Fantasy & Science Fiction, Extended Edition

by Spilogale Inc.

  There is no time for any of this, nor will it fit this context. Beasley's perverse and dramatic obsession: Extend the Requiem . Continue the Requiem. Bring it to a conclusion—and with it the eighteenth century itself. Here a quick connection, there a rapid scuffle in an anteroom with a surprised and resistant Constanze, soon enough neutralized. Frantic denials passed up the line. Who, us? Mozart? 1791? Most of life is falsification, manipulation. And so this synoptic way to conclusion—the abduction has been managed against all reasonable possibility.

  "This warehouse leaks."

  Pru shrugged. "It's the eighteenth century. What do you expect?"

  Mozart lay on a sheet-draped table in front of Dr. Richards. She touched his left wrist with a blue ceramic instrument. Lights sparkled on the instrument and it uttered a chirp. A drop of water plopped onto the sheets next to Mozart. Richards sniffed. "Don't they have lead on the roofs, or something like that?"

  "This isn't a church."

  "Still." Richards adjusted a thin yellow tube attached to a needle in the back of Mozart's left hand. "Where's Beasley?" she asked.

  "He's out playing."

  Richards glanced up. "Playing?"

  Pru smiled. "The eighteenth century is too much of a temptation for him. He's gone to court."

  "Court?"

  "You know: white wigs, satin, brocade, bowing, plotting, assignations if he can manage a few."

  "Is that safe?"

  "Safe enough. He took Tina with him." Pru motioned to Chad and the others who sat or reclined on various bales. "And left us with those vultures."

  Mozart sighed and shifted beneath the sheets. Richards handed the blue device to Pru. "Hold this, please." She ran her fingers beneath his jaw and paused just below the left ear. Her eyes became unfocused as her implants processed data.

  Pru looked down at Mozart's wan, still boyish face. "He's very sick, isn't he?"

  Richards's eyes focused again. She nodded. "On the edge of catastrophic renal failure. I think I've got a handle on that. Something else is going on, though, some toxin or microorganism I haven't isolated. There are bugs back here that no computer has ever seen." Richards shook her head. "He's far too ill to be doing this to him."

  Pru shrugged. "That won't matter to Beasley, as long as he lives long enough to sway the Institute at that conference next week."

  "We may be able to get him that far, but afterward?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  Richards straightened. "It does matter. No human being is just a useful piece of meat, not the poorest beggar we saw out there on the streets."

  Pru looked at her closely for several moments. "You really mean that, don't you?"

  "I do."

  Pru looked down. "It would be nice to believe in something. It might even be nice to care about someone." She glanced back at Richards. "You won't have to worry about Mr. Mozart anyway."

  Richards's eyes jerked up. "What do you mean?"

  Pru glanced idly at Chad and the others. They were chuckling about something Hess had said. Pru lowered her voice. "Beasley is rich and powerful enough to fake a legitimate use for the time travel machinery, but nobody can completely break the rules. If we take Mozart back, we've got to leave somebody here."

  "Somebody?"

  Pru smiled. "That would be you."

  "Me?" she said. "Why me? What can I do? How can I replace him?"

  "You're not here to replace him," Pru said. "You're here to occupy his room, his air, his circumstance. Temporal displacement. It is a matter of weight."

  Mozart, apparently interested even on his deathbed, sighed, gestured, made a hoarse sound, spoke indistinctly. "Muss es sein?"

  Was that what she heard? No, that was impossible. Those were Beethoven's words, not Mozart's. Recall pierced her in gleaming splinters. This is madness, she thought. We can watch him die or we can make him die but we cannot do both. How did we come here?

  "You are both fools," Richards said and pointed a technician's hand to the murmuring Mozart. "It can't be done. And certainly not by me."

  The fleshpots of Europe, she thought absently. That is where Beasley has gone. All of this, the whole insane scheme so that he could desert us and act out some savage fantasy. She shuddered. She had a technician's soul. That was the problem; that was her undoing. "Give it up," she said. "This is madness."

  Unless this was some insane collaboration between Beasley and Pru, unless she had somehow become entrapped in a folie à deux beyond comprehension.… "I'm leaving," she said. "It's a mad task, a mad outcome. I won't be part of this."

  "But you are. You are more a part of it than you will ever understand."

  Richards felt sudden enormous weight upon her, a collaborative weight, the weight of air and crushing circumstance. "Poisoned!" she thought and plummeted.

  "Poisoned?" she murmured.

  "You said something?" Pru asked.

  "Poisoned." She stared at dried dung in the wide cracks of the warehouse floor. "Poisoned."

  Pru took her hand and helped her rise from the dusty boards. "You fainted. I didn't think doctors did that. What's this about poison?"

  Richards looked bleakly at her hands. "No matter what I do, I'm poisoned. My life is over. I'll always know that I helped Beasley commit murder and hijack human knowledge."

  Pru snorted. "Give me a break! We invent ourselves several times a day. There is no past, no history. If there is responsibility, it is to your own future."

  Chad loomed above them. "Time to go, girls. Beasley said to get him loaded up as soon as you were done. You look done."

  Beasley appeared behind Chad. "I'm back." He looked incongruously comfortable in blue satin and white wig. He nodded to Pru. "Pearl, Arzu?"

  The two designated vultures detached themselves from their perches. "Yes?" answered Arzu.

  "Warm up the transfer apparatus and go on through. Make sure it's working correctly before we attempt to transfer Mozart."

  The locus of this story is Mozart and Beasley's doomed and illegal attempt to get the Requiem done through transport of the dying man. It is an accursed plan but it is the only plan with which he will contend.

  Watch him contend. Let us witness his contention. Here he is, enormous in his desperation and hate, grasping Mozart, Richards at his side clutching the other foot. There they are, struggling; Richards, struggling and cursing with the heat in an attempt to push the dying Mozart into the receptor they have smuggled into his room. Constanze has been distracted and sent on an errand with gold in her purse; Vienna is in distant tumult; they are focused upon necessity. Mozart, no longer a genius, never to be the composer of the "Sanctus," "Offertory," and "Cum Sanctu Spiritu," gasps heavily, unevenly for dying breath and slowly they move him toward the transporter.

  Beasley curses the age to which he was born, his own vanity, his misdirected and poisonous set of conclusions. Richards, overcome with remorse, pulls; Beasley pushes; she tugs; he gasps; they groan, and slowly the dying composer passes into metal jaws which bite and snatch. In the distance is the sound of tumult.

  Four cloaked shadows detached themselves from the sides of the alley and formed a loose globe around Tina. Her sharp teeth gleamed as she drew her rapier. Light from a torch one corner over revealed four masked men. Tina chuckled. "Eeek. Four muggers in black masks. What shall I do?"

  The tallest man drew his sword and stepped forward. "I ask you to yield."

  "On whose authority?"

  "On that of a certain Count, my employer."

  Tina's smile widened. "Count von Walsegg?"

  The man stopped. "A certain Count. Now throw down your sword."

  Tina nodded. "Sure. Any second now." She leapt, extended her sword arm in an impossible stretch. Her blade flashed in toward the captain's chest. He executed a counter-parry and bound her blade.

  Tina grinned up at him and thrust her thorn into his groin. The thorn, loaded with lethal venom now, struck deep into a leather pad and stuck.

  The captain gripped Tina's left
wrist. "Nice try. I've seen that move before." A club descended on the back of Tina's head. The crack of oak meeting skull echoed from stone walls. Tina fell onto wet cobbles.

  They stumble haplessly into a machine too small for two, unbearable for three, and, groaning, are encompassed by metal.

  This is the point of the narrative for explication, invention, description—the part in which the flight itself should have been described, the scramble past the gates of known circumstance, a florid description of the escape.

  And an inserted passage on the clumsily cloned Mozart brought to meet the superficial gaze of a superficial time. That cloned Mozart, fabricated and spiritless but superficially interchangeable. Such is the contempt of Beasley's age for what they take to be the mindless credulity of the eighteenth century. An imaging of the shrieking rattle of the clone as the clumsy substitution is made. If this is done properly, inclusively, we should not neglect the faint, high, lustful blush and tremble in Pru's face and hands as the substitution is made. It will be an opportunity.

  Richards stepped out of the transporter and wiped a tear from her cheek. She looked at Beasley. "He'll need attention as soon as you arrive."

  "Of course." Beasley looked around. "Tina will escort the clone back to Constanze's lodgings and then we'll be done." A tiny blue light flashed from a bracelet on Beasley's left wrist. His eyes went wide.

  Pru asked, "What is it?"

  Beasley's voice was hoarse. "Silent alarm. Tina is down. Something happened not far from here." Nixonian sweat gleamed suddenly upon his upper lip. "We'd better depart. Quickly! Chad?"

  "Yes?"

  "I'll leave now with Mozart. Pru and Richards can follow. You and Hess come last. Got it?"

  "Got it. What about Tina?"

  "What about her?" His eyes locked briefly with Chad's.

  Chad nodded. "Got it."

  Beasley continued, "Let the clone sit where he is. Somebody will figure out where he belongs."

  Hess lifted Mozart like a baby and placed him, tubes and all, in the transporter. Beasley went in after Hess exited. He entered the activation code and punched the transfer button. Light built within the machine, flashed rainbow colors across the warehouse, and then went dark. It was empty.

  Pru walked slowly over to Hess and Chad, a lazy smile curving her lips. "It was a real pleasure working with you boys." She put her arms around Chad and Hess. "Maybe we should get together at home, just the three of us."

  Chad leered. "What a fine idea! I'd thought that myself, baby."

  Pru suddenly slapped her palms against their shoulders. Chad and Hess dropped to the floor like bundles of rags. Pru glanced at Richards and grinned. "I have thorns too."

  Richards stuttered, "I don't…I don't understand."

  "Help me get this meat in the machine. You'll go last with baby Mozart."

  Richards stood staring at her. "You tricked Beasley."

  Pru's right eyebrow arched ironically. "He's a big boy. He knows I play my own game. Always."

  "You want his plot to fail?"

  Pru smiled.

  "You betrayed him?"

  "Come on!" Pru pointed at the fallen men. "Help me! We don't have a lot of time here."

  Richards bent to help Pru. Skinny Chad was not difficult to drag into the apparatus. Hess was another story, but at last they had him stuffed in on top of Chad. Pru entered the code, pressed the transfer button, and leapt out of the machine.

  Richards confronted her as she turned. "You worked against him from the start, didn't you?"

  The lazy smile again drifted across Pru's lips. "Do you really think that I want Beasley's personality impressed upon the Institute's supercomputers? His brutishness flowing unimpeded into the minds of trillions? It was diverting to screw him now and then, but to have him pawing in my mind constantly like an obsessed, huffing bull is far too much."

  "But he's done it! He's got Mozart!"

  "He's got trouble."

  "You turned him in? The Time Condittiore?" asked Richards.

  Pru shook her head. "I turned him in, but nothing so blatant as a public arrest will happen. He will be taken into custody at some point, but it will be hushed up. I suspect Beasley will suffer severely diminished capacity for a time and then all of his resources will be strictly monitored. His plotting days are over."

  "What about you?"

  "We're sending two Mozarts back. I'll stay here with Tina."

  Richards looked at Mozart's clone. The innocent face shone like a flame above pure oil. Pru touched her arm. "Trust me, Richards, he'll be safe in the future."

  Richards took Pru's hand. "Call me Abby."

  In the swell and escaping light of that Parma to which they will return awaits nothing for Beasley and his crew but the blood of paradox. What they do not yet know, what they will learn, is that if the strain of passage does not kill Mozart, then the nature of paradox will. To come at the end of the journey to the place where one has begun, as Thomas Stearns Eliot is reputed to have observed.

  But where did Beasley begin? Surely not hunched in the transporter like a beast, about to fall into the State. Surely not in Salzburg, that damned city which Mozart hated so. And surely not in that sacred place with Pru when, staring into her widening, frightening eyes, he came to understand that there was no place within her which he could ever occupy, no tenderness which he could ever know. That knowledge had driven him to the Requiem Aeternum and the "Dies Irae"; he had sought in K. 626 what nothing in this place of metal and desire could ever give him, and now, with Pru stolen from him and the dying Mozart lolling in his place, he had nothing but failed resource, loss, and of course paradox.

  Mozart would emerge from the transporter alive, if only barely, they would get him into a protected place, they would administer balm and detoxification and prayer, but it would be the shock of passage which would kill the composer.

  "You'll take care of him?" Pru nodded toward Mozart's clone, now sitting within the time transporter.

  "Baby Mozart?" Abby looked at his puzzled, smiling face. "I'll take care of him."

  "Good. Who knows what he'll do in our time."

  Abby nodded. "Who knows? You won't, for sure. Do you really intend to stay?"

  Pru smiled. "I do. I must. Eight came. Only eight may leave."

  "What about Tina?"

  Pru chuckled. "Don't worry about Tina. She's in a dungeon now, but her skills are too useful to be wasted in Vienna. I might hire her myself."

  "Isn't this risky?"

  Pru shook her head. "I doubt it. All that rant about paradoxes and changing the future is crap."

  "You're sure?"

  Pru shrugged. "Pretty sure. Current theory predicts infinite futures, so whatever I do to change a few million of them won't matter. I hope."

  Abby thought about this and then looked up. "Why do you want to stay? What's here for you?"

  Pru was silent for a moment and then she tapped her right temple with her index finger. "The Requiem needs finishing. I'll do it quietly, secretly. I'll make sure the mystery is preserved. Mozart will die a secret, shrouded death here and the Requiem will appear when needed. After all, Constanze always needs ducats. She'll cooperate and keep her mouth shut."

  Abby shook her head. "That won't take a lifetime."

  Pru grinned. "Hey, my immunities are good and there are a couple of people here I'd like to meet."

  "Who?"

  "Beethoven, for one." She licked her lips. "And I've always been curious about Napoleon. What was he like in the sack?"

  Abby laughed. "You're incorrigible!"

  Pru nodded. "Always."

  And surely now there is a scene to be written about incorrigible Pru, intrepid Pru, time traveler and reprobate, explorer and party girl. More than a scene, a series. In one she clutches Beethoven tightly, leans him into her breasts, explores with her free hands the wizened genitals of the Master. "Ah," she says to him, "I am your Immortal Beloved," and later he is conducting the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, deaf as a p
ost, totally lost, and all that he can recall is her thundering against him. That would be one scene and here is another: Napoleon on Elba, Pru sneaking into his quarters in a surfeit of cunning and technological mastery, and his half-salute to her in cover of darkness. There are other scenes that could be written: a charmer, Pru, mad as a hatter as you have noted and equally obsessed, but they are not for this narrative. She will find her way through the compass of history free of our attention; her role in this narrative, like her role in Beasley's strange and unaccomplished life, is done. Those no longer part of our odyssey are subsequently detached from its history no matter how we may clamor for them, and of Pru I can tell you little more. Just as the technology of time travel has not been made available in this recollection, so Pru's further adventures must be purely speculative.

  Remember: it is an explanatory age, an expository time. The need for detail in narrative was a product of its formal origin earlier in Mozart's century.

  Good-bye, good-bye, Richards had said.

  Perhaps the concept of certainty is an illusion. Meanwhile, in this reconstituted, brassy century, the real Mozart lies abed, shocked into deepest slumber, heedless of the composition paper that lies scattered beside him. The slumber touches on coma, is perhaps indistinguishable from it; the savaging of time conversion and the toxic gasses of this distant century have conflated to create great risk, irreversible damage.

  Swaddled in paradox, Beasley thinks, looking upon this pathetic, aseptic, hardly domestic scene. Mozart and he alike have been trapped here by self-canceled circumstance. So this is how Mozart died, Beasley thinks. If not a victim of temporal displacement, then ravaged by the toxicity of our time. He wonders if that cobbled version Richards had conveyed to 1791 looked like this, was reacting similarly. Were these two versions linked?

  The problem is too complicated for Beasley, far beyond his feeble power of rationalization. It is not an age contrived for paradox or resolution, this post-technological time. If it were an age open to the possibilities of paradox, none of this would have ever happened.

  All he knows for sure is that he misses Pru, mired two centuries away, trapped in a historical context she cannot fully understand. Pru and her sense of doom had so powerfully attracted and centered him. Where has it gone? And in that going what has Beasley himself become? Requiem aeternam cum sancto spiritu —Beasley sees his circumstance, his entire history, as a mirror; it casts back at him only his own strangled features. Who could have known?