The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  He did not have long to dwell on these thoughts; he spotted his hostess on the way to greet him. For just an instant, Jaeger thought he was having a stroke--wasn't seeing double one of the symptoms? But the two women weren't moving together, and there were two men with them who shared only a familial resemblance, so he decided he wasn't done for yet.

  Eleanor relieved his confusion by stepping forward. "Maestro Jaeger, thank you so much for coming tonight. May I introduce my daughter, Vera; my husband, Stanton; and His Gaylordship Wendell Darris."

  "Delighted to meet each of you." Jaeger shook their hands in turn, carefully extending his index finger to apply counterpressure in case of too crushing a grip.

  Vera said, "I'm so honored you've decided to play for us, Maestro. This is a greater surprise than I could have possibly imagined."

  Eleanor wondered just exactly how Vera meant that.

  "The honor is all mine, young lady." Jaeger looked back and forth between Eleanor and Vera. "Excuse an old man for staring, but I can't help studying your remarkable resemblance to your mother. We don't have very many clones in the habitats. Different eugenic goals, you know."

  Vera concealed her annoyance; she knew the word "clone" was used less precisely in the colonies--the "habitats," she must remember to say around Jaeger, if she didn't want to provoke war. "I'm my mother's twin," she told Jaeger, "by parthenogenesis. The process doesn't produce the various inadequacies that clones suffer from."

  "Forgive me my error," Jaeger said. "I didn't mean to insult you. But I must say it was rather my impression that such 'inadequacies' resulted from nurture rather than nature."

  "Hear, hear," Wendell said.

  Vera flushed deeply but avoided looking at Wendell. "Some people," she told Jaeger, "reject any scientific conclusion that doesn't happen to support their convictions."

  "Some people do indeed," Wendell said.

  "Maestro," said Stanton, "you've just walked into the middle of one of the most hotly debated political issues on the planet."

  "And this discussion is getting altogether too serious for a party," Eleanor said. "Maestro, can I get you anything to smoke, or to eat? Or perhaps you'd like to meet some of our guests?"

  "Thank you, but if you don't mind, I'd like to spend some time in the laserium warming up--if it wouldn't offend you?"

  "Not at all," Eleanor said. "Vera, why don't you escort the Maestro down?"

  "Of course."

  Wendell laughed. "Pardon me, Maestro, but this reminds me of a story I've heard about you--"

  "Yes?"

  "--that a well-known society hostess, some years ago, once asked you what your price would be to play at one of her exclusive parties. And it's said you gave her a price of five hundred auragrams. She supposedly agreed without flinching, then said to you, 'You realize, of course, that I will expect you not to mingle with my guests.' And you are supposed to have said, 'In that case, madam, I will charge you only one hundred auragrams.'"

  Everyone laughed, especially Wendell, a confirmed self- panicker if ever there was one. "This story has followed me around for years," Jaeger said. "I only wish it were about me. It actually goes back to the celebrated virtuoso Fritz Kreisler."

  "Really?" Wendell said. "I thought I knew all the great names of lasegraphy, but I've never heard of him."

  Jaeger smiled wistfully; he knew too well that time wounded as often as it healed. "Kreisler was a virtuoso before the laser was even invented," he said. "He was a violin player."

  Wendell shrugged.

  A few minutes later, Vera took Jaeger down to the lawn dome. When they entered, Jaeger was happy to learn that the Darrises had a top-notch private laserium, one of the best home facilities he'd ever seen. It wasn't the pyradome, of course, but them again, what was? There were reclining couches here to seat over two hundred around the dome's perimeter, with a Tiger Pit in the center for the performer. Jaeger himself had been the one who'd tagged the Tiger Pit after performing one night to a paticularly hostile audience. The name had stuck. Jaeger found the day glow controls, since Vera didn't know where they were anyway, and he raised the dome lights. He began unpacking his instrument while Vera look on attentively; Jaeger had no way of knowing the significance.

  His instrument comprised two parts. Jaeger's console was merely a very light, very modern LCAA 1600 keyboard, not very much different from consoles in use a century before. The controls were seventy-two touch-sensitive finger panels and a dozen foot pedals, with a monitor screen and an electronic scroller for written scores; inside the console were mostly just some very prosaic oscillators and microprocessors.

  The Merlino chromatic laser Jaeger owned was a different matter altogether. Aside from superlative eighty-two-year-old craftsmanship, there was nothing unusual about the array of scanners, mirrors, prisms, dichroic filters, holographic plates, and other opticals designed to modulate pinpoint laser beams into dimensional imagery. What distinguished the Merlino was an almost intangible warmth and subtlety of expression, possible only through its use of nine of the rarest, most expensive, and most perfect cut fire gems in existence.

  Nobody knew precisely what fire gems were--whether they were natural crystals or synthetic artifacts--but they had been found in some quantity on one of the asteroids. Opinions respecting whether they were natural or created by some previous human or alien civilization tended to shift with the latest theories regarding the probable existence of an ancient, exploded planet where the asteriod belt was now.

  Touching a fire gem had been found to produce warm, tingling feeling in human beings, with analogous effects reproducible -- but not explained--by experiments on laboratory animals and plantlife. More important from the technologist's standpoint was the fire gem's very odd behavior when subjected to various bands of electromagnetic radiation. Most important from the lasegrapher's viewpoint were the gem's ability to lase easily and continuously, with a very high efficiency of power input to output, and the gem's remarkably variable range of spectral lines in lasing, with no intermodulation to disrupt the laser's spatial coherence.

  For Jaeger, this meant a laser instrument that could operate on little power, without cooling, and throughout a fully tunable spectral range.

  Vera and Jaeger talked while he set up his instrument--a little about life in the habitats; a little about Vera's service experience, a subject Jaeger found particularly interesting since the habitats had never instituted any kind of service. "The worst part is the utter loss of privacy," Vera explained, "the feeling of being ordered around all the time, of being just another anonymous corporal. But there's also a feeling of doing something really important, of relieving the social pressure that might lead to another war, so you learn to forget your own personal problems and just do your job."

  Finaly, Jaeger plugged his instrument into a power outlet and touched it on.

  Nothing happened.

  Jaeger looked at an indicator on his console. "No juice," he said.

  Vera looked disgusted. "My mother told me repairmen were in here all day getting the dome ready for you. They were supposed to have the problem fixed."

  "'Supposed to' is not one of my favorite expressions," Jaeger said.

  "Can you run off internal?"

  Jaeger checked another indicator, then shook his head. "I did a concert on Harlem Lake last night and haven't had a chance to recharge."

  "Couldn't you stretch time by running the laser at quarter power?"

  Jaeger looked at Vera oddly.

  "I used to play," she said.

  Jaeger shook his head again. "Quarter-power is what I was counting on when I checked the power pack."

  "Maybe I can find somebody up at the party who can figure out what's wrong."

  "A sensible approach," Jaeger said. "Meanwhile I'll take a look around here and see if I can find the problem." He hesitated a moment. "You said you 'used to' play?"

  Vera nodded.

  "Why did you give it up?"

  Vera paused in the dome's ent
ranceway, moonlight framing her face. "I found myself deathly afraid of the laser," she said.

  "Afraid of it how?" he asked. "Afraid it would burn you?"

  She shook her head. "Afraid that it wouldn't have burned me. That it would've gone right through me like I was a ghost. Like it was real and I wasn't." She paused a moment, shaking her head, before leaving. "I was only fifteen. Crazy the sorts of things teenagers are afraid of."

  Jaeger stood watching after her as she walked back to the house. Then he began opening up cabinets and panels in the Tiger Pit.

  A few minutes of rummaging around didn't produce any solution to the power problem, but Jaeger did find some lasegraphic scores that fascinated him. He was looking them over--one in particular--when Eleanor walked in. She strode to the far side of the dome, opened a blue panel on the wall, and pressed in a clear-plastic module. "Try it now," she said.

  Jaeger touched his console again. "Success," he reported.

  "The repairmen left the circuit breaker out."

  "I thought so, but I didn't know where it was."

  "If it's all right," Eleanor said, "we'll start seating at ten to eleven."

  "Fine."

  "I've got to run back to the party. Can I bring you anything?"

  "No," Jaeger said, "thank you. One thing, though, which I'd better check with you about. While I was looking for the power problem, I came across some scores of yours. There's one in particular I'd like to play. Would you have any objections?"

  "No, of course not, Maestro," said Eleanor, "whatever you like."

  Eleanor returned to the party and Jaeger began his warming-up exercises.

  He started by playing a composition he had written early in his career, but he ran his fingers over the keyboard without turning on his laser. The spectral scales and lissajou patterns he keyed, had they appeared on the dome, would have told him nothing he didn't already know, and would have meant nothing to a casual observer. Jaeger's Blind Exercises had been composed only for the fingers, not for anyone's eyes. After a few minutes, however, he judged the circulation in his fingers sufficient for some real work. He inserted the score he had found into his console and began sight-reading it. When he cycled the laser up to half-power--all that was needed in this size dome--and lowered the day glow lighting, a blue figure-8 began a dance in the sky.

  It was a happy little dance. The blue figure-8 warbled and squiggled its way across the dome and around the edge. It turned sommersaults and cartwheels. It metamorphosed into different shapes and sprang back again. It shrank down to a pinpoint, then rebounded into a giant. When it had finished, a red figure-8 repeated the dance the blue one had done, while the blue now weaved in and around the red figure's dance like a dog running around and between its master's feet.

  When the red figure had finished its exposition, a green figure-8 began the dance still again, while the red began its own embellishments. The pattern continued with a violet figure doing the dance, then embellishing, then a yellow, then an indigo, then an orange, then the blue once again, while each of the other figures now weaved into, out of, and around the blue in a sprightly, contrapuntal moving design.

  When Jaeger had finished playing the piece, he found he had an audience of one. He turned up the dome's day glow lighting a bit. "Shouldn't you be in bed?" he asked.

  "I couldn't sleep. The dancing lights woke me up."

  Jaeger was surprised. "I'm sorry," he said.

  "I dreamed them in my head."

  "You dreamed about the dancing lights?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I dream about them too," Jaeger said to Joan. "Come on down here and keep me company."

  Dragging a small orange blanket behind her, Joan padded over to the Tiger Pit and climbed down the three steps into it. Jaeger gestured to a spot next to him on his reclining bench, and she climbed on alongside. "Were you with my mommy this morning?" Joan asked.

  "I don't know. What's your mommy's name?"

  "Eleanor D'laney Darris. My name is Joan Seymour Darris."

  "Yes, I was."

  "Then I'm allowed to talk to you," Joan said. "I'm not allowed to talk to people we don't know."

  "That's very wise," Jaeger said. "And I imagine I'm allowed to talk to you too, then."

  Joan nodded.

  "But I'm forgetting my manners, Joan. My name is Wolfgang Jaeger, and my friends call me, 'Wolf.' You can call me 'Wolf,' if you'd like."

  "Do your friends call you 'Wolf' because you bite them."

  Jaeger smiled. "Not anymore," he said. "I haven't bitten any of my friends for many years."

  "Wouldja promise not to bite me?"

  "I promise."

  "Okay," Joan said seriously. "Are you a lasegrapher?"

  "Yes, I am. And you said that very well."

  "My daddy says that my sister used to be one too."

  "Your sister told me." There were a few seconds of silence; Joan didn't seem to have anything else she wanted to say. "Would you like to see me make a butterfly?" Jaeger asked. Joan nodded. "Well, let me turn down the lights so we can see it better."

  Jaeger dimmed the day glowing again, watching Joan to make sure she didn't mind the dark; then he began running his fingers over the key panels again. He built up the stylized image of a butterfly, line by colored line, in the center of the dome, then fixed the image and began concentrating on movement. Joan watched as a small butterfly began flapping its wings slowly, flying around the dome in larger and larger loops.

  "How about two butterflies?" Jaeger asked. Instantly, a second butterfly appeared in the dome and began flying parallel to the first, and whatever the first butterfly did the second one did a split second later.

  Joan watched them for a few moments. "Don't they like each other?" she asked.

  Jaeger glanced down at Joan intently for a second, then back up at the butterflies in the dome. "Why do you say they don't like each other?"

  "Well, that butterfly is always doing the same thing as this one."

  "And that means they don't like each other?"

  "Uh-huh."

  Jaeger touched a panel and the second butterfly veered off in the opposite direction from the first, beginning to fly in counterpoint to the other one. "Do they like each other any better now?" he asked.

  Joan thought about it for a second, then shook her head. "Now that butterfly is always going the other way jus' so it isn't being a copycat."

  "I see," Jaeger said. "How will I know when they start liking each other?"

  "Well... they'll start helping each other 'stead of fighting all the time."

  Jaeger considered this, then touched a panel which put each butterfly under discrete control; they began a complex series of complementary aerial maneuvers in which each one finished a motion started by the other.

  "Now they like each other," Joan said emphatically.

  The two butterflies looped around several more times, slowed up to halt, dipped their wings to each other in a bow, then disappeared.

  Jaeger raised the glowing and turned back to Joan. "Do you know that you're a very bright young lady?" he asked her.

  "Uh-huh."

  His eyes twinkled. "How do you know that?"

  "I saw it in the mirror," she said.

  Jaeger did a double take, regarding Joan more seriously.

  "There she is!" Stanton called out from the entranceway.

  Stanton headed toward the Tiger Pit; very shortly, Eleanor, Vera, and Wendell followed him, Eleanor telling her wristphone, "In the lawn dome, Mac. You can stop worrying."

  There was the standard back-and-forth as Eleanor and Stanton brought their daughter up on charges of Being out of Bed. Joan pleaded "guilty-with-an-explanation" and was given a suspended sentence. As soon as Mr. McIntosh arrived, she said good night to everyone, waved to Jaeger, and was carried off to bed again.

  Of course, Eleanor then felt compelled to spend some time apologizing to Jaeger for Joan's interruption, and he spent some time telling her that he didn't mind at all, whic
h naturally she didn't believe since she thought he was just being polite. In fact, Jaeger was being polite; the absolute truth, which he refrained from telling Eleanor, was that he considered the child who had just been dragged off to bed far more interesting company than she was.

  What he did say was, "Your little girl has a very fine sense of symbolic relationships. Most refreshing."

  "Well, she is very precocious," Eleanor said, "and I must tell you she was completely enchanted by your performance this morning -- her first concert. In fact, I caught Joan doing some drawings later, from memory, of your vistata. She got the color scale right, too."

  "Most interesting."

  "I put one up in the kitchen. Would you care to see it?"

  "Mother, we should start seating," Vera said.

  "I would like to see it," Jaeger said. "Perhaps afterward?"

  "I was thinking, earlier today," said Eleanor, "that Joan is just the right age to start on the console."

  "The perfect age," Vera said. "And in eleven years she'll be the perfect age to be floated out of a Tiger Pit on a stretcher."

  "My dear," said Jaeger, "it was not by accident that I named this enclosure the 'Tiger Pit.' Every lasegrapher--indeed, every artist--is a gladiator, a matador, a Christian thrown to the wild animals. Each artist must confront the ultimates many times--the Truth, the Self, Death itself--with the Lady there to reward the winners and the Tiger for the losers. Such myths are admirably accurate. It is learning to survive one's encounters with the Tiger that distinguishes the living artists from the ghosts."