The Rose

Book 496: Gateway Essentials

by Charles L. Harness

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Hired to keep house for George Randolph and his three unruly brothers at their ramshackle ranch, penniless and friendless Rose Thornton soon finds herself the object of George's affection.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

The Rose is about my brother Billy—Blandford Bryan Harness. Billy was nine years older than I, and the age gap precluded the comradely rapport of brothers born closer together. No matter. Maybe he knew me only as a noisy kid, often in his way. But I knew him, as the acolyte knows the demi-god. He was a fine artist; he studied art at TCU, then at the Chicago Art Institute. He wrote short stories but never submitted any for publication. Much much later, I used the plots of several of those stories in my own work. He was a fair mechanic; he kept our ancient Hudson tuned and running. He was many things. No palette of adjectives really illustrates him. He was mocking, wry, sardonic, frequently scornful.

He was killed by two brain tumors. Inoperable, the surgeons said, though God knows they tried. He died at home, in his bed. Mother sat there and held his hand. We all heard his last gasp. He was 26.

I began work on The Rose almost twenty years later. It had been a rough season for me. In the lab where I worked then, a dear friend, a world-class chemist, had been passed over for promotion, and we knew he would now resign. He had been like an older brother to me, a tremendous help when I was just getting started in the patent department. In fact, looking back, he very nearly filled the vacancy left by Billy. His departure was prolonged and painful. Writing The Rose helped me deal with it, like some sort of catharsis. So I finished it and it went out to market.

Every SF market in the U.S. turned it down. John Campbell: “I know only one tune, ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’” Forrest Ackerman finally sold it in England to Authentic Science Fiction magazine. After that everybody wanted it, and it’s been printed in the U.S. and in six or seven foreign languages.

The tale (as indeed the story itself says) is plotted around a short story, “The Nightingale and the Rose,” by Oscar Wilde. This was in a little fabrikoid-bound volume I found among Billy’s books after he died. I was so impressed, I actually memorized the story—2,500 words.

The picture of Billy I love best: He and I are trying to play checkers on the breakfast-room table. Little Brother Pat keeps interfering. Billy in calm silence unlatches the window screen. picks a puzzled Pat up carefully, lowers him out the window, relatches the screen, returns to the game. It was all so smooth, so ceremonial, so right, that I think little Pat took it as a rare honor.

Wherever a mind could go, Billy had been. He could answer Goethe’s question in Mignon: Yes, he knew the land where the lemon trees grow. And the other things. He had sailed to Byzantium. He had heard the mermaids sing. And the very best of all, he had loved, and been loved.

The perfect Ruy Jacques.

Her ballet slippers made a soft slapping sound, moody, mournful, as Anna van Tuyl stepped into the annex of her psychiatrical consulting room and walked toward the tall mirror.

Within seconds she would know whether she was ugly.

As she had done half a thousand times in the past two years, the young woman faced the great glass squarely, brought her arms up gracefully and rose upon her tip-toes. And there resemblance to past hours ceased. She did not proceed to an uneasy study of her face and figure. She could not. For her eyes, as though acting with a wisdom and volition of their own, had closed tightly.

Anna van Tuyl was too much the professional psychiatrist not to recognize that her subconscious mind had shrieked its warning. Eyes still shut, and breathing in great gasps, she dropped from her toes as if to turn and leap away. Then gradually she straightened. She must force herself to go through with it. She might not be able to bring herself here, in this mood of candid receptiveness, twice in one lifetime. It must be now.

She trembled in brief, silent premonition, then quietly raised her eyelids.

Somber eyes looked out at her, a little darker than yesterday: pools plowed around by furrows that today gouged a little deeper—the result of months of squinting up from the position into which her spinal deformity had thrust her neck and shoulders. The pale lips were pressed together just a little tighter in their defense against unpredictable pain. The cheeks seemed bloodless, having been bleached finally and completely by the Unfinished Dream that haunted her sleep, wherein a nightingale fluttered about a white rose.

As if in brooding confirmation, she brought up simultaneously the pearl-translucent fingers of both hands to the upper borders of her forehead, and there pushed back the incongruous masses of newly-gray hair from two tumorous bulges—like incipient horns. As she did this she made a quarter turn, exposing to the mirror the humped grotesquerie of her back.

Then, by degrees, like some netherworld Narcissus, she began to sink under the bizarre enchantment of that misshapen image. She could retain no real awareness that this creature was she. That profile, as if seen through witch-opened eyes, might have been that of some enormous toad, and this flickering metaphor paralyzed her first and only forlorn attempt at identification.

In a vague way, she realized that she had discovered what she had set out to discover. She was ugly. She was even very ugly.

The change must have been gradual, too slow to say of any one day: Yesterday I was not ugly. But even eyes that hungered for deception could no longer deny the cumulative evidence.

So slow—and yet so fast. It seemed only yesterday that had found her face down on Matthew Bell’s examination table, biting savagely at a little pillow as his gnarled fingertips probed grimly at her upper thoracic vertebrae.

Well, then, she was ugly. But she’d not give in to self-pity. To hell with what she looked like! To hell with mirrors!

On sudden impulse she seized her balancing tripod with both hands, closed her eyes, and swung.

The tinkling of falling mirror glass had hardly ceased when a harsh and gravelly voice hailed her from her office. “Bravo!”

She dropped the practice tripod and whirled, aghast. “Matt!”

“Just thought it was time to come in. But if you want to bawl a little, I’ll go back out and wait. No?” Without looking directly at her face or pausing for a reply, he tossed a packet on the table. “There it is. Honey, if I could write a ballet score like your Nightingale and the Rose, I wouldn’t care if my spine was knotted in a figure eight.”

“You’re crazy,” she muttered stonily, unwilling to admit that she was both pleased and curious. “You don’t know what it means to have once been able to pirouette, to balance en arabesque. And anyway”—she looked at him from the corner of her eyes—“how could anyone tell whether the score’s good? There’s no Finale as yet. It isn’t finished.”

“Neither is the Mona Lisa, ‘Kubla Khan,’ or a certain symphony by Schubert.”

“But this is different. A plotted ballet requires an integrated sequence of events leading up to a climax—to a Finale. I haven’t figured out the ending. Did you notice I left a thirty-eight-beat hiatus just before the Nightingale dies? I still need a death song for her. She’s entitled to die with a flourish.” She couldn’t tell him about The Dream—that she always awoke just before that death song began.

“No matter. You’ll get it eventually. The story’s straight out of Oscar Wilde, isn’t it? As I recall, the student needs a red rose as admission to the dance, but his garden contains only white roses. A foolish, if sympathetic, nightingale thrusts her heart against a thorn on a white rose stem, and the resultant ill-advised transfusion produces a red rose … and a dead nightingale. Isn’t that about all there is to it?”

“Almost. But I still need the nightingale’s death song. That’s the whole point of the ballet. In a plotted ballet, every chord has to be fitted to the immediate action, blended with it, so that it supplements it, explains it, unifies it, and carries the action toward the climax. That death song will make the difference between a good score and a superior one. Don’t smile. I think some of my individual scores are rather good, though of course I’ve never heard them except on my own piano. But without a proper climax, they’ll remain unintegrated. They’re all variants of some elusive dominating leitmotiv—some really marvelous theme I haven’t the greatness of soul to grasp. I know it’s something profound and poignant, like the Liebestod theme in Tristan. It probably states a fundamental musical truth, but I don’t think I’ll ever find it. The nightingale dies with her secret.”

She paused, opened her lips. . .