Tripping the Tale Fantastic Read online

  “The cheapest model,” Anderson said with rather more enthusiasm.

  “But I expect that in no time at all you’ll want to trade it in for our Scholar, with fifty times the memory storage at less than twice the price. You could be ready to cope with fifty composers and not just one—”

  “The Analyzer,” Anderson said inexorably.

  “Well, of course it’s your decision. Now which composer dataset would you prefer? With the Analyzer, of course, you can only have one.”

  Anderson contemplated the bandaged finger which he’d cut on some broken glass in his pocket. He massaged it gently and said, “Mozart.”

  “Oh, a very good choice, sir. What was the name again?”

  Anderson told him again, and wonders of technology were duly set into motion. The result was a transparent ear-mold with the thumbnail-sized bulge of the Analyzer protruding; there was also a discreet invoice which made his credit card seem ready to wilt Dali-fashion as he passed it over.

  “The battery is extra, sir. Would you be wanting a battery?”

  “On the whole, yes.”

  “Then if you’ll sign here ... Thank you so much. I’m sure you’ll find your computer aid a real social help, and something which a busy person like you needn’t be in the slightest ashamed of using.”

  “A tone-deaf person like me.”

  “Of course.”

  After playing for an afternoon with his new toy Anderson felt himself rather well up on music and Mozart, rather as his first day with a pocket calculator had given him the air of an expert on the theory of numbers. In the evening he paid a call.

  “Hello—just thought I’d drop in to say thanks for the party.”

  “Why, how charmingly old-fashioned of you, Colin. Do come in and have a quick one. I really don’t know why I throw these parties; one loses so much glassware. I’ll only be a second, now.” And Nigel vanished, presumably to manipulate the combination lock on his secret drinks cupboard.

  The room’s trendy bareness seemed to shout at Anderson now that it was emphasized by the lack of crowd. He wandered to the intricate hi-fi console and allowed himself to be discovered peering at it.

  “Oh! Did you want to hear some music?”

  “I was just thinking I’d probably ... appreciate it more without all those people shouting their heads off.”

  “Well, well.” Nigel looked at him with eyes slightly narrowed, and then turned to the smart brushed-aluminum console. Anderson noted that the drinks provided for single callers weren’t any bigger than those at vast parties—but was he imagining it, or did this sherry taste slightly more, as it were, British than last Saturday’s offering? He longed to sniff Nigel’s glass and compare; but already the sound of what might very well have been music was spilling from each corner of the room.

  “Now what d’you think of this delightful tune,” said Nigel with a false smile.

  Anderson cupped his ear at the nearest speaker with the gesture he’d been practising, and flipped a fingernail at the Analyzer nestling there. The noise was like a small gunshot; he suppressed the resulting wince before it reached the outside world. “Interesting,” he said with what he hoped was an air of deep concentration. Nigel watched him, faintly smiling. Then after a moment, a mechanical version of the still small voice of conscience whispered in Anderson’s ear, saying: “Random notes, 87% probability ... random notes, 92% probability ... random notes, 95% probability ...”

  “Oh, this is more of your stochastic music,” Anderson murmured. “Now I can listen to it properly I can see it’s just random notes. I mean, I can hear it’s random.”

  Nigel’s smile became at once more visible and less convincing. “Of course that was rather obvious after our little chat on Saturday,” he said and fiddled again with the controls. “Let’s have something of the real thing.” The speaker noises changed to something quite definitely though indefinably different, and Nigel turned again toward his guest like a restaurant waiter offering a selection of red herrings. “What d’you think of that?”

  Anderson consulted the Analyzer, and after a short pause came back with, “Come on, Nigel, pull the other one. It’s random again, isn’t it? Only this time it’s the change in pitch between successive notes that gets randomized over a certain interval, so it sounds that little bit more musical than just random notes.”

  “Can’t fool you,” said Nigel, hardly smiling at all. “Anything you’d like to hear?”

  “I’ve been listening to a few things by the chap you recommended—Mozart. Not bad.”

  “My God, I recommended him? I must have been really pissed. Still, there should be something of his in the databank—” He turned back toward the console keyboard.

  A minute or two later Anderson was able to say with quiet confidence, “Ah yes, that’s the K.169 string quartet, isn’t it?” Following an irresistible urge, he breathed gently over his fingernails and polished them on the lapel of his jacket. Half-heatedly his host caused the equipment to play further noises which the Analyzer rapidly identified as the Serenade in D Major, adding the useful information that it had been composed in Salzburg. Nigel seemed a little shaken by this onslaught, and was breathing more heavily as he returned to the console.

  “Not recognized,” said the small voice. “Transition probability analysis suggests Mozart work, 82% probability ...”

  “That’s Mozart all right,” said Anderson, thinking fast. “But hardly one of his best pieces ... in fact I must admit I don’t recognize it at all.”

  “Er, yes, just an obscure oboe quartet I thought might amuse you. H’mm.” A thought appeared to have struck Nigel, and he punched another sequence on the keyboard—savagely, as though squashing small insects.

  “Not recognized. Transition probability analysis suggests not Mozart work, 79% probability ...”

  “You’ve got the wrong composer, old chap.”

  “It’s so easy to make mistakes with equipment as sophisticated as this,” Nigel said viciously. “I’ll have to throw you out soon—I’m meeting someone tonight—but first, what d’you think of this one?”

  The lights on the hi-fi console flickered alarmingly for nearly a minute; Anderson fantasized that Nigel’s expensive gadgetry, like Nigel, was baffled and irritated. Then more musical noises seeped through the room. Anderson cupped his ear attentively, and clicked his fingernail again at what was hidden inside. There was a pause.

  “Not recognized. Transition probability analysis suggests Mozart work, 94% probability.”

  The transition probability jargon was something to do with sequences of notes favored by given composers. In the long run they left their fingerprints all over their work so obviously that even a machine could catch them red-handed.

  “Ah, you can’t mistake Mozart,” Anderson sighed, wondering if he was overdoing it a trifle. “Even in a minor work like this—no, I don’t actually recognize it—the towering genius of the man comes across so clearly.” He definitely was overdoing it, he decided.

  Nigel seemed to have brightened surprisingly. “This really is a very sophisticated system, you know. I’m rather proud of it. One thing you can do with it, if you know how, is to have the processor run through a selection of someone’s works and cobble up a sort of cheap and nasty imitation—something to do with transition probabilities, it says in the manual. Of course you couldn’t expect it to fool anyone who knew anything about music, not for an instant ... But I’ll have to say goodbye now. Do come round again whenever you like. It’s nice to see you making an effort, musically, but you really will have to try much harder yet. Old chap.”

  Anderson looked down into his empty glass and thought of thrusting it into his pocket quickly, or perhaps up Nigel’s nostril, slowly.

  “It’s very kind of you,” he said with a titanic effort.

  The CAS salesman studied him wisely. “Now if you cared to exchange it for the Scholar model we could in fact allow quite a generous trade-in price, Mr Anderson.”

  “And t
hen I suppose I’d have a wonderful machine that could fail to spot imitations of fifty composers rather than just one?”

  “Our clients usually find the Scholar very satisfactory,” the other said severely.

  “So will I—if it can tell inspired music from cobbled-together computer rubbish, the way this one doesn’t.”

  The salesman sighed. “To handle that would need a full-scale AI, an Artificial Intelligence. CAS isn’t in that business ... yet. Now if you come back next year, when we hope to have chased out the last bugs, then perhaps we can sell you our Mark III model—the AudioBrain.”

  Anderson reflected for a moment, and then leaned forward with what he considered to be an expression of great shrewdness. He’d practiced it in the mirror for use on Nigel. “If you’re likely to market it next year, there must be prototypes around the place right now. In fact you must be market-researching the thing already. It wouldn’t hurt to let me try one out a little for you.”

  Licking his lips, the CAS man murmured that it would be, well, rather irregular, but ... Anderson reached for his wallet.

  “How am I doing, Nigel?” he asked confidently, back in the bare, expensively-carpeted room.

  “Not bad,” Nigel muttered. “You must be trying a bit harder than you were—I told you understanding music was mainly a matter of trying. How does this sound to you?”

  One of Anderson’s ears took in the new meaningless noises that were tinkling from all four corners of the pastel room. In his other ear, the AudioBrain prototype whispered to him: “Sounds like Bach, I should say ... but that’s just the TP analysis. As a whole it’s hardly an inspired piece, and the long-term melodic structure is absolutely shot to hell. No, it has to be another faked-up computer piece ...”

  ”Synthetic Bach,” Anderson said casually. “Come on, Nigel, no need to keep on pulling my leg like that.”

  Nigel looked thoroughly annoyed. Possibly to conceal this and reduce Anderson’s satisfaction temporarily, he took the tiny glasses away for replenishment from the hundred-gallon plastic tank of cheapest British sherry which Anderson was now convinced existed somewhere toward the rear of the flat.

  Despite having defeated Nigel in umpteen straight sets of hard-fought musical appreciation, Anderson still didn’t feel wildly happy. It might have been that he was tiring of the game; it might have been the AI software built into this new hearing aid, which was now saying: “You should be able to tell this for yourself, dumbo. Only a real musical illiterate could miss spotting that one ... you’re not trying, that’s all. You’re hopeless. You really should make an effort.”

  “But I’m tone-deaf,” Anderson said aloud.

  “That’s what they all say,” the AudioBrain retorted. “Come off it!”

  Thus it was that as Nigel returned, Anderson was addressing the empty air and saying, “Go to hell, you loathsome little person.”

  It was another of those parties whose expensive minimalism extended to the furniture, the pictures on the walls, and (inevitably) the drinks.

  “Hello, Nigel, long time no see,” said Anderson.

  “Um. How’s the culture, then? Still working to better yourself on the musical front?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, are you still slogging away at the musical appreciation?”

  “Pardon?—Oh, that. No, I find I can’t handle music any more. I’m going deaf—and not just tone-deaf.” He pushed back his hair and tapped the thing plugged into his ear.

  “Oh, my God, I didn’t know, I’m so sorry ...”

  Anderson decided once again that he liked the AudioBrain a good deal more with its battery removed.

  ***

  THE MEANING, NOT THE WORDS

  Kristen Ringman

  I stole you from your tent.

  I’m not usually so impulsive, but your eyes—one hazel and one green—were so beautiful I couldn’t help myself. You never actually saw me, not then. Not while you zipped your tent shut or while you lay down on the top of your sleeping bag because that night was humid. Not until my hands were in yours, my body against your body, pulling you outside with strength I only have in those moments. Strength for taking humans. I am otherwise made of slim bones, pale white skin, and red fur. A fox who is sometimes a girl.

  You weren’t like any other human I had taken before.

  You didn’t speak with your mouth; instead you used your hands. Your family, who seemed to have coerced you into their camping trip high up in the White Mountains, didn’t sign with you. But I knew of your hand language because of the way you used it with your friends in video chats on your phone when you were able to find a signal. You used every muscle in your face to add layer upon layer of inflection to the movements of your hands. The conversations kept cutting out, so you sometimes punched the side of a tree in frustration. I apologized for you, but I didn’t have to—even the trees understood: blood relatives surrounded you, but you were alone.

  We steal people like you.

  Humans who don’t just feel alone—you’re isolated. In a group of people, you go unseen like a fae creature, like a spirit. It’s easier this way. Not only because your friends and family don’t notice your absence at first. You’re our kindred and you don’t even know it. You ache for the magic only we can give you. The songs of trees and rivers. The lives of animals up close, sometimes right against your skin. Stars reflected in pools like so many shiny fish. A sky filled with bats and the unnoticed wings of the fae, blending in with the background, as we always do.

  I stole you because I fell in love with your eyes and the voice you kept in your hands like the glow of a firefly. Words I could understand better than spoken English. Not words—meanings. The way your dark hair always got in your face. The way you moved through the trees without caring what you were stepping on or how loud your steps were. I wore my fox skin during the day and I watched you, listening to the snapping of the branches under your feet as you walked away from your campsite and back, away and back. I felt the tension between you and your kin like a tightrope you walked with your arms out like wings. I don’t know how you crossed that line, back and forth, so fluidly, without stumbling. I wasn’t sure I could have done it, not like you.

  I had to wait until nightfall before I could take you without anyone else seeing. Lucky for me, your tent faced the dark grove of hemlocks, away from the campfire and the circle of voices you didn’t seem to care that you couldn’t hear. I shifted under the hemlocks: my red fur became a long mane of tangled russet, my small breasts stayed hard against my skin, my nipples perked up from the chill in the late summer air, my human ears pointed up ever so slightly. The only part of me that stayed exactly the same was the amber in my eyes that matched the color of my fur and hair.

  I knew my own beauty. I couldn’t take humans so easily if I didn’t have it.

  You didn’t hear me unzip the opening in your tent, nor did you hear me slip inside and take you in my arms. Once we touched, I knew it would be easy. Your skin sang against my skin as if it finally found something it had been looking for desperately.

  It’s not always that simple, the stealing of humans.

  Sometimes they fight the connection. They reach for their gadgets: the material possessions their inner psyche understands it is losing. Instead of reaching for their lives themselves, they covet the things inside them. It becomes hard for them but effortless for me. I don’t care about how pretty they are then—their soul is full of greed and plastic. It’s not an asset to our realm. It’s nothing that would make a good fae. Those are the humans that I take and I find a way of dissolving them. Of turning them into so many grains of sand at the bottom of a pond. Or I let them stay human. I let them go back to those objects they worship, the clothes they drape over themselves like capes, the phones they clutch in their small hands, the paint they smear on their faces. Humans like that—they think they’re witches, but they’re slaves.

  Other times there are people like you: the human I stole from a tent in northern New
Hampshire on the eve of the August full moon. You were perfect.

  As soon as I released your body by the shore of the pond in the moonlight, you pulled off your clothes and dove into the shining waters. You thought I was a girl.

  “Who are you?” you signed.

  I understood you, but I couldn’t sign back. I could only mime things that made you laugh at me, or stare in wonder at my eerie accurateness, or nod with comprehension of the meaning behind the words. You understood me, too. I loved you more for that.

  We spent the night dipping in and out of the gray waters, walking the Moon’s path along the shore of the pond, watching the deep green pine trees sweeping themselves back and forth over the stars. I spoke with you of fae things I had never told a human before, all with my hands making shapes, my face learning to move in the subtlest ways. Your hands were on fire with language and stories, telling me of school and home, your friends, your parents, your dog. I loved that your dog was closer to you than your family—that he was your family. But then he was gone, and you would always be broken inside. I heard things from your hands that made my fae heart ache and my skin yearn to shift back into the fox skin—into the mind that wouldn’t quake at such emotions, the mind that would sort them out and follow the scent of the nearest food, slinking through the trees like a red shadow.

  Your life made me cry. You kissed me.

  For the first time in my life, I wasn’t prepared. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make you like me. I loved you for who you were already. A human.

  But a fox girl and a human?

  It would never work.