For Love of Amanda

by Timothy Zahn

  For Love of Amanda

  Timothy Zahn

  Timothy Zahn

  For Love of Amanda

  "Music hath charms..." and, like any powerful tool, it must be handled with care.

  The bar was a small local job, a bit shabby but clean enough, tucked away in an out-of-the-way corner of an equally worn working- class neighborhood.

  I looked around as I sipped the beer I'd ordered. The clientele was pretty much the same mix I'd seen here every other evening for the past week: burly working-class men from the steel mills gathering for a little hearty Saturday-night conversation, a few lower-level professionals and their wives or girlfriends, plus a scattering of hopeful or hopeless singles, most of them looking a little on the burned-out side. There was also a sprinkling of travelers from the small and undistinguished hotels around the corner on the highway, most of them probably salesmen who spent far too much of their time in places like this.

  But then, so had I, at least lately. And I was hardly in the sales business.

  I took another sip, wincing at the taste. The place smelled heavily of this particularly bad brand of beer, heavily overlaid with the scent of the harder drinks being downed by those who hadn't come here to socialize. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, and a general conversational buzz punctuated at irregular intervals by a call for service or a bark of laughter.

  It was just so typically mid-twentieth-century-America that sometimes I felt I had to be on a vid set; that at some unexpected moment a Mohawk-haired director would step into view from among the potted ferns lining the wall by the door and yell, "Cut."

  But that wasn't going to happen. This was the real 1953, and the real Pittsburgh. And I was really here.

  I sipped my beer again and glanced at the clock above the bar. One minute till nine. The piano across from the far end of the bar was still unoccupied; but if there was one thing I'd learned in the past six weeks, it was that the pianist was one of those time-obsessive people you could set your watch by. I took another sip --

  And there he was, stepping out of the door behind the bar and making his unobtrusive way through the tables toward the piano. He was thin to the point of scrawniness, twenty-three years old though he looked younger, with the vacant-edged expression of a man who's collected enough kicks to the head that he's basically given up on life.

  The great jazz pianist Weldon Sommers. Or rather, the soon-to- be-great jazz pianist Weldon Sommers.

  He sat down at the piano, and for a moment his fingers caressed the keys in silence as if he was waiting for the muse to join him on the bench. Then, very softly, he began to play.

  It was nothing special at first, just the typical background filler that a thousand other third-rate barroom pianists were pounding out this evening all across the United States. His eyes lifted from the keys as he gradually brought up the volume on the half-melodies and began looking around the room. Here and there his gaze paused momentarily on this table or that, as if sifting through the essence of the person or persons seated there, before moving on.

  And then, after a few false starts, I saw his eyes come to rest on a hard-faced brunette seated alone at the bar, her lacquered nails rubbing with silent hopelessness at the smooth curve of her glass. As Weldon stared at her, I heard the meaningless filler he was playing start to change as the tone began to mirror the mix of emotions in her face. The melodies became longer and more elaborate, the harmonies sweeping the minor end of the musical spectrum. It was as if he was capturing the essence of the woman in his music, creating her pain and despair and feeding it back again to her.

  And the change wasn't only in the music. As I watched Weldon, I could see a hint of shared pain and pity in his face as he created the music of her soul.

  I looked back at the woman. She was responding to the music, slumping ever farther onto her bar stool, staring into her drink as if wishing it was a deep pool she could throw herself into. Her fingers dabbed at her eyes, her back twitching with silent sobs. She had connected with the music; and as the music had darkened and deepened, the hopelessness she'd brought in with her had turned to black thoughts of death.

  And then, with a subtlety that I doubted a single person in the bar even noticed, the music again began to change.

  It began with whispers of hope, bits of brighter melodies unexpectedly appearing among the minor keys like small patches of blue sky peeking out between storm clouds. Slowly, the cheerful melodies began to grow in length and complexity and energy, the blue sky steadily pushing back the clouds.

  And again, the brunette was responding. The thoughts of death on her face began to soften, the hopelessly tight grip on her glass began to loosen, and her slumped posture began to straighten. When the music had mirrored her mood she had connected with it, grabbing on like a fish with a piece of bait. And now, with her psyche firmly hooked, Weldon and his music were pulling her upwards toward the light.

  The blue sky dominated the music now, the darkness shrinking into mere echoes of distant pain and sorrow. The brunette was looking around the room, actually focusing some attention on the rest of humanity instead of solely on herself. There was no real animation in her face yet, but her eyes seemed brighter and more cheerful. Though maybe that was just the aftereffect of the tears in her eyes.

  And then, with a suddenness that caught me by surprise even though I'd been expecting it, from out of the mix of clouds and blue sky came a blaze of musical sunlight.

  The effect was striking. The brunette straightened up, her chin lifting as she took a deep breath. This time as she looked around the room, her face was relaxed and at peace, a small smile playing around the corners of her lips. The music came to a crescendo, then faded away into a quiet calmness. The woman took another deep breath, then picked up her drink as if to down the remains in a single, radiantly defiant swallow.

  She paused, looked into the glass, and set it down untouched. Pulling a couple of well-worn bills out of her purse, she laid them on the counter beside the glass. Then, with her head held high, she walked straight across the room to the door.

  And as she lifted her hand to open it, I saw for the first time the glint of the wedding ring on her left hand.

  I looked over at Weldon. His eyes were still on the door through which she had disappeared, and as I peered through the smoke it seemed to me that his face was more alive than it had been when he'd first entered the room.

  Small wonder. In a few short minutes, with nothing but his music and his genius, he had lifted another human being from despair to hope to confidence.

  And as far as I could tell, not a single person in the bar besides me had even a glimmer of what had happened. Probably the woman herself had no idea how her miraculous transformation had been engineered.

  For a minute Weldon seemed to savor his victory. Then the satisfaction faded, the protective mask slipped back into place across his features, and his gaze resumed its probing wanderings around the room. All in a night's work, apparently. His eyes touched my face....

  And paused.

  I held that gaze, trying to look casual and unconcerned and as oblivious as everyone else in the bar, waiting for his eyes to move along. But they didn't. The barroom filler he had resumed playing turned into a questioning lilt, and his eyebrows lifted toward me in invitation.

  I hesitated, all the dire official warnings fast-forwarding through my brain. Even professional time observers shied away from personal contact with the locals, and I was anything but a professional. Add that to Weldon's already demonstrated ability to read the human psyche, and staying where I was definitely seemed like the smart thing to do.

  But then, I'd never been very good at doing the smart thing. Besides, I was already playing one maj
or off-edge hunch here. What could it hurt to add another one to the hopper?

  And so I picked up my glass and strolled over to an empty table near the back corner of the piano.

  "My name's Weldon," he said as I sat down. "What's yours?"

  "Call me Sigmund," I said. "I like your piano playing."

  "Thank you," he said, his fingers adding a little trill into his current tune that somehow sounded like a musical version of his thanks. "Is that Sigmund as in Sigmund Freud? Or Sigmund as in the tragic hero of the Volsung Saga?"

  "Neither," I said, grimacing. The concept of the tragic hero was not one I liked to dwell on. "It means 'victorious protector.' I see you're an educated man."

  He shrugged. "I've got a lot of time to read. You seemed to like that last piece."

  "Indeed I did," I agreed. "I wasn't the only one, either."

  Beneath his thin shirt, I could see his shoulders tense up. "What do you mean?" he asked cautiously.

  So he was one of those who didn't like taking credit for his successes. Not that I would have pegged him as anything else. "You play all your own material?" I asked instead.

  For a second he looked like he was going to insist that I answer his question. But then he apparently thought better of it. "Mostly," he said, his fingers sliding into a melody that sounded distant and aloof. I wondered if he was echoing someone else in the bar or merely indicating an emotional retreat of his own. "Sometimes I get requests."

  "I doubt it," I said, looking around the room. "Tell me: have you ever written down your music and submitted it to a publisher?"

  That one earned me an even sharper look. "Why?" he countered suspiciously. "You a scout for someone?"

  I shook my head, the dire warnings screaming a little louder for attention. _No pushing, no suggesting, no altering_, were the strict time-observer rules, and I was currently in peril of shredding all three of them. "I just wondered."

  "Sure," he said, his music taking on a tinge of anger. Clearly, he didn't believe me. "You think I haven't noticed you hanging around?"

  Uh-oh. "You must have a good memory for faces," I said, deciding to go with the innocent approach. "I've only been around here the past week or so."

  "_And_ you were at Jack's Tap the week I was playing there," he retorted. "_And_ at Otto's the week and a half I was over there. Let me guess: you're scouting greater Pittsburgh for the perfect beer."

  I winced. So he _had_ spotted me, at least for part of the month and a half I'd been dogging his heels across Allegheny County. So much for my professional expertise. "Okay, you got me," I conceded, dropping quickly to backup position. "But there's nothing sinister about it. I just happen to like your music, that's all."

  "Enough to follow me around?"

  "Enough even to put up with this," I said, lifting my glass slightly.

  "And what, you haven't got a home to go to?"

  I shrugged. "Like you, I've got a lot of time on my hands."

  He played for another minute without speaking. I listened to the music, searching it for clues as to what he was thinking or feeling. But all I could hear was more of the neutral barroom filler. "There's no point in trying to sell any of this stuff," he said at last. "So if you were going to ask, don't."

  "I wasn't going to," I assured him, choosing my words carefully. "Though I don't see why you're so adamant about it. Music is all about connecting with people's hearts and minds, after all. Yours seems to do that in spades."

  "Yes, well, that's the problem, isn't it?" he said bitterly. "It's a little _too_ personal."

  "What's wrong with being personal?" I asked. "How many other composers can say their music fits even a single person like a handmade silk glove?"

  He threw me a frown. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Silently, I cursed myself. "Nothing," I said. "Just something a friend once said about your music." She wasn't exactly a friend, of course, but he didn't need to know that. "She's a fan of yours, too."

  "Then she doesn't know a thing about music," he declared bluntly, the notes flowing out of his fingers taking on a harsh, discordant flavor. Here and there, I noticed, heads were starting to turn in our direction. "I can only write for one person at a time. Period."

  "Okay, fine," I said hastily. "I didn't mean to step on your toes. Sorry."

  He glowered at the piano, but I could hear the harshness starting to smooth out. "I tried to sell a few pieces once," he said, the music taking on a wistful tone. "I thought maybe I could help people. Like..."

  "Like you helped that brunette?"

  He snorted. "Yeah. Only no one wanted it. They all said it was ... none of them wanted it."

  I nodded, taking a sip of my beer. That wasn't strictly true, I knew. One of the five publishers he'd sent music to in the past three years had expressed some definite interest.

  But then Weldon had suddenly withdrawn it from consideration. None of the biographies I'd read had given any explanation as to why he'd done that. "Maybe they were just feeling too good that day," I suggested. "Your specialty seems to be encouraging people who are down in the dumps."

  The music drifted from wistful into a darker melancholy. "You think I helped her," he said, his voice almost too soft to hear. "You think she went back to her husband all ready to work out their problems and start over again."

  He shook his head. "No. She's all fired up now, but it won't last. Chances are she'll be right back here Monday night."

  "You're not responsible for solving all the problems of the world," I reminded him quietly. "Besides, who's to say when a temporary fix will grow into something more permanent? You never know about these things."

  "Sure," he said, in a tone that said he didn't believe it for a minute. "I know."

  I looked down into my glass, tipping it and watching the remnants of the foam slide up and down the sides. So that was it, or at least part of it. Somewhere along the line, one of his musical helping hands had gone awry. Had made matters worse, probably, though I could only guess how that might have happened.

  And for whatever reason, he'd taken that failure personally. It hadn't stopped him from playing individual songs for individual people, but it _had_ scared him away from any attempt to market his work to the masses. Probably also why he kept moving from area to area, bar to bar. If and when the brunette came back with even deeper troubles, he didn't want to be there to see it. Or maybe he just didn't want to be there to offer her more false hope.

  Weldon Sommers, in other words, was well on his way to turning himself into a modern version of one of the classical Greek tragic figures he undoubtedly read all about in those lonely off-hours of his.

  But at the moment, that didn't matter. All that mattered was the timing of the two events. And I could only hope that this mysterious failure had happened just before he'd withdrawn his music from that fifth publisher. Reading his history, Weldon had struck me as the impulsive type who generally let stimulus flow into response with very little delay.

  Which was the needle point on which this whole gamble was balanced. Sometime in the next four weeks, he would suddenly change his mind again and send out the composition that would end up changing his life forever. If the woman who would inspire that song had already walked into and out of his life, I was drinking bad beer for nothing.

  Lifting my glass, I took another sip. Across the room, the door opened --

  And there she was.

  I caught my breath, nearly choking on that last swallow of beer. She was a far cry from the holos I'd studied before I'd left: her blond hair falling flat and listless across her shoulders, her once radiant face turned weary and hopeless, her young, athletic body slumped with fatigue inside the confines of a plain and ill-fitting blue dress and brown jacket. She'd been through the mulcher and then some.

  But it was her, all right. Amanda Lowell, daughter of Sir Charles Anthony Lowell, ninety-seventh richest man in the world. The woman who I'd gambled would be the inspirational spark that would send Weldon Sommers's career in
to the musical stratosphere.

  The woman I'd come two hundred years into the past to find.

  A pair of hard-eyed men crowded in right behind her, catching the door before it could swing completely shut. Once, I suspected, the genteel Miss Lowell would have flinched to have men like that even in the same room with her. Now, she didn't even seem to notice as they pushed past her in their rush to get to an unoccupied table between the door and the far corner of the bar. One of them said something as they passed; shaking her head, she started across the room.

  I watched her as she made her way between the tables toward the bar. Her blank eyes stayed fixed straight ahead, not even acknowledging the presence of the people she was brushing past. I saw a couple of men glance at her, then glance just as casually away again. The brunette hadn't been the only hopeless-looking single woman in tonight, and there was nothing else in Amanda's appearance that anyone here would notice, let alone care about.

  No one except Weldon Sommers.

  I hoped.

  Slowly, I lowered my glass to the table, afraid to move quickly lest I distract his attention. Had he seen her? Surely he had. Had he noticed her face, then, her dully terrified state of mind? Again, how could he have missed it?

  But the music hadn't changed from the emotionally vacant barroom drivel. Amanda found an empty stool and slumped down onto it; and still the music didn't change. The bartender stepped up to her, nodded at her inaudible request, and turned to the bottles stacked behind him. Over by the door, one of the hard-eyed men grabbed a passing waitress's arm and jabbed a finger imperiously toward the bar.

  And still the music didn't change.

  I squeezed my glass hard, afraid to even look at Weldon, a horrible thought crawling like a spiny lizard through my gut. Had my mild attempts at encouragement actually had the opposite effect? Could the revived memory of whatever that dark incident was in his past have temporarily shied him away from his private crusade to lift the downtrodden and comfort the brokenhearted?