Powers, Richard - Orfeo

As soon as he began to walk, yesterday’s debacle softened and grew manageable. Coldberg and Mendoza now seemed like the bumbling twin bowler-hatted inspectors in Tintin. He fell in a hundred yards behind the jogging woman and started on his own small steps to Parnassus. Every few yards he caught himself looking for Fidelio, as if the dog had run off somewhere.

The park could have been a seventeenth century landscape painting. Nothing tied Els to the present except for the jogging woman. She had on a sports bra and shorts of some shiny, environment-sensing tech material. She ran like an anatomy lecture. In Els’s youth, a woman dressed like that in a town like this would have been arrested for subverting public morals. She seemed to Els preternaturally desirable. Happily, he no longer felt desire.

She lapped him as he reached the central transect. He picked up his pace, jogging for a while behind her. An old man of seventy chasing an almost nude girl through a dawn glade: a scene straight out of Baroque mythological opera. The shining form in front of him pulled away again, laying waste to sloth, anomie, idle thought, and metaphor.

White wires ran from the cuff on her arm into her ears. Jogging and the portable jukebox: the greatest musical match since tape hit the V8. A thousand and one nights of continuous hits, all inside a metal matchbox. When this woman reached Els’s age, mind-controlled players would be sewn into the auditory cortex. And not a moment too soon, because the entire nation would be deaf.

It seemed to Els that Mahler would have loved the MP3 player, its rolling cabaret. His symphonies, laced with tavern music and dance tunes, were like a vulgar playlist. The fifth Kindertotenlieder had its eviscerating mechanical music box, and Das Lied von der Erde was inspired by one of the earliest cylinders recorded in China. Real composers didn’t fear the latest mass-market recording. They used it. But how to use one and a half million new songs a year?

Once, Els had spent months cutting quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape with razor blades and splicing the snips back together. He’d programmed a computer to generate a string quintet using probability functions and Markov chains. At this jogging woman’s age, he’d believed that digital technology might save art music from the live burial of the concert hall. Now the concert hall itself needed saving.

He drifted underneath the giant trunks, their branches drift-netting the dawn sun. The hundred trees had all gone into the park at the same time, and, in a long largo, they’d begun to leave the place together. Every high wind now brought down another hulk. The park would be a very different proposition — a sunny, trivial one — by the time Els, too, vacated the neighborhood.

The goddess had no use for trees. Her knees, like twin pistons, rose high and clean. Tiny daubs of sweat coated her olive limbs. Through the trees, Els glimpsed her in profile. Her face, resolute but neutral, focused a good hour or two into the future. She looped back up the path behind him, a bright, cyborg Thanks issuing from her as she flowed past.

A tinny munchkin backbeat trailed from her earbuds in her wake. Els couldn’t make out the flavor of her bliss. This park, these advance spring flowers, the sixty-degree air stolen from paradise, were colored for her by invisible instruments that no one but she could hear.

She ran down the path ahead of him, now and then reaching across with her right arm and grabbing at the arm cuff, as in a tricky cross-hands Chopin étude. It dawned on Els: she was canceling songs.

At the wooded edges of the pond to the south, the spring migration was gathering. Els counted the different calls, but lost track around eleven. Fresh, surprising music that escaped all human conventions: the very thing he’d spent his life searching for was here all along, free for the listening.

Off to his left, a crow cawed in the branches of a gaunt pine. Nearby, something small began to trill: an invisible soloist reinventing melody, as it had done for millions of years before human ears. Els trotted, light in the scattered racket of the morning chorus. The jogger appeared again through a clearing, still executing her merciless verdicts. She averaged half a minute between swipes — judge and jury in a kangaroo court. Every few dozen steps she condemned the Now Playing to the dustbin of history.

Her player must have contained thousands of tracks tagged by artist, year, genre, and user rating. A few menu clicks and she could be the Minister of Culture for her own sovereign state of desire. Yet she turned away twenty times as many auditioners as she let through. The explanation came to Els after another quarter mile: shuffle — the Monte Carlo game that had changed music forever. She was running through her several thousand tunes like random speed-date suitors. Songs were breaking over her in waves of wild accident — the mix-and-match mashup that was her birthright.

She rounded the southeast corner of the park, toward the high school, flicking away tunes like evolution’s demiurge. She was looking for something, the perfect sonic drug. And the medicine chest was endless: the laughing gas of a forties big band, a highball of brassy show tunes, punk heroin, techno-ecstasy, folk songs like a pack of tobacco, the hashish trance of Pali chanting, a caffeinated Carnatic raga, cocaine-tinged tango. .

A player filled with her private reserve, and still the random shuffle produced dozens of songs in a row that had to be killed. Or maybe she was streaming on mobile broadband—3 or 4 or 5G, or whatever generation the race had reached by that morning. A server farm on the far side of the planet was piping down one hundred million tracks of recorded music into her blood pressure cuff, and none suited. The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste. How many tunes did anyone need? One more. The next new one.

All the bogus bacterial blood is a pigment called prodigiosin. From prodigiosus —strange, remarkable, wondrous — a prodigy.

The sun had risen and the neighborhood was waking. Car wheels a block away thrummed on the asphalt. Els rounded the park’s southwest corner and passed the driveway of a mock-Tudor house, where a man in navy sweats and a T-shirt — Gravity: Not Just a Good Idea — was putting two plastic trash cans the size of a Mercury space capsule out on the curb. The man waved to Els as if they knew each other. Els waved back, in case they did.

He’d see what he could discover, online. Maybe the ACLU had a hotline. Coldberg and Mendoza had no warrant. His rights had surely been violated.

The goddess came up behind him again, her step matching the latest beat coming through the thin white wires. A Persian tar improvisation to cure melancholy. A Ukrainian funeral lament. Every tune in creation lined up in her shuffled stream, waiting to take its ten-second turn.

Els stepped off into the grass as she shot by. Above him, in the branches, the air still rang with birdsong. Check the day. Drop it, drop it, pick it up, pick it up. What cheer, what cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer? Why don’t you come to me? Messy sprung rhythms spilled out over every bar line Els could draw for them. If any grand, guiding rule held these rhythms together, Els was too crude and long-lived a creature to hear it. The racket was like the local combined middle schools set loose with a copy of GarageBand. Surplus bothered no one here. The noise washed over him, brisk and urgent and shining.

Through that clatter came a news flash. Three strong notes descended in a major triad, then riffed on the tonic in a dotted rhythm:

Sol, mi, do-do-do-do-do-do-do. .

A thing no bigger than a child’s fist was asserting a chord as brazen as any that a kid Mozart might plunk out prior to taking it through a maze of rococo variations. Els scanned the trees, but the perp hid. Maybe the bird had ripped off a playing child or heard the notes spill out of a summer convertible. Birds were big on mimicking. Mozart’s pet starling liked to mock the theme from his G Major Piano Concerto, K. 543. Australian lyre birds could mimic camera shutters, car alarms, and chain saws so perfectly they passed for real.