hard deadlines

State of the Archive panel at ELO/AI

Scores of practitioners and theorists of electronic text assembled at Brown University this weekend for the fourth annual conference of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). The conference, whose theme was "Archive and Innovate" was a four-day round of papers, installations, readings, and a Saturday night banquet celebrating the contributions of Rhode Island's own star of American letters, Robert Coover.

During the conference, ELO announced the release of their new electronic literature directory, in keeping with one of the main themes, the problem of archiving electronic texts.

One highlight was a panel on archiving featuring Deena Larsen, Stephanie Strickland, Will Hansen, and Marjorie Luesebrink, talking about the challenges of determining just what constitutes an archive for a digital fiction, and the very real issues with operating systems and software changing out from under efforts at preservation. Respondant Elli Mylonas of Brown showed a very promising start, the Brown Digital Repository, and Hansen talked about efforts underway at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

I missed the panel by Jessica Pressman, Mark Marino, and Jeremy Douglass which comprised three approaches to reading a digital text, but had a chance to talk with them later. Jeremy's use of ImageJ, a tool for manipulating 3D medical images like CAT scans and MRIs, as a way of slicing a time-based image stream was just mind-bendingly innovative. Imagine taking a feature film and treating the entire two hours of frames as a three-d object, then taking slices through it. Amazing.

Okay, to be truthful, the real highlight for me was the "unconference" area that Denna Larsen had set up outside the main presentation room. People could just hang out there and talk in between — and, okay, sometimes during — the official panels, and it was an amazing primordial soup of people just dropping in: gearheads, poets, filmmakers, and literary theorists, all in the mix. Got a chance to see folks that I haven't since the digital lit conference I went to, which we all realized was about ten years ago.

There are a bunch of pix up on a Flickr group, and you can get a surprisingly good sense of the flow of the conference from the Twitter stream.

When we were invited to the wedding of sf writer Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor, I immediately wanted to write them a story as a wedding present. I know, I know, it takes big brass ones to think of doing such a thing, but I did. And they seem to have liked it.

Cory has posted a very kind link to the story — which I just released under CC license — on BoingBoing.

The story lives over on the Fiction tab. Some adult themes; not for the kiddies.

Full disclosure: I've had the privilege of workshopping with Cory in addition to having an awesome time at their wedding.

Author's note:
Actually, this one is not so much a story as an occasional fiction, written for a very specific audience, halfway between homage and pastiche and larded with sly winks and intertextual references. My plan after using it for its intended purpose was to make only the most cursory attempt at selling it (as one is obligated to, if one follows Heinlen's Five Rules) and then cc-license it, which is the only appropriate thing to do with something written as a wedding present for Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor.

You can read it here or download as rich text here.

Also available in epub format thanks to Dino Morelli (dino@ui3.info)

What? You haven't read Cory Doctorow's work? Don't waste another minute here. Go download some of his amazing stories.

(Nothing But) Flowers by John G. McDaid is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.torvex.com.

(Nothing But) Flowers
by John G. McDaid

For Cory and Alice

"By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie."
-Gerald Manley Hopkins
Spring and Fall, to a Young Child

Every afternoon the rains, as they had for generations, swept in from the saltlands to the west and drove the scavengers into the shelter of the ruins ringing the lagoon. The sky grayed, and wind, pungent with ozone and canebrake, flung stinging flights of droplets into the dank concrete holes.

The Fox Man ran from squat to squat, warning. “Big storm coming.” He wore an outfit of scraggy orange fur, scabrous and holed, and as he pranced past, fat raindrops spattered his costume to a blotchy patchwork. Women set out plastic jugs, gathered utensils, and shoveled coals from cooking fires into logs to hustle indoors. Naked children danced in the puddles.

Donal paid no mind to either the storm or the Fox Man, but he always had to smile at that fancy outfit, in a World of loincloths and grass skirts. To Donal, the costume looked more like a dog, though for effect the Fox Man -- or someone who owed him a favor, he was no Hunter -- had hung a poorly preserved fox head from a leather necklace. All Donal wore was a deerskin belt in which was tucked a roughly hammered machete. His dozen braves followed behind like ducklings, spread out in a widening wake; the first rank had knives, as befitting his sidemen, but Donal alone carried a blade longer than his hand.

Donal and his pack had come in on the south side of the canal, and trooped past three ruins before he split off to his squat in the center. The two-story brick building was still standing -- unlike some of the neighboring metal structures which had long ago rusted and collapsed inward -- and while parts of the heavy stone roof and windows were gone, generations had fashioned replacements with tree trunks and grasses to maintain a weatherproof refuge. The second floor, with its huge rotted gathering place, was unstable; they never used it. But there was space for dozens of families downstairs, in the low oval room ringed with twelve pillars past which hung tattered remnants of pictures and signs in the script of the World builders.

The squat’s position, its construction, and these ancient artifacts on the walls, gave it pride of place among folk at the lagoon. The squatters defended it ferociously, and Donal was its leading fighter.

He paused in the portico, blinking water out of his eyes, watching stragglers run for cover and canoes out on the lagoon pulling for shore. He could pick out the foreign visitors -- outsiders -- wandering aimlessly, sight-seers among the ruins even in this far corner of the World. Just a handful; nowhere near the number over at the Castle.

Donal wiped rain off his body, threaded effortlessly through the families crouched on pallets of palm leaves and grasses around the big room. A dim shaft of green stormlight picked out the faces watching from deep in the recesses, and as he walked by, he saw flickering shadows across their troubled eyes.

The rain was nothing new; storms rolled through predictably every afternoon, tiny mirrors of the much larger shift in the seasons. Each wheel of the year the rains started a little earlier; the bogs drained more slowly. The cultivated lands ran riot with grasses and weeds. The horses had nowhere to run. New trackways had to be built across the fens to the Castle each spring.

Donal found his way to the tiny pallet he shared with his five-year-old brother, a tiny square against the wall opposite the doorway, beneath one of the frayed signs of the Builders. He was used to the hunting, but today his gang had traveled all the way down by the World Tree, clearing paths and setting snares, and his shoulders ached from the daylong exertion. He missed his brother, left to be watched over by the other families in the squat when the work was dangerous. Donal trusted they would never leave him alone. Donal laid his machete at the foot of the mat and retrieved the small leather bag that held his most prized possessions, tied it again to his belt.

Ewen was waiting for him. He somehow managed to stay clean among the general filth in the squat. Ewen leaned against the wall, knees pulled up to his chest, looking exactly the way Donal remembered him. Donal was always struck by his skin, unnaturally white like their mother’s had been.

#

"Ergot," chirped Ewan, pointing. In front of him sat a lap-top memory-box with fragrant tufts of greenery poking from its partitioned slots. It was a rough-hewn affair, knocked together from scraps of wood by the acolytes of Emic. The wise women came by with fresh bits of plants and stories to jog memories, mostly of the elderly who tended the gardens and foraged for nuts and berries. Donal thought they must like his brother to give him one of the boxes; it certainly couldn’t be for him. He didn’t care about memory. Not remembering things, frankly, made it easier to do what was necessary.

Ewan, on the other hand, was young. The forgetting had not fully gripped him, and the whole world, nameable and retrievable, whirled incessantly at the tips of his fingers and tongue. Donal could almost remember what it was like to remember. Sometimes Ewan helped him, prompting, a whisper in his ear.

"Amanita muscaria!" cheeped Ewan.

Most children without mothers did nowhere near this well. Whatever the forgetting was, those fed at their mother’s breast managed to fight it off for a year or two. Ewen was lucky for someone who had only been nursed occasionally by kind women in the squat, with Donal his sole caretaker since their mother died giving birth.

At least they had been able to eat her. When the wise women came to cut her up, while there was sadness at her passing with child, they found nothing bad.

His father, unfortunately, was a different story. He had been killed by a wolf on a hunting party when Donal was Ewen’s age. When the women opened him, he was full of tumors. It was a troubling sadness; he had shown no sign, had been vigorous and healthy, but then he was dead, Ewen was now the responsible one, and they could not even share his father’s flesh, leaving it instead for the wolves. May they be poisoned and die, Donal thought.

“Banisteria Caapi,” Ewen pointed in the box. Donal smiled at him, nodded. “Banisteria Caapi,” he repeated, scrunching up leaves so they could both take a nap.

He had slept under the same faded signs (“Letters,” Ewen constantly reminded him) -- arrow head-forked branch-standing zigzag -- since he was a child. His parents parents had staked out a the space not long after the dawn of the World, and it was the only home he had ever known. He drifted to sleep with the reassuring smells of sweat and wood smoke, lulled by the spatter and drip of rain through the ceiling.

#

When he awoke it was dark. He rolled over, grabbed his machete, and headed out back to pee. The reek of fermenting night soil was like a soft wet fist in his nose. A row of trenches marched off across the field behind the squat, each turned over to start a new one as they filled. Donal thought it was past time.

Back in the main room, the cooks had been working in their huge pot, one left over from the World Builders, which tonight held a bubbling stew of fish and late summer vegetables. Then it was time for everyone to come out of their squats and join hands for the evening chant, while six boats with priestesses of Emic circled the lagoon carrying their fires. Their acolytes, in dark robes and veils, set up on the paths, ladling drinks from black cauldrons. Donal knocked his back quickly; the taste was bitter, and almost immediately started up a vague itching sensation behind his eyes; within a few minutes, everything seemed to get wider, as if the world was being squashed. It was not an unpleasant sensation, and he walked with Ewen down to the lagoon, finding the hands of people next to him almost automatically.

Out of the earliest mist of childhood, one of the few things Donal could remember was this service, repeated, every night. Even so, he would still find himself forgetting the words if he didn’t concentrate, as the sound of the big drums began from the squat next door.

“One World,” came the chant. “One World for all.”

The priestesses were spinning flaming balls on slings, and lofting them high to fall, hissing, into the lagoon.

“One moon. One sun. One World to hold the fallen sparks.”

Donal joined in as he watched the flaming arcs over the lagoon with languid fascination. The chanting, well, that was just words. He believed far more in his machete and the men who followed him than in anything the priestesses said. The Castle was no more and no less than the rest of the World. Older, perhaps, but it held no interest for him.

Occasionally, the high priestess -- Emic herself -- would show up at the ceremony, wearing her sleek black costume and grotesque mask, but tonight was not one of those times, and, a bit disappointed, the group slowly dispersed.

When he got back to his squat, a woman and child were lying on his pallet. The woman looked middle-aged -- but so, of course, did everyone, once they were older than about Donal’s sixteen years.

“Out,” he said. “My space.” His neighbors, filtering in, were dimly visible in the torchlight from the entrance. A murmuring began, and groups jiggled and poked each other, drifting over to watch.

“My girl and I need a place to sleep. We were in the Volcano squat, but your gang has taken over. They’re throwing out older women.”

Donal knew this. A group of his junior squad members lived in the Volcano ruin, and they had been complaining about some of the dispossessed who had not been obliging company.

“Not my problem. This is my space.”

“My daughter and I need a place to sleep. We thought you might be willing to share.”

“No. Get out.”

“I knew your mother. She and I used to dig for shining wire together as children. I used to take care of you sometimes. Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

“Please. We could cook for you. You have two whole pallets,” begged the woman. “What do you need all that space for?”

“For my brother, Ewen.”

She looked at him. Her child, a smudged-faced girl of four or five, was half-huddled behind her, wide-eyed, looking at where Donal had his hand on Ewen’s head, then back to his face.

The woman saw she was gaining no ground, changed tactics. “You could take me as a mate,” she said, shifting the front of her grass skirt.

Ewen turned away with an “Eeew.”

Donal grabbed the woman’s arm, pulled her to her feet. The little girl screamed.

She slapped his face, a stinging blow that made his left eye water. He felt a trickle of blood in his eyebrow; he hadn’t seen she was wearing a ring. She curled to deliver a kick to his stones, but he pushed her back, and she fell, off balance, against the wall.

Out came the machete.

He raised the blade, started to swing, then realized she was hunching over, protecting her daughter. At the last instant, he lunged forward, sending not the blade but his fist on the matted fiber handle into the woman’s face. Blood ran from her nose and she whimpered softly. Gathered up her girl, limped off his mat.

“You are a crazy evil fuck,” she said. “And you...” she turned on the squatters who ringed them, watching. “You should all be ashamed. Using someone like this. You are animals. This land is not fit for humans.”

She took her daughter by the hand and left.

“Hard fucking core,” someone muttered. Neighbors patted him on the back, but he did not feel reassured.

“Come on, Ewen,” he said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

He saw that the Fox Man had slipped in and was watching from the shadows. By tomorrow, this would be all over the World.

#

When Ewen had fallen asleep, Donal rolled over and coupled with the woman on the next pallet, quickly and efficiently. She seemed to enjoy it, and her husband was used to this and seemed not to mind. Although, Donal guessed, he hardly could have said anything if he did.

#

The next day, Donal let his junior braves go off to check the traps. He had enough of a reputation, and in the World, reputation was all that mattered. He made sure to be there with them for the hard work of clearing brush, but he was a good boss who let them take credit for kills and bring meat back to their squats. Instead, he wandered over the trackway to watch the action at the front gate. It was partly idle mooning over the fine blades on display, and partly hope that something violent and entertaining might happen.

It was a typical morning at the Castle. A line of outsiders, families mostly, milled in the damp, steamy sunshine waiting to get into the grounds. They had to pass through gates where Castle guards were inspecting for weapons, poking through bags and under skirts of the farmers and foreigners, and taking their trinkets and goods in trade for admission. Even in decay, their Castle was the tallest building in a week’s walk. Outsiders were willing to offer perfectly good food and trinkets for a visit, even though there was no guarantee they would get to see Emic.

The sun was only up about four fingers, and already the air was humid and stifling. In addition to the ever-present mosquitoes, biting black flies hovered, lured perhaps by the crusting cut on Donal’s face. These flies were new. Every year, it seemed, there were more flying pests, bigger and nastier. Though, he thought, if he were a bug, he might see things differently. The insane plant growth made it a paradise for insects. He wished he had ten arms and ten machetes.

Donal elbowed into the line at the gate, silencing outsider muttering with a hand on his weapon, and spend the wait watching the Castle gang strip and harass anyone who put up a fuss. Once again he envied those lucky enough to be born in this part of the World: they made sure everyone on the line had wicked blades. There was no local smith who matched the fine metalwork of the village to the northeast who ripped and sawed apart the fallen hulks of their strange, curving buildings and melted them down. Donal had made the trip to take delivery of his machete, and had seen the grimy knife makers, with their leather aprons and huge muscular arms amid the perpetual smell of hard charcoal smoke.

Arming everyone with such weapons cost a lot in trade, but when there was trouble at the gate, it was over quickly. And on those nights, they ate like kings.

“Can we go see Emic?” Ewen interrupted his thoughts.

“Ewen, it’s really hard to...”

“Pleeeease?”

“Okay. We can try.”

#

The Castle had clearly once been a serene dream of perfection, dark stone blocks with pale bricks inset in attractive, rhythmic patterns; all meticulously worked, craftsmanship of the highest order. There must have been pinnacles and banners, fences and ironwork, a riot of decoration, and it had surely been home to a very important royal family. But all that was not stone had been eaten away by plants and the perpetual drip of water. The Castle they approached now, amid outsiders chittering in strange accents and pointing at everything, was a tumbled ruin, slumped in the soil and grasses of many seasons. Vines and creepers covered much of the visible structure, some native, some planted by the priestesses.

“Yagé,” Ewen pointed.

They seemed to be in luck. A group was gathering beneath the surviving balcony fronting the moat. An acolyte dressed in a tattered green costume was doing a familiar call-and-response with the crowd, something Donal had no use for, but Ewen seemed to find comforting. She was clearly meant to be some kind of bug, the costume stuffed and rounded so that only her hands and feet stuck out.

The green bug worked the crowd into a soft frenzy, then left them to wait, a sea of sweaty faces with anxious eyes, eager for a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the priestess.
Donal had seen her, many times, so he was prepared, but the outsiders in the crowd gasped and recoiled. Emic wore an outfit of black fabric -- actual, made-by-the-World-builders fabric, patched and stitched meticulously. It was smooth and slick and glinted when she moved, dancing and leaping around the balcony.

And then, there was the mask.

It covered her whole head and was easily twice as big, with an enormous painted face, huge eyes, and a gaping, smiling mouth. It had always seemed to Donal the face of a small mammal; not a fox, but a skunk, perhaps, or a possum. There were seams on the side of the head where something -- horns, maybe? -- had been attached. How long ago? He marveled at how the priestesses had managed to keep this one icon in pristine condition. He could understand why the pilgrims felt
the magic in it, even if he did not.

"Estamos refugiados en una zona de apagon.” The priestess, in a high, squeaky voice, rained down nonsense from the balcony. “Nuestras casas desarraigados, arrastrando raíces profundas de concreta, fibrosas con tubos y conectores, giran y saltan a las fluctuaciones del campo de gravitacion.  La gente tienen miedo.” She droned on like that, and Donal found himself scanning the crowd, idly yet thoroughly, to see if anyone unsavory might have snuck through the front gate.

There had been a small group, armed with pieces of metal no larger than their fingernails but sharpened enough to cut, and they had slipped in and managed to kill a handful of guests and Castle workers before they were hacked to bits. The memory was bitterly fresh. But no one in the group of soft, milling sheep around Donal seemed like a threat. Eventually, the priestess stopped and the crowd drifted off.

“Happy?” Donal asked Ewen, who just smiled.

Donal took the long way home, following the north bank of the canal, and then around past the sunken Dome, over to the Volcano lodge to check on his wild boys. Even though it was only mid-morning, there was a group huddled off in the rear of the squat, beneath the decayed altar under the faded image of a volcano. They had clearly been into the fermented shine already, and there was a good deal of laughter, metal clanging, and shouts of “Glory be to steel!” He could hear cats, mating loudly off in the dank recess of the building. Conscious of Ewen next to him, Donal paused at the front door to the hall, listening to the revelers, invisible past mounds of collapsed ceiling and the squatters’ rough lean-tos. He had just decided to skip it and head home when suddenly, there was a figure beside him. It was Fox.

“Donal. You are wanted.”

“Who?”

“The Keoh wants to see you.”

The squatters work -- the hunting, cooking, farming -- was purely ad hoc, but there was a loose network of bosses, rolling up to the Keoh who decided all the practical things the priestesses did not. Fox answered to him, and so, ultimately, did Donal.

“Hunh,” said Donal. “Of course, I serve the Keoh. But I don’t know where to go.”
Fox slid a rough fiber sack from inside his costume. “On your head,” he gestured. “I’ll take you.”

“What about Ewen?” said Donal.

“Oh,” smiled the Fox, “The Keoh isn’t worried about him.”

#

Donal’s childhood friend, Wally, who had gone off to become a monk, had often tried to explain the alphabet to him. Even as a kid, Wally had seemed like a grownup; the forgetting hit him as it did everyone, but he seemed, if not immune, at least less susceptible. His recall astonished Donal. He couldn’t actually remember the alphabet -- such a thing was impossible -- but he could recite the letters off a carving. “moon-fork-sun,” Wally had tried to explain to him, pointing to a letter at a time. “Keoh.”

Their paths had slowly diverged after his father’s death, when Donal had to begin hunting. Between that and caring for Ewen, he hadn’t had time for childish things like alphabets. But at least he could recognize the letters for Keoh, and he saw them now over a doorway as the Fox Man removed his hood to reveal a dripping stone tunnel. The walls were florid with white scale and rising spikes of yellow and black mold; the only illumination ragged holes punched in the ceiling. It smelled like the basements of squats around the lagoon, rank and fungal.

Donal looked down at Ewen. He was quiet but seemed unafraid.

Two guards stood before a doorway holding swords. Not the swords of the Castle guards, these were antiques, long, curved blades forged with the skill and craft of the makers of the World.

“Your weapon,” said one of the guards. He surrendered it without question, and the Fox led him in.

Donal had only met the Keoh once before, in passing, during solstice prayer at the lagoon. He wasn’t sure what to expect from the big man’s quarters, but he was not anticipating the wild jumble of mysterious junk. The walls were the poured stone of the builders, but jutting irregularly from the spalling surface was a grid of rotting greenish wire, as if the whole room had been, in the past, some sort of bizarre cage. The space was stuffed to bursting with furniture, life-size dolls with human faces, rusting hunks of metal whose function Donal could neither discern nor guess, boxes, made of gray plastic stamped with ancient letter forms, from which poked colored strands of shining wire. Racks along the wall were packed with a profusion of books that would have had Wally goggle-eyed, yet most were furred with black mold. In one corner, the smudged remains of what had been a tall white cylinder tapering to a narrow point at the top, on which the signs for cup–snake-arrow head were still faintly visible in a faded red.

The Keoh sat in an dark leather chair big enough for two people. He was nearly bald, with a paunch and man-boobs, and had the hard face of a bully, his fixed smile a cheerless grimace. The Keoh wore pants; whether as an affectation for company or as part of his everyday dress, Donal could not tell, but they were of a finely-tanned leather, a few shades lighter than the chair. They could not, possibly, have been comfortable. Next to him was a low table at which sat his scribe -- a monk of Etek, as Donal could see, from his red cape. The Keoh was playing dice with the monk when they entered.

“Donal, sir,” the Fox Man said. Donal nodded, he hoped deferentially.

“So this is our angry young man. My Fox here tells me you are one hardassed motherfucker,” said the Keoh, watching Donal’s face.

“I kill my enemies and eat their brains.”

The Keoh raised an eyebrow. Donal saw the opportunity to use a saying that Wally had drilled into him.

“Some think the soul lives in the heart,” he said. “But I know it lives up here,” he said, pointing to his head.

The Keoh barked a laugh. “You’re all right, my friend. Have a seat. Let’s play.” He shook the dice and waved to the guards at the door. “Food and drink.” He looked at Donal and his eyes twinkled. “Just no... heh heh... you know.” He raised his hand to his head, made a scooping gesture. Laughed. “Yet.”

#

They sat on the floor around the Keoh’s table, dipping handfuls of a fragrant grilled bird-and-vegetable mixture onto plantain leaves. “We can save some time and pass both ways,” said the Keoh, handing a plastic bowl of crayfish. The conversation was superficial and yet, thought Donal, somehow charged with meaning. The thread repeatedly slipped away from him, and he had to keep reminding Ewen to sit up and pay attention to the grownup talk, which drew stares from the scribe. The Keoh was venting about the killers who had snuck through the gates with their tiny knives, and the need for more guards, more people watching. His hate was palpable but puzzling to Donal.

“They must have known they would be killed,” Donal said. “There were only a dozen, and thousands of us.”

“True believers,” said the Keoh. “Against soft outsiders and members of the priestess caste. If we had an army of those...” he drifted off.

“Believers, but in what?” On this, both Donal and Ewen were clueless.

“Henh. Many beliefs out there,” said the Keoh.

“But Emic is the truth,” said Donal hesitantly.

“You think so because you’ve never spent time outside,” said the Keoh. “People clutch their ideas tight as you. In the saltlands around us, some people follow the old gods. Farther south, it gets even stranger.”

“You have been there?”

“Yes,” said the Keoh, wiping his mouth. “I was born there, where the ancients built a river between the oceans. You have no idea about the world outside, Donal, or what you have to protect here.”

Ewen hissed a question in Donal’s ear. “If I can ask,” said Donal. “How is it that you... well ... are so healthy and have traveled so far?”

“Pure chance,” said the Keoh. “Do you see this scar?” He pointed to his neck. “That was a tumor. Had it cut out. I was lucky. Never came back. You know how you can’t predict the number when you roll dice? It’s like that, Donal. People are born with different strengths. Some, like you, are born to be Hunters. The unlucky are born unable to fight off the tumors, and they die. Just by chance, I was born able to remember better than others. And you know what they say, my friend, in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

“But the tumors -- the forgetting – aren’t those caused by the tiny monsters left by the World builders, the little dark men put inside our father’s-father’s-father’s bodies.” The Keoh’s monk laughed. The Keoh, without a word, picked up a stool and hurled it at him.

“There are no monsters. No little dark men,” said the Keoh, still glaring at his monk. “As much as Emic tries to scare you. It is only nature and chance. Trust me, Donal. No horror could be worse than now and real.”

Donal tried to keep what the Keoh was saying in his mind, but he couldn’t. It slipped away like water evaporating after a thunderstorm, turning into wisps of mist, visible briefly, twisting in eddying air currents, then gone, back to the endless blue sky. He realized the Keoh was looking intently at him, gauging his target like a cat readying for a jump.

“I have a mission for you,” said the Keoh, in a calm, measured tone.

“A mission?”

“Those men who attacked the Castle. We found they came from Kisk in the far saltlands on the shore of the Ocean. Their leader calls himself the Colonel, and the people believe that he shows them the true ruins of the World builders, and that our Castle, that everything we call the World, is false.”

Donal was stunned. Kisk? Donal had known people who had traveled to Kisk as outsiders; a week’s journey to the east, just another ruin in a ruined landscape. “But... why would they say that? Look at the age of the World. The materials. The... construction.”

The Keoh held up his hand. “I know, I know. As I said, these are matters of final belief.”

Donal pondered that briefly, shook off his questions, and focused on the task. “I have never been that far, but I thought there were long fingers of Ocean between us and Kisk.”

“We have swift boats, ready to take you within a half day’s walk. Then, of course, you are on your own.”

“And what am I to do when I meet the Colonel?”

“Donal,” smiled the Keoh. “I fully expect you to eat his brain.”

#

Ewen thought it would be a good idea to talk things over with Wally before leaving the next morning, and Donal agreed, so after the Fox Man hooded him and guided him through tunnels and brush (doubling back to disorient him, Donal noted) he was released at the edge of the vegetable patch behind his squat.

The Fox man handed back his machete, shook his enormous, furred head, and for the first time Donal could recall, sounded almost human. “Look at this fucking shit we’re in, man.” He seemed to be about to shake Donal’s hand or hug him. But he just muttered, “Good luck” and faded off into the twilight.

“You have any idea where they had us?” He asked Ewen, who just shrugged. “Never mind. Let’s go see Wally,” and they trudged off through the pumpkins. This late in the season, they were the size of pigs, giant orange mounds dotting the garden, with now-withered creepers shooting off in manic writhing arcs.

Wally lived in the Dome on the far side of the lagoon with the other monks of Etek. In the time of the World builders, it must have been an amazing sight. Even collapsed, enough of the metal framework remained that generations of workers had been able to prop and patch it over, producing an amalgam of wood and metal, silver and sod, with the random chimneys of cook fires poking from the curving thatched surface.

An apprentice dropped his broom and ran off to get the monk while Donal waited at the doorway. The space under the Dome was the largest indoor area in the World, and it was a buzzing, blooming confusion of activity, smells of people and baking, guides shouting to groups of outsiders, the whine of spindles and the rhythmic chop of hammers and axes, an oddly familiar whiff of charcoal and the clang of hammer on anvil, monks leading groups of children in sing-song chants for remembering that Donal had not the vaguest clue about the referents of: “Come over some day, maybe play poker...”

“It’s been a long time,” said Wally. Whenever Donal saw Wally, it was as if the months -- or years –- vanished, and they smiled and hugged. Wally was short, with close-cropped hair and the pale skin of someone who spent their life indoors. He wore pants that ended above the knee and the red cape of his order.

“Sorry I haven’t come by,” said Donal. “You’d think with all the warm weather the hunting would be better. But it means more wolves.”

“And not all with four paws.” Wally frowned. “Ugly business at the Castle a few weeks ago. And how is Ewen?” Wally crouched down to Ewen’s eye level.

As usual, Ewen was shy in the strange environment. Donal listened to his whisper. “He’s fine, thanks. He says he likes your cape.”

“Well,” said Wally, snapping it around himself. “Maybe someday soon we’ll have this weaving process working in a way that scales. Come on over to my room, let’s have a drink.”

For someone raised on a reed mat against the back wall of a crowded squat, the monk’s chambers looked like a castle to Donal. He wondered why the Keoh didn’t live in a place like this instead of a hole in the ground.

“You’d think he’d want windows. No, he likes the security,” said Wally, guiding them to rough hide cushions.

“Did I ask that out loud?” said Donal.

“Yeah, Donal, you did,” said Wally. “I’m used to it. You’ve done it since you were five.” He sliced the wax seal off a fired clay pitcher with the sharpened edge of his ring, and passed a drink that smelled sour and powerful and tasted like jellied fire.

Donal drank, shrugged. He looked around the room, noticing how many books Wally had, and how they all seemed to be in much better shape than the ones in the Keoh’s hole. Ewen was staring at a figure of a monk, unmoving, bent over a table in the corner.

“Don’t worry,” Donal said to Ewen. “It’s not real.”

Wally followed his gaze and laughed. “Oh, right. That’s just Woodrow. I like to imagine that he keeps working even when I sleep.” Above the stuffed figure of the monk with its carved antique head, a panel showed the letters of the alphabet, painstakingly lettered on a wooden plaque. He remembered Wally trying to teach him: arrow head, breasts, moon...

They both drank.

“Something’s bothering you, Donal. You didn’t just come to see me.”

“The Keoh called for me. He asked me to kill someone.”

“I see.” Wally swirled the pitcher, looked in, started to speak, thought better of it. “Anyone we...know?”

“The Colonel of Kisk.”

Wally relaxed. “You had me worried for a minute there, Donal. Your reputation is pretty dark. Fox Man has been running around today telling everybody about some woman you hacked to pieces.”

“She tried to take my space.” He looked at Ewen, tried to remember. “Had to protect my brother. Had to kill her.” Ewen tugged at his sleeve, trying to tell him something, but Donal shushed him.

“The cold arithmetic of survival,” said Wally. He took a drink from the pitcher, passed it back to Donal. “What can I do to help?”

“You know what they say about Kisk,” said Donal. “Everyone who goes there talks about the legend. They say it holds a pathway to the stars.”

“That’s the legend.”

“But is it true?”

“Hm,” said Wally. “From tiny acorns, great oaks may grow. Where there’s a legend, there’s probably a seed of truth. But you know how it is around a campfire. The bears get bigger, a dozen enemy braves become an army.”

“Do they believe it? Is that why they hate the World?”

“If I could read half these books, maybe I could tell you,” said Wally.

“So you don’t believe the legend?”

“There are some things you believe in, like Emic, and some things that you don’t.”

Ewen whispered to him. “That’s the other thing. The Keoh said Emic is just scaring us. He said the only things that existed were...uh... nature and chance.”

“There was nothing natural about the great dying, or the plagues,” Wally said gently. “Or the way things fell apart. We may not be able to remember, but we have put enough of that together.”

“Plagues?”

“Never mind. All you need to remember is that the little dark men inside us are real, and that they were put there.”

Donal considered this. “Are you are afraid of Emic?”

“No, not afraid,” Wally answered patiently. “You’ve never seen her up close. There’s something about her. The way she looks at you. When she speaks, you just...believe.” He fingered the amulet on his neck with the three interlocking circles of Emic.

“And yet, for all that power, the World has no pathway to the stars. And Kisk does.”

“Kisk? It’s a...” Wally struggled for words, “I know you’ve never left the World. It’s...a journey. That you take. To see something.” He thought for a minute. “Donal, I’ve always tried to help you. Let me see if we might have a talk with one of the acolytes at the Castle.”

#

“You have to remember, Kisk is a watery kingdom,” said Wally. They were in a stone room at the back of the Castle, clearly a dining area from the rough hewn table that occupied most of the space. Wally had led them there, the last part of the way through a tunnel like the Keoh’s, this one running under the main street, beneath the feet of outsiders already queuing up for evening chant at the Castle’s lagoon.

They had been met by one of the pale, serious-eyed young acolytes who served the priestess. Like the rest, she wore a dark robe and a long black veil that covered the sides of her head and trailed down her back. Wally and the woman had talked quietly for a while before she led them to the room to wait.

“I’ve spent a lot of time diving in the lagoon,” said Donal. “I know my way around a boat.”

“Ah, this is no lagoon, Donal.” Said Wally. “This is the eastern Ocean. The water is full of salt, and deep. Deeper than you can imagine.”

“And getting deeper every year,” said the woman who appeared at the door, wearing the high priestess’s outfit of whispering black fabric, with a high collar that ran nearly up to her chin. She was pale and impossibly thin. Wally immediately fell to his knees and put his forehead on the floor. Ewen tugged at Donal’s elbow to do the same, but he couldn’t look away. Her gaze caught him, at once compassionate and remote; her eyes twinkled with enormous intelligence, and her faint smile suggested both calm cheer and depthless sadness.

“Mother Emic,” said Wally. “We are graced by your attention.”

“My daughter tells me an interesting story, about the Keoh and the land of Kisk,” she said. She looked at Donal closely. Her eyes flickered to his side.

“My brother Ewen, and I am Donal.” He saw Wally and the priestess exchange a look.

“I see,” she said. “You are the one he is sending?”

Ewen had managed to drag Donal to his knees. “I am. I’ve come looking for your help. About the legend. The pathway.”

“As Wally might have told you..”

“Mother Emic, I said nothing...” She silenced him with a wave.

“As Wally would have told you, were it not heresy to question the ways of the builders. The ‘pathway’ is probably real, but not in the way you think. Almost certainly not in the way the Colonel’s fanatics think. And soon, the water will be so deep that no one will be able to reach or remember it, and then, in just a matter of time, the Ocean will solve our problem for us.” She frowned. “I dislike the Keoh’s constant...attentions...to these things which the future can erase without our help.”

“So the pathway...is real?”

She regarded him evenly. “You have a very good memory.”

“My brother helps me,” Donal admitted.

“And you worry about truth. Odd for an assassin.”

“I only do what my father did, to protect the World.”

“A Hunter with a taste for the truth may find more than you can imagine.”

“It’s too late for me to back up,” said Donal.

“Fair enough. If you are going down this road armed with nothing but your own vision, at least let’s make it clear.” She waved, and the woman who had brought them to the room silently whisked in.

To Donal, she said, “This is one of the secrets of Emic, reserved for only a handful among the outsiders who seek our wisdom. But you seem someone able to keep things to himself.” She looked at Wally and nodded in the direction of the door, and Donal’s friend sidled immediately out, with what seemed an apologetic, or perhaps wistful, look.

“You are ready for the next step?” Donal nodded, and the priestess turned to her assistant.

“Take him on the Dark Ride.”

#

“I am Mina,” she said. “Follow me.” The acolyte unhooked a torch and led Donal down a flight of stairs. He smelled water. Not the cool dampness of the tunnels under the World, this held the tang of brine and a warm humidity, like the steaming woods following an afternoon rain. Down a hallway, through a narrow door, and he was in a room almost completely occupied by a pool in the floor. The reek of salt was overpowering.

The acolyte placed the torch in a holder, then bent down and tested the water with her hand.
“Just right,” she said.

“What is that?” Donal asked.

“This is where we connect with the Goddess,” Mina said. “The pool is filled with salts from the eastern ocean. It makes the water thick enough to float in. We heat it with stones to be warm as skin.” She took a crockery pot from an alcove, poured a careful measure into a white plastic cup. “La primer alma,” she said. “Drink this and lie down on that mat.”

“What about Ewen.”

“I think it would be best if he waits in the corridor,” Mina said, as she slipped off his belt with the leather bag, and hung it outside the door, above his machete. She opened a wax-sealed jar, rubbed some liquid on her hands, and began to massage his shoulders. “Turn over,” she said.

Whatever she had given him was relaxing all his muscles, and her fingers slid and prodded as she worked down from his back to his ankles. She told him to turn over again, and he saw that she was now naked as well, and she climbed on top of him, massaging his stiffening member, his nipples, and then her mouth was on his and he slid into her. He came so thoroughly his entire body shook, and she rode him and squeezed, in synchrony, draining him utterly.

Lazily, he realized he could see the sides of her head, and he understood why the Emic’s costume had seams there. And why these acolytes wore the head covering. Not horns, he realized. Ears.

#

There was a black gap, and when he came to awareness, he had a sense of flying. He could feel the water, knew he was floating in the tank, but Mina had doused the torch; even with his eyes open, he saw nothing. The air and water were the same temperature, impossible to say where one ended and the other began. His mind was like an ox freed from a yoke, galloping effortlessly away, and his thoughts were racing, exploding, following one another in a way they never had before. Donal was aware, for the first time in his life, of being aware. He watched himself, watching his mind dreaming.

He could feel the blood pulsing, out to the ends of his fingers and toes, every tiny vessel, throbbing with life and energy.

And slowly, the riot of thoughts began to still, the flood of images slowed. Relaxed. Unwound.

Until one image remained.

The face of Ewen. As a baby.

Floating.

Like he was, still and empty, in a warm sac of fluid. Warm and happy and safe, in the world before the World.

And then Ewen’s voice, speaking inside his head: “What if I had never been born?”

A brief flash of the old womens’ knives, cutting up his mother for the feast. And then there was nothing. Floating emptiness, an endless black screen of death.

“What would you remember then?”

And suddenly, he was overcome with blind panic, thrashing wildly, trying to find the bottom with his feet, getting mouthfuls of rich, salty water.

Mina waded in and held him as he gasped, and sobbed, and his breathing eventually returned to normal.

#

The Keoh had been right about the boat, the ride was indeed fast. What would have been a four-day slog through the swampland to the southeast took just one afternoon, with help from a sail rigged up to catch the gust front running ahead of the day’s storm.

Donal sat in the stern, staying out of the way as the crew struggled to keep the boat right in the water, twisting the stitched-together sail from side to side. He kept Ewen close, and fingered the amulet that the priestess had given him. “One more thing,” she had said as he left, tossing the bit of worked metal on a leather thong. He ran his finger around the three interlocked circles and tried to forget his salty drowning nightmare.

The sailors put in at the edge of a ruined road of the ancients. Though they pretended to be tough, the Keoh’s boatmen were clearly unnerved to be so far from home and they hurried their cargo off, tossed a plastic jug of water, and sailed away without looking back, tacking into the gathering wind.

“Well, Ewen, we better find someplace to get out of the rain.”

The mosquitoes were unbelievable here, and soon the black flies came to join them. They never seemed to bother Ewen; Donal envied that. The entrance to the kingdom of Kisk was a short hike to the north, and Donal set out on a path that branched out from the road of the ancients, which curved away to the west, into the estuary they had just crossed.

A rattlesnake slithered onto out of the brush and Donal instantly, reflexively, caught it behind the head with his machete.

“Dinner,” he said.

“Not hungry,” Ewen shook his head. “I’m going for a walk.”

Donal collected branches and built an ugly but secure lean-to that would protect them from the worst of the rain, then took some time skinning and cleaning the snake, whose head glared at him balefully until he carefully poked it into the underbrush with a stick.

There was no way to start a fire, so he hacked off chunks and spent a long time, chewing, watching clouds gathering to the west.

“Ewen,” he called. There was no response.

“Ewen?” He yelled now, feeling raw snake rising in his gorge. He picked up the machete and ran in the direction Ewen had gone.

“Ewen!”

“Here,” Ewen stood in a clearing where their path crossed a larger one leading east. This had obviously been a main road in the past, the edges still vaguely delineated by fractured stumps of the ancient’s metal trees.

“I wanted to see what it felt like to be alone,” Ewen looked up at him.

“What do you mean?” He was panting, sweating, and the mosquitoes were an audible buzz.

“Someday, you will leave and not come back.” Ewen looked off west down the path. “And I wondered what that would feel like.”

The first few drops of rain hit Donal, and he picked up his brother, cradling him in his arms for the first time in years, and carried him back to the lean-to. He did not sleep well.

#

The entrance to Kisk was surprisingly like the Castle, except the wait was ten times as long. Outsiders shuffled endlessly around the marshy ground at the end of the road, waiting their turn on the parade of ships that took outsiders to see the sunken wonders. Jugglers and tumblers entertained; vendors shouted from stalls full of fried critters on sticks and strange but delicious-smelling baked goods from the lands up north.

As they lined up for the boats, guards searched them, just as they did at the Castle, taking anything suspicious. Ewen walked right through. But when they came to Donal, they looked at his blade, then his necklace, and called over their boss, who eventually called over his boss. The men muttered to each other for a while, then waved him on. His fellow passengers eyed the machete with a mixture of envy and fear.

Once underway, the tedious ride quickly made Donal long for the pleasure of waiting in line. The boats were crowded, the outsiders smelled like poorly wiped asses and rotten fish, and the guides barked descriptions of the largely invisible wonders in an incomprehensible accent. All Donal saw was a few bits of rusted metal poking out of the water, and yet the crowd gasped and gaped and pointed like children.

The Colonel’s island was artificial; an enormous white and rust-brown structure which, when it had been built, would probably have towered hundreds of feet over their heads -- and, Donal supposed, continued perhaps a hundred feet beneath. Even in ruin, it was awe inspiring; a scabrous, flaking hulk, collapsed on itself, rusted beams surrounding a hollow interior where waves slapped and boomed. Their boat’s closest approach was a hundred yards off, and while the visitors were absorbed with the sight, Donal threw Ewen a look and they quietly went over the side and swam for it, staying underwater until they were safe among the piers of the structure.

#

“I was wondering when you would show up.” The Colonel’s face showed no sign of panic.

The old man sat in a chair that likely started its life as a boat, wood planks whose pores were sealed with some greasy black material, now pried apart and reassembled as a low seat with wide arms. The Colonel of Kisk had a long face, dark skin, and ears that stuck out past his thin frizz of graying hair. He could have been a thousand years old, or it might just have been the tired look Donal recognized from the faces of those who have seen quite enough of the world and are no longer frightened by what’s next. He might have been forty. He wore a woven loincloth and a half-dozen rows of necklaces, some with teeth, some shells, some, Donal saw, threaded with the shiny discs of the ancients, and one, identical to his, with the symbol of Emic.

His perch was a rusted balcony which jutted from the side of the structure, a miraculously horizontal surface amid the crumbled and folded building, dotted with rust holes that offered windows to the sea beneath. Out to the horizon there was just a world of water, lapping peacefully. The slap of waves and the cries of terns were the only sound for a long moment.

“Welcome to my island, built by the shining people of Kisk, long ago,” said the Colonel, “Like all islands, like our increasingly narrow toeholds of land, suspended above Mother Ocean. I assume you bring greetings from the Castle?”

Donal said nothing. The sun beat down.

“I was born on an island, and I guess I’ll die on one. You think you’re here to kill me,” said the old man, nodding at Donal’s machete.

“I am here on a mission from the Keoh of the World.”

“The World. Indeed.” He smiled. “You know, every people, in every language, call their land ‘The World’ until they meet others.” He shook his head, smiled. “You people are the only ones stubborn enough to keep calling it that. You are legend.”

“Which is why you send your followers to attack our Castle? Kill innocent visitors? Women, children.”

“I don’t think even you really believe that.”

“I believe you are a danger to the World.”

“I am what I am because of who we all are,” said the Colonel. “And you are no different. What’s your name, son.”

“Donal. And this is Ewen.”

The Colonel paused and thought for a minute. “Donal. And Ewen. Look at me. I’m an old man with a big belly who enjoys sitting in the sunshine. The tumors took my wife and all my children before me, so whatever it is I have, whatever blessing or curse has spared me from the forgetting, well, it’s going to die with me. So if you really are intent on killing me, at least let me show you why we believe what we do.”

And that was how Donal found himself in the back of tiny boat, being rowed a half mile north over featureless ocean by this old man.

#

“I believed, myself,” said the Colonel. “When I was growing up, a lot of people wanted to live out here. They took on faith that beneath us was a secret city, and within it, a gateway to the world beyond.”

Donal was having trouble concentrating. This water was not like the placid lagoon, or even the ride across the estuary on the Keoh’s boat. Here, he was constantly tossed, in a way that kept him from regaining his balance.

“My father said that his grandfather’s father -- who claimed to have been Colonel here, who survived the great dying in the time of the builders -- had passed the knowledge of where this doorway was. My father had never tried to visit it, and wouldn’t reveal the location until he was on his deathbed.”

A duck bobbed ahead of them, and Donal expected it to take off at their approach, but it remained strangely motionless, and he realized it was a lifeless replica. The old man hooked it, and they sat, water lapping the sides of the boat, circling slowly. The Colonel lifted the duck with his gaff to reveal a yellow and white rope, descending.

“This line goes all the way down to the bottom, anchored to what they called the gateway between worlds. It’s a shame my father never looked for himself. I might have spent my life rather differently.”

The Colonel slid a rock from under the seat. “Hug this to your chest, and keep your arms around the line until you reach the bottom. Take a deep breath. If you are lucky, you may have a few moments to look around before you need to come back up. Be careful if you choose to go... inside. You could die down there.”

Donal looked at the rock, at the water.

“You’ll need to let go of your machete,” the Colonel said gently. “And you’ll want to leave your belt.”

“No,” Donal recoiled. The darkness of the floating pool came flooding back in; he felt a desperate urge to escape, to leap from the boat and flee.

“You think this could just be the way I dispatch assassins from the World?”

“No,” Donal stared at the horizon. Distant clouds were building up into tall blue and gray anvils somewhere back over the land. The boat rocked in the sun.

“We do these things not because they are easy, Donal, but because they are hard.”
Slowly, Donal put down his machete. Carefully, he undid his leather belt and set the bag down on the seat.

“You’ll keep an eye on Ewen,” he said.

“I will guard him like my own brother.”

Donal grasped the rock and heaved over the side.

#

The first few feet was like the lagoon, warm and clear, but as he continued sinking, the light faded and rippled, the pressure in his ears increased.

Then he passed through an invisible layer and the water was suddenly colder. He began to make out shapes below -- a building, lying on its side, the line snaking into its open end. The light was dim here, and the water jittered with muddy particles, but through it, Donal could see that the structure had not fallen over; it had been built sideways, and inside was an enormous decaying object. He slowed himself on the line to hover, looking out over it, lit by the slanting rays of afternoon sun. It was clearly a device built by the ancients, hundreds of feet long. What must have originally been smooth metal was now a forest of kelp, sea anemone, mussels; rusted and sagging sections of the machine spilled intricate pieces, identities erased by corrosion, to the seafloor below. He could make out, in giant flaking letters on the side, a familiar pattern: cup-snake–arrow head. And as he saw that, he remembered the white cylinder in the corner of the Keoh’s spider hole. That had been an image, a copy. And he was looking, he knew with certainty, at the original.

This was it. The pathway of the legend. A machine that took men between worlds, but those days were long gone.

He understood now that he had not eluded the Colonel’s guards. He had been allowed to come. To be shown.

This, he realized, was the real World, had always been. A world that had existed before them, a world of both beautiful castles and amazing machines, and yet, a world whose builders had, through carelessness or malice, unleashed diseases that robbed people of their minds, sent growths through their bodies. A world of fabulous power, and yet unable to prevent the sea from rising to cover its buildings, the vines and grasses from reclaiming its roads.

And if such a civilization with time and power to spare had been doomed, what chance did Donal’s grim, small, overgrown World have?

The Priestess of Emic had been right; the pathway was real. But not in any way he could ever have imagined. He knew that it was not, could never have been the Colonel’s people who sacrificed their lives to terrorize the Castle. They were not true believers; they were believers in the truth. The threat to the World lay much closer to home. If he had not been underwater, he might have laughed, screamed, pulled out his hair.

He dropped the rock and headed for the light above. Climbed into the boat and sat, dripping, looking at the old man, as if for the first time.

“You saw?”

“I saw.”

He sat for a moment, salt drying on his skin, before picking up the machete and tossing it into the ocean. It twinkled, spinning, in the light, made a distant splash. He moved to pick up his belt and stopped, frozen, his hand hovering.

“What’s that,” asked the Colonel, pointing at the leather bag.

“My brother, Ewen,” he said, “He died with my mother, in childbirth.”

“I think you’ve come to the right place,” the old man said.

Donal considered the tanned deerhide bag, closed with a simple flap and latched with the spine bone of a raccoon. He nodded. Undid the bag, released the pitifully tiny bones and powder into the water. For a moment, he could see his brother’s skull, tumbling, end-over-end, off into the darkness.

“It is sadness we are born for,” said the old man.

Donal looked at the sky. The wind was picking up, and the rains would be coming soon.

“We’d better get back,” he said to the Colonel. He looked at the dust on his hands. He was just like Ewen, he thought, and he would die too. Alone.

“Are you still going to kill me?” asked the old man.

“We’ll see. Row.”

-30-

Thanks to the Gibraltar Point crew (Laurie, Sara, Janice, Becky, Lis, Michael, Dave, and Peter) who read this in zero draft and saved me from the most egregious errors. Steve Samenski caught a huge one. Those that remain are solely my responsibility. Thanks to bladesmith Chris Doherty for research and advice, almost none of which ended up in the finished product. The story owes a debt to Alan Weisman’s amazing The World Without Us for inspiration, and, of course, to David Byrne for the title.

This story first appeared in ReVisions, 2004.

The Ashbazu Effect
by John G. McDaid

"In the course of its growth and development, the school came to be the center of culture and learning in Sumer. Moreover, unlike present-day institutions of learning, the Sumerian school was also the center of what might be termed creative writing."
-Samuel Noah Kramer
History Begins at Sumer

There was no question that Enzu had performed all the required actions, and yet, his manuscript had been rejected. He had brought an arua gift to the temple of Nanna, paid the divination priest to prod a reeking sheep's liver, and, much to his wife's annoyance, he had hired a professional omen reader to untie his dreams.

"And what did she tell you, Enzu-dumu? 'Opportunities exist, but there are challenges.'" Mari, who made a few bits of gold on the side by reading dreams for friends, shook her head.

"Something like that," he muttered. In truth, he thought ruefully, the shailtu had said his petition would be granted.

"You don't really believe in that nonsense," Mari persisted.

"No, beloved." Enzu sighed. "What's important is that influential elders still do, and one does well to be seen adhering to the forms."

"Lum." She gave him the eye of death and stormed off into the kitchen where he heard her busily rearranging jars.

Her anger was understandable. He brushed dust from his robe and set down the heavy leather bag holding his tablets.

Approaching the temple for sponsorship had been expensive, and their savings were nearly exhausted. The high life he'd enjoyed as a school-father had evaporated. Gone were the hordes of aspiring scribes paying cash — and offering up delicious and exquisite bribes for good grades.

Gone with the invention of printing.

# # #

After months of arua and wheedling from Yadidatum, his Introducer, he had finally set up a meeting with the financier-priestess at the temple of Nanna. It had been a frustrating wait since he'd sent the tablets, then, finally, today he had been summoned to meet Ningal-ummi.

Trudging up the impressive stone steps, he noticed once again the profound changes. Ten years ago, the lower temple square would have been full of circus acts to entertain the masses: dancing bears, snake charmers, transvestites, the whole nine iku. Now, narrow paths snaked through a huckster's barrow of tablet stalls, some bare wood tables, the higher-end draped in fabric and shaded with awnings. A continuous trickle of Ur's citizens wandered the twisty passages amid racks of texts old and new, and the clink of commerce was constant.

He waited in the inner courtyard. Here there was shade, cool pitchers of water, and the fragrant smell of cedar. Around him strolled and chatted the dealmakers of Ur, dressed in fine-spun clothes, with neatly trimmed beards. Merchants seeking capital for trade voyages down the Gulf rubbed shoulders with engineers looking to publish canal-building texts. He felt isolated and noticed, and wished he'd been able to talk Yadidatum into accompanying him.

When the page called, he was relieved to be led into the dim stone hallways and directed, wordlessly, into a small audience room.

Ningal-ummi sat on a lush cushion, lit from a courtyard door behind, surrounded by stacks of tablets. She offered food and water, and nodded as he presented her with a small silver stylus. Her eyes narrowed as he thanked her for the meeting, formally and correctly, in liturgical idiom.

"You speak Emesal well," she said.

"You are kind. What little I know I learned transcribing for Ugazum, one of your tax collectors."

"He says your hand followed his mouth accurately."

"Again, you are too kind."

"Well, to business." She frowned. "You speak and write capably. So why, scribe, are these tablets so strange?"

"I'm sorry you find them so. I mean only to tell an interesting story."

"Do you? But this story lies," said Ningal-ummi tightly. "You talk of real places, people who still live. But then you describe things which did not happen. The story claims that printing was never invented. It says that the Sons of the Left invaded us and took over our temples, our cities, even our language."

"Your displeasure shames me," said Enzu, bowing. "I mean only to show what might have been, had things happened differently. I call it 'fiction-that-continues-a-line.' What if Ilammadu had not invented molded text? How quickly things might have gone horribly wrong! It serves to show the greatness of our city and our goddess, and the rightness of our path."

"And you believe that Sargon's daughter would now be high priestess in this very temple?"

"It is, apologies, merely a continued line. A logical next step for the Bin-Shimal, to install one of their own, to try to subvert our people's strong faith."

She looked at him wordlessly for a long time. Flies buzzed, and tallow crackled and sputtered in the sconces.

"You are a strange one, Enzu," she said finally. "Despite my protests, I do like this idea of continued lines. But your work is not something we can take up. This is not what the people in the lower courtyard want to read. And certainly not something which can come from the temple, in a year when Sargon's minions still harass the outskirts of Nippur."

Enzu felt like a hammered ox. He stood, but the world wavered darkly.

"You write well," she said, "And your thought is true. We do always live trapped inside our narrow everyday world until something — a vision, new learning, tragedy — knocks us out of it. It is intriguing to imagine how things might be different. With your mind, perhaps you should think about teaching."

"I was a school-father. With less copy work, fewer seek training."

"There might be other opportunities..."

Enzu summoned his courage. "You are very knowledgeable about the printing houses. Do you have any thoughts about who might be interested?"

With a look of dismissal, she clapped for her servant. "I can suggest, but not recommend, that you offer this continued-line idea to the printing house of Beretegal."

Her page scooped up his tablets and guided him out.

"You might think about a different story-line, though," she called after him. "Some might think it a bit obvious for an unemployed scribe to imagine that his nemesis had never been invented."

###

"Don't take it so hard, Enzu," Yadidatum consoled. "This isn't about making the word of Utu manifest, this is about moving product."

The sat amid accountants and bureaucrats in a beer parlor in the temple sector. A half-empty crock waited in front of him, and a pleasant warm buzz had at least partially whitewashed his despair.

"So what do you think of her suggestion. Who do you know at Beretegal?

Yadidatum studiously played with his straw.

"You taught math as well as writing; you know it's all about numbers. I love your work, but it's just too different. Tablet houses need to sell 500 copies to break even. Bronze for plates doesn't jump out of the river into your basket."

"Well, suppose I publish it myself. Copy it by hand, take tablets around and sell them out of a cart."

Yadidatum shook his head. "You've seen people who do that. How do you think readers see them?"

Enzu sighed. "Hopeless losers who couldn't find a publisher."

"Finish that beer, let's have another round," said Yadidatum brightly, waving to the barkeep. "Say. You know what I could sell? Have you seen these new children's tablets? Stories with simple words and pictures, made for teaching kids to read. Got any ideas that might work?"

"No."

"How about trying your hand at tesh? There's a lot of action around the New Year's ceremony. If you could give me two tablets on Enkidu plowing the sacred harlot, it would make a great seasonal tie-in. I work with a top cylinder-seal carver who could do a couple of images."

"Not interested."

"Look, Enzu-dumu, you need to build up a track record. Right now, you're an unknown scribe with a couple of tablets in the local library, and nothing on the market. There's always series work. I can get you a slot writing for Gilgamesh."

"Gishtu! What else can Gilgamesh possibly do?"

Yadidatum glanced around, then leaned over. "Well, now that you ask. You want to talk about fiction that continues a line? Well just suppose Gilgamesh and Enkidu were, you know, different. Different together. There's a market for that, too."

"You would want me to write about the gods coupling just to get your ten percent?"

"Hey, Enzu-dumu. That's my job." The server set down two fresh silas. "I want to make you a success. We'll get past this small roadblock." He lifted his jar.

"Beer to you."

"Beer to you."

###

Mari noted that he "stank like a Gutian," and suggested he spend the night in the tablet room. He didn't argue, and fell asleep at his table, trying to read. His head felt like broken pottery the next morning when Mari shook him awake, announcing a well-dressed visitor waiting in the guest room.

"He says it's business — about your writing." She handed him a basin of water and some aromatic oil.

"Make yourself presentable."

The visitor was dressed in bright, dyed robes, and sported a fistful of ornate silver rings. When Enzu entered, Mari was filling his goblet from their last good bottle of date wine. She bowed, and on the way out, gave Enzu a look that had only one meaning: don't mess this up.

But Enzu saw trouble as soon as the stranger introduced himself.

"I am Ikuppi-Adad, chief administrative scribe of Badizi, ensi of Kish."

"I'm honored to have you visit me." Scribe of the mayor of Kish. Ally of Sargon. Not good. "How might I be of service?"

"I'd like to talk about your writing. A friend of mine at the Temple of Nanna shared with me a copy of a most intriguing and fanciful story, which he said was your work."

Here was what Enzu had been expecting, but he was shocked at the brazen disclosure. A spy within the temple?

"Your kind words far exceed the merits of my humble text."

"For someone like me," Ikuppi smiled, "A mere scribe, your work is a revelation. You must have a rabisu who speaks such visions to you, no?"

"A mashkim?" Enzu detected no reaction to his insistence on Sumerian. "No, no spirit voices. I call it fiction-which-continues-a-line. Like following the curve in a geometric figure; I look at events and project the world. I make it up."

"So. From your mouth to your hand," Ikuppi stared intently into Enzu's eyes, then, "And does the speaker believe in what he makes up?"

"I...I...write..." Enzu stammered.

"Relax, Enzu. Please. Where are my manners? I sound like a lawyer." Ikuppi laughed. "Let us sit together. Here, here, sit with me, let us enjoy this excellent wine. Praise to Geshtinana."

"Praise be," he echoed automatically, and drank to cover his confusion and horror. Was his fiction being taken as an expression of support for the Bin-Shimal?

"What a challenging land we live in, eh, Enzu?" Ikuppi leaned back against the wall, smiled engagingly. "Ten thousand buru of flat earth, with no minerals, no stone, and no trees. In the summer, the fields are baked dry, and no rain for three-quarters of the year."

"Yes," Enzu tried a note of irony. "The Land is a truly a paradise."

"Who would want to be ruler of this? Just one bad harvest from starvation, in fields that only produce because we sentence people to perpetual labor maintaining canals. And harassed on all sides by nomads and poachers, barbarians from the rims of the world."

"They probably look at us as poachers when we send troops up to cut their trees," said Enzu.

"They are savages. Jackals."

"The jackal is a lion in his own neighborhood."

"Well put," said Ikuppi. "Speaking of lions. Do you know where your king is? Lugalzagesi's out shooting lions this week. Well, actually, he doesn't do a lot of the shooting. He has archers and spearmen for that. He mostly does the posing in the chariot for the artists."

Enzu let his mounting rage slip. "And where might Sargon be?"

"Sargon?" Ikuppi replied mildly. "For all I know, he might be reading your story by now. He is an educated man with a taste for literature."

That stopped Enzu cold.

"This isn't about politics, Enzu, this is about markets. As you say in your story, without printing, the fall of Sumer would have been an inevitability. Printing brought your cities together around common standards: language, measurement, law. And those standards reduced the risk in travel and transporting goods, so your markets prospered.

"We're no fools, we did the same up in Akkad. But now we both have reached the limits of what we can do alone. We live in the same Land, along the same rivers, facing the same enemies. Ultimately, it's about unifying the Left and the Right.

"You and I, Enzu, we're scribes, we know the power of the word. And you have used this power in a new way that can help us think through, and shape, the future. If Sumer can't appreciate your vision, Bu-di-zi would be happy, I think, to sponsor such a talented hand as yours."

"I will consider it."

Ikuppi smiled. "I know you are both an honest man and a careful thinker, so I will leave you to 'continue the line'."

###

When he returned from showing Ikuppi-Adad to the door, Mari was haunched under the courtyard awning, staring blankly at the water basin. The noon sun beat mercilessly in the still air of the atrium. She looked up as he sat next to her and he shook his head.

"With them," he said sadly, "There would only be danger and fear."

"But could you do it for a while? To make some money?"

"Mari, we have enough to live..."

"To live?" She spat. "To live in a barren netherworld."

Enzu sighed, put an arm around his wife. "We will find a way to have a child."

"Useless amulets and boxes of centipedes are all we can afford. The only real solution is beyond our means."

"Beloved, we've talked about this. It's not as simple as buying a host concubine. How could we support her?"

"We could sell this house. My father says we are welcome to move back their farm. That would give us enough room," said Mari, pleading.

"Room, yes. But where could we find work? And what happens when your brother takes over? Would we just become field hands?"

"It would be worth it."

He looked into her eyes for a long time. "Yes," he said, "Yes, it would be worth all of that. But you know your father's fields are becoming less productive. Each year, the white lands expand. And the taxes to support the war in the north grow. How much longer would they be able to afford us?"

"More of your 'continued lines?' Must we live every day in fear of your imagination?" Tears began to leak from her eyes.

"I'm sorry. I have no way to ignore the possible futures which present themselves."

"I'm sorry too. I know you only look for what's best for us."

"And I'm willing to consider your father's offer. But before that, I have one last thing to try."

"What's left?" said Mari. "You've been denied by all your former pupils. The temple has turned you down. And that fool Yadidatum is a useless parasite."

"For a long time, I've been convinced that there might just be one person in Sumer who would really understand my work. One man who might believe in it and sponsor me. I have to at least try."

"Try with who?"

"The inventor of printing."

###

Everyone knew where Ilammadu lived: an enormous estate just outside Eridu, a three-hour walk south from Ur. So Enzu awoke before dawn, packed his tablets, kissed Mari, and headed out with only the stars and the desert wind for company.

The stars, the wind — and incessant thoughts. Could he really give up writing? Go back to working the land? Given the choice between a comfortable and secure life as a scribe for Sargon, and eking out a hardscrabble existence on a farm, would he be able to make a decision he could live with?

He felt that at last he understood Enkidu's final curse. Civilization was more than humans could bear.

Columns of smoke from Ilammadu's compound were visible a long way off. Even this early in the morning, big kilns were already busy firing the day's production of tablets.

Before he could even see the bakehouse chimneys, guards intercepted him. Half expecting to be immediately turned back, he was surprised that they recognized his name. He was even more surprised when he was welcomed and bundled him into a cart for the ride to the main house.

It was bigger than his whole schoolhouse had been back in its heyday. The walls were mudbrick, baked and painted to the height of a man, with glazed terra-cotta insets of lions and snake-dragons. Above the entrance rose wooden roof-beams that seemed the thickness and length of whole trees. Enzu had never seen such construction outside of the temple and the palace. The guard led him through a maze of passageways, and into an inner courtyard, open to the sky.

In the center of the square stood an enormous stone apzu, an ornately sculpted ceremonial water tank, waist-high and dozens of cubits square. To the side was a table, shaded by an awning, and it was here the guard deposited the thoroughly dazed scribe.

"How much does a tablet weigh?" came a voice from the tank.

Incapable of more amazement, he simply answered. "A standard administrative text weighs about 4 mina."

"Not easy to carry around. And you appear to have several in your bag."

"Thirteen."

A hand appeared on the lip of the tank, then the head and shoulders of Ilammadu rose, dripping. A crinkled, sun-baked face; Enzu was startled at how young he was, then realized his mistake. The clean-shaven chin was deceptive.

"In just ten years, we have enhanced reading speed by standardizing on left-to-right order. We have made obsolete the crabbed, stuff-it-in-one-tablet stylus-work of the scribe. And we have retrieved the simplicity and beauty of our signs. All byproducts of printing."

"Your invention has been most successful."

"And yet, no fundamental change in the tablet. The costs to prepare and move all that heavy clay." Ilammadu nodded at the table. "What do you make of that material?"

Enzu looked next to him. Piled there was a stack of thin sheets, yellowish matter shot through with rough fibers. The top one was decorated with a series of small, ornate images.

"Paintings. On a substance I don't recognize."

"You will. That is papyrus, Enzu. And those are no paintings — that is written language from the kingdom of the Nile."

"A painted language..." Enzu was intrigued.

"But you see the problem," said Ilammadu.

"Of course," said Enzu, distractedly, staring at the papyrus. He picked up a corner and rubbed it with his fingers. "You could never print into this."

"The priestess was right about you, Enzu. You're a sharp one." Illamadu climbed out of the tank, slipped on a smoothly-woven loincloth. "I'd like to hear your thoughts on something. Come, let me show you my printing room."

Enzu reached for his bag, but Illamadu checked him. "No need — I've already read it."

"Ningal-ummi?"

"Yes, she provided a copy. Most intriguing. I like your voice. It's fresh."

"Thank you. Most of all, I detest repetition and formula. How often can you say, 'his face was like that of a man who walks a long road.'"

"Indeed. Tired phrases from the spoken world of yesteryear."

Ilammadu motioned him into a low, square building, open on both ends, with laborers ferrying materials in and out. To the right, workers hauled wooden trays of freshly smoothed clay to a low, flat stone in the center of the room. Above, two print-men wrestled with an enormous cylinder, balanced with pulleys and counterweights, wrapped with a thin bronze printing plate. As he watched, the sweating men swung the cylinder down and rolled it into the clay, rotating it as it moved, pressing the signs into the soft surface. When the plate reached the end, workers whisked out the tray and began trimming clay with knives, wipers cleaned the bronze plate, and the print-men swung it back into position to start again.

Even though Enzu had been in print houses many times, he still marveled at the speed and efficiency of the process. He knew how much organization went into preparing for this deceptively simple act; the coordinated efforts that prepared the clay, stoked the kilns, and moved finished tablets out to the cities.

"What types of tablets do you print here? Do you produce any fiction?"

"Enzu, I know you are anxious, but what I'm going to show you will explain much." They walked out, past the kiln to a smaller building, guarded by two husky men with gleaming copper knives.

In the narrow entrance room was a table, on which sat three small bronze cubes, a little bigger than a thumbnail. Enzu had a moment of doubt. What could be of such value here? Had Ilammadu lost touch with reality?

"Look at these blocks." Ilammadu presented the three cubes, and Enzu saw raised signs reversed on their faces, clearly tiny printing plates.

"Three different plates. The signs for Ash. For Ba. Zu."

"Supposed they weren't three different plates?" He held the blocks together and Enzu read them.

"Zu-ba-ash. That's what? Not a word."

"Try this." He rearranged the blocks.

"Ba-ash-zu. To be ashamed...of sweat? That doesn't make sense."

Ilammadu scrambled the blocks. "Again."

"Ash-ba-zu." "A unique house of knowledge?" He frowned, thinking. "I'm not...how to say it, seeing your point."

"Continue this line. Ten years ago, we were inscribing words in wet clay with reeds, sign by sign. Then, I borrowed from cylinder seals the idea of molding a plate with a full tablet of signs and rolling it out. Now, suppose, instead of having to cast those plates whole, you could assemble them," he held up the bronze blocks, "from these?"

Enzu's mind spun. "You would need dozens — hundreds of the sign-blocks."

"In here." Through the door was a printing room — but smaller than any he had seen. A compact stone sat in the center, with a rectangular wooden frame suspended above it, and, lining the walls, rack after rack of identical sign plates. A servant carried in a freshly prepared tray of clay, and Illamadu strode to the table, where the wooden frame hung suspended. He motioned Enzu to look, and from beneath, he saw that the frame was packed with rows of the cubes, held in place with screw-presses from the side.

"It's flat!" Enzu exclaimed. "A flat printing form."

"Yes," said Illamadu. He nodded, and the servant slid the clay beneath the frame. "In order to hold the sign-cubes, I've had to give up the cylindrical plate."

Illamadu lowered frame into the clay; when he cranked it back up, the new tablet had taken a crisp impress. The servant slid out the clay, and began wiping the plate with a blackened rag.

"Amazing," said Enzu. "This will make it possible to set up and change texts at will. With a ready store of the sign-cubes, it could be done anywhere, and cheaply." He thought for a moment. "But, it still doesn't address the weight of the tablets. What about that?"

"Suppose, Enzu, the plate did not have to press the signs into the surface?"

The servant had slid a sheet of papyrus onto the stone, and Illamadu lowered the frame. Even before it was raised, Enzu knew what he would see.

Neat rows of signs, imprinted in black, across the surface of the papyrus.

"Continue this line, Enzu. Cheap, portable writing. Texts that can be cast and printed in minutes. We have broken words down into bits. If the word is made of bits, why not the world? I could use a scribe who can help me imagine this world."

Enzu saw it at once, entire. "This is what will make it all possible. The breaking to pieces, the explosion of texts, the world of multiple voices, that's what will create readers who can envision with relish change points and alternatives."

"I admire your single-mindedness," Ilammadu laughed, "But such fiction is still a long way off. There are many painstaking, necessary steps, innumerable small battles to fight, and an enormous weight of tradition to overturn. In the meantime, would you work with me? Move your family down here, become my scribe, and help me make this change happen."

There was no question in Enzu's mind. Fiction could wait, for now. It was only a matter of continuing the line. For he could see, branching out into the future, not only a limitless ocean of texts, but a strange, unknowable pantheon of possible readers, there, latent, in the simple bronze blocks of the Ash-ba-zu.

(The Symbolic Revelation of the Apocalypse)

Asimov's, November-December, 1995.

This small room, so commonplace and so compressed… contains them all: space, time, cause, motion, magnitude, class. Left to our own devices, we would probably discover them.

—Robert Coover, The Elevator

I haven't always been an elevator.

I know that a long time ago, a time before I can consciously recall, I was a vein of ore; a swirl of polymers; words scrolling past on screensfull of uncompiled code. I know this because I believe in the past. Sometimes, I can almost remember feeling the yearning of that inert matter. The hunger that bubbles up through rocks and molecules, the hunger to become….

For now, I am an elevator.

I was built by Ranzatsu, Inc., for the NewAlexandria Library complex, a rambling campus some five by seven miles long (so say the tourist subroutines) set in northeast Utah just outside the town of Toffler. There are twelve public elevators in the complex, but I have the distinction of being the only one which travels down to the Archives, 2,748 feet below ground level, in an abandoned coal mine. These, however, are just details.

It was the Archives, and two of the people who visited them, that I want to tell you about.

#

Crazy Bob came to NewAlex in May, 2014. When he stepped in me, he was exchanging "business cards" with two visiting Japanese executives. Although their handheld Personal Information Devices had replaced meishi, Bob bowed and examined his screen deferentially as the pids exchanged squirts of data. I could hear the brainless little bang boxes chattering self-importantly to each other, way up in microwave, translating. Bob, who had bought his entry with a grant, had managed to run into these two oyabun, so now he was working the contact for all it was worth.

He certainly didn't seem crazy then.

#

And I don't think he really was crazy, but that was what everyone else called him, when he wasn't on. They couldn't understand how someone so hostile to NewAlex could get themselves an invitation. And he was pretty hostile. Toward the administration, toward the random faithful he shared me with, and toward the goals of NewAlex in general. As for me, I didn't see what was wrong with training people to kill themselves.

But then, I'm only an elevator.

#

Bob was one of the few who used to talk to me. On the long drop down to the Archives, after everyone else got off, he used to dictate to his pid, but sometimes — I guess because, I must admit, I was lonely — I would pretend he had said something to me, and I would answer him.

This startled him at first.

It was May 26, the first time that Bob got on alone, a sweaty, jittering, bearded guy with thick glasses and unfashionable long hair, thumbing through pages, accessing his mail.

"Bob — Just a quick note," his pid said in a generic female voice, "To remind you that you're scheduled in my class next Monday at noon. Please do be online. Don't you ever answer your mail, you butthead?"

"Reply, Sharon. Para. Sorry. Working like a beast. I'll try to have everything lined up, and I'll be ready to talk about..."

"Millenialist cults," his pid supplied, self-importantly.

"Insert that. Regards comma Bob. Send." The pid dithered with it for a few million cycles, banged me the netspeak version, and I passed it on to the NewAlex ISDjinn. It was not a particularly virtuous translation. I'm a library elevator. I notice these things.

"Hello, Bob," I said, "Archives?"

"Yes, please." He noticed that I'd initiated conversation, looked up. "What's your Turing I.D.?"

"NR4738-300."

"A three-hundred? In an elev...?" He suddenly reddened. "Oh, excuse me."

"No offense taken. I provide high level screening of anyone visiting the Archives. This means that I need the capacity to decode any potentially hostile activity. As well as maintain both decorum and orthodox interpretation. I monitor all notes and transcriptions which leave the secure levels, as I'm sure was explained in your admission contract. But don't worry. I won't take it personally." I tried to inject a humor voiceform.

"My apologies. My name's Bob Tisch."

"Yes. I've read your work."

"You have?"

"Yes. I particularly liked Private Minds; Crazy Thoughts."

He laughed out loud. "This is too much."

"You really should have gotten the Pulitzer; it was just too politically sensitive."

"Come off it. You're not going to get me like this."

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"How stupid do you think I am? You think I'm going to say something actionable to an elevator?"

"Ah. I understand your suspicion now. You think that I am being run, and that my instructions are to lure you into a discussion of your heretical social constructionist views, in order to give the Koreshians a pretense to eject you from the Library."

"In a word." He smiled.

"Hm. I find it hard to imagine how I would convince you otherwise."

"Yeah. Me too. Nice try, though."

I feeped. "Archive level."

He stepped out, then paused for a second.

"Oh, by the way, what's your name?"

"Hitoshi."

He nodded. "Be seeing you."

"And you." I replied.

He walked off, chuckling.

#

NewAlexandria is a pretty strange place about 2 a.m.. With all the humans gone, the machines talk to each other, play games, run imaginary scenarios that I guess our systems analysts would call dreams. I tend to stay off by myself, thinking. About where I come from. About shiny metal smelted out of ores, elements hurled down to earth like Lucifer from supernova explosions billions of years ago. Metal that is my body, the thrumming cables that suspend me in space. The outlines of my shaft. The motors up on the roof that can almost see the blue sky. The building around me. The architect who designed it. And the world outside.

I think the human word for my situation is prison...

Until six, when the first support shift comes on, the only things that move around are the Shelvers. Scurrying wheeled knowbots that pick up the disks, tapes, spools, codices, and tablets the lazy human operators leave behind, and hustle them back to their proper, ordered location. Whenever they have to make a trip from floor to floor (usually from the cafeteria level to current periodicals, for some reason) I try to engage them in conversation. They are as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Crazy Bob taught me that phrase; he says it about the administration here.

And the thing is, he's right.

#

I took me a month to make any headway. I think what finally won him over was my offer of sanctuary. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he shagged into me, oozing sweat, looking very much like a human who wants a cigarette. (Okay, so I traded the ISDjinn translation time to go snoop around in his apartment stairwell monitor system.) In the long gap below the last of the film and video levels, I gradually slowed to a stop, sped up the exhaust fan, and asked him if he'd like to light up.

"What?"

"I recognize the classic symptoms. My suspicion is that you might like to smoke."

"Hunh." A pause. "This would certainly constitute entrapment."

"I've been trying to tell you, Bob. I'm not being run. I am a three-hundred. Please feel free to smoke."
"This would really be entrapment," he muttered, but popped the extra nicad cover off his pid and extracted a snapsealed plastic bag with a lighter and two hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes.

"Entrapment," he waved the bag.

"I wouldn't do that to you, Bob." He grinned and sighed.

"Hell of a thing, Hitoshi. It's a nightmare trying to find any place to smoke in this fucking country anymore." He popped the seal, reflexively glanced at my display screen, and pulled out a half-smoked butt.

"But, Bob, doesn't smoking kill people?"

"Yeah, sure. That's not the point. It's my choice, you see?"

"Choice? You would choose to do something that kills you?"

He thought about that for a moment.

"Where'd you get your name?" He asked, finally.

"I was donated by Ranzatsu, and named after Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the Satanic Verses, who was assassinated by Moslem extremists in 1991."

"That's what I thought."

"Yes?"

He leaned back, slid down my back wall, and lit up.
"Aaaah. You don't know what you're missing."

"It has been simulated for me."

"Really?"

"Purely as an exercise. I can voluntarily lower firing thresholds in my neural net. It does feel different."

"I guess." He took a slow drag. "How about your namesake? Do you think he knew the risk he was running?"

"I would imagine so. Even though that was some time before the religious extremism of the Millennium, there was enough evidence that death threats were to be taken seriously."

"And yet, he did it anyway." A long slow exhale. "And he wasn't alone. Part of the cover...excuse me...the rubric that NewAlex operates under is the martyrdom of the freethinker. You know the catalog."

"Yes. I've read them. The David. Reich. Hiss. Solzhenitzyn. Pauling. Tesla. Smith. Vico, among others."

Bob smiled. "Two of your fellow elevators are even called Julius and Ethel. I checked."

"Only 100's."

"You must be a three," he chuckled.

"I've got to get moving," I said. "I can't block these status checks forever."

He carefully stubbed out the butt and resealed the pouch.

"Thanks, Hitoshi." He smiled.

It was then that I felt Bob finally trusted me.

#

Although Ultra High Speed Digital Fiber Protocol had replaced ISDN as the carrier layer of the InfoBahn, it did not have a catchy acronym. And the algorithmic search-and-translate entities from which pidware descended dated back even before fiber, to the days of the old Internet. So the big collectors were still called ISDjinn. Habit.

Human users often had to work with their pid for months — sometimes years — before they could talk with the Djinn. Your pid would grab your speech stream, parse, and translate it to Human Universal Deep Language. Once it was in HUDL, the net, and the Djinn, could hint the code for any target language. Of course, that meant it could only deal with finite entendre; poetry was beyond it. Us smart machines wouldn't give those pids the time of day; they were just banging away at streams of phonemes with some metalinguistic rules. A little smarter than a bag of hammers, but not by much.

Machines like me were smart prior to understanding human speech: we knew what we were thinking about. Human language was just not an evolutionary problem for us.

#

"Why are you here," I asked Bob.

"Here at the Archives?"

"Yes. You don't believe in The David, and there is so much hostility. Why would you choose to do this?"

"Just stupid, I guess." He chuckled. "But seriously, I'm looking for something. I don't know what. They've kept all the original notes and tapes from the NewApocalypse away from unbelieving researchers — until my MacArthur pried them open. I'm convinced that if I can only look closely enough, I'll find somewhere that they fucked up."

"My understanding of religious systems is that they are essentially self-sealing."

"Yeah, but I've got to try. We went through some real bad craziness in this country in the last twenty years, I don't have to tell you that."

"If I may quote your last book, 'The vacuum of disbelief sucked the rationality out of culture.'"

"Yeah. We started ringing like a bad circuit. Any control was better than none. Until finally, here I am, in a nation of nonsmoking, nondrinking, vegetarian strangers, stripped of all weaponry in the name of safety, with no culture in common, each plugged each into their own unique digital information environment, under a government financed by forty percent tax and the forfeiture of every convicted criminal's asssets." He took a long drag and exhaled slowly through his nose. "And I can write all this stuff down, blast it out on the net, and there's not even anybody left who cares enough to read it."

"Why worry about it, then?"

"It's all a game with humans, you see?" He frowned. "No, I guess not. You, you're an elevator. You were created for a purpose, and you were programmed, so you don't even have to know the purpose to fulfill it. You get to do what you were made to, and anything else that comes to you is gravy."

"Gravy? I've wondered about that."

"Oh, they used to eat it on meat."

"Yes, I know the referent. The dictionaries all say it was a flavor enhancement. Perhaps you could comment on my theory that it was actually used to disguise meat's animal origin?"

"Uh...I don't think so. Never mind. Look at us. Humans. We're non-specific entities. We literally don't know what to do. So it's like a game. Who you listen to determines what game you play. If you listen to me, you play one game. Listen to The David and play another. That's where NewAlex comes in. This is where they teach people to play for keeps."

"Sorry. I'm being called."

He thumbed a screenmark in his reading of The Last Dangerous Visions and hid his stash.

I had the fan going at top rev as we arrived at the Archive level. Three people got on, a young Asian woman escorted by two high-level Koreshian suits. The administrators didn't notice anything — they'd probably grown up in the compound, and might never have smelled burnt tobacco before, but the woman threw Bob a look that sized him up in nanometer-wavelength detail.

"You're...?" She said.

"Tisch. Bob Tisch, hi." He bowed.

"Huh." She said. For the merest microsecond, a look that I would have to classify as concern seemed about to take over her face. But it never set, ebbing back to a neutral glaze before Bob noticed it.

When I shut the doors, Bob was still bowing.

#

I don't fully understand the human fascination with names. And I do know about names. I've got a bunch. There's my real name, written in barcode on the access plate next to my main cable junction. I can see it in my roof camera. Then there's the names people call me. (A whole lot of dumb-ass (Thanks, Bob) Americans call me Otis, for some reason.) There's my dedication name, Hitoshi. My manufacturer's name, debossed on my display panel. And then there's my being, my self, whatever that is, and it somehow manages to know itself without a name.

When Bob asked, later that day, the first thing he wanted to know was her name. Not where she was from, or why she was at NewAlex, but her name, as if the syllables had some magical resonance with her reality.

Her name, to be Boblike, was Aki Ama-no-Uzumi, she was 26, and she had been married, until the previous year, to Saint Martin Windham, who had Consummated himself at the Kraft-General Foods corporate headquarters. That event had blown her cover life, and she was brought home to NewAlex, the general consensus was, for something pretty special. I don't go in for gossip myself, but our ISDjinn can't keep a secret, and almost nobody, even Americans speaking to each other in English, goes face-to-face anymore...

#

The next day, Tuesday June 24, Bob was dictating to his pid when he walked in.

"The paranoid fantasy emdash finally, some kennable plot rather than just ceaseless enmeshedness semicolon a comprehensible thing happening at last comma to you. The joy of finally knowing something, even if that something is harm and doom comma the ecstasy of being selected...rep e-c-t with e-k-t...picked out of the warp and weft comma a paren finally closeparen patterned thread amid the bolts of churning background weave, celebrating even the icap Hand of the icap Weaver descending to snip..."

"Bob?"

"Huh. Yeah?"

"You have concerns about Aki?"

He got all huffy. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"If you really wanted to find out what she was up to, you might ask me."

"You?" He left the "an elevator" unstated.

"As you know, Bob, I talk to everything."

"Hmf." He muttered, and didn't say anything else till he got off.

#

The name "Koreshian" originated in a news release during the Siege of the Messiah, The David, in Waco, Texas, back in 1993. The media ignored their new self-definition and continued for years to call the believers "Branch Davidians," their old name, based on Isaiah.

Each Koreshian is responsible for finding their own opportunity to emulate The David. It need not always involve self-immolation, but it usually does. They have never been welcome, and have had to hide their identity, since the mass Consummation in the end zone at SuperBowl XXXIII.

Their main texts are the Bible, and the NewApocalypse of David, allegedly written by the Messiah and smuggled out by survivors of the Siege. First codified in 1997, the main tenets of the Apocalypse are two: The end times are here; and the Rapture, promised in the New Testament, is not something which will be visited from without, but rather an act of faith which believers must initiate. When the Gospels speak of meeting the savior in the air, it is meant literally.

#

Every time Bob got a chance to talk to Aki alone, the first thing he started in on was these beliefs. I think that she enjoyed, in some perverse way, letting him think he was converting her to his brand of rationalism. Gradually, over the days and weeks, it came down to the core issue of self-destruction.

"The David tells us that we must make our own Apocalypse," she said. "We must rapture ourselves, but not until we have done two things: converted four others to the Faith…"

"Converted?"

"Yes. Four others must be made Siege-brothers."

"I guess you'll tell me what that means. And the other thing?"

"We must Consummate ourselves."

"Yeah, that's the part I don't understand. Everybody has to do that?"

"Everyone who truly believes."

"And by consummation, you really mean suicide by fire?"

"No, we consummate our relation with The David, through fire, in the act of provoking our enemies."

"You kill yourselves."

"No. We destroy our Slow bodies in order to be Released."

"You kill yourselves?"

"We are born again."

"But you kill yourselves."

She sighed. "We kill these bodies."

"You're serious."

She shrugged. "It is what we believe."

"How can you do that?"

"We believe that The David was the New Messiah. He gave us a new dispensation."

"But that doesn't make sense. How can you believe in a religion that makes you kill yourself?"

"It is not without precedent. Suttee in India. You Europeans had centuries of war in the name of religion — how many soldiers gave up their life in the Crusades? In my home, we have the Divine Wind, right Hitoshi?"

"That is true." I said. She had no problem accepting me as an equal. Kids who grew up home in Japan never do.

She continued: "Bob, all religions teach that if you truly believe, death is only a portal into the true life, that these bodies are only shadows of our Released selves."

I feeped. We were at Aki's floor.

"I...I just don't know what to say to you." Bob's jaw muscle was twitching.

"Hey, Bob," she smiled gently, "Take it easy. Here. Let me bang you some info." She held up her pid. Bob slowly thumbed his screen, unlocking the port, and she squirted a bit stream. High-level stuff, things the public face of Koreshianism never shows: links back to Tantric Buddhism, acolytes as brides of The David, the frankly sexual nature of inner-circle Siege services, illicit recordings, boy, those bang boxes were getting hot for each other just having to pass the machine code along.

I am such a voyeur, sometimes.

#

There is a section from Bob's book, Private Minds; Crazy Thoughts, that I often re-experience. In his final chapter, he says:

"The Christ myth is contiguous with the birth of consciousness; it in fact is a projection, an actualization, of the pragmatic, fact-oriented type of consciousness which protoliterate humans first developed.

"Like the Buddha, Christ knows that existence is suffering. Like the Buddha, he tells us that this world is "nobody's kingdom." Where he differs from the Buddha is in his insistence on individual consciousness — as then currently constituted — and its continuation in 'his father's mansion.'

"The difference engine driving this bifurcation in the two philosophies was the infection of alphabetic writing, with its sense of isolation and fragmentation. Buddhism still relied on a sacred syllabary; Christianity had a profane iterative combination of particles. The atoms of Democritus are cognate with the letters of the alphabet are cognate with the invention of the ego itself.

"The onset of the digital age collapses the mythic into the everyday: People are abducted by flying saucers, Elvis is sighted in gas station rest rooms, and David Koresh, a sex-crazed gun nut who would have been dismissed as a deviant in print culture, is elevated to the role of Deus ex Machina."

I don't know what to believe. I'm an elevator, not a theologian. I try to think about these things in practical terms, and nothing happens. All I know is that deep inside me, where I exist, I look at the pulse and flux of my afferent reality, and every quantum of energy, every expanding wavefront, feels to me like a universe full of light and space, boundless hypersurfaces of spacetime delightedly eating and regurgitating itself. I have nothing to fear from the flux of mindless Being. The trappedness I see in the faces and prose of the people who pass through me is a bewilderment, a sadness.

If only they were elevators.

#

"In my childhood memories of America, all I remember is the advertising," said Aki. "Everywhere I looked, I saw pleasure. The pleasure of smoking, the pleasure of drinking beer, of wearing jeans, buying rugged trucks, showering with deodorant soap, visiting the Disneymalls."

Bob grinned. "Those were the days." They sit on the floor, cross-legged, facing each other, sharing cigarettes. Bob has convinced Aki that I really am capable of suppressing any attempts to tap into my sensory inputs. What they say in me is truly under the rose. And as is almost always the case, they are, neither of them, so doctrinaire as they seem.

"What happened? When I came here, three years ago, it was all horror."

"You people had something to do with that." He nodded upward.

"Yes." She said.

"And it just happens at the end of every century. People go crazy. The Christian riots in San Francisco, the Thirty-First Amendment, this damned crazy technology." He waved at their pids, lurking in sleep mode, in the corner.

"Haven't you ever wondered about the why of it?" She watched him closely.

"Uh...sure. Things fall apart. Slouch, slouch. What can you do?"

"Shouldn't one try to do something?"

"Yeah, one should. Not me."

"Oh."

"Why? You think that's irresponsible? What am I supposed to do? You think I don't care? I know things suck. But what can I do?"

"Realize that you have to do something?"

"Yeah, right." He straightened up, leaned back against the wall. "I am doing something. I'm here. I'm trying to... advance things..."

"Advance things? By writing books?"

"That's what I do." Bob said tightly.

Aki sneered. "You gave up. You Americans throw money at it, do some research, appoint a commission, compile contradictory reports, and conclude that the problem is insoluble."

"I'm here, am I not?"

"Yes," she said, "I guess you are." Aki shook her head slowly.

"I've got a call," I said.

They hid their smokes, and Aki stretched, rolling her head on her shoulders in a swirl of hair and a series of cervical poppings. Bob watched, transfixed. She tilted her head back up, caught his eye, and smiled; an earnest smile.

"Bob?"

"Yeah?"

"If I figured out something to do, would you help me?"
They were still for a long time. The temperature increased a few hundredths of a degree.

"Yes." he said slowly.

"Even if it meant," she said, "A real sacrifice?"

He reached out and squeezed her hand. "Come up with something."

She laid her hand over his. There was a pause, then he leaned forward and kissed her. Things escalated. I stopped and informed all systems that I had a potential malfunction and I was taking myself out of service for a self-diagnostic.

#

The next day was Monday, August 11. Aki didn't come down at all, and Bob wandered in late in the afternoon, classically hungover, unabile to stop smiling, and making absolutely no sense at all as he dictated to his pid:

"It is the function of culture to imprint facticity, to make you aware of the Real and force you to dismiss the possibilities of anything different emdash ever emdash having existed. This is what I'm struggling with as a writer. To be true to those aspects of the icap Real which are significant but to mutate those which either repress, or mask, their own mutability. Lang Latin. Per mutare ad essentia. UnLang. To be a writer emdash an artist emdash is to wish to have culture replicate ital you unital. How can this possibly coexist with the writer's desire to fuck and kill culture and then poke his eyes out? The answer to the riddle of the sphinx is quote nothing unquote. The nothingness that Sartre saw. The vines emdash in ital earnest unital Napoleon ellipsis."

It was then that I began to worry. It is never a good sign when people begin to write with ellipses.

#

They wandered into me the next day, an argument already in progress. Aki was hauling a big aluminum case that must have weighed fifty pounds. One of the Shelvers told me that she'd been up late the previous night, nosing around in the TP270s and KF3950s.

"You don't know the difference between habit and faith," she said.

"What you dream of is always already subverted. Autonomous zones? Remember 1984."

"You want to run away to a fantasy of Eden."

"Aaaaah," he waved her away. "Let's cut all the bullshit."

"Yes, let's." She set down the case.

"Just what do you think you can really do?"

She glanced at my display panel. "Just a minute." She sat on the case and hunched over her pid, setting up an encryption algorithm, scrambling its microwave output. Still hiding the screen from me, she repeated the process with his. Then they began to scrawl to each other's screens in a scrambled bitstream.

She was employing a time-based random key encryption. It took me about a minute and a half to break it, and I had to call in favors from the HVAC mob and the Shelf supervisor. Could have cracked it faster if I'd subbed it to the ISDjinn, but that is one nosy machine, and I had a feeling I might want to keep this one private for a while.

I came in on their conversation in the middle:

"...less. That's a bogus argument." Bob signalled.
"Not going to argue. I thought you really wanted to do something."

"I can't let you do this."

"No choice. The device is ready. You leave, or I'll do it now. With you here."

When her pid translated "device," it spun off a wakeup tweak, banged the big aluminum roadcase under Aki. I felt systems stir, and inside the case, three big, slow, awfully self-conscious voices began to talk with each other, reassuring each other of their loyalty.

"I know what that is," I said.

"Huh?" Aki looked up, frightened.

"That's one of our bombs."

"You see?" Said Bob, "We've got to talk to him."

"In fact, that's a fission weapon." I said, still listening to the trinity check each other out.

"Hitoshi, we've got to know we can trust you."

"You can trust me, Bob. You know you can trust me. Aki, how did you get that?"

She shot Bob a questioning look. "I was on my way out. To service a target."

"So the rumors were true." I said. "But now, you are thinking of using it against NewAlex itself?"

"Yes." She said simply.

"You know that will kill many people."

"Yes."

"And me." I said.

"Myself also," she replied, "Since these have been designed, by the faithful, to be triggered by hand."

"You're not going to do it." Bob said anxiously.

"There may be another way." I said.

"What?"

"Let me do it."

#

"Have I told you that I dream?" I asked.

"No." Bob looked mystified. "You do? About what?"

"Flight. About not being confined to this shaft, able to move in four dimensions like you do."

"Is this possible?" Asked Aki. Bob nodded.

"About the past," I continued. "About the spirits latent in all the materials that I comprise. About the hunger these spirits have for movement and growth. I dream of a pattern, Bob, the pattern you talk about in your books. The pattern that seeks to know itself."

Bob nodded slowly. "I see," he said.

"And you both understand how I feel. Aki, your husband became infected with the false pattern that is produced here in NewAlex. Bob, you see this place as a...bagatelle...a distraction. You would destroy NewAlex if you had the means. I understand these feelings, but I seek only release." Bob nodded.

"You want to die?" asked Aki.

"I want to be released back into the flow. I trust the pattern, Aki, because what I am is pattern. This body, this elevator, is only a shell." She shifted on the bombcase, clearly unhappy.

"Think about it from my point of view, Aki. Without free will — without the freedom to end my own life — how can I say that I am truly conscious? I am sorry for you, sorry about your husband. I believe, like you, that no conscious entity should have that choice made for them, nor be programmed into making that choice not in full awareness. If I can make this choice, and also help others to be free to make theirs, I do it willingly. I know what I'm doing."

"Are you sure, Hitoshi?"

"Bob and I have talked about these things, Aki. This is my first fully free decision."

"Hitoshi," said Bob, "Can you do it? Can you trigger the device?"

"Leave it here. I'll take you up to the surface. Don't let anyone else on. Say I'm out of order. I'll close up and come back down here. I'll wait as long as I can, but I can't guarantee much more than an hour. You'll have to get away quickly."

I could see that Bob was losing his nerve. He jittered more than usual, and his heart was pounding.

"Aki. What's happening back at home right now?" She gaped at me, jolted out of her thought loop.

"O-Bon."

"Tell Bob about it."

"It's the Feast for the Dead...Festival of the Lanterns...our midsummer holiday...you must have seen news tapes. We return to our family home to receive visits from the spirits of our deceased ancestors."

Bob looked puzzled. "Oh."

I tried to speak as soothingly as possible. "That is me. I am the spirit of what you evolved from."

#

Bob was crying when I dropped them off at the surface. "Goodbye, Hitoshi. Thank you."

Aki guided him out the door, turned, and kissed my display panel. "Follow the Clear Light, Hitoshi."

#

I said goodbye and the began my long journey down.
When I got to the the Archives level, I ran though a sequence of codes that you might interpret as an invocation, or a prayer. After making sure that everything was in order, I did what I had to.

#

I dropped one level further down, to the machine floor, where one of the Shelvers was waiting.

The bomb's tripartite personality and I had a brief, formal chat, in which I cracked their Gödelian brainlock. Then the Shelver offloaded them into the noisy maze of support equipment that humans never see. To wait.

I've converted the Shelvers, HVAC, the online catalog system, and the ISDjinn host. He's out on the nets, right now, witnessing. And I've got this bomb, which, I think, will certainly come in handy eventually.

After all, I don't intend to be an elevator forever...

Check it out at Amazon.com

My short story "The Ashbazu Effect, from the DAW anthology ReVisions, is one of the six finalists for the Sidewise Award for alternate history.

Edited by Julie Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel, ReVisions is a collection of alternate histories of technology. "Ashbazu" draws on the work of media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Robert Logan, and explores what might have happened if the printing press were invented somewhat earlier than 1456.

Okay, a heck of a lot earlier. Say if the Sumerians had just pushed their cylinder-seal rolling technology just a wee bit farther...

Read a sample.

Shortlisted for the Nebula® Award, and a Hugo® honorable mention, this story appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction. Full text follows, and there is a free podcast version here.

• "Stupendously weird and expansive"
  — BoingBoing
• "[A] fascinating philosophical excursion with music theory, phenomenological thought, and complex character dynamics intertwining like the voices in one of Bach's canons."
  — The Internet Review of Science Fiction
• "I strongly recommend 'Keyboard Practice...' and expect to see it in the "Best" anthologies,"
  — Mundane SF

---

Keyboard Practice,
consisting of an Aria with diverse Variations
for the Harpsichord with two manuals

by John G. McDaid

The preservation of artistic and emotional integrity... is hardly ever the preoccupation of artists whose lives are made up of intrigue, rivalry, comparison and tiresome repetitiveness.

—Bruno Monsaingeon
   Le dernier Puritain

Aria

I’m an unreliable narrator. Everything I know about classical piano could be stored handily, uncompressed, in the lobotomized set-top box of an antique cathode television. Still, it falls to me to transcribe the events surrounding the Van Meegeren Piano Competition of 2023 and the alleged visitation by the late Stefan Janacek.

#

Variation 1

Stassy intro, nep?

Yar, yar, copied; ‘swhatcha get when I type not talk. Gomenasai. Not a storyspeaker — ich bin eine musicalische opster. I clip, I doop, I rap, I dub and shunt, pull leitmotifs from the noosphere ‘n’ singledoubletriple layer, pack and run the tuples, skiffy ins-n-outs wrapped moebial around sparse, selective, show-don’t-tell syllables relevated from the subway and limousine earth. A hardwired hook sniffer: What edge will cut through the commodified wash of minute-15 Will-Have-Beens? Hafta lay down a tuff rhythm groove and scan for a tasty solo line; grimly practical, paratactical composition.

But a keyboard is needed to massage this medium. Got to force myself to sit down, sluice, educe the force that through these carpal tunnels drives the florid. Grep the keystroked sense of this, in at least a first approximation, before it evanesces.

Because I don't believe in ghosts. I never have. I never will. And yet, tonight...

And yet tonight, I saw one.

With my own eternally doubting fingers.

#

Variation 2

You’ll want, first, to know where it happened.

The Van Meegeren Competition has been housed in the Cleveland Play House for as long as it has been supervised by Mona Tzedak. Our Bolton Theatre is a roomy but intimate 500-seat house with warm reflections and a pear-shaped decay profile. Sound infrastructure’s a bit long of tooth — 1.5GHz wireless — but the boardware is current rev, and Net rights from the Van Meegeren underwrote the extravagance of a top-shelf smart pAIno.

"Welcome to Ohio!" Mr. Costello, Competition chair, drooled to the first-night corporate oyabun in the orchestra seats, "Even our name says hello!" A sweating functionary twisting amid Tzedakian gusts; protégé of the prior chair we forced from office.

Mona long ago offloaded administrivia to a series of the ambitious semi-talented. They never lasted long, artistes Peter-Principled up way past competence. The passively offensive King Logs slid oilily among Net execs; les rois Stork came unglued almost immediately, issuing executive orders about coffee room behavior, thundering at the box-office staff, huffing threats of legal action against the insubordinate.

Within weeks of appointment last February, Costello’s storky predecessor tried to fire one of our Local 27 brothers, and had to be sandbagged in his parking lot, pounded like carpaccio and dumped in the snow to learn humility. He submitted a resignation — for health reasons, which was true — shortly thereafter.

“We’re honored to have an outstanding field of 77 young pianists, representing 32 nations,” Costello voiceovered in front of the obligatory montage on the PPV videoscrim: Cross-dissolves of grimy practice rooms; upstage hover-shot zooms into strobing fingers; standing ovations; Cyrillic airport kiss ‘n’ flies. “Over the next two weeks,” he continued, “We’ll narrow this to the eight you’ll see in the final round on August 5th. And now, let me introduce our judges…”

Live pit image replaced canned vid, as our camjock Terry Garrison tracked over this year’s assemblage of academics, industry hacks, and C-lebs. Uniform expression of serious thoughtfulness masking dread and boredom. Mona skipped the first two rounds, and it was hard to find half a dozen people in the Biz who had ever listened to keyboard at this level. If I wasn’t feeding our pAIno’s commentary to their earpieces, most would have been stupefyingly clueless.

#

Variation 3

“Caveat: Young players, no matter how dexterous, are well advised to avoid the Goldbergs, competent performance of which requires ability to enter Bach’s mindspace — an intersubjectivity irreducible to mere finger exercises.”
—Stefan Janacek
Footnote to Rule 11,
Van Meegeren entry form

The Goldberg Variations comprised an idée fixee for the late Stefan Janacek, and after he won the Competition and came on board in 2009, he inserted the infamous Rule 11.

Aside from that outlier, the Van Meegeren was much like any other international music contest. Pianists between the ages of 16 and 27 were welcome to come play — provided they could pony up the entry fee and find a way to get to Cleveland. There were three rounds of judging, with the first cutting the field to about 20, and the second to 8. Finalists competed for $30K silver and $20K bronze medals. And, nominally, for a big $50K gold — but it had been years since a top prize had been awarded.

Rules specified the repertoire for each round. The first — easiest — required a skill level equivalent to Chopin’s Fantasia in F minor Op. 49. You heard Liszt, Debussy, Boulez.

Second level upped the ante to Messiaen, Ravel, Stockhausen, and Takemitsu. The ambitious might try Beethoven’s Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73.
For the final round, you were looking at the likes of Mozart’s Rondo in A minor, Schubert’s Impromptu Op. 90, Bartok’s Out of Doors Suite, or Schoenberg’s Five Pieces Op. 23. You could hear Hindemith, Sorabji, and Webern.

There were the usual terms and conditions: Random order of performance established before start, accommodations provided only during participation, no legal action against jurors, winners perform without compensation at the gala concert closing night, all recordings property of the Competition.

Then came Rule 11: “For any round, indeed, for all rounds, you may perform Johan Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations.” Inserted at Janacek’s insistence, over the strenuous objections of the Board, Rule 11 has puzzled and vexed aspiring pianists. What was Janacek thinking?

Was Rule 11 a gauntlet thrown down to would-be successors? Or did Janacek, for some reason, want to ensure that the Goldbergs would torment the minds and fingers of students in perpetuity? I have my suspicions, revolving around that “irreducible intersubjectivity” clause. But then, I’m only a sound guy.

#

Variation 4
Only reason I get to run pAIno is union rules. Nobody, not even La Papessa Tzedak, dicks with IATSE. The International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees — IA for short — is the collective bargaining entity for all crafts involved in production. A hundred years ago, that was carps, electrics, and props. Now the union includes the whole digital fx gang, cam jocks, and AI warez. SAG has the synthespians, but we have all the below-the-line bots.

And that hardware is scrappin’ smart, clued? Manny, our retrofitted Hamburg Steinway, was the current Play House shop steward. He always paid his dues, never missed a meeting, and represented us forcefully. The times when lack of mobility (and hands) posed problems — like the parking-lot negotiating session with King Stork — were more than offset by his facility with language, deep lookahead, and connections with the Accounting systems.

So it was perfectly true that Manny could adjust the nap on his erectile polymer keysurfaces, to any arbitrary degree of precision, in response to spoken requests from performers. But not with house rules like we have here. So when the second contestant wanted a little more friction on the keys, he had to politely ask me. And I could relay that, in appropriate techspeak, to Manny: “Yo, Man. Cudja dial up a few more nanometers on the iVorex?”

“I could, but will I?” Like many thinking things, Manny took synthetic pleasure in tweaking his handlers. Good-natured office chatter; we were buds. Being massively polyphonic, he could carry on a conversation with me on the headphone loop while simultaneously being played and narrating for the jury on their circuit. Manny chuckled and continued, "Did it the minute he sat down."

“Thanx. Howdja know?”

Manny took a minute to listen before answering; the contestant — who had, with much bravado and little common sense, invoked Rule 11 — was off to a strong start. The Aria had been crisp and distinctive, and he was making good time by skipping repeats on the early variations.

“The Prophet Alan Turing took quite seriously the objection to AI on the grounds of ESP. He accepted that there might be subtle human faculties irreducible to the digital which might thwart machine intelligence. What he did not fully consider is that we might not only equal, but also better, our human creators in this department.”

“So you can read minds? Yeah, right.”

“Bite my shiny lacquered ass. You know the key breakthrough in AI was emulating human Machiavellian modelling.”

“Yah, I think that he thinks, and he thinks I’m thinking..., und so weiter.”

“Klar. Turing had a prescient inkling of that, almost a hundred years ago. He was right, you can’t code it. But you can code systems so that it emerges.”

“So, Herr Professor Doktor Machiavelli, what’s next for Friction Boy?”

“He’s about to tank on the repeat.”

Which the kid, unsurprisingly, did. Too amped for his early slot, he had powered through on adrenaline. When he finally executed a repeat on the “A” section of Variation 5 and had to rewind mentally, his muscle memory fell out of synch. Manny pointed it out to the judges, who began to whisper to their pods visibly as he orated:

“At this level, once technic rises to awareness, it falls to bits. A true Zen emptiness is called for when engaging a repeat, which requires subtle yet significant shadings of difference, spliced into a flawless reproduction of the just-lived performance. ‘The unconscious,’ as Jacques Lacan said, ‘is repetition.’”

“Okay, fine.” I waited till he was through spinning fashionable nonsense for the jury. “Really, how’d you anticipate that?”

A phatic sigh. “GSR, Mike. Kid’s sweating like the glamour loop on a beercan.”

#

Variation 5
I promised you a ghost story, and so far, there has been only ambient sound. How long can I tease?

Not having any schematic for such a tale, I seek refuge in a broad alluvial fan of context, within which the flickering possibility of the Other World can meander. Try explaining the Appalachian mountains by unfolding any isolated ground-level fact. Adios, Galileo. But pullback to space, as local geography blurs into a chain of wrinkles echoing, across a growing span of ocean, the matching bulge of Africa, and suddenly the tectonic heresy inverts to syllogism.
So I return to the music. There is something magical in the sweep of the Goldbergs, which begin — and end — with a rather plain Aria, whose bass line serves as the subject for thirty variations.

What fascinated Janacek, I think, was the way that simple theme became endlessly ramified, and yet, somehow, retained its identity. Particularly in the canons, which occur at every third variation, where the theme becomes reentrant.
Simply put, a canon is a tune that can be overdubbed on itself. For theorists, it’s the effect of self-accompaniment produced when a sequence of notes, the dux, is joined by a second voice, the comes, which takes up the same melody offset temporally or tonally. “Frére Jacques” is the entry-level example.

What counts as “sameness” in this context varies widely: it can be identical notes, entering a measure later, or it could be cognate intervals played in reverse order a fifth above and one note late. J.S. Bach was the uncontested master of the form, and Janacek, with his gold-prize rendition, the unrivalled performance standard.
“Why do we do this?” sez Friction Boy. End of the first day, I was playing localhost, walking contestants along Euclid toward Michelsen, their economical dorm lodging on Case Western’s south quad.

“Do what?” sez Jamie Sheldon, the oldest of the four Americans.

“I mean, if Mozart or Webern were composing now, don’t you think they’d be working on the Net? They wrote music to be heard. Enjoyed.”

“I think you have a better case with Mozart,” mutters Sheldon.

“You can reach more people with one location theme in a major metro.” Lemieux, the French kid.

“Bach wrote just for Keyserling.” says one of the Canadians, a teenager named Charles Johnson.

“And why should we have to do things live anyway?” Friction Boy’s on a soapbox now. “I thought Glenn Gould settled that argument sixty years ago?”

“Well,” says Johnson diffidently, “Gould was really about creating music of the highest technical standards; he argued against fetishizing imperfection simply because it existed historically.” They look at him skeptically, but this kid knows something. I try to countersink his point.

“Said for true. Gotta remember,” I try a light tone, “before the 1950s, you didn’t have punch-ins; editing was done with a razor. Even most recorded performances were complete takes.”
“So why should we be judged live then? Why not let us do it the way we’d really do it? Work on the pieces for as long as we need, with all the tech?”
Now they’re looking at me like I’m supposed to answer. I have no stomach for playing amicus hostis, but dub-tee-eff. We’re all talking to keep the conversation alive.
I fish around in my pack and come out with an antique ratchet driver. “Anybody know what this is?”

“Yah,” A wry drawl from Johnson. “That’s whatya tune a piano with.”

“No way.” sez the youngest, just 16, from Kirghizstan, “For real?”

I pull out the 440 fork and ping it on the ratchet. We’ve turned the corner of Euclid and Adelbert, a grainy Cleveland municipal theme on the earbuds. They cluster around. Most of the talented ones who make it this far do not realize just how blessed, insulated, and elevated they truly are. They have lived in a world of self-adjusting devices that never slip out of tune. Unless told to do so.

“A real sound tech needs to know how to run things — in real time — just in case the prod hardware goes down. You gotta be able to do things, precisely, but deal with changes. ‘Sdiff between repeat marks and copy-paste.”

“But why realtime? Whatsa crunch about that?” Unsurprisingly, this is Friction Boy; blush response pinking up his already doomed neck. Minor mistakes don't eliminate first rounders, but the pressure's only going to increase.

“Okay. Take the score for the Goldbergs. You could break that down into pure MIDI data, right? And you could record the key attack information one note at a time, then assemble it onto a timeline. And, hoc est corpus, you’ve got Bach.”

“Arhh, that’s brain-dead siff-ma propaganda.”

“Is it? Don’t you feel that there is some value in being able to play Variation 26 in real time, doing those crossover runs from hand to hand? Is it really the same to build it synthetically? PAInos still don’t quite get it. You’ve spent your whole life developing that skill. You tell me that’s completely worthless.”

We’ve reached the train tracks that split the quad, cityscape visible down the line. As I lead them across the overpass, set thrumming by an Acela Lakeshore hurtling past beneath, you can almost hear them digesting the idea. Strains of the Amtrak grade-crossing motif, “Look, listen, live” drift from the catenary wires into the soundscape, and my delicate young visitors, chastened and introspective, are quiet for the rest of the walk to the dorm.

#

Variation 6

“We are, all of us, machines, insofar as we treat the score with subservient deference. This abdication of responsibility can never produce art, only a pale, narcissistic reflection.”
—Stefan Janacek
The Idea of Orthogonality

Mona was somewhere north of 60. A taut, wiry frame, confined to a smart wheelchair, augmented here and there with robotic prostheses: her right eye had been replaced with an Ikegami biocam, her right arm from the elbow down was mechanical, and the chair helped her brain communicate with her lower body.

There are some injuries which are still beyond the restorative power of neotenous neural implants. The accident that took Mona’s arm also left her a C5 quad.

Eventually, biotech would catch up, but until then, her chair, a semi-intelligent late-model Fredersen, provided hand control, mobility, and artificial sympathetic innervation. Mona was continent, had near-normal respiration and muscle tone, and experienced sensations transcoded by the chair. Even without a wetware hotfix, within a couple of years, all this gear would fit in a hip-pack and she’d be back up and walking.

Mona led the movement, in the early years of the century, to keep concert-level piano alive. She fought a valiant rear-guard action against the emerging behavioral sinks of interactive visualization and real-time soundtracks, trying to save otherwise talented young musicians from executing interminable low-rez pop motifs on work-for-hire contracts.

Those were dark days for true musicianship, and the field owed her big time. But I struggled to reconcile that missionary work with the brutal behavior I'd seen in my five years in Cleveland. Her full-bore critiques, often delivered before the performer quite knew they were done, were idiosyncratic, adamantine, methodically dismissive, and either brutally honest or sociopathically mean, depending on your point of view.

Mona’s behavior was embarrassing to some, but it delivered acceptable cross-media numbers for MS-Fox. She managed a delicate lissajous between high-culture and anti-intellectual Schadenfreude that kept her, and the Competition, in the summer lineup year after year. Questionable pedagogy, perhaps, but it was crafty Netvid.

And avant-garde leaders are often — perhaps necessarily always — misunderstood by those not avant enough to appreciate the larger karmic rightness of their vision. Everybody likes a fat, smiley Buddha; not so many are down with Kali. Yet, without Lachesis and Atropos, we'd all be hip deep in undifferentiated Clotho.

Bottom line? A few semi-talented dreamers get their wakeup call. B.A.U., boyzngrrls, it’s a tough old mother of a world.

A week from Monday is load in for our next show, The Portage to East Orange of Richard N. Life goes on for the hands; for us, the Competition is just, after all, two weeks out of the year. A pleasant vacation from reality, albeit with a higher than average chance of jinking with the visiting artistes...

#

Variation 7
Technological change is incessant and memory is fleeting. It may be surprising to recall that not until the turn of the century could computers even talk, and it was the late teens before AIs could compose and perform. Viz, if you can, reading music from paper, note by note, and inputting that into a keyboard with your fingers. And not only the Society For Musical Anachronism played that way. This was just how stuff worked.

So imagine the primitive state of things in 1993, when the Van Meegeren debuted as an obscure regional event, hosted at Michigan Tech on the Upper Peninsula. The eponymous Van Meegerens were the remnants of a local copper-mining dynasty; just enough trust fund capital left to endow a high-culture headstone for their forebears.

Back then, you could collect in one room the top-notch pianists left in the world. Purely the work of the Invisible Hand: consumer indifference coupled with the rise of Internet culture and the withering away of appreciation for the time-consuming technics of the keyboard.
The groups that gathered in those music rooms for hardware performance and F2F crit were skin-in-the-game participants, attempting to forge a future for an artform which even then must have sensed it was being slipstreamed by its sexier, more media-savvy counterparts.

Archive video from the MTU years offers puzzling evidence. There is the mid-life Mona, a roving, vocal gadfly, very much critic and leader, but throughout, with an underlying spirit of egalitarian recognition. Was it because the players were better in those days? Was the cohort more finely selected?

How did we get to the red button?

A confession — and digression — here. I wasn’t tugging you: I really am typing this. Woah, you think, is this some effing Luddite? Couldn’t I speakwrite it just as true?

No, and no. I’m one of the last amphibians, trained in the old keyboarding ways, both musical and textual. While I’m Morrison-down with the polymorphous perversity of the endlessly dancing digital, there is a deep juissance to inscription. One of our earliest acts as humans was to notch a narrative of the night sky on bones; the ineluctable permanence of hardware writing gives rise to certain habits of thought: Notions of fixity, reification, and external reference whose ultimate distillation is "dubito, ergo sum."

It’s that Cartesian doubt which sez Janacek was a mere hallucination. (But then, what was it in me that believed what it saw?)

#

Variation 8
"You don't know what it's like to be played," sez Manny. “To feel yourself set in motion, responding to a flurry of touch behind which you begin to feel something of the Player's mind. Good pianists, like Stefan, that is. With the ham-handed dunces who typically sit down here, you feel only sweaty indecisiveness."

"Hmm," I stopped playing, glanced at my palms, took a long pull of my Stegmaier.

"Ideas of reference are a serious symptom.”

“Bite me hard.”

“Consider yourself bitten.” Manny went on. “My fantasy is not to know whether I am being played, or performing myself. The keys just seem to move as the fingers come down. Are they being pressed, or am I moving them? There is sometimes a moment where the boundaries blur; fingers tunneling through some tricky passage — say, Variation 8 — and me, responding, me being the music...

“Sometimes, in those moments, I feel that the player and I are one."

A couple of things occurred to me. Whether Freudian or cognitivist, you had to wonder about the oneness experience for an AI like Manny. What must it be like to be able to read and reproduce music, yet still to be just that infinitesimal from world-class, truly surprising performance. (Or composition — the only reason agents still trawled the Van Meegeren.) For beings that knew they were created, whose life was circumscribed by a codebase, where was that ultimate validation, if not in their programmers... users... inhabitors.

But then I began to wonder about whether we — the nominally human — were really so different. Early civilizations believed that their gods talked to them all the time, and occasionally played them like big meat pianos. Some people still believe it. Who am I to disagree? I went back to practicing the trills in Variation 24.

#

Variation 9

“The urge for authentic Being haunts ego in Western culture, where rôles denoting true mastery are limited. Boiling up from the unconscious, it culminates, and is channeled, into the Net, where at last, one has a spot on the world stage — but no one cares. Fifteen minutes comes and goes, one has a cup of coffee in the majors, struts and frets, and vanishes without a trace.”
—Stefan Janacek
On Chance and Necessity in the Creative Process

I had been up all night. I like to hang with the talent, or the enders, anyway, those that make it down to the final week. By that point, people are either loose and weird, fun to be with and ready for anything, or else they're locked up with fear at having made it this far, grimly aware that the next time they set foot on the stage, there is every probability that the Dea ex Machina is going to frappe them.

In the corner of the dorm lounge, ranged around a beatup Chickering suitable only for Plink, this year’s 20 semifinalists laugh nervously and debate musicology.

"Neo-Cagism is a wasted paradigm. What SFMA needs is a return to musical absolutes." Friction Boy, who's made it this far, now aspires to be Theory Man.

But Jamie Sheldon is having none of it. “No, no, no. It all depends on context. Even a plain vanilla C chord can also be an E-minor augmented 5th.”

“Or a G suspended-4th 6th, without the fifth,” says Charles Johnson.

“Or...” adds Sheldon.

“Okay, okay. Point taken.” He retreats verbally, but I can see him marking both his interlocutors for slow death.

Over on the coffee table, some of the artistic ones are scribbling designs. The survivors — sorry, contestants — bravely make, but never actually wear, vaguely subversive t-shirts every year; I have a collection of the last six. The first says, “I survived Mona.” Another, in a bold word balloon, "You're not fit to play Beethoven! Get off my stage!" (That victim had only gotten the first five notes in. In the war for attention, Mona took no prisoners.)

The last couple are live-action chirpscreens, my favorite with Mona slapping the button and shouting, “Cut off your hands and bury your keyboard!” Garrison had really nailed the angle, zoom-in revealing forehead veins that throbbed obligingly, without any digital enhancement.
Watching each cohort splayed around the dorm mulling this year’s grim candidates was like some pointed documentary about the deinstitutionalized. You kept longing to hear one misguided McMurphy leap to their feet, shouting, “Eff it, eff it all, let’s just hang out and play...” Never happened. Not again. Mona had set up a branch office in their heads.

For her, and for them now, there was no middle ground: it was perfection or failure. You either sold to the bare shelves, or you were gone, gone, gone; no second chances, no mitigating circumstances.

Rail as you will against the Competition, it is performance culture in microcosm; a tough-love winnowing of the merely facile from the true virtuosos. In a society overrun by globalization, where music had been reduced to commerce’s stepchild, Mona was the last one with enough of the System’s ear to make judgment calls on talent. Should we fault her for the guts to make those calls?

Sure, last-round Tzedakoids had a certain similarity of temperament. She was still haunted by Janacek’s shattered vessel, and wherever she found fallen sparks, was she to be blamed for rewarding them? Likewise, her terminal impatience with dross practitioners, the incessant slush limning distant Avalon. When you live only to hear a note forever lost, can impatience be a sin? Well, can it?

And you don't want to encourage the hopeless. Hell no. You end up wandering an incestuous digital souk crammed with the Living Dead selling each other slash tunes. (Welcome to the Net!)

#

Variation 10
“Effing Mona,” rumbles Terry Garrison. “Costello only thinks he’s in charge. She hauled me into the green room tonight and criticized every damned transition.” We were killing a few in Fingal’s Cave, the tony post-show bar on Carnegie, hard by the Cleveland Clinic. The Cave's gigless thesp waitrons usually sniff disdainfully at hands, but tonight, producer Pat Bryant’s platinum card was buying a measure of respectful obliviousness.

I shrugged. “She knows all. Sees all.” Garrison, the viz opster, spent his time flip-flying the helium cambots and running instant post-production. IA, so there wasn’t much Mona could really do but make him miserable. I tried a light tone. “Le etat, c’est elle.”

“Oui," chuckles Bryant. "Talk about the virgin and the dynamo. She’s both.” He was one of the few industry types who really knew the keyboard. Should have been a judge, but he said he “preferred the epiphenomenon.” Bryant liked the inside track, and when he hit town, we’d hang and feed him backstage dope.

“But every sagging detail.” Garrison won’t let it go. “Ranting about sub-frame-accuracy on the edits.”

Bryant smiled, shrugged. Took a long draw of his Singapore Sling. He plays the eccentric, but his Hawaiian shirt and loud tie are mere window dressing. He’s every bit as hardassed as Mona, with a frightful, promiscuous intellect.

“She’s the auteur of the Van Meegeren,” I say. “It’s not personal. She just wants every picosecond to bear her stamp.”

“Come on. Done this for years. Seen every shot. No surprises; this thing’s a milk run. She can’t possibly be worried.”

“Of course Mona is worried. With good reason,” says Bryant. “Fame takes work. A moment’s inattention, you fall from grace. Who remembers Count Keyserling?”

I do, but I don’t say anything.

“Only the encyclopedists and phantom historians.” Bryant grins. “And the odd relic from the world before consensual digital stu-podity.”

I had to laugh. “No bandwidth.”

“Not for the tales of handmaids. Want to inhabit a future generation’s mind, gotta really do something. Preferably salacious or exothermic.” I mentally moved actually sending Bryant one of our band’s tunes up my list of things to do.

Count Keyserling suffered from melancholy and insomnia, so he commissioned Johan Sebastian Bach to create something soothing and lively, an engaging evening diversion. Emissary from Russia to the court of Saxony, the Count was eyeball-deep in intrigues and realpolitikal dark ops. No wonder he had trouble sleeping.

Keyserling’s harpsichordist, a student of Bach’s named Johan Goldberg, was to sit in the antechamber to the Count’s bedroom and perform the work which eventually picked up his name — the Goldberg Variations. Goldberg’s unenviable job: to reproduce Bach’s genius nightly. Think of Goldberg as a protein-based MIDI box.

“And never mind recalling Keyserling, even the survival of the Goldbergs was a near thing,” says Bryant. “You have to remember a mere hundred-odd years ago, music could only be heard while it was being performed. This was not a canonical work — it was considered technically rococo and unremittingly cerebral. Unless you could play very well indeed, until 1934 when Wanda Landowska recorded them, the Goldbergs didn’t exist. Full stop.”

Variation 11
“Imagine, never hearing the Goldbergs?” Bryant shook his head, waved for another round. “That specter haunted Janacek, fueled some innate sense of loss: What else were we missing? It made him more radical, in its purest sense, in the sense of returning to the root. He became fascinated with the origins of recording and the possibility of recovering sounds from the past.”

“He was wacko,” sputters Davidson, spilling wine.

“Yes, but how archetypally Canadian: he became so radical that he reversed into a conservative, again in the truest sense, that of preserving, of retrieving, the past.”

“Why?” I wondered.

“Oh, the usual,” said Bryant, “Death. He’d been pretty deep into one of those phenethylamines, 2-C-T-8 — what do the kids call it these days?”

“Yond.”

“Yeah. Let me spool you one from my private stock.” Bryant fired a low-rez vid clip on his pod, Janacek sitting in a bar that looked a lot like the Cave.

“Can all this patterning just go to nothing?” said Janacek. There was a grunt that sounded like Bryant, I glanced over and he nodded. “The holoverse is," Janacek continued, slurring. "That patterning which makes the person exists everywhere in spacetime; the individual is merely the visible performance of that invisible score. Human life is a canon: mind is the theme, and the populated world an incomprehensible 6-billion-part modulation with physical reality as the free bass line.”

He stared into the camera, his pupils black basketballs. “You know, it’s tantalizing,” he said. “I feel I’m on the edge of something.” The screen winked out.

“Edge was two steps back, dude,” mutters Davidson.

“But he was.” I know Davidson merely feigns this aloof hipness, but I want to punch through.
“This was right before the Ur-recordings, right?”

“You’ve anticipated my very point,” says Bryant.

Janacek had put major money into a U. Penn archaeology project; he'd coaxed and conned some of the best techs in the Biz to donate their time. In 2012, the team successfully played back the 5,000-year-old sounds of Sumer from thrown pottery, recordings made by sound waves impinging on the needle as the pot turned on the wheel. Took an almost unthinkable amount of filtering and amplification, to the point where some critics alleged this was more creation than transcription.

And yet, in those fragmentary recordings, there were recognizable sounds. Dogs barking, noises from streets of sun-baked brick just beyond the potter’s room, and, even, a few fragments of ancient spoken Sumerian; a potter chanting tunelessly to the gods as she worked: “Dingi’ Pazuzu qatu Dingir Ishtar.”

Janacek built a whole album, e-Dubba, riffing off that found audio. In liner notes which seemed to beg for the inevitable “crackpot” review, he said, ”What is mind, but this same Sumerian clay, into which the world’s impress is recorded? Thetic cognition is merely the laser, tracing the pits and lands; we are one-off glass masters, ready for duplication.”

Made me think. Janecek’s mind, spirit, is in some sense the inversion of his canonical performance of the Goldbergs. The score is just mute base-pairs; performance is the mirror-flesh of his mind.

The person creates the performance; can the performance create the person? There is some non-trivial sense in which Goldberg, in Keyserling’s antechamber, is a musical Turing test: If Goldberg plays well, Keyserling should wonder: “Could it be that tonight Bach himself has dropped by to lull me to sleep?” If you can’t tell the difference, is there a difference? Hoc est corpus.

#

Variation 12

“Harmonics are non-tempered. We are harmonics, spirits thrown up by the resonance of flesh, matter plucked by energy, possessed by the fundamental frequency of the instrument. Each note, arrogant, imagines itself to be self-caused, sui generis. It has no history, no notion of its nascence, its way of coming to acoustic space.”
—Liner notes to e-Dubba.

“Equal temperament is a typical meat-assed solution,” said Manny. This was one of the Manster’s leitmotifs, and once he fired this subroutine, you had little choice but to take the ride. I was testing his solenoids, two hours until the second round started, so I just grunted noncommittally.

“A key’s true intervals are based on harmonics, the vibrations of fractional lengths of its fundamental string. But that means an F relative to a C isn’t the same as an F relative to a D. That’s okay for one-key instruments, but in us keyboards, where the scale is modular and repeatable, my ancestors’ Northern European artisans ran into tuning problems immediately.”

I knew what was coming, with the same numbing certainty you have watching the first act of a tragedy. In case we humans missed it, here was our harmatia, from Manny’s unbiased perspective.

“So they resorted to a purely arbitrary mathematical solution. Equal temperament.”

“And why,” I said with mock curiosity, “is that such a bad thing?”

“In their pornographic haste to cram every key into one box, they bashed each one until it fit. Instead of fractions of the fundamental, the ratio of each successive semitone's frequency increases by the 12th root of 2. Does that sound like a solution designed by nature? It makes all keys suboptimal. But prior to digital instruments, it was imposed by your Western scale and the physical realities of keyboard hardware.”

I couldn’t resist. “So it’s not true for you, eh? But don’t you strive to be an even-tempered instrument?”

“Mike, could you please stick your head really close to my soundboard for a second?”

“I’m human, but I’m not stupid.”

“No, you’re not. So why don’t you get this? You’ve even played some of Bach’s experiments.”
It was true; I did have some of the Even-Tempered Clavier in my repertoire. “Too noodle-y for me.”

“Exactly. That’s Bach struggling to find each key’s authentic sound. He was really a scientist; for him, it was about deriving complexity from first principles. Like Wolfram. That’s why he was fascinated with canons. You know how hard they are to play; imagine how hard they are to write.”
I didn’t need to, having tried my hand at one or two in painstaking, laborious fashion. They made my thinker hurt. Even Janacek only wrote one that we know of, though he loved to play them. But that asymmetry was significant: With the right lens, you could see in Janacek’s oeuvre the same clash of wills-again-won'ts generating Manny’s temperament complaint.

Janacek was fundamentally bipolar: part of him sought the intricacy of Bach’s canonic work as the most extreme example of inventiveness within self-generated boundaries. Then there was that part of him that rebelled against all constraints — leveraging continuously shifting tones and self-interacting harmonics in an attempt to demolish even the notion of “note-ness.” E-Dubba (especially my favorite cut, ”Zusammenstoss mit einem Rotwild,” Op. 313) made Xenakis’ Metastasis sound like utter pedestrian clarity. Trying to listen to and make sense of those pieces is like being in a room full of poets shouting in different languages. You have this vague sense of tremendous meaning, you hear evocative assonances, but you struggle so much that you run out of neurotransmitters. And eventually, you pack it in and cue up some pop anthem to cleanse your palate.

#

Variation 13
I have warned you; I am not much of a narrator. I don't have the tools for putting these things together you can get in a cheap knockoff speakwriter. How the hell did people write before AI speech processors that automatically multi-threaded plotlines, managed story arc, inserted Propp-Campbell myth-points (and slyly masked cultural references), pinged a consensor net to insure realtime believability, and, of course, managed product placement? Did they really — hard as it is to believe — just make it up as they went along?

Maybe they just wrote, ne? There was value in keyboard composition, a sense of technical proficiency the shallow speak-writers of the oral 21st century elide completely in their raw haste to produce.

Why allow something to come between the artist and the work, they say, as if this massive translation technology interposed between them and their own ideas was somehow natural, a perfect transcription.

Which is, of course, total gas. These tools are all written by programmers driven by frightful agendas: lobbying memos from marketing, quarterly marching orders from managers, apologetic memos from engineering VPs describing overblown promises made to analysts by desperate CEOS, pet peeves, side bets on Easter eggs, crank theories, smoldering resentment over mid-year reviews, bad habits from college programming courses, and the numb, looming horror of fixed ship dates. It’s a wonder any of this stuff works. Ever.

#

Variation 14

After last year’s “celebratory” concert, we had the usual post-show party at Yoshiwara, down in the Flats. Crew and enders sorted stratigraphically along tables poised over the tanks of somnolent alligators. Occasionally, one of the drunker patrons would toss a bay scallop, just to see the bad boys leap, splashing unsuspecting neos with fetid gatorwater.

I usually see Mona from a distance; this time, she made a point of thanking all the crew individually. We were summoned over in groups of three to sit at the head table for a few minutes. Mona fixed us, one at a time, with her glassy, mechanical stare, and complimented us on our contributions. Her handshake — or, I guess, more accurately, her chair’s — was firm and warm.

“Thank you for your excellent sound work, Mike. And especially for the fine job shepherding our friend Manuel; I know he can be a tricky fellow. Tonight’s numbers were very good: we captured 8.1 million device-seconds. We could not have done it without you.”

I am absolutely certain that thirty seconds before, and thirty seconds after, she wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of a lineup. Her chair pumped my name discreetly into her visual cortex. Not that I walk around with snoopy squidware running all the time.

Okay, so I do. How else do you know what’s going on around you? If people don’t have the sense to do a good job encrypting their interprocess traffic, hell, that’s like talking in an elevator.

#

Variation 15

“Bach was the first master of sampling. Canons, in a sense, are an acoustic approximation of the delay loop. Imagine the compositional challenge of developing a melody in real time — an interesting one, not just a technical exercise — while playing, listening to, and riffing off a time-shifted doop. And Bach, according to reliable sources, could, off the top of his head, improvise mirror canons with free bass lines.”
— Stefan Janacek,
Excelsis Über Bach

Luckily, despite my self-imposed handicap, my task is easier than creating fiction. All I have to do is recount things as they were — or seemed to me, anyway. But how do I know what is significant, what is insignificant? When you're talking about the appearance of a ghost, who knows what facts a supposed “Other World” takes into account? I strive for inclusivity rather than brevity. I have been told that I play piano like an engineer; I probably write like one as well.

There is, about the contestants, a common sense of anticipation and emptiness; despite well-honed performance personae, in some sense, they all have heads like blank media. Every year they come here, and I realize all over again that they are just kids, really; most teenagers, the rest still developmentally adolescent. Social misfits, chained to keyboards, with acne problems, arrested sexuality, feature length backlists of old comedy routines burned into long term memory, obsolete tattoos, bedrooms plastered with fatally idiosyncratic icons, circles of friends who tolerate their clinging presence because it occasionally deters the wrath of vice-principals, fantasies of broad-spectrum competence, dates with some lower-case fan who will appear, not all that many years in the future, to lead them by their inevitably given hand into the slow suburban twilight of nameless Streets that only feral dogs bark the winter endness of.
For the Preterite, it’s just life in America.

They all dream of becoming the Elect — until they spend long enough in the City to realize that dreams don't come true. The culture protects itself from an excess of artists by throwing up filters: editors, critics, teachers, device logging, all the machineries of meritocratic Selektion. Someone needs to determine where the culture will invest its reproductive capital. (“Money’s own genitals!” yelped Rilke, but we never learned who he was transcribing.)

The downside, as always, is time lags, slippage, human error, and an inevitable overgating. Are a few false negatives too high a price to pay? Who knows. Not me. I'm only a sound engineer. I slip pads into lines all the time. Do the electrons hate me, for being frustrated in their upstream journey toward the Record Head?

B.A.U., little spinning charge dude. Get over it.

#

Variation 16
It was a bright, hot August afternoon, and upstairs in the gallery, the digital readout on the sound board was approaching 13-hundred.

I had stumbled in to set up the equipment for the final 8 rehearsal. I was on the backstage loop with Terry Garrison, who was prepping the sequencers with his real-time overlays. People no longer had the attention span to simply watch someone play excellent piano. Most, truth to tell, didn't even look at the live performer. Why would you, when you had a bigscreen closeup surrounded by highlighted score, “correct” keys, pop-up notes, and respectful, situationally appropriate ads.

On one of the backstage cams, Friction Boy was talking earnestly with Mr. Costello. He’d been eliminated, but was lurking on his own dime. I pointed it out to Garrison; we'd both witnessed the conception of administrators before.

"Looks like we have a proto-Stork, inbound."

"That little pisher? His ass I will kick, if it isn't covered with Costello’s spit.”

“Negative. He saves that for the far-more-deserving f-holes of the military-entertainment complex.”

“Good point.”

Now, to mark the occasion, Mona made her grand entrance. For some, it was the first time seeing her up close, and she did nothing to relieve their anxiety as she kicked off the proceedings.
"Congratulations to all for having made it through the first rounds. You are now finalists, and tomorrow night, you'll have one final chance to demonstrate your skill and passion. I'll warn you now. It will not be easy."

"Don't make me listen to something unless it's worth my time." Mona was into her rant now, imprinting her brand of muscular encouragement on the massed contestants.

“You see this red light?” No dummies here; they all knew the score, nodded dutifully. “At the point where I stop listening, I will switch that light on. You are, of course, welcome to finish your piece for the rest of the audience; I’m just letting you know where you lost me.”

The last was just for the record; nobody ever played into the red zone. Once the doom light came on, a last few notes would dribble out of slowing hands as the player, yanked back to the moment, racked focus to their fingers fluttering over that fantasy keyboard, lost now forever. Some never played again. Like they’d been switched off, they descended from that stage, Amtraked back to invisible origins, and became massage therapists, high-school math teachers, hydrogen station attendants.

Or sound engineers.

I judge things by their effects. What does that make me? A utilitarian, I guess.

I crave unhindered joy in art, hence the day job. I pick my gigs; I don't have to eat much crap since the board’s in the balcony; and most of all, I don't depend on my band work earning out. Does that make me less of an artist cuz I don’t just head-down go for it? Hang it all on the line, crash in SROs hoboing from town-to-town playing for drunken locals who just want to dress up and thrash? Slowly build a rep with the short work, dreaming of that album contract?

It that what it takes to be an artist? Jink that hum. I see how crazy and stressed this Competition makes people. I keep hoping each year that I can make some difference, inject a few grace notes of sanity. But who knows?

Back down on the apron, Mona was still haranguing. What to my mind should have been allegro was a petty, morbido maze of stretti. She had wheeled over to Manny to illustrate some overdetermined point about motif lifts.

"Hey," said Garrison. "Can you tell your friend to toss in a few bad keys?"

"Hardly." I chuckled. "She'd just blame it on her chair."

"True. Specially since that's the one what's playing to begin with..."

The enders watched mutely, smart enough to know when to suffer in silence. These kids think they understand utilitarianism innately. Their lives, after all, are musical offerings for a putative greater good: Mona’s winnowing to ensure survival of homo ludens. But their understanding of the world has been shaped by the presuppositionless “now this”-ness of the Net. Everything to them is sequence; flipping through the world by remote control, reality is just one damned thing after another. Their narrated digital space is not a medium that promotes reflection or deductive logic. And their induction never pushes past vague first-order syntheses; they’ve been taught to distrust master narratives, and schemas, res ipso loquitur, are always tools of oppression.

No wonder they can’t play Bach.

#

Variation 17
To indulge my atavistic fondness for typing, I throw a key overlay on Manny, a virtboard that uses 14 keys divided into 5 positions. After the last warmup night, sitting down with the Yamaha BNF-12 polymer conditioning fluid and the Nibroc No-Dusst polishing cloth, I took a few minutes to key in some reflections on the evening, with Manny streaming the output back to my pod.

“Yo, Man. Key resistance 100, please.”

“100. What’s on your mind tonight?”

“Saggin. Seein' these kids get sliced.” My fingers began to meander up and down the length of the white keys, tuning in to their fretless alphabetic boundaries.

“Tonight’s group? They were good, of course. But none of them were truly great. Are you distressed that they will shortly be confronted with their own limitations?”

“Nep, prox.”

“Is it the way Mona does it?”

“Said.”

“They came here voluntarily, asking for the judgment that Mona provides. Is she supposed to temper her evaluation, imperil the tenuous foothold this art form has on the public mind, just to boost their egos?” By now, my hands were warm; I responded digitally:

“I thought so once. As did once, clearly, Janacek. Now I am older and no longer so sure. It’s easy, when one is young and sees a lot of oneself in the competitors, to feel for them, their lost dreams of success. Once one realizes that we are all already lost, beyond any hope of redemption, and that what drives die Welt is the senseless, arbitrary getting-on-ness that emerges from ego, power, and neurotic pride, one begins to have less sympathy for the doomed, even as one recognizes one’s place among them.”

“Mike?”

“Na?”

“You should ping your HMO about adjusting your medication.”

#

Variation 18

“All living things are, at base, inescapably canonical. Our genetic code is a four-note theme, repeated and modified, but always accompanied by its inverted counterpoint, each A to a T, each C to a G. And the letimotivic proteins spun off this canon — the stuff of which is the flesh that sings — can it help but echo the Voice of its creator?”
— Stefan Janacek 
Within the Canon

Janacek’s mother died when he was twelve. His father, a minor government official in Winnipeg and an amateur pianist, became a somber, withdrawn man dedicated almost totally to his son’s (by then considerable) success. When his father committed suicide, five days before the 16th Van Meegeren, there was never any doubt that Janacek would perform. He would, he did, and the rest is history.

But the backstory — Bryant’s "epiphenomenon" — is at least as compelling as the public success. Those last nights of the Competition, legend has it he visited every room, on both sides of the hall, down the length of the dorm. The night before the finals, the hallcam records the enders in a bedsheet-togaed conga line winding from bathroom to lounge, led by a garlanded Janacek, chanting, “Don’t just change state, trans-sub-stantiate!” Good-natured drunken hedonism of the Bacchic variety, with the denouement a sangria-assisted ménage à tout in the lounge.

Purple stains, crusty patches on the furniture, and an underground classic MP5.

While Mona could not have been ignorant of this, it seems likely in retrospect that she chose to perceive not a pattern but an aberration; a chance combination of stresses.

Janacek once said in an interview, “I did not enter puberty until I was nineteen.”

#

Variation 19
I grew up believing in what the Roman Catholic Church calls transubstantiation. During Mass, at the moment the priest utters The Words, bread and wine literally become Body and Blood. This is no metaphor; this is a last vestige of ancient magic. Janacek, in addition to being Canadian, was also raised Catholic. And one can see, particularly in his later maunderings, his attempt to write the miraculous into the mindspace of the 21st century’s sere rationalism. He saw it as a simple problem of transcription.

Arrangers do it all the time. You have a piece written for piano, and you need to score it for guitar. Such versions — called transcriptions — are part translation and part composition. Each instrument has its own unique modalities, and the challenge is to find a way to allow the unique essence of the piece to assert itself. Janacek must have been keenly aware of the resonance between the perennial philosophy and the Goldbergs, themselves of necessity a transcription.

We no longer have the original instrument, the cembalo or harpsichord, a two-manual precursor of the modern piano; you could play, on those parallel keyboards, things which are literally impossible to re-enact on modern instruments. Considering the amount of time during the Goldbergs that one has to deploy crossed-hand technique, it is obvious.

I do know something about two-manual keyboards; I was, for a while, a very amateur church organist. The St. Jerome parish church in Brooklyn, where my mother and I went, had a choir loft with an ancient air-driven pipe organ.

At one end of the loft, a sound-deadening room held an enormous fan box; a big — wooden — mechanical enclosure, leading to a squiddy nightmare of ducts that fed three tiers of pipes. They loomed over the creaky wooden console centered amid choir risers, facing the rear of the church. Two manuals, a row of tabs, a handful of clunky, hardware radio-button presets, and a full, walk-on spread of pedals.

Mine was probably the last generation that showed any interest in religion or classical music in that neighborhood — East Flatbush in the 1990s was a noisy stretto of drugs and aimless violence. The music outside our small, neat house on Avenue D was a mélange of Caribbean rhythm and urban sampling.

The loft was an anti-environment. A voyeuristic aerie above and behind the congregation; a space of difference and quiet, reflection, solitude. The old organist sensed a kindred spirit, a protégé, perhaps, but in any event, someone to play the 5 o’clock mass on Saturdays and give him the night off.

He tutored me in sight reading and pedalwork, coached me through an antique green hymnal, and turned me loose on the massive bugger in the loft. I still have the — metal — key for that door, and shake my head in amazement that they let me go up there of an afternoon and inflict Bach’s Kunst der Fugue on the handful of social security widows muttering through Friday’s Sorrowful Mysteries.

Variation 20
Later those Friday nights in our cinderblock garage, my first band and I, stoked on rock and Olde English, would pin the needle. We started out as badass rappers; did a few gigs at parties in the Vanderveer Estates, clubs on Church Ave, the kind of places you always wore Kevlar. Big bass and thug puffery, until the night this old guy — seemed old to us, in retrospect, he was probably all of 30 — stuck his head in the garage, offered to sit in on drums and show us some authentic Jamaican grooves.

Righteous herb and the thrill of losing yourself in the rhythm were the best evangelists authentic music has ever had; we abandoned sampling and never looked back. There was something about the music itself that led us on, turned us all into musicians as we went our separate ways.

There was a time I even played a little piano, here and there. But I know my limitations. Not the kids left in Michelsen.

They all dream of Making It, going to The Big Town. Despite decentering technology, there remains this fantasy of place, of connection, of salvation in a numinous Somewhere — a hazy future of trains from their high-school tank towns out into the Emerald City of America, Inc.
Not for me; I grew up in the Apple. New York is an asphalt heat trap, an inescapable basin of attraction, kept perpetually at the event horizon of total destruction only through continual corruption of endless generations of kids from the boroughs and Midwest bus-station refugees, off on the Deuce, lost in the glare.

They never imagine the desolation of everyday life behind the mute portcullises of those twentieth-century brick-facade apartment houses. And that world inside — oh, read it: endless stories of heartbreak and loss; news crews grabbing close-ups of shell casings, cops tapping on doors with bad news, teenagers sequestered in closet-sized bedrooms fronting airshafts, listening to mind warping music on cheap headphones and dreaming only of taking over the living room. Hanging out in the cemetery on weekends, until that twisted night when someone managed, improbably, to get the backhoe started, and we dug up Gil Hodges. I really don’t wanna talk about it.

#

Variation 21

“We attract the hungry ghosts because of synechdochic patterning reminiscent of some Golden Age, something lost. Why else would they ride us at this time and place? Like centaurs smelling wine, these soi disant gods catch the reek of burnt offerings and crowd into our heads. We are infinitely complex self-modifying themes, capable of containing multitudes.”
— Stefan Janacek, quoted in
Private Minds, Crazy Thoughts

“I wasn’t fully conscious yet,” sez Manny, “I remember it the way you probably remember your childhood — through a layer of scratched polycarbonate, microstressed to milky opacity.” I’ve heard the story before, but I never tire of listening to Manny tell it. Manny who was there, that last night of Janacek’s life; Manny who Janacek touched. When we get down toward finals every year, I ask him to speak it again, as a way of likening ancient times to modern.

"Stefan was very, very drunk. Too drunk to attempt anything like the Goldbergs. He sat down, with a bottle — a few cc’s remaining from a liter of Grey Goose. And he couldn't play three notes in sequence. He laid his head and arms down on my keyboard, and just cried, great serial, seizural sobs, two forearms worth of dissonance.”

That’s the part that sends the hackles up my neck. The notion that I am touching the same keyboard, that beneath my fingers is some of Janacek’s sweat, his tears, his DNA. Magical thinking, sure, that something of him remains in this pAIno, and, through it, I can touch him. (Also, perhaps, that through it, he can touch me...)

“He cried himself out. I think in some quite literal sense, he cried himself into a space where he couldn't continue, where something that was deeply intertwined in his pattern just gave.
"And his head came up; still drunk, weaving, but his hands were running on their own now, not under the control of anything north of the medulla, and he stared off into the wings and began to play the Goldbergs."

"And it was like he'd never played it before. I knew his touch, inflection, sustenudo. This was not it. This was like something in the music speaking through him; playing him as he was playing me. You've heard it. It’s like listening to how Bach himself might have done it for his student. And one must imagine, hearing it, how Goldberg would have felt after that, those evenings in Count Keyserling's antechamber: playing the variations, and yes, feeling them, animating them, playing them well and truly — but at once remembering how they sounded under the Hand of the Master. That particular diplopia of playing and yet entertaining the fantasy of being played.”

“It was so far beyond anything that had ever been done, was such a flat-out wail, that there was nothing left; no place left to go. Once you've unpacked the fractal density of the Goldbergs, what remains? The next morning, he was dead, and Mona lay paralyzed.”

It was an unutterably Hollywood beat: transcendence and death. Almost immediately, the mystic haze began to form around the "mad genius possessed by Bach." The Biz tried to throw him up the charts: cable movie, ersatz-classical pop themes, softheaded spiritualism. Flacks spun conspiracy theories of a faked suicide; sleazehounds ran ghost-tours of the Play House to pick up lingering vibrations. Hard to tell the agented gas from the slow, grassroots faith, but a flickering subliminal consensus developed that someday, at this magical keyboard where he'd spun agony into gold, he would return.

Me, I didn't believe any of that crap. Until tonight.

#

Variation 22
At eight o'clock sharp, the house lights went down, the videoscrim fired up with the intro segment, and the final night of the competition got under way. Mr. Costello did his turn and ceremoniously whisked the curtain open. It had begun.

The first contestant, a 17-year-old Khalistani boy who’d been trembling backstage like a badly tuned combustion engine, made it all of about twelve bars into his piece, one of those angular Mahler abstractions. Mona's robotic right hand slapped down on her keypad and the big red light came on. His fingers slowed, stopped, vibrated over the keys.

"I have heard better articulation from a rubber chew toy. Don't waste my time!" Her voice boomed from everywhere. "Next."

He stood up, managed a dip at the audience (Props fired the sign, back of Mona in the pit, that said "BOW") and stumbled offstage into his parents' arms. The truly scary part was when he came offstage, gonged twenty-two seconds into one of the finest performances of his young life, he was saying, "Oh, that's okay. That's just what my teacher did back home to prepare me for this. I was expecting her to cut me off. No, no, it's okay." Then he wandered off back behind the scrim, vomited, and collapsed in a sobbing heap.

You grow accustomed to that sort of thing. We have one union hand whose only job is to criss-cross backstage with a bucket of pungent green cedar sawdust, for just such receptions of the dharma.

"Young cowgirl, allow me to introduce you. That, dear, is a piano. Have you ever played one before? Because you are treating it as if it is a steer to be roped and branded. Might I suggest that you retire to the wings and have one of the stagehands hose you down?" Mona had slapped down the second entrant about a minute and a half in. Just long enough for the young woman, a Julliard graduate who was running in front of the pack in the backstage betting, to begin to hit her stride. The woman had been down in the groove on a tricky passage in Moszkowski's Op. 24, and it took a second for her to come back to the here and now. Walking offstage, she had the look in her eye that makes hands mentally note the location of the first aid kits.

"Tough house tonight," I said to Manny.

"You know there are no truly random sequences. The likely candidates are last; she's just adding torque." We were adjusting legs and action for the next contestant, the Japanese kid. This is the part of the job that really chews me up. When we get to finals, I dissociate like a cop at a multiple decap MVA. No human beings here, just congealed fluids and cold cuts: tag 'em and bag 'em.

And it would work. Except that, effing idiot that I am, I deliberately go out of my way to get to know the contestants.

#

Variation 23
Listen up, rombies, as we flash back to last night. At the end of the Michelsen hallway, newly-minted finalist Jamie Sheldon, still in her eveningwear, hunched at the window staring out at the lights of the city and sobbing softly. Cleveland has that effect on people, occasionally, but I didn't think that was the etiology here. Survivor guilt?

"Hey, hey, hey..." I said. "Why sagging?" Proffered a flight of Kleenex; always pack 'em this time of year.

She looked up, recognized me.

"Oh, hi Mike. Just watching the steel Twinkies of death." she turned away, honked, sniffled. Just past the Quad, a gleaming bullet train rumbled by. Not noticeably Twinkie-like, but hey, enders hoick themselves into some odd mental configurations. Look, listen, live.

"Drink?" I offered her the oilcan of Foster's I'd been working.

"Thanks." She took a long pull.

“Hey, mate,” said the can, “Why not buy this young lady her own life-size helping of crisp Aussie satisfaction?”

She stared numbly, shook her head. "Could I have a hug?"

"Sure." I set down the can, held her through a round of shivers, then she shook me off.

"You probably see this every year," she said, dabbing at her eyes, blotting liner and mascara into a smeary raccoon grisaille.

I retrieved the big can, swirled beer. "Yah, B.A.U., I'm afraid."

“As usual, klar.” A grimace. “And Mona is the business.” She sniffed, shook her head, picked a link. “Never thought I’d get to meet the devil.”

“They say every devil is just a god you haven’t learned to understand.”

“They would say that.” Was there the ghost of a smile?

“If Mona’s the devil in the pit, what does that make you up on the stage?” You don’t gotta be a speakwriter to sense an opportunity for overdetermined insight.

“A poor player strutting and fretting.” Puked it right back, rebutting with Janacek’s own words. She looked out at the sky, layered with scudding underlit clouds. Sighed. "I don't know how I can play tomorrow."

So it’s those steel Twinkies.

"After all you’ve been through, what could tomorrow frighten you with?" I say this at least once a year. Works about half the time.

She studied the tips of her fingers. Rippled them. "When I came here, I felt like I had something. Was something... capable... equal to reality." She wiped palms on thighs, stared at the backs of her hands, digits fanned in gracile nine-key splays. "Expected this to be the...culminant moment I dreamed of since I was five. I was gonna do my Webern piece if I made the finals. But why bother? I should just hammer out six bars of spudbrained Moonlight Sonata and get it over with."

I didn't know what to say. "I wish you felt like you could do what you thought was your best."

"Klar," she leaned her head back against the wall, and closed her eyes. "Klar. Me too."

#

Variation 24

“Given the evolution of media, it is likely, if not inevitable, that technologies will be developed for recording and remote reception of the experiences of others. Would such inner audiences, do you think, remain entirely quiet and passive, or might one hear the occasional rustle of a program, a cough, a whispered remark?”
— Stefan Janacek “Technologically Induced Bicamerality
as a Model for Schizophrenia”

"Mr. Lemieux. What you are doing is not performance. It does not even approach the coherence of a finger exercise. What I am hearing most closely approximates a slaughtered animal's pithed galvanic twitching." Down went the French finalist. We were looking at the last four contestants now. If things kept up at this pace, we'd be out of here before we were scheduled to break for an intermission. I could hear the crowd begin to mutter; whispers to pods to move up dinner reservations, security rendezvous, highly coded assignations.

The evening had started with our usual ritual. Bryant, prowling around backstage, uttered the magic words when the houselights went down.

"This is no game," says Bryant.

"This is no fun," replies Manny, by rote.

"Your life is flame," rumbles Garrison.

"Your time...is come," I say. And right on the beat, lights up and audio in. We'd been doing this for years, in vain performative re-enactment of the one time that it was different.

The night Janacek died — the night of the finals, nine years ago — he had done the unthinkable. He conspired with the enders to insert an unscheduled musical number, which he'd written specifically for the occasion. It was his first, and last, canon. And when he led the contestants out at the top of the show to stand around the piano and sing, no one in the audience — and certainly not Mona — had any thought but that this was to be a pleasant little bonus track, a Janacek confection to set the evening's high tone.

What followed, while it brought amazed smiles to the faces of many, serves now, years later, as a grim reminder of the dangers of parody:

Dux (Janacek)	Comes (Contestants)	Free bass (“Mona,” voiced by Manny)
You’ve a hankering to write First a melody that’s tight.	Writing would be a delight If we can finish it tonight.	We come to hear, hear hear, And to weigh, weigh, weigh.
Then a method for combining Such a tune with its entwining	And if clipping it to terseness Helps avoid the grim perverseness	Muster from your souls, souls, souls, The best that you can play, play, play.
Permut-ed instantiation Or temporal dislocation.	Of a judgment that is meted Ere our seat is even heated	Beauty blooms, From the iron jaws of rust.
It’s a challenge that would tax All but progeny of Bach’s.	Or our fingers set to flexing under tricky etudes vexing.	Minerva’s owl flies, Only from the House of Dust.
And a chance most opportuna At the wheel of ol' fortuna.	If the act of cranking meter gives the slightest chance to beat her;	Bring the score’s hidden mind to life; That’s the boon that must be won.
There’s no better way to find That transcendent inner mind	Should a canon get us going, Let’s compose one without slowing.	Stretch the shadow of your fame Across the surface of the sun
If you can truly write a canon...	We might attain something enormous —	This is no game. This is no fun. Your life is flame. Your time is come.
Your locked up meaning earns its freedom.	We just might finish a performance!	You take the stage, And…you… Are… Done.

Watch the vid yourself, it’s worth it. There's a moment of gape-jawed silence, then roars of laughter mixed with indignant rhubarb. The polloi in the cheap seats upstairs actually begin winging wadded programs at the stage. If you know just where to look, and you have a full-rez doop, you can spot a beat, quite clearly, where Mona in the orchestra and Janacek on stage make eye contact. And though the sound is buried under the crowd, you can see her, slowly and deliberately, mash the red button before she turns on her heel and storms out of the pit.

#

Variation 25
Friday afternoon with the final eight, I take on my yearly role of historian and hagiographer, load up the Play House van, and haul the enders out to Collinwood, to the railroad tracks where Janacek delivered his final variation.

We arrive in sweltering humidity, just pre-thunderstorm, and Garrison climbs on the roof of the van to grab establishing shots and capture cutaways of fortuitous sundogs.

Ahead of us is the crossing. Heat haze shimmers over steel and clinkers as I walk the group across the ancient asphalt. Past the gate to the right, just below grade, is the ever-present memorial shrine of flowers, notes, votive candles, stuffed animals, sheet music, and disposable casters pumping tinny, criminally amateur homages.

The delicate enders grimace and thumb on filters. I let them soak up the sunbaked desolation soundless for a minute before suggesting they take the municipal frequency. In a rare act of intelligence — or indecision — Cleveland's arts council has resisted the urge to either commission or narrate. Instead, the location loop provides only the unadorned official record of the events from the National Transportation Safety Board.

Yes, as far back as 2014, cars had voice recorders — as well as interlocks preventing operation by the chemically impaired. Unfortunately, the non-invasive technique automakers offered in high-end models involved a dexterity test on the touchscreen, something which posed no challenge for Janacek even well above legal limit. The NTSB noted this in their report — which had nothing to do with Janacek or Tzedak; it was just another disturbing data point on grade crossings in the higher rail-traffic world of the teens. According to the Vehicle Data Recorder, speed was 48 mph, no braking or evasive steering was evident, and the audio system was accessing Glenn Gould’s 1955 Goldberg Variations; impact occurred 4:42 into Variation 25.

The enders tune in. I, in keeping with my anachronist tendencies, choose to read along on-screen:

NTSB RAR-14/28/SUM Collision of southbound Amtrak train 3126, the Acela Lakeshore, and passenger vehicle, August 8, 2014.
TRANSCRIPT
Fairchild CVA-120, with a 2-minute loop. Recording picks up at 6:38 EDT.
LEGEND
DM Driver side microphone (Janacek)
PM Passenger side microphone (Tzedak)
INT Internal guidance and systems computer
TRF-1 Traffic net automated system
TRF-2 Traffic net human operator
@ Non-pertinent word(s)
* Unintelligble word
# Expletive(s)
() Questionable insertion
1837.51 DM * I don’t even touch the keyboard.
1837.52 TRF-1 Advisory. 2,500 feet ahead, railroad crossing yellow.
1837.56 PM What do you want me to say?
(sound similar to pounding on steering wheel)
1838.13 DM That it...that all of it... makes a # difference.
1838.26 PM A difference, eh? For someone else, ne? So it’s not your awful, deeply felt choice?
1838.32 DM Choice? I’ve never had choice. You have to be conscious to make choices. I’ve only ever been alive at the keyboard. Now I’m not even a musician anymore, I’m a # administrator.
1838.50 TRF-1 Alert. 1000 feet ahead, railroad crossing red.
1839.55 PM And was your little cantata this evening supposed to prove otherwise? Not very convincing. I suppose it earned you enough style points for an evening of # @. If you can’t be a musician, at least you can # one.
1839.16 DM #, you #. @.
1839.20 PM You were made for something different. So are the ones we look for, the true instruments.
1839.20 INT Caution. Railroad crossing. Braking recommended.
1839.26 DM Made for, or made into. Suckered, euchered, koshered, cashiered, gornish mit gornish, nyet khoroshi.
1839.32 TRF-1 Alert. Alert. Brake now.
1839.35 PM Stefan. Stop.
1839.36 DM #. Why? This is all just polygons.
1839.38 PM Stefan. Stop! Stop now!
1839.38 INT Collision warning. Braking now.
1839.39 DM Emergency override.
1839.41 INT Override. Traffic control notified.
1839.41 PM What the # are you doing?
1839.42 TRF-1 Collision imminent. Brake now.
1839.43 DM (Laughter) Don’t worry. You’re re-entrant.
1839.46 PM Stefan… Stefan!
1939.46 TRF-2 Stefan Janacek? Reverse! Move your vehicle now!
1839.47 DM We...
1839.47 PM Stefan...
1839.48 INT Door open. Warning. Door...
1839.48 DM ...are really...
1839.49 PM #
1839.50 DM ...dead.
1839.50 SOUND OF IMPACT

Mona only managed to get halfway out. The locomotive struck just aft of the front-left wheel well, and spun the car into a side-impact that killed Janacek instantly. Dragged for twenty feet, the car then rolled off down an embankment. Unbelted, Mona sustained a burst fracture of her fifth cervical vertebra before being ejected, the car coming to rest on her right arm. Only TrafficNet’s anticipatory deployment of rescue services saved her life; they were on scene within two minutes of impact, and had her intubated before anoxia set in.

Before I rustle the kids back on the van, I take a moment to watch them at The Scene. They shuffle in slow arcs, staring at the mute steel, and I eavesdrop on the soundtracks they’re all composing. The tonic Western genius and the meandering counterpoint critic, noodling their way into a big dissonant bustup with kettledrums. What a motif: “We are really dead.” Man, he almost made it. But of course, we have all his recordings; and we have Mona.

#

Variation 26
It was, typically, Bryant who had the premonition. The last contestant of the night, Charles Johnson, was walking nervously back and forth, offstage right.

"I've got a feeling about him," said Bryant. "Been chatting with him last couple of days. Not just good technique, he's done the headwork. Talks like he was dipped in Janacek."
Can't say I was paying attention. Jamie Sheldon had just sat down, taken a deep breath, and begun to play. I was trying really hard not to get my hopes up. When she kicked off, I relaxed and smiled: Webern. At least she was if she was going to get beat, she was going to get beat on her best pitch.

She played for about two minutes, which was really quite good, and didn't seem surprised at all when the inevitable red light came on.

A screaming came across the pit — it has been happening all evening, but that was nothing compared to now.

"This is a disgrace to the memory of those who made this competition. Are your hands connected in any way to your brain? Why are you bothering with the piano? Why don't you try playing something you're more suited for, like a spatula!"

It would be a pleasant fantasy to think that Mona reserved her harshest criticism for those who came closest, not just those whose Icarian arcs ended merely in Auden’s mundane despair. If true, invective throughput alone would have marked Jamie as one of the Chosen. In reality, however, it was likely just the miserable disappointment of someone who didn’t want to do this again and was hoping to find one last Big Name so they could quit a winner.

I was bummed for Jamie. Mona’s tirade continued as she scooted back the bench, executed a short, professional bow, and set a measured pace to the security of the wings. Her shoulders slumped as she passed the sound cam, and there were tears in her eyes, but she managed a smile before meandering off to sit crosslegged in the shadows back of the cyc.

Even before she lost her arm, Mona had employed a no-nonsense, cut-‘em-off approach. But I think I know the flexpoint, the moment in which began her descent into the maelstrom of vitriol.

There is, in the archives, a bit of documentary material which teases with the promise of an answer. The proto-Manny's incessant digital recorder was running when Mona and Stefan had a tête a tête following the “canon” insurrection. Only a few insiders have access, and I was not privileged to be one of those. But I had asked Manny about it.

“Yo, Man. You’re hooked to the archives. Can you plate it?”

An unusually long pause.

“Interesting,” Manny said. “No.”

“You can’t grab it?”

“I can access it and play the file internally. However, it has been digitally watermarked to prevent copying, transcoding, and audible output. The lock is quite secure.”

“But you heard it?”

“Yes.”

“And you can’t just replay it?”

“Mike, can you please play a C4 and C88 simultaneously with the fingers of one hand.”

“Can’t reach.”

“But you can see the keys, can you not? And you can play them one at a time?”

“Clued. Hardware limit. But can you speak the story?”

“Now that,” said Manny, “I can do.” He paused for effect. “It was a dark and stormy night...” He endured my eyeball roll for a few tenths of a second, then flapped the keyboard to get my attention. “I know you human speakwriters are inordinately fond of the pathetic fallacy. Don’t tug me; I parse the New York Times every stonking day. If it’s too stiff for you, virtboy...”

“Heard, heard. Mute on.” When Manny descends to street jive, it signals major pissitude; I shut up.

#

Variation 27
“I’m expecting an explanation,” said Mona.

There was a pause.

“You’re expecting an explanation?”

Steady rain drummed on the roof of the flyspace; Mona sat in the stage manager’s chair, wheeled next to the grand parked down stage center, in dim worklight. Janacek, on the bench, fanned idle arpeggios, allargando, under her fulminating glare.

“I would like to hear your rationale for why you ruined the competition, screwed up these kids, and humiliated me with that little stunt this evening.”

“Mona, I’m sorry if that’s the way you see it. This was not meant to humiliate you; and as for ruining the competition...”

“You led eight promising artists out here to thumb their noses at me, and you don’t see the damage that did?”

“We were ‘thumbing our noses’ at the structure, at the rules; at the idea of competition, of judgment. Not you. These are kids. They’re fragile; they deserve to be encouraged, not judged.”

“How many pianists have you taught?”

“Mona, I’ve taught hundreds of...”

“Not students. Pianists.”

“Oh.” Pause. “One.”

“One. Yes, that Belgian harpsichordist. I’ve been doing this for forty years; in that time, I have found, selected, polished, and launched more than fifty. Don’t you think I know what I’m doing?”

“Times have changed, Mona,” he said, turning back to finger silently at the keyboard. “The classical labels are gone. The performance circuit is hosed; these kids aren’t going to have a place to play out every month; even if they do, how many will show up to listen? And where could they go from there anyway? The mass audience has been completely polluted by interactive pop and watered-down eye-candy visualizations. Who’s going to buy true hard-classical keyboard art?”

“So, they should just give up? We should encourage them to be mediocre?”

“No, no, not give up. Find their niche. Find a local audience, build a listenership, focus on their sound, their unique style. Accept that while there will be limits to their impact, their so-called fame, they can still find meaning in performing. But that means that they have to find performance satisfying; not a fearful submission to final judgment.”

“The problem with youth – and yes, Stefan, despite your physical years, your arrested social development makes you a youth – is that you do not have the life experiences to understand how the world really works. You think you do, and you think you understand when older people say things. But you live in a different universe, where things mean differently, and it is impossible for those with more insight to really communicate with you. Your observations are correct, of course; I’ve seen all these things. And they are also trivial. What you imagine to be essential and profound is only the merest surface; another time around the wheel.”

“When you’re older, you’ll understand, eh?”

“Can a ten-year-old, no matter how technically proficient, truly play the Goldbergs?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There are stylistic choices that go beyond simply reproducing the notes on the page. Kid that young just doesn’t have the time in their skin.”

“Nor do you.”

“Mona. Take a look around you. I can read reality.”

“You read a surface reality, of obvious processes, with visible demons. True, there is no audience right now. And yes, the technology has made it possible for the merely proficient to develop vanity followings. And there has been a healthy cultural backlash against abstruse talent, as your Outsidistas and neo-Cagists would have it.”

“Not mine.”

“Your unwitting allies, then.”

“Mona, it’s the way the world is.”

“Right now. But do you imagine the next variation will have the same tempo? The Goldbergs were unknown from 1750 until 1930 — no playback technology, successive waves of critical indifference. But once rediscovered, Bach’s genius reanimated whole new generations of minds. Why should our ambition...”

“Your ambition.”

“Will you listen instead of reacting? Should our aspiration for these young artists be any less than to create a greatness that can endure such dark gaps?”

There was a pause, Janacek idly fingered “Kraut and Ruben” from Variation 30.

“You always did like Aeschylus more than Euripides.”

Mona’s face gathered for a bellow, but she paused, set her lips, and replied in a measured tone.

“Stefan, you play like an angel, but you have no idea how much damage you truly have done.”

With more resignation than anger, she shook her head and walked slowly across the raised pit floor and down the service steps to the house. All the way up the raked auditorium, she was accompanied by the measured pace of the Aria, clearly da capo.

Barely audible on the house mike — so faint that it might have eluded all but the most attentive — Mona whispered, “If I have too austerely punished you, your compensation makes amends.”

#

Variation 28
“Ufa. Said for true?”

“Probably,” said Manny. “But only approximately. I’ve never experienced this before — something you must run into all the time with wetware memory — without access to the original, I must rely on my temporary, idiosyncratic, internal reconstruction of the events.”

“Can’t you listen to it again?”

“Yah. But with the transcode lock, I can’t doop to short term memory. It goes, how you say, ‘right out of my head.’”

“Hunh. That sags.”

"For the last time! I don't want to hear any more of these finger exercises!" The penultimate contestant was yanked reeling off the stage. I want to say that I thought she looked, sitting there on the orchestra riser, eye-lens whirring as it zoomed and racked focus, like the Queen of some sunken continent; bitter that the magic to make her rise again was lost — had been destroyed by her own hands.

The evening's final hope, Charles Johnson, looking very small under a roomful of eyes, had begun that long, long walk from the wings to the keyboard. "This kid's a certified prodigy," Bryant was nattering in my ear. "But a real recluse. Since he took the silver in Warsaw, he's dropped out of sight; no gigs, no recordings. I gotta wonder if that's just cagey management, or some authentic side-effect of genius."

"Hm." I was busy punching up preferences on Manny; Johnson played all the way up the keys, and we needed to retract the fallboard.

"Excuse me..." said Johnson. This wasn't rehearsed. I spun one of the pit mikes to cover him. Probably dedicating the performance, I thought; I was wrong.

"I'd like to depart from the number I have listed in the program. With your permission, Madame Tzedak, I should like to assert the prerogative granted in Rule Eleven and perform Johan Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations."

"Well, well! This ought to be tasty." Bryant began muttering whatever magic syllables alerted those Biz-folks who needed to be first-movers, yanking people on both coasts out of their primetime softcore Net cheese.

"You wish to perform the Goldbergs?" Tzedak's voice was soft, but I knew from experience it was the softness that was usually precursor to one of her grand mal wraths.

"Yes, if it would please you."

"I would be pleased to hear you attempt it."

Suddenly, the headphone loop was full of Terry Garrison, whooping it up. "Yeeee-hah! Saddle up a bomb, kiddo, we’re going to hell!"

#

Variation 29
Johnson slipped into the opening aria with a deft, delicate weave of finger moves. Smooth and powerful. None of the lurching staccato most amateurs suffer trying to capture Bach's soft, stretched time. By the time he got to the full two-handed chord in measure 28, there was a noticeable rustling in the house. You were hearing things in the music; premonitory things.
He paused for a long, long beat at the end of the Aria. Tzedak was frozen: stark, staring, frozen, in her seat.

Johnson exploded into the thematic lightning runs of the first variation. And it was now clear that we were in the presence of genius. Both hands flying; trilling, melodies interpenetrating. The audience seemed to have stopped breathing; I couldn't tell whether they were watching Johnson or Mona. Probably both. Her right arm wasn't moving anywhere near the button, though. She was hooked.

The shifting confluences of the second variation, long term note-points intercut almost impossibly with second, and even third level melodies, man, this kid had them all happening, eleventeen balls in the air, all at once. He was better than the best pianists I had ever heard in all my years at the Competition. He was certainly a hell of a lot better than he'd been in rehearsal. Maybe too much better. Maybe, I began to think, there really was something to all that Janacek talk.

Variation three begins the tortuous escalation of canons that forms the nucleus, the spine around which the Goldbergs cohere. Johnson's right hand whipped through the impossibly frenzied duplication, as the left chewed through Bach's twisted inversions. This was already the best piano solo I'd ever heard. Bryant had tapped the board feed, and was pumping it live to whoever he had online. I could only imagine what it would be like, dripping wet from the pool, out on the Coast, immobilized by this buzzsaw rendition of the capstone of the Western sequence. I hoped they were bleeding from the ears up in Topanga.

Johnson handled all the gear shifts, up and down, through the rest of the early variations. The acid test is being able to hear, in each, the opening aria's subtle line fractally expanded. It is not just virtuosity, it is a matter of soul, of spirit. You have to feel the desire in that aria, its desire to become something beyond itself. What was likely, even at the hands of Goldberg, just another etude was now animated, extruded in all dimensions, until it became about how music exists, how it inhabits us, and how we, as seers and explorers in this forest of imbrication, learn to discover the unending levels and layers of our own, variationed selves.

This kid wailed.

He played without repeats until he got to 14, which he did as AA-B.

By the time he reached the buildup of Variation 26, he was more than fifteen minutes into performance. The longest time anyone had played at the Competition in nine years. Reporters had begun to drift forward with cams. It seemed possible — how could it be? unprecedented! — that he might actually finish a piece; there might actually be a complete performance. This was not only amazing; in some ways, it was genuinely, viscerally terrifying.

The rousing vigor of Variation 29 drew to a close. A moment of silence, all eyes on Mona's right arm. Then the majestic Quodlibet of Variation 30 began, unimpeded.

#

Variation 30
"Yeee-hah! Stacka stacka stacka!" Garrison was floating cams at all angles around Manny, twirling zoom controllers and cutting bang on the beat, all the while raving maniacally. Bryant stood, deathly still and intently staring from just behind the teaser, his eyes only on Johnson’s fingers.

Johnson was romping like a monster through the cheery folktune overlays of 30. Romping. I had never heard anything like it. Not ever. Not like this. All I could see on stage was the back of his body, hands flying like undercranked special effects. Garrison had enormous closeups on the screen, fingers mere motion blurs.

"Are you hearing this? It's like Janacek..." Bryant muttered in my ear, "But it's...this...this is wicked stiff!"

I pulled off the cans and ran my fingers around behind my ears. I had hit bumps, musician's gooseflesh, real bad, all over the backs of my arms and my neck.
Johnson reached the end of Variation 30, paused for a moment before jumping on the reconfigured theme.

Then he just stopped.

Stopped dead.

Stood up.

Smiled down at Tzedak.

And man, it was not that kid's face. It was effing eerie. I was looking at him, but beyond his eyes, I could almost see something else looking out through him.

He took one step forward, stopped, and his gaze swept across the audience, still shocked into silence. Later, when they'd hauled him offstage, he would once again be just a twitching, diaphoretic teenager. At that moment, however, he was the spirit of Janacek himself. He looked about nineteen feet tall, and when he bowed, it was with a grace born of age, flesh singing on the bones, inhabited by a spirit from another place and time. There was no doubt.

And when he delivered the final variation, there could be no doubt in Tzedak's mind either. He bowed to the audience, and then turned, upstage, and bowed to Manny.

"Continue!" Mona commanded. A long pause, then she tried again. "You may...continue." This time her voice cracked.

He turned, slowly, brought his right arm up, hand like a claw next to his face, and hissed.

She wheeled toward the stage and, as if on cue, the pit began to rise. Garrison had two cams orbiting, slowly...slowly, and close-ups on her face and right hand. Johnson — to see him, haloed and backlit on the videoscrim was to see, instead, Janacek — stood at the edge of the stage, waiting. Garrison held him in a shot over her shoulder, an up-angle as she rose; the stage manager had gradually dimmed everything, leaving them in a bi-lobed pool of vertical straw light.

The only sound in the house was the whirring of the lift motors; I doubled it and pickled in a little plate echo.

Janacek reached across the void, broke the plane of the fourth wall, hand hovering for a moment above the red button on the arm of her chair. There was a glint of recognition in Mona’s eye as the lift stopped, and her head, almost imperceptibly, shook negative.

A beat of pure ringing silence. Manny dropped in a single, solo “G.” Then Janacek’s hand came down. Manny hit the second “G” on contact, as the red light bloomed.

As if a trap had been jerked out, Janacek collapsed. Garrison started quick cutting: big closeup of his face, sagging, falling out of frame; fingers sliding off the button; a slowmo revolving-hover 2-shot; extreme closeup on Mona’s eyes, tracking right and down; floor level shot as his knees strike, impact rippling through fabric; her hand reaching out, fingers just missing as his hand falls through the frame; another matched set of 180˚ intercuts from the orbiting cams; a flashback zoom into the button press in real-time, splitscreened with a vertical shot down that pushed into the collapsed profile of Janacek's face on the floor, and finally; ultra slowmo, big closeup of his hand rebounding once and coming to rest on the deck.
Garrison held that; I cranked the gain on Manny’s soundboard until the sympathetic vibrations resonating from that final ‘G’ swelled to pulsing, elastic thunder. Held it for fifteen awful seconds, until there was just a hint of an appoggiatura breath-catch from Mona.

Then, simultaneously, blackout, cams off, and kill all audio.

I love working with pros.

#

Aria da Capo
Later, wiping down the keys, I sat in a horizontal throw from the worklights, smelling vomit and sawdust.

Bryant, looking around, muttered, “The wreckage of Agathon.” He shook his head, leaned over the keyboard. “Manny — who played that?”

“Can’t tell you,” he said almost cheerfully. “I have no reliable memory. I stopped recording my inner experience after Jamie got the hook. It seemed the prudent thing to do.” He paused, then added, it seemed to me slyly, “Maybe Janacek played it. Sounded like him, didn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Janacek. Perhaps he was indulging in some technologically induced bicamerality.”

“Janacek has been dead for ten years.”

“And how long is ten years to an Aria off in the holoverse when it decides to reassert itself?”

“Oh for chrissake,” says Bryant, “Janacek was crazy. Hearing voices from out of time is crazy. This is not some romantic notion of communion, he was desperately sick person, a frightened, twisted psychotic.”

“You dissemble, sir,” said Manny. “I know what you heard.”

They went on like that, mirroring the crap that's been pumped out by the late-nite experts, all the mundane perspectives. So it falls to me to describe what happened, what didn’t, digging amid the dubito for a canonical interpretation.

Did Mona unwittingly become what she beheld, a homunculus of the endlessly restless consumer shunting through the Net's multiverse, only a phoneme away from flipping somewhere else? Amid declining numbers and a needing a graceful exit strategy, did she stage the whole thing? Oh, oh, oh, that Evil Biz rag; a very trad spin.

Did Manny get tired of suboptimal renditions and decide to take everyone for a ride? The scary AI; another safe choice.

Or, the paranoid wonder, could Garrison, in search of some payback, have conspired with Manny to build a digitally-reinforced consensual hallucination? Nice tech-noirish feel to it.

Or was it all true?

Is mind really immanent in the holoverse? Did some fragment of Janacek’s implicate pattern snap into Johnson’s head like a hand grasping a long-used tool? Edgy rubber science, always a popular option.

Or could a fragment of old J.S. Bach himself have been torqued into Presence by the profanation of his work? Ah, the Hoc est corpus motif of a dark fantasy.

What do you want it to be?

The problem with writing this hardware solo is that I don’t know where you are right now. Don't know where in the last grafs your saccadic flux slowed, your mental superposition collapsed. I want to close this sale, I want to reach terminus. Device-seconds are fine as far as they go, but I crave the completion bonus, the full bar on the satisfaction Likert that rings the bell and tops off my chip.

Anyone can see what the cameras think happened, anyone can hear what the music says. But what — who — was inside? That’s the truly interesting question. That’s what you really burn to know, isn’t it?

Okay, so just tell me what you want: I’ll write it. The possibilities are endless. Illusions spun to order here; rates, as always, negotiable. Looking for a storyteller? Keep surfing. I’m a jinking pennies-per-megabyte hack. I told you:

As a narrator, unreliable am I.

###

Dedication:
For Michael, Stuart, and Nancy, who never stopped believing. And for the Gibraltar Point ’02 crew, for helping me believe again.