Listen
Page 2
* * *
Aino came back to the car while Mika was having breakfast. Oort had left to reconnoiter on her own. Voices were audible again. Aino sat down in the door opening. She didn’t look like she had had much sleep. She accepted the cup of tea Mika handed her.
“He can’t talk anymore,” she said. “He tried to incubate and get the voice. He failed. And now he’s a pariah.”
“So is he coming with us to Amitié?” Mika asked.
“He wants to,” Aino said. “But he wants to be with me.” She squeezed her lips together.
“And you don’t want to.”
Aino shook her head. “He didn’t love me, he loved the intriguing outcast. It’s not me he loves now, either. Now he loves the savior. The one who doesn’t look away.” She sipped her tea.
“But didn’t you love him back?” Mika asked.
“I did,” Aino said, “but that’s not enough.”
She looked out across the valley. “Sometimes I think I should feel guilty for leaving him here. But then I remember that he didn’t really want me. It was the song and the village and this world.”
Mika refilled Aino’s cup.
“Is that what the ambassador wants?” Aino asked suddenly. “To have a voice? Is she here to do the same thing?”
“I don’t know,” Mika said. “It’s something about this moon. Something about the way sound works here. Exactly what, I don’t know.”
“You’re talking very fast,” Aino said.
“Sorry.” Mika cleared his throat. “I’m like that right now.”
“I can tell. It’s getting worse, isn’t it.”
Mika nodded. “I can’t take meds. If I do I can’t hear Oort anymore.”
“What is it costing you to not take them?”
“Everything.”
“And why?” Aino tilted her head. “If it costs you everything, what do you get in exchange?”
Mika made himself breathe more deeply, construct longer sentences.
“You’ve heard Oort,” he began. “You’ve heard her speak, but as soon as she stops you can’t remember what she said, right? All you know is that she said something, and in that moment you understood exactly what she meant, it was so perfect, so precise. Right?”
Aino nodded.
“Imagine hearing that and then remembering it.” Mika shook his head. “Badly put. I mean, when Oort speaks, every sentence is perfectly constructed. The sound and the intent are coupled. Do you have an ear for music?”
“Eh,” Aino said. “Good enough for singing.”
“So imagine, then,” Mika said, “imagine the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard, with a hundred under- and overtones in harmony, a music that contains everything, so complex that it never bores you, and listening to it almost makes you cry. And you understand why music exists. And when it’s over, you just want more.”
Aino waited.
“That’s what it’s like every time Oort opens her mouth,” Mika finished.
“But is it worth it?” Aino asked.
“Right now it feels like it.”
Aino looked at him with sadness. “You’re like Petr.”
Mika laughed a little too loudly and shrugged.
When they ran out of tea, Aino took Mika to the river. Being under such a wide sky again felt unreal. It almost swallowed him. All sharp noises were muted; it was just them and the mountain and the goats who came to see if they had anything edible. They recognized Aino. Mika sang one song after another, and Aino listened, and there was a sad cast to her features but that was probably for Petr’s sake.
* * *
When dusk fell, Oort still wasn’t back. The mountainside on the other side of the valley caught the last of the sunlight. In the village, the meager outdoor lighting came on. Doors and windows closed to the dry cold.
“We should go looking for her,” Mika said.
“Go talk to people,” Aino said. “They might have seen her.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
Aino gave him a crooked smile. “They won’t talk to me, and you don’t want to walk at my pace.”
“No, that’s really not—” Mika started, but Aino interrupted him:
“Yes, it is.” Then she pointed. “There. There she is.”
There she was indeed: the ambassador was standing on a rock shelf above the village.
Aino frowned. “What is she doing up there?”
“Is there something special about that place?”
“We don’t go there. Other than when it’s time to…” She touched her throat. “Don’t go up there, Mika.”
Mika went up there.
Ambassador Oort stood on the edge of the shelf, looking out across the valley. A small flock of birds circled overhead. Occasionally one of them dove toward the ambassador, but veered away at the last second, as if not finding what it expected.
“It’ll happen soon,” she said when Mika walked up to her.
Mika caught his breath with his hands on his knees. “What’ll happen soon?”
“Soon we’ll see if this is the right place,” Oort replied.
She turned and looked at Mika, and her face was tense with nervous joy.
An eerie light swelled on the horizon.
“There,” the ambassador said. “Now.”
A second horizon overtook the first as a glowing sliver of the gas giant rose and absolute silence fell. Far away, Mika could hear the faint rush of blood in his ears. Ambassador Oort opened her mouth and sang.
She sang, and the song made Mika’s eyes tear up, it dug a hole in his belly. He opened his mouth to join her, but his voice left no trace in the air. The ambassador’s deep voice filled the world. She turned to Mika, and her eyes shone in the light of the gas giant. Suddenly Mika understood everything, more than everything. Creation spread out in front of him like a map.
The ambassador sang a low note and swept her hands sideways, as if opening a curtain. And the world slipped sideways. An untouched, verdant landscape, another sky where strange stars were coming out, another gas giant glowing a fiery orange. The ambassador’s tinkling laugh.
* * *
When Mika came to outside the village, they took him to the spaceport and sedated him, and he crashed on the shuttle and the darkness took over and everything slowed down to a crawl.
Hands, brain, tongue. The sluggish pointlessness, the sleep, the dreams about the shelf. As they helped him to his room on the station. Visited him and made him swallow pills. Long cool hands on his forehead. As he floated to the surface, and had a sudden moment of clarity: that was Aino sitting on a chair next to his bed.
“Are you awake now,” she said.
Mika nodded mutely.
“Oort?” he asked.
Aino shrugged. “Somewhere on Kiruna. They all went there.”
“I saw something there,” Mika said. “On the shelf.”
“What did you see?”
“I don’t remember,” Mika replied. “But I understood everything.”
“They said you had a psychotic break.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“Maybe so,” Aino said. “But you were crazy nonetheless.”
“Petr?”
“He’s on his way to Gliese now,” Aino said. “Where he belongs.”
* * *
The treatment supposedly healed the damage the repeated episodes had made. Still, Mika was left a little more stupid, a little slower, a little duller. Aino let him help out in the workshop every now and then. Working with his hands was calming.
They never spoke about what had happened or not happened. They cut, basted, and hemmed in silence. Sometimes someone came in, and Mika caught himself listening tensely, but the customer always spoke in a normal voice.
Neither the music nor being Gunnhild with Bård did anything for him. A different longing clawed at him, one that couldn’t be satisfied. A longing to be back on the rock shelf, to see what Ambassador Oort was showing him, to remember what it was
. To see the world swept aside.
About the Author
Karin Tidbeck lives in Malmö, Sweden, and writes in Swedish and English. Her stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Shimmer, Unstuck Annual and the anthologies Odd? And Steampunk Revolution. Her short story collection Jagannath was published in English in November 2012. She recently received the Crawford award for 2013. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Karin Tidbeck
Art copyright © 2016 by Keith Negley