The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  "Do you really hate me that much?" Vera asked.

  "Did you hate the Touchable you sent to the ovens?" Joan answered.

  "No. I was just doing what I had to do."

  "So am I."

  "Even that Touchable girl forgave me," said Vera.

  "It was her choice," said Joan.

  Vera turned red. "It's not wise," she said, "to carry around hatred for so many years. You should forgive me now for your own peace of mind."

  "If it makes you feel any better," Joan said, "how I feel about you doesn't have anything to do with either my peace of mind or the reason I can't forgive you."

  "You're too raping logical for twelve," Vera said, "but you're going to find out soon there are things logic can't protect you from."

  Joan got up to leave.

  "Where are you going?" Vera asked sharply.

  "To practice."

  "Crone Almighty," Vera said, "haven't you had enough of lasers after what happened to Mother? How can you go anywhere near the lawn dome after last night?"

  Joan paused in the doorway. "It's funny," she said. "That's what I was thinking of asking you about Mom's bedroom." She waited another moment, then left. But Joan left for the practice console and the holoscreen in her own room, rather than for the lawn dome and her laser.

  Monday evening at six, Jack Malcolm dropped Joan off at the pyradome to set up her instrument in the Tiger Pit for the competition. As per lots drawn, Joan was scheduled to compete at seven-thirty--considered a prime spot, since she would be the first performer the jury would see after their final dinner break. But there was a surprise waiting for Joan in the Tiger Pit when she arrived: an arrangement of roses, set into an ascending color scale, with a handwritten note from Wendell that said simply, "I'll see you Over the Rainbow."

  After she had set up and tested her laser in the huge dome, Joan went back to the greenroom, where half a dozen of her competitors--all in their late teens and early twenties--were engaged in animated discussion. By remaining on the fringes of their conversation--but watching their reactions to her--Joan concluded that the news about her mother had not yet got out. No one ventured a "Touch luck, kid," or--worse--suggested that the jury might rule in favor of Joan out of sympathy. Joan hoped the jury hadn't yet heard; she didn't want to go through the rest of her life wondering if her first "break" had been due more to sympathy than to talent. Assuming she would win, that was.

  Joan had her mind set at rest on that point just past seven, when Wolfgang Jaeger came back to wish several of his students "Over the Rainbow," then pulled Joan into the corridor to wish her the same out of their earshot. Jaeger told Joan that Jack Malcolm had told him earlier in the day about her mother's deanimation, but that her jury did not know; Jaeger could state this for certain since he had just come back from dinner with them, during which Eleanor's name had come up with no reference to her accident. Jaeger told Joan that someday Eleanor would be very proud of her, and after being assured by Joan that she would be all right, he returned to the greenroom to lend moral support to his students.

  Joan waited at the mouth of the tunnel, next to the water cooler, tissue dispenser, and bucket, waiting for the red light to turn. Jack Malcolm had offered to wait with her again, but Joan had turned him down, saying that this time she had to be alone. Jack had tried to talk her out of it, but Joan had insisted. At seven twenty-five, the light turned from red to yellow, and precisely at seven-thirty, it turned to green.

  To the sound of thunder and the sensation of blinding light, Joan entered the Tiger Pit. She bowed blindly at four, eight, and twelve o'clock to the audience around her; then--in the Tiger Pit of the pyradome--Joan sat down to play her laser for the first time since it had struck down her mother.

  She lowered the glowing to pitch blackness, then began to play the only composition she had elected to compete with, her own Vistata No. 1 in Sixth.

  First movement. Joan is in the grass courtyard of the Malcolm Institute, looking for Mr. McIntosh; outside the courtyard, the last rays of day shine onto the street. Joan skips through the gate, still searching for Mr. McIntosh, and is about to head back in when the gate drops.

  Second movement. Joan makes several more attempts to get back inside the courtyard, unsuccessfully, while day shifts increasingly to night. When the shift is complete, the Touchable arrives, and the two of them talk for a few minutes. When they have finished, they begin the walk to the Touchable's home.

  Third movement. They come to the phosphorescent white landing strip and start moving slowly across; what faint light there is takes on a ghostly aura around them. The Touchable stops Joan, tells her they must now be very brave, and they start across again.

  Fourth movement. Halfway across the landing strip, the light from the flare hits them, casting ghoulish shadows behind them. But it is not until the second flare is tossed behind them that Joan first sees the man the Touchable has warned her against, the man who admits to Joan that he is the Wolf.

  The Wolf. The Wolf that had killed the Touchable who asked Joan to be her daughter.

  The Wolf. The Wolf that the doctor said had inflicted the worst injuries on her mother.

  Suddenly, Joan was no longer in the pyradome, playing a composition, but for a split second actually back on the landing strip with the Wolf.

  Then another beat, and Joan was again in the pyradome, but fully aware that her hands were stroking the laser, which, both in substance and in composition, unleashed the Wolf that had attacked her mother.

  She was back on the landing strip again, her hands guiding the Wolf's attack on the Touchable. A scream welled up in Joan's throat; but she was back in the Tiger Pit, where her compulsive training never to start a panic denied her even this release.

  She forgot where she was in the piece and froze. For one beat. For two beats. For three beats. No, No, NO! she thought; not like Vera--not like Vera--and with her final reserve, she jumped in at the only place that would come to her, the end of the last movement. It was a fatal mistake. She saw the Wolf taking the naked Touchable higher and higher and higher ... and when she fell, Joan fell with her.

  When Joan came to, she was lying on a couch in the greenroom with Wendell, Malcolm, and Jaeger standing around her looking concerned and talking animatedly. She was disoriented a moment; then she remembered and sat up in a panic. "I've got to go out and finish!"

  "Shhh," Wendell said, "you don't have to go anywhere. Just rest here for a few minutes; then I'll take you home."

  "I have to go back or I'll be disqualified!"

  "You already have been, honey," said Malcolm. "It doesn't matter."

  "Doesn't matter?" Joan cried. "Do you think I want to end up like Vera?"

  "You'll never be like Vera," Wendell said. "You couldn't be if you live twice as long as Maestro Jaeger."

  "It was too much for you, too soon," Malcolm said. "I never should have let you compete tonight...not too soon after the accident."

  Joan shuddered. "I never want to play that laser again. Never."

  "I don't blame you," Jaeger said. "It would be like trying to do sculpture with Lady Macbeth's dagger."

  "Not Macbeth, Maestro," said his Gaylordship. "Hamlet." Wendell turned to Malcolm. "Are you familiar with the play, Jack?"

  "What?" Malcolm said. "Yes, of course."

  "Hamlet would have saved everybody a lot of trouble if he'd simply left Denmark for good."

  "I see your point," Malcolm said. "But do you two think you can pull it off?"

  "Leave my brother to me," Wendell said.

  "What are you all talking about?" Joan asked.

  "My dear young lady," Jaeger said, turning to Joan. "How would you like to come back with me to study in Ad Astra?"

  Chapter 14

  THE FIRST THOUGHT that Joan Seymour Darris had about Ad Astra, even before she ceased marveling about how light she felt standing on the surface of this new inside-out world of hers, was that there were so many women all around--even girls her own age or younger
. The second thought she had was that so many of the Astrans were wearing less clothing out in public than she wore to bed back on Earth. And the third thought was that so many of these people were walking around in mixed couples--couples of any sort, for that matter--and they looked so, well, carefree together.

  Her fourth thought was that she'd better find a rest room at the docking station immediately; though the space liner had been boosting under gravity for all but half an hour, she hadn't wanted to tangle for a second time with the ship's free-fall toilet--obviously designed by a male--which another woman had referred to as "the velvet maiden." She'd barely managed to conceal the evidence of her first try at it.

  All told, the trip out from Earth had taken her and Wolfgang most of a day, beginning with her tearful goodbye at Soleri Skyport to her father, her brothers, Gramps, and Jack Malcolm. Joan had even given Vera a kiss on the cheek, accepting one from her sister in return. There were, of course, all sorts of useless going-away presents, and one very useful one from Wendell: The Diplomat's Guide to the Habitats. It was a fact- filled, etiquette-crammed, opinionated, and anecdotal pocket library complied by one of the Federation's most successful ambassadors, His Excellency Burke Filcher, who early in his career had negotiated the Rainbow Compact that formally ended the Colonial War and restored trade between Earth and its space relations. Burke Filcher had since gone on to a powerful seat in the House of Commen, and his manual had since been issued to all Federation officials traveling abroad.

  The shuttle trip up to Virginia Station took just over an hour. Then there was a two-hour layover that Joan and Jaeger spent down in the Wheel shopping, at lunch in the Tokomak Lounge, and gawking at Earth through coin-operated telescopes. Finally, they boarded the Yuri Gagarin for their five-hour trip to Ad Astra.

  For Joan, the worst part of both the shuttle ride and the cruise in the Gagarin were the periods of free fall. She had taken anti-nausea pills, so she didn't experience any spacesickness, but the sensation of weightlessness was exactly like endless falling. She spent the free-fall periods of docking maneuvers and the mid-flight turnover of the Gagarin strapped tightly into her acceleration couch, watching a holy program that she could barely apprehend.

  The Diplomat's Guide to the Habitats (latest edition) described Ad Astra and its oldest city, Nova Paulus, where Joan was moving, as follows:

  The firstborn of the North American Concord's former colonies, Ad Astra is a cluster of manufactured habitats situated in the LaGrange Two orbit one-sixth of the way out again past our moon, about 450,000 kilometers from Earth. This cluster consists of ten pairs of habitat cylinders--each cylinder being 35 kilometers along its major axis and 7 kilometers in diameter--with each pair of cylinders rotating along parallel axes pointed toward the sun, but rotating counter to its twin cylinder for gyroscopic balance linked together by an 80-kilometer-long bridge.

  The people live inside these cylinders.

  The current combined population of Ad Astra is about 50 million, divided roughly equally between male and female, and distributed more-or-less among the twenty cylinders. Four more cylinders are under construction.

  In the Ad Astran cluster are also pairs of several hundred smaller cylinders used for agriculture, heavy industy, research, and anything dangerous to inhabited areas.

  As an introduction to comprehensive treatment, this abstract will examine the Nova Paulus habitat, a city of 2,327,000. Except for being in the opposite season, its twin cylinder, Minneanova, is structurally identical.

  Three land valleys the cylinder's length, and a bit over 3 kilometers wide, are alternated by similar-shaped dichroic window arrays with segmented planar mirrors orbiting overhead, creating a natural-looking sky above each valley. The mirrors change angle gradually to simulate a natural movement of the sun across the sky, day into night. For the last thirty years, the Astrans, as they like to be called, have settled upon a sixteen-hour day and a nine-hour night as metabolically optimum; however, natural sunlight is on tap--through a system of mirrors and optic fibers--twenty-five hours a day to any resident desiring it.

  Nova Paulus's three valleys are Valle de Sol, Sunny Glen, and Sundale. I surmise the name-givers were from Encino.

  In Nova Paulus's endcaps, mountains rise 3,500 meters (one climbs inside the mountains), while finger lakes line the mountains' base. In the Eastern endcap is Mt. El Capitan, a tourist center owing to its low-gravity attractions; in the Western endcap, Mt. Capistrano provides communities to senior citizens for similar advantages.

  Each valley has a land area of about 10,900 hectares, with the endcaps adding usable mountain land of about 4,400 hectares, resulting in the usable land area in Nova Paulus of about 371 square kilometers. Population density is about 6,270 people per square kilometer, roughly equal to Newer York today, six decades after the War.

  Rotation along Nova Paulus's major axis (a three-minute period) provides simulated gravity, approximately two- thirds Earth normal at the lowest point in the valleys. Higher into the mountains, gravity reduces considerably, reaching free fall at the cylinder's axis.

  Nova Paulus's axis is the home of its most popular attractions: its free-fall sports arena, its aviaries - where anyone may take wing and fly like a bird--its honeymoon hotels ... and its red-light district. As hard as it is to believe in this day and age, prostitution is legal here. But then, so is virtually everything else.

  The arrangement of homes, recreation, and shopping reflects a pleasant diversity of the best aspects of polyurban living today, with no disruption from the intermingling of residential and industrial areas.

  Weather is controlled to public comfort, transportation is cheap and convenient, and street crime is virtually unknown--a wonder of wonders, since the wearing of personal weapons is quite common.

  The people are easygoing and well mannered--even toward tourists, whom they regard much as a rancher views cattle. Their soft-spoken, but sometimes quite animated, way of talking seems to be the only universal trait in this pluralistic culture.

  Since secession, the Astrans have relied exclusively on the Ad Astran Union's General Lease for their social contract. All residents must be signatories to the Lease or local merchants will not house, feed, or in any way do business with them. An exception is made for children, the retarded, and tourists, whose presenses are vouchsafed by a sponsor--a signatory to the Lease who agrees to take on their liabilities. Such liabilities may be insured, and are routinely taken on by tourist bureaus eager for business.

  The Lease has no positive obligations--no taxes, duties, or compulsory service--and specifically forbids the Union from imposing a cost on anyone without prior consent. The cost of all common goods and services - foreign defense, maintenance of thoroughfares, even the manufacture of air--seems to have been absorbed into the prices of salable products. I suspect they've figured out a way to make the tourists pay for them. There does not seem to be a single instance of what economists on Earth refer to as the "public goods" problem of externalities.

  The concept of criminal justice is completely dormant here; even murder is treated as a tort. Dispute settlement is private, ranging from arbitration based on mercantile concepts of common law ... to dueling.

  The only remnant of democratic processes, since the War, is the yearly elections to decide on time and climate. This seems to be a local sport as much as anything else, and campaigns can be quite heated. Literally so: a recent climate campaign slogan was "Fry the bastards!" I believe they fried them.

  The most frustrating thing about Ad Astra is that, having no government to speak of, it has no use for an old political hack such as me. There being only honest work here, I would quickly starve to death, should I ever be foolish enough to emigrate to this space island paradise.

  --Burke Filcher, M.H.C.

  As soon as Joan had returned from the rest room, and Jaeger had arranged for their baggage to be sent on ahead, there was the matter of Joan's legal status--child, tourist, or resident? Joan and Wolfgang discussed the ma
tter with the Leasing Agent in the docking station's shipping office. The agent, a dark-haired girl only a few years older than Joan, pointed to a copy of the Lease mounted on the wall, and asked Joan to read it to her aloud. "When in the course of human events--" Joan began, but the girl interrupted her. "You can read," she said.

  "Haven't I seen that opening paragraph somewhere before?" Joan asked.

  "Plagiarism is our second-largest industry," Jaeger told her.

  "What's the first?" Joan asked.

  "You are," the agent said, "unless you claim resident status."

  "What's involved?" Joan said.

  "Signing the Lease," Jaeger said. "In essense, the Lease demands only one thing--that in exchange for the right to do business with people here, you agree to accept responsibility for any cost you incur at the expense of someone else. You agree that if you buy something on credit, you'll pay for it. You damage somebody's property, you reimburse them. You agree to do a job and don't deliver, you absorb the cost of having failed to do it."

  "What's the most I can get stuck for?" Joan asked.

  "If you murder someone, except in defense, you can become the property of their heirs."

  "What if I don't sign?"

  "Then," the agent said, "you buy a ticket out of here right now--the Merchant Association will risk lending you the ticket if you can't afford it--or you find a sponsor to guarantee your debts."