering to soften my voice. He wasn't going to manage me any longer and I wasn't going to listen to his directives. Childish, perhaps, but at that moment, small rebellions were all that I had left.
He plucked at the couch, his head down. His hair was thinning on the sides. He would need some reconstruction, and he didn't even realize it.
“All right then.” He took a deep breath as if he were steeling himself against what he had to say. “The best thing you can do is retire. The Pane will remember, and so will the musical community. But they'll also remember that you had achieved top celebrity status once. For a little while, you were perfect.”
The shaking was growing worse. I leaned against the desk just so that I could brace myself. I had to concentrate on my breathing, just like I used to do before a concert.
“You won't be able to get the best students,” he said, “but you'll get the cream of the beginners. It'll be a good life. Not as glamorous as it had been before, but good.”
Glamorous? He thought that performing in front of the Pane was glamorous? I remembered no glamor. Just concert halls and round eyes, watching, the hush as I walked onto the stages specially built for the new kind of music, the way my back ached after hours of holding myself rigid, and the headaches I had when I finished a successful concert.
Perhaps he enjoyed the meals, the hotels, the traveling, but I saw little of it. I couldn't mingle—the dry air in Pane restaurants made my throat tickle—and I rarely saw the outside of my suite, since the Pane didn't want to spend time with performers away from the concert halls.
“You still have a future,” he was saying, understanding me well up until the last, “just not the one you were expecting.”
He stood and met my gaze for the first time since he had come into the room. I finally saw him clearly, realizing that what I had always taken for intensity had been a reserve, an unwillingness to let his emotions get wrapped up in his business.
“I've done the best for you I could,” he said, “although I don't expect you to understand that.”
Then he nodded once and headed out of the study. I gripped the sides of the desk, my legs weak.
When he reached the door, he stopped. “And you might want to destroy all of that non-Pane music. It will only dilute your purity and, should anyone find out you've been listening, corrupt your reputation. On other worlds, perhaps people still enjoy that stuff. But music on Djape has its own traditions, ones you were created especially for. Remember that.”
Then he left, closing the door behind him.
I sank onto the overstuffed chair beside the desk. Created. He had said created. I thought I had been found.
I wondered what else I did not know about my own life.
I suspected it was a lot.
* * * *
After Gibson left with his new prodigy, I hid in the gardens and listened to every piece of music I could find—that is, every piece composed with humans, not Pane, in mind.
I was stunned by the depth and breadth of it. The mixture of voices fascinated me—female sopranos and altos, and unaltered male tenors and basses.
I wasn't sure I liked the deep sound, but it
entranced me nonetheless. Such freedom existed out there, away from Djape, where this music was created.
Such freedom and so many opportunities.
It took me months, but I finally decided to make those opportunities my own.
* * * *
I planned my escape from Djape meticulously. I studied everything I could about travel routes off planet. Human settlements were more numerous than I had realized, and I had hundreds of choices.
The problem wasn't where to go, but how to get there. Very few human transport ships ran between Djape and other worlds. The performers couldn't travel to non-Pane approved worlds for fear of tainting their performances—or, more accurately, for fear of the perception of taint that would forever follow them from the trip.
Managers, handlers, and merchants came and went with ease. But the successful managers and handlers hired their own transport. The merchants traveled on the cargo ships that supplied the small human colonies scattered across Djape.
The supplies, I learned, were more numerous than I had expected. Very little human food grew in Djape's soil, and the Pane would not let humans disfigure the areas around their enclaves with greenhouses or hydroponic gardens. I learned that most of the food I had eaten throughout my life on Djape had been imported, just like most of the material I wore and most of the furniture I sat on.
The Pane did not want humans to contaminate their world, even if they did want humans to perform for them. This so-called contamination included any kind of infrastructure. They allowed us our towns, but not industry or agriculture or even a real form of government.
Yet they expected us to police ourselves.
So much of what we needed on Djape came from a space station called the Last Outpost. The Last Outpost was not the last human outpost in this sector, or in truth wasn't an outpost any longer. It was the only station between the nearest human-controlled world and Djape, and it had become a community in and of itself.
Humans lived and worked on the Outpost. Entire generations had never left, tending to the ships, as well as to the diplomatic needs of the human community on Djape. Wherever humans lived and worked, they also needed entertainment.
All of my research confirmed that the best musicians in the sector rotated in and out of the Last Outpost. The Outpost had more bars, concert halls, and theaters than any other space station in this region—more, some said, than any other human-sponsored station.
The musically inclined (at least among the humans) actually vacationed at the Last Outpost to take in all the forms provided there. The Outpost itself was considered a music capital by all three neighboring human worlds.
It even had its own conservatory, as well as a university with the best music department in the sector, and more informal instruction than any other city outside of the great and mythical Earth.
Gibson would not have approved, but Gibson no longer controlled me. No one did.
And it was with that heady sense of freedom that I finally left Djape, the place I had lived since I was three years old.
* * * *
The trip was not what I had expected. The single transport that occasionally stopped on Djape would not arrive for another two years. So I hired a cargo ship.
It was small and cramped, but the human crew left me to my own devices. We made the trip in thirty-six uneventful hours—a short time, it seemed to me, to make the transition from one life to another.
During the last few hours of the trip, I watched the Outpost appear in a portal. My research told me the Outpost was unusual, but nothing had prepared me for the size of it. Interwoven rings, dozens, maybe a hundred, grew out of a small square station built centuries ago in this part of space. Each ring had a specialty and each ring had its own warren of buildings, living quarters, and businesses.
For that reason, I hired a porter to meet me at the docks. He was a slight man with dark hair and a thin, petulant mouth. He brought a large cart with him, one that seemed to operate under its own power. When he saw that I had only two bags, he appeared surprised.
“Well, now,” he said as I came down the cargo ship's passenger ramp, “this's the first time I've been called out for something I can carry in my own two hands.”
My cheeks heated. I wanted to ask him if I had made some kind of social gaffe, but I did not. Gibson used to tell me that the only way others knew a man was uncomfortable was for him to admit it. Performers, Gibson said, were never uncomfortable; nor did they make mistakes. They simply did things their very own way.
I was already doing things my own way. My clothing marked me as different as well. On the cargo ship, no one wore robes, but I had nothing else. Here, too, in the docking area, I was the only person whose clothing flowed around his sandaled feet.
The porter took my bags and set them on his cart. They seemed somewhat forlorn there, as if they were waiting for a dozen other bags to join them. The porter helped me onto a seat at the front of the cart. He sat in the middle, pressing screen commands that were nearly invisible from my vantage.
We lurched forward, and I headed into my very first human-designed enclave. I sat stiffly, hands folded, as we left the nearly empty docking area and emerged in the Last Outpost itself.
A cacophony greeted me. We went from clanging echoey near-silence to an amalgam of unrelated sounds. Voices carrying on dozens of conversations, children laughing, music blaring overhead. Our cart glided above the polished floor, but other carts had actual wheels that clack-clacked as they moved around us. People stood in front of open doors, hawking wares inside.
Shoppers merged with foot traffic and all the carts, talking, pointing, joking. Blue dresses jarred against orange pants that jarred against green hats. Brown coats, lavender shirts, white bandannas—no one wore the same uniform. No one wore the same colors.
The cart veered sharply to the left. Building facades lined the curved walls, each building a clear construct with a strict design code. Some were white with columns around the doors, others multi-colored, some with tiny round doors, others with irises that webbed open as something went by.
Those passing now were predominantly human, but some were not. One group of bipeds was covered in fuchsia-colored feathers. I couldn't tell if the feathers were a kind of clothing or part of their bodies. Others who passed had flippers instead of limbs, and still others waved their eyes on stalks, peering at me as if I were the exotic one.
“Short timers stay here,” my porter said. “Those who come to the Outpost regularly have apartments in the permanent ring.”
The permanent ring had an exotic sound to it. I tried to imagine living forever in this noisy, busy place, and found I could not. I had seen no windows since we had docked. Even if there were windows, they would only show darkness. I had always craved warmth and sunlight. I could not imagine being without them forever.
The cart glided into an archway. Dozens of other carts floated in the small space, all at varying height. The carts hummed at different frequencies, clashing and grating against my ears. The air here smelled slightly metallic, which meant that the gliders themselves gave off some kind of discharge.
The porter lowered his glider to a space in front of white double doors. The doors were carved with the name of the hotel in black flowing script.
I stepped gingerly off the glider onto a platform in front of the doors. Inside, lights as bright as the afternoon sun in my garden back home greeted me, soothing my jangled nerves.
I turned, about to grab the bags, when the porter grinned at me. “Door to door service,” he said and lugged them inside.
I followed.
The lobby of this hotel—if one could call it a lobby—was cavernous. It felt like an outdoor spa. The bright lights hid the ceiling—above me it looked like a gigantic sun had obliterated the sky. Plants that I did not recognize, most of them green, grew out of the floor, grouping around the furniture, and adding a minty scent to the already perfumed air.
The tension left my shoulders and I felt, for the f
irst time since I had left Djape, that I could relax. The porter led me to a black marble podium, one I would not have seen without him. It was hidden by the leafy plants, which parted as we approached.
The man set down my bags and extended a small silver disc. “Just a thumbprint,” he said, “to verify it's you and your account will be charged.”
I placed my thumb against the disc, which lit up. Then he nodded to me, pocketed the disc, and disappeared through the leaves.
I felt a slight pang at seeing him go. To assuage it, I turned to the podium. A lighted menu appeared above it. I checked myself in, then followed the written instructions. My bags were already moving on some kind of walkway toward my cabana.
I followed them.
My cabana resembled a small house. In fact, if I had not known I was on a station in space, I would have thought I was in some open but exotic domed colony somewhere.
The cabana had six rooms and two levels. Floor-to-ceiling windows covered the walls on the exterior side. The view constantly changed as the station slowly rotated.
I explored cautiously. The room that intrigued me the most was the dining area off the courtesy kitchen. A table sat on a clear floor, in a platform that extended out from the ring. When I sat on one of the chairs, I felt as if I were floating just outside the station.
I finally understood how someone lived on the Outpost without feeling trapped or claustrophobic. I had known that the place was huge—one of the largest of its type anywhere in the sector—but I had thought that the darkness and the cramped quarters would make it feel like an underground cavern. Instead, I felt like I was in a magical place, one that held the promise of a great future.
For the first time in months, I was at peace.
* * * *
I mapped my assault on the Outpost's musical venues as if I were planning a military campaign. In part, I knew that I would be an outsider, and I didn't want to call too much attention to myself. So my earliest visits would be at venues not too far from the guest ring.
But also, I didn't want to hear exceptionally exotic music. I was much more interested in music history, old Earth forms, truly human music with no alien influence whatsoever.
Asimov's SF, September 2009 Page 15
