He looked to his left. Ms. Dinh smeared Camembert on a cracker. “The Noiesni are currently in their Forty-second Epoch. Are you with the man there? I hope he’s wearing comfortable shoes, because Sh’tka’heh has twenty-four Epochs to go.” Ron saw that she wouldn’t mind being the first to leave tonight. Glancing down at the crackers again, she whispered, “I’ve never seen the Noiesni go overboard like that even for somebody of the opposite sex. You’d better watch out. I thought he was just an alien, but maybe he’s gay.” She bit her lower lip and started to leave the room. Pausing, she looked over her shoulder. “Actually, it can’t go on forever. Sh’tka’heh has a breakfast meeting with the Pope. At the Vatican. He’ll be out of here by midnight.” She left the room.
A woman, probably straight—and human—she was outside and she hurt. Who to blame? The Noiesni?
Or Thump?
“Well, yeah,” Thump was saying, “I got my first bass when I was eleven. You gotta be at least five feet tall to reach.” His left arm stretched off to the side, salami flopping in the air. “And in grade school, that was before we left The Dalles, we had a band, and I had a dogshit amp until I was fourteen… I mean, it wasn’t even a bass amp, so it rolled off real bad!” He grabbed another handful of salami, offered Sh’tka’heh a piece. “Did I hear you’re looking at Zenoquint’s chips so you guys can help us build a better rocket? That’s great, but do you get any, like, royalties or anything? Royalties are kind of important, y’know.”
Sh’tka’heh took a slice of salami between his second and third fingers—or third and fourth, who could tell? His thumb was on backward. “We’ve made no design commitments at all. But the bass you play, this interests me more.”
The room had grown too quiet. There was a conspicuous absence of people at the table, though several lingered in the doorways. As Chad glided up, Ron wanted to die.
“Sh’tka’heh gets this way out at Zeno… especially in the fab. The way we do things fascinates him. I hope he’s not making Thump uncomfortable.”
Ms. Dinh might be right. Maybe Sh’tka’heh was trying to impress Thump. The alien continued, “Fundamental pitch can be equated to a monochord strung between the inflationary moment and the ultimate event horizon. From this the harmonic divisions of strings in ten-space can be derived. So, mankind isn’t barking totally up the wrong tree. But you need more ‘music’ and fewer numbers. Once the modalities of energy-matter condensation are determined, supra-luminal travel can be equated to polyphony, the harmonies equating to dimensions. But no one can show you the equations. Implosion at key navigational points has to happen in accord with your neurophysiology and nobody else’s.”
“The stars are frets, but you gotta know the tune to get there?” Thump said with a nod.
“More or less.” Sh’tka’heh visibly relaxed, and those grotesque fingers interlaced. He was at ease now. Someone understood. The two of them were inside, and only the two of them.
Thump, nodding… no, it was more than that. It was another little dance shimmying up his butt and his back. Ron saw it, thuh-banh-bmp, thuh-b’b’banh-bp!Thump’s thumb twitched.
An alien, Ron wanted to yell, an alien’s ruining a party given in his honor, and Thump understands him. After ten minutes, he understands this freak like he’s never understood me. No, I’m just a fag, and nobody needs to understand me. I can’t build spaceships, I can’t end hunger and injustice, but I don’t waste my life playing a guitar, either.
The anger made it easier to hear the Noiesni blather softly on, “like a song… like a poem… and in a moment, between Canopus and Vega, you dream the summits of a thousand dreams; from Rigel to Altair you swing by an invisible cord, and the chords you hear heal the demon-dark emptiness, fill it with nebulae and light more subtle…”
And Thump, smiling, interrupted him, “and your foot on a fuzz box that makes your room scream like an empty parkin’ garage, you fall and fall and fall until your life’s hangin’ from one note…”
From his pocket Sh’tka’heh cautiously pulled what looked like a debit card, but as crystalline as the chandelier. He toyed with it for a few moments. “It looks like a suitable waveform is only thirty or forty light-years away; I’m sure we dubbed it on the way in… a bass, yes, is this a good one?”
Another chandelier’s worth of light appeared and floated between Thump and the French doors. It coalesced; the gleam transmuted into solid curves, black and lustrous; sparks spun away into a blond neck; light became a surf of chrome.
Ron watched as Thump moaned audibly and ran his hand over the sapphire-blue pickguard. “Fender Jazz, ’62… fff-uh-ck, it’s not a reissue? Where’d you get this? Is it yours?” Thump lifted the instrument out of the air and offered it to Sh’tka’heh, but only after he’d cradled it close to himself, wood and metal in the image of child or true love.
“The instrument is a song in and of itself. It still exists as light, light-years away from here.” Sh’tka’heh took the instrument. His thumb wrapped around the neck closer to the guitar body than the rest of his fingers. “Care to step outside?”
Thump’s hand weighed against a latch. As he swung the French door open he asked, “What are we gonna plug into?”
Sh’tka’heh grinned. “We’ll rig up something.”
The glint in his eyes frightened Ron. He’d seen it before, in Thump’s face, and until now he’d assumed it was just the rapture of the weak, of people who could afford to commit slow suicide in crummy apartments and bad jobs.
They closed the door. The house was silent except for soft and vapid music. Ron turned around to face the catastrophe.
Chad sat on the arm of a couch and wouldn’t raise his head. Ms. Dinh was gone. The crowd was too thin. This wasn’t pique or boredom—a lot of fear in these men. In a beautiful home on a wonderful night, they were suddenly outside. It was fear like being a boy in a locker room, quiet while everybody else talked about girls. Girls were music, and Ron had never understood. Tonight Thump and the Noiesni had the music.
Chad still wouldn’t look at him. The party was a horror show. With that sly wanting-a-glass-of-milk rudeness, Thump had burned everybody.
An eerie glow shone through the windows.
“Thump!” Ron cried aloud. He lunged through the dining room, grabbed the door latch and rattled glass, fought to get outside.
City below, stars above, and between them blazed a huge opal where the swimming pool had been. Maybe it was one of the knots into which the Noiesni could tie space. It seemed as private as a first kiss. They were in there, conspirators, both of them aliens.
Betrayed and angry, Ron stepped in, too.
Too fine for words. The stars shone, while city and river glistened far below. Twinkling, the pool had become an immense amplifier, sonorous with wonder as Sh’tka’heh played the Fender, strap slung elegantly over his gawky shoulder, thumb reaching around and touching the E-string deftly far up the neck.
As slinky as blues, as stately as Bach, the music traveled far away, accompanied by the slow-breathing woods, by the snare-stars that whispered like silver sand poured on the drum of the night sky.
Thump shuffled back and forth, danced for himself, rapt, his fingers twitching, his jaw sometimes working as if he meant to sing the song that the Noiesni played.
The tune went someplace that Ron could never go. Once he could have headed in that direction… two years ago when Thump had come home too late, so unfairly late, tugging Ron from sleep, urging him to rest his head on a chest warm from a night’s music. Ron had always chosen to sleep instead, curled around his pillow, but yearning angrily for Thump s chest, his wide grip, yearning even though it was all right there. He d been angry because a man couldn’t be in two places at once, and Thump chose to come home too late, always had to be elsewhere just to be Thump.