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Tapestudy of musical forms was, Grant could tell, going to be an interesting challenge. He was procrastinating, sheerly procastinating. Justin had an extra session with Ari tonight, nothing new, nothing unexpected. In the old days he would have worried, or sent himself into that familiar loop of Justin will be all right Justin will be all right because the alternative was to fray himself, and that wouldn't help himself or Justin.
Anyway, it had started with Valery Schwartz. Or ended with Valery, hard to say. Nobody had liked him. Even Maddy, whom Ari had tasked with keeping him—quiet, had found him a trial. Maddy, with her gift of setting people at ease and smiling at them and, along the way, finding out what they knew.
The hard part was that, for all his fondness for shock and clamorous contrasts, Valery had genuine talent. Vision. Something that Grant recognized and responded to, at any rate. That one video with the endless velvet variations of red, and the great fractal forests opening into vistas of teeth. Not pleasant, no, but when he looked at it he had been simultaneously attracted and repulsed, wanting to map the shapes so he wouldn't traverse them in his dreams. He was sure that he had less orderly dreams than most azi, the price of Alpha temperament, and in the nights following the teeth had followed him into his dreams, unexpected concavities and sharp points of unfriendly beauty.
Justin had been less impressed, but Grant wouldn't be surprised if Justin's CIT deep-sets had in some unpredictable CIT fashion been inoculated against the particular stimuli that Valery liked to play with. It would have made for some interesting dinner conversations if not for the tensions that had surrounded the whole topic of Valery and his attempts to secure Ari's patronage.
It hadn't taken long for Ari to find a pretext to revoke Valery's invitation and send him packing. Oh, she hadn't done it in those terms. There hadn't been an argument. By all accounts their last conversation had been coldly polite, Ari spinning promises that were going to add up to less than Valery imagined, the simulacrum of a business arrangement.
Grant was agnostic on the matter of the future of art. He knew, because it was obvious just from the way Ari furnished all her work and living spaces, and because Justin sometimes talked about it, haltingly, that Ari Senior had taken the visual arts seriously. Valery would land on his feet, and in the meantime he was no longer around to make everyone snappish. That would be a good thing.
But the ship that had brought Valery had also brought entertainment tapes, including some real avant-garde stuff. Grant hadn't cared for most of it, precisely, but it had given him something to think about. There had been a case of an Alpha breaking down at Esperance, back when Justin had done realtime work for Yanni Schwartz. They'd only found a partial fix, and not much luck with the cause, either. Justin had spent a lot of time talking about it, or more accurately, staring off into the distance while Grant cajoled him into a better mood.
Grant wasn't sure what exactly had spurred him to think of the Alpha. The fragility of Alphas in general? (Not that he felt fragile. But it behooved someone in his line of work not to deny the tendency.) Evenings alone, possibly. He could probably have been doing something more fruitful than watching the new entertainment tapes, except there was something to be said for novelty.
What had struck him, however, was the music. Sure, every time a ship came in, it brought music along with financial data and news and mail and everything else, the pulsebeat of cultural exchange. But one particular tape, called The Lily Chronicles, a volume out of an entertainment series, unsettled him. The storyline was part murder mystery and part fantasy melodrama with metacommentary by cobwebbed puppets, which was odd enough. He had eventually figured out, however, that what really troubled him was the musical conventions.
Jordan hadn't really exposed him and Justin to music in a formal sense, growing up, so this wasn't entirely obvious. Still: he remembered the moment when the Red Knight brought her sickle sword down upon a child, and he would have sworn that the horns over the succession of chords—in waltz time, at that—were sweetly triumphant, except the cinematography and the actress's hollow expression spoke instead of self-damnation. And then it had occurred to him, some scrap he'd overheard from a sound engineer who worked with the tape designers, that maybe the sweetly triumphant chords didn't sound sweet and triumphant to the audience for whom that tape had originally been intended. That maybe it did, to them, evoke self-damnation and betrayal of ideals and terrible turning points.
The idea had seemed preposterous. He'd been convinced that the composer had just misstepped. Then he started looking into musical trends coming from the rest of Union, and he reconsidered. The semantic drift was unmistakable.
Now he was educating himself in the familiar conventions of musical scoring, including the conventions used by tape designers in laying down audio. Some things were simple: heartbeat rhythms, the role of strictly regulated periodicity in an azi's existence since conception. Other things turned out to be more troublesome. A lot of convention was exactly that, convention; and as it turned out, convention was changing in ways that some of the standard tapes could not have accounted for. It wasn't too farfetched that dissonance in the emotional currents induced by tape audio would upset the careful programming. You wouldn't expect this to affect the typical, oh, Eta; but an Alpha, especially an Alpha with a latent sensitivity to aesthetics—that was another matter.
This line of thought was not original to him. Grant had found old papers pointing out the possibility. Psychoacoustics, ethnomusicology, even essays on parameters for algorithmic music generation. More, if he only knew the right keywords to retrieve the information with. He had been bringing himself up to speed on the topics, more of a survey really, so he would have a better idea of what to look for.
Tonight's tape was unusually relaxing, although perhaps that had to do, ironically, with the background music being played when it wasn't excerpts to illustrate various of Earth's classical forms. He came out of the trance slowly, pleasantly; he wasn't humming, but he wouldn't have been surprised if he had been, either.
Shortly afterward, Justin came in. "This isn't fair to you," he said. "I'm sorry." His voice was only slightly slurred.
"No harm done," Grant said easily.
Justin flopped down on the couch and waved off Grant's offer to pour him vodka. "I shouldn't have any more alcohol. But Ari was brooding about that boy"—Valery had rapidly become "that boy" to Justin, at first as a half-deprecating joke, and then with sharp exasperation—"and we weren't going to be productive anyway."
Even Ari had not been able to hide her disappointment with how her effort to reach out to her childhood friend had turned out. If anyone was an expert in how people changed when you were away from them for years, it was Justin. But Justin wouldn't say it to Ari's face, and it was a topic that even Grant touched on very carefully.
"You know," Grant said, "'that boy' wasn't entirely for the bad. I have something I'd like to run by you tomorrow."
Justin pulled a face. "This isn't about those art videos of his, is it? The one with the snakes, and the soft wriggling stars..."
"Not exactly," Grant said. "But it's related to one of those realtime cases from a while back, and it might be useful in the future. Not tonight, though. Maybe I'll catch you for lunch tomorrow?"
"Yes," Justin said, and sighed when Grant moved in to rub his shoulders. "Yes, that'll work. And if I can tell Ari something useful came out of that whole wretched incident, so much the better."
Grant chuckled softly. "Well, I wouldn't be quite that optimistic. But we'll see."