"He was dead then," Michael said.
"Maybe he could tell what was coming. Seeing what the old world would bring."
Michael felt a thrill run up his spine. Yes. Old world passing into new.
More anxiety after a rich, romantic interlude. Horns, xylophone accents, clarinets and French horns - that hideous solo trumpet again, intruding into the anxiety, presaging a delicious, horrible revelation.
Michael was frozen in his seat. He could hardly think about what was occurring within him. Old world into new.
Yet all this was accidental - the matching of the Tenth -
Unfinished. Interrupted by death.
- with The Infinity Concerto.
Uplift, again the anxious strains, and back to domestic normality, the world and social life and children -
Mixed with a foreboding of disaster to come -
Of change and trauma and anticipation, foresight -
Harbinger of a new age, of fear and even disaster -
Then quiet, skeletal strings, thinning out the fabric of reality, extending the cold from his stomach to his head. Drums pounded unobtrusively, ominously.
On the stage, the largest drum - an eight-foot-wide monster - was assaulted by the drummer with one shattering beat.
The coldness vanished, leaving him suspended in the auditorium, hardly aware of seats, orchestra, walls, ceiling. He could feel the sky beyond. In his left palm lay a pearly sphere. He closed his hand to conceal it.
Camouflage. Everything had been camouflaged to mislead, misdirect. The Infinity Concerto was not by itself a Song of Power. The similarities had seemed merely coincidental.
Mahler's Tenth was leading the way, closing out the old world, describing the end of a long age (sixty million years! or just the end of European peace - or merely the tranquility of one man's life, blighted by the death pf a daughter. perhaps feeling what the second daughter would have to suffer in a new world gone twice mad) and expressing hope for a time beyond. Rich, anxious, neurotic, jumping with each tic and twitch of things going awry, trying to maintain decorum and probity in the midst of coming chaos.
The beats of the huge drum accented a funeral dirge. Again the skeletal tones, this time from muted trumpets.. and then heralding horns, a light and lovely flute song of hope developed by the strings. becoming strained again, overblown, life lived too hard, tics and twitches -
Drum beat. A tragic triad of notes on the trumpet.
Drum beat. Low bassoons vibrating apart the seconds of his life. Michael still could not move.
(Deception. Camouflage. Misdirection.)
The tempo increasing into a new dance, new hope - recovery and healing - and yet another decline. Michael was growing weary of the seesaw, but only because it was too close to the everyday pace of his life. Life in this world, world passing.
Rise to triad and.
A disaster. The entire orchestra seemed to join in a dissonant clash, trumpet holding on the high A again, matched by more horns, another clash that made his head ache, reprise of the theme of everyday life. And then the trumpet, released somewhat from its harsh warning role, was allowed a small solo. The triad reoccurred on other instruments, in a major key and hopeful, not shattering, and then domesticity.
a segue, connective tissue old to new
How much like what had happened recently, the weirdness mixed unpredictably with Earth's solid reality and inner silence of mind. There seemed to be a rise in intensity to some anticipated triumph, thoughtful, loving and accepting. but not acceding. Quiet contemplation.
Michael could move again. He glanced nervously at Kris-tine to see if she had noticed. The symphony was coming to a conclusion, and he felt his inner strength surge.
Triumph. Quiet, strong and sure - overcoming all tragedy.
Triumph.
The last notes of the Tenth faded, and Crooke seemed to reappear on the podium, and the orchestra seemed to become real again.
The audience was silent for an uncomfortably long time.
"You're sweating," Kristine said, handing him a handkerchief from her purse.
"Thanks." Michael wiped his forehead. Sweat had dripped into his eyes, stinging. The hall seemed very warm, even stifling. He glanced at his hand. The pearl was gone.
Finally the audience reacted with strong but not overwhelming applause. They had heard, appreciated, but they had not felt, or if they had, they had ignored what they felt. A few stood and applauded vigorously, as if to make up for the rest. Michael glanced back but could not see his parents.
Crooke appeared exhausted but happy. He bowed and then continued with the structure of the program by taking a microphone handed to him and announcing that the interval between pieces would be very short. Some in the audience grumbled.
"Stand, stretch our legs?" Kristine suggested.
Michael stood beside her and discreetly windmilled his arms, tensing and untensing his legs. His lungs felt as they once had when he had accidentally breathed dilute fumes from a spill of nitric acid in a chemistry class - tight, but not constricted.
"That was wonderful," he said, sounding doubtful even to himself.
"I'm very proud," Kristine said softly. "Everything's turning out fine. Even the audience."
The air suddenly seemed much improved. He was calm again, prepared.
Mahler's Tenth, properly orchestrated, was itself a Song of Power. It codified the old world, harsh and demanding, lovely and lyrical, unyielding and fickle.
An old rose, fading and growing thorny. How had it avoided being pruned by the Sidhe? Then again, it had not - Mahler had died before finishing it. Other attempts to fulfill the promise had not succeeded.
Edgar Moffat came to the podium. Michael, on impulse, kissed Kristine lightly on the cheek, then caressed her bare shoulder with one hand. She smiled uncertainly at him, then sat and focused her attention on the podium.
The baton went up and lowered slowly.
The first movement began rapidly, the unmutilated piano jumping in almost immediately. As it played, a deep, resounding tone came from the double basses, ascending in pitch through the strings, almost harsh, moving from cello to viola to violin to be drowned by drums, low and rumbling. A sharp rise of French horns glared and did battle, fast, fast, dancing, dissonant and yet perfect, a rousing gallop of ghost horses that faded into whispering strings.
Sea-grass propelled by moonlight.
Horns sketched out a vast unease, brooding. They lost all musical tone and whooshed like the wind, a soft winter storm coming.
A passage of unfilled graves, herald of change and nightmares from unlived childhoods, from an infinity of lives never occupied by the moving strands of an infinity of souls.
Michael blinked back tears and held Kristine's hand. She, too, was responding, and her cheeks were wet.
Lives lived and lost. Tommy. The others.
Eleuth.
If they let go, he seemed to understand, they would lose each other. She moved against his shoulder and shivered.
"Is this what they heard?" she asked.
Michael swallowed. "No. Everything was different then. It's the same music, but it's in its proper time now."
"How do you know that?" she asked.
He shook his head. "It resonates."
"Will people vanish tonight, or later?"
"Not from hearing this," he said.
The music increased tempo and surged forward on horns, harp and strings, the second rank of violins plucking furiously. The musicians seemed obsessed, and Moffat directed them with a minimum of motion, baton describing the beat and left hand barely indicating emphasis; he was giving them their lead and letting their concentration carry them through.
At no point did the music let up. When the piano rejoined the flow, the beat, the pulse, was in a fractured and disjointed waltz time. The pulse became even more ragged, jazzed, with unpredictable and violent bursts from the drums and horns. Then it smoothed and mellowed.
Gentle, heart-beat sound
s, lulling, pierces of ragged dance fading, recurring but polished, and then slowing.
As gently as could be imagined, the prelude ended. Without a moment's pause, the second, mutilated piano began a quiet and persistent solo, staying in the middle register, its tone odd and almost harsh, not disturbing, simply biding its time. And the music did something Michael had never heard before.
It described waiting. While not long in itself, the piano solo was covering thousands, perhaps millions of years.
He glanced at Kristine. Her eyes were wide. She was enchanted, uncritical, absorbing all. Waltiri's magic - evident in his movie scores - was here unbridled.
The orchestra leaped in behind the piano. Time was still at issue - and growth. Michael no longer paid attention to the mechanics, the key or the structure or the way the sounds were created.
He had caught on to the underlying beauty of the piece. He saw it in relation to Kubla Khan, to the pleasure dome even in its incomplete, unsuccessful form; he saw it in relation to the symphony just played. They were all similar songs played in different worlds, to accomplish similar purposes. Subtle variations in the underlying patterns could lead to widely disparate results.
Mahler had once written a song-cycle/symphony called - the Song of the Earth. The name had been applied, perhaps, to the wrong piece. His Tenth was a Song of the Earth, of Earth as it had been.
The Infinity Concerto was heralding the Earth to come.
And Michael felt himself in it. He was described there - not personally, but in his role. Growing, mutating, uncontrolled, all potential and little achievement. It frightened him. The music was not gentle now. It was complex, demanding, full of discord.
Dischord.
Discard.
Start again.
Renew.
Unite. (How?)
Create. Create what?
The audience was becoming noisy, even above the now-loud music. There was something unresolved, and they sensed it almost in mass.
Decline to quiet, persistent but soft, demanding but muted.
Strings played on their bridges - skeletal - horns muted - breaking time down. The celeste tinkling behind all. Apprehension.
What happened next, Michael could not describe, nor could members of the orchestra. The'music suddenly den-pended on the fourth movement, adagio, which had not yet been played, and that fore-reference worked because he - they - understood what would happen in the fourth movement.
Kristine was smiling ecstatically. The audience fell silent. The tension had been impossibly resolved.
The second movement ended. The third began without more than a few seconds' pause. The Synclavier and the mutilated piano involved each other in a philosophical discussion. The third movement passed, and Michael did not remember its passing, or even what it was. It was played, but it added a nonmemorable subtext to everything around it. It was a movement and a bridge in itself, effective only as a commentary.
The fourth movement was upon him. Kristine's face showed irritation or pain. The pain changed to dismay.
The fourth was not the same movement referred to in the second. There were in fact two adagios, but only one was being manifested. The other existed as a creation solely in the minds of the audience, a phantasm of music, yet Michael had no doubt that both movements had been minutely composed and scored by Waltiri.
He began to fear what the fifth movement might bring.
The fourth, as played, was slow, primitive, spare, even deliberately inelegant. It was a new world unresolved, the shape undefined, though with all the elements present, coalescing. Instruments played to different rhythms, slowly coordinating, then fading, then coming to agreement again, themes weaving in and out, with then a reprise of the original theme transposed to B minor. Moffat had called this the "explosive," yet it seemed anticlimactic.
The normal piano began to dominate, with its precise laying down of individual notes and chords, no glissandos, no slides, simply sketching what was to come.
Then, entirely unearthly, the Synclavier mocked the piano. It created the slides and linked the sketched-out harmonies. It played them back upon themselves and created canons and reversed them in ways only a machine could manage.
This was the human contribution to the music. The Sidhe would never have countenanced a Synclavier, or anything similar to it - not even a simple theremin. What Waltiri had requested was something only humans could add to music. Through technology, they were performing music the Sidhe could have created only through magic.
Humans had found their place in the world to come. They had lived in this universe long enough to master it not with magic, but on its own terms. Not with outside skill, but with skills taught by the hard, unyielding nature of reality. And they had turned those skills into devices for creating wonderful, impossible music.But this isn't music any more, Michael thought.
"What is this?" Kristine whispered.
The Synclavier had made its point and did not belabor it. Sounding almost abashed, the orchestra resumed its dominance, but the normal piano was done for. It played no more in the fourth and not at all in the final movement. The final movement was home for the mutilated piano and the Synclavier.
Michael shut his eyes. It seemed as if all his hopes and concerns were about to be examined. The fifth movement would be himself. And he knew Kristine was feeling the same thing - that it would be about herself.
The music, a sweeping, demanding dance, was now a training ground for a new world.
In 1939, before its time, opus 45 at this point in the score would have sown the seeds for a translation into the Realm. Other music had accidentally achieved this effect; Clarkham, and perhaps Waltiri as well, had deliberately designed The Infinity Concerto to work in such a way.
But Waltiri had woven in something else. With time, the effect of the music would alter. It would not translate; it would prepare. The audience was being made aware of the world they would ultimately have to face.
The music vanished into its own purpose.
Only in the last part of the fifth movement did the adjunct Song of Power rise up and show its medium again. The music became light and beautiful, consciously showy and rich with melody. The melody switched to C minor.
"Jesus Christ," said a man behind Michael, loudly.
Out of the last hundred measures - the measures Moffat had confessed he could not "hear" while reading the score - came quiet assurance, not disturbance. The bomb was being carefully, elegantly defused. The worlds would meet, pass into each other.
They would not destroy each other..
The concerto reached its conclusion. (Rut the unplayed fourth movement echoed; perhaps it would never stop. Das Unendlichkeit Konzert.)
The music faded.
The hall was as quiet as empty space.
Kristine shut her eyes folded her hands as if in prayer. "They're going to like it," Michael reassured her.
The audience exploded. Everyone stood at once. Applause, shouts of "Bravo!" and exclamations of amazement both crude and ecstatic. Michael stood and looked around anxiously, seeing a few people still in their seats, limp, eyes glazed. But gradually they, too, stood and applauded, returning to the hall from wherever they had been. Moffat took his bow and called out Crooke from the wings. The applause redoubled and did not diminish as the soloists were brought forward. Michael glanced around apprehensively as he applauded.
He didn't know what he expected next. Whether the sky would come crashing down and the air would be filled with flying Sidhe, whether Clarkham himself would appear ringed in fire, whether Waltiri and his birds would fill the hall. Anything seemed possible. The Song had been played through. How long would it take to accomplish its task?
The crowd surged out of the hall, forcing Michael and Kristine with it. It stood on the grass and sidewalks outside, shouting and arguing. Kristine was beaming. "It's like when they played Stravinsky and Milhaud," she said. "It's really happened!"
"I thought they threw the seat cushions ar
ound for Stravinsky," Michael said.
"Our crowd is much too liberal to do that," Kristine said. "Let's find Berthold and Edgar."
The gathering at Macho's was crowded and noisy. Michael stayed on the sidelines, letting others enjoy their triumph; he had really had so little to do with it. Crooke was flushed, a beer in one hand and a glass of sparkling water in the other, sipping from them alternately and smiling at a short, very shapely woman who had attached herself to him. Moffat held court from a large round table, regaling his audience of students and formally dressed alumni with tales of Hollywood in the fifties.
Greg Bear - Songs of Earth 2 - Serpent Mage Page 17
