Songmaster (9 page)

Is she insane? It occurred to Ansset more than once. He could conceive of no reason for her to have locked him up in absolute silence. Neither silence nor singing did any good. What did she want?

Does she hate me? That question had arisen often enough in the last few years. During his ban he had found the pressure almost unendurable. But he trusted her—whom else could he trust? It was terrible to know that everyone was wondering what he had done wrong, when he knew but could not tell them that he had done
nothing
wrong. And her mad ideas about his mind—often he could not understand what she was getting at, but sometimes he felt he was getting closer. She accused him of not singing from himself. And yet he knew that his singing was exhilaration, the one great joy of his life. To look at people and understand them and sing to them and change them; he almost re-created them, almost felt as if he could take them and make them over, make them better than they were. How could this not be coming from himself?

And now silence. Silence until his head ached. In all his life there had been no such silence, and he didn’t know what to make of it. Why did you become so close to me, if you only meant to cut me off? And yet she wasn’t cutting him off, was she; here he was in the High Room, spending every moment with her. No, she wasn’t just trying to hurt him. There was a purpose in this. Some insane purpose.

Somehow she has misunderstood me. It made Ansset sad that everyone so consistently failed to understand him. The children couldn’t be expected to; the masters and teachers hardly knew him; but Esste. Esste knew him as completely as anyone could. I have sung every song I have to her, and she has refused them all. I showed her that I could sing to a theatre of strangers and change them, and she told me I had failed. She can’t admit that I can do any good.

Is she jealous? She was a Songbird herself. Can she see that I’m better than her, and does that make her want to hurt me? This thought appealed to him because it offered some rational explanation. It
might
be true, while insanity was clearly out of the question no matter how often he tried to persuade himself of it. Jealousy.

If she realized it, she wouldn’t persecute him anymore. They could be friends again, like that day on the mountain by the lake, when she taught him Control. He had not understood it before then. But the lake—that was clear, that had told him the
reason
for Control. It wasn’t just a matter of
not
crying, of
not
laughing, of holding still when told to, all the meaningless things that he had struggled with and hated and resented as he studied in the Common Rooms. Control was not to tie him down, but to fill him up. And the very day of that lesson, he had relaxed, had allowed Control to become, not something outside himself that pressed him in, but something inside himself that kept him safe. I have never been happier. Life has never been easier, he thought at the time. It was as if the anger and fear that had constantly plagued him before had disappeared. I became a lake, he thought, and only when I sing does anything come out. Even then, the singing is easy, it comes lightly and naturally. Because of Control I can see sorrow and know its song. It doesn’t make me afraid as it did before—it gives me music. Death is music, and pain, and joy, and everything that people feel—it is all music. I let it all in and it fills me up and only music comes out.

What is she trying to do? She doesn’t know.

I have to help her. I have used my music to help strangers in Step, to awaken sleeping souls in Bog. But I have never used it to help Esste. She’s troubled and doesn’t know why, and thinks that it’s my fault. I will show her what it is she really fears, and then perhaps she will understand me.

When I sang before, I tried to calm her fear. This time I will show it to her more clearly than she has ever seen it.

And with that decision made, Ansset slept on the eighth night of his stay in the High Room. He gave no outward sign, of course, of what had passed through his mind. His body had been as rigid as when he sang, as when he slept.

Ansset did not sit on the periphery of the room or exercise periodically as he had before. On the eighth day of the confinement he sat in the middle of the floor, directly before the desk, and looked at Esste as she worked. He is going to attack today, Esste immediately concluded, and braced herself inwardly. But she was not ready. There was no brace to cope with what Ansset did to her today.

His singing was sweet, but not reassuring. Instead the song kept forcing memories into her mind. He had found the melody of nostalgia. She struggled (outwardly placid) to keep working. But as she went over reports of lumbering operations in the White Forest she no longer felt like Esste, the aging Songmaster of the High Room. She felt like Esste, Polwee’s Songbird, and instead of stone walls she saw crystal out of the corners of her eyes.

Crystal of the palace Polwee had built for his family on the face of a snow-covered granite mountain, a palace that looked more like nature’s work than the mountain around it. All the world seemed artificial once she had seen Polwee’s home. But she remembered it better from inside than out. The sun shining through a thousand prisms into every room, a hundred moons rising wherever she looked at night, floors that seemed invisible, rooms whose proportions were all wrong and yet completely perfect, and more than all the beauty of the place, the beauty of the people.

Polwee was the easiest placement anyone could remember. He had come to the Songhouse to apply for a Songbird or a singer only a few weeks before Esste was ready to be placed. He had talked to Songmaster Blunne and in the first minute she had said, “You may have a Songbird.” He had never asked the price, and when it came time to pay, he never minded that it was half his wealth. “All my wealth would have been worth it,” he told her when she left to return to the Songhouse at the age of fifteen. Only good people had come, only kind people, and in Polwee’s palace there was always love and joy to sing about.

Love and joy and Greff, Polwee’s son.

(I cannot remember this, said a place in Esste’s mind, and she tried to continue with her work, but now it was the High Room that was at the periphery of her vision and the reality was all crystal and light. She sat stiffly at the table, her Control keeping her from betraying any emotion, but utterly unable to work or pretend to work because Ansset’s song carried too far, deeply into her.)

Greff was his father’s son. Concerned more for her happiness than his from the moment she arrived. He was ten and she was nine; and the last year the drug’s effects began to wane and Esste reached puberty only a few months ahead of schedule. It had no effect on her voice yet, and showed only slightly in her body. But Greff was growing an adolescent mustache, and he was even more tender than before, touched with shyness that made her feel an infinite fondness, and they had made love quite by accident as snow fell on the crystal one winter.

It was not forbidden, was not really even a failure of Control—she had sung throughout, and learned new melodies as she did. But she did not want to leave him. She realized that Greff was more important to her than anybody in the Songhouse. Who had ever loved her like this? Whom had she ever loved? She tried to be rational, to tell herself that she had been nearly seven years, almost half her life with Greff as her closest friend, that, no matter how she felt about him, she was a creature of the Songhouse and would not be happy living outside forever.

It made no difference. The Songmaster came to take her home, and she refused to come.

The Songmaster was patient. He was still in middle age; it would be years before he would be named Songmaster of the High Room, and Nniv had not learned the brusqueness that enabled him to bear later, heavier responsibilities. So instead of arguing, Nniv merely asked Polwee if he could stay for a while. Polwee was concerned. “I didn’t know anything about it,” he kept saying, but as Nniv later sang to Esste, “It wouldn’t have mattered if he knew, would it?” Of course it wouldn’t. Esste was in love with Greff from their first childish romps through the crystal the year she arrived.

The longer Nniv stayed, the more patiently he waited, the more the memory of the Songhouse became important to her. She began to remember her teachers, her master, singing in Chamber. She began to spend more time with Nniv. One day she sang a duet with him. The next day she came home.

(Ansset’s song did not relent. Esste had not remembered this day in years. And had never remembered it with such clarity. But she could not resist him, and she lived through it again.)

“I’m going, Greff.”

And Greff looked at her with surprise on his face, hurt in his voice as he spoke. “Why? I love you.”

What could she explain? That the children of the Songhouse needed other singers as much as they needed to sing? He’d never understand that. She tried to tell him anyway.

“Esste, Esste,
I
need you! Without your songs—”

That was another thing. The songs—she would always have to perform, forever if she stayed with Greff. She could not refuse to sing, but already, after only seven years, singing for people whose only songs were coarse approximations of what they thought and felt, or (worse yet) lies, she was weary of it.

“You don’t have to sing if you don’t want to!” Greff cried, desperation in his voice, tears on his face. “Esste, what has this Songmaster done to you? You were prepared to defy armies in order to stay with me, and suddenly today you don’t care about any of that, you’re ready to leave me without a second thought.”

She remembered his embrace, his kisses, his pleading, but even then her Control had worked, and he finally backed away, hurt beyond describing because her body had been cold to him. Patiently she explained the one reason he would understand. She told him about the drug that put off puberty for years, how the drug had no permanent effect beyond the one that counted—singers and Songbirds were sterile for life. “Why else do you think we bring children in from outside? It wouldn’t do for children to be born in the Songhouse. We’d be more concerned with being parents than with being singers. I can’t marry you. There’d be no children.”

But he insisted, demanded. He didn’t care about children, just cared about her, and she finally realized that love wasn’t just giving, it was also—

(I don’t want to remember this! But Ansset’s song did not give up—)

It was also possession, ownership, dependence, self-surrender. She turned and walked out of the room, went to Nniv, told him she was going with him back to the Songhouse. Greff stormed into the room, a bottle of pills in his hand, threatening to kill himself if she left. She had no answer for him, only wished that he had been able to take it with grace, only wished that people outside the Songhouse could also learn Control, for it smoothed pain as nothing else in life could. So she told him, “Greff, I’m going because Nniv and I sang a duet last night. You can never sing with me, Greff. So I can’t stay with you.”

She turned and left. Nniv afterward told her that Greff swallowed the poison. Of course he was saved—in a house full of servants suicide is difficult to accomplish and Greff had no real intention of dying, just of forcing Esste to stay with him.

It had taken all of Esste’s Control, however, not to turn back, not to change her mind at the entrance of the starship and plead for a chance to stay with Greff.

Control had saved her. And Ansset’s song insisted:

Leave me in Control. Do not break my Control.

It was night. She sat by the table, the electric light on overhead. Ansset was asleep in his corner of the room. She did not know how long ago he had gone to sleep, how long ago his song had ended, or how long she had sat stiffly by the table. Her arms hurt, her back ached, the tears that her Control had barely contained pressed behind her eyes and she knew that the victory today had been Ansset’s. There was no way he could know what parts of her past were most painful—but his singing could evoke those memories anyway, and she dreaded the morning. Dreaded the morning and the songs Ansset would sing, but she lay down anyway, slept instantly, dreamed nothing, and the night passed in a moment.