SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

And for a sec he just stared at me like I was a total whack job, which hey, was about what I’d've expected. But then he kinda cocked his head and said, “You can see that Cool Whip shit in the sky? You can hear this?”

Right? Right ? Whaaaaaaaat the hell ?

So I picked my fucking jaw up and I’m like, uh sure, yeah I can see it, and of course I’m wondering what’s up with him because he shouldn’t be able to see squat, and it’s not like I’d ever run into this punk at the Musician coop meetings if you know what I mean.

But hey, time was kind of tight, just then, and every second I wasn’t Singing the shield above me thinned out. So I’m like, "Kid, you gonna help me out or what?" And he kind of blinked those dishwater eyes and said, "Sure, why not." Seriously, just like that. Crazy lady wants to teach me to sing while a shrieking taffy-cloud’s trying to eat us? Sure, why not?

So I belted out another verse of barriers before launching into the quickest, dirtiest Tone lesson of my life.

Looked like I was right about the secret Musicality of that kid, too. He listened all crazy tight-jawed intense while I looped back through another round of my shore-it-up Song, his eyes right on me even as the Noise churned around us, even as the dingy brownstones and the scraggly park and the gawping brunchers were all drowned out by the shook-up-soda white of the Noise trying to punch through the wall I’d made.

Then that fucking kid opened up his pimple-ringed mouth and a sweet, clean tenor soared right out of it. Perfect pitch and every syllable just so, even though you know, it’s Tonal , he couldn’t have had even half an idea what the hell he was singing.

By now we must’ve been drawing a crowd, but the Noise was bubbling and boiling and kicking up a racket like a bucket of parrots, so I threw back my shoulders and raised my chin and belted out the rolling rich tones of kicking ass, the most powerful Song I knew, the kind that makes you feel like your throat is on fire. The kid was keeping my Tone wall in place, so I dug down deep into the Song in my stomach an threw my full voice into tearing that bastard apart.

Have you ever been in a fight with Noise? Not a full choir, they basically pulverize the thing in a measure. I mean a real brawl, where it has a chance to squirm a little? No?

The only thing I can think of is…well, picture a volcano erupting down out of the sky, only the lava is made of white-hot marshmallow fluff and the sound of it’s worse than anything, like a whole percussion section being crushed in a dump truck while a pack of cats are fucking on top of it. It’s unreal , but you gotta hold on to your melody like the lifeline it is, your one and only way back out of this lobster pot of shrieking screaming fury.

The kid choked on his own Song, then, and the Tone wall shimmered around us. I looked back at him, half-thinking I’d catch him trying to sell the damn tapes to someone else while I was busy. But he wasn’t looking at me, or at the tapes, and his hands were shaking, and he stared at the sky looking fit to piss himself and run.

So I’m thinking to myself, I don’t have any idea what the hell’s going on with this kid, but with this much angry Noise piling up on top of me I can’t stop Singing for more than a phrase. I snapped my fingers in front of his nose, not a real high-content way to talk to someone but enough to get him to look at me anyway. I met his eyes and stopped my Song long enough to say, "Don’t leave me hanging."

And I swear, he just swallowed his freakout right down and sang out even louder than before, so hard that he ripped a kind of raw ragged edge to that bell-clear baby voice.

You know that moment when a little kid Sings for the first time? When it’s like you can see their Song flowing into them? When they go from being some poor little Tone-sensitive critter to a real Musician, with a Voice that’ll let 'em make a place for themselves in the world? Like sure, being all full up of Song is what lets the Noise find you, but it’s worth it because you’re like…finally all the way you ?

I tell you, it’s one thing with the kids, but watching that happen to this almost-man who’s maybe had kind of a hard time of it…like I was watching it all kind of click together, everything he’d been through, all the shit he’d seen when no one else could, a decade and change of being some kind of feral Musician with no one to help him make sense of it. All of that sliding into place right there behind his eyes.

Fuck me, that was something else.

I sang, and he sang, and the Noise stretched and swelled like a spongey ceiling above us. Our voices were a boxer’s fists, one knocking back the beast and the other punching it full of wet gaping holes as it wailed and fought like a fox in a bag. I shifted my Song a little, wrapping the Tone wall up and around it, hugging that fucker nice and close before I lay in with all the fight and fierceness I had left in my gut.

And then, soap-bubble sudden, it burst and fell.

A snowfall of shed sound settled on the barrier above us. The kid and I finished our stanzas and stopped. The city sounds of cars and pigeons and window ACs rose up and filled the sudden silence.

I looked around at the crowd we’d gathered, maybe a dozen or so curious folks with nowhere urgent to be. A few of them applauded. I think an old man tossed a dollar onto the blanket. Within a minute or so, they’d all wandered back to whatever they’d been doing before.

I mean hey, this is New York. Mostly people just want to keep their heads down and deal with their own shit.

As the sidewalk emptied, the Tone wall over our heads broke apart. And the kid and I kind of sized each other up while tiny flakes of Noise settled in drifts on the sidewalk, clung to the hair and necks and faces of the Toneless all around us, all set to become little fragments of shit music lodged in their heads for the next few days.

I popped in a couple of fresh batteries and got my cloak Song spinning again. The Kid just kind of stood there watching me, like some poor nerd at a middle school dance, standing and waiting for someone to tell him what to do with himself.

Then I heard Lucille’s tinny voice calling my name. I’d forgotten to hang up the damn phone.

I lifted it back to my ear, already apologizing, but she shouted me right down.

She wanted to know who’d been Singing with me. She wondered if maybe I’d bring him to choir.

"Hey kid," I said. "You got anywhere to be?"

He grunted something that I took for a "No."

"Any chance you read sheet music?"

He didn’t, but that was fine, too. He was obviously a fast learner.

"Leave this shit here, you won’t need it," I said. "Except the tapes. You grab those motherfuckers right now."

I mean, it’s like I said. I’m not an idiot.

Originally Published in The Alien Chronicles

When the Nexus shifts to one-man missions to make first contact, the security division’s second-in-command accepts a challenging assignment to negotiate with the most dangerous planet yet. Where reason does not persuade this alien species, militaristic skill might . If he lives through the trials.

The captain called me on the comms routed through my cochlear implant. He wanted to talk. He never used his office, so I found him in the hall. Louise, our head of security, was finally back and out of quarantine, so I was no longer acting head of our division. But I had been, for weeks, so I was used to the routine.

“How do you feel about taking a sabbatical?” he asked as we started walking.