27 Short Stories

by Orson Scott Card

  "I know," Christian said, afraid, yet not really understanding what life outside his house would be like.

  "We'll train you for the kinds of jobs you can pursue now. You won't starve. You won't die of boredom. But because you broke the law, one thing is forbidden to you now"

  "Music:,

  "Not all music. There is music of a sort, Christian, that the common people, the ones who aren't Listeners, can

  have. Radio and television and record music. But live music and new music-those are forbidden to you. You may not sing. You may not play an instrument. You may not tap out a rhythm."

  "Why not?"

  The Watcher shook his head. "The world is too perfect, too at peace, too happy, for us to permit a misfit who broke the law to go about spreading discontent. And if you make more music, Christian, you will be punished drastically. Drastically."

  Christian nodded, and when the Watcher told him to come, he came, leaving behind the house and the woods and his Instrument. At first he took it calmly, as the inevitable punishment for his infraction; but he had little concept of punishment, or of what exile from his Instrument would mean.

  Within five hours he was shouting and striking out at anyone who came near him, because his fingers craved the touch of the Instrument's keys and levers and strips and bars, and he could not have them, and now he knew that he had never been lonely before.

  It took six months before he was ready for normal life. And when he left the Retraining Center (a small building, because it was so rarely used), he looked tired and years older, and he didn't smile at anyone. He became a delivery truck driver, because the tests said that this was a job that would least grieve him and least remind him of his loss and most engage his few remaining aptitudes and interests.

  He delivered doughnuts to grocery stores.

  And at night he discovered the mysteries of alcohol; and the alcohol and the doughnuts and the truck and his dreams were enough that he was, in his way, content. He had no anger in him. He could live the rest of his life, without bitterness.

  He delivered fresh doughnuts and took the stale ones away with him.

  SECOND MOVEMENT

  "With a name like Joe," Joe always said, "I had to open a bar and grill, just so I could put up a sign saying `Joe's Bar and Grill: " And he laughed and laughed, because, after all, Joe's Bar and Grill was a funny name these days.

  But Joe was a good bartender, and the Watchers had put him in the right kind of place. Not in a big city but in a small town; a town just off the freeway, where truck drivers often came; a town not far from a large city, so that interesting things were nearby to be talked about and worried about and bitched about and loved.

  Joe's Bar and Grill was, therefore, a nice place to come, and many people came there. Not fashionable people, and not drunks, but lonely people and friendly people in just the right mixture. "My clients are like a good drink. Just enough of this and that to make a new flavor that tastes better than any of the ingredients." Oh, Joe was a poet; he was a poet of alcohol, and like many another person these days, he often said, "My father was a lawyer, and in the old days I would have probably ended up a lawyer, too. And I never would have known what I was missing."

  Joe was right. And he was a damn good bartender, and he didn't wish he were anything else, so he was happy.

  One night, however, a new man came in, a man with a doughnut delivery truck and a doughnut brand name on his uniform. Joe noticed him because silence clung to the man like a smell-wherever he walked, people sensed it, and though they scarcely looked at him, they lowered their voices or stopped talking at all, and they got reflective and looked at the walls and the mirror behind the bar. The doughnut deliveryman sat in a corner and had a watered down drink that meant he intended to stay a long time and didn't want his alcohol intake to be so rapid that he was forced to leave early.

  Joe noticed things about people, and he noticed that this

  man kept looking off in the dark corner where the piano stood. It was an old, out-of-tune monstrosity from the old days (for this had been a bar for a long time), and Joe wondered why the man was fascinated by it. True, a lot of Joe's customers had been interested, but they had always walked over and plunked on the keys, trying to find a melody, failing with the out-of-tune keys, and finally giving up. This man, however, seemed almost afraid of the piano, and didn't go near it.

  At closing time, the man was still there, and, on a whim, instead of making the man leave, Joe turned off the piped in music, turned off most of the lights, and went over and lifted the lid and exposed the gray keys.

  The deliveryman came over to the piano. Chris, his name tag said. He sat and touched a single key. The sound was not pretty. But the man touched all the keys one by one and then touched them in different orders, and all the time Joe watched, wondering why the man was so intense about it.

  "Chris," Joe said.

  Chris looked up at him.

  "Do you know any songs?"

  Chris's face went funny.

  "I mean, some of those old-time songs, not those fancy ass-twitchers on the radio, but songs. `In a Little Spanish Town: My mother sang that one to me." And Joe began to sing, "In a little Spanish town, 'twas on a night like this. Stars were peek-a-booing down, 'twas on a night like this."

  Chris began to play as Joe's weak and toneless baritone. went on with the song. But his playing wasn't an accompaniment, not anything Joe could call an accompaniment. It was, instead, an opponent to his melody, an enemy to it, and the sounds coming out of the piano were strange and unharmonious and, by God, beautiful. Joe stopped singing and listened. For two hours he listened, and when it was over he soberly poured the man a drink and poured one for himself and clinked glasses with Chris the doughnut deliveryman who could take that rotten old piano and make the

  damn thing sing.

  Three nights later, Chris came back, looking harried and afraid. But this time Joe knew what would happen (had to happen), and instead of waiting until closing time, Joe turned off the piped-in music ten minutes early. Chris looked up at him pleadingly. Joe misunderstood-he went over and lifted the lid to the keyboard and smiled. Chris walked stiffly, perhaps reluctantly, to the stool and sat.

  "Hey, Joe," one of the last five customers shouted, "closing early?"

  Joe didn't answer. Just watched as Chris began to play. No preliminaries this time; no scales and wanderings over the keys. Just power, and the piano was played as pianos aren't meant to be played; the bad notes, the out-of-tune notes, were fit into the music so that they sounded right, and Chris's fingers, ignoring the strictures of the twelve-tone scale, played, it seemed to Joe, in the cracks.

  None of the customers left until Chris finished an hour and a half later. They all shared that final drink and went home, shaken by the experience.

  The next night Chris came again, and the next, and the next. Whatever private battle had kept him away for the first few days after his first night of playing, he had apparently won it or lost it. None of Joe's business. What Joe cared about was the fact that when Chris played the piano, it did things to him that music had never done, and he wanted it.

  The customers apparently wanted it, too. Near closing time people began showing up, apparently just to hear Chris play. Joe began starting the piano music earlier and earlier, and he had to discontinue the free drinks after the playing, because there were so many people it would have put him out of business.

  It went on for two long, strange months. The delivery van pulled up outside, and people stood aside for Chris to enter. No one said anything to him. No one said anything at all, but everyone waited until he began to play the piano.

  He drank nothing at all. Just played. And between songs the hundreds of people in Joe's Bar and Grill ate and drank.

  But the merriment was gone. The laughter and the chatter and the camaraderie were missing, and after a while Joe grew tired of the music and wanted to have his bar back the way it was. He toyed with the idea of getting rid of the pia
no, but the customers would have been angry at him. He thought of asking Chris not to come any more, but he could not bring himself to speak to the strange, silent man.

  And so finally he did what he knew he should have done in the first place. He called the Watchers.

  They came in the middle of a performance, a blind Watcher with a dog on a leash, and an earless Watcher who walked unsteadily, holding on to things for balance. They came in the middle of a song and did not wait for it to end. They walked to the piano and closed the lid gently, and Chris withdrew his fingers and looked at the closed lid.

  "Oh, Christian," said the man with the seeing-eye dog.

  "I'm sorry," Christian answered. "I tried not to."

  "Oh, Christian, how can I bear doing to you what must be done?"

  "Do it," Christian said.

  And so the man with no ears took a laser knife from his coat pocket and cut off Christian's fingers and thumbs, right where they rooted into his hands. The laser cauterized and sterilized the wound even as it cut, but still some blood spattered on Christian's uniform. And, his hands now meaningless palms and useless knuckles, Christian stood and walked out of Joe's Bar and Grill. The people made way for him again, and they listened intently as the blind Watcher said, "That was a man who broke the law and was forbidden to be a Maker. He broke the law a second time, and the law insists that he be stopped from breaking down the system that makes all of you so happy."

  The people understood. It grieved them; it made them

  uncomfortable for a few hours, but once they toad returned home to their exactly right homes and got back to their exactly right jobs, the sheer contentment of their lives overwhelmed their momentary sorrow for Chris. After all, Chris had broken the law. And it was the law that kept them all safe and happy.

  Even Joe. Even Joe soon forgot Chris and his music. He knew he had done the right thing. He couldn't figure out, though, why a man like Chris would have broken the law in the first place, or what law he would have broken. There wasn't a law in the world that wasn't designed to make people happy-and there wasn't a law Joe could think of that he was even mildly interested in breaking.

  Yet. Once, Joe went to the piano and lifted the lid and played every key on the piano. And when he had done that he put his head down on the piano and cried, because he knew that when Chris lost that piano, lost even his fingers so he could never play again-it was like Joe's losing his bar. And if Joe ever lost is bar, his life wouldn't be worth living.

  As for Chris, someone else began coming to the bar driving the same doughnut delivery van, and no one ever saw Chris again in that part of the world.

  THIRD MOVEMENT

  "Oh, what a beautiful morning! " sang the road-crew man who had seen Oklahoma! four times in his home town.

  "Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham!" sang the road-crew man who had learned to sing when his family got together with guitars.

  "Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom!" sang the road-crew man who believed.

  But the road-crew man without hands, who held the sings telling the traffic to Stop or Go Slow, listened but

  never sang.

  "Whyn't you never sing?" asked the man who liked Rogers and Hammerstein; asked all of them, at one time or another.

  And the man they called Sugar just shrugged. "Don't feel like singin'," he'd say, when he said anything at all.

  "Why they call him Sugar?" a new guy once asked. "He don't look sweet to me."

  And the man who believed said, "His initials are CH. Like the sugar, C & H, you know." And the new guy laughed. A stupid joke, but the kind of gag that makes life easier on the road building crew.

  Not that life was that hard. For these men, too, had been tested, and they were in the job that made them happiest. They took pride in the pain of sunburn and pulled muscles, and the road growing long and thin behind them was the most beautiful thing in the world. And so they sang all day at their work, knowing that they could not possibly be happier than they were this day.

  Except Sugar.

  Then Guillermo came. A short Mexican who spoke with an accent, Guillermo told everyone who asked, "I may come from Sonora, but my heart belongs in Milano! " And when anyone asked why (and often when no one asked anything), he'd explain: "I'm an Italian tenor in a Mexican body," and he proved it by singing every note that Puccini and Verdi ever wrote. "Caruso was nothing," Guillermo boasted. "Listen to this! "

  Guillermo had records, and he sang along with them, and at work on the road crew he'd join in with any man's song and harmonize with it or sing an obbligato high above the melody, a soaring tenor that took the roof off his head and filled the clouds. "I can sing," Guillermo would say, and soon the other road-crew men answered, "Damn right, Guillermo! Sing it again!"

  But one night Guillermo was honest and told the truth. "Ah, my friends, I'm no singer."

  "What do you mean? Of course you are!" came the unanimous answer.

  "Nonsense!" Guillermo cried, his voice theatrical. "If I am this great singer, why do you never see me going off to record songs? Hey? This is a great singer? Nonsense! Great singers they raise to be great singers. I'm just a man who loves to sing but has no talent! I'm a man who loves to work on the road crew with men like you and sing his guts out, but in the opera I could never be! Never! "

  He did not say it sadly. He said it fervently, confidently. "Here is where I belong! I can sing to you who like to hear me sing! I can harmonize with you when I feel a harmony in my heart. But don't be thinking that Guillermo is a great singer, because he's not!"

  It was an evening of honesty, and every man there explained why it was he was happy on the road crew and didn't wish to be anywhere else. Everyone, that is, except Sugar.

  "Come on, Sugar. Aren't you happy here?"

  Sugar smiled. "I'm happy. I like it here. This is good work for me. And I love to hear you sing."

  "Then why don't you sing with us?"

  Sugar shook his head. "I'm not a singer."

  But Guillermo looked at him knowingly. "Not a singer, ha! Not a singer. A man without hands who refuses to sing is not a man who is not a singer. Hey?"

  "What the hell did that mean?" asked the man who sang folk songs.

  "It means that this man you call Sugar, he's a fraud. Not a singer! Look at his hands. All his fingers gone! Who is it who cuts off men's fingers?"

  The road crew didn't try to guess. There were many ways a man could lose fingers, and none of them were anyone's business.

  "He loses his fingers because he breaks the law and the Watchers cut them off! That's how a man loses fingers. What was he doing with his fingers that the Watchers

  wanted him to stop? He was breaking the law, wasn't he?"

  "Stop," Sugar said.

  "If you want," Guillermo said, but the others would not respect Sugar's privacy.

  "Tell us," they said.

  Sugar left the room.

  "Tell us," and Guillermo told them. That Sugar must have been a Maker who broke the law and was forbidden to make music any more. The very thought that a Makereven a lawbreaker-was working on the road crew with them filled the men with awe. Makers were rare, and they were the most esteemed of men and women.

  "But why his fingers?"

  "Because," Guillermo said, "he must have tried to make music again afterward. And when you break the law a second time, the power to break it a third time is taken away from you." Guillermo spoke seriously, and so to the road-crew men Sugar's story sounded as majestic and terrible as an opera. They crowded into Sugar's room and found the man staring at the wall.

  "Sugar, is it true?" asked the man who loved Rogers and Hammerstein.

  "Were you a Maker?" asked the man who believed.

  "Yes," Sugar said.

  "But Sugar," the man who believed said, "God can't mean for a man to stop making music, even if he broke the law."

  Sugar smiled. "No one asked God."

  "Sugar," Guillermo finally said, "There are nine of us on the crew, n
ine of us, and we're miles from any other human beings. You know us, Sugar. We swear on our mother's graves, every one of us, that we'll never tell a soul. Why should we? You're one of us. But sing, dammit man, sing! "

  "I can't," Sugar said.

  "It isn't what God intended," said the man who believed. "We're all doing what we love best, and here you are, loving

  music and not able to sing a note. Sing for us! Sing with us! And only you and us and God will know!"

  They all promised. They all pleaded.

  And the next day as the man who loved Rogers and Hammerstein sang "Love, Look Away," Sugar began to hum. As the man who believed sang "God of Our Fathers," Sugar sang softly along. And as the man who loved folk songs sang, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," Sugar joined in with a strange, piping voice, and all the men laughed and cheered and welcomed Sugar's voice to the songs.

  Inevitably Sugar began inventing. First harmonies, of course, strange harmonies that made Guillermo frown and then, after a while, grin as he joined in, sensing as best he could what Sugar was doing to the music.

  And after harmonies, Sugar began singing his own melodies, with his own words. He made them repetitive, the words simple and the melodies simpler still. And yet he shaped them into odd shapes and built them into songs that had never been heard of before, that sounded wrong and yet were absolutely right. It was not long before the man who loved Rogers and Hammerstein and the man who sang folk songs and the man who believed were learning Sugar's songs and singing them joyously or mournfully or angrily or gaily as they worked along the road.

  Even Guillermo learned the songs, and his strong tenor was changed by them until his voice, which had, after all, been ordinary, became something unusual' and fine. Guillermor finally said to Sugar one day, "Hey, Sugar, your music is all wrong, man. But I like the way it feels in my nose! Hey, you know? I like the way it feels in my mouth! "

  Some of the songs were hymns: "Keep me hungry, Lord; ' Sugar sang, and the road crew sang it too.