This silences them. They all stare at me, wide-eyed. Have I somehow misspoken? In a situation like this, am I supposed to ply them with false hope instead of giving an honest status report?
I do not know the Brights the way an ambassador would; I am too young to even have spoken to anyone with first-hand knowledge of the Brights. I have only a superficial understanding of their thought patterns, and this is a task best reserved for someone who truly knew them. If not for a Bright itself.
I cannot do what the humans expect of me. And yet, I must try.
I close my eyes to block the stimulus so I can delve deeper. Soon, I can visualize the interconnected web of the ship’s systems, each hub enmeshed among the others as if held in place with thick, pulsing vines. The offline sectors and systems appear marooned and dark, disconnected from the vital flow of the web.
Concentrating, I examine the systems more closely. Here: movement, change. And here, and here. Everywhere I scrutinize, the deep structural connections are unraveling, senescing, peeling away like flower petals destined to be supplanted with fruit. It is a process I understand only with academic distance — from my examination of plant genomes, not from personal experience. Still, I recognize the patterns as organic design, organic thinking. Only the Brights would build a ship as convoluted and self-referential as a genome.
Back in the control room, the humans are getting restless. “What is going on?” demands Mosby.
I retreat from the depths enough to answer him. “The architecture you have now was never meant to last. It is…” I do not know why I pick the word: “juvenile.”
Mosby opens his mouth but Ahmed looks at him says, “Less talk, more work.”
I must agree with Ahmed.
Ignoring the sounds of the control room, I return my focus to the Legacy’s architecture. I pull myself deeper, down into the disordered conglomeration of systems, losing awareness of my physical body. I focus all my mental acuity to study the ship.
It wants to grow, to metamorphose, to mature. I can tell this much: growth could be good, but it also could be cancerous. The old connections run dry and slough off, and the systems sprout wild new vine stubs that quest in every direction. Left to their own devices, the systems will strangle themselves with malformed, overgrown connective structure. But how am I to guide this process, rife with botanical zeal only a Bright could comprehend?
I pause, thinking. Metamorphosis is an animal concept. They are not vines, they are tentacles — and tentacles I understand. I think of my stellate fighter, how cleanly designed it was, with its eight rays each encapsulating a tentacle, and all the neatly arranged interfaces. And at the center, my brain to process and control.
So, me — and by extension, the control room — at the nexus of the web. The strongest connections, thick and steady, direct from each system to the nexus. Lesser connections, flexible and mutable, exchanging information among the systems themselves. I weave the ship the way I would weave my own flesh, easing the nascent tentacles over a new growth template as if it were a foreign genome to be integrated.
When the connections have been laid, the most delicate part still remains to be done: I carefully extract myself from the center of the web, leaving behind the shell of the control room, not so much a vacancy as a resting state. I pull away, leaving all the connections intact, the hollow space waiting patiently for its next command.
It is done. And, if all is right, it will even be receptive to the humans’ control.
I rise slowly, like floating up to the surface from the depths of an ocean, the lights and sounds of the control room wavering and resolving. I blink, eyes slow to focus as the ciliary muscles reawaken to their duties.
On every wall of the room, the display screens shine with dazzling varicolored light. My tear ducts water, my pupils hasten to contract. I see the humans shading their faces with their hands, so I know my body’s reaction is not an oversensitive after-effect of deep interfacing. The screens are very bright.
Yes, I realize. The screens are Bright.
“They’re beautiful,” says Rosenberg, “even if it hurts to look at them.”
Ahmed is still bent over a console. “There’s an audio recording, too, but the frequencies are all ultrasonic.”
Rosenberg asks, “What are they saying?”
“It’ll take a while for the translators to work it out,” says Ahmed.
“Unnecessary,” I say. I force some crude adjustments to the anatomy of my ears, expanding the range of my hearing. The recording is part-way through the message, but I wait until the end and it loops back to the beginning. “Roughly translated: the Legacy’s destination is a research base on a dwarf planet in the outskirts of the Brights’ home system. They hope that, in the time it has taken your primitive species to develop interplanetary travel and discover Legacy, the pathogen will have gone extinct. The research base contains preserved samples of healthy Bright genomes. If you have the technology to restore plant biota from the genomic database and shepherd Legacy through the transition to maturity, you will be able to restore the Brights.”
Everyone goes quiet. What have I done, meddling in the fate of these humans? An ambassador would have known better than to do for them what they cannot do themselves; I was a fool to think I could help without entangling myself. I feel nauseated, an unfamiliar physiological response to this upwelling of emotions inside me.
Ahmed is the one who says what they all must be thinking. “But it wasn’t us who brought back the plants and guided the ship, it was you.”
Which means the task of restoring the Brights falls on my shoulders, not theirs. “I know,” I say, and rush from the room.
Hiding in the aft solarium, I stare out at the painted starscape. By human means of reckoning, this region of space was my home for three lifetimes: cold empty death punctuated with tiny oases of energy and life. They all belonged to me, once. I felt at home in the void, satisfied with what I was, and now I am trapped behind this glass and can only yearn for that silent solitary existence.
At my core I am a fighter pilot — a thug, a killer. I was made to do what the rest of the Sheekah, with their delicate dispositions, could not. How can anyone expect me to resurrect a whole sentient species when all my training and experience has been in dealing death, not life?
I am no one’s savior. It is too heavy a burden to bear.
Liu comes in: shuffle, shuffle, soft steps on the deck. He approaches hesitantly, hanging back as if he doesn’t wish to intrude on my thoughts.
“Rosenberg sent you?” I say. I am learning how their hierarchy works.
Liu takes the words for an invitation and joins me on the bench. “She wants me to try talking with you.”
“We have now spoken.” I look at him. “You may report success.”
“Why, Ohree, that was almost a joke. Are you growing a sense of humor to go with the mammalian physique?”
“Doubtful,” I say, looking away again. Though maybe I am.
Liu lets out a loud breath. His vocal pitch drops lower. “You know what I’m here to ask you about.”
“Rosenberg wants me to continue with you to your destination. Rosenberg wants me to revive the Brights.”
“We can’t do it without you, obviously.”
“You do not understand. The process will not be a simple one, like with the seeds. Brights are very complex organisms. I will have to adapt my whole physiology, I will have to gestate the embryos inside me.”
Liu is silent for so long that I give up my view of the stars and turn to face him. He is staring at me. “What exactly do you have on your to-do list that ranks more important than this?”
I pause. “If they made the smallest mistake, if even one gene region is tainted with pathogenic code, I will die.”
“Since when were you more afraid of dying than of not having a purpose?” Liu’s lips curl in an expression I now know to indicate amusement. “How human of you.”
The words fall on me like a blow. He is ri
ght — only two days ago I was contemplating suicide. I fall back on an older argument. “An ambassador would be properly trained for such a task, which I am not.”
“You thought you couldn’t guide the Legacy through her transition, but you could,” he said. “It doesn’t matter that your own society marked you a castaway. It doesn’t matter what life you had before. You are capable of things you haven’t even dreamt of yet, and it would honor us to be the ones who help you discover those things.”
I go very still. I do not dare to hope this could be true. It violates a paradigm so deep-seated in my psyche that I did not even suspect its existence until now.
Liu says, “Humans aren’t in the habit of changing their given names. Surnames, though, were originally descriptive — you were named for your profession, or the village you came from, or your parentage.” He pauses, the silence almost livid in the air. “You don’t have a surname.”
If I was frozen before, now I am a comet lost between the stars — even my molecules feel stuck. I am sure I could not look away if I tried. I know Liu knows how Sheekah naming works.
Liu smiles, though somehow the expression seems grave, as if he understands exactly what it is he’s doing. “I think we’ll call you Ohree Brightbearer, if the sound of it suits you.”
“Yes,” I say, hardly able to breathe. “Yes, it suits me fine.”
I am named, and there is work ahead of me.
About the Author
Gwendolyn Clare has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and is currently working to add another acronym to her collection. Away from the laboratory, she enjoys practicing martial arts, adopting feral cats, and writing speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Ekaterina Sedia’s Bewere the Night anthology, Daily Science Fiction, and Abyss and Apex, among others.
The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science Fiction
Christopher Bahn
Music and technology have always gone hand in hand — and the explosive flowering of music as an art form in the last century is also the story of the explosive growth of technology. Indeed, people have recognized the potential of computers to revolutionize music since before there even were computers. In 1842, writing about the theoretical uses of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, computer-science progenitor Ada Lovelace enthused that once the fundamentals of harmony and musical composition were properly understood, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” (And there’s something wondrous about a woman at the dawn of the Victorian Age dreaming of something now commonplace with electronic groups such as Daft Punk.) Like computing itself, electronic music began as the arcane province of technology specialists and slowly became a truly democratic force that put the power to change the world — or at least soundtrack it — in the hands of everyone. And because cutting-edge technology is particularly good at sounding alien and futuristic, it’s meshed perfectly with science fiction as a subject matter. Below is a brief history of the ways those three elements — the music, the tech, and the SF themes — have intersected and influenced each other, in various media, over time.
The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
In 1919, a Russian scientist named Lev Termen invented one of the earliest electronic instruments, which came to be called after the anglicized version of his last name: the theremin. (Termen himself has a history at least as fascinating as his instrument: After emigrating to the U.S. where he scandalously married an African-American ballet dancer, he was kidnapped by Soviet secret police and repatriated to the USSR, where he worked on espionage tech including one of the first bugging devices.) Although its ethereal sound is now practically synonymous with ’50s SF movies, the theremin made its way into cinema 20 years earlier, first via Russian composers like Dmitri Shostakovich, then as a background element in 1933’s King Kong and 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. In 1945, the theremin’s weird warble was used in a pair of thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, to illustrate the emotional chaos of their amnesiac and alcoholic protagonists. But the theremin was first used as a major foreground soundtrack element in the alien-contact classic The Day The Earth Stood Still. Composer Bernard Hermann put two theremins at the center of his score to highlight both the wise and gentle alien ambassador Klaatu and his deadly robot Gort. For a decade after, the theremin was de rigueur for any movie about alien creatures, showing up in It Came from Outer Space, Operation Moon — and much later in Tim Burton’s retro-futuristic Mars Attacks.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Perhaps ironically, the theremin is absent from the first major movie to feature a totally electronic soundtrack, the SF-meets-Shakespeare space drama Forbidden Planet. Husband-and-wife composing team Louis and Bebe Barron got their start as avant-garde musicians in the orbit of the radical composer John Cage, but they made a stab at the more lucrative land of studio soundtrack work with Planet. They hand-built their own circuitry to create the phenomenally eerie music accompanying Leslie Nielsen and company’s journey through space. The main device in the Barrons’ toolkit was a tone-generating circuit called a ring modulator (famously used later by the BBC for the distorted squawks of Doctor Who’s Daleks), which they manipulated with reverb, delay, and other effects. Crucially, they didn’t see their music merely as mechanical sound, instead treating their instruments as actors whose job was to produce an emotional response. Though their soundtrack was hugely innovative and influential, the experience was a mixed success for the Barrons: Because they weren’t members of the musicians’ union, their score was classified not as music but as “electronic tonalities,” denying them a well-deserved shot at an Oscar and effectively ending their Hollywood career.
The Tornados, “Telstar” (1962)
The first British group to score a number-one hit in America wasn’t The Beatles, but an instrumental surf-rock band called The Tornados — thanks to a song written by their producer, the decidedly eccentric electronics wizard Joe Meek. Named after the first successful communications satellite to achieve orbit around Earth, “Telstar” captured the early-’60s fascination for the space age with a jaunty, buzzy keyboard-driven melody that incorporated bleeps and whooshes alongside a soaring background vocal. The main instrument here was a clavioline, an electronic keyboard that was a precursor to modern synths, but much of the magic came in post-production via Meek’s jerry-rigged assembly of tape machines, compressors and other devices in his home-built London studio. Meek’s own career was less stratospheric: Though the song sold five million copies and was covered by dozens of other bands, a plagiarism lawsuit (almost certainly groundless) ensured that Meek never saw a dime from it during his lifetime, and mounting pressure from his business problems, his drug use, and his (then-illegal) homosexuality led him to the murder-suicide of himself and his landlady in 1967.
Doctor Who (1963)
Set up in the late ’50s to bring the new worlds of electronic music to British TV and radio productions, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pushed the boundaries of what was possible to do with sound. And with their longest-lasting popular success, the theme song to the venerable science-fiction TV series Doctor Who, they went all the way to the edge of time and space. Although the tune itself was written by Australian composer Ron Grainer, the song didn’t truly come to life until a then-uncredited engineer named Delia Derbyshire got her hands on it. Lacking advanced synthesizers or multi-track recording, she created each note of the song individually, combining them via a series of tape loops of white noise and a simple bass line painstakingly adjusted for speed and pitch. The result was, in a word, fantastic, evoking in a few moments everything important about Doctor Who’s enigmatic title hero — his questing wonder, but also loneliness, outsiderhood, and otherworldly danger that have stayed with him in all incarnations, for nearly 50 years. Side note: One Doctor Who sound you might think would be electronic isn’t: The TARDIS takeoff and lan
ding effect was created by scraping a door key up and down the strings of a piano.
David Bowie, “Space Oddity” (1969)
Most of the music talked about so far was made using highly specialized equipment — often massive, complicated and expensive pieces built by musicians who were also formidable technicians. But in 1967, a British gadgeteer named Brian Jarvis fixed his niece’s broken toy piano by giving it an electronic upgrade, later refining the idea into a simple handheld keyboard operated with a metal pen: the Stylophone. His invention sold millions of copies, but might still be seen merely as a battery-operated toy if not for David Bowie, who used a Stylophone as a key instrument on “Space Oddity.” The first in a string of legendary singles, “Space Oddity” not only made Bowie a star but was a calculated stab at capturing the late-’60s’ fascination and optimism with the idea of space travel — ironically enough, in a bleak but captivating story about a lonely astronaut floating in a doomed spaceship. Still, it was exactly the right song at exactly the right time, and the BBC’s adoption of it as the theme tune for their coverage of the Apollo moon landing helped ensure Bowie’s status as something like an alien ambassador to humanity. Bowie’s love of the Stylophone wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan, either: He used it on a number of subsequent songs, and said in 2002 that he still carries it with him when he travels to help write new material.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
The Stylophone may have been just a toy, but the 1960s also saw more complex synthesizers start to make their way into mainstream music, as the technology was refined and made easier to use. After getting his start with a mail-order built-your-own-theremin business in the ’50s, Robert Moog invented the game-changing synthesizer that bears his name, which used transistors that made it small enough to be cheap and portable. It first gained wide public attention in 1968 when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos applied the futuristic instrument to centuries-old classical music on Switched-On Bach, going on to sell more than a million copies and bringing electronica to audiences who never would have been open to it otherwise. Three years later, Carlos’ electro-classical creations got an even wider audience when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned his lens on Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange — the tale of a street thug in a nightmarish near-future Britain who loves Beethoven even more than he loves beating and raping. Kubrick naturally turned to Carlos for the soundtrack, which helped give the movie just the sense of baroque surreality it needed.
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