"Will I ever be able to do music again?" I asked. "If the war ends one day?"
"They're working on it," said the neurosurgeon, which meant no, and then the anesthesia kicked in.
My mom cried when I said I wanted to study music. My brother was a weapons tech, my sisters were a physical therapist and a regular therapist, and Mom herself had done payroll and accounting for the Armada. All, she told me, perfectly respectable ways of contributing to the war effort, which didn't require any brain surgery at all.
Dad had been the musician. I'd never heard a note out of him, of course, but they didn't surgically excise his genes, and I'd gotten the right ones. Or the wrong ones. Mom didn't put tunes on at home, but she sent us to school and they had music classes, and it clicked, for me. And the last thing she wanted was for me to turn out like Dad.
They'd stayed married, at least on paper. Dad lived in the in-law unit, up in the attic, after he came home from his tour. Sometimes came down to eat dinner with us. It's possible they occasionally had little sleepovers, though everybody went out of their way not to make the details common knowledge. But they didn't really have conversations, anymore, afterwards. They couldn't be on the same page. It wasn't that she missed her beloved musician to talk about neoclassical with. She didn't know a chord from a chorus. It was what they'd replaced it with.
She cost me some sleep, but I didn't let her dissuade me. They put the music classes in school for a reason, along with the the dance, everything from ballet to ballroom. Somebody had to pick it up and gorge themselves on it and become a connoisseur, a creator, a tastemaker, and then give it all up for the war. As though there was a collections bucket for it, next to the ones for refrigerator magnets and prewar diamonds.
I had a CO, also a conductor. I'd seen her in action, when I was in basic training pre-surgery. They had to make sure that in addition to rhythm and discernment we'd also be able to keep up with the military discipline and the physical requirements. Anybody who washed out at that stage got to stay on Earth with all of their neurons where they grew, and became a music teacher. Past junior high that was the kind of person who did most of my music pedagogy. My mom was probably praying for it to be me next with all her heart, but I held up fine under a couple extra Gs and could say "sir" when I was supposed to, so.
Anyway, they'd shown me video of my now-CO conducting a battle. She'd managed to keep her facility with the baton, so her relay station was arranged around her like a full orchestra, and she whipped her hands around in a frenzy, and a billion aliens perished.
She'd been panting with exertion at the end, grinning with artistic ecstasy. She'd taken a bow.
Aliens have computers too. By and large they're just as good as ours, and anywhere they're not up to par, the aliens can get ahold of some of ours and get there. Computers can make music too, even invent new music if they're set to it properly. Making them dance is harder but it's a decade harder, not a century. If bopping around to novel tunes were what it took to blow the enemy out of the sky and take their smithereen-laden moon outposts and ruptured stations, we'd be just about evenly matched with everyone else in the war of all against all. The fact that humans can hack it without the doodads if called upon to do so doesn't help at all when everybody who's coming to the party is already starfaring. They think our sense of timing gave us a bit of an edge in a couple of battles, but we were fighting uphill, new entrants to the front without established detentes or any weaponry well adapted to the field of combat. Being able to coordinate on "three, two, one, go!" was not nearly as lethal as phase injectors or infraplasma.
So it's not quite right to say that humanity's unique attunement to rhythm is what we're leveraging to survive out there. Computers are great at keeping time and everybody's got them. We can't echolocate, but you don't see us dropping like flies to enemies that can, we just build stuff that compensates.
Computers don't have taste. You can tell them the win conditions for chess or go, and they'll figure out how to beat grandmasters, even if they're just meditating and masturbating about it all by themselves with no exposure to any other players. And you can show them a hundred million songs, and they will learn to make something that's sort of like those. You can order the pieces by some metric that might correlate with quality, like popularity or critical reception or even how much each piece influenced those that came after, and then the computer can spit out stuff that's farther along on those metrics. Specify anything you want, and it'll spin up your pack-a-day smoker with a warbling baritone crooning about leaving his lover in Lisbon with backing vocals in Proto-Indo-European and accompanying zither.
But it won't like it.
You can make them lie! You can have a conversation with a computer that tells you how much it appreciates the theme and the alliteration and that little lick in the bridge and the stylistic influences of the zither. It'll pretend for you all day long. But it doesn't like it. It doesn't enjoy anything. You can train it to tell a more consistent story, get it so it'll guess it's supposed to like Beethoven and not Bach, or the Beatles and not the Beastie Boys, and give it a song it's never heard before from one or the other and get the answer you were hoping for. If it's figured out that it's "supposed" to be a fan of some artist, because you told it so or because it made up a persona to please you, it's not going to later decide of its own accord that it's moved on from that phase, or that this one song of theirs isn't quite hitting the spot. It's never having any aesthetic experiences.
And neither do aliens.
Basic training, and then surgery, and then a lot of bed rest while I recovered from surgery and worried at my new synaesthesia like a missing tooth or a nearly-loose scab. My hair grew into its military regulation cut from shaved-down surgical status, and they started putting me on the simulations.
I didn't have the baton muscle memory any more. No cinematic wand-waving for me. I tried metronoming my hand around, but it connected to nothing, meant nothing. I might as well have been attempting to control the tide by doing Kegels. I hummed a note and it mostly just made me hungry. It reminded me of the microwave at home.
The conductor's baton makes for great example videos, but they have a standard setup for people whose brain-scrambling doesn't come out so picture-perfect and they trained me on that. It was a little like a very complicated video game, at first. The re-mapping can't come to the fore until you've got enough basic skill to get all the little imaginary ships to do what you want. I did the tedious basic exercises: send this squadron to orbit that star. Dispatch one of your drones to the target orbital. Send fighters to the third moon, but, ooh, at the same time, also withdraw fighters from the second moon, without getting mixed up, exciting, yay.
The controls were intended to be easy to pick up, but you need a lot of degrees of freedom for this to work at all, so there were a lot of them and they were very finely responsive. I was weeks in the ergonomic chair, scowling at pretend destroyers and corvettes, blowing up the wrong enemy cruisers and having to start over. As a video game, it was not very fun. The commercial version for propagandizing teenagers has more noises and lights and achievements and fake blood. I was supposed to be getting something deeper out of it, but only once I had the facility with the machinery that I had once had with a hundred-chair symphony orchestra.
I took a very normal amount of time to get that click. Two months, six days. The mission of the hour was to coordinate eight battalions in a complicatedly interdependent slingshot maneuver to ambush and annihilate the enemy where it was scattered through an asteroid belt. I was on my fourth try. I was pretty sure my attempts were basically by-the-book and I was just making some minor timing error with the gravity interactions, and I was giving it yet another go, this time with my wrist brace cinched up a bit tighter.
I tried turning off one of the ships' phase booster for a split second, so it lagged the others. I wasn't sure why I did it, the way you aren't sure why you're adding a grace note.
The battalions swung around in a gorgeous arc and slammed with spine-tingling crunchy dissonance into the simulated opponents. With everything tuned to concert-A, I swept through the debris with my virtuoso torpedo launcher at the root of a minor seventh, and ten thousand aliens perished.
I was laughing. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever done.
Dad didn't often talk about his tour of duty. It didn't come up most days. Fireworks didn't bother him. He didn't have nightmares. I don't think he even went to therapy besides the couple's counselor. Despite Mom's chilliness, he came home from the war a functional person. He could talk about whatever was more relevant: whether we'd done our homework. What we wanted for dinner. Whether the screen door needed replacing or the shelter under the back yard needed its supplies rotated out or the neighbor with diamond earrings was using valuable ones cut before the bombardment or cheap new ones that didn't belong in a maser cannon array. (Usually. Pizza. Yes, probably, maybe.)
When I settled on my career plan, he opened up a little more. He'd start getting really animated, the way people do when they're remembering better-than-sex birthday cake or a drug-fueled religious experience or the sensation of skydiving. He'd say things like, "The ETs turned away from the north wing, but there we were in the east wing mezzo-piano-like, and we hit them sforzando," or, "Me and my buddy O'Connor had two fighters in adjacent bays, and it was like we were telepaths, we could strafe like a smooth bow change and shoot pizzicato at the same time together".
And then he'd stop. He'd look guiltily at the nearest evidence of my mother - a photo, her spot at the dining table, the general direction of the stairs. Me, sometimes, the eyebrows I got from her side of the family. And then he'd give some blander tidbit. "The food was all right," he'd say, "except when we were in the Orion zone." Or, "Sleeping in zero G isn't as comfortable as it looks like it should be." Or -
"Sometimes I wish I was still out there. My poor old veins can't take it any more, but if they did find a use for me..."
He'd been a violinist and he'd laid down his strings for his planet. I dug up the violin when I was twelve. It was in the basement, in its case next to the Christmas decorations. He couldn't play it any more and Mom wouldn't have it around us kids.
They were careful to keep the tense sad arguments away from us. I eavesdropped now and then, though. Caught the word "bloodthirsty".
He never was that. He just wanted to play again.
Imagine having fourteen songs stuck in your head at the same time, except that, through dream logic and the power of neurosurgery, they're also all spaceship formations with each ship contributing a bit of leitmotif to the whole of its squadron. They've all got to come in at just the same time except for the oboes, modulo relativistic dilation which feels sort of like syncopation and rubato had a baby six-part round conceived in a tokamak. You lose a couple of scouts and their descants fade out, but the rest of your force is crescendoing, scrambling up-tempo, trembling through phase depths with perfect vibrato. They obliterate the enemy and an orgasmic Ode to Joy cascades through your synapses.
Usually a conductor gets a week or two off after something like that.
It's a commonplace that if you tell someone you're going to have them compare a couple of different sound systems, but they're actually the same one and you just up the volume a couple of notches, your test subject will tell you that the louder one is the superior device. Richer, fuller sound, they'll tell you. It sounds clearer and brighter and better.
But you can't just follow that logic indefinitely, because the human ear has limitations. Eventually it'll start to hurt or be too intense to process.
There isn't such a limit on the human ability to conceptualize raw numbers.
If I had a wife to go home to, of course it would sound bad to her. It hasn't been in vogue to relish the deaths of your enemies for hundreds of years. The fashionable response, among the civilians back home, is that it's very sad that we came of age in a universe wracked with warfare and negative-sum competition. That it is a terrible pity we've never found anyone we could make our allies, let alone friends, like old science fiction once promised us. That if only we had the means and the security to do so, the right thing to do would be to become the pacifistic watchdogs of the stars, gently putting violent species in time-out in their own systems till they were ready to play nice. That in principle each one of those aliens was a uniquely valuable individual with moral worth and rights just like us, embroiled in this struggle no less tragically than we were.
I put six hundred million aliens to rest and it moved me to tears.
If you know where a ship is going to be - in what phase, at what velocity, at what location, when precisely, and in which frame of reference - then you can lay a trap there. It's pretty easy. It almost never happens. Not being predictable like that is like not leaving your valuables visible in your car, or remembering to lock your front door. If people started forgetting to do those things, theft would get commoner until they remembered again, and the equilibrium is that loot is locked up and ships are bopping around according to random numbers.
Except human ships.
A computer can generate music. But if you ask a computer to choose music, it's just another way of generating a random number. An alien could plot ship trajectories that way, but why use such a convoluted method of rolling dice? More efficient to just have your pilot lay out a range of tactically acceptable paths and then stab in the dark. We won't be able to lay any traps for them and they'll get where they're going. If they winnow it down further, if they start trying to choose the optimal path, the most efficient or the one that performs well on some metric? Well, we have computers too. We can figure out what those paths are, and if they stop locking their doors, we'll start blowing them up.
A computer cannot tell which path is prettiest.
I can.
My first shore leave back on Earth, Mom was purse-lipped and brisk. She hugged me. She asked me all the standard questions: are they feeding you enough, are you going to be here all month or were you going to spend some of your leave in the tropics, did your sister tell you she got a new puppy, did your brother tell you about the new baby. Nothing about my job.
Mom didn't like that I studied music, but back when it was possible I'd wash out and miss the operating table, she did appreciate it on some level. She'd come to recitals. She got me a nice stereo one Christmas. She would admit to having favorite songs, and if she had a glass of wine with dinner she'd put on some oldies to share with me.
She heard nothing lovely in my scatenato slaughter and she never would.
But Dad, my awkward distant dad who'd always acceded to the consensus that he was the strange one and the burden of fitting in was on him -
He wanted all the war stories. He wanted the declassified footage and the dramatic retellings and the frenzied tip-of-tongue desperation to communicate about my masterpieces.
When my leave was up I went back out to the war zone. I got a letter a few weeks later, to the effect that my parents were separating and my dad was moving into a veterans' retirement community.
The letter was pretty dry, but I could imagine it. Why should Dad have to put up with the way Mom treated him and his passion and his art? I was glad I'd been a catalyst to get him thinking about whether he wanted to live out his old age sort-of-cohabiting with such a cold fish who couldn't even try for vicarious enjoyment of the eroico extermination. She was blind to the sublime. Tone-deaf.
My mother and one of my sisters decided to stop speaking to me and Dad over it, but what was there to say between us anyway?
We're not winning.
We made a strong initial showing, by the standards of newly starfaring species who become threatening enough to be worth killing. This reference class is in contrast to "sitting on strategically important real estate enough to be worth killing", all of whom are dead, and also "longstanding enough participants in the war to have outlasted less effective peers", all of whom are much scarier than latecomers like us.
We have our aesthetic advantage, and the boffins do their darndest to catch up on all the technological states of the art as we gather it by salvage and spycraft. But anyone flying around out here has made it this far because they have something going for them. They outbreed us ten to one, or they have such permissive biological needs that they can go to space in a laundry basket with an engine strapped on, or they can hibernate undetectably on a planet that looks secure for six years and then hatch and eat everyone trying to settle it, or they've defeated an elder race and cannibalized their industrial base, or, or, or.
I don't think the sci-fi romantics will get their way and we'll all hold hands and sing together across the stars. It just doesn't seem like the universe worked out that way. We'll fight forever, or we'll win, or we'll lose.
But what's the point of being a human, anyway, if it's not to see your enemies driven before you, a polyphony of death and decelerando? - or whatever your medium is. The ballerinas do good work in their division too. I won't knock a fine painting or turn up my nose at a sculpture either.
I have held legions in my fingertips and commanded them through gorgeously human tessituras across the starfields of song and we have defended the folks back home, guardian angel voices in rhapsody. If the enemy gets me one of these days, I will go with threnody on my lips.
If only you could hear it.