Chorus Skating

by Alan Dean Foster

  Jon-Tom edged forward until he was sitting on the rim of his seat. “It doesn’t have to be anything significant, Master. A small dilemma we could resolve. Something requiring the attention of a spellsinger. Nothing drastic, no real perils. Just a little spice.”

  Removing his glasses, Clothahump set to cleaning them with a soft cloth he extracted from one of the drawers built into his plastron. “I wish I could help you, lad, but insofar as I can tell, all is right with the world. There is a faint sense of occasional crises elsewhere, but you say you are averse to any serious commuting.” He shrugged, his shell bobbing. “Now if you will excuse me, I desire to return to the profound mental state in which I had immersed myself prior to your unexpected and intrusive arrival. Remnants of a difficult conceptualization still cling to the heightened edge of my consciousness.”

  “Oi, let’s leave ’im alone, mate.” Mudge slid off his chair. “I’m ready to reacquaint meself with me bed, I am.”

  “But we agreed,” Jon-Tom protested.

  The otter walked over until he was staring straight into the seated human’s face. “Look ’ere, mate, you’ve asked ’is sorcerership if there were any problems wot needed dealin’ with and ’e’s told you there ain’t. So why don’t you leave the both of us be and go back to your ’ousecleanin’?”

  “No! There has to be something. Anything,” he insisted, imploring the wizard.

  “Welllll…” The turtle replaced his glasses on his beak. “There is one little thing. A genuine inconsequentially.”

  “Anything,” Jon-Tom reiterated.

  Clothahump considered. “It involves music.”

  “There, you see?” the spellsinger informed a doubtful Mudge. “Something simple enough for me to deal with.”

  “Simple is as simple does,” the otter muttered under his breath.

  “I do not know if this is a matter fixable,” Clothahump professed, “or if so, if it is even worth pondering over.”

  “Tell me,” asked Jon-Tom eagerly.

  The wizard composed himself. “It appears to involve a minor disturbance in the musical firmament. Nothing to titillate one, I’m afraid.”

  Jon-Tom slumped. “A musical disturbance? That’s it?”

  “I warned you.”

  “This disturbance. You’re sure it’s not destroying a village somewhere, or undermining the stability of a mountain, or driving to madness some ferocious being?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “It hardly sounds worth wasting a spellsong on. A task for a minor adept, at most.”

  “Take it or leave it, lad.”

  Jon-Tom considered. “There’s nothing else?” Clothahump shook his head, whereupon his young partner looked resigned. “All right, then: Tell me about it.”

  “It’s actually a bit more specific than just a disturbance. I’ve succeeded in isolating the condition, or rather, it appears to have isolated itself. As to an esthetic evaluation, that is beyond me. As you know, I have something of a tin ear. Or would, if I had ears.” He chuckled at his own joke.

  “That’s our Clothahump,” attested Mudge softly. “A regular barrel o’ unrestrained mirth.”

  “Yes, well.” Somewhat less than overwhelmed by companionable hilarity, the wizard regained his aplomb. “I suppose you should have a look at it.”

  “A look at it?” Jon-Tom’s eyebrows lifted.

  Rising from his chair, Clothahump beckoned for them to follow him deeper into the convoluted maze that was the tree’s interior.

  The subject of his terse discourse idled in an alcove hollowed out of an internal wall near the back of a workshop, soaking up numinous ambiance like a lizard on a hot rock. As the trio approached, the collage of scintillating motes oscillated, momentarily catching and throwing back the subdued light. It was a ghostly luminescence, Jon-Tom mused: a glimmering not-there existing at the outermost limits of visual perception, a faint phosphorescence that skated so lightly on the thin ice of one’s corneas that the relevant rods and cones barely remarked on its presence.

  Like the shadow of an aurora, it hovered before them. Then the motes seemed to twitch briefly and reposition themselves. As they did so, a musical tone sounded in the room. It was pleasant, plaintive, and fleeting.

  “I can’t see it very well,” Jon-Tom declared, “but it’s lovely. What is it?”

  “Music, of course,” said the wizard. “What did you think it was? An acoustical alignment. A harmonic convergence. A sonorous synchronicity.”

  “I don’t follow. I heard the tone, but that doesn’t tell me what it is.”

  “I’ve just told you, lad. It’s music.”

  “I’ll be recruited for a eunuch,” Mudge exclaimed. “I’ve ’eard plenty o’ music in me time, but I ain’t never actually seen any before.”

  Jon-Tom regarded the wispy ovoid with great interest as it chimed afresh. “I didn’t know you could see music.”

  “It’s normally not this straightforward.” Clothahump squinted through his glasses. “Usually conditions have to be exactly right. Even so, it’s slippery stuff to try and get a visual fix on.”

  Taking a step forward, he extended a stubby hand. The mote-mass hesitated, then began to curl freely about his fingers, bathing them in halftones. They cast, Jon-Tom noted, no shadow.

  “It appears to be a portion of a much larger musical thought,” the wizard informed them. “I have done some research and find it to consist of a number of unvarying chords which are continuously re-forming themselves.” He grunted. “Music is not an area in which I chose to specialize.”

  Jon-Tom moved forward. “May I?”

  “By all means.” The wizard stepped aside.

  The motes drifted clear of Clothahump’s fingers and cautiously swarmed Jon-Tom’s extended hand. There was no feeling of physical contact, no tactile sensation whatsoever. Only a suggestion of a warm tingle whenever the notes periodically aligned themselves and sang out. Sometimes the tempo varied, sometimes the volume, but the basic underlying chords were always the same.

  The spellsinger was quietly awed. “I’ve felt music before, but never quite this literally.”

  The motes left his hand and drifted off, hovering halfway between human and turtle. They continued to resonate, a distinctly mournful sound.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Find it? I am not in the habit of seeking out stray music, lad. It found me. I woke up two days ago to Ghorpul’s subdued shouting. This had somehow floated into the atrium study and was toying with a set of decorative chimes Padula the Clotted Witchess had given me a hundred or so years ago. I had the distinct impression it was trying to make friends.”

  “Music has a way of getting in anyplace.” Jon-Tom continued to be fascinated by the wandering motes.

  Clothahump harrumphed meaningfully. “That may be, but I hold an intense distrust of invasive phenomena, no matter how sweet or sad they may sound. I had Ghorpul take a feather duster to it and together we tried to shoo it away, until it began to sound so plaintive I decided to ignore it for a while. It doesn’t seem harmful, and it leaves my food alone. It just hovers in that alcove and watches, if music can be said to watch. Sometimes it resounds urgently, at other times querulously. I take from it a feeling of increasing desperation.”

  “You think somethin’s wrong with it, guv?” Mudge squinted uncertainly at the motes.

  “I believe it wants something,” the wizard informed them. “Or perhaps it is simply lost.”

  “Lost chords.” Jon-Tom looked pensive. “I’ve heard of lost chords, but I never encountered any before. I certainly never expected to see any. If it’s lost, how can we help it? How do you ask questions of a piece of music?”

  “I have not the slightest idea,” replied Clothahump laconically, “nor does the question especially interest me. But it clearly is in need of assistance, which I have no inclination to provide. I just did not have the heart to kick the poor thing out. It seems such a lamentably anxious piece of music.” He extended his fin
gers again and once more the motes swirled about them.

  “It changes, though whether it is responding to one’s mood or to some other, unknown influence I cannot say.”

  Swinging the duar around in front of him, Jon-Tom let his fingers toy with the strings. A different kind of music filled the room as he sang, “Are you lost?”

  The motes reacted instantly. They whisked away from the wizard’s fingers, structured themselves, and repeated the same bright sequence of notes sharply, three times in succession.

  “I would interpret that as a positive response,” commented Clothahump unnecessarily.

  Jon-Tom nodded, pleased with himself. “But how does music get lost?”

  “Maybe it lives in a certain instrument that’s gone missin’?” Mudge suggested.

  “Nothing so prosaic, I would-think.” The wizard studied the drifting nimbus. “More likely it is absent from its place in a much longer sequence of notes. It belongs to a much more extensive and complex piece, from which it has somehow unaccountably strayed.”

  Jon-Tom glanced sharply at the wizard. “I thought you had no interest in music.”

  Clothahump shrugged. “I did not mean to indicate that I am entirely ignorant on the subject.” fie gestured at the cloudy aurora. “Clearly it exists in a state of distress, unable to partake of the musical thought of which it is a part. In short, it is lost, and suffering from what we might call musicus interruptus.”

  “Oi,” murmured Mudge, “I can sympathize with that, I can.”

  “What did it come here for?” Jon-Tom wondered. “What could it want from you? Help in finding the rest of itself?”

  “A reasonable supposition. Since you have already demonstrated a certain skill at such inquiry, why not ask it yourself?”

  “I will.” Whereupon he sang out the query in straightforward terms.

  Instantly the motes dashed toward the doorway, returned, and raced off again, pausing each time at the open portal. It repeated this half a dozen times, resounding emphatically on each occasion, until finally it halted: not back in its comforting alcove, but within the open doorway.

  “I should think that obvious enough,” the wizard remarked.

  “It wants you to follow.”

  “Bloody ’ell,” Mudge mumbled. “’Ere we go.”

  “I would not waste my time on something so trivial as a bundle of lost chords,” Clothahump went on, “but if you and your musk-minded friend are as bored as you say, here is an opportunity to pursue a puzzle that seems devoid of poison, fang, or claw.”

  Jon-Tom wavered. “It doesn’t seem very significant, does it? You’d think even Ghorpul could solve the conundrum.”

  “Yes, you would,” agreed the wizard, “but he has tried and has had no luck. He cannot spellsing to it, as you can. Anyway, I need him here.”

  “Not exactly something on the scale of confronting the Plated Folk,” Jon-Tom muttered. “On the other hand, I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

  “You have said to me on more than one occasion that your life consists of following music,” Clothahump reminded him. “Here is an opportunity to do so literally.”

  “How far do you think it will lead us?” Jon-Tom wondered.

  The turtle gazed skyward. “Who can say? All I know is that you have embarked before in the company of far less pleasant guides.”

  What if he did decide to follow the music’s lead? Jon-Tom mused. It could vanish at any time, dissipate into the woods or sink into the ground, leaving him and Mudge with time wasted and feeling very foolish. How could they explain that to Talea and Weegee? As he hesitated, the object of study darted into the hallway, returned to chime at them with distinct agitation, and dashed off again.

  “Follow or stay,” Clothahump directed him, “but make up your mind. My meditative conditioning continues to deteriorate.”

  Jon-Tom would have preferred a more forthright emergency, something he could really sink his spellsinging talents into. But there was only the cluster of lost chords, calling plaintively.

  “Mudge?” he asked, putting off an actual decision.

  The otter rolled his eyes. “I suppose it’ll be good for a stroll at least as far as the Tailaroam. By then maybe you’ll be fixed, guv, if not it. At least ’tis ’armless, unlike certain o’ the other loony notions you’ve followed.” He ambled out into the hallway and waved at the motes. They swarmed curiously around his hand before darting off in the direction of the main entrance to the tree.

  “Righty-ho, then! Lead on, an’ try to sound a bit more cheerful about things, wot?”

  “Go on,” Clothahump urged the chords. “These two will try to help you. They are nominally competent, and in any event I must remain here, sequestered in the corners of my mind.”

  The scintillating susurration seemed to understand, swirling energetically around Jon-Tom’s face like so many positrons with delusions of grandeur, before rushing off down the hallway once more. His skin tingled as if it had been briefly basted with extract of joy.

  “You’ve been accepted,” the wizard observed with satisfaction.

  “I’d better be. No one else is going to blindly follow a bunch of notes off into the woods.”

  “That’s for sure,” Mudge added sharply.

  “Let’s go.” He started down the hall.

  Mudge made a face. “I’ve ’eard this before, I ’ave. Right, then. Lead on. Wherever on ’appens to be.”

  They followed the mote-chords out of the tree, onto the grass, and southward into the Bellwoods, man and otter trailing a glittering cloud of miniature stars and planets, moons and comets, that together formed not a constellation but a distinct and increasingly cheerful fragment of a tune.

  Clothahump watched them depart, grateful to see the last of them. With Ghorpul engaged in his duties, the wizard was finally able to retire once more to the special room of velvet darkness in which he chose to lose himself in contemplation of the unfathomable mysteries of the Universe.

  Seating himself in the exact center of the spherical chamber (which required that he hover precisely three body lengths off the floor), he made use of a quantity of drifting powders and potions. Soon the surroundings were illuminated by a nebulous, chromatic blush, which under the wizard’s sonorous, hypnotic urging began to take on substance and form.

  It was the shape of another turtle: young, lithe (insofar as a turtle could be lithe), decidedly female, and soft of shell. It was a most impressive conjuration, though its inherent philosophical gravity might well constitute a matter for some debate. Proximate to the phantasm Clothahump floated, hands and legs folded in front of him, his largely inflexible face cast in a perhaps less than profound grin… .

  As they followed the main north-south trailway away from the river and their homes, Jon-Tom was convinced he detected a decided bounce in Mudge’s step and a glint in the otter’s eye.

  “Getting that old anticipation back?”

  The otter peered up at him. “Excited? About the possibility o’ dyin’ in some ’orrible fashion, or violently sacrificin’ some important body part I’ve grown especially fond of? Oh, I’m in a terrible hurry for that, I am!” Then he flashed that irresistible grin Jon-Tom had come to know so well.

  “Actually, for the first time ever takin’ off in your company, mate, I feel ’alfway relaxed. After all, ’ow much trouble can a bit o’ bemused music get one into?” He nodded in the direction of the cloud of swirling chords which bobbed impatiently along not a dozen paces in front of them, chiming as they beckoned.

  Swinging the duar around, Jon-Tom began experimenting idly with a favorite melody. The response of the mote-notes was immediate. They darted toward him, causing Mudge to duck sideways, and swarmed the magical instrument: spiraling around the double stems, forming vortexes beneath the resonating chamber, testing the extent of the interdimensional harmonic flux that burned and throbbed where the two sets of strings intersected.

  Mudge relaxed and smiled. “I think you’ve made a friend,
mate.”

  Jon-Tom’s fingers moved easily through the gentle glowing warmth of the orphaned chords. “Music’s always been my friend. Over the years I’ve grown with it and it with me.” A determined look crossed his face. “Where spellsinging is concerned, I intend for this journey to differ from all that have preceded it.”

  Mudge started. “’Ang on a minim there, Jon-Tom. We ain’t likely to be requirin’ much in the way o’ spellsingin’ on this trip.”

  “We don’t know that,” replied his tall companion cheerfully. “But if the occasion demands, I plan to take a clue from Buncan. Who says you can’t learn from your kids?”

  “How do you mean?” asked Mudge darkly.

  “I mean that I’m not just going to sing the same old songs anymore. When possible I’m going to try and do as he did and devise my own lyrics to cope with any unexpected situations.”

  “’Ere now, guv, I know it ain’t for me to say, but if it were up to me, I’d rather you didn’t do that, don’tcha know. You always seemed to ’ave enough troubles findin’ quite the right old song to spellsing. I ain’t sure brilliant improvisin’ is exactly your line.”

  “Employing lyrics of my own invention will give me a lot more control over each spell. Besides, you have to admit I can’t do worse than I’ve done with the standards.”

  To this the otter had to nod sagely. “You ’ave me there, mate.”

  “Have some confidence, Mudge. After all, I’ve been doing this for nearly twenty years now.”

  “That’s wot worries me,” the otter confessed, but under his breath.

  “Your feather’s wilted.” Jon-Tom indicated the battered green felt cap and its decorative quill.

  The otter touched a finger to the tip of the weathered chapeau. “Weegee keeps throwin’ it away. I keep sneakin’ out and recoverin’ it from the garbage. Tis a game we play.” To change the subject he gestured toward the river. “Wot do we do if our musical accompaniment decides to make a sharp left-’and turn? Sing up a spellsong for walkin’ on water?”