Take No Prisoners (6 page)

The inside of the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
was a horrible place of silence. Oh, there were spoken-words of course, both Ironfolk and Finefolk, but the metal walls shut us off even from the faint music of starlight. There were birds aboard, but they were kept frozen in the hold; I do not know if this was to spite us, or just if the Ironfolk were not only deaf to birds' singing but also blind to the colors of their feathers and the thought-focusing hardness of their eyes. Not even the soft susurration of insects was permitted:
they
were killed on sight, or poisoned in their nests.

We plotted. We dreamed strange, music-less dreams. Some of us cursed Brightjacket, wherever he might now be, for having led our folk out into the archipelagos of the probability sea; others, wiser, knew that he had at least postponed our fate until now, which was something we should be thanking him for. There was much foolish talk of sundering the walls of the vessel, so that air and water and bodies and all would be flushed out into the ocean voids. It seemed like a pointless aim for rebellion, whatever its appeal – that kind of death, bathed in the chants of starlight, must surely be better than the life we were leading, but we had no wish to die. Besides, there were weans and other innocents among the Ironfolk families who had been brought on board; did we want their metal blood on our hands?

But, if we could have found a way of leaving, we'd have taken it. Or if we'd known how to wrest control of the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
from its officers, then we'd have done that, too.

Scheming is as good as a log fire for keeping the body warm; that's really why we plotted such a lot.

I had a secret which I talked about to none, not even the flass who then shared my bunk and my hopes – and whose name I have written out of my memories. She would never consciously have let the knowledge of my secret color her thoughts, but others might have detected it nevertheless; and then I might have been surrounded by hotheads, demanding that I lead them in a doomed revolt against our oppressors.

Buried in my meager baggage was a tiny five-stringed harp. It had been crafted worlds away from where I had settled myself to live; its wood was of a mustard yellow unlike any I had elsewhere seen (although there are copses of it here on this world of mine). My mother had given it to me at one of the times I had wedded a flass, and had lied to me, as mothers do, that it was once her own grandmother's, even though it was patently new-made. The strings on it were not to my liking – the first thing that I did after my wedding was replace them with good twisted fishgut – but the frame was well enough constructed to sound a fine note. The whole instrument was barely bigger than my flattened pair of hands, and it could sustain only the simplest of melodies – certainly nothing of the complexity of even a Changing-spell – yet it made a pretty noise, a merry tinkle, like the sound early-morning mist makes on glass, which you can hear only if you listen carefully enough.

Why the Ironfolk guards should have let me keep it, I have no idea. They had searched through the few belongings they'd allowed us to bring with us – not once but twice or three times, hurling anything that looked in the slightest like it could make music into one of their cruel shredding machines. (The tale was told that sometimes, for the sport of hearing screams, they did this also to Finefolk weans, but this I never saw myself, and I believe it to have been only a story.) Perhaps they had never seen a harp so small, so that when they came across it in their rootling they thought it was something else. Maybe the Ironfolk have objects of quite different purpose that look like that. I have no knowledge. Whatever the truth was, I was not going to give them the instrument if they were too stupid to see it when it was in front of their eyes.

Not, I repeat, that it was in itself much good for anything. Even had it been a full clarsach – the most alive of all instruments – it would have been unable to play any living music in that vessel, surrounded as it was by crafted metal. It was a toy, and had never been anything more; here on the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
it was just a way of reminding myself of the music I had once played, when I had been free to walk on worlds. There is a pleasure to be found in painful nostalgia; sometimes, when all slept but me, I plinked a lifeless note or two and tormented myself ecstatically. So softly did I pluck its fishgut strings that even the flass slenderly snoring beside me was unwakened.

But once an Ironfolk warder heard.

I have no inkling of why I didn't know that he was coming. Normally we Finefolk could tell where they were even as far as a league away, with their iron-nailed boots clanging echoes out of the loathed steel walkways. Or the guards would come to an aluminum door which would slide back from them into its aluminum niche, the scrape of the two aluminums together sounding out an alarm that struck across voices and, as it was this time, snores. (Some Ironfolk snore hardly at all, which is very strange. But, to make up for that, those that snore loudest make a deafening din.) Perhaps I was thinking too much of the fact that we were nearing the time when the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
would throw herself clear of the Galaxy and set out across the gulf to the Spiral of Andromeda; that would be the moment when all of us knew that our last farewells had truly been said to our homeworlds. Perhaps I was too engaged in my delightful misery to hear what my ears were trying to tell me. Or perhaps I was, secretly, eager to be discovered – as if the part of me that did not enjoy the pain wanted an end of it, and of the little instrument that conjured it.

The door to our cabin – mine and my flass's – was not of the sort that slid away like a horse's pizzle, but it was of painted aluminum all right, and its crash against the painted aluminum wall as he threw it open returned me from wherever my sadness had blown me. I saw his eyes – his sightless Ironfolk eyes – bulge like a frog's when he saw what I was doing. In a second there was a heavy metal weapon in his hand – one of the spitting-weapons, that could be built light but are instead built heavy by the Ironfolk, to enhance their bullying demeanor. I sat on my bunk, half-raised, staring over my slumbering flass not so much at the intruder but at the serpent-eye black of his weapon's nozzle. I could hear his muscles tense as he prepared to make me die (although I kindly know he knew it not) with its dart, and I prepared myself for that; I would not have brought death willingly upon me, of course, but my sorrow was great enough that I had little regret about dying.

Which would have happened, except that the scream of metal against metal had woken my flass. Just as the guard's finger stressed she raised herself up on her elbows, taking the dart in the center of her forehead. At once the tiny metal point spread its evil cacophony all through her, and her body flailed its revulsion; the pain was overly great for her to scream before she died, or even to try to sing the notes of the Dying-song.

I think the guard was too terrified to shoot at me after that; I know he had not had the intention of bringing about a dying. The lives of we slaves had not been expensive up until now, but the
Ten Per Cent Extra Free
was close to the time of leaving the Galaxy, so hereafter our numbers could not be simply replenished by a raid or a trade. The Ironfolk forget that even their "harmless" trinket darts, loaded with synthetic stuffs that render Ironfolk themselves sleepy but not damaged, being tipped with metal are death to us. They also forget that they are all, sometimes, guilty of forgetting; the guard was likely to be punished for doing something that his punishers did as often as he. He had not a wish to add a further dying to the tally.

He gestured with his spitting-weapon at me, and I made my eyes flare as if in fear of it. I curbed the grief I felt for my flass, although I vowed that one day in the Spiral of Andromeda I would find a place far from the crafted metal so that I could sing for her her Dying-song in all its entirety. I picked myself off my bunk and moved away from her, as he had indicated. Another jerk of the weapon, and I threw my pitifully small harp towards him across the metal floor.

He crunched it underfoot, adding a second murder to his first; I heard its tiny scream as what little of the living music it had managed to hold fled from it.

Then we were walking along empty gray corridors, him at my back with his spitting-weapon still raised, as if there were somewhere that I could escape to. The odd thing was this: throughout all, I had been able to hear that, incredible as it still seems, there was music of a sort in the weapon. It was dull and barely thinking, like that of a fallen tree, and it was more of a malignant discord than anything else, but the fact that it was nevertheless
there
struck me as a marvel. The thing was of crafted metal – surely it, which killed the living music in all it touched and stiffened music merely by its proximity, could not itself be a vessel for the music? I began to wonder if perhaps we of the Finefolk were not, in a way, even more ignorant of the Ironfolk: they at least are aware of the existence of the living music, even though they cannot know or understand it; whereas we have never known that their shaped-metal implements could have music at all. I still cannot decide if this was a great insight of mine, or if it was merely that my senses were deceiving me in my sadness for my dead flass.

We were in a bigger room, and there were others – no other Finefolk, of course, for this was not a room where our kind would normally be expected to go, but instead an Ironfolk place. They were in clothes like my guard's, but some had colored ribbons stitched to them, as if a cloud-blackened sky could be brightened by a paintbrush: the Ironfolk cannot see that dead colors are less brilliant than living darkness. The one who had brought me here held out the dead fragments of my harplet, the regretted trophy of his kill; he jabbered spoken-words whose meaning I could not care to understand, for I was trying to hear the silence of the mustard-yellow splinters in his hand.

One of the ones wearing dead ribbons beat me about the face with the heels of his hands, then clenched a fist to strike me harder – enraged, I think, that the blood coming from my nose was straw-yellow rather than a treacly red; but he was held back by a bark from another, and he dropped his arm to his side.

The beating had cleared my head; I made to thank my assailant, but was told curtly to hold my peace.

"We'll have to make an example of it," said the one who had spoken to my attacker and then to me. "Who knows how many others of the slugglies might be harboring instruments, like this one? We can't risk their starting to play the bloody things once we're in fastspace." He looked directly at me. "I'm sorry about that, buster."

For a moment he seemed partly to be one of us. Confused, I fluted some notes at him, imitations of living song, but it was clear he knew nothing of them. Then I tried spoken-words, but he told me once more to be quiet.

"Kill it?" said another. "Something dramatic? Feed it into a recyc and show the mess on holo all over the ship? Stuff the thing out a lock?"

The one who seemed to be their leader shook his head, which is the Ironfolk signal of negation. "No. We'll give it a pod. After we've left the Galaxy."

"But that's ..." began the one who had slapped me.

"Cruel. Yes. But with the veneer of clemency. There will be no blood. If it were seen to be killed, that just might be enough to trigger the slugglies into rising against us. There are nearly ten thousand of them, remember, Coutts. But that's not the main worry. I'm more concerned with what the passengers might think."

"Passengers –
huh
!" This was one of the others. He made as if to spit, but didn't. "Bunch of no-hopers. Cattle. Can't think why we don't just flush
them
out the locks. Save the cost of carrying them. No one would know."

"Silence, Wren." The leader spoke almost silently himself, his crude Ironfolk words harsh with sibilants, like a weasel moving rapidly through dry grass. "Some of the passengers – many of them – feel sorry for the slugglies, and the kids take to them. Easy enough when you see them here on ship, like pretty children themselves; the passengers don't know how they live on their homeworlds. The passengers don't
know
they're animals. The slugglies are too human. So we can't hazard this thing's death rousing sympathies in the wrong places. Yet we need to get the message through to its fellows. So we put it in a pod and send it off into space. Then we have an amnesty for a few days, so the slugglies can hand in any instruments they've managed to smuggle aboard, or 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.