Songmaster (5 page)

Ansset regarded her placidly, then opened his mouth, not to speak but to sing. At first she decided to leave immediately; soon she was incapable of deciding anything.

Kya-Kya had heard many singers before, but no one had sung to her like this. There were words, but she did not hear words. Instead she heard kindness, and understanding, and encouragement. In Ansset’s song she was not a failure. She was, in fact, a wise woman who had done a great favor for the Songhouse, who had earned the love of all future generations. She felt proud. She felt that the Songhouse would send her out, not in shame, but as an emissary to the worlds outside. I will tell them of the music, she thought, and because of me the Songhouse will be held in even greater esteem by everyone who knows of it. For I am as much a product of the Songhouse as any singer or Songbird. She was bursting with joy, with pride. She had not been so happy in years. In her life. She embraced the boy and wept for several minutes.

If this is what Ansset can do, he is worth all the praise he has been given, she thought. Why, the boy is full of love, even for me. Even for me. And she looked up into his eyes and saw—

Nothing.

He regarded her as placidly as he had before. Control. He had let out the Song, and that was all. There was nothing human about him when he wasn’t singing. He knew what she wanted to hear, he had given it to her and that was all he needed to do.

“Do they wind you up?” she said to the blank face.

“Wind me up?”

“You may be a singer,” she said angrily, “but you aren’t human!”

He began to sing again, the tones already soothing, but Kya-Kya leaped to her feet, backed away. “Not again! You can’t trick me again! Sing to the stones and make them cry, but I won’t have you fooling me again!” She fled the room, slamming shut the door on his song, on his empty face. The child was a monster, not real at all, and she hated him.

She also remembered his song and loved him and longed to return to his stall to hear him sing forever.

That very day she pleaded with Esste to let her go early. To let her leave before she ever had to hear Ansset sing again. Esste looked confused, asked for explanation. Kya-Kya only insisted again that if she wasn’t allowed to go, she’d kill herself.

“You can go tomorrow, then,” the new Songmaster in the High Room said.

“Before the funeral?”

“Why before the funeral?”

“Because he’ll sing then, won’t he?”

Esste nodded. “His song will be beautiful.”

“I know,” Kya-Kya said, and her eyes filled with tears at the memory. “But it won’t be a human being singing it. Good-bye.”

“We’ll miss you,” Esste said softly, and the words were tender.

Kya-Kya had been leaving, but she turned to look Esste in the eye. “Oh you sound so sweet. I can see where Ansset learned it. A machine teaching a machine.”

“You misunderstand,” said Esste. “It is pain teaching pain. What else do you think the Control is for?”

But Kya-Kya was gone. She saw neither Esste nor Ansset again before the tram took her and her luggage and her first month’s money away from the Songhouse. “I’m free,” she said softly when she passed the gate leading to Tew and the farms opened before her.

You’re a liar, you’re a liar, answered the rhythm of the engines.

A machine teaching a machine. The words left a sour memory that stayed with Esste through all the funeral arrangements. A machine. Well, true enough in a way, and completely untrue in another. The machines were the people who had no Control, whose voice spoke all their secrets and none of their intentions. But I am in control of myself, which no machine can ever be.

But she also understood what Kya-Kya meant. Indeed, she already knew it, and it frightened her how completely Ansset had learned Control, and how young. She watched him as he sang at Nniv’s funeral. He was not the only singer, but he was the youngest, and the honor was tremendous, almost unprecedented. There was a stir when he stepped up to sing. But when he was through singing, no one had any doubt that the honor was deserved. Only the new ones, the Groans and a few of the Bells were crying—it would not be right at a Songmaster’s funeral to try to get anyone to break Control. But the song was grief and love and longing together, the respect of all those present, not just for Nniv, who was dead, but for the Songhouse, which he had helped keep alive. Oh, Ansset, you’re a master, thought Esste, but she also noticed things that most did not notice. How his face was impassive before and after he sang; how he stood rigidly, his body focused on making the exact tone. He manipulates us, Esste thought, manipulates us but not half so perfectly as he manipulates himself. She noticed how he sensed every stir, every glance in the audience and fed upon it and gave it back a hundred-fold. He is a magnifying mirror, Esste thought. You are a magnifying mirror who takes the love you’ve been given and spews it out stronger than before, but with none of yourself attached to it. You are not whole.

He came to where Esste sat, and sat beside her. It was his right, since she was his master. She said no words, but only sighed in a way that said to Ansset’s sensitive ears, “Fair, but flawed.” The unexpected and undeserved criticism did not cause his expression to change. He only answered with a grunt that meant, “You hardly needed to tell
me
, I knew it.”

Control, thought Esste. You have certainly learned Control.

Ansset did not sing again for an audience in the Songhouse. At first he did not notice it. It was simply not his turn to solo or duo or trio or quarto in Chamber. But when everyone in his chamber had performed twice or three times, and Ansset had not been asked to sing, he became puzzled, then alarmed. He did not ask because volunteering simply was not done. He waited. And waited. And his turn never seemed to come.

It was not long after he noticed it that the others in Chamber began commenting on it, first to each other, finally to Ansset. “Did you do something wrong?” they asked him, one by one at mealtime or in the corridors or in the toilet. “Why are you being punished?”

Ansset only answered with a shrug or a sound that said, How should I know? But when his ban from performing continued, he began to turn away the questions with coldness that taught the questioner quickly that the subject was forbidden. It was part of Control for Ansset, not to let himself become part of speculation about this mysterious ban. Nor would his Control allow him to ask. Esste could continue as long as she liked. Whatever it meant, whatever she hoped to accomplish, Ansset would bear it unquestioning.

She came to his stall every day, of course, just as before. Being Songmaster in the High Room meant additional duties, not relief from her previous ones. Finding and training Mikal’s Songbird was her life’s work, chosen freely decades ago. It would not end, the burden would not be lifted, just because Nniv died and that damned fool Kya-Kya had had the temerity to afflict her with his office. She said as much to Ansset, hoping to reassure him that he would not be losing her. But he took the news without any sign that he cared either way, and went on with the day’s lessons as if nothing were wrong.

And why should he do anything else? Until Kya-Kya had said her say just before leaving, Esste had not worried particularly. If Ansset was superb at Control, he was superb at everything else, too, and so it was not to be remarked upon. But now Esste noticed the Control as if each example of Ansset’s apparent unconcern were a blow to her.

As for Ansset, he had no idea what was going on inside Esste’s mind. For Esste’s Control was also superb, and she showed nothing of her worry or reasoning to Ansset. That was as it should be, Ansset assumed. I am a lake, he thought, and all my walls are high. I have no low place. I grow deeper every day.

It did not occur to him that he might drown.

A lesson.

Esste took Ansset to a bare room with no windows. Just stone, a dozen meters square, and a thick door that admitted no sound. They sat on the stone floor, and because all the floors were stone, they found the floor comfortable, or at least familiar, and Ansset was able to relax.

“Sing,” said Esste, and Ansset sang. As always, his body was rigid and his face showed no emotion; as always, the song was intensely emotional. This time he sang of darkness and closed-in spaces, and he sounded mournful. Esste was often surprised by the depth of Ansset’s understanding of things he surely, at his age, could not know firsthand.

The song resonated and echoed back from the walls.

“It rings,” Esste said.

“Mmmm,” Ansset answered.

“Sing so it doesn’t ring.”

Ansset sang again, this time a wordless and essentially meaningless song that danced easily through his lowest notes (which were not very low) and came out more as air than as tone. The song did not echo.

“Sing,” Esste said, “so that it is as loud to me, here by the wall, as it is right next to you, but so that none of it echoes.”

“I can’t,” Ansset said.

“You can.”

“Can you?”

Esste sang, and the song filled the room, but there was no echo.

And so Ansset sang. For an hour, for another hour, trying to find the exact voice for that room. Finally, at the end of the second hour, he did it.

“Do it again.”

He did it again. And then asked, “Why?”

“You do not sing only into silence. You also sing into space. You must sing exactly for the space you have been given. You must fill it so that no one can fail to hear you, and yet keep your tone so clear and free of echo that all they can hear is exactly what your body produces.”

“I have to do this every time?”

“In a while, Ansset, it becomes reflex.”

They sat in silence for a moment. And then, softly, Ansset asked, “I would like to try to fill the Chamber this way.”

Esste knew what he was asking, and refused to answer his real question. “I believe the Chamber’s empty right now. We could go there.”

Ansset struggled with himself for a moment—Esste assumed, anyway, for though he was silent for a time, his face showed nothing. “Mother Esste,” he finally said, “I don’t know why I’ve been banned.”

“Have you been?”

Mildly: “You know I have.”

It was a minor victory. She had actually forced him to ask. Yet the victory was an empty one. He had not lost Control; he simply had found it unproductive to remain silent about it. Esste leaned back on the stone wall, not realizing that she herself was bending to his rigidity by relaxing her own.

“Ansset, what is your song?”

He looked at her blankly. Waited. Apparently he did not understand.

“Ansset, you keep singing our songs back to us. You keep taking what people feel and intensifying it and shattering us with it, but child, what song is yours?”

“All.”

“None. So far I have never heard you sing a song that I knew was only Ansset.”

He did not lose Control. Surely he should be angry. But he only looked at her with empty eyes and said, “You are mistaken.” The child was six, and said
you are mistaken
.

“You will not sing before an audience again until you have sung for me a song that is yours.”

“How will
you
know?”

“I don’t know, Ansset. But I’ll know.”

He continued to regard her steadily, and she, because of her own Control, did not break her gaze. Some children had taken to Control very badly before, and usually they ended up as Deafs. Control was not easy for anyone, but essential for the songs. Yet here was a child who, like most really good singers and Songbirds, had learned Control quickly, lived with it naturally.
Too
naturally. The object of Control was not to remove the singer from all human contact, but to keep that contact clear and clean. Instead of a channel, Ansset was using Control as an impenetrable, insurmountable wall.

I will get over your walls, Ansset, she promised him silently. You will sing a song of yourself to me.

But his blank, meaningless face said only, You will fail.