The Planet on the Table (25 page)

“I feel
real
good,” said Sidney.

Then we turned a curve and were pointed right at the Performing Arts Center. It stuck up from the canyon floor like one of the natural spires, a huge stack right at the end of the colony, the last structure before the black U of the Gap stretched out, lightless and empty. The car hit the final swoop of track up to it, and scarcely slowed down. Nobody said anything; Fingers stopped singing. As we drew closer, and the side of the building blocked out our view of the Gap, Hook finished the verse:

“And I got no place to go to

And I got no place to stay

And I don’t know where I’m going

But I’m on my way.”

The waiting room backstage was crowded with a menagerie of about forty brightly dressed performers, all wandering in and out of practice rooms and talking loud, trying to work off tension. As soon as we walked in the door I could feel a heat on my cheeks, on account of all the eyes focusing on us. Everyone was happy to have something to think about besides the upcoming few hours, and as I looked at us all, standing in the doorway gawking, I could see we were good for that. Even in our best clothes (supplied by JM) we looked like exactly what we were: bulky, roughshod, unkempt, maimed, oh, we were miners, clear enough; and under the stares of that rainbow of costumes I suppose we should have quailed. But the energy we got from adrenaline and the White Brother and our wild flight down the Gap gave us a sort of momentum; and when Hook and Crazy looked at each other and burst out laughing. it was them that quailed. Glances turned away from us, and we strode into the room feeling on top of things.

I walked over to a circle of chairs that was empty and sat down. I got my trumpet out of its case and stuck my very shallowest mouthpiece into it; hit ‘em high and hard, I thought. The rest of the band was doing the same around me, talking in mutters and laughing every time their eyes met. I looked around and saw that now our fellow performers were trying to watch us without looking. As my gaze swept the room it pushed eyes down and away like magic. When Washboard pulled his washboard out of his box and compulsively rippled his studded fingers down the slats to pop the cowbell, there was an attentive, amazed silence—very undeserved, I thought, considering how strange some of the other instruments in the room appeared—if that was really what they were, I walked over to the piano in a corner of the room, and nearly fell at an unexpected step down. I hit B-flat. My C was in tune with it. Hook, Sidney, and Crazy hit a variety of thirds and fifths, intending to sound as haphazard and out of tune as possible. Sidney made a series of small adjustments to his clarinet, but Hook and Crazy laid their brass down, the better to observe the show going on around them. Washboard was already moving around the room, stepping from level to level and politely asking questions about the weird machinery.

“Hey, look at this!” Hook called across to me. He was waving a square of paper. I crossed back to him.

“It’s a program,” he explained, and began to read out loud, “ ‘Number Eighteen, the Hot Six Jazz Band, from Jupiter Metals, Pallas—an instrumental group specializing in traditional jazz, a twentieth-century style of composition and performance characterized by vigorous improvisation.’ Ha! Vigorous improvisation!” He laughed again. “I’ll vigorously improvise those—”

“Who’s that up there?” Fingers asked, pointing with his good hand at the video screen they had up on one wall. The performer on stage at the moment was a red-robed singer, warbling out some polytonal stuff that many of the people in the room looked like they wanted to hear, judging by the way they stared at Hook. The harmonies and counterpoints the performer was singing with himself were pretty complex, but he had a box surgically implanted in one side of his neck that was clearly helping his vocal cords, so even though he was sliding from Crazy’s tuning note up to the A above high C while holding a C-major chord. I wasn’t much impressed.

“ ‘Number Sixteen,’ ” Hook read (and my heart sledged in my chest all of a sudden; only two to go), “ ‘Singer Roderick Flen-Jones, from Rhea, a vocalist utilizing the Sturmond Larynx-Synthesizer in four fugues of his own composition.”

“Shit,” Crazy remarked at a particularly high turn, “he sounds like a dog whistle.”

“Pretty lightweight,” Washboard agreed.

“Lightweight? Man, he’s
featherweight!
” Crazy shouted, and laughed loudly at his own joke; he was feeling pretty good. I noticed we were causing a general exodus from the main waiting room. People were drifting into the practice chambers to get away from us, and there was a growing empty space surrounding our group of chairs. I caught Hook’s eye and he seemed to get my meaning. He shrugged a “Fuck them,” but he got Crazy to pick up his tuba and go over some turns with him, which calmed things down somewhat.

I sat down beside a guy near our chairs who was dressed up in one of the simpler costumes in the room, a brown-and-gold robe. He had been, watching us with what seemed like friendly interest the whole time we’d been there.

“You look like you’re having fun,” he said.

“Sure,” I agreed. “How about you?”

“I’m a little scared to be enjoying myself fully.”

“I know the feeling. What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the instrument in his lap.

“Tone-bar,” he said, running his fingers over it; without amplification it made only the ghost of a rippling glissando.

“Is that a new thing?” I asked.

“Not this time. Last time it was.”

“You’ve tried this before?”

“Yes,” he said, “I won, too.”

“You won!” I exclaimed. “You got one of the grants?” He nodded. “So what are you doing back here?”

“That grant only gets you from place to place. It doesn’t guarantee you’re going to make enough to keep traveling once you’re done with it.”

“Well, will these folks give a grant twice?”

“They’ve never done it before,” he, said, and looked up from his tone-bar to smile lopsidedly at me. “So I’ve got quite a job today, don’t I.”

“I guess,” I said.

We watched the video for a while. As the singer juggled the three parts of his fugue Tone-bar shook his head. “Amazing, isn’t he,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “The question is, do you listen to music to be amazed.”

He laughed. “I don’t know, but the audience thinks so.”

“I bet they don’t,” I said.

This time he didn’t laugh. “So did I”

Number Sixteen was leaving the stage and being replaced by Number Seventeen. That meant we wouldn’t be on for an hour or so. I wished we were going on sooner; all the excitement I had felt was slowly collecting into a tense knot below my diaphragm. And I could see signs of the same thing happening to the others. Not Crazy; he was still rowdy as ever; he was marching about the room with his tuba, blasting it in the technicians’ ears and annoying as many people as possible. But I had seen Fingers wandering toward the piano, undoubtedly planning to join Hook and Crazy in the phrases they were working on; some character wrapped in purple-and-blue sheets sat down just ahead of him and began to play some fast complicated stuff, classical probably, with big dramatic hand-over-hands all up and down the keys. Fingers turned around and sat back down, hands hidden in his lap, and watched the guy play; and when the guy got up Fingers just sat there, looking down at his lap like be hadn’t noticed.

And Sidney got quieter and quieter. He stared up at the video and watched a quartet of people fidget around a big box that they all played together, and as he stared he sank into his chair and closed around his clarinet. He was getting scared again. All the excitement and energy the band had generated on the trip over had disappeared, leaving only Washboard’s insistent tapping and Crazy’s crazy antics, which were gaining us more and more enemies among the other performers.

While I was still wondering what to do about this (because I felt like I was at least as scared as Sidney) Crazy made his way back to our corner of the room, did a quick side shuffle, and slammed into another musician.

“Hey!” Crazy yelled. “Watch it!”

I groaned. The guy he had knocked over was dressed in some material that shifted color when he moved; he had been making loud comments about us from the practice rooms ever since we had arrived. Now he got his footing and carefully lifted his instrument (a long many-keyed brass box that turned one arm back into itself) from the floor.

“You stupid, clumsy, drunken oaf,” he said evenly.

“Hey,” Crazy said, ignoring the description, “what’s that you got there?”

“Ignorant fool,” the musician said, “It’s a Klein synthesizer, an instrument beyond your feeble understanding.”

“Oh yeah?” Crazy said. “Sounds a little one-sided to me.” He burst out laughing.

“It is unfortunate,” the other replied, “that the Blakely Foundation finds it necessary to exhibit even the most
atavistic
forms of music at this circus.” He turned and stalked over to the piano.

“Atavistic!” Crazy repeated, looking at us. “What’s that mean?”

I shrugged. “It means primitive,” said Tone-bar. Hook started to laugh.

“Primitive!” Crazy bellowed. “I’m going to go hit that guy and let him think it over.” He turned to follow the musician, tuba still in his arms; and before anyone could move, he missed the step down and crashed to the floor, as loud as fifty cymbals all hit at once.

We leaped over and pulled the tuba off him. It was hardly dented; somehow he had twisted so it fell mostly on him.

“You okay?” Hook said anxiously, pushing back the rest of us. From somewhere in the room there was a laugh.

Crazy didn’t move. We stood around him. “God damn it,” Hook said, “the bastard is out cold.” He looked like he wanted to kick him.

“And look!” Sidney said, lifting Crazy’s left arm carefully. Right behind his hand (his fingering hand) was a bluish lump that stretched his skin tight. “He’s hurt that wrist bad,” Sidney said: “He’s out of it.”

“Fuck,” Hook said quietly. I sat down beside him, stunned by our had luck. There was a crowd gathered around us but I didn’t pay them any attention. I watched Crazy’s wrist swell out to the same width as his hand; that was our whole story, right there. We’d put him on stage in a lot of strange conditions before, but a man can’t play without his fingering hand…

“Hey, Wright is here today,” Tone-bar said. He was frowning with what Looked like real concern. “Doesn’t he know some old jazz?” None of us answered him. “No, seriously,” he said. “This kid Wright is an absolute genius, he’ll probably be able to fill in for you.” Still none of us spoke. “Well, I know where his box is,” he finally continued. “I’ll try to find him.” He worked his way through the crowd and hurried out the door.

I sat there, feeling the knot in my stomach become a solid bar, and watched a few of the stagehands lift Crazy up and carry him out. We were beat before we began. You can play jazz without a tuba player—we had often had to—but the trombone has to take a lot of the bass line, nobody can be as free with the rhythm, the sound is tinny, there’s no power to it, there’s no
bottom
! Sidney looked over at Hook and said, with a sort of furtive relief, “Well, you said we didn’t have a chance,” but Hook just shook his head, eyes glistening, and said quietly, “I wanted to show ‘em.”

I sat and wondered if I was going to be sick. Crazy had crazied us right back to the rocks, and on top of my knotted stomach my heart pounded loud and slow as if saying “ka-Doom, ka-Doom, ka-DOOM.” I thought of all the stories I’d heard of Vesta, the barren graveyard of the asteroids, and hoped I didn’t live long enough to be sent there.

There was a long silence. None of us moved. The other performers circled about as quietly, making sure not to look at us. Slowly, very slowly, Sidney began to pull apart his clarinet.

“
I got him!
” came a wild voice. “He can do it!” Tone-bar came flying in the door, pulling a skinny kid by the arm. He halted and the kid slammed into his back. With a grin Tone-bar stepped aside and waved an arm.

“Perhaps the finest musician of our—” he began, but the kid interrupted him:

“I hear you need a tuba man,” he said and stepped forward. He was a few years younger than me even, and the grin on his adolescent face looked like it was clamped over a burst of laughter. When he pushed all his long black tangles of hair back I saw that the pupils of his eyes were flinching wildly just inside the line of the irises; he was clearly spaced, probably had never seen a tuba before.

“Come on, man,” I said. “Where did you learn to play jazz tuba?”

“Pluto,” he said, and laughed.

I stared at him. I couldn’t believe it. As far as I knew, Dixieland jazz was only played in the bars on Jupiter Metals’ rocks; I would have bet I knew, or knew of, every Dixieland musician alive. And this kid didn’t come from the mines. He was too skinny, too sharp-edged, he didn’t have the look.

“I didn’t even know anyone played traditional jazz anymore,” he said. “I thought I was the only one.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“We don’t got a whole lot of choice, Shaky, we’re running out of time,” said Hook. “Hey kid—you know ‘Panama’ ?“

“Sure,” he said, and sang the opening bars. “Bum-bum, da da da-da, da da-da-da da.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“I can do it,” the kid said. “I want to do it.”

“All right,” Hook said, “Might as well take him.” I looked at Hook in surprise and saw that he was grinning again; clearly there was something about the kid, the intensity of those black-hole eyes perhaps, that had him convinced. He slapped the kid on the shoulder and nearly knocked him down, “Come on!” he shouted. “Time to go!”

“Time to go!” I cried. “What the hell happened to Number seventeen?”

“They getting off! Let’s go play!”

And the stagehands were already carrying stuff for us, watching the kid and gabbling excitedly.

“Shit,” I exclaimed, and stuck my hand out to the kid. We shook. “Welcome to the Hot Six. Solos all sixteen bars, including yours if you want, choruses and refrains all repeated, don’t worry about the tags; we’ll have to stick to the old songs, do you know ‘St. Louis Blues’? ‘That’s a Plenty’? ‘Didn’t He Ramble’? ‘Milenburg Joys’? ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’? ‘Want a Big Butter-and-Egg Man’? ‘Ain’t You Coming Back to Dixieland’?” and, miraculously, he kept yelling “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as he struggled with the tuba, still almost laughing, and then we were in the hall and didn’t have time for any more—