She snatched a wicked-looking, vaguely familiar knife from a nearby table and pointed it at him.
Robbins stared at her. What was he supposed to do now? He was taller than she was, probably stronger. But he was no fighter, she was about fifteen years younger than him—and she had a knife.
“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “It’s over. Just what do you think you’re going to do with that knife?” Remembering too late that she was probably an expert at surgery, he hoped she’d take it as a purely rhetorical question. “We’re on to your plan, and you can’t fight all of us!” Of course, he added to himself, the rest of “us” don’t happen to be here right now—.
The knife in Ertmann’s hand drifted slowly downward. “You’re right,” she whispered. “I can’t fight all of you.”
You’ve got her on the ropes, now finish her off! “Harrison took you into his confidence. He trusted you—and you betrayed him! You betrayed all of us at the Institute—but most of all you betrayed him. He’s been like a father to you all these years, and you still betrayed him!” He wasn’t sure if the “father” part was true, but it sounded good.
The knife clattered to the floor. Robbins glanced over his shoulder, expecting to hear curses in German and see an irate composer storm out of the bedroom to confront the prowlers in his home.
“You’re right,” Ertmann repeated. The NV goggles covered her eyes so he couldn’t see the tears, but she was sobbing. “What do you want me to do?”
“Activate the portal and leave—now!”
It was hard to act so cruelly. He had to suppress another urge to give her a comforting hug. Quietly, she fumbled with the bracelet on her wrist. The portal snapped to shimmering life—and then she was gone.
Robbins exhaled slowly. Didn’t know you had it in you.
Then he tensed again. Just because Beethoven hadn’t made a dramatic entrance into the kitchen didn’t mean he wasn’t stumbling around in his bedroom trying to light a candle to see who was making the commotion. Cautiously, Robbins walked to the bedroom, and peeked in.
The great man was snoring heavily, lying in the same position Robbins had seen (would see?) him in when he came with the vaccine. Robbins mentally kicked himself for forgetting something so basic. Ertmann could have shouted and made noise all night and it wouldn’t have woken Beethoven up!
He went back to the kitchen. He wasn’t sure how much time he had before “he” would come through from the other side. And he certainly didn’t want to find out first-hand what kind of unpleasant things Everett was alluding to if he encountered his “earlier” self.
As Robbins started to activate the portal a sudden thought stopped him. When he re-emerged back on Earth, Ertmann would still be alive—wouldn’t she? He’d assumed that, by going back into the “past” to confront her and change what she’d done, he’d also be preventing her from committing suicide. Now, trying to remember what Everett had said, he wasn’t so sure. But you couldn’t talk to a “dead” person like that—could you? Then he remembered what he’d told Ertmann, how she’d betrayed everyone, especially Harrison—and where he’d heard those words before. If she was still dead when he returned to Earth—.
Feeling sick, he activated the portal and stepped through.
“Well, was it worth it?”
Robbins smiled at her. “I think so.”
He sat down next to Antonia on the couch in his apartment. The last ten days had been the most exhausting—and exhilarating—of his life. He’d made thirty-two trips to TCE since translocating a second time to Vienna on March 27, 1827—and this time finding the newspaper headline was about somebody named Metternich, and not Beethoven’s death. Daylight trips to music shops, more nighttime excursions to the composer’s home during his additional lifetime—. Beethoven’s apartment now seemed as familiar to him as his own.
After the composer died in 1834, he and his staff made scouting excursions every one to two years to see what effect his “new” music had produced on other composers. So far the survey had reached 1847—and found no significant changes. Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz—the new masterpieces Beethoven created hadn’t affected their music. Maybe it was because those final works were so distinctly in his own individual style—an apotheosis of everything he had previously written. A musical valedictory, rather than breaking new ground like the Eroica.
Antonia said, “When can we hear this wonderful music?”
“Soon.” Late this afternoon his staff had finished downloading all the scores he’d scanned from the composer’s manuscripts into the musicology section’s own computer system. After assigning digitized instruments to each part, and adjusting the dynamics and tempos, they now had versions of the music ready for playback.
“I have to admit, I am curious. What did he write during those ‘extra’ years?”
“Mostly chamber music. The remaining movements of his string quintet in C major. Three string quartets. Two piano sonatas. Three trios for piano, violin, and cello.” He paused. “And one work for orchestra.”
Antonia arched her eyebrows.
“You and I will be the first people on our Earth to hear Beethoven’s final symphony.
“The A minor.”
“The Tenth.”
Raising his arm as if holding a baton, he brought it down with a sudden down-beat. “Computer—begin!”
The slow introduction to the first movement began with a series of crashing dissonances by the full orchestra. Finally the clashing chords resolved themselves into a quiet, gentle theme in C major, introduced by a solo clarinet and supported by pizzicato strings. Gradually the melody was taken up by the rest of the orchestra, underwent a brief development—then suddenly disappeared in a dark descent into A minor as the main Allegro section began. A short exposition presented two tragic themes. (“Both,” Robbins whispered, “are derived from ones in works by J. S. Bach. The ‘Crucifixus’ section of the Mass in B minor, and a cantata entitled ‘Christ Lay in the Bonds of Death.’ ”) The development section kept almost exclusively to minor keys, the sense of pain, foreboding, and heroic but futile struggle in the music becoming more and more intense. The recapitulation brought no relief, finally ending in a whisper of hopeless resignation in the tonic minor.
The Andante second movement was a set of alternating variations on two themes, one in F major and the other in C minor. (Robbins smiled at the quizzical look on Antonia’s face. “Sound familiar, don’t they? Both melodies are similar to ones in Messiah. The aria He Was Despised, and the chorus, ‘Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs.’ Beethoven once said Handel was his favorite composer.”) The movement’s initial quiet, pastoral mood eventually gave way to darkness and despair in its last measures.
The third movement Scherzo was a Presto in C minor that sounded like a dame macabre, a hideous joke. (“The main theme is like the one Mozart used in the ‘Dies Irae’ section of his Requiem.) Each return of the prayer-like melody (“More Mozart—from the Masonic Funeral Music”) in the A-flat major Trio sections was, just as a glimmer of hope seemed to appear, abruptly trampled by the reappearance of the dark theme of the main section.
And then—the fourth and last movement, initially marked Moderate. It opened with the reappearance of the original gentle C major theme from the beginning of the symphony, played this time in A minor. The higher strings and woodwinds played it softly, tentatively. Just as it swelled into a tragic sigh a harsh new theme played fortissimo by the trombones and lower strings tried to overwhelm it. ( “That new theme,” Robbins whispered, “is a verbatim quote of music Beethoven’s old teacher, Haydn, wrote to honor the emperor of his native Austria.”) Despite this onslaught by the second subject, the primary theme returned again and again, each time more forcefully, until it and the Emperor’s Hymn seemed locked in a titanic struggle full of clashing dissonances. Then, after a sudden and dazzling modulation to its original key of C major, with trumpets blaring and timpani thundering the primary theme overwhelmed the “imperial” one, shattering it into scattered notes and crushing it out of existence. Its true power and strength finally revealed, the full orchestra took up the melody in a coda of orgiastic celebration and joy that made the ending of Beethoven’s preceding symphony seem tame and restrained by comparison. Finally, amid martial fanfares of barbaric intensity by the brass and percussion, the strings and woodwinds played the victorious C major theme in a massive contrapuntal tour de force that brought the symphony to a triumphant close.