This is the nineteenth installment* of an exploration of some
of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator apologizes for an almost-quarrel, spends an evening on
the town, and gets a sudden insight into the nature of the Lakeland Republic’s
achievement from a seemingly unlikely source...
*(The actual nineteenth; the last one was misnumbered.)
***********
I felt a little worse for wear the next morning, but not too
bad, and so when the alarm on the wind-up clock next to the bed went off at
eight-thirty I mumbled something unprintable and got up. It was Sunday, of
course, and I planned to go to the Atheist Assembly again, so I got to work
making myself presentable. My electric razor did its usual halfhearted job on
my stubble, and I shook my head and wondered what men used in the Lakeland
Republic to keep their chins smooth when they didn’t let the barber take care
of it. Probably some antique technology that works better than ours, I thought
sourly.
To say I was in a rotten mood was a bit of an
understatement, but it was my own doing. I’d decided on the cab ride back from
the Harbor Club that I needed to call Melanie Berger sometime the next day and
apologize. That’s not something I enjoy at all, and I also knew perfectly well
that it might be wasted effort, but there it was. Partly, the professional in
me wasn’t willing to lose a useful contact in the Lakeland government just
because the two of us had both been too tired to be tactful; partly I felt embarrassed that I’d handled the whole thing
so clumsily, and partly there was the chemistry I’d sensed between the two of
us. There may have been more than that, too, but that was enough.
So I’d decided to call her early in the afternoon, after I
got back from Assembly and had lunch. I was brooding over that while I shaved
and showered and got dressed, and I was still brooding over it at nine-fifteen
as I got my tie settled. Just then the phone rang, and wouldn’t you know it, it
was none other than Melanie Berger.
“Peter? I hope I’m not calling too early.”
“Not a bit,” I said. “I was just getting ready to go to
Assembly. What’s up?”
She paused for a moment, in exactly the way I would have,
and said, “I wanted to apologize for the way things went Friday night.”
“I was going to call you later today and say the same
thing,” I told her. A moment of silence
passed, and then we both started talking at the same time; we both stopped, and
then she laughed, and so did I.
“Okay,” I said, still laughing. “I’ll gladly accept your
apology if you’ll accept mine. Deal?”
“Deal,” said Melanie. “The thing is, I’d like to make it up
to you. Are you free this evening?”
“Sure.” That sounded promising. “What do you have in mind?”
“You mentioned that you’d wanted to see the Toledo Opera
production of Parsifal. Jaya and Ramaraj Patel have season tickets, and
I heard from them last night—they both came down with the same flu you got, and
they’re not going anywhere tonight—so I thought I’d find out if I could
interest you in a night at the opera.”
“I’d be delighted,” I said, “on one condition.”
“Oh?”
“That you let me take you out to dinner first.”
“You’re on,” she said. We got the details sorted out and
said goodbye, and I got out of the room and down to the street just in time to
catch the streetcar to the Capitol Atheist Assembly.
The meeting was pleasant but not particularly memorable,
though Sam Capoferro was up to his usual standard on the piano, playing Handel
and Bach with understated elegance, and everyone I met greeted me as though I
was already an old friend. The reading was a rousing bit of Bertrand Russell,
and the talk was about telling the difference between reason and the habits of
thought that people confuse with reason, which was edgier than anything I’d
heard in the Philadelphia Assembly for a good long time. Afterwards we sat
around in the social hall over coffee and cookies, and talked.
The tensions between Texas and the Confederacy got a good
share of the talk, and I listened closely when Senator Chenkin sketched out the
situation to a couple of friends who hadn’t been following it closely. “Both
countries would go broke without the income from their petroleum industries,”
she said, “and they’ve both had production declines for the last half dozen
years, so neither side is in any position to back down. This could get really
bad.”
“How bad?” one of her friends asked her. She didn’t answer,
just shook her head, but I could see the answer in her eyes, and it wasn’t
anything I wanted to think about.
So I filed that away and caught the streetcar back to the
hotel not long thereafter. Once I was there I talked to the concierge about
what you wear to an opera in the Lakeland Republic—I’d wondered whether they’d
gone back to opera capes and top hats, and was relieved to find out that
ordinary evening wear would do—and then went out to see if the barber I’d
visited my first day in Toledo had Sunday hours. Fortunately he did, and he was
just finishing up a shave and trim on another customer when I got there. When
it was my turn, he greeted me effusively and said, “You got a special evening
planned, I bet,” and laughed when I asked him how he’d guessed. “Of course you
do. Any guy comes in here midway through
a weekend day for a shave and trim, dollars’ll get you doughnuts that’s what’s
on the schedule. Don’t you worry, I’ll get your face smoother than a baby’s
butt.”
He did, too. I left there looking ready for an evening out.
A pleasant lunch in the hotel café, a talk with the concierge about
restaurants, and a couple of leisurely hours reading the Sunday paper and
getting caught up on the news: that filled the rest of the time before I caught
a cab over to Melanie Berger’s, picked her up, and headed for a top-end
restaurant not quite two blocks from the Toledo opera house.
We had a great time. The food was really good and the wine
was better, and both of us had the common sense to keep the conversation well
away from progress or anything related to it. Of course we talked about
politics—get two people who work in any line of business together, even for a
social evening, and they’re going to talk shop—but that wasn’t the only subject
of conversation by a long shot. One of the others was the performance we were
about to take in. The Toledo Opera had a homegrown bass, a young guy named
Michael Bickerstaff, who would be singing the part of Gurnemanz. He’d done a stellar job the year before in
his first major role as Sarastro in The Magic Flute, but of course
Wagner’s much harder on singers than Mozart ever dreamed of being.
“They say he’s really good,” Melanie said. “Good enough that
a couple of European opera companies are interested in him, and some people
here are talking about what kind of a Wotan he’d make.”
That impressed me. “Are they planning on doing the Ring
cycle here?”
“Jaya tells me there’s been some tentative discussions with
the Minneapolis Opera about a joint production,” she said. “They’ve got some
really solid singers—tonight’s Kundry is one of theirs.”
Dinner wound down pleasantly, and in due time we headed for
the opera house. Like most of Toledo, it
was new construction but old-fashioned design, with a spacious lobby and
comfortable seats. Ours were about halfway toward the left wall on the first
balcony. We got settled, and of course then had to stand up a couple of times
while latecomers made their apologies and edged past to their own seats. Our
conversation wound up, the lights went down, the conductor got up on his podium
and the first bars of the Prelude sounded in the dim light.
When the curtains slid open, I admit I braced myself. In
Wagner’s operas, there’s really only room for one monumental ego, and it’s his,
but you get directors who don’t get that and try to make a production original
by pulling some visual stunt or other. I’ve seen Wagnerian operas where all the
singers were in Old West outfits, or superhero costumes, or bulbous yellow
things that made them look like a flock of rubber duckies—I never did find out
what those were supposed to be about. Apparently the Toledo Opera had managed
to escape that bad habit. The set was abstract to the point of starkness, with
fabric veils and shafts of light providing most of the decor; you could tell
the designer had taken a close and thoughtful look at Bayreuth productions from
the middle of the last century. The costumes looked more or less the way you’d
expect a bunch of Grail Knights to look, which was a pleasant surprise.
Then Gurnemanz got up from under the abstract tree where
he’d supposedly been sleeping, and broke into his first lines—He, ho, Waldhüter
ihr!—and I knew right away that we were in for a treat.
Most of the singers were, in the strict sense of the word,
second-rate: one notch below first-rate, which is still good enough to
enjoy. The soprano who sang Kundry,
Maria Vargas Ruz, was better than that; she didn’t have the absolute purity of
tone you need for the most demanding soprano roles, but the role she was
singing actually goes better with a little roughness in the voice.
Then there was Michael Bickerstaff. He wasn’t just
first-rate, he was world-class, a big barrel-chested young man with one of the
best bass voices I’d heard in years. The role of Gurnemanz, the old Grail
Knight, is the backbone of Parsifal; a good Gurnemanz can make a
mediocre production enjoyable, while an unimpressive one drags like a lead
weight on a performance that might otherwise be worth hearing. Bickerstaff was
stunningly good; he more or less picked up the show and carried it on his
shoulders, and I enjoyed the result tremendously.
The first act flowed past, and the second; Parsifal
vanquished the self-castrated sorcerer Klingsor and recovered the Holy Spear;
the third act got well under way, and Parsifal, Gurnemanz, and Kundry were on
stage, surrounded by a tolerably good suggestion of a field of flowers. The
passage that’s called der Karfreitagszauber, the Good Friday
Enchantment, started up, Bickerstaff sang Du siehst, das ist nicht so—
“You see it is not so”—and that’s when it hit me.
You know how sometimes you can brood over some problem for
hours and get nowhere with it, and then when you go do something else for a
while and you’re not thinking about it at all, the answer basically downloads
itself into your brain? That’s what happened. I’d spent most of the day
thinking of just about anything but the paradox Melanie Berger had dropped on
me two nights before, and right then I realized that it wasn’t a paradox at
all. I managed to drag my attention back to the performance before Bickerstaff
was more than a few words further on, and kept the realization I’d just had at
arm’s length for the rest of the evening, but it wasn’t going anywhere and I
knew it.
Here’s what I figured out. As you might expect, it begins
with opera.
These days, nobody listens to twentieth-century opera.
That’s not accidental, either—it’s either painfully derivative or it’s
impossible to sit through. Once I went to see a revival of one of Benjamin
Britten’s pieces, I forget which one, and what I mostly remember was the
audience gamely trying to pretend that they were appreciating something that
was about as enjoyable as listening to a chorus of dental drills. The standard
joke in opera circles these days is that opera companies put on twentieth
century works when they’re tired of the inconvenience of performing in front of
an audience.
One of my Philadelphia friends, who’s a much more serious
opera buff than I’ll ever be, explains it like this. Any art form has a certain
amount of notional space to it, and each work done in that space fills up part
of it. Before you’ve filled up the space, innovation works more often than not,
but after the space is full, innovation just generates noise. That’s why the
history of every art gets sorted out into a period of exploration, when you
succeed by trying new things, and a period of performance, when you succeed by
doing old things very, very well. If you keep on trying to innovate when the
notional space is full, the results are either going to be derivative or
unbearable, and either way they’re not going to be any good, because the good options
have already been taken.
You know that an art is getting close to the edges of its
notional space when innovation involves a lot of risk. Wagner was right up
against the edges of opera’s notional space, which is why his late operas are
so exhilarating—you can watch him tiptoeing right up to the edge of noise and
balancing there—but they don’#8217;t have the easy grace of operas written a couple
of generations before his time. You see the same thing in jazz, starting in the
second half of the twentieth century: people like Thelonious Monk and Dave
Brubeck were self-consciously testing the boundaries, figuring out just how far
they could go without falling over the edge into noise. Another generation or
two, and you get the kind of jazz that nobody bothers to play any more, because
by and large it’s just pretentious doodling.
The thing is, it’s not just true of art. Nobody’s pushing
brand new alphabets any more, because that notional space got filled in a long
time ago. Nobody’s inventing new can openers or bathtubs, and nearly all of
what passes for innovation these days in cars, say, is just gimmickry aimed at
getting the clueless to shell out money. I knew all that, but it never occurred
to me that technological progress followed the same trajectory: it had its period of exploration and then
crossed over into its period of performance, but nobody noticed, and so
everyone just kept on buying into the latest innovations, even though most of
those had fewer benefits and worse downsides than the things they replaced.
I’d missed that completely.
I’d been wandering around the Lakeland Republic, noticing that the way
they did things had better outcomes, lower costs, and fewer downsides than the
way people do things everywhere else, and I still didn’t get it. It was as
though I’d been listening to an opera by Mozart or Verdi and thinking that the
poor people in the audience must be feeling horribly deprived because they
weren’t getting Benjamin Britten. Du siehst, sang Gurnemanz, das ist
nicht so.
Writing it all out like that, it sounds all clear and
straightforward. It wasn’t. There was the first sudden realization while
Bickerstaff was singing, and then other details—many more than I’ve written
out—came dropping into my mind over the next couple of hours. All the while I
was mostly paying attention to other things, such as a really solid performance
of an opera I love, and the attractive woman I was seeing it with, and certain
other things I’ll mention in a moment, and the things I’ve written were
tumbling around in the back of my head. It wasn’t until I was in the cab headed
back to my hotel the next morning that I finally sat back and let the whole
thing come together into a coherent argument. Long before that happened,
though, I’d stumbled straight through the door into a different world.
But again, there was an opera to take in. After the final
minutes of the music, when it always feels to me as though the opera house has
shaken off gravity and gone soaring into the sky; after the applause—we were
all on our feet, and when Michael Bickerstaff bowed I’m surprised the roar
didn’t cause structural damage to the building; after the house lights came up
at last, and people started filing out, Melanie said, “Season tickets get us
into the reception, and there’s someone there I’d like you to meet.”
So we filed out and went down a side corridor; Melanie
showed our passes to an usher out in front of an unmarked double door, and in
we went. The room on the other side was big and airy, with a mural of scenes
from famous operas on one wall, and a bank of tables along the other with
champagne and finger food. It wasn’t too crowded yet, and I gathered that the
person Melanie wanted me to meet hadn’t arrvied, so we got a couple of glasses
and sipped bubbly for a few minutes while more people filed in. Finally, when
the room was getting good and packed, Melanie led me through the crowd.
“Janice,” she said, “this is Peter Carr, from
Philadelphia—one of Ellen Montrose’s people.” With an impish smile: “And a
limited partner of yours. Peter, Janice Mikkelson.”
Mikkelson was maybe sixty, with short straight hair the
color of steel wool and a pantsuit that looked plain at first glance but
probably cost as much as any of the fancy dresses in the room. She gave me an
assessing look as we shook hands, and I said, “To the extent of one share of
Mikkelson LLC.”
She laughed. “Not exactly a vote of confidence, but I’m
pleased to meet you anyway.” I got introduced to her wife Sharon, a gorgeous
Asian woman maybe fifteen years her junior, and we stood chatting for a while
about the performance. Mikkelson turned to me, then, and said, “Any chance you
have time in your schedule to talk? I’m interested in the possibility of doing
business in the Atlantic Republic.”
“I can do that,” I said. “Also, if you don’t mind, I’d be
interested in getting your perspective on things here in Lakeland.” She nodded,
we both checked our notebooks, and scheduled something for Tuesday afternoon.
“Come up to my place,” Mikkelson said. “Some drinks, some conversation, some
business—I think it’ll be productive.”
We chatted a little more, and then moved on in the usual
way. Not much later Melanie and I were on our way down the long ramp to the
lobby and then out to the street, where cabs lined up waiting for easy fares.
We took one to her place, a brick row house a dozen blocks from the Capitol,
and I walked her to her door. I had a pretty good idea by then of how the
evening was going to end, and so it wasn’t any kind of surprise when she gave
me the kind of raised-eyebrow smile that means exactly one thing. I went to pay
the cab fare, came back to her, took her hand and followed her inside.
***********
In other fiction-related news, the anthology of deindustrial-SF stories set in the future outlined in my novel Star’s Reach is finally, after an unconscionable delay, coming together. I’d like to ask everyone who submitted a story to that project to visit the Meriga Project website—I’ve got a new post up and need some data from contributors. Many thanks!