Songmaster (8 page)

“I haven’t time for this,” Esste said, allowing her voice to sound irritated.

“Neither have I,” Kya-Kya answered defiantly.

“The schools on Tew are excellent. Your stipend is more than adequate.”

“I have been accepted at the Princeton Government Institute.”

“It will cost ten times as much to support you on Earth. Not to mention the cost of getting you there. And the inconvenience of having to give it to you in a lump sum.”

“You earn ten times that amount from a single year’s payment on a Songbird.”

True enough. Esste sighed inwardly. Too much today. I was not ready to face this girl. What Ansset has not taken from me, exhaustion has. “Why Earth?” she asked, knowing that Kya-Kya would recognize the question as the last gasp of resistance.

“Earth, because in my field I’m a Songbird. I know that’s hard for you to admit, that someone can actually do something excellent that isn’t singing, but—”

“You can go. We will pay.”

The tone of voice was dismissal. The very abruptness and unconcern of it made her victory feel almost like a letdown. Kya-Kya waited for a few moments, then went to the door. Stopped. Turned around and asked, “When?”

“Tomorrow. Have the bursar see me.”

Esste turned back to the papers on her table. Kya-Kya took advantage of her inattention to look around the High Room. I chose you for this place, Kya-Kya thought, trying to feel superior. It didn’t work. It was as Hrrai had said—she made the obvious choice. Anyone who knew the Songhouse would have named Esste to the office.

The room was cold, but at least all the shutters were closed. There were drafts, but no wind. Apparently Esste did not intend to die soon. Kya-Kya looked at the window where she had almost fallen out. With the shutters closed, it was just another window, or part of the wall. The room was not kilometers above the ground; it was as low as any other building; the Songhouse was just a building; she did not care whether she never saw it again, felt no lingering fondness for its stone, refused to dream of it, did not even demean herself by disparaging it to her friends at the university.

Her fingers brushed the stone walls as she left.

Esste looked up at the sound of Kya-Kya’s leaving. Finally gone. She picked up the paper that concerned her far more than the needs of a Deaf who was trying to avenge her failure.

The letter had been transmitted that morning. Twenty-two days. And the worst of it is, Ansset is ready. Ready. Ready.

I am not ready.

Twenty-two days. She pushed a button under the table. “Send Ansset to me.”

Rruk had just entered Stalls and Chambers, right on schedule. She had no power in her voice, but she was a sweet singer, and pleased everyone who heard her. Still, she was afraid. Stalls and Chambers was a greater step than those between Groan and Bell or Bell and Breeze. Here she was one of the youngest, and in her chamber she
was
the youngest. Only one thing helped her forget her timidity—this was the seventh chamber. Ansset’s chamber.

“Will Ansset come?” Rruk asked a boy sitting near her.

“Not today.”

Rruk did not show her disappointment; she sang it.

“I know,” said the boy. “But it hardly matters. He never sang here anyway.”

Rruk had heard rumors of that, but hadn’t believed them. Not let Ansset sing? But it was true. And she murmured a song of the injustice of Ansset’s banning.

“Don’t I know it,” said the boy. “I once sang just such a song in Chamber. My name’s Ller.”

“Rruk.”

“I’ve heard of you. You’re the one who first sang the love song to Ansset.”

It was a bond—they both had given something, even dared something for Ansset. Chamber began then, and their conversation ceased. Ller was part of a trio that day. He took the high part, and did a thin high drone that changed only rarely. Yet it was still the controlling voice in the trio, the center to which the other two voices always returned. By subordinating his own virtuosity, he had made the song unusually good. Rruk liked him even more, for his own sake now, not just for Ansset’s.

After Chamber, without particularly deciding it, they went to Ansset’s stall. “He was called to the Songmaster in the High Room just before Chamber. Perhaps he’ll be back now. Usually Esste comes to him as master, so it may be that she called him up there to lift the ban.”

“I hope so,” Rruk said.

They knocked at Ansset’s door. It opened, and Ansset stood there regarding them absently.

“Ansset,” Ller said, and then fell silent. Any other child they could have asked directly. But Ansset’s long isolation, his unchildlike expression, his apparent lack of interest—they were difficult obstacles to surmount.

When the silence had lasted too long, Rruk blurted, “We heard you went to the High Room.”

“I did,” Ansset said.

“Is the ban lifted?”

Ansset again looked at them in silence.

“Oh,” said Rruk. “I’m sorry.” Her voice told how sorry.

It was then that Ller noticed that Ansset’s blankets were rolled together.

“Are you leaving?” Ller asked.

“Yes.”

“Where?” Ller insisted.

Ansset went to the blanket, picked it up, and came back to the door. “The High Room,” he said. Then he walked by them and headed down the corridor.

“To live there?” Ller asked.

Ansset did not answer.

“This was not a job for a seeker,” the seeker said. “I know,” Esste answered, and she sang him an apology that pleaded the necessity of the work.

Mollified, the seeker made his report. “I spent the income from a decade of singers getting into the secret files of the child market. Doblay-Me is a simple place to do business. If you have enough money and know whom to give it to, you can accomplish anything.”

“You found?”

“Ansset was kidnapped. His parents are very much alive, would pay almost anything to get him back. And when he was taken, he was old enough to know his parents. To know they didn’t want him to go. Stolen from them at a theatre. The kidnapper I talked to is now a petty government official. Taxes or something. I had to hire some known killers in order to scare him into talking to me. Very unpleasant business. I haven’t been able to sing in weeks.”

“His parents?”

“Very rich. The mother a very loving woman. The father—his songs are more ambiguous. I’m not a great judge of adults, you know that. I haven’t needed to be. But I had the feeling there were guilts in him that he was afraid of. Perhaps he could have done more to get Ansset back. Or perhaps the guilts are for other things entirely. Completely unrelated. According to the law, now that you and I know this, it’s a capital offense not to give the boy back.”

Esste looked at him, sang a few notes, and both of them laughed. “I know,” the seeker said. “Once in the Songhouse, you have no parents, you have no family.”

“The parents don’t suspect?”

“To them their little boy is Byrwyn. I told them that the psychotic child in our hospital on Murrain had the wrong blood type to be their son.”

A knock on the door.

“Who?”

“Ansset,” came the answer.

“May I see him?” the seeker said.

“You may see him. But don’t speak to him. And when you leave, bar the door from the other side. Tell the Blind that I’ll be taking my meals through the machines. No one is to come up. Messages through the computer.”

The seeker was puzzled. “Why the isolation?”

“I am preparing Mikal’s Songbird,” Esste said.

Then she arose and went to the door and opened it. Ansset came in, holding his blanket roll unconcernedly. He looked at the seeker without curiosity. The seeker looked at him, too, but not so unemotionally. Two years of tracing Ansset’s past had given the boy unusual importance in the seeker’s eyes. But as the seeker watched, and saw the emptiness of Ansset’s face, he let himself show grief, and he sang his mourning to Esste, briefly. She had told him not to speak. But some things could not. Should not go unsaid.

The seeker left. The bar dropped into place on the other side of the door. Ansset and Esste were alone.

Ansset stood before Esste for a long time, waiting. But this time Esste had nothing to say. She simply looked at him, her face as blank as his, though because of age some expression was permanently inscribed there and she could not look as empty of personality as he. The wait seemed interminable to Esste. The boy’s patience was greater than most adults’. But it broke, eventually. Still silent, Ansset went to the stone bench beside one of the locked shutters and sat down.

First victory.

Esste was able, now, to go to the table and work. Papers came from the computer, she wrote by hand notes to herself; wrote by keys messages into the computer. As she worked, Ansset sat silently on the bench until his body grew tired and cold. Then he got up, walked around. He did not try the door or the shutters. It was as if he already grasped the fact that this was going to be a test of wills, a trial of strength between his Control and Esste’s. The doors and windows would be no escape. The only escape would be victory.

Outside it grew dark, and the light from the cracks in the shutters disappeared. There was only the light over the table, which almost no one ever saw in use—the illusion of primitiveness was maintained before everyone possible, and only the staff and the Songmasters knew that the High Room was not really so bare and simple as it seemed. The purpose of it was not really illusion, however. The Songmaster of the High Room was invariably someone who had grown up in the chilly stone halls and Common Rooms and Stalls and Chambers of the Songhouse. Sudden luxury would be no comfort; it would be a distraction. So the High Room seemed bare except when necessity required some modern convenience.

Ansset sat in the gloom in a corner of the High Room as Esste finally closed the table and laid out her own blankets on the floor. Her movement gave him permission to move. He spread out his own blankets in the far corner, wrapped himself in them, and was asleep before Esste.

The second day passed in complete silence, as did the third, Esste working most of the day at the computer, Ansset standing or walking or sitting as it pleased him, his Control never letting a sound pass his lips. They ate from the machine in silence, silently went to the toilet in a corner of the room, where their wastes were consumed by an incredibly expensive disturbor in the walls and floor.

Esste found it hard, however, to keep her mind on her work. She had never been so long without music in her life. Never been so long without singing. And in the last few years, she had never passed a day without Ansset’s voice. It had become a vice, she knew—for while Ansset was banned from singing to others in the Songhouse, his voice was always singing in his stall, and they had conversed for hours many times. Her memory of those conversations, however, maintained her resolution. An intellect far beyond his years, a great perception of what went on in people’s minds, but no hint of anything from his own heart. This must be done, she said. Only this can break his walls, she said to herself. And I must be strong enough to need him less than he needs me, in order to save him, she cried to herself silently.

Save him?

Only to send him to the capital of mankind, to the ruler of humanity. If he has not found a way to tap the deep wells of himself by then, Ansset will never escape. There his very closedness would be applauded, honored, adored. His career would be made, but when he came back to the Songhouse at the age of fifteen there would be nothing there. He would never be able to teach; only to sing. And he would be a Blind. That would kill him.

That would kill me.

And so Esste remained silent for three days, and on the fourth night she was wakened from her sleep by Ansset’s voice. He was not awake. But the voice had to come out. In his sleep he was singing, meaningless, random ditties, half of them childish songs taught to new ones and Groans. But in his sleep his Control had broken, just a little.

The fourth day began with complete silence again, as if the pattern could be repeated forever. But sometime during the day Ansset apparently reached a decision, and, when the High Room was warmest in the afternoon, he spoke.

“You must have a reason for your silence, but
I
don’t have a reason for mine except that you’re being silent. So if you were just trying to get me to stop being stubborn and talk, I’m talking.”

The voice was perfectly controlled, the nuances suggesting a
proforma
surrender, but no real recognition of defeat. A slight victory, but only a slight one. Esste showed no notice of the fact that Ansset had spoken. She was grateful, however, not so much because it was another step forward as because it meant she could hear Ansset’s voice again. Ansset speaking with perfect Control was only slightly closer to her objective than Ansset silent with perfect Control.

When she did not answer, Ansset fell silent again, occasionally exercised as before, said nothing for several hours. But at nightfall, when Esste laid out her blanket and Ansset laid out his, he began to sing. Not in his sleep, this time. The songs were deliberately chosen, gentle melodies that pleased Esste very much. They made her feel confident that everything would work out fine, that her worries were meaningless, that Ansset would be fine. After a while they even made her feel that Ansset was already fine, and she had been exaggerating her fears because of her concern for him in the frightening placement he would be facing.

She startled. Her Control gave no outward sign, but inwardly she was furious with herself. Ansset was using his voice on her, using his gift. He had sensed her mood of worry and her wish for peace and was playing on it, trying to put her off her guard.

I’m out of my class, she realized. I’m a Groan trying to sing a duet with a Songbird. How can my silence compare to his singing as a weapon in this battle?

He sang that night for hours, and she lay awake resisting him by concentrating on the problems and concerns of the Songhouse. The pressure from Stivess to open the northwest section, which the Songhouse almost never used, to oil exploration. The complaints by Wood that pirates were using the desert islands in the southwest as bases from which to pillage shipping in the gulf. The question of where to invest the incredible amount the emperor would pay each year to have a Songbird. The damage that would be done when Mikal the Terrible actually received a Songbird and the rest of mankind, to whom the Songhouse had seemed like the one inviolable institution left in the galaxy, lost faith and supposed that for money, or under pressure, even the Songhouse had lowered its standards.

All these thoughts were enough to occupy days and weeks under normal circumstances. But Ansset’s songs played around the edges and while she was no longer trapped by them, she also could not completely escape them. Even after Ansset gave up and went to sleep, she lay awake, dreading the next day. I was worried about how this would affect the boy, she thought ironically. It’s my Control that’s in danger, not his.

Ansset sang to her sporadically through the next day, and she found that, awake, she could resist him better than in the weariness of evening. Yet the resistance took effort, and when evening came she was even more tired than before, and the ordeal was even harder.

But her Control did not break, and while Ansset could sense emotions that her Control hid from others, he apparently did not realize how close he had come to success. On the sixth day he fell silent again, much to her relief. And he showed signs of the tension on him. He exercised more often. He looked at her more often. And he touched the door twice.