“How terrible it would be,” her mother said, nodding wisely, “if you had no children.”

  Inside the coffin, his last need fulfilled, Mark Tapworth heard it all but could not hold it in his mind, for in his mind there was space and time for only one thought: consent. Everlasting consent to his life, to his death, to the world, and to the everlasting absence of the world. For now at last there were children.

  Adagio and Benediction

  Delot Bramwi is dead. To me, the loss is more personal than to most people whose lives he touched; but I do not plan to write of my grief. He would have called my grief trivial; or else he would have said it was far too important to entrust to mere words.

  I write by way of a preface to Delot Bramwi’s last work. He knew of his coming death months before, and he conceived a project of breathtaking scope—and he failed. But in the failure he also created this small testimony, which is perhaps a more fitting capstone to the monument to himself that his life already was. It is a small work, as, in the end, we saw that Father Delot was a small man; not small among men, of course, for mankind is not noted for high concentrations of greatness among the general population, but rather he was small as all of us are small, when pitted against such powers as death and decay and sorrow. But he hoped.

  The hagiography is already begun. Stories of his remarkable feats of mind when he was four or five years old already circulate among the people who already say Delot as if the name were not a common one. Intellectuals prefer higher folklore; historians have the true tales, which are no less remarkable than the invented ones, because all tell a kind of truth of the man.

  I will tell only two stories in my preface, hoping I do not write more to introduce his last words than he wrote himself.

  My father was one of the first merit prefects; and after Delot’s descension from power, my father brought me, at age eleven, to Father Delot’s school.

  “It is my daughter, Lovina,” he said, and Delot nodded. But Delot’s assistant, a grim young man named Soren Tuk, shook his head.

  “I have her tests,” he said coldly, “and they do not merit consideration for this school.”

  I understood enough to know that he was saying I was not bright enough to enter. My father was distressed. Soren seemed ready for an argument. Only Delot was calm.

  “I will not try to change your mind then,” my father said, knowing that Father Delot was incorruptible, even by friendship.

  “Wait,” said Father Delot.

  “You can’t,” said Soren, “be thinking of making an exception for such an unremarkable child.”

  “Lovina,” said Delot to me, and I came forward. He put his left hand on my cheek and his right hand on the back of my neck, cradling my head and making me feel both confident and excited, though I was rather young to realize the implications of who he was. “Young girl,” he said, “do you see my dilemma? I love your father very much—there is nothing I would deny him that is in my power to give. Yet when I set up this school, it was to be for remarkable children—children like Soren—who have the potential in their minds for solving the world’s problems. How can I violate my standards? Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Then tell me what I should do,” he said, “and I will abide by your decision, if I can.”

  And so I thought. And at eleven I was a keen-witted child in a way—but not so keen-witted that solutions sprang full-blown into my mind. So I spoke staggeringly. I remember the ideas, and I will set them down clearly here, but at the time I did not speak half so well.

  “My father knows that he has your love, so that if you deny him his request, he will know that you did not do it to hurt him, and so he will not be hurt.

  “Your school has a purpose, and taking me in would not fulfill that purpose, but would instead distract from it. Therefore, to be kind to me would be cruelty to the other children you have taken in, and the greater good would be to refuse me.

  “And as for me, I know I am not brilliant or exceptional. I did not ask to be brought to this school. I came because I love my father, and he wants me to be the kind of girl who can enter a school like this. But it isn’t my fault or your fault if I am not.”

  Although I spoke haltingly, Father Delot smiled when I was through and turned to Soren. “There are kinds of wisdom your tests don’t uncover, Child Soren,” he said. And he smiled at my father and told him he would gladly take me into his school.

  Since that time Soren’s tests have proved correct. Intellectually I am far from being the equal of even the least bright of Father Delot’s students. But despite this, Father Delot left me in joint control of the school with Soren. Why? There are obvious speculations, but this one fact is certain: Father Delot does not judge people as others do.

  And another anecdote:

  A famous artist from Selway came to Father Delot once when he reigned as Lycurgus from Talloman Hartwith. The artist demanded that the national-level prefectures be abolished. “They have too much power over the day-to-day lives of the people,” declared the artist.

  “There is no power,” answered Delot, “except over the day-to-day lives of the people—unless you find a race that lives year to year. Power is only over people’s acts, and they act day to day.”

  “The NLPs have too broad a discretionary power,” insisted the artist. “There is nothing to stop them from declaring a particular person a threat to the society and banning him, without any reason at all. They have the potential for tyranny. They have nearly absolute power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Then Delot answered with an answer that I believe is typical of the way he dealt with all such questions:

  “The fact that a saying is ancient does not make it true. The truth is that the absolutely corrupt must also corrupt all their powerful acts. In ancient times, power went to those who sought it; the seeking of power itself is corrupt; hence that saying had the appearance of wisdom, just as some people thought the crowing of the cock brought the sunrise.

  “The national-level prefects are chosen against their will. They despise power and have better things to do with their time than to govern. Because of this, I am aware of no case where a prefect has even approached the limits of his power. Do you have any examples of abuse?”

  “It is the potential for abuse,” said the artist, “that frightens me.”

  At this Delot laughed, and finally said, “My friend, you are an artist. Do you believe that art has an effect on people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does it change their nature or their behavior?”

  “It does, but it is not political.”

  “True. It is much stronger than mere political power. For where governments can only affect the way their citizens act, artists change the ways in which people think and feel. Furthermore, artists can do this with their audience being scarcely aware that any such change is happening.”

  “You overestimate our ability.”

  “You underestimate my power of observation. Those who hunger after power used to go into politics. But those who lust after power so much that they are unwilling to compromise and therefore cannot succeed in politics, those become artists. They are far more dangerous than any politician.

  “And yet. There is not enough beauty in the universe. So we tolerate your power because of the gifts you give us. If we removed or limited your power, we would lose your gifts, wouldn’t we?”

  “If you grant that we have such power, yes.”

  “The gift of government is domestic peace and international security, without making it excessively difficult for people to enjoy life. Your prefect must have power to give that gift. His is an art, too. You are only jealous because he is able to succeed more often than you are. A society in which the artists control the public is as dangerous as a society in which the government controls the artists.”

  And the interview ended.

  Why I chose these two incidents I do not know; but both stories I know to be true, and to me they express the essence of Delot Bramwi. The disease that killed him also took his mind. But the brief testimony that follows is, perhaps, his clearest statement. Though the subtleties of philosophy were already beyond him, his human emotions were, I believe, never clearer. Perhaps in losing his mind he found his heart; but that implies that it was at one time unfound. And that I know was never the case. He always hoped.

  His words:

  The disease is such that the man who has it does not know that his mental powers are failing. He does not feel his brain deteriorate. He does not see the foolishness of his ideas. In short, he blissfully loses his mind without mourning, and only those around him see, and understand, and weep the loss.

  Most men, therefore, are not told when they contract the illness. I, however, am Delot Bramwi; the legend has it that I will not eschew truth whatever the pain it costs. Therefore the timid physicians collectively screwed up their courage and informed me that within the next year my mind would deteriorate and I would become a mental three-year-old, happily sucking my thumb as I died.

  It was not cheerful news, but I am able to bear many things well. I took it, not as a condemnation, but rather as a reprieve. Instead of death and madness taking me by surprise, I would have the jump on them. I had time to do a Work.

  Not a monument to make sure my name would stand forever. My name shall already stand forever. From the time the Council of Worlds petitioned me, sued me, pleaded with me to take the mantle of Lycurgus and build the human universe again into an edifice that would both endure forever and make life worth living for as many individuals as possible, it was plain that in the success or failure of my work, the very audacity of the project would guarantee my fame.

  And after thirty-one years as dictator of mankind, I had constructed on the wreckage of the sleepy old empire a new order. When I saw that the machine was capable of running itself, I voluntarily left the seat of power and returned to my home, to my small school, to the disciples who thought I had something left to teach them, to my friends who wisely knew that I had much love left to take and give.

  So the Work I resolved to do was not one to build my name. Rather I resolved that I would write what no other human being could write: the treatise on the ultimate truth of the human condition. If this is hubris, tell me who had a better training.

  I have met every possible problem that can come before a magistrate, and I have solved it, not just for my time, but for future generations.

  I have tasted and used absolute power, and I have surrendered it and felt the helplessness of the king shorn of royalty.

  I have been hated, loved, feared, resented, despised, and worshipped, and I am not, or at least was not, insane.

  For these reasons, I thought I understood something of the truth, and so I began to write. I confided my project in only a few disciples, and for days and hours and weeks and months I spoke within the confines of my office the words that would be assembled into the perfect masterpiece of wisdom.

  I wax ironic.

  What gives a man reputation for wisdom? I claimed none at first, just operated my little school. And yet, somehow, when those encumbered with the burden of government reached their most desperate hour, realizing that the worlds of men were ungovernable by mutual consent, my reputation for wisdom was such that they decided, without interview, without study, without even much thought, that I would be the god in the machine, that I would come to them and hold the Furies at bay until, at last, the peace of the eternities could come to them.

  Whether that reputation for wisdom was deserved or not at the start, when my thirty-one years of government ended I felt that I had, after all, found wisdom as a result of carrying out the work for which wisdom had been thought to be prerequisite.

  That was what I tried to write. And as the words flowed from my lips, I marveled at the wisdom of them. Thought led to thought, idea to word, sound to song, mood to vivid passion, until the whole of me, and all the contents of my mind, were set into the tapes, ready for editing.

  And then I called to me my two most devoted disciples: Soren Tuk, a man of keen wit and cruel insight, who could slay a lie almost before it had been uttered, and Lovina N, a woman of compelling kindness, who could comfort the dead and bring peace to the madman’s heart.

  They had been hearing my words almost as I uttered them for all the months of my Work, and I planned to charge them with its preparation for publication.

  “You will put commas where the commas ought to be; you will take my thoughts and order them where order demands they fit.” And they nodded, and were ready to agree.

  But I have respect for their minds, and so I also asked a question.

  “Child Soren,” I asked, “what do you think of what I have written?”

  He did not answer.

  And in his silence I heard a terrible roar. I heard again all the frivolity of my life. I remembered, oddly, that I had fathered eleven children in eleven of the most intelligent women I could find, and had called it my own private program of eugenics. Where were these children? Why was I unable to find them and cling to them and force them to keep at bay the terrible truth that waited in Child Soren’s silence?

  “You keep silence,” I said, “and therefore it is doubly important that you speak.”

  Lovina shook her head and stared intently at Child Soren, and so I demanded that Soren tell me, and he told me:

  “Father Delot, you were too late. The disease has outstripped you. Your clarity is gone. There is neither logic nor progression in your final work. There is no insight that has not been worn out long ago by thin minds and easy speakers. Your final wisdom is only the foolishness of an old man about to die.”

  “It isn’t true,” cried Lovina, to protect me.

  But Child Soren said to her, and his voice was fervent, exalted: “All his life Father Delot has lived for truth. Do I betray him this near his death with a lie?”

  And so we stayed in silence, and at last I found what I truly wanted to do, and I said, “Fix the commas, then, Child Soren, and place the manuscript before the scholars. It will have value as a lesson in decay, and it may be compared with my works in days when my mind was clear and my creation was great.”

  And then they left me alone, and I sat in darkness in the office that existed only to capture all my words and preserve them forever. And now it is morning, and I have sat through the night, and I realize that where I thought to leave a testament, I can only leave a testimony; I am a witness without the wit to add to the sum of human knowledge. Will even these words, then, be valueless?

  It doesn’t matter. I will say them:

  Truth is a search, not a finding, and in the last of my life I am losing all that I had found. That is the bitterest truth of my life. Child Soren cut me to the heart with truth; my blood is on the floor and I haven’t the courage to taste it, to swallow it, to make it part of me again. I am beaten. I have failed.

  All my life I hated flattery; yet now I realize that it is not the lie that is cruel, but the discovery of the lie. Because my mind’s death is so near, there would have been no discovery and hence no cruelty had Child Soren lied to me; I would never have felt the agony of trust broken. The lie would have been my comfort as I lost all that had made my life worth living; and comfort, however arrived at, is beauty, which transcends mere accuracy of detail. The truth of a thing is higher than its facts.

  I would have wished to die happily; now I will die with failure overriding all my accomplishments.

  And yet.

  And yet I now wonder if we did not find the highest truth of all, yesterday: that my writing was indeed my testament, that the vague and confused and contradictory and hackneyed ideas in it were in fact the compost which gave fertility to all my acts. What if my reputation for wisdom was unearned, and the foolishness of my final Work was all I ever had within me?

  Does my former work then topple? Do nations divide away, does oppression recommence, is despair once more the order of the worlds of men? Does the unworthiness of the builder undermine the beauty of that which he built?

  That would be foolishness.

  The only wisdom I had was to believe that I could do the work I was asked to do; what I did could have been done, therefore, by any equally foolish man. I acted, and my act will have its effects long after my words have been forgotten.

  And so I say to Child Soren: Revere the living acts of undespairing men. These are the only truth that is inviolable.

  I say good to the universe; I laugh and cry and clap as the music goes adagio through its inconsistent songs; selah to my life; amen to all lives; and if this, too, is foolishness, then treasure it for love of my own wizened beauty, for that will remain even after my thought is, finally, gone.

  I am three years old at last, and I will play.

  Songhouse

  “Music hath charms . . .” But there’s more than one requirement for a songbird.

  Prologue

  Nniv did not go to meet Mikal’s starship. Instead he waited in the rambling stone Songhouse, listening to the song of the walls, the whisper of the hundred young voices from the Chambers and the Stalls, the cold rhythm of the drafts. There were few in the galaxy who would dare to make Mikal come to them. Nniv was not daring, however. It did not occur to him that the Songmaster needed to go meet anyone.

  The people who were not sheltered by the Songhouse walls were not so placid, however. Mikal’s reputation was well-known, and Tew had been a bit slow about submitting to the Discipline of Frey. Who could have known that Mikal would not be content with ravaging the worlds he had already won, that instead he would govern wisely and brutally and well and would use those worlds as a springboard from which he now reached out farther and farther into the galaxy. Too many of the great leagues and nations had fallen, and now there were few worlds that even thought of resisting Mikal when his ships came. Instead—and the world of Tew was no different—the governments made it a point to impress Mikal with their loyalty to him, their desire to have him rule over them. Secretly, they all wished he would get swallowed up in a nova. Publicly, he had no stauncher allies.