Take No Prisoners (7 page)

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 is 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 so 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.

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.