Serpent Mage

  The crowd grew quiet as the lights dimmed. Mahler’s Tenth, the giant of the evening, was to be performed first, followed by an intermission of only five minutes, then finally the concerto.

  Berthold Crooke came to the podium, with the orchestra already assembled and waiting. Crooke tapped lightly on the podium and motioned for an oboist to play an A-sharp. The orchestra tuned to that note and then went off on its own, instrument by instrument. Again the oboist played an A sharp, and again the orchestra tuned. Finally—on the verge of overkill—the digital keyboard performer produced a perfect A-natural, and the orchestra tuned to that.

  When the pleasant cacophony was over. Crooke tapped again, and silence fell.

  He raised his baton.

  The first movement of the Tenth was an elegiac adagio in F sharp major-minor. Michael fell into the music despite its intense anxiety and sadness. The weave of the music swung hypnotically from domestic tranquillity to ominous warning. What ensued was almost painful in its intensity—a dissonant clash of the orchestra, topped by a solo trumpet blaring a high A note—death and destruction, shock and dismay. The adagio now concluded, seemed complete in itself, and it left Michael almost empty of feeling, drained.

  The second movement, a scherzo—the first of two—was a complete contrast, beginning with a heavily satiric taunt in changing rhythms and tempos and then transforming the theme of the first movement into a happy country dance. It concluded joyously in the major key, leaving Michael with an overwhelming sensation of hope.

  That sensation was tempered by the third movement, titled Purgatorio. In B-flat minor and 2/4 time, it drew its own conclusions after seesawing between anxiety and hope, sun and cold shadow...and those conclusions were dark, declining.

  “‘Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” Kristine whispered.

  “What?” Michael asked.

  “That’s what Mahler wrote on the original score.”

  The beginning of the second scherzo nearly lifted him from his seat—a shrill blast from horns and strings and then back to the dance with life and hope, decline and death.

  The scherzo brought to mind a long-past snippet of conversation between Mora and Clarkham under the Pleasure Dome.

  “The poor, sad German.”

  “I was not responsible for Mahler. Or for his child. That was not my work at all.”

  “Did Mahler lose one of his children?” Michael asked Kristine.

  “A daughter,” she whispered. “His other daughter was incarcerated in a concentration camp during World War II,” Kristine added softly, leaning to speak into his ear.

  “He was dead by then,” Michael said.

  “Maybe he could tell what was coming. Saw what the old world would bring.”

  Michael felt a thrill run up his spine. Yes... Old world passing into new.

  More anxiety after a rich, romantic interlude. Horns, xylophone accents, clarinets and French horns—that hideous solo trumpet again, intruding into the anxiety, presaging a delicious, horrible revelation.

  Michael sat frozen. He could hardly think about what was shaping itself within him. Old world into new.

  Yet all this was accidental—the matching of the Tenth—

  Unfinished. Interrupted by death.

  —with the Infinity Concerto.

  Uplift, again the anxious strains, and back to domestic normality, the world and social life and children—

  Mixed with a foreboding of disaster to come—

  Of change and trauma and anticipation, foresight—

  Harbinger of a new age, of fear and even disaster—

  Then quiet, skeletal strings, thinning out the fabric of reality, extending the cold from his stomach to his head. Drums pounded unobtrusively, ominously.

  On the stage, the largest drum—an eight-foot-wide monster—was assaulted by the drummer with one shattering beat.

  The coldness vanished, leaving him suspended in the auditorium, hardly aware of seats, orchestra, walls, ceiling. He could feel the sky beyond. In his left palm lay a pearly sphere. He closed his hand to conceal it.

  Camouflage. Everything had been camouflaged to mislead, misdirect. The Infinity Concerto was not by itself a song of power. The similarities had seemed merely coincidental.

  Mahler’s Tenth led the way, closing out the old world, describing the end of a long age (sixty million years! or just the end of European peace—or merely the tranquillity of one man’s life, blighted by the death of a daughter...perhaps feeling what the second daughter would have to suffer in a new world gone twice mad) and expressing hope for a time beyond. Rich, anxious, neurotic, jumping with each tic and twitch of things gone awry, trying to maintain decorum and probity in the midst of coming chaos.

  The beats of the huge drum accented a funeral dirge. Again the skeletal tones, this time from muted trumpets...and then heralding horns, a light and lovely flute song of hope developed by the strings...becoming strained again, overblown, life lived too hard, tics and twitches—

  Drum beat. A tragic triad of notes on the trumpet.

  Drum beat. Low bassoons vibrating apart the seconds of his life. Michael still could not move.

  (Deception. Camouflage. Misdirection.)

  The tempo increasing into a new dance, new hope—recovery and healing—and yet another decline. Michael was growing weary of the seesaw, but only because it came too close to the everyday pace of his life. Life in this world, world passing.

  Rise to triad and...

  Disaster. The entire orchestra joined in a dissonant clash, trumpet holding on the high A again, echoed by more horns, another clash that made his head ache, reprise of the theme of everyday life... And then the trumpet, released from its harsh warning role, allowed a small solo. The triad on other instruments, in a major key and hopeful, not shattering. Then domesticity.

  Segue. Connective tissue, old to new.

  How much like what had happened recently, weirdness mixed unpredictably with Earth’s solid reality and inner silence of mind. There seemed to be a rise in intensity to some anticipated triumph, thoughtful, loving and accepting...but not acceding. Quiet contemplation.

  Michael could move again. He glanced nervously at Kristine to see if she had noticed. The symphony was coming to a conclusion, and he felt his inner strength surge.

  Triumph. Quiet, strong and sure—overcoming all tragedy.

  Triumph.

  The last notes of the Tenth faded, and Crooke seemed to reappear on the podium, and the orchestra seemed to become real again.

  The audience sat silent for an uncomfortably long time.

  “You’re sweating,” Kristine said, handing him a handkerchief from her purse.

  “Thanks.” Michael wiped his forehead. Sweat had dripped into his eyes, stinging. The hall seemed stifling. He glanced at his hand. The pearl was gone.

  Finally the audience reacted with strong but not overwhelming applause. They had heard, appreciated, but they had not felt, or had ignored what they felt. A few stood and applauded vigorously, as if to make up for the rest. Michael glanced back but could not see his parents.

  Crooke appeared exhausted but happy. He bowed and then continued with the structure of the program by taking a microphone handed to him and announcing that the interval between pieces would be very short. Some in the audience grumbled.

  “Stand, stretch our legs?” Kristine suggested.

  Michael stood beside her and discreetly windmilled his arms, tensing and untensing his legs. His lungs felt as they once had when he had accidentally breathed dilute fumes from a spill of nitric acid in chemistry class—tight, but not constricted.

  “That was wonderful,” he said, sounding doubtful even to himself.

  “I’m very proud,” Kristine said softly. “Everything’s turning out fine. Even the audience.”

  The air seemed much improved. He felt calm again, prepared.

  Mahler’s Tenth, properly orchestrated, was itself a song of power. It codified the old world, harsh and demanding, lo
vely and lyrical, unyielding and fickle.

  An old rose, fading and growing thorny. How had it avoided being pruned by the Sidhe? Then again, it had not—Mahler had died before finishing it. Other attempts to fulfill the promise had not succeeded...

  Edgar Moffat came to the podium. Michael, on impulse, kissed Kristine lightly on the cheek, then caressed her bare shoulder with one hand. She smiled uncertainly at him, then sat and focused her attention on the podium.

  The baton went up and lowered slowly...

  The first movement began rapidly, the unmutilated piano jumping in almost immediately. As it played, a deep, resounding tone came from the double basses, ascending in pitch through the strings, almost harsh, moving from cello to viola to violin to be drowned by drums, low and rumbling. A sharp rise of French horns glared and did battle, fast, fast, dancing, dissonant and yet perfect, a rousing gallop of ghost horses that faded into whispering strings.

  Sea-grass propelled by moonlight.

  Horns sketched out a vast unease, brooding. They lost all musical tone and whooshed like the wind, a soft winter storm coming.

  A passage of unfilled graves, herald of change and nightmares from unlived childhoods, from an infinity of lives never occupied by the moving strands of an infinity of souls.

  Michael blinked back tears and held Kristine’s hand. She, too, was responding, and her cheeks were wet.

  Lives lived and lost. Tommy. The others.

  Eleuth.

  If they let go, he seemed to understand, they would lose each other. She moved against his shoulder and shivered.

  “Is this what they heard?” she asked.

  Michael swallowed. “No. Everything was different then. It’s the same music, but it’s in its proper time now.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “It resonates.”

  “Will people vanish tonight, or later?”

  “Not from hearing this,” he said.

  The music increased tempo and surged forward on horns, harp and strings, the second rank of violins plucking furiously. The musicians seemed obsessed, and Moffat directed them with a minimum of motion, baton describing the beat and left hand barely indicating emphasis; he gave them their lead and let their concentration carry them through.

  At no point did the music let up. When the piano rejoined the flow, the beat, the pulse, changed to a fractured and disjointed waltz time. The pulse became even more ragged, jazzed, with unpredictable and violent bursts from the drums and horns. Then it smoothed and mellowed.

  Gentle, lulling heart-beat sounds, ragged dances fading, recurring but polished, then slowing.

  As gently as could be imagined, the prelude ended. Without a moment’s pause, the second, mutilated piano began a quiet and persistent solo, staying in the middle register, its tone odd and almost harsh, yet not disturbing, simply biding its time. And the music did something Michael had never heard before.

  It described waiting. While not long in itself, the piano solo covered thousands, perhaps millions of years.

  He glanced at Kristine. Her eyes were wide. She was enchanted, uncritical. Absorbing all. Waltiri’s magic—evident in his movie scores—was here unbridled.

  The orchestra leaped in behind the piano. Time was still at issue—and growth. Michael no longer paid attention to the mechanics, the key or the structure or the way the sounds were created.

  He had caught on to the underlying beauty of the piece. He saw it in relation to “Kubla Khan,” to the pleasure dome even in its incomplete. unsuccessful form; he saw it in relation to the symphony just played. They were all similar songs played in different worlds, to accomplish similar purposes. Subtle variations in the underlying patterns could lead to widely disparate results.

  Mahler had once written a song-cycle/symphony called Das Lied von der Erde—the Song of the Earth. The name had been applied, perhaps, to the wrong piece. His Tenth was a Song of the Earth, of Earth as it had been.

  The Infinity Concerto was heralding the Earth to come.

  And Michael felt himself in it. He was described there—not personally, but in his role. Growing, mutating, uncontrolled, all potential and little achievement. It frightened him. The music was not gentle now. It was complex, demanding, full of discord.

  Discord.

  Discard.

  Start again.

  Renew.

  Unite. (How?)

  Create. Create what?

  The audience was becoming noisy, even above the now-loud music. Something had not been resolved, and they sensed it almost en masse.

  Decline to quiet, persistent but soft, demanding but muted...

  Strings played on their bridges—skeletal—horns muted—breaking time down. The celeste tinkling behind all. Apprehension...

  What happened next, Michael could not describe, nor could members of the orchestra. The music suddenly depended on the fourth movement, adagio, which had not yet been played, and that fore-reference worked because he—they—understood what would happen in the fourth movement.

  Kristine smiled ecstatically. The audience fell silent. The tension had been impossibly resolved.

  The second movement ended. The third began without more than a few seconds’ pause. The digital keyboard and the mutilated piano involved each other in a philosophical discussion. The third movement passed, and Michael did not remember its passing, or even what it was. It was played, but it added an unmemorable subtext to everything around it. It was a movement and a bridge in itself, effective only as a commentary.

  The fourth movement was upon them. Kristine’s face showed irritation or pain. The pain changed to dismay.

  The fourth was not the same movement referred to in the second. There were in fact two adagios, but only one was being manifested. The other existed as a creation solely in the minds of the audience, a phantasm of music, yet Michael had no doubt that both movements had been minutely composed and scored by Waltiri.

  He began to fear what the fifth movement might bring.

  The fourth, as played, was slow, primitive, spare, even deliberately inelegant. It was a new world unresolved, the shape undefined, though with all the elements present, coalescing. Instruments played to different rhythms, slowly coordinating, then fading, then coming to agreement again, themes weaving in and out, with then a reprise of the original theme transposed to B minor. Moffat had called this the “explosive,” yet it seemed anticlimactic.

  The normal piano began to dominate, with its precise laying down of individual notes and chords, no glissandos, no slides, simply sketching what was to come.

  Then, entirely unearthly, the digital keyboard mocked the piano. It created the slides and linked the sketched-out harmonies. It played them back upon themselves and created canons and reversed them in ways only a machine could manage.

  This was the human contribution to the music. The Sidhe would never have countenanced an electronic instrument—not even a simple Theremin. What Waltiri had requested was something only humans could add to music. Through technology, they made music the Sidhe could have created only through magic.

  Humans had found their place in the world to come. They had lived in this universe long enough to master it not with magic, but on its own terms. Not with outside skill, but with skills taught by the hard, unyielding nature of reality. And they had turned those skills into devices for creating wonderful, impossible music.

  But this isn’t music any more, Michael thought.

  “What is this?” Kristine whispered.

  The keyboard had made its point and did not belabor it. Sounding almost abashed, the orchestra resumed its dominance, but the normal piano was done for. It played no more in the fourth and not at all in the final movement. The final movement was home for the mutilated piano and the keyboard.

  Michael shut his eyes. It seemed as if all his hopes and concerns were about to be examined. The fifth movement would be himself. And he knew Kristine was feeling the same—that it would be about hers
elf.

  The music, a sweeping, demanding dance, was now a training ground for a new world.

  In 1939, before its time, Opus 45 at this point in the score would have sown the seeds for a translation into the Realm. Other music had accidentally achieved this effect; Clarkham, and perhaps Waltiri as well, had deliberately designed the Infinity Concerto to work in such a way.

  But Waltiri had woven in something else. With time, the effect of the music would alter. It would not translate; it would prepare. The audience was being made aware of the world they would ultimately have to face.

  The music vanished into its own purpose.

  Only in the last part of the fifth movement did the adjunct song of power rise up and show its medium again. The music became light and beautiful, consciously showy and rich with melody. The melody switched to C minor.

  “Jesus Christ,” said a man behind Michael, loudly.

  Out of the last hundred measures—the measures Moffat had confessed he could not “hear” while reading the score—came quiet assurance, not disturbance. The bomb was being carefully, elegantly defused. The worlds would meet, pass into each other...

  They would not destroy each other.

  The concerto reached its conclusion. (But the unplayed fourth movement echoed; perhaps it would never stop: Das Unendlichkeit Konzert. )

  The music faded.

  The hall was as quiet as empty space.

  Kristine shut her eyes, folded her hands as if in prayer. “They’re going to like it,” Michael reassured her.

  The audience exploded. Everyone stood at once. Applause, shouts of “Bravo!” and exclamations of amazement both crude and ecstatic. Michael stood and looked around anxiously, seeing a few people still in their seats, limp, eyes glazed. But gradually they, too, stood and applauded, returning to the hall from wherever they had been. Moffat took his bow and called Crooke out from the wings. The applause redoubled and did not diminish as the soloists were brought forward. Michael glanced around apprehensively.

  He didn’t know what he expected next. Whether the sky would come crashing down and the air would be filled with flying Sidhe, whether Clarkham himself would appear ringed in fire, whether Waltiri and his birds would fill the hall... Anything seemed possible. The song had been played through. How long would it take to accomplish its task?