Songmaster (7 page)

You are eight years old, Esste said silently. You might as well be a crusty old eighty.

They saw Bog by daylight.

“Name?” asked Ansset.

“The city is on the estuary of the River Salway. Most of the land is only a few centimeters above sea level, and it is constantly trying to sink into the sea.” She showed him how architecture had adapted to the conditions. Every building had a main entrance opening onto air on every floor. As the building sank, the entrance on the next floor up came into use. There were buildings whose tops were only a few feet above street level—usually, other buildings had already been built atop them.

The lighted signs were off in the daytime, and very few people were on the streets. “As dismal as Step,” Ansset said.

“Except that it comes alive at night.”

“Does it?”

Litter was inches deep on the streets in some places. Sweepers sucked their way through the city, roaring as they chewed up the trash. The few people on the streets looked as if they had had a hard night—or were up after very little sleep. It had been a carnival the night before; today the city was a cemetery.

A park. They sat on a massit that contoured itself to fit their bodies within a few moments. An old woman sat not far off, dangling her feet in a pond. She was holding a string that led off into the water. Beside her an ugly eel occasionally twitched. She was whistling.

Her melody was harsh, untuneful, repetitive. Ansset began singing the same tune, in the same pitch—high, wavering, uncertain. He matched her, waver for waver, sour note for sour note. And then, abruptly, he sang a dissonance that grated painfully. The old woman turned around, heaving her huge stomach off her lap as she did. She laughed, and her breasts bounced up and down. “You know the song?” she called.

“Know it!” cried Ansset. “I wrote it!”

She laughed again. Ansset laughed with her, but his laugh was a high imitation of hers, great gasps and little, loud bursts of sound. She loved hearing his laugh as much as her own—since it was her own. “Come here!” she called.

Ansset came to her, and Esste followed, unsure whether the old woman meant well for the boy. Unsure until she spoke again.

“New here,” she said. “I can tell who’s new here. This your mother? A beautiful boy. Don’t let go of him tonight. He’s pretty enough to be a catamite. Unless that’s what you have in mind, in which case I hope you turn into an eel, speaking of which would you like to buy this one?”

The eel, as if to display its charms, twisted obscenely.

“It isn’t dead yet,” Ansset commented.

“They take hours to die. Which is fine with me. The longer they wiggle the more they pee and the better they taste. This pond’s full of them. Connects right up with the sewer system. They live in the sewer. Along with worse things. Bog produces more turds than anything else, enough to keep a million of these things alive. And as long as they’re around, I won’t starve.” She laughed again, and Ansset laughed with her, then briefly took her laugh and turned it into a mad song that made her laugh even harder. It took Control for Esste not to laugh with her.

“The boy’s a singer.”

“The boy has many gifts.”

“Songhouse?” asked the woman.

Better to lie. “They wouldn’t take him. I told them he had talent, genius even, but their damned tests wouldn’t find a genius if he sang an aria.”

“That’s fine enough. Plenty of market for singers around here, and not the Songhouse type, you can bet. If he’s willing to take off his clothes, he can make a fortune.”

“We’re just visiting.”

“Or there are even places where he could earn plenty by putting them on. All kinds here. But you
are
from out of town. Everybody knows you don’t go into the parks in the daytime. Not enough police to patrol them. Even the monitors do no good—only a few men and women to watch them, and they’re sleepy from the night before anyway. The night’s alive, but the daytime’s deadly. It’s a saying.”

The singsong in her voice had said as much. But Ansset apparently couldn’t resist. He took the words and sang them several times, each time funnier than the last. “The night’s alive, but the daytime’s deadly.”

She laughed. But her eyes got serious quickly. “It’s all right here on the edge. And they never bother me. But you be careful.”

Ansset picked up the eel, looked at it calmly. The eel’s eyes looked desperate. Ansset asked, “How does it taste?”

“How else? All it eats is shit. It tastes like shit.”

“And you eat it?”

“Spices, salt, sugar—I can take eel and make it taste like almost anything. Still terrible, but at least not eel. Eel’s a flexible meat. You can bend it and twist it into whatever you want.”

“Ah,” said Ansset.

To the old woman, his
ah
meant nothing. To Esste, it said, I am an eel to you. It said, You can bend me, but I will strain against the bending.

“Let’s go,” said Esste.

“A good idea,” said the old woman. “It isn’t safe here.”

“Good-bye,” said Ansset. “I’m glad I met you.” He sounded so glad to meet her that she was surprised, and smiled with more than mirth as they left.

“This is boring,” Ansset said. “There must be more to see than this.”

Esste looked at him in surprise. When she had come here as an incipient Songbird, the shows with their dancing and singing and laughing were a marvelous surprise to her. She had not thought Ansset would be so easily satiated.

“Where should we go, then?”

“Behind.”

“Behind what?”

He did not answer. He had already left his seat and was sliding out between the rows. A woman reached out and patted his shoulder. He ignored her completely and moved on. Esste tried to catch up, but he fit better through the crowds in the aisles as people constantly moved in and out. She saw him dart out the door where the waiters came and went. Esste, having no choice, followed. Where was the fear and shyness of strangers that normally kept children from the Songhouse in line?

She found him with the cooks. They laughed and joked with him, and he echoed their laughs and their mood and made it happier as he talked virtual nonsense to them. They loved it. “Your son, lady?”

“My son.”

“Good boy. Wonderful boy.”

Ansset watched as they cooked. The heat in the kitchen was intense. The cook explained as he worked. “Most places use quick ovens. But here, we go for the old flavors. The old ways of cooking. It’s our specialty.” Sweat dripped from Ansset’s chin; his hair stuck to his forehead and neck in sweaty curls. He seemed not to notice it, but Esste noticed, and in tones that meant she intended to be obeyed she said, “We’re going.”

Ansset offered no resistance, but when she started leading him to the door they had entered from, he unerringly headed toward another exit. It led to a loading dock. Loaders looked at them curiously, but Ansset was humming a mindless tune and they left him alone.

Beyond the dock an indoor street serviced all the buildings of that area. It was a city within the city: all the fronts outside glittering for the visitors, the gamers, the funseekers, while behind the buildings, within the buildings the loaders, the cooks, the waiters, the servants, the managers, the entertainers passed back and forth, rode in shabby taxis, emptied garbage. It was the ugliness that all the pleasure of Bog generated, hidden from the paying customers behind walls and doors that said Employees Only.

Esste could barely keep up with Ansset. She made no pretense of directing him now. He had found this place, and it was his music that kept at bay those who might have stopped them. She had to stay with him; wanted to stay with him, for she was excited by the discoveries he made, much more excited than he let himself appear to be.

A garbage-processing station; a whoreshop; an armored car loading that hour’s receipts from a gambling establishment; a dentist who specialized in fixing the teeth of those who had to smile and didn’t want to take more than a few minutes off work; a rehearsal for a slat show; and a thousand loaders bringing in food and taking out garbage.

And a morgue.

“You’re not allowed in here,” said the embalmer, but Ansset only smiled and said, “Yes we are,” and sang unshakable confidence. The embalmer shrugged and went on with his work. And soon he began talking as he went. “I clean ’em,” he said. The bodies came in on a conveyor. He rolled them off onto a table, where he slit the abdomen and removed the guts. “Rich folks, poor folks, winners, losers, players, workers, they dies a hundred a night in this city, and here we cleans ’em up pretty so they’ll keep. All the guts is the same. All the stinks is the same. Naked as babies.” The guts went into a bag. He filled the cavity with a stiff plastic wool and sewed up the skin with a hooked needle. It took only ten minutes for one body. “Another one does the eyes, and another one does visible wounds. I’m a specialist.”

Esste wanted to leave. Pulled on Ansset’s arm, but Ansset wouldn’t go. He watched four bodies come by. The fourth one was the old woman from the park. The embalmer had just about run out of chat. He cut open the huge stomach. The stench was worse. “I hate the fat ones,” said the embalmer. “Always having to hold the fat out of the way. Slows me down. Gets me behind.” He had to reach over mounds of flesh to reach the bowels, and he swore when he broke them. “Fat ones makes me clumsy.”

The woman’s face was set in a grimace that might have been a grin. Her throat had been slit.

“Who killed her?” asked Ansset, his face and voice showing no emotion beyond curiosity.

“Anyone. How should I know? Just a deader. Could have been killed for anything. But she’s a poor one, all right. I know the smell. Eats eels. If the killers hadn’t got her, the cancer would’ve. See?” He pulled up the stomach, which was distended and putrified by a huge tumor. “So fat she didn’t know she had it. Would have finished her off soon enough.”

It took the embalmer several tries and stronger thread before he could tie the abdomen back together again. In the meantime another body passed on the conveyor. “Damn,” he said. “There’ll be complaints tonight, that’s for sure. Another missed quota. I hate the fat ones.”

“Let’s go
now
,” said Esste, deliberately letting her Control slip enough that he would be surprised into moving. He let her lead him to the indoor street.

“Enough,” Esste said. “Let’s go.”

“She was wrong,” Ansset answered.

“Who?”

“The woman. She was wrong. They wouldn’t let her alone.”

“Ansset.”

“This has been a good trip,” Ansset said. “I’ve learned a lot.”

“Have you?”

“Pleasure is like making bread. A lot of hot, nasty work in the kitchen for a few swallows at the table.”

“Very good.” She tried to lead him away.

“No, Esste. You can ban me at the Songhouse, but you can’t ban me here.” And he broke away from her and ran to the backstage entrance of a theatre. Esste followed, but she was not young, and though she had made an effort to stay in shape, a woman of her age could not hope to overtake a child determined to escape. She was lucky to stay close enough to see where he went.

An orchestra was playing to a full hall, and a woman on the stage was dancing nude. An equally naked man waited in the wings. Ansset stood behind one of the illusions, rigid as he sang. His voice was clear and loud, and the woman heard it and stopped dancing, and soon the members of the orchestra began hearing it and stopped playing. Ansset stepped through the illusion and walked out onto the stage, still singing.

Ansset sang to them what they had been feeling, what the orchestra had been pathetically incompetent to satisfy. He sang lust to them, though he had never experienced it, and they grew passionate and uncontrollable, audience and orchestra and the naked woman and man. Esste grieved inwardly as she watched it. He will give them everything they want.

But then he changed his song. Still without words, he began telling them of the sweating cooks in the kitchen, of the loaders, of the dentist, of the shabbiness behind the buildings. He made them understand the ache of weariness, the pain of serving the ungrateful. And at last he sang of the old woman, sang her laugh, sang her loneliness and her trust, and sang her death, the cold embalming on a shining table. It was agony, and the audience wept and screamed and fled the hall, those who could control themselves enough to stand.

Ansset’s voice penetrated to the walls, but did not echo.

When the hall was empty, Esste walked out onto the stage. Ansset looked at her with eyes as empty as the hall.

“You eat it,” said Esste, “and you vomit it back fouler than before.”

“I sang what was in me.”

“In you? None of this ever got in you. It came to the walls and you threw it back.”

Ansset’s gaze did not swerve. “I knew you would not know it when I sang from myself.”

“It was you that did not know,” Esste said. “We’re going home.”

“I was to have a month.”

“You don’t need a month here. Nothing here will change you.”

“Am I an eel?”

“Are you a stone?”

“I’m a child.”

“It’s time you remembered that.”

He offered no resistance. She led him to the hotel, where they gathered their things and left Bog before morning. It all failed, Esste thought. I had thought that the mixture of humanity here would open him. But all he found was what he already had. Inhumanity. An impregnable wall. And proof that he can do to people whatever he wants.

He had read the audience of strangers too well. It was something that had never happened at the Songhouse before. Ansset was not just a brilliant singer. He could hear the songs in people’s hearts without their having to sing; could hear them, could strengthen them, could sing them back with a vengeance. He had been forced into the mold of the Songhouse, but he was not made of such malleable stuff as the others. The mold could not fit.

What will break? Esste wondered. What will break first?

She did not for a moment believe it would be the Songhouse. Ansset, for all his seeming strength, was far more fragile than that. If he goes to Mikal like this, Esste realized, he will do the opposite of all my plans for him. Mikal is strong, perhaps strong enough to resist Ansset’s perversion of his gift. But the others: Ansset would destroy them. Without meaning to, of course. They would come to drink again and again at his well, not knowing it was themselves they drank until they were dry.

He slept in the bus. Esste put her arms around him, held him, and sang the love song to him over and over in his sleep.