Asimov's SF, July 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And they did come when the dolphins called. Whales, a great river of whales rising majestically from the deeps, a parade, a promenade of whales, such as the oceans had not and could not ever really see. Gray whales. Sperm whales. Right whales. Cachelots and baleens. Species who had never swum together. The whales of the world. And among them the blue whales, the greatest creatures Planet Earth had ever spawned, the grandfather and grandmother monarchs of the seven seas. Of the world entire, as far as the dolphins were clearly telling her.

  For one thing was quite clear.

  This could not possibly be reportage. This could only be art.

  And as if to drive it home, the transmission began to throb, to oscillate at a very slow and very long rhythm, like a slow-motion tsunami circling the globe, like a majestic sine wave a thousand miles from end to end arising from the deeps.

  And then the whales were riding it like surfers far beneath the surface of the sea, indeed not far above the sea bottom itself. And then it seemed that the whales themselves were transmitting, in unison, in chorus. Whether this dark and curved landscape was the bottom of the seas as perceived by the whales, or their sonic vision thereof as received and retransmitted, or the artistic interpretation of their songs by the dolphins, was impossible to tell.

  The abyssal landscape itself throbbed in locked harmony with the slow majestic beat of the oscillating transmission carrying it. Whales, dolphins, schools and shoals of fish, swam along it, above it, far above it, a long subtle sine wave tide of life, rising and falling almost imperceptibly. And then an image of this flow of the oscillating aquatic biosphere reduced to tiny abstraction as it circled the rocky globe of the Earth that lay beneath the sea.

  They knew! Somehow the whales, and the dolphins through them, knew that the world was a sphere. That much was stunningly clear. That much humans also knew. But it also seemed clear to Caroline Koch that these cetacean intelligences, these cetacean spirits, were trying to tell her something that humans did not know. And what it was she could not understand. And wondered if humans ever could.

  * * * *

  Mario Roca decided that there was nothing for it but to go public. Maybe there could be a series of foundation grants. Maybe the military would see some unpleasant use for the system needed to play The Music of Silence. Maybe some studio would see a movie in it. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  So he made the rounds of the talk show circuit. He already had some access as a fairly well-known composer and musician, and he could play The Music of Silence transposed up into middle C. And once the story behind it made the supermarket press beside Hollywood scandals and two-headed pigs, he had ready access to one or two levels below the top.

  It was about ten minutes or so before the next guest got to spiel.

  And this time the next guest was the famous marine biologist Caroline Koch. He had heard of Koch and her breakthrough with the dolphins. Who hadn't, if vaguely? It was a cause celebre, if truth be told, a couple of levels above his own. He watched the footage she had brought with her diffidently, in fact not without a certain picquish envy.

  Until she ran the whale song sequence and he found himself tapping his forefinger in time to the oscillation of the video images as he beheld the slow sine wave of the parade of aquatic life.

  It was a rapid rhythm of about eight beats per second, but the movement of the whales was a slow sinuosity—

  His mouth actually gaped open.

  “And what is this that the whales are saying to us according to you, Dr. Koch?” the interviewer demanded somewhat snidely.

  “To tell you the truth,” Koch replied in squirming discomfort, “I really have no idea.”

  But Mario Roca did. He knew.

  Eight beats per second. Or rather, he knew, without measuring it against a metronome, 8.15.

  The whales weren't moving to the rhythm.

  Not 8.15 beats a second, 8.15 Hertz per second.

  It was a musical note.

  It was a pitch-perfect C.

  Five octaves down from middle C.

  * * * *

  Caroline Koch had known of Mario Roca, in fact rather liked his music, but psychically preparing herself to go on after him she hadn't paid much attention to his “Music of Silence” presentation, though she had vaguely heard of it. She was bemused and somewhat flattered when he insisted on buying her a drink after the show.

  When she found out why she was poleaxed.

  “It's music,” he told her. “The rhythm of the image oscillations is 8.15 beats per second, which makes no sense if you take it as a bass-line, but 8.15 vibrations per second is a C-note, five octaves down from middle-C.”

  “Like The Music of Silence . . .”

  “Exactly. There's something about the key of C that's harmonic to the . . . well, soul, if you will. I don't know what, but I know it's true, and so do you, and so does everyone on a deep level, and so, it would seem, do your whales.”

  “They're not my whales, they're the dolphins' whales, and it's not whale song, it's the dolphin version.”

  It was Mario Roca's turn to give her a blank quizzical stare.

  “I checked it against the whale song sound-print parameters. Not whale pattern, dolphin pattern. Not whale song, dolphin art.”

  “I don't understand . . . “

  “I'm not sure I do. But I think the dolphins are saying something about the whales, and it seems, well, worshipful, to a human at least, but of course that's hopelessly anthropomorphic. Or something about the whale . . . soul . . . or how they regard themselves . . . or . . .”

  Caroline Koch shrugged her shoulders in frustration.

  “So why don't we sing directly to the whales and let them sing their song to us themselves?” said Mario Roca.

  * * * *

  Mario Roca considered himself a “serious” musician, but he wouldn't have thrived as such so well for so long without also being a showman; nor was he very shy or self-contemptuous about it, as witness his current and thus far futile talk show campaign to secure financing for a performance of The Music of Silence.

  And now this woman, and her dolphins and whales, had dropped it into his lap.

  “There's some kind of whale migration along the coast of California, isn't there?” he said. “And humans have a thing about whales . . .”

  A blank uncomprehending stare.

  “There's my audience!” he proclaimed.

  “The gray whales? You can't get the financing to play The Music of Silence to a paying human audience but you expect to get it to play a concert to whales?”

  “They're bankable!” Mario Roca exclaimed.

  Caroline Koch gave him a look that would've told anyone that she thought they were crazy.

  Like a fox.

  “We set up grandstands in good position on the California coast, with conventional stadium speakers and video screens, with your gear to do the receiving, and the necessary underwater speakers to transmit The Music of Silence to the whales. The humans hear what I'm playing in middle C and see the whale transmissions through your equipment on the screens, and I play it for the whales five octaves down. Admission to the live performance at top dollar! Worldwide live broadcast rights! Recording rights! Ring-tones! Depending on what happens, I'll jam beyond the fixed composition with the whales and get enough for DVDs!”

  * * * *

  “The cliffs above Malibu would be ideal,” Mario Roca told Caroline Koch. “Or San Francisco Bay?”

  “You don't get it,” she told him.

  “Don't get what?”

  “The gray whales don't travel in great parades. That's delphine artistic license. They're separated from each other by miles. Whale-watchers consider themselves lucky if they see half a dozen in a day.”

  Mario Roca gave her a look so unlike any she had ever seen on a human face that she didn't know what to call it—a true magician's divine madness, perhaps, or hubric madness pure and simple.

  “Then I'll just have to call them together.”

 
“You expect to . . . to just call the whales to you?”

  “Yes I do,” said Mario Roca. “The Music of Silence will call their spirit from the vasty deep. And yes, they will come when I call.”

  * * * *

  The temporary seats atop the Malibu cliff were filled, the standing room on the beach was sold out, worldwide television rights were pre-sold, along with the DVD and download rights, and various tie-ins already had the concert maybe $50 million away from breaking even. The huge underwater speakers were in place, the landside audio system had completed its sound check, the landside video screens were showing the station-break commercials, and Koch's equipment had long since completed its trials. She sat beside him behind it on the pontoon raft offshore, and Mario Roca flexed his fingers over the keyboard of his own rig, ready to begin what would be either the crowning glory of his career or a titanic career-ending financial flop.

  All the ducks were lined up, whatever that was supposed to mean, except the whales.

  The gray whale migration was well under way out there, and the leviathans had been spotted swimming southward in their usual widely dispersed pattern. Mario Roca had grandly assured Koch and all the investors that they would come when he called with the Shakespearean line, which seemed to have assured everyone but himself.

  “Showtime,” he muttered to himself, and hit the keys with a mighty deep subsonic C major chord.

  * * * *

  While Mario Roca was lining up his lion's share of the financing, Caroline Koch had been doing her bit, securing her modest share with assorted grants from universities and scientific foundations in return for “front row seats,” which had turned out to be virtual when Roca refused to let anyone but the two of them out here on the raft, and the right to put their real-time questions to the whales, always assuming that she and Roca would be able to put them.

  Assuming that the whales would cooperate, cetacean biologists and people who called themselves “cetacean sociologists” wanted to know how whales could possibly know that the Earth was a sphere. Biophysicists wanted to know why the whales broadcast an 8.15 carrier wave, a.k.a a note precisely five octaves down from middle C. Specialists in cetacean migrations wanted to confirm their theory that it was somehow orienting them, a whale equivalent of a Global Positioning Satellite, active or somehow passive being a shrill bone of contention. Less academically credible pseudo-scientists would also be allowed to put their twenty million cents in if they laid their money down.

  And now it was all out of her hands.

  It was up to Mario Roca, his music, and the whales.

  * * * *

  Mario Roca and Caroline Koch had monitors showing what appeared on the landside stadium screens behind them and earphones that could be tuned to what the live and television audiences were hearing. Mario Roca was hardly surprised that the audience was not exactly enraptured by an empty ocean and a steady C chord, and could well imagine that demanding rhythmic clapping and foot stomping might be going on way back there over his shoulder.

  But there was no point in beginning The Music of Silence without the whales.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, a C-note in the same deep subsonic answered back. Mario Roca dropped the C out of his chord. A few moments later, without his touching the keys, it was back.

  The as yet unseen whales were filling it in. They were playing in harmony with him! It was beginning to work! And one, and two, and three, and then in dozens, whales were turning shoreward toward him, breaking their millennial migration pattern, as cheers broke out from the audience on the cliffs.

  Mario dropped the E from his C major chord. Nothing. The G. Again the whales failed to fill in.

  Whales, it seemed, were Johnny One-Notes, and that note was middle C.

  They were forming up into a thickening parade past his position now, like an audience filing into a concert hall, which it seemed they were actually becoming, as they stopped and formed up into ranks facing inward in parabolic circles.

  Time to give them what they had come to hear. Or at least what he had come to play.

  Mario Roca played the opening bar of The Music of Silence . . .

  * * * *

  Caroline Koch marveled in disbelieving wonder, listening in rapture at the middle-C transposition of what Mario Roca was playing five octaves down to the whales. This she had heard many times before, and while it was pleasant enough to her human ears, it had seemed classically conventional with a few twists, no work of transcendent musical genius. But now, with what seemed like hundreds of gray whales floating motionless in apparently equal or even deeper rapture, it was utter magic even to a scientist who had dedicated her life to the study of the cetaceans, who was surely already up for a Nobel for what she had accomplished.

  What she had done joyously paled beside what Mario Roca was achieving now. And indeed a snatch of song from somewhere played back from deep memory said it all for her.

  All my life, I have always waited for this moment to arrive.

  * * * *

  Mario Roca played The Music of Silence through to the end. And waited for the whales to reply. And after a few endless moments of true silence above the sea and below it in all octaves, they did.

  A subsonic C far louder than anything the human underwater speakers could produce, a cetacean orchestra and full chorus in parabolic formation forming a far more immense virtual speaker and singing that singular inaudible note so powerfully that the surface of the sea between it and the shore rippled with wavelets moving at 8.15 Hertz.

  In human musical terms, it was nothing but a single huge note five octaves down from middle C. Transposed upward into human audible range it was only a pleasant enough mantric drone.

  But through the machineries of Caroline Koch it was revealed as a kind of carrier wave for the true song of the whales as the whales and dolphins perceived it themselves, and that was epic grandeur.

  The waters of an empty sea a few feet down, and then a descent down, down, down, into the deeps, into the abyssal deeps, to the very floor of the ocean pulsing like a human heart.

  No, not like the rhythm of a human heart, but the rise and fall of the long sinuous sine wave produced by an Ur-C note uncountable fathoms and five octaves down at the bottom of the sea.

  And then there were whales surfing this deep carrier wave in majestic slow motion, gently up and down, the wave made visible only by the movement of the cetacean riders. And then there were impossible shoals and schools of whales in all their tribal diversity—gray whales, right whales, sperm whales, baleins and cachelots—riding the C note wave together, the perspective pulling back, back, back, so that they became tiny figures like blood cells circulating round and about a webwork of veins and arteries. Back, further back still, and the whales themselves dwindled away into invisibility as the webwork of the deep C revealed itself as mapping a slowly rotating globe.

  As the sonic circulatory system of the planet itself, as the guide-paths of cetacean migrations, as the ultimate bass line of their songs, not The Music of Silence but The Music of the Sphere, of Planet Earth itself.

  The primal C.

  How could the planet itself produce it?

  Mario didn't know very much geology, but he knew enough. He knew that the continents and seabeds were solid rock floating on a molten sea, and far beneath that was a globe of iron, and all of it in seething and bubbling motion, grinding, rubbing, clanging and banging against each other at wildly varying beats, producing waves and clashing wave-fronts, sonic, electromagnetic, perhaps even gravitational.

  How could this chaos produce a perfect harmonic C?

  The scientists would probably argue about it until they were blue in the face, but Mario Roca understood in a flash, for the answer to this ultimate question was the same as the culmination of his ultimate musical vision quest.

  It took a musician to understand that the question itself was inside out and upside down.

  The true question was not how could such apparent discord
produce a perfect harmonic C, and the musical answer was that it didn't.

  The note that it produced was perceived by humans as the note that most harmonized with their spirit, was the core around which their many musical scales were usually based, was the musical highway of the migrations of the whales and the dolphins of the sea and for all Mario Roca knew of the birds of the air, the vibration that soothed and guided the soul of the biosphere itself, because it was the song of the planet.

  If there was a biosphere on Mars, it might resonate to E or B flat. Jupiter might be G or F, Venus D sharp, Saturn A.

  The whale song stopped. What else, after all, was there to say?

  The whales remained silent and motionless waiting for a reply.

  What could that possibly be, save we understand?

  Mario Roca prided himself as a musician on the edge of greatness, and now he had learned something that would have graced his brow with the laurel of a Nobel Prize for Music if such a thing existed, and who knows? It might yet be created to justly honor him.

  But there was a limit to his hubris. He knew that he was not capable of improvising a musical reply worthy of this occasion. So he played a piece by a composer whom he could easily enough acknowledge as his master.

  And the whales dissolved their unnatural gathering and swam back off to their millennial and primal dance about the planet to Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

  Transposed to The Music of the Sphere, five octaves down in the deep key of C.

  Copyright © 2011 Norman Spinrad

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  * * *

  Short Story: BRING ON THE RAIN

  by Josh Roseman

  Josh Roseman (not the trombonist) lives in Georgia (not the country). In addition to Asimov's, his fiction has appeared in Big Pulp and Fusion Fragment, as well as in podcast form on Drabblecast and Dunesteef. Josh also blogs for Escape Pod, and has narrated stories for StarshipSofa. To find out what he's doing right now, visit his website, roseplusman.com, or find him on Twitter @listener42. The author's first story for us takes a brittle look at the consequences of a very long term draught and what they mean for competing groups of people when the heavens finally . . .