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
