The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  14010 Captain's Row, Valle de Sol, Ad Astra.

  The fool had listed herself in a legal document on file with the Federation as a "permanent resident" of the habitats. This would do nicely.

  Vera instructed her terminal to reprint the registration report on the left side of the terminal and to list the address of the Upper Hudson Parrish office of the Ministry of Universal Service on the right side. This done, she ordered the address stored, the right side cleared again, and began dictating a short letter:

  The enclosed document has come to my attention. As an officer of the Upper Manor, it is my duty to inform you that the said Joan Darris, a native of Earth, has falsified her age on this document--seemingly in your favor--but with the actual intent of carrying a pregnancy through to term and returning to her "permanent" address outside your jurisdiction before the usual draft age. Under Paragraph Five, Section Two of the Federation Universal Service Act--which states that a female citizen of the Federation is liable for universal service at the convenience of the Federation from any time between menarche and menopause--I suggest immediate induction as a precautionary and disciplinary measure. Address notice to Joan Seymour Darris at HELVISTA, Hudson.

  As per Federation Statute No. 39,557, correspondence regarding a potential inductee between a judicial officer and M.U.S. may not be reproduced, released, or used in evidence.

  Vera Collier Delaney

  Chief Justice, Legos, Ltd.

  "Lex Scripta, Lex Terrae"

  Vera hesitated only a second, just long enough to feel sufficiently guilty to qualify in her own mind as a human, then ordered, "Transmit both sides to stored address with my verification code."

  "Posted," her terminal printed out; and "Posted," it said aloud.

  Vera's intercom sounded; she brought up the image of her clerk. "It's a quarter to, Your Honor."

  "Yes, Ted?"

  "Your ten-o'clock conference with Justice--"

  "On my way," Vera said.

  Vera checked her hair and makeup, slipped on her jacket, and thought that she must be forgetting something. Just before she stepped out the door, her terminal said," Correspondence received, M.U.S. Upper Hudson."

  Ted ran after Vera before she'd reached the lift and tossed her the briefcase Her Honor had forgotten. Vera slipped it into her jacket pocket. By the time she reached the ground, Vera was convinced that she'd only been doing her civic duty.

  Joan lay on her bed in her old room at Helix Vista, playing with her Slinky. She'd found the toy while rummaging through her clothes closet to make room for new wardrobe.

  Joan played the Slinky back and forth between her hands, feeling the weight build up first in one hand, then in the other, and wondered why such a simple, silly little toy was so much fun. It was like a roga phrase in miniature, she thought. A coiled spring built up tension on one side, then released it and built up tension on the other, always searching for a center of gravity. Back and forth it went, with the rhythmic certainty of a heartbeat, or a Chaldean metronome.

  She wondered why it was only in roga that she could let her feelings run free. Jaeger was right. She hadn't managed to get any of her feelings into her compositions since her first vistata. Could it be that she was avoiding dealing with her feelings--bringing them into her view, into her work--because of the shock she'd experienced with the composition at its premiere? Was roga a safe retreat--a sanctum--for her, since it was incapable of representing abstract ideas the way classical lasegraphy did? Was this what Jaeger had seen in her--that she was afraid to represent anything meaningful to her because it might cause her pain? Had Jaeger seen her true color--and it was yellow? Was this the judgment her teacher had refused to render?

  She played the Slinky back and forth between her hands. It was a spiral, such as Jaeger had used at the finale of his Resurrection Vistata. What had he said the spiral meant? A novelist-philosopher from the last century of the old millennium had written that the line was the best geometric symbol of the pursuits of Man because it was an abstraction rarely found in nature, which relied more on the always-repeating cycles represented by the circle. But Jaeger said that this philosopher had seen only part of the truth, looking at the symbolism in terms of two-dimensional shapes, rather than three-dimensional forms.

  If you looked at a circle flat-side on, Jaeger said, you saw a closed, continuous loop; but if you shifted around ninety degrees, the circle could just as easily be an ascending spiral. And since every cycle in nature was always a little different from the previous one--each orbit of a planet around its sun at a different space in its galaxy, each cycle of a galaxy at a different place in its cluster, each spring season in the year different from the resurrection of the previous year--Jaeger had thought that the spiral--a synthesis between the circle and the straight line--was the most appropriate symbol of all.

  Joan thought about it. The line arguing against the circle, forming into the spiral. It had the proper dialectic of a roga phrase. Line, circle, spiral. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Jaeger, of course, disliking roga as much as he did, had never seen it in these terms. The sequence was completely missing from The Resurrection Vistata.

  It was obvious to her. She began making lists in her mind of various spirals: spiral nebulae, the double helix of the DNA molecule, spiral staricases, the spiral path the soul was supposed to take on its way to heaven, the path of an object caught in a vortex or whirlpool, the spiral that appeared when one divided a rectangle into squares and continuously drew the resulting radii--Jaeger had used this last in the finale of The Rainbow Vistata. Why, the very house she was in right now was a representation of that principle, combining the ancient Chaldeans'--the real ones'--rainbow ziggurats--the Tower of Babel that the Rubinsteins had told her about--with a spiral. Even Helix Vista...

  Joan laughed. Then she left the Slinky behind on the bed, walked over to her practice console, and switched it on. Helix Vista, of course. Had she gone away for five years just so she could see with some perspective--some distance--what had been staring her in the face since she was born?

  It couldn't be called anything else but The Helix Vistata.

  She switched the console into record mode and began making some initial sketches.

  Let's see. The first movement would have to state the dialectical roga phrase. Start with the thesis--the circle? No, the line. Classical development of its implications. What color sequence? A standard progression would do for a start. Okay, then come back with the antithesis--the circle; now develop it, reverse the coloratura; now something dramatic-- perhaps a roga seque--to introduce the rotating synthesis of the two into--

  "Joan?"

  She didn't even look up. "Not right now, Vicque."

  "It's Nicque," her brother said. "And it can't wait. There's a Monitor here to see you."

  Joan finally looked up. "Come on, Nicque. I don't have time for jokes right now."

  "I'm not joking."

  "Well, what does he want me for?"

  "How should I know? But he's pretty good-looking. Maybe he wants to take you out."

  "Well, if he does, he's come at the wrong time." Joan flipped her console from record mode to standby and followed Nicque down the lift.

  "Can I have him when you're through with him?" Nicque asked.

  "You'll have to ask him out yourself," Joan said as she went to the foyer.

  The Monitor, a young, dark-haired man with striking blue eyes that matched his uniform, was as good-looking as her brother had indicated. "Yes," Joan asked.

  "Joan Seymour Darris?"

  "That's me."

  The Monitor handed Joan a foil envelope. "I'm serving you with this offically," he said.

  "What is it?" Joan asked.

  "Open it."

  Joan ran her thumb along the foil and the envelope opened. She took out a piece of official stationary, which began, as these things had always begun, "Greetings from the First Lady of Earth. You are hereby ordered to report for a physical examination to determine your fitn
ess to serve..."

  The Monitor didn't quite have to catch her.

  Chapter 19

  "NEXT."

  A dark-haired girl got up from the bench and went down a long corridor into the examination cubicle with its light flashing. There was one more girl ahead of Joan; who was dressed as if she'd come here for a wedding. Looked at in the right way, perhaps she had.

  Customs must have given them some sort of warning, Joan thought miserably as she sat on the bench in the Poughkeepsie office of Universal Service, waiting for her physical. It was about the two-hundredth time that she'd considered the thought in the two weeks since she'd received her notice. She suspected it would not be the last.

  Joan looked around the waiting room. Drab civilian clerks sat at rows of computer terminals. One wall displayed the flags--in descending order--of the World Federation, the North American Concord, and Hudson Parish. On the opposite wall was emblazoned the Federation Peace Corps official motto. Joan had learned the motto's origin from a history professor at Dryer. It seemed to her a poor joke on the world. The motto was, "Make Love, Not War."

  "Next."

  The bridesmaid on the bench next to Joan--or was she now the bride?--got up and walked down the aisle to the cubicle with the flashing light. I'm next, Joan thought, even while she was still wondering whose sick sense of humor was responsible for a pregnant virgin's catching the bouquet.

  Joan's ability to thwart the draft had dead-ended immediately. After consulting with her lawyers--in corpore, this time - Joan had learned that she had, in fact, been liable for the draft since her first menstruation at thirteen, and that the draft age was merely the de facto earliest age a girl would be drafted. The only reason Joan had received her notice prematurely was the Ministry of Universal Service's administrative judgment that as a long-term resident of the colonies, Joan was a particularly high risk for evasion; as a simple precaution it had issued a jeopardy summons.

  Normally, such an early summons might be fought with a plea for a student deferment. Such deferments were routinely granted up to age twenty-five. But Joan could not qualify. She had already received her bachelor's degree, she was not currently engaged in post-graduate work regarded as essential, and her idea that she might claim to be engaged in detached postgraduate study at the Dryer School not only would fall on deaf ears, but more than likely would confirm their view that she was leaning toward extraterrestriality.

  Neither, with a jeopardy assessment on file, was there any possibility that she would be granted a deferment to carry her pregnancy to term.

  This left only the possibility of claiming conscientious- objector status, which also turned out to be a cul-de-sac. Such exemptions were granted only to religious orders of Lesbian Wiccens--a small, but politically powerful sect; Joan had no provable link to any such sect, not could she establish one in time, even if she'd wanted to. As for Christian orders, those left on Earth had either accepted the secular view propagated by the Peace Corps that their service was a charitable duty performed to prevent war, or accepted the life of a Touchable as witness to their faith. Those Christians whose beliefs were irreconcilable with the Federation's policies had long ago emigrated to the colonies, the largest single exodus building up the St. Clive habitats to a population of a quarter-billion over the past half-century.

  Joan had learned immediately that her father, brothers, grandmother, and other relatives had never considered the possibility that Joan wouldn't serve. Vera cannily pointed out to Joan that even their mother had served. Ever since the Colonial War, when there had been suspicion that family sympathies lay with their financial interests in the colonies, the Darrises had always bent over backwards to establish their patriotism to Earth--hence Eleanor's volunteer work for the U.S.O. after her marriage to Stanton.

  The one relative Joan thought might have both the sympathies and the means to help her was Wendell; but Vera had anticipated this direction and informed Joan that anything in which she might try to involve His Gaylordship would be at her uncle's expense. Did Joan really wish to involve Wendell in the political scandal of obtaining special privileges for a relative while he was engaged in the fight to save his career? Vera even obliquely suggested that since Wendell had always pushed his party toward a free-trade policy with the habitats, Joan's premature notice might have been the result of action by His Gaylordship's protectionist enemies in Federation customs, trying to trap him through his favorite niece into just such a false move.

  Vera's suggestion worked. Joan had refrained from seeking out Wendell--not for the sake of politics, or her belief in Vera's conspiracy theory, but for the sake of the only animate relative who shared her love of the laserium.

  But this might not have prevented Joan from attempting escape to Ad Astra, where she could have carried the surrogate until she could have placed it in a vivarium, had she not learned in her consultations one more odd fact. Joan Darris, on Earth at seventeen, was a minor and legally unable to sue on her own behalf to obtain custody of her mother's deanimate body. Joan Darris, draft evader living in Ad Astra, would be a permanent fugitive from Earth--declared Touchable in absentia--and being unable to sue for custody of her mother's body, would have to rely on her father's and Vera's goodwill for her mother's reanimation--goodwill that had been glaringly absent so far.

  But Corporal Joan Darris would reach legal majority on Earth immediately upon induction, and would be free to institute legal proceedings for custody at once.

  "Next."

  Joan got up from the bench and walked down the corridor to the cubicle third from the end on the left, with its light flashing.

  Inside the cubicle, a robot nurse instructed Joan to strip completely and get up on the examining table. The next hour was spent under the robot's direction in all sorts of routine measuring, testing, holography, sonography, radiography, probing, scanning, and scrutinizing that the medics could trust to be done routinely, without the application of human intelligence. Joan also provided blood, urine, fecal, and tissue samples, as well as smears from several parts of her anatomy. A human physician never came in at all; Joan was simply told to get dressed and report to Room 101.

  "Room 101" had a talking door that said, to anyone who came within a meter, "Dr. Chertok's office. Please go into the waiting room and sit down." Joan went into the waiting room and sat down along with a half-dozen other women her age. A roga set with all the juice squeezed out of it was being played on a holoscreen; Joan always found LAZAK depressing--even though she knew the commercial lasegraphers who recorded it made a small fortune from it--and did her best not to watch.

  Twenty-five minutes later, another robot nurse instructed Joan to go into Dr. Chertok's office. It was merely a parlor with a desk, comfortably furnished with plush chairs, a couch, and a mocha machine. Dr. Chertok, a homey-looking woman whom Joan assigned a rough age of eighty, sat behind a desk looking at her terminal. "Please sit down," she said without looking up from her display, "Ms. Darris, isn't it?"

  "Yes." Joan took the chair opposite the desk. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

  The doctor looked up. "It's a bad habit, particularly unwise in the first trimester of pregnancy."

  Joan started slightly. "Are you suggesting that I'll be allowed to carry my pregnancy to a point where it matters?"

  "No. Your current pregnancy will, of course, be terminated. The advice is simply for a time, three years from now, when you'll be free to have as many babies as you wish."

  "I see," Joan said.

  "I don't," Dr. Chertok said. "You're an unusual case, Ms. Darris. I don't get very many women sitting in that chair who are simultaneously pregnant and the possessor of an unruptured hymen."

  "May I smoke, now?" Joan asked.

  "Hmmm? Oh, go right ahead." The doctor reached over and speeded up the ventilation a bit.

  Joan lit up and didn't say anything.

  "Ms. Darris?"

  "Yes?"

  "Aren't you going to tell me?"

  "I didn't know you
were asking," Joan said.

  "Couldn't you have assumed my question?"

  "I'm not here by choice, Dr. Chertok. I'm not assuming anything anymore."

  Dr. Chertok scribbled a note on a pad in front of her. Joan, who had found it useful in zero gravity to be able to read upside down, read to herself, "Passive-aggressive tendencies."

  "Are you a psychiatrist, Dr. Chertok?"

  Dr. Chertok smiled. "You're an extremely bright woman, Ms. Darris."

  Joan inclined her head slightly.

  "Why do you resent the service, Ms. Darris?"

  "I don't resent it," Joan said. "I abhor it."

  "Is that why you've chosen artificial impregnation? Because you're opposed to sex?"

  "I have no idea whether I'm opposed to sex or not," Joan said. "I have no experience to judge from, as you just got through pointing out."

  "Pardon me for a moment," Dr. Chertok said. She turned back to her terminal and typed in a question; an answer came back in seconds. "I'm sorry," she said. "I can see that you're upset because the service will require you to postpone the recovery of your mother."

  Joan looked startled for the second time in a few seconds. "You have access to that?"

  "Why, yes," Dr. Chertok said. "Is there some reason I shouldn't?"

  "I demanded full confidentiality," Joan said.

  "Such procedures are always on file with the goverment," Dr. Chertok said, "though it is rare for us to be allowed access."

  Joan took another toke. "I see," she said tightly. A suspicion arose in her mind. "How could you have obtained access, then?"

  "That's a question to address to the Ministry's Counsel General," Dr. Chertok said, "but at some point a court order must have been issued. Such files are kept sealed unless unlocked by a judge."

  A notion that Joan had filed away as "impossible" was suddenly refiled under "likely." But it didn't change her opinion of Vera in the least.

  "You're a great boon to the service, Ms. Darris," said Dr. Chertok. "With a young woman otherwise in good health, as you are, we sometimes have to spend thousands of auragrams--and use up to six months of service time--to perform reconstructive surgery on a face, or improve a figure, or straighten a set of teeth. We won't have to do anything of that sort with you."