Collected Short Fiction, page 822
“You medieval witch.”
“You look so pretty when you sleep, Dill. The long hair. The sweet skin. Like a girl, even. You bring out the Sappho in me.”
“Do I?” He laughs and crams his maleness out of sight between his lean thighs. Clamps his legs. He gouges his palms against his chest, trying to push up ersatz breasts. “Come on,” he says hoarsely. “Here’s your chance—”
“Silly. Stop that!”
“I think I’d be very pretty as a girl.”
“Your hips are all wrong,” she says and pulls his locked feet apart. But there will be no sex between them now. He rarely indulges at this time of day, with a performance coming up. And in any case the mood is wrong, too skittish, too brittle. She vaults off the sleeping platform and deflates it with a kick of the pedal while he is still on it. An airy whooshing. That sort of mood; presexual, childish. He watches her waltz to the cleanser. What a fine butt she has, he thinks. So pale. So full. The splendid deep cleft. The elegant dimples. He creeps towards her and stoops to nip a hinder cheek, carefully, not wanting to leave a blemish. They share the cleanser. The baby begins to yowl. Dillon glances over his shoulder. “God bless, god bless, god bless!” he sings, beginning basso, ending falsetto. What a good life, he thinks. How neat existence can be. Electra, pulling on her clothes, says, “Can I get you some fumes?” A transparent band over her breasts. Rosy nipples like little blind eyes. He is pleased that she has stopped nursing; biology is tremendously moving, yes, but the dribbles of bluish-white milk over everything annoyed him. Doubtless a failing to eradicate. Why be so fastidious? Electra enjoyed nursing. She still lets the little suck, saying it’s for the child’s pleasure; but there can hardly be much kick in a dry tit, so Dillon knows the locus of the joy in that particular transaction. He hunts for his clothing.
“Will you paint today?” he asks.
“Tonight. While you’re performing.”
“You haven’t worked much lately—”
“I haven’t felt the strings pulling.”
It is her special idiom. To practice her art she must feel rooted to the earth. Strings rising from the planet’s core, entering her body, snaking into her and then tugging. As the world turns, the imagery is wrenched from her blazing distended body. Or so she says; Dillon never questions the claims of a fellow artist, especially when she is his wife. He admires her accomplishments. It would have been madness to marry another cosmos-grouper, although when he was eleven he had just such a thing in mind. To share his destinies with the comet-harp girl. He’d be a widower now if he had. Down the chute, down the chute! What a flippy filther that one had been. And had wrecked a perfectly wonderful incantator, too, Peregrun Connelly. Could have been me. Could have been me. Marry outside your art, boys; avoid unblessworthy invidiousness.
“No fumar?” Electra asks. She has been studying ancient languages lately. “Porque?”
“Working tonight. It spills the galactic juices if I indulge this early—”
“Mind if I?”
“Suit yourself.”
She takes a fume, nipping the cap neatly with a daggered forefingernail. Quickly her face flushes, her eyes dilate. A lovable quality about her: she is such an easy turnon. She puffs vapors at the baby, who chortles, while the maintenance slot’s field buzzes in a solemn attempt to purify the child’s atmosphere. “Grazie mille, mama!” Electra says, mimicking ventriloquy. “E molto belle! E delicioso! Was fur schones Wetter! Quella gioia!” She dances around the room, chanting fragments of exclamations in strange tongues and tumbles, laughing, into the deflated sleeping platform. Her frilly frock blows up; he sees an auburn pubic glow and is tempted to top her despite his resolutions, but he regains his austerity and merely blows her a kiss. As if perceiving the phases of his mental processes, she piously closes her thighs and covers herself. He switches on the screen, selecting the abstract channel, and patterns blaze on the wall. “I love you,” he tells her. “Can I have something to eat?”
She breakfasts him. Afterward she goes out, saying that she is scheduled to visit the blessman this afternoon. He is privately glad to see her go, for just now her vitality is too much for him. He must slide into the mood of the concert, which requires some spartan denials from him. Once she has gone he programs the terminal for a reverberant oscillation and, as the resonant tones march across his skull, he slips lightly into the proper frame of mind. The baby, meanwhile, remains in its slot, enjoying the best of care. He thinks nothing of leaving it alone when, at 1600 hours, he must go off to Rome to set up for the evening’s performance.
THE liftshaft shoots him a hundred sixty levels heavenward. When he gets off, he is in Rome. Crowded halls, tight faces. The people here are mostly minor bureaucrats, a middle echelon of failed functionaries, those who would never get to Louisville except to deliver a report. They are not even smart enough to hope for Chicago or Shanghai or Edinburgh. Here they will stay in this good gray city, frozen in hallowed stasis, doing dehumanized jobs that any computer could handle forty times as well. Dillon feels a cosmic pity for everyone who is not an artist, but he pities the people of Rome most of all, sometimes. Because they are nothing. Because they can use neither their brains nor their muscles. Crippled souls; walking zeros; better off down the chute. A Roman slams right into him as he stands outside the liftshaft bank, considering these things. Male, maybe forty, all the spirit drained from his eyes. The walking dead. The running dead. “Sorry,” the man mumbles and speeds on. “Truth!” Dillon cries after him. “Love! Loosen up! Top a lot!” He laughs. But what good does it do; the Roman will not laugh with him. Others of his kind come rushing down the corridor, their leaden bodies absorbing the last vibrations of Dillon’s exclamations. “Truth! Love!” Blurred sounds, fading, graying, going. Gone. I will entertain you tonight, he tells them silently. I will drive you out of your wretched minds and you will love me for it. If I could only burn your brains! If I could only singe your souls!
He thinks of Orpheus. They would tear me apart, he realizes, if I ever really reached them.
He saunters toward the sonic center.
Pausing by the elbow-bend of the corridor, still halfway around the building from the auditorium, Dillon feels a sudden ecstatic awareness of the splendor of the urbmon. A frenzied epiphany; he sees it as a spike suspended between heaven and earth. And he is almost at the midway point right now, with a little more than five hundred floors over his head, a little less than five hundred floors under his feet. People moving around, copulating, eating, giving birth, doing a million blessworthy things, each one out of 800-how-many-thousand traveling in his own orbit. Dillon loves the building. Right now he feels he could almost soar on its multiplicity the way others might soar on a drug. To be at the equator, to drink the divine equilibrium—oh, yes, yes! But of course there is a way to experience the whole complexity of the urbmon in one wild rush of information. He has never tried it; he is not really heavy on groovers and has stayed away from the more elaborate drugs, the ones that open your mind so wide that anything can wander in. Nevertheless, here in the middle of the urbmon, he knows that this is the night to try the multiplexer. After the performance. To pop the pill that will allow him to drop the mental barriers, to let the full immensity of Urban Monad 116 interpenetrate his consciousness. Yes. He will go to the 500th floor to do it. If the performance goes well. Nightwalking in Bombay. He really should turn on in the city where tonight’s concert will be held, but Rome goes no farther down than the 521st floor and he must go to the 500th. For the mystic symmetry of the thing. Even though it is still inexact. Where is the true midpoint in a building of a thousand floors? Somewhere between 499 and 500, no? But the 500th floor will have to do, We learn to live with approximations.
He enters the sonic center.
A fine new auditorium, three stories high, with a toadstool of a stage in the center and audience webs strung concentrically around it. Lightglow drifts in the air. The mouths of speakers, set into the domed rich-textured ceilings, pucker and gape. A warm room, a good room, placed here by the divine mercy of Louisville to bring a little joy into the lives of these bleak juiceless Romans. There is no better hall for a cosmos group in the entire urbmon. The other members of the group are here already, tuning in. The comet-harp, the incantator, the orbital diver, the gravity-drinker, the doppler-inverter, the spectrum-rider. Already the room trembles with shimmering plinks of sound and jolly blurts of color, and a shaft of pure noreferent texture, abstract and immanent, is rising from the doppler-inverter’s central cone. Everyone waves to him. “Late, man,” they say, and, “Where you been?” and, “We thought you were skimming out,” and he says, “I’ve been in the halls, peddling love to the Romans,” which shatters ahem into strands of screeching laughter. He clambers onto the stage.
II
HIS instrument sits untended near the perimeter, its lattices dangling, its lovely gaudy skin unilluminated. A lifting machine stands by, waiting to help him put it in its proper place. The machine brought the vibrastar to the auditorium; it would also tune it in for him, if he asked it to, but of course he will not do that. Musicians have a mystique about tuning in their own instruments. Even though it will take him at least two hours to do it and the machine could do it in ten minutes. Maintenance workers and other humbles of the grubbo class have the same mystique. Not strange: one must battle constantly against one’s own obsolescence, if one is going to go on thinking of oneself as having a purpose in life.
“Over here,” Dillon tells the machine.
Delicately it brings his vibrastar to the output node and makes the connection. Dillon could not possibly have moved the immense instrument. He does not mind letting machines do the things humans were never meant to do, like lifting three-ton loads. Dillon puts his hands on the mahipulatrix and feels the power thrumming through the keyboard. Good. “Go,” he tells the machine, and silently it slides away. He kneads and squeezes the projectrons of the manipulatrix. As if milking them. Sensual pleasure in making contact with the machine. A little orgasm with every crescendo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
“Tuning in!” he warns the other musicians.
They make feedback adjustments in their own instruments; otherwise the sudden surge of his entrance might damage both instruments and players. One by one they nod their readiness to him, the gravity-drinker lad chiming in last, and finally Dillon can let out the clutch. Yeah! The hall fills with light. Stars stream from the walls. He coats the ceiling with dripping nebulae. He is the basic instrument of the group, the all-important continuo, providing the foundation against which the others will do their things. With a practiced eye he checks the focus. Everything sharp. Nat the spectrum-rider says, “Mars is a little off-color, Dill.” Dillon hunts for Mars. Yes. Yes. He feeds it an extra jolt of orange. And Jupiter? A shining globe of white fire. Venus. Saturn. And all the stars. He is satisfied with the visuals.
“Bringing up the sound, now,” he says.
The heels of his hands hit the control panel. From the gaping speakers comes a tender blade of white noise. The music of the spheres. He colors it now, bringing up the gain on the galactic side, letting the stellar drift impart plangent hues to the tone. Then, with a quick downward stab on the projectrons, he kicks in the planetary sounds. Saturn whirls like a belt of knives. Jupiter booms. “Are you getting it?” he calls out. “How’s the clarity?” Sophro the orbital diver says, “Fat up the asteroids, Dill,” and he does it, and Sophro nods, happy, his chins trembling in pleasure.
After half an hour of preliminary maneuvers Dillon has his primary tuning finished. So far, though, he has done only the solo work. Now to coordinate with the others. Slow, delicate work: to reach reciprocity with them one by one, building a web of interrelationship, a seven-way union, Plagued all the way by heisenberging effects, so that a whole new cluster of adjustments has to be made each time another instrument is added to the set. Change one factor, you change everything; you can’t just hold your own while keying in more and more and more output. He takes on the spectrum-rider first. Easy. Dillon gives forth a shower of comets and Nat modulates them pleasantly into suns. Then they add the incantator. A slight stridency at first, quickly corrected. Good going. Then the gravity-drinker. No problem. The comet-harp, now. Rasp! Rasp! The receptors go bleary and the entire thing falls apart. He and the incantator have to retune separately, rejoin, bring the comet-harp into the net again. This time all right. Great plummy curves of tone go lalloping through the hall. Then the orbital diver. Fifteen sweaty minutes; the balances keep souring. Dillon expects a system collapse any second, but no, they hang on and finally get the levels even. And now the really tough one, the doppler-inverter, which threatens always to clash with his own instrument because both rely as much as visuals as audio, and both are generators, not just modulators of someone else’s playing. He almost gets it. But they lose the comet-harp. It makes a thin edgy whining sound and drops out. So they go back two steps and try again. Precarious balance, constantly falling off. Up till five years ago, there had been only four instruments in cosmos groups; it was simply too difficult to hold more than that together. Like adding a fourth actor in Greek tragedy: an impossible technical feat, or so it must have seemed to Aeschylus. Now they were able to coordinate six instruments reasonably well, and a seventh with some effort, by sending the circuit bouncing up to a computer nexus in Edinburgh, but it is still a filther to put them all in synch. Dillon gestures madly with his left shoulder, encouraging the doppler-inverter to get with it. “Come on, come on, come on, come on!” and this time they make it. The time is 1840. Everything sticks together.
“Let’s run it through, now,” Nat sings out. “Give us an A for tuning, maestro.”
DILLON hunches forward and clutches the projectrons. Feeds power Gets a sensory shift; the knobs abruptly feel like the cheeks of Electra’s buttocks in his hands. Smiles at the sensation. Firm, bouncy, cool. Up we go! And gives them the universe in one sizzling blare of light and sound. The hall swims with images. The stars leap and cross and mate. The incantator man picks up his sonics and does his trick, enhancing, multiplying, intensifying, until the whole urbmon shakes. The comet-harp makes bleeping blurting loops of dizzying counterpoint and starts to rearrange Dillon’s constellations. The orbital diver, hanging back, makes a sudden plunge at an unexpected moment, and dials spin on everybody’s control panel, but it is such a devastating entry that Dillon inwardly applauds it. The gravity-drinker smoothly sucks tone. Now the doppler-inverter goes at it, shooting up its own shaft of light, which sizzles and steams for perhaps thirty seconds before the spectrum-rider grabs it and runs with it, and now all seven of them are jamming madly, each trying to put the others on, shooting forth such a welter of signals that the sight must surely be visible from Boswash to Sansan.
“Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!” Nat screams. “Don’t waste it! Man, don’t waste it!”
And they cut out of phase and go down and sit there idling, sweaty, nerves twinkling. Withdrawal pain; it hurts to step away from such beauty. But Nat is right: they mustn’t use themselves up before the audience gets here.
Dinner break, right on stage. No one eats much. They leave the instruments tuned and running, of course. Lunacy to disrupt the synch after working so hard to get it right. Now and then one of the idling instruments flares past its threshold and emits a blob of light or a squeak of sound. They’d play themselves if we’d only let them, Dillon thinks. It might just be a wild soar to turn everything on and sit back, doing nothing, while the instruments themselves gave the concert, self-programed. You’d get some strange percepts then. The mind of the machine. On the other hand it might be a hell of a dropper to find out you were superfluous. How frail is our prestige. Celebrated artists today, but let the secret sneak out and we’ll all be pushing junk buckets in Reykjavik tomorrow.
The audience begins to show up at 1945. An older crowd; since this is the first night of the Rome run, the rules Of seniority have governed the distribution of tickets and the under-20s have been left out. Dillon, midstage, does not trouble to hide his scorn for the gray, baggy people settling into the audience webs all around him. Will the music reach them? Can anything reach them? Or will they sit passively, not even going halfway out to the performance? Dreaming of making more littles. Ignoring the sweating artists; taking up a good seat and getting nothing from the fireworks about them. We throw you the whole universe and you don’t catch. Is it because you’re old? How much can a plumpish many-mother, 33 years old, pull from a cosmos show? No, it isn’t age. In the more sophisticated cities there’s no problem of audience response, young or old. No, it’s a matter of your basic attitude toward the world of art. At the bottom of the building, the grubbos respond with their eyes, their guts, their balls. Either they’re fascinated by the colored lights and the wild sounds, or else they’re baffled and hostile, but they aren’t indifferent. In the top levels, where the use of the mind is not only permitted but desired, they reach out for the show, knowing that the more they bring to it, the more they get from it. And isn’t that what life is all about, to wring all the sensory percepts you can out of the outputs drifting past your head? What else is there? But here, here in the middle levels, all the responses are dulled. The walking dead. The important thing is being present in the auditorium, grabbing that ticket away from someone else, showing off. The performance itself doesn’t matter. That’s just noise and light, some crazy kids from San Francisco having a workout. So there they sit, these Romans, disconnected from skull to crotch. What a joke. Romans? The real Rome wasn’t like that, you bet. Calling their city Rome is a crime against history. Dillon glares at them. Then, overfocusing his eyes, he deliberately blurs them out; he does not want to see their flabby gray faces, for fear the sight of them will color his performance. He is here to give. If they can’t take, tough.
