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Her father doesn’t know much about music, nor does he care much for it. But he cares a lot about being a Rodian, and about his children caring that they’re Rodians. He’s said it a thousand times in her short life, and he says it again while they’re waiting in line for the concert.
“My children will be proud to be Rodians!” One large green hand makes a sweeping gesture at the four little ones in a row – two boys, one girl, one undecided, and none of them paying much attention to him. “Rodian culture, Rodian language, Rodian music – that’s what we need in our home. That’s what our children will love. None of that alien garbage. What has the rest of the galaxy ever brought us, anyway? Nothing but trouble, nothing at all.”
Ouanii is next-to-youngest in the family line-up, but she’s old enough to notice the looks her father gets from passers-by on the busy street when he talks like this. She notices the sighs and the snickers, and the eyerolls from people with small enough pupils to make such an odd expression. The Rodian ticket-seller sighs, too, when her father snaps at him for speaking Huttese.
“We don’t need to bend our throats to that slug tongue!” he says, and Ouanii wonders, not for the first time, why this matters so much. As far as she can tell, there’s not that much of a difference between Huttese and Rodian. A lot of the words are the same, or close enough to be understood. Ouanii can speak both languages. The only difference she’s noticed is that just about everyone at school and on the street speaks Huttese, more than they speak Rodian. On the holonet, the difference is even more stark. She got laughed out of a chat room once for typing in Rodian. They all said they couldn’t understand her.
Yes, she’s proud to be Rodian. She would say so, if asked, and she would mean it. But Ouanii also likes to be understood.
Ouanii knows what music is. Her mother sings along to holotapes in the kitchen, and her eldest brother brought home all the Imperial Era protest songs he learned about in school. But in that concert hall, leaning so far forward in the cushy chair that she’s nearly standing, Ouanii feels like she’s hearing music for the first time.
From her family’s mezzanine seats, the Rodian performer is small on the stage, but the sound coming from the intricate instrument before her is the most enormous thing Ouanii has ever heard – no, felt – in her life. The musician’s hands leap and slide across buttons, wheels, and streams of light. The chords carry throughout the hall, the rhythms vibrating the child to her core. Ouanii looks at her hands, pressed against the back of the seat in front of her. Could such tiny, trembling digits create something so powerful, so beautiful, so… all-encompassing?
Ouanii’s eyes snap back to the stage, unable to bear looking away for long. The performer’s body moves with the music, casting ever-shifting shadows around the room; it’s a dance as much as a song. Sometimes she twirls across the stage, away from her instrument, and the music continues without her – but she always returns, bringing forth new sounds to fill the room. Is it the music that moves the performer, Ouanii wonders, or she who moves the music? It seems like there’s no separation at all between the performer and what she performs, as though together, the musician, the instrument, the music, and the lights create something different, something new, something alive.
The song ends, and the audience around Ouanii applauds, but all she can do is stare. There are no words in the concert, but she has the strangest feeling that she’s just been spoken to in a language she’s somehow known all her life, but never thought to use.
After the concert, all Ouanii can do is talk about it, and look up holovids of it, and spend her entire allowance on holotape downloads.
Her father considers this a sign of a successful outing. “See? Rodian culture!” he says.
But the search history on Ouanii’s datapad is not limited to Rodian music. In the privacy of her room, she fills her ears with quenk jazz and Warbat trance and every song that Gaya has ever released.
“When can we go to another concert?” she asks, and she won’t take her parents’ hesitation for an answer. Ouanii crosses her arms and stomps her feet at their claims that it’s too expensive to go every day, or every week, or even every month.
“Just listen to the holotapes,” her parents say, but the holotapes aren’t enough. Ouanii’s eyes itch for the lights of the concert hall. Her ears are hungry for music that comes to her on its own, free from the translation of recording devices and speakers. She’s never alone with her thoughts anymore. Her brain is overflowing with music. It spills out of her head and into her hands. Her fingers constantly tap out rhythms on tables, chairs – everything within reach – and when her family tells her to stop, all she can do is beg for concerts, for musicians, for music.
It’s her second-elder brother who finally says, “Why don’t you just play it yourself?” and her mother who suggests a visit to a musical instrument store.
The walls of the little store are lined with contraptions of every shape, size, and color; things with tubes and things with buttons, some with electronic parts and others powered by breath. Some of the instruments are bigger than her, and some are so small she could cup them in her hands. Everything is so shiny that Ouanii keeps her hands firmly at her sides, worried she might break something.
The shopkeeper, a Rodian much older than her father, gently guides her around the room, pointing out each instrument by name and telling her about the kind of sound it makes.
“What’s caught your interest?” he says as they once again reach the front of the store. “What would you like to learn?”
Ouanii’s eyes fall on a poster hanging over the store counter. It’s an ad for a concert, a performer shining under the colored stage lights. It’s not the performer she saw on that night that changed everything, but this performer is standing behind the same instrument. It’s like a table with two thick, curved legs. Tubes emerge from the sides like a spread of antlers, and a large, glowing wheel stands at its center. Ouanii can’t see the buttons and levers from this angle like she could from above on the mezzanine, but she’s sure they’re there.
She points at the poster, and the shopkeeper follows her gaze.
“Ah, the lumosynth!” he says. “That’s right, your father said you saw Mu Preewar perform when she was in town. It’s a beautiful instrument, isn’t it? A challenge to master, but very versatile.”
“And it’s Rodian.” Her father surveys the room. “I don’t see any of those in here.”
“We’d have to order one in. And they don’t run cheap…”
The shopkeeper starts talking in numbers. Ouanii isn’t that good at math yet, but she can tell from the way her father’s brow furrows that it’s a lot. The wonder of the store starts to fade, sliding down with her heart to her feet.
Evidently sensing the change in tone of the room, the shopkeeper reaches behind the counter. “You don’t want to start with the lumosynth, anyway. Like I said – it’s a challenge to master. Something to aspire to! And, ah, they don’t make them child-sized anyway. But this – this is perfect for a sharp-eared beginner like yourself.”
He presents her with a much smaller instrument, a shiny brass-colored thing with keys and sliders on its side. Swiftly attaching a leathery strap, he hangs the instrument from her shoulder. Ouanii shifts her neck, feeling the weight.
“This is a ketasiik,” he says. “Composers who write for the lumosynth usually work with this, as well. You’ll often find the two instruments in concert together, in fact – or at least with a paktosynth, which is the younger cousin to a lumosynth, in a way. If I may take your hand…? Thank you. Now, you place your fingers here, and press…”
Noise comes out of the ketasiik, grating at her ears. Ouanii’s face squeezes into a wince.
“Yes, you’ll make a lot of noise, at first.” The shopkeeper glances at her father. “Something for the whole family to enjoy. But Ouanii…” He taps a finger against the ketasiik, and then on her chest, right over her heart. “If you put in the work, and give it your love, then in time, that noise will become music. Every star begins by making noise. It’s up to you to practice every day and turn that noise into music. One note at a time, one chord at a time… Can you do that?”
Ouanii can’t imagine being a star. But she wants music. And so, she carefully cradles the instrument – her instrument – the whole way home.
Noise remains noise for a very long time. Ouanii watches all the tutorial holovids the shopkeeper recommended and every other ketasiik recording she can find. She runs scales. She memorizes chord charts. When she finally consistently coaxes clear notes out of the instrument, much to the relief of her family, she plays each note again and again until she knows without hesitation which fingers, in which order, make which sound. She has her youngest sibling quiz her, shouting out the letters and numbers of notes at random until Ouanii doesn’t need to think through the scales to find the note she needs. She has them all literally at her fingertips.
And then, like a door suddenly sliding open, the entire world of music is available to her. She listens to holotapes and knows how to play every note.
“Listen,” she says to her family as she turns off the speakers, powers up her ketasiik, and plays the song they were just listening to, note-perfect.
Her elder brothers act unimpressed, as elder siblings tend to do. But Ouanii sees the way her parents look at each other with raised brows, and she knows she’s tapped into something incredible.
Years pass. Ouanii realizes, one day, that she’s no longer getting any better at the ketasiik. She’s grown enough now for no one to mind if she goes downtown on her own, and so she returns to the music store. The old shopkeeper greets her warmly, and he nods while he listens to her play.
“It seems to me it’s time to expand your repertoire,” he says. “What’s caught your interest?”
Ouanii looks around the room, at the many instruments, most of which she recognizes now by the musicians across the galaxy who use them. Her fingers itch to grab them all.
“Even if I could choose,” she says, “my allowance isn’t that much.”
“Well, you’re welcome in my store any time, little star. I’d be happy to talk you through the basics on anything you see here. Given how well that old ketasiik still works, I’m guessing I can trust you to treat my instruments with care. Am I right about that?”
“Oh, sir! Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!”
That makes him laugh. “No need for that! Call me Gloodo.”
From that moment onward, Ouanii is in Gloodo’s store almost every day after school, learning the language and personality of each instrument, turning noise into music, one note at a time, one chord at a time. Gloodo has her play for the patrons in his shop, sometimes, to demonstrate the sounds of whatever they’re thinking about buying. These small audiences often clap for her, and they leave with a smile in their eyes and a skip in their step. Seeing their reaction makes Ouanii feel warm inside, and she says so to Gloodo.
“Music has the power to make people happy, little star,” he replies. “I’m sure there are lots of people who would be very happy to hear you play.”
Music making people happy is only part of the truth, Ouanii thinks later, curled up on her bed watching a livestream of a gonk-rock band. The members of this band are all from the Core Worlds, lightyears away, and she doubts any of them speak Rodian. But their music tells her, and everyone who hears it, how to feel. Happy, sad, angry, hopeful… Different notes, different keys, different rhythms… It’s like a universal language, she realizes, smiling at the thought. Music is meaning conveyed via sounds that everyone, everywhere, can understand.
Ouanii begins uploading music to the holonet. She starts with a few original songs, improvisation on the ketasiik, which get no attention. Then, she posts a cover of Gaya’s “Coaxium,” and someone shares it with someone, who then shares it with someone who has a lot of followers.
In the middle of dinner, Ouanii’s datapad erupts with notifications, much to her parents’ annoyance. Ouanii doesn’t know how to explain what’s happening. All she can do is stare at the “views” number that keeps getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
Ouanii keeps playing covers. She starts with her favorite musicians and soon begins to take requests from the comments. She records holos of herself in Gloodo’s store, finding the perfect instrument for each song. She learns how to calibrate a microphone and edit clips together. She sings in Huttese, and she learns to block the people who leave nasty comments demanding that she sing in Galactic Basic. She learns to love that moment of connection forged when someone on the other side of the galaxy exclaims, “Oh my stars, you love this song, too?”
People keep asking Ouanii what she wants to do with her life. The question is always the same, whether it comes from her family, her schoolteachers, or her peers. But as far as Ouanii is concerned, she’s already doing what she wants to do. Nothing could make her happier or feel more purposeful than she is when she’s making music. Her parents do their best to talk her into pursuing a more stable career, but as Ouanii reaches adulthood, there’s no other work that she wants to do.
Ouanii takes her music out of the house and onto the street, a little cup at her feet for her on-the-go audience. She picks up every credit she makes from busking and carries them home with pride. Sometimes she convinces the bar down the street from Gloodo’s store to pay her to perform for an evening. She tries to teach herself how to monetize her holovids, but it doesn’t bring her the riches that the holonet influencers swear it will. Still, Ouanii saves her earnings, one credit at a time, one performance at a time.
One day, she runs the numbers in her head and realizes she has enough to buy a new instrument. The lumosynth she’s spent so many years dreaming about is still thousands of credits out of reach, but a paktosynth is smaller, and similar enough – and it’s a choice she can make for herself, right now. So she does.
Gloodo has long since retired to a vacation home deep in the jungle, but as Ouanii sets the paktosynth up on the street corner, with that same old ketasiik still slung over her shoulder, she can hear his voice in her head, praising her for expanding her repertoire.
Looping is the best new trick the paktosynth allows Ouanii to add to her routine. She’s dabbled in editing together multiple recordings to make it sound like she’s duetting herself, but now she’s able to do so in real time, weaving together rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyric right there on the street corner. It takes practice to make it all work smoothly, and even more practice to get to the point where Ouanii is able to dance away from her instrument, letting the music live on without her hands, like Mu Preewar did under the lights all those years ago. But Ouanii knows how to practice, and the more she learns, the less the practice feels like work. It feels more like there is nothing else worth doing with her hands, her mind, and her soul but this.
Ouanii is busking a few streets away from the concert hall. She doesn’t have any kind of permit or permission to perform there, but it’s easy to drum up a crowd, so this corner is frequently her stage.
She’s working her way through Gaya’s greatest hits, because the Twi’lek superstar was just in town for a one-night-only and everyone is abuzz for her music even if, like Ouanii, they couldn’t afford a ticket. No one has put any credits in her cup yet this afternoon, but they’re clapping and singing along, and that’s all that matters. They are an amorphous field of color and sound around Ouanii, and she is the conductor of their joy.
She doesn’t notice the small speeder with tinted transparisteel pulling up to the curb as she’s drawing the opening chords of “Coaxium” out of the paktosynth. She doesn’t notice, at first, the speeder door opening and someone taking a high-heeled step out onto the street – but the crowd notices, and Ouanii notices the sudden shift in focus and exclamations around her. She can’t afford to be distracted while constructing a loop or else it’ll all collapse into noise, so she doesn’t look. So she doesn’t see.
But she hears the voice that cuts through the crowd, singing: “I’m gonna show you something that’s crazier than your wildest dreams / I promise it will blow your mind…!”
There are people on the holonet who do excellent celebrity impressions, even singing impressions. For a full second, Ouanii thinks that that’s what she’s hearing. But in that space between the verse and the first chorus, she looks in the same direction as everyone else, towards the source of the voice, and –
Oh dear stars above, is that Gaya?
Ten thousand hours of practice take over her hands, which continue to play even as Ouanii stares, even as one dark, perfect eyebrow rises on Gaya’s perfect purple face and her perfect mouth quirks into a smirk as she continues to sing along with Ouanii, there on the street corner, under the lights of a dozen datapads.
More than a year later, when a young hallikset player asks her how she started working with Gaya, Ouanii will shake her head and say it’s kind of a blur. She remembers trying desperately to think of something to say, and asking Gaya why she was still in town, and feeling ridiculous for it. She remembers how Huttese rolled off Gaya’s tongue just as smoothly as any other language, as smoothly as a song. She remembers Gaya’s manager, Raithe Kole, leaning across the armrest of the fancy little speeder to shake her hand, his small human eyes leaving her feeling scrutinized, as though he’d looked right through her and into her future.
Ouanii knows that there must have been a job offer, and that she must have said yes, but she doesn’t remember that.
Instead she remembers Gaya saying, “You’ll need something grander for the stage than those little toys. Something that will fill a stadium with your sound. What would you prefer to play?”
“I can play whatever you need me to play.”
Gaya doesn’t laugh often, but Ouanii has already begun to recognize the way the tilt of her head, her eyebrows, and her shoulders work together to convey a confident amusement.
“That’s not what I asked, dahmaling. Are you going to make Gaya repeat herself?”
Ouanii’s hands tighten around the ketasiik in her lap. She thinks of the paktosynth securely wrapped in its case. She thinks of Mu Preewar under the lights, and she thinks of Gloodo. A challenge to master, he’d called it.
Ouanii asks for a lumosynth, and she silently swears to master it more quickly than any instrument she’s learned in her life.
Ouanii doesn’t need her family’s approval, but she asks for it anyway, and they give it. Her siblings help her pack. Her mother reminds her to call home often. As she prepares to walk out the door, her father puts his hands on her shoulders and turns her to face him.
“No matter where you go in the galaxy,” he says, “never forget that you are Ouanii – you are Rodian. A Rodian musician.”
She puts her hands over his. “How could I forget? But it’s my job now to play Gaya’s music. There will be time for Rodian music later.”
“Make sure you don’t forget.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Gaya has a reputation. Rather, she has many reputations, and Ouanii’s heard them all. Gaya is an innovative composer, a brilliant lyricist, and an overall phenomenal performer. Gaya demands a fierce loyalty from her fans, and she shows an equal loyalty to her home world, Ryloth. Gaya takes no shit, but she keeps her cool, and she always speaks her truth.
Gaya is also, reportedly, difficult to work with. According to the holonet, in her long, illustrious career, she has never kept an accompanist for more than a few months at a time. So Ouanii expects difficulties. She expects disagreements, and she is prepared to go along with whatever the galactic superstar demands of her, because this opportunity is too good to waste.
Ouanii has a few days to warm herself up on the lumosynth before Gaya puts her onstage. The rehearsal room on Coruscant – who would have thought she’d ever go to Coruscant – is bigger than her childhood bedroom. She closes her brain to the enormousness of it all, refuses to think about how much and how quickly things are changing, and focuses on what she knows how to do, what she must do: practice.
The people who work in this building only speak Galactic Basic, but Ouanii can understand them, mostly, even if they’re completely baffled by her. She eventually finds someone patient enough to figure out that she’s looking for a holotape player, and kind enough to help her find one. Her quest complete, Ouanii shuts herself up in the rehearsal room and puts Gaya’s holotapes on repeat. She plays along with the recordings, matching every note, every rhythm, every breath, until it’s perfect.
On the second day, Gaya pays a visit. She enters the room while Ouanii is midway through “Poverty of Love.” After mere seconds of watching Ouanii play, Gaya’s voice rings out sharply across the room.
“Turn it off.”
Ouanii obeys, pausing the holotape. She looks at Gaya – at Gaya’s frown – and she switches off the holotape player with a trembling finger. For a long moment, Gaya just looks at her, glares at her, and Ouanii’s insides twist around her heart. Has she done something wrong already? Is she about to get fired? Is she not good enough for Gaya, not good enough for the intergalactic stage, not good enough at all?
“That’s not how you play,” Gaya finally says, putting one hand on her hip. “That’s how Aphaea played, in the recording studio. Now, a recording is the same every time. That’s the nature of it. But if Gaya wanted her music to sound the same every time, she’d sing with a track. Does Gaya sing with a track?”
Ouanii shakes her head, too focused on keeping her hands still and maintaining eye contact to speak.
“No. Gaya sings with her accompanist.” One perfectly-manicured purple finger points straight towards the Rodian. “And now, Gaya sings with Ouanii. How does Ouanii play Gaya’s music? Show me.”
It takes some time for Ouanii to work up the courage to look away from Gaya and down at the lumosynth. She puts one hand on the wheel, and the other hovers over the glowing keys. But she does not play.
Gaya is waiting. Waiting for her to play like Ouanii. But how could she play like Ouanii here, where no one even speaks Huttese, let alone Rodian? Here, where everything depends on Gaya, who could open the doors to the galaxy with a nod of her head, and close them again with a frown? Here, with this beautiful, breathtaking instrument she’s spent years dreaming about, and yet still feels like a stranger?
But is the lumosynth a stranger, or a friend that she has yet to fully get to know?
Ouanii thinks about her siblings shouting out notes for her to play. She thinks of Gloodo in the music store, and Mu Preewar in the concert hall, and all the Rodians gathering around her on the street corner. She thinks of the people on the holonet, whose faces she never saw, typing, I love this song, too!
And Ouanii plays. She plays like a Rodian, moving with the music to the point of dance. She plays like Ouanii, with the joy of having loved music with her entire being for as far back as she can remember. She plays a wrong note, accidentally, and another, but it doesn’t matter. She changes the volume and the rhythm whenever she thinks she should, whenever it feels right to do it, and the instrument is alive beneath her hands.
In the final verse, Gaya sings with her, and the doors to the galaxy slide open.
They perform everywhere. Gaya fills concert halls and stadiums from the Core Worlds to the Outer Rim. On every world, Ouanii brings Gaya’s stories and songs to life for the cheering, screaming, swooning crowd. It’s exhilarating, and she loves it. It’s exhausting, and she loves it, then, too. It’s different every day, and somehow, she gets used to it, and somehow, it never gets old.
There’s always the rush of nerves from head to toe right before she steps onto the stage. There’s always the wonder of the lights and the sound and the emotions washing through hundreds and thousands of bodies and minds. There’s always the music, and the sense of purpose it gives her to take it in and let it out again and again and again, knowing that every show is unique, every audience is unique, every moment that she and Gaya create together is unique in the way that only live performance can be.
Ouanii is live. She is alive.
And she is a star. It’s just a fact. She’d always blushed a bit when Gloodo called her “little star,” but there’s no denying it now. When Gaya points to Ouanii at the end of every show, giving credit to her accompanist, the audience screams her name. Ouanii finds holovids of Gaya’s shows which zoom in on her from time to time, and she sends the links to her parents. There are even articles about Ouanii on the holonet. The media makes up all kinds of stories about her childhood, and they spell her name a dozen different ways, but she doesn’t care. They can use whatever spelling they like, as long as she keeps getting to do what she loves, as long as she can perform and practice and travel.
It’s a pleasant surprise, how much she loves traveling the galaxy. She’s walking on worlds she’d only seen in pictures before and meeting people she’d never thought she’d be able to see. Sometimes, the people she meets have never seen a Rodian before. Often, the people she meets don’t even speak Huttese, and Ouanii goes months and months without hearing a single word in Rodian.
There’s a loneliness, there, to be true. There are times when her stomach suddenly twists with a hunger for home, and times when her brain swings back and forth between frustration that she never learned to speak Basic and anger that no one else cared to learn her language, either.
But when she performs, none of that matters. There is no language barrier in music. Ouanii and Gaya tell their audiences how to feel, and they do. When Ouanii performs, everyone understands her, and she loves it.
It’s not just the music she loves. It’s the team. There’s Gaya, who trusts Ouanii to bring herself to the stage and to her performance; who gives advice exactly when it is needed and then stands back to let Ouanii shine; who is wholehearted and reliable and always makes sure Ouanii knows everything she needs to know before a new world, a new venue, a new opportunity. There’s a difference between the way you look up to someone famous from afar, and the way you look up to someone who is your mentor, your partner, your friend. As weeks become months, and months become more than a year, Ouanii is grateful for every day she knows that Gaya is her friend.
And then there’s Raithe, who is something of an enigma at first – always talking so quickly, so overly witty, that Ouanii is sure he’s hiding something or at least trying to keep her off-balance. But the more they work together, the more she sees him – how he uses that wit to ensure his clients come out on top of every deal; how he’s constantly evaluating the people around him for their talents and trustworthiness; how he notices when she’s trying very hard not to feel lonely and comes over to her with a drink in one hand and a joke in the other.
Ouanii trusts Raithe as much as she trusts Gaya, and she continues to trust them both even as she realizes that the two of them have business together that has nothing to do with music. There’s something that they never talk about in front of Ouanii, something that often requires Gaya or Raithe to disappear while Ouanii goes ahead to the next venue and gets things ready. They’re always back in time for the show, and they never give her a reason to worry, so Ouanii doesn’t worry. She doesn’t need to know everything. She just wants to be a part of it all, and she is.
She’s a part of something enormous, and it wouldn’t be the way it is without her, and that’s more than enough. It’s more than she could have ever hoped for.
Ouanii kicks off her boots and lies back on the hotel room bed, still in the midst of that particular mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration that comes from a stadium performance. Looking up through the lights at the thousands of people from so many different worlds, all together in this moment, finding escape from the rising turmoil in the galaxy through music… Ouanii can’t make out individual faces in a stadium crowd, but she always thinks of the little ones up there, the children leaning forward in their mezzanine seats like she did all those years ago, dazzled by the music and the lights and the enormousness of it all. Now, she’s the performer on the stage, one with the music, blessed with the knowledge that she’s doing what she’s made to do.
She should really get to sleep. She needs to get up early tomorrow to make the connection to Chandrila. Both Raithe and Gaya have business to take care of, somewhere, but they’ve promised to meet her on the Halcyon in time for the Sail-Away Show, and she believes them. Gaya is never late. A starcruiser is an unusual venue for them, and a dinner show of any kind equally unusual; the audience will be tiny compared to the crowd she performed for tonight.
Ouanii keeps thinking about tonight’s show, and the audience. They’re good thoughts, but they’re keeping her awake. On top of that, she has a song stuck in her head, an original melody she’s been playing with for a while. Ouanii doesn’t consider herself a composer by any means. She remembers too well how poorly her original songs did on the holonet, way back when, and she’s completely content performing Gaya’s music. But she makes up her own songs, sometimes, just for herself.
As the bed slowly becomes more comfortable beneath her, she starts sleepily making up lyrics to the song. They’re not very good lyrics. The words wouldn’t even rhyme in Basic. But she keeps thinking about the thousands, millions, billions of people in the galaxy, from so many worlds and speaking so many languages, all brought together because of music, and she sings about it to herself, in her head where only she can hear.
We’re just one big thing, really; all together in one big thing, and everyone can understand everyone…