A Separate War and Other Stories (7 page)

“So you invite us to be slaughtered instead,” he said. “Me and your two representatives here.”

“I'll tell them to cease fire immediately.”

All this conversation was going on with a twenty-second time lag. So “immediately” would be a while in coming.

Without comment, the two Taurans disappeared, and the forty duplicate humans filed back through the dome.

“All right,” Eagle said, “perhaps there is a way around this time lag. Which of you is the ranking officer here?”

“I am,” I said.

“Most of my individuals have returned to an underground shelter. I will turn off your stasis field and our defenses simultaneously.

“Tell them they must stop firing immediately. If we die, our defenses resume, and they won't have the protection of the stasis field.”

I chinned the command frequency, which would put me in contact with Cat and Sergeant Hencken as soon as the field disappeared.

“I don't like this,” Morales said. “You can turn your weapons on and off with a thought?”

“That's correct.”

“We can't. When Captain Potter gives them the order, they have to understand and react.”

“But it's just turning off a switch, is it not?” There was another huge bang, and a web of cracks appeared in the wall to my left. Man looked at it without emotion.

“First a half dozen people have to understand the order and decide to obey it!”

The male and female smiled and nodded in unison. “Now.”

Thumbnail pictures of Karl and Cat appeared next to Morales. “Cat! Karl! Have the weapons units cease fire immediately!”

“What's going on?” Karl said. “Where's the stasis field?”

“They turned it off. Battle's over.”

“That's right,” Morales said. “Cease fire.”

Cat started talking to the squads. Karl stared for a second and started to do the same.

Not fast enough. The left wall exploded in a hurricane of masonry and chunks of metal. The two Men were suddenly bloody rags of shredded flesh. Morales and I were knocked over by the storm of rubble. My armor was breached in one place; there was a ten-second beep while it repaired itself.

Then vacuum silence. The one light on the opposite wall dimmed and went out. Through the hole our cannon had made, the size of a large window, the starlit wasteland strobed in silent battle.

The three thumbnails were gone. I chinned down again for command freek. “Cat? Morales? Karl?”

Then I turned on a headlight and saw that Morales was dead, his suit peeled open at the chest, lungs and heart in tatters under ribs black with dried blood.

I chinned sideways for the general freek and heard a dozen voices shouting and screaming in confusion.

So Cat was probably dead, and Karl, too. Or maybe their communications had been knocked out.

I thought about that possibility for a few moments, hoping and rejecting hope, listening to the babble. Then I realized that if I could hear all those privates, corporals, they could hear me.

“This is Potter,” I said. “
Captain
Potter,” I yelled.

I stayed on the general freek and tried to explain the strange situation. Five did opt to stay outside. The others met me under the yellow light, which framed the top of a square black blast door that rose out of the ground at a forty-five-degree angle, like our tornado shelter at home, thousands of years ago, hundreds of light-years away. It slid open, and we went in, carrying four fighting suits whose occupants weren't responding but weren't obviously dead.

One of those was Cat, I saw as we came into the light when the airlock door closed. The back of the helmet had a blast burn, but I could make out VERDEUR.

She looked bad. A leg and an arm were missing at shoulder and thigh. But they had been snipped off by the suit itself, the way my arm had been at Tet-2.

There was no way to tell whether she was alive, since the telltale on the back of the helmet was destroyed. The suit had a biometric readout, but only a medic could access it directly, and the medic and his suit had been vaporized.

Man led us into a large room with a row of bunks and a row of chairs. There were three other Men there, but no Taurans, which was probably wise.

I popped out of my suit and didn't die, so the others did the same, one by one. The amputees we left sealed in their suits, and Man agreed that it was probably best. They were either dead or safely unconscious: if the former, they'd been dead for too long to bring back; if the latter, it would be better to wake them up in the
Bolivar
's surgery. The ship was only two hours away, but it was a long two hours for me.

As it turned out, she lived, but I lost her anyhow, to relativity. She and the other amputees were loaded, still asleep, onto the extra cruiser, and sent straight to Heaven.

They did it in one jump, no need for secrecy anymore, and we went to Stargate in one jump aboard
Bolivar
.

When I'd last been to Stargate it had been a huge space station; now it was easily a hundred times as large, a man-made planetoid. Tauran-made, and Man-made.

We learned to say it differently:
Man
, not man.

Inside, Stargate was a city that dwarfed any city on the Earth I remembered—though they said now there were cities on Earth with a billion Men, humans, and Taurans.

We spent weeks considering and deciding on which of many options we could choose to set the course of the rest of our lives. The first thing I did was check on William, and no miracle had happened; his Strike Force had not returned from Sade-138. But neither had the Tauran force sent to annihilate them.

I didn't have the option of hanging around Stargate, waiting for him to show up; the shortest scenario had his outfit arriving in over three hundred years. I couldn't really wait for Cat, either; at best she would get to Stargate in thirty-five years. Still young, and me in my sixties. If, in fact, she chose to come to Stargate; she would have the option of staying on Heaven.

I could chase her to Heaven, but then
she
would be thirty-five years older than me. If we didn't pass one another in transit.

But I did have one chance. One way to outwit relativity.

Among the options available to veterans was Middle Finger, a planet circling Mizar. It was a nominally heterosexual planet—het or home was now completely a matter of choice; Man could switch you one way or the other in an hour.

I toyed with the idea of “going home,” becoming lesbian by inclination as well as definition. But men still appealed to me—men not Man—and Middle Finger offered me an outside chance at the one man I still truly loved.

Five veterans had just bought an old cruiser and were using it as a time machine—a “time shuttle,” they called it, zipping back and forth between Mizar and Alcor at relativistic speed, more than two objective years passing every week. I could buy my way onto it by using my back pay to purchase antimatter fuel. I could get there in one collapsar jump, having left word for William, and if he lived, could rejoin him in a matter of months or years.

The decision was so easy it was not a decision; it was as automatic as being born. I left him a note:

9

From
The New Voice
, Paxton, Middle Finger 24–6
14/2/3143
OLD-TIMER HAS FIRST BOY

When I was married I played in a pretty good band and made pretty good money, but when the marriage went south so did I. Wound up being a sideman in a college town in Florida. Jazz and swing and rock, whatever—need a banjo, I can frail along; pluck a mandolin.

Or a lute. How I got the lute, and the lute got me, is a story.

A sideman's a musical hired gun, and a chameleon. You learn to pick up the lead's style really fast and get under it. You make them happy and you get more work; word gets around.

I was a noodler as a kid, with a no-name classical guitar my father left sitting around. Always had a good ear. When a song came up on the radio I'd pick up that soft-string and just start playing along somewhere in the middle of the fingerboard. I learned how to read music with piano lessons, but the main thing was always ear to fingers without too much brain in between. That turned out to serve me well.

I also did a little teaching at a local music store, classical on Wednesdays and rock on Thursdays. That eked out my sideman income, which was irregular all the time and shrank to almost nothing in the summer—bands that book college towns when the students are away don't make enough money to hire someone like me. (Someone who's the best damned guitar player in town, and modest besides.)

The teaching gig is how I met Laura, got the lute, fell in love, and turned my life into something mad and magical. And I do mean madness and magic, not metaphor.

I later found out that Laura had seen me perform at a gig that turned out to be a kind of one-man-band freak show. It was a pretty good folk-rock quintet that changed its name about once a week. When I worked for them they were Jerry & the Winos, though if you've ever heard of them it was probably as Baked Alaska, with their hit single and album “Straighten Up and Die Right.” Cheerful bunch.

Anyhow, one of Jerry's winos was poleaxed with something like Montezuma's Revenge—they'd just come from New Mexico and figured the spices might have gotten him, not to mention the thirty-two-hour drive. So they hired me to pick up for the guy, who doubled on twelve-string and electric bass, no problem.

(I have an apartment so full of musical instruments that you have to move one to sit down. That's relevant.)

It turned out that it wasn't the food, though, but a bug, and the quintet that had become a quartet wound up being just Jerry and me, with the rest of his band in the hospital. Jerry may have beaten the the thing because he was such a total drug addict that he couldn't tell the difference between being sick and being well. Or maybe the heroin killed off all those microorganisims before it finally killed Jerry, six or seven years later.

But that was one hell of a gig. He had the lungs and the energy of his namesake Garcia, and a kind of stoned concentration that was a marvel to watch. The afternoon three of his guys took a fast cab to join their buddy in the GI ward, Jerry and his sound man laid out all their arrangements on the floor of the stage and we walked down the line, the two of them basically arguing about what instrument I was going to play when. Jerry knew I could play anything from a Roland to a rattle, and he decided to make a virtue out of a necessity—not to mention saving a few hundred bucks by not hiring another sideman or three.

I was in seventh heaven. I also got a lot of ego gratification and local publicity out of it, because Jerry was generous in explaining what had happened and how I'd saved his sorry butt. So I just danced from keyboard to fingerboard; frets to fretless—if there'd been a saxophone onstage I would've tried to learn it. We had it set up so Jerry went between electric and acoustic while I went from one music stand to the next, reading like a son of a bitch on five instruments. Jerry vetoed the sound man when he wanted to use the Roland's computer-generated percussion, which was good. Jerry did rhythm while I did lead, and vice versa. By the end of the second night we were playing like we'd been together forever, and Jerry said if the other guys weren't pals, he'd leave 'em in the hospital and we could hit the road together.

But he and the Winos moved on, and I went back to doing what I did, with one huge difference: Laura had been there both nights. Friday with a date, and then Saturday alone.

I hadn't seen her—with the lights you don't see a lot past the stage—and if I had, I probably wouldn't have taken special notice. She was one of those women who could be beautiful when she wanted to be, but preferred the anonymity of being plain. A kind of protective coloration: whatever she was, it wasn't ordinary.

She showed up the next Wednesday at the store and asked about classical lessons. No, she didn't have a guitar, which was good; my secondary function at the place, maybe my primary one, was to sell guitars to my defenseless students.

I'm a reasonable guy and usually start them out with something good but not too expensive. An expert can get a pretty good sound out of anything, but a beginner can't; on the other hand, you don't want to talk somebody into a thousand-dollar guitar that she'll be stuck with if she quits in a month.

Nobody'd ever done what she did. She asked me what my favorite chord was—an open A major seventh in the fourth position—and listened to me play it on every classical guitar in the store. She didn't buy the most expensive one, but she was close, a custom-made three-quarter-size that a luthier up in Yellow Springs had made for a guy who died before it could be delivered.

I said it had a haunting tone. She said maybe that was because it was haunted.

She was clumsy the first day, but after that she learned faster than anyone I've ever taught. Once a week wasn't enough; she wanted lessons on the weekends, too. Sometimes at the store on Saturday; sometimes elsewhere on Sunday, when the store was closed. We practiced down at the lake on campus when the weather was fine; otherwise her place.

Her apartment was as plain and neat as mine was cluttered and, well, not neat. Mine looked like a bachelor had lived there alone for five years. Hers looked like no one lived there at all. It had the understated rightness of a Japanese Sumi-e painting—a few pieces of furniture, a few pieces of art, all in harmony. I wondered what was hidden behind the closed bedroom door. Maybe I hoped the room was heaped high with junk.

When I did see it, I found it was as simple as the rest of the place. A low bed, a table and chair, and a place to hang our clothes.

She was no groupie. I'd had plenty of experience with them, both before and (unfortunately) during my marriage. Sidemen don't get groupies, though, and groupies don't approach you with quiet seriousness and explain that it was time to move your relationship to a higher spiritual plane.

I hesitated because of age—I'd just turned forty and she seemed half that—and I did respect her and not want to hurt her. She smiled and said that if I didn't hurt her, she would try to return the favor.

Later I would remember “try to.” She must have known.

Our first night was more than a night, in both time and consequence. She revealed her actual beauty for the first time, and gave me more physical pleasure than any woman ever had, and took the same in return. I didn't question where she could have learned all that she knew. Sometime around noon, she left me exhausted in her bed, and it was getting dark again when she gently shook me awake. She said she had a present for me.

There were two candles on her table, with wine and cheese, bread and fruit. She lit a few other candles around the room while I opened the bottle, and then brought over her gift, a large angular thing in a cotton sack. When I took it from her, it knocked against the table with a soft discordant jangle.

It was a big ornate lute-like thing, which she called a chitarrone. At least that's what the antique dealer had called it when she bought it at the big flea market in Waldo.

It didn't sound very musical, missing some strings and not in tune with the rusty ones it did have, but even in its beat-up state it was an impressive piece of work, a cross between a lute and a kind of string bass. The wood was inlaid in a neat pattern, and there were three ornately carved sound holes. It came with a diagram showing how the strings should be tuned, drawn with brown ink on paper that felt like soft animal skin, a kind of hokey attempt at antiquity, I thought. The notes were square, but the staffs were recognizable. I knew I could string it with modern mandolin, guitar, and cello strings.

It couldn't possibly be as old as it looked, and not be in a museum, and she said no, the dealer only claimed it was a twentieth-century copy. It hadn't cost enough to be that old. I looked forward to trying it out; I could get strings at the store the next day and tune it up between students—maybe I'd have it sounding like something when she came in for her four o'clock lesson.

She said she'd look forward to it, and we got to work on the wine and food. We talked of this and that, and then I played her some old ballads on her small guitar. The food of love, the poet said, and we moved back into her rumpled bed.

I woke to the smell of coffee, but she was already gone; a note by the pot said she had an eight o'clock class. I made a breakfast of leftover cheese and bread and cleaned up a bit, feeling unnaturally domestic. Went back to my place sort of drifting in a state of
I-don't-deserve-this-but-who-does?
Shaved and showered and found a clean shirt, and got to the store an hour and a half before my first pupil.

The chitarrone looked authentically old in the cold fluorescent light of the store's workroom. I cleaned it carefully with some Gibson guitar spray, but resisted waxing it. That would make it prettier, but would have a muting effect on the sound, and I was intensely curious about that.

Over the course of the day, during two dead hours and my lunch break, I replaced the strings one at a time and kept tuning them up as they relaxed. I tuned the thing two whole tones low, since it obviously hadn't been played in some time, and I didn't want to stress it.

It had a good sound, though, tuning: plangent, archaic. It was a real time trip. They don't make them like that anymore—or they do, but not for working musicians like yours truly. A twenty-one–string nightmare, I don't think so.

The other guys at the store were fascinated by it, though, and so were two of my students. But not the one I wanted to see and hear it. She didn't make her four o'clock.

I called and her phone had been disconnected. After work, I rushed over and found her apartment door open, the living room and bedroom bare. The super, miffed because I'd interrupted her dinner preparations, said the place had been empty since June, two months. When I tried to explain, she looked wary and then scared, and eased the door shut with two loud clicks.

The chitarrone, lying diagonally across the car's backseat, was solid and eerily real. As I drove home it played itself at every bump in the road, a D diminished, slightly out of tune.

Amazon.com didn't have
The Chitarrone for Idiots
, or for madmen, but there were plenty of lute books with medieval and Renaissance music, and it was easy to incorporate the instrument's bass drone strings into the melodies. There wasn't much call for it in jazz and rock gigs, but I brought it along when folk groups were amenable. I'd worked out some slightly anachronistic pieces like “Scarborough Fair” and “Greensleeves” that were easy to play along with, and singable, and they led to the unlikely gig that demonstrated the thing's true power.

I got a call from a music professor who asked whether I really had a chitarrone, and he got all excited when I demonstrated it over the phone. Could I clear up two weekends in February and play with his consort at the upcoming Medieval Faire?

In fact I was free those weekends. We set up a couple of practice dates, and he faxed me some sheets. They were lute and therobo parts, and it was easy to cobble them together into something that used the instrument's resonant bass strings.

We met at the professor's crumbling-but-genteel Victorian mansion. He'd gathered eleven students who played an assortment of modern replicas of period string, wind, and percussion instruments, and they were all enthralled by my medieval Rube Goldberg machine. The professor, Harold Innes, was especially impressed, not only at the workmanship but the careful aging of the instrument—could it possibly be a “misplaced” museum piece? I told him it came from the Waldo flea market, and God knows where it might originally have been stolen from.

Innes's wife Gladys was a piece of work, setting out tea and cookies with a kind of smoldering resentment. If she had ever been charmed by her husband's fascination with old music (and perhaps with young students), it had not withstood the test of time. Maybe it was the unfortunate choice of a husband whose last name made a jingling rhyme with her first—thirty or forty years of being “Gladys Innes” might push you toward being “Gladys Anything Else.”

Halfway though the rehearsal, they had a quiet but intense argument in the kitchen. One of the students wondered aloud where they would rehearse if Gladys got the house, and the others just nodded sourly.

Gladys did know music, though. She asked me intelligent questions about various tunings and techniques for playing the thing, and when Harold asked me to do a couple of solo numbers, she came out and listened with rapt attention.

I got the job, and looked forward to it even though the six days would pay less than a normal weekend, and I would have to rent and wear a ridiculous houppelande thing, tied around the waist with a rope, that made me look and feel like Falstaff.