Sauntering along, hands thrust into her artist’s smock pockets, Hightee looked sideways at him. “Now what is this something else?”
“Your new musical!” said Madison. “I’ve brought it!”
“That’s unusual,” said Hightee. “Normally I originate them and my own staff develops them.”
Madison hadn’t known that: on Earth artists didn’t write them; they just sang and acted in them. But he plunged ahead. “Well, the order to do it comes from Lord Snor himself. He’s a great admirer of yours, as they all are. When he heard one of the songs from it, he said, ‘THAT’S HIGHTEE!’”
“He did? That’s funny. He’s as deaf as a rock.”
“To everything but a bone-phone,” said Madison hastily. “They put bones into the probe, I mean prones into the bobe. . . .”
Hightee laughed. Then she said, “I’m sorry I got you all flustered. Maybe Lord Snor did wake up and listen to what goes on on Homeview. Stranger things have happened.”
Madison was floundering in his briefcase. The impact of Hightee Heller was a bit much for him. But he was a veteran and he got himself under control. “Look, I better play you one of the songs from it. Where can I find a piano?”
“A what?”
“A keyboard. I’m not any pro but I tinkle away.”
Hightee was walking away from him. He quickly followed. Then he noticed that some of the vine-covered walls they had been passing were actually the sides of structures. She opened something that looked like a garden gate and Madison, coming up behind her, found himself looking into what must be a musical-equipment repair shop.
A middle-aged man was standing over a bench which was littered with electronic components and shells of what might be instruments. He looked up, saw Hightee, smiled and laid down a tool.
“Jarp,” said Hightee, “have you ever heard of an instrument called a piano?”
“No,” said Jarp. “What’s it look like?”
“Teeth,” said Madison. “It has lots of keys like ivory teeth.”
Jarp turned to Hightee. “He’s talking about some primitive mouth instrument.”
“No, no,” said Madison. “It’s quite sophisticated. You play it by hitting the keys with both hands in chords. You mean you don’t have a keyboard? Oh, dear!”
“What scale is it?” said Jarp.
“Eight-note major, thirteen-note chromatic.”
“Do you know the notes?”
When Madison nodded, Jarp dug around and found the remains of a chorder-beat that operated on finger proximity. Madison, after a couple of sour tries, managed to get it to hum the right numbers of vibrations. Jarp turned on a recorder and Madison, moving his finger closer and closer and holding it each time he had the right note, ran the chromatic scale.
“All those notes on one instrument?” said Hightee.
“Yes,” said Madison. “Eighty-eight total.”
“I know,” said Jarp. “He’s talking about a chorder-bar.” He turned to Madison. “When you put a finger down on a long bar, it sounds a note. When you put it down softly you get low volume; when you put it down hard you get high volume. But you were saying something about a keyboard or keys. What’s it look like?”
Madison found some paper, but he was making such a bad job of it, Jarp took it away from him and with a long sheet of paper, using Madison’s hand span for an octave, shortly had a piano keyboard drawn. Jarp looked at it and scratched his head. “Never saw anything like it. It must work mechanically: you strike a key, you say, and it takes a hammer and hits a string. How clumsy! I guess it must be a blood brother to one of those stick harps they once had in the back country of Mistin. Used to jump around naked beating them before they did their spring mating.”
“Well, see what you can do,” said Hightee, “and bring it to the practice room when you finish.” Madison followed her out. They were shortly on a path that wound round a waterfall, the birds flying escort. “Now what’s the story of this musical?” said Hightee. “The book. I hope it isn’t about spring mating.”
Madison laughed easily and donned his most engaging smile. “No, hardly. It’s really a great vehicle that will show your lovely voice off as never before. You see, there’s this mythical planet named Terra. The whole story is a fantasy, you see.”
“Oh, I like fantasy. Prince Caucalsia made a great hit. But go on.”
Madison wished he could just give her the treatment. But it was in his briefcase and she was using the time to get some exercise in. He and the horror-writer had sweat their brains out on it but he hadn’t thought he would have to give it verbally. He hoped he had it straight.
“Well,” said Madison, “this fantasy planet Terra is ruled by a huge monster in a red suit with horns and a tail.”
“You’re describing a Manco devil.”
“Good,” said Madison, who had never heard of one. “I’m glad you’ve got that straight. So this Manco devil rules all the people. And they haven’t got any money and they are starving. Now, in the opening scene we show the people all huddled and starving and praying and the devil comes in and kicks them around.”
“How awful!”
“But wait,” said Madison. “The devil has a huge court of devils and one of these has lost his devil child and an old nurse has put a HUMAN child in its place to fool the devil and the devil raises this human child, thinking it is his own.
“So the sight we saw in the first scene—the main devil kicking the people around—is witnessed by this human child, who is now a young man, and he decides it’s bad.”
“Good for him,” said Hightee.
“But the devils in the court all think this son is one of them. They think he’s a reliable officer of good repute. But really, he’s planning to help the people. So, whenever he can get away, he puts on a mask and starts robbing trains.”
“Trains?” said Hightee. “What’s a train?”
Madison said, “This is a fantasy.”
“Oh.”
“Now, the devils all ship their valuables and money on these trains.”
“Ah, a train is a space-liner between planets,” said Hightee.
“Well, kind of,” said Madison. “And the hero robs them.”
“You mean the fellow goes CRIMINAL?”
“Well, he HAS to,” said Madison.
“Oh, I don’t think that would go down well. People despise criminals.”
Madison said, “Well, this isn’t really criminal. It’s in a good cause. He robs the trains and he gives the money away to the poor and they DON’T STARVE!”
“Listen,” said Hightee. “It’s the people who raise the food. If they didn’t raise the food, they couldn’t buy anything with the money the hero gives them.”
“Oh, the devils grab the food and the people have to bribe them to get it back. So suddenly the devils find out WHO the bandit is. A devil’s own son! So they declare him an OUTLAW! And there’s a lot of fighting and the outlaw escapes.”
“Hurray!” said Hightee.
“But the devils finally catch him,” said Madison, “and hang him. Hang him up high and very dead. The people all cry—”
“Wait a minute,” said Hightee. “I don’t see any part in this for me. There’s no girl.”
“Well, I was coming to that. You’re the hero’s sister.”
“Then I must be a devil, as he was a stolen child.”
“No, no. The devil stole a brother and SISTER! I forgot to mention it. And in the musical, the sister warns and saves the hero time and again. And SHE’S the one who sings all the songs. The outlaw just runs around shooting people, and the sister, in the songs, describes what he is doing. And all the people begin singing her songs.”
“So there’re a lot of choruses.”
“Exactly!” said Madison. “Now the last scene when they hang him is the great one. All the people are there watching him choke out his life on the scaffold—”
“How grisly!”
“And the sister comes in and sings a gr
eat song, a kind of a dirge. And then the devils realize that she was the one who tipped him off all the time and they hang her on the spot!”
“No!”
“Yes. Right alongside her brother on a second scaffold. And then two graves open up and huge skeletal hands come out of them and grab the bodies off the scaffolds. And then the people all rise up and sing the song she had been singing and remember the outlaw forever!”
Hightee Heller was staring at him, wide-eyed.
Madison held his breath. Would she fall for it?
A speaker underneath a flowering tree opened up and interrupted them. “Hightee, the instrument is ready.”
PART SEVENTY-SIX
Chapter 2
Madison, as he followed her into the music practice room, knew he had better be awfully lucky or awfully good or both.
The place was a domed room with no flat surfaces to reflect sound. It was decorated with huge enlargements of Voltarian single notes in pastel blue that hung in various places as baffles to further break up the sound. The interior of the dome was a pastel yellow. Jarp was hanging something from wires in the middle of the room. It was the drawn piano keyboard but the keys were vertical and it was raised five feet above the floor.
“No,” said Madison. “You sit down to it.”
“No musician ever sits down,” said Jarp. “It must be awfully lazy music.”
“Give him what he wants,” said Hightee. “I can’t see for the life of me how you play such a thing. Keys?”
At Madison’s direction, Jarp had a band helper get a stool and then they supported the keyboard horizontal and firmed it in place.
Madison, on his part, couldn’t possibly see how it would work. The keys, white and black, were simply drawn on paper. They had no action up or down at all.
He summoned up his nerve. It was all or nothing. He struck one of the painted, motionless keys with one finger and he got a sort of a howl.
“Oh, no,” he said. “A piano doesn’t sound like that. It vibrates more like a harp.”
“Let’s see if we’ve got the notes right, first,” said Jarp.
Madison limbered up his fingers, wishing he had at least tried to entertain people since he was twelve. He ran the whole scale from bottom to the top. Yes, the notes were all on pitch. But no piano ever HOWLED!
“The tones are wrong,” said Madison. “A piano note is bright and bubbling.”
“My word,” said Jarp. “Well, here’s the adjustment tool and that’s the panel over on the right end. The first slot is ‘attack,’ the second is ‘decay.’ The next one is ‘overtones’ and the bottom one is ‘percussion.’ See what you can do.”
Striking one picture of a key with one finger, Madison fiddled with the controls. He began to perspire. He got rid of the howls and got some sharp striking notes but it still didn’t sound like a piano. Far too dead now.
“What’s this second box under the top one?” said Madison.
“Well, that thing I pasted the picture on is a chorder-bar. I moved the contact points under it so they match the pictures that you drew, only I can’t figure why anybody would want pictures to play an instrument. You simply press the right spots hard or soft. And you don’t want that second box. That’s drums, cymbals and bells.”
“Ah!” said Madison and promptly went to work with his tool on the second box. He found another slot Jarp hadn’t mentioned: it was “resonance.”
Striking one note repeatedly, he thought he finally had it right.
He wiped off his hands, flexed his fingers, and without daring to hope, experimentally struck a chord. It felt so weird not to have anything move.
Everything, he felt, depended upon this now.
He took a deep breath and began to play “Beale Street Blues.”
He got very interested. This thing was putting out sound like the most jangly honky-tonk piano he had ever heard.
He was making an AWFUL lot of flubs and sour chords.
Too much depended on this. He was rattled. He stopped playing and wiped off his hands again. He shook his fingers in the air. What piece had he been enamored with and had played a lot? Then he remembered. It was Scott Joplin’s music they had used in the movie The Sting. It seemed very appropriate.
He started playing. This instrument really did have a wide dynamic range; the soft was soft and the loud was LOUD! He started to give it the heavy downbeat of ragtime.
He glanced sideways at his audience of two. He could tell nothing from their faces.
He thought he had the instrument now. He reached over to his briefcase and whipped out a sheet. “Now this,” he said, “is one of the lyrics of the musical.” Nothing had been easier than to come up with music, for he could pirate the entire library of Earth ragtime and blues and simply get words written to it. He had lifted the tune “The Trickster Rag” from a Broadway musical comedy, The Con Man. The ex-Royal Academy reporter had put new words to it.
“If you would like,” said Madison, “I will play the melody through and then you can sing it. It’s called ‘The Outlaw.’”
Hightee took it, looked at it. Madison went through the tune and then Hightee began to sing:
We hunt him here,
We hunt him there,
For he is hiding everywhere:
The outlaw!
In your favorite boudoir,
If you hear a randy snore,
Don’t look further anymore:
The outlaw!
If you step into a bank
And see the muzzle of a tank,
Don’t ask who you have to thank:
The outlaw!
If there is a town to steal,
If the jewels are very real,
If the beauty has appeal:
The outlaw!
He’ll take anything you’ve got,
Your money, girls, the whole lot,
And leave you tied up in a knot:
The outlaw!
He will use the smartest lure
To take riches from a boor
And give it to the very poor:
The outlaw!
So for this man, strike up the band,
And give to him a helping hand,
For he will give us the whole land:
THE OUTLAW!
Her brilliant voice died away.
“Of course,” said Madison, “when you sing it in the play, you will be wearing black shorts and boots and a wide-rimmed black hat and you will have a gun on each hip and then draw and hold up the audience at the end of the song. And then the outlaw himself rushes amongst them, robs them and runs off to give it to the poor. Terrific theater!”
A man who must be her bandleader had drifted in.
“That’s an amazing downbeat,” said Hightee. “What do you think of it, Tink?”
“Primitive,” said Tink. “It probably came from the backwoods of some planet like Flisten and then got refined a bit. Drums. You know, comes from beating sticks on logs. And the downbeat is probably some kind of a charge motion at a wild animal. Hunter enactment dances. You know, chug chug CHUG, chug chug CHUG.”
“You are absolutely right,” said Madison. “Except it comes from the blacks of Africa and it got to New Orleans and caught on all over the place. It’s called jazz.”
“You sure got that chorder-bar sounding crazy,” said Tink. “Why didn’t you tune it up for him, Jarp?”
“He tuned it,” said Jarp defensively.
“It’s tuned to represent a honky-tonk piano,” said Madison.
“Why do you need the pictures drawn on it?” said Tink.
“Listen,” said Hightee, glancing at her locket watch, “I’ve got to run. I have a show to do this afternoon. I’ll walk you to your car, Madison. Somebody tell my maid to bring me a jacket and tell my driver to run out an airbus.”
Madison walked with her out of the music practice room. He had no clue as to whether he had won or lost. An awful lot depended on getting this image built so he could fit Heller to it.
Hightee seemed to be a bit thoughtful. They came to the landing target. She stopped suddenly, “A MODEL 99! Good heavens! I didn’t think they ever would sell one!”
Madison had forgotten all about Flick. Suddenly he decided he could at least use this meeting to prevent further robberies. He said, “My driver will be delighted to show it to you.”
Flick, scarlet-faced, trying to go down on his knees but too frozen to even make them bend, just stood there.
Madison said, “Flick is trying to ask you if you’d honor him by letting him drive you to the studio.”
“That would be an adventure. I’ve heard these ride like a cloud.” Her maid was hurrying up with her things and she turned to her. “Send Tink and the others in my car. I’m going to take a ride in this Model 99.”