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// Choir 
// Story: Mister Cook Goes to Canterlot 
// by Dave Bryant 
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“. . . two performances a day,” Raven had informed me over lunch. “They spend the morning rehearsing and setting up, making any repairs or changes they need to, well, anything. Then there’s the early performance in the afternoon; since it’s during business hours, most of the audience is class trips, a few families taking the day off, retirees, and tourists such as yourself.” She smirked, and I chuckled. “Then they break for a rest and dinner before the late performance in the evening—that one usually sells out. It’s a pretty gruelling schedule, but a good many of the singers seem to thrive on it. The life of an artist, eh?” The recommendation had been irresistible, and so I found myself in the early afternoon before a ticketing window at the front of the city’s biggest concert hall.
“If you really want to sit down in the stalls, we can do that,” the gangly unicorn colt behind the window offered in a doubtful tone. “But that’s where most of the families and the field trips end up. The parents and teachers try to keep an eye on the foals, but they can get pretty, um, boisterous sometimes.”
“I see,” I replied gravely. “I suppose that leaves the balcony and the boxes. Anything to choose between them?”
“Well, balcony seats cost less than boxes. Course, that’s why they mostly fill up with the retired folks.” From his expression, I gathered the last couple of words were a polite euphemism for cheapskate cranky old fogeys. “The boxes are the best seats for this kinda thing, but . . .”
“You get what you pay for,” I finished with a crooked smile. “Sure, I’ll take a box seat.”
“Okay, box ticket for one. I can put you in a smaller one, but you still might have to share it with a couple of ponies. I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s fine,” I assured him. “I’m sure I can deal with it.”


When I entered, the sumptuous lobby indeed was thronged with ponies of every age and tribe. Most of the adults were doing their level best to corral the fillies and colts bouncing around with a superabundance of energy. I hid a grin at the repeated cries for pegasus foals to come down out of the air: “it’s rude to fly indoors!” Certainly that was true, but there was a practical element behind the custom as well. A few times I’d seen the unfortunate aftermath of flyers coming to grief as a result of miscalculating in close quarters, ranging from bumps and bruises to broken bones. Not all of those injuries were theirs—falling from altitude onto other ponies didn’t do those hapless victims any good either.
The smaller boxes, I realized from the seating diagram prominently displayed on the wall opposite the entrance, were closer to the stage, a fortunate happenstance. I scrutinized it for a moment, mentally tracing out a route to the box listed on my ticket stub, before I glanced around again. The concert hall’s architecture and décor, for all their luxury and resulting appeal to the rich or aspiring, were surprisingly clean and streamlined, with far less of the fussy velvet-and-gingerbread elaborations I was accustomed to seeing in vintage settings or photographs in my own world. In fact, the clearest, if subtle, sign of opulence was a complete electrification of every light fitting I could see, the first such I’d seen in the city. If that extended throughout the building, it was quite an achievement, and the refurbishment likely had made the papers at the time, with much verbiage lavished on the improvement in safety offered by electric lighting.
The floor, typically for vestibules in both worlds, was tiled, and it was only a moment before I spotted foot-rail brushes discreetly bolted to the floor near the side wall. I made my way over to scrub all four hooves, one after another, across one of the coir-clad cylinders, as etiquette and cleanliness demanded. The hardwood floors and fine runner rugs of the building’s halls and stairs would not take kindly to dirt and detritus tracked in from the streets. A couple of slightly desperate-sounding voices behind me pointed out my fine example and urged the youngsters to follow it, and I bit my lip on another grin. Once I had my face on straight again, I turned back and began to make my way toward the archway leading, eventually, to my box. The exuberance of the children around me was cheering, but also a trifle wearing, and it seemed the prudent course to evacuate the premises before they stampeded.


Faint murmurs of voices and echoes of hoofsteps underscored the muffled hush so distinctive of auditoria; woodwax, potpourri, and shampooed horsehide lent a genteel scent to the air. I craned my neck to stare at the engraved brass plaque mounted over the smaller arch before me, the curtains within drawn aside welcomingly, the last one along the corrider serving the upper boxes on this side of the hall. Satisfied it was the correct number, I ambled quietly into the tiny gallery between the arch and the box proper.
Two flame-yellow pegasus mares, one in early middle age and the other at least a generation older, already sat on the overstuffed cushions filling the sunken bench at the box’s outer edge. Both looked up in evident surprise.
I was no less startled. “Ah—hello, General. I didn’t expect to find you here.”
“Mister . . . Cookie Pusher, isn’t it?” asked the officer in undress blues. Her elder, who probably didn’t know who I was any more than I knew her, seemed bemused.
“Please, call me Cook, ma’am.” I always have preferred the nickname.
Major General Spitfire rolled her eyes. “You’re not one of my troops, Mister Cook.”
The corner of my mouth quirked. “I have to call you something, General, and just your bare name seems a trifle . . . familiar.”
She raised a hoof, opened her mouth, and paused. “Okay, fair enough.” She turned the raised hoof to a gesture. “Mister Cook, this is Stormy Flare, my mother.”
I bowed and murmured a polite greeting, which was returned in kind with a quizzical air.
“I didn’t expect to see you here either, Mister Cook, so I guess we’re even,” the general added. “I had some leave time, so I thought I’d spend it with family in Canterlot. What about you?”
Ah, the bluff military manner. “I haven’t had a chance yet just to play tourist in Canterlot without any . . . official supervision, and the holiday season seemed like a good excuse.” I shrugged.
Spitfire’s eyes narrowed, and I suspected only the presence of her mother, who doubtless wasn’t cleared to know the whole story, stifled the trenchant remarks I could all but see gathering on the tip of her tongue. Instead, she finally contented herself with a sigh and the oblique warning, “You know I’ll have to fill out a report.”
“So will I,” I riposted wryly, just as a carillon sounded the final call for seating.


Despite a tendency toward hyperbole, the program book proved more informative than I anticipated; all the usual elements were present. Titles and descriptions of the songs to be performed, entirely a cappella. A brief and slightly overwrought description and history of the Canterlot Civic Choir, to back the proud claim it was among the finest in the country. A list of members grouped by vocal range—names only, I was interested to note, without any indications of tribes or sexes. Inevitably the last few pages were crammed with sponsor advertisements, earnest and quaint with their stilted language and etched illustrations.
I had time for only a brief skim before the (also electric) auditorium lights lowered and the curtain rose. The serried ranks of performers stood, splendid and statuesque, on their risers, those on one side of the stage gowned in gold-trimmed white, those on the other in midnight blue chased with silver. If my mental arithmetic was correct, that wardrobe couldn’t be older than about two and a half years. In any case, it was a gorgeous contribution to their corporate identity, as uniforms should be, and it muted the visual cacophany that would result from so many brilliantly colored and probably clashing bare equine bodies in one place. A vibrant moment of silent suspense held the vast chamber en tableau. Then a wave of the conductor’s baton punctured the dam, and a flood of voices burst forth.
Every hair on my hide stood at attention. A soaring paean vaulted to the heavens with the hopes and fears of a generation on the verge of starvation and exposure. Petty hatreds and jealousies, folly and obduracy. The tender green shoot of friendship rising through the blinding white snows of despair. A new land and a new nation flowering where once had been nothing and less than nothing.
It was, perhaps, not the most factual of accounts. Its truth was emotional rather than historical, and for its purposes, that was enough. I blinked on sudden tears, breathless and shaken by the sheer power and naked longing in the lyrics and the voices giving them form. It was a masterwork, and I had no trouble understanding why it led the program.


If the rest of the songs did not scale the same heights, still each was affecting in its own way. There were breezy popular carols, staid traditional folk tunes, solemn formal chorales. The program progressed smoothly, one form to another, never allowing young ears to grow too bored with stuffy old standbys nor old ears to grow too impatient with newfangled trifles—there would be something more palatable soon enough.
It all culminated in a reverent, introspective reminder of the holiday’s importance, thoughtful and measured. By the time the last notes faded, I found myself, for the first time since I’d set out that morning, truly regretting Sunset’s decision not to come. I shook my head and reminded myself her new friends in her new home probably were showing her things that were as new and exciting to her as this was to me. The difference was, the first voice whispered, new though it might be, she was home. I was a diplomat in a foreign land.
“Quite a show, isn’t it?” The quiet murmur beside me was barely audible over youthful cheers and whistles and the more circumspect stamping of hooves on floors.
I blinked, suddenly pulled from the reverie in my own little world. “Ah—it certainly is,” I agreed with complete sincerity. I eyed the general sidelong and, under cover of the applause, added, “As fine a show as any I’ve seen back home.”
A beaming smile flashed for a moment before settling back into a pensive look. “It’s a great reminder why I put this on in the first place.” A polished hoof brushed over her uniform tunic. “We might have been a tribe of mighty warriors, but this—” She waved the same hoof outward, toward the foals and families below and the bowing performers on stage. “—this is more important.”


I said my goodbyes to the two mares on the front steps, our breath puffing in the chill midafternoon air and a raucous tide of foals pelting around and past us like a cataract. Stormy Flare had been a more gracious sort than her daughter, but both shared a certain plainspoken practicality I found refreshingly straightforward. They took wing right from the spot rather than cope with the thundering herd, and I quirked a slight grin before turning to make my way carefully through the crowd. By the time I reached the sidewalk, I was humming and looking for another cab. I knew just where the next stop would be.