by Rick Wilber
Abruptly, she lifted her hands from the keys.
Had Kristian had the use of his voice at the moment Clara Schumann stopped playing, he would have cried out. She had been at the very point of showing him, of solving the problem of his research! It was as if she knew just what he wanted to hear, as if she deliberately stopped short of the p dolce marking so he would not learn what the Master meant by it! As if-
Kristian’s mind rocked with the implication. He moved back, away from the pair at the piano, and stared at their backs. Surely she could not be - surely it was not possible-
But she turned at that moment, her great dark eyes wide, her full lips curving. And he knew. He couldn’t understand how, not yet, but he knew. Frederica Daniels was in Clara Schumann. She had, bizarrely, possessed her.
The immorality of it, the unfairness, the complete and utter selfishness of such a thing rendered him, for the moment, incapable of thought. He stared at her, and she stared back, and he understood that she perceived him perfectly. She knew he was there, and she had no intention of giving him what he wanted.
Brahms turned to her, murmuring a query. Clara - Frederica - responded with a slight shake of her head, a gentle touch of her hand to her brow. Moments later, the Master was solicitously helping the traitoress up the stairs to rest. Kristian hovered where he was, powerless to intervene.
***
At first the Director wouldn’t believe him. He explained, again and again, that she had stopped short of playing the p dolce section twice, that there was no doubt in his mind it was deliberate, that she had looked directly at him, out of Clara’s eyes. “She saw me,” he said. “She knew I was there.”
“But she couldn’t - there is no way for one person to-”
Kristian made an irritated noise. “Of course she could!” he snapped, frustration making him impatient. “She inserted herself, don’t you see?”
The Director shook his head. It was the technician who said, softly, “The codification makes it possible. We made it easy for her.”
Kristian nodded to him. “Of course. The question is, what do we do about it?”
“If we pull the plug, she’ll die.”
“Her body will die,” Kristian said. “Who knows what will happen to her consciousness? She’s perfectly comfortable in someone else’s body.”
“Perhaps we have to leave her there, then,” the Director said glumly. “If she dies, her father will dismantle the whole program. He has the connections to do it.”
“We can’t leave her!” Kristian protested. “She’s taken over someone else’s life!” Someone beautiful and fragile, he thought, though he didn’t say so. Someone who had suffered enough already.
“This isn’t supposed to be possible,” the Director said. “Changing the past. . .”
“We don’t know if she’s changed anything,” Kristian said. “There’s no record of Clara Schumann joining Brahms in Castagno that summer of 1861, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
“I just don’t know what to do.”
“Well, I do,” Kristian said, standing, moving back to the hospital bed to look down on Frederica Daniels’ still form. “I’m going back again.”
***
She saw him the moment he returned. It was an odd sensation, a seeing not with the eyes, but with her consciousness. She knew that was true, and yet the impression of perceiving Kristian through the usual conduit of retina, ganglia, and optic nerves was unshakable. He simply was there, all at once, and his physical image - projected, she imagined, by his own consciousness - was clear and consistent.
He knew. She could see that he knew.
She smiled at him, and lifted her head in the way she knew set off her creamy neck, the roundness of her chin. She touched her abundant hair, and let her fingers trail down her cheek.
Kristian’s eyes hardened at her teasing. He gazed at her, his mouth set, his shoulders stiff with anger. She didn’t care. There was nothing he could do. She was in complete control, and had even begun to suspect Clara was gone, vanished, vanquished.
She had been about to take up the sonata once again, but now she set it aside. Hannes had gone out for a walk, and would be back soon. She rose, turning her back on the presence of Kristian Nordberg, and went out to the kitchen to order a pot of tea. As the cook set the kettle to boil, she gazed dreamily out the window. The olive blossoms had begun to drift to the ground, and the fruit was beginning to set. The pastel houses, tumbling across the little hillside in their charming fashion, glowed gently in the afternoon sunshine. Frederica savored every sensual detail. Surely, there was no more beautiful place in the world than this, not even in Vienna.
She smiled to herself at the stir in her loins, and leaned forward to watch Hannes climb back up the steep street.
***
It was surprisingly, disturbingly easy, Kristian found. All the study of processes, all the diagrams and formulas and programming language came to his aid. Brahms stepped in through the arched doorway, and Kristian - smoothly, without hesitating - inserted his own consciousness into the Master’s. It was like beginning a new piece of music, but one so similar to others that the fingerings came naturally, that he could anticipate the harmonic structure, the tempo and dynamic changes. It was, oddly, like putting his hand into a glove, like slipping his feet into comfortable boots. He was inside the other’s mind and body, so thoroughly integrated that he trembled with the Master’s shock at his presence.
But compunction was a feeling he couldn’t afford, not at this moment. He tried to transmit a sense of calm, of reassurance. It was difficult. He had to concentrate on the sensation of walking, of turning, of speaking. He said Clara’s name, and she turned to him, embraced him, pressed her lips to his. He tried to respond naturally. If she guessed. . . if she knew what he had done. . . it would never work.
He didn’t dare speak to her in his modern-day German. After the briefest hesitation, he decided to chance Italian. “Si fa una piccola passeggiata, carissima?” he whispered into her cloud of hair.
She giggled, and pulled away to admonish him with one white finger. In her perfect nineteenth-century German, she said. “I will walk with you a moment in the garden, Hannes. But the tea is almost ready.”
He circled her waist with his arm, and turned toward the door, keeping his eyes averted. Surely, he thought, if she were to look into his eyes, she would perceive him there. Her body was pliant beside him as they stepped out into the shade of the olive trees. The grass was soft beneath their feet, the sun warm on their uncovered heads. Clara’s skirts brushed Brahms’ leg, a feeling almost more intimate than the touch of her lips. Kristian took a deep breath, and was surprised to find that he could smell the fresh air, the trees, the trailing roses that climbed the stone wall. His hand tingled with the warmth of Clara’s body, and he realized he was hearing things with physical ears, the clink of the gardener’s spade against a stone, the humming of the cook as she moved about the kitchen - Rossini, that was. L’Italiana. He would have to think about this later, about the sharp difference between physical perception and that which was purely mental. But now - now he must concentrate on Frederica.
They completed a circuit of the house, stepping around a little pile of bruised and faded olive blossoms the gardener had raked up. They reached the gate, and Frederica turned back, to go inside.
Kristian seized her arm with his hand - with Brahms’ hand - and caught her back.
She turned, eyes suddenly wide. “Hannes?” she breathed.
He opened the gate with his other hand, and pulled her toward it.
“Hannes!” she cried.
He tightened his grip, knowing the fragile white skin would be bruised, unable to prevent it. He kept his eyes on the street, on the gate, anywhere but on her face.
“What are you doing? Nein, Liebchen, nein!”
She struggled, and Kristian had to take hold of her with both hands, and drag her, stumbling, resisting, out through the gate.
With a
tremendous effort, she pulled back. The delicate hand stitching of her lawn dress tore at the shoulders. She whirled, and tried to go back inside the garden.
Kristian grunted, “goddammit,” under his breath. He seized her by the waist, and yanked her roughly backward. He had never, in all his life, behaved so violently.
And now she understood. She turned to him, her pupils wide with shock and fear. “Oh, no,” she moaned.
“Yes!” he said firmly. “Let her go, Frederica. Let Clara go”
“No,” she pleaded, “please, no. You don’t understand! I-”
He picked her right off her feet, and took two steps out into the lane. The moment he reached the perimeter of the locus he began to feel the blurring of his consciousness. He took another step, wishing there were another way, wishing he could take the time to explore Brahms’ mind. Learn about p dolce . . .
It was there! The thought was in the Master’s mind, buried under a hundred other thoughts, idiosyncratic, creative ideas. . . If only he could hold on to it. . .
Another step, and Kristian s head began to spin. The woman in his arms kicked and screamed, but with every step he took, her cries grew fainter, her struggles weaker.
Kristian grew weaker, too. His hands slipped on her body, his grip loosening as the Insertion failed. He stumbled forward, one more shaky step. He had to drag her far enough outside the locus, but his hands were nerveless, and his feet could no longer feel the ground.
His vision faded, and the world turned upside down.
***
Kristian opened his eyes to the white walls and gleaming steel and chrome of the clinic. He drew a ragged breath, and turned his head to look at the other bed, where Frederica lay. The Director and the technicians were gathered around her, staring at the monitors. The physician’s assistant had his fingers on her wrist and a technician was hurriedly injecting something into the Y-port of her IV. The monitors were alive with movement, lines and waves dancing across the screens.
“She’s back?” Kristian croaked.
The Director turned to him. He nodded, but his face was drawn. “She’s back. But she’s not waking up.”
One of the technicians came to help Kristian untangle himself from the wires and cords, remove the sensor cap, slip off the pressure cuff and detach the heart monitor. Kristian coughed, and reached for a glass of water. He cleared his throat, and started to stand, but the dizziness of transition overwhelmed him. He sank back again, and the technician put a hand on his shoulder. “Wait,” he told Kristian. “Give it a minute.”
Kristian sat and stared across the room at Frederica Daniels. She was back, and yet she wasn’t. She lay still except for the slight rise and fall of her chest. Not even her eyelids moved.
“Will she be all right?” he asked quietly.
“We don’t know.” The technician shook his head. “There’s no reason she shouldn’t. Her codification is intact. Her screens came alive at the same moment you woke up.”
Kristian watched Frederica for a long time, and wondered.
***
Discover Magazine’s reporter came to interview Kristian the day after he defended his dissertation. It took Kristian some time to tell his story. He tried to explain what Insertion felt like, though he warned the reporter that it was hard to put into words. He described what Brahms looked like, what Casa Agosto looked like, what Castagno of 1861 looked like. He spoke guardedly, having promised the Director, of finding the “lost” girl and bringing her back. He left out Frederica’s possession of Clara Schumann, and his own of Johannes Brahms.
“But if you brought her back - then why won’t she wake up?’
“I don’t know. None of us understands it.”
“Then how do you know you did bring her back? Perhaps her consciousness is still in the nineteenth century.”
Kristian only shrugged. He did know, because in 1862, Clara Schumann had resumed concertizing after a six-month hiatus. But he couldn’t explain that without revealing what had really happened.
“Tell me why you did this, Dr. Nordberg. Why risk Insertion, especially after what happened to Miss Daniels?”
“I wanted an answer to an old question of performance practice. Brahms sometimes wrote p dolce on his scores, but he never explained exactly what it meant. It was essential to my dissertation.”
He didn’t say that Frederica had wanted the same thing, but that now it appeared she would never write her dissertation. Only he and the Director knew that Frederica had done her damndest to keep Kristian from writing his.
The reporter smiled. “Ah. You must have learned what you needed to know.”
Kristian leaned back in his chair, in his comfortable office in the music department, where he had just been offered the Llewellyn Chair for Musicology. “I did,” he said. “Indeed I did. I learned it from the Master himself.”
Ben Loory is the author of the collection Tales of Falling and Flying (Penguin) picked as a favorite book of the year by the staff of The Paris Review, and the collection Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (Penguin). His fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Electric Literature, and Fairy Tale Review and have been heard on This American Life from NPR, which called his stories, “Dreamlike in the best possible way: both cheerfully surreal and cosmically unsettling.” Here, Loory gives us exactly that, a cheerfully surreal alternate-history look at bonsai trees and James K. Polk.
James K. Polk used to keep bonsai trees up on the roof of the White House. Not a lot of people know that about him, but it’s an important fact. In 1845, James K. Polk had over two hundred trees. Most of them were under three inches tall. One was so small, people couldn’t see it.
Are you sure it’s there? people would say.
Oh, it’s there! James K. Polk would say.
And the people would look at him.
How’s the country? they’d say.
The country? he’d say. It’s okay.
***
At night, James K. Polk would lie in his bed and think about his tiniest tree. It wasn’t just that it was so incredibly small; it was perfectly formed in every way.
What’s wrong with these people? James K. Polk would say. Why don’t they appreciate my art? I’ve grown the best bonsai tree of all time, and they act like I’m doing something wrong!
***
Then one night James K. Polk had a dream, and in his dream he went to Japan. And for some reason, everyone there had giant eyes.
I bet they could see my tree, he said.
***
So in the morning, James K. Polk started making plans. He went to see the secretary of the navy.
I’m gonna need a boat, he said, that can make it to Japan. And a few of your very best men.
You can’t go to Japan! the naval secretary said. There are big issues to be dealt with here!
Big issues aren’t always the most important, Polk said, and he put his trees in the boat and set sail.
***
The voyage to Japan was long and arduous, and by the time they got there, most of the crew was dead. A lot of the trees had been eaten for food, and the rest had been thrown overboard.
The only bonsai tree James K. Polk had left was his almost-invisible one, which he’d secreted away in an inside vest pocket.
It was still in perfect condition.
***
When he set foot on the shore, James K. Polk knelt down and kissed the rocky ground. Then he looked up and saw the Japanese welcoming party coming.
But they all had normal-sized eyes.
It turned out that people in Japan couldn’t see his tree better than anyone else. Nevertheless, they were very nice to him–treated him with all due respect.
So James K. Polk stayed. He loved life in Japan. For the first time ever, he felt at home. He took a course in calligraphy and wrote some haikus. He studied Zen. The monks said he showed promise.
***
But back in America, trouble was brewing.
The Ja
panese, people said. They’ve stolen our President!
And they built an armada, and mustered an army, and sailed across the sea to get him.
***
The Japanese lookouts saw the ships coming.
Don’t worry, they said, we won’t let them take you.
They loaded their guns and lined up on the shore.
Polk saw that a great war was imminent.
***
All right, Polk said, and he held up a hand. Let’s not make a big thing about this.
And he said his good-byes and put his tree in a suitcase, and walked up the plank into the ship.
***
All the way back, people lectured Polk about the issues and problems of the day–about how he had to take things seriously, undertake big projects, be a leader of men. So when he got back home, Polk did a lot. He took the Oregon Territory from the British, and California and New Mexico away from Mexico–even fought a little war over it. One of the last things he did was one of the biggest–he broke ground on the Washington Monument. Everyone thought this was absolutely wonderful (it earned him the title “least known consequential President”).
And at the end of four years, Polk calmly stepped down.
I won’t be running for a second term, he said.
What? people cried. But you’re a great leader!
I’ve done everything I set out to do, Polk said.
***
Of course people argued, but Polk stood his ground. He stood his ground, and he walked away.
He still had his little invisible tree.
And he didn’t leave it to the Smithsonian for display.
Novelist and physicist Alan Smale’s Sidewise Award-winning story, “A Clash of Eagles” ultimately grew into the popular “A Clash of Eagles” trilogy of books published by Del Rey in the United States and Titan Books in the United Kingdom. His short stories appear regularly in Asimov’s Science Fiction and other publications. In this story, he explores an alternate past where an expansive Roman Empire finds conflict in ancient North America.