The Music Master of Babylon by Edgar Pangborn (best ebook reader TXT) 📗

days, they were away from us in—places where we were not to go, praying. Old Ones are always praying."

"I will hear this Old Man pray," said Jonason. The butt of the javelin rested against Jonason's foot, the blade swaying from side to side. A wrong word, any trifle, Brian knew, could make them decide in an instant that he was evil and not sacred. Their religion would certainly require a devil.

He thought also: Merely one of the many ways of dying. It would be swift, which is always a consideration.

"Certainly you may hear me pray," said Brian abruptly. "Come this way." In a fluctuating despair, he knew that he must not become angry, as a climber stumbling at the edge of a cliff might order himself not to be careless. "Come this way. My prayers—I'll show you. I'll show you what I did when I was a young man in a world you never knew."

He stalked across the Hall of Music, not looking behind, but his back sensed every glint of light on that bread-knife javelin.

"Come this way!" he shouted. "Come in here!" He flung open the door of the auditorium and strode up on the platform. "Sit down over there and be quiet!"

They did, he thought—he could not look at them. He knew he was muttering, too, between his noisy outbursts, as he snatched the cover off the Steinway and raised the lid, muttering bits and fragments from old times, and from the new times.

"They went thataway. Oh, Mr. Van Anda, it just simply goes right through me; I can't express it. Madam, such was my intention—or, as Brahms is supposed to have said on a slightly different subject, any ass knows that. Brio, Rubato and Schmalz went to sea in a—Jonason, Paula, this is a piano. It will not hurt you. Sit there, be quiet, listen."

He found calm. Now if ever, now when I have living proof that human nature (some sort of human nature) is continuing—surely now, if ever, The Project—

With the sudden authority that was natural to him, Andrew Carr took over. In the stupendous opening chords of the introduction, Brian very nearly forgot his audience. Not quite, though. The youngsters had sat down out there in the dusty region where none but ghosts had lingered for twenty-five years or more. The piano's first sound brought them to their feet. Brian played through the first four bars, piling the chords like mountains, then held the last one with the pedal and waved his right hand at Jonason and Paula in a furious downward motion.

He thought they understood. He thought he saw them sit down again, but he could pay them scant attention now, for the sonata was coming alive under his fingers, waking, growing, rejoicing.

He did not forget the youngsters again. They were important, terrifying, too important, at the fringe of awareness. But he could not look at them any more. He shut his eyes.

He had never played like this in the flood of his prime, in the old days, before great audiences that loved him. Never.

His eyes were still closed, holding him secure in a secret world that was not all darkness, when he ended the first movement, paused very briefly, and moved on with complete assurance to explore the depth and height of the second. This was a true statement at last. This was Andrew Carr; he lived, even if, after this late morning, he might never live again.

And now the third, the storm and the wrath, the interludes of calm, the anger, denials, affirmations. Was there anything he didn't know, this heir of three centuries who died in jail?

Without hesitation, without any awareness of self, of age or pain or danger or loss, Brian was entering on the broad reaches of the last movement when he opened his eyes.

The youngsters were gone.

Well, he thought, it's too big. It frightened them away. He could visualize them, stealing out with backward looks of panic. Incomprehensible thunder. But he could not think much about them now. Not while Andrew Carr was with him. He played on with the same assurance, the same joyful sense of victory. Savages—let them go, with leave and good will.

Some external sound was faintly troubling him, something that must have begun under cover of these rising, pealing octave passages—storm waves, each higher than the last, until it seemed that even a superhuman swimmer must be exhausted. An undefinable alien noise, a kind of humming.

Brian shook his head peevishly, shutting it away. It couldn't matter, at least not now. Everything was here, in the beautiful labors his hands still had to do. The waves were growing more quiet, settling, subsiding, and now he must play those curious arpeggios which he had never quite understood—but, of course, he understood them at last. Rip them out of the piano like showers of sparks, like distant lightnings moving farther off across a world that could never be at rest.

The final theme. Why, it was a variation—and how was it that he had never realized it?—a variation on a theme of Brahms, from the German Requiem. Quite plain, quite simple, and Brahms would have approved. Still it was rather strange, Brian thought, that he had never made the identification before in spite of all his study. Well, he knew it now.

Blessed are the dead....

Yes, Brian thought, but something more remained, and he searched for it, proudly certain of discovering it, through the mighty unfolding of the finale. No hurrying, no crashing impatience any more, but a moving through time with no fear of time, through radiance and darkness with no fear of either. Andrew Carr was happy, the light of the Sun on his shoulders.

That they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow after them.

Brian stood up, swaying and out of breath. So the music was over, and the young savages were gone, and somewhere a jangling, humming confusion was filling the Hall of Music, distant, but entering with violence even here, now that the piano was silent. Brian moved stiffly out of the auditorium, more or less knowing what he would find.

The noise was immense, the unchecked overtones of the marimba fuming and quivering as the high ceiling of the Hall of Music caught and twisted them, flung them back against the answering strings of harps and pianos and violins, the sulky membranes of drums, the nervous brass of cymbals.

The girl was playing it. Really playing it.

Brian laughed once, softly, in the shadows, and was not heard. She had hit on a most primeval rhythm natural for children or savages and needed nothing else, hammering it out swiftly on one stone and then the next, wanting no rest or variation.

The boy was dancing, slapping his feet, pounding his chest, thrusting out his javelin in perfect time to the clamor, edging up to his companion, grimacing, drawing back to return. Neither was laughing or close to laughter. Their faces were savage-solemn, downright grim with the excitement, the innocent lust, as spontaneous as the drumming of partridges.

It was a while before they saw Brian in the shadows.

The girl dropped the hammer. The boy froze briefly, his javelin raised, then jerked his head slightly at Paula, who snatched at something. Only moments later did Brian realize that she had taken the clay image before she fled. Jonason covered her retreat, stepping backward, his face blank with fear and readiness, javelin poised. So swiftly, so easily, by grace of a few wrong words and Steinway's best, had a Sacred Old One become a Bad Old One, an evil spirit.

They were gone, down the stairway, leaving the echo of Brian's voice crying: "Don't go! Please don't go! I beg you!"

Brian followed them unwillingly. It was a measure of his unwillingness that moments passed before he was at the bottom of the stairway looking across the shut-in water to his raft, which they had used and left at the window-sill port. Brian had never been a good swimmer; he was too dizzy now and short of breath to attempt to reach it.

He clutched the rope and hitched himself, panting, hand over hand, to the window, collapsing there a while until he found strength to scramble into his canoe and grope for the paddle. The youngsters' canoe was already far off, heading up the river, the boy paddling with deep powerful strokes.

Up the river, of course. They had to find the right kind of Old Ones. Up across the sun-path.

Brian dug his blade in the quiet water. For a time, his rugged ancient muscles were willing. There was sap in them yet. Perhaps he was gaining slightly.

He shouted hugely: "Bring back my two-faced god! Bring it back! It's not yours. It's not yours!"

They must have heard his voice booming at them. At any rate, the girl looked back once. The boy, intent on his effort, did not.

Brian roared: "Bring back my god! I want my little god!"

He was not gaining on them. They had a mission, after all. They had to find the right kind of Old Ones. But damn it, Brian thought, my world has some rights, hasn't it? We'll see about this.

He lifted the paddle like a spear and flung it, knowing even before his shoulder winced how absurd the gesture was. The youngsters were so far away that even an arrow from a bow might not have reached them.

The paddle splashed in the water. Not far away: a small infinity. It swung about to the will of the river, the heavy end pointing, obediently downstream. It nuzzled companionably against a gray-faced chunk of driftwood, diverting it, so that presently the driftwood floated into Brian's reach.

He caught it, and flung it toward the paddle, hoping it might fall on the other side and send the paddle near him. It fell short, and in his oddly painless extremity, Brian was not surprised, but merely watched the gray driftwood floating and bobbing along beside him with an irritation that was part friendliness, for it suggested the face of a music critic he had met in—New Boston, was it? Denver? London? He couldn't remember.

"Why," he said aloud, detachedly observing the passage of his canoe beyond the broad morning shadow of the Museum of Human History, "I seem to have made sure to die."

"Mr. Van Anda has abundantly demonstrated a mastery of the instrument and of the—" You acid fraud, go play solfeggio on your linotype! Don't bother me!—"and of the literature which could, without exaggeration, be termed beyond technique. He is one of those rare interpreters who at the last analysis—"

"I can't swim it, you know," said Brian.

"—have so deeply submerged, dedicated themselves, that they might truly be said to have become one with—" Gaining on the canoe, the gray-faced chip moved tranquilly, placidly approving, toward the open sea. And with a final remnant of strength, Brian inched forward to the bow of the canoe and gathered the full force of his lungs to shout up the river: "Go in peace!"

They could not have heard him. They were too far away and a new morning wind was blowing, fresh and sweet, out of the northwest.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Music Master of Babylon, by Edgar Pangborn