Songmaster

by Orson Scott Card

  So Kya-Kya said nothing, as they filed into the seats that formed a horseshoe whose open end framed Mikal's throne. Kya-Kya took a seat near one end, so that she would be looking at Mikal's profile-she preferred to study someone without direct eye contact Eye contact allowed them to lie.

  You should stand, said the guide deferentially, and of course they all took the suggestion and stood. A dozen uniformed guards entered the hall and fanned out to positions along the walls. Then the Chamberlain entered and announced in slow, ceremonial tones, Mikal Imperator has come to you. And Mikal came in.

  The man was old, the face lined and creased and sagging, but his step was bright and quick and his smile seemed to come from a light heart. Kya-Kya of course rejected that first impression, for it was obviously the public relations face that Mikal wore to impress visitors. Yet he seemed to be in undeniably good health.

  Mikal came to the throne and sat, and it was then that Kya-Kya realized that Ansset had come into the room with him. Mikal's presence was so overpowering that even the beautiful Songbird had not been able to distract. Now, however, Mikal took the boy's hand and gently pulled him forward, sent him a few steps ahead of the throne, where he stood alone and looked at everyone in the small audience.

  Kya-Kya did not watch Ansset, however. She watched the other students watching him. They all wondered, of course, if a boy of such great beauty had found his way into Mikal's bed. Kya-Kya knew better. The Songhouse would never tolerate it. They would never send a Songbird to someone who would try such a thing.

  Ansset turned all the way to look at the end of the row of chairs, and his eyes met Kya-Kya's. If he recognized her, he gave no sign. But Kya-Kya knew enough about Control know that he could well have recognized her- in fact, probably had.

  And then he sang. The song was powerful. It was all the hopes and finest ambitions of the students there, a song of serving mankind and being honored for it. The words were simple, but the melody made all of them want to shout for the excitement of their own futures. All except Kya-Kya, who remembered gatherings in the great hall of the Songhouse. Remembered hearing others sing .there, and how she had felt at the first gathering after she had been declared Deaf. There was no hope in the song for her. And in a way her own bitterness at Ansset's song was a pleasure. He obviously was singing what the students most wanted to hear, trying to touch everyone in the audience. But he would never touch her.

  When Ansset finished, the students did stand, did clap and cheer. Ansset bowed shyly, then walked from the place in front of Mikal's throne and came to stand near the wall. Not two meters from Kya-Kya. She glanced at him when he came. It hurt her to see up close how beautiful he was, how kind and happy his face seemed in repose. He did not seem to look at her, so she looked away.

  Mikal began to speak then, the usual things about how important it was for them to study hard and learn how to cope with all the known problems, yet develop themselves so that they had the deep inner resources to cope with the unexpected. And so on, thought Kya-Kya, and on and on and on and on.

  Listen, said a voice in Kya-Kya's ear. She whirled and saw only Ansset, still a couple of meters off, still not looking at her. But she had been forced out of her reverie; she heard Mikal.

  You will naturally rise quickly to important positions, with many people under you. Often you'll become impatient with the sluggish people under you. The petty bureaucrats who seem to love to own every piece of paper that crosses their desks for as long as they possibly can before passing it on. They seem to have tiny minds, no ambitions, no vision of what the government ought to be doing. You'll long to take a heavy broom and sweep the bastards out. God knows I've wanted to often enough.

  The students laughed, not because of what he said, but because they were immensely flattered that Mikal Imperator would speak so casually, so openly to them.

  But don't do it. Don't do it unless you absolutely have to. The bureaucrats are our treasures, the most valuable part of the government. You who have great ability, you'll rise, you'll change, you'll get bored, you'll move from job to job. If you had a different kind of emperor, some of you would get removed from time to time and sent to- Well, I haven't the kind of imagination to conjure up the sort of places offensive administrators might get sent. Again a laugh. Kya-Kya was disgusted.

  Listen, said the voice again, and this time when Kya-Kya turned, Ansset was looking at her.

  I know it's treason to speak of it, but I doubt that any of you have failed to notice that I'm old. I've ruled a long time. I'm past a man's normal life expectancy. Someday, I have reason to believe, I will die.

  The students sat stiffly, unsure of what this had to do with them, but certain that they wished they were not hearing such things.

  When that happens, someone else will take my place. I don't come from a particularly long dynasty, and there may be some question as to who is my legitimate heir. There may even be some nastiness over the question. Some of you will be tempted to take sides. And those who choose the wrong side will pay for your mistake. But while all the storms rage, those paper-pushing bureaucrats will go on in their stodgy, incompetent way, running the government. Already they have such inertia that I couldn't possibly change them even if I wanted to. Here and there, a few changes. Here and there an improvement, or a brilliant bureaucrat who deserves and damn well better get a promotion. But most of them will go on doing things in the same infinitely slow way, and that, my young friends, will be the salvation and the preservation of this empire. Rely on the bureaucracy. Depend on the bureaucracy. Keep it, if you can, under control. But never weaken it. It will save mankind when every visionary has failed, when every Utopia has crumbled. Bureaucracy is the one eternal thing mankind has created.

  And then Mikal smiled, and all the students laughed again, because they realized that he knew he was exaggerating. But they also knew that he meant much of what he said, and they understood his vision of the future. That it didn't matter who was at the helm, as long as the crew knew how to run the ship.

  But no one understood him so well as Kya-Kya. There was no time-honored system of succession to the throne, as there had been in the Songhouse, where the choice of the Songmaster of the High Room had been left up to a Deaf and no one had even protested her choice. Instead, the rule of the empire would pass to whoever was strong-i est and most determined at the time of Mikal's death. In history, far too many sovereigns had destroyed their empires by trying to promote a favorite or a relative as successor. Mikal had no such intention. He was announcing to the students from the Princeton Government Institute that he was going to leave the succession up to the law of natural selection, while trying to build institutions that would survive the turmoil.

  The first few years after Mikal's death will be interesting, Kya-Kya decided, and wondered why, when those years were bound to be miserable and full of slaughter, she was so glad to know she would be alive and working in government during them.

  Mikal stood, and so everyone stood, and when he had gone they erupted into dozens of different conversations. Kya-Kya was amused at how effectively Mikal had taken everyone in with his warmth and casualness. Had they forgotten that this man had killed billions of people on burned-over worlds, that only brute force and utter callousness had brought him to power? And yet she also had to admire the fact that after a life like the one Mikal had led, he was able to so conceal his viciousness that everyone In the room but her-no, be honest, everyone in the room-now thought of him as grandfatherly. Kind. A gentleman and gentle man. And wise.

  Well, give the old bastard that. He was smart enough to stay alive as the number one target in the galaxy. He'd probably die in bed.

  Contempt is so easy, said Ansset's voice beside her.

  She spun to face him. I thought you were gone. What did you mean, telling me to listen? She was surprised that she spoke angrily to him.

  Because you weren't, The boy's voice was gentle, but she heard the undertones of songtalk.

  Don't try it with m
e. I can't be fooled.

  Only a fool can't be fooled, Ansset answered. He had grown, she noticed. You pretend not to like Mikal. But of all the people here, you're the one most like him.

  What did he mean? She was infuriated. She was flattered. Do I look like the killer type? she asked.

  You'll get what you want, Ansset answered. And you'll kill to get it, if you have to.

  Not just songs but psychology, too. How far-reaching your training must have been.

  I know your songs, Kya-Kya, Ansset said. I heard your singing when you came to Esste in my stall that day.

  I never sang.

  No, Kya-Kya. You always sang. You just never heard the song.

  Ansset started to turn away. But his air of confidence, of superiority, angered Kya-Kya. Ansset! she called, and he stopped and faced her. They're using you, she said. You think they care about you, but they're only using you. A tool. A foolish, ignorant tool! She had not spoken loudly, but when she turned she realized that many of the other students were looking back and forth between her and Ansset. She walked away from the boy and threaded her way through the students, who knew enough not to say anything, but who no doubt wondered how she had gotten into a conversation with Mikal's Songbird, and no doubt marveled that she had been able to bring herself to be angry at him.

  That had been enough to keep the students gossiping for days. But before she reached the door, she heard all the conversations fall silent, and Ansset's voice rose above the fading chatter to sing a wordless song that she, alone of all the students, knew was a song of hope and friendship and honest good wishes. She closed her mind to the boy's Songhouse tricks and left the room, where she could wait outside in silence with the guards until the guide came to lead them all away.

  The buses, all fleskets from the Institute, took them home to Princeton with only one stop, in the ancient city of Philadelphia, where one of the older men students was kidnapped and found, mutilated terribly, near the Delaware River. He was the fifteenth in a wave of kidnap murders that had terrorized Philadelphia and many other cities in the area. The rest of the students returned in utter gloom to Princeton and resumed their studies. But Kya-Kya did not forget Ansset. Could not forget him. Death was in the air, and while Mikal could not be responsible for the mad killings in Philadelphia, she could not help but believe that he, too, would die mutilated. But the mutilation had been going on for years, and she thought of Ansset, and how he, too, might be twisted and deformed, and for all that she cared nothing for the Songhouse and even less for Mikal's Songbird, she could not help but hope that somehow the beautiful boy who had remembered her after all these years could emerge unsullied from Susquehanna and go home to the Songhouse clean.

  And she fretted, because she was in school and the world was passing on quickly toward great events that she would not be part of unless she hurried or the world waited just a little bit for her. She was twenty years old and brilliant and impatient and frustrated as hell. She cried for the Songhouse one night when she went to bed especially tired.

  5

  Ansset walked m the garden by the river. In the Songhouse, the garden had been a patch of flowers in the courtyard, or the vegetables in the farmland behind the last chamber. Here, the garden was a vast stretch of grass and shrubs and tall trees that stretched along the two forks of the Susquehanna to where they joined. On the other side of both rivers was dense, lush forest, and the birds and animals often emerged from the trees to drink or eat from the river. The Chamberlain had pleaded with Ansset not to wander in the garden. The space was too large, kilometers in every direction, and the wilderness too dense to do any decent patrolling.

  But in the two years he had lived in Mikal's palace, Ansset had tested the limits of his life and found they were broader than the Chamberlain would have liked. There were things Ansset could not do, not because of rules and schedules but because it would displease Mikal, and displeasing Mikal was never something Ansset desired. He could not follow Mikal into meetings unless he was specifically invited. There were times when Mikal needed to be alone-Ansset never had to be told, he noticed the mood come over Mikal and left him.

  There were other things, however, that Ansset had learned he could do. He could enter Mikal's private room without asking permission. He discovered, by trial and error, that only a few doors in the palace would not open to his fingers. He had wandered the labyrinth of the palace and knew it better than anyone; it was a way he often amused himself, to stand near a messenger when he was being sent on an errand, and then plan a route that would get him to the destination long before the messengers. It unnerved them, of course, but soon they got into the spirit of the game and raced him, occasionally reaching the end before Ansset.

  And Ansset could walk in the garden when he wanted to. The Chamberlain had argued over it with Mikal, but Mikal had looked Ansset in the eye and asked, Does it matter to you, to walk in the garden?

  It does, Father Mikal.

  And you have to walk alone?

  If I can.

  Then you will. And that was the end of the argument. Of course, the Chamberlain had men watching from a distance, and occasionally a flit passed overhead, but usually Ansset had the feeling of being alone.

  Except for the animals. It was something he hadn't had that much experience with at the Songhouse. Occasional trips to the open country, to the lake, to the desert. But there had not been so many creatures, and there had not been so many songs. The chatter of squirrels, the cries of geese and jays and crows, the splash of leaping fish. How could men have borne to leave this world? Ansset could not fathom the impulse that would have forced his ancient ancestors into the cold ships and out to planets that, as often as not, killed them. In the peace of birdsong and rushing water it was impossible to imagine wanting to leave this place, if it was your home.

  But it was not Ansset's home. Though he loved Mikal as he had loved no one but Esste, and though he understood the reasons why he had been sent to be Mikal's Songbird, he nevertheless turned his back on the river and looked at the palace with its dead false stone and longed to be home again.

  And as he faced the palace, he heard a sound in the river behind him, and the sound chilled him like a cold wind, and he would have turned to face the danger except that the gas reached him first, and he fell, and remembered nothing of the kidnapping.

  6

  There were no recriminations. The Chamberlain didn't dare say I told you so, and Mikal, though he hid his grief well, was too grieved and worried to bother with blaming anyone except himself.

  Find .him, he said. And that was all. Said it to the Captain of the guard, to the Chamberlain, and to the man with death in his voice who was Mikal's ferret. Find him.

  And they searched. The news spread quickly, of course, that Mikal's Songbird had been kidnapped, and the people who read and cared at all about the court worried also that the beautiful Songbird might have been a victim of the mutilator who still went uncaught in Philadelphia and Manam and Hisper. Yet the mutilator's victims were found every day with their bodies torn to pieces, and never was one of the bodies Ansset's.

  All the ports were closed, and the fleet circled Earth with orders to take any ship that tried to leave the planet and stop any ship that tried to land. Travel between districts and precincts was forbidden on Earth, and thousands of flits and flecks and fleskets were stopped and searched. But there was no sign of Ansset. And while Mikal went about his business, there was no hiding the circles under his eyes and the way he bent a little as he walked and the fact that the spring was gone from his step. Some thought that Ansset had been stolen for profit, or had been kidnapped by the mutilator and the body simply had not been found. But those who saw what the kidnapping did to Mikal knew that if someone had wanted to weaken Mikal, hurt him as deeply as he could be hurt, there could have been no better way than to take the Songbird.

  7

  The doorknob turned. That would be dinner.

  Ansset rolled over on the hard bed, his
muscles aching. As always, he tried to ignore the burning feeling of guilt in the pit of his stomach. As always, he tried to remember what had happened during the day, for the last heat of day always gave way to the chill of night soon after he awoke. And, as always, he could neither explain the guilt nor remember the day.

  It was not Husk with food on a tray. This time it was the man called Master, though Ansset believed that was not his name. Master was always near anger and fearsomely strong, one of the few men Ansset had met in his life who could make him feel as helpless as the eleven-year-old child his body said he was.

  Get up, Songbird.

  Ansset slowly stood. They kept him naked in prison, and only his pride kept him from turning away from the harsh eyes that looked him up and down. Only his Control kept his cheeks from burning with shame.

  It's a good-bye feast we're having for you, Chirp, and ye're going to twitter for us.

  Ansset shook his head.

  If ye can sing for the bastard Mikal, ye can sing for honest freemen.

  Ansset let his eyes blaze. His voice was on fire as he said, Be careful how you speak of him, traitor!

  Master advanced a step, raising his hand angrily. My orders was not to mark you, Chirp, but I can give you pain that doesn't leave a scar if ye don't mind how ye talk to a freeman. Now ye'll sing.

  Ansset had never been struck a blow in his life. But it was more the fury in the man's voice than the threat of violence that made Ansset nod. But he still hung back. Can you please give me my clothing? It an't cold where we're going, Master said. I've never sung like this, Ansset said. I've never performed without clothing.

  Master leered. What is it then that you do without clothing? Mikal's catamite has naw secrets we can't see. Ansset didn't understand the word, but he understood the leer, and he followed Master out the door and down a dark corridor with his heart even more darkly filled with shame. He wondered why they were having a goodbye feast for him. Was he to be set free? Had Mikal paid some unimaginable ransom for him? Or was he to be killed?