Tintagel
Tintagel
Paul Cook
An [
e-reads
] Book
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1981 by Paul Cook
First e-reads publication 1999
www.e-reads.com
ISBN 0-7592-0080-7
Author Biography
Paul Cook worked at the Arizona State University as an acquisitions librarian for five years, where most of his time was spent doing research in the Noble Science Library. He currently works in the English Department as a Senior Lecturer. He has written several novels, including TINTAGEL, THE ALEJANDRA VARIATIONS, and FORTRESS ON THE SUN.
Other works by Paul Cook
The Alejandra Variations*
The Engines of Dawn
On the Rim of Mandala
Fortress on the Sun
Duende Meadow
Halo
*also available in e-reads editions
Author's Acknowledgment
I think it goes without saying that all of the pieces of music mentioned in this novel actually do exist, with the exception of Shostakovich's
Sixteenth Symphony
. Upon his death in 1975, Shostakovich is believed to have left behind drafts of two movements which would have become his 16th symphony had he lived to complete it. That it is in G Minor is a fabrication of my own.
I would also like to mention that in the three years it has taken to write
Tintagel
Roy Harris, Samuel Barber, and Howard Hanson died. We don't have too many left.
On a lighter note, I would like to extend my appreciation to Pete Zorn, Jim Hawks, and my father, Harlin Cook, for the music they've shared with me over the years. Much of
Tintagel
, as a consequence, is due to them. And lastly, I would like to thank Scott Card for his enthusiasm and Corrinne Hales for her friendship during my stay in Salt Lake City. They both made my life with Uncle Fudd a little more endurable.
PAUL H. COOK
Salt Lake City, Utah, 1981
For Paul and Suzy Kinsey
and Mike Williams
Music
What are you playing, boy? Through the gardens it went
like many steps, like whispering commands.
What are you playing, boy? See, your soul
is entangled in the rods of the syrinx
.
Why do you lure her? The sound is like a prison
where loitering and languishing she lies;
strong is your life, and yet your song is stronger,
against your longing leaning sobbingly.—
Give her a silence, that the soul may softly
turn home into the flooding and the fullness
in which she lived, growing, wide and wise,
ere you constrained her in your tender playings
.
How she already wearier beats her wings:
Thus will you, dreamer, waste her flight away,
no more may carry her across my walls
when I shall call her in to the delights
.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
From
Translation From the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
, ed. by M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1938.
From
Sound And Symbol
by Victor Zukerkandl
It has been said that inner and outer world meet in melodies. It would be more to the point to say "penetrate each other"; a "meeting" of inner and outer world occurs in any experience of our senses. The mode of the meeting is different, however, when it occurs between physical things and our eyes or hands, or between tones and the ear. Eye or hand keeps the physical thing that I meet away from me, makes me conscious of distance, reinforces the separating barrier. Tone penetrates into me, overflows the barrier, makes me conscious not of distance but of communication, even of participation. Our current schema "inner-outer world" is derived solely from one type of encounter—that brought about by the eye and the hand. William James warned—and he had anything rather than music in mind—" 'Inner' and 'outer' are not coefficients with which experiences come to us aboriginally stamped, but are rather results of a later classification performed by us for particular needs." The needs are those of so-called practical life, our active and passive encounter with the physical world. Only in this encounter do "inner" and "outer," I and the world, face each other like two mutually exclusive precincts on either side of an impassable dividing line. But if what we encounter is nonphysical, purely dynamic—as it happens to be the case of musical tones—the quality "out there" is replaced by the quality "from-out-there-toward-me-and-through-me." Instead of setting off two precincts from each other and presenting them as mutually exclusive, this encounter causes them to penetrate each other, participate in each other.— To think of the musical view of the universe as a bridge between the scientific and the religious views is not sheer nonsense.
From Victor Zukerkandl,
Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World
. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956.
"We do not compose;
we are composed
."
—Gustav Mahler, 1904
Table of Contents
Tintagel
Chapter One
Overture
It was all a question of acceptance.
As his patient burro cleared the rise of the sparsely wooded hill, the old Chinaman realized that sooner or later the veil that blocked his memory would lift and everything would be explained.
Everything
. Until then, all he could do was accept his situation, like accepting the lazy breeze that accompanied him on his journey across the taiga, or those beautiful yellow-black finches that darted between the gnarled evergreen pines.
The old man shivered just as his burro reached the top of the dirt road that breached the hill. But his shivering had nothing to do with the growing coolness of the afternoon as the day waned toward dusk.
He was ill, and he knew it. The disease his body harbored, he realized, was slowly dying out, like a beast in its final death-throes, weakly striking out with only a hint of its former desperate energy. But what it was he suffered from, he didn't exactly know. Blood rushed into his brain, his vision momentarily blurred. A chill had settled about his shoulders like a cloak. His nerves suddenly jolted with the machinegun-fire of tiny spurts of uncontrollable electricity, and the muscles along his spine, and on up to his frail shoulders, jumped and shuddered.
Then came the voices, and the music.
How long this had been going on, he really didn't know. But the music seemed to be with him always. And returning to full consciousness from the grip of this partial amnesia of his was like a fog slowly lifting from the countryside. Only a few details at a time came into focus, and still many of those details remained very much in doubt.
The disease not only affected his body, but seemed to reach very deep into his preconscious mind as well. And just what the voices were that queued in as the music faded, he had absolutely no idea: a million yammering voices, in all the known languages, and some unknown. He felt weak, often nauseated. But as he rode upon the sturdy back of his burro from town to town, he tried to search for an answer to a greater curiosity than his own personal illness.
For weeks now, there had been no people in the villages he passed. The provinces were no longer crowded, teeming. The roads were completely empty, and the woods were filled with only the voices of birds and cries of an occasional beast.
China was empty of people.
And this notion led him to believe that he was insane. Especially when the voices badgered him from within, and the peaceful silences of the Shensi forests battered him from without, for he knew that this was simply not the way things were meant to be.
But rather than ask the one thousand questions that his mind demanded, he merely accepted the situation for the time being. He trundled along the deserted roads and highways, hoping for an end to his search.
He shivered again as the music lurked in the darkest recesses of his mind. It was like the wind through silk curtains. Even without thinking—merely feeling the pulses of energy in his tired body—he knew that something was wrong about all of this. Frightfully wrong.
It seemed so strange that the sky over the industrial regions did not sag with chemical waste, that the air did not burn his lungs. It was equally strange to him that the streams he passed ran ferocious and free. There were even no dams for the furlongs of rice paddies; no dam for the megawatts needed to run an ever-vigilant Republic. Moreover, there were no high-tension wires strung up like cat's-cradles across the provinces. The highways were empty of the common flatbed trucks loaded with industrial equipment, or the tractors lumbering like insects off to harvest. There were no steam- or propane-powered automobiles filling the countryside with the interrupted energy of a growing nation. So much was missing.
The old man coughed, and the burro halted, feeling its rider shake in the seizure of his mysterious ailment.
To calm his mind, the old Chinaman closed his eyes and recalled his Buddhist mantra. His nostrils flared as he drew in the refreshing, bitter air. Soon, perhaps tonight, it would snow. And the snow would fall clean and white, and it would cover the province for hundreds of kilometers and the old man knew that no human foot would trample it. In a land of over three billion inhabitants, there were simply no longer any inhabitants. No one.
Slowly, he breathed.
Somehow, intuitively, he knew that as he inhaled a breath of clean air, that his mantra, and his
pranayam
, his breathing, were the key to all of this. He didn't quite know why. But the concentration on the breathing and his mantra—complex and long in its derivative Mandarin—drew out the voices, and then quieted them. And soon, when he was relaxed enough, the music would vanish as well, and everything would be all right. For a while.
But for the moment he let it all pass from his mind. All the questions, in the end, had their answers. Several kilometers down the road from the hillside, he could see a modest, thatched hut that would be his way station for the night. It stood alone in a gentle clearing. The thought of a warm meal and a place to pass the long night pushed everything aside.
And tonight it wouldsnow. That was something he could easily accept, given the circumstances.
Chapter Two
Orchestral Suite: From Israel
Paul Ben-Haim
Rising from the floor of his workroom, Francis Lanier felt the effects of Liu Shan's Syndrome wearing off. He shuddered slightly, fingering the small transceiver at his right earlobe, switching off the remaining strains of Bela Bartok's
Concerto for Orchestra
. He looked down at the man who lay curled in a fetal position before him.
The room was dark, the floor a cool onyx tile. The walls of his workroom were lined with an efficient fiberglass sound-proofing. No furniture of any kind obtruded.
"Senator Randell," Lanier bent down to the man, who lay asleep, effectively drugged.
Randell, a large man, moaned softly in his stupor. His shirt was torn somewhat and grass stains covered his pants where Lanier had brought him down.
Lanier stepped over to the intercom on the wall. Still uneasy from the transition, his legs shook. He leaned against the wall.
"Christy," he called to his secretary in the outer room. "We're back. Are the medics here?"
"Yes, Fran," came Christy's voice, over the intercom, relieved. "We're all here."
The overhead fluorescent lights blazed on and the door to the workroom opened noiselessly and Christy entered. She was trailed by two medics who had brought with them a collapsible metal stretcher. In a very businesslike manner, the medics laid Randell out and lifted him onto it. Christy glanced down at the large puddle of blood that Francis Lanier's boots and clothing made.
