As we practiced we had absolutely no idea that the very next evening we’d be giving the performance of our lives. Because we’d be playing for our lives.
Not knowing stuff like that is good, I guess. Makes getting out of bed in the morning a bit easier.
After breakfast on concert day Rube and Maire took the shuttle back to the enclave. Maire wanted to do some sightseeing and a bit of amateur exoanthropology—pursuits a bit at odds with the persona she cultivates. Rube’s sole interest outside music is sex, and it was a given that his plan was to find some female staffer who would be susceptible to his pudgy Gypsy charms.
Maire always said we were fools for not making the most of our time spent on these alien planets by experiencing and learning all we could. She was probably right. Rube always said I was a moron for not trying to make some whoopee while there were some potential whoopee-makers to be made. A little of his brand of exploration would no doubt have done me some good as well. Yet with both these options open to me, I always chose to stay behind and revel in having the whole ship to myself.
I got on extremely well with both of them and their predecessors, but I also enjoyed and truly needed solitude. This is largely because of who I am and what I used to be.
Yes, I’m that Schlomo Kessel, the child prodigy who was playing Mozart on the violinna by age four, and composing full concertos by age six. By age ten I had already been guest soloist with several of the major Philharmonics for the performance of the two symphonies I had written by then.
Classical music goes through periodic cycles of being in vogue, and then being regarded as yawno stuff strictly for fogeys and firps. I had the luck, for good or ill, to come along during a period when it was considered absovac, and I became one of its hottest stars. From the very first my family recognized my talent and treated me like a marketable commodity with a limited shelf-life. My childhood couldn’t have been stranger if I’d been raised by pimps and hammerhead sharks; I was money and meat to them. By age fourteen I was an erratic, overextended, substance-sucking burnout, and by seventeen a hopeless basket case—all this under the unblinking scrutiny of media insatiable for scandal and milking my meteoric rise and ignominious implosion for all it was worth.
Not long after my twenty-first birthday a music-loving guard at the Alabama county prison where I was residing, thanks to vagrancy and public subtoxication charges, recognized me as that Mo Kessel. Bubba X’s attempts to get me some help caught the attention of the ETDS, who are always on the lookout for beleaguered talent to dragoon. They bailed me out and had me detoxxed, a process not unlike wringing out a towel used to mop the floor after an earthquake at a pharmacy. Once I was semi-coherent one of their lawyers walked me through a proper bankruptcy (as opposed to the kind I had managed on my own), then explained that by availing myself of their services I had enlisted for a three-year minimum hitch.
I was thirty-five when we played Sk’rrl. You do the math.
My happiest, most contented moments outside of playing music come from being totally alone in a place hundreds or even thousands of light-years from the media, from my former fame, and from a family that would no doubt do their damnedest to turn me back into their meal ticket if I ever returned.
Rube and Maire returned late that afternoon. Rube wore his smug and goofy I got lucky! grin and headed straight to his compartment for a post-coital nap. Apparently the lack of privacy hadn’t put him off. I’m not sure what would.
Maire and I settled into the galley for some tea and cookies, another of our little rituals. She always felt it was her duty to report on her explorations so I’d have some vague idea as to where we were. We always made a minor event of it by having a debriefing tea.
This time there was a serious, pensive air about her that made me vaguely uneasy. I poured and asked her if the place was as bad as Dork had said.
“No,” she replied after a moment’s frowning thought. “Dork said the sk’rrli are savage, but they’re not. Not the way he meant it, anyway. Just very primitive, and totally without artifice.”
“How so?” I asked. Maire’s voice is lovely, a warm smoky alto totally at odds with the zombie cryptozoid image she cultivates. I admit I had a secret desire to have her whisper sultry suggestions in my ear in the dark, but knew that wasn’t going to happen unless I got a genbed.
“They’re like their music—which is actually quite interesting. Very direct. Simple emphatic statements with no subtext. Music made to provoke a direct response, not subtly invoke a mood or image. Think late 20th Rap or various aboriginal war chants. I recorded some if you want to hear it later.”
“Sure.” I scratched my chin. “Are they as, well, less than pretty as they looked from a distance?”
That made her laugh. “Oh yeah. The embassy staff call them lobbears, and it fits. The adults are huge, with patches of ratty red fur over shiny red chitin. Body shaped like and almost as heavy as a bear’s, thick arms and legs with exposed joints. Big paws, with these nasty looking pincers instead of claws. Lobster eyes and feelers, bearish muzzle, lots of teeth.”
I suppressed a shudder. “Well, I suppose their children are cute.”
She grinned and shook her head. “No, not really.”
“What kind of audience do you think they’ll make?”
Her grin faded and she toyed with the handle of her teacup. “I’m not sure. They do like music, and make quite a lot of it. But I’m not so sure what Dork wants us to play is the sort of thing they will appreciate.”
I shrugged. “Well, what’s the worst that can happen if we bomb? They’ll just boo—or whatever it is they do.”
“Maybe…” she replied, stretching the word out.
“What?” The look on her face was not encouraging.
“These people don’t hide their feelings, Mo. They respond to things forcefully and directly. I saw a child take a mrr’hhg away from another child. It’s mother didn’t say No no no or slap its paw. She just grabbed the kid’s hand and tore a couple of pincers off it.”
I nearly spilled my tea. “She what?”
“I know. Edwina—the staffer I met who acted as my guide—explained that the pincers will grow back, and to the sk’rrli mind the new ones will be less likely to latch on to others’ things. Like I said before, these folks are unswervingly direct. If a male and female get the hots for each other they have sex right then and there, and make as much noise as they can to let everyone else know how good it is. If they get mad at each other they fight it out. If one wants another’s nest mound, he or she goes right over and says so. Either a trade is struck, the mound-hunter accepts no for an answer, or they tussle for it. They’re a little, um, prone to violence.”
I had to ask. “What do you think they might do if they don’t like what we play?”
She met my gaze squarely, solemnly. “It could get ugly.”
Her words made me shiver then and now. Maybe it was some broguey whisper of her partially Celtic bloodlines which gave her the gift of prophecy.
We talked a little about being on our toes during the concert, then went to our respective compartments to rest up for it. Since we all grabbed a quick bite to eat while we dressed, I didn’t get a chance to talk to Rube until the shuttle ride to the enclave. I tried to make him understand what we might be facing, but didn’t get far. He was too buoyantly positive that seeing him perform on stage would drive the woman he’d found that afternoon into a frenzied hunger for an encore, and wasn’t thinking with any part of his anatomy above his cummerbund.