(ed note: Due to an series of unfortunate events Astronaut David Bowman's fellow astronauts (and one sick AI) are all killed. David finds himself very lonely, as the only human being for 9.5 astronomical units.)

     He kept himself neat and tidy; no matter how tired he became, he never skipped a shave. Mission Control, he knew, was watching him closely for the first signs of any abnormal behavior; he was determined that it should watch in vain — at least, for any serious symptoms.
     Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship’s sound system running at almost painful loudness.

     At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays — especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare — or poetry readings from Discovery’s enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.
     So he switched to opera — usually in Italian or German, so that he was not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was Verdi’s Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The “Dies Irae,” roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more.
     Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart.

     And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years.

• 

His finger stabbed the SELECT button for the first tape. Kitaro’s Oasis. He’d start ofi this session, when the winds peaked to their strongest and the ocean hurled daggers at him, with music that reached gently out to him. From Morning Prayer through Aratanaru Tabiji, Kitaro’s New Wave. Not of water per se but of spirit. Hell, that’s appropriate, he conceded, considering the name of this split-tailed tub. He knew the other numbers by heart and knew also that his conscious appreciation of what he’d be hearing would perk up when the strains of Shimmering Horizon mixed with the scream of wind.

He depressed the second button for another Kitaro series with the simple title of Ki. Enough selections in here to bring even more meaning to what might be his final moments. Stream of Being to Endless Water and finally to Cloud in the Sky as the final number. “Leave it to the Japanese to make it only one cloud, ” he grumbled aloud and went on to the third tape.

Daniel Kobialka’s Mind Dance offered a Bolero Medley that would set the stage for two music passages he had always loved: Clair de Lane and then Song for Lisa...

He gritted his teeth, felt Spirit groan from another barrage of roaring wind, and went back to the music selection rack. His finger stabbed the title Deep Breakfast. What a damned dumb name for one of the most stunning musical passages he’d ever heard. He had thought Ray Lynch was crazy until he understood the meaning of the composer, who had once told a friend: “You must be starved, old friend. Come into my apartments, and we’ll suffer through a deep breakfast of pure sunlight. ” Good enough, Ray Lynch, wherever and whoever the hell you are.

That would be enough to mix mind and music with wind and water; from this moment on he wanted the sound to come louder and louder to crash over and against and through him. He worked the computer control for the music rack so that when Midnight Blue slid into position and tore from the powerful speakers embedded in the cabin and the hull, all about him on the decks, he would be inundated with the crystal, soaring voice of Louise Tucker-...

Flashdance choked into position. Irene Cara’s voice would go right through him with the opening number, and he tapped buttons rapidly so that after each successive number on the tape, What A Feeling would play before the next number in line. Power and energy and life would surge from the speakers to tear over him, to make him one with the moment and the danger.

Then the entire sound track from Close Encounters. The whole works, every inch, every decibel, soft to furious, childlike and steamy to raw power. His finger stabbed and the electronics obeyed and the next tape moved into its slot.

He laughed aloud as he brought into position a long double tape of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. He didn’t know why he’d insisted to himself that he must include this music. The magic of a much earlier age and the magic of imagination and power all rolled into——well, into whatever it was that called to him.

His laughter ebbed when he came to Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire. That was so goddamned real to this very moment . . . That’s not what bothered him, he admitted to himself. It was the composer. And it wasn't this tape. It was that other one Vangelis had done. Every time he heard it the music hurled him violently back to the horror and agony of those months of bitter survival in Antarctica. How the hell had Vangelis even selected the name?...

He stared at his finger in the shuddering, careening cabin of Spirit, the finger poised over the button that would slide the haunting, icicle-tinkling strains of Vangelis’ Antarctica into its numbered slot. My God, he’d been back there. . . . A shudder spasmed his muscles and he shook himself like a wet dog to shove away the moment, and his hand moved and poised over the last button. A smile creased his stubbled face.

This was more like it. His select, chosen finale. The creation long ago of Alan Hovhaness, a celebration of life and surging energy, of . wonder and . . . And God Created Great Whales. A magnetic capture of Kostelaneu and great whales recorded in the deeps, woven together with the magic of imagination and music, captured here for him. His finger stabbed the button and the tape clicked into place. Done, by damn.

• 

(ed note: go here for a list of links to sites where you can purchase this song)

Born in the belly of a rocket ship, as from Terra it did fly
His first cries drowned by the engines' roar, in no cradle did he lie
He'd hit Santara by the time he was four, Gal-Haydn when he was nine
Born as a spaceman in a spaceman's bed, and as a spaceman he would die

He learned every course that a ship could take, found a few more on the side
He learned new tricks every stop they'd make; with the engines he did ride
A spacer's pride was his swagger-stick, and his pride knew that it could survive
He lived as a spaceman from the day he was born, and as a spaceman he would die

They headed for Diversa in his trading years, when he'd just turned thirty-four
The captain planned on a mighty pay, after running a load of ore
The engine room gave him all they had, but the captain ordered more
They pumped 'em up to their hottest gain just to hear the rockets roar

Five hundred miles above the planet's ground, the engines died away
The captain called, "We need power now or we'll all die today!"
The spaceman said, "All the boys are dead and I'm not far behind.
We've pulled much more than she's meant to take, and the baffles have blown wide."

The captain said, "Well, do something man," and the spaceman smiled wide
"Except hold the plates down with my bare hands, we can't do nothing but enjoy the ride."
But the ground flew up with destructive speed, and the spaceman knew his mind
He couldn't sit in the engine room and wait for his friends to die

So he turned and he put his hand inside, where the engines used to glow
He found the plates and he held them fast, 'cause to quit's no way to go
And the rocket shook with a mighty roar, and the engines they did cry,
And the spaceman smiled in the engine's glow, for as a spaceman he would die

They found the boys in the engine room; by their stations they did lie
The spaceman with his hands on a baffle plate was still sitting where he'd died
They took them out, gave them to the stars; not a single spaceman cried
For spacemen in the stars do live, and in the stars they long to die

The spaceman's life for his men did give, and the stars would let him lie
He lived as a spaceman from the day he was born, and as a spaceman he did die

• 

When I was young I told my mum
I'm going to walk on the Moon someday
Armstrong and Aldrin spoke to me
From Houston and Cape Kennedy
And I watched the Eagle landing
On a night when the Moon was full
And as it tugged at the tides, I knew deep inside
I too could feel its pull

I lay in my bed and dreamed I walked
On the Sea of Tranquillity
I knew that someday soon we'd all sail to the moon
On the high tide of technology
But the dreams have all been taken
And the window seats taken too
And 2001 has almost come and gone
What am I supposed to do?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

Now my dreams have all been shattered
And my wings are tattered too
And I can still fly but not half as high
As once I wanted to

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get to the moon
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we've all grown up too soon

My son and I stand beneath the great night sky
And gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo And he says
"Why did they ever go?"
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don't offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cos where in the hell's that at?

Now that the space race is over
It's been and it's gone and I'll never get out of my room
Because the space race is over
And I can't help but feel we're all just going nowhere

• 

Worlds grow old and suns grow cold
And death we never can doubt
Time's cold wind, wailing down the past
Reminds us that all flesh is grass
And history's lamps blow out

CHORUS:
But the Eagle has landed; tell your children when
Time won't drive us down to dust again

Cycles turn while the far stars burn
And people and planets age
Life's crown passes to younger lands
Time sweeps dust of hope from his hands
And turns another page

CHORUS

But we who feel the weight of the wheel
When winter falls over our world
Can hope for tomorrow and raise our eyes
To a silver moon in the open skies
And a single flag unfurled

CHORUS

We know well what Life can tell:
If you would not perish, then grow
And today our fragile flesh and steel
Have laid their hands on a vaster wheel
With all of the stars to know

CHORUS That the...

From all who tried out of history's tide
Salute for the team that won
And the old Earth smiles at her children's reach
The wave that carried us up the beach
To reach for the shining sun

CHORUS For the...

• 

Once upon a time,
You could hear the Saturn's roar
As it rose upon it's fiery tail to space.
And once upon a time, the men that we sent out
Landed in a strange and alien place.
And as I watched them walk upon the Moon,
I remembered Icarus,
Who flew too close to the Sun.

Once upon a time, they tore the gantries down
And the rockets flew no longer to the Moon.
And once upon a time,
We swore that we'd return,
But it doesn't look like we'll be back there soon

And as the Moon shines down
On the shattered launching ground,
I remember Apollo,
Who flew the chariot of the Sun.
And I wonder of the legends they will tell
A thousand years from now.

• 

Now the big ships fly to a hundred suns, by pushing the speed of light
And they want good men for the deep space runs, pushing the speed of light
And the pay is good, and you're young and strong,
And you tell yourself that it won't be long
So you sign on board, hear the drive's deep song, pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light

And you've left behind you the world of men
With no way in space to go home again
When you're pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light

Now it's two months out and it's two months back, when you're pushing the speed of light
Twenty years on your homeworld's track, pushing the speed of light
(gamma=60.0, 99.986% the speed of light)
And your friends are gone and your lovers too
And there's damn-all left that you can do
And you try to lie, but you know it's true, pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light

So you sign back on for another run of pushing the speed of light
And you swear to God that your pushing's done, pushing the speed of light
But that one run turns into four or five
And your heart beats time to the humming drive
And there's nothing left keeps you alive, but pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light

Now you've spread your seed with the star drive's flame, by pushing the speed of light
Left sons behind you to carry your name, pushing the speed of light
And you watch them age, and you watch them die,
As you race the light-wind across the sky
And the gods are silent when you ask them, Why? Pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light

Now, the speed of c is a wall, they say, when you're pushing the speed of light
That cuts you off from yesterday, pushing the speed of light
But you know someday you're gonna win that race
And fly back the years to your starting space
And you'll stay awhile 'fore you're back in space, pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light

And you've left behind you the world of men
With no way in Hell to go home again
When you're pushing the speed of light
Pushing the speed of light

• 

We're out looking for astronauts
Looking for astronauts
We're out looking for astronauts
Looking for astronauts

It's a little too late, too late, too late for this
Isn't it a little too late for this?
Little too late, too late for this
Isn't it a little too late for this?

You know you have a permanent piece
Of my medium-sized American heart

We're out looking for astronauts
Looking for astronauts
We're out looking for astronauts
Looking for astronauts

Are we gone?
Come on, yeah, we know we're gone
Bye bye bye
Bye bye bye, we know we're gone
Take all your reasons and take them away to the middle of nowhere, and on your way home
Throw from your window your record collection
They all run together and never make sense, but that's how we like it, and that's all we want
Something to cry for and something to hunt

Are we gone?
Come on, yeah, we know we're gone
Bye bye bye
Bye bye bye, we know we're gone

We're out looking for astronauts
Looking for astronauts
We're out looking for astronauts
Looking for astronauts

It's a little too late, too late, too late for this
Isn't it a little too late for this?
Little too late, too late for this
Isn't it a little too late for this?

You know you have a permanent piece
Of my medium-sized American heart
So don't wear the watch when you're out with the c**ts
You can break what you have, but the rest of it's mine

Take all your reasons and take them away to the middle of nowhere, and on your way home
Throw from your window your record collection
They all run together and never make sense, but that's how we like it, and that's all we want
Something to cry for, and something to hunt

(ed note: This is an example of Filk Music: folk songs with science fiction or fantasy themes popular at SF conventions. I used to enjoy going to Boskone.)

 Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
        Where the three-body problem is solved,
        Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
        And the cold virus never evolved.                       (chorus)
		
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
        Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
        Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
        And a kilogram weighs half a pound.                     (chorus)
		
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
        No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
        When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
        If we just find a big enough wrench.                    (chorus)
		
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
        And living up here is a bore.
        Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
        'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!                      (chorus)

CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
        Where the space debris always collects,
        We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
        Solar power and zero-gee sex.
                -- sung to tune of "Home on the Range"
				
Copyright © 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm. All Rights Reserved.				

• 

Oh the whiskey is floating, won't stay in ye glass
I'm weightless and spinning and drunk of me ass
Oh the whiskey is floating in a sphere b'for me head
If we don't clear this wormhole we're surely be dead

Refrain:
So reach for the whiskey boys reach for the stars
They won't stop us drinking on Venus or mars
So reach for the whiskey boys reach for the sky
For the vacuum of space sucks the bottles all dry

Oh infinite booty awaits us in space
We'll pillage and plunder with fervor and grace
Thats whats my astronomical unit is for
Let's party where no one has partied before

Refrain

Alone in the cockpit i gaze at the stars
I drink and i think of my hooooooooome (he thinks of his home) (of my hooome)

Our thrusters are the hottest that you've ever felt
They might just unbuckle your asteroid belt
We're honing our moonwalking skills as we speak
We'll dance on Uranus at this time next week

• 

Won herself a pass to some far off moon
It was second class but what's to lose?
And looking out her window she could more than assume
That you can't see air or time

She's the only rocketeer in the whole damn place
They gave her a mirror so she could talk to a face
She still got plenty lonely but that's just the case
With time, time, time

Started hearing voices sometime in June
She knew she could go crazy but didn't think that soon
Now she doesn't feel lonely but she'd just as soon
Try, try, try, try

Man shot to the moon
I bought a paperback and want to go real soon
I'm shot to the moon
Been there a half an hour, I want to come home soon

• 

I always said when I'm gone, when I’m dead
Don't lay me down with the dirt on my head
You won't need a shovel, you don’t need a cold headstone
You don't need to cry, I'm gon' be going home

I'm waiting for my spaceship to come back to me
It's coming back for me
I don't really care if you believe it's coming back for me, yeah
I been living in a lonesome galaxy
But in my dreams, I see them come ’n rescue me
Look up in the sky and there they’ll be
I bet you'll think of me then
You’re gonna say, "Ooh, look at that, oh yeah, yeah"
Damn, if it ain't true
They're coming back for me, they're coming back for me, yeah

I knew from the start I don’t belong in these parts
There's too much hate, there's too much hurt for this heart
Lord knows this planet feels like a hopeless place
Thank God I'm going back home to outer space

I'm waiting for my spaceship to come back to me
It's coming back for me
I don't really care if you believe it's coming back for me, yeah
I been living in a lonesome galaxy
But in my dreams, I see them come 'n rescue me
Look up in the sky and there they'll be
I bet you'll think of me then
You're gonna say, "Ooh, look at that, oh yeah, yeah"
Damn, if it ain't true
They're coming back for me, they're coming back for me, yeah

I'm waiting for my spaceship to come back for me
And I don't really care if you believe me
Oh I, I have been living in a lonesome galaxy
But in my dreams, I see them come 'n rescue me
Look up in the sky and there they'll be
I bet you'll think of me then
You're gonna say, "Ooh, look at that, oh yeah, yeah"
Damn, if it ain't true
They're coming back for me, they're coming back for me, yeah

As I leave this earth and sail into the infinite cosmo of the universe
The wars, the triumphs, the beauty and the bloodshed
The ocean of human endeavor
It all grows quiet, insignificant
I'm nothing more than recycled stardust and borrowed energy
Born from a rock, spinning in the ether
I watch my life backwards and forwards and I feel free
Nothing is real, love is everything, and I know nothing

Songwriters: Andrew Pearson / Kesha Sebert / Pebe Sebert

• 

Well, I'd like to visit the moon
On a rocket ship high in the air
Yes, I'd like to visit the moon
But I don't think I'd like to live there
Though I'd like to look down at the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love
So although I might like it for one afternoon
I don't want to live on the moon

I'd like to travel under the sea
I could meet all the fish everywhere
Yes, I'd travel under the sea
But I don't think I'd like to live there
I might stay for a day there if I had my wish
But there's not much to do when your friends are all fish
And an oyster and clam aren't real family
So I don't want to live in the sea

I'd like to visit the jungle, hear the lions roar
Go back in time and meet a dinosaur
There's so many strange places I'd like to be
But none of them permanently

So if I should visit the moon
Well, I'll dance on a moonbeam and then
I will make a wish on a star
And I'll wish I was home once again
Though I'd like to look down at the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love
So although I may go I'll be coming home soon
'Cause I don't want to live on the moon
No, I don't want to live on the moon

• 

She was born in '37
Grew up to join the space programme
The first female cosmonaut
In '63 her craft was launched

Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova

In Vostok 6 she made her flight
Orbiting three days and nights
Fifty times around the world
All alone this russian girl

Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova

5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

She was born in '37
Twice awarded the order of Lenin
The first woman hero of the modern age
But for Valentina there's no grand parade

Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova

5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1

• 

(ed note: the various facts quoted are reasonably accurate)

(spoken)
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
(sung)
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

(waltz)

Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's b****r all down here on Earth!

• 

In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find

In the year 3535
Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today

In the year 4545
You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes
You won't find a thing to chew
Nobody's gonna look at you

In the year 5555
Your arms hangin' limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin' to do
Some machine's doin' that for you

In the year 6565
You won't need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

In the year 7510
If God's a coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He'll look around Himself and say
Guess it's time for the judgment day

In the year 8510
God is gonna shake His mighty head
He'll either say I'm pleased where man has been
Or tear it down, and start again

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wonderin' if man is gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing

Now it's been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what, he never knew, now man's reign is through
But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight
So very far away, maybe it's only yesterday

In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find…

• 

(PAST)

Well, I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming,
Saying something about a queen.
There were peasants singing and drummers drumming
And the archer split the tree.
There was a fanfare blowing to the sun
That was floating on the breeze.
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies. (this was amended with each decade, it is currently "in the 21st century")
Look at Mother Nature on the run
In the nineteen seventies.

(PRESENT)

I was lying in a burned out basement
With the full moon in my eyes.
I was hoping for replacement
When the sun burst thru the sky. (nuclear detonation)
There was a band playing in my head
And I felt like getting high.
I was thinking about what a friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.
Thinking about what a friend had said
I was hoping it was a lie.

(FUTURE)

Well, I dreamed I saw the silver space ships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun,
There were children crying and colors flying
All around the chosen ones.
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun.
They were flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun.
Flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home.

• 

"....Sleeping Satellite is about mans adventures to the moon and was written in the summer of 1989 at the time of 20th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon. The song is intended as a comment on how in the 20 years since the first landing little progress appeared to have been made in space travel/exploration. It's not intended as anti space travel, it's just the opposite and it bemoans the fact that at the time of the anniversary the initiative had not been progressed from the original achievement. Hope this helps. Love and peace, Tasmin...."

I blame you for the moonlit sky
And the dream that died
With the Eagle's flight
I blame you for the moonlit nights
When I wonder why
Are the seas still dry?
Don't blame this sleeping satellite

Did we fly to the moon too soon
Did we squander the chance
In the rush of the race
The reason we chase is lost in romance
And still we try
To justify the waste
For a taste of man's greatest adventure

I blame you for the moonlit sky
And the dream that died
With the Eagle's flight
I blame you for the moonlit nights
When I wonder why
Are the seas still dry?
Don't blame this sleeping satellite

Have we lost what it takes to advance?
Have we peaked too soon?
If the world is so green
Then why does it scream under a blue moon
We wonder why
If the earth's sacrificed
For the price of it's greatest treasure

I blame you for the moonlit sky
And the dream that died
With the Eagle's flight
I blame you for the moonlit nights
When I wonder why
Are the seas still dry?
Don't blame this sleeping satellite

And when we shoot for stars
What a giant step
Have we got what it takes
To carry the weight of this concept
Or pass it by like a shot in the dark
Miss the mark with a sense of adventure

I blame you for the moonlit sky
And the dream that died
With the Eagle's flight
I blame you for the moonlit nights
When I wonder why
Are the seas still dry?
Don't blame this sleeping satellite

• 

A sea shanty, chantey, or chanty is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labor on board large merchant sailing vessels. The term shanty most accurately refers to a specific style of work song belonging to this historical repertoire. However, in recent, popular usage, the scope of its definition is sometimes expanded to admit a wider range of repertoire and characteristics, or to refer to a "maritime work song" in general.

Of uncertain etymological origin, the word shanty emerged in the mid-19th century in reference to an appreciably distinct genre of work song, developed especially in American-style merchant vessels that had come to prominence in the decades prior to the American Civil War. Shanty songs functioned to synchronize and thereby economize labor, in what had then become larger vessels having smaller crews and operating on stricter schedules. The practice of singing shanties eventually became ubiquitous internationally and throughout the era of wind-driven packet and clipper ships.

Shanties had antecedents in the working chants of British and other national maritime traditions, such as those sung while manually loading vessels with cotton in ports of the southern United States. Shanty repertoire borrowed from the contemporary popular music enjoyed by sailors, including minstrel music, popular marches, and land-based folk songs, which were then adapted to suit musical forms matching the various labor tasks required to operate a sailing ship. Such tasks, which usually required a coordinated group effort in either a pulling or pushing action, included weighing anchor and setting sail.

The shanty genre was typified by flexible lyrical forms, which in practice provided for much improvisation and the ability to lengthen or shorten a song to match the circumstances. Its hallmark was call and response, performed between a soloist and the rest of the workers in chorus. The leader, called the shantyman, was appreciated for his piquant language, lyrical wit, and strong voice. Shanties were sung without instrumental accompaniment and, historically speaking, they were only sung in work-based rather than entertainment-oriented contexts. Although most prominent in English, shanties have been created in or translated into other European languages.

The switch to steam-powered ships and the use of machines for shipboard tasks, by the end of the 19th century, meant that shanties gradually ceased to serve a practical function. Their use as work songs became negligible in the first half of the 20th century. Information about shanties was preserved by veteran sailors and by folklorist song-collectors, and their written and audio-recorded work provided resources that would later support a revival in singing shanties as a land-based leisure activity. Commercial musical recordings, popular literature, and other media, especially since the 1920s, have inspired interest in shanties among landlubbers. The modern performance contexts of these songs have affected their forms, their content, and the way they are understood as cultural and historical artifacts. Recent performances range from the "traditional" style of practitioners within a revival-oriented, maritime music scene, to the adoption of shanty repertoire by musicians in a variety of popular styles.

Nature of the songs

Function

In the days when human muscles were the only power source available aboard ship, shanties served practical functions. The rhythm of the song served to synchronize the movements of the sailors or to pace the labor as they toiled at repetitive tasks. Singing helped to alleviate boredom and to lighten, perhaps, the psychological burden of hard work. Shanties may also be said to have served a social purpose, as to build camaraderie.

Form

All shanties had a chorus of some sort, in order to allow the crew to sing all together. Many shanties had a "call and response" format, with one voice (the shantyman) singing the solo lines and the rest of the sailors bellowing short refrains in response (compare military cadence calls).

The shantyman was a regular sailor who led the others in singing. He was usually self-appointed. A sailor would not generally sign on as a shantyman per se, but took on the role in addition to their other tasks on the ship. Nevertheless, sailors reputed to be good shantymen were valued and respected.

The following example, a verse of the shanty "Boney" (in reference to Napoleon), shows the call and response form and the interplay between the voices of the shantyman and the crew.

Shantyman (solo): Boney was a warrior,
All (refrain): Way-ay-ya,
Shantyman (solo): A reg'lar bull and tarrier,
All (refrain): John François!

When working this as a short-drag shanty (see below), hands on the line would synchronize their pulls with the last syllable of each response (in italics).

Lyrical content

The practical function of shanties as work songs was given priority over their lyrics or the musicality of a performance. Due to this, shanty texts might have been poor from an aesthetic standpoint—even at times random nonsense—so long as the singing fit the form of the work song. One writer about shanties warned his readers that their lyrics, to landsmen, would "probably appear as the veriest doggerel." He went on to explain,

As a rule, the chantey in its entirety possesses neither rhyme nor reason; nevertheless, it is admirably fitted for sailors' work. Each of these sea-songs has a few stock verses or phrases to begin with, but after these are sung, the soloist must improvise, and it is principally his skill in this direction that marks the successful chantey-man.

Improvisation and stock verses were the tools of the trade of shantymen. Similar to the blues, shanties often exhibited a string of such verses without much explicit or continuous theme. While on one hand this may simply reflect the aesthetic of the music-culture from which the form originated, this, too, was a feature suited to practical restrictions. Work tasks might be of any length and often unpredictable. Songs with a fixed set of verses, or ballads, which tell a story, were not so well suited to tasks that could end abruptly at any time or that might require extending.

Improvising of lyrics in such a context could be seen as an African-American musical characteristic, as Euro-American observers of Black work-singing consistently remarked on its extempore nature. Stock verses helped the shantyman fill space when his creative faculties came up short. These might take the form of multipurpose clichés, like,

Up aloft this yard must go.
[refrain]
Up aloft from down below.
[refrain]

Or, the shantyman may use formulas, like "Were you ever in [blank]?", for example,

Were you ever down in Mobile Bay?
[refrain]
A-screwing cotton by the day?
[refrain]

(The refrain in these cases may be any; that is, the stock verses may be fitted to any of a number of shanties having a similar tune-chorus form.)

Many stock verses used phrases that "floated" between both minstrel and authentic African-American traditional songs. For example, the phrase "girl with the blue dress on" is documented in a Black muledriver's song and in a popular minstrel song, as well as in a few shanties, for example,

O wake her, O shake her,
O shake that girl with the blue dress on,
O Johnny come to Hilo;
Poor old man.

As evident from the last lyric, above, shanty lyrics were not limited to seafaring or work topics. Drawing lyrics (and sometimes entire songs) from the popular and traditional repertoires of the time meant that a wide range of themes were represented.

Types

Broadly speaking, the categories for shanties can be understood in terms of whether the task(s) for which they were used was/were related to hauling or heaving. "Hauling" (pulling) actions were intermittent in nature. They required a coordinated show of focused exertion, not sustained, but rather at specific moments. Shanties for hauling tasks thus coordinated the timing of those exertions, the "pulls." "Heaving" (pushing) actions were of a continuous nature. In these, coordination was of minor importance as compared to pacing. Rather than rhythmically timing the labor, shanties for heaving were more intended to set an appropriate, manageable pace and to occupy or inspire workers throughout the duration of what could often be long tasks.

Types related to hauling actions

Long-drag shanty

Also called a "halyard shanty". Sung with the job of hauling on halyards to hoist, over an extended period, topsail or topgallant yards. Usually there are two pulls per chorus as in "Way, hey, Blow the man down!" Examples: "Hanging Johnny," "Whiskey Johnny," "A Long Time Ago," and "Blow the Man Down."

• Sample: "Hurrah for the Black Ball Line" (video), led by Peter Kasin on the ship Joseph Conrad at the Mystic Sea Music Festival, 2010.

Short-drag shanty

Also called a "[fore/main]sheet shanty". Sung for short hauling jobs requiring a few bursts of great force, such as changing direction of sails via lines called braces, or hauling taut the corners of sails with sheets or tacks. These are characterized by one strong pull per chorus, typically on the last word, as in "Way, haul away, haul away "Joe"'!" Examples: "Boney," "Haul on the Bowline," and "Haul Away Joe."

• Sample: "Haul Away Joe" (audio), sung by A. Wilkins, Eastern U.S., ca. 1930–32. From the U.S. Library of Congress, R. W. Gordon Collection.

Sweating-up chant

Also called a "swaying off chant. Sung for very brief hauling tasks, as for a few sharp pulls or "swigs" on a halyard to gain maximum tautness of a sail. These short chants are often classed as "sing-outs," but their form differs little from sheet shanties. Examples include mostly chants that have not gone under any well-known name, along with the better known "Johnny Bowker" and other short-drag shanties.

• Sample: "Haul the Woodpile Down" (audio) sung by unnamed sailor in San Francisco Bay area, early 1920s. From the U.S. Library of Congress, R. W. Gordon Collection.

Hand over hand shanty

Used for lighter hauling tasks, such as setting staysails and jibs or when simply hauling in the slack of a rope. The action is that of tugging alternately with each hand, on each beat.

• Sample: A recreation of a hand over hand chant (video), from notation by Doerflinger (1951) of Capt. James P. Barker's singing.

Bunt shanty

Used for "bousing up" (i.e. hauling) a bunt—the tightly bunched bundle of a sail that would need to be gathered up and fastened to the yard when furling. "Paddy Doyle's Boots" is universally attested as one of the few, exclusive bunt shanties. However, "Saint Helena Soldier" and "Johnny Bowker" have also been noted.

Stamp and go shanty

Also called a "runaway" or "walk away" shanty. Although technically a hauling action, the work accompanied by this type of shanty was continuous in nature. Thus the songs had longer choruses, similar to heaving shanties. The work entailed many hands taking hold of a line with their backs to the "fall" (where the line reaches the deck from aloft) and marching away with it along the deck.

On vessels of war, the drum and fife or boatswain's whistle furnish the necessary movement regulator. There, where the strength of one or two hundred men can be applied to one and the same effort, the labor is not intermittent, but continuous. The men form on either side of the rope to be hauled, and walk away with it like firemen marching with their engine. When the headmost pair bring up at the stern or bow, they part, and the two streams flow back to the starting-point, outside the following files. Thus in this perpetual "follow-my-leader" way the work is done, with more precision and steadiness than in the merchant-service.

As this maneuver could only be used on ships with large crews, such as vessels of war—in which few shanties were sung—shanties to accompany it were few in number and were not often noted in context. The most commonly cited example is "Drunken Sailor", which is thought to be one of the few shanties allowed in the Royal Navy.

Types related to heaving actions

Capstan shanty

Raising the anchor on a ship involved winding its rope around a capstan, a sort of giant winch, turned by sailors heaving wooden bars while walking around it. Other heavy tasks might also be assisted by using a capstan. Being a continuous action, shanties sung to accompany these tasks might have longer solo verses and, frequently, a "grand chorus," in addition to the call-and-response form. Examples: "Santianna", "Paddy Lay Back," "Rio Grande," "Clear the Track, Let the Bulgine Run," "Shenandoah", and "John Brown's Body."

• Sample: "Roll the Old Chariot Along" (audio) sung by unnamed sailor in San Francisco Bay area, early 1920s. From the U.S. Library of Congress, R. W. Gordon Collection.

Windlass shanty

Modern shanties were used to accompany work at the patent windlass, which was designed to raise anchor and was operated by the see-saw like action of pumping hand brakes. The up and down motion of the brake levers lent the action a binary form that was well-suited by many of the same songs used as halyard shanties. And yet, the continuous nature of the task also meant grand choruses were possible. So while halyard shanties and capstan shanties tended to be exclusive of one another, windlass shanties sometimes shared repertoire with each of those other types. Examples: "Sally Brown," "Heave Away, My Johnnies," and "Mister Stormalong."

• Sample: "Cheer Up, My Lively Lads" (video), led by Chris Koldewey and Carl Thornton on the schooner L.A. Dunton at the Mystic Sea Music Festival, 2010. Note: this is a small windlass, and the operation of it is a bit different from those on larger vessels.

Pump shanty

Because of leakage of water into the holds of wooden ships, they had to be regularly pumped out. The frequency and monotony of this task inspired the singing of many shanties. One design of pump worked very similarly to the brake windlass, while another, the Downton pump, was turned by handles attached to large wheels. Examples: "Strike the Bell," "Fire Down Below," "South Australia", and "One More Day." An example of special note is "Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her" (also known as "Time for Us to Leave Her"), which was generally sung during the last round of pumping the ship dry once it was tied up in port, prior to the crew leaving the ship at the end of the voyage.

Other types

Miscellaneous deep-water shanties

Shanties might come into play for miscellaneous additional shipboard tasks. For example, songs used to accompany the work of holystoning the deck have been attested. "Poor Old Man" (also known as "Poor Old Horse" or "The Dead Horse") was sung in a ritual fashion once the sailors had worked off their advance pay (the so-called "dead horse") a month into the voyage. The ceremony involved hauling a stuffed facsimile of a horse up to the yardarm, before letting it drop into the sea, all the while singing this customary shanty.

Coastwise and longshore shanties

Shanties have also been well-documented in use for tasks other than those of the deep-water sailor. The working of cargo was performed by stevedores to the accompaniment of shanties, for example in the tradition of the Georgia Sea Island Singers of St. Simons Island, Georgia. They used such shanties as "Knock a Man Down" (a variation of "Blow the Man Down") to load heavy timber. The category of menhaden chanties refers to work songs used on menhaden fishing boats, sung while pulling up the purse-seine nets. The musical forms, and consequently the repertoire, of menhaden chanties differ significantly from the deep-water shanties, most noticeably in the fact that the workers "pull" in between rather than concurrently with certain words of the songs. Common examples are "The Johnson Girls" and "Won't You Help Me to Raise 'Em Boys." Off-shore whalermen in parts of the Caribbean sang shanties whilst rowing their whaleboats and when hauling their catch onto land.

• Sample: A menhaden chantey, "Won't You Help Me to Raise Um" (video), performed by The Northern Neck Chantey Singers of Virginia.
• Sample: A demonstration of whaleboat shanties (video), by The Barrouallie Whalers of St. Vincent & the Grenadines.

The above categories, with respect to the repertoire they contain, are not absolute. Sailors often took a song from one category and, with necessary alterations to the rhythm, tempo, or form, used it for a different task. This can be seen in the frequent lack of consensus, among different writers and informants, as to what job a given shanty was used for.

• 

      Sea shanties are blowing up because of viral Tiktoks and it is overdue in my opinion! Sea shanties are not just sailors' songs — they are a means of archiving and sharing information, as well as facilitating types of work.

     Many people know sea shanties from Hollywood movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or video games like Assassin's Creed Black Flag. While sea shanties are catchy tunes, the actual songs have deeper meaning. Sea shanties contain important information for sailors in periods where they might not be literate or able to carry maps.
     Take the famous "Spanish Ladies" which on the surface is about women, ranting, and roaring. In reality, it codifies navigation info. Here are some lyrics not about ladies:

"Until we strike soundings
In the Channel of old England,
From Ushant to Scilly 'tis thirty-five leagues…
So the first land we made, it is called the Deadman,
Next Ram Head, off Plymouth, Start, Portland, and the Wight"

     This is a nautical chart from Spain to Britain: soundings are depth measurements at sea, there is the distance measurement between Ushant, France, to the island of Scilly, a deadman is a spot for tying off a ship on shore, and the subsequent locations are west-east visual markers. So what we see here is a song as a method of archiving and sharing important information. It certainly isn't the first time song has been used for preserving information (e.g. Aboriginal songlines).

     The other purpose for sea shanties is for facilitating work. The rhythms among sea shanties relates to the type of work that they were meant to guide. For example, there are heaving/hauling shanties, which were sung while heaving/hauling on lines. Captain Johnson explains the ha-he rhythm in 1929 Around Cape Horn.
     This work-based design is why sea shanties typically don't have instruments and there is often a call-and-response, as there is one person leading the group on the work/song. Leave her Johnny is an examples in 4/4 time with lines 2 and 4 sung in chorus.
     Sea Shanties are quite simple so that they keep the rhythm of work, but also so they can be shortened or extended for the duration of the work. Sea shanties like "Haul on the Bowline" straight up tell you what they're designed for.
     The call-and-response format of sea shanties later re-emerged in popular music. The Pogues used the sea shanty style in a number of songs with South Australia borrowing a hauling-style rhythm and call-and-response. If you have the itch, Spotify has a playlist of Assassins Creed's remastered sea shanties.

     That's a brief intro to sea shanties and why they're so distinctive. There's more nuance — naval vs merchant songs — which I'll defer to specialists, as my knowledge of sea shanties comes from working on tall ships and maritime history as it relates to shipwrecks I've found.

• 

     Important note: the role of Black sailors. I saw a SHA or SAA presentation a few years ago on major percentage of Black mariners in 19th c. merchant navies and the role of Black work songs in the development of sea shanties. In the English Folk Dance and Song Society archive you can listen to recordings of shanties showing the influence of Black music. The attached images shows a Black musician atop a capstan playing a hauling shanty in 1832. Black sailors appear in the English navy as early as the Tudor Period and were a major & of later merchant navies — and especially pirate vessels, who offered a more egalitarian shipboard society. So Black sailors had a role in sea shanties from the start.

     Do sea shanties have a future in the 21st century? The workplace may no longer need work songs. Perhaps the call-and-response and repetitive rhythms could be re-emerge in protest songs.

• 

      John Archer suggests that it is the (Wellerman) shanty’s “cheerful energy and hopeful outlook” – in contrast to other more “dreary” whaling songs – that has led to Wellerman’s rediscovery on social media.

     Nathan Evans, a 26-year-old postman and aspiring musician from outside Glasgow, is credited with having started the “ShantyTok” trend with his rousing rendition of Wellerman, posted in late December.

     “My guess is that the Covid lockdowns have put millions of young [people] into a similar situation that young whalers were in 200 years ago: confined for the foreseeable future, often far from home, running out of necessities, always in risk of sudden death, and spending long hours with no communal activities to cheer them up.”

(ed note: all of which would also apply to spacecraft crew on a long mission)

The first time the humans told us they sang their way through subspace, we thought it a translation error.

.

We-the-hive were overjoyed to meet them. Finally, finally, it was proven that we were not alone! And though we already knew that we must not be, given the vastness of time and the multiverse, we also knew that those same vastnesses were against us. Civilizations we could meet are greatly outnumbered by those who came before us and we are too late to meet, those who will come after us and we are too early for, and those so far away that we cannot find them.

A starfaring civilization, like our own, increased the chances of meeting greatly. One of our most distant scientific surveyors sensed a faint and far away disturbance, similar to the waves our own ships make when diving into and out of subspace. An exploratory team was sent to investigate, and there at the furthest reach ever taken from the hive’s center, to our everlasting joy, we found human explorers on the far edges of their own range.

Their ships were strange to us, and their selves even stranger. Translation, and the mutual communication of peaceful intentions, was difficult. Mathematics was the first understanding we were able to share, as the basic principles do not change—though their and our systems of harnessing it are different. Science followed after, as the elements and natural laws are unchanging. So it was discovered that we-the-hive and the humans share the common ground of being carbon-based heterotrophs who consume water to maintain life processes.

These commonalities were far outnumbered by our differences. Yet, the most important thing we had in common was the desire to understand each other. With earnest effort, with forgiveness for unintended insult and misunderstanding, we worked to learn each other’s languages.

Science being an early part of our understanding of each other, we asked them about the construction of their ships. They told us of their material compositions and their subspace engines, different in design but similar in purpose to our own technology—but when we asked them about the shielding and stabilization they used to make the journey survivable, they told us only that they sang their way through.

Translations were imprecise, and their language often contradictory. Of course we believed that it was yet another translation error. We believed there was a nuance we were missing.

The humans were a very musical civilization. They were always singing, all of them. They sang for joy, and they sang for mourning, and they sang for any reason at all between the two extremes.

(Later, we would discover that this was not universally true. That those who crewed their ships were chosen from the most musical among them. We only met their singers, their travelers, their ship’s crews. How could we know differently?)

We believed, with music such a central part of their civilization, that they had given the words for song more meaning. Their subspace stabilization and shielding technology, without which any ship that dove into the confusion of subspace would be utterly destroyed and lost, had taken its name from music. We-the-hive noted the mistranslation, and worked to increase our understanding.

As our trust and understanding increased, as the human linguists became haltingly conversant in our language and we in theirs, the humans introduced to us a group of their hatchlings. It was a mighty show of trust, as they valued their younger generations as deeply as we did our own. Though still flexible, an adult human’s mind was too set in its ways to easily become fluent in another language. That of their hatchlings was far more suited to the acquisition of language. With equal time spent between their own language and ours, it was hoped that the young would grow to be adults who could serve as translators and teachers to increase the closeness and understanding of our peoples.

We allowed our hatchlings and theirs to mingle, to play together, to bond. We spoke to the human hatchlings, and the speed at which they learned our language matched the speed they learned the language of their own people. It was to be a long project, but a joyful and an exciting one.

We learned more about the humans, and they learned more about us. Along with scientific sharing, we established a small trade, exchange of goods and curiosities from one civilization to another.

Our understanding grew, but we still did not understand completely. The humans told us that they sang their way through subspace. When we could no longer believe that the translation was so deeply in error, we instead believed that the crews who piloted the human ships did not understand the technology they used. They were such a granular species, not unified. We believed that those who built the ships had not shared knowledge with those who piloted them, and so they had developed superstitions around technology they did not comprehend.

We-the-hive asked to send a pod of researchers through a subspace dive on one of the human ships. We asked for it. The humans agreed, willingly, in exchange for an equal number of their own scientists to take the same trip aboard one of our ships. Our pod and their scientists were chosen. The ships and the destination were chosen.

The pod boarded the human ship with nothing but curiosity and excitement. As the humans were wont to limit the number of dives they took and make the most of every trip, a ship carrying cargo on one of their usual supply runs was chosen. The ship was called the Merry Dancer, of the type the humans called a ‘small freighter’.

It was greatly open through the inside. The 'bird’s nest’ hung from the ceiling at the center, and there the Captain and Pilots had their stations. Room had been found to rig up two safety harnesses, to secure two individuals from the research pod where we could watch the Captain and Pilots work. The rest of us joined the singers, who stood in a line from stem to stern along the bottom of the ship.

The mood was solemn and focused as the humans prepared for the journey. The subspace engines were prepped, their rumble vibrating through the ship. The Pilots and Captain stretched their hands and rolled their necks, loosening themselves up. The singers took deep breaths and hummed, warming their voices.

“All Ready?” the Captain asked. She was a small human, her wrinkled skin a pleasingly luminous deep brown and her thickly curly silver hair tied up in many braids and twisted into a knot at the back of her head. She was called Janette, and when she spoke, in her firm and quiet voice, the crew of the Merry Dancer listened closely and with respect.

“Singers in Position,” the chief among the singers—the Lead Chanter—reported. “At your command, Captain.” He was a large human, hairless and very round, with pink skin heavily freckled with brown spots. He was called George, and his voice was big and booming as so many of the ship’s singers were. Even when he was not working he was always surrounded by the singers of the Merry Dancer, in a loud and happy group that was always singing, for they trusted him and liked to be close.

After a look and a nod with the two pilots, the Captain spoke again. “You may begin when ready,” she said. And then, informally and with a small smile, “Sing to me.”

Lead Chanter George stamped out a beat that the rest of the singers took up immediately. He inhaled a massive breath, filling his belly and broad chest to its limit. (And we had heard of the training most ship’s singers chose to undertake from childhood, exercises to increase their lung capacity and improve the volume and resonance of their voices, that they might sing loud and long without doing themselves damage. George epitomized the results, as so many lead chanters did.)

He belted out the line to song we had heard the humans singing before. A 'shanty’, they called it; an old one. It was dated from long before their species even dreamed that they could leave their birth planet and sail across the stars rather than the oceans of their homeworld.

“Oh, we’ll blow the man up and we’ll blow the man down!” George led.

And every singer through the ship, in time and at great volume, sang out in answer: “Way, hey, blow the man down!”

George spared a brief moment of attention to wink at the nearest member of the research pod as he led again: “We’ll make the trip over, won’t let our friends down.”

“Give us some time to blow the man down!” the singers responded.

The sound of their voices and the solid beat of their stamping boots vibrated the entire ship. It was clear that the acoustics were designed such that the vibrations bounced off the walls of the ship, centering unerringly on the crow’s nest. The Captain and the Pilots nodded in time as the Lead Chanter improvised the next verse and sang it up to them, as the singers responded in tuneful chorus.

The Captain’s hand clenched on a lever, the subspace engine throttle, tight enough her knuckles paled. A deep breath, and she slammed the throttle wide open in time with the singers. The engine roared briefly, outclassed only by the song. Immediately it was clear why the humans, in their language, had named their version of the subspace dive after a violent strike—the punch. It was a hard transition, swift and jarring.

Then. Oh, then. We understood, suddenly and most terribly, why the humans could not describe their subspace shielding and stabilization technology to us, for they had none.

They had none!

Their minds, bodies, and their entire ships were fully exposed to the nongeometrical confusion of subspace. The research pod, we who had asked to be there and been eagerly chosen, were caught up in it as well. Spacetime was ruffled, twisted, wrinkled, defying understanding in ways that three-dimensional space and regularly linear time never did. Unshielded subspace was a mind-destroying horror, the likes of which we-the-hive had never experienced.

And through the midst of the direful disorientation, the humans were singing.

We-the-hive discovered the principles of subspace engines, the basics for the traversing of subspace to make the lightyears of interstellar travel pass in hours, long before we used them. The dive to the space below the three dimensional and outside of linear spacetime requires mere force. Three generations were born and died while we developed the much more difficult shielding and stabilization technology, which requires finesse. Only when we had perfected it, when we could hold an entire ship in a stable pocket of three dimensions through a subspace trip, did we become starfarers.

The humans had taken a very different approach.

Lead Chanter George stood like a stone against the wind, inventing lyrics for his ancient shanty, and the ship’s singers stomped the deck in time and answered, never faltering. Above them, Captain Janette and her pilots listened hard to the song and the echoes. Their hands were on their controls, manually firing the ship’s small stabilization engines. They judged by the sound alone whether any part of the ship was warping, if it was redshifting or blueshifting out of tune or out of time.

Ship’s singers had told us, proudly, that they lived and died by their voices. We had thought it hyperbole.

The twist and shake of the ship, what the humans called the shimmy and roll and the bucking gravitational waves, never abated. The singing never ceased. In between lines of the call and response of the shanty, singers took sips of water from the bottles on their belts to keep their throats from growing dry. George communicated with his Second with brief hand signs, and sie took over leading with a different shanty—another ancient song, The Wellerman. The pilots breathed hard with the effort of concentration. Sweat beaded at the Captain’s hairline. A thin trickle ran down her cheek and neck in a jaggedly uneven line, pushed and pulled by the roiling of subspace.

The humans, with their fortitude and adaptability, and specifically the crew of the Merry Dancer with their long experience, were able to keep functioning. They could continue to work despite the tearing disorientation, else the ship and all in it would have been lost. The members of the research pod were not so prepared, and were not so adaptable. With communication disrupted between us so each was utterly alone, with the confusion and isolation overwhelming, we had all curled up tight inside our carapaces for safety, like frightened hatchlings. Only one in three were able to even peek a single eyestalk out to observe with shattered perception, to increase our knowledge and understanding as had been the intention of the trade.

(On the hive’s ship, mid journey, one of the human researchers aboard hesitantly asked when the trip was going to begin. This caused great confusion all around.)

Another unknowable and incomprehensible time later, the Second signaled to Lead Chanter George, and he led again with a third song—Roll The Old Chariot Along. The music, sure and unending, was a comfort in the confusion. The singers’ strong voices, unified, were a touchstone in the chaos.

The third song was ongoing when the subspace engine began cycling again, powering up for the punch back out. Despite the strain, despite the confused length of time of their singing, George’s voice grew in volume, and the rest of the singers followed. They overwhelmed the sound of the engine, providing Captain Janette and the Pilots with the guidance they needed through the last moments.

The second punch was every bit as harsh as the first. Space time warped, twisted, and then snapped back into three dimensional linearity. Through the transition, the singers never faltered. The reverberation of their voices rang through the ship, a joyful shout. George had his hands raised high as he led one final chorus at half time.

“Lead Chanter, singers, you may stand down,” the Captain announced, formally, and then smiling but still dignified despite her obvious weariness. “Nicely done, crew.”

Some of the singers cheered and hugged each other, or slapped each other’s backs in celebration. Others, though, ran and fell to their knees by the nearest of the research pod to them.

“What happened?”, “Are they ok?” “Are they hurt?”, “I don’t understand they just collapsed as soon as we punched!”

Lead Chanter George, trusted and respected by the singers he led, sang out calming words even as he sat on the deck beside one the nearest researcher from the pod—one who had an eye stalk out monitoring. He smiled at us, human expression of happiness. He placed one large warm hand on the back of the researcher’s carapace. He could not speak our language, but with his tired voice he sang the tone of safety—with the caress and the crooning he communicated an absence of danger as we might to our own hatchlings.

We would learn that a young relative of his was among the human hatchlings who mingled with ours, that by observing us with our own hatchlings he’d learned the way to offer comfort. One and another of the singers took up the tone, until the ship throbbed with it. The research pod were given care and reassurance, and with the sharp reduction in stress we were able to uncurl, to communicate and reintegrate and return to a harmonious whole as we worked to piece together our shattered understanding of what had occurred.

The touch and the tone were not quite the same as our own, similar enough, but different. Still, the difference was not unpleasant. In that moment, in the relief and the… the kindness, the sonorous resonance of a human singer’s voice and the softness of a human hand were fixed as beautiful. These humans were not us, not ours, but become beloved. When the research pod was reintegrated in the whole of we-the-hive, the beauty and affection remained.

We would learn that the journey we observed had been 'easy’, routine, as safe as any trip could be. The humans had pride in the safety of their ships and in the training of their capable crews—that they lost, astoundingly, merely one in two thousand ships in unstabilized dives.

They had done so much with so little, singing their way through subspace while still researching the technologies that would make it safe.

When we-the-hive truly understood the risks the humans took with every single journey, when the research pod’s knowledge was fully integrated, we knew we could not leave them without the advantages we had.

.

The decision to share all details of our subspace shielding and stabilization technology with the humans—with our friends—was swift and without dissent.

• 

      AS HAD become their habit before an evening shift package, the Voice-of-Decision for River-’Tween-Worlds and the Operations Director for Transtellar United’s Wormgate Complex dined together. The menu consumed consisted of a raw and slightly rank slab of gristly deep ranger flesh liberally dusted with Kessta pollen, iced tea, and a Cobb salad.
     The fact that the two aspects of the meal were consumed two point forty-eight parsecs (8 light-years) apart did nothing to distract from the worn-comfortable camaraderie of the meal.
     “Voice-of-the-Dance Tleelot found the selections of Artist-called-Miller most impressive. Believes we can apply to varianting of Flame-River and Joyous-Bay dance cycles. We shall experiment next amusements gathering.”
     The fluid chirps and puns of Tarrischall’s actual words in the tongue of the People flowed behind the stark computer English. Marta Lane had long ago developed the knack of laying the alien’s vocal emotion tones over the bland and choppy diction of the translator block to deduce the true meaning behind her friend’s speech.
     “I’ve found that Glenn Miller works better then Cab Calloway for free-fall dance,” she replied. “The flow of the Big Bands draws a more rhythmic line than Bebop. I’d love to see what you are doing with it.”
     “Shall record and send, Marta-Friend. Appreciate your introduction to musics of your Pre-Space-Times. Would like more, especially Artist-Called-Miller.”
     “My pleasure, Tarrischall. After shift tonight I’ll bang ‘Tuxedo Junction’ and ‘The Jumpin Jive’ across the link. We might try a little Charley Parker while we’re at it."
     Seated in her quarters aboard the Stellar Transfer Command Station, Lane took up her personal data pad, and clipped the transparent rectangle of crystal state circuitry and liquid surface display onto the forearm sleeve of her black vacuum suit liner.
     The figure within the snug liner was still firm and svelte, and Lane’s angular features were still unlined for all of her fifty plus years. An athletic mother of two and grandmother of four, she well-carried the biological rewards bestowed upon a human female who had lived the majority of her life in a low-to-zero gravity environment.
     A simple gene booster treatment could have erased the silver hazing her blond spacer’s ponytail as well, but she elected to keep her hair natural. It served to remind the youngsters on her watch that the Boss had indeed been around since the legendary days when the old fire-belching shuttle rockets had been the only available stair step into space.
     Lane tapped the time hack recall on the pad’s surface with a fingernail. “Speaking of banging things across, we’d better get to work if we’re going to make that transfer at twenty-two hundred, Voice-of-Decision. I make it T minus two hours eighteen minutes to shift initiation.”
     “Wrong, O Operations Director, it is two hours, seventeen minutes and twenty-three seconds, human time, precise, to channel open. Any load configuration changes in batch of cheap beads and trinkets you send to us?”
     “Nothing appreciable. The outbound will be a couple of tons light. Quan Intertrade had a transshipment delay on a load of entertainment cards they wanted to squeeze aboard today’s load. They requested a hold, but I chilled it. I daresay the People can survive without The Classics of Twentieth Century Video Comedy, volume eight, for another twenty-four hours.
     “Volume numbered eight?” Tarrischall chirped.
     “Uh-huh,” Lane called up a data line. “Leave it to Beaver through Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”
     “My species thanks you for reprieve.”
     “You’re most welcome. You never know, though. You might like the one about the beavers.”

---

     Humor-purring to himself Tairischall-of-the-Crystal Springs twisted his sphere-of-communications closed, stowing it into a pouch in his possessions harness. He had eaten in the lower observation bubble of the River-’Tween Worlds Nest-of-Guidance, simultaneously enjoying his meal, his conversation with Friend-Marta-of-the-Place-called-New-England, and the awe-inspiring view.
     River-’Tween Worlds held in geosynchronous orbit above the North Pole of Life-Waters, the home world of the People. The huge northern polar continent with its central ice cap rotated slowly beneath them, half in shadow, half blazing in the golden light from Life-Fire-of-All-Things.
On the nightside of Life-Waters, the lights of the linear      river cities of the People trickled along the numerous broad watercourses that connected the ice pack with the equatorial lake/seas. On dayside, in a half loop along the equatorial orbits, the sunward collector arrays of the light-power-gatherers glittered like a string of pleasure-time beads.
     River-’Tween-Worlds itself was not visible from this end of the great cylindrical skynest. The channel entry assembly held in a slightly higher orbit above the support facility. However, the running lights and glowing propulsor vents of the orbital traffic servicing River-’Tween-Worlds spiraled up past the skynest, the trade of the People flowing out to buy the wonders and amusements of the distant Upright culture (Human).
     With a final quick cleansing lick of his forepaws, Tarrischall fluidly reversed himself in midair, launching down the core passage with a thump of his muscular tail against the dome surface.
     Approaching the central interchange, he exchanged whistled salutations with a pair of coworkers. Spiraling past them, he snared the padded surface of the maneuvering ball that hung suspended at the corridor nexus. His six sets of claws caught a purchase in the webbed fabric and he re-launched himself into the guidance chamber access, his day’s duties due to commence in a sixteenth portion.
     None of the People’s space facilities utilized artificial gravity unless it was necessary for some industrial application. A semi-aquatic species, the People had come to relish free fall as much as they loved the floating freedom of their world’s vast network of lakes, rivers and shallow seas. A product of his planet’s water-dominated evolutionary processes, Tarrischall was asexipedal, carnivorous semi-mammal, bearing closest resemblance to a terrestrial river otter blown up to the scale of a Bengal tiger. Covered from whisker pads to tail with a glossy blood-red fur that trended toward a yellowish cream tone along his belly, his species found clothing irrelevant.
     Friend-Marta had often mentioned that her kind found the People to be most attractive. Honestly flattered, Tarrischall had always replied with a verity of polite sophistries.
     Marta’s folk were certainly nice enough to know and do trade with, but it had to be admitted that the Uprights were an odd-looking crew.
     Tarrischall shot into the Guidance Chamber, a spherical structure with far-viewer panels sheathing its upper and lower surfaces and a row of task pallets spaced around it in a central belt.
     The other Voices were already present and at station with shift preparations already underway under the guidance of Narisara-of-the-Ice-Crystal-River. The sleek, black-furred Voice-of-Physics would no doubt have an arch comment or two about the Voice-of-Decision being the last to arrive for duty.
     Bouncing off the maneuvering ball in the center of the chamber, Tarrischall dove across to his task pallet. En route he aimed a teasing nip at one of Narisara’s rear legs. Without looking up from the glowing half-bubble of her instrument display she replied with a tail swat that could have broken a jaw if it had been aimed to connect.
     Still purring contentedly to himself, Tarrischall belly flopped onto his pallet, his rear- and mid-claw sets hooking into the webbing while the stubby digits of his forepaws played across the touch bar arrays surrounding his display bubble, summoning it to life.
     “Fair night, pups,” he called cheerfully. “Let’s send the Uprights some presents.”

---

     The security hatch into the gate operations center recognized Marta’s bio-pattem, sliding open at her approach.
     The compartment that contained the center was a large one for a space station. Three tiers of ranked workstations descended from Director’s row, facing the ten-by-five-meter main viewer tank inset in the far bulkhead. Her section chiefs were already hard at it, working the shift countdown.
     “Evening, Marta,” Assistant Operations Director Estiban Rocardo called up from the central station of the upper tier. “T minus two and ten to dilation and we are showing all green boards.”
     Behind him, the primary display held focus on the Worm Gate itself. Considerable familiarity was required before the view ceased to inspire awe.
     The gate complex hovered in fixed orbit at the L-2 Lagrange point beyond Earth’s moon. Several kilometers beyond the rotating rim of the command station, the gate itself lay silhouetted against the mottled gray expanse of Luna’s rear face.
     The gate structure itself could only be called titanic. Taking advantage of free-fall engineering, its individual components were unconnected, station-keeping on each other via cybemetically precise thruster control. The twin semi-cylinders of the field generator/accumulator arrays dwarfed the girder structure tube of the perimeter grid, the so-called "worm cage” at their center focus, and the cage itself was one half a kilometer across by one and a half in length.
     The toylike myriad of support facilities clustering in free space around the gate, the barge docks, the maintenance and warehousing platforms and the habitat wheels, gave the facility scale. Smaller yet, tug and barge combos and orbital shuttles flitted between the stations like gleaming fish within the structure of a coral reef.
     In absolute contrast was the Wormhole itself. It was there. It was always there, trapped at the central nexus of the worm cage. Marta knew she was looking right at it, but there was nothing to be seen save for the hole’s imprint on her instrumentation.
     In its power-conserving nontransit mode, the Wormhole was almost microscopic, held open just enough to insure continued existence and to permit the coherent light flow of the communications laser.
     The Worm Gate was beyond being the single greatest creation of humanity. Its building had required the concentrated efforts of two civilizations. The only like to it was its identical twin parked above the second planet of the Wolf 359 system (which is two point forty-eight parsecs from Sol. The People's home star).
     Marta chuckled softly, deliberately pausing for a moment to make herself be impressed.
     “What’s the joke, Marta?” Rocardo inquired, lifting a dark eyebrow.
     “Oh, nothing, Estiban. It’s all so workaday anymore that sometimes I forget that we’re busy doing the impossible out here.”
     “What do you mean by impossible?”
     “Back in my first year at MIT I can remember attending a lecture by one of the world’s foremost physicists who loudly and firmly proclaimed that the worm search was a waste of funding and that interstellar travel was and would always be beyond the reach of mankind.”
     Her Assistant Director smiled indulgently. “No insult tended. But that was a long time ago.
     “I suspect, young man, that had we not made contact with the Furrys that world view would still be in effect. Science is instinctively conservative. We don’t like to shuffle the laws of the universe around unless we have a very good reason for it. But once we knew that somebody was indeed in the neighborhood, we simply had to figure out a way to borrow each other’s lawn mowers.”
     Marta had been a little girl when first contact had been established between Humanity and the People. The two species had found each other intriguingly different and yet much alike, both had a broad streak of curiosity in their racial psyche. Both also soon found the years’ long cycle of conversation via radio telescope infinitely unsatisfying. A human scholar asking a question of his counterpart among The People had to wait years for the reply and vice versa. Within the scientific communities of both worlds the quest for an improved form of communication became a fixation that bordered on a mania.
     Each culture had possessed its own Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Each had an approximately equal understanding of the structure of the universe and each focused its search in the same rarified area of theoretical physics, seeking for a mathematically irrational chimera called a wormhole.
     A decade was spent proving that, yes, such things did in fact exist, but as an ephemeral transitory at the outermost edge of quantum reality. Dimensional “holes” did indeed open intermittently between far distant points in space, but so submicroscopically small and for such a brief period that even a single photon of light could not hope to transit through one.
     A second decade was spent proving that such a wormhole could be “caught” and “held open” via a negative energy field. With the proper application of power, vast oceans of power, it could be “stretched “ to a “size” that would permit the passage of physical matter. However, a living being could not survive the transit. Systems created within the three-dimensional universe, be they mechanical, electronic, or bio-logical, could not function within the dimensionless realm that existed within the wonnhole, but ideas and goods could theoretically be passed across from one world to the other.
     A third decade went into the construction of the hardware to make it happen.

---

     “River-'Tween-Worlds, this is Worm Gate. We are coming up on shift initiation. We show good systems and we are ready to set transfer sequencing.”
     Marta gave her command headset a final settling tug, her eyes flicking to the multiple countdown display bars glowing across the bottom of the imaging tank.
     “Understood, Worm Gate. We also prepared.” Over the translator link Tarn'schall’s voice held none of its usual humorous shading. Her Furry compatriot was the consummate professional when it came to Operations. “We have good systems. We stand by sequencing.”
     “Very well, River-’Tween-Worlds. Coming up on sequencing initiator. Mark zero three … two … one … Set.”
     The twin timing bar displays crawled across the main screen. T minus ten minutes to power up. T minus twenty-five to barge entry. Instantly the bars began their slow shrink back down toward the zero point.
     The clocks had started.
     One could not dally around with a barge shift. Not while one was expending enough electricity to power an entire continent. The gate crews at both ends of the hole lived by the fact they could build up enough juice in their accumulator arrays to execute a single two-way barge transfer every twenty-four hours plus a small emergency reserve.
     “We have systems verification from ‘Tween-Worlds,” the Grid Systems Manager called up from his station. “Auto sequencing set and verified.”
     “Very good, grid. River-’Tween-Worlds, we show auto sequencing set and counting. Do you concur?”
     “We concur sequencing, Worm Gate. We are go for transfer.”
     Lane abstractly noted that the archaic space age technoslang sounded odd coming from one of the People. Tarrischall had become immensely proud of his linguistic expertise in the area, however.
     “Acknowledged, River-’Tween-Worlds. Transfer is go. Securing communications and data links and withdrawing lasercom platform at this time. Talk with you afterward.”
     “A-Okay, Worm Gate. Later. Want to hear more about this Jumping Jive. River-’Tween-Worlds, over and out.”
     “Jumping Jive?” Rocardo queried off circuit.
     “Um-hum, Marta replied absently. “It’s a long story. Let’s just say I’m running a personal cultural exchange program with our Furry friends.”
     Her mouth tugged down momentarily as the command link indicator with River-’Tween-Worlds control blinked off her communications display. When they dilated the gate to move a cargo barge through to the Wolf system, they temporarily lost their ability to push a modulated data stream through the Wormhole to the opposite gate. Thus, each transfer had to be accomplished as a pretimed sequence of events.
     That loss had always made Marta Lane just a little bit uncomfortable.

---

     “Raft positioning?” Tarrischall tossed the question over his shoulder, not shifting his keen jet-eyed gaze from the distant-vision displays.
     “Raft anchored at channel approach,” Marrun-of-Gray-Lake growled back from the Voice-of-Raft-Guidance position. “Drift canceled on all vectors and holding stable.”
     On the overhead displays the panning vision of the seer units verified the burly Gray-Laker’s words. The cargo raft, a huge round-ended cylinder with its sides marked with the odd angular writing and insignia of the Uprights, hovered beyond the gaping mouth of the perimeter grid, poised for the opening of the channel. Remotely guided Pusher units clung to its flanks like leech shrimp, their propulsor vents flaring intermittently.
     “Raft Functions?”
     “Internal functions verified to the sixteenth level,” Varess-of-Storms-Bay replied crisply. The slight, golden-furred Voice-of-Raft-Guidance was the newest member of the watch and still somewhat self-conscious among Tarrischall’s veteran crew. “Ready to assume entry guidance.”
     “Very good. We will be ready for you in a moment.” Tarrischall’s eyes flicked to the disappearing time dots on the sequencing display. “Voice-of-Physics, channel status.”
     “Plus on all channel systems,” Naiisara replied crisply. "Nominal to the sixteenth level. Primary and crisis reservoirs at fifteen point six. Prepared for route sequencing on posted marks. Prepared for last phase safety block clearance.”
     “You have it, O elegant black-furred one. Let’s crack her open.” Once more Tarrischall grinned at Narisara’s fastidious snort.
     “All voices prepare for channel opening.” she called. "Safety blocks are clear. Flow increase on my notice. Portion one … portion two … portion three …

---

     “Four… three …two …one …,” The Gate Systems Manager droned from his workstation, calling off the last disappearing millimeters of the bar display. No matter how many times she sat through it, Marta still felt her throat tighten as the countdown reached its conclusion.
     “Zero … we have power up.”
     There was no overt physical change within or without the control center beyond a shifting of light patterns on the control displays. But within the gate accumulator arrays huge supercooled fluid state switches closed, bringing the largest single power system the human race had ever created on-line. Focused negative energy fields of mind-boggling intensity converged and intermeshing within the worm cage. For a brief moment mankind warred with the very physical structure of the Universe … and won.
     A blackness came to be in the heart of the perimeter grid.
     A blackness deeper than that of the surrounding space itself. A slowly growing sphere of absolute nothing, a nothing with a density, a dimension, a nothing that the stars couldn’t be seen through, a nothing that twisted the stomach when looked at. A midnight void darker than the human comprehension of dark.
     As he always did at the opening of the gate, Rocardo murmured, “One of these days I’m not going to want to look at that damn thing anymore.”
     Marta nodded in understanding. She was in love with the possibilities of the Wormhole and of interstellar communications, but there was always a discomfort in looking at something human eyes had never been designed to see.
     As it was, they were only seeing the wormhole’s event horizon, that portion of its structure that extruded into the human-experienced three dimensions. There was much, much more to it than what was visible and likely just as well.
     Bad as it was looking at the hole through a live video pickup, it was worse via a viewport or a space suit faceplate. Lane found it rather like standing on the edge of a high cliff or atop a tall building. A … pulling.
     Others felt it as well. There had been a number of suicide attempts over the years involving the wormhole. One or two had even made it in. Marta had often mused that it probably was a rather interesting way to go
.     The sphere of ultimate emptiness expanded until it just filled the center of the girderwork cylinder.
     “We have full dilation and stability,” Rocardo reported from below, “All boards read green. Reception tugs are positioning. T minus thirteen and counting to projected barge entry and acquisition.”
     “Very good. Maintain monitoring. Stand by for reception.”
     For the moment all of the action was taking place out at Wolf 359. Tarrischall and his gang would be busy popping the sixty-thousand-metric-ton transfer barge into their end of the hole.
     “End” was a purely subjective reference, of course. While the actual state of existence within the Wormhole could be described mathematically, it could not be visualized by a mind designed to operate in three dimensions. On one level, the concept of “distance” had become irrelevant within the perimeter grid of the gate, all points within its contained “universe” being equidistant. On another, it was time that was irrelevant and all of the space between Wolf 359 and Sol still existed, the materials in transit being dispersed across those quadrillions of kilometers.
     However, even locked within this trans-state, individual atoms still maintained inertia. The barge’s entry momentum would be enough to carry it through the region of irrelevancy from one “end” of the hole to the other.
     Emerging Earthside, the barge’s systems would reintegrate and it would be recovered for unloading.
     Simple and foolproof.

---

     “All pushers unbound and clear,” Marrun reported. On the far viewers, the pusher units could be seen scurrying away from the massive cargo raft, propulsor vents glowing brightly. The raft was on its own now.
     “Voice-of—Physics?”
     “The channel is smooth,” Narisara replied, using the formalism. “The river flows between the stars.”
     "Voice-of-Raft-Guidance?”
     “The raft obeys on all standards. Ready to voyage.”
     “Very well. All Voices, stand by for transit-of-channel. Varess, send her through.”
     On the far viewers, a double belt of dazzling sparks flared into existence at the bow and stem of the cargo raft as its own vents lit. Ever so slowly it began to gain way, the propulsors struggling to inch its bulk forward into the mouth of the perimeter grid.
     “Raft entry velocity to first level … second level … third level…” Varess chanted. “Drift remains null on all vectors … fourth level … fifth …”
     Tarrischall tried to keep his attention focused on the raft. It wasn’t easy with the black sphere of the channel mouth tugging seductively at the edge of his vision. The Ecstasy-of-the-Great-Dark-Current they called it. That near overwhelming urge felt by some of the People to take that longest dive down the channel. Tarrischall often felt the tug himself.
     The dream of doing so and surviving, of reaching the exotic and mysterious world of the Uprights and beyond was a favorite theme of the spinners of projection fictions. Tarrischall enjoyed such yarns and in spite of what Narisara and the other joy-smashing Voices-of-Physics might say, he was certain that someday a technology would be found to permit a living being to ride the currents to another star.
     Varess’ sudden sharp warning cry shattered his musing. “This-Voice-speaks-warning! I have a massive flow net fluctuation aboard the raft! Performance variance across all patterns!”
     “Define!” Tarrischall barked, his head snapping down to his display bubble and to the suddenly racing data lines.
     “No definition isolated! Generalized flow failure in onboard energy matrix! Shifting to crisis alternative flow!”
     Tarrischall gave himself the briefest of instants for consideration. The cargo raft was still stable and gaining velocity as per the set transfer pattern and all functions aboard it had safety duplicates and automatic switch overs. Yet there was a major function collapse going on within the massive vehicle, something beyond anything he had ever seen before.
     He could not risk the River-’Tween-Worlds! He slapped the alarm pad at his side triggering the rising tri-toned wail of the Danger-And-Rally call within all the chambers of the skynest.
     “All Voices! Abort the shift! Abort! Raft Guidance, decelerate! Pusher Guidance, position for recapture! Mender and Mooring Gangs prepare! I speak with Voice-of-Crisis! ”
     “Decelerating!” Varess cried back. “Alternative functions engaged! Braking vents engaged! Drift vectors holding stable. Entry velocity reducing to sixth level … fifth … fourth …
     On the far viewer display the vector of the raft’s propulsor vents altered, thrusting forward. The huge freight hauler was losing velocity, but slowly, so slowly. There was so much mass out there to stop.
     The blunt curved nose of the raft was approaching the mouth of the perimeter grid.
     Maybe it would have been better to trust the duplicate functions and run her through, Tarrischall thought feverishly, but it was too late to bother about it now. They were committed.
     “Velocity now third level … second …"
     On the main display the double ring of scintillating propulsor vents flickered and went dark.
     Varess’ voice rose into a strangled scream. “Alternative energy flow failure! Total failure! Crisis alternative functions do not reply! I have lost raft guidance! She floats free!”
     “Mairun, get your pushers in there now!”
     The Voice-of-Pusher-Guidance could only look slowly away in the refusal posture. “No good, Tarrischall. No good. She’s entering the grid and I don’t have the clearance. If one of my units bumps her in a crisis bonding, I could knock her off vector and into the grid structure. She’s going in and I can’t stop her.”
     He was right. May the Life-Fire-of-All-Things burn all! He was right! Even as Tarrischall looked on in growing horror, the bow of the cargo raft was ghosting into the grid mouth.
     Tarrischall twisted to look at Narisara, his last hope of regaining control of the disintegrating situation. “Flow down, Voice-of-Physics! Close the channel!
     The black-furred one could only look away as well. “No time,” she replied quietly. “We can’t fade the flow fast enough. The closing channel mouth would catch the raft. She’s going through wild, Tarrischall, and we can’t stop her.”
     Tarrischall could only stare up at the far viewer display. “Beware Marta-My-Friend,” he whispered. “Beware.”
     The silver-gray curve of the raft’s bow touched the infinite spherical blackness of the channel event horizon.

---

     The tension inside the control center had grown into something physically perceptible. Tight-lipped, Marta Lane stared as the acquisition time bar crept deeper into the red zone.
     “We are now at T plus two minutes and thirty-nine seconds post projected acquisition, Director,” the gate systems manager said almost apologetically.
     “I can see it, Mr. Desvergers,” she snapped “Quantum monitoring. Status on the hole?”
     “No entry registering yet, ma’am.”
     Lane glanced down at her assistant director. “Something’s wrong Wolf side, Estiban. Tarrischall wouldn’t waste our energy this way with a sloppy transfer. He’s got problems. Take us to Flash Yellow. Set alert protocols until we get this thing sorted out.”
     “Doing it, Marta.”
     “Contact,” The quantum monitor leaned in over his workstation display. “Director, we have mass in the hole …but we have a slow entry … way slow! Less than one-fifth standard transit velocity registering.”
     “What the hell?” Lane’s brows knit together. “How’s the hole standing?”
     “Dimensional structure is stable in all aspects. No variants! We have a good dilation here. This has got to be a barge problem. I confirm we have mass in trans-state and transit. Gravitational displacement is correct for projected payload, but it’s just crawling through.”
     “Power boards, reserve status!”
     “Down to sixty-five of standard. Load draw steady… Recomputing power consumption rates… We’ll make it, but it’ll be close. Forget today’s outbound shift, though. This is going to drain us dry.”
     “Forget the outbound! Stand by your reserve accumulators and alert Ces-Lunar for an emergency power draw! Tug Control!”
     “Yo!
     “I want your reception tugs holding right outside of the worm cage. The second you can get a good approach, move in and get a latch on her. I think we might have a rogue barge coming through. Barge Control!”
     “Yes, ma’am.”
     “You heard what I just said to Tugs. The instant that brute is out of trans-state, get me a full diagnostic. If she seems to be clearing the perimeter grid on her own, let her drift out. Do not attempt active control until she’s in open space.”
     “Understood.”
     “Director! There she is. She’s coming through!” On the main display, the ultradark of the wormhole event horizon bulged. Cherenkov radiation played in spectral lavender waves around the extrusion, hydrogen atoms and solar wind particles from another star system reintegrating into conventional space. Rippling shadow slowly peeled back from the blunt bow of the cargo carrier revealing steel that shimmered with residual inconsistency.
     “Come on, old girl,” Marta found herself murmuring. “Not far now, just a little more.”
     “Barge exit velocity one point five meters per second … No! One point four … point three! She’s decelerating!”
     Marta’s world was turning on edge. “That’s impossible! Barge control, could we have a retro burn or an out-gassing event underway?”
     “Negative! Negative! Her systems haven’t reintegrated from trans-state and I’m not detecting anything venting! This has to be an outside influence!”
     “It’s the magnetic field of the perimeter grid!” Rocardo yelled from his station. “It’s reacting with the ferrous metals in the cargo and hull structure. She’s coming through so far below velocity she may not have the momentum to carry her clear.”
     “Damnit, Estiban don’t give me ‘may’! Yes or no!”
     “Computing now!”
     The answer came from another source. “Velocity point five meters per second … point three … Relative velocity zero! I say again, we have zero velocity… Velocity now negative point one!”
     Half the length of the cargo barge protruded from the unstable, quivering sphere of the gate mouth but only half. Then, slowly the expanse of metal hull began to shorten.
     “My God,” someone spoke in an appalled whisper, “she’s falling back into the hole.”
     “Tugs!” Marta called desperately. “Can you get a lock on her!”
     The Tug Controller was already shaking his head. “No room. No time! She’s going! She’s going! She’s gone!”
     Lane’s thumb flipped aside the guard on her console and smashed down on the alarm key. Throughout the Worm Gate complex the Flash Red disaster klaxons began their harsh bray.

---

     “She’s still in there!” Narisara cried. “The raft is still inside the channel! She did not exit!”
     “That’s impossible,” Tarrischall snapped back. “She had to clear!”
     “She hasn’t,” the Voice-of-Physics replied impatiently. “I am still registering mass inside the channel. Movement rate null. The raft must be caught between the magnetic lobes of the channel mouths.”
     On the far viewer, the black sphere of the channel event horizon continued to hover blandly at the center of the web-work tube of the perimeter grid. Invisible within that sphere, however, the cargo raft was still present, coexistent dimensionally not only within River-’Tween-Worlds but at the Earth Worm Gate as well.
     “Voice-of-Physics, what happens if we can’t clear the channel? What happens when we have to reduce the power flow?”
     “I don’t know,” Narisara replied. “We have never attempted such a simulation.”
     “Guess!”
     “Tarrischall, I can’t! The matter inside the channel is dimensionally unstable. I cannot project how it will react to a channel contraction. Possibly as a quantum material. Possibly as tridimensional. I can’t tell!”
     “Differentiation!
     “As quantum material it may disperse out along the residual thread of the channel, leaking back into tri-space as a few extra ultimotes per lype of interstellar gas.”
     “As trimaterial?”
     “You will be compressing a hundred and eighty thousand kyhar of mass down to a point you could balance on a pup’s claw tip.”
     Tarrischall felt his whiskers bristle. “To say more simply, POOYGH!”
     Narisara gave an affirmative toss of her shapely head. “A mass explosion such as no one has ever imagined. We would bum brighter than the Life-Fire-of-All-Things.”

---

     “Where’s my power!” Marta called in a half-scream to her Energy Boss.
     “They’re trying to get authorization from the Ces-Lunar Grid Authority now, ma’am,” the thoroughly unhappy techno yelled back over his shoulder.
     “Damn it, I’m the authority! Tell those idiots to check their disaster protocols. A Worm Gate emergency has absolute priority over everything except basic life support, and we are declaring a gate emergency! Tell them we could lose the wormhole and the whole bloody L-2 complex if we don’t get that power shift immediately!”
     “Doing it, ma’am!”
     “L-2 traffic control on red command channel, ma’ am,” Communications cut in. “They acknowledge your crisis declaration and are standing by for instructions.”
     “Tell them to initiate immediate dispersal of the complex by Plan Red Roger. Clear all nonessential manned vessels and platforms out of this traffic block with all speed and keep them out until we can get a handle on this thing.”
     “Aye, ma’am.”
     On the big display, the city in the sky was already disintegrating, its component stations leaving their formation within the Lagrange point. With attitude control thrusters and dockedtug engines blazing to haul them clear, the awkward voyagers were drifting outward in a slow motion bomb burst that left the Worm Gate and gate control wheel alone in a growing volume of empty space.
     “We’re starting to get some power supplementation from Ces-Lunar already, Marta,” Rocardo reported, “but we are still trending negative on our accumulator reserves. Can we fade back a little? Let the hole contract a bit to conserve power.”
     Lane shook her head, eyeing the sphere of blackness hovering within the perimeter grid. “We have sixty thousand metric tons of mass out there locked in trans-state, Estiban. If we try altering the variables on that much malleable matter, I don’t know what will happen. Nobody else does either.”
     “Headquarters has triggered a net crisis conference,” the Assistant Director replied, sounding hopeful. “They’re bringing in every physicist in the field to work the problem.”
     “And maybe they’ll come up with some answers in six months or so. We don’t have that much time. Power levels?”
     “Down to twelve per on all reserves.”
     “Dr. Lane, I have an idea,” the tug controller spoke up.
     “Go, Fred.”
     “Why don’t we try and shove the barge out of there? I could send one of our big Miki T-5s into the hole. I know all of its systems would go down as it crossed the event horizon, but we could back it off and run it in at full thrust with a load of momentum built up. It’d wreck the tug, but it might be enough to knock the barge out the other side.”
     Marta turned the suggestion over in her mind examining it from all angles, then shook her head. “No, that might work under simple Newtonian physics but we’re operating quantum here. While we know individual atoms can maintain momentum in trans-state, nobody can say if momentum can be kinetically transmitted.
     “If we ram a tug into the hole, it might just pass right through the barge’s dimensionally irrational form and go right out the other side. On the other hand, there might be enough nuclear forces interaction for the barge’s mass to not only absorb the tug’s momentum but its physical structure as well. The two vehicles could merge with an overlap on the subatomic levels. Two objects can’t occupy the same space, in the nonquantum universe at any rate. When they came out of trans-state at Life-Waters, there could be a mass explosion that could vaporize the whole gate.”
     “Lord and Lady!” The tug controller murmured. He liked the People, too.
     “We’ve got no choice, Estiban,” Lane stated to her Assistant Director, making her final decision in the matter. “If we get down to four percent reserve without stabilization, we’re going to cut the negative energy fields and dump the hole.”
     For a Gate Controller, those words were blasphemy. “You can’t be serious!” Rocardo exclaimed, “It took ten years to isolate and fix a properly oriented wormhole for the 359 system. If we dump the hole …”
     “I know. If we dump the hole, it’s gone. We’ll never get it back. We may never acquire another one for Wolf system either. But if we can keep the physical gate structure intact, we’ll at least have chance to try again. If we destroy the gates, that chance will be gone, too. Power?”
     Rocardo replied by looking down at his station displays. “Now down to nine per on the reserves.”

---

     The string-of-gem city lights on the night side of Life-Waters were blinking out, fading as the orbital light-power-gatherers that fed the People’s civilization shifted their flow rays on River-’Tween-Worlds, a half cone of raw energy flooding across space and through the overloading absorption structures.
     Tarrischall rode the power tasking pallet himself, nursing the straining systems like a caregiver with a sick pup, rolling each control rod with an extended claw tip. “Smoothly, smoothly,” he murmured to himself, staring into the data bubble, “I-lick-your-fur, sweet one. Steady down and quit twitching on me.”
     All others in the Gathering-of-Voices were silent save for Narisara. Bouncing back and forth between her display and that of the Voice-of-Decision, she maintained Tar'rischall’s situational awareness.
     “Evacuation of orbit zone continuing … Voices-of-Central-Energy acknowledge the Word-of—Crisis. We have priority flow in all channels.”
     “Praise to a sane bureaucrat. Thermal grade on receptor arrays?”
     “Nothing is melting yet and that’s all that can be said.”
     “And how are the Uprights doing?”
     “As well as we are, I must presume. I detect a slight structural flux from their end, but so far the channel holds open.” She looked across at Tarrischall. “I speak as Voice-of-Physics. The wisdom is to cast loose and abandon the channel. There is great danger here and I can see no resolution.”
     “No! This fish hasn’t escaped yet!”
     “Tarrischall-of-the-Crystal-Springs,” Narisara’s voice softened, speaking as herself and not the Voice-of-Physics; “What avails catching the fish if one drowns doing it?”
     He looked up from the display for a moment meeting her polished jet gaze. “I know, Black Fur, but I will not cast loose while there is a chance. I will not let the People go back to being alone in this Universe.”

---

     “Yes, she’s stable and holding!” Rocardo yelled in triumph. “We have ambience on the power flow!”
     “Reserve levels remaining?”
     “Five percent!”
     “Systems stability?”
     “Power receptors and cooling systems are operating at about three hundred percent overload, but they are holding!"
     Marta covered her face with her hands and exhaled, pushing aside the shutdown command that had been about to cross her lips.
     They were holding. The system wasn’t supposed to operate this way, but it was. Almost the full load of the great ces-Lunar power grid had been diverted into the Worm Gate receptors, the massed output of the mighty hydrogen III fusion reactors poring up through the microwave beams from the Moon’s surface.
     Deprived of their power, the low-gee manufacturing complexes and mass driver catapults that propelled the Moon’s industrial economy had been forced into a crash shutdown and even the urban habitation centers were reduced to operating on solar backup for basic life support. The screams of protest would already be starting.
     But they had time now. At least a little bit to find some kind of solution.
     Marta Lane allowed herself another deep breath before speaking.
     “Get the backup team in here to cover the stations. All primary team members stand down for a ten-minute break, then report to the conference room for a crisis assessment group. I’ll be wanting ideas, people, any flavor you can come up with.”

---

     Tanischall looked on as his watchmates drifted aimlessly or hung anchored to the soft, padded walls of the rest and discussion chamber. Beyond the hiss of the passage-of-air grilles the chamber was ominously quiet.
     “Very well, he said, “we have agreement that Marrun’s plan to bump the raft out of the channel with a pusher unit will not work. What will? What can affect an object in trans-state that we can manipulate?”
     “Very little,” Narisara swayed limberly in free fall, holding herself moored to the chamber wall with the extended claws of a single rear paw. “It is hard for us to even visualize what we are dealing with within the channel. We can describe trans-state in mathematical terms, but our minds are not made to ever understand it.”
     “Slime and stinking water, Narisara, I don’t want to understand it! I just want to fiddle with it! The raft is transstate. Situation acknowledged. What effects transstate matter? I require simplicity!”
     She muttered something about simple minds and flipped inverted, reseating her grip on the wall padding. “The various field effects are valid to a degree within the channel. The ultimotular forces, gravity, magnetism, all of these things can affect transstate matter.”
     “That’s the birth of our problem,” Varess added shyly. “The perimeter grids at either end of the channel generate very strong magnetoelectric fields. The magnetically valid metals in the raft’s structure are caught between them.”
     “Even with all the light-seasons of distance between Life-Waters and Terra? We are being affected by their gate fields?” Marrun questioned.
     “Indeed,” Narisara replied to the Voice-of-Pusher-Guidance. “The area within our perimeter grid coexists with the area within that of the Upright’s when the channel is open. The two are as one with the distance between rendered invalid within the Universe structure.”
     She waved a deprecatory mid-paw. “As I said, one can describe it and understand it mathematically, but our three-dimensional minds can’t create a true visualization.”
     “No, but then that really isn’t important … is it?”
     Tarrischall shoved off from the chamber wall, an odd glint in his eyes. “As I said, Black Fur, simplification. Reject quantum physics for now.”
     His forepaws gestured out the problem. “Imagine the channel as a simple, three-dimensional structure. We would have a perimeter grid producing a magnetic field here and another one here with a tunnel in between and the raft held stuck in the tunnel by the two balanced field effects. Correct?”
     The Voice-of-Physics negated with a glance away. "That’s a pup’s model.”
     “I speak applied simplicity, Voice-of-Physics. Is this not a valid model?”
     She tossed her head, “It is valid … vaguely.”
     “Very well. And cannot the magnetoelectric field levels be modulated to a degree within the perimeter grids without losing the channel?”
     “They can.”
     “Very well again. So if magnetic fields indeed can affect the raft in the tunnel, theoretically, by varying those field effects, we should be able to shift the position of the raft inside, drawing it toward or pushing it away from the grids. Correct?”
     The Voice-of-Physics eyes narrowed. “That’s not truly what would be happening.”
     “Simplicity, Black Fur, simplicity!”
     “Yes, very well, agreed,” Narisara yielded. “At least that’s what might seem to occur. But to what end? We could not push or pull the raft completely to either channel mouth against the resistance of the other grid field and that other grid field can’t be shut down or have its polarity inverted without cutting loose the channel.”
     “True, but this humble Voice-of-Decision recalls that ultimotes maintain momentum in trans-state. The raft could not clear the channel this time because it lacked enough momentum to pierce the grid fields. What if we could rebuild the raft’s momentum inside the channel by shoving it to-and-fro between the grid fields until it has regained enough energy to break out?”
     “Like rocking a mired land carrier out of a mud hole,” Marmn suggested.
     “Precisely, Gray-laker. If we can manage the shifts properly, I’ll challenge we can pop her out of there like a robug out of a hollow reed. Speak, Voice-of-Physics. Valid or no?”
     Narisara thought long, her eyes almost closed. All of the watch held their breaths as if on a deep dive. “Yes,” she said finally. “Possibly.”
     “Ha!”
     She cut off Tarrischall’s bark of triumph with a lifted forepaw. “But such an action would have to be perfectly timed and coordinated with the Uprights at their end of things. I say once more, perfectly timed and coordinated in both interval and sequence. Otherwise we could unbalance and lose the channel. And we have no way of telling the Uprights what they must do.”

---

     Assistant Director Rocardo tossed his work pad stylus down onto the tabletop. “That’s it, the simulator team says it could work, but we’d have to do it in absolute lockstep with the Furrys, and we haven’t any way to tell them what to do.”
     “Damn the damn budgetary committee to hell,” Marta paced angrily beside the conference room. “I told them we needed to put more funding into communications R&D, but it’s always ‘next year, next year, we have to watch the profit margins’.”
     Rocardo shrugged pragmatically. “The laser link’s always been adequate. No one ever visualized having to shove a photon beam past a mass of trans-state stuck in the hole before.”
     “It’s not adequate now. And we certainly can’t wait around for seven and a half years for a radio message to reach 359.”
     Rocardo glanced at his data pad. “We can’t even wait another seven and a half hours. Ces-Lunar is screaming for their power back, Company Headquarters is demanding we come up with a solution and, most critically, our receptor and transformer systems are starting to degrade from the over-load. We have to do something, Marta!”
     “I know it, Estiban. I even know what we need to do. But we have to establish three factors with River-‘Tween-Worlds to pull it off; an execution time, a duration for the field cycles and which gate initiates the cycling sequence.”
     She paused in her pacing. “Tarrischall and his crew are sharp, as good or better than we are. I’m willing to bet he must have come to the same conclusions we have and that he must be hunting for a way to establish a mutual operational baseline with us to make it work.”
     “How are we supposed to manage that without a communications link? By mind reading?”
     “Exactly.”

---

     Tarrischall had returned to the observation dome at the planetside end of the skynest. With the Word-of-Crisis still in effect, the half bubble of Glass-like-Steel was empty save for himself. Floating limply, he juggled his inert sphere-of-communications between his fore and mid-paws in an unthinking pattern, his tiring mind focused on the looming problem.
     How do you match thought processes with a semi-hairless, bipedal land dweller with a penchant for munching on vegetation? How could minds reach across the gap between stars?
     Talk with me, Marta-From-the-Place-Called-New-England. You must know the solution as well as I. How are we to do this thing?
     If only they could have their last conversation back again. Just thirty or so heartbeats of the time they had spent casually discussing music and dance.
     Idly, Tairischall twisted the two halves of the sphere-of-communications, triggering the replay of the musical selections Marta had sent him. As the lissome alien tone patterns flowed around him, he wondered sadly if they were the last present he would ever receive from his distant friend of Earth.
     Tairischall’s grip on the sphere tightened abruptly and he stared at the silver orb as if he had never seen it before.

---

     “T minus ninety! All stations, stand by! We’re doing this thing now! Gate Control?”
     “Go!”
     “Tug Control?”
     “Go!”
     “Power Control?”
     “Systems are in overload but holding nominal.”
     “Traffic Control.”
     “L-2 Block is clear except for authorized emergency spacecraft.”
     It had been a long, long night shift and now the eyes of all humanity were peering over Marta Lane’s shoulder. The Ces-Lunar media nets were accessing Gate Control’s video feeds, streaming a second-by-second narration of the crisis around the worlds. No doubt the media newsies would have loved to be underfoot aboard the command station as well, but Marta’s emergency prerogatives were still worth something.
     Likewise she’d also cut off all communication with Transstellar’s board of directors and semihysterical CEO. If this didn’t work, there would be plenty of time to be fired later.
     She glanced at the primary screen time hack. Oh-seven hours, oh-four minutes, and forty seconds.
     “Stand by to initiate magnetic field modulation program on my mark…three…two…one…mark!”
     “Program engaged,” Gate Control reported. “Perimeter grid field intensity dropping to eighty-percent load. Two minutes and fifty-five seconds and counting to power up.”
     Somewhere within the control center a whisper of long-ago music played.

---

     Uncountable trillions of miles away the first bar of the same tune issued from Tarrischall’s sphere-of-communications.
     “Flow increase!” he snarled with eyes narrowed and ears laid back.
     “Flow increasing to perimeter grid. Magnetoelectric field intensity growing to plus one fifth of standard.” Narisara’s voice rose excitedly. “Magnetodynamic flux noted in the channel, but the quantum structures appear stable. They are doing it, Tarrischall! They understand! The Upright gate is reducing flow! They are cycling with us!”
     “Yes! Yessss! Marta-of-the-Place-Called-New-England thinks as one of the People! Four limbs or not, I’d put a pup in her come the next season!”
     The otherworldly music ran on, trickling from the sphere.
     “Director Lane, the switching arrays don’t like this. We’re throwing thermal spikes at each power shift and the cyclic rate we’ve set isn’t giving us the time we need to cool them down.”
     “Blame Glenn Miller, not me, Mr. Desvergers. Stay on the cycle and do the best you can.”
     “Marta, check your quantum structure readouts!”
     “What is it, Estiban?”
     “We are registering a shift! We have mass movement!
     She’s starting to rock!”

---

     A rising chorus of warning tones from the tasking displays sang a song of incipient disaster that threatened to drive out the twelfth replay of the Terran melody.
     “Tarrischall, the raft was displaying a slow but definite lateral drift on that last emergence. If she angles off enough to collide with the grid …”
     “Don’t encourage the curse with your words, Black Fur, I saw it. Claws out, pups! This strike ends the chase. Marrun, maneuvering room be damned! This time grab her by the throat and hang on till your jaws crack!”
     The Voice-of-Pusher-Guidance grunted an acknowledgment. He had his six most powerful units hovering around the mouth of the perimeter grid, ready to pounce like a hunter’s pack on a surfacing deep rover. It wasn’t a bad analogy for the situation.
     The shadow sphere within the grid began to shimmer.
     “The time is on us! Narisara. Full flow on the gate fields! Full flow! Haul her in!”
     The stern of the cargo raft burst out of the event horizon, no longer tracking true but drifting off side and angling across the channel, its dead gyros and propulsor vents incapable of stabilization. Even if the straining function nets of River-’Tween-Worlds could withstand another modulation cycle, a few more fractions of drift would bring about a catastrophic collision between the raft and the grid structure. It had to be now!
     Tarrischall held a diving breath as the curve of the raft’s stem protruded a few lengths from the lip of the grid, hovering on the cusp of the cycle.
     “Take her! Take her now!”
     Marrun socked his Pushers in. Not even attempting a run at the bonding points, he rammed the robotic propulsor units into the raft, spearing it with expanding crash harpoons. Vents flared and raged as Marrun countered the drift and applied extraction power in a wild paw dance across his tasking board.
     Like two pups with a scrap, the Pusher units and the magnetic pull warred … then, ponderously, the raft was floating back and out of the grid it had entered far too long before.
     Joyous pandemonium raged in the two control rooms stars apart.

---

     There was, of course, an aftermath. Communications between the gate control centers had to be reestablished, the wormhole had to be closed, and the emergency power diversions rerouted. A protracted series of systems tests and repairs were initiated and a start had to be made on establishing a new set of operational protocols that would ensure a like event could never happen again.
     And finally there was the press conference.
     At Marta’s insistence it would be an audio interview only, conducted over the communications link from her quarters. She was not about to present herself to the video scrutiny of two entire civilizations after an all-nighter at crisis stations. At least not until she had enjoyed a three water-credit bath, a gluttonous Earth import meal, and at least ten hours of sleep.
     Over the laser-link channel from Life-Waters, good old Furry Tarrischall, as ebullient as ever, was more than willing to carry the show for her. She had only to add the occasional word at the interviewer’s prompt.
     “We have solution,” he proclaimed dramatically. “I know wise Friend-Marta must have same solution as well. But we must coordinate or all is lost. We must begin the cycling of magnetic fields at the same instant! Same instant! We must cycle at same interval and one or other must start cycle. But how is to do this when we cannot speak? Tchah! It must be done through things already said, from commonalities already available and recognized.
     “My mind chases itself. Then I recall last words spoken with Friend-Marta and the music of the Artist-Called-Miller given to me. Here is our commonality!”
     “Er, Artist-called-Miller, Director Lane?” The interviewer inquired cautiously.
     “As in Glenn,” Lane replied into her interphone deck. “Tarrischall and I share a mutual appreciation of Terrestrial pre-atomic age swing music.”
     Marta sat back in her chair and started to unseal her suit liner, thinking fondly of the gloriously wasteful bath to come. Maybe she would even let Estiban cover the gate survey while she ran over to L-5 for a few days to spoil her grandchildren. “The previous evening I’d beamed Director Tarrischall some new musical selections and we’d been talking about them over the director’s channel just before we’d gone on duty. One of the songs was Glenn Miller’s classic ‘Seven O Five.’ ”
     “This gave time of cycle initiation,” Tarrischall added smugly. “Standard Human Earth song, standard Human Earth time, five minutes after seventh hour, Greenwich Meridian.”
     “Also the version of ‘Seven O Five’ I’d sent Tarrischall was exactly two minutes and fifty five seconds long. That gave us our cycling time.”
     “I see.” The interviewer said slowly. “Ingenious. But that still leaves one question, Director Tarrischall. I understand that it was critical that one gate or the other had to start this magnetic cycling to clear the wormhole. Your team was the one that led off. How was that decided? Did you risk the communications between our words on a hunch, a guess?”
     Tarrischall snort growled a non-translatable profanity “—guess! We knew! Easiest part of all. Friend-Marta and I have nice music, I am male, she female. We dance!”
     “Dance?” The interviewer was totally bewildered now.
     “Of course,” Marta Lane smiled a tired smile no one would see. “Back in the good old days the gentleman always led.”

Oh you young whipper-snappers think you are so smart with yer Twitters and Facebooks and Snapchats. But sometimes there are big advantages to doing things old school. Modern junk rots all too easily with format wars, which you might have noticed if you have tried recently to get your data off a Zip cartridge. Especially if your data is a bunch of music files.

Back when I was a kitten in pre-internet days of yore when dinosaurs roamed the earth, if you liked a song on the radio you held up your cassette tape recorder to the loudspeaker and hoped your kitten sister would stop yelling. Cassette tape players are even harder to lay your mitts on nowadays, format rot strikes again.

So you have to get back to the basics, the lowest common denominator. Back to the times when instead of listening to radio, you'd wait until a Bard visited your medieval village and sang you some songs! Instead of a tape recorder, you had to memorize the songs. The Bards had to memorize them as well, so they did their best to make it easy. The stories were exciting, the tunes were catchy, and the lyrics rhymed. Especially good songs would spread, which is the middle-ages version of "going viral."

Now below you'll see how the intrepid crew of the Benjamin Franklin used this technique.

They wanted to get their message out to the various inhabited planets. Traveling from planet to planet themselves is a solution that does not scale well. There ain't no interstellar internet. Trying to send data files on USB flash drive ain't gonna work when alien computers don't even use binary, much less have USB ports. So whatcha gonna do?

Get back to basics of course. All the alien star travelers in the cluster share [A] a common pidgin language and [B] a fondness for hanging around in spaceport bars getting plastered while singing drinking songs. So the men of the Benjamin Franklin use Bard song techniques to craft a scaleable solution.

• 

• 

• 

XIII
THE BATTLE OF BRANDOBAR
Annotated English version

 

To the literary historian, this ballad is notable as the first important work of art (as opposed to factual records, scientific treatises, or translations from planetary languages) composed in Uru. However, the student of military technics can best explain various passages which, couched in epical terms, convey the general sense but not the details.

The naval engagement in question was fought near the Brandobar Cluster, an otherwise undistinguished group of stars between Vorlak and Mayast. On the one side was the alliance of Vorlak, Monwaing, and several lesser races. Secret demonstrations of new weapons, combined with indignation at the ruin of Earth, had induced a number of hitherto neutral planets to declare war on Kandemir. Opposed to them was the Grand Fleet of the nomads, which included not only their clan units but various auxiliaries recruited from non-Kandemirian subjects of their empire. Their force was numerically much stronger than the attackers.

* * *

 
Three kings rode out on the way of war
(The stars burn bitterly clear):
Three in league against Tarkamat,
Master of Kandemir.
 
And the proudest king, the Vorlak lord,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Had been made the servant in all but name
Of a planetless wanderer chief.
 
And the secondmost king was a wingless bird
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
Who leagued at last with the Vorlak lord
When the exiles were allied.
 
And the foremost king in all but name
(New centuries scream in birth)
Was the captain of one lonely ship
That had fled from murdered Earth.
 
For the world called Earth was horribly slain
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
By one unknown; but the corpse's guards
Were built on Kandemir.
 
The Earthlings fled—to seek revenge
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
For ashen homes and sundered hopes
First seen in unbelief.

 
And haughty Vorlak spoke to them
(A bugle: the gods defied!):
"Kandemir prowls beyond our gates.
Can ye, then, stay the tide?"
 
And the Monwaing wisemen spoke to them
(New centuries scream in birth):
"Can ye arm us well, we will league with you,
Exiles from shattered Earth."
 
And the wanderer captain told the kings
(The stars burn bitterly clear):
"I have harnessed and broken to my will
Space and Force and Fear."
 
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Laughed aloud: "I will hurl them down
Like a gale-blown autumn leaf."
 
And he gathered his ships to meet the three
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
As an archer rattles his arrow sheaf
And shakes his bow in pride.

 
Forth from their lairs, by torchlight suns,
(New centuries scream in birth)
The nomad ships came eager to eat
The wanderers from Earth.
 
And hard by a cluster of youthful suns
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Known by the name of Brandobar,
They saw the enemy near.
 
And the three great kings beheld their foe
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
With half again the ships they had,
Like arrows in a sheaf.
 
"Now hurl your vessels, my nomad lords,
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
One single shattering time, and then
Their worlds we shall bestride."
 
"Sleep ye or wake ye, wanderer chief,
(New centuries scream in birth)
That ye stir no hand while they seek our throats,
Yon murderers of Earth?"
 

Militechnicians can see from the phrasing alone, without consulting records, that the allied fleet must have proceeded at a high uniform velocity—free fall—in close formation. This offered the most tempting of targets to the Kandemirians, whose ships had carefully avoided building up much intrinsic speed and thus were more maneuverable. Tarkamat moved to englobe the allies and fire on them from all sides.

 
"Have done, have done, my comrades twain.
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Mine eyes have tallied each splinter and nail
In yonder burning spear.
 
"Let them come who slew my folk.
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
We wait for them as waits in a sea
The steel-sharp, hidden reef."
 

The reference here is, of course, to the highly developed interferometric paragravity detectors with which the whole allied fleet was equipped, and which presented to the main computer in their flagship a continuous picture of the enemy dispositions. The nomads had some too, but fewer and of a less efficient model.

 
Now Kandemir did spurt so close
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
They saw his guns and missiles plain
Go raking for their side.
 
The exile captain smiled a smile
(New centuries scream in birth)
And woke the first of the wizardries
Born from the death of Earth.
 
Then Space arose like a wind-blown wave
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
That thunders and smokes and tosses ships
Helpless to sail or steer.
 
And the angry bees from the nomad hive
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Were whirled away past Brandobar
Like a gale-blown autumn leaf.
 

This was the first combat use of the space distorter. The artificial production of interference phenomena enabled the allied craft to create powerful repulsion fields about themselves, or change the curvature of the world lines of outside matter—two equivalent verbalizations of Goldspring's famous fourth equation. In effect, the oncoming enemy missiles were suddenly pushed to an immense distance, as if equipped with faster-than-light engines of their own.

Tarkamat recoiled. That is, he allowed the two fleets to interpenetrate and pass each other. The allies decelerated and re-approached him. He acted similarly. For, in the hours that this required, his scientists had pondered what they observed. Already possessing some knowledge of the physical principles which underlay this new defense, they assured Tarkamat that it must obey the conservation-of-energy law. A ship's power plant could accelerate a missile away, but not another ship of comparable size. Nor could electromagnetic phenomena be much affected.

Tarkamat accordingly decided to match velocities and slug it out at short range with his clumsy but immensely destructive blaster cannon. He would suffer heavy losses, but the greater numbers at his command made victory seem inevitable.

 
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
Rallied his heart. "Close in with them!
Smite them with fire!" he cried.
 
The nomad vessels hurtled near
(New centuries scream in birth)
And the second wizardry awoke,
Born from the death of Earth.
 
Then Force flew clear of its iron sheath.
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Remorseless lightnings cracked and crashed
In the ships of Kandemir.
 
And some exploded like bursting suns
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
And some were broken in twain, and some
Fled shrieking unbelief.
 

Over small distances, such allied vessels as there had been time to equip with it could use the awkward, still largely experimental, but altogether deadly space-interference fusion inductor. The principle here was the production of a non-space band so narrow that particles within the nucleus itself were brought into contiguity. Atoms with positive packing fractions were thus caused to explode. Only a very low proportion of any ship's mass was disintegrated, but that usually served to destroy the vessel. More than half the Kandemirian fleet perished in a few nova-like minutes.

• 

Tarkamat, unquestionably one of the greatest naval geniuses in galactic history, managed to withdraw the rest and re-form beyond range of the allied weapon. He saw that—as yet—it was too restricted in distance to be effective against a fortified planet, and ordered a retreat to Mayast II.

 
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
Told his folk, "We have lost this day,
But the next we may abide.
 
"Hearten yourselves, good nomad lords.
(New centuries scream in birth)
Retreat with me to our own stronghold.
Show now what ye are worth!"
 
The third of those wizardries awoke
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
Born from the death of Earth. It spoke,
And the name of it was Fear.
 
For sudden as death by thunderbolt,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
Ringing within the nomad ships
Came the voice of the exile chief.
 
Tarkamat, Master of Kandemir,
(New centuries scream in birth)
Heard with the least of his men the words
Spoken from cindered Earth.
 

On the relatively coarse molecular level, the space-interference inductor was both reliable and long-range. Carl Donnan simply caused the enemy hulls to vibrate slightly, modulated this with his voice through a microphone, and filled each Kandemirian ship with his message.

 
"We have broken ye here by Brandobar.
(The stars burn bitterly clear)
If ye will not yield, we shall follow you
Even to Kandemir.
 
"But our wish is not for ashen homes,
(The stormwinds clamor their grief)
But to make you freemen once again
And not a nomad fief.
 
"If ye fight, we will hurl the sky on your heads.
(A bugle: the gods defied!)
If ye yield, we will bring to your homes and hearts
Freedom to be your bride.
 
"Have done, have done; make an end of war
(New centuries sing in birth)
And an end of woe and of tyrant rule—
In the name of living Earth!"
 

Tarkamat reached a cosmic interference fringe and went into faster-than-light retreat. The allies, though now numerically superior, did not pursue. They doubted their ability to capture Mayast II. Instead, they proceeded against lesser Kandemirian outposts, taking these one by one without great difficulty. Mayast could thus be isolated and nullified.

The effect of Donnan's words was considerable. Not only did this shockingly unexpected voice from nowhere strike at the cracked Kandemirian morale; it offered their vassals a way out. If these would help throw off the nomad yoke, they would not be taken over by the winning side, but given independence, even assistance. There was no immediate overt response; but the opening wedge had been driven. Soon allied agents were being smuggled onto those planets, to disseminate propaganda and organize underground movements along lines familiar to Earth's history.

Thus far the militechnic commentator. But the literary scholar sees more in the ballad. Superficially it appears to be a crude, spontaneous production. Close study reveals it is nothing of the sort. The simple fact that there had been no previous Uru poetry worth noticing would indicate as much. But the structure is also suggestive. The archaic imagery and exaggerated, often banal descriptions appeal, not to the sophisticated mind, but to emotions so primitive they are common to every spacefaring race. The song could be enjoyed by any rough-and-ready spacehand, human, Vorlakka, Monwaingi, Xoan, Yannth, or whatever—including members of any other civilization-cluster where Uru was known. And, while inter-cluster traffic was not large nor steady, it did take place. A few ships a year did venture that far.

Moreover, while the form of this ballad derives from ancient European models, it is far more intricate than the present English translation can suggest. The words and concepts are simple; the meter, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration are not. They are, indeed, a jigsaw puzzle, no part of which can be distorted without affecting the whole.

Thus the song would pass rapidly from mouth to mouth, and be very little changed in the process. A spacehand who had never heard of Kandemir or Earth would still get their names correct when he sang what to him was just a lively drinking song. Only those precise vocables would sound right.

So, while the author is unknown, The Battle of Brandobar was obviously not composed by some folkish minstrel. It was commissioned, and the poet worked along lines carefully laid down for him. This was, in fact, the Benjamin Franklin's message to humans throughout the galaxy.

I envisage at least three passages by Poul Anderson adapted to screen:

• the opening section of "The Game of Glory" (see an earlier post)
• the introduction and conclusion of The Earthbook Of Stormgate
• the Ballad of Brandobar from After Doomsday (St Albans, Herts, 1975, pp. 127-135)

James Blish commended how, having built up to a major space battle, Anderson then described that battle in a ballad written after the event.

The ballad comprises thirty five quatrains, rhyming abcb. Thus, the opening quatrain reads:

"Three kings rode out on the way of war
"(The stars burn bitterly clear):
"Three in league against Tarkamat
"Master of Kandemir." (p. 127)

(The ballad of John Barleycorn begins with "Three kings...")

The second line of each quatrain in the Ballad of Brandobar is:

"(The stars burn bitterly clear):",
"(The stormwinds clamour their grief)",
"(A bugle: the gods defied!)",
"(New centuries scream in birth)"

- or, in the concluding quatrain:

"(New centuries sing in birth)" (p. 133)

Anderson gives us the "Annotated English version" since the original was in Uru. The annotations are explanatory prose passages inserted between some of the quatrains, e.g.:

"Militechnicians can see from the phrasing alone..." (p. 129)

"The reference here is, of course, to the highly developed interferometric paragravity detectors..." (p. 130) etc.

Thus, I think there should be three voices:

• one chanting the first, third and fourth line of each quatrain
• a second interrupting with each second line
• a third solemnly intoning the annotations

We need sound effects for stormwinds, bugle, screaming and singing, visuals for "stars" and for the narrative, I think static graphics or brief animations to illustrate the story which includes:

"For the world called Earth was horribly slain..." (p. 128)

- and ends with:

" 'Have done, have done; make an end of war
" (New centuries sing in birth)
"And an end of woe and of tyrant rule -
"In the name of living Earth!' " (p. 133)

How dramatic is that?

The first quatrain is preceded by two paragraphs explaining that the ballad is "...the first important work of art...composed in Uru." (p. 127) Previously, this interstellar language had been use only for "...factual records, scientific treaties, or translations from planetary languages..." (p. 127) Should that have read, "...factual records, scientific treatises, political treaties, or translations..."? (I have noticed quite a few typos in my edition of After Doomsday.)

(ed note: A thousand years ago a human colony starship landed on a planet, where the humans were immediately enslaved by the native alien Hussir race. The humans were considered to be animals like horses, and the Hussir discouraged each other for doing tasteless things like talking to humans or otherwise implying they were not animals. There are small groups of wild humans who live in the forests. The alien Hussir have a medieval technology level. And saddles they put on humans so they can be ridden like horses. The humans that they don't butcher for meat, of course.

The colony starship is called the Star Tower, and sits in the middle of the alien city Falklyn. Humans are not allowed to approach it. If a human could get inside, close the airlock, feed in a starship navigation tape into the autopilot, and inject a dose of cold-sleep drug, the ship could travel back to Terra and summon a Terran liberation warfleet.

The problem is that the humans have been treated like animals for so long that they have forgotten how to read. They actually have a problem with talking, let alone understanding long words. How can they possibly pass the complicated instructions down through the generations?)

     When the two suns had set and Alan was bedded down with the other children in a corner of the meadow (with the rest of the human/horses), the exciting events of the day repeated themselves in his mind like a series of colored pictures. He would have liked to question Robb, but the grown men and older boys were kept in a field well separated from the women and children.
     A little distance away the women were singing their babies to sleep with the traditional songs of the humans. Their voices drifted to him on the faint breeze, with the perfume of the fragrant grasses.
     That was a real baby song, the first he ever remembered. They sang others, and one was the song Wiln had interrupted at the Star Tower.

“Twinkle, twinkle, golden star,
I can reach you, though you’re far.
Shut my mouth and find my head,
Find a worm that’s striped with red,
Feed it to the turtle shell,
Then go to sleep, for all is well."

     Half asleep, Alan listened. That song was one of the children’s favorites. They called it “The Star Tower Song,” though he had never been able to find out why.
     It must be a riddle, he thought drowsily. “Shut my mouth and find my head…” Shouldn’t it be the other way around — “Find my head (first) and shut my mouth…"? Why wasn’t it.? And those other fines. Alan knew worms, for he had seen many of the creepy, crawly creatures, long things in many bright colors. But what was a turtle?

---

     “But I like the other way better,” Alan (leader of the wild humans) said. “There must be a reason why they won’t let humans enter the Star Tower.”
     Roand’s toothless smile did not mar the innate dignity of his face.
     “You are a mystic, as I am, young Alan,” he said. “But the tradition says that for a human to enter the Star Tower is not enough. Let me tell you of the tradition.
     “The tradition says that the Star Tower was once the home of all humans. There were only a dozen or so humans then, but they had powers that were great and strange. But when they came out of the Star Tower, the Hussirs were able to enslave them through mere force of numbers.
     “Three of those first humans escaped to these mountains and became the first Wild Humans. From them has come the tradition that has passed to their descendants and to the humans who have been rescued from Hussir slavery.
     “The tradition says that a human who enters the Star Tower can free all the humans in the world — if he takes with him the Silk and the Song.”
     Roand reached into a crevice.
     “This is the Silk,” he said, drawing forth a peach-colored scarf on which something had been painted. Alan recognized it as writing, such as the Hussirs used and were rumored to have been taught by humans. Roand read it to him, reverently.

REG. B-XII. CULTURE V. SOS.

     “What does it mean?” asked Alan.
     “No one knows,” said Roand. “It is a great mystery. It may be a magical incantation.”
     He put the Silk back into the crevice.
     “This is the only other writing we have handed down by our forebears,” said Roand, and pulled out a fragment of very thin, brittle, yellowish material. To Alan it looked something like thin cloth that had hardened with age, yet it had a different texture. Roand handled it very carefully.
     “This was torn and the rest of it lost centuries ago,” said Roand, and he read.

October 2 … ours to be the last … three lost expeditions … too far to keep trying … how we can get …

     Alan could make no more sense of this than he could of the words of the Silk.
     “What is the Song?” asked Alan.
     “Every human knows it from childhood,” said Roand. “It is the best known of all human songs.”
     “‘Twinkle, twinkle, golden star,'” quoted Alan at once, “ ‘I can reach you, though you’re far…'”
     “That’s right, but there is a second verse that only the Wild Humans know. You must learn it. It goes like this.

Twinkle, twinkle, little bug,
Long and round, of shiny hue.
In a room marked by a cross.
Sting my arm when I've found you.
Lay me down, in bed so deep.
And then there’s naught to do but sleep.

     “It doesn’t make sense,” said Alan. “No more than the first verse — though Mara showed me what a turtle looks like.”
     “They aren’t supposed to make sense until you sing them in the Star Tower,” said Roand, “and then only if you have the Silk with you.”

(ed note: The wild humans decide to make an attack on the city of Falklyn, which turns into a rout since they have zero military experience. Alan and Mara get separated from the others, and wind up at the Star Tower. Alan is carrying the Silk. They manage to enter the Star Tower)

     The other guards were coming up from all directions. Arrows rang against the sides of the Star Tower as the two humans ducked inside.
     There was a light inside the Star Tower, a softer light than the gas lamps but more effective. They were inside a small chamber, from which another door led to the interior of the tower.
     The door, swung back against the wall on its hinges, was two feet thick and its diameter was greater than the height of a man. Both of them together were unable to move it.
     Arrows were coming through the door. Alan had left the guards’ weapons outside. In a moment the Hussirs would gain courage to rush the ramp.
     Alan looked around in desperation for a weapon. The metal walls were bare except for some hand rails and a panel from which projected three metal sticks. Alan wrenched at one, trying to pull it loose for a club. It pulled down and there was a hissing sound in the room, but it would not come loose. He tried a second, and again it swung down but stayed fast to the wall.
     Mara shrieked behind him, and he whirled.
     The big door was closing, by itself, slowly, and outside the ramp was raising itself from the ground and sliding into the wall of the Star Tower below them. The few Hussirs who had ventured onto the end of the ramp were falling from it to the ground, like ants.
     The door closed with a clang of finality. The hissing in the room went on for a moment, then stopped. It was as still as death in the Star Tower.

     They went through the inner door, timidly, holding hands. They were in a curved corridor. The other side of the corridor was a blank wall. They followed the corridor all the way around the Star Tower, back to the door, without finding an entrance through that inner wall.
     But there was a ladder that went upward. They climbed it, Alan first, then Mara. They were in another corridor, and another ladder went upward.
     Up and up they climbed, past level after level. The blank inner wall gave way to spacious rooms, in which was strange furniture. Some were compartmented, and on the compartment doors for three levels, red crosses were painted.
     Both of them were bathed with perspiration when they reached the room with the windows. And here there were no more ladders.

     “Mara, we’re at the top of the Star Tower!” exclaimed Alan.
     The room was domed, and from head level all the dome was windows. But, though the windows faced upward, those around the lower periphery showed the lighted city of Falklyn spread below them. There was even one of them that showed a section of the park, and the park was right under them, but they knew it was the park because they could see the Hussirs scurrying about in the light of the two gas lamps that still burned beside the closed door of the Star Tower.
     All the windows in the upper part of the dome opened on the stars.
     The lower part of the walls was covered with strange wheels and metal sticks and diagrams and little shining circles and colored lights.
     “We’re in the top of the Star Tower!” shouted Alan in a triumphant frenzy. “I have the Silk and I shall sing the Song!”
     Alan raised his voice and the words reverberated back at them from the walls of the domed chamber.

‘"Twinkle, twinkle, golden star,
I can reach you, though you're far,
Shut my mouth and find my head,
Find a worm that's striped with red,
Feed it to the turtle shell,
Then go to sleep, for all is well."

     Nothing happened.
     Alan sang the second verse, and still nothing happened.

     “Do you suppose that if we went back out now the Hussirs would let all humans go free.?” asked Mara doubtfully.
     “That’s silly,” he said, staring at the window where an increasing number of Hussirs was crowding into the park. “It’s a riddle. We have to do what it says.”
     “But how can we? What does it mean?”
     “It has something to do with the Star Tower,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe the 'golden star' means the Star Tower, though I always thought it meant the Golden Star in the southern sky. Anyway, we’ve reached the Star Tower, and it’s silly to think about reaching a real star.
     “Let’s take the next line. ‘Shut my mouth and find my head.' How can you shut anyone’s mouth before you find their head?”
     “We had to shut the door to the Star Tower before we could climb to the top,” she ventured.
     “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “Now, let’s find a worm that's striped with red'!"
     They looked all over the big room, in and under the strange crooked beds that would tilt forward to make chairs, behind the big, queer-looking objects that stood all over the floor. The bottom part of the walls had drawers and they pulled these out, one by one.
     At last Mara dropped a little disc of metal and it popped in half on the floor. A flat spool fell out, and white tape unrolled from it in a tangle.
     “Worm!” shouted Alan. “Find one striped with red!”
     They popped open disc after metal disc—and there it was: a tape crossed diagonally with red stripes. There was lettering on the metal discs and Mara spelled out the letters on this one.

EMERGENCY. TERRA. AUTOMATIC BLASTDOWN.

     Neither of them could figure out what that meant. So they looked for the "turtle shell," and of course that would be the transparent dome shaped object that sat on a pedestal between two of the chair-beds.
     It was an awkward job trying to feed the striped worm to the turtle shell, for the only opening in the turtle shell was under it and to one side. But with Alan lying in one cushioned chair-bed and Mara lying in the other, and the two of them working together, they got the end of the worm into the turtle shell’s mouth.
     Immediately the turtle shell began eating the striped worm with a clicking chatter that lasted only a moment before it was drowned in a great rumbling roar from far down in the bowels of the Star Tower.
     Then the windows that looked down on the park blossomed into flame that was almost too bright for human eyes to bear, and the lights of Falklyn began to fall away in the other windows around the rim of the dome. There was a great pressure that pushed them mightily down into the cushions on which they lay, and forced their senses from them.
     Many months later, they would remember the second verse of the song. They would go into one of the chambers marked with a cross, they would sting themselves with the bugs that were hypodermic needles and sink down in the sleep of suspended animation.
     But now they lay, naked and unconscious, in the control room of the accelerating starship. In the breeze from the air conditioners, the silken message to Earth fluttered pink against Alan’s throat.

• 

(ed note: Twilight's Peak is a pre-packaged adventure for the table-top role playing game Traveller. As part of the adventure, the secret location of a lost treasure is hidden inside a tedious ballad)

      In any case, Gyro Cadiz left Vanejen on 101-984. Twenty-four weeks later, the ship was routinely posted as overdue, and earned the official designation of missing after thirty-two weeks, on 326-984. Further word was not forthcoming.
     The answer came a hundred years later, in the aftermath of a fringe skirmish of the False War (1082 to 1084). Naval patrol ships reconning the Treece system (Lanth subsector) found, and destroyed, a Shivva class patrol frigate (Zhodani, obviously) in the process of refuelling. Afterwards, while checking out the rest of the system, the navy found a single scout/courier in a cometary orbit.
     It proved to be one of the scouts from the Gyro Cadiz task force, its crew dead, its power cells long since drained. Its entire memory banks were contaminated and unreadable, with the only clue to the fate of the task force contained in the diary of a crewmember.

     The second officer of the ship, a scout named Wen Livern, fancied himself an epic poet, and transcribed the entire history of the task force, from its formation on Vanejen in 984, in the form of a long, amateurish epic.
     The work runs 9000 lines, about 100,000 words. Such statistics, however, do not describe it. Arranged in seven chapters, the lines are further divided into groups of three to ten (typically four) lines each, expressed in thought rhyme, also known as parallelism. The effect is amateurish, the style didactic. There is little meter, and no word or tone rhyme. The poem is terrible reading, and few ever have.

     A few samples from the epic will serve to illustrate the style, construction, and quality.

     We fought to save the Imperium, / and struggled to vanquish the mutineers.

     The lines are synonomous parallelism, also known as thought rhyme. The second line is a thought rhyme of the first, repeating in synonyms the thought of the first. To the uninformed, the lines may simply sound redundant.

     The choking dust was our bane, / but our lone ship fed our lungs.

     These lines are antithetic parallelism, where the second thought is in contrast to the first.

     The wolves and bears clawed at the roof, / and drove us deeper into the catacombs of mystery.

     This third form is climactic parallelism, where the the second line amplifies and expands the thought of the first.

ADMINISTERING THE EPIC

     Assuming that the concerned adventurers wish to examine the manuscript of the epic, they may do so, and can be informed of some of the basic details of the poem. However, all attempts to read and study the poem should meet with failure, probably through sheer boredom. After starting any portion of the epic, the individual will stop within fifteen minutes and express a desire to do almost anything other than read this epic.

     Two readily obvious answers to the problem can help through this process.

     First, a scholar can be hired to give his ideas or thoughts on the matter. Cost may be high, and the person's silence is not assured. Assume at least Cr10,000 for the basic analysis of the manuscript. In addition, the person will want to publish the findings (in the local computer net) immediately (which is a bad thing if you are on a treasure hunt and do not want it to turn into a treasure race).

     Second, the manuscript can be fed into the computer (optical scan makes it non-boring), and it can be synopsized for easier reading. For impact, assume that the first run of the program is set for maximum reduction: the print-out result is two words— "We died."

     Fiddling with the program parameters (specifying synopsization percentage, word count, reading level, and other factors) should eventually produce the epic synopsis presented on the next few pages. The text should be made available to the characters for perusal at their leisure.

(ed note: In the story, the first "space colony" was three large spaceships in Terra orbit. Unfortunately the children born were mutants. The people of Terra freaked out because they are always hysterically xenophobic about anything slightly different. They call the mutants "IDs".

Terra forms the OSI guards, who post a guard ship on the three ID spaceship. It is to prevent the three ships from returning to Terra and giving the people of Terra space-cooties. Which is impossible, but just try explaining reality to hysterical xenophobic morons. The OSI guard ship is also to prevent the three ID ships from leaving Terra, because fark you.

The IDs manage to survive, somehow, living on algae and carefully metered oxygen. Several generations pass, with the OSI ship contemptuously ignoring the ID's pleas for the lives of their children. Because everybody knows IDs are not really human beings, just subhuman monsters. Which is because this is the official propaganda all Terrans are taught in their schoolbooks.

Desperate, the three ID ships attack the OSI guard ship and manage to escape into the asteroid belt. There the IDs form colonies. As it turns out, their mutations allow them to florish in the free-fall environment.

Terra freaks out and sends fleets of OSI ships. There follows a series of basically pointless wars.

Then OSI Major Hopkins manages to capture an ID. She is a "Mauki", an ID bard-singer. Major Hopkins is a poisonous little bigot whose parents were not married.)

• 

     Major Hopkins was half asleep when the singing began. It was low, and soft, and for a while he was not sure whether he was hearing or dreaming. It was a woman’s voice. And there was only one woman aboard this big spaceship. He reached out in the darkness, and picked up his phone.
     “Control? Hopkins. Tell the guards to shut that woman up!”
     “You mean the mauki, sir ?”
     “Yes, the mauki! Tell her to shut up. I can’t sleep.” He slammed the phone hack in its clip...
     ...“Shut her up?” Corcelli said. “Have you listened to her? That voice! She could tear the soul out of a corpse.” Hopkins slid off the sleeping shelf, and went into the jumpway of the big spaceship. The lights were on, and he could see half dressed men clumped around the brig. And he could hear the singing clearly—
     The lights were on, and he could see half dressed men clumped around the brig. And he could hear the singing clearly—

Do you dream of Earth
And broad blue seas
The clear blue sky
The tall green trees
The birds that fly
In the warm spring breeze
The leaves that die
The brooks that freeze
And the snows that lie
In majestic ease.
And the wives who cry

Do you dream of Mars
And scorching sands
The clear thin air
The crusted lands
The rocks that tear
The miners’ hands
The cliffs that stare
At the burnt brown hands
Of shrubs that share
The sun seared lands
And the wives who care

     “All right men, at ease.” No one seemed to notice his approach.
     ...“Attention! ATTENTION !” It was a command this time. There were awkward off-balance salutes. A murmur. “You men look like green cadets. Out of sectors after watch. You know the rules on this ship. A month’s pay dock for all of you, and three days on yeast and water.” His voice was hard, echoing off the thin metal walls in harsh overtones...
     ...The mauki had been captured eighteen hours before, fished out of a little crippled scooter that was drifting, just inside the nearest Ring clump. The big OSI spaceship eased up to it cautiously, and grappled it into the air lock. There was a woman and a seven-year-old boy aboard...
     ...In the meantime, he had to hide.
     Sleek, streamlined 6-G spaceships were all right for air-space jumps, but for the long orbits, light 1-G jobs meant fuel economy, and spheres had the added advantage of the lowest possible moment of inertia, which meant valuable maneuverability in the Rings. The OSI spaceship, a thin magnesium ball of sixty meter radius, had the military disadvantage of a characteristically regular silhouette, that made it as easy to spot as a cue ball in a coal bin.
     Hopkins had the big spaceship moved slowly against a huge dark drifting rock mass, and blacked out so it was almost impossible to distinguish it from the meteorite...
     ...The singing crept softly through the ship, a warm background tone to the small shuffling noises the waiting men made. It got louder, and Corcelli looked at the major. The pressure bulkhead was in battle-ready, half shut, but the whispering sounds seeped into the control cabin, and grew louder, into words.

Where is your home, wanderer?
Your home, your home
That house, that wife
The sighing breeze
That stirs tall trees
Cuts like a knife
Wherever you roam
Where is your home, wanderer?

     The chant had a strange rhythm, and the mauki’s voice sounded some times like a strangled sob. Corcelli felt a tightness in his throat. He switched on the recorder quietly.
 

Out on your jets, thunderer.
Your jets, your jets
That squealing scream
shuddering dumb
Titanium
Outreaching stream
But have no regrets.
Out on your jets, wanderer.

     “What is this? A morgue?” Hopkins snapped. His harsh voice shot up to a high pitch, and he coughed. Nobody spoke. “Talk, will you. Talk!” He looked around hostilely. Corcelli turned to the radar man to say something, but the technician had a faraway look in his eyes.

Do you hate the taste
Of tank grown food?
And hate this hell
Of walls gun-blued
A whining shell
Of rocket-spewed
Once-men. The wail
Of jets subdued
The oily smell
Of air renewed
And—up! The bell!

Do you miss the sloosh
Of Venus bogs
The squish of clay
And rotting logs
The night’s damp gray
The drizzling fogs
That drench each day
The big mulch clogs
That ooze away
And the wives who pray

     ...“There is a song,” the mauki explained, “which tells the history very well.”
     Hopkins leaned back on the G couch, his hollow face hard and white.
     The mauki began:

First was hard bright burning light
Then long months of outward flight
Out to far abhelion
By the orbit of our earth
Out from perihelion
Inside the inner ring
Where hull plates sing

Then there was the gravi-braking
Weary clumsy orbit making—

     They listened. There was a strange shifting tempo to the song, because the mauki wasn’t singing, but just talking. It was word magic, rise and fall, intensification and inflection. The mauki bared the history of the IDs to them, the mutants—

Swollen bodies, crumbled minds
Freaks and monsters
Mutants deaf and sick and blind—

     The formation of OSI, the inspection—

Then the curse came, bitter exile
Ultimatum, Live a while
in a paralyzed ellipse
Prisoners of justice
In three weary, leaky ships
Till the yeast and algae mola
And the ships grow cold.

     This ID history was different than they had ever heard before. It was the ID’s side of the story.

All infants born in Space are IDs
A single static rote that rids
The earth of interest in us
And out in Space we lived
Air bleeding in the emptiness
Measured food and measured air
Measured years to death we share.

     She told of the sudden wave of normal births—

Little freaklinqs sickened, died
Little ID-lings lived and grew

     The wasted pleas for the lives of the ID-lings, the attack on the in spection rocket, the escape,

In the three ships, silent waiting
Weary exiles tired of hating
Ended mission
Nothing left
A-bomb sections change position
Molecollision
Nuclear fission.
A fleeing spaceship. Behind a light.
Only silent empty night
Asteroid Rings our hiding place
In the barren wastes
And outer depths of Space
Living, dying
Multiplying.

     Her voice drifted down the still passageways of the huge spacesphere, clutching at their souls, lifting buried feelings from disciplined death, breathing the past of a hunted race eking out a bare existence from the cold rocks of the Rings. Then the great ID-human wars, and

Earthlings labor, cursing praying
Stream to battle undelaying
Torn from air and soil
Out to Space
Worn by weightlessness and toil
Angry world
Spaceward hurled.

     She traced the wars, the battles, the futility, the sorrow. Then the tone shifted slightly.
 

Hate and hunt and harry. Why?
Man has land, and ID has sky
To each his own
In peace
Each to his own
End the hate
Night grows late.

     “All right, that’s enough of that,” Hopkins snapped quickly. But his voice went unheard. The mauki threw her head back, and sang the last verse, her voice reaching down the gangways. It wasn’t the loudness, it was something in the overtones, making the thin metal walls hum in resonance, trebling, clear, rich, commanding—

Let our wish be understood
A treaty, truce, a brotherhood
Now, to save the race
Worlds were made for men
IDs were born for Space
Let ID ships roam
Now. Orbit home.

     “Shut up!” Hopkins snarled. He started halfway out of his G-couch, but the mauki shook her head, and pressed her finger to her lips in a gesture of silence. The major stopped in surprise, and then settled back on the edge of the couch.
     “We’ve heard enough of your lies,” he said. He noticed that no one was listening to him. “ATTENTION !” he roared, his voice breaking almost into a shriek. Heads snapped to stiff attention. “You will disregard everything you have heard this woman say. As you know from your basic education, it is all lies. Stupid emotional stuff.”

---

• 

     It was just before the watch change that the radar went. The chant—they called it the “mauki chant”— was a throaty trill, almost at the upper limit of hearing, hanging like an anguished violin note, and penetrating. There was an odd quality to the notes, so penetrating that the walls whined, and trembled to the touch. Then the radar set blew.
     The blowout was peculiar, a sudden series of pops, and no radar. It was the tubes. A half dozen of the same type tubes had shattered. They weren’t hot, and the connections all looked O.K...
     ...Hopkins looked at the officers and crewmen, his face hard, his mouth twisted into a bitter sneer. “The radar goes and we’re sitting here helpless, and none of you knows what shattered the tubes?” There was no answer. “We could be sheared in two by a meteorite, or caught in an ID attack — and not know it was coming.” The sneer was almost a smile. “Did any of you ever see someone shatter a fine glass by hitting a certain chord on the piano, or violin ?” There was a murmur.
     “You’ve heard of such things, haven’t you? Know what it’s called ?”
     “Resonance,” Corcelli said.
     “Right. Resonance. Sound vibrations at the natural frequency of the shattered glass. Over and over. Intensification. Know what happens then ?”
     “Increased amplitude.”
     “Right. Increased amplitude, crystal fatigue, and disintegration. Which is what happened to the tubes. Something in this ship was vibrating at the resonant frequency of the shattered tubes, and is vibrating now at the natural frequency of those other tubes.” The glass had a definite whine. Hopkins damped one, smothering it with his hand. “No dice,” he said, “that the destruction is to similar tubes, which means we can’t replace all of them.”
     “But what’s causing this vibration ?” the technician asked. Hopkins looked around at them coldly.
     “Just listen,” he said. They listened tensely, and—
     The mauki chant...

Wives that wait and silent weep
Men that outward spin through deep
Unresisting void and glide
Cross the system, onward ride
Inward, faster, maximum.
Gravi-braking, home they come
What good tears when hearts are cold?
Going boys, returning old
Grim and bitter, hardened men.
Home, then out to Space again.
Life a chain of quick good-byes
Thrusting upwards to the skies
Meetings, partings, sadness, pain.
Home, then out to Space again.

Earthlings, shape your orbits home
You were never meant for Space
We were born to ride the night
Howling down a lonesome flight
Feeling Space with eyes and mind
Earthlings, back! Your eyes are blind.
Build your cities, till your soil
Sweat, and understand your toil.
Keep your roots deep in the ground
Watch the sun and stars go round
Never really knowing why.
We are dwellers of the sky
You have nothing here to gain
Only fear and haunting pain
Tortured lonely thoughts remain.
Back! Go back while you are sane.
Earthlings, shape your orbits home.

(ed note: An ID ship boards the OSI ship and rescues the Mauki, since the OSI's radar has been shattered. They leave.

Major Hopkins freaks out since he knows when the OSI finds out that he had a Mauki but manage to lose her, his career will be over. He threatens first officer Corcelli, telling him to keep his mouth shut, and pretend they never captured the Mauki in the first place.

Corcelli later discovers that the recorder he switched on was still recording. He puts it somewhere safe, because it has a recording of Hopkins ordering him to hide evidence of the Mauki, which is a felony. At the trial it will save Corcelli's rump and put Hopkins into the slammer.

But the rest of the tape will be played in open court. Including the Mauki's chant with the true history of the Terran-ID war. This will leak out, exposing the false propaganda in the schoolbooks, and eventually leading to peace between the Terrans and the IDs. Corcelli realizes this was the Mauki's plan all along.

Behold the power of a Bard's song.)

(ed note: Our heroes are from a Terran colony that backslid to about 17th century level technology after the fall of the first galactic empire, and are currently on a covert mission to a colony that backslid to medieval level technology. They are trying to help defend a city against the local version of the Mongol hordes. The city knights know little about modern tactics and their heads are full of stupid notions of about diving into the hordes of enemies on horseback for honor and glory. Which just gets them killed. But Brett is a Bard.)

      "And your knights, Vanjynk?" MacKinnie asked.
     "They drill well, they wheel to the trumpets, but they still do not like turning from the battle. Nor do I, but I see it must be done." Vanjynk lifted his cup and gulped the wine. "You fight strangely on your world, star man."
     "Lay off that talk," Stark muttered. "We have enough trouble with the Temple people without that."
     MacKinnie nodded. "Hal's right. But tell me, will the knights obey the trumpets?"
     "I believe so," Brett answered. "They have little wish to be killed by barbarians. But there is no fear of death in these men, only of dishonor."
     "Aye, so Brett made a song about foolish knights who abandoned their commander and were shamed forever," MacLean said. "Silly thing, but catchy. Seems to have helped."
     "If songs help, sing your lungs out," MacKinnie told them. "The key to this whole battle is getting the heavy cavalry to bear on the barbarians while they're bunched up. Nothing on this world can stand up to a charge from those armored ironheads, but as soon as they lose their momentum and scatter, the maris can pick them off with no trouble at all."

• 

      IT WAS NEARLY sundown when Ravdin eased the ship down into the last slow arc toward Earth's surface. Stretching his arms and legs, he tried to relax and ease the tension in his tired muscles. Carefully he tightened the seat belt for landing; then he blinked eagerly down at the vast, tangled expanse of Jungle-land below him. Several miles ahead was the bright circle of the landing field, with the sparkling glow of the city beyond. Momentarily his eyes swept the horizon beyond the city, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Concert before he was swallowed by the brilliant lights.

     The station was completely empty as Ravdin walked down the ramp to the shuttles. At the desk he checked his fuel report in the shiny punchcard robot, and walked swiftly across the polished floor. The wall panels pulsed a sombre blue-green, broken sharply by brilliant flashes and overtones of scarlet, reflecting with subtle accuracy the tumult in his own mind. Not a sound was in the air, not a whisper nor sign of human habitation. Vaguely, uneasiness grew in his mind as he entered the shuttle station. Then, suddenly, the music caught him—a long, low chord of indescribable beauty, rising and falling in the wind, a distant whisper of life. The Concert, of course. Everyone would be at the Concert tonight, and even at the five-mile distance, the beauty of four hundred perfectly harmonized voices could carry to him in the breeze. The uneasiness disappeared, replaced by an eagerness to join, to discharge his horrible message and join the others in the great amphitheatre set deep in the hillside outside the city. Because he knew everyone would be there—except one. Instinctively Ravdin knew that Lord Nehmon would be missing the Concert, too, waiting for him to return.

     The shuttle slipped soundlessly from its berth, rising in a slow arc high over the edges of Jungle-land toward the shining walls of the city. Ravdin settled back, trying to clear his mind of the shock and horror, straining to catch the wisps of music as he crossed closer to the hillside place, down into the bright beauty of the city. The curves and spires of glowing plastic passed below, and his throat tightened as he looked down. Very suddenly he realized that his whole life was entangled in the very beauty of that wonderful city, everything he had ever hoped or dreamed lay sheltered there in the ever-clinging rhythm of colors and shapes and sounds. And now, he knew, he would see his beloved city burning once again, a consuming pyre, heartbreaking memorial to the age-old fear of his people.

     Ravdin's throat tightened as he tried to smile, and his voice was hoarse and urgent. "They're coming, Nehmon! I saw them, hours ago—"
     Lord Nehmon's eyes searched the younger man's face for a long moment; then he turned away, not quite concealing the sadness and pain in his eyes. "You couldn't be mistaken?"
     "No chance. I found signs of their passing in a dozen places. I saw them, their whole fleet. There were hundreds. They're coming, I saw them."

     "Did they see you?" Nehtnon's voice was sharp.
     "No, no. The Warp is a wonderful thing. With it, I can come and go in the twinkling of an eye. But I saw them in the twinkling of an eye."
     "It couldn't have been anyone else ?"
     "Could anyone else build ships like the Hunters?"
     Nehmon sighed, sinking back into his relaxer, shaking his head. "No one that we know." He glanced up at the scout. "Sit down, Ravdin, sit down. I—I'll just have to rearrange my thinking a little. Where were they? How far?"
     Ravdin sat down facing him, his face drawn and pale. "Seven light years, Nehmon. Can you imagine it? Just seven, and they were coming without hesitation. They know where we are." His eyes filled with fear. "They couldn't have come—unless they have the Warp, too—"

     The older man's breath cut off sharply. There was real alarm in his eyes. "You're right," he said softly. "Six months ago it was eight hundred light years away, in an area completely remote from us. Now just seven. In six months they have come so close—"
     "And there's no confusion now. They know where we are—" the scout looked up at Nehmon, a desolate look. "What can we do? We have only weeks, maybe days, before they're here. We have no time to plan, no time to prepare for them. What can we do?"
     The room was silent. Finally the older man stood up, wearily, his six hundred years of life showing in his face for the first time in centuries. "We can do once again what we. have always done," he said sadly. "We can run away."

---

     He found no answer there, only sadness. "The Concerts—it's taken so long, we're so close to the ultimate goal in the Concerts—" he gestured toward the thought-sensitive sounding boards lining the walls, through which the dancer-illusion had been possible—"All the beauty and peace we've found here—"
     "I know. How well I know." Ravdin's voice became sharper. "Yet the Hunters come again, and again we must run away."
     "We run away, Nehmon. Think about that a moment. We run, and we run, and we run. From what? We run from. the Hunters. They're hunting us, these Hunters. They never quite find us, because we've already run. We're clever, we're fortunate, we have a way of life that they do not, so they've never found us—yet. Whenever they come close to finding us, we run."
     Nehmon nodded slowly. "For thousands of years."
     Ravdin's eyes were bright. "Yes, we run, we cringe, we hide under stones, we break up our lives and tear up our families, we run like frightened animals—" he gulped a breath, and his eyes sought Nehmon's, angrily. "Why do we run, my Lord?"
     Nehmon's eyes widened. "Because we have no choice," he said sharply. "We must run or be killed. You know that; you've seen the records, you've been taught."
     "Oh, yes, I've been taught, I know. I've been taught that millenia ago remote ancestors of ours fought the Hunters, and lost, and fled, and were pursued—and always ran, ran, ran. But why? Time after time we've been cornered, and we've turned and fled. Why? Even animals know that when they're cornered they must turn and fight—"
     "We are not animals." Nehmon's voice cut the air like a whiplash.
     "But we could fight."
     "Animals fight. We do not. We fought once, like animals, and now we must run from the Hunters, who must continue. to fight like animals. Let the Hunters fight."

---

     She turned to Lord Nehmon then, her face stricken. "Oh, Nehmon, if you could have been there tonight—it was horrible. There was something in the air. Everyone felt it—we knew there was something wrong, and the Concert was ruined. The people were afraid—"
     Ravdin turned away sharply. "Tell her," he said to the old man.
     Dana looked at them, her gray eyes widening in horror. "The Hunters! They've found us?"
     Ravdin nodded wordlessly.

     Her hands trembled as she sat down, and there were tears in her eyes. "We came so close tonight—so very close. I felt the music before it was sung, do you realize that? I felt the fear around me, even though no one said a word. It wasn't vague or fuzzy, it was clear! The transference was perfect." She turned her stunned face to the old man. "It's taken so long to come this far, Nehmon. So much work and training to reach toward a perfect communal Concert. We've had only two hundred years here, only two hundred! I was just a little girl when we came, I can't even remember before that. Before we came here we were undisturbed for a thousand years, and before that, four thousand. But two hundred—we can't leave now. Not when we've come so far."

     Dana's face glowed with excitement; her slender body was alive with new vitality, new hope. "But they might have changed. Things can happen—look at us, how we've grown since the wars with the Hunters. Think how our philosophy and culture have matured! Oh, Ravdin, you were to be Master at a Concert next month. Think how the Concerts have changed! Even my grandmother can remember when the Concerts were just a few performers playing, and everyone else just sitting and listening! Can you imagine anything more silly? They hadn't even thought of transference then, they never dreamed what a real Concert-communion could be. Why, those people had never tasted music, until they became a part of the music. Even we can see these changes — why couldn't the Hunters have grown and changed just as we have?"

     Nehmon's voice broke in, almost harshly, as he faced the excited pair. "The Hunters don't have Concerts," he said grimly. "You're deluding yourselves. They laughed at our music, they scoffed at our arts and twisted them into mockeries. They had no concept of beauty in their language. The Hunters are incapable of change."

     "She's right." Ravdin's voice was low in the still room. "You're wrong, my Lord. We can't continue this way if we're to survive. Sometime our people must contact them, find the link that was once between us, and forge it strong again. We could do it."

     Down below on the street the last groups of people were passing, the last sweet, eerie tones rising to the darkening room. In a few moments the last families would have taken their refuge in the ships, waiting for Nehmon to give the dreaded signal to fire the plastic city before the ships started on their voyage. The Concerts were over. They all knew the years of aimless wandering in the black reaches of space before another home could be found. They knew the longer yeats of settlement and turmoil before the Concerts could once again rise from their hearts and throats and minds, once again work toward the climactic expression of their heritage.

     Ravdin felt the desolation in the in the old man's face, and his own mind reeled in sudden despair. It was such a slender hope, so frail and dangerous. He knew of the terrible fight, the war of his people against the Hunters, so many thousand thousand years before. They had risen together, a common people, a single planet their home. And then, the gradual splitting of the nations, his own people living in peace, seeking the growth and beauty of the arts, hating the bitterness and barrenness of war—and the Hunters, under an iron heel of militarism, of government for the perpetuation of government, split farther and farther from them. It was an ever-widening split as the Hunters grew to hate Ravdin's people for all the things the Hunters were losing: peace, love, happiness. Ravdin knew of the slowly developing doctrine of the Sanctity of Life, shattered abruptly by the horrible wars, and then the centuries of fear and flight, hiding from the wrath of the Hunters' vengeance. His people had learned much in those long years—they had conquered disease, they had grown in strength as they dwindled in numbers. And now the end could be seen, crystal clear, the end of his people and a ghastly grave.

---

• 

     THEY STOOD in the jungle-land and heard the running animals. They shivered in the cool night air as the bright sparks of the ships' exhausts faded into the black starry sky. A man and a woman, speechless, watching, staring with awful longing into the skies, watching the. bright specks flicker and go out—
     And then, days later, new sparks of light appeared in the black sky, grew to larger specks, and then to flames, and finally settled to the earth on powerful, flaming jets.

     They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down out of the air, hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the tall thicket of the jungle. Ravdin's signal had brought the ships down, and the Hunters had seen them, standing on a hilltop where the amphitheater had been. Men had come out of the ship, large men with cold faces and dull eyes, weapons strapped to their trim uniforms. The Hunters had blinked at them, unbelieving, and their weapons were held ready. Ravdin and Dana were seized and led to the largest ship. As they approached it, their hearts sank and they clasped hands to bolster their failing hope. The leader of the Hunters sat back from his desk as they were thrust into the cabin. His face was a graven mask as he searched their faces dispassionately, the slightest hint of a sneer about his deep-set, thoughtful eyes. Their eyes were pale with fear in the bright light, and Frankle felt a wave of disgust pass through his mind. "Chickens," he muttered. "We have been hunting down chickens." His eyes turned to one of the guards. "They have been searched?"

     "Of course, sir."
     Ravdin stared at him for a moment. "My people were here, that's true. We stayed to contact you, to tell you we want peace—"
     Frankle's eyes widened, almost startled. Then tired lines appeared around his eyes. "You came to us in war, once, long ago. Now you want peace. What would you do, clasp us to your bosom, to smother us in your idiotic music? Or have you gone on to greater things? Is that all you have to say? Where have your people gone?"
     Ravdin met him eye for eye. "I can't say."
     The Hunter burst into a short laugh. "I'm quite sure you can. You don't choose to—just now. Let's be precise. Who knows, very soon you may wish with all your heart to tell me—"

     Dana stepped forward suddenly, her cheeks flushed. "We don't have the words to express ourselves,we can't tell you in words what we must," she said softly. "But music is a language even you can understand. We could tell you what we want, in music—"

     Frankle scowled. He knew the magic of this music, he had heard of the witchcraft these weak chicken- people could weave, of their strange, magic power to steal men's minds from them, to make them like children before wolves. Yet he had never heard that music, with his own ears—he looked up at them, his eyes strangely bright. "You know I cannot listen to your music," he growled. "It's forbidden, even you should know that. How dare you propose—"

     "But this is different music—" Dana's eyes widened suddenly, and she threw an excited glance at her husband. "Our music is beautiful, wonderful to hear. If you could only hear it—"
     "Never." The man looked away, a little light of indecision in his eyes. "Your music is forbidden, poisonous—"
     Her smile was like sweet wine, a smile that worked into the Hunter's mind like a gentle, lazy drug. "But you are the leader here," she said. "And forbidden pleasures are so much sweeter—"

     Frankle's eyes were on hers, fascinated. Slowly, with a graceful movement, she drew the gleaming thought-sensitive stone from her clothing. It glowed in the room with a pearly luminescence, and she saw the man's eyes turning to it, drawn as if by magic. Then he shook his head, and a cruel smile played about his mouth. He motioned toward the stone. "All right," he said mockingly. "Show me your precious music."

     Like a tinkle of glass breaking in a well, the stone flashed its fiery light in the room. Little swirls of music floated suddenly into the barren stillness of the room. Frankle tensed, a chill running up his spine, unable to draw his eyes from the gleaming jewel. And then the music was there in the room, rising in its glorious beauty like an overpowering wave, filling his mind with strange and wonderful images. The stone shimmered and grew, and took the form of dancing clouds of light, swirling with the music as it rose. Suddenly FrankIe felt his mind groping. toward the music, trying desperately to reach into the heart of it, to become part of it. And Ravdin and Dana stood there, trancelike, staring transfixed at the gleaming center of light, forcing their joined minds into the crashing, majestic chords as the song lifted from the depths of oblivion to the heights of glory in the old, old song of their people—

     A song of majesty, and strength, and dignity. A song of love, of aspiration, a song of achievement. A song of peoples driven by ancient fears across the eons of space, seeking only peace, seeking love, even the love of those who drove them. Frankle heard the music, and could not comprehend, for his mind could not catch the chords, the true overtones of that glorious music, but he felt the strangeness in the pangs of fear which groped through his mind, cringing from the wonderful strains, dazzled by the dancing light. And then he was staring at the couple, wide-eyed, trembling. The authority was gone from his face for the barest instant, the cruelty was gone, the avarice, the sardonic mockery. For the briefest moment his cold grey eyes grew incredibly tender with a sudden ancient, long-forgotten longing, crying at last to be heard—

     And then, with an animal scream, he was stumbling into the midst of the light, lashing out wildly into the heart of its shimmering brilliance, sweeping the hypnotic stone with a roar into a crashing, ear-splitting cacophony against the cold steel bulkhead. He stood, his whole body shaking, eyes blazing with fear and anger, bitter hatred sparking from his gleaming eyes as he turned on Ravdin and Dana, his voice a raging storm of hatred in the dying strains of the music.

     "Spies! You thought you could steal my mind away, make me forget my duty, make me listen to your rotten, poisonous noise! Well, you failed, do you hear? I didn't hear it, I didn't listen, I didn't! I'll hunt you down as my fathers hunted you down. I'll bring my people their vengeance and glory, and then your music will be dead!" He turned to the guards, wildly, his hands still trembling. "Take them out! Whip them, burn them, do anything! But find out where their people have gone. Find out! Music! We'll take the music from them, once and for all—"

(ed note: the two are tortured until finally they are forced to use the hypnotic key that erases all their memories, turning them into mindless creatures. Frankel does not have them executed, instead he has them left in the burnt spot that was their city. The Hunters depart to continue the hunt. The two stand in the rain.)

     They knew no words, no music, nothing. And they did not know that in the departing ships the seed was planted. For Frankle had heard the music, he had seen the beauty of his enemies for that brief instant, and in that instant they had become less his enemies. Though he hated them now, the tiny, tiny seed of doubt had been planted. The seed would grow.

     The two never knew that the link had been forged.

      “Will she hear you?”
     “If she’s on this face of the Moon. If she was able to get out of the ship. If her suit radio wasn’t damaged. If she has it turned on. If she is alive. Since the ship is silent and no radar beacon has been spotted, it is unlikely that she or the pilot lived through it.”
     “She’s got to be found! Stand by, Space Station. Tycho Base, acknowledge.”
     Reply lagged about three seconds, Washington to Moon and back. “Lunar Base, Commanding General.”
     “General, put every man on the Moon out searching for Betsy!”
     Speed-of-light lag made the answer sound grudging. “Sir, do you know how big the Moon is?”
     “No matter! Betsy Barnes is there somewhere—so every man is to search until she is found. If she’s dead, your precious pilot would be better off dead, too!”
     “Sir, the Moon is almost fifteen million square miles. If I used every man I have, each would have over a thousand square miles to search. I gave Betsy my best pilot. I won’t listen to threats against him when he can’t answer back. Not from anyone, sir! I’m sick of being told what to do by people who don’t know Lunar conditions. My advice—my official advice, sir—is to let Meridian Station try. Maybe they can work a miracle.

---

     Elizabeth Barnes, “Blind Betsy,” child genius of the piano, had been making a USO tour of the Moon. She “wowed ‘em” at Tycho Base, then lifted by jeep rocket for Farside Hardbase, to entertain our lonely missilemen behind the Moon. She should have been there in an hour. Her pilot was a safety pilot; such ships shuttled unpiloted between Tycho and Farside daily.
     After lift-off her ship departed from its programming, was lost by Tycho’s radars. It was…somewhere.
     Not in space, else it would be radioing for help and its radar beacon would be seen by other ships, space stations, surface bases. It had crashed—or made emergency landing—somewhere on the vastness of Luna.

---

     “Meridian Space Station, Director speaking—” Lag was unnoticeable; radio bounce between Washington and the station only 22,300 miles up was only a quarter second. “We’ve patched Earthside stations to blanket the Moon with our call. Another broadcast blankets the far side from Station Newton at the three-body stable position. Ships from Tycho are orbiting the Moon’s rim—that band around the edge which is in radio shadow from us and from the Newton. If we hear—"
     “Yes, yes! How about radar search?”
     “Sir, a rocket on the surface looks to radar like a million other features the same size. Our one chance is to get them to answer…if they can. Ultrahigh-resolution radar might spot them in months—but suits worn in those little rockets carry only six hours’ air. We are praying they will hear and answer.”
     “When they answer, you’ll slap a radio direction finder on them. Eh?”
     “No, sir.”
     “In God’s name, why not?”
     “Sir, a direction finder is useless for this job. It would tell us only that the signal came from the Moon—which doesn’t help.”
     “Doctor, you’re saying that you might hear Betsy—and not know where she is?”
     “We’re as blind as she is. We hope that she will be able to lead us to her…if she hears us.”
     “How?”
     “With a laser. An intense, very tight beam of light. She’ll hear it—”
     “Hear a beam of light?”
     “Yes, sir. We are jury-rigging to scan like radar—that won’t show anything. But we are modulating it to give a carrier wave in radio frequency, then modulating that into audio frequency—and controlling that by a piano. If she hears us, we’ll tell her to listen while we scan the Moon and run the scale on the piano—”
     “All this while a little girl is dying?”
     “Mister President—shut up!”
     “Who was THAT?”
     “I’m Betsy’s father. They’ve patched me from Omaha. Please, Mr. President, keep quiet and let them work. I want my daughter back.”
     The President answered tightly, “Yes, Mr. Barnes. Go ahead, Director. Order anything you need.”

---

     In Station Meridian the Director wiped his face. “Getting anything?”
     “No. Boss, can’t something be done about that Rio Station? It’s sitting right on the frequency!”
     “We’ll drop a brick on them. Or a bomb. Joe, tell the President.”
     “I heard, Director. They’ll be silenced!”

---

     “Sh! Quiet! Betsy—do you hear me?” The operator looked intent, made an adjustment.
     From a speaker came a girl’s light, sweet voice: “—to hear somebody! Gee, I’m glad! Better come quick—the Major is hurt.”
     The Director jumped to the microphone. “Yes, Betsy, we’ll hurry. You’ve got to help us. Do you know where you are?”
     “Somewhere on the Moon, I guess. We bumped hard and I was going to kid him about it when the ship fell over. I got unstrapped and found Major Peters and he isn’t moving. Not dead—I don’t think so; his suit puffs out like mine and I hear something when I push my helmet against him. I just now managed to get the door open.” She added, “This can’t be Farside; it’s supposed to be night there. I’m in sunshine, I’m sure. This suit is pretty hot.”
     “Betsy, you must stay outside. You’ve got to be where you can see us.”
     She chuckled. “That’s a good one. I see with my ears.”
     “Yes. You’ll see us, with your ears. Listen, Betsy. We’re going to scan the Moon with a beam of light. You’ll hear it as a piano note. We’ve got the Moon split into the eighty-eight piano notes. When you hear one, yell, ‘Now!’ Then tell us what note you heard. Can you do that?”
     “Of course,” she said confidently, “if the piano is in tune.”
     “It is. All right, we’re starting—”
     “Now!”
     “What note, Betsy?”
     “E flat the first octave above middle C.”
     “This note, Betsy?”
     “That’s what I said.”
     The Director called out, “Where’s that on the grid? In Mare Nubium? Tell the General!” He said to the microphone, “We’re finding you, Betsy honey! Now we scan just that part you’re on. We change setup. Want to talk to your Daddy meanwhile?”
     “Gosh! Could I?”
     “Yes indeed!”
     Twenty minutes later the Director cut in and heard:
     “—of course not, Daddy. Oh, a teensy bit scared when the ship fell. But people take care of me, always have.”
     “Betsy?”
     “Yes, sir?”
     “Be ready to tell us again.”

---

     “Now!” She added, “That’s a bullfrog G, three octaves down.”
     “This note?”
     “That’s right.”
     “Get that on the grid and tell the General to get his ships up! That cuts it to a square ten miles on a side! Now, Betsy—we know almost where you are. We are going to focus still closer. Want to go inside and cool off?”
     “I’m not too hot. Just sweaty.”

---

     Forty minutes later the General’s voice rang out: “They’ve spotted the ship! They see her waving!”

• 

• 

• 

      This is the story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways — but not the official version. You sang his words in school:

“I pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave me birth;
Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.”

      Or perhaps you sang in French, or German. Or it might have been Esperanto, while Terra’s rainbow banner rippled over your head.
     The language does not matter — it was certainly an Earth tongue. No one has ever translated “Green Hills” into the lisping Venerian speech; no Martian ever croaked and whispered it in the dry corridors. This is ours. We of Earth have exported everything from Hollywood crawlies to synthetic radioactives, but this belongs solely to Terra, and to her sons and daughters wherever they may be.
     We have all heard many stories of Rhysling. You may even be one of the many who have sought degrees, or acclaim, by scholarly evaluations of his published works — Songs of the Spaceways, The Grand Canal and other Poems, High and Far, and “UP SHIP!”

     Nevertheless, although you have sung his songs and read his verses, in school and out your whole life, it is at least an even money bet — unless you are a spaceman yourself — that you have never even heard of most of Rhysling’s unpublished songs, such items as Since the Pusher Met My Cousin, That RedHeaded Venusburg Gal, Keep Your Pants On, Skipper, or A Space Suit Built for Two.
     Nor can we quote them in a family magazine.
     Rhysling’s reputation was protected by a careful literary executor and by the happy chance that he was never interviewed. Songs of the Spaceways appeared the week he died; when it became a best seller, the publicity stories about him were pieced together from what people remembered about him plus the highly colored handouts from his publishers.
     The resulting traditional picture of Rhysling is about as authentic as George Washington’s hatchet or King Alfred’s cakes.
     In truth you would not have wanted him in your parlor; he was not socially acceptable. He had a permanent case of sun itch, which he scratched continually, adding nothing to his negligible beauty.
     Van der Voort’s portrait of him for the Harriman Centennial mouth, sightless eyes concealed by black silk bandage. He was never solemn! His mouth was always open, singing, grinning, drinking, or eating. The bandage was any rag, usually dirty. After he lost his sight he became less and less neat about his person.

---

     “Noisy” Rhysling was a jetman, second class, with eyes as good as yours, when he signed on for a loop trip to the Jovian asteroids in the RS Goshawk. The crew signed releases for everything in those days; a Lloyd’s associate would have laughed in your face at the notion of insuring a spaceman. The Space Precautionary Act had never been heard of, and the Company was responsible only for wages, if and when. Half the ships that went further than Luna City never came back. Spacemen did not care; by preference they signed for shares, and any one of them would have bet you that he could jump from the 200th floor of Harriman Tower and ground safely, if you offered him three to two and allowed him rubber heels for the landing.
     Jetmen were the most carefree of the lot, and the meanest. Compared with them the masters, the radarmen, and the astrogators (there were no supers nor stewards in those days) were gentle vegetarians. Jetmen knew too much. The others trusted the skill of the captain to get them down safely; jetmen knew that skill was useless against the blind and fitful devils chained inside their rocket motors.
     The Goshawk was the first of Harriman’s ships to be converted from chemical fuel to atomic power-piles — or rather the first that did not blow up. Rhysling knew her well; she was an old tub that had plied the Luna City run, Supra-New York space station to Leyport and back, before she was converted for deep space. He had worked the Luna run in her and had been along on the first deep space trip, Drywater on Mars — and back, to everyone’s surprise.
     He should have made chief engineer by the time he signed for the Jovian loop trip, but, after the Drywater pioneer trip, he had been fired, blacklisted, and grounded at Luna City for having spent his time writing a chorus and several verses at a time when he should have been watching his gauges. The song was the infamous The Skipper is a Father to his Crew, with the uproariously unprintable final couplet.
     The blacklist did not bother him. He won an accordion from a Chinese barkeep in Luna City by cheating at onethumb and thereafter kept going by singing to the miners for drinks and tips until the rapid attrition in spacemen caused the Company agent there to give him another chance. He kept his nose clean on the Luna run for a year or two, got back into deep space, helped give Venusburg its original ripe reputation, strolled the banks of the Grand Canal when a second colony was established at the ancient Martian capital, and froze his toes and ears on the second trip to Titan.

     Things moved fast in those days. Once the power-pile drive was accepted the number of ships that put out from the LunaTerra system was limited only by the availability of crews. Jetmen were scarce; the shielding was cut to a minimum to save weight and few married men cared to risk possible exposure to radioactivity. Rhysling did not want to be a father, so jobs were always open to him during the golden days of the claiming boom. He crossed and recrossed the system, singing the doggerel that boiled up in his head and chording it out on his accordion.
     The master of the Goshawk knew him; Captain Hicks had been astrogator on Rhysling’s first trip in her. “Welcome home, Noisy,” Hicks had greeted him. “Are you sober, or shall I sign the book for you?”
     “You can’t get drunk on the bug juice they sell here, Skipper.” He signed and went below, lugging his accordion.
     Ten minutes later he was back. “Captain,” he stated darkly, “that number two jet ain’t fit. The cadmium dampers are warped.”
     “Why tell me? Tell the Chief.”
     “I did, but he says they will do. He’s wrong.”
     The captain gestured at the book. “Scratch out your name and scram. We raise ship in thirty minutes.”
     Rhysling looked at him, shrugged, and went below again.

     It is a long climb to the Jovian planetoids; a Hawk-class clunker had to blast for three watches before going into free flight. Rhysling had the second watch. Damping was done by hand then, with a multiplying vernier and a danger gauge. When the gauge showed red, he tried to correct it — no luck.
     Jetmen don’t wait; that’s why they are jetmen. He slapped the emergency discover and fished at the hot stuff with the tongs. The lights went out, he went right ahead. A jetman has to know his power room the way your tongue knows the inside of your mouth.
     He sneaked a quick look over the top of the lead baffle when the lights went out. The blue radioactive glow did not help him any; he jerked his head back and went on fishing by touch.
     When he was done he called over the tube, “Number two jet out. And for crissake get me some light down here!”
     There was light — the emergency circuit — but not for him. The blue radioactive glow was the last thing his optic nerve ever responded to.

---

“As Time and Space come bending back to shape this starspecked scene,
The tranquil tears of tragic joy still spread their silver sheen;
Along the Grand Canal still soar the fragile Towers of Truth;
Their fairy grace defends this place of Beauty, calm and couth.

“Bone-tired the race that raised the Towers, forgotten are their lores,
Long gone the gods who shed the tears that lap these crystal shores.
Slow heats the time-worn heart of Mars beneath this icy sky;
The thin air whispers voicelessly that all who live must die —

“Yet still the lacy Spires of Truth sing Beauty’s madrigal
And she herself will ever dwell along the Grand Canal!”

     — from The Grand Canal, by permission of Lux Transcriptions, Ltd., London and Luna City

---

• 

     On the swing back they set Rhysling down on Mars at Drywater; the boys passed the hat and the skipper kicked in a half month’s pay. That was all — finish — just another space bum who had not had the good fortune to finish it off when his luck ran out. He holed up with the prospectors and archeologists at How-Far? for a month or so, and could probably have stayed forever in exchange for his songs and his accordion playing. But spacemen die if they stay in one place; he hooked a crawler over to Drywater again and thence to Marsopolis.
     The capital was well into its boom; the processing plants lined the Grand Canal on both sides and roiled the ancient waters with the filth of the runoff. This was before the TriPlanet Treaty forbade disturbing cultural relics for commerce; half the slender, fairylike towers had been torn down, and others were disfigured to adapt them as pressurized buildings for Earthmen.
     Now Rhysling had never seen any of these changes and no one described them to him; when he “saw” Marsopolis again, he visualized it as it had been, before it was rationalized for trade. His memory was good. He stood on the riparian esplanade where the ancient great of Mars had taken their ease and saw its beauty spreading out before his blinded eyes — ice blue plain of water unmoved by tide, untouched by breeze, and reflecting serenely the sharp, bright stars of the Martian sky, and beyond the water the lacy buttresses and flying towers of an architecture too delicate for our rumbling, heavy planet.

     The result was Grand Canal.

     The subtle change in his orientation which enabled him to see beauty at Marsopolis where beauty was not now began to affect his whole life. All women became beautiful to him. He knew them by their voices and fitted their appearances to the sounds. It is a mean spirit indeed who will speak to a blind man other than in gentle friendliness; scolds who had given their husbands no peace sweetened their voices to Rhysling.
     It populated his world with beautiful women and gracious men. Dark Star Passing, Berenice’s Hair, Death Song of a Wood’s Colt, and his other love songs of the wanderers, the womenless men of space, were the direct result of the fact that his conceptions were unsullied by tawdry truths. It mellowed his approach, changed his doggerel to verse, and sometimes even to poetry.
     He had plenty of time to think now, time to get all the lovely words just so, and to worry a verse until it sang true in his head. The monotonous beat of Jet Song —

When the field is clear, the reports all seen,
When the lock sighs shut, when the lights wink green,
When the check-off’s done, when it’s time to pray,
When the Captain nods, when she blasts away —

Hear the jets!
Hear them snarl at your back
When you’re stretched on the rack;
Feel your ribs clamp your chest,
Feel your neck grind its rest.
Feel the pain in your ship,
Feel her strain in their grip.
Feel her rise! Feel her drive!
Straining steel, come alive,
On her jets!

     —came to him not while he himself was a jetman but later while he was hitch-hiking from Mars to Venus and sitting out a watch with an old shipmate.
     At Venusburg he sang his new songs and some of the old, in the bars. Someone would start a hat around for him; it would come back with a minstrel’s usual take doubled or tripled in recognition of the gallant spirit behind the bandaged eyes.
     It was an easy life. Any space port was his home and any ship his private carriage. No skipper cared to refuse to lift the extra mass of blind Rhysling and his squeeze box; he shuttled from Venusburg to Leyport to Drywater to New Shanghai, or back again, as the whim took him.
     He never went closer to Earth than Supra-New York Space Station. Even when signing the contract for Songs of the Spaceways he made his mark in a cabin-class liner somewhere between Luna City and Ganymede. Horowitz, the original publisher, was aboard for a second honeymoon and heard Rhysling sing at a ship’s party. Horowitz knew a good thing for the publishing trade when he heard it; the entire contents of Songs were sung directly into the tape in the communications room of that ship before he let Rhysling out of his sight. The next three volumes were squeezed out of Rhysling at Venusburg, where Horowitz had sent an agent to keep him liquored up until he had sung all he could remember.
     UP SHIP! is not certainly authentic Rhysling throughout. Much of it is Rhysling’s, no doubt, and Jet Song is unquestionably his, but most of the verses were collected after his death from people who had known him during his wanderings.

---

• 

     The Green Hills of Earth grew through twenty years. The earliest form we know about was composed before Rhysling was blinded, during a drinking bout with some of the indentured men on Venus. The verses were concerned mostly with the things the labor clients intended to do back on Earth if and when they ever managed to pay their bounties and thereby be allowed to go home. Some of the stanzas were vulgar, some were not, but the chorus was recognizably that of Green Hills.

     We know exactly where the final form of Green Hills came from, and when.

     There was a ship in at Venus Ellis Isle which was scheduled for the direct jump from there to Great Lakes, Illinois. She was the old Falcon, youngest of the Hawk class and the first ship to apply the Harriman Trust’s new policy of extra-fare express service between Earth cities and any colony with scheduled stops.
     Rhysling decided to ride her back to Earth. Perhaps his own song had gotten under his skin — or perhaps he just hankered to see his native Ozark’s one more time.
     The Company no longer permitted deadheads: Rhysling knew this but it never occurred to him that the ruling might apply to him. He was getting old, for a spaceman, and just a little matter of fact about his privileges. Not senile — he simply knew that he was one of the landmarks in space, along with Halley’s Comet, the Rings, and Brewster’s Ridge. He walked in the crew’s port, went below, and made himself at home in the first empty acceleration couch.

     The Captain found him there while making a last minute tour of his ship. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
     “Dragging it back to Earth, Captain.” Rhysling needed no eyes to see a skipper’s four stripes.
     “You can’t drag in this ship; you know the rules. Shake a leg and get out of here. We raise ship at once.” The Captain was young; he had come up after Rhysling’s active time, but Rhysling knew the type — five years at Harriman Hall with only cadet practice trips instead of solid, deep space experience. The two men did not touch in background nor spirit; space was changing.
     “Now, Captain, you wouldn’t begrudge an old man a trip home.”
     The officer hesitated — several of the crew had stopped to listen. “I can’t do it. ‘Space Precautionary Act, Clause Six: No one shall enter space save as a licensed member of a crew of a chartered vessel, or as a paying passenger of such a vessel under such regulations as may be issued pursuant to this act.’ Up you get and out you go.”
     Rhysling lolled back, his hands under his head. “If I’ve got to go, I’m damned if I’ll walk. Carry me.”
     The Captain bit his lip and said, “Master-at-Arms! Have this man removed.”
     The ship’s policeman fixed his eyes on the overhead struts. “Can’t rightly do it, Captain. I’ve sprained my shoulder.” The other crew members, present a moment before, had faded into the bulkhead paint.
     “Well, get a working party!”
     “Aye, aye, sir.” He, too, went away.
     Rhysling spoke again. “Now look, Skipper — let’s not have any hard feelings about this. You’ve got an out to carry me if you want to — the ‘Distressed Spaceman’ clause.”
     “‘Distressed Spaceman’, my eye! You’re no distressed spaceman; you’re a space-lawyer. I know who you are; you’ve been bumming around the system for years. Well, you won’t do it in my ship. That clause was intended to succor men who had missed their ships, not to let a man drag free all over space.”
     “Well, now, Captain, can you properly say I haven’t missed my ship? I’ve never been back home since my last trip as a signed-on crew member. The law says I can have a trip back.”
     “But that was years ago. You’ve used up your chance.”
     “Have I now? The clause doesn’t say a word about how soon a man has to take his trip back; it just says he’s got it coming to him. Go look it up. Skipper. If I’m wrong, I’ll not only walk out on my two legs, I’ll beg your humble pardon in front of your crew. Go on — look it up. Be a sport.”
     Rhysling could feel the man’s glare, but he turned and stomped out of the compartment. Rhysling knew that he had used his blindness to place the Captain in an impossible position, but this did not embarrass Rhysling — he rather enjoyed it.

     Ten minutes later the siren sounded, he heard the orders on the bull horn for UpStations. When the soft sighing of the locks and the slight pressure change in his ears let him know that take-off was imminent he got up and shuffled down to the power room, as he wanted to be near the jets when they blasted off. He needed no one to guide him in any ship of the Hawk class.
     Trouble started during the first watch. Rhysling had been lounging in the inspector’s chair, fiddling with the keys of his accordion and trying out a new version of Green Hills.

“Let me breathe unrationed air again
Where there’s no lack nor dearth”

     And “something, something, something ‘Earth’” — it would not come out right. He tried again.

“Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth
Of our lovely mother planet,
Of the cool green hills of Earth.”

     That was better, he thought. “How do you like that, Archie?” he asked over the muted roar.
     “Pretty good. Give out with the whole thing.” Archie Macdougal, Chief Jetman, was an old friend, both spaceside and in bars; he had been an apprentice under Rhysling many years and millions of miles back.
     Rhysling obliged, then said, “You youngsters have got it soft. Everything automatic. When I was twisting her tail you had to stay awake.”
     “You still have to stay awake.” They fell to talking shop and Macdougal showed him the direct response damping rig which had replaced the manual vernier control which Rhysling had used. Rhysling felt out the controls and asked questions until he was familiar with the new installation. It was his conceit that he was still a jetman and that his present occupation as a troubadour was simply an expedient during one of the fusses with the company that any man could get into.
     “I see you still have the old hand damping plates installed,” he remarked, his agile fingers flitting over the equipment.
     “All except the links. I unshipped them because they obscure the dials.”
     “You ought to have them shipped. You might need them.”
     “Oh, I don’t know. I think—”

     Rhysling never did find out what Macdougal thought for it was at that moment the trouble tore loose. Macdougal caught it square, a blast of radioactivity that burned him down where he stood.
     Rhysling sensed what had happened. Automatic reflexes of old habit came out. He slapped the discover and rang the alarm to the control room simultaneously. Then he remembered the unshipped links. He had to grope until he found them, while trying to keep as low as he could to get maximum benefit from the baffles. Nothing but the links bothered him as to location. The place was as light to him as any place could be; he knew every spot, every control, the way he knew the keys of his accordion.
     “Power room! Power room! What’s the alarm?”
     “Stay out!” Rhysling shouted. “The place is ‘hot.’” He could feel it on his face and in his bones, like desert sunshine.
     The links he got into place, after cursing someone, anyone, for having failed to rack the wrench he needed. Then he commenced trying to reduce the trouble by hand. It was a long job and ticklish. Presently he decided that the jet would have to be spilled, pile and all.
     First he reported. “Control!”
     “Control aye aye!”
     “Spilling jet three — emergency.”
     “Is this Macdougal?”
     “Macdougal is dead. This is Rhysling, on watch. Stand by to record.”
     There was no answer; dumbfounded the Skipper may have been, but he could not interfere in a power room emergency. He had the ship to consider, and the passengers and crew. The doors had to stay closed.
     The Captain must have been still more surprised at what Rhysling sent for record. It was:

• 

 

We rot in the molds of Venus,
We retch at her tainted breath.
Foul are her flooded jungles,
Crawling with unclean death.”

     Rhysling went on cataloguing the Solar System as he worked, “—harsh bright soil of Luna—”,”—Saturn’s rainbow rings—”,”—the frozen night of Titan—”, all the while opening and spilling the jet and fishing it clean. He finished with an alternate chorus —

“We’ve tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.”

     —then, almost absentmindedly remembered to tack on his revised first verse:

  “The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
All hands! Stand by! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.
Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet—”

     The ship was safe now and ready to limp home shy one jet.
     As for himself, Rhysling was not so sure. That “sunburn” seemed sharp, he thought. He was unable to see the bright, rosy fog in which he worked but he knew it was there. He went on with the business of flushing the air out through the outer valve, repeating it several times to permit the level of radioaction to drop to something a man might stand under suitable armor. While he did this he sent one more chorus, the last bit of authentic Rhysling that ever could be:

  “We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.”

 

• 

(ed note: our heros: Richard and Dorothy Seaton, Martin and Margaret Crain, have discovered that the entire galaxy in general and Terra in particular are threatened with conquest by the dread Fenachrone empire. They are traveling in their spaceship, the Skylark, to find the rumored people of Norlamin. Those people are benevolent and scientifically advanced. As they approach the rumored area; the Norlamin named Orlon discover them with long-range scanners, contact them, and give them directions to their planet. )

      ‘I’ll say I’m relieved! We ought to be able to take ’em, with the Norlaminians backing us. If they haven’t already got the stuff we need, they will know how to make it – even if that zone actually is impenetrable, I’ll bet they’ll be able to work out some solution. Relieved? That don’t half tell it, guy – I feel like I’d just pitched off the Old Man of the Sea who’s been riding on my neck! What say you girls get your fiddle and guitar and we’ll sing us a little song? I feel good – they had me worried – it’s the first time I’ve felt like singing since we cut that warship up.’

     Dorothy brought out her ‘fiddle’ – the magnificent Stradivarius, formerly Crane’s, which he had given her – Margaret her guitar, and they sang one rollicking number after another. Though by no means a Metropolitan Opera quartette, their voices were all better than mediocre, and they had sung together so much that they harmonized readily.
     ‘Why don’t you play us some real music, Dottie?’ asked Margaret, after a time. ‘You haven’t practiced for ages.’
     ‘Right. This quartette of ours ain’t so hot,’ agreed Seaton. ‘If we had any audience except Shiro, they’d probably be throwing eggs by this time.’
     ‘I haven’t felt like playing lately, but I do now,’ and Dorothy stood up and swept the bow over the strings. Doctor of music in violin, an accomplished musician, playing upon one of the finest instruments the world has ever known, she was lifted out of herself by relief from the dread of the Fenachrone invasion and that splendid violin expressed every subtle nuance of her thought.
     She played rhapsodies and paeans, and solos by the great masters. She played vivacious dances, then ‘Traumerei’ and ‘Liebestraum’. At last she swept into the immortal ‘Meditation’, and as the last note died away Seaton held out his arms. ‘You’re a blinding flash and a deafening report, Dottie Dimple, and I love you,’ he declared – and his eyes and his arms spoke volumes that his light utterance had left unsaid.

---

(ed note: At Norlamin, things are put into motion to deal with the Fenachrone. After dinner comes the relaxation period at Orlon's residence)

     When all had returned to the common room of the observatory and had seated themselves Orlon took out his miniature ray-projector, no larger than a fountain pen, and flashed it briefly upon one of the hundreds of button-like lenses upon the wall. Instantly each chair converted itself into a form-fitting divan, inviting complete repose.
     ‘I believe that you of Earth would perhaps enjoy some of our music during this, the period of relaxation and repose – it is so different from your own,’ Orlon remarked, as he again manipulated his tiny force-tube.

     Every light was extinguished and there was felt a profoundly deep vibration – a note so low as to be palpable rather than audible: and simultaneously the utter darkness was relieved by a tinge of red so dark as to be barely perceptible, while a peculiar somber fragrance pervaded the atmosphere. The music rapidly ran the gamut to the limit of audibility and, in the same tempo, the lights traversed the visible spectrum and disappeared. Then came a crashing chord and a vivid flare of blended light; ushering in an indescribable symphony of sound and color, accompanied by a slower succession of shifting, blending colors.
     The quality of tone was now that of a gigantic orchestra, now that of a full brass band, now that of a single unknown instrument – as though the composer had had at his command every overtone capable of being produced by any possible instrument, and with them had woven a veritable tapestry of melody upon an incredibly complex loom of sound. As went the harmony, so accompanied the play of light. Neither music nor illumination came from any apparent source; they simply pervaded the entire room. When the music was fast – and certain passages were of a rapidity impossible for any human fingers to attain – the lights flashed in vivid, tiny pencils, intersecting each other in sharply-drawn, brilliant figures which changed with dizzying speed: when the tempo was slow the beams were soft and broad, blending into each other to form sinuous, indefinite, writhing patterns whose very vagueness was infinitely soothing.

     ‘What do you think of it, Mrs Seaton?’ Orlon asked, when the symphony was ended.
     ‘Marvelous!’ breathed Dorothy, awed. ‘I never imagined anything like it. I can’t begin to tell you how much I like it. I never dreamed of such absolute perfection of execution, and the way the lighting accompanies the theme is just too perfectly wonderful for words! It was wonderfully, incredibly brilliant.’
     ‘Brilliant – yes. Perfectly executed – yes. But I notice that you say nothing of depth of feeling or of emotional appeal.’ Dorothy blushed uncomfortably and started to say something, but Orlon silenced her and continued: ‘You need not apologize. I had a reason for speaking as I did, for in you I recognize a real musician, and our music is indeed entirely soulless. That is the result of our ancient civilization. We are so old that our music is purely intellectual, entirely mechanical, instead of emotional. It is perfect, but, like most of our other arts, it is almost completely without feeling.’

     ‘But your statues are wonderful!’
     ‘As I told you, those statues were made myriads of years ago. At that time we also had real music, but, unlike statuary, music at that time could not be preserved for posterity. That is another thing you have given us. Attend!’
     At one end of the room, as upon a three-dimensional screen, the four Terrestrials saw themselves seated in the control room of the Skylark. They saw and heard Margaret take up her guitar and strike four sonorous chords in ‘A’. Then, as if they had been there in person, they heard themselves sing ‘The Bull-Frog’ and all the other songs they had sung, far off in space. They heard Margaret suggest that Dorothy play some ‘real music’, and heard Seaton’s comments upon the quartette.
     ‘In that, youngster, you were entirely wrong,’ said Orlon, stopping the reproduction for a moment. ‘The entire planet was listening to you very attentively – we were enjoying it as no music has been enjoyed for thousands of years.’
     ‘The whole planet!’ gasped Margaret. ‘Were you broadcasting it? How could you?’
     ‘Easy,’ grinned Seaton. ‘They can do practically anything.’

     ‘When you have time, in some period of labor, we would appreciate it very much if you four would sing for us again, would give us more of your vast store of youthful music, for we can now preserve it exactly as it is sung. But much as we enjoyed the quartette, Mrs Seaton, it was your work upon the violin that took us by storm. Beginning with tomorrow, my companion intends to have you spend as many periods as you will, playing for our records. We shall now have your music’
     ‘If you like it so well, wouldn’t you rather I’d play you something I hadn’t played before?’
     ‘That is labor. We could not …’
     ‘Piffle!’ Dorothy interrupted. ‘Don’t you see that I could really play right now, to somebody who really enjoys music; whereas if I tried to play in front of a recorder I’d be perfectly mechanical?’
     ‘’At-a-girl, Dot! I’ll get your fiddle.’
     ‘Keep your seat, son,’ instructed Orlon, as the case containing the Stradivarius appeared before Dorothy, borne by a pencil of force. ‘While that temperament is incomprehensible to one of us, it is undoubtedly true that the artistic mind does operate in that manner. We listen.’

     Dorothy swept into ‘The Melody in F’, and as the poignantly beautiful strains poured forth from that wonderful violin she knew that she had her audience with her. Though so intellectual that they themselves were incapable of producing music of real depth of feeling, they could understand and could enjoy such music with an appreciation impossible to a people of lesser mental attainments; and their profound enjoyment of her playing, burned into her mind by the telepathic, almost hypnotic power of the Norlaminian mentality, raised her to heights she had never before attained. Playing as one inspired she went through one tremendous solo after another – holding her listeners spellbound, urged on by their intense feeling to carry them further and ever further into the realm of pure emotional harmony. The bell which ordinarily signaled the end of the period of relaxation did not sound; for the first time in thousands of years the planet of Norlamin deserted its rigid schedule of life – to listen to one Earthwoman, pouring out her very soul upon her incomparable violin.
     The final note of ‘Memories’ died away in a diminuendo wail, and the musician almost collapsed into Seaton’s arms. The profound silence, more impressive far than any possible applause, was broken by Dorothy.

     ‘There – I’m all right now, Dick. I was about out of control for a minute. I wish they could have had that on a recorder – I’ll never be able to play like that again if I live to be a thousand years old.’
     ‘It is on record, daughter. Every note and every inflection is preserved, precisely as you played it,’ Orlon assured her. ‘That is our only excuse for allowing you to continue as you did, almost to the point of exhaustion. While we cannot really understand an artistic mind of the peculiar type to which yours belongs, yet we realized that each time you play you are doing something no one, not even yourself, can ever do again in precisely the same subtle fashion. Therefore we allowed, in fact encouraged, you to go on as long as that creative impulse should endure – not merely for our own pleasure in hearing it, great though that pleasure was; but in the hope that our workers in music could, by a careful analysis of your product, determine quantitatively the exact vibrations or overtones which make the difference between emotional and intellectual music.’

• 

The great polar explorer Roald Amundsen credited expedition cook Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm as having “rendered greater and more valuable services to the Norwegian polar expedition than any other man.” He was citing not only Lindstrøm’s vaunted prowess as a chef, but his keen sense of humor, with which he regularly defused conflicts among the isolated crew members.

Lindstrøm’s joviality is seen by behavioral scientists as an essential component of a small group that must live in closed quarters over an extended period of time, such as a four- to six-member expedition to Mars. As Noshir Contractor of Northwestern University put it, “the human body is the one object on a spacecraft over which engineers have no control.” Contractor, a professor of behavioral science, was speaking at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C. Although we have learned a lot from the space program about such hazards to astronauts as radiation and gravity fields, Contractor said, “It is only in the past decade or so that we have begun to write the manual … for the social impacts that accompany humans who are going into space.”With increasing time in isolation, crews exhibited a decline in their ability to think together and solve problems.

A trip to Mars would last almost three years. It would take 259 days to get there, and the crew would have to stay on the Red Planet for an Earth-year to be in proper position to return home, another nine-month journey. That crew might comprise several nationalities and cultures and other demographic variations. Due to the distance, communications with Earth could be delayed up to 22 minutes each way, requiring the crew to be essentially autonomous in case a problem arose. Could they get along with each other and resolve crises without the nearly instantaneous backup that mission control has provided for astronauts on the International Space Station and even the moon?

The Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) project is a human Petri dish, located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center near Houston, Texas, and designed to study interactions among several humans in a small space over extended periods of time. At the AAAS meeting, Leslie DeChurch, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University, described HERA isolation experiments in which nine four-person crews spent 30 to 45 days living under conditions that simulated part of a journey to Mars. They were tested with four behaviors related to collective intelligence: making decisions, executing tasks, negotiating and resolving conflicts, and generating new ideas and solutions to problems. All of the groups showed improvement in behavioral areas of collective performance, but with increasing time in isolation, they exhibited a decline in their ability to think together, combine expertise, and solve problems creatively. There are typically periods of peak crew intelligence and periods of “problematic” crew intelligence. DeChurch correlated the latter partly to the increasing communications delay as the simulations moved farther from Earth.

Jeffrey Johnson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, related his observations among small groups, especially fishermen who were isolated for long periods in the Alaskan Arctic. During a prolonged strike that kept the men largely confined to their bunkhouses, he observed one of them emerge as what he called the “court jester.” Nicknamed by the others as Captain Sadsack, he alleviated tension and maintained cohesion between two groups of Italian-American fisherman from different geographic areas. Sadsack willingly accepted being the butt of jokes and pranks in which both groups participated. He never complained and was well liked by all, Johnson said.

Johnson followed up those observations with studies of groups at various research facilities in Antarctica and found that in the most effective of them, members of the crew adopted informal roles that contributed to group cohesion. “The clown was the most central figure” in one South Pole Station group, Johnson told me. “The clown bridged social relations between the scientists and the trades crew—the plumbers, electricians, and mechanics. His bridging role was fostered by his humor and fun-loving nature.”

Johnson added that less effective groups lacked a clown figure or others in informal leadership roles. He also found, in other experiments, that the importance of these informal roles in group cohesion scaled down to much smaller groups, even to the size of a Mars mission.

At HERA, scientists are improving their skill at analyzing interactions among the test subjects, and using their data to predict how participants would behave in larger and longer missions. If, in the 1970s, Contractor said, Skylab’s mission control had the behavioral insights that scientists now have, it could have predicted the unprecedented work stoppage by the crew of Skylab-4. The crew, which had developed decreasing internal cohesion as compared with the previous missions, shut down communications with Houston for a weekend and relaxed. It was—so far—the only “strike” by astronauts in the history of space exploration.

A similar facility to HERA is HI-SEAS—Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, on the high slopes of Mauna Loa. HI-SEAS experimental groups tend to be larger, up to six persons, and stay in place longer, eight to 12 months, as compared with HERA groups, according to Steve Kozlowski, a professor of organizational psychology at Michigan State University. The HI-SEAS subjects are studied in real time and each person wears an electronic badge that monitors interactions among the group members. Among the findings so far, Kozlowski said, is that cohesion is high at the start of a simulated mission, but after four to seven months, one or more persons will begin to “desynchronize” from the rest of the team. Others do so later. By the end of the mission, cohesion is “all over the place,” he said. This has occurred in every HI-SEAS mission longer than six months, and would be a serious concern in a Mars mission, which will be up to six times longer.

Tom Williams, a research scientist at NASA who leads a team focused on human factors and behavioral performance, said the space agency was working to identify the many risks to crew health and performance during a Mars mission. So far NASA has isolated 32 separate risks. “It doesn’t mean we think team dysfunction is going to cause a mission to fail, but we think we better need to understand that, to make sure that we can adopt preventive strategies.”

Group dynamics were scarcely an issue back in the days of Mercury and Gemini. As Contractor said, “Many of the mental and physical characteristics that Tom Wolfe referred to in The Right Stuff are not going to be valid today, when much greater emphasis has to be placed on crew members working together cohesively, rather than being celebrated for their rugged individualism.”

Harvey Leifert is a science writer based in Bethesda, Maryland.

• 

      Cornwell whispered, “A cache of Singing Bells; an accumulated cache of Singing Bells. Unpolished, but such beauties, Mr. Pevton. The man was a lunar grubstaker who had a method for locating the Bells in the crater sides. I don’t know his method; he never told me that. But he has gathered dozens, hidden them on the moon, and come to Earth to arrange the disposing of them.”
     “He died, I suppose?”
     “Yes. A most shocking accident, Mr. Peyton. A fall from a height. Very sad. Of course, his activities on the moon were quite illegal. The Dominion is very strict about unauthorized Bell-mining. So perhaps it was a judgment upon him after all … In any case, I have his map.”

---

     “Singing Bells,’’ put in the extraterrologist (Dr. Urth) in great excitement. “Don’t tell me this murder of yours involves Singing Bells!”
     “What if it does?” demanded (Inspector) Davenport, blankly.
     “I have one. A University expedition uncovered it and presented it to me in return for … Come, Inspector, I must show it to you.”
     For a moment he looked about, puzzled, then remembering, he pushed aside a chart showing the evolutionary scheme of development of the marine invertebrates that were the highest life-forms on Arcturus V and said, “Here it is. It’s flawed. I’m afraid.”

     The Bell hung suspended from a slender wire, soldered delicately onto it. That it was flawed was obvious. It had a constriction line running halfway about it that made it seem like two small globes, firmly but imperfectly squashed together. Despite that, it had been lovingly polished to a dull luster, softly gray, velvety smooth, and faintly pockmarked in a way that laboratories, in their futile efforts to prepare synthetic Bells, had found impossible to duplicate.
     Dr. Urth said, “I experimented a good deal before I found a decent stroker. A flawed Bell is temperamental. But bone works. I have one here,” and he held up something that looked like a short thick spoon made of a gray-white substance, “which I had made out of the femur of an ox … Listen.”
     With surprising delicacy, his pudgy fingers maneuvered the Bell, feeling for one best spot. He adjusted it, steadying it daintily. Then, letting the Bell swing free, he brought down the thick end of the bone spoon and stroked the Bell softly.
     It was as though a million harps had sounded a mile away. It swelled and faded and returned. It came from no particular direction. It sounded inside the head, incredibly sweet and pathetic and tremulous all at once.
     It died away lingeringly and both men were silent for a full minute.

     Dr. Urth said, “Not bad, eh?” and with a flick of his hand set the Bell to swinging on its wire.
     Davenport stirred restlessly, “Careful! Don’t break it.” The fragility of a good Singing Bell was proverbial.
     Dr. Urth said, “Geologists say the Bells are only pressure-hardened pumice, enclosing a vacuum in which small beads of rock rattle freely. That’s what they say. But if that’s all it is, why can’t we reproduce one? Now a flawless Bell would make this one sound like a child’s harmonica.”
     “Exactly,” said Davenport, “and there aren’t a dozen people on Earth who own a flawless one, and there are a hundred people and institutions who would buy one at any price, no questions asked. A supply of Bells would be worth murder.”

---

     “Ah, but inspect it,” said Dr. Urth, and with a quick motion of his hand, he tossed it through six feet of air to Peyton.
     Davenport cried out and half-rose from his chair. Peyton brought up his arms with an effort, but so quickly that they managed to catch the Bell.
     Peyton said, “You damned fool. Don’t throw it around that way.”
     “You respect Singing Bells, do you?”
     “Too much to break one. That’s no crime, at least.” Peyton stroked the Bell gently, then lifted it to his ear and shook it slowly, listening to the soft clicks of the Lunoliths, those small pumice particles, as they rattled in vacuum.
     Then, holding the Bell up by the length of steel wire still attached to it, he ran a thumb nail over its surface with an expert, curving motion. It twanged! The note was very mellow, very flute-like, holding with a slight vibrato that faded lingeringly and conjured up pictures of a summer twilight.
     For a short moment, all three men were lost in the sound.

I mulled over things I had heard Mr. Dubois — Colonel Dubois — say, as well as his extraordinary letter, while we went swinging back toward camp. Then I stopped thinking because the band dropped back near our position in column and we sang for a while, a French group — "Marseillaise," of course, and "Madelon" and "Sons of Toil and Danger," and then "Legion Étrangère" and "Mademoiselle from Armentières."

It's nice to have the band play; it picks you right up when your tail is dragging the prairie. We hadn't had anything but canned music at first and that only for parade and calls. But the powers-that-be had found out early who could play and who couldn't; instruments were provided and a regimental band was organized, all our own — even the director and the drum major were boots.

It didn't mean they got out of anything. Oh no! It just meant they were allowed and encouraged to do it on their own time, practicing evenings and Sundays and such — and that they got to strut and countermarch and show off at parade instead of being in ranks with their platoons. ...

...The band suffered a lot of attrition but somehow they always kept it going. The camp owned four sets of pipes and some Scottish uniforms, donated by Lochiel of Cameron whose son had been killed there in training — and one of us boots turned out to be a piper; he had learned it in the Scottish Boy Scouts. Pretty soon we had four pipers, maybe not good but loud. Pipes seem very odd when you first hear them, and a tyro practicing can set your teeth on edge — it sounds and looks as if he had a cat under his arm, its tail in his mouth, and biting it.

But they grow on you. The first time our pipers kicked their heels out in front of the band, skirling away at "Alamein Dead," my hair stood up so straight it lifted my cap. It gets you — makes tears.

We couldn't take a parade band out on route march, of course, because no special allowances were made for the band. Tubas and bass drums had to stay behind because a boy in the band had to carry full kit, same as everybody, and could only manage an instrument small enough to add to his load. But the M. I. has band instruments which I don't believe anybody else has, such as a little box hardly bigger than a harmonica, an electronic gadget which does an amazing job of faking a big horn and is played the same way. Comes band call when you are headed for the horizon, each bandsman sheds his kit without stopping, his squadmates split it up, and he trots to the column position of the color company and starts blasting.

It helps.

The band drifted aft, almost out of earshot, and we stopped singing because your own singing drowns out the beat when it's too far away.

      A genial voice rang out suddenly. It seemed to come from the crystal centerpiece on the table. From the direction in which other diners turned their attention, it obviously came from the crystal centerpiece on every table.
     It said, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Green Room. Have you eaten well? For your added pleasure, the management is proud to present the magnetonic rhythms of Tobe Tobias and his—"
     As the voice spoke, the lights went out and the remainder of its words were drowned in a rising sigh of wonder that came from the assembled guests, most of whom were fresh from Earth. The aquarium globe in the ceiling was suddenly a luminous emerald green and the sea-ribbon glow was sharply brilliant. The globe assumed a faceted appearance so that, as it turned, drifting shadows circled the room in a soft, almost hypnotic fashion. The sound of music, drawn almost entirely from the weird, husky sound boxes of a variety of magnetonic instruments, grew louder. The notes were produced by rods of various shapes being moved in skillful patterns through the magnetic field that surrounded each instrument.
     Men and women were rising to dance. There was the rustle of much motion and the sibilance of laughing whispers.

• 

• 

The ondes Martenot or ondes musicales ("musical waves") is an early electronic musical instrument. It is played with a keyboard or by moving a ring along a wire, creating "wavering" sounds similar to a theremin. A player of the ondes martenot is called an ondist.

The ondes Martenot was invented in 1928 by the French inventor Maurice Martenot. Martenot was inspired by the accidental overlaps of tones between military radio oscillators, and wanted to create an instrument with the expressiveness of the cello.

The instrument is used in more than 100 classical compositions. The French composer Olivier Messiaen used it in pieces such as his 1949 symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, and his sister-in-law Jeanne Loriod was a celebrated player of the instrument. It appears in numerous film and television soundtracks, particularly science fiction and horror films. Jonny Greenwood of the English rock band Radiohead is credited with bringing the ondes to a larger modern audience. It has also been used by pop artists such as Daft Punk and Damon Albarn.

Sounds and technique

The ondes Martenot is unique among electronic musical instruments in its methods of control. The ondes Martenot can be played with a metal ring worn on the right index finger. Sliding the ring along a wire produces "theremin-like" tones, generated by oscillations in vacuum tubes, or transistors in the seventh model.

The third model of the instrument, unveiled in 1929, had a non-functioning simulacrum of a keyboard below the wire to indicate pitch. This model also had a "black fingerguard" on a wire which could be used instead of the ring. It was held between the right thumb and index finger, which was played standing at a distance from the instrument. When played in this way, the drawer is removed from the instrument and placed on a bench next to the player. Maurice Martenot's pedagogical manual for the ondes Martenot, written in 1931, offers instruction on both methods of playing.

Later versions added a real functioning keyboard; the keys produce vibrato when moved from side to side. This was introduced in the 1930s with the 84-key fourth version of the instrument. Subsequent versions had 72 keys. Combined with a switch that transposes the pitch by one octave, these instruments have a range from C₁ to C₈.

A drawer allows manipulation of volume and timbre by the left hand. Volume is controlled with a touch-sensitive glass "lozenge", called the "gradation key"; the further the lozenge is depressed, the louder the volume. In his preface to Jeanne Loriod's Technique de l'Onde Electronique Type Martenot., Olivier Messiaen explains that the "gradation key, struck by one or several fingers of the left hand, gives at the same time the sound, its intensity, and the attack itself. The intensity ranges from an almost inaudible pianissimo to the most terrible and painful fortissimo, passing through all intermediate gradations. The conceivable attacks are more numerous than those of the piano, violin, flute, horn or organ – they range from an absolute legato and glissando to the sounds of temple blocks and membranophones. Somewhere beyond the absolute legato exists an extraterrestrial, enchanted voice, and beneath the dry staccato attack may be found sound effects such as cracked bell, a crumbling pile of sand, or an aircraft motor." Early models could produce only a few waveforms. Later models can simultaneously generate sine, peak-limited triangle, square, pulse, and full-wave rectified sine waves, in addition to pink noise, all controlled by switches in the drawer. The square wave and full-wave rectified sine wave can be further adjusted by sliders in the drawer. On the Seventh model, a dial at the top of the drawer adjusts the balance between white noise and the other waveforms. A second dial adjusts the balance between the three speakers. A switch chooses between the keyboard and ribbon.

Further adjustments can be made using controls in the body of the instrument. These include several dials for tuning the pitch, a dial for adjusting the overall volume, a switch to transpose the pitch by one octave, and a switch to activate a filter.

The drawer of the Seventh model also includes six transposition buttons, which change the pitch by a specific interval. These are called -1/4 (lower by one quarter tone), +1/4 (raise by one quarter tone), +1/2 (raise by one semitone), +1 (raise by one whole tone), +3ce (raise by one major third), and +5te (raise by one major fifth. These can be combined to immediately raise the pitch by up to a minor ninth.

Martenot produced four speakers, called diffuseurs, for the instrument. The Métallique features a gong instead of a speaker cone, producing a metallic timbre. It was used by the first ondes Martenot quartets in 1932. Another, the Palme speaker, has a resonance chamber laced with strings tuned to all 12 semitones of an octave; when a note is played in tune, it resonates a particular string, producing chiming tones. It was first presented alongside the sixth version of the ondes Martenot in 1950.

According to the Guardian, the ondes Martenot "can be as soothing and moving as a string quartet, but nerve-jangling when gleefully abused". Greenwood described it as "a very accurate theremin that you have far more control of ... When it's played well, you can really emulate the voice." The New York Times described its sound as a "haunting wail".

Legacy

In 2001, the New York Times described the ondes, along with other early electronic instruments such as the theremin, teleharmonium, trautonium, and orgatron, as part of a "futuristic electric music movement that never went remotely as far as its pioneers dreamed ... proponents of the new wired music delighted in making previously unimaginable noises". The French classical musician Thomas Bloch said: "The ondes martenot is probably the most musical of all electric instruments ... Martenot was not only interested in sounds. He wanted to use electricity to increase and control the expression, the musicality. Everything is made by the musician in real time, including the control of the vibrato, the intensity, and the attack. It is an important step in our electronic instrument lineage."

According to music journalist Alex Ross, fewer than 100 people have mastered the instrument. In 1997, Mark Singer wrote for The Wire that the ondes would likely remain obscure: ''The fact is that any instrument with no institutional grounding of second- and third-raters, no spectral army of amateurs, will wither and vanish: how can it not? Specialist virtuosos may arrive to tackle the one-off novelty ... but there's no meaningful level of entry at the ground floor, and, what's worse, no fallback possibility of rank careerism if things don't turn out.''

In 2009, the Guardian reported that the last ondes Martenot was manufactured in 1988, but that a new model was being manufactured. In 2011, Sound on Sound wrote that original ondes Martenot models were "all but impossible to obtain or afford, and unless you can stump up 12,000 Euros for one of Jean‑Loup Dierstein's new reproduction instruments, the dream of owning a real Ondes is likely to remain such". In 2012, the Canadian company Therevox began selling a synthesizer with an interface based on the ondes Martenot pitch ring and intensity key. In 2017, the Japanese company Asaden manufactured 100 Ondomo instruments, a portable version of the ondes Martenot.

The ondes Martenot's electronics are fragile, and it includes a powder which transfers electric currents, which Martenot would mix in different quantities according to musicians' specifications; the precise proportions are unknown. Attempts to construct new ondes Martenot models using Martenot's original specifications have been mixed.

• 

• 

(ed note: Barnum and Baily are Partners, that is, Barnum is a human being merged with Baily. The latter is a "symb", an intelligent plant creature who is symbiotically merged with Barnum's body. Anyway, such Partners live around Saturn's rings and are inspired to compose music. When they do, they travel to sell their composition to a producer. They have traveled to the firm of Ragtime and Tympani. The lady Tympani works with them to translate their composition into musical notation because B&B wouldn't know a treble cleff if it flew straight up their behind. During a break, Tympani shows them a prototype for a new musical instrument called a Synapticon. Just so you know Tympani does not have feet, she has extra hands called "peds.")

      “When you go back out,” she (Tympani) said, “Why don’t you give some thought to working in a synapticon part for your next work?”
     “What’s a synapticon?”
     She stared at him, not believing what she had heard. Then her expression changed to one of delight.
     “You really don’t know? Then you have something to learn.” And she bounced over to her desk, grabbed something with her peds, and hopped back to the synthesizer. It was a small black box with a strap and a wire with an input jack at one end. She turned her back to him and parted her hair at the base of her skull.
     “Will you plug me in?” she asked.
     Barnum saw the tiny gold socket buried in her hair, the kind that enabled one to interface directly with a computer. He inserted the plug into it and she strapped the box around her neck. It was severely funtional, and had an improvised, breadboarded look about it, scarred with tool marks and chipped paint. It gave the impression of having been tinkered’ with almost daily.
     “It’s still in the development process,” she said. “Myers—he’s the guy who invented it—has been playing with it, adding things. When we get it right we’ll market it as a necklace. The circuitry can be compacted quite a bit. The first one had a wire that connected it to the speaker, which hampered my style considerably. But this one has a transmitter. You’ll see what I mean. Come on, there isn’t room in here.”

     She led the way back to the outer office and turned on a big speaker against the wall.
     “What it does,” she said, standing in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides, “is translate body motion into music. It measures the tensions in the body nerve network, amplifies them, and…well, I’ll show you what I mean. This position is null; no sound is produced.” She was standing straight, but relaxed, peds together, hands at her sides, head slightly lowered.
     She brought her arm up in front of her, reaching with her hand, and the speaker behind her made a swooping sound up the scale, breaking into a chord as her fingers closed on the invisible tone in the air. She bent her knee forward and a soft bass note crept in, strengthening as she tensed the muscles in her thighs.
     She added more harmonics with her other hand, then abruptly cocked her body to one side, exploding the sound into a cascade of chords. Barnum sat up straight, the hairs on his arms and spine sitting up with him.
     Tympani couldn’t see him. She was lost in a world that existed slightly out of phase with the real one, a world where dance was music and her body was the instrument. Her eyeblinks became stacatto punctuating phrases and her breathing provided a solid rhythmic base for the nets of sound her arms and legs and fingers were weaving.
     The beauty of it to Barnum and Bailey was the perfect fitting together of movement to sound. He had thought it would be just a novelty: sweating to twist her body into shapes that were awkward and unnatural to reach the notes she was after. But it wasn’t like that. Each element shaped the other. Both the music and the dance were improvised as she went along and were subordinate to no rules but her own internal ones.
     When she finally came to rest, balancing on the tips of her peds and letting the sound die away to nothingness, Barnum was almost numb. And he was surprised to hear the sound of hands clapping. He realized it was his own hands, but he wasn’t clapping them. It was Bailey. Bailey had never taken over motor control.

---

• 

     They had to have all the details. Bailey was overwhelmed by the new art form and grew so impatient with relaying questions through Barnum that he almost asked to take over Barnum’s vocal cords for a while.
     Tympani was surprised at the degree of enthusiasm. She was a strong proponent of the synapticon but had not met much success in her efforts to popularize it. It had its limitations, and was viewed as an interesting but passing fad.
     “What limitations?” Bailey asked, and Barnum vocalized.
     “Basically, it needs free-fall performance to be fully effective. There are residual tones that can’t be eliminated when you’re standing up in gravity, even on Janus. And I can’t stay in the air long enough here. You evidently didn’t notice it, but I was unable to introduce many variations under those conditions.”
     Barnum saw something at once.
     “Then I should have one installed. That way I can play it as I move through the Ring.”
     Tympani brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. She was covered in sweat from her performance, and her face was flushed. Barnum almost didn’t hear her reply, he was so intent on the harmony of motion in that simple movement. And the synapticon was turned off.
     “Maybe you should. But I’d wait if I were you.” Barnum was about to ask why but she went on quickly. “It isn’t an exact instrument yet, but we’re working on it, refining it every day. Part of the problems, you see, is that it takes special training to operate it so it produces more than white noise. I wasn’t strictly truthful with you when I told you how it works.”
     “How so?”
     “Well, I said it measures tensions in nerves and translates it. Where are most of the nerves in the body?”
     Barnum saw it then. “In the brain.”
     “Right. So mood is even more important in this than in most music. Have you ever worked with an alpha-wave device? By listening to a tone you can control certain functions of your brain. It takes practice. The brain provides the reservoir of tone for the synapticon, modulates the whole composition. If you aren’t in control of it, it comes out as noise.”
     “How long have you been working with it?”
     “About three years.”

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I’ve been playing music I’ve been called all different kinds of fool-more times than Lobey, which is my name.

(ed note: apparently he plays it with his fingers and toes)

Thoughtfully, he reached into a locker for a little hemispherical musical instrument. Absently, he touched its strings, bringing forth queer, shivering, haunting tones.

The instrument was a twenty-string Venusian guitar, two sets of strings each strung across each other on a metal hemisphere. Few Earthmen could play the complicated thing but Captain Future had a habit of plucking haunting tones from it when he was lost in thought.

• 

A laser harp is an electronic musical user interface and laser lighting display. It projects several laser beams—and a musician plays these by blocking them to produce sounds-reminiscent of a harp. The laser harp has been popularized by Jean Michel Jarre, and has been a high profile feature of almost all his concerts since 1981. British electronic musician Little Boots has used a similar instrument in concerts. The British electro jazz band 1201-Alarm feature a laser harp as a main aspect of their live show.

Design

Unframed style, also known as "Infinite Beam" laser harps

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This style of laser harp is generally built using a single laser, splitting its beam into an array of beams in parallel or fan arrangement. Playing the actual sound is usually handled by connecting the laser harp to a synthesizer, sampler or computer.

This frameless design is more elaborate than the framed style, relying on reflecting the light back to a single photodiode. The fan of laser beams is actually a single beam scanned into a fan pattern. By matching the timing of the reflected beam, the instrument can determine which beam the player is blocking and sound the corresponding note. Alternative designs use multiple lasers. In these designs, each laser can be independently controlled (pulsed on and off) to simulate playback of prerecorded notes.

Several techniques generate more control data, such as a continuous range of values like those in typical MIDI controllers:

• An infrared or ultrasonic rangefinder attached to the instrument that determines the position of the hand that blocks a beam
• A laser-based rangefinder that determines the distance from the hand to the laser's starting or ending point (and possibly using this laser itself as the string)—or a variation of this that uses the intensity of the sensor signal itself
• A camera that tracks position and motion of the laser dot on the hand, or length of the exposed beam if visible, then calculates a continuous value based upon a reference

The first of these is relatively inexpensive and straightforward to implement, and can use the same micro-controller that drives the lasers and reads the detectors.

The advantage of a dedicated sensor mechanism is that the instrument can be self-contained, as opposed to requiring a computer to control it with input from an ILDA interface and USB camera. The PC-based approach, however, offers more flexibility and can be constructed with mostly off-the-shelf hardware.

Unframed laser harps benefit from the use of higher-power lasers, as they facilitate easier detection by the sensor system. As the sensor is exposed to all ambient light, it can be swamped by stage lighting behind the artist if the sensitivity is too high. To avoid this, the system can use ambient light sensors to reject ambient light. The player may use white or light-coloured gloves to improve performance by scattering more light off the player's hands to provide the sensor with a higher signal-to-noise ratio with respect to ambient light. Furthermore, the gloves protect the player's skin from potentially hazardous laser radiation and give audiences a more visual impression of the instrument.

Bi-color and full color laser harps

In 2005 the first free full color ILDA laser harp Genesis controller idea and project was born on laserist board and the harpelaser.com domain was registered. The last sensor designed rejects ambient light and can measure the hand height in the beams. It offers the possibility to play on the sound like the pitch, filters; these things were not really available before. Free software allows the musician to create patches, playlists, color presets like rainbow, visual effects, midi channel and virtual harp to test. The last functions added to this model are the automatic learning of the song by playing it on a keyboard and the beam vibration to simulate a real string dumped vibration (idea submitted by Francis Rimbert).

In 2008 Maurizio Carelli, an Italian software and electronic engineer, had the idea of a new portable red/green laser harp. This device features a configurable full octave with green beams for any diatonic note and red ones for any chromatic note for full Diatonic and Chromatic scale. In this way any musician can easily play a laser harp, fully polyphonic. This machine became the first portable bicolor laser harp, and it is still in production. In the second half of 2010, Carelli also designed an ILDA full color laser harp controller.

Unframed style, "Image recognition" laser harp

The image recognition laser harp is also an unframed design, but uses a high-speed USB camera connected to a laptop computer, instead of a photodiode to detect the reflected light from the hand breaking the beam. The digital picture is analyzed by the computer software to determine which beam is broken and send the appropriate MIDI signal back to the synthesizer, which is responsible for creating the sound. The computer also controls the laser projector via an ILDA USB laser controller.

Framed style

The framed style, which is often created to look like a harp with strings, uses an array of photodiodes or photoresistors inside the upper or lower part of the frame to detect blocking of the laser beams. The framed harp built by Geoffrey Rose in 1975/6 was an octagonal shape with a 5 X 5 matrix of laser beams. The lasers can be mounted on the 'neck' or upper side of the harp, shining down, or on the body, shining up. Typically, the lasers used are very low-powered 5 mW red or green lasers, which are considered safe for public interaction by the FDA. Any number of laser beams can be arranged in this type of laser harp, from as few as one or two, up to 32 or more, depending on the capacity of the MIDI controller(s) and software being used. This style of Laser Harp can be created in any size, from a lap sized harp to a room sized installation, or larger, like the installations seen at Burning Man. In this design, only an analog DC (on/off) trigger is created by the breaking of the beam (and the DC circuit made by the beam shining on the optic sensor), which is sufficient to trigger any number of events (musical or otherwise) as determined by the data analyzer/software in question. In the MIDI controller, this analog DC current interruption is converted to a digital signal, which is then used to trigger many possible events or actions. Some software comes equipped with full wave file editors and synthesizers, and can also trigger video and still imagery via projection units.

Typical framed style laser harp software functions

Play Modes:

• Trigger Mode — In this mode, breaking a beam always triggers the event, sound (a sample, loop or MIDI note), image or video that that particular beam has been preset to trigger. Each beam will always trigger its own preset event when broken. e.g. If the beam number one is set to play a bass drum and beam two a snare drum; then one will always play a bass drum and two a snare.
• Sequence Mode — In this mode, breaking any of the beams plays a preset melody or song one note at a time. Familiar tunes may be played by the breaking the beams in time with the song. Little or no musical ability is required to play a tune. Similarly, a sequence of images could be displayed or an image could be built up one part at a time.
• Event Mode — When broken, a beam set to 'Event Mode' can change octaves, sounds, songs or programmed settings for any or all of the beams.

Switch Modes:

• On-Off — A sound will play only while a beam remains broken. The sound stops when the beam is unbroken.
• Play to end — Once triggered, a sound will play to the end regardless of when the beam is unbroken.
• Toggle Mode — Breaking a beam the first time triggers a sound which plays to the end (or loops) until the beam is broken a second time.

All beams do not have to be set to the same Play or Switch Mode - each beam may be set up differently.

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(ed note: The following events happen to the Third Men, the third human species. They arose about forty million years after our species became extinct.)

Industrialism, however, was never more than a digression, a lengthy and disastrous irrelevance in the life of this species. There were other digressions. There were for instance cultures, enduring sometimes for several thousand years, which were predominantly musical. This could never have occurred among the First Men; but, as was said, the third species was peculiarly developed in hearing, and in emotional sensitivity to sound and rhythm. Consequently, just as the First Men at their height were led into the wilderness by an irrational obsession with mechanical contrivances, just as the Third Men themselves were many times undone by their own interest in biological control, so, now and again, it was their musical gift that hypnotized them. Of these predominantly musical cultures the most remarkable was one in which music and religion combined to form a tyranny no less rigid than that of religion and science in the remote past. It is worth while to dwell on one of these episodes for a few moments.

The Third Men were very subject to a craving for personal immortality. Their lives were brief, their love of life intense. It seemed to them a tragic flaw in the nature of existence that the melody of the individual life must either fade into a dreary senility or be cut short, never to be repeated. Now music had a special significance for this race. So intense was their experience of it, that they were ready to regard it as in some manner the underlying reality of all things. In leisure hours, snatched from a toilful and often tragic life, groups of peasants would seek to conjure about them by song or pipe or viol a universe more beautiful, more real, than that of daily labour. Concentrating their sensitive hearing upon the inexhaustible diversity of tone and rhythm, they would seem to themselves to be possessed by the living presence of music, and to be transported thereby into a lovelier world. No wonder they believed that every melody was a spirit, leading a life of its own within the universe of music. No wonder they imagined that a symphony or chorus was itself a single spirit inhering in all its members. No wonder it seemed to them that when men and women listened to great music, the barriers of their individuality were broken down, so that they became one soul through communion with the music.

The prophet was born in a highland village where the native faith in music was intense, though quite unformulated. In time he learnt to raise his peasant audiences to the most extravagant joy and the most delicious sorrow. Then at last he began to think, and to expound his thoughts with the authority of a great bard. Easily he persuaded men that music was the reality, and all else illusion, that the living spirit of the universe was pure music, and that each individual animal and man, though he had a body that must die and vanish for ever, had also a soul that was music and eternal. A melody, he said, is the most fleeting of things. It happens and ceases. The great silence devours it, and seemingly annihilates it. Passage is essential to its being. Yet though for a melody, to halt is to die a violent death, all music, the prophet affirmed, has also eternal life. After silence it may occur again, with all its freshness and aliveness. Time cannot age it; for its home is in a country outside time. And that country, thus the young musician earnestly preached, is also the home land of every man and woman, nay of every living thing that has any gift of music. Those who seek immortality, must strive to waken their tranced souls into melody and harmony. And according to their degree of musical originality and proficiency will be their standing in the eternal life.

The doctrine, and the impassioned melodies of the prophet, spread like fire. Instrumental and vocal music sounded from every pasture and corn plot. The government tried to suppress it, partly because it was thought to interfere with agricultural productivity, largely because its passionate significance reverberated even in the hearts of courtly ladies, and threatened to undo the refinement of centuries. Nay, the social order itself began to crumble. For many began openly to declare that what mattered was not aristocratic birth, nor even proficiency in the time-honoured musical forms (so much prized by the leisured), but the gift of spontaneous emotional expression in rhythm and harmony. Persecution strengthened the new faith with a glorious company of martyrs who, it was affirmed, sang triumphantly even in the flames.

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One day the sacred monarch himself, hitherto a prisoner within the conventions, declared half sincerely, half by policy, that he was converted to his people's faith. Bureaucracy gave place to an enlightened dictatorship, the monarch assumed the title of Supreme Melody, and the whole social order was re-fashioned, more to the taste of the peasants. The subtle prince, backed by the crusading zeal of his people, and favoured by the rapid spontaneous spread of the faith in all lands, conquered the whole world, and founded the Universal Church of Harmony. The prophet himself, meanwhile, dismayed by his own too facile success, had retired into the mountains to perfect his art under the influence of their great quiet, or the music of wind, thunder and waterfall. Presently, however, the silence of the fells was shattered by the blare of military bands and ecclesiastical choirs, which the emperor had sent to salute him and conduct him to the metropolis. He was secured, though not without a scrimmage, and lodged in the High Temple of Music. There he was kept a prisoner, dubbed God's Big Noise, and used by the world-government as an oracle needing interpretation. In a few years the official music of the temple, and of deputations from all over the world, drove him into raving madness; in which state he was the more useful to the authorities.

Thus was founded the Holy Empire of Music, which gave order and purpose to the species for a thousand years. The sayings of the prophet, interpreted by a series of able rulers, became the foundation of a great system of law which gradually supplanted all local codes by virtue of its divine authority. Its root was madness; but its final expression was intricate common sense, decorated with harmless and precious flowers of folly. Throughout, the individual was wisely, but tacitly, regarded as a biological organism having definite needs or rights and definite social obligations; but the language in which this principle was expressed and elaborated was a jargon based on the fiction that every human being was a melody, demanding completion within a greater musical theme of society.

Toward the close of this millennium of order a schism occurred among the devout. A new and fervent sect declared that the true spirit of the musical religion had been stifled by ecclesiasticism. The founder of the religion had preached salvation by individual musical experience, by an intensely emotional communion with the Divine Music. But little by little, so it was said, the church had lost sight of this central truth, and had substituted a barren interest in the objective forms and principles of melody and counterpoint. Salvation, in the official view, was not to be had by subjective experience, but by keeping the rules of an obscure musical technique. And what was this technique? Instead of making the social order a practical expression of the divine law of music, churchmen and statesmen had misinterpreted these divine laws to suit mere social convenience, until the true spirit of music had been lost. Meanwhile on the other side a counter-revival took place. The self-centred and soul-saving mood of the rebels was ridiculed. Men were urged to care rather for the divine and exquisitely ordered forms of music itself than for their own emotion.

It was amongst the rebel peoples that the biological interest of the race, hitherto subordinate, came into its own. Mating, at least among the more devout sort of women, began to be influenced by the desire to have children who should be of outstanding musical brilliance and sensitivity. Biological sciences were rudimentary, but the general principle of selective breeding was known. Within a century this policy of breeding for music, or breeding "soul," developed from a private idiosyncrasy into a racial obsession. It was so far successful that after a while a new type became common, and thrived upon the approbation and devotion of ordinary persons. These new beings were indeed extravagantly sensitive to music, so much so that the song of a sky-lark caused them serious torture by its banality, and in response to any human music of the kind which they approved, they invariably fell into a trance. Under the stimulus of music which was not to their taste they were apt to run amok and murder the performers.

We need not pause to trace the stages by which an infatuated race gradually submitted itself to the whims of these creatures of human folly, until for a brief period they became the tyrannical ruling caste of a musical theocracy. Nor need we observe how they reduced society to chaos; and how at length an age of confusion and murder brought mankind once more to its senses, but also into so bitter a disillusionment that the effort to re-orientate the whole direction of its endeavour lacked determination. Civilization fell to pieces and was not rebuilt till after the race had lain fallow for some thousands of years.

So ended perhaps the most pathetic of racial delusions. Born of a genuine and potent aesthetic experience, it retained a certain crazy nobility even to the end.

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Within the humming, echoing cave of theArgo, it was becoming more and more difficult to believe that any other world existed, particularly during the long weeks while the great hull was riding the Standing Wave, a universe in itself. But regularly there came through that closed universe the undeniable, uniformly shaped pips of the Hegemony's detection beams, reminding the Argo's crew that though they could see nothing of the galaxy while they were in transit, the Heart Stars were watching them constantly.

Then the Argo burst once again out of its self-made, invisible cocoon, and beneath it rolled a world of green hills and cloud-dappled blue skies so like the Earth that Jack felt an acute pang of homesickness. Surely this planet, so calm, so pastoral, so domesticated, could not present any unpleasant surprises. That just wouldn't be fair.

But it did. Earth-like the planet was, geophysically, but its people had never heard of the Earth and had no intention of living like Earthmen. The life that they lived in the gigantic stone temples they had built upon pylons in the middle of the sea was centred in music, which in turn was based upon the ceaseless rolling of the broad combers of the waves. They vaguely understood that the gig was something like the small, high-pooped, lateen-sailed carracks with their dragon's-head forecastles in which they cruised their ocean, but they looked with horror out of their frog-like eyes upon the star travellers, and were obviously happy to be rid of them. They did not fit anywhere into the completely ritualized life of this culture, where even the smallest act or gesture was ceremonial as well as functional and had its appropriate five-note melody. The last thing Jack and Sandbag heard as they quitted that world was a cacophonous skirling of pipes and horns, at once both mournful and aggressive, as though the people were hoping to blow them off the face of the planet.

Yet the world from which these constant chants and pipings arose was immensely wealthy, and immensely powerful. It was the first Heart Star planet that they had seen that was impressive enough, despite its peculiarities, to seem to merit full membership in a union as all-embracing as the Hegemony of Malis.

'All the same,' Sandbag said, 'if I ever get to be Earth's ambassador to that crew, the first thing I'm going to do is turn off my hearing aid.'

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      Of all the things received over the Ophiuchi Hotline (an extraterrestrial technology information broadcast), none is more wonderful than the symb. In the early part of the third century, symbs were seen as the salvation of the human race. Futurists saw the day when each human would be paired with a symb partner and forever free of reliance on airlocks, hydroponic farming, and recycled water. Each human would be a tiny model of lost Earth, free to roam the solar system at will.
     It's easy to see what inspired the optimism. The symmetry of the concept is overwhelming. Each human-symb pair is a closed ecology, requiring only sunlight and a small amount of solid matter to function. The vegetable symb gathers sunlight in space, using it to convert human waste and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. At the same time it protects the fragile human from vacuum and the extremes of heat and cold. The symb's body extends into the lungs and through the alimentary canal. Each side feeds the other.
     What we didn't bargain for is the mind of the symb. Since it has no brain, a symb is nothing but a lump of artificial organic matter until it comes in contact with a human. But upon permeating the nervous system of its host it is born as a thinking being. It shares the human brain. The early experimenters learned that, once in, the symb was there to stay. Since that time relatively few have opted to surrender their mental privacy in exchange for Utopia in the Rings (of Saturn).
     But out of the disappointment we have been given a precious gift. Ring society is not human society. We live in rooms and corridors; they have all of space. We each have the right to be the mother of one child in our lifetimes; they breed like bacteria. We are islands; they are paired minds. It is a relationship that is difficult to imagine.
     Somewhere in that magical junction of two dissimilar minds a tension is created. Sparks are struck, sparks of dazzling creativity. All Ringers (human/symbs pairs living in Saturn's Rings) are poets. Poetry is a normal by-product of living. To those of us without the courage to pair, who wait for the infrequent contacts of Ringers with human society, their songs are beyond price.

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      At first consideration it seemed logical to many that the best art in the system should issue from the Rings of Saturn. Not until humanity reaches Beta Lyrae or farther will a more beautiful place to live be found. Surely an artist could draw endless inspiration from the sights to be seen in the Ring. But artists are rare. How could the Rings produce art in every human who lived there?

     The artistic life of the solar system had been dominated by Ringers for over a century. If it was the result of the heroic scale of the Rings and their superb beauty, one might expect the art produced to be mainly heroic in nature, and beautiful in tone and execution. Such had never been the case. The paintings, poetry, writing, and music of the Ringers covered the entire range of human experience and then went a step beyond.

     A man or a woman would arrive at Janus for any of a variety of reasons, determined to abandon his or her former life and pair with a symb. About a dozen of them departed like that each day, not to be heard of for up to a decade. These people were a reasonable cross-section of the race, ranging from the capable to the helpless, some of them kind and others cruel. There were geniuses among them, and idiots. They were precisely as young, old, sympathetic, callous, talented, useless, vulnerable and fallible as any random sample of humanity must be. Few of them had any training or inclination in the fields of painting or music or writing.

     Some of them died. The Rings, after all, were hazardous. These people had no way of learning how to survive out there except by trying and succeeding. But most came back. And they came back with pictures and songs and stories.

     Agentry was the only industry on Janus. It took a special kind of agent, because few Ringers could walk into an office and present a finished work of any kind. A literary agent had the easiest job. But a tinpanalleycat had to be ready to teach some rudiments of music to the composer who knew nothing about notation.

     The rewards were high. Ringer art was statistically about ten times more likely to sell than art from anywhere else in the system. Better yet, the agent took nearly all the profits instead of a commission, and the artists had never pressured for more. Ringers had little use for money. Often, an agent could retire on the proceeds of one successful sale.

     But the fundamental question of why Ringers produced art was unanswered.

     Barnum didn’t know. He had some ideas, partially confirmed by Bailey. It was tied up in the blending of the human and symb mind. A Ringer was more than a human, and yet still human. When combined with a Symb something else was created. It was not under their control. The best Barnum had been able to express it to himself was by saying that this meeting of two different kinds of mind set up a tension at the Junction. It was like the addition of amplitudes when two waves meet head-on. That tension was mental, and fleshed itself out by clothing it.self in the symbols that were lying around for the taking in the mind of the human. It had to be the human symbols because the intellectual life of a symb starts at the moment it comes in contact with a human brain. The symb has no brain of its own and has to make do with using the human brain on a time-sharing basis.

(ed note: Ringer Human/Symb partners living in Saturn's Rings create priceless music)

      The Ringmarket was the clearinghouse for the wildly variant and irresistibly beautiful art that was the byproduct of living a solitary life in the Rings. Art brokers, musicmongers, poetry sellers, editors, moodmusic vendors . . . all the people who made a living by standing between the artist and the audience and raking off a profit as works of art passed through their hands; they all gathered at the Ringmarket bazaar and bought exquisite works for the equivalent of pretty-colored beads. The Ringers had no need of money. All exchanges were straight barter: a fresh gas bottle for a symphony that would crash through the mind with unique rhythms and harmonies. A handful of the mineral pellets the Ringers needed every decade to supply trace elements that were rare in the Rings could buy a painting that would bring millions back in civilization. It was a speculative business. No one could know which of the thousands of works would catch the public taste at high tide and run away with it. All the buyers knew was that for unknown reasons the art of the Rings had consistently captured the highest prices and the wildest reviews. It was different. It was from a whole new viewpoint.

     It took them (Ringer Equinox/Parameter) four years to work their way around to Ringmarket. They traded a song, one that had taken three years to produce, a sweet-sad dirge that somehow rang with hope, orchestrated for three lutes and synthesizer; traded it and a promise of four more over the next century to a tinpan alleycat for an elephant gun. Then they went out on a trail that was four years cold to stalk the memory of those long-ago pachyderm days.