Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories

It was the flapblacks and their love of our music which had finally freed humanity from Sol and allowed us to stretch out to the stars. More personally, of course, space travel was what provided me with my job, for which I was mostly grateful.

The catch was that it wasn't just the music they needed. Or rather, it wasn't the music alone. Which was, unfortunately, where musicmasters like Jimmy came in.

You see, you couldn't just play the music straight for them. That would have been too easy. What you had to have was someone aboard the transport listening to the music as you pumped it out through the hull.

And not just listening; I mean listening. He had to sit there doing nothing the whole time, following every note and rest and crescendo, letting his emotions swell and ebb with the flow. Basically, just really getting into the music.

The experts called it psycho-stereo, which like most fancy words was probably created to cover up the fact that they didn't know any more about this than they did anything else about the flapblacks. Best guess—heavy emphasis on guess—was that what the flapblacks actually liked was getting the music straight while at the same time hearing it filtered through a human mind. They almost certainly were getting the pre-music call telepathically—until they wrapped, there was no other way for them to pick up the sound in the vacuum of space.

However it worked, the bottom line was that I couldn't handle the job.

Neither could Bilko or Rhonda. Sure, we all liked music, but we also all had other duties and responsibilities to attend to during the flight. Even if we hadn't, I

doubt any of us had the kind of single-track mind that would let us do something that rigid for hours at a time. And you had to keep it up—one slip and your flapblack would be long gone and you'd have to stop and pull in another one.

That wasn't a problem in itself, of course; there were always flapblacks hanging around waiting to be entertained. The problem came in not knowing to the microsecond exactly how long you'd been traveling. At flapblack speeds, a second's worth of error translated into a lot of undershoot or overshoot on your target planet.

And even apart from all that, I personally still wouldn't have wanted the job.

I've always considered my emotions to be my own business, and the thought of letting some alien will-o'-the-wisp listen in was right next to chewing sand on my list of things I didn't like to think about.

Enter Jimmy and the rest of the musicmaster corps. They were the ones who actually made star travel possible. People like Bilko, Rhonda, and me were just here to keep them alive along the way, and to handle the paperwork at the end of the trip.

It was a train of thought I'd been running along quite a lot lately, more or less beginning with our previous musicmaster's departure two months ago and Jimmy's arrival. My digestion was definitely the worse for it.

"Looks like everything's smooth here," Bilko commented, pulling his lucky deck of cards from his shirt pocket. "Quick game?"

"No, thanks," I said, looking at the cards with distaste. Considering that it purported to be a lucky deck, those cards had gotten Bilko into more trouble over the years. I'd lost track of how many times I'd had to pacify some pick-up game partner who refused to believe that Bilko's winnings were due solely to skill.

"Okay," he said equably, fanning the deck. "Want to draw cards for first turn in the dayroom, then?"

Mentally, I shook my head. For all his angling, Bilko could be so transparent sometimes. "No, you go ahead," I told him, keying in the autosystem and giving the status lights a final check. The dayroom, situated across the main corridor from the passenger cabin, was our off-duty spot. On the bigger long-range transports dayroom facilities were pretty extensive; all ours offered was stale snacks, marginal holotape entertainment, and legroom.

"Okay," he said, unstrapping. "I'll be back in an hour."

"Just be sure you spend that hour in the dayroom," I added. "Not poking around Scholar Kulasawa's luggage."

His face fell, just a bit. Just enough to show me I'd hit the target dead center. "What makes you think—?"

The intercom beeped. "Captain Smith?" a female voice asked.

I grimaced, tapping the key. "This is Smith, Scholar Kulasawa," I said.

"I'd like to see you," she said. "At your earliest convenience, of course."

A nice, polite, upper-class phrase. Completely meaningless here, of course; what she meant was now. "Certainly," I said. "I'll be right there."

I keyed off the intercom and looked at Bilko. "You see?" I told him. "She read your mind. The upper classes can do that."

"I wouldn't put it past them," he grumbled, strapping himself back down. "I hope your bowing and cringing is up to par."

"I guess I'll find out," I said, getting up. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes, dream up a crisis or something, will you?"

"I thought you said she could read minds."

"I'll risk it."

Scholar Kulasawa was waiting when I arrived in our nine-person passenger cabin, sitting in the center seat in a stiff posture that reminded me somehow of old portraits of European royalty. "Thank you for being so prompt, Captain," she said as I stepped inside. "Please sit down."

"Thank you," I said automatically, as if being allowed to sit in my own transport was something I needed her permission to do. Swiveling one of the other seats around to face her, I sat down. "What can I do for you?"

"How much is your current cargo worth?" she asked.

I blinked. "What?" "You heard me," she said. "I want to know the full value of your cargo. And add in all the shipping fees and any nondelivery penalties."

What I should have done—what my first impulse was to do—was find a properly respectful way to say it was none of her business and get back to the flight deck. But the sheer unexpectedness of the question froze me to my seat. "Can you tell me why that information should be any of your business?" I asked instead.

"I want to buy out this trip," she said calmly. "I'll pay all associated costs, including penalties, add in your standard fee for the side trip I want to make, and throw in a little something extra as a bonus."

I shook my head. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, Scholar," I said, "but this run is already spoken for. If you want to charter a special trip at Parex, I'm sure you'll be able to find a transport willing to take you."

She favored me with a smile that didn't have a single calorie of warmth anywhere in it. "Meaning you wouldn't take me?"

"Meaning if you wish to discuss it after we've offloaded at Parex I'll be willing to listen," I said, standing up. I had it now: her scholarhood was in psychology, and this was all part of some stupid study on bribery and ethics.

"But thank you for the offer—"

"I'll pay you three hundred thousand neumarks," she said, the smile gone now.

"Cash."

I stared at her. The power lifters and gourmet food we were carrying were worth maybe two hundred thousand, max, with everything else adding no more than another thirty. Which left the little bonus she'd mentioned at somewhere around seventy thousand neumarks.

Seventy thousand neumarks...

"You don't think I'm serious," she went on into my sudden silence, reaching into her jacket and pulling out what looked like a pre-paid money card. "Go on," she invited, holding it out toward me. "Check it."

Carefully, suspiciously, I reached out and took the card. Pulling out my reader, I slid it in.

As the owner of a transport plying some of the admittedly less-than-plum lanes, I had long ago decided that buying cut-rate document software would ultimately cost me more than it would save. Consequently, I'd made sure that the Sergei Rock's legal and financial authenticators were the best that money could buy.