The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  At five to nine, a stunning woman with ash-blond hair, sky- blue eyes, and the figure that was an exercise in lightness ascended onto the terrace. As did every veteran at this ball, she wore the white dress uniform of the Federation Peace Corps: a gown that revealed nothing but promised it all.

  A tall, black-skinned, and handsome comman walked up to her, presenting his dance card. "Mademoiselle," he said with a slight quebecois accent, "may I escort you until our first dance?"

  For a moment she looked no older than sixteen, and she laughed. "Thank you, but I believe my husband might object."

  The young comman was even more taken aback when Stanton Darris walked up and led Eleanor away, winding their way across the roga imagery reflected from the gossamer canopy onto the mirrored dance floor.

  The comman was not to be blamed for his mistake. What biological distinctions there were between Eleanor Darris and her parthenogenic daughter would have shown up only in a medical or Federation Monitor laboratory--assuming their brainprints hadn't already been scanned.

  The comman stood watching after them as Eleanor and Stanton reached the cannabistro, where they approached a tall, somewhat stout, and curly-haired androman the comman recognized from holovision as His Gaylordship Wendell Darris.

  Wendell stood at the cannabistro, loading his pipe with a marijuana blend Darris Investments imported from the Lenin colony -- Colombian seeds grown in lunar soil. "A fine welcome," Gaylord Darris said to his brother before Stanton could open his mouth. "No balloons, no pretty boys waving placards, no holy reporters. And in an election year."

  Stanton shook his brother's hand. "There's a kid here from the Harvard Crimson," he said "You want me to get him?"

  "Lady, no," Wendell said. "He might win the Murdoch Prize for the interview and I'd be thrown out of the Yale Alumni Association. Hello, Eleanor. You can still fit into the uniform, I see."

  "And you're looking particularly effete tonight," she said.

  "Thanks, but you can save the compliments. If I look at all the way I feel, I must look like scat. Has our surprise arrived yet?"

  "Not till ten."

  Wendell nodded and turned back to his brother. "I haven't seen Mom yet."

  "She's still vesting, and burning mad that we allowed the party to start before she gave the service."

  "You know how traditionalist she can be."

  "Wendy, where's Marion hiding?" Eleanor asked. "I'd like to say hello before I have to start playing hostess again."

  Wendell paused just a moment, to underscore a warning "Marion sends his regrets. A last-minute stomach-ache, I'm afraid."

  Eleanor caught his tone. "That's dreadful. Was it something he ate?"

  "Probably," Wendell replied, tamping down his pipe. "Marion seems never to have learned what not to swallow."

  Precisely at nine, a stunning woman with ash-blond hair, sky- blue eyes, and a figure that was an exercise in lightness ascended onto the terrace. As did every veteran at this ball, she wore the white dress uniform of the Federation Peace Corps: a gown that revealed nothing but promised it all.

  A tall, black-skinned, and handsome comman walked up the her, again presenting his dance card. This time, Vera Collier Delaney nodded to him, but she told him to wait.

  Right behind Vera, a silver-haired woman in flowing emerald robes, a regal strength belying her one hundred years, ascended onto the floor. Though she no longer wore the vernal beauty of her daughter-in-law and adopted granddaughter, Kate Seymour could still command every set of eyes on the terrace. The High Priestess of the Darris family circle moved in front of Vera and -- with years of nightclub experience--took her stage. The crowd naturally made a pathway as she led Vera up to the bandstand. As Kate Seymour stepped onto it, the orchestra immediately shifted into an ancient and rhythmic strain. All lights went out.

  The High Priestess lit two white candles on the bandstand, then removed a short sword from her emerald robes. She traced a nine-foot circle, east to east, around her, and as she traced it, it appeared in glowing light on the floor--courtesty of the roga player.

  Then she took her sword and pointed it at Vera, who was suddenly bathed in white light. By stage magic, there stood Vera just outside the circle, naked and blindfolded.

  The High Priestess drew next to her and pointed the sword directly at Vera's heart. "O you who stand on the threshold of initiation, the world of men, and the domains of the Dread Lords of the outer spaces, do you have the courage to undergo the trial?"

  "I do," Vera replied. "I have two passwords."

  "Speak them."

  "Perfect love and perfect peace."

  Kate Seymour dropped her sword; the clatter echoed across the terrace. "All who bring such words are doubly welcome." She drew Vera into the circle with her. "I give you a third password -- a kiss." She kissed Vera on the lips. "This is the way all are first brought into the circle."

  For the next ten minutes, Vera was subjected to ancient rituals of consecration, bondage, and scouring. Vows were made and presents given. Finally, Vera stood before her grandmother, without blindfold and again in uniform, as the old High Priestess completed her last service. "Listen, O Mighty Ones! Vera Collier Delany has been consecrated a High Priestess of the Art and a Sister of the Wicce."

  Kate Seymour left the bandstand and walked off the terrace.

  Vera waited for silence, then spoke. "Listen now to the words of the Great Mother."

  "I who am the beauty of the Green Earth, and the White Moon among the stars, I call unto your soul to arise and come to me. Rejoice, for all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals. Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence--within you. And you who think to search for me, behold--I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of all desire."

  "So be it ordained," the crowd intoned.

  "Blessed be," said Vera. "Let the festivities resume."

  The lights came back on. Vera signaled to the roga player to begin again, then led the young comman, whose dance card she had signed first, onto the floor.

  A few minutes later, the party was in full swing again. Even Kate Seymour, who had changed from her emerald robes into an evening formal, had dragged Stanton onto the dance floor.

  Over at the cannabistro, Gaylord Darris was holding court, surrounded by Eleanor and a dozen of her guests. At the moment, Wendell was trying to stump--with a 1-centigram bet on the line -- a commercial envoy from Lenin. "So," he said, speaking in Russian, "The Minister of Ecology says to the waiter, 'Waiter, there's a fly in my soup.'"

  The envoy smiled. "And the waiter says, 'Don't worry, tovarishch, it won't drink much.'"

  Several of the guests understood Russian and laughed. "Rapier," Wendell said, blunting the tip of his profanity at the last instant. He withdrew an aurafoam coin from his capote and dropped it into the envoy's hand. "I could have sworn that one was new."

  The envoy shook his head. "I heard it in Daedalus more than six months ago."

  A puzzled matron asked, "But I thought they didn't import any flies to the habitats."

  "We don't, madam," the envoy said. "That's what makes it so funny."

  "Vladimir!" a woman's voice called.

  "My wife wishes to dance," the envoy said, bowing to Gaylord Darris, then withdrawing.

  Wendell and Eleanor spent the next few minutes discussing classical lasegraphy, their joint work for the Darris Foundation, and some folk etymology Wendell had recently discovered regarding the illegitimate derivation of the word "vistata" from the Italian vedere.

  After the first dance, Vera took the young comman over to the cannabistro to meet Eleanor; the crowd around Wendell began dispersing, allowing some privacy, as robots began handing out glasses of champagne. "Mother and Wendell," Vera said, "may I introduce Francois Duroux. Francois, my mother, Eleanor Darris, and her brother-in-law, Gaylord Darris."

  "How do you do?" Duroux freed his right hand from a champagne glass so he c
ould shake hands with them. "Madame," he said to Eleanor. "I apologize for my confusion earlier tonight. I hope I did not cause you and your husband embarrassment."

  Eleanor smiled pleasantly. "Please don't give it a second thought."

  "Certainly not," Vera said, somewhat acidly. "My mother has always played our resemblance for all it's worth."

  The remark stung Eleanor, though it didn't surprise her. Eleanor was about to comment when she saw Wendell quickly shake his head once at her, so she said nothing.

  Duroux carefully tried to disappear into his champagne glass for a moment.

  Vera changed the subject. "Francois wants to recruit me for his mother's judiciary firm in Montreal."

  "That is not quite right," Duroux corrected her. "Maman wishes Vera to work for her. I merely convey the offer as her employee."

  "You do have your own desires, though?" Eleanor asked.

  "But of course."

  "Then I assume you met my daughter in the Hawaiian dicteriat?"

  "Mother!" Vera said, scandalized.

  But Duroux was quite used to overprotective parents, so he rolled with the punch. "Madame, the judiciary profession is much too sensitive to public opinion for a firm to risk--shall we say -- so intimate a channel. No. Vera and I met several months ago at our corporate offices in Montreal."

  "I used a leave to take their company's entrance exams," said Vera.

  "I apologize," Eleanor said. "But getting back to your mother's offer--which firm is this?"

  "Legos, Limited."

  "Legos would sponsor her law training?"

  "To a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree--three years. Then another year of internship as my mother's law clerk before Maman would give Vera a bench of her own."

  "Your mother is Claudine Duroux?" Gaylord Darris asked. The young comman nodded. "I met her when she ovafied before the Select Committee on the Touchable Riots last session--something about cost overruns?"

  Duroux nodded again. "I don't know what was more costly, sentencing Touchables to the microwaves--capital cases just drag on--or fining the Marnies for daylight venery. The costliest was the trial of the Marnies who had icarated about a dozen Touchables. By the way, Your Gaylordship, do you hunt?"

  Wendell shook his head. "Barbaric practice."

  "Chacun a son gout," Duroux said, abandoning the idea of inviting His Gaylordship along on his next nightstalk. "Regardless, all this backed up our court dockets for almost a year. I should know. Scheduling of trials is my primary responsibility for Legos."

  "I also recall your mother's appearance before my Ways and Means Committee, several months later..."

  "Maman spoke of it. Painfully."

  Wendell laughed. "I'll just bet Her Honor did; I'll just bet. Gaylord Chung and Lady Weinstein were batting her back and forth at the hearing like a squatball in the fifth down. If I hadn't stepped in, I think they'd have stuffed her up the net too."

  Duroux smiled. "She remembers, and has told me she will support your ticket this June, even though she dislikes your running mate."

  "Tell her not to worry. A first-term lady doesn't have seniority to get anywhere near the Judiciary Committee. You will understand why I can't comment more explicitly."

  "Of course."

  "A toast," said Stanton Darris from the bandstand, where he addressed the assemblage. "Vera, come on up here where people can see you."

  Chapter 5

  Eleanor and Wendell's surprise for Vera arrived on schedule at ten o'clock. Colors in motion, observed Wolfgang Jaeger as he was flown in by taxi to Helix Vista. But it was by no means an infrequent perception for him, since he saw colors in motion whenever he looked, in much the same way that a sculptor can't help noticing passing faces. For Jaeger, colors in motion weren't only the essence of a ball, they were the essence of his life--the essence of everything.

  A sculptor looking at Jaeger's face would have seen it lined with age and pain. He was one hundred fifty-five years old, and this was his last night on Earth. He was not sorry to be leaving. His bones ached from too much sustained gravity, his neck still ached from the identity transponder implanted at Federation customs, his mind ached from too many remembrances, his eyes ached from having seen much too much.

  Though he was one of the last children of the old millennium, virtually his entire life had been in the new one. The art form of which he was, and had been for the last century, the uncontested master had barely reached its puberty when he'd reached his own. Under his tutelage, lasegraphy had grown to rival music as the essential expression of the human soul.

  Such growth had not come automatically. A lover had said to him half a lifetime ago, "Wolf, you treat yourself like a hothouse plant." It was true. But for a tropical plant in a northern climate, a hothouse was what it took to survive. He had told her, "If you want lushness, you pay for it."

  She had left him soon thereafter.

  He was often unspeakably alone. Everyone was perfectly willing to stand up after his recitals, applauding wildly for his finished masterpieces, but no audience had ever wanted to know the pain he'd had to endure to make the masterpieces possible. He heard backstage and during interviews phrases such as "the nobility of artistic suffering," but these had only been words. He saw nothing noble in his own pain. It just existed, silently, like a star exploding in a vacuum.

  So he had paced and he had worried; he had debased himself before the backers, booking agents, and promoters; he had waited for them to get back to him. Then he would wonder why he didn't have enough energy left to sit down at the console. He wondered why the lights wouldn't dance, why the dreams had stopped. He was spiritually dead, and he haunted anyone who came to visit his grave.

  He ranted and he raved, he cursed the universe and he cursed himself, he drove away anyone who'd had the misfortune to love him. But no one understood--could understand. Only someone whose mind took the same odd turns his mind took, could have understood. Others tried, they made mighty and worthy efforts, but they had never been up against the chromatic laser and a cathedral of empty night.

  One night, when the pain became too much to take, he returned to the console.

  And, my God, the lights began to dance. The pain began flowing out of his fingers and slashing through the dark. Dreams of wandering and speaking, trial and suffering, death and rebirth were translated into colors and motion, patterns in cadence.

  When his fingers had stopped moving, he had finished a composition that had eluded him for six years. When he played it once all the way through, and shut off his instrument, he felt he had returned to God the rainbow He had given Noah after the flood.

  Vistata No. 7: "The Resurrection" had premiered in New York the next spring. He had come back to Newer York now to celebrate the centennial of that premiere.

  It had not been an easy decision to come back to Earth. In the two catastrophic wars his long life had driven him through, he had seen human beings heedlessly set against each other. He had seen the Brushfire War set East against West, and its aftermath set men against women. In this war he had refused to become a partisan. He had seen the War of Colonial Secession set Earth against the heavens. But in this war he had sided with the heavens. This was his only return trip to his native world since.

  A thought struck him and he laughed. Here he was, on the last night of his only trip to Earth since he had moved to Ad Astra sixty years ago, and he was spending it playing at a witch's bat mitzvah. At age eleven, he had started his career by playing at a bat mitzvah of the original sort. It was an appropriate goodbye.

  After the taxi had landed, Jaeger paid its computer with a credit card, telling it to have dispatch send another taxi for him at 1 A.M. Then he took a tall, flat ferrofoam case--bulging at one end--from the seat beside him and climbed out of the taxi with some difficulty. A robot butler met him at the house, took his coat, and directed him to a lift which took him directly to the terrace. When he had ascended onto it, he set his instrument between his feet and looked around.

&nb
sp; It was a celebration like so many other celebrations he'd attended in a long life. The details never seemed to change. There was loud music, that horrible roga--people dancing, eating, drinking, smoking. Clusters of people talked about things that didn't matter to them. For a moment, Jaeger forgot that this was the world he was born on and felf himself completely an alien. Why, he wondered, was doing this considered celebrating? What did these people do with their lives that this was their most prized way of marking it? For him, his best moments were spent alone at the console, with no one watching, and what he found there needed no external celebration. And if he felt, when the hunting was particularly good, that he wished to celebrate it further, the celebration came in sharing what he had found with others. But what were these people sharing with each other that this mindless chaos was the result? Give me even one person who sees the things I see, Jaeger thought, and you can keep all the champagne and caviar on Earth.