Robert Silverberg - The World Inside

“Let’s go up now,” Nat murmurs. “Ready, Dill?”

He is ready. He brings his hands up for a virtuoso pounce and slams them down on the projectrons. The old headblaster! Moon and sun and planets and stars come roaring out of his instrument. The whole glittering universe erupts in the hall. He doesn’t dare look at the audience. Did he rock them? Are they gasping and tugging at their droopy lower lips? Come on, come on, come on! The others, as if sensing that he’s into something special, let him take an introductory solo. Furies fly through his brain. He jabs the manipulatrix. Pluto! Saturn! Betelgeuse! Deneb! Here sit people who spend their whole lives locked inside a single building; give them the stars in one skullblowing rush. Who says you can’t start with your climax? The power drain must be immense; lights must be dimming all the way to Chicago. What of it? Did Beethoven give a fart about the power drain? There. There. There. Throw stars around. Make them shimmer and shake. An eclipse of the sun — why not? Let the corona crackle and fry. Make the moon dance. And bring up the sound, too, a great heaving pedal-point that sneaks up the webbing at them, a spear of fifty-cycle vibration nailing them in their assholes. Help them digest their dinner. Shake up all the old shit clogging the colon. Dillon laughs. He wishes he could see his face now; something demonic, maybe. How long is the solo going to last? Why don’t they pick up on him, now? He’s going to burn out. He doesn’t mind, throwing himself into the machine like that, except for the faint paranoid feeling that the others are deliberately allowing him to strain past his limits so he’ll injure himself. The rest of his life sitting like a slug, going booble-booble-booble. Not me! He pulls out all the stops. Fantastic! He’s never done things like this before. It must be his rage at these dull Romans that is inspiring him. And all of it wasted on them. Slot that, though: what counts is what’s happening inside him, his own artistic fulfillment. If he can blow their skulls, that’s a bonus. But this is ecstasy. The whole universe is vibrating around him. A gigantic solo. God himself must have felt this way when he got to work on the first day. Needles of sound descending from the speakers. A mighty crescendo of light and tone. He feels the power surging through him; he is so happy with what he is doing that he grows hard below, and tips himself back in his seat to make it ram more visibly against his clothes. Has anyone ever done something like this before, this improvised symphony for solo vibrastar? Hello, Bach! Hello, Mick! Hello, Wagner! Shoot your skulls! Let it all fly! He is past the crest, starting to come down now, no longer relying on raw energy but dabbling in subtler things, splashing Jupiter with golden splotches, turning the stars into icy white points, bringing up little noodling ostinatos. He makes Saturn trill: a signal to the others. Who ever heard of opening a concert with a cadenza? But they pick up on it.

Ah, now. Here they come. Gently the doppler-inverter noodles in with a theme of its own, catching something of the descending fervor of Dillon’s stellar patterns. At once the cometharp overlays this with a more sensational series of twanging tones that immediately transmute themselves into looping blares of green light. These are seized by the spectrum- rider, who climbs up on lop of them and, grinning broadly, skis off toward the ultraviolet in a shower of hissing crispness. Old Sophro now does his orbital dives, a swoop and a pickup followed by a swoop and a pickup again, playing against the spectrum-rider in the kind of cunning way that only someone right inside the meshing group can appreciate. Then the incantator enters, portentous, booming, sending reverberations shivering through the walls, heightening the significance of the tonal and astronomical patterns until the convergences become almost unbearably beautiful. It is the cue for the gravity-drinker, who disrupts everybody’s stability with wonderful, wild liberating bursts of force: By this time Dillon has retreated to his proper place as the coordinator and unifier of the group, tossing a skein of melody to this one, a loop of light to that one, embellishing everything that passes near him. He fades into the undertones. His manic excitement passes; playing in a purely mechanical way, he is as much listener as performer, quietly appreciating the variations and divagations his partners are producing. He does not need to draw attention now. He can simply go oomp oomp oomp the rest of the night. Not that he will; the construct will tumble if he doesn’t feed new data every ten or fifteen minutes. But this is his time to coast.

Each of the others takes a solo in turn. Dillon can no longer see the audience. He rocks, he pivots, he sweats, he sobs; he caresses the projectrons furiously; he seals himself in a cocoon of blazing light; he juggles alternations of light and darkness. The rod in his pants has softened. He is calm at the eye of the storm, fully professional, quietly doing his work. That moment of ecstasy seems to belong to some other day, even to some other man. How long had the solo lasted, anyway? He has lost track of the time. But the performance is going well, and he leaves it to methodical Nat to keep watch of the hour.

After its frenzied opening the concert has settled into routine. The center of the action has shifted to the doppler-inverter man, who is spinning off a series of formula flashes. Quite nice, but stale stuff, over-rehearsed, unspontaneous. His offhandedness infects the others and the whole group vamps for perhaps twenty minutes, going through a set of changes that numb the ganglia and abort the soul, until finally Nat spectacularly shrieks through the whole spectrum from someplace south of infrared into what, as far as anyone can tell, may be the Xray frequencies, and this wild takeoff not only stimulates a rebirth of inventiveness but also signals the end of the show. Everybody picks up on him and they blast free, swirling and floating and coming together, forming one entity with seven heads as they bombard the flaccid data-stoned audience with mountains of overload. Yes yes yes yes yes. Wow wow wow wow wow. Flash flash flash flash flash. Oh oh oh oh oh. Come come come come come. Dillon is at the heart of it, tossing off bright purple sparks, pulling down suns and chewing them up, and he feels even more plugged in than during his big solo, for this is a joint thing, a blending, a merging, and he knows that what he is feeling now explains everything: this is the purpose of life, this is the reason for it all. To tune in on beauty, to plunge right to the hot source of creation, to open your soul and let it all in and let it all out again, to give to give to give to give

to give

to give

and it ends. Pull the plug. They let him have the final chord and he cuts off with a skullblower, a five-way planetary conjunction and a triple fugue, the whole showoff burst lasting no more than ten seconds. Then down with the hands and off with the switch and a wall of silence rises ninety kilometers high. This time he’s done it. He’s emptied everybody’s skull. He sits there shivering, biting his lip, dazed by the house lights, wanting to cry. He dares not look at the others in the group. How much time is passing? Five minutes, five months, five centuries, five megayears? And at last the reaction. A stampede of applause. All of Rome on its feet, yelling slapping cheeks — the ultimate tribute, 4,000 people struggling out of their comfortable webs to pound their palms against their faces — and Dillon laughs, throwing back his head, getting up himself, bowing, holding his hands out to Nat, to Sophro, to all six of them. Somehow it was better tonight. Even these Romans know it. What did they do to deserve it? By being such lumps, Dillon tells himself, they drew forth the best we had in us. To turn them on. And we did. We knocked them out of their miserable soggy skulls.