make."
I learned more as they continued to talk. The "pod" they had been speaking of was nothing to do with plants but instead like a lifeboat on a world-bound vessel; it was normally to be used for escape only when the main craft was certainly doomed. The Ten Per Cent Extra Free , like other large vessels, had thousands of these plastic pods. Because it was not seen as practicable to give each of them all the machinery necessary to act as fully independent spacecraft (it never having occurred to the Ironfolk that the true way of making such things would be for each glad or flass to fashion their own, so that it would sing in harmony with them), they were rigged with standard gear. Moving at a creep across rather than swiftly above the surface of the probability sea, a pod would head for the nearest sunlike star, and hope to find worlds there. At the same time, though, it would release a burst of high-pitched sounds which could flip along the crests of the waves, so that other Ironfolk might hear the call for help. The cruelty of the leader's punishment was that he planned to release the pod with me in it far out in the intergalactic ocean, with the nearest sunlike star many lifetimes' journey away. All things would be reused inside the pod, so that I would neither starve nor suffocate; I would merely live out my decades and die insane from loneliness, if I did not take my own life before.
It was a good Ironfolk plan, but the leader had forgotten that I and my kind were not Ironfolk. I could simply sleep out the millennia if I chose. Even if I could not have done so, most of us are poor at thinking of what is to come; the flasses and glads would have seen me go and wished me a good voyage, little thinking of the consequences facing me. As it was, they were going to dance that one of us at least had escaped from tyranny into freedom. They might be inspired to make instruments of their own, so as to be caught and rewarded as I had been.
I tried to explain this to the leader, but he would not hear. I wonder if the Ten Per Cent Extra Free reached the Spiral of Andromeda, or if some one of our kind found a way, despite the prisoning metal, of coaxing an instrument into singing the living music.
~
"Next," Qinefer is saying, "Brightjacket takes the grumbling sigh of a cloud that is lit by fires from beneath, and he lays the higher and the lower notes over the melody that wet wood makes in flames, and this he meshes into the rest of the glorious harmony that he is making. But still, even after all this, he is not done; for no chord is complete without humor. He takes a blade of grass between his thumbs and blows on it, making a raucous fartlike blare; this he captures with his hands before it can flee, and he casts it into the harmony. Yet still he is not done ..."
She will carry on the account of Brightjacket's making for a long while yet; the weans love to build the harmony in their minds, so that they may hear it for themselves. She is inventive in this, never building the same chord from one telling of the tale to the next, and they joyously never correct her, as they might if she made some trifling other detail different. Yet she does not know the true harmony that opens up the pathways through the sea, for that is another memory I have failed to give her.
"Mummy," says Harum at last, after Brightjacket's chord has been made, "how do the ships of the Ironfolk sail the sea?"
It is not a question that either of the weans have thought to ask before, and Qinefer glances at me, requesting that I explain; this is yet a further knowledge that I have held to myself. I twitch my eyes, refusing her request; my grin is required to mollify her.
Yes, she is inventive. The weans are satisfied by her explanation.
~
In the beginning there was only the probability sea, the nothingness where everything was waiting for something to happen. The eldern might say that what happened was the mothering of the Finefolk, but that is not truth.
I learned more as they continued to talk. The "pod" they had been speaking of was nothing to do with plants but instead like a lifeboat on a world-bound vessel; it was normally to be used for escape only when the main craft was certainly doomed. The Ten Per Cent Extra Free , like other large vessels, had thousands of these plastic pods. Because it was not seen as practicable to give each of them all the machinery necessary to act as fully independent spacecraft (it never having occurred to the Ironfolk that the true way of making such things would be for each glad or flass to fashion their own, so that it would sing in harmony with them), they were rigged with standard gear. Moving at a creep across rather than swiftly above the surface of the probability sea, a pod would head for the nearest sunlike star, and hope to find worlds there. At the same time, though, it would release a burst of high-pitched sounds which could flip along the crests of the waves, so that other Ironfolk might hear the call for help. The cruelty of the leader's punishment was that he planned to release the pod with me in it far out in the intergalactic ocean, with the nearest sunlike star many lifetimes' journey away. All things would be reused inside the pod, so that I would neither starve nor suffocate; I would merely live out my decades and die insane from loneliness, if I did not take my own life before.
It was a good Ironfolk plan, but the leader had forgotten that I and my kind were not Ironfolk. I could simply sleep out the millennia if I chose. Even if I could not have done so, most of us are poor at thinking of what is to come; the flasses and glads would have seen me go and wished me a good voyage, little thinking of the consequences facing me. As it was, they were going to dance that one of us at least had escaped from tyranny into freedom. They might be inspired to make instruments of their own, so as to be caught and rewarded as I had been.
I tried to explain this to the leader, but he would not hear. I wonder if the Ten Per Cent Extra Free reached the Spiral of Andromeda, or if some one of our kind found a way, despite the prisoning metal, of coaxing an instrument into singing the living music.
~
"Next," Qinefer is saying, "Brightjacket takes the grumbling sigh of a cloud that is lit by fires from beneath, and he lays the higher and the lower notes over the melody that wet wood makes in flames, and this he meshes into the rest of the glorious harmony that he is making. But still, even after all this, he is not done; for no chord is complete without humor. He takes a blade of grass between his thumbs and blows on it, making a raucous fartlike blare; this he captures with his hands before it can flee, and he casts it into the harmony. Yet still he is not done ..."
She will carry on the account of Brightjacket's making for a long while yet; the weans love to build the harmony in their minds, so that they may hear it for themselves. She is inventive in this, never building the same chord from one telling of the tale to the next, and they joyously never correct her, as they might if she made some trifling other detail different. Yet she does not know the true harmony that opens up the pathways through the sea, for that is another memory I have failed to give her.
"Mummy," says Harum at last, after Brightjacket's chord has been made, "how do the ships of the Ironfolk sail the sea?"
It is not a question that either of the weans have thought to ask before, and Qinefer glances at me, requesting that I explain; this is yet a further knowledge that I have held to myself. I twitch my eyes, refusing her request; my grin is required to mollify her.
Yes, she is inventive. The weans are satisfied by her explanation.
~
In the beginning there was only the probability sea, the nothingness where everything was waiting for something to happen. The eldern might say that what happened was the mothering of the Finefolk, but that is not truth.
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