Excerpt: The Troubadour

Blackness. Nothingness, a complete void, an emptiness that was beyond empty. Andrew Rain observed from the outside, bodiless, but very conscious of the situation and the body he apparently didn’t occupy. How could someone live in a place like that? It was so depressing. The simple lifelessness of the darkness seemed to weigh down on even Rain, the invisible, disembodied spirit.

Was something there? Yes. Hope sprung up from the depths of Rain’s heart, but only very little. A little girl, her skin glowing in the dark, but faintly, weakly, as if tired of warding off the surrounding darkness. Her head was down, her back facing him. She sat on a wooden stool, her tiny legs dangling, very still, almost lifeless. Lifeless?

No. Her arm was moving. Was she holding something? It looked like it. Her arm was moving, and there was something happening. Sound. But not just sound, not just noise, but something beautiful and compelling. The sound seemed to flow through him, beckoning him forward. It reached down into reaches of his mind and soul he didn’t know were there, bringing out feelings he didn’t think could ever exist. What was he feeling? For the first time, he felt like moving forward. He felt like if he set out to accomplish something, he would accomplish it, no matter how many walls came to block his path. And although he felt this, and he cherished it, he knew this feeling was forbidden, because no one had ever expressed feelings like this where he came from.

So where had he learned of it? This noise. No, it wasn’t noise. It was something more. It had an entirely different entity than noise, although it was in essence the same thing. This was different from the monotonous raking of soil as his hoe dug into the arid dirt of the dead Earth, and he pulled, and pulled, wishing he could pull in something more. It was like the screams of women, people he both knew and loved, being dragged in by the Protectorates to pay their pleasure dues.

Rain groped with helpless, nonexistent fingers at the noise. He wanted to touch it, to taste it, to keep it. The way it flowed, pitch moving rapidly up and down, then slowly coming to a soft close, then suddenly blossoming with noise - everything about it brought him the feeling that he could go on living. Suddenly, he found he loved this girl.

Then she screamed.