Harlan Ellison - The Song the Zombie Sang

From the fourth balcony of the Los Angeles Music Center the stage was little more than a brilliant blur of constantly changing chromatics—stabs of bright green, looping whorls of crimson. But Rhoda preferred to sit up there. She had no use for the Golden Horseshoe seats, buoyed on their grab-grav plates, bobbling loosely just beyond the fluted lip of the stage. Down there the sound flew off, flew up and away, carried by the remarkable acoustics of the Center’s Takamuri dome. The colors were important, but it was the sound that really mattered, the patterns of resonance bursting from the hundred quivering outputs of the ultracembalo.

And if you sat below, you had the vibrations of the people down there—

She was hardly naive enough to think that the poverty that sent students up to the top was more ennobling than the wealth that permitted access to a Horseshoe; yet even though she had never actually sat through an entire concert down there, she could not deny that music heard from the fourth balcony was purer, more affecting, lasted longer in the memory. Perhaps it was the vibrations of the rich.

Arms folded on the railing of the balcony, she stared down at the rippling play of colors that washed the sprawling proscenium. Dimly she was aware that the man at her side was saying something. Somehow responding didn’t seem important. Finally he nudged her, and she turned to him. A faint, mechanical smile crossed her face. “What is it, Laddy?”

Ladislas Jirasek mournfully extended a chocolate bar. Its end was ragged from having been nibbled. “Man cannot live by Bekh alone,” he said.

“No, thanks, Laddy.” She touched his hand lightly.

“What do you see down there?”

“Colors. That’s all.”

“No music of the spheres? No insight into the truths of your art?”

“You promised not to make fun of me.”

He slumped back in his seat. “I’m sorry. I forget sometimes.”

“Please, Laddy. If it’s the liaison thing that’s bothering you, I—”

“I didn’t say a word about liaison, did I?”

“It was in your tone. You were starting to feel sorry for yourself. Please don’t. You know I hate it when you start dumping guilt on me.”

He had sought an official liaison with her for months, almost since the day they had met in Contrapuntal 301. He had been fascinated by her, amused by her, and finally had fallen quite hopelessly in love with her. Still she kept just beyond his reach. He had had her, but had never possessed her. Because he did feel sorry for himself, and she knew it, and the knowledge put him, for her, forever in the category of men who were simply not for long-term liaison.

She stared down past the railing. Waiting. Taut. A slim girl, honey-colored hair, eyes the lightest gray, almost the shade of aluminum. Her fingers lightly curved as if about to pounce on a keyboard. Music uncoiling eternally in her head.

“They say Bekh was brilliant in Stuttgart last week,” Jirasek said hopefully.

“He did the Kreutzer?”

“And Timijian’s Sixth and The Knife and some Scarlatti.”

“Which?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember what they said. But he got a ten-minute standing ovation, and Der Musikant said they hadn’t heard such precise ornamentation since—”

The houselights dimmed.

“He’s coming,” Rhoda said, leaning forward. Jirasek slumped back and gnawed the chocolate bar down to its wrapper.

Coming out of it was always gray. The color of aluminum. He knew the charging was over, knew he’d been unpacked, knew when he opened his eyes that he would be at stage right, and there would be a grip ready to roll the ultracembalo’s input console onstage, and the filament gloves would be in his right-hand jacket pocket. And the taste of sand on his tongue, and the gray fog of resurrection in his mind.

Nils Bekh put off opening his eyes.

Stuttgart had been a disaster. Only he knew how much of a disaster. Timi would have known, he thought. He would have come up out of the audience during the scherzo, and he would have ripped the gloves off my hands, and he would have cursed me for killing his vision. And later they would have gone to drink the dark, nutty beer together. But Timijian was dead. Died in ’20, Bekh told himself. Five years before me.

I’ll keep my eyes closed, I’ll dampen the breathing. Will the lungs to suck more shallowly, the bellows to vibrate rather than howl with winds. And they’ll think I’m malfunctioning, that the zombianic response wasn’t triggered this time. That I’m still dead, really dead, not—

“Mr. Bekh.”

He opened his eyes.

The stage manager was a thug. He recognized the type. Stippling of unshaved beard. Crumpled cuffs. Latent homosexuality. Tyrant to everyone backstage except, perhaps, the chorus boys in the revivals of Romberg and Friml confections.

“I’ve known men to develop diabetes just catching a matinee,” Bekh said.

“What’s that? I don’t understand.”

Bekh waved it away. “Nothing. Forget it. How’s the house?”

“Very nice, Mr. Bekh. The houselights are down. We’re ready.”

Bekh reached into his right-hand jacket pocket and removed the thin electronic gloves, sparkling with their rows of minisensors and pressors. He pulled the right glove tight, smoothing all wrinkles. The material clung like a second skin. “If you please,” he said. The grip rolled the console onstage, positioned it, locked it down with the dogging pedals, and hurried offstage left through the curtains.

Now Bekh strolled out slowly. Moving with great care: tubes of glittering fluids ran through his calves and thighs, and if he walked too fast the hydrostatic balance was disturbed and the nutrients didn’t get to his brain. The fragility of the perambulating dead was a nuisance, one among many. When he reached the grab-grav plate, he signalled the stage manager. The thug gave the sign to the panel-man, who passed his fingers over the color-coded keys, and the grab-grav plate rose slowly, majestically. Up through the floor of the stage went Nils Bekh. As he emerged, the chromatics keyed sympathetic vibrations in the audience, and they began to applaud.

He stood silently, head slightly bowed, accepting their greeting. A bubble of gas ran painfully through his back and burst near his spine. His lower lip twitched slightly. He suppressed the movement. Then he stepped off the plate, walked to the console, and began pulling on the other glove.

He was a tall, elegant man, very pale, with harsh brooding cheekbones and a craggy, massive nose that dominated the flower-gentle eyes, the thin mouth. He looked properly romantic. An important artistic asset, they told him when he was starting out, a million years ago.

As he pulled and smoothed the other glove, he heard the whispering. When one has died, one’s hearing becomes terribly acute. It made listening to one’s own performances that much more painful. But he knew what the whispers were all about. Out there someone was saying to his wife:

“Of course he doesn’t look like a zombie. They kept him in cold till they had the techniques. Then they wired him and juiced him and brought him back.”

And the wife would say, “How does it work, how does he keep coming back to life, what is it?”

And the husband would lean far over on the arm of his chair, resting his elbow, placing the palm of his hand in front of his mouth and looking warily around to be certain that no one would overhear the blurred inaccuracies he was about to utter. And he would try to tell his wife about the residual electric charge of the brain cells, the persistence of the motor responses after death, the lingering mechanical vitality on which they had seized. In vague and rambling terms he would speak of the built-in life-support system that keeps the brain flushed with necessary fluids. The surrogate hormones, the chemicals that take the place of blood. “You know how they stick an electric wire up a frog’s leg, when they cut it off? Okay. Well, when the leg jerks, they call that a galvanic response. Now, if you can get a whole man to jerk when you put a current through him—not really jerking, I mean that he walks around, he can play his instrument—”