The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories

  “Another woman said, “Can you play the alto line for us? From ‘Fall on your knees’?”

  This was obviously going to take a while, and I couldn’t afford to wait. I started up the aisle toward them, and the entire choir looked up from their music and glared at me.

  Mr. Ledbetter turned around, and his face lit up. He turned to the women again, said, “I’ll be right back,” and sprinted down the aisle to me. “Meg,” he said, reaching me. “Hi. What—?”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I got your message, and—”

  “You’re not interrupting. Really. We were almost done anyway.”

  “What did you mean, don’t play them any more Christmas carols? I didn’t get your message till after I’d played them some of the other songs from the mall—”

  “And what happened?”

  “Nothing, but on your message you said—”

  “Which songs?”

  “‘Joy to the World’ and—”

  “All four verses?”

  “No, only two. That’s all that were on the CD. The first one and the one about ‘wonders of his love.’”

  “One and four,” he said, staring past me, his lips moving rapidly as if he were running through the lyrics. “Those should be okay—”

  “What do you mean? Why did you leave that message?”

  “Because if the Altairi were responding literally to the words in ‘While Shepherds Watched,’ Christmas carols are full of dangerous—”

  “Dangerous—?”

  “Yes. Look at ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are.’ You didn’t play them that, did you?”

  “No, just ‘Joy to the World’ and ‘White Christmas.’”

  “Mr. Ledbetter,” one of the women called from the front of the church. “How long are you going to be?”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said. He turned back to me. “How much of ‘While Shepherds Watched’ did you play them?”

  “Just the part up to ‘all seated on the ground.’”

  “Not the other verses?”

  “No. What—?”

  “Mr. Ledbetter,” the same woman said impatiently, “some of us have to leave.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he called to her, and to me, “Give me five minutes,” and sprinted back up the aisle.

  I sat down in a back pew, picked up a hymnal, and tried to find “We Three Kings.” That was easier said than done. The hymns were numbered, but they didn’t seem to be in any particular order. I turned to the back, looking for an index.

  “But we still haven’t gone over ‘Saviour of the Heathen, Come,’” a young, pretty redhead said.

  “We’ll go over it Saturday night,” Mr. Ledbetter said.

  The index didn’t tell me where “We Three Kings” was, either. It had rows of numbers—5.6.6.5. and 8.8.7.D.—with a column of strange words below them—Laban, Hursley, Olive’s Brow, Arizona—like some sort of code. Could the Altairi be responding to some sort of cipher embedded in the carol like in The Da Vinci Code? I hoped not.

  “When are we supposed to be there?” the women were asking.

  “Seven,” Mr. Ledbetter said.

  “But that won’t give us enough time to run over ‘Saviour of the Heathen, Come,’ will it?”

  “And what about ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’?” the redhead asked. “We don’t have the second soprano part at all.”

  I abandoned the index and began looking through the hymns. If I couldn’t figure out a simple hymnal, how could I hope to figure out a completely alien race’s communications? If they were trying to communicate. They might have been sitting down to listen to the music, like you’d stop to look at a flower. Or maybe their feet just hurt.

  “What kind of shoes are we supposed to wear?” the choir was asking.

  “Comfortable,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “You’re going to be on your feet a long time.”

  I continued to search through the hymnal. Here was “What Child Is This?” I had to be on the right track. “Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella.” It had to be here somewhere. “On Christmas Night, All People Sing—”

  They were finally gathering up their things and leaving. “See you Saturday,” he said, herding them out the door, all except for the pretty redhead, who buttonholed him at the door to say, “I was wondering if you could stay and go over the second soprano part with me again. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “I can’t tonight,” he said. She turned and glared at me, and I knew exactly what that glare meant.

  “Remind me and we’ll run through it Saturday night,” he said, shut the door on her, and sat down next to me. “Sorry, big performance Saturday. Now, about the aliens. Where were we?”

  “‘We Three Kings.’ You said the words were dangerous.”

  “Oh, right.” He took the hymnal from me, flipped expertly to the right page, pointed. “Verse four. ‘Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying’—I assume you don’t want the Altairi locking themselves in a stone-cold tomb.”

  “No,” I said fervently. “You said ‘Joy to the World’ was bad, too. What does it have in it?”

  “‘Sorrow, sins, thorns infesting the ground.’”

  “You think they’re doing whatever the hymns tell them? That they’re treating them like orders to be followed?”

  “I don’t know, but if they are, there are all kinds of things in Christmas carols you don’t want them doing: running around on rooftops, bringing torches, killing babies—”

  “Killing babies?” I said. “What carol is that in?”

  “‘The Coventry Carol,’” he said flipping to another page. “The verse about Herod. See?” He pointed to the words. “‘Charged he hath this day . . . all children young to slay.’”

  “Oh, my gosh, that carol was one of the ones from the mall. It was on the CD,” I said. “I’m so glad I came to see you.”

  “So am I,” he said, and grinned at me.

  “You asked me how much of ‘While Shepherds Watched’ I’d played them,” I said. “Is there child-slaying in that, too?”

  “No, but verse two has got ‘fear’ and ‘mighty dread’ in it, and ‘seized their troubled minds.’”

  “I definitely don’t want the Altairi to do that,” I said, “but now I don’t know what to do. We’ve been trying to establish communications with the Altairi for nine months, and that song was the first thing they’ve ever responded to. If I can’t play them Christmas carols—”

  “I didn’t say that. We just need to make sure the ones you play them don’t have any murder and mayhem in them. You said you had a CD of the music they were playing in the mall?”

  “Yes. That’s what I played them.”

  “Mr. Ledbetter?” a voice said tentatively, and a balding man in a clerical collar leaned in the door. “How much longer will you be? I need to lock up.”

  “Oh, sorry, Reverend McIntyre,” he said and stood up. “We’ll get out of your way.” He ran up the aisle, grabbed his music, and came back. “You’ll be at the aches, right?” he said to Reverend McIntyre.

  The aches? You must have misunderstood what he said, I thought.

  “I’m not sure,” Reverend McIntyre said. “My handle’s pretty rusty.”

  Handle? What were they talking about?

  “Especially ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’ It’s been years since I last sang it.”

  Oh, Handel, not handle.

  “I’m rehearsing it with Trinity Episcopal’s choir at eleven tomorrow if you want to come and run through it with us.”

  “I just may do that.”

  “Great,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “Good night.” He led me out of the sanctuary. “Where’s your car parked?”

  “Out in front.”

  “Good. Mine, too.” He opened the side door. “You can follow me to my apartment.”

  I had a sudden blinding vision of Aunt Judith glaring disapprovingly at me and saying, “A nice young lady never goes to a gentleman’s apartment alone.”

  “You did say
you brought the music from the mall with you, didn’t you?” he asked.

  Which is what you get for jumping to conclusions, I thought, following him to his apartment and wondering if he was going out with the redheaded second soprano.

  “On the way over I was thinking about all this,” he said when we got to his apartment building, “and I think the first thing we need to do is figure out exactly which element or elements of ‘all seated on the ground’ they’re responding to, the notes—I know you said they’d been exposed to music before, but it could be this particular configuration of notes—or words.”

  I told him about reciting the lyrics to them.

  “Okay, then, the next thing we do is see if it’s the accompaniment,” he said, unlocking the door. “Or the tempo. Or the key.”

  “The key?” I said, looking down at the keys in his hand.

  “Yeah, have you ever seen Jumpin’ Jack Flash?”

  “No.”

  “Great movie. Whoopi Goldberg. In it, the key to the spy’s code is the key. Literally. B flat. ‘While Shepherds Watched’ is in the key of C, but ‘Joy to the World’ is in D. That may be why they didn’t respond to it. Or they may only respond to the sound of certain instruments. What Beethoven did they listen to?”

  “The Ninth Symphony.”

  He frowned. “Then that’s unlikely, but there might be a guitar or a marimba or something in the ‘While Shepherds Watched’ accompaniment. We’ll see. Come on in,” he said, opening the door and immediately vanishing into the bedroom. “There’s soda in the fridge,” he called back out to me. “Go ahead and sit down.”

  That was easier said than done. The couch, chair, and coffee table were all covered with CDs, music, and clothes. “Sorry,” he said, coming back in with a laptop. He set it down on top of a stack of books and moved a pile of laundry from the chair so I could sit down. “December’s a bad month. And this year, in addition to my usual five thousand concerts and church services and cantata performances, I’m directing aches.”

  Then I hadn’t misheard him before. “Aches?” I said.

  “Yeah. A-C-H-E-S. The All-City Holiday Ecumenical Sing. ACHES. Or, as my seventh-grade girls call it, Aches and Pains. It’s a giant concert—well, not actually a concert because everybody sings, even the audience. But all the city singing groups and church choirs participate.” He moved a stack of LPs off the couch and onto the floor and sat down across from me. “Denver has it every year. At the convention center. Have you ever been to a Sing?” he said, and when I shook my head, “It’s pretty impressive. Last year three thousand people and forty-four choirs participated.”

  “And you’re directing?”

  “Yeah. Actually, it’s a much easier job than directing my church choirs. Or my seventh-grade girls’ glee. And it’s kind of fun. It used to be the All-City Messiah, you know, a whole bunch of people getting together to sing Handel’s Messiah, but then they had a request from the Unitarians to include some Solstice songs, and it kind of snowballed from there. Now we do Hanukkah songs and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and ‘The Seven Nights of Kwanzaa,’ along with Christmas carols and selections from the Messiah. Which, by the way, we can’t let the Altairi listen to, either.”

  “Is there children-slaying in that, too?”

  “Head-breaking. ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron’ and ‘dash them in pieces.’ There’s also wounding, bruising, cutting, deriding, and laughing to scorn.”

  “Actually, the Altairi already know all about scorn,” I said.

  “But hopefully not about shaking nations. And covering the earth with darkness,” he said. “Okay”—he opened his laptop—“the first thing I’m going to do is scan in the song. Then I’ll remove the accompaniment so we can play them just the vocals.”

  “What can I do?”

  “You,” he said, disappearing into the other room again and returning with a foot-high stack of sheet music and music books, which he dumped in my lap, “can make a list of all the songs we don’t want the Altairi to hear.”

  I nodded and started through The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs. It was amazing how many carols, which I’d always thought were about peace and goodwill, had really violent lyrics. “The Coventry Carol” wasn’t the only one with child-slaying in it. “Christmas Day Is Come” did, too, along with references to sin, strife, and militants. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” had strife, too, and envy and quarrels. “The Holly and the Ivy” had thorns, blood, and bears, and “Good King Wenceslas” talked about cruelty, bringing people flesh, freezing their blood, and heart failure.

  “I had no idea Christmas carols were so grim,” I said.

  “You should hear Easter,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “While you’re looking, see if you can find any songs with the word ‘seated’ in it so we can see if it’s that particular word they’re responding to.”

  I nodded and went back to reading lyrics. In “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” everyone was standing, not seated, plus it had “fear,” “trembling,” and a line about giving oneself for heavenly food. “The First Noel” had “blood,” and the shepherds were lying, not sitting.

  What Christmas song has “seated” in it? I thought, trying to remember. Wasn’t there something in “Jingle Bells” about Miss Somebody or Other being seated by someone’s side?

  There was, and in “Wassail, Wassail,” there was a line about “a-sitting” by the fire, but not the word “seated.”

  I kept looking. The nonreligious Christmas songs were almost as bad as the carols. Even a children’s song like “I’m Getting’ Nuttin’ for Christmas” gaily discussed smashing bats over people’s heads, and there seemed to be an entire genre of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”–type songs: “Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake,” “I Came Upon a Roadkill Deer,” and “Grandpa’s Gonna Sue the Pants Off Santa.”

  And even when the lyrics weren’t violent, they had phrases in them like “rule o’er all the earth” and “over us all to reign,” which the Altairi might take as an invitation to global conquest.

  There have to be some carols that are harmless, I thought, and looked up “Away in a Manger” in the index (which The Holly Jolly Book, unlike the hymnal, did have): “. . . lay down his sweet head . . . the stars in the sky . . .” No mayhem here, I thought. I can definitely add this to the list. “Love . . . blessings . . .”

  “And take us to heaven to live with thee there.” A harmless enough line, but it might mean something entirely different to the Altairi. I didn’t want to find myself on a spaceship heading back to Aquila or wherever it was they came from.

  We worked till almost three in the morning, by which time we had separate recordings of the vocals, accompaniment, and notes (played by Mr. Ledbetter on the piano, guitar, and flute and recorded by me) of “all seated on the ground,” a list, albeit rather short, of songs the Altairi could safely hear, and another, even shorter list of ones with “seated,” “sit,” or “sitting” in them.

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Ledbetter,” I said, putting on my coat.

  “Calvin,” he said.

  “Calvin. Anyway, thank you. I really appreciate this. I’ll let you know the results of my playing the songs for them.”

  “Are you kidding, Meg?” he said. “I want to be there when you do this.”

  “But I thought— Don’t you have to rehearse with the choirs for your ACHES thing?” I said, remembering the heavy schedule he’d left on his answering machine.

  “Yes, and I have to rehearse with the symphony, and with the chancel choir and the kindergarten choir and the handbell choir for the Christmas Eve service—”

  “Oh, and I’ve kept you up so late,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Choir directors never sleep in December,” he said cheerfully, “and what I was going to say was that I’m free in between rehearsals and till eleven tomorrow morning. How early can you get the Altairi?”

  “They usually come out of their ship around seven, but some of
the other commission members may want to work with them.”

  “And face those bright shiny faces before they’ve had their coffee? My bet is you’ll have the Altairi all to yourself.”

  He was probably right. I remembered Dr. Jarvis saying he had to work himself up to seeing the Altairi over the course of the day: “They look just like my fifth-grade teacher.”

  “Are you sure you want to face them first thing in the morning?” I asked him. “The Altairi’s glares—”

  “Are nothing compared to the glare of a first soprano who didn’t get the solo she wanted. Don’t worry, I can handle the Altairi,” he said. “I can’t wait to find out what it is they’re responding to.”

  What we found out was nothing.

  Calvin had been right. There was no one else waiting outside University Hall when the Altairi appeared. I hustled them into the audio lab, locked the door, and called Calvin, and he came right over, bearing Starbucks coffee and an armload of CDs.

  “Yikes!” he said when he saw the Altairi standing over by the speakers. “I was wrong about the first soprano. This is more a seventh-grader’s ‘No, you can’t text-message during the choir concert—or wear face glitter’ glare.”

  I shook my head. “It’s an Aunt Judith glare.”

  “I’m very glad we decided not to play them the part about dashing people’s heads into pieces,” he said. “Are you sure they didn’t come to Earth to kill everybody?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s why we have to establish communications with them.”

  “Right,” he said, and proceeded to play the accompaniment we’d recorded the night before. Nothing, and nothing when he played the notes with piano, guitar, and flute, but when he played the vocal part by itself, the Altairi promptly sat down.

  “Definitely the words,” he said, and when we played them “Jingle Bells,” they sat down again at “seated by my side,” which seemed to confirm it. But when he played them the first part of “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys and Dolls and “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” they didn’t sit down for either one.