Mathématique: Chapter 35

Nicholas Rush was wired for D minor.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Alien-induced psychosis.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 35

A swath of sunlight cut the dimness of the deserted pseudo-Irish pub, illuminating dust in the air, wood-grained ridges in the floor. Rush had seen better pianos than the one at which he sat. He’d played better pianos. He’d owned better pianos.

The room was silent, but for his own breathing, quiet in the quiet air.

He was ignoring a chord progression.

He was alone.

“You okay, hotshot?” Young asked.

(He was alone, except for Young.)

The piano was upright and old. Recently tuned, supposedly. Rush hadn’t verified as much, because to do so would require touching it. He hadn’t touched it. He didn’t want to touch it. It hunched menacingly, all waiting spruce and lacquered basswood.

“I’m fine.”

“Well, you look like shit.”

“Y’tell me as much daily.” Rush, busy ignoring a chord progression, didn’t look at Young. He looked at the piano keys, trying to touch them without touching them.

“Hotshot.” The sobriquet was meaningless but for its ring of warning. “We can leave,” Young offered. “We can come back later.” And then, in an undertone, “Or, y’know. Never.”

Rush glanced up.

The colonel leaned into a floor-to ceiling beam, arms crossed, as implacable as a load-bearing wall. “We’ve been here for an hour.”

Rush returned his attention to the piano keys. “D’you not have projects to run, budgets t’fuck up, strategies to devise, people to kill?”

“People to kill? I’m all caught up.”

Rush eyed the piano keys, laid out predictably, the same way every time. That was industrialization for you. Eighty-eight keys. Seven octaves and a minor third in the upper register. (It wouldn’t be enough.) 

The moment (hour?) felt like a series summation, a sequence converging on infinity or on a rational or irrational number. The limit of the summation would be the platform from which he’d crack the ninth cypher. Or from which it might crack him right back.

It coiled within him, waiting for the attentional turn of mind and hand.

Not yet.

(Almost.)

“You gonna play that thing?” Young asked.

 

(Unclear).

He’d thought a piano could help him? It couldn’t help him. Nothing could help him. He curled his fingers around the ridged edge of the bench under his thighs.

Ideally, he’d touch the keys when he could guarantee the only thing his fingers would produce was the sound of a vacant alien city. And not something better known.

“Rush.”

He wasn’t sure what was happening in his head or what was trying to happen, but it wasn’t a thing he wanted. When he reproduced the tonal structures, he’d do it with his hands and not his mind. His hands and not his mind. Which explained, in part, why he was ignoring a chord progression. It was becoming difficult as it spiraled toward a binary choice. Altera or—

It wouldn’t be Schumann.

The pool from which his musical perseverations might pull was bounded by key and interval. It’d always had been this way and he’d never looked too hard at the proclivities of his subconscious; why dig out old foundations when city walls could be built atop a base more primitive? This happened all the time. (Perhaps not on Altera. Altera or Atlantis. They were loved. Built from new.)

It’d be Beethoven.

Unless he could confine himself to Lantean chords, converging on D minor.

(He could hear it in the background of his thoughts.)

To crack this cypher was to crack himself right out of all foundation he possessed. He was ignoring a D minor chord, and, unsupervised, it passed in and out of Alteran intervals, blending his classical training into something he didn’t recognize, threatening the borders of his conscious perception.

“Rush.”

“What.”

“I think we should go.”

He wanted to control this.

He did.

But he was fixed.

He couldn’t stay.

He couldn’t leave.

He couldn’t play Beethoven, he couldn’t unleash the tones he needed, he was caught between asymptotes that approached divergent limits. Had he thought he could do this? He couldn’t do this. But he had brought himself to a point from which retreat was impossible.

“This isn’t a good day for you, hotshot.”

(None of them seemed to be good days.)

D minor.

He was ignoring it.

D minor.

He was ignoring it.

D minor.

He wasn’t ready.

D minor.

(It wasn’t D minor. Not quite.)

“I’m thinking you try again tomorrow.”

Altera: a hostile note implicit in the sweep of grass and sea and nested sets of deaths beneath its surface. Sorrow in the contour of its skyline, nearly transparent in the light of a white star. Sheppard had wept, possessed by sentient architecture, left with no choice but to give (to take) all that had been demanded (offered).

Perhaps it was worse to be deaf to the sound of the call. D minor. Almost D minor. (Relatively conjunct, cadences unclosed, polyphonic texture, within which motives grow.)

Altera. Rush took a breath and released it.

In a moment of balanced forces, he understood he was no longer capable of ignoring the chord progression. Good. This was what he’d come here for. To let it out. And to let it in. He was ready.

He let go of the bench.

The chord and key and intervals of Altera exerted a shear force on his mind that reached out—either over spacetime or from his own memory; he could not tell and it did not matter—to pry up a bounded edge of his consciousness. 

This didn’t sit right with him, because it was what he did: the cracking of codes, the torquing of theorems, the forcing of formulas. Not what was done to him; he was not a thing to be broken into, he was not composed of circuits amenable to rerouting, he was not a locked to be opened, he didn’t come open it was other things that did that, other things, other things, other things other things other things.

D.

D in the contra octave.

D in the contra octave, transposed to great, transposed to small, transposed up and down the range, but every variant of D made overtone to the note in his mind vibrating at thirty-six point seven hertz.

He struggled to free himself, struggled to divert into another mental avenue, because he didn’t want this imposition of tonal structure, not this way, not shoved upon him by an aggressive, foreign influence, whatever it was that was spreading the pins and tumblers of his selfhood, whatever was combing a melodic reworking through his thoughts and coercing him into shadowed versions of chromatic scales he knew.

E in the contra octave, its overtones limited by his hands on the piano and by the upper bound of neural extrapolation stretching to accommodate the demands made by the melodic texture in his mind. The hold permitted no escape from its counterpoint of cryptography, inverted. It was breaking him open, his mind adjusting in step-wise accommodation to the demanding press of a remembered city: implacable, grieving, lonely, massive, coming. He couldn’t move, couldn’t deviate. Compression waves filled the air and filled his thoughts.

F in the contra octave, G in the contra octave, A in the contra octave. B-flat in the contra octave.

The sundering of his psyche penetrated from mind to hand, a melodic plunge into and out of the harmonic minor of the chromatic reformation of his consciousness and no wonder it’d been Beethoven, no wonder it’d always been Beethoven, Nicholas Rush was wired for D minor and Ancient musical theory was built on that (almost) D minor progression. It came into and out of his conscious perception in a rhythm unendurable and slow.

D minor. (His.)

And its variant. (Other.)

D minor.

And its variant.

D minor.

Then, its variant.

The tempo overwhelmed his shredding opposition and slid into his mind without resistance, bending the minor key of D in an incremental arc. Something shifted in his mind, like a puzzle piece locking into place, like an entropic gain, a process that wouldn’t reverse, that couldn’t.

Without sight, by sound and feel alone, he coaxed a hazy echo of Beethoven from the piano, but couldn’t reproduce the outgoing tide of tones in his mind.

He stopped playing.

His eyes were open, but the world was only three things: fraying gray, an almost D minor chord, and—

“Damn it, Rush.”

He wasn’t playing, but he was hearing what he wasn’t playing. Not at all sure how that worked, he tried to figure it out with limited data.

“Get up.” Young’s hands were on his shoulders. Under an arm. “Up.”

Rush didn’t think “up” would turn out well at all.

“Don’t pass out.” Young hauled him up, spun him one hundred and eighty degrees and pressed him down in a waveform inversion, forcing his head between his knees, one hand on the back of his neck. “Do NOT do it.”

His visual field began to clarify from beneath its haze of gray.

“Head down.” Young shifted to sit next to Rush on the piano bench. “Slow deep breaths,” Young said.

(This situation was Not Preferred.)

“I’m fine,” he said.

“Sure.” Young gripped Rush’s shoulder.

Rush pressed back into Young’s hand, grounding himself in the ache at the base of his neck. “I’m fine.” He did his best to sit.

Young shoved him back down. “You pass out and you spend the night in the base infirmary.”

A broken chord reverberated through his mind and through the world.

“Lam’s on shift,” Young continued, “and Lam is tough to bullshit.”

(True.)

“Even for a champion bullshitter, such as yourself.”

Rush tried to listen to Young, rather than the tones and overtones in his mind. “Flattered,” he said indistinctly, “I’m sure.”

“Yeah, I’d say you rank somewhere between Vala and Jackson,” Young continued, “but it’s hard to tell. That’s the nature of bullshit.”

“Will y’let me up?” Rush hissed.

“You gonna pass out?”

“No.”

Young eased up on the kilopascals of pressure he was applying to Rush’s shoulder. Grudgingly.

Rush sat against what was still (considerable) resistance, pressed the heel of his hand into his eye socket, and said. “D minor. Not quite. But close enough.” He could still hear the chord vibrating above and below the Cartesian world construction his mind was running to render reality. It might never (NEVER) leave him.

“The hell is that supposed to mean?” Young asked, aggressively affable.

Rush squinted at the man through his headache. “It’s a key signature.”

“Uh, musical key or cryptographic key?”

“They’re not mutually exclusive, I suppose.”

The colonel sighed. “You’re sure about this ‘D minor’ thing?” Young’s question came measured, slow, condescending, specific, cautious, and with enough eyebrows-up crispy diction that implied Rush’s sanity was highly suspect.

(Fair enough.)

“I’m sure,” Rush said.

“So all that key smashing did something for you?”

“Yes.”

Young, tentative, said, “It didn’t really hit as…” He trailed off.

(Fuck.)

Rush rallied, pH neutral to full acidity. “As fuckin’ what. It ‘didn’t hit’ as fucking. What.”

“Organized?” Young suggested gingerly.

“As though you’d recognize ‘organization’ if it wore a bloody nametag and handed you a call graph,” he muttered.

Young snorted. “I’m guessing that was a pretty brutal insult in, like, information theory or whatever.”

“Devastating,” Rush confirmed.

Deep in the kitchen, behind the bar, he heard the low murmur of the O’Malley’s staff beginning their preparations for opening.

“You ever think about maybe—seeing someone?” Young asked. “Like a mental health professional?”

“I have. On multiple occasions. I’ve passed two psychological evaluations and a battery of neuropsychiatric tests.”

“I don’t think that any of that was for your benefit, hotshot. Might’ve even been part of your genetic workup.”

Yes well, in retrospect, that made sense.

“I fail to see your point.”

“I think you should talk to Lam. Tell her you can’t sleep. And whatever else is going on with you.”

“I don’t see what she’s going to do about any of it.”

“It’ll make me feel better,” Young said.

“Get t’ fuck,” he replied with a quick, wry smile.

Young looked away, clapped Rush’s shoulder, then used it to lever himself to his feet. “Stay there,” he said. “I’m gonna find our guy.”

“What ‘guy’?” Rush pressed his fingertips to his temple.

“The guy who owns this place,” Young said. “Tell him we’re done?”

“Oh we are, are we?”

“Yeah,” Young said. “We’re done.”

Rush looked up at him. “We’ll never be done.”

Hours later, Rush stood in Young’s kitchen.

It had begun with an alteration of character. Morphing tones became a pair of tremolos, not strings exactly, but not not-strings either. And then, in overlay, came an unmistakable upper line of falling fifths. Beethoven’s Ninth, first movement, in D minor. Alternate D minor. Variant D minor.

He didn’t want this.

(Yes he did.)

This, all of this, would be useful.

Either way, fuck if it wasn’t pure dead fascinating. Fuck if it wasn’t pure dead difficult to ignore: complicated and polyphonic and loud and no longer precisely D minor.

“Hotshot.” Young spoke over not-oboes, not-flutes, and not-D minor. “Are you listening to something?”

“Why do you ask?” Rush countered.

“You stopped peeling potatoes.”

He looked down. In one hand was a half-stripped potato, in the other, a peeler.

The not-strings and the not-percussion entered. He flinched.

“I was thinking.” Rush fought to speak through the musical tempest in his thoughts, as though more and more of his mind was devoting itself to reproducing an alien variant of Beethoven’s Ninth.

Falling fifths.

That was how it’d started.

Did that mean something?

Possibly.

Possibly it meant something.

“Okay,” Young replied. “Well, I’m thinking maybe tonight we’ll order pizza.”

“I have to write something down,” Rush murmured absently.

“Okay,” Young said.

He didn’t care to work like this, but Young wouldn’t let him return to his apartment without making his life a thing more difficult than it currently was. Somewhere within the swath of paper multiplying beneath his hands was the list he’d made of the resonant frequencies of Ancient control crystals.

He couldn’t find it.

“Is this what you do every night, hotshot?” Young asked quietly.

“No.” Rush lifted his laptop off the collection of papers it partially obscured. He couldn’t find his list. Correction. Yes, he could. He pulled it free from the company of lesser papers.

“The ‘terror fanfare’,” Gloria whispers. 

“What?” he replied.

“Nothing,” Young said. “I didn’t say anything.”

A unified, polyphonic, distorted wave of noise crested and broke over his seawall throughs, drowning resonant frequencies he was focusing on. He flinched. He pressed his hand, palm down, against the list of numbers, as though he might absorb them through his skin.

“I did warn you, darling.”

He took a breath.

“It sounds strange in the alternate key,” Gloria whispers. “Don’t you think? I wonder if you’ll ever get the original back.”

He doubted it.

“Hotshot,” Young said.

“Do you think the choral portions will be in Ancient?” Gloria asks over the not-bass not-recitatives. “That seems like it would be distracting.”

“What,” he snarled at Young, “do I not seem occupied to you?”

“I suppose you’ll find out,” Gloria says over the falling fifths from movement one, “you absurd man.”

“Yeah,” Young growled. “You seem a little too damn occupied, hotshot.”

Yes well. Rush settled himself, returned his attention to his laptop, to the code of the ninth cypher, to the resonant frequencies that would—

“I’m not sure you’ll ever be able to listen again,” Gloria says, over the beginnings of the orchestral construction of the central theme.

He swallowed. Glanced at Young. “I’m fine.”

Young’s dark hair blazed gold in the slantwise light of the setting sun, his expression closed and profound against an orchestral backdrop.

“Sometimes,” Rush began, his hands braced against the table, trying to organize himself enough to get the words out before the reappearance of the terror fanfare and the coming choral section, “it’s necessary to focus so intently on a problem that—”

“Oh sweetheart,” Gloria says.

(What the fuck.)

“—that the ephemera of daily existence are—shut out and—”

He flinched at the reappearance of the terror fanfare. “Don’t talk to me,” he finished, cutting his losses.

“I wasn’t, hotshot. You were the one who said ‘what’.”

Oh Freunde, nicht dise Töne.

He pressed a hand to his head.

“Oh,” Gloria says, surprised. “It’s German.”

“I know,” he said.

Adquin nos ponemus nostras voces
in plus grata et exultans tonus.

“Nick,” Young said, “stop working.”

“There’s the Ancient,” Gloria says, satisfied. And then, conciliatory, as though she knows he’s not happy about it, “At least it’s not a simultaneous overlay.”

“Not yet,” Rush said. “Not yet.”

As the sixth symphonic loop recommenced, he had to admit to himself that he was perseverating on not-Beethoven as he fuckin’ tried and failed to blend resonant frequencies of control crystals into an Ancient equivalent of the circle of fifths. Maybe it would be a circle of ninths? Maybe of tenths? Maybe it would be nine fifths. Ten fifths? Ten fifths would be two.

(Fuck.)

He found it difficult to construct a geometric representation of pitch relationships in an alien tonal architecture whilst a fucking resplendent and detailed version of said tonal architecture was stuck on a fuckin’ loop in his fuckin’ head.

Why Beethoven?

(Why not Beethoven?)

“I called Lam.” Young dropped into the chair next to him.

Ugh, he hadn’t, had he?

(One look at the colonel confirmed he very much had.)

Rush looked again at his circular falling fifths that wouldn’t quite work themselves into a cypher key.

“I. Called. Lam.”

“I heard you,” Rush muttered over the falling fifths. Those fucking, falling, fatidic fifths. Circle of fifths. Yes well, message received, thanks. He didn’t need the constant Beethoven to pursue the associated insight. “Why would y’do that?”

“What do you think happened to you on that planet?” Gloria asks, like she’s giving him a hint.

“Because,” Young growled, “you need to be checked out. Physically.”

“This is out of the ordinary, even for you,” Gloria agrees.

“Fine,” Rush snapped, “I’ve no idea what y’think she’ll do, but fine.”

“They don’t know what the third gene does,” Gloria says. 

“They don’t know what the third gene does,” Young said.

Rush looked up, startled. “What?”

“They have no idea what it does, hotshot. But look, if you can turn Ancient stuff on, then maybe it stands to reason that Ancient stuff might have some effect on you, right?”

“This was my point,” Gloria says. “You do seem to be…activated.”

(What the fuck was happening?)

“I know that was your point, but—” Rush decided not to finish his sentence.

“Do you think it might be having any kind of effect?” Young asked, slow and inaudible over the aggressive line of the not-brass section in his head.

“Remember when you used to come to rehearsals and sit in the back, grading exams?” Gloria whispers. 

“Possibly,” Rush said.

“Hotshot, you’re hearing shit, aren’t you. You can tell me, if you are. You wouldn’t be the first, okay? Not by a long shot.”

“Let’s be clear about this darling; he’s asking if you’re hallucinating.”

“No,” Rush replied. “I’m distracted. I need coffee.”

“I’d throw my coffee maker out the window to prevent you from drinking coffee right now,” Young growled.

“Bit dramatic.”

“Can I interest you in a glass of water and the maximum dose of god damned Tylenol PM?”

“No,” Rush replied.

“Here comes the scherzo, sweetheart.”

He put his pen down, propped his elbows on the table, and dropped his head into his hands as the not-D minor second movement slammed into his mind like a tonal train or a melodic wrecking ball that was, like his mind, contrapuntal.

“You okay?”

It wasn’t so difficult. (He was certain it wasn’t). All he needed was for everyone and everything in his mind and environment to be quiet for roughly two hours, and he’d crack the cypher. He was close. He had a method. He had a transposition key for the shifts in Hertz.

“Rush.”

Triple time as quadruple time, scherzo-trio-scherzo, the gestalt of the sound sickeningly unfamiliar, obliterating the original; how was he supposed to do anything with this?

“Rush,” Young said.

“What?” He couldn’t hear himself over the rise and fall of not-flutes.

“At least this one sounds relatively normal,” Gloria whispers sympathetically, or maybe symphonetically. “B-flat major doesn’t transpose as well as D minor. Movement three turns grotesque.”

“Why don’t you get some sleep? It’s one in the morning.”

He looked over at Young, who was sitting across from him, his chin in his hand, utterly exhausted and backed by the not-melody of the not-trio portion of the not-movement.

“He’s not bad looking,” Gloria whispers. “I think C major suits people with curls, don’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, with more than a trace of fondness.

“How is sleeping, at night, ridiculous?” Young asked, driven beyond his limits. The colonel was injured. Somewhere on an alien world, he’d crashed an alien car. That’s what he’d said. 

“Why don’t you sleep?” Rush suggested kindly. “Y’look fucking terrible.”

“I look terrible. I do.”

“That’s what I said.” Rush dropped his eyes to matrices of resonant frequencies.

“Get up,” Rush murmured, over a line of not-cellos and not-basses, in the not-fourth movement, one hand on Young’s shoulder, shaking him. “If y’fall asleep at the fuckin’ table, y’quite literally won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

“Kiva,” Young breathed, starting awake.

“Kiva?” Rush repeated, over the mental vibration of a bass line.

“Did you just say ‘Kiva’?” Young growled.

Rush raised his hands, startled into a backward half-step. “I said ‘kiva’ because you said ‘kiva.’ Th’fuck is ‘kiva’?”

“No one,” Young said, taking a deep breath. “Nothing. Sorry. What the hell time is it?”

“Y’think I know?” Rush helped him up as a familiar, building theme gave itself over to almost-violins. “D’you have to work tomorrow?” 

“Let me check,” Young growled. “Yeah. Yeah I do, Rush. And you’re coming in with me.”

“Yes yes.” Rush tried to ignore the melody of his thoughts.

“Even like this,” Gloria whispers, “even transposed, it’s still beautiful. I’d love to hear what Beethoven might’ve done with the range in Ancient musical works. Cities, ships, geodesic shielding the size of planets as musical organs. He was destined for such scale.”

“I know.” Rush directed them towards the colonel’s bedroom.

“That was surprisingly easy,” Young grunted, angling for his couch.

“I’m extremely reasonable.” Rush couldn’t hear himself over the forceful entrance of alien brass.

“Shut up,” Young said. “You’re not even remotely reasonable.”

“Five to six.” He helped Young sit.

“Damn it.”

“Watch out, darling,” Gloria whispers. “It always comes out of nowhere.”

He flinched at the reappearance of the terror fanfare, but not much. Not much. “Go to sleep,” Rush whispered, over the dissonance in his mind as he turned off the lights.

“Rush,” Young growled. “Do not leave.”

“I don’t plan on it,” he replied.

“Now you can work without interference,” Gloria whispers.

He nodded. The only light came from behind the closed blinds and from his laptop, aglow upon the table. He opened the blinds.

“Rush,” Young said. “You can turn on the lights, you know.”

“I know.”

“Draw it,” she urges. “You’ll be able to focus on it if you draw it.”

The slide of marker over virginal wall was viscerally satisfying. He drew a perfect circle, freehand.

“And now the table. The table of frequencies. Write it out.”

He did so, the terms spaced equally, atypically legible.

“This isn’t only for yourself,” Gloria whispers. “Anyone could look at this and see where you were headed.”

He staggered beneath the weight of the chorus in his mind, the not-singers in hybrid German-Ancient, the not-brass, and the not-strings.

“It’s not just for you. It’s never been just for you. It’s meant to be shared. It’s meant to be experienced by all who can experience it,” Gloria whispers. “Why not blend the functional and the aesthetic if you can? If you’ve the power and style to do so? And you do, Nick, you’ve always been able to do it. What’s mathematics, if not that?”

He braced a hand against the wall.

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen

Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,

Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

He shook his hair back.

“Don’t hold to the German, darling. Let that go.”

Laetor sicut eius soles volant

Per caeli gloriosum ordinem—

He had it. He was certain he did. He simply had to complete the circle of relational pitches, arcing it back on itself, in a series of resonant frequencies.

“Begin,” Gloria says. “You must begin.”

He began to fill in the pitches he’d worked out over the previous hours, the contours of his thoughts dragged into arpeggios that wouldn’t let him go.

“To create a machine that feels—” Rush breathed.

“It is a cruelty,” Gloria confirms, audible even over the assault of the chorus. “It is a cruelty. Is it any wonder it won’t let you go?”

He wrote down a set of numbers corresponding to a crystal combination, permuting in his mind to the second step, to the third, to the fourth, and then—

“You understand, don’t you, darling?”

It wouldn’t work past the fourth, the harmonies were wrong.

“Don’t you, Nick?”

“Yes,” he whispered, lost in an alien variant of pitch class space.

“Begin again,” Gloria says, bright and full of hope, burning like a Romantic-Era candle in a dark theatre.

He began again.