The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Maybe if I’d known more about music—the real hard-core stuff, mathematics of progressions and so forth—I’d have been able to pick out more similarities (or differences) between the two Gladneys’ work. I called for recordings by other composers he’d listened to, and I played those as well. Our boy, as Jesl had called him, hadn’t been trying to crib from Bach or anyone else. He had avoided being derivative as much as possible, admirable in a beginning talent and also evident of already well-developed control, which is a good sign only as long as it doesn’t become inhibition. What he had borrowed from other composers was mostly technique—my ear was good enough to pick that up, if I listened to everything several times. The composer he seemed to have borrowed from least was, oddly enough, Gladney. Or perhaps that wasn’t so odd. Perhaps the compositions sounded too familiar.

  I listened to the piano-clarinet piece over and over, trying to hear some similarity between it and any of the other Gladney’s music—a sequence of notes, rhythm, something. He’d been unable to tell me exactly what had happened in the dream where he’d heard it—just that he’d known the dream was about Gladney. That was somewhat unsettling and would have been more so if he had composed all his music after dreaming about that former persona. But he hadn’t, and I would have found it reassuring if the piano-clarinet piece hadn’t been so obviously superior to all of his other attempts. Variation on a theme, he’d called himself. It nagged at me.

  —

  I waited until Gladney had been escorted off to some kind of day-to-day culture workshop early the next afternoon and had Jesl let me into his room so I could set up for our first session. That way he wouldn’t have to receive me as a guest with all the attendant awkwardness again.

  The bed, I decided, would be the best place to put him; it was obviously what he gravitated to when left to himself, so he’d probably be more receptive lying down. I rolled my equipment over and assembled the eight odd-sized components. They still reminded me of a giant set of cub’s blocks. With me as the giant cub, I supposed, building some kind of surreal structure, a little like a cubist idea of a skyscraper. It looked ready to topple over as most of the smaller pieces were clustered on one side of the largest one, a four-foot rectangle. In reality it would have been more trouble than it was worth to knock it over. By the time Gladney returned I had the compartmented tank for our eyes set out on the stand by the bed, the optic-nerve connections to the system primed, and a relaxation program ready to run the moment he was hooked in.

  He didn’t seem surprised to see me, only a little resigned and nervous. “You’re not going to want to hear any more music, are you?” he asked with an attempt at a smile.

  “No more recordings, no.” I patted the bed. “Come get comfortable. We don’t have to start immediately.”

  Now he did smile, stripped off his overshirt and chaps (it never fails to amaze me what will come back into style), and flopped down on the bed in his secondskins.

  Rather than play one of the usual preparatory games like What Would You Do? or What Do You Hear? with him, I eased him into chatting about his habilitation. I thought I’d learn more about his state of mind from simple conversation than from games. After all, what past experience could he draw on for a game? It would only oblige him to be inventive and pull his concentration from the situation at hand. Chitter-chat was the right approach. He had some rather astute observations on modern life, as any outsider would, and I hoped he wouldn’t lose them when he became an insider. He wasn’t really opening up to me—I hadn’t expected that—but watching him try to hide in his own talk was enlightening. He wasn’t going to give a single thing away, not even in mind-to-mind contact, and if I didn’t figure out a different approach, I’d end up chasing him all over his own mind.

  Eventually he began winding down. I let him get away with some delaying tactics: going to the bathroom, taking his vitamins—delaying tactics can be important personal-preparation rituals, if they don’t go on for too long. When he began talking about having a snack, I made him lie down again and start breathing exercises.

  He was a good breather, reaching a state of physical receptiveness more quickly than a lot of more experienced clients I’d had. When the time came I removed his eyes for him; just pressed my thumbs on his closed lids and out they popped into my palms, as smoothly as melon seeds. Gladney didn’t even twitch. The connections to his optic nerves disengaged with an audible kar-chunk. Hospital eyes are always a little more mechanical than they have to be. After I placed them in the left side of the holding tank, I slipped the system connections under his flaccid eyelids. A tiny jump in the wires told me when he was hooked in to the mental finger-painting exercise I’d selected for him. Mental finger-painting was about the right amount of effort for someone on his level. The system supplied the colors; all he had to do was stir them around.

  I breathed myself into a relaxed state in a matter of moments, but I waited a full minute before popping my own eyes out and joining him in the system. I wanted to give him time to get acclimated. Some people experience a sense of continuous drifting when they first enter the system, a disorientation not unlike weightlessness, and they need a minute alone to right themselves before they have to get used to another presence.

  My materialization was even more gradual than usual, to spare him any trauma. His perception of my entry was as another color, oozing in greenly and then transforming itself into a second consciousness. Bright lights flashed as he recognized me, some of them nightmare purple, but it wasn’t me he was afraid of. There was a little fear from not having a body to feel, but he was becoming accustomed to that. He was edgy about something else entirely—quick images of traps snapping shut, closet doors slamming. But there was exhilaration, too, at being in a realm where almost nothing is impossible.

  The images began to flow more continuously from him, rolling over us in a tumbling series, gargantuan confetti. Most of them were portions of dreams, scenes from books he’d read; some were strange scenes he was making up in the heat of the moment, just to see if he could do it. I stabilized myself and moved with his attention, reminding him that I was still there. The image of my own face came, followed by a series of others that gradually became more bizarre. The undertones running out of him indicated this was how he imagined everyone else in the world to be—somewhat exotic, different, mysterious, alien, existing on a plane he had only the haziest conception of.

  I emphasized my presence before he could become caught up enough in his grotesquely ornamented faces to get hysterical. He steadied, his energy level decreasing. I felt him adjust something and there was a sense of balance being established, as though two large masses floating in space were settling into orbit around each other. Space was a good word for it. The feeling of emptiness surrounding us was enormous and almost vivid enough to induce vertigo.

  This is me. So much nothingness to be filled. He was unaware that he’d said anything; it simply came out of him as everything else had. There was a brief image of Gladney—the previous Gladney—and he tensed at the thought. Somewhere. In this big emptiness—

  The Gladney-that-had-been drifted away from us and disintegrated. The thought remained incomplete. He seemed to be at a total loss now, drifting nowhere, so I gave him a new image, a simple one: the synthesizer. As soon as I was sure he saw it, I added the music, the clarinet-piano piece.

  Suspicion bristled on him for a moment, and then he was rerunning the music with me. I could hear little extra things, notes and embellishments absent from the recording. He was on the verge of rolling with it, letting it come the way it had been meant to, when hard negation chopped down like a guillotine blade. We were left in silence. If he could have withdrawn from me, he would have, but he didn’t know how to.

  I waited, making my presence as non-threatening as possible, while I took his Emotional Index. He registered in peculiar fragmented sensations of movement rather than visuals, because everything was movement for him. I could see that now. The universe was movement, th
e movement of vibration. Like a tuning fork. He was a tuning fork, and right now he was vibrating in the key of fear-sharp. One octave up I could hear a whiny echo of guilt.

  The intensity of it ebbed, and I turned the music on again. This time he didn’t shut it down. He just pulled back from it as far as possible and allowed it to replay as the original recording without changes. I slowed down my time sense and concentrated, tightening myself until I was small enough to slip in between the notes. At that level they thundered, no longer recognizable as music; my consciousness vibrated in sympathy. I concentrated a little more, and the thundering rumble of the notes became more ponderous. Now I could detect something else within the vibrations of the music, faint but present. I would have to concentrate even harder to find out what it was, and I was nearly to the limit of my endurance. To concentrate that forcefully is to alter the state of consciousness in such a way that one is not actually conscious in the true sense of the word—I would not be able to monitor Gladney. From his perspective it would seem as though I’d vanished into some part of his mind inaccessible to him, or gone from being real to being imaginary.

  I strained, achieving it slowly. The notes swelled until I could perceive only one at a time, and I let the nearest one swallow me up. It was a piano note, G, perfectly formed in perfect pitch, a universe created by the oscillation of a string in the air (that was how he saw it, not as synthesized piano but the real thing). Each sweep of the string through space created the universe of the note anew, the string reaching the limit of its swing before the ghost of itself opposite had disappeared. And within—

  He looked up with a smile of mild interest. The face was unmistakable in spite of all the changes he’d been through in the last year and a half.

  Come closer, he said.

  Gladney?

  The same. The smile broadened. Well, not quite the same. Those pampered good looks in full flower, the well-tended skin, the sculptured jawline, the hair brushed straight back and falling nearly to his shoulders. His face was the most solid thing about him. The rest had been sketched in vaguely. I could get no undertones from him, no feelings, no image.

  He locked me in here, he said. So I won’t get out and take—

  The note passed away, and we were in another. Gladney was standing on a high hill in the middle of the day.

  —what used to be mine. He looked around. In the distance the horizon ran wetly, melting into the sky. I live in the music now. He can’t come in unless I get out.

  It wasn’t possible. If anything had been left of the old Gladney’s mind after the suckers had finished cleaning out his brain, it would have shown up while he was still in quarantine. This had to be a delusion of the present Gladney, some kind of survivor guilt. Until he ceased to think of music as being a simultaneously convex and concave prison, he would never be able to compose more than a few incomplete snatches of melody.

  The outdoor scene disappeared as the note went on; now we were in a vague representation of the old Gladney’s recording studio. He looked up from the piano he was sitting at.

  Can you prove who you are? I asked him.

  You can see me as I was. Isn’t that enough for you?

  No. The Gladney-that-is has perfect pitch—that could easily translate to his being able to reproduce his old appearance. If you are really the Gladney-that-was, you can tell me something about yourself that the Gladney-that-is has no knowledge of.

  The delusion spread his hands. He’s studied up on me thoroughly. They gave him access to vid-magazines, newstapes.

  There’s still plenty he doesn’t know, I said. The private things. Certain memories. Feelings. Tell me something your family could confirm as true.

  His face took on a defiant look, but there was no more feeling from him than there would have been from a holo transmission. That in itself indicated he was a fabrication, but my merely telling Gladney that wasn’t going to help. Even if I could get his intellect to believe me, his emotions probably wouldn’t.

  Tell me something, I prodded again.

  He rose and leaned on the top of the piano. Don’t you think a man with perfect pitch would be able to interpolate the private feelings of another man who had grown from the same brain?

  The studio was gone. He was leaning on a small table in a quick-eat while I stood just outside the entrance. I could hear the drumming of his fingers on the table.

  Tell me a fact, then. Just one fact he couldn’t possibly know.

  He straightened up abruptly. The mindsuckers damaged me. I remember only what he knows.

  I’d expected him to hide behind that, but I was unsure what to do next. Arguing with the delusion was only going to strengthen its sense of presence. Even acknowledging it was giving it something to feed on. Confronting it was Gladney’s job, not mine. I was going to have to get him down in the music with me.

  The note passed and was replaced by a bedroom. Gladney lay crosswise on a bed with his arms folded behind his head. He was looking at me upside down.

  I’m residue, he said happily. His reversed smile was grotesque. I’m a myelin ghost. You can’t get rid of me without physically damaging his brain.

  I hooked my feet under the bed and willed myself upward. His bizarre upside-down face rushed away from me as I grew through the ceiling of the phantom room, up into the emptiness to the limit of the note. The piano string swung across a sky made of the present Gladney’s face. My abrupt appearance gave him a surge of alarm that nearly dislodged me.

  Where were you?

  You know. The piano string moved between us. I stretched out my arms. Take my hand before that string comes back.

  No.

  Why not? It’s your music.

  No!

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the piano string return to view, slicing through space. Please, Gladney. Don’t let that string put another barrier between you and your own work.

  Panic at the idea of being cut off from his music made him grab my hands; half a moment later panic at the idea of meeting his delusion head-on made him sorry he’d done it.

  We were pitching and bucking in the throes of his fear, but still the piano string approached. Shortly it would pass through my wrists and fragment my concentration.

  I can’t pull you in, Gladney. You have to come on your own.

  I’m afraid!

  Why? Say it!

  I’m afraid because—

  Say it!

  He’ll get me!

  Who?

  Gladney!

  You are Gladney.

  No!

  Then who are you?

  There was no answer. The piano string was almost on us.

  Are you a composer?

  His affirmation ducked him under the string just before it would have severed my hands. He stared after it with a horrified elation, and then we were rushing down into the music together in the momentum of his admission.

  The delusional image of Gladney watched us descend. The real one made a soft landing on the bed beside it, still gripping my hands. Without thinking, he tried to pull me onto the bed between himself and the other.

  The bedroom vanished. We were on an underground tube, the only three in the coach. I moved around behind Gladney, and he had to let go of me. As soon as he did, the delusional image vanished. Gladney was startled, but not half as much as I was. He moved forward with his hands out in front of him, feeling the air.

  He’s not here, Allie. Is he?

  I didn’t answer. I was still trying to figure out what had happened. Delusions didn’t just go away that quickly.

  Allie? He half-turned toward me, and I saw that his eyes were closed. He swung his arms back and forth awkwardly, fingers clutching at nothing. Either he was making use of a fairly sophisticated mental maneuver, a sort of sneaking up on his own blind side, or he was faking same to stay blinded to the situation. I couldn’t tell which; his undertones showed only confusion.

  Suddenly his hands seized on something invisible. The delusion snapped
into existence again, caught in Gladney’s grasp. The air around them crackled with sparks from Gladney’s terror.

  Allie! I can’t let go!

  We went from the tube to a raft in the middle of the ocean, bright sun beating down on the water. Gladney still had hold of the delusion. His eyes were open now. A shadow passed over us—a high-flying piano string.

  High A-sharp, Gladney said automatically, identifying the note. We’re getting close to the end of the melody. What do I do with him then?

  You’re asking me? It’s yours. What do you do when music’s over?

  We were in the lower branches of a large tree, then back to the tube very briefly (B-flat grace note, Gladney said), in the bedroom, on a windy rooftop several thousand feet above the ground. Gladney was plunging us to the end of the song. The images began to blend into one another, flickering and flapping. Gladney and his delusion flashed on and off in a variety of positions, Gladney still holding on, as though they were wrestling or dancing. The music went from slow motion subsonic to recognizable melody. The background imagery faded away completely, leaving the two Gladneys in their dance/struggle. The delusion offered no resistance, but Gladney was too occupied to notice. The struggle became a tumbling, end over end over end over end. I saw Gladney’s hospital room, the synthesizer, Gladney himself standing before it, staring it down as though it were an enemy. Dr. Jesl appeared briefly, carnelian eyes blind to the two figures tumbling past her through the entertainment center, where Gladney sat studying a newstape of the Gladney-that-had-been on the holo screen. The tumblers rolled on to the vision of a dimly remembered dream, that dream of Gladney, the old Gladney, lifting his head to the sight of three people, visible only from neck to thigh, rushing forward at him.