by Lisa Tuttle
“I don’t know anything about music,” I said. “But I do know computers, and there are programs which can write music.”
He snorted. “Depends what you call music.”
“That’s not really the point. It’s analysis, not composition, I’m interested in. Computers are great for detective work. What made you decide the music you found was Craithe’s? There must have been some basic principles… .”
“To be perfectly honest, I was following a hunch, operating on instinct as much as anything. There’s no proof.” He looked straight into my eyes, and I suddenly twigged that he’d made the whole thing up to sell his biography.
“Wasn’t there any music found in the cottage?”
“Yes, of course! You don’t think I made that up? Look, I don’t have proof, these things can’t be proved, whatever you may think, but using my knowledge of musicology and of Craithe I made some perfectly legitimate speculations… . Of course the music was there! But most of it was burnt by the time I got my hands on it. There were really only scraps left.”
“Could I see them?”
“I’ve brought you photocopies. You can use them however you like.”
“Thank you. There’s something you might not have thought of doing, but I’d like to get it analyzed not only in comparison with Craithe’s other works, but also to compare his last symphony with Flora Abernethy’s own compositions.”
“Oh, Lord,” he said. “You’re not intending to argue — not seriously — that loony feminist’s theory?”
“Why not? The only manuscript is in her hand, and you must admit that it is completely unlike his earlier works.”
“It’s also wholly unlike anything she ever wrote,” he said definitely. “There’s absolutely no connection between any of her known works and Craithe’s final opus. So if the lack of connection between the last symphony and his earlier work is meant to be proof that he couldn’t have written it — why doesn’t it matter in her case? I’ll tell you why: the woman who wrote that article had no notion. She was simply casting about, rather desperately, in search of some new victim-heroine to prove her thesis that women’s work is always stolen by men. She had absolutely no evidence. And for all the mad things Flora Abernethy said, she never claimed that Craithe’s work was hers.”
“You did ask her?”
He looked at me without replying. I felt I was trespassing, but I didn’t let it stop me. “I did think it strange that although you interviewed her you didn’t give her explanation of what happened to him. Surely she had some idea?”
“She was quite mad. It would not have been kind, nor served any purpose, to have published her rambling, mystical notions. As far as she was concerned, Edward Craithe simply vanished. He ‘left this plane,’ I believe was how she put it. I doubt she’ll be able to tell you anything useful. If you have any idea of putting her on television … well, I hope you’ll think very hard about it.”
“I don’t intend to exploit her,” I said, annoyed. “Maggie — her social worker — doesn’t think she’s crazy.”
He shrugged. “Even if she’s completely sane now she’s unlikely to be able to remember the truth of what happened when she was mad. I suspect that she simply doesn’t know what happened to Craithe, whether he told her where he was going, expecting her to follow, or if he simply abandoned her, unable to cope with her grief and her madness any more than he could cope with the war.”
I wondered what Flora Abernethy had told this man but I didn’t press him; I preferred to let her speak for herself.
*
Flora Abernethy lived in a basement flat on a rundown street near the center of Edinburgh. She was a frail-looking, white-haired woman who spoke clearly but moved very slowly. The dimly lit front room was bone-chillingly cold, although it was only October; she switched on an electric heater for my comfort. Even had Maggie not warned me I would have recognized by this how she lived, pinching and scrimping and doing without, putting on another ancient woolly rather than add to her electricity bill. I wished I’d brought more than a box of biscuits, but Maggie had insisted that Miss Abernethy would be mortally insulted by a food basket. “Too much like charity. She’d be mortified.” If my program got made, then later there would be money she’d be able to accept: fees for her time and help, fees for the use of her music.
When we were settled, finally, with our cups of tea and the box of biscuits open on a table between us, I asked if she minded my tape recording our interview.
“I don’t mind at all, dear. In fact, I prefer it. This way there can be no confusion about what I’ve said. Because you’re bound to question it. But I don’t mind that, as long as you hear it. It won’t hurt me if people think I’m mad. What matters to me is that the truth should be told.”
“Yes … what truth is that?”
“About Edward Craithe. What happened to him. Isn’t that what you’ve come to ask?”
My heart lurched. I had meant to lead up to this more gently, but… . “You know what happened to him?”
“Of course I do. I told the other one, the one who was writing a book, but he never put in what I said. He thought I was mad, you see, and of course I was, driven mad with grief, but that’s not to say that it wasn’t true. I know what happened. I know what I did.
“I’ve always been able to hear the music in people. It was a gift I was born with, although as I grew up I realized that other people couldn’t hear what I could, and that it would be better for me if I didn’t talk about it. One day, after I was grown, I attended a lecture on non-Western musical traditions, and the lecturer mentioned in passing the ancient Chinese belief that all of creation was molded according to the music performed inside it. And suddenly I understood: this was how I perceived the world. After that I was wild to learn whatever I could about Chinese music and religion.
“I didn’t get much further until I came across Mr. Tang. He could hear the music in people, too, and so we recognized each other. Unlike me, he came from a culture, a tradition, which accepted his gift, and made sense of it. He agreed to teach me what he knew.
“One day when I was going to visit Mr. Tang I met Edward coming out. We knew each other already, for we belonged to the same musical world. At first I was wild with excitement, imagining that he had the gift too, but I soon learned I was wrong. He had approached Mr. Tang as an interested outsider. He did not ‘hear’ people as I did, yet he was drawn to the idea of a universal music, of music as the shaping principal of all creation… . I think really it was the religious impulse in him which was nearly strangled by his dour, Free Church upbringing, and that he was looking for God in music as the only alternative he could imagine to worship. It might have remained an intellectual interest for him, he might have drifted away as easily as he had drifted into the orbit of Mr. Tang — but he fell in love with me, and began learning to listen.”
“I thought you said you were born with the ability?”
“Och, aye, it was a gift I had; that’s not saying it can’t be learned as well. I wouldn’t have known how to teach something that came so naturally to me, but Mr. Tang taught it as a form of meditation: gradually the student would learn to focus his attention to hear the universal music. Edward began to catch snatches of it here and there, he was learning. What kept him at it, he often told me, was the desire he had to hear my song.” She smiled sadly. “But the war came, and everything changed.
“Edward was called up. Mr. Tang disappeared. Everything was confusion and flight. And then I found that I was pregnant. And I … I lost my reason.
“I should have been glad of Edward’s child — we had hoped for a child someday. But somehow, with the war … I became convinced that I would lose Edward, and that without him I could not survive. I felt I must keep him with me at any cost. And so, on his last day with me before he was to be shipped out, I asked him to sit and meditate with me. I listened to the song of his soul — which of course I had heard many times before — with the closest attention I had ever paid.
My senses were sharpened by fear. I knew I had to hear him exactly as he was — I did not dare make any mistakes — because this time I was going to write down what I heard.
“I did that. And as I made the final notation, and raised my eyes to look at him across the room — he was gone. Physically, bodily gone. The only thing left of him was the music I had just copied down which still, to my ears, hung as a faint echo in the air.
“At first I was elated. I had captured my dear Edward in music and now nothing could harm him, nothing, not the war, not death, or any person, could take him away from me. I only gradually realized that by saving Edward in this form I had lost him physically. I had translated him out of his human body into the pure music of his soul and I had no way of getting him back.
“Of course I tried playing the music. And when that had no tangible result I told myself, well, that was because I had only one instrument, and he would require a symphony. I couldn’t command an orchestra to play at my whim, of course, so that would have to wait. In the meantime, I tried to find Mr. Tang. If he couldn’t call Edward back, I hoped he would allow me to join my love, by translating me. You see, there was no one else I knew of in the world with the ability to hear my music and write it down. Possibly Edward might have learned to do it, or if Mr. Tang had taught someone else… . I had the address of a pupil of his, in Wales, but when I made my way out there, he too was gone, called up. His family took pity on me, an abandoned pregnant woman, and let me stay with them. I was delivered of a dead child at seven months and spent the rest of the war in a mental institution.
“After the war, when my translation — Craithe’s last symphony, they called it — was performed and still Edward did not return … then I was forced to recognize the full enormity of what I had done. By writing down his music I had destroyed his life, killed him just as thoroughly as if I had fired a bullet into his heart.
“If Edward had died in the war his music would have joined with the universe, his particular song would not be fixed but would disperse and be re-formed, like the atoms of his physical body, into new life. What I did gave him one type of immortality, by freezing him into one single symphony, as he was at twenty-eight, but it denied him the chance of rebirth, of the eternal round of life that everyone else has. Well, one must learn to live with one’s mistakes. I survived a suicide attempt and many years of lonely madness. I must go on to the end, however it comes to me, knowing I cannot make amends for my terrible mistake.”
*
She looked sad and tired and very old as she fell silent. Full of sympathy, I said, “But Edward Craithe is immortal, because of the final symphony. The only immortality anyone can hope for is to be remembered, and for their work to still be known. That’s what I believe, anyway.”
“And so you believe me?”
Listening to her story, I’d suspended my disbelief. Now, put on the spot, I dithered. “Well, I — I’ve never heard anything like that before. It’s an interesting idea. You know they say that we, that all living things are composed of information, and that theoretically it should be possible to transcribe all that information and store it in a computer. That would be a sort of immortality, because if it could be stored and retrieved later … but I’d never heard it suggested that if you did transcribe all the information of a life into a computer that you’d be transferring the life from one form to another; I’d always assumed it would be a duplication, that the person would go on living in his or her body even after all the essential information was stored on a computer … maybe it’s a paradox? Nobody can be in two places at once?”
She was looking much perkier, almost alarmingly bright. “Souls in computers! Yes … I saw something on the television about that, but do you know, I never made the connection? But we are all information, and music is another form of information which can be stored and reproduced… . Do you know much about computers, my dear? Do you have access to one?”
“Yes, I do.” I was taken aback by her informed interest, and ashamed of myself for assuming that because she was old she was also ignorant of modern ideas. “In fact, I’d thought of using one to research this film. I had hoped to get some samples of your own compositions and compare them with Craithe’s earlier works, and with the final symphony—” I stopped in embarrassment, but I needn’t have worried. She didn’t care what I believed about who had written the final symphony; she was pursuing her own train of thought.
“There are computers — sorry, programs — which can write music, yes? Could it, if you entered the final symphony, continue it?”
“But it’s finished already. It’s a complete work.”
“Yes, that was my mistake. I finished Edward by finishing the symphony instead of leaving it open. He wasn’t dead, that shouldn’t have been his ending, he should have gone on living. And if he had, his life’s music would have taken a different form, to a different conclusion. Could it, this computer program, could it change the course of the music?”
“Well, yes.” I had the uneasy feeling that I was encouraging her in her madness, but what else could I do? “I don’t see why not, if you fed in a few simple rules, whatever knowledge a human composer would have to have, and then you let it follow those rules. I mean, I don’t know anything about music, but I should think it would be like structuring a program to create anything.”
“Please …” She leaned forward in her chair, her little bird-claw hands clutching at the arms, her bright eyes full of hope and fixed on me. “Would you let me try it?”
“Well … yes. Why not?”
*
I’d realized by then that even if my film did get made I wasn’t going to be able to have Flora on screen, revealing her madness to the world. I may have already suspected my project was on the skids, but I had started something I had to see through.
Maggie had offered me an open-ended invitation to stay with her while I was in Edinburgh, and I’d thought I might as well spend a week or two up north doing some research, so I’d brought along my laptop and the as yet untried musical software. I took it with me when I called on Flora Abernethy at her flat the following day.
Flora was a quick study. Despite her age and the fact that she’d never had any hands-on experience with a computer before, she adapted very quickly. I had imagined that I would be the operator, doing things at her suggestion, but her knowledge of music was something I could not match; it was less frustrating for both of us if she worked directly on the computer. She took to mouse and screen as to another musical instrument. Observing her as she entered Craithe’s last symphony — commanding the on-screen virtual orchestra to play it — I recognized that she was a woman of genius, and I was gripped by a feeling of profound sorrow for the waste of what should have been a rich, creative life.
“Now,” she said, raising her hands above the mouse pad. “Now, the music is in the machine. Edward, as he was, in 1940, is in there, like a phonograph of his soul.” She turned to look at me, standing behind her. “Now, I want to let the music out of the fixed form, the symphony, I trapped it in, and let him live again. How can you help me?”
In the games — if that’s the right word — of artificial life I knew about, there were a few established rules which determined when the units could move, and in which direction, when they could reproduce, and so on. Flora was working with music, but she didn’t want to create a song or a symphony — she wanted something open-ended, for the music of Craithe’s last symphony to grow, like the living being she believed it was. I told her she needed different software — or I needed to modify the program we had to allow her individual notes the chance to evolve, to emerge in some system that formed naturally according to the rules of life, rather than being imposed by the rules of musical composition.
“How long would this take?”
“I should be able to do it tonight.”
“And bring it back to me tomorrow?”
I promised I would, and then I went back to Maggie’s flat and spent the evening modifying the
music program so it would do what Flora wanted. It took very little time to set it up the next morning at Flora’s place: once the notes had been fed in we just let it run, the music playing softly, strangely from the speakers as the visual form of the notes ran in shifting patterns on the screen. From time to time I thought I recognized snatches of Craithe’s final symphony, but just as often the sounds which emerged were not music at all.
*
While that went on, I was able to continue my interview with Flora. I had no idea how or if I would ever use the material, since the film I’d envisioned seemed unlikely ever to be made, but I was still going through the motions. And besides, I was curious about her.
So she told me about her sad, lonely childhood: her father was killed in the Great War, and she’d lost her mother and baby sister to the influenza not long after that. She’d been taken in and raised by her only relation, a spinster aunt, who had always been kind to her. This aunt had died when Flora was seventeen, leaving her alone in the world. But she’d won a music scholarship and had a small inheritance which kept her going. Music was always the constant in her life and she had, of necessity, lived for it. She had won an award for composition while a student, and she had sold a few songs. Her alliance with Edward had brought her more recognition, giving her an entrée into more exalted musical circles. Before the war, she had been commissioned to write a chamber piece which had been performed and broadcast.
I was thrilled by these revelations, and pleased that Edward had helped rather than hindered her career. “I’d love to hear some of your work,” I said.
She shook her head dismissively. “I don’t have it anymore.”
“You lost it? All of it?”
“You must remember what my life was … during and after the war. From pillar to post. Locked up, out of control. No home of my own. It’s not as if I decided to destroy my music, or to save it. I simply … lost track. I have no idea what happened to it, to any of it… . And, really, it’s not important.”
