She reached for her coat, ripped off the student badge and threw the cloak across her shoulders. She remembered, hand on panel, that she’d better take her credit plate with her. As she fumbled in the slip drawer for it, she saw the notation on her engagement pad.
‘Party at Rory’s to celebrate!’
She snorted. They’d all know. Let them chortle over her downfall. She’d not play the bravely-smiling-courageous-under-adversity role tonight. Or ever.
Exit Killashandra, quietly, stage center, she said to herself as she ran down the long shallow flight of steps to the Mall in front of the Culture Center. Again she experienced both satisfaction and regret that no one witnessed her departure.
Actually she couldn’t have asked for a more dramatic exit. They’d wonder this evening what had happened. Maybe someone would know ... someone always did know even the most confidential things about fellow students. She knew that Valdi would never talk ... not about his failures, or anyone else’s. They’d not know from him. And the verdict of the examiners would be classified in the computer; but someone would ‘know’ that Killashandra Ree had failed her vocal finals, and what the grounds for the failure were. In the meantime, she would have effectively disappeared and they could speculate. They’d remember, when she rose to prominence in another field. Then they’d marvel that nothing could suppress the excellence in her.
These reflections consoled Killashandra all the way to her lodgings. Students rated supported dwellings: no more the terrible bohemian semi-filth and overcrowding of old, but her room was hardly palatial. After she had failed to re-register at the Music Center, her landlady would be notified and the room locked to her. Subsistence living was abhorrent to Killashandra : it suggested an inability to achieve. But she’d take the initiative on that too. Therefore leave the room now. And all the memories it held.
Also, it would spoil her mysterious disappearance if she were to be ‘discovered moping in her digs.’ So, with a brief nod to the landlady who always checked comings and goings, Killashandra ascended to her floor, keyed open her room and looked around it. Really nothing here to take but clothing. Despite that decision, Killashandra packed the lute which she had handcrafted to satisfy that requirement of her profession. She couldn’t bear to play it but she also couldn’t abandon it. Clothes in carisak, lute in case, she left the key in the lock. She nodded to the landlady just as she always did and exited.
Having fulfilled the dramatic requirement of her assumed role, she now didn’t have an earthly idea what to do with herself. She skipped onto the fast belt of the pedestrian way, heading into the center of the city. She ought to register with a work bureau, she ought to apply for subsistence. She ought to do many things but suddenly Killashandra discovered that ‘ought to’ no longer ruled her. No more tedious commitments to schedule, to rehearsals, to lessons, to study, to any of her so-called friends and associates. She was free, utterly and completely free, with a lifetime ahead of her that ought to be filled. Ought to? With what?
The walkway was whipping her rapidly into the busier commercial stations of the city. Pedestrian directions flashed at cross-points: mercantile purple crossed with social services’ orange: green manufactory and dormitory blue-hatching; medical green-red stripes and then airport red and spaceport star-spangled blue.
Killashandra was enmeshed by indecision. And while she toyed with the variety of things she ought to do, she was carried past the crosspoints that would take her where she ought to go.
Ought to, again, she thought. And stayed on the speed-way. Half of Killashandra was amused that she, once so certain of her goal, could be so irresolute. It did not, at that moment, occur to her that she was suffering an intense, traumatic shock. Nor that she was reacting to that shock, first in a somewhat immature fashion with her abrupt withdrawal from the abortive sphere of interest; secondly in a mature one, as she divorced herself from the indulgence of self-pity and began a positive search for an alternative life.
She couldn’t know that Esmond Valdi was concerned about her, realizing that the girl would be reacting in some fashion to the death of her ambition. She might have thought more kindly of him had she known, though he hadn’t pursued her further than her study or do more than call to the Personnel Section to report his concern for her. He’d taken the comfortable conclusion that she was in some other student’s room, having a good cry. Knowing her dedication to music, he’d come to the equally incorrect assumption that she’d undoubtedly continue in music, accepting a choral leadership in due time. That’s where he wanted her. It simply didn’t occur to him that Killashandra would be able to discard ten years of intensive training in one split second. He would not have done so, faced with her decision. He’d have been shocked if he’d known how completely she was to reject all references to those ten years.
Killashandra was halfway to the spaceport before she came to the decision that that was where she ought to go. ‘Ought,’ this time not in an obligatory but in an investigative sense.
This planet held nothing but distressing memories for her. She’d leave it and erase all vestiges of its painful associations, domestic and career. Good thing she had the lute. She had sufficient training credentials to go along as a casual entertainer on some liner at the best, or as a crystal tuner at the worst. She might as well travel about a bit to see what else she ‘ought’ to do with her life now.
The ‘now’ both exacerbated and amused her until the speedway slowed to run into the spaceport terminal. For the first time since he’d left Maestro Valdi’s studio, Killashandra was aware of externals - people and things.
Come to think of it, she’d never actually been to the starburst-design spaceport. She’d never been on any of the welcoming committees for off-planet Stellars. A shuttle took off from its bay, its powerful plasma engines making the port buildings rumble. There was, however, a very disconcerting whine that she was subsonically aware of, feeling it down the mastoid bone right to her heel. She shook her head. The whine intensified - it must have to do with the shuttle - until she had to clamp her hands over her ears to cut the irritation. The sonics abated and she forgot the incident, wandering around the immense, bubble-domed reception hall of the port facility. Consoles were ranked across the inner wall, each one labeled with the name of the freight or passenger service, each with its screen plate. Faraway places with strange sounding names: an ancient fragment of song obtruded and was suppressed. No more music.
She paused at a portal to watch a shuttle off-loading cargo, the dockmen working with aircushions to remove odd-sized packages which had traveled by drone from who-knew-where in the galaxy. A supercargo was scurrying about, checking numbers against the arm-computer he wore, juggling weigh-units and arguing with the dockees. He was a bustling portentous man, utterly involved in his lot of life. Killashandra snorted. She’d have more than such trivia to occupy her energies. In the process of inhaling, she caught the whiff of appetising odors not entirely cleansed from the air.
She was hungry! Hungry? When her whole life had been shattered? How banal! But the odors made her salivate. Well, her credit plate ought to be good for a meal. She’d better check the balance lest she be embarrassed if the plate was spewed back out in the restaurant check-desk.
She slapped the credit plate into one of the many public outlets in the reception hall and was agreeably surprised to see that there’d been a credit that very day. A student credit she was forced to notice. Her last one. The fact that the total represented a bonus did not please her. A bonus to signalize the fact that she could never be a soloist?