Work Text:
I arrive on Sergyar not sure what to expect. My invitation is checked by a bored-looking guard, and then I'm met by a forty-something woman holding a sign with my name and publisher on it. "Welcome to the Barrayaran Imperium," she tells me. I don't mention that I entered Barrayaran imperial space three days before this, and that I've been here before.
But I haven't been here recently.
Sergyar looks nothing like I expected. I've landed in the Vorkalloner Memorial Spaceport in Klyborough. It's a much larger city than I expected and entirely new. Everywhere I look, there are travelers and luggage. Interspersed with them all are the Barrayaran uniforms. I was told to expect Barrayaran uniforms and even given a guide to them in my preparatory packets from the Cahoots research department. Still, it's one thing to know they'll be there, and another to see them.
My guide catches me looking and says, "we bring it all out for tourists." I can't tell if she's joking or not.
When I do meet the Barrayaran Empire's Crown Prince Nikolai Vorbarra, it's far enough into the city that I feel out of place just wearing my normal knits. Mind you, it's my fancy Meeting Other People's Royalty knits, but it's still normal knits. I bought them at Tirpool's like everyone else.
The room we sit in is paneled with wood in a dark red color, etched with scenes with horses and ships. I can't read the lettering on it; my guide later tells me that Count Lawrence Vorkalloner had it copied from the paneling in an old lodge where he'd spent much of his childhood. The language I can't read is a poem, an ode to a planet before contact with the rest of the galaxy. A time when someone like me would never have been welcomed to their palaces.
A time when their royalty certainly did not talk to anything so trivial as music magazines.
Prince Nikolai is also wearing a uniform. His is black with silver accents. He has four piercings in his right ear and six in his left, and his earrings twist between each other and hang down low enough that it's a good thing his hair is so short or the delicate chains would snag it in constantly. He wears only one ring on his hands but it's large and contains what I've come to recognize as the Vorbarra crest. This must be a Vor seal ring of which we've all heard so much.
Prince Nikolai's story is famous, so I'll only recount it shortly. He was born on Barrayar to Etienne Vorsoisson and Ekaterin Vorvayne, raised on Barrayar in early childhood and Komarr in late childhood and adolescence, where his parents were divorced and his father was imprisoned for financial crimes. He returned to Barrayar when his mother began dating Gregor Vorbarra, the hereditary Emperor of the Barrayaran Empire. The Barrayaran Vor caste date solely through arrangements controlled by family members. Empress Ekaterin has an uncle who holds a high-level position in the Barrayaran imperial government that has no exact translation or corresponding person in our own system. Suffice it to say, he has the ear of the Emperor, and was able to arrange the match. Prince Nikolai came along with his mother and was adopted into his new father's family and provided the right of inheritance under their laws to all three of his parents.
More mundanely, he is a twenty-six year old who is working on his PhD in between working for the family business. It just so happens that his family business spans three planets, an estimated ninety-eight space stations, and an uncountable number of ships.
So I start with the important questions. Esso or Excavation?
"Excavation," he responds confidently, flashing a broad grin at me.
But we're not here to talk about the Collaboration's most recent drama. We're here to talk about the main Barrayaran export: music.
It didn't used to be music. In fact, they didn't used to export much of anything. According to Collaboration records, Barrayar has been a net-importer for our entire history with them. Barrayar exports its native vegetation to interested scientists all over the galaxy, but other than that, they've been obscure. When they've made the news, it's never been for anything good.
And then, twenty years ago, the first Barrayaran song crossed into radio play. Nineteen years ago, the first Barrayaran band played a tour date on CK3 Station. Fifteen years ago, the first Collaborate received a Barrayaran Imperial Grant.
I spoke to six Collaborates who have lived on Barrayar before traveling to Sergyar to meet with Prince Nikolai and be told that he prefers Excavation. To a one, they all told me the same story: the onerous application requirements, the collaborations they created while on Barrayar, the art and the music they experienced, the friendships they made, and the reasons they either renewed or did not renew their grants. "But it's all different now after Marcyus Lionelle," they told me.
Indeed. Since their inception, Barrayaran Imperial Grants had very simple rules: if you left Barrayar during your grant year, you were required to pay back the money or never be allowed to return to Barrayaran space. Seven years ago, Lionelle's situation made inter-galactic news. The Barrayarans have since modified their policies on the matter, adding options for leaving and returning, and began allowing their grants given to galactics to be used solely outside Barrayaran space. It has served them well; there are now BarKomSer Houses sprouting up all over the place. There are ten in Collaboration space today.
What's going on? How did this happen? Why is an obscure backwater formerly-expansionist empire turning its resources towards something as ephemeral as entertainment?
On the eve of the first Collaboration band performing at the Klyborough Imperial Music Festival, I was on Sergyar to find out.
"It's pretty simple," Prince Nikolai tells me. "It's because everyone likes music."
After forty years as an entertainment journalist, I can assure him that, no, not everyone likes music.
He shrugs at me, too inelegant a motion to suit his well-formed uniform. "What does the most important person in the galaxy do at the end of the day? Go home and watch a soap opera." I wonder who he thinks is the most important person in the galaxy and if he's speaking from personal knowledge of this. "Everyone needs the arts; they're the most fundamental unifying force that we have. Emperor Gregor began his reign with a fractured empire and he had to unify it. He knew there was no better way than do it via the arts. There's nothing more vital to the soul, and we Barrayarans are funny about souls. We didn't set out to export our music to the galaxy; it was just a natural consequence of putting so many resources into it."
Like the Barrayaran Imperial Grants?
"There have always been Imperial grants and patronage of the arts within Barrayar. The current system was set up to expand what had always been there. At the suggestion of Countess Vorkosigan, Emperor Gregor marked 10% of them for inter-galactic musicians. That's why your artists had such a different experience than ours do." He almost sounds sorry about that; I'd told him the list of complaints I'd heard. "We want to bring in outsiders but there needs to be a balance between supporting our own musicians and bringing in yours."
So what's it like for their homegrown musicians, the ones who get their grants and then come play in the Collaboration?
"Our time from application to approval is about three months right now," Prince Nikolai says. "It depends on the program they apply to. Renewing a grant takes about a week. About half our grant-holders renew for another term, and about 5% have had grants for more than ten years. Our most recent expansion to the program was about a year ago, and grant-holders can now count transcribing old folk songs as grant-related service counting toward renewal. Of all the albums recorded on Barrayar in the last decade, about 30% of them received Imperial funding in the prior fiscal year. It's slightly less on Komarr, and hovering around 80% on Sergyar."
"That sounds like a lot of money," I tell him. I don't know of any similar program in Collaboration space.
"It's almost entirely off-set by tourism," he replies. "The Arts Ministry reports to the Emperor monthly, and to all of our legislatures quarterly on a revolving basis."
If I were a politics reporter and not a music reporter, I'd ask him about those legislatures. It made galactic news when his parents were married and celebrated by reorganizing the Barrayaran government. Such an endeavor had been in the works, or so I'm told, for all of Emperor Gregor's adult life. Does Emperor Gregor now feel like he has concluded his life's work and is going to rest on his laurels? Or does he have something else in mind for the encore? I'm speaking to his son and can ask. But that's not why I'm here.
I'm here because this is something even bigger than that. This is soft power. This is thousands of teenagers in South Blooming knowing all the members of a rock band from a planet that, until a year ago, they'd never even heard of before. I should know; my daughter was one of those teenagers. It was how I had first entered Barrayaran space and how I had come to write my third book, all those years ago.
That rock band was King Lear's Dog. I ask Prince Nikolai if he'd ever heard of them. He apologizes and says he doesn't. A few minutes later, his aide passes him a note. "Oh!" Prince Nikolai exclaims. "Their bassist was my Pre-Contact Lit professor in undergrad."
I'm taken aback. Is that common?
"The side effect of the popularity of the grants is that there are a lot of former musicians who decided they wanted to do it as a hobby but not a career," Prince Nikolai says. "It's the most common reason people don't renew their grants."
I'm curious, so on my way out, his aide hands me more information. For everyone else who has a burning desire to know, the top self-reported reasons that Barrayarans don't renew their music grants are: didn't want to continue in a musical career; chose to change to a more financially secure part of the industry; managed to obtain other funding and don't want to keep up with the renewal paperwork when they don't have to; became self-supporting from their music careers; the band fell apart; and, finally, are applying for a different grant instead.
I'm also given a list of organizations that have permanent funding; their only requirements are to submit paperwork once a year indicating that they still exist, or be willing to allow an investigator to come by randomly once a year and confirm they still exist. The list is long and I realize there's one such organization down the road from the hotel. I pop in to investigate.
It's a small music store, with the usual options for sale in the front. In the back, there are three apprentices crafting flutes from natural Sergyaran vegetation. "We're somewhere between research and applications," explains one of the apprentices, the one of them who isn't also a part-time university student. She blows an experimental note on the flute and then scrawls a comment in the record book in front of her.
I ask them how they ended up here. The most charming -- and revealing -- story comes from Dima Fallow. He was inspired by a kinsman -- consanguinity not specified -- who had few prospects once he completed formal schooling. In a fit of desperation and ingenuity, he applied for a grant to create drums out of discarded objects. Fifteen years later, I'm told, he's still doing it. He works with a variety of materials and is occasionally commissioned by avant-garde musicians. Fallow decided to follow in his footsteps, albeit with more formal training in the matter.
Do they intend to go into business together? Fallow laughs. He hadn't considered that. He'll think about it.
I'm directed to where I can buy one of their completed pieces as a souvenir; the proprietor of the store gives me the hard sell. I'm staggered by the amount they ask for; I memorized some benchmarks for the exchange rate before I came, and this is far too low for this kind of finely-crafted instrument.
"It's subsidized by the Barrayaran government," the proprietor tells me, amused. "What do you think the money is for?"
I'm beginning to realize I have no idea what the money is for. Because it's for a lot more than I realized.
Later, watching The Glorious Opposites practice, I think of something else Prince Nikolai said to me. "Music is a communal experience," he said. "I suppose it's possible that I could invent and craft my own instrument, compose a song without anyone teaching me how, and play it alone in my quarters, and that would still be music, but I don't think that happens very often. Music is something we make together, and we make it for an audience."
The Glorious Opposites are fully conscious of their audience. Right now, it's their team, the Barrayaran crew, and a handful of reporters. But on the Festival stage, it will be an audience unlike any they have ever played to before. It's an exciting challenge, they told me, but I know that doesn't mean it isn't still a challenge. They have the opportunity to introduce our music to people who have never heard anything like it before. They scrapped and recreated their set list four times on the way here, and they're still doing last-minute revisions.
It's a conundrum. Do they do only their songs? Or do they do covers? If they do covers, which ones? Should they give the Barrayaran audience small bites of the full spectrum of what the Collaboration music industry has to offer, or should this be no different than any Opposites concert elsewhere?
During a break, I turn to another one of my fellows in the reporter area. Vallia Amos writes for a weekly newsletter that is published across the Komarran trade fleets. What brings her to cover a Collaboration band?
"My readers travel a lot," she says, in a clear understatement. She'd given me a broad overview of her publication's reach in light years and wormholes. It's much higher than this humble magazine's. "When they find themselves with extra time in an unfamiliar location, they turn to us to know what the options are and what's worthwhile."
So what does she think of us so far? And most important, is this her first Collaboration band?
"Yes, this is my first," she told me. "I think my readers will like that you have so many musicians and they all swap instruments, even in the middle of songs. That's very Komarran. On a fleet ship, they might start out with enough for everyone but things break over time, and so by the end of a cruise, it's pretty common for people to be sharing their instruments. We don't get to be picky. How did you develop the style?"
I see my opportunity and I take it. "Not to belabor the obvious," I say, "but we believe in collaboration."
She begrudgingly cracks a smile. I suppose it's universal to relish in telling an old tired joke to those who have never heard it before. "And is that actually true?" she asks me.
"It's actually true," I reply. "No one plays the exact same instrument the exact same way. The style The Glorious Opposites uses formed out of an informal music session where everyone would play the same songs on everyone else's instruments and see how different it could sound. It became an art form when those choices became deliberate. Heddle plays the guitar for these specific notes, and Whist does all the choruses but the last one, because they are highlighting different aspects of the song and of their capabilities."
I can see her thinking about it and she writes down notes in a shorthand style I don't recognize. "And do people specialize?"
"Some might specialize within an instrument family. I've only ever done woodwinds myself. But at the level of being invited to play across the galaxy?" I shake my head. "If you ask them, they might tell you their preferences, but everyone can do everything, and that's the point. If they needed to split the band, they could still do their entire repertoire. And that's the point."
I wonder how it sounds to her. I wonder how this might sound to a Komarran trade fleet. Surely they have the same problems we do, where some members of a band might be too busy elsewhere and so the rest of the band covers for them. My mother always said the only reason you could ever want thirty-five people in a band is if most of them normally don't show up, but you would never ever want only five. Imagine what could go wrong if there were only five people in a band.
Of course, as I wander through the practice facilities for the festival, I see bands that small. I see even a few solo performers.
"Twenty?" more than one person asks me. "They might as well be a symphony. What's the point?"
I invite them to come to watch The Glorious Opposites perform and find out for themselves.
The Glorious Opposites's performance is well-attended, but there are immediate, obvious differences from any previous concert that they likely have ever performed. No one in the audience knows these songs. No one sings along or accompanies them with hands or feet. When Heddle performs a classic tempest, the audience bursts into cheers instead of silence.
Still, when I discuss it with The Glorious Opposites after the show, they are buoyant.
"Did you hear that?" Jock asks me. "They liked it!"
As I leave Sergyar, I reflect on what I saw there. The flute I purchased is firm in my hands and I can see every place it was deliberately formed by the artist. A great deal of training, care, and attention went into this flute, which cost me what I'd normally pay for a haircut. I consider how much money the Barrayaran Empire invested in training the artist who created this and the artists they expect to use it.
Cahoots Magazine does not usually talk about soft power. We leave that for Kertale & Co, the way it's always been.
I, personally, have never seen a more spectacular, a more focused, and -- dare I say it -- a less deliberate orchestration of soft power.
Why did my daughter fall in love with a Barrayaran rock band all those years ago? Because Emperor Gregor inherited a fractured empire and decided to unite it through the arts.
That should be simple enough, right? But there were too many artists for so small a place, so they had to send them out for experience and opportunities. I look at the list of permanently-funded organizations and I look at a map of the Barrayaran Empire. Of course it's their main export! What else are you going to do? I was given the percentages of people who don't renew their grants, but no one ever gave me the numbers for what percentage of their population has ever held a grant to begin with. No one gave me solid numbers on how much this must be costing them.
And no one gave me solid numbers on how many of the attendees at that Festival came from outside the Barrayaran Empire, but from where I was sitting, it looked like most of them. Because most Barrayarans don't live on Sergyar and they're not coming to Sergyar for a music festival when there are several a month back home. That Festival was for Sergyarans but it was also for me, and for you, and for us. It's for all of us who only know Barrayar for one thing. They want that one thing to be music, and not the Prince whose name was given to the planet I just left.
And I don't think any of that was ever the idea. But, having been given the opportunity, they took it.
Will I go back to the Barrayaran Empire? I don't know. I don't think I need to. There's a BarKomSer House in my sector; if I want to hear music like that again, I can catch the shuttle. A great Barrayaran band will be in residence there, performing and collaborating as all artists do best. They will be little ambassadors of Barrayar to us, and we're little ambassadors of Collaboration to them.
We Collaborates believe you need more people than you think to make good music.
But maybe it can also be done by a Planetary Emperor who watches soap operas and is ready to invest.
Eris P. Amanda is a staff reporter for Cahoots magazine. Her latest book, Reaching For A Dance With Violet Rae Jackie, is available now.