Roll Over Vivaldi
by Stephen L. Burns
Illustration by Dell Harris
The concert was going badly. The audience was getting ugly.
And I mean ugly. They were completely and indelibly redefining the word and concept in a way I hope to never see matched again.
This was about three years ago, when Triaxion was playing on a planet named Sk’rrl. The average adult sk’rrli is about two and a half meters tall, and looks like an unhappy cross between a cooked lobster and an anorexic grizzly bear. Now take several hundred of these hulking creatures and whip them into a sort of lynch mob/soccer riot/piranha smorgasbord mood. Face that with an instrument in your hand and you begin to get the sinking feeling that any encores you might perform are going to be on harp, with heavenly choir for backup.
Being sensible folks, Maire, Rube and I—a string trio who performed under the name Triaxion—were scared spitless.
The only positive aspect of our situation was that dumb embasstard we called Dork was even more terrified than we were. If we were crapping bricks, he was on the verge of filling his pants with entire buildings. He had good reason. The sk’rrli who had him in their pincered paws seemed inclined to tear him limb from limb, eat him alive, or both.
It was definitely the low point of our concert.
“You must be joking.”
Those were the ambassador’s first words as he stared across his desk at us. Not Hi, how was your trip? (after all, we had traveled two hundred and some odd light-years to get there) or even an insincere, but at least minimally polite Welcome to Sk’rrl. The expression on his long face matched this disdainful greeting. He had a lemon-sucker’s mouth, a gin-drinker’s breath, gimlet eyes, and the nostrils of his piccolo nose were flared as if smelling something bad. Nice hair though, a flowing silver mane that looked almost manufactured.
Maire, Rube and I exchanged a covert glance. Maire rolled her eyes. Rube grinned and turned to face Ambassador Dorchester Hepplewhyte, who in that moment forever became Dork in my mind.
“Three musicians meet at a bar after work,” Rube intoned as if imparting critical wisdom. “A violinist, a flautist, and a pianist. The violinist puts down a five and orders a beer. The flautist does the same. The pianist hauls out a big wad of bills, peels off a hundred, slaps it down and says, ‘Give me the best wine this dive has to offer.’ The other two musicians stare at him a moment, then drag him off his stool and beat the living hell out of him.”
Dork stared at Rube, face squinched with a mixture of bafflement and pique. “What the devil are you talking about?” he demanded.
Rube’s grin took on a crazy edge. “Pianist envy.”
Maire and I couldn’t help snickering, both at the old joke and the look that appeared on Dork’s face. He looked like a man who had just bit into something crunchy at the very moment he was noticing half a cockroach in his caviar. I knew that we had just dropped another dozen strata in his estimation. I should have cared more than I did, but I ask you, how much weight can you really give the opinion of someone with a name like Dork?
Like space itself, the system essentially sucks. Every bureaucracy by its very nature creates a vacuum into which are drawn megamounts of malingering, monotony, monomania, malfeasance, misguided machinations, and just plain muddle. The ETDS (the Extra Terrestrial Diplomatic Service) is a mind-numbingly humongous bureaucracy; the sort of human enterprise which could become truly dangerous if it ever managed to run at more than 5 percent efficiency.
Dork’s expectations had been clearly and abysmally failed by our arrival. Had been failed by the three of us. What he had done was requisition a cadre of classical musicians from the ETDS’s Cultural Assets Branch, and it was obvious that he’d thought he would get a small orchestra, or at the very minimum an octet. Now he could only conclude that his mission didn’t rate as high as he thought, because all he’d gotten was a lousy trio.
He could probably have swallowed that slight—diplomats snack on slights the way other folks munch salted peanuts—except that in a certain kind of mind the concept of a classical ensemble raised certain cliched expectations. Dork obviously had that sort of mind, and we’d missed his mental mark by even further than we’d traveled to get there. Of course it was a rather small target.
It would have been easy to adopt a screw him attitude. Actually, just meeting him made it nearly impossible not to. But like it or not, we did have to get along with him. Although all three of us were world-class musicians and products of the finest conservatories, we were basically conscripts and our future partly hung on his performance report. The only way to stop being part of the Cultural Big Stick the ETDS kept whacking poor defenseless alien races with was to gain enough plus points for a discharge. He had points to give, and reeked parsimony.
As leader of our admittedly motley troupe it was my job to make nice, mend fences, smooth ruffled feathers and kiss up. I forced a smile.
“Rupert is quite a kidder,” I said in a placating tone, “and the warpout drugs tend to make him giddy.” I offered my hand. “I’m Schlomo Kessel, first violinna and leader of Triaxion.”
Dropping my name made him blink in surprise. It even retuned his estimation upward a bit from b-flat. He leaned forward to give my hand a limp, damp squeeze, trying to hide a frisson of fazement. I have a certain fame—and infamy. I think he was almost impressed enough to write off my faded aloha shirt, patched jeans, and crusty sandals as personal eccentricity.
I went on to introduce my fellow musicians, preferring to jump over my own checkered past. “This lovely lady is Maire MacAuff Matsumi, violinna and viola la bamba. She has, among other honors, played first violin and violinna with the Glasgow, Dublin, London, and Tokyo Philharmonics.” Maire curtseyed and coyly batted her eyelashes at Dork. Their having been threed into tiny writhing snakes put a bit of hurt in her flirt, but they went with her ragged black cryptozoid weeds and white marbleized buzzcut. Dork managed a queasy smile in return.
Next I indicated Rube, his chubby body resplendent in a glittering hololame jacket, mustard paisley biballs and fluorescent puce Shooz. “Our third member is of course the famous soloist Rupert Czaro, cellotta and occasional stand-up comedy.”
“Let us hope the occasion is over,” Dork sniffed haughtily, gesturing that we should sit. We got three wobbly straightback buttnumbers facing him. He settled back into the chair behind his desk, a padded monster only a few jewels and a bit of gilding shy of being a throne.
“I’m sure it is,” I answered, shooting Rube a warning glance. He tried to look innocent with no particular success.
“Good.” Dork sighed, clasping his manicured hands before him. “My life is quite difficult enough as it is on this madhouse of a planet. Unspoiled, they said when they assigned me here.” His dour mouth twisted. “Savage would have been a better description. Beastly. Why, the natives here are so uncouth they won’t even let us have walls!” He refilled a glass from the silver pitcher at his elbow, downed half of it. A flush suffused his face and the sharp scent of gin wafted over us.
“I’d kind of wondered about that,” I admitted. The embassy had a roof and floor, but not a single interior or exterior wall. The various rooms inside it had been marked off by lines painted on the floor. The staffer who had escorted us from the pad had ignored the lines until she got close to the Dork Zone at the building’s center.
“They found the very idea of walls insulting. They are exceedingly, ah, up-front about everything in what passes for their society. They have sex in public and quite loudly. They bathe by licking each other. As for bathrooms.…” He shuddered, a pinched and haunted look misting his eyes.