Muse Page 2

  “It’s not done! I’m crap at this, stop watching me!”

  Dev came in - he had his vest on; Captain Kamdar wasn’t still borrowing it. “What are you yelling at each other about? If you’ve got to shout can’t you at least turn the music up, Ananda?”

  “Oh, good idea,” Ananda said. “I’ll do that. One second.” She bolted down her rice and flung the plate into the washer and went to fuss with the volume. The music swelled.

  She didn’t like this song as much as she’d liked the last one.

  Let alone the first one.

  But it was better than yelling; so she didn’t bother Hari again. She was bored. There was something wrong with her Greek font.

  She missed Tara. Tara she could stare at for hours, if Tara wouldn’t giggle and push her face away.

  Jyoti didn’t fix dinner either. The captain went looking.

  Jyoti was dead.

  * * *

  There was a note. Jyoti had found a calligraphy program buried in the screen software and left a note that almost didn’t hurt to look at, until they actually read it.

  It rhymed.

  There was something wrong something wrong something wrong, with the colors and that little burr in the high register of their audio and the bleak deserted expanse of space of the walls the floor the ceiling the air -

  And Jyoti couldn’t take it -

  And realizing it didn’t help.

  “Parvati didn’t get out of the ship,” Ananda heard herself saying, and her voice was ugly, why hadn’t she taken choir when she’d had the chance to smooth away the twang? But she couldn’t find the calligraphy program and write it out pretty if she wanted Dev to know what she was saying.

  “Go wake her up,” murmured the captain.

  “If it’s an infection,” said Hari.

  “She’s already exposed. She overlaps her dinner with our breakfast,” said Kamdar, “but if it’s something else, if it was in the food or - or something - then - Mehta, go wake her up.”

  Ananda went. She detoured to turn the music louder. Why didn’t she bring any pictures of her wife -? She navigated to Parvati’s room with her eyes closed and hated the half-visible sparks that clouded her vision as afterimages.

  “Parvati.” What a name. Who gave their child a name like that? It was so full of - of sounds.

  “Ananda? What?”

  Ananda hated her own name too. Ananda hated everybody’s name. “Jyoti committed suicide,” she forced herself to say.

  Parvati opened the door. On Muse doors glided open silently. This door - did not. “What?”

  “Don’t make me repeat myself.” Ananda’s eyes were still scrunched shut.

  “Jyoti is dead? Why the - is there a note?”

  Ananda nodded.

  “Ananda, what’s wrong?”

  “We.” Ananda swallowed. “We may have caught something, on the planet. Do you have it yet? Is there anything - anything beautiful, on this entire ship -?” The answer was no. There was nothing. Her desk ornament was probably as good as it got and Ananda kind of wanted to smash it.

  “Math,” said Parvati. “I was doing math when you interrupted me. Are you delirious?”

  “No. No, it’s only.” It was too hard to explain out loud; raising her voice to be heard over the music was worse - and Dev wasn’t there. “Let me borrow your screen.”

  Ananda had to open her eyes to do it, but she found the calligraphy software and when she typed the letters swooped into place, forming acceptable ligatures and decorated descenders. She had no talent for poetry; she did not make it rhyme.

  We’re all in a bad way. Everything’s painfully ugly, that’s why we have the imported music turned up so high, it drowns it out a little. Hari’s trying to paint and I think the captain wants to put her eyes out and Jyoti’s dead and I don’t know what Dev’s doing, yet, it might be that he’s fine because he can’t see to begin with, but I don’t know that any of us are going to be much help with getting home.

  “I can fly the ship myself if I have to,” said Parvati. “The question is do we go home, if there’s an infection aboard. We might have to quarantine ourselves.”

  “Oh stop talking,” breathed Ananda.

  “This is important,” said Parvati. “Half the Muse colonists lived, right? Initial batch, no selction for resistance to the pathogen, half of them lived and established a civilization. A very, very arty civilization -”

  “We could turn around,” said Ananda suddenly. “We could turn around and we could stay there and everything’s almost tolerable, there -”

  “We need to finish carving the path so nobody thinks we met an army on the far end and panics,” said Parvati. “And then we report in, or I do anyway -”

  “You might have it.”

  “Oh,” said Parvati ruefully, “I definitely have it. This puts all the math I’ve been doing in perspective. But I’m in the surviving half, all right? I’m - channeling it. And we tell them what happened from a safe distance, and then we can turn around and live in an art museum and tell them they’re all infected so they don’t let anyone else land.”

  “My wife,” said Ananda.

  “What about your wife?”

  “I need to see her. She’s beautiful and it feels like there’s nothing beautiful and I need -”

  “We can get some pictures or video or whatever you need bounced up without exposing her or anybody else to whatever the hell we’ve got,” said Parvati.

  “I can see the pixels, on the screens,” breathed Ananda. “It’s not going to be enough.”

  “You can’t see the pixels, I promise you can’t, not really. We will get you very high-resolution photos of your wife and in a few weeks you’ll be back on Muse surrounded by acceptably pretty things, all right?”

  “We thought they were artists,” said Ananda. “They’re - it’s barely a coat of paint -”

  “I know,” murmured Parvati. “I have it too. I know.”

  Parvati steered Ananda back to her cabin and Ananda sat there, staring fixedly at her kitschy, pathetic desk ornament, until she managed to sleep.

  * * *

  On the eighth day the captain blinded herself.

  It wasn’t a surprise. She’d been going with a blindfold on, borrowing Dev’s vest, teaching herself Braille at his control panel. Parvati had made a token attempt to supervise her and forestall the outcome but simply couldn’t be everywhere at once. Parvati was barely getting the ship function checks done when she needed to be proving lemmas or whatever she was up to when she sought to satisfy the bottomless aesthetic need. Hari couldn’t help her, he was completely wrapped up in trying to get his paintings to come out right.

  On the ninth day Dev told Ananda to turn the music off.

  “What - no - I can’t - Dev the ship makes noises we’re all breathing I can’t I can’t -”

  “Turn the music off,” Dev said, “or I’m going the way Jyoti did, I have a song, I have a good song, it’s better, I can make it good, but I have to have quiet to work -”

  “There’s no way to get it totally quiet, the ship noises -”

  “Stop talking!” screamed Dev. “Turn the music off and I’ll make us better music than this rubbish -”

  “No no no -”

  Dev slapped her and Ananda fell to the ground, sobbing, feeling even more disgusting, like a suppurating abscess on the skin of the world. “Turn. It. Off. Give me an hour. I need to write my song.”

  “Do it yourself.”

  “Your screen’s completely flat and my vest doesn’t have the resolution to read it. Turn the music off.”

  “Make Parvati do it.”

  “I can’t distract her. She’s spread thin making sure we don’t disintegrate into supraspace and I don’t want to die unless you don’t let me compose my song - I can almost taste it, Ananda, it’s perfect, it’s better than anything we heard on the planet, it’s going to be beautiful, really, really, beautiful, but I need quiet. Turn the music off.”

  “Be
autiful?”

  “Yes,” said Dev, and there was an awful longing in his face, when Ananda could stand to look at him long enough to read his expression.

  “An hour,” she said, and she turned the music off, and took the screen into her room with her and locked the door so the captain wouldn’t be able to override her. If Dev thought he could make something really, truly beautiful -

  Kamdar beat at her door, howling, but while her captaincy would have let her bypass the lock, it would require more finesse at navigating blind than the captain had managed to pick up so far. Ananda stayed safely ensconced, earplugs in, trying not to listen to the pounding on the wall or the buzz of the ship, staring at her grotesque, twisted ornament. There was no beauty. There was nothing worth looking at but she couldn’t help but see and she was too afraid of pain to take the captain’s way out.

  Thank goodness there wasn’t a mirror in her cabin.

  How did Tara stand to look at her? Could she do her wife the unkindness of making her look at her again? Maybe it would be better just to beg for the photos and a video letter and not try to do a two-way conference. Then Tara wouldn’t have to look at her.

  Ananda knew perfectly well that Tara didn’t have whatever it was, would find Ananda probably about as pleasant to look at as she ever had. But with no music to set the pace of her thoughts she was descending into a spiral of revulsion and couldn’t imagine that her wife would feel any differently. She looked at her hand. It was a mistake: she’d touched Tara with that hand and couldn’t believe she’d performed such a blasphemous action. She could bite her nails off, if it weren’t too disgusting to contemplate putting them in her mouth, but that would only make it worse. She didn’t have anything in the room with her that would let her lop off offending parts sturdier than her nails: bad foresight. If she tried to leave before piping audio into the air again Kamdar would probably strangle her.

  Her screen notified her that Dev had sent her something.

  She opened up the file and flooded the ship with it.

  It wasn’t beautiful.

  * * *

  They were back on Muse-sourced music. Dev wouldn’t come out of his room, but he’d kick the door if someone called for him; he wasn’t dead. Yet.

  Parvati was short on sleep. Ananda tried to help with a check but was driven to tears by the grotesque design of the diagnostic software and wound up costing more time than she’d saved. None of them were eating well. Ananda knew how to cook, and was ostensibly supposed to take over for Jyoti if Jyoti were indisposed. No one even bothered to ask her to try.

  And then Ananda had the dream.

  Dev must have had a dream like this, she thought. Dev must have dreamed music; Ananda dreamed stars. An architecture of exulting slow-motion supernovae, all placed just so with the precise vagueness of dreams. She swam among the points of sharp-prickled perfect-colored heat which traveled in languid smooth curves, slid bright blurs across deep black infinite backdrop. She dreamed that Tara was there and that Ananda had made all the stars to show her and Tara loved them and they were both beautiful too and the stars were right.

  Ananda woke up dehydrated from crying. If she could paint it - well, not paint, it had to be three dimensions. If she could three dimensionally model it. If she could make it real, just like the dream, then the whole thing would be worth it. All the pain and frustration and the hour of aching quiet for Dev’s technically lacking composition -

  …Dev had thought he could make something beautiful, too.

  Ananda was probably kidding herself.

  She gulped water. She cried more. She asked Hari if she could look at his painting and he snapped at her. She tried sketching out the configuration of the stars and it just wouldn’t come out right.

  When Captain Kamdar was fumbling her way through a meal, Ananda snuck into her quarters and found the doodle that the governor of Muse had made. It was trivial and badly-made and his hand had shaken and it was the loveliest thing in the room, just like Ananda’s glass ornament.

  Ananda waited until Hari left his screen unattended and looked at his painting. It was like Dev’s song. Inspired incompetence.

  The people of Muse were artists so that they could self-medicate without frustrating themselves into self-mutilation. Ananda wondered in a moment of near-lucidity how many children there found ways to kill themselves when they couldn’t hold a paintbrush steady in primary school and despaired.

  The stars were so beautiful and she couldn’t make them, she didn’t know how.

  Ananda looked at their Muse Greek books. They were illegible to her; this was not a problem. She needed the illustrations. Music wept its inability to express its underlying revelation into her ears, but at least it covered worse noises. Pictures crept along the margins and inset themselves into the paragraphs of the books. Decently-composed, respectably color-corrected photographs illustrated concepts she was not yet able to read about. The Musicians knew what they were doing to the very limits of human technical ability. If she could live through the next few weeks - and she thought she could, if only she could see her wife - then she’d be able to live there. It wouldn’t be lovely. It’d be tolerable.

  They got closer to Satyameva Jayate.

  Dev demanded another hour of quiet to try again. Ananda gave it to him. At least he knew how to start with nothing and end with music; she couldn’t even do that for her dreamed stars.

  Her dreamed fractal jewels fraying light into ideally shattered color.

  Her dreamed clouds of sunrise-pink smoke and flowers.

  Her dreams, her dreams, her dreams.

  Everyone slept more as the infection sank its teeth deeper into them. Parvati slept through checks, seeking infinite infinities and spectacular irrationals that promised to show her their ends; Ananda heard her muttering about them. The missed checks concealed no flaws. How fortunate.

  They made it home.

  * * *

  By the time they got within chatting distance of their planet (had it always been that sick teal color? The desert on the continent Ananda had grown up on looked like a ragged scar - the clouds roiled in logicless eddies -) Hari was dead. He couldn’t get the paintings to come out right. He was convinced he was never going to get the paintings to come out right. If the paintings could not come out right -

  He didn’t leave a note. Everyone knew what it felt like.

  Ananda was in the best shape after Parvati. She still had her eyes and ears. She was alive. She could leave her room - she’d been leaving Dev plates of haphazardly assembled meals at irregular hours, outside his door. She could talk again, if she spoke softly, modulated her voice just so, it was hideous but not enough to make her want to rip out her own throat. (The Musicians had been so polite about their ugly, undecorated visitors and their scratchy despicable excuses for voices. Ananda wished they’d been rude.)

  Parvati called in from orbit. She made their primary report. Ananda didn’t even listen. She was only waiting for one thing.

  Parvati waved her over.

  And there was Tara, blinking at her from the screen.

  There… was…

  It was Tara. Tara, worried, upset, confused.

  There was no deficit in Ananda’s ability to recognize faces, per se. It was Tara.

  Ananda looked at her wife.

  Ananda reached for her eyes.

 

 

  Hannah Blume, Muse

 

 

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