Rolling Thunder (19 page)

Taliesen Base listens to all the megacrystals on Europa, but concentrates its up-close work on seven of the mountains within closest range of the main base. They seldom called them TECPs; they were given more informal names. TECP-45, the largest of the seven, became Doc. TECP-40, the most active of the seven, is known as Grumpy. The least active is Sleepy. One of them is almost completely hidden by a mantle of ice and snow: Bashful. Another has the most spectacular icefalls from its summit.
Achoo! Gesundheit,
Sneezy.

No metaphor is perfect. There’s nothing Happy or Dopey about the remaining two, but that’s what they’re called.

So there you have them, and I won’t again refer to them by their acronyms.

I LISTENED TO
hundreds of the songs over the next few days in my spare time.

Something about them haunted me. The songs did not use any scale that I was familiar with, and an analysis by computer agreed with me that there was no formal human system of music that employed such intervals. Since it was all one-note progressions, there was no harmony.

I did a pattern search and came up with the songs of humpback whales. It was a bit surprising to me, because these songs sounded nothing like humpbacks, but people at the base assured me that the computers had previously seen similarities. Way beyond my abilities, some mathematical algorithm, apparently.

No algorithm had yet produced any useful information.

Other, mostly atonal, works of music popped up, and I listened to them all. John Cage was there, and Stockhausen, and Xenakis, and Wyschnegradsky. Cage’s piece was something with a “prepared piano,” which is a piano with various foreign objects attached to the strings or the hammers or dampers. Some intriguing sounds were produced. Another work on the list was by Lennon and McCartney, “A Day in the Life.”

The computer also found a mere five-note motif on a major penta-tonic scale:

re - mi - do - do — (octave down) — sol

Gran would probably have known it instantly if I sang it. It was composed by John Williams and used in a movie called
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
I watched it one night. Primitive film, and creepy, with some superadvanced alien race contacting humans for the first time. Frankly, I couldn’t see the connection with the Europan crystals, beyond the obvious one that they were alien, and they sang. Maybe that’s why the computer connected them, and not the content of the sounds themselves.

Shortly after that I had a thought. I called up what I was thinking of as “Doc’s Tune” and played it along with Grumpy’s. At last, here was harmony … of a sort.

Yes, most of it was musical gibberish to me, but here and there was an intriguing phrase, a harsh but interesting dissonance. Some of it was quarter-tone, and some was tritone, and a little analysis from my computer picked out chord progressions that were in 19, 22, and 72 equal temperaments.

I was sure I was also hearing the twenty-four-tone Arabic temperament. There seemed to be pentatonic Chinese intervals, too. I’d have to check that out with someone more knowledgeable about
gong, shang, jue, zhi,
and yu, and other Chinese modes.

There is still so much I don’t know in the vast ocean of music! But one thing I was sure of: This
was
music, and there was more going on than met the ear.

WE’RE GOING TO
Forward Base! We’re going to Forward Base!

I feel like I’m four years old and Mom has just asked me if I want to go to the zoo … and ride the elephant! I hop, I skip, I jump, I glide! I got my mojo workin’! Gone put on my walkin’ shoes and walk away dese Taliesen Blues!

Trouble is, you see, the bus to and from Clarke Centre only runs once a week, and after you’ve been here four days there’s really not much left to see. So my little group of VIP tourists has been getting antsy. I haven’t complained—I’m doing my best not to seem like a spoiled brat of a rich family.

But you should hear Cosmo! According to him, no one ever told him he had to hang here for seven days. According to him, he was assured he could get his work done in forty-eight hours and take a special bus to Clarke, Ganymede Central, and back to civilization: i.e., Thunder City.

According to Tina, his secretary and general factotum, she had been there when Cosmo had been told not once, but twice, exactly what the situation was.

“He just doesn’t listen,” she confided. “He thinks the universe exists for his benefit, and when something doesn’t go his way there’s always someone to blame. Usually it’s me. God, I hate this job.”

“Why don’t you quit?” I asked her.

“Well, the money’s good. I’ve met people who’ll help me later, when I
do
leave the asshole. And you know that old joke about the guy at the circus who shovels up the shit behind the elephants. Somebody asks him why he keeps working at this nasty job, and he says, ‘What, and quit show business?’ “

I had time to get to know Cosmo’s crew, Tina in particular, while we were waiting for our ride to Forward. There were also “Slomo,” the cameraman, and Nigel, his agent, and Aldric, his dogsbody.

“Actually I was on the payroll as a gopher,” he said, “but I’m not a rodent. I considered batman, which is more dignified, or drudge, which is more accurate, but I think dogsbody hits a middle ground. Any job too disgusting for the elephant-shit shoveler, that’s my department.”

Last but certainly not least of the minientourage—Cosmo never travels with less than five, Tina said, and viewed that few as a real hardship—was Brynne, his mistress. If her IQ matched her bra size she’d have been a Nobel Prize candidate, but she turned out to be not nearly as stupid and a lot friendlier than my prejudices had led me to expect. When their various services were not required, the four of them—minus Nigel, who was never to be seen except on the bus trips—would lie out under the sunlamps by the pool, naked, with me, Monet Wu, Dekko, and Ambassador Baruti. We would take a dip from time to time, and Tina, Monet, and I would try our best not to stare at Brynne, who had had every body mod it was possible to have and thus looked a little like an inflatable latex sex toy, though a very solid one. The best word for her was probably pneumatic, as in an inflatable tire.

Dekko and Aldric made no pretense of not staring. Staring would have been hard to conceal anyway, considering their tongues were hanging somewhere in the vicinity of their belly buttons and their eyes kept popping out and rolling around on the concrete.

Honestly, what is it about huge perky boobs, a perfect face, long shapely legs, a flat tummy … well, I guess I’m answering my own question, aren’t I?

Brynne paid no more attention to it than a champion Afghan hound in the show ring. She shut them down effortlessly, and almost painlessly. She said right out that she would always be faithful to Cosmo, as long as he was paying the bills. She was easygoing, by her own description non-ambitious, and had no complaints about the long wait other than to note it was impossible to get a good pedicure way out here, and she was getting some split ends. A body like that takes a lot of upkeep.

Of the males at poolside, only Slomo seemed unimpressed.

“He claims to be asexual,” Monet told me. “He’s good-looking, right? So I put a few moves on him, but there’s nobody home in the libido room. Not gay, either. I suppose it takes all kinds. You think the world needs asexuals?”

“I’m just glad he’s willing to do it, so I don’t have to,” I said.

Dekko put a few moves on me, in a perfunctory sort of way. I saw he was surprised when I turned him down. He wasn’t used to that, being quite a catch with his family money and Mediterranean good looks. A nut brown, well-defined body, luxuriant curly black hair, a bit of a pouty lower lip I might like to chew on, and startling blue eyes. But there was frost behind those eyes, and a lazy sense of entitlement that turned me right off. Plus, he joined Brynne in lamenting the lack of a good pedicurist at Taliesen. I can’t stand vanity in a man.

And so we passed the middle days of our great adventure.

* * *

ACTUALLY, I DID
do something productive, though when I was done I wasn’t quite sure what I had.

I’d listened to all the songs I had access to, some of them many times. I had a vague idea of using some passages in a song of my own. Computers hadn’t been able to make any sense of the songs, but they didn’t have … ears, in the sense of a
human
sensibility, a
musical
sensibility, to appreciate them esthetically. One of the many things a computer still can’t do is tell the difference between a good song and a bad song, or a merely pleasant song. Or a
great
song. That,
I
could do. I’d never been much of a songwriter, but I’m as good at listening as anybody in music today. Frankly, I think I’m as good as Sinatra, and a heck of a lot nicer.

So I listened.

I started by playing the songs against each other, sometimes two, sometimes three. Nothing clicked. Putting three or more together just resulted in noise.

One thing a computer
can
do is sort through infinite mounds of garbage and pick out a gem …
if
you ask it the right question,
if
you set the right parameters. Since I didn’t know what those questions or parameters were, I noodled.

You don’t know noodling? It’s like doodling, only without a pencil. You sit at the keyboard and you let your fingers have fun. Only this time I was using a computer.

It kept coming up with things, I kept listening to them, and rejecting them. I did that for hours, in my room or lying by the pool with my headset on.

I was drowsing off, sitting on my bed, when something began forming.

Communication. Assume they’re communicating in some way. Question, answer. Statement, response. I play the theme, then I hand it over to you on the saxophone and you elaborate it. You toss it to the trumpet player. Jazz, daddy-o! Now I come in again with my new thoughts on the matter. Fusion. Be-bop. Vocalese, scat. Free funk, M-base, hard bop, modal blues.

Ella, talk to me!

Yardbird, can you hear what I’m layin’ down?

I set the machine to find pairs that were offset by one day, then by two days, then three and a half days, and played them together.

Things began popping up. The third was a blend of Grumpy on one day, then Dopey in what might have been a response later, with a third, unnamed mountain known only as TECP-61 after that.

It was beautiful.

It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, though it contained elements that almost seemed familiar. For the first time, I had a line that made sense to the human ear. I can describe it, sonically, how there were heterodynes in there, weaving sinuously through the main thematic line, how a dissonance in one chord would resolve itself with stunning logic in the next, but it wouldn’t mean anything. You’d have to hear it.

I was operating on instinct now. I offset the three lines half a beat each, so instead of a steady progression of quarter notes, I now had a livelier eighth-note sequence. Even better. There was still not what you’d call a discrete Western-style melody, but if you came at it from a more Eastern sensibility, you could actually sing it, though it would be challenging.

I selected thirty-two bars that seemed most interesting and unrolled my keyboard and started to jam with Grumpy, Dopey, and #61, who I took to thinking of as Jazzie, the eighth dwarf. No matter what I did to the music, it was Jazzie’s theme that kept coming through.

I honestly can’t say when I started singing. It just seemed to well out of me, this music, almost inaudible at first, in playback, then growing in confidence and meaning. I counterpointed, I threw in little bits that almost seemed familiar without ever actually sampling. I swooped, I soared, I crackled, I roared.

There were no words. It wasn’t precisely scat, either, as my lips were hardly involved. At one time I was sustaining two notes at once, like Tuvan throat singing, something I’d failed at previously.

I was cooking.

It lasted about seven minutes, this transporting rapture, and then I knew just where to end it. I found a resolving chord from somewhere, let it hang with no visible means of support, and then I was done. I sighed, and took off the phones, and heard clapping behind me. I turned around and saw half a dozen people crowded around my open bedroom door. I felt like I was coming out of a dream, or maybe a drug trip.

“We came to see who was strangling the cat,” Slomo said. Tina punched him.

“What
was
that?” she asked.

“I don’t really know,” I said.

“Would you do it again?”

I was certain I couldn’t, not without some rehearsal, not without hearing it all again, and probably not exactly the same ever again. But hey, that’s jazz.

So I played it back for them. They all came into the room, Slomo, Tina, Brynne, Dekko, Monet, the ambassador. After the first few minutes most of them were swaying in place, and I’m not sure they knew they were doing it. Tina essayed a little dance step, shook her head, and tried another. Brynne showed her something, and they played off each other for a while.

Then I played it again. And once more.

“What’s it called?” Monet asked.

Hmmm. Grumpy? Dopey? Awful. But …

” ‘Jazzie’s Song,’ ” I said.

I DIDN’T KNOW
what I had. I shipped it off to my brother Mike, and to Quinn, to see if he could do anything with it. Then I pretty much forgot it.

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