Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  So, like the cranky child I am, as most of us can be from time to time, I get my way…or I don’t sell the story to that buyer. Which means I seldom write to order. I do a story with what Flaubert called “clean hands and composure” and then send it out to market. For the most exorbitant rate I can bleed out of a magazine or television network.

  But Terry Carr is a friend of mine, and when he asked me for a story for an upcoming anthology, I amused myself by playing a little game. “What kind of story do you want, Terry?” I said over the long-distance phone.

  “Whatever you want to write,” he replied.

  “No, I’m serious,” I said. “Let me give you your heart’s desire. Tell me what kind of story you like to read, and I’ll do that thing.”

  So Terry expressed a delight at Jack Vance-style stories in which many and variegated aliens appear, in a strange and alien setting, and with a happy ending, which he said I don’t often have in my work. He also said it should be the longest title I’d ever written (in a career that has featured some real doozies), because “long titles are in this year.”

  So I wrote down the title “Out Near the Funicular Center of the Universe the Wine Has Been Left Open Too long and the Memory Has Gone Flat,” which was twenty-two words, beating my next closest by seven entire words. (The title was later shortened at Terry’s request to what now appears; I do not think this has anything to do with Mr. Carr and cowardice. However, when the manuscript arrived in Oakland, Mr. Carr’s place of residence, the horrified gulp of disbelief registered a full 6.8 on the Richter Scale.)

  Serves him right for making me work my weary old brain to figure out a happy ending for a story about the heat death of the universe. Next time he’ll ask me for a soft pink-and-white bunny-rabbit story.

  The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat

  “Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.”

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  “Taking advantage of what he had heard with one limited pair of ears, in a single and isolated moment of recorded history, in the course of an infinitesimal fraction of conceivable time (which some say is the only time), he came to believe firmly that there was much that he could not hear, much that was constantly being spoken and indeed sung to teach him things he could never otherwise grasp, which if grasped would complete the fragmentary nature of his consciousness until it was whole at last–one tone both pure and entire floating in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence.”

  W. S. MERWIN, “The Chart”

  Ennui was the reason only one hundred and one thousand alien representatives came to the Sonority Gathering. One hundred and one thousand out of six hundred and eleven thousand possible delegates, one each from the inhabited worlds of the stellar community. Even so, counterbalancing the poor turnout was the essential fact that it had been ennui, in the first place, that had caused the Gathering to be organized. Ennui, utter boredom, oppressive worlds-weariness, deep heaving sighs, abstracted vacant stares, familiar thoughts and familiar views.

  The dance of entropy was nearing its end.

  The orchestration of the universe sounded thick and gravelly, a tune slowing down inexorably, being played at the wrong speed.

  Chasm ruts had been worn in the dance floor.

  The oscillating universe was fifty billion years old, and it was tired.

  And the intelligent races of six hundred and eleven thousand worlds sought mere moments of amusement, pale beads of pastel hues strung on a dreary Möebius strip of dragging time. Mere moments, each one dearer than the last, for there were so few. Everything that could be done, had been done; every effort was ultimately the fuzzed echo of an earlier attempt.

  Even the Sonority Gathering had been foreshadowed by the Vulpeculan Quadrivium in ’08, the tonal festival hosted by the Saturniidae of Whoung in ’76, and the abortive, ludicrous Rigellian Sodality “musical get-together” that had turned out to be merely another fraudulent attempt to purvey the artist Merle’s skiagrams to an already disenchanted audience.

  Nonetheless (in a phrase exhumed and popularized by the Recidivists of Fornax 993-λ), it was “the only game in town.” And so, when the esteemed and shimmering DeilBo devised the Gathering, his reputation as an innovator and the crush of ennui combined to stir excitement of a sluggish sort…and one hundred and one thousand delegates came. To Vindemiatrix Σ in what had long ago been called, in the time of the heliocentric arrogance, the “constellation” of Virgo.

  With the reddish-yellow eye of the giant Arcturus forever lighting the azure skies, forever vying with Spica’s first magnitude brilliance, Σ’s deserts and canyons seemed poor enough stage setting for the lesser glow of Vindemiatrix, forever taking third place in prominence to its brawny elders. But Σ, devoid of intelligent life, a patchwork-colored world arid and crumbling, had one thing to recommend it that DeilBo found compelling: the finest acoustics of any world in the universe.

  The Malestrom Labyrinth. Remnant of volcanic upheavals and the retreat of oceans and the slow dripping of acid waters, Σ boasted a grand canyon of stalagmites that rose one hundred and sixty kilometers; stalactites that narrowed into spear-tip pendants plunging down over ninety kilometers into bottom-less crevasses; caverns and arroyos and tunnels that had never been plotted; the arching, golden stone walls had never been seen by the eyes of intelligent creatures; the Ephemeris called it the Maelstrom Labyrinth. No matter where one stood in the sixteen-hundred-kilometer sprawl of the Labyrinth, one could speak with a perfectly normal tone, never even raise one’s voice, and be assured that a listener crouching deep in a cave at the farthest point of the formation could hear what was said as if the speaker were right beside him. DeilBo selected the Maelstrom Labyrinth as the site for the Gathering.

  And so they came. One hundred and one thousand alien life-forms. From what the primitives had once called the constellations of Indus and Pavo, from Sad al Bari in Pegasus, from Mizar and Phecda, from all the worlds of the stellar community they came, bearing with them the special sounds they hoped would be judged the most extraordinary, the most stirring, the most memorable: ultimate sounds. They came, because they were bored and there was nowhere else to go; they came, because they wanted to hear what they had never heard before. They came; and they heard.

  “…he domesticated the elephant, the cat, the bear, the rat, and kept all the remaining whales in dark stalls, trying to hear through their ears the note made by the rocking of the axle of the earth.”

  W. S. Merwin, “The Chart”

  If she had one fear in this endless life, it was that she would be forced to be born again. Yes, of course, life was sacred, but how long, how ceaselessly, repetitiously long did it have to go on? Why were such terrible stigmas visited on the relatives and descendants of those who simply, merely, only wished to know the sweet sleep?

  Stileen had tried to remember her exact age just a few solstices ago. Periodically she tried to remember; and only when she recognized that it was becoming obsessive did she put it out of her mind. She was very old, even by the standards of immortality of her race. And all she truly hungered to know, after all those times and stars, was the sweet sleep.

  A sleep denied her by custom and taboo.

  She sought to busy herself with diversions.

  She had devised the system of gravity pulse-manipulation that had kept the dense, tiny worlds of the Neer 322 system from falling into their Primary. She had compiled the exhaustive concordance of extinct emotions of all the dead races that had ever existed in the stellar community. She had assumed control of the Red Line Armies in the perpetual Procyon War for over one hundred solstices, and had amassed more confirmed tallies than any other commander-in-chief in the War’s long history.

  Her insatiable curiosity and her race’s longevity had combined to provide the necessary state of mind that would lead her, inevitably, to the soun
d. And having found it, and having perceived what it was, and being profoundly ready to enjoy the sweet sleep, she had come to the Gathering to share it with the rest of the stellar community.

  For the first time in millennia, Stileen was not seeking merely to amuse herself; she was engaged on a mission of significance…and finality.

  With her sound, she came to the Gathering.

  She was ancient, deep yellow, in her jar with cornsilk hair floating free in the azure solution. DeilBo’s butlers took her to her assigned place in the Labyrinth, set her down on a limestone ledge in a deep cavern where the acoustics were particularly rich and true, tended to her modest needs, and left her.

  Stileen had time, then, to dwell on the diminished enthusiasm she had for continued life.

  DeilBo made the opening remarks, heard precisely and clearly throughout the Maelstrom. He used no known language, in fact used no words. Sounds, mere sounds that keynoted the Gathering by imparting his feelings of warmth and camaraderie to the delegates. In every trench and run and wash and cavern of the Maelstrom, the delegates heard, and in their special ways smiled with pleasure, even those without mouths or the ability to smile.

  It was to be, truly, a Sonority Gathering, in which sounds alone would be judged. Impressed, the delegates murmured their pleasure.

  Then DeilBo offered to present the first sound for their consideration. He took the responsibility of placing himself first, as a gesture of friendship, an icebreaker of a move. Again, the delegates were pleased at the show of hospitality, and urged DeilBo to exhibit his special sound.

  And this is the sound, the ultimate sound, the very special sound he had trapped for them:

  On the eleventh moon of the world called Chill by its inhabitants, there is a flower whose roots are sunk deep, deep into the water pools that lie far beneath the black stone surface. This flower, without a name, seems to be an intricate construct of spiderwebs. There are, of course, no spiders on the eleventh moon of Chill.

  Periodically, for no reason anyone has ever been able to discern, the spiderweb flowers burst into flame, and very slowly destroy themselves, charring and shriveling and turning to ashes that lie where they fall. There is no wind on the eleventh moon of Chill.

  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 that 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 Joumelli 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…something with its face hidden…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; th
ey 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 living vertebrates; there was a wail of loss at that moment, as their chromosomes begged for return to the warm, salty sea. The delegate from Algol C XXIII 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.