The Fredösphere

As I mentioned yesterday, I am enjoying a return trip through Robert Heinlein's space opera Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.  It's almost redundant for me to mention that its plot follows the "boy astronaut saves the world" algorithm.  (Is there any other?)  This implementation has a bit of a twist:  it's the "boy astronaut, and his plucky little girl sidekick and an alien called the Mother Thing who communicates via music that sounds like bird songs that anyone instantly can comprehend intuitively save the world."  Ah, yes, you say; one of those.

I have remembered little of the book from the time I first read it.  The one plot element that stayed with me through the years was the use of scraps of music notation, dropped into the midst of the text, to express the Mother Thing's speech.  Heinlein doesn't bother notating everything she says; he gives you just an occasional passage to help you remember that she's really singing, not speaking in English (or for that matter, communicating telepathically).

I'm tempted to say Have Spacesuit is the rare sci-fi novel where music sight-reading ability is an advantage.  That is not really true, because ignorance of these melodies allows one to fill in the details according to the needs of one's own imagination -- as happens with so many details when one reads.  This time through the book, I have been unable to resist working out the sound of Mother Thing's melodies, and they have proved to be rather prosaic.  When it comes to expressing speech through birdlike song, Heinlein's Mother Thing is no match for Wagner's wood bird.  And it gets worse:



Horrible!  It's the Mother Thing, singing in the key of F -- the most alien key of all!  Aaaaaaargh!