When they entered the meetinghouse, Yana had to pause to adjust to the temperature-and the odor-of the hall, which had been packed solid with energetic folk for the past eight or nine hours.
If these dancing, singing, talking, gesticulating, laughing, crying people were really the cruel victims of a malign curse that doomed them forever to bondage to a hostile planet, they were either blissfully unaware of it or they plainly didn’t give a rat’s ass.
And suddenly, neither did she. She liked this lot better than the whole Intergal company corps and the board of directors put together, and if there was something wrong with them, well, she had been told to investigate and that was what she was doing. Sort of.
The room was hot, but she didn’t mind; it was redolent with food, sweat, and other odors, but there was also a sensation that defied a name, although she thought it had something to do with the great good humor, the fun, the joy these people were projecting. How they had kept it up the whole time she had been gone, she didn’t know. But patently they had! She grinned up at Scan and saw that he was sweating; she felt the first moisture beading her brow, too.
As if their entrance were a signal, the music ground to a wheezing stop and the dancing couples stood looking toward them expectantly. Clodagh, Scan, and the others stripped off their parkas, and Yana removed hers. In a corner of the room a bodhran rumbled like marching thunder and a banjo began playing in a minor key. Someone began singing in a husky tenor, as if his throat had endured too many cold winds and the smoke from too many fires. He sang a lonely, homesick sort of song about the green fields of planet Earth, then followed with a rollicking, humorous parody contrasting Earthbound living to life on Petaybee. The next song was a similarly silly one about the last man on the planet who could read, which Yana knew was an exaggeration since at least the company-sponsored people read memos and orders and such.
That song changed the mood of the evening, and every instrument but the drum stilled. The drum slowed from the bouncing beat of bodhran to the steady muted thump of a heartbeat.
Without exchanging another word with anyone, Clodagh began singing the song she had sung for Yana over dinner the first night.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.
The drum pounded in even, measured time as Clodagh was joined by everyone else as soon as she had sung the first line.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. The air swirled with smoke from the fire, on it riding the evaporated breath and sweat of the two or three hundred people cramming the hall. Yana felt them so strongly around her that it was as if they all wore the same skin; the drum was the beat of their collective heart.
As the last droning word of Clodagh’s song died away, someone else took up a new song, one that Yana had not heard before.
“Lost the song, lost the words, lost the tongue
Lost the skill to read our own tracks.
Lost the skill to mark our trail.
Lost the symbols to read the spoor of others.
Lost the pictures that once replaced them.
Lost the voices that told us we did not need them.
Lost the earth for want of the songs. Ajija.”
The voices swelled around Yana as several more drums took up the beat, so that the walls of the lodge itself seemed to pulse with the tempo. Sean’s voice sang in her right ear, Bunny’s in her left, Clodagh’s in front of her, and Aisling’s behind her. She found it difficult to think of the report, difficult to think of anything, in fact, except exactly what was happening all around her, inside her. She breathed in the air that the others had breathed before her, she swayed to the beat of the drum, and although she didn’t know these songs, she realized that her own mouth was opening with all those other mouths. This was a sort of spiritual communion, with those around her, that had nothing whatever to do with a religion, or a ritual of any sort. Happening, that’s what it was. A Happening. It was happening just as much to everyone else in the hall as it was to her. Words were irrelevant: feeling was important. She just had to be singing something as the song continued, a new voice leading it.