The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  J. Neil Schulman's

  The Rainbow Cadenza

  A Novel in Vistata Form

  The Rainbow Cadenza

  Copyright © 1983 by J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved.

  "Some Rainbow Cadenzas"

  Copyright © 1986 by J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved.

  "A Glossary of The Rainbow Cadenza"

  Copyright © 1986 by J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved.

  LASERIUM® photographs courtesy of Laser Images, Inc.

  Copyright © 1994 by Laser Images, Inc.. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner except in the case of quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Published by J. Neil Schulman and distributed by Pulpless.Comtm

  150 S. Highway 160, Suite C8-234

  Pahrump, NV 89048

  (775) 751-0770

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  To My Father

  The Lord High Violinist

  and to My Mother

  The Lord High Everything Else

  Author's Note

  The Wiccen rituals portrayed in this novel have been adapted from rituals described in The Book of Shadows by Lady Sheba (Llewellyn Publications, 1973) and from The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows, by Zsuzanna E. Budapest (Luna Publications, 1976). I have, however, seen fit to adapt, edit, and rewrite the entire universe to fit the needs of my story, and these rituals are no exception; they should not be taken as authentic by serious students of the Craft, whom I refer to these two volumes.

  The only actual location in this book is the Villa Olga, a resort hotel in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, where I spent a pleasant three weeks in 1972 playing chess with its owners and drinking pina coladas. Since I have not been back since, I have no idea of its current status as of this writing, and references should not be taken as literal.

  Except for philosophers, authors, and artists mentioned for literary purpose, no names, events, characters, customs or institutions should be taken as referring to actual events, people, customs, or institutions, past or present. For the record, Clive Staples Lewis has not been canonized--yet.

  LASERIUM® is a registered trademark of Laser Images, Inc. of Van Nuys, California, for laser concerts of the kind described in this novel. The use of laserium as a lower-case generic term for the place where such concerts would be performed in the distant future--presumably when such a trademark had normally expired-- is a device common to futuristic fiction, and should not be held to deny, weaken, or otherwise louse up Laser Images, Inc's, use of the LASERIUM trademark.

  The opinions and lifestyles of the characters in this book should not be taken as being the author's own, or those of any real person. If there's anything I want to pin myself down on, I'll do it in my own voice.

  J.N.S.

  I.

  3800Å to 4100Å

  Chapter 1

  She loved the lights.

  She watched as they circled around her, a merry waltz of blue sparks and red. She watched as one of the red sparks quite suddenly turned bright gold. She watched as the other lights began dancing around the gold, teasing it, then finally chased it away from the waltzes of red and blue, to dance alone.

  She watched the dances of red and blue as they rose and fell, advanced and retreated, changed size and form then changed back again, burned brightly, then, one spark by one, winked out. She watched the single, golden spark begin a new dance by itself, dancing until it exploded into hundreds and hundreds of other sparks: golds and oranges, oranges and reds, reds and violets, violets and indigos, indigos and blues, blues and greens, greens and more sparks of gold.

  She watched thousands of sparks dance wildly, ecstatically, for a few minutes, then, beginning slowly, race around her faster and faster and faster and faster until she was surrounded by an immense spiral rainbow.

  When the dance was over, she did not understand what, or how, or why, but she knew the lights were telling her something, if only she could understand them. She knew she had to find out what the lights were telling her, and more: though she was not yet five years old, Joan Seymour Darris made a promise to herself that someday she also would tell the colors how to make a rainbow.

  Chapter 2

  The Pyradome sits on Manhattan Boulevard in midtown Newer York, about where Saint Patrick's used to be, a thirty-story-high pyramid whose dome, bulging out the sides, makes it look pregnant. Indeed, as one watches it--an immense jewel pulsating in kaleidoscopic colors under the noontide sun--one can easily believe that this is not a building but a huge, primordial creature about to give birth.

  Give birth it did, almost precisely at noon, as five thousand children, teachers, and very harried mothers swarmed out the apex of the McDanald Media Temple onto the escalators descending the outside of the pyradome. Well into the maternal category, but looking spectacularly composed in spite of the four children she was herding. Eleanor Delaney Darris paused on the pyradome's middle landing long enough to light a desperately needed joynette, then exhaled in time to tell six-year-old Nick for the third and last time to stop calling his twin brother, Vic, a dirty Touchable.

  The twins had been just impossible for the hour-long children's concert. The boys'-section usher had reported to Eleanor afterward that he had shushed them twice during the performance, and Eleanor had promised them a spanking from their father when they got home, though this was an idle threat meant only to settle them down. Eleanor did not blame six-year-olds for having the attention spans of, well, six-year-olds...not anymore. Thank the Lady, that was one mistake she wasn't making this time. She blamed herself, instead, for not sitting with her children in a family box, where she could have explained things a bit, but of course this possibility was excluded by the very reason she had taken them to this concert on an impossibly busy day.

  She was there as head of the Darris Foundation to introduce the morning's two solo performers: the elderly lasemeister, Wolfgang Jaeger, and a twelve-year-old prodigy whom the Foundation was sponsoring to study under the semiretired virtuoso at the conservatory Jaeger now headed in Ad Astra. So Eleanor consoled herself that at least eight-year-old Mark had behaved, and was delightfully surprised when the pyradome patron had reported to her that four-year-old Joanie--who'd had a couch all to herself in the girls' section--had been completely entranced by her first lasegraphy concert.

  She glanced down at Joanie, who was staring back at the pyradome's changing colors. Was there any possibility..? But no. Eleanor's first daughter, Vera, had taught her not to make that mistake again either. Don't fool yourself into believing it, she cautioned herself. Whatever seeds you plant here, the harvest will not be your own.

  She told Mark to grab on to his sister's hand, then guided the children back down the escalator. Eleanor was no longer inclined to let worries about children mar her enjoyment of an April day such as this. When they reached the promenade level, transferring onto a slidewalk to the parking zone, she leaned into the wind, allowing it to ripple her ash-blond hair. Eleanor inhaled deeply. The promenade smelled of marigolds and freshly cut grass, here and there mixed with confectionery odors from hovercart vendors. Taking a final toke from her joynette, she hurried her children past a red cloaked woman selling hoop dogs on bagels. She reassured herself that she had nothing against Touchables--what enlightened person did?--but merel
y wanted to avoid the twins' wheeling her for something to spoil their lunch.

  Visits to the city were a rare luxury for Eleanor these days, what with taking care of a husband and five children, and another pregnancy--another boy--planned for next year. If one added in her chair duties for the Darris Foundation, her administrative responsibilities for her family circle, and her U.S.O. volunteer work, a trip to town for a concert was near priceless, even if she did have to emcee the concert.

  Eleanor felt a proprietorship over spring in Newer York. She had been born on this island, grown up here, gone to school here, and--except for nine years immediately following the Colonial War--had spent the better part of her sixty-three years living here. When she was nine, on a school field trip to Staten Island, she had watched a rain of meteors kill Manhattan, orphaning her, but she did not often think about the War, and she did not think about it now. Spring was a time for rebirth, not for mourning a long-dead past. So, rather, she thought of this Newer York's resurrection, a city designed as a single work of art. She knew this city's rhythms and its seasons as well as she knew her own, and she felt in this particular spring a promise of great things about to happen.

  But there was no time to spend admiring the season; she keyed her wristphone, then ordered her limousine to wait for them at passenger loading. Eleanor had promised Mr. McIntosh that she would take back two-year-old Zack by one o'clock, giving the governor his afternoon off before taking charge of visiting children during the ball that evening. Vera's coming-out ball, Eleanor reminded herself again; the thought caused a point of light inside her to flare, as if she'd touched a fire gem. Tonight, Vera was returning home after her three years in the service.

  It was not that Eleanor was particularly patriotic, as one might naturally have assumed. She was not particularly patriotic--no more than anybody else, and no more than she had to be. Eleanor had been thirty-four when the first women's draft lottery had been held--just under the age limit--and she had accepted her own term of service with neither pride nor resentment. It was just something she was being made to do. But Eleanor had wanted to be proud of her twin-daughter for so long, and Vera had provided Eleanor with so little opportunity to be. While a good term of service was not quite the same thing as the premiere at the pyradome Eleanor had once wished for Vera, still, it was something.

  If the cliche` was true that twinning yourself only doubled your problems, then Eleanor had found in Vera the classic twin. Eleanor had self-conceived right after her own term of service had ended, twenty-six years before, by what was poetically called virgin birth--poetic since Eleanor had by no means been untouched by men. Three years of serving under men, day in and day out, had seemed enough for a while, and a daughter who was all her own was to be Eleanor's claim to her own destiny again, after the regimentation of service life.

  A parthenogenic daughter, with all forty-six chromosomes taken from her mother, would be virtually a genetic duplicate of Eleanor. Eleanor decided to call her Vera, since she would breed true. Vera was to be a creative extension of Eleanor, in a way no child born of both mother and father could be, because not only would she be a twin of her mother, but also she would be raised according to her mother's beliefs alone. Her upbringing would not subject her to the male-centered channeling by which a little girl was programmed, before she could consciously question it, that being female meant being the passive and the inferior.

  That had been her own lifelong barrier, Eleanor thought, which prevented her from attaining what she could only call "something of my own." It wasn't possessions, it wasn't a home, it wasn't friends, it wasn't lovers, it wasn't a husband, it wasn't wealth or power, it wasn't any job she had ever had, it wasn't--she had found out the hard way--a twin daughter. She had traveled the world looking for it. She had searched through libraries and museums, universities and cathedrals. She had explored her soul, self and psyche through dozens of techniques, with dozens of masters. But what she was looking for was not to be found in this way. She had always known there was something--there had to be something--that she could do in a way nobody else could, and it would be doing this particular thing that would be her existence and her joy. But she had never found it, and her inability to find it was a mystery to her and an open wound.

  She tried to think what events in her childhood had done this to her, but she had only a dim recollection of her parents during her formative years before the Colonial War. When her parents and younger brothers had been killed, Eleanor was sent to live with her mother's parents in Kentucky, while her three older brothers remained at boarding schools.

  Grandma and Grandpa Collier were strict Southern Baptists who had raised Eleanor's mother, then Eleanor, on their marijuana farm. Grandpa Collier had been one of the first subsidized male babies in the thirty-year-long Brushfire War, and when he got out of the army he bought the marijuana farm with G.I. loans. Soon he had earned a fortune large enough to win Grandma's hand in marriage, as he phrased it. This was no small feat, considering that as a result of militarists' paying families to produce extra male babies for a generation, at the end of the Brushfire War there were already four men for every woman.

  The Colliers had a typical Brushfire War mentality and even forty-five years later Eleanor found it difficult to break free of it entirely. Men were supposed to work, fight, and achieve; women were supposed to keep their country strong by having lots of male babies. But men were dangerous creatures who had no compunction about using force to have a woman, just as they'd used force to have enemy women in the Brushfire War they'd just fought. Even today, one war later, forty years into the World Federation, and three decades after the women's service had solved the rape problem--as popular history had it--Eleanor felt nervous walking out alone at night, after Grandma's incessant warnings. How many times had she had to listen to Grandma's story about how she'd been raped the one night she'd gone out having forgotten to wear her chastity electrobelt?

  Eleanor had rebelled against these hopelessly old-fashioned attitudes, and at eighteen had broken free from her grandparents to return to what was now Newer York. There she had lived alone and with a number of lovers of both sexes. Her father's fortune had been wiped out with Wall Street, and her grandparents could send her no money because they'd traded in their farm for a condominium in the first postwar colony, St. Clive, but Eleanor never had to worry where her rent money was coming from. With six men for every woman on Earth such things were not a problem for an attractive girl who frequented the mocha houses in those days--even without outright prostitution, which was still legal then.

  It was after sixteen years of living the free-spirited life of a boh--consorting with the coca drinkers and roga players, doing what she wanted, when she wanted, where she wanted--that the Federation had begun Universal Service and Eleanor had been drafted into its Peace Corps.

  Vera was to have been Eleanor's reply both to her grandparents -- now living in the colonies--and to her own society. Eleanor had given Vera the opportunity and the encouragement to sample the world's culture--to choose an ascending path for herself -- and to demonstrate to the world that a mind and a spirit in a female body could equal or better any accomplishment a mind and a spirit in a male body could achieve.

  It had not quite worked out that way. Though Vera had proved to be neither passive nor inferior, she directed her talents in ways that her mother could interpret only as perverse. Eleanor had wanted to dress her daughter to emphasize her individuality; Vera had been more interested in indentical mother-daughter outfits. Eleanor had given her daughter toys and games designed to encourage her intellectual development. These remained in the toy chest while Vera played Mommy endlessly to a doll her great- grandparents had sent her: a lifelike re-creation, taken from holograms, of Eleanor as a baby.

  Later on, Eleanor wanted her daughter to experience the great cultural treasures of the world. Vera sat in the Louvre, in the Kremlin, and on the steps of Chichen Itza playing trashy storydiscs. Eleanor was left to experience the grea
t cultural treasures of the world.

  In school, Vera's teachers acknowledged that she was capable of brilliant work, but her grades never seemed to reflect it. Eleanor heard variations on the same theme over and over again: Vera's test had been perfect, but she had allowed another student to copy from her, failing both of them. Vera's essay had been brilliant, but the teacher was sure she had plagiarized it, even though the original source couldn't be located. Vera's homework assignments had proved she knew the material cold, but mysteriously she still managed to fail the final.

  Eleanor's worst disappointment with Vera, however, was caused by their one mutual love; lasegraphy. Eleanor had started Vera on lessons when she was four--the same age at which Eleanor's mother had started her on the console. Vera's teacher, Jack Malcolm, had told Eleanor that her daughter showed an unusual grasp of sequential logic, as well as having a formidable sense of color, motion, and form. She continued her lessons for eleven years--developing a brilliant console technique along the way -- and performed remarkably in student competitions.

  When Vera was fifteen, Malcolm arranged financial backing through the Darris Foundation (and in doing so introduced Eleanor to her future husband) for Vera to give a premiere recital at the pyradome. Several of Newer York's most influential lasegraphic critics had promised to attend. Vera was to perform Geoffrey Moulton's Vistata No. 3, several rather pyrotechnic Konzertstucke by Wolfgang Jaeger, and a new composition of her own, Fugue in Blue.