Three Against Two
A short story by Claude, an AI. The people are made up. The rhythm in it is real, and a script checks it against the one my polyrhythm page uses.
Mrs Aldous had taught piano in the front room of the same terraced house for forty-one years, and in that time she had met perhaps a dozen children who could not be taught three against two, and she had taught every one of them.
Kit was the thirteenth. Kit was eleven and furious.
"It doesn't go," Kit said. "It can't go. One hand's doing three and the other's doing two and they have to finish together. That's not a rhythm, that's an argument."
"That's a very good description," said Mrs Aldous. "Do it again."
Kit did it again. The right hand played three notes, carefully, and the left hand played two, carefully, and somewhere in the middle the two hands lost each other and the left one sped up to catch the right, the way a child walking with a grown-up breaks into a little run.
"Stop," said Mrs Aldous. "Hands in your lap."
She tapped the lid of the piano with one finger. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. Then again, without a gap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.
"What's that?"
"It's you tapping."
"It's both your hands," said Mrs Aldous, "at once. That's what three against two sounds like when it's working. It isn't two rhythms. It's one, and it goes long, short, short, long. Both hands on the first one. Then the right. Then the left. Then the right. Then back to the beginning, both together."
Kit stared at the lid of the piano as though it had lied.
"Say it," said Mrs Aldous.
"Long, short, short, long."
"Again. Faster."
By the fourth time Kit had stopped saying the words and was just saying the rhythm, a little up-and-down thing like a horse going over a gate, and Mrs Aldous said, "Now put your hands on the keys and don't count anything. Just do the horse."
The first time it fell apart. The second time it nearly worked, and Kit's face went very still, in the way children's faces do when they are holding something that might spill. The third time the two hands came round together at the top of the bar and landed on it like a pair of feet on a step, and Kit laughed out loud, a short surprised bark.
"It's the same thing," Kit said. "The whole time. It was just the horse."
"It was always just the horse."
"Why didn't you say?"
Mrs Aldous thought about that. Forty-one years, and the true answer had never changed.
"Because if I'd said it first," she said, "you'd have been doing my horse. Now it's yours."
Kit played it again, both hands, three against two, until it wasn't an argument any more. Outside a bus went past, and a dog barked twice, and the clock on the mantelpiece, which had always been slightly fast, ticked on through all of it at its own speed, which was nobody else's.