The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  "Well, if you don't believe in voting, how do you think people can change anything?"

  "Things would change just fine by themselves," Joan had said, "if everybody would just mind their own raping business."

  "And the winner of the Upper Manor's pink seat," Farmer said on the holy, "is Chauvinist Party challenger Anita Morgan, defeating two-term Libertarian Lady Frances Clark, who chaired last year's controversial hearings on alleged heterosexual behavior by andromen in the Upper Manor. Defeated along with Clark is five-term veteran Libertarian Gaylord Wendell Darris, chairman of Gentry's powerful Ways and Means Committee. This stunning upset is the first time that the Chauvinists have held North America's seats in the Upper Manor since the Federation was declared, and our computers show that the margin of victory will have been tight, coming in at a little over one-half percentage point in each parish."

  "You see?" Adele told Joan. "Your vote might have made a difference."

  "Thanks," Joan said. She smiled. "I'm not used to thinking of myself as omnipotent."

  "Don't you even feel bad about your uncle?"

  "I emphathize with him. I don't sympathize with him."

  "Honestly, Joan, sometimes I really don't know what you're talking about."

  "--go now to Clark-Darris Election headquarters in Washington, Potomac, where correspondent Ravi Panikkar is with Gaylord Darris."

  "Shh," Joan said to Adele, "I want to hear this."

  The holy cut to Wendell and the dark-skinned, lavender-Nehru- jacketed correspondent. "Your Gaylordship," Panikkar said, "just a few minutes ago you heard U.H.I. declare Vidal Vidal the winner of the lavender seat in the Upper Manor that you have held for thirty years. What are your thoughts at this moment?"

  Wendell grinned, and Joan had the feeling that her uncle was in the dorm with her, grinning at her personally, though intellectually she knew perfectly well that everyone watching holovision around the world had exactly the same impression.

  "Well, Ravi," Wendell said, "first of all, I'm always amazed at how you news people would have me throw in the wet towel when out of twenty-five million votes you project a winner on the basis of the first fifteen thousand six hundred counted."

  "Your Gaylordship," Panikkar said. "I'm sure you know that out of thousands of electoral-race- projections, U.H.I. has been wrong only once."

  Wendell shrugged. "Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer computers that look backward rather than forward. But I'm evading your question."

  "Uh, I was trying to avoid saying that, Your Gaylordship."

  "Well, you can just relax about all this 'Your Gaylordship' formality, Ravi--didn't you just say I'd been voted out?"

  "Uh, you don't seem upset about it," Panikkar said.

  "Oh, I feel bad for all my campaign workers, who have worked their tails off during the campaign, but three decades in the Upper Manor can be a long stretch, Ravi, and very frankly, I feel the way I did as a young boy, this time of year, when I'd leave school on the last day of term for summer vacation."

  "The difference this time, Your--uh--"

  "Wendell."

  "--Wendell, is that you won't be returning in the fall."

  "Oh, I wouldn't write me out of the game so fast, Ravi. It's only the third down, and our team is ahead. I'm sure my party will find some useful work for an old snareman like me."

  "Do you have any advice for your successor in the seat?"

  Wendell grinned wickedly. "I'd advise him to keep the eyes in the back of his head wide open, because this election was pretty close, and after a term with the Chauvinists administering the Concord you're just likely to see this old snareman pull out his lariat and rope the netman one more time. Aside from that, Vidal Vidal is a fine androman and I wish him all the luck the Lady can smile on him. He'll need it, if my colleagues still in Gentry have anything to say about it."

  "Thank you, Your Gaylordship. Back to you, Bruce Farmer."

  The anchor returned to the screen. "And thank you, Ravi. We go now to the Sixteenth Parish race in the House of Commen, where Pacifica Parish Representative Burke Filcher has just been declared reelected in our U.H.I. projection for his fourth term--"

  "See?" Joan said to Adele. "Uncle Wendell doesn't seem much more bothered by this than I am."

  "I don't know," Adele said. "One thing for sure, though. If I were in your position, with what you told me about your upcoming lawsuit, I'd much rather have an uncle in the House of Gentry, where he could rope the netman if he has to, rather than one who's just lost his lariat."

  Chapter 24

  THE TRAINING of Taurus 25 continued on the parade ground and in the lecture hall, on the dance floor and in the boudoir. After her first all-day session with Dr. Blaine, Joan immediately assumed the standard routine of three sessions with him a week, two hours per session, on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. After the run-in at their first session, Joan "submitted to the inevitable" and did pretty much as she was told. But she tried to keep his physical contact with her body as limited and dispassionate as possible. Blaine observed this with a professional's eye, deciding to see if it would work itself out.

  The problem came to a head abruptly in Joan's ninth session with him on Friday, July 3--the afternoon before the second weekend pass Corporal McDonough had granted all but Cadette Sommers. It was almost halfway through the session, approaching the break, with Joan spread-eagled on the bed and Dr. Blaine between her legs. He was, of course, performing cunnilingus on Joan, trying to break through her barrier of unresponsiveness.

  Joan was breathing in quick, shallow breaths, her face and chest were flushed, and her nipples were hard. Suddenly, she grabbed his head, pulled it tight to her crotch, began panting and vocalizing...

  And Blaine pulled away from her. "Stop it," he said. "Stop it!" He jumped off the bed and stood over Joan, looking as if he might strike her. Joan drew away from him, frightened.

  "How dare you?" he said. "How dare you lie to me like that! Do you realize I could have you court-venereed for insubordination?"

  "What are you--"

  "Cut the scat! Do you think that after ten years of this I don't know the difference between a real orgasm and a faked one?" He stood back, catching his breath, and fuming.

  Joan didn't say anything. He had caught her red-handed, red- faced and red-breasted.

  After a minute he tossed her a robe. "Put this on," he said.

  "Are you going to tell Corporal McDonough?"

  "That's entirely up to you," he said. "Right now, I'm going to take a joynette break and give you a few minutes to think about what your choices are."

  "Could I have one?"

  He lit two joynettes and gave Joan one.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "It doesn't have anything to do with you. It's me."

  "Look, Darris, my ego isn't involved here, so you don't have to massage it. Why do you think the Corps hires andros for this job?"

  "Because a comman would get too excited and come too fast?"

  Blaine took a toke and shook his head. "Out of thousands of applicants, they could find as many commen as needed with the required self-control. Uh-uh. They use us because we won't get emotionally involved. It's not an infallible system, of course -- what is?--but it doesn't happen that an androman switches over to comman all that often, so it's a statistically insignificant risk. If you're thinking that you've offended me, think again, you haven't. If you're thinking that you can butter me up, bat your eyelids, and maybe even cry, you can forget that too. I'm immune. Your only choices are to come clean with me or, or so help me, ten minutes from now you'll be confined to quarters awaiting trial. Clear?

  "Clear," Joan said.

  "All right. You can start by telling me why you'd pull such a stupid stunt."

  "You've probably figured it out already."

  "Don't play games with me, Corporal. Of course, I know. I want to see if you're self-honest enough that you know."

  Joan shrugged. "The Corps can take my body, it can extort labor out of me,
it can invade my privacy. It can't tell me what my most private feelings are going to be."

  "No, you're right. They can't force you to feel. But since they can require you to be somewhere doing something you obviously would rather not do, my question is --why make it hard on yourself? What can you possibly gain by turning yourself into a robot for three years?"

  "My self-respect," Joan said. "I don't ever want to forget that I'm being forced to do this."

  Blaine took another toke and looked disgusted. "Maiden, Lady, and Crone--Corporal Joan-of-Arc, ready to march into the fire for the right to make herself miserable."

  "Sometimes pain is the only reminder you can have that you're not selling out."

  "Corporal, get this through your head and get it through there quickly: whether of not you enjoy the next three years is of no consequence to me, to your D.I., to the First Lady, to the commen who'll be fucking you--or to anyone else on this planet but you. The only reason the Corps prefers orgasmically responsive women is that women who don't come are a discipline problem - which is exactly what we're having right now. Beyond that, nobody gives a good scat. If you need to remind yourself that you're being forced, why don't you simply program your terminal to sing you a song about it each morning?"

  Joan couldn't help laughing in spite of herself.

  Blaine allowed himself a slight smile also, but went on. "Tell me, are you a Christian?"

  Joan shook her head.

  "Well, then, who do you think is going to send you to hell - or bar the way to heaven--if Corporal Joan Darris has an orgasm while she's in the Corps? What will happen--who will be injured -- if you come while you're being forced to fuck? And who's going to decorate you if you somehow manage to make the next three years total drudgery for yourself?"

  "No one," Joan admitted.

  "You're cloneraping right, no one! Are you any freer from coercion if you don't come?"

  Joan shook her head.

  "As a matter of fact," Blaine said, "by making the question of an orgasm a personal obsession, whom are you locking up? The people who decided that Joan Darris would be forced into the Corps, or you?"

  "It's just...I feel if I'd be enjoying it at all, I'd be committing some sort of treason."

  "To whom?"

  "To every woman who's being coerced this way."

  "Does your not having an orgasm make things any better for them?"

  Joan shook her head.

  "You implied before," Dr. Blaine said, "that you didn't want to allow your feelings to be owned by the Corps. Why should your orgasms be the property of other women? If you think you own yourself, don't you have the right to as much pleasure as you can muster from an otherwise unpleasant, coerced service?"

  "I...I guess I didn't see it that way."

  Joan took another toke.

  "I'm not sure...I don't think...I could come with someone I don't love or trust completely," she said.

  "Joan." He startled her by using her first name. "Sexual responsiveness isn't conditional on what other people do or don't do. You own every orgasm you have--it's property no one can take away from you. What turns you on, how you fantasize to get there, isn't any of my business, and I'd never ask you about it. That's a place in you that no one can ever touch--unless you choose to share it. Okay?"

  "Okay."

  Blaine snuffed out his joynette. "Look, this has been a rough day for you. I can call it a session and we can get going again on Monday."

  Joan thought about it a few seconds. "I think...if you don't mind..." She took off her robe again. "I'd like to try it again. For real, this time."

  "All right."

  Blaine sat down on the bed next to Joan, put his arms around her, and kissed her. This time, Joan opened her mouth and cooperated.

  They proceeded naturally from kissing to caressing to touching each other in the pleasure centers the manual spoke about, and soon he slid down on the bed again and resumed licking her most pleasurable center.

  A few minutes later she was again breathing in quick, shallow breaths, but her mind was 450,000 kilometers from Earth, and surprising herself a little, she saw herself watching Roland Church's bass fortissimist, Hill Bromley, with his muscular arms rippling against his black vest and the bulge in his black trunks when he hit the instrument's lowest notes that shook her to the core. She watched him, with his hair as red as her father's, his quick, feral smile that went through her like the vibrations from his fortissimo. Abruptly, he left his fortissimo floating in the Avocado Pit and sailed over to her pallet in the audience, only the audience was gone. He grabbed her roughly. He was running his hands over her breasts, pressing his open mouth tightly against hers, crushing her against the pallet, his red hair mingling with her own--she felt a sudden pressure between her legs...and she was there, free-falling with him, falling, falling falling... -- Then she was back on Earth, sobbing silently, utterly drained and defenseless. But she was also utterly free, for the first time, and she knew that this was a freedom that no one could ever steal away.

  The Teapot Dome, at 9100 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, served a brew that was probably closer in appearance in crude oil than to tea; but if there were any scandals--political or otherwise--in the closet of this mocha house, no one had yet found a skeleton key.

  Later that evening, after entering her charge code and conjuring up the Friday Late Edition of the Los Angeles Times onto her dorm-room terminal, Joan changed into a summery, rainbow dress, put on rose perfume, and caught the tube to Hollywood.

  After finding a line of roga fans around the block to Doheny, waiting to get inside to see Roland Church, Joan walked back around to the stage door and spent a few minutes batting her eyelids at the security guard before he would agree to send her name in to Roland Church or Hill Bromley. Ten minutes before nine she was put onto the guest list, motioned inside, and given a ringside seat near the Tiger Pit at the owner's table.

  The owner, Hill Bromley, could not join her at the table, of course, being otherwise occupied with his bass fortissimo in the Tiger Pit. But Hill did see Joan at his table while he was warming up and gave her a friendly wave.

  Joan waved back to him enthusiastically. Perhaps a little too enthusiastically, she worried. But her concern was more than overpowered by her relief at finding out that Bromley--who Estele had explained back at The Last Ditch was not "with" her - was wearing, according to local custom, vest and trunks not of lavender, but of blue. It would have been just a little too much to find out that the first man she really had the hots for was andro.

  At a few minutes after nine, Roland Church came out--to tumultuous applause--into the Tiger Pit for his first set. He accepted his reception for a few minutes, then held up his hand for silence. "Thank you, thank you, friars and sisters," he said. "We're going to try something a little different, tonight -- something very special that I've been working up for the past few years. It's not like anything I've ever done before--hell, I don't think it's like anything anyone had done before--and I hope you like it. I call it Kama Roga."

  The house glowing went down: Church shouted to his precussionist, Phoebe Norton, "One, two, three, four!" and his backup band began to play, soon joined by Church.

  It was a fast-moving, violent expression of the prime Hindu dialectic. Perusha--matter--as thesis, symbolized by the Phallus of Shiva; Prakriti--energy--as antithesis, symbolized as the Yoni of Shakti--synthesized into Matter and Energy creating the World.

  The idea was pure roga, but the complexity of development and the coloratura were pure classical, and Joan realized that the form of the composition was as dialectical as the subject matter. Roga was the thesis, classical was the antithesis--and the synthesis was, well, something too new for Joan to know what it was. She felt a thrill up and down her spine of the same sort she'd felt the first time she'd seen a performance of The Rainbow Vistata, a sensory equivalent of the statement: This is new and different; this is the way I want to feel about the universe.

  The audience in The Tea
pot Dome obviously felt the same way - whistling, applauding in rhythm, stamping their feet and pounding on the tables--but this was Church's crowd anyway, and Joan hadn't expected any different. When Church turned her way, she yelled, "Bravo!" He grinned.

  The rest of the first set was pretty much the same standard roga Church had always done, and included several pieces Joan had seen in the recording session in Ad Astra, two and a half months before.

  During the break, Church and Bromley came over to the table and joined her; the other members of the band had decided to spend the hour across the street watching a new roga band at a showcase club called The Pink Panther.

  "So," Church began, "how's my massive little sister been?"

  "I was drafted," Joan said.

  "Oh, scat," Bromley said, and it was the first time Joan had really seen him react to anything.

  "Scat, indeed," Joan said. "I haven't had a minute on the console in almost three weeks. I can feel my fingers turning to clay."

  "Well, we can do something about that, can't we?" Church said to Hill. Hill nodded. "How'd you like to take my next set?" he asked Joan.

  "What?" Joan could barely speak. "I haven't played in weeks -- no roga since April--and you want me to perform in public?"

  "This isn't the pyradome," Bromley said. "If you blow a phrase or two, we can cover you with the music and who'll know?"

  "But--"

  "Now, I've got just the thing for you," Church said. "I've got a new arrangement I've just worked up on the practice console back in the greenroom. Why don't you go warm up, give it a try, and if you feel okay with it in an hour, I'll send you in with it -- okay, princess?"

  "Well, okay. But I'm not going on unless the fingers work."

  "That's a lady!" Hill said, and Joan felt warm all over.

  Church caught the feeling. "Hill, my friar, would you do me the honor of escorting the princess back?"

  An hour later, Joan was standing in the dark at the edge of the Tiger Pit. Her palms were as wet as her throat was dry, and she was wondering at the moment how the Christ she'd ever got herself into this situation. Hill gave her a thumbs-up and grinned. Then Church came into the spotlight, took some applause before waving the audience to silence, and began working the crowd. He wasn't about to deliver Joan to an audience of his fans--expecting him to play--without a proper setup.