Asimov's SF, July 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “Everyone please welcome Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn,” Big C said. The names were starting to be more and more pronounceable to me, a fact I didn't exactly appreciate.

  Big C turned from the microphone and faced us, snapping his fingers on two and four, and loudly whispered, “Stardust.” We all got our horns ready, and he nodded and the rhythm section started us off with a mild blur. We usually played it as a tenor lead tune, meaning it was usually my solo, but of course, when you have a guest feature sitting in, the melody gets played by the guest, so I just improvised harmonies with the other saxes.

  The bassoon was awful, like a dog being beat down by a drunk master. It wasn't music. Ain't no other way to say it. He played the whole time blurred up so bad that not a damn thing fit together. The tunes didn't line up right, there was no fugue or harmony or counterpoint that I could find. It was just like a bunch of jumbles laid up on top of one another. I swear, I got dizzy just hearing it. He ended the tune by playing a high E and a high F-natural and a high D-sharp all together, this ugly dissonant sustained cluster that went all through the outro and kept going for two minutes after the rest of the band had stopped playing.

  At the end of it, all the Frogs in the audience cheered and groaned and waved their tentacled hands in the air, which was their way of clapping, and I hunkered down for a long night of bullshit.

  * * * *

  So J.J., he came back a week later. I saw him drinking coffee in one of the open bars when I came back from window-shopping with Monique in the station dome on Mars. Not that there was anything for me to buy, or that I had any money—that was all waiting for me back on Earth. But there was a lot to see on the station at Mars in those days, and I even picked myself up a real live Mars rock. Still got it, too, at my house.

  “Hi,” I said to J.J..

  He looked up at me and blinked, sniffed the air. “Hello. How are you? I'll see you at rehearsal tomorrow.” And then he turned back to his coffee, as if I'd already walked away.

  Still, weird as that was, I didn't quite believe it when Big C told me he wasn't J.J. no more. “Might seem like it, might talk like it, but he ain't J.J.,” Big C said. “They made some kind of living copy of him, fixed it up all wrong—fixed it up to think more like them than like us—and now he just plain ain't J.J. no more. Just accept it.”

  Me, I figured that Big C had been on the ships long enough to have lost his mind too. But thinking back on that conversation, I could see that J.J. was different. He talked like some kind of white lawyer or something, for one, his voice all stiff and polite. And when time came for the next rehearsal, his playing was dead. There wasn't nothing original in it, no spark. I'd listen along to his bass lines and then go back to my room and listen to my LPs, and I'm telling you, there wasn't a single line he played after he came back that wasn't lifted out of someone else's playing.

  But I really knew it wasn't him because of the time I finally saw how he got himself off. He'd been dropping hints, every once in a while, but I never figured it out until one night, when I went to get back some Mingus LP I'd loaned him. I banged on his door, I knew he was in there, but he didn't answer.

  So finally I opened the door myself, and there he was on his bed with two Frogs on top of him, tentacles stuck down his throat and wrapped round his legs, slithering their eyed-tongues all over his balls and shit. I slammed the door and just about threw up.

  J.J., he had been always as much of a sex-freak as any other cat in any band I played with, and maybe he was so pent-up with all that celibate living that the space Muslims got him thinking he had to do. Maybe his balls got so blue that he lost his mind. But he'd never, ever talked about screwing no Frogs. That was what convinced me, finally, that J.J. was gone.

  * * * *

  I found Monique in the lobby a few days after that, staring out the window at the stars. I hadn't seen her around in a week and a half, hadn't gone down to the French floor, but we were already on our way to Jupiter. It was supposed to take a month or two to get out there, and we'd stay for a week or so, or that was what Big C told us. There was a lot to see and do on all the moons, and some shows not to be missed.

  “Where you been, girl?” I asked her.

  “Busy,” she said. “Very busy.”

  “Doin’ what?” I asked her, as innocently as I could.

  “One of our girls, she is sick. She was taken away by les grenouilles,” she said, and made a face.

  “Must've forgot to take her pills,” I said, almost to myself.

  “Euh? Quoi?” Monique said. She surprised me. I looked at her. “Que dis-tu?”

  “I said, she must have forgotten to take her pills. Like what happened to J.J.”

  “Non,” she said. “One of the alligator...”

  “Frogs...” I corrected her.

  “Frog, oui, les grenouilles, one of the ‘frog,' ‘e ask ‘er to come to ‘is rooms, and she say non, and next day she become very sick.” Suddenly I could see J.J. in my head with those tentacles in his mouth and wrapped around his legs. I couldn't stand to think about all that again.

  “But baby, you're okay, right?” I took her hand.

  She turned and looked at me with those eyes of hers, green like Chinese jade. “I want to go ‘ome,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “I don't know ‘ow you can t'ink you are falling in love on a Frog ship. I don't know ‘ow anyone can believe in love in a ‘orrible place like this.”

  “Baby, come with me,” I said to her.

  “Oui, I will come with you. But I will not love you, Robbie,” she said, and squeezed my hand a little. “And you must not love me, either,” she said.

  And then she turned her head and looked out at all them stars for a little while more.

  * * * *

  The month we spent traveling out to Jupiter passed so goddamn fast, all blurred awkward sex and blurred awkward music and J.J. all sad and serious up there on his bass, and that dumb, stank-ass Frog Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn sitting in on his sad-assed bassoon at least once a week. The band still played like a well-oiled machine, still hit every note exactly right, but there was something going wrong, and I think we all could feel it.

  And then one day, right in the middle of our show, Big C does that hamming-up thing that he was always so good at, and the wall went all transparent and I swear, Jupiter—fucking Jupiter—was right there in front of us covering the whole window. It looked like a giant bowl of vanilla ice cream and caramel and chocolate sauce all melted together and mixed up, with a big red cherry in the middle of it. It was big, man, biggest thing I ever saw, with these little moons floating around it. I couldn't breathe for a second. I looked out into the audience for Monique, but she wasn't at the table I'd left her at. Too bad, she would have loved to see Jupiter like that, right there in front of us.

  “Now, as you all know, the orbit of Jupiter is a special place, a place where many people travel and choose to stay because it's so beautiful. While you're here, you should all go down to Io and use this opportunity to see some of the greats of jazz, people like Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Cab Calloway, Johnny Hodges ... don't miss them.” When I heard that, I couldn't believe my ears. Bird? How could they have Bird up here, when I'd seen him in New York? Had he come back for another tour? I had no idea how that could be. I didn't think it through so good, though, then. My mind went right on back to that other name: Lester Young.

  “Now,” Big C said, “in honor of the jazz mecca that we're at, we're going to play a little tune called ‘The Jupiter's Moons’ Blues.'”

  He counted us in, four, five, four five six seven, and what do you know but that damn Frog's bassoon started up again with the head. By then I swear I would have broken the thing over Heavy Gills Mmmhmhnngn's head if I ever got the chance, I'd heard so much of it.

  * * * *

  There was all kinds of cool shit to do on them moons, submarine trips on Europa and Ganymede, volcano jumps on Io; they even let us humans ride along in these special ships tha
t could drop down into the atmosphere of that badass old Jupiter himself and see the critters that the Frogs had transplanted there from some planet near where they came from.

  But none of that interested me. Some of the guys in the band, they told me, “Robbie, man, what you doing missing a chance to see all this fine shit?”

  “Man, all I wanna see,” I told them, “is Lester Young. I'm gonna go see the Prez.”

  * * * *

  The club on Io was small, quiet. The Frogs didn't get interested in jazz until sometime after they'd checked out everything else that their people had done on Jupiter and the moons, and since ours was the only cruiser to show up for a while, right away was the best time to go in and check out the Prez.

  That's what we called Lester Young, “Prez,” because he used to be—and according to me up till that day, still was—the President of the Tenor Saxophone. Man, that sound. I'd seen him in New York a few times, and a bunch of times in Philly too, and he always had it, that thing, what Monique always called je ne sais quoi, which means who the fuck knows what? Man, before the war, Prez always had that up there in his sweet, sweet sound.

  So anyway, Monique and me, we ended up in this little club in a bubble floating over Io. There were these big windows all over where you could look out onto the volcanoes spitting fire and smoke and shit. There was even one of them windows in the club, and Monique kept looking out of it.

  Prez wasn't playing when we got there, it was too early so some other cats were on the bandstand. Trio of guys, didn't know their names but I was pretty sure I'd met the pianist before. They were all right. Sometimes cats like Prez, man, they did even better with those plain bread-and-butter rhythm sections, playing that kind of old swing style. It was all about his beautiful voice, his sound. Waiting for Prez, I could hear his tenor sound, man, that touch of vibrato, that strong gentle turn in his melody riding his own beat, just a little off of the bass, you know what I mean.

  Monique started to get bored. I could tell. She fiddled with her hair, looked out at the volcanoes.

  “Baby, Prez should be on soon,” I told her.

  She frowned at me, that sexy baby-I'm-pissed-off kind of frown. “I want to go for a walk. See the bubble.” We'd passed some nice shop windows and cafes out there, and I guessed she really just wanted to go shopping. But it also felt a little bit like a test, and I never in my life let no woman test me.

  “You go on and go shopping if you want, but me, I ain't gonna miss Prez for the world. Not a tune, not a single damn note.”

  “Fine,” she said, and adjusted her purse. “I'll be back later. Maybe,” she added with a pout, and turned on her high heel and marched out, adjusting her hair as she went, and wiggling her ass because she knew I was checking it.

  I didn't give a shit, man. French can-can girls you can get any old time if you really want one, but there wasn't nowhere to see Lester Young except on Io. This was my last chance to see him in my life, unless he came back to Earth, and he'd been in bad shape the last time I'd seen him.

  Well, I ended up sitting there through a half hour of mediocre rhythm section ad lib, sipping my Deep Europa Iced Tea—that's what they called a Long Island Iced tea in that place, the only drink I could afford—when finally Prez showed up.

  Now, seeing Prez that time, hearing him play, it was kind of like the first time you had sex. I don't mean waking up from a dirty dream and finding your bed's all sticky, neither. I mean the first time you're with some girl a year ahead of you in junior high school, and you go on upstairs in her house when her mama's out and maybe you kiss on her a little and then you put it in her, and a minute or two later you're wondering what just happened and is that it and why everyone is always making a big deal about that shit?

  It was a shame and a huge letdown, is what I'm trying to say.

  Prez, he used to be a little fucked-up. Not when he was younger, before the war. Back then, that cat had some kind of magic power, man. People always wanted him to play like Hawk, I mean Coleman Hawkins, but he didn't listen to nobody, he played his own sound, and it was beautiful. He had this way of making melodies just sing, so sweet it'd break your heart in half.

  But then they sent him to war, and seeing as he was black, they never put him in the army band. Just who exactly do you think you are, boy? Glenn Miller? Off to the front line with you, nigger, that's how it was. Folks said it wasn't surprising, him not having his head on straight after all that happened to him: being sent to fight in Europe, and what he saw in Berlin after the Russians dropped that bomb they got from the Frogs onto the city. How he got stuck in a barracks in Paris for all that time after, fighting the local reds, and what happened after we pulled out of Europe, where they court-martialed his ass because his wife was a white woman and he didn't take shit off the other soldiers for it. After all that, they said that something inside him was broke, broke in a way that couldn't never be fixed.

  Well, you know, I was hoping that maybe the Frogs had somehow fixed him up, like they'd done with Bird. When I seen him, standing tall, cleanest cat you ever seen, with a big old smile and a fine suit and the same old porkpie hat he always wore, I started to think maybe they'd done the world a service, brought back the President of the tenor saxophone.

  So anyway, he lifted that horn of his up to his lips, with the neck screwed in a little sideways, so that the body of the horn was lifted up off to the side the way he always used to do, and as he started to blow “Polkadots and Moonbeams,” my heart sank.

  It didn't sound like the real Lester Young, not the Prez I knew. It sounded like some kind of King Tut mummy Lester Young sound. Like the outside shape of his sound was still there, but that something important inside it had been took out. I'm sure nobody else there could hear it, but I could. I knew it right away.

  I could feel my heart splitting in two as I just sat there and watched the Prez, the man who'd been the Prez, drift his way through tune after tune. It was all right, that floating sound of his, the way he always waltzed loose with the rhythm, the sweet tone, the little bursts forward and then the cool, leaning-back thing he'd do after it. But there was something missing.

  Then it hit me what was wrong. I knew every last one of the solos he was playing. Not the tunes, I mean, not just the heads and changes. I mean I knew every goddamn note he played. He wasn't improvising at all. Everything, every lick, was from his old recordings. “My Funny Valentine"; “I Cover the Waterfront"; “Afternoon of a Basieite” ... Every goddamn note was off one of his old pre-war LPs. He was playing it all exactly the way he'd played it in the studio, at live shows, anywhere he'd been recorded. I knew, because I had all them same recordings up in my head, too, every last one of them.

  So I just sat there staring at him with tears in my eyes, and waited for it to be over.

  But you know, during the first set break, he came over and sat with me. Of all the people he could have sat with, all the people who'd come to Io just to see him, he came and sat with me, probably the only cat in the place who was disappointed with what he'd heard.

  “You're a saxophone player, aren't you, young man?” he said, suave as ever but a bit too cool. He must've seen me eyeing his fingers on the horn.

  “Yes sir, I am. I'm from Philadelphia, and my name's Robbie Coolidge.”

  “Might you happen to be a tenor player by any chance?”

  “Yes sir,” I said, nodding.

  “Mind if I join you here? Seeing as you lost your hat and all,” he said, hand on the back of a chair. By “hat,” he meant Monique. Everyone knew that was the way Prez talked, funny names for everything. “Hat” was a new one, though. “My ‘people’ are in need of a little rest, is all,” he said, and wiggled his fingers. That was what he called his fingers, his “people.”

  And of course I told him I didn't mind, and offered to buy him a drink and he laughed and said now that all the drinks were free for him, he didn't want no liquor no more. And then he just started talking to me. Asked me how old I was, asked me if I missed m
y mama's cooking—I didn't, my mama was a terrible cook, she used food as a kind of weapon when she was mad at me, but I didn't tell him that—and then he told me about his own mama's cooking.

  I don't remember exactly what he said, honestly; what I remember was his careful, quiet smile and his bright big eyes lit by some exploding volcano out the big dome window, and how goddamned happy he seemed to be remembering his mama in the kitchen, the smells and the flavors coming back to him across all those years and all those miles from when he'd sat at the kitchen table waiting for dinner.

  And don't ask me how I knew, but right then, I realized that they'd done to him whatever they'd done to J.J. and to Bird, and that Lester Young, whoever he was, he was gone from the world, same as J.J. and maybe same as Bird, even. All that was left of the Prez was a shell, a filled with something that was supposed to be him but wasn't. That was what I was talking to, and it was all I could do not to cry in his face.

  At the end of the set break, when he got up to play again, he told me, “Get off the ships, son. Get yourself on back to the Apple Core,” which was what he'd started calling Harlem after the war. “You're way too young for this kind of life.”

  A little while after he started to play again, Monique came in, and I just took her by the hand and we left.

  * * * *

  “Listen, you jive-assed negroes, just listen to me for a minute! This shit they got us playing, man, it ain't jazz! I don't know what the fuck it is, but it ain't human music. Jazz is for humans, my brothers!”

  Some of them Muslim brothers were nodding their heads as I said this, but I knew one or two of them who wasn't going to go along with this so easy.

  “Boy, you all wet. You signed a god-damned contract.” It was Albert Grubbs, just like I expected. I forget the Muslim name he'd gone and taken for himself, but anyway, I knew him as Albert Grubbs, and sure enough, a few years later, everyone else did too, once he dropped all that religious bullshit. But right then, he was dead against us doing anything to upset relations with the Frogs, because he was still big on the whole space Muslim thing at the time. They figured if we was good enough Uncle Toms, the Frogs might give us some ships of our own, and let us fly around the solar system, so we could brag about beating white people to it. He looked about ready to start quoting the Koran or Mohammed or something like that, so I stood up. I wasn't gonna rehearse no more till we talked it all out.