Ensemble

his bed, twisting a drapery tassel in her fingers, “I’ve known all along that overwork would do this to you. Look how it affected me, back in the bad old days!” Luckily for him, he had managed to keep up her alimony payments even after the rest of his savings had begun to diminish as swiftly as his health, and so she and her attorney were on good terms with him again. “Why this machine has consumed your life, I don’t know. I suspect it has something to do with that awful Cossack you have doing housework for you. She has the evil eye, I can warn you, and I don’t care how long you’ve known her. Where was she the night your mother died? Or your father? How is she blameless?”

  He spat a high C into the bronze cuspidor, then fell back against the bed once again. “Don’t be foolish, Effie,” Arthur finally said weakly from within his mountain of pillows and quilts. “Mrs. Karinskaya adored my mother. And when she didn’t have to, she watched after my brothers and me.”

  “She exploited you, and she’s given you these outlandish notions. If I were you, I’d order her out of this house, posthaste.” Effie pulled on the tassel and the curtains on the window behind her closed, which was just as well, because he needed to sleep.

  Arthur did not tell Effie about the notebooks in his safe and his extensive dialogue with the future. It might have been because he did not want to witness a tantrum over them; it might also have been because, like her, he was beginning to fear for his sanity. For the Omniphonium had spoken—or rather, the citizens of the future had spoken through the Omniphonium, and he had taken diligent dictation. Some day, he had thought, he would publish a book, and it would be the most startling book ever written by an American: My Colloquy with the World to Come, he might title it. The conversation had begun one evening after supper when he had gone back to the mill with an idea to make some minor adjustment, when he had accidentally laid his elbow across one of the keyboards he’d neglected to switch off. True, he had been experiencing quite a headache ever since he’d finished eating, but he was certain this was not an hallucination: in the sound the speaker in the “conductor’s” listening booth relayed to him, he heard the distinct susurration of human voices, calling him by name. He pressed another key, but nothing—then an approximation of a melody in the Dorian scale, approximating the timbre of a cithara, and he heard the quavering but distinct whispers once again. One hand on the keyboard, the other poised over a ready ledger, he waited for further instructions and then began to take notes.

  The future, it seemed, did not deem this a very important endeavor on his part, but would oblige him by answering whichever of his questions they found attractive. No, they would not tell him the outcome of human political or economic systems, and they would not indulge his baser instincts by giving names or dates. Instead, they were more inclined to philosophize and advise, with much the same often frustrating logic the dead are famous for, with their homilies and vague reassurances. Nevertheless, he was happy to appease the future, and if they would speak distinctly enough, he would do them the honor of conveying their every thought and word.

  It took a bit of flattery and cautious diplomacy, but they agreed and allowed him to proceed. Over the weeks he filled his ledgers with his nearly (to anyone else) illegible handwriting and shorthand, and so he became conversant with the life and ethics of the future.

  First of all, we are no longer “human,” they told him; to call them such a thing would be akin to calling a human an ape. Darwin was right, and their ways were no longer ours. Homo sapiens have made a radical transmogrification of sorts, being once barbaric, chthonic creatures, born of blood, eaters of flesh, murderers of life. Our race is now one of transparency and light, the voices explicated, with bodies as insubstantial as those of glassine jellyfish you used to see in your primitive oceans. We convert the light of the sun, in fact, into the food of mental automation; like spores of long-dead lichen upon a rock in winter, the sun awakes us, animates us, nourishes us until we mature, meet one another, and propagate. We have not bodies as you define them; we are born as are the children of spiders, cast on gossamer into the sunlit empyrean. For years, centuries perhaps (if we were to count them by ancient horological practices), we float on the wind, traffic with the clouds, lovers of the sun, creatures of pure spiritual abstraction. Such an existence is pleasanter beyond your wildest imaginings, more satisfying than any of your artistry or intellectualizing, for we exist almost as thought alone. We say “almost,” for there are still vestiges of your old human desires and ambitions in us, so we seek out one another, calling across the stratosphere, until we form groups, or coagulations, you might say—and like colonies of coral in your clearest seas, we aggregate a culture, a civilization around us; such colleges of collective consciousness increase a hundredfold our powers of mental divination, and it is our love for one another that binds us together like the cement secreted by your tiny polyps—we form great psychic attachments for one another, delighting in combining our mental prowess the way you might mix colors on a palette. Nothing excites us more than discovering new ways of looking at a conundrum, or seeing the hidden side of the enigmas which once baffled your generations. We are happiness itself! So happy are we that we willfully undergo karyokinesis, a mental mitosis, you might say, so as to give birth to other generations even more advance than our own. However, we cannot say whether or not we shall live forever; that problem has not been answered by even the best of our thinkers, for one day we may indeed be proven mortal yet, whatever atoms bind us together into the airy entities we are might one day break apart like so many marbles in an earth-child’s game. Would that be death

  or just another step toward a higher level of existence? We are not certain as of yet, but we are eager to learn…

  These crystalline entities of the Aether, Arthur further discovered, are on occasion compelled to give physical expression to the boundlessly ecstatic joy they feel, intermingling as they do in their wondrous cities of light: they therefore gather and glimmer across the heavens as does the aurora borealis or australis, casting rainbow-colored fires against the unutterable vacancy of the universe. At such times, their minds mingle as do voices in a choir, striking sublime chords of rapture and bliss that ripple across and through them like a tide over shifting, gleaming sands. Their everyday communication alone produces vibrations which might be perceived as the most paradisiacal music ever heard by the human ear; it is through such harmonic pulsation that they were able to effect détente with our brutish past through this marvelous machine. In fact, one might say that the future of humankind exists as song, is song, as intangible as it is exquisite. In their music, if heard properly, can be divined the combined wisdom of all ages and all saviors, and in their melodies all cultures, all civilizations have met their culmination and termination. For pure sound is as one with pure light in this manifestation of the noble future that awaits us: Music is life! Life is music! (If this is difficult to visualize or rationalize, the rest would be as custardy as flummery to the all but the least skeptical reader.) Such frothy idylls and overwrought examinations filled page after page of his thin-ruled ledgers, and it was not until Arthur had taken to his bed that he realized that he might just have well been describing his idea of heaven.

  Meanwhile Effie had set about usurping the duties of the housemistress. Mrs. Karinskaya was a sufficient cook and laundress, but she was congenitally incapable of pushing a broom or lifting a feather-duster; her own quarters were a heap of books, boots, and empty medicinal bottles—there, Effie would not dare invade, but she declared the rest of the farmhouse her sovereignty, and was soon spreading the gospel of borax and Lysol. She was a nervous woman, as has been stated before, but she found assuagement for her nerves in busywork, and now in the nursing of another. For one thing, she was convinced that there was little physical wrong with Arthur: his condition was due to the overly intellectual life of a scientist, compounded with a lack of exercise or fresh air in his limestone dungeon, as well as insufficient nourishment and an her
editary oversensitivity to sound—and especially due to the poisonous presence of that crotchety giantess. She knew that Mrs. Karinskaya both needed her and hated her; she was her and her rival. “Arthur is not dying,” she would tell his old nursemaid, “and you needn’t have even sent for me, but I am glad I came.” Other times, she would tell the older woman, “Look how rosy his cheeks are! That is not a dying man. He will be up and out of bed within a month. Already, he is eating more of your borscht.” Mrs. Karinskaya would just stick out her lower lip and make a sort of razzing noise that Effie took to be some sort of Tartar expression of disdain.

  Often, Mrs. Karinskaya would be gone for hours at a time, usually very early in the morning of very late at night. If Effie had ever bothered to go into town at such hours, she might have heard an adagio that sounded suspiciously reminiscent of Vivaldi seeping from within the thick walls of the mill, and if she had crept within the gates and hoisted herself up onto a high window-ledge, she might have seen the tall form of a woman