Gianni

Gianni by Robert Silverberg

“But why not Mozart?” Hoaglund said, shaking his head.

“Schubert, even? Or you could have brought back Bix Beiderbecke, for Christ’s sake, if you wanted to resurrect a great musician.”

“Beiderbecke was jazz,” I said. “I’m not interested in jazz. Nobody’s interested in jazz except you.”

“And people are still interested in Pergolesi in the year 2008?”

“I am.”

“Mozart would have been better publicity. You’ll need more funding sooner or later. You tell the world you’ve got Mozart sitting in the back room cranking out a new opera, you can write your own ticket. But what good is Pergolesi? Pergolesi’s totally forgotten.”

“Only by the proletariat, Sam. Besides, why give Mozart a second chance? Maybe he died young, but it wasn’t all that young, and he did his work, a ton of work. Gianni died at twenty-six, you know. He might have been greater than Mozart if he’d had another dozen years,”

“Johnny?”

“Gianni. Giovanni Battista. Pergolesi. He calls himself Gianni. Come meet him.”

“Mozart, Dave. You should have done Mozart.”

“Stop being an idiot,” I said. “When you’ve met him, you’ll know I did the right thing. Mozart would have been a pain in the neck, anyway. The stories I’ve heard about Mozart’s private life would uncurl your wig. Come on with me.”

I led him down the long hallway from the office past the hardware room and the timescoop cage to the airlock separating us from the semidetached motel unit out back where Gianni had been living since we scooped him. We halted in the airlock to be sprayed. Sam frowned and I explained, “Infectious microorganisms have mutated a lot since the eighteenth century. Until we’ve got his resistance levels higher, we’re keeping him in a pretty sterile environment. When we first brought him back, he was vulnerable to anything—a case of the sniffles would have killed him, most likely. Plus he was a dying man when we got him, one lung lousy with TB and the other one going.”

“Hey,” Hoaglund said.

I laughed. “You won’t catch anything from him. It’s in remission now, Sam. We didn’t bring him back at colossal expense just to watch him die.”

The lock opened and we stepped into the monitoring vestibule, glittering like a movie set with bank upon bank of telemetering instruments. The day nurse, Claudia, was checking diagnostic readouts. “He’s expecting you, Dr. Leavis,” she said. “He’s very frisky this morning.”

“Frisky?”

“Playful. You know.”

Yes. Tacked to the door of Gianni’s room was a card that hadn’t been there yesterday, flamboyantly lettered in gaudy, free-flowing baroque script.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PERGOLESI

Jesi, January 3 1710—Pozzuoli, March 17 1736

Los Angeles, Dec. 20 2007—.

Genuis At Work!!!!

Per Piacere, Knock Before You Enter!

“He speaks English?” Hoaglund asked.

“Now he does,” I said. “We gave him tapesleep the first week. He picks things up fast, anyway.” I grinned. “Genius at work, eh? Or genuis. That’s the sort of sign I would have expected Mozart to put up.”

“They’re all alike, these talents,” Hoaglund said.

I knocked.

“Chi va la?” Gianni called.

“Dave Leavis.”

“Avanti, dottore illustrissimo!”

“I thought you said he speaks English,” Hoaglund murmured.

“He’s frisky today, Claudia said, remember?”

We went in. As usual he had the blinds tightly drawn, shutting out the brilliant January sunlight, the yellow blaze of acacia blossoms just outside the window, the enormous scarlet bougainvillea, the sweeping hilltop vista of the valley and the mountains beyond. Maybe scenery didn’t interest him—or, more likely, he preferred to keep his room a tightly sealed little cell, an island out of time. He had had to absorb a lot of psychic trauma in the past few weeks; it must give you a hell of a case of jet-lag to jump 271 years into the future.

But he looked lively, almost impish—a small man, graceful, delicate, with sharp, busy eyes, quick, elegant gestures, a brisk, confident manner. How much he had changed in just a few weeks! When we fished him out of the eighteenth century, he was a woeful sight, face lined and haggard, hair already gray at twenty-six, body gaunt, bowed, quivering. He looked like what he was, a shattered consumptive a couple of weeks from the grave. His hair was still gray, but he had gained ten pounds; the veils were gone from his eyes; there was color in his cheeks.

I said, “Gianni, I want you to meet Sam Hoaglund. He’s going to handle publicity and promotion for you project. Capisce? He will make you known to the world and give you a new audience for your music.”

He flashed a brilliant smile. “Bene. Listen to this.”

The room was an electronic jungle, festooned with gadgetry: a synthesizer, a telescreen, a megabuck audio library, five sorts of data terminals and all manner of other things perfectly suited to your basic eighteenth-century Italian drawing room. Gianni loved it all and was mastering the equipment with astonishing, even frightening, ease. He swung around to the synthesizer, jacked it into harpsichord mode and touched the keyboard. From the cloud of floating minispeakers came the opening theme of a sonata, lovely, lyrical, to my ear unmistakably Pergolesian in its melodiousness, and yet somehow weird. For all its beauty there was a strained, awkward, suspended aspect to it, like a ballet performed by dancers in galoshes. The longer he played, the more uncomfortable I felt. Finally he turned to us and said, “You like it?”

“What is it? Something of yours?”

“Mine, yes. My new style. I am under the influence of Beethoven today. Haydn yesterday, tomorrow Chopin. I try everything, no? By Easter I get to the ugly composers. Mahler, Berg, Debussy—those men were crazy, do you know? Crazy music, so ugly. But I will learn.”

“Debussy ugly?” Hoaglund said quietly to me.

“Bach is modern music to him,” I said. “Haydn is the voice of the future.”

Gianni said, “I will be very famous.”

“Yes, Sam will make you the most famous man in the world.”

“I was very famous after I—died.” He tapped one of the terminals. “I have read about me. I was so famous that everybody forged my music, and it was published as Pergolesi, do you know that? I have played it, too, this ‘Pergolesi.’ Merda, most of it. Not all. The concerti armonici, not bad—not mine, but not bad. Most of the rest, trash.” He winked. “But you will make me famous while I live, eh? Good. Very good.” He came closer to us and in a lower voice said, “Will you tell Claudia that the gonorrhea, it is all cured?”

“What?”