Asimov's SF, July 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Yellow one's so you can blur, the way they like. Blue one fixes you up with a better memory, so you can call up everything you ever heard. That one takes a while to kick in. Last one, the green one, that one's for programming memory of all those licks you memorize into your muscles and shit, instant super-chops. That one comes in real quick. You gotta take these sons-a-bitches every day for six months. Don't forget, or you'll turn your own ass so inside-out it ain't even funny. Got it?”

  “Uh huh,” me and J.J. said, and took the pills with a big glass of water. Water didn't taste quite right, wasn't nice and a little sweet like back in New York.

  Big C, he had a bunch of us new guys—enough to play in a big band. He had us all sit down and listen to the old band, outgoing band, who wouldn't be leaving for a couple of days, so we could listen to them and get the hang of things. He told us big bands only went on tour on the Frogships for a year at a time, most times. Man, I didn't know they was looking to make a big band. I hadn't played in one for years, but whatever. I sat and listened. Didn't figure I could back out then, it was too late.

  Well, they started to play—some old Basie tune, I think it was, but they were playing it so fast I couldn't tell which one. Badass, these cats—they didn't drop a beat, not a squeak anywhere. They played the head perfectly at what was definitely three hundred beats a minute or more.

  But when the solo section came, I rubbed my eyes and starting worrying about them drugs Big C had gave us. Big C, I could see him fine and clear, but the lead alto saxman, when he stood up and started playing a solo, he started to blur, and he wasn't playing one solo, it was two solos at once. And then four solos, and five, all of them going in different directions at the same time. He had his horn all the way up, leaning back and screeching altissimo, and he was hunched forward and honking at the low end of his horn. All of that at the same time, fast lines and slow lines together. He was like a dozen saxophonists in one.

  The drummer was slowly going out of sync with himself, blurring into a smear of sticks and flashing cymbals, and when I looked close, I could see the cymbals moving, and staying still, all at the same time. It was one hell of a sight to see, believe me. I tapped J.J. on the shoulder, told him to check that shit out, and he nodded, so I knew I wasn't crazy. It was like ten drummers all playing at once, almost all the same thing, but a little bit off, each one a little bit different. Different cymbal crashes at different times, the downbeat pushed a little forward and a little back all at the same time. But if you listened, in a way, it all fit together somehow. That blew me away.

  The rest of the band started playing backgrounds, but they weren't blurry, so the shout chorus came in together—a few beats quiet, then, in unison, bop!, then a few bars, then ba-doo-BOP! The alto player was playing three-octave unisons with himself. I swear I could see his right hand on the bottom keys, fingers moving and totally still at the same time.

  And then the head of the tune came back, but the whole band was a blur, and everything was craziness, like ten, twenty, a hundred big bands trying to play together and coming close but never lining up the downbeats, pushing them forward and back all at the same time, clashing and smashing—it was something else!

  It was a new kind of music, man. Real out. Like hearing bebop again for the first time, but multiplied by all the dope in the world.

  “Them pills we took, they gonna let us play like that?”

  “I suppose so, J.J.”

  “Goddamn!” he hollered, and “Sheeeeeeeeee-it!” and “Check these cats out!” all at once, in three different voices, and he started clapping his hands and not-clapping his hands all at the same time.

  * * * *

  “Brother, I been living with these Frog-head bastards a long goddamn time, and trust me, shit ain't right with them. You ever look at one closely?” That was Big C.

  “Well, yeah,” I answered, looking around his room. “They're blurry. Too many eyes.”

  “Too many eyes? You ever stop and think that we don't have enough eyes?” He squinted at me the way Monk used to do to people. “But that blur...! Now, that's what I'm talking about!” he said, waving his hands at me. “They're all blurred up, it's like there's a hundred Frogs inside every one of them cats, walking around, doing things. They can't squash themselves into just one person, the way we all just do naturally.”

  He wiggled his fingers in front of his face like he was showing me what he meant. “And if they're listening to a band, they need the band to blur too, or they just get bored. That's why they like jazz so much! Best goddamn music in the world. ‘Cause we make shit up—we improvise. Can't do that with no goddamn Mozart, now can you? Classical music, that just bores these Frogs to death, everything all written out and the same every time, the same even when you blur it.”

  I was staring at my hands, watching them blur and unblur. It was kind of like taking a piss, you could control it just by thinking about it. Except I was like a little kid, I didn't know exactly how to control it yet, just that I could kind of make it happen.

  “You're getting it, Robbie, just relax into it, man. It'll be like natural soon.”

  “So how long you been on these ships, Big C?” I asked.

  He scratched under his chin, back up where his beard was shaved off, and made a face at me. “What year's it now?”

  “Nineteen forty-eight.”

  “Goddamn,” he said, “God-damn!” And he got real quiet, and turned his head away so I wouldn't see him cry.

  * * * *

  Our schedule for those first few weeks was crazy, all day practicing and then all night jamming our asses off and hanging out in one another's’ rooms, horns in our hands, LPs going.

  One of the craziest things the drugs did was they let us memorize any kind of music we heard. Hearing it was all it took to program it into our heads, well, except it was more like your fingers would remember the tune.

  So we would sit there listening to all kinds of LPs, bebop and swing and ragtime and Bach and Stravinsky and Indian music and whatever, and since we all had good ears, and since we could blur ourselves, each blurred self could listen to a different part of the music—the bass line, harmony lines, and the solo on top of it all—so we could come to the end of a record with the whole thing in our heads.

  Now, this wasn't so new: I could listen to a solo a couple of times and hold it in my head, but what was strange was that, after a couple of weeks on them alien drugs, I found I could remember any damn tune I wanted, note-for-note. I could call up any one of Bird's recorded solos on “Anthropology"; I could call up a big band playing Monk's arrangement of “Epistrophy” and play the second trombone line on my sax if I wanted. Every line was right there in my head, and in the muscles of my arms and fingers and lips, and if I blurred out and played back that line even once, I could play it again and again, forever, just by deciding to, without even having to think it through.

  In other words, them alien drugs made each and every one of us into one-man jazz record machines.

  That was why we spent so much time sitting around listening to everyone else's LPs and crystals, a bunch of us cats blurred out of our minds, laughing and telling ourselves to shut up and soaking that shit up, all of it. There were some bootlegs, too, and man, some of them were amazing: “Bird on Mars,” one of them was labeled, and that was some crazy, hip, bad music. I could listen to that all day long.

  But you know, eventually, a cat gets tired of just being around musicians, and he starts wanting himself some jelly. Me, I never had no problem getting me some, women like me and I like them, but it had been a couple of weeks since I'd gotten any, so I decided to go look up them can-can girls and get me some.

  I took the elevator down a floor at a time, wandered around till I found them. I saw some crazy-assed sights on the way, too: in one room, there was some kind of Russian circus with these huge blurred-up clowns juggling fire-sticks on the backs of blurry elephants who were dancing to the beat of some scary Russian music. There were all these bears
, too, just as blurred as anything, marching around them all. In another room, I saw those rodeo cowboys again, too, riding on blurred-up horses and swinging lassos in a hundred directions at once. But this one guy I saw, he wasn't just blurred, he split from himselves, ran in ten different directions at once after a bull that blurred and split up in the same damn way. Some of him caught the bull and roped it, and some of him got stomped by it. One of him even got gored in the stomach by its horns, poor bean-eating bastard.

  But finally, I got down about ten floors below our floor, which was under the big-assed lobby. All the signs there were in French, so I knew I was in the right place. I went from room to room, saw a bunch of them blurry Frogs in these salons, smoking their cigarettes and talking in their weird voices while skinny East Indian girls in old-fashioned oriental clothing served them dainty little white teacups full of funky tea and whatever else Frogs drank.

  But finally, I found the auditorium where the girls danced the can-can. That was the orchestra's night off, so the girls were practicing to these crazy recordings of blurred-up can-can music. When I walked in, they were dancing, those French can-can girls, and they was fine, all long strong legs going up and down, arms on each other's shoulders. Ain't nothing in the world turns a cat on like seeing women touch each other, except seeing their legs up in the air.

  So I sat there and watched their legs go up and down, down and up, scissoring blurs, and I blurred myself too so I could see them clearly. I scanned up and down the line of them, until I found the one I remembered from the elevator, and let her faces burn into my mind.

  After they finished, I went and found my way backstage. There was a bunch of green rooms. It was crazy—every girl had her own little green room on that floor. But I didn't know which one she was in, that fine-built woman I picked out from the can-can lineup, so I blurred myself and went up to all the green rooms I could, knocked on every one of them at once.

  The door where she answered, I unblurred myself over to that one, and smiled at her with that innocent-country-boy smile like I always used to use on women. She was wearing some kind of silk kimono, you know, one of them Japanese-type housecoats, and her hair was down, and I could hear jazz wafting out from behind. Heard that jazz and I knew that I was in.

  “You're the one I ‘ave seen in the elevator, oui? The one who kept looking at me? But why ‘ave you come ‘ere?”

  “Well, I thought about it, and decided I missed you.”

  She mumbled something in French, something that sounded a little like I'd be needing to try some other can-can girl next, but then she opened the door wide and smiled at me. “Come in, Monsieur...”

  “Coolidge,” I said, and took off my fedora to bow to her all charming, the way women like when you first meet them. “Robbie Coolidge.” I stepped into the room, and could hear the music clearly: it was Nat King Cole, “Stardust.” Her can-can outfit was draped over the makeup mirror with the light bulbs all around it, huge peacock feathers sticking up above our heads, and I could smell mentholated smoke in the air.

  “I am called Monique,” she said. No last name then, just Monique. Then she asked, “You would like some coffee?”

  “Mmm, yeah, coffee sounds good.”

  She excused herself for a minute, and when she came back, she had two cups of coffee in her hands.

  “You ‘ave cigarette?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Got a whole pack,” I said, and I fished it out of my coat pocket and set it on the table with a pack of matches on top. They were Mercury Barron's Ultras, the new kind that were supposed to make you live longer if you smoked three a day. “Want one?”

  “Non,” she said, and smiled. “Maybe later.”

  The coffee was fine, really good French coffee, steaming. Even the goddamn steam smelled good. I held the cup and breathed deep and looked at her sipping from her own cup.

  “So where you from?” I asked, and she stared at me for a few minutes. She rubbed an eyelid, and a little of the makeup smudged.

  “I don't t'ink you really care, do you?” she asked, and sipped her coffee.

  “Sure, girl, I care,” I lied, and she leaned forward, and blurred herself, and a million breathy whispers of gay Pa-ree tickled in my ear.

  * * * *

  That ended up being the night the ship took off for Mars, though Monique and I were too busy to notice. We only found out later, when one of the guys in the band ended up wandering into the lobby and noticing the stars were moving, nice and slow, but still moving.

  It was a couple of weeks before Monique was in the habit of coming up and listening to the band play, and some of the guys didn't like it. That was when some of the cats in the band were starting to act all high-and-mighty, turning into what my father used to call “political negroes,” and taking it upon themselves to tell everyone else how a black man oughtta live.

  What made me real sad was that J.J. had fallen in with that pack of nuts. He used to be real nice, real cool and thoughtful. He'd always been a soulful kind of cat, but when he was with them space-Muslim gum-flappers, talking all that nonsense about how the black man was supposed to colonize the solar system for Allah's glory and to show the devil white man and all that, I couldn't stand to be around him. I hated it when he talked that bullshit.

  So this one day, between sets, I'm sitting there at one of the tables with Monique and having a nice time. She's drinking wine and I'm having a cigarette and we're talking, and J.J. comes up with this look on his face. I knew it was trouble, that look, and I stood up before he got close, and said, “J.J., I already got one daddy, and he's in Philly, so I don't need you to...”

  “Robbie, goddamn it, you listen to me,” he said, and glanced at Monique as if she might leave if he glanced at her the right way.

  “Who is ‘e?” she asked, standing up.

  “Sit down, Monique,” I said firmly, and she instantly got that look on her face. You know the look: the one women get when you tell them what to do for their own good.

  “Robbie, something's going on round here! We gotta cut out, brother! Them Frogs, they been in my room, man! They put something inside my stomach. Like a worm. No, a woman. Yeah, a woman worm! She been crawling inside my stomach, screamin', like, 'J.J.! J.J.! Gimme some ice cream!' Help me, Robbie! I'm fuckin’ dying here, man!” he screamed and blurred before my eyes, all his voices screaming at me at once. Poor cat was scared shitless, and he scared the shit out of me, too.

  I pushed Monique off to the side and blurred myself, and each of me reached out to one of them blurs of J.J.

  “J.J.,” each of me said, all together, “Listen, J.J., you sick or something, man. You need to cool it. Cool it right now.”

  He screamed louder, each of him started to shake, and his blurred selves started moving farther and farther apart. I didn't want him to pull me apart like that too, so I quickly unblurred myself, relaxed back into one, and stepped back from him.

  A couple of big old bad-assed Frog bouncers smeared themselves out into an army, and rushed around the room in pairs, grabbing all his blurred selves and hauling them, every last one of J.J.'s selves screaming at the top of its lungs, out one of the exits of the room.

  The room went tense and quiet, and many eyes, Frog and human alike, were on me and Monique. Whispering started, and I caught Big C's eye. Set-break's over, his look said. Back on the goddamn bandstand. Now.

  So I tried to kiss Monique on the cheek—she pulled away a little, but I still got her for a second—and hurried back up with my tenor in hand.

  “Apologies everyone!” Big C said into the microphone with a big fake smile on his face. “Show must go on, like they say. Luckily for us, we got a Mphmnngi in the house who's proficient at bass.” Mphmnngi, that was what the Frogs called themselves. Then Big C started saying some bizarre sounds, and I thought he was going crazy too, until some stank old Frog in a tight black suit stood up and bowed his big old froggy head at Big C. Then I realized those weird-assed sounds were this Frog's name.

&nbs
p; “Come on up and join us!” Big C said, and the Frog came up on stage, picked up J.J.'s bass with his three-tentacled hands, and strummed the strings to check the tuning.

  “Goddamn shame,” said Winslow Jackson, the alto player who sat beside me on the bandstand. He and Big C were almost the only guys who had toured before. “Seen too many guys end up like that.”

  “How's that?” I asked, wondering if maybe some of outer space had got into the ship, and fucked with J.J.'s head.

  “Must've forgot to take his pills,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “It's a damn shame.”

  Not taking your pills for one day would make you go crazy like that? I ain't never heard of no drug like that, and to this day I'm not so sure it was the pills at all. What if I had took my pills every day and ended up the same as him anyway? Poor J.J. I didn't know whether I'd ever see him again, but I didn't have any time to worry about that: Big C was talking to the crowd again, and I had to get ready to play.

  “Before we dig into the music, I'd like to share some important news with you! We have arrived at Mars orbit!” Big C hollered into the mike, and behind him, a big piece of wall just suddenly went transparent. Everyone turned to look at the red planet out there, except Big C, who kept talking about how exciting it was to be playing at Mars again, how much he enjoyed it every time.

  Mars. We were at Mars. That shit blew my mind.

  “And now, we have another special guest who's going to join us,” Big C said into the microphone.

  A short, weird-assed looking Frog got up, a long black bassoon under his arm, and started walking toward us. He was wearing a fine brown suit, tight as a mother, and a brown fedora hat that matched his fern-colored Frog skin. He waved his little tail behind him as he went up to the stage.