Muse Read online

  Muse

  by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)

  Ananda decided that she wasn’t going to tell anyone that the captain read her dramatic reentry-into-normal-space speech from notes taken on lace-bordered stationery.

  “Today,” Lata Kamdar intoned, aiming at the nearest audio pickup, “we reattain the stars. Today we reach our hands out to our neighbors, not to bid them goodbye before we scatter in a hundred directions, but to reconnect the broken graph of human colonization. Today we have carved a path from our home to our neighbors’, and brought with us the tools to draw one back, so that before the month is out, it will be as easy to get from one planet to another as it is to travel between continents. Today we lay the foundation for a web of exploration and trade that will surpass all the glories of lost Earth.”

  “Today,” muttered Hari, “if they’re unfriendly we explode in orbit rather than let them find our families back home -”

  “Shhh,” said Ananda.

  “Today,” concluded the captain, “we begin to undo the Scatter.” She switched off the microphone. “Randhawa, if you wrecked my recording with your commentary -”

  “The mic didn’t grab anything but you, Captain,” promised Ananda.

  “Good. We don’t expect to have to explode in orbit. We expect to be greeted politely by people with even more incentive to form a friendly relationship than we have. We’re the ones with the boats.”

  “Captain Kamdar,” said Ananda, “we’re getting radio spillover.”

  “Brilliant,” replied Kamdar. “Let’s eavesdrop. Did you send our greeting broadcast?”

  “If they’re listening, they’ll get it; I sent several repetitions,” confirmed Ananda. “We’ll be within chatting distance in a few hours, and then we can say something more substantive than this is the crew of the Spindrift from the colony Satyameva Jayate on a peaceful contact-establishing mission in forty dialects.” And she drummed her fingers on her control screen and the ship’s computer selected a stream of radio to share.

  Music sighed into the bridge. It began mid-phrase but resolved into an ecstasy of orchestral harmony and then careened into a choral section, and everyone caught their breath.

  No crewmember moved or spoke or coughed until the piece was over. The radio went on, in barely recognizable colonial-bottlenecked Greek, for a sentence before Ananda switched it off.

  “Put it back,” breathed the translator. “Put it back, I think it said there was another song next -”

  “Belay that, Mehta,” the captain told Ananda. “We’ll be here all day with our mouths hanging open. Can we find a station with something more informative than the colony’s excellent musical taste?”

  Ananda flipped through the radio band, listening to snippets in her headset until she found something without any tune to it, and let it fill the bridge audio channel.

  “Pradha,” Kamdar prompted the translator. And when that didn’t get his attention: “Dev.”

  “Yes, Captain, sorry, Captain,” said Dev, and he listened, and typed. His control panel was textured; it made a clicking sound against his nails when he reached for certain letters. Ananda got up to peer over his shoulder as he translated: celestial holiday (?) feast and sculpture festival (?) this concludes (?) cultural event news rain in (?) province this (span?) warming under less cloud cover (?)…

  While Dev worked on that, and Jyoti went to fix everybody lunch, and Hari performed a nav check to make sure they’d approach the colony at the right angle, Ananda got the computer cataloguing the rest of the radio band as best as it could. She might want to listen to more of the local music later during her downtime.

  * * *

  The Spindrift swung within chatting distance of the colony. It had been designated with a number when it was settled during Scatter, but the crew had been trying to avoid using it, presuming that the colonists of this planet - like those of their own - would have renamed it in short order. Ananda prodded her control panel until she managed to raise somebody who’d talk back, then kicked them over to Dev, who’d been working on picking up the colonial Greek. Nobody shot at them. They were invited to land on the planet (which was named Muse). It was a good day, Ananda thought, the best possible reception they could have hoped for. Muse had not yet reattained spaceflight but was only too delighted to receive neighbors who had.

  Dev shadowed the captain when they landed, muddling through Greek that had spent hundreds of years on Muse evolving away from the original and that he’d had to study from books that themselves had been translated a few times to keep up with Satyameva Jayate’s own linguistic slide. He introduced the crew to the Muse colonists; Captain Kamdar shook hands with Muse’s governor, and, through Dev, complimented the music they’d picked up. The governor said something about how if they liked that they should come to a live concert.

  Ananda hung back, mostly; she wasn’t a diplomat and her Greek was negligible. She’d gotten on this expedition for other skills, with some help from extensive networking. She’d taken the job to say she’d been there, to be listed fourth or fifth when someone wrote textbooks about Reestablishment or whatever they wound up calling colonies getting back in touch after Scatter.

  But she was as excited as everyone else for the concert. Parvati, just waking up for her overnight shift, volunteered to stay behind on the ship, claiming not to like music. (Jyoti tried to convince her; she was unmoved by the statement that it was really good music.)

  It was spectacular. If it made any sense to describe a concert as orgasmic, it was orgasmic. The natives in attendance seemed less impressed; Ananda, looking around during intermission, thought she had seen more enraptured ticketholders when she took her nephew to a children’s theater production with last-minute props and primary-school-quality writing. The only thing that could distract her from the movements of the sound was the architecture. Everything was beautiful; the armrests of the chairs were carved, each one different, and the arches of the music hall swooped with achingly perfect curves, and there was statuary tucked everywhere with room. She’d closed her eyes when they’d boarded the train to go to the show, fearing motion sickness, but now regretted it - she must have missed dozens of buildings and maybe some of them were this beautiful.

  She let herself get sick, when they went with the governor back to a local hotel to spend the local night (none of the Satyameva Jayate visitors were tired, but they were trying to adjust to daylight in the time zone where they’d landed). It looked like the entire planet was a museum, or at least the whole capital city. The colors alone threatened to seduce her into learning Greek and staying forever and having her wife sent after her. Tara would like the place, Ananda thought. Tara liked lovely things.

  The hotel rooms had murals on the walls and dizzy beauty latch-hooked into the carpets and frosted flowers on the window glass and Ananda was afraid to touch anything.

  She slept, eventually, embroidery scratching her skin.

  * * *

  The crew of the Spindrift were united in their fascination with the artistic output of Muse. Muse was keen on the gifts they’d brought, likewise; so the governor toted them to landmarks and galleries and gardens and ballets that brought Ananda at least to tears, and Dev did his best to translate the scientific papers on propulsion and other technical offerings for the governor’s entourage of interested parties. Dev had brushed up particularly on his technical vocabulary for exactly this reason.

  The members of the party who couldn’t understand even half a conversation in Muse Greek could not participate. So they had to occupy themselves shuffling around looking at the art, moving hither and thither in tourist-mode, and this was no hardship. Every public place had music playing. Even the conversations of the passers-by were pretty; Dev’s Greek halted and croaked slowly from his lips but the natives ju
st about sang it, fluttering their hands, closing their eyes as though to more clearly see whatever it was they were trying to describe to one another. Nobody looked at the visitors for more than a moment; Ananda had expected space visitors to be very interesting, and instead there was unbroken politeness and personal space.

  “I feel like I’m on a movie set,” Ananda told Jyoti, when they were ahead of the rest of the party at a hall of sculptures. “Even just walking down the street. It’s inorganically gorgeous.”

  “Have you noticed how abstract it is?” Jyoti asked. “I’ve seen a handful of portraits, landscapes, but mostly they seem to pull pretty out of thin air and skip turning it into a shape you’d recognize.”

  Ananda hadn’t actually noticed that. “Now that you mention it. But they’re all wearing makeup, they acknowledge beauty in the human form.”

  “Not all of them, some of them seem to do veils instead.”

  “I don’t think Dev wants to waste his time asking how to say who does your eyeshadow in Muse Greek, though.”

  “Fair. I’m so glad they’re a colony of friendly artists. I was scared they’d be armed to the teeth and mad about something and we’d have to blow ourselves up just to prevent them from taking the Spindrift and finding Satyameva Jayate. Instead we get to take pictures and - oh Ananda look at the shoes on that man -”

  They admired his shoes until he’d gone by, and then Ananda picked up: “I wasn’t worried, really. I knew it was in the mission parameters, but it’s an edge case. I’d go on another one of these, even, when we come back crowing about our success and build another dozen ships to find more neighbors. If they don’t come to us first.”

  “I hope nobody comes to us. Even odds they’d be invaders. I’d rather be in the middle of a lot of spokes we put down ourselves.”

  “Fair enough.”

  The party caught up, and Dev expressed that a museum docent had told him that they shouldn’t talk over the music if they could possibly avoid it please, and they moved on to look at more of the marble and wood and glass.

  * * *

  It was a week into their visit before anyone thought it was worth making Dev figure out how to ask about the history of the colony. It was small, much less populated even after two centuries to establish itself than was Satyameva Jayate, and while they’d gotten infrastructure like trains and plumbing set up, they seemed to be so heavily focused on art that Captain Kamdar figured there had to be some cultural reason.

  The Muse colonists - Ananda had yet to think of a better demonym than “Musicians”, and this was not fair, since some of them were painters or landscapers or something else instead, in addition to it being an awful pun - had a very limited understanding of their own colonial history, it turned out.

  Satyameva Jayate had had its own psychological problems when its colonists landed and it began to sink in that they could not get off their new rock, could not with current technology get in touch with anyone else. But on Muse…

  “I can’t decide if I’m depressed or inspired,” Hari remarked later, when they were all crowded in the captain’s hotel room with room service (prettily plated and garnished on patterned china).

  “How do you get the colonial psych mix so wrong,” said the captain, “that half the people who land commit suicide in the first six months? Dev, are you positive you got that right?”

  “Positive,” said Dev. “They don’t know and neither do I how the colonists were picked - maybe people bribed their way on, maybe there were stowaways, nobody was trying to write historical primary sources when they had twice as much work as expected getting the farms going and building houses and burying the dead. Which couldn’t have helped in itself, either.”

  “If half the people who’d landed on Satyameva Jayate had killed themselves,” said Ananda, “I don’t know that we’d have managed to establish a colony at all instead of - starving, handling the equipment wrong -”

  “There was mishandled equipment - if everybody who knows how to use this or that terraforming item offs themselves, somebody has to try anyway, apparently a lot of people wound up blinding themselves or neglecting their hearing protection,” said Dev. “The governor’s aide was very awkward when she explained that.” (Everyone glanced at Dev. Dev, of course, didn’t notice.)

  “But they’ve done beautifully,” said Kamdar.

  “Literally,” said Jyoti, and that got a laugh.

  “Maybe the survivors included a critical mass of artists, and now they’re just really inbred,” suggested Hari.

  “It could be my Greek,” said Dev, “but I don’t get the impression that they think they’re talented at all. Even the professional artists, let alone the hobbyists.”

  “The governor was doodling while we talked about what to name the supraspace path between here and Satyameva Jayate,” said Kamdar, “and he was about to throw it away, and he laughed at me when I asked if I could keep it. He let me, though.” She unrolled the drawing and showed it off.

  “I guess we’re going to be exporting strictly non-creative work,” said Ananda.

  “Don’t let Parvati hear you calling tech stuff non-creative,” advised Jyoti.

  “What’s the path going to be called? When it’s carved in both ways?” asked Hari.

  “Litha. Muse Greek for ‘truth’ - their language, our planet’s name,” Dev replied.

  * * *

  The Spindrift was expected to turn around after spending no more than three weeks at their destination, and Ananda missed Tara something fierce by the time Kamdar ordered them all to pack up to go. There would be more trips - for that matter, Muse now had the plans for a ship of their own in the same model, if they could divert enough attention to mining and manufacture. The next order of business was to get home, get plenty of Muse Greek into the hands of linguists other than Dev so they could parallelize, and report success.

  The governor gave them all a little local spending money for souvenirs and Ananda bought a glass desk ornament, champagne-gold with ribbons of blue writhing inside it. She had the impression that the governor thought her choice (all their choices) tacky, but she didn’t care, the desk ornament was just about the prettiest thing she’d seen that she could pick up unless she counted Tara.

  The trip was going to take fifteen days in supranormal space, and except for Hari and Parvati making their regular round-the-clock checks of all the systems, there wasn’t going to be much to do. Ananda fiddled with their recordings of Muse songs until she could get the formats to translate, and reasonable-quality versions floated through the cramped ship corridors and into their rooms. Parvati confessed that it was, indeed, lovely music, as music went.

  Ananda didn’t notice anything wrong until they’d been in supraspace for two days and she found the captain borrowing Dev’s camera vest, with the grid of buzzers that let him “see” where obstacles were.

  “It doesn’t fit you,” she told Kamdar.

  “I know,” the captain replied. “I’m just getting a feel for how long it’d take to get used to it. Dev doesn’t mind, he’s napping.”

  “Is there something wrong with your eyes…?”

  “Medically? No.”

  “If your eye color was bothering you I’d think you’d get contacts or dye, not borrow Dev’s vest.”

  “No, not that either. Not that mud brown is anything to be particularly pleased with,” snorted Kamdar.

  “Brown is a perfectly nice eye color, Captain. My wife’s got brown eyes,” Ananda said. “So have I. So have most people.”

  The captain shrugged and took off Dev’s vest and put it back where he left it when he was sleeping.

  And Ananda let it go.

  She worked on Muse Greek, because they had the materials to make that feasible, and when she took a break, she looked at her desk ornament, following the ribbons of blue with her gaze.

  There was a twist in one of them that she didn’t like, on reflection. It had seemed perfect when she’d picked it out.

  She went b
ack to studying.

  The next ship-morning, when she picked up her textbook again, she fiddled with the settings on her screen until she’d found a font that didn’t make the Greek letters look like - like segments of bugs, scrabbling around in millipede-rows. There was one that was tolerable. She suspected it wouldn’t have come up if she wasn’t starting to see the letters as text more than arcane symbols. Probably a sign of progress.

  Jyoti didn’t have lunch ready when Ananda went to the ship kitchen. “Is Jyoti sick?” she asked Hari, who had brought his screen into the dining nook with him.

  “Don’t know,” Hari said, distracted, around a mouthful of rice. “We haven’t talked. There’s extra from yesterday and some ready-made.”

  Ananda mounded rice and chicken and sauce on a white plate - who’d picked these dishes, she wondered, would it have killed them to put a design in the plastic? - and heated it up. “What are you doing?” she asked, peering at Hari’s screen. “Is that a painting?”

  Hari’s hand twitched, leaving smears of ochre on the screen, and he gestured to undo the mistake. “Don’t look. It’s not done.”

  “Feeling inspired?”

  “I used to paint, in school, a little. I wasn’t very good.” He drew more careful ochre lines, then undid it again, went into the color picker, switched to a less saturated and browner shade. “Thought I’d try to get to ‘decent’…”

  Ananda’s lunch was hot; she took it out. She rummaged in the spice rack - Jyoti would scold her, but Jyoti wasn’t there - and found something, she didn’t know enough about spices to say what exactly, that looked nice sprinkled on the pale orange sauce. She shook a little on, then poured some into her hand so she could pinch it into place more exactly. Almost symmetrical, not quite. She neglected to put the herb jar away and sat down where she could see Hari’s screen and ate.

  “I said don’t look.”

  “What do you want me to look at? There’s nothing to look at.”