Dent saw the man, started. “I’ve only seen holos, but that sure looks like him!”
“That’s Ernst Ekern!” Yananda exclaimed. “Come on.” He stood, pulled Martian credits from a pocket and spilled them over the table, hurried out of the cafe with an explanatory wave at the waiter. Dent followed him, hopping up and down to keep the curly gray head in sight among the great crowd on the stairs.
only connect
Margaret was sitting with her legs over the edge of the flattened top of the volcanic knob, looking down at the rainbow slope of tents and people, enjoying the moment of calm that she always felt when she was sure a concert was ready to go and there was nothing left for her to do. Kicking her feet against the ancient rock of Olympus Mons, lofting the fabric of her loose blue pants, checking her watch to see the remaining minutes flick away: all part of her ritual, all made new and exciting by the crowd and the enormous landscape. She felt light in a way that seemed only partly caused by the diminished gravity; it was the view that made her light! The striped-quilt festival grounds squirmed with color, the planet spread its tan plain to the horizon, hundreds of kilometers away, and Margaret grinned, admiring the Martians’ sense of place.
Behind her there was an exasperated, impatient shout from Delia. Lazily she turned her head to look; all was well, all was well, no need to shout.… Delia was ordering one of her assistants down into the crowd to check a faulty speaker; they both jabbed at the map Delia held until the exact speaker was confirmed. Headphones covering her ears, Delia returned to her console and typed out more test patterns. This time there were a lot of them, with speakers on almost every terrace—a speaker for every instrument in the Orchestra, although that wasn’t necessarily how Johannes would use them. The Orchestra looked like a glass tree sitting on hundreds of black plastic roots that ran to the edge of the knoll and stopped as if chopped off by some industrious woodman: the transmitters for the signals to the speakers. They made the top of the knob a hard place to walk over. It was a more complicated system by far than any Delia had ever had to deal with, and it had taken over a week to set up, following the long day when Johannes had made his wishes clear. All those speakers scattered about: “Won’t the sound be terrible?” Margaret had asked him. Johannes had shook his head. “Just the way I want it. You’ll see.” And that was that.
Now Anton was stepping across the transmitting cables, looking as tense as Delia, though he had little to do. Perhaps that was the reason; no need for lights at the Areology. “Anton, come sit with me and look,” Margaret called, but he shook his head and continued to pace around the cables, meeting no one’s eyes. Margaret shrugged.
Johannes appeared at the top of the stairs cut into the knob, dressed in a rust tunic and tan pants. Karna and Marie-Jeanne were at his side.
As he approached the Orchestra Anton quickly cut in front of him. “Johannes, I have to speak to you.”
“Not now.” The empty black eyes were looking up at the control booth, and seeing nothing else.
“Please, Johan, it’s important. It has to do with—”
“Not now, Anton. I can’t think about it. Do you understand?” He looked Vaccero straight in the face.
“It’s important. I know what happened to you on Icarus—”
“No!” Johannes said sharply. He held up a hand as if to ward off what Anton might say. “Just listen to the music, Anton. Do you hear me?”
“But I have to tell you,” Vaccero said, voice twisted with desperation. Margaret shifted her feet up onto the knob, half rose, worried by the way Anton’s voice sounded.
“Just listen,” Johannes said, looking up at Vaccero with an expressionlessness so severe that it was an expression, a sort of … refusal. “That will answer you, do you understand?” He stepped past Vaccero and ducked into the piano bench entrance; Anton reached out for him and was restrained by Karna.
“He has to concentrate now,” Karna said quietly.
By this time Margaret was on her feet, and over the cables to the scene. Anton was shaking, tears fell from the bottom halves of both eyes in a great flood—“Anton,” Margaret said, shocked, “what is it?” But he quickly turned away and stumbled off across the thick black cables. Margaret stared at his back, frowning, suddenly worried. I know what happened to you on Icarus…? But he was hurrying down the steps at the edge of the knob’s flat top. She looked over at Delia, but Delia had missed the exchange. Karna was looking after Anton, head cocked. Margaret jerked a thumb: “Have someone follow him,” she tried to say, but halfway through the sentence Delia waved up at the control booth, and
From every direction came a crash, a great wave of sound.
the peak
Like a tree growing branches at the speed of light: at the very moment of that first primal crash Dent knew something different was happening. He was on one of the central staircases behind Yananda, and they were searching for Ekern among all the tall Martians who hid him so effectively. The roar—all of the Orchestra’s instruments playing at once, fortissimo—stopped him. Like everyone else he looked up at the knob. On the next terrace a giant black speaker wailed an awful oscillating screech that made it hard to walk, even to stand upright!—the godzilla and its weird metallic hum, swirling up and down in an octave tremolo. A different sound from every direction. Stunned, Dent looked around: open-mouthed faces (he felt his open mouth), frightened eyes, hands over ears. Behind Dent a treble bass rumbled up and down its scale, like rain in a dream. Like everyone around him he ran up the central stairs, stumbling, pushing, leaping up, making recoveries impossible in normal gravity. Everyone was moving up. An oboe sounded in his ear, high, thick, reedy, an oboe crying out! Echoes of it came from all over the grounds. He stopped to listen. Another part of him realized that everyone had been running, back then; and now the people he could see were standing still. The terraces above were packed, a field of heads, hair like caps of spun metal in the brilliant sunshine. The penetrating cry of the oboe
Crash trumpets all over the park: the call. Dent closed his eyes. From every direction came phrases in the whole range of audible sound, touching every pitch and timbre. But with his eyes closed Dent heard a pulse beneath it all, insistent and regular, moving through every sound in the cacophony, a rhythm, Dent walked to it, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, overlaid a hundred times in a thick patterning of the rhythm, but there, definitely there, Dent walked to it as if dancing. A speaker he passed was singing, over the textured pulse two voices sang a melody and Dent’s body jerked; it was the song he had loved when he was a boy heartbroken at a girl’s rejection—wasn’t it? It was gone now, the voices journeyed on but it had had that rise to it, that turn, bringing the whole flood of feeling back. He opened his eyes and looked at the long-nosed faces around him. They were staring at speakers, faces uplifted and vulnerable as surprise, recognition, pain, melancholy, all flicked across them. He met the gaze of an old man with dark wrinkled skin, and knew that they both had heard the song of their first love; somewhere in the weave of melodies some snatch of their own past had been threaded in. Under the instrumental music Dent heard the mass of the audience’s voices babbling in the rhythm, voices of wonder, and he said aloud, “Voices are instruments too,” but he couldn’t hear himself. Faces all flushed, eyes bright, in a physical response to form … and all the strands were linking up, merging to five or six melodic lines that tumbled across each other in a wild, thick contrapuntal mesh, all to the rhythm, the rhythm, the dance.…
* * *
In the control booth of the Orchestra all was calm. Waves of music washed over Johannes as from another world. Nearly every part had been taped beforehand, and he had the leisure to listen, sometimes to listen only. The old orchestrina was really cranking along this time, every thing on every glass arm sawing, blowing, pounding, clanking such that the whole tower was rocking about. All of the keyboards in the booth jumped under invisible fingers, like a convocation of player pianos; it was enough to make him laugh. What bliss it was to k
now in every vibrating cell that the world was determined, that he need only step through his paces, the thoughts and actions that were implied in the big bang so long ago. To step in the shoes of destiny … he had only to add piano phrases now and then, which he did with vigor. Piano Concerto With Mechanical Orchestra, by the Universe. He heard the dense rhythmic music all at once and together for the first time, and it pleased him. So many elements fit together so snugly, and all with such a pulse, such a pulse, such a pulse, such a pulse, such a pulse, such a pulse! With a grin he pounded on the treble bass, both hands in the bottom two octaves, trilling the floor of the sound as if it were the very floor of the universe itself, on which everything else rested. All ten fingers now, play! Play with delight whatever the world says comes next!
* * *
Ernst Ekern hid behind one of the huge speakers until the tour crew members pursuing him had passed. When they were lost in the crowd he stepped out from behind the speaker and the curving wall of the mercury drum assaulted him full force, hurting his ears. He climbed to a higher terrace, basking in the awful, patterned cacophony. It was possible to leap up from one terrace to the next! No one else seemed to know it. There was a surge in the music that drove through him, vibrated in his viscera and made his heart pound. It was the pulse he had first heard on Lowell, now elevated to a higher plane. The other members of the order, wherever they were—a turning, falling flute phrase tore at him; it was the melody, it was the melody he was to have played after the dream.… With a shudder he listened to another speaker’s crescendo and it was gone, buried in the surge of the present chaos. And he had caused this; he had forced Wright to this; he held back a shout then gave way, shouted great bellows—
The cutting phrase returned, rammed home by heavy percussive beats, and suddenly Ekern knew what sounds would come next. He knew it and it came true just as he had foreheard it. He was standing on one of the higher terrace railings, looking over the Martian heads; now the railing seemed more elevated than before, he could see the heads of people on the upper terraces, below him now. He saw in a single glance all the speakers scattered over the festival grounds, and he heard the instruments sounding from each of them with the utmost clarity. At first it was wonderful to hear the music so well, to understand the pattern so clearly; he conducted with his arms, pointing from this speaker to that to mark entrances, shouting unheard directions in a tongue-twisting glossolalia. But his vantage point continued to rise, until it was obviously a case of levitation, for the slope was far below him, far below: vertigo. Something was amiss here. Something unnatural was being directed against him. Merely to hear this music was to understand that the future was predestined; had his hoax been true all along? Ekern saw the aftermath of the festival, the vehicles pouring away over the escarpment, planes flying off.… Fearfully he clamped his eyes shut and saw the rest of his life coursing onward as inevitably as the tearing violins that now surged inside his skull so wrongly. He was paralyzed, he couldn’t speak, he was out of his body, he saw himself weeping on the floor of Prometheus Station, and with a shriek he fell back to the festival terrace and lost consciousness.
* * *
Somewhere, from some battery of speakers across the terraces, Dent heard the music he had heard so long ago on Grimaldi, now made whole by its interaction with all the other parts. Something in the way the sound grew louder and softer, shifting from speaker to speaker, made him acutely aware of the physicality of sound, as when one opens a door and the music from the next room grows louder in exact time with the swing of the door. Vibrating air; this thin air at the top of the breathable atmosphere vibrated so purely that he could see it, swirling over the great cone of the volcano. All was vibration, patterns of vibration, and everything he could see and hear interpenetrated everything else.
At that moment each speaker spoke with the voice of a single instrument; he could hear each clearly. The sixty strings scattered over the terraces sang together, and across them lunged the metal-on-metal shriek of the Planck synthesizer, from a speaker just behind Dent. The great metallic scrape of life. He heard every speaker there as if he stood before it alone. And as he listened, his attention perfectly tuned, the music multiplied—where before one instrument had sounded from each speaker, now every instrument in the Orchestra sounded from every speaker, and each Orchestra played something different, so that there was a hundredfold jump in complexity. And he was aware of every strand, he vibrated with each of them—
and he knew what was coming next.
Flushed faces split with amazement. A row of tents glowing yellow and red and blue. Because (he felt) he had lived on Mars all his life, the air was like a gel, a drug, and he saw everything with aching clarity.… He expanded with the sound until his consciousness encompassed all the Areology; he was everywhere at once. For a second he thought, out of body experience; then he was just there. Part of his extended vantage point was immensely high, he looked down on the festival which was no more than a small patch of variegated color on the vast side of Olympus Mons. He could see over the rim of the volcano into the caldera; dark, jagged, ringed desolation. Looking back down at the patch of order he saw what they really were, he saw that they were a small colony of creatures on a planet not their own, that the very air they breathed was that of an atmosphere (far below him) that they had created themselves, a thin skin of gas like a houseplant that had to be nourished and watered and given enough light.… He saw that they were all working together at the first step of the species’ break from the home world, and he understood that if the first step were taken successfully, with balance, they could run from star to star all across the night. All this he saw for the first time, as clearly as he saw the achingly detailed festival ground below him, where each person and object was made luminous, its relation to the whole defined by the interlocking inevitable music that filled the glass of the air with meshed vibration holding them all.
And now the music multiplied again: now from each speaker came the multiplicity that formerly had come from all of them together, so that there was another hundredfold increase in complexity; and after that, with each pulse of rhythm it multiplied again, until there were an infinite number of melodic lines. Extension of consciousness into all ten dimensions: the future was set in this vibrating gel as solidly as any present. Dent Ios saw all time stretched before and behind him in an endless spiral. For an eternal moment there was not a thought in his head, just music and the spiral vision.
When he came to, and looked at the beautiful animals milling around him on the terraces, he thought, We’re on Mars. We’re on Mars. It was a spark in his soul, a peak in the music. All the beautiful animals.… Dent stirred, he found he was standing on one of the terrace railings, and with a clean standing jump he leaped up to the next terrace, and there was a tall old Martian who looked like his father; Dent danced across the terrace to him, three steps and a pirouette, and embraced the man in a crushing bearhug. Off, then, still in the dance. How this gravity let one soar! The music led his steps, he didn’t even think of them—Dent Ios was a free man at last, he just pushed off, leaped up, triple-stepped, a likely face, embrace! A likely face, embrace! A woman, her long-nosed Martian horse face so beautiful, embrace! And off he spun across the terrace, feeling utterly abandoned, completely a part of the spinning music, absolutely free. A likely face! A likely face! There a brother, leaping to embrace him! And he laughed and looked at the endless succession of terraces below him, and saw that each person he had hugged had danced off to hug someone else, and exponentially the number of dancers grew until all danced, all leapt from terrace down to waiting arms, up to spinning partners, all part of a spontaneous ballet in two-fifths of Earth’s gravity, partners all. Partners all. A likely face!
And then the coda began, a shift in structure as clear as the crashing thunder of the treble bass’s trilling at the floor of the dance; as in the symphonies of the old time, when with a single chord everything returns to the original key signature, and every listener kno
ws the end is near. Dent was yanked back into time, back onto a terrace railing, into an awareness of his own mortality, a hard thing to experience. He knew the music was about to end. Shaking his head he returned to himself. He had been a Martian and seen the future, he had left himself and become nothing but dance, he had initiated the ballet of embracing—but now he was just mortal Dent again, his mouth hanging open like a dolt. He stared at the people around him, saw tears streaming down faces, figures still hugging each other, he walked light as the touch of a glint over his terrace in the surge of emotion and the great coda. Face examined face (a beautiful child), following the music as the pulse slowed at last, the melodies rose up through the final progression of ancient simple chords, tearing up from the crowd to a high end. All the faces wandering aimlessly in a crowd of brothers and sisters never before recognized, never before seen—and all the disoriented joy became comical at last and Dent laughed, hugged and shook hands, light as a glint of light, meeting all his long lost kin, all those he had loved for so long without ever knowing it. “I am a Martian,” he told them, “I am a Martian.” Everyone stunned, aware of the music ending, ending … cheering for the fun of the noise, to contribute to the music … tiny figures up on the knob, embracing … dizzily Dent blinked and looked beyond, at the rise of Olympus Mons, and he felt he could reach out and touch the mountain’s top, just as earlier he had seen over its rim; he felt at that moment as if he could see endlessly over every point of the compass, touch any place on the planet, and he felt himself fill with love for it was Mars the planet of hope, Mars the planet of promise, Mars the planet of peace.
textural change
Anton Vaccero stopped at the door that said, in dark red letters, EXPLORE THE UNIVERSE.
It was on a shabby, crowded side street of Mareotis, a city to the northeast of the big volcanoes set in a series of shallow, wide, parallel canyons, or fossae as the locals called them. Every district was run down, every side street tawdry and littered with rubbish. Anton stood before the door—just an ordinary door—and took a deep breath. His body was a cold board. It was early evening; he was hungry, he had trained north all that day and never thought to eat. He didn’t feel it as hunger; he felt it as hollowness. He was the hollow man. He pushed open the door and stepped through.
The Memory of Whiteness Page 23
