Songmaster

ESSTE

1

There were many ways a child could turn up in the child markets of Doblay-Me. Many children, of course, were genuine orphans, though now that wars had ended with Mikal's Peace orphanhood was a social position much less often achieved. Others had been sold by desperate parents who had to have money-or who had to have a child out of their way and hadn't the heart for murder. More were bastards from worlds and nations where religion or custom forbade birth control. And others slipped in through the cracks.

Ansset was one of these when a seeker from the Song-house found him. He had been kidnapped and the kidnappers had panicked, opting for the quick profit from the baby trade instead of the much riskier business of arranging for ransom and exchange. Who were his parents? They were probably wealthy, or their child wouldn't have been worth kidnapping. They were White, because Ansset was extremely fairskinned and blond. But there were trillions of people answering to that description, and no government agency was quite so foolish as to assume the responsibility of returning him to his family.

So Ansset, whose age was unknowable but who couldn't be more than three years old, was one of a batch of a dozen children that the seeker brought back to Tew. All the children had responded well to a few simple tests- pitch recognition, melody repetition, and emotional response. Well enough, in fact, to be considered potential musical prodigies. And the Songhouse had bought-no, no, people are not bought in the child markets-the Song-house had adopted them all. Whether they became Songbirds or mere singers, masters or teachers, or even if they did not work out musically at all, the Songhouse raised them, provided for them, cared about them for life. In loco parentis, said the law. The Songhouse was mother, father, nurse, siblings, offspring, and, until the children reached a certain level of sophistication, God.

New, sang a hundred young children in the Common Room, as Ansset and his fellow marketed children were ushered in. Ansset did not stand out from the others. True, he was terrified-but so were the rest. And while his nordic skin and hair put him at the extreme end of the racial spectrum, such things were studiously ignored and no one ridiculed him for it, any more than they would have ridiculed an albino.

Routinely he was introduced to the other children; routinely all forgot his name as soon as they heard it; routinely they sang a welcome whose tone and melody were so confused that it did nothing to allay Ansset's fear; routinely Ansset was assigned to Rruk, a five-year-old who knew the ropes.

You can sleep by me tonight, Rruk said, and Ansset dumbly nodded. I'm older Rruk said. In maybe a few months or sometime soon anyway I get a stall. This meant nothing to Ansset. Anyway, don't piss in your bed because we never get the same one two nights in a row. Ansset's three-year-old pride was enough to take umbrage at this. Don't piss in bed. But he didn't sound angry-just afraid.

Good. Some of 'em are so scared they do. It was near bedtime; new children were always brought in near bedtime. Ansset asked no questions. When he saw that other children were undressing, he too undressed. When he saw that they found nightgowns under their blankets, he too found a nightgown and put it on, though he was clumsy at it. Rruk tried to help him, but Ansset shrugged off the offer. Rruk looked momentarily hurt, then sang the love song to him.

I will never hurt you.

I will always help you.

If you are hungry

I'll give you my food.

If you are frightened

I am your friend.

I love you now

And love does not end.

The words and concepts were beyond Ansset, but the tone of voice was not. Rruk's embrace on his shoulder was even more clear, and Ansset leaned on Rruk, though he still said nothing and did not cry.

Toilet? Rruk asked.

Ansset nodded, and Rruk led him to a large room adjoining the Common, where water ran swiftly through trenches. It was there that he learned that Rruk was a girl Don't stare, she said. Nobody stares without permission. Again, Ansset did not understand the words, but the tone of voice was clear. He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.

How come you don't talk except when you're mad? Rruk asked him as they lay down in adjoining beds (as a hundred other children also lay down).

It was now that Ansset's control broke. He shook his head, then turned away, buried his face under the blankets, and cried himself to sleep. He did not see the other children around him who looked at him with distaste. He did not know that Rruk was humming a tune that meant, Let be, let alone, let live.

He did know, however, when Rruk patted his back, and he knew that the gesture was kind; and this was why he never forgot his first night in the Songhouse and why he could never feel anything but love for Rruk, though he would soon far surpass her rather limited abilities.

Why do you let Rruk hang around you so much, when she isn't even a Breeze? asked a fellow student once, when Ansset was six. Ansset did not answer in words. He answered with a song that made the questioner break Control, much to his humiliation, and weep openly. No one else ever challenged Rruk's claim on Ansset. He had no friends, not really, but his song for Rruk was too powerful to challenge.

2

Ansset held on to two memories of his parents, though he did not know these dream people were his parents. They were White Lady and Giant Man, when he thought to put names to them at all. He never spoke of them to anyone, and he only thought of them when he had dreamed the dreams of them the night before.

The first memory was of the White Lady whimpering, lying on a bed with huge pillows. She was staring into nothingness, and did not see Ansset as he walked into the room. His step was unsure. He did not know if she would be angry that he had come in. But her soft, whipped cries drew him on, for it was a sound he could not resist, and he came and stood by the bed where she rested her head on her arm. He reached out and patted her arm. Even in the dream the skin felt hot and fevered. She looked at him, and her eyes were deep in tears. Ansset reached to the eyes, touched the brow, let his tiny fingers slide down, closing the eyes, caressing the lids so gently that the White Lady did not recoil. Instead she sighed, and he caressed all her face as her whimpers softened into gentle humming.

It was then that the dream went awry, ending in odd ways. Always Giant Man came in, but what he did was a mystery of rumbling voice, embraces, shouts. Sometimes he also lay on the bed with White Lady. Sometimes he picked Ansset up and took him on strange adventures that ended in waking. Sometimes the White Lady kissed him good-bye. Sometimes she did not notice him once the Giant Man came into the room. But the dream always began the same, and the part that never changed was memory.

The other memory was of the moment of kidnapping. Ansset was in a very large place with a distant roof that was painted with strange animals and distorted people. Loud music came from a lighted place where everyone was always moving. Then there was a deafening noise and the place became all light and noise and conversation, and White Lady and Giant Man walked among the crowd. There was pushing and jostling, and someone stepped between White Lady and Ansset, breaking their handhold. White Lady turned to the stranger, but at the same moment Ansset felt a powerful hand grip his. He was pulled away, bumping harshly through the crowd. Then the hand pulled him up, hurting his arm, and for a moment, lifted above the heads of the crowd, Ansset saw White Lady and Giant Man for the last time, both of them pushing through the crowd, their faces fearful, their mouths open to cry out. But Ansset could never remember hearing them. For a blast of hot air struck him, and a door closed, and he was outside in a blazing hot night, and then he always, always woke up, trembling but not crying, because he could hear a voice saying Quiet, Quiet, Quiet in tones that meant fear and falling and fire and shame.

You do not cry, said the teacher, a man with a voice that was more comforting than sunlight.

Ansset shook his head. Sometimes, he said.

Before, answered the teacher. But now you will learn Control. When you cry you waste your songs. You burn up your songs. You drown your songs.

Songs? asked Ansset.

You are a little pot full of songs, said the teacher, and when you cry, the pot breaks and all the songs spill out ugly. Control means keeping the songs in the pot, and letting them out one at a time.

Ansset knew pots. Food came from a pot. He thought of songs as food, then, besides knowing they were music.

Do you know any songs? asked the teacher.

Ansset shook his head.

Not any? Not any songs at all?

Ansset looked down.

Ansset, songs. Not words. Just a song that has no words but you just sing, like this, Ah-- and the teacher sang a short stretch of melody that spoke to Ansset and said, Trust, Trust, Trust.

Ansset smiled. He sang the same melody back to the teacher. For a moment the teacher smiled, then looked startled, then reached out with wondering eyes and touched Ansset's hair. The gesture was kind. And so Ansset sang the love song to the teacher. Not the words, because he had no memory for words yet. But he sang the melody as Rruk had sung it to him, and the teacher wept. It was Ansset's first lesson on his first day at the Songhouse, and the teacher wept. He did not understand until later that this meant that the teacher had lost Control and would be ashamed for weeks until Ansset's gifts were more fully appreciated. He only knew that when he sang the love song, he was understood.

3

Cull, you're beyond this, said Esste, with grief and sympathy and reproach. You're a good teacher, and that's why we trusted you with the new ones.

I know, Cull said. But Esste--

You wept for minutes. Minutes before you regained Control. Cull, have you been ill?"

Healthy.

Are you unhappy?

I wasn't, not until after-after. I wasn't weeping for grief, Mother Esste, I was weeping for--

For what?

Joy.

Esste hammed exasperation and noncomprehension.

The child, Esste, the child.

Ansset, yes? The blond one?

Yes. I sang him trust, and he sang it back to me.

He shows promise then, and you broke Control in front of him.

You are impatient.

Esste bowed her head. I am. Her posture said shame. Her voice said she was still impatient and only a little ashamed after all. She could not lie to a teacher.

Listen to me, pleaded Cull.

I'm listening, said Esste's reassuring sigh.

Ansset sang my trust back to me note for note, perfectly. Nearly a minute, and it wasn't easy. And he didn't sing just the melody. He sang pitch. He sang nuance. He sang every emotion I had said to him, except that it was stronger. It was like singing into a long hall and having the sound come back at you louder than you sang it,

Do you exaggerate? asked Esste's hum.

I was shocked. And yet delighted. Because I knew in that instant that here we had a true prodigy. Someone who might become a Songbird--

Careful, careful, said the hiss from Esste's mouth.

I know it's not my decision, but you didn't hear his answer. It's his first day, his first lesson-and anyway, that was nothing, nothing at all to what came after, Esste, he sang the love song to me. Rruk only sang it to him once yesterday. But he sang the whole thing--

Words?

He's only three. He sang the melody and the love, and Esste, Mother Esste, no one has ever sung such love to me. Uncontrolled, utterly open, completely giving, and I couldn't contain it, I couldn't, Esste, and you know my Control has never faltered before.

Esste heard Cull's song, and the teacher wasn't lying to protect himself. The child was remarkable. The child was powerful. Esste decided she would meet the child.

After she met him, in a brief encounter at the Galley at breakfast, she reassigned herself to be his teacher. As for Cull, the consequence of his loss of Control was much lighter than the usual, and as Esste taught Ansset day after day, she sent word for Cull to be advanced step by step until within a few weeks he was a teacher of new ones again, and Esste put the word around so that none would criticize Cull: With this child, any teacher would have lost Control.

And there was a dancing quality to her walk and a warmth to her voice that made every teacher and master and even the Songmaster in the High Room ..realize that Esste at last hoped, perhaps even let herself believe, that her life's work might be within reach. Mikal's Songbird? another Songmaster presumed to ask her one day, though his melody told her she need not answer if she didn't want to.

She only hummed high in her head and leaned her head against the stone, and laid her hand on her cheek so that the Songmaster laughed. But he had his answer. She could clown and play to try to hide her hopes, but the very clowning and playing were message enough. Esste was happy. This was so unusual it even startled the children.

4

It was unheard of for a Songmaster to teach new ones. The new ones did not know it, of course, not at first, not until they had learned enough of the basics to advance, as a class, to become Groans. There were other Groans, some as old as five or six, and like all children they had their own society with its own rules, its own customs, its own legends. Ansset's class of Groans soon learned that it was safe to be pugnacious and obstinate with a Belch, but never with a Breeze; that it meant nothing where you slept, but you sat at table with your friends; that if a fellow Groan sang you a melody, you must deliberately make a mistake in singing it back to him, or he'll think you're bragging.

Ansset learned all the rules quickly, because he was bright, and made everyone in his class think of him as a friend, because he was kind. No one but Esste noticed that he did not exchange secrets in the toilet, did not join any of the inner rings that constantly grew and waned among the children. Instead, Ansset worked harder at perfecting his voice. He hummed almost constantly. He cocked his head when masters and teachers talked without words, using only melody to communicate. His focus was not on the children, who had nothing to teach him, but on the adults.

While none of the children were conscious of his separation from them, unconsciously they allowed for it, Ansset was treated with deference. The hazing by the Belches (no, not in front of the teachers-in front of the teachers they're Bells), which was usually at the level of urinating on a Groan so he had to shower again, or spilling his soup day after day so that he got in trouble with the cooks- the hazing somehow bypassed Ansset.

And he entered the mythology of the Groans very quickly. There were other legendary figures-Jaffa, who in anger at her teacher burst one day into a Chamber and sang a solo, and then, instead of being punished, was advanced to be a Breeze without ever having to be a Belch at all; Moom, who stayed a Groan until he was nine years old, and then suddenly got the hang of things and passed through Bells and Breezes in a week, entered Stalls and Chambers and was out as a singer before he turned ten; and Dway, who was gifted and- ought to have become a Songbird, but who could not stop rebelling and finally escaped the Songhouse so often that she was thrust out and put with a normal boarding school and never sang another note. Ansset was not so colorful. But his name passed from class to class and from year to year so that after he had been a Groan for only a month, even singers in Stalls and Chambers knew of him, and admired him, and secretly resented him.

He will be a Songbird, said the growing myth. And this was not resented by the children his own age, because while all of them could hope to be a singer, Songbirds only came every few years, and some children passed from Common Rooms into Stalls and Chambers without ever having known someone who became a Songbird. Indeed, there was no Songbird at all in the Songhouse now-the most recent one, Wymmyss, had been placed out only a few weeks before Ansset came, so that none of his class had ever heard a Songbird sing.

Of course, there were former Songbirds among the teachers and masters, but that was no help, because their voices had changed. How do you become a Songbird? Groans would ask Belches, and Belches would ask Breezes, and none of them knew the answer, and few dared hope that they would achieve that status.

How do you become a Songbird? Ansset sang to Esste one day, and Esste could not hide her startlement completely, not because of the question, though it was rare for a child to ask such an open question, but because of the song, which also seemed to ask, Were you a Songbird, Esste?

Yes, I was a Songbird, she answered, and Ansset, who had not yet mastered Control, revealed to her that that was the question he had been asking. The boy was learning songtalk, and Esste would have to be careful to warn the teachers and masters not to use it in front of him unless they didn't mind being understood.

What did you do? Ansset asked.

I sang.

Singers sing. Why are Songbirds different?

Esste looked at him narrowly. Why do you want to be a Songbird?

Because they're the perfect ones.

You're only a Groan, Ansset. You have years ahead of you. The statement was wasted, she knew. He could sing, he could hear song, but he was still almost an infant, and years were too long to grasp.

Why do you love me? Ansset asked her, this time in front of the class.

I love all of you, Esste sang, and all the children smiled at the love in her voice.

Why do you sing to me more than to the others, then? Ansset demanded, and Esste heard in his song another message: The others are not my friends because you set me apart.

I don't sing to anyone more than to anyone else, Esste answered, and in songtalk she said, I will be more careful. Did he understand? At least he seemed satisfied with her answer, and did not ask again.

Ansset became one of the great legends, however, when he was promoted from Groan to Belch earlier than the rest of his class-and instead of Esste remaining with the class, she moved with Ansset. It was then that Ansset realized that not only was it unusual for a Songmaster to be doing a teacher's job, but also Esste was teaching, not the class, but him. Ansset. Esste was teaching Ansset.

The other children noticed this at least as quickly as Ansset did, and he found that while all of them were nice to him, and all of them praised him, and all of them sought to be near him and eat with him and talk to him, none of them sang the love song to him. And none of them was his friend, for they were afraid.

5

A lesson.

Esste took her class of Bells out of the Songhouse. They rode in a flesket, so that all of them could see outside. It was always a wonder to them, leaving the cold stone walls of the Songhouse. Groans were never taken out; Breezes often were; and Bells knew that the trips in the flesket were only a taste of things to come.

They went through deep forests, skimming over the underbrush as they followed a narrow road cut between tall trees. Birds paced them, and animals looked up bemusedly as they passed.

To children schooled to singing, however, the miracle came when they left the flesket. Esste had the driver, who was only eighteen and therefore just returned from being a singer outside, stop them by a small waterfall. Esste led the children to the side of the stream. She commanded silence, and because Bells have the rudiments of Control, they were able to hold utterly still and listen. They heard birdsong, which they longed to answer; the gurgle of the stream as it slopped against the rocks and inlets of the shore; the whisper of breezes through leaves and grass.

They sat for fifteen minutes, which was near the limit of their Control, and then Esste led them closer to the waterfall. It wasn't a long walk, but it was slick and damp as they approached the mist rising from the foot of the falls. There had been a landslide many years before, and the cascade, instead of falling into the pool it had carved out of rock, tumbled onto rock and sprayed out in all directions. The children sat only a dozen meters away, and the water soaked them.

Again, silence. Again, Control. But this time they heard nothing but the crash of the water on the rock. They could see birds flying, could see leaves moving in the wind, but could hear nothing of that.

After only a few minutes Esste released them. What do we do? asked one of the children.

What you want, answered Esste.

So they- gingerly waded at the edge of the pool, while the driver watched to make sure no one drowned. Few of them noticed when Esste left; only Ansset followed her.

She led him, though she gave no sign she knew he was following, to a path leading up the steep slope to the top of the falls. Ansset watched her carefully, to see where she was going. She climbed. He climbed after. It was not easy for him. His arms and legs were still clumsy with childhood, and he grew tired. There were hard places, where Esste had only to step up, while Ansset had to clamber over rises half as high as he was. But he did not let Esste out of his sight, and she, for her part, did not go too quickly for him. She had gathered her gown for the climb, and Ansset looked curiously at her legs. They were white and spindly, and her ankles looked too thin to hold her up. Yet she was nimble enough as they climbed. Ansset had never thought of her as having legs before. Children had legs, but masters and teachers rushed along with gowns brushing the floor. The sight of legs, just like a child's, made Ansset wonder if Esste was like the girls in the shower and toilet. He imagined her squatting over the trench. It was a sight that he knew was forbidden, yet in his mind he violated even good manners and stared and stared.

And came face to face with Esste at the top of the hill.

He was startled, and showed it. She only murmured a few notes of reassurance. You were meant to be here, her song said. Then she looked out beyond the hill, and Ansset looked after her. Behind them was forest in rolling hills, but here a lake spread out to lap the edges of a bowl of hills. Trees grew right to the edge, except for a few clearings. The lake was not large, as lakes go, but to Ansset it was all the water in the world. Only a few hundred meters away, the lake poured over a lip of rock to make the waterfall. But here there was no hint of the violence of the fall. Here the lake was placid, and waterbirds skimmed and dipped and swam and dived, crying out from time to time.

Esste questioned him with a melody, and Ansset answered, It's large. Large as the sky.

That is not all you should see, Ansset, my son, she said to him. You should see the mountains around the lake, holding it in.

What makes a lake?

A river comes into this valley, pouring in the water. It has no place to go, so it fills up. Until some spills out at the waterfall. It can fill no deeper than the lowest point, Ansset, this is Control.

This is Control. Ansset's young mind struggled to make the connection.

How is it Control, Ansset?

Because it is deep, Ansset answered.

You are guessing, not thinking.

Because, said Ansset, it is all held in everywhere except one place, so that it only comes out a little at a time.

Closer, said Esste. Which meant he was wrong. Ansset looked at the lake, trying for inspiration. But all he could see was a lake.

Stop looking at the lake, Ansset, if the lake tells you nothing.

So Ansset looked at the trees, at the birds, at the hills. He looked all around the hills. And he knew what Esste wanted him to know. The water pours out of the low place.

And? Not enough yet?

If the low place were higher, the lake would be deeper.

And if the low place were lower?

There wouldn't be a lake.

And Esste broke off the conversation. Or rather, changed languages, because now she sang, and the song exulted a little. It was low and it was not loud, but it spoke, without words, of joy; of having found after long searching, of having given a gift carried far too long; of having, at last, eaten when she thought never to eat again. I hungered for you, and you are here, said her song.

And Ansset understood all the notes of her song, and all that lay behind the notes, and he, too, sang. Harmony was not taught to Bells, but Ansset sang harmony. It was wrong, it was only countermelody, it was dissonant to Esste's song, but it was nevertheless an augmentation of her joy, and where a mere teacher, with less Control, might have been overcome by Ansset's echo of the deepest parts of her song, Esste had Control enough to channel the ecstasy through her song. It became so powerful, and Ansset was so receptive to it, that it overcame him, and he sobbed and clung to her and still tried to sing through his tears.

She knelt beside him and held him and whispered to him, and soon he slept. She talked to him in his sleep, told him things far beyond his comprehension, but she was laying pathways through his mind. She was building secret places in his mind, and in one of them she sang the love song, sang it so that at a time of great need it would sing back to him and he would remember, and be filled.

When he woke, he remembered nothing of having lost Control; nor did he remember Esste speaking to him. But he reached out and took her hand, and she led him down the hill It felt right to him to hold her hand, though such familiarity was forbidden between children and teachers, partly because his body had vague memories of holding the hand of a woman whom he completely trusted, and partly because he knew, somehow, that Esste would not mind.

6

Kya-Kya was a Deaf. At the age of eight she had still not progressed beyond the Groan level. Her Control was weak. Her pitch was uncertain. It was not lack of native ability-the seeker who found her had not made a mistake. She simply could not pay attention well enough. She did not care.

Or so they said. But she cared very much. Cared when the children her age and a year younger and a year younger than that passed her by. All were kind to her and few despaired, because it was well known that some sang later than others. She cared even more when she was gently told that there was no point in going on. She was a Deaf, not because she could not hear, but because, as her teacher told her, Hearing, you hear not. And that was it. A different kind of teacher, different duties, different children. There weren't that many Deafs, but there were enough for a class. They learned from the best teachers Tew could provide. But they learned no music.

The Songhouse takes care of all its children, she thought often, sometimes gratefully, sometimes bitterly. I am taken care of. Taught to work by being given duties in the Songhouse. Taught science and history and languages and I'm damned good at it. Outside, outside they would consider me gifted. But here I'm a Deaf. And the sooner I leave the better.

She would leave soon. She was fourteen. Only a few months left. At fifteen she would be out, with a comfortable stipend and the doors to a dozen universities open to her. The money would continue until she was twenty-two. Later, if she needed. The Songhouse took care of its children.

But there were still those few months, and her duties were interesting enough. She worked with security, checking the warning and protective devices that made sure the Songhouse stayed isolated from the rest of Tew. Such devices had not always been needed, in the old days. There had even been a time when the Songmaster in the High Room ruled all the world. But it was still less than a century since the outsiders had tried to storm the Songhouse in a silly dispute over a pirate who wanted the Songhouse's reputed great wealth. And now the security devices, which took a year to patrol. The duty had taken her around the perimeter, a journey longer than circling the world, and all by skooter, so that she was alone in the forests and deserts and seacoasts of the Songhouse lands.

Today she was checking the monitoring devices in the Songhouse itself. In a way it made her feel superior, to know what none of the children and few of the masters and teachers knew-that the stone was not impenetrable, that, in fact, it was heavily strung with wires and tubes, so that what seemed to be a rambling, primitive stone relic was potentially as modern as anything on Tew. Possession of the wiring diagrams gave her information that would surprise any of the less-informed singers. Yet whenever she dwelt on her pride at having inside knowledge, she forced herself to remember that she was only allowed the knowledge so young because she was completely outside all the discipline and study of the Songhouse. She was a Deaf-she could know secrets because she would never sing and so she didn't matter.

That was her frame of mind when she entered the High Room. She knocked brusquely because she was feeling upset. No answer. Good, the old Songmaster, Nniv, wasn't in. She pushed open the door. The High Room was freezing, with all the shutters open to the wintry wind. It was insane to leave the place like this-who could work here? Instead of going to the panels where the monitors were hidden, she went to the shutters of the nearest window, leaned out to catch them, and found herself looking down forever, it seemed, to the next roof below her. She hadn't realized how high she really was. On the east side, of course, the Songhouse was higher, so the stairs up to the High Room were not so terribly long. But she was high, and the height fascinated her. What would it be like to fall? Would she feel it like flying, with the exhilaration of the skooter rushing down a hillside? Or would she really be afraid?

She stopped herself with one leg over the sill, her arms poised to thrust her out. What am I doing? The shock of realization was almost enough to throw her forward, out the window. She caught herself, gripped the sides of the window, forced herself to slowly pull her leg back inside, withdraw from the window, and finally kneel, leaning her head against the lip of rock at the base of the window. Why did I do that? What was I doing?

I was leaving the Songhouse.

The thought made her shudder. Not that way. I will not leave the Songhouse that way. Leaving the Songhouse will not be the end of my life.

She did not-believe it. And, not believing, she gripped the stone and wanted not to ever let go.

The room was cold. It made her numb, motionless as she was, and the whine of the wind through the spaces in the roof and the rush of wind through the windows made her afraid in a new way. As if someone were watching her.

She turned. There was no one. Just the bundles of clothing and books and stone benches and a foot sticking out from under one of the bunches of clothing and the foot was blue and she went over to it and discovered that this bundle of clothing was the misshapen, incredibly thin body of Nniv, who was dead, frozen in the wind from the winter outside. His eyes were open, and he stared at the stone in front of his face. Kya-Kya whimpered, but then reached down and pulled on his hip, as if to wake him. He rolled onto his back, but an arm stuck up in the air, and the legs moved only a little, and she knew he was dead, that the entire time she had been in the room he had been dead.

The Songmaster in the High Room died only rarely. She had never known another. It was Nniv who had ultimately decided her fate. He had declared her Deaf and decided she would leave the Songhouse without songs. She had hated him in her heart, though she had only talked to him a few times, ever since she was eight. But now she only felt repulsed by the corpse, and more than that, disgusted at the way he had died. Was the room always kept this bitterly cold? How had he lived so long! Was this some part of the discipline, that the ruler of the Songhouse lived in such squalor and misery?

If this emaciated, frozen corpse was the pinnacle of what the Songhouse could produce, Kya-Kya was not impressed. The lips were parted and the tongue lolled forward, blue and ghastly. This tongue, she thought, was once part of a song. Reputed to be the most masterful song in the galaxy, perhaps in the universe. But what had the song been, if not the throat and lips and teeth-and lungs, all now cold; if not the brain, that now was still?

She could not sing because of lips and teeth and throat and lungs and because in her own mind she was not so single-minded that she could be what the Songhouse demanded. But did it matter?

She Hid not feel triumphant that Nniv was dead. She was old enough to know that she, too, would be dead, and if she had a century ahead of her, it only meant time in which she might end up just as accidentally cruel as Nniv had been. Kya-Kya did not pretend to unusual virtue. Just unusual value, which no one but her recognized. And it occurred to her that Nniv's failure to recognize who and what she was (or had he, indeed, recognized it?) did not change her.

She left him, went downstairs to find the Blind in charge of maintenance, an old man named Hrrai who rarely left his office. Nniv is dead, she told him, wondering if her happiness sounded in her voice (but knowing that Hrrai would not be likely to read her very well, being a Blind). Can't let anyone hear that I'm happy, she thought. Because I'm not rejoicing at his death. Only at my life.

Dead? Imperturbable Hrrai only sounded mildly surprised. Well, then, you must go tell his successor.

Hrrai leaned down over his table and began worrying his pen back and forth across a page.

But Hrrai... Kya-Kya said.

But what?

Who is Nniv's successor?

The next Songmaster of the High Room, he said. Of course.

Of course nothing! How should I know who that is? How am I supposed to figure it out if you don't tell me?

Hrrai looked up, more surprised this time than he had been at the news of Nniv's death. Don't you know how this works?

How should I? I'm a Deaf. I never got past Groan.

Well, you needn't act so upset about it. It isn't exactly a secret, you know. Whoever finds the body will know, that's all. Whoever finds that the Songmaster in the High Room is dead will know.

How will I know?

It will be obvious to you. Just go and tell him or her that he or she is supposed to take care of funeral arrangements. It's all that simple. But you really ought to act quickly. The Songhouse shouldn't be long without someone in the High Room.

He turned back to his work with a finality that told Kya-Kya she must leave, must be about her business, certainly must not bother him anymore. She left. And wandered the halls. She had thought to be quit of the Song-house in a matter of months, the least important person ever to have been there, and suddenly she was supposed to choose the leader of the place. What kind of crazy system is this? she thought. And what the hell kind of rotten luck for me, of all people!

But it was not rotten luck, and as she wandered through the stone corridors, all of them chilly with the winter outside, she realized that no one ever came to the High Room unbidden except maintenance people, and all the maintenance people were Deafs or Blinds, those who had not made it into the highest reaches of the singing folk. They could not sing, they could not teach-and so it was left to one of them to stumble across the body and, being impartial, not a member of the eligible group, choose fairly the person who obviously should be the Songmaster in the High Room.

Who?

She went to the Common Rooms and saw the teachers moving among the classes and knew that she could not suddenly elevate a teacher above his rank; it was tempting to be whimsical, to take vengeance on the Songhouse by naming an incompetent to head it, but it would be cruel to the incompetent so called, and she couldn't destroy someone that way. She knew enough to know that it was just as cruel to lift someone above where he ought to be as it was to force him to stay below his true station. I won't cause misery.

But the Songmasters, the logical group to choose from- she knew none of them, except by reputation. Onn, a gifted teacher and singer, but always assigned as a consultant to everybody because he couldn't live with the necessity of keeping a fixed schedule, meeting with obnoxious people, and making, of all things, decisions. Much better to give advice. No, Onn was not the one anyone would expect, though he was by far the nicest. And Chuffyun was too old, far too old. He would not be long behind Nniv.

In fact, just as Hrrai had told her, the choice was obvious. But not one she enjoyed, not at all Esste, who was cold to everyone except for the little boy she was promoting as a possibility for Mikal's Songbird. Esste, who had reached down into the Common Rooms and lowered herself to be a teacher when she had been administrator of half the Songhouse, all for the sake of a little boy. No one made such great sacrifices for me, Kya-Kya thought bitterly. But Esste was a great singer, one who could light fires in every heart in the Songhouse-or quench those fires, if she wanted to. And Esste was above the petty jealousies and competitions that were endemic to the Songhouse. Esste was above such things in her attitude- and now she would be above them in station, too.

Kya-Kya stopped a master (who was quite surprised at having a Deaf interrupt her) and asked where she might find Esste.

With Ansset, With the boy.

And where is he?

In his stall.

Stall. The boy had been promoted. He couldn't be more than six yet, and he was already in Stalls and Chambers. It turned Kya-Kya's mouth down, her stomach dull. But in a moment she brightened again. The boy had been advanced by Esste, that's all. He would be in the Song-house all his life, except for a few years as a performer. While she would be free, could see all of Tew-more, could see other planets, could go, perhaps, to Earth itself where Mikal ruled the universe in indescribable glory!

A few questions. A few directions. She found Ansset's stall, identical to all the others except for a number on the door. Inside she could hear singing. It was conversation- she knew when it was songtalk. Esste was inside, then. Kya-Kya knocked.

Who? came the answer-from the boy, not from the Songmaster.

Kya-Kya. With a message for Songmaster Esste.

The door opened. The boy, who was far smaller than Kya-Kya, let her in. Esste sat on the stool by the window. The room was bleak-bare wooden walls on three sides, a cot, a stool, a table, and the stone wall framing the single window that opened onto the courtyard. Every stall was interchangeable with any other. But Kya-Kya would once have given her soul to have a stall and all that it implied. The boy was six.

Your message?

Esste was as cold as ever; her robe swirled around her feet as she sat absolutely erect on the stool.

Esste, I have come from the High Room.

He wants me?

He is dead. Esste's face betrayed nothing. She had Control. He is dead, Kya-Kya said again. And I hope you will take care of the funeral arrangements.

Esste sat in silence for a moment before she answered.

You found the body?

Yes.

You have done me no kindness, Esste said, and she rose and left the room.

What now? Kya-Kya wondered, as she stood near the door of Ansset's stall. She had not thought beyond informing Esste. She had expected some reaction; expected at least to be told what to do. Instead she stood here in the stall with the boy who was the opposite of her, the epitome of success where she had met nothing but failure.

He looked at her inquiringly. What does this mean?

It means, said Kya-Kya, that Esste is Songmaster in the High Room,

The boy showed no sign of response. Control, thought Kya-Kya. That damnable Control

Doesn't it mean anything to you?" she demanded.

What should it mean? Ansset asked, and his voice was a web of innocence.

It should mean a little gloating, at least, boy, Kya-Kya answered, with the contempt the hopelessly inferior can freely use when the superior are helpless. Esste's been pampering you every step of the way. Leading you up without having to go through the pain everyone goes through. And now she has all the power it takes. You'll be a Songbird, little boy. You'll sing for the greatest people in the galaxy. And then you'll come home, and your Esste will see to it you never have to bother with being a friend or a tutor, you'll just step right into teaching, or being a master, or perhaps-why not?-a high master right from the start, and before you're twenty you'll be a Songmaster. So why don't you forget your Control and let it show?. This is the best thing that's ever happened to you! Her voice was bitter and angry, with no hint of music In it, not even the dark music of rage.

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 Song-house 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.

7

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 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 hundredfold. He is a magnifying mirror, Esste thought. You are a magnifying mirror who takes the love you've been given and spew 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.

8

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.

9

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.

10

Riktors Ashen was angry when he got to the High Room. Listen, lady, do you know what this is?

No, Esste answered, and her voice was calculated to soothe him.

It's a warrant of entry. From the emperor. And you've entered. Why are you upset?

I've entered after four days! I'm the emperor's personal envoy, on a very important errand--

Riktors Ashen, Esste interrupted (but quietly, calmly), you are on an important errand, but this is not it. This is just a stop along the way--

Damn right, Riktors said, and this petty errand has put me four days behind schedule.

Perhaps, Riktors Ashen, you ought to have asked to see me.

I don't have to ask. I have the emperor's warrant of entry.

Even the emperor asks before he enters here.

I doubt that.

It's history, my friend. I myself brought him to this room.

Riktors was less agitated now. Was, in fact, embarrassed at his outburst. Not that he hadn't the right-this was a man, Esste knew, who could use rage to good effect. He hadn't risen to high rank in the fleet without reason. He was embarrassed because the rage had been real, and over a matter of pride. This was a young man who was learning. Esste liked him. Even though he was also a young man who would kill anyone to get what he wanted. Death waited in his calm hands, behind his boyish face.

History is shit, Riktors said mildly. I'm here to find out about Mikal's Songbird.

The emperor has no Songbird.

That, said Riktors, not without amusement, is precisely the problem. Do you realize how many years have passed since you promised him a Songbird? Mikal is a hundred eighteen years old this year. Naturally it's polite to suppose the emperor will live forever, but Mikal himself told me to tell you that he is aware of his mortality, and he hopes he will not die without having heard his Songbird sing.

You understand that Songbirds are matched very, carefully to their hosts. Usually we have the Songbird and work to place him or her properly. This was an unusual case, and until now we haven't had the right Songbird.

Until now?

I believe we have the Songbird who will be Mikal's.

I will see him now.

Esste chose to smile. Riktors Ashen smiled back. With your permission, of course, he added.

The child is only six years old, Esste answered. His training is far from complete.

I want to see him, to know that he exists.

I'll take you to him.

They wound their way down the stairs, through passages and corridors. There are so many corridors, Riktors said, that I don't see how you have any space left for rooms. Esste said nothing until they reached the corridors of Stalls, where she paused for a moment and sang a long high note. Doors closed in the distance. Then she led the emperor's personal envoy to Ansset's door, and sang a few wordless notes outside.

The door opened, and Riktors Ashen gasped. Ansset was thin, but his light complexion and blond hair were given a feeling of translucence by the sun coming in his window. And the boy's features were beautiful, not just regular; the kind of face that melted men's hearts as readily as women's. More readily.

Was he chosen for his voice, or his face? Riktors Ashen asked.,

When a child is three, answered Esste, his future face is still a mystery. His voice unfolds more easily. Ansset, I have brought this man to hear you sing.

Ansset looked blankly at Esste, as if he did not understand but refused to ask for explanation. Esste knew immediately what Ansset planned. Riktors did not. She means for you to sing for me, he said helpfully.

The child needs no repetition. He heard my request, and chooses not to sing.

Ansset's face showed nothing.

Is he deaf? asked Riktors.

We will go now, answered Esste. They went. But Riktors lingered until the last possible moment, looking at Ansset's face.

Beautiful, Riktors said, again and again, as they walked through more passageways toward the gatehouse.

He is to be the emperor's Songbird, Riktors Ashen, not the emperor's catamite.

Mikal has a large number of offspring. His tastes are not so eclectic as to include little boys. Why wouldn't the boy sing?

Because he chose not to.

Is he always so stubborn?

Often.

Hypnotherapy would take care of that. A good practitioner could lay a mental block that would forbid resistance--

Esste sang a melody that stopped Riktors cold. He looked at her, not understanding why suddenly he was afraid of this woman.

Riktors Ashen, I do not tell you how to move your fleets of starships between planets.

Of course. Just a suggestion--

You live in a world where all you expect of people is compliance, and so your hypnotherapists and your mental blocks accomplish all your ends. But here in the Song-house, we create beauty. You cannot force a child to find his voice.

Riktors Ashen had regained his composure. You're good at that. I have to work a little harder to force people to listen to me.

Esste opened the door to the gatehouse.

Songmaster Esste, Riktors said, I will tell the emperor that I have seen his Songbird, and that the child is beautiful. But when can I tell him the child will be sent?

The child will be sent when I am ready, Esste replied.

Perhaps it would be better if the child were sent when he was ready.

When I am ready, Esste said again, and her voice was all pleasure and grace.

The emperor will have his Songbird before he dies.

Esste hissed softly, which forced Riktors to come closer, to bring his face near enough that only he could hear what Esste said next:

There is much for both of us to do before Mikal Imperator dies, isn't there?

Riktors Ashen left quickly then, to finish his business for the emperor.

11

Brew takes your mind,

Bay takes your life,

Bog takes your money,

Wood takes your wife.

Stivess is cold,

Water is hot,

Overlook wants you,

Norumm does not.

What song is that? asked Ansset.

Consider it a directory. It used to be taught to the children of Step, to make fun of the other great cities of Tew. Step is no longer a great city. But the ones they made fun of still are.

Where will we go?

You are eight years old, Ansset, Esste answered. Do you remember any life, any people outside the Song-house?

No.

After this, you will.

What does the song mean? asked Ansset. The flesket stopped then, at the changing place, where Songhouse vehicles always stopped and commercial transport took over. Esste led Ansset by the hand, ignoring his question for the moment. There was business at the ticket counter, and their luggage, slight as it was, had to be searched and itemized and fed into the computer, so that no false insurance claims could be made. Esste knew from her memories of her first venture outside the Songhouse lands that Ansset understood almost nothing of what was going on. She tried explaining a few things to him, and he seemed to pick it up well enough to get along. The money, and the idea of money, he took in stride. The clothing he found uncomfortable; he kept taking the shoes off until she insisted that they were essential. She did not look forward to his getting accustomed to the food. There would be diarrhea for days-at the Songhouse he had never acquired a taste or a tolerance for sugar.

She was not surprised at his quiet acceptance of everything. The trip meant that he was within a year of placement, yet he showed no excitement or even interest in his ultimate destination. Over the last two years he had finally begun to show a little human emotion in his face, but Esste, who knew him better than any other, was not fooled. The emotion was placed there in order to avoid exciting comment. None of it was real It was nothing more or less than what was expected and proper at the moment. And Esste despaired. There were paths and hidden places that she herself had put in Ansset's mind, but now she could not reach him at all. She could not get him to speak of himself; she could not get him to show even the slightest inadvertent emotion; and as for the closeness they had felt on the hill overlooking the lake, he never betrayed a memory of it but at the same time never allowed her to get even a few steps into the path she could follow to put him into a light trance, where she might have accomplished or at least discovered something.

When the business at the changing place was finished, they sat to wait for the bus, a flesket that anyone with the money could ride. It was then that Esste whiled away the time by answering Ansset's question. If he was surprised or gratified that she had remembered it, he did not show any sign.

Brew is one of the Cities of the Sea-Homefall, Chop, Brine, and Brew-all of which are famous for beer and ale. They also have a reputation for exporting very little of their product because they are such prodigious drinkers. Beer and ale contain alcohol. They are enemies of Control, and you cannot sing when you've been-drinking them.

Bay takes your life? Ansset prompted, having memorized the song, as usual.

Bay used to have the unfortunate habit of holding public executions every Saturday whether anyone was sentenced to death or not. To avoid using op too many of their own citizens, they used strangers. The practice has, in recent years, been stopped. Wood had a sort of mandatory wife-market. Very odd things. Tew is a very odd planet. Which is why the Songhouse was able to exist here. We were more normal than most dries, and so we were left alone.

Cities?

The Songhouse began as a city. It began as a town of people who loved to sing. That's all. Things grew from there.

The rest of the cities?

Stivess is very far to the north. Water Is just as far to the south. Overlook is a place whose only product is the beauty of its scenery, and it lives off the people of wealth who go there to end their days. Norumm has four million people. It used to have nine million. But they still feel crowded and refuse to let more than a few people visit them every year.

Are we going there?

We are not.

Bog takes your money.' What does that mean?

You'll find out for yourself. That's where we're going.

The bus arrived, they boarded, and the bus left. For the first time in memory, Ansset saw people outside the milieu of the Songhouse. There were not very many people on the bus. Though this was the main highway from Seawatch to Bog, most people took the expresses, which didn't stop at the Songhouse changing place-or even at Step, usually. This bus was not an express-it stopped everywhere.

Directly in front of them were a mother and father and their son, who must have been at least a year older than Ansset. The child had been riding far too long, and could not hold still.

Mother, I need to go to the toilet.

You just went. Stay in your seat.

But the child whirled around and knelt on the bench to stare at Esste and Ansset, Ansset looked at the boy, his gaze never wavering. The boy stared back, while wagging his backside impatiently. He reached out to bat at Ansset's face. It might have been meant as a friendly gesture, but Ansset uttered a quick, harsh song that spun the boy around in his seat. When the mother took the boy to the bathroom at the back of the bus, the child looked at Ansset in terror and stayed as far from him as possible.

Esste was surprised at how frightened the child had become. True, the music had been a rebuke. But the child's reaction was far out of proportion to Ansset's song. In the Songhouse, anyone would have understood Ansset's song, but here the child should have understood it only vaguely -that was the purpose of the trip, to learn to adapt to outsiders. Yet somehow Ansset had communicated with the boy, and done it better than he had with Esste.

Could Ansset actually direct his music to one particular person? Esste wondered. That went beyond songtalk. No, no. It must have been just that the boy had been paying closer attention to Ansset than she had, so that the song struck him with more force.

And instead of worrying, she made the incident give her more confidence. In his first encounter with an outsider, Ansset had done far better than he should have been able to. Ansset was the right choice for Mikal's Songbird. If only.

Though the forest was not so lush as the deep woods in the Valley of Songs, where all Ansset's excursions had taken him before, the trees were still tall enough to be impressive, and the lack of underbrush made for a different kind of beauty, a sort of austere temple with trunks extending into the infinite distance and the leaves making a dense ceiling. Ansset watched the trees more than the people. Esste speculated as to what was going on in his impenetrable mind. Was he deliberately avoiding looking at the others? Perhaps he needed to avoid their strangeness until he could absorb it. Or was he truly disinterested, more drawn to the forest than to other human beings?

Perhaps I was wrong, Esste thought. Perhaps my intuition was a mistake, and I should have let Ansset perform. For two years he has had no audience but me. If his preferred treatment before kept the other children from being close to him, his ban had made him a pariah. No one knew what his error had been, but after that triumphant song at Nniv's funeral Ansset's voice had gone unheard, and everyone concluded the disgrace must be punishment for something terrible. Some had even sung of it in chamber. One child, Ller, had even had the temerity to protest, to sing angrily that it was unjust to ban Ansset for so long, so unfairly. Yet even Ller avoided Ansset as if the future Songbird's suffering were contagious.

If I was wrong, Esste concluded, the damage has been done. In a year Ansset will go to Mikal, ready or not. Ansset will go as the finest, most exquisite voice we have sent from the Songhouse in living memory. But he will go as an inhuman creature, unable to communicate the normal human feelings with others. A singing machine.

I have a year, Esste thought, I have one year to break down his walls without breaking his heart.

The forest gave way to wooded prairie, the desolate land where wild animals still roamed. Population pressure on Tew had never been great enough to drive many settlers to this plateau where winters were impossibly cold and summers unbearably hot. They were an hour reaching the Rim, a great cliff thousands of kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high. Here, however, the rift had split in two parts, and between them other cliffs took the descent more gradually. The city of Step had grown up at the front of the jumble of rock, where river traffic had to end and transfer to roads. Few of the farmers could afford fleskets. Even when Step ceased to be a major city, it remained important locally.

The bus followed the switchback road carved centuries ago in the rock. It was rough, but the bus never felt it, except when sudden dips forced it to drop a bit in altitude. Ansset still watched the scenery, and now even Esste gazed at the huge expanse of farmland at the base of the descent. What fell as snow on the plateau came as rain below the Rim, and the farmers here fed the world, as they liked to say.

Step itself was boring. All the buildings were old, and decay was the loudest message shouted by the shabby signs and the nearly empty streets. Nevertheless, lessons had to be learned. Esste took Ansset into a dismal restaurant and ordered and paid for a dinner. Even the prices are depressed here, she commented. Ansset ignored her.

The restaurant was no more crowded than the streets. Wherever all the people were, it wasn't here. And the food came quickly. It was not bad, but the flavor had left it somewhere between the farm and the table. Ansset ate some, but not much. Esste ate less. Instead, she looked around at the people. At first she got the impression that they were all old, but because she didn't trust impressions, she counted. Only, six were gray-haired or balding-the other dozen were middle-aged or young. Some were silent, but most conversed. Yet the restaurant felt old, and the conversations sounded tired, and it all made Esste vaguely sad. The songs of the place were gone, if there had ever been songs. Now only moans were appropriate,

And, as soon as Esste thought. that, she realized that Ansset was moaning. The sound was soft but penetrating, almost like the background noise of the kitchen machines that processed the food. Control allowed Esste to refrain from glancing at Ansset. Instead she listened to the song. It was a perfect echo of the mood of the place, a perfect understanding of the, not misery, but weariness of the people. But gradually Ansset built a rising tone into his melody, a strange, surprising element that made it interesting, or at least that made a person hearing it want to be interested in something. Esste knew immediately what 'Ansset was doing. He was breaking the ban. He was performing. And once again the song was not his was what every person in the restaurant, including Esste, wished to hear, wished to be made to feel.

The lilting quality of his song became more pronounced. People who had not been conversing began to talk; conversations already in progress became more animated. People smiled. The ugly young woman at the counter began talking to the waiter. Even joking. No one seemed to notice Ansset's song.

And Ansset faded, softened the song, let it die in mid-note so that it seemed to continue into the silence. Esste was not sure, in fact, when the song was over, even though she was the only person who had been carefully listening to it. Yet the effect of the song lingered. Deliberately Esste waited, watched to see how long the people would remain cheerful. They left the restaurant smiling.

I congratulate you, said Esste, on your superb performance.

Ansset's face did not respond. His voice did. They're harder to change than Songhouse people.

Like trying to move through water, yes? asked Esste.

Or mud. But I can do it.

Not even smugness. Just a recognition of fact. But I know you, boy, Esste thought. You are enjoying yourself immensely. You are having a hilarious time outsmarting me and at the same time proving that you can handle any situation. As long as it's outside of you.

The bus took them through the night back up the Rim, but to the west this time, and it was still dark when they reached Bog. The sky was dark, that is. The lights of the city filled the land to the edge of the sea. It seemed in places that there were no breaks between the lights, as if the city were a carpet of pure light, a fragment of the sun. The clouds above the city glowed brightly. Even the sea seemed to shine.

The streets were so crowded, even in the last hours before dawn, that buses and fleskets and even skooters had to use overhead ramps that wound among the buildings. It was dazzling. It was exciting. The crush of humanity was frantic, desperate, exhilarating, even from the inside of a bus. Ansset slept through It, after waking for a moment when Esste tried to get him to look. Lights, he said, in a tone of voice that said, I'd rather sleep.

Might as well go upstairs and sleep, said the clerk at the hotel. Nothing happens during the day here. Not even business. Can't even get a decent meal except at one of those junky all-day diners.

But after only a few hours of sleep, Ansset insisted that they go out.

I want to see the city now.

It looks better by electric light, Esste told him.

So. So that's why I want to see it.

So? I'd rather rest.

The beds here are too soft, Ansset said, and my back is sore. The food we ate in Step has sent me to the toilet four times, and it looked better than it did on the table. I want to see outside. I want to see it when it isn't dressed up to fool people.

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 lives, but the daytime's a crime. 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 lives, but the daytime's a crime.

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.

12

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 sidling 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.

13

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.

Songmaster Esste:

Mikal has called me to Earth to serve in his palace guard. He has also instructed me to bring his Songbird back with me. It is my understanding that the child is nine. I have no choice but to obey. I have arranged my route, however, so that Tew is my last stop. You have twenty-two days from the date of this message. I regret the abruptness of this, but I will carry out my orders. Riktors Ashen.

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.

14

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 far 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 going? 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.

15

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 fight 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 op in the chilly stone halls and Common Rooms and Stalls and Chambers of the Song-house. 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 blankets on the floor. Her movement gave him permission to move. He spread out his 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 disturber 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 pro forma 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 started. 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.

16

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 it off? And yet she wasn't cutting it 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.

17

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 Song-master 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 Song-house 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 Song-house. 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 star-ship 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.

18

Riktors Ashen arrived unannounced on the planet Garibali, his last stop but one before Tew. He preferred to arrive unannounced on Mikal's errands. Yet there was no sign that he had flustered anyone; there was no panic when he presented his credentials at customs. The official there had simply bowed, asked him his preference of hotel, and arranged a private car to take him there. It disturbed Riktors because it meant that things here were worse than reports had hinted. The problem might be just the nation of Scale, where he had landed, or it might be the whole world, but they had been expecting an imperial messenger-and on a nominally free world, that meant that they knew there was some reason an imperial messenger ought to come.

Someone had been busy calling. The hotel staff was ready for him when he arrived. Riktors watched with amusement as the elaborate courtesy occasionally gave way to terror-in the hotel, at least, Mikal's emissary had not been looked for.

There was a woman waiting for him in his room.

Riktors closed the door. Axe you an official or a whore? he asked.

She shrugged. An official whore, perhaps? She smiled. She was nude.

Riktors was unimpressed. However efficient they were in Scale, they certainly had no taste. Talaso, he said.

Yes? she asked, puzzled.

I want to see him.

Oh, no, she said helplessly. I can't do that

I think you can. I think you will.

But no one sees him without an appoint-

I have an appointment, He reached out his hand, touched her neck almost affectionately. But there was a small dart in his hand, and though she winced at the sudden, sharp sting, the drug worked quickly.

Talaso? she asked sleepily.

Immediately.

I don't know, she said.

But you know who does

She led him out of the hotel. He did not bother dressing her; she was incapable of feeling any shame under the drug, and Riktors felt it appropriate. Symbolic, perhaps, that the entire world stood naked before him.

It required the drugging of another confused official before Riktors Ashen stood outside the door of Talaso's office. Talaso's receptionist called the guard, of course, and there were three soldiers with weapons leveled, prepared to kill Riktors before he was allowed to enter. But then the door opened and Talaso himself stood there, poised and self-assured.

Let Mr. Ashen come in, please. I meant to see him tomorrow, but since he is so impatient I will see him now.

Reluctantly the guards let him by, and Riktors entered the room. He immediately began the formal accusation. You are known to be constructing starships capably of military activity. You are known to be overtaxing. You are suspected of having a police force three times the legal maximum, and you are accused of dominating and requiring tribute from at least four other nations on Garibali. The facts, the suspicions, and the accusations are enough to bring you to trial before the emperor. If you resist arrest, I am authorized to pass judgment and execute sentence myself. The charge is treason; you are under arrest.

Talaso did not lose his smile. Perhaps, Riktors thought, perhaps he does not realize the danger. Or he thought that because my tone was so matter-of-fact he could resist or delay or argue.

Mr. Ashen, these are serious charges.

You will come with me immediately, Riktors said.

Of course I honor the emperor, but-

This is not your trial, I have no time to listen to your protests, and it will do you no good. Come along, Talaso.

Mr. Ashen, I have responsibilities here. I can't just leave them on a moment's notice.

Riktors looked at his watch. Any further delay or attempt at delay will constitute the treasonous crime of resisting the emperor's arrest, for which the penalty is death.

You forget, said Talaso, that I have three guards standing behind you and you made the foolish mistake of coming to my nation, to my city, alone.

Whatever gave you the idea that I am alone? Riktors asked mildly.

Talaso looked irritated; this, Riktors knew, was his first realization that he just might have been too confident. You are the only passenger who debarked from a registered passenger ship.

The emperor's soldiers have already won complete control of the port, Talaso.

It's a passenger ship! Talaso said angrily. You can't fool me. The sealed identifier declares it to be a passenger ship! The identifiers are absolutely tamperproof-

By the emperor's own decree, Riktors said.

Shoot him, Talaso said to the guards, who stood with their lasers in hand. But they were already collapsing from the drug Riktors had released by clamping the muscles of his buttocks tightly while scuffing his boot along the floor. Talaso's terror suddenly won out, and he was trembling and shouting for help as he fumbled for a weapon in his desk.

Talaso, you are guilty of treason, sentenced to death; look at me.

Talaso tried to hide behind the desk; but he did look at Riktors, just for a moment. Just long enough for Riktors's dart to strike him in the eye.

Talaso clutched at his face; then the poison struck. He vomited violently, so violently that his jaw dislocated. He sprawled on the desk until the spasms began. His muscles contracted sharply. He jerked and flopped over like a fish drowning in air, until one of the spasms struck with such force that his neck broke. Then he lay still, his hair matted with his own vomit, his face turned at an angle from his shoulders that it could never have assumed in life.

Riktors grimaced. It was an unpleasant business, serving as Mikal's emissary. Soil, he had done it well enough these past years, and at last he had been promoted to the palace guard. He could have been moved into the job of assassin, an ugly business of stealth and well-contrived natural deaths, a dead-end assignment. Riktors was sure he would have been a good assassin, and he had good friends among that most private group-but much better to govern. That was the part of his job that Riktors actually liked, and thank God the emperor had chosen to let him follow that path instead of the other.

He turned and opened the door. More guards had just arrived. Riktors killed them all, along with Talaso's receptionist and the official whore and the confused official who had led him here.

Then he called in other bureaucrats from nearby rooms. He brought them into Talaso's office and showed them the corpse. I assume there was holographic recording equipment running, he said. There was. Duplicate it and broadcast it immediately throughout Scale and all over the world. The official he looked at was confused. My friend, Riktors said, I don't care much what your job has been before. I am the government of Scale now, in the name of the emperor Mikal, and you will do what I say or you will die.

The corpses around him were proof enough of power. The official left quickly, and Riktors continued giving orders, already setting in motion the changes that had to be complete in a week for him to stay on schedule, that had to be so thorough that no new dictator could spring up on Garibali for centuries. He picked up the phone and called the port. His second-in-command had been waiting for his call.

Proceed, Riktors said. I have Talaso here, dead of course, and we're moving well.

And I have a message for you from the emperor. His agents on Clike have found that the rumors were unfounded and your visit there has been canceled. He orders you to proceed to Tew when this work is accomplished.

Tew. The Songhouse, and Mikal's Songbird. Then would you please inform the Songhouse we will be arriving a week earlier than we anticipated. Courtesy could not be forgotten, not if the machinery of government were to run smoothly. The Songhouse. That frozen, frightening woman, Esste, and the beautiful child who would not sing for him. Petty politicians and adventurers like Talaso were easy to handle. But how to fight with singers, how to win a gift that could only be given freely- those were questions whose answers could not be found. That was an assignment that could not be handled routinely, and if he succeeded it would be because they let him succeed, and if he failed it would mean the end of his career, the whimsical end to his ambition because he had once happened to be the soldier nearest to Tew that Mikal Imperator could trust.

Damnable bad luck.

He sat down at the receptionist's desk and began to reorganize the government of Scale while his soldiers took control of every other government on Garibali, one by one, and placed the rule of two billion people in Riktors's hands. In the delight of power, Riktors soon put the Songbird far into the back of his mind, where he need not worry. Not just yet, anyway.

19

It was the fourth day that Ansset had tormented Esste. It was near dark outside, and the High Room was growing cold. He had stopped singing an hour ago, but he could not move. He sat in the middle of the floor and looked at Esste and was afraid.

She sat still, her eyes open, looking forward but seeing nothing. Her hands rested on the table in front of her. She had not moved from that position since Ansset began his song in the morning.

And now he was full of doubt. He did not understand what was happening to her. The first time he had been excited because he had actually changed her. While her Control had held and she still remained silent, she had stopped work, had lost her struggle to concentrate on the computer in the table. He had thought the end would come the next day. But the next day she had held on, and the next, and today he realized that she was not going to break. He knew that these were the songs that would make her afraid. But he had no idea what fears he had summoned up.

Each night he had gone to sleep with her frozen at the table; each morning he had awakened to find her asleep in the blankets. When she woke she said nothing, hardly looked at him, just got up, ate, went to the table, and began work. Each day he had started to sing and, each time a little sooner, she had stopped working and taken her day-long pose of studied inattention.

What am I doing to her behind her face?

Ansset felt restless, felt that he had to move. He delayed (Control) and when he got up he got up slowly (Control) and did not walk back and forth but instead headed directly for a shutter and tried to open it and realized that the very attempt was a sign that his Control was slipping. At the thought he was instantly aware of the walls of rock inside him, the deep placid lake that grew ever deeper within them. But something was stirring at the bottom of the lake.

He touched the cold stone wall between the windows and heard the whine of wind outside. Perhaps the first storm of fall was coming. Why had she brought him here? What was she trying to achieve?

What have I done to her?

He looked into the lake, looked deep and began to understand what was happening to him. After eleven days in the High Room he was beginning to be afraid. Things were out of his control. He could not leave. He could not force Esste to speak to him, or even to weep or show any sign that she felt anything at all. (Why is it so important that she show a sign of feeling?) And now he was feeling things within the walls of his Control that did not belong there. Fear stirred at the bottom of his calm. Fear, not just of what would happen to him in the High Room, but of what he might have done to Esste. He could not put it into words, but he realized that if something happened to her, something would happen to him. There was a connection. They were linked somehow, he was sure of it. And by raising her fears he had raised his own. They lurked. They waited. They were inside his walls and he did not know how he would be able to control them.

Speak to me, Esste, he said silently. Speak to me and be angry with me and demand that I change, abuse me or praise me or sing idiotic songs about the cities of Tew but stop hiding from me!

She did not look alive or human, her face empty like that, her body motionless. Human beings moved, their faces expressed things.

I will not break Control.

I will not break Control, he sang softly. But in the moment of singing he knew it was not true, and the fear moved sluggishly within him.

20

It was her childish nightmare that held her. A roaring in her ears and a vast invisible globe that grew and grew and rolled toward her to crush her swallow her fill her empty her... .

And the globe reached her, roaring like a storm at sea. She was a little girl holding the blanket up right to her neck, lying on her back, her eyes wide open, seeing and not seeing the ceiling of the Common Room, seeing and not seeing the vast roar that had filled the hall. She opened her hands to press against the globe, but it was too heavy and she could not lift her hands against the weight. She closed her hands into fists, but the stuff of the globe could not be shut out so simply, and it squeezed in between her fingers and into her fist so that instead of shutting it out she was holding it in. If she opened her mouth it would enter and fill her. If she closed her eyes it would be able to change without her seeing. And so she lay there hour after hour until sleep overcame her or until she screamed and screamed and screamed.

But no one ever came, because she never made a sound.

The stone wall emerged from the shadows. It was dark night, and the light through the cracks in the shutters was gone. Ansset was no longer in the middle of the room. She could see him asleep sitting up in the corner, his blanket wrapped around him. The wind whistled outside; it was cold. She reached stiff and painful fingers down to the computer and made the room warmer. She was inured to cold, but Ansset was still young. Freezing him to death would accomplish nothing.

She got up slowly, so that her body could adjust to movement. Her back protested. But the pains of her body were nothing. Today had been worse than ever, not a memory of the past at all, but the terrors of childhood returned with a vengeance. I cannot last another day of this.

She had said the same thing to herself yesterday, and yet she had lasted.

How am I different from him, she wondered. I, too, am hiding behind my Control. I, too, am unreachable, express nothing to anyone but what I choose to express. Perhaps if I unbent, if I broke Control just a little, he, too, would come out and be human again.

But she knew she would not try the experiment. He would have to open first. If she moved first it would all have been wasted, and he would be stronger and she weaker the next time it was tried. If there was a next time. Twenty-two days. It was the twelfth night, tomorrow would be the twelfth day, they were more than halfway through the time and she had accomplished nothing of importance except that her own strength was flagging and she wondered if she could last another day.

She walked to her blanket roll, and spread the blankets on the floor and bent over to lie down. But in the bending she glanced at the corner where Ansset was sleeping, and she quickly looked up again and stared and realized that Ansset was not asleep as he had been every other time. His eyes were open. He was watching her.

Don't sing! she cried out silently. Let me have peace!

He did not sing. He just watched. And then, in a controlled, quiet voice that expressed no emotion whatsoever he said, Can we stop now?

Can we stop now? If it hadn't been for Control she would have laughed hysterically. He asks her for mercy? His voice was still ice; the battle was still going on; but he had asked for it to end, and somehow that made her feel that she had, after all, made some progress. No. She hadn't made the progress. He had. It was a sign that maybe this would end.

She slept a little better that night.

In the morning a message waited on the computer. Riktors Ashen had sent a regretful note that the emperor had canceled several of his errands and he would be arriving on Tew a week ahead of schedule. The emperor had been most explicit. The Songhouse had promised him a Songbird. He needed the Songbird now. If the Songbird did not come with Riktors Ashen immediately, Mikal would know that the Songhouse did not intend to keep the promise made by Songmaster Nniv.

A week early. Three days from now.

She ate breakfast with Ansset, silently, and wondered if there was any hope of finishing this now.

Sitting for her day's work at the table, Esste steeled herself for Ansset to sit in the middle of the floor and start to destroy her with a song. Today it did not happen. Today Ansset walked around aimlessly, stroking the rock, sitting down and standing up again almost immediately, trying the door, trying the shutters. He hummed as he did, but the humming expressed almost nothing, a hint of impatience, and under that an even fainter hint of fear, but he was not trying to manipulate her with his voice. At first she was relieved beyond expression, but soon, as she began to pursue the work that had gone undone for three days, she began to worry about Ansset again. Now that he was giving her a rest from fearing for herself, she could care about him.

The strain was beginning to show in his face. His eyes were not empty. They darted back and forth, unable to rest on one object for long. And he was biting his cheek occasionally. Control was breaking down. Why now? What had happened to him?

I have to watch him now, very carefully. I'm playing with fire, playing along the rim of his destruction, I must know the moment when I can speak to him. He must not be allowed to pass into despair.

Three days.

In the afternoon Ansset's aimless humming turned into speech. At first Esste could hardly hear him and wondered if he was even talking to her. But soon the words became clearer and, she noticed, he was exactly filling the High Room with his voice and speaking no louder. The voice was still under Control; it expressed, but only what he wanted it to express. Please please please, said the controlled careful meticulous voice, please please please I've had enough can I please go or will you please say something to me I don't know what you're trying to accomplish I don't understand any of this but please I can't stand it anymore please please please... .

Ansset's voice droned on and he didn't look at Esste, looked instead at the walls and the windows and the floor and his own hand, which did not tremble when he looked at it but wavered ever so slightly when he did not. She had not seen him move a muscle when he sang in years. This movement was not voluntary, but it was movement, and the very involuntariness of it spoke of terrible things going on inside Ansset's mind. She wanted to reach out and comfort him and stop the muscles from trembling. She did not, however. She stayed at the computer and worked as she listened to his voice drone on.

I'm sorry I made you afraid I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry please can this be over I'm afraid of you I'm afraid of this room let me hear your voice Esste Esste Esste please... .

His voice finally faded into silence again and he sat by the door, his face pressed into the heavy wood.

21

I have begged and she hasn't answered. The whales are swimming deep inside me and she doesn't help. I need help. All the monsters in the world are inside me instead of outside me I've been tricked and trapped and they are inside my walls not outside my walls inside with me and she won't help me. When I stop thinking about a muscle it shakes. When I stop thinking about a fear it leaps at me. I'm drowning but the lake keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper and I don't know how to get out the walls go up forever and I can't climb over and I can't break through and she won't talk to me.

Ansset pressed his face into the wood of the door until it hurt terribly, and the pain helped.

He remembered. He remembered singing. He could hear all the voices. He heard Esste's voice criticizing his songs. He heard the other children in Chamber. He heard the voices in his class of Breezes and his class of Bells and his class of Groans. Voices at meals. Voices in the toilet. The voices of the strangers in Step and Bog. Rruk's voice as she helped him learn how things were done in the Song-house. All the voices sang at once to him but there was only one voice that he could not recognize, that he could not hear clearly, a dim and distant voice that he did not understand.

But it was not a Songhouse voice. It was coarse and crude and the song was meaningless and empty. But it was not empty, it was full. It was not meaningless, for he knew that if he could once hear the song, really hear it through the din of the other voices, that it would help him, that the song would mean something to him. And as for coarseness and crudeness, the song he tried to hear did not jar on him at all. It made him feel as comfortable as sleep, as comfortable as eating, as the satisfaction of all the miserable desires. He strained to hear, he pressed his face into the wood, but the voice would not come clear.

Not for hours, and he rubbed his face back and forth against the wood, and threw himself to the stone floor, so the pain would drive all the other voices out of his mind, would let him hear the one voice he searched for, because that was the voice that would save him from the terror that swam every moment closer to the surface where he watched and waited helplessly.

22

The vigil lasted all night. Esste watched as Ansset drove the splinters of the door into his nose and brow and cheeks until blood flowed. She watched as he tried to grip and tear the stone until his nails broke. She watched as he slammed his face into the rock walls until he bled and she feared he would cause permanent damage. It seemed he would never sleep. And in between the self-mutilation he would, in a wooden, controlled voice, his body held as rigid as he could hold it for all the trembling, say, Now please. Now please. Help me. There was Control, but that was all. No music. His songs were gone.

Just for the moment, she told herself. Just for now. His songs, his good songs, will come back if I just wait for this to run its course, like a fever that has to break.

Morning came and Ansset was still awake. He had stopped thrashing, and Esste went to the machines for food. She set it in front of him, but he did not eat. She reached a piece of it to his mouth, but instead of taking the food he bit her, he set his teeth into her fingers with all his strength. The pain was excruciating, but Esste's Control was not even tested by this-physical pain, at her age, was the least of her weaknesses. She waited patiently, saying nothing. Blood from her fingers drooled out of Ansset's mouth for minutes as both silently looked at each other. And it was Ansset who made the first sound, a moan that sounded like the slow breaking of rock, a song that spoke only of agony and self-hatred. Slowly he released his bite on her fingers. The pain rushed up her arm.

Ansset's eyes went blank. He did not see her.

Esste went to the machine and covered her fingers with salve. She was exhausted after a night of no sleep, and Ansset's savage bite had disturbed her far more than the mere pain. I will stop. This has gone too far, she decided. Her hand shook, despite Control, despite the calm she tried to enforce on herself. I can't do this anymore, she said silently.

But for twelve days she had been silent, and sound did not come easily to her throat. Came with such difficulty, in fact, that as she looked at Ansset's blank face she could not make any sound come. Instead she lay down on her blanket, unused that night, and slept.

She awoke to the sound of wind howling through the High Room. It was cold, icy even under the blanket. It took only a few moments for her to realize what that meant. She leaped up from the floor. It was afternoon, but dark with wind and clouds. The clouds were so low that mist trailed into the High Room with every gust of wind, and the ground was invisible. Every shutter of every window was open, some of them banging against the stone walls outside.

He has jumped from the tower. The thought screamed in her mind, and she gasped aloud.

Her gasp was answered by a moan. She whirled and saw Ansset lying on the table, curled up with the thumb and little ringer of his right hand in his mouth, the other fingers pressed into his forehead and eyes like an infant's involuntary pose. The relief that swept over her forced her to lean on the table, taking her breath in great gasps. Any illusion of Control was gone now. Ansset had won, forcing her to break before her task was completed.

The cold forced her to take action again. She went to the windows and closed them all, leaning out over the sills to catch the handles of the shutters and pull them closed. The mist was so dense that it seemed to swallow up her hand as she reached into it. But inside she was singing. Ansset had not jumped.

The windows closed, she returned to the table, and only now realized that Ansset was asleep. He trembled with cold and, probably, exhaustion, but he had not seen her panic, her relief, had not heard her gasp. Her first thought was gratitude, but she realized that it might have been good for him to see that fear for his safety could overcome even Esste's iron reserve. It is as it is, she told herself, and looked in his left hand for the key to the shutters, found it, and went around and locked them all, then replaced the key on the chain which had fallen to the floor after he took it from her neck in her sleep.

She went to the computer and turned up the heat in the High Room. Instantly the stones under her feet grew warm.

Then she took her blanket and Ansset's and covered the boy where he lay on the table. He stirred slightly, moaned and whimpered, but did not awaken.

23

Ansset's face was stiff when he awoke. He was not cold anymore. His head ached, and where the splinters had been driven into his face, the stinging was a constant undercurrent. But he felt something cool touching his face, and wherever it touched, the stinging went away. He opened his eyes just a little. Esste leaned over him, dabbing salve on his face. For the moment Ansset forgot everything bad and carefully said to her, I didn't jump. They told me to jump and I didn't,

She said nothing. She said nothing at all, nothing at all, and her silence was a blow that knocked him back in on himself, and his struggle returned. The water was rushing up to meet him, a vast whirlpool sweeping higher and higher and Ansset was at the top and there was nowhere higher that he could go to escape it. He looked inside himself and there was no escape and as the water touched him, swept his feet out from under him, bore him in fast, dizzying circles around and around, he screamed. His scream was a voice that filled the High Room and echoed from the walls and shattered the stillness of the mist outside.

He was no longer in the High Room. He was being sucked down into the maelstrom. The water closed over his head. Spinning faster and faster he plunged deeper and deeper toward the mouths of the waiting terrors below. One after another they swallowed him up. He felt himself being swallowed, the massive peristalsis driving him into gullet after gullet, hot warm places where he could not breathe.

And he was walking into a room. Walking and walking but getting no farther into the room than he had been before. And all alone, no other sound, he heard the song he had been searching for. Heard the song and saw the singer, but could not hear and could not see, not really, because the singer had no face that he could recognize, and the song, no matter how carefully he listened, kept escaping the moment after he heard it. He could not hear the melody in his memory, only in the moment, and as he looked at an eye, the other eye vanished, and when he looked for the mouth, the eye he had seen before disappeared.

He was no longer walking, though he had no memory of reaching the woman who lay on the bed. He reached out. He was touching her face. He was stroking her face so very gently, tracing the features, the eyes, the mouth, and the voice sang, Bi-lo-bye. Bi-lo-bye, but the moment he understood the words he lost them. Lost them, and the mist came and swallowed up the face. He clutched for it, held it, held it tight; she could not disappear from him in the mist which was all white invisible faces that swallowed her up. This time he held on tightly and he would not let go, nothing could pull him away.

He heard the song again, heard the song and it was exactly the same song and this time the words were:

I will never hurt you.

I will always help you.

If you are hungry

I'll give you my food.

If you are frightened

I can your friend.

I love you now

And love does not end.

He knew where he was now. Somehow he had been pulled from the lake. He lay on the shore of the lake and he was dry and safe and the song he had been searching for had at last been found. He still gripped the face tightly, clinging to the hair, holding the face close over his own as he lay there, and he knew her at last, and cried for joy.

24

Ansset lay across Esste's lap, his hands frantically gripping her hair, when at last his violent shaking stopped, and his jaw slackly opened, and his eyes at last focused and he saw her.

Mother, he cried, and there was no song but childhood in his voice.

Esste opened her mouth, and tears poured from her eyes and flew as she blinked to Ansset's cheeks, and she sang from the deepest part of her heart. Ansset, my only son.

He wept and clung to her, and she babbled meaningless words to him, sang her most soothing songs to him, and held him tightly. They lay on the blankets in the warm High Room as the storm raged outside. As she held his bruised and cut face into her shoulder, she also wept; for two hidden places had been plumbed, and she did not know or care which had been the greater achievement. She had locked him into silence in the High Room in order to cure him; he had returned the favor, and she, too, was healed.

25

It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day. Sunlight streamed through the cracks in the western shutters. Ansset and Esste sat on the floor of the High Room, singing to each other.

Ansset's song was halting, though the melody was high and fine, and his words were all the agony of loss and loneliness as he grew up; but the agony had been transformed, was transformed even as he sang, by the harmony and countermelody of Esste's wordless song which said not to fear, not to fear, not to fear. Ansset's hands danced as he sang, played gently along Esste's arms, face, and shoulders, kept capturing her hands and letting them go. His face was alight as he sang, the eyes were alive, and his body said as much as his voice did. For while his voice spoke of the memory of fear, his body spoke of the presence of love.

26

Riktors Ashen was not sure what to do. Mikal had been emphatic. The Songbird was to return with Riktors Ashen. And yet Riktors knew that he could not achieve anything by blustering or threatening. This was not a national council or a vain dictator on an unsophisticated planet where the emperor's very name could inspire terror. This was the Songhouse, and it was older than the empire, older than many worlds, older than any government in the galaxy. It recognized no nationality, no authority, no purpose except its songs. Riktors could only wait, knowing that delay would infuriate Mikal, and knowing that haste would accomplish nothing in the Songhouse.

At least the Songhouse was taking him seriously enough that they left a full-fledged Songmaster with him, a man named Onn whose every word was reassurance, though in fact he promised nothing at all.

We're honored to have you here, Onn said.

You must be, Riktors answered, amused. This is the third time you've said so.

Well, you know how it is, Onn said with good cheer. I meet so few outsiders that I hardly know what to say. You'd hardly enjoy hearing the gossip of the Songhouse, and that's all I know to talk about.

You'd be surprised at how much interest I'd have in gossip.

Oh, no. We have singularly boring gossip, Onn said, and then changed the subject to the weather, which had been alternately rainy and sunny for days. Riktors grew impatient. Weather mattered a great deal, he supposed, to the planetbound. To Riktors Ashen weather of any kind was just one more reason to be in space.

The door opened, and Esste herself entered, accompanied by a boy. Blond and beautiful, and Riktors recognized him instantly as Ansset, Mikal's Songbird, and almost said so. Then he hesitated. The boy looked different somehow. He looked closely. There were scratches and bruises on his face.

What have you been doing to the boy? asked Riktors, appalled at the thought that the child might have been beaten.

It was Ansset himself who answered, in tones that inspired absolute confidence. The boy could not lie, said his voice: I fell on the woodpile. I knew better than to play there. I was lucky not to break a bone.

Riktors relaxed, and then realized another, more important reason why the child looked different. He was smiling. His face was alert, his eyes looked warm and friendly. He held Esste's hand.

Are you ready to come with me? Riktors asked him.

Ansset smiled and sighed, and both melted Riktors's normal reserve. He liked the boy immediately. I wish I could come, Ansset said. But I'm a Songbird, and that means that I must sing to the whole Songhouse before I go. Ansset turned to Esste. May I invite him to attend?

Esste smiled, and that surprised Riktors more than the change in Ansset. He hadn't thought the woman knew how to seem anything but stern.

Will you come? Ansset asked.

Now?

Yes, if you like. And Ansset and Esste turned and left. Riktors, unsure of himself, looked at Onn, who blandly returned his gaze. I was invited, Riktors decided, and so I can follow them.

They led him to a large hall which was filled with hundreds and hundreds of children who sat on hard benches in absolute silence. Even their bare feet on the stone made little noise as the last of them filed into place. Scattered among them were many teen-agers and adults, and on the stone platform at the front of the hall sat the oldest of them. They were all dressed alike in the drab robes that reached the floor, though none of the children seemed to have clothing that exactly fit. The impression was of poverty until he looked at their faces, which looked exalted.

Esste and Ansset led him to the rear of the hall, at the end of the center aisle. Riktors was surprised to have been given such a poor seat; he did not know, and no one at the Songhouse ever told him, that he was the first outsider in centuries to witness a ceremony in the great hall of the Songhouse.

He did not even know it was a ceremony. Ansset and Esste merely walked, hand in hand, to the front of the hall. Esste stepped onto the platform, then reached down a hand to bring Ansset up. Then the Songmaster retired to a chair on the platform while Ansset stood alone in front, at the head of the aisle, where Riktors could see him clearly.

And he sang.

His voice filled every part of the hall, but there was no resonance from the walls to distort the tone. He rarely sang words, and those he sang seemed meaningless to Riktors. Yet the emperor's envoy was held spellbound. Ansset's hands moved in the air, rising, falling, keeping time with odd rhythms in the music. His face also spoke with the song so that even Riktors, at a distance, could see that the song came from Ansset's soul.

No one in the hall wept, not even the youngest Groans with the least Control. Control was not threatened by Ansset's song, and it did not reflect the feelings of the audience. Indeed, the song divided the audience into every separate individual, for Ansset's song was so private that no two people could hear it the same way. The song made Riktors think of plunging down between planets, though the child could not possibly have experienced a pilot's thrill of vertigo. And when Ansset at last fell silent, the song lingered in the air and Riktors knew he would never forget it. He had shed no tears, felt no terrible passions. Yet the song was one of the most powerful experiences of his life.

Mikal has waited a lifetime for this, Riktors thought.

All the children and adults in the hall arose, though he had seen no cue given. And all of them began to sing, one by one, then all together, until the sheer weight of sound made the air in the hall feel thick and aromatic with melody. They were saying good-bye to Ansset, who alone was silent, who stood without weeping on the platform.

They were still singing as Ansset stepped from the platform, and without looking to the left or the right walked down the aisle to where Riktors waited. Ansset held out his hand. Riktors took it.

Take me with you, Ansset said. I'm ready to go.

And Riktors's hand trembled as he led Ansset from the hall, as he took him to the flesket waiting outside that would carry them both to Riktors's starship. Riktors had seen wealth, had seen the opulence of Mikal's palace at Susquehanna, had seen the thousand most beautiful things that people made and bought and sold. None of them was worth the beauty that walked beside him, that held his hand, that smiled at him as the Songhouse door closed behind them.