He heard the song again, heard the song and it was exactly the same song and this time the words were:

  I will never hurt you.

  I will always help you.

  If you are hungry

  I’ll give you my food.

  If you are frightened

  I am your friend.

  I love you now

  And love does not end.

  He knew where he was now. Somehow he had been pulled from the lake. He lay on the shore of the lake and he was dry and safe and the song he had been searching for had at last been found. He still gripped the face tightly, clinging to the hair, holding the face close over his own as he lay there, and he knew her at last, and cried for joy.

  23

  Ansset lay across Esste’s lap, his hands frantically gripping her hair, when at last his violent shaking stopped, and his jaw slackly opened, and his eyes at last focused and he saw her.

  “Mother,” he cried, and there was no song but childhood in his voice. He called softly again, “Mother.”

  Esste opened her mouth, and tears poured from her eyes, and flew as she blinked to Ansset’s cheeks, and she sang from the deepest part of her heart. “Ansset, my only son.”

  He wept and clung to her, and she babbled meaningless words to him, sang her most soothing songs to him, and held him tightly. They lay on the blankets in the warm High Room as the storm raged outside. As she held his bruised and cut face into her shoulder she also wept; for two hidden places had been plumbed, and she did not know or care which had been the greater achievement. She had locked him into silence in the High Room in order to cure him; he had returned the favor, and she, too, was healed.

  24

  It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day. Sunlight streamed through the cracks on the western shutters. Ansset and Esste sat on the floor of the High Room singing to each other.

  Ansset’s song was halting, though the melody was high and fine, and his words were all the agony of loss and loneliness as he grew up, but the agony had been transformed, was transformed even as he sang, by the harmony and countermelody of Esste’s wordless song which said not to fear, not to fear, not to fear. Ansset’s hands danced as he sang, played gently along Esste’s arms, face, and shoulders, kept capturing her hands and letting them go. His face was slight as he sang, the eyes were alive, and his body said as much as his voice did. For while his voice spoke of the memory of fear, his body spoke of the presence of love.

  25

  Riktors Ashen was not sure what to do. Mikal had been emphatic. The Songbird was to return with Riktors Ashen. And yet Riktors knew that he could not achieve anything by blustering or threatening. This was not a national council or a vain dictator on an unsophisticated planet where the emperor’s very name could inspire terror. This was the Songhouse, and it was older than the empire, older than many worlds, older than any government in the galaxy. It recognized no nationality, no authority, no purpose except its songs. Riktors could only wait, knowing that delay would infuriate Mikal, and knowing that haste would accomplish nothing in the Songhouse.

  At least the Songhouse was taking him seriously enough that they left a full-fledged Songmaster with him, a man named Onn whose every word was reassurance, though in fact he promised nothing at all.

  “We’re honored to have you here,” Onn said.

  “You must be,” Riktors answered, amused. “This is the third time you’ve said so since my arrival.”

  “Well, you know how it is,” Onn said with good cheer. “I meet so few outsiders that I hardly know what to say. You’d hardly enjoy hearing the gossip of the Songhouse, and that’s all I know to talk about.”

  “You’d be surprised at how much interest I’d have in gossip.”

  “Oh, no. We have singularly boring gossip,” Onn said, and then changed the subject to the weather, which had been alternately rainy and sunny for days. Riktors grew impatient. Weather mattered a great deal to the planet-bound. To Riktors Ashen weather of any kind was just one more reason to be in space.

  The door opened, and Esste herself entered, accompanied by a boy. Blond and beautiful, and Riktors recognized him instantly as Ansset, Mikal’s Songbird, and almost said so. Then he hesitated. The boy looked different somehow. He looked closely. There were scratches and bruises on his face.

  “What have you been doing to the boy?” asked Riktors, appalled at the thought that the child might have been beaten.

  It was Ansset himself who answered, in tones that inspired absolute confidence. The boy could not lie, said his voice: “I fell on the woodpile. I knew better than to play there. I was lucky not to break a bone.”

  Riktors relaxed, and then realized another, more important reason why the child looked different. He was smiling. His face was alert, his eyes looked warm and friendly. He held Esste’s hand.

  “Are you ready to come with me?” Riktors asked him.

  Ansset smiled and sighed, and both melted Riktor’s normal reserve. He liked the boy immediately. “I wish I could come,” Ansset said. “But I’m a Songbird, and that means that I must sing to the whole Songhouse before I go.” Ansset turned to Esste. “May I invite him to attend?”

  Esste smiled, and that surprised Riktors more than the change in Ansset. He hadn’t thought the woman knew how to seem anything but stern.

  “Will you come?” Ansset asked.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, if you like.” And Ansset and Esste turned and left. Riktors, unsure of himself, looked at Onn, who blandly returned his gaze. I was invited, Riktors decided, so I can follow them.

  They led him to a large hall which was filled with hundreds and hundreds of children who sat on hard benches in absolute silence. Even their bare feet on the stone made little noise as the last of them filed into place. Scattered among them were many teenagers and adults, and on the stone platform at the front of the hall sat the oldest of them. They were all dressed alike in the drab robes that reached the floor, though none of the children seemed to have clothing that exactly fit. The impression was of poverty until he looked at their faces, which looked exalted.

  Esste and Ansset led him to the rear of the hall, at the end of the center aisle. Riktors was surprised to have been given such a poor seat; he did not know, and no one at the Songhouse ever told him, that he was the first outsider in centuries to witness a ceremony in the great hall of the Songhouse.

  He did not even know it was a ceremony. Ansset and Esste merely walked, hand in hand, to the front of the hall. Esste stepped onto the platform, then reached down a hand to bring Ansset up. Then the Songmaster retired to a chair on the platform while Ansset stood alone in front, at the head of the aisle, where Riktors could see him clearly.

  And he sang.

  His voice filled every part of the hall, but there was no resonance from the walls to distort the tone. He rarely sang words, and those he sang seemed meaningless to Riktors. Yet the emperor’s envoy was held spellbound. Ansset’s hands moved in the air, rising, falling, keeping time with odd rhythms in the music. His face also spoke with the song so that even Riktors, at a distance, could see that the song came from Ansset’s soul.

  No one in the hall wept, not even the youngest Groans with the least Control. Control was not threatened by Ansset’s song, and it did not reflect the feelings of the audience. Indeed, the song divided the audience into every separate individual, for Ansset’s song was so private that no two people could hear it the same way. The song made Riktors think of plunging down between planets, though the child could not possibly have experienced a pilot’s thrill of vertigo. And when Ansset at last fell silent the song lingered in the air and Riktors knew he would never forget it. He had shed no tears, felt no terrible passions. Yet the song was one of the most powerful experiences of his life.

  Mikal has waited a lifetime for this, Riktors thought.

  All the children and adults in the hall arose, though he had seen no cue given. And all of them began to sing, one by one, then all together, until the sheer weight of sound made the air in the hall feel thick and aromatic with melody. They were saying good-bye to Ansset, who alone was silent, who stood without weeping on the platform.

  They were still singing as Ansset stepped from the platform, and without looking to the left or the right walked down the aisle to where Riktors waited. Ansset held out his hand. Riktors took it.

  “Take me with you,” Ansset said. “I’m ready to go.”

  And Riktors’ hand trembled as he led Ansset from the hall, as he took him to the flesket waiting outside that would carry them both to Riktors’ starship. Riktors had seen wealth, had seen the opulence of Mikal’s palace at Susquehanna, had seen the thousand most beautiful things that people made and bought and sold. None of them was worth the beauty that walked beside him, that held his hand, that smiled at him as the Songhouse door closed behind them.

  Freeway Games

  Except for Donner Pass, everything on the road between San Francisco and Salt Lake City was boring. Stanley had driven the road a dozen deadly times until he was sure he knew Nevada by heart: an endless road winding among hills covered with sagebrush. “When God got through making scenery,” Stanley often said, “there was a lot of land left over in Nevada, and God said, ‘Aw, to hell with it,’ and that’s where Nevada’s been ever since.”

  Today Stanley was relaxed, there was no rush for him to get back to Salt Lake, and so, to ease the boredom, he began playing freeway games.

  He played Blue Angels first. On the upslope of the Sierra Nevadas he found two cars riding side by side at fifty miles an hour. He pulled his Datsun 260Z into formation beside them. At fifty miles an hour they cruised along, blocking all the lanes of the freeway. Traffic began piling up behind them.

  The game was successful—the other two drivers got into the spirit of the thing. When the middle car drifted forward, Stanley eased back to stay even with the driver on the right, so that they drove down the freeway in an arrowhead formation. They made diagonals, funnels; danced around each other for half an hour; and whenever one of them pulled slightly ahead, the frantically angry drivers behind them jockeyed behind the leading car.

  Finally, Stanley tired of the game, despite the fun of the honks and flashing lights behind them. He honked twice, and waved jauntily to the driver beside him, then pressed on the accelerator and leaped forward at seventy miles an hour, soon dropping back to sixty as dozens of other cars, their drivers trying to make up for lost time (or trying to compensate for long confinement), passed by going much faster. Many paused to drive beside him, honking, glaring, and making obscene gestures. Stanley grinned at them all.

  He got bored again east of Reno.

  This time he decided to play Follow. A yellow AM Hornet was just ahead of him on the highway, going fifty-eight to sixty miles per hour. A good speed. Stanley settled in behind the car, about three lengths behind, and followed. The driver was a woman, with dark hair that danced in the erratic wind that came through her open windows. Stanley wondered how long it would take her to notice that she was being followed.

  Two songs on the radio (Stanley’s measure of time while traveling), and halfway through a commercial for hair spray—and she began to pull away. Stanley prided himself on quick reflexes. She didn’t even gain a car length; even when she reached seventy, he stayed behind her.

  He hummed along with an old Billy Joel song even as the Reno radio station began to fade. He hunted for another station, but found only country and western, which he loathed. So in silence he followed as the woman in the Hornet slowed down.

  She went thirty miles an hour, and still he didn’t pass. Stanley chuckled. At this point, he was sure she was imagining the worst. A rapist, a thief, a kidnapper, determined to destroy her. She kept on looking in her rearview mirror.

  “Don’t worry, little lady,” Stanley said, “I’m just a Salt Lake City boy who’s having fun.” She slowed down to twenty, and he stayed behind her; she sped up abruptly until she was going fifty, but her Hornet couldn’t possibly out-accelerate his Z.

  “I made forty thousand dollars for the company,” he sang in the silence of his car, “and that’s six thousand dollars for me.”

  The Hornet came up behind a truck that was having trouble getting up a hill. There was a passing lane, but the Hornet didn’t use it at first, hoping, apparently, that Stanley would pass. Stanley didn’t pass. So the Hornet pulled out, got even with the nose of the truck, then rode parallel with the truck all the rest of the way up the hill.

  “Ah,” Stanley said, “playing Blue Angels with the Pacific Intermountain Express.” He followed her closely.

  At the top of the hill, the passing lane ended. At the last possible moment the Hornet pulled in front of the truck—and stayed only a few yards ahead of it. There was no room for Stanley, and now on a two-lane road a car was coming straight at him.

  “What a bitch!” Stanley mumbled. In a split second, because when angry Stanley doesn’t like to give in, he decided that she wasn’t going to outsmart him. He nosed into the space between the Hornet and the truck anyway.

  There wasn’t room. The truck driver leaned on his horn and braked; the woman, afraid, pulled forward. Stanley got out of the way just as the oncoming car, its driver a father with a wife and several rowdy children looking petrified at the accident that had nearly happened, passed on the left.

  “Think you’re smart, don’t you, bitch? But Stanley Howard’s feeling rich.” Nonsense, nonsense, but it sounded good and he sang it in several keys as he followed the woman, who was now going a steady sixty-five, two car-lengths behind. The Hornet had Utah plates—she was going to be on that road a long time.

  Stanley’s mind wandered. From thoughts of Utah plates to a memory of eating at Alioto’s and on to his critical decision that no matter how close you put Alioto’s to the wharf, the fish there wasn’t any better than the fish at Bratten’s in Salt Lake. He decided that he would have to eat there soon, to make sure his impression was correct; he wondered whether he should bother taking Liz out again, since she so obviously wasn’t interested; speculated on whether Genevieve would say yes if he asked her.

  And the Hornet wasn’t in front of him anymore.

  He was only going forty-five, and the PIE truck was catching up to him on a straight section of the road. There were curves into a mountain pass up ahead—she must have gone faster when he wasn’t noticing. But he sped up, sped even faster, and didn’t see her. She must have pulled off somewhere, and Stanley chuckled to think of her panting, her heart beating fast, as she watched Stanley drive on by. What a relief that must have been, Stanley thought. Poor lady. What a nasty game. And, he giggled with delight, silently, his chest and stomach shaking but making no sound.

  He stopped for gas in Elko, had a package of cupcakes from the vending machine in the gas station, and was leaning on his car when he watched the Hornet go by. He waved, but the woman didn’t see him. He did notice, however, that she pulled into an Amoco station not far up the road.

  It was just a whim. I’m taking this too far, he thought, even as he waited in his car for her to pull out of the gas station. She pulled out. For just a moment Stanley hesitated, decided not to go on with the chase, then pulled out and drove along the main street of Elko a few blocks behind the Hornet. The woman stopped at a light. When it turned green, Stanley was right behind her. He saw her look in her rearview mirror again, stiffen; her eyes were afraid.

  “Don’t worry, lady,” he said. “I’m not following you this time. Just going my own sweet way home.”

  The woman abruptly, without signalling, pulled into a parking place. Stanley calmly drove on. “See?” he said. “Not following. Not following.”

  A few miles outside Elko, he pulled off the road. He knew why he was waiting. He denied it to himself. Just resting, he told himself. Just sitting here because I’m in no hurry to get back to Salt Lake City. But it was hot and uncomfortable, and with the car stopped, there wasn’t the slightest breeze coming through the windows of the Z. This is stupid, he told himself. Why persecute the poor woman anymore? he asked himself. Why the hell am I still sitting here?

  He was still sitting there when she passed him. She saw him. She sped up. Stanley put the car in gear, drove out into the road from the shoulder, caught up with her quickly, and settled in behind her. “I am a shithead,” he announced to himself. “I am the meanest asshole on the highway. I ought to be shot.” He meant it. But he stayed behind her, cursing himself all the way.

  In the silence of his car (the noise of the wind did not count as sound; the engine noise was silent to his accustomed ears), he recited the speeds as they drove. “Fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five on a curve, are we out of our minds, young lady? Seventy—ah, ho, now, look for a Nevada state trooper anywhere along here.” They took curves at ridiculous speeds; she stopped abruptly occasionally; always Stanley’s reflexes were quick, and he stayed a few car lengths behind her.

  “I really am a nice person, young lady,” he said to the woman in the car, who was pretty, he realized as he remembered the face he saw when she passed him back in Elko. “If you met me in Salt Lake City, you’d like me. I might ask you out for a date sometime. And if you aren’t some tight-assed little Mormon girl, we might get it on. You know? I’m a nice person.”

  She was pretty, and as he drove along behind her (“What? Eighty-five? I never thought a Hornet could go eighty-five”), he began to fantasize. He imagined her running out of gas, panicking because now, on some lonely stretch of road, she would be at the mercy of the crazy man following her. But in his fantasy, when he stopped it was she who had a gun, she who was in control of the situation. She held the gun on him, forced him to give her his car keys, and then she made him strip, took his clothes and stuffed them in the back of the Z, and took off in his car. “It’s you that’s dangerous, lady,” he said. He replayed the fantasy several times, and each time she spent more time with him before she left him naked by the road with an out-of-gas Hornet and horny as hell.