Drumbeats (3 page)

The
sorcier
said something, which Anatole translated. “
Vous avez l’esprit de batteur
.” You have the spirit of a drummer.

With a throbbing hand, Danny squeezed Anatole’s bare shoulder and nodded. “
Oui
.”

The chief also congratulated him, thanking him for sharing his white man’s music with the village. Danny found that ironic, since he had come here to pick up a rich African flavor for his compositions. But Danny could record his impressions in new songs; the village of Kabas had no way of keeping what he had brought to them.

The withered
sorcier
picked up one of the drums at his side, and Danny recognized it as the small drum the old man had been finishing in the dim hut that afternoon. He fixed his deep gaze on Danny for a moment, then handed it to him.

Anatole sat up, alarmed, but bit off a comment he had intended to make. Danny nodded in reassurance and in delight he took the new drum. He held it to his chest and inclined his head deeply to show his appreciation. “
Merci
!”

Anatole took Danny’s hand to lead him away from the walled courtyard. The chief clapped his hands and barked something to the other boys, who looked at Anatole with glee before they got up and scurried to the huts for sleeping. Anatole stared nervously at Danny, but Danny didn’t understand what had just occurred.

He repeated his thanks, bowing again to the chief and
sorcier
, but the two of them just stared at him. He was reminded of an East African scene: a pair of lions sizing up their prey. He shook his head to clear the morbid thought, and followed Anatole.

In the village proper, one of the round thatched huts had been swept for Danny to sleep in. Outside, his bicycle leaned against a tree, no doubt guarded during the day by the little man with the enormous cutlass. Anatole seemed uneasy, wanting to say something, but afraid.

Trying to comfort him, Danny opened his pack and withdrew a stick of chewing gum for the boy. Anatole boy spoke rapidly, gushing his thanks. Other boys suddenly materialized from the shadows with childish murder in their eyes. They tried to take the gum from Anatole, but he popped it in his mouth and ran off. “Hey!” Danny shouted, but Anatole bolted into the night with the boys chasing after.

Wondering if Anatole was in any real danger, Danny removed the blanket and sleeping bag from his bike, then carried them inside the guest hut. He decided the boy could take care of himself, that he had spent his life as the whipping boy for the other sons of the chief. The thought drained some of the exhilaration from the memory of the evening’s performance.

His legs ached after the torturous ride upland from Garoua, and he fantasized briefly about sitting in the Jacuzzi in the capital suite of some five-star hotel. He considered how wonderful it would be to sip on some cold champagne, or a scotch on the rocks.

Instead, he lifted the gift drum, inspecting it. He would find some way to use it on the next album, add a rich African tone to the music. Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel had done it, though the style of Blitzkreig’s music was a bit more. . .aggressive.

He would not tell anyone about the human skin, especially the customs officials. He tried without success to decipher the mystical swirling patterns carved into the wood, the interwoven curves, circles, and knots. It made him dizzy.

Danny closed his eyes and began to play the drum, quietly so as not to disturb the other villagers. But as the sound reached his ears, he snapped his eyes open. The tone from the drum was flat and weak, like a cheap tourist tom-tom, plastic over a coffee can.

He frowned at the gift drum. Where was the rich reverberation, the primal pulse of the earth? He tapped again, but heard only an empty and hollow sound, soulless. Danny scowled, wondering if the
sorcier
had ruined the drum by accident, then decided to get rid of it by giving it to the unsuspecting White Man who wouldn’t know the difference.

Angry and uneasy, Danny set the African drum next to him; he would try it again in the morning. He could play it for the chief, show him its flat tone. Perhaps they would exchange it. Maybe he would have to buy another one.

He hoped Anatole was all right.

Danny sat down to pull the thorns and prickers from his clothes. The village women had provided him with two plastic basins of water for bathing, one for soaping and scrubbing, the other for rinsing. The warm water felt refreshing on his face, his neck. After stripping off his pungent socks, he rinsed his toes and soles.

The night stillness was hypnotic, and as he spread his sleeping bag and stretched out on it, he felt as if he were seeping into the cloth, into the ground, swallowed up in sleep. . . .

Anatole woke him up only a few moments later, shaking him and whispering harshly in his ear. Dirt, blood, and bruises covered the boy’s wiry body, and his clothes had been torn in a scuffle. He didn’t seem to care. He kept shaking Danny.

But it was already too late.

Danny sat up, blinking his eyes. Sharp pains like a bear trap ripped through his chest. A giant hand had wrapped around his torso and would squeeze until his ribs popped free of his spine.

He gasped, opening and closing his mouth, but could not give voice to his agony. He grabbed Anatole’s withered arm, but the boy struggled away, searching for something. Black spots swam in his eyes. He tried to breathe, but his chest wouldn’t let him. He began slipping, sliding down an endless cliff into blackness.

Anatole finally reached an object on the floor of the hut. He snatched it up with his good hand, tucked it firmly under his withered arm, and began to thump on it.

The drum!

As the boy rapped out a slow steady beat, Danny felt the iron band loosen around his heart. Blood rushed into his head again, and he drew a deep breath. Dizziness continued to swim around him, but the impossible pain receded. He clutched his chest, rubbing his sternum. He uttered a breathy thanks to Anatole.

Had he just suffered a heart attack? Good God, all the fast living had decided to catch up to him while he was out in the middle of nowhere, far from any hope of medical attention!

Then he realized with a chill that the sounds from the gift drum were now rich and echoey, with the unearthly depth he remembered from the other drums. Anatole continued his slow rhythm, and suddenly Danny recognized it. A heartbeat.

What was it the boy had told him inside the sorcier’s hut—that the magical drums could steal a man’s heartbeat? “
Ton coeur c’est dans ici
,” Anatole said, continuing his drumming. Your heartbeat lives in here now.

Danny remembered the gaunt, shambling man in the marketplace of Garoua, obsessively tapping the drum from Kabas as if his life depended on it, until his hide-wrapped fingers were bloodied. Had that man also escaped his fate in the village, and fled south?

“You had the spirit of a drummer,” Anatole said in his pidgin French, “and now the drum has your spirit.” As if to emphasize his statement, as if he knew a White Man would be skeptical of such magic, Anatole ceased his rhythm on the drum.

The claws returned to Danny’s heart, and the vise in his chest clamped back down. His heart had stopped beating. Heart beats, drumbeats—

The boy stopped only long enough to convince Danny, then started the beat again. He looked with pleading eyes in the shadowy hut. “
Je vais avec toi
!” I go with you. Let me be your heartbeat. From now on.

Leaving his sleeping bag behind, Danny staggered out of the guest hut to his bicycle resting against an acacia tree. The rest of the village was dark and silent, and the next morning they would expect to find him dead and cold on his blankets; and the new drum would have the same resonant quality, the same throbbing of a captured spirit, to add to their collection. The sound of White Man’s music for Kabas.

“
Allez
!” Anatole whispered as Danny climbed aboard his bike. Go! What was he supposed to do now? The boy ran in front of him along the narrow track. Danny did not fear navigating the rugged trail by moonlight, with snakes and who-knows-what abroad in the grass, as much as he feared staying in Kabas and being there when the chief and the
sorcier
came to look at his body in the morning, and no doubt to appraise their pale new drum skin.

But how long could Anatole continue his drumming? If the beat stopped for only a moment, Danny would seize up. They would have to take turns sleeping. Would this nightmare continue after he had left the vicinity of the village? Distance had not helped the shambling man in the marketplace in Garoua.

Would this be the rest of his life?

Stricken with panic, Danny nodded to the boy, just wanting to be out of there and not knowing what else to do. Yes, I’ll take you with me. What other choice do I have? He pedaled his bike away from Kabas, crunching on the rough dirt path. Anatole jogged in front of him, tapping on the drum.

And tapping.

And tapping.

The End

AFTERWORD

Neil Peart

In the late ’80s, a novel called
Resurrection Inc.
arrived in my mailbox, accompanied by a letter from the author, Kevin J. Anderson. He wrote that the book had been partly inspired by an album called
Grace Under Pressure,
which my Rush bandmates and I had released in 1984.

It took me a year or so to get around to reading
Resurrection Inc.
, but when I did, I was powerfully impressed, and wrote back to Kevin to tell him so. Any inspiration from Rush’s work seemed indirect, at best, but nonetheless, Kevin and I had much in common, not least a shared love since childhood for science fiction and fantasy stories.

We began to write to each other occasionally, and during Rush’s
Roll the Bones
tour in 1991, on a day off between concerts in California, I rode my bicycle from Sacramento to Kevin’s home in Dublin, California. That was the beginning of a good friendship, many stimulating conversations (mostly by letter and e-mail, as we lived far apart), and regular packages in the mail, as we shared our latest work with each other—the ultimate stimulating conversation. In subsequent years I would send Kevin a few books of my own, numerous CDs and DVDs from my work with Rush, and there seemed to be a fat volume from Kevin arriving about every other month.

Back in 1991, though, Kevin was still working full-time as a technical writer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He spent every spare minute working on his fiction, and though he would famously collect over 750 rejection letters, there was no doubt in Kevin’s mind about his destiny. Even as a child, Kevin didn’t “want to be” a writer when he grew up; he was
going to be
a writer.

And so he was. To date, Kevin has published over 80 novels, story collections, graphic novels, and comic books, and he still spends every minute
being a writer.
Kevin doesn’t write to live, he lives to write.

He has even found ways to weave his recreation, relaxation, and desire for adventure and physical challenge into the writing process, carrying a microcassette recorder on long hikes throughout the West, including the ascent of each of Colorado’s 46 “fourteeners,” (peaks over 14,000 feet).

In a recent exchange of e-mails, Kevin and I were discussing writing styles and habits, and he offered this revealing passage:

A long time ago, my friend and collaborator Doug Beason made a joking comment when I suggested that I needed a break, a sabbatical. He said, “Kevin, if you ever stop writing, your head would explode!”

And I knew he was right. My imagination is stuck in overdrive, for better or worse. Instead of a writer calling for a Muse to give him an idea, I’ve got a hyperactive Muse that won’t leave me alone.

I feel as if my head is a pot filled with too many popcorn kernels, popping away, filling the container and pushing the lid up, and unless I keep shoveling the new stuff out, the whole thing will blow up on me. I’m writing as fast as I can to keep the growling, slavering Ideas from nipping too close at my heels.

There was a
US News & World Report
article a few months ago about a newly “found” disease they called “hypergraphia,” the compulsion to write. They said writers like Sylvia Plath and Tolstoy were so obsessed with writing they often wrote as much as a thousand words a day. (A thousand words? Man, I’ve done over 10,000 words in a day!) I guess I’m an addict.

I’m picturing you as a guy with a similar compulsion to drum, slapping your knees, the furniture, the walls, feeling a rhythm in your blood. It’s what you do. For me, stories are the drumbeats inside me. I’m always fabricating stories, characters, weird locations, plot twists. I’m just not happy “relaxing.” Sometimes I’m just banging around having fun, goofing with toys that I enjoy—as when I write Star Wars or comics or light books like
Sky Captain
; other times I’m intense and working on something I think is Really Important, like
Hopscotch
. The “Seven Suns” books are a little of both, the biggest and most challenging story I’ve ever told, but damn, I’m having the time of my life with it, too.

I’ve been saying for years and years, “soon I’ll slow down and take more time to smell the roses.” It’ll never happen, I suppose, because I just love the writing so much. Three days ago I started writing Seven Suns #5, and I was in absolute euphoria plotting the 112 chapters. This happens, then this happens, then this happens—I was discovering what my beloved characters were going to do, where they would end up, who would die, who would triumph. I came up with some twists and new ideas that were revelations to me, real lightning bolts from the hyperactive Muse—and best of all, they were so
logical
and
inevitable
in the universe of the story, that it seemed as if they were sewn into the fabric of my imagination from the very beginning, but I just didn’t realize it yet. Now that’s cool.

So, yes, I would like to have that sense of stillness and the time to pay attention deeply to the things around me . . . but on the other hand, I can’t wait to see what happens next in the new novel that’s just over the horizon.

And Kevin Anderson’s horizons are wider than most—infinite, really. His imagination roams the entire universe, creating strange new worlds and peopling them with strong, believable characters.

From the philosophical depth of
Resurrection Inc.
and
Hopscotch,
to the novelizations for
Star Wars
and
The X-Files;
from the genre of “historical fantasy” (which I think Kevin
invented
—richly-imagined tales about Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Charles Dickens), to the breathtaking scope of his “imagineering” in the Seven Suns series, there have been so many excellent works that have delighted
this
reader, and millions of others.

Among seemingly overlooked treasures, I fondly remember the fantasy trilogy,
Gamearth, Gameplay,
and
Game’s End,
now sadly out of print, but there are also Kevin’s collaborations with Doug Beason, like
The Trinity Paradox
and
Ill Wind,
and the ongoing, highly successful
Dune
series with Brian Herbert
.

In writing to Kevin in response to reading one of those,
The Butlerian Jihad,
I talked about the subtle skill of his craft:

More and more I notice how truly masterful writing, yours and others’, leaves the reader with an overall impression of making it all seem
easy
—regardless of how much work has gone into the craft, the background, the research, and the intellectual underpinnings (or maybe
because
of all that), it just breathes off the page in a smooth flow of seemingly-inevitable revelations.

I know I’ve made similar comments about drummers before: some of them try to make simple things look difficult and impressive, but the true masters make the impossible seem easy.

It doesn’t seem fair to the
creator
of that carefully-wrought illusion, undermining all the effort and experience necessary to operate at that rarefied level, but it’s the ultimate nature of mastery, I guess. (It may be lonely at the top, but it must feel better than being at the bottom!)

In late 2002, toward the end of a long American tour that had me drained and feeling sorry for myself, I wrote to Kevin:

One bright spot I can report along the way is that during some idle hours in the tuning room, on the bus, and in hotel rooms, I had the great pleasure of reading
Hidden Empire.

First of all, I have to tell you that if you or anyone else had any doubt, I think you have achieved a true Masterpiece with this book—meaning that term in the sense which
you
clarified for me years ago. It is definitely a piece of work to lay alongside those of the Masters, to be accepted by them and by the great abstraction of “the Audience” as one of the pantheon of masters yourself.

Congratulations. I really think it is a great book. I was so impressed by it at the time, and also after the fact—a true test of quality, I’m sure you’ll agree.

The craftsmanship alone is sheer perfection. The architecture of the storytelling moves forward with grace and economy, combining girders and panels of deft characterizations, wondrous settings, admirable “imagineering,” and all the superstructure of pure
thought
that has preceded all that.

(The reader will have observed by now that when Kevin asked me to write this essay, it was easy to say yes—I knew the important stuff had already been written, either by me or by him. I would only have to look it up!)

Here are some of Kevin’s thoughts on “style,” from a recent exchange of e-mails on the subject:

I think in a letter to you many years ago, I talked about creating believable worlds and scenes; one of the vital tricks I mentioned was to nail down a few small but very precise and mundane details (the color of a piece of lint, the brand of a gum wrapper wadded up in a gutter), and the reader will buy into the rest of what you’re describing. It seems easy, seems transparent. It’s simple to show off, to be flashy and flamboyant, to prance around and point at marvelous overblown metaphors. It’s more difficult to be subtle.

To which I replied, in part:

Another note about writing style that occurred to me in connection with what I wrote the other day: I just finished Gabriel García Márquez’s memoir,
Living to Tell the Tale,
and he described his early decision as a writer to avoid all adverbs of the “ly” sort
(mento
in Spanish, I think), and how it became almost pathological with him, just as Hemingway tried to cut every unnecessary adjective.

In your case, with the necessary “mission” of describing an entirely imaginary universe for the reader, it would seem especially difficult to avoid extraneous adjectives and adverbs—and yet you
do,
making the descriptions of planets, cities, palaces, customs, and technology fall more-or-less naturally into the ongoing narrative. And . . . you make it look so
easy.

As we have discussed, that is the highest level of craft, and yet the least likely to be admired, or even appreciated. Once I offered a definition of genius, in particular reference to Buddy Rich: “Doing the impossible, and making it look easy.”

And yes, Kevin does make it look easy, though of course it’s not. He works to a very high standard of quality in his writing, from the conception to the execution, and these stories are a testament to the consistency of his art.

When people have called him lucky, Kevin likes to counter, “Yes, and the harder I work, the luckier I get.”

As one of his appreciative readers, I think the harder Kevin works, the luckier
we
get.