by Paula Guran
“I thought—if I could get through the concert—”
“Well, you can’t. You showed us that, by God.” He whirled and pointed his finger at Ereza. “You—get up here! I can’t be talking in two directions.”
Ereza stifled an impulse to giggle. He acted as if he had real authority; she could just see him trying that tone on a platoon commander and finding out that he didn’t. She picked her way to a set of small steps up from the floor of the hall and made her way across the stage, past the empty chairs. Arla stared at her, still breathing too fast. She would faint if she kept that up, silly twit.
“What a mess!” the conductor was saying. “And what an ugly thing that is—is that the best our technology can do for you?” He was staring at her temporary prosthesis, with its metal rods and clips.
“Tactful, aren’t you?” She wasn’t exactly angry, not yet, but she was moving into a mood where anger would be easy. He would have to realize that while he could bully Arlashi, he couldn’t bully her. If being blown apart, buried for days, and reassembled with bits missing hadn’t crushed her, no mere musician could.
“This is not about tact,” the conductor said. “Not that I’d expect you to be aware of that . . . Arriving on the eve of this concert to upset my soloist, for instance, is hardly an expression of great tact.”
Ereza resisted an urge to argue. “This is a temporary prosthesis,” she said, holding it up. “Right now, as you can imagine, they’re short-staffed; it’s going to take longer than it would have once to get the permanent one. However, it gives me some practice in using one.”
“I should imagine.” He glared at her. “Now sit down and be quiet. I have something to say to your sister.”
“If you’re planning to scold her, don’t bother. She’s about to faint—”
“I am not,” Arla said. She had gone from pale to a dull red that clashed with her purple tunic.
“You have no rights here,” said the conductor to Ereza. “You’re just upsetting her—and I’ll have to see her later. But for now—” He made a movement with his hands, tossing her the problem, and walked offstage. From that distance, he got the last word in. “Miss Fennaris—the cellist Miss Fennaris—see me in my office this afternoon at fourteen-twenty.”
“You want lights?” asked a distant voice from somewhere overhead.
“No,” said Arla, still not looking at Ereza. “Cut ’em.” The brilliant stage lighting disappeared; Arla’s dark clothes melted into the gloom onstage, leaving her face—older, sadder—to float above it. “Damn you, Ereza—why did you have to come now?”
Ereza couldn’t think of anything to say. That was not what she’d imagined Arla saying. Anger and disappointment struggled; what finally came out was, “Why didn’t you come to see me? I kept expecting you . . . Was it just this concert?” She could—almost—understand that preparing for a major appearance might keep her too busy to visit the hospital.
“No. Not . . . exactly.” Arla looked past her. “It was—I couldn’t practice without thinking about it. Your hand. My hand. If I’d seen you, I couldn’t have gone on making music. I should have—after I beat you at Flight-test I should have enlisted. If I’d been there—”
“You’d have been asleep, like the rest of us. It wasn’t slow reflexes that did it, Arlashi, it was a bomb. While we slept. Surely they told you that.” But Arla’s face had that stubborn expression again. Ereza tried again. “Look—what you’re feeling—I do understand that. When I woke up and found Reia’d been killed, and Aristide, I hated myself for living. You wish I hadn’t been hurt, and because you’re not a soldier—”
“Don’t start that!” Arla shifted, and a music stand went over with a clatter. “Dammit!” She crouched and gathered the music in shaking hands, then stabbed the stand upright. “If I get this out of order, Kiel will—”
Ereza felt a trickle of anger. “It’s only sheets of paper—surely this Kiel can put it back in order. It’s not like . . . what do you mean ‘Don’t start that’?”
“That you’re not a soldier rigmarole. I know perfectly well I’m not, and you are. Everyone in the family is, except me, and I know how you all feel about it.”
“Nonsense.” They had had this out before; Ereza thought she’d finally got through, but apparently Arla still worried. Typical of the civilian mind, she thought, to fret about what couldn’t be helped. “No one blames you; we’re proud of you. Do you think we need another soldier? We’ve told you—”
“Yes. You’ve told me.” Ereza waited, but Arla said nothing more, just stood there, staring at the lighter gloom over the midhall, where the skylight was.
“Well, then. You don’t want to be a soldier; you never did. And no need, with a talent like yours. It’s what we fight for, anyway—”
“Don’t say that!”
“Why not? It’s true. Gods be praised, Arlashi, we’re not like the Metiz, quarreling for the pure fun of it, happy to dwell in a wasteland if only it’s a battlefield. Or the Gennar Republic, which cares only for profit. Our people have always valued culture: music, art, literature. It’s to make a society in which culture can flourish—where people like you can flourish—that we go to war at all.”
“So it’s my fault.” That in a quiet voice. “You would lay the blame for this war—for that bomb—on me?”
“Of course not, ninny! How could it be your fault, when a Gavalan terrorist planted that bomb?” Musicians, Ereza thought, were incapable of understanding issues. If poor Arla had thought the bombing was her fault, no wonder she came apart—and how useless someone so fragile would be in combat, for all her hand-eye coordination and dexterity. “You aren’t to blame for the misbegotten fool who did it, or the pigheaded political leadership that sent him.”
“But you said—”
“Arlashi, listen. Your new cello—you know where the wood came from?”
“Yes.” That sounded sullen, even angry. “Reparations from Scavel; the Military Court granted the Music Council first choice for instruments.”
“That’s what I mean. We go to war to protect our people—physical and economic protection. Do you think a poor, helpless society could afford wood for instruments? A concert hall to play in? The stability in which the arts flourish?” Arla stirred, but Ereza went on quickly before she could interrupt. “I didn’t intend to lose a hand—no one does—but I would have done it gladly to give you your music—”
“I didn’t ask you for that! You didn’t have to lose anything to give me music. I could give myself music!”
“Not that cello,” Ereza said, fighting to keep a reasonable tone. She could just imagine Arla out in the stony waste, trying to string dry grass across twigs and make music. Surely even musicians realized how much they needed the whole social structure, which depended on the military’s capacity to protect both the physical planet and its trade networks. “Besides—war has to be something more than killing, more than death against death. We aren’t barbarians. It has to be for something.”
“It doesn’t have to be for me.”
“Yes, you. I can’t do it. You could fight—” She didn’t believe that, but saying it might get Arla’s full attention. “Anyone can fight, who has courage, and you have that. But I can’t make music. If I had spent the hours at practice you have, I still couldn’t make your music. If I die, there are others as skilled as I am who could fight our wars. But if you die, there will be no music. In all the generations since Landing, our family has given one soldier after another. You—you’re something different—”
“But I didn’t ask for it.”
Ereza shrugged, annoyed. “No one asks for their talent, or lack of it.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Arla struggled visibly, then shrugged. “Look—we can’t talk here; it’s like acting, being on this stage. Come to my rehearsal room.”
“Now? But I thought we’d go somewhere for lunch. I have to leave soon.”
“Now. I have to put my precious war-won wood cello away.” A
rla led the way to her instrument, then offstage and down a white-painted corridor. Ereza ignored the sarcastic tone of that remark and followed her. Doors opened on either side; from behind some of them music leaked out, frail ghosts of melody.
Arla’s room had two chairs, a desk-mounted computer, and a digital music stand. Arla waved her to one of the chairs; Ereza sat down and looked over at the music stand’s display.
“Why don’t you have this kind onstage? Why that paper you spilled?”
Her attempt to divert Arla’s attention won a wry grin. “Maestro Bogdan won’t allow it. Because the tempo control’s usually operated by foot, he’s convinced the whole orchestra would be tapping its toes. Even if we were, it’d be less intrusive than reaching out and turning pages, but he doesn’t see it that way. Traditionally, even good musicians turn pages, but only bad musicians tap their feet. And we live for tradition—like my cello.” Arla had opened the case again, and then she tapped her cello with one finger. It made a soft tock that sounded almost alive. With a faint sigh she turned away and touched her computer. The music stand display came up, with a line of music and the measure numbers above it.
She turned it to give Ereza a better view.
“Do you know what that is?”
Ereza squinted and read aloud. “Artruud’s Opus 27, measure seventy-nine?”
“Do you know what that is?”
Ereza shook her head. “No—should I? I might if you hummed it.”
Arla gave a short, ugly laugh. “I doubt that. We just played it, the whole thing. This—” She pointed at the display, which showed ten measures at a time. “This is where I blew up. Eighty-two to eighty-six.”
“Yes, but I don’t read music.”
“I know.” Arla turned and looked directly at her. “Did you ever think about that? The fact that I can play Flight-test as well as you, that my scores in TacSim—the tests you had me take as a joke—were enough to qualify me for officers’ training if I’d wanted it . . . but not one of you in the family can read music well enough to pick out a tune on the piano?”
“It’s not our talent. And you, surrounded by a military family—of course you’d pick up something—”
“Is war so easy?” That in a quiet voice, washed clean of emotion. Ereza stared at her, shocked.
“Easy! Of course it’s not easy.” She still did not want to think about her first tour, the near disaster of that patrol on Sardon, when a training mission had gone sour. It was nothing she could discuss with Arla. Her stump throbbed, reminding her of more recent pain. How could Arla ask that question? She started to ask that, but Arla had already spoken.
“But you think I picked it up, casually, with no training?”
“Well . . . our family . . . and besides, what you did was only tests, not real combat.”
“Yes. And do you think that if you’d been born into a musical family, you’d have picked up music so casually? Would you be able to play the musical equivalent of Flight-test?”
“I’d have to know more, wouldn’t I?” Ereza wondered where this conversation was going. Clearly Arla was upset about something, something to do with her own wound. It’s my arm that’s missing, she thought. I’m the one who has a right to be upset or not upset. “I’d still have no talent for it, but I would probably know more music when I heard it.”
“Yet I played music in the same house, Eri, four to six hours a day when we were children. You had ears; you could have heard. We slept in the same room; you could have asked questions. You told me if you liked something, or if you were tired of hearing it; you never once asked me a musical question. You heard as much music as many musicians’ children. The truth is that you didn’t care. None of our family cared.”
Ereza knew the shock she felt showed on her face; Arla nodded at her and went on talking. “Dari can tell you how his preschool training team pretended to assault the block fortress, and you listen to him. You listen carefully, you admire his cleverness or point out where he’s left himself open for a counterattack. But me—I could play Hohlander’s first cello concerto backward, and you’d never notice. It’s not important to you—it’s beneath your notice.”
“That’s not true.” Ereza clenched the fingers of her left hand on the arm of the chair. “Of course we care; of course we notice. We know you’re good; that’s why you had the best teachers. It’s just that it’s not our field—we’re not supposed to be experts.”
“But you are about everything else.” Arla, bracing herself on the desk, looked almost exultant. Ereza could hardly believe what she was hearing. The girl must have had this festering inside for years, to bring it out now, to someone wounded in her defense. “You talk politics as if it were your field—why this war is necessary, why that legislation is stupid. You talk about manufacturing, weapons design, the civilian economy—all that seems to be your area of expertise. If music and art and poetry are so important—if they’re the reason you fight—then why don’t you know anything about them? Why don’t you bother to learn even the basics, the sort of stuff you expect Dari to pick up by the time he’s five or six?”
“But—we can’t do it all,” Ereza said, appalled at the thought of all the children, talented or untalented, forced to sit through lessons in music. Every child had to know something about drill and survival techniques; Cravor’s World, even in peacetime, could be dangerous. But music? You couldn’t save yourself in a sandstorm or grass fire by knowing who wrote which pretty tune, or how to read musical notation. “We found you teachers who did—”
“Whom you treated like idiots,” Arla said. “Remember the time Professor Rizvi came over, and talked to Grandmother after my lesson? No—of course you wouldn’t; you were in survival training right then, climbing up cliffs or something like that. But it was just about the time the second Gavalan rebellion was heating up, and he told Grandmother the sanctions against the colonists just made things worse. She got that tone in her voice—you know what I mean—and silenced him. After that he wouldn’t come to the house. I went into the city for my lessons. She told the story to Father, and they laughed together about the silly, ineffectual musician who wouldn’t stand a chance against real power—with me standing there—and then they said, ‘But you’re a gifted child, Arlashi, and we love it.’ ”
“They’re right.” Ereza leaned forward. “What would a composer and musician know about war? And it doesn’t take much of a weapon to smash that cello you’re so fond of.” She knew that much, whatever she didn’t know about music. To her surprise, Arla gave a harsh laugh.
“Of course it doesn’t take much weaponry to smash a cello. It doesn’t take a weapon at all. I could trip going down the stairs and fall on it; I could leave it flat on the floor and step on it. You don’t need to be a skilled soldier to destroy beauty: any clumsy fool can manage that.”
“But—”
Arla interrupted her. “That’s my point. You take pride in your skill, in your special, wonderful knowledge. And all you can accomplish with it is what carelessness or stupidity or even the normal path of entropy will do by itself. If you want a cello smashed, you don’t need an army: just turn it over to a preschool class without a teacher present. If you want to ruin a fine garden, you don’t have to march an expensive army through it—just let it alone. If you want someone to die, you don’t have to kill them: just wait! We’ll all die, Ereza. We don’t need your help.”
“It’s not about that!” But Ereza felt a cold chill. If Arla could think that . . . “It’s not about killing. It’s protecting—”
“You keep saying that, but—did you ever consider asking me ? Asking any artist, any writer, any musician? Did you ever consider learning enough of our arts to guess how we might feel?”
Ereza stared at her, puzzled. “But we did protect you. We let you study music from the beginning; we’ve never pushed you into the military. What more do you want, Arlashi?”
“To be myself, to be a musician just because I am, not because you needed someone to
prove that you weren’t all killers.”
That was ridiculous. Ereza stared at her twin, wondering if someone had mindwiped her. Would one of the political fringe groups have thought to embarrass the Fennaris family, with its rich military history, by recruiting its one musician? “I don’t understand,” she said, aware of the stiffness in her voice. She would have to tell Grandmother as soon as she got out of here, and find out if anyone else had noticed how strange Arla had become.
Arla leaned forward. “Ereza, you cannot have me as a tame conscience . . . someone to feel noble about. I am not a simple musician, all full of sweet melody, to soothe your melancholy hours after battle.” She plucked a sequence of notes, pleasant to the ear.
“Not that I mind your being soldiers,” Arla went on, now looking past Ereza’s head into some distance that didn’t belong in that small room. Ereza had seen that look on soldiers; it shocked her on Arla’s face. “It’s not that I’m a pacifist, you see. It’s more complicated than that. I want you to be honest soldiers. If you like war, admit it. If you like killing, admit that. Don’t make me the bearer of your nobility, and steal my own dark initiative. I am a person—a whole person—with my own kind of violence.”
“Of course you’re a whole person—everyone is—”
“No. You aren’t. You aren’t because you know nothing about something you claim is important to you.”
“What do you want me to do?” Ereza asked. She felt grumpy.
Her stump hurt now, and she wanted to be back with people who didn’t make ridiculous emotional arguments or confuse her.
“Quit thinking of me as sweet little Arlashi, your pet twin, harmless and fragile and impractical. Learn a little music, so you’ll know what discipline really is. Or admit you don’t really care, and quit condescending to me.”
“Of course I care.” She cared that her sister had gone crazy, at least. Then a thought occurred to her. “Tell me—do the other musicians feel as you do?”
