“Right. Here we go.”
The intercom keyed off. “What was that about the time margin?” Bilko asked.
“Never mind,” I gritted. The damn kid must have had an alternative program figured out and ready to go before I even got there. Which meant the whole argument had been nothing more than him pushing me on the time rule, just to see if I’d bend. No absolutes; no rules; do whatever works or whatever you can get away with. Typical underbaked juvenile nonsense.
A deep C-sharp note sounded, and I felt my chair shaking slightly as the hull vibrated with the pre-music call. I shifted my attention to the forward viewport, staring unblinkingly out at the distant stars, and waited. Ten seconds later the C-sharp was replaced by the opening notes of the Brahms Double Concerto—
And with breathtaking suddenness the stars vanished.
I looked back down at my control board, disappointment mixing into my already irritated mood. Only once had I ever actually seen a flapblack as it came in, and I’d been trying ever since to repeat the experience. Not this time.
“We’ve got a good wrap,” Bilko reported, peering at his displays. “Inertial confirms four point six one light-years per hour.”
“Definitely a Blue, then.”
“Or a real slow Green,” Bilko said. “Computer’s still running the spectrum.”
I nodded, listening to the music and gazing out at the nothingness outside. And marveling as always at this strange symbiosis that humanity had found.
They were called flapblacks. Not a very imaginative name, and one which subsequent study had shown to be inaccurate anyway, but it had stuck now for five decades and there was no reason to assume it would ever get changed to something better. The first crew to run into one of the things had overscrubbed their meager sensor data until the creature had looked like a giant pancake shape wrapping itself around their ship and blocking off the starlight.
At which point, to their stunned amazement, it had picked up their ship and moved it.
As far as I knew, we still didn’t have the faintest idea how the flapblacks did what they did. The idea that an essentially insubstantial being that apparently lived its entire life in deep space could physically carry multiple tons of star transport across multiple light-years at rates of up to five light-years per hour, was utterly absurd. We didn’t know what they were made of, how they lived, what they ate, what else they did, how they reproduced, or how many of them per cubic light-year there were. In fact, when you boiled it down, there was virtually only one thing we did know about them.
And that was that they loved music. All kinds of music: modern, classical, folk melodies, Gregorian chants—you name it, some flapblack out there loved it. Play a clean musical tone through your hull and within seconds you’d have flapblacks crowding around like seagulls at a fish market. Start the music itself, and one of them would instantly wrap itself around the transport, and you’d be off for the stars.
“Spectrum’s coming up,” Bilko reported. “Yep—definitely a Blue.”
I nodded again in acknowledgment. The flapblacks themselves showed little internal structure, and of course no actual color at all. But it hadn’t taken long for someone to notice that, just as the transport was being wrapped, the incoming starlight experienced a brief moment of interference. Subsequent study had shown that the interference pattern looked and behaved like an absorption spectrum, with the lines from any given flapblack grouped together in a particular color of the spectrum.
That had been the key that had turned the original musical-shotgun approach into something more scientific. Flapblacks whose lines were in the red part of the spectrum were fairly slow, were apparently not strong enough to wrap transports above a certain mass, and came when you played musicals or opera. Orange flapblacks were faster and stronger and liked modern music—any kind—and Gregorian chants. I’d yet to figure that one out. Yellows were faster and stronger yet and liked jazz and classical rock/roll. Greens were still stronger, but now a little slower, and liked Baroque and Mozartian classical. Blues were the strongest of all, though slower than any of the others except Reds, and liked 19th-century romantic and any kind of folk melody.
It was the flapblacks and their love of our music that had finally freed humanity from Sol and allowed us to stretch out to the stars. More personally, of course, space travel was what provided me with my job, for which I was mostly grateful.
The catch was that it wasn’t just the music they needed. Or rather, it wasn’t the music alone. Which was, unfortunately, where musicmasters like Jimmy came in.
You see, you couldn’t just play the music straight for them. That would have been too easy. What you had to have was someone aboard the transport listening to the music as you pumped it out through the hull.
And not just listening; I mean listening. He had to sit there doing nothing the whole time, following every note and rest and crescendo, letting his emotions swell and ebb with the flow. Basically, just really getting into the music.
The experts called it psycho-stereo, which like most fancy words was probably created to cover up the fact that they didn’t know any more about this than they did anything else about the flapblacks. Best guess—heavy emphasis on guess—was that what the flapblacks actually liked was getting the music straight while at the same time hearing it filtered through a human mind. They almost certainly were getting the pre-music call tele-pathically—until they wrapped, there was no other way for them to pick up the sound in the vacuum of space.
However it worked, the bottom line was that I couldn’t handle the job. Neither could Bilko or Rhonda. Sure, we all liked music, but we also all had other duties and responsibilities to attend to during the flight. Even if we hadn’t, I doubt any of us had the kind of single-track mind that would let us do something that rigid for hours at a time. And you had to keep it up—one slip and your flap-black would be long gone and you’d have to stop and pull in another one.
That wasn’t a problem in itself, of course; there were always flapblacks hanging around waiting to be entertained. The problem came in not knowing to the microsecond exactly how long you’d been traveling. At flapblack speeds, a second’s worth of error translated into a lot of undershoot or overshoot on your target planet.
And even apart from all that, I personally still wouldn’t have wanted the job. I’ve always considered my emotions to be my own business, and the thought of letting some alien will-o’-the-wisp listen in was right next to chewing sand on my list of things I didn’t like to think about.
Enter Jimmy and the rest of the mu-sicmaster corps. They were the ones who actually made star travel possible. People like Bilko, Rhonda, and me were just here to keep them alive along the way, and to handle the paperwork at the end of the trip.
It was a train of thought I’d been running along quite a lot lately, more or less beginning with our previous musicmaster’s departure two months ago and Jimmy’s arrival. My digestion was definitely the worse for it.
“Looks like everything’s smooth here,” Bilko commented, pulling his lucky deck of cards from his shirt pocket. “Quick game?”
“No, thanks,” I said, looking at the cards with distaste. Considering that it purported to be a lucky deck, those cards had gotten Bilko into more trouble over the years. I’d lost track of how many times I’d had to pacify some pickup game partner who refused to believe that Bilko’s winnings were due solely to skill.
“OK,” he said equably, fanning the deck. “Want to draw cards for first turn in the dayroom, then?”