Aurora in Four Voices

Part II: Dream Debt

Jato lay in bed, unable to sleep. He had dimmed the lights until only faint images of sand-swept fields softened the walls, holoart he had created himself, memories of his home.

Even after eight years, he still found this room remarkable. He had grown up in a two-room dustshack his family shared with two other families. Here he had, all to himself, a bed with a quilt, a circular bureau, a mirror, a bathroom, and soft rugs for the floor. The Dreamers charged no rent and gave him a living stipend. His medical care was free, including the light panels and vitamin supplements his sun-starved body craved.

Tonight the room felt emptier than usual. He gave up trying to sleep and went to the bureau, a round piece of furniture that rotated. He removed his statue from the top drawer. He had come to Ansatz hoping for a miracle, to trade for a fabulous treasure. He had his own dreams then, ones he hoped to achieve by selling such a masterpiece: a farm of his own, a business, a better home for his family, well-deserved retirement for his parents, a wife and children for himself. A life.

He had never intended to make art. Still, living in Nightingale, how could a person deny the pull to create? The statue had taken years to finish and he kept it hidden now, knowing how lacking the Dreamers would find his attempts. He liked it, though.

To get the stone he wanted, he had climbed down windscoured cliffs below Nightingale, into crevices lost in the night-dark shadows. There he cut a chunk of black marble no human hand had ever before touched. Back in his rooms, he fashioned it into a bird with its wings spread wide, taloned feet beneath its body, supported by a stand carved from the same stone. Next he made clay copies of it. He spent several years cutting facets into the copies, redoing them until he was satisfied. Then he carved the facets into the statue and inlaid them with crystalline glitter.

Dreamers used elegant mathematical theories to design their creations. Jato knew his was simple in comparison. The geometry of the facets specified a fugue in four voices, each voice an aspect of his life: loss, of his home and life on Sandstorm; beauty, as in the stark glory of Nightingale; loneliness, his only companion here; and the dawn, which he would never again see.

Holding the statue, he lay down in bed and fell asleep.

The bird sang a miraculous fugue, creating all four voices at once. Jato held it as he ran through Nightingale. The pursuing Mandelbrot drone gained ground, until finally it whirred around in front of him. Fractals swirled off its surface and turned into braided steel coils. They wrapped around his body, crushing his chest and arms, silencing the bird. He reeled under the icy stars and fell across the first step of the SquareCase.

He wrestled with the coils until he worked his arms free, easing the pressure on the bird. It sang again and its voice rose to the stars on wings of hope.

The fractal coils fell away from his body. As Jato stood up, the spacer appeared, walking out of the shadows that cloaked the SquareCase. She toed aside the coils and they melted, their infinitely repeating patterns blurred into pools of glimmering silver. The bird continued to sing, its fugue curling around them in a mist of notes.

The spacer stopped only a pace away. Her eyes were a deep green, dappled like a forest, huge and dark. She brushed her fingers across his lips. Jato put his hand on her back, applying just enough to pressure to make the decision hers; stay where she was, or step forward and bring her body against his.

She stepped forward…

The Whisper Inn was a round building, graceful in the night. Holding his bundle, Jato stood at its door, an arched portal bordered by glimmering metal tiles.

"Open," he said.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. "Open."

Swirling lines and speckles appeared on the door and a holo formed, an amber rod hanging in front of the door. A curve appeared by the rod and rotated around it, sweeping out a shape. When it finished, a vase hung in the air with the rod piercing its center. Soothing pastel patterns swirled on the image.

"Solid of revolution complete," the door said. "Commence integration."

"What?" Jato asked. No door had ever asked him to "commence integration" before.

"Shall I produce a different solid?" it asked.

"I want you to open."

Silver and black swirls suffused the vase. "You must calculate the volume of the solid."

"How?"

"Set up integral. Choose limits. Integrate. Computer assistance will be required."

"I have no idea how to do that."

"Then I cannot unlock."

Jato scratched his chin. "I know the volume of a box."

The vase faded and a box appeared. "Commence integration."

"Its volume is width times height times length."

Box and rod disappeared.

"Open," Jato said.

Still no response.

Jato wondered if the Innkeeper had his door vex all visitors this way. Then again, Dreamers would probably enjoy the game.

"Jato?" the door asked.

"Yes?"

"Don’t you want to enter?"

He made an exasperated noise. "Why else would I say ‘Open’?"

Box and rod reappeared. "Commence integration."

"I already did that."

"I seem to be caught in a loop," the door admitted.

Jato smiled. "Are you running a new program?"

"Yes. Apparently it needs more work." The door slid open. "Please enter."

Muted light from laser murals lit the lobby. As the floor registered his weight, soft bells chimed. Fragrances wafted in the air, turning sharp and then sweet in periodic waves.

The Innkeeper’s counter consisted of three concentric cylinders about waist height, all made from jade built atom-by-atom by molecular assemblers, as were most precious minerals used in Nightingale’s construction. The Innkeeper sat at a circular table inside the cylinders, reading a book.

Jato went to the counter. "I’d like to see one of your customers." He knew the spacer had to be here; this inn was the only establishment in Nightingale that would lodge sun-dwellers.

The Innkeeper continued to read.

"Hey," Jato said.

The Dreamer kept reading.

Jato scowled, then clambered over the cylinders. "The offworld woman. I need her room number."

The Innkeeper rubbed an edge of his book and the holos above it shifted to show dancers twirling to a Strauss waltz.

Jato pulled the book out of his hand. "Come on."

The Innkeeper took back his book without even looking up. A whirring started up behind Jato, and a Mandelbrot globe bumped his arm.

"I owe her," Jato said. "She gave me a dream."

That caught the Dreamer’s attention. He looked up, his translucent eyebrows arching in his translucent face. "You come with Dream payment?" He laughed. "You?"

Jato tried not to grit his teeth. "You know payment has to be offered."

"She is in Number Four," he said.

Jato hadn’t actually expected a reply. Apparently the unwritten laws of dream debt overrode even the Innkeeper’s distaste for talking to large, non-translucent people.

Old-fashioned stairs led to the upper levels. As Jato climbed, holoart came on, suffusing the walls with color. He glanced back to see the holos fade until only sparks of light danced in the air, mimicking the traces left by particles in an ancient bubble chamber.

No one answered when he knocked at Number Four. He tried again, but still no answer.

As he started to leave, a click sounded behind him. He turned back to see the spacer in the doorway, light from behind her sparkling on the gold tips of her tousled hair. She wore grey knee-boots and a soft blue jumpsuit that accented her curves. The only decorations on her jumpsuit were two gold rings around each of her upper arms. A tube trimmed each of her boots, running from the heel to the top edge of the boot, an odd style, but attractive.

"Yes?" she asked.

Jato swallowed, wondering if he had just set himself up for a rebuff. He tried to think of a clever opening that would put her at ease, perhaps intrigue or even charm her. What he ended up with was the scintillating, "I came to see you."

Incredibly, she stepped aside. "Come in."

Her room was pleasant, with gold curtains on the windows and a pretty rumpled bed that looked as if she had been sleeping in it.

Jato hesitated. "Did I wake you? I can come back later."

"No. Now is good." She motioned him to a small table gleaming with metal accents. Its fluted pedestal supported two disks, the upper joined to the lower along a slit that ran from its center to its rim, a style common in Nightingale. The only explanation Jato had ever extracted from a Dreamer was, "Riemann sheets." He had looked it up at the library and found an opaque treatise on complex variable theory that apparently described how the sheets made a multi-valued expression into a mathematical function.

After they sat down, he set his bundle in front of her and spoke the formal phrases. "You gave me a dream. I offer you my work in return."

She watched his face. "I don’t understand."

"A beautiful dream." He wondered if he sounded as awkward as he felt. "This is what I have to trade." Pulling away the wrapping, he showed her the bird. Giving it up was even harder than he had expected. But it was a matter of honor: he had a debt and this was the only payment he had to give.

As she sat there staring at his life’s creation, his face grew hot. He knew the wonders she had seen in Nightingale. The bird was pitiful in comparison.

"It makes music," he said. "I mean, it doesn’t make the music but it tells you how to make it."

She looked up at him. "Jato, I can’t accept this." An odd expression crossed her face, come and gone too fast to decipher. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was awe. Then she said, "Regulations don’t allow me to accept presents."

Through the sting of her refusal, he realized what she had said. "How did you know my name is Jato?"

"After we talked, I looked up your Ansatz records."

He stared at her. Those records were sealed. That was the deal; as long as he did what Crankenshaft wanted, his records remained secret and he had his relative freedom on Ansatz.

Somehow he kept his voice even. "How?"

"I asked," she said. "The authorities had to let me."

Like hell. They were supposed to say No. Had his presence become so offensive that they decided to get rid of him despite Crankenshaft? Or maybe Crankenshaft no longer needed him.

Then it hit Jato, what else she had said. Regulations didn’t allow her to accept gifts. Regulations.

Of course. He should have recognized it earlier. The gold bands on her jumpsuit were no decorations. They denoted rank.

"You’re an ISC soldier," he said.

She nodded. "An Imperial Messenger. Secondary Class."

Jato stared at her. Secondary was equivalent in rank to colonel and "Messenger" was a euphemism for intelligence officer. He had almost asked a high-ranking spy-buster to smuggle him off Ansatz.

ISC, or Imperial Space Command, was the sole defense in known space against the Traders, whose military made a practice of "inviting" the settled worlds to join their growing domain. All settled worlds. Whether they wanted to join or not. The Traders based their economy on what they called "a benevolent exchange of work contracts designed to benefit both workers and the governing fellowships that hold their labor contracts," one of the more creative, albeit frightening, euphemisms Jato had heard for slavery. The Imperialate had formed in response, an attempt by the free worlds to remain that way. That was why so many colonies, including Ansatz, had joined the Imperialate despite the loss of autonomy that came with ISC’s autocratic control.

He spoke with a calm he didn’t feel. "Are you going to turn me over to ISC?"

"Well, no," she said. "I just wondered about you after you followed me up those strange stairs."

Relief swept over him, followed by distrust, then resentment, then embarrassment. One of his few comforts on Ansatz had been his pleasure in creating the bird. Now every time he looked at it he would remember how she rejected it.

As he rose to his feet, an emotion leapt across her face. Regret? It was mixed with other things, shyness maybe, even a fear of rejection. It went by too fast for him to be sure.

She stood up. "May I request an alternate gift? Something that wouldn’t violate regulations?"

He had no alternate gifts. "What do you mean?"

"I’d like to see Nightingale." She hesitated. "Perhaps you would show it to me?"

She wanted a guide? True, he was the best candidate; the Dreamers would never deign to offer such services. But most people would prefer no guide at all to a convicted murderer.

Of course his records said he was "cured." Besides, rumor claimed Messengers had enhanced speed and strength. Perhaps she was confident enough in her abilities that she didn’t see him as a threat.

"All right," he said.

"Well. Good." It came again, her beguiling flash of shyness. "Shall we, uh, go?"

He smiled. "It would help if I had a name to call you."

"Oh. Yes. Of course." She actually reddened. "Soz."

"Soz." He gave her a bow from the waist. "My pleasure at your acquaintance."

Her face softened into a smile. "And mine at yours."

They walked down to the lobby in awkward silence. Outside, they strolled through the Inn’s rock garden, where tall lamps made shadows stretch out from human-sized mineral formations. The arrangement of rocks looked random, but it had an underlying order calculated from chaos theory.

As they followed a path toward the city proper, Jato tried to relax. Conversation had always been his stumbling block. In his adolescence, he had discussed it with is father while they were weeding a field.

"About girls," he had said.

"What about them?" his father asked.

"You know."

His father sat back on his heels. "Treat her right and she’ll treat you right."

"Can’t talk."

"Then listen."

"Don’t know what ‘treat her right’ means."

"The way you want to be treated."

Jato thought of having a girl treat him the way he wanted to be treated. "What if we get into trouble?"

His father scowled. "Don’t."

He had figured that his father, who became his father only a few tendays after he married Jato’s pregnant mother, would have had a more informative answer than that. "What if it happens anyway?"

"You see that it doesn’t." He pointed his trowel at Jato. "You go planting crops, boy, you better be ready to take responsibility if they grow." Lowering his arm, he looked across the field to where Jato’s mother was curing tubes by the water shack, her long hair brushing her arms, Jato’s five younger siblings helping her or playing in the dust. "Choose a place you value." His voice softened. "A place you can love."

Jato watched him closely. "Did you?"

He turned back, his face gentle now. "That I did."

That was the extent of his father’s advice on women, sex and love, but it had held up well over the years. On Nightingale, however, he barely ever had the chance to talk to a woman, let alone go walking with one. So being with Soz felt odd.

Eventually the path became a boulevard. They ended up at a plaza in front of Symphony Hall, near the tiled pool. A lamp came on, bathing the pool in rosy light, and a fountain shot out of the water in a rounded arch. A gold lamp switched on, followed by a fountain with two arches, then a green lamp and three arches, and so on, each fountain adding smaller refinements to the overall effect. Altogether, they combined to create a huge blurred square. Sparkles of water flew around Jato and Soz and mist blew in their faces.

"It’s lovely," Soz said.

Jato watched her, charmed by the way the rainbow-tinged mist haloed her head, giving her pretty face an ethereal aspect. She looked like a watercolor painting in luminous colors. "It’s called the FourierFount," he said.

She smiled. "You mean like a Fourier series?"

"That’s right." He restrained himself from blurting out how much he liked her smile. "The water arches can’t combine like true wave harmonics, but the overall effect works pretty well."

"It’s unique." She glanced down at his hands. "Jato, look. Your bird."

He held up the statue and saw what she meant. Light from the fountain was reflecting off the glitter so that it surrounded the statue with a nimbus of rainbows.

She held out her hands. "May I?" He handed it to her, and she turned it this way and that, watching the shimmer of light on its facets. "What did you mean, that it makes music?"

"The angle of each facet defines a note." He wondered if he even had the words to explain. Before composing the fugue, he had tried to learn music theory, but in the end he just settled for what sounded right. He played no instruments, nor could he make notes in his mind without hearing them first. He needed a computer to play his creation. The Dreamers steadfastly ignored his requests for web training, so he muddled through on his own, eventually learning enough to use one particular console in the library.

"Could I hear the music?" Soz asked.

Her request touched off an unexpected spark of panic. What if she scorned what she heard, the musical self-portrait he had so painstakingly crafted? "I can’t play it," he said. "It needs four spherical-harmonic harps."

"We can have a web console do it."

He almost said no. But he owed her for the dream and playing the fugue would pay his debt. Going on a walk through Nightingale didn’t count; dream debt required a work of art created by the debtor.

Still he hesitated. "It’s a long way to the console I use."

She motioned at Symphony Hall. "That building must have public consoles."

He could imagine what she would think of a grown man who could barely log into the web of a city where he had lived for years. He paused for a long time before he finally said, "Can’t use them."

"It has no console room?"

"It has one."

"Can’t you link to your personal console from here?"

His shoulders were so tense, he felt his sweater pulled tight across them. "No personal console."

She blinked. "You don’t have a personal console?"

"No."

"Where do you work?"

"Library."

"We can probably link into the library system from here." She watched his face as if trying to decipher his mood. "I can set it up for you."

So. He had run out of excuses. After another of their awkward pauses, he said, "All right."

He took her to an alcove in Symphony Hall. Blue light filled the room and blue rugs carpeted the floor. The sculpted white shapes of the public consoles made a pleasing design around the perimeter of the room.

Soz sat on a cushioned stool in front of the nearest console. "Open guest account."

When a wash of blue appeared the screen, Jato almost laughed. Only Dreamers would color-coordinate a room’s decor with its web console.

"Welcome to Nightingale," the console said. "What can I do for you?"

"Library access," she said. "Establish a root directory here, standard branch structure and holographics, maximum allowed memory, full paths to available public nodes, and all allowed anonymous transferral options."

"Specify preferred nodes," the console said.

"One to produce a music simulation, given a representation of the score and a mapping algorithm."

A new voice spoke in mellow tones. "Treble here. Please position score and define algorithm."

Soz glanced at Jato. "You can take it from here."

He just looked at her. It had sounded like she was speaking another language. He hadn’t even known the computers she spoke to existed. "Take it where?"

She stood up and moved aside. "Tell Treble how to access your files."

"I don’t have an account."

"Everyone has an account."

He had to make a conscious effort to keep from gritting his teeth. "I guess I’m no one."

Soz winced. "I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way." She started to say more, then stopped. Glancing around the alcove, she said, "This room must be easy to monitor."

"Probably." Did she think the Dreamers were watching them? "The drones keep track of me."

She nodded. Any questions or comments she had intended to make about his lack of computer accounts remained unsaid. Instead she indicated a horizontal screen on the console. "If you put the statue there and give Treble the mapping for the fugue, it will make a hologram of the bird, digitize it, transform the map, and apply the transform to the digitized data."

Jato wished he were somewhere else. This was worse than the business with the door at the Inn. At least then he had been revealing his ignorance to an inanimate object. "I’ve no idea what you just said."

Incredibly, she flushed, as if she were the one making an idiot out of herself rather than him. "Jato, I’m terrible at this. Ask me to calculate engine efficiency, plot a course, plan strategy-I’m a whiz, like you with your art. Put me in front of a handsome man and I’m as clumsy with words as a pole in a pot."

He stared at her. A whiz… like you with your art. She thought he was a "whiz." A handsome whiz, at that.

Jato smiled. "You’re fine." He motioned at the console. "So I put the statue there?"

Her face relaxed. "That’s right. Then tell Treble how to figure out the notes."

He set down the bird, and two laser beams played over it, making the glitter sparkle. When they stopped, he said, "Treble?"

"Attending," the console answered.

"The angle a facet makes with the base of the bird specifies a note. It varies linearly: facets parallel to the base are three octaves below middle C and those perpendicular are three octaves above." He touched the statue, his fingertips on its wings. "Each plane parallel to the base defines a chord and each facet touching the plane is a note in that chord. To play the fugue, start at the bottom and move to the top."

"Is height a discrete or continuous variable?"

"Continuous." Only a computer could do it. Human musicians would have to take planes at discrete heights. If the intervals between the planes were small enough, the human version approached the computer version. But the fugue only truly became what he intended when the distance between planes was so small that for all practical purposes it went to zero.

"Facets with one ridge are played by a spherical-harmonic baritone harp," he said. "Two ridges is tenor, three alto, and four soprano. Loudness is linear with glitter thickness, from pianissimo to fortissimo. Tempo is linear with the frequency of the light corresponding to the glitter color." He tapped a beat on the console. "Red." He increased the tempo. "Violet."

"Data entered," Treble said. "Any other specifications?"

"No." Then, realizing he would have to see Soz’s reaction to the music, Jato said, "Yes. Lower the room lights to fifteen percent."

The lights dimmed, leaving them in dusky blue shadows. It was too dark to see Soz’s face clearly.

A deep note sounded, the rumbling of a baritone harp. After several measures of baritone playing alone, tenor joined in with the same melody, mellow and smooth. Alto came next and soprano last, as sweet as the dawn.

Treble shaped the music far more tenderly than the generic program he used in the library. Yes, that was it, the minor key there, that progression, that arpeggio. Treble had it right. At the bird’s arching neck, soprano soared into a shimmering coloratura. Notes flowed over them, radiant and painful, too bright to endure for long. The other harps came in like an undertow, pulling soprano beneath their deeper melodies. At the head of the bird, soprano burst free again, a fountain of sound.

Yes. Treble had it. Treble knew.

Gradually the music slowed, sliding over the outstretched wings above the bird. Finally only baritone rumbled in the glimmering wake of soprano’s fading glory. The last notes vibrated in the alcove and died.

Jato stood frozen, afraid to move lest it rouse Soz to reveal her reaction. Yet the silence was also unbearable. What did she think? That was him in that music, the vulnerable part, without barriers or protections.

Her head was turned toward the console, so he saw only her profile. A glimmer showed on her cheek. Something was sliding down her face.

He touched the tear. "Why are you crying?"

"It’s so beautiful." She looked up at him. "So utterly sad and utterly beautiful."

Beautiful. She thought his music was beautiful. He tried to answer, make a joke or something, but nothing came out. So he drew her into his arms and laid his cheek on top her head.

She didn’t pull away. Instead she put her arms around his waist and held him. The fresh scent of her newly washed hair wafted around him. Softly she said, "What place do you like best in Nightingale?"

"The Promenade."

"Will you take me there?"

He swallowed. "Yes."