I spent weeks slaving over a hot workstation cooking that up for you, and this is the thanks I get?
Spiegel found the video on Ted's shelf. Grateful for the diversion, Adie collaborated in dragging Ted out and commandeering the set. And so the nodding, enchanted geriatric ring looked on at their first working demo of virtual reality, a new galaxy beyond their combined ken.
Steve appeared on the videotape, making a few off-color comments that no one, Ted included, seemed to decipher. Then he stepped into the Cavern and fired it up. He took a spin through the Crayon World, then the Weather Room, then the Jungle.
What is this? a blue-skinned, beaked woman asked. A travel show or something?
I seen one of them, explained a man attached to a tube of oxygen. It's got to do with special effects.
On the tape, Spiegel set the controls for Aries.
I did that, Adie said, holding Ted's flapping hand.
I… thought it was… Van Gogh.
Then the taped version of Steve booted up the invisible organ. His hands played upon air, and a deeper air issued from them. Ted sat forward, transfixed. Here at last was something one could learn from. They'd forgotten to attach his belt restraint. Adie had to reach over to keep him in the chair.
I need… one of those. But one.. that doesn't need hands. Ted wanted to see the instrument again. He asked for a third look, but the rest of the audience shouted him down. He rocked his head all the way back to his room. That's… the thing I'm going to be playing. Any month now.
Somehow that day passed faster than the last. Time's aperture stopped down to match the stunted bandwidth. Steve took more dictation. F… sharp. No. Make that a G… flat. Even the simplest whole-note triads required endless revision.
Adie watched. Through the window, at the contested feeder, the sparrow industry worked out its continued survival, eating and excreting, twitching and chattering, inventing each minute from scratch.
They rolled Ted out to the terrace, hoping to store up the outdoors in the cells of his body. He asked for a windbreaker, despite the warmth. He seemed happy just to sit and look, without any walls to jam his focal length.
Spiegel, workless now for longer than he had been since college, paced in place. Already he wanted the airport waiting lounge and the flight back to Seattle. So what do you do all day? How do you fill the damn vacuum?
Ted's eyes opened wide. For the last few weeks… I've been trying to remember… the name of every woman I've ever… enjoyed.
Spiegel all but spit his teeth across the terrace. How many of those that you enjoyed did you actually… enjoy?
Not… many. Ted avoided looking at either of them. I'm just trying… to put my story together. Where I was… when. I don't know. Half a minute passed. And why.
Done, Adie laughed. And it's taken me less than forty seconds.
Ted stared at her, that look of myelin-stripped panic. You knew… all of them?
Not yours, you idiot. Mine.
Oh. Ted's grin worked against the width of the disease. Oh. In that case… I wonder if you could help me with… the name of the cat woman?
Spiegel tucked his face under his arm. Adie smiled sweetly. You asshole.
The… cat woman. You two… know the one I mean?
The three of them sat loosened by the breeze, looking over the accumulated wreckage of the past that still, somehow, seemed worth enumerating.
They didn't brave a restaurant again that evening. Instead, Adie ran out for candles and wine, a decent BV Napa cabernet that they drank out of paper cups. By dinner's end, there seemed nothing left to say.
Steve, as always, broke first under the silence. Well. Shall we have a listen before we go?
A… listen? Ted's face shrank in horror at the possible meanings.
To the chamber symphony, man. What did you think I meant?
The chamber…? How?
Steve pointed at the computer and whirled his finger around in space — the obscure sign language for whirring electrons. Through the magic of semiconductors. How else?
Oh. It flooded Ted's voice, a bitterness so great that only an immobilized soul could survive it. Oh. I thought you meant a real listen.
But a fake listen would have to do, for the fake was all they had. Spiegel loaded the piece, set quarter note equal to sixty, clicked the cursor on the first measure, and released the synthetic music.
Notes spread over them in the dark, notes in a constellation that no one could have guessed came out of this man. The sound stunned Adie, even in the synthesized clarinets and trombones, even in the tinny approximation of inch-wide speakers. This music was not Ted, not any Ted either of them had ever known. It had no edge, no irony, no flamboyance, no demonstration of academic credentials. It was tonal. Standing waves of continuous, proscribed modulations outdid even Dives in luxurious archaism. Music meant nothing, except by convention. But this massive parallel data of pitches in time turned her viscera in a way unreachable by any paraphrase. There were things so complicated that only the ear could know them.
Sound snaked around itself, pointless and beautiful. The shaped sound counted for nothing. It demonstrated nothing. It proved nothing but its own raw need for a redemption that, finally, could only be denied. Something in this music had been lost in transcription. Some impediment to Zimmerman's conception brought about by the disease. Some inability to write what he meant, dictating through the ether while lying in bed.
But a look came across Ted's face as he listened. The music came as close to conception as the encumbered process was ever going to let him come. At last the piece trickled out, stumbling through the incomplete measure that Spiegel had transcribed that very evening. And when the chords decayed, the piece still abided in the night that scattered it.
Ted's eyes pleaded with the two of them. His mouth latched on to a sudden rush. If I could just finish all four movements. It's music… that people might love. That people might think about and… feel. Not like that alien stuff we all used to make…
You'll finish, Spiegel said. And then you'll write something else. Because this one won't please you anymore. Yet, Ted corrected. Won't… please me yet. Give us a minute, Adie ordered.
Spiegel's head jerked back. I have been asked to evacuate, he told Ted. Goodbye. Farewell. Take care. Write if you get work.
He walked without looking, out to the front room, where a ballroom of white-tied aristocrats swirled to the strains of a Strauss ländler. Near the door, a doubled-up woman, trembling against her rocker in time to the meter, hummed a descant to the ghost dance's tune.
Adie reappeared, pumice-faced. OK. I'm done. Let's get out of here.
Nothing outside could touch either of them. The rental car was their cocoon, a safe capsule heading north in the dark.
Were you aware, Stevie said to the Ohio night, that a huge percentage of the population eventually gets sick and dies?