Menno grinned at me, a cocky challenge. He placed his mouth around the mouthpiece and blew while strumming his fingers across the strings.
The result … it was … it was like nothing I’d heard in life or a dream.
The sounds were not mere sounds. I don’t have words to explain. Maybe no one does. The sounds touched a part of me I’d long forgotten. The sounds made me think of Aguella. Of home. Of the stars and the sun and the clouds and of all the beauty, sadness, joy, and laughter I’d ever known.
Menno/Father finished playing and the creatures in the audience emitted honking vocalizations that seemed especially harsh in contrast with the sounds of Menno’s instrument.
“Your turn,” Menno said.
I placed my lips as I’d seen him do, and my hands as he had done. And I made sounds. But not the sounds he had made. Mine were harsh and grating and contemptible in my own ears.
And yet, I could hear, even there, even in my own incoherence, the seed of something. Something.
The audience favored me with stony silence.
“That’s game.” Menno laughed.
“What is this game, Father?”
“These creatures are called the Unemites. They are not space-faring. I happened to draw a Skrit Na freighter into my web — useless species, the Skrit Na — and aboard their ship they had a Unemite captive.”
“The game, Father. What is it called?”
“They call it music.”
“I can never hope to win,” I said. “I beg you, Father: Release me. I don’t want to play it again.”
He refused. Of course I knew he would. And I knew this about Father: His one weakness was his cruelty. I could use that. He would force me to play this game a thousand times.
Step into my lair, said the dreth to the chorkant.
“Shall we immerse?”
“On the other side,” I answered.
The Unemites. The instruments. The hundredth game.
I had waited. So hard to show just enough improvement to entice Father, to challenge him, without revealing all that I was learning. So hard to lay the foundation of this moment.
The hundredth game. But the ten thousandth time I had played it in my mind, all alone. The instrument, the adge, as the Unemites called it, had scarcely been out of my thoughts.
The adge had become a part of me. It was inside me, in my brain, and even if Father ended the game, he could never take the adge from me, never take music from me, never. I owned it. I had become it. And now, this game, the hundredth, I would show him.
He was Menno, cocky, sure of victory, but wary enough that he had to try harder than he’d have liked to gain the approval of the audience.
And yet, in a hundred games Father had not advanced. Not an original idea, not a new expression. Ironic at some level: Menno, the real Ketran Menno, had always been an advocate of taking the game to a new level, injecting a wild disregard for convention.
I smiled to myself. Ah, Menno, you’d be proud of me.
But it was Aguella who was in my thoughts as I raised the adge’s mouthpiece to my lips. It was Aguella who made the music possible for me, and the lack of an Aguella, or anything like her, that would doom poor Father. You needed love to win at the game of music.
I played a riff. Menno gaped. The audience sat forward.
That’s right, Father, I’ve rewritten the rules.
I played of sadness. I played of loneliness. Despair. Love found and lost. I played of tragic misunderstanding and weary cynicism and defeat. I played of perseverance, endurance beyond all suffering. Endurance in the face of hopelessness, hope when even hope was a betrayal.
My adge spoke of every terrible moment of my life. It spoke of the loss of my people. The loss of friends. Losses and losses.
And yet, though I played so much sadness, the music at the same time denied despair. How could anyone despair while music was being played?
I could see it in the Unemite faces: They heard the loneliness and in that expression of loneliness found comfort for their own.
Oh, yes, I had them. I owned them, the audience. I had them through and through and they would go with me wherever my adge led.
And Father? Oh, it was sweet to see him. Sweet to watch his uneasiness turn to amazement turn to sullen anger.
The music didn’t touch him. But he could see that I had won. I had won the game so resoundingly, so finally that he could never hope to compete with me again. Not at the game of music.
“How?” he asked me finally.
I played a phrase on my adge, and then I did what no Unemite had conceived of doing. I sang. I used my voice, my Ketran voice, to make the sounds that the adge could not.
The Unemites went mad. The hooting was frantic, manic, insane. Lovely.
“How?!” Menno/Father demanded, barely concealing the rage.
“I’m a loser,” I sang in answer. “They called me a brilliant loser, all winners, all winners but me: loser. But only a loser can sing the azures. Only a loser truly sees.”
I thought that Father would kill me straightaway. But he didn’t.
I thought he would never play the game of music again, but he tried. And this time he copied much of what I’d done. It didn’t matter. I had a new trick up my sleeve: improvisation.
I had devised a tactic of improvising in duet. I would offer a musical phrase, play for a few moments, then invite him to pick up the thread and extrapolate.
Father could not. And his efforts were pitiful.
For a long time afterward, Father did not approach me. No games of any kind. Nothing but silence. I was left to float, left to gaze out across the grim sea
