The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (19 page)

Martha Jacques blinked, as though trying to break through some indescribable spell that was being woven about her. Then she laughed shortly. “Go on. I wouldn’t miss this for
anything. Just when
should
I destroy the Via?”

The artist sighed. “You see? Your only concern is the
result
. You completely ignore the
manner
of its accomplishment. Really, Mart, I should think you’d show more
insight into your first attempt at serious art. Now please don’t misunderstand me, dear. I have the warmest regard for your spontaneity and enthusiasm: to be sure, they’re quite
indispensable when dealing with hackneyed themes, but headlong eagerness is not a substitute for method, or for art. We must search out and exploit subsidiary themes, intertwine them in subtle
counterpoint with the major motifs. The most obvious minor theme is the ballet itself. That ballet is the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen or heard. Nevertheless,
you
can give it a
power, a dimension, that even Anna wouldn’t suspect possible, simply by blending it contrapuntally into your own work. It’s all a matter of firing at the proper instant.” He
smiled engagingly. “I see that you’re beginning to appreciate the potentialities of such unwitting collaboration.”

The woman studied him through heavy-lidded eyes. She said slowly: “You
are
a great artist – and a loathesome beast.”

He smiled still more amiably. “Kindly restrict your appraisals to your fields of competence. You haven’t, as yet, sufficient background to evaluate me as an artist. But let us return
to your composition. Thematically, it’s rather pleasing. The form, pacing, and orchestration are irreproachable. It is adequate. And its very adequacy condemns it. One detects a certain
amount of diffident imitation and over-attention to technique common to artists working in a new medium. The overcautious sparks of genius aren’t setting us aflame. The artist isn’t
getting enough of his own personality into the work. And the remedy is as simple as the diagnosis: the artist must penetrate his work, wrap it around him, give it the distilled, unique essence of
his heart and mind, so that it will blaze up and reveal his soul even through the veil of unidiomatic technique.”

He listened a moment to the music outside. “As Anna wrote her musical score, a hiatus of thirty-eight rests precedes the moment The Nightingale drops dying from the thorn. At the start of
that silence, you could start to run off your nineteen sub-equations in your little tin box, audio-Fourier style. You might even route the equations into the loudspeaker system, if our gadget is
capable of remote control.”

For a long time she appraised him calculatingly. “I finally think I understand you. You hoped to unnerve me with your savage, overaccentuated satire, and make me change my mind. So you
aren’t a beast, and even though I see through you, you’re even a greater artist than I at first imagined.”

He watched as the woman made a number of adjustments on the control panel of the black box. When she looked up again, her lips were drawn into hard purple ridges.

She said: “But it would be too great a pity to let such art go to waste, especially when supplied by the author of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’. And you will indulge an
amateur musician’s vanity if I play
my
first Fourier composition
fortissimo
.”

He answered her smile with a fleeting one of his own. “An artist should never apologize for self-admiration. But watch your cueing. Anna should be clasping the white rose thorn to her
breast in thirty seconds, and that will be your signal to fill in the first half of the thirty-eight rest hiatus. Can you see her?”

The woman did not answer, but he knew that her eyes were following the ballet on the invisible stage and Dorran’s baton, beyond, with fevered intensity.

The music glided to a halt.

“Now!” hissed Jacques.

She flicked a switch on the box.

They listened, frozen, as the multi-throated public address system blared into life up and down the two miles of the Via Rosa.

The sound of Sciomnia was chill, metallic, like the cruel crackle of ice heard suddenly in the intimate warmth of an enchanted garden, and it seemed to chatter derisively, well aware of the
magic that it shattered.

As it clattered and skirled up its harsh tonal staircase, it seemed to shriek:

“Fools! Leave this childish nonsense and follow me! I am Science! I AM ALL!”

And Ruy Jacques, watching the face of the prophetess of the God of Knowledge, was for the first time in his life aware of the possibility of utter defeat.

As he stared in mounting horror, her eyes rolled slightly upward, as though buoyed by some irresistible inner flame, which the pale translucent cheeks let through.

But as suddenly as they had come, the nineteen chords were over, and then, as though to accentuate the finality of that mocking manifesto, a ghastly aural afterimage of silence began building up
around his world.

For a near eternity it seemed to him that he and this woman were alone in the world, that, like some wicked witch, she had, through her cacophonic creation, immutably frozen the thousands of
invisible watchers beyond the thin walls of the stage wings.

It was a strange, yet simple thing that broke the appalling silence and restored sanity, confidence, and the will to resist to the man: from somewhere far away, a child whimpered.

Breathing as deeply as his near paralysis would permit, the artist murmured: “Now, Martha, in a moment I think you will hear why I suggested your Fourier broadcast. I fear Science has been
had once mo – ”

He never finished, and her eyes, which were crystallising into question marks, never fired their barbs.

A towering tidal wave of tone was engulfing the Via, apparently of no human source and from no human instrument.

Even he, who had suspected in some small degree what was coming, now found his paralysis once more complete. Like the woman scientist opposite him, he could only sit in motionless awe, with eyes
glazing, jaw dropping, and tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth.

He knew that the heart strings of Anna van Tuyl were one with this mighty sea of song, and that it took its ecstatic timbre from the reverberating volutes of that godlike mind.

And as the magnificent chords poured out in exquisite consonantal sequence, now with a sudden reedy delicacy, now with the radiant gladness of cymbals, he knew that his plan must succeed.

For, chord for chord, tone for tone, and measure for measure, The Nightingale was repeating in her death song the nineteen chords of Martha Jacques’ Sciomnia equations.

Only now those chords were transfigured, as though some Parnassian composer were compassionately correcting and magically transmuting the work of a dull pupil.

The melody spiralled heavenward on wings. It demanded no allegiance; it hurled no pronunciamento. It held a message, but one almost too glorious to be grasped. It was steeped in boundless
aspiration, but it was at peace with man and his universe. It sparkled humility, and in its abnegation there was grandeur. Its very incompleteness served to hint at its boundlessness.

And then it, too, was over. The death song was done.

Yes, thought Ruy Jacques, it is the Sciomnia, rewritten, recast, and breathed through the blazing soul of a goddess. And when Martha realizes this, when she sees how I tricked her into
broadcasting her trifling, inconsequential effort, she is going to fire her weapon – at
me
.

He watched the woman’s face go livid, her mouth work in speechless hate.

“You
knew
!” she screamed. “You did it to humiliate me!”

Jacques began to laugh. It was a nearly silent laughter, rhythmic with mounting ridicule, pitiless in its mockery.

“Stop that!”

But his abdomen was convulsing in rigid helplessness, and tears began to stream down his cheeks.

“I warned you once before!” yelled the woman. Her hand darted toward the black box and turned its long axis toward the man.

Like a period punctuating the rambling, aimless sentence of his life, a ball of blue light burst from a cylindrical hole in the side of the box.

His laughter stopped suddenly. He looked from the box to the woman with growing amazement. He could bend his neck. His paralysis was gone.

She stared back, equally startled. She gasped: “Something went wrong!
You should be dead!
”

The artist didn’t linger to argue.

In his mind was the increasingly urgent call of Anna van Tuyl.

Dorran waved back the awed mass of spectators as Jacques knelt and transferred the faerie body from Bell’s arms into his own.

“I’ll carry you to your dressing room,” he whispered. “I might have known you’d over-exert yourself.”

Her eyes opened in the general direction of his face; in his mind came the tinkling of bells: “No . . . don’t move me.”

He looked up at Bell. “I think she’s hurt! Take a look here!” He ran his hands over the seething surface of the wing folded along her side and breast: It was fevered fire.

“I can do nothing,” replied the latter in a low voice. “She will tell you that I can do nothing.”

“Anna!” cried Jacques. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Her musical reply formed in his mind. “Happened? Sciomnia was quite a thorn. Too much energy for one mind to disperse. Need two . . . three. Three could dematerialize weapon itself. Use
wave formula of matter. Tell the others.”

“
Others?
What are you talking about?” His thoughts whirled incoherently.

“Others like us. Coming soon. Bakine, dancing in streets of Leningrad. In Mexico City . . . the poetess Orteza. Many . . . this generation.
The Golden People
. Matt Bell guessed.
Look!”

An image took fleeting form in his mind. First it was music, and then it was pure thought, and then it was a crisp strange air in his throat and the twang of something marvellous in his mouth.
Then it was gone. “What was that?” he gasped.

“The Zhak symposium, seated at wine one April evening in the year 2437. Probability world. May . . . not occur. Did you recognize yourself?”

“Twenty-four thirty-seven?” His mind was fumbling.

“Yes. Couldn’t you differentiate your individual mental contour from the whole? I thought you might. The group was still somewhat immature in the twenty-hundreds. By the fourteenth
millennium . . .”

His head reeled under the impact of something titanic.

“. . . your associated mental mass . . . creating a star of the M spectral class . . . galaxy now two-thirds terrestrialized . . .”

In his arms her wings stirred uneasily; all unconsciously he stroked the hot membranous surface and rubbed the marvellous bony framework with his fingers. “But Anna,” he stammered,
“I do not understand how this can be.”

Her mind murmured in his. “Listen carefully, Ruy. Your pain . . . when your wings tried to open and couldn’t . . . you needed certain psychoglandular stimulus. When you learn how
to” – here a phrase he could not translate “ – afterwards, they open . . .”

“When I learn –
what
?” he demanded. “What did you say I had to know, to open my wings?”

“One thing. The one thing . . . must have. . . to see the Rose.”

“Rose-rose-
rose
!” he cried in near exasperation. “All right, then, my dutiful Nightingale, how long must I wait for you to make this remarkable Red Rose? I ask you,
where is it?”

“Please . . . not just yet . . . in your arms just a little longer . . . while we finish ballet. Forget yourself, Ruy.Unless . . . leave prison . . . own heart . . . never find The Rose.
Wings never unfold . . . remain a mortal. Science . . . isn’t all. Art isn’t . . . one thing greater . . . Ruy! I can’t prolong . . .”

He looked up wildly at Bell.

The psychogeneticist turned his eyes away heavily. “Don’t you understand? She has been dying ever since she absorbed that Sciomniac blast.”

A faint murmur reached the artist’s mind. “So you couldn’t learn . . . poor . . . poor Nightingale . . .”

As he stared stuporously, her dun-colored wings began to shudder like leaves in an October wind.

From the depths of his shock he watched the fluttering of the wings give way to a sudden convulsive straining of her legs and thighs. It surged upward through her blanching body, through her
abdomen and chest, pushing her blood before it and out into her wings, which now appeared more purple than grey.

To the old woman standing at his side, Bell observed quietly: “Even
homo superior
has his death struggle . . .”

The vendress of love philters nodded with anile sadness. “And she knew the answer . . . lost . . . lost . . .”

And still the blood came, making the wing membranes thick and taut.

“Anna!” shrieked Ruy Jacques. “You
can’t
die. I won’t let you! I love you!
I
love you!
”

He had no expectation that she could still sense the images in his mind, nor even that she was still alive.

But suddenly, like stars shining their brief brilliance through a rift in storm clouds, her lips parted in a gay smile. Her eyes opened and seemed to bathe him in an intimate flow of light. It
was during this momentary illumination, just before the lips solidified into their final enigmatic mask, that he thought he heard, as from a great distance, the opening measures of Weber’s
Invitation to the Dance
.

At this moment the conviction formed in his numbed understanding that her loveliness was now supernal, that greater beauty could not be conceived or endured.

But even as he gazed in stricken wonder, the blood-gorged wings curled slowly up and out, enfolding the ivory breast and shoulders in blinding scarlet, like the petals of some magnificent
rose.

Dino Buzzati (1906–72) was one of the important Italian writers to emerge after the second world war. His principal modes were the absurd and the
fantastic. He first came to international attention with his contemporary novel
The Tartar Steppe
(1945). His only SF novel,
Larger Than Life
(1960), a big computer story (a mainframe
computer is programmed with the personality of a woman), is undistinguished. Critics agree, however, that his major work was in his short stories.