There was nothing to do to get ready. Mantenon nodded, surprised to feel a little excitement even as he knew how artificial this was. A birthday was a birthday; you couldn’t make one by saying so. But then there were the birthdays he had already lost—that had gone unnoticed. The tech flicked several keys and one number in one column darkened.
“Now that’s marked as your shipday—your special day. The interval will be about what it was on Union Five, because that’s given as your base, and next time you’ll be given notice four weeks in advance. Oh—you get an automatic day off on your shipday… I guess it won’t mean much to you, you don’t have crew duties. But you get special ration tabs, any flavor you like, if it’s on board, and a captain’s pass for messages. You can send a message to anyone—your family, anywhere—and for no charge.”
Mantenon’s shipday party enlivened the long passage between worlds, and he ended the lateshift in someone else’s cabin. He had dreaded that, having to admit that he was a virgin, but, on the whole, things went well.
The last world of that system was a gas giant with all the dazzling display of jewelry such worlds could offer: moons both large and small, rings both light and dark, strange swirling patterns on its surface in brilliant color. Mantenon found himself fascinated by it, and spent hours watching out the ports, more hours watching projections of cubes about this satellite or that. Finally the captain came to see what was wrong.
“Nothing,” he said, smiling. “It’s simply too big to hurry with. Surely you realize that an artist can’t always create instantly?”
“Well, but—”
“I’m starting,” he assured her. “Right away.” And he was, having decided that he was not about to wait the whole long sentence out. They couldn’t be planning to stay in deep space for that long without resupply, with the same crew growing older along with him. They must be planning to get supplies and replacements while he was in deepsleep, while he thought they were using the deepspace drive. And he intended to be free of this contract at the first stop.
He had written a song for the poet: three, in fact. He had taken a folksong one of the lifesystems techs sang at his shipday party, and used it in a fugue. He listened to their tales of home, their gossip, their arguments and their jokes, saying little but absorbing what he needed to know. Gradually the crew was responding to him, to his music; he heard snatches of this work or that being hummed or whistled, rhythmic nuances reflected in tapping fingers or the way they knocked on doors. Everything he wrote carried his deepest convictions, carried them secretly, hidden, buried in the nerve’s response to rhythm, to timbre and pitch and phrase. And gradually the crew had come to depend on his music, gradually they played their cubes of other composers less. But he knew his music could do more. And now it would.
Mantenon sat curled into the Meirinhoff’s embrace, thinking, remembering. He called up his first reaction to his contract, refined it, stored it. Then he began with his childhood. Note by note, phrase by phrase, in the language of keychange, harmonics, the voice of wood and metal and leather and bone, of strings and hollow tubes, vibrations of solids and gases and liquids, he told the story of his life. The skinny boy for whom music was more necessary than food, who had startled his father’s distinguished guest by insisting that a tuning fork was wrong (it was), who had taught himself to read music by listening to Barker’s Scherzo To Saint Joan and following the score (stolen from that same guest of his father’s, the conductor Amanchi). The youth at the Academy, engulfed for the first time in a Meirinhoff, able for the first time to give his imagination a voice.
He stopped, dissatisfied. It wasn’t only his dilemma. He had to make them understand that it was theirs. He couldn’t take the ship; they had to give it to him; they had to want him to go where he wanted to go. Either they would have to understand his need for music, or he would have to offer something they wanted for themselves.
He let himself think of the different homeworlds he’d heard of. The famous worlds, the ones in the stories or songs. Forest worlds, dim under the sheltering leaves. Water worlds. Worlds with skies hardly speckled with stars, and worlds where the night sky was embroidered thick with colored light. And in his mind the music grew, rising in fountains, in massive buttresses, in cliffs and shadowed canyons of trembling air, shaping itself in blocks of sound that reformed the listening mind. Here it was quick, darting, active, prodding at the ears; there it lay in repose, enforcing sleep.
In the second week, the captain came once to complain about the fragments he’d played in the crew lounge.
“It’s unsettling,” she said, herself unsettled.
He nodded toward the outside. “That’s unsettling. Those fountains…”
“Sulfur volcanoes,” she said.
“Well, they look like fountains to me. But clearly dangerous as well as beautiful.”
“No more, though, to the crew. Check with me, first, or with Psych.”
He nodded, hiding his amusement. He knew already that wouldn’t work. And he kept on. The music grew, acquired complex interrelationships with other pieces… the minor concerto, the brass quintet, the simple song. Humans far from home, on a ship between worlds, with a calendar that accumulated months and gave no seasons, what did they want, what did they need? The rhythmic pattern gave it, withheld it again, offered it, tempting the listener, frustrating the ear. Yet… it could satisfy. It wanted to satisfy. Mantenon found himself working until his arms and legs cramped. To hold that power back, to hold those resolving discords in suspension, took all his strength, physical as well as mental.
He knew, by this time, that Security had a tap in his Meirinhoff. They monitored every note he brought out, every nuance of every piece. He did what he could: kept the fragments apart, except in his head, and devised a tricky control program, highly counterintuitive, to link them together when he was ready. It disgusted him to think of someone listening as he worked; it went against all he’d been taught—though he now suspected that Security had taps in the Academy as well. If they wanted to, they could make him look ridiculous all over CUG, by sending out the preliminary drafts under his name. But they wouldn’t do that. They wanted his music. So they had to monitor everything. Someone was having to listen to it, all of it; someone whose psych profile Mantenon was determined to subvert.
First he had had to learn more about it. The Central Union boasted hundreds of worlds, each with its own culture… and in many cases, multiple cultures. The same music that would stir a Cympadian would leave a Kovashi unmoved. For mere entertainment, any of the common modes would do well enough, but Mantenon needed to go much deeper than that. He needed one theme, one particular section, that would unlock what he himself believed to be a universal desire.
It was the poet who gave him the clue he needed. At latemeal, he hurried to sit beside Mantenon, and handed over four new poems.
“For Kata,” he said. “She’s agreed to marry me when we—” He stopped short, giving Mantenon a startled look.
“When you get permission, Arki?” asked Mantenon. He thought to himself that the poet had meant to say “… when we get back to port.” He wondered which port they were near, but knew he dared not ask.
“Yes… that is… it has to clear Security, both of us being Navy.”
“Mmm.” Mantenon concentrated on his rations; Arki always talked if someone looked away.
“It’s Crinnan, of course,” Arki muttered. “He’ll approve, I’m sure—I mean, he’s from Kovashi Two, just as we are.”