Damon Knight - Orbit 18

One time, late in the graveyard shift, I was joined at my front table by a Metis mute, one of the miners whose vocal cords had been ruined by the zinc blowout on Metis. Between sets Sidney sat with us, asked me how Hook was doing (this was right after his accident), and talked about Earth. He told us about New Orleans in the old times, when the jazz bands played in the streets. Telling it, he got so excited I didn’t need to prod him with questions; he spoke on his own, even told us his one childhood memory of Earth: “That ocean, it was like a flat blue plate, big as Jupiter from Io, speckled with shadows from clouds; and the horizon was straight as a rail, edge to edge, cutting off a sky that was a blue I can’t describe.” When he went back to play I was under the spell of Dixieland; and by the gleam in the mute’s eye I could tell he felt it too. When Sidney played a good break the mute would put back his head and laugh, mouth split wide open, silent as space.

So when Sidney was done we decided to take the mute along to his place, to give the mute some floor to sleep on; he didn’t have any money or anywhere to go. Now at this time (this was on Achilles) Sidney lived in a cubbyhole behind one of the Supervisors’ big homes. When we got there Sidney wanted us to hold back, while he went to check if his sister-in-law was awake—she didn’t like him bringing folks home. Sidney explained this, but the mute didn’t appear to understand; he must have thought he was being left, because every time Sidney walked a few steps and turned around, he found the mute right behind him, grinning and dragging me along. So there was a lot of waving and explaining going on when the JM police suddenly appeared; we didn’t even have time to run.

“Where you going?” one of them asked.

“Home,” Sidney said.

“I suppose you live here?” the cop said, pointing at the Supervisor’s place.

“Yeah,” Sidney said, and before he had time to explain, they were taking us off to jail.

We were hardly inside the jail door when they went to work on the Metis mute. Kicked him and beat him till he couldn’t stand. His face was so bloody. Sidney and I stood shaking against the wall, expecting we’d be next, but they let us alone. Turned out one of the cop’s wives had been killed on Metis, and he’d been after the mutes ever since. So when they were done with him they slammed us all into the bullpen.

There’s not much JM can do to make its jails any worse than its mines, but what they can do they have done. The cell we were in was cold and dark, like a tunnel in a power breakdown, except for the gravity, which felt like it was over 1.00.1 crawled over the rock floor, unable to see, and quietly called Sidney’s name.

“Steve?” his voice said. “Where you gone to?” His hand caught my arm, and he set me down beside him.

“Quit that snuffling,” he said to me. “This your first time in jail? Is that right? Well, it won’t be your last, no, not a miner kid like you. They’ll put you here many times before you’re done.” He paused. “Look at all these folks.”

A dim light gleamed through the door grating, and when my eyes adjusted I saw shapes huddled on the floor. They were gathered in knots, feet in each other’s stomachs, using the survival techniques JM had taught them.

“They going to let us die?” I asked fearfully; the only times I had seen men curled together like that was when they carried the bodies, two by two, out of breakdowns.

“No, no,” he said. “They just like us, just put in here for nothing, to be cold and hungry and heavy for a shift or two, to remind them who’s boss on these rocks.” He sounded old and tired; and yet when I looked up at him, I saw that he was pulling the parts of his clarinet out of his big old coat and putting them together. He was sitting against the rock wall of the cell, with the mute propped up beside him. When his horn was together he put it to his mouth, gave the reed a lick, commenced to play.

He started soft, barely sounding the notes, and played Burgundy Street Blues all the way through without raising his voice. As he played What Did I Do some of the huddled figures slowly sat up and listened, backs and heads to the wall, looking up at the ceiling or the yellow squares of the grate.

Then he played the new songs, written by miners’ bands and only heard in the bars scattered through their asteroids. He played Ceres, and Hidalgo; and Vesta Joys; he played his Shaft Bucket Blues and I Got Me a Feeling. Then he played Don't God Live Out This Far, one of the first of the miner blues, which made it about twenty years old; and people began to join in. These were miners, men who seldom sang in the bars, seldom did more than stomp their boots or shout something between phrases; and at first their singing was an awkward sort of growl, barely in tune or time with Sidney. But he picked them up and more joined in, hesitantly, till you could make out the words of the refrain:

There were about thirty verses to the song. It was about a miner who keeps getting in trouble, till JM decides to finish him: “Super comes at shift-start for me to be hung, on account of something that I hadn’t done.” The Supervisor believes he’s innocent, but there’s no proof. It was the same old, old thing.

When the singing got loud enough Sidney took off from the melody and floated up above it. And they sang! There was something in it that seemed to take my lungs away, so I could only breathe quick and shallow; it was what they had of the music inside themselves. Just hearing someone’s voice in the dark, and knowing his life has a long way to go . . .

The light from the door just caught the plumes of breath frosting out from the men singing. I looked over at the mute. His eyes were open, staring out somewhere in space. As I watched he lifted up his hands and started a little syncopated clap, very soft, giving as much to the music as he could. When Sidney heard it he looked down at him, then looked back up; he played louder, filling the room with his sound, till the clarinet was all we heard or needed to hear, and the last verse came to its end.

“Oh yeah,” said a quiet voice.

Sidney looked at the mute, smiled, shook his head. “A little blues for us, eh, brother?” he said. “A little slave music.”

The mute nodded and grinned, which made his lip crack open again and spill blood down his chin.

Sidney laughed at him and wiped some of the blood from the mute’s face. “Oh yeah,” he said softly, “a little miner music.”

We found Sidney just where Hook guessed he might be, huddled in the room where our baggage and instruments were stored. He was perched up on the box that Crazy’s tuba traveled in, with his shoulders hunched and his legs crossed. When we burst into the room he jumped and then settled back, head down, staring sullenly across at us. His clarinet lay fitted in his arms. We all stood still, barred and hidden in the shadows thrown by the single bulb behind us, waiting for somebody to say something. The wisps of hair Sidney combed across his head looked thicker because of the shadows they cast on his bald pate. He looked like one of the tunnel-gnomes men claim to see on Pallas; creatures who were once men maybe, who escaped JM by living in the old shafts. I had never noticed how small he was.

“You scared?” Hook asked.

Sidney raised his head to stare at Hook better. “Yeah, I am,” he said suddenly, loud in the dim room, “shouldn’t I be?”

“Hey, Sidney.” I said, “you don’t got no reason to be scared—”