“We’ll soothe them into catatonia,” I promised, signaling to my cohorts that it was time to get out of there. We stood up and started to leave.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he honked shrilly before we’d gone a dozen steps.
We stopped and looked back. In the instant our backs had been turned his glass had been magically refilled. “Going to practice,” I explained.
He pointed at our feet with a shaking finger. “Would you be so kind as to leave by the door?”
We looked down. Sure enough, we’d gone straight through one of the walls. Well, we were escaping.
“Sorry,” I said. We recrossed the invisible wall and this time departed through the non-existent door.
“And don’t slam it after you,” Rube whispered as we went over the theoretical threshold.
We hadn’t gotten much of a look at our prospective audience on the way in from the shuttle to the Embassy, and that situation didn’t change much as a staffer escorted us back. All we saw was some indistinct activity off in the distance, like big red ants walking upright. Because of the sk’rrli Wall Ban there was no fence around the Embassy. The distance the natives kept suggested that they found something offensive about the place. Maybe it was the Eau de Disinfectantte. My money was on it being Dork.
Once we were seated in our shuttle it lifted off and headed back toward where our ship was parked on a high, all but airless plateau some 500 kilometers away—skipships are never left where the natives can get their hands, claws or tentacles on them.
“We’re not going to practice the Vivaldi, are we, Mo?” Maire asked hopefully.
I just smiled.
Rube squinted at me. “You know that we know it by heart. Hell, I bet someone could cut our heads off, hand us our instruments, and we could still play it note-perfect.”
I remained silent, but let my smile grow a bit wider.
Maire grinned and clapped her hands. “It’s Name Time!”
“Screw,” I began.
“Screw who?” Rube breathed.
“Screw Dork.”
“Dork!” Maire hooted. “Perfect!”
Rube bowed. “You, sir, remain the master.”
This was one of our many little sanity-preserving rituals. As senior member I held the baton, leading Triaxion. One of the self-imposed demands of my high office was coming up with a nickname for whatever clown had requisitioned us like were some piece of equipment: Musical Ensemble/ Trio/String/Classical.
“And as for practicing the Vivaldi…” I continued, pausing for maximum effect. Both were nodding and grinning, waiting for the word.
“Well, I think I’d rather see us die.”
They applauded. I took my bow, accepting their accolade.
Rube had been part of the trio for nearly a year at that point. Maire had come on board some four months before him. I’ve been doing this longer than I care to remember, and had held the baton for nearly eight years by the time we played Sk’rrl.
We spent weeks at a time cooped up in our ship, getting from one gig to the next. Superluminal travel takes next to no time at all compared to rockets and stuff like that, but it still takes just over two hours to sneak edgewise around a single light-year—which meant our 200+ ly trip from Driffel IV to Sk’rrl took just shy of three weeks.
That’s ample time to turn even the mildest-mannered musician into a slavering homicidal maniac. Diversion was of supreme importance, especially since sex was out—both Rube and I were purehet and Maire absolez. Over the years I’ve assembled various social mechanisms to help avoid bloodshed.
We each had our own extensive entertainment libraries. Most nights one of us would take on the mantle of EJ, programming group viewing and listening. We also took turns choosing the evening meals, and followed an arcane, complicated system of trading food and menu control privileges for small favors, game partner duty and the EJ anchorship.
And of course we practiced, practiced, practiced every day, even though each of us had indeed played Carnegie Hall. This was done both solo and as a group. To spice that up I had come up with the die.
When we got back to our ship and reached our practice space I removed the dodecahedral superbounce rubber die from the ornately carved hikkawood case we’d gotten for it on Klaaaam. Each of our names was inscribed on four faces on the die. Whoever’s name came up got the baton for that session and picked the material we would practice.
My taste ran to idiosyncratic arrangements of Bach, Mozart and Grieg, mid-20th Jazz from Ellington, Basie and Charles, and have an unending fascination with early 21st South African composer Jaan Biko’s “Uhuru” movement concertos. Maire went in for madrigals, Baroque, traditional Celtic, Middle Eastern funeral music, and Classic Pop of the late 20th. Rube’s choices were too wildly eclectic to be pigeonholed, though he’d made his concert mark with highly acclaimed interpretations of Bartok, Liszt, Rostropovich, Shostakovich, and Elvis Havel.
I tossed the die. It bounced erratically around, finally coming to rest at Maire’s feet. She bent down to read the verdict. “I guess you’re it, Rube.” she announced.
He grinned like an evil cherub. “Excellent choice, Lady Luck. Shall we?”
We took our seats and turned on our music stands. I touched the stud that turned the baton over to him, making his stand the master and ours slaves. Both Maire’s and my displays blanked while he made his selection. Every music student at some time plays “Stump the Stand,” a game that’s all but unwinnable. A Frewer Concert Grand music stand has well over 71 million pieces of music stored in its memory, and back in the home system updates are automatically done weekly. So the score to everything from the latest Aleutopop chant to the most obscure medieval madrigal like The Wart on Friar Frederick’s Fanny is there for the asking. With all that at his fingertips, Rube could present us with literally anything.
When my display cleared it showed the opening measures of Robot Spider Tarantella by Lunar composer Faisal Frick, a half-hour long virtuoso piece bursting at the seams with highspeed arpeggios and minor key contrapuntal runs. Frick was quite often called “Cyberbach” because of the extraordinarily complex mathematical structure of his work.
“This ought to be fun,” I said, picking up my violinna, powering it up and hitting autotune. Maire did the same. Rube got his cellotta in position, took a couple of sword-slashes with his bow, then regarded us with a raised eyebrow. “Are we ready?”
In the arrangement he’d chosen I had the opening notes. I answered by striking them, and away we went into that magical place where we breathe life into music, and it breathes life into us in return.
Like I said before, we were all basically conscripts. But don’t let that fool you; each of us was accomplished enough to play with the finest orchestras, and had. It was just that a combination of bad luck and certain personal disasters had put us in the contractual clutches of the ETDS. Maire had been trying to put a failed love affair behind her, wanted to see really far-off places, and so one dark night of the soul in Dubuque she’d enlisted. Rube had hanky-pankied himself into a situation where getting outsystem and thereby beyond the reach of a certain cuckolded and Colt-carrying cellisticidal Czech conductor had been prudent.
Each of us had considerable experience in performing both pure Classical and Pops repertoire, and could play literally anything on first sight. We put in a lot of practice time, and as a working trio played like we were telepathically linked. You name it and we could play the hell out of it.