Five minutes. You’re wasting time. Move.
He entered the largest bedroom, small by modern standards. A window cast a rectangle on the bed. The first person he saw was Angela, the target’s half-sister. Her back was to her father, snuggled in his arms, sleeping soundly.
Brome stood over the family in the dark.
Alois’s round face was drowned in sleep, mustached mouth slightly parted and snoring with a soft buzz. Klara lay on the other side of the bed, breathing evenly. A rocking crib sat flush against the wall, under a gilded mirror. A discarded blanket lay tangled on the wooden floor.
The boy was not in the crib.
Brome walked quietly around the foot of the bed and saw Klara had one possessive arm over a tiny hump under the covers. Only vaguely aware of the time ticking down in his visor’s HUD, and the blinking recall switch, Brome stood and stared at the mother and her newborn child.
—And knew without a doubt he wouldn’t have been able to do this if he hadn’t already been desensitized to it a hundred times.
That’s why Hannah ran so many sims. She wanted me inured to killing a child in its mother’s arms. Even him.
Klara’s already lost three: one within a few days of birth, two to diphtheria.
Now she’ll lose a son because of me: a specter from a parallel history, supported by science and technology even I don’t fully understand. For reasons she would never believe, never accept. (Do I?) Have her wake up with a dead baby in her arms? I won’t do that to any mother, for any reason. Hannah be damned.
Take him to the crib and do it there.
I vow. I vow.
He placed his palm against the side of Klara’s neck. A needle slid from his gloved thumb and pierced her skin. She opened her eyes, startled, blinked several times, closed them again. She was deeply asleep again within seconds.
Brome carefully removed the embroidered quilt, revealing the target. He slipped his hands under the tiny body and lifted the infant into a gleaming chink of moonlight. Adolfus whimpered, his tiny red fists clenched to his chest, mouth a red bow. The dark hair on his head was fine and thick. Long eyelashes brushed ruddy cheeks.
Brome stared raptly at the boy nestled in the crook of his arm, trying to equate this baby to the incalculable horrors of his own past and the future looming vast for the world of this domain. Oblivious to the passing time, he stood riveted by the meaning of the life he held in his arms for both worlds. Both histories. Himself.
He placed a second thumb-needle against the baby’s neck, preparing to release a toxin that would shut down the child’s respiration.
Joseph, you did this for me. You knew. That’s why you found me in Athens.
I am the only man who can set right what was never meant to happen: the dissolution of my own humanity, my own soul.
I don’t have to shatter the world if I can make it better, make it mean something again to be human. Only I hold the key to do that. One universe healed, another grappling with a more difficult lesson. I, locked in the middle.
To heal a wound in a history that never should have happened—on any world. Brome believed that now. Looking at the boy, he knew it was frighteningly true: he was the only person in history who could set things right.
I’m not neglecting the past, he told himself. I’m affirming it. Forgiveness can’t be an esoteric concept. If so, our grip on humanity is lost and we can never find the true depth of the human heart.
The suit’s software alerted him. Sixteen minutes had passed. Only four left.
Four! Heart racing, he backed out of the master bedroom and hurried through the parlor. Oh God, oh God. Descending to the ground floor, he held the child close. The boy was beginning to wake, fussily. Brome opened the com channel in his HUD. Voice shaky with muffled disbelief in his helmet: “I’ve done it, I’ve done it. I have him….”
There was no interim during which he was aware of transfer to his side of the domain wall. One fraction of a second he was in the gloom of Pommer Inn—then reclining in the pilot’s chair, clutching the screaming baby while the top half of the ovoid chamber cracked open and lifted, flooding light into his face. Attendants fell on him, downloading the visual record, stripping off helmet, gloves, battery pack, plastic oxygen tank.
Brome stepped off the dais, barely aware of the screams of disbelief reverberating in the lab. People clustered around him, keeping a careful distance from the squalling infant. Hannah gaped unbelievingly at what he carried. Gibli elbowed his way through the crowd, felt the tiny body with his hands and gasped.
Tears spilled shamelessly down Brome’s face. “I couldn’t do it, Joseph. God help me, I couldn’t do it.” His voice broke. “I’m only human.”
The child wailed, tiny fists waving.
Brome, his sense of wonder vast at the infant in his arms, looked up, dazed. And all Humanity, and the histories of worlds gone mad and other worlds healed, and the faces of millions always important, towered like mountains over the event-chain he called life, thundering, thundering.
Copyright © 2002 K. Mark Hoover
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K. Mark Hoover is a writer living in Mississippi. He has published over a half dozen fiction and non-fiction articles and is the contest administrator for the Moonlight & Magnolia Fiction Writing Contest. The contest is open to new writers of genre fiction. He is married and has three children.
Capturing the Musical Essence: A Look at the Scores for Harry Potter and The Fellowship of the Ring
By C. A. Casey
2/25/02
Comparing the soundtracks to the movies, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has become something of an Olympic event among reviewers. The reason may be in part because the films were released within a couple of months of each other surrounded by a lot of hype and eager anticipation. But a more important reason is that the books the films are based on have strong, loyal readerships that have put added pressure on the filmmakers to be as true to the written word as possible.
In attempts to capture the essence of the written word on film, filmmakers focus on elements such as dialogue, plot, and setting. They are also aware of how each reader converts the descriptions of characters and worlds into images and sounds within their minds while reading the books. Secondary to this is the cinematic device used to enhance the other elements in the film—the background music. Background music is not something our minds conjure up when reading—unless the music is a part of the text itself. Yet, more often than not, the presence of background music in film adaptations of books is an important contributor to the success of those adaptations.
Spinning Sound Out of Silence
The composition of the score is the only aspect of film adaptation of books for which the adapter can’t go back to the source material to find specific examples. The only exception is when music is mentioned or performed in the books and even these most often don’t go into the depth of detail needed to give a composer a clear aural impression.
When a setting or an object or a character is described in a book, we may quibble on the minute details, but if the author does a good job with the descriptions, there is usually very little dispute over the broader visual images. A hundred different artists can come up with a hundred different interpretations of what a hobbit looks like, but the images will have enough in common with the descriptions in the works of Tolkien to make each image recognizable as a hobbit. But what happens if a hundred different composers tackle the following passage from The Fellowship of the Ring?
Then it seemed to Frodo that she lifted her arms in a final farewell, and far but piercing-clear on the following wind came the sound of her voice singing. But now she sang in the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea, and he did not understand the words: fair was the music, but it did not comfort him.
The resulting music from these hundred composers will have nothing about it that shouts to the listener that it depicts anything from The Lord of the Rings, much less a specific passage. Even the use of Tolkien’s Elven lyrics would not invoke the same “that’s what it was like in the book” reaction that visual images could invoke.
The musical references in the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone are mostly of school or holiday songs imbued with the flavor of England. One delightful moment in the book is when Albus Dumbledore invites the students to pick their favorite tune and sing the words of the school song to it. When the song is complete he responds with, “Ah, music. A magic beyond all we do here!” This is a musical moment that would bring tears of delight to Charles Ives’ eyes and also one of the few musical moments depicted in a book that can be interpreted by a hundred different composers and still be recognized as being from Harry Potter.