The music was almost as inconsequential as the baritone’s hunting song—an arrangement of one of the waltz-like Martian kumbus. But the voice . . .
It was not only the rich solidity of its lower notes, its ease in the upper register, the unbroken transition over what must be damned near two and a half octaves, but the absolute clarity and facility with which it handled every trick in the conceivable repertory of the voice. It was cold; you might even say it was mechanical; but it was, Jon Arthur realized, the first time in his life that he had heard absolutely perfect singing.
He looked at the faces of the other critics. Good, there’d be no time wasted in balloting. The audition was settled, and he could stop being a music critic and take up the more important (and, his observing mind could not help commenting, somewhat more absurd) task of striving single-handed to save man and his system.
He always thought of the penthouse in the Eighties, complete with view of the Hudson, as “Headquarters.” It was another of the small touches of melodrama that he liked to insert to keep himself sane.
Steele Morrison maneuvered his pulleys and the outsize boatswain’s chair swung across the room to greet him. “Sure,” Morrison always answered the frequent protests, “I know with modern prosthetics I could walk as good as anybody. But then I’d get exercise and I’d lose weight; and every time I weighed in for spaceflight, I swore once I retired I’d be the fattest man in New York.”
Jon Arthur shook the vast hand and marveled, as always, at the unflabbiness of its grip. “Somebody’s tracked him down,” he said without preamble. “He’s at Venusberg.”
“We do get some breaks, baby, don’t we?” Morrison zoomed the boatswain’s chair across its network to the bar. “Straight?”
“As usual.”
“How soon you going?”
“This damned audition deal ties in like a dream. Since I was on the committee, it’ll be a natural to sell the paper on a follow-up story on Mme. Storm’s colony at Venusberg.”
Morrison nodded as he traveled back with the drinks. You never went to the part of the room where Steele Morrison was; it hurt his feelings not to be able to zoom back at you. “Don’t know why—had a hunch and did a little reading on Mme. Storm. Rumors of something nice and tender back in her great days between her and Kleinbach. Use it for what it’s worth.”
“She was a great singer. I’ve heard her tapes.”
Morrison shrugged. “Something else too, I guess. Can a man fall in love with a voice, baby?”
Jon Arthur gave a little silent and serious consideration to his drink and (surprising himself) to the question.
“Matter? Did I say something?”
“No, just thinking. Making plans. The audition winner,” Arthur carefully sounded as indifferent as though it had been the baritone, “leaves next Monday. I can set up the deal by then. Think it’s worth one last crack at Weddergren in the meantime?” Steele Morrison zoomed for a corner and traveled back with an election pamphlet in the familiar aseptic blue and white of the Academy. “Here’s his latest, baby. It’s out in the open now: no more elections, that’s for sure. Antiquated and unscientific, seems as how. The system is Man’s laboratory, ” he read, “in which he conducts the greatest of all his experiments: the shaping of his own destiny. To run this laboratory by democratic politics is as absurd as to base its experiments upon the ‘laws’ of alchemy and astrology. That’s what the man says.”
“The worst of which is that it so damned near makes sense.”
“Baby,” said Morrison, “I’ve got kind of a vested interest in this system. With one leg buried on Mars and the other on Venus you might say I sort of straddle it. All our kind of people a hundred years ago, they thought once we forgot nationalism and got world government everything was going to be as easy as a high jump on Mars. Well, we’ve got world government, no phony league but an honest Federation based on the individual as a unit—and that Federation is smack up against the most important election in its history without any possibility of electing the right party. If the Academy wins, we’re a laboratory—which I give maybe one generation before it becomes a technological autocracy. If the Populists win—and may their jets clog forever for stealing that fine old word—we’ll have book burnings and lab smashings and a fine fast dive into the New Dark Ages. And in between are the guys who don’t care, the guys who can’t be bothered, the guys who’d like to but. . .”
“And us,” Arthur concluded, “keeping underground so we won’t wind up in the Belsens of either side . . . I’m seeing Weddergren tonight,” he suddenly announced his decision. “We’ve got to make one more try.”
The system’s greatest scientist but one, the Academy’s candidate for President of the World Federation, was surprisingly accessible to Jon Arthur. A technician (the Academy was firmly opposed to a servant class, but a man needs technical assistants) ushered Arthur into the study the moment he heard his name.
Dr. Weddergren advanced, white mane and all, to greet him warmly. “Delighted, my boy! I was hoping you’d come around in person to congratulate me on my pupil.” This seemed a peculiar gambit even for an Academy politician. “Your pupil?”
“The Parva. Faustina Parva. The contralto who—”
For a moment Arthur was distracted from his mission. “Phenomenal,” he admitted. “Tire greatest voice, I swear, that I have ever heard. But your pupil . . . ?”
Dr. Weddergren allowed himself a patronizing smile. “So you didn’t know? You’re like the rest, eh? The Weddergren Drive . . . the Weddergren Orbit Calculator . . . The shoemaker should stick to his last, perhaps, as those unscientific Populists keep striving to assert?”
Arthur had never quite realized that unscientific could be the most obscene term of invective in the language. “I knew, of course, that you were fond of music . . .” he began.
“Fond?” There was a brief glimpse of a sincerity which the Weddergren features had never revealed on a telescreen. “You might say that. You might also, if you wish, say that it is my life—in a way that the Weddergren Drive or even the Academy can never be. And this part of my life,” his features took on again their reasonable persuasiveness, “offers fresh evidence of the nature in which science can guide and mold life in any of its aspects. As a music critic, you are, I imagine, somewhat familiar with vocal training and its methods?”
“I am.” Arthur smiled. “It is difficult to imagine a less scientific field.”
“Precisely. And yet what is its objective? To enable a machine to produce optimum results. The nature of that machine is exactly and minutely known. There is not the slightest mystery attached to the functioning of any of its parts. Yet instead of feeding into that machine an accurately punched tape, furnishing it with complete instruction on the control and articulation of each of its parts for every specified result desired, what do vocal teachers do? They teach by example, by metaphor, by analogy, by feeling and intuition! It is as though, instead of allowing a calculator the normal functioning of its binary synapses, you read it a lecture on the mystique of the theory of numbers!”
“There’s something in what you say,” Arthur admitted, with an eerie echo of his partial agreement with the doctrine of the System as Laboratory.
“The Parva,” Weddergren announced, “is my proof. A good vocal organ to start with, of course. One does not waste time on a shoddily constructed machine. Careful analysis of the precise physiology of the voice. A long and detailed course of training, on strictest scientific principles with no mystical flubdubbery. Intensive hypnopedagogy until the mind has learned in sleep every minutest aspect of the volitional control of the vocal apparatus. That is all, and the result you heard this afternoon.”
Jon Arthur’s mental ear heard again the beauty, the perfection . . . and the hint of coldness. It was that hint which enabled him to say, “Music is so often allied with science, isn’t it? One has read of Einstein, and wasn’t Kleinbach much interested too?”
Again Weddergren nearly forgot to be t
elegenic. “Kleinbach . . .” he said softly. “I studied under him, you know. I suppose if this century has produced a great man . . .”
“I’ve met others of his pupils, but they never could explain him to me. Perhaps you can, Dr. Weddergren. Do you understand why he did . . . what he did?”
“Vanish, you mean? Remove himself? To think we do not even know whether he is alive or . . . Frankly, I think I do. He understood the necessity for the Academy and for the steps that we shall take after the election. But he could not bring himself to face those steps in actuality. With all his greatness he was . . . a romantic, shall we say? Perhaps even an atavist. And yet I have sometimes thought . . . It was an equation of Kleinbach’s, you know, that started me on the road to the Drive. And it was Kleinbach taking me to hear Storm that first aroused my interest in the voice. If I could talk to him, I’ve sometimes thought . . . If after the election he . . . My boy,” Dr. Weddergren suddenly observed to a nonexistent telecamera, “I have no desire to talk anything but music with you. I so rarely have such an opportunity to indulge myself. You thought you heard something extraordinary this afternoon—as indeed you did. How would you like, now, to hear the only perfect voice in the world?”
Jon Arthur was all affable interest and musical companionship. He had learned what he needed to know.
It was as he left Weddergren’s, still a little dazed by what the scientist had displayed, that the first attempt was made on his life.
It was a clumsy attempt and undoubtedly Populist in origin. An Academy assassin might simply have brushed against him and deposited a few bacilli; it was fortunate that the Populists’ abhorrence of science extended even to its criminal uses.
The plan had obviously been to insert a knife between his ribs. The moment he sensed the rush of his attacker, he set his muscles in the Fifth Position of juzor—that extraordinary blend of Terran judo and Martian zozor on which he had spent so many months under Steele Morrison’s eye, with Steele’s sharp tongue keeping him going whenever he was tempted to point out the absurdity of a peace-loving music critic as a juzor-expert secret agent.
Somewhat to his amazement, the Fifth Position worked. The Populist lay sprawled on the sidewalk, looking like a not too bright but rather friendly young man who has just passed out amiably. Arthur did not stop to check if the skull was fractured in the precise spot indicated in the book of instructions; he simply pocketed the knife and, once he had convinced himself there was not another on his tail, hurried to “Headquarters.”
“So now maybe you’ll begin to think it’s serious,” Morrison grunted after the third drink, “Until you reach Kleinbach and get back with his message—if he’ll give you one—your chances of enjoying good health are about as good as for a bonfire on an airless asteroid. Especially watch it on the liner; they’re bound to have somebody aboard.”
They did, but it was a week before Jon Arthur spotted him.
The liner was one of the new deluxe fleet, completely autogravitized and hyperjetted to the point where the trip to Venus was cut down to three months. With the election seven months off, a half-year’s round trip left him one month to find Kleinbach and persuade him; that was timing it as fine as writing music for splitsecond telecast tapes.
But all the time-tension would come when they hit Venusberg. For three months on the liner there was nothing to do but enjoy himself—and, incidentally, stay alive.
The latter task seemed to offer no difficulties at the moment; certainly neither did the former, once he began to become really acquainted with Faustina Parva.
The audition winner had at first treated him merely with the courtesy due to a judge who had cast one of the votes that sent her to Venus. The slight coldness that he had detected in her singing was accentuated in her speaking personality, and he was more than willing now to believe that she was Dr. Wedtiergren’s creation.
Then, one week out, came the episode of her practicing.
Whether it was consideration for others or the sense of relaxation that strikes all space voyagers, Jon Arthur was uncertain; the first seemed a little unlikely. But for a week she had refrained from practicing. Now she began.
The most beautiful voice in the world (which it was quite possible that the Parva possessed) is somewhat lacking in appeal when it practices scales, when it takes one single phrase of great technical difficulty and scant musical interest and repeats it, worries it, frets it until at last the phrase is perfect and the accidental listener is cutting out paper dolls.
No space crew in history has ever mutinied, but few space crews have traveled with a contralto whose tremendous voice can fill an amphitheater—or a space liner.
What made Jon Arthur pause in front of the captain’s cabin was the unusual quality of intense emotion in the Parva’s voice.
“You can’t do this!” she was saying, toward the very top of her extensive range. “I have to practice. If I go three months without practicing, I’ll land at Venusberg in such shape that Mme. Storm will wonder why they ever picked me!”
“If you go three months with practicing, my dear young lady,” the captain announced, “there won’t be a man on this liner capable of landing you at Venus-berg!”
It was a pretty impasse, Arthur thought. Both parties were unquestionably right. It seemed a problem to which there was no key . . .
Key . . .
Key . . . !
Jon Arthur pushed open the door. “Pardon me, I couldn’t help overhearing the discussion. Wouldn’t it solve the problem,” he hurried on before he could be interrupted, “if Miss Parva were assigned one hour a day in which she might practice in one of the air locks?”
Both captain and contralto stared at him, then turned to each other with broad smiles.
“So the key was the lock,” Arthur was saying to the Parva later in the bar. “Vacuumsealed, soundproof. . .”
“I’m afraid I’m very much indebted to you.” She sounded as though she really regretted the fact. “First the audition, now this . . .”
“Honestly, I’m indebted to you.” Why had he thought her plain at that audition? “Simply for existing with the voice that you have.”
“Do you mind?” a man’s voice asked. “Since we’re all going to the same place, why not get acquainted now?”
The Parva seemed not to place him, but Arthur’s mind rang instantly with sounds about saddles and hounds and the treble shout of the merry rout. The robustious baritone introduced himself as Ivor Harden, explained that though he’d lost out on the scholarship he had scraped up barely enough money to make it on his own, paid the Parva a pretty compliment on winning, and still without having allowed the interposition of a word ended with, “And what’s that you’re drinking, Mr. Arthur?”
“Bourbon over ice,” said Arthur, thinking that the least the baritone could do to atone for his interruption was to buy a round.
But Harden simply beckoned the steward and ordered one bourbon over ice. Resignedly Arthur ordered another and a Deimos Delight for the girl, and hastily threw the conversation back to her with a reference to Dr. Weddergren.
For the first time he felt a warm devotion in her as she spoke of the scientist who had molded her voice. The transference with singer and vocal teacher is not unlike that with patient and psychiatrist, and even Weddergren’s purely scientific method seemed to have evoked the same phenomenon.
“He’s wonderful!” she said. “There isn’t a man alive who understands the voice as he does—and can make you understand it too.”
“My teacher,” said Harden, “says it’s bad to understand too much; you should feel!’
“Nonsense!” Faustina Parva announced flatly. “You sound like a Populist!”
“That’s bad?” the baritone snapped.
It was as well that the drinks arrived then; Populist-Academist arguments were never safe, and especially uncomfortable to Arthur in his loathing of both sets of extremists. By the time the drinks were signed for, the Parva was safely back on vocal training.
“And did Dr. Weddergren show you Marchesi?” she asked.
“He did—damnedest experience I’ve ever had, not even excepting,” he added, “your audition.” (Was the corner of his eye tricking him, or had the baritone just dropped something into his own bourbon over ice?)
“Please!” She was imperious. “Don’t be gallant!”
“I’m not. Just factual.” He looked at her for a moment with intense and concentrated devotion. (Which allowed the move which he had next expected; with sleight of hand worthy of such legendary figures as Robert-Houdini or Rawson, the baritone had switched the two bourbons.)
“Who is Marchesi?” Harden asked.
“You don’t know the name?”
“Never heard it.”
“That’s odd.” And it was, for a singer. “Considered the greatest vocal teacher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and possibly of all time.”
“Until now,” the Parva interrupted.
“As you will. And Weddergren has his Marchesi too. Look over at the bar, Harden; you see that electronic mixer?” Harden looked. (And the bourbons changed places again; juzor training develops ones aptitude for sleight of hand.)
“What about it?” Harden asked.
“It’s a fine example of a usuform robot, made to do one thing superlatively well. Weddergren has made a singing robot—a precise reproduction of the ideal human vocal apparatus, but incapable of human errors.”
“Not quite precise,” the girl corrected him. “It has a slightly larger uvula than any human being. Dr. Weddergren thinks that’s important; one reason he chose me to train was my uvula. Look—it’s extraordinarily well developed.”
She opened her generous mouth. Now the face which had begun to seem oddly beautiful to Arthur was distorted into a comedy mask; he leaned forward and peered, honestly interested professionally in this odd physiological fact. (For one instant even the corner of his eye was observing nothing but a singular uvula.)
The Compleat Boucher Page 43