by Thomas Disch
Bridgetta took three steps forward to stand behind the other bride, her feet planted squarely in the billowing train. The two grooms came out of the sacristy to take the hands of their betrotheds. The minister began to speak the silent words of the ceremony, which Panofsky, reading his lips, repeated after him.
Hansard had to dodge out of the way when the groom reached around to receive the ring from his best man. Panofsky handed Hansard the ring that Bridie had made from a costume-jewelry ring of her own by removing the stone and filing away the setting until there was only a thin gold band. Hansard placed the gold circlet on Bridgetta's finger.
He leaned forward to kiss her. When his lips were almost touching hers, she whispered, "Say it again," and he said, " I do, I do!" Then they kissed, man and wife now, till death should part them.
"I've written a small epithalamion for the occasion. Would anyone like to hear a small epithalamion?" Panofsky asked.
"Afterward. Epithalamions come with the dinner," Jet said.
The sub-one bride and groom turned around and, stepping to invisible music, descended from the altar and went out of the church. Bridie ran the tape ahead to the sprightlier Mendelssohn theme. Hansard and Bridgetta stopped kissing.
"Stand back, and let me look at you," he said, smiling broadly.
She stepped back, and then, when the shot rang out, stepped back again. Blood stained the makeshift bridal gown just beneath her heart. Her mouth dropped open, and the smile was vanished from her lips, from her eyes. He caught her in his arms. She was dead.
"That's one ," shouted a half-familiar voice. Hansard turned to see Worsaw standing in the midst of the wedding guests crowding into the aisle. "And this is two." The rifle fired again, but he missed Bridie, who had been his second target.
"Get down, out of sight!" Hansard shouted, though he did not think to take his own advice. Jet took hold of the wheel chair of one Panofsky and pushed him into the sacristy. Bridie and the new Bridget both dove into the floor. The other Panofsky had driven off under his own power and Hansard could not see him, though indeed he could see very little beyond the widening circle of blood staining the damask of the bridal dress. Forgotten, the tape recorder continued to play the Mendelssohn march tune.
"Beast!" Panofsky's voice shouted. "Monstrous, loveless beast!" He was driving his wheel chair through the crush of people in the center aisle. He aimed a revolver at Worsaw, but even from where he was Hansard could see the old man's aim was wide. A third and fourth shot rang out, the pistol and then the rifle, and Panofsky pitched forward in his chair. The wheels penetrated the surface of the floor, but the chair scarcely slowed in its headlong motion forward. Soon the wheel chair, bearing the crumpled body, had passed out of sight downward.
Hansard realized that the moment demanded action, but he was reluctant to let his bride's still-warm body sink to the floor.
Another rifle shot, and the tape recorder was silenced.
"That was dumb, Hansard," Worsaw called out. "Playing that music was plain dumb. I wouldn't of known you was in here without that."
Gently, Hansard lowered Bridgetta's body, keeping his eyes always on her murderer.
"Oh, you don't have to worry yourself yet, Captain. I won't touch you till I've wiped out your friends. I've got a score to settle with you. Remember?"
Hansard reached inside the jacket of his uniform for the pistol with which Panofsky had provided him. He did not move fast.
"Don't be stupid, Captain. How can you pull that out, when all I have to do is squeeze a trigger? Now put your hands up in the air, and tell those women and that other old man to come out from where they're hiding. If they're good-looking enough, I might not have to kill them after all. How about that?"
Hansard did not obey these commands, nor did he, by any deliberate action, disobey them. Indeed, his mind was too numb to produce the thoughts that would have led him to action.
Behind Worsaw a woman's voice let forth an incoherent cry; Worsaw spun to face the imagined danger, but it came not from behind him, as it first seemed, but from above. He had been standing at the back of the church, beneath the choir loft. When he turned, Panofsky's wheel chair dropped through the low-hanging ceiling on top of him. Hansard's wits thawed sufficiently for him to draw his pistol from its holster and empty it into Worsaw's back.
Jet dropped down from the choir loft and came running forward to Hansard. She spoke disjointedly. "I thought . . . are you hurt? . . . and then, around the outside of the church, and up the stairs to the choir . . . it was so heavy, and I could hear him. . . ." He allowed her to embrace him, but he did not return her embrace. His body was rigid, his jaw tense, his eyes glazed with a film of inexpressivity.
Once she'd released him he walked forward and turned over Worsaw's bleeding body. "Three times," he said. "First, inside the manmitter. Then, at the pumping station, and now here. I seem to spend all my time killing this one man."
Bridie and the new Bridget came in at the main door, where the last of the wedding guests were filing out. "Bernard is dead," Bridie announced. "We found him in the cellar. But where's the other Bernard?"
"In the sacristy," said Jet. "Hiding in the minister's clothes closet. It was his idea that I use his chair as a projectile. He felt that I would probably have just as poor aim with a pistol as his double had."
"I seem to spend all my life killing people," Hansard said aloud, though he seemed to be talking only to himself.
"Nathan, it isn't like that," Jet insisted earnestly. "What happened today could have happened any time, without your ever being around. It was an accident; a grotesque accident."
"Go away, please, all of you. I'd rather not see . . . your faces . . . when hers . . ." He turned away from the three women and walked back to the altar. There he took up the dead Bridgetta in his arms.
Jet would have protested again, but she was checked by Bridie. Instead she went with the empty wheel chair into the sacristy. Bridie and the new Bridget dragged the body of Worsaw out of the church. In five minutes Jet returned to ask when they would see him again.
"I want to spend the night here," Hansard said, "with my bride."
Jet went away. The cleaning people came into the church and began to sweep it out and mop up, though they did not see the blood-flecked book lying in the center aisle: The Private War of Sergeant Worsaw .
Afterward, the electric lights were turned off. In the semidarkness Hansard found himself able at last to cry. It had been many years since the tears had come from those eyes, and they did not, at first, flow freely.
Before the brute fact of death nothing can be said. It would be best if, like the three women, we leave Hansard to himself now. His grief, like his love, cannot take a very large part in our story -- which is not very far from ending.
FIFTEEN
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
And yet, what a curious, contradictory grief it was. For she who had died was not dead. She was alive; thrice over she was alive. Though no one of the Bridgettas proposed this consolation in so many words, still the daily and unavoidable fact of their presence -- of her presence -- could not but have its effect on Hansard. In one sense, it only made his loss more poignant by offering constant reminders of her whom he had lost. On the other hand he could not very well pretend that his loss was irreplaceable.
The surviving Panofsky and three Bridgettas, for their part, accepted what had happened with great equanimity. They were, after all, accustomed to the idea of their own expendability.
Then too there was the sobering consideration that in a week -- in six days -- in five days -- they would all be dead; Bridgetta, Panofsky, Hansard, and the whole populace of the Real World. Even in the depths of his grief Hansard was aware of the minutes slipping by, of the dreaded day creeping up on them like a fog bank rolling in from the river.
On the evening of the 27th, Panofsky called them all together. "The question arises, fellow citizens, how shall we pass the time? Bridgetta has a supply of LSD in our medicine ca
binet, should anyone so desire."
Hansard shook his head no.
"Nor do I. However, we may change our mind. If anyone starts to panic, it's a good thing to remember. I understand it's especially helpful for terminal cancer patients, and somehow I've always associated cancer with the bomb. There are also any number of bottles of good brandy and Scotch in the cellar, should the need arise. What I would suggest, most seriously, is what a defrocked priest advised in a clandestine religion class in the labor camp of my youth -- that if one knows the Day of Judgment is at hand, one should just go about one's ordinary business. Any other course partakes of hypocrisy. For my own part, I intend to study the folio of equations that Bernard-Sub-One has just sent me through the transmitter."
Though it was sensible advice, Hansard had difficulty following it. With Bridgetta dead, the ordinary fabric of his life had dissolved. He might still continue to mourn her, but as the time advanced, the magnitude of the impending catastrophe seemed to mock at the smallness of his own sorrow. Perhaps it was exactly this that goaded him to find a solution to the catastrophe, and thereby restore a measure of dignity to his own mourning.
Or perhaps it was just luck.
However that may be, he found himself more and more driven to listen to music. At first he gave his attention to the more fulsomely elegiac selections from Panofsky's library of tapes: Das Lied von der Erde , Die Winterreise, the Missa Solemnis. He listened to the music with an urgency more intense than he had known even at the depth of his adolescent Sturm-und-Drang; as though some part of him already knew that the key he sought was concealed behind these silvery shifting tone-fabrics, hidden in the pattern but a part of it.
Gradually he found the Romantics, even Beethoven, too heavy for his taste. He would have liked to turn to Bach then, but Panofsky's library provided only the Sonatas for Unaccompanied Violin and the Well-Tempered Clavier. Here too, though still indistinctly, he felt the presence moving just beyond the veil; yet when he tried to touch it, to fix it firmly in apprehension, it eluded him as when, reaching into a pooi of water, the fish dart swiftly out of reach of the grasping hand. At last it was Mozart who gave it to him.
On the first play-through of the tape of Don Giovanni , he felt the veil tearing. It began during the trio of the three masquers at the end of the first act, and the rent widened steadily until the penultimate moment when Donna Elvira arrives to interrupt the Don at his carousal. He scorns her earnest warnings; she turns to go out the door . . . and screams; the great D-minor chord thunders in the orchestra, and the statue bursts into the hall to drag the unrepentant Don to hell.
Hansard stopped the tape, reversed the reel, and listened to the scene again from the moment of Donna Elvira's scream.
The veil parted.
"The chord ," he said. "Of course, the chord."
He tore himself away from the music to seek out Panofsky, but discovered the old man sitting only a few feet away, listening raptly to the opera.
"Doctor Panofsky, I -- "
"Please, the music! And no more of that foolish 'Doctor.'"
Hansard switched off the recorder during the height of the brief, electric scene between Don Giovanni and the statue.
"I'm sorry, but I must tell you now. It concerns the music, in a way -- but more than that, I've thought of how it can be done . . . what you said could not be . . . how to communicate with the Real World! Perhaps, just perhaps."
"The most awesome moment in all music, and you -- "
"I'll form a chord!"
"It is true," Panofsky replied, in a more moderate tone, "that Mozart can suggest to us a harmony embracing the world; but art, sadly, is not the same thing as reality. You are wrought up, Nathan. Calm yourself."
"No, no, truly -- this is the way ! You can talk to Panofsky-Sub-One by becoming part of him again, by restoring the unity that was disrupted. You'll mesh with his body -- and with his mind; probably when he's asleep."
A light began to glow in Panofsky's eyes. "I am a fool," he whispered, then paused, as though waiting for Hansard to contradict him -- or perhaps for his other self to agree. He went on: "An idiot. A chord -- yes, it is a fine analogy, though, mind you, nothing more . I can't be sure yet. There is a demonstrable relationship between a man of the Real World and his echo, a sort of proportion, but whether it is enough . . . I cannot, in the time we have left, develop a mathematical model . . ."
"There's no need to. Just do it!"
"But what a lovely analogy." Panofsky's eyes were closed, and his fingers moved in pantomime before him. "You sound middle C on the piano, and simultaneously the C an octave above. The ear can no longer sort out what it hears, and the overtones of the two notes resolve into a single chord."
"The fibers of the body would be the overtones," Hansard theorized eagerly. "The tone of the muscles, the memory traces of the brain, the blood type, the whole pattern of being. Place the two patterns together, and there'll be a sort of resonance between them, a knitting together."
"Yes, a kind of understanding, perhaps; a natural sympathy, a bond."
"A chord . . . And wouldn't communication be possible then?"
"Without evidence, Nathan, how can we know? But there's a chance, and I must try it. If it works -- why then, Nathan, you and I may have saved the world at its last minute. You frown! What now, Nathan? Is it that you misdoubt my plan? Well, well, Napoleon had his skeptics too, and see how far he went.
"No, I'm perfectly confident that once I've been able to communicate with Panofsky-Sub-One I can carry it off, grandiloquent as it must sound to you. But now I must find that gentleman out. And -- speak of the devil . . ."
For another Panofsky had just entered the library through the open door. "You might have been waiting outside the transmitter if you'd been expecting me. It wasn't very cheery coming into an empty house. Why are the two of you looking at me as though I were a ghost? And for that matter -- " turning to Hansard, "I don't believe we've been introduced."
"But you're not Panofsky-Sub-One," Hansard said.
"A sound induction. No, he just left for Moscow. Didn't you see where I'd noted it down on the memo calendar?"
"And Bridgetta?" his double asked.
"Went with him, of course."
"How long will they be gone?"
"Till June 2nd, when Malinova repeats her Giselle . Good heavens, Bernard, what's the matter? You look as though I'd just announced the end of the world."
But, a little later:
"You can't expect me to build it!" Hansard protested.
"Nonsense, Nathan, there's nothing to build. Just a trifle of rewiring. Surely there is a stock of spare elements at the Mars base. With the equipment as it exists, it shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes' work to convert those elements to what we'll need."
"But the elements for the Camp Jackson manmitter are so small!"
"Size is no consideration, Nathan, nor is distance. And you'll have all the power you need in a dry cell. No, my chief worry is not in your assembling the transmitter, but in your getting the co-ordinates down pat. I think we can afford a day of practice. Have you ever put together your own hi-fi?"
"When I was a kid."
"Then you should have no trouble. A hi-fi is more complicated. Let me show you what you must do. In the laboratory. Now. Quickly, quickly!"
At twilight on the 29th of May Hansard and Bridie stood once again on Gove Street and watched the men of Camp Jackson walking in and out of the wall about the pumping station. Their number had been much reduced: Hansard counted fewer than ten. It was necessary to use these transmitters, which were in continuous operation, rather than the manmitters within the camp proper, since there were no jumps scheduled to Camp Jackson/Mars for two more weeks. Had Panofsky possessed the co-ordinates for the Mars Command Post, Hansard might have foregone this sort of hitchhiking altogether.
Finally the last of the men they had seen go in came back out. They waited another half hour, then strolled down the street to the wall and through i
t, trundling an empty wheel chair before them. The door of the pumping house had been standing open during the day, and the great volume of sub-two water had spilled out, to run down the hill and form a shallow moat on the inside of the wall. There were only a few inches of water on the floor of the station, and the steady cascade pouring out of the transmitter -- the echo of the water that had just been transmitted to Mars. A chilly breeze stirred their clothing, originating in the transmitting chamber of the air pump.
