Take No Prisoners by John Grant Page A

metal.
    "'To the stars,' says Brightjacket in response to their question, and he begins to laugh a little-boy laugh. 'To the stars – that's a place where we gallant lads and fair lasses can hide from the Ironfolk.'
    "I told you that our folk are not fine at looking to the future, so no one thinks to say there are only so many stars in the skies, and that sooner or later the Ironfolk will take themselves and their machines to those places, too. If anyone thinks of that, they believe it to be so many millions of years away it hardly matters. Even Brightjacket – who keeps quiet on the subject, as he would – believes that at least thousands of years must go by before the Ironfolk learn the simplest music, let alone the complicated harmonies that must be meshed to open the pathways across the greater seas to the stars. And he's right, of course – the Ironfolk have still never learned to play the living music, and I doubt very much if they even know it exists. What he doesn't reckon on – none of them do – is that the crafted-metal machines might become strong enough to batter their way across the interstellar oceans; and then, later, discover a way of skipping across the crests of the probability waves."
    ~
    When I gave Qinefer my memories, there were a few I held back, not wishing that she should live a life of fear. By the time the Ironfolk had discovered how to skip the waves, they'd also encountered enough of our worlds to have found out about the living music. I doubt if any of them will ever learn to play it, still less to sing it; yet they are aware enough of its existence to know that they should fear it, and to take precautions against letting any of our kind give voice. They know, too, that it is their crafted metal that stiffens the living music in us; that is why, when they come to each new world, they swiftly ring it with their steel-and-aluminum space-sailing vessels, so preventing as many as possible of us from opening up the oceanic pathways and escaping. The rest of us can soon be caught and enslaved; all the Ironfolk need to do is capture one of us alive, and threaten to cut out his or her vocal cords with a steel knife ... The rest submit themselves, rather than hear that happen.
    My world was taken that way. I remember it as if it were only a century or two ago. Qinefer's recital of a bugaboo tale for the weans, even though I know it better than she does, has picked the scabs off memories. Ours was a well populated world, with upwards of a hundred thousand of us – almost as many as had once dwelt on Earth. Perhaps fifty score escaped; another fifty score died in futile fighting; the rest of us were loaded into colony vessels much like the Ten Per Cent Extra Free , so that we could slave for their owners and in due course their passengers. In the last, of course, we were intended to be still slaving for them on the worlds in the Spiral of Andromeda.
    The inside of the Ten Per Cent Extra Free was a horrible place of silence. Oh, there were spoken-words of course, both Ironfolk and Finefolk, but the metal walls shut us off even from the faint music of starlight. There were birds aboard, but they were kept frozen in the hold; I do not know if this was to spite us, or just if the Ironfolk were not only deaf to birds' singing but also blind to the colors of their feathers and the thought-focusing hardness of their eyes. Not even the soft susurration of insects was permitted: they were killed on sight, or poisoned in their nests.
    We plotted. We dreamed strange, music-less dreams. Some of us cursed Brightjacket, wherever he might now be, for having led our folk out into the archipelagos of the probability sea; others, wiser, knew that he had at least postponed our fate until now, which was something we should be thanking him for. There was much foolish talk of sundering the walls of the vessel, so that air and water and bodies and all would be flushed out into the ocean voids. It seemed like a pointless