Asimov's SF, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “If you sent the older boy to Djape, you would change him in the wrong way. The younger one, he would have the good life you told Jackson about. And if the younger boy chooses something different when he gets older, then so be it. But you would be forcing the older child into a mold that doesn't suit him.”

  “One child, not two,” Felix said, almost to himself. “They're not going to like this.”

  “One child who sings longer. One child who loves what he does. Usually you send two because one will break, right?”

  He looked at me. His gaze was measuring. It was as if I had uncovered a secret even he didn't want to acknowledge.

  “It's always been that way,” he said. “You send two, one breaks. And no one has been able to predict the break.”

  “Because you have to know what life on Djape is like, and you don't know that,” I said.

  “But you do.”

  Too well.

  “Don't send the one who'll break,” I said. “Send the woman instead.”

  “They hated women's voices,” he said as if I didn't know.

  “She's not going there to sing,” I said. “She's going to make sure he does.”

  “By taking care of him,” Felix said. He turned away from me, but not before I saw the relief on his face.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Are you telling me no one takes care of these children?”

  “No, I'm not saying that.” I looked at the door where the children had filed out. I had no idea what level of care they received here. I supposed I could ask Jackson.

  “Then why send the woman?” Felix asked.

  “The children get good care,” I said, “but they—we—are commodities. And if we break, no one puts us back together.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” Felix asked.

  “As an adult,” I said. “But I know it happens to the young ones. I've seen it.”

  “What do they do with them?” Felix asked.

  I frowned. I didn't exactly know. The ones I had seen got led offstage, never to perform again.

  “They grow up to become support staff, I think,” I said. “I don't exactly know.”

  Sadly, ironically, I had never thought about it before.

  Felix walked to the front of the room. He was clearly thinking about what I'd said. He clasped his hands behind his back, paced as if he were retracing the boys’ steps, and then walked back to me.

  He nodded. “I can make this work. I know I can.”

  His mood seemed suddenly lighter. I let out a small breath of air I hadn't realized I had been holding.

  Maybe this all disturbed me more than I wanted to admit. Such a big system, and these boys were only a small part of it. The entire Outpost had developed around the orphans. And if they had been farmed out throughout the decades, then they had an impact throughout the entire sector.

  But Felix clearly wasn't thinking of that. He was thinking of our discussion. He clapped a hand on my back and led me out of the auditorium. As we walked down the hall, he said, “If I do this, you'll have to agree to listen to the future candidates.”

  It wasn't a question. It was a command. I bristled at commands.

  “I already said I don't want your job,” I said.

  “I'm asking you to consult,” he said. “In exchange for the right to study at the Conservatory.”

  I wanted to say no, but that might have been a reaction to his preemptory statement. I also wanted to study at the Conservatory. I wanted to study human musical traditions. I wanted to learn everything I could about the art I had just so recently discovered. I could do some of that simply by attending the bars, clubs, and concert halls on the Outpost. But the last week of listening to Jackson's performances had raised questions too complicated to answer in a single night's performance.

  Still, I wanted to make my own decision—and not one based on Djape or the Pane or sending boys to a life just like mine had been. “I want to think about it,” I said.

  My silence must have told Felix about my ambivalence. He nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

  * * * *

  I spent the next three days thinking about Felix's offer. Only I wasn't thinking so much about the trade as I was about myself. I had never done a lot of self analysis. I was just stumbling onto it here, and it felt as uncomfortable as the music I had first heard in the blues club.

  Windchimes did not feel emotion. Windchimes simply let air pass through their instrument, achieving a purity of sound that was in their very nature. Not because they had brought the emotion to the surface. Not because they had felt anything, except maybe a cold breeze.

  The fear came because the instrument could become flawed. The chimes could crack, the wind could shatter a delicate part of the glass itself. And then nothing, not even the most careful repair, could remake the sound. Sound was notoriously fickle. Its perfection was short-lived.

  Perhaps that was why blues had intrigued me so much. The blues did not seem to recognize perfection. The blues seemed to spurn it.

  The older boy had felt emotion when he sang. The younger boy had not. He hadn't even thought of music as anything other than sounds that traveled through his instrument, through his voice.

  Perfection could be trained. It could be achieved by a blessed few. I had done so. That child might be able to as well.

  Oddly, at least to me, I felt less conflicted about choosing the children than I did about my own motivation for doing so. When I had left Djape, I'd hoped to leave permanently. I had kept my home there, yes, because I was afraid (that word again!) that I would not survive the universe outside of the one I had known.

  But I could survive here, even if I did not join the Conservatory. I could spend the rest of my life here, listening to music, discovering new theories, and learning to use my voice in a new way.

  I did not go to the blues club during those three days, but I did go back to the Children's Ring. I asked for—and received—my records.

  Apparently Gibson, who had taken me from the Outpost, had kept my name. I had been three, just like he said. One of ten survivors of a mid-space collision between a passenger ship and some kind of space debris. The pilots survived. A few of the crew had taken the children first to a secure area. By the time they were ready to get the parents, they'd realized that the back section of the ship had opened to the coldness of space.

  All of the children had been brought to the Outpost, where the authorities had followed standard protocol: they had searched for the remaining family. Some of the children had grandparents and aunts and uncles. I had had no one, except the two people traveling with me. People who were listed only by their names, and the fact that they were traveling to the Outpost to look for work.

  “Charity cases,” the woman who helped me with the records said. “Sometimes the Outpost does that. It funds a ship of job seekers. It's hard to get good workers out here, and even harder to keep them.”

  “So I would have ended up on the Outpost no matter what,” I said.

  She nodded. “And probably not have been tested for music. You would have lived with your parents and most likely had minimal education. You would have ended up as they did.”

  “Dead?” I asked.

  She laughed. “No,” she said. “Whatever jobs they found themselves in were the jobs you would have been considered for.”

  “Work is hereditary here?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “But families tend to follow the same paths. The new jobs are filled by the children from the Ring—the talented children of the Ring, of course.”

  Her comments sounded self-serving to me, so I investigated them, and found, indeed, that employment studies of the Outpost had shown the most driven employees were not members of the families who lived here, but the children who had been orphaned. They had learned competition, the value of hard work, and how to maximize their own skill set.

  Which was what I was now trying to do. I had a beautiful voice—albeit unconventional for the Outpost—
and a growing love of all types of music. A curiosity that had gotten me in trouble on Djape and might serve me well here. A curiosity that seemed to grow the more I learned.

  After the three days, I returned to Felix and accepted his offer. I would help him chose the right children for Djape and he would guarantee me a permanent place of study in the Conservatory.

  But I did have one condition. If I felt a perfectly pure boy soprano would be destroyed on Djape—and there were no others to take his place—the Pane and their human minions would be told that there were no boys in that group. Fewer children would go to Djape, but those who would might actually have a chance at long-term musical (and personal) survival.

  Felix agreed. He offered to take me to dinner to celebrate, but I refused.

  Instead, I went to the blues club.

  Jackson's band was at the end of a song. Instead of fading out as he usually did, Jackson started a completely different song. The band members looked at him, and then the percussionist grinned. He caught the syncopated beat. So did the bass player. The saxophonist did his own riff. The female singer grabbed a tambourine off the percussionist's table and tapped it against her hip on the off-beats.

  I made my way to my usual table. The waitress was already setting down my C'cola when Jackson started singing Playin’ With My Friends. I had heard it before, but never so energetically.

  He was looking at me as he played, inviting me through the lyrics of the song to join them on stage. He even beckoned as he sang that I could pick any song I wanted to, so long as it was the blues.

  I shook my head and sat down. He grinned at me, and stopped singing, playing a variation on the melody that I had never heard before. The entire band played without a singer for another fifteen minutes, various versions of the same song, with each instrument taking the melody—except the percussionist, who kept the same syncopated beat for the entire piece.

  It was one of the most interesting—and welcoming—songs I had ever heard them do. By the end of it, I was clapping with the tambourine's beat like everyone else.

  Finally Jackson eased out of the piece, followed by the bass. The percussion, tambourine, and trumpets finished it off with a flourish. Then everyone bowed, and threaded off the stage.

  Jackson leaned his electric guitar against his stool. He climbed down into the audience as well, and startled me by coming to my table just as the steak-and-potato soup did. He ordered his own C'cola and a side of brisket.

  “Why didn't you come up?” he asked. “I know you can sing.”

  “Not like that,” I said. “Try as I might, I can't achieve a half-flatted note.”

  “Achieve it?” He raised his eyebrows. “You don't achieve notes. You sing them.”

  I shrugged. “I can't sing them either.”

  “Lemme hear you,” he said. “Come on up to the stage.”

  I shook my head. “You have an audience.”

  “So?” He finished his C'cola as he stood, then set the glass on the table. “Come on.”

  “The last time I sang for anyone,” I said, “I swallowed a note.”

  He laughed. “Hell, we're lucky if we even hit them.”

  That was true. I exhaled, and I stood reluctantly. My stomach had clenched, but to my surprise, my throat hadn't.

  I climbed onto the stage and stood with my back to the small crowd. “What do you want me to try?”

  “Something Pane,” he said. “Something you're used to.”

  “No one here will like it,” I said.

  He nodded. “I want to hear it.”

  So I sang part of Tampini's Aria in E Major. I hit each note perfectly. They sounded too large in the club—ironic, I thought, considering the power of the blues band before me.

  Jackson was grinning. “That's Pane music, huh?”

  I nodded. “It's certainly not blues,” I said.

  “So sing for me,” he said. “This line.”

  He sang the opening lines of the song that the band had just done. I sang as softly as I could, knowing how embarrassingly strange my pure high voice sounded.

  “Keep going,” he said, as I faded out. “You know the words.”

  And I did. Music stayed in my head. So I sang the opening lines of Playin’ With My Friends, and he built a bridge underneath me with the electric guitar. Shivers were running down my spine.

  I had always thought I was a windchime, but Jackson's song was making me into something else. As I sang, the other band members filed back on stage. They picked up in the middle as if they had never quit, only I was singing the melody. Jackson kept the bridge beneath me, and I kept my back to the audience. We played through all three verses and two renditions of the chorus, and then Jackson nodded at me to stop.

  The band played twelve more bars and stopped as well. There was a moment of silence—the Pane version of a boo—and then someone clapped. Others followed. The applause was so steady and fierce that it threatened to overwhelm me.

  I hadn't moved. Jackson had to set down his guitar and grab me by the shoulders, turning me around. The audience was on its feet, clapping and stomping and asking for more.

  “But it's not the blues,” I said to Jackson.

  “Not the old-fashioned kind, that's true,” he said. “This is something new. That's what they're applauding. Something different.”

  “Is that good?” I asked.

  He extended a hand to the still applauding crowd. “What do you think?”

  I thought I had never experienced a reaction that so moved me. The Pane's pleasure allowed me to keep my job. Here I had no job. I had experimented—and it had succeeded.

  “Join us for another song?” he asked.

  I started to shake my head, then changed my mind.

  “Just one,” I said, “and no more.”

  Five songs later, winded and covered in sweat, I staggered off the stage. The waitress brought me a fresh bowl of soup, some water, and another C'cola. The audience congratulated me and asked me when I was going to sing again.

  Jackson grinned. “He'll be back,” he kept promising.

  “I can't,” I said to him as he sat back down at my table. “I don't sing like you do. There's no music like this.”

  “Precisely,” he said. “That's what's so wonderful about it.”

  “It doesn't follow any rules,” I said.

  “So there can't be perfection,” he said.

  I stared at him for a moment, stunned at what he just said. No perfection? Not even a little?

  “We'll start slowly,” he said. “One night a week. We'll put a sign out front, and call it the Pane Blues.”

  “Isn't that a contradiction?” I asked.

  “Music loves dissonance,” he said. “You just haven't learned that yet.”

  He was right. I hadn't learned dissonance. But I had a hunch I would.

  And if my previous experiences on the Outpost were any example, I might actually come to love it.

  “One night,” I said, “and no more.”

  He grinned. He knew as well as I did that my vows that night weren't holding up.

  I wasn't sure I wanted them to.

  I was acting without thinking, just like I had done in that concert in Tygher City, when my voice broke. My perfection broke. My life broke.

  And became something new.

  Something flawed.

  Something better.

  Copyright © 2009 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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  * * *

  Department: NEXT ISSUE

  OCTOBER/NOVEMBER DOUBLE ISSUE

  No room here to be clever about our fabulous October/November double issue, so let's begin: Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore contribute a literary tale of loss and personal redemption amidst the curious life cycle of an insect known as the “Blood Dauber"; Heather Lindsley, making her Asimov's debut, tells of the troubles experienced by time-traveling wage-slaves who answer the eternal question of just “Where the Time Goes"; R. Garcia y Robertson returns
to his Burroughs-inspired milieu for a jaunt during “Wife Stealing Time"; Damien Broderick channels the inventive spirit of classic Zelazny in his tale “Flowers of Asphodel"; Ian Creasey describes the peculiar weltschmerz felt by a man who must leave his body behind to travel the stars in “Erosion"; Robert Reed contributes a sure SF award-nominee with his haunting “Before My Last Breath"; William Barton pens a thrilling interstellar adventure in his Standard ARM series, trawling “The Sea of Dreams"; Christopher Barzak shares the tragic story of “The Ghost Hunter's Beautiful Daughter"; Elissa Malcohn laments the discovery of a peculiar bit of “Flotsam"; and Nancy Kress shares her latest, “Deadly Sins.”

  OUR EXCITING FEATURES

  We present a fascinating interview with physicist Michio Kaku in a brand new Thought Experiments column by Mary Robinette Kowal; Robert Silverberg, in Reflections, continues to offer insights into the invention of his popular Majipoor series in “Building Worlds II"; Norman Spinrad brings us “On Books” and James Patrick Kelly offers a new On the Net; plus an array of poetry you're sure to enjoy. Look for theOctober/November issue on sale at your newsstand on September 1, 2009.

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  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS

  by Paul Di Filippo

  * * * *

  My Wars, and Welcome to Them

  Harry Crosby will turn eighty-seven years old in 2009, Ghu willing. He doesn't write much these days, but his classic older work is receiving some renewed attention, thanks to fresh editions from Baen Books.

  You say you've never heard of Harry Crosby before—or if you have, you know only of the Lost Generation poet by that name...? Good point. That's because our genre's Harry Crosby is better known as Christopher Anvil, his relatively famous pen name.

  Baen has done five prior collections by Anvil, all mammoth omnibus volumes giving lots of reading pleasure for the buck, and the latest is no different: War Games (hardcover, $22.00, 468 pages, ISBN 978-1-4165-5602-2) actually even contains a complete novel, The Steel, the Mist, and the Blazing Sun (1980). The rest of the military-themed book consists mostly of stories from Astounding/Analog and Galaxy, circa 1957-1972, with a couple from other zines and a few outliers from the eighties.