I first heard non-Pané music in an alley behind an auditorium in Lhelomika. Lhelomika, the arts capitol of Djapé, made me nervous. The last two times I had performed there, I shivered as I hit each note—not with cold, but with fear.
That afternoon, I walked outside the auditorium, trying to calm myself. From a nearby building, I heard a raspy male voice—a deep unaltered adult male voice—attempting to sing a melody. Some instruments I could not identify provided a music bed behind the voice.
The instruments were more harmonious than the voice, even though they did not hit pure tones. But the voice held me. It sang of a wonderful world, one that had beauty in its simple existence.
Strangely, the harshness of the voice, its lack of tone and musicality, provided a contrast to the lyrics so profound that it accented them.
I stood outside the building, listening as the song played, knowing that this was human music and it was forbidden to me. If Gibson, my manager, caught me, he would chastise me. Male sopranos who performed as long as I had—some twenty years now—were rare, a commodity worth millions.
Each day that I survived in my rarefied position as performer—a living windchime, as the Pané called us—was a victory. I knew my time was limited.
Maybe that was why, when I made it through that evening’s performance with no mistakes, I hid in my study and searched for that song on the forbidden human databases.
I didn’t find it for months.
When I did, I listened, rapt, as stunned as I had been the first time at the simple beauty of contrast, the way that the flaws added to the whole.
The Pané would never accept flaws.
I knew it, and ignored it.
And some would argue, that was the beginning of the end.
I sang my last concert before a packed hall in Tygher City. The auditorium there, made of bone and thin membranes almost like skin, had acoustics so perfect that a sigh made on stage could be heard in each seat, in every row. Only the best performers got a berth in Tygher City, and I’d played there for fifteen of my twenty-five summers.
On this evening, I sang three solos accompanied by the Boys’ Choir, all in the second half of the concert, and all written by Tampini.
Tampini composed for male windchimes, accenting their technique and vocal range. His work, very Pané, was rarely performed outside the Tygher City auditorium, since it was one of the few places on Djapé that had the acoustic sensitivity for his works.
The auditorium in Tygher City made me nervous. A note missed by as little as one-one-thousandth would receive silence, the Pané version of a boo. Even timing that did not follow the score to the letter—say, a half note extended to a dotted half simply for interpretation—had gotten more than one performer thrown off the stage.
So I had dreaded the performance for weeks, and shaved my involvement from six solos to three. Even then, I couldn’t lose the feeling of impending doom.
I had mentioned that to Gibson, and he had laughed at me, telling me I worried too much. Still, he had the on-site doctor take my temperature and give me a thorough going over to make certain there were no alien viruses coursing through my system. They couldn’t give me any medication to keep my blood pressure steady because medication might make an alteration, even a slight one, in my vocal chords. Nor could they feed me to keep my blood sugar up, because food coated the throat, disturbed the stomach, and occasionally caused gas.
More than one performer had lost his berth in Tygher City because of a nearly silent swallowed belch.
All that preparation, all the careful rehearsal—my time monitored so that I didn’t overdo—and still I approached the edge of the shell-like stage with trepidation.
It didn’t show, of course. I walked on stage with a fake confidence born of years of performing. I wore a blue robe that contrasted with the chorus’s white, and reflected the natural interior light of the bone auditorium as if we were outdoors.
The Pané crowded in their seats, squat and attentive, their heads down so that they could hear better. They were oddly malleable creatures, mostly cartilage, their skin a translucent gray that showed the shadows of their internal organs.
Their faces, it was said, took a lot of getting used to; eyes askew, mouth hidden, and the ridges that looked like sheet wrinkles covering the bulk of their skull. The Pané looked normal to me, but I really couldn’t remember the times before I arrived on Djapé. Like so many of my companions, my voice came early. Someone discovered my hollow, fluted soprano before I had turned three.
The first part of the set went well. The boys’ choir had a sweetness that the adult male sopranos lost. Or perhaps it was the innocence in their faces, the love of singing that also got lost after years of performing.
The children took on Tampini like he was meant to be sung, with precision and grace and harmonies that sent shivers up my spine. The Pané remained motionless, so attentive that they barely seemed to breathe. I sang the first solo, the hardest of the three, with a clarity of tone that I hadn’t realized I could achieve.
The problems started in the second solo which was, really, more of a descant. I felt a thickness at the back of my throat, as if phlegm were creeping in. I had the desperate urge to cough, but consummate performer that I was, I did not. Coughing ruined the vocal chords and had to be avoided at all costs. Clearing the throat and shouting had the same effect, and I hadn’t done any of those things in my memory.
But I wanted to, right there on stage, in front of five thousand rapt Pané.
When the second Tampini ended, and I was allowed to walk backstage before taking my second bow, I swigged the warm water Gibson kept for me. It cleared the throat slightly, refreshed me enough, and got rid of the urge to cough.
In fact, I had forgotten all about it as I started into the third solo.
This last, a Pané favorite, always seemed the least musical to me. The boys provided a choral backdrop, usually made up of thirds and fifths, while I let my four-octave voice explore its range. At the time, I was the only man on Djapé who could hit the E above High C, and Gibson exploited that as often as he could, having me sing show-off pieces like Tampini’s Aria in E Major.
The aria had an optional arpeggio section, and Gibson always made me include it at Tygher City. To the human ear, the arpeggios sounded like little more than exercises, going from E major to Bb minor, and on through every possible variation, until the mind wearied and the human listener grew bored.
But the Pané heard overtones and undertones we could not. A series of arpeggios like that apparently created harmonies that lingered, pleasing the Pané as no other musical trick could. Any performer who could do the Aria in E Major and do it well was a guaranteed celebrity on Djapé.
The aria had become my signature piece, much as I despised it.
I was right in the middle of the C Major arpeggio when my voice cracked.
It didn’t break the way voices do when they change—I’d heard that a few times, and it was a horrible thing, especially the look on the boy’s face when he realized his treatment was faulty, and the thing that he had lived his entire life for, the thing that defined him, was vanishing.
No. Instead, my voice cracked with exhaustion, leaving a hole between the Gs. Even though I found High C, felt it position properly in my vocal chords, the note did not emerge. Instead, there was a wisp of air, a near-silence, almost a hiss that was audible throughout that galaxy’s most sensitive auditorium.
The audience gasped. It was a hideous, nonhuman sound. The Pané attempted to imitate us, out of a sense of courtesy, but it backfired. Their gasp was closer to a roar, emerging from the throat and not the diaphragm.
It was a sharp, shocked sound, one in such a low register that the Pané couldn’t hear it.
But I could, and it terrified me. They had made the sound in my presence maybe a hundred times before, but never once directed at me.
Still, my training paid off. I did not lose my place or my concentration, and when High C was part of an arpeggio again, I hit the note with the same clarity and purity that I had always had.
I finished the piece and walked off the stage to lukewarm applause, knowing that my career was finished.
Gibson, to his credit, tried to smooth the moment over as if it hadn’t mattered at all. His puffy face looked pasty in the backstage lights, and his hair seemed even thinner than before.
He put his fleshy hands on my back, easing me toward the dressing room.
“No need to worry,” he said. “We’ll get it checked out. You just should have told me.”
Told him what? My voice had never broken, never failed me, not even when I’d gone on stage with fevers, and mysterious Pané-originated illnesses. I had never failed before—not in twenty-two years. I had no idea how to react. Neither did anyone else.
