The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  Joan started screaming, and this time she didn't stop.

  When Vera carried a hysterical Joan, wrapped in the Touchable's cloak, into Helix Vista, Mr. McIntosh tried to ask what had happened, but Vera ignored him and carried Joan up to bed. She dissolved a sedative in a cup of water and made Joan drink it. Then she sprayed Joan's scrapes with disinfectant plastice and dressed her for bed. She remained until her sister fell asleep. After telling the domestic computer to have Mr. McIntosh wait for her in the library, she returned to her own room, where she showered and dressed herself in a robe.

  Mr. McIntosh was waiting for Vera anxiously when she finally entered the library. Vera regarded him coldly. "I'll expect you to be packed and out of here by tomorrow at noon," she said.

  Mr. McIntosh closed his eyes, and a single tear leaked onto his cheek. He could only nod.

  Chapter 10

  TO JOAN SEYMOUR DARIS the next five weeks were the Tiger Pit, and she was fighting for her life against the Tiger.

  Its claws--leaving the Tiger's own stripes where nobody could see them--were her discovery that the world was far more brutal, and far more hideous, than she had ever imagined. Its teeth -- shearing into her mind--were guilt for bringing about the attack on the Touchable, and the helplessness in defending her from a man too montrous to comprehend. Its whiskers were her longings for Mr. McIntosh; its eyes were the looks from her brothers, accusing her of causing him to be sent away. Its tongue -- licking her wounds as a Tigress licks her cubs, therefore never letting her forget them--was Vera.

  Vera got her licks in over and over, but in ways so subtle that perhaps at first she even did not realize what she was doing. In the next five weeks her mealtime warnings to the children to "Eat or you'll grow up to be a Touchable" took on a new meaning. They expanded to almost every possible subject until, from Joan's standpoint, even the most trivial act of disobedience was potentially a capital crime.

  Vera drove the point home to Joan, once and for all, in a conversation a week after the incident. Vera sat Joan down on her lap and, between Joan's tearful protests that she didn't want to talk about it, doggedly assured Joan that she shouldn't worry that what had happened to the Touchable was her fault, because only selfish people become Touchables in the first place, and what had happened was the woman's own fault for not doing what she was supposed to do.

  Thereafter, Joan did everything she could to pretend that nothing at all had happened, and Vera, realizing that the only others who knew what had happened wouldn't be talking about it, found herself able to believe that she had arrived too late to do anything.

  When Eleanor and Stanton returned from St. Clive, it looked to them that Vera had everything at Helix Vista running smoothly.

  Their children seemed healthy and happy after five weeks under Vera's sole care. They showed proper delight at their parent's return, and even greater delight at the many presents from their parents and great-grandparents. They were delighted even with Stanton's amateur holos showing Grandma and Grandpa Collier performing zero-gravity acrobatics, and Joan was particularly thrilled with the official holos showing her parents being presented at the Court of King Elwin and Queen Lucy.

  Vera's picturegram five weeks before, telling them that she'd fired Mr. McIntosh, had explained that the governor had made himself sick at a cannabistro while in charge of the children, and he had consequently missed picking up Joan after her evening lesson. "By the time I was able to fly to the Institute," Vera had transmitted, "Joan had wandered into the street and was so terrified at being abandoned in the dark that she wet herself. I feel that after dereliction of duty such as Mac's, firing him was the only thing I could do."

  Vera had gone on to say that she'd given Mr. McIntosh two months' severance pay, with a letter of recommendation stating that his job performance was excellent and they were letting him go only because of a change in the family's domestic needs. Since all the Darris children would be attending school in the fall, this was almost true.

  It was a dead issue by the time they returned home, but at the time of Vera's picturegram, Eleanor had wanted to reverse Vera's decision. Stanton had argued, however, that they couldn't very well second-guess Vera's judgment from hundreds of millions of kilometers away--especially since otherwise Vera's handling of the matter was perfectly sound. Their initial observations on their homecoming seemed to confirm Stanton's earlier opinion.

  Nonetheless if, during their first week home, Eleanor and Stanton had any inkling that not everything was perfectly well with Joan, they could get no distinct idea what it was. She had always been quiet, but now she seemed positively withdrawn, spending almost every free minute at her console. Moreover, twice that week Eleanor and Stanton awoke to find that Joan had crawled into their bed during the night--something she had not done for more than two years.

  But it wasn't until a week later, the last Tuesday in August, that Eleanor and Stanton knew tht something about Joan was clearly off. Vera was busy studying more law discs she needed to cover before school started, and Stanton had decided to drop into his office for a few hours. So, for the first time, she resumed her old practice of taking Joan to her laser lessons, and it was there she got her first indications.

  Joan's Tuesday lessons were now at 1 P.M. Vera had told her that the time had been changed to avoid having Joan left alone in the dark again. But Eleanor wondered why, even in full daylight, Joan grasped her hand tightly while they walked between the skymobile and the Institute, and why Joan showed no dislike of darkness as such--specifically the darkness necessary in the dome.

  As Eleanor watched Joan's lesson, she saw that her little girl had made vast progress since the last time she had observed her, three months before. Not only was Joan beginning to show some real dexterity on the console, but she was playing with an intensity--a fire--that seemed remarkable for a student who had been studying only eighteen weeks. But along with this new intensity there seemed to be new problems, as Jack Malcolm explained to Eleanor after Joan's lesson. He took Eleanor into his office while Joan waited in the lobby with a comic disc.

  "Her color sense has, to say the least, become rather extreme," Malcolm told Eleanor. "Her primaries have become overwhelming at times, especially when a composition involves heavy use of reds."

  "Doesn't that indicate some sort of retrogression?" Eleanor asked.

  "Normallly, with a child her age, I would say so. But an incident during one of her lessons, six weeks ago, makes me think that certain colors have taken on an absolute value for her. We were working on Fantasia in Seventh--a red tonic playing off against a blue dominant--and everything had been going along fine for several lessons. Then Joan came in on a Friday and didn't want to play it for me. This usually means that a student hasn't been practicing, so I insisted--and do you now what she did? She played it for me, perfectly, but transposed down a third. All the reds changed into yellow, all the blues changed to violets."

  Eleanor was silent for a long moment. "Six weeks ago. That was the Friday after she was left outside here in the dark?" Malcolm nodded. "Did you see any other sign that something was bothering her?"

  "Nothing at all," Malcolm said. "It was quite a relief after my conversation with Vera that Wednesday when I got Mr. McIntosh's phone message."

  "What message?"

  "The one telling me to hold on to Joan after her lesson, because he couldn't make it back here by dark. I called Helix Vista immediately, because there was a squad of Monitors scouring the neighborhood that morning, and I was terrified they might be searching for Joan."

  "What was it?"

  "Nothing unusual," Malcolm said. "Some Touchable got herself icked. It's always something, around here. The ghetto, you know. Anyway, when I spoke to Vera, she blamed me as much as Mr. McIntosh for letting Joan get outside, and she was all set to stop Joan's lessons entirely. But I wasn't about to have her ruin Joan's career the way she ruined her own. I'm afraid I had to threaten her with calling His Gaylordship before she agreed that all that was
really necessary was an earlier lesson."

  "You don't think Joan could have gotten involved with that icked Touchable, do you?"

  Malcolm shook his head. "I can't imagine a hunting party icarating a Touchable anywhere near a little girl. They'd lose their medallions--might even pull a stiff fine. Besides, Vera would have had to have seen something, wouldn't she?"

  "Yes, of course," Eleanor said. "I wasn't thinking."

  Still, she couldn't help thinking about it, back at Helix Vista later that afternoon. Stanton had flown home with his belt and had decided to show off for his children, who were playing touch squatball on their course. But when he approached them, Joan ran frantically toward the house, screaming; went inside and grabbed Eleanor; then wouldn't let go.

  Whatever doubts Eleanor had about what might have happened to Joan during the summer were pushed out of her mind simply by the onslaught of fall. Eleanor became pregnant with her fifth son. She packed Vera off to Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides--the campus of Federation University Law School. Mark and the twins returned to their Astoria School, while Zack was started mornings at a piagetic nursery school. Lastly, Joan was enrolled for the first time at the Erika Blair Girls' Academy in Manhattan.

  With her mornings free, Eleanor decided that she could wait awhile before breaking in a replacement for the sorely missed Mr. McIntosh. She felt she could do without gubernatorial help at least until spring, since the baby wasn't due until next June.

  She also decided that now that she was back from vacation, and Vera was no longer around to taunt her about it, there was nothing preventing her from using those free mornings to take up the laser again. During the same conversation with Jack Malcolm in which she arranged for Joan's lessons to be shifted to after- school hours, Eleanor fitted herself into Jack's schedule for weekly lessons Thursday morning. She swore Jack to secrecy about the lessons--particularly from Vera and Wendell, though for opposite reasons--but she also told Stanton about it. She swore him to secrecy also.

  Joan did not take to school the way a comman takes to the dicteria.

  Her teacher at the Blair Academy, Mrs. Martingale, was a bored young widow, who, when Mr. Martingale had drowned while scuba diving, had found herself with a considerable fortune, plenty of time, and an education degree. She gave Joan a representative sample of what she could expect on the very first day, when she sat her down at a computer terminal and told her to recite, if she could, all the numbers between one and one hundred.

  Joan, who had already been taught some math by Mr. McIntosh, said, "Uh-huh, that's easy."

  "Just do it!" Mrs. Martingale said, scaring Joan halfway off her chair.

  Things went downhill from there. Several weeks later, during a lesson in light penmanship, Joan complained to her teacher that she couldn't write because her hands were sweating, and the light pen kept on slipping out of her grasp. Mrs. Martingale just ordered her to go back to writing. When Joan persisted that she couldn't write because of her sweaty hands, Mrs. Martingale took it as a sign of open rebellion, told her that she was a bad little girl who--if she wasn't careful--would grow up to be Touchable, and sent her down to the principal's office for punishment.

  Dr. Blair, a slightly built Englishwoman in her nineties, asked Joan why she had disobeyed her teacher's order to write. Joan simply repeated, "My hands keep on sweating and the light pen keeps on slipping. And I won't grow up to be a Touchable, I won't!"

  "I see," Dr. Blair said. She recorded a quick note on her desktop terminal, transmitted it up to Mrs. Martingale's classroom, and told Joan to return to class.

  Afterward, during light penmanship lessons, Joan was given a piece of towel to dry off her hands as needed.

  The dozen other girls in her class interested Joan only until she discovered that they knew nothing of lasegraphy, and didn't seem to be able to talk about anything even half as interesting. Moreover, aside from Visual Language and Numerical Manipulation -- what previous generations had called the Three R's--Joan found the lessons to be nothing but the memorization of unrelated facts, the imposition of rules for their own sake, and learning to be able to respond satisfactorily to a question on a subject to which she hadn't been paying any attention.

  She also quickly learned how to invent games and draw pictures on her terminal, but always have them erased from memory by the time Mrs. Martingale punched to monitor her desk on the teacher's master display.

  Perhaps it was a useful education after all.

  In mid-December, a week before the Yule Solstice vacation, the class was given an introductory lesson in lasegraphy. There was, of course, nothing in this lesson that Joan didn't already know. But in the course of it, Joan discovered--to her absolute delight--that the school computer was programmed in Scholastic laser notations.

  Thereafter, her secret games took a more specific direction. She began noodling around with rearranging sequences from various compositions she had been studying with Malcolm, and without realizing it, she began composing original sequences of her own. Since she didn't dare leave them in the computer, where her teacher could find them, Joan simply memorized the parts she wanted to keep.

  Of course, there came a day, in early February, when Joan got so deeply involved with one of her compositions that she failed to notice, during a history lesson, that Mrs. Martingale was monitoring her. Naturally, the teacher again sent Joan down to the principal's office to be punished for failing to pay proper attention in class. She also transmitted a note down to the principal stating that if she expected her to maintain discipline with the other girls, her punishment of the Darris girl had to be backed up this time.

  There was another discussion between Joan and Dr. Blair, a phone conversation between Dr. Blair and Eleanor--while Joan waited in an empty classroom next to the principal's office -- then a second phone call from Dr. Blair to Jack Malcolm. Afterward, Dr. Blair spent a good twenty minutes trying to figure out what to do. She decided while looking in on Joan.

  From then on, whenever Mrs. Martingale sent Joan to the principal's office to be punished "for not paying attention" Dr. Blair assigned Joan the punishment of being made to sit all by herself, for one hour, in that empty classroom. From Mrs. Martingale's viewpoint, this was a perfectly acceptable punishment--one that was an effective deterrent for the other girls in her class. In fact, Mrs. Martingale would have intensely disliked such a sentence herself.

  Perhaps, then, it was just as well that Mrs. Martingale didn't know that Dr. Blair was leaving Joan alone with an active computer terminal in that classroom--with access to private, permanent memory--and that Joan was using those solitary hours to compose to her heart's content.

  III.

  4600Å to 4900Å

  Chapter 11

  IN THE APRIL of Joan's twelfth birthday, the Lasegraphy Company of Ad Astra--better known as LCAA--sponsored a weeklong festival at the McDanald Media Temple--better known as the pyradome. It was to be a lasegraphical extravaganza the like of which had never before been seen on Earth--so the publicity said, and the publicists did not have to exaggerate much. Not only were LCAA Records' top classical and roga artists appearing -- including its classical superstar, Wolfgang Jaeger--but the festival would be a showcase for aspiring composers and performers. Prizes to be won included, in the senior competitions, recording contracts and financial backing for concert tours, with scholarships and instruments to be awarded in the junior competitions.

  Jack Malcolm considered that he was a winner even before the festival started: five of his institute's students were performing at the festival. One was an alumnus of the Malcolm Institute now on the roster of LCAA's featured recording artists. Three current pupils--including Eleanor Darris--were performing in student showcases. Lastly, and most exciting of all to Malcolm, Joan Darris would premiere her own Visata No. 1 in Sixth at the festival, and on the basis of a transcription of its first movement submitted with Joan's application, the festival's judges had unilaterally switched Joan from the junior to the senior competitio
n--the youngest composer to be so honored. Inasmuch as Joan had no pressing need for either scholarship money or a free instrument, Malcolm suggested to Joan that she had nothing to lose by the move.

  At the moment, however, Joan was next to Malcolm on a couch in the Institute's box at the pyradome--with Stanton, Vera, Wendell, Kate Seymour, and five of the seven Darris boys in their family box right behind them--and in a few minutes it was Eleanor who would be making her debut in the Tiger Pit.

  Eleanor's avocation had been a well-kept secret for more than six years: only the previous November, when the festival's acceptances were sent out, had family or friends other than Malcolm, Stanton, and Joan learned that Eleanor had taken up the console again. Eleanor had restricted her time with the laser to hours when her older sons were at school and her younger sons were off with their governor, Seth Whitehead, an elderly gentleman who nonetheless belied his name with a thick crop of brown hair, and who mooted the point by insisting the entire family call him "Gramps." Still, if Eleanor had been expecting extreme though opposite reactions from Vera and Wendell when they found out, only His Gaylordship's was true to form: he had dipped into his lasegraphic collection to give Eleanor a virtual relic of the art: an original cinematic print, almost two centuries old, of Ivan Dryer's Laser Image--the earliest recorded lasegraphic performance. When Eleanor had met Vera in downtown Newer York to tell Vera of her new career, over lunch in the Legos courthouse's exclusive Marsupial Club, Vera had merely said, "How marvelous for you," and had gone on eating her fruit salad. Eleanor was not sure that she wouldn't have preferred outright hostility.