Songmaster (28 page)

But she clung to the line and let it draw her in. Because there was another part of her that hadn’t had much play lately: she needed his gentle hands and quiet tears, his lies and his affection. And so she pretended to believe that he really did need her even as she said, “I thought it would come to this, eventually.” She didn’t say that she hadn’t thought that when it happened she would be longing for it, that it would not be a question of fun but rather a question of need, that this half-man would be able to do in one night what no one had been able to do in her life—win enough of her trust that she was willing, even for a moment, to let herself want him.

So she comforted him that night, and, strangely enough, she was also comforted, though she had said nothing to him of her loneliness, had told him nothing of her dreams. As she ran her hands over his smooth skin, she remembered the harsh cold stone of the Songhouse and could not think why the one should have reminded her of the other.

“I will tour the empire next year,” Riktors announced at dinner, and the two hundred prefects gathered at the tables cheered and clapped. It struck Ansset, from his place beside Riktors at the table, that the outburst was largely sincere, an unusual event in the palace. Ansset smiled at Riktors. “They mean it,” he said, for Riktors’s ears only. Riktors’s eyes crinkled a little, enough of a sign that he had heard, had understood. And then the tumult died and Riktors said, “Not only will I tour, and visit at least one world in every prefecture, but also I will bring my Songbird with me, so that all the empire can hear him sing!”

And the cheers were even louder, the applause even more sincere. Riktors looked at Ansset and laughed in delight—the boy looked completely surprised, and Riktors loved to surprise him. It wasn’t easy to do.

But when the room was quiet again, Ansset said, softly, “But I won’t be here next year.”

Enough people heard him that a whisper began along the head table. Riktors tried to keep his expression bland. He knew immediately what the boy meant. It was something that Riktors had forgotten without forgetting. He knew that Ansset was nearly fifteen years old, that the contract with the Songhouse was nearly up. But he had not let himself think of it, had not let himself plan for a future without Ansset beside him.

Riktors looked at Ansset and patted his hand. “We’ll talk about it later,” Riktors said. But Ansset looked worried. He spoke louder this time.

“Riktors,” the boy said, “I’m nearly fifteen. My contract expires in a month.”

Some of the prefects in the audience moaned; most, however, realized that what was being said at the head table was not according to plan. That Ansset was doing what no one dared to do—reminding the emperor of something the emperor did not want to know. They kept their silence.

“Contracts can be renewed,” Riktors said, trying to sound jovial and hoping to be able to change the subject immediately. He did not know how to react to Ansset’s insistence. Why was the boy pushing the matter?

Whatever the reason, he was still determined to push.

“Not mine,” said Ansset. “In two months I get to go home.”

And now everyone in the hall was silent. Riktors sat still, but his hands trembled on the edge of the table. For a moment he refused to understand what Ansset was saying; but Riktors did not become emperor by indulging his need to lie to himself. Go home, the boy had said. His choice of words had to be deliberate—in public Ansset had no inadvertent words.
Get to go home
, not
have to go home
, he had said. And suddenly the last few years were all undone; Riktors felt them unwinding inside him, unraveling, all the fabric turning into meaningless threads that he could not put together however much he tried.

There were countless days of conversation, the songs Ansset had sung to him, walks along the river. They had romped together like brothers, Riktors forgetting all his dignity, and Ansset forgetting—or so Riktors had believed—all the enmity of the past.

Do you love me? Riktors had once asked, opening himself as, with any other person, he could not have afforded to open himself. And Ansset had sung to him of love. Riktors had taken this to mean yes.

And all the time Ansset was marking time, watching for his fifteenth birthday, for the expiration of his contract, for home.

I should have known better, Riktors told himself bitterly. I should have realized that the boy was Mikal’s, would always be Mikal’s, would never be mine. He did not forgive, as I thought he had.

Riktors imagined Ansset returning to the Songhouse on Tew; he pictured him embracing Esste, the hard woman who only looked soft when she looked at the Songbird. Riktors pictured her asking, “How was it, living with the killer?” And he pictured Ansset weeping; no, never weeping, not Ansset. He would remain calm, merely sing to her of the humiliation of singing for Riktors Ashen, emperor, assassin, and pathetic lover of Ansset’s songs. Riktors imagined Ansset and Esste laughing together as they talked of the moment when Riktors, weary of the weight of the empire in his mind, had come to Ansset in the night for the healing of his hands, and had wept before the boy sang a note. A weakling, that’s what I’ve been, in front of a boy who never shows an unwitting emotion; he has seen me unprotected, and instead of loving me he has felt only contempt.

It was just a moment that Riktors sat there silently, but in his mind he progressed from surprise to hurt to humiliation and, at last, to fury. He rose to his feet, and there was no hiding the anger on his face. The prefects were alarmed—it is not wise to witness the embarrassment of powerful men, they all knew, and no one was so powerful as Riktors Mikal.

“You are right!” Riktors said, loudly. “My Songbird has reminded me that in a month his contract expires and he goes, as he says, home. I had thought that this was his home, but now I see that I was mistaken. My Songbird will return to Tew, to his precious Songhouse, for Riktors Mikal keeps his word. But the Songbird, since he obviously holds us in little esteem, will never again see his emperor, and his emperor will never again permit himself to hear his lying songs.”

Riktors’s face was red and tight with pain when he turned and left the dinner. A few of the prefects made some small effort to touch their food; the rest got up immediately, and soon all were headed out of the hall, wondering whether it would be better to stay around to try to show the emperor that they were still as loyal as ever, or to head quickly for their prefectures, so that he and they could all pretend that they had never come, that the scene with Ansset had never taken place.

As they left, Ansset sat alone at the table, looking at but not seeing the food in front of him. He sat that way, in silence, until the Mayor of the palace (the office of Chamberlain had long since been abolished) came to him and led him away.

“Where am I going?” Ansset asked softly.

The Mayor said nothing, only took him into the maze of corridors. It did not take Ansset long to recognize the place they were going to. When Riktors Ashen changed his name and moved into the palace, he had stayed away from Mikal’s old chambers; instead he had established himself in new rooms near the top of the building, with windows that displayed the lawns and forest all around. Now the Mayor led Ansset through doors that once had been guarded by the tightest security measures in the empire, and at last they stood inside the door of a room where an empty fireplace still had ashes on the hearth; where the furniture remained ummoved, untouched; where the years of Mikal’s presence still clung to all the features of the place, to all the memories the room inevitably stirred in Ansset’s mind.

There was a thin layer of dust on the floor, as in all the unused rooms of the palace, which were only cleaned annually, if at all. Ansset walked slowly into the room, the dust rising at each footfall. He walked to the fireplace; the urn that had held Mikal’s ashes still waited beside the opening. He turned back to face the Mayor, who finally spoke.

“Riktors Imperator,” the Mayor said, with the formality of a memorized message, “has said to you, since you were not at home with me, you will stay where you are at home, until the Songhouse sends for you.”

“Riktors misunderstood me,” Ansset said, but the Mayor showed no sign of having heard. He only turned away and left, and when Ansset tried the door, it did not open to his touch.

They spent weekend after weekend in Mexico, the largest city in the hemisphere. Josif went to make the rounds of bookstores—the market in old books and rare books was always hot, and Josif had an eye for bargains, books selling for way under value. He also had an eye for what he wanted—histories that were long out of print, fiction written centuries ago about the author’s own period, diaries and journals. “They say there’s nothing original to be said about the history of Earth, that all the facts have been in for years,” Josif said fiercely. “But that was years ago, and now no one remembers anymore. What it was like to live here then.”

“When?” Kyaren asked him.

“Then. As opposed to now.”

“I’m more interested,” she always told him, “in tomorrow.”

But she wasn’t. Today was all that interested her in the first weeks they spent together. Today because it was the best time she had ever had, and she wasn’t sure that it would last, or that tomorrow would be half as desirable.

Kyaren went to Mexico for the feel of people. Nowhere in Eastamerica, and certainly nowhere in the Songhouse, were there people like those who crowded the sidewalks of Mexico. No vehicles were allowed except the electric carts that brought in goods to the stores; people, individual people, had to walk everywhere. And there were millions of them. And they all seemed to be outside all the time; even in the rain, they sauntered through the streets with the rain sliding easily off their clothing, relishing the feel of it on their faces. This was a city where Kyaren’s hunger could be filled. She knew no one, but loved everyone.

“They sweat,” Josif said.

“You’re too immaculate,” Kyaren answered crossly.

“They sweat and they step on your feet. I see no reason to be in a crowd any more than is unavoidable.”

“I like the sound of them.”

“And that’s the worst of it. Largest city in the world, and they insist on speaking Mexican, a language that has no reason to exist.”

Kyaren only scowled at him. “Why not?”

“They’re only five thousand kilometers from Seattle, for heaven’s sake.
We
managed to talk like the rest of the empire. It’s just vanity.”

“It’s a beautiful language, you know,” she said. “I’ve been learning it, and it opens your mind.”

“And makes your tongue fall out of your mouth.”

Josif had no patience with the eccentricities of his native planet.

“Sometimes I’m embarrassed as hell to be from Earth.”

“The mother globe.”

“These people aren’t real Mexicans. Do you know what Mexicans were? Short and dark! Show me a short dark person out there!”

“Does it matter if they can trace their pedigrees back to the number one Mexican and her husband?” Kyaren demanded. “They
want
to be Mexican. And whenever I come here,
I
want to be Mexican.”

It was a friendly argument that always ended either with them going outside—Kyaren to wander and talk to storekeepers and shoppers, Josif to prowl along the shelves, waiting for a title to make a sudden move so he could pounce—or in bed, where their pursuits more nearly coincided.

It was on a weekend in Mexico that they decided to take over the world.

“Why not the universe?”

“Your ambition is disgusting,” Josif said, lying naked on the balcony because he liked the feel of the rain, which was falling heavily.

“Well, then, we’ll be modest. Where shall we start?”

“Here.”

“Not practical. We have no base of operations.”

“Tegucigalpa, then. We secretly twist all the programs of the computers to follow our every command. Then we cut off everybody’s salaries until they surrender.”

They laughed; it was a game. But a game they played seriously enough to do research. They would hunt for possible weaknesses, places that the system could be subverted. They also worked to get an overview of the system, to understand how it all fit together. Josif knew his way around the government library in Mexico, and they both spent time punching up readouts on the establishment of Tegucigalpa only three hundred-odd years before.

“The thing’s relatively new. Half the functions have only been installed in the last ten years.
Ten years!
And most other planets have been fully computerized for centuries.”

“You’re too down on Earth,” Kyaren chided him, poring over minutes of meetings, which were so heavily edited at their level of clearance that it was hard to get anything coherent out of them at all.

But it was not in Mexico that they found the scam. It was at home.

Kyaren had been reading a book on demographics, one that she had only been able to skim at Princeton. It set norms for age distributions on a planet; she found the information fascinating, especially the variations that depended on local employment, climate, and relative wealth. She amused herself by plotting the demographic distribution of ages for Earth, based on the easily obtained statistics on employment and the economy. Then she took a few minutes of break time at work to check her figures.

They were wrong.

From birth to retirement age at 80, her figures were actually quite good. It was from 80 to 100 that things didn’t work.

Not enough people were dying at those ages.

In fact, she realized, almost
no one
was dying, compared to the normal mortality rates. And then, from 100 to 110, they died like flies, so that from 110 on the statistics were normal.

Surely someone would have noticed this before, Kyaren thought. Certainly the Earth would have gained a reputation for unusually low mortality rates. It had to be common knowledge—the food distribution must certainly be affected by it, and pension expenses must be unusually high. Scientists must be trying to discover the reason for the phenomenon.

And yet she had never heard of it at all.

In the programming manuals they had looked at in the library in Mexico, Kyaren had found some little-known programs that allowed an operator to check a program rather than use it to find and process data. Kyaren talked to Josif about it that night, which they spent in his place because it was larger and had room for both of them without having to petition for extra furniture, which would have made their arrangement public knowledge.

“I’ve checked my figures again and again, and they’re not wrong.”

‘Well, the only way to solve it is go kill some old people, I guess,” Josif said, reading a twenty-third-century mystery—in translation, of course.

“Josif, it’s wrong. Something’s wrong.”

“Kyaren,” he said, impatient but trying not to sound like it, “this is a game we were playing. We really don’t have any responsibility for the whole world. Just for dead people and the not-quite-dead. And then just as numbers.”

“I want to find out if the figures on death are right or not.”

Josif closed the book. “Kyaren, the figures on death are right. That’s
my
job, isn’t it? I do death.”

“Then check and see if my figures are right.”

He checked. Her figures were right.

“Your figures are right. Maybe the book’s wrong.”

“It’s been the bible of demographics for three centuries. Someone would have noticed by now.”

Josif opened the book again. “Damned Earth. The people don’t even know when to die.”

“You must have noticed it,” Kyaren said. “You must have seen that most of your deaths were grouped between a hundred and a hundred and ten.”

“I’ve never noticed anything like that. We deal with individuals, not the aggregate. We terminate files, you know? We don’t watch trends.”

“I just want to check some things. You know that program we found on checking entries? The error-finder?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember the numbers?”

“Kyaren, you’re not being very good company.”

Together they figured out the numbers and codes; Kyaren left for a few minutes and verified them on the local library terminal by hunting up her last library use. The program worked fine; it was quite simple, in fact, which was why they were able to remember it.

The next day, during a break, Kyaren punched in a date-of-entry query on the solitary death in Quong-yung district—she figured a single death would be simpler, would give her a single readout. What should have flashed on her screen was the date of entry, the name of the operator who entered the death information, the vital statistics entered on that date on that person, and the operation number.

Instead, what flashed on was the bright
RESTRICTED
sign and what sounded was a loud buzzer at Warvel’s desk.

Everyone looked up immediately, watched as Warvel got up quickly, looking alarmed. Kyaren knew that on his desk her area was flashing; sure enough, when he located the culprit he slammed his hand on the desk and charged furiously over to her.

“What the bloody hell are you doing, Kyaren!” he bawled as he came over.

What should she tell him—that she was playing a game of plotting to take over the world? That she was double-checking the figures because they didn’t jibe with her own calculations?

“I don’t know,” she said, letting herself sound as surprised and flustered as she felt. “I was just playing with the thing. Just punching in random numbers and words, I don’t know.”

“
Which
random numbers and words?” he demanded, leaning over her terminal.

“I don’t remember,” she lied. “It was just whimsical.”

“It was just
stupid
,” he said back to her. “There are programs here that if you just randomly and
whimsically
happened to stumble on them, they’d freeze the whole operation until the stinking
police
came to find out who’s trying to jury the system. You understand? This system is
foolproof
, but we don’t need any extra fools trying to prove it!”

She apologized profusely, but as he returned, unmollified, to his desk, she realized that he had seemed not so much angry as afraid. And the others in the room, as Warvel returned to his desk, looked at her sullenly, angrily—and, also, fearfully.

What had she done?

“Kyaren,” Warvel said as she left the office at the end of the working day. “Kyaren, your four-month report is coming up in a few days. I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a negative report.”

Kyaren was stunned. “Why?” she asked.

“You haven’t been working. You’ve been obviously loafing. It’s bad for morale, and it’s downright dishonest.”

“When have I loafed?” she asked. A negative report now, on her first job—especially one this easy—could destroy her hope of a government career.

“I have complaints from fourteen people. Every single person in this office except you and me, Kyaren. They’re tired of watching you playing games. Studying up on ancient history and playing computer games when you should be trying to help old people cope with inflation and the fluctuations of the economy. We aren’t here for fun, Kyaren, we’re here to help people. Do you understand?”

She nodded. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“I’ll give you a negative report, but I won’t fire you unless there’s any more trouble. You understand? Three years of perfect work and you get the negative report taken off your record. It’s something you can live down—if you just stick to business in the future.”

She left. At home Josif was appalled.

“Fourteen complaints?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Kyaren, you could have an intimate sexual relationship with a lamp in the middle of the lunchroom and you’d have a hard time getting
three
complaints!”

“What do they have against me?” she asked.

Josif’s face grew somber. “Me,” he said.

“What?”

“Me. You had problems enough. Adding me to them—do you know how many women have tried to get me into bed? There’s something about a known homosexual that’s irresistible to a certain kind of woman. They regard him as a challenge. Me as a challenge. And then you come along and suddenly we’re spending weekends together. The ones that aren’t jealous are probably revolted to think of what perverted things I must be making you do.”

“It isn’t you.”

“Then what is it?”

“They’re afraid.”

“Of what?”

“How should I know?”

Josif got up from the bed, went to the door, leaned on it. “Kyaren, it’s me. We’ve got to stop. When you leave tonight that’s it.”

He sounded sincere. She wondered why even the thought of leaving him and not coming back made her feel as if she were falling from someplace very high.

“I’m not leaving tonight,” she said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

“No. For your own good.”

She laughed incredulously. “My own good!”

He looked at her from the door, his face very serious.

“My own good is to stay right here.”

He shook his head.

“Do you really mean this?” she asked, unbelieving. “Just like that, you decide I’m supposed to go because
you
think it’ll be better for
me?
”

“Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it,” he said.

And they started laughing and he came back to the bed and suddenly they weren’t laughing, just holding each other and realizing that this wasn’t something they could simply end when it became inconvenient.

“Josif,” she said.

“Mmm?” His face was buried in her hair, and he was sucking on a strand of it.

“Josif, I frightened them. They’re afraid of something.”

“You’re a pretty mean-looking woman.”

“There’s something pretty funny about it. Why should death-entry information be restricted?”

They couldn’t think of a reason.

And so the next day at lunch Josif had a sheet of paper—something little used in the computer center—and on it were ten names and ten numbers. “Can you use this?” he asked.

“What are they?”

“Dead people. Today’s first entries. They should be in your computer by now, since I punched them all in. That’s their identification numbers, and date of entry is a few hours ago. That’s basically all the date-of-entry code would have told you anyway. Can you do anything with them?”