competing senso-cells, some of the statues responding to Lunora’s enigmatic presence, others to Nevers and the secretary.
Lunora shook her head slowly, mouth hardening as the noise irritated her. ‘Yes, Mr Nevers,’ she said in her slightly husky voice, It’s all very clever, but a bit of a headache. I
‘Of course, Miss Goalen,’ Nevers agreed hurriedly, looking around desperately. As he knew only too well, sonic sculpture was now nearing the apogee of its abstract phase; twelve-tone blips and zooms were all that most statues emitted. No purely representational sound, responding to Lunora, for example, with a Mozart rondo or (better) a Webern quartet, had been built for ten years. I guessed that her early purchases were wearing out and that she was hunting the cheaper galleries in tourist haunts like Vermilion Sands in the hope of finding something designed for middle-brow consumption.
Lunora looked up pensively at
Immediately the statue came to life. About twelve feet high, it was shaped like an enormous metal totem topped by two heraldic wings. The microphones in the wing-tips were powerful enough to pick up respiratory noises at a distance of twenty feet. There were four people well within focus, and the statue began to emit a series of low rhythmic pulses.
Seeing the statue respond to her, Lunora came forwards with interest. Nevers backed away discreetly, taking Mme Charcot with him, leaving Lunora and I together, separated by a thin metal skin and three feet of vibrating air. Fumbling for some way of widening the responses, I eased up the control slides that lifted the volume. Neurophonics has never been my strong suit – I regard myself, in an old-fashioned way, as a sculptor, not an electrician – and the statue was only equipped to play back a simple sequence of chord variations on the sonic profile in focus.
Knowing that Lunora would soon realize that the statue’s repertory was too limited for her, I picked up the hand-mike used for testing the circuits and on the spur of the moment began to croon the refrain from Creole Love Call. Reinterpreted by the sonic cores, and then relayed through the loudspeakers, the lulling rise and fall was pleasantly soothing, the electronic overtones disguising my voice and amplifying the tremors of emotion as I screwed up my courage (the statue was priced at five thousand dollars – even subtracting Nevers’s 90 per cent commission left me with enough for the bus fare home).
Stepping up to the statue, Lunora listened to it motionlessly, eyes wide with astonishment, apparently assuming that it was reflecting, like a mirror, its subjective impressions of herself. Rapidly running out of breath, my speeding pulse lifting the tempo, I repeated the refrain over and over again, varying the bass lift to simulate a climax.
Suddenly I saw Nevers’s black patent shoes through the hatch. Pretending to slip his hand into the control panel, he rapped sharply on the statue. I switched off.
‘Don’t please!’ Lunora cried as the sounds fell away. She looked around uncertainly. Mme Charcot was stepping nearer with a curiously watchful expression.
Nevers hesitated. ‘Of course, Miss Goalen, it still requires tuning, you –’
‘I’ll take it,’ Lunora said. She pushed on her sunglasses, turned and hurried from the gallery, her face hidden.
Nevers watched her go. ‘What happened, for heaven’s sake? Is Miss Goalen all right?’
Mme Charcot took a cheque-book out of her blue crocodile handbag. A sardonic smirk played over her lips, and through the helix I had a brief but penetrating glimpse into her relationship with Lunora Goalen. It was then, I think, that I realized Lunora might be something more than a bored dilettante.
Mme Charcot glanced at her watch, a gold pea strung on her scrawny wrist. ‘You will have it delivered today. By three o’clock sharp. Now, please, the price?’
Smoothly, Nevers said: Ten thousand dollars.’
Choking, I pulled myself out of the statue, and spluttered helplessly at Nevers.
Mme Charcot regarded me with astonishment, frowning at my filthy togs. Nevers trod savagely on my foot. ‘Naturally, Mademoiselle, our prices are modest, but as you can see, M. Milton is an inexperienced artist.’
Mme Charcot nodded sagely. ‘This is the sculptor? I am relieved. For a moment I feared that he lived in it.’
When she had gone Nevers closed the gallery for the day. He took off his jacket and pulled a bottle of absinthe from the desk. Sitting back in his silk waistcoat, he trembled slightly with nervous exhaustion.
‘Tell me, Milton, how can you ever be sufficiently grateful to me?’
I patted him on the back. ‘Georg, you were brilliant! She’s another Catherine the Great, you handled her like a diplomat. When you go to Paris you’ll be a great success. Ten thousand dollars!’ I did a quick jig around the statue. ‘That’s the sort of redistribution of wealth I like to see. How about an advance on my cut?’
Nevers examined me moodily. He was already in the Rue de Rivoli, over-bidding for Leonardos with a languid flicker of a pomaded eyebrow. He glanced at the statue and shuddered. ‘An extraordinary woman. Completely without taste. Which reminds me, I see you rescored the memory drum. The aria from
‘It doesn’t,’ I told him, sitting on the desk. ‘That was me. Not exactly Caruso, I admit, but then he wasn’t much of a sculptor –’
‘What?’ Nevers leapt out of his chair. ‘Do you mean you were using the hand microphone? You
‘What does it matter? She won’t know.’ Nevers was groaning against the wall, drumming his forehead on his fist. ‘Relax, you’ll hear nothing.’
Promptly at 9.01 the next morning the telephone rang.
As I drove the pick-up out to Lagoon West Nevers’s warnings rang in my ears – ‘… six international blacklists, sue me for misrepresentation …’ He apologized effusively to Mme Charcot, and assured her that the monotonous booming the statue emitted was most certainly not its natural response. Obviously a circuit had been damaged in transit, the sculptor himself was driving out to correct it.
Taking the beach road around the lagoon, I looked across at the Goalen mansion, an abstract summer palace that reminded me of a Frank Lloyd Wright design for an experimental department store. Terraces jutted out at all angles, and here and there were huge metal sculptures, Brancusi’s and Calder mobiles, revolving in the crisp desert light. Occasionally one of the sonic statues hooted mournfully like a distant hoodoo.
Mme Charcot collected me in the vestibule, led me up a sweeping glass stairway. The walls were heavy with Dali and Picasso, but my statue had been given the place of honour at the far end of the south terrace. The size of a tennis court, without rails (or safety net), this jutted out over the lagoon against the skyline of Vermilion Sands, low furniture grouped in a square at its centre.
Dropping the tool-bag, I made a pretence of dismantling the control panel, and played with the amplifier so that the statue let out a series of staccato blips. These put it into the same category as the rest of Lunora Goalen’s sculpture. A dozen pieces stood about on the terrace, most of them early period sonic dating back to the ’70s, when sculptors produced an incredible sequence of grunting, clanking, barking and twanging statues, and galleries and public squares all over the world echoed night and day with minatory booms and thuds.
‘Any luck?’
I turned to see Lunora Goalen. Unheard, she had crossed the terrace, now stood with hands on hips, watching me with interest. In her black slacks and shirt, blonde hair around her shoulders, she looked more relaxed, but sunglasses still masked her face.
‘Just a loose valve. It won’t take me a couple of minutes.’ I gave her a reassuring smile and she stretched out on the chaise longue in front of the statue. Lurking by the french windows at the far end of the terrace was Mme Charcot, eyeing us with a beady smirk. Irritated, I switched on the statue to full volume and coughed loudly into the hand-mike.
The sound boomed across the open terrace like an artillery blank. The old crone backed away quickly.
Lunora smiled as the echoes rolled over the desert, the statues on the lower terraces responding with muted pulses. ‘Years ago, when Father was away, I used to go on to the roof and shout at the top of my voice, set off the
