Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“I feel pretty good,” Sidney said from his window seat.

I sat back and watched the other cars slide along their strands, listening to the band keep loose. The front line, I thought, would be okay. I had been playing with Hook and Sidney since I was twelve years old—twelve years now—and Hook and Sidney had been playing together longer than that; we were the best front line there was, without a doubt, maybe the best there had ever been. And our back line was almost as good. Washboard never stopped hitting; even now he was clicking out rhythms on the side of the car, metal studs already taped to his fingers. Crazy was unreliable, we’d had to play many times without him because of his wild drinking; he didn’t have the virtuoso command of the tuba that old Clarence Miles, our first tuba man, had had before he was paralyzed; but nobody could pump as much air through a tuba as Crazy could, and his mad stomping and blowing was one of the trademarks of the Hot Six. Fingers—he was probably our weakest spot. He’s a bit slow to understand things, and he only has eight fingers now; maybe the best thing about his playing is that all eight of those fingers hit the keys a good part of the time. That’s the only way a piano man gets heard in a Dixieland band, especially a fine loud one like ours.

Hook slammed us into one of the track intersections without slowing down, and we dropped through it with a sickening jolt. I had visions of the whole band plummeting down the Gap like a puny imitation of the rock that had carved it.

“Goddammit Hook, what’s the rush?” I asked. “We’re not that late.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “This is just a fancy ore car here, I got it in hand.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, Shaky,” Crazy chipped in. “Why you worrying? You ain’t going to get shaky again, are you Shaky?” They all laughed, Hook hardest of all; he had named me that (because I was so scared when I first played with the band that my tone had a vibrato in it).

“I feel real good,” said Sidney.

Then we turned a curve and were pointed right at the Performing Arts Center. It stuck up from the canyon floor like one of the natural spires, a huge stack right at the end of the colony, the last structure before the black U of the Gap stretched out, lightless and empty. The car hit the final swoop of track up to it, and scarcely slowed down. Nobody said anything; Fingers stopped singing. As we drew closer, and the side of the building blocked out our view of the Gap, Hook finished the verse:

The waiting room backstage was crowded with a menagerie of about forty brightly dressed performers, all wandering in and out of practice rooms and talking loud, trying to work off tension. As soon as we walked in the door I could feel a heat on my cheeks, on account of all the eyes focusing on us. Everyone was happy to have something to think about besides the upcoming few hours, and as I looked at us all, standing in the doorway gawking, I could see we were good for that. Even in our best clothes (supplied by JM) we looked like exactly what we were: bulky, roughshod, unkempt, maimed, oh, we were miners, clear enough; and under the stares of that rainbow of costumes I suppose we should have quailed. But the energy we got from adrenalin and the White Brother and our wild flight down the Gap gave us a sort of momentum; and when Hook and Crazy looked at each other and burst out laughing, it was them that quailed. Glances turned away from us, and we strode into the room feeling on top of things.

I walked over to a circle of chairs that was empty and sat down. I got my trumpet out of its case and stuck my very shallowest mouthpiece into it; hit ’em high and hard, I thought. The rest of the band was doing the same around me, talking in mutters and laughing every time their eyes met. I looked around and saw that now our fellow performers were trying to watch us without looking. As my gaze swept the room it pushed eyes down and away like magic. When Washboard pulled his washboard out of its box and compulsively rippled his studded fingers down the slats to pop the cowbell, there was an attentive, amazed silence—very undeserved, I thought, considering how strange some of the other instruments in the room appeared—if that was really what they were. I walked over to the piano in a comer of the room, and nearly fell at an unexpected step down. I hit B flat. My C was in tune with it. Hook, Sidney, and Crazy hit a variety of thirds and fifths, intending to sound as haphazard and out of tune as possible. Sidney made a series of small adjustments to his clarinet, but Hook and Crazy laid their brass down, the better to observe the show going on around them. Washboard was already moving around the room, stepping from level to level and politely asking questions about the weird machinery.

“Hey, look at this!” Hook called across to me. He was waving a square of paper. I crossed back to him.

“It’s a program,” he explained, and began to read out loud, “ ‘Number Eighteen, the Hot Six Jazz Band, from Jupiter Metals, Pallas—an instrumental group specializing in Dixieland jazz, a twentieth-century style of composition and performance characterized by vigorous improvisation.’ Ha! Vigorous improvisation!” He laughed again. “I’ll vigorously improvise those—”

“Who’s that up there?” Fingers asked, pointing with his good hand at the video screen they had up on one wall. The performer on stage at the moment was a red-robed singer, warbling out some polytonal stuff that many of the people in the room looked like they wanted to hear, judging by the way they stared at Hook. The harmonies and counterpoints the performer was singing with himself were pretty complex, but he had a box surgically implanted in one side of his neck that was clearly helping his vocal cords, so even though he was sliding from Crazy’s tuning note up to the A above high C, while holding a C-major chord, I wasn’t much impressed.

“ ‘Number Sixteen,’ ” Hook read (and my heart sledged in my chest all of a sudden; only two to go), “ ‘Singer Roderick Flen-Jones, from Rhea, a vocalist utilizing the Sturmond Larynx-Synthesizer in four fugues of his own composition.’ ”

“Shit,” Crazy remarked at a particularly high turn, “he sounds like a dog whistle.”

“Pretty lightweight,” Washboard agreed.

“Lightweight? Man, he’s featherweight!” Crazy shouted, and laughed loudly at his own joke; he was feeling pretty good. I noticed we were causing a general exodus from the main waiting room. People were drifting into the practice chambers to get away from us, and there was a growing empty space surrounding our group of chairs. I caught Hook’s eye and he seemed to get my meaning. He shrugged a “Fuck them,” but he got Crazy to pick up his tuba and go over some turns with him, which calmed things down somewhat.

I sat down beside a guy near our chairs, who was dressed up in one of the simpler costumes in the room, a brown-and-gold robe. He had been watching us with what seemed like friendly interest the whole time we’d been there.

“You look like you’re having fun,” he said.

“Sure,” I agreed. “How about you?”

“I’m a little scared to be enjoying myself fully.”

“I know the feeling. What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the instrument in his lap.

“Tone-bar,” he said, running his fingers over it; without amplification it made only the ghost of a rippling glissando.

“Is that a new thing?” I asked.

“Not this time. Last time it was.”

“You’ve tried this before?”

“Yes,” he said. “I won, too.”

“You won!” I exclaimed. “You got one of the grants?” He nodded. “So what are you doing back here?”