Orpheus Read online

Orpheus

  By Sarah Stegall

  Copyright 2011 by Sarah Stegall

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, objects and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Overture

  They have increased the inflation of the dome for me, but it is not necessary. Only a few kids queue up for a thumbprint on their cubes; most cannot read a human language. They are here because they have ten minutes to kill between holo showings and they want to be in the presence of an Event.

  Of course, I am a very small event. This is only my third published cube.

  “I read your book,” says a gruff voice in excellent English. I am unused to hearing it and look up. Tall, male, slender, with black hair (today) and green eyes (this week).

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  A thin slice of smile, with red teeth glimpsed between. “I liked your book. Especially the ocean scene.”

  “My editor wanted me to cut it.”

  A wider slice. He needs a shave. “It is the best part of the book.”

  By now the teenagers around us are staring in open-mouthed wonder. The holo has started but they ignore it; I realize that he must be something special to have made these illiterate children miss their fix. The cube before me is gold, the “deluxe” edition, allowing ten viewings before self-destruction. I press my thumb against its sensitized surface.

  “Thank you.” He does not turn to go.

  “Who are you?”

  “Shard,” he replies. A gasp goes up from the munchkins.

  “Shard who?” I reply, revealing my ignorance of my own culture.

  “Shard,” he repeats, waiting for me to recognize him.

  “Oh.” Of course I recognize him, and by now so do you. His face is on every holo, his voice on every wave.

  “Thank you. I am glad you liked it,” I whisper.

  Another predatory smile, and he turns to go, his ragged tunic fluttering. The light catches on the famous cheekbone scars. He strides away, is gone, the moment fades and I begin to recover from the shock of meeting a Name.

  And then he is back. Another squeal, quickly shushed.

  “Come eat with me,” he commands.

  Of course I do. He is one of the most beautiful men in the worlds.

  Concerto in Blue minor

  There is no light. Shard insists on total darkness, not just the gleam-ridden half-light of conventional theater, with exit lights glowing. In the early days, Light Fixture, his top roadie, would sabotage the nearest substation to achieve this total blackness.

  Into this breathing silence strikes one single cobalt ray, accompanied by a sinuous, throbbing chord. Amber light swells forth as a bass line, a wink and sparkle of pink tremolo, a bamboo thunder. A fog of aerosolized psychotropic drugs, masked with scents of lemon and cinnamon, anise and burning leaves drifts over the crowd. In years to come, the combination of those scents will trigger flashbacks among the survivors of tonight’s performance.

  Black matte globes hover and swoop, the eyes of the audience out there. They upload the concert onto pirate wavelengths, encrypt it with codes available only via passwords distributed by word of mouth, whispered ear to ear to ear. The webnet’s strict protocols mean nothing to this viral assault. Viewers on worlds too distant to be seen with the naked eye tune in, inhaling their own homebrewed scents. They hoard and trade the threedees like currency. The undernet teems with them, an Ebola of liberation.

  In the hall, shapes emerge from the air, made coherent by the insistent call of the music. Peripherally glimpsed, three dimensional holosculptures twist and sigh to the call of the melody – tragedy, triumph, love, loss. Without words, in the immortal way of music and image, Shard teaches, elucidates, breaks down all defenses. The audience shatters.

  Which is precisely as intended. Over the next two hours, the light and scent sculptures weave and dance among musics creating or created by them--who can tell? Subsonics embedded in the structures sneak past all logical constructs in the forebrain. Scent trickles past the psychological defenses of a lifetime to soak the limbic system of the audience in emotions they cannot name, cannot resist. Themes and messages drift like fog between sobbing listeners, or loft overhead on iridescent blooms of glowing light. The music/light laughs, weeps, reprimands. No listener can remain aloof, no critic maintain his detachment. Shard evokes the fall of empires, the rise of ideals, the cry of the hopeless. No censor can find the crux of an argument, no commission can decide if the lightsinger is artist or agent provocateur.

  “They are merely entertainment,” he grins to the newsies.

  In rebellious alleyways, the masses hum his tunes and plot.

  Interlude in Asia

  Asia smells like something crawled into it and died. It is hot and wild, and everyone stares, wherever we go. I am as invisible in his wake as a shadow at midnight.

  Everyone stares.

  “Why don't you opaque the windows?” I ask.

  “They have no one else.”

  We visit one of the famous floating restaurants. We go dancing in a club half a kilometer below the ocean. He moves like a wild thing, all stillness one moment, then all speed and sliding light. When he dances I can smell his sweat. Something speaks to me beyond the physicality of him, beyond the lissome grace, the scars. Lying under all is a raw, taut anger I catch only rare glimpses of. In the wordplay between us there are always hints, some need-to-reveal balanced against his need-to-conceal.

  At the concerts, the ones staged as flash mobs, I hear the restless crowd. For the duration of the music and light, they sit passively, so completely engaged they almost forget to breathe. But when it’s over, both Shard and his audience return to the same restlessness, the same seeking. I don’t know what he wants.

  As we sit watching a dawn rise over the sea, I ask him, “What are you thinking?”

  “Dissonance. Tonal shift.” His eyes are wide and clear and utterly mad. “Revolution.”

  Pursued by the Furies that sing in his head, we flee into the far reaches of the Neptunian rings.

  Symphony in Red major

  Shard changes, is changed. There are no more excursions to the clubs, the restaurants. He wears transparent shirts to show his scars. On the stations circling Tethys and Dione, he wanders, with no bodyguard, into the abandoned tunnels where the outcasts live, the ones who knock out all the lights and steal water through shunt-pipes.

  On Ganymede he stalks out of an elaborate party given in his honor by a corporate princeling. In Lunabase he spurns an invitation from the Board to an honorary dinner.

  There’s some gift, some talent for fitting in, for going along with the crowd, that neither of us have ever had. We glide through the crowds like sharks through goldfish. Webnet interviewers acquire a wary look as Shard acquires difficult opinions. Somehow, he manages to maintain his celebrity status even as he becomes anathema to the media establishment that makes it possible.

  Inevitably, he finds Psychophane. A tasteless liquid that enhances the body’s reaction to electromagnetic radiation, it was discovered on Callisto, distilled from some bizarre fluid found below the icy surface. It is Shard who discovers that sound can activate this billion-year-old compound. The result is random personality change, triggered by the kind and intensity of the sound, an individual’s own hormonal chemistry, and the psychotropin levels in the blood.

  Shard pays black laboratories to engineer it to his specifications. He reprograms Light Fixture, and in the next concert releases a mist of Psychophane into the audience. The crowd tears Light Fixture limb from circuit. Two of the audience members are
eaten alive by their seatmates, and ten of the survivors must be confined to mental institutions for the rest of their lives. The remainder experience an oracular revelation that fires a new generation of poets, dreamers and artists.

  This is not conducive to industrial productivity.

  Sponsorship drops to zero. Shard's work suddenly disappears from legitimate outlets, from nodes controlled by cartels and corporations. It makes no difference. More viral than any plague, the message goes out in bootleg and blackwave: seize your freedom.

  Oratorio in Five Dementia

  Shard finds Triton’s retrograde orbit ironically appropriate. We walk the rat ways that crisscross the oldest part of the ice mine colonies; masses of gray-clad, dull-eyed miners move on the treads and walks. Canned, psychomanipulative music playing at subliminal levels programs them to accept the boredom of life spent in a glass box watching robots carve blocks of frozen gases out of the planet.

  I look at Shard. I have heard the rumors that Shard was born here, that his scars