Fugue in Blue was never premiered. Three hours before her recital, Vera went into convulsions and was rushed to Golden-Sky General Hospital. She stayed there five days while doctors ran every conceivable test on her. And though they reported that her convulsions had been genuine, they were never able to detect any physiological cause.
Vera refused ever to return to the console, and she refused to give her reasons to anyone. For years afterwards, she even refused to remain in the same room where a lasegraphic recording was being played. It was only in her senior year of university, where she maintained above-mediocre work in a political-science major, that Vera relaxed enough to begin participating in lasegraphy again, but solely as a viewer. She began attending concerts and playing recordings, but she never again allowed it any importance in her life.
She entered into the service immediately after her university graduation, as soon as her student draft deferment was up. From all accounts her mother had been able to receive. Vera's service record was consistently excellent. Although this was the only consistent excellence Vera had shown since abandoning the console, Eleanor wondered why this knowledge now filled her with a dread that wiped out the warm tingle she'd felt a few minutes before. The apprehension lasted just an instant, but when it was gone it took the warmth with it, leaving only the chill of someone's death.
Eleanor tried putting this out of her mind as she marched her second daughter and three of her four sons--all conceived in the usual way--into the pyradome parking zone. Soon she was aided in her attempt by the slidewalk, as it merged them into the crush of departing passengers. Her limousine phoned her back to let her know that it was waiting for them at Platform Green. Then she struggled to keep her children together as they passed through red, orange, and yellow platform, where schoolmasters were shepherding uniformed boys back onto the airbuses they'd arrived in. When the family reached Platform Green, Eleanor did some quick shepherding of her own, until they reached a queue of private skymobiles. Past a Schwinn station wagon, past a Cadillac de Sade, past a Mao miniflyer, a powder-blue Astarte limousine was hovering.
Eleanor's skymobile was a brand-new bubble-top model and there was the usual argument with the children about which one would get the prized seat up top. She awarded it to Mark, this time, for his good behavior at the concert. As soon as everyone was strapped in, she told the computer to fly them directly home.
"Home," to both the Darris family and the onboard computer pilot, was an estate in upper Hudson Parish about 160 kilometers north of Manhattan via the Hudson River Air Corridor--in Kingston, to be exact. Traffic control cleared them for takeoff, only to stick them into a holding circle at 1,000 meters for nine minutes. Eleanor smoked another joynette and allowed Joanie to join Mark in the bubble for aerial views of the pyradome and the Rainborough Bridge. Nick, feeling left out, started complaining that he had to go to the bathroom. Not to be outdone by his twin brother, Vic immediately chimed in. Eleanor told them she should have thought of that back at the pyradome, thinking herself that the little monsters deserved to wet themselves.
Joanie was already rebelted into her seat by the time traffic control routed them through Newark--the wrong direction, but avoiding the worst of noon traffic--and when they were eventually into the Hudson Corridor they were assigned a 5,000- meter cruising altitude. Eight minutes later, they dropped out of the corridor at Poughkeepsie, circled Port Ewen, and in another few minutes were into a final descent over the Darris apple orchards. A quick pass over their squatball course, their horse stables, and Lake Kingston brought them to the landing strip on the Darris estate, Helix Vista.
Suddenly, the computer sounded collision alarm. All of them were shoved back into their seats as the craft accelerated into a steep, banked climb. What the rape is going on? Eleanor wondered. Then they were hit by the airwash of another skymobile cutting only meters under them, and were violently rocked back and forth several times until the computer managed to compensate. All three boys started crying.
As suddenly as it started, the alarm stopped. The computer brought them around again in preparation for their landing. Eleanor could see a silvered craft on the Darris strip just ahead of them, taxiing across the lawn to their house, but it was too far off to recognize.
They came into the landing strip again and slowed to a hover. Eleanor manually taxied them off the runway before she cut out the impellents. Only after she had checked to make sure her children were all right, and had quieted down the boys, did Eleanor notice her own galloping pulse rate. No computer would have cut it that close. That other skymobile had been on manual. She was going to have that cloneraping pilot's heart for lunch.
Eleanor let Mark and Joanie out--her little girl amazingly serene, as if nothing unusual had happened--then turned around to let the twins out. "Oh, scat," she said.
The twins had wet the seat.
Chapter 3
That cloneraping pilot was, of course, Vera.
Eleanor marched across the lawn, her cubs in tow, a lioness preparing to make cat food out of the brainwiped lout who had dared to frighten her children. When she approached her house, though, she saw not a delivery boy's craft but a stiletto-shaped Phaethon sportster. The sportster's trunk was open, so she did not immediately see the jump-suited woman who was pulling out a general-issue Kevlar valise. When the bonnet was slammed shut, allowing her to see Vera, Eleanor was stunned.
Vera was not supposed to be home until that evening, arriving by suborbital shuttle; Stanton Darris--Eleanor's husband and Vera's stepfather--was supposed to pick Vera up at Soleri Skyport on his way home from work. Moreover, when Eleanor had seen her daughter on the last holiday leave Vera had used to come home--Beltane, almost a year ago--Vera had not even owned a skymobile.
So when, somewhat uncharacteristically, Vera shouted, "Mother!" and dropped her valise to throw her arms around Eleanor, it may be understandable why, in the spirit of the moment, Eleanor decided to forget the incident.
When lunch was served up. Vera was at the table, not on it.
Corporal Vera Delaney had been stationed in Honolulu. The night before her discharge, she had gone out to celebrate with several of her messmates; as usual the women went to the casinos on Molokai. They'd had a few tokes in the cannabistro, spent some time at the blackjack tables, and eventually lost all their money gambling. They were about to head back to their quarters when they passed by a velletrom table just as a player started a psycho-kinetic winning streak. Vera stopped for a moment to look, the man immediately associated his sudden streak of velleity with Vera's presence, and he asked her to stick around.
He kept pulling threes. And sixes. And twelves.
He'd just read a disc called Velletrom: Free Will Can Pay Big!
He owned a local skymobile dealership.
It was, of course, against regulations for a civilian to give a gift to a corporal in the Federation Peace Corps while she was on active duty. So he told Vera to drop by his dealership as soon as she was officially a civilian again. The silver Phaethon was a demonstrator.
"He didn't even want to fuck me," Vera told her mother.
"Lavender," Eleanor said.
Vera shook her head. "Would I have brought this up if he wasn't wearing blue? Uh-uh. He said if we fucked it wouldn't be a gift. Then where would he be the next time he wanted the Lady to bring him kinesis?"
"Gamblers and their superstitions," Eleanor siad. She had been put off by her grandparents' religious fanaticism and believed in neither God nor Goddess.
Rather than have her new toy freighted home, Vera had decided to fly the craft herself, leaving that evening. From Honolulu to Newer York, 8,000 kilometers. Ten hours' flying time, with a two hour rest stop in Pacifica and nothing to keep her going but a reservoir of hot coca mocha. And, of course, the Phaethon being a sportster, it was manual control all the way.
Aside from an hour's nap she'd caught in the parking zone of a Quiche & Knish in Los Angeles, Vera had been up since 9 A.M. Honolulu time, the previo
us day. Eleanor could well appreciate why Vera might have been a little bleary-eyed by the time she came into Helix Vista for a landing.
"But why didn't you phone me last night, to let me know your change of plans?"
"I thought I'd surprise you," Vera said.
"You did," Eleanor replied. She didn't add that she'd just as soon pass up such surprises. "But I'll get even tonight," she told her daughter. "I've managed to work up a little surprise of my own."
Vera went up to get some sleep before her ball. Eleanor made a quick call to Stanton's office, letting his secretary know that Stanton no longer needed to pick Vera up, then went to the kitchen to check on preparations. One of the robots brought her a bowl of dip to taste. She dipped her finger into it, then scowled. "Much too much garlic. Throw this away and start again." The robot threw the dip into the scintillator and made more dip while she checked on the caviar. This time she gave her okay.
She was just about to head into the children's den, to relieve Mr. McIntosh, when the repairman for the lawn dome and the champagne delivery arrived simultaneously. This day was becoming more impossible by the minute.
When Eleanor stopped into the children's den, Mr. McIntosh and the children had finished lunch, and the boys were on the floor with him playing a round-robin game; two-year-old Zack was perched on the governor's lap. Joan was sitting Indian-style in a big old beat-up armchair, drawing on rainbow paper with thermocrayons.
Mr. McIntosh was the youngest, and the best, governor Eleanor had ever hired; the slim, light-brown-haired boy had been nineteen when he had come to work for the Darris family three years before. His gentleness, endless patience, and easygoing intelligence ensured his rapport with the children. Eleanor just couldn't understand how some families could trust their children to a robot. A robot couldn't make a sulking child laugh, no matter how flexible its programming was supposed to be.
Eleanor sighed. "Mac..."
"I'll stay," the governor said. His rapport seemed almost magical at times. "Your turn, Mark."
"Onions," said Mark.
"But your afternoon," Eleanor said. "I promised."
"Nothing I can't put off," Mr. McIntosh said. "Very good, Mark. Vic?"
"Oranges."
"Sorry, Nick said oranges already. Try again." He turned to Eleanor again. "You can make it up to me next week."
"He did not. Go ick yourself!"
"I did too! You go ick yourself!"
"You're a sweetheart," Eleanor said.
Mr. McIntosh smiled. "Let me prove it sometime."
Eleanor smiled slightly. "I'll take my word for it." The young man grinned again, then was immediately busy mediating between the twins.
She decided to put off her duties for another minute and walked over to Joan. Her daughter had drawn a big yellow dot with a multicolored spiral shooting out of it. It changed color with each orbit: yellow to orange, orange to red, red to violet, violet to indigo, indigo to blue, blue to green, green and circling back into the yellow again. A rainbow helix, of sorts.
"What have you got there, darling?"
Joan held up the paper to her mother. "See? I'm telling the lights."
"Telling the lights?"
"Telling them, like this morning. They're dancing for me."
Eleanor crouched to examine the paper more closely. It was true. Joan had exactly remembered a spectral sequence from the children's concert--the finale to the last movement of Wolfgang Jaeger's Resurrection Vistata. She had drawn the correct sequence for a color scale.
For just a moment, Eleanor let her hopes sweep away her doubts. But once burned by Vera, Eleanor was shy of the fire. She believed it was her stage-mothering that had pressured her first daughter into a nervous collapse.
"Honey, can I have this when you're through with it? I want to keep it."
Joan handed it to her mother. "I'm gonna do another one."
Eleanor kissed Joan on her cheek, then rolled up the drawing, deciding to hang it in the kitchen. When she left to supervise unloading of the champagne, she began singing to herself, happily.
In the year Joan Seymour Darris turned five, there lived seven men for every woman on Earth.
A century earlier, cynics had commented that given an opportunity to create an advantage, the human race inevitably turned it into a disadvantage. Ecologists had said that given the possibility of destroying the natural balance, the "Cancer of the Planet" just naturally chose the unnatural. Clergy had found the chance to preach that once men and women turned from God's ordained plans, nothing but evil could result.
Only one thing was certain. Repeatedly given the choice between self-control and its opposites, tyranny and dissipation, too many of the race forswore self-control.
On February 15, 1979, working from a technique developed by Dr. Ronald Ericsson of Sausalito, California, Dr. W. Paul Dmowski of Chicago announced his successful demonstration of a procedure whereby androsperm--those spermatozoa producing male off-spring -- could be concentrated to increase the probability of male children. The technique, however, would not work with female producing gynosperm, and could therefore be used only to help create male babies. But the procedure was expensive, and there was no noticeable effect on population demographics.
Some years later, Dr. Bowie Golden-Sky of Los Angeles perfected a drug that, taken by a man the day before sexual intercourse, would deactivate his gynosperm entirely, thus ensuring that any offspring resulting from such a union would be male. There was nothing at the time that a woman could take to change this. The most she could manage was the null result of no offspring at all.
After laboratory testing, Upjohnson Pharmaceuticals began marketing the drug worldwide under the commercial name Adamine.
Oddly or not, Adamine encountered little political opposition. Perhaps the pro-abortion arguments feminists had used regarding absolute control over their own bodies restrained them from telling men what they, in turn, could put into theirs.
It did not take long for the statisticians to notice that just about twice as many male babies were being born as female babies. Patriarchal cultures, particularly in the Middle and Far East, demonstrated a preference for male offspring. By the time the demographics became obvious to all, the Brushfire War had started. Male military leaders saw advantages to a surplus of males in a conventional war that looked bound to drag on. Politicians saw their advantage in victory from the cradle.
Manpower--specifically male--was demanded. In totalitarian countries, men were simply ordered to produce male babies. Those families not producing the desired surplus were punished. That women played a less-than-peripheral role in producing babies was a minor point that male political rulers never seemed to notice.
For the United States, it was another generation of young American men being chewed up in remote jungles, deserts, and ice floes. A long war seemed inevitable, but the constant drain on the country's supply of young men was making the war uneconomic and unpopular. Two solutions were arrived at.
In the short term, the United States persuaded Canada, Mexico, and its new ally Cuba to combine with it--on the models of NATO and the European Common Market--to form the North American Concord.
In the long term, the Concord parliament passed an act granting progressive tax rebates to families producing healthy male babies. Female babies were still allowed, of course, but were not subsidized.
It was a popular law. For many families, the tax rebates were the difference between soyaburgers and beefalo steaks--with enough, perhaps, left over for a new holovision set. In Cuba and Mexico, the rebates were for many families the difference between squalor and the much higher level of American squalor.
The Concord eventually won its war but by the time the Brushfire war ended, males under twenty-six years old outnumbered females by four to one. The subsidies were repealed, but it was much too late.
With a shortage of young women, the overall birthrate was dropping rapidly. Illegal prostitution thrived, then was legalized to be inspected an
d taxed. Men who had learned how to rape the wives and daughters of their enemies brought this lesson home with them. The ratio of men to women made rape epidemic. As in prisons and boarding schools for centuries earlier, men turned to--and on--other men.
New and inexpensive technologies perfected during the war provided at least the hope of an exit for the surplus of men; outer space. A permanent lunar-exploration outpost was established. Laser launching systems and, later, continuous- boost thermonuclear spaceships provided access to the entire solar system. Scientific footholds were made on Mars, on several of Jupiter's moons, and even on Venus.
Several free-space habitats--huge orbiting cities envisioned the previous century by such pioneers as Gerald K. O'Neill of Princeton--were constructed, each housing thousands of colonists. Permanent mining operations on the moon, and later in the asteroid belt, combined with near-free solar energy to make such efforts both technologically and economically possible.
Second and third generation O'Neill colonies--massive cylindrical habitats, each with a population capacity in the millions--included the Concord's Ad Astra, the Chinese Confucius, and the Soviet Lenin. O'Neill, Kibbutz, Uhuru, and Rising Sun soon followed.
Nonetheless, only a small fraction of the surplus male population was able to leave. Political measures throughout the world tried to control the marauding young men.
The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form Page 2