The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Dr. Williams listened for a brief awestruck period, then smeared the sweat from his eyes with a wobbling hand and tried to think.

Accepting purely for the sake of argument that the situation was real, what for pity’s sake was the creature that now sat outside the cave making noises like the long-dead Duke Ellington band in full cry? He laboriously reviewed its actions, trying to build up some sort of composite picture that would give him a clue as to its nature and purpose.

The conclusions that he eventually drew, while outside the fifth straight rendition of Ko Ko thundered towards its conclusion, were absurd but inescapable. Somehow, in some multidexterous way that was quite beyond his imagining, it was capable of memorizing or recording what it heard and then repeating it in minute detail, even to the extent of approximately simulating the individual timbres necessary to achieve the final collective sound. This was sheer lunacy, of course, but Dr. Williams doggedly faced up to the fact that on the present evidence there was no other possible explanation. Secondly, it was either quite young or relatively stupid. Its attitude was clearly that of a dog or small child that wanted to play, the unmistakably plaintive note now having taken on a whining quality that grated unpleasantly on his already highly strung nerves.

His experience of both dogs and children had been limited of late years, a situation largely dictated by his wife who had no interest in either, but he knew that both had a tendency to sulk when denied their immediate interest. Discipline, of course, was the correct treatment, but he couldn’t see how he was going to apply any under the existing circumstances. All things considered, cooperation seemed the better part of valor, a decision aided by the fact that absence of anything that could be remotely construed as aggressive intent had at last permitted Dr. Williams’ curiosity to at least partially overcome his fear.

He opened the container, placed the machine on the floor of the cave, selected and fitted another spool, and pressed the on button again. Potato Head Blues by the Louis Armstrong Hot Seven clattered from the speaker, well-nigh deafening him until he made hasty adjustments to the controls. Beyond the cave entrance, he could detect signs of excited movement. A tentacle tip appeared, jigging solemnly, shortly to be joined by others.

Dr. Williams took a deep breath, said yet another silent but fervent prayer, and crawled outside with the machine blaring under one arm.

The greeting that he received, he had no doubt, was friendly. Tendrils patted, smoothed and tickled him from all angles, sometimes clumsily, but all with a marked absence of animosity. Dr. Williams clung grimly to the still performing machine and bore the buffeting with as much equanimity as he could muster, flinching only occasionally.

The music chirruped to a close, provoking obvious consternation and an abrupt halt to the amiably excited pawing. This recommenced, briefly, as the caustic virtuosity of Charlie Parker’s saxophone scurried from the speaker, then ceased altogether as the creature carefully lowered itself to a squatting position, its tendrils now moving in gently bobbing patterns that made Dr. Williams think light-headedly of dancing flowers. Gingerly, and wearing a fatuously polite smile, he joined it on the ground, offering thanks for the apparently safe opportunity to do so before his legs gave way of their own accord.

The spool took some twenty minutes to run its course. During that time they were regaled by the thickly textured sonorities of Coleman Hawkins, a brace of roaring pieces from the Woody Herman and Count Basie bands, an Art Tatum solo and several sourly elated numbers by an Eddie Condon group. Apart from a cautiously twitching foot Dr. Williams sat motionless, eyeing his incredible companion and its movements with wary fascination. Occasionally and startlingly the creature would counterpoint the current ensemble or solo with a phrase of its own, intrusions that initially did little to aid the subsidence of Dr. Williams’ state of tension, but which he eventually came to await with eager anticipation. These embellishments took a variety of forms, each displaying an astonishing degree of sympathy with the performance.

The final number on the spool commenced, a dryly dragging performance of the blues. With a certain stiff embarrassment, Dr. Williams got to his feet, returned to his former place of refuge, and procured the component parts of his clarinet. He assembled it with hands that now shook only slightly, religiously moistened the reed, then returned to sit in his former position.

He joined in cautiously at first, adding a muttered, almost apologetic embroidery to the trombone solo, inserting his phrases carefully between and around its familiar ruminations. Other instruments joined in for the final collective chorus, and Dr. Williams went with them, piping plaintive comments that were interspersed with the occasional squeak brought about by nervousness and lack of practice and listening with one eagerly attentive ear to the now more frequent and brassily stated interjections supplied by the extraordinary figure before him.

The performance sank to a muted close. There was a brief, solemn silence, and then the creature began to make music of its own, single-voiced and softly at first, but swelling gradually to a richly textured fortissimo; jagged, dissonant sounds that caused the hairs at the nape of Dr. Williams’ neck to lift ecstatically and his foot to match its insistent pulse.

It was some minutes before he fully realized what was happening. The music contained passages that he found vaguely familiar, but recognition, when it came, still startled him. A chromatic passage that was nothing more nor less than pure Tatum or Hawkins would be followed immediately by the creature’s own variations, spine-tingling patterns that meshed perfectly with the rambling yet oddly coherent structure of the music.

Dr. Williams became dimly aware that at some point in the proceedings he had joined in again, contributing strangely angular phrases that he would never normally have been capable of conceiving, let alone attempting to perform. He ducked and bobbed and weaved with the music, instinctively following the tantalizing zigzag of modulations, somehow seeking out the right note, the apt harmonic aside.

At long last, it faded and died. Dr. Williams twiddled a startlingly intervalled and totally fitting coda, then sat in deep reverie, inexpressibly content. The skies might fall, he could be stricken with some dread and unheard of disease that was beyond his curing, he might even suddenly find himself viewed in a rather more edible light by the odd and now silent and motionless figure that sat not eight feet away from him, but nothing could destroy the happiness that he felt at that moment. In the past he had added his not altogether unaccomplished embellishments to countless recorded performances, but absence of willing fellow participants had always ensured that these were solitary intrusions onto already familiar ground. Now, for the very first time, the crutch of foreknowledge had been removed, leaving him dependent entirely on his own imagination, his own abilities.

And it hadn’t been half bad, Dr. Williams thought. He felt a muffled surge of vanity, then let it come jauntily through in all its unabashed swagger. No, by God, it hadn’t been half bad.

He glanced briefly at the creature, placed his clarinet back in his mouth, tapped his foot briskly four times, then blew.

Some little time after that, the strains of an exuberant and quite unique performance of Tea for Two played by an extraordinary collection of instruments that included bassoon-like croakings and something that sounded vaguely like a plunger-muted sousaphone racketed raspingly through the slowly darkening forest.