With his eyes closed, he stroked the keys, the buttons, the pedals, bringing first one section then another into prominence, extrapolating from what he heard in the earphones to the whole sound, once freed. The crunch, once he had it to his satisfaction, became the sound a large gourd makes landing on stone… he remembered that from his boyhood. And after, the liquid splatter, the sound of seeds striking… in his mind a seed flew up, hung, whirling in the air like a tiny satellite, a pale yellow moon, waxing and waning as his mind held the image. He noted that on subvoc, recorded that section again.
The melody that had first come to him, the one he’d suppressed, came again, demanding this time its accompaniment of woodwinds. He called up bassoon, then the Sulesean variant, even deeper of pitch, and hardly playable by a human. Above it, the oboe and teroe. He needed another, split the oboe part quickly and transposed pedals to woodwinds, his toes and fingers racing while the thought lasted. He wasn’t sure it had anything to do with the planet, but he liked it. He paused, then, and called the recordings back into the earphones.
The crunch: massive, final, definitive. A long pause… he counted measures this time, amazed at the length of it before the splattering sounds, the flute and cello that defined the seed/satellite. He stopped the playback, and thought a moment, lips pursed. It was a conceit, that seed, and maybe too easy… but for now, he’d leave it in. He sent the replay on. The melody was all right—in fact, it was good—but it had no relation to the preceding music. He’d have to move it somewhere, but he’d save it. He marked the section for relabelling, and lay back, breathing a little heavily and wondering what time it was.
The clock, when he noticed it on the opposite wall, revealed that he’d spent over three hours in the Meirinhoff. No wonder he was tired and hungry. He felt a little smug about it, how hard he’d worked on his first day out of transfer, as he levered himself out of the instrument and headed for the shower.
In the next days, he found himself working just as hard. An hour or so in the lounge alone, watching the planet in the viewscreen, changing magnification from time to time. Disgust waned to distaste, and then to indifference. It was not responsible, after all, for how it looked to him. The planet could not know his struggles to appreciate it, to turn its mineral wealth, its ugly lifeless surface, into a work of art.
And when he could look at it no longer, when he found himself picking up what little reading material the ship’s crew left lying about, he returned to his instrument, to the Meirinhoff, and fastened himself into that embrace of mingled struggle and pleasure. His mind wandered to the Academy, to the lectures on esthetic theory, on music law, all those things he’d found so dull at the time. He called up and reread the section in General Statutes about colonization and exploitation of new worlds, until he could recite it word for word, and the rhythm worked itself into his composition.
“It is essential that each new world be incorporated into the species ethic and emotional milieu…” Actually it didn’t make much sense. If it hadn’t been for whoever wrote that, though, most musicians wouldn’t have a job. The decision to send musicians and artists to each newly discovered, rated world, before anyone actually landed on it, and to include artists and musicians on each exploration landing team had provided thousands of places for those with talent. Out of that effort had come some superb music and art—Keller’s “Morning on Moondog,” and the ballet Gia’s Web by Annette Polacek—and plenty of popular stuff. Miners, colonists, explorers—they all seemed to want music and art created for “their” world, whatever it was. Mantenon had heard the facile and shallow waltzes Tully Conover wrote for an obscure cluster of mining worlds: everyone knew “Mineral Waltz,” “Left by Lead,” and the others. And in art, the thousands of undistinguished visuals of space views: ringed planets hanging over moons of every color and shape, twinned planets circling one another… but it sold, and supported the system, and that was what counted.
Georges Mantenon had hoped—had believed—he could do better. If nothing as great as Gia’s Web, he could compose at least as well as Metzger, whose Symphony Purple was presented in the Academy as an example of what they were to do. Mantenon had been honored with a recording slot for two of his student compositions. One of them had even been optioned by an off-planet recording company. The Academy would get the royalties, if any, of course. Students weren’t allowed to earn money from their music. Still, he had been aware that his teachers considered him especially gifted. But with a miserable, disgusting orange ball streaked with blue fungus—how could he do anything particularly worthy? The square of blue carpet had been easy compared to this.
He tried one arrangement after another of the melody and variations he’d already composed, shifting parts from one instrument to another, changing keys, moving the melody itself from an entrance to a climax to a conclusion. Nothing worked. Outside, in the screens, he saw the same ugly world; if his early disgust softened into indifference, it never warmed into anything better. He could not, however calmly he looked, see anything beautiful about it. The moons were better—slightly—and the third, when it finally appeared around the planet’s limb, was a striking lavender. He liked that, found his mind responding with a graceful flourish of strings. But it was not enough. It fit nowhere with the rest of the composition—if it could be called a composition—and by itself it could not support his contract.
He had hardly noticed, in those early days, that he rarely saw any of the crew, and when he did, they never asked about his work. He would have been shocked if they had asked: he was, after all, a licensed creative artist, whose work was carried out in as much isolation as Security granted any of the Union’s citizens. Yet when he came into the crew lounge, after struggling several hours with his arrangement for the lavender moon, and found it empty as usual, he was restless and dissatisfied. He couldn’t, he thought grumpily, do it all himself. He lay back on the long couch under the viewport and waited. Someone would have to come in eventually, and he’d insist, this time, that they talk to him.
The first to appear was a stocky woman in a plain uniform—no braid at all. She nodded at him, and went to the dispenser for a mug of something that steamed. Then she sat down, facing slightly away from him, inserted a plug in her ear, and thumbed the control of a cubescreen before he could get his mouth shaped to speak to her. He sat there, staring, aware that his mouth was still slightly open, and fumed. She could at least have said hello. He turned away politely, shutting his mouth again, and folded his arms. Next time he’d be quicker.
But the next person to come in ignored him completely, walked straight to the other woman and leaned over her, whispering something he could not hear. It was a man Mantenon had never seen before, with a single strip of blue braid on his collar. The woman turned, flipped off the cubescreen, and removed her earplug. The man sat beside her, and they talked in low voices; Mantenon could hear the hum, but none of the words. After a few minutes, the two of them left, with a casual glance at Mantenon that made him feel like a crumpled food tray someone had left on the floor. He could feel the pulse beating in his throat, anger’s metronome, and a quick snarl of brass and percussion rang in his head. It wasn’t bad, actually… he let himself work up the scoring for it.
When he opened his eyes again, one of the med techs stood beside him, looking worried.