“Do you know what that is?”
Ereza squinted and read aloud. “Artruud’s Opus 27, measure seventy-nine?”
“Do you know what that is?”
Ereza shook her head. “No—should I? I might if you hummed it.”
Arla gave a short, ugly laugh. “I doubt that. We just played it, the whole thing. This—” She pointed at the display, which showed ten measures at a time. “This is where I blew up. Eighty-two to eighty-six.”
“Yes, but I don’t read music.”
“I know.” Arla turned and looked directly at her. “Did you ever think about that? The fact that I can play Flight-test as well as you, that my scores in Tac-Sim—the tests you had me take as a joke—were enough to qualify me for officers’ training if I’d wanted it… but not one of you in the family can read music well enough to pick out a tune on the piano?”
“It’s not our talent. And you, surrounded by a military family—of course you’d pick up something—”
“Is war so easy?” That in a quiet voice, washed clean of emotion. Ereza stared at her, shocked.
“Easy! Of course it’s not easy.” She still did not want to think about her first tour, the near disaster of that patrol on Sardon, when a training mission had gone sour. It was nothing she could discuss with Arla. Her stump throbbed, reminding her of more recent pain. How could Arla ask that question? She started to ask that, but Arla had already spoken.
“But you think I picked it up, casually, with no training?”
“Well… our family… and besides, what you did was only tests, not real combat.”
“Yes. And do you think that if you’d been born into a musical family, you’d have picked up music so casually? Would you be able to play the musical equivalent of Flight-test?”
“I’d have to know more, wouldn’t I?” Ereza wondered where this conversation was going. Clearly Arla was upset about something, something to do with her own wound. It’s my arm that’s missing, she thought. I’m the one who has a right to be upset or not upset. “I’d still have no talent for it, but I would probably know more music when I heard it.”
“Yet I played music in the same house, Eri, four to six hours a day when we were children. You had ears; you could have heard. We slept in the same room; you could have asked questions. You told me if you liked something, or if you were tired of hearing it; you never once asked me a musical question. You heard as much music as many musicians’ children. The truth is that you didn’t care. None of our family cared.”
Ereza knew the shock she felt showed on her face; Arla nodded at her and went on talking. “Dari can tell you how his preschool training team pretended to assault the block fortress, and you listen to him. You listen carefully, you admire his cleverness or point out where he’s left himself open for a counterattack. But me—I could play Hohlander’s first cello concerto backward, and you’d never notice. It’s not important to you—it’s beneath your notice.”
“That’s not true.” Ereza clenched the fingers of her left hand on the arm of the chair. “Of course we care; of course we notice. We know you’re good; that’s why you had the best teachers. It’s just that it’s not our field—we’re not supposed to be experts.”
“But you are about everything else.” Arla, bracing herself on the desk, looked almost exultant. Ereza could hardly believe what she was hearing. The girl must have had this festering inside for years, to bring it out now, to someone wounded in her defense. “You talk politics as if it were your field—why this war is necessary, why that legislation is stupid. You talk about manufacturing, weapons design, the civilian economy—all that seems to be your area of expertise. If music and art and poetry are so important—if they’re the reason you fight—then why don’t you know anything about them? Why don’t you bother to learn even the basics, the sort of stuff you expect Dari to pick up by the time he’s five or six?”
“But—we can’t do it all,” Ereza said, appalled at the thought of all the children, talented or untalented, forced to sit through lessons in music. Every child had to know something about drill and survival techniques; Cravor’s World, even in peacetime, could be dangerous. But music? You couldn’t save yourself in a sandstorm or grass fire by knowing who wrote which pretty tune, or how to read musical notation. “We found you teachers who did—”
“Whom you treated like idiots,” Arla said. “Remember the time Professor Rizvi came over, and talked to Grandmother after my lesson? No—of course you wouldn’t; you were in survival training right then, climbing up cliffs or something like that. But it was just about the time the second Gavalan rebellion was heating up, and he told Grandmother the sanctions against the colonists just made things worse. She got that tone in her voice—you know what I mean—and silenced him. After that he wouldn’t come to the house; I went into the city for my lessons. She told the story to Father, and they laughed together about the silly, ineffectual musician who wouldn’t stand a chance against real power—with me standing there—and then they said, ‘But you’re a gifted child, Arlashi, and we love it.’”
“They’re right.” Ereza leaned forward. “What would a composer and musician know about war? And it doesn’t take much of a weapon to smash that cello you’re so fond of.” She knew that much, whatever she didn’t know about music. To her surprise, Arla gave a harsh laugh.
“Of course it doesn’t take much weaponry to smash a cello. It doesn’t take a weapon at all. I could trip going down the stairs and fall on it; I could leave it flat on the floor and step on it. You don’t need to be a skilled soldier to destroy beauty: any clumsy fool can manage that.”
“But—”
Arla interrupted her. “That’s my point. You take pride in your skill, in your special, wonderful knowledge. And all you can accomplish with it is what carelessness or stupidity or even the normal path of entropy will do by itself. If you want a cello smashed, you don’t need an army: just turn it over to a preschool class without a teacher present. If you want to ruin a fine garden, you don’t have to march an expensive army through it—just let it alone. If you want someone to die, you don’t have to kill them: just wait! We’ll all die, Ereza. We don’t need your help.”
“It’s not about that!” But Ereza felt a cold chill. If Arla could think that… “It’s not about killing. It’s protecting—”
“You keep saying that, but—did you ever consider asking me? Asking any artist, any writer, any musician? Did you ever consider learning enough of our arts to guess how we might feel?”
Ereza stared at her, puzzled. “But we did protect you. We let you study music from the beginning; we’ve never pushed you into the military. What more do you want, Arlashi?”
“To be myself, to be a musician just because I am, not because you needed someone to prove that you weren’t all killers.”
That was ridiculous. Ereza stared at her twin, wondering if someone had mindwiped her. Would one of the political fringe groups have thought to embarrass the Fennaris family, with its rich military history, by recruiting its one musician? “I don’t understand,” she said, aware of the stiffness in her voice. She would have to tell Grandmother as soon as she got out of here, and find out if anyone else had noticed how strange Arla had become.
Arla leaned forward. “Ereza, you cannot have me as a tame conscience… someone to feel noble about. I am not a simple musician, all full of sweet melody, to soothe your melancholy hours after battle.” She plucked a sequence of notes, pleasant to the ear.
“Not that I mind your being soldiers,” Arla went on, now looking past Ereza’s head into some distance that didn’t belong in that small room. Ereza had seen that look on soldiers; it shocked her on Arla’s face. “It’s not that I’m a pacifist, you see. It’s more complicated than that. I want you to be honest soldiers. If you like war, admit it. If you like killing, admit that. Don’t make me the bearer of your nobility, and steal my own dark initiative. I am a person—a whole person—with my own kind of violence.”