Looking Glass 4 - Claws That Catch (38 page)

“When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town,” he screamed over the guitar, “Down around San Antone, And the folks are risin' for another day . . . round about their homes . . .”

“Sir!” Eric shouted. “Sir! Open your eyes!”

Weaver looked up and the guitar twanged a loud, flat C chord as it slid to a stop. Because he could see what he was doing.

He couldn't see what was happening to the Tree, but he could see the effects. The walls of the room had become transparent and all four of the Jovians were in view. Something was causing the massive planets to fluoresce in different colors. The only thing that would do that, Weaver knew, was massive energy input. Offhand, the amount of joules just wouldn't register. Actually, for a moment they did, then his brain locked up trying to count the zeros. Pretty close to the total output of Earth's sun was the best he could figure. For each Jovian. The energetic gas was flashing in all the colors of the rainbow and as the Jovians moved it streamed out behind.

“Don't stop!” Eric shouted again. “It's just started!”

Weaver caught up the melody again, grooving on the music and playing for all he was worth. But this time he kept his eyes open. This show was just too good to miss.

“Well, the secret of the Tum-Tum Tree is finally explained,” Captain Zanella said, shaking his head.

“It's a concert venue,” Weaver finished, grinning. “It's a grapping interstellar concert venue.”

While Weaver was playing in the control compartment, the wall of the compartment the camp had been moved to became transparent as well. As the Tree spun on its axis, the Jovians could be seen fluorescing while the music was transmitted to the entire crew. After a few minutes of playing, the “beams” that the Tree was shooting out began collecting the gases, drawing them towards the Tree and fluorescing them along their entire length. The whole solar system was lit up with cascading waves of lambent color, reds, blues, greens, purples, every color of the rainbow as the gases reacted to the massive power of the Tum-Tum Tree and formed a huge spiral of shining, rippling light.

“Apparently an open one, too,” Miriam said. “The caves are now explained. Besides being sort of stellar sky-boxes, they're rooms for bands getting ready to play to warm up. And they have automatic visual feedback if you're not up to par. No offense, Captain.”

“None taken,” Bill said dryly. “I think the main venue must have filtered out the vocal component.”

“It is even more remarkable from space,” Colonel Che-chee said. “But we nearly lost a dragonfly. Cha-shah came close to one of the beams and reported that if it had not been for his shield he would now be dead. And he was not even in the beam itself, more than a hundred meters away.”

The video shots from the dragonflies showed that the tree opened up into a hemisphere, stretching somehow to engulf the upper tenth of the star then entirely wrapping it in some sort of absorption field. The incredibly hot, bright, star faded to insignificance, becoming almost black, keeping the light from the star from overwelming the show and feeding the masses of raw power into the beams that created it.

If anything, the most spectacular sight was the Tum-Tum Tree, which must have been using a good quarter of the star's energy itself. It blazed along with the music, visible only from space. But from the right place it would be magnificent.

“Time to full warm up was right at nine minutes,” Figueredo said. “At that point, stellar output was less than three percent of normal and the power of the beams was blasting the Jovians so hard they've probably lost a good ten percent of their mass.”

“Yeah, but it's gas,” Weaver pointed out. “Most of it remained in the orbits. They'll collect it back over time. When this thing was in full use, though, I wonder how they kept them supplied?”

“With these guys, sir, who knows, sir?” Figueredo said. “They could have teleported it through gates from other Jovians. Especially if they could expand the size of the gates.”

“Planet-sized gates?” Bill mused. “Heck, just set up a gate to move a smaller Jovian. Put one gate in the way of the incoming Jovian and the other by the one you're refueling.”

“That is scary,” Miriam said. “That's . . . too big.”

“These guys used the full output of a blue-white star, twenty thousand times the power of Sol, as a laser-light show,” Bill pointed out. “Throwing around Jovians would be comparatively trivial.”

“The males did report something that troubles me,” Colonel Che-chee said, her nose twitching. “They say that they could hear the music. Not over the radio, mind you. They could hear it as if they were present. They, in fact, complained about how loud it was.”

“Impossible, Colonel,” Captain Zanella said. “Noise does not propagate through vacuum, no matter how loud it is.”

“I told them this,” the colonel said. “They still insist that they heard the music.”

“Was it in time with the pulsing of the planets?” Bill asked.

“I believe they said it was,” the colonel replied.

“There's a way that you could do it,” Weaver said musingly. “If you knew the make-up of the receiving ship, or suit in this case, you could tune a gravitational beam to cause harmonics in the receiving ship. But, my God, the computational requirements! You'd have to figure for light-speed lag, the materials you were encountering, location of the target referential to the Jovians and the Tree . . .” He shook his head in wonder. “And all this for an entertainment device?!”

“You know, in about eight years this star's going to start blinking from the standpoint of the nearest G class star,” Bill said, watching as Red moved out of place and Gants stepped up. The Tree would hold in “playing” position for up to fifteen minutes, apparently to let bands change places. And it reacted to any music, even badly sung or played. It was best with better quality and reacted the most effectively to pure sonic mass, the more decibels the more the planets fluoresced. But it would even cause some reaction from a badly sung nursery tune, as Captain Zanella had demonstrated to everyone's dismay.

“Since there are ruins there, you have to figure that the race that built this thing had this star blinking on and off all the time,” Bill continued. “You can just see it: Those damned kids are at it again!” He looked less excited than he sounded.

“I'm glad we found this,” Miriam replied softly. “It's nice to find that at least one race could pour this much effort into something of beauty, that has no other use than to bring joy.” She looked at him for a moment and then snorted. “Penny and some dehydrated fruit for your thoughts?” she added, holding out a bag of dehydrated apples.

“Is it that obvious?” Bill asked.

“Not to get too Star Trekkish,” Miriam said. “But I'm also an empath. To me, yeah.”

“I'm wondering whether I'm doing the right thing,” he said, shrugging. “This is more my cup of tea than personnel records or wheedling clerks. Yes, I chose to be a Naval officer but I'm a scientist at heart. Astro was fun, exciting, challenging in a way that I found . . . useful and interesting. XO . . .”

“Sucks,” Miriam said.

“In a nutshell,” he replied. “And God only knows how long I'm gonna be stuck as one.”

“And you don't get along with Captain Prael,” Miriam said. “Not that I blame you.”

“We're getting along better,” he said. “But I'll admit I've been comforting myself with the thought: 'He's not going to be here long.' That said, what do I get next? Somebody more like Spectre? More like Prael? Worse?”

“What are you going to do?” Miriam asked.

“I'm not good at turning down a challenge,” Bill said. “And I've gotten better at the paperwork. It's not the sort of paperwork I prefer, and I think it's really limiting my scope, but I'm getting better at it. Being XO has taught me stuff. And if I'm ever going to command the Blade, it's stuff I need to know.”

“You want to command the Blade?” Miriam asked.

“Oh, hell,” Bill said, snorting. “I want to own the Blade. I want to go off looking at what I want to look at. But the closest I'll ever come is commanding it. So, yes. And to do that, I need to be XO. No matter how much it sucks.”

“So you're not going to bunk off to something else?” Miriam asked.

“Nope. I'll stick it as long as it takes for the Navy to trust me to command.”

“Good,” Miriam said. “In that case, I'll stick around too.”

“I wonder what Gants is going to sing?”

“No idea,” Miriam said. “But it couldn't be worse than Captain Zanella's rendition of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb.' ”

Sub Dude stepped into the middle of the crystals and cleared his throat. Sticking his right hand into his blouse, he straightened from his habitual slouch, opened his mouth and proceeded to “sing”:

"I am the very model of a modern Major-General,

I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral,

I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical

From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical . . ."

“Okay,” Miriam said, laughing so hard tears were coming out of her eyes, “I was wrong.”

“What we need is a band,” Weaver said, rubbing his hands together.

“Sir, with all due respect, I think you're taking this too far,” Captain Zanella said, smiling.

“I'm not sure he is.” Miriam looked at her notes. “There are different effects for the guitar and singing. A band would have that much more effect. Actually, a symphony would be about right or a full opera . . .”

“Anybody else got any instruments?” Weaver asked. “Keyboard? Drums? A flute even?”

“I've got a keyboard,” Miriam admitted.

“Really?” Berg said. “I've never heard you play it.”

“I use headphones,” Miriam said. “And I don't play '70s rock.”

“God, not that Goth stuff,” Weaver moaned. “There's hardly a guitar part in it.”

“I play classical,” Miriam said.

“Well, that's not gonna work.”

“I dunno,” Captain Zanella said. “Be interesting to see how it reacts to 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.' ”

“Got any idea how hard that is to play on a guitar?”

“My point, which I'm making badly, sir,” Captain Zanella said, “is that our mission was to investigate and explore this facility and determine if we could find its purpose and potentially activate it. Not to use it as a concert venue.”

“Because we still don't understand its full abilities,” Bill pointed out. “We've determined that it can distinguish between recorded music and live and reacts better to live . . .”

“Good thing Ashley Simpson doesn't have to use it, then,” Berg quipped.

“That right there is something to investigate,” Weaver finished, ignoring the lieutenant. “I see no reason, given that we've determined its purpose, not to fully explore that purpose. I want a survey all of the sailors and Marines to determine if anyone has any instruments with them and their level of playing ability. I intend to fully explore the abilities of this facility.”

“A one and a two . . .”

It turned out that there was more musical talent, for want of a better word, on the ship than had been realized. One of Colonel Che-chee's dragonfly pilots had a Cheerick reed-flute with him. The device looked like a super-recorder, played more like a bassoon and had the sound quality of a Peruvian flute. The LPO of the mess section had brought an Adar drum-set, a full collection of drums that could be folded down to the size of an alarm clock. When extended it wasn't much more than thin membranes and floor triggers but it had all the sound of a full drum-set.

With Weaver's guitar and Miriam's keyboard there was a minimal band. Heck, with just Miriam's keyboard there was a minimal band. Her keyboard was just as advanced as Weaver's guitar set-up but with a much broader range of abilities, capable of mixing or replicating a full orchestra.

After a brief wrangle, it was agreed that Miriam was lead singer. And since she was also unwilling to play the wide variety of suggestions from Weaver, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to .38 Special to the Allman Brothers, she had also picked the music.

Weaver still, ostensibly, led the band.

“How can you see into my eyes, like open doors . . .” Miriam sang as Weaver rolled his eyes. He didn't get to come in with some serious guitar until a third of the way into the song. What kind of rock and roll did you call that?

“Def Leppard even,” Weaver said.

“Too '80s,” Miriam replied, looking over the music that she had with her.

“But it's got big, big sound!” Weaver pointed out. “Big sound is good with this place. Blue Öyster Cult?”

“Ugh!”

“But it was the original Goth band,” Weaver explained. “What else do you call 'Don't Fear the Reaper'?”

“Discordant noise. And you just want to play 'Smoke on the Water.' ”

“That was Deep Purple.”

“Whatever!”

“But it's got a GREAT bass riff! I can set the guitar to bass . . .”

“Oh, here, Crüxshadows! You'll like them.”

“Who? What the grapp is a Crew-shadows?”

“You don't look so good, sir,” Captain Zanella said as Weaver slumped into their shared tent.

“The band is experiencing creative differences,” Weaver said loftily. “I managed to get Ke-cha on my side with Jethro Tull, since there's actually a flute part, but Miriam's insisting on a bunch of Goth and Industrial bands nobody's heard of. One of them she wanted to replace the fiddle portion with flute and when Ke-cha tried to play it, well, let's just say that he's an okay flute player but he's not up to that person's fiddling. I pointed out that not only was I in command of this expedition, the speakers were mine and she suggested that I sounded like a vulture squabbling over carrion when I sang back-up and . . .  Well, we're having creative differences.”

“Command is a lonely thing, sir,” Captain Zanella said, trying not to grin. “But to put it in nautical terms, sir, sometimes you just can't fight the tide.”

“Your input is duly noted, Captain.”

“A choice profound is bittersweet,” Miriam sang. “No one hears Cassandra cry . . .”

“That actually wasn't all that bad,” Weaver said, plucking at the strings of his guitar and working over a riff he'd flubbed.