Kolfmann looked at me fiercely for a moment, and I felt a shiver go through me. But my elation knew no bounds. I had won a great battle for music, and I had won it with ridiculous ease.
He went away for a while to master the technique of the synthesizer. I gave him my best man, one whom I had been grooming to take over my place someday. In the meantime I finished my Beethoven, and the performance was a great success. And then I got back to Macauley and his circuit.
Once again things conspired to keep me from full realization of the threat represented by the Macauley circuit. I did manage to grasp that it could easily be refined to eliminate almost completely the human element in music interpretation. But it’s many years since I worked in the labs, and I had fallen out of my old habit of studying any sort of diagram and mentally tinkering with it and juggling it to see what greater use could be made of it.
While I examined the Macauley circuit, reflecting idly that when it was perfected it might very well put me out of a job (since anyone would be able to create a musical interpretation, and artistry would no longer be an operative factor), Kolfmann came in with some tapes. He looked twenty years younger; his face was bright and clean, his eyes were shining, and his impressive mane of hair waved grandly.
“I will say it again,” he told me as he put the tapes on my desk. “I have been a fool. I have wasted my life. Instead of tapping away at a silly little instrument, I might have created wonders with this machine. Look: I began with Chopin. Put this on.”
I slipped the tape into the synthesizer and the F Minor Fantasy of Chopin came rolling into the room. I had heard the tired old war-horse a thousand times, but never like this.
“This machine is the noblest instrument I have ever played,” he said.
I looked at the graph he had drawn up for the piece, in his painstaking crabbed handwriting. The ultrasonics were literally incredible. In just a few weeks he had mastered subtleties I had spent fifteen years learning. He had discovered that skillfully chosen ultrasonics, beyond the range of human hearing but not beyond perception, could expand the horizons of music to a point the presynthesizer composers, limited by their crude instruments and faulty knowledge of sonics, would have found inconceivable.
The Chopin almost made me cry. It wasn’t so much the actual notes Chopin had written, which I had heard so often, as it was the unheard notes the synthesizer was striking, up in the ultrasonic range. The old man had chosen his ultrasonics with the skill of a craftsman—no, with the hand of a genius. I saw Kolfmann in the middle of the room, standing proudly while the piano rang out in a glorious tapestry of sound.
I felt that this was my greatest artistic triumph. My Beethoven symphonies and all my other interpretations were of no value beside this one achievement of putting the synthesizer in the hands of Kolfmann.
He handed me another tape and I put it on. It was the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor; evidently he had worked first on the pieces most familiar to him. The sound of a super-organ roared forth from the synthesizer. We were buffeted by the violence of the music. And Kolfmann stood there while the Bach piece raged on. I looked at him and tried to relate him to the seedy old man who had tried to wreck the synthesizer not long ago, and I couldn’t.
As the Bach drew to its close I thought of the Macauley circuit again, and of the whole beehive of blank-faced handsome technicians striving to perfect the synthesizer by eliminating the one imperfect element—man. And I woke up.
My first decision was to suppress the Macauley circuit until after Kolfmann’s death, which couldn’t be too far off. I made this decision out of sheer kindness; you have to recognize that as my motive. Kolfmann, after all these years, was having a moment of supreme triumph, and if I let him know that no matter what he was doing with the synthesizer the new circuit could do it better, it would ruin everything. He would not survive the blow.
He fed the third tape in himself. It was the Mozart Requiem Mass, and I was astonished by the way he had mastered the difficult technique of synthesizing voices. Still, with the Macauley circuit, the machine could handle all these details by itself.
As Mozart’s sublime music swelled and rose, I took out the diagram Macauley had given me and stared at it grimly. I decided to pigeonhole it until the old man died. Then I would reveal it to the world and, having been made useless, myself (for interpreters like me would be a credit a hundred), I would sink into peaceful obscurity, with at least the assurance that Kolfmann had died happy.
That was sheer kindheartedness, gentlemen. Nothing malicious or reactionary about it. I didn’t intend to stop the progress of cybernetics, at least not at that point.
No, I didn’t decide to do that until I got a better look at what Macauley had done. Maybe he didn’t even realize it himself, but I used to be pretty shrewd about such things. Mentally, I added a wire or two here, altered a contact there, and suddenly the whole thing hit me.
A synthesizer hooked up with a Macauley circuit not only didn’t need a human being to provide an aesthetic guide to its interpretation of music, which is all Macauley claimed. Up to now, the synthesizer could imitate the pitch of any sound in or out of nature, but we had to control the volume, the timbre, all the things that made up interpretation of music. Macauley had fixed it so that the synthesizer could handle this, too. But also, I now saw that it could create its own music, from scratch, with no human help. Not only the conductor but the composer would be unnecessary. The synthesizer would be able to function independently of any human being. And art is a function of human beings.
That was when I ripped up Macauley’s diagram and heaved the paperweight into the gizzard of my beloved synthesizer, cutting off the Mozart in the middle of a high C. Kolfmann turned around in horror, but I was the one who was really horrified.
I know. Macauley has redrawn his diagram and I haven’t stopped the wheels of science. I feel pretty futile about it all. But before you label me reactionary and stick me away, consider this:
Art is a function of intelligent beings. Once you create a machine capable of composing original music, capable of an artistic act, you’ve created an intelligent being. And one that’s a lot stronger and smarter than we are. We’ve synthesized our successor.
Gentlemen, we are all obsolete.
The Songs of Summer
This is yet another of the stories I wrote in June of 1955; but before I discuss it, let me jump a year or so forward, to the summer of 1956. Much has happened since my first valiant sales. I have received my degree from Columbia; I have married; and, both alone and in collaboration with a roguish character named Randall Garrett, I have sold dozens and dozens of stories to all manner of magazines. (Again, I refer you to the pulp-story collection In the Beginning for the full story of how this came about.)
Garrett was the key figure in my sudden burst of success. A capable science-fiction writer hampered by alcoholism and incorrigible laziness, he had turned up in New York in the spring of 1955, very much at the end of his resources, and through fortuitous events had landed in the same sleazy building where Harlan Ellison and I (and a few other science-fictional types) were renting rooms. Garrett and I saw each other as complementary figures. His background was in the sciences, mine in literature. He was a clever plotter but a clumsy stylist, whereas I still was having some trouble constructing stories but told them smoothly and well. He was an ebullient extravert; I was quiet and reserved. He was a monumental procrastinator; I was a demon for work.
We took to each other immediately—attraction of opposites, I suppose—and as soon as my academic term ended early in June, we began to write stories together, Garrett typing madly until he collapsed from drink and fatigue, I taking over and working until he recovered, Garrett going on to finish the story, I giving it its final coat of polish. Everything we turned out sold. He knew all the New York editors—their foibles, their preferences—and took me around to their offices to meet them. Suddenly I found myself on first-name terms with the greats of the field, John W. Campbe
ll, Jr. of Astounding, Horace Gold of Galaxy, and such lesser but distinguished figures as Robert W. Lowndes, Larry T. Shaw of the new magazine Infinity, and Howard Browne of Amazing Stories. They all saw in me a competent and ambitious story-making machine, a writer who could, working at high speed and with great reliability, turn out unspectacular but useful fiction at any length. Very quickly I made myself invaluable to them as they struggled to fill their monthly or bimonthly magazines with copy. And so I was launched.
Now that I had so suddenly ceased to be a wistful amateur and become a busy and widely known member, at the age of 21, of the inner circle of professional science-fiction writers, I began to dig out the two or three dozen stories that I had written and failed to sell during my apprenticeship period, and submitted them one by one to the editors who were now my friends. All other things being equal, an editor will look at a manuscript by a writer he knows far more sympathetically than one that comes in from a stranger in the mail; and, one by one, all those stories that had been so extensively rejected in 1953 and 1954 and the early months of 1955 began to make their way into print in 1956.
It would take several volumes the size of this one to restore them all to print now, and I’m not sure that there’s any great need to clutter people’s bookshelves with fat collections of the More-or-Less-Okay-But-Not-Exactly-Great Early Stories of Robert Silverberg. A few samples like “Road to Nightfall” and “Gorgon Planet” and “The Silent Colony” should serve sufficiently to demonstrate the virtues of my prentice-work and to establish the historical record, but enough is probably enough.
But I do want to exhume one more of what I have come to think of as my “pre-professional” stories, for its own intrinsic interest and for the light it casts on later work. Once again, as with “The Silent Colony,” I was imitating my betters here—this time, reaching well beyond even Robert Sheckley’s league, all the way up to William Faulkner. As a Columbia undergraduate in 1954 I had read with some awe—staying up through the night and finishing it at dawn—Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The use not merely of multiple point of view but of multiple narrator seemed to me a startling and awesome technical device; and with the rashness of youth I tried it myself in “The Songs of Summer.” Having already achieved—so it seemed to me—some mastery of the conventional single-viewpoint short story, I was now ready, at the age of twenty, to begin experimenting with more ambitious fictional forms. (And also with some themes, like that of the group mind, that I would use again and again in later years.)
“The Songs of Summer” was another product of June, 1955. The first dozen editors to whom my agent sent it were unimpressed—or, at any rate, didn’t care to print it. Whenever they felt like publishing this sort of experimentation, they had Theodore Sturgeon or James Blish to write it for them. But after it had been circulating for about a year, during which time I became well known to the New York editors and was starting to bring them the stories they had rejected the year before and have them buy them the second time around, it found a home with Robert Lowndes’ magazine Science Fiction Stories in the spring of 1956. My records indicate that I was paid 3/4 of a cent a word for it—$48.00. By then my name was becoming a familiar one on the contents pages of the s-f magazines, and I suppose Lowndes thought he could take the risk. (In fact, he ran it as the lead story in his September, 1956 issue—though it was Clifford D. Simak who got his name on the cover.) I didn’t send a copy to Faulkner to see what he thought of it.
~
1. Kennon
I was on my way to take part in the Singing, and to claim Corilann’s promise. I was crossing the great open field when suddenly the man appeared, the man named Chester Dugan. He seemed to drop out of the sky.
I watched him stagger for a moment or two. I did not know where he had come from so suddenly, or why he was here. He was short—shorter than any of us—fat in an unpleasant way, with wrinkles on his face and an unshaven growth of beard. I was anxious to get on to the Singing, and so I allowed him to fall to the ground and kept moving. But he called to me, in a barbarous and corrupt tongue which I could recognize as our language only with difficulty.
“Hey, you,” he called to me. “Give me a hand, will you?”
He seemed to be in difficulties, so I walked over to him and helped him to his feet. He was panting, and appeared almost in a state of shock. Once I saw he was steady on his feet, and seemed to have no further need of me, I began to walk away from him, since I was anxious to get on to the Singing and did not wish to meddle with this man’s affairs. Last year was the first time I attended the Singing at Dandrin’s, and I enjoyed it very much. It was then that Corilann had promised herself. I was anxious to get on.
But he called to me. “Don’t leave me here!” he shouted. “Hey, you can’t just walk away like that! Help me!”
I turned and went back. He was dressed strangely, in ugly ill-arranged tight clothes, and he was walking in little circles, trying to adjust his equilibrium. “Where am I?” he asked me.
“Earth, of course,” I told him.
“No,” he said, harshly. “I don’t mean that, idiot. Where, on Earth?”
The concept had no meaning for me. Where, on Earth, indeed? Here, was all I knew: the great plain between my home and Dandrin’s, where the Singing is held. I began to feel uneasy. This man seemed badly sick, and I did not know how to handle him. I felt thankful that I was going to the Singing; had I been alone, I never would have been able to deal with him. I realized I was not as self-sufficient as I thought I was.
“I am going to the Singing,” I told him. “Are you?”
“I’m not going anywhere till you tell me where I am and how I got here. What’s your name?”
“My name is Kennon. You are crossing the great plain on your way to the home of Dandrin, where we are going to have the Singing, for it is summer. Come; I am anxious to get there. Walk with me, if you wish.”
I started to walk away a second time, and this time he began to follow me. We walked along silently for a while.
“Answer me, Kennon,” he said after a hundred paces or so. “Ten seconds ago I was in New York; now I’m here. How far am I from New York?”
“What is New York?” I asked. At this he showed great signs of anger and impatience, and I began to feel quite worried.
“Where’d you escape from?” he shouted. “You never heard of New York? You never heard of New York? New York,” he said, “is a city of some eight million people, located on the Atlantic Ocean, on the east coast of the United States of America. Now tell me you haven’t heard of that!”
“What is a city?” I asked, very much confused. At this he grew very angry. He threw his arms in the air wildly.
“Let us walk more quickly,” I said. I saw now that I was obviously incapable of dealing with this man, and I was anxious to get on to the Singing—where perhaps Dandrin, or the other old ones, would be able to understand him. He continued to ask me questions as we walked, but I’m afraid I was not very helpful.
2. Chester Dugan
I don’t know what happened or how; all I know is I got here. There doesn’t seem to be any way back, either, but I don’t care; I’ve got a good thing here and I’m going to show these nitwits who’s boss.
Last thing I knew, I was getting into a subway. There was an explosion and a blinding flash of light, and before I could see what was happening I blanked out and somehow got here. I landed in a big open field with absolutely nothing around. It took a few minutes to get over the shock. I think I fell down; I’m not sure. It’s not like me, but this was something out of the ordinary and I might have lost my balance.
Anyway, I recovered almost immediately and looked around, and saw this kid in loose flowing robes walking quickly across the field not too far away. I yelled to him when I saw he didn’t intend to come over to me. He came over and gave me a hand, and then started to walk away again, calm as you please. I had to call him back. He seemed a little reluctant. The bastard.
I tried to get him
to tell me where we were, but he played dumb. Didn’t know where we were, didn’t know where New York was, didn’t even know what a city was—or so he said. I would have thought he was crazy, except that I didn’t know what had happened to me; for that matter, I might have been the crazy one and not him.
I saw I wasn’t making much headway with him, so I gave up. All he would tell me was that he was on his way to the Singing, and the way he said it there was no doubt about the capital S. He said there would be men there who could help me. To this day I don’t know how I got here. Even after I spoke and asked around, no one could tell me how I could step into a subway train in 1956 and come out in an open field somewhere around the thirty-fifth century. The crazy bastards have even lost count.
But I’m here, that’s all that matters. And whatever went before is down the drain now. Whatever deals I was working on back in 1956 are dead and buried now; this is where I’m stuck, for reasons I don’t get, and here’s where I’ll have to make my pile. All over again—me, Dugan, starting from scratch. But I’ll do it. I’m doing it.
After this kid Kennon and I had plodded across the fields for a while, I heard the sound of voices. By now it was getting towards nightfall. I forgot to mention that it was getting along towards the end of November back in 1956, but the weather here was nice and summery. There was a pleasant tang of something in the air that I had never noticed in New York’s air, or the soup they called air back then.
The sound of the singing grew louder as we approached, but as soon as we got within sight they all stopped immediately.
They were sitting in a big circle, twenty or thirty of them, dressed in light, airy clothing. They all turned to look at me as we got near.
I got the feeling they were all looking into my mind.
The silence lasted a few minutes, and then they began to sing again. A tall, thin kid was leading them, and they were responding to what he sang. They ignored me. I let them continue until I formed a plan; I don’t believe in rushing into things without knowing exactly what I’m doing.