To Be Continued 1953-1958 Page 9
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Away from here,” he said. “You are a devil.”
He tottered weakly through the door, and I let him go. The old man was badly confused. But I had a trick or two up my cybernetic sleeve to settle at least some of his problems and salvage him for the world of music. For, whatever else you say or think about me—particularly after this Macauley business—you can’t deny that my deepest allegiance is to music.
For the rest of the day I stopped work on my Beethoven Seventh, and also put away Macauley’s diagram, and called in a couple of competent technicians and told them what I was planning. Our first line of inquiry, I decided, would be to find out who Kolfmann’s piano teacher had been. We had the reference books out in a flash, and found the man without much difficulty. His name was Kellerman, and he had died nearly sixty years before. Here luck was with us. Central was able to locate and supply us with an old tape of the International Music Congress held at Stockholm in 2187.
At that meeting Kellerman had spoken briefly on The Development of the Pedal Technique. His discussion had been extremely boring, but it wasn’t the subject matter which interested us. We split his speech up into phonemes, analyzed, rearranged, evaluated, and finally went to the synthesizer and began feeding in tapes.
What we got back was a new speech in Kellerman’s voice—or reasonable facsimile thereof. Certainly it would be good enough to fool Kolfmann, who hadn’t heard his old teacher’s voice in more than half a century. When we had everything ready I sent for the old musician and a couple of hours later they brought him in, looking even more dispirited and more worn.
“Why do you bother me?” he asked. “Why do you not let me die in peace.”
I ignored his questions. “Listen to this, Mr. Kolfmann,” I said. I flipped on the playback, and the voice of Kellerman came out of the speaker.
“Hello, Gregor,” it said. Kolfmann was profoundly startled. I took advantage of the prearranged pause in the recording to ask him if he recognized the voice. He nodded, his lips white. I could see that he was frightened and suspicious, and I hoped that the whole plan wouldn’t backfire.
“Gregor, one of the things I tried most earnestly to teach you—and you were my most attentive pupil—was that you must always be flexible. Techniques constantly change, even though great art remains unchanged. But have you did not take my advice.”
Kolfmann was starting to realize what we had done. His pallor was ghastly now.
“Gregor, the piano is an outmoded instrument. But there is a newer, a greater instrument available for you. Why do you deny greatness? This wonderful new synthesizer can do all that the piano could do—and more. It is a tremendous step forward—”
“All right,” Kolfmann said. His eyes were gleaming strangely. “Turn that machine off.”
I reached over and flipped off the playback.
“You are very clever,” he told me. “I take it you used your synthesizer to prepare this little speech for me.”
I nodded.
“Well, you have been highly successful—in your silly, theatrical way,” he said. “And I—I have been even more foolish than you. I have stubbornly resisted when I should have joined forces with you. Instead of hating you, I should have been the first to learn how to create music with a new and untried instrument.”
Such was the measure of his greatness! He could with complete honesty and complete humility admit error and rechart his entire career.
“It’s not too late to learn,” I said. “We could teach you.”
Kolfmann looked at me steadily for an instant, and I felt a shiver go through me. But my elation knew no bounds. I had won a great battle for music, and I had won it with ridiculous ease.
He went away for a full month to master the technique of the synthesizer. I gave him my best men, the technicians I had been grooming to take over in my place when age forced my retirement. In the meantime I completed my Beethoven, and the performance was a most gratifying success. And then I got back to Macauley and his circuit.
Once again circumstances conspired to keep me from fully realizing just how serious a threat the circuit had posed. I did manage to grasp that it could be refined to eliminate almost completely the human element in music interpretation. But I had ceased to concern myself with laboratory work for so long a period that I no longer adhered to my old habit of studying any sort of diagram and mentally tinkering with it and juggling it to see if some greater use could not be made of it.
While I was examining the circuit one disturbing thought did occur to me, however. Since anyone would be able to create a musical interpretation, and artistry would no longer be an operative factor I night very well find myself out of a job. I was worrying about that when Kolfmann came in with some tapes. He looked twenty years younger. His face was no longer haggard and despairing and there was a triumphant sparkle in his eyes.
“I will say it again,” he told me, placing the tapes on my desk. “I have been a fool. I have wasted my life. Instead of tapping away at a silly little instrument I might have created a new music with this machine. Look: I began with Chopin. Put this on.”
I slipped the tape into the synthesizer and the F Minor Fantasia came rolling into the room. I had heard that majestic drum roll a thousand times, but never with such glorious overtones.
“This machine is the noblest instrument I have ever played,” he said.
I looked at the graph he had drawn up for the piece, in his painstaking, crabbed handwriting. The ultrasonics were literally incredible. In just a few weeks he had mastered subtleties it had taken me fifteen years to learn. He had discovered what skillfully-chosen ultrasonics, beyond the range of human hearing—but not beyond perception—could do. He had discovered how to expand the horizons of music to a point that would have been inconceivable to the pre-synthesizer composers, with their crude instruments and faulty knowledge of sonics.
The Chopin almost made me cry. It wasn’t so much the actual notes which Chopin had written, and which I had heard so many times before. It was more the unheard notes the synthesizer was striking in the ultrasonic range. The old man had chosen his ultrasonics with the skill of a craftsman—no, with the hand of a genius. I saw Kolfmann in the middle of the room, standing proudly while the piano rang out—a glorious tapestry of sound.
He handed me another tape and I put it on. It was the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and as the sound of a super-organ mingled with the soaring supersonics the unearthly splendor of the composition almost took my breath away. And Kolfmann stood there entranced.
I looked at him and tried without success to relate him to the seedy old man who had attempted to wreck the synthesizer a few short weeks before.
As the Bach drew to its close I thought of the Macauley circuit, again, and of the whole beehive of blank-faced technicians striving to perfect the synthesizer by eliminating the one imperfect element: Man. And I woke up.
My first decision was to suppress the Macauley circuit until after Kolfmann’s death, which could not be long delayed. I made this decision out of sheer kindness. Kolfmann, after all these years, was having a moment of supreme triumph. If I let him know that no matter how magnificent his achievement became the new circuit could do it better, he would not survive the blow.
He fed the third tape in himself. It was the Mozart Requiem Mass, and I was astonished by the inspired brilliance which had enabled him to master the difficult technique of synthesizing voices. Still, with the Macauley circuit, the machine could handle all such details by itself.
As Mozart’s sublime music swelled and rose, I took out the diagram Macauley had given me, and stared at it grimly. At that moment I reached my final decision. I would pigeonhole it until the old man died. Then I would reveal it to the world and, having made my own future meaningless, would sink into peaceful obscurity with at least the assurance that Kolfmann had died happy.
It was sheer kindheartedness, gentlemen. There was nothing malicious or reacti
onary about it. I didn’t intend to stop the progress of cybernetics—at least, not at that point.
No, I didn’t make my last shattering discovery until I got a better look at what Macauley had done. Quite possibly he didn’t even realize it himself, but I could be pretty shrewd about such things. Mentally, I added a wire or two here, altered a contact there, and suddenly the full truth dawned on me.
Macauley had assured me that a synthesizer hooked up with the new circuit wouldn’t need a human being to provide an aesthetic guide to its interpretation of music. Up to now, the synthesizer could imitate the pitch of any sound in or out of nature. But we had to control the volume, the timbre, and all the other factors which make up interpretation of music. With Macauley’s innovation the synthesizer could handle every one of those factors.
But also, I now realized, it could create its own music—from scratch, with no human help. Not only the conductor but the composer would become obsolete. The synthesizer would be able to function independently of any human being. And art gives dignity and purpose and direction to human life.
That was when I ripped up Macauley’s diagram and heaved the paperweight directly at the synthesizer, cutting off the Mozart in the middle of a high C. Kolfmann turned around in horror, but I was the one who was really horrified.
I know. Macauley has redrawn his diagram and I haven’t stopped the wheels of science. I feel pretty futile about it all. But before you label me reactionary and stick me to prison, consider this:
Art is a major, determining function of intelligent beings. When once you’ve created a machine capable of composing original music, capable of an artistic act, you’ve created an intelligent being. And one that’s a great deal stronger and smarter than we are. We’ve synthesized our successor.
Gentlemen, we are all obsolete.
THE SONGS OF SUMMER
This is yet another of the stories I wrote in June of 1955; but before I discuss it, let me jump a year or so forward, to the summer of 1956. Much has happened since my first valiant sales. I have received my degree from Columbia; I have married; and, both alone and in collaboration with a roguish character named Randall Garrett, I have sold dozens and dozens of stories to all manner of magazines. (Again, I refer you to the pulp-story collection In the Beginning for the full story of how this came about.)
Garrett was the key figure in my sudden burst of success. A capable science-fiction writer hampered by alcoholism and incorrigible laziness, he had turned up in New York in the spring of 1955, very much at the end of his resources, and through fortuitous events had landed in the same sleazy building where Harlan Ellison and I (and a few other science-fictional types) were renting rooms. Garrett and I saw each other as complementary figures. His background was in the sciences, mine in literature. He was a clever plotter but a clumsy stylist, whereas I still was having some trouble constructing stories but told them smoothly and well. He was an ebullient extravert; I was quiet and reserved. He was a monumental procrastinator; I was a demon for work.
We took to each other immediately—attraction of opposites, I suppose—and as soon as my academic term ended early in June, we began to write stories together, Garrett typing madly until he collapsed from drink and fatigue, I taking over and working until he recovered, Garrett going on to finish the story, I giving it its final coat of polish. Everything we turned out sold. He knew all the New York editors—their foibles, their preferences—and took me around to their offices to meet them. Suddenly I found myself on first-name terms with the greats of the field, John W. Campbell, Jr. of Astounding, Horace Gold of Galaxy, and such lesser but distinguished figures as Robert W. Lowndes, Larry T. Shaw of the new magazine Infinity, and Howard Browne of Amazing Stories. They all saw in me a competent and ambitious story-making machine, a writer who could, working at high speed and with great reliability, turn out unspectacular but useful fiction at any length. Very quickly I made myself invaluable to them as they struggled to fill their monthly or bimonthly magazines with copy. And so I was launched.
Now that I had so suddenly ceased to be a wistful amateur and become a busy and widely known member, at the age of 21, of the inner circle of professional science-fiction writers, I began to dig out the two or three dozen stories that I had written and failed to sell during my apprenticeship period, and submitted them one by one to the editors who were now my friends. All other things being equal, an editor will look at a manuscript by a writer he knows far more sympathetically than one that comes in from a stranger in the mail; and, one by one, all those stories that had been so extensively rejected in 1953 and 1954 and the early months of 1955 began to make their way into print in 1956.
It would take several volumes the size of this one to restore them all to print now, and I’m not sure that there’s any great need to clutter people’s bookshelves with fat collections of the More-or-Less-Okay-But-Not-Exactly-Great Early Stories of Robert Silverberg. A few samples like “Road to Nightfall” and “Gorgon Planet” and “The Silent Colony” should serve sufficiently to demonstrate the virtues of my prentice-work and to establish the historical record, but enough is probably enough.
But I do want to exhume one more of what I have come to think of as my “pre-professional” stories, for its own intrinsic interest and for the light it casts on later work. Once again, as with “The Silent Colony,” I was imitating my betters here—this time, reaching well beyond even Robert Sheckley’s league, all the way up to William Faulkner. As a Columbia undergraduate in 1954 I had read with some awe—staying up through the night and finishing it at dawn—Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. The use not merely of multiple point of view but of multiple narrator seemed to me a startling and awesome technical device; and with the rashness of youth I tried it myself in “The Songs of Summer.” Having already achieved—so it seemed to me—some mastery of the conventional single-viewpoint short story, I was now ready, at the age of twenty, to begin experimenting with more ambitious fictional forms. (And also with some themes, like that of the group mind, that I would use again and again in later years.)
“The Songs of Summer” was another product of June, 1955. The first dozen editors to whom my agent sent it were unimpressed—or, at any rate, didn’t care to print it. Whenever they felt like publishing this sort of experimentation, they had Theodore Sturgeon or James Blish to write it for them. But after it had been circulating for about a year, during which time I became well known to the New York editors and was starting to bring them the stories they had rejected the year before and have them buy them the second time around, it found a home with Robert Lowndes’ magazine Science Fiction Stories in the spring of 1956. My records indicate that I was paid 3/4 of a cent a word for it—$48.00. By then my name was becoming a familiar one on the contents pages of the s-f magazines, and I suppose Lowndes thought he could take the risk. (In fact, he ran it as the lead story in his September, 1956 issue—though it was Clifford D. Simak who got his name on the cover.) I didn’t send a copy to Faulkner to see what he thought of it.
——————
1. Kennon
I was on my way to take part in the Singing, and to claim Corilann’s promise. I was crossing the great open field when suddenly the man appeared, the man named Chester Dugan. He seemed to drop out of the sky.
I watched him stagger for a moment or two. I did not know where he had come from so suddenly, or why he was here. He was short—shorter than any of us—fat in an unpleasant way, with wrinkles on his face and an unshaven growth of beard. I was anxious to get on to the Singing, and so I allowed him to fall to the ground and kept moving. But he called to me, in a barbarous and corrupt tongue which I could recognize as our language only with difficulty.
“Hey, you,” he called to me. “Give me a hand, will you?”
He seemed to be in difficulties, so I walked over to him and helped him to his feet. He was panting, and appeared almost in a state of shock. Once I saw he was steady on his feet, and seemed to have no further need of me, I began to walk away
from him, since I was anxious to get on to the Singing and did not wish to meddle with this man’s affairs. Last year was the first time I attended the Singing at Dandrin’s, and I enjoyed it very much. It was then that Corilann had promised herself. I was anxious to get on.
But he called to me. “Don’t leave me here!” he shouted. “Hey, you can’t just walk away like that! Help me!”
I turned and went back. He was dressed strangely, in ugly ill-arranged tight clothes, and he was walking in little circles, trying to adjust his equilibrium. “Where am I?” he asked me.
“Earth, of course,” I told him.
“No,” he said, harshly. “I don’t mean that, idiot. Where, on Earth?”
The concept had no meaning for me. Where, on Earth, indeed? Here, was all I knew: the great plain between my home and Dandrin’s, where the Singing is held. I began to feel uneasy. This man seemed badly sick, and I did not know how to handle him. I felt thankful that I was going to the Singing; had I been alone, I never would have been able to deal with him. I realized I was not as self-sufficient as I thought I was.
“I am going to the Singing,” I told him. “Are you?”
“I’m not going anywhere till you tell me where I am and how I got here. What’s your name?”
“My name is Kennon. You are crossing the great plain on your way to the home of Dandrin, where we are going to have the Singing, for it is summer. Come; I am anxious to get there. Walk with me, if you wish.”
I started to walk away a second time, and this time he began to follow me. We walked along silently for a while.
“Answer me, Kennon,” he said after a hundred paces or so. “Ten seconds ago I was in New York; now I’m here. How far am I from New York?”