He started soft, barely sounding the notes, and played “Burgundy Street Blues” all the way through without raising his voice. As he played “What Did I Do” some of the huddled figures slowly sat up and listened, backs and heads to the wall, looking up at the ceiling or the yellow squares of the grate.
Then he played the new songs, written by miners’ bands and only heard in the bars scattered through their asteroids. He played “Ceres,” and “Hidalgo,” and “Vesta Joys”; he played his “Shaft Bucket Blues” and “I Got Me a Feeling.” Then he played “Don’t God Live Out This Far,” one of the first of the miner blues, which made it about twenty years old; and people began to join him. These were miners, men who seldom sang in the bars, seldom did more than stomp their boots or shout something between phrases; and at first their singing was an awkward sort of growl, barely in tune or time with Sidney. But he picked them up and more joined in, hesitantly, till you could make out the words of the refrain:
There were about thirty verses to the song. It was about a miner who keeps getting in trouble, till JM decides to finish him: “Super comes at shift-start for me to be hung, on account of something that I hadn’t done.” The Supervisor believes he’s innocent, but there’s no proof. It was the same old, old thing.
When the singing got loud enough Sidney took off from the melody and floated up above it. And they sang! There was something in it that seemed to take my lungs away, so I could only breathe quick and shallow; it was what they had of the music inside themselves. Just hearing someone’s voice in the dark, and knowing his life has a long way to go…
The light from the door just caught the plumes of breath frosting out from the men singing. I looked over at the mute. His eyes were open, staring out somewhere in space. As I watched he lifted up his hands and started a little syncopated clap, very soft, giving as much to the music as he could. When Sidney beard it he looked down at him, then looked back up; he played louder, filling the room with his sound, till the clarinet was all we heard or needed to hear, and the last verse carne to its end.
“Oh yeah,” said a quiet voice.
Sidney looked at the mute, smiled, shook his head. “A little blues for us, eh, brother?” he said. “A little slave music.”
The mute nodded and grinned, which made his lip crack open again and spill blood down his chin.
Sidney laughed at him and wiped some of the blood from the mute’s face. “Oh yeah,” he said softly, “a little miner music.”
We found Sidney just where Hook guessed he might be, huddled in the room where our baggage and instruments were stored. He was perched up on the box that Crazy’s tuba traveled in, with his shoulders hunched arid his legs crossed. When we burst into the room he jumped and then settled back, head down, staring sullenly across at us. His clarinet lay fitted in his arms. We all stood still, barred and hidden in the shadows thrown by the single bulb behind us, waiting for somebody to say something. The wisps of hair Sidney combed across his head looked thicker because of the shadows they cast on his bald pate. He looked like one of the tunnel-gnomes men claim to see on Pallas; creatures who were once men maybe, who escaped JM by living in the old shafts. I had never noticed how small he was.
“You scared?” Hook asked.
Sidney raised his head to stare at Hook better, “Yeah, I am,” he said suddenly, loud in the dim room, “shouldn’t I be?”
“Hey, Sidney.” I said, “you don’t got no reason to be scared—”
“Don’t got no reason!” He pointed at me, clarinet still in hand. “Don’t you say that shit to me, Shaky. I got the best reason possible to be scared.” He jumped down from the box. “The best reason possible. This is a contest, boy, we ain’t playing to please these folks, we playing to show them that we better musicianers than all them others! And if we don’t show them that, if we don’t win one of them grants, we gone. We back to the mines, boy, and we’ll work in those shafts until JM has broke us so we can’t work no more, and we’ll never get to see the Earth. So don’t tell me I got no reason to be scared.”
“Come on, Sidney, you can’t think like that,” I said, searching for something I could say to him. “it ain’t so bad as—”
“Sidney,” Hook said, like I hadn’t been talking at all (suddenly I see a picture in my head, of Sidney crouched down and shifting through a four-foot-high tunnel, Hook straddled senseless across his back, one of his hands clamped white around Hook’s wrist, which ended in a tangle of bloody filaments; shouting instructions in furious fearful high voice to the men trying to get the airlock opened), I stepped back and let Hook talk to him.
“Sidney,” he said, “you ain’t thought this out. They been putting one over on you. You’re talking like this contest is a big vital thing, like we got some chance of going out there and winning one of them grants. Sidney, we got no chance, don’t you realize that?”
“Hook—” I objected.
“No, you listen to me, we got no chance. You seen all those other musicianers here—those folks been doing nothing but play music all their lives, they playing all those fancy machines and doing things with music we don’t even know about! And we just a bunch of miners playing some old Earth-type of music that just showed up a few years back, and only ‘cause JM salvaged a ship full of band instruments and give them to us so we’d stay out of fights! And you still think we got a chance?”
Sidney and I stared at him.
“No way,” he continued grimly, “no more’n there’s a chance that JM will retire us at forty and send us to Mars. They got us here just so they can say they got folks from everywhere, even the rocks, and they going to give the grants to those fancy-ass musicianers, not us. So just exactly what you said is going to happen, Sidney, when this thing is over they going to send us back to the rocks to work and work, every third shift, till some equipment catches you or some tunnel collapses”—waving his hooks so they flashed silver in front of us—”and then, if you’re still alive, they’ll dump you on Vesta rock and wait for you to die.
“And the only way you got to show how you feel about that, Sidney, is through that horn, through that skinny black horn of yours. When you get out there they going to be looking down on you, just like they always have, and all you can do about it is to play that thing! play it so hard they got to see you! play it and show them what kind of music a man plays when he works all his life digging in those fucking rocks!”
“He stopped, gulped in some air. Sidney and I didn’t make a sound. Suddenly he turned and walked over to the baggage, rummaged around a bit, then found the trunk he wanted and pulled it around so he could unstrap it and fling it open. He reached in and pulled out a long white bottle, held it high in the dim light white he unscrewed it. He turned it upside down to his mouth and took a long pull.
“Eeeow!” he whooped. He held it out toward Sidney. “So what say we have a drink of the White Brother, brother, and then go play us some music.”
I looked at Sidney. I don’t think I’d ever seen him indulge in the White Brother; he hardly even drank beer.
“I believe I will,” Sidney said, and swallowed near half the bottle.