Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (513 page)

* * * *

Ereza sat in the back row of the concert hall, surrounded by people in formal clothes and dress uniforms. Onstage the orchestra waited, in formal black and white, for the soloist and conductor. She saw a stir at the edge of the stage. Arla, in her long swirling dress, with the cello. The conductor—she looked quickly at her program for his name. Mikailos Bogdan.

Applause, which settled quickly as the house lights went down. Now the clear dome showed a dark night sky with a thick wedge of stars, the edge of the Cursai Cluster. The conductor lifted his arms. Ereza watched; the musicians did not stir. His arms came down.

Noise burst from speakers around the hall. As if conducting music, Bogdan’s arms moved, but the noise had nothing to do with his direction. Grinding, squealing, exploding—all the noises that Ereza finally recognized as belonging to an armored ground unit in battle. Rattle and clank of treads, grinding roar of engines, tiny voices yelling, screaming, the heavy thump of artillery and lighter crackling of small arms. Around her the others stirred, looked at each other in amazement, then horror.

Onstage, no one moved. The musicians stared ahead, oblivious to the noise; Ereza, having heard the rehearsal, wondered how they could stand it. And why? Why work so for perfection in rehearsal if they never meant to play? Toward the front, someone stood—someone in uniform—and yelled. Ereza could not hear it over the shattering roar that came from the speakers then—low-level aircraft strafing, she thought. She remembered that sound. Another two or three people stood up; the first to stand began to push his way out of his row. One of the others was hauled back down by those sitting near him.

The sound changed, this time to the repetitive crump-crump-crump-crump of bombardment. Vague, near-human sounds, too…Ereza shivered, knowing before it came clear what that would be. Screams, moans, sobs…it went on far too long. She wanted to get up and leave, but she had no strength.

Silence, when it finally came, was welcome. Ereza could hear, as her ears regained their balance, the ragged breathing of the audience. Silence continued, the conductor still moving his arms as if the orchestra were responding. Finally, he brought the unnerving performance to a close, turned and bowed to them. A few people clapped, uncertainly; no one else joined them and the sound died away.

“Disgracefully bad taste,” said someone to Ereza’s right. “I don’t know what they think they’re doing.”

“Getting us ready to be ravished by Fennaris, no doubt. Have you heard her before?”

“Only on recordings. I’ve been looking forward to this for decads.”

“She’s worth it. I heard her first in a chamber group two years ago, and—” The conductor beckoned, and Arla stood; the gossipers quieted. Intent curiosity crackled around the hall, silent but alive.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Arla said. She had an untrained voice, but even so it carried to the back of the hall. “You may be wondering what happened to the Goldieri Concerto. We chose to make another statement about music.”

The conductor bowed to her, and signaled the orchestra. Each musician held an instrument at arm’s length; at the flick of his baton they all dropped to the floor, the light rattling cases of violins, the softer boom of violas, the clatter and thud and tinkle of woodwinds, brasses, percussion. A tiny round drum rolled along the floor until it ran into someone’s leg and fell over with a final loud tap. Louder than that was the indrawn breath of the audience.

“I’m Arla,” she said, standing alone, facing a crowd whose confusion was slowly turning to hostility. Ereza felt her skin tingling. “Most of you know me as Arla Fennaris, but tonight I’m changing my name. I want you to know why.”

She turned and picked up her cello, which she had left leaning against her chair. No, Ereza thought, don’t do it. Not that one. Please.

“You think of me as a cellist,” Arla said, and plucked three notes with one hand. “A cellist is a musician, and a musician—I have this from my own sister, a wounded veteran, as many of you know—a musician is to most of you an impractical child. A fool.” She ran her hand down the strings, and the sound echoed in Ereza’s bones. She shivered, and so did the people sitting next to her. “She tells me, my sister, that the reason we’re at war right now—the reason she lost her arm—is that I am a mere musician, and need protection. I can’t protect myself; I send others out to die, to keep me and my music alive.” Another sweeping move across the strings, and a sound that went through Ereza like a jagged blade. All she could think was No, no, don’t…no… but she recognized the look on Arla’s face, the tone of her voice. Here was someone committed beyond reason to whatever she was doing.

But Arla had turned, and found her chair again. She was sitting as she would for any performance, the cello nestled in the hollow of her skirt, the bow in her right hand. “It is easy to make noise,” Arla said. With a move Ereza did not understand, she made an ugly noise explode from the cello. “It takes skill to make music.” She played a short phrase as sweet as spring sunshine. “It is easy to destroy—” She held the cello up, as if to throw it, and again Ereza heard the indrawn breath as the audience waited. Then she put it down. “It takes skill to make—in this case, millenia of instrument designers, and Barrahesh, here on Cravor’s World, with a passion for the re-creation of classic instruments. I have no right to destroy his work—but it would be easy.” She tapped the cello’s side, and the resonant sound expressed fragility. “As with my cello, with everything. It is easy to kill; it takes skill to nurture life.” Again she played a short phrase, this one a familiar child’s song about planting flower seeds in the desert.

“My sister,” Arla said, and her eyes found Ereza’s, and locked onto them. “My sister is a soldier, a brave soldier, who was wounded…she would say protecting me. Protection I never asked for, and did not need. Her arm the price of this one—” She held up her right arm. “It is difficult to make music when you are using your sister’s arm. An arm taught to make war, not music. An arm which does not respect music.”

She lowered her arm. “I can make music only with my own arm, because it’s my arm that learned it. And to play with my arm means throwing away my sister’s sacrifice. Denying it. Repudiating it.” No, Ereza thought at her again. Don’t do this. I will understand; I will change. Please. But she knew it was too late, as it had been too late to change things when she woke after surgery and found her own arm gone. “If my sister wants music, she must learn to make it. If you want music, you must learn to make it. We will teach you; we will play with you—but we will not play for you. Good evening.”

Again the conductor signaled; the musicians picked up their instruments from the floor, stood, and walked out. For a moment, the shuffling of their feet onstage was the only sound, as shock held the audience motionless. Ereza felt the same confusion, the same hurt, the same realization that they would get no music. Then the catcalls began, the hissing, the programs balled up angrily and thrown; some hit the stage and a few hit a musician. But none of them hurried, none of them looked back. Arla and the conductor waited, side by side, as the orchestra cleared the stage. Ereza sat frozen, unable to move even as people pushed past her, clambered over her legs. She wanted to go and talk to Arla; she knew it would do no good. She did not speak Arla’s language. She never had. Now she knew what Arla meant: she had never respected her sister before. Now she did. Too late, too late cried her mind, struggling to remember something, anything, of the music.

* * * *

Copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Moon.

(1947– )

Born in Philadelphia and educated at Penn (a BA in English in creative writing) and Harvard (an MA in teaching in visual studies), James Morrow taught film before turning to writing utopian satires; his first book was
Moviemaking Illustrated: The Comicbook Filmbook
(1973). Morrow’s first SF novel was
The Wine of Violence
(1981), a satirical story about human visitors on an alien planet of cannibals, but he’s best known for his Godhead Trilogy (
Towing Jehovah
1994,
Blameless in Abaddon
1996, and
The Eternal Footman
1999), where God dies and falls into the sea, leaving the world to cope with His absence.

Morrow lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, Kathryn Ann Smith. They have two children.

Morrow won his second Nebula for “City of Truth”. (He also has two World Fantasy Awards to his credit.) There’s a shorter version of the novella floating around, but this, the original version, is my favorite (and maybe the funniest) Morrow story.

First published as a chapterbook in January, 1991

One

I no longer live in the City of Truth. I have exiled myself from Veritas, from all cities—from the world. The room in which I’m writing is cramped as a county jail and moist as the inside of a lung, but I’m learning to call it home. My only light is a candle, a fat, butter-colored stalk from which nets of melted wax hang like cobwebs. I wonder what it would be like to live in that candle—in the translucent crannies that surround the flame: a fine abode, warm, safe, and snug. I imagine myself spending each day wandering waxen passageways and sitting in paraffin parlors, each night lying in bed listening to the steady drip-drip-drip of my home consuming itself.

My name is Jack Sperry, and I am thirty-eight years old. I was born in truth’s own city, Veritas, on the last day of its bicentennial year. Like many boys of my generation, I dreamed of becoming an art critic one day: the pure primal thrill of attacking a painting, the sheer visceral kick of savaging a movie or a poem. In my case, however, the dream turned into reality, for by my twenty-second year I was employed as a deconstructionist down at the Wittgenstein Museum in Plato Borough, giving illusion its due.

Other dreams—wife, children, happy home—came harder. From the very first Helen and I wrestled with the thorny Veritasian question of whether love was a truthful term for how we felt about each other—such a misused notion, love, a kind of one-word lie—a problem we began ignoring once a more concrete crisis had taken its place.

His sperm are lazy, she thought. Her eggs are duds, I decided. But at last we found the right doctor, the proper pill, and suddenly there was Toby, flourishing inside Helen’s redeemed womb: Toby the embryo; Toby the baby; Toby the toddler; Toby the preschool carpenter, forever churning out crooked birdhouses, lopsided napkin holders, and asymmetrical bookends; Toby the boy naturalist, befriending every slithery, slimy, misbegotten creature ever to wriggle across the face of the Earth. This was a child with a maggot farm. A roach ranch. A pet slug. “I think I love him,” I told Helen one day. “Let’s not get carried away,” she replied.

The morning I met Martina Coventry, Toby was off at Camp Ditch-the-Kids in the untamed outskirts of Kant Borough. He sent us a picture postcard every day, a routine that, I realize in retrospect, was a kind of smuggling operation; once Toby got home, the postcards would all be there, waiting to join his vast collection.

To wit:

Dear Mom and Dad: Today we learned how to survive in case we’re ever lost in the woods—what kind of bark to eat and stuff. Counselor Rick says he never heard of anybody actually using these skills. Your son, Toby.

And also:

Dear Mom and Dad: There’s a big rat trap in the pantry here, and guess who always sneaks in at night and finds out what animal got caught and then sets it free? Me! Counselor Rick says we’re boring. Your son, Toby.

It was early, barely 7 A.M., but already Booze Before Breakfast was jammed to its crumbling brick walls. I made my way through a conglomeration of cigarette smoke and beer fumes, through frank sweat and honest halitosis. A jukebox thumped out Probity singing “Copingly Ever After.” The saloon keeper, Jimmy Breeze, brought me the usual—a raspberry Danish and a Bloody Mary—setting them on the splintery cedar bar. I told him I had no cash but would pay him tomorrow. This was Veritas. I would.

I spotted only one free chair—at a tiny, circular table across from a young woman whose wide face and plump contours boasted, to this beholder’s eye, the premier sensuality of a Rubens model. Peter Paul Rubens was much on my mind just then, for I’d recently criticized not only
The Garden of Love
but also
The Raising of the Cross.

“Come here often?” she asked as I approached, my plastic-wrapped Danish poised precariously atop my drink. Her abundant terra-cotta hair was compacted into a modest bun. Her ankle-length green dress was made of guileless cambric.

I sat down. “Uh-huh,” I mumbled, pushing aside the sugar bowl, the napkin dispenser, and the woman’s orange peels to make room for my Bloody and Danish. “I always stop in on my way to the Wittgenstein.”

“You a critic?” Even in the endemic gloom of Booze Before Breakfast, her smooth, unpainted skin glowed.

I nodded. “Jack Sperry.”

“Can’t say I’m impressed. It doesn’t take much intellectual prowess, does it?”

She could be as honest as she liked, provided I could watch her voluptuous lips move. “What line are
you
in?” I asked.

“I’m a writer.” Her eyes expanded: limpid, generous eyes, the cobalt blue of Salome’s So-So Contraceptive Cream. “It has its dangers, of course. There’s always that risk of falling into…what’s it called?”

“Metaphor?”

“Metaphor.”

There were no metaphors in Veritas. Metaphors were lies. Flesh could be
like
grass, but it never
was
grass. Use a metaphor in Veritas, and your conditioning instantly possessed you, hammering your skull, searing your heart, dropping you straight to hell in a bucket of pain. So to speak.

“What do you write?” I asked.

“Doggerel. Greeting-card messages, advertising jingles, inspirational verses like you see in—”

“Sell much?”

A grimace distorted her luminous face. “I should say I’m an
aspiring
writer.”

“I’d like to read some of your doggerel,” I asserted. “And I’d like to have sex with you,” I added, wincing at my candor. It wasn’t easy being a citizen.

Her grimace intensified.

“Sorry if I’m being offensive,” I said. “Am I being offensive?”

“You’re being offensive.”

“Offensive only in the abstract, or offensive to you personally?”

“Both.” She slid a wedge of orange into her wondrous mouth. “Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“A good marriage?”

“Pretty good.”
To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to the degree that these mischievous and sentimental abstractions possess any meaning:
Helen and I had opted for a traditional ceremony. “Our son is terrific. I think I love him.”

“If we had an affair”—a furtive smile—“wouldn’t you feel guilty?”

“I’ve never cheated.” An affair, I mused. Scary stuff. “Guilt? Yes, of course.” I sipped my Bloody Mary. “I believe I could tolerate it.”

“Well, you can drop the whole fantasy, Mr. Sperry,” the young woman said, a declaration that filled me with an odd mixture of relief and disappointment. “You can put the entire thought out of your—”

“Call me Jack.” I unpackaged my Danish; the wrapper dragged away clots of vanilla icing like a Band-Aid pulling off a scab. “And you’re…?”

“Martina Coventry, and at the moment I feel only a mild, easily controlled desire to copulate with you.”

“‘At the moment,’” I repeated, marveling at how much ambiguity could be wedged into a prepositional phrase. In a fashionably gauche move I licked the icing off the Danish wrapper
(The Mendacity of Manners
had recently hit the top slot on the
Times
best-seller list). “Will you show me your doggerel?” I asked.

“It’s bad doggerel.”

“Doggerel is by definition bad.”

“Mine’s worse.”

“Please.”

Martina’s pliant features contracted into a bemused frown. ‘There’s a great deal of sexual tension occurring between us now, wouldn’t you say?”

“Correct.”

She reached into her purse and pulled out a folded sheet of crisp white typing paper, pressing it into my palm with a sheepish smile.

First came a Valentine’s Day message.

I find you somewhat interesting,

You’re not too short or tall,

And if you’d be my Valentine,

I wouldn’t mind at all.

A birthday greeting followed.

Roses drop dead,

Violets do too,

With each day life gets shorter,

Happy birthday to you.

“I have no illusions about earning a living from my doggerel,” said Martina, understating the case radically. “What I’d really like is a career writing political speeches. My borough rep almost hired me to run his re-election campaign. ‘Cold in person, but highly efficient’—that was the slogan I worked out. In the end, his girlfriend got the job. Do you like my verses, Jack?”

“They’re awful.”

“I’m going to burn them.” Martina kissed an orange slice, sucked out the juice.

“No. Don’t. I’d like to have them.”

“You would? Why?”

“Because I’m anticipating you’ll write something else on the page.” From my shirt pocket I produced a ballpoint pen
(Paradox Pen Company
—
Random Leaks Common).
“Like, say, the information I’ll need to find you again.”

“So we can have an affair?”

“The thought terrifies me.”

“You
are
fairly attractive,” Martina observed, taking the pen. Indeed. It’s the eyebrows that do it, great bushy extrusions suggesting a predatory mammal of unusual prowess—wolf, bear, leopard—though they draw plenty of support from my straight nose and square jaw. Only when you get to my chin, a pointy, pimply knoll forever covered with stubble, does the illusion of perfection dissolve. “I’m warning you, Jack, I have my own Smith and Wesson Liberalstopper.” She signed her name in bold curlicues across the bottom of the page, added her address and phone number. “Try to force yourself on me, and I’ll shoot to kill.”

I lifted the doggerel from the table, flicking a Danish crumb from the word
Valentine.
“Funny—you’ve
almost
told a lie here. Roses don’t drop dead, they—”

“They wither.”

“If I were you, Martina, I wouldn’t take such chances with my sanity.”

“If you were me,” she replied, “you
would
take such chances with your sanity, because otherwise you’d be someone else.”

“True enough,” I said, pocketing Martina Coventry’s stultifying verses.

* * * *

Galileo Square was clogged with traffic, a dense metallic knot betokening a delay of at least twenty minutes. I flipped on my Plymouth Adequate’s radio, tuned in WTRU, and began waiting it out. Eighteenth Street, Nineteenth Street, Twentieth…

“…fact that I accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar kickback during the Avelthorpe Tariff Scandal should not, I feel, detract from my record on education, the environment, and medical…”

Twenty-fifth Street, Twenty-sixth Street, Twenty-seventh…

“…for while we do indeed divert an enormous amount of protein that might help relieve world hunger, the psychological benefits of dogs and cats have been proved almost beyond the shadow of a…”

Thirtieth Street, Thirty-first…

“…displeased with the unconscionable quantities of sugar we were putting into children’s cereals, and so we’re happy to announce a new policy of…”

At last: the Wittgenstein Museum, a one-story brick building sprawling across a large concrete courtyard, flanked by a Brutality Squad station on the north side and a café called the Dirty Dog on the south. The guard, a toothy, clean-cut young man with a Remington Meta-penis strapped to his waist, waved me through the iron gates. I headed for the parking lot. Derrick Popkes of the Egyptian Relics Division had beaten me to my usual space, usurping it with his Ford Sufficient, so I had to drive all the way to the main incinerator and park by the coal bin.

“Channel your violent impulses in a salutary direction—become a Marine. Purge your natural tendency toward—” I silenced the radio, killed the engine.

What had life been like during the Age of Lies? How had the human mind endured a world where politicians misled, advertisers overstated, clerics exaggerated, women wore makeup, and people professed love at the drop of a tropological hat? How had humanity survived the epoch we’d all read about in the history books, those nightmare centuries of casuistic customs and fraudulent rites? The idea confounded me. It rattled me to the core. The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: staggering.

“You’re late,” observed the chief curator, bald and portly Arnold Cook, as I strolled into the front office. “Heavy traffic?”

“Yes.” I slid my card into the time clock, felt the jolt of its mechanism imprinting my tardiness. “Bumper to bumper.” Every so often, you’d experience an urge to stop short of total candor. But then suddenly it would come: a dull neurological throb that, if you didn’t tell the whole truth, would quickly bloom into a psychosomatic explosion in your skull. “I also wasted a lot of time getting a young woman’s address.”

“Do you expect to copulate with her?” Mr. Cook asked, following me to the changing room. Early morning, yet already he was coated with characteristic sweat, droplets that, as I once told him in a particularly painful exercise of civic duty, put me in mind of my cat’s litter box.

Denim overalls drooped from the lockers. I selected a pair that looked about my size. “Adultery is deceitful,” I reminded the curator.

“So is fidelity,” he replied. “In its own way.”

“In its own way,” I agreed, donning my overalls.

I followed a nonliteral rat-maze of dark, dusty corridors to my workshop. It was packed. As usual, the items I was supposed to analyze that day divided equally into the authentic
objets d’artifice
unearthed by the archaeologists and the ersatz output of the city’s furtive malcontents—its “dissemblers.” For every statue from ancient Greece, there was a clumsy forgery. For every Cezanne, a feeble imitation. For every eighteenth-century novel, the effluvium of a vanity press.