The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (3 page)

Well
, he thought,
I’ll be able to conduct
The Love of Danae,
after all. It isn’t every composer who can premier his own opera posthumously
. Still, there was
something queer about all this – the queerest part of all being that conviction, which would not go away, that he had actually been dead for just a short time. Of course, medicine was making
great strides, but . . .

“Explain all this,” he said, lifting himself to one elbow. The bed was different, too, and not nearly as comfortable as the one in which he had died. As for the room, it looked more
like a dynamo shed than a sickroom. Had modern medicine taken to reviving its corpses on the floor of the Siemanns-Schukert plant?

“In a moment,” Dr. Kris said. He finished rolling some machine back into what Strauss impatiently supposed to be its place, and crossed to the pallet. “Now. There are many
things you’ll have to take for granted without attempting to understand then, Dr. Strauss. Not everything in the world today is explicable in terms of your assumptions. Please bear that in
mind.”

“Very well. Proceed.”

“The date,” Dr. Kris said, “is 2161 by your calendar – or, in other words, it is now two hundred and twelve years after your death. Naturally, you’ll realize that
by this time nothing remains of your body but the bones. The body you have now was volunteered for your use. Before you look into a mirror to see what it’s like, remember that its physical
difference from the one you were used to is all in your favor. It’s in perfect health, not unpleasant for other people to look at, and its physiological age is about fifty.”

A miracle? No, not in this new age, surely. It is simply a work of science. But what a science! This was Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and the immortality of the superman combined into
one.

“And where is this?” the composer said.

“In Port York, part of the State of Manhattan, in the United States. You will find the country less changed in some respects than I imagine you anticipate. Other changes, of course, will
seem radical to you, but it’s hard for me to predict which ones will strike you that way. A certain resilience on your part will bear cultivating.”

“I understand,” Strauss said, sitting up. “One question, please; is it still possible for a composer to make a living in this century?”

“Indeed it is,” Dr. Kris said, smiling. “As we expect you to do. It is one of the purposes for which we’ve – brought you back.”

“I gather, then,” Strauss said somewhat dryly, “that there is still a demand for my music. The critics in the old days – ”

“That’s not quite how it is,” Dr. Kris said. “I understand some of your work is still played, but frankly I know very little about your current status. My interest is
rather – ”

A door opened somewhere, and another man came in. He was older and more ponderous than Kris and had a certain air of academicism, but he, too, was wearing the oddly tailored surgeon’s gown
and looked upon Kris’ patient with the glowing eyes of an artist.

“A success, Kris?” he said. “Congratulations.”

“They’re not in order yet,” Dr. Kris said. “The final proof is what counts. Dr. Strauss, if you feel strong enough, Dr. Seirds and I would like to ask you some questions.
We’d like to make sure your memory is clear.”

“Certainly. Go ahead.”

“According to our records,” Kris said, “you once knew a man whose initials were R. K. L.; this was while you were conducting at the Vienna
Staatsoper
.” He made the
double “a” at least twice too long, as though German were a dead language he was striving to pronounce in some “classical” accent. “What was his name, and who was
he?”

“That would be Kurt List – his first name was Richard, but he didn’t use it. He was assistant stage manager.”

The two doctors looked at each other. “Why did you offer to write a new overture to
The Woman Without a Shadow
and give the manuscript to the city of Vienna?”

“So I wouldn’t have to pay the garbage removal tax on the Maria Theresa villa they had given me.”

“In the backyard of your house at Garmisch-Partenkirchen there was a tombstone. What was written on it?”

Strauss frowned. That was a question he would be happy to be unable to answer. If one is to play childish jokes upon oneself, it’s best not to carve them in stone and put the carving where
you can’t help seeing it every time you go out to tinker with the Mercedes. “It says,” he replied wearily, “ ‘Sacred to the memory of Guntram, Minnesinger, slain in a
horrible way by his father’s own symphony orchestra.’”

“When was
Guntram
premiered?’ ”

“In – let me see – 1894, I believe.”

“Where?”

“In Weimar.”

“Who was the leading lady?”

“Pauline de Ahna.”

“What happened to her afterwards?”

“I married her. Is she . . . ,” Strauss began anxiously.

“No,” Dr. Kris said. “I’m sorry, but we lack the data to reconstruct more or less ordinary people.”

The composer sighed. He did not know whether to be worried or not. He had loved Pauline, to be sure; on the other hand, it would be pleasant to be able to live the new life without being forced
to take off one’s shoes every time one entered the house, so as not to scratch the polished hardwood floors. And also pleasant, perhaps, to have two o’clock in the afternoon come by
without hearing Pauline’s everlasting, “Richard –
jetzt komponiert!
”

“Next question,” he said.

For reasons which Strauss did not understand, but was content to take for granted, he was separated from Drs. Kris and Seirds as soon as both were satisfied that the
composer’s memory was reliable and his health stable. His estate, he was given to understand, had long since been broken up – a sorry end for what had been one of the principal fortunes
of Europe – but he was given sufficient money to set up lodgings and resume an active life. He was provided, too, with introductions which proved valuable.

It took longer than he had expected to adjust to the changes that had taken place in music alone. Music was, he quickly began to suspect, a dying art, which would soon have a status not much
above that held by flower arranging back in what he thought of as his own century. Certainly it couldn’t be denied that the trend toward fragmentation, already visible back in his own time,
had proceeded almost to completion in 2161.

He paid no more attention to American popular tunes than he had bothered to pay in his previous life. Yet it was evident that their assembly-line production methods – all the ballad
composers openly used a slide-rule-like device called a Hit Machine – now had their counterparts almost throughout serious music.

The conservatives these days, for instance, were the twelve-tone composers – always, in Strauss’ opinion, dryly mechanical but never more so than now. Their gods – Berg,
Schoenberg, Webern – were looked upon by the concert-going public as great masters, on the abstruse side perhaps, but as worthy of reverence as any of the Three B’s.

There was one wing of the conservatives however, that had gone the twelve-tone procedure one better. These men composed what was called “stochastic music,” put together by choosing
each individual note by consultation with tables of random numbers. Their bible, their basic text, was a volume called
Operational Aesthetics
, which in turn derived from a discipline called
information theory, and not one word of it seemed to touch upon any of the techniques and customs of composition which Strauss knew. The ideal of this group was to produce music which would be
“universal” – that is, wholly devoid of any trace of the composer’s individuality, wholly a musical expression of the universal Laws of Chance. The Laws of Chance seemed to
have a style of their own, all right, but to Strauss it seemed the style of an idiot child being taught to hammer a flat piano, to keep him from getting into trouble.

By far the largest body of work being produced, however, fell into a category misleadingly called science-music. The term reflected nothing but the titles of the works, which dealt with space
flight, time travel, and other subjects of a romantic or an unlikely nature. There was nothing in the least scientific about the music, which consisted of a mélange of clichés and
imitations of natural sounds, in which Strauss was horrified to see his own time-distorted and diluted image.

The most popular form of science-music was a nine-minute composition called a concerto, though it bore no resemblance at all to the classical concerto form; it was instead a sort of free
rhapsody after Rachmaninoff – long after. A typical one – “Song of Deep Space,” it was called, by somebody named H. Valerion Krafft – began with a loud assault on the
tam-tam, after which all the strings rushed up the scale in unison, followed at a respectful distance by the harp and one clarinet in parallel 6/4’s. At the top of the scale cymbals were
bashed together,
forte possible
, and the whole orchestra launched itself into a major-minor wailing sort of melody; the whole orchestra, that is, except for the French horns, which were
plodding back down the scale again in what was evidently supposed to be a countermelody. The second phrase of the theme was picked up by a solo trumpet with a suggestion of tremolo, the orchestra
died back to its roots to await the next cloudburst, and at this point – as any four-year-old could have predicted – the piano entered with the second theme.

Behind the orchestra stood a group of thirty women, ready to come in with a wordless chorus intended to suggest the eeriness of Deep Space – but at this point, too, Strauss had already
learned to get up and leave. After a few such experiences he could also count upon meeting in the lobby Sindi Noniss, the agent to whom Dr. Kris had introduced him and who was handling the reborn
composer’s output – what there was of it thus far. Sindi had come to expect these walkouts on the part of his client and patiently awaited them, standing beneath a bust of Gian-Carlo
Menotti, but he liked them less and less, and lately had been greeting them by turning alternately red and white, like a totipotent barber pole.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he burst out after the Krafft incident. “You can’t just walk out on a new Krafft composition. The man’s the president of the
Interplanetary Society for Contemporary Music. How am I ever going to persuade them that you’re a contemporary if you keep snubbing them?”

“What does it matter?” Strauss said. “They don’t know me by sight.”

“You’re wrong; they know you very well, and they’re watching every move you make. You’re the first major composer the mind sculptors ever tackled, and the ISCM would be
glad to turn you back with a rejection slip.”

“Why?”

“Oh,” said Sindi, “there are lots of reasons. The sculptors are snobs; so are the ISCM boys. Each of them wanted to prove to the other that their own art is the king of them
all. And then there’s the competition; it would be easier to flunk you than to let you into the market. I really think you’d better go back in. I could make up some excuse –
”

“No,” Strauss said shortly. “I have work to do.”

“But that’s just the point, Richard. How are we going to get an opera produced without the ISCM? It isn’t as though you wrote theremin solos, or something that didn’t
cost so – ”

“I have work to do,” he said, and left.

And he did, work which absorbed him as had no other project during the last thirty years of his former life. He had scarcely touched pen to music paper – both had been astonishingly hard
to find – when he realized that nothing in his long career had provided him with touchstones by which to judge what music he should write
now
.

The old tricks came swarming back by the thousands, to be sure: the sudden, unexpected key changes at the crest of a melody, the interval stretching, the piling of divided strings, playing in
the high harmonics, upon the already tottering top of a climax, the scurry and bustle as phrases were passed like lightning from one choir of the orchestra to another, the flashing runs in the
brass, the chuckling in the clarinets, the snarling mixtures of colors to emphasize dramatic tension – all of them.

But none of them satisfied him now. He had been content with them for most of a lifetime and had made them do an astonishing amount of work. But now it was time to strike out afresh. Some of the
tricks, indeed, actively repelled him: Where had he gotten the notion, clung to for decades, that violins screaming out in unison somewhere in the stratosphere were a sound interesting enough to be
worth repeating inside a single composition, let alone in all of them?

And nobody, he reflected contentedly, ever approached such a new beginning better equipped. In addition to the past lying available in his memory, he had always had a technical armamentarium
second to none; even the hostile critics had granted him that. Now that he was, in a sense, composing his first opera – his first after fifteen of them! – he had every opportunity to
make it a masterpiece.

And every such intention.

There were of course, many minor distractions. One of them was that search for old-fashioned score paper, and a pen and ink with which to write on it. Very few of the modern composers, it
developed, wrote their music at all. A large bloc of them used tape, patching together snippets of tone and sound snipped from other tapes, superimposing one tape on another, and varying the
results by twirling an elaborate array of knobs this way or that. Almost all the composers of 3-V scores, on the other hand, wrote on the sound track itself, rapidly scribbling jagged wiggly lines
which, when passed through a photocell-audio circuit, produced a noise reasonably like an orchestra playing music, overtones and all.

The last-ditch conservatives who still wrote notes on paper did so with the aid of a musical typewriter. The device, Strauss had to admit, seemed perfected at last; it had manuals and stops like
an organ, but it was not much more than twice as large as a standard letter-writing typewriter and produced a neat page. But he was satisfied with his own spidery, highly legible manuscript and
refused to abandon it, badly though the one pen nib he had been able to buy coarsened it. It helped to tie him to his past.