The Mephit's Tales

It was a relatively quiet day at the Five Lamps. There was still a heavy beat in the upper levels, but instead of loud bass underscoring music, it was a softer drumbeat, and it lay under no strings, voices, or obviously synthesized tones, but a mix of wind instruments – sometimes cheerful, others almost plaintive.

That fit the mood of Founders Day. Yes, it had been a triumphant moment when the first colony ships touched down on Hematite, the first colony to be jointly settled by humans and tavarri since the two races had made peace after the tense, if not quite violent, days of first contact; but not everyone who had embarked survived the journey, and not all those who landed lived to see the colony become prosperous in its own right. Those had been uncertain days, and Founders Day was set aside both to celebrate and to solemnly remember.

He sat apart from the crowd, nursing his drink, but he watched them. In the cut and colour of clothing, in the flow of the crowd, in the movement of individual bodies, in every gesture, his keen gold eyes looked for patterns even as they saw beauty. In each footstep, each heavy beat of the music, his ears detected a rhythm that his heart found itself following. He never focused on any one person for long, but he watched almost always, only rarely turning his attention to the bartender for a refill and that for as little time as he could manage.

He couldn’t sustain that sort of scrutiny forever, especially not as the drink and the beat collided in some corner of his mind and started to dull his senses; and as his picture of the crowd came to be dominated by motion over form, he lost himself in the flow, his sight losing focus as his thoughts turned inward.

(more…)

The beat was heavy and pervasive, impossible to ignore. It drove into Arverik’s skull, imposing its order on his breath, his heartbeat, even shaping the rhythms of his very thoughts. This was not a place where anyone with his sense of hearing could concentrate.

But the Tavar wasn’t here to concentrate, he was here to immerse himself in experience. And these humans really knew how to make music.