Universe 7 - [Anthology] Read online

  He said Beethoven, and there was no surprise. Grueder nodded, made a notation on a schedule, a tiny precise scratching motion with his antique pen, and said he didn’t see why not, and that Largens would be permitted a preliminary occupation during the composing of the first piano sonata, 1793, full rights pending approval of the results of that study. Was that acceptable?

  Largens thanked everyone several times.

  Santesson was on hand the next day, too, when Largens showed up at the transfer room with a head full of anticipations, and, stupidly, a notebook. He and Santesson laughed at that. Then the older man wished him luck and left him alone with the technicians.

  They asked him a number of questions about his ancestry and mental health while they took an EEG and ran some machines of which he could see only the exposed backs, and finally they brought him a paper cup full of orange juice.

  “What’s this?” Largens asked.

  “A hallucinogen. Very mild. It prepares you for the transfer.”

  “I never had to do this before.”

  “You were never trying to get into Beethoven’s head before. He has a tremendous alpha potential. If you didn’t drink this, it’d be like mismatching audio impedances; you’d never get across.”

  He was led into a thick-carpeted room more like a den than a laboratory: rich tapestry colors and subdued yellow lights instead of harsh fluorescents. Purposes of setting, he presumed. The only visible electronics were a stereo system and a tangle of multicolored wires that spilled from a wall socket into spaghetti patterns on the couch. The silence could be felt, like the pressure preceding a storm; behind the wall hangings there must have been acoustical tiles.

  “Would you undress now, Mr. Largens?” someone said.

  His clothes came off with more friction than usual, it seemed; his hearing seemed somehow bent, his vision slightly fragmented. They taped electrodes to him: cold metal goosefleshed his neck and arms, his groin, the small of his back, behind his ears. He felt the coldness spreading to cover his skin with hallucinatory foil. He heard a thunk and a quiet hissing as someone set a phono needle down. A tickling began behind his ears and Beethoven’s first piano sonata began to play in his head

  swimming in sounds that spiraled up around him, came together in his head and canceled gravity, he could feel billions of tiny soft points of velvet grow and lift him through the liquid sky with the first piano notes rising, pulsing colors on the horizon, and each note had a texture, this C like rough dark wood, that F a silky coldness, an A like a trapped bumblebee in his hands, and the music was no longer coming into him through his ears but was bursting out from within like a spontaneous song breaking free and sailing into a clear summer sky, apart from its source, apart from time, it carried Largens and he had no sense of going forward or going back or anything other than motion itself, of shutting his eyes and feeling the gone world whirl beneath him, he was a child flat back on a grassy plain, eyes clenched tight at the sky and fingers dug into fistfuls of earth and the whole world spinning and spinning and nothing but spinning, the motion, the vertigo, circles and currents, layers of moire confusion, oceans and waves rolling and rolling, the perpetual roll and flat scream of things that change and never change, moving not moving, the seasons that spin down a spiral of time, the ocean that crawls and rolls under its map-flat surface, the planets that turn and spin, each its own clock, the moving and complete motions of the instantaneous universe. He was moving through the first movement of the first piano sonata of the beginning of a long and turbulent life full of its own movements and motions, songs wound into a soul and waiting for release, steps to be taken through meadows and woods and narrow cobbled streets, wines to be tasted .. . and it all shifted and was moving him somewhere, the motion and the music becoming one and leading him into a life whose goal was their perfect union.

  There was a darkness, and a light, as Largens opened his new eyes onto Vienna of 1794.

  2

  Cries and the beat of hooves and the rumble and clatter of wagons through mudpuddled streets reached him as he lurched to consciousness. The windows of the room leaned open to catch the afternoon rain-freshened air, and the sun struck rainbow brilliances off watery glass. The voices Largens heard could have been Beethoven’s subconscious musings or the town’s glad emergence after the storm. Beethoven went to the window and breathed deeply. Largens dizzied with the sights and sounds and smells of his dream come real, and he wept. He tried to put his hands to his face, and of course nothing happened. Foolish man, he fondly cursed himself, crying without eyes, expecting another man’s body to express your joy. But if he was physically detached, the spiritual union was incredible. This was no fantasy; he was Beethoven, he could feel every ache and exultation of the composer’s soul, and he had never before known what life could be like—! To have the world spread before you, to sense the forces of destiny shifting like banks of clouds or strata of earth—this was what it was to be great, to carry genius within you like a seed, a freight of potency. Very early in his own life Largens had felt the hints of this. In a way, his whole life had been an attempt to recapture that lost greatness. And here, Beethoven: with no doubt of his own importance, even so young. As young as Largens had been when he entered the Center. The drab improbable world of the future, his past.

  Beethoven’s mind was warm and sparkling. It idled and hummed with life like a brook in late spring; thoughts mixed and swirled in currents of warm and cool. Beethoven was content simply to be in his new lodgings and to peer out the large crystal windows overlooking the street where movers struggled in with his belongings. The sweet force of this content washed Largens.

  Largens reviewed the history of the moment: it was late in the year; Beethoven had just moved to Count Carl Lichnowsky’s house in Vienna, Alserstrasse 45. Here he would earn a substantial salary for composing and performing, and form a rare lasting friendship with the Count. Dem Fursten Carl von Lichnowsky gewidmet. He remembered the words from the top of a piano sonata he had played when young.

  Beethoven paced the room, brooding. He thought rapidly, in fragments of dialect. Words, sounds, gave shape to music, which he visualized rather than heard. Once visualized, he immediately orchestrated the phrase. Only occasionally did he go to the piano to play out a bar. At last he began to play a full piece, the second movement of his first piano sonata.

  Largens waited. This movement had been written piecemeal years before, but there were other things in the composer’s mind, and Largens could sense syntheses occurring between what was played and what was imagined. He watched the young fingers triphammer up and down arpeggios with a certain vicarious satisfaction, a remote pride. With two final flourished chords, the movement ended, and Largens’ mind leaped to full attention.

  Beethoven leaned over the keyboard, pondering. Then he lifted a quill, inked it, and began to write...

  Hours later Largens awoke in Manhattan, screaming German curses. He blinked twice and settled foolishly back onto the couch as an attendant unwound wires, disconnected meters, and handed him his clothes. He stared at them as if they had changed color, or shrunk three sizes. He was acutely disoriented. A doctor standing near the door watched Largens and made notes on a flat glowing pad.

  “I ... he was having a tantrum,” Largens explained. “He lost his temper at a mover for interrupting him. He . . .” His thoughts fluttered. He shook his head. “Why am I so woozy?”

  The doctor said, “Could be the drug.”

  “But I’ve taken them before; I never felt like this. Are you sure it’s nothing serious?”

  The doctor regarded him coldly. “We are not sure of anything, Mr. Largens.”

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. It’s a little idiosyncrasy of mine that I snap at people for no reason at all.”

  “For what reason are you snapping at me?”

  The doctor thumbed off his light-pen. “It’s a little matter of responsibility, Mr, Largens. Of all the ways you could
be spending this money—and for that matter, your time, though I suppose that’s your business— this strikes me as the most wasteful and dangerous. If I had my way, you people wouldn’t be mucking around in the past at all. We just don’t know enough about it. But you’ve got your government lobbies, and people must have their novelties, so you’re allowed to go. Let’s leave it at that. But don’t expect me to get too concerned over your dizziness.”

  “If you feel that way, why do you work here?”

  The doctor paused, and had a look Largens knew: the hard, bitter look of a man who knows just how much of himself he has sold, and how cheaply. “I intend to start a free clinic with my salary from here.” He clipped the pen in his pocket and walked out.

  The attendant put away a handful of wires. “Don’t mind him. Professional paranoia. Every week a different worry. This week it’s something called a crosstalk effect.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, when you have a cable or a magnetic tape or a laser carrying more than one channel of information, there’s always a certain amount of leakage between channels. If one channel’s quiet you can hear the others coming through. That’s crosstalk. The more channels, the worse it gets. So they’re especially worried about guys like Beethoven; sometimes he has a dozen or more researchers in his head at once. They’re worried about that.”

  “What, that Beethoven might overhear thoughts from the future?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Oh, but that’s absurd. Even if Beethoven heard anything, he’d never guess the source. He’d think it was ...” Largens slowed.

  “Inspiration. Intuition. You begin to see?”

  Largens stood silent. He thought of Da Vinci’s notebooks, the visions of Blake. For a second in the murmur of the air conditioning, he thought he could hear a dozen researchers from his future whispering in one corner of his mind. “Oh, but after all...”

  The attendant held up his hand. “I know, I know. I won’t argue it. It’s one of those damned paradoxes. Could be, couldn’t be. That’s why they’re upset. Until they can prove any of it, there’s nothing they can do. And how do you prove a paradox?” So there were paradoxes, after all.

  In the first piano sonata of Ludwig Van Beethoven, the influence of his tutor Josef Haydn is clearly felt. Haydn seems to guide the young composer’s pen from time to time. But

  In this, his first sonata, the young Beethoven first breaks from his classical antecedents. The second movement seems to be saying a last farewell to the “galant” age. Breaking from the strict regimen of Haydn’s instruction,

  The first sonata might be called a tribute to Haydn. The composer moves with great surety through these familiar

  Here the young Beethoven’s craftsmanship still shows sign of immaturity, as when the splendid A-flat major cantilena is prevented from fully developing by a clumsy

  The second movement is not in sonata form, but is rather a rhapsody, laid out

  Beethoven’s originality

  Yes, yes, but where did he get his ideas?

  At six Santesson came in to wish him good-night. All day Largens had been working on his essay and it had gone nowhere. The older man read the desk at a glance, took in the litter of half-written pages, abandoned beginnings, and all that they meant—and gave Largens a sympathetic nod. There must have been something near desperation in the young man’s face, because Santesson paused as he was leaving, and motioned Largens to follow.

  They went down the empty halls, the last ones in the building. They did not speak. They reached the transfer room and only then did Largens have an intimation of their purpose. Santesson fumbled a key from his pocket, slid the door open, and sealed it after them before turning on the lights.

  The room stood empty and silent. Humming. “Do you know how to use the equipment, Charles?”

  “No.”

  For half an hour Santesson detailed the use of the machinery, scrupulously, completely, until Largens could have started it alone, sent himself on a retrogressive voyage—and at the end of it Santesson pressed a key into his hand. “In case you ever need to,” he whispered. And left Largens alone in the dark building.

  A tight humming excitement was in him. He walked around the room, running his hand over smooth panels, knurled knobs. He listened to his breathing and felt his pulse. His hands moved over the controls almost independently of thought. He set them for Beethoven, 1794. He stepped into the carpeted tapestried room where the Kempff recording of the first sonata still rested on the turntable. If he could live it just once more ... His hands moved, attaching wires, taping electrodes, remembering. He lay on the couch for minutes. Then he got up, went back to the main room, returned all the switches to neutral, shut the lights off and went home.

  3

  Shortly after that he had an invitation from the Santessons. A cocktail party at their home in the West Eighties. He guessed it would be wearisome, but the night of the party he dressed anyway and took a cab crosstown. He had to go. In the past few years he had obligated himself. To tell the truth, Largens relied on these social functions to advance him where his talents alone might not. Seeing the uncompleted essay in his voicetyper, thinking of the rumors of personnel cutbacks, he knew he had to go. Any gesture of support from Santesson was welcome.

  The apartment was elegant. The room was lit in soft blue. All the elder members of the Center were there, the aged coterie he had never before met informally. The elite. They had been born in the middle of the last century; some had studied with Stockhausen, Berio, Xenakis. The last legendary names of music.

  Lia Santesson greeted him with a quick surprising press of her lips to his. Behind her was George Santesson, smiling warmly.

  “Good of you to come, Charles.”

  He had the giddy, paranoiac feeling that they were all here for him, for his imminent prominence. The feeling increased as Lia led him through a gauntlet of introductions, her small electronic earrings making windchime noises as they walked, the old men’s voices barely rising above the background of the party. They treated him with courtesy. He moved tentatively past their nods and smiles, a man exploring unsure ground.

  The party’s tempo was adagio. The guests all spoke softly, like low whispering strings; they moved like ancient clockwork. After a while Largens moved to a remote corner of the room. There was fatigue from the closed world of the party, which, somewhere, he realized was the same closed world as his life. Adagio molto e cantabile.

  “Is that you, Charlie?”

  The wonder in the voice stopped him. He turned. “I’m sorry?”

  “David Kanigher, remember? The New Music Ensemble, what, fifteen years ago?”

  “David! Of course!” Kanigher now wore glasses and an ineffective mustache, but was otherwise unchanged.

  “Charlie. What have you been doing?”

  And time shifted for Largens then: it stuttered and stopped and he was no longer at the Santessons’ party, but somewhere liquid in his own mind, where the events of his life swept past him like a wave pulling sand from under his bare feet. He was there only with Kanigher, wondering how he could possibly explain his life’s turnings to this stranger from the past. He felt a sudden cold twist of remorse. It might have been the liquor or the plummet of memory, but all at once it sickened him to be standing there, just past thirty-five years old, talking with a man whose ambitions he had once shared.

  Young Largens had been the Center’s enfant terrible in the days before he switched over to musicology. One of the few real talents. Then a criticism from Santesson had unmanned him. Though Santesson had been only forty then, he carried unmistakable authority, and what he said had struck Largens to the core: You’ve no heritage. No sense of the past in your music. Modern, superficial, shallow. Clever, but ultimately disappointing.

  Of course it was what Largens had always feared about himself. He had been orphaned at thirteen, already an excellent pianist; he had been sent to relatives, an ancient aunt and uncle who had no piano an
d refused to let him waste time on music. It took him a full year to muster the courage to sue them and win the right to live in a state Montessori home. He grew up there with a hundred other youngsters, all bright and creative: artists, actors, poets. From then on, everyone in his life had been adept, but, he realized with adolescent smugness, none brilliant. That was for him. He was sure he had that spark of true greatness. And he feared that, like his playmates, he was really a talented dilettante.