“I suppose it does seem rather humorous, Mr. Parker. No doubt you are right. You are kind to an old man who wishes for too much. Still,” and he looked at Sam with diamond eyes, “it would be fun to think on what I have said the next time listeners at a concert do not behave in a manner understandable to their elders.”
“Sure, sure. Thanks for your hospitality, Mr. White-horse.” He glanced over at the cradle. The baby had a coal smudge of black hair with oddly familiar dark-pool eyes. He looked back at Sam innocently.
“Your father was quite a phenomenon, Bill White-horse. I hope your great-grandfather raises you well.”
The baby had a little Hopi-like doll rattle in one hand. He gurgled and shook it, rattling the seeds inside against the tissue-thin wood.
Parker shivered from head to foot.
207
Ye Who Would Sing
I love classical music. I love the mountains and the forest. The forest plays its own songs with wind and rain and the musings of small creatures, but what if it could do even more?.. . .
Caitland didn’t hate the storm any more.than he had the man he’d just killed, but he was less indifferent to it. It wouldn’t have mattered, except that his victim had been armed. Not well enough to save himself, but sufficiently to make things awkward for Caitland.
Even so, the damaged fanship could easily have made it back to the Vaanland outpost, had not the freakish thunderstorm abruptly congealed from a clear blue sky. It was driving him relentlessly northward, away from one of the few chicken scratches of civilization man had made on this world.