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Synopsis

In the far reaches of our galaxy, the artist will face the ultimate censorship.

Mikk of Vyzania, the galaxy's greatest performance master, commanded stages on all the myriad worlds. His sublime, ethereal performances were unforgettable, drawing on the most treasured traditions of every culture, every people, throughout inhabited space. His crowning achievement, and his obsession: the Somalite song dance, an art form that transcends both song and movement to become something greater and more spectacular... almost divine.

When tragic events caused performance of the song dance to be proscribed, Mikk was devastated... until his strong sense of justice forced him to defy the ban. His trial will be the most sensational in the recent history of the galaxy; the sentence he faces is death.

Now the greatest performance master must hope to become the greatest escape artist. Somehow Mikk must break the stranglehold of censorship and change the law... or die trying!

Excerpt

Chapter One: Mother

Although it was also a stunning social coup that raised the cabaret zimrah player well above her former station, Mikk's mother had married for love. Therefore, when her tall, quiet husband announced he had been assigned to the new Vyzanian Consulate on Bar Omega Sept and would depart in the morning--alone--Ranya became anxious.

"Why can't I go with you?" She was fiddling with her coiffure and the entire edifice suddenly came undone and masses of thick, brilliant orange curls tumbled about her face.

"Our relations with the Septans are in their infancy and very tenuous," her husband said. "They have been known to kidnap diplomats' wives and hold them as bargaining chips--especially pregnant ones."

"But, how long will you be gone?" Ranya stroked his smooth, still face and wondered why, even this close, his large, light eyes did not appear to be looking at her.

"I don't know." He went away ... and stayed away, leaving her with nothing but a sprawling mansion deep in the parkland outside the capital city of Wynt, a host of servants, the estate's broad garden full of flowers, fruit trees, and fountains, and ten generations' worth of heavy, priceless jewelry. Ranya, devastated, promptly fired all the servants, thought better of it and rehired them, then shut herself in her lonely bedchamber until she delivered a son whose hair was much redder than her own.

"Madam!" cried Henni, her tiny high-strung maid with the overbite. "Such a pretty little boy! Surely he has been marked by the gods for great things." Ranya touched his cheek but would not hold him. He looked a lot like his father and she was not sure she could bear to get close to the baby's all too familiar pale lavender eyes.

"Why does he keep crying?"

"He's hungry, madam. You must nurse him." So she would have to touch him after all. Ranya opened her tunic and gingerly lifted the wiggling creature to her breast. Mikk immediately locked his mouth around her nipple--his desperation shocked her a little--and began to knead her flesh with his tiny white hands. Ranya had to admit the sensation was not unpleasant and relieved some of the uncomfortable pressure in her breast. Besides, as he nursed, Mikk closed his eyes. What a strange little thing! Even his eyelashes were a dazzling crimson.Very well. She would do this. He was her son, after all, someone dependent on her. Someone she could be sure of.

Ranya smiled at him ... and he promptly spit up on her tunic. She shrieked and instantly tossed him aside. Luckily, he dropped onto the bloody pile of cushions and bedclothes where she had given birth.

"Madam!"

"What's wrong with him? My tunic is ruined!"

The baby puckered up his face and began to howl up and down the scale like the city's fire alarm.

"Madam, he's just a baby!" Henni scooped Mikk up, wiped the sour-smelling birth blood and curdled breast milk from his face, and rocked him until he quieted. Ranya couldn't face her and tugged nervously on a wayward orange curl.

"I don't feel well, Henni. I think I'll lie down."

"Yes, madam. Of course."

"I mean, I didn't expect ..." Ranya looked at the milky mess on her tunic, her distorted breasts, the sore sagging sack of her empty abdomen, and moaned.

"I am so ugly!"

"Madam, you're not ..."

"Leave me alone, Henni, and keep the baby away from me!"

She rushed out of the room.

When she was finally slim again and felt more like herself, Ranya put on some dark green silk, frosted her eyes, came out of hiding, and gave a dinner party for the most influential society people she could convince to come. One of them, an eccentric dowager bound up so tightly in costly but filthy yellow gauze that she resembled a Rogoine mummy ready for interment, insisted on seeing the baby. She bent stiffly over Mikk's hammock and studied the carefully cocooned child a long time before she clicked her tongue and made her pronouncement.

"A truly out-ra-ge-ous color, my dear! Quite delicious!" She touched the boy's feathery wisps with her pointy finger. "What are you going to do with him?"

"I thought I'd raise him to be a performer," Ranya said softly. She had had plenty of time to think about it while holed up, guilty and humiliated, in the back guest chamber. It was the best possible future she could imagine for anyone, let alone her son, but she was worried. This old freak in rancid yellow was the wealthiest landowner in Wynt and intimate with the royal family. Her opinion carried a lot of weight.

The matron straightened as though forcing a rusty hinge.

"Don't be ridiculous, child! You've left that vulgar life behind. It's time to assert yourself in your new position." She smiled, displaying black, broken teeth, the familiar final stage of excessive bantroot use. Ranya tried not to show her disgust and must have succeeded because the woman rested her claw on her shoulder.

"How I envy you, dear! A rich, beautiful woman whose husband is away. Indulge yourself! Take a lover! But let's not hear another word about performing, either for you or this funny little progeny of yours. Artists are servants and you are no longer a servant." She patted the younger woman's cheek and lurched a little to kick her body into its fettered shuffle out of the room. "Hire a nanny, darling, and come to town. You're wasting your life cooped up in this house."

That night, Ranya tossed fitfully in the silken seine of her double hammock and listened to the warm rain echo down the open white corridors and patios of the house.

How dare that hag belittle her career! Performers were not servants and she had been good, even famous! She tore open the window tapestries so the night breezes, subtly sharpened by the alcoholic scent of the lakes, could cool her body. All those long years wishing for a way out of the endless cycle of tours, the roaming from town to town, cabaret to cabaret, the mean meals in mean lodgings, the advances of her viperous manager ... But, the performance itself--to cradle the rare and delicate instrument and dance her fingertips over the invisible, vibrating strands of light, to feel the caress of the sister vibration in her throat and the warm, seductive communion with the audience--that had always been wonderful. Always! Ranya loved to perform and missed it terribly but had not been able to play since her husband's departure. Her fingers were too sad.

Bitterness oozed through her heart and mind like the black, muddy slurry that collected around the lips of the ponds during the Dormant Season, and she decided she would be avenged through her son.

"He will be a performer," she whispered to the darkness, "but not a mere cabaret artist living in closets with a shriveled-up lackey who can't hear his orders let alone follow them, oh no! He'll be a performer of distinction, a classical actor perhaps, maybe a concert singer, even," she sighed, "a performance master! No one would dare call a performance master a servant!"

She would take her new wealth and engage the best teachers--vocalists, instrumentalists, acting coaches--and Mikk would shame the world with his brilliance.

She resettled herself in the hammock and closed her eyes. Such a magnificent vision! It had to come true.

Unfortunately, her spindly spawn seemed bent on thwarting all of his mother's dreams. As he grew, Mikk turned out to be just as uncoordinated as any other toddler. He seemed congenitally incapable of paying attention to what he, or anyone else, was doing and had an absolute knack for dropping things. Ranya lost forty-three cups and dishes in one particularly awful month.

"Madam," Henni protested, "he's too small to use adult crockery."

"One more word out of you and you'll lose your position. I know how to raise my own son."

It was a lie, but Ranya was having enough trouble without insubordinate servants. Mikk cried a great deal and begged shamelessly to be held, which she still could not bring herself to do. That sad, fawning little face looked more and more like her husband's every day except for a girlish delicacy around the mouth and that horrible hair. Ranya's own scarlet tresses dulled in comparison.

"Get away from me! I can't look at you when you're whining like that."

What had she done to deserve this aggravation? No husband in her bed, house guests who continued to ask her with coy condescension about her "quaint past," and now a weird child as ungainly as an orphaned marsh deer let loose in a glass dealer's, a child she had hoped would vindicate her.

On top of everything, early in his life Mikk contracted arranic throat fever, not an ordinary childhood disease but a serious adult malady usually suffered by poor fishermen who lived on the mud flats of the Grand West Lagoon. He was delirious for weeks and thrashed about in his hammock as he coughed up dark pink blood from his torn vocal cords. For many years after, Mikk could not speak above a raspy whisper and could not sing at all. Even when doctors pronounced his throat completely healed, the boy continued to whisper, which infuriated his mother past all patience.

"What did you say?" The glittering cascades of her long earrings clacked as Ranya snapped her head in his direction. "I cannot hear you. Speak up or say nothing! And don't stare at me like a fish, you little brat. No one wants to see your tongue."

Mikk decided discretion was the best way to deal with his mother's imperious tone and intimidatingly beautiful purple eyes. He closed his mouth and looked away, silent.

"Gods above!" his mother cried. "You're not a mute. Are you deaf?"

Mikk winced at the increase in volume...

Copyright © 1997 by Katie Waitman

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