A Race to Pleasure

01/Jan/2181

The Great Millennium Hall made up almost a third of the side of the vast ship. Its facing window, of almost thirty-thousand square meters was, it was said, twenty centimetres thick against the vacuum. The hall had been especially reconfigured for the event and a raked orchestra stage, in its half-moon arrangement, was half-depressed into the embroidered floor. This partial depression served to prioritise the view and aided in dwarfing the musicians, almost to the point of irrelevance, by the window behind.

The players were the very finest available, and though they were paid for their excellence, they would also be compensated for their additional composure on this occasion; they would all, save the conductor, miss the spectacle.

Caroline Cattrell had been commissioned to coordinate the programme. This would be the defining project of her career and she had waived any notion that she might retire prematurely on maternity leave. After it was done, her motherhood could play-out in heightened satisfaction.

But her immediate vexation was that of the venue plan. A new one had been drawn up for the reconfiguration but it differed from that of the few ticket-holders at the rear sides. This was clearly unacceptable - it really never should have been issue, let alone remain one just under three hours before it was set to begin.

“Antony. Antony!” He was fiddling about with the green rope partitions.

“Couldn’t you hear me? Anthony - have the seats been sorted yet?” Caroline mourned the new effort required to keep her voice of cheerful calm.

“We haven’t changed the seats - the tickets are in blocks - we’ll just have to keep tabs on them as they come in.”

“No Anthony - I know that! But that just isn’t the acceptable way of doing things.”

“What do you want me to do Caroline? - we’ve got the discrepancies written up - we’ve got it covered.” If Anthony had one skill beyond all else it was to convey what appeared to be unbridled competence through the smile of his eyes. Caroline felt deceived by them.

“I really don’t have the time to be sorting out these kind of things now. Look, Anthony - it’s perfectly doable - you say we know what the discrepancies are - just send out a message to the affected ticket holders with their new numbers. Why has no one done that?” His face - and again! - cocky and sympathetic - how did his expression manage that? He explained, in his cockily sympathetic manner:

“No, it’s the ticket codes - we need to see the physical ticket codes before we can reallocate the numbers.” Caroline’s whole face ached in frustration.

“Get Simon on it. Get him to compare the original ticket allocations with the seat numbers. Leave the ropes - they look perfect to me - jump on whatever Simon’s doing, ok?”

“Alright Caroline, alright.” She left him.

An hour before the event, the great ship had manoeuvred into position so that the view through the window was directed towards only the misted gulf of black: misted by starlight. The inverted constellation of Scorpius sported Antares brightly.

At half-past the audience – thankfully – dithered in to resolved seating. Those from the deeper cabins above the waste treatment deck, to those from the outer cabins and suites and the royal suites of suites – they all dithered in. The more important the official, the greater their dither due to the number of greetings that had to be made along the significant distance to their seats on the  front rows. Caroline – who was much more contented now – put the performance on hold for a couple of minutes to facilitate the remainder of the niceties.

It was a rather curious programme to put together – Caroline had been aware of that very early on – because, for all the pieces the orchestra played: ‘Finlandia’, ‘The Hand of Man’, an excerpt from Adès’s ‘In Seven Days’ – all would be received with polite impatience today.  ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’, of which Caroline had had heated exchanges about in the past: You finish with the Wagner, you don’t start with the Wagner!, had on this occasion been programmed by her, as the opener. All focus then was on the finale; there’d be no interval today.

The applause, after each piece grew shorter… and shorter; those on the back rows clapped louder to compensate.

But the finale, finale begun.

Four cellos in modest vibrato collaborated a chord of E-flat major.

The illest in the hall, forgot their coughs and the audience, in their hundreds, flicked their shivering attention across the great window of misted black.

The piece they had all waited for, was of course, Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’

And the flutes, and the clarinets, and the oboes and the horns joined the strings and blazed.

The musicians took pains to ignore bar 328 which they read towards, further down the page; they really shouldn’t have circled it. The lips of damp-faced brass players were pressed against their teeth. None of the players were noticed now – even the conductor brought his eyes away and up to the black.

Notes and bars and passages whipped slowly past – Tchaikovsky could have written anything for all those in that hall knew – it wasn’t really music any more – just noise, or energy, or quantum fabric; it was irrelevant.

Bar 322, bar 323, bar 324…

Two, 50 kilometer long G-wave stations: cosmic microphones were positioned out there and specially configured to broadcast into the surround sound system of the hall.

Bar 325, bar 326, bar 327…

Bar 328. The Millennium hall had become white and all white as 591 kilometres away the first 500 kiloton bomb was detonated. The music continued.

750 kilotons. One megatons. Five megatons. Ten megatons.

55 bars; whiteness rippled with the power of the gods. The audience was silent; like they weren’t there anymore.

Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Ten megatons. Thirty megatons. Fifty megatons.

Fifty megatons. Sixty megatons. Seventy megatons. Eighty megatons. Ninety megatons. A hundred megatons.

The concert was deemed a great success, and it was praised by how fitting it was that, as a celebration of peace, the destruction of the symbols of war was witnessed; transfigured into beauty. It was deemed such a success that the demand for bombs, and for bigger bombs… boomed. They’d be surrounded by tonnes of quarried minerals which would bring shuddering colours, or ripping sparks hundreds of meters long. More and more beautiful; a race to pleasure.

The arms races of earth before had enabled much destruction but none of them came close the destruction brought on by the pleasure race, which – decoupled from the notion of violence – inflated to the point of no return: to the point at which the violent uses of these “fireworks” would once again be rejuvenated.