They were interrupted by a shout from Roy. “Something's happening back at the 1824 junction! You better have a look!"
They hurried over. The blurring scrolling of numbers on the screens meant nothing to them, but Roy tried valiantly to explain.
“Something inserted itself into the plenum about a picosecond before the channel got totally pinched off. There's evidence of quantum tunneling. Whoops! There it goes! The dam just burst! We've got an influx of virtual particles!"
Marty kept his voice remarkably steady. “Roy, will you please tell me what the hell you're talking about?"
Roy wiped a drop of sweat off his forehead. Otherwise his face was neutral. “It means that someone jammed a crowbar into your timeline, and now they're prying it back open again."
Marty gave Lester a look that could kill. “The Music Factory,” he said.
* * * *
Harv Saltz looked grim. The others gathered around the conference table looked grim too. Except for Adam Fisk, the comptroller. He had an I-told-you-so expression on his face.
“All right, Lester, take it slow,” Harv said. “Just explain to us how it happened. First you told us that if we offered Beethoven enough money, we'd have no problem getting an exclusive on his tenth symphony. I believe the expression you used was ‘an offer he can't refuse.’ Evidently the money wasn't enough. He pocketed the advance you gave him—an exorbitant figure—which bought us some months of inaction, while you lived it up on the expense account."
“It was supposed to be a slam dunk,” Larry McGavin put in.
“Please, Larry,” Harv said. He turned back to Lester. “Then you bought Beethoven back to our time with you with the promise of a miraculous operation that would restore his hearing—another offer he couldn't refuse..."
“I was against it,” Adam said. “Throwing good money after bad. And quite a bit of money at that. It would have reduced our profit margin on the project to—"
“That's water under the bridge, Adam,” Harv said. “In view of the problem we've got now.” He aimed his gaze at Lester again. “I've got a meeting with the board next week. They're pretty upset. So tell me again, how is it that you managed to spend another three months supposedly riding herd on him, and still no symphony?"
All eyes were on Lester. He spent a couple of seconds groping for words, then said, “Well, uh, we had what seemed to be his sincere assurances that..."
Adam Fisk interrupted him. “But no written contract. And nothing about returning the original advance."
Lester got unexpected help from the guy from legal who had been asked to sit in on the meeting. “A contract would have been unenforceable anyway. A hypothetical future has no standing in a hypothetical past, even assuming that we wanted to make a case out of it."
“It might have helped turn the screws on him,” Adam persisted.
Harv rapped the table. “Please, gentlemen! Let him talk."
Lester looked over at Marty for support. No help there. Marty was maintaining a self-protective silence.
“I think he intended to honor his promises,” he said ruefully. “But then he got back to his own milieu. He could hear again. And more to the point, he could play the piano again and hear himself play. It must have hit him like a ton of bricks. The first thing he did was to get rid of the out-of-tune pianos with the broken wires that he'd abused over the years. He fell in love with the state-of-the-art Broadwood piano that the manufacturer sent to him when word of his miraculous cure got around. And he started playing in public again."
“I fail to see...” someone began.
Lester pressed on. “Don't forget, Beethoven made his first splash in Vienna as a piano virtuoso. He played the salons, he wowed the ladies, he amazed everybody with his ability to improvise. The money was good and the adulation even better. He got to be quite a prima donna. He insulted his patrons and they put up with it. He threatened to break a chair over Prince Lichnowski's head for asking him to improvise for some dinner guests he didn't like. Another time, one of his groupies—a princess—got down on her knees and begged him to play, and he wouldn't give her the time of day. He was still young and feeling his oats when he started to lose his hearing. It was a terrible blow not to be able to do the concerts and private performances any more. He never stopped regretting the life that he lost. Composing is one thing, but playing to a live audience is something else."
“Get to the point, Lester,” Harv said. “What happened?” He was tapping the table with a finger, a bad sign.
“Right,” Larry McGavin growled. “I got the sales force all fired up about this, Lester. Now, all of a sudden, no symphony. What do I tell them?"
“I was getting to that,” Lester said. He took a deep breath. “For the first week, nothing on paper. No notes, no sketches, none of the usual scrawls. I nagged him about that, believe me, I did. But he just kept saying he was working things out in his head, and when they firmed up a little better, he'd start sketching out some ideas. He was on the verge of losing his temper, so I backed off. But he accepted an invitation from his old patron, Prince Lichnowski, to play at some fancy soiree. They had an emotional reconciliation, and rumor has it that the prince paid him six hundred florins, his old stipend. Same thing happened a week later, with Prince Lobkowitz. He played the Hammerklavier sonata, and caused quite a stir. Remember, he'd never really heard it himself. Neither had his audience. The pianists of his time thought it was unplayable."
“Very interesting, I'm sure,” Harv said. “Get on with it."
Lester looked over to Marty for support, but Marty was sitting there placidly, looking as detached as he could manage.
“Well, then Lobkowitz and Beethoven's self-appointed manager, Anton Schindler, hatched this scheme of a giant subscription concert, Beethoven's Comeback or something. I braced him about it, but he waved me off, saying the symphony ideas were still percolating in his head, and when he was ready, he'd start work. So I figured, let him get it out of his system, and I'll tackle him afterward."
“And?"
“The concert was a huge success. He had to repeat it four times over the next two weeks. It was the talk of Europe, not just Vienna. Beethoven didn't bother to write anything new for it. He just played some of his surefire hits—the Appassionata sonata, the Moonlight, the Pathetique. He filled in with an hour of improvisations—showy stuff, all fireworks and no red meat. The audience lapped it up. When it was over, Beethoven was rolling in dough. Like nothing he'd seen before."
“I presume you—what was it?—'tackled him’ afterward?” Harv said with dangerous sarcasm. Several murmurs of assent could be heard round the table.
“He blew me off. It was more of the same. Concerts, private parties, piano lessons for adoring countesses. He was having the time of his life. He wouldn't talk to me any more. The last I heard, he and Schindler were cooking up a tour of France and England. Then Russia."
“Lester..."
Lester tried to fend off the explosion. “For God's sake, what was I supposed to do? The man was reborn! He spruced up, got a new wardrobe, got his hair trimmed! He has a girlfriend! A countess!"
Harv's secretary entered the conference room just in time to postpone his wrath. She whispered in his ear and handed him a piece of paper. He read it, then looked round the table with a cold, steely gaze that was worse than an explosion.
“What I feared,” he said. “The Music Factory's releasing a new series. ‘Beethoven at the Piano: Improvisations from His World Tour.’”
The explosion came, but it was everybody else at the table, not Harv, who looked as if he was simply contemplating murder. They were all glaring at Lester and talking at once. “...cooked again, goddammit...” “...shouldn't have listened...” “...why didn't you record him yourself..."
Lester saw his whole career flashing before his eyes. He tried desperately to make himself heard. “I only had my Palm-All with me ... who would've thought there'd be concerts..."
It was Marty who came to the rescue. He
rapped on the table to get their attention, and when he had it, he spoke with all the calm authority of a creative director coming to the defense of a wayward subordinate.
“Don't be too hard on Lester. Sometimes it hits the fan and there's nothing you can do about it. There's no sense dwelling on past mistakes. We need to look ahead, find a new project that will make Divergences, Inc. numero uno again. And Lester might just have come up with that project. We were talking about it this morning."
Lester knew what a rope was when he was drowning. He squared his shoulders and faced the music. “I asked myself what would grab everybody's attention even if they didn't know much about music. What would compare with the appeal of something like Beethoven's Tenth?"
He paused for a beat while he tried to think of something. They were waiting expectantly.
“And then I had it,” he said. “Schubert's Finished."
Copyright (c) 2008 Donald Moffitt
* * * *
“You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they've exhausted all the other possibilities."—Winston Churchill
* * * *
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Novelette: AMOR VINCIT OMNIA
by Craig DeLancey
What's “normal” depends on where on the scale you're looking from....
“Mr. Sumaran? Mr. Allen Sumaran? I want to thank you for seeing me today."
My visitor looked nothing like the kind of low-level bureaucrat that he claimed to be. He was too old and too fit. He appeared in his mid sixties, with short and graying hair, but lean, athletic, as square as the frame of my office door where he stood. Well-muscled arms filled out the sleeves of his conservative blue jacket, a Brooks Brothers generic with two brass buttons and the pockets still sewed shut. It shined as if he'd bought it that morning.
“You're welcome, Mr. Austin,” I told him, waving that he should enter. As he approached I saw that he had distinctive green eyes, one with a touch of brown in the iris. I found him imposing and slightly frightening, although I knew no reason to fear him then, and only later did the ghost tell me the truth about him: this man wanted to own me and everyone I loved. This man's goal was the enslavement or the genocide of my secret race.
“Call me Tom,” he said.
“Allen.” I held out my hand and he shook it fiercely, his grip rough from a callused palm.
“Please sit.” I pointed him to a chair as I sat behind my desk. The windows of my Manhattan office covered the wall behind my desk and gave a view both beautiful and distracting, through tall towers and the gaps between air defense spires out to the Hudson beyond. But Austin focused very clearly on me, his piercing green eyes fixed on mine.
“You said you need to talk to me about the Marrion Home,” I reminded him.
“Yes.” A slight tic showed itself in a flinching of his left eyebrow, as if through great effort he were holding something back. “As I said before, I work for the E.P.A. You were raised in the Marrion Home?"
“My parents died shortly after my birth. I was fortunate to be born in Pennsylvania, where it was possible to actually be taken in by the orphanage instead of being shuffled from foster home to foster home. I liked it at Marrion. In fact, I often miss it. It was a good place to grow up."
“I'm sure it was. There were less than a hundred of you there, correct?"
“That's right. Some kind of budget constraints. There were a few classes, and then for more than a decade they admitted no one new. Not until the rest of us graduated, in fact. Why are you interested?"
“Unfortunately, we have reason now to believe that the grounds of The Marrion Home may have been contaminated by some industrial pollutants that are known carcinogens."
“That's terrible,” I said.
“Yes, sir, it is.” But his intense stare revealed no genuine concern.
“Well, I just had a check-up. My doctor says I'm fine."
He twitched again and forced himself to smile. “I'm very glad to hear that. However, we'd like to check for things that your doctor might miss. Would you be able to stop by the offices of a doctor here in town that is working with us on this problem? He'd like to do some tests on you. Nothing major. Blood tests, mostly."
“Perhaps. If you think it best.” I saw no harm in telling him it might be possible. “But it'll take at least a week or two. I am extremely busy, as you can imagine."
“I can. You just became the CFO of Ariel Systems, correct? I read in the paper a few weeks ago that you are expected to be CEO someday. They said you have a great strategic mind."
I had seen the article in the Journal. Below a pointillist portrait of me lay twenty column inches of flattery, the usual business press mythology about brilliant executives who deserved their obscene pay.
“I've been lucky, Tom. We guessed at a few long-term trends in bioinformatics and turned out to be right. That made us the market leader."
“Still, you must be very proud,” he said.
I resisted the temptation to frown. I had started with grand dreams to reform the corporation, to wrestle it onto a path to do great things, to lead the cure of a thousand diseases, but at best I had just pushed it a tiny way. Each day it grew harder to know if I remained true to those dreams. Our software mostly helped big pharma make the drugs that dominated the market: hair growth tonics or erection cocktails or mood improvements for geriatrics. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere died of plagues.
I gave him a business cliché. “I'm proud of my team and their accomplishments."
Austin only forced another smile. An awkward silence fell. He continued to stare as if expecting me to betray some hidden truth.
Finally, I said, “But this job does take a lot of time. Can you leave any information that you have with my assistant, and she'll see if we can schedule something as soon as possible?"
“That would be great. One other question. Can you help us track down your ... fellow classmates from the Marrion Home?"
“I should be able to do that. This evening I'll go through my personal files and see whom I have contact information for."
“Thanks very much."
We stood. I walked him to the door and opened it for him, and then shook his hand. Again the coarse grip like steel. He passed me a card. To make a good show of it, I pointed him at my assistant and told her to tentatively schedule something in the next week. I thanked Austin again and closed my door.
The Marrion Home. I had not been back to the orphanage in years, but had maintained close ties with almost all of my classmates. The eighty-seven others I grew up with were for me one large extended family. We had annual reunions, which most of us managed to attend even though we were now dispersed about the planet. We exchanged holiday cards by the dozens. Not a wedding or birth passed without everyone getting involved. And some of this family were very close indeed: I reached for the phone to make a call to Jack Reed, Vice President of Business Development for Ariel Systems, who worked just three floors below mine.
Jack had lived at the Marrion Home with me, a fellow orphan, one year younger. I hired him into Ariel shortly after I came there. Jack had already gotten a visit from Austin the morning before and had told me about it immediately afterward. This morning he had left me a voice mail explaining he urgently needed to talk, but I had not called him back yet.
Then I remembered it was Monday and set the phone down. Jack would be at OpenMed. I peeked out of my office, was relieved to see that Mr. Austin no longer lurked there, and told my assistant, “Something has come up and I have to go out. Clear my appointments for this afternoon. I'll be back for the board meeting at five."
* * * *
I caught a taxi across town, which dropped me in front of a neat brownstone flanked by art galleries. D
ouble glass doors marked only with “OpenMed” printed in small, neat green letters, opened onto a long room where a mix of students, grizzled doctor activists, and visiting scientists milled around tabletop computers, talking excitedly. I said a few hellos, learned that Jack was working upstairs, and ascended the minimalist winding metal stair tucked into the back of the room.
Jack slouched behind his desk, staring intently at a terminal. I watched him for a moment through the glass wall of the office. It was still morning, but his shirttail, somehow freshly soiled with jam, hung out. Always, after the first hour of work, his shirt was wrinkled and usually stained somewhere miraculous. His hair, which he meant to oil back, usually fell partly over his face. In any normal corporate environment he would have been overlooked and his genius would have been lost. His sloppiness would have been mistaken for indiscipline, his quirks of shyness confused with inability, his hesitation to make decisions would have overshadowed his ability to foresee their most distant consequences. But working under my protection he had done great things. His insights founded the strategy that had made Ariel the market leader.
Jack spent every other Monday here at OpenMed's main office, working with a dozen volunteers and activists. He did this by spreading over a year the four weeks of vacation he earned as a VP at Ariel Systems. I used to try to keep up with him, but with my promotion I could no longer spare the time, and could only help on weekends and some evenings.
OpenMed was a nongovernmental organization that promoted the development and distribution of new medical treatments that would be shared freely with any manufacturer, bringing the open source development model to drugs and biomedical technology. Jack and I had helped found it more than five years before, but it was Jack's baby. Now a global organization with a dozen offices around the world, OpenMed had some real successes, including the development of a new HIV regimen led jointly by graduate students at Columbia and some doctors in Cuba.
“What are you doing here?” he asked as I came in. “Don't you have the board meeting tonight?"
Analog SFF, April 2008 Page 9
