Coulb took a deep breath and then, as if in intentional contrast to the indescribable musical sweep they had just endured, cracked his knuckles. He walked over to the now transparent plate collector, reached beneath the motionless tuning strips, and removed the duar from its braces. In appearance it was unchanged, but when Jon-Tom took it from the kinkajou’s grasp a subtle trembling ran from the instrument through his fingertips and up his arms, drifting away like a lost sigh.
Coulb looked up at him out of wise, gratified eyes. “Now try your instrument, young human.”
Jon-Tom put the strap over his shoulder, let the duar rest against his chest. It felt familiar, comfortable, a part of him. The wood was golden and the strings gleamed like chrome. It had not been restored so much as resurrected.
The first sounds that issued from the resonating chamber when he passed his fingers across the double set of strings were exalted.
Couvier Coulb looked satisfied and found himself a chair. “Play something. Not for magic. For the music.”
Jon-Tom nodded and smiled at the old craftsman. The bond between them transcended such insignificant differences as species. This was to be the kinkajou’s reward. Play he would for the master, something high-spirited and full of life. A celebration.
Too much of a celebration for Mudge, who never had become a heavy metal fan. He ran from the workshop, his paws clapped over his ears. He was followed by a reluctant Weegee and an apologetic Cautious.
Though she winced a lot, Amalm stayed. As for Couvier Coulb, he seemed to drop twenty years. As the smile on his face grew broader he began snapping his fingers and tapping his feet, and his long prehensile tail twitched back and forth behind his chair like a furry metronome. The house went dead quiet for about five minutes before it began to join in, hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence.
Jon-Tom had never felt better in his life. Never played better either, he reflected happily. He bounced and pranced and leaped about the room, even managing an exuberant aerial split à la Pete Townshend. And when he concluded, the sweat pouring from his face and beneath his arms, the breath coming in long sweet sucks, it still was not silent in the workshop. Couvier Coulb was on his feet, applauding mightily.
“Such depth of feeling! Such insight and enthusiasm. Such wanton expression of personal karma.”
“Say what?” Jon-Tom straightened.
“What do you call it?”
“A song for my lady love, who I wish was here to share this moment with me. It’s called ‘The Lemon Song,’ by a quiet bunch of good-natured fellows who named themselves Led Zepplin. Very refined.”
The kinkajou stored this information, then turned and walked toward the back of the workshop. “Come, young man. I have something else to show you.” The twinkle was back in his eyes.
“Please, before I forget, let me pay you. My pack is out in our room.”
“No money. You saved my life. Don’t insult me by offering me money. And you have gifted me with this wonderfully sensitive music of yours as well.” He grabbed Jon-Tom’s hand and pulled him along.
The back wall was filled by a filing cabinet that ran from floor to ceiling. A rolling ladder provided access to the top drawers. Coulb climbed a few steps, halted to trace minuscule labels with one long finger, then opened one of the files. Jon-Tom could see that it was filled from side to side with five-inch-tall bottles of colored glass. They looked a lot like old-fashioned milk bottles except that their stoppers were made of some odoriferous golden-hued resin. The kinkajou removed one bottle and showed it to his young guest.
“The stopper is pure frankincense. I buy it from a trader who visits the Mews once a year from the desert lands. It is the only substance that seals.”
The bottle appeared to be empty. Jon-Tom wasn’t close enough to read the stick-on label. He gestured at the filing cabinet. “What is all this?”
“Why, my music collection, of course. I am a maker of instruments. I can repair or design devices that will produce sounds imagined but not yet heard. I can play many of them passing well. But I cannot compose. I cannot create. So when I am tired or bored I go to my collection.” He pointed toward the now empty gneechee collector.
“The music our little friends produce emerges through the tiny holes in the collector plate. When I am in the mood I place another filter atop it. This filter shrinks down to a tube which I then insert into one of these bottles. Thus do I collect music. Much of it I do not recognize, but that does not keep me from enjoying it. I have become something of an expert on the music of other worlds and dimensions. The gneechees move freely among many. Listen.” He pulled the stopper.
The sound of a symphony orchestra again filled the workshop. Brass rumbled and strings queried. As Coulb began to close the stopper the music reversed itself, playing backward as it was drawn back into the bottle by some unimaginable suction.
“I have been able, by dint of hard work and much study, to identify music and composers.” He squinted at the label. “That was part of the second movement of the Fourteenth Symphony by a gneechee who called himself Beethoven.”
Jon-Tom could hardly breathe. “He wrote only nine symphonies.”
“While he was alive, yes.” Coulb wagged a finger at his guest. “In the gneechee form we all eventually come to inhabit he has continued to compose. Originally from your world, it seems. Let’s see what else I have from the same plane.” He chose another bottle and cracked the stopper.
An oceanic orchestral surge swamped Jon-Tom’s senses. Coulb let him listen a little longer this time, until the last note of the overwhelming crescendo had receded into the far reaches of time and space. It continued to echo in Jon-Tom’s brain.
The kinkajou checked his label. “This one must have been an interesting fellow. It took three bottles to hold all of this composition. Another of your symphonies, this one the Twelfth, by a Gustav Mahler.” He climbed to the top row of drawers, examined the contents of another. “Here is one of my favorites: Prist’in’ikie’s Tanglemorf for Gluzko and Eelmack.”
The sounds that now assailed Jon-Tom’s ears were utterly alien. Atonal without being disorganized, dissonant without being harsh, and extremely complex.
“I don’t know that composer.”
“Doesn’t surprise me, young man. I’m not sure I know the dimension. Gneechees do get around.”
“You’ve heard the kind of music I play. The Beethoven and the Mahler were wonderful but—don’t you maybe have something a little lighter from my neck of the woods?”
“Lighter? Like your own music, you mean?” Jon-Tom nodded. Coulb descended the ladder, opened another new drawer and chose a bottle. The glass was a rich, dark purple.
It contained sounds that were as familiar as they were new and unmistakable. Only one man had ever been able to make such sounds with an electric guitar. It was full of raw, disciplined power.
“Let me guess,” Jon-Tom whispered. “Jimi Hendrix?”
“Yes.” Coulb peered through his thick glasses at the label. “From the Snuff an’ Stuff double album. Bored yet?”
“I don’t think new music could ever bore me, sir. I even liked that Pristinkeewinkie stuff.” He stared silently at the cabinet. It must hold thousands of songs and symphonies and other posthumous unheard compositions by hundreds of long-deceased musicians.
“Call me Couvier. We have a lot to listen to.”
The house shook all that day and on into the night as Coulb played for Jon-Tom pieces of Bartok’s opera, A Modern Salammbo, selections from Wagner’s second Ring cycle, and most of a heartrending album by Jim Morrison.
And when kinkajou and man fell asleep, it was to the haunting strains of Janis Joplin’s “Texas Eulogy.”
Both woke with the sun. Jon-Tom thanked the old kinkajou profusely. Coulb shrugged it off. “Any time you feel the need to refresh your soul with new music, come and visit. The enjoyment one gains from listening is doubled when shared.”
