_There is always The Project._ "Why, perhaps."
"We know all the prayers, Old Man."
"Yes, I'm sure you do."
"The Old Man will come with us."
"Eh?" _There is always The Project._ "Come with you?"
"We look for old ones," said the young man. There was a new note in his
voice, and the note was impatience. "We traveled many days, up across
the sun-path. We want you to speak the Abraham-words for marriage. The
Old Ones said we must not mate as the animals do without the words. We
want--"
"Marry, of course," said Brian feebly, rubbing his great, long-fingered
hand across his face so that the words were blurred and dull.
"Naturally. Beget. Replenish the Earth. I'm tired. I don't know any
Abraham-words for marriage. Go on and marry. Try again. Try--"
"But the Old Ones said--"
"Wait!" Brian cried. "Wait! Let me think. Did he--he who told you to
call him Jonas, did he teach you anything about the world as it was in
the old days, before you were born?"
"Before? The Old Man makes fun of us."
"No, no." And since he now had to fight down physical fear as well
as confusion, Brian spoke more harshly than he intended: "Answer my
question! What do you know of the old days? I was a young man once, do
you understand? As young as you. What do you know about the world I
lived in?"
* * * * *
Jonason laughed. There was new-born doubt in him as well as anger,
stiffening his shoulders, narrowing his innocent gray eyes. "There was
always the world," he said, "ever since God made it a thousand years
ago."
"Was there? I was a musician. Do you know what a musician is?"
The young man shook his head, watching Brian--too alertly, watching his
hands, aware of him in a new way, no longer humble. Paula sensed the
tension and did not like it.
She said worriedly, politely: "We forget some of the things they taught
us, sa. They were Old Ones. Most of the days, they were away from
us in--places where we were not to go, praying. Old Ones are always
praying."
"I will hear this Old Man pray," said Jonason. The butt of the javelin
rested against Jonason's foot, the blade swaying from side to side.
A wrong word, any trifle, Brian knew, could make them decide in
an instant that he was evil and not sacred. Their religion would
certainly require a devil.
He thought also: _Merely one of the many ways of dying. It would be
swift, which is always a consideration._
"Certainly you may hear me pray," said Brian abruptly. "Come this way."
In a fluctuating despair, he knew that he must not become angry, as a
climber stumbling at the edge of a cliff might order himself not to be
careless. "Come this way. My prayers--I'll show you. I'll show you what
I did when I was a young man in a world you never knew."
He stalked across the Hall of Music, not looking behind, but his back
sensed every glint of light on that bread-knife javelin.
"Come this way!" he shouted. "Come in here!" He flung open the door of
the auditorium and strode up on the platform. "Sit down over there and
be quiet!"
They did, he thought--he could not look at them. He knew he was
muttering, too, between his noisy outbursts, as he snatched the cover
off the Steinway and raised the lid, muttering bits and fragments from
old times, and from the new times.
"They went thataway. Oh, Mr. Van Anda, it just simply goes right
through me; I can't express it. Madam, such was my intention--or, as
Brahms is supposed to have said on a slightly different subject, any
ass knows that. Brio, Rubato and Schmalz went to sea in a--Jonason,
Paula, this is a piano. It will not hurt you. Sit there, be quiet,
listen."
He found calm. _Now if ever, now when I have living proof that human
nature (some sort of human nature) is continuing--surely now, if ever,
The Project--_
* * * * *
With the sudden authority that was natural to him, Andrew Carr took
over. In the stupendous opening chords of the introduction, Brian very
nearly forgot his audience. Not quite, though. The youngsters had sat
down out there in the dusty region where none but ghosts had lingered
for twenty-five years or more. The piano's first sound brought them to
their feet. Brian played through the first four bars, piling the chords
like mountains, then held the last one with the pedal and waved his
right hand at Jonason and Paula in a furious downward motion.
He thought they understood. He thought he saw them sit down again, but
he could pay them scant attention now, for the sonata was coming alive
under his fingers, waking, growing, rejoicing.
He did not forget the youngsters again. They were important,
terrifying, too important, at the fringe of awareness. But he could
not look at them any more. He shut his eyes.
He had never played like this in the flood of his prime, in the old
days, before great audiences that loved him. Never.
His eyes were still closed, holding him secure in a secret world that
was not all darkness, when he ended the first movement, paused very
briefly, and moved on with complete assurance to explore the depth
and height of the second. This was a true statement at last. This was
Andrew Carr; he lived, even if, after this late morning, he might never
live again.
And now the third, the storm and the wrath, the interludes of calm, the
anger, denials, affirmations. _Was there anything he didn't know, this
heir of three centuries who died in jail?_
Without hesitation, without any awareness of self, of age or pain or
danger or loss, Brian was entering on the broad reaches of the last
movement when he opened his eyes.
The youngsters were gone.
Well, he thought, it's too big. It frightened them away. He
could visualize them, stealing out with backward looks of panic.
Incomprehensible thunder. But he could not think much about them
now. Not while Andrew Carr was with him. He played on with the same
assurance, the same joyful sense of victory. Savages--let them go, with
leave and good will.
* * * * *
Some external sound was faintly troubling him, something that must
have begun under cover of these rising, pealing octave passages--storm
waves, each higher than the last, until it seemed that even a
superhuman swimmer must be exhausted. An undefinable alien noise, a
kind of humming.
Brian shook his head peevishly, shutting it away. It couldn't matter,
at least not now. Everything was here, in the beautiful labors his
hands still had to do. The waves were growing more quiet, settling,
subsiding, and now he must play those curious arpeggios which he had
never quite understood--but, of course, he understood them at last. Rip
them out of the piano like showers of sparks, like distant lightnings
moving farther off across a world that could never be at rest.
The final theme. Why, it was a variation--and how was it that he had
never realized it?--a variation on a theme of Brahms, from the German
Requiem. Quite plain, quite simple, and Brahms would have approved.
Still it was rather strange, Brian thought, that he had never made the
identification before in spite of all his study. Well, he knew it now.
_Blessed are the dead...._
Yes, Brian thought, but something more remained, and he searched for
it, proudly certain of discovering it, through the mighty unfolding of
the finale. No hurrying, no crashing impatience any more, but a moving
through time with no fear of time, through radiance and darkness with
no fear of either. Andrew Carr was happy, the light of the Sun on his
shoulders.
_That they may rest from their labors, and their works do follow after
them._
Brian stood up, swaying and out of breath. So the music was over,
and the young savages were gone, and somewhere a jangling, humming
confusion was filling the Hall of Music, distant, but entering with
violence even here, now that the piano was silent. Brian moved stiffly
out of the auditorium, more or less knowing what he would find.
The noise was immense, the unchecked overtones of the marimba fuming
and quivering as the high ceiling of the Hall of Music caught and
twisted them, flung them back against the answering strings of harps
and pianos and violins, the sulky membranes of drums, the nervous brass
of cymbals.
The girl was playing it. Really playing it.
* * * * *
Brian laughed once, softly, in the shadows, and was not heard. She
had hit on a most primeval rhythm natural for children or savages and
needed nothing else, hammering it out swiftly on one stone and then the
next, wanting no rest or variation.
The boy was dancing, slapping his feet, pounding his chest, thrusting
out his javelin in perfect time to the clamor, edging up to his
companion, grimacing, drawing back to return. Neither was laughing or
close to laughter. Their faces were savage-solemn, downright grim with
the excitement, the innocent lust, as spontaneous as the drumming of
partridges.
It was a while before they saw Brian in the shadows.
The girl dropped the hammer. The boy froze briefly, his javelin raised,
then jerked his head slightly at Paula, who snatched at something.
Only moments later did Brian realize that she had taken the clay image
before she fled. Jonason covered her retreat, stepping backward, his
face blank with fear and readiness, javelin poised. So swiftly, so
easily, by grace of a few wrong words and Steinway's best, had a Sacred
Old One become a Bad Old One, an evil spirit.
They were gone, down the stairway, leaving the echo of Brian's voice
crying: "Don't go! Please don't go! I beg you!"
Brian followed them unwillingly. It was a measure of his unwillingness
that moments passed before he was at the bottom of the stairway looking
across the shut-in water to his raft, which they had used and left at
the window-sill port. Brian had never been a good swimmer; he was too
dizzy now and short of breath to attempt to reach it.
He clutched the rope and hitched himself, panting, hand over hand,
to the window, collapsing there a while until he found strength to
scramble into his canoe and grope for the paddle. The youngsters' canoe
was already far off, heading up the river, the boy paddling with deep
powerful strokes.
Up the river, of course. They had to find the right kind of Old Ones.
Up across the sun-path.
Brian dug his blade in the quiet water. For a time, his rugged ancient
muscles were willing. There was sap in them yet. Perhaps he was gaining
slightly.
He shouted hugely: "Bring back my two-faced god! Bring it back! It's
not yours. _It's not yours!_"
* * * * *
They must have heard his voice booming at them. At any rate, the girl
looked back once. The boy, intent on his effort, did not.