You ever ride the bus as a kid? Remember that first time when you were alone, momma couldn't come or something? That ride's fuckin' scary, you're all alone and don't have a clue what you're supposed to do, but the moment you get on the return trip it ain't even a thing. The shuttle hop back from Rigleth Anum was a little like that, 'cept the weirdos were bug-faced aliens from Tau Ceti. Well, actually they were mostly Formolai, since we were all riding from Rig-A to Exchange Five-Seven-One. If you never seen Forms, think about being on that bus with a whole lotta shy five-foot anteater-lizards.
Though if you know anything about 'em, you know they ain't really shy. They've got this stuff, electro-something, shit's like what sharks have, right? Except it's super strong and doesn't reach very far. So if one of them gets too close to a body, they feel all their nerves and shit going off. That's why they always do that thing where they act like the loser at a club, except that for them it's like
not staring at you for creepy-long times from across the room.
Anyway, thing was, the shuttle was a dirt-old Kellerite heap of shit, the operator was the fiftieth owner or something, so you had twenty-odd Forms all trying to keep their two meter personal space clear, when we've got forty seats in a seven-by-four meter box. I'm just getting my groove on with some old school shit, all the pieces going along loud as hell, when I get a tap on my shoulder. This Form, big brass pair, right? Got close enough to
touch me without getting the willies, and he's staring at my audio plugs with his ears cocked forward like a dog. Turns out, he could hear well enough to catch the tail end of Neilsen's Fifth.
Now, I ain't got a word of any of the Form languages, but that's no trouble-he didn't have a lick of English or Mandarin either, but the translator cut in right as the last refrain died. Nice model, too, barely any stuttering and the grammar was damn close. Lil' guy wanted to know what it was. This was the first of this I'd heard, the first time
any of old Earth's daughters or sons found out, so far as I know. The Forms, they're different in a lotta ways, but sometimes they're just right on galactic average. Like with music.
See, that's what happens when you evolve on a nice, lazy garden world, you don't have to worry about much, so you never need to pull together. You just cruise along doing your thing, not bothering much 'cept when you want something from someone. Leastwise, that's what the bio-geeks say. I mean, they have music and shit, it's just all like that old folky stuff where you got someone with a guitar or shit maybe singing along to their playing, sometimes with the crowd doing whatever amounts to clapping along. Bands? They ain't got 'em. You start talking about an honest orchestra, and lord, their eyes bug right out-when they got eyes, anyways.
As I was saying, this Form wants to know what I was listening to, so I tell him. I mean, I didn't rattle off the name of the symphony or the group playing it, I just said it was orchestral. He sits there for a second or two, his head quivering a little, then admits that his translator didn't have that word. So I went simpler, told him that it was a bunch of people all playing at the same time, and he really freaks. The guy got the concept side of it, just didn't understand the practice-I quote, “How do they prevent discord generation? Absolutely improbable for so many sophonts to happen to overlap neatly for so long.”
That's the moment where I got where he was coming from. The hangup wasn't that he didn't get the idea of a bunch of people all playing at once, but that they'd do so as a
group instead of sawing away at a hundred different tunes. Turns out he thought at first that it was just a really loud recording of four or five bards in the same room. Once I got the point across, I swear, that Form looked like he was about to drool on my damn lap. Never heard of an orchestra, never even seen two or three folks play together-the hell do you say to something like that?
I'll tell you what, you offer to pull up another one, this time with video. So I popped the screen up and flicked my datstick to some old footage, a
real famous performance, and held it out so's he could tap his own audio plugs into the feed-and talk about guts, he had some shit that cut through my security, didn't even wait for me to unlock the signal. I can't say I've ever seen an alien orgasm in public, but that poor boy came close.
I get where he was coming from, too. You live your whole life, your entire history, nothing but single artists doing what they could on their own, then you see ten thousand people singing and playing one of the finest tunes anyone ever put to paper? Shit'd be like living your whole life on brown rice and lukewarm water, then someone comes along and hands you a big ol' slab of chocolate and a bottle of French red.
He didn't say nothing for a while, just breathed in and out. I can't really be sure, but if he'd been human I'd say it was his voice cracking as he asked my name. I gave it, asked his-the translator spat out one of those crappy equivalencies, [Crux of Springtime Vigor]. Forms aren't much for touching strangers, remember, but honest truth, he knew a bit about xenos body language and offered a handshake, ears and nose fluttering. Shit's like kissing a stranger with tongue while sobbing for Forms, except less messy. Next question was whether he could buy a copy of the recording.
Lemme lay this out first. I was on that shuttle 'cause I was coming back from Rig-A on business for Samsung. They were looking to get a deal on a license and tooling to make holo-tanks, enter the market early, since Sony was still fucking around trying to make 'em from scratch. I got paid five figures to ride a space-bus there and back with the hard copy of the contract.
I
was gonna give Crux the song and footage gratis-shit's just a copy of a copy, so who cares? He jumps in before I can get a word out and offers up a deed to some building, fuck me if I knew where. Whatever, he's falling over himself, ain't no skin off my nose, he just asked for another arrangement as part of the deal. Started out all complex alien business doublespeak, we talked around in circles until I figured out that he just wanted exclusivity and more business. Basically I didn't sell or give anything like that to any other non-humans and we set up a meet for me to bring a proper archive of “throng-song gatherings”.
That's when he quoted the per-song fee and the bonus for visual footage to go with. That crazy Form was offering five grand in Orion-arm credchits for every grainy concert tape I could dig up, or a forty percent share in profits after royalties held for the artists-and fuck the ones who wanted the whole pie after the fact, artist's cuts are legal standard across the whole Milky Way and they've been like that since we were hairy all over. I'm no idiot neither, that was about a hundred grand US each, and if someone with high-grade electronics was offering bank like that, it meant he saw a hell of a lot more coming down the line. I took the forty. Fair's fair, it was his contacts, I just picked and carried the selection.
Once I made it back to terra firma I ran a search on the deed, found out it was an honest to god self-contained luxury module on Helalei Station, practically sharing bulkheads with the embassy segment. That thing was worth more than half the orbitals in Sol put together, barring the Jovian refineries, I shit you not.
Anyway, a couple months later I made it back out to my meet-up with Crux and got the ball rolling. As it turns out, he had contacts in the Mandate's BuCult, once they hit the market with human music it spread all the way to the Carina-Sagitarrius arm inside of a Solar year. That's how we got out of the Teapot War, you know? Way I heard it, the Lotozi got their tendrils on some Wu-Tang and Wagner, not even a quarter-revolution later they've got diplomats calling their UNS counterparts over here to offer a ceasefire in exchange for a set of new, unreleased performances.
And there's the true story of how Monnie Williams became the richest woman in the galaxy through the power of music. That kid from Footloose can suck it. Now gimme me my fuckin' drunk, pal.