Free The World Inside by Robert Silverberg Page B

providing the foundation against which the others will do their things. With a practiced eye he checks the focus. Everything sharp. Nat the spectrum-rider says, “Mars is a little off-color, Dill.” Dillon hunts for Mars. Yes. Yes. He feeds it an extra jolt of orange. And Jupiter? A shining globe of white fire. Venus. Saturn. And all the stars. He is satisfied with the visuals.
    â€œBringing up the sound, now,” he says.
    The heels of his hands hit the control panel. From the gaping speakers comes a tender blade of white noise. The music of the spheres. He colors it now, bringing up the gain on the galactic side, letting the stellar drift impart plangent hues to the tone. Then, with a quick downward stab on the projectrons, he kicks in the planetary sounds. Saturn whirls like a belt of knives. Jupiter booms. “Are you getting it?” he calls out. “How’s the clarity?” Sophro the orbital diver says, “Fat up the asteroids, Dill,” and he does it, and Sophro nods, happy, his chins trembling in pleasure.
    After half an hour of preliminary maneuvers Dillon has his primary tuning finished. So far, though, he has done only thesolo work. Now to coordinate with the others. Slow, delicate work: to reach reciprocity with them one by one, building a web of interrelationship, a seven-way union. Plagued all the way by heisenberging effects, so that a whole new cluster of adjustments has to be made each time another instrument is added to the set. Change one factor, you change everything; you can’t just hold your own while keying in more and more and more output. He takes on the spectrum-rider first. Easy. Dillon gives forth a shower of comets and Nat modulates them pleasantly into suns. Then they add the incantator. A slight stridency at first, quickly corrected. Good going. Then the gravity-drinker. No problem. The comet-harp, now. Rasp! Rasp! The receptors go bleary and the entire thing falls apart. He and the incantator have to retune separately, rejoin, bring the comet-harp into the net again. This time all right. Great plummy curves of tone go lalloping through the hall. Then the orbital diver. Fifteen sweaty minutes; the balances keep souring. Dillon expects a system collapse any second, but no, they hang on and finally get the levels even. And now the really tough one, the doppler-inverter, which threatens always to clash with his own instrument because both rely as much on visuals as audio, and both are generators, not just modulators of someone else’s playing. He almost gets it. But they lose the comet-harp. It makes a thin edgy whining sound and drops out. So they go back two steps and try again. Precarious balance, constantly falling off. Up till five years ago, there had been only five instruments in cosmos groups; it was simply too difficult to hold more than that together. Like adding a fourth actor in Greek tragedy: an impossible technical feat, or so it must have seemed to Aeschylus. Now they were ableto coordinate six instruments reasonably well, and a seventh with some effort, by sending the circuit bouncing up to a computer nexus in Edinburgh, but it is still a filther to put them all in synch. Dillon gestures madly with his left shoulder, encouraging the doppler-inverter to get with it. “Come on, come on, come on, come
on
!” and this time they make it. The time is 1840. Everything sticks together.
    â€œLet’s run it through, now,” Nat sings out. “Give us an A for tuning, maestro.”
    Dillon hunches forward and clutches the projectrons. Feeds power. Gets a sensory shift; the knobs abruptly feel like the cheeks of Electra’s buttocks in his hands. Smiles at the sensation. Firm, bouncy, cool. Up we go! And gives them the universe in one sizzling blare of light and sound. The hall swims with images. The stars leap and cross and mate. The incantator man picks up his sonics and does his trick, enhancing, multiplying, intensifying, until the