Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
Jamieson grunted, making notes on his own machine, subvocalizing certain phrases to set them in mind.
Tasmin scowled, erased, notated once more. ‘This cadence, here. Take it slow; don’t hurry it. Extend this syllable out, out, that’s the base. Build on that, don’t lose it. Come up on the vibrato softly, then let it grow, make it tremble….’
‘Wait a minute,’ Clarin muttered, reaching for the pen and pointing to the screen. ‘Here, and here, do it this way.’ The glowing notes and words shivered and changed. Tasmin considered. Yes, it was better. Was it enough? Only the attempt would tell.
‘I don’t get this bit,’ Jamieson said. ‘Shouldn’t it fall into the minor, TA-daroo, like that? You’ve got it on the next syllable….’
‘No, it works. You initiate the harmonic line and Clarin comes in here, and me, here.’
‘What are they doing?’ Bondri whispered to Donatella.
‘I’m not sure,’ the Explorer answered. ‘I’ve never seen anyone do it before.’
‘How can they make a song without singing it?’
‘It’s just something they do,’ she replied.
An hour wore away, and most of another. Words and phrases were changed in meaning by others that came before or after, by subtle modifications in emphasis or key. They sang very softly to Bondri, phrase by phrase, and he nodded, wondering at the strangeness of this. What would the Great Ones make of this concept of difference? Of dominance of one group by another group? To the Great Ones, all viggies were alike, the same. The Great Ones seemed to know nothing of individuality. What would they think? What would they do?
Bondri turned to the senior giligee for comfort.
‘All will be as all will be,’ it sang, quoting the fifth commandment of the Prime Song. ‘Be at peace, Bondri Wide Ears.’
‘That’s easy for you to sing,’ Bondri mumble-hummed, quoting Jamieson. This human language had some interesting things in it. Sarcasm, for instance. And irony. Bondri was very taken with both.
‘All right,’ Tasmin cried at last. ‘Pay attention, class. We’re almost sight reading this one, so hold your concentration. Get it right the first time, because we may not have a second chance. Donatella, help us with these effects – on this line right here….’
‘You expect me to sight read this!’ she exclaimed incredulously.
‘You can do it,’ announced Clarin through tight lips.
‘It’ll take all four boxes,’ Jamieson said. ‘Tasmin leads.’
‘Pronounce that word again,’ Tasmin was asking Bondri. ‘Dooo-vah-loo-im.’ He made another notation of accent on the keyboard. ‘Did you feed it to the other boxes, Jamieson?’
‘All in but that last change. All right.’
They stood apart, breathing deeply, the boxes supported on their retractable stands. Tasmin keyed the first sounds he had scored, a low, brooding bass, pulsing beneath the words he was singing, the words he was thinking. It would not be enough to sing nonsense syllables. They had sung nonsense words for generations. This time he had to know what he meant.
The bass built into a mighty chord of pure sound, noninstrumental in feeling, then faded away almost to silence as Tasmin began to sing.
‘Here in this beautiful land,’ he sang, ‘we lived on lies.’ This was a phrase Bondri had helped them with: a condition that is not real, a word that is warped.
‘Lies,’ sang Clarin and Jamieson, weaving the sound of
lies
into a dissonance, which throbbed for one moment and then resolved into an expectant harmonic.
‘Powerful ones let us move in these lands only if we lied.’ Tasmin had wanted the word
freedom
. Neither Bondri nor the translator could come up with anything. Did the Great Ones have any concept of freedom? How would they?
‘If we told the truth, they would force us [the word meant shatter or demolish] away from these lands of glory. Our voices would be silenced, our praise songs fallen into quiet.
‘The lies they put into our mouths were these….’
Donatella bent frantically over her box making a wild clamor of bells. Beneath Jamieson’s fingers, trumpet sounds soared into incredible cascades of sound. Drums beat in an agitated thunder under Clarin’s hands.
Three voices rose as one, separating into distinct upward spiraling tendrils of song. ‘They forced us to say there were no Presences [great beings, mighty nonmobile creatures]. They told us to say the Great Ones were no more than empty stones.’
Silence. A tentative fluting. ‘Why? Why did they do this?’ Jamieson’s voice rose in a lilting cusp of sound, questioning, seeking, wheeling like a seeking gyre-bird, tumbling in the air, a question that moved so quickly it could not be caught or denied. ‘Why?’
From the troupe of Bondri Gesel, an antiphon, unrehearsed, spontaneous as a fall of water. ‘Why?’ What creature could do this thing?’
A return to the ominous base, the annunciatory drum.
‘The laws of man [this small, mobile creature not made as the Great Ones are made, other than the messengers of the gods] are clear,’ Tasmin sang. ‘Where sentient creatures already are [beings like the Great Ones in thinking, making concepts] humans may not go except as those small creatures will allow.’
A hushed phrase, sung in unison, echoed by the troupe of Bondri Gesel. ‘We singers respect [obey, honor] the law.’
‘But the powerful ones do not respect the law,’ Clarin trumpeted.
Silence. A cymbal, tapped. A woodblock sound, like the inexorable drop of water.
‘We, we the singing creatures, the speaking creatures, we respect the law and yet we lied…’
Three voices rising in one great harmonic chord. ‘Because our concepts would be broken if we left the Great Ones. We did it out of fear, out of hope, out of love.’
Voices trailing into silence. Liquescent flute sounds dripping away. A last faint call of a grieving trumpet, as though from a distant rampart, being abandoned. A last tap of slack headed, fading drum. Quiet.
What a definition of hypocrisy, Clarin thought, almost hysterically. A symphony on human mendacity.
From the Black Tower, not a quiver.
The four of them stared up at the enormous height, their faces strained with the concentration of the song, gradually relaxing, becoming slack. Jamieson staggered and collapsed on the ground, smiling apologetically at Donatella before he passed out. The giligees gathered around him again, chirping angrily.
Tasmin wondered weakly if they’d gotten any of the words right. The word for love, for instance. Bondri had said it that way, but Bondri had had an odd expression on his wide face when he said it. Tasmin started to ask Bondri whether the word had ever even been used with the Presences.
And was knocked to his knees by the song coming from the Black Tower.
He could not understand a word of it. The translator chirped and gurgled, words fled across the screen only to be replaced with others. Words accumulated, multiple meanings were tried and discarded. Missing sense was filled in on the basis of speculation, words in parentheses bubbled and disappeared. Others came in their places.
‘Interesting! (occupying of intelligence). More interesting (even than) the exercise (amusement, occupation) we have (been engaged in). Small mobile creatures (having such) concepts has not (been considered). Our messengers have not (troubled us, announced to us) concepts. Northern entities (parts?) find this (intriguing). Southern parts (entities?) even now begin (debate upon) concepts implied. Deep buried sections (parts? entities?) where the (great water lies) also include themselves. Wonderful! Quite wonderful!
Imperative: Explain love. Explain hope. Explain fear.’
Just in case they missed it, the Black Tower sang it twice more, in variations. The translator compared versions two and three with version one and settled upon a single message.
Bondri had huddled down beside Clarin, the two of them arguing over an explanation of love that would make sense to a crystalline being. An unlikely duo to be doing such a thing, Tasmin thought at first. Then, remembering certain things both Bondri and Clarin had done in the past, he thought perhaps they were the best ones to do so. Bondri was going on about loving sets of offspring, loving a good giligee, loving the troupe.
Clarin didn’t talk with the viggy long. Using the translator, she began singing about hope and fear, with the troupe of Bondri Gesel as backup. Those of us with short lives,’ she vocalized, in a line of extended melody, ‘much regret ending, becoming nothingness. This regret is fear. Those of us with fragile bodies that can be broken, much regret that breaking. This regret is also fear. We fear ending and breaking. We fear the ending of those we think of as parts of ourselves . Others are those who are not broken with us or ended with us. Thinking of others as part of self is called love.
‘So, in our minds we create patterns in which there is no fear. These patterns are called hope….’
Donatella was stretched out on the ground, simply listening, her face remote and musing. When she saw Tasmin looking at her, she remarked, ‘She makes it all sound so simple, Tasmin. They’ll probably understand her, too. I told you they talked, Tasmin. I told you. God, I wish Link could be here…’
Later, falling over themselves from exhaustion, they tried to sleep, but Bondri Gesel kept waking them.
‘The Great One wishes you to explain pain once more, Loudsinger.’ ‘The Great One asks that you tell again of the difference between bad and good.’ ‘In answer to a previous question, you used certain Loudsinger words the Great One does not understand. The Great One wants to know more about “standard business practices.” ’ ‘The Great One wants to know if you have something the same as hoosil. I told the Great One that was anger, but it wants
you
to tell it. It sang your particular label. This means the Great One now knows we are each a separate creature, Tasmin Ferrence. It never thought that before. None of them ever thought that before.’
Tasmin accepted this through a haze of fatigue. ‘I noticed the translator had some trouble deciding between parts and entities. As though the Presence isn’t quite sure about boundaries between things.’
‘The viggies noticed this, too, Tasmin Ferrence.’
‘You sound amazed, Bondri Gesel.’
‘I am … what is that word Jamieson gave me? I am dumbfounded, Tasmin Ferrence. I am based in silence.’ Bondri bounded away, obviously elated, only to return later, waking them all to get yet another answer and to answer a question or two himself.
‘What was that business about the northern and southern parts, Bondri? I didn’t understand that,’ asked Jamieson.
‘The one you call the Black Tower touches the ones you call the Watchers, deep beneath the soil. Far to the west it touches the ones you call Mad Gap. It touches the False Eagers and Cloud Gatherer and all the Presences of the Redfang Range. Beneath the lands, Tasmin Ferrence, all the Presences touch one another. Or perhaps not quite all. Perhaps they are all part of one thing. A thing that is everywhere, beneath the Deepsoil, far down, even beneath the seas. We think this is so. Or perhaps they only talk with one another. This is why, we viggies think, the Great One is not sure about edges of things. The Black Tower is not sure where it ends and other things begin. It is not madness, like the Enigma, but it is strangeness….’
Morning.
Donatella, still triumphant, to Jamieson, ‘I told you they talked.’
‘You didn’t tell me they talked all the time.’ Jamieson was unable to get up, and no one would let him try. Still, he seemed to be alert, with a clear understanding of what was going on. He asked Tasmin, ‘What do we do now? Have we got enough proof for the commission?’
‘We haven’t talked to it yet about what Justin is planning to do….’
‘Has already done,’ snapped Don. ‘At least partly.’
This took the entire morning. Some things were understood almost immediately. The Black Tower understood destruction. It did not understand ‘maximizing profits,’ however, which Tasmin had taken some time to translate though he used the Urthish word for it, too. When the Tower finally understood cost benefits, it had a fit of hoosil, which required them to leave the vicinity for over an hour. At the end of the hour, the concept had been spread through the vast network and they were told that all the Presences both understood it and were equally annoyed by it as it pertained to them. What came out always equaled what went in, so far as the Presences were concerned. Taking more out than went in was immoral, unmathematical, and illogical. Things did not balance properly if more went in than out, or vice versa.
‘Of course, they’re completely right,’ Donatella said. ‘Do we want to talk about closed and open systems? Maybe that can wait.’
‘It’ll have to wait,’ Tasmin told her. ‘We’re all getting to the point that our voices are giving out.’
‘Now what?’ intoned Bondri Gesel, sounding weary but indomitable. The troupe had spent the morning telling each other what was happening, just to get it on record, and they had not been able to arrive at a finished song. Some of the words did not seem to be entirely accurate or true. The senior giligee was having a fit over that. Giligees were conservative anyhow, and this one was carrying the brain-bird of Prime Priest Favel, which made it even more conscious of doing things right.
‘I hate to say this, Bondri, but do you suppose we could teach the Black Tower to speak some Urthish? The human language? We have some words that are very cumbersome to translate.’
‘It should be very easy for them to learn the whole language,’ Bondri sang. ‘The Great One has already asked us to begin.’ Bondri sounded offended by this.
‘Your own language is far superior,’ Tasmin offered placatingly. ‘Truly.’
‘Oh, we know it is. More accurate. More specific.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Your language, on the other hand, has a lot of words we don’t have at all. It has more room in it.’
‘That’s true.’
‘That’s what the Great One says. The Great One says it is a good language for puzzles, because it can mean many things.’
‘The Great Ones like puzzles, do they?’
‘For millions of years they have done puzzles, Tasmin Ferrence. They have divided themselves into parts. What you would call teams. They have used us to carry puzzle moves from one part to another, so the other team would not know what move they are making. They made us for this, or so our Prime Song says. Now you are their new puzzle, Tasmin Ferrence. You and all the Loudsingers. We viggies think it will be interesting to watch them figure you out.’