taxonomites | [location: Central]

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[location: Central]

First A. Then D, E, and G, in perfect fifths. Sooner or later, life does have to go on.

Sherlock Holmes raises the pitch pipe to his lips and blows D, E, and G, shrill and pronounced in the summer air. He prefers to tune those in relation to one another and to A, generally, not by the pipe, but it never hurts to check his strings against them.

He fusses minutely with the fine tuners, leaned against the wall. His case is at his feet. Though he expects only Extras' custom today, the look of the thing matters. To him, at least. Unlike most of the matters he deals in, there are no absolute truths in violin tuning: only the perfect fifth, one in relation to another. One may vary the tuning as much as one pleases, as long as one varies them all. Sometimes he experiments with a particular scordatura for a time; generally he tunes just a fraction brighter than G-D-A-E, though, for clarity of sound and because he doesn't expect company in harmony.

The truth is, as much as he likes to play his violin, he would rather be doing it somewhere else right now. Squirreled away indoors in the heart of one of these abandoned buildings, maybe, where he can practice in peace and pretend the city is empty until he gets tired or slinks off to Jeremy's for food, either/or. Saying hello to the other prisoners in Taxon is not his idea of fun just today.

But he generates all of his income busking. Besides, on some level he supposes he owes it to the others to make himself available, for questions or tirades or whatever else they see fit. So Sherlock keeps his odd hours, ignores his tablet (with exceptions), and keeps more than ever to himself: except on his usual odd-numbered afternoons and even-numbered evenings, where he sets up somewhere on the Taxon streets and plays his violin, to raucous and randomly-generated Extra applause.

[ooc: corresponding to dien's everybody come yell at jason post, here's my everybody come yell at sherlock post! fire away!]

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Fake people wash back and forth like ocean waves, foaming in ill timed applause. One of those waves tosses up a Metody, quiet and lurking off to the side, listening peacefully.

Metody likes music as much as any monster. When the music ends, she claps politely, then uses her pad to give a tip.

Sherlock notices her when she joins the crowd mid-set--some things are impossible to turn off--but he finishes his song before lowering the instrument to give his shoulder a rest. He raises his wrist to check his balance, a little taken aback by her tip.

"Your request?" he prompts her without looking up.

....she can request music?

"The We-" wait, no. No, that was probably not - what about - n-

She's silent for a moment of thought, trying to think of something that isn't culturally keyed or purely obnoxious.

" - what kind of music do you know? I'm not sure how we overlap."

"Try me," is his answer. Is he less talkative than usual, or does he adopt a different manner when he's playing for an audience?

Both are true. Sherlock's not trying to be taciturn, but he is preoccupied and, moreover, of a sober mood. He feels tired, the sort of tired that happens when you sleep too much rather than too little: but if Metody Green wants to extend an olive branch for some inexplicable reason, he's no one to refuse it. She's an odd one, this inhuman androgyne, but--he's come to realize--a harmless one as well.

"Fol-" Even before she finishes the syllable, she hears the wistfulness in her voice. No, maybe not folk.

"Vivaldi's Summer?"

"You don't bother with obscurity, now, do you?" Sherlock arches a quizzical brow. He sounds less judgmental than curious, however; were Metody from his own world he might cast aspersions on her musical education, but he suspects she's as uncertain as he is of how much music their worlds have in common at all. Vivaldi is not a divergence point, at least. However else history might have conducted itself differently, it managed to spit out two Antonio Vivaldis, and with him two sets of Four Seasons concertos.

Not that history should conduct itself that way at all. Not that the physics of this make any sense. He engrosses himself wondering about that again and loses track of time for a few moments before coming to himself again; he remembers he's holding his violin and then, abruptly, that he's supposed to play it. So he raises his bow: "I presume we're thinking of the same piece," he says of this with a wry smile.

"Movement 1? Or Movement 3, the Storm?"

"It seemed prudent to start with large, obvious things, and work from there. All the Americas I've researched have a background of similar music, though more recent stuff is...well. The closer I look, the more different things are, often in the most ridiculous ways."

She smiles a little, politely ignoring his moment of absence. She can hardly throw stones at that particular glass house. "Movement 1, please. And thank you."

Edited 2013-07-17 05:08 (UTC)

If this were a test, Metody would have passed it for the time being. (And really, it's always at least a fraction of a test with Sherlock Holmes.) He favors her with the edge of a smile, indicating that Movement 3 would have been the wrong answer, and commences his performance.

Vivaldi's Concerto no. 2 in G minor, L'estate, is written to be played allegro non molto in its first movement: fast, but not too fast. Sherlock complies; his non molto even manages not to be a little more molto than most, like one might expect from him, but there's something a bit sardonic in the way he drags out his bowing, as if he's humoring the display of formality. His tempo edges on a dragged-out allegretto.

It invests the piece with a thick sense of anticipation, already strung along by the lilting minor key--like it promises to slide into the adagio of the second movement, broken by furious strings, and then finally into the famous trembling presto strings of the Storm he disdains so much. But he never plays it. He leaves it unsatisfied and open-ended, still far from the consummation of the third movement: the end of Movement 1, as he promised.

"Movement 3 was my first piece," he comments as Extras break into a round of applause that he ignores. "My first proper piece. I was plucking away at it before then, composing things--drove the nanny round the bend, I'm sure. I've some remnant fondness, but it's much too often plucked out of context. Still. It's not Pachelbel." He cracks his knuckles. In some ways he's not unlike any other violinist; whenever an Extra prompts him to play Pachelbel's Canon in D, he claims he doesn't know it.

Metody knows precious little about classical music, but, as the saying goes, she knows what she likes. And, as satisfying as the fury and motion of Movement 3 is, she prefers the slow, tantalizing build of Movement 1. It feels far more alive to her, and more summery as well, with the straining twine of branch and bird.

She leans against a wall and listens with the sweet, absent smile that makes her look like a brainless little doll. When it is over, she sighs happily. And then laughs.

"Pachelbel's Canon is...I enjoyed it the first time I heard it in concert, because it was something familiar in an unfamiliar context. And then I realized I heard it over and over and over, and now I like it the same way I like holiday songs - more for the comfort of familiarity and repetition, and less because I like the piece itself."

" - gosh, I hope we're talking about the same piece of music, or that all is going to sound very strange to you."

He almost lifts bow to strings again to demonstrate, but considers that this would amount to playing Pachelbel's Canon, which would be breaking his tacit vow. "Is it insipid? Repetitive? Oversaturates weddings and Christmas Mass?" He raises his eyebrows. "Then we're probably talking about the same piece."

Sherlock relents and compromises by plinking out a few notes on the strings from the Canon with his fingers: those four damnable measures that performing violinists hear in Hell, as far as he can tell. So many hated boyhood Christmas Masses, forced on him first by a father with very little faith but a great deal of stubborn regard for tradition, then a brother unable or unwilling to stop doing anything their father started--and God willing, there's something the matter with him, because he's almost starting to miss hating Christmas Mass. The things you remember.

"Q.E.D.," he says. "Rubbish."

"It would be serene and simple if it wasn't inesc- oh, yes, that's it. One of my grandmothers loves it, so every single cousin plays it when they learn how to play an instrument. And goodness, have I got a lot of cousins."

"You compose?" Musicians. They're like artists, right?

Metody Green is a curious individual. All pink and frills and down-home quasi-Southern-belle oh-gosh and golly-gee girl-next-doorness, living in a not-quite-human, not-quite-gendered body and streaked with an evident tough-as-nails survivalist streak. Sherlock wonders if she's quite so singular where she comes from or if most are as distinguished as she. Goodness indeed.

He spends little time speculating on her world, though, comparatively--it's so divergent from his own that he has little to go on. He needs data. No bricks without clay, as he's said before.

Sherlock answers her question with a shake of his head. "I am not a creative person," he says briskly. "In the strictest sense of the word: I don't create. I unravel. On one side of the world stand the composers, artists, engineers of the world, in a way of thinking--and then on the other the critics and scientists and investigators. Art is a form of engineering. I'm no engineer."

It is a sincere distinction. Moriarty was an engineer, perhaps the most masterful, of his art--directly opposed to Sherlock's own, so perhaps Sherlock was always going to be penciled in on his dance card, or vice versa. Mycroft is, too: there's nothing intrinsically pernicious about creativity.

There is an art in detection as well, though not one that produces a masterwork--streaks of inspiration, periods of stifling, smothering block. But Sherlock thinks it a world apart from the sort of lightning that struck Vivaldi, once upon a time. Or James Moriarty. He's lived his life in fascination with that sort of mind.

Metody's first impression of Sherlock had not been overly flattering; she was frightened, he was rude and abrupt. But he was a familiar kind of rude to someone well acquainted with academia, and she was starting to get an idea of how very many people he must have seen arrive.

And even if he is a bit of a jerk, he's not being one now. And real conversation is a marvelous thing.

"Ah." She smiles sympathetically. "I'm not creative either." Her smile brightens. "I'm a very good craftsman, though. There's a lot of joy in that."

"If you're not an engineer, what are - ah, what were you? I was a student, before all this."

"A scientist," says Sherlock with a slight smile.

He sets bow to strings again like he's going to just leave her with that--but after a moment he looks up again, through his eyelashes. It certainly hasn't escaped general notice that Sherlock Holmes has a flair for the dramatic. "In philosophy," he says. "Professionally I was a detective. I worked with--with the Metropolitan Police Service," he says with a frown, as if he's wondering if there even is a Metropolitan Police Service or for that matter a United Kingdom in Metody's world (which he is). "On retainer, though. Consultations. Otherwise I was a private investigator, I suppose. That calls to mind something very noir, doesn't it," he says with a disdainful snort. "Nothing like that. Ninety-nine parts perspiration to every sliver of inspiration. It's all details, Miss Green--the difference between an arrest and an unsolved crime is a detail."

There might be the faintest hint of a sparkle to Metody's smile at that moment of drama. It could be the glitter of suppressed humor, or it could be the nearby streetlight. Who's to say?

"Goodness. That sounds...largely tedious. I can't imagine it's like on TV when you live it in real life."

Mildly, she adds, "One of my brothers is a cop."

Sherlock's rather disappointed with the quality of the bad television in Taxon, as a matter of fact: it's just not bad enough. Manufacted fake telly just doesn't have the heart in it--it's like when science fiction channels try to make B-movies. One can't try to make a B-movie or a bad television show. He misses Jerry Springer.

He says none of this to Metody. "Is he?" he says with mild disinterest. "Do they let people like you into the police force where you're from? Or is it things? I don't have an exact taxonomical grasp of what half of us are, biologically."

This is said casually, offhand--like it's a foregone conclusion that Metody isn't entirely what she claims to be, an open secret. Which it is to him. Many things are foregone conclusions to him.

She stands straighter, drawing back from him. She's not sure which of those who were there that night went around talking - Horst seems like a stand up guy, Nuada isn't likely to be in a condition to gossip, but Coa- Cain and....Smecker? Was that it? - those two are unknowns.

Its inevitable, really. What's more interesting than a source of shame?

"Things. And not knowingly, no - but I'm Unfortunate anyway, so law enforcement has never been an option."

People never like to feel their privacy's been invaded--even if all that's been taken from them, they offered up freely. Perhaps without realizing. But freely nevertheless.

"I told you, Miss Green." He glances back down at his instrument. "Ninety-nine parts perspiration," he says again: the beginning and end of all the explanation of his methods he feels up to giving just now. Other days he's a terrible show-off. The motivation comes and goes.

Sherlock catches a string with his thumbnail and lets it go, sounding a short, reverberating note. "I find the distinction between people and things to be a semantic one, for the most part."

Her eyes, brilliant blue in the way of tinted lenses, flick over the mindless crowd. "I suppose it would seem semantic to someone who comes up on the happier side of things. But it's still an important difference."

"All categories are semantic." Metody never should have engaged him on matters epistemological. Theories of knowledge could keep him here all day. "The most staggering lesson I ever learned in biology when I was small was that taxonomy--everything we understand about classification--is an invention. Linnaeus's invention, for the most part. Had some other botanist distributed his own Systema Naturae to that kind of success, we'd conceive of it differently."

This is usually the sort of conversation he has over his own microscope, with one eye to the lens. He's not sure why that occurs to him now.

"I imagine you draw your boundaries of personhood where they make the most sense to you. As do I."

Just as this conversation verges on the distressingly personal, though, Sherlock hefts his violin again. "In any case, they're hardly paying me for my conversation here," he says with a brief smile. "Any parting requests?"

"It's a tool. A useful way to see and manipulate the world." A person without taxonomy and semantics might as well be a computer without an operating system, or numbers without accounting.

"Ah...hm. Tchaikovsky's Meditation?"

A shrug as he adjusts the positioning of the violin and considers, briefly, Tchaikovsky's Méditation in D minor. Straightforward enough, but without orchestral backing, more than a little forlorn.

Then he looks off into the middle distance--past or perhaps through Metody, to a horizon somewhere beyond the Taxon skyline--and commences the piece. Soon it's as if he's forgotten Metody or shuffled her in with the Extras, and for all practical purposes he has; ultimately, there's only one audience he truly cares to please with his music. The peculiar narcissism of artists: and of Sherlock Holmes.

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