The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  The theme was very like a hymn, and they played it that way, sure. They were praying now, they were singing a devotional. But the devotional that you sing when you are twenty-three and have just been hired as a double bass player in the Berlin Philharmonic, is very different from the devotional that you hum in the Untergrund when the Lancasters growl overhead. It was the latter they sang now, both rebuke and consolation, the mix ultimately some kind of deep ache for the world they had lost. It would never come back.

  Plucked emphases from the basses formed a perfect cover for him to tap the D drum around the rim and check the tuning. It seemed all right. As a totality it was perhaps a bit sharp, but it was consistent, and he could pedal it down and all would be well.

  Now he came to the similar light taps that were actually written in the score. How Beethoven had loved pulse, no composer before him and few since had ever thought to use the timpani in this way. Schnapp still glared at them from his cockpit; they definitely had made some noise during their operation, but as there were people in the audience coughing from time to time in helpless little explosions, it did not seem to the timpanist that it could matter much. He focused on his part, the gentle tapping in time with the tune. When else did he ever get to sing like this? It was such a sweet and peaceful thing.

  But then, a light bang: the end was nigh. Slower than ever, as the coda declared itself; even there he got to tap along, gently gently. Then the solid thumps at the end; but not the end (another little joke); but then the end.

  Fourth movement: Presto Ode to Joy

  From the first shot of the finale they were cast immediately back into the violence of the first and second movements. His big copper drums were fully involved in that, simply smashing people back into reality and the war. The brief recollections of the first three movements made their truncated appearances each in turn, but each then mutated back into the war. The conflict swirled, thundered, sucked them all back down. All this dark re-announcement of the world was soon to be broken by the sound of the human voice, the hoarse shout of a man. But for the moment darkness was all.

  Then the famous theme, the raw material they would be wrestling with for the next half hour, came into the world as a kind of feeling in the stomach, a mere whispering from the basses. The maestro liked this very pianissimo, and as usual he had arranged for the choir to come onto the stage during this first enunciation, so that the singers' little coughs and the unavoidable creaks of their feet on the risers were almost as loud as the basses, which made Schnapp glower; but the maestro liked it that way. The first time through, he would say, it's supposed to ghost into you.

  So the Bruno Kittel choir shuffled in, as quietly as they could; and as they did (it took a while) the strings picked up the great tune and carried it and its most basic descant up into consciousness, rising then like a wave to break into the brasses. Now standing all around and behind the timpanist was a crowd of people, men and women ranked on risers. Easily a hundred women there to his right, in their white blouses and perfect hair—their presence palpable, their scent a mix of shampoo and sweat that smelled to him like bread. Now the whole nation was the band.

  The quartet of soloists stood up together, down there to Furtwängler's right. Not these tones! the bass singer bellowed, and they began the immense and unstable mix of vocal and orchestral that would surge thereafter around the stage. Meanings ricocheted out of the strange lyrics: something better had to exist, they seemed to say, or they would make it out of nothing; this is how he interpreted it, and the phrases often matched that feeling. Then the whole choir jumped in with the bass, saying the same lines: and they were well launched on the tumultuous ride of the great finale.

  The structure of the movement made for many moments and passages complete in themselves, each section a kind of continent they were to traverse. It was not quite a tone poem, but rather a set of variations so various that they were hardly recognizable as such; still the great tune lay inside each one of them, concealed within inversions, reversals, textural changes, tempo changes—every kind of change deployed, every kind of magnificence revealed. Keeping the order and flow between the sections was part of the maestro's job, and one aspect of his genius.

  Among other things, he had taught them that when the quartet of soloists sang, the players had to dampen their sound to make the four audible to the listeners in the hall. He was very insistent on this dynamic modulation, and they had learned to play in a mode that might be called piano furioso, an intense mode which kept the music and the players on fire without overwhelming the soloists' sound. The orchestra was better at this than the Kittel choir, or so it sounded to the timpanist; when choir and soloists were both singing, the soloists could not possibly be heard over their massed ensemble. Maybe it didn't matter. They were all singing the solos in their heads anyway, hearing them the way his dad heard Matthias.

  Surely there could be no one happier than a timpanist in the midst of this finale. He was asked to bang, thump, grumble, pound, tap, roar. He drove the music, punctuated it, played in it; it was as if Beethoven had been concerned to make him joyful. The so-called Turkish variation, with the tenor's solo in it, went off with jaunty gaiety, his fellow percussionists clanging away like drunken Ottomans. And the tenor was very fine. Every quartet had its best member, and this time it appeared to be the tenor, one Helge Roswange, whose voice had a friendly and even noble tone. Unfortunately his solo's final flourish, his leap to the sky, was completely overwhelmed by the choir. One had to hear it like Beethoven had heard it.

  This led to the solemn chords of the passage in which the choir sang very slowly. Over— the— stars, and so on. That too went well. Again a prayer. The women's voices were an unearthly sound, there was no instrument that could match that sound for sheer beauty.

  On they moved, as if through rooms in heaven; and as each part of the symphony had gone so well, as well as any of them had ever heard it, the stakes were somehow raised, their spirits were raised; they became exhilarated. He could hear very clearly that the choir was as caught up by this as the instrumentalists: their voices, my Lord! All were caught together in something tremendous, flying up into it; and Furtwängler was alive to it, he was pulling it together for them to hear and sing. On his face they saw: if they made it beautiful enough, they might leave the planet altogether. Oh they were culpable, yes, but they had not intended it. Suffering had driven them to it. They had gone mad, but in their madness made this. What if the worst culture made the most beautiful thing, what then? Wasn't it then more complicated than people thought? It would at least be a conundrum forever, people would look at the film and listen to the tapes and hear this music and take pause, see birds in a cage, hear that not everyone had been suborned, that some had had to stay and fight from within as best they could, with whatever they had, even if it was just to make a music that would remind people hunched by their radio that there was a better world.

  Then there came the timpanist's favorite part in the entire symphony: the big fugue marked Allegro energico, sempre ben marcato—a braided fugue in which different parts of the choir split first into two parts, then moved on to other melodies while new voices took up the original pair, after which the orchestra also broke into sections and joined either one vocal part or another, while violins and basses also tossed back and forth a rapid obbligato, above or below, or both at once. Large groups of people therefore were simultaneously belting out tunes entirely distinct and different from the rest— Joy, beautiful divine spark, we are intoxicated with fire as we enter your sanctuary— All men become brothers wherever your gentle wing reposes— Do you have a presentiment of the eternal, O world? Seek it above the starry tent! Over the stars it must dwell! —all these phrases overlapping in the same time and space, and yet the weaving lines made something massive and right, a polyphony with so many interlocking melodies that the timpanist could not believe that Beethoven in his deafness could really have imagined what it would sound like, he must only have seen it as a patter
n on the page, a hope in him, a hope now filling the hall, a magnificent chaos that was not chaos—he got to emphasize this on his drums—out of chaos emerged order, out of chaos emerged beauty, a beauty so complex it could not be comprehended. This must be the passage, Günther thought, as he always thought when playing it, where Beethoven had gotten confused during the premiere performance. The old man had sat on the stage next to the conductor, trying to help with tempi, but had lost his place, and the conductor had forged on without him; and when it was all over and the audience clapped and cheered, Beethoven had sat there still facing the orchestra, his back to the audience, deaf and unaware, perhaps disconsolate at losing his place; and so the soprano, Fraulein Unger, had gone to him and taken his hand and turned him around so he could see the audience, who then began leaping in the air to show him how they felt. This was his country, these were his people, the nation of musicians, sovereign even in chains. Wherever your gentle wing reposes. Whoever has become a friend of a friend. He pounded this feeling home at the fugue's end, just as Beethoven required of him.

  Now their faces were all flushed. Red-faced, bright-eyed, they kept their gazes fixed on the maestro or their sheet music, as if to look around might reveal something unbearable. Intently the choir whispered the tip-toe section that followed, rocking back and forth, the whispered staccato seek it—above—the star—ry tent before the sudden shouts, Brothers! Brothers! Back and forth, whisper shout, whisper shout, such fun to do, all now shouting together as loudly as they could. Two hundred strong—he had never heard music this loud in his life. The performance just kept on getting better, they all heard it, it seized them up and carried them off!

  The final quartet of the soloists came at last, sign of the approaching end: a curious gnarled thing to the timpanist's ear, like four lines of wool all kinked in knots; but with the gorgeous high turn of the soprano at the climax, that downward bend on the word wing—Where your gentle wiiiing alights. Where grace comes down and touches our soul.

  The moment the soprano finished her last words, dein sanfter Flügel weilt, Furtwängler rushed them through the complex coda, he drove them. First very fast, in a real hurry—then the final ritard, for the toppling off the cliff of the voices, the falling fifths again—at the bottom of which he redoubled the pace to something quite inhuman. Always he did it this way, "go like a bat out of hell," he would say, but never so fast as on this night of nights. Even at his usual tempo the piccolo player was forced to play with supernatural speed and volume, but on this night Frans had to simply throw his hat to the wind and skreel like a maniac, and the timpanist had to strike every note of it with him, and he did!

  Then they stood there, still inside the reverberations of the final chord, still ringing with it. The timpanist listened, quivering, his eyes fixed on Furtwängler's face. In the silence certain to follow, everything that so horribly portended would come to pass, all that hung over this night like a sword—their ongoing crime, the inevitable judgment, death itself—none of it mattered. They were gone.

  Afterword by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Thanks

  First: thank you, readers of my fiction; I appreciate your giving it your time and thought, which brings it to life.

  This is also a good place to thank all the editors who helped me with these stories. Damon Knight was my first editor and one of my most important teachers. I miss him. Same for my second editor, Terry Carr. Thank you also to Ed Ferman, Beth Meacham, Lou Aronica, Shawna McCarthy, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gregory Benford, Jan O'Nale, David Pringle, Henry Gee, and Jane Johnson. Many of the stories in this book exist because of requests from these friends and colleagues.

  In this book particularly, it is a pleasure to thank Jonathan Strahan, whose idea the book was, and who selected and arranged the stories in a way I really like, but could not have figured out myself.

  My writing teachers were also important to most of these stories, and I remain grateful to them: Donald Wesling, Fredric Jameson, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Joe Haldeman, Kate Wilhelm, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gary Snyder.

  Science fiction is, among other things, a community—something like a small town, scattered (as if by some cosmic accident) across space and time. I wrote these stories as a resident of that town, in conversation with that community. Some of my friends had a particularly strong effect on my short fiction, either by comment or example, and I'd like to thank in particular my Clarion classmates; also Carter Scholz, Lucius Shepard, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, John Clute, Terry Bisson, Paul Park, and Karen Fowler. I am lucky to know these people.

  The Stories

  I don't have much to say about these stories in the aggregate. I can see that there are differences and similarities among them, but this is not a deep insight. I also see some shifts in my methods over the years, as well as some enduring concerns and habits; again, not a remarkable observation. I think I will do better by speaking about the stories individually, as almost all of them spark a few memories or observations in me, which may be of interest. So let's do it that way.

  "Venice Drowned"

  In the summer of 1977 I traveled through Europe with friends, and on the way to Trieste our train pulled into the Venice train station to transfer our car to another train. I had just enough time to walk out the main entry of the station, see that its broad stairs dropped into a canal, and then hurry back to our train.

  That glimpse stuck with me, and after some reading about Venice (Shelley's poem "Julian and Maddalo" told me about the island asylum), I wrote this story. It was my first sale to Terry Carr, and the start of a too-short friendship with him. What a beautiful guy.

  After the story was published, in December of 1985, my wife Lisa and I came into Venice on the ferry from Athens, and only then did I really see the city and its lagoon, including the nearly deserted island of Torcello, and its church's great mosaic of the Virgin Mary—the one the tourists in my story are trying to take away. Last year I visited Venice again, and found giant posters of the Torcello Mary plastered all over town, as if to tell me: still here.

  The rise in sea level described in the story is pretty stupendous, and yet in a century or two we may have done it.

  "Ridge Running"

  I started this story at the end of the Clarion I attended, in the summer of 1975, then worked on it again for Ursula Le Guin's writing class at UC San Diego, in the spring of 1977. Final efforts were made in 1983, when Ed Ferman bought it for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  This was the first published story of mine about being in the mountains, so I was really pleased when readers put it on the Hugo ballot—a generous gesture that has been a permanent encouragement to me.

  "Before I Wake"

  I kept a dream journal from 1975 to about 1980, and found that the ability to remember dreams is like a muscle: the more you work it, the stronger it gets. While recording my dreams I was often amazed at their surreality, and wished I could be so bold in my waking fiction. Then one morning I woke with the idea for this story. It would necessarily be a disaster story, but it would be a new kind of disaster—something to add to the Ballardian list of ways to wreck the world. I used some of my dreams' images in the story, so this one was truly "writing unconscious."

  "Black Air"

  I wrote this one in early 1982, soon after moving in with Lisa in Davis. I don't remember the idea coming to me; seems like one day I was writing it, and it already knew what it was. A mysterious visitor.

  It was given the World Fantasy Award for best novella, and that was the occasion for a fun trip to Ottawa to receive the award. While there I visited Canada's national art gallery, and went to the Europe floor and was really unimpressed. I was in the elevator leaving the building, thinking Poor Canada, so culturally deprived, they have even managed to acquire five bad van Goghs, maybe the five worst van Goghs of all—when the elevator doors opened on the Canadian floor, revea
ling several giant canvases of the Group of Seven. I got out there and had one of the most visually stunning hours of my life. I learned that Canada does not need van Goghs.

  "The Lucky Strike"

  One day in 1983, when we were living in our little place in downtown Davis, the image came to me of the Enola Gay, flying toward Japan but then tipping over and falling into the sea. That was a story for sure, but what? After a few weeks of reading I wrote it out pretty quickly.

  "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions"

  After I wrote "The Lucky Strike," I began to have second thoughts about the postwar alternative history described at the end of that story. Back in DC after our Swiss adventure, I was reading all the new stuff about chaos theory, and some historiography in preparation for the Mars books, and it seemed to me human history might be regarded as a kind of chaotic system. This story was the result. It had a strange form, but it did what I wanted; and "form follows function" is one of the great rules.

  "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars"

  This one I wrote in 1998, but the inspiration for it came from our two years in Zürich (1986–87), when I was a member of the baseball team Züri 85. My teammates were great guys, who made us feel more at home in Switzerland.