The Planet on the Table

Coming Back to Dixieland

It figures, just as sure as shift-start, that on our big day there’d be trouble. It’s a law of physics, the one miners know best: things tend to fuck up.

I woke first out of the last of several nervous catnaps, and wandered down to the hotel bar to get something a little less heavyweight than the White Brother for my nerves. On one level I was calm as could be, but on another I was feeling a bit shaky (Shaky Barnes, that’s me). Now, we drank the Brother during performances back on the rocks, of course, between sets sitting at the tables, or during the last songs when someone offered it; and Hook would make his announcement, “We never know if this’ll make us play better or worse, but it sure is fun finding out,” and then pass it around. Which was the point; we had to play good this day, so I wanted something soothing, with a little less pop to it than the White Brother we’d brought with us, which amplifies your every feeling, including fear.

So when I threaded my way through the hotel (which was as big as the whole operation on Hebe or Iris) back to our rooms, I expected the band to still be there sleeping. But when I’d finished stepping over all the scattered chairs, tables, mattresses and such (the remains of the previous shift’s practice session) I could find only three of them, all tangled up in the fancy sheets: Fingers, Crazy, and Washboard. I wasn’t surprised that my brother Hook was gone—he often was—but Sidney shouldn’t have been missing; he hadn’t gone off by himself since we left Ceres Central.

“Hey!” I said, still not too worried. “Where’d they go, you slag-eaters!” They mumbled and grunted and tried to ignore me; I gave Washboard a shove with my foot. “Where’s Hook? Where’s Sidney?” I said a little louder.

“Quit shouting,” Washboard said fuzzily. “Hook’s probably gone back to the Tower of Bible to visit the Jezebels again.” He buried his head in the pillow, like a snoutbit diving into bubblerock; suddenly it popped back out. “Sidney’s gone?”

“You see him?”

Fingers propped himself up on his elbow. “You better find Hook,” he said in his slow way. “Hook, he’ll know where Sidney gone to.”

“Well, did Hook say he was going to the Tower of Bible?” No one spoke. Crazy crawled over to a bed and sat up. He reached behind the bed and pulled out a tall thin bottle, still half filled with cloudy white liquid. He put it to his mouth and tilted it up; the level dropped abruptly a couple of times.

“Crazy, I never seen you hit the White Brother so early in the dayshift before,” I said.

“Shaky,” he replied, “you never seen me get the chance.”

“You going to get us in trouble,” I said, remembering certain misadventures of the past.

“No, I’m not,” Crazy said. “Now why don’t you run down Hook, I’m pretty sure he’s in Sodom and Gomorrah, he liked that place”—he took another swallow—”and we’ll hold down the fort and wait for Sidney to come back.”

“He better come back,” I said. “Shit. Here it is the biggest day in our lives and you guys don’t even have the sense to stay in one spot.”

“Don’t worry,” Crazy said. “Things’ll go fine, I’ll see to it.”

I took one of the slow cars through the track-webbed space between our hotel and the Tower of Bible. The Tower is one of Titania’s biggest experiments in Neo-Archeo-Ritualism, sometimes called Participatory Art. Within the huge structure, set right against the wall of the Titania Gap, the setting for every chapter in the Bible is contained, which means you can participate in a wide variety of activities. The lobby of the Tower was unusually crowded for the early hours of the dayshift, but it was Performance Day, I remembered, and people were starting early. I worked from ramp to ramp, trying to make my way through the oddly assorted crowd to the elevator that would take me to Sodom and Gomorrah. Finally I slid through the closing doors and took my place in the mass of future Sodomites.

“What I want to know,” one of them said happily, “is do they periodically sulfurize everyone in the room?”

“Every two hours,” a woman with round eyes replied, “and does it feel real! But then they unfreeze you and you get to begin again!” She laughed.

“Oh,” said the man, blinking.

The elevator opened and the group surged past me toward Costumes. I stood and looked down some of the smoky streets of Gomorrah, hoping to see my brother in the crowd. Just as I decided to get one of the costumes and start searching, I saw him coming out of the door marked JEZEBELS one arm wrapped around a veiled woman.

“Why, he must have just got here,” I said aloud, and took off after him. “Hook!” I called. “Hook!”

He heard me and quickly steered the woman into a side street. I started running. Sure enough, when I rounded the corner they had disappeared; I made a lucky guess and opened the door to a house made of sediments, and caught up with them moving up the narrow stairs. “Hook. God damn it,” I said.

“Later,” he mumbled back at me, face buried in the Jezebel’s neck.

“Hook, it’s important.”

He waved his right arm back at me in a brush-away motion, and the metal rods of his hand flashed in my face. “Not important!” he bellowed. I grabbed his arm and pulled on it.

“How can you say that?” I cried. “Today’s the day! The six bands those judges pick today get to go to Earth and everywhere—”

He finally stopped dragging us all up the stairs. “I know all that, Shaky, but that don’t happen for a few hours yet, so why don‘t you go down to Psalms or Proverbs and calm down some? No reason for you to be so anxious.”

“Yes, there is,” I said, “a real good reason. Sidney’s gone.”

Hook tucked his chin into his neck. “Sidney’s gone?” he repeated.

“Nobody’s seen him all shift.”

His three metal fingers waved up and down, scissoring the air; it was the same nervous sign of thought he’d made when he had his hand, and played the trumpet. “Did you search the hotel good?” he said after a bit. “I don’t think he’d leave the hotel.”

I shook my head. “I came here, I thought you’d know where he is.”

“Well, he’s probably in the hotel somewhere, take a look why don’t you?”

“What if he’s not there? Come on, Hook, if we don’t find him we’re sunk.”

“All right,” he said. “Shit. You’re as bad as Sidney. I’ve been playing with that man near twenty years, and I never seen him so scared.”

“You think he’s scared?” That had never occurred to me. Sidney was quiet, not too forward, but I’d never seen him scared of playing music.

“Sure he’s scared.” He looked at the Jezebel, who hadn’t made a sound so far. “I got to find Sidney,” he explained. “I’ll be back to celebrate tomorrow.”

Her veiled head nodded, and I could see the flash of teeth. “We better hurry,” Hook said. “We’re due to be turned into a pillar of salt any minute now.” We ran back and dived into the elevator, just behind the man who had been asking questions on the way up. Down in the lobby we dodged through a group of wide-eyed Venusian monks and then through a stumbling crowd of wet people from one of the aquatic scenes. Then we made it to the exit, jumped in a car, and popped out into the Gap.

“That Participatory Art,” Hook said, “is really something.”

“Sidney’s probably hiding in the hotel somewhere, the bar or maybe the baggage rooms,” Hook said as we neared our hotel.

I could see that he was as worried as I was. Despite his easygoing speculations, his nervous trumpet fingering gave him away. Sidney’s absence was a serious matter, partly because it was so unexpected; Sidney was never gone, never sick, never hurt; there was nothing that could keep Sidney from playing. And how he could play that clarinet! It was more than notes, it had to do with what was inside the man, the strength and the feeling; there’s no way I can describe it to you but by telling a story here; a little blues:

After the long shift’s ending, when I was just a kid and still working the sheds, I’d go down to the Heel Bar to sip beer and listen to Sidney play his clarinet. At this time he was playing with just Washboard and a piano man, Christy Morton, who later got killed in the big tunnel collapse on Troilus; and they were working out all the old tunes he’d discovered in the Benson Curtis tapes.

Sidney was as quiet and unassuming then as always. It didn’t matter how much stomping and shouting he stirred up, or how much Washboard and Christy sang into the tune; old Sidney would stand there, head bowed, horn cradled in his arm when he wasn’t playing, as silent and bashful as a child. Then he’d raise that horn lo his mouth, and when be played it was clear he had found his way of talking to the world. All the clamoring in the room channeled into him, he was transformed, and, sweat-bright with the effort, he’d wrench those songs into a sound as clean and live as a welding arc. Listening to him my cheeks would flush with blood, my heart would pound like Washboard’s cowbell.

One time, late in the graveyard shift, I was joined at my front table by a Metis mute, one of the miners whose vocal cords had been ruined by the zinc blowout on Metis. Between sets Sidney sat with us, asked me how Hook was doing (this was right after his accident), and talked about Earth. He told us about New Orleans in the old times, when the jazz bands played in the streets. Telling it, he got so excited I didn’t need to prod him with questions; he spoke on his own, even told us his one childhood memory of Earth: “That ocean, it was like a flat blue plate, big as Jupiter from lo, speckled with shadows from clouds; and the horizon was straight as a rail, edge to edge culling off a sky that was a blue I can’t describe.” When he went back to play I was under the spell of Dixieland; and by the gleam in the mute’s eye I could tell he felt it too. When Sidney played a good break the mute would put back his head and laugh, mouth split wide open, silent as space.

So when Sidney was done we decided to take the mute along to Sidney’s place, to give the mute some floor to sleep on; he didn’t have any money or anywhere to go. Now at this time (this was on Achilles) Sidney lived in a cubbyhole behind one of the Supervisor’s big homes. When we got there Sidney wanted us to hold back while he went to check if his sister-in-law was awake—she didn’t like him bringing folks home. Sidney explained this, but the mute didn’t appear to understand; he must have thought he was being left, because every time Sidney walked a few steps and turned around, be found the mute right behind him, grinning and dragging me along. So there was a lot of waving and explaining going on when the JM police suddenly appeared; we didn’t even have time to run.

“Where you going?” one of them asked.

“Home,” Sidney said.

“I suppose you live here?” the cop said, pointing at the Supervisor’s place.

“Yeah,” Sidney said, and before he had time to explain, they were taking us off to jail.

We were hardly inside the jail door when they went to work on the Metis mute. Kicked him and beat him till he couldn’t stand. His face was so bloody. Sidney and I stood shaking against the wall, expecting we’d be next, but they let us alone. Turned out one of the cops’ wives had been killed on Metis, and he’d been after the mutes ever since. So when they were done with him they slammed us all into the bullpen.

There’s not much JM can do to make its jails any worse than its mines, but what they can do they have done. The cell we were in was cold and dark, like a tunnel in a power breakdown, except for the gravity, which felt like it was over 1 .00. I crawled over the rock floor, unable to see, and quietly called Sidney’s name.

“Steve?” his voice said. “Where you gone to?” His hand caught my arm, and he set me down beside him.

“Quit that snuffling,” he said to me. “This is your first time in jail? Is that right? Well, it won’t be your last, no, not a miner kid like you. They’ll put you here many times before you’re done.” He paused. “Look at all these folks.”

A dim light gleamed through the door grating, and when my eyes adjusted I saw shapes huddled on the floor. They were gathered in knots, feet on each other’s stomachs, using the survival techniques JM had taught them.

“They going to let us die?” I asked fearfully; the only times I had seen men curled together like that was when they carried the bodies, two by two, out of breakdowns.

“No, no,” he said. “They just like us, just put in here for nothing, to be cold and hungry and heavy for a shift or two, to remind them who’s boss on these rocks.” He sounded old and tired; and yet when I looked up at him, I saw that he was pulling the parts of his clarinet out of his big old coat’ and putting them together. He was sitting against the rock wall of the cell, with the mute propped up beside him. When his horn was together he put it to his mouth, gave the reed a lick, commenced to play.

He started soft, barely sounding the notes, and played “Burgundy Street Blues” all the way through without raising his voice. As he played “What Did I Do” some of the huddled figures slowly sat up and listened, backs and heads to the wall, looking up at the ceiling or the yellow squares of the grate.

Then he played the new songs, written by miners’ bands and only heard in the bars scattered through their asteroids. He played “Ceres,” and “Hidalgo,” and “Vesta Joys”; he played his “Shaft Bucket Blues” and “I Got Me a Feeling.” Then he played “Don’t God Live Out This Far,” one of the first of the miner blues, which made it about twenty years old; and people began to join him. These were miners, men who seldom sang in the bars, seldom did more than stomp their boots or shout something between phrases; and at first their singing was an awkward sort of growl, barely in tune or time with Sidney. But he picked them up and more joined in, hesitantly, till you could make out the words of the refrain:

There were about thirty verses to the song. It was about a miner who keeps getting in trouble, till JM decides to finish him: “Super comes at shift-start for me to be hung, on account of something that I hadn’t done.” The Supervisor believes he’s innocent, but there’s no proof. It was the same old, old thing.

When the singing got loud enough Sidney took off from the melody and floated up above it. And they sang! There was something in it that seemed to take my lungs away, so I could only breathe quick and shallow; it was what they had of the music inside themselves. Just hearing someone’s voice in the dark, and knowing his life has a long way to go…

The light from the door just caught the plumes of breath frosting out from the men singing. I looked over at the mute. His eyes were open, staring out somewhere in space. As I watched he lifted up his hands and started a little syncopated clap, very soft, giving as much to the music as he could. When Sidney beard it he looked down at him, then looked back up; he played louder, filling the room with his sound, till the clarinet was all we heard or needed to hear, and the last verse carne to its end.

“Oh yeah,” said a quiet voice.

Sidney looked at the mute, smiled, shook his head. “A little blues for us, eh, brother?” he said. “A little slave music.”

The mute nodded and grinned, which made his lip crack open again and spill blood down his chin.

Sidney laughed at him and wiped some of the blood from the mute’s face. “Oh yeah,” he said softly, “a little miner music.”

We found Sidney just where Hook guessed he might be, huddled in the room where our baggage and instruments were stored. He was perched up on the box that Crazy’s tuba traveled in, with his shoulders hunched arid his legs crossed. When we burst into the room he jumped and then settled back, head down, staring sullenly across at us. His clarinet lay fitted in his arms. We all stood still, barred and hidden in the shadows thrown by the single bulb behind us, waiting for somebody to say something. The wisps of hair Sidney combed across his head looked thicker because of the shadows they cast on his bald pate. He looked like one of the tunnel-gnomes men claim to see on Pallas; creatures who were once men maybe, who escaped JM by living in the old shafts. I had never noticed how small he was.

“You scared?” Hook asked.

Sidney raised his head to stare at Hook better, “Yeah, I am,” he said suddenly, loud in the dim room, “shouldn’t I be?”

“Hey, Sidney.” I said, “you don’t got no reason to be scared—”

“Don’t got no reason!” He pointed at me, clarinet still in hand. “Don’t you say that shit to me, Shaky. I got the best reason possible to be scared.” He jumped down from the box. “The best reason possible. This is a contest, boy, we ain’t playing to please these folks, we playing to show them that we better musicianers than all them others! And if we don’t show them that, if we don’t win one of them grants, we gone. We back to the mines, boy, and we’ll work in those shafts until JM has broke us so we can’t work no more, and we’ll never get to see the Earth. So don’t tell me I got no reason to be scared.”

“Come on, Sidney, you can’t think like that,” I said, searching for something I could say to him. “it ain’t so bad as—”

“Sidney,” Hook said, like I hadn’t been talking at all (suddenly I see a picture in my head, of Sidney crouched down and shifting through a four-foot-high tunnel, Hook straddled senseless across his back, one of his hands clamped white around Hook’s wrist, which ended in a tangle of bloody filaments; shouting instructions in furious fearful high voice to the men trying to get the airlock opened), I stepped back and let Hook talk to him.

“Sidney,” he said, “you ain’t thought this out. They been putting one over on you. You’re talking like this contest is a big vital thing, like we got some chance of going out there and winning one of them grants. Sidney, we got no chance, don’t you realize that?”

“Hook—” I objected.

“No, you listen to me, we got no chance. You seen all those other musicianers here—those folks been doing nothing but play music all their lives, they playing all those fancy machines and doing things with music we don’t even know about! And we just a bunch of miners playing some old Earth-type of music that just showed up a few years back, and only ‘cause JM salvaged a ship full of band instruments and give them to us so we’d stay out of fights! And you still think we got a chance?”

Sidney and I stared at him.

“No way,” he continued grimly, “no more’n there’s a chance that JM will retire us at forty and send us to Mars. They got us here just so they can say they got folks from everywhere, even the rocks, and they going to give the grants to those fancy-ass musicianers, not us. So just exactly what you said is going to happen, Sidney, when this thing is over they going to send us back to the rocks to work and work, every third shift, till some equipment catches you or some tunnel collapses”—waving his hooks so they flashed silver in front of us—”and then, if you’re still alive, they’ll dump you on Vesta rock and wait for you to die.

“And the only way you got to show how you feel about that, Sidney, is through that horn, through that skinny black horn of yours. When you get out there they going to be looking down on you, just like they always have, and all you can do about it is to play that thing! play it so hard they got to see you! play it and show them what kind of music a man plays when he works all his life digging in those fucking rocks!”

“He stopped, gulped in some air. Sidney and I didn’t make a sound. Suddenly he turned and walked over to the baggage, rummaged around a bit, then found the trunk he wanted and pulled it around so he could unstrap it and fling it open. He reached in and pulled out a long white bottle, held it high in the dim light white he unscrewed it. He turned it upside down to his mouth and took a long pull.

“Eeeow!” he whooped. He held it out toward Sidney. “So what say we have a drink of the White Brother, brother, and then go play us some music.”

I looked at Sidney. I don’t think I’d ever seen him indulge in the White Brother; he hardly even drank beer.

“I believe I will,” Sidney said, and swallowed near half the bottle.

Back up in our rooms Crazy was leading Fingers and Washboard in the “Emperor Norton Stomp,” running up the walls as high as he could and then diving off onto the unmade and trampled beds. He saw us standing in the doorway and from his position high on the wall he dived straight for us and bounced on the floor.

“Crazy,” Hook said cheerfully, “you are crazy.” He stepped over him and made his way through the stuff heaped on the floor. He pulled his trombone out of the pile beside his bed.

“Let’s roll,” he said.

“Wait” Crazy cried. He poured some White Brother into cups and passed them around. When Sidney took one he didn’t say a word, just grinned and pointed. Sidney paid him no attention.

We raised our cups in the air. “To the Hot Six,” I said. “Play that thing!” We downed the Brother; I could feel him slide into my stomach and explode there, making my blood pound and my vision jump.

We got our instruments and made our way to the lobby. When we got there we headed for the clerk’s desk, bumping together and shushing each other, trying to calm down some while Hook spoke to the clerk.

“We are the Hot Six,” Hook shouted at the clerk, who stepped back quickly. “And we playing at the Outer Planets Center for the Performing Arts’ W. H. Blakely Memorial Traveling Grant Competition” (we all threw in some “oh yeahs!” for such virtuosity) “and we need your fastest car right now.”

“Well sir,” the clerk said, “all the cars have the same speed capability.”

“Oh come now, come now,” Hook said, “are you telling me that you don’t know of a single car that’s set to go a mite faster than normal?”

“No sir, none except the cars reserved for emergencies—”

“Emergencies! Why, don’t you know that’s exactly what this is? An emergency!”

“An emergency,” we all echoed, and Crazy began to climb over the desk, muttering in a low voice, “Emergency, emergency.”

“If you don’t give us one of them emergency cars,” Hook continued in a lowered voice, “then we’ve come over fifteen hundred million miles for no reason at all.”

The clerk looked past Hook and saw us staring at him with the intensity that the White Brother can give you; looked at Crazy, who was clawing at the buttons on top of the counter. He shrugged. “One of the special cars will be waiting for you at the departure gate.”

“Make it a big one,” Hook said, “we got a lot of stuff to carry.”

We went to the departure gate and found a sixteen-person car, painted bright red, waiting for us. We threw all the instruments in the back and clambered in; Hook set the controls and fired us out into the Titania Gap.

The Gap is a long, straight canyon whose origins are unknown. It looks like it was carved into Titania some eons back by a good-sized rock (say about the size of Demeter) that nearly missed it. It’s about two hundred miles long, four to ten miles wide, and nearly that deep, and almost the entire colony on Titania is set down in the skinny end of it. So when we popped out the wall of our hotel and shot down our track, we were greeted with the sight of the whole colony, covering the floor and climbing the walls of a canyon that would have swallowed most of the rocks we had lived on. There was only the fine lacing of car tracks looping through space to keep us from dropping two or three miles. Above us the swirling greens of Uranus blocked off most of the sky we could see.

“Shit, this thing is fast,” Hook said, after the car had taken a long drop and thrown us back in our seats. Crazy whooped and climbed over the seats back to his tuba case, from which he pulled another milky-white bottle. Fingers cheered and started singing, half-tempo like he always starts, “I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way,” and Hook joined him.

“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 jazz 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 adrenaline 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 his 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 corner 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 traditional 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?”

“That grant only gets you from place to place. It doesn’t guarantee you’re going to make enough to keep traveling once you’re done with it.”

“Well, will these folks give a grant twice?”

“They’ve never done it before,” he, said, and looked up from his tone-bar to smile lopsidedly at me. “So I’ve got quite a job today, don’t I.”

“I guess,” I said.

We watched the video for a while. As the singer juggled the three parts of his fugue Tone-bar shook his head. “Amazing, isn’t he,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “The question is, do you listen to music to be amazed.”

He laughed. “I don’t know, but the audience thinks so.”

“I bet they don’t,” I said.

This time he didn’t laugh. “So did I”

Number Sixteen was leaving the stage and being replaced by Number Seventeen. That meant we wouldn’t be on for an hour or so. I wished we were going on sooner; all the excitement I had felt was slowly collecting into a tense knot below my diaphragm. And I could see signs of the same thing happening to the others. Not Crazy; he was still rowdy as ever; he was marching about the room with his tuba, blasting it in the technicians’ ears and annoying as many people as possible. But I had seen Fingers wandering toward the piano, undoubtedly planning to join Hook and Crazy in the phrases they were working on; some character wrapped in purple-and-blue sheets sat down just ahead of him and began to play some fast complicated stuff, classical probably, with big dramatic hand-over-hands all up and down the keys. Fingers turned around and sat back down, hands hidden in his lap, and watched the guy play; and when the guy got up Fingers just sat there, looking down at his lap like be hadn’t noticed.

And Sidney got quieter and quieter. He stared up at the video and watched a quartet of people fidget around a big box that they all played together, and as he stared he sank into his chair and closed around his clarinet. He was getting scared again. All the excitement and energy the band had generated on the trip over had disappeared, leaving only Washboard’s insistent tapping and Crazy’s crazy antics, which were gaining us more and more enemies among the other performers.

While I was still wondering what to do about this (because I felt like I was at least as scared as Sidney) Crazy made his way back to our corner of the room, did a quick side shuffle, and slammed into another musician.

“Hey!” Crazy yelled. “Watch it!”

I groaned. The guy he had knocked over was dressed in some material that shifted color when he moved; he had been making loud comments about us from the practice rooms ever since we had arrived. Now he got his footing and carefully lifted his instrument (a long many-keyed brass box that turned one arm back into itself) from the floor.

“You stupid, clumsy, drunken oaf,” he said evenly.

“Hey,” Crazy said, ignoring the description, “what’s that you got there?”

“Ignorant fool,” the musician said, “It’s a Klein synthesizer, an instrument beyond your feeble understanding.”

“Oh yeah?” Crazy said. “Sounds a little one-sided to me.” He burst out laughing.

“It is unfortunate,” the other replied, “that the Blakely Foundation finds it necessary to exhibit even the most atavistic forms of music at this circus.” He turned and stalked over to the piano.

“Atavistic!” Crazy repeated, looking at us. “What’s that mean?”

I shrugged. “It means primitive,” said Tone-bar. Hook started to laugh.

“Primitive!” Crazy bellowed. “I’m going to go hit that guy and let him think it over.” He turned to follow the musician, tuba still in his arms; and before anyone could move, he missed the step down and crashed to the floor, as loud as fifty cymbals all hit at once.

We leaped over and pulled the tuba off him. It was hardly dented; somehow he had twisted so it fell mostly on him.

“You okay?” Hook said anxiously, pushing back the rest of us. From somewhere in the room there was a laugh.

Crazy didn’t move. We stood around him. “God damn it,” Hook said, “the bastard is out cold.” He looked like he wanted to kick him.

“And look!” Sidney said, lifting Crazy’s left arm carefully. Right behind his hand (his fingering hand) was a bluish lump that stretched his skin tight. “He’s hurt that wrist bad,” Sidney said: “He’s out of it.”

“Fuck,” Hook said quietly. I sat down beside him, stunned by our had luck. There was a crowd gathered around us but I didn’t pay them any attention. I watched Crazy’s wrist swell out to the same width as his hand; that was our whole story, right there. We’d put him on stage in a lot of strange conditions before, but a man can’t play without his fingering hand…

“Hey, Wright is here today,” Tone-bar said. He was frowning with what Looked like real concern. “Doesn’t he know some old jazz?” None of us answered him. “No, seriously,” he said. “This kid Wright is an absolute genius, he’ll probably be able to fill in for you.” Still none of us spoke. “Well, I know where his box is,” he finally continued. “I’ll try to find him.” He worked his way through the crowd and hurried out the door.

I sat there, feeling the knot in my stomach become a solid bar, and watched a few of the stagehands lift Crazy up and carry him out. We were beat before we began. You can play jazz without a tuba player—we had often had to—but the trombone has to take a lot of the bass line, nobody can be as free with the rhythm, the sound is tinny, there’s no power to it, there’s no bottom! Sidney looked over at Hook and said, with a sort of furtive relief, “Well, you said we didn’t have a chance,” but Hook just shook his head, eyes glistening, and said quietly, “I wanted to show ’em.”

I sat and wondered if I was going to be sick. Crazy had crazied us right back to the rocks, and on top of my knotted stomach my heart pounded loud and slow as if saying “ka-Doom, ka-Doom, ka-DOOM.” I thought of all the stories I’d heard of Vesta, the barren graveyard of the asteroids, and hoped I didn’t live long enough to be sent there.

There was a long silence. None of us moved. The other performers circled about as quietly, making sure not to look at us. Slowly, very slowly, Sidney began to pull apart his clarinet.

“I got him!” came a wild voice. “He can do it!” Tone-bar came flying in the door, pulling a skinny kid by the arm. He halted and the kid slammed into his back. With a grin Tone-bar stepped aside and waved an arm.

“Perhaps the finest musician of our—” he began, but the kid interrupted him:

“I hear you need a tuba man,” he said and stepped forward. He was a few years younger than me even, and the grin on his adolescent face looked like it was clamped over a burst of laughter. When he pushed all his long black tangles of hair back I saw that the pupils of his eyes were flinching wildly just inside the line of the irises; he was clearly spaced, probably had never seen a tuba before.

“Come on, man,” I said. “Where did you learn to play jazz tuba?”

“Pluto,” he said, and laughed.

I stared at him. I couldn’t believe it. As far as I knew, Dixieland jazz was only played in the bars on Jupiter Metals’ rocks; I would have bet I knew, or knew of, every Dixieland musician alive. And this kid didn’t come from the mines. He was too skinny, too sharp-edged, he didn’t have the look.

“I didn’t even know anyone played traditional jazz anymore,” he said. “I thought I was the only one.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“We don’t got a whole lot of choice, Shaky, we’re running out of time,” said Hook. “Hey kid—you know ‘Panama’ ?“

“Sure,” he said, and sang the opening bars. “Bum-bum, da da da-da, da da-da-da da.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

“I can do it,” the kid said. “I want to do it.”

“All right,” Hook said, “Might as well take him.” I looked at Hook in surprise and saw that he was grinning again; clearly there was something about the kid, the intensity of those black-hole eyes perhaps, that had him convinced. He slapped the kid on the shoulder and nearly knocked him down, “Come on!” he shouted. “Time to go!”

“Time to go!” I cried. “What the hell happened to Number seventeen?”

“They getting off! Let’s go play!”

And the stagehands were already carrying stuff for us, watching the kid and gabbling excitedly.

“Shit,” I exclaimed, and stuck my hand out to the kid. We shook. “Welcome to the Hot Six. Solos all sixteen bars, including yours if you want, choruses and refrains all repeated, don’t worry about the tags; we’ll have to stick to the old songs, do you know ‘St. Louis Blues’? ‘That’s a Plenty’? ‘Didn’t He Ramble’? ‘Milenburg Joys’? ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’? ‘Want a Big Butter-and-Egg Man’? ‘Ain’t You Coming Back to Dixieland’?” and, miraculously, he kept yelling “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as he struggled with the tuba, still almost laughing, and then we were in the hall and didn’t have time for any more—

We got out on stage and it was hot as a smelting chamber. The audience was just a blue-black blur outside the lights, which were glaring down exactly like the arc lamps set around a tunnel end. I could tell seats went way up above us (they going to be looking down on you) and then we were all standing there set to go and a big amplified voice said, “From Jupiter Metals, Pallas, the Hot Six,” and suddenly we all had our horns to our mouths. I put mine down and said, “‘In the Alley Blues,’” which, amplified, sounded like a single word, then put the horn up and commenced playing.

We sounded horrible. They had indirect mikes on all of us, and just playing normal mezzo forte we were booming out into the huge caven of the auditorium, so we could hear very clearly how bad we sounded. Hook was solid, and so was the kid, which was a relief; but my tone was quivering with just the slightest vibrato, and sometimes I couldn’t hear Sidney at all. And his fear was spreading to the rest of us. We knew he had to be petrified to even miss a note.

We brought “In the Alley” to a quick finish, and the applause was loud. That made me realize how big the audience was (twenty thousand, Tone-bar said) and I was more scared than ever, I could feel their eyes pressing on me, just like I can sometimes feel the vacuum when I look out a view window. I figured we’d better play one of the best songs next, so we’d get as much help from the material as possible. “ ‘Weary Blues,’ ” I said, meaning to say it to the band, since we had planned to play “Ganymede.” But the mikes picked me up anyway and I heard “Weary Blues” bounce back out of the cavern, so I just raised my horn to my lips and started; and it was probably two bars before everyone caught on and joined in. That didn’t help any.

And I myself was having trouble. The more I could hear the vibrato wavering down the middle of my tone, the worse it got, and the more I could hear it… it began to sound like an oscilloscopic saw, and I hoped it wouldn’t get out of control and break the tone completely. We got to the refrain, where “Weary” usually starts rolling, I could tell that everyone was so scared they couldn’t think about what they were playing, so the notes were coming out right by instinct, but there was no feel in them, it was like they were being played by a music box, every note made by a piece of metal springing loose.

“Weary Blues” ended and again the applause was triple forte. I stepped over to Hook and shouted, under my breath, “Let’s do ‘I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans.’ ” He couldn’t hear me, so I said it louder and the mikes caught me, “ ‘I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans.’” I announced. There was a long flurry of laughter from the audience. Hook started the intro to “Plans,” as calm as though he were playing to a crowded bar. We slid into the song and I realized how much easier it is to play fast when you’re nervous. Hook was doing fine, but his backup was trembling, barely hitting the chords. With the leisure of playing accompaniment I could look up and see the silver line of boxes that held our judges, hanging high above us; and that didn’t help either.

We moved quickly into “That’s a Plenty,” and I could tell we’d calmed down enough to think about the music; after your body pumps full of adrenaline, soaks you in sweat, and shakes you like the ague, there’s not much more it can do, you’ve got to calm down some; but that maybe wasn’t helping us, since now we had to make the music ourselves, rather than leave it to instinct. I was still shaky enough that when I got to the triple-tonguing in the trumpet break, it actually seemed slow to me, and next time around I fitted in another note, hammering them with two double-tongues. This seemed to perk up the band (“Put chills down my spine,” the kid said later), but we still sounded ragged; I knew if we continued like this we were in trouble. And Sidney was still missing phrases. I don’t think I’d ever heard him miss more than a note or two in my whole life, and here he was squeaking through bars at a time, playing like he had a crimp on his throat.

When we finished the kid waved me over to him. He raised a hand in the air and lowered it, which was apparently the signal needed to get the mike men off us. The kid was completely relaxed. He looked like he was having a good time.

“Your clarinet player is dying,” he said. “Does he know ‘Burgundy Street Blues’?”

“Sure,” I said,

“Maybe you should have him play that. If he had to play a song by himself he’d be sure to calm down some.”

I turned around. “Sidney, you ready to play ‘Burgundy Street’?”

He shook his head vehemently.

“Come on, Sidney,” Hook said from beside him. “That’s your song.” He turned to the audience, and the kid quickly lifted a hand, “ ‘The Burgundy Street Blues,’ ” Hook announced.

Now “Burgundy Street,” like “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” or “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” is a single-strain tune, just an eight-bar melody; and it’s the variations that a clarinet player works in as he repeats it, again and again, that make the song something special. The first couple of times Sidney went through it, I could barely hear him. He was playing the melody, as simple as possible, and the sound he was making was more breath than tone. I didn’t think he’d finish. He shifted toward us as if he wanted to turn his back on the audience, but Hook threw in a couple bars of harmony to bolster him, and when he started the strain a third time he took hold of himself and bore down; and that time, though the notes quivered and never got over pianissimo, he could be heard.

The kid was hopping up and down beside me as if he couldn’t wait to start playing again. “Damn that man plays fine clarinet,” he whispered to me. Suddenly I realized that if you didn’t know Sidney you might think he was playing warbly on purpose, in which case it sounded all right. Apparently this occurred to Sidney too. Each time around he played a little louder, tried a few more variations, gathered a little more confidence. The fifth time around he usually played a variation filled with chromatic runs; he went ahead and tried them, and they came out sharp and well articulated. Amplified like he was, he could hear as clearly as anyone how good he sounded—he was learning what I’d already discovered, that even though you’re scared, the notes come out. He began to take advantage of the new acoustics, building up till he filled the auditorium with sound, then dropping back so fast the mike men were lost, and he was as silent as piano keys pushed down.

And as he went on, I could see him begin to forget his surroundings and become what he was, a musician working on the song, putting together phrases, playing with the sounds he could make. His forehead wrinkled and smoothed as he carved an especially difficult passage; he closed his eyes, and the notes took on a life that hadn’t been there before. He was lost in it now, completely lost in it, and the last time around he bent the notes like only a fine clarinet player can bend them, soaring them out into the cavern; a sound human and inhuman, music.

When he was done everyone was clapping, even me, and I realized that I had only thought the earlier applause was loud because I’d never heard that many people clap at once before. Now it was louder than when a ship takes off over a tunnel you’re in…

We played “Panama” next, and the difference was hard to believe. Sidney was back in form, winding about the upper registers with quick-fingered ingenuity, and as he pulled together so did the band. And the kid, as if he’d only been waiting for Sidney, began to let loose. He’d abandoned his steady oomph-oomph-oomph-oomph and was sliding up and down the bass clef, playing like a fourth member of the front line, and leading the tempo. Normally I set the tempo, and Crazy and Washboard listen to me and pick it up. But the kid wasn’t paying any attention to me; his notes were hitting just a touch ahead of mine, and if there’s anyone who can take the tempo away from the trumpet it’s the tuba. I tried to play as fast as him but he kept ahead; by the time he let Washboard and me catch up with him we were playing “Panama” faster than we’d ever played it, and excited as we were, we were equal to it. When we finished, the applause seemed to push us to the back of the stage.

We played the “St. Louis Blues,” and then the “Milenburg Joys,” and then “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and each time the kid took over, pumping wildly away at the tuba, and pushed us to our limit. Sidney responded like that was the way he’d always wanted to play, arching high wails between phrases and helping the kid to drive us on. And the audience was with us! Maybe the earlier groups had been too modern, maybe too many of them had been playing to the judges; whatever the reason, the audience was with us now. An hour ago none of them had even heard of Dixieland jazz, and now they were cheering after the solos and clapping in the choruses; and we had to start “Sweet Georgia Brown” by playing through the applause.

Then we were set for the finale. “For all of you music lovers in the house,” I said, knowing they wouldn’t get the reference to Satchmo but saying it anyway, “we going to beat out ‘The Muskrat Ramble.’”

“The Muskrat Ramble.” Our best song, maybe the best song. We started up the “Ramble” and the band fell together and meshed like parts of a beautiful machine. All those years of playing in those bars: all the years of getting off work and going down and playing tired, playing with nobody listening but us, playing with nothing to keep us going but the music; all that came from inside us now, in a magic combination of fear, and anger, and the wild exhilaration of knowing we were the best there was at what we were doing. Hook was looping his part below me, Sidney leaping about above, the kid pushing us every note; and to keep up with the weave we were making I had to play hard and fast right down the middle of the song, lifting and growling and breaking my notes off, showing them all that there was a man working behind that horn, blowing as clear and sharp and excited as old Dipper-mouth Satchel-mouth Satchmo Louie Louis Daniel Armstrong himself. When we played the final round of the refrain everyone played their solo at once, only Fingers and Washboard held us down at all, and the old “Muskrat Ramble” lifted up and played itself, carrying us along as if it made us and not the other way around. Hook played the trombone coda and we tagged it; then the kid surprised us and repeated the coda, and we barely got our horns back up to tag it again, then we all played the coda and popped it solid, the end.

I motioned the band off, We were done; there was no way we could top that. We started for the wings and the roar of the audience soared up to a gooseflesh howl. We hurried off, waving our arms and shouting as loud as anyone there, jumping up and down and slapping each other on the back, chased by a wall of sound that shook the building.

We waited; tired, happy, tense, we waited:

And God damn me if we didn’t win one of those grants, a four-year tour of the Solar System; oh, we leaped about that waiting room and shouted and hit each other; Fingers and Washboard marched about singing and smashing out rhythms on the walls and furniture; Hook stood on a table and sprayed champagne on us; the kid rolled on the floor and laughed and laughed, “Now you’re in for it.” he choked out, “you’re in for it now!” but we didn’t know what he meant then, we just poured champagne on his head and laughed at him, even old Sidney was jumping up and down, wisps of hair flying over his ears, singing (I’d never heard him sing) a scat solo he was making up as he went along, shouting it out while tears and champagne ran down his face: