A singer stepped onto the stage. She was dressed in the traditional flounced skirts of the derivoo, her hair was drawn severely into a forward-tilting pile atop her head, and her face was whitened, with a perfect circle of red on each cheek.
The audience fell into an expectant silence. Accompanied only by three musicians, the derivoo began to sing. It was a song of love and longing, and despite her antique appearance the singer’s voice was a wonder, caressing each syllable with the silky care of a languid lover. The singer’s hands, whitened like her face, fluttered in the air like doves, illustrating the words as she sang. At times the singer paused, letting the suspense mount, and Sula found herself holding her breath until the singer released the tension with her voice.
At the end, the applause was ecstatic. Sula had seen derivoo before, but only on video: she hadn’t realized how powerful a live performance could be.
“She’s a wonder, isn’t she?” Martinez said.
“Yes,” Sula agreed. His hand slipped across the table and took hers. His hand was large and warm and not over-moist. On the whole, Sula decided, a good hand.
The singer began again. It was a song about death, a mother pleading with the unknowable for the return of her child. The voice that had formerly caressed now took on a desperate, raw tone of perfect emotional desperation that cut like a razor. By the end of the performance, the singer’s whitened face was furrowed by the track of a single tear.
Sula retrieved her hand to applaud. Listening to the singer was like having her nerves scorched with acid, but for some reason it feltgood. The songs of mourning and love drew aside the curtains from a charged, elemental fact of the universe, something true and primal and grand. These, the songs said, were death and longing, the unchangeable facts of existence. This, the songs said, was what it meant to be human.
Derivoo was almost wholly a human art. Though one of Terra’s great contributions to imperial civilization was tempered tuning, few of the great composers or performers to make use of this discovery were human. Because the faces of the Daimong were expressionless, their chiming voices communicated all emotion, nuance, and context; they were born into what was essentially a musical environment, and lived in it all their lives. They were capable of enormous brilliance and subtlety in musical interpretation, though their performances were best appreciated in recording: the scent of rotting flesh tended to limit the appeal of concert appearances, and the best place to appreciate one of the magnificent massed Daimong choirs was from far upwind.
Whereas it was generally agreed that the Creewere music. Their primitive eye-spots were balanced by the sensitive hearing of their broad ears and the sound-ranging capabilities of their melodious voices. Their personalities tended toward the effervescent side of the spectrum, and the music they created was ideal for expressing joy and delight. The most popular performers and composers tended to be Cree, and even if a song were written or popularized by a member of some other species, it was usually a Cree who recorded the version the worlds thought definitive.
When the musical expression of magnificence, joy, splendor, and dance became a province of other species, the Terrans had been left with tragedy, with the music of loss and sadness. Other species found something fascinating in the Terrans’ straightforward utterance of despair, in standing to face the truths that were unendurable. Even the Shaa approved. They found the idea of tragedy ennobling, and perfectly in tune with their own stern ethic, their own belief that all but their own ideas were transient and mortal…and if people like Lear and Oedipus came to grief, it was only because of an insufficient understanding of the Praxis.
Derivoo was simple—one singer, a few accompanists, and absolute purity of tragic expression. It had none of the Daimongs’ grandeur, or the burbling joy of the Cree. What derivoo possessed was the confrontation of one soul with darkness, a soul resolute in the knowledge that darkness will triumph but willing nevertheless to shout the fact of its existence into the face of the howling cosmic wind.
Sula listened enthralled. The singer’s presence was magnificent, and the musicians knew how to accent her effects without spoiling her simplicity. The urgency of her voice and the purity of her emotion closed on Sula’s heart like a fist. She seemed to hear the words pulsing through a veil of blood. Death, to Sula, was not a stranger.
She had helped to carryDelhi ‘s dead from the scorched control room, crew curled into charred husks that weighed no more than a child, that left a dust of charcoal mortality on her hands.
She had killed two thousand or more Naxids at Magaria.
When she was young she had killed a grown man, had him thrown into a river.
She had once killed an unhappy, confused young girl.
Mortality wove a web through the air around her, warranting that her spark, too, was brief, that she, too, was dust on the hands of fate.
Assured of this, she felt a smile draw itself onto her lips. She knew where she was.
Sula was home.
There was a brilliance in Sula’s face that evening, a rising of color in the cheeks and an unearthly glow in the green eyes. The derivoo had transformed her. Martinez watched in fascination as the singer’s spirit entered Sula, and he was so overcome by the ivory and roses of Sula’s complexion glowing in the soft light of the club that the only reason he failed to fling himself on her and feast with his lips on that perfect countenance was that he was afraid he’d spoil it, that her beautiful trance would be broken….
He didn’t dare kiss her until after they’d left the club, until he felt her shiver in the chill of the night air and he could wrap her in the warmth of his arms and press her lips with his own.
“That waswonderful, ” she said after a moment. He felt a brief disappointment that she spoke of the derivoo and not his kiss.
“She’s one of the best,” Martinez said. He took her arm and walked with her down the street in the general direction of the funicular. The door of a bar opened and cast a warm glow on the pavement. Music thumped out from clubs.
“You’re cold. Would you like to stop in one of these places and take the chill off?”
“I’m not cold. I’m all right.” She forced a smile. “I don’t want to hear any other music tonight. It wouldn’t measure up.”
She turned to him, the color still high in her face. Her smile was brilliant. Martinez maneuvered her into the recessed doorway of a shop and took her in his arms and kissed her. For a moment he enjoyed the warmth of her breath on his cheek, the softness of her lips, the taste of a citrus-flavored soft drink on her mischievous tongue, and then he drew back. Sandama Twilight whirled in his senses. His heart was beating thickly, to a strange lurching rhythm, and his mind seemed to be lurching as well, incongruous thoughts and impressions flashing from its dim recesses. He forced it into the channel he wanted.
“You know,” he said, “I wasn’t joking when I said I wanted to join your family.”
Her smile was bemused. “I suppose I could arrange to adopt you. Though I hadn’t planned on being a mother quite so young.”
“There’s an easier way I could join,” Martinez said. “We could get married.”
Sula stared at him, pupils wide in her green eyes, and then an expression of suspicion crossed her face. “You’re not joking, are you, captain?”
“N-No.” Martinez fought the stammer that seemed to have suddenly possessed his tongue. “Absolutely not.”
Sula’s face was dazzling in its sudden brilliant splendor. Further words seemed suddenly unnecessary. His lips took their answer from hers.
A moment later, mind whirling, he was walking with her down the street, aware of the idiot’s grin on his face and the bloom of happiness in his chest.