Strictly speaking, Bailey was not even a he. Bailey was a plant, and Barnum thought of him as a male only because the voice in Barnum's headâBailey's only means of communicationâsounded masculine. Bailey had no shape of his own. He existed by containing Barnum and taking on part of his shape. He extended into Barnum's alimentary canal, in the mouth and all the way through to emerge at the anus, threading him like a needle. Together, the team looked like a human in a featureless spacesuit, with a bulbous head, a tight waist, and swollen hips. A ridiculously exaggerated female, if you wish.
“You might as well start breathing again,” Bailey said.
“What for? I will when I need to talk to someone who's not paired with a symb. In the meantime, why bother?”
“I just thought you'd like to get used to it.”
“Oh, very well. If you think it's necessary.”
So Bailey gradually withdrew the parts of him that filled Barnum's lungs and throat, freeing his speech apparatus to do what it hadn't done for over ten years. Barnum coughed as the air flowed into his throat. It was cold! Well, it felt like it, though it was actually at the standard seventy-two degrees. He was unused to it. His diaphragm gave one shudder then took over the chore of breathing as if his medulla had never been disconnected.
“There,” he said aloud, surprised at how his voice sounded. “Satisfied?”
“It never hurts to do a little testing.”
“Let's get this out in the open, shall we? I didn't want to come here any more than you did, but you know we had to. Are you going to give me trouble about it until we leave? We're supposed to be a team, remember?”
There was a sigh from his partner.
“I'm sorry, but that's just it. We
are
supposed to be a team, and out in the Ring we are. Neither of us is anything without the other. Here I'm just something you have to carry around. I can't walk, I can't talk; I'm revealed as the vegetable that I am.”
Barnum was accustomed to the symb's periodic attacks of insecurity. In the Ring they never amounted to much. But when they entered a gravitational field Bailey was reminded of how ineffectual a being he was.
“Here you can breathe on your own,” Bailey went on. “You could see on your own if I uncovered your eyes. By the way, do youâ”
“Don't be silly. Why should I use my own eyes when you can give me a better picture than I could on my own?”
“In the Ring, that's true. But here all my extra senses are just excess mass. What good is an adjusted velocity display to you here, where the farthest thing I can sense is twenty meters off, and stationary?”
“Listen, you. Do you want to turn around and march back out that lock? We can. I'll do it if this is going to be such a trauma for you.”
There was a long silence, and Barnum was flooded with a warm, apologetic sensation that left him weak at his splayed-out knees.
“There's no need to apologize,” he went on in a more sympathetic tone. “I understand you. This is just something we have to do together, like everything else, the good along with the bad.”
“I love you, Barnum.”
“And you, silly.”
Â
The sign on the door read:
Â
TYMPANI & RAGTIME
TINPANALLEYCATS
Â
Barnum and Bailey hesitated outside the door.
“What are you supposed to do, knock?” Barnum asked out loud. “It's been so long I've forgotten how.”
“Just fold your fingers into a fist andâ”
“Not that.” He laughed, dispelling his momentary nervousness. “I've forgotten the politenesses of human society. Well, they do it in all the tapes I ever saw.” He knocked on the door and it opened by itself on the second rap.
There was a man sitting behind a desk with his bare feet propped up on it. Barnum had been prepared for the shock of seeing another human, one who was
not
enclosed in a symb, for he had encountered several of them on the way to the offices of Tympani and Ragtime. But he was still reeling from the unfamiliarity of it. The man seemed to realize it and silently gestured him to a chair. He sat down in it, thinking that in the low gravity it really wasn't necessary. But somehow he was grateful. The man didn't say anything for a long while, giving Barnum time to settle down and arrange his thoughts. Barnum spent the time looking the man over carefully.
Several things were apparent about him; most blatantly, he was not a fashionable man. Shoes had been virtually extinct for over a century for the simple reason that there was nothing to walk on but padded floors. However, current fashion decreed that Shoes Are Worn.
The man was young-looking, having halted his growth at around twenty years. He was dressed in a holo suit, a generated illusion of flowing color that refused to stay in one spot or take on a definite form. Under the suit he might well have been nude, but Barnum couldn't tell.
“You're Barnum and Bailey, right?” the man said.
“Yes. And you're Tympani?”
“Ragtime. Tympani will be here later. I'm pleased to meet you. Have any trouble on the way down? This is your first visit, I think you said.”
“Yes, it is. No trouble. And thank you, incidentally, for the ferry fee.”
He waved it away. “Don't concern yourself. It's all in the overhead. We're taking a chance that you'll be good enough to repay that many times over. We're right enough times that we don't lose money on it. Most of your people out there can't afford being landed on Janus, and then where would we be? We'd have to go out to you. Cheaper this way.”
“I suppose it is.” He was silent again. He noticed that his throat was beginning to get sore with the unaccustomed effort of talking. No sooner had the thought been formed than he felt Bailey go into action. The internal tendril that had been withdrawn flicked up out of his stomach and lubricated his larynx. The pain died away as the nerve endings were suppressed. It's all in your head, anyway, he told himself.
“Who recommended us to you?” Ragtime said.
“Who . . . Oh, it was . . . Who was it, Bailey?” He realized too late that he had spoken it aloud. He hadn't wanted to, he had a vague feeling that it might be impolite to speak to his symb that way. Ragtime wouldn't hear the answer, of course.
“It was Antigone,” Bailey supplied.
“Thanks,” Barnum said, silently this time. “A man named Antigone,” he told Ragtime.
The man made a note of that, and looked up again, smiling.
“Well now. What is it you wanted to show us?”
Barnum was about to describe their work to Ragtime when the door burst open and a woman sailed in. She sailed in the literal sense, banking off the door-jamb, grabbing at the door with her left ped and slamming it shut in one smooth motion, then spinning in the air to kiss the floor with the tips of her fingers, using them to slow her speed until she was stopped in front of the desk, leaning over it and talking excitedly to Ragtime. Barnum was surprised that she had peds instead of feet; he had thought that no one used them in Pearly Gates. They made walking awkward. But she didn't seem interested in walking.
“Wait till you hear what Myers has done now!” she said, almost levitating in her enthusiasm. Her ped-fingers worked in the carpet as she talked. “He realigned the sensors in the right anterior ganglia, and you won't believe what it does to theâ”
“We have a client, Tympani.”
She turned and saw the symb-human pair sitting behind her. She put her hand to her mouth as if to hush herself, but she was smiling behind it. She moved over to them (it couldn't be called walking in the low gravity; she seemed to accomplish it by perching on two fingers of each of her peds and walking on them, which made it look like she was floating). She reached them and extended her hand.
She was wearing a holo suit like Ragtime's but instead of wearing the projector around her waist, as he did, she had it mounted on a ring. When she extended her hand, the holo generator had to compensate by weaving larger and thinner webs of light around her body. It looked like an explosion of pastels, and left her body barely covered. What Barnum saw could have been a girl of sixteen: lanky, thin hips and breasts, and two blonde braids that reached to her waist. But her movements belied that. There was no adolescent awkwardness there.
“I'm Tympani,” she said, taking his hand. Bailey was taken by surprise and didn't know whether to bare his hand or not. So what she grasped was Barnum's hand covered by the three-centimeter padding of Bailey. She didn't seem to mind.
“You must be Barnum and Bailey. Do you know who the original Barnum and Bailey were?”
“Yes, they're the people who built your big calliope outside.”
She laughed. “The place
is
a kind of a circus, until you get used to it. Rag tells me you have something to sell us.”
“I hope so.”
“You've come to the right place. Rag's the business side of the company; I'm the talent. So I'm the one you'll be selling to. I don't suppose you have anything written down?”
He made a wry face, then remembered she couldn't see anything but a blank stretch of green with a hole for his mouth. It took some time to get used to dealing with people again.
“I don't even know how to read music.”
She sighed, but didn't seem unhappy. “I figured as much. So few of you Ringers do. Honestly, if I could ever figure out what it is that turns you people into artists I could get rich.”
“The only way to do that is to go out in the Ring and see for yourself.”
“Right,” she said, a little embarrassed. She looked away from the misshapen thing sitting in the chair. The only way to discover the magic of a life in the Ring was to go out there, and the only way to do that was to adopt a symb. Forever give up your individuality and become a part of a team. Not many people could do that.
“We might as well get started,” she said, standing and patting her thighs to cover her nervousness. “The practice room is through that door.”
He followed her into a dimly lit room that seemed to be half-buried in paper. He hadn't realized that any business could require so much paper. Their policy seemed to be to stack it up and when the stack go too high and tumbled into a landslide, to kick it back into a corner. Sheets of music crunched under his peds as he followed her to the corner of the room where the synthesizer keyboard stood beneath a lamp. The rest of the room was in shadows, but the keys gleamed brightly in their ancient array of black and white.
Tympani took off her ring and sat at the keyboard. “The damn holo gets in my way,” she explained. “I can't see the keys.” Barnum noticed for the first time that there was another keyboard on the floor, down in the shadows, and her peds were poised over it. He wondered if that was the only reason she wore them. Having seen her walk, he doubted it.
She sat still for a moment, then looked over to him expectantly.
“Tell me about it,” she said in a whisper.
He didn't know what to say.
“Tell you about it? Just tell you?”
She laughed and relaxed again, hands in her lap.
“I was kidding. But we have to get the music out of your head and onto that tape some way. How would you prefer? I heard that a Beethoven symphony was once written out in English, each chord and run described in detail. I can't imagine why anyone would
want
to, but someone did. It made quite a thick book. We can do it that way. Or surely you can think of another.” He was silent. Until she sat at the keyboard, he hadn't really thought about that part of it. He knew his music, knew it to the last hemi-semi-demi-quaver. How to get it out?
“What's the first note?” she prompted.
He was ashamed again. “I don't even know the names of the notes,” he confessed.
She was not surprised. “Sing it.”
“I . . . I've never tried to sing it.”
“Try now.” She sat up straight, looking at him with a friendly smile, not coaxing, but encouraging.
“I can hear it,” he said, desperately. “Every note, every dissonanceâis that the right word?”
She grinned. “It's
a
right word, but I don't know if you know what it means. It's the quality of sound produced when the vibrations don't mesh harmoniously:
dis
-chord, it doesn't produce a sonically pleasing chord. Like this,” and she pressed two keys close together, tried several others, then played with the knobs mounted over the keyboard until the two notes were only a few vibrations apart and wavered sinuously. “They don't automatically please the ear, but in the right context they can make you sit up and take notice. Is your music discordant?”
“Some places. Is that bad?”
“Not at all. Used right, it's . . . well, not pleasing exactly . . .” She spread her arms helplessly. “Talking about music is a pretty frustrating business, at best. Singing's much friendlier. Are you going to sing for me, love, or must I try to wade through your descriptions?”
Hesitantly, he sang the first three notes of his piece, knowing that they sounded nothing like the orchestra that crashed through his head, but desperate to try something. She took it up, playing the three unmodulated tones on the synthesizer: three pure sounds that were pretty, but lifeless and light-years away from what he wanted.
“No, no, it has to be richer.”
“All right, I'll play what I think of as richer, and we'll see if we speak the same language.” She turned some knobs and played the three notes again, this time giving them the modulations of a string bass.
“That's closer. But it's still not there.”