by Unknown
“A virgin queen,” Uncle Prospero says, “and every last man in the kingdom she ruled was her aspiring paramour. They were born loving her, and they continued to love her from cradle to grave, though none of them could ever have her, and they knew it. This is the root of the beautiful paradox. All the men in the kingdom knew that, if they were ever to convince the virgin queen to love them, in the moment she was kissed, in the moment she was touched, she would cease to be what they desired. Not a virgin queen; just an ordinary queen, like any other.”
—we run our ∫elues a ground—
Prospero reaches out and runs a finger along the green gilded edge of the folio’s page, his face entranced. “There was an agreement between all the men, and it was never spoken of, because no one ever needed to speak of it. The agreement was this: they could hold contests and duels and chess matches to decide who loved and deserved her the most; they could compose songs and dances; they could boast of their prowess and they could abase themselves at her feet. But never, never, could they touch her. For the moment one of them laid a finger on her, brushed a tear from her eye, caressed the space on her neck where the hair was too short to be combed and too fine to be seen: at that moment there would be no more contests, and no more dances, and no more songs, and the dances and songs were what made the world beautiful, and the virgin queen was what made it possible for the world to be beautiful. This was the power, and the curse, of their undying love.”
Prospero removes his finger from the book, lifting his gaze to look into the eyes of a wisp of a dark-haired girl facing him on the other side of the table. “This,” he says, “is a book of lovesongs, composed for the virgin queen by one of her most talented and fervent admirers. It is a catalog of all the many forms of love that one human being can have for another. There is the love between father and son, of mother for daughter; love between soldiers bleeding to death in each other’s arms; love possessive, love obsessive; love of men for women, and for power, and for the mirror images they see in other men’s faces; and there is jealousy as well, and hatred, for these, too, are forms of love: twisted, but true all the same—”
(The children are completely bewildered. It was real neat at first, being in the Tower, I mean, what are the kids back at school gonna say about this, we were in the Taligent Tower, we saw all kinds of crazy stuff, lots of cool machines, aw holy cripes we saw them putting together mechanical men, but now this guy has us in his dumb old library and he’s going on about this book and love and stuff, and every time he says the word love it’s weird, like when your mother tells you she loves you it’s weird enough, but it’s your mother, you know, but when your father says he loves you it’s really weird, like maybe he’s drunk or getting ready to die or something, but no, he just said it, this word, and this old guy just keeps saying it over and over again, I wish he would stop—)
—Have mercy on vs. We ∫plit. We ∫plit. We ∫plit.
THIRTY-SIX
From the sixth notebook of Caliban Taligent:
—By day I am worse than a beast, but at night . . . oh, at night I have the loveliest dreams. At night the chessmaster and the poet within me combine to give me fantasies of such rampant hubris that I am shamed upon waking from them. In my dreams legions come to worship me, and they gather before me and cry out with one voice, “What have we done to deserve you as a deity, you, Caliban, whose name is used as a curse, you with your twisted face and your blackened, shriveled heart?” And I must reply to them, “You made me. God made man in his own image, so man returns the favor by remaking the face of God again and again, changing His image to suit constantly shifting faith and fashion. This is what you have done to me. You made me. You.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
The tour of the Taligent Tower has reached its final stop, and the children have still not seen Miranda, their hostess. They are seated in the five front rows of a concert hall, intimately designed, but still large enough to hold a few hundred. The lights in the house are up. Prospero stands in front of a deep-red velvet curtain hanging in front of the stage. An enormous tarpaulin covers the entire orchestra pit, and oddly shaped lumps beneath the canvas suggest some things beneath it that are clearly not musical instruments.
“Supersonic-train conductor.” “Firefighter.” “Flying car pilot.” “Typewriter girl.” “Dollmaker.” Prospero has asked the children to tell him what they want to be when they grow up, and they are naming off occupations, one by one. Harold is sitting next to Sebastian in the back row: he will be the last. “Policeman.” “Pawnshop owner.” “Numbers runner.” “Hired assassin.” “Psychotherapist.”
It is almost Harold’s turn to speak, and he can’t think of what to say. “Sebastian,” Prospero says. “You can’t be a mechanical man, and I’m sorry about that. But is there anything else you want to be?”
“We-e-e-ell,” says Sebastian nervously, kicking his legs back and forth in the oversized seat, “the other thing I want to be when I grow up is a vitrioleur, b-b-but my mom, she said already that she ain’t gonna send me to school for that, ’cause she said it’s too expensive and only a few of ’em can get steady work.”
Prospero recalls what his publicist said: Remember, you have to inspire them. “You shouldn’t give up on your dream, just because of something silly like money,” he says. This sounds inspirational, he thinks. “You’re young, and you have the future in front of you, and you can have anything you want if you want it enough. You can even have all the perfect things in the world that could ever be, all at once. Because that’s what the future is: possibility.”
“But my mom, she said the people always sayin’ stuff like that is the same people that’s got all the money anyway and they don’t know what it is to have to live hand to mouth paycheck to paycheck—”
“—ahem that’s very nice. And you.”
“Harry. Harry Winslow.”
“Harry. What do you want to be? When you grow up.”
The thing is, up to now, Harold hasn’t really given much thought to what he wants to be. Strange: it seems that all the other children in the audience, rattling off their responses so easily, are already thinking of themselves as adults. But Harold hasn’t made that cognitive leap yet. The things that adults do aren’t things he imagines himself doing: reading the newspaper; making things with his hands and selling them for money; touching parts of women’s bodies. For Harold there are no newspapers, and the radio tells him the news of the world; money appears whenever it wants, dropping from his father’s hand into his; girls would be just like boys, if they didn’t insist on acting so strange.
But everyone in the hall is waiting—the children are turned around, looking over the high backs of their chairs at him, and now he’s getting nervous. He needs to come up with something. He thinks back to what his father said to him a few days ago: So be on your best behavior. Remember everything you see. When you come back, write it down. I’ll buy you some pens and some clean new paper, and you can sit at my desk and write down everything you remember. Maybe that can be a job. Maybe you can make a job out of writing things down? Yes. “I want to write things down!” Harold blurts. “I want to write stories down. I like”—and now it dawns on him, really occurs to him for the first time, that all stories have makers as well as listeners—“listening to stories. So maybe I might like telling them, too. Sir!”
“Beautiful,” Prospero says. “Fantastic. It’s good to have ambition, and in the past age of miracles there were indeed many professional storytellers who traveled from town to town, paying for their room and board with tales of the lands they’d come from, or lands they’d just imagined. But those days are gone, child, and this is the age of machines. Have you thought of what will happen to you if you want to tell a tale and no one can hear you or has the time to listen? Have you thought about trying to tell a tale in a crowded room, where everyone is shouting to be heard?
“Storytelling—that’s not the future. The future, I’m afraid, is flashes and impulses. It’s made up of
moments and fragments, and stories won’t survive.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
“Well,” Prospero says to the audience of children, “you all seem to have wonderful aspirations for the future, but none of you have fallen into my trap! I was hoping that one of you boys and girls would say that you wanted to be a musician, because then I would get to tell you that you had better find another line of work, and fast!” He calls offstage: “Gideon! Martin! Uncover my mechanical orchestra!”
At this summons the two men, wearing spotless laboratory gowns, emerge from one of the hall’s side doors. With some struggle they remove the tarpaulin from the orchestra pit, rolling it into a tube which they carry out the way they came in, one of them supporting either end. Gideon waves at the group of kids in the auditorium as he leaves, and Harold wonders which of the other children in the crowd had directly been subjected to his hustle.
With its cover gone, the children can now see in the pit a machine of ludicrously sprawling complexity. It has all of the instruments of a conventional orchestra, arranged in their traditional positions, but the instruments are all inextricably entangled in a nest of levers and pulleys and rods, along with many mechanical devices that resemble the spidery elongated arms that Harold had seen earlier, hanging from the ceiling of the room where the mechanical men were being assembled. Bellows are attached to the horns and woodwinds; mechanical hands with pencil-thin fingers are poised over the strings of a pair of harps.
In the center of the orchestra pit is a large, ornately carved cabinet from whose back a hundred levers sprout, each in a different direction. Each lever is indirectly connected through a chain of devices to one of the mechanical orchestra’s instruments. Installed in the front of the cabinet is a scroll housed on an enormous wooden rod; it is about ten feet wide and seems as if it might be a mile long if unrolled. The scroll is punched with thousands of holes in a series of lines that appear to run its length, in parallel.
A crank with a large, filigreed brass handle protrudes from the side of the cabinet; its purpose is to turn the enormous scroll in its housing. Sitting next to the crank is a plushly cushioned, wooden three-legged stool, for its operator.
“Nowadays,” Prospero says, “when people wish to hear music that is live, instead of phonographic, they have to hire several, sometimes hundreds of performers. It is extremely expensive and impractical, is it not? One finds oneself wondering if the expenditure is worth the reward. But my mechanical orchestra will change all that. Encoded within the scroll that you see in this cabinet, here, is an entire piece of music. And just the way that a human musician has a scoresheet that tells him what notes to play and how to play them, this scroll tells the mechanical orchestra what notes to play. The difference is that where it once took many, many people to perform a piece of music, people who had to be sent to school for training, wasting years of life in the process that might be spent in more productive ways: now it only takes one person, turning that crank, right there.”
Prospero smiles. “Ladies and gentlemen, performing Jean Sibelius’s Opus 109, The Tempest: my daughter, Miranda Taligent.” And the girl comes onto the stage.
Her clothing is odd: first, because it is several centuries out of fashion; second, because it seems to be the sort of thing one might wear if one is the guest of honor at a coronation, rather than a birthday party. Every inch of Miranda’s spare body is concealed except for her tiny hands, which peek forth from the billowing sleeves of an overdress, elegantly embroidered and decorated in a pattern of entangled vines of ivy, flirting with the concept of tessellation without actually repeating itself. The overskirt opens down the middle, revealing a second dress, a forepart, decorated with a complex pattern of silvery intermeshing gears of different sizes. This pattern also refuses to repeat itself, as if in imitation of the intricately entwining vines of the overdress. A white ruff a yard across encircles the little girl’s neck, and its effect is to make Miranda’s head, with her porcelain-powdered face and her shimmering red-gold hair piled atop it in a series of intertwining braids, seem as if it is a solitary gourmet delicacy on a plate, waiting to be devoured.
She moves awkwardly across the stage, as if her clothing is reinforced with hoops of iron, and comes to stand next to her father, facing the bedazzled children. “Good day,” she says, her vowels perfect and discrete, her consonants sharp and clipped. “My name is Miranda. Today is my birthday. Welcome to my Tower. I will perform for you.”
And with that, the little girl turns stiffly, winces as if she is in pain, leaves the stage, and descends into the pit.
THIRTY-NINE
A mechanical Prospero moves toward center stage, in front of a backdrop upon which is painted an impressionistic image of a tranquil island shore populated by palm trees, the sun a perfect yellow suspended in a field of cloudless blue. Unlike the mechanical men seen thus far (which were clearly made from one kind of metal or another), the mechanical Prospero is almost indistinguishable from the real one (now seated next to Harold to watch Miranda’s performance). From this distance, indescribable, but still somehow perceptible, irregularities in its movements and gait are the only signs that the automaton is less, or other, than human. “The skin is rubber,” Prospero says. “The hair is from human heads. These are our best mechanical men. Prototypes: you wouldn’t believe how expensive they are to manufacture.” For the duration of the performance Prospero talks to Harold nonstop, raising his voice to compete with the music and the voices (yes, the voices) of the mechanical performers on the stage. “We only have a very few so far, some of which are on this stage, the rest of which populate Miranda’s playroom. I know they may look more like living humans than you may be used to, but there’s no need to be afraid. We’re just now learning how to mechanically duplicate the subtler movements of the human body. Do you have any idea how complicated a larynx is? A device that you use countless times each day without even having to give a single thought to the complexity of its construction? It’s taken us years to find the proper combination of strings and weights—look. Here’s Ariel, the sprite. He’s going to sing.”
“Hør, hør, hvor kjaek og kry hanen galer højt i sky, højt i Sky! Kykkeliky!” sings Ariel in a mezzo-soprano with slight undertones that speak of tin and clockwork. The androgynous machine, child-sized, naked, and covered in glittering golden paint, hangs suspended by cables above the stage, a windup key grinding in its back. “Hør, hør! Vov, vov! Hunden gjøer; Vov, vov!” But Harold’s ears are attuned to something else, a second symphony playing itself out under the harmonies of the Sibelius, composed of the rumbling trundling of the coded scroll as it rotates in its housing in the central cabinet, the clicks and snicks of the levers and drivers that move the bows across the strings, and the motors that grumble sullenly in the guts of the singers.
Now a new automatic actor comes onto the stage, capering and stumbling on all fours like a damned idiot, covered in dirt, grasping the scarred, barren space in its crotch where its genitalia ought to be. Its hair is made from shining twisted copper wires, and its head is turned around backward on its neck. “Ban! Ban! Caliban!” it yells, out of time with the music, falling to the floor and clumsily picking itself up. “Ban! Ban! Caliban!” On the opposite side of the stage, the fake Prospero in his necromancer’s robes and the fake Miranda in her outgrown swaddling rags shrink away in mock-theatrical terror, turning their heads and throwing their arms in front of their faces. The flesh-and-blood Miranda in the pit goes on patiently turning the crank at the heart of the orchestral machine, staring at nothing.
“Ban! Ban! Caliban! Ban! Ban! Caliban!”
“There he is,” Prospero whispers to Harold, his voice trembling. “The beast.”
FORTY
“Harry,” Prospero says later, placing his hand on the boy’s shoulder, “perhaps I shouldn’t have been so hard on you when you told me of your wishes. It isn’t nice to have someone else dash your dreams for you, is it? It gives you the same feeling you get when you’ve been caught doing
something shamefully wrong. The feeling that you’ve been exposed. As if you’re reciting a poem to a roomful of great-aunts and your trousers drop.
“Harry, there is something I like about you, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. I’ve made a mistake, but let me try to fix it. There are no preterite storytellers, Harry; remember that. I’ll make the storyteller the luckiest boy, so he’ll have a story to tell the other boys at school. I want you to meet my daughter. At the birthday banquet you will sit at my daughter’s right hand.”
FORTY-ONE
And so, at Prospero’s request, Harold Winslow sits to the right of Miranda Taligent at her fabulous birthday banquet. The children are back in the banquet hall where they began today’s adventure. The two mudslinging girls that had messed up their clothing with fighting have returned, wearing brand-new, beautiful dresses that look like they were bought off the rack at the same establishment where Miranda’s coronation gown was handmade: the embroidery is not quite as elaborate, and the ruffs are not quite as large, but they are still most impressive. “We watched these made for us,” the formerly squabbling girls sing in harmony to envious onlookers. “Mechanical seamsters measured us and made them to fit us and no one else, all in a snap and a flash. It was worth getting in trouble.” The girls sit across the table from Harold, swinging their legs back and forth, holding hands.
