Part 10 (1/2)

The Damaris was owned by a man called John Southern. He was missing two fingers on his left hand and an old scar made his left eye droop in a way that was like a wink. He was quite bald on the top of his head but wore his gray hair extravagantly long behind, and his gray mustache hung right down to his collar, which was high and starched but dirty. Altogether these peculiarities lent him a roguish air. I knew at once that I would not be able to help liking him, but also that he was not a good man, and that he would never pay me regularly or fairly.

”Name?”

”Hal Rawlins.”

His handshake was crus.h.i.+ng. He glared for a moment then grinned. ”Well, I've heard worse, Mr. Rawlins. Charley says you're looking for work. You look like you got a story. Everybody's got a story these days. Don't tell me. You sing?”

”I never tried but I guess I could learn. Charley said you needed a-”

”A man with a knack for machines, yeah. That you? Charley says you can talk like you got learnin'. Say somethin' learned.”

”Light,” I said, ”must be considered a form of energy, not dissimilar in nature to electricity or heat. It is a creative energy, a refinement of the raw Ether; darkness is merely its absence. It-”

I was quoting from the Encyclopedia published by the Baxter Publis.h.i.+ng Corporation of Jasper City, parts of which I happened to have by heart.

”All right, all right. You a Linesman, Mr. Rawlins?”

”I am not.”

”I'll have no Linesmen on board. Twenty years I've worked this river, since back when Damaris herself was alive and dancin'. You a dancer, Mr. Rawlins? No? Never mind. Got a girl for that. Twenty years and every year business gets harder as the Line gets closer. What keeps me afloat right now is defiance and spite.”

I had in fact noticed that the Damaris was light on pa.s.sengers.

”I have my own grievances against the Line,” I said. ”I understand.”

”You'll keep 'em to yourself, then. You been to school?”

”Some school. Not much. I'm self-taught.”

”We go all the way east to the Three Cities and into Jasper City, where the University is. Sometimes we get rich folks' kids on board. What's that look for, Rawlins, you don't want to see the big city?”

”Let's talk about this machine. What do you need me for? As far as I can tell the wheel turns the, let's say the old-fas.h.i.+oned way.”

This was what the learned Professors of Jasper City would call a euphemism, which is to say a magic word to make the world seem better than it is. What I meant was that the wheel of the Damaris was turned by a team of Folk, who were kept in chains below. Mr. Southern gave me a searching look and I thought he might be about to say something on that subject, but instead he nodded and then slapped the top of the piano.

I should say that the Damaris had a bar on the upper deck, full of shadows and faded finery and suggestive paintings and a faint sweetish smell of rotten wood. There was also a piano, and we were standing next to it.

”Well,” I said. ”The piano? That's not what I imagined but I reckon I could learn to play.”

”It's not what it looks like, Mr. Rawlins.”

What it was, was something I had never heard of. It was a new thing in the world and there were no real names for it yet. John Southern called it a motor piano or a self-player piano or that d.a.m.n thing. Its inventor had called it a music box.

It looked like a large upright piano. It was made of wood, and in keeping with the rest of the Damaris it was painted red and black and gold, and somewhat over-ornamented, and covered in dust and grime. There were two wide rows of black and white keys, that were like a kind of terrifying message in a code I could not read. Above the keys there was a window in the piano's frame, exposing bright metallic workings that bore no resemblance to any musical instrument I had ever seen before, or for that matter any machine. A wild profusion of wires hooked into each other at every possible angle and I could see that the apparatus almost hummed with counter-posed tensions. If it resembled anything at all, it resembled an ill.u.s.tration of the Brain and Nervous System that was one of the main attractions of the Encyclopedias I used to sell back in East Conlan- except that that was the lurid pink and vein-blue of human flesh, while the piano was all golden-glittering and immaculate. Immediately my curiosity got the better of me and I reached in and touched a wire, and there was a s.h.i.+vering sound and deep inside something turned over and the wires began to work against each other and the keys depressed as if a ghost was sitting at the bench and the piano played a few notes of very beautiful music, which turned into a few bars of utter cacophony, then silence.

”Useless d.a.m.n thing,” Southern said.

I fell in love with the machine at once.

There was another window you could open in the frame. There were a lot of secret parts, like in a haunted house in a book- I doubt I ever found them all. Behind that window were levers, switches, and several cylinders of hard molded wax, wrapped in stiff yellow paper punched with holes. I did not get where I am today without being a quick study and it did not take me long to understand that the cylinders could control the piano, the molding being a form of secret language that the mechanism could speak, not unlike telegraph-signals.

Someone had scratched kotan into the bra.s.s, with a flourish, on the topmost winding-mechanism. Beneath kotan were the words gibson city, 1889.

”I guess that's the fellow who made it,” Southern said. ”Kotan. We got it for next to nothin' in Gibson City last year. A theater didn't want it anymore, they said it made their actors nervous. I reckon maybe they just couldn't get it to work.”

”A great year for inventions,” I said. I could not stop running my hands over the frame. ”A great year for the future.”

”We had a piano player,” Southern said, ”but he was a drunk. I won't tell you what the one before 'im did or I'll get mad. I've had my d.a.m.n fill of piano-players. I thought, guess we should get someone to fix this d.a.m.n thing. Least it can't get drunk. You're not a drunk, are you, Rawlins? Can you fix it?”

”No,” I said. ”Yes.”

Fixing the thing was easy enough. A few wires had snapped, a few more had been loosened by the rolling of the boat, some springs had sprung and some mice had made a nest in an unwise location, from which I had no choice but to round up and relocate them. Just replacing the wires and getting rid of the mice was enough to improve its operations greatly- Mr. Southern could have done it himself if not for what I think was a superst.i.tious fear of the machine. By the time I had done that, we were a day further down the river, and I was hired on as a member of the crew, responsible mostly for the care and maintenance of the piano, and for pretending to play it in the evenings.

The performance was mostly a matter of smiling and patter and leaving the machine to do its own work. I could guide it but not control it. I could stop it and start it and gently coax it, through arrangement of the cylinders and wires, in certain directions, but that was all- it would play what it would play. In fact do not think I ever understood a quarter of the machine's secrets.

I stayed with the Damaris until it was summer, until we had left the Western Rim far behind and the Ire had become the Ja.s.s and we neared the border of the Tri-City Territory. Our progress eastward was constant but irregular. We stopped in every town, and we followed what seemed like every last tributary of the Ire or the Ja.s.s, and we changed direction frequently, according to Mr. Southern's whims, or the cross-currents of business, or because of rumors and warnings about which towns or stretches of river ahead of us or behind us were dangerous due to the fighting. I didn't complain. Mr. Southern provided me with a russet suit, and though it was old and faded and too big and not nearly so fine as my old white suit from my days on the road it was handsome enough in the half-light of the bar. Every night I sat behind the piano as it worked itself, and mimed the action of playing, and smiled at everyone.

The pa.s.sengers of the Damaris were farmers and business-travelers and the occasional adventurous young man or woman who was traveling for no clear purpose that even they understood. There were a few rough hunting-trapping types returning from the West with spoils. There was the regular cast of wild-eyed speculators. There were handsome young private secretaries delivering important correspondence or financial doc.u.ments, and doing their best to look inconspicuous. There were wealthy men and women from Greenbank or Melville who had been displaced when the Line destroyed their towns, and now had nothing to do but drift and drink until their money ran out. There were some missionaries and a journalist or two. There were some bad men and some gun-for-hire types and my guess is some of the striking and menacing men who came and went and commanded a s.p.a.ce of shadow around themselves were Agents of the Gun. Sometimes when I played I wore a hat low on my head for fear somebody would recognize me.

We had traveling entertainers, including two consecutive magicians. We had pickpockets, some of whom operated with John Southern's sanction and some of whom soon wished they did. From time to time there was a girl who stood beside me and danced, listlessly or with naive enthusiasm. They were paid poorly and they usually left at the soonest opportunity. One or two of them were pretty, I guess. I only had eyes for the machine. Most nights I slept beside it, on a red couch at the back of the bar.

The piano was powered by a hand-crank that wound and tightened coiled springs. An hour's work in the afternoon would provide those springs with enough stored energy to last for the night. I sweated over the crank the way Carver had sweated over the pedals of the Apparatus.

The music of the piano was not always beautiful. Truth is it varied widely in quality. Initially it depended on the arrangement of the wax cylinders and the rings upon them and certain levers and switches- which on my first night on the Damaris I calculated had one hundred and eight possible permutations or states of ordering, and then on the second night I understood that I failed to account for the function of certain pedals and frets, and that there in fact were somewhat more than eleven thousand such permutations- and then on the fourth night with the piano I understood with a delight I cannot describe that the true number was much, much higher, as big as music or language or the world. Well anyhow however I arranged matters the piano quickly slipped my control. The patterns became unpredictable. Fugues emerged and subsided. Sometimes the piano produced tones and rhythms that no human person would think to produce or enjoy, as if it was amusing itself. It seemed to have moods. Sometimes the noises it produced were like one imagines the music of the Future will be. When it was bad I laughed a lot and told jokes and n.o.body seemed to care too much. Once or twice a gla.s.s was thrown at my head but without particular malice, and I have quick reflexes. n.o.body cared much when it was good, either. Southern continued to refer to the machine as that d.a.m.n thing, though he was happy not to have to pay a pianist. n.o.body saw what I saw in it. The mind that had built the machine was a subtle and lovely one and I knew that it was a mind that would understand the Light of the Apparatus. It was a mind that recognized nothing as impossible. Kotan. I did not know if it was a man or a woman, old or young, rich or poor- there seemed no likelihood that we would ever meet. I did not know if it was a place or a time or a factory, for that matter.

Anyhow this whole period was a pleasant interlude in my life. I collected tips and I saved a little money and I did not mind so much that n.o.body knew my name. The pa.s.sengers brought stories of the fighting creeping further and further east, as if it was following us- stories of Line forces commandeering towns, of Agents of the Gun swaggering openly into saloons and murdering as they pleased- stories of Heavier-Than-Air Vessels and Gas and Ironclads and witchcraft and uprisings of the free Folk and of strange new weapons and the Miracle at White Rock. ”Not here,” I said. ”Not to night. We left the War behind on land.” And I smiled and coaxed the piano into something to put them at ease.

The one part of the job I disliked was when somebody would request a particular piece of music. I did not have that kind of control over what the piano would do. Its internal mathematics carried their own implications and it worked them out, like it or not. You could not easily explain that to a drunk. Instead you had to convince them that they wanted what they were going to get anyhow- and so the princ.i.p.al skill the job required was fast-talking and a convincing smile.

The worst of all songs was ”The Ballad of John Creedmoor,” which appeared at the beginning of spring. The drunks sung it often. They asked for accompaniment and I said no. They asked me why not, was I a loyalist of the Line or something, and sometimes they got belligerent. They sang it anyhow.

John Creedmoor was a thief and a wicked, wicked man He fought and he killed in the War Till he looked at the blood that stained his hands And it made him cry out, ”No more!”

Now Liv was a lady of elegant birth A beauty, a kind heart for sure And she came and she saw all this suffering earth And it made her cry out ”No More!”

And together they went way out to the West Where the land and the sky are as one Where the wild Folk dwell and each morning is blessed And they said, ”Let the fighting be done.”

And so on. There were a number of different versions of this song, and some of them went on longer than others, but however long it lasted the d.a.m.n thing never got any less bad than it started out. I shall not inflict on posterity the verses that mentioned myself, Professor Harry Ransom, the ”coal-black wonder-worker,” nor the verses about the Miracle of White Rock and the death of the ten-foot monster Knoll.

Now who can say where they are on this day If we knew we never would say But one day they will come to the place that they seek And one day this land shall know peace.

”No,” I said, when I was asked to play the melody. ”We are on the water, gentlemen. We drift downriver. Like I said: we have already escaped the War. Why dwell on it?”

CHAPTER 13.