Night Songs at Um

by John T. Cullen

  She looked dead serious, almost drained, today. Her youthful skin had a light tan the color of forest honey. Her hair was like corn silk, fine, hanging straight like braiding and cut straight around at the neck. Her features were plain and fresh and healthy, with pink cheeks and high, wide cheekbones. Her almond-shaped eyes tended to be blue when she was happy and gray when she was angry. Rarely was she sad, and that was a light gray-green like a cold sea. He'd only begun to notice that in her recently, as the time of her freedom arrived.

  In law, they were master and bonded servant. Terraforming was no place to take a wife and family, so said society. Better to take a plaything and wait for later to get serious with someone real.

  Aside from the genetic Hoyer drips at the gyne clinic, her parents had conceived and borne her for the express purpose of living as a contract genefym in bond to a wealthy man who hopefully would treat her decently, perhaps even awarding her a stipend of retirement when her term was up. Most genefyms (or bondboys, for those who swung that way) were released after ten years to settle in backworlds where they could forget their past and where their lowly gene status caused only a shrug.

  Pontin intended to arrange for a place to be found where Menet could thrive. He wanted her to have comfort, with a small stipend, so she'd have the chance to meet a man and make her life with him. This, despite her limitations, since she'd been engineered not to have the female reproductive cycle and could never have children, which had left her small-breasted. She could outrun Pontin, outswim him, and generally outwrestle him when she started her mischief—and she was pretty imaginative in bed. And easy to please. And difficult to hurt, not that he'd made any effort to, but he was a brusque, clumsy man, not very well spoken, and he seemed never to know the right thing to say, or the moment for saying it. Even with her monoflow hormone cycle, being an artist, she could sometimes dissolve in tears and fly from a room, to lock herself in her room and paint with her watercolors for an hour or two, to nap exhaustedly, and then to emerge yawning and tousled—looking first for him, to get a hug. She would make someone a decent wife, he thought. Genefyms could adopt, could even be hormonized to lactate, so there was hope for men of lesser social stratum to take a woman like her and leave offspring.

  * * * *

  Pontin had done it all. He had been an Engineer III on a previous assignment, lovely big snow world several nebular clusters away in this arm of the galaxy, and there, being younger and brasher, he'd had three bondwomen. The three genefyms had fought constantly with each other, and then they'd turn on him all together, and he'd been forced to go to a Learned Counsel and do a swap which had left him one of the witches—he was as much under contract as she, though he had all the advantages—and finally he'd rid himself of that one in a swap for Menet Flaun (with all that Hoyer legal beagledom harping from the courtroom galleries).

  Why are my thoughts today so much about her? he wondered. Why, when I should be looking forward to my engagement with someone like ... and he thought for example of Mardal Hunter of Merovix-Hunter 5 in the Sea of Shells, 4th Arm (pictures sent to him, excellent, nice looking young woman, glowing and promising young debutante and perfect realfym for a great man just maturing and effectively owner of his own blossoming planet).

  He sipped the hot, bittersweet kava tea as he wandered up and down before the window. What was it? He'd always known he must let go of Menet. She'd known it all along too. It was how things worked. What had she, sunny woman, said once? She'd told him one night in bed, after they'd had sex, and she was stroking his hair: “That's part of my job, is to make you civilized. Just like you take these planets and turn them from wastelands into great lush worlds, so it's my job to give you pleasure and to tame you. I'm your terraformer!"

  “You are a dolphin!” he'd said and tickled her, she'd squealed and run around the bed, and he after her.

  Tonight it was different. The carefree nature of their contract was gone.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  She barely nodded. Her eyes glittered sea-green.

  * * * *

  The airbus whistled home through the thickening atmosphere, over spreading vegetation that would in another generation become rainforest, Pontin kept going over and over the fantasy in his mind. What would it be like to rule not a city, but a whole world? Would he go to the museum and retrieve a book? Would he learn to play an instrument and wear a tux to the opera? Would he marry one of the glamorous daughters of aristocracy and have children—in vitro, not to spoil her figure? Would he walk in the park and play chess with—no, the Governor was an invisible presence, the powerful fist of the State if needed, otherwise its benign helping hand. To compensate for staying out of the mainstream, he'd be rewarded with every luxury imaginable, satisfying every appetite, even learning new appetites so that he could sate those.

  In the weeks to follow, Pontin would began to have visitors in First City, the new capital, his new home for the rest of his life. He'd hardly visited there, except on Engineer business. It was a city of wide, empty streets, of glass and steel skyscrapers, of airfields and gravbases. Right now its population was a blissful 100,000, and those were the builders. In the next decade, several million people would begin to inhabit the city—and billions more would settle on Mirabel IV's several continents.

  * * * *

  Menet's manumission dinner, a tradition for centuries between masters and bondservants, turned out to be more subdued, yet beautiful, than planned. He hadn't told the Chorearch about this party. This was a small, special affair for the woman who'd shared his bed the past five years, and he'd wanted to make it as special as possible. The ruins at Um were his most precious spot on this entire world, and he could not give Menet a more meaningful gift. She understood that, and kissed him during a secluded moment, long and hard, their last such privacy.

  Having duly notified Arbold, the State Antiquities Master (and bribed Arbold to keep silent about it with the busybody Chorearch), Pontin 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 gyneservants who were Menet's best friends.

  They flew to the ruins at Um in three airbuses, lumbering silvery cigar tubes owned by the Terraform Corporation. In the distance, in a sea-intoxicated haze, rose the towers of the planet's new capital. The jungles around First City looked dark green in the afternoon sunlight, like velvet. Already it was a place of floating orbs and whizzing flyers and floating airships.

  He forced himself to push all that away and focus his attentions here, in this air-haunted, grassy relict of a lost eon, and on Menet's little party.

  “Thank you, Grumpy.” Menet sat beside him and squeezed his arm. “It's so lovely. You'll be happy there."

  “And you will be happy in your new life,” Pontin assured her. “I'm not grumpy, just sad that things have to change.'

  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 Pontin'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 Arbold theorized was made of ground up sandstone mixed with a kind of sticky spittle—like a giant bird's nest. The ruin was not immense, but actually seemed intimate. It measured a few hundred meters along the greater axis of the oval, and a hundred meters wide on the shorter leg. Its ceiling, molded from the same material, had once soared ten stories. It might have taken centuries to build. Where the ceiling had fallen, great blocks of this spitstone 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.

  What had it all meant? Nobody knew. Had it been built by one giant, or a thousand little men like humans? Nobody knew.

/>   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 Arbold 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 women hugged Menet and shook Pontin's hand. Pontin wore a dark tuxedo, while Menet wore a tiny black dress that showed off her pale shoulders and slim legs. She looked stunning, Pontin thought, proud that she had prospered in his house, happy for her.

  “I wanted it to be right,” Pontin 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.

  Pontin, Menet, and Menet's 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 sang and drank champagne while the wind blew through the open hall.

  “Master,” she said formally, using a term she'd rarely ever spoken with him, “thank you for this kindness. I will never forget you or this place."

  Pontin laughed as champagne bubbles fell from his eyes, and she dabbed at his cheeks with a napkin while capturing her tongue tip between white teeth in concentration.

  There was something timeless about the silence in the great basilica. Shafts of light beamed down through the windows at regular intervals—Pontin lost count of how many windows there were—on each long side, something like a hundred, he estimated. Arbold 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. The group walked along in a light, fun attitude, but also hushed, reverent, dwarfed by their surroundings.

  As dusk fell, they sat down to the formal dinner. Menet sat opposite Pontin 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. Pontin 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.

  Pontin was pleased that the ruins were playing along. Few people had witnessed it, because the place had been kept secret by Pontin and Arbold to protect it. Pontin looked at Arbold questioningly several times, and each time the short, dark-haired man would shake his vigorously and say: Not time yet.

  A drum tapped softly, and a pianello's hammers rang on its wires, and a 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, Arbold 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, Pontin 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 Arbold 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. Pontin 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 gasped.

  Pontin opened his eyes. There—the Um Effect, as Arbold had dubbed it, after the name given this hill by an automatic program in some distant survey office. The original name of the basilica was lost in time, if it ever had a name.

  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, Arbold had told Pontin—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.

  Pontin reached across the table and took Menet's hand. They squeezed hands, watching the phenomenon. The music was faint, but harmonic and complex, almost as stately as an organ's. After about a half hour, the colors began to fade. Then there were only echoes chasing echoes, barely audible. Then there was silence.

  * * * *

  Menet's belongings began to appear in sacks and boxes outside her room. They lined the narrow, cottage-like walls on both sides. Her instruments, paints, dolls, papers, recorders, players, flute, stuffed animals, toys, and candy jar seemed packed by a firm, determined, and slightly angry hand. She kept to herself, avoiding him, and he, noticing, began to avoid her. He felt a hollowness inside, like the basilica at Um. He already longed for the old days, when he'd worked and played hard. But all things in life were gone irrevocably once they were gone—like Um. Only memories remained, for a time, and then nothing.

  He drove her to the gravbase and kissed her good-bye. He waved as her rolling stair with hundreds of terraformers on it moved toward the vast underbelly of the InterGalax Terraform Corp workship. The ship covered the western sky like a huge green white and blue balloon. Pontin was already driving away, kind of glad to see her go, kind of missing her, ultimately glad to start a new life that he'd worked so hard toward.

  The hammer sound rolled across the miles from the ship, one long slow pile driving smash after another as the antigravity engine cut in. Once gravitational energy had been understood, and added to both ends of the energy spectrum to make a unified circle, those waves that were both something and nothing could be counteracted with waves that were nothing and something, thereby canceling the attraction of a huge mass like Mirabel IV. The great ship, containing all of Pontin's companions of the past five years, including Menet, began to vanish into the thin white clouds high up in the powder blue sky.

  * * * *

  His residence on the roof of the 500-story First City Tower was as quiet as his wood frame lakeside house, which was already being torn down to make room for a mile-long resort hotel. The residence proper was a quiet, sumptuous structure of elegant materials—polished marble, finely chiseled granite, stainless steel trim, many colors and textures of glasses from crystal through waxy polychrome blobs. The carpets inside were thick, the furniture filling every nook with the smell of leather. A complete entertainment center in the form of a sunken amphitheater seating 80 could project live holographic shows from around the galaxy. Six master bedrooms formed a semicircle to let him house guests of state in style, unless they stayed in the hotel downstairs. A private elevator big as a house took him down 300 stories t
o the shopping malls or 500 stories down to the domed trains station that one day would connect all of Mirabel IV.

  Out on the rooftop, he had an acre of gardens smothered in trees. Fountains plashed. He could call upon any number of servants, helpers, gens to cook for him, to satisfy any appetite he might have. For the moment, his most driving passion was loneliness.

  He met regularly with the Chorearch, whose blue skin gave off a faint acid smell almost like citrus when she became excited. Standing in the audience hall with her ladies in training, she cut a tall, wide-shouldered figure. She was voluminously robed in silks and gilds, and always wore a tall headpiece like a crown with the Vyzant symbols in it. She was the choreographer of the dance taking him from his old life to the new, and Mirabel from its past into its future.

  “Whatever your Lordship needs, my staff will provide,” the Mother said with clasped hands and sonorous voice that echoed in the audience hall. “It is our duty and our delight to make your transition as enjoyable and meaningful as possible."

  Pontin had learned not to incline his head or bow, but to make a quick, sweeping-aside hand gesture of approval. “I thank you, Mother, and the Viceroy and His Vyzantine Majesty the Cosmarch.