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 b
e 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.
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