Before They Were Giants (20 page)

“Just like sex,” the deaf man said, “climax at the end.” I wait. Time passes.
Pop pop pop . .
. like swollen grains of rice. Something must be done. Might as well play the damn thing. Put on a show.

I’m not convinced by you, Pierson! Not a bit!

~ * ~

I begin arranging the keyboards into concert position, my hands shoving them about like tugboats pushing big ships. Dispassionately I watch my hands shake. The cold corner of my mind has taken over and somehow I am outside the nausea. I am seeing things with the clarity you have when you are extremely hungry, or tired past the point of being tired. Everything is quite clear, quite in focus. I have heard that drowning men experience a last period of great calm and clarity before losing consciousness. Perhaps the tide is that high now. I cannot tell. Oh, I am tired of this! Why can’t it be over? Bach’s “Rejoice, Beloved Christians,” the baritone playing the high line. The passages come to me clean and sharp now. I find it hard to keep my balance; everything is overexposed. I am swaying. I close my eyes. A Chopin Nocturne. Against the black field of my eyelids’ insides there is a marvelous show of lights, little colored worms that burst into existence, crawl across my vision and disappear. Behind the lights are barely discernible patterns, geometric tapestries that flare and contract under tne pressure of my eyelids. The music is intertwined with this odd mandala; when I clamp my eyes hard there is a sudden rush of blue geometry with a black center, with it a roll of tympani, shrieking of woodwinds and the strings fitting quickly and surely into the fantastic blue patterns that blossom before me. Mozart’s Concerto in G, as effortlessly as if I were the conductor and not the performer. Above it rises a trumpet solo, my own improvisation, arching high above the structure of the concerto. My interior field of vision clears and becomes a neutral color, grey or dull purple. Ten clear lines run across it in sets of five. The score. As I play the notes they appear, in long vertical sets as in a conductor’s score. They move off to the left as if the score were on a conveyor belt. Excellent. Half-notes, quarter-notes in the bass clef; long runs of sixteenth-notes in the treble, all look like the sun shining through pinholes in a dark sheet of paper. The concerto flows into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with a transition that pleases me. As far as I can tell the score is perfectly accurate. I am playing brilliantly, with enough confidence to throw grace notes of my own about in passages of great speed. I think, “It would be nice to have the cellos playing their counterpoint here,” and then I hear the cellos making their quick departure from the rest of the strings. My fingers are not doing it. Play it with everything you have. The Finale of the Third, every single instrument achingly clean and individual. Nineteen years, Pierson, is this what you mean?

The Orchestra is the extension of what I want to hear.

I move into realms of my own, shifting from passage to passage, playing what I always wanted to hear; half-remembered snatches, majestic crescendos that you wake up from in the middle of the night, having dreamed them, and wish you could recapture; the architecture of Bach, the power of Beethoven, the beauty of Mozart, the wit and transitions of de Baik. All a confusion, all a marvel. Think it in your head and hear the Orchestra play it. The performer the instrument, the instrument a part of the performer. Pierson, what have you done?

Music. If you are at all alive to it you will have heard passages that bring a chill to your back and a flush of blood to your cheeks; a physical response to beauty. A rush. The music I am playing now is the very distillation of that feeling. It soars out and for the first time I hear echoes in this room, it is that powerful. The score no longer consists of musical notation; it is an impressionistic fantasy of a musical score, the background a deep blood red, the notes sudden clusters of jewels or long flows of colors I can’t identify even as I see them; yet see them, most certainly. The drums are pounding, strings rushing and jumbling, awash in a wave of
fortissimo
brass shouts, not blaring—the horns of the Orchestra cannot blare—but at their highest volume, triumphant—

. . . triumphant she is as I ascend the dais I can see her face and she is strained and ecstatic as if in labor for to her I am being born again and throughout the investiture all I can see is her bright face before me unto her a Master is born—

. . . and masterful, chaotic yet perfectly calculated. The score is a
millefleurs
of twisted colors, falling, falling, the notes are falling. I open my eyes and find that they are already stretched wide open; a rush of red, red is all I see, a blinding waterfall of molten glass cascading down, behind it a thousand suns.

~ * ~

I awake from a dream in which I was ... in which I was . . . walking through hallways. Talking with someone. I cannot remember.

~ * ~

I am lying on the glass floor of the booth, I can feel the bas-relief of the clef signs. My mouth feels as if it had been washed in acids, which I suppose it has. My legs. My left hand is asleep. I have been poured from my container, my skeleton is gone. I am a lump of flesh. I move my arm. An achievement.

“Eric,” comes the Master’s voice, high-pitched in its anxiety. It is probably what awakened me. His hand on my shoulder. He babbles without pause as he helps me out of the Orchestra. “I just got back, you’re all right, you’re all right, the music you were playing, my God, magnificent, here, here, watch out, you’re all right, my son—”

“I am blind,” I croak. There is a pause, a gasp. He holds me in his arms, half carries me onto a cot of some sort, muttering in a strained voice as he moves me about.

“Horrible, horrible,” he keeps saying. “Horrible.” It is age-old. Lose your sight, and learn to see. I blink away tears for my lost vision, and cannot see myself blink.

“You will make a great Master,” he says firmly.

I do not answer.

And after a long pause—

“Yes,” I say, wishing he understood, wishing there was someone who under -stood, “I think it will.”

~ * ~

Kim Stanley Robinson

here’s a strange perception among some writers and critics that genre fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy, is somehow different from “literature.” Despite the fact that many novels now universally regarded as classics began as Victorian soap-operas (Dickens, anyone?), speculative fiction’s tendency to focus on ideas rather than characterization or symbolism leads some scholars to turn up their noses and condemn the whole genre as “mere entertainment.”

Authors like Kim Stanley Robinson throw a monkey wrench into such arguments. Often categorized as a writer of “literary science fiction,” Robinson is a student of language first and foremost, having studied English and literature all the way through a Ph.D., and unafraid to display his mastery of it. Best known for his widely praised Mars Trilogy, in which a longstanding passion for the Red Planet resulted in one of the most popular terraforming sagas of all time, Robinson has also produced the post-apocalyptic Three Californias trilogy,
Antarctica, The Years of Rice and Salt,
and the global-warming series Science in the Capitol. Often dealing with highly relevant environmental and social justice themes, in which scientists manage to triumph while still fundamentally acting like scientists, his works have picked up two Hugo and Nebula awards, the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and no less than six Locus awards.

The story in this collection, “In Pierson’s Orchestra,” eventually evolved into the
navel A Memory of Whiteness.
But in 1976, long before the story’s novelization or the successes of books like the Mars Trilogy, there was only a young grad student, and a fortuitous Clarion application . . .

Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?

I think the structuring of the story is quite strong, maybe because it is simple and conforms to the Aristotelean unities of time and place, as if it were a play. The protagonist’s past is filled in neatly in this structure, again as it would be if the story were being staged, almost. This kind of structural success had to have been almost purely an accident. In terms of the content, the attempt to write about music is always doomed, but here it becomes part of a more general out-of-body experience like a shaman voyage, and the description of that transcendence has a certain rhetorical lift and carry to it—the first of many tries at describing such states in my work. There is also a little bit of life knowledge about piano teaching that got into the story, from my childhood with my mom. Little touches there are right because I knew what I was talking about. There were very few things you could say that about at the time I wrote that story, so to an extent it represents the power (often exaggerated) of the phrase “write what you know.”

If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?

Well this is very hard to imagine. After I wrote
The Memory of Whiteness
as a continuation of this story, using this story as the first chapter, I understood that writing about music just can’t be done very well; the two are simply too different, so that what can be said about music doesn’t capture the actual experience of listening to music. So from that time (1983) on, I have not written about music except very incidentally. In the ease of this story, music would be too important to leave out. If I were to write it today, I wouldn’t write it. That would also save me having to confront the story’s weaknesses, for instance its ignorance of drug addiction and withdrawal.

What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?

I went to a Yes concert and watched Rick Wakeman play a synthesizer bank with which he could sound like an entire orchestra. It struck me that a physicalization of this electronic sound would make a beautiful statue as well as instrument. My grandfather was an organ player among other instruments, and I had enjoyed pulling the various stops on his organ and listening to the sounds it would make. So these experiences gave me the context for the idea to come to me, I’m sure.

At the time I had the idea for the story, I was beginning to add short story writing classes to my poetry classes at UC San Diego. I was in my junior year of college there, and over the previous year had become very intent on writing, mostly poetry, but with short fiction included almost from the start. At the same time I was discovering science fiction as a reader. I was reading a lot of New Wave science fiction and I found it really exciting. The future of the arts was now something science fiction was interested in, and the stories were filled with avant-garde techniques from the high Modernist period of the 1920s and 30s, which was another body of work I was discovering at that time. I was doing a lot of reading and writing, and all my life I listened to music while working; really at my house music was playing all the time. So it all came together in the winter of 1972, and I distinctly remember writing the first draft of this story by hand at my parents’ house, in my old bedroom, over the Christmas break, and finishing the final few scenes in a single day, and re-reading the pages and realizing that I had done something better than I had ever managed before. As I had written stories off and on since I was about twelve, this feeling was among other things a distinct surprise.

Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?

Where I was when I sold it is the interesting part. I had sent the story in as my submission story to the Clarion writer’s workshop, in the spring of 1974, and I had been accepted into the workshop, but had been unable to attend for personal reasons. When I wrote to tell the Clarion people that, they wrote back and said they were sorry and hoped I could attend the next year or some later time. I hoped so too, and forgot about it; spent much of that summer in the Sierras, and in August of 1974 took off from a backpacking trip direct for Boston, where I was going to start at Boston University as a graduate student in English. As I drove east on Highway 80 I called my parents from time to time, and I stopped late one afternoon in Rawlings, Wyoming, to call them from a gas station phone booth. My mom answered and told me a letter had arrived for me from Damon Knight. I had her open it and read it to me, and in it Damon said he had read and liked my Clarion submission story, and would like to buy it for
Orbit.
I was amazed. I drove on that evening with Beethoven’s Third playing very loudly. I stopped for the night at the rest stop on the continental divide, which in those days (I hope still) was marked by a stupendously tall statue of Lincoln’s head. This seemed a very appropriate magical sign to me, and I laid out in my sleeping bag in the parking lot next to my car, and by a street lamp read Fritz Leiber’s “Gonna Roll the Bones” in Ellison’s
Dangerous Visions,
and afterward lay there awake for a good part of the night.