“You can let the woman go now, Thomas. She’s quite dead.”
Thomas released the woman’s neck, and she fell back to the dirt floor of her home. Thomas wanted to beg her forgiveness, tell her he was sorry. But it would not matter.
“Let me see your hands,” Karthenor whispered. Thomas held them up for inspection.
“Would you look at that? Months of incarceration, and still you have calluses on your fingers. You must be quite the musician, Thomas Flynn. Did you see the lute hanging from the rafters? Do you know how to play it?”
Thomas looked up. Indeed, he hadn’t seen it. “No. Yes,” he answered both questions in turn, as his Guide demanded.
“Calluses,” Karthenor whispered. “You see, Thomas, that’s why I like you so much better than I like them.” The barest nod indicated the dead shepherd and his wife. “You are a man who works, who strives to attain. I’ve heard you singing. You’ve a fine voice, a great talent. The universe is a better place because you are here.
“You could have stayed in your own world. You could have lived happily in Tihrglas. A talented man like you could have retired in some style. But you chose to leave that all behind, to grasp for something more. I like that in you, Thomas.”
Thomas wanted to spit in Karthenor’s face. The applause of this monster was an outrage.
“I see by your grimace that you do not care for me,” Karthenor said. “It does not matter. You and I are not so unalike, regardless of what you think. After all, I have questioned you under the influence of my Guide. I know your secret heart. You are a man who uses people, then discards them. You care nothing for your fellow men. You hold them in low regard. Perhaps not to the degree that I do, but you are not much better.
“Still, you make the unimportant ones serve you. You’re smart enough to do that, at least, but I fear, Thomas, that you lack vision.
“So I’ll teach you what the dronon have taught me. You see … this farmer, his wife-they served no purpose. But you and I are people who matter. We are the dreamers, the achievers, those who grasp. And by letting them serve us”-he waved at the corpse of the dead woman-“in however small a manner, we suddenly have given meaning to their meaningless existence.”
Karthenor looked into Thomas’s eyes and said, “Tell me all that you are thinking. Speak the truth, Thomas.”
“You’re a monster! You’re a monster to use such cold logic against me!”
“Yes?” Karthenor said.
Then, against every inclination Thomas had toward decency, he confessed, for his Guide uttered words he would never dare, “And yet, and yet, in one thing-you are right. We are much alike. Both of us take what we want from the world, in an effort to live our dreams. I debauch women and leave them alive to face their guilt. Perhaps, once, because of my callousness, I left a woman to die.” Even with the Guide on, Thomas could speak no more.
“Often farmers will plow a field, then leave it fallow after,” Karthenor said. “To leave behind the women you have debauched makes sense, for one might always return and gain more service from them.
“But let me enlarge your vision,” Karthenor said. “You are a simple man, from a backward planet, so I will try to speak in analogies you can comprehend: when a man owns a pig on your world, does he not use the whole creature? It is true that he feeds it, and cleans its pens, and gives it water-so that the casual bystander might be led to believe that he is a servant to his hog.
“But such a bystander would be shortsighted, wouldn’t he? No, the farmer has a greater goal. As the pig matures, he uses its dung to enrich his fields. He might let it root in stony ground, so that later it is easier to plant in that field. And when the pig is ready to slaughter, the farmer takes its flesh to eat, its skin to wear, its intestines to make casings for his sausage. He will eat the pig’s stomach, heart, liver, kidneys, brain, ears, blood. He will boil the bones to make soap, and feed scraps of the hog to his dogs. Those parts he does not find a use for, he will bury in the ground to fertilize his fields. Nothing is wasted. Do you understand? Nothing!”
Thomas nodded in answer to the question. “Now, the dronon are wise in this respect. They use their own people, use them as efficiently as we use hogs. They put them to work, demanding their time, talent, and effort. No dronon life is wasted, no moment left unaccounted for. And because of this, this great secret, the dronon as a species shall out-match mankind. We are ephemeral. We are fog that they shall pass through on their way to glory. So, unless you wish to be destroyed, this is the lesson you must learn from the dronon: the proper use of mankind!”
Even had Thomas been able to respond, he would have been unable to speak. Karthenor’s cold wisdom astonished and horrified him. It was not the ruthlessness of his logic: it was the honesty of it, the simplicity. He had never considered mankind in such a light, and Karthenor’s vision seemed to pierce a veil of darkness in Thomas’s mind. Yes, he almost wanted to say, yes, that is how it should be. A life should not be wasted. Yes, I want to live in a world where life has meaning.
Yet he could not. He could not look down upon man as such an ignoble thing. Karthenor clapped Thomas on the shoulder and smiled: “I shall make a dronon of you yet, Mr. Flynn!
“Now, Thomas, I want you to sing for me, and for the boy here,” Karthenor ordered, getting up, removing the lute strap from a peg. He handed the instrument to Thomas an admirable piece with a front of fir and a sound box of rosewood. It had been tuned by someone with a fine ear. Somehow, Thomas could not imagine the shepherd having so fine a touch with an instrument. It had to have been the wife, with her delicate bones and her long, sensitive fingers.
And all the clear arguments that he’d just heard issue from Karthenor’s lips suddenly collapsed in on themselves. This woman they had murdered played the lute. This woman had played the lute, and for all Thomas knew, she might have been the greatest composer who had ever lived.
Karthenor had abused her, treating her worse than Thomas had ever treated any whore who might give it to him cheap, standing against the wall in some waterfront fishing village.
If Karthenor had really believed what he said about understanding the proper use of mankind, he would have found better use for this woman. The truth was that he took from her only what he wanted.
Thomas felt surprised at himself. For one moment, he had almost been deceived into believing that he and Karthenor shared an insight, belonged to some great fraternity of “Those who matter.” It was an alluring lie. As Thomas tested the instrument, plucking the lute strings so the clear notes reverberated over the room, Karthenor amended his commandment, “Sing for me tonight, Thomas. Sing songs that are sweet, so the child will sleep well. Sing the most beautiful tune you know, and sing it better than you ever have before.”
So Thomas sang the ballad of Tara Gwynn, a love song for the first girl he’d ever loved, the one he loved the best. She’d died giving birth to his child. It was a piece he’d been working on in secret for many years, and he’d hoped that when he’d honed its rough edges, it would gain him some notoriety. It was to be his masterwork.
But as he sang, he did not sing for his lost love. Instead, he sang for the woman who lay dead at his feet. He sang of his loss for her, so that tears filled his eyes.
Perhaps it was not the most beautiful piece in Thomas’s repertoire, though it was close, but it was the one he felt most deeply now. It shamed him to the core of his soul that on this night, of all nights, as the colored moons of Tremonthin crept out over the pine trees, shining through the windows of the cabin like ornamental lanterns, and the owls hooted in the spring woods, and Thomas had just killed a woman-it shamed him that the Guide made Thomas obey Karthenor’s order.