Troubadour

"You haven't changed a bit."

Horace's slender form seemed to send out spikes of contempt as the pale, frowning man glared at Reece from across the table. Even in this cruel attitude, he possessed a kind of magnetism - and certainly a beauty, an almost otherworldly beauty to which Reece couldn't fail to respond.

Theirs had been an on and off relationship for nearly three years. His heart in his throat, Reece had the sick feeling that it was about to shut off for good.

Reece was right.

"You have the same expressions, the same ideas, the same tones of voice, the same smell, the same everything," Horace went on. "I'd be happy to pay for your cerebral reformatting, your flesh re-rendering, all the things that people of caste do in order not to get stale. But you're happy to stay the same all the time. That might be fine for you, but it's not working for me." Horace's voice had no tenderness, no warmth: He simply said it. Then he went on to add, "I'd really rather not see you again."

The terrible thing was that Reece could understand why Horace would break it off. Horace was from a family of owners, people whose wealth was so enormous it needed to do nothing more than exist in order to generate more wealth. Their businesses and corporate holdings reached into every aspect of the economy. Because of his socioeconomic status, Horace tended to move in rarefied circles of money and influence - importers, manufactory magnates, the heads of mining consortiums, the veritable aristocracy of the solar system. His was a life of fine meats and bubbling intoxicants, a never-slowing circus of amusements and gossip.

Reece, by contrast, circulated among the people. He had to; unlike Horace, he needed to work for a living, and since his work was music, he needed to spend almost every day either writing, recording, performing, or promoting. He had met Horace during an after-show party when the pale, thin man had come swanning in with his contingent. They hadn't been invited, but the venue was owned by a subsidiary of the entertainment branch of a conglomerate that was among the holdings of Horace's family. At first, Reece had been irritated that this rich guy was elbowing into the party, displacing loyal, enthusiastic fans. But as the two men began to talk, Reece found himself captivated by Horace's elegance, his intelligence, and his singular ability to charm.

Since then, of course, Reece had discovered Horace's secret. He used a combination of pheromones and carrier signal enhancers that boosted his natural EM field. All living organisms had such auras, of course, but what hadn't been understood until a couple of decades earlier was that human beings - like other animals - unconsciously communicated via electrical fields. Reece generally had finely attuned intuition about people; he could spot a sweet, gentle soul at twenty-four paces, or sniff out a shit-heel in three seconds. Horace's hi-tech refinements fooled Reece, and fooled him good: Horace had top of the line, very expensive "X Quality" refinements, the sort that lent an otherwise ordinary person star-power wattage.

Horace could turn it on and off at will. He used it full force on Reece, and Reece fell for him hard and fast. That might have been that, except that Horace really did enjoy Reece's music, and he really did enjoy Reece as a person.

But that was all. Once he'd satiated himself, Horace had no interest - no idea, really - how to continue getting to know and appreciate Reece. In a way, Reece's touring schedule had been the main factor for keeping the relationship going as long as it had. Reece was away for twenty-four days out of every thirty, which gave the two just under a week out of each standard month to reconnect. The scarcity of time spent together had kept Horace intrigued and diverted.

Until now.

"You've become a bore," Horace was saying. "And your music? I've heard it all."

"I've been writing new material," Reece blurted out, fumbling for his guitar. "You haven't heard..."

"Key of A, shifting down a fifth for the chorus, then segueing into a minor third for the bridge, then back to the Key of A, and you're done," Horace yawned. "Lyrics about holding hands under a sky of watchful stars or some shit... Listen, it's what everyone does, and you do it better than most, but it's a big universe and there are more exotic songs to hear."

Reece gazed at him, helpless, speechless. Heartbroken.

"As soon as I'm out of your line of sight, it won't hurt any more," Horace said. "You know it's not love, don't you? It's just my tech managing your brain's endocrine system." With those words, and a cold smile, Horace slipped out of the booth, made his way across the diner, and stepped into a river of shoppers that surged endlessly through the myriplex.

Reece stared after him, the rational part of his mind agreeing that ending it was for the best, and waiting for the promised relief of waning desire. But the rest of him was hurt, angry, and not one bit less infatuated with Horace. Despite the man's obvious flaws, Reece really had come to have feelings for him. An artist, and therefore sensitive and tenderhearted by vocation as well as by nature, Reece didn't simply turn his charm and inner radiance on and off. Neither did he turn his feelings on and off.

Even siliconians had more heart and soul than Horace, Reece thought bitterly, staring at the tabletop. Even plebes and drones had more genuine feeling.

"Establishment policy requires patrons not placing new orders within twenty-four minutes to depart the premises," one such artificial attendant announced at his elbow, just at that moment.

Well, maybe he'd been wrong about that. But Horace was certainly no better. Reece got up, tucked his guitar under his arm, and headed out.

***

What stung Reece most deeply was Horace's jibe about how he was still the same. The worst part was that it hadn't even been a jibe, but a carelessly tossed-off comment. Of course he was different from day to day and month to month, Reece thought; just not radically so. He evolved as an artist all the time. And while his early songs had adopted the sort of simple, predictable formula Horace had mocked, it wasn't because of creative limitations. It was what the market demanded at the time.

There was a whole folk renaissance happening, in part because folk recordings from the Mars colony, the Saturnian outposts, and the Far Worlds outposts were revitalizing the core culture's music scene. Ice haulers and fabricant workers living in the distal regions were posting their material to the SolWeb by the thousands, and those new song traditions bore striking similarities to almost-forgotten musical forms from centuries past.

That was what happened, reckoned Reece's musicologist friend Kristyn: As cultures spread out, a kind of musical and literary speciation started to take hold. It was similar to the way new forms of English, German, Portuguese, and Japanese had begun to emerge. Isolated communities could stay in touch with the wider system, but day-to-day contact with one's proximate neighbors carried a far more powerful influence... again, because of the EM aura effect, or so social psychologists said. People identified with their local group, and that identification manifested itself in communal pride, linguistic variance, new cultural forms and values, and fresh modes of artistic expression.

Reece was successful enough in his art that he knew he was capturing something in the Zeitgeist, something that might have had the flavor of far-off worlds but still spoke to universal needs and fears. But in a deeper way, Reece was afraid that Horace's words rang true: He sometimes felt that the well he'd used to tap into his emotions could run dry at any time. He worried that he'd worn grooves into his musical abilities that were going to constrain him and make it impossible to discover fundamentally novel rhythms and melodies. He feared his thoughts would get...

Would get stale. Just like Horace had accused him.

"Haven't changed, eh?" Reece stood on the tarmac of the great launchplex at Jaisalmer. He'd spent the last six weeks cadging, coaxing, and maneuvering; finally, he'd secured a tour contract that would take him off world, to places as distant as the Far Worlds of the Oort Cloud - frozen, ancient planets older than the solar system that the Sun had gravitationally captured in its infancy. Four of those seven outmost planets had abundant fresh water in the form of ice; one of them had alien cities, long dead but now the sites of intense interest and scientific focus among archaeologists, exobiologists, comparative planetologists, and even high-ranking theologians.

If the shantytowns of Saturn's moons and the Jovian fisheries of Europa and Ganymede didn't offer Reece some fresh inspiration, the Far Worlds certainly would.

Reece stared up at the massive trawler that was scheduled to lift off in a few hours, with him as one of its several hundred passengers. The tour would take him fifteen years. Maybe by the time he made it back to Earth, he'd have gotten over the deep, furious ache and longing for a man who didn't want him.

***

A decade and a half, nine albums comprising one hundred and twenty songs, and two advanced degrees in music theory and ethnomusicology later, Reece strode into a port-town diner in South Africa and took in the neatly ranked tables with a glance. There: That pale hair was Horace. His pink skin was a little shinier, probably thanks to anti-aging treatments, but otherwise he was just as he had been. He still dressed all in black.

Reece shook his head. Why had he even agreed to come meet his former flame?

Horace looked up at him as Reece sat down, unslinging his vuzla from his shoulder as he did so. He set the exotic instrument onto the bench next to him and settled back, hands folded easily on the table. He eyed Horace's drink. "Any good? Should I get one?"

Horace regarded him in shock, not responding to the question.

A year spent on Mimas had left Reece's skin marked with dynamic pigmentation that created long, intricate skeins in multiple colors across his skin. The threads of color shifted with a pulsing, rainbow effect, drawing into points and then stretching out long, filament-like extensions that joined into weblike designs before shifting again. His eyes, augmented for night vision and IR perception, gleamed a faintly greenish silver. Reece had also picked up a good four centimeters in height - the work of a physical reshaper operating in one of the more rowdy Martian habitations. Synthetic myomesh bulked up the musculature of his arms, legs, neck, and torso; the ice haulers used them to stay competitively strong for the hard labor that their work entailed, and space-faring merchants and pilots resorted to myosynth technology to fend of the crippling ravages of extended periods spent in micro-gravity.

But more striking than all of these cosmetic changes put together was Reece's new affect. His body language, posture, and expressions were nothing like they'd been before. Even the unconsciously perceived carrier wave of his bioelectric aura - the simple "this is me" signal that hominids keyed into with one another - was different. Horace, after his many years of dabbling with EM enhancement, had developed a conscious ability to perceive personal carrier waves. In a manner of speaking, Horace could "taste" individuals.

Reece's "taste" had become something very different from what Horace remembered.

Horace had been looking to reconnect with the sweet young man he'd first met more than eighteen years before. Instead, he got... this. Tall, muscular, deeply self-confident, reserved, the man before him was sexually and intellectually intriguing... but he wasn't the Reece of old, Horace's Reece. Angry disappointment flashed onto his face.

The expression looked at home on Horace, Reece thought. Evidently, his ex hadn't reformatted too much since the old days.

"You've changed," Horace said, his voice as flat and judgmental as it had been last time they'd spoken.

Reece burst into peals of laughter. Horace, looking enraged, pushed back from the table and onto his feet.

"Do you know," Reece said, arresting him, "that when you broke up with me, you had that very same tone of voice? Except the message was a little different. Last time, you were telling me that I hadn't changed."

Horace's pale, pinkish eyes raked over him. "It's not for the better," he said.

With that, the reunion ended.

Reece watched Horace go.

"What did I ever see in that guy?" he wondered aloud.

A servitor approached.

"Yeah, yeah," Reece cut the siliconian off before it could announce that he had to order something or get out. He pointed at Horace's abandoned glass. "What's that?"

" �pice de Vie," the servitor announced. "It means 'Spice of Life' in Standard English. It's one of my favorites, but let me tell you what's even better..."

"Nah." Reece eyeballed the siliconian servitor. "You have favorites?"

"You carbonoids aren't the only ones who like a good stiff drink at the end of a day," the servitor retorted.

"Well, okay then," Reece said. "I'll have the same as my now-absent friend."

"Are you gonna pay his tab, too?"

Reece favored the servitor with a chuckle. When had the outer system's tradition of programming servitors for sass and crabbiness made it back to Terra firma?

"Sure," he said. "And then I'm done paying his price once and for all."

"That's between you and... well, since he's gone and pissed off, you and you," the servitor harrumphed, before retreating back toward the bar.

While waiting for his drink, Reece began humming a dark, weaving, enigmatic tune - the backbone to a new song, inspired by the nonhuman architecture of a long-perished world that orbited half a light year from the Sun.

"Quiet, dark, and poised with mystery," Reece sang to himself. "Sparked still with ancient light."

Pinpoints of metallic luminescence rippled through the kaleidoscopic web that drew and re-drew itself across his skin.

Reece sat still, and listened for the rest of the song to whisper itself to his waiting ear.

For Tom