by S. A. Barton
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“Jacinta, why do you spend so much time listening to Neyerneyemeet?” her father asked when she came home at noon, still rubbing sleep from her eyes. As he spoke, his fingers moved among the twisted fibers that spread over the grass in front of his crossed legs, as if they had life independent of him. From their movements, centimeter by centimeter, emerged a fishing net. His eyes were on Jacinta and hers on him; the net took shape unseen as they spoke.
“Her music says something to me,” Jacinta said, “but I don't know what. Sometimes it sounds old, sometimes it sounds new. Sometimes it sounds like something natural and sometimes it sounds out of place, like an alien thing come to visit Earth. I don't understand how it all comes from Neyerneyemeet, but it does. I think. I haven't seen her yet.”
“Yet, little one?” he asked. Jacinta sighed. When she had been smaller, she had liked to be called 'little one'. But now that she was growing taller, almost to Father's shoulder now, she liked it less. She wondered if she would still be 'little one' when she was old enough to marry.
“I'm going to see her one day. I'm going to see her make her music,” she said. She frowned at his chuckle.
“She's not so much of a mystery as that, Jacinta,” he said. “She only likes to keep to herself. Sometimes she even joins the rest of us. When I was younger, a little before I married your mother, I saw her at a smoking ceremony. She danced in the smoke with the rest of us, and she played a round chime she held in one hand, as big as your head, with bars of all different metals hanging from it like tentacles from a jellyfish. She held it steady as she danced through the eucalyptus smoke, like the chime was what she danced around and not the fire. Her fingers plucked at it... well. It was beautiful. The music, and the chime, and her dancing.” For a moment, his eyes were far away. Jacinta spoke and brought him back.
“Did she say anything?”
“Oh, no,” he said, chuckling again. “If she had you'd have heard about it by now, that's sure. Neyerneyemeet hasn't talked since the Last War, I think.”
“Why not?”
“Why would you ask me, Jacinta? She certainly hasn't told me.”
“Why is she so old? Everyone dies. Everyone but her.”
“She hasn't told me that, either.”
Jacinta growled at her father, half play and half frustration. His hand left the fishing net long enough to ruffle her hair, and she ran outside to wander. Without her meaning to, her feet took her back to the top of the landfill, to the old hole that music wafted from most days. She sat down under the eucalyptus, right where she had fallen asleep the night before. Crosslegged, she rested her hands in her lap and closed her eyes. She let her mind fall still, letting the music move through her like a dream. Today it was thin and whining, rising and falling and twisting raucously. It was low and hard to hear, and it sounded like music that was begging to be played loud, loud enough to shake in your bones. It felt like longing and anger and the blunted joy that comes with happiness filtered through longing and anger. It was like nothing Jacinta had ever heard before.
She stood up. She was thirteen, almost a woman, in only three years old enough to marry if she chose. If someone chose her back. She was old enough to explore. She walked to the edge of the pit, stepped one foot onto the weathered stairs cut into the edges of the pit, deep enough that if you stacked it full it would take a dozen families' huts to fill it.
She paused, one foot on the smooth-edged stone step, looking down into the bottom where five open mineshafts beckoned, spaced almost but not quite evenly around the lopsided circle the bottom of the pit made.
Almost even. Almost a circle. Almost, she could tell which shaft the music came up from. Full of almosts, just like the rest of life. The music was coming from one of the three on that side. Unless it was one of the two on the other. She stepped down, slow, each step down distinct with a separate pause. She listened as she descended, trying to place the music in one of the shafts. This one? That one in front? The other, to the left? Each step down changed her perspective, changed the paths that the echoes took to reach her ear, changed the place her mind thought must be the source of the thin metal twang and growl that drove at her with a beat that throbbed like a heart in the middle of the smoking ceremony, in the dance, in the scent of burning green things, purifying, purified, wild, leaping, transported. Throbbing.
Her heart thundered in her chest as she reached the bottom of the pit and walked to the center. There, that shaft, the low one with the timber frame that bent down in the middle, cracked. She walked to it, and the music shifted again. This time, instead of pausing, she kept walking forward until she stood inside the dark shaft. The music wasn't in this one. She turned around and walked back out into the sun, turned to go to the next shaft. She'd walk around the edge, listening at each portal until she found the one.
Is this really wise? Is this a good thing to do? Her mind insisted on asking her again as she walked. She refused to stop and consider; she had already done that on many nights under the eucalyptus tree, and at the top of the stairs. She put the thoughts aside again and again as you would a bothersome cat, gently but firmly. The music wasn't in the next shaft either, or the next.
In the fourth, when she stepped inside the entry, this one's timbers firm and solidly rectangular, the black old wood impregnated with the dirt and oils from thousands of miners' hands, the music swelled.
She had come too far to pause and reflect now. The doubts were gone, the bothersome cat-thought gone away. And yet it came back quickly as she walked; the dark deepened swiftly as she began to walk down the shaft, into the landfill. In only a dozen paces she was nearly blind. She stopped, closing her eyes, listening to the music gathering around her. She could almost hear the walls. Experimentally, she stepped a little to one side, reached an arm out. The wall was where she thought it was. There was no picture in her mind, only a feeling like intuition, but softer and somehow more certain. Her ears told her where the walls were even if she didn't quite know how. She knew somewhere deeper in her mind than her thoughts.
Keeping her eyes closed, she began to move forward into the dark. No matter what it was that allowed her to place the walls by the music rebounding from them, she still knew caution. Caution was grown-up, and so was she. She pushed her feet forward, one then the other, feeling along the floor. She felt the ups and downs, the bumps and cracks, in the matted soil and flat-trodden trash of the people from before the War. Sliding her feet, keeping her body leaning backward so that if her foot went over a drop she might be able to keep herself from falling, she crept deeper. She found herself waiting before sliding each foot, making each slide as long or as short as fit the music, adding to the song with the sounds of her progress.
Her foot reached a big bump. She lifted her foot, callused toes feeling along the rough surface, seeking the top. It kept going up. A step? She stopped with her foot almost to knee height, put her foot back down, reached her hand out. A wall. She opened her eyes and looked right and left. To the left, there was a faint light showing, just a smudge in her vision with no real direction, faint and soft. It was—it was hard to tell, in the dark where she couldn't even see the walls. Ten meters, thirty? Eyes open now and fixed on the glow, she walked with her right hand dragging the wall's bumpy surface. The floor was still invisible so she kept the same foot-dragging gait as she went. The glow grew stronger; after thirty paces she could guess it came from a passageway leading off to the right, after sixty she could tell that it was filtered through a thick blanket, and that she was only twenty or so paces distant, perhaps ten meters.
She stood before the beige blanket; it was homespun with light leaking around the edges and out from under the bottom where it ended a centimeter above the hard-packed floor. The music leaked out too and she noticed it again, wondering when she had stopped hearing it and it had become another feature of the environment, in the background, inaudible. She w
as sure it hadn't stopped as she had been walking through the dark; she'd have noticed the silence. She had simply been moving through it as a fish moves through water, without realization. She reached out and moved the blanket to one side. The light hurt her eyes and she blinked rapidly. Somehow, she had expected the music to do the same, to deafen her with a sudden increase, but it did not, it stayed exactly the same. But through her blinks she could see it being made.
Neyerneyemeet was small and black, black as the richest soil by the riverside where The One People planted rice, black as the night without the moon, and the whites of her eyes glinted like stars from her face, which was downturned as she watched her own seamed dark hands plucking out the notes in the flickering light of a menagerie of oil lamps resting in notches along the walls of the broad chamber behind the blanket. The instrument she plucked was outlandish, strange, a thing of ancient technology from before the Last World War, a thing of factories and not of today's careful handmaking. The One People still made things like this, but sparingly, computers and electronic tools and solar skins and even satellites and spaceships. But handcrafters made them one at a time and the things they made looked like handmade things. This thing was shiny plastic, smooth, machine-stamped when it didn't need to be, reflecting the flickers of lamplight, garish apple red at its broad body that covered Neyerneyemeet's lap, and angular, a jutting triangle with a long black neck against which metal strings lay glossy like brass. A black cord joined it to a box, and from the box wailed the strange music.
Neyerneyemeet looked up at her, white eyes blazing in the deep black face, with centers like holes in the night. Their eyes met. Neyerneyemeet kept playing, a finger adjusting a dial on the red face of the instrument: the music grew quieter and wailed still, but more softly. Jacinta opened her mouth to speak but found all of the questions she had, had fled. She closed her mouth and sat down on the cold roughness of the floor, not noticing the chill, lost in listening.
The music paused for a short space, a handful of seconds, not more than a minute. And then it began again, quiet, high, irregular, softly crying. Jacinta closed her eyes and let the crying move through her. She could hear the baby in the music. The music grew, slow at first, then faster, faster, swelling, questing. It grew sure and bold and brash and Jacinta could hear something like herself in it, exploring and questioning behind its surety. It grew still more sure, regular, softening around the edges, less brash, more predictable. And then suddenly it swelled and burst into a wild fragmented breakbeat shriek, echoing off the walls and multiplying into uncountable threads and undertones, all clashing, wounded, screaming in agonized minor keys. The shrieking, the screaming, went on and on until Jacinta thought her ears would bleed and her head could take no more, overwhelmed. And then one of the fragments emerged from the chaos, limping, wounded, a stark single tune, simple, stripped, naked, wandering, lost.
Jacinta reeled, feeling her body shake as she sat crosslegged. The music had brought the dry history of the Last World War to life in her mind, the human pain, the billions dead, the suffering four hundred years old that had wasted the old civilizations of Europe and Asia and the Americas and Africa with nuclear missiles and bloody plagues and poison gasses and hails of bullets. The wars that had left only the people of Australia, and bloodied and wounded even those, everywhere but in one place. But Australia had emerged from the war, here at old Melbourne, made Wurrengourne by the becoming one of the Two Old Peoples, and Jacinta leaned forward, understanding, ready to hear.
But the red instrument in Neyerneyemeet's hands fell silent as she laid one dark hand gently flat across the brassy strings, stilling them. They watched each other in the lamplight for long minutes, both still. As they waited, Jacinta realized she was listening to another sound, one that emerged as her ears adjusted to the end of the music and grew sensitive in the quiet. The new sound was breathing; before she had realized she was hearing it, she had heard it, and her breathing had changed to match Neyerneyemeet's, and they breathed as one in the cool rock-dust smell of the cave Jacinta's ancestors had carved with pick and shovel.
“Is there more?” Jacinta finally asked in a tiny whisper.
Neyerneyemeet stood, her frame heavy and short like her limbs, and walked to Jacinta's side. She laid one hand light on Jacinta's shoulder, gave one slow, slight nod, then went back to her blanket. Jacinta stood and left the cave, much more surely than she had entered. It wasn't until she was outside that she wondered how she had known that Neyerneyemeet meant she would play more another day rather than right away.
