Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  During the death ceremonies of the spiderweb flowers, the plants give off a haunting and terrible sound. It is a song of colors. Shades and hues that have no counterparts anywhere in the stellar community.

  DeilBo had sent scavengers across the entire face of Chill’s eleventh moon, and they had gathered one hundred of the finest spiderweb flowers, giants among their kind. DeilBo had talked to the flowers for some very long time prior to the Gathering. He had told them what they had been brought to the Maelstrom to do, and though they could not speak, it became apparent from the way they straightened in their vats of enriched water (for they had hung their tops dejectedly when removed from the eleventh moon of Chill) that they took DeilBo’s purpose as a worthy fulfillment of their destiny, and would be proud to burn on command.

  So DeilBo gave the gentle command, speaking sounds of gratitude and affection to the spiderweb flowers, who burst into flame and sang their dangerous song of death. . . .

  It began with blue, a very ordinary blue, identifiable to every delegate who heard it. But the blue was only the ground coat; in an instant it was overlaid with skirls of a color like wind through dry stalks of harvested grain. Then a sea color the deepest shade of a blind fish tooling through algae-thick waters. Then the color of hopelessness collided with the color of desperation and formed a nova of hysteria that in the human delegates sounded exactly like the color of a widower destroying himself out of loneliness.

  The song of colors went on for what seemed a long time, though it was only a matter of minutes, and when it faded away into ashes and was stilled, they all sat humbled and silent, wishing they had not heard it.

  * * * *

  Stileen revolved slowly in her jar, troubled beyond consolation at the first sound the Gathering had proffered. For the first time in many reborn lifetimes, she felt pain. A sliver of glass driven into her memories. Bringing back the clear, loud sound of a moment when she had rejected one who had loved her. She had driven him to hurt her, and then he had sunk into a deathly melancholy, a silence so deep no words she could summon would serve to bring him back. And when he had gone, she had asked for sleep, and they had given it to her . . . only to bring her life once again, all too soon.

  In her jar, she wept.

  And she longed for the time when she could let them hear the sound she had found, the sound that would release her at last from the coil of mortality she now realized she despised with all her soul.

  After a time, the first delegate—having recovered from DeilBo’s offering—ventured forth with its sound. It was an insect creature from a world named Joumell, and this was the sound it had brought:

  Far beneath a milky sea on a water world of Joumell’s system, there is a vast grotto whose walls are studded with multicolored quartz crystals whose cytoplasmic cell contents duplicate the filament curves of the galaxies NGC 4038 and NGC 4039. When these crystals mate, there is a perceptible encounter that produces tidal tails. The sounds of ecstasy these crystals make when they mate is one long, sustained sigh of rapture that is capped by yet another, slightly higher and separate from the preceding. Then another, and another, until a symphony of crystalline orgasms is produced no animal throats could match.

  The insect Joumell had brought eleven such crystals (the minimum number required for a sexual coupling) from the water world. A cistern formation had been filled with a white crystalline acid, very much like cuminoin; it initiated a cytotaxian movement; a sexual stimulation. The crystals had been put down in the cistern and now they began their mating.

  The sound began with a single note, then another joined and overlay it, then another, and another. The symphony began and modulations rose on modulations, and the delegates closed their eyes—even those who had no eyes—and they basked in the sound, translating it into the sounds of joy of their various species.

  And when it was ended, many of the delegates found the affirmation of life permitted them to support the memory of DeilBo’s terrible death melody of the flowers.

  Many did not.

  * * * *

  “. . . the frequencies of their limits of hearing ... a calendar going forward and backward but not in time, even though time was the measure of the frequencies as it was the measure of every other thing (therefore, some say, the only measure) . . .”

  w. s. merwin, “The Chart”

  She remembered the way they had been when they had first joined energies. It had been like that sound, the wonderful sound of those marvelous crystals.

  Stileen turned her azure solution opaque, and let herself drift back on a tide of memory. But the tide retreated, leaving her at the shore of remembrance where DeilBo’s sound still lingered, dark and terrible. She knew that even the trembling threads of joy unforgotten could not sustain her, and she wanted to let them hear what she had brought. There was simply too much pain in the universe, and if she—peculiarly adapted to contain such vast amounts of anguish—could not live with it. . . there must be an end. It was only humane.

  She sent out a request to be put on the agenda as soon as possible and DeilBo’s butlers advised her she had a time to wait; and as her contact was withdrawn, she brushed past a creature reaching out for a position just after hers. When she touched its mind, it closed off with shocking suddenness. Afraid she had been discourteous, Stileen went away from the creature quickly, and did not reach out again. But in the instant she had touched it, she had glimpsed something ... it would not hold. . . .

  The sounds continued, each delegate presenting a wonder to match the wonders that had gone before.

  * * * *

  The delegate from RR Lyrae IV produced the sound of a dream decaying in the mind of a mouselike creature from Bregga, a creature whose dreams formed its only reality. The delegate from RZ Cephei Beta VI followed with the sound of ghosts in the Mountains of the Hand; they spoke of the future and lamented their ability to see what was to come. The delegate from Ennore came next with the sound of red, magnified till it filled the entire universe. The delegate from Gateway offered the sound of amphibious creatures at the moment of their mutation to fully land-living vertebrates; there was a wail of loss at that moment, as their chromosomes begged for return to the warm, salty sea. The delegates from Algol CXXHI gave them the sounds of war, collected from every race in the stellar community, broken down into their component parts, distilled, purified, and recast as one tone; it was numbing. The delegate from Blad presented a triptych of sound: a sun being born, the same sun coasting through its main stage of hydrogen burning, the sun going nova—a shriek of pain that phased in and out of normal space-time with lunatic vibrations. The delegate from Iobbaggii played a long and ultimately boring sound that was finally identified as a neutrino passing through the universe; when one of the other delegates suggested that sound, being a vibration in a medium, could not be produced by a neutrino passing through vacuum, the Iobbaggiian responded—with pique—that the sound produced had been the sound within the neutrino; the querying delegate then said it must have taken a very tiny microphone to pick up the sound; the Iobbaggiian stalked out of the Gathering on his eleven-meter stilts. When the uproar died away, the agenda was moved and the delegate from Kruger 60B IX delivered up a potpourri of sounds of victory and satisfaction and joy and innocence and pleasure from a gathering of microscopic species inhabiting a grain of sand in the Big Desert region of Catrimani; it was a patchwork quilt of delights that helped knit together the Gathering. Then the delegate from the Opal Cluster (his specific world’s native name was taboo and could not be used) assaulted them with a sound none could identify, and when it had faded away into trembling silence, leaving behind only the memory of cacophony, he told the Gathering that it was the sound of chaos; no one doubted his word. The delegate from Mainworld followed with the sound of a celestial choir composed of gases being blown away from a blue star in a rosette nebula ten light-years across; all the angels of antiquity could not have sounded more glorious.

  And then it was Stileen’s turn, and she read
ied the sound that would put an end to the Gathering.

  * * * *

  “And beyond—and in fact among—the last known animals living and extinct, the lines could be drawn through white spaces that had an increasing progression of their own, into regions of hearing that was no longer conceivable, indicating creatures wholly sacrificed or never evolved, hearers of the note at which everything explodes into light, and of the continuum that is the standing still of darkness, drums echoing the last shadow without relinquishing the note of the first light, hearkeners to the unborn overflowing.”

  w. s. merwin, “The Chart”

  “There is no pleasure in this,” Stileen communicated, by thought and by inflection. “But it is the sound that I have found, the sound I know you would want me to give to you. . . and you must do with it what you must. I am sorry.”

  And she played for them the sound.

  It was the sound of the death of the universe. The dying gasp of their worlds and their suns and their galaxies and their island universes. The death of all. The final sound.

  And when the sound was gone, no one spoke for a long time, and Stileen was at once sad, but content: now the sleep would come, and she would be allowed to rest.

  “The delegate is wrong.”

  The silence hung shrouding the moment. The one who had spoken was a darksmith from Luxann, chief world of the Logomachy. Theologians, pragmatists, reasoners sans appel, his words fell with the weight of certainty.

  “It is an oscillating universe,” he said, his cowl shrouding his face, the words emerging from darkness. “It will die, and it will be reborn. It has happened before, it will happen again.”

  And the tone of the Gathering grew brighter, even as Stileen’s mood spiraled down into despair. She was ambivalent—pleased for them, that they could see an end to their ennui and yet perceive the rebirth of life in the universe —desolate for herself, knowing somehow, some way, she would be recalled from the dead.

  And then the creature she had passed in reaching out for her place on the agenda, the creature that had blocked itself to her mental touch, came forward in their minds and said, “There is another sound beyond hers.”

  This was the sound the creature let them hear, the sound that had always been there, that had existed for time beyond time, that could not be heard though the tone was always with them; and it could be heard now only because it existed as it passed through the instrument the creature made of itself.

  It was the sound of reality, and it sang of the end beyond the end, the final and total end that said without possibility of argument, There will be no rebirth because we have never existed.

  Whatever they had thought they were, whatever arrogance had brought their dream into being, it was now coming to final moments, and beyond those moments there was nothing.

  No space, no time, no life, no thought, no gods, no resurrection and rebirth.

  The creature let the tone die away, and these who could reach out with their minds to see what it was, were turned back easily. It would not let itself be seen.

  The messenger of eternity had only anonymity to redeem itself ... for whom?

  And for Stileen, who did not even try to penetrate the barriers, there was no pleasure in the knowledge that it had all been a dream. For if it had been a dream, then the joy had been a dream as well.

  It was not easy to go down to emptiness, never having tasted joy. But there was no appeal.

  In the Maelstrom Labyrinth, there was no longer ennui.

  <>

  * * * *

  So many people talk about our energy crisis, so many suggestions are made, from installing offshore windmills to tapping the thermal heat produced by animal droppings . . . yet no one (until John Shirley) has suggested that we use the most reliable form of energy in the universe: entropy. Here he tells of a future world in which death-energy has at last been harnessed for living. Of course, there are complications. . . .

  john shirley is a graduate of the Clarion SF Writers’ Workshops and has sold stories to Clarion, New Dimensions, and others. He writes with an original voice, and you’ll be seeing much more from him.

  * * * *

  Under the Generator

  BY JOHN SHIRLEY

  Looking into the eyes of the woman who sat across from him in the crowded cafeteria, he was reminded of the eyes of another woman entirely. Perhaps there were secret mirrors hidden in the faces of the two women. He remembered the other woman, Alice, when she had said: I just can’t continue with you if you insist on keeping that damn job. I’m sorry, Ronnie, but I just can’t. My personal convictions leave no room for those inhuman generators.

  He reflected, looking into the eyes of the second woman, that he could have quit the job for Alice. But he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t actually wanted her. And he had gone easily from Alice to Donna. He resolved not to lose Donna too because of his work with the generators.

  “I used to be an actor,” Denton said. Swirling coffee in his cup, he shifted uncomfortably in the cafeteria seat and wondered if the plastic of the cup would melt slightly into the coffee. . . . Working at the hospital, drinking coffee every morning and noon out of the same white-mold sort of cups, he had visions of the plastic slowly coating the interior of his stomach with white brittle.

  “What happened to acting and how far’d you get?” Donna Farber asked with her characteristic way of cramming as much inquiry as she could into one line.

  Denton frowned, his wide mouth making an elaborate squiggle across his broad, pale face. His expressions were always slightly exaggerated, as if he were an actor not yet used to the part of Ronald Denton.

  “I was working off-Broadway, and I had a good part in a play I wrote myself. An actor can always play the part better if he wrote it. The play was called All Men Are Created Sequels. Tigner produced it.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Naturally it fell flat after I pulled out.”

  “Naturally.” Her silver-flecked blue eyes laughed.

  “Anyway, I felt that acting was stealing too much of my identity. Or something. Actually, I’m not sure just why I quit. Maybe it was really stage fright.”

  His unexpected candor brought her eyes to his. He remembered Alice and wondered how to discover just how Donna felt about his job, if she felt anything at all.

  But the subject was primed by his black uniform. “Why did you quit acting to work in the generators?”

  “I don’t know. It was available and it had good hours. Four hours a day, four days a week, twelve dollars an hour.”

  “Yeah . . . but it must be depressing to work there. I mean, you probably still haven’t been able to give up acting entirely. You have to act like there’s nothing wrong around people who are going to die soon.” There was no indictment in her tone. Her head tilted sympathetically.

  Denton just nodded as if he had found sorrowful virtue in being the scapegoat. “Somebody has to do it,” he said. Actually, he was elated. He had been trying to arouse interest from Donna for a week. He looked at her frankly, admiring her slender hands wrapped around her coffeecup, the soft cone of her lips blowing to cool the coffee, close flaxen hair cut into a bowl behind her ears.

  “I don’t entirely understand,” she said, looking for a divination in her coffee, “why they didn’t get the retired nurses or someone used to death for the job.”

  “For one thing, you need a little electronic background to keep watch on the generators. That’s what got me the job. I studied electronics before I was an actor.”

  “That’s a strange contrast. Electronics and acting.”

  “Not really. Both involve knowledge of circuitry. But anyway, not even experienced nurses are used to sitting there watching people die for four hours at a time. They usually let them alone except when administering—”

  “But I thought you said all you had to do was sit and check the dials every so often. You mean you have to watch?”

  “Well. . . you can’t help it. You si
t right across from the patient. Since you’re there, you look. I’m aware of them, anyhow, because I have to make sure they aren’t dying too fast for the machine to scoop.”

  She was silent, looking around the busy lunchroom as if seeking support from the milling, wooden-faced hospital employees. She seemed to be listening for a tempo in the clashing of dishes and the trapped rumble of conversations.

  Denton was afraid that he had offended her, giving her the impression that he was a vulture. He hoped that she wasn’t looking around for someone else to talk to. . . .

  “I don’t like it in here,” she said, her voice a small life to itself. “I think it’s because in most kitchens you hear the clinking noises of china and glass. Here it’s scraping plastic.” One side of her mouth pulled into an ironic smile.

  “Let’s go outside then,” Denton said, a trifle too eagerly.