Night Songs at Um

by John T. Cullen

  You are singing to us, aren't you? Pontin marveled, wine bottle swinging lightly at his side.

  Yes, I sing for you, and you alone, because you saved me to the end of my days.

  He closed his eyes and listened in ecstasy at the notes. They were louder and clearer than the other night when the basilica had sung for Menet.

  I sing for those who have come to undo me. I sing for those who have come to laugh and enjoy the last of my hours. In that way, it is the best of ways to end what has been.

  Now it sang for the new Governor, the UnderGovernor, and all the visiting nobility.

  Dilith shook him. “Are you nuts? You're grinning and hugging yourself.” She shook him again. “Pull yourself together, Pontin. People are staring. You're talking to yourself."

  I sing for those who understand. I sing for those who do not comprehend.

  Dilith hissed in his ear. “For Dehos’ sake!"

  Someone let out a loud, brutal yell.

  Pontin opened his eyes, startled. The beautiful tune died in his head. Dilith fled into the crowd of milling people with a look of excited interest in her otherwise frosty eyes.

  Another screech cut through the air—no, a whoop, followed by others. Dozens of ground car engines roared into life. Headlights flicked on.

  Still the lights wavered in the windows, bouncing messages from one window to another. Sometimes three windows would sing a perfect chord in unison.

  Pontin watched in dismay as the cars flew by, bouncing and twisting on the rough floor. He had a vision of Arnaud, yelling as he waved a fist; he had his other arm around Dilith in the back of an open car. Pontin saw a brief glimpse of the mercenary, Athvane, clutching a cigar in his teeth and a shotgun in his hands as he stood upright against the rollbar of a racing car. Others had shotguns. Around and around the basilica they raced—waving their guns.

  POOM, went a shotgun, and a window's colors fell in shards.

  POOM went another shotgun, and another window went blank.

  Those watching screamed and clapped in hysterical delight. Those in the trucks and cars screamed and fired, over and over, having a contest to see who could shoot which windows out first.

  Pontin watched all this, feeling too sick to move. The wine bottle fell from his grasp and broke.

  He saw Arbold frantically run into the road, waving his arms to stop a car. The car ran him over, its tires rolling down the center of his body, flattening it, dead. Squish, out came purplish stuff.

  Pontin turned and staggered toward the nearest window. Cars raced around him, and he almost didn't care if they hit him. But none did. He climbed up slight incline to the opening of a window that had fallen in ages ago. He left the shouting and the shooting behind him and stumbled in the dark—until he tripped and fell.

  He heard an echo of song in his head, faint and steady, not sad in any way:

  I sing for the hours that are no longer mine. I sing for the minutes that have yet to come. I sing for the end of my days, for my freedom is here at last.

  A series of explosions rocked the earth. “The gas!” someone screamed. “The flares! Someone has storked the proton gyres! Run for your lives!"

  Pontin fell, tumbling, and rolled down a slope amid a slide of pebbles. A few rocks rolled, bouncing, ominously near his head. Each time he hit, more bones broke. He couldn't breathe—his ribs caved in, the breath knocked out of him, his lungs collapsed—and shock drove away pain. Then he whacked into something and blacked out.

  * * * *

  In the darkness, a lone voice sang:

  I sing the end that's near. I sing the world that's dear. I sing the coming, and now the going.

  Yvold thought: I loved you.

  I know you did. You are the last to love me. I take your memory with me as I pass on.

  Who are you? What are you? I have stood on that hill so often, with the breeze blowing quietly in my hair, and wondered.

  I sing what I was.

  It sent him not a picture, but a sensation, and he understood now the civilization that had evolved here, lived its brief course as humans must in their own yoke also, and then died away into all eternity. Each of the basilicas had been a creature. They were intelligent, and huge, and talented. They did not dream of travel to the stars. Instead, they rooted like enormous flowers, and sang to the passing stars at night. What more could they need? Why travel into space, when the stars never came into reach? Even in death, their ribs continued to live on in a spiritual life that would not fade until the last stone fell and the last arch crumbled.

  Each basilica was what remained of the carapace, the exoskeleton, of one of these creatures who lived a thousand years. They lived a solitary existence, but sang to each other and filled the air with puffy spores on a cloudless blue spring day so that the green hills resounded with their trumpeting, and at night with the auroras of their music. During their heyday, they could fill the entire atmosphere with their shimmering, wavering lights.

  I sing what little life is left. I sing that I give you what I have, my one last and true lover, so that you may live.

  In the darkness, in his dream, he felt its huge kind soul roll over somehow, in some unearthly space, and lower itself onto his dying frame, crushed as he was under rocks and soil and bodies and broken arches. It embraced him as a lover would, and breathed the last of its soul into his own tiny guttering candle. It pulled him out of the rubble and transported him, somehow, to safety in the night-black fields away from the flaming henge that was its bones.

  * * * *

  When Yvold came to, he couldn't see, and he couldn't move. He felt a dull ache all over, but he knew it should be worse. And yet it wasn't. He could smell the soil, and tiny bits of plant life, so he knew he was alive. He knew roughly where he was. It was very silent. No shooting, no cheering. If only he could see. Something held him close. Something enveloped him, healing him with goodness. He luxuriated as if floating in syrup, in sunlight, amid bubbles, shooting toward the surface.

  Healing.

  I sing ... but no, that soundless voice was forever still and gone.

  He opened his eyes and saw the blue sky. He was alive, and well. He laughed at the joy of it, standing up—and there was Menet.

  “Darling Yvold."

  She knelt over him. It really was she. He recognized the wide, pink face and the bright-blue almond eyes full of joy. He recognized her mouth, her lips, her slightly flattened and lightly freckled nose that he reached up to touch with a trembling fingertip.

  “Menet, it can't be you. Did I die? Is this a dream?"

  Her voice was girlish and dry, filled with mischief and some amount of teasing reproach. “You're very much alive. I don't know how you lived after that.” She pointed to the still-smoking ruin of the flattened basilica, where rescue machines from First City were rolling back and forth. It was morning, hours after the blast of cooking gases, and the bodies had all been removed.

  She sat down, reached under him, and with some effort cradled him over her lap. “We looked for you when word came."

  He stared at the few broken, blackened ribs left of what had been the holy place at Um. Something—the spirit of the basilica, the ghost of an ancient thing, the sentient being whose shell the basilica was, just as Yvold's skull was the shell of his brain and therefore of who he was, had somehow sheltered and healed him, had breathed new life into him with its last breath.

  “I didn't really go on the gravity boat,” Menet said. “I didn't want to leave you."

  He turned his attention from the hill, which had lost its significance, to the woman who held his head against her warm, firm chest. “I didn't know it, but I didn't want to leave you either."

  “I hope you're not angry with me."

  “No."

  “I missed you."

  He took a deep breath. “They're all dead, aren't they?"

  She nodded. “We were looking for you in the disaster."

  “We?"

  “Me and a couple of roughhousers."<
br />
  He started, sat up. “You mean you guys didn't leave?"

  She nodded, lowering her eyes guiltily.

  “Menet, I'm not going to be Governor."

  “We weren't sure you wanted to be."

  He laughed. “You knew that?"

  She stroked his forehead with a firm, dry hand. “I've been your soul mate for years. I know things about you that you don't know."

  He gripped her wrist. “Do I know things about you that you don't know?"

  She teased him: “If you stop being blind you might."

  He stared up at the flashing blue lights, the trudging emergency responders in their orange striped vests. “They'll have to appoint someone else."

  “They already have. The Chorearch held an emergency ceremony on world-holo this morning. His name is Temerius."

  Yvold gasped. “He was late. You know, I almost bet he had his goons blow the place up to kill me and make himself Governor.” He thought about that sickening realization. “I couldn't prove it, and he'd look for another way to get rid of me."

  “He was quick to have her declare you dead.” She gave him a shake. “Want to go back to terraforming?"

  “Yes.” She helped him up, and he dusted himself off.

  “Can you make it?” she asked.

  “Yes.” The singer had taken good care of him, even depositing him out of harm's way maybe through a teleport or whatever. “I can walk.” He put his arms around Menet, kissed her.

  She signaled to two or three familiar men, roughhousers of his old crew, who stood on a nearby hill beside a dented steel air skimmer with rusting vents and chipped yellow paint. They were silent, enigmatic, loyal men whose dark hair blew in the breeze.

  “Hurry,” Menet said as she put her arm around his waist and towed him to go faster. “We can deepvox a report from sixty parsecs, but we have to get away from here."

  He nodded, jogging ahead and towing her by the hand. “I'll take you for my goodfym if you'll let me."

  “I've always been your goodfym,” she said with a pleased look. “I used to lie beside you when you slept, and wish I could be a trumensh."

  He said: “I'll take Engineer II or III wherever I can get it. I'll go by a phony name."

  “You could be Yvold Flaun. It's not much of a name, but it's kept me pretty game."

  “Now that I'm officially dead,” he said, “I can be anyone I want, and escape the likes of Temerius."

  They walked up the gravelly water trail that led down into the grotto where he'd been hidden. Arm in arm. He picked up her rucksack. The roughhousers hugged him, each in turn, thumped his back, high-fived with Menet.

  “Hello, Boss,” spoke the senior man.

  “Hey, Beer Breath,” Yvold said. “Good to be back. Thanks for sticking around.” They made fists and bumped knuckles.

  In a minute, they were in the oily smelling, smoky flyer, rising up, tilting away, turning toward the hills beyond First City. Beer Breath said: “Our gravity lift is in the woods back on Ramp 55, you know, the one where we brought all the fish in?"

  “I remember it well,” Yvold shouted over the rushing air and engine noise.

  Menet clung to him as if her arms were steel cables. He felt the softness in her waist, the richness of her firm thighs, and loved being with her. “How did you find me?” he asked her

  “I don't know. That's the strangest thing. We figured we'd hang around to see if you were really going through with it. We figured by last night, if you really were going to do the whole investiture thing, that you'd have changed and really want to stay here. We were already packing up to leave, and my heart was breaking.” She paused to swallow and regain her composure. She wiped a tear away and looked at it on her fingertip, disbelieving, with a sniff. “Something told me to come back for you. Some sort of vast mental whale or something. I can't explain it. We heard the explosions and saw the fires and just stood there watching. Then I felt something singing in my head, telling me you needed me. It was as if Um itself were calling me to come get you."

  The hilltop, scarred now with black, scorched where the ruins had tumbled, fell behind as a set of dark rain clouds gyred overhead to wet the broken soil and heal it so that new things could grow there.

  Yvold clasped hands with his truefem as they rattled away with his troops to their gravity lift. Then, just hours later, there was a flash of light in the gray melon slice of morning light atmosphere between black night and day.

  The terraformer was used to roving from world to world. He relished a quick departure as soon as possible after blue water started flowing under fresh skies and the first fleet of colonists started arriving in orbit.

  That sharp reddish wink between dusk light and starlight, that arrow of fine silver light, was his ship and crew shooting far, far away into the carpet of stars to the next job. Somewhere out there, a Temporale portal waited to take him vast distances in mere hours through the underverse. And so he resigned his mind and soul to living out his life with her, and making dead worlds new and blue.

  * * * *

  For similar stories from John T. Cullen's future histories, see Lantern Road (www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook7409.htm) and Harps (www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook8810.htm).

  For more stories from John T. Cullen, see www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/JohnArgoeBooks.htm.

  For way-out speculative fiction by John T. Cullen, including Robinson Crusoe 1,000,000 A.D., and Mars the Divine, see www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/TerrySunbordeBooks.htm.

  For more from Clocktower Books, see www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/ClocktowerBooksandFarSectorSFFHmagazineeBooks.htm.

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  Visit www.farsector.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.