She didn’t answer.
“Rhoda?”
“Will you excuse me, Laddy? I think I want to be all by myself for a while.”
He slipped the pipe into his pocket and turned to her. She was looking through him as if he were no less glass than the scene surrounding them. Taking her hands in his own, he said, “Rhoda, I just don’t understand. You won’t even give me time to find the words.”
“Laddy—”
“No. This time I’ll have my say. Don’t pull away. Don’t retreat into that little world of yours, with your half-smiles and your faraway looks.”
“I want to think about the music.”
“There’s more to life than music, Rhoda. There has to be. I’ve spent as many years as you working inside my head, working to create something. You’re better than I am, you’re maybe better than anyone I’ve ever heard, maybe even better than Bekh someday. Fine: you’re a great artist. But is that all? There’s something more. It’s idiocy to make your art your religion, your whole existence.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because I love you.”
“That’s an explanation, not an excuse. Let me go, Laddy. Please.”
“Rhoda, art doesn’t mean a damn thing if it’s just craft, if it’s just rote and technique and formulas. It doesn’t mean anything if there isn’t love behind it, and caring, and commitment to life. You deny all that. You split yourself and smother the part that fires the art…”
He stopped abruptly. It was not the sort of speech a man could deliver without realizing, quickly, crushingly, how sententious and treacly it sounded. He dropped her hands. “I’ll be at Treat’s, if you want to see me later.” He turned and walked away into the shivering reflective night.
Rhoda watched him go. She suspected there were things she should have said. But she hadn’t said them. He disappeared. Turning, she stared up at the overwhelming bulk of the Music Center, and began slowly to walk toward it.
“Maestro, you were exquisite tonight,” the pekinese woman said in the Green Room. “Golden,” added the bullfrog sycophant. “A joy. I cried, really cried,” trilled the birds. Nutrients bubbled in his chest. He could feel valves flapping. He dipped his head, moved his hands, whispered thankyous. Staleness settled grittily behind his forehead. “Superb.” “Unforgettable.” “Incredible.” Then they went away and he was left, as always, with the keepers. The man from the corporation that owned him, the stage manager, the packers, the electrician. “Perhaps it’s time,” said the corporation man, smoothing his mustache lightly. He had learned to be delicate with the zombie.
Bekh sighed and nodded. They turned him off.
“Want to get something to eat first?” the electrician said. He yawned. It had been a long tour, late nights, meals in jetports, steep angles of ascent and rapid re-entries.
The corporation man nodded. “All right. We can leave him here for a while. I’ll put him on standby.” He touched a switch.
The lights went off in banks, one by one. Only the nightlights remained for the corporation man and the electrician, for their return, for their final packing.
The Music Center shut down.
In the bowels of the self-contained system the dust-eaters and a dozen other species of cleanup machines began stirring, humming softly.
In the fourth balcony, a shadow moved. Rhoda worked her way toward the downslide, emerging in the center aisle of the orchestra, into the Horseshoe, around the pit, and onto the stage. She went to the console and let her hands rest an inch above the keys. Closing her eyes, catching her breath. I will begin my concert with the Timijian Ninth Sonata for Unaccompanied Ultracembalo. A light patter of applause, gathering force, now tempestuous. Waiting. The fingers descending. The world alive with her music. Fire and tears, joy, radiance. All of them caught in the spell. How miraculous. How wonderfully she plays. Looking out into the darkness, hearing in her tingling mind the terrible echoes of the silence. Thank you. Thank you all so much. Her eyes moist. Moving away from the console. The flow of fantasy ebbing.
She went on into the dressing room and stood just within the doorway, staring across the room at the corpse of Nils Bekh in the sustaining chamber, his eyes closed, his chest still, his hands relaxed at his sides. She could see the faintest bulge in his right jacket pocket where the thin gloves lay, fingers folded together.
Then she moved close to him, looked down into his face, and touched his cheek. His beard never grew. His skin was cool and satiny, a peculiarly feminine texture. Strangely, through the silence, she remembered the sinuous melody of the Liebestod, that greatest of all laments, and rather than the great sadness the passage always brought to her, she felt herself taken by anger. Gripped by frustration and disappointment, choked by betrayal, caught in a seizure of violence. She wanted to rake the pudding-smooth skin of his face with her nails. She wanted to pummel him. Deafen him with screams. Destroy him. For the lie. For the lies, the many lies, the unending flow of lying notes, the lies of his life after death.
Her trembling hand hovered by the side of the chamber. Is this the switch?
She turned him on.
He came out of it. Eyes closed. Rising through a universe the color of aluminum. Again, then. Again. He thought he would stand there a moment with eyes closed, collecting himself, before going onstage. It got harder and harder. The last time had been so bad. In Los Angeles, in that vast building, balcony upon balcony, thousands of blank faces, the ultracembalo such a masterpiece of construction. He had opened the concert with Timi’s Ninth. So dreadful. A sluggish performance, note-perfect, the tempi flawless, and yet sluggish, empty, shallow. And tonight it would happen again. Shamble out on stage, don the gloves, go through the dreary routine of re-creating the greatness of Nils Bekh.
His audience, his adoring followers. How he hated them! How he longed to turn on them and denounce them for what they had done to him. Schnabel rested. Horowitz rested. Joachim rested. But for Bekh there was no rest. They had not allowed him to go. Oh, he could have refused to let them sustain him. But he had never been that strong. He had had strength for the loveless, lightless years of living with his music, yes. For that there had never been enough time. Strong was what he had had to be. To come from where he had been, to learn what had to be learned, to keep his skills once they were his. Yes. But in dealing with people, in speaking out, in asserting himself… in short, having courage… no, there had been very little of that. He had lost Dorothea, he had acceded to Wizmer’s plans, he had borne the insults Lisbeth and Neil and Cosh—ah, gee, Cosh, was he still alive?—the insults they had used to keep him tied to them, for better or worse, always worse. So he had gone with them, done their bidding, never availed himself of his strength—if in fact there was strength of that sort buried somewhere in him—and in the end even Sharon had despised him.
So how could he go to the edge of the stage, stand there in the full glare of the lights and tell them what they were? Ghouls. Selfish ghouls. As dead as he was, but in a different way. Unfeeling, hollow.
But if he could! If he could just once outwit the corporation man, he would throw himself forward and he would shout—
Pain. A stinging pain in his cheek. His head jolted back; the tiny pipes in his neck protested. The sound of flesh on flesh echoed in his mind. Startled, he opened his eyes. A girl before him. The color of aluminum, her eyes. A young face. Fierce. Thin lips tightly clamped. Nostrils flaring. Why is she so angry? She was raising her hand to slap him again. He threw his hands up, wrists crossed, palms forward, to protect his eyes. The second blow landed more heavily than the first. Were delicate things shattering within his reconstructed body?
The look on her face! She hated him.
She slapped him a third time. He peered out between his fingers, astonished by the vehemence of her eyes. And felt the flooding pain, and felt the hate, and felt a terribly wonderful sense of life for just that one moment. Then he remembered too much, and he stopped her.
He could see as he grabbed her swinging hand that she found his strength improbable. Fifteen years a zombie, moving and living for only seven hundred four days of that time. Still, he was fully operable, fully conditioned, fully muscled.
The girl winced. He released her and shoved her away. She was rubbing her wrist and staring at him silently, sullenly.
“If you don’t like me,” he asked, “why did you turn me on?”
“So I could tell you I know what a fraud you are. These others, the ones who applaud and grovel and suck up to you, they don’t know, they have no idea, but I know. How can you do it? How can you have made such a disgusting spectacle of yourself?” She was shaking. “I heard you when I was a child,” she said. “You changed my whole life. I’ll never forget it. But I’ve heard you lately. Slick formulas, no real insight. Like a machine sitting at the console. A player piano. You know what player pianos were, Bekh. That’s what you are.”
He shrugged. Walking past her, he sat down and glanced in the dressing-room mirror. He looked old and weary, the changeless face changing now. There was a flatness to his eyes. They were without sheen, without depths. An empty sky.
“Who are you?” he asked quietly. “How did you get in here?”
“Report me, go ahead. I don’t care if I’m arrested. Someone had to say it. You’re shameful! Walking around, pretending to make music—don’t you see how awful it is? A performer is an interpretative artist, not just a machine for playing the notes. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. An interpretative artist. Artist. Where’s your art now? Do you see beyond the score? Do you grow from performance to performance?”
Suddenly he liked her very much. Despite her plainness, despite her hatred, despite himself. “You’re a musician.”
She let that pass.
“What do you play?” Then he smiled. “The ultracembalo, of course. And you must be very good.”
“Better than you. Clearer, cleaner, deeper. Oh, God, what am I doing here? You disgust me.”
“How can I keep on growing?” Bekh asked gently. “The dead don’t grow.”
Her tirade swept on, as if she hadn’t heard. Telling him over and over how despicable he was, what a counterfeit of greatness. And then she halted in midsentence. Blinking, reddening, putting hands to lips. “Oh,” she murmured, abashed, starting to weep. “Oh. Oh!”
She went silent.
It lasted a long time. She looked away, studied the walls, the mirror, her hands, her shoes. He watched her. Then, finally, she said, “What an arrogant little snot I am. What a cruel foolish bitch. I never stopped to think that you—that maybe—I just didn’t think—” He thought she would run from him. “And you won’t forgive me, will you? Why should you? I break in, I turn you on, I scream a lot of cruel nonsense at you—”
“It wasn’t nonsense. It was all quite true, you know. Absolutely true.” Then, softly, he said, “Break the machinery.”