Universe 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Terry Carr

  Then another researcher blinked into being. Santesson. Vibrations of interest, perhaps irony, reached him. Of course. This was a younger Santesson. And he suddenly realized, that was why Santesson had been so friendly and encouraging the first tune. Santesson knew Largens would end up here sometime later. A fragment of Largens’ future had been part of Santesson’s memory.

  Meanwhile, Beethoven’s whole train of thought went past unnoticed. Largens let it. To hell with analysis: he was here for magic. He didn’t care why Beethoven was writing the symphony, only that he was a part of it. He wanted to be more a part of it. So when Beethoven sat at the pianoforte to start work, Largens in effect dictated a phrase to him.

  To his utter and terrified amazement, the composer stopped. His pen wavered in midstroke; it trembled with just a hint of suspicion as Largens’ phrase roiled in his mind; then he jotted it down. Crosstalk.

  Beethoven had heard.

  Some chemistry, some arcane connection of blood pressures, brainwaves, something had bridged the gap—and now Beethoven was developing a passage from his theme. What had he done?

  This was not the Ninth Symphony; and yet the music spattered out from the pen, not entirely his, not all Beethoven’s. His panic increased. What were the mechanics of music, time, the past?

  Music was articulated time. Largens always thought of it as a river. If he were lucky, relaxed and easy in his craft, a man could tap the flow, turn the currents of time to something solid, a piece of music. And rarely, so rarely, he might actually direct the flow. Time might swirl and bend around him as space bends around a point of gravity. Beethoven had that force; that was his magic. But Beethoven was unique. What of himself and the critics that with machineries, with tinkerings and tampermgs dammed the flow? What were they doing to the past?

  The next few hours were blurred and broken. Largens had no sense of returning to 2016. He remembered Santesson’s voice, among all the other phantom voices filling Beethoven’s head. The opening of the third movement—but not the way Largens remembered it. He lost all track of time then and came finally to consciousness in the dark transfer room, drained and sick with the irresponsibility of what he had done. He skirted Central Park on the way home, feeling vaguely threatened by it, watching the night sky glow faintly through layers of leaves that shifted as he walked under them. The way the layers crossed and moved stirred something in him. It reminded him of the surrealistic moments of transfer. It gave him unpleasant intimations, as if the trees were trying to tell him something; or, more accurately, his mind was searching for a way to reach him, and the trees were handy. Something is different. He was too tired to think about it; He stopped in a bar on Sixty-eighth Street, had three drinks and went home. He had trouble with his door key—he had to search his ring for it, which seemed far too crowded—got inside, and dropped onto the bed.

  The benefit of living in a closed world was that you were effectively shielded from attack from without. The failing was that your defenses weakened, and if the closed world started to come apart, you were helpless.

  Charles Largens’ world had showed the first weak seam. He lay drunk in his bed and cried as he hadn’t since his parents died.

  The afternoon before the official transfer he spent with Lia. In the same apartment on East Eighty-fourth, they traded thoughts and intimacies. He spoke as in a dream:

  “Does it seem different to you?”

  “What?”

  “The way things are.”

  “What things?”

  “Everything; I don’t know. You and I and

  The apartment on Seventy-eighth Street was unchanged since Santesson’s death; Lia lived alone there and he visited frequently. This morning

  He was so confused now, the world seemed only a welter of possibilities, nothing was certain. The sense of change that followed each of his returns had disjointed him so

  A thin drizzle grayly painted the bedroom window as they

  No, no; it was not real, it couldn’t be. He was dreaming, the dreams timeless monuments of time, clear and precise, their meanings faint and distant. These dreams had no more reality, no less importance, than all the music he had never written.

  His dreams now, his nightdreams, were of Beethoven and the past, of music unraveling itself into spaghetti piles, and he woke frequently in sweat and fear, lying still but sliding madly into the past: time and the tide took him back, the great bulk of days he had lived weighed more heavily than days he would yet live, freighted him toward the past. It was only necessary to stand still in that awful darkness to be drawn vertiginously back.

  And one morning, that morning he walked to the Center in a surreal mood, living, in a fantasy of the near-future which was a baroque counterpointed dream of the past since he was dreaming of where he would be in a half hour which would be two hundred years in the past, and concurrently he was remembering all .the tunes in his past he had daydreamed of this moment, each disparate present a window on the past through the future, and how different it all was from how he had frequently thought it would be. He had now a fear of alternate presents, vague suspicions of what was happening to him, to time, to music. He thought of how hectic his time with Beethoven would be with all the researchers from past and future history converging on that most covetable moment of inspiration.

  (He had spent one afternoon with Bach during the Brandenburg months, during his assistantship to Santesson, and had been so drained by the babel of thoughts from the dozen others also there that he quite forgot why he had come. His own thoughts were washed from him in the greater cataract; there was only the sound of all the critics that would ever inhabit Bach during that period—a dozen trains converging on the same terminus from different moments in time, with a tumult and a clattering and collision, Bach, the terminus, all ignorant of the chaos within.)

  (Or had all that furious racket somehow fueled the headlong counterpoint of the Brandenburg concert!? No, ridiculous, stop it.)

  But he walked into the transfer room now with a growing apocalyptic sense, his every instinct so tightly wound that they had to give him a tranquilizer with the drug; and at the moment of triggering he still screamed, screamed his way into the place without time, the place of motion without destination, form without function, research without purpose, the floating fragments of tunes without order. Time without his world, times without Beethoven, times where his own life was rich and glorious; and in an instant quickly past he heard his song cycle finished, he heard half a score symphonies that were his own; he clutched at them and they vanished, and only the flat spinning emptiness remained, as distant and unreachable as the bowl of the sky. . . . The moire patterns slowed, the layers peeled back to show greater complexities, more permutations, fork upon fork of time, and then a great rending—

  (there was a time as a boy he had lain by midnight railroad tracks, waiting for a train to pass, the air hot, muggy, iron-smelling; he waited till a glow appeared, distant, and grew to a full glare; and then the train was upon him and rushing past like doom and time and the endless vacuum of space wrapped in a midnight earth blackness, the air shuddering and sucking all around him, the very fabric of space torn with its force. He felt his heart clutch up, stall, and he felt the end of the world passing in that endless second. Time suspended. He felt that now, in the moment of transfer, in the region between times.)

  —as blocks of time were torn by their roots, knocked free and avalanched

  : all past in an instant.

  1823. Baden.

  He was there; and the first thing was not a clear idyllic vision of the past, but a riot-blur of graygreen light and the assault of a thousand nightmare conversations of which he heard no words— but Beethoven was deaf— but the voices of a thousand and more men from Largens’ time filled the void with their own sounds and laments, voices of pain and frustration and everything Largens saw coming to fruition in himself, voices of humanity enough to crush him— then strangely they all fell silent— a tense waiting hush, as before a curt
ainrise—

  ... and Beethoven thought clearly of the fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony, musing, brooding, on the proper introduction to Schiller’s Ode...

  and the voices surged out of silence:

  O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! Sondern lasst uns ausgenehmere anstimmen und freudevoliere...

  Beethoven staggered and gasped. He tore open his notebook.

  The voices—!

  Beethoven’s tortured mind sensed them, it caught all the thunder and roar of a thousand voices, all gabbling humanity; they struck off his mind like a scream off piano strings, fragmenting into tones and harmonies:

  Freude, schöner Gotterfunken, Tochter aus Elysium. . .

  He scribbled frantically, desperately, and they urged him on, the minds pressed and sang and screamed, pleaded with him to say for them the things they couldn’t, and Beethoven was filled with pity, understanding, a community of despair...

  Seid umschlungen, Millionen, dieser Kuss der ganzen Welt...

  and harder they pressed, each with his own personal demands and pains, each in search of his own special magic, a thousand variations of the Ninth, a thousand personal misinterpretations spilling their own lost songs into the chaos—

  Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng getheilt...

  Largens caught the roar of an electronicized version, metal resonances echoing through Beethoven’s deaf mind, a confusion of sounds, reverberating, building, starting to topple this immense structure, and in the chaos he recognized Santesson’s voice, and then his own, all singing with the mad intensity they had never trusted their own lives to reach, a tottering sea of sound, climbing and accelerating, oh they knew what was coming, they knew it! madly racing, screaming—

  Ja, wer ouch nur eine Seele, sein nennt auf dem Er-denrundl

  Und wet’s nie gekonnt der stehle, weinend sich cans diesem Bund...

  until it was too much, too much pressure, and there was a rending and a piercing cry of anguish that was Beethoven’s own as he saw what was inside him, and the turmoil raged on and on, past the end of the music—

  (the last cry of a man dying, mad and forgotten, in the midst of a summer storm. The lightning flickered and the thunder rolled out of the hills over Largens as he died; then he opened his eyes and thought, Oh my God, it’s me, it is, it’s me and Santesson and all the rest, all the failed and weak and impotent. . . but it’s not Beethoven.)

  Silence...

  Somewhere outside it was raining, fat drops hammering and spraying his face, and unheard thunder shaking the earth...

  and inside the chaos raged on and rose over Largens as all the occupants wept and muttered about their own misspent lives (and the composer was silent, silent) and they at least rested in this dark world of gray ash, this mind burnt and made their own—

  (and Largens strained to hear Beethoven, but there was silence, silence, only silence—)

  until the recall, and with great relief he heard the raining silence fall away, recede like foaming surf into sand, and he heard:

  “You okay?”

  The lights were soft and warm: inside lights. The sky’s cold gray was gone. He was back.

  “Uh.” Speech was an effort. “Yeah, Are—are you the one who strapped me in?”

  “Yeah. You’re all right, you’re sure?”

  “Uh huh.” Largens’ voice was quite flat “You look different.”

  The attendant smiled. “They all say that after they’ve been through the breakdown.”

  “Breakdown?”

  “Yeah. The 1823 breakdown you went to study, remember?” The attendant shook his head with old amusement. “Every time, you guys forget.”

  “I... I went to study the Ninth...”

  “The what?”

  “The Ninth, the Ninth Symphony! The Chorale on Schiller’s’Ode to Joy!’”

  “Hey, take it easy. Beethoven only wrote eight symphonies, remember? There were fragments for the Ninth, but no more.”

  “No!” Largens sat up suddenly, and the room tilted in his vertigo he felt thoughts rushing away and he tried to hold them.

  “Poor guy,” the attendant said, peeling tape from wires. “First he loses his hearing, then his sanity. Never wrote another note.”

  Largens was sick, soul-sick. The room spun without spinning.

  They had killed the Ninth Symphony. All the frustrated pianists and composers and singers turned scholars had brought their frustration to the works they studied; and they had brought it to Beethoven himself. All their souls’ cheapnesses summed; the faint crosstalk turned to a shout. They had brought their weakness and despair in such pent-up furious quantity that Beethoven had been swamped by it, and drowned.

  Largens saw layers of reality peeling away, shifting, each one new with each new transfer, each time another subtle alteration: past present future so closely bound and interwoven there was no way not to change them.

  This time they had killed the Ninth. This time Beethoven had gone mad in 1823. But next time—after the next transfer, what might happen? Would there be seven symphonies, or six, or four? As the thousands converged earlier and earlier in the master’s life in coming realities, in search of unworked time, when would the breakdown occur? After a few more years of indiscriminate transfers, would the young Beethoven ever leave Bonn to study with Haydn? Or would he rebel against his tyrannical father and never touch the piano after the old man’s death?

  It was all so delicately balanced.

  And he felt the reality of the Ninth leaving him, a great weight lifting; his memories slid and shifted and there was a great surge of loss. How, how did it go?

  Freude...

  He tried to hear, to remember, but there was only the silence, deafening and mute.

  A terrible long night. Sleepless, he listened to faraway traffic and watched snow hit his window. He had dreams while he was awake. Dreams in which the building moved. In which the room filled with water, then emptied of air. The window vanished and he was left in complete blackness. He got up and walked around in the blackness. He walked at least a quarter of a mile straight into it. Then he was in bed again. He went to visit his aunt and uncle. They yelled at him. He forced open his uncle’s dresser with a claw hammer and got out the pistol he kept there and shot both of them. There was a large grand piano in the living room when he tried to leave. He couldn’t get past it. Later he was in a cemetery, knocking over stones. The ground was very dry and loose and they went over easily. When he saw the old composer walk stiffly around the room, lecturing, he went to sleep.

  He woke at two in the afternoon and took a cold shower. Without thinking, he called the government agency. He then dressed and dictated two letters to his voicetyper. He mailed one and took the other with him. He walked directly to Grueder’s office. The old man was hanging up the phone when he entered.

  “Charles.” He looked pale and shaken. “Something awful has happened. The government’s found out about our unauthorized transfers.”

  Largens slid his envelope across the table. Grueder only glanced at it.

  “They’re sending investigators. They’re sure to close us down.”

  “So?”

  “So? No more transfers!”

  “I called them.”

  Grueder looked at him dumbly. “You. I didn’t trust you at first. Then I did.”

  “I had a little talk with Beethoven last night. Or with myself, or with whatever remnants of Beethoven are in me. He said it might be too late, but I’d never know if I didn’t try.”

  “This is incredible. You’ll regret this, Largens!”

  “I may.”

  “You idiot! What are you going to do now, compose?”

  “I think so.”

  “You can’t walk away from it that easily!”

  “Yes I can,” Largens said.

  He went outside. He was shaking. If it had gone on, all Beethoven’s music might have gone. What would the world—his world—be like without Beethoven?

  Still, he was
afraid he had made a terrible mistake.