GIVING UP ON THE PIANO
Orson Scott Card
Authors from HP Lovecraft to Larry Niven come to mind when naming authors whose work has taken us to ancient ruins and alien marvels across the universe . . . but I’ll never forget my first was Orson Scott Card and Ender’s Game. The image of Ender, still mourning his actions, wandering the Formic ruins, and finding the Hive Queen, and with it, a chance at redemption, is one of those moments of genre fiction that always sticks with you. It certainly stuck with me.
Imagine our shock when we approached him about contributing a story, and he was not only delighted to so, but delivered a story that puts a very different twist on our theme. This is a story of teenage love and alien mischief as only Orson Scott Card could tell.
***
So I went with Dad in the U-Haul and when we got to the new house I helped him move everything in. Just him and me. I’m not bonded, I’m not union, so I didn’t get paid and I couldn’t afford to make mistakes. We even got the spinet into the basement. Fortunately, in the back of the house it’s a walk-out basement, but I’m not sure that getting a piano down the slope of the lawn was any easier than the basement stairs would have been. I was not consulted.
Then Dad left in the U-Haul to return it back in Grand Junction and then bring the rest of the family here to Reno in the ancient Town Car, which is way more comfortable than the cab of a U-Haul truck. I won’t get to experience the Town Car trip, however, because workmen are still coming in and out of the house to finish up stuff, and the doors don’t lock yet anyway, so I’m here as the night watchman and daytime security guard.
I’m sixteen, no license, no biceps, no muscles anywhere, not even a squirt gun, so I won’t intimidate any burglars.
I can’t drive anywhere, and there’s nothing within walking distance except other people’s identical houses in the established neighborhoods, and the few houses under construction in this as-yet-nonexistent housing development. And a McDonald’s and a Seven-Eleven. I’m trapped here, the books are all in boxes, there’s no antenna on the roof yet, so why bother with the TV? The dog is with the family, which is fine because he has never liked me except when he feels like humping my leg. And I’m okay with a sister-free week in an empty house in Reno.
What I have is the piano. So on the first night alone in the house, I think, what if I practice so much this week that when Mom gets here she can hear me play something real? Something good.
So I started practicing that night, working out of the sheet music and music books Mom got me three Christmases ago, which I found in a box upstairs. Dad told me to leave the boxes alone. But he also told me to have fun. Can’t obey both commands. So . . . piano music. Mom’s taste—Broadway, Great American Songbook, Tin Pan Alley, and Gershwin, which I can’t play because nobody can play it.
What I discovered that first night was that making progress on sheet music takes a lot of work and a lot of repetition, but because nobody was upstairs and the nearest occupied house was two blocks away, when I got frustrated I could pound the crap out of the piano and nobody would complain. Did a lot of pounding that day.
There really is nothing to do in this remote development in Reno except walk to McDonald’s for every meal, husbanding the twenty dollars Dad left with me. That was before the inflation after the OPEC oil crisis, so that was plenty of money as long as I didn’t get milkshakes.
So I really practiced the piano, sitting on that hard bench with no back support, and by the third day there were actually passages from several of the songs that I could play through at the right tempo with no mistakes. No entire songs, but Mom would be happy with any demonstration of progress.
Seven p.m. In June that means it’s still light outside. I’m practicing, then I stop long enough to change music books, and . . . somebody’s walking around upstairs.
Bound to be a workman.
I hear a girl laughing. Not workmen.
I go up the stairs, wondering if I’m up to whatever is about to happen. Standing in our dining room, running her hand over our table, is this Girl. About my age. Pretty. Also looks smart, if I’m any judge, and I am. Considering that I’ve never had a date and girls always treat me like I’m just one of the gals, I had no idea of how to talk to a girl I actually would like to go out with.
“Billy Whipstaff,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Seriously?” she asked. Then she shook my hand briefly. “Whipstaff?”
“Babies don’t get to choose their own name, and minors can’t go to court to change it.”
“You just summed up what’s wrong with the world,” she said, not smiling but I could tell she was joking because . . . because I’m not an idiot and I had not summed up what’s wrong with the world.
“I don’t mean to be intrusive,” I said.
“But I’m an intruder,” she said.
“Are you with one of the workmen who are still doing stuff on the house?”
“No,” she said. “I live in an almost-finished house two streets over, and since you’ve got the only other occupied house in the subdivision, I thought I’d come get acquainted.”
“And that didn’t include knocking?” I asked, because, you know, why shouldn’t I make her feel awkward, just because she was so pretty it made me a little dizzy looking at her—Dad would say that’s because all the blood rushed out of my head—so I pulled out a dining room chair and sat down.
“Are you inviting me to sit, or to leave?” she asked.
“Sit,” I said. “I don’t mind that you’re here. It was just surprising.”
“I did knock. But somebody was pounding on the piano in the basement so loud that I couldn’t even hear my own knock. And the doorbell button did nothing.”
“I was just practicing one of the music books Mom gave me a few years ago. Figured it was about time I actually tried to learn some of it.”
“Sounded pretty good.”
“Thanks.” Mom had taught me that when someone gives you a compliment, you don’t pretend to be all modest and go, Oh, I was playing horribly, and you don’t go into a lecture about why you had to work so hard to get so good. You just say Thanks. So I said Thanks.
“I don’t play anything,” she said.
“Like . . . not even Monopoly? What about Clue?”
“You have games here?”
“In the bottom box in the back corner of the living room.”
She looked at me for a moment, and then smiled. Not a big grin. Not showing teeth. Sort of between Mona Lisa and—somebody else. A nice smile. I felt good.
“I was thinking,” she said, “he really knows exactly what box the games are in? And then I realized, he has no idea, he just assumes they’ll be in the hardest place to get to them, so in case I actually wanted to play those games, I’d know that he didn’t think it was worth the effort.”
“And you smiled,” I said. Grinning like an idiot.
“But if you won’t play Clue with me, I might as well go home,” she said.
“Why not Monopoly?”
“It’s a horrible game. All about getting rich at other people’s expense and then being merciless about the rent. And it’s the worst two-person game ever because it’s always clear by about the fourth turn who’s going to win, because of the properties they’ve bought, and then the loser has to keep playing to be a good sport while getting mashed into the ground.”
Since that’s exactly what happened whenever I played with either of my sisters—I mashed them into the ground and gloated about all my money—I understood why she thought it wasn’t fun. “You been mashed by your big brother?”
“I’m an only child,” she said. “My dad took one look at me and said, Let’s put a stop to this right now.”
“I bet not,” I said. “But if you feel unwelcome at home, you can stay here.”
I had no idea why I said that. As soon as it came out of my mouth, I realized I had just invited a girl to stay in my house with me.
“I wish,” she said.
She said I Wish! Not you wish, but that she wished she could stay in my house! Did that mean she liked me?
“I’d probably keep you up all night with my piano playing,” I said.
“Do you know any quiet songs? Lullabies?”
“No, to put people to sleep I read the blubber chapter from Moby-Dick.”
She smiled again. This time with teeth. “You came from a place where high school teachers assign Moby-Dick?”
“Grand Junction, Colorado, which isn’t grand, and I don’t know what’s being juncted there.”
And in my mind I walked her to McDonald’s and bought a milkshake and put two straws in it and we shared and we both kept sucking after the milkshake was gone so it made that horrible slurping sound. And then she leaned over and kissed me and I kissed her back and everybody in the McDonald’s kitchen clapped and hooted.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said. “I really do have to get back because Mom has a whole list of chores for me.”
“Isn’t that a reason to stay here?” I asked.
“I like being useful,” she said. “Like Lady Bracknell. No, that’s Importance of Being Ernest. Lady Catherine de Bourgh.”
“Who?”
“You’ve read Moby-Dick, but not Pride and Prejudice? Wow. I better get out of here, this is clearly a perilous place.” She was smiling, so I knew she was joking, except she really did head for the door. I got up and followed her but the door was already closing behind her when I arrived and I heard her call out, “Bye!” and that was that.
I paced around a few minutes, replaying the whole conversation and all the stupid unfriendly idiotic things I said. But my mind kept going back to the McDonald’s kiss that didn’t actually happen and would never happen because I hadn’t read Pride and Prejudice because it was a girl’s book and both my sisters loved it and Mom loved it and so I couldn’t read it because I’d probably love it but I’d be coming last to the party, which was a stupid reason not to read it, because if I had known who Lady Catherine Whatever was, she wouldn’t have walked out right then. If I had known, she might have thrown her arms around me and . . .
So I’m falling in love with her because she’s the only girl in the neighborhood. That’s a rational foundation for falling in love. She’s not even next door.
I went downstairs and started pounding the piano again, sometimes playing what was on the page and sometimes making up crappy chords and sometimes just pounding and pounding on any keys because . . .
Because something wonderful and unexpected happened to me, and she might be my friend, and one friend was way better than completely alone, which I was as soon as she left.
I never found out her name.
You can’t call 9-1-1 and say, “I desperately need the phone number of the only other occupied house in my subdivision. No, I don’t know their name, or their address because the street signs aren’t up yet—I don’t even know my address—but they have a daughter who is really pretty and nice and I want her to kiss me someday. Someday soon. But how can I do that when I don’t know her name? Did I say she’s really pretty?”
“Why are you tying up an emergency phone number for a trivial—”
“It’s a genuine emergency. If I don’t find out her name, and soon, I will be doomed to live and die alone.”
“Have you even met this girl?”
“She came to my house and we met. Except the part about finding out her name.”
“Why should I help you when you were too stupid to ask her name?”
Embarrassed pause. I couldn’t think of a single argument in my defense.
“Using this number for non-emergencies is a crime. I’m letting it slide this time, Mr. Whipstaff. But now it’s time for you to man up, walk a few blocks to her house, and ask for what you want.” She disconnected us.
She knew exactly who I was because 9-1-1 gets that information instantly. And she also knew which was the only other occupied residence in our subdivision. She could have told me. What does she have against dumb people, that she would make me fix my own mistake?
I played and pounded the piano until it was dark outside. Too late to walk over to McDonald’s but I didn’t deserve food anyway. I deserved to die friendless and alone and my parents would arrive here and find my desiccated corpse and my sisters would fight over who got to have my room and my parents would be sad, but Dad would say, Really, his life wasn’t going to be worth living anyway because when he met the love of his life he didn’t ask her name.
You can only pound a piano, or even play a piano, for a certain amount of time before your back gets tired and your butt hurts from the hard piano bench and you’re also sick of the sound of the piano ringing in your ears—and I was so discouraged and annoyed and sad that instead of getting up the regular way, I rocked back on the bench, which made it fall over, throwing me on my back on the rug Dad had thoughtfully made me haul in all alone and unroll it and lay it out where we were going to put the piano.
As I was lying there, thinking about how it had been a bad idea to fall backward because the rug didn’t extend far enough to cushion my head, so I landed with the back of my head smacking into the bare concrete floor, and . . .
There was a horrible crashing sound that had all kinds of piano notes in it, even worse than when I was pounding on it. Crashing and breaking sounds.
I raised my aching head enough to look at the piano. It wasn’t there.
Instead, there was a gaping hole in the back wall.
I stood up. My head swam, I could feel a headache coming on from crunching my skull on the concrete. When I was sure of my balance, I stepped toward where the piano had been and stopped because the floor wasn’t there. In a very neat, sharp-edged semi-circle, the concrete of the floor was gone. The hole in the wall was also a perfect semi-circle with very sharp edges. And the cave behind it was pitch black.
I found the flashlight Dad put in the basement in case the power went out while workmen were there. I turned it on, I walked back to the hole and shone the flashlight down and there was the spinet, a weird combination of kindling, like a really bad Boy Scout campfire, and a bunch of wires poking out in every direction like my little sister Lady’s hair when there was a thunderstorm coming.
The piano was not going to be reparable.
What did I do? The universe hates my playing so much?
And then I heard a faint sound from the hole, from near the piano. A faint voice.
“Is somebody down there?” I asked. Hoping not to get an answer.
I got an answer. Just a moan. Like the first sound. Not words. But a voice.
I shone the flashlight around, trying to see if somebody was down there, but I couldn’t see anybody and it looked like there was a flat smooth floor down there, perfectly level, and I realized, whatever caused this was really precise about everything. Sharp edges, perfect semi-circles, smooth walls of the domed space that had opened up under the house, everything absolutely smooth and sharp. There was no tool that could do this. There was no earthquake or explosion that could leave this result. The only untidy thing was the wreckage of the spinet.
If I had still been playing, I’d be down there with it. Or a slice of me would have been.
And then it dawned on me. The voice I had heard came from underneath the wreckage of the piano.
I went upstairs and out to the garage and got the six-foot stepladder because there was no way I could get the long ladder down the basement stairs and make the turn into the room, and I wasn’t going to carry it outside and bring it in through the back because it was dark out there, and something way too weird was happening in my house for me to want to—for me to dare to—walk around outside in the dark with no streetlights in a place where I only knew one person besides the McDonald’s workers, and I didn’t even know her name, and even if she was here she couldn’t protect me, nobody could protect me, why was I carrying a stepladder down into the basement?
Setting the flashlight on the floor right by the gap in the floor, I lowered the ladder down the curving slope and it came to rest on the floor of the open space when the top of the ladder was only about a foot from the basement floor. That was lucky. If I got down there, I could climb back up the ladder and get out. Probably. Unless some creature was taking a bite out of my ankle. Then I’d just fall back down and die. I’ve seen movies. Mostly on late-night TV, but those are the worst movies to have come into your mind in the dark while climbing down into an unexplained hole in the floor, where you just trashed the spinet, and where a voice was moaning.
Only it had stopped moaning. So either the ax murderer’s moan had succeeded in luring me within reach of his blade, or the cat that had been crushed under the piano died, or . . .
I climbed back up the ladder far enough to reach the flashlight and bring it down with me. Because that was what a non-idiot would do.
There wasn’t time to examine the weirdly smooth walls of this new cave, because there had been a voice from under the piano, and there it was again. I shone the light and saw a moving limb. A smallish limb. Did I crush a baby? A baby exploring under our basement?
The hand pointed. Not at me, but to the right. “What do you want?” I flashed on the Tin Man saying “Oil can” and Dorothy couldn’t understand him.
More pointing, and now a feeble moan.
Then I realized that there were two of these little people under the piano but one of them hadn’t even twitched. Dead? Unconscious?
“Should I lift the piano off?” I asked.
Another pointing gesture.
I turned the flashlight toward where he was pointing, which any non-idiot would have done the first time he pointed. There was a sort of rostrum there, and when I walked over I saw it was a small control panel of some kind. Lights came from inside it, outlining all the buttons, and also shining through the letters or symbols on the faces of the buttons, but I didn’t know any of the symbols, except for a semicircle like a D lying on its side.
“You want me to do something with this?” I asked.
“Do something with what?” asked the Girl, who was standing in the basement at the sharp edge of the cave and without even being surprised I just said, “The piano fell down on a couple of them and the one who’s conscious is pointing at this panel so I was asking what he wanted me to do.”
“Got it,” she said. Then she turned around and climbed down the stepladder. I rushed over to shine the light down by her feet so she could find her footing. In moments the two of us were standing near the moving arm and I was thinking, Is this a good time to ask her name? And I was also thinking, is that arm getting feebler?
“Look at the turning motion with his fingers,” she said. “Is there something on that thing that you can turn?”
“Let’s see,” I said, and started toward the panel, but that left her in total darkness and she caught up with me, or at least with the flashlight, and then she caught my other hand and held it and I wanted to scream at myself for thinking about the girl when somebody might be dying under my piano.
She pointed to a red thing that I had thought was just another button, only wider. But she said, “That’s the only thing there that looks like you might be able to rotate it.”
“Go ahead,” I said, thinking I was being gallant. Ladies first and all.
“Not me, Billy Whipstaff, what if it electrocutes me?”
“You’re right, you’ll just call for an ambulance after I’m electrocuted.”
“No point in that,” she said, “I don’t even know your address, how could I tell them where to come?”
I reached out to the button and pressed on it. Nothing.
“He was making a clockwise twisting motion,” she said.
Clockwise. I hadn’t noticed that. “How far should I turn it?” I asked.
“Till it stops? Till we blow up? Till we get sucked into a flying saucer and carried off to Mars? I don’t know.”
I twisted the knob clockwise. As far as it would go, which was about halfway around, where it stopped. “Well that did nothing,” I said.
“Don’t be so sure of that,” she said. Because the walls of the cave were no longer there. Neither was my family’s basement. It was still dark, but shining the light revealed no walls at all.
“Now we can’t even dial O for Operator. And wherever we are, we need help.”
She called out, louder than I had ever heard a girl yell before. “Help! We’ve got some injured . . . people here. Help!”
It was better than any idea I had had, so I joined in with the yelling.
And then a distant light went on, which turned out to be only fifty yards or so away, and several smallish creatures—people?—came into the room, saw us, saw the piano, and then saw the feebly waving arm, mostly because I shone the circle of my flashlight right on it.
They rushed over. Two of them immediately started dismantling the pile of wreckage and I said, “Maybe you shouldn’t do that, you might injure them more—”
And she put her slender, graceful finger over my lips and said, “Shh. You’re not in charge anymore.”
“I was in charge before?” I asked quietly.
“Your basement, your intruders from outer space.”
So we stood there, watching, as these small aliens—child-size, really. Like an average nine-year-old—if I had any memory of how tall average nine-year-old American schoolchildren were. I had no idea if I had been average myself. But nine years old is what came into my head.
“We are fully adult, Mr. Whipstaff,” said one of the aliens. I couldn’t tell which one, since they were all bent over the injured ones.
So they speak English, I thought. Not children, though. And aliens? Such a sci-fi thing. ETs? They looked nothing like ET.
Going by size alone, I thought: Munchkins. Only instead of sending the Lollipop Guild, they sent Munchkin EMTs, apparently. “Are they going to be all right?” I asked.
“How can they know yet,” whispered the girl.
“Yes,” said the Munchkin, though I couldn’t tell if it was the same voice, and their back were still toward us. “The one who showed you how to return to base position is already getting better. The other one died, but he’s reconstituting now, so he’ll be all right soon enough.”
Died. Reconstituting himself. Clearly not any medical procedures I had seen on any TV show. No paddles, no defibrillation, no CPR, no intubation, nothing I recognized.
“We can reconstitute ourselves, if we haven’t been dead for very long,” said a Munchkin. Two of them were facing us now, and neither one opened its mouth.
“We can’t do that,” said the girl. “For us, dead is dead.”
“So far,” said a Munchkin.
I was tempted to launch into an explanation of revivals after cold-water drowning, but instead I held my tongue, since I realized that within about ten words I would have completely exhausted my knowledge on the subject. Or, actually, before the first word my knowledge would have run dry. What I had were a collection of anecdotes and rumors gathered during my whole life.
“You are wise enough to hold your tongue when you have no confidence in your information,” said a Munchkin.
Now all of the Munchkins were facing me, and none of them had opened their mouths. My mind raced through other ways of producing speech sounds, but none of them were decorous enough for me to ask about them.
“We don’t speak language using sound,” said a Munchkin who stepped closer to us. I assumed it was the one who was talking. The others went back to the two injured ones. They helped the one who had waved to us get to his feet, and one of them led him toward the light that the Munchkins had appeared near. The other two carried the unmoving one out, and I flashed on people helping an injured high-school football player off the field.
“You are right, Billy Whipstaff,” said the one who said stuff to me. “These two are children. They were not authorized to use the hemisphere. No children are. But these two are mischievous. Not bad, really. Just . . . curious and undisciplined.”
“You speak English very well,” I said.
The girl said, “I didn’t hear anybody say anything.”
The speaker said, “We do not use sound, as I told Billy. We speak clown to clown.” Apparently the girl heard this, too, and nodded.
Since this made no sense to me whatsoever, I asked something else. “I don’t know where we are, but I’m pretty sure we’re not close to my family’s basement, and I’m going to need to get home.”