A quote: “It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win.” ~~ John Paul Jones
I’ll start with a story …
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It was the weirdest raid we’ve ever been on. So far. Business is booming even as townies and farmers give us the side eye, then meet us out back with requests.
Stealing is wrong, of course, sir. But this is against the Grays.
So, as existence farming grows into profits and towns are now better than lean-tos made of granny’s quilts at the intersection of dirt and mud, things we can’t make for ourselves yet (and the Grays refuse to trade for) we just up and take.
Dangerous business, though, so I did balk at first. You want what? But the townies had gathered quite a pretty sum.
We took our time planning. Scouting was a must and we needed more than one escape route. I even insisted on a diversion because the time getting out of The City was the largest risk.
Yet, I lost one young man. Hurts me bad.
Snow was just starting to fall the evening I found myself in the new hall, still smelling of rough-cut pine, as a young man seated himself, took a deep breath and started playing White Christmas on the piano we fetched.
It was sawdust I got in my eyes.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: I was puzzled when the movers from grandpa’s estate showed up with the old piano. All I knew was that it came with a note saying “This should help you.” I was never much of a pianist but I could see that it needed work.
The restoration work on it took me almost a year since I had work and other duties. Little by little, the original beauty came through. I had a professional replace the strings and tune it and the result was incredible.
I had just finished the last bit of work when grandpa’s lawyer showed up with paperwork. Turns out this was a one of a kind Steinway that had been given to grandpa when he was young. The papers were proof of authenticity and an offer from a buyer. The amount being offered was insane to me but the lawyer told me that there has been a vicious bidding war over it last week.
So yeah; it did help me. I accepted the offer, paid off all of my debts and looked forward to early retirement.
But then the old guitar arrived from the lawyer’s office and the note said “This should help you as well.”
Sue O says: Sue O says: Sue O says: Well rats, I was trying to post a laughing emoji but I guess you actually have to say something.
Cameron says: So you liked my story? -:-)
The piano had belonged to my grandmother, who was a concert pianist in her day. Not the world-traveling sort that you learn about in music history, but she certainly had a major presence in our part of Texas. That grand piano was a custom job, commissioned by an admirer who always said it was politics, not ability, that kept her from being world-class.
She’d willed it to my daughter, who had already shown signs of being a music prodigy even before she started school. After Grandma’s funeral, we scrambled to make a place for it in our modest home — and Kerry’s piano teacher said she could tell the difference now that Kerry was practicing on a real piano instead of my old electronic keyboard from my garage band days. By the time Kerry was in junior high, she was playing at chapel service for the younger children, and her teacher was talking about connecting her with instructors who could push her further than his modest abilities. He compared his situation to an ordinary high-school physics teacher trying to teach an Einstein.
And then the Chongu arrived, and everything changed. Far from being alone in the universe, we were in a galaxy at war — and many of the things we’d assumed to be natural phenomena were in fact part of that war. And they wanted humans spread across a large number of worlds, so that no single attack by their xenocidal enemies could wipe out our entire species.
The settler packages were generous, since there were many worlds out there that had no indigenous sophonts, or only aquatics, and they needed to be settled and made strong against the Tchiador. My husband had always struggled with town jobs, but the family ranch simply hadn’t been big enough for him and his two older brothers, so of course he wanted to sign up to claim a ranch of his own out there among the stars.
Except for one problem — the mass allowances for settlers, while unimaginably generous compared to what astronauts could take with them on our chemical rockets, were still far too stringent to take something as big as a concert grand piano, even an heirloom custom-made by a famous piano-maker. I hated to abandon my grandmother’s legacy to our daughter, but I couldn’t bear to tell Lije to give up his dreams and resign himself to working for a boss forever.
And then one of Kerry’s friends at school discovered that the Chongu had some kind of a molecular scanner. It would be able to scan Grandma’s piano right down to the individual molecules, using some kind of quantum field technology. On the other end, they’d have a molecular printer that could perfectly duplicate it, to the point that it was a purely philosophical question whether it was “really Grandma’s piano.”
And now it stands here, in our ranch house on the fourth planet of a star that’s just a catalog number for astronomers back on Earth. Kerry’s practicing as often as she can fit in the time, between her chores here on the ranch and the schooling we all have to take to get us up to speed on the suddenly expanded world in which we now lived. Maybe she won’t become a famous performer, but she’s already getting invitations to play for various events.
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