Chorale

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Kemper had the answer; Reuter had the problem. Kemper had figured it all out by the twenty-second century; he was a man of temporal science. The past did not exist. The past upon which the present was based had no credence unless it could be reconstructed, bit by tiny bit. Surrogates would have to go back in time and become the cast of thousands. Napoleon was needed; likewise the Kennedys, all four of them. There were those who would have taken argument with Kemper, but Kemper, unfortunately, was beyond dispute; in other words he, like all the other famous and infamous, was dead. Reuter's problem was that he had gone back to Vienna in the early 1800s to be Beethoven. Beethoven, Reuter has decided, was a disgusting man. Someone must listen - don't they realise that it was all a fraud?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 186

Sample

And now, Reuter thought, to the Heilingstadt Testament. He wanted no part of it but sempre fi; you had to meet all the conditions. Who needs it? he thought: complain, complain, renunciation of this, dismissal of that, ruminations about death, the weather, poor sinus, and beyond it all the matter of the deafness which was, frankly, already beginning to be something of a bore.

It never came to anything. The work, as a matter of fact, got better. Since the deafness had had no bad outcome, since it hardly interfered with the output (as every fool knew), why make such a point of it, then? Ah well,

he knew the answer to that, all right. History being inflexible. And so on and so forth. The question of reconstruction. Servility. Possibility.

Oh, all of the Travelers were well briefed on that aspect, all right. Once you began to jiggle with the details, even the least significant, let alone the really important stuff like the deafness, you risked losing hold of large pieces of history and then the jig was up, as it were, the world was washed away. Fertig. We live on a peninsula surrounded by dark waters of history, held to land only by the one thin tendril of continuous past, Reuter thought. Now, that was pretty good. Really, that wasn’t bad at all. It was a hell of a lot more interesting than the self-pitying babble he was assigned to put down now.

I’d really like to write that down instead, Reuter thought dangerously.

But no. No. He was here to do what he was here to do: ergo the Heilingstadt Testament. Hunched over the papers on the third floor of his stinking, reeking rooms in 1803’s Vienna, Reuter applied himself once again to the paper. God, it really smelled in here. All of Vienna smelled; what was drained from the past in recollection was the corporeality of it. No one at the Institute was prepared to deal aboveboard with the fact that the past stank, that most historical figures living before 1900 were badly in need of superficial hygiene.

Still. The sinus would block out some of this. I renounce, he wrote. I renounce all of this, all of that.

Now, how did that go in German? It didn’t matter; the papers would be picked up in due course and the translation done by section clerk, but he would feel a little more secure about this, a lot less foolish, if he knew German. A smattering anyway. Hint of authenticity. For that matter, he would feel more secure also if he knew something about music, but then again you had to keep a sense of perspective. Music was merely symbology. His field was history and the workings of the mind which would have been Ludwig van Beethoven’s. The rest of it could be faked, right down to the transcripts of the many famous compositions which had been stowed for him in various interstices of the room. Nothing had to be original; all that he had to do was reconstitute.

He supposed. Anyway, that was the Institute’s position.

Renunziata? No, that was Spanish. Reconaissant? Reconissement? Probably no such words, although his execrable French would have been preferable to nonexistent German. I renounce all of it, he wrote in English. I can no longer go on. The truth of the matter is that I am going rapidly deaf in both of my ears, and with the loss of that vital sense comes the necessary loss of my art. I am a fraud, a mockery. I am no longer Beethoven.

Garbage. Self-pitying garbage. Reuter flung the pencil against a wall, put his palms on the paper, lurched upright. The trouble was that he could no longer take this stuff seriously. Napoleon, JFK, Thomas Alva Guinzanburg: now, there were personalities that you could really get yourself into. Even some of the minor composers like Ravel or Berlioz had some balance, some range of personality. Berlioz was in fact a genuinely complex man: a writer, a critic, a mystic. But Ludwig van—and you might as well face it—had only the two modes: self-pity and heroism, and both at the cheapest and most superficial level. Superficial. In fact, the man was actually frivolous; he did not react to his feelings so much as observe them and contrive reactions to suit. Twenty-four more years of this, even through the compressed process of re-enactment, might well drive him insane. Who could put up with this garbage? He, Reuter, would wind up as crazily dead as the original. Compression and all, he wondered if he would be able to last out the few months subjective. Probably. Probably he would. Insanity might be a relief, but he was doomed to the cold lucidity of the process and the integrity of self.

Enough, Reuter thought Enough of this. I can pick up on it later. I can finish the Testament after I have a little walk and perhaps a piece of sausage. He rummaged through the odorous closet, found his filthy frock coat, and went down the stairs toward the teeming streets of Vienna. He would enjoy some sausage, come to think of it Then he could look up his nephew Earl and kill a few hours in conversation.

Oh, no. No Earl. That would be another fifteen years or so. You had to keep all of these facts, wearisome as they were, straight.

At his final briefing the director had been explicit to Reuter. Even a little threatening. “We have noticed,” the director said, “noticed both in the interviews and in some of the ongoing testing procedures, that you are showing reluctance, perhaps the word we are looking for is actual resistance, toward the occupation of Traveler.” The others had nodded. Some of them had nodded and others had not. The director had either nodded or he had refrained from nodding. One of Reuter’s problems is that he has always had difficulty in individuating these people, from one another and indeed within their own persona. They had a very mechanical aspect, which was, perhaps, not out of place for what was, after all, a highly technologized age. In this most technological era of all history, Reuter realized, he had a suspicion and fear, a fundamental incomprehension, of all machinery. It was good for his occupation, necessary, but still, still…

“Re-evaluation is constant,” the director had said. “An ongoing process.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? Then you know that you are free to withdraw at any time, even now. If it makes you unhappy to do this, you need not be compelled.”

“Well, now,” Reuter said uneasily, shifting his seat, looking past the gleaming fluorescence to the screens on which all of his interview was being recorded, “I wouldn’t say that I was unhappy, not at all.”

“Subjectively you may be.”

“Not in the least,” Reuter said heartily. “Of course I’m dealing with a very unhappy character here; there might have been a little transference—”

“Not to speculate,” the director said. “The Traveler is not a piece of machinery, you know. If he was, we could have the checkpoints made automatically. You must, sometimes intolerably, be human; you must act with conviction, and this can lead inevitably to tension, stresses. You see, we come prepared to understand.”

“It’s all right,” Reuter had said. He had really, for complex reasons, not wanted to cease being a Traveler at that point. It would not have done him any good in his other works. “I want to continue; in fact, I must continue. You know that I’m good at this.”

“No one can be good indefinitely.”

“Of course.”

“You cannot be a Traveler forever, and there comes a time when, if the Traveler does not make that judgment, we must.”

“I really understand that,” Reuter said. It was surprising, put to pressure, how anxious he was to remain. It was the kind of thing that would have to be investigated in depth, but never under the gaze of the director, much less the frowns of the board surrounding. “It’s just the present case. Being Beethoven, I mean.”

“Beethoven was a monumental figure, a towering influence, perhaps the watershed of all music—”

“I know that. I know.”

“It should be considered a privilege to be Beethoven. We would not have selected just anyone, you know.”

“I have to admit I have little sympathy for the subject,” Reuter said. “I don’t actively dislike him, but I can’t seem to get inside the persona.”

“Do you want to withdraw?” the director said. He inclined his head, went into momentary conference with the board member on his left, then seemed to take information from the right. The two members of the board folded their hands and looked at Reuter, then away. The director sighed and slapped an imaginary object from his right shoulder. “That’s your option all along,” he said.

“No. I don’t want to.”

“Then, why bring up these objections?”

“I’m trying to be honest”

“Are you?” the board member to the director’s left said, “or are you asking that the responsibility for removal be taken from you and given to us? That’s a very common tactic, you know.”

“I am being honest,” Reuter said loudly. The questioning had attacked him at the level of vanity; if nothing else, Reuter liked to believe that he had far more integrity and insight than the average Traveler, who, face it, was not very bright and who came from crushing social circumstances that drained moral sensitivity. “I’ve done all the research, haven’t I? I’ve prepared myself for this as seriously as I ever have, I’m highly primed and very knowledgeable. It would be a complete waste if I withdrew now.”

“A waste of what?” the director said.

“Of all this knowledge. I can play the role with utter conviction. It’s just that it makes me unhappy to do it; but then again, that’s really a performance problem, I admit that. I can work it out.”

“Well, then,” the director said and coughed, shook his head, conferred again with his right and left. He really seemed to be a hesitant individual, lacking that sense of authority which Reuter had always expected of these boards; but then again, you had to consider his unique and individual problems, just as, Reuter hoped, his own were being considered. “Well, then, you do realize that in Vienna, if you are not Beethoven, even for a moment—”

“I will be. I can promise you that not for a moment will I fall out of role.”

“Ah,” the director said. He paused, cleared his throat, leaned forward as if to say something penetrating and final, but then seemed to slip out of position. “You will have to avoid a repetition of this, you realize. We can’t go through this every time you undertake an assignment. We’re really not primed for it, you know.”

“I know that,” Reuter said. “I promise you that if I continue to feel this way you’ll be the first to know. The very first. I’ll make a clean breast of things. In fact, I will resign.”

“Well, of course.” There was another long pause. The board members seemed to have passed into a highly abstracted state; a few of them even seemed to be dozing. The director fumbled with his cuffs. For people of their very real importance in the Department of Reconstruction—really, on the day-to-day level they were running it—they struck Reuter as being curiously tentative. Even now, even in his very real distress, he could obviously win his point with them over and again.

Well. You had to face the truth. He was willing to do so; he would do so even now: the Department was regarded outside as being an eccentric, minor dumping ground for misfits and cranks. Nobody really took the Department seriously; it was essentially sustained only because it would be too much trouble to dismantle it and too risky if, unreasonably, the consequences of abolition were serious. Like all bureaucracies it was self-perpetuating and there was a certain amount of mysticism at work here. Still, it was hard to have self-respect working for people like this.

Still, what was self-respect? Beethoven certainly had very little outside his one area of accomplishment, and that went for most of the major historical figures, good and bad alike, who were essentially compensating for inferred inadequacies.

“You’re under constant review,” the director said. “You will be observed throughout. This is a constant process, you know, just as . . .