Текст книги "The Complete Short Stories"
Автор книги: James Graham Ballard
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 113 страниц)
Four
Mangon slowed down as they approached a side road. Two hundred yards away on their left a small pink-washed cabin stood on a dune overlooking one of the stockades. They drove up to it, turned into a circular concrete apron below the cabin and backed up against one of the unloading bays, a battery of red-painted hydrants equipped with manifold gauges and release pipes running off into the stockade. This was only twenty feet away at its nearest point, a forest of door-shaped baffles facing each other in winding corridors, like a set from a surrealist film.
As she climbed down from the truck Madame Gioconda expected the same massive wave of depression and overload that she had felt from the stockade of aircraft noises, but instead the air seemed brittle and frenetic, darting with sudden flashes of tension and exhilaration.
As they walked up to the cabin Mangon explained: Party noises – company for me.
The twenty or thirty baffles nearest the cabin he reserved for those screening him from the miscellaneous chatter that filled the rest of the stockade. When he woke in the mornings he would listen to the laughter and small talk, enjoy the gossip and wisecracks as much as if he had been at the parties himself.
The cabin was a single room with a large window overlooking the stockade, well insulated from the hubbub below. Madame Gioconda showed only a cursory interest in Mangon’s meagre belongings, and after a few general remarks came to the point and went over to the window. She opened it slightly, listened experimentally to the stream of atmospheric shifts that crowded past her.
She pointed to the cabin on the far side of the stockade. ‘Mangon, whose is that?’
Gallagher’s. My partner. He sweeps City Hall, University, V.C., big mansions on 5th and A. Working now.
Madame Gioconda nodded and surveyed the stockade with interest. ‘How fascinating. It’s like a zoo. All that talk, talk, talk. And you can hear it all.’ She snapped back her bracelets with swift decisive flicks of the wrist.
Mangon sat down on the bed. The cabin seemed small and dingy, and he was saddened by Madame Gioconda’s disinterest. Having brought her all the way out to the dumps he wondered how he was going to keep her amused. Fortunately the stockade intrigued her. When she suggested a stroll through it he was only too glad to oblige.
Down at the unloading bay he demonstrated how he emptied the tanker, clipping the exhaust leads to the hydrant, regulating the pressure through the manifold and then pumping the sound away into the stockade.
Most of the stockade was in a continuous state of uproar, sounding something like a crowd in a football stadium, and as he led her out among the baffles he picked their way carefully through the quieter aisles. Around them voices chattered and whined fretfully, fragments of conversation drifted aimlessly over the air. Somewhere a woman pleaded in thin nervous tones, a man grumbled to himself, another swore angrily, a baby bellowed. Behind it all was the steady background murmur of countless TV programmes, the easy patter of announcers, the endless monotones of race-track commentators, the shrieking audiences of quiz shows, all pitched an octave up the scale so that they sounded an eerie parody of themselves.
A shot rang out in the next aisle, followed by screams and shouting. Although she heard nothing, the pressure pulse made Madame Gioconda stop.
‘Mangon, wait. Don’t be in so much of a hurry. Tell me what they’re saying.’
Mangon selected a baffle and listened carefully. The sounds appeared to come from an apartment over a launderette. A battery of washing machines chuntered to themselves, a cash register slammed interminably, there was a dim almost sub-threshold echo of 60-cycle hum from an SP recordplayer.
He shook his head, waved Madame Gioconda on.
‘Mangon, what did they say?’ she pestered him. He stopped again, sharpened his ears and waited. This time he was more lucky, an overemotional female voice was gasping ‘…but if he finds you here he’ll kill you, he’ll kill us both, what shall we do…’ He started to scribble down this outpouring, Madame Gioconda craning breathlessly over his shoulder, then recognized its source and screwed up the note.
‘Mangon, for heaven’s sake, what was it? Don’t throw it away! Tell me!’ She tried to climb under the wooden superstructure of the baffle to recover the note, but Mangon restrained her and quickly scribbled another message.
Adam and Eve. Sorry.
‘What, the film? Oh, how ridiculous! Well, come on, try again.’
Eager to make amends, Mangon picked the next baffle, one of a group serving the staff marriel quarters of the University. Always a difficult job to keep clean, he struck paydirt almost at once.
‘…my God, there’s Bartok all over the place, that damned Steiner woman, I’ll swear she’s sleeping with her..
Mangon took it all down, passing the sheets to Madame Gioconda as soon as he covered them. Squinting hard at his crabbed handwriting, she gobbled them eagerly, disappointed when, after half a dozen, he lost the thread and stopped.
‘Go on, Mangon, what’s the matter?’ She let the notes fall to the ground. ‘Difficult, isn’t it. We’ll have to teach you shorthand.’
They reached the baffles Mangon had just filled from the previous day’s rounds. Listening carefully he heard Paul Merrill’s voice: ‘…month’s Transonics claims that… the entire city will come down like Jericho.’
He wondered if he could persuade Madame Gioconda to wait for fifteen minutes, when he would be able to repeat a few carefully edited fragments from Alto’s promise to arrange her guest appearance, but she seemed eager to move deeper into the stockade.
‘You said your friend Gallagher sweeps out Video City, Mangon. Where would that be?’
Hector LeGrande. Of course, Mangon realized, why had he been so obtuse. This was the chance to pay the man back.
He pointed to an area a few aisles away. They climbed between the baffles, Mangon helping Madame Gioconda over the beams and props, steering her full skirt and wide hat brim away from splinters and rusted metalwork.
The task of finding LeGrande was simple. Even before the baffles were in sight Mangon could hear the hard, unyielding bite of the tycoon’s voice, dominating every other sound from the Video City area. Gallagher in fact swept only the senior dozen or so executive suites at V. C., chiefly to relieve their occupants of the distasteful echoes of LeGrande’s voice.
Mangon steered their way among these, searching for LeGrande’s master suite, where anything of a really confidential nature took place.
There were about twenty baffles, throwing off an unending chorus of ‘Yes, H. L. ‘, ‘Thanks, H. L. ‘, ‘Brilliant, H. L.’ Two or three seemed strangely quiet, and he drew Madame Gioconda over to them.
This was LeGrande with his personal secretary and PA. He took out his pencil and focused carefully.
‘…of Third National Bank, transfer two million to private holding and threaten claim for stock depreciation… redraft escape clauses, including non-liability purchase benefits..
Madame Gioconda tapped his arm but he gestured her away. Most of the baffle appeared to be taken up by dubious financial dealings, but nothing that would really hurt LeGrande if revealed.
Then he heard—
‘…Bermuda Hilton. Private Island, with anchorage, have the beach cleaned up, last time the water was full of fish… I don’t care, poison them, hang some nets out… Imogene will fly in from Idlewild as Mrs Edna Burgess, warn Customs to stay away…’
‘…call Cartiers, something for the Contessa, 17 carats say, ceiling of ten thousand. No, make it eight thousand…’
‘…hat-check girl at the Tropicabana. Usual dossier…’
Mangon scribbled furiously, but LeGrande was speaking at rapid dictation speed and he could get down only a few fragments. Madame Gioconda barely deciphered his handwriting, and became more and more frustrated as her appetite was whetted. Finally she flung away the notes in a fury of exasperation.
‘This is absurd, you’re missing everything!’ she cried. She pounded on one of the baffles, then broke down and began to sob angrily. ‘Oh God, God, God, how ridiculous! Help me, I’m going insane…’
Mangon hurried across to her, put his arms round her shoulders to support her. She pushed him away irritably, railing at herself to discharge her impatience. ‘It’s useless, Mangon, it’s stupid of me, I was a fool—’
‘STOP!’
The cry split the air like the blade of a guillotine.
They both straightened, stared at each other blankly. Mangon put his fingers slowly to his lips, then reached out tremulously and put his hands in Madame Gioconda’s. Somewhere within him a tremendous tension had begun to dissolve.
‘Stop,’ he said again in a rough but quiet voice. ‘Don’t cry. I’ll help you.’
Madame Gioconda gaped at him with amazement. Then she let out a tremendous whoop of triumph.
‘Mangon, you can talk! You’ve got your voice back! It’s absolutely astounding! Say something, quickly, for heaven’s sake!’
Mangon felt his mouth again, ran his fingers rapidly over his throat. He began to tremble with excitement, his face brightened, he jumped up and down like a child.
‘I can talk,’ he repeated wonderingly. His voice was gruff, then seesawed into a treble. ‘I can talk,’ he said louder, controlling its pitch. ‘I can talk, I can talk, I can talk!’ He flung his head back, let out an ear-shattering shout. ‘I CAN TALK! HEAR ME!’ He ripped the wrist-pad off his sleeve, hurled it away over the baffles.
Madame Gioconda backed away, laughing agreeably. ‘We can hear you, Mangon. Dear me, how sweet.’ She watched Mangon thoughtfully as he cavorted happily in the narrow interval between the aisles. ‘Now don’t tire yourself out or you’ll lose it again.’
Mangon danced over to her, seized her shoulders and squeezed them tightly. He suddenly realized that he knew no diminutive or Christian name for her.
‘Madame Gioconda,’ he said earnestly, stumbling over the syllables, the words that were so simple yet so enormously complex to pronounce. ‘You gave me back my voice. Anything you want—’ He broke off, stuttering happily, laughing through his tears. Suddenly he buried his head in her shoulder, exhausted by his discovery, and cried gratefully, ‘It’s a wonderful voice.’
Madame Gioconda steadied him maternally. ‘Yes, Mangon,’ she said, her eyes on the discarded notes lying in the dust. ‘You’ve got a wonderful voice, all right.’ Sotto voce, she added: ‘But your hearing is even more wonderful.’
Paul Merrill switched off the SP player, sat down on the arm of the sofa and watched Mangon quizzically.
‘Strange. You know, my guess is that it was psychosomatic.’
Mangon grinned. ‘Psychosemantic,’ he repeated, garbling the word half-deliberately. ‘Clever. You can do amazing things with words. They help to crystallize the truth.’
Merrill groaned playfully. ‘God, you sit there, you drink your coke, you philosophize. Don’t you realize you’re supposed to stand quietly in a corner, positively dumb with gratitude? Now you’re even ramming your puns down my throat. Never mind, tell me again how it happened.’
‘Once a pun a time—’ Mangon ducked the magazine Merrill flung at him, let out a loud ‘Ole!’
For the last two weeks he had been en fte.
Every day he and Madame Gioconda followed the same routine; after breakfast at the studio they drove out to the stockade, spent two or three hours compiling their confidential file on LeGrande, lunched at the cabin and then drove back to the city, Mangon going off on his rounds while Madame Gioconda slept until he returned shortly before midnight. For Mangon their existence was idyllic; not only was he rediscovering himself in terms of the complex spectra and patterns of speech – a completely new category of existence – but at the same time his relationship with Madame Gioconda revealed areas of sympathy, affection and understanding that he had never previously seen. If he sometimes felt that he was too preoccupied with his side of their relationship and the extraordinary benefits it had brought him, at least Madame Gioconda had been equally well served. Her headaches and mysterious phantoms had gone, she had cleaned up the studio and begun to salvage a little dignity and selfconfidence, which made her single-minded sense of ambition seem less obsessive. Psychologically, she needed Mangon less now than he needed her, and he was sensible to restrain his high spirits and give her plenty of attention. During the first week Mangon’s incessant chatter had been rather wearing, and once, on their way to the stockade, she had switched on the sonovac in the driving-cab and left Mangon mouthing silently at the air like a stranded fish. He had taken the hint.
‘What about the sound-sweeping?’ Merrill asked. ‘Will you give it up?’
Mangon shrugged. ‘It’s my talent, but living at the stockade, let in at back doors, cleaning up the verbal garbage it’s a degraded job. I want to help Madame Gioconda. She will need a secretary when she starts to go on tour.’
Merrill shook his head warily. ‘You’re awfully sure there’s going to be a sonic revival, Mangon. Every sign is against it.’
‘They have not heard Madame Gioconda sing. Believe me, I know the power and wonder of the human voice. Ultrasonic music is great for atmosphere, but it has no content. It can’t express ideas, only emotions.’
‘What happened to that closed circuit programme you and Ray were going to put on for her?’
‘It – fell through,’ Mangon lied. The circuits Madame Gioconda would perform on would be open to the world. He had told them nothing of the visits to the stockade, of his power to read the baffles, of the accumulating file on LeGrande. Soon Madame Gioconda would strike.
Above them in the hallway a door slammed, someone stormed through into the apartment in a tempest, kicking a chair against a wall. It was Alto. He raced down the staircase into the lounge, jaw tense, fingers flexing angrily.
‘Paul, don’t interrupt me until I’ve finished,’ he snapped, racing past without looking at them. ‘You’ll be out of a job but I warn you, if you don’t back me up one hundred per cent I’ll shoot you. That goes for you too, Mangon, I need you in on this.’ He whirled over to the window, bolted out the traffic noises below, then swung back and watched them steadily, feet planted firmly in the carpet. For the first time in the three years Mangon had known him he looked aggressive and confident.
‘Headline,’ he announced. ‘The Gioconda is to sing again! Incredible and terrifying though the prospect may seem, exactly two weeks from now the live, uncensored voice of the Gioconda will go out coast to coast on all three V. C. radio channels. Surprised, Mangon? It’s no secret, they’re printing the bills right now. Eight-thirty to nine-thirty, right up on the peak, even if they have to give the time away.’
Merrill sat forward. ‘Bully for her. If LeGrande wants to drive the whole ship into the ground, why worry?’
Alto punched the sofa viciously. ‘Because you and I are going to be on board! Didn’t you hear me? Eight-thirty, a fortnight today! We have a programme on then. Well, guess who our guest star is?’
Merrill struggled to make sense of this. ‘Wait a minute, Ray. You mean she’s actually going to appear – she’s going to sing– in the middle of Opus Zero?’ Alto nodded grimly. Merrill threw up his hands and slumped back. ‘It’s crazy, she can’t. Who says she will?’
‘Who do you think? The great LeGrande.’ Alto turned to Mangon. ‘She must have raked up some real dirt to frighten him into this. I can hardly believe it.’
‘But why on Opus 4ero?’ Merrill pressed. ‘Let’s switch the premiere to the week after.’
‘Paul, you’re missing the point. Let me fill you in. Sometime yesterday Madame Gioconda paid a private call on LeGrande. Something she told him persuaded him that it would be absolutely wonderful for her to have a whole hour to herself on one of the feature music programmes, singing a few old-fashioned songs from the old-fashioned shows, with a full-scale ultrasonic backing. Eager to give her a completely free hand he even asked her which of the regular programmes she’d like. Well, as the last show she appeared on ten years ago was cancelled to make way for Ray Alto’s Total Symphony you can guess which one she picked.’
Merrill nodded. ‘It all fits together. We’re broadcasting from the concert studio. A single ultrasonic symphony, no station breaks, not even a commentary. Your first world premiere in three years. There’ll be a big invited audience. White tie, something like the old days. Revenge is sweet.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Hell, all that work.’
Alto snapped: ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be wasted. Why should we pay the bill for LeGrande? This symphony is the one piece of serious music I’ve written since I joined V. C. and it isn’t going to be ruined.’ He went over to Mangon, sat down next to him. ‘This afternoon I went down to the rehearsal studios. They’d found an ancient sonic grand somewhere and one of the old-timers was accompanying her. Mangon, it’s ten years since she sang last. If she’d practised for two or three hours a day she might have preserved her voice, but you sweep her radio station, you know she hasn’t sung a note. She’s an old woman now. What time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.’ He paused, watching Mangon searchingly. ‘I hate to say it, Mangon, but it sounded like a cat being strangled.’
You lie, Mangon thought icily. You are simply so ignorant, your taste in music is so debased, that you are unable to recognize real genius when you see it. He looked at Alto with contempt, sorry for the man, with his absurd silent symphonies. He felt like shouting: I know what silence is! The voice of the Gioconda is a stream of gold, molten and pure, she will find it again as I found mine. However, something about Alto’s manner warned him to wait.
He said: ‘I understand.’ Then: ‘What do you want me to do?’
Alto patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good boy. Believe me, you’ll be helping her in the long run. What I propose will save all of us from looking foolish. We’ve got to stand up to LeGrande, even if it means a one-way ticket out of V. C. Okay, Paul?’ Merrill nodded firmly and he went on: ‘Orchestra will continue as scheduled. According to the programme Madame Gioconda will be singing to an accompaniment by Opus Zero, but that means nothing and there’ll be no connection at any point. In fact she won’t turn up until the night itself. She’ll stand well down-stage on a special platform, and the only microphone will be an aerial about twenty feet diagonally above her. It will be live – but her voice will never reach it. Because you, Mangon, will be in the cue-box directly in front of her, with the most powerful sonovac we can lay our hands on. As soon as she opens her mouth you’ll let her have it. She’ll be at least ten feet away from you so she’ll hear herself and won’t suspect what is happening.’
‘What about the audience?’ Merrill asked.
‘They’ll be listening to my symphony, enjoying a neurophonic experience of sufficient beauty and power, I hope, to distract them from the sight of a blowzy prima donna gesturing to herself in a cocaine fog. They’ll probably think she’s conducting. Remember, they may be expecting her to sing but how many people still know what the word really means? Most of them will assume it’s ultrasonic.’
‘And LeGrande?’
‘He’ll be in Bermuda. Business conference.’
Five
Madame Gioconda was sitting before her dressing-table mirror, painting on a face like a Hallowe’en mask. Beside her the gramophone played scratchy sonic selections from Traviata. The stage was still a disorganized jumble, but there was now an air of purpose about it.
Making his way through the flats, Mangon walked up to her quietly and kissed her bare shoulder. She stood up with a flourish, an enormous monument of a woman in a magnificent black silk dress sparkling with thousands of sequins.
‘Thank you, Mangon,’ she sang out when he complimented her. She swirled off to a hat-box on the bed, pulled out a huge peacock feather and stabbed it into her hair.
Mangon had come round at six, several hours before usual; over the past two days he had felt increasingly uneasy. He was convinced that Alto was in error, and yet logic was firmly on his side. Could Madame Gioconda’s voice have preserved itself? Her spoken voice, unless she was being particularly sweet, was harsh and uneven, recently even more so. He assumed that with only a week to her performance nervousness was making her irritable.
Again she was going out, as she had done almost every night. With whom, she never explained; probably to the theatre restaurants, to renew contacts with agents and managers. He would have liked to go with her, but he felt out of place on this plane of Madame Gioconda’s existence.
‘Mangon, I won’t be back until very late,’ she warned him. ‘You look rather tired and pasty. You’d better go home and get some sleep.’
Mangon noticed he was still wearing his yellow peaked cap. Unconsciously he must already have known he would not be spending the night there.
‘Do you want to go to the stockade tomorrow?’ he asked.
‘Hmmmh… I don’t think so. It gives me rather a headache. Let’s leave it for a day or two.’
She turned on him with a tremendous smile, her eyes glittering with sudden affection.
‘Goodbye, Mangon, it’s been wonderful to see you.’ She bent down and pressed her cheek maternally to his, engulfing him in a heady wave of powder and perfume. In an instant all his doubts and worries evaporated, he looked forward to seeing her the next day, certain that they would spend the future together.
For half an hour after she had gone he wandered around the deserted sound stage, going through his memories. Then he made his way out to the alley and drove back to the stockade.
As the day of Madame Gioconda’s performance drew closer Mangon’s anxieties mounted. Twice he had been down to the concert studio at Video City, had rehearsed with Alto his entry beneath the stage to the cue-box, a small compartment off the corridor used by the electronics engineers. They had checked the power points, borrowed a sonovac from the services section – a heavy duty model used for shielding VIPs and commentators at airports – and mounted its nozzle in the cue-hood.
Alto stood on the platform erected for Madame Gioconda, shouted at the top of his voice at Merrill sitting in the third row of the stalls.
‘Hear anything?’ he called afterwards.
Merrill shook his head. ‘Nothing, no vibration at all.’
Down below Mangon flicked the release toggle, vented a longdrawn-out ‘Fiivvveeee!… Foouuurrr!… Thrreeeee!… Twooooo!
Onnneeee…
‘Good enough,’ Alto decided. Chicago-style, they hid the sonovac in a triple-bass case, stored it in Alto’s office.
‘Do you want to hear her sing, Mangon?’ Alto asked. ‘She should be rehearsing now.’
Mangon hesitated, then declined.
‘It’s tragic that she’s unable to realize the truth herself,’ Alto commented. ‘Her mind must be fixed fifteen or twenty years in the past, when she sang her greatest roles at La Scala. That’s the voice she hears, the voice she’ll probably always hear.’
Mangon pondered this. Once he tried to ask Madame Gioconda how her practice sessions were going, but she was moving into a different zone and answered with some grandiose remark. He was seeing less and less of her, whenever he visited the station she was either about to go out or else tired and eager to be rid of him. Their trips to the stockade had ceased. All this he accepted as inevitable; after the performance, he assured himself, after her triumph, she would come back to him.
He noticed, however, that he was beginning to stutter.
On the final afternoon, a few hours before the performance that evening, Mangon drove down to F Street for what was to be the last time. He had not seen Madame Gioconda the previous day and he wanted to be with her and give her any encouragement she needed.
As he turned into the alley he was surprised to see two large removal vans parked outside the station entrance. Four or five men were carrying out pieces of furniture and the great scenic fiats from the sound stage.
Mangon ran over to them. One of the vans was full; he recognized all Madame Gioconda’s possessions – the rococo wardrobe and dressing table, the couch, the huge Desdemona bed, up-ended and wrapped in corrugated paper – as he looked at it he felt that a section of himself had been torn from him and rammed away callously. In the bright daylight the peeling threadbare flats had lost all illusion of reality; with them Mangon’s whole relationship with Madame Gioconda seemed to have been dismantled.
The last of the workmen came out with a gold cushion under his arm, tossed it into the second van. The foreman sealed the doors and waved on the driver. wh… where are you going?’ Mangon asked him urgently.
The foreman looked him up and down. ‘You’re the sweeper, are you?’ He jerked a thumb towards the station. ‘The old girl said there was a message for you in there. Couldn’t see one myself.’
Mangon left him and ran into the foyer and up the stairway towards Studio 2. The removers had torn down the blinds and a grey light was flooding into the dusty auditorium. Without the flats the stage looked exposed and derelict.
He raced down the aisle, wondering why Madame Gioconda had decided to leave without telling him.
The stage had been stripped. The music stands had been kicked over, the stove lay on its side with two or three old pans around it, underfoot there was a miscellaneous litter of paper, ash and empty vials.
Mangon searched around for the message, probably pinned to one of the partitions.
Then he heard it screaming at him from the walls, violent and concise.
‘GO AWAY YOU UGLY CHILD! NEVER TRY TO SEE ME AGAIN!’
He shrank back, involuntarily tried to shout as the walls seemed to fall in on him, but his throat had frozen.
As he entered the corridor below the stage shortly before eight-twenty, Mangon could hear the sounds of the audience arriving and making their way to their seats. The studio was almost full, a hubbub of well-heeled chatter. Lights flashed on and off in the corridor, and oblique atmospheric shifts cut through the air as the players on the stage tuned their instruments.
Mangon slid past the technicians manning the neurophonic rigs which supplied the orchestra, trying to make the enormous triple-bass case as inconspicuous as possible. They were all busy checking the relays and circuits, and he reached the cue-box and slipped through the door unnoticed.
The box was almost in darkness, a few rays of coloured light filtering through the pink and white petals of the chrysanthemums stacked over the hood. He bolted the door, then opened the case, lifted out the sonovac and clipped the snout into the canister. Leaning forward, with his hands he pushed a small aperture among the flowers.
Directly in front of him he could see a velvet-lined platform, equipped with a white metal rail to the centre of which a large floral ribbon had been tied. Beyond was the orchestra, disposed in a semicircle, each of the twenty members sitting at a small box-like desk on which rested his instrument, tone generator and cathode tube. They were all present, and the light reflected from the ray screens threw a vivid phosphorescent glow on to the silver wall behind them.
Mangon propped the nozzle of the sonovac into the aperture, bent down, plugged in the lead and switched on.
Just before eight-twenty-five someone stepped across the platform and paused in front of the cue-hood. Mangon crouched back, watching the patent leather shoes and black trousers move near the nozzle.
‘Mangon!’ he heard Alto snap. He craned forward, saw Alto eyeing him. Mangon waved to him and Alto nodded slowly, at the same time smiling to someone in the audience, then turned on his heel and took his place in the orchestra.
At eight-thirty a sequence of red and green lights signalled the start of the programme. The audience quietened, waiting while an announcer in an off-stage booth introduced the programme.
A compre appeared on stage, standing behind the cue-hood, and addressed the audience. Mangon sat quietly on the small wooden seat fastened to the wall, staring blankly at the canister of the sonovac. There was a round of applause, and a steady green light shone downwards through the flowers. The air in the cue-box began to sweeten, a cool motionless breeze eddied vertically around him as a rhythmic ultrasonic pressure wave pulsed past. It relaxed the confined dimensions of the box, with a strange mesmeric echo that held his attention. Somewhere in his mind he realized that the symphony had started, but he was too distracted to pull himself together and listen to it consciously.
Suddenly, through the gap between the flowers and the sonovac nozzle, he saw a large white mass shifting about on the platform. He slipped off the seat and peered up.
Madame Gioconda had taken her place on the platform. Seen from below she seemed enormous, a towering cataract of glistening white satin that swept down to her feet. Her arms were folded loosely in front of her, fingers flashing with blue and white stones. He could only just glimpse her face, the terrifying witch-like mask turned in profile as she waited for some off-stage signal.
Mangon mobilized himself, slid his hand down to the trigger of the sonovac. He waited, feeling the steady subliminal music of Alto’s symphony swell massively within him, its tempo accelerating. Presumably Madame Gioconda’s arranger was waiting for a climax at which to introduce her first aria.
Abruptly Madame Gioconda looked forward at the audience and took a short step to the rail. Her hands parted and opened palms upward, her head moved back, her bare shoulders swelled.
The wave front pulsing through the cue-box stopped, then soared off in a continuous unbroken crescendo. At the same time Madame Gioconda thrust her head out, her throat muscles contracted powerfully.
As the sound burst from her throat Mangon’s finger locked rigidly against the trigger guard. An instant later, before he could think, a shattering blast of sound ripped through his ears, followed by a slightly higher note that appeared to strike a hidden ridge half-way along its path, wavered slightly, then recovered and sped on, like an express train crossing lines.
