The big room held the tangible residue of his long career. Over here, the music itself, in recorded performance: disks and cassettes for the early works, sparkling playback cubes for the later ones. Here were the manuscripts, uniformly bound in red half-morocco, one of his little vanities. Here were the scrapbooks of reviews and the programs of concerts. Here were the trophies. Here were the volumes of his critical writings. Staunt had been a busy man. He looked at the titles stamped on the bindings of the manuscripts: the symphonies, the string quartets, the concerti, the miscellaneous chamber works, the songs, the sonatas, the cantatas, the operas. So much. So much. He had tried his hand at virtually every form. His music was polite, agreeable, conservative, even a bit academic, yet he made no apologies for it: he had followed his own inner voices wherever they led, and if he had not been led to rebellion and fulminations, so be it. He had given pleasure through his work. He had added to the world’s small stock of beauty. It was a respectable life’s accomplishment. If he had had more passion, more turbulence, more dynamism, perhaps, he would have shaken the world as Beethoven had, as Wagner. Well, the great gesture had never been his to brandish; yet he had done his best, and in his way he had achieved enough. Some men heal the sick, some men soothe the souls of the troubled, some men invent wondrous machines—and some make songs and symphonies, because they must, and because it is all they can do to enrich the world into which they had been thrust. Even now, with his life’s flame burning low, with everything suddenly seeming pointless and hollow to him, Staunt felt no sense of having wasted his time filling this room with what it held. Never in the past hundred years had a week gone by without a performance of one of his compositions somewhere. That was sufficient justification for having written, for having lived.
He turned on the synthesizer and rested his fingers lightly on the keys, and of their own will they played the opening theme of his Venus symphony of 1989, his first mature work. How far away all that seemed now—the glittering autumn of triumphs as he conducted it himself in a dozen capitals, the critics agog, everyone from the disgruntled Brahms-fanciers to the pundits of the avant-garde rushing to embrace him as the savior of serious music. Of course, there had been a reaction to that hysterical overpraise later, when the modernists decided that no one so popular could possibly be good and the conservatives began to find him too modern, but such things were only to be expected. He had gone his own way. Eventually others had recognized his genius—a limited and qualified genius, a small and tranquil genius, but genius nevertheless. As the world emerged from the storms of the twentieth century’s bitter second half, as the new society of peace and harmony took shape on the debris of the old, Staunt created the music a quieter era needed, and became its lyric voice.
Here. He pushed a cube into a playback slot. The sweet outcry of his wind quintet. Here: The Trials of Job, his first opera. Here: Three Orbits for Strings and Stasis Generator. Here: Polyphonies for Five Worlds. He got them all going at once, bringing wild skeins of sound out of the room’s assortment of speakers, and stood in the middle, trembling a little, accepting the sonic barrage and untangling everything in his mind.
After perhaps four minutes he cut off the sound. He did not need to play the music; it was all within his head, whenever he wanted it. Lightly he caressed the smooth, glossy black backs of his scrapbooks, with all the documentation of his successes and his occasional failures neatly mounted. He ran his fingers along the rows of bound manuscripts. So much. So very much. Such a long productive life. He had no complaints.
He told his telephone to get him the Office of Fulfillment again.
“My Guide is Martin Bollinger,” he said. “Would you let him know that I’d like to be transferred to the House of Leavetaking as soon as possible?”
Four
Bollinger, sitting beside him in the copter, leaned across him and pointed down.
“That’s it,” he said. “Omega Prime, right below.”
The House of Leavetaking seemed to be a string of gauzy white tentlike pavilions, arranged in a U-shape around a courtyard garden. The late afternoon sun tinged the pavilions with gold and red. Bare fangs of purplish mountains rose on the north and east; on the other side of Omega Prime the fiat flat brown Arizona desert, pocked with cacti and palo verde, stretched toward the dark horizon.
The copter landed silently. When the hatch opened, Staunt felt the blast of heat. “We don’t modulate the outdoor climate here,” Bollinger explained. “Most Departing Ones seem to prefer it that way. Contact with the natural environment.”
“I don’t mind,” Staunt said. “I’ve always loved the desert.”
A welcoming party had gathered by the time he emerged from the copter. Three members of Omega Prime’s staff, in smocks monogrammed with the Fulfillment insignia. Four withered oldsters, evidently awaiting their own imminent Going. A transport robot, with its wheelchair seat already in position. Staunt, picking his way carefully over the rough, pebble-strewn surface of the landing field, was embarrassed by the attention. He said in a low voice to Bollinger, “Tell them I don’t need the chair. I can still walk. I’m no invalid.”
They clustered around him, introducing themselves: Dr. James, Miss Elliot, Mr. Falkenbridge. Those were the staff people. The four Departing Ones croaked their names at him too, but Staunt was so astonished by their appearance that he forgot to pay attention. The shriveled faces, the palsied clawlike hands, the parchment skin—did he look like that, too? It was years since he had seen anyone his own age. He had the impression that he had come through his fourteen decades well preserved, but perhaps that was only an illusion born of vanity, perhaps he really was as much of a ruin as these four. Unless they were much older than he, one hundred seventy-five, one hundred eighty years old, right at the limits of what was now the human span of mortality. Staunt stared at them in wonder, awed and dismayed by their gummy grins.
Falkenbridge, a husky red-haired young man, apparently some sort of orderly, was trying to ease him into the wheelchair. Irritably Staunt shook him off, saying, “No. No. I’ll manage. Martin, tell him I don’t need it.”
Bollinger whispered something to Falkenbridge. The young man shrugged and sent the transport robot away. Now they all began walking toward the House of Leavetaking, Falkenbridge on Staunt’s right, Miss Elliot on his left, both of them staying close to him in case he should topple.
He found himself under unexpectedly severe strain. Possibly refusing the wheelchair had been foolish bravado. The fierce dry heat, the fatigue of his ninety-minute rocket journey across the continent, the coarse texture of the ground, all conspired to make his legs wobbly. Twice he came close to falling. The first time Miss Elliot gently caught his elbow and steadied him; the second, he managed to recover himself, after a short half-stumble that sent pain shooting through his left ankle.
Suddenly, all at once, he was feeling his age. In a single day he had begun to dodder, as though his decision to enter a House of Leavetaking had stripped him of all his late-staying vigor. No. No. He rejected the idea. He was merely tired, as a man his age had every right to be; with a little rest he’d be himself again. He walked faster, despite the effort it cost him. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. There was a stitch in his side. His entire left leg ached.
At last they reached the entrance to Omega Prime. He saw now that what had seemed to be gauzy tents, viewed from above, were in fact sturdy and substantial plastic domes, linked by an intricate network of covered passageways. The courtyard around which they were grouped, contained elaborate plantings of desert flora: giant stiff-armed cacti, looping white-whiskered succulents, odd and angular thorny things. The plants had been grouped with remarkable grace and subtleness around an assortment of strange boulders and sleek stone slabs; the effect was one of extraordinary beauty. Staunt stood a moment contemplating it. Bollinger said gently, “Why not go to your suite first? The garden will still be here this evening.”