But who was he to make that decision? They had paid their deposits, and they had the right to sit there in the wombs until their rentals ran out. He had started Ana with a forty-year contract, but he thought of that as just the beginning.
He had brought with him a copy of Ana’s medical records. He added to it a full description of everything he had seen in the past hour or two, copied the whole document, and made sure that a complete set was included with the file records on Ana. When Ana’s body was finally taken away for storage he went back to the house, fell into bed, and slept like a cryocorpse himself for sixteen hours.
It was time for the next step. And it was not going to be easy.
When Drake was fully awake again, fed and bathed, he called Tom Lambert and asked to see him — at Tom’s home, rather than his office. He accepted the hefty drink that Tom prepared, after one look at him, for “medicinal purposes,” and laid out his plans.
After he was finished Tom walked over to Drake, poked the muscles in his shoulders and the back of his neck, pulled down his lower eyelid and stared at the exposed skin, and finally went to sit opposite him.
“You’ve been under a monstrous strain for the past few months,” he said quietly.
“Very true. I have.” Drake kept his voice just as calm.
“And it would be quite unnatural for your behavior or your feelings to be completely normal. In fact, if you seem normal now, it’s only because you have completely walled in your emotions. You certainly don’t understand the implications of what you are proposing to me.”
Drake shook his head. “This isn’t new. It’s only new to you. I’ve been thinking of this since the day I gave up on all other options.”
“Then that was the day you put the lid on your feelings.” Tom Lambert leaned forward. “Look, Drake, Ana was a wonderful woman, a unique woman. I won’t say I know what you have been through, because obviously I don’t. I do have some idea of your sense of loss. But you have to ask yourself what Ana would want you to do now. You can’t let the past become your obsession. She would tell you that you still have a life of your own. Even without her, you have to live it. She would want you to live it, because she loved you.” He paused. “Let me make a suggestion…”
While Tom was talking, Drake found it harder and harder to listen. The room felt dull and airless and he had trouble breathing. Tom Lambert’s words came from far off. They didn’t seem to say anything. He forced himself to concentrate, to listen harder.
“…of your work. You are still a young man. Forty to fifty good years ahead of you. And already you have a reputation. You are one of this country’s most promising composers, and your best works still lie ahead. Ana may have performed your work better than anyone else, but there will be others. They will learn. With your talent you owe it to the rest of us not to cut your career off before it reaches its peak.”
“I have no intention of doing so. I will compose again. Later.”
“You mean, later after that?” Tom was frowning and shaking his head. “Suppose there is no later? Drake, take my advice as both your doctor and your friend. You desperately need to get out of your house, and you need to take a vacation. Go off on a cruise somewhere, take a trip around the world. Expose yourself to some new influences. I know how you must feel now, but you should give it a year and see how you feel then. I guarantee you, everything will seem different. You’ll want to live again. You’ll give up this crazy idea.”
The breathless feeling was fading. Drake again had control of himself. He waited patiently until Tom was finished, then nodded agreement.
“I’ll do as you say. I’ll get away from here for a while. But if it turns out that you are wrong — if I come back to you, in, say, eight or ten years, and I ask you again, will you do it? Will you help me? I want you to give me an honest answer, and I want your word on it.”
The tension drained visibly from Tom Lambert. He snorted in relief. “Ten years from now? Drake, if you come back to me in eight or ten years and ask me again, I’ll admit I was completely wrong. And I promise you, I’ll help you to do what you’ve asked.”
“An absolute promise? I don’t want to hear some day that you changed your mind, or didn’t mean what you said.”
“An absolute promise. Sure, I’ll give you that.” Tom laughed. “But I’m not worried that I’ll ever be called on it. I’ll bet you everything I own that after a year or two have gone by, you’ll never mention that promise again. Hard as it seems to believe today, you’ll be living a new life, and you’ll be enjoying it.” He walked over to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. “I’d like to propose a toast, Drake. Or actually, three toasts. To us. To your future. And to your next — and greatest — composition.”
Drake raised his glass in return. “To us, and the future. I’ll drink to those. But I can’t drink to my next work, because I don’t know when I’ll create it. I have lots of other things to do — for one thing, you told me to get out of town. I’m going
to do that, right away. But don’t worry, Tom. I’ll be in touch when the time is right.”
Chapter 4
Into the Abyss
There were two problems. The first was easy to define but hard to solve: money.
In the early days, Drake and Ana had been very poor. As a result they talked about money quite a lot. She would glance through their joint checking account book, with its zero balance, and groan. He would laugh, with more worry than humor, and once he quoted something he had just read by Somerset Maugham: “Money is the sixth sense that enables us to enjoy the other five.” He added: “I guess that leaves us six senses short.”
Unfortunately, neither groans nor quotations produced income. Money, or the lack of it, seemed important, as important as anything in the world except music” and each other.
Career success brought a change of attitude. Ana had her teaching and her concert appearances, Drake had pupils and occasional commissions. Their needs were modest. They bought a house, a big old-fashioned brick Colonial with four bedrooms and half an acre of fenced yard, expecting that someday they would need all the space for an expanded family. Neither of them wanted to travel or be wealthy. Wordsworth was quoted rather than Maugham: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
Now all that was past. Drake needed money, lots of it. He had to make sure that Ana could remain safe within her icy womb for the indefinite future, until she could be safely thawed and her disease cured. Then her life would begin again. There were a few things he couldn’t guard against, such as a total collapse of the world to barbarism, or the rejection of all present forms of currencies and commodities. Those were risks that Ana — and he — would have to accept.
The other problem was more subtle. According to Tom it might be a long time before a cure was found for Ana’s rare and highly malignant disease. As he pointed out, something that killed only a few people a year did not get the attention of common cancers and heart diseases, which ended the lives of hundreds of millions.
Suppose that a cure was not discovered for a century, or even for two centuries. What knowledge of present-day society would interest people in the year 2200? What must a man know or a woman be, for the inhabitants of that future Earth to think it worthwhile to revive them? Drake was convinced that even when a foolproof way of resuscitating the revivables was discovered, most bodies in the cryowombs would stay exactly where they were. The contracts with Second Chance provided only for maintenance in a cryonic condition. They did not, and could not, offer a guarantee that an individual would be thawed.
Why thaw anyone at all? Why add another person to a crowded world, unless he or she had something special to offer?
Drake imagined himself back in the early nineteenth century. What could he have placed into his brain, then, that would be considered valuable today, two hundred years later? Not politics, nor art. Knowledge of them was quite adequate. Certainly not science or any technology — progress, in the past two centuries had been phenomenal
.
What would the people of the future want to know about the past?
He decided that he had lots of time to ponder his own question; time, which had been denied to Ana. It would be foolish to hurry, when he could plan and calculate at his leisure. He set a goal of ten years. That would still allow forty of the shared fifty that he had looked for and longed for. But he was quite willing to stretch ten to fifteen if he had to.
If it did take more time, it would not be because he allowed himself to be distracted by other activities. His only diversion was to estimate the probabilities that everything would work out as he hoped. Always, the odds came out depressingly low.
While he was trying to decide what he needed to learn, he still had to solve that difficult first problem: making money.
He decided to visit his old teacher. His relationship with Bonvissuto had passed through three distinct phases. At first
there had been absolute awe of the professor’s musical skill and encyclopedic knowledge. Bonvissuto seemed to know, and be able to play by heart at his cherished Steinway, his own piano transcription of any work by any composer. After three years of study, Drake’s attitude changed. He still respected and admired his mentor’s learning, but in matters other than music he came to think Bonvissuto a bit of a comic figure. He could not ignore the elevator heels, red carnation buttonholes, dyed-brown shoulder-length tresses, unreliable Italian accent, and relentless romantic activity.
It was Ana, in Drake’s final year as Bonvissuto’s student, who revealed to Drake another side of their teacher.
“Can’t you see how much he envies you?” she said, as they sat one afternoon poring over a marked-up score of Carmina Burana.
“Who?”
“Bony. Who else?”
“Me?” Drake put down the score. “Why on earth do you think he would envy me? He knows ten times as much about music as I’ll ever know.”
“He does. But just the same he envies you — for the same reason as /envy you. He teaches music. I perform music. But you create music. Neither of us is able to do that. Can’t you see the look in his eyes, whenever you bring him a beautiful original melody? He’s delighted, yet sad. It must kill him inside, to be so gifted and yet be missing that one essential spark.”
Ana’s insight led Drake to a final opinion of his teacher. The professor could be sarcastic and short-tempered. He was certainly vain, and a dedicated womanizer. But he loved music, with a passion and a strength and a devotion far beyond anything else in life.
And again it was Ana who stated it best. When a discussion of Haydn’s “English” songs was interrupted by a telephone call from Bonvissuto’s current flame, she said to Drake, quietly and with real affection for their teacher, “Listen to him. He tells Rita — and Charlene and Mary and Leah and Judy — that he loves them, and I think he really does. But he’d trade the lot in for one new Haydn symphony.”
Or one new original work by Drake Merlin? Drake wasn’t sure, then or ever. But two months after Ana had been placed in the cryowomb, he appeared in Bonvissuto’s office one morning without warning. The teacher gave him one startled look, then turned his eyes away. “I know, I know,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
It had been three years since the two last met, but Bonvissuto had followed the careers of all his former students. He took vast pride in them. Naturally, he knew about Ana.
“I didn’t come here to talk about her,” Drake said, “unless you want to, I mean. I came to ask your advice.”
“Anything that I can do, I will. For you and little Ana, I will be happy…” Bonvissuto paused, swallowed, and turned away. The volatile Italian persona was not all fake.
“I have to make money.” Drake spoke dispassionately to the other man’s back. He needed advice, not emotional support. “A lot of money. I wondered if you could suggest a way.”
“You! The least commercial of all my students. Oh!” Bonvissuto turned again, and Drake saw in his eyes a sudden understanding. “I know. I went through some of it myself, two years ago. The damned hospitals — the tests, and all the drugs, and prices you wouldn’t believe — five dollars for an aspirin, two hundred dollars a day for a room, fifty dollars for a doctor who drops in on you for two minutes and doesn’t even look at you — they bleed you dry.”
Drake nodded. It was a mistaken assumption, but letting it stand saved lots of explanation. “I need to make as much money as I can. As quickly as I can. I don’t know how.”
“But I do.” Bonvissuto went across to his piano. “Provided you are willing to lower your standards. Are you?”
“I don’t know. What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry. I am not about to suggest that you form a rock group. You compose well, and you compose fast. But your music is too difficult to be popular. This is what Drake Merlin is writing.” Bonvissuto played a sequence of spare chords with no clear tonal center, and above them on the right hand a wandering angular melody.
“That’s from my Suite for Charon !”
“It is indeed. I took the liberty of making a piano transcription.” Bonvissuto sounded not at all apologetic. “It is very beautiful — to you, and me, and maybe a few thousand others. But if you want to appeal to a few million, you must be simpler, more accessible. Like this.” Bonvissuto played a jaunty bass theme, accompanied by dazzling prestissimo downward runs on the right hand.
Drake frowned. “That’s by Danny Elfman. It’s film music.”
“It is. Are you saying you are above such things?”
“Not at all. It’s first-rate. But I can’t walk into a film studio and say, let me score a movie. They’d throw me straight out.”
“Of course.” Bonvissuto shrugged. “It is obvious that you don’t start there. Or rather, if you choose to start there, I can’t help you. But a dozen paths can lead in that direction.” He stood up, went to his old oak desk, and picked up a cheap black notebook with a spiral binder. “All the time, I hear of musical markets. I write them down. They are open to you, provided that you don’t insist on writing compositions that break new ground. People are most comfortable with the familiar. They say they know what they like, but really they like what they know. See here.”
He opened the book and ran down the list of entries with his long, thin index finger. “I include concerts and recitals on this list, but for you I strongly recommend composition. Are you willing to write a commemorative overture for the hundredth anniversary of the first heavier-than-air flight? That offers four thousand dollars, for eleven minutes. The time requirement is precise, no more, no less. The work will be played after the national anthem, after a Star Wars selection and before ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ I would not recommend march tempo. Or how about this one, which came to me through private channels: a commission to ghost-write a violin concerto for a Cabinet member with musical delusions of grandeur.”
“What would I do?”
“You would write the music, after listening for half an hour to Lamar Malory’s vague and off-key humming of themes. Your name will not, of course, go on the finished work. His name will. The fee offered, for your music and your silence, is four hundred dollars per composed minute. It is not much, but the music does not have to be very good. In fact, it would be suspicious if it were.”
Drake bit back the urge to ask why Bonvissuto did not take the commissions himself. “What are the deadlines?”
“How soon can you produce?”
“Faster than anyone else they can find. I’ll take both of them. As many as I can get, in fact. I’ll write around the clock if I have to.”
“I’ll see what I can do. I can’t guarantee these or any other commissions, but I can make sure that you are on the short list. After that it’s up to you. I warn you, you will be dealing with people who have no more music in them than a dog who howls at the moon.” Bonvissuto shrugged. “I am sorry, but that is the price. Never mind. When you have the money that you need, you can return to normal life.”
A norma
l life was not what Drake had in mind — not for a long time yet. But he could not discuss his plans. He thanked Bonvissuto and left.
It was the beginning of a long period of incessant work. Drake took commissions, wrote commemorative pieces, gave concerts, and made recordings. As his reputation for good, fast, and reliable work grew, he produced reams of music for good, bad, and indifferent shows and movies. If anyone compared his recent work with his earlier work, and thought that he was debasing his art, they were too polite to comment. His own attitude was simple: if it was lucrative, it was acceptable.
Once a month he visited Ana’s cryowomb facility. He could not see her, but he could sit outside the room where she was housed. Knowledge of her presence produced in him a strange tranquillity. After a couple of hours with her, he could again face his work.
Sometimes that work was unpleasant, grinding toil. Since he agreed to tight deadlines, he was often forced to compose late at night when he was close to exhaustion. But sometimes the odd commercial challenges brought out the best in him. The finest melody of his life came to him as the theme music to a successful television show. And after four years he had an even bigger stroke of luck.
He had written a set of short pieces a couple of years after he and Ana first met, a kind of musical joke designed especially to appeal to her. They were baroque forms, with period harmonies, but he had added occasional modern
harmonic twists, piquancy inserted where it would be most surprising and most appealing.
They had been quite successful, although only among a limited audience. Now, given a commission to provide the incidental music for a series of television dramas on life in eighteenth-century France, and facing another impossible delivery date, Drake returned to cannibalize, adapt, and simplify his own earlier work. The dramas turned out to be the hit of the decade. His music was credited as a big part of the reason for their success. Suddenly his minuets, bourrees, gavottes, sarabands, and rondeaux were everywhere. And as they flooded from the audio outlets, the royalties flooded in from every country around the globe.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 3