I would not allow my feathers to lift, or flutter. I would not allow a single twitch that I did not intend. “Did Strong Claw turn back?” I asked. I would have pointed to the picture, but I did not wish to move.
“She knew all was well behind her,” said White Ring. “If none survive on Earth, and we die attempting Mars, what then?”
“We don’t know there’s air to breathe where we’re going,” said the daughter beside White Ring, when I didn’t answer. “There was none on the moon.”
“What a wonder this is! You lowlanders disbelieved when the engineers from the mountains said there was no air on the moon. Now you disbelieve when you are told that Mars certainly has an atmosphere.”
“Bent light,” White Ring began, her voice scornful.
“There is more than just the bending of light to prove it. There are plants, the astronomers have said so. We see them wax and wane with the seasons. There is no reason to think that Mars will not be much like Earth.”
“The astronomers are not all agreed. Not even those from the mountains.”
“But you have staked your life on it,” I pointed out.
“While other lives were sure to continue,” said White Ring. “What if everyone else is dead?”
“Then they are dead because Earth is now unlivable,” I said. “And in that case, why turn back?”
“I know your ambition of old,” said White Ring. “I had not thought you would exercise it at a time like this.”
My feathers twitched then, I couldn’t avoid it. I allowed them to tremble and rise. White Ring and her daughter watched me with malice, the other five with fear, or perhaps something else.
The moment stretched out. Time—time might be an enemy or an ally. Prolong the contention, and the moment to turn back would have passed. Allow the return to begin, and there would be only a short space, if any at all, in which it would be possible to correct our course.
“You call me ambitious,” I said, “and I am. I would reach Mars! Did any of us embark without a similar ambition? But now you abandon what we have all worked so hard to attain! And when I point this out, I am threatened. Why is this? If one of you,” and here I pointed around the circle, “had spoken, would this have been the response?” Had I seen movement among the others? Someone about to speak, some thoughtful twitch of feathers? “You may kill me if you like, as I am clearly outnumbered. But it will not change the truth.”
One of those who had been silent spoke. “There is something in what she says.”
White Ring was silent a moment. “It would be best not to fight,” she said. “I would not lose more of us. Bring out the histories.”
“Bring out the histories,” I agreed.
She scratched at the unyielding metal ground with her foot, never taking her eyes off me. Then she barked a short order to her daughter, who repeated White Ring’s word into the speaking tube.
The ladder well was behind me. I did not look as I heard the singer climbing into the room, or move as he squeezed past into the center of the circle in front of White Ring. I never moved my eyes from her, and let the others shift to let him by.
He was shorter even than most males, and his feathers were a dull brown, specked with black. He was an unprepossessing thing until he opened his mouth, as I well knew. He was my son.
He lowered his head in front of White Ring. “You choose first,” she said to me. I should have been daunted—if I chose first, hers would be the last word. But I was not.
“I choose Strong Claw’s Voyage,” I said.
We are all susceptible to the power of song. The songs you’ve known since hatching, in the mouth of a great singer, will quicken your pulse and stop your breath. As my son called out the opening lines to the history I had chosen, all in the room were compelled by his voice to listen. Feathers ruffled and then settled, and all were still and there was no sound but his song.
There is no need to give the details here. The story is told, in its essentials, in the picture on the wall of the sky-boat, and in any event I might have chosen anything from the histories I wished, so long as White Ring would feel safe making the obvious choice when her turn came.
No, the song, and its argument, is already clear to you. Instead, I will tell you about my son.
When I was younger, and looking for a mate, I had resolved to have only the strongest, wiliest male I could find. I wanted large, strong daughters. I wanted children who would distinguish themselves on a hunt. I turned down suitors who were stupid, or weak, or too short. Some I killed. I would have killed the little brown-feathered thing that approached me last, but he opened his mouth and sang.
His voice! I lost all reason.
When the first clutch of eggs hatched, I had five daughters and six sons. Three of the daughters seemed strong enough. Three of the males were small and weak, and I thought they might die. But one of those, as I bent near to it, tiny, naked-looking thing, let out one barely audible peep.
I ate the four weaklings and fed them to him. His health was all my care in the coming months, and he grew strong.
He was undersized, but he was clever. I taught him what I could, and when the day came, that comes for all male children, the day to leave his mother and sisters behind forever, I instructed him to seek out the singers guild.
For most mothers, when that day comes it is as though they never had male children. The boys go off to other territories, and if they’re seen again the sight raises no sentiment in the breast of the formerly doting mother. Your daughters are yours for life; your sons cease to exist when they leave the nest. But I took what steps I could to ensure that my son would be mine, no less than my daughters, even after he had gone to the singers guild.
I didn’t know then that I would be on the sky-boat, or that a giant rock would hurtle out of the heavens and destroy the Earth. And even had I known, I could not have predicted that the lowlander singer would die during the launch, leaving my boy the only historian on the ship. But I knew that a singer’s voice has a power entirely different from claws and teeth. White Ring had said she knew my ambition of old, but she did not realize its true extent.
The song ended. Strong Claw, victorious through all dangers, never turning back though she knew not what the end of her voyage would be, stood at last on the shore of the land she had discovered. Every listener sighed to hear it. It is an old song, and a pleasing one, with a clear lesson—the strong and resolute prevail.
It was no more than I had already said. And as I had hoped—expected!—White Ring answered with The Endangered Camp.
It is a story older even than Strong Claw’s. It begins when a party of hunters goes out looking for iguanadon. (I myself have never seen an iguanadon, but they thunder through the oldest stories in vast herds.) They leave behind them in the woods their camp, a nursery. “Mounds of earth and leaves,” the singer sang, “the infants waiting their time to come forth, and the guardians of the nests watchful.”
An idyllic scene! But while the hunters are gone, the camp is attacked. The beast’s tearing claws and rending teeth kill one guardian, and the others circle the nests as well as they can, and cry out together, Let the hunting party return!
Close around me, the listeners were rapt and their eyes wide, and they barely breathed, such was the power of the singer’s voice.
The hunting party did return, of course. They heard the cries of the guardians, and ran with desperate speed back to the camp. Three guardians were killed, and four hunters, but they drove off the beast, saved the eggs, saved the pack. So the history tells us.
Now, this is the strange thing about history. When we are in doubt as to what course to take, or there is some debate, we examine the histories, we say, “So our ancestors did then, and so we should do now.” And we think of the past as a solid, unbreakable rock that will always have the same form. But by accident or design, the rock is shaped. A singer drops a line here, a verse there, knowing or unknowing. And if you change the past, you change the future.