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Empire of Time series

= NIGHT SONGS AT UM =

a science fiction short story by John Argo

4.

Menet’s manumission dinner, a tradition for centuries between masters and bondservants, turned out to be more subdued, yet beautiful, than planned. Kery had to get special permission from Clifor, the State Antiquities Master. Kery had hired a chef and two waiters from the official canteen, along with two helpers. He’d also hired five musicians and two more helpers. Finally, he’d invited the five or six young servants who were Menet’s best friends. Clifor had insisted on coming along, partly to see his beloved Um, partly to protect it against any possibly rowdy servant partiers.

They flew to the ruins at Um in three airbuses, lumbering silvery cigar tubes owned by the Terraform Corporation. The jungles around Kalopolis looked dark green in the afternoon sunlight, like velvet, Kery thought proudly. In the distance, in a sea-intoxicated haze, rose the towers of the planet’s new capital. His future home.

Menet sat beside him and squeezed his arm. “It’s so lovely. You’ll be happy there.”

10,000 years ago, Mirabel IV had been inhabited. Very little remained of its inhabitants—only skeletal traces that revealed they did not look much like humans, nor like any known life form—chitinous, wormy, round. It was theorized that they floated about, so Clifor said. He was a small, chubby man with jet black hair and a receding hairline, who always wore black suits and looked worried.

The only known ruin from ancient times was this city of which little was left except the great Basilica, as Clifor had dubbed it, giving his name to a footnote in a history text. The Basilica was part of an enormous sandstone wilderness that rolled in reddish-yellow waves of outcroppings as far as the eye could see. It took Kery’s eyes a while to focus enough to recognize the Basilica even as the airbuses began their descent.

Perfectly oval, the Basilica was made of a kind of concrete that Clifor theorized was made of ground up sandstone mixed with a kind of sticky spittle—like a giant bird’s nest. The ruin was immense, measuring a mile long on the greater leg of the oval, and half a mile wide on the shorter leg. Its ceiling, molded from the same material, had once soared, by Clifor’s estimate, 900 feet up. It might have taken centuries to build. Where the ceiling had fallen, great blocks of sandstone were piled on the ground. Where once had been floors so smooth they gleamed like mirrors—bits of the old floors could still be found in nooks around the walls—now grass grew among the blocks. Birds flew freely in and out of a long series of tall, narrow windows.

The airbuses formed a row and one by one flew down at an angle through one of the windows. The ledges of the window, and its frame, had been shaped into elaborate whorls, which Clifor theorized was writing. But writing of what? Sacred texts? Love manuals? So little was left from the ancients that it was hard to even guess.

The airbuses hovered inches above the highest of the blocks, which made plateaus dozens of feet on a side. The helpers set up a long table. They brought out heaters and coolers containing fine foods and drinks.

Menet glowed quietly, watching the preparations, watching as the helpers set up the band instruments—a harp, a pianello, a violabasso, a flaut, and a set of drums with kachingers and a double brass whapper. The musicians—four men in black tux, and a blonde woman in a black dress—greeted Menet and her master. The men shook their hands. The woman hugged Menet and shook Kery’s hand. Kery wore a dark tuxedo, while Menet wore a tiny black dress that showed off her pale shoulders and slim legs. She looked stunning, Kery thought, proud that she had prospered in his house, happy for her.

“I wanted it to be right,” Kery said awkwardly.

“I’ll always remember this,” she whispered, her eyes blue-gray-green. He could not remember recently seeing her eyes without that hint of green.

Kery, Menet, and her friends went for a walk around the inner wall of the ruin. It was a long hike, and the afternoon was hot. One of the buses floated over to bring canapés and chilled drinks about halfway through their hike, which was over three miles. They were all young, active people, and nobody got extra tired.

There was something timeless about the silence in the great Basilica. Shafts of light beamed down through the windows at regular intervals - Kery lost count of how many windows there were—on each long side, something like a hundred, he estimated. Clifor tagged along, excitedly pointing out every nuance—the hollows, that might have been prayer niches, though no statues of any kind had been found, nor any definitive pictures of the round, floating beings who had built this place. The walls cambered outward for hundreds of feet before curving back inward and then breaking off jaggedly where the ceiling had fallen in—probably while humans still fought with stone implements during the ice ages. The group walked along in a light, fun attitude, but also hushed, reverent, dwarfed by their surroundings.

As dusk fell, they sat down to dinner. Menet sat opposite Kery at the table, as was the custom—not together. Several candles flickered with solemn gaiety in a row along the central part of the table. The table was loaded with plates of this and that, from pates to roast fowl, fruits, nuts, salads, baked goods, everything grown and prepared on Mirabel IV. Menet proposed a toast to her master, praising his achievements. Kery proposed a toast to Menet, thanking her for bringing him happiness. They made up the words but the formula was traditional. Everyone rose and clapped at the end of the speeches.

Then they ate, and the music played.

The airbuses had been floated away, out the windows, to give an unimpeded view of the surroundings. It grew a little chilly, and Menet slipped a dark wrap over her shoulders.

Kery hoped that tonight would be one of the occurrences that Clifor had told him about. It was the enduring mystery of Mirabel IV, one that Clifor believed would make him famous as its discoverer. Few people had witnessed it, in an effort to protect the fragile event. Kery looked at Clifor questioningly several times, and each time the short, dark-haired man would shake his vigorously and say: Not time yet.

The drum tapped softly, the pianello’s hammers rang on its wires, the violabasso scraped out the kind of dark brushstrokes today’s youth seemed to like, the harp sent out clattering handfuls of sounds like icicles falling, and the flaut’s haunting owl sounds drifted like dust motes before the canyon-great walls.

Suddenly, Clifor half rose and held up a hand. The musicians fell still one by one. Last was the flautist. Her notes blended with something else, the barest of sounds, sympathetics, as the wind blew over the window ledges. Like a giant organ, Kery thought. The wind rose and fell, and with it the elephantine whispers that trod the Basilica’s floors. The sounds gave the illusion that the building was shuddering, but Clifor had tested all that and found the building did not move—just the air. The notes were so low and so dark they were barely audible. Kery closed his eyes and listened intently. It was a music at once sad and happy—sad to be gone, happy to have once lived. In the dark swirl of sound, he could make out chords of harmony interspersed with streaks of chaos. It was like painting in dozens of shades of black.

Somebody shrieked.

Kery opened his eyes. There—the Um Effect, as Clifor had dubbed it.

It no longer worked on all the windows, after these millennia, but several dozen here and there still glazed over with a thin film—ice, Clifor had told Kery—that bifurcated into thousands of tiny panes, like stained glass in the ancient Earth cathedrals. The colors moved about, telling a story, but of what? It would take scientists generations to unearth the Rosetta Stone that would help them decipher the writings and arts of Um.

Kery reached across the table and took Menet’s hand. They squeezed hands, watching the phenomenon. After about a half hour, the colors began to fade. Then there were only echoes chasing echoes, barely audible. Then there was silence.

Time to pack up. Menet gave Kery’s hands a squeeze and let go. “Thanks.”

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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.