by Chad Oliver
Martin Ashley trembled. For all of his life, he had been a man in search of something without a name. The search had taken him into schools and across the light-years, and once, with Carol, he had almost found it. And now, after so long—
He was too old and had lived too deeply to believe that he had found it at last. Perhaps men never found it, and that was the secret that kept them going. But there was a chance now.
A chance.
The ship was gone, and there was the silence again, the silence of night and of land left alone.
Martin Ashley shivered.
He knew that the others were watching.
They came out of the shadows where they had been waiting for him—Rondol, Catan, and the woman, Lirad. Lirad smiled and took his hand.
“Welcome, my son,” Catan said. “We have been expecting you.”
Hesitantly, Martin Ashley said, “I think I know about Bob. You … sent … him back to Earth, didn’t you?”
Rondol nodded. “Your people are young and very aggressive,” he said. “They found us once, and will again. We planted only a very small seed in your young friend—a seed that will flower just enough so that your people will be willing to listen and co-operate when next they come our way. You or your sons can talk to them, and we can be friends instead of enemies. Your friend wanted to go home anyway, you know; we did not harm him.”
“I let him go,” Ashley said slowly. “And myself? I must know that. I know that you will not lie to me.”
“We did nothing to you, Martin,” Rondol told him. “You were one of us from the beginning; you have always been one of us. Your decision was one of free will, at least inasmuch as any man ever has free will.”
“Let’s go, then,” Martin Ashley said. “I’m ready.”
He heard it before he saw it, as they walked along the pathway beneath the pines. Drums, and chanting voices in the night. And then he saw them waiting—the orange fires burning in the village of the Nern.
He had seen it all before, a long time ago, with Ernie and Bob, hidden in this same forest.
The rite of passage, the initiation ceremony during which the child passed into adulthood.
This time, he knew, it was for him.
He held Lirad’s hand, tightly.
With a greater humility than he had ever known, and with a pride that burned like fire within him, he walked forward, toward the drums and the singing and the people who were waiting to take him in.
He looked up once. There they were, untold millions of them, his star-brothers, the old ones and the never-born, sparkling in the sky.
They smiled, understanding.
He walked on, shoulders squared, into the village.
DIDN’T HE RAMBLE
The old man sat in a soundproof room. He was elegantly dressed in evening clothes, although he had discarded his formal cape at the moment, and his well-manicured fingers were busily tapping out time against the frosted side of his cocktail glass.
The old man’s name was Theodore Pearsall, a fact of some importance since he was one of the richest men in the world. Money did not interest him, however; it was only a means to an end.
He reached out a soft pink hand and made a slight adjustment, turning one of the twenty-two knobs on his chair-arm a fraction to the left.
“Play that thing!” Theodore Pearsall shouted, surprisingly. “Do it, Dippermouth!”
Dippermouth obliged.
A gleaming tape, preserving music almost two hundred years old, slid into position behind the transparent plastic safety shield. It fed itself into the shining player, and music surged from the ultra-high-fidelity speaker that spanned one entire wall.
Louis Armstrong, of course. One of the good old good ones, as Satchmo himself used to say: “Potato Head Blues,” cut by the Hot Seven away back in 1927, with Louis still sticking to the vibrant cornet.
Pearsall closed his eyes, and smiled. His whole face relaxed. His polished shoe thumped on the thick carpet. There was Johnny Dodds’s driving clarinet, and those wonderful tailgate smears from Kid Ory’s trombone….
“Those were the days,” Pearsall whispered happily.
He was quite lost now.
The speaker tirelessly recreated the past, and the legendary men played again: Sidney Bechet’s inventive soprano sax, King Oliver swapping breaks with Little Louis, and Bix, impossible Bix, blowing those springwater-pure notes so cleanly it broke your heart—
Jelly Roll Morton then, singing out his genius and his despair:
I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away,
I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away….
The thick door opened and slammed with a jarring crash.
Pearsall turned, expecting a robot, but it wasn’t a robot—at least not quite.
It was Laura, his wife.
She was wearing her crucified expression.
“In case you’ve forgotten, Theodore, we’re Having A Party upstairs tonight.” (She said it in capital letters, as always.) “The least you could do would be to come up and mingle with our guests.”
Pearsall considered the matter, silently.
“Can’t you turn that thing off while I’m talking to you? Are you drunk, Theodore?”
“Not yet,” he assured her, and turned Jelly Roll back into the long silence of the centuries.
He looked at his wife, without pleasure. Laura was beautifully dressed, of course, all silks and ruffles, and she had kept her figure well. He wondered if he had ever loved her.
“Are you coming?”
“Looks that way, chicken.”
She beamed at him. “We’re playing charades,” she said triumphantly, and hurried out the door.
Theodore Pearsall shuddered, drained his drink, and stood up.
“One more night,” he told himself, savoring the words.
He looked around the friendly room and smiled a little.
Then he marched upstairs, much as a man might stroll out to greet a firing squad in the cold gray light of dawn.
He hooked his thumbs in his evening suspenders, more to annoy Laura than anything else, and surveyed the scene.
There’s no place like home, he thought sourly.
It was plush, he had to give it that. The furnishings of the huge living room were flamboyantly nonfunctional, as modern trends demanded: heavy wine drapes flopping over the leaded windows, glittering chandeliers blazing down on thick flowered carpeting, a profusion of tastefully worm-eaten antique chairs, a couple of iron-hard couches covered in stiff brocade, a scattering of spindly tables, gewgaws, and assorted gingerbread.
He snapped his fingers.
“Sir?” said the gleaming robot that flashed to his side.
“A glass of gin, if you will be so kind.”
Robots are not equipped with a look of disapproval, but this one made a creditable try.
“Sir?”
“Put an olive in it so it’ll look like a martini. And hurry.”
The robot glided toward the bar with a distinct air of aloofness.
There was a lot of well-mannered laughter, and some of it quite possibly was genuine. The room was full of antiseptically clean people. All the men had red faces and distinguished gray hair. All the women were delicately pale, in stunning slither-gowns, as lovely as butterflies and with brains to match.
One portly gentleman, with a kind of desperate gravity, was imitating a rocket in outer space.
Pearsall took the glass, popped the olive into his mouth, and fortified himself with a slug of clear gin. He affixed a transparently false smile to his face and moved forward.
It was, he reflected, precisely the sort of party that the scandal tapes were always screaming about. IS THEODORE PEARSALL A HEDONIST? WHAT’S WITH THE DOLL IN PEARSALL’S HALL? IS TEDDY A BEAR?
The item the tapes forgot to mention was that the whole business was a crashing bore.
A perfumed hand touched him.
“Here you are, you nice man!” It was
Jenny, wife of one of the vice presidents of one of his companies. She had been a looker once upon a time, and still dressed like a siren. Unhappily, she was incurably vivacious. “We’re going to be partners!”
“Goody,” said Pearsall, allowing himself to be led toward the crowd.
An old, old song was spinning through his head:
Lord, I’d rather drink muddy water,
Sleep in a hollow log….
Big Gate, there. Jack Teagarden. Born down in Texas, raised in Tennessee—
One more night.
He patted Jenny absently on the head, and did his duty in an interminable game of charades.
Much later, after the guests had departed and Laura had gone to her bedroom, Pearsall hurried down into his soundproof vault and locked the door behind him.
His mind was quite clear, despite the gin, and he was as excited as a boy about to snag his first brook trout.
He pulled out a concealed phone line. It was a direct hook-up; no need to touch the dial.
“Williams?”
“Ah, Mr. Pearsall! We thought you might have forgotten us.”
“Hardly.” He sneaked a look around the room to reassure himself. “Is everything ready?”
“It’s waiting for you, sir. And a fine job it is, if I do say so myself.”
“Well, make it snappy, Williams. My affairs here are all in order, and there’s a trust fund to take care of Laura. I’m ready to go.”
“Now?”
“Now. Tonight. As soon as possible.”
“As you wish, sir. Ah, there’s one small item—”
“Yes?”
“The girls, as you specified, will be real ones, working in relays. Excellent—ummm—local color. Now, the Patrol has made discreet inquiries of this office, Mr. Pearsall. They seem to feel that as long as the girls are there—so close to home, as it were—they were wondering whether it would be permissible for off-duty Patrolmen to … how shall I say it—make use of the unusual facilities available—”
Pearsall snapped his fingers. “Excellent!” he beamed. “A gasser!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, it’s wonderful. The money, of course, will go to help defray the expense of the project?”
“A businessman to the end, Mr. Pearsall! Precisely what we had in mind.”
“And Laura will never know where I am?”
“You may rely on our absolute discretion, sir. In fifty years of service, our firm has never had a complaint.”
“Tonight, then, Williams. Step on it. Use the rear entrance.”
“As you wish, sir. Our representative will carry the contract with him; please read it carefully on the trip out. If I may be of any further service, it will be my pleasure.”
“Thank you, Williams.”
He broke the connection. He had never felt so alive, so eager. He paced the floor, his face beaming.
He cut in the music.
“Muskrat Ramble!”
“Save It Pretty Mama!”
“Way Down Yonder in New Orleans!”
They came for him at four in the morning, long before Laura was awake.
As far as the world he had known was concerned, he vanished without a trace.
The ship climbed into the sunrise on a ladder of flame. She lanced through mountains of clouds, and then the familiar blue of the sky faded and darkened, and she was in space.
Pearsall had been in space before, and it did not enchant him. True, the cold lights of the stars were lovely against their backdrop of velvet, and the sun was a yellow blaze of glory. But it was life that called to Pearsall, all the life that he had missed, all the smells and sounds and joys and heartaches he had heard about and read about, but never experienced.
And space was an infinite sea of death.
It was not for him.
Not yet.
His old blue eyes skipped over the contract.
“… and on the basis of the Purchaser’s life expectancy as determined by the Company’s physicians, and verified by the Purchaser’s personal physicians, the Company agrees to provide, supply, and maintain said Project according to the Purchaser’s specifications, until such a time as said Project can no longer be of any use to the Purchaser, whereupon said Project and Property revert to the Company, for whatever use …”
He read the rest of it, and signed it.
He knew, of course, that it was now possible for doctors to calculate a patient’s very hour of death with certainty. Accidents could kill a man before his time, but there had been no case since the year 2100 of a man living past his expected death date—and techniques of diagnosis and prognosis had improved some since then. Naturally, this was one item of information that doctors were forbidden by law to give to their patients.
It was better not to know.
He sat back in his seat, his eyes closed. The power was off now, as the ship coasted silently toward Mars, and beyond. He couldn’t sleep, didn’t want to sleep. He felt no regret for what he was leaving behind him. He had no children, and his marriage to Laura had been one of convenience, nothing more. His money had been inherited for the most part, and had brought him no happiness. Earth itself was a fossil; exciting things were happening on other worlds, but he had not been qualified to go.
No, he was well rid of it—all of it.
It was what was ahead that counted.
A world of his own, his kind of world, with his kind of people.
His heart hammered in his chest, his eyes grew bright.
This won’t do, he thought. Mustn’t overexcite myself.
He took two sleeping pills, and dozed off.
The ship had nosed into the Company’s section of the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter and was braking her acceleration before he woke up. He brushed the white hair out of his eyes and stared through the viewscreen. Thousands of tiny worlds hung there in space, moving through tightly calculated orbits.
Each world was a man’s dream come true, and each one was different. He had heard rumors of some of the early ones: a world where there was a major sporting event every four hours, a world that was a hunter’s paradise of swift streams and fearless animals, a world that was an erotic dream come to life….
The ship matched velocities exactly with a dimly glimpsed shape. There was a chunk as the two coupled together, airlock to airlock.
“We’re here, sir,” a voice said.
Theodore Pearsall stood up, his fists clenched tightly, his breath coming very fast.
“We’re here,” he repeated.
He moved toward the door.
Then he was inside and the ship was gone.
He smelled it first: a wet, heavy river-smell. He drew it into his lungs, tasting it, savoring it. It hung over the city like a sweet, invisible fog.
The River.
Ole Miss.
Then he heard it. His eyes misted. Music: clear as a bell, liquid as the river itself, lifting into the air like a buoyant, living thing. It sent a shiver down his spine and he began to run, just a little.
He hardly saw the old frame buildings with their towers and chimneys, didn’t feel any of the smiling people he bumped into, ignored the whispered invitation that drifted down from behind a second-story shutter.
He started to turn in through two white swinging doors at a place called Tom Anderson’s. He was close enough to the music to reach out and touch it, but he stopped. He listened.
More music.
Coming down the street.
There it was, rounding the corner. A wagon, pulled by a team of horses. A sign on the wagon, advertising a dance. And a band, letting fly with “Milneburg Joys.” No piano, of course, but drums, guitar, and string bass. A youngster on cornet, sitting on a box. An older man playing clarinet, sitting beside him. And sitting on the back edge of the wagon, his feet dangling down, his golden trombone slide flashing in the sun—
Kid Ory.
He was younger than in most of the pictures you saw, even though the Kid ha
d never really aged. He looked perhaps twenty-five, a handsome Creole man, and the power in his horn shored up the band like a rock-solid two-by-four. As Pearsall watched, Ory took his lips away from the mouthpiece and shouted something to him in French.
Pearsall flushed; he couldn’t catch the words. But he grinned and waved back at him. The Kid nodded, counted with his horn, swung into the intricate slides of “Ory’s Creole Trombone.”
The wagon passed by, the music still lingering in the warm, humid air, like a crisp painting slowly fading in the sun.
Pearsall walked into Tom Anderson’s and stepped up to the bar.
“Mistah Theodore Pearsall!” the bartender said, beaming from ear to ear.
“Call me Ted,” Pearsall said. It was the first time in his life he had ever said it. It felt good.
“Yassuh. What’ll it be?”
“Scotch and water, please.”
The man poured it out, handed it to him. Pearsall reached for his money.
“Don’t cost you nothin’, Mistah Ted. On the house.”
Pearsall turned away, feeling better than he had felt in years. He had to hand it to the Company: they were doing the job up brown.
The leader of the band, a Negro Pearsall didn’t recognize at first, nodded gravely to him, tapped his foot, and blew into his horn—blew down into it, digging for the low ones. “Tishomingo Blues”—Lord, it was Bunk, Bunk Johnson and the boys. It was flowing, understated New Orleans jazz, and it was the whole group that played it, not a crew of soloists.
Pearsall watched and listened and sipped his drink. He thought: They’re all out there, right now, waiting for me. Louis and Sidney and Buddy and Jelly Roll. And Bix, Bix had to be there, even if he hadn’t been there in real life. For when dreams come true, they’re better than real life ever was, that’s why they’re dreams….
He stayed for two hours, just being happy, and then he walked over to his apartment, still in the French Quarter. It was plain but comfortable, with a big brass bed and open windows over the street. The curtains fluttered in the breeze off the river, and he heard a clarinet wailing from far away.
Dodds? Fazola, maybe?
No matter.
There was a newspaper on the stand by the bed, a real newspaper, not a tape. He glanced at the date.
