Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October 2002 by Dell Magazines

Author:Dell Magazines [Magazines, Dell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Publisher: www.Fictionwise.com
Published: 2001-04-16T22:00:00+00:00

For Love of Amanda by Timothy Zahn

“Music hath charms...” and, like any powerful tool, it must be handled with care.

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The bar was a small local job, a bit shabby but clean enough, tucked away in an out-of-the-way corner of an equally worn working-class neighborhood.

I looked around as I sipped the beer I'd ordered. The clientele was pretty much the same mix I'd seen here every other evening for the past week: burly working-class men from the steel mills gathering for a little hearty Saturday-night conversation, a few lower-level professionals and their wives or girlfriends, plus a scattering of hopeful or hopeless singles, most of them looking a little on the burned-out side. There was also a sprinkling of travelers from the small and undistinguished hotels around the corner on the highway, most of them probably salesmen who spent far too much of their time in places like this.

But then, so had I, at least lately. And I was hardly in the sales business.

I took another sip, wincing at the taste. The place smelled heavily of this particularly bad brand of beer, heavily overlaid with the scent of the harder drinks being downed by those who hadn't come here to socialize. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, and a general conversational buzz punctuated at irregular intervals by a call for service or a bark of laughter.

It was just so typically mid-twentieth-century-America that sometimes I felt I had to be on a vid set; that at some unexpected moment a Mohawk-haired director would step into view from among the potted ferns lining the wall by the door and yell, “Cut.”

But that wasn't going to happen. This was the real 1953, and the real Pittsburgh. And I was really here.

I sipped my beer again and glanced at the clock above the bar. One minute till nine. The piano across from the far end of the bar was still unoccupied; but if there was one thing I'd learned in the past six weeks, it was that the pianist was one of those time-obsessive people you could set your watch by. I took another sip—

And there he was, stepping out of the door behind the bar and making his unobtrusive way through the tables toward the piano. He was thin to the point of scrawniness, twenty-three years old though he looked younger, with the vacant-edged expression of a man who's collected enough kicks to the head that he's basically given up on life.

The great jazz pianist Weldon Sommers. Or rather, the soon-to-be-great jazz pianist Weldon Sommers.

He sat down at the piano, and for a moment his fingers caressed the keys in silence as if he was waiting for the muse to join him on the bench. Then, very softly, he began to play.

It was nothing special at first, just the typical background filler that a thousand other third-rate barroom pianists were pounding out this evening all across the United States. His eyes lifted from the keys as he gradually brought up the volume on the half-melodies and began looking around the room.

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