motiveless malignity
Ekern’s fear began in a dream. One night before a performance—just a little recital for all the students of his teacher—he had gone to bed fine. And then in the dream it had all gone wrong. He was alone on a big dark drafty backstage, with acoustic dampers hanging overhead like the blades of guillotines, and through the wings and chinks in the stage curtains the voice of the audience poured like a thick liquid. Frightened by the babble he opened his flute case and found the top section missing. He put the other two sections together and searched frantically in the bare wooden corners of the backstage, but there was nothing there but dust and wood and the thick liquid sound of the watchers, and he was being called to perform. They grabbed him by the arms and pulled him toward the stage as he struggled and fought.…
But that was just a dream, and dreams rarely impinge on the real. The next day, however, as the actual performance drew closer, his unease grew and grew, until he stepped out onto their little practice stage rigid with fright. Though his flute was whole he could barely play it. The dream had been like the tree of knowledge; and now he knew enough to be afraid. “A very nerve-racked performance,” his perfectionist father had said severely. And two weeks later at a festival performance it was worse.
Tearfully Ekern cursed the dream, and wondered why it had come to him. It had been an act out of his control, he never would have willed it; and as his fear grew with every attempt to play, it seemed to him that he had been destined to suffer the curse of stage fright, in a world where performance was all.
Years later, playing to himself in a stairwell full of echoes, it occurred to him that most of the times we are betrayed, it is by ourselves—by some part of the self impervious to the will, beyond will. That there was such a part of his “self” amazed and appalled him, and he wondered if it were really so. Do Titans war within us, as the alchemist Jung said? And if so, why should one Titan prevail, another fall? Do our “selves” have any control whatsoever over our lives?
the convocation of the magi
These questions and others like them still gnawed at Ekern during the course of the Grand Tour, as he and the other fellows of his order fired through the vacuum ahead of the tour, from Titania to the little terra Grimaldi. They descended on the terra like the falling angels on the lake of fire, intent on secret conquest. Diana stood at the center of a small clearing, and Ekern stood facing her, part of the circle of twelve around her. Beside the circle was a low concrete blockhouse, its only entrance a heavy steel door. Surrounding the blockhouse and the group of playwrights was a circle of baobabs, standing like an outer circle of listeners; beyond the trees, verdant savannah extended to the chocolate hills on the horizon. The steep-sided dome of the sky was a dark blue, and under the light of the low whitsun the trees gleamed like dusty gold leaf, casting long shadows all the way to the eastern hills.
Diana called them to order with her chant:
“Go under the real
To the heart of the real,
Where what we can trust
Is not what we feel,
But what we then know,”
and so on. Ekern barely listened, impatient for her to finish. She was deceptive, their Magus; appearing simple made her dangerous, and Ekern kept his expression perfectly attentive. He had been apprenticed to her, and knew her temper. She had introduced him to metadrama, wandering the edge of Lowell’s hemisphere one day (observing that it was a much smaller section than a hemisphere, that the sphere’s center must be far underground, that the surface of the city bowed up in the center of town, like the surface of a much larger buried sphere, so that everywhere in the city the pull of the underground gravity generator felt [almost] properly down; observing that one could stick one’s hand through the discontinuity of the invisible dome, and freeze it) —wandering in the melancholy humiliated life destined to be his, he had been struck by a young woman running for the discontinuity itself. “Watch out!” he had cried aloud, and held her by the arm as she struggled to free herself and dash through the barrier into Pluto’s black night. “Hey!” he had cried, and then two men were pummeling them, attempting to free the woman so she could kill herself! In a confused frenzy he struck them both sprawling and trapped the woman under him.
And then she had started to laugh. Oh, it was a crude metadrama, no doubt of it. “You were magnificent,” she said. And when the two men had explained themselves, and his anger had subsided, he had considered it. Performance without the stage, without the exposure. “No matter how angry you are at us,” the woman said, “we pulled a performance from you that you couldn’t have made otherwise. And at the same time you were plunged straight to the heart of yourself, of your reality. Think about it.” For some time he thought of nothing else; and then he went to see her.
So began Ekern’s involvement with metadrama. And having looked back at the course of his life, in an attempt to explain this involvement, you may marvel at the paucity of causes: a dream, a fear of stages, a driving father—another child might have laughed at these influences, become someone kind, bold, generous. So I have failed; to explain Ernst Ekern is to dive deeper than I can go. But do not blame me, Reader. We emerge from the womb with our characters formed, our destinies written; can you explain yourself to yourself? If not, forgive me.
Now Diana finished her chant, and nodded to Ekern. Here, he thought, before this group, some of whom never gave their names, never even spoke, he could command. These people lived in fear always, but Ekern was free of fear. All life was a performance, a deception. Each person had a hundred performances a day to get through. And before his craven fellows he was the supreme performer. He stepped forward and captured all their gazes with a single sweeping look.
“‘Here we shall see, If power change Purpose, what our seemers be.’” So the Duke of Vienna had begun, in Measure for Measure. Ekern pointed at the blockhouse. “I know the code to this little terra, this piece of the flesh of the goddess lost. So we will descend through that door to the center of this terra, where the gravity generator resides. Down there you will witness the next scene of my drama, but you will also be my players. In this you are actors and audience at once, observing your audience to see his performance.”
Atargatis looked over Diana’s broad shoulder at him. “And what will we see, master?”
“That I will not tell you,” Ekern said easily. “You have seen the play thus far: first Wright frightened the crowd, and then the crowd frightened him. You should be able to see the synthesis of this. We now offer, not without ambiguity, a guide, an explanation.” In the eastern sky, just over the horizon, slate clouds flickered with soundless lightning. Ekern let his silence extend for a time. “You know of the Greys. They have a terra of their own, and it is said that downsystem they are seen often. Yet in essence they are a secret order, like ours. No one knows their purpose.”
At this Atargatis smiled a crooked smile.
“We will subsume the Greys,” Ekern continued. “They will become no more than the shell for our own purposes. Where it leads Wright, you will see. As the Duke of Vienna said, ‘If his own life answer the straightness of his proceeding, it shall become him well; wherein if he choose to fail, he hath sentenced himself.’”
And with that he waved a hand, dispersing them. “We meet again at my calling.” Off between the baobabs they weaved, talking among themselves. Atargatis waited for Ekern, eyes bright with curiosity. They left the grove together.
“What made you choose the Greys as your disguise?” asked Atargatis.
Ekern shrugged. “They suit certain needs of mine. Why do you ask?”
“I will tell you when I have seen more,” Atargatis replied, smiling. Out on the open hillside there was more light; Grimaldi’s whitsun blazed in the evening sky like the little chip of Sol it was. To the east against the slate clouds arched a small rainbow, one especially bright in its violet, green and yellow bands. Atargatis pointed at it. “It is a good image of your drama, is it not? The rainbo
w is not there without us, and as we walk toward it it moves ahead of us, never getting closer.…”
“The image fits only a fraction of the drama I conceive,” Ekern said sharply. Atargatis was too bright, too cunning, too interested. Ekern wanted him only to witness and remain silent. “This is nothing but a bow of color, a natural manifestation of split light.”
“Natural, yet arranged by the weather people of Grimaldi,” Atargatis said, smiling.
the music of the spheres
Great Orion approached Grimaldi more slowly, and on board life fell uncertainly into the patterns of shipboard existence: long hours of sleep, extended meals, promenades before the broad windows, frequent concerts, endless talk. Johannes Wright spent the first part of the flight in the hospital; after that he kept to himself, spending his time in the Orchestra. His concentration was impaired, however, and often he found himself imagining the terrifying moment when the red streaks had burst up at him out of the city of blues, melting the section of escalator below him, forcing him to jump out into empty space; it was only luck that the platform had been there—he hadn’t even seen it. Shuddering he would come to in his Orchestra, safe, and attempt to calm down and return to his music … it was hard. He avoided conversation with Margaret, who wanted to talk security, and with everyone else as well, except for Dent Ios. Ios only wanted to talk music, and Johannes liked that.
So the two of them limped along the corridors, Johannes favoring his left ankle, Dent favoring his right. The comic sight became the talk of the ship, but they didn’t notice. One morning Dent caught up with him on his way to work, and Johannes invited him along.
The Orchestra was kept in a large dimly lit storage chamber, a room not much taller than the Orchestra itself, but much broader. Johannes switched on a light, and they limped over to look up at it. “Come up to the control booth,” Johannes said.
“Is there room?” Dent asked.
“Oh yes.” Johannes climbed in over the piano bench and began to make his way up the glass steps, through all the blue shadows. “Yablonski and I spent hours here together.” He settled on the Master’s stool, and Dent ducked into one corner, rubbernecking to see all the booth’s interior.
But after a time he said, “Don’t you find this distancing from the instruments a problem? Isn’t it … bad for the music?”
Johannes laughed shortly. “How I used to think so! And how it cost me.” A moment to fend off those memories. “But it is more a player piano than an organ, if you see what I mean. One shouldn’t attempt to play all of a piece live—there Yablonski and most of the earlier Masters were wrong. You need to take advantage of the thing’s taping abilities.”
“But that takes you even further from live performance, right? Recording music that is mechanically played?”
“It’s true,” Johannes admitted. These questions of his youth were painful to recall. “But the controls are much more delicate than you might imagine. Here.” He pulled out a clarinet keyboard. “Pressure on the keys partly determines volume, and pushing one side of the key or the other raises or lowers the tone. You have to have a fine touch, but with practice you can play slurs, vibrato, tremolo, crescendo and decrescendo … and the embouchures, the bowing, they’re all superior. It is truly an astonishing instrument, but not exactly a performance instrument. Rather a composing instrument—a very good one. I could make tapes and you couldn’t tell the difference between the Orchestra’s instruments and their counterparts played directly by a musician.”
Dent peered into one tall bank of keyboards. “I believe you.” He stopped his inspection and straightened up. “And what will you compose with this instrument? What is this large work I have heard people speak of?”
Johannes considered how to say it, and became confused. “I call it The Ten Forms of Change. After Holywelkin’s book.”
“And the music is based on Holywelkin’s mathematics?”
“Well—” Johannes stopped, searched for words. “Every quality of sound can be a sign. Pitch, timbre, duration, intensity—these tonal qualities constitute the sounds themselves, which are arranged in rhythmic patterns. Tensing, emphasizing, relaxing, tensing again, this sequence repeated in various pulses is the essence of rhythm. Sounds in rhythm create sonorous motion, and the simultaneous sounding of tones creates harmony, characterized by mass, volume, density, and tension … and what is needed is a harmonic texture as dense as the fabric of the real; not notes at every possible pitch all at once, for that is not the way of the world, but chords of immense volume, containing nodal points where subsidiary chords are clustered.…”
Dent was looking confused. “These are the elements of music, yes?”
“—chords woven as densely as glints in spacetime,” Johannes said.
“I see,” Dent said slowly. “I take it your composition is … complex.”
“All music is complex.”
“I see.” Dent fumbled for words. “But you were saying something about Holywelkin?”
“Yes, and this is where the two came together for me. Once you have made a musical phrase, you have a sort of variable, a form that can be manipulated by equation.”
“So you do,” Dent said, squinting with concentration.
“Now—this is what struck me—there are ten operations by which one can change a phrase, or develop it, to use composing terms. Change has ten forms. And Holywelkin, do you see, in his equations describing the changes in micro-dimensional events, do you see, formulated ten big sets of equations. This is no shocking surprise, as the changes correspond in both cases to basic forms of change postulated in symbolic logic.”
“I see?” Dent said.
“But the two are not just related. They are the same! Inversion, retrogradation, retrograde inversion, augmentation, diminution, partition, interversion, exclusion, inclusion, and textural change—these composing operations are the very ones described by Holywelkin’s equations!”
“And so that means…” Dent said, and stopped, eyebrows raised.
“It means that the structure of our thinking and the structure of reality have an actual correspondence. Think about it,” Johannes urged him. “When the big cyclic accelerators were set up in the 2900s in Mercury’s orbit, they fired particles at higher energies than ever before. At those levels of energy everything appeared random, the results were so strange. Mauring postulated compactified curved dimensions to quantize gravity and explain certain features of particle physics, but she worked in isolation and the experimental physicists never saw a way of using her geometry—they thought it was just an abstract exercise. Do you see the problem?”
Dent cleared his throat, said carefully, “I can see there must have been a problem.”
“Holywelkin, you see, came along at a time when the paradigm had topped out. This is always the great moment in physics, when the theoretical paradigm begins to break down under the weight of experimental data, because someone’s got to make the break, in a lateral drift to a new paradigm.
“And Holywelkin did it. He studied Mauring’s geometry and explained the data from the Great Synchrotrons in her terms: five macro-dimensions, five micro-dimensions, vanishing points, discontinuities and bubble discontinuities, pocket gravities, whitelines—all her strange system. He said that the shortest events were all the same—he called them glints, and postulated that they were moving according to the basic forms of change described in symbolic logic. Then he integrated Mauring’s geometry and these principles of symbolic logic, down at this level where the events occurred chiefly in the sixth through the tenth dimensions—where particles per se had disappeared entirely.”
“Disappeared entirely,” Dent said.
“So with quantum mechanics fitting inside Holywelkin’s more comprehensive physics, what do the equations describe? Very short-lived events, in waves with certain characteristics of form, amplitude, and frequency, changing by inversion, retrogradation, et cetera—”
“Ah!” Dent said, his deep frown replaced by a rai
sed forefinger. “Like music!”
Johannes nodded. “Exactly. We exist in the middle world. The universe is about ten to the fortieth times bigger than us, and glints are about ten to the fortieth times smaller than us. This strikes me as suspicious, and I suspect it may be an artifact of our perceptual limits, but never mind that, the important thing is, most of existence is beyond our senses. We can know it discursively, to use your terms, but we can’t know it by acquaintance. Thus it has no real meaning for us. Particularly when it gets as difficult and contrary to common sense as Holywelkin physics. To know the real nature of the universe by acquaintance—”
“By acquaintance with an analogy, you mean,” Dent said, tugging hard on a moustache.
“Yes,” Johannes agreed, nodding in approval, pleased that he was being understood to an extent, “but an accurate analogy, you see, an exact one. Using short tones of a certain pitch and timbre to represent glints, we can program Holywelkin’s equations into the Orchestra’s computer, and trace the progress of the glints musically—thus tracing the history of whatever substance the glints compose, no matter how large. We might then truly understand the nature of reality.…”
“And is this the music that you played on Lowell?” Dent asked.
“No no. Only a study for it.”
“And people went mad.”
“So I’ve been told.” Because the accuracy of Holywelkin’s physics might make it possible to predict the future.… “I don’t want to talk about that. The important thing is, I’m not finished. There’s the question of timbre, and of the origin of the first phrase. It’s proving difficult.” Because he wasn’t ready to face the implications. Because there was no obvious starting point. Because … “Because I don’t know enough yet.”
Dent nodded, looking thoroughly confused. “I look forward to hearing this composition.”
the convocation of the irregulars
As they approached Grimaldi Margaret called a meeting of her security staff, and because of his adventures Dent Ios was allowed to join them. Margaret, Karna, Yananda, Marie-Jeanne and Dent gathered in the Alnilam Chamber, a large clear bubble protruding from the side of Orion, and sat in one of the little nests of chairs out against the dome, where no one could hear them, or approach without being seen. The great clouds of the Milky Way spilled across the spangled blanket of stars, so that it seemed there was almost as much white in the vacuum as black.