wire up a frog’s leg, when they cut it off? Okay. Well, when the leg jerks, they call that a galvanic response. Now, if you can get a whole
“Can he think too?”
“I suppose. I don’t know. The brain’s intact. They don’t let it decay. What they do, they use every part of the body for its mechanical function—the heart’s a pump, the lungs are bellows—and they wire in a bunch of contacts and leads, and then there’s a kind of twitch, an artificial burst of life—of course, they can keep it going only five, six hours, then the fatigue-poisons start to pile up and clog the lines—but that’s long enough for a concert, anyway —”
“So what they’re really doing is, they take a man’s brain, and they keep it alive by using his own body as the life-support machine,” the wife says brightly. “Is that it? Instead of putting him into some kind of box, they keep him in his own skull, and do all the machinery inside his body—”
“That’s it. That’s it exactly, more or less. More or less.”
Bekh ignored the whispers. He had heard them all hundreds of times before. In New York and Beirut, in Hanoi and Knossos, in Kenyatta and Paris. How fascinated they were. Did they come for the music, or to see the dead man walk around?
He sat down on the player’s ledge in front of the console, and laid his hands along the metal fibers. A deep breath: old habit, superfluous, inescapable. The fingers already twitching. The pressors seeking the keys. Under the close-cropped gray hair, the synapses clicking like relays. Here, now. Timijian’s Ninth Sonata. Let it soar. Bekh closed his eyes and put his shoulders into his work, and from the ring of outputs overhead came the proper roaring tones. There. It has begun. Easily, lightly, Bekh rang in the harmonics, got the sympathetic pipes vibrating, built up the texture of sound. He had not played the Ninth for two years. Vienna. How long is two years? It seemed hours ago. He still heard the reverberations. And duplicated them exactly; this performance differed from the last one no more than one playing of a recording differs from another. An image sprang into his mind: a glistening sonic cube sitting at the console in place of a man. Why do they need me, when they could put a cube in the slot and have the same thing at less expense? And I could rest. And I could rest. There. Keying in the subsonics. This wonderful instrument! What if Bach had known it? Beethoven? To hold a whole world in your fingertips. The entire spectrum of sound, and the colors, too, and more: hitting the audience in a dozen senses at once. Of course, the music is what matters. The frozen, unchanging music. The pattern of sounds emerging now as always, now as he had played it at the premiere in ’19. Timijian’s last work. Decibel by decibel, a reconstruction of my own performance. And look at them out there. Awed. Loving. Bekh felt tremors in his elbows; too tense, the nerves betraying him. He made the necessary compensations. Hearing the thunder reverberating from the fourth balcony. What is this music all about? Do I in fact understand any of it? Does the sonic cube comprehend the B Minor Mass that is recorded within itself? Does the amplifier understand the symphony it amplifies? Bekh smiled. Closed his eyes. The shoulders surging, the wrists supple. Two hours to go. Then they let me sleep again. Is it fifteen years, now? Awaken, perform, sleep. And the adoring public cooing at me. The women who would love to give themselves to me. Necrophiliacs? How could they even want to touch me? The dryness of the tomb on my skin. Once there were women, yes, Lord, yes! Once. Once there was life, too. Bekh leaned back and swept forward. The old virtuoso swoop; brings down the house. The chill in their spines. Now the sound builds toward the end of the first movement. Yes, yes, so. Bekh opened the topmost bank of outputs and heard the audience respond, everyone sitting up suddenly as the new smash of sound cracked across the air. Good old Timi: a wonderful sense of the theatrical. Up. Up. Knock them back in their seats. He smiled with satisfaction at his own effects. And then the sense of emptiness. Sound for its own sake. Is this what music means? Is this a masterpiece? I know nothing any more. How tired I am of playing for them. Will they applaud? Yes, and stamp their feet and congratulate one another on having been lucky enough to hear me tonight. And what do they know? What do I know? I am dead. I am nothing. I am nothing. With a demonic two-handed plunge he hammered out the final fugal screams of the first movement.
Weatherex had programmed mist, and somehow it fit Rhoda’s mood. They stood on the glass landscape that swept down from the Music Center, and Jirasek offered her the pipe. She shook her head absently, thinking of other things. “I have a pastille,” she said.
“What do you say we look up Inez and Treat, see if they want to get something to eat?”
She didn’t answer.
“Rhoda?”
“Will you excuse me, Laddy? I think I want to be all by myself for a while.”
He slipped the pipe into his pocket and turned to her. She was looking through him as if he were no less glass than the scene surrounding them. Taking her hands in his own, he said, “Rhoda, I just don’t understand. You won’t even give me time to find the words.”
“Laddy—”
“No. This time I’ll have my say. Don’t pull away. Don’t retreat into that little world of yours, with your half- smiles and your faraway looks.”
“I want to think about the music.”
“There’s more to life than music, Rhoda. There has to be. I’ve spent as many years as you working inside my head, working to create something. You’re better than I am, you’re maybe better than anyone I’ve ever heard, maybe even better than Bekh someday. Fine: you’re a great artist. But is that all? There’s something more. It’s idiocy to make your art your religion, your whole existence.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because I love you.”
“That’s an explanation, not an excuse. Let me go, Laddy. Please.”
“Rhoda, art doesn’t mean a damn thing if it’s just craft, if it’s just rote and technique and formulas. It doesn’t mean anything if there isn’t love behind it, and caring, and commitment to life. You deny all that. You split yourself and smother the part that fires the art…”
He stopped abruptly. It was not the sort of speech a man could deliver without realizing, quickly, crushingly, how sententious and treacly it sounded. He dropped her hands. “I’ll be at Treat’s, if you want to see me later.” He turned and walked away into the shivering reflective night.
Rhoda watched him go. She suspected there were things she should have said. But she hadn’t said them. He disappeared. Turning, she stared up at the overwhelming bulk of the Music Center, and began slowly to walk toward it.
“Maestro, you were exquisite tonight,” the pekinese woman said in the Green Room. “Golden,” added the bullfrog sycophant. “A joy. I cried, really cried,” trilled the birds. Nutrients bubbled in his chest. He could feel valves flapping. He dipped his head, moved his hands, whispered thankyous. Staleness settled grittily behind his forehead. “Superb.” “Unforgettable.” “Incredible.” Then they went away and he was left, as always, with the keepers. The man from the corporation that owned him, the stage manager, the packers, the electrician. “Perhaps it’s time,” said the corporation man, smoothing his mustache lightly. He had learned to be delicate with the zombie.
Bekh sighed and nodded. They turned him off.
“Want to get something to eat first?” the electrician said. He yawned. It had been a long tour, late nights, meals in jetports, steep angles of ascent and rapid re-entries.
The corporation man nodded. “All right. We can leave him here for a while. I’ll put him on standby.” He touched a switch.
The lights went off in banks, one by one. Only the nightlights remained for the corporation man and the electrician, for their return, for their final packing.
The Music Center shut down.
In the bowels of the self-contained system the dust-eaters and a dozen other species of cleanup machines began stirring, humming softly.
In the fourth balcony, a shadow moved. Rhoda worked her way toward the downslide, emerging in the center aisle of the orchestra, into the Horseshoe, around the pit, and onto the stage. She went to the console and let her hands rest an inch above the keys. Closing her eyes, catching her breath. I will begin my concert with the Timijian Ninth Sonata for Unaccompanied Ultracembalo. A light patter of applause, gathering force, now tempestuous.
