Free Take No Prisoners by John Grant Page B

worlds they ventured to, as they had been with Earth in the old days, before the Ironfolk's arising.
    "That is why, when the Ironfolk conquered the ocean crossings – they talk of conquest, not of befriending – and discovered that so many worlds were populated by Finefolk, who had become blended in so well with their worlds that they might have been there forever, they thought of our kind as being not of Earth at all. We were, instead, relics of some long-forgotten race born elsewhere – on the Galaxy's far side, perhaps, or even in another galaxy. We had, so the Ironfolk said, many millions of years ago traveled in now-long-rotted not-metal ships and been set down everywhere to colonize, but instead of doing so had regressed to become animals. As if the Ironfolk themselves were anything else! Never forget, Larksease and Harum, that you and me and your Daddy are animals, as much as any squid or starling, else you become like the Ironfolk, who think themselves other."
    I don't know if what she says is true, although it has seemed so. I do not know if the Ironfolk truly believe us to be like animals, or if they just tell themselves we are, so that it appears less of a sin to them that they should slaughter or enslave us. They have a code which they use in place of cooperation with the universe, but it seems that it can function only if founded on a complicated tapestry sewn from deceptions. Often they use the code to deceive themselves into believing that they wish to perform good actions, when what they really wish is to destroy; far more often, sadly, the deception is another way around, so that they harm the universe, by harming its parts, while convincing themselves that what they are doing is for the good. I have seen Ironfolk condemn to the fire a hundred hundred or more innocents of their own sort – weans included – yet all the while telling themselves (or inventing gods to tell them so) that this is a kindly deed, and virtuous. Such crimes and worse have they performed against the Finefolk; I am sure their hands would more often have been stayed, though, had they let themselves know that we are wiser than they.
    It is to the Ironfolk's discredit, of course, that they would contemplate massacring animals of any kind in this way. I am trying to think with their mind; this causes me hurt, and may not be a revealing exercise.
    ~
    I emerged from the Ten Per Cent Extra Free into light.
    All around me the waters of the probability ocean were phosphorescent with the living music, sparked into being by the passage of the vessel. Brilliant runs of notes glissaded in and out of existence; chords clattered audaciously against the blackness, as if in the knowledge that their lives would be short, and so making sure that their effulgence would compensate; here, there, everywhere were cadences that were both born and dying in an instant. The harmony of all this was bizarre, and for the first seconds after the pod crept from the belly of the Ten Per Cent Extra Free it seemed to me unutterably, intolerably discordant; yet almost at once I began to respond to it, recognizing it for the primal assonance of the universe, and therefore the basic assonance of myself.
    And there were suns – great rumbustious suns: yellow, like crashes of brazen trumpets; blue, like banks of zithers and oboes; white, like the high notes of an organ as the bass reeds trudge their heavy way beneath. I held my arms against the light, but my ears I did not block, for they revelled in the ever-fading songs.
    One song I concentrated on, letting it fill me. With lips rubbery from nervousness and broken from the beating the Ironfolk had given me before consigning me to eternity, I lisped its tune. I eased my whole body into the melody, so that every cell of me was singing the particular song of a bright yellow sun. I could not truly sing the living music, for the pod had much of crafted metal in it; but I could let the living music be in me, for it was loud