by Damon Knight
“Because,” he explains, waving the drumstick about, “this is prettier. Isn’t that reason enough? Christ! You purists are so refined. If you are to play my instrument you must change the way you think of yourself.”
“You can’t change the way you are.”
“You most certainly can! What could be simpler? Listen: you want the music to be played as written, as well as possible. Fine. That is admirable. My instrument does not make much of a symphonic orchestra, it is true, even though the simplifications made are your fault and not the machine’s; but that is not what I built it to be, believe me! It has its own artistic integrity, and you must find it. If you do not like simplifying orchestral arrangements, don’t! Play something else! If you can find nothing that seems suitable, write something yourself! I don’t suppose anyone has shown you my compositions for the instrument? No? Ah, well, they never did think much of me as a composer.” He brightens. “Enjoy yourself in that little booth, eh? Have you ever done that? It’s quite easy.”
I look around at the banks of keyboards. “It’s just like putting on a show,” I mutter.
“So? Then put on a show! It’s a great, showy machine when you get to know it. Of course, you don’t know it very well yet.” He smiles a crafty smile. “I took nineteen years to build it,” he says, “and it would only take two or three to put it together. There’s more to it than meets the eye.” He turns to leave, shimmering his familiar transparent red. He walks to the door and stops. “Play it,” he says, “don’t just look at it. Play it with everything in you.” He leaves. The door closes.
So here I am, a young man frying in a hallucinogenic withdrawal, suspended in this contraption like a fly trapped in the web of a spider frying in a hallucinogenic withdrawal.. . You’ve seen pictures of those poor tangled webs that drugged spiders make in labs? That is what Pierson’s Orchestra would look like in two dimensions, from any side. Glass arms holding out bright brass and wood instruments like Christmas-tree ornaments. A glass hand, a tree reaching up in a swirl of rich browns and silvers and prisms. Music doesn’t grow on trees, you know. The cymbals are edged with rainbows.
Most certainly I have been suffering delusions. It is easy afterward to say that a conversation with a man dead three centuries is an illusion, but while it is happening, quite definitely happening, it is hard to discount one’s senses. Damage is being done in my brain; it is as if I can feel the individual cells swelling and popping. I am very sick. There is little to do but sit and wait it out. Surely it is near the end—in a sudden flash I see the Orchestra as a giant baroque cross upon which I am draped … but no. It is a fantasy, one I can recognize. I am afraid of those I can’t recognize.
“Just like sex,” the deaf man said, “climax at the end.” I wait. Time passes. Pop pop pop .. . like swollen grains of rice. Something must be done. Might as well play the damn thing. Put on a show.
I'm not convinced by you, Pierson! Not a bit!
I begin arranging the keyboards into concert position, my hands shoving them about like tugboats pushing big ships. Dispassionately I watch my hands shake. The cold corner of my mind has taken over and somehow I am outside the nausea. I am seeing things with the clarity you have when you are extremely hungry, or tired past the point of being tired. Everything is quite clear, quite in focus. I have heard that drowning men experience a last period of great calm and clarity before losing consciousness. Perhaps the tide is that high now. I cannot tell. Oh, I am tired of this! Why can’t it be over? Bach’s “Rejoice, Beloved Christians,” the baritone playing the high line. The passages come to me clean and sharp now. I find it hard to keep my balance; everything is overexposed. I am swaying. I close my eyes. A Chopin Nocturne. Against the black field of my eyelids’ insides there is a marvelous show of lights, little colored worms that burst into existence, crawl across my vision and disappear. Behind the lights are barely discernible patterns, geometric tapestries that flare and contract under the pressure of my eyelids. The music is intertwined with this odd mandala; when I clamp my eyes hard there is a sudden rush of blue geometry with a black center, with it a roll of tympani, shrieking of woodwinds, and the strings fitting quickly and surely into the fantastic blue patterns that blossom before me. Mozart’s Concerto in G, as effortlessly as if I were the conductor and not the performer. Above it rises a trumpet solo, my own improvisation, arching high above the structure of the concerto. My interior field of vision clears and becomes a neutral color, grey or dull purple. Ten clear lines run across it in sets of five. The score. As I play the notes they appear, in long vertical sets as in a conductor’s score. They move off to the left as if the score were on a conveyor belt. Excellent. Halfnotes, quarter-notes in the bass clef; long runs of sixteenth-notes in the treble, all like the sun shining through pinholes in a dark sheet of paper. The concerto flows into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with a transition that pleases me. As far as I can tell the score is perfectly accurate. I am playing brilliantly, with enough confidence to throw grace notes of my own about in passages of great speed. I think, “It would be nice to have the cellos playing their counterpoint here,” and then I hear the cellos making their quick departure from the rest of the strings. My fingers are not doing it. Play it with everything you have. The Finale of the Third, every single instrument achingly clean and individual. Nineteen years, Pierson, is this what you meant?
The Orchestra is the extension of what I want to hear.
I move into realms of my own, shifting from passage to passage, playing what I always wanted to hear; half-remembered snatches, majestic crescendos that you wake up from in the middle of the night, having dreamed them, and wish you could recapture; the architecture of Bach, the power of Beethoven, the beauty of Mozart, the wit and transitions of de Baik. All a confusion, all a marvel. Think it in your head and hear the Orchestra play it. The performer the instrument, the instrument a part of the performer. Pierson, what have you done?
Music. If you are at all alive to it you will have heard passages that bring a chill to your back and a flush of blood to your cheeks; a physical response to beauty. A rush. The music I am playing now is the very distillation of that feeling. It soars out and for the first time I hear echoes in this room, it is that powerful. The score no longer consists of musical notation; it is an impressionistic fantasy of a musical score, the background a deep blood red, the notes sudden clusters of jewels or long flows of colors I can’t identify even as I see them; yet see them, most certainly. The drums are pounding, strings rushing and jumbling, awash in a wave of fortissimo brass shouts, not blaring—the horns of the Orchestra cannot blare—but at their highest volume, triumphant—
… triumphant she is as I ascend the dais I can see her face and she is strained and ecstatic as if in labor for to her I am being born again and throughout the investiture all I can see is her bright face before me unto her a Master is born—
. . . and masterful, chaotic yet perfectly calculated. The score is a mille fleurs of twisted colors, falling, falling, the notes are falling. I open my eyes and find that they are already stretched wide open; a rush, a rush of red, red is all I see, a blinding waterfall of molten glass cascading down, behind it a thousand suns.
I awake from a dream in which I was … in which I was . . . walking through hallways. Talking with someone. I cannot remember.
I am lying on the glass floor of the booth, I can feel the bas-relief of the clef signs. My mouth feels as if it had been washed in acids, which I suppose it has. My legs. My left hand is asleep. I have been poured from my container, my skeleton is gone, I am a lump of flesh. I move my arm. An achievement.
“Eric,” comes the Master’s voice, high-pitched in its anxiety. It is probably what awakened me. His hand on my shoulder. He babbles without pause as he helps me out of the Orchestra, “I just got back, you’re all right, you’re all right, the music you were playing, my God, magnificent, here, here, watch out, you’re all right, my son—”
“I am blind,” I croak. There is a pause,
a gasp. He holds me in his arms, half carries me onto a cot of some sort, muttering in a strained voice as he moves me about.
“Horrible, horrible,” he keeps saying. “Horrible.” It is age-old. Lose your sight, and learn to see. I blink away tears for my lost vision, and cannot see myself blink.
“You will make a great Master,” he says firmly.
I do not answer.
“The blindness will not make any difference at all.”
And after a long pause—
“Yes,” I say, wishing he understood, wishing there was someone who understood, “I think it will.”
The Memory Machine
Our guest today, the marvelous actress Mercedes McCambridge, was at one time in dire need of trouble.
—Barbara Walters
* * *
How's That? How’s That? How’s That?
That love is salt in my wounds, that love is sand in my throat, Claire. Claire. Claire. —“The Feast of St. Dionysus,” by Robert Silverberg, in An Exaltation of Stars, edited by Terry Carr (Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 6.
“Brother,” he said. “Brother! Brother!” —Ibid., p. 30.
“Yes, John? Yes? Yes?” —Ibid., p. 40.
We might be able to do anything, the Speaker says, once we have reached that hidden god and transformed ourselves into the gods we were meant to be. Anything. Anything. Anything.
—Ibid., p. 46.
“Dave!” Oxenshuer cries. “Oh, Christ, Dave! Dave!”
—Ibid., p. 51.
I float. I go forth. I. I. I. —Ibid., p. 53.
I go to the god’s house and his fire consumes me. Go. Go. Go.
—Ibid., same page.
* * *
Whom, heem?
This book is honest homage from an early master of science fiction to an earlier writer whom Williamson feels has not yet been surpassed.
—Alexei and Cory Panshin, in F&SF, March 1974
Rioz, whom we started out thinking was going to be the third-person limited narrative point of view, is no longer even present.
—The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov, by Joseph E. Patrouch Jr. (Doubleday, 1974)
* * *
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Perhaps, though he did not like to admit it, his sight had betrayed him. Behind his glasses were fifty-four-year-old eyes.
—“Stations of the Nightmare, Part 1,” by Philip Jos6 Farmer, in Continuum 1, edited by Roger Elwood (Putnam, 1974)
After rejecting quantities of suitors out of devotion to the Tolstoyan ideal, she had fallen wildly in love with a man much older than she, Michael Sukhotin, who was married and the father of six children; he was in his fifties, had a middle-aged paunch and was both charming and witty.
—Tolstoy, by Henri Troyat, translated by Nancy Amphoux
* * *
So Much For Kidneys' Lib
… Are you SURE that an absolute ruling aristocracy is an evil and unworkable thing? Even one that’s been carefully, laboriously worked out on a hierarchic basis over many, many generations of trial and error, under all sorts of real-world challenges?
Then dethrone that arbitrary, absolute tyrant between your ears—that gray aristocracy that lives in its stone-walled castle up on top, demanding tribute of oxygen, food and comfort at the expense of trillions of worker cells! Away with that luxury-loving ruling aristocracy! Free the trillions of working individuals, and establish perfect equality among all the individual cells!
It’s guaranteed to work—just destroy that unequal hierarchy and perfect equality results.
All the cells are dead very shortly.
—John W. Campbell, Jr., in Analog, July 1967
* * *
But Nothing to Compare with a Hole in the Shoe
“Hello,” Project Dove’s coordinator interrupted his wish on the seventh ring.
“Udall, this is Coltrain!”
“What . . . Coltrain?” Udall yawned sleepily.
“Listen, for God’s sake, Liu’s got—” He stopped. There was something aggrandizing about the emptiness of a dead line.
—“The Sixth Face,” by Thomas Sullivan (Analog, April 1975)
* * *
Let's See, Jesse Was the One Who Robbed Banks . . .
Last year’s Hugo Award winning story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Ornelas” by Ursula Le Guin carried the subtitle: “Variations on a Theme by Henry James.” At the time I felt sure I understood the story . . . but since then I have seen so many interpretations that not only contradict my conception of what the story means, but contradict each other, so perhaps Le Guin’s intended moral is not as obvious as I thought it was. Perhaps a clue to the meaning is contained in the subtitle, but I am not familiar with the works of William James—nor can I find anyone in the Psychology Department here who can enlighten me. Does anyone out there know what the reference to James in the subtitle means.
—Denis Quane, Notes from the Chemistry Dept. #11, May
MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER
A story of the golden time, when a man with a string of stolen Cadillacs could stand tall and look the world in the eye.
Howard Waldrop
It was the time of the Sun Dance and the Big Tractor Pull. Freddy-in-the-Hollow and I had traveled three days to be at the River. We were almost late, what with the sandstorm and the raid on the white settlement over to Old Dallas.
We pulled in with our wrecker and string of fine cars, many of them newly stolen. You should have seen Freddy and me that morning, the first morning of the Sun Dance.
We were dressed in new-stolen fatigues and we had bright leather holsters and pistols. Freddy had a new carbine, too. We were wearing our silver and feathers and hard goods. I noticed many women watching us as we drove in. There seemed to be many more here than the last Sun Ceremony. It looked to be a good time.
The usual crowd gathered before we could circle up our remuda. I saw Bob One-Eye and Nathan Big Gimp, the mechanics, come across from their circles. Already the cook fires were burning and women were skinning out the cattle that had been slaughtered early in the morning.
“Hoa!” I heard Nathan call as he limped to our wrecker. He was old; his left leg had been shattered in the Highway wars, he went back that far. He put his hands on his hips and looked over our line.
“I know that car, Billy-Bob Chevrolet,” he said to me, pointing to an old Mercury. “Those son-a-bitch Dallas people stole it from me last year. I know its plates. It is good you stole it back. Maybe I will talk to you about doing car work to get it back sometime.”
“We’ll have to drink about it,” I said.
“Let’s stake them out,” said Freddy-in-the-Hollow. “I’m tired of pulling them.”
We parked them in two parallel rows and put up the signs, the strings of pennants and the whirlers. Then we got in the wrecker and smoked.
Many people walked by. We were near the Karankawa fuel trucks, so people would be coming by all time. Some I knew by sight, many I had known since I was a boy. They all walked by as though they did not notice the cars, but I saw them looking out of the comers of their eyes. Music was starting down the way, and most people were heading there. There would be plenty music in the next five days. I was in no hurry. We would all be danced out before the week was up.
Some of the men kept their strings tied to their tow trucks as if they didn’t care whether people saw them or not. They acted as if they were ready to move out at any time. But that was not the old way. In the old times, you had your cars parked in rows so they could be seen. It made them harder to steal, too, especially if you had a fence.
But none of the Tractor Pullers had arrived yet, and that was what everybody was waiting for.
The talk was that Simon Red Bulldozer would be here this year. He was known from the Brazos to the Sabine, though he had never been to one of our Ceremonies. He usually stayed in the Guadalupe River area.
But he had beaten everybody there and had taken all the fun out of their Big Pulls. So he ha
d gone to the Karankawa Ceremony last year, and now was supposed to be coming to ours. They still talk about the time Simon Red Bulldozer took on Elmo John Deere two summers ago. I would have traded many plates to be there.
“We need more tobacco,” said Freddy-in-the-Hollow.
“We should have stolen some from the whites,” I said. “It will cost us plenty here.”
“Don’t you know anyone?”
“I know everyone, Fred,” I said quietly (a matter of pride). “But nobody has any friends during the Ceremonies. You pay for what you get.”
It was Freddy-in-the-Hollow’s first Sun Dance as a Raider. All the times before, he had come with his family. He still wore his coup-charm, a big VW symbol pried off the first car he’d boosted, on a chain around his neck. He was only seventeen summers. Someday he would be a better thief than me. And I’m the best there is.
Simon Red Bulldozer was expected soon, and all the men were talking a little and laying a few bets.
“You know,” said Nathan Big Gimp, leaning against a wrecker at his shop down by the community fires, “I saw Simon turn over three tractors two summers ago, one after the other. The way he does it will amaze you, Billy-Bob.”
I allowed as how he might be the man to bet on.
“Well, you really should, though the margin is slight. There’s always the chance Elmo John Deere will show.”
I said maybe that was what I was waiting for.
But it wasn’t true. Freddy-in-the-Hollow and I had talked in English to a man from the Red River people the week before. He made some hints but hadn’t really told us anything. They had a big Puller, he said, and you shouldn’t lose your money on anyone else.