The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [153]
“Speaking as your friend,” he agreed, “and as a friend to all humankind.”
“So what would you recommend?”
“I’d recommend that you didn’t ask me that. My opinion’s already on record. If you want to add to the debate, you need to come up with something of your own.”
“And we have several chances to hit the jackpot, if Gray and I and whoever else give different answers?”
“That’s not obvious,” he said, sounding a little reluctant as well as a little uncertain. “It might make more impact if all of you were to put forward the same answer.”
“And if we all put forward different ones, mine’s not likely to count for nearly as much as Mortimer Gray’s, or even Alice Fleury’s,” I guessed. “In fact, mine’s likely to count least of all. But I’m here, and I’m otherwise redundant, and the Snow Queen’s decided that I’m sufficiently amusing to be entertained.”
Rocambole didn’t even nod his head, but he didn’t disagree with my estimation either. I figured that he had to be right about one thing, even if the rest were mere pretense. Even if my answer were to be damned as the testimony of a corrupt barbarian, and even if it had to be relayed to a team of hanging judges by a crazy fay who liked to imagine herself as a bogey from an obsolete children’s fantasy, it was far better to have the opportunity to offer such an answer than to have no voice at all.
Forty
Opera
After the meal came the concert. I hadn’t felt in any need of the meal — although I realized a little belatedly that la Reine des Neiges could easily have made me feel hungry if she’d wanted to — and I certainly didn’t want to waste time listening to music, but I didn’t have any choice.
“It won’t work,” I told Rocambole. “I’ve got a tin ear. Always have had.”
“Are you sure of that?” was Rocambole’s teasing reply.
I was. Like anyone else, I had a certain nostalgic regard for the popular tunes of my adolescence, because of the accidental associations they recalled, but I’d never had any interest in music as music. I had just enough sense of rhythm to respond to a pounding beat, but the dominant music of my era had been computer-generated tunes performed in VE by synthetic icons; it had all been custom-designed to be popular, and it was, but not with me. I had always been different. Indeed, I had always been proud of being different, to the extent of making a fetish out of not liking the things that other people liked, not doing the things that other people did, not thinking the things that other people thought and not wanting the things that other people wanted. There’s only so far you can take that kind of assertive individualism, but one thing of which I was confident was that I’d taken it far enough to be immune to a machine’s careful calculation of what “popular” music amounted to.
I tried to explain all that to Rocambole. “It isn’t just that I didn’t like digitally synthesized music,” I told him. “I always disapproved of it on principle. I rather admired the guys who insisted on making music themselves: playing imperfectly on imperfect instruments, amplifying it, if any amplification seemed necessary, with dodgy analog equipment. Music with raw noise in it. Music that was never the same from one performance to the next. Music with all the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of human voices.”
“La Reine’s opera has voices in it,” my friend replied, with a slight grin to signify that he knew exactly what effect the word “opera” would have.
I had never seen the point of opera. I liked plays — especially plays with actual actors who didn’t deliver their lines with mechanical precision — but I had never understood why anyone had ever thought it a good idea to devise plays in which the actors had to sing their lines, let alone to sing them in such an outlandishly indecipherable manner. It had always seemed to me so utterly bizarre as to be quite beyond the scope of my appreciation.
And that, I realized, must be the point. La Reine des Neiges liked a challenge. Demonstrating that she could serve all five of my senses better than the