But they listened when he came. They listened almost reverently, 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 peace that is left for Man-all men, no matter how many arms they had, or what their skin was 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 also had the joy of metal under quick fingers, the strength of turned nickel-steel, and the whip of heart and soul working in loneliness. They listened when his song came with the night wind, probing, crying through the darkness of a thousand worlds and on 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.
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 ships, and the torches with which they flayed 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. His fingers cajoled and pried 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 call came.
And the workmen cried.
They felt no shame as the tears coursed through the dirt on their faces and mixed with the sweat-shine of their toil. They stood, silent and dreaming, as he came toward them.
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 did not move. There was a pad of soft-soled feet behind him. A spaceman-tanned, supple, almost as tall as the ballad-singer and reminding him of another spaceman, a blond-haired boy he had known long ago-came up beside him.
“What can I do for ya, Minstrel?” asked the spaceman, tones of the accent of a long distant Earth rich in his voice.
“What do they call this world?” the Minstrel asked. His voice was quiet, like a needle being drawn through velvet.
“The natives call it Audi, and the charts call it Rexa Majoris XXIX, Minstrel. Why?”
“It’s time to move on.”
The spaceman grinned hugely, lines of amusement crinkling out around his watery brown eyes. “Need a lift?”
The Minstrel nodded.
The spaceman’s face softened, the lines of squinting into the reaches of an eternal night broke and he extended his hand: “My name’s Quantry; top dog on the Spirit of Lucy Marlowe. If you don’t mind working your way singing for the passengers, we’d be pleased to have you on board.”
The tall man smiled, a quick radiance across the shadows of his face. “That isn’t work.”
“Then done!” exclaimed the spaceman. “C’mon, I’ll fix you 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 feederbins, walling off a compartment with an electric blanket draped over a loading track rail. 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 being sluiced through their tubes to the converter-cells, the lift tubes being extruded. His mind did not leave its thoughts as the tubes warmed, turning the pit to green glass beneath the ship’s bulk. Tubes that would carry the ship to an altitude 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 into inverspace.
As the ship came unstuck from solid ground and hurled itself outward on its whistling sparks, 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 converter-cells cut off, the ship shuddered, and he knew they were inverspaced. The Minstrel sat up, his eyes far away. His thoughts were deep inside the cloudcover 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, but 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 of it, matching, sustaining, ringing in harmony with the inverspace drive. They grinned at each other with a softness their faces did not seem equipped to wear.
“It’s gonna be a good trip,” said one to another, smiling. 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 saloons, 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.
NEVER SEND TO KNOW FOR WHOM THE LETTUCE WILTS
So I’m watching the report on CNN about how little kids who’ve become enamoured of smackdown wrestling (which is so fulla crap bogus I can never figure how anybody can be dumb enough even to watch it, much less think of it as anything but staged stupidity, Three Stooges in ugly tights...but then I can also never understand why people who watch those weepy televangelists don’t spot them as the con men they truly are), and the kids are so impressionable...not to mention dumb as a paving stone...that they’re setting up these makeshift WWF play areas in their backyards. And they’re jumping on each other, and they’re hitting each other with chairs, and they’re throwing smaller kids against walls, and they’re dropping both knees into some other urchin’s solar plexus, and in general going way beyond the kind of silly horseplay you and I engaged in when we were their age. (And here’s a question: isn’t there an adult in that time zone who can see what’s going down, and maybe suggest that poking a garden hoe into another kid’s eye might impair his career as an air traffic controller in later life?) But the chilling capper to this report is the moment when one of these doofus children, who has been-are you ready for this-videotaping the massacre, isn’t satisfied with the “reality” of the scenario, and he takes a flippin’ cheese grater to the face of his “opponent,” slicing and dicing the kid for life, and he looks into the camera and grins and says, “See, now ya kin see the blood! Ain’t it kewl!” The troublemaker lesson to be learned from this story is: curiosity about things that you shouldn’t be curious about can get you scarred for life. Oh, and the other lesson: stay away from people dumber than you. If such creatures exist.