Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 30

"Hmm. Kay, why don't we just tell the truth? We're replicating a violin."

"But that would give it all away...oh!"

"n.o.body's going to know what violin is in that tank. We'll just have some practice violin lying around and everyone will think that was the scan object."

Where would we get that? "I hate to say this; it's like a breach of security, but we need someone with a violin and an extra set of strings to put on the replica when it comes out."

"Terri plays the violin. And she's got a 1789 Figer-not a Stradivarius, but it looks old."

I had to ask, didn't I? The thought of her playing the Mendelssohn violin concerto made me want to puke. Couldn't she leave any of my men alone? "Don't you know someone else? Any old fiddle will probably do."

"You can trust Terri."

He grinned at me, the jerk. I groaned.

"She'll help us; I know she will."

"You know she will? Ted, what did you tell her?"

"I didn't tell her everything, but I had to break a date."

I felt like a hundred-meter-long lobster had seized my stomach with his claw. Terri's pillow talk is legendary. I kept my cool, oh yes. But I think I might have had some tears in my eyes, then.

He melted and put an arm around me. "Sure, Kay, sure. All I want from Terri right now is a violin and a tuning. She's just a violin object, okay?"

"A violin object. Right." Somehow I nodded.

Two hours later, Terri looked at the stringless violin in the block of plastic matrix and laughed. "First, you don't just restring a violin like this. The bridge will fall down as soon as you wash that stuff off, and then the sound post will probably move."

"Fall down?" Ted said.

"Sound post?" I chimed in.

Terri held her instrument up with a superior smile on her face. "Look inside, through the F-holes. See that wood dowel standing between the front and back? The tone of the violin depends on that being in just the right place and it's not glued. It just sits there, held in place by the pressure the strings put on the bridge above it. You need a special tool to get it back in place and hours of fiddling around with it. And the bridge has to be put up at exactly the right angle too, or the violin won't sound the same."

"It hasn't moved yet," I observed.

"But I can't restring it inside that stuff." Terri folded her arms and raised her eyebrows.

"Suppose," Ted said, "I just wash the stuff off the top. You could restring it and set the bridge up, then I'll wash the rest out."

"What do you wash it with?" Terri asked. "Water would ruin it."

"It's not water-Dr. Molar designed something that turns the matrix into carbon dioxide, methane and something else. I forget what, but you just squirt the solvent over it and it vaporizes."

Terri took a deep breath. "Okay, Teddy. For you, I'll try it. But I don't think it will fool him."

It will if you keep your mouth shut, I thought. "We've got to try at this point," I said.

No, we didn't I could give the whole thing up.

No, I couldn't.

Terri smiled at me. "It's going to take a while, Kay."

I wanted to tell Ted to wipe that silly grin off his face and smash the "1789 Figer" over its owner's head. But she was holding the violin and all the cards.

So I smiled back. "Okay. Gotta book. Thanks. See you." Outside it was dark, thank goodness. I didn't want anyone to see my face like that.

I buried myself in books Monday night while Terri and Ted took care of stringing the replicated violin, etc. Yeah, it was an abject surrender, but I had a final Wednesday and cla.s.ses Tuesday. I had to sleep. Pa.s.sion is one thing, the rest of your life is something else. Grades were the rest of my life. Ted would be loyal or not, but I had to book, had to.

That night, I dreamed of sleeping with Andre Stevens for a grade. He took what he wanted, then laughed at me when I asked for the grade and gave me an F. I was about to deck him when I realized his laugh was my computer telling me it was time to get up and get going.

I didn't recognize the woman looking back at me from the mirror. Three months of nonstop tension, climbing rope ladders in subzero cold, and all-nighters with nothing to eat and I looked like I was halfway to that dreaded thirty. A touch of frost in the hair and I could be a prof. Weight problem? What weight problem?

No time for breakfast, even. Throw something on, grab the books, lock the door, and head for campus. Head back. I'd forgotten the lights-fifty cents of electricity. Fifty cents a day was fifteen dollars a month-a good part of my disposable budget. And it was raining. I slogged back through the mud to turn them off, grabbed a raincoat, locked the door again and started trotting for Calculus cla.s.s. There wouldn't, I realized, be time to see Ted and the violin replica. What kind of girlfriend, I thought, leaves her squeeze all day with another woman for a fifty-cent light bill?

On the other hand, with the violin project known, maybe I shouldn't be around. Let's make my being late a strategic decision to maintain the element of surprise. Strategic decision, h.e.l.l, I thought as I pulled the door to Jobs Hall open. You forgot to turn the lights off.

By the time the week was over, I was headed for B's in everything but Music Appreciation, with an outside chance at an A in calculus. I'd even managed to get Ted for a night-Wednesday-and saw the violin. We talked and planned until two A.M.

A couple of days before the concert, I went downstairs in the science building to see Ted to tell him what happened, and I saw him and Terri making out down in the Physics lab a.s.sistant's room. So I said "'scuse me," and left. Ted had won the conference meet-d.a.m.n near seventy meters, and he was getting his reward, I guess. That giant lobster got hold of my gut again. I kind of collapsed on that little bench outside the room. I'd had such hopes and plans. Well, we still had the project. We could at least finish that together.

They came out a little later and Terri waved a cheery goodbye, leaving me with Ted. He came over. I looked up into his eyes. He pulled me up and put his arms around me while I got a little wet-eyed but I clamped down on the cry. I wasn't going to fall that low.

"Kay, Kay," he murmured. "I wish I could be two people."

I thought of knocking him out and of using the replicator. I really did. Terri could have one Ted, and I'd have the other.

"Just give me a little room," my Ted said. "I need to sort this out. I still like you. I like you a lot.

You're bright, you're competent. I'm just fighting my chemistry."

I just looked up at him and did something really stupid. "Ted," I said. "I love you-and she can't give you that." It was the first time either of us had ever said that word and it was most definitely uncool. But, again, I was feeling a little desperate. Terri just didn't deserve someone like Ted-she deserved a real jock, the dumb kind.

"Gee, I wish you hadn't said that, Kay."

"Yeah, me too. But there it is. Deal with it."

The last concert was Friday night. Stevens would take the violin home to practice Wednesday and Thursday night, so our only chance to switch the violins was Tuesday night. Ted gave me the violin and the remote Tuesday, between my calc final and the final torture session in Stevens' cla.s.s.

"Can you handle this alone?" he asked. "I've got other plans."

I could figure that one out. But I wasn't going to give up now. "No sweat," I said in my best competent, liberated tone of voice. "I have the drill down cold."

He smiled and looked a little guilty.

We taped a cardboard box into some semblance of a violin case, and soon I was trotting off down the quad with a stolen Stradivarius.

Except it wasn't a real Stradivarius. Or was it? How could one tell? And what was its value? I had a sudden glimpse of a future in which our little escapade would not be seen as a harmless student prank.

There was a lot of money tied up in things that were supposedly unique. Maybe my folks should have named me Pandora.

In Minnesota, on daylight savings time, within a month of the longest day of the year, it stays light pretty late. I waited in an open practice room-they should have kicked me out, I guess, but no one did.

Besides the practice stool, it had a nice comfortable chair. So, yup, with all the stress and lost sleep and everything I was out cold by the time my rear end got comfortable.

It was twilight when I woke up. I snuck out under the gray, got below the window and opened my bag, partly hidden by the bushes. It was still pretty light, I thought-better wait a little while longer. Then I noticed something funny-it was light in the wrong part of the sky.

I looked at my watch. 4:50 A.M. A jogger ran by and waved at me. No way was I going to cat-burgle this morning-Stevens' office window faced east. I sat down in the gra.s.s and pounded my head and cried. The whole thing was over. One screw-up, and it was all over.

Determined to get the bad news over with and deal with it, I found Ted.

"I didn't make the switch," I said. "I fell asleep waiting for the coast to clear."

"Oh, oh." Ted said. He looked as miserable as I felt. "Then you've still got our replica?"

I nodded, miserably. I was deep into self-loathing. I thought about how to end it all-it wasn't cold enough out to freeze anymore, but the Mississippi was just a few blocks away, and the fall from the LakeStreet bridge would probably stun me enough to let me drown in peace.

"Hmm," Ted said. "Maybe it doesn't matter. If the violins are identical, atom for atom, there would be no way to prove that one you have isn't his violin. You could just go on with the plan as if you had made the switch."

I shook my head. "He'd just say I was lying. How could I prove otherwise? I should have taken archaeology. Then I could go on a field trip down to the Yucatan and sift for shards of some ancient cannibal's chamber pot while being eaten alive by AIDS-bearing mosquitoes."

But even when I'm emoting nonsense, Ted's a stickler for accuracy-an engineering disease, they say. "I don't think," he said, "there were cannibals in the Yucatan, I've never heard of them using chamber pots, and I don't think you can get AIDS from mosquitoes. Malaria, maybe."

"That's not the point!" I said.

Ted smiled-he knew, he was just trying to break the tension a little.

My mind ran open-loop. In the middle of this disaster, I imagined myself in the Central American jungle up to my knees in chamber pot shards, trying to figure out what pot they belonged to and how old they were.

How old? A thin ray of light pierced my gloom, a faint twinkling candle of hope a million miles away.

"Ted," I said slowly, "how would you date a chamber pot, anyway?"

I looked at Ted-and suddenly his smile changed to a big grin.

"Kay, you'll want to see Dr. Molar and tell him what's happened. And then you'll need to talk to Stephens' insurance company. We'll need a witness and certification."

Stephens, it turned out, had insured his violin through Lloyd's of London, appropriately enough. And yes, they would be very interested in proof of which violin was the "real" Stradivarius. So interested that the fact that there was only a week until the concert was no problem.

That evening before the concert, I put on my one long black dress, grabbed my "good" black jacket and headed for the physics building, just a short walk from the concert hall. Ted was there with the Replica. He gave me a kiss and we headed for the fine arts center.

We caught up with Terri in the foyer. She was in a tight all-black pants suit with a turtleneck collar.

"Hi," I said. "I'm going to sit up front to give him the replica to try."

She got the strangest expression I've ever seen on her face. "But doesn't he already have the replica?"

"I didn't make the switch. Fell asleep."

Terri looked first at me then Ted, looking for everything like a cornered rat. "Oh," she said.

The first few notes of "Dear Old Lloyd's" sounded on the PA chimes and we headed for our seats.

The concert was beautiful despite the character of the performer. For an encore, Stevens took the violin to the podium and played his own arrangement of "All Through the Night" with soft voices in the background sounding like an organ. There was hardly a dry eye in the house, including mine. I felt just awful. I knew, right then, that this was the wrong time, wrong place, wrong situation. It would just have to wait until next year. I'd planned to run up and spring the replica on him before the applause stopped.

But I shut my eyes and stayed right where I was.

"You have something for me, Ms. Kim, I believe," Stevens announced, in front of everyone.

The lobster got my stomach and grabbed hard. All of a sudden Terri's expression made sense; Stephens knew, and there was only one person who could have told him. I shot a look back at her that would vaporize an elephant. She kind of shrugged her shoulders.

"Ms. Kim, and some of her deconstructionist pranksters," Stevens continued, "have thought to play a little joke on me, and you. They made, with their little atomistic reductionist gizmo over in the physics building, an alleged copy of my Stradivarius violin. Now, the violin you heard tonight was quite adequate, surprisingly so, I must admit, or we would have had this conversation a little earlier. So, in fact, I am quite impressed. But the fun is over, Ms. Kim, and I would like my violin back, for this is not, as you all will soon hear, a real Stradivarius. Let's have it back now."

I desperately wanted to bail out of the whole thing. But it was much too late. I took the replica out ofits tacky cardboard box and with as much poise as I could manage went up onto the stage. If you're going to go down, I told myself, go down in style.

"Well?" he intoned.

"I didn't make the switch," I said, hoping my voice didn't waver too much. "I'm carrying the replica."

"Nonsense. Young lady, this has gone far enough. That violin is worth over a million dollars, and you must return it this instant!"

I scanned the audience for Dr. Molar. He was the only one that could verify that I was telling the truth, but I couldn't find him. Had the a.n.a.lysis gone wrong? My hands got sweaty.

I turned back to Stevens. "But...but you've got it wrong. This isn't..."

"I do not have it wrong. This is not a Stradivarius." In anger he raised his violin by its neck over his head, threatening to smash it down on the very solid-looking conductor's music stand.

Suddenly, I realized he really could destroy it, destroy the original Stradivarius, destroy something made so carefully from ancient wood by the long-dead master. My arms shot out toward him with the replica. "No! No! Don't break it. Here, take this then."

He frowned down on me and brought the violin down, but not on anything. Then he gave it to me.

"So maybe I have taught you something after all. You would not see a beautiful instrument destroyed, even if it wasn't a Stradivarius. Very well. But now, you have to hear the difference," he beamed to the crowd, his voice and face full of confidence and triumph, "you and any curious folk who might wish to stay."

No one, absolutely no one, had left. My public humiliation was to be about as public as it could get.

He turned to me. "You," he said ominously, but then smiled, "may sit down now."