The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers

by Michael G. Coney

  Uttering a vicious hissing noise, he came under the wire, threw me an icy look as he passed, slid across the yard, and disappeared among the driftwood on the shore. I called it an honorable draw, because I had the slithe.

  I entered the pen and picked the reptile up. He was trembling violently, his skin still yellow; it looked as though it had been permanently dyed that way.

  This strange region of Earth, half land, half ocean, which we call the Peninsula, abounds in characters equally as strange. They come here to escape, to retire, to write, to paint, to live, to die—but mainly to play. A few come here with the genuine and honest intention of making a profit; in fact the city of Louise is just like any other North American city on the surface, with stores and lawyers and used hovercar dealers and all the trappings of civilization. Yet there is no escaping the underlying strangeness which dates, I suppose, from the Western Seaboard Slide so many years ago. It is as though the ocean is reluctant to surrender the low-lying land which it briefly occupied during that disaster. Marine images are everywhere; from the barren landscape which the tsunami swept clean of land-born life, depositing its legacy of shells and fossils and the corpses of great fish and even greater ships, to the images of the mind; the compulsions which force the inhabitants to surround themselves with reminders of their prehistoric surroundings.

  Naturally enough, the craze for terrestrial fish began on the Peninsula, and although it has since spread nationwide, the person chiefly responsible for the distasteful fad is still with us.

  The afternoon following the incident with the moray eel I called at the premises of Pacific Kennels, to lodge a complaint.

  The Kennels are situated some three miles from my farm, and consist in the main of a rectangular arena bordered by cages; the entire affair measures some forty yards by twenty. Nearby stands a mock-Tudor house, a tombstone to good taste. A kennel maid greeted me and, after passing on my message, led me into the presence of Miranda Marjoribanks, the proprietor of Pacific Kennels.

  She stood statuesque in the center of her large living room, wearing something flowing. “Good afternoon, Mr. uh, Sagar,” she said with faint distaste. She has pretensions toward the cultural image whereas I am only a rough farmer. An emotion mobile flickered and murmured in the corner of the room; I knew without looking at the signature that it would be an original Hector Bartholomew.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Marjoribanks,” I replied, pronouncing her name as it is spelled, which always annoys her.

  “Please be seated.”

  “I’d rather stand, thanks.” There was a big horse mackerel on the nearest chair, breathing hard and shedding scales. “I’m afraid I have a complaint. Your fish have been frightening my slithes again. I must ask you to keep them under closer control.” I spoke stiffly. I knew that, whatever I said and however I said it, the matter would shortly become unpleasant.

  “Oh? And how can you say they are my fish, may I ask?”

  “A moray took one of my animals this morning. Nobody around here owns a moray. And it can’t have come far, otherwise the oxygenator would need replacing.”

  “I’ll have you know the latest oxygenators are most efficient, Mr. uh. A fish can live for months, years, without recharging. I don’t think I am boasting when I say that my fish are now as well-adapted to land as the domestic cat—and they make just as good a pet. If not better. And they would most certainly not attack other animals. Most certainly not.”

  “How do you know? They have to eat, don’t they?” I was thinking of Carioca Jones’s objectionable land shark. “My God, if enough of them get loose they’ll be roaming the countryside in packs!”

  She stared at me furiously. “That, Mr. Sagar, is just the sort of ill-informed comment which can stir up prejudices against the most good-natured and lovable of animals. They said the same thing about the paracat, years ago. Come with me.” She swept from the house and I had no option but to follow.

  We crossed the open area of rough scrub and stopped at the chain-link fence of the fish enclosure. All manner of brutes lay comatose in the September sun: sharks, rays, barracudas, octopuses, tunas. Among them, unconcerned, moved the kennel maid, feeding a tidbit to a sailfish, rubbing moisturizer into the rough hide of a hammerhead. “Rosalie!” called Miss Marjoribanks.

  The girl approached, stepping carefully among the dozing forms. She smiled at me; she was quite pretty.

  “Mr. Sagar seems to think our fish are savage beasts, Rosalie,” said Miss Marjoribanks. “I’d like you to demonstrate just how wrong he is.”

  The girl smiled again, glancing around the enclosure. She spotted a barracuda nearby; a six-foot bastard at least one-third of which was head and jaws. She sat down beside it; the fish watched her with one eye, oxygenator throbbing lazily beneath the silver scales. She reached out a finger and tickled the fish. The jaws gaped, the sharp teeth were exposed.

  Then Rosalie lay back on the grass and the barracuda’s eye followed her as she approached nearer, nearer until her face was within the angle of those terrible jaws and the fish had only to snap them shut in order to disfigure that pretty face for life.

  “You see, Mr. Sagar?” Miss Marjoribanks cried triumphantly. “The barracuda is just one of those creatures which Man has granted an undeserved reputation. Newspocket has reported attacks on skin divers. Now, I took the trouble to do a little research. You know what I found? There were two types of incident involving barracudas and skin divers. Firstly, when the diver had speared a fish, the barracuda scented the blood, moved in, and took the fish from the end of the spear.

  “And secondly, when the skin diver was stupid enough to shoot the barracuda himself. Then the fish would dart away but would be brought up short by the spear in its side, attached to the line from the gun, and it would be forced to turn. It would tend to swim in a circle, faster than the diver could turn around, gradually wrapping the diver in the line, shortening the distance between them until fish and man were tied together. Then, crazed with fear and pain, the fish would naturally snap at the nearest object.”

  She went on for some time in this vein while Rosalie moved among the fish, feeding them. I was unconvinced, but she is not the type of woman on whom it is wise to use logic. It was apparent to me that the fish were harmless because they were not hungry, because they were constantly fed. It seemed to me that the average fish-owner might not be so careful. Carioca Jones, for instance. I would hate to be around her land shark if it had missed a meal.

  But the most significant point involved Rosalie herself. In the course of the lecture it emerged that the girl was a state prisoner, bonded to Miss Marjoribanks.

  I felt that here was a case where the penal laws were being abused, but there was nothing I could do.

  3

  I had replaced the frightened slithe with the others and given him a couple of days to recover, but it was no use. The terror had had a traumatic effect on him and his presence made the others uneasy. He could not lose the yellowish tint which the rest of the team were taking as a warning signal, causing their own skins to fluctuate in unhappy sympathy. In the end I removed him and placed him in isolation.

  As a result of this event I doubled the size of the team. I could now afford ten individual disasters without threat to the dress project; and a large, communal disaster did not matter unduly, provided all the animals suffered alike.

  Carioca Jones came to see me the day after the moray incident and my visit to Pacific Kennels. By the time I was told she was around, she had already pumped Dave and was leaning over the prize pen in a proprietorial manner.

  “Hi, Joe darling. Your man tells me these are my creatures.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But aren’t they a bit variegated, Joe darling?” Her sharp black eyes scrutinized the tiny herd as the animals scuttled about. “It wouldn’t do for Carioca Jones to go dressed in motley, would it?”

  “I told you about that. They have to get used to each other.”

  “Oh, dear, they
’re not like us, are they? I mean, we sort of hit it off immediately, didn’t we? I think you felt that too, didn’t you, Joe?”

  “Of course. Look … Carioca. Unfortunately I have a hell of a lot to do.”

  “But I understand! I’ve only dropped by for a minute, Joe. I thought we might get the fitting done.” She opened up a minuscule purse and dangled a tape measure which I regarded as one regards a krait. She smiled knowingly. That goddamned measure was becoming almost symbolic.

  So I took her into the house and, unchaperoned, got it over with—the measurements, I mean. I don’t think she really expected anything else. She just had that knack of making anything appear sexual, which was why her career had been so successful and why it was over, now the bloom had gone. Sad? It was almost pathetic; I kissed her briefly as a compulsory compliment and got her out of the house.

  “Well now, that wasn’t so bad, was it, Joe?”

  “Uh.”

  “I’ll get out of your way now. I have to go into town and do some shopping. I wonder. How would you like to come along? It would do you good to get away from this smelly old farm for a while. Eh, Joe? Maybe we could have a drink somewhere?”

  She had dropped the overemphasized manner of speech, she had dropped the coquettishness, she was suddenly, genuinely trying to get through to me. She was lonely and she wanted company for the rest of the afternoon. I wondered what had got into her—then I remembered the episode of the orchestrella.

  “Where’s Joanne?” I asked.

  Her gaze shifted; she looked away. “Back at home.”

  So there had been a split-up; it was not surprising. I wondered if Joanne was packing her bags and leaving—and I think I felt lonely too, then.

  “I’m sorry, Carioca,” I said. “I’d like to come. But I’ve got a hell of a lot to do here, like I said. Maybe some other time.”

  She smiled. “You really mean that, don’t you, Joe? How nice. We must make a date sometime.”

  “Great.”

  I walked with her to the car and held the door open. She couldn’t resist vouchsafing the usual thigh display as she got in; then she looked at me and said in completely flat, neutral tones: “I must hurry. I have to buy an orchestrella before the stores close.”

  I’ve often wondered about the way she said that. That not-quite-casual remark of hers became almost an obsession with me when months later I lay on the warm sands of Halmas and tried to remember and to forget—and even now there is nothing I can pin down, nothing which might have given me a clue as to what her intentions were, that September afternoon. Nothing to tell me whether I was terribly to blame for what happened subsequently.

  Was she saying she was sorry? At, the time I thought so; but then, she is an actress.

  The car rose and whined off, and she was gone. I was left thinking about Joanne again, as I did so often. And as I thought about Joanne and the wrecked instrument, which it seemed Carioca had achieved the decency to replace, I suddenly thought I would make some recompense also. After all, I was partly to blame.

  I went into the workshop and gave Dave careful instructions. I wanted to give Joanne a present; not something ridiculously expensive like Carioca’s goddamned dress—just something small and appropriate.

  But as I went outside again, feeling Dave’s amused gaze on my back, I wondered if maybe I just wanted to be around when Joanne wore slithe skin for the first time.

  I was so engrossed in this speculation that I jerked in dangerous proximity to heart failure when her voice spoke right next to me.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Sagar.”

  “Uh, God. I … I didn’t see you arrive, Joanne. Call me Joe. What … how did you get here?”

  “Oh, I borrowed a car. Look, Joe. Have you seen Carioca?”

  “You’ve just missed her.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “Louise. She was—” I stopped in time. Maybe the orchestrella was supposed to be a surprise. “Is it anything urgent?”

  “I … I don’t know.” She hesitated. “We haven’t spoken very much, you know, since—Then she went off this afternoon without saying a thing, not a thing.”

  “Don’t worry. She was perfectly normal when I saw her.”

  “Oh, thank goodness.” She looked around, at a loss. “Well, I must get going. I’ll see if I can find her in town. When we … when we go to Louise together, we usually split up for shopping and meet at the Princess Louise bar, at six. That’s where I’ll find her, I’m sure. She’ll be there.”

  “Joanne, I tell you she’s OK.” She was fidgeting around and twisting the strap of her bag between her fingers and it was driving me mad. I mean, here she was on my home ground, and all we could talk about was an aging 3-V star who was more than capable of looking after herself. “Come in and have a drink, why don’t you?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. Really, not now. I must go.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said. “We can all have a drink.”

  But with luck, I thought, we won’t be able to find Miss Carioca Jones.

  Time has been kind to the Princess Louise. The records of its arrival are sketchy as the ship’s log was destroyed—along with the entire crew, so it is said—at the time of the Slide. Soon afterward it was discovered by the few survivors of the tidal waves which had cleaned any other form of shelter off the surface of the Peninsula. These frightened wrecks huddled together for months, maybe years, until they gradually drifted back into communication with the rest of the world.

  Their first contact doubtless came by means of the roving bands of Indians who had hunted the more northerly regions since time immemorial. By then, it is supposed that the Princess Louise had become a village in its own right. Then suddenly the world returned and a city grew around the beached liner. And with the arrival of people, history began to move forward again on the Peninsula.

  “Look. I’m sorry if there was some sort of trouble,” I said as we sipped our drinks in the busy bar. “I feel partly to blame, you know.”

  “I … I don’t see why.”

  “Well, you know … I was maybe a bit tactless praising your playing, knowing Carioca can get jealous. I just didn’t think.”

  “I haven’t noticed she’s particularly jealous,” she said. “She likes to be the center of things, yes. But jealous?” At last she grinned, a good straightforward grin. “I think she was annoyed because she wasn’t getting what she wanted, so she took it out on me—or rather my orchestrella.” She hesitated oddly then, and the grin faded.

  “I’m not sure she, uh, wanted anything. She just wanted me to think she did. It was an act.” And it could be a dangerous act; this was when I experienced my first real twinge of uneasiness about Joanne’s position. “Can’t you see what she’s really like, Joanne?”

  I had lost her again. “I know what she’s like, and she’s always been very good to me.”

  She was loyal to Carioca Jones and she was damned if she was going to denigrate her in front of a comparatively casual acquaintance like me. Apologetically I reached across the table and put my hand over hers.

  That was the moment Carioca Jones chose to arrive. As I tried to collect my thoughts I remembered I had told her previously I was too busy to come out.

  I often saw Carioca Jones during the next few weeks. When we met, her manner was not unfriendly, and she never referred to the meeting with Joanne and me—or the public scene that had ensued. She dropped by every few days to check on the progress of her dress and chatted pleasantly about the promising appearance of the slithes. By now the little reptiles were identical in their reactions; it was a pleasure to see them all change color, simultaneously, from dull brown to warm pink when I approached with food. I calculated they would all be due to shed in a couple of weeks’ time, and within two or three days of one another.

  Just once she made an oblique reference to Joanne. She let drop the news that she was practicing the orchestrella again; I presumed Joanne was giving her lessons. She held her kno
tted fingers before her as she said this, flexing them as though playing an imaginary instrument. It put me in mind of an eagle swooping on a lamb.

  I found an excuse to call on the house, once. I got Doug Marshall to take me for a run in his hydrofoil and persuaded him to anchor off Carioca’s beach. He, myself, and Charles Wentworth sat in the cockpit drinking while I kept my eyes on the shore. Marshall was talking about his new glider which he expected to be delivered later in the week, and Charles and I listened, although from time to time I caught Charles glancing at me with a faint grin, as though he knew what I was looking for.

  “I think I’ll just slip ashore for a minute,” I said suddenly.

  They looked knowing. “Not longer than an hour, right, Joe?” said Marshall. “I want to get some practice in later, before the new glider arrives.”

  It seemed a long time before I was hurrying through the trees but it was probably only a few minutes, such is the time-scale of love. The carport was empty, so I could safely assume Carioca was out, and that it was Joanne I had caught a glimpse of from the boat. Then I heard the sweet sounds of an orchestrella being played as only Joanne knew how. I slipped through the open French windows and crossed the floor quietly. The interior of the semidome was the antithesis of light but I could see her hands stroking a new and ornate orchestrella. I watched and listened for a while, then I spoke. Time was short and Carioca might return at any moment.