The Asutra

For a period existence went quietly. The sun-or suns-never appeared; the dank gloom oppressed the spirits and made for dreariness and lethargy. The daily routine included calisthenics, periods of training in the lizard-cars, and work sessions, which might consist of food preparation, sorting of ores, shaping and polishing of swamp wood. Neatness was emphasized. Detachments policed the barracks and groomed the landscape. Etzwane wondered whether the insistence upon order reflected the will of the asutra or the Ka. Probably the Ka, he decided; it was unlikely that the asutra altered the personality of the Ka any more than they had affected Sajarano of Sershan, or Jurjin, or Jerd Fi

Asutra were everywhere evident. Perhaps half the Ka carried asutra; mechanisms were guided by asutra, and Polovits spoke in awe of asutra-guided aircraft. The latter two functions seemed somewhat plebeian activity for the asutra, Etzwane reflected, and would indicate that asutra, no less than Ka, men, ahulph, and chumpa, were divided into categories and castes.

At the end of the day, an hour was set aside for hygiene, sexual activity, which was permitted on the floor of a shed between the male and female barracks, and general recreation. The evening rain, occurring soon after light left the sky, put a term to the period, and the slaves went to their barracks, where they slept on mounds of dried moss. As Polovits had asserted, no guards or fences restrained the slaves from flight into the hills. Etzwane learned that on rare occasions a slave did so choose to seek freedom. Sometimes the fugitive was never again seen; as often he returned to camp after three or four days of hunger and thirst and thankfully resumed the routine. According to one rumor, Polovits himself had fled into the hills and upon his return had become the most diligent slave of the camp.

Etzwane saw two men killed. The first, a stout man, disliked calisthenics and thought to outwit his corporal. The second man was Srenka, who ran amok. In both cases a Ka destroyed the offender with a spurt of energy. The Great Song of Kahei was for Etzwane a labor of love. The instructor was Kretzel, a squat old woman with a face concealed among a hundred folds and wrinkles. Her memory was prodigious, her disposition was easy, and she was always willing to entertain Etzwane with rumors and anecdotes. In her teaching she used a mechanism which reproduced the rasps, croaks, and warbles of the Great Song in its classic form. Kretzel then duplicated the tones on a pair of double-pipes and translated the significance into words. She made it clear that the Song was only incidentally music; that essentially it served as the basic semantic reference to Ka communication and conceptual thinking.

The Song consisted of fourteen thousand cantos, each a construction of thirty-nine to forty-seven phrases.

"What you will learn," said Kretzel, "is the simple First Style. The Second employs overtones, trills, and echoes; the Third inverts harmony and for emphasis reverses phrases; the Fourth combines the Second with augmentations and variations; the Fifth suggests rather than propounds. I know only the First, and superficially at that. The Ka use abbreviations, idioms, allusions, double and triple themes. The language is subtle."

Kretzel was far less rigorous than Polovits. She told all she knew without restraint. Did the asutra use or understand the Song? Kretzel rocked her shoulders indifferently back and forth. "Why concern yourself? You will never address yourself to the things. But they know the Song. They know everything, and have brought many changes to Kahei."

Encouraged by the woman's loquacity, Etzwane asked other questions. "How long have they been here? Where did they come from?"

"All this is made clear in the last seven hundred cantos, which report the tragedy which came to Kahei. This very land, the North Waste, has known many terrible battles. But now we must work, or the Ka will presume sloth."

Etzwane made himself a set of double-pipes, and as soon as he had subdued his aversion for the Ka musical intervals, which he found u

Sexual activity among the slaves was encouraged, but couples were not allowed to form permanent liaisons. Etzwane occasionally saw Rune the Willow Wand across the compound where the women performed their own exercises, and one day during the period of "free calisthenics " he took the trouble to approach her. She had lost something of her insouciance and nonchalant grace; she looked at him now without cordiality, and Etzwane saw that she failed to recognize him.

"I am Gastel Etzwane," he told her. "Do you remember the camp by the Vurush River where I played music and you dared me to knock away your cap?"

Rune's face showed no change of expression. "What do you want?"

"Sexual activity is not forbidden. If you are so inclined. I will apply to the corporal and specifically request that-"

She cut him short with a gesture. "I am not so inclined. Do you think I care to bear a child on this dreary gray hell? Go spend yourself on one of the old women, and bring no more blighted souls to life."

Etzwane expostulated, citing one principle, then another, but Rune's face became progressively harder. At last she turned and walked away. Etzwane somewhat wistfully returned to his calisthenics.

The days dragged by with a slowness Etzwane found maddening. He estimated their duration to be four or five hours longer than the days of Shant: a situation which upset his natural rhythms and made him alternately morose and nervously irritable. He learned the first twelve cantos of the Song, both the melodies and the associated significances. He began to practice basic communication, selecting and joining musical phrases. His dexterity was counterbalanced by an almost uncontrollable tendency to play notes and phrases as personal music, slurring here, extending there, inserting gracenotes and trills, until old Kretzel threw up her hands in exasperation. The sequence goes thus and so," and she demonstrated. "No more, no less! It conveys the idea of a vain search for crayfish along the shore of the Ocean Quagmire during the morning rain. You introduce random elements of other cantos to create a mishmash, a farrago of ideas. Each note must be just, neither under- nor over-blown! Otherwise you sing absurdities! "

Etzwane controlled his fingers and played the themes precisely as Kretzel had indicated. "Good!" she declared. "Now we proceed to the next canto, where proto-Ka, the Hiana, cross the mud flats and are a

Etzwane much preferred Kretzel's company to the peevish admonitions of Polovits, and he would have spent all his waking hours practicing the Great Song had she allowed. "Such diligence is wasted," said Kretzel. "I know the cantos; I can sing to the black ones in faltering First Style. This is all I can teach you. If you lived a hundred years you might begin to play Second Style, but never could you know the feeling, for you are not a Ka. Then there are Third, Fourth, and Fifth, and then the idioms and cursive forms, the converging and diverging harmonics, the antichords, the stops, the hisses and slurs. Life is too short; why exert yourself?"

Etzwane decided, nonetheless, to learn as best he could; he had nothing better to do with his time. Every day he found Polovits more detestable, and his only escape was to Kretzel. Or freedom in the hills. According to Polovits, the wilderness afforded neither food nor water, and Kretzel corroborated as much. His best hope of evading Polovits lay in the Great Song… What of Ifness? The name seldom occurred to Etzwane. His old life was vague; by the day it dwindled and lost detail. Reality was Kahei; here alone was life. Sooner or later Ifness would appear; sooner or later there would be a rescue-so Etzwane told himself, but every day the idea became more and more abstract.