by John Grant
And there were suns – great rumbustious suns: yellow, like crashes of brazen trumpets; blue, like banks of zithers and oboes; white, like the high notes of an organ as the bass reeds trudge their heavy way beneath. I held my arms against the light, but my ears I did not block, for they revelled in the ever-fading songs.
One song I concentrated on, letting it fill me. With lips rubbery from nervousness and broken from the beating the Ironfolk had given me before consigning me to eternity, I lisped its tune. I eased my whole body into the melody, so that every cell of me was singing the particular song of a bright yellow sun. I could not truly sing the living music, for the pod had much of crafted metal in it; but I could let the living music be in me, for it was loud enough to be heard through the muffling metal webs.
Others of the suns died, but this one, after faltering momentarily, began to proclaim itself with renewed vigor to the universe. I could also, through the pod's transparent front, see it now, less than a light-day away, a brilliant yellow spot against the fuzzy white backdrop of the Galaxy, which was a slanting chant extending diagonally across a side of my field of view.
The pod's sluggish electronic sensors picked up my brightly singing sun – I felt them reacting beneath my feet, like clumsy Ironfolk shambling around on a downstairs floor. Slowly the angle of the Galaxy shifted, so that it became almost horizontal ahead of me where I sat, still clamped into the single padded throne of the pod's bow. The little vessel's own sounds picked themselves up to a higher notch as it fixed its course.
But this I barely heard, for the song of my sun was throughout me; it was me. The Ten Per Cent Extra Free long gone behind me, all of the other suns it had created were now lost to silence; there was only the bright new music of the yellow sun and the supportive, distant monotone chanting of the Galaxy's trillionfold voices.
How long I held the song I do not know. There was a time-telling device aboard the pod, and I scrutinized it some while afterwards, but my punishers had not thought to tell me how to read it. But I know that I sang with the new sun until I sensed that it no longer required me to do so, that henceforth it could carry the burden on its own. And even then I sang a while, too exhausted to cease. I slept several times – I was aware of that – yet it did not stop my singing.
Much later, once I had come here, I tried to recreate that pure song in my mind, but it was lost – for the good, perhaps, for it was not my own song to sing, only to share, as I and Qinefer and Larksease and Harum share it now.
I had some years to watch my sun grow brighter as the pod slowly approached it. During this time I added harmonies to its melody, singing around it, above and below, weaving new things with it: I wove the playful counterpoint of a planet for it, and I dressed that planet in airy grace-notes. I made green sounds, rustling runs of notes for windblown grasslands. I burbled bright streams and grumped great rivers. I sang birdsong – not the songs birds sing but the songs they are. I chuckled heavy animals stumbling through thick bushwork, hissed eels, belched toads and frogs, bellowed whales and breathed moths. I was like a glad lover choosing to clothe my love for the later joy of slowly discovering her nakedness.
I had no need to sing the song of my world's seas. Their song is born from that of the probability ocean.
And then at last I was there, the pod picking out the silvery mote that was my world and heading towards it. I heard all the songs that I had sung being echoed back to me as I hung in orbit.
My world looked and sounded strikingly like the Earth from which Brightjacket had led us.
But without Ironfolk.
~
"What's it like," says Larksease to her mother, "traveling from world to world along Brightjacket's pathways?"
Qinefer doesn't know, of course – does not really know. This time when she looks to me for assistance I do not simply grin and leave her to it. I turn myself around on my haunches so that I'm facing my family. As always, I'm struck by Qinefer's beauty; I was wise, in the end, not to try to create her. Neither of the weans look in the slightest like either of us, which is as it should be. I lean forward and kiss Larksease and Harum on their warm little foreheads, then permit my lips to dally with Qinefer's for a moment longer.
"They're not Brightjacket's pathways," I say to Larksease with pretended severity. "Just because you hear a bird doesn't mean that it's your bird." Silently I make excuses to myself for myself: our sun is mine because I heard it, and so I am not telling a full truth to Larksease. "The pathways are the universe's; they are the probability sea's freedom of choice. Brightjacket merely found how we could set ourselves in resonance with that freedom of choice."
"Stop splitting hairs, Daddy," says Larksease. "Tell us what it's like."
I hum a short sequence of notes, then stop. I decided, once I had come to my world, that I would never repeat the harmony that Brightjacket found. This was to be all of the universe to me. The stars I created in its skies were merely lights, touched onto the backdrop of the probability sea; the Galaxy and the Spiral of Andromeda I blacked over – all other islands are too distant for my eyes to see. There is nothing in the sky that has been tainted by the Ironfolk's presence except perhaps the sun, which they long ago created through inadvertence; yet even it has surely been purified, made mine – become of the Finefolk's making. Certainly there must be pathways leading from here to the Ironfolk's universe, but I do not wish to discover them. And, most certainly, I do not wish my flass or my weans to dance along them.
I resort to words. To light.
"When the harmony is complete," I say, "you find yourself amid glows of dark coral, as if you were burrowing deep among the petals of a rose with the sunlight shining through them. There is a hot darkness at the heart of the rose, and you rush towards it; the folds brushing you are hot and moistly briny, and you have to make some effort pushing yourself against them. And then, just before you reach the roasting heat of the rose's core, you are released to find yourself standing on the new world. Your whole body is alive with song, and you feel for moments as if the universe had chosen you as the sole instrument through which it will play all of its many musics. That is what it is like to dance the pathways, my weans."
Qinefer is smiling, and looking away from me.
"Is it a nice singing?" asks Harum, his brow wrinkled.
"Yes," Qinefer replies gently before I can speak, surprising me. "But there are nicer ones – like the chorus of lemon juice on your tongue, or the whistling of one mind in tune with another, or ..."
She stops speaking, and her eyes meet mine. All around us is the crashing noise of the probability ocean, dwarfing all other songs. She shrugs, and the children follow the direction of her shoulders skyward, listening.
It is too easy to forget the grand, just because it is always there. It was my only companion for my first years on my world, and it was a long while before I wished for another. Everywhere was new to explore; while like Earth, this is not Earth. In my glee of counterpoint as I'd approached my sun I had left much of the world as mere sketches; the sun itself, and the probability sea, had sung so many of the details. There are beasts undreamt-of by any worldly being – so strange that I still can find no tunes to encompass them. There is one vast plant that gives birth to the clouds of the sky, and another that has the world's rivers for roots, flowing up from the sea and not down to it. There are types of tiny creatures made up only of descants of raw light; they flee shimmering from heavier beings that seem to be nothing but the smell of marsh-gas. How one can be the predator and the other the prey is something that I have never learned, no matter how carefully I have listened.
It was not the total discovery of the secrets of my world that led me to yearn at last for someone beside me – no, not that at all, for I sense the world will never reveal its entirety to me. More it was the growing need to have someone beside me to share my unearthings, so that I would not be singing each new song alone. I can recollect the moment now. I was running my fingers over the gleamy surface of a rock
that had split on the heaving of the world beneath it, hearing it sigh the same music as oil on still water, yet hard-edged rather than soft-, and moving my mind to shape a chord in response, when I realized the emptiness of any chord I could create. The notes were all there, each in place and each of the right intensity, and yet the whole was incomplete; much as two strings can be plucked to produce an identical tone, so that you cannot tell if one is sounding or both – and yet you can.
All potentials are present in the probability sea, of course; yet it is easier to spring some of them into stiffenedness than others. Photons are easiest of all, obviously; and, among greater structures, little prompting is required for the sea to produce suns. The various cadenzas I had to sing in order to build my world were many and collectively complicated, but at the heart of each there was simplicity: I had merely to set things in train, leaving the velleities of probability to shape the rest. But a person of the Finefolk – or even, for that matter, of the Ironfolk – is something else entirely: the mind that is capable of abstraction approaches in complexity the most perplexing of the living music, transcending even the creations of Brightjacket in his discovery of the pathways to the Freedom. I was not certain that my own mind was capable of creating such convolutions of harmony as to create its like.
Yet the yen burned on in me.
And there came the day when it must be requited.
I sat upon this very shore, with the sharp white sand abrading my buttocks and thighs caressingly, and stared out across the blue of the worldly sea – my worldly sea. I focused the spark of me until I heard nothing but the sound of its waves, of its deep waters straining against the sludge of its floor, and of its myriad creatures going oozily about their ways or springing all bright and silver-piercing briefly into the sunlight for splashy instants. There were other sea-songs, too: some dark and chillily weightsome, some light like spume on the wind. I could not have counted all the songs, but I forced my mind to draw them together, making threads of them from which I could weave new patterns. The sun rose and the sun set, but still my weaving went on; I was making a canvas of the sea-songs, setting them out as a tableau of sound, so that all of them could be seen there.
At last the task was done, yet that was only a part of the greater task. There was the shushing of the breeze-blown sand around me to be added to the tableau, and the aloof airs of the reeds, and the thunder of the sky's blue, and the pulse of a hunting cat, and the whipple of falling sycamore seeds, and all the other refrains of my living world. My mind hurt from the strain of keeping this throb of sound alive, and yet I did so; after thought, I realized that the thrum of this mental pain was a part of what I needed also, and so I wove it in among the others, along with my own ragged breathing and the scent of my sweat. And the fleet crescendo of lightning. And the mewling of a gale in the next valley. And the squeak of sap in trees. And the ...
It was done when it was done: I did not have to decree that it was complete.
She walked down from the bladegrass-banks onto the beach. She was finely formed, a flass of such fairness that no glad could have looked upon her without his soul filling with yearning to taste her. My exhaustion fell scraping from my shoulders like a snake's sloughed skin. As she came towards me across the sand, her thighs licking together with the gentle touch of indigo flames shyly playing against a fresh green log, I reached up my arms towards her, ready to embrace her ...
And let them fall again.
She, the encapsulation of all the songs that I had drawn from the world and the sky above it, and even from my own self, had no song of her own: her soul was mute. She looked at me through eyes that were nothing more than eyes. Her perfection was entire – without a line wasted and without an essential line spared. I reached out a hand again, and saw its fingers run over the flawless skin of her belly; I could appreciate intellectually its immaculateness, but no song transmitted itself through those fingers from her flesh.
I said to her in spoken-word: "Welcome." It was the least I could do. Besides, my spirit was telling me that surely all my work had not been in vain, that surely it must be my observing rather than her lack which created an illusion of songlessness.
She said nothing, but just continued contemplating me. I could hear her thoughts, although I could not understand them. They were rational – even clever in a superficial way, like the thoughts of the Ironfolk can be.
I darted a glance at her face again; at those empty eyes.
And recognized them.
Her thoughts were like one of the Ironfolk's because that was what she was; and that was why, also, she was songless, having failed to discover the harmony of the probability sea. It was something I could not give to her – the only thing I had not given to her, for I had woven all the rest of my own music into her. And so she was hollow, like the Ironfolk were.
I didn't know what to do with her. She was alive, insofar as the Ironfolk are alive. My thoughts were in discord: I had created her; I was responsible for her; it was not her fault that she had been created; I could not simply destroy her again; it was not my entitlement.
"What's your name?" she said. Asked as if a name were an arbitrary label, rather than a characteristic as fundamental as one's own song. It was an Ironfolk question; she had not already heard my name. "Where's everyone else? Don't you get lonely, just sitting out here on the beach? Can't you take me to your house? The sun's too hot and bright; my skin is going to burn. This place stinks – all the seaweed, I guess."
And on. The sea turned from blue to gray, and the seaweed did start stinking. Five hundred paces inland there was a scream of protest as rocks that were not meant for building together were forced into a wrong assemblage. A gray cloud – a greasy, dirty, reluctant gray, not the gray of a dove's breast – tried to smother the sun. The sand was coarse and irritating against my skin.
The songs began to leach out of all the things in my world.
I killed her then, telling myself that she anyway had no life. I do not know if that was true or not but I lived long enough among the Ironfolk to learn some of the tricks that they can play with their ethical codes; if I have continued to deceive myself in this, it is because I have never tried to unpick my self-created deception. The world-song I had created in order to spark her from the waves had not entirely fled from me; I was swiftly able to reassemble it and sing it again, without the flass's void at its core.
In a single tick of my heart she faded and was gone, healing the world.
~
"Are you going to finish the story?"
It is Larksease again. I have been silent for too long, and Qinefer has not desired to take up her thread.
"No," I say. "Not today. Not ever. The story of Brightjacket, and of how he led the Finefolk through the pathways to the stars – that story has no end, will never end. There is no finish to it. Your mother has told you that often enough, has she not?"
There is no finish to any of the stories and songs that make up the probability sea; Larksease and Harum will come to know that.
Harum plucks up to ask me the question that he always asks me, if I am near when his mother is telling this tale. "Daddy, are you Brightjacket?"
And I smile as I always do, and scrabble my fingers through his hair, hearing the harmony of my flesh with his. "No, Harum, you know I am not. Listen to me and tell me if you can hear the name 'Brightjacket' in my song."
He goes through a pantomime of doing so, while his sister looks scornfully on him. She is older, after all – old enough to have forgotten when it was she who asked me the same question.
"No," he says at last. "Your name isn't Brightjacket. It's ... I don't know what it is."
"You will when you're bigger," says Qinefer, cuddling him to her.
He will not, for the probability sea, being all songs, has no name. I once had a name of my own – and for all I know it may have been Brightjacket (although that would conflict with my memories of having seen him as he constructed the chord that led us Finefolk t
o the Freedom) – but I traded it for Qinefer, unwittingly giving it (although I would have done this willingly) as part of the bargain I made with the probability sea.
For the sea heard my keening as the Ironfolk mermaid I had sung from my worldly ocean faded; it heard the discord of my grief.
Yet in the infinitude of tune that is the probability sea there is no such thing as a clangor that cannot be made melodious – that cannot be complemented with another sound to make a harmonious wholeness. In that moment when I was open to the universe, a broken instrument at its heart making a broken sound, the probability sea moved to make me entire again. It dissolved me back into itself, so that I was thinly scattered at once through all of the ocean; and then it reconstituted me in the instant of my dissolution – as it had to do, if it was to keep its own song entire – reconstituted me as a full chord, my broken discord matched with fresh notes such that the song my being sang was the perfective part of the song of the ocean, and as such its whole.
I looked, on this same beach these years ago, at the flass who was my completion, and her song told me its name was Qinefer. Side-harmonies would become called Larksease and Harum; those were their correct names. She and I may create further embellishments to the joyous chord we are, and they too shall doubtless have names.
But my own song no longer has a name, for it is that of the ocean.
A Lean and Hungry Look
By more than a quirk of circumstance, Inspector Romford was in the audience himself the night that Clarence Griggs was murdered, and so was able to observe exactly what happened.
