Uranians, page 18
Arrigo had a whole speech prepared for Elkeid, the moral being that the ship will support such extremes that whatever wild new thing he is, he will be embraced and cared for. In the shadow of Leo’s pillar, though, in the hot, starchy grass, they sat and didn’t speak at all. They plucked and wound dry blades around their fingers and absorbed the silence Leo had worked so hard to nourish. Within that silence, Arrigo sensed the presence of another lesson in the grass with them, one he wasn’t yet equipped to understand.
He’d looked up at the pillar-hermit. Maybe this stylus was Leo’s penance, to model the lost ship’s peculiar, public solitude. The height was seclusion, but also notoriety. Years later, Leo must have decided his penance was miscarrying—when they started calling him Saint Leo—and he fled into the desert.
The Ekphrasis still sends signals down the Vine, never answered. Calling, singing into the dark.
La Traviata in Space
So, what about large-scale structure? Violetta and Alfredo fall in love, they break up, they reconcile, she dies—why does that feel like an opera instead of warmed-over gossip? I want to tease out one aspect of that story-shape, which is important to La Traviata in the Amazon and Melsinger’s rewrite, and it has to do with the harmonics of Violetta’s death.
That finale is in D-flat major, a key Verdi uses in only a few other, significant places: it’s the key in which Germont, the voice of social convention, sings his stodgy, come-home-son aria, “Di Provenza il mar,” and tells Violetta, Give up this seductive dream. Meanwhile, a lot of the opera’s most enchanting music—including Violetta’s “Sempre libera”—is in A-flat major. Now, D-flat and A-flat are a perfect fifth apart, an interval so fundamental to Western music, I can’t even begin to capture how rich this connection is. But if you’ve heard any classical music, you’ve heard that thing at the end of a piece, where the music flies up into a sort of suspension (bum!), then falls back down with a satisfying crash (bwaaah!!), and then everyone knows the symphony is over. That’s a closed cadence, a musical punctuation mark. The final chord (the bwaaah!!) is the “tonic” chord, built on the tonic, or first pitch, of the key. The chord before it, the one that sounds like someone tossed a ball in the air, is the “dominant” chord, built on the dominant pitch of that key. What’s the dominant pitch? Well, it’s the pitch a perfect fifth above the tonic. So, say you’re Beethoven, finishing a movement in D-flat major, your final progression will be an A-flat chord, creating a sense of suspension, expectation, dissonance, that resolves in a D-flat chord, with its corresponding sense of release and completion.
That’s what Verdi does in the finale of La Traviata. The doctor, the maid, Alfredo, and an apologetic Germont are gathered around Violetta’s couch as she swoons through her last breaths; the ensemble’s music is in D-flat, the “Di Provenza” key. Suddenly, Violetta revives—she’s full of life again!—the strings rise chromatically, and the orchestra churns out A-flat chords like crazy (remember, the “Sempre libera” key), and Violetta holds a high A-flat . . . ! Then it all comes crashing down: Violetta dies, and the dominant A-flat chord resolves into D-flat chords—they’re D-flat minor, though, a tragic modulation of the tonic—which the orchestra smashes into our ears as the curtain falls. The end: Violetta’s wayward life is a fleeting, unstable dissonance that can only collapse into the tragic force of conformity.
For the original La Traviata in the Amazon, Melsinger plays off this ending while offering a different thesis. The final scene is the Italian troupe’s soprano performing “Sempre libera” for the Manaus élite in the Teatro Amazonas, surrounded by a chorus of the dead: her fellow singers, her lover Maria, the rubber tappers. The chorus of shades sings nonsense words, incoherence, the language of the dead, in pitches that add up to musical chaos—there’s no key, no tonal center—while her voice hurtles over them, the artist struggling against the universe’s entropy to carve out some moment of beauty. We all liked it. It felt like a solid, queer response to Verdi’s bleak closed cadence. The music never resolves into Germont’s key, but stays centered, if anywhere, in Violetta’s A-flat major. Violetta, or at least the artist inhabiting her, is not required to die; she persists in the face of a death-driven universe.
For the revised La Traviata in the Amazon, though, I feel like I’m missing something. There is still the same scenario, Violetta and “Sempre libera” and the chorus of shades, but it sounds different, as if the soprano’s key modulates out of A-flat, although her melody line looks the same as before. Melsinger is no help, the smug old coot, watching me strain to hear it with a merry glint in his eyes and a smile forming in his loose, cloudy beard.
• • •
ARRIGO WALKS BY himself through the thoroughly greened halls of homedeck. Whole corridors have become dirt paths under hanging arbors and vines; rain spills in, blown by steady winds. In the night hours, it smells like jasmine. A chalky aroma of dirt kicked up under his shoes, dew on fat mushrooms blistering out of decayed hotel furniture. Arrigo sees blooms he’s sure he’s never known on Earth. Strong-smelling lilacs as big as beehives and giant peonies like yolks of color. Spectacles of vitality, a gaudy thriving signaling to others the stores of life in their folds.
In one of homedeck’s corridors (he doesn’t know which), people have seen a giant lady in a black mantle kneeling around a spilling basket of flowers. Arrigo doesn’t see her tonight, but there is someone at his door, waiting.
An old man, stout but well-postured, in a short-sleeve linen button-down. His potbelly strains at the placket and his arms, thin and brown, are scrawled in the weathered green-black of old tattoos. His hair is a bright silver, but his lashes are as long and dark as a girl’s.
“Mike?”
Mike holds Arrigo’s gaze, defensive. He is ready to bolt if Arrigo looks away, which is all Arrigo wants to do.
It’s been forty-two years since he and Mike split; thirty-five years since the last word they spoke, something like “Excuse me” when they bumped into each other in the kitchens. It’s hard avoiding someone on a ship of only twenty-four hundred people. But they’ve done it. Mike’s made a social burrow out of his fellow engineers, a rowdy, sharp crowd. Whenever Arrigo’s spotted Mike, at a gallery show or a dance, he turns young and wretched; his self-possession melts, his bones vanish, and he flops into a puddle of need. So, he’s kept his distance. He has no intention of turning back into the person who’d do anything for Mike to forgive him.
“You look good,” Arrigo says, which of course is the worst thing to say. It’s true, Mike looks amazing, considering—but it’s that considering that is so terrible. Mike, in his eighties (?), is “debonair,” “active,” “spry”: words used only to describe people who have lived past their time. Mike endures Arrigo’s admiration. His gaze skips across Arrigo’s ageless body and that old, furious pride roils into his expression. Arrigo unlocks the door and gets Mike inside before he can change his mind.
“You go first,” Mike says. “I move slower these days.”
“Take your time,” Arrigo says, and Mike does, as if the floor will lurch out from under his feet. Which it will, but not for twelve more hours at least.
“I wasn’t waiting for long.” Mike enunciates in a careful, wondering voice, like he can’t believe it himself. “I stopped by, hoping to find you at home. And then, there you were, coming around the corner.”
He raises his voice too loud; he is probably going deaf. And he takes forever to get through a sentence, with a whole facial dance of brow-knitting and blinks. He is himself, but a codger. His personality has taken on a certain stoniness and sunk to the bottom of something.
“Your place is clean,” Mike says, not hiding his surprise.
Arrigo’s apartment is tidy, colorful and enthusiastically decorated, but, he’s proud to show Mike, he hasn’t reverted to the cluttered, manic living space of his twenties. They find one of the smaller star-children in a cupboard and chase him out. Star-children born these later years are always in strange places—in hatches, up trees, under your bed.
He makes tea from a jar of dried nettle. “I’m really trying to get into tea,” Arrigo says.
Mike says something, but too quietly. He clears his throat, winces, tries again.
“Lana told me why, told me about . . .” His words fail.
Arrigo’s stomach drops. This is it: they are doing this. What should have happened decades ago, it’s happening now. Arrigo isn’t prepared, he is holding a pink ceramic tea-mug like an asshole. Mike scowls, indicating himself up and down: “Why you wanted the Vine intact. I was unfair to you.”
Arrigo sets the mug down and straightens. “When did she tell you?”
Mike grimaces. “About six years ago. Look—it didn’t exactly make me eager to see you, right? Knowing you were so horrified by me aging naturally, you’d blow up our relationship and turn in our friends to stop it. Didn’t exactly inspire me the way she expected it to.”
“Oh, Mike,” Arrigo says, embracing him, pressing his face in the crook of Mike’s neck. “Leo was more your friend,” he says. “I mean, I respect him, but I don’t believe in God—you know—”
“Obviously. Can we sit down?”
Arrigo retrieves an extra cushion from off his bed.
“You were still wrong to do what you did,” Mike calls from the living room. “I’m not going to apologize for being mad at you. What, you think I didn’t notice the vitacene dosing was off? I knew before I met you. I mean, why do you think I was in sick bay that day? Remy and I have been working on this for ages.” Arrigo reenters with the cushion, trembling. Mike is testing his wrist, working the joint back and forth. “You couldn’t just talk to me and respect my ability to deal with my own vitacene-rejecting body. No, you had to go off and do some grand operatic tragic-romance bullshit, it’s exactly the sort of false consciousness we wanted to quarantine on Earth.” Mike lifts, slides the cushion on to the chair, and sits again, blinking. “What, am I talking too much?”
Arrigo sits next to Mike and holds both his hands. “I’m sorry. It’s—I’m so happy to see you again. I don’t care how mad you are, that’s fine, I’m just glad you’re talking to me.”
His face, the face Arrigo knows with his eyes closed, is crumpled with wrinkles and sags in unkind places. He has deep grooves and planes under his eyes, as if a kid with a pocketknife had carved him out of wood—as if time, which has so finely worked on the rest of them, used Mike as its practice scrap.
“I was brutal to you,” he says. “I should—look, I’m sorry about it.”
“Water under the bridge.”
“It’s not,” Mike says, “but you can say it is, for now. It felt like the time to take care of unfinished business.” His gaze drifts sidelong. “Before the Big Dip, I mean. Don’t you think?”
He says this as if he’s making rounds, as if some next piece of business is waiting for him. Arrigo says, “You’re not going, are you?”
It’s not like Arrigo’s been holding out four decades for him. Pining, madame-butterflying, rehearsing their fourteen-minute reconciliation duet: no. He’s had boyfriends and crushes, the usual. But the lack of resolution between him and Mike has always disappointed him, the preposterous holes they’d left in each other’s stories.
Mike asks, “How long do you want me to stay?”
The worry darts shyly from Mike’s eyes. His vulnerability shocks Arrigo. What it must cost him. Arrigo doesn’t know how to answer. Or, rather, he knows how to reassure Mike, how to please him or say what he thinks will please him. He pictures what it would be to kiss his old unhusband now, or to get down on the floor and suck at his gnarled cock, or to fuck, gently and carefully, to lay pillows under tricky joints. He figures any desire or kindness he withholds from Mike’s elderly body will be a curse he lays on his own old age. And to be honest, he’s not uncurious. But he’s also not ready to do any of that, and he’s not being asked to, either. Mike is asking him about time.
“Longer,” Arrigo says, and his throat tightens. Tears pearl under his eyes.
• • •
MIKE ENDS UP staying the night. By the time their conversation flags, he’s so tired, Arrigo insists he sleep in the bed, while Arrigo takes the couch. They talk about Qaf, of course. Despite the inhibited dosing, Mike’s vitacene worked a little. Remy estimates that Mike is in his early seventies physiologically, so there’s some chance he could live to see planetfall. Arrigo talks about real sunlight on their faces and the smell of ocean fog, and Mike reminds him the sun will be dimmer, and there’s no guarantee the air will be breathable.
But you’ll see it with us, Arrigo asks him, in masks or suits or whatever, and yes—Mike hesitates, but Arrigo’s smile draws the word from him, yes—if everything works out, Mike’ll be down there with the rest of them.
Bedding down alone, curled over old couch cushions, Arrigo lets the dismay and grief he’s been holding back pour out. It’s not all for Mike. The mortal condition wallops Arrigo like some terrible surprise each time. Arrigo stayed with M.E. through the very end of their cancer, and now he’s seeing Melsinger down the same difficult path. At the time, he’d thought M.E., as a philosopher, would be prepared to meet death with a rational system, but no, the pain and ugliness of the body giving out unraveled them. Please, they begged, their chewed nails digging into his wrist, eyes popping, red and baby-blue. Please, I don’t want to, I’m so afraid. Now, to see Mike wearing his own mortality so nakedly—Donne was mistaken: death is awfully proud. Arrigo cries silently, careful not to be heard. Why does every opera end with a heap of bodies on the stage? Well, not really. There are the comic operas. But mortality haunts the form. Maybe, rather, it acts as a counterweight, balancing the music’s explosive life against death’s gravity. Or maybe that same gravity, death’s sureness and solidity, gives the music its grandeur and purpose, serves as a rigid structure for us to ornament. Death structures our life and beauty dresses it.
I am undonne, he thinks, drifting into unconsciousness.
As for Mike, the smell of Arrigo’s sleep on the sheets instantly relaxes him, and he drops into a dreamless space.
• • •
HERE IS WHAT Mike’s been up to in the last forty-odd years: he worked on the ship, mostly. He kept to himself and aged. Even after the Vine investigation cleared him, he was notorious, so he tended to rebuff shows of sympathy or sexual interest as lurid. He brought food for Leo on his pillar, but Leo didn’t talk to him. He went to prayer meetings with other priestless Catholics and listened to the other Filipinos describe Holy Week processions in Manila and Naga. In Bicol, they told him, where his grandmother lived, there is a holy effigy of Christ-in-death that heals the sick. A childless woman of great piety raised it from a shapeless piece of wood, like a son, and by a miracle, it grew into Christ’s form taken down from the Cross and it even walked the region for a time, but now is too old. He made friends with Carolyn Red Deer, over beers and a shared distaste for the Lana-and-Arrigo show. It was Carolyn who got him working on the long-range spectroscopes and the Hoopoe probe, a Vine transponder refitted as a space probe they could send ahead to Qaf. He drew a comic book called Nighttown about an oppressed underclass living on the outside of a Dyson sphere. He learned Tagalog after all, and for real, and even Bikol too. He exercised. He stayed limber. He was in the room with Carolyn when their world began to fall apart, one final time.
In the morning, Mike is seated opposite the couch when Arrigo stirs. “I need to tell you something about Qaf,” Mike says, quickly and smoothly, like he’s practiced.
Arrigo turns and looks for the hologram floating in the middle of his table.
It is unrecognizable, red and yellow and gray like a bruise.
• • •
CAROLYN RED DEER races bad news up the ship, finding her friends and exes before the rumors hit them unprepared. It’s one reading, she tells Lana. It’s an outlier. The model assigns greater weight to the most recent telemetry, so the Hall Q simulation is getting ahead of itself. Carolyn makes encouraging faces like she’s trying them in a mirror. Her jet-black brows nearly fly away, she arches them so high. The chances of Qaf actually being like what the last spectroscopic reading shows, while producing every previous reading in error—she can’t even begin to calculate it. It’s low, astronomically low.
So, what does the last spectroscopic reading show, Carolyn? “Methane and carbon dioxide atmosphere. Sulfuric acid clouds. Massive, relentless volcanic activity. Surface temperatures over 400 centigrade. We can’t see how it could support water, much less complex life. It’s angry.”
Lana shuts off her hearing aids and closes her eyes. Silence rings and whines.
“You said it’s an outlier,” Lana says, as she switches her aids on again. “What are the chances of the planet being like what we thought it was, and producing this reading in error?”
Carolyn slumps. “Astronomically low.”
Alone, hurrying, Lana considers her next steps. Most of what she’d do in this situation is already underway. They’ve been anticipating a MSME around the transition to deceleration; the food stores are full, oxygen levels slightly high, pods assigned, and crew are already gathering on greendeck. But there’s more to do. She needs to do more. Losing Qaf—it’s worse than losing Earth. The thought worms into her inner body, leaving an airy borehole in its wake, a tunnel of faintness and cold needling through her. The miracle of Qaf’s alien life spun from original forms—a pile of volcanic ash. A raging hellscape.
(Earth is not necessarily lost, by the way—but Lana treats Earth as lost to her, whatever its true situation. This is the only sane meaning of distance.)
Lana stoops and catches her breath against an old wardrobe overgrown in clematis. I can bear it, she tells the wardrobe. She smacks it with the heel of her palm. The rotten structure rattles, then groans with a human voice.
