Returning to the afterdeck, Thissell took up the strapan- this a circular sound-box eight inches in diameter. The dray-fish strained, the harness tautened, the houseboat moved north. Ignoring Thissell they stowed the pen, hoisted anchor. The fish were finally harnessed Toby and Rex climbed aboard, red bodies glistening, black cloth masks clinging to their faces. No question about it, he was becoming acclimated to Sirene! A significant stage had been reached when the naked face of a fish caused him shock! Thissell laughed uneasily, fingering his own mask, the Moon Moth. Its streaming black muzzle broke water, and Thissell, looking into its face, felt a peculiar qualm: the fish wore no mask! The youngest fish, either playful or captious, ducked and plunged. He bent over the rail, peered down into the underwater pens where Toby and Rex, the slaves, were harnessing the dray-fish for the weekly trip to Fan, eight miles north. He rose to his feet, went forward through the parlor saloon, the dining saloon, along a corridor past the galley and came out on the foredeck. Looking over the instruments Thissell resisted an urge to fling all six into the Titanic. He practiced with a dogged, deadly diligence, in which his original concept of music as a source of pleasure had long become lost. Trills, arpeggios, slurs, click-stops and nasalization damping and augmentation of overtones vibratos and wolf-tones concavities and convexities. He had practiced scales in nineteen keys and four modes, chords without number, intervals never imagined on the Home Planets. Every waking moment since his arrival had been given to the instruments: the hymerkin, the ganga, the zachinko, the kiv, the strapan, the gomapard. He flexed his arms, wrung his aching fingers. Thissell practiced another ten minutes, then put aside the zachinko. Of the six instruments he had set himself to learn, the zachinko had proved the least refractory (with the exception, of course, of the hymerkin, that clacking, slapping, clattering device of wood and stone used exclusively with the slaves). Thissel ran off a dozen quick scales, making very few mistakes. Pressure on the keys forced air through reeds in the keys themselves, producing a concertinalike tone. Now he put down the ganga for the zachinko, this a small sound-box studded with keys, played with the right hand. The scene had become as familiar, though not as boring, as the ganga, at which he had worked two hours, twanging out the Sirenese scales, forming chords, traversing simple progressions. Mireille shone hazy and white overhead, as if through a tangle of spider web the face of the ocean pooled and puddled with mother-of-pearl luster. A hundred yards inshore, surf defined a strip of white beach beyond rose jungle, with the silhouette of craggy black hills against the sky. He sat on the rear deck practicing the ganga, a zitherlike instrument not much larger than his hand. Edwer Thissell, resident on Sirene only three months, recognized the lack but could do nothing about it: this particular houseboat was the best he could get. That time was far gone the houseboat now commanded no prestige whatever. Seventy years ago the first owner, on accepting the boat, had honored the builder and had been likewise honored the transaction (for the process represented a great deal more than simple giving and taking) had augmented the prestige of both. The carpeting had lost its pile the carved screens were chipped the iron lantern at the bow sagged with rust. Such was Edwer Thissell's houseboat, but ownership brought him neither pleasure nor pride. The bow was given to service facilities and quarters for the slaves amidships were a pair of sleeping cabins, a dining saloon and a parlor saloon, opening upon an observation deck at the stern. The doors were carved from slabs of a mottled black-green wood the windows were many sectioned, paned with squares of mica, stained rose, blue, pale green and violet. The bow bulged like a swan's breast, the stem rising high, then crooking forward to support an iron lantern. In style, the boat was massive, broad beamed, steady as the shore itself, without ponderosity or slackness of line. The planking of waxy dark wood showed no joints, the fastenings were platinum rivets countersunk and polished flat. The houseboat had been built to the most exacting standards of Sirenese craftsmanship, which is to say, as close to the absolute as human eye could detect. Signature Buildings of San Francisco Backstory.Presentations for Biography of a City: San Francisco.Humanities Course Keynote Presentatioms. Biography of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.
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