Music Hath Charms

Music Hath Charms is the first movement of ''Killdeer. It was published as a short story in the collection Cat Tales as well, before Killdeer's ''publication.

The story introduces the siblings Elspeth and Anton Kolesar and gives their establishing characteristics - the first as a young woman bored by her brother's droning lectures, the second as a young man full of his own self-importance and interest in "cultural studies of the quasi-human creatures of the galaxy".

We find that Anton is Elspeth's last living relative, and that he finds her as irritating as she finds him, though she does all the shipboard maintenance on the starship that is their home, the Cicatrix, where they have lived for the last five years, Elspeth never going planet-side, since their parents' deaths when she was thirteen. This tells us, then, that Elspeth is eighteen years old.

The deaths of Elspeth's parents are related next, and that the First Responders called Anton from their Headquarters, ordering him to take custody of his thirteen-year-old sister.