He followed Christine into her house.
It was an old, comfortable-looking place with a great many small, dark, high-ceilinged rooms on the ground floor and a massive wooden staircase leading upstairs. The furnishings looked heavy and unstylish, as though they were already long out of date, but everything had an appealing, well-worn feel.
“My family’s lived in this house for almost a hundred years,” Christine said, as though reading his mind. “I was born here. I grew up here. I don’t know what it’s like to live anywhere else.” She gestured toward the staircase. “The music room is upstairs.”
“I know. Do you live here by yourself?”
“Basically. My sister and I inherited the house when my mother died, but she’s hardly ever here. The last I heard from her, she was in Oaxaca.”
“Wah-ha-ka?” Thimiroi said carefully.
“Oaxaca, yes. In Mexico, you know? She’s studying Mexican handicrafts, she says. I think she’s actually studying Mexican men, but that’s her business, isn’t it? She likes to travel. Before Mexico she was in Thailand, and before that it was Portugal, I think.”
Mexico, Thimiroi thought. Thailand. Portugal. So many names, so many places. Such a complex society, this world of the twentieth century. His own world had fewer places, and they had different names. So much had changed, after the time of the Blue Death. So much had been swept away, never to return.
Christine said, “It’s a musty old house, I know. But I love it. And I could never have afforded to buy one of my own. Everything’s so fantastically expensive these days. If I hadn’t happened to have lived here all along, I suppose I’d be living in one of those poky little studio apartments down by the river, paying umpty thousand dollars a month for one bedroom and a terrace the size of a postage stamp.”
Desperately he tried to follow what she was saying. His implant helped, but not enough. Umpty thousand dollars? Studio apartment? Postage stamp? He got the sense of her words, but the literal meanings eluded him. How much was umpty? How big was a postage stamp?
The music room on the second floor was bright and spacious, with three large windows looking out into the garden and the street beyond. The piano itself, against the front wall between two of the windows, was larger than he expected, a splendid, imposing thing, with ponderous, ornately carved legs and a black, gleaming wooden case. Obviously it was old and very valuable and well cared for; and as he studied it he realized suddenly that this must not be any ordinary home musical instrument, but more likely one that a concert performer would use; and therefore Christine’s lighthearted dismissal of his question about her having a musical career must almost certainly conceal bitter defeat, frustration, the deflection of a cherished dream. She had wanted and expected more from her music than life had been able to bring her.
“Play for me,” he said. “The same piece you were playing the first time, when I happened to walk by.”
“The Debussy, you mean?”
“I don’t know its name.”
Thimiroi hummed the melody that had so captured him. She nodded and sat down to play.
It was not quite as magical, the second time. But nothing ever was, he knew. And it was beautiful all the same, haunting, mysterious in its powerful simplicity.
“Will you sing for me now?” Christine asked.
“What should I sing?”
“A song of your own country?”
He thought a moment. How could he explain to her what music was like in his own time—not sound alone, but a cluster of all the arts, visual, olfactory, the melodic line rising out of a dozen different sensory concepts? But he could improvise, he supposed. He began to sing one of his own poems, putting a tune to it as he went. Christine, listening, closed her eyes, nodded, turned to the keyboard, played a few notes and a few more, gradually shaping them into an accompaniment for him. Thimiroi was amazed at the swiftness with which she caught the melody of his tune—stumbling only once or twice, over chordal structures that were obviously alien to her—and traveled along easily with it. By the time he reached the fifth cycle of the song, he and she were joined in an elegant harmony, as though they had played this song together many times instead of both improvising it as they went. And when he made the sudden startling key-shift that in his culture signalled the close of a song, she adapted to it almost instantaneously and stayed with him to the final note.
They applauded each other resoundingly.
Her eyes were shining with delight. “Oh, Thimiroi—Thimiroi—what a marvelous singer you are! And what a marvelous song!”
“And how cunningly you wove your accompaniment into it.”
“That wasn’t really hard.”
“For you, perhaps. You have a great musical gift, Christine.”
She reddened and looked away.
“What language were you singing in?” she asked, after a time.
“The language of my country.”
“It was so strange. It isn’t like any language I’ve ever heard. Why won’t you tell me anything about where you come from, Thimiroi?”
“I will. Later.”
“And what did the words mean?”
“It’s a poem about—about journeying to far lands, and seeing great wonders. A very romantic poem, perhaps a little silly. But the poet himself is also very romantic and perhaps a little silly.”
“What’s his name?” she asked.
“Thimiroi.”
“You?” she said, grinning broadly. “Is that what you are? A poet?”
“I sometimes write poetry, yes,” he said, beginning to feel as uneasy as she had seemed when he was trying to praise her playing. They looked at each other awkwardly. Then he said, “May I try the piano?”
“Of course.”
He sat down, peered at the keys, touched one of the white ones experimentally, then another, another. What were the black ones? Modulators of some sort? No, no, their function was very much like that of the white ones, it seemed. And these pedals here—
He began to play.
He was dreadful at first, but quickly he came to understand the relationship of the notes and the range of the keyboard and the proper way of touching the keys. He played the piece that she had played for him before, exactly at first, then launching into a set of subtle variations that carried him farther and farther from the original, into the musical modes of his own time. The longer he played, the more keenly he appreciated the delicacy and versatility of this ancient instrument; and he knew that if he were to study it with some care, not merely guess his way along as he was doing now, he would be able to draw such wonders from it as even great composers like Cenbe or Palivandrin would find worthwhile. Once again he felt humbled by the achievements of this great lost civilization of the past. Which to brittle, heartless people like Hollia or Omerie must seem a mere simple primitive age. But they understood nothing. Nothing.
He stopped playing, and looked back at Christine.
She was staring at him in horror, her face pale, her eyes wide and stricken, tears streaking her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The way you play—” she whispered. “I’ve never heard anyone play like that.”
“It is all very bad, I know. But you must realize, I have had no formal training in this instrument, I am simply inventing a technique as I go—”
“No. Please. Don’t tell me that. You mustn’t tell me that!”
“Christine?”
And then he realized what the matter was. It was not that he had played badly; it was that he had played so well. She had devoted all her life to this instrument, and played it with great skill, and even so had never been able to attain a level of proficiency that gave her any real satisfaction. And he, never so much as having seen a piano in his life, could sit down at it and draw from it splendors beyond her fondest hope of achieving. His playing was unorthodox, of course, it was odd and even bizarre, but yet she had seen the surpassing mastery in it, and had been stunned and chagrined and crushed by it, and stood here now bewildered and confounded by this stranger she had brought into her own home—