inclusion: interpolation
And so, dear Reader, you will not be surprised to learn of the following events; this is how they occurred. One evening on the great Orion, Anton Vaccero gathered the Orchestra’s traveling crew into its suite’s window lounge, where he read the tarot for each one of them. All agreed that Anton’s readings exhibited an accuracy that was uncanny, and all became absorbed in the reading.
Margaret, who took no interest in the tarot, spent the evening playing with the Orion’s passenger orchestra. She was assigned one of the second cello parts in De Bruik’s If … Then, and as she took the elevator up to the crew’s suite she hummed the famous cello part of the response, which she had played that night with particular fire.
The elevator door opened onto their suite, and she stepped out. The central hall was empty and silent. Walking down it she passed several empty rooms, and the window lounge had its door shut. Margaret heard a faint shout from within. She tried the door, but it was locked, and her keytab had no effect on it. Inside someone shouted “Help!” She knocked, which produced a chorus of shouts.
She called ship security on the phone and described the situation tersely. Very little time passed before several of the ship’s security people hurried out of the elevator, and they went to work on the lounge door.
When they opened it Anton and Delia and Marie-Jeanne and the rest of the crew burst out, all talking at once. “Shut up!” Margaret said loudly.
“We were locked in!” cried Vaccero.
“We know,” Margaret snapped. “Did you see who did it?”
“No,” several of them said at once. The door had slammed in the midst of a reading, and their keytabs had been useless to free them. The room was without intercoms, and they had been forced to sit and wait.
“Check all the rooms,” Margaret said to the security people.
The woman in charge nodded briefly. “Don’t touch anything,” she told the crew.
“I thought you told me no one but us could get to this suite,” Margaret said angrily.
The woman nodded. “You can’t get the elevator to stop here without one of your keytabs. And the vents are connected to alarms.”
“Well, someone found a way.”
“Maybe.” The woman ignored Margaret’s hard look. “It’s more likely one of your keys got them here.”
Delia shrieked. “Ah! Oh, my God…” She backed out of one of the corner lounges, hands at her mouth.
Margaret ran after the security people to the lounge.
It was a shambles, furniture scattered everywhere. And there was a large red drawing on one of the lounge’s beige walls, painted in thick red brush-strokes. It consisted of three figures. The largest was a bull, drawn in an imitation of the Cro-Magnon cave painting style, with an elongated body and long curving horns. Over the bull a human figure stood; one of his hands held the bull’s head up, and the other reached across the bull’s shoulder and slashed its throat. Another figure crouched under the slash and held a cup to collect the falling blood; but the paint ran right through the cup to the floor.
Someone cleared her throat awkwardly. Margaret looked away from the painting and noticed that the room’s furniture, rather than being tossed around, had been carefully upended: tables and chairs pointed leg up, lamps and stands and bookcases were placed upside down. Nothing had been damaged.
Vaccero, face pale, crossed the room to inspect the drawing. He turned to look at Margaret. “Blood of some kind,” he said. “It’s real blood.”
“Everyone get out of here,” Margaret said. “Let security go to work.” She addressed the agent in charge. “I want one of your people here at the elevator all the time, from now on. And cameras set up in the halls.”
The woman nodded. “Sorry about this. But remember—what I said about access to this suite still holds.”
“And I want a guard with the Orchestra itself,” Margaret went on. “Full time.” She left the room, went back to the window lounge door to pick up her cello in its black case. “And get that wall cleaned, too!” she shouted down the hall. Rudyard and Sean were comforting Delia, whose face was still pinched with fear. Margaret stalked to her room and kicked open the door. It slammed against the inside wall and bounced back, and she kicked it again.
the anxiety of influence
It was apparent to Johannes that his new acquaintance Dent Ios was interested in him, but for a few days—during which Ios stared at him in passageways, conspicuously eavesdropped on his dinner conversation, and even followed him—Johannes did not understand why. One evening as Ios was twisting his long awkward body to hear what was being said at their table, Johannes leaned back and said, “Why don’t you join us?”
Ios jumped and then blushed, mumbled a thank you and struggled around to their table with a wary, nervous look, as if he might be plunked with another radish, or something bigger. Johannes compressed a smile to nothing, and shared only the briefest flicker of a glance with Karna, whose face said all too plainly, This man is a rabbit!
But once he was settled at their table he behaved normally. When asked about Titania he gave a description of the Smithson anarchy that made them all laugh, and the story of his adventure in Lowell was also entertaining, in a way. “I hope my music didn’t inspire the attack on you,” Johannes said, concerned.
“No. The man was criminal in some way, alas. Music had nothing to do with it.”
Later Karna excused himself with a polite and straightforward farewell to the man, and Johannes was left alone with him. “Why do you follow the Grand Tour?” Johannes asked.
Ios smiled crookedly. “It’s my job.”
“And your job is?”
“I am the correspondent for the journal Thistledown.”
“You report the events of the tour?”
“I write only about the music.”
Johannes said, “You make your living writing about music?”
“Actually I breed tapirs for a living. But I do write about music, yes.”
Johannes laughed. Then he saw he had offended the man: ellipses of sealed lips, cheeks flaring red … “Sorry,” Johannes said. “But—writing about music!”
“Now wait a minute,” said Dent Ios. “It’s not as funny as all that, Mr. Wright.”
“Call me Johannes.”
“Certainly. And you call me Dent. But you must allow me to defend the act of writing about music.”
“Of course,” Johannes said. “It needs defending, if you ask me. I can’t imagine anything more futile.”
“Well—nevertheless—follow along, if you will. You will agree that there are two ways that we know the world—by acquaintance, and discursively.”
“At least two. I agree.”
“Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses—the primary way of knowing. But discursive knowledge includes all that language does—”
“Not the sound of it.”
“No. But the meaning. The ability to know what is not present is discursive. So discourse is as important as acquaintance, even if it isn’t primary.”
Johannes paused to think about it. “Maybe,” he granted.
“In our time, I don’t see how you could disagree. It is a discursive age. Now, music itself is known both by acquaintance and discursively. Musical phrases refer the listener to other phrases, and to things outside music—they are part of a discourse.”
“Agreed.” Johannes began to attend to this rabbit-man with some interest. “But writing…?”
“Language allows us to discuss what we know by acquaintance or discursively. Without language, we could not say what music meant.”
“But even with language we cannot say what music means,” Johannes said, laughing. “What about all the criticism we see—you know: this is the greatest work since De Bruik died, it dazzles with glittering tongues of flame, some dark, others wounding to the eye, while every phrase is as remarkable as summer’s first light on a spring day, its sheen is as
brittle as icicles of almost naked exaltation.…”
“Please!” Dent cried. “Not funny!” But he had laughed. “That’s just bad writing. And there’s a lot more bad writing about music than good. Because it’s hard to do. Music is a dynamic, polyphonic process, while writing is linear and static. But that doesn’t mean writing about music is never accurate, or useful.”
“I suppose.” Johannes tried to recall some example of useful writing about music. Handbook of Musical Notations, perhaps. “But these dubious metaphors and all the rest…”
“I know. Often it’s as bad as the example you recited. That was for real?”
“Yes! I memorized it.”
“Amazing. But think about it. Music has qualities which are also known by the other senses. This cross-sensory participation is called sensory isomorphism, and the words that describe properties perceived by more than one sense are called universals. Our response is universal, while the stimulus is particular, you see. So that if I were to call a melody rough, I would be naming a response to a particular stimulus—a response I might make to other stimuli as well. Use of these universals is not only valid, it’s necessary! Otherwise we couldn’t talk about music at all.”
“I’m still not sure we can,” Johannes said. But Dent’s words had stimulated a response in him; certain problems he had imagined for the reception of his new work might not be problems at all, if the audiences could make analogies to their sense of sight and touch. He might actually be able to reveal to them the world.…
Dent said, “What about De Bruik’s writings, her notebooks?”
“Rubbish!” Johannes cried. “Have you read them? They’re craziness.”
Dent laughed again. “I always thought it was me.”
“No. Unless it was both of us. De Bruik—her music is a huge achievement, it hangs over us all, but … music was her language, not words. She wrote as if she barely understood English.”
Dent pounded the table with delight; but at the end of his mirth a finger pointed up out of one fist at Johannes. “Still, no composer can be trusted when talking about De Bruik. It’s bound to be blasphemy, right?”
“Yes,” Johannes sighed. “I suppose so.”
“Like the Romantics after Beethoven. What was it Tchaikovsky said about him? Like listening to Jehovah—no love, only fear.”
“I enjoy listening to De Bruik,” Johannes objected mildly.
“But as you said, her achievement hangs over us all. It intimidates the artists who follow.”
“Perhaps,” Johannes said. “She wrote a lot of music that we cannot write, now.”
“Exactly! Do you know Bloom’s books on influence?”
Johannes shook his head. “Someone has written about this?”
“Oh yes. Long ago. Old alchemical texts, very bizarre. But the basic ideas are good. He outlines strategies that the younger artist uses to deal with the overwhelming presence of the precursor artist.”
“You do it better than they did.”
“Ha! But if you have a precursor like De Bruik?”
Johannes shrugged. “Perhaps this is something that critics worry about more than composers.” He saw Dent frown. “You know—the truth is, I’m not doing what De Bruik did. She was great, but it doesn’t affect me. There’s always new music to write.”
“But that is one of Bloom’s strategies. You make a clinamen, a swerve away from the precursor. Clinamen from Lucretius’s term for the swerve in atoms that makes change in the universe possible.”
“What a strategy—a universal like that would describe any artist’s relation to any earlier artist, wouldn’t it? Very convenient for the critic.” But he thought, Makes change in the universe possible.… Holywelkin would say, there is no such thing as a clinamen; each swerve in the sub-subatomic realm could be accounted for in Holywelkin physics, and if his equations were applied completely to the macroscopic world, presumably they could account for all change there as well. This disturbing thought was one that had recently occurred to Johannes during his studies of Holywelkin.…
So this man Dent could make him think! It was a surprise. Because of his isolation as Master of the Orchestra, he had not really talked with anyone in a serious way about music since … well, since Yablonski died. And Yablonski had been no theorist. So, since his days in the conservatory: how they had argued over composition there! And perhaps he missed those talks, even though he had forgotten the language for them. Once he had been yoked to the Orchestra, no one on Pluto had ever really talked with him again.
The realization made him feel lonely, and he avoided the feeling. His thoughts wandered to his composition and its relation to De Bruik’s body of work, and they became lost in it, so that music filled his mind. He did not know how much time had passed when Dent spoke again.
“What?” he said.
“What about you, Johannes? It’s been over two hundred years since De Bruik, and composers since then have been—well, at a loss, say.”
“I don’t know.”
“No, but you must tell me. Not about how your work relates to hers, if you don’t want to. But what do you think of De Bruik?”
“Well…” He made an effort to converse with this man who had sparked his interest. “You know. De Bruik lived just as Holywelkin’s work was becoming known. A process that has still not ended, I might add! And everything shifted with Holywelkin, including music. Music depends on the world view of the time, as you probably know—you see the corpuscular-kinetic view of reality expressed in classical music, relativity and the uncertainty principle expressed in the aleatoric music that came in the centuries after Einstein. And De Bruik did the same for the new Holywelkin age, or tried to. But she was an instinctive artist, she composed in a frenzy, hardly reflecting on what she had done … so … she reacted to Holywelkin, but she didn’t understand him. Neither the physics nor her reaction. She just composed. All that work—The Floor of Time, Muon Meets Gluon Meets Quark, The Glint in Your Eye—beautiful music, all of it, but not … accurate. Impressionistic only. And the whole range of De Bruik’s work—three thousand compositions, was it? Well, it was genius. But the whole body of work was one giant impression. She was a great explorer, and much was seen, but little … understood. Because it’s not just a matter of feeling, there’s a more direct connection, something more accurate, more rigorous. There can be a music that sings the world precisely, do you see?”
Dent shook his head. “How have you gone about your work, then?”
“I? I have been studying Holywelkin.”
“But nobody really understands Holywelkin, do they?”
“Certainly.” He observed the man curiously; odd that people remained so far from physics, when it was the whole foundation of their world. “The people who do understand him keep our worlds in existence. And I understand something about him. I—met him—” But the frown of consternation on Dent’s face showed he had gone further than the man was prepared for. “—in a way. And I have been studying the geometer Mauring, who preceded him. She is easier, and gives me an entry, and … well. I don’t want to get into that.” Spiraling down into the micro-universe where each clinamen could be charted by Holywelkin’s equations, by Mauring’s strange postulates.… “But De Bruik did something instinctively that I will do with my full intelligence. And the result will be something entirely new.”
titania
Time passed, and the crossing to the Uranian system came to an end. Orion and its comet tail of followers spun down into orbit around Titania, the system’s largest moon. Margaret Nevis was on the first shuttle to Titania’s spaceport, and once there she waited impatiently for the arrival of Wright and Godavari.
The spaceport was splayed out over the tableland adjoining the rim of a giant rift called the Titania Gap, which marked where Titania had once almost broken apart. The terminal’s outdoor patio stretched along the rim of the Gap, and there Margaret paced the length of the railing. She stared moodily down into the kilometer-deep gouge of the cany
on, at the city of Titania contained in it. From her prospect it appeared an architect’s model of a city: buildings like blocks, parks like green postage stamps, trees like miniature bonsais. But no sane architect would have designed such a city. Titania was the meeting place for all the worlds of the Uranian system, and under its long string of hemispheres people were free to build what they would, where they would. The result was a crazed jumble of styles: here were green mounds covering underground dwellings, there a white marble villa, farther on a neighborhood of geodesic domes, beyond them a line of old space bunkers, across the Gap a line of Martian skyscrapers. Margaret pursed her mouth at the disorganized spectacle and scanned the skies overhead for a sight of the next shuttle. Nothing but the blue-black of the air under the hemisphere, and the stars, with Uranus like a greenish opal flanked by the two diamonds of Bottom and Puck. She took a turn at the end of the terminal, and started another lap.
By the time their shuttle arrived impatience had driven Margaret into a foul mood. Karna was the first out of the shuttle, followed by Johannes and a tall spindly man who was deep in conversation with him. Johannes waved his hands, talking as fast as he could, not watching where he was going, and the other man nodded like a marionette with its head on a spring, nod, nod, nod, nod, nod. She walked to them and shook hands with Karna. “We’ve had an eventful flight,” she said curtly.
“Uh oh.” Karna’s glance was sharp, worried.
“I’ll tell you about it. Hello, Johannes.”
“Hello Margaret.” The artificial eyes looked up at her. “Margaret, this is Dent Ios, our traveling companion on the crossing, and a writer for Thistledown.”
Margaret had never heard of Thistledown. She shook the man’s hand; he had the limpest handshake she had ever felt. “Hello,” she said. “I hope you write well of us.”
“I do too,” the man said, smiling nervously. He shuffled in an uncoordinated way, and his gaze flickered to Johannes, who said,
“Dent and I have been talking during the trip, and I want to be able to continue the conversation. I’d like to offer Dent a room with us, if we have one available.”
The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance Page 7