John Barnes A Million Open Doors

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consistently. And if not, there's always work, you know we aren't barbarians."
I was silent. A girl like that, and an artist besides, could end up shoveling
stables or scraping paint, merely because she thought she was a better
musician than a machine ... I
was beginning to phrase my next letter to Marcabru already...
Margaret patted my arm and said, "It's really her choice, you know. And you
didn't lead her into it or anything. Don't take it too hard."
I was spared the need for a reply by the lights coming down. Thorwald came out
on the stage, and the same voice heckled him again: "Scared you off last time,
hunh?"
"Paul, you're bad for business."
With a mutual snort, Margaret and I both realized that in fact it was Paul who
had been heckling before. "He was right, though," she whispered. "We
do have to give
people time to do what they're doing. We really can't just make them all come
to order on the clock..."
"You're sounding very Occitan tonight," I teased and could see it was a
mistake. She flushed the way Val did, which meant it had read as flirting ...
and flirting with someone you couldn't possibly be interested in is the worst
sort of cruelty. I would have to be very careful for a while with
Margaret especially because I
did want her friendship.
How would I explain her to Marcabru? I could present Thorwald and Paul as
nascent jovents, Valerie as a donzelha, but Margaret?
The Occitan solution occurred to me. I would say nothing of her, but if he
ever saw her, or pictures of her, and voiced a critical thought, I would offer
him challenge atz fis prim, to the first death.
Life really was simpler, back home.
Thorwald was introducing Valerie; he seemed to think that this was going to be
the most shocking act of the evening, so he was apparently trying to
prepare the crowd adequately, stressing the "freedom and power of
expression" that came from this
"new or new to us technique of improvisation. You are going to hear things in
the music that you have never heard before; it is our belief that they have
always been there, that Valerie simply brings them forth." He went on in that
vein for a while, long enough to have convinced me, if I hadn't known better,
that we were about to see an exhibit in musical anthropology.
When Valerie finally came on the stage, she didn't get quite the applause that
Anna or
Taney had gotten, and "small wonder after that yawn-y introduction,"
Margaret whispered. I nodded emphatically.
Valerie had obviously decided to break them in gradually. She started with a
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few old ballads from the Scottish, Argentine, and Texan traditions it was
strange how, when they crossed over to Terstad, they seemed to become so
similar. Her introductions were brief, usually just telling us where a piece
came from and in what century the most controversial thing she did,
probably, was to play "Diego Diablo," an old ballad of the
Southern Hemisphere League from the years right after the Slaughter
that was thoroughly loaded with the traditional hatred of the Latin Americans
for United Asia, throwing all the blame and blood of the destruction of the
Plata Transpolis (and its 130
million people) on the "Butcher-King of Taipei," and glorifying the
counterstrike that leveled Honshu Transpolis. Even after hundreds of years,
on a world tens of light-years from Earth, it could stir and freeze your
blood I would have to point out to Thorwald how very natural the lust for a
fight is in a human being.
It was when she broke into another piece that everything went crazy. She had
taken one of Anna K. Terwilliger's poems, one of the ones that had made no
sense at all to me but drawn fierce applause, and set it to what was
apparently another traditional contest piece, one that was supposed to be
instrumental.
The uproar when she began was deafening, and so many people were on their feet
that the rest of us stood up to see. Most of the arguments were in Reason, so
I had little idea what was going on at the time, and I still don't really, but
it seemed to be that Anna had written a sort of Godel's Theorem of the local
theology in that poem, proving that if it were true, there had to be true
things that it could not comprehend and that was heresy. To top it off,
Valerie had set it to a melody that was traditionally a dirge, played in some
ceremony where they contemplated ... well, the Reason for it translates as the
"TradeOffNess of Life," and the title of the piece is "You Can't Always Get
What You
Want" anyway, I still don't entirely understand it, and I don't think a
non-Caledon ever
can, but the point was it was played at many of their most serious religious
rites, and dated clear back to the legendary founders of their faith in the
Industrial Age, and she was playing it in ragtime.
In short, between the angry words and the mocking music, this was bitter
sarcasm hurled straight into the face of Caledon thought, and the riot that
followed was probably about the most restrained response that could have been
expected.
Everywhere around me people shouted into each other's face; you could see
couples breaking up into furious acrimony with each other, Caledons pushing
each other (Deu I
was glad I hadn't yet taught any of them to punch or kick effectively!),
and one pale blond woman standing on a chair screaming at the whole [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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