Timothy Zahn - For Love of Amanda

But then, I'd never been very good at doing the smart thing. Besides, I was already playing one major off-edge hunch here. What could it hurt to add another one to the hopper?

And so I picked up my glass and strolled over to an empty table near the back corner of the piano.

"My name's Weldon," he said as I sat down. "What's yours?"

"Call me Sigmund," I said. "I like your piano playing."

"Thank you," he said, his fingers adding a little trill into his current tune that somehow sounded like a musical version of his thanks. "Is that Sigmund as in Sigmund Freud? Or Sigmund as in the tragic hero of the Volsung Saga?"

"Neither," I said, grimacing. The concept of the tragic hero was not one I liked to dwell on. "It means 'victorious protector.' I see you're an educated man."

He shrugged. "I've got a lot of time to read. You seemed to like that last piece."

"Indeed I did," I agreed. "I wasn't the only one, either."

Beneath his thin shirt, I could see his shoulders tense up. "What do you mean?" he asked cautiously.

So he was one of those who didn't like taking credit for his successes. Not that I would have pegged him as anything else. "You play all your own material?" I asked instead.

For a second he looked like he was going to insist that I answer his question. But then he apparently thought better of it. "Mostly," he said, his fingers sliding into a melody that sounded distant and aloof. I wondered if he was echoing someone else in the bar or merely indicating an emotional retreat of his own. "Sometimes I get requests."

"I doubt it," I said, looking around the room. "Tell me: have you ever written down your music and submitted it to a publisher?"

That one earned me an even sharper look. "Why?" he countered suspiciously. "You a scout for someone?"

I shook my head, the dire warnings screaming a little louder for attention. _No pushing, no suggesting, no altering_, were the strict time-observer rules, and I was currently in peril of shredding all three of them. "I just wondered."

"Sure," he said, his music taking on a tinge of anger. Clearly, he didn't believe me. "You think I haven't noticed you hanging around?"

Uh-oh. "You must have a good memory for faces," I said, deciding to go with the innocent approach. "I've only been around here the past week or so."

"_And_ you were at Jack's Tap the week I was playing there," he retorted. "_And_ at Otto's the week and a half I was over there. Let me guess: you're scouting greater Pittsburgh for the perfect beer."

I winced. So he _had_ spotted me, at least for part of the month and a half I'd been dogging his heels across Allegheny County. So much for my professional expertise. "Okay, you got me," I conceded, dropping quickly to backup position. "But there's nothing sinister about it. I just happen to like your music, that's all."

"Enough to follow me around?"

"Enough even to put up with this," I said, lifting my glass slightly.

"And what, you haven't got a home to go to?"

I shrugged. "Like you, I've got a lot of time on my hands."

He played for another minute without speaking. I listened to the music, searching it for clues as to what he was thinking or feeling. But all I could hear was more of the neutral barroom filler. "There's no point in trying to sell any of this stuff," he said at last. "So if you were going to ask, don't."

"I wasn't going to," I assured him, choosing my words carefully. "Though I don't see why you're so adamant about it. Music is all about connecting with people's hearts and minds, after all. Yours seems to do that in spades."

"Yes, well, that's the problem, isn't it?" he said bitterly. "It's a little _too_ personal."

"What's wrong with being personal?" I asked. "How many other composers can say their music fits even a single person like a handmade silk glove?"

He threw me a frown. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Silently, I cursed myself. "Nothing," I said. "Just something a friend once said about your music." She wasn't exactly a friend, of course, but he didn't need to know that. "She's a fan of yours, too."

"Then she doesn't know a thing about music," he declared bluntly, the notes flowing out of his fingers taking on a harsh, discordant flavor. Here and there, I noticed, heads were starting to turn in our direction. "I can only write for one person at a time. Period."

"Okay, fine," I said hastily. "I didn't mean to step on your toes. Sorry."

He glowered at the piano, but I could hear the harshness starting to smooth out. "I tried to sell a few pieces once," he said, the music taking on a wistful tone. "I thought maybe I could help people. Like..."

"Like you helped that brunette?"

He snorted. "Yeah. Only no one wanted it. They all said it was ... none of them wanted it."

I nodded, taking a sip of my beer. That wasn't strictly true, I knew. One of the five publishers he'd sent music to in the past three years had expressed some definite interest.

But then Weldon had suddenly withdrawn it from consideration. None of the biographies I'd read had given any explanation as to why he'd done that. "Maybe they were just feeling too good that day," I suggested. "Your specialty seems to be encouraging people who are down in the dumps."

The music drifted from wistful into a darker melancholy. "You think I helped her," he said, his voice almost too soft to hear. "You think she went back to her husband all ready to work out their problems and start over again."

He shook his head. "No. She's all fired up now, but it won't last. Chances are she'll be right back here Monday night."

"You're not responsible for solving all the problems of the world," I reminded him quietly. "Besides, who's to say when a temporary fix will grow into something more permanent? You never know about these things."

"Sure," he said, in a tone that said he didn't believe it for a minute. "I know."

I looked down into my glass, tipping it and watching the remnants of the foam slide up and down the sides. So that was it, or at least part of it. Somewhere along the line, one of his musical helping hands had gone awry. Had made matters worse, probably, though I could only guess how that might have happened.

And for whatever reason, he'd taken that failure personally. It hadn't stopped him from playing individual songs for individual people, but it _had_ scared him away from any attempt to market his work to the masses. Probably also why he kept moving from area to area, bar to bar. If and when the brunette came back with even deeper troubles, he didn't want to be there to see it. Or maybe he just didn't want to be there to offer her more false hope.

Weldon Sommers, in other words, was well on his way to turning himself into a modern version of one of the classical Greek tragic figures he undoubtedly read all about in those lonely off-hours of his.

But at the moment, that didn't matter. All that mattered was the timing of the two events. And I could only hope that this mysterious failure had happened just before he'd withdrawn his music from that fifth publisher. Reading his history, Weldon had struck me as the impulsive type who generally let stimulus flow into response with very little delay.

Which was the needle point on which this whole gamble was balanced. Sometime in the next four weeks, he would suddenly change his mind again and send out the composition that would end up changing his life forever. If the woman who would inspire that song had already walked into and out of his life, I was drinking bad beer for nothing.

Lifting my glass, I took another sip. Across the room, the door opened --

And there she was.

I caught my breath, nearly choking on that last swallow of beer. She was a far cry from the holos I'd studied before I'd left: her blond hair falling flat and listless across her shoulders, her once radiant face turned weary and hopeless, her young, athletic body slumped with fatigue inside the confines of a plain and ill-fitting blue dress and brown jacket. She'd been through the mulcher and then some.