Echo Round His Bones (16 page)

Hansard did not obey these commands, nor did he, by any deliberate action,
disobey them. Indeed, his mind was too numb to produce the thoughts that
would have led him to action.
Behind Worsaw a woman's voice let forth an incoherent cry; Worsaw spun to
face the imagined danger, but it came not from behind him, as it first
seemed, but from above. He had been standing at the back of the church,
beneath the choir loft. When he turned, Panofsky's wheel chair dropped
through the low-hanging ceiling on top of him. Hansard's wits thawed
sufficiently for him to draw his pistol from its holster and empty it
into Worsaw's back.
Jet dropped down from the choir loft and came running forward to Hansard.
She spoke disjointedly. "I thought . . . are you hurt? . . . and then,
around the outside of the church, and up the stairs to the choir . . . it
was so heavy, and I could hear him. . . ." He allowed her to embrace him,
but he did not return her embrace. His body was rigid, his jaw tense,
his eyes glazed with a film of inexpressivity.
Once she'd released him he walked forward and turned over Worsaw's bleeding
body. "Three times," he said. "First, inside the manmitter. Then, at the
pumping station, and now here. I seem to spend all my time killing this
one man."
Bridie and the new Bridget came in at the main door, where the last of the
wedding guests were filing out. "Bernard is dead," Bridie announced.
"We found him in the cellar. But where's the other Bernard?"
"In the sacristy," said Jet. "Hiding in the minister's clothes closet.
It was his idea that I use his chair as a projectile. He felt that I would
probably have just as poor aim with a pistol as his double had."
"I seem to spend all my
life
killing people," Hansard said aloud,
though he seemed to be talking only to himself.
"Nathan, it isn't like that," Jet insisted earnestly. "What happened today
could have happened any time, without your ever being around. It was an
accident; a grotesque accident."
"Go away, please, all of you. I'd rather not see . . . your faces . . .
when hers . . ." He turned away from the three women and walked back to
the altar. There he took up the dead Bridgetta in his arms.
Jet would have protested again, but she was checked by Bridie. Instead
she went with the empty wheel chair into the sacristy. Bridie and the
new Bridget dragged the body of Worsaw out of the church. In five minutes
Jet returned to ask when they would see him again.
"I want to spend the night here," Hansard said, "with my bride."
Jet went away. The cleaning people came into the church and began to sweep
it out and mop up, though they did not see the blood-flecked book lying in
the center aisle:
The Private War of Sergeant Worsaw
.
Afterward, the electric lights were turned off. In the semidarkness
Hansard found himself able at last to cry. It had been many years
since the tears had come from those eyes, and they did not, at first,
flow freely.
Before the brute fact of death nothing can be said. It would be best
if, like the three women, we leave Hansard to himself now. His grief,
like his love, cannot take a very large part in our story -- which is
not very far from ending.
FIFTEEN
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
And yet, what a curious, contradictory grief it was. For she who had died
was not dead. She was alive; thrice over she was alive. Though no one of
the Bridgettas proposed this consolation in so many words, still the daily
and unavoidable fact of their presence -- of
her
presence -- could not
but have its effect on Hansard. In one sense, it only made his loss more
poignant by offering constant reminders of her whom he had lost. On the
other hand he could not very well pretend that his loss was irreplaceable.
The surviving Panofsky and three Bridgettas, for their part, accepted what
had happened with great equanimity. They were, after all, accustomed to the
idea of their own expendability.
Then too there was the sobering consideration that in a week -- in six
days -- in five days -- they would all be dead; Bridgetta, Panofsky,
Hansard, and the whole populace of the Real World. Even in the depths of
his grief Hansard was aware of the minutes slipping by, of the dreaded
day creeping up on them like a fog bank rolling in from the river.
On the evening of the 27th, Panofsky called them all together. "The question
arises, fellow citizens, how shall we pass the time? Bridgetta has a supply
of LSD in our medicine cabinet, should anyone so desire."
Hansard shook his head no.
"Nor do I. However, we may change our mind. If anyone starts to panic,
it's a good thing to remember. I understand it's especially helpful
for terminal cancer patients, and somehow I've always associated cancer
with the bomb. There are also any number of bottles of good brandy and
Scotch in the cellar, should the need arise. What I would suggest,
most seriously, is what a defrocked priest advised in a clandestine
religion class in the labor camp of my youth -- that if one knows the
Day of Judgment is at hand, one should just go about one's ordinary
business. Any other course partakes of hypocrisy. For my own part,
I intend to study the folio of equations that Bernard-Sub-One has just
sent me through the transmitter."
Though it was sensible advice, Hansard had difficulty following it. With
Bridgetta dead, the ordinary fabric of his life had dissolved. He might
still continue to mourn her, but as the time advanced, the magnitude
of the impending catastrophe seemed to mock at the smallness of his own
sorrow. Perhaps it was exactly this that goaded him to find a solution
to the catastrophe, and thereby restore a measure of dignity to his
own mourning.
Or perhaps it was just luck.
However that may be, he found himself more and more driven to listen
to music. At first he gave his attention to the more fulsomely elegiac
selections from Panofsky's library of tapes:
Das Lied von der Erde
,
Die Winterreise, the
Missa Solemnis
. He listened to the music with an
urgency more intense than he had known even at the depth of his adolescent
Sturm-und-Drang; as though some part of him already knew that the key
he sought was concealed behind these silvery shifting tone-fabrics,
hidden in the pattern but a part of it.
Gradually he found the Romantics, even Beethoven, too heavy for his taste.
He would have liked to turn to Bach then, but Panofsky's library provided
only the Sonatas for Unaccompanied Violin and the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Here too, though still indistinctly, he felt the presence moving just
beyond the veil; yet when he tried to touch it, to fix it firmly in
apprehension, it eluded him as when, reaching into a pooi of water,
the fish dart swiftly out of reach of the grasping hand. At last it was
Mozart who gave it to him.
On the first play-through of the tape of
Don Giovanni
, he felt the veil
tearing. It began during the trio of the three masquers at the end of the
first act, and the rent widened steadily until the penultimate moment when
Donna Elvira arrives to interrupt the Don at his carousal. He scorns
her earnest warnings; she turns to go out the door . . . and screams;
the great D-minor chord thunders in the orchestra, and the statue bursts
into the hall to drag the unrepentant Don to hell.
Hansard stopped the tape, reversed the reel, and listened to the scene again
from the moment of Donna Elvira's scream.
The veil parted.
"The
chord
," he said. "Of course,
the chord
."
He tore himself away from the music to seek out Panofsky, but discovered
the old man sitting only a few feet away, listening raptly to the opera.
"Doctor Panofsky, I -- "
"Please, the music! And no more of that foolish 'Doctor.'"
Hansard switched off the recorder during the height of the brief,
electric scene between Don Giovanni and the statue.
"I'm sorry, but I must tell you now. It concerns the music, in a way --
but more than that, I've thought of how it can be done . . . what you
said could not be . . . how to communicate with the Real World! Perhaps,
just perhaps."
"The most awesome moment in all music, and you -- "
"I'll form a chord!"
"It is true," Panofsky replied, in a more moderate tone, "that Mozart
can suggest to us a harmony embracing the world; but art, sadly, is not
the same thing as reality. You are wrought up, Nathan. Calm yourself."
"No, no, truly --
this is the way
! You
can
talk to Panofsky-Sub-One
by becoming part of him again, by restoring the unity that was disrupted.
You'll mesh with his body -- and with his mind; probably when he's asleep."
A light began to glow in Panofsky's eyes. "I am a fool," he whispered,
then paused, as though waiting for Hansard to contradict him -- or
perhaps for his other self to agree. He went on: "An idiot. A chord --
yes, it is a fine analogy, though, mind you, nothing
more
. I can't be
sure yet. There is a demonstrable relationship between a man of the Real
World and his echo, a sort of proportion, but whether it is enough . . .
I cannot, in the time we have left, develop a mathematical model . . ."
"There's no need to. Just
do
it!"
"But what a lovely analogy." Panofsky's eyes were closed, and his fingers
moved in pantomime before him. "You sound middle C on the piano, and
simultaneously the C an octave above. The ear can no longer sort out what
it hears, and the overtones of the two notes resolve into a single chord."
"The fibers of the body would be the overtones," Hansard theorized eagerly.
"The tone of the muscles, the memory traces of the brain, the blood type,
the whole pattern of being. Place the two patterns together, and there'll
be a sort of resonance between them, a knitting together."
"Yes, a kind of understanding, perhaps; a natural sympathy, a bond."
"A chord . . . And wouldn't communication be possible then?"
"Without evidence, Nathan, how can we know? But there's a chance,
and I must try it. If it works -- why then, Nathan, you and I may have
saved the world at its last minute. You frown! What now, Nathan? Is it
that you misdoubt my plan? Well, well, Napoleon had his skeptics too,
and see how far he went.
"No, I'm perfectly confident that once I've been able to communicate with
Panofsky-Sub-One I can carry it off, grandiloquent as it must sound to you.
But now I must find that gentleman out. And -- speak of the devil . . ."
For another Panofsky had just entered the library through the open door.
"You
might
have been waiting outside the transmitter if you'd been
expecting me. It wasn't very cheery coming into an empty house. Why are
the two of you looking at me as though I were a ghost? And for that matter
-- " turning to Hansard, "I don't believe we've been introduced."
"But you're not Panofsky-Sub-One," Hansard said.
"A sound induction. No,
he
just left for Moscow. Didn't you see where
I'd noted it down on the memo calendar?"
"And Bridgetta?" his double asked.
"Went with him, of course."
"How long will they be gone?"
"Till June 2nd, when Malinova repeats her
Giselle
. Good heavens, Bernard,
what's the matter? You look as though I'd just announced the end of
the world."
But, a little later:
"You can't expect me to
build
it!" Hansard protested.
"Nonsense, Nathan, there's nothing to build. Just a trifle of rewiring.
Surely there is a stock of spare elements at the Mars base. With the
equipment as it exists, it shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes' work
to convert those elements to what we'll need."
"But the elements for the Camp Jackson manmitter are so small!"
"Size is no consideration, Nathan, nor is distance. And you'll have all
the power you need in a dry cell. No, my chief worry is not in your
assembling the transmitter, but in your getting the co-ordinates down
pat. I think we can afford a day of practice. Have you ever put together
your own hi-fi?"
"When I was a kid."
"Then you should have no trouble. A hi-fi is more complicated. Let me
show you what you must do. In the laboratory. Now. Quickly, quickly!"
At twilight on the 29th of May Hansard and Bridie stood once again on Gove
Street and watched the men of Camp Jackson walking in and out of the wall
about the pumping station. Their number had been much reduced: Hansard
counted fewer than ten. It was necessary to use these transmitters, which
were in continuous operation, rather than the manmitters within the camp
proper, since there were no jumps scheduled to Camp Jackson/Mars for two
more weeks. Had Panofsky possessed the co-ordinates for the Mars Command
Post, Hansard might have foregone this sort of hitchhiking altogether.
Finally the last of the men they had seen go in came back out. They
waited another half hour, then strolled down the street to the wall
and through it, trundling an empty wheel chair before them. The door of
the pumping house had been standing open during the day, and the great
volume of sub-two water had spilled out, to run down the hill and form a
shallow moat on the inside of the wall. There were only a few inches of
water on the floor of the station, and the steady cascade pouring out of
the transmitter -- the echo of the water that had just been transmitted
to Mars. A chilly breeze stirred their clothing, originating in the
transmitting chamber of the air pump.
"Now," Bridie said briskly, "we shall just have to hope that we can discover
to which of the Posts they're transmitting at any given moment. Follow the
technicians about and see what they do. Meanwhile, I'll look over the
equipment."
Within five minutes they had found the switch mark CJ that controlled
air transmissions. They observed two full cycles of transmission as the
stream of air was routed to each of the Command Posts in turn; there was
an interval between transmissions averaging five seconds. Only during
this time would it be safe for Hansard to enter the transmitting chamber;
a little earlier or a little later, and he would be transmitted piecemeal
to Mars, as Worsaw had been.
"It's not enough time," Bridie said unhappily.
"It's enough time," Hansard said.