Charles L. Fontenay

Earth was through with war. And while it is
right that man have peace, it is also right that
he have freedom. But Mars was in slavery, and to Mars
Cornel Lorensse dedicated his life and his talent....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Martianne is heard occasionally these days as a stirring concert or band selection. But there was a time when its playing was punishable by death—and its defiant strains challenged the harried police in tavern and drawing room all over the Earth.

In the days just before one marche militaire changed two worlds, Earth was weary of war, afraid of war, and desired to put behind it all reminders of war. The psychosociologists said uniforms of policemen, of postmen, of airline pilots, of lodge brethren, of theater ushers, were militaristic, and they were abolished. The psychosociologists said the march rhythm in music was nationalistic and instigated combative feelings, and it was banned. The scenes, the sounds, the sights of antagonisms between men were forbidden.

The Polonaise, the Marseillaise, the March of the Toys, all suffered the same fate. Sousa's marches and Tschaikovsky's 1812 Overture went the same way. Dixie and the Hawaiian War Chant were treated alike. All were relegated to tape in dusty archives, and their sale or public performance forbidden on pain of fine and prison sentence.

Whatever unlawful violence there might be on faraway Mars, Earth was through with all forms of war and its trappings.

Into these circumstances, Cornel Lorensse intruded on the night of December 6, 2010. He pressed his thin face against the steam-misted window of The Avatar in Nuyork and saw a piano standing idle inside.

The Avatar was one of those small restaurants sunk a few feet below sidewalk level, which catered with exotic dishes to the tastes of a select group. It was well-populated at this hour, and Cornel licked his lips hungrily at the epicurean delights unveiled at each table.

He felt in the pocket of his worn coveralls. A single coin answered the exploration of his fingers. He was down to his last resource, and he was no nearer to finding the Friends than he had been when he landed.

He looked again at the piano, hesitated, then went down the three steps to the restaurant's door, pushed it open and went in. It was his good fortune that Wan Ti, owner of The Avatar was receiving his guests in person at the moment.

"I'll play you a concert for a meal," said Cornel, gesturing toward the piano.

Wan Ti's dark eyes swept over him, taking in the battered coveralls, the earnest face, the untrimmed blond hair, the slender hands. Wan Ti's yellow countenance remained bland.

"I have a piano player," said Wan Ti.

Cornel laughed, with a note of desperation in his tone.

"Let me play one selection," he urged. "If you want to stop me then, you can kick me out."

What Wan Ti thought could not be gauged from his expression, but he had not built his clientele against fierce competition by turning his face away from the unusual. He inclined his head slightly, and waved Cornel to the piano.

Cornel sat down at the keyboard, brushed his hair back from his eyes, and flexed his long fingers. Thrusting the tantalizing aroma of food to the back of his mind, he played.

The murmur of conversation in The Avatar faltered and died as the fervid melody of Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata filled the air. It was unusual music to people accustomed to hearing the more modern compositions of Schonberg, Harris and Westine. The comparison of Cornel's inspired touch to the mechanical renditions of Wan Ti's regular piano player was noticeable even to those who were unfamiliar with music.

When the final movements of the allegro ma non troppo faded, Cornel sat back and looked toward Wan Ti. The proprietor cocked an ear toward the rare applause, smiled and nodded slightly. Exultantly, Cornel swung into Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu and followed it, not pausing, with Liszt's Waldesrauschen and Schubert's Serenade.

The applause was just as enthusiastic, but by now the hum of voices and the click of eating utensils had begun to rise again. Frowning slightly, Cornel hunched his shoulders and began a composition the most musical of his audience had never heard before.

Like the molten notes of the nightingale, the music floated and throbbed above the diners, almost a physical thing. The people in the restaurant paused with food halfway to their lips. They turned to see the artist, carefully, so that no chair would scrape. The waiters stopped with trays in their hands. Wan Ti stopped a newly arriving couple, his fingers at his lips.

In the midst of the applause that roared through the room when Cornel had finished, a waiter tapped his shoulder.

"Excuse me, sir," he said. "Miss Meta Erosine asks that you join her at her table."

Rising and bowing to his audience, Cornel followed the man to a table at the rear of the room, where a woman sat with her escort.

Meta Erosine's pale, heart-shaped face, with its mop of short black hair and luminous black eyes, was widely known on Earth, but Cornel had never been to Earth before. Her vibrant beauty blazed on a victim unprepared for it.

She was clad in the cretan-can-can style just then becoming popular, with breasts exposed over a tight bodice and a short, ruffled skirt gathered in front to reveal the knees. She smoked a long-stemmed, tiny-bowled pipe, studded with jewels.

Beside her sat a sleek, mustached young man in ruffled lavender shirt and pink tights, his fingers covered with rings.

"Sit down and eat with me, musician," invited Meta. Somewhat dubiously, Cornel took a seat at her right, across the table from the beruffled escort.

"Meta, I wish you wouldn't demean yourself by taking up with tramps and guttersnipes," objected her companion, wrinkling his nose.

"Leave me, Passo," she ordered, waving an imperious hand. "Why should I sup with painted popinjays when I can adore genius?"

Passo flushed and his mouth fell open. But he arose and slunk quietly away.

"Now, musician," said Meta, leaning over the table so that her powdered breasts brushed the glassware, "tell me, what was that last number you played?"

"One of my own compositions," he said diffidently. The odor of food was too much for him, and he leaned across the table to appropriate Passo's untouched salad. "Its name is Wind in the Canals."

"It should be Le Vent dans les Canals," she said. "You should title your compositions in French—they will be more fashionable."

"I don't know French," he said, munching a stick of celery. "We don't speak French on Mars."

She laughed, a laugh like the music of his playing.

"You will, my genius," she promised him. Her eyes ran over his lean face, his unkempt hair. "You look as though you could use shelter and clothing. Come home with me tonight. I shall give your genius to the world."

Cornel never had experienced such luxury as was his in the apartment Meta assigned to him in her magnificent home in Jersi. He had his personal servant. New clothes were waiting for him. A barber cut his hair when he had finished a hot, scented bath, and the big bed in which he slept was soft as down.

Meta asked no information of him until they met at a late breakfast the next morning. There, beautiful in translucent white negligee, she sipped her coffee and asked questions.

"I came from Mars to get help for my people," he said. "We need guns and supplies, food and oxygen equipment."

"You're one of the Charax rebels?" she asked.

"Rebels?" He snorted. "We're free people, fighting for our freedom. We want self-government, we want to own our land and our homes, we want the right to rule our own lives."

"That's guaranteed in the Constitution," said Meta.

"Earth's Constitution. Mars isn't Earth. The Mars Corporation controls both spaceports. It owns all business and industry on Mars. It's milking the planet dry of resources and profits, and it's set up a company government that makes the people of Mars no better than slaves."

He smiled a bitter smile.

"Earth's government protects the freedom of Earth's people," he said, "but the people of Earth don't know what's happening on Mars. The Mars Corporation has its senators and representatives, bought and paid for, so the Earth government sends troops and supplies to Mars to fight the battles of the Mars Corporation. We aren't rebels, we're fighting for our just freedom."

"If the Mars Corporation controls the spaceports, how did you get to Earth?" she demanded.

"We have three battered ships hidden in the desert near Syrtis Major," said Cornel. "It takes a long time for us to get fuel to take one of them up, but they thought it worthwhile if I could get to Earth and get help for my people."

"Why you?"

"My music is well known on Mars, and my people know that the people of Earth love music. Here on Earth, where there is peace and prosperity, people pay to hear good music and good musicians. Our plan was for me to give great concerts and at each concert ask the people of Earth to help their Martian brothers gain their freedom."

"A good way to get arrested," said Meta dryly. "You'd be convicted of inciting military action and sentenced to prison in any court of Earth."

"I didn't know that, but I suppose the Friends would have a way."

"The Friends?"

"The Friends of Mars. It's an organization of Earth people trying to help us. I suppose it must be a secret and illegal organization, for I found that the man I was supposed to get in touch with had been arrested, and I haven't been able to find out anything more about the Friends."

"Such an organization would be illegal on Earth," said Meta. "Come here, Cornel. I want to show you something."

Taking him by the arm, she led him from the breakfast room to a terrace overlooking a snowy valley. She moved closer to him in the chill wind that billowed her thin garments around her, and waved her hand at the scene below them.

"This is Earth," she said. "Look at those mountain peaks, the blue sky and the white clouds. In summer, this valley is clothed with green, and warm breezes bring the scent of flowers to this terrace. Have you ever seen anything like this on Mars?"

"No," he said softly. "Mars is always cold and dusty, and the sky is nearly black."

"Cornel," she said softly, you're a great musician. Mars is rough frontier territory, and the frontier has no place for music. Last night you saw what your music could mean here.

"Forget Mars. You belong to Earth."

The meteoric rise of Cornel Lorensse to fame in 2011 and 2012 now commands a full column in the Encyclopaedia Terrestriana. Brushed off in a single sentence in the encyclopaedia, but much discussed in that day, was his close relationship with Meta Erosine, his patroness.

For half a decade, wealthy, beautiful Meta Erosine had been the toast of Earth. She was an actress, a painter, a singer, a socialite, and she had changed men almost as often as she changed the dresses she wore. Her face was familiar in newspapers and on television screens, her husky songs were on a million recording tapes, her colorful antics were the grist for magazine articles and the subject of denunciations from the pulpit.

In Cornel she seemed to have found a vehicle for all the burning fire of her energy. She pushed him, she groomed him, she threw the power of her wealth behind him. His slender figure clad in a black velvet suit sat at polished pianos on a hundred stages; and for each concert, the auditoriums and the audiences were bigger.

Meta was with him on these concert tours; and between tours he stayed in seclusion at the big house in Jersi, putting into music his memories of his native Mars. Each tour introduced to the world the new compositions of Cornel Lorensse.

What he wrote and played was the haunting music of the deserts, the canals and the marches. Into his music he poured the loneliness of the red sands and the violence of the desert winds, the beauty of sable skies jeweled with enormous stars, the happiness of the helmeted traveler when he reaches the green valleys of the canals, the hopes and joys of human lovers gathered in bubble-like domes amid the chill wastelands.

He did not, as Meta had wanted to, give his compositions French titles. He named them as he would have named them on Mars: The Desert Wanderer, Swift Phobos, Marsh Gardens, names that were strange to Earth, but were familiar themes of his own people.

His melodies took music-loving Earth by storm. They burst upon a world in which 20th century dissonance had strangled 19th century romanticism, like flowers in a garden of crystal. It was Cornel Lorensse and those pioneer composers who avidly aped him who began the 21st century Renaissance in music.

Without shame, Cornel lived on the largesse of his patroness, for his growing fees and royalties all went for one purpose. He had found the society called the Friends of Mars, and everything that he earned he poured into their coffers to finance privateer space vessels able to elude the Mars Corporation's company-owned warships and to keep a thin line of supplies flowing to the Free Martian people scattered in their desert strongholds.

Like any secret society in a hostile culture, the Friends of Mars maintained dissociated chapters, connected by the slenderest and most carefully guarded lines of communication. Cornel knew of only one chapter, in Nuyork, and to this he took his contributions when he was between concert tours.

During one of those visits, late in the summer of 2012, Javan Tomlin, chief of the chapter, told him that all he contributed was still not enough for Mars to become free.

"Our base of support isn't broad enough," said Javan. "Ships cost money, fuel costs money, supplies cost money. Guns and ammunition are most expensive of all, because military weapons are illegal. No one man can support such an operation, even when he makes the kind of money you're making."

There were half a dozen of the Friends of Mars, besides Cornel and Javan, in the meeting room. The others nodded agreement at Javan's words.

"None of us are wealthy and we can't contribute much but our time and work," said one of them. "The wealthy people all sympathize with the Mars Corporation."

"That's too much of a blanket indictment," said Javan. "The Mars Corporation controls the spacelines to Mars, and what little information comes back to Earth is censored and heavily propagandized in their favor. Most people don't know what's happening on Mars. Our people need a powerful radio transmitter to broadcast to Earth, Cornel."

Cornel shook his head.

"What information the people of Earth get must be disseminated on Earth," he said. "Powerful radio equipment would take up space and weight needed for arms. Besides, the Mars Corporation forces have air power and directional finders. They'd bomb a permanent installation before it had a chance to send out its second broadcast."

"All we can do is work and hope," said Javan gloomily. "If we had a fleet of about a dozen good ships, we might be able to swing it, but we have only two and a third abuilding."

"There are three on Mars," Cornel pointed out.

"One was blasted in space last week, and they're too old to lift more than half cargo, anyhow," said Javan. "The corporation controls the Earth space stations, through the government, and we have to use direct drive stage-rockets."

Cornel left, not feeling very optimistic. At the curb outside the club, he looked up and down the street for a cab to take him to the heliport where his copter was parked.

There was no cab in sight, but from a side street a little distance away a long black limousine swung into the boulevard, sped swiftly to the club entrance and halted. The back door opened and Meta leaned out, beckoning.

"Get in, quick!" she urged. "We've got to get away from here!"

Not understanding, Cornel got in. The car roared away with a burst of acceleration that thrust him back on the cushions beside her.

"What in Saturn?" he demanded and turned to look out the rear window.

A squad of police cars was converging on the club he had just left. Sirens screaming, they pulled up, blocking the street, and armed officers in plain clothes leaped out and hurried into the club.

Meta put her arms around his neck and drew his head down to her lap.

"They're raiding the Friends of Mars," she said, and a soothing note crept into her tone. "You're safe, darling. They don't know you were there."

"But how did they know? How did you know?" he demanded, struggling unsuccessfully to free himself from the imprisonment of her embrace. The sound of the sirens had died in the distance behind them.

"I told them," Meta said firmly. "Where do you think I get the wealth you've been living on, darling? I own a fourth of the stock of the Mars Corporation."

The next morning, Cornel had disappeared. Meta was frantic. Every available agency was pressed into service, but Nuyork was a city of fifteen million people and Cornel had vanished.

It was two weeks before he returned. When he did, he was gaunt and grim and dirty as he had been the night Meta had first seen him in The Avatar.

"Darling, why did you run away?" she asked, holding him close in her arms.

"I came back because I love you," he answered tiredly. "But I came back, too, because I love Mars more, Meta. I had to go away and think what I was to do."

"It's all right now," she soothed. "You understand that the odds against your rebels are just too heavy. You have a life on Earth to live."

"Yes," he said in a low voice. "But there'll be no concerts this season, Meta."

"Cornel, you can't cancel now! The schedule's all arranged."

"I shall cancel," he said firmly. "You want me to live on Earth, so you must let me learn about Earth. I intend to spend this winter studying psychosociology and terrestrial law—and composing."

Her brow cleared.

"If you'll continue your composing, it's all right," she said. "Next season's concerts can be the greatest ever. I'll pay off the promoters, darling."

So it was done. That season the admirers of Cornel Lorensse's music had to content themselves with recordings. Cornel himself spent his time quietly at Nuyork University and at the house in Jersi.

As she had said, the 2013 concert season was Cornel's greatest, right from the start. In part it was due to Meta's own efforts, for she spent tremendous sums of money and utilized her own famous personality to great advantage in promotional work.

Across the nation, across the the world, the tour swept, snowballing constantly. Christmas of 2013, and Cornel Lorensse introduced a great new hymn, From the Polar Caps. New Year's Day, 2014, and The Years to Come was introduced by radio and television at a thousand parties.

There had been some quibbling at the beginning of the season, because the business directors of the tour had wanted to combine the drawing power of Cornel's name with that of well-known concert orchestras. Cornel insisted on using his own orchestra, built up carefully during his year of study. As the season progressed, it became apparent that Cornel's name alone was enough of a drawing card.

February, March, 2014, and every network had bought into the schedule. When Cornel Lorensse's weekly concerts were on the air, there was nothing else on radio or television, anywhere in the world, except on the non-affiliated local stations. April passed triumphantly, and the final concert was scheduled for May 15 in Rome.

The D'Annunzio Colosseum, built in 1971, was filled to capacity. Careful staging was necessary, to care for all the cameras and microphones of the various television and radio networks.

The program was not a long one: Debussy's Clair de Lune, Lorensse's Swift Phobos, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Waco's Variations on a Theme by Altdown—and the words "To be announced." It was a familiar phrase, and it always meant the introduction of a new composition by Cornel Lorensse.

The concert went smoothly before—how many listeners? Fifty million? A hundred million? Two hundred million? On the great, brightly lighted stage Cornel played the concert grand with superb mastery and bowed to the applause, a pale, solemn figure in black.

When he had acknowledged the acclamation after the Waco piece, the audience waited in hushed silence for his announcement of the final number on the program.

"The composition I am about to play is the culmination of my musical career," Cornel said quietly into the microphones. "It is a product of my studies, not only of music, but of psychosociology and law.

"In hypnoschool last year, I studied the effects of music on the human mind. It is a new field, and many of you are aware of it only through the fact that certain kinds of music are forbidden by law as dangerous to peace on Earth.

"I have tried to go into it much more deeply than that."

He smiled bitterly.

"Most of you know that I am a Martian, one of the so-called Martian rebels," he said. "I think much of the appeal of my music to you has been its Martian quality. To the people of Earth, most of whom have never seen Mars, it has pictured my planet.

"My latest composition will do so even more graphically, for it has been composed on a deliberate psychological foundation. This song will show Mars to you. It will show you my people, and what my people want.

"I may add that I have studied the law carefully, and I can assure you that this composition is not military in nature.

"Ladies and gentlemen of Earth, accompanied by the orchestra I shall now play The Martianne."

In the control rooms of the auditorium and of relay points throughout the world, censors, vaguely alarmed by Cornel's words, hovered with their fingers on cutoff keys. Then they relaxed. Cornel had told the truth. There was nothing of a military nature in the opening bars of The Martianne.

It was a theme handled, but less competently, in some of his other compositions. The woodwinds began on a soft, sad note, gradually rising in power, like the thin winds that moaned across the Martian desert sands. Into this, almost inaudibly at first, crept the clear piano notes that marked the cautious, wondering intrusion of humanity on an alien world.

The drums beat the construction of the domes, the horns blared the landing of the spaceships, the violins cried the hopes of the men and women who went to Mars to find a new life. It was a picture in music, so skilfully drawn that when the first discordance crept in, every listener could identify it instantly as the age-old greed of man seeking to subvert frontier freedoms to his own selfish ends.

When the blare of trumpets and the ruffle of drums thundered into the final militant theme of The Martianne, every listener knew it bespoke the valiant fight of men for freedom against an oppressor.

Every listener knew what he heard was music that had been prohibited on Earth for a decade—yet they listened. The censors, shocked, galvanized, started to act, to cut off the broadcast—and could not. The powerful music had crept insidiously into their minds, and their fingers were paralyzed above the keys while The Martianne flamed triumphant through the air of Earth.

When the final note had died away, Cornel stood up at his piano and said into the microphones:

"That is the music of Mars. Remember it, people of Earth."

It was a brief trial. Cornel was admittedly guilty of violating the law against inciting the public to military action, but because of Meta's influence and the temper of the people, he was not sentenced to prison. He was deported to Mars, freed to return to his own people.

Spurred by the Mars Corporation, the Earth government acted quickly. The Martianne was the most dangerous of any music the psychosociologists had banned. Its performance was prohibited on pain of death, possession of a tape of it was punishable by fine and imprisonment.

But too many tapes had been home-recorded on the night of Cornel's last concert. Too many people remembered the basic strains, the theme of The Martianne. Laws could not confine it. It was hummed, at first secretly, then openly and defiantly.

And too many people had hung on every televised instant of Cornel's trial and had heard him say, simply and earnestly, why he had violated the laws designed to protect the peace of Earth, why he had willingly endangered his life.

"It is right that men should have peace," said Cornel on the witness stand, "but first, it is right that they should have freedom."

At first secretly, then openly and defiantly, the Friends of Mars grew into an organization that poured the contributions of the people of Earth into ships and guns for the free people of Mars.