Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  It was the opera that counted, however. That grew and grew under his pen, as fresh and new as his new life, as founded in knowledge and ripeness as his long, full memory. Finding a libretto had been troublesome at first. While it was possible that something existed that might have served among the current scripts for 3-V—though he doubted it—he found himself unable to tell the good from the bad through the fog cast over both by incomprehensibly technical production directions. Eventually, and for only the third time in his whole career, he had fallen back upon a play written in a language other than his own, and—for the first time—decided to set it in that language.

  The play was Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed, in all ways a perfect Strauss opera libretto, as he came gradually to realize. Though nominally a comedy, with a complex farcical plot, it was a verse play with considerable depth to it, and a number of characters who cried out to be brought by music into three dimensions, plus a strong undercurrent of autumnal tragedy, of leaf-fall and apple-fall—precisely the kind of contradictory dramatic mixture which von Hofmannsthal had supplied him with in The Knight of the Rose, in Ariadne at Naxos, and in Arabella.

  Alas for von Hofmannsthal, but here was another long-dead playwright who seemed nearly as gifted, and the musical opportunities were immense. There was, for instance, the fire which ended Act II; what a gift for a composer to whom orchestration and counterpoint were as important as air and water! Or take the moment where Perpetua shoots the apple from the Duke’s hand; in that one moment a single passing reference could add Rossini’s marmoreal William Tell to the musical texture as nothing but an ironic footnote! And the Duke’s great curtain speech, beginning:

  Shall I be sorry for myself? In Mortality’s name.

  I’ll be sorry for myself. Branches and boughs,

  Brown hills, the valleys faint with brume,

  A burnish on the lake. . . .

  There was a speech for a great tragic comedian in the spirit of Falstaff: the final union of laughter and tears, punctuated by the sleepy comments of Reedbeck, to whose sonorous snore (trombones, no less than five of them, con sordini?) the opera would gently end. . . .

  What could be better? And yet he had come upon the play only by the unlikeliest series of accidents. At first he had planned to do a straight knockabout farce, in the idiom of The Silent Woman, just to warm himself up. Remembering that Zweig had adapted that libretto for him, in the old days, from a play by Ben Jonson, Strauss had begun to search out English plays of the period just after Jonson’s, and had promptly run aground on an awful specimen in heroic couplets called Venice Preserv’d, by one Thomas Otway. The Fry play had directly followed the Otway in the card catalogue, and he had looked at it out of curiosity; why should a twentieth-century playwright be punning on a title from the eighteenth?

  After two pages of the Fry play, the minor puzzle of the pun disappeared entirely from his concern. His luck was running again; he had an opera.

  SINDI WORKED MIRACLES in arranging for the performance. The date of the premiere was set even before the score was finished, reminding Strauss pleasantly of those heady days when Fuestner had been snatching the conclusion of Elektra off his worktable a page at a time, before the ink was even dry, to rush it to the engraver before publication deadline. The situation now, however, was even more complicated, for some of the score had to be scribed, some of it taped, some of it engraved in the old way, to meet the new techniques of performance; there were moments when Sindi seemed to be turning quite gray.

  But Venus Observed was, as usual, forthcoming complete from Strauss’s pen in plenty of time. Writing the music in first draft had been hellishly hard work, much more like being reborn than had been that confused awakening in Barkun Kris’s laboratory, with its overtones of being dead instead, but Strauss found that he still retained all of his old ability to score from the draft almost effortlessly, as undisturbed by Sindi’s half-audible worrying in the room with him as he was by the terrifying supersonic bangs of the rockets that bulleted invisibly over the city.

  When he was finished, he had two days still to spare before the beginning of rehearsals. With those, furthermore, he would have nothing to do. The techniques of performance in this age were so completely bound up with the electronic arts as to reduce his own experience—he, the master Kapellmeister of them all—to the hopelessly primitive.

  He did not mind. The music, as written, would speak for itself. In the meantime he found it grateful to forget the months-long preoccupation with the stage for a while. He went back to the library and browsed lazily through old poems, vaguely seeking texts for a song or two. He knew better than to bother with recent poets; they could not speak to him, and he knew it. The Americans of his own age, he thought, might give him a clue to understanding this America of 2161, and if some such poem gave birth to a song, so much the better.

  The search was relaxing, and he gave himself up to enjoying it. Finally he struck a tape that he liked; a tape read in a cracked old voice that twanged of Idaho as that voice had twanged in 1910, in Strauss’s own ancient youth. The poet’s name was Pound; he said, on the tape:

  . . . the souls of all men great

  At times pass through us,

  And we are melted into them, and are not

  Save reflexions of their souls.

  Thus I am Dante for a space and am

  One François Villon, ballad-lord and thief,

  Or am such holy ones I may not write,

  Lest Blasphemy be writ against my name;

  This for an instant and the flame is gone.

  ’Tis as in midmost us there glows a sphere

  Translucent, molten gold, that is the “I”

  And into this some form projects itself:

  Christus, or John, or eke the Florentine;

  And as the clear space is not if a form’s

  Imposed thereon,

  So cease we from all being for the time,

  And these, the masters of the Soul, live on.

  He smiled. That lesson had been written again and again, from Plato onward. Yet the poem was a history of his own case, a sort of theory for the metempsychosis he had undergone, and in its formal way it was moving. It would be fitting to make a little hymn of it, in honor of his own rebirth, and of the poet’s insight.

  A series of solemn, breathless chords framed themselves in his inner ear, against which the words might be intoned in a high, gently bending hush at the beginning . . . and then a dramatic passage in which the great names of Dante and Villon would enter ringing like challenges to Time. . . . He wrote for a while in his notebook before he returned the spool to its shelf.

  These, he thought, are good auspices.

  And so the night of the premiere arrived, the audience pouring into the hall, the 3-V cameras riding on no visible supports through the air, and Sindi calculating his share of his client’s earnings by a complicated game he played on his fingers, the basic law of which seemed to be that one plus one equals ten. The hall filled to the roof with people from every class, as though what was to come would be a circus rather than an opera.

  There were, surprisingly, nearly fifty of the aloof and aristocratic mind sculptors, clad in formal clothes which were exaggerated black versions of their surgeons’ gowns. They had bought a block of seats near the front of the auditorium, where the gigantic 3-V figures which would shortly fill the “stage” before them (the real singers would perform on a small stage in the basement) could not but seem monstrously out of proportion, but Strauss supposed that they had taken this into account and dismissed it.

  There was a tide of whispering in the audience as the sculptors began to trickle in, and with it an undercurrent of excitement, the meaning of which was unknown to Strauss. He did not attempt to fathom it, however; he was coping with his own mounting tide of opening-night tension, which, despite all the years, he had never quite been able to shake.

  The sourceless, gentle light in the auditorium dimmed, and Strauss mounted the podium. Ther
e was a score before him, but he doubted that he would need it. Directly before him, poking up from among the musicians, were the inevitable 3-V snouts, waiting to carry his image to the singers in the basement.

  The audience was quiet now. This was the moment. His baton swept up and then decisively down, and the prelude came surging up out of the pit.

  FOR A LITTLE while he was deeply immersed in the always tricky business of keeping the enormous orchestra together and sensitive to the flexing of the musical web beneath his hand. As his control firmed and became secure, however, the task became slightly less demanding, and he was able to pay more attention to what the whole sounded like.

  There was something decidedly wrong with it. Of course there were the occasional surprises as some bit of orchestral color emerged with a different Klang than he had expected; that happened to every composer, even after a lifetime of experience. And there were moments when the singers, entering upon a phrase more difficult to handle than he had calculated, sounded like someone about to fall off a tightrope (although none of them actually fluffed once; they were as fine a troupe of voices as he had ever had to work with).

  But these were details. It was the overall impression that was wrong. He was losing not only the excitement of the premiere—after all, that couldn’t last at the same pitch all evening—but also his very interest in what was coming from the stage and the pit. He was gradually tiring, his baton arm becoming heavier; as the second act mounted to what should have been an impassioned outpouring of shining tone, he was so bored as to wish he could go back to his desk to work on that song.

  Then the act was over; only one more to go. He scarcely heard the applause. The twenty minutes’ rest in his dressing room was just barely enough to give him the necessary strength.

  AND SUDDENLY, IN the middle of the last act, he understood.

  There was nothing new about the music. It was the old Strauss all over again—but weaker, more dilute than ever. Compared with the output of composers like Krafft, it doubtless sounded like a masterpiece to this audience. But he knew.

  The resolutions, the determination to abandon the old clichés and mannerisms, the decision to say something new—they had all come to nothing against the force of habit. Being brought to life again meant bringing to life as well all those deeply graven reflexes of his style. He had only to pick up his pen and they overpowered him with easy automatism, no more under his control than the jerk of a finger away from a flame.

  His eyes filled; his body was young, but he was an old man, an old man. Another thirty-five years of this? Never. He had said all this before, centuries before. Nearly a half century condemned to saying it all over again, in a weaker and still weaker voice, aware that even this debased century would come to recognize in him only the burnt husk of greatness?—no, never, never.

  He was aware, dully, that the opera was over. The audience was screaming its joy. He knew the sound. They had screamed that way when Day of Peace had been premiered, but they had been cheering the man he had been, not the man that Day of Peace showed with cruel clarity he had become. Here the sound was even more meaningless: cheers of ignorance, and that was all.

  He turned slowly. With surprise, and with a surprising sense of relief, he saw that the cheers were not, after all, for him.

  They were for Dr. Barkun Kris.

  KRIS WAS STANDING in the middle of the bloc of mind sculptors, bowing to the audience. The sculptors nearest him were shaking his hand one after the other. More grasped at it as he made his way to the aisle and walked forward to the podium. When he mounted the rostrum and took the composer’s limp hand, the cheering became delirious.

  Kris lifted his arm. The cheering died instantly to an intent hush.

  “Thank you,” he said clearly. “Ladies and gentlemen, before we take leave of Dr. Strauss, let us again tell him what a privilege it has been for us to hear this fresh example of his mastery. I am sure no farewell could be more fitting.”

  The ovation lasted five minutes and would have gone another five if Kris had not cut it off.

  “Dr. Strauss,” he said, “in a moment, when I speak a certain formulation to you, you will realize that your name is Jerom Bosch, born in our century and with a life in it all your own. The superimposed memories which have made you assume the mask, the persona, of a great composer will be gone. I tell you this so that you may understand why these people here share your applause with me.”

  A wave of asserting sound.

  “The art of mind sculpture—the creation of artificial personalities for aesthetic enjoyment—may never reach such a pinnacle again. For you should understand that as Jerom Bosch you had no talent for music at all; indeed, we searched a long time to find a man who was utterly unable to carry even the simplest tune. Yet we were able to impose upon such unpromising material not only the personality, but the genius, of a great composer. That genius belongs entirely to you—to the persona that thinks of itself as Richard Strauss. None of the credit goes to the man who volunteered for the sculpture. That is your triumph, and we salute you for it.”

  Now the ovation could no longer be contained. Strauss, with a crooked smile, watched Dr. Kris bow. This mind sculpturing was a suitably sophisticated kind of cruelty for this age, but the impulse, of course, had always existed. It was the same impulse that had made Rembrandt and Leonardo turn cadavers into art works.

  It deserved a suitably sophisticated payment under the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—and a failure for a failure.

  No, he need not tell Dr. Kris that the “Strauss” he had created was as empty of genius as a hollow gourd. The joke would always be on the sculptor, who was incapable of hearing the hollowness of the music now preserved on the 3-V tapes.

  But for an instant a surge of revolt poured through his bloodstream. I am I, he thought. I am Richard Strauss until I die, and will never be Jerom Bosch, who was utterly unable to carry even the simplest tune. His hand, still holding the baton, came sharply up, though whether to deliver or to ward off a blow he could not tell.

  He let it fall again, and instead, at last, bowed—not to the audience, but to Dr. Kris. He was sorry for nothing, as Kris turned to him to say the word that would plunge him back into oblivion, except that he would now have no chance to set that poem to music.

  RAY BRADBURY

  Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed

  Although not the first author to write fiction set on Mars, Ray Bradbury staked a major claim to one of the most fertile landscapes in all science fiction with a series of stories published in pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s in which he envisioned the Red Planet as a new frontier where humanity might leave its imprint, for better or for worse. His collection The Martian Chronicles (1950), for which these stories served as a foundation, was a breakthrough success that alerted a mainstream audience to the value of science fiction as a modern mythology that embodies timeless human dreams and fears. Frail and fallible human beings are the foremost concern of Bradbury’s fiction, whether in the persona of the fireman in the future dystopia Fahrenheit 451 who comes to doubt the merits of his job—destroying ideas by burning books—or the ordinary middle-class Americans in the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes who allow fear of their own mortality to coerce them into Faustian pacts with a Mephistophelian owner of a traveling carnival. Bradbury’s lyrical stories have been collected in The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, A Medicine for Melancholy, The Machineries of Joy, and numerous other volumes including the definitive Stories of Ray Bradbury. The modern Gothic stories in his collections Dark Carnival and The October Country were a major influence on contemporary horror and dark fantasy fiction. Dandelion Wine, his novel of a midcentury Midwestern childhood, and the loose trilogy comprised of Death Is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Green Shadows, White Whale, drawn from his experiences as a young writer, are quintessentially Bradburyesque explorations of the magic possibilities of everyday life. He has written the childre
n’s books Switch on the Night, The Halloween Tree, and Ahmed and the Oblivion Machine, hundreds of poems collected in The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury, a score of plays, including The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and the essay collection Yestermorrow. Many of his stories have been adapted for stage, screen, television, musical theater, and the comics. His own screenwriting credits include It Came from Outer Space and the screenplay for John Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick. His many awards include the Nebula Grand Master Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement from the Horror Writers Association.

  THE ROCKET METAL cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.

  The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the center of a vacuum. His wife, before him, seemed almost to whirl away in smoke. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes.

  The children looked up at him, as people look to the sun to tell what time of their life it is. His face was cold.

  “What’s wrong?” asked his wife.

  “Let’s get back on the rocket.”

  “Go back to Earth?”

  “Yes! Listen!”

  The wind blew as if to flake away their identities. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He felt submerged in a chemical that could dissolve his intellect and burn away his past.

  They looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. They saw the old cities, lost in their meadows, lying like children’s delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.

  “Chin up, Harry,” said his wife. “It’s too late. We’ve come over sixty million miles.”