Then I hadn’t misheard him before. “Aches?” I said.
“Yeah. A-C-H-E-S. The All-City Holiday Ecumenical Sing. ACHES. Or, as my seventh-grade girls call it, Aches and Pains. It’s a giant concert—well, not actually a concert because everybody sings, even the audience. But all the city singing groups and church choirs participate.” He moved a stack of LPs off the couch and onto the floor and sat down across from me. “Denver has it every year. At the convention center. Have you ever been to a Sing?” he said, and when I shook my head, “It’s pretty impressive. Last year three thousand people and forty-four choirs participated.”
“And you’re directing?”
“Yeah. Actually, it’s a much easier job than directing my church choirs. Or my seventh-grade girls’ glee. And it’s kind of fun. It used to be the All-City Messiah, you know, a whole bunch of people getting together to sing Handel’s Messiah, but then they had a request from the Unitarians to include some Solstice songs, and it kind of snowballed from there. Now we do Hanukkah songs and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and ‘The Seven Nights of Kwanzaa,’ along with Christmas carols and selections from the Messiah. Which, by the way, we can’t let the Altairi listen to, either.”
“Is there children-slaying in that, too?”
“Head-breaking. ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron’ and ‘dash them in pieces.’ There’s also wounding, bruising, cutting, deriding, and laughing to scorn.”
“Actually, the Altairi already know all about scorn,” I said.
“But hopefully not about shaking nations. And covering the earth with darkness,” he said. “Okay”—he opened his laptop—“the first thing I’m going to do is scan in the song. Then I’ll remove the accompaniment so we can play them just the vocals.”
“What can I do?”
“You,” he said, disappearing into the other room again and returning with a foot-high stack of sheet music and music books, which he dumped in my lap, “can make a list of all the songs we don’t want the Altairi to hear.”
I nodded and started through The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs. It was amazing how many carols, which I’d always thought were about peace and good will, had really violent lyrics. “The Coventry Carol” wasn’t the only one with child-slaying in it. “Christmas Day Is Come” did, too, along with references to sin, strife, and militants. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” had strife, too, and envy and quarrels. “The Holly and the Ivy” had thorns, blood, and bears, and “Good King Wenceslas” talked about cruelty, bringing people flesh, freezing their blood, and heart failure.
“I had no idea Christmas carols were so grim,” I said.
“You should hear Easter,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “While you’re looking, see if you can find any songs with the word ‘seated’ in it so we can see if it’s that particular word they’re responding to.”
I nodded and went back to reading lyrics. In “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” everyone was standing, not seated, plus it had “fear,” “trembling,” and a line about giving oneself for heavenly food. “The First Noel” had “blood,” and the shepherds were lying, not sitting.
What Christmas song has “seated” in it? I thought, trying to remember. Isn’t there something in “Jingle Bells” about Miss Somebody or Other being seated by someone’s side?
There was, and in “Wassail, Wassail,” there was a line about “a-sitting” by the fire, but not the word “seated.”
I kept looking. The nonreligious Christmas songs were almost as bad as the carols. Even a children’s song like “I’m Getting’ Nuttin’ for Christmas” gaily discussed smashing bats over people’s heads, and there seemed to be an entire genre of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”–type songs: “Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake,” “I Came Upon a Roadkill Deer,” and “Grandpa’s Gonna Sue the Pants Off Santa.”
And even when the lyrics weren’t violent, they had phrases in them like “rule o’er all the earth” and “over us all to reign,” which the Altairi might take as an invitation to global conquest.
There have to be some carols that are harmless, I thought, and looked up “Away in a Manger” in the index (which The Holly Jolly Book, unlike the hymnal, did have): “…lay down his sweet head…the stars in the sky…” No mayhem here, I thought. I can definitely add this to the list. “Love…blessings…”
“And take us to heaven to live with thee there.” A harmless enough line, but it might mean something entirely different to the Altairi. I didn’t want to find myself on a spaceship heading back to Aquila or wherever it was they came from.
We worked till almost three in the morning, by which time we had separate recordings of the vocals, accompaniment, and notes (played by Mr. Ledbetter on the piano, guitar, and flute and recorded by me) of “all seated on the ground,” a list, albeit rather short, of songs the Altairi could safely hear, and another, even shorter list of ones with “seated,” “sit,” or “sitting” in them.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Ledbetter,” I said, putting on my coat.
“Calvin,” he said.
“Calvin. Anyway, thank you. I really appreciate this. I’ll let you know the results of my playing the songs for them.”
“Are you kidding, Meg?” he said. “I want to be there when you do this.”
“But I thought— Don’t you have to rehearse with the choirs for your ACHES thing?” I said, remembering the heavy schedule he’d left on his answering machine.
“Yes, and I have to rehearse with the symphony, and with the chancel choir and the kindergarten choir and the handbell choir for the Christmas Eve service—”
“Oh, and I’ve kept you up so late,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Choir directors never sleep in December,” he said cheerfully, “and what I was going to say was that I’m free in between rehearsals and till eleven tomorrow morning. How early can you get the Altairi?”
“They usually come out of their ship around seven, but some of the other commission members may want to work with them.”
“And face those bright shiny faces before they’ve had their coffee? My bet is you’ll have the Altairi all to yourself.”
He was probably right. I remembered Dr. Jarvis saying he had to work himself up to seeing the Altairi over the course of the day: “They look just like my fifth-grade teacher.”
“Are you sure you want to face them first thing in the morning?” I asked him. “The Altairi’s glares—”
“Are nothing compared to the glare of a first soprano who didn’t get the solo she wanted. Don’t worry, I can handle the Altairi,” he said. “I can’t wait to find out what it is they’re responding to.”
What we found out was nothing.
Calvin had been right. There was no one else waiting outside University Hall when the Altairi appeared. I hustled them into the audio lab, locked the door, and called Calvin, and he came right over, bearing Starbucks coffee and an armload of CDs.
“Yikes!” he said when he saw the Altairi standing over by the speakers. “I was wrong about the first soprano. This is more a seventh-grader’s ‘No, you can’t text-message during the choir concert—or wear face glitter’ glare.”
I shook my head. “It’s an Aunt Judith glare.”
“I’m very glad we decided not to play them the part about dashing people’s heads into pieces,” he said. “Are you sure they didn’t come to Earth to kill everybody?”
“No,” I said. “That’s why we have to establish communications with them.”
“Right,” he said, and proceeded to play the accompaniment we’d recorded the night before. Nothing, and nothing when he played the notes with piano, guitar, and flute, but when he played the vocal part by itself, the Altairi promptly sat down.
“Definitely the words,” he said, and when we played them “Jingle Bells,” they sat down again at “seated by my side,” which seemed to confirm it. But when he played them the first part of “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys and Dolls and “S
ittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” they didn’t sit down for either one.
“Which means it’s the word ‘seated,’ ” I said.
“Or they only respond to Christmas songs,” he said. “Do you have some other carol we can play them?”
“Not with ‘seated,’ ” I said. “ ‘All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth’ has ‘sitting’ in it.”
We played it for them. No response, but when he played “We Need a Little Christmas,” from the musical Mame, the Altairi sat down the moment the recording reached the word “sitting.”
Calvin cut off the rest of the phrase, since we didn’t want the Altairi sitting on our shoulders, and looked at me. “So why did they respond to this ‘sitting’ and not the one in ‘All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth’?” he mused.
I was tempted to say, “Because ‘All I Want for Christmas’ is an absolutely terrible song,” but I didn’t. “The voices?” I suggested.
“Maybe,” he said, and shuffled through the CDs till he found a recording of the same song by the Statler Brothers. The Altairi sat down at exactly the same place.
So not the voices. And not just Christmas. When Calvin played them the opening song from 1776, they sat down again as the Continental Congress sang orders to John Adams to sit down. And it wasn’t the verb “to sit.” When we played them “The Hanukkah Song,” they spun solemnly in place.
“Okay, so we’ve established it’s ecumenical,” Calvin said.
“Thank goodness,” I said, thinking of Reverend Thresher and what he’d say if he found out they’d responded to a Christmas carol, but when we played them a Solstice song with the phrase “the earth turns round again,” they just stood there and glared.
“Words beginning with s?” I said.
“Maybe.” He played them, in rapid succession, “The Snow Lay on the Ground,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and “Suzy Snowflake.” Nothing.
At ten forty-five Calvin left to go to his choir rehearsal. “It’s at Trinity Episcopal, if you want to meet me there at noon,” he said, “and we can go over to my apartment from there. I want to run an analysis on the frequency patterns of the phrases they responded to.”
“Okay,” I said, and delivered the Altairi to Dr. Wakamura, who wanted to squirt them with perfumes from the Crabtree and Evelyn store. I left them glaring at him and went up to Dr. Morthman’s office. He wasn’t there. “He went to the mall to collect paint samples,” Dr. Jarvis said.
I called him on his cell phone. “Dr. Morthman, I’ve run some tests,” I said, “and the Altairi are—”
“Not now. I’m waiting for an important call from ACS,” he said, and hung up.
I went back to the audio lab and listened to the Cambridge Boys’ Choir, Barbra Streisand, and Barenaked Ladies Christmas albums, trying to find songs with variations of “sit” and “spin” in them and no bloodshed. I also looked up instances of “turn.” They hadn’t responded to “turns” in the Solstice song, but I wasn’t sure that proved anything. They hadn’t responded to “sitting” in “All I Want for Christmas,” either.
At noon I went to meet Calvin at Trinity Episcopal. They weren’t done rehearsing yet, and it didn’t sound like they would be for some time. Calvin kept starting and stopping the choir and saying, “Basses, you’re coming in two beats early, and altos, on ‘singing,’ that’s an A flat. Let’s take it again, from the top of page eight.”
They went over the section four more times, with no discernible improvement, before Calvin said, “Okay, that’s it. I’ll see you all Saturday night.”
“We are never going to get that entrance right,” several of the choir members muttered as they gathered up their music, and the balding minister from last night, Reverend McIntyre, looked totally discouraged.
“Maybe I shouldn’t sing after all,” he told Calvin.
“Yes, you should,” Calvin said, and put his hand on Reverend McIntyre’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. It’ll all come together. You’ll see.”
“Do you really believe that?” I asked Calvin after Reverend McIntyre had gone out.
He laughed. “I know it’s hard to believe listening to them now. I never think they’re going to be able to do it, but somehow, no matter how awful they sound in rehearsal, they always manage to pull it off. It’s enough to restore your faith in humanity.” He frowned. “I thought you were going to come over, and we were going to look at frequency patterns.”
“We are,” I said. “Why?”
He pointed behind me. The Altairi were standing there with Reverend McIntyre. “I found them outside,” he said, smiling. “I was afraid they might be lost.”
“Oh, dear, they must have followed me. I’m so sorry,” I said, though Reverend McIntyre didn’t seem particularly intimidated by them. I said as much.
“I’m not,” he said. “They don’t look nearly as annoyed as my congregation does when they don’t approve of my sermon.”
“I’d better take them back,” I said to Calvin.
“No, as long as they’re here, we might as well take them over to my apartment and try some more songs on them. We need more data.”
I somehow squeezed all six of them into my car and took them over to Calvin’s apartment, and he analyzed frequency patterns while I played some more songs for them. It definitely wasn’t the quality of the songs or the singers they were responding to. They wouldn’t sit down for Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper” and then did for a hideous falsetto children’s recording of “Little Miss Muffet” from the 1940s.
It wasn’t the words’ meaning, either. When I played them “Adeste Fideles” in Latin, they sat down when the choir sang, “tibi sit gloria.”
“Which proves they’re taking what they hear literally,” Calvin said when I took him into the kitchen out of earshot of the Altairi to tell me.
“Yes, which means we’ve got to make sure they don’t hear any words that have double meanings,” I said. “We can’t even play them ‘Deck the Halls,’ for fear they might deck someone.”
“And we definitely can’t play them ‘laid in a manger,’ ” he said, grinning.
“It’s not funny,” I said. “At this rate, we aren’t going to be able to play them anything.”
“There must be some songs—”
“What songs?” I said in frustration. “ ‘I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm’ talks about hearts that are on fire, ‘Christmastide’ might bring on a tsunami, and ‘be born in us today’ sounds like a scene out of Alien.”
“I know,” he said. “Don’t worry, we’ll find something. Here, I’ll help you.” He cleared off the kitchen table, brought in the stacks of sheet music, albums, and CDs, and sat me down across from him. “I’ll find songs and you check the lyrics.”
We started through them. “No…no…what about ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day’?”
“No,” I said, looking up the lyrics. “It’s got ‘hate,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘dead,’ and ‘despair.’ ”
“Cheery,” he said. There was a pause while we looked through more music. “John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas’?”
I shook my head. “ ‘War.’ Also ‘fights’ and ‘fear.’ ”
Another pause, and then he said, “All I want for Christmas is you.”
I looked up at him, startled. “What did you say?”
“ ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You,’ ” he repeated. “Song title. Mariah Carey.”
“Oh.” I looked up the lyrics. “I think it might be okay. I don’t see any murder or mayhem.” But he was shaking his head.
“On second thought, I don’t think we’d better. Love can be even more dangerous than war.”
I looked into the living room, where the Altairi stood glaring through the door at me. “I seriously doubt they’re here to steal Earthwomen.”
“Yeah, but we wouldn’t want to give anybody any ideas.”
“No,” I said. “We definitely wouldn’t want to do that.”
We went ba
ck to searching for songs. “How about ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’?” he said, holding up a Patti Page album.
“I’ll Be Home” passed muster, but the Altairi didn’t respond to it, or to Ed Ames singing “Ballad of the Christmas Donkey” or Miss Piggy singing “Santa Baby.”
There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to their responses. The keys weren’t the same, or the notes, or the accompaniment. They responded to the Andrews Sisters but not to Randy Travis, and it wasn’t the voices, either, because they responded to Julie Andrews’s “Awake, Awake Ye Drowsy Souls.” We played them her “Silver Bells.” They didn’t laugh (which didn’t really surprise me) or bustle, but when the song got to the part about the traffic lights blinking red and green, all six of them blinked their eyes. We played them her “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow.” They just sat there.
“Try the ‘Christmas Waltz,’ ” I said, looking at the album cover.
He shook his head. “It’s got love in it, too. You did say you didn’t have a boyfriend, didn’t you?”
“That’s right,” I said, “and I have no intention of dating the Altairi.”
“Good,” he said. “Can you think of any other songs with ‘blink’ in them?”
By the time he left to rehearse with the symphony, we didn’t know any more than when we’d started. I took the Altairi back to Dr. Wakamura, who didn’t seem all that happy to see them, tried to find a song with “blink” in it, to no avail, had dinner, and went back over to Calvin’s apartment.
He was already there, working. I started through the sheet music. “What about ‘Good Christian Men, Rejoice’?” I said. “It’s got ‘bow’ in it,” and the phone rang.
Calvin answered it. “What is it, Belinda?” he said, listened a moment, and then said, “Meg, turn on the TV,” and handed me the remote.
I switched on the television. Marvin the Martian was telling Bugs Bunny he planned to incinerate the earth. “CNN,” Calvin said. “It’s on forty.”
I punched in the channel and then was sorry. Reverend Thresher was standing in the audio lab in front of a mob of reporters, saying, “—happy to announce that we have found the answer to the Altairi’s actions in the mall yesterday. Christmas carols were playing over the sound system in the mall—”