Songmaster by Orson Scott Card Page B

understand them and sing to them and change them; he almost re-created them, almost felt as if he could take them and make them over, make them better than they were. How could this not be coming from himself?
    And now silence. Silence until his head ached. In all his life there had been no such silence, and he didn’t know what to make of it. Why did you become so close to me, if you only meant to cut me off? And yet she wasn’t cutting him off, was she; here he was in the High Room, spending every moment with her. No, she wasn’t just trying to hurt him. There was a purpose in this. Some insane purpose.
    Somehow she has misunderstood me. It made Ansset sad that everyone so consistently failed to understand him. The children couldn’t be expected to; the masters and teachers hardly knew him; but Esste. Esste knew him as completely as anyone could. I have sung every song I have to her, and she has refused them all. I showed her that I could sing to a theatre of strangers and change them, and she told me I had failed. She can’t admit that I can do any good.
    Is she jealous? She was a Songbird herself. Can she see that I’m better than her, and does that make her want to hurt me? This thought appealed to him because it offered some rational explanation. It might be true, while insanity was clearly out of the question no matter how often he tried to persuade himself of it. Jealousy.
    If she realized it, she wouldn’t persecute him anymore. They could be friends again, like that day on the mountain by the lake, when she taught him Control. He had not understood it before then. But the lake—that was clear, that had told him the reason for Control. It wasn’t just a matter of not crying, of not laughing, of holding still when told to, all the meaningless things that he had struggled with and hated and resented as he studied in the Common Rooms. Control was not to tie him down, but to fill him up. And the very day of that lesson, he had relaxed, had allowed Control to become, not something outside himself that pressed him in, but something inside himself that kept him safe. I have never been happier. Life has never been easier, he thought at the time. It was as if the anger and fear that had constantly plagued him before had disappeared. I became a lake, he thought, and only when I sing does anything come out. Even then, the singing is easy, it comes lightly and naturally. Because of Control I can see sorrow and know its song. It doesn’t make me afraid as it did before—it gives me music. Death is music, and pain, and joy, and everything that people feel—it is all music. I let it all in and it fills me up and only music comes out.
    What is she trying to do? She doesn’t know.
    I have to help her. I have used my music to help strangers in Step, to awaken sleeping souls in Bog. But I have never used it to help Esste. She’s troubled and doesn’t know why, and thinks that it’s my fault. I will show her what it is she really fears, and then perhaps she will understand me.
    When I sang before, I tried to calm her fear. This time I will show it to her more clearly than she has ever seen it.
    And with that decision made, Ansset slept on the eighth night of his stay in the High Room. He gave no outward sign, of course, of what had passed through his mind. His body had been as rigid as when he sang, as when he slept.

 

17

     
    Ansset did not sit on the periphery of the room or exercise periodically as he had before. On the eighth day of the confinement he sat in the middle of the floor, directly before the desk, and looked at Esste as she worked. He is going to attack today, Esste immediately concluded, and braced herself inwardly. But she was not ready. There was no brace to cope with what Ansset did to her today.
    His singing was sweet, but not reassuring. Instead the song kept forcing memories into her mind. He had found the melody of nostalgia. She struggled (outwardly placid) to keep working. But as she went over