The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  Joan did not learn all this at once, but she learned to read and write symbols for what she was learning to do as she learned to do it. This was the first written language she learned, since none of those in her household made regular use of the written form of the English they spoke, and nobody around her saw any pressing reason that she should learn to read or write in it.

  Throughout Joan's first lesson, Eleanor sat off to one side in the Tiger Pit, observing. Malcolm never minded when a parent wished to observe, but this was something Vera had never permitted her; she had always complained that her mother's presence during lessons inhibited and distracted her. It was a problem Joan did not share. In fact, she barely noticed that her mother was there. But Eleanor's presence at the sessions allowed Joan to be helped with any problem arising during her practicing at home in the lawn dome, in effect giving her a second teacher.

  From Eleanor's standpoint, it was almost as if she herself were getting a second chance at learning the laser, since in effect she was progressing at the same rate Joan was. She even had Vera's old console taken out of storage and set it up alongside Joan's quarter-size in the lawn dome--ostensibly so she could better help Joan with her studies, but also because she was enjoying the lessons more than anything else she had done in years.

  This happy state of affairs did not last long, though. One evening in early June, when Eleanor remained in the lawn dome practicing an hour longer than Joan had, Vera suggested that if Eleanor was set on a career for herself, she should tell Malcolm who it was he was really teaching. "All you have to do," Vera said, "is forget about your trip to St. Clive...and weren't you planning another son for next year? I suppose you'll have to forget about him too."

  After that evening, Joan practiced alone with the holoscreen Wendell had given her, or supervised in the lawn dome by Mr. McIntosh if her lesson required the laser, and Mr. McIntosh took over chauffering Joan to her weekly lessons.

  By her eighth week, the Tuesday before Midsummer solstice, it was evident to Malcolm that Joan was an exceptionally adept student. At a stage when most other students were still trying to get the left hand to speak to the right hand, Joan was playing basic repertoire--Jittlov's Animato in Second. It was not a terribly difficult piece, but he had assigned it to her only the week before, and she came into this lesson able to play it. She couldn't play it well, of course, but being able to play it at all after so short a time was impressive.

  He recorded a short letter to Eleanor, suggesting that Joan's lessons be increased to twice weekly, and gave it to her to be hand-delivered to her mother. Thereafter, Joan took her lessons not only Tuesdays at six-fifteen, but also Fridays at two.

  Eleanor and Stanton had several family-circle members over that Saturday, June 21, for a combination Midsummer feast and bon-voyage party for themselves. Surprisingly, two days before an election, Wendell Darris decided to attend; Stanton decided that the personal pressures of this campaign had completely fagged out his brother. But His Gaylordship's attendance prompted Joan's first performance that evening in the lawn dome. She played Animato in Second--the only piece she knew--to a standing ovation. The ovation was from her Uncle Wendell, who was the only person at her performace, and he had been standing near the outer wall for the entire time she played for him.

  Nevertheless, it was not an unsuccessful premiere, as these things go.

  Election night that Monday, June 23, brought mixed news to Helix Vista. The bad news was that the Libertarians had lost ground to the Chauvinist Party in both the Upper and Lower Manor; in particular, the Hudson Parish seat in the House of Commen, which the Libertarian Party had held since the Federation was declared, had been lost. But the Darrises were celebrating that evening, since Wendell had won a fourth six-year term as the North American Concord's gaylord in the House of Gentry.

  Tuesday morning, the 24th, Stanton and Eleanor kissed their children goodbye at Soleri Skyport, gaining assurances from Vera and Mr. McIntosh that everything would hold together for the next eight weeks...and further promises from the twins that they would be good. Then they boarded the shuttle that would take them to Virginia Station, in fixed orbit 35,880 kilometers over the equator at the longitude of Newer York. From there they would transfer to the thermonuclear torchship Jupiter Moon for their nine-day journey, out past the orbit of Mars in the asteroid belt, to St. Clive.

  Routines at Helix Vista stayed unchanged. The estate's domestic computer, aided by the robot staff, ran almost everything by itself, and what supervisory duties Eleanor had performed, Vera took over. Except for mealtimes--when Vera was constantly warning them that they'd better eat properly or they'd grow up to be Touchables--Mr. McIntosh kept charge of the children. And while their mother was missing, they certainly had the next-best-thing--in a genetic sense--for a replacement. Zack naturally assumed that Vera was his mother, and even the older children, in their turn, mistakenly addressed Vera as "Mommy."

  The first one to call her that, at dinner a few days after their parents' departure, was Joan. For a moment, both their faces flushed bright red--Vera's in anger, Joan's in embarrassment--and Joan was so mortified that she ran out of the room. Almost immediately, though, Vera got control of herself. She followed Joan out to the patio and made it quite clear to her, with appropriate affection, that she didn't blame her at all for the mistake. Later, when the other children did it, Vera seemed almost pleased.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that there would come a night, after the children were asleep, when Vera and Mr. McIntosh would find their eyes meeting across an empty room. It happened the first Thursday in July, shortly after 11 P.M., GMT-plus-five. The robot butler informed Mr. McIntosh, who was in the kitchen practicing the guitar, that a picturegram had just been received from St. Clive, and asked whether he wanted it played now. Mr. McIntosh asked the butler where Vera was. The butler relayed the question to the domestic computer. The computer found masses radiating a temperature near 37 degrees C in five other rooms, but determined that only one of the masses breathed as an adult human would. It relayed this information to the butler, which told Mr. McIntosh, instants after he asked, that Vera was in the blue lounge. He next asked if Vera might be asleep; after checking again, the butler told him that her respiration was much too rapid for sleep. That should have alerted him, but didn't. Mr. McIntosh told the butler that the two of them would take the picturegram on the blue lounge's holoscreen, then he took the lift up to the fifth level.

  But the blue lounge's holoscreen was already in use when Mr. McIntosh walked in. A disc was on playing Fugue in Blue. The blue figure-8 warbled and squiggled its way around the screen, shrinking and rebounding, then the red, then the green. As for Vera, she lay on a recliner watching, with her dress hitched above her waist, masturbating.

  She felt the beginning of sensations she had not felt in well over three years. A warm excitement grew, centering in her breasts and between her legs, but gently spreading throughout her entire body. She closed her eyes, sensing the gathering-together whose delicious ripples were just approaching high tide, and searched for an image that would bring them in. She opened her eyes to help her focus better, and saw Mr. McIntosh standing in the doorway, watching her.

  Their eyes met across the empty room. She didn't quite scream. "Scat, Scat, SCAT!"

  Mr. McIntosh's pulse quicked, his eyelids were half closed, and his throat was a desert. His voice, living its own life, said, "I can make you finish."

  She noticed the erection under his pants and was furious. "If the last six thousand men who fucked me didn't make me come, what makes you think you can?"

  "I won't fuck you. I'll lick you out."

  She was terribly frustrated, and she didn't see anything to lose. "Very well," she said. "But hurry."

  Vera watched Mr. McIntosh stride across the room to her the way a master lasegrapher would approach the Tiger Pit, and she slid herself down in the recliner to allow him access. He took just a moment to position himself comfortably between her legs, blew gently acr
oss her blond pubic hair while finding her clitoris, then lowering his tongue to it, beginning to stroke rhythmically.

  "Harder," she said.

  He began licking harder, faster, and she began feeling the beginnings of the sensations again, that fire-gem-like warmth. After a little while, he began caressing her more tenderly again, then he would surprise her with a lightning-hard stroke; she gasped and ran her fingers through his light brown hair, pulling his head closer. He responded by moving his hands up to tease her breasts. She noticed, somewhere near the edge of her consciousness, that Fugue in Blue had ended, that the disc was over. But it didn't matter anymore, she could see it by herself. He jolted her by missing a beat, then made two hard strokes together, and she would have begun spiraling down out of control when she saw Eleanor and Stanton staring at her on the holoscreen.

  Every nerve ending in Vera's body stood on edge, and this time she did scream. It was not a scream of pleasure.

  But Mr. McIntosh didn't realize this and he continued licking.

  Vera grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head away from her, almost giving Mr. McIntosh a whiplash as he tumbled onto the floor.

  "Hello, back home," Eleanor said. "We thought we'd just surprise you--"

  "I can't talk now," Vera yelled at the screen. "Phone off!"

  "--and not wait to let you know we arrived in Cair Paravel safely--"

  Vera pulled down her dress, trying to cover herself while wondering why the phone's camera eye wasn't lit red; she supposed it was broken. "I'll have to call you back," she told the screen, more calmly. "Computer, turn the phone off."

  "Null program," the computer said.

  Mr. McIntosh tried getting his wind back to talk, but couldn't yet.

  "--very nice cruise," Stanton continued, "although the free fall during turnover didn't agree with me--"

  "Computer--"

  "Relax," Mr. McIntosh finally managed to get out. "Crone Almighty, it's not the phone."

  "Then how the rape--"

  "It's a picturegram," he said. "That's what I was coming in here about. I told the computer to pipe it up here."

  "What?"

  "You think they'd phone from St. Clive?" He took a breath. "With twenty-six minutes between answers?"

  "--so we'd better sign off before this gets expensive," Eleanor said. "Bye-bye."

  The holoscreen cleared.

  Vera felt utterly raw. She felt as raw as she had just before her collapse at the pyradome, warming up three hours before her premiere. "You stupid penis," she started in on Mr. McIntosh with her service vocabulary. She was almost crying now. "You utterly dumbjohn scathead."

  Mr. McIntosh didn't say anything. He had seen Joan come into the lounge in her pajamas, rubbing her eyes; her bedroom was just down the hall. "I got woken up," Joan said. "I heard Mommy screaming."

  "It was just a dream," Vera said wearily. "Go back to bed."

  Mr. McIntosh looked at Vera with disgust, but it was too late.

  "It wasn't a dream," Joan said. "I heard her."

  "You just thought you did, honey," said Mr. McIntosh. "All you really heard was Vera and me, playing a game."

  "It really wasn't Mommy?"

  "No, sweetheart," he said. "Come on, I'll take you back to bed."

  Mr. McIntosh took Joan's hand, but paused a moment in the doorway. "Vera, I'm really sorry," he said. "I truly am."

  "Go ick yourself," Vera said childishly.

  He left the lounge to return Joan to her bedroom.

  Vera sat in the recliner for another few minutes, hugging her knees and shaking badly. "Cloneraper," she said.

  Helix Vista was different after that night. Vera began missing meals with the family, refusing to speak to Mr. McIntosh at all. She would leave the room if he was in it, pass him in the hallways as if one or the other of them were a specter. Then, for three days, she flew off by herself to the English countryside, not bothering to tell Mr. McIntosh where she was going or how long she would be gone. When she returned, as unheralded as she'd left, she gave him no apology, though her absence had caused him to miss his day off. But Vera's time alone had calmed her down enough that she was able to resume more-or-less civil relations with him, though she still would not speak to him unless she thought it was unavoidable.

  It was unavoidable on Tuesday, July 15--the day of Joan's sixteenth lesson.

  Chapter 8

  Vera watched from the dark. She watched the lights. She watched her little sister make them dance.

  The whiny, rainy sort of day that often came to Upper Hudson in the summer was too wet, too chill, too dim even for children like the Darrises, who otherwise liked to play in the rain. It was, in fact, exactly the sort of day that had always kept such children indoors whether they liked it or not--to prevent them from getting colds had been the old reason, but since nobody got colds anymore, grown-ups found other excuses to prevent little feet from tracking in mud.

  Still, even a thunderstorm wasn't usually enough to order the Darris children inside. Helix Vista was equipped with an outdoor climate-control-system--to make a sunny day with anti- precipitation fields and radiant units--which was just fine unless the domestic computer said the grounds needed watering anyway.

  This particular afternoon in July, the grounds needed watering. Nevertheless, a red sky at night--for Mark and the twins, delight--for Joan was the warning sailors took from red sky in morning. A moderate deluge was made to order for a five- year-old celestial navigator to whom darkness was safety and sunlight the siren song luring her onto the rocks of her teacher's displeasure. But Joan was not yet old enough to sail the laser alone.

  Much of Joan's practice could be done alone in her room, with her console plugged not into a laser but into the holoscreen her Uncle Wendell had given her. The holoscreen could stimulate lasegraphic patterns as a laser would project them in the dome in all respects but two: in absolute amplitude of imagery, and in intensity of hue. The composition that Joan was preparing for that evening's lesson--Plainer's Fantasia in Seventh -- required developing a sensitivity to both.

  When it came time that afternoon for Joan to practice -- preparation that properly required the laser--she had found that her usual steward was preoccupied in an activity that might most accurately be termed preventing her brothers from dismantling the house. Mr. McIntosh had disentangled himself from the boys long enough to ask Vera, who was doing some advanced reading of law discs, whether she might subsitute for him in the lawn dome. Reluctantly, Vera had agreed.

  Vera sat near the lawn dome's outer edge, watching Joan intently. In the Tiger Pit, Joan sat at a quarter-size console almost identical to the one Vera had owned at her age, and played the patterns across the darkened sky as if she'd been born to it. Vera could already see the beginning of technique, of Joan's personal style. The breathing of the laser matched Joan's breathing. Its spirit was her spirit, illuminating her unburdened joy. Joan made the lights her own lights. The longer Vera watched, the more uneasy the former lasegrapher became.

  At first Vera did not have any idea what was bothering her. She wondered if perhaps it was her old, teenage fear of the laser, but had a sense that this feeling related to something that had started much earlier. She thought, then, that the feeling was sympathetic in nature, a reflection from Joan to herself of her own bad experience with the art, a desire to spare her sister the pain she had gone through. Since this was what she expected herself to feel, thinking herself a benevolent person, she was halfway to believing it. But almost at once, in the beat it took the laser to slash across the dome, she saw through it all.

  She saw a little blond-haired girl seated at a quarter-size console not here, but in one of the domes at the Malcolm Institute. In two audience couches were a man she recognized as a still-brown-haired Jack Malcolm and a grown-up blond woman who looked exactly as she herself now looked. In the semi-dissolved way that a holovision program sometimes showed a scene from two vantage points simultaneously, Vera saw herself both as the young perfor
mer and as the grown observer. In a detached sense, though, she knew that she was the little girl, and the woman was her mother.

  This particular day, near the end of a lesson after three years of such lessons, seven-year-old Vera was showing her mother and teacher that she had mastered a short virtuoso piece from the late Nascent period called Apollo and Dionysus. A study in contrasts--orderly, then chaotic; somber, then frenetic; majestic, then silly--it was one of those warhorses that every young lasegrapher studied for technique, and in which every audience delighted.

  Her mother and teacher were no exception. When she had raised the glowing, Eleanor had applauded enthusiastically, soon joined by Malcolm, and Vera had stood up on the bench in the Tiger Pit and had taken her bow. "Excellent," Malcolm had said to her, "excellent."

  "Just marvelous, darling," Eleanor had told her.

  "I'm very proud at how much work you've put into this piece," Malcolm had said. "Your personality really shines through."

  Vera remembered that she had taken the compliment in stride; it merely confirmed a fact she'd already known. "Thanks," she'd said. "Is that it for today?"

  "You can wrap it up."

  Vera had unplugged her console and begun packing while Eleanor and Malcolm chatted. Vera had paid close attention. "You know, Eleanor," Malcolm had said. "I had the strangest feeling of deja vu watching Vera play this piece."