by John M. Ford
At sunset, with the red-gold light washing down the face of Shadow Mountain, dazzling on the lake below, Dr. Larkin told Mrs. Weiss about the cancer.
Helena Weiss stared at him for what might have been minutes. They had gotten to the park before noon, hiked all over creation, and only now did he say anything, as if he’d been saving it as a present.
“Is it operable?” she managed to say.
“What’s operable, and what isn’t? You would have to go through a couple of higher function centers to get to the body of the growth, but the damn thing’s stellate-you know, starburst.”
“I know.”
“And you’d never get all the spikes. So surgery, plus irradiation, with plenty of chances for both to go wrong and no guarantee of a cure or anything like one.”
Weiss looked straight out at the western horizon, at thin lenticular clouds trapped in the mixing layers of the atmosphere. Her palms were damp. She still hated heights. Spacelab had been high, too, but you couldn’t just slip and fall from orbit.
You couldn’t even jump.
Still staring at the boundary clouds, she asked, “How -long?”
“Not long. Probably not six months. If it takes longer, there would be… mental changes, convulsions. It could get-”
“Messy?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you get so cold?”
He did not answer, and she felt very bad, sensing his hurt. But she did not turn, because there was nothing that way to look at but a rock and a tree and Boris Larkin, M.D. Finally she faced him.
He was sitting on a rock, hands folded on a blue-jeaned knee, staring at the toe of his extended boot.
Weiss said, “So now what?”
He looked up. Golden light bounced from his glasses, making his face indistinct. “How long to do your symphony?”
“Quattrocycle,” she said, too quickly.
“Quattrocycle, yeah,” he said, and looked down, the flare of light going out. he looked very tired. “How long?”
“Not long,” she said, and as she saw him twitch she realized they had just turned each other’s words around. She looked back to the red sun, burning up the layers of cloud. She said, “Just tell me…”
* * * *
Helena Weiss first met Dr. Boris Evgenovitch Larkin in a conference room at Penrose Hospital. “Not Penrose Community,” Dr. Larkin had warned her over the phone, “make sure the cabdriver knows.”
The driver recognized her-”The Mrs. Weiss?” and she was too honest to deny it-and all the way in from the airport hotel she was treated to El tren subterraneo and Suite for Walking Beams from a tape player on the taxi’s dashboard. Then they arrived at the wrong hospital, and he played her all of One Thousand Orbits on the trip across town. And out the windows were mountains, large mountains. Pointing up. High. In the air. She was high up in the air. It wasn’t worth a free cab ride.
When she walked into the hospital lobby, hands white on the shoulder strap of her keyboard, the staff tried to get her into a wheelchair and admitted on the spot. Several repetitions of Larkin’s name and her own finally got her pointed the right way, into the little conference cubicle, with a cup of something that had the color but no other characteristic of coffee.
At least the room had no windows.
She unzipped the case, touched the keyboard within. She clipped on the earphones, turned power on, and began to play-nothing of her own, of course. The Pachelbel Canon in D, that perennial Muzak favorite, because nobody was listening, so what the hell. Even poststructuralist architectonic composers have to have secret vices.
She looked up. A man was standing across the table. He was short, broad, dark, and muscular, in a white lab coat over a sweater and slacks. He was in his early thirties, like herself. There were pencils and so forth in his pockets, a photo badge on his lapel. He wore very large eyeglasses.
“I’m Boris Larkin,” he said.
“Oh, uh-hello.”
She snapped off the keyboard power and took off the phones. “I’m Helena Weiss. Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”
“Yeah. Could I look at that? I like gadgets.” He came around the table faster than she could push the keyboard toward him. She said, “Do you play an instrument?”
“No. I have lousy taste in music, too. What’s a timbre gate?”
“It shapes waveforms. Under the panel-here-these slide pots alter the wave envelope at time increments set by these dials over here.”
“Do you have to do that for every note?”
“That’s just the programming panel. This key moves the setting to a memory block. I can hold eight reshapes at once and call them from this switch.” She turned the power on again, gave him a phone, and played a few notes with different gatings.
“I love it,” he said. “Where do you get one of these?”
“I built this one,” she said.
He laughed. “Then I really love it. Come on with me, then, and I’ll show you what I do in the basement of this place.”
* * * *
Mrs. Weiss’s head was held firmly inside a sort of Plexiglas helmet, crowned with a steel cylinder one meter across. Dr. Larkin was taking readings with a pocket Multimeter. He said, “You feel okay?”
“Fine.” She sat comfortably in a padded metal chair.
“Good. Some people get nervous when they’re hooked up to this thing. It reminds them of that one the state runs.”
“What one is that?”
“The one over at the prison.”
“Oh, Yeah, right.”
“And,” he said theatrically, “I will know if you get nervous.”
“Really?” She thought a moment. “I’m scared to death of heights.”
“Are you serious? Because I wasn’t.” She nodded. He added, “I’ll label the tape with that, if you don’t mind. There are about eighty billion things we want to try correlations on, and every piece of data helps.”
“Sure. What’s that?”
Larkin was loading a glass cylinder into a bright metal device. The tube came from a metal box marked PROPERTY U.S. AIR FORCE in blue and RADIOACTIVE in purple on yellow. He snapped a lever on the gadget, and it became a hypodermic syringe. “This is the potion that makes the magic machine work. Radioiodine-129. Scared of needles too?”
“I thought everybody was scared of needles,” she said as he swabbed her neck. She looked away. The sting wasn’t too bad.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve only got two doctorates; I’m not a nurse.”
“But that stuff belongs to the Air Force?”
“In the same sense,” he said quite seriously, “that Johann Sebastian Bach’s music belonged to the margrave of Brandenburg, or Wagner’s belonged to Ludwig of Bavaria. We all have our patrons at court.” Before she could think about that, he said, “Okay, now what you want to do is watch that monitor. Can you see it clearly?”
“I see it.”
“We’re all set, then.” Larkin closed the RADIOACTIVE box and went behind an instrument board. With its knobs and little screens, it reminded Weiss of a Hammond Polytronic or a Concert Moog VI. There was no keyboard, but an Arp-X synthesizer dispensed with that, too. She touched the keyboard in her lap, rested her fingers lightly in home positions.
Larkin worked his own console. The monitor cube came to life with a pattern of colored bars, knotted around and through one another. Larkin’s hands moved below Weiss’s line of sight, and the interlinked pattern rotated, tumbled end for end.
The cube went blank. Above Weiss’s head there was a faint noise of machinery. Her eyes flicked up, down. In the arm of the chair, out of sight but in easy reach, was a switch that would immediately release her head from the scanner. A chicken switch, the European Space Agency ground crew called theirs, when they tested her for Space-lab. She hadn’t pulled it then.
“Signal’s coming through,” Larkin said.
In the cube monitor, painted on the filament strands that filled it, was something like a pink, climbing vine.
“That’s your cranial artery,” Larkin said. “The tracer’s just getting there.”
The vine branched out, became diffuse. The cube flashed, and a green-line overlay showed a rounded outline: a humped, furrowed shape, the shape of a human brain. Helena Weiss’s.
The technique was called Solid Image Generation by Multi-Axial Positron Scanning: SIGMAPS. On the front of the control bank, in burnished metal, was the emblem Σβ: the Greek sigma and the symbol for a positron, an antimatter electron. The radioiodine tracer emitted positrons, which crashed into the molecules of her brain to produce gamma rays. In the cylinder around her skull, scanners were triggered in sequence, hundreds of times a second, reading the ray emissions and feeding data to the monitor. She thought of a dollar-in-the-slot arcade machine: Brain Invaders.
The green sketch-plan was gone now, unnecessary. Weiss saw the outlines of her brain in blue, a lacy cyan haze filling out the lobes of her cerebrum. Within it were spots of colors from further down the spectrum-yellow fingers around hot orange cores-and in her left frontal lobe was a blood-red star.
“Comfortable, Mrs. Weiss?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Have a listen.” He put a little cassette player on top of the console, and she tensed-there were flashes around the cerebellum-but it was not her music. It was the Ninth. Her brain lit up.
Specifically, two more red stars novaed, left hemisphere and right. The brain revolved in space, showing a top view, left side, right.
Larkin said, “This is something they found out with flat positron images, what we called PET scans. The activity zone on the right, that’s where all of us listen to music. But you’re a professional musician, and you’re reacting in the left cortex, the analytical centers, too. You’re very analytical, Mrs. Weiss.”
“Thank you.”
“Now, here’s something new.” The leftside red zone began expanding, the whole image was being enlarged. The brain surface was soon lost beyond the limits of the cube, until the whole monitor was filled with what must have been only a few cubic millimeters of her brain.
The structure displayed was in layers of color, with strands of contrasting colors interlaced. It was, she thought, like the understructure of Manhattan, or oil wells in deep rock strata, or-and each time the image changed in her mind, the image in the monitor shifted its form.
“This is the edge of a thought,” Larkin said, suddenly quite intense. “For decades we argued about whether there were really activity centers. Well, there are; the scan shows them working. But what’s the difference between working-center brain and noncenter brain? It’s not a line, you can see that, not just a line, any more than the skin was the simple mechanical structure we thought it was. There’s a whole boundary complex, and if those intermittent flashes-see, there’s one!-if those mean what I think, then the active brain is interacting with the… you can’t call it inactive, call it otherwise-active, majority. And if the-what the fuck!”
The image on the monitor pitched over. “Alle Menschen icerden Bruder,” sang the tape. Weiss tried to turn her head, which hurt just a little. “What is it, Doctor?”
He was silent for several seconds, unseen behind his machinery. Then he said, “Uh, nothing. Seeing things, I guess.” His humor came back instantly. “Stare at brains all day and you’ll start seeing pictures in them. Queen Victoria. The Yellow Brick Road.” Larkin threw some switches, and the monitor went dark, the scanner silent.
“Is that all?” she said, hands poised above the keyboard. “Enough for today. Do you think you’re going to get a piece of music out of this?”
Weiss’s hands moved across the keys, but the power was off. “I tell reporters I don’t write ‘pieces of music,’ but I think so. It’s too soon to tell what it’ll be like, but-”
“We’ll do more scans. You’re not really a subject until I have an hour’s tape on you. But no more until Monday.” He moved the catches and released her from the scanner, stuck a label on a tape cassette and made unreadable scrawls across it.
“It’s three days till Monday,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said distantly. Then he looked at her, scratching his temple with his pen. “You ever climb a rock?”
* * * *
It had taken two hours Friday night, at a shop that seemed to stock nothing but leather and blue denim and big hats, to get Mrs. Weiss fitted out with hiking rig. By noon Saturday they were on a trail in Rocky Mountain National Park. It was no strain for her; she was in excellent shape for thirty-four, she hiked regularly (over rather flatter ground), she had passed the ESA physical. At least, it was no physical strain. Keep looking at the trees, she kept telling herself. Keep looking at the ground. Do not look over there. There’s nothing over there but a thousand meters of straight down.
They stopped for lunch in view of a peak Larkin said was named Hallett. “Over twelve thousand feet. You look terrible. Pace too quick?”
“No,” she said, looking at a point about halfway up Hallett Peak. Half the rest of the distance up, anyway; she realized they were halfway up, and she chewed a super-carbohydrate bar in deep thought of meadows and living rooms. Larkin handed her a cup from his vacuum flask, and she took a long first swallow. It wasn’t water.
Larkin said, “Hey, slow down, that stuff’s too good for guzzling.”
“White wine on a mountain?”
“A loaf of gorp, a jug of Gewurztraminer, and thou beside me in the wilderness. Hoo boy, wilderness.”
“I think you’re crazy,” she said.
“Of course I am. Alcohol is illegal in national parks. Try to look like you’re drinking ginger ale.”
“Who’s to know?” She looked toward the edge of their clearing, felt her feet getting damp, looked back. “In fact, who’s to know if we fall off this vertical surface?”
“Sit down. It doesn’t really tilt. Invisible hands aren’t really thrusting you toward the edge.” He reached into a pocket of his down vest and showed a flat, black object with a set of buttons on its face. “And if anything untoward happens, this FM phone can call that ranger station yonder”-he pointed, but she didn’t look-”and they’ll have the choppers out in nothing flat. Any time, any weather. I’ve seen ‘em come in with more ice than blade overhead.”
“Well, at least I’ll get a decent burial.”
He took a bit of beef jerky, sipped his wine. “You know, it’s probably not heights you’re afraid of; it’s falling. Everybody’s scared of falling at birth, and we overcome it to varying degrees. I’m not really sure acrophobia is a separate fear at all.”
“I didn’t think you were a psychiatrist. Or is that your other doctorate?”
He shook his head. “Ph.D. electrical engineering.”
“Yeah? Me too. Don’t call me Doctor.”
“Why?”
“I’m an artist. I want to keep my amateur standing.”
He chuckled. “My first research work was on perception. One of the things we did was put subjects over a cliff-”
“What?”
“A ‘visual cliff,’ sorry. A drop-off, with checkerboard painting to make it very obvious. We could read a basic fear blip: some showed it more strongly than others, but everyone showed it to some extent.”
“All scientists are sadists,” she said, watching him gesture explosively as he spoke.
“Yeah, I’ll buy that. Ever put EEG wires on a baby? The parents smile and nod at you, helping science march on, and you feel like a pervert. But the really weird thing was, there was no cliff. The perspective of the drop was painted on a dead-flat board. You could touch it, pound on it, jump on it-and people did all that-and we still got the falling-fear blips.” He turned to look at the mountaintop, the brim of his cap throwing his face into shadow. “It was like… an archetype. A basic subconscious code for-” He held out his hands, palms outward, framing the view.
She said, “Faw down go boom?”
He laughed. “Exactly. Exactly! We have to learn that fire burns, too much candy makes tummyaches-but faw down go boom is hard-wired somehow.” He turned back to her. “How did you come by the minor-chord triplets for the aquifer theme in Walking Beam Suite?”
“I thought you said you had terrible taste in music,” she said, surprised.
“I don’t know one note from another,” he said, “unless I ask and somebody tells me.”
“Well, I warn you, you won’t get far asking artists where they steal things from.” He looked expectant. She said, “You’re supposed to laugh at that, but let it pass. It happens that I do remember where those notes came from. I was listening to the geophone tapes I’d made in Oklahoma, and had the coffee percolator on, and the triplets just, well, bubbled up, if that’s not a terrible choice of words.”
“It’s… excellent.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I’m not. No. Not at all. Have you thought about your new work?”
“There’s hardly been time. You want to scan me again, don’t you?”
“Mrs. Weiss, I could scan you for hours.”
She waited for him to kiss her, but he didn’t. He closed the thermos of wine and said, “That’s enough for a first day in the mountains.”
They drove back to Colorado Springs, arriving a little after dark. Larkin let Weiss off at the hotel doorstep. She said, “If you’d like to come in for coffee-”
“I’ve seen quite a few hotel rooms, thanks,” he said politely, “and one’s like another. Good night, Mrs. Weiss.”
“My late husband made me promise…” she started to say, too late. She watched from the curb until the car’s taillights had vanished.
Over the next weeks she did spend hours in the scanner listening to music, playing it. He showed her tapes of other subjects, pointing out patterns in patients with fugue dementia, cranial wounds, the great spreading darkness or stroke. He gave her a joystick wired to the main console so she could explore the corridors of her own brain, flying nap-of-cortex through convolutions, looping the corpus callosum.
On Thursdays the Air Force “got its money’s worth,” as Larkin put it; bored and unwilling cadets were sent in to be scanned as they did mental and manual exercises. The Air Force wanted a magic indicator of potential piloting skill.
He got Weiss a white coat and stethoscope, and addressed her as Doctor (“It’s not a lie, right?”). They gave one young man a paper and told him to read it aloud, and the bewildered cadet recited all of “High Flight” while Weiss entered chords in the keyboard’s memory and Larkin hid, laughing helplessly behind his console.
She watched him lecture neurology students on SIGMAPS and more mundane subjects; she did a special series of talks for advanced music classes and gave a couple of recitals.
After the recitals she began to get headaches behind her left eye; he gave her aspirin and caffeine, and that was all. “If you need aspirin-codeine, I’ll prescribe it,” he said, “but I don’t like tranquilizers for headache. Valium in particular. You give somebody Valium, and they tell you it works just great, and you don’t know whether to be happy or scared.”
They went to movies. They never ate twice at the same restaurant. She never saw where he lived. He never went further than the hotel lobby. After four weeks they went back to the mountains.
“I’m going to do a quattrocycle,” she told him in the high, clear air.
“I have no idea what that is,” he said, “unless you tell me.”
“Four cycles-subpieces that interlock. A little like symphonic movements, but not as elaborate as a symphony, and the parts are more closely related. The themes of the cycles are-”
“The temporal lobe,” he said, “occipital, parietal, and frontal lobes.”
“You guessed.”
“What else have you been staring at for a month? It had to be that, or else cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla, and pons.”
“Hmm. I may have to write two.” She looked out at the peaks surrounding them; ice-blue and chocolate and snowcapped and vivid red. “It’s not hard to look at them,” she said. “Especially since they’re outside the window every damn morning. Do you ever get tired of looking at mountains, Boris?”
“No. My melancholy Russian soul.”
“You told me you weren’t Russian. Just had some family with long memories.”
“Yeah. Maybe melancholy souls are genetically determined.”
“Or part of the collective unconscious?”
“Now there is something I would like to know. How long has it been, Helena, since you wrote the Spacelab piece?”
“One Thousand Orbits was… three years ago, Christmas.”
“That would be nearer three and a half.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“You’d produced much faster before that, hadn’t you?”
“I guess so. I did about one major work a year after Terry died, plus the other things-songs, radio commercials.”
“But nothing now for three and a half years.”
“Not nothing, Boris. Nothing major. Do you think composers live on composing? The first day we met, you talked to me about ‘patrons at court.’ I’m a rich widow. If they melted all my records down for floor tile I’d still be a rich widow.”
“But not as happy.”
“I’d have to think about it,” she said, joking, and at once regretted it. Worry was marked in every part of him. She touched his shoulder, asked about several things it might have been, all of which he denied. Her head began to hurt, and he said, “It’s tension,” from somewhere very far away.
They went back to the city, and he left her at the hotel.
The following week he went to Denver, where he could not be reached and would not return calls.
On Saturday morning he phoned early, from the lobby downstairs. They went to the park, they climbed the trails, and that afternoon he told her what the SIGMAPS scan had found, the Denver specialists confirmed.
“Just tell me,” she said (recalling “-what the fuck?” “What is it?” “Nothing-”) “Did you know then?”
“Not for certain. Not then. And I didn’t want-I couldn’t say anything until I was certain.”
Well, she thought, this is one I can’t blame on Terry’s ghost.
Larkin said, “I really do want to hear your symphony.”
“Quat-tro-cycle! “ She turned away from him, looked down at the lake, too angry to realize what she was doing. She felt slightly dizzy, touched her eye, where there was the promise of pain. He would give her pills for that, because she could not work in pain, but nothing that might relax her, make her rest; he would not let her rest until the music was done. He wanted to hear it. All right. She would give it to him.
“Let’s go,” Larkin said to her, “before we lose all the light.”
* * * *
She left the Springs for home the following week, with a trunkful of notes, her suitcase, and her keyboard. A taxi took her to the airport, and no one saw her off. That was just how she wanted it.
She had not been back to the house for sixteen months. There were no deliveries there to stop or start; the mail accumulated at her post-office box until she or her New York agent called for it.
The house had no telephone either, and the electric power came from a generator that ran on gasoline, moonshine, or anything in between. In the basement was a bombproof shelter, gas/biowar-protective suits in several sizes, including maternity, and enough dehydrated food to last for at least five years.
In a room on the main floor was Helena’s master composition console, a percolator, and a framed photo of Terence Gallagher Weiss, deceased, who had refused to be called a survivalist, insisting that he just didn’t believe in miracles. He had gotten a promise out of her, that if the time came she’d go on living without him.
Now and again, she would rage at his picture, calling it anything she could think of. It was not that she had been made to keep her promise. She had just never imagined that it could be so hard to keep.
Writing the quattrocycle took almost four months. The lobes of the brain failed her as a framework, as did the gross structures; she had to tear down and build up again, note by note, phrase by phrase.
The headaches became blinding more than once, and she would have to stop for a day, take aspirin, drink coffee, sleep; but only for a day at a time.
When she was satisfied with the last note, she made a shortwave call to the state police, telling them that the house would be empty again, loaded tapes and bag and keyboard into the Land Rover, and drove away through the yellow haze of autumn.
* * * *
They found a sheltered spot on the lee slope of Shadow Mountain. Mrs. Weiss set up the keyboard and auxiliary tapes on a rock of a convenient height, and Dr. Larkin unspooled a strand of wire and hooked it to a pair of thin-panel speakers.
They had a tiny amphitheater in the shadow of the spine of the land. Larkin poured some white wine from his flask and settled down. Helena Weiss began to play.
The first cycle crashed against itself in waves of antiphony, a quick, bold, immediate theme for the right hand against a more deliberate and reverberating one for the left that faded and crested: Jaynes’s bicameral mind, the centers of direct response having access to the higher reasoning potential only in moments of stress, and then only as an oracular voice from beyond. The overvoice ceased oscillating, becoming coequal to the instant mind: the breakdown of bicamerality, the origin of conscious thought.
The second cycle began in thunder.
The second cycle was concrete thought. The sounds of the hunt, the battle, the crowd; dance music and work song; gongs of bamboo and brass and steel. Notes progressed evenly, bricks on bricks in square measures and even time, until as the thunder returned, the lightning cracking it across, the notes seemed to strain against the lines, as if trying to expand.
The third cycle: abstract thought.
Note sequences leaped the scale as if intuitively finding the upper registers; there were five-tone scales, twelve-tone, twenty-tone, in measures of seven notes or thirteen or any number. There was ragtime. There was atonality. There were 4.33 seconds of silence. There were blue notes Doppler-shifted into the red, bending around the universe and back. Out again went the bridge, bending, stretching, galloping in a harmonic wind, until it shifted into the black.
The fourth cycle snapped into existence from silence, as if the ear had refused to hear the chaos at its very beginning. Then, above the incoherent rush of sound, a single line of melody rose like a vocalist in an unknown language, singing of those things that no language has ever found words for. A counterpoint split from the voice, the “Starscape” theme from One Thousand Orbits and the melody sang against a background of stars, of crystalline, inhuman precision: but in the melody the inhumanity dissolved, and the distance to the stars-the boundary between what was thought and what was not thought-was bridged.
She launched into the last line. Her left hand played an overpowering major-chord sequence, while her right fingers picked out delicate knotworks of sound in the keyboard’s pipe voicings: a million impulses of thought submerged in the torrent of intellect in motion, going on forever.
And Amen!
She leaned on the rock that held the board. Her knees were weak, and the sweat was cold on her forehead and the back of her neck. She turned slowly to face him. “And no headache,” she said. ‘“Guess you were right. It was just tension. Just-”
Larkin was sitting with his back against a boulder. His left leg stuck out, twisted at a bizarre angle. His head was back against the stone, eyes open and staring at the sky, hard as ice. There was a dark trickle from his nostril.
Not very messy, she thought.
She touched him. He was stiff and quite cold. Oh, Boris … how did you get so cold? She wondered if he had first realized he was dying the day she arrived, when he had that small seizure behind his console. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” But surely there had been earlier signs. The man who built SIGMAPS must have known his own brain. The goddam son of a bitch who had swindled her out of the only fear that she could admit to having.
She shouted, “You got it out of me, didn’t you, you selfish son of a bitch? You wanted me to do it, up here, so you could hear it just for yourself-all for yourself- and now what? How am I supposed to get us off this rock? Listen to me, you bastard!”
Two fingers of Larkin’s right hand were thrust deep into his vest pocket.
Inside the pocket was his FM phone, with instructions, typed because his handwriting was so bad.
The helicopter came very soon, just as he had said it would. And as it lifted them away, its lights like gem-stones on the velvet cloth of the sky, Helena Weiss sat in its open door, playing the last cycle with her fingers bloody, the notes echoing from the peaks and in every layer of the air.