In Concert Page 3

  She could hear breathing behind her; the alien Simms was following her. Her flight took her deeper and deeper into the Emporium, which was much larger than she had thought, much more labyrinthine. She could hardly breathe. Everything she saw and heard was distorted. Once she cried out, and was frightened by the sound of her own voice.

  “Celia!” called Simms. He was very close. “Wait!”

  Candelaria turned a corner to hide herself from him. She didn’t have much time. A box on the floor in front of her overflowed with fur; she pulled out a handful, pulled the things apart, found a red wig and a full gray beard and put them on.

  “Celia!”

  He sounded slightly farther away now, as if he’d taken a wrong turn. In this part of the Emporium — its heart, she imagined — there was almost no light. She crept sideways, like some scuttling kind of creature. Her hands found a tall crate, eased the lid open, pulled out appendages that felt more like flesh than her own flesh, attached them at random places on her body with the straps and hooks only approximately fastened. Some part of her body bumped against a box and she heard bottles clinking together; she pulled out a large one, unstoppered it, and doused herself with scent like nameless flowers and musk.

  “Celia.” He was inches away from her. She could feel his body beat, smell him, hear her name as be whispered it again and again. “Celia.”

  Stumbling over her own unfamiliar arms and legs and breasts, she turned toward him. Her chest ached; she felt on the verge of tears. But her hodgepodge disguise was strangely calming. She imagined herself embracing the twisted little creature. She imagined touching him, her fingertips resting on alien skin, and found she could retain the image a few seconds before having to turn away. She gathered her cloak of prostheses closer to her own flesh, and the feel of plastics and fiber was oddly warming.

  From inside her shirt she pulled the microphone and extended it toward him like a hand, both welcoming and distancing. She wanted to ask him something, but she was still too panicky to frame the question. She wanted to ask him. She turned up the volume. She fought for control. She wanted to ask him. Her voice was muffled by the heavy beard in a comforting way. He stared at her with what might have been apprehension. “Tell me,” she said, her voice beginning to break. She moved the microphone closer, a reaching or a threatening. “I need you to tell me about it. Please. Gordon, I need you to tell me how it is.”

  THE STING

  Last night I woke up from a nearly formless dream, shaking with the realization that Rae and I had never Sung together. It was hard to comprehend, so much a part of my life now are Sings and so integral to every Sing are my memories of Rae. She is dead. We’ll never Sing together. It was a new grief; it kept me awake the rest of the night, and today it will send me to the Cleer.

  Forever alien, I’ll stand among the Cleer in the rough-hewn amphitheater, my mouth open like theirs even though it can’t tremble in the same way. I’ll make my sound, which will never be quite the sound the Cleer make but is close enough. Rae will swell my voice. My mind will be flooded with images: oval faces, vague stick figures dancing, the seasons changing with the Song. Images from human myths, from old Earth songs, maybe from Cleer things that I couldn’t name. Images of Rae. I have no way of knowing what the Cleer see when they Sing; we can’t talk that precisely or poetically to each other, after all this time, and when they touch me I don’t know for sure what it means. But I have come to recognize their tears, and I think they recognize mine.

  Then — if I’m lucky, if it’s a good Sing for me, if it works — the sound will pull greedily at my throat and my thoughts, the dark stones and the gentle disfigured Cleer and the grim Matchhead sky and even my precious thoughts of Rae will recede into nothing, and for a while all of my attention will be needed for the Song.

  For now, though, I sit alone at my tiny dusty window with my morning cup and watch the Matchhead sun come up over the flat Matchhead horizon. The stark landscape, the dreary vista of featureless stone and night-colored clay, echoes what I’m feeling, verifies it, makes it resonate. A retired mining engineer I used to know — I wonder whatever became of him; he was old and weary when I knew him — told me this was called “pathetic fallacy,” and he said that was one reason why people came to Matchhead. More and more, I think he was right. Earth has lost its capacity for pathetic fallacy. It doesn’t respond so intimately to its inhabitants anymore. There’s no room there for feelings outside the self.

  I think I glimpse a Cleer go by. It enters and leaves the area I can see out my window before I can really tell who or what it is. Up early, I think, and then realize how little I know about these creatures who have come to mean so much to me, how seldom I’ve tried to learn anything about their customs or habits, how few words I understand of their musical language, how unreliable is my ability to distinguish one of them from another. I remember hearing a good deal about them before I first came to Matchhead. Back then, I dismissed most of it as exaggeration, tall tales; now, I can’t tell how much of it was true, or in what way.

  “Voices like birds they have, birds you never heard nor heard of. Why, I hear they sing the precious ore out of the ground!”

  “I saw a Cleer once. Yes, indeed. Opened its mouth to a friend o’ mine and my friend near died o’ joy. That’s a fact.”

  The planet Matchhead itself has acquired legendary qualities. It draws people like a frontier, like a new world or a promised land. In ancient times there was the French Foreign Legion; now, Matchhead attracts disappointed lovers, misguided romantics, dreamers in search of a dream. Because the corporations that run the place will hire with few questions asked, debt-dodgers come, criminals and ex-criminals and those on the brink. Matchhead pay is good and there aren’t many taxes, so we have men and women who know no better way of supporting families on Earth; they always plan to stay only as long as it takes to accumulate a nest egg, and usually only their paychecks ever see home again.

  Myself, I don’t remember why I first came here. Maybe my reasons were clearer to me then, or maybe I never had real reasons; it was a long time ago, and I was a very different man. Probably there was some element of adventurousness to it, although I don’t remember. I was alone, but I’d always been alone and I didn’t think of myself as lonely; certainly I wouldn’t have known what it meant to be heartbroken. I wasn’t escaping anyone or anything; nobody ever got close enough for me to need escape, and I didn’t take many chances.

  It couldn’t have been because of Rae, although there are times now when it seems that everything is or was because of her. I didn’t know Rae then. I didn’t imagine that she existed. If anyone had asked — if I’d known to ask myself — I’d have said I wasn’t looking, for her or for anything in particular.

  Matchhead from a distance looks just as its name implies: small and bright red from all the iron ore, with white polar caps, the larger on the north end. Not that you see matches anymore, except in museums; those first engineer/explorers must have been quite the romantics themselves.

  I am not a romantic. Not anymore. I’m a realist. For the first time in my life, I know what I need. Even when I had Rae, I didn’t know I needed her. It was only after she died — long after she died — that I understood what I had lost. The Cleer showed me that. I’m neither grateful to them nor bitter.

  I check the time, get up stiffly from my seat at the window, fix breakfast. Soon I can go to the Sing.

  Matchhead was Inter-Ore’s biggest find; it virtually made the company, and nothing has equaled it since. When Inter-Ore got to Matchhead, the Cleer had already been here for a very long time. A routine had been established so long that it must have seemed like a cultural tradition indigenous to Matchhead: Every once in awhile a huge Cleer ship arrives — presumably from their home planet, wherever that may be — to pick up ore and Cleer and to deposit more Cleer. The rest of the ore — mined, ready for transport and processing — is simply left behind. Inter-Ore considers it a bonanza, and it may be some kind of payoff or
kickback or bribe, but more likely it’s just more than the Cleer can use, and so they pay it no attention.

  The Cleer are expert miners; they seem born to it. They’re geologically and mechanically knowledgeable, efficient, persistent. But there is no greed in them, hardly any of what we’d even call a work ethic. When they’re not mining they’re staring silently off into space, and one activity doesn’t seem to interfere with the other. If you’re working near a Cleer encampment, you’re not surprised when one of them appears to help repair broken-down equipment or dredge a stubborn vein. It’s not unheard-of for Inter-Ore prospectors to come upon a particularly rich lode that the Cleer are already working; politely, quietly, the Cleer just move on.

  I met Rae after I’d been out awhile. I’d been doing scheduling at a temporary outpost on one of Matchhead’s gigantic, country-sized mesas, and had made a little error, putting one driller operator in for a double shift. When a tall figure strode into the office, dust hood making it look like some sort of enormous desert insect, I prepared to take cover.

  “So you’re the bastard — “ she began.

  The female voice surprised me enough to delay my answer a few beats. Women on Matchhead tended to hold upper-echelon jobs, engineers and surveyors and the like; I’d never encountered a woman on a crew.

  She took off her hood and impatiently shook her head. Her sandy hair was stringy and matted with grime against her skull, but she had astonishing green eyes, and she was beautiful.

  Finally I said, “I’m the bastard,” and she chuckled.

  It’s dangerous to be remembering all this in such detail when I’m by myself, when I’m not at a Sing. I switch on the morning news for distraction, but nothing much has happened during the night and it doesn’t help. I can’t stop thinking about Rae, and she’s been dead now for nearly half my life.

  Love in all its variations is free and easy on a mining outpost. There’s not much talk about commitment, but it’s not cold, either, as a lot of people think. It’s friendly. At first I didn’t take love with Rae very seriously; I was used to going through friends and lovers without giving any of them much thought.

  But before I knew it, things were different with Rae. I liked talking to her. I liked touching her. I liked looking at her. We talked a lot about Earth, how neither of us had been able to find what we wanted or needed there. Of course, we admitted, we couldn’t find what we wanted or needed on Matchhead either, but here we could justify putting the search on hold.

  We spent nearly all our time together. We arranged with the dispatchers — it wasn’t hard; nobody much cared — to be sent on the same sequence of jobs at roughly the same time. We worked well together. We talked well together. We slept and lived well together, and we made marvelous love. Looking back on it, I think I accepted her as if she’d always been part of me and always would be. There are ways in which that is true.

  Rae and I never Sang together, and I regret that enormously; it’s an irretrievable loss. But once we sat on a hot sandy hillside and watched and listened to the Cleer at a Sing.

  Probably everything about the Cleer is more interesting than their physical appearance. Their bodies are practically featureless, except for a few strategic orifices; their skin is translucent, almost transparent, and the body-workings you can see through the skin look amazingly uncomplicated. “Cleer” is apparently a variant of “Clear”; those first engineers weren’t all that imaginative, and they obviously took note, as we are trained to do in this profession, of surface details.

  But Rae noticed something else that day on that dusty hill, before we were both caught up speechless in the beauty and pain of the Song itself. “Look,” she said suddenly, and leaned forward, tightening her grip on my hand. “They’re hurt. Maimed. Every one of them.”

  I looked. I wasn’t as sure as she was — Rae had an exquisite eye for detail — but at last I thought I saw what she meant. Every one of the Cleer in the crowded amphitheater below us seemed to have something wrong with its body. Some hole, some misalignment, some painful awkwardness.

  Physical disfigurement among humans isn’t uncommon on Matchhead; mining is hard and dangerous work, and the sophisticated technology has been applied less to ensuring miners’ safety than to getting the ore out. The bars in Pull Out, Oretown, Packett are full of miners retired with plastic arms, legs, feet. I was used to that. So it shouldn’t have shocked me to make the same discovery about the Cleer. But I remember shivering a little as Rae said, “Come to think of it, they don’t fix the damage to their bodies the way we do. Obviously they could. They have the technology. It’s as if the hurt were some kind of badge.”

  “They seem so peaceful,” I said.

  “I know. More peaceful than you or me.” She squeezed my hand.

  I was suddenly full of curiosity. “I wonder what they do on their own planet. I wonder how long any one individual stays on Matchhead — and, for that matter, why they come here. I wonder what their lives are like.”

  Then the Song reached us. A deep sound, liquid, translucent, like a collective recollection of which Rae and I shared only a tiny piece. Like a soft breathing animal. Like the sand that blows all the time on Matchhead, billowing and searing. Like the vast sky, somehow, though in truth I’ve never seen such a sky here or anywhere. The Song filled us. We were filled with all we had felt and had not said. The Song pushed out of us, gently drew us with it, until we were free of our bodies and the whole world was Singing and Rae and I were huddled in each other’s arms.

  The morning light comes through my slit of a window now like a weapon. I get up to dress, and I’m so weak I can hardly move. Already I’m exhausted, and ahead of me is another long day at a developing site in the stage of chaos and clamor and productivity that demands full attention and energy. I’m foreman now; it’s my responsibility. I don’t have time to go to a Sing this morning. But I will go. I have to go. Half-naked and chilled, I stand still in the middle of my room and can’t stop myself from thinking about Rae and about the Cleer.

  My first field assignment for Inter-Ore was to prepare an inventory of equipment abandoned on company properties. I was to match serial numbers from historical documents and set aside, for cataloguing into a planned Matchhead History Museum, any equipment used in the original exploration. It was slow, dirty, boring work, but I finished it, finally; the museum has yet to be built.

  One day I was working in the southern hemisphere — broad red and gray plains, mostly gravel, hard flat rock, stiff clay. The colors are dark and muted until sunlight touches them; then there are brilliant highlights. Vegetation is sparser here than in the north, a few brush strokes of black and silver, narrow cracks of life in the barren landscape. Although I didn’t see any fauna at all on that first desolate assignment, I know now that there are some: rodents, tiny flying snakes, a few brown insects. The one outstanding feature on the southern half of the planet is a broad steep-sided mesa, against which much of the equipment was piled.

  I was crouching on a rock ledge that jutted out from the side of the mesa, trying to make out the serial number stamped on an ancient earth mover. It looked to be a historical piece, and I remember actually being excited by the find, which shows just how dull the job had become. I remember also that I was trying not to think about the four miners who’d died just east of the mesa a few days earlier when their ground-effect vehicles were caught in a furious, blinding dust storm. The ledge shifted. I tried to scramble off. It collapsed, and I fell.

  I lay there a long time with my leg twisted back under me. I knew I wasn’t in any real danger; I’d triggered a beacon immediately, I had plenty of supplies, and I’d never heard of any life forms on Matchhead that would pose a threat. But I was scared. I felt like a child. My leg hurt. Nobody would worry about me. Maybe Rae would worry a little; we’d just met. The desperation with which I hoped she’d worry about me made me feel frightened and foolish, and I was crying.

  Then I saw a dark form silhouetted against the bright brown starlit
sand, coming swiftly toward me. I sobbed and waited, foolishly, for the end.

  The Cleer stood over me, two of them, their strange expressionless eyes fixed on my face. One stooped and touched my leg. I pulled away in revulsion, and pain catapulted through me. Its oral cavity gaped, and I could hear a slight continuous hiss. When it stood up again it turned to its companion. They didn’t speak, but in concert they picked me up and carried me out of the rocks and into the open night.

  I was so frightened, so overwhelmed by strangeness and pain and by alien will, that I didn’t pay attention to where they were taking me. Suddenly I was aware of being on a broad rock plain, out of the edge of which had been gouged a depression like an amphitheater. Sound drifted toward me, music, beautiful and agonizing. They had brought me to a Sing.

  I was surrounded by Cleer, and my fear dissolved. The Song was a living thing. I wanted to be part of it; I didn’t want just to sit there with my mouth closed. But something held me back. I looked around at the others in embarrassment.

  They lulled me to sleep with their Song. When I awoke they were all gone, and one of our rescue copters was setting down nearby. I was taken to a hospital post where the leg was set and cast, and before long it was as good as new. But I always knew, even before I understood it, that the real healing had come from the Sing.

  I have managed to dress, all but my boots, which I can’t find. I’m sitting on the floor now, cross-legged like a child, supposedly looking for my boots. But my hands are limp in my lap and tears are streaming down my cheeks. The Cleer have taught me to mourn. It’s not as good alone, away from a Sing; in fact, it’s dangerous. But it’s better than nothing.

  Rae died toward the end of our first tour of duty on Matchhead. Sometimes I’ve wondered if we would have re-upped, or if we’d have gone home to Earth together. It doesn’t matter, of course, because suddenly it was all over.