Falling Free

speeding land rover. Five minutes later the vehicle braked to a halt beside the shuttle’s forward hatchway. The figure under the dusty bubble canopy paused to adjust a breath mask, then the bubble swung up and the side ramp swung down.

Dr. Minchenko adjusted his own breath mask firmly over his nose and, followed by Ti, rushed down the shuttle stairs to assist the frail, silver-haired woman who was struggling with an assortment of odd-shaped packages. She gave them all up to the men with evident gladness but for a thick black case shaped rather like a spoon which she clutched to her bosom in much the same way, Silver thought, as Claire clutched Andy. Dr. Minchenko shepherded his lady anxiously upward toward the airlock—her knees moved stiffly, on the stairs—and through, where they could at last pull down their masks and speak clearly.

“Are you all right, Warren?” Madame Minchenko asked.

“Perfectly,” he assured her. “I could bring almost nothing—I scarcely knew what to choose.”

“Think of the vast amounts of money we shall save on shipping charges, then.”

Silver was fascinated by the way gravity gave form to Madame Minchenko’s dress. It was a warm, dark fabric with a silver belt at the waist, and hung in soft folds about her booted ankles. The skirt swirled as Madame Minchenko stepped, echoing her agitation. “It’s utter madness. We’re too old to become refugees. I had to leave my harpsichord!”

Dr. Minchenko patted her sympathetically on the shoulder. “It wouldn’t work in free fall anyway. The little pluckers fall back into place by gravity.” His voice cracked with urgency, “But they’re trying to kill my quaddies, Ivy!”

“Yes, yes, I understand…” Madame Minchenko twitched a somewhat strained and absent smile at Silver, who hung one-handed from a strap listening. “You must be Silver?”

“Yes, Madame Minchenko,” said Silver breathlessly in her most-politest voice. This woman was quite the most aged downsider Silver had ever seen, bar Dr. Minchenko and Dr. Cay himself.

“We must go now, to get Tony,” Dr. Minchenko said. “We’ll be back as quick as we can drive. Silver will help you, she’s very good. Hold the ship!”

The two men hustled back out, and within moments the land rover was boiling off across the barren landscape.

Silver and Madame Minchenko were left regarding each other.

“Well,” said Madame Minchenko.

“I’m sorry you had to leave all your things, “ said Silver diffidently.

“H’m. Well, I can’t say I’m sorry to be leaving here.” Madame Minchenko’s glance around the shuttle’s cargo bay took in Rodeo by implication.

They shuffled forward to the pilot’s compartment and sat; the monitor scanned the monotonous horizon. Madame Minchenko still clutched her giant spoon suitcase in her lap. Silver hitched herself around in her wrong- shaped seat and tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to someone for more than twice the length of her own life. Had Madame Minchenko been young once? Surely Dr. Minchenko had been old forever.

“However did you come to be married to Dr. Minchenko?” Silver asked.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Madame Minchenko murmured dryly, half to herself.

“Were you a nurse, or a lab tech?”

She looked up with a little smile. “No, dear, I was never a bioscientist. Thank God.” Her hand caressed the black case. “I’m a musician. Of sorts.”

Silver perked with interest. “Synthavids? Do you program? We’ve had some synthavids in our library, the company library that is.”

The corner of Madame Minchenko’s mouth twisted up in a half-smile. “There’s nothing synthetic in what I do. I’m a registered historian-performer. I keep old skills alive—think of me as a live museum exhibit, somewhat in need of dusting—only a few spider webs clinging to my elbow.…” She unlatched her case and opened it to Silver’s inspection. Burnished reddish wood, satin-smooth, caught and played back the colored lights of the pilot’s compartment. Madame Minchenko lifted the instrument and tucked it under her chin. “It’s a violin.”

“I’ve seen pictures of them,” Silver offered. “Is it real?”

Madame Minchenko smiled, and drew her bow across the strings in a quick succession of notes. The music ran up and down like—like quaddie children in the gym, was the only simile Silver could think of. The volume was astounding.

“Where do those wires on top attach to the speakers?” Silver inquired, pushing up on her lower hands and craning her neck.

“There are no speakers. The sound all comes from the wood.”

“But it filled the compartment!”

Madame Minchenko’s smile became almost fierce. “This instrument could fill an entire concert hall.”

“Do you… play concerts?”

“Once, when I was very young—your age, maybe… I went to a school that taught such skills. The only school for music on my planet. A colonial world, you see, not much time for the arts. There was a competition—the winner was to travel to Earth, and have a recording career. Which he subsequently did. But the recording company underwriting the affair was only interested in the very best. I came in second. There is room for so very few…” her voice faded in a sigh. “I was left with a pleasing personal accomplishment that no one wanted to listen to. Not when they had only to plug in a disc to hear not just the best from my world, but the best in the galaxy. Fortunately, I met Warren about then. My permanent patron and audience of one. Probably as well I wasn’t trying to make a career of it, we moved so often in those days, when he was finishing school and starting work with GalacTech. I’ve done some teaching here and there, to interested antiquarians…” She tilted her head at Silver. “And did they teach you any music, with all the things they’ve been teaching you up on that satellite?”

“We learned some songs when we were little,” said Silver shyly. “And then there were the flute-toots. But they didn’t last long.”

“Flute-toots?”

“Little plastic things you blew in. They were real. One of the creche-mothers brought them up when I was about, oh, eight. But then they sort of got all over the place, and people were complaining about the, um, tooting. So she had to take them all back.”

“I see. Warren never mentioned the flute-toots.”

“Oh.”

Madame Minchenko’s eyebrows quirked. “Ah… what sort of songs?”

“Oh…” Silver drew breath, and sang, “Roy G. Biv, Roy G. Biv, he’s the color quaddie that the spectrum gives; Red-orange-yellow, green and blue, indigo, violet, all for you—” she broke off, flushing. Her voice sounded so wavery and weak, compared to that astonishing violin.

“I see,” said Madame Minchenko in a strangely choked voice. Her eyes danced, though, so Silver didn’t think she was offended. “Oh, Warren,” she sighed, “the things you have to answer for…”

“May I,” Silver began, and stopped. Surely she would not be permitted to touch that lavish antique. What if she forgot to hold onto it for a moment and the gravity pulled it from her hands?

“Try it?” Madame Minchenko finished her thought. “Why not? We appear to have a little time to kill, here.”

“I’m afraid—”

“Tut. Oh, I used to protect this one. It sat unplayed for years, locked up in climate-controlled vaults… dead. Then of late I began to wonder what I was saving it for. Here, now. Raise your chin, so; tuck, so,” Madame Minchenko curled Silver’s fingers around the violin’s neck. “What nice long fingers you have, dear. And, er… what a lot of them. I wonder…”

“What?” asked Silver as Madame Minchenko trailed off.

“Hm? Oh. I was just having a mental picture of a quaddie in free fall with a twelve-string guitar. If you weren’t squashed into a chair as you are now you could bring that lower hand up…”

It was a trick of the light, perhaps, of Rodeo’s westering sun sinking toward the sawtoothed horizon and sending its red beams through the cabin windows, but Madame Minchenko’s eyes seemed to gleam. “Now arch your fingers, so…”

Fire.