The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  I'll admit to the second reason, but I decided I also wanted multiple Afterwords to The Rainbow Cadenza for a fourth reason: I am genuinely passionate about various themes I wrote about in my novel, and there are experts who--given a chance to improvise their own nonfiction "cadenzas" on my fictional themes--might shed some additional light on each of them.

  Since I organized my novel around the seven colors in a rainbow plus an invisible ultraviolet, the light that will be shed on these topics will be rainbow-colored as well: there will be eight of them--one for each color, and one for ultraviolet.

  If you are reading these words before you've read my novel, please read my novel first. As a matter of style, these "cadenzas" are placed after the novel since there's no point playing riffs until you've seen the theme. If I thought everything I wanted to say could be said in nonfiction, I would have written a textbook, not a novel. But a novelist is likewise wary of losing dramatic pace with technical discussions, so having some nonfiction follow the fiction is my attempt to let you have your cake and eat it, too.

  For the record, let me say that while I would not be at all opposed to this edition of The Rainbow Cadenza being used for classroom discussions of these--and other--ideas, I do request that teachers refrain from paying me the compliment of placing my novel on any mandatory reading lists.

  When I was in school, having a book assigned to me made sure that either I would avoid reading it or, if I forced myself, that I would hate it. I went so far as, in class, to read books I freely chose from the library hidden behind the covers of the assigned book.

  Even though I know it's irrational, I still hate the books I was assigned. Any author with strong opinions will find enough readers to dislike his or her books without being hated for being made compulsory reading.--JNS, 1986

  Note: Except where indicated, these afterwords and my introductory comments appear as they were first written for the 1986 Avon paperback edition.--JNS, 1996

  VIOLET

  HOUSE OF THE LASER

  by Ivan Dryer

  CEO

  Laser Images, Inc.

  Joan Darris sees her first lasegraphic performance at the "pyradome" named the "McDanald Media Temple," studies at the "Dryer School of Lasegraphy," and performs zero-gee recitals in "Garmire Cathedral." These names for future lasegraphic institutions harken back to the early history of the LASERIUM® concerts produced by Laser Images, Inc., of which Ivan Dryer was the pivotal founder and is currently Chairman and President.

  LASERIUM® and The Rainbow Cadenza converged into a multimedia "READ THE BOOK--SEE THE LASER" event with long-running performances in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston, of "LASERIUM® Presents The Rainbow Cadenza," an all-classical-music LASERIUM® show which allowed readers who enjoyed my depiction of lasegraphy in The Rainbow Cadenza to experience the excitement of a live laser concert for real.

  Here Ivan Dryer gives a brief history of the beginnings of LASERIUM, and lets fly his own imagination about additional forms of entertainment to which we can look forward. Ivan graciously updated his afterword for this new edition.--JNS, 1996

  In the summer of 1956 an aspiring young astronomer joined the staff of the Griffith Observatory and Planetarium in Los Angeles. Fourteen years later, I was still aspiring--but to be a filmmaker--and was then introduced to a laser for the first time. I had gone out to Caltech to film the off-hours artwork of laser physicist, Elsa Garmire. When the laser turned on so did I. I immediately knew where and what to do with it.

  Within a month, in December, 1970, a simple demonstration was given by the two of us to the Observatory staff. It would be for a one-hour live show with alternately filmy and neon-like laser patterns projected among the stars of the Planetarium sky. It would be called LASERIUM ("House of the Laser"). The staff people liked what they saw ... but not enough. This was entertainment, not science. We were outsiders. The banks felt somewhat the same way. A one-hour show of abstract patterns of light with music? No story, no characters--no track record? No dice.

  Three years later, a one-watt Krypton laser was borrowed for another demonstration at Caltech. Over a hundred people were invited. Only two showed--but they were the new Director and Head Lecturer at Griffith Observatory. A permit was issued for a test run, beginning with our world premiere on November 19, 1973.

  My new partner, Charles McDanald, and I finished building and installing the Krypton laser projector at 5:00 a.m. the morning of the premiere. At 8:00 a.m. I appeared on a local TV show, and at 11:00 a.m. we held our press preview. It was also our first rehearsal, and it was terrible. Nonetheless, that evening 700 people came to see what this LASERIUM was about.

  At the conclusion of our four-week test period we were turning away 500 a show. (So much for the banks.) Since then, approximately eighteen million persons worldwide have experienced one of what now number forty LASERIUM shows, featuring rock, classical, jazz, and synthesized music, alone and in combination.

  Because the laser colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) are so pure, the images appear three-dimensional and seem to be almost alive. The essentially abstract nature of LASERIUM allows the audience to participate with their imaginations in helping create their own experiences. That, combined with the element of a live performer responding to audience feedback, makes for a lot of repeat customers--the LASERIUM experience has always been unique.

  Arts Magazine proclaimed in 1978 that "within LASERIUM ... lie seeds of what will become the high, universally acclaimed visual art of the future." While The Rainbow Cadenza is certainly an heir to that statement, I have always considered our shows as entertainment, mass entertainment, "environmental" entertainment.

  It is my opinion, and my dream, that future entertainment forms will build on LASERIUM's environmental approach. With the advent of the scale, diversity, and technological quality that home entertainment, especially virtual reality, will offer in the next decades, the public will be coaxed to leave their personal media centers primarily for communal multimedia spectacles that are unreproducible at home.

  Our first multimedia production was an all-classical show with a story narrative called "Crystal Odyssey" in 1980. Now we are preparing our second such outing in Cyberquest: An Internet Odyssey, which will fill the entire planetarium sky with far more complex laser animation than heretofore possible. It will also feature ChromaDepth 3D, video, a taste of interactivity and a major celebrity.

  The next wave of this "new entertainment" may be manifest in interactive multimedia environments using dome or IMAX-size screens, 3D lasers and large-frame film or laser video projection, indoor pyrotechnics, smoke, fog, the kitchen sink! Via joysticks or other individual controls, the audience members will finally get to have their own say about the size, shape, color and motion of the images. The results will be fascinating studies in chaotic dynamics and group mind.

  Someday may come the "Media Temples," state-of-the-art domed multi-media theatres such as our Pyradome design, featuring all of the above and more. But even these will fall short of the promise of Holography: laser-generated, true 3-D images.

  Sometime in the next 30 years (and 300 years before Star Trek's Holodeck) someone is likely going to come up with the technology to produce the "Holos": three-dimensional objects projected in mid-air, with such apparent solidity and resolution of detail that they seem to be "The Real Thing." Hooking their Hologenerators to their then vastly powerful desk-top (or vest-pocket) computers, people would be able to synthesize any person, and re-create any event at any place they desire.

  What we're talking about now is the creation of new realities, indistinguishable from the old one we now share, at least in their verisimilitude. We can only surmise what would be the impact on our social structure and institutions.

  In my view, the ultimate environmental entertainment would be the Holosphere, a huge experience sphere in Space at near-zero G. You jump away from the slowly rotating perimeter toward the weightless center. You fly, unfettered (an ancient dream in itself). The Hol
ogenerators are activated, each responding to telemetered feedback from you and your fellow Holonauts.

  As your thoughts go, so do the images forming around you: you soar among the mountains of the moon, into the clouds of Jupiter, and through the rings of Saturn. You journey beyond the edge of the galaxy to view its immense pinwheel filling the sky. You venture into its central black hole, into another universe? If you so will it--it is anything you want it to be. (As real as the chair you're sitting in now.) How do you get back?

  Do you want to?!!

  INDIGO

  NEW WINE IN AN OLD BOTTLE

  by Wendy McElroy

  Wendy McElroy is author of the book XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography, editor of the book Freedom, Feminism and the State--an anthology of feminist writings--editor of the magazine The Voluntaryist, a former Reichian clinical therapist, an activist in the Anti-AntiPornography movement, a popular libertarian lecturer, and an author who has published prose in The Journal of Libertarian Studies and Reason as well as poetry in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her latest book is Sexual Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women.

  Here she contrasts the feminist struggle for women's freedom and self-realization with the continuing paternalism which is marketed to women in the guise of "women's power."--JNS, 1996

  In the war between the sexes, the bodies of women are the battleground. When feminists of the '60's cried "the personal is the political," they pointed to the control of biology as the key means of politically repressing women. Through birth control and abortion laws, the restriction of pornography, the licensing of marriage and divorce, the government declares a woman's body to be state property. Be sexual, it agrees, but on our terms. Be a woman, but follow our blueprint.

  The women in J. Neil Schulman's The Rainbow Cadenza know what it is to be state property, for this book carries the war over biology to its ultimate, hideous conclusion ... the drafting of women for sexual service--three years of what Joan Darris, the heroine, calls "continuous rape."

  "Is that such a bad deal?" asks Burke Filcher, the novel's main villain a/k/a main politician. After all, in this rainbow world, men vastly outnumber women, and uncontrolled rape could easily shred the tender web of social harmony. Surely it is more civilized to issue quotas of sex to men who need it and, thus, take rape out of the street and into the political process where it belongs.

  To draftees unable to follow this logic, Burke expands: "[L]ook at the bargain ... immediately after the service, you are one of the prime beneficiaries of that peace and prosperity--one of the privileged ruling class." And Burke is telling the truth.

  Through serving the state, women gain status and access to powerful positions through which they too can enforce laws institutionalizing rape. Vera Delaney, for example, uses the position of judge to prematurely conscript her sister, Joan, into the Corps. Is this such a bad deal?

  For better or worse, it is merely new wine in an old bottle. The state has always regaled women with the advantages of being controlled. Marriage laws protect purity. Abortion laws protect the family. Women need protection from falling into sin through weakness. This is one expression of the madonna/whore approach to women. Women are pure, but only so long as the sexual animal pacing within is tightly chained.

  Of course, The Rainbow Cadenza chains this beast on a different leash. Instead of passing laws to hold women back from the steaming sexual abyss, Schulman's society commands--jump or be pushed! Instead of using a woman's innocence to measure her worth, it merely flips through her service record. Schulman's ideal woman is a state whore who pledges allegiance to the state by placing her left hand over her ovaries. The measurement changes but the standard lingers on. Sex.

  This standard is cemented into society by those old fellow travellers, church and state. The Rainbow Cadenza unveils a state-sanctioned religion (Wicce) which worships a goddess and ritually welcomes corpswomen back from the service and into "the world of men." It unfolds a state which introduces draftees to be raped with the chilling words: "Greetings from the First Lady of Earth. You are hereby ordered to report to a physical examination to determine your fitness to serve..."

  Consider the paradox. Both church and state ostensibly enshrine women, yet Joan Darris is being systematically, officially raped every day. How can this be? Let's add one more fact to the equation: the women with power are those enmeshed in the church or state institutions; the women enshrined are those who obey. They may indeed have power. They do not have freedom.

  Joan Darris will not obey. She does not want to be enshrined or privileged. "I think if there were a button here," Joan tells Filcher, "and by pushing it I could blow up this planet to avoid subjecting myself to the next three years [of service], I wouldn't delay pushing it for a second."

  After lighting his pipe and pronouncing Joan a "pretty prosecutrix," Filcher takes a puff and comments on how small a price is the sexual draft compared to a military one. "You are completely free from this price," Joan observes. "Is that fair?"

  "Life is rarely fair, my dear," Schulman's villain responds, "especially when the needs of a world are involved."

  Here is the hunger of feminism: women must be the legal equal of individual men; and all individuals must be respected.

  But The Rainbow Cadenza is not essentially a political novel and to paint it as such is to lose much subtlety. It is a novel abou individuals--primarily Joan Darris--who refuse to obey. The state is merely one and perhaps not the greatest enemy of the individual.

  Joan must say "no" to much more than a state committee. To preserve the spark which defines her, Joan must say "no" to both family and culture. What could possibly be worth this struggle?

  She loved the lights ... When the dance was over, she did not understand what, or how, or why, but she knew the lights were telling her something, if only she could understand them. She knew she had to find out what the lights were telling her, and more: though she was not yet five years old, Joan Seymour Darris made a promise to herself that someday she also would tell the colors how to make a rainbow.

  Someday Joan will be a lasegrapher and the lights will dance from her fingertips. Now, she must fight for the rainbow against a woman who loves and hates it ... Vera Delaney.

  Vera can never forgive Joan for conquering the lights which she herself can neither conquer nor abandon, but must hunger after. Joan is the mirror of Vera's failure.

  Eleanor is the reason for it.

  Vera is Eleanor's parthenogenic daughter, with all forty-six chromosomes taken from the mother. She is such a true genetic duplicate, and Eleanor has aged so little, that they are often mistaken for each other. This pleases one of them.

  The relationship between Eleanor and Vera is easily the most intriguing one in the book. In this nightmare version of My Mother/My Self, Vera does not even possess her own genetic pattern. When Eleanor advises her to expand horizons and find herself, Vera spits back:

  You tried them all. Dance, music, painting, sculpture ... if you couldn't find yourself that way, neither can I. Besides, I'm not looking to find myself. I know what I'd find. You.

  To become herself, Vera must destroy her mother. To live with herself, she must destroy Joan. She is a fascinating failure at both. Even after shelving Eleanor in cryonic suspension, Vera is not free. There is no Vera for her to grow into. There is only Eleanor, in whose bed Vera sleeps, in whose identity Vera settles like a cat.

  Through a sharp plot twist, Vera, in turn, is stripped of her stolen persona and destroyed, allowing Eleanor to live again, her brain within Vera's body. One must die if the other will live for there is only one identity.

  But Joan possesses the inestimable benefit of a unique genetic pattern and does not have to destroy others to be herself. She eliminates Vera as a matter of self defense and justice to her mother. Although much could be made of the Joan/Vera conflict being symbolically a daughter/mother one, this dilutes the sharp purity of the battle between Vera and Eleanor. Even Freud admitted, "so
metimes a cigar is just a cigar."

  Sometimes Vera is just Vera. How ironic that the only person by whom she may have been perceived as throughly herself destroyed her. Vera is a tragedy. And The Rainbow Cadenza is a triumph in at least this area ... it understands women.

  BLUE

  SEX SELECTION:

  SOME PREDICTIONS BASED ON PRESENT TECHNOLOGY

  by Ronald J. Ericsson, Ph.D.

  President

  Gametrics Limited

  Colony (Wyoming) Route

  Alzada, Montana 59311

  The Dr. Ronald Ericsson referred to in The Rainbow Cadenza as a pioneer of sex-selection technology is real: his patented process, made available in clinics by his company Gametrics Limited, has permitted thousands of families around the world to select the sex of a child.

  Dr. Ericsson makes here a powerful case for the human right of absolute freedom in reproductive options, and demonstrates that only such free choice can avoid the disastrous gender imbalance which I show politics causing in The Rainbow Cadenza.--JNS, 1986

  Gametrics Limited has the only biotechnology to preselect for males with a high degree of accuracy. Couples that have used this method number into the thousands, and 80% of those who conceived had boys.

  This method isolates Y sperm (which produce boys) by allowing sperm to swim downwards into a vertical column of human serum albumin. It has proven to be effective when used by gynecologists throughout the world. A somewhat similar, but more complex, method to preselect for girls (preselected sperm artificially inseminated in conjunction with the hormonal induction of ovulation) has provided positive, but as yet limited, results.