Powers, Richard - Orfeo

His whole history, recorded in a few haphazard splashes of water: the idea was mad. But music itself — the pointless power of it — was mad, too. A six-chord sequence could chill a soul or make it see God. A few notes on a shakuhachi unlocked the afterlife. A simple tavern sing-along left millions longing for their nonexistent homes on the range. A hundred thousand years of theme and variations, every composer stealing from every other, and none of it had any survival value whatsoever.

Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els’s damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

Fidelio pulled at the leash, a more present need. The banks of the pond were damp, and Els’s shoes sank into the muck. He took a stick and scraped the mud from his soles. Each scrape flung away millions of species of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, micro-algae, actinomycetes, nematodes, and microscopic arthropods — billions of single-cell organisms, each pumping out tens of thousands of different kinds of proteins. This torrent, too: chemical signaling, mind-shattering tone clusters, deafening festivals of invention for anyone who cared to attend.

Somewhere in the billions of base pairs in those millions of species there must be encoded songs, sequences that spoke to everything that had ever happened to him. Music to abandon a wife and child by. The lifelong rondo of a friendship gone wrong. Hermit songs. Songs of love and ambition and betrayal and failure and repentance. Even the evening hymn of a retired industrial chemist whose one regret was living so far from his grandchildren.

Els turned from the pond and tugged the dog back onto the macadam loop. Cars shot up and down the nearby street. A low-slung Mustang slunk by, spilling over with a cranked-up anthem of pounding love. Fidelio dashed about in ecstasies, chasing butterflies, barking at phantoms that operated on frequencies Els couldn’t hear. Panting to keep up, with only half the animal’s legs, Els slipped the leash off the retriever’s neck — a little violation of the law that hurt no one and carried at most a nuisance fine. The dog shot toward a sycamore a hundred yards away and stood at the base, barking, as if her happy, pitched howls might induce her prey to hurl itself out of the branches and sacrifice itself to the circle of life.

And in that moment, the idea came to him. It assembled itself in Els’s head as he stood and watched Fidelio baying: music for an autumn evening, a ring of thanksgiving, with no beginning or end. He’d signed on for the full ride long ago, and all that remained was to be true to the dreams of his youth and take them to their logical extreme. He could make his great song of the Earth at last — music for forever and for no one. .

A few days earlier, on the radio, lying in bed before falling asleep, he’d heard soundtracks extracted from DNA — strange murmurings transposed from the notorious four-letter alphabet of nucleotides into the twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. But the real art would be to reverse the process, to inscribe a piece for safekeeping into the genetic material of a bacterium. The precise sounds that he inscribed into the living cell were almost immaterial: birdsong, a threnody, the raw noise of this arboretum, music spun from the brain that those self-replicating patterns had led to, four billion years on. Here was the one durable medium, one that might give any piece a shot at surviving until alien archaeologists came by to determine what had happened to the wasted Earth.

Digitize a composition into a base-four strand, then put the tape inside the player. You’d have to allow for the slow drift of mutation that reworked every genome. But that endless change in the musical message would be more like a feature than a bug. As far as Els knew, the medium was virgin territory. Soon it, too, would be covered with graffiti. But he could get there early and play for one last moment in a newfound land. No storage medium longer-lasting than life.

He would spend his remaining days seeing what might be done in the form, and learning to hear a little of life’s great ground bass along the way. With a little time, patience, a web connection, the ability to follow instructions, and a credit card, he might send a tune abroad again, into the very distant future, unheard, unknown, everywhere: music for the end of time.

Els dropped to his knees, patted the ground, and whistled. Fidelio came bounding back, delirious with frantic and unqualified love. Els leashed the dog, bundled her back into the car, and drove home with an urge to work that he hadn’t felt since his opera had fallen into earthly politics years ago. He’d heard a way that he might redeem, if not the past, then at least his youthful sense of the future. Making things felt strange again, and dangerous. Patterns might yet set him free.

That evening, he set to work ordering parts for a home laboratory.

And filter and fibre your blood.

He’s sure the game is over the minute he walks into the clinic. The night clerk looks up from the reception desk, alert. Els gazes back, with the courage of one already lost.

I’m here to see Richard Bonner .

The clerk keeps eying him. I’m sorry. We’re closed for visits .

I’m his brother. It’s a family emergency. I’ve driven all the way from Texas.

The clerk gets on the phone. In a moment, he says, Mr. Bonner? Chuck here. Sorry to call so late. Your brother is here? To see you? From Texas?

In the endless pause, Els edges back toward the foyer. The clerk cradles the phone to his face and examines Els. Which brother?

Els rolls his eyes. Pure Verdi. Peter , he says. How many does he think he has?

The clerk repeats the name into the phone. He waves his hand while talking, for no one who can see. Invisible gestures — like music for the deaf. The wait stretches out. The clerk shakes his head and listens. Els gauges the distance to the front door.

The clerk hangs up and smiles. I’m supposed to send the bastard through.

The facility is opulent. A central lounge with leather couches and a beaded cathedral ceiling opens up onto a cactus garden. There’s a tiny library with magazines and paperbacks. The women’s wing leads down a pale raspberry hallway; the men’s is hunter-green. Dozens of ink and watercolor washes of animals in a peaceable kingdom line the hall. Past the nurses’ station, through a half-open door, is a small lab, its shelves full of glassware and boxes of medication.

Els passes a room with a movie screen, then a small gym where a handful of ancient women grind away on treadmills while youthful aides take their vitals. In a sunny atrium, four gray-haired men in golf shirts and khaki slacks hunch over a table playing an elaborate board game involving thousands of colored cubes. Two younger men with stopwatches and clipboards observe.

Richard stands in a doorway at the end of the long hall. He looks like he’s wearing stage makeup, the greasepaint formula for old age. He grabs Els by the shoulders, scrutinizing the effects of seventeen years. He wags his head, refuting the evidence.

You’re supposed to be in hiding. Did I get that wrong?

It’s Bonner, but it isn’t. He’s inches shorter. Something around the eyes has been ravaged. Els looks down and sees the interstate still sliding by beneath him. He’s too blasted to form words. Bonner pulls him to his chest in an awkward clutch. The release is abrupt and a little confused.

Richard’s mouth comes open, laughter without sound. He studies Els, puzzled. Look at you. Quite a pickle you’ve gotten yourself into, Maestro. Come on. I’ve got stuff to show you.