The Soft Terrible Music

 

 

EACH OF CASTLE SILVERSTONE’S ONE HUNDRED windows looked out on the landscape of a different country. The iron drawbridge opened on Mars. A stainless steel side gate led out into a neighborhood in Luna City. A small, bronze gate opened in a small, public place aboard Odalisque, the largest of the Venusian floating islands drifting high above the hot, dry desert of the planet. A sliding double door opened through the sheer face of a cliff overlooking Rio de Janiero, where one could stand before an uncrossable threshold. There was also a door that led nowhere. It was no different in function than the other doors, except that it was not set to any destination. This castle, like any true home, was the expression of a man’s insides, desolate places included. When the castle was not powered-up for full extension, it stood on a rocky hillside in Antarctica’s single warm valley, where it had been built in the early twenty-second century by Wolfgang Silverstone, who rented it out occasionally for political summits. In design it was a bouquet of tall, gleaming cylinders, topped with turrets from a variety of castle building periods. The cylinders surrounded a central courtyard, and the brief connecting walls were faced with gray stone that had been quarried from the valley.

The castle got its name as much from the flecks of fool’s silver in the stone as from the name of its builder. The castle also differed from other extended homes, because it was not linked to the houses of friends and relatives, or to apartments and pieds-‡-terre in major cities. The castle had its vistas, and one could step out into them, but its exits were private. Some of them even looped back into chambers within the castle.

Few homes had ever been built with as much care and attention to a human being’s future needs, to his own future failings. Deep within himself, Silverstone knew what would happen, had accepted it, and had made provisions for his fate.

Halfway through construction, he altered some of the keep’s plans to attract a single woman—Gailla, the woman with the perfect memory, who by age eighty had read and retained every novel written since the eighteenth century. Silverstone, in a fit of fibbing, told her that his castle had a library of one thousand previously lost and unknown works, that he found her irresistible, and that if she married him for the minimum allowable term he would give her the key to the library.

As he waited for Gailla’s answer, his nights trembled with odd dreams, in which he felt that he had always known her, even though he was certain that they had never met—at least not physically. Upon waking, he would conclude that he must have seen her image somewhere; or, more simply, that he wanted her so desperately that his unconscious was inventing an unbroken history of romance, to convince him that they had always been together in their love.

What was five years of a term marriage, he told her; another century of life waited. He was not unattractive for a child of fifty, even if he said so himself. The prize of books he offered seemed to draw her curiosity. Its very existence intrigued her. But secret libraries were not unknown. The Vatican still had much of one locked away, and the history of the Middle East and North Africa was filled with stories of vanished libraries waiting under the sands along ancient, dried-up waterways. One more lost library was not an impossibility.

Fearful that she would leave him if he did not make good on his original boast, he told her that his treasure was a library of books that had been saved from the great “paper loss” of 1850–2050, when most acid paper books had crumbled to dust because there had been no money or will to preserve them; the world had been too busy dealing with global warming and rising ocean levels. He had found the books on his forays into various abandoned Antarctic bases, where the dry cold had preserved the paper. They were mostly mysteries, science fiction, adventure, suspense, bestsellers, and romance novels brought by the base personnel for amusement. Only about a thousand volumes.

As it turned out, she soon discovered that the books were a fraud. Silverstone confessed that he had found only a few; the rest were written to complete extant scraps, cover designs and jacket blurbs, by paid specialists who did not know for whom they were working or that they were part of a larger effort. But fraud or not, it was at least an echo of a newly discovered library, and given enough time, it would become interesting in itself, he assured her, and it seemed to him that she appreciated the compliment of his ploy.

He told her how paper had been made and aged, covers painted, fingerprints of the dead scattered through the volumes. Gailla seemed delighted—for about a month—until she saw how bad the books were, how trite and poorly written. Silverstone was delighted by her bedroom habits—also for about a month. She lost interest in him at about the same time she was able to prove that the books, from internal anachronisms, were fakes.

“How dare you!” she screamed, careful to put on a convincing show. “Why did you do it?”

“To attract you,” he answered, astonished by her perfectly controlled bitterness, which seemed to hide another purpose. “Are you sorry? Would you have bonded with me for myself?”

“You never gave me the chance!” she sang out in a voice that began as a low grumble and ended in a high soprano.

“But you would have,” he demanded, “in other circumstances?”

The question seemed to upset her greatly, and she gave no answer; but Silverstone was convinced that she was holding back a no, and he began to wonder why he had ever been attracted to her. It had seemed to him at the beginning that she would alter the course of his life, change the unknown fate that lay hidden in the back of his mind; and now it seemed to him that nothing could save him from it. It was as if she had known all along about the abyss that threatened to open before him, and was waiting for the right moment to push him into it—after she had tormented him with doubt for a sufficient period of time.

 

He often went to one window after another, as if looking for a landscape into which he might disappear. Autumn scenes drew him, especially mountainous ones with streams, where the leaves on the trees were turning gold and brown. Then he hungered for the sterility of desert sands; and this gave way to a need for lush jungles, and then windswept plains. He became insatiable, passing from window to window like a thief in a museum, eyeing the views greedily, feeling that there could never be enough windows.

Sometimes he liked to step out on Mars, onto his small patch of it, where he could stand and marvel at the honeycomb of habitats spreading across the planet. Five-sided, one-thousand-foot-high transparent cells, immediately habitable in the Martian sunlight —they would one day roof over the red planet with an indoor-outdoors, thus solving the problem of keeping a permanent atmosphere on a low-gravity world. Here was an achievement he envied, wishing that he had been its architect. It was an accomplishment in the making that no amount of inherited wealth could buy.

There were afternoons when he would slip through the gate into Luna City and wander through the VR-game bazaars, where the miners bought their cruel distractions.

Passing into his small hotel room on Odalisque, the Venusian floating island, he would shower and dress for dinner at the Ishtar Restaurant, where huge wallscreens revealed a radar imaging of the bleak landscape fifty kilometers below, which waited for human ambitions to make a mark on it.

And at least once a month he would stand in the alcove above Rio and stare out at the city below as if it were his hometown, imagining the old streets as if he had once known them.

And again, as with the windows, there were not enough doors to satisfy him. Every there became a here when he came to it, losing the longing-magic that drew him.

On the battlements at night, as he considered his deteriorating situation with Gailla, it was—the stars! the stars!—that gave him any kind of peace. By day he felt exposed to the sky, whether a white sheet of overcast or the brilliant glare of yellow sun in a deep blue sky. In the evenings, when he took a short walk across the bare valley of stone, it was always a walk across himself, in search of something he had lost. When he stopped and looked back at the castle, he felt that he had left himself behind. Returning, he felt better, except that Gailla was still there, an intruder deep within him, and he regretted bitterly ever having let her in.

Trying to think how he might extricate himself, he would visit the castle’s dungeons, where the heat exchangers drew strength from the hot springs beneath the bedrock to run the electric generators. Here, also, were the brightly lit hothouses that grew his flowers and vegetables. He did not feel exposed beneath this well-defined, contained, and nourishing daylight. Sitting there, watching the vegetables grow, he calmed himself enough to think that he would simply let the minimum term of his marriage run out. There was only a year and a half left. That would be the simplest solution. Until then, he would simply keep out of her way.

But asleep in his own room, he would often hear her moving inside him, opening doors and closing them, as if looking for something. He would wake up and hear her doing the same thing again, and he wondered what she had come into him to find. And he realized, although some part of him had known it all along, that there were two castles, that there had been two castles from the very moment he had conceived the plans for its construction in this valley—one castle outside and one within himself, and that Gailla had invaded both of them.

He began to wonder what she was looking for, and decided that he would have to spy on her to find out. Had she married him to steal something? What did he have that required so much effort? If it was so desirable, maybe he should also know about this prize, and prevent her from stealing it. What could it be? He already had everything that money could buy.

During the night of January 31st, he slept lightly, and when he heard her opening and closing doors, he got up and dressed, then went out to see what he could learn. He found her on the second level of the north turret, going from room to room down the spiral staircase, opening every door, shining a light inside, then backing away and leaving the door slightly ajar. He listened to her from behind a Freas tapestry, until she reached the bottom. There she sighed as if greatly satisfied, and went down the final curve of the stairway into the main hall below.

He crept out from his hiding place and hurried to the railing, from which he looked down and saw her pacing before the great fireplace, where the dying embers of a collapsed universe still glowed. She was dressed in her outdoor jumpsuit, but it could not conceal her tall, slender shape. At last she sat down in one of the great high chairs and closed her eyes in contentment.

It made no sense at all.

“You can come down, Wolfy,” she called out suddenly. “I know you’re there!”

Was she bluffing, he wondered? Had she called out like this on several nights, out of a general suspicion?

She looked up suddenly and pointed to where he stood. “I can’t quite see you in this wretched light, but you’re there in the shadow near the railing.”

She was not bluffing. He leaned over and said, “I’ll be right with you,” then came down the stairs, hoping that now he would at last learn what she was after, crossed the hall, and sat down in the high-backed chair facing hers.

Staring at her intently, he was about to ask what she was looking for.

“Be patient,” she said, expecting his question.

He looked at her, puzzled. “And you bonded with me just to... carry on some kind of search? Whatever for?”

“You’ll know soon enough, Wolfy.”

“Do you even know yourself?”

“I know,” she said, and as the redness of the embers painted her face, it seemed that she was about to become someone else.

“So tell me,” he said. “It’s something I’ll have to know sooner or later—right?”

She nodded grimly and said, “More than you want to know. But before I tell you, Wolfy, be advised that people know where I am.”

“What do you think I’ll do to you?” he asked with surprise.

“Let me tell you a story...”

He settled back in his chair.

“During the plague deaths of the twenty-first century,” she began, “a man was born in Rio. He grew up to be a thief, a murderer, a crooked politician, a mayor of more than one city, and finally the president of a country. In a depopulated world, his talents were needed, and he did well in administrative posts, although always to his own benefit. But as the century grew old and the population began to increase again, people became more jealous of political and economic power, and sought to take back from him what he had gained. He defended himself, of course, but when he saw that he would be brought down, either by assassination or by imprisonment, he decided that he had to die. So he went to a rich friend who was a recluse, killed him, and then stepped into the man’s identity, through somatic changes of his own physique, which already resembled that of the victim, and finally through selective memory implants. And then he went one step further, desperate to cover his trail completely. He wiped away his own self to prevent capture, and became Wolfgang Silverstone, as completely as anyone could, short of having actually been Wolfgang Silver-stone.”

“What!” Silverstone cried out.

“Sit down and calm yourself, Wolfy. You can’t know right now that any of this is true, but trust me, the trail is still there, because you didn’t want to hide it completely.”

“That’s crazy. It’s the same as suicide!”

“No, the man from Rio planned to come back.”

“What?”

“Yes, he left a ‘trigger’ inside his stolen persona, so that one day it would resurrect his earlier self. I’m certain of that. This trigger is what I’ve been looking for. It’s here in this castle, and even you don’t know where it is, even though you had it built as part of your way back. The man you were was too egotistical to have allowed himself to become someone else permanently. You’re not the man you were, but you will be, very soon now.”

Silverstone laughed. “But how?”

“There’s a pre-trigger,” she said, “that will guide you to the place at the appropriate time, and there you will know how to free your true self and become again the man who killed the original Silverstone.” She recited the words softly, as if she had rehearsed them a thousand times—which, of course, she had.

Silverstone stood up and lurched toward her, but she pointed a weapon at him wearily and said, “Sit down, Wolfy. Do you think I would have told you all this without some insurance?”

He stopped, then stumbled back into his chair. “Who are you?” he asked. “What is all this to you?”

She shrugged. “Police—and there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

He sat back, stunned. “But surely you see... that you have no proof beyond this story you’ve told me. You personally don’t know that it’s true. You’re just putting bits and pieces together.”

“You’ve been getting restless lately,” she said, “as if you were looking for something—and you have been, constantly. You’re getting close to the time you set for triggering your own return. You see, even in your persona state, your guilt remains, buried deeply, of course. Even your building this castle is part of that. You built it as a way of exploring yourself, of setting the means for your return. You’ll give me all the proof I need, because you’ll go to a certain prepared room at the appointed time and come out guilty of murder. It’s why I’m here, and why I married you.”

He laughed. “But I can’t know that any of this is true!” he shouted. “Even you admit that. If I don’t go to this room, you’ll have no case. Even if I do go in, I don’t have to say anything when I come out. Why did you bother to tell me all this? You might have done better leaving me in the dark. Mind you, that’s still assuming any of this is true.”

“I want you to suffer for a while.”

“Did you find the room? You certainly spent enough nights annoying me with your explorations.”

“Shut up, Wolfy. You’re just a clever sociopath living through a dead man’s memories. You set up a time for retrieving yourself, after stealing from people in troubled times. I suppose even a thug wants to be himself, to come back from, in effect, being dead.”

“How long must a man lie dead,” he recited, puzzled by the words that came out of him. “Forever is too long. There must be mercy somewhere.”

“See, you’re in there, all right,” she replied, “speaking out even though you don’t quite know it.”

Shaken, he asked derisively, “Did you call him Wolfy? And were you his she-wolf?”

“Shut up!”

“You’ll never call anyone but me Wolfy again,” he said. “What can getting this other guy bring you?”

“He’ll be at peace. I’ll be at peace, knowing that the murderer of my beloved has been exposed.”

“Oh, then you won’t kill me yourself? You’ll just have them take me away.”

“But first you’ll have to live again as the man you were.”

He sat slightly forward in his chair and her hand tensed around her gun. “But don’t you see,” he said earnestly. “I’m not responsible. I know only what you’ve told me about all this. I don’t know or feel anything about the crime.”

“Don’t worry, it’ll all come back to you. That’s why you did it this way, so you could say that you weren’t responsible. It’s part of your crime.”

“Really?”

“You set it up, and I’ve caught you.”

“Are you sure? Beware, you may not like what you find.”

“Don’t threaten me,” she said. “You are Benito Alonso Robles, the man from Rio, who killed Wolfgang Silverstone in 2049 and downloaded the essentials of his personality into your own, overwriting yourself for a timed period in order to evade the police. Murder was only your last crime, designed to conceal all the others. We can’t get you on many of those, but we will certainly get you for murder.”

“How clever of me,” Silverstone said. “So what now?”

She did not answer him.

“Consider,” he continued, “that if I am all that is left of Silver-stone, your so-called beloved, then why didn’t I remember you when we met?”

“We were no longer together when you killed him,” she said, “and sometime before that, in order to ease his pain, he had suppressed his experiences with me. Still, I think something in you seemed to know me.”

“Ah! And then I fell in love with you again. That was why I was so earnest, so eager. But how could I know, my dear?” He held his arms out to her. “And now you want to destroy all that survives of your beloved, even after what was left of him was strong enough to come after you again!”

“No—you’re only a fragment of him, and you’ve developed in ways he would not have, had he lived. For one thing, there’s a different unconscious below the superimposed personality and its memories, and that makes you very different.”

“Still, I’m all that’s left of Wolfy dearest.”

“But not any part that knows me very well,” she said coldly. “Why did you pick him? Had he done you any wrong?”

“How do I know? If all this is true, then he was simply convenient, I suppose. Ask me later—if we get to later, and if any of this is true.”

“Get up,” she said. “We’re going upstairs.”

“Is it time, my dearest?”

“I don’t know. Do you feel anything? You may have already spoken the pre-trigger.”

He stood up and she motioned for him to climb the great stairs to the second level of the north tower. As he started up, she followed well below him, gun aimed at his back.

“Keep going,” she said when he reached the landing.

“How do you know it’s up here?” he asked.

“Where would you say, then?”

“The lower levels?” he said, laughing. “How would I know? If what you say is true, I may even be the man you say I killed— I mean physically as well as whatever identity was fed in.”

“You’re not,” she said. “I’ve already had your DNA checked.”

He laughed again. “Of course, the opportunity presented itself to you on more than one occasion. You simply carried a sample away in you.” He turned around and faced her with open hands. “Gailla,” he said, “you don’t know what you’re doing and neither do I, by your own claims. You don’t know how the pre-trigger will kick in, or where this... this restoration will take place. And you admit that as far as I know, I am Silverstone...”

“You’re not him,” she said. “That much I know.”

“Yes, yes, the DNA. But I only have your word for that too.”

“Do you feel anything?” she asked. “An impulse to go somewhere, or say something to yourself?”

“Not particularly.”

“Just a few moments ago you wanted to go to the lower levels below the castle.”

“An idle remark.”

“It might mean something.”

“Well, I have lived with a vague expectation of some kind for a while now. It came to me just after we... no longer got along.”

“Really.”

“Maybe your being a cop spooked me at some basic level.” He turned around suddenly and watched her tense. He waited a moment, then asked, “What do you really want from me? Simple revenge, is that it?”

“No, I just want you to know again, consciously, what you did, and let the law do with you as it will. That’s revenge enough.”

“But what if I never remember?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” she said. “You took him from me a long time ago, and denied us a chance of ever getting back to each other. We might have by now.”

“It’s pretty to think so, and sad that you do.”

“You don’t really care.”

“Not much. You’re purging me of any desire I once had for you.”

“Sorry I can’t say the same. It was never there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Turn around and get going.”

He smiled, turned, and climbed the spiral.

“Stop right there,” she said suddenly. “Face the door on your right.”

He obeyed. “Why here?”

“Process of elimination,” she said. “You have never entered this room since we’ve been together. Do you recall ever entering it?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

“Go in.”

He pressed his palm to the plate, and the door slid open. He stepped inside. She came in right behind him. The door slid shut.

An overhead panel of light blinked on, filling the room with bright yellow light, and he saw another door at the end of the room.

Then he looked to his right and saw the portrait on the wall.

He turned and gazed up at a dark painting of someone sitting at a mahogany desk. It was an old man with thin, white hair teased out to twice the size of his head. He was dressed in a bright red, nineteenth century military tunic that seemed to be choking his wrinkled neck. There were no markings on the tunic to indicate nationality. The man’s mouth was closed tightly....

And as he stared at the face, a flood of returning memory filled his mind, and he knew that this was the trigger. And with his memories came also the remembrance of the day he had set the trigger at the portrait of Silverstone’s ancestor. Then, packed away, the painting had waited for the castle to be built, where he would one day come to himself again, secure, reestablished, reawakening to himself again, slowly, secretly, safely bringing himself out of the sleepwalker’s life that had been necessary for his survival.

He waited as his identity returned. It blossomed within him, realms of self and memory fitting themselves into vast, empty spaces—but Silverstone stayed with him all the way, showing no sign of fading. He turned to face Gailla and said, “He’s still with me... I can’t get rid of him!”

“He’ll keep you company at your trial,” Gailla said joylessly.

“But you’ll be killing what’s left of your old love!” he cried.

“I’ve been prepared for some time,” she said. “They’ll wipe you clean and start you up as someone else. It’ll be all over for both of us.”

“No!” he cried, turned, and rushed to the other door. She did not fire, and he knew that she couldn’t, and that he would have enough time to do what he now remembered was his last recourse, waiting for him if something went wrong.

He palmed the door, and still she had not fired. As the door slid open, he knew that she was hesitating, unable to kill the last of her lover. And he felt it also, the mountainous regret at having killed him. He could not banish it, or the vast cloud of the man’s mental remains. It refused to fade away, invading his unused regions with new patterns, and he knew that he was too weak to wipe them out. The impulse to love had infected him with weak sentiments, and he knew that she felt it also. The bodily memories of their lovemaking had softened them both. That was why she had not killed him as soon as he had regained himself. Or was she preparing him for when she would rebuild her old lover by amplifying the stubborn echoes that remained until they burgeoned and became again the personality she had known? Maybe she knew how to resurrect him and had planned it all along, and would carry out her plan after sufficient revenge had been visited on him.

Well, he would deny her that. He could still take everything from her, and achieve one last victory over a world that had opposed his every desire from the start, always forcing him to take what he wanted. There was nothing else he could do.

“Wait!” she cried as the door opened into chaos. It would have been a way to somewhere, but he had deliberately left it set to no destination—realizing that he might need its sudden exit one day.

As he tumbled into the black obscenity of existence without form, he saw her in the doorway, her mouth open wide in horror and regret, her arms reaching out to him uselessly. And as he felt himself deforming, changing, losing all sense of time and space, he knew that his death would not be quick, that no supernatural damnation could ever have equaled the slow loss of himself that was just beginning.

Gailla was shooting at him now, and he imagined that it was a gesture of pity, an effort to shorten the suffering of what was left of her lover. The third bullet opened his chest, entering slowly, as if unsure of how to obey the laws of physics in this realm. It explored his pain, telling him that he had made this final fate for himself by building the castle and its doorways, with every fleeting, trivial decision—step by inexorable step to one end, to bring him here, to this death.

“Gailla,” Silverstone whispered through the pain of her bullet’s dancing, failed mercy. “I’m still here.”

Then Robles closed his eyes and heard the soft, terrible music filtering in from behind the show of things. It was an inhuman music, with nothing of song or dance, or memory in it. It was a music of crushed glass, severed nerves, and brute rumblings, preparing the way for a theme of fear.

And as Robles knew himself in his pain, he yearned for death because Silverstone was still with him.