In Memoriam

His proudest touch, Strand reflected, had been the birdsong in the trees. Four species sang in four-part harmony, an innovation from before the war. He’d resurrected it that night, and their fluting choruses had spilled across the banquet tables and the garden maze. 

The birds sang that all was well. Their training could take a year, longer than it took the navy to turn out a new dreadnought, and to some, their opulence might even seem illegal. By the letter of the law, Strand supposed it was. Even genius had its rationing, and there were the sumptuary statutes to consider. 

But those statutes were suspended now. They had been for some time. And so while the subtle dissonances buried in the birdsong were enough to bring a tear to Strand’s bloodshot eyes, they did not touch him as they once had. They did not burn through him like a drug, a fire coursing through his veins. They went down like the finest chocolates—bitter, slightly sweet—and Strand raised his glass to their memory.

“The thing to do,” Hallam was saying, “is live. Don’t you think so, Emilia? That’s what your poems say to me. We must live, gaily, treating life like one last glass of our host’s fabulous champagne. Life is like a drink, dear friends, and I intend to drain it to the lees.” 

Emilia batted her long lashes, gazing fondly at the foolish boy. They were a matched pair, young and beautiful, with a coltish giddiness when the after dinner conversation bled from politics back into art. Hallam wore a jacket of sky blue brocade which seemed merely an introduction to his tablemate’s electric gown, while her gown, by some tulled fashion-magic, jolted twofold tattoo patterns through their pale skin and inky hair. 

“He makes too much of me,” Emilia said, in a stage whisper that was anything but humble. “My poems, I’m afraid, lie stillborn with the war. I’m told they’re rationed content, that hardly anybody reads them.” 

“That, my dear,” Hallam said, “only confirms your genius.” 

A cane rapped against the table’s far end, and all eyes were momentarily dragged back to Admiral Valere. 

“Genius,” rumbled the Admiral, “is a resource like any other. The nation demands—”

“The nation,” Emilia said sweetly, “has already claimed my firstborn. Must it take the products of my soul, as well?” 

A taut silence fell over the table and Strand rose, walked unnoticed into the darkness past its edges. The demimonde whirled there, the half seen figures who must always haunt the fringes of polite society. The graspers and the climbers and the hourly coquettes; how he loved them! He’d never appreciated them, before. They’d been the birds nesting in his trees, but he’d never listened to their music. 

Couples swirled all around him, their shadowed faces barely rendered, and Strand thought back to his childhood. The spacious manse above him hurled wings into the darkness and he remembered days before the war, rambling through the garden maze and down into a city scattered over seven hills. He’d met Hallam and Emilia there, and others, countless others. In the right season you’d see lilies pushing through the city’s pavers, lilacs sheltering courtesans beneath the glow of gaslamp fireflies. Strand remembered. He’d chased lovers through its sultry streets, and broken more than his fair share of noses. 

Strand found himself beside the banquet table again. He signaled for dessert and the faceless servants crowded closer, locusts grazing on the bowed feast table. Men lit their partners’ cigarettes. A strawberry sherbet was served. 

“Oh, but you must tell them, E!” Hallam was saying. He turned to Inigo, the floral-figurist, grasping the man’s forearm tightly. “You’ll love this, I promise. Her new project is sublime.” 

The doddering figurist leaned forward, glasses falling down a leaf blade nose. Strand could see his own reflection, creeping closer in their lenses. 

“And just what is your next project, Ms. Tennyson?” Inigo said. “The war permitting, of course.” 

Emilia flashed a brilliant smile. “Is there any other subject? Inigo, my work will be the war.”

A dozen voices called out at once but she simply raised a hand, and the figures arrayed around the table all receded.

“After the war,” Emilia said, “when this awful business is done, there will be so many hulks, won’t there? They say the navy builds a dozen dreadnoughts every year, and ten times that number of destroyers. I should think that there will be a sale. What else are we to do with them? Has humanity so many mothballs?” 

Her smile dimpled, deepened. “I’ll buy the very worst. Give me your hulled minesweepers, and your frigates with broken wings. Give me your condemned carriers, your destroyers cored of crucial decks—give me a dreadnought dredged from some strange sea! I’ll set them in the sky like satellites. A hundred ships fresh off the lines, all chocked full of lights and gleaming brighter than the stars. I’ll design a brand new constellation and I’ll call it, oh, I don’t know—In Memoriam. A monument to our lost boys. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, Admiral Valere? Assuming, of course, that we achieve—what did you call it in The Times? ‘Perfect pacification?’”

The admiral did not rise to her bait. An aging boar in golden braid, he looked around the table carefully, as if memorizing all their faces. 

“And what does our host think?” Valere said softly. “Strand? What do you make of Ms. Tennyson’s suggestion?” 

“I think it’s rather patriotic,” Strand said. “Save, perhaps, for its unfortunate postscript. The war will be over by our next gathering, Ms. Tennyson. You have my—and the admiral’s—word. The pacification will be…perfect.” 

The poet leaned back, smoke curling from an ivory cigarette holder. The other artists dotted around the table began to laugh and to conspire, talking circles around the dreams they’d long deferred. Inigo proposed a new series of temporal sculptures wrought in yet un-budded blooms, one bust each for Valere, and the other members of the ruling junta. Hallam leaned against a buxom cantatrice, theorizing (but never singing) new harmonies to teach the birds. 

And still, Emilia watched him. She blew intriguing fractals out of sweet, amethyst smoke. Shapes the cool breeze quickly set upon, and carried from Strand’s view. 

***

The birds launched into a jaunty tune and a hundred couples whirled out onto the lawn. Strand hadn’t moved. He was still there, at the head of his disordered table. Sleeping revelers slouched over the last bites their sherbet while, at the table’s opposite pole, Admiral Valere hummed along tunelessly.

Strand nodded to him. Their families went back. He remembered the gnarled spaceman from the salad days of his own youth. He’d seemed a hero, then. Fighting fit and shockingly well married, his ship was often mentioned in The Times. 

But times had changed. Since the war, only the holidays had brought them together. This table was a routine that had entrapped them. These dinners, the one spell they couldn’t break. 

“Oh, Strand!” Emilia called. 

Strand turned in time to catch her emerging from the darkness. She’d changed into a gown tailored for dancing. A close bodice and slitted skirt left her lithe limbs unencumbered, while the fretwork climbing from her hips led the eye up to a crown of roses. The roses were a masterwork confection. Their petals were quite real, but their thorns were chocolate, spiked. Strand could see Hallam several steps behind her, stripping a stem between deft fingertips.

“Won’t you dance, Strand?” Emilia said, extending her hand. “I think it’s almost tragic for a man not to dance at his own party.” 

Strand reached for his drink. His fingers grazed the cup’s chipped rim but did not grasp it. “Did you hear her, Hallam?” he said. “The lady wants to dance.” 

“The lady,” Hallam said, chewing on a chocolate thorn, “has danced my feet clean off already. I’m drafting you for the war.” 

“War,” Strand said. He barked a hollow laugh and rose unsteadily. “What do either of you know of war?” 

“Hear, hear!” the admiral growled, stamping his cane in time with the birds. 

“I know it means I cannot write,” Emilia said. “Can there possibly be more?” 

Strand shook his head, and together they glided out onto the lawn. Shadows wheeled around them, but they were followed by a beam of moonlight, a silver glow that softened Strand’s fraught features. 

Emilia said, “Strand, what do you think about the junta, truly? Your father supported the regime, so tell me. Why won’t they let me write, or let Inigo bloom his sculptures? If Hallam’s struck by just the mood, so that all that he can bear to do is sing, what difference does it make if it’s him doing the singing, or one of your trained birds?” 

“My birds were trained before the war,” Strand said. 

“Were they, really?” 

He shrugged. “If Valere asks.” 

Her smile was a sweet reward, cousin to the roses that wreathed her hair. Strand plucked one, tucking it into his ascot. 

“I’ve always wondered at that distinction,” he said slowly. “It seems ridiculous, I know, but I’ve come to realize it’s a matter of control. Denial is the surest way to harness any man’s—” he dipped his head, “or woman’s, soul. By the same token, imagination is the only way to free it. In some contexts, that’s enough to make your art into a weapon. 

“The junta knows this. It pursues its goal—pacification—with a singular intensity, a passion born out of proscribed desires. I’m no artist, but I believe that similar passions must exult the soul in art as much as war; art merely comes into its power later. Art needs time to be understood. The decades wear art’s edges clean, and pare the artist into a safer, sanitized ideal, the bare essence of a thing that, in its youth, was covered in too many thorns.”

Strand spun her, and by the time Emilia had completed her pirouette he held the rose between his teeth. Chocolate thorns dissolved on his tongue tastelessly and she laughed. 

“And war? Does war not have its thorns?” 

“All war has is thorns,” Strand said, tossing the bare stem away. “But at first war’s thorns are its strength, and then, like art’s, they fade away. We remember all war’s victories, whitewash its horrors and defeats. Take your hulks—hang them up in orbit and we’d never see the scars that undergird their beauty. They’d be too far away, remote not just in time, but distance. On a long enough scale, you might even see that art and war are symbiotic. Flash forward a hundred years, to generations that have grown up in the shadow of your monument, and the boys who once cried gazing up at In Memoriam would be the same ones to ration our next genius.” 

Emilia shivered. The birds sang slower, and Hallam waltzed by on his cantatrice’s arm. 

“That’s mad,” Emilia said. “They should have you write an op-ed in The Times.”

“Ah, Ms. Tennyson,” Strand said. “But who would lend me their word ration, hmm?” 

They turned a silent circle, then. Strand’s world narrowed to the dewing lawn, the candled banquet tables, the manse glowering above. 

He waited for a question that none of them would ever ask. He wanted Emilia to say, “You’re so different than I remember.” He wanted Hallam, on his next stately procession, to whisper “My God, Strand, are you still sober?” 

Instead, Strand froze on that dark, foot trammeled lawn, listening to the sounds of distant fireworks and closer quarrels, the tiny, half-drawn dramas that were soon to be dispelled by dawn. He saw his servants staring spellbound at the slate gray clouds, and he heard, above the fragile music, the first astonished outburst of the admiral’s applause. 

***

They came in tight chevrons and loose squadrons, starfighters strafing in their finger-fours, while above them rode the sickled outline of the light cruiser Valkyrja, flagship of the home-defense fleet. Strand clapped. They all clapped. The old admiral even shed a patriotic tear; his ex-wife had once famously remarked that he loved nothing better than parades. 

“My cousin is the commodore,” Strand explained. Emilia’s arm was still locked tight in his, though the night had brought them back to the banquet table, and Hallam had pilfered another of her roses. 

“But still! The birds, the flyover…How did you dare?” 

“It’s simple,” Strand said. “I invited Valere. Look at his waistline. Proscribed or not, that man has passions. Especially for things drenched in the properly patriotic perfumes.” 

“Cologne,” said Emilia. “A real patriot would wear cologne.” 

Strand made a show of sniffing the air. “Then I’m afraid, my dear,” he said, “that I’ve smelled out your heresy.” 

Servants pulled out chairs and the pair sat, considering each other. Around the banquet’s fading edges, the demimonde danced on. Top hats and flaring petticoats fuzzed into a fugue. 

“What will you do when the war is over?” Emilia asked suddenly. “I know that we’re not meant to talk about it, but your birds aren’t meant to sing. It’s New Year’s Eve, Strand. Lets throw caution to the wind, and be honest for a change.” 

Strand shuddered. He mouthed the words, “After the war,” but couldn’t say them. 

“I—,” he said. “I…” 

“Oh Hallam, you idiot!”

And Strand turned to see the night dissolving. Beyond the banquet tables, his party had faded to a silvered shell. Shots of twilight-esque distortion shimmered through his many guests, fracturing the demimonde into solemn, solitary creatures, isolated figures that danced on though the music had stopped playing. Inigo, the floral-figurist, burst into a bed of roses, reproductions of the flowers that still wreathed Emilia’s hair—flowers that she trampled on the way to her young lover. So too went the servants and coquettes, the rakes wandering the garden maze. In a moment all were gone, winking out like the lights in the mansion’s broad bay windows. 

“Hallam, you idiot!” Emilia screamed again. The scene had died down to the banquet table, Strand frozen at one end and a melee at the other. 

It was just some stupid quarrel, Strand thought. Drunk on champagne and spiked thorns, Hallam had pushed a point too far, and come to blows with Admiral Valere. The boy went down slurring mangled rhetoric, while the old boar swung his fat cane, braying. 

It was over inside a minute: the fight, the party. All of it. Strand found himself astonished—for a second time—that events could change so fast. That one night he could be consumed by art, affairs, and music, and the next—

The next, he could have nothing. No one. 

Amidst disembodied cries of “Again, next year?” and “To Christmas in the Hun’s capital!” Strand raced across the grounds to Hallam and Emilia. They huddled together beneath heroic statues of his ancestors: a father in the foreign service, grandfathers who had fought in different wars. 

Crouching at their side, Strand said, “What would you have done, Ms. Tennyson? Without this world, without its rationing, would you still craft your constellations? If the war dropped all its claims on you, how would you spend your perfect peace?” 

Her answer was an empty gaze. The color leached out of her roses, and out of Hallam’s beautiful brocade, and together they burnt up, swirling into a smoky bruise that was quickly dispelled by the breeze. 

Strand whirled back to Admiral Valere. The old boar gave a rictus laugh and slumped back against the banquet table. His flesh decayed before Strand’s eyes. He became gaunt and dessicated, a mummy decked in golden braid, drowning beneath the dirty dishes of a hundred makeshift meals.  

“Do you remember their faces?” Strand cried. “I do!”

But the dead man didn’t answer, and his silence became deafening. The wind gusted, hurling the thin panels of Strand’s hastily assembled holosuite down to coat the lawn. Beyond that shattered shell there crept the cautious vanguard of the sun, and the dark towers of the ruined city turned to cliffs that penned the dying night.

“Next year, then,” Strand said. “Next year, friends! We’ll Christmas in the Hun’s dear capital!” 

Strand tossed his empty glass into the remnants of the garden maze and staggered forward as if drunk, searching through the fallen holopanels for some final, friendly face, a glimpse of Hallam or Emilia, even a grasper from the demimonde. 

All were gone. Their reconstructions had cost Strand a year, a year spent scraping, saving, dreaming, unable to ration the products of his starving soul. 

“Next year,” Strand said, still searching. “She’ll have an answer for me next year. I’ll write it for her, if I have to!”

And in that solemn, sacred silence Strand scrounged on alone, unaware he’d lost the birdsong, unaware he’d lost the trees.