It whistled and sparkled till it flicked off into some crazy-quilt not-space, and was gone forever.
Tarmac clicked under the heels of his boots. Bright, shining boots, kept meticulously clean by polishing over polishing till they reflected back the corona of the field kliegs and, ever more faintly, the gleam of the night. The Minstrel kept them cleaned and polished, a clashing note matched against his generally unkempt appearance.
He was tall, towering over almost everyone he had ever met in his homeless wanderings. His body was a lean and supple thing, like a high-tension wire; the merest suggestion of contained power and quickness. The man moved with an easy gait, accentuating his long legs and gangling arms, making his well-proportioned head seem a bubble precariously balanced on a neck too long and thin to support it.
He kept time to the click of the polished boots with a soft half-hum, half-whistle. The song was a dead song, long forgotten.
He, too, was a half-dead, half-forgotten thing.
He came from beyond the mountains. No one knew where. No one cared where. He had almost forgotten.
But they listened when he came. They listened almost reverently, having heard the stories about him, with a desperation born of men who know they are severed from their home worlds, who know they will go out and out and seldom come back. He sang of space, and he sang of land, and he sang of the nothing that is left for Man — all Men, no matter how many arms they have, or what their skin is colored — when he has expended the last little bit of Eternity to which he is entitled.
His voice had the sadness of death in it. The sadness of death before life has finished its work. But it had the joy of metal under quick fingers, the strength of turned nickel-steel, and the whip of heart and soul working through loneliness. They listened when his song came with the night wind; probing, crying, lonely through the darkness of a thousand worlds and in a thousand winds.
The pitmen stopped their work as he came, silent but for the hum of his song and the beat of his boots on the blacktop. They watched as he came across the field.
There was no doubt who it was. He had been wandering the star paths for many years now. He had appeared, and that was all; he was. They knew him as certainly as they knew themselves. They turned and he was like a pillar, set dark against the light and shadow of the field. He paced slowly, and they stopped the hoses feeding the radioactive food to the little animals, and stopped the torches they boiled on the metal skins; and they listened.
The Minstrel knew they were listening, and he unslung his instrument, settling the narrow box with its tone-rods around his neck by its thong. As his fingers cajoled and pleaded and extracted the song of a soul, cast into the pit of the void, left to die, crying in torment not so much at death, but at the terror of being alone when the last calling came.
And the workmen cried.
They felt no shame as the tears coursed through the dirt on their faces and over the sweat shine left from toil. They stood, silent and all-feeling, as he came toward them.
Then with many small crescendos, and before they even knew it was ended, and for seconds after the wail had fled back across the field into the mountains, they listened to the last notes of his lament.
Hands wiped clumsily across faces, leaving more dirt than before, and backs turned slowly as men resumed work. It seemed they could not face him, the nearer he came; as though he was too deep-seeing, too perceptive for them to be at ease close by. It was a mixture of respect and awe.
The Minstrel stood, waiting.
“Hey! You!”
The Minstrel stood waiting. The pad of soft-soled feet behind him. A spaceman; tanned, supple, almost as tall as the ballad-singer — reminding the ballad singer of another spaceman, a blond-haired boy he had known long ago — came up beside the silent figure. The Minstrel had not moved.
“Whut c’n ah do for ya, Minstrel?” asked the spaceman, tones of the South of a long faraway continent rich in his voice.
“What do they call this world?” the Minstrel asked. The voice was quiet, like a needle being drawn through velvet. He spoke in a hushed monotone, yet his voice was clear and bore traces of an uncountable number of accents.
“The natives call it Audi, and the charts call it Rexa Majoris XXIX, Minstrel. Why?”
“It’s time to move on.”
The Southerner grinned hugely, lines of amusement crinkling out around his watery brown eyes. “Need a lift?”
The Minstrel nodded, smiling back enigmatically.
The spaceman’s face softened, the lines of squinting into the reaches of an eternal night broke and he extended his hand: “Mah name’s Quantry; top dog on the Spirit of Lucy Marlowe . If y’doan mind workin’ yer keep owff bah singin’ fer the payssengers, we’d be pleased to hayve ya awn boward.”
The tall man smiled, a quick radiance across the darkness the shadows made of his face. “That isn’t work.”
“Then done!” exclaimed the spaceman. “C’mon, ah’ll fix ya a bunk in steerage.”
They walked between the wiper gangs and the pitmen. They threaded their way between the glare of fluorotorches and the sputtering blast of robot welding instruments. The man named Quantry indicated the opening in the smooth side of the ship and the Minstrel clambered inside.
Quantry fixed the berth just behind the reactor feeder-bins, sealing off the compartment with an electrical blanket draped over a loading track bar. The Minstrel lay on his bunk — a repair bench — with a pillow under his head. He lay thinking.
The moments fled silently and his mind, deep in thought, hardly realized the ports were being dogged home, the radioactive additives were being sluiced through their tubes to the reactors, the blast tubes were being extruded. His mind did not leave its thoughts as the atomic motors warmed, turning the pit to green glass beneath the ship’s bulk. Motors that would carry the ship to a height where the driver would be wakened from his sleep — or her sleep, as was more often the case with that particular breed of psioid — to snap the ship through into inverspace.
As the ship came unstuck from solid ground, hurled itself outward on an unquenchable tail of fire, the Minstrel lay back, letting the reassuring hand of acceleration press him into deeper reverie. Thoughts spun, of the past, of the further past, and of all the pasts he had known.
Then the reactors cut off, the ship shuddered, and he knew they were in inverspace. The Minstrel sat up, his eyes far away. His thoughts deep inside the cloud cover of a world billions of light years away, hundreds of years lost to him. A world he would never see again.
There was a time for running, and a time for resting, and even in the running, there could be resting. He smiled to himself so faintly it was not a smile.
Down in the reactor rooms, they heard his song. They heard the build to it, matching, sustaining, whining in tune with the inverspace drive. They grinned at each other with a sweet sadness their faces were never expected to wear.
“It’s gonna be a good trip,” said one to another.
In the officer’s country, Quantry looked up at the tight-slammed shields blocking off the patchwork insanity of not-space, and he smiled. It was going to be a good trip.
In the salons, the passengers listened to the odd strains of lonely music coming up from below, and even they were forced to admit, though they had no way of explaining how they knew, that this was indeed going to be a good trip.
And in steerage, his fingers wandering across the keyboard of the battered theremin, no one noticed that the man they called “The Minstrel” had lit his cigarette without a match.