The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  “Debussy ugly?” Hoaglund said quietly to me.

  “Bach is modern music to him,” I said. “Haydn is the voice of the future.”

  Gianni said, “I will be very famous.”

  “Yes. Sam will make you the most famous man in the world.”

  “I was very famous after I—died.” He tapped one of the terminals. “I have read about me. I was so famous that everybody forged my music, and it was published as Pergolesi, do you know that? I have played it, too, this ‘Pergolesi.’ Merda, most of it. Not all. The concerti armonici, not bad—not mine, but not bad. Most of the rest, trash.” He winked. “But you will make me famous while I live, eh? Good. Very good.” He came closer to us and in a lower voice said, “Will you tell Claudia that the gonorrhea, it is all cured?”

  “What?”

  “She would not believe me. I said, The doctor swears it, but she said, “No, it is not safe; you must keep your hands off me; you must keep everything else off me.”

  “Gianni, have you been molesting your nurse?”

  “I am becoming a healthy man, dottore. I am no monk. They sent me to live with the cappuccini in the monastery at Pozzuoli, yes, but it was only so the good air there could heal my consumption, not to make me a monk. I am no monk now and I am no longer sick. Could you go without a woman for three hundred years?” He put his face close to Hoaglund’s, gave him a bright-eyed stare, leered outrageously. “You will make me very famous. And then there will be women again, yes? And you must tell them that the gonorrhea, it is entirely cured. This age of miracles!”

  Afterward Hoaglund said to me, “And you thought Mozart was going to be too much trouble?”

  When we first got him, there was no snappy talk out of him of women or fame or marvelous new compositions. Then he was a wreck, a dazed wraith, hollow, burned out. He wasn’t sure whether he had awakened in heaven or in hell, but whichever it was left him alternately stunned and depressed. He was barely clinging to life, and we began to wonder if we had waited too long to get him. Perhaps it might be wiser, some of us thought, to toss him back and pick him up from an earlier point, maybe summer of 1735, when he wasn’t so close to the grave. But we had no budget for making a second scoop, and also we were bound by our own rigid self-imposed rules. We had the power to yank anybody we liked out of the past—Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Jesus, Henry the Eighth—but we had no way of knowing what effects it might have on the course of history if we scooped up Lenin while he was still in exile in Switzerland, say, or collected Hitler while he was still a paperhanger. So we decided a priori to scoop only someone whose life and accomplishments were entirely behind him, and who was so close to the time of his natural death that his disappearance would not be likely to unsettle the fabric of the universe. For months I lobbied to scoop Pergolesi, and I got my way, and we took him out of the monastery eighteen days before his official date of death. Once we had him, it was no great trick to substitute a synthetic cadaver, who was duly discovered and buried, and so far as we have been able to tell, no calamities have resulted to history because one consumptive Italian was put in his grave two weeks earlier than the encyclopedia used to say he had been.

  Yet it was touch and go at first, keeping him alive. Those were the worst days of my life, the first few after the scooping. To have planned for years, to have expended so many gigabucks on the project, and then to have our first human scoopee die on us anyway—

  He didn’t, though. The same vitality that had pulled sixteen operas and a dozen cantatas and uncountable symphonies and concerti and masses and sonatas out of him in a twenty-six-year lifespan pulled him back from the edge of the grave now, once the resources of modern medicine were put to work rebuilding his lungs and curing his assorted venereal diseases. From hour to hour we could see him gaining strength. Within days he was wholly transformed. It was almost magical, even to us. And it showed us vividly how many lives were needlessly lost in those archaic days for want of the things that are routine to us antibiotics, transplant technology, micro-surgery, regeneration therapy.

  For me those were wondrous days. The pallid, feeble young man struggling for his life in the back unit was surrounded by a radiant aura of accumulated fame and legend built up over centuries: he was Pergolesi, the miraculous boy, the fountain of melody, the composer of the awesome Stabat Mater and the rollicking Serva Padrona, who in the decades after his early death was ranked with Bach, with Mozart, with Haydn, and whose most trivial works inspired the whole genre of light opera. But his own view of himself was different: he was a weary, sick, dying young man, poor pathetic Gianni, the failure, the washout, unknown beyond Rome and Naples and poorly treated there, his serious operas neglected cruelly, his masses and cantatas praised but rarely performed, only the comic operas that he dashed off so carelessly winning him any acclaim at all—poor Gianni, burned out at twenty-five, destroyed as much by disappointment as by tuberculosis and venereal disease, creeping off to the Capuchin monastery to die in miserable poverty. How could he have known he was to be famous? But we showed him. We played him recordings of his music, both the true works and those that had been constructed in his name by the unscrupulous to cash in on his posthumous glory. We let him read the biographies and critical studies and even the novels that had been published about him. Indeed, for him it must have been precisely like dying and going to heaven, and from day to day he gained strength and poise, he waxed and flourished, he came to glow with vigor and passion and confidence. He knew now that no magic had been worked on him, that he had been snatched into the unimaginable future and restored to health by ordinary human beings, and he accepted that and quickly ceased to question it. All that concerned him now was music. In the second and third weeks we gave him a crash course in post-Baroque musical history. Bach first, then the shift away from polyphony—”Naturalmente,” he said, “it was inevitable, I would have achieved it myself if I had lived”—and he spent hours with Mozart and Haydn and Johann Christian Bach, soaking up their complete works and entering a kind of ecstatic state. His nimble, agile mind swiftly began plotting its own directions. One morning I found him red-eyed with weeping. He had been up all night listening to Don Giovanni and Marriage of Figaro. “This Mozart,” he said. “You bring him back, too?”

  “Maybe someday we will,” I said.

  “I kill him! You bring him back, I strangle him, I trample him!” His eyes blazed. He laughed wildly. “He is wonder! He is angel! He is too good! Send me to his time, I kill him then! No one should compose like that! Except Pergolesi. He would have done it.”

  “I believe that.”

  “Yes! This Figaro—1786—I could have done it twenty years earlier! Thirty! If only I get the chance. Why this Mozart so lucky? I die, he live—why? Why, dottore?”

  His love-hate relationship with Mozart lasted six or seven days. Then he moved on to Beethoven, who I think was a little too much for him, overwhelming, massive, crushing, and then the romantics, who amused him—“Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, all lunatics, dementi, pazzi, but they are wonderful. I think I see what they are trying to do. Madmen! Marvelous madmen!”and quickly on to the twentieth century, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, not spending much time with any of them, finding them all either ugly or terrifying or simply incomprehensibly bizarre. More recent composers, Webern and the serialists, Penderecki, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ligeti, the various electronicists and all that came after, he dismissed with a quick shrug, as though he barely recognized what they were doing as music. Their fundamental assumptions were too alien to him. Genius though he was, he could not assimilate their ideas, any more than Brillat-Savarin or Escoffier could have found much pleasure in the cuisine of another planet. After completing his frenzied survey of everything that had happened in music after his time, he returned to Bach and Mozart and gave them his full attention.

  I mean full attention. Gianni was utterly incurious about the world outside his bedroom window. We told him he was in America, in California, and showed him a map. He nodded
casually. We turned on the telescreen and let him look at the landscape of the early twenty-first century. His eyes glazed. We spoke of automobiles, planes, flights to Mars. Yes, he said, meraviglioso, miracoloso, and went back to the Brandenburg concerti. I realize now that the lack of interest he showed in the modern world was a sign neither of fear nor of shallowness, but rather only a mark of priorities. What Mozart had accomplished was stranger and more interesting to him than the entire technological revolution. Technology was only a means to an end, for Gianni—push a button, you get a symphony orchestra in your bedroom: miracoloso!—and he took it entirely for granted. That the basso continuo had become obsolete thirty years after his death, that the diatonic scales would be demoted from sacred constants to inconvenient anachronisms a century or so later, was more significant to him than the fusion reactor, the interplanetary spaceship, or even the machine that had yanked him from his deathbed into this brave new world.

  In the fourth week he said he wanted to compose again. He asked for a harpsichord. Instead we gave him a synthesizer. He loved it.

  In the sixth week he began asking questions about the outside world, and I realized that the tricky part of our experiment was about to begin.

  Hoaglund said, “Pretty soon we have to reveal him. It’s incredible we’ve been able to keep it quiet this long.”

  He had an elaborate plan. The problem was twofold: letting Gianni experience the world, and letting the world perceive that time-travel as a practical matter involving real human beings—no more frogs and kittens hoisted from last month to this—had finally arrived. There was going to be a whole business of press conferences, media tours of our lab, interviews with Gianni, a festival of Pergolesi music at the Hollywood Bowl with the premiere of a symphony in the mode of Beethoven that he said would be ready by April, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time we would be taking Gianni on private tours of the L.A. area, gradually exposing him to the society into which he had been so unilaterally hauled. The medics said it was safe to let him encounter twenty-first-century microorganisms now. But would it be safe to let him encounter twenty-first-century civilization? He, with his windows sealed and his blinds drawn, his eighteenth-century mind wholly engrossed in the revelations that Bach and Mozart and Beethoven were pouring into it—what would he make of the world of spaceways and slice-houses and overload bands and freebase teams when he could no longer hide from it?

  “Leave it all to me,” said Hoaglund. “That’s what you’re paying me for, right?”

  On a mild and rainy February afternoon Sam and I and the main physician, Nella Brandon, took him on his first drive through his new reality. Down the hill the back way, along Ventura Boulevard a few miles, onto the freeway, out to Topanga, back around through the landslide zone to what had been Santa Monica, and then straight up Wilshire across the entire heart of Los Angeles—a good stiff jolt of modernity. Dr. Brandon carried her full armamentarium of sedatives and tranks ready in case Gianni freaked out. But he didn’t freak out.

  He loved it—swinging round and round in the bubbletop car, gaping at everything. I tried to view L.A. through the eyes of someone whose entire life had been spent amid the splendors of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, and it came up hideous on all counts. But not to Gianni. “Beautiful,” he sighed. “Wondrous! Miraculous! Marvelous!” The traffic, the freeways themselves, the fast-food joints, the peeling plastic facades, the great fire scar in Topanga, the houses hanging by spider-cables from the hillsides, the occasional superjet floating overhead on its way into LAX—everything lit him up. It was wonderland to him. None of those dull old cathedrals and palazzi and marble fountains here—no, everything here was brighter and larger and glitzier than life, and he loved it. The only part he couldn’t handle was the beach at Topanga. By the time we got there the sun was out and so were the sunbathers, and the sight of eight thousand naked bodies cavorting on the damp sand almost gave him a stroke.”What is this?” he demanded. “The market for slaves? The pleasure house of the king?”

  “Blood pressure rising fast,” Nella Brandon said softly, eyeing her wrist-monitors. “Adrenalin levels going up. Shall I cool him out?”

  I shook my head.

  “Slavery is unlawful,” I told him. “There is no king. These are ordinary citizens amusing themselves.”

  “Nudo! Assolutamente nudo!”

  “We long ago outgrew feeling ashamed of our bodies,” I said. “The laws allow us to go nude in places like this.”

  “Straordinario! Incredibile!” He gaped in total astonishment. Then he erupted with questions, a torrent of Italian first, his English returning only with an effort. Did husbands allow their wives to come here? Did fathers permit daughters? Were there rapes on the beach? Duels? If the body had lost its mystery, how did sexual desire survive? If a man somehow did become excited, was it shameful to let it show? And on and on and on, until I had to signal Nella to give him a mild needle. Calmer now, Gianni digested the notion of mass public nudity in a more reflective way; but it had amazed him more than Beethoven, that was plain.

  We let him stare for another ten minutes. As we started to return to the car, Gianni pointed to a lush brunette trudging along by the tidepools and said, “I want her. Get her.”

  “Gianni, we can’t do that!”

  “You think I am eunuch? You think I can see these bodies and not remember breasts in my hands, tongue touching tongue?” He caught my wrist. “Get her for me.”

  “Not yet. You aren’t well enough yet. And we can’t just get her for you. Things aren’t done that way here.”

  “She goes naked. She belongs to anyone.”

  “No,” I said. “You still don’t really understand, do you?” I nodded to Nella Brandon. She gave him another needle. We drove on, and he subsided. Soon we came to the barrier marking where the coast road had fallen into the sea, and we swung inland through the place where Santa Monica had been. I explained about the earthquake and the landslide. Gianni grinned.

  “Ah, il terremoto, you have it here too? A few years ago there was great earthquake in Napoli. You have understood? And then they ask me to write a Mass of Thanksgiving afterward because not everything is destroyed. It is very famous mass for a time. You know it? No? You must hear it.” He turned and seized my wrist. With an intensity greater than the brunette had aroused in him, he said, “I will compose a new famous mass, yes? I will be very famous again. And I will be rich. Yes? I was famous and then I was forgotten and then I died and now I live again and now I will be famous again. And rich. Yes? Yes?”

  Sam Hoaglund looked over at him and said, “In another couple of weeks, Gianni, you’re going to be the most famous man in the world.”

  Casually Sam poked the button turning on the radio. The car was well equipped for overload and out of the many speakers came the familiar pulsing tingling sounds of Wilkes Booth John doing Membrane. The subsonics were terrific. Gianni sat up straight as the music hit him. “What is that?” he demanded.

  “Overload,” Sam said. “Wilkes Booth John.”

  “Overload? This means nothing to me. It is a music? Of when?”

  “The music of right now,” said Nella Brandon.

  As we zoomed along Wilshire Sam keyed in the colors and lights too, and the whole interior of the car began to throb and flash and sizzle. Wonderland for Gianni again. He blinked, he pressed his hands to his cheeks, he shook his head. “It is like the music of dreams,” he said. “The composer? Who is?”

  “Not a composer,” said Sam. “A group. Wilkes Booth John, it calls itself. This isn’t classical music, it’s pop. Popular. Pop doesn’t have a composer.”

  “It makes itself, this music?”

  “No,” I said. “The whole group composes it. And plays it.”

  “The orchestra. It is pop and the orchestra composes.” He looked lost, as bewildered as he had been since the moment of his awakening, naked and frail, in the scoop cage. “Pop. Such strange music. So simple. It goes over and over again, the
same thing, loud, no shape. Yet I think I like it. Who listens to this music? Imbecili? Infanti?”

  “Everyone,” Sam said.

  The first outing in Los Angeles not only told us Gianni could handle exposure to the modern world but also transformed his life among us in several significant ways. For one thing, there was no keeping him chaste any longer after Topanga Beach. He was healthy, he was lusty, he was vigorously heterosexual—an old biography of him I had seen blamed his ill health and early demise on “his notorious profligacy”—and we could hardly go on treating him like a prisoner or a zoo animal. Sam fixed him up with one of his secretaries, Melissa Burke, a willing volunteer.

  Then, too, Gianni had been confronted for the first time with the split between classical and popular music, with the whole modernist cleavage between high art and lowbrow entertainment. That was new to him and baffling at first. “This pop,” he said, “it is the music of the peasants?” But gradually he grasped the idea of simple rhythmic music that everyone listened to, distinguished from “serious” music that belonged only to an elite and was played merely on formal occasions. “But my music,” he protested, “it had tunes, people could whistle it. It was everybody’s music.” It fascinated him that composers had abandoned melody and made themselves inaccessible to most of the people. We told him that something like that had happened in all of the arts. “You poor crazy futuruomini,” he said gently.

  Suddenly he began to turn himself into a connoisseur of overload groups. We rigged an imposing unit in his room, and he and Melissa spent hours plugged in, soaking up the waveforms let loose by Scissors and Ultrafoam and Wilkes Booth John and the other top bands. When I asked him how the new symphony was coming along, he gave me a peculiar look.

  He began to make other little inroads into modern life. Sam and Melissa took him shopping for clothing on Figueroa Street, and in the cholo boutiques he acquired a flashy new wardrobe of the latest Aztec gear to replace the lab clothes he had worn since his awakening. He had his prematurely gray hair dyed red. He acquired jewelry that went flash, clang, zzz, and pop when the mood-actuated sensoria came into play. In a few days he was utterly transformed: he became the perfect young Angeleno, slim, dapper, stylish, complete with the slight foreign accent and exotic grammar.