Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  “Is anybody taking care of it Down South?” I asked Austro when next the straw bosses were busy elsewhere.

  “Sure, a cousin of mine is doing it down there,” he said. “This cousin was raised on the Malawi Shores, and then he was shanghaied to Rio as a lad. Now he’s teamed up with a cross-eyed carioca youngster who’s kind of like Roy Mega. They’re pretty good at it down there, almost as good at it as Roy and I are.”

  “How many hot seasons are there in the year, Austro?” I asked him.

  “Get out of the way, Austro and Laff!” Benedetti was howling. “There’s work to do.”

  * * * *

  Well, it was fun. Every day, though we worked long hours, was really a holiday. It’s fun to be smart. And the smarter you are, the more fun it is. Those who deny this are those who’ve never had any really smart days in their lives. It’s top fun when the whole world is smart, or the top half of it anyhow. There’s really excitement in learning everything, everything, and then exploding it into bigger and bigger versions of itself. It’s like doubling your life’s knowledge every day, and then doubling it again the next day. It’s like—

  (—time is compressed here, and the brain days are all run together. There is too much of it for analysis, though analysis of everything else is part of the brain days. The pleasure is still too near to be put into words, and they say that the hotbrain jag will be even better next year.)

  * * * *

  “There’s a new corporation trying to buy me out,” Barnaby Sheen said one evening. “The corporation is made up of the second, third, and fourth biggest people in the hot-brain cash-in complex. But I’m still number one. Why should I sell?”

  “Sell before the sun goes down, Sheeny,” Gippo Sharpface told him. “And then pull a few millions off the roll for us your faithful and seasonable minions.”

  “But the thing is getting bigger and bigger,” Barnaby puffed.

  “And tonight is hot-brain full moon,” Austro said. “Oh sure, it’ll be back again next year. Well, sell now and you will have the means to handle it next year any way you want to. Sell it, carrock!”

  “At a certain hour we will send out a new shape and a new smell and a new sound,” said Roy Mega. “And these things will trigger a new hot season.”

  “Ah yeah, I hear the new sound now,” Barnaby said. “It’s the sound that the merry-go-round makes just before it breaks down.”

  Barnaby Sheen had to hurry, but he did manage to sell his hot-brain empire before the sun went down.

  * * * *

  3

  Barnaby Sheen was stamping out a multitude of burning cigar butts. Or else he was dancing some funny dance in the early morning. I had never seen him dance before, but he wasn’t bad.

  “Loppity, Goppity, Gippity, Gopes—I’m a little kid from the Guna Slopes,” Austro was singing with the ringing upper half of his voice, and he was filling the air with rock dust as he cut the same immortal galloping words into a rock slab. At that moment, Austro was the hottest poet in the world.

  Gippo Sharpface, wearing outsized dark glasses, was facing directly into the bright morning sun, and he was painting it: a bumingly brilliant orb, which was wearing outsized dark glasses. Gippo was doing absolutely new things with color, burning things, foxfire things. Gippo, at that moment, was the finest artist that the world has seen for the last twenty thousand years.

  Doctor George Drakos was sitting on a little stool. He was holding a surgeons bone-saw. He had put a double bend into it, and he was striking it with a bone-chiseler’s hammer. And you wouldn’t believe the music he was making. George Drakos, at that moment, was the finest musical-saw player the world had ever seen.

  Cris Benedetti was wearing a toga, and he had pieces of laurel looped around his ears. He was declaiming drama. It wasn’t old Shakespearean drama or any such thing. It was old-new Cris Benedetti drama. It was ringing and riming and eloquent like real hot-art season drama. It moved one to passion and pleasure. Evoked forms crowded the golden morning, and the fine voice of Cris called out real response. At that moment, Cris Benedetti was the finest dramatic declaimer in the world.

  Harry O’Donovan was sculpturing something in lucite and chrome. It was primordial form made out of the primordial elements of fire and ice. It was almost the secret of life itself, it was almost the shape of destiny. It was probably good.

  And the voice of Mary Mondo the ghost girl was doing cantatas and those other flutey songs. And she was good. She had probably always been in accord with the hot seasons.

  Boy Mega was producing some sort of delta-secondary music by manipulation of split-frequency circuits. Ah well, nobody had ever done quite that thing before, and the first of everything is always good by definition.

  “The hot-art season, huh!” Barnaby Sheen commented, still doing his cigar-butt stomp-out dance. “Did you guys know that it would be the next season? There ought to be a way to make a good thing out of it. Austro, do you know who will be the hottest art property in the world by midmorning?”

  “Carrock, I know, I won’t tell,” Austro caroled. “Moppity, Loppity, Lippity, Moan—Let it alone, man, let it alone!” Austro sure made the rock dust fly when he was graving his verses on stone and singing his own accompaniment to chisel and graver.

  “For the sanctification of your soul, don’t squeeze every season, Sheeny,” great artist Gippo Sharpface said. “Ah, what nobility and blaze of color! I frighten myself with my own genius. But let this one go, Sheen.”

  “What, You the Fox say that? But I’ve the feeling you’re right I think I’ll go write me a thundering epic drama. It will begin with the Chorus of May Dancers doing a stunning dance sort of like the one I’ve been doing. Say, are the seasons inexorable under the revised system? Their returning is a freedom-of-expression thing, of course, but must we follow just one sequence in them? We should have a choice in this too.”

  “There’s another world down under,” Roy Mega said.

  “What follows the hot-art season here?” Gippo Sharpface asked. And the sun in his painting was brighter than the sun in the sky.

  “The hot-rock season will come next,” Austro told us. “That’s when the people have a fever for building huge structures out of every material, but rock is still prince of materials. Did you know that the Great Pyramid was built in a single hot-rock season?”

  “Does anyone know what is playing down under now?” Harry O’Donovan asked.

  “It’s the hot-love season just starting there,” Roy Mega said. “Some people believe that it was the original oestrus, the first hot wave.”

  Gippo Sharpface made a sudden noise. Then he effected one more burning splotch on his splendid painting. “Gad, what genius!” he cried in humble admiration, “but the very greatest things, by their nature, must be left unfinished.” He signed the unfinished sun painting “Fire Fox.”

  “I’m off, fellows,” he said then. “Hot love was always my first love. I can pick up the hot-art season again once or even twice a year. And I’ll catch the hot-brain season again, either down there or back here again next spring. But something is calling me down there right now. Anyone else for Rio? Austro?”

  “No, no, I’m scared of that stuff,” the greatest rock-graving poet in the world refused it. “Maybe next year. I’m at the bashful stage now. Carrock, I’m only a twelve-year-old kid.”

  “I’m with you, Gippo,” Harry O’Donovan said, and he left his sculptured lucite and chrome that was almost the secret of life itself.

  “In just three more moons it’ll be hot-love season here, fellows,” Roy Mega said reasonably. But Gippo and Harry were already gone.

  * * * *

  “Gippity, Goppity, Goopity, Gouth—Gippo and Harry are fire-tailing South,” Austro sang and chiseled his great folk poem.

  It’s wonderful to hear the greatest poet of an age in action.

  <>

  * * * *

  The idea of time travel is so appealing that it’s becom
e a standard plot device in science fiction, despite the fact that by all standards of logic it’s clearly impossible: visiting the past would violate the cause-and-effect basis of scientific thinking. But perhaps it would be possible for future chrononauts to observe the past by inhabiting the minds of selected people . . . and what historian in any field could resist such an opportunity? Especially the chance to share with Beethoven the composition of his greatest work, the Ninth Symphony?

  Carter Scholz, who builds from this idea a dramatic tale of the anomalies of creation, is a graduate of the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshops whose previous stories have appeared in Orbit, Alternities, Clarion IV and Output

  * * * *

  THE NINTH SYMPHONY OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN AND OTHER LOST SONGS

  Carter Scholz

  1

  When a man’s halfway to his death, he knows. The bones shift, the organs settle, the blood ticks out a quiet warning: time’s half gone, look around, what’ve you done, what are you going to do? Every day we meet reminders of our mortality and dismiss them, uneasily ignore, turn our faces from the grave. But at that halfway mark, ignorance is impossible; a man thinks, My God, I’m thirty-five, I’m forty, and the years are relentless, I’ll never be thirty or twenty or fifteen again—and was I ever? Did I ever look around, feel, really know eighteen or twenty-four or any of my ages? Did I make the most of them?

  Charles Largens woke one morning and found himself there. He thought, I’m thirty-five years old and I won’t live past seventy. My bones tell me in language I can’t rebuff. Half my life is gone, and oh Lord, where?

  The early years had gone into two sonatas, an unfinished symphony, a mass, an incomplete song cycle. Those were good years, good work. But since then his time had gone into research, criticism; it had been made solid, not in sounds but in vast stacks of paper, dreary essays and analyses. He did not enjoy it, and often the stuff had no meaning for him, but it took his time nonetheless. It had taken half his life.

  In his voicetyper was an unfinished essay on Buxtehude; he had abandoned it last night when the fugues and inventions piled up in a baroque tangle and he could make no more sense of them. Notes had swarmed past his eyes like flies on a five-staved racetrack, the precise ordered counterpoint a frightening miniature of his own boxed and formal life. He fell asleep with that image and woke to the sudden shock of being thirty-five. And he thought of Ludwig Van Beethoven, his avatar, the one constant source of solace in his life. He wanted to be Beethoven that morning, more than he ever had before.

  Such a thing was not impossible. It was not easy to be Beethoven, of course. Like most of the Lincoln Center musicologists in the year 2016, he had been trying the greater part of his career for that distinction; and only now, after years of the lesser talents, the Couperins and Loeschorns and Bertinis, and atop that awful sense of waste and futility, did he feel ready to consider the Master.

  But be honest: it was more than consideration; this morning he recognized it as an obsession. Bach and Chopin and Debussy and even old Buxtehude were fine in their places, but for him, Charles Largens, only one composer had all the balance, the power, the complete tightness that music ought to have; so as a pianist might dream of Carnegie (as he once had), or an artist of the Guggenheim, or a literary critic of Finnegans Wake, so Largens longed to base his lifework as musicologist on the works of Beethoven. More now; as Beethoven he might transcend the study of music, and attain the abstract itself. That was the dream that kept him going those years after his own music went dry, the dream that drove him to write essays on the preludes of Moskowski and bore himself to madness with Czerny just because he had been a student of the Master’s; just because that particular essay might draw some attention, make someone cry, Hey! he’s got it! and you could never tell what might attract the men with power, the men with the machines, so you did it all.

  He wanted to be Beethoven, and these men could do that for him, with their machines.

  The machines were windows into the past. Not doors, nor even a very clear sort of window; they more revealed the texture of the glass than the scene beyond, for what they did was transfer your consciousness into the mind of someone in the past.

  After the historians found that subjective impressions of history were not very much more valuable than textbooks and records, the psychologists and scholars took over the vast banks of transfer equipment; they roamed and delved the past like archaeologists in a newly unearthed Greek library. Essays appeared psychoanalyzing Freud. The real reasons for the Emancipation Proclamation were revealed. The Shakespeare/Bacon myth was finally debunked. George Washington’s real name came out. And it was inevitable that the artists, the writers, the musicians, in their mutual despair of ever taking art further than it had already gone in the barren year 2016, came forward eager to learn the inspirations for Macbeth, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Waiting for Godot, the Beethoven Ninth. To find out if El Greco was really astigmatic; to catch Hemingway’s last thoughts as he triggered the shotgun; to study firsthand the mad genius of Van Gogh; to see the world as the great minds of history saw it. To put together in the sad flat year 2016 a world, piecemeal, from remnants of the past

  Time travel, of a sort; it was not real time travel, for that would have been magic, a kind of miracle, and there were no more miracles or magic in the world they had made. It was a world of norms and averages and no extremes, a world where everything had an explanation and a reason, where even this miraculous-seeming tune travel could be expressed in hard clear terms, if you had the math. There were no paradoxes; the mind occupied seemed to have no awareness of its passengers. The passengers could only observe, could not touch the past. One might even jump back into one’s own life and affect it not at all (aside perhaps from some slight déja vu). Of course, the government kept the tightest of reins on the process; so only now, after ten years with the very elite Lincoln Center Research Group, did Charles Largens feel qualified to ask for Beethoven, to accept that last resort.

  It was his essay on the inspirations of Buxtehude that drew the attention of H. Grueder, chairman of the board deciding past inhabitations. Largens had been studying the lesser talents for those ten years; he had even inhabited a few. And now his patience had paid its reward: word was out that Charles Largens was a man to watch, a man on the edge of success. And the only thing dulling his sense of triumph was that ineluctable, tender realization that he had never meant to be a musicologist. He had joined the Lincoln Center group as a pianist and composer; but the tenor of the times was research over performance, study before passion; and call it weakness, expediency, what you will, he had found himself more in the archives than in the practice rooms. After some years those quantitative changes became qualitative: he stopped even calling himself a composer; he was a musicologist (sharp Latin percussives), still a student of music, but now from the cold side: theory over practice, intellect over heart. As a boy he had dreamed of long polished grand pianos, warm and shining under bright spots, their keyboard mouths open and waiting, and beyond the stage’s edge a blinding darkness filled with murmurs and the rustlings of programs, shirts, gowns. And ovations, storms of applause like all the warm summer showers that ever were, drenching him to a blissful numbness. But his life of composing was not that way; it was drab and hungry, and he wanted so desperately the color of a great composer’s life. And what easier, director way than the transfers? At first he told himself that his own work would profit from the contacts with past greats; but he knew it was a lie—he found that the contacts withered his own impulses. He was glutted, stuffed with music not his own. Several times in those years he had wanted to quit, get out, go back to composing—but the money was good, he was sometimes acclaimed for his critical insights as he had not been for his music, and he had a fear that perhaps he could not compose any more. And too, as his own music faded, there was the growing dream of Beethoven.

  The morning that dream seemed ready to come real, the morning Graeder sent for him, he was met by George Santesson
outside the conference room. The rest of the board was inside, waiting for him; the separate and personal greeting from Santesson was a surprise. The big man smiled broadly and wrung his hand with real warmth. “Nervous?” he whispered. Largens nodded.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll make it. I read your essay. You’ll do fine.”

  Largens felt warm. He fumbled for a way to extend the moment. “I feel as nervous as I did at my conservatory tryout.”

  Santesson smiled in appreciation. “You majored in composition, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I see you’ve been doing research on me.”

  “One likes to know about one’s future colleagues.” With that, Santesson pushed open the thick leather-covered door and they entered. Largens’ heart surged: Santesson was head of Beethoven Studies. Such confidence was heady stuff.

  He seated himself at the far end of an oval table. Grueder congratulated him on his essay, shuffled through some notes, and finally asked the long-awaited question: Who? Who would it be next? Offering him his choice of composers for extended study, with full inhabitation rights. He had the strange feeling that Grueder already knew—Santesson certainly did—the feeling that this was all formality, that the decision was already made. He had for that second the feeling ola defendant watching the jury file back in.