Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

But I had not made that decision yet. That had been the old plan, for a universe that had Jinny in it.

And more than just that, I suddenly realized with dizzy shock—it had been a plan for a universe that had the entire existing musical establishment of the Solar System as part of the given. All the other musicians, critics, and composers, all the vast potential audience, all the sources of funding, all the supporting institutions. In a society of many billions, composer is an honorable and even sometimes honored occupation. With a target audience that huge, one need not reach all that many of them to earn a living, and respect. Now that I was going to be living, forever, in a society of five hundred people and their offspring, everything needed to be rethought.

Another not inconsiderable point: I had hired on this tub as a farmer’s helper. The Colonial Council might decide to hold me to it, feeling that the colony needed shit shoveled more than it needed sax played, and until I could afford to put up enough credits for at least one Basic Share, they had as much say over my time as I did. The prudent man would divide his time between the hydroponic farm, and whatever would bring in the highest possible return in the shortest time—which did not describe sax playing in any known universe. Not even the currently most popular kinds of sax music… which were decidedly not what I wanted to compose.

If I did not speak up right now, these folks were going to accept me as a composer/musician. That would be awkward down the line if I ended up concluding that my life was best spent as something else altogether.

What else? I hadn’t admitted it to myself until now, but what I had always been second most interested in, after music, was history, particularly PreCollapse history. Terrific. If anything, history was even less use than serious music, to a frontier society. If, after a long day in the fields, my hypothetical descendants had any curiosity at all about the planet the Old Farts were always nattering about, they would be more than satisfied with the copious data we already had aboard, and any new historical fact I could ever learn would already be over ninety years old back on Earth, already chewed to death. The Libra colony would one day be interested in its own history—presuming it survived—but not until at least two generations after we landed, which itself was decades away.

Okay, Joel, don’t think about what else, now. But start backtracking, right now… right up to the point where you’d have to commit to some other track. Otherwise you may spend the next twenty years being thought of as the composer who couldn’t cut it.

“Sol and Herb spoke a little hastily without realizing it,” I heard myself saying. “Music is what I have done. I’m not certain it’s what I will do now, aboard the Sheffield . Or when we hit dirt at Brasil Novo either, for that matter. I’m still giving that thought.”

“What other areas interest you?” Itokawa asked.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to try space piracy,” I said.

“A step up from musician,” Sol agreed drily.

“Or perhaps dowsing.”

London whooped with laughter, a bracing sound. “Yes, I imagine aboard a ship would be a good place to learn how to locate water. You could check your answers without having to dig all those pesky holes.”

I smiled back at her. I wanted to banter with her, but also wanted this part of the conversation over as soon as possible. I had given just enough comic answers to hint that a serious one would not be forthcoming.

“You will find your path,” Itokawa said. He sounded a lot more certain than I felt.

“With luck,” I agreed. “Speaking of things we weren’t speaking of—”

But I didn’t have to manufacture a subject change, because one presented itself just then: my axe. The decision to send for it had apparently been made while I was deep in thought. Nothing for it but to play now.

But first they all had to ooh and ah, of course.

I had brought four saxophones with me, actually: soprano, tenor, alto, and baritone. (Musical instruments did not count against personal weight allowance.) But someone, almost surely Sol, had sent for my personal favorite, the one I considered my primary axe: Anna, a genuine Silver Sonic—a PreCollapse Yanigasawa B-9930 baritone, solid silver with a gold-plated hand-engraved bell and keys. The Selmer is more famous—but how often is the most famous really the best? Anna is a thing of beauty even to a layman, so elegant and precise you’d think she’d been finished by a jeweler… and a special joy to play for those who can handle her. Featherlight keys, lightning-fast response, tone-boosted resonator pads… never mind, I see you yawning. Let it stand that three people who spent their working days contemplating the infinite beauty that underlies the universe thought her special enough to admire extravagantly.

Even before they’d heard a note.

The baritone sax has never been a terribly popular instrument with musicians, because it is, physically, such a screaming bitch to play. It’s huge and ungainly and requires you to move an immense volume of air. But some of the greats—Gerry Mulligan, James Carter—understood that it is worth the effort. Baritone sax is probably the most powerful resonant wind instrument there is, the Paul Robeson of horns, and no other is so immediately impressive to the layman.

(A purist would note there are actually two deeper saxes, the bass and contrabass, just as there are two higher than soprano, the sopranino and soprillo, and some even recognize one lower than contrabass called the tubax—but you’re unlikely ever to hear any of them.)

While I wetted up my reed, I tried to decide what to play for them. Naturally, I wanted to play them one of my own compositions. And I was reasonably sure all three were sophisticated enough to appreciate it, if only mathematically—very sure, in Sol’s case. But what if they were sophisticated enough to hate it? Also, I was far less sure of everyone else in the place, and perfectly well aware that some of my work can strike a civilian as dry and complex. To pick the most polite words Jinny had used.

Okay, wrong time and place for an original Johnston. Something immediately accessible, but not crap. I reached into the air, and pulled down a tune Charlie Haden wrote to his wife Ruth called “First Song.” It was the opening number of the last set Stan Getz ever played, and it always tears me up. You’d think a tenor piece wouldn’t sound right on a baritone, but that one does. It snuck up on me; before long I had forgotten anyone else was listening, and played my heart out.

I hadn’t played a note in weeks, hadn’t even thought of it. My fingers were stiff, my embouchure weak, my wind less than optimal. I killed them, that’s all. You can tell when it’s working. I was playing smarter than I actually am, and could tell.

For the first three or four minutes, I was imagining accompaniment. Kenny Barron, who backed Getz by himself on that long-ago night in Copenhagen. Piano as crisp as snapping sticks.

And then suddenly the piano was really there.

I nearly clammed the phrase I was playing, and spun toward the bandstand. It was empty.

Wherever the keyboard player was, he was really good. Really good. I quartered the room without finding him, then eighthed it with no better luck. There were several side rooms and alcoves in which he might be lurking—or he could have been anywhere on the ship, listening in and tapping into the house sound system to play along. I decided to worry about it later, and put my attention back on Anna.

That piano was just the floor I’d needed to set my feet properly. We talked, briefly, and then he set me loose to wander. Before I knew it I had disappeared down the mouthpiece. When Getz played the song that night, he was saying good-bye to his life. I used it now to say good-bye to mine. God knew what new life I would build for myself, but the old one was over for good and for all, as unreachable as a moment ago, or the second before the Big Bang. Out of the bell of my Anna I blew my scholarship, and the mentor who would appear someday to nurture and teach me, and my master’s, and my debut at the legendary Milkweg II in Amsterdam, and my discovery by the contemporary serious music establishment, and System-wide recognition, and the respect of an entire generation of my peers… I blew away my courtship with Jinny, and our marriage, and our wedding night, and our first nest, and our first child, and all our children, and their childhoods and adolescences and adulthoods, and their children, and all the golden years she and I would have spent loving and cherishing them all…I blew away both my dead parents, whose widely separated graves I would never see again… I blew away Ganymede my home, lost to me for so long and now lost for good, and all those who still lived on her… and not incidentally I blew away a quantum of wealth and power that perhaps could have been expressed as a fraction of all there was using only a single digit in the denominator.