Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  That night Brenneker made a tour of the inside of her home and found that the woodworm had damaged the bond where the neck of the lute joined the body. She set about to repair the damage as best she could, plugging the holes with spidersilk and binding the weakened seam with long, tough strands. It was hard work and took much of her strength. She could barely stay awake long enough to eat the cricket that came chirping to hear her music.

  Finally the greatly anticipated day came and Laurel took the coach to the big city where the contest was to be held. She refused to surrender her lute to the baggage rack and carried it in her lap, where it provoked much comment among the other passengers.

  “What is that strange instrument?” they would ask. Or, “Please play us a tune.”

  Laurel consented and filled the coach with dulcet tones as her clear voice transported all the listeners to “Scarborough Fair.”

  When they arrived in the city, Laurel spent some of her hard-earned lesson money on a room at the inn. That night when Laurel was asleep, Brenneker found more holes to fill. Turkawee had almost destroyed one of the interior braces of the frame. And not only that, but also he had eaten away most of the surface below the bridge. If this were to give way, the strings would go slack and the instrument would be unplayable. Brenneker worked far into the night, binding the lute with her webbing. So far her spider silk, being stronger in tensile strength than steel wire of its same proportions, had held the lute together. But Brenneker was worried that the damage was too extensive. The inside of the lute was completely webbed and re-webbed in silk and she knew it would not hold forever. She ate sparsely that night of the few insects that inhabit an inn and then forced her body to make more thread to continue the repairs. By daybreak she was nearly exhausted. She tried to get some sleep, but Laurel woke early, concerned about the contest, and practiced her pieces, causing Brenneker to get no sleep at all.

  Brenneker dozed on the carriage trip across town to the university, but awoke in time to restring and tune her musical web before the contest began.

  Both Brenneker and Laurel fidgeted nervously as they awaited their turn to play. There were many contestants, including a few lutists. One young man held the very antique instrument of which Laurel’s was a copy. He allowed Laurel to stroke the strings once to demonstrate the superiority of its sound. But he was quite impressed when Laurel strummed a few bars on her own instrument with Brenneker’s lute in tandem. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Your cheaply made modern instrument sounds almost as good as mine.”

  “Better,” thought Brenneker, smugly, but then she remembered the damaged bridge and hoped it would stand the strain. She roused herself wearily and went to find a few more holes, which she hastily filled with silk.

  When Laurel’s time came to play, she mounted a stool on the edge of the stage. Brenneker peered out through the sound holes and saw a sea of faces watching. As Laurel tuned up, Brenneker heard an unnerving creak as the wood near the bridge shifted slightly. To her horror she saw daylight between the bridge and the body of the lute. She jumped to the ceiling of her home, bound the gap quickly, and prayed that the mend would hold. Her spinnerets ached with the strain of making so much silk, and she was very tired, but forced herself to pick the strings nimbly as Laurel began with a lively dance tune. Apparently the lovely tone impressed the judges, for Laurel was selected from a large field of competition to enter the finals.

  The young man with the antique instrument was also one of the finalists, and he stopped to wish Laurel good luck. Laurel asked him if he would accompany her on “The Ash Grove,” but he excused himself, saying that time would be too short for him to learn the intricate counterpart melody. He also assured her that without a duet piece, she didn’t have a chance in the competition.

  This point was emphasized by the lovely duet played by the young man and a woman who accompanied him on the psaltry. They received a standing ovation from the audience and high marks from the judges.

  “Mercy,” thought Brenneker. “Now Laurel won’t be able to win the scholarship,” and spider tears dampened the silk of her web.

  “Hey! It’s raining on my picnic,” said a small voice near her.

  She looked over and saw Turkawee calmly munching a chunk of spruce.

  Without thinking, Brenneker pounced and bit with just enough venom to cause the woodworm to fall into a swoon.

  “That should keep you from doing more damage!” she snapped. But the damage had already been done. One of the sounding pegs looked as if it were ready to crumble into dust. Brenneker could feel, through her feet, the ominous vibrations as the tension of the strings pulled against the ravaged wood.

  Finally Laurel’s turn came again. She played a few classical pieces, a rondo, and sang “The Wife of Ushers Well,” accompanying herself beautifully with an intricate rhythm she had worked out. For her last song, she began “The Ash Grove.” Her first variation was neatly composed, but Brenneker thought it lacked the clever harmony of the previous duet. The second variations sounded very lonely without accompaniment, and this provoked Brenneker to try something she’d never done before. On the third verse she began to play her web in the counterpoint harmony as she had heard Thomas play so many times on the recorder. Laurel paused abruptly, but then, true performer that she was, began to play the melody in clear, bold tones, which complemented Brenneker’s descant. Laurel played every variation, and Brenneker knew them all and answered back. The people in the audience were amazed that someone could play two-part harmony on one instrument. This was the most lovely duet arrangement of “The Ash Grove” that the judges had ever heard.

  “That’s the first time I ever heard anyone play a duet alone,” said the young man with the lute as she came down from the stage. “Your harmony was better than any duet I’ve ever heard. How did you ever do that?”

  Flustered, Laurel answered, “I don’t know. I guess sometimes one must be alone to truly be in harmony with one’s self.”

  A few more contestants got up to play, but they seemed half-hearted. The contest went of course to Laurel, who was almost as bewildered at her music as was everyone else. When she ascended the stage to accept the scholarship, the audience cheered and whistled for an encore.

  Laurel sat down and prepared to play again, but just then there came a terrible wrenching sound and a loud snap. Brenneker saw the roof fly off her home, pulling a tangle of cobwebs after it. She cowered by the sound pegs, weak and frightened, and saw the face of Laurel staring down at her. Raising one timorous leg, she strummed a chord on her music web and thought she saw recognition in Laurel’s eyes.

  One of the judges came onstage to help pick up the debris. When he saw the large spider, he said, “How ugly! Let me kill it for you.”

  “No,” said Laurel. “It’s the fairy harpist that Sanger told me about. See how she plays her web like a harp. She’s been my secret friend all these years.”

  Because Brenneker appeared to be in a very weakened state and near death, Laurel kept her in a bottle for a few days and fed her all the crickets she could catch. Then, when it appeared that the spider would live, she took her back to the small town and turned her loose in the woods.

  It was not the woods of home, but Brenneker found a hollow tree in which to string her harp and was quite content to play her songs alone for a while, although she missed Laurel’s music. When spring came that next year, she played her love song to the open air, and it was Wisterness who came, tapping shyly on her web strings to attract her attention.

  “I have always loved your songs,” she said. “I had hoped you would come.”

  “Now you shall play my songs,” he said, and he sacrificed himself to their mutual need.

  Weeks later, she watched her young spiderlings float away on their kiteless strings, and she knew she would not play alone anymore. Then, feeling the deep harmony of the universe in her soul, she returned her web to the Dorian mode and played the gentle, lilting sadness that was now Wisterness.

 
; © 1980 by Mercury Press.

  Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Reprinted by permission of OSFCI.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Susan C. Petrey’s first fiction sale was “Spareen Among the Tartars” to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1979, the first of her Varkela stories. All of Petrey’s short fiction is collected in Gifts of Blood. Her work has been featured in best-of-the-year annual Arthur W. Saha’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, and in the anthologies Tomorrow Sucks and Virtuous Vampires. She died in 1980.

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

  Instructions

  Roz Kaveney

  Let me put it one way—telling the Mysteries for you like beads, simply and straightforwardly—bicycle gears, pink foam, budget sheets, the itch of stars, presumption in a limousine, the dance of plasma, prizes, revisions, giggles, memories, Instruction, and necessary reticences. Have you understood yet?

  • • • •

  To put it another way, to help you on your path …

  • • • •

  “I wish you’d stop going on about space aliens,” Philip said. “Everyone else knows they’re just a fairy story; they laugh at you behind your back at school, you know.”

  The new bicycle he had got for his twelfth birthday had excellent gearing, which meant that he was always less out of breath than Helena by the time they got to the top of Hatterton Hill. He had the bad habit of using that opportunity to start arguments; he was a boy, and was to be a man, for the tactical moment.

  (Boy, and man, and bicycle, are convenient, and accurate, terms of discourse, new and unknown as they may be to you. We had to be Instructed, and so will you.)

  “Why do you say that?” said Helena, gulping from her water bottle and biding her time. She did not address the question of people laughing at her—it was of no interest to her.

  She was an earnest child, who might have been unpopular with her peer group for her intelligence, were it not for a stubborn lower lip and the occasional flash of some blue metal in the depths behind her thick spectacles.

  “My father says,” Philip continued. “My father says that if there were aliens, they would come calling.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” Helena said. “I am sure aliens have better and more interesting places to go most of the time.”

  It was a sunny day in the orbital year 1968 of their culture’s era, and she was really just trying to win the argument.

  • • • •

  There was—as you have been told—a people, once upon a time, who surfed seas of methane compounds on great ruby crystals and caught flying pink foam out of the air to feed their children; they were scholars and poets and warriors and engaged in other meritorious activities which I cannot conveniently put into your language.

  I say they, because things were different then, but I might also have said we; but ah! we were less Instructed then.

  The people were honourable according to their own codes, but suffered from certainty that the gods had made them in their own image. Certainty, you will note, and not merely belief. They had personal memories, of course, not being hive minds like you, but there were, and are, also memories, handed down as a sort of impersonal fact like the need to breathe, or, in their case, to catch flying foam.

  One of these stated, with vividness like a first kiss or moment of ecstatic surfing, that creatures like themselves but larger had stood upon one of the few points of solidity on their world, an outcropping of crust towards its northern pole, and summoned the materials of life from the depths. The people remembered that precise moment of ceasing to be non-life and becoming not only life but sentience.

  They were grateful to their gods, all but a few philosophers, whose lives proved fragile.

  It was from the process of their extirpation that there arose leaders, who persuaded the masses that the favour, perhaps the return, of the gods, demanded this holocaust. Philosophy is less fragile than philosophers, and perpetual deferment of final extirpation gradually promoted those leaders and their scions to a caste of priest kings.

  • • • •

  At thirty-five, Dr. Helena Jones took wry pleasure in intimidating the men in her Department, none of whom had been even slightly charmed when she traded in her glasses for contact lenses.

  Philip Masterton MP was undaunted by her gaze; he was at the Department to look for budget cuts and had a suspicion of where to find them.

  “What proportion of your budget,” he said, with an almost convincing winner’s smirk, “is wasted on searches for imaginary alien intelligences?”

  He searched the large folder of budget allocation slips he had on his side of the desk, but kept a wary eye on Helena, hoping for some crack in that impeccable certainty, as he had hoped for twenty-five years.

  “None,” Helena said.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Philip said, “given that you read a paper on your childhood obsession only three years ago in Reykjavik.”

  “None,” Helena said, “as such. Obviously, the programmes we are working on examine all detected interstellar noise for organisation, but that is not specifically a matter of a search for intelligible organisation. The rhythms of the birth and death of galaxies are not run at speeds convenient to our perception. If listening for heartbeats means we pick up something else, it will merely be a bonus.”

  Philip smiled graciously, acknowledging the defeat he had anticipated all along; since the COBE survey results, the kind of big cosmology Helena claimed to be working on was a popular shibboleth.

  “Talking of a bonus,” he said, with his usual sense of timing, “is there any chance of my buying you dinner tonight?”

  • • • •

  The knowledge that there were gods and that they lived elsewhere than in the world skewed the people’s thought towards mysticism, but also gave rapid rise to knowledge of the outer universe. Their senses included fine appreciation of stellar radio sources, for one thing, which they used for accurate senses of time and direction; it is difficult to waste centuries turning an itchy but useful noise in your brain into a fallacious system of prediction. They had their superstitions, but not necessarily those of most other intelligences.

  Rapidly, as these things go, the people worked their elegant minds around the existence of other worlds, the foundations of matter and the origins of the universe. As a corollary of this, of course, they intuited the existence of other living beings, beings not made in the image of gods; the first thinkers to produce this idea proved fragile in their turn, but after a while, cautionary pragmatism took over the thoughts of the priest kings.

  If there were beings so blasphemous as to exist without divine sanction, they might come calling, polluting the surf and taking all savour from the foam. Further, the gods might well resent such pollution and never come again. Something would have to be done.

  • • • •

  Irritatingly, her ex-husband had been in Stockholm on business that week, and Helena could not think of any very good reason not to allow Philip to accompany her to the Prize ceremony and dinner. He was, after all, though an irritating philistine and ignoramus, her oldest friend.

  There was also a certain pleasure in rubbing his nose so spectacularly in the fact that he was wrong and she was right.

  “There was a message after all,” she smirked in the limousine back to the hotel.

  He had not told the driver the address of his hotel, but, she realised, she was pleased at his presumption.

  “That’s as may be,” he replied, after moments of thought, “but I do not see any obvious chance of our reading it in our lifetimes.”

  “You have a point,” she said, “but lifetimes are going up all the time. This is the Twenty-First Century, after all.”

  • • • •

  The decision to devise a high technology was one which changed the people less than expected; after brief and violent contention over the issu
e, the first thing the priest kings had the new batch of philosophers work on was a way of entrenching their power in the genetic memory of their subjects.

  After all, the gods, being all good, needed a ruling class prepared to ensure the virtue of lesser beings, by whatever means convenient; it was a meritorious act to make the people more like the gods, less prone to error or sedition—to make the priest kings more like the gods, in their power and their majesty, and the deference and worship owed them.

  Details of such editorial adjustment of the genome were beneath the priest kings’ attention; they would surf majestically into congregations of philosophers, and catechise their servants without deigning to understand the responses.

  The physical constraints of their world meant that metallurgy was a late and exotic invention; streaks of dancing plasma were, however, parent’s foam to them.

  After a mere millennium of concentrated effort, a vast pulsating plasma was eating its way along the currents of dark dust that were its quickest way out towards the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, with, twinkling from its core, a lethal present for all beings blasphemous enough to presume to intelligence.

  Deceit was not so much an immorality for the priest kings as something in which posterity would, with the mingling of bloodlines and the memories that went with them, eventually and inevitably catch one out. Alien beings, they reasoned, not having the perception of the gods to tie notions of truth to, would not be able to remember true things in the same way across the generations; to deceive them was thus not to pollute truth, was, indeed, epistemologically meritorious.

  With a collective sigh of distaste for what had been a necessary episode, the priest kings had the philosophers revise the embedded memory of the people to remove the technological episode; they even removed the people’s genetic memory of the gods, allowing them the indulgence of an oral tradition.