PROLOGUE
Into the Hands of a Girl
The people of Oreana are not explorers; their ruling philosophy is we strive to reach perfection here before we venture forth. So, it was possibly more a myth than the truth that one of their own stole a precious cultural heirloom and subsequently brought it to Earth. Also, the distance between these two planets is too vast for anyone from Earth to have traveled there and back at any time other than the very recent present, but this ancient one-of-a-kind instrument with its strings and many strange valves had already been here on our planet for many years, passed down from generation to generation. Perhaps the perpetrator was of neither world, rather some interloper or outcast who long ago stole the clesig from the Oreanians and left with it. However it happened, the history of how this instrument came into the hands of the Neiswender family has never been very clear.
What the Neiswenders will tell you is that some time ago, an unknown space vessel crashed landed on Earth, killing all its crew except a lone survivor (always said to be a woman) who removed the clesig from the wreckage and settled here. Whether she herself had children or simply passed the stolen artifact along is not known. But it came eventually to be held by a maiden aunt called Aunt Edna who in turn passed it along to her nephew. Aunt Edna’s nephew was the neighbor and friend of the father of the current possessor of the clesig.
Part string instrument, part Rube Goldberg machine with its keypads and dampers, the clesig could be held in one’s arms and played like a small harp or rested on one’s lap and played like a zither, but there was no mouthpiece or pedals to push air through the tone holes. No one knew what to do with it. There was a depression with an empty mounting at the very top of its main bridge showing specks of the original slate blue color scratched into the mottled metal. It was thought that a crystal or gem had been placed there to generate vibrations, but, as with most things about the clesig and Oreana, it was all speculation.
It was an object of great value to Aunt Edna’s nephew, but his two sons and daughter had no use for it and no musical appreciation of it. His wife had always admired its beauty, and would have been thrilled to make a place for it in their home. She would have looked after it and held it at full value, but she died three years before he inherited it from his aunt. His neighbor, Maurice Neiswender, would often drop by after dinnertime, bringing his two young daughters with him, hoping to cheer up his lonely friend. The men would shoot the breeze while their offspring would unite in causing havoc—the boys jumping on their beds, the girls running and screaming—until they were ordered outside. Maurice was fascinated with the clesig, as was one of his two daughters, the one called Joanni, who was said to harbor musical abilities. Joanni, at times, reminded Aunt Edna’s nephew of his late wife, causing brief images of her to flash across his mind.
The two friends enjoyed speculating on the clesig’s provenance. Any mystery or enigma of nature captured Maurice’s attention; he was a man filled with curiosity, an engineer who longed for scientific discovery and adventure. He fancied himself an explorer of sorts, and though not as credentialed as some others in his agency, was slowly rising through the ranks. His second daughter, Joanni, was equally drawn to the clesig and the sounds that could be drawn from it. She was studying the piano and becoming quite proficient at it, but she couldn’t get the mysterious instrument from somewhere out in space out of her mind, and privately made it her mission to master it, if she could.
It was no surprise, then, that Aunt Edna's nephew one day made up his mind and gifted the curio to his good friend Maurice. And it was not any greater a surprise that a few years later, on her sixteenth birthday, Maurice Neisweinder put it into the hands of a girl who lived with her music and the beautiful world constructed within her own mind. Her father was very pleased with the small part he had played in the instrument’s interstellar journey, but her mother was not. She wanted to be the mother of a proper concert pianist, not the mother of a traveling carnival hurdy-gurdy performer, nor for that matter, the wife of a self-proclaimed explorer with his crazy pie-in-the-sky schemes.
Image: Detail from “White Heron,” Kamisaka Sekka, 1909. Rijksmuseum. Public Domain. Edited by J. Weigley