The Serpent Mage (12 page)
Authors: Greg Bear
Chapter Eleven
Kristine stayed in the Waltiri house only two nights. She then found a small studio apartment, sharing with an older woman geology student who spent most of her time on field trips in the Mojave Desert. No mention was made of Tommy; there seemed to have been a clean break. Nor did Kristine speak of Nikolai again; her almost panicked enthusiasm of that day had apparently subsided.
She kept up a feverish activity arranging for the concert, but whenever the possibility of something more came up — something more intimate — she backed away. A look came into her eyes. As tempted as he was, Michael did not probe. His own emotions seemed to have slipped into neutral. The times they met and discussed the performance, he felt more relaxed and open, unpressured. But as interested as they were in each other, their relationship did not advance. It was necessary for Kristine to reevaluate, and for Michael as well.
Students from the university came to the Waltiri house and carted away truckloads of papers. For a week, Michael simply kept out of the way of a group of musicologists and librarians who spent the hours from eight in the morning to six at night cataloging, rerecording and safeguarding Waltiri's recordings. They worked mostly in the music room.
Two weeks passed. He experienced no further visions or revelations, and there was nothing overtly unworldly in the news. Twice Michael inspected the Tippett Residential Hotel, and once, late at night, he revisited Clarkham's house, but all was quiet.
The quiet times would end soon.
He began sleeping in the master bedroom in late May. Kristine's occupation of the room had dispelled some of the groundless tabu Michael had felt about the marital bed of Arno and Golda. He found he slept more peacefully there; it was quieter even than the rest of the house. His sleeping awareness was sharper in that room.
It was on an overcast, drizzling night in early June that Michael dreamed of the reoccupation of Earth's oceans by the Pelagal Sidhe.
He floated just above the level of deep-ocean waves
, cresting at thirty and forty feet. On the horizon, a wickedly glorious sunset was approaching its climax, tipping each wave with red and gold. Columns of clouds advanced east from the squat red sun, each wearing a cap of fading glory and resting on a base of shaded slate-brown. Rain fell in sheets to the north. Michael could feel the freshness of the ocean wind and the cold of the sea spray; he could smell the salt and the fresh rain. He had never felt more alive, and yet he knew he was asleep and that his sensate body was nowhere near his point of view.
The west was darkening, and all the clouds had gone to gray and dark brown with edges of green. He seemed to look up at the zenith, rotating his nonbody somehow, and felt rather than saw a discontinuity in a massive gray cloud high overhead. Water began to fall, not rain but salty and brackish, copper-colored like the sea beyond Clarkham's Xanadu. Michael thought of water breaking during birth. A radiance of blackness ate away the bottom of the cloud, and out of the blackness, an entire ocean fell, not in drops, but in solid columns dozens of yards wide. In the columns, Michael saw deep sea-green male and female Sidhe riding the fall with webbed feet pointed down, arms held high over their heads and fingers meeting in a prayer gesture, eyes trained down, huge bubbles flowing around them from air trapped between the columns and the Earth sea below.
The ocean was a mass of foam for miles around, and the air filled with a noise beyond the capacity of ears to hear, even had he listened with ears. Waves surged outward from the fall in immense rolls.
The sky closed up, and the cloud dissipated.
Michael's point of view shifted, and he now looked down on the roiling Earth sea. The surface was lime-green with breaking bubbles. Fog and salt mist hid the horizon on all sides.
A dozen, then a hundred, and a thousand, a myriad of the Sidhe breached the surface in graceful lines, ordered themselves in cylindrical ranks beneath the waves and swam from the site of the fall.
Michael came awake abruptly and lay on the bed, his body cold as ice. After a few moments of
hyloka
, he warmed again.
The mass migrations were beginning.
Kristine parked at a lot across from the studio's Gower Street gate. "Edgar's very busy now. He's doing sessions on the score for Lean's new picture — a real break for him, you know. Lean has always used Maurice Jarre."
Michael nodded, more intent on examining the studio than the names. The bare tan outer walls seemed more appropriate for heavy industry than a dream factory.
Kristine crossed the street and opened the glass door for him, pointing to a reception desk on the left side of a small sitting room. Behind the desk sat a woman in a blue and gray security uniform, appointment book and computer terminal before her. She smiled at Kristine.
"Betty, this is Michael Perrin," Kristine introduced. "Betty Folger. She keeps out riffraff like us most of the time, but…"
"Mr. Moffat?" Betty asked, smiling. She referred to the screen, then to the book. "He's logged you in for eleven-fifteen. It'll take you five minutes to j>et to recording studio 3B. If you start now, you'll be right on time." She held up a map, but Kristine waved it off.
"I know the way," she said. "Thanks."
Michael followed, impressed by the quiet and sense of order within the studio. Kristine led him down a corridor lined with offices and out of the building, across a small grassy park shaded with olive trees and then between two huge hangar-like sound stages. Beyond one rank of sound stages and before a second, nestled between backdrops imitating sky and rocks, was a quaint western town, quiet now except for a repair crew and a blue Ford pickup loaded with paint and supplies.
"It's magic, isn't it?" Kristine enthused.
Michael agreed. He had never visited a studio before, not even on the declasse Universal tour. He knew the basics of motion picture production — location shooting, interior sets built within the sound stages, special effects and opticals, but the actuality was still magic.
They skirted a shallow, dry basin covering at least two acres, with a rough-hewn wooden pier jutting out to the middle. On the sound stage immediately behind the basin, a monumental blue sky and clouds had been painted. A line of painted dead palm trees hid the foundation of the sound stage.
"3B is back around that way," Kristine said. "We're taking the long route. I wanted you to see the sets. No tour complete without them."
They entered a long, white two-story building across from the studio fire department, passed down yet another cool, darkened hall lined with framed photos of studio executives, composers and movie sets and stopped before a door marked "3B — Authorized Only." A red light above the door was not glowing. Kristine knocked lightly on the door, and a dark-bearded young man in a
Black Easter
T-shirt and jeans answered.
"Frank, this is Michael Perrin — Frank Warden."
Warden shook Michael's hand and returned to a bank of sound equipment covering an entire wall. 35 mm spools unloaded their tan recording tape through a maze of guides and heads, while rows of lights blinked nearby and dB meters bounced their needles in reaction to sounds unheard. "Edgar's listening to the playback now. Might as well go in. We're about to dump a flighty saw man and do it all digital." He gave them both a stern, meaningful look: rough session.
"It's a different world from Waltiri's day," Kristine commented softly as they took the right hand door into the control room. Edgar Moffat — in his early fifties, balding, with a circlet of short-cut gray hair — sat in a leather swivel chair before a bank of sliding switches, verniers and three small inset computer screens. Compact earphones wrapped around his head played faint, eerie music. Through the glass beyond the controls, Michael saw two performers in a soundproofed recording studio, one clutching a violin and the other an elongated band of flexible steel. They were exchanging bows with each other and trying them out, in complete silence, on the band-saw and the violin. Moffat removed his earphones and shook his head, then punched a switch. A squeal of vibrating metal invaded the control room.
"Gordon, George, it's still off. Take a break and get your shit together. We'll want it right next time or we synthesize it. One more blow against performers, right?"
The musicians nodded glumly and set their instruments down.
Moffat swiveled to face them with a broad smile. "Kris-tine, good to see you again. It's been weeks since you last slummed from the heights of academe."
"It's been busy. Very busy. Edgar, this is—"
"Your new boyfriend. You dumped that Tommy bastard, right?"
Kristine gave him a pained look. "This is Michael Perrin. He's executor for the Waltiri estate."
Moffat's expression intensified, and he stood up. "Sorry, but he wasn't worthy of you, and you know it. Michael, glad to meet you. Kristine told me about the situation. 1 worked with Arno in the fifties and sixties. You might say he gave me my start. Tough old bird." He raised a bushy white eyebrow as if hoping for a reaction. Michael calmly shook his hand. "Kristine says you've found 45."
"We're going to perform it, if I have my way," Kristine said proudly.
"Christ, I always thought it was a myth. I talked with Steiner once — he said he was there, at the Pandall. He plugged his ears with cotton. Now I ask you, is that to be believed? Others weren't so lucky, he said. Friedrich, Topsalin — where are they now? Topsalin sued, so the legend goes."
"It's all true," Michael said. "That's what Arno told me."
"Well, Arno never talked about it to us. Not even to Previn, and he was really intent on making Previn a protege. Previn resisted, unlike me, and look where he is, and look where I am." He held out his hands, smiling ruefully. "Arguing with a man playing a blunted cross-cut tree-cutter."
"I brought a copy along," Kristine said, unzipping her bag. She handed him the manuscript. He motioned them to sit in worn but comfortable chairs crammed into a corner, then put on a pair of glasses and peered at the pages.
"Mm," he said on the third page. "I heard once that Schonberg liked this better than anything else Arno had done. Heard that from David Raksin. More legend. Arnold and Arno. Arnold kept accusing Arno of doing nothing but Hollywood." He briefly assumed Schonberg's Viennese accent. '"45 is not Hollywoody. Finally!' I can see why he said that. I wouldn't dare put a score like this in front of a bunch of union musicians. This is difficult stuff. The piano… Jesus, how to mangle a good instrument. Brass bars on the strings, a microphone hook-up… hell, he was asking for an electric piano, Cosmic honky-tonk." He spent several minutes leafing through the first third of the concerto, then closed it and sighed. "Absolutely insane. You can't even call it discord. It's wonderful. So who'll perform it?"
"I was hoping you could make recommendations. We have a good orchestra, but—"
"You need seasoned folks. You know, a lot of pros would give their perfect pitch for a chance to perform a legend"
"You have the contacts," Kristine said. "If you could put out the word…"
"Have you tried to reach David Clarkham?" Moffat asked.
"He disappeared in the forties," Michael said.
"Why should we talk to him?" Kristine asked, tensing.
"If he's still alive, he might have something to say about this. He's almost as legendary as 45. The dark man of Los Angeles music. I could tell you stories… secondhand, of course… the man was certifiable. Why Arno worked with him I'll never understand, and of course he never told me, except to shake his head once or twice and wave away the questions."
"What kind of stories?" Kristine asked, forcing herself to relax with a small shiver.
"Steiner told me once, before he died, that he met Clarkham. Clarkham confessed to Steiner that he was the figure in gray who commissioned Mozart to write his requiem. Hounded Mozart."
Michael's eyes widened. "He might have been," he said simply. Moffat narrowed his eyes and cocked his head to one side.
"Don't mind Michael," Kristine said. "He's full of mystery, too."
"At any rate, combining both of their talents in one work…" Moffat returned the concerto score with some reluctance to Kristine. "It'll need reorchestration. I can already pick out passages that simply can't be played."
"Arno would want it exact," Michael said.
"I'm sure he would," Moffat replied, lifting his eyebrows. "He could be as bitten by the serial bug as any of us. But he knew as well as I that a score has to be looked at realistically. Some things inevitably have to be changed. And I think we can do it
better
than it was done in 1939. The notation here…" He reclaimed the manuscript and opened it to the middle, pointing out long black jagged lines, half-circles and maltese crosses. "I may be the only person who can decipher some of this now. Arno's special symbols. I decoded from his four-staff scores when I orchestrated for him."
"I knew we'd need you," Kristine said.
"Okay, but where's the funding?"
"I'm working on that. When will you have time to rehearse?"
"Starting on the thirty-sixth of June," Moffat said ruefully. "Depends on whether or not Lean and I see eye to eye on this. He insists on waltz beats in the strangest places. I love Maurice dearly, but those two have worked together entirely too long." He reached his hand out and gripped Michael's shoulder. "You know music, young man?"
"Not very well," Michael said. "I've been teaching myself for a few months now."
"Not the way to go about it, believe me. You seem concerned about… what? Duplicating the effect of the original performance?"
Michael nodded.
"You want to get us all sued?" Moffat smiled wolfishly, knitting his gray brows. "Well, I'll take the risk. There's not
much adventure in this business. Til need all the notes and journal entries you can find on this… and correspondence, anything where Arno might have revealed his intentions. He was never the most precise composer. It'll be doubly difficult not having him here to make final decisions."
