Chronopolis

by J. G. Ballard

  She pointed to the cabin on the far side of the stockade. “Man-gon, whose is that?”

  Gallagher's. My partner. He sweeps City Hall, University, V.C., big mansions on 5th and A. Working now.

  Madame Gioconda nodded, and surveyed the stockade with interest. “How fascinating. It’s like a zoo. All that talk, talk, talk. And you can hear it all.” She snapped back her bracelets with swift decisive flicks of the wrist.

  Mangon sat down on the bed. The cabin seemed small and dingy, and he was saddened by Madame Gioconda’s disinterest. Having brought her all the way out to the dumps he wondered how he was going to keep her amused. Fortunately the stockade intrigued her. When she suggested a stroll through it he was only too glad to oblige.

  Down at the unloading bay he demonstrated how he emptied the tanker, clipping the exhaust leads to the hydrant, regulating the pressure through the manifold and then pumping the sound away into the stockade.

  Most of the stockade was in a continuous state of uproar, sounding something like a crowd in a football stadium, and as he led her out among the baffles he picked their way carefully through the quieter aisles. Around them voices chattered and whined fretfully and fragments of conversation drifted aimlessly over the air. Somewhere a woman pleaded in thin nervous tones, a man grumbled to himself, another swore angrily, a baby bellowed. Behind it all was the steady background murmur of countless TV programs, the easy patter of announcers, the endless monotones of racetrack commentators, the shrieking audiences of quiz shows, all pitched an octave up the scale so that they sounded like an eerie parody of themselves.

  A shot rang out in the next aisle, followed by screams and shouting. Although she heard nothing, the pressure pulse made Madame Gioconda stop.

  “Mangon, wait. Don’t be in so much of a hurry. Tell me what they’re saying.”

  Mangon selected a baffle and listened carefully. The sounds appeared to come from an apartment over a launderette. A battery of washing machines chuntered to themselves, a cash register slammed interminably, there was a dim, almost subthreshold echo of 60-cycle hum from an SP record player.

  He shook his head, waved Madame Gioconda on.

  “Mangon, what did they say?” she pestered him. He stopped again, sharpened his ears and waited. This time he was more lucky. An overemotional female voice was gasping “. . . but if he finds you here he’ll kill you, he’ll kill us both. What shall we do . . .” He started to scribble down this outpouring, Madame Gioconda craning breathlessly over his shoulder, then recognized its source and screwed up the note.

  “Mangon, for heaven’s sake, what was it? Don’t throw it away! Tell me!” She tried to climb under the wooden superstructure of the baffle to recover the note, but Mangon restrained her and quickly scribbled another message.

  Adam and Eve. Sorry.

  “What, the film? Oh, how ridiculous! Well, come on, try again.”

  Eager to make amends, Mangon picked the next baffle, one of a group serving the staff married quarters of the University. Always a difficult job to keep clean, he struck pay dirt almost at once.

  “. . . my God, there’s Bartok all over the place, that damned Steiner woman, I’ll swear she’s sleeping with her ...”

  Mangon took it all down, passing the sheets to Madame Gioconda as soon as he covered them. Squinting hard at his crabbed handwriting, she gobbled them eagerly, disappointed when, after half a dozen, he lost the thread and stopped.

  “Go on, Mangon, what’s the matter?” She let the notes fall to the ground. “Difficult, isn’t it? We’ll have to teach you shorthand.”

  They reached the baffles Mangon had just filled from the previous day’s rounds. Listening carefully, he heard Paul Merrill’s voice: “. . . month’s Transonics claims that ... the entire city will come down like Jericho.”

  He wondered if he could persuade Madame Gioconda to wait for fifteen minutes, when he would be able to repeat a few carefully edited fragments from Alto’s promise to arrange her guest appearance, but she seemed eager to move deeper into the stockade.

  “You said your friend Gallagher sweeps out Video City, Man-gon. Where would that be?”

  Hector LeGrande. Of course, Mangon realized. Why had he been so obtuse? This was the chance to pay the man back.

  He pointed to an area a few aisles away. They climbed between the baffles, Mangon helping Madame Gioconda over the beams and props, steering her full skirt and wide hat brim away from splinters and rusted metal work.

  The task of finding LeGrande was simple. Even before the baffles were in sight Mangon could hear the hard unyielding bite of the tycoon’s voice, dominating every other sound from the Video City area. Gallagher in fact swept only the senior dozen or so executive suites at V.C., chiefly to relieve their occupants of the distasteful echoes of LeGrande’s voice.

  Mangon steered their way among these, searching for LeGrande’s master suite, where anything of a really confidential nature took place.

  There were about twenty baffles, throwing off an unending chorus of “Yes, H.L.,” “Thanks, H.L.,” “Brilliant, H.L ” Two or three seemed strangely quiet, and he drew Madame Gioconda over to them.

  This was LeGrande with his personal secretary and PA. He took out his pencil and focused carefully.

  “. . . of Third National Bank, transfer two million to private holding and threatened claim for stock depreciation . . . redraft escape clauses, including nonliability purchase benefits ...”

  Madame Gioconda tapped his arm but he gestured her away. Most of the baffle appeared to be taken up by dubious financial dealings, but nothing that would really hurt LeGrande if revealed.

  Then he heard—

  “. . . Bermuda Hilton. Private Island, with anchorage, have the beach cleaned up, last time the water was full of fish ... I don’t care, poison them, hang some nets out . . . Imogene will fly in from Idlewild as Mrs. Edna Burgess, warn customs to stay away . . .”

  “. . . call Cartier’s, something for the Comtessa, 17 carats say, ceiling of ten thousand. No, make it eight thousand . . .”

  “. . . hat-check girl at the Tropicabana. Usual dossier . . .”

  Mangon scribbled furiously, but LeGrande was speaking at rapid dictation speed and he could get down only a few fragments. Madame Gioconda barely deciphered his handwriting, and became more and more frustrated as her appetite was whetted. Finally she flung away the notes in a fury of exasperation.

  “This is absurd, you’re missing everything!” she cried. She pounded on one of the baffles, then broke down and began to sob angrily. “Oh, God, God, God, how ridiculous! Help me, I’m going insane ...”

  Mangon hurried across to her and put his arms around her shoulders to support her. She pushed him away irritably, railing at herself to discharge her impatience. “It’s useless, Mangon, it’s stupid of me, I was a fool—”

  “STOP!”

  The cry split the air like the blade of a guillotine.

  They both straightened and stared at each other blankly. Mangon put his fingers slowly to his lips, then reached out tremulously and put his hands in Madame Gioconda’s. Somewhere within him a tremendous tension had begun to dissolve.

  “Stop,” he said again in a rough but quiet voice. “Don’t cry. I’ll help you.”

  Madame Gioconda gaped at him with amazement. Then she let out a tremendous whoop of triumph.

  “Mangon, you can talk! You’ve got your voice back! It’s absolutely astounding! Say something, quickly, for heaven’s sake!”

  Mangon felt his mouth again, ran his fingers rapidly over his throat. He began to tremble with excitement, his face brightened, he jumped up and down like a child.

  “I can talk,” he repeated wonderingly. His voice was gruff, then seesawed into a treble. “I can talk,” he said, louder, controlling the pitch. “I can talk, I can talk, 1 can talk!” He flung his head back, let out an ear-shattering shout. “I CAN TALK! HEAR ME!” He ripped the wrist-pad off his sleeve and hurled it away over the baffles.

  Ma
dame Gioconda backed away, laughing agreeably. “We can hear you, Mangon. Dear me, how sweet.” She watched Mangon thoughtfully as he cavorted happily in the narrow space between the aisles. “Now don’t tire yourself out or you’ll lose it again.”

  Mangon danced over to her, seized her shoulders and squeezed them tightly. He suddenly realized that he knew no diminutive or Christian name for her.

  “Madame Gioconda,” he said earnestly, stumbling over the syllables, the words that were so simple yet so enormously complex to pronounce. “You gave me back my voice. Anything you want—” He broke off, stuttering happily, laughing through his tears.

  Suddenly he buried his head in her shoulder, exhausted by his discovery, and cried gratefully, “It’s a wonderful voice.”

  Madame Gioconda steadied him maternally. “Yes, Mangon,” she said, her eyes on the discarded notes lying in the dust. “You’ve got a wonderful voice, all right.” Sotto voce, she added: “But your hearing is even more wonderful.”

  Paul Merrill switched off the SP player, sat down on the arm of the sofa and watched Mangon quizzically.

  “Strange. You know, my guess is that it was psychosomatic.” Mangon grinned. “Psychosemantic,” he repeated, garbling the word half-deliberately. “Clever. You can do amazing things with words. They help to crystallize the truth.”

  Merrill groaned playfully, “God, you sit there, you drink your coke, you philosophize. Don’t you realize you’re supposed to stand quietly in a corner, positively dumb with gratitude? Now you’re even ramming your puns down my throat. Never mind, tell me again how it happened.”

  “Once a pun a time—” Mangon ducked the magazine Merrill flung at him, let out a loud “Olee!”

  For the last two weeks he had been en fête.

  Every day he and Madame Gioconda followed the same routine; after breakfast at the studio they drove out to the stockade, spent two or three hours compiling their confidential file on LeGrande, lunched at the cabin and then drove back to the city, Mangon going off on his rounds while Madame Gioconda slept until he returned shortly before midnight. For Mangon their existence was idyllic; not only was he rediscovering himself in terms of the complex spectra and patterns of speech—a completely new category of existence—but at the same time his relationship with Madame Gioconda revealed areas of sympathy, affection, and understanding that he had never previously seen. If he sometimes felt that he was too preoccupied with his side of their relationship and the extraordinary benefits it had brought him, at least Madame Gioconda had been equally well served. Her headaches and mysterious phantoms had gone. She had cleaned up the studio and begun to salvage a little dignity and self-confidence, which made her single-minded sense of ambition seem less obsessive. Psychologically, she needed Mangon less now than he needed her, and he was careful to restrain his high spirits and give her plenty of attention. During the first week Mangon’s incessant chatter had been rather wearing, and once, on their way to the stockade, she had switched on the sonovac in the driving cab and left Mangon mouthing silently at the air like a stranded fish. He had taken the hint.

  “What about the sound-sweeping?” Merrill asked. “Will you give it up?”

  Mangon shrugged. “It’s my talent, but living at the stockade, let in at back doors, cleaning up the verbal garbage—it’s a degraded job. I want to help Madame Gioconda. She will need a secretary when she starts to go on tour.”

  Merrill shook his head warily. “You’re awfully sure there’s going to be a sonic revival, Mangon. But every sign is against it.”

  “They have not heard Madame Gioconda sing. Believe me, I know the power and wonder of the human voice. Ultrasonic music is great for atmosphere, but it has no content. It can’t express ideas, only emotions.”

  “What happened to that closed circuit program you and Ray were going to put on for her?”

  “It—fell through,” Mangon lied. The circuits Madame Gioconda would perform on would be open to the world. He had told them nothing of the visits to the stockade, of his power to read the baffles, of the accumulating file on LeGrande. Soon Madame Gioconda would strike.

  Above them in the hallway a door slammed. Someone stormed through into the apartment in a tempest, kicking a chair against a wall. It was Alto. He raced down the staircase into the lounge, jaw tense, fingers flexing angrily.

  “Paul, don’t interrupt me until I’ve finished,” he snapped, racing past without looking at them. “You’ll be out of a job, but I warn you, if you don’t back me up one hundred percent I’ll shoot you. That goes for you too, Mangon. I need you in on this.” He whirled over to the window, bolted out the traffic noises below, then swung back and watched them steadily, feet planted firmly on the carpet. For the first time in the three years Mangon had known him he looked aggressive and confident.

  “Headline,” he announced. “The Gioconda is to sing again! Incredible and terrifying though the prospect may seem, exactly two weeks from now the live uncensored voice of the Gioconda will go out coast to coast on all three V.C. radio channels. Surprised, Mangon? It’s no secret; they’re printing the announcements right now. Eight-thirty to nine-thirty, right up on the peak, even if they have to give the time away.”

  Merrill sat forward. “Bully for her. If LeGrande wants to drive the whole ship into the ground, why worry?”

  Alto punched the sofa viciously. “Because you and I are going to be on board! Didn’t you hear me? Eight-thirty, two weeks from today! We have a program on then. Well, guess who our guest star is?”

  Merrill struggled to make sense of this. “Wait a minute, Ray. You mean she’s actually going to appear—she’s going to sing—in the middle of Opus Zero?” Alto nodded grimly. Merrill threw up his hands and slumped back. “It’s crazy. She can’t. Who says she will?”

  “Who do you think? The great LeGrande.” Alto turned to Man-gon. “She must have raked up some real dirt to frighten him into this. I can hardly believe it.”

  “But why on Opus Zero?” Merrill pressed. “Let’s switch the premiere to the week after.”

  “Paul, you’re missing the point. Let me fill you in. Sometime yesterday Madame Gioconda paid a private call on LeGrande. Something she told him persuaded him that it would be absolutely wonderful for her to have a whole hour to herself on one of the feature music programs, singing a few old-fashioned songs from the old-fashioned shows, with a full-scale ultrasonic backing. Eager to give her a completely free hand, he even asked her which of the regular programs she’d like. Well, as the last show she appeared on ten years ago was canceled to make way for Ray Alto’s Total Symphony, you can guess which one she picked.”

  Merrill nodded. “It all fits together. We’re broadcasting from the concert studio. A single ultrasonic symphony, no station breaks, not even a commentary. Your first world premiere in three years. There’ll be a big invited audience. White tie, something like the old days. Revenge is sweet.” He shook his head sadly. “Hell, all that work.”

  Alto snapped: “Don’t worry, it won’t be wasted. Why should we pay the bill for LeGrande? This symphony is the one piece of serious music I’ve written since I joined V.C., and it isn’t going to be ruined.” He went over to Mangon, sat down next to him. “This afternoon I went down to the rehearsal studios. They’d found an ancient sonic grand somewhere and one of the old-timers was accompanying her. Mangon, it’s ten years since she sang last. If she’d practiced for two or three hours a day she might have preserved her voice, but you sweep her radio station, you know she hasn’t sung a note. She’s an old woman now. What time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.” He paused, watching Mangon searchingly. “I hate to say it, Mangon, but it sounded like a cat being strangled.”

  You lie, Mangon thought icily. You are simply so ignorant, your taste in music is so debased, that you are unable to recognize real genius when you see it. He looked at Alto with contempt, sorry for the man, with his absurd silent symphonies. He felt like shouting: I know what silence is! The voice of the Giocon
da is a stream of gold, molten and pure. She will find it again as 1 found mine. However, something about Alto’s manner warned him to wait.

  He said: “I understand.” Then: “What do you want me to do?”

  Alto patted him on the shoulder. “Good boy. Believe me, you’ll be helping her in the long run. What I propose will save all of us from looking foolish. We’ve got to stand up to LeGrande even if it means a one-way ticket out of V.C. Okay, Paul?” Merrill nodded firmly and he went on: “Orchestra will continue as scheduled. According to the program Madame Gioconda will be singing to an accompaniment by Opus Zero, but that means nothing and there’ll be no connection at any point. In fact she won’t turn up until the night itself. She’ll stand well downstage on a special platform, and the only microphone will be an aerial about twenty feet diagonally above her. It will be live—but her voice will never reach it. Because you, Mangon, will be in the cue box directly in front of her, with the most powerful sonovac we can lay our hands on. As soon as she opens her mouth you’ll let her have it. She’ll be at least ten feet away from you so she’ll hear herself and won’t suspect what is happening.”

  “What about the audience?” Merrill asked.

  “They’ll be listening to my symphony, enjoying a neurophonic experience of sufficient beauty and power, I hope, to distract them from the sight of a blowzy prima donna gesturing to herself in a cocaine fog. They’ll probably think she’s conducting. Remember, they may be expecting her to sing, but how many people still know what the word really means? Most of them will assume its ultrasonic.”

  “And LeGrande?”

  “He’ll be in Bermuda. Business conference.”

  Five

  Madame Gioconda was sitting before her dressing-table mirror, painting on a face like a Halloween mask. Beside her the Gramophone played scratchy sonic selections from Traviata. The stage was still a disorganized jumble, but there was now an air of purpose about it.