“And does this Marchesi sing well?” the baritone asked.
“Perfectly,” said the Parva.
“I’ll agree,” Arthur added. “But I’m not sure that’s a desideratum. The voice is free of human errors—and of humanity.” (If I were Harden . . . He could have switched them then; if he did I should switch back. But is he counting on that? Did he leave them alone so that I would switch them back andfeed myself whatever he’s slipped in there?)
“Freedom from errors,” the girl said a trifle sharply, “should be humanity’s goal.”
“Please! Let’s stay away from politics and keep to music.” (Or is it indeed my turn to switch anyway? Where is it now ? First he . . . Then . . .)
The girl’s glass was empty. “Gentlemen, neither of you’s even sipped his drink. And I shouldn’t have had two Deimoses; they’re too sweet. I want a taste of whisky to clean my mouth. Which of you will be so kind?”
(Which glass is it? Which was the last switch? And if it is mine and I offer it, will he let her . . . ?)
As if actuated by one control button, the two men rose, neatly upsetting the table. The two streams of bourbon, toxic and intoxicant, mingled on the floor.
It is not within the scope of this narrative to detail the three months of the trip. That scene in the bar was in its way typical enough.
Conversations, in and out of the bar, with Faustina Parva followed the same pattern. The two were drawn together by their common deep devotion to singing, and held apart by the difference in their attitudes. And at the moment when Arthur was struggling hardest to repress a sharp retort to some philosophical echo of Weddergren, he would find himself wondering why he had never noticed before that she had unusually deep dimples, which lent a curious softness to an otherwise almost severely carved face.
There was no doubt that Ivor Harden was a Populust agent, and that his singing career was a fraud. His inadequacy as a vocalist did not prove it; some of the least talented can be the most career-minded. But it was significant, for instance, that he bothered to avail himself of an air lock for practice only twice in the course of the trip.
It was also not without significance that the steward reported his presence in Arthur’s corridor just before the incident of the Martian sand adder in the bedclothes, and that he had left his palmprints on the cargo box which so nearly decapitated Arthur when the captain (his warmest friend since the lock-solution) was showing him over the hold.
Typical Populist scorn of the methodology of any science—criminalistics, in this case—not to know that palmprints are as sure as fingerprints, nor to realize that Arthur would long ago have unobtrusively secured all the baritone’s prints (smiling to himself with the pleasant notion that something might be solved by means of the big toe).
The last attack came on the night of the captain’s dinner. In the concert that followed, Arthur heard Parva sing (other than in practice) for the first time since the audition. She did not choose to unleash her pyrotechnics for this somewhat indifferent audience. She merely sang a few popular songs, and the dark rich purity of her voice was as clean and deep as Space itself.
When Ivor Harden began (he had the incredible nerve to sing Jet Song to the spacemen who had grown up on it), Arthur slipped out to the smoking chamber. Parva’s singing had stirred him deeply (what was it Steele had said about Kleinbach and Storm?), but that was partly because he was a specialist, a connoisseur. He had watched the unmoved faces of the average listener . . .
The attack came from a direction which indicated the defensive use of the Seventh Position of juzor—which was also advisable because it was reasonably certain to leave the attacker alive . . . and in no mood to argue.
Arthur retrieved the weapon—one of those damnable South Martian thorns, as long as your forearm and instant death once the bloodstream meets it—and looked down at the gasping understeward. The door was still open; Harden was off to hounds with a treble shout for an encore.
Arthur weighed the thorn suggestively and nodded toward the source of the voice. “He hired you to do it, didn’t he? So he’d have an alibi from the whole ship’s company.”
Nerve-wrenched and feeble though he was, the steward protested. “He didn’t have to hire me. I’m as good a Populist as he is any day! The hell with science! Let’s be men again!”
“And all have a jolly time sticking thorns in each other . . . Get out! Tell him he’ll have to try again—oh, and another message: Tell him he’s still flatting on his G’s.”
Tomorrow they would land. Ivor’s opportunities should be plentiful on a strange planet. Now to stay alive until he found Kleinbach . . .
Irita Storm had been (Arthur had seen early stereos) as enchanting a soubrette as ever graced operetta and opera, with a voice whose light brilliance had been supported by a strong lower register. Now at 65, she retained only her middle voice, but with so complete a command of style and musicianship that you hardly regretted the absence of necessary notes. And she had so perfected the soubrette’s art of coquetry that you could enjoy it as an abstract technical triumph without concern over the more physiological aspects of the male-female relationship.
But there was little coquetry evident, even though she was alone with a man, when she talked with Jon Arthur after first hearing the Parva. Her professional concern was too strong.
“Of course you were right as a judge to select her,” she pouted. “It’s one of those voices that make legends. It’s in the tremendous tradition—Pasta, Mantelli, Schumann-Heink, Geyer, Supervia, Pharris, Krushelnitsa . . . and now Parva. And she’s trained to perfection—nothing for me to do there. But my dear young man, can you imagine the greatest voice in the world with the emotional and interpretive warmth of a carefully constructed robot?”
“I can,” Arthur smiled, “because I’ve heard it. The robot, I mean, and I will say that Parva comes closer to humanity than that.”
“I’m furious, do you hear me? There’s never been a voice so perfected—and so wasted! It’s high time she came here! Give me six months. That’s all I ask, young man—six months, and you won’t know her!”
Six months, Jon Arthur reflected as he left, and you may not know the system . . .
He had met one impasse after another since his arrival on Venus. He had expected to receive almost immediately one of the familiar rice-paper messages; he had received nothing. Even, in its way, more perturbing: he had expected the necessity of holding his guard high against Ivor Harden and his allies; he had moved unharmed through an apparently tranquil existence.
The cliff he was strolling along, the surf far below, reminded him of the Big Sur country in California. Venus had, in most respects, proved surprisingly Ter-ra-like after the great project of the gyro-condensers had removed the vapor layer. But it was to him a Never-Never-Terra in which his tensions and problems seemed to have removed themselves—and thereby agonizingly increased his anxiety.
No clue anywhere to the retreat of Kleinbach, and yet the message had been so specific—and someone should have contacted him at once. There had been, he’d learned, two recent “accidental” deaths on the staff of the Storm Resident Laboratory. That might explain the lack of contact—but then what explained his own charmed life? Why not an “accident” to—
He heard a soft chuckle behind him and sprang around through one hundred and eighty degrees of arc so that he should be no longer between the sound and the cliff.
Ivor Harden smiled at him almost patronizingly. “These cliffs are dangerous,” he observed. “You should be more careful.” And he walked off with as strictly ham a laugh as any baritone ever emitted at the end of the creed in Otello.
Jon Arthur stared after him. In his preoccupation he had almost invited Harden to kill him. The opportunity had been perfect. But the baritone had declined it, and even made a point of stressing his forbearance.
Therefore . . .
“He’s either dead or dying,” he said flatly to Mme. Storm. “They don’t even care now whether I re
ach him. But they’re stupid—they may have guessed wrong; there may still be a chance. You must take me to him.”
Mme. Storm fluttered her eyelashes with a skill rarely attained at an age when they are worth fluttering. “My dear boy,” she murmured with the faintest hint of throatiness, “flattering though it is to be accused of having a lover hidden away . . .”
“You’re the only one of his former intimates on Venus. He loved you once. He’d turn to you when he was alone and dying. I’ve explained why I must see him. I’m forced to trust you. And you see what it can mean to—”
The deft gesture of Mme. Storm’s right hand evoked a nonexistent fan, over which her old eyes shone with a far from old warmth. “Please, my dear. Don’t make another noble speech. You see, you’ve done it. When you said he loved me once. I have to correct that: He still loves me.”
“Then he is here!”
“Come,” she said, and moved from the room like a bride.
The great and dying Kleinbach was trying to listen; Jon Arthur could see that. The mechanisms of bones and veins which had once been hands plucked senselessly at the covers, and the pallid eyes stared at the face of Mme. Storm (with the mouth of a coquette and the eyes of a widow) or at nothing at all. But Arthur could feel, almost extrasensorily, the desire to respond.
“You can save us,” he insisted. “An authentic message from you—I’ll take care of identity checks that will satisfy every expert. You’re the man that they’ll all listen to. To the Academy, you’re the one man that even Weddergren feels damned near humble before. To the Populists—maybe not to their leaders, but to the millions who act and vote—you’re a symbol, as Einstein was before you and as no Academist is: a symbol of something wonderful and strange but very human. You’re the bridge, the link, the greatness that synthesizes opposites. A word from you—and the Center falls together behind that word, leaving the extremists where they belong, on the sidelines of man’s march . . .”
“Shh!” Mme. Storm whispered. She had sensed the effort in the sunken face before Arthur could realize that the old man intended to speak.
The first words were in German: “Es irrt der Mensch . . .”
The emaciated voice dwindled to nothing. Arthur remembered the passage from Faust; something about how man must still strive and err as he strives . . .
The next words were in English, and were two: “Man’s reach . . .”
Then there was silence in the little room. From some faraway world, certainly no nearer this than the orbit of Mercury, came sounds of scales and vocalizing, those jarring preliminaries to beauty which characterize a school of singing.
Arthur never knew how long the room was silent before he realized that it was too silent.
There had been three different rhythms of breathing. Now there were two.
Mme. Storm looked up at him, at once older and younger than he had yet seen her. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Don’t blame yourself. You didn’t . . . It was only days, perhaps hours . . .”
He leaned over and kissed her on the thin roughed lips. “ From him,” he said. He looked at the dried thing on the bed. “Cover his face,” he said gently. “He died old.”
To musicians, artists, writers, Venusberg means The Colony; to spacemen it means the most wide-open port in the system.
The first aspect had afforded Jon Arthur his excuse for coming; the second provided oblivion against the tragic failure of a mission.
It was two weeks before he even attempted to sober up. It was another week before he emerged from the pea soup fog of his hangover.
He emerged to find a batch of cryptically phrased spacegrams from Steele Morrison, Morrison, whose general tenor was “any luck?” and another batch from his managing editor, whose general tenor was “Where the hell is the first article of the series on Storm?” He tore up both batches unanswered.
“The dark night of the soul” is a phrase invented by a great mystic to describe a certain indescribable and enviable state of mystic communion and dissolution, but it sounds as though it described what a less mystic religious writer called “the Slough of Despond.”
It was night in Jon Arthur’s soul, a night of blackest indifference. Not even despair, which implies a certain desperate striving; but a callous inability to sense the importance of anything now that the Great Importance had collapsed.
Weeks passed and the election was held on Terra and the Academy won and Dr. Weddergren became President and 720,000 people were killed on both sides (and on neither) in the Populist riots which the Academy’s military technicians (the Academy did not believe in soldiers) finally quelled and Dr. Weddergren announced again that the system is Man’s laboratory and as a token thereof canceled the municipal elections about to be held in Greater Hollywood and Jon Arthur did not give a damn.
More weeks passed and the spacegrams kept coming and the last one said it was the last one because music critic and correspondent Arthur was no longer employed and Jon Arthur did not give a damn.
He had a few hundred credits left and the abandoned hut on the beach cost nothing and the hangovers were relatively shorter when you timed the bouts more carefully and there was much to be said for simply watching the waves to pass the time while staying sober.
So many people had come and gone in the hut on one night or another—Parva, Steele Morrison (with both legs), Kleinbach (reading a volume of Browning), Ivor Harden, even Marchesi once—that Arthur felt little surprise to see Irita Storm standing before him.
“You placed the quotation of course?” he remarked, as though they had just been discussing that scene in the little room.
“Of course,” she said. “Ah, but a mans reach should exceed his grasp—”
“—Or what’s a heaven fori Good question, that. Andrea del Sarto. ”
“Very good question. Question that leads me, young man, to ask you to come to see me.”
Jon Arthur decided that was permissible to leer at imaginary elderly coquettes. He did not feel it fair of imaginary elderly coquettes to deal him an almost convincingly unimaginary slap.
“When you’re sober.” There was no coquetry in the voice. “If ever. For one thing, I want you to hear Parva. I’d really value your opinion—when you think I can get it.”
It took almost two days for Arthur to convince himself that the brief scene had really taken place. At the end of another two he was neither trembling nor thirsty . . . at least not very much.
But he was trembling a little when Mme. Storm came into the side room where she had placed him.
“I didn’t want her to know you were here,” she explained. “It might have made her either very much above or very much below her usual form.”
“I don’t see why,” he asserted argumentatively.
“Don’t fish!” snapped Mme. Storm—and then answered his fishing with an odd little smile that could have made her even greater than she was in her youthful career as soubrette. “But what did you think?”
“Astonishing,” he answered soberly. “She’s not only singing . . . she’s living and feeling and . . . and being. She’s cut the duralloy cord that tied her to Weddergren and Marchesi.”
Mme. Storm looked smug. “I don’t think,” she said, “that the President is going to like me.”
Gradually the night began to clear. Music meant something more than the surf. And there might be meaning even in a life without Kleinbach, even in a life under the Academy.
And there was Faustina.
Most of her nonworking time they now spent together. Casually they ignored the fact that he was no longer the Great Critic who could build her career. They talked as fellow workers in music, planning productions, discussing repertory, making notes on the new translations he would prepare for some of her roles.
Fie decided to move from the hut to the Resident Laboratory when Mme. Storm asked him to give her pupils a series of lectures in music history. It was by then quite natural that Faustina should help him move such few possessions as
he had.
And afterwards when they were sitting on the cliff she said, “I listened today to some of the tapes I made when I first came here. You know, I don’t think I like that girl.”
“That’s funny,” he said. “I was in love with her, in a way.”
“She’s too much like Mar— You were what?”
“In love with her.”
“I must say this is a fine time to mention it!”
“Hardly realized it myself till now. Of course it wasn’t anything comparable to being in love with you.”
She took both his hands in hers. “And you are, aren’t you?” she said gravely. “You’d better be . . . It’s ridiculous, I’ve learned so much from Mme. Storm, I think I’ve even learned how to be me from her, but I haven’t learned how to flirt.” He kissed her hands gently. “So I’d better,” she went on, “just plain say I love you, and we’ll both know where we are.”
“We are,” he said quietly, “on a cliff on Venus which might well be the Big Sur on that blue star up there. That far an Academist might go. But of course the correct answer is simply We are, period.”
After a long time, when her mouth was finally not otherwise occupied, she began to sing. She started with Plaisir d’amour: “Love’s pleasure lasts but an instant, love’s regrets for a lifetime . . .”
There is such a voluptuous sweetness to sad songs when you are unbearably happy.
And she sang this and that, and Greensleeves and Stardust. And the beauty of her voice and the beauty of her body and the beauty of her love were one.
That night had ended the night.
The next day Jon Arthur knew what he must do, and it was not to give a series of lectures on the history of music.
Mme. Storm protested. “You, yes, young man. Do what you will. But not Parva. I’m not through; she’s only great, she—” But she capitulated finally. “If you promise to bring her back—and as many other robots that well trained as you can find. I’ll make wonderful people of them too.” And the invisible fan bestowed a parting benediction.
The Compleat Boucher Page 44
