Robinson Kim Stanley

In Pierson’s Orchestra

The dead shall live, the living die,

and Music shall untune the sky.

Hallway to hallway to hallway I flit, like a bat in a mine. The lights are dimmed and the halls are empty, eerie gray slots. I cast long shadows from low light to light as I move along, next to the wall. I can feel my upper arms slide wetly against my ribs, and my heart’s allegro thumping. A voice within me sneers: “Time for your diamond, junkie.”

Dead sober will I see him, I promise myself again. My hand shakes and I put it back in my pocket. Familiar halls now, and I slow down as if the air is getting thicker; still in color-blind greys, and the air is perhaps filled with dust, or smoke. It is past time for my next crystal. I have not slept for five days, I am continuing on the drive of my decision.

Home. VANCOUVER CONSERVATORY, the tall door announces. I turn the knob, give the door a push to get it started. It opens. I slip through, silently cross the entrance floor. Pierson’s hologramic statue stares down at me, a short ruby-red figure transparent in the dim light. I circle him warily, alive to his presence in the shadows between me and the ceiling. Hallways, again; then another door, the door: sanctum sanctorum. You remember the old animated film Fantasia? Suddenly I am Mickey Mouse, in Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, about to interrupt the sorcerer over his cauldron. A deep bell clangs from the main hall and I jump. Midnight: time for the breaking of vows. I knock on the door, a mistake; I have the privilege of entering without knocking; but no, I have lost all that, I have revoked all that. An indistinct shout arrives from inside.

I push the door open and a slice of white light cuts into the hallway. In I go, blinking.

The Master is under the orchestra, on his back, tapping away cautiously at the dent in the tuba tubing. The dent occurred at the end of the last grand tour, when one of the workmen helping to move it onto a rollcart tripped and kicked the tuba with his steel-tipped boot.

The Master looks up, white eyebrows rising like a bird’s crest. “Eric,” he says mildly, “why did you knock?”

“Master,” I say shakily, my resolve still firm, “I can no longer be your apprentice.”

Watch that sink in, like a hot poker in snow. He edges out from under the orchestra, stands up; all slowly, so slowly. He is old. “Why is this, Eric?”

I swallow. I have a lie all prepared, I have considered it for hours and hours; it is absurd, impossible. Suddenly I decide to tell him the truth. “I am addicted to nepanathol.”

Right before my eyes his face turns deep red. “You what?” he says, then almost shouts, “I don’t understand!”

“The drug,” I explain, “I’m hooked.”

Has the shock been too much for him? He trembles. He gets it out, calm and clear. “Why?”

It is so complex. I shrug. “Master,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

With a convulsive jerk he throws the hammers in his hand, and I flinch; they hit the foam lining of the wall without a sound, then click against each other as they fall.

“You’re sorry!” he hisses, and I feel his contempt. Why does one always whisper in this room? “You’re sorry! My God, you’d better be more than sorry! Three centuries, eight masters of the orchestra, you to be the ninth and you break the line for a drug? The greatest artistic achievement of all time—” he waves toward the orchestra, but I refuse to look at it—”you choose nepanathol above it? How could you do it? I’m an old man, I’ll die in a few years, there isn’t time to train another musician like you—and you’ll be dead before I will!” True enough, in all probability. “I will be the last Master,” he cries out, “and the Orchestra will be silenced!”

With the thought of it he twists and sits down cross-legged on the floor, crying. I have never seen the Master cry before, never thought I would. He is not an emotional man.

“What have I done?” Echoless shrieks. “The Orchestra will end with me and they will say it’s my fault, that I was a bad Master—”

“You are the best of them,” I get out.

He turns on me. “Then why? Why? How could you do this?”

I would have been the ninth Master of Pierson’s Orchestra. The heir to the throne. The crown prince. Why indeed? Such a joke.

As from a distance I hear myself. “Master,” I say, “I will stop taking the drug.”

I close my eyes as I say it. For an old man’s sake I will go through the withdrawal from nep. I shake my head, surprised at myself.

He looks up at me with—what is it, craftiness? Is he manipulating me? No. It’s just contempt. “You can’t,” he mutters angrily. “It would kill you.”

“No,” I say, though I am by no means sure of this. “I haven’t been addicted long enough. A few hours; eight, maybe; then it will be over.” It will be short; that is my only comfort. A very real voice inside me is protesting loudly: “What are you doing?” Pain. Muscle cramps, memory confusion, memory loss. Nausea. Hallucinations. A high possibility of sensory damage, especially to the ears, sense of smell, and eyes. I do not want to go blind.

“Truly?” the old man is saying. “When will you do this?”

“Now,” I say, ignoring the voice inside. “I’ll stay here, I think,” gesturing toward the Orchestra but still not looking in its direction.

“I too will stay—”

“No. Not here. In the recording booth, or one of the practice rooms. Or go up to your chambers, and come back tomorrow.”

We look at each other then, old Richard and young Eric, and finally he nods. He walks to the tall door, pulls it open. He turns his head back. “You be careful, Eric,” he says.

I nearly laugh, but am too appalled. The door clicks shut, and I am alone with Pierson’s Orchestra.

~ * ~

I can remember the first time I saw the Orchestra, in Sydney’s old sailboat of an opera house, around the turn of the century when my mother and I were living there. It was a special program for young people, and the Master—the same one, Richard Wolfgang Weber Yablonski, an old man even then—was playing pieces to delight the young mind: I can remember the 1812 Overture, Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, De Bruik’s Night Sea, and Debussy’s Claire de Lune. The Claire de Lune was a shock; used to my mother’s quick, workmanlike version. I barely recognized the Master’s; slow, simple, the solo piano supported at times by the strings; he started each phrase hesitantly, and exaggerated the rests, so that I felt as if the music had never been played before; that it was the results of the blue lights striking the fantastic tower of blue circles and glints, and long blue curves.

After the performance a few children, the ones being considered for the apprenticeship, came forward to talk with the Master. I walked down the aisle, my mother’s palm firm in the middle of my back, barely able to pull my eyes from the baroque monster of wood and metal and glass, to the mere mortal who played the thing. He spoke to us for a while, quietly, of the glories of playing an entire orchestra by oneself, watching our faces.

“And which did you like better,” he asked, “Pictures at an Exhibition played on the piano, or with the full orchestral arrangement?”

“Orchestra,” cried a score of voices.

“Piano,” I said, hitting a sudden silence.

“Why?” he asked politely, focusing on me for the first time. I shrugged nervously; I couldn’t think, I truly didn’t know; fingers digging into my back, I searched for it—

It came to me. “Because,” I said, “it was written for piano.”

Simple. “But do you not like Ravel’s arrangement?” he inquired, interested now.

I thought. “Ravel changed a rough Russian piano score into a French romantic orchestration. He changed it.” Oh, I was a bright kid, no doubt about it, back in those days when I spent five hours a day at the keyboard and three in the books—and one in the halls, one desperately short hour, five o’clock to six o’clock every day in the halls burning up a day’s pent-up frustration—

“Have you compared the scores?” the Master asked me.

“Yes, Master, they are very similar. It is the instrumentation that makes the difference.”

The Master nodded his head, seeming to consider this. “I believe I agree with you,” he said.

Then the talk was over and we were on our way home. I felt sick to my stomach. “You did good,” my mother said. I was nine years old.

~ * ~

And here I am ten years later, sick to my stomach again. That is, I think I am. It is difficult to tell what is happening in my body—past time for my next crystal, that’s sure. The little twinges of dependence are giving me their warning, in the backs of my upper arms. At least it will be short. “Just like sex,” I remember an addict saying in a high-pitched voice. “Short and sweet with the climax at the end.” His friend nodded and flashed fingers at him.

I turn to the Orchestra. “Imagine all of the instruments of a full symphonic orchestra caught in a small tornado,” an early detractor said of it, “and you will have Pierson’s invention.” The detractor is now forgotten, and few like him exist now; age equals respectability, and the Orchestra now has three hundred years’ worth. An institution.

And imposing enough: eleven meters of instruments suspended in air, eleven meters of twisted brass and curved wood, supported by glass rods only visible because of the blue and red spotlights glinting from them. The cloud of violas, the broken staircase of trombones; a truly beautiful statue. But Pierson was a musician as well as a sculptor, a conductor as well as an inventor, and a genius to boot: an unfortunate combination.

I move to the piano opening and slide onto the bench. The glass depression rods cover the keys so that it is impossible to play the piano from here; I must move up to the control booth. I do that, using the glass steps behind the cellos. Even the steps are inlaid with tiny French horn figures. Incredible. It is as if I were seeing everything in the Orchestra for the first time. The control booth, suspended in the center of the thing, nearly hidden from the outside; I am astounded by it. As always, I sit back in the chair and look at the colors: keyboards, foot pedals, chord knobs, ensemble tabs, volume stops, percussion buttons, keyboards, keyboards; strings yellow, woodwinds blue, brass red, percussion brown—

…then the Master, waiting outside the Orchestra to listen, shouts “Play!” impatiently, and I jump and begin the lesson. “Play!” he shouts as I sit watching the clarinets rising. “Play! What are you doing? You cannot just sit and look at the Orchestra,” he tells me emphatically, “until you have learned to play it,” and even as he tells me he is looking at the Orchestra himself, watching the dark browns reflect out of the golds and silvers; but then, he can play it—

…I hit one of the tabs with my toe, the tympani roll tab, hit tempo and sustain keys and boom, suddenly the B flat tympani fill the room, sticks a blur in the glass arms holding them. I long to hold the drum sticks and become the rhythm myself, to see the vibrations in the sound surface and feel them in the pit of my stomach; but to play that roll in Pierson’s Orchestra I just slide a tab to a certain position and push another one down with my toe, so I stop pushing the tab down and there is instant silence.

~ * ~

I do not feel well. The clean red and blue dots in the metal surfaces have become prisms—I blink and they are dots again. Water in my eyes, no doubt. I look at all the keyboards surrounding me. Just a fancy organ is all it is.

I remember when I was learning to play the trumpet, and the triumph it was to play high C. I left all three valves open and pushed the mouthpiece against my lips so hard I could feel the little white ring that would show when I took the horn away which is the wrong way to play high notes, but I had a weak embouchure—and forced a thin stream of air through my clamped lips to hear a high G, surely the highest note in my power. But then my stiff fingers pushed down the first two valves, I tightened my lips an impossible notch further, and the note slid up to an A as the valves hit their stops; quickly then, I lifted my right forefinger and reached a B. And then finally, before I ran out of air, with my eyes closed and my face contorted and my lips actually hurting, I lifted the middle valve and was magically playing a C, high C; a weak, scratchy note that soon dissolved into dry air rasping through the brass tubes; but a high C nevertheless. It was an achievement.

I touch a small piece of red plastic. A small plastic gate opens in a hollow plastic tube, compressed air forces its way through a wire-banded pair of plastic lips into one of the four trumpets, then winds its way through the tubes, and emerges from the bell as a pure, impossibly high E, two full steps above the highest note I ever played. I turn off the note. “Great, Pierson,” I say aloud. “Great.”

~ * ~

I begin playing Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto in F, ignoring the starts of pain that flare like struck matchheads in my arms and legs and neck. I play all sixty strings with my left hand, snapping down chord tabs until as I play the first violin part, the second violins, the violas, the cellos, the basses— they all automatically follow. Passages where they are not in unison have been rearranged, or, if vital, will be played with great difficulty on the individual keyboards below the control. Percussion and brass use the same method, but are played by my feet unless especially difficult. In this way the entire concerto is played leaving the right hand free to play the oboe solo as it runs over the background, a kitten on a marble staircase. The whole process requires intense concentration, which I am not giving it—I am playing quite poorly—and the ability to divide one’s attention four or five ways without becoming confused; but still, four or five ways, not one hundred and ten.

I swing down the basses’ keyboard so I can play it with my feet. I indulge my bad habit and watch my feet as I play, big toes trapped and pointing downward under the pressure of the other toes, bouncing over the yellow keys and creating low bowed notes that expand out of the rising spiral of big, dark bodies behind me. My arches cramp, and in my guts something twists. I can’t remember the music—the conductor’s score that threaded through my head is gone. I can no longer play. Sweat is breaking out of my face and arms, and the Orchestra is slowly spinning, as it does in concerts—

…I am waiting for Mikel and JoAnne to arrive so we can leave for the concert. I am at the battered old upright piano that I brought from my mother’s house right after the funeral, playing Ravel’s Pavanne and crying at it. I laugh bitterly at my ability to act, unsure as always if my emotions are real, or feigned for some invisible audience in a theater wrapped around my head; and I think, ignoring the evidence blinking before me: I can call them up at will when I’m miserable enough!

Mikel and JoAnne walk in, laughing like wind-chimes. They are both singers in Vancouver’s Opera, true artists. They light up some Baygolds and we smoke and talk about Tslitschitche, the quartet we are going to hear. The conversation slows, Mikel and JoAnne look at each other:

“Eric,” Mikel says, “JoAnne and I are going to drop crystals for the concert.” He holds out his hand. In his palm is a small clear crystal that looks like nothing so much as a diamond. He flips it into the air, catches it in his mouth, swallows it, grins. “Want to join us?” JoAnne takes one from him and swallows it with the same casual, defiant toss. She offers one to me, between her fingers. I look at her, remembering what I have heard. Nepanathol! I do not want to go blind.

“Are you addicted?” I ask. They shake their heads.

“We restrict ourselves to special occasions,” JoAnne explains. They laugh. The idea of it—

“Hell,” I say, “give me one.” I hit notes on the piano; C,G, G G sharp, G—B,C; and put a crystal in my mouth. It has no taste. I swallow it—

~ * ~

Hallucinations. For a moment there I was confused. I get back onto the stool and regret moving so quickly. Nausea is making me weak. I try playing some Dixieland, an avocation of mine of which the Master disapproves and in which I am (perhaps as a result) quite knowledgeable. It is difficult to play the seven instruments all at once—clarinet, trumpet, trombone, banjo, piano, drums, bass (impossible, actually; watch the tapes take down eight-bar passages and replay them when repeat buttons are pushed; often playing the Orchestra requires skills usually possessed by sound engineers), so I drop all of them but the front line.

The trombone is a fascinating thing to watch! Unable to anticipate the notes as human players do, the glass arms of the Orchestra move the slide about with an incredible, mechanical, inhuman speed. I am playing the Jack Teagarten solo to St. Louis Blues, and I am hitting wrong notes in it. I switch to the clarinet solo which is, to my surprise, the solo from The Rampart Street Parade (you see how they fit together?) and quit in resignation. I hate to play poorly.

~ * ~

“All you have to do to stop this,” the voice says out loud, and then I finish it in my head, is to get home and swallow a nep crystal. Without a moment’s thought I slip off the stool: my knees buckle like closing penknives and I crash into the bank of keyboards, fall to the floor of the booth. In the glass floor are inlaid bass and treble clef signs. After a while I pull myself up and am sick in the booth’s drinking fountain. Then I let myself drop back to the floor.

I feel as sick after vomiting as before, which is frightening.

“Do, do something,” the voice says, “don’t just look at it.” At what? I ask. I pull out the celesta keyboard just before me, the bottom one in the bank. I look up at the ornate white box that is the instrument, suspended in the air above me, dwarfed by the grand piano beside it. The celesta: a piano whose hammers hit steel plates rather than wires. I run my finger along a few octaves and a spray of quick bell-notes echoes through the chamber.

I try a Bach Two-Part Invention, a masterpiece of elegance that properly belongs on the harpsichord. My hands begin to play at different tempos and I can’t stop it; frightening! I stop playing, and to aid my timing I reach a shaky right hand up and start the metronome, an antique mechanical box that struck Pierson’s fancy at about eighty. An upside-down pendulum, visually surprising because it seems to contradict the laws of gravity rather than agree with them as a normal pendulum does.

I begin the Invention again, but the tempo is too fast for me (I usually play it at 12,0); the notes become a confused mass, sounding like church bells recorded and replayed at a much higher speed.

The gold weight on the metronome’s arm reflects a part of my face (my eyes) as it comes to its lowest point on the left side. And my heart—certainly my heart is beating in time with the metronome’s penetrating, woodblock-struck, rhythmic tock.

And just as undeniably the metronome is speeding up. Impossible, for the weight has not moved on the arm, yet true; at first it was an andante tock… tock, and now it is a good march tempo, tock, tock; and my heartbeat a tempo all the way. With each pulse small specks of light are exploding and drifting like tiny Chinese lanterns across my eyes. I can feel the quick pulses of blood in my throat and fingers. I am scared. The tocks are now an allegretto tocktocktock. I lift my finger up, a terrible weight, and stick it into the flashing silver arc with the gold band across its center. The metronome stops.

I begin breathing again. My heart begins to slow down. A true hallucination, I think to myself, is very disturbing. After a time I push the celesta keyboard back into its nook and try to stand up. My legs explode. I grasp the stool. Cramps, I think in some cold corner of my mind, watching the limbs flail about. I knead the bulging muscles with one hand and keep shifting to find a more comfortable position; it occurs to me with a start that this is what the phrase “writhing in agony” describes; I had thought it was just a literary figure.

The cold corner of my mind disappears, and that was all that was left—

I come to and the cramps are gone. They feel like they are on the verge, though. If I don’t move, I think I will be all right. I wish it were closer to the end.

I can see my reflection in the tuba’s dented bell. A sorry-looking spectacle, disheveled and pale. The features are architecturally distinct. I can quite clearly see the veins below my eyes. The reflection wavers, each time presenting me with a different version of my face. Some are dome-foreheaded and weak-chinned; some have giant hooked noses; others are lantern-jawed and have pointy heads. Some are half-faced—

…I am trying to keep in step with the rest of the Children’s Orchestra, now being temporarily transformed for the Tricentennial celebration into a marching band. A marching band: in the old days they used to dress musicians in uniforms and have them walk through the streets in ranks and files, playing tunes to the tempo of their steps. I can conceive of nothing more ridiculous, as I struggle under the weight of a Sousaphone, a tuba stretched into a circle so that it can be carried while marching. There are no pianos in a marching band, obviously. Fuming at the treatment a child prodigy receives, I puff angrily into the huge mouthpiece and watch my reflection sway back and forth in the curved brass surface. The conductor is scurrying about the edges of the group, consulting the Parade Manual in his hand and shouting, “Watch your diagonals! Watch those diagonals!” Next to me Joe Tanaka (he is a cellist, drafted as I have been) says, “If God meant us to play and walk at the same time, he’d have had us breathe through our ears.” The halls force us to make a ninety-degree turn and there is chaos. “Step small on the inside!” the conductor is shouting. Each rank looks like a game of crack-the-whip. “Halt!” the conductor shrieks. Still breaking up at Tanaka, I cannon into the girl in front of me and three or four of us go down in a tangle. In the midst of the cries and recriminations I look at the crumpled Sousaphone bell and see the lower half of my face reflected: big mouth, no eyes—

~ * ~

I have a terrific headache. I reach up to the stool and grab it; my hand closes on nothing and I look again; at least six inches off. I must get up on the stool. Arms move up, feet grope for purchase, all very slowly. I move with infinitesimal slowness, as a child does when escaping his house at night to run the halls. Head to seat, knee to footbar, I stop to get used to the height, watching the fireworks display in my eyes. My hands never stop trembling now.

Now I am up and seated on the stool. I remember a film in which a man was buried to the neck in the tidal flats, at low tide. A head sitting on wet, gleaming sand, looking outward: the image is acid-etched on the inside of my eyelids.

Do something. I pull out the French horn and oboe keyboards for Handel’s Children’s Prayer. “These are the instruments with colds,” the Master once said in a light moment. “The horn has a chest cold, the oboe a head cold.” Handel is too slow. I switch to scales, C, F, B flat, E flat, A flat, D flat; bead, bead; every good boy deserves favor, each good boy does fine; then the minors, harmonic and melodic—

…“Drop that sixth,” she yells from the kitchen, “harmonic not melodic. Play me the harmonic now.”

Again—

“Harmonic!”

Again.

She comes in, grabs my right hand in hers, hits the notes. “Third down, sixth down, see how it sounds spooky? Do it now.”

Again. “Okay, do that twenty times, then we’ll try the melodic.

~ * ~

I stop playing minor scales, my heart pounding. I collect the oddball keyboards seldom played—glockenspiel, contrabassoon, harp, alto clarinet—and become bored with them even as I gather them. I am sick again in the drinking fountain. Certainly I have been in the Orchestra for a long time. A walk about the room would be nice, but I fear it is beyond me. I am very near the end, one way or another. The tide is rising. De Quincey and Cocteau lied to me—there is no romance in withdrawal, in the experience itself, none at all. It is no fun. It hurts.

~ * ~

There is a knock at the door. In it swings, slow as an hour hand. A short man struts through the doorway. Tied to his middle is a small bass drum, and welded to the top of the drum is a battered trumpet, its mouthpiece waving about in front of his face. Beside the mouthpiece is a harmonica, held in place by stiff wires wrapped around his neck. In his right hand is a drumstick, in his left hand is an old clacking percussion device (canasta) and between his knees are tarnished cymbals, hanging at odd angles. He looks as scruffy as I feel. He marches to a spot just below me, lightly beating the drum, then halts and brings his knees together sharply. When the din dies down he looks up and grins. His face has a reddish tint to it, and I can see through his nose.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“John Pierson,” he replies, “at your service.” Suddenly I see the resemblance between the disreputable character below me and the statue high in the outer entryway. “And you?” he says to me. His hair is tangled.

“Eric Johann Vivaldi Wright.”

“Ah-ha! A musician.”

“No,” I tell him, “I just operate your machine.”

He looks puzzled. “Surely it takes a musician to operate my machine?”

“Just a button-pusher. Did you really build this thing?” Time stretches out. We are speaking in a dead silence, stillness. There are long pauses between phrases.

“I did.”

“Then it’s all your fault. You’re the cause of the whole mess,” I say down to him, “you and your stupid vulgar monstrosity! When you erected this heap,” I ask him, tapping a glass upright sharply with my foot, “were you serious?”

“Certainly,” he replies, nodding gravely. “Young man,” he says, emphasizing every third or fourth word with a rimshot, “you have Completely Missed the Point. You claim Too Much for my Work. With my invention it is Possible for One Man to play extremely Complex pieces by Himself. That is All. It is merely a rather Complicated musical Instrument, able to create Beautiful Music.”

“No way, old man,” I say, “it’s an imitation orchestra is what it is, and pretty poor job it does, too. For example” (I have run through this so many times before): “If Beethoven’s Third were to be played, which one could do it better, your Orchestra or the Quebec Philharmonic?”

“Quebec, undoubtedly, but—”

“Okay, then. All you’ve done is turned a sublime group achievement into a half-assed egotistical solo.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” he exclaims, rimshots for every “no.” “The invention is an imitation of an orchestra, only in the same way a one-man band was an imitation of a band, eh?” He winks suggestively. “In other words, not at all. A one-man band was not to be judged for anything except his own individual performance. It is a fallacy to become comparative.” He takes off and makes a revolution around the Orchestra, playing “Dixie” on the trumpet and pounding the bass drum, and filling all the rests with the cymbals. It sounds horrible. Back again. “Entertaining, no? Contributions?” He grins. “A one-man band was a great institution.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but none of them ever claimed to be musicians.”

“They most certainly did! Someone who makes music, young man, is a musician. This purist attitude, this notion of artistic integrity that you have, has blinded you. Art with a capital A! What nonsense! Music is noise that entertains, that makes one feel good. My instruments can do that as well as any.”

“No it can’t,” I almost shout. “Wrong! This instrument can’t make music as well as the instrument that is in an orchestra, that takes a hundred and ten people to play it. Your instrument is just showmanship, and I am an artist. There is no shame in being a purist.”

“Bah!” he says. “A purist is just someone living a hundred years in the past. You would have scoffed at the integrity of the organ had you been around at its invention, or the synthesizer.”

“A purist,” I say, “just likes to see things done right.” I trace the other line down, following arguments like fugues. “And if you’re going to build a solo instrument that makes a lot of sounds, why not work with synthesizers?”

“Because,” he explains, waving the drumstick about, “this is prettier. Isn’t that reason enough? Christ! You purists are so refined. If you are to play my instrument you must change the way you think of yourself.

“You can’t change the way you are.”

“You most certainly can! What could be simpler? Listen: you want the music to be played as written, as well as possible. Fine. That is admirable. My instrument does not make much of a symphonic orchestra, it is true, even though the simplifications made are your fault and not the machine’s; but that is not what I built it to be, believe me! It has its own artistic integrity, and you must find it. If you do not like simplifying orchestral arrangements, don’t! Play something else! If you can find nothing that seems suitable, write something yourself! I don’t suppose anyone has shown you my compositions for the instrument? No? Ah, well, they never did think much of me as a composer.” He brightens. “Enjoy yourself in that little booth, eh? Have you ever done that? It’s quite easy.”

I look around at the banks of keyboards. “It’s just like putting on a show,” I mutter.

“So? Then put on a show! It’s a great, showy machine when you get to know it. Of course, you don’t know it very well, yet.” He smiles a crafty smile. “I took nineteen years to build it,” he says, “and it would only take two or three to put it together. There’s more to it than meets the eye.” He turns to leave, shimmering his familiar transparent red. He walks to the door and stops. “Play it,” he says, “don’t just look at it. Play it with everything in you.” He leaves. The door closes.

~ * ~

So here I am, a young man frying in a hallucinogenic withdrawal, suspended in this contraption like a fly trapped in the web of a spider frying in a hallucinogenic withdrawal… You’ve seen pictures of those poor tangled webs that drugged spiders make in labs? That is what Pierson’s Orchestra would look like in two dimensions, from any side. A glass hand, a tree reaching up in a swirl of rich browns and silvers and prisms. Music doesn’t grow on trees, you know. The cymbals are edged with rainbows.

Most certainly I have been suffering delusions. It is easy afterward to say that a conversation with a man dead three centuries is an illusion, but while it is happening, it is hard to discount one’s senses. Damage is being done in my brain; it is as if I can feel the individual cells swelling and popping. I am very sick. There is little to do but sit and wait it out. Surely it is near the end—in a sudden flash I see the Orchestra as a giant baroque cross upon which I am draped… but no. It is a fantasy, one I can recognize. I am afraid of those I can’t recognize.

“Just like sex,” the deaf man said, “climax at the end.” I wait. Time passes. Pop pop pop… like swollen grains of rice. Something must be done. Might as well play the damn thing. Put on a show.

I’m not convinced by you, Pierson! Not a bit!

~ * ~

I begin arranging the keyboards into concert position, my hands shoving them about like tugboats pushing big ships. Dispassionately I watch my hands shake. The cold corner of my mind has taken over and somehow I am outside the nausea. I am seeing things with the clarity you have when you are extremely hungry, or tired past the point of being tired. Everything is quite clear, quite in focus. I have heard that drowning men experience a last period of great calm and clarity before losing consciousness. Perhaps the tide is that high now. I cannot tell. Oh, I am tired of this! Why can’t it be over? Bach’s “Rejoice, Beloved Christians,” the baritone playing the high line. The passages come to me clean and sharp now. I find it hard to keep my balance; everything is overexposed. I am swaying. I close my eyes. A Chopin Nocturne. Against the black field of my eyelids’ insides there is a marvelous show of lights, little colored worms that burst into existence, crawl across my vision and disappear. Behind the lights are barely discernible patterns, geometric tapestries that flare and contract under tne pressure of my eyelids. The music is intertwined with this odd mandala; when I clamp my eyes hard there is a sudden rush of blue geometry with a black center, with it a roll of tympani, shrieking of woodwinds and the strings fitting quickly and surely into the fantastic blue patterns that blossom before me. Mozart’s Concerto in G, as effortlessly as if I were the conductor and not the performer. Above it rises a trumpet solo, my own improvisation, arching high above the structure of the concerto. My interior field of vision clears and becomes a neutral color, grey or dull purple. Ten clear lines run across it in sets of five. The score. As I play the notes they appear, in long vertical sets as in a conductor’s score. They move off to the left as if the score were on a conveyor belt. Excellent. Half-notes, quarter-notes in the bass clef; long runs of sixteenth-notes in the treble, all look like the sun shining through pinholes in a dark sheet of paper. The concerto flows into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, with a transition that pleases me. As far as I can tell the score is perfectly accurate. I am playing brilliantly, with enough confidence to throw grace notes of my own about in passages of great speed. I think, “It would be nice to have the cellos playing their counterpoint here,” and then I hear the cellos making their quick departure from the rest of the strings. My fingers are not doing it. Play it with everything you have. The Finale of the Third, every single instrument achingly clean and individual. Nineteen years, Pierson, is this what you mean?

The Orchestra is the extension of what I want to hear.

I move into realms of my own, shifting from passage to passage, playing what I always wanted to hear; half-remembered snatches, majestic crescendos that you wake up from in the middle of the night, having dreamed them, and wish you could recapture; the architecture of Bach, the power of Beethoven, the beauty of Mozart, the wit and transitions of de Baik. All a confusion, all a marvel. Think it in your head and hear the Orchestra play it. The performer the instrument, the instrument a part of the performer. Pierson, what have you done?

Music. If you are at all alive to it you will have heard passages that bring a chill to your back and a flush of blood to your cheeks; a physical response to beauty. A rush. The music I am playing now is the very distillation of that feeling. It soars out and for the first time I hear echoes in this room, it is that powerful. The score no longer consists of musical notation; it is an impressionistic fantasy of a musical score, the background a deep blood red, the notes sudden clusters of jewels or long flows of colors I can’t identify even as I see them; yet see them, most certainly. The drums are pounding, strings rushing and jumbling, awash in a wave of fortissimo brass shouts, not blaring—the horns of the Orchestra cannot blare—but at their highest volume, triumphant—

…triumphant she is as I ascend the dais I can see her face and she is strained and ecstatic as if in labor for to her I am being born again and throughout the investiture all I can see is her bright face before me unto her a Master is born—

…and masterful, chaotic yet perfectly calculated. The score is a millefleurs of twisted colors, falling, falling, the notes are falling. I open my eyes and find that they are already stretched wide open; a rush of red, red is all I see, a blinding waterfall of molten glass cascading down, behind it a thousand suns.

~ * ~

I awake from a dream in which I was… in which I was… walking through hallways. Talking with someone. I cannot remember.

~ * ~

I am lying on the glass floor of the booth, I can feel the bas-relief of the clef signs. My mouth feels as if it had been washed in acids, which I suppose it has. My legs. My left hand is asleep. I have been poured from my container, my skeleton is gone. I am a lump of flesh. I move my arm. An achievement.

“Eric,” comes the Master’s voice, high-pitched in its anxiety. It is probably what awakened me. His hand on my shoulder. He babbles without pause as he helps me out of the Orchestra. “I just got back, you’re all right, you’re all right, the music you were playing, my God, magnificent, here, here, watch out, you’re all right, my son—”

“I am blind,” I croak. There is a pause, a gasp. He holds me in his arms, half carries me onto a cot of some sort, muttering in a strained voice as he moves me about.

“Horrible, horrible,” he keeps saying. “Horrible.” It is age-old. Lose your sight, and learn to see. I blink away tears for my lost vision, and cannot see myself blink.

“You will make a great Master,” he says firmly.

I do not answer.

And after a long pause—

“Yes,” I say, wishing he understood, wishing there was someone who understood, “I think it will.”

Content

Robinson Kim Stanley In Pierson’s Orchestra