PART THE FIFTH
Chapter the First of Part the Fifth
In which the narrative recounts acts in the life of Tel Arman in Chicago, Illinois
“Ready?” Miles asked Tel Arman from the other side of the ping-pong table, ready to serve the ball to him.
“Ready for orders, Sir,” said Tel Arman.
Miles dropped his hands and gave Tel Arman his friendly exasperated look.
“I’m not your commanding officer,” said Miles. “I’m just another kid in the choir. So, when I say ‘ready.’ you say ‘ready’ or, better yet, you say ‘yea, I’m ready.’ Got it?”
“Yea, I’m ready, you just-another-kid-in-the-choir,” Tel Arman replied.
Miles grinned.
“That’s better. Now I’m going to serve the ball and you hit it back as hard as you can. Ready?”
“Y-e-e-e-a.”
Miles batted the ping-pong ball towards the left corner and Tel Arman slammed the ball hard, right into the net.”
“Pretty good,” said Miles, “but you have to hit the ball over the net without missing the table on my side. Try serving it to me.”
Tel Arman did better at the game Miles was teaching him where he had to throw a large ball into a hoop to score points, and he didn’t like having trouble with a game that seemed so simple. He tried thinking of the ping-pong ball as a bomb that he was steering at a rebel on the other side of the Empire. He bounced the ball and smacked a line drive just over the net. Rebel stronghold explodes! But the ball slammed back, hit edge of the table and bounced against Tel Arman’s chest. It was the rebel counter-attack all over again.
“Not bad,” said Miles encouragingly, “but you have to be ready to return the ball if I smash it in your face.”
“So I see,” said Tel Arman.
Tel Arman glanced over to the battered couch against the wall where Pir Min was chatting happily with Brendan and Luke and Sue Pafko. Tel Arman still did not feel comfortable around Pir Min and that also made him uncomfortable with Luke and Brendan, who seemed to think that the Empire’s attacks on Pir Min had been made on them as well. Pir Min himself was amazingly civil to Tel Arman, considering what the Imperial forces had done to him. That, perhaps, was part of the problem. One of the imperial maxims stated: If struck on one side of the face, hit the striker on both sides of the face before the striker can aim another blow at you. The imperial maxim applied to the game of ping-pong, it seemed. If your opponent slams the ball at you, slam the ball back at your opponent so that your opponent cannot slam the ball back at you a second time. Tel Arman positioned the ball and paddle as Miles had instructed him and batted a hard serve at Miles. When the ball came whistling back, Tel Arman took a step back and slammed the ball at Miles. Miles swung hard but only tipped the ball into his face.
“I’m going to get you,” said Miles with a broad grin.
The ball came at Tel Arman so hard that all he could do was bat it over Miles’ head, way off the table.
“Why do you guys say you shouldn’t hit people back when they hit you and then you try to get back at me when we play ping-pong?” Tel Arman asked Miles.
Miles broke into that wide grin of his.
“Because this is a game we’re playing. I’m not trying to hurt you. That’s why we play with a ball that can’t hurt you. We’re trying to have fun.”
That was one of many things that Tel Arman had difficulty understanding about this world. “Fun” and “Game” were concepts as hard to understand as the idea of “turning the other cheek.”
“In our world we don’t have a word for that,” said Tel Arman.
“So much for your world,” said Miles.
Tel Arman opened his mouth to say something in defense of the Empire but realized that he didn’t want to defend the Empire after all.
“I don’t understand your world,” said Tel Arman.
“I don’t think we understand it, either,” said Luke, overhearing him from the couch.
“Then how do you expect me to understand it?”
“Who said we expect you to understand this world, or even like it?” Luke asked in return.
But Tel Arman knew that the boys had a hard time remembering how foreign everything was to him. They tried not to make fun of him for cringing at the smallest thing growing in the churchyard but they sometimes couldn’t help it. The most mortifying moment came when Tel Arman treated an unwrapped piece of food called a “hot dog” as if it were a bomb about to explode.
“How come you’re more scared of a hot dog than you are of a guy holding a knife?” Miles asked him then.
“Because I was trained to attack guys with knives but all the food I got came in imperial packets,” Tel Arman answered hotly.
Kit asked him what the packets were like and then responded to Tel Arman’s explanation with “yuck!”
Tel Arman was learning quickly that Chet Maxson was very different than anybody he had ever known in the Empire. He couldn’t imagine Tarboc Ductor welcoming boys fleeing from another world any more than the could imagine the Emperor himself doing that. Most of the boys in this choir were a lot more like Chet than they were like Tarboc Ductor or the other imperial cadets. Tel Arman still had a hard time understanding why they tried to help him adjust to this world instead of taking advantage of his weaknesses to stay on top of him.
Another concept Tel Arman had trouble understanding was that of a “parent.”
“What’s that?” Tel Arman asked when Martha Maxson told him and Pir Min that she and Chet would be their parents in this world.
“Parents take care of you and they love you and they help you grow up,” Pir Min explained.
“I have a feeling that did not happen with you,” said Martha.
Tel Arman almost broke down right then when he shook his head. He explained how imperial children were raised by imperial childcare attendants and they never knew who their parents were. Men and women came together for as long or short a time as they wished and most men had no idea of how many children they had begotten. The only human relationships were those of commanding and being commanded. Not even the imperial attendants in the nursery were as kind as Martha.
Tel Arman was learning, however, that the world he had just entered, as a whole, was actually very much like the one he had left. The compound where he sang, called Saint Dunstan’s, seemed to be a rebel stronghold, much like Pir Min’s. That was why Pir Min understood Chet and Martha and the boys in this choir more than Tel Arman did. But not only was Saint Dunstan’s a rebel stronghold, but the choir seemed to be part of a rebel group in opposition to the chief commander who was called Father Morton. The Maxsons had resorted to a lawyer who created fake birth certificates for Pir Min and Tel Arman, claiming they were born in distant states of the empire. It was not feasible to pretend they were foreigners, although that would have had some advantages. This empire, too, had recently experienced terrorist attacks similar to the one leveled at Tel Arman’s Empire and the government suspected every foreigner of being a terrorist and any document involving a foreigner would be examined carefully. It wasn’t lost on Tel Arman that the chief commander of the compound was told nothing of what was happening, although the commander’s assistant was helping the boys. Meanwhile, Luke and Brendan had warned the Maxsons that other boys might have to flee their worlds as well and they were already working on a broader plan for bringing in the other boys and caring for them.
“Most people hate everybody who is different from everybody else,” Tel Arman heard Brendan say.
“This country still lets people be different,” said Kit.
“—Sometimes,” Luke added.
“YOU’D BETTER NOT GO TELL THE COPS ON US!”
That was Craig Pafko’s big mouth. The ping-pong game and everything else going on in the Wreck Room came to a stop.
“Craig, keep your voice down,” said his mother, Mrs. Pafko, who was on duty that day.
“BUT TIMMY SAYS HE’S GOING TO TELL THE COPS WE’RE LETTING ALIENS INTO OUR WORLD!” Craig yelled back, his voice toned down only a little.
Everybody turned on Timmy Sanders so quickly that Tel Arman expected him to be the victim of a word bomb. Timmy was a boy Tel Arman hardly knew as Timmy never talked to him. At this moment, his face was alive with fear and anger.
“DON’T YOU GUYS SEE?” Timmy asked. “THERE’S NO TELLING WHO’S GOING TO CREEP INTO OUR WORLD AND TAKE IT OVER IF WE DON’T DO PUT A STOP TO IT!”
Tel Arman saw Pir Min’s lips quiver and that made him wonder why he was hardly reacting to those words at all. Tel Arman remembered hearing Timmy mutter that Pir Min had “stolen” his solo. That explained a lot, but Timmy’s fear was obviously much greater than worry about boys stealing his solos.
“TIMMY!” Sue Pafko yelled back at Timmy. “DON’T YOU HAVE ANY IDEA OF HOW PIR MIN AND TEL ARMAN FEEL? HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF YOU HAD TO FLEE TO ANOTHER WORLD AND PEOPLE SAID THINGS LIKE THAT TO YOU?”
Tel Arman was still puzzled with the way so many people in this world, or at least in this rebel compound, kept talking about feelings. One of the most important imperial maxims stated: “All feelings are obstacles to every imperial duty.” Tel Arman was still wondering why Mother Stephens kept asking him and the other boys how they felt about seeing the attempt to sacrifice Passenell in that world. After several boys talked about how frightened and confused they were, one of them asked her: Isn’t religion supposed to be peaceful?” Mother Stephens explained that people used to sacrifice other humans because they thought it was the best way to get the gods to do what the sacrificers wanted, but that Jesus didn’t want people to do that any more. Then she talked about a story about a man who was asked by God to sacrifice his son but then was told by God not to do it. So far, Tel Arman was having a very hard time understanding who this commanding officer called God was and he didn’t know how to ask Mother Stevens to explain it to him.
“Do Pir Min and Tel Arman act like they’re trying to take over our world?” Brendan asked Timmy.
“But what’s going to stop other guys from coming here and taking us over?” asked Timmy.
“Timmy’s right,” said Tel Arman. “I think the imperial troops from my world would come here and take over this world—if they could. I think they can’t if the Empire is as wrecked as I think it is.”
“If you tell the cops that kids are coming in here from other worlds,” said Luke, “they’ll put you on the funny farm.”
Several boys laughed at this. Tel Arman did not understand the term but there was no question that a “funny farm” was not funny for anybody who lived on one.
“Timmy, you know that Jesus teaches us to welcome strangers, don’t you?” said Mrs. Pafko.
Timmy nodded, but he still looked scared of all the aliens he feared were going to invade Chicago through the entrance in the choir room.
“I really think you should apologize to Pir Min and Tel Arman.”
“I’m sorry,” said Timmy, without looking at anybody.
The bell rang to call the boys to choir rehearsal. It was a relief for Tel Arman to just go and do what Chet asked him to do and stop worrying about how he felt about Timmy’s words. Almost everything he sang in the choir was what he once called “rebel music,” but since he was ordered to sing it, he simply did it, just as he sang imperial music when ordered to do it as a cadet for the Empire. He sang through the vocal exercises with no problem and waited for Chet to begin rehearsing the music.
“I’ll start with the Howells ‘Take thee Earth for Cherishing,’” Chet announced.
“That’s Herbert Howling,” Craig whispered to Tel Arman, initiating him into the twisted names the boys gave some of the composers.
“Now the hardest thing about this anthem is the intonation,” said Chet. “There are many jaded chords that create a lot of tension and you have to hold to your part of the tension to stay in tune. Remember, this is a funeral anthem. Howells wrote it in memory of President Kennedy back in 1963. It is precisely to give such powerful expression to the grief experienced at that time that we have so many jaded harmonies to negotiate. Since we have the full choir this afternoon, we can really get to work at handling this harmony. Men, you have to set the tone first. Boys listen carefully—if the men set the tone properly that is—and then enter with the same sense of dignified grief. The note, please, Jack.”
The tenor sang the note and then Chet cued the men to start the anthem. As Tel Arman listened to the men singing the opening measures, the sudden loss of everything that had governed his life overwhelmed him. When Tel Arman entered with the other trebles on their first anguished phrase, he thought he would burst into tears, but there was too much music to think about if he was going help keep the pitch in tune. Tel Arman remembered Chet saying that music gives shape to emotions that otherwise run wild and he realized that the clashing harmonies expressed his own sense of grief and saved him from the need to shed tears in front of the whole choir. Perhaps that was what Mother Stephens, Mrs. Pafko and Martha Maxson mean when they talked about feelings.
Chet spent much time on that anthem, going over some passages many times to firm up the notation and mold the expression. Tel Arman had never worked so hard at music as a cadet. The music he sang then was much simpler and it came easily to him. The overall discipline of his training, however, was of some help as he was used to working at a task until he got it right while he noticed that some of the boys, not least Craig Pafko, were becoming impatient. Chet noticed it too.
“I know that it is hard to keep going over something like this,” said Chet, “but it is much more productive when we have the men here so that we can work with the full harmony. Please take a deep breath and—“
Chet stopped because the wall behind the filing cabinets had just opened up.
“I think it’s time to rehearse with the real full choir,” said Luke.
“All right. QUIET! That’s better. Remember, we don’t know that much about how this forty-third dimension or whatever-it-is works so please stick together. And be orderly.”
Luke did a good job of firmly keeping the boys in order without barking like an imperial officer. Timmy looked as if he wanted to run away, but when Craig waved insistently at him, he walked hesitantly into Merithwell with the rest of the choir. The boys from the other worlds were filing in as well. Tel Arman noticed, however, that nobody from the Drakkenfleiss Academy was there, not even Dunsland. That Tormo Redhand did not come with Mark Streeter and his boys was something of a relief. Tel Arman was amazed with how bright Merithwell had become. The stone walls were close to becoming solid with sparkling light laced through all of them and through a large window, the boys could see a nearby tower that Ritzvah and her group were building for instrumental musicians who were gathering from the seven worlds. Tel Arman listened to Kyle tell Luke and Brendan about a concert he had coming up where he would have a large solo and Brendan promised to “crash the concert.” Brendan’s tone of voice suggested that whatever he meant by crashing, he wasn’t going to hurt Kyle by it.
“Attention, please,” said Chet quietly. The talking stopped promptly. “I must say that I have better luck in getting you to stop talking in this place than I do in the choir room in my own world. I hope you are all in the mood for rehearsing the Gloria of the Western Wind Mass because that is what we are going to do. After that, we are going to work on songs from some of your worlds. Luke will sing the treble solos in the Gloria, Danzigger, please do the same for the Credo, Kyle you have the Sanctus and Brendan, the Agnus Dei. Ready? Kyle, please sing the original song for us.”
Proceed to Chapter the Second of Part the Fifth