Chorus

Chapter Eleven

Note: I haven't had a break since the beginning of spring between my health issues, work and everyone deciding to get married every single weekend of this summer, I am beyond running on fumes and at this stage I think I am only kept upright by sheer force of will. Pray for me, please.

…..

"Hey, do you know these two offcuts?" Orthoclase asked lazily, tossing a tablet-type screen at him.

Steven froze. Garnet and Amethyst, caught by the pause button in a moment of intense worry, in what was clearly Lars' ship. They looked awful, dark bags under their eyes and posture crooked with exhaustion. It felt like it had been years since he saw them.

"Yes," he said, swallowing thickly.

"I got an encrypted message from that ship, they're looking for you."

He had been in the rest pod, taking a fitful but dreamless nap.

"Did you tell them I'm here?" he asked.

"I didn't confirm," Orthoclase shrugged. "I told them I knew where you were and that you weren't in any danger, but I didn't give them our location."

"They're probably worried sick," Steven said sheepishly. "I mean, they were already worried about Pearl going missing, and then I went missing..."

"You want to bring them here?" she asked.

"Huh? Are you okay with that?"

"Sure, why not?" she shrugged again. "You're trustworthy and you trust them, I'm cool with it. I'll send them a location and pick them up. But while I'm doing that, you need to get the pearls to that Lapis across town."

"Okay," he agreed. Knowing he was going to see Amethyst and Garnet soon nearly made him weep with relief. Although... "Um,...I don't really know how to get across town by myself..."

"Ginger will go with you," Orthoclase offered. "She's got all the pearls in her subspace so don't attract attention."

"But...what about the checkpoints?" Steven asked.

"Let them crack her as usual, they won't find anything unless you give them a reason to probe her gem. So, like I said, don't attract attention."

…..

"When was the last time you got this pearl serviced?" the Topaz at the checkpoint asked in the most bored tone Steven had ever heard.

"Um, like...half an orbit?" he stammered, trying to remember Homeworld's odd phrasing.

"Get it done ASAP. I'll let you off with a warning this time," the Topaz scolded, pulling the forceps out of Ginger's mouth.

"Sure, sure I will," Steven said, walking backwards. "Thanks, I will."

Once they were safely away from the checkpoint, Steven breathed a sigh of relief. They'd been through three of them, and each one managed to miss that Ginger was carrying a case of stolen pearls inside her.

"Does it hurt when they do that?" he asked Ginger.

"Yes," she replied in that same blunt manner she always did.

In a way, her honesty was refreshing, even though it often shocked and scared him. Almost everyone in Steven's life tried to sugarcoat things for him, but Ginger didn't seem able. Or maybe she just didn't want to.

"Orthoclase told me they have to do it because you won't open your mouth under orders. Wouldn't it be easier if you did?"

He waited for Ginger to tell him he was prying, or just refuse to answer. He knew she could; she kept things from Orthoclase all the time. Instead, she was as brutally honest as he had come to expect from her.

"Most gems are able to repair their damaged gems with mineral grafts, it's a non-invasive procedure," she explained, lowering her voice to a whisper as they passed a handful of gems loitering at a corner. "Pearls cannot do this, so when our gems are damaged we need to absorb filler from the inside out. They use a tube to do this. It's very unpleasant."

Steven had a feeling 'unpleasant' was an understatement.

"Sometimes back home sick people have to get tubes put in to help them breathe or eat when they're too sick to do it on their own," he said. "It looks pretty bad, but it's for the best..."

"The tube is not the issue," Ginger cut in. "The filler is taken from processed pearls. It is an intrusion and our mass rejects it automatically. If we had a choice, we would not choose to be repaired at all."

Steven wasn't quite sure he fully understood what she was saying, but it brought up that awful squirmy feeling, like he was going to be sick.

Serves me right for being so nosy, he thought bitterly.

The sprawling estate where the Dowager Lapis lived was just a few blocks away, and he gladly focused on that instead of the conversation he had just had. He could hear faint singing from inside as he knocked on the door.

The Lapis' pearl ushered them inside quietly, guiding them into a large room with a small stage. The Jaspers' pearl was the one singing, some upbeat tune with a matching quickstep dance, her long curly twintails bouncing around her face with each movement. The dowager Lapis watched her from a couch, a long glass tube of some smoky substance dangled elegantly from her hand. Her face was unimpressed, one eyebrow scornfully raised.

When the pearl finished and took a deep curtsy, the dowager rolled her eyes.

"It's trite, but I suppose the brutes down at the barracks enjoy this kind of nonsense?" she snorted.

"Yes, they do," the pearl replied softly.

"It's passable, if they won't let you sing anything more dignified it'll have to do." she scoffed. "But you're too quiet still. All of you are too quiet."

With a start, Steven realized that the Disney pearls were in the room as well, lingering to the side of the stage.

"You need to project," the dowager instructed. "I know you're all used to singing under your breath, but you need to put more power into it. Push from your stomach as well as your chest."

The pearls all nodded in unison. Lapis' pearl ushered Steven and Ginger in a little closer.

"Orthoclase's pearl and quartz are here," she said.

"Hm? Oh, very good," the Lapis sighed. "I suppose you've brought the rest of them?"

"Yeah, we ended up with forty two!" Steven enthused.

"Wonderful," the Lapis replied. It was hard to tell if she was being sarcastic, her general way of speaking seemed to drip with disdain it masked any sincerity.

Ginger removed the sack of pearls from her subspace and placed it on the low table. Slightly, almost imperceptibly, the Disney pearls and the barracks pearl leaned forward to see them.

"It doesn't matter how many we get if they can't learn to sing with some actual force," Dowager Lapis sniffed. "It won't even be worth hearing."

"But...your one sings sometimes, doesn't she?" Steven asked.

Lapis' pearl (the one he had started thinking of as Alice, just in his own mind) dropped her gaze to the ground as her owner turned to look at her.

"Only when she thinks I can't hear her," Lapis said. "She has a delightful voice, but it's weak. I do not intend to risk my standing and properties if they can't sing above a whisper."

It was pure hyperbole, the pearls did sing notably quieter than the average karaoke bar customer but they were hardly whispering. But Lapis was such a purist she would accept nothing less than proper volume. Panic bubbled up in Steven's throat, and Orthoclase wasn't around to offer any solutions. He would have to think of something...

"What if I work with them for a while?" he blurted out. "I mean, I sing in a band sometimes and sometimes I get told to quit that damn racket so it must be pretty loud..."

"Do what you want," Lapis said dismissively, rising to her feet. "I'm going to my rest pod. I've had quite enough of tutoring for one cycle."

She swept out of the room in the most grandiose manner, leaving an awkward silence in her wake. The pearls stared at Steven, clearly waiting to be told what to do.

"Okay," he sighed, cracking his knuckles. "Um, Alice?"

Lapis' pearl didn't respond.

"Oh, right," he muttered. "That's you! You're Alice...I mean, that's what I'm calling you so I don't get you mixed up with the other pearls...is that okay with you?"

Slightly baffled-looking, she nodded.

"Good. So I need you to find a thing...like, back home I play a ukulele and I forgot to bring it with me and I don't know if Homeworld has something like that, but it's like this big and it has four strings and it's pretty easy to play...can you find something like that?"

"It sounds like a dulcemeter," she replied. "My owner has one in storage."

"Okay, great! Can I use it?" he asked, and she nodded.

As she left to find the instrument, Steven set up an assembly line on the table of pearls to press his licked palm to. A lot of them were in terrible condition, cracked and crumbling and covered in deep gouges. Each one was made smooth and whole in turn and reformed about a minute later. Soon the room was crowded with pearls, mildly confused and examining their no-longer-faulty masses. Fingers fluttered with abandon, to the point they generated a small breeze.

Once they were all reformed, Steven went around the room naming all of them. As far as he was concerned, Pearl had been Pearl for his entire life and he couldn't call any other pearl by her name. After naming a few more Disney pearls (Belle, Jasmine, three seed pearls he called Minnie, Daisy and Tinkerbell) he ran out of the movies he had actually seen and switched to naming them after flowers, fruit and other plants (Azalea, Fern, Violet, Strawberry, Hazel). He asked them all if they minded their names, and he should have known none of them would object, but he felt he had to ask anyway.

Eventually, Alice returned with a metal instrument. It looked more like a lute than a ukulele, but they way it played was similar enough. Alice advised that they move to the basement of the building, it was soundproof.

"Is there any reason they're so quiet?" Steven asked Ginger as they went down the stairs, depending on her honesty to find a way around the problem.

"Only certain gems perform professionally," Ginger replied. "Pearls are only asked to sing by their owners, usually in private. Most never sing at all. And we are created to be quiet."

It said a lot about pearl culture that even when they broke the rules to sing to each other, it was barely an octave higher than a breath. But perhaps that was the solution; it was easier to break the rules when everyone around you was doing the same.

He asked them all to sit in a circle, and they obeyed (in unison, which was a bit creepy.)

He started them off easy; Row, row, row your boat. Only the barracks pearl (Bunny), Alice, the blind pearl (who he had named Blinky and couldn't stop thinking of her as that even though it sounded like a really mean joke) and the Disney pearls managed to sing much louder than a sigh, but he thought by the time the round included every pearl in the room they had relaxed enough to enjoy themselves. Their fingers never stopped moving.

He had them follow him in On Top of Old Smoky next. He knew his own singing was off-key and scratchy compared to the purity of their tones, but he made up for it in volume. He thought some of them looked alarmed at the way he screeched about losing his stuff on the mountain, but when nothing bad happened the concern faded.

He could barely play the instrument Alice had given him, it was nothing like a ukulele after all, but they picked up the tune of whatever he was bellowing at them easily enough. They probably had no idea what any of the animals he sang about in Old MacDonald were, but they followed his lead without question. Soon he had them yelling the refrain to John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt loud enough to rival a small kindergarten class.

Eventually he ran out of bus journey singalong tunes and moved on to pop hits he sort of remembered from the radio. Sometimes he didn't remember all the words, but that hardly mattered. It wasn't like any of the pearls were judging him. One of the seed pearls (Minnie) gave up on singing actual words and just threw out a lot of nonsense words to the approximate tune Steven was trying to teach them. After a while, they all stopped trying to copy his words and used nonsense words instead.

It took him some time to realize that the words weren't nonsense at all; it was a language of its own. He fell quiet, just strummed the instrument, as the pearls took up the music for themselves in their own words.

It was a strange language; all breathy softness and clear vowels, no consonants to speak of, and yet it could be roughly translated if you listened closely. It was the sound of their gestures, the brush of their fingers and the exhaled sigh drifting in the wind, the whisper of material grasped in the palm of the hand, the shuffle of a barely moved foot on a marble floor, the flutter of a slowly blinking eyelash. Set to music, it sounded transcendent, like a prayer.

With a start, he realized that this was the music he had heard in his dream, that faint echo in the abyss.

The voices in the chamber swelled, reached a crescendo where they burst against the ceiling, and then they fell silent again. Fifty two pairs of eyes turned towards Steven; they had plainly forgotten he was there at all, and now he thought he could see a note of fear in their collective postures.

"Wow," he mumbled, scratching his head. "That was...wow..."

He turned to Ginger, but she wasn't looking at him. She was ramrod straight in her seat, clutching her skirt hard enough to tear holes in it. Tears glittered in her eyes but she was holding them back.

"That was okay, wasn't it?" he whispered to her, suddenly nervous. "I mean...they're louder now. That was what we needed, wasn't it?"

She wiped at her eyes, and in a flicker she was coldly solemn once again.

"Yes," she agreed, and would say no more.

…..

"Well, you've more of a talent for tutoring than I ever did, quartz," Lapis said when Elsa finished her song. "Excellent work."

"It was nothing," Steven chuckled. "They did all the hard work, I just kind of shouted at them."

"Whatever works," Lapis muttered.

"I'm sorry I couldn't play the thing," he told her. "It looked like my ukulele but it didn't sound much like it."

"That's quite all right," she said, almost kindly. "I've never cared much for the dulcemeter, it's an awfully shrill instrument. I used to keep it for my students but the ones who proved good on the dulcemeter often turned out to be horrible on the symphonaria. I couldn't bear to let them touch it."

Steven's curiosity was piqued, this was the most words he had heard the Dowager Lapis say. She was obviously passionate about music, but while Alice was playing some soft up-and-down melody on the huge piano-thing in the middle of the room he had never seen Lapis even touch it.

"Is that thing the symphonaria?" he asked, pointing at the contraption. "It looks pretty hard to play."

"It's very challenging," Lapis admitted. "Even if you learn to play it, it takes an eternity to master it. But when you do, it makes the most beautiful music..."

Her face softened as she spoke, her smile bittersweet.

"I was once the very best, if you can believe that," she told him. "I played for the Diamonds. Gems waited orbits to see me play in the forae. No gem has played quite so well as I did..."

She trailed off, staring at Alice's slight frame as her fingers flew across the strings.

"...until I let her play. What a waste...the only gem who ever hears her play is me."

"Why?" Steven asked.

Lapis snorted, inhaled a drag of her pipe and blew it over her shoulder. Bitterly amused, she smirked down at him.

"Perhaps a quartz of your stature doesn't quite understand," she explained. "No pearl will ever be permitted to play the symphonaria in public. No matter how good she is."

"Oh," he mumbled. He should have expected that. "Well, what's stopping you from playing? You obviously miss it."

"An accident damaged my gem many orbits ago," she told him. "I was given all the usual grafts, but my fingers don't work the way they used to. I don't know why I'm telling you this..."

"Ah...well, I might be able to help with that..."

Lapis scoffed and rolled her eyes, but Steven didn't bother explaining. He knew she'd thank him. He licked his palm and slapped it across her gem, ignoring her splutter of outrage.

"What do you think you're..."

She trailed off, dropping her pipe to stare at her hands. Her breathing was shallow, she trembled. Alice stopped playing to go to her owner's side and support her as she shakily got up from the sofa.

"This is..." Lapis mumbled. "What did you do?"

"I healed your gem. You should be able to play again, right?"

Lapis didn't walk so much as glide over to the symphonaria. Her fingers fluttered over the strings, the pipes and keys in a set of complicated but flawless scales. Steven heard her sob, saw her press her hands over her face and lower her head to the surface of the instrument. Awkward as always after making someone cry, he looked away...

...and the sudden tension in Alice's stance struck him like a punch to the gut. Outwardly she didn't look any different, but he could tell something was wrong. She was looking at her owner crying over the symphonaria as if she had just been condemned to death.

Oh no.

Had he been wrong to heal Lapis, like he had been wrong to heal Murder Pearl? He just wanted to make her feel better, but had he somehow made life worse for Alice?

"Orthoclase says we can return to the workshop," Ginger said, emerging from the basement. "We're to leave all the pearls here."

Before he left, the Dowager Lapis managed to give him a dignified but tearful thank you.

…..

In all the excitement, he'd quite forgotten that Orthoclase had gone to pick up Garnet and Amethyst. His relief at seeing them was immediately overtaken by horror at the first words out of Garnet's mouth.

"We are leaving," she hissed. "NOW!"