by John Grant
He crunched it underfoot, adding a second murder to his first; I heard its tiny scream as what little of the living music it had managed to hold fled from it.
Then we were walking along empty gray corridors, him at my back with his spitting-weapon still raised, as if there were somewhere that I could escape to. The odd thing was this: throughout all, I had been able to hear that, incredible as it still seems, there was music of a sort in the weapon. It was dull and barely thinking, like that of a fallen tree, and it was more of a malignant discord than anything else, but the fact that it was nevertheless there struck me as a marvel. The thing was of crafted metal – surely it, which killed the living music in all it touched and stiffened music merely by its proximity, could not itself be a vessel for the music? I began to wonder if perhaps we of the Finefolk were not, in a way, even more ignorant of the Ironfolk: they at least are aware of the existence of the living music, even though they cannot know or understand it; whereas we have never known that their shaped-metal implements could have music at all. I still cannot decide if this was a great insight of mine, or if it was merely that my senses were deceiving me in my sadness for my dead flass.
We were in a bigger room, and there were others – no other Finefolk, of course, for this was not a room where our kind would normally be expected to go, but instead an Ironfolk place. They were in clothes like my guard's, but some had colored ribbons stitched to them, as if a cloud-blackened sky could be brightened by a paintbrush: the Ironfolk cannot see that dead colors are less brilliant than living darkness. The one who had brought me here held out the dead fragments of my harplet, the regretted trophy of his kill; he jabbered spoken-words whose meaning I could not care to understand, for I was trying to hear the silence of the mustard-yellow splinters in his hand.
One of the ones wearing dead ribbons beat me about the face with the heels of his hands, then clenched a fist to strike me harder – enraged, I think, that the blood coming from my nose was straw-yellow rather than a treacly red; but he was held back by a bark from another, and he dropped his arm to his side.
The beating had cleared my head; I made to thank my assailant, but was told curtly to hold my peace.
"We'll have to make an example of it," said the one who had spoken to my attacker and then to me. "Who knows how many others of the slugglies might be harboring instruments, like this one? We can't risk their starting to play the bloody things once we're in fastspace." He looked directly at me. "I'm sorry about that, buster."
For a moment he seemed partly to be one of us. Confused, I fluted some notes at him, imitations of living song, but it was clear he knew nothing of them. Then I tried spoken-words, but he told me once more to be quiet.
"Kill it?" said another. "Something dramatic? Feed it into a recyc and show the mess on holo all over the ship? Stuff the thing out a lock?"
The one who seemed to be their leader shook his head, which is the Ironfolk signal of negation. "No. We'll give it a pod. After we've left the Galaxy."
"But that's ..." began the one who had slapped me.
"Cruel. Yes. But with the veneer of clemency. There will be no blood. If it were seen to be killed, that just might be enough to trigger the slugglies into rising against us. There are nearly ten thousand of them, remember, Coutts. But that's not the main worry. I'm more concerned with what the passengers might think."
"Passengers – huh!" This was one of the others. He made as if to spit, but didn't. "Bunch of no-hopers. Cattle. Can't think why we don't just flush them out the locks. Save the cost of carrying them. No one would know."
"Silence, Wren." The leader spoke almost silently himself, his crude Ironfolk words harsh with sibilants, like a weasel moving rapidly through dry grass. "Some of the passengers – many of them – feel sorry for the slugglies, and the kids take to them. Easy enough when you see them here on ship, like pretty children themselves; the passengers don't know how they live on their homeworlds. The passengers don't know they're animals. The slugglies are too human. So we can't hazard this thing's death rousing sympathies in the wrong places. Yet we need to get the message through to its fellows. So we put it in a pod and send it off into space. Then we have an amnesty for a few days, so the slugglies can hand in any instruments they've managed to smuggle aboard, or make."
I learned more as they continued to talk. The "pod" they had been speaking of was nothing to do with plants but instead like a lifeboat on a world-bound vessel; it was normally to be used for escape only when the main craft was certainly doomed. The Ten Per Cent Extra Free, like other large vessels, had thousands of these plastic pods. Because it was not seen as practicable to give each of them all the machinery necessary to act as fully independent spacecraft (it never having occurred to the Ironfolk that the true way of making such things would be for each glad or flass to fashion their own, so that it would sing in harmony with them), they were rigged with standard gear. Moving at a creep across rather than swiftly above the surface of the probability sea, a pod would head for the nearest sunlike star, and hope to find worlds there. At the same time, though, it would release a burst of high-pitched sounds which could flip along the crests of the waves, so that other Ironfolk might hear the call for help. The cruelty of the leader's punishment was that he planned to release the pod with me in it far out in the intergalactic ocean, with the nearest sunlike star many lifetimes' journey away. All things would be reused inside the pod, so that I would neither starve nor suffocate; I would merely live out my decades and die insane from loneliness, if I did not take my own life before.
It was a good Ironfolk plan, but the leader had forgotten that I and my kind were not Ironfolk. I could simply sleep out the millennia if I chose. Even if I could not have done so, most of us are poor at thinking of what is to come; the flasses and glads would have seen me go and wished me a good voyage, little thinking of the consequences facing me. As it was, they were going to dance that one of us at least had escaped from tyranny into freedom. They might be inspired to make instruments of their own, so as to be caught and rewarded as I had been.
I tried to explain this to the leader, but he would not hear. I wonder if the Ten Per Cent Extra Free reached the Spiral of Andromeda, or if some one of our kind found a way, despite the prisoning metal, of coaxing an instrument into singing the living music.
~
"Next," Qinefer is saying, "Brightjacket takes the grumbling sigh of a cloud that is lit by fires from beneath, and he lays the higher and the lower notes over the melody that wet wood makes in flames, and this he meshes into the rest of the glorious harmony that he is making. But still, even after all this, he is not done; for no chord is complete without humor. He takes a blade of grass between his thumbs and blows on it, making a raucous fartlike blare; this he captures with his hands before it can flee, and he casts it into the harmony. Yet still he is not done ..."
She will carry on the account of Brightjacket's making for a long while yet; the weans love to build the harmony in their minds, so that they may hear it for themselves. She is inventive in this, never building the same chord from one telling of the tale to the next, and they joyously never correct her, as they might if she made some trifling other detail different. Yet she does not know the true harmony that opens up the pathways through the sea, for that is another memory I have failed to give her.
"Mummy," says Harum at last, after Brightjacket's chord has been made, "how do the ships of the Ironfolk sail the sea?"
It is not a question that either of the weans have thought to ask before, and Qinefer glances at me, requesting that I explain; this is yet a further knowledge that I have held to myself. I twitch my eyes, refusing her request; my grin is required to mollify her.
Yes, she is inventive. The weans are satisfied by her explanation.
~
In the beginning there was only the probability sea, the nothingness where everything was waiting for something to happen. The eldern might say that what happened was the mothering of the Finefolk, but that i
s not truth. We do not know what happened to churn the featureless serenity of the ocean, and perhaps it is impertinent of us even to speculate. But something touched its waters into motion, something sent waves rippling across it; so that, whereas before there had been nothingness, as all the probabilities were perfectly matched and balanced, now there were regional asymmetries – like temperature discretenesses in the waters of a worldly ocean. And as with those variations, on occasion fluid nothingness was frozen into a more tangible beingness – a minuscule crystal of ice – a locus where the probabilities were restricted, so that the future was no longer a choice from an infinity of potentials, merely from a great many.
Probability was the living music.
Countless times a note of living music was instantly mated with a negation-of-living one, such that both vanished in their birthing of fresh nothingness, as if a spider devoured not only her mate but also herself; but this was not always the case. Sometimes the living notes escaped the seductions of their anti-living counterparts, so that both remained solitary, unable to return to the formlessness of the once-tranquil sea. The living notes might sometimes then come together, growing just as tiny crystals of ice can grow out of brine to create something huge – a stately, lumbering ice-mountain. Not all did this; some were too fleet-moving, and for others the conditions in the sea around them were ... not quite favorable. And the same occurred for the pieces of frozen counter-music, of course; hugely large or infinitesimally small, they still pattern the surface of the probability ocean, seeking to mate with the living; in their different ways, both the Ironfolk and the Finefolk know this to be true, but knowledge of the truth has brought to neither of the kinds of folk any proper understanding of the life-negating counter-music.
The waters of the probability ocean are never still. They wash around the ice-bits remorselessly. Sometimes they melt away a piece; sometimes they bring some of the counter-music up close enough to the shore that much is reduced to water. But over everything there is a balance, so that what is lost back into formlessness in one place emerges from it in another.
To the Ironfolk the pieces of frozen probability are something less wonderful: they are particles either of matter or of energy – for the Ironfolk do not realize, in their hearts, that energy is merely fleeter matter, singing the same song but more nimbly; and nor do the Ironfolk know that nothing in the probability ocean is truly disassociated from all else, so that nothing can be particulate. Yet even the Ironfolk have recognized, in a smallest way, the waves on the waters. Where the pieces of living music are very tiny, the eddies around them are accordingly so; and they may build to become standing waves, as I have seen in fjords. These minuscule ripples, too, the Ironfolk call particles, even though they know that they are not that but fluctuations on the surface of the probability sea.
In the gulfs between worlds the waves have a chance to grow much greater, so that they are like those of inland seas. It was the discovery that they could make their craft flit from crest to crest of these that enabled the Ironfolk to travel so very rapidly among the stars; though they will never discover what the Finefolk have always known, that it is possible to create music in resonance with the waves of the particle sea, so that we pass through it instantly along uncluttered pathways.
As they skip the crests of the rollers between the stars, the Ironfolk's vessels cast up a great spray of droplets. Pieces of living music and counter-music are condensed from the waters, only to mate with each other and instantaneously vanish again. These pieces of stiffened probability may take many forms and magnitudes: most are only notes, mere crystals, smaller than a crystal of physical water could ever be, and too small to have a shape; others may be much larger, may be chords of a mountain's size, and their forms may be whatever the whim of chance decrees, from a fire-nostrilled dragon to a cloud of light. But the Ironfolk are unaware of them, for these manifestations last no more than seconds, at the very most, before being negated by their dark counterparts; they might last longer were the Ironfolk astute enough to seek them, for the focus of a hearer's interest is another way of making music resonate with the ocean. But the Ironfolk, of course, don't think to do so.
The gulfs between the stars are as nothing to those between the island galaxies. Here the waves, undisrupted by islands of frozen probability, can build up to become truly mighty rollers – as vast beside those that range between the stars as those are to the minuscule eddies about the nucleus of an atom. Here, too, the Ironfolk's vessels may move at their fastest speeds, for the distance between one crest and the next is so unimaginably greater. And their bows cast up an accordingly greater spray, whose droplets of music, much larger and more capable of coalescing like-to-like, can last for minutes or even hours. Here, because of their size, there is less variability in the forms of the pieces of frozen probability; most are too large to be anything but suns, or to sound as anything less than an inferno of chords.
The Ironfolk's intergalactic vessels leave behind them in the blackness of the probability ocean, all unknowing, trails of swiftly failing suns, like luminous pearls streaming from a broken necklace onto the surface of a worldly midnight sea, briefly floating before they sink from sight.
Like choirs, dying.
~
"They're arguing for a long time once finally Brightjacket's harmony is struck. Who shall go to the Freedom first? The eldern are saying – not all of them, for your Daddy is one of them who does not agree – that the one to take the pathway should be someone so old that he (they prefer it be a glad, as they are eldern) can remember a time before the Ironfolk came to plague us. The weans, on the other side, are plaintive that their youth gives them the right to go first to where all shall once again be young like they are; for, if you think about it, it is memory of a fixed place that gives us Finefolk our ages. Those of intervening years are shouting that ... well, you can imagine the kerfuffle: worse than you two at bath-time. In the end it is Brightjacket who resolves the dilemma, by the simple means of taking the first step himself.
"There is a delay no longer than the beat of a mouse's heart" – she draws the words out, taking the tip of her forefingers to her lips; her eyes are as wide as the weans' – "and then the timbre of the universe's chant changes just a trifle, and all know that Brightjacket is alive and safe on the world that he chose. As the Finefolk listen longer to the washing of the sea-waves, and to the new note he has added to their sound, they learn that Brightjacket is already constructing a further harmony, there on that new world of his, so that he may step yet further out into the ocean's darkness."
She describes it well. I can remember the hush that took the throng of us in that bizarre chamber at the core of Snowdon. Then there was singing and piping that made the air a splash of colors, like the sky at sunrise, mottled like a trout's belly, with scales iridescing in every hue that the sun possesses.
"By the time the Earth had turned once more on its axis, there were fewer than a hundred of the Finefolk left to know it. Those were the ones who wished to stay, who found that the interest of watching the Ironfolk develop their unmusical arts outweighed the disgustingness of having to be so close to them in order to do so. For the rest, there was a universe of worlds that offered welcome. Haven. Peace. The Freedom. Far from the stiffening curse of crafted metal, the Finefolk could become of one song with the worlds they ventured to, as they had been with Earth in the old days, before the Ironfolk's arising.
"That is why, when the Ironfolk conquered the ocean crossings – they talk of conquest, not of befriending – and discovered that so many worlds were populated by Finefolk, who had become blended in so well with their worlds that they might have been there forever, they thought of our kind as being not of Earth at all. We were, instead, relics of some long-forgotten race born elsewhere – on the Galaxy's far side, perhaps, or even in another galaxy. We had, so the Ironfolk said, many millions of years ago traveled in now-long-rotted not-metal ships and been set down everywhere to colonize, but instead of doing s
o had regressed to become animals. As if the Ironfolk themselves were anything else! Never forget, Larksease and Harum, that you and me and your Daddy are animals, as much as any squid or starling, else you become like the Ironfolk, who think themselves other."
I don't know if what she says is true, although it has seemed so. I do not know if the Ironfolk truly believe us to be like animals, or if they just tell themselves we are, so that it appears less of a sin to them that they should slaughter or enslave us. They have a code which they use in place of cooperation with the universe, but it seems that it can function only if founded on a complicated tapestry sewn from deceptions. Often they use the code to deceive themselves into believing that they wish to perform good actions, when what they really wish is to destroy; far more often, sadly, the deception is another way around, so that they harm the universe, by harming its parts, while convincing themselves that what they are doing is for the good. I have seen Ironfolk condemn to the fire a hundred hundred or more innocents of their own sort – weans included – yet all the while telling themselves (or inventing gods to tell them so) that this is a kindly deed, and virtuous. Such crimes and worse have they performed against the Finefolk; I am sure their hands would more often have been stayed, though, had they let themselves know that we are wiser than they.
It is to the Ironfolk's discredit, of course, that they would contemplate massacring animals of any kind in this way. I am trying to think with their mind; this causes me hurt, and may not be a revealing exercise.
~
I emerged from the Ten Per Cent Extra Free into light.
All around me the waters of the probability ocean were phosphorescent with the living music, sparked into being by the passage of the vessel. Brilliant runs of notes glissaded in and out of existence; chords clattered audaciously against the blackness, as if in the knowledge that their lives would be short, and so making sure that their effulgence would compensate; here, there, everywhere were cadences that were both born and dying in an instant. The harmony of all this was bizarre, and for the first seconds after the pod crept from the belly of the Ten Per Cent Extra Free it seemed to me unutterably, intolerably discordant; yet almost at once I began to respond to it, recognizing it for the primal assonance of the universe, and therefore the basic assonance of myself.