It had something else to it that I liked, a trick he'd borrowed from Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn didn't want to take the chance that some dummy in the audience would think the pause after the first movement meant the whole concerto was over, and so start to clap. That's not awful in itself, but what makes it troublesome is that then half the audience is flustered because they applauded in the wrong place, and the other half is irritated because those dummies have held up the performance. So Mendelssohn doesn't let anybody make that mistake. There is a sustained note left over from the first movement that continues right into the opening of the second. There is never that moment of silence when the audience fidgets, and the men who are there because their wives insisted on it are looking nervously at their neighbors to see what's expected of them, and up on the stage you hear the rustle and the whispers and the muffled coughs. I've often wished that Tchaikovsky and Bruch and Beethoven had been that thoughtful, and I've been grateful that Mendelssohn and Gershwin had.
Funny, though. This time the soft, almost subliminal tattoo of the drums did not keep the audience from stirring. I saw an usherette lean past Dominic's empty seat to whisper in Senator Kennedy's ear. Slavi was already raising his baton for the start of the second movement, but that didn't keep Jack Kennedy from rising and slinking away up the aisle. As I counted bars to the beginning of my own part, I saw Jackie give me a smile and a tiny, spread-hands shrug of apology. With almost any other Senate wife I would have known that was just convention, but I knew that in Jackie's case she was personally contrite. She was the cultured one in the gallery of Senate wives. She would have made a fine First Lady, I always thought, if her husband hadn't been short-counted in Chicago in 1960.
The disturbance didn't end there.
With help from people like Jackie and Slavi Rostropovich—and, of course, from Dom—I had turned out to be pretty much Washington's favorite society fiddler. So the audience was what they call "social." Meaning, in Washington, governmental—diplomats, legislators, top people from the administration. Even President Nancy was there in her box, with her First Gentleman sitting as always urbane and self-assured beside her. That kind of an audience had special problems. The worst of them was that if something went terribly sour somewhere in the world, half the audience would have to be told about it at once.
It had. They were.
By the middle of the slow movement there were gap-toothed empty seats in every part of the house. When I finished my tricky, and beautiful, crescendo in the third, the applause was lean. It wasn't lack of enthusiasm, I thought. It was lack of people. Slavi looked at me. I looked at Slavi. We both shrugged in baffled resignation.
For decency's sake we took two bows. Then we retired from the stage and didn't come back, giving the audience a chance to escape—as many of them were anxious to do.
As curiosity made many of us on the stage eager to do.
It was worse for Slavi than for me. I was through for the evening and glad of it, while he would have to come back after the intermission to do the second half of the program. It was Mahier, and both of us knew there would not be much of a crowd to sit through that interminable First Symphony.
When we found out what was happening that became a certainty.
The first one to get to us to tell us was my dresser, Amy. Amy doesn't really "dress" me, although I'm sure she would if she had to. What she does is take care of me. She keeps an eye on the Guarnerius when I put it down for a moment; she makes sure I have a dress without stains or wrinkles to wear for the concert, and another for the usual party afterward; she sees that there are always tampons in the side pocket of my music bag. She does all that, and one big other thing. She keeps my husband from getting suspicious when I'm off somewhere with Dom.
She also tells me what I need to know, even if I'm not going to like it. Especially if I'm not going to like it. Of all the shocked, scared, and worried expressions backstage that night, hers was the most upset; but she pushed through the muttering, whispering stagehands and musicians to get to us. "Nyla," she wailed, "Albuquerque's gone crazy!"
Albuquerque was, of course, where the Sandia base was. Where Dominic was. I stopped short. My knees went weak. From behind me
Slavi caught one arm. Amy caught the violin and then the other arm, in that order.
"And Dom?" I croaked.
"Oh, Nyla," Amy said, sobbing, "he's the worst of the lot!"
A man named Dominic DeSota, sweating as he moved through the reeds around the old water-detention pond, raised his head from his work. He thought he saw a sudden glow of orange light in the sky toward the southeast, in the place where Chicago had once been. It wasn't an illusion. It was a real burnishing of the low clouds, as though there were a huge, distant fire. He stood up straight, peering What were those lights off on the horizon? There were streams of white, streams of red, the white lights coming toward him and the reds away. It was almost as though there were cars again! But they disappeared in the wink of an eye and he was alone in the sultry night. He returned to the job of emptying the last trap on his line, where what had once been someone's pet angora hissed and spat. It was no longer sleek, fat, and pretty, but DeSota was glad to see it. It was dinner.
23 August 1983
10:20 P.M. Major DeSOTA, Dominic P.
It was just the purest chance that the first prisoner I took was myself.
I would have seen me sooner or later, of course. We knew I was there. Maybe "I"—that "I" who was now my prisoner—did "me"— the me who nailed him—a favor, because one of the reasons I got command of the first assault detachment through the portal was that Senator Dominic DeSota was there. (Senator! How had that happened? How had I risen so high in his timeline, and only to the damn dumb rank of field officer, and reserve at that, in my own? But that other DeSota's position was going to help me elevate mine. . .
"They're ready, sir," said Sergeant Sambok.
"Good-oh," I told her, and followed her back upstairs to the office of the chief scientist. I didn't have time to think about the grammatical games we were learning to play—the "I" that watched "me" through the peepers, the "them" that were "us." I didn't have time to wonder at what I'd wondered at a time or two before, either—namely, at the curious coincidences between that Dom DeSota's life and my own. Our lives were different in tremendous ways. But both of us had wound up involved in the parallel-time situation— and not, of course, just "both" of us, because there were all those other Dominic DeSotas in all the other times. The tech advisors had no time for such questions. I knew that was so, because I'd asked them. All they would say, not counting mathematics, was mumblemumble, after all, we Dominic DeSotas had genes in common; had boyhoods in common, anyway up to whenever the point of separation was; we'd read the same books and seen the same movies. So naturally we set into similar molds. .
"Right in here, sir," said the sergeant, and I walked through the door she held open for me into the office of the operating head of the Cathouse, as these people had amusingly named their parallel-time project.
The Signal Corps lieutenant said, "You're on in thirty seconds, Major."
"Right," I said, and sat down at the desk. It was clean—the chief scientist was one of those security-conscious guys, no doubt. The only thing on it was the Signal Corps microphone with the wires that led to the backpack transmitter on the lieutenant's helper. I tested the drawers. Locked, but we'd take care of that in a minute.