Orson Card - Songmaster

No, Brother Onn. Ansset himself is too much made of love and loyalty. He makes others desire what he himself already is. He is a tool that cannot be used for evil.

Will he ever know?

Perhaps; I do not think he yet suspects the power of his gift. It would be better if he never found out how little like other Songbirds he is. And as for the last block in his mind-we laid that well. He will never find his way around it, and so he will never learn or even search for the truth about who controlled the transfer of the crown.

Songmaster Onn sang tremulously of the delicate plots woven in the mind of a child of five, of six, of nine; plots that could have unwoven at any time. But the weaver was wise, and the cloth has held.

Mikal the Conqueror, said Esste, learned to love peace more than he loved himself. So will Riktors Mikal. That is enough. We have done our duty for mankind. Now we must teach other little singers.

Only the old songs, sighed Songmaster Onn.

No, answered Songmaster Esste, with a smile. We will teach them to sing of Mikal's Songbird.

Ansset has already sung that song, better than we could hope to.

They walked slowly out of the High Room as Song-master Esste whispered, Then we will harmonize! Their laughter was music down the stairs.

1

Kya-Kya's arms were too thin. She noticed it again as she touched the keys on her computer terminal; if she ever had to use her arms to lift something quite heavy, they would break. I am not meant to bear burdens, Kya-Kya reminded herself. I don't look like a substantial person, which is why I am forced into such insubstantial work.

It was a rationalization she had tried before and never more than half believed. She had graduated from the Princeton Government Institute with the fourth highest score in the history of the school; and when she tried to find work, instead of being flooded with prestigious job offers, she found herself forced to choose between a computer-pumping job at the Information Center in Tegucigalpa and a city manager's position on some Godforsaken planet she couldn't even find on the starmaps. It's an apprenticeship, her adviser had told her. Do well, and you'll rise quickly. But Kya-Kya sensed that even her adviser didn't really believe it. What could she hope to do well in Tegucigalpa? Her job was in Welfare, the Department of Senior Services, the Office of Pension Payments. And it wasn't an imperial office-it was planetary. Earth, of all places, which might be the capital of the universe but was still a provincial backwater at heart.

If Kya-Kya could once convince herself that she had not been given a better position because of some wrong impression she gave, of weakness or incompetence or un-dependability, she could then believe that, by her proving that she was strong and competent and dependable, her situation might improve. But she knew better. At the Songhouse it had been the Deafs and, not quite so much, the Blinds who had had to take a second- or third-class role in the community. Here on Earth, it was the young, the female, the gifted.

And while youth would take care of itself, there was nothing she particularly wanted to do about being female- changers were even more heavily discriminated against. And her gifts, the very things that could make her the most valuable to government service, made her an object of envy, resentment, even fear.

It was her third week there, and it had finally come to a head today. Her job took, at best, a third of her time- when she slacked. So she began to try (on the assumption that she needed to prove her competence) to find out more about the system, to grasp the overall function of everything, the way all the data systems linked together.

Who programs the computers? she innocently asked Warvel, the head of Pensions.

Warvel looked annoyed-he did not like interruptions. We all do, he said, turning immediately back to his desk, where figures danced across the whole surface, showing him exactly what was going on at every desk in his office.

But who, persisted Kya-Kya, set up the way it works? The first programming?

Warvel looked more than annoyed. He stared at her intently, then said savagely, When I want a research project on the subject, you'll be the person I appoint. But right now your job is taking inflation tables and applying them to classes of pensions for the budget year starting in only six months, and when you're here at my desk, Kyaren, it means that neither you nor I is doing his job!

Kya-Kya waited for a few moments, watching the slightly balding top of his head as he played with the numbers on his desk, querying the computer on questioning procedures. She could not understand the violence of his outburst, as defensive as if she had asked him whether it was true he had been castrated in a playground accident when he was five. When he noticed she was still standing there, he reached over and pointed to a spot on his desk where no figures appeared at all.

See that blank spot? Warvel asked.

Yes.

That's you. That's the work you're doing right now.

And Kya-Kya returned to her desk and her terminal and began punching in the numbers with her slender fingers on the end of slender arms, feeling weaker and slighter than she had ever felt before.

It was not just Warvel, not just the work. From the moment she arrived, it seemed that none of her co-workers was interested in making her acquaintance. Conversations never included her; in-jokes left her completely in the dark; people fell silent when she came near a table in the lunchroom or a fountain in the halls. At first-and still- she tried to- believe that it was because she was young, she was frail, she did not make friends easily. But actually, right from the start, she knew it was because she was an ambitious woman with remarkable scores from the best school on the planet; because she was curious and wanted to learn and wanted to be excellent, which would threaten all of them, make them all look bad.

Petty bureaucrats with infinitesimal minds, she told herself, jabbing at the keys on the computer. Small minds running a small planet, terrified of someone who smacks of potential greatness-or even potential averageness.

They had all watched her. return to her desk from her interview with Warvel. Even the women had looked her up and down in the contemptuous way they had on Earth, as if the act of surveying her body expressed their opinion of her mind and her heart. There wasn't one sympathetic look on anyone's face.

She stopped punching keys and got hold of herself. Think that way, Kyaren, she told herself, and you'll never get anywhere. Must do my best, must try to be good at it, and hope for a change, hope for some opportunity to shine.

Her terminal glowed at her, unwinking, as steady as her ambition, as blinding as her fear, and she could not concentrate on it anymore. And so she punched in her lunch-time, was given clearance-there were enough tables open in the lunchroom-and left her desk to go eat. The eyes followed her again, and after she left, she could hear the buzz of conversation begin. The office was unbearably silent when she was there; when she was gone, everyone was friendly.

It was in the lunchroom that day that she met Josif.

The setting was the good thing about Tegucigalpa. The Information Center was almost invisible from the air-all the roofs were planted with the same jungle growth that was lush on the hills. But in the complex itself, everything was a miracle of green and glass, huge transparent walls on hundreds of buildings rising twenty or forty or eighty meters into the air. The lunchroom was at the edge, on a slope, where it could overlook much of the rest of the complex-even had a view of the village that was all that was left of the ancient city. As Kya-Kya-or Kyaren, as she had taken to calling herself when she first discovered she was going to work on Earth, in an effort to sound more native-took her food from the dispensers and carried it to an empty table, she watched a dazzlingly bright bird float down from the roof of the Income Department and land on a small island in the Chultick River. During its descent, a wild thing living in a perfectly wild habitat, the bird had passed in front of the glass windows where dozens of people worked sucking information out of computers, twisting it around, and spewing it back in. A jungle, with electricity manipulated amid the trees to hold all the knowledge of a world.