Lullaby of the Ages
by Matthew KresselThe time has come to move. The beasts swim through the deep together. They are always together, glutting themselves on the spray of food swirling throughout the eddied waters. Over slow eons their bellies have grown large, and the little ones born in these deeps cannot remember a time without food, without plenty. But the herd has ravaged these seas. Food has grown scarce.
The mother calls to her young. She sings the song of gathering. The other mothers call too, until the herd sings together, until the waters fill with the song of change. It is a melody of hope and sadness, sadness that the time has come for the herd to move, hope that their hunger will be sated again.
The calls echo off their mammoth bodies, a rising cacophony that frightens the children. The mother points with her song: there! Eons across the deep, across the black, cold seas, is a smattering of speckled light, of spinning eddies, of food. There, her children will grow as fat as she. There, the herd will find peace again.
The herd agrees. Her children huddle close. It is their first time venturing into the voids. How long? they ask in song. How long till we reach the other side? The mother, not wishing to frighten them, sings a melody they know and love. The children do not yet understand the concept of eternity, even a small one.
Year 627 C.E.
I sit outside the Brahmin's tent drinking tea, a foul substance the locals pour down their throats in small rivers. I'm dressed in the garb of the lower castes, a henna-colored sarong wrapping my waist, a lapis-stained sheath concealing my breasts. What taboos these humans have about their flesh!
No one pays notice to me as I sift a bowl of cumin seeds through my hands. They assume I'm here for enlightenment, a pilgrim of the Brahmin come to ask for eternal knowledge, that my cumin is my gift. But I'm not here to seek audience with that laconic man and his distant stare, even though when he looked at me as he entered his tent this morning, I saw recognition in his eyes – he knows I'm not of this Earth. No, I am here to await the arrival of my husband.
I have been waiting for him for two hundred and forty one revolutions of this planet around its sun. I expect him soon. I can smell his body stuttering across time towards me.
The sun climbs a quarter way up the sky as seekers enter the Brahmin's tent. The ethers fill with sweet musk, and when I hear my name called, my heart sings a thousand praises. It is not the Brahmin who calls to me.
"Vanya, my love, I have spun back to you."
I stand without looking behind me. I don't want him to see the twisted expectation on my face, the revelations of this human form. I compose myself, but do not turn as I say, "Druyo, your presence is like a thousand suns."
"Turn to face me," he says. "Let me see you again, no matter your body."
I spin slowly, and look upon his bronze skin. He has taken the form of a shirtless farmer, and though his human eyes are as brown and dark as the hours after sunset, within them I see his true form, radiant, sparkling, like the matter about a black hole.
He hugs me and I hug him back. These human bodies have such strange methods of expression. It feels warm, and I give myself over to the feeling. I can sense his desire, too. He wants to spill his seed.
"Not yet," I say. "Not yet."
"Brahmagupta," he says.
"Who?"
"An astronomer. A mathematician. Not far from here in the city of Bhillamala."
"Why must you spoil the moment?" I say. But I know the truth. In a few minutes or hours he will spin away into the future again, looping back to meet me in a dozen or hundred years like the lonely orbit of a distant planet. I have started my ovulation, and his courting has begun, and nothing save death can stop our cycles. In short, we have no time.
"My Vanya," he says, "This man studies the stars and knows numbers the way none of his generation have. In one year he will write a text called the Brahmasphutasiddhanta – "The Opening of the Universe" – which will be read for centuries. If we can seed his mind with the Tone then he may write it into his text. The humans of the future, with their curious minds, will try to create it."
I know he is right. When it comes to the future, my husband is always correct. But I just want a moment to hold him under this yellow sun before the obligations of life drag us away.
"Come," he says. "I've arranged for travel with a caravan."
It is a joke, of course. Neither he nor I have any need for such primitive modes of locomotion. We travel over mountain, desert, and stream at the speed of thought, arriving in the city of Bhillamala in the time of a single vibration of an atom.
Druyo leads me by the hand through crowded streets and alleys, past trophy elephants and traders selling chickpea. Bhillamala is so clean and sparkling compared to the rest of the empire of Harsha that after centuries of living in squalor I feel like I'm in a dream. He leads me up to a mahogany door adorned with a thin film of gold and silver. No man of poverty lives here.
"He is the chief astronomer at the Ujjain observatory," my husband says. "Twice a year he makes the journey there to observe the stars. He is away from his wife."
I look into his eyes, to see if I’ve understood him correctly.
"It is the only way, my love," he says. "You shall seduce him, enter into his arms and whisper thoughts of the Tone to him while he cradles you. It will slip into his work, The Opening of the Universe. Our children will be born in safety."
"I will not," I say.
"You must!" he says. "There is no other way to coerce him. These humans are suspicious creatures. You cannot openly tell them what we are trying to do. You know the story of the Fools."
I know the story well. The Fools opened their mouths, and my race nearly died. "I cannot lie with him," I say.
Anger boils inside me. How could he ask this of me? But I do my best to hide it from him. Our time together is so short, and I will not defile it with argument.
"Their sex is so primitive," he says. "Solely of the flesh. It’s not betrayal, Vanya."
I want to shout, How can you so easily prostitute your wife? But instead I say, "We will do what needs to be done."
"Though I glimpse the future," he says, "when I return to you the course of history is again unwritten, existing as a sea of potential only. Our children will live or die based on your actions now."
I understand his terrified heart, his attempt to sublimate fear. But I will not begin the lives of our children with an act of shame. There still is time. I try to bring our thoughts back to love. "When you spin into the future," I say, "what is it like?"
"I think only of you," he says. "Only you and the children."
I reach for him as he falls out of phase with this time, as he becomes a smear of broken light like the dappled sun setting behind a mountain. He is gone before I can touch him, slingshot into the future, ahead fifty, one hundred, five hundred years. I do not know how long it will be before I see him again.
Oh, Druyo, my love.
A man opens the gilded door and stares across the threshold at me with eyes that peer deeper than most. He is draped in fine silks and wears a brocade of silver; clearly the King favors this man of numbers.
"I heard voices out here," he says. He scans the alley with his eyes. "It's disturbing my work."
"You are Brahmagupta?" I ask.
"Yes," he says. "And who are you, my fine lady?"
He is handsome, for a human. "No one to concern yourself with," I say. "I'm sorry to have disturbed you."
"Shame," he says. He harrumphs and closes the door.
I look down at my hand and notice I'm still carrying the bowl. But my cumin seeds, the gift for the Brahmin, have long since spilled away.
There is more time. And there has to be another way.
While the mother sleeps and the herd drifts silently across the void, the children venture out into the darkness. Yes, they can see the swirling eddies of food ahead. Yes, they believe their mother when she says they will arrive soon, but it has been so long, and the waters are so cold. So empty. Surely there must be something to do in these voids. Their bellies ache with hunger, their minds with boredom.
They play games to see who can swim the farthest from the herd, to see who is the bravest. It sates their minds for a time.
The mother awakens and counts her children. The number is one short; the youngest is missing. She awakens the herd, and together they scour the deeps for the child. Where has she gone? the mother laments. Where is my beautiful daughter?
Wandered off, the children tell her, into the deeps in search of adventure. We returned, and we thought she was with us.
Why did you disobey me? the mother admonishes. Your sister is too small to swim without escort. Even in these voids the seas throb with unseen tides!
They search tirelessly for the child. The mother lags behind the group, singing the song she used to calm her daughter when she was first thrust from her womb.
Where are you? she cries. And when the herd is but a speck of moving forms far ahead she knows that her responsibility is to her other children now. She must leave the lost child to her fate.
When she returns to the herd she does not scold her children again. They have learned a hard lesson. To disobey is to die.
Year 1801 C.E.
I have been living in Trento, a city bisected by a broad river, bordered by mountains that slope up toward the sky. A mist falls over the ancient stone walls and stuccoed rooftops as I sit on my windowsill, reading Brahmagupta's The Opening of the Universe, a copy I purchased from a printer a few decades ago at great expense. The entire tome is written in verse, a paean to the Heavens, and from time to time I pause to read a stanza, wondering how history might have changed if I'd obeyed my husband. I cannot read much before putting the book down again. I have accomplished nothing in all these years. Perhaps I missed my only chance.
But I will not give up. I still believe that there are ways to influence these people that don't involve an act of self-defilement.
And, Druyo, he is coming today. I have smelled his sweet odor in the ether for days. Oh, how I long for his presence! He approaches slowly, his orbit into the future, elliptical and long.
"Vanya," he says, stuttering across the space before me as he slips into phase with my time.
"Druyo," I say, "I knew you'd return!"
He has taken the form of an Italian merchant; he wears a crimson tunic, and his skin is swarthy like those of the southern climes. "The future did not change," he says.
He does not have to admonish me, for I know my guilt.
"I looped far into the future, waiting for the moment when Brahmagupta's text would be read and dissected by a capable human. But you had not seeded his thoughts, and though many read his work in the future, the tones still remain unknown to humanity. By the time I discovered this, I was past perigee, unable to slow my course into the future. I drifted for centuries, alone."
His human face twists in anger. Unlike me, he has not spent enough time with these humans to learn how to hide his feelings.
"I wish I could have been with you. To comfort you."
He frowns, and it pains me. "Nearly twelve hundred years have passed," he says. "It's now too late for this species, but there are others in this galaxy. Hundreds of races are capable of making the Tone. If we include the entire galactic cluster, thousands. It's time to move on to another planet, Vanya."
"Not yet!" I say. "While you loop across time, I've lived with these humans. Look how they've spread across their planet." I gestured out the window. "In a few centuries, they'll do the same across the stars."
"You are guessing. You have not seen the future."
"I am certain of it, Druyo."
"How can you be?"
"You must trust me!"
He turns from me and sees the book on the windowsill.
"Is that Brahmagupta's text?" he says.
"Yes. The Opening of the Universe."
"Why do you still read it?" he says. "That opportunity for change has passed."
"Because it's beautiful," I say.
"There is no time for beauty," he says.
"There must be. Otherwise, life is pointless."
He sighs deeply. "My mother said that I should trust the woman when it comes to the Tone and that the woman should trust the man with regards to the future. Which one of us is right, Vanya?"
I move closer to him. "Both. And neither."
He studies my body. "Your belly has swollen," he says.
"I've been human so long. This body has started to express my pregnancy."
He squeezes me and I feel ecstasy. Oh, it has been so long! I feel his body, like mine, swollen with life, threatening to burst. "It's painful without you," he says.
"A few more centuries and we can release our burdens," I say. "And, Druyo, I've not spent all these years idly. These humans have been progressing. I have been studying with a man named Romagnosi. He tutors me in the sciences. I believe he's about to discover the basis of the tones."
"No, no!" my husband says. "Do not focus your energies upon him."
"Why not?"
"Because, he's not the one who — "
Footfalls stomp on the landing, ending our conversation. The ever-punctilious Signor Gian Domenico Romagnosi steps through the doorway, right on time, here for my weekly physics lesson. Some scoff at his private visits to an unmarried woman, but Romagnosi has no patience for taboo. The man went to jail for giacobinismo — speaking rebelliously against the government. He has no fear against breaking long-held beliefs in pursuit of truth.
"Is mia signora ready for her lesson?" Romagnosi says. Water drips from his cloak.
"Now is not a good time, Signor!" I say, planting myself securely before the man.
"Are you with guest?" Romagnosi asks.
I sneak a glance backwards. My husband has hidden himself behind a curtain; it bulges like my belly.
"I'm not feeling well today," I say. "Please, please! Can you come back tomorrow?"
"Does signora need a doctor?" Romagnosi asks, stepping one more foot into the room. He reaches for my head. "Are you feverish?"
I look back one more time and see the curtain flutter in the breeze. The bulge — my husband — has gone.
"Never mind," I mourn, letting my head fall. I am overwhelmed with despair. Druyo left me without instructions. Without knowledge of the future, I am blind.
Romagnosi, ever eager to teach, quickly unfurls his heavy texts onto the desk.
He lights a lantern and beckons me to sit next to him. I keep glancing at the empty curtains. All I want is to huddle in my husband's embrace, but it will be centuries before I can touch him again.
I remember when we met, eons ago, deep in space, how our radiant forms were drawn to each other like gravity. His first words to me were, "You are the brightest star." For slow ages we drifted through galaxies, sharing stories of our journeys through the Cosmos, until one day our cycles began. I felt the stirring of life within me. He skipped and stuttered forward in time, minutes, days, then weeks with each leap. Each time he moved farther away from me. We had to prepare. I hunted for a planet and found Earth, a world on a galactic edge, with a race about to venture out into the Cosmos. A race capable of making the Tone.
"I had a breakthrough this week!" Romagnosi blurts, returning my thoughts to the present. "I did as you suggested, Vanya. I ran an electric current through a voltaic pile, and it deflected a magnetized needle! Your hypothesis was correct. Electricity and magnetism are intertwined! I'm going to write a paper."
I feel a small thrill at his revelation. This race is progressing, however slowly; I wish my husband was here to see my progress.
I plod through the rest of my lesson with Romagnosi, feigning interest. What things I could be teaching him! But this species mustn't ever know who or what I am, or what I'm trying to do. This was the way my mother raised her brood, and her mother before her, going back thousands of generations, each in a different galaxy, each on a different planet. As a child my mother told me the story of the Fools, those of our species who, eons ago, revealed themselves to the races of the universe. The planet-bound feared us, creatures who could see into their future, who had manipulated civilizations for millennia. We were hunted to near-extinction. It taught us a hard lesson: we are safer in anonymity.
When night has fallen and my studies are done, Romagnosi dons his coat and stands by the door. I think of my husband, how he has become like a wisp of evaporating smoke.
"Who is the father?" Romagnosi says.
I loosen the folds of my dress. "Excuse me?"
"You hide it well," he says. "But I'm a man of observation, remember?"
I blush. How ironic that these opaque human bodies can be so transparent. "He'll be returning soon."
"Soon?" he says, looking around the empty room. "I have been tutoring you for three months and I've never seen another man. If you need anything, Vanya, I'm here."
"I want you to write that paper."
"Indeed," he says. "I will!" He bids me farewell with a bow and shuffles out the door.
In the evening breeze, the curtains blow aside, revealing marks scribbled on the wall. I look closer, and read this:
"Hans Christian Ørsted, Copenhagen, 1820
"James Clerk Maxwell, Scotland, 1864
"Nicola Tesla, Saint Louis, 1893
"Guglielmo Marconi, London, 1896
"I love y— "
The last letter stutters across the wall, unfinished.
The children have stopped playing. The mother still sings her songs, but her joy is a ruse. The swirling eddies of food have moved closer, yes, but the food is still so far away. Even she has grown weary.
The elders have slowed. They trail leagues behind until they are but faint specks against the black sea. The herd slows for them. They prod and cajole and push the elders onward. But it has become ever more apparent that if the herd is to reach the food before everyone starves to death, they must travel faster.
There are grandfathers and grandmothers among the weak, souls who have dwelled in the bristling deeps for countless eons before most of the herd was born. Their stories have warmed hearts and soothed minds. Their wisdom has kept the herd safe when invisible vortices threatened to rip them apart.
You must leave us, the grandmother says. You must go on without us.
No, the mother says. We will find a way.
For ages you have trusted my wisdom, the grandmother says. I thus counsel you now: if you do not leave us here, everyone will die. Let your freedom from us be our last gift of wisdom to the herd.
I remember, the mother says, when we swam in the sparkling seas, when I was just a floating speck against your vastness. I wanted to be like you, large and indomitable.
Now you are larger than me, the grandmother says. Now you are brave. And now it is your turn to carry the wisdom. When you reach the plentiful shoals, look back into the dark, and remember your ancestors who float in the voids, watching you always.
I cannot let you go, the mother says.
You must and you shall.
The grandmother and the elders swim away from the herd into the dark. The mother watches them go. Then she calls to her children.
Come, little ones, she sings. We must move on.
Why isn't Grandmother coming with us? her daughter says.
The mother says, Grandmother has always looked out for the herd, has she not?
Yes, says the daughter.
Grandmother is looking out for the herd now. She will be looking out for the herd for the rest of eternity. Her eyes will always be upon us.
Mother, the daughter says, are we going to die?
The mother stares at the spirals of food, still eons away. She is too tired to lie.
I don't know, little one, she says. I don't know.
Year 1976 C.E.
Things are progressing rapidly now. These humans know of the tones and, as I have predicted, their insatiable curiosity has led them on a quest to know everything about these waves that race through the ether.
I have pushed and prodded and cajoled.
I have used the names my husband has given me.
In 1820, shortly after I sent him Romagnosi's paper, Hans Christian Ørsted gave a lecture in Copenhagen on the deflection of a magnetized needle by an electric current. The scientific community stirred.
The children in my belly kicked.
In 1864, a year and a half after I suggested to James Clerk Maxwell at a dinner party that Faraday's equations were meaningless without a mathematical formulation, he wrote a paper called "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field." Maxwell had laughed and looked curiously at me, surprised and amused that a woman of my class knew the work of Faraday, but he soon skulked off onto the balcony for the rest of the evening to smoke and make notes. When the hostess, Maxwell's wife, asked where the father of my child was, I said, "At a clinic in Amsterdam with a severe case of tuberculosis." This did not seem to satisfy her; it did not seem to satisfy any of the humans.
In 1891, using the pseudonym of a male German scientist, I took up correspondence with Nikola Tesla. Tesla was mad, but brilliant. Often I didn't understand his hastily scrawled theories of metaphysics that he tested on me. "The transmission of electromagnetic energy is where the future lies," I told him. "Your other inventions are important, true, but none so much as the generation of electromagnetic waves through the aether." If he was our last hope, I would have been worried.
But there was one more name on my husband's list.
A young man named Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor living in London. In 1896, I shipped plans of several experimental "radiotelegraph" devices to him. I did not provide a return address, and Marconi, in his many papers and lectures, never once attributed his successes to his anonymous benefactor. The young man, with his boundless ambition foreseen only by my husband, improved upon the work of other inventors, and eventually, in 1901, transmitted a tone across the Atlantic Ocean.
Tesla claimed that Marconi infringed his patents. An American named Amos Dolbear claimed the device was his. A dozen other scientists claimed authorship.
But it was all of theirs and it was none of theirs.
Could I, as the silent and invisible hand guiding them all, claim authorship, too? I have no interest in this pervasive human desire for the immortality of a name. Anonymity is the marrow of my people. Fifteen hundred years with this species and I still don't understand their need for labels, for attribution and honor. What does it matter when the invention benefits all?
Now, with the tones, they send machines into orbit and transmit music across continents. They have used the tones for entertainment and they have used them for war. Seven years ago they landed their on the Moon, a momentous feat for beings that have to drag their flesh through space step by languid step. And now they have begun sending probes deep into their solar system. If they don't destroy themselves with their weapons first, in a few dozen or hundred years they will send ships toward the stars.
And this is the most crucial time of all. Now they will pick the frequencies that will carry them through the dark, cold ether. I must make sure they use the Tone. Otherwise, all of our work will be for naught.
With the help of a half-dozen dozen degrees obtained at European universities, I have insinuated myself into an organization called NASA, which sits in the marshy swamplands of Cape Canaveral, Florida. They believe I'm a Czechoslovakian ex-pat. For three months I have been working with a team designing the high-gain antenna and communications subsystem for a spacecraft they have called, uninspiringly, "Voyager 1."
I have not seen my husband in one hundred and seventy five years, not since he vanished from behind the curtain in 1801. Without him, I work by intuition.
My belly has swelled so that the first thing these humans ask when they greet me is, "When are you due?"
I answer them always the same. "Soon. Soon now. I don't have an exact date." Especially around these people of math, I'm careful not to reveal numbers.
I work in a warehouse-sized building, where scientists, dressed in cloaks, huddle in pale rooms that reek of plastic, pencil, and solder, and here we design the future of the human race. In one room sits the Voyager spacecraft, a giant metallic insect open for dissection. Whenever I miss my husband, I wander into that room and think of my unborn children.
"Vanya," Dr. Malde says to me as he bursts into our lab. "I've told you a dozen times: this frequency you've chosen is much too high. Why didn't you use the design we settled on?"
"I was improvising. With a higher frequency, we can transmit more data per second."
"And where will you store all this data? You're talking about terabytes per second, Vanya."
"It's just a carrier frequency. We don't need to transmit a bit every cycle."
"And why this number? 7.40607111 THz? What's so unique about this frequency that you persist in using it in almost every design?"
Because it is the Tone, you fool! I think. Because it is the frequency that will save my children from death, that will save a hundred thousand galaxies, your race, and a million others from annihilation! But instead I say, "Because it has a lack of interfering sidebands."
"It's too high," he says. "Change it."
"But it doesn't — "
"Change it, Vanya, or find yourself a new job."
And just like that, with the cold authority from an ignorant human, a trillion cubic light-years of space is doomed to death. I could try to influence the Soviet Union, but their space program is teetering near collapse, and I suspect in a decade or two they will bankrupt themselves. So what now? There are a thousand paths I could follow, none promising, none certain. Without my husband to glimpse the future, I am adrift without a guide.
On my bookshelf is Brahmagupta's tome, The Opening of the Universe, the same copy I purchased in Trento so many years ago. Now its pages are yellow and brittle. I open it randomly and read several stanzas. I wonder, have I made a grave mistake? Should I have listened to my husband all those years ago?
I close the book. In my belly three hundred babies kick.
Ten percent of the herd has died; the weak, the aged, the infirm. The herd sleeps as one body, an amalgam of moving forms, and when they awaken, they find another has skulked off into the deeps to die.
They have not sung for eons. There is no joy here.
One of the daughters hums a tentative note. Then she begins to sing.
What are you doing? the mother asks.
I am singing to the herd, hums the daughter.
The herd does not want to sing today, the mother says. Besides, it will tire you.
I don't care, the daughter says. I am singing anyway.
Such is the way with children, the mother thinks. Impetuous until the end. But after the next sleep, the mother understands. The daughter has sung her last song. While the herd slept, her daughter has skulked away to die.
Year 2114 C.E.
These humans are creative, yes, and ambitious beyond my wildest dreamings. They have stationed themselves permanently on the Moon and Mars. They have sent manned expeditions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Each week they loft new probes throughout the solar system and into deep space. They have a million ships, they use ten thousand frequencies, and none of them — not one — is the precious Tone.
I have failed.
And my husband has not returned. Perhaps he couldn't hold himself any longer and spilled his seed. Perhaps he still spins into the future, glimpsing histories I will never see. More than anything, I wish he was here, to hold me in these final hours before I give birth, to promise me that our children will be safe. Each day without him is agony.
These days I bide my time as a servant to an aging widow. In her mansion outside of Madrid I care for this human who has nothing left but a large bank account and an empty house. In her senility, she hasn't noticed my belly swollen like a watermelon for years, my ever-present despair. When I'm not bathing her or dusting her lonely study or reminding her yet again that her husband, like mine, is gone, I spend my time reading in her library.
In the volumes of old and dusty books I find peace. And one is not hers, a book I have carried with me for nearly three centuries. Always, I open to a random page, and always, I read a few stanzas before closing it again.
Today, in The Opening of the Universe, I read:
In the House where the Twins live,
At the Seventh Hour, Twenty-Fourth Minute, and Thirty-Fourth Second,
At the Thirty First Degree, Fifty-Third Minute, and Seventeenth Second,
With the setting Sun, at the quarter Moon,
With the Ram's Horn that points to Heaven,
Sing your Tone to the Sky,
You, who sits among Books, who cares for the Aged.
Do this and create Life in Wholeness, not Shame,
My One, my Brightest Sun,I will always be with you,
My Love.
Whether You see Me or not.
Such an odd passage for Brahmagupta, I think. I don't remember reading it, but then, in all these years, I haven't been capable of reading much at a time. But as I read and reread the words I comprehend a deeper meaning. Through this text, the book I have carried with me for centuries, Druyo has sent me a message through time.
I am the one who "sits among Books, who cares for the Aged." The "House of the Twins" is the constellation Gemini. The numbers are astronomical coordinates in the sky. The Ram's Horn that points to Heaven is the Madrid Deep Space Network antenna, shaped like a horn. Druyo wants me to sing the Tone to the sky. But why?
For the next seventy-two hours I sit by the window without sleep and watch the sun and the stars turn their courses through the sky, until the next quarter moon. And on the third day, with the setting sun, I leap a hundred miles across Spain into the control room of the Deep Space Network in Madrid. The orange sun sends broken beams of light through the windows, reminding me of the mountains of India so long ago. The room, alive with blinking computer consoles, is absent of human life.
I sit before the computer and use the controls to point the telescope at seven hours, twenty four minutes, and thirty four seconds right ascension, thirty one degrees, fifty three minutes, and seventeen seconds declination, according to the text.
Outside, the large antenna turns painfully slow, like my course through human history. I tune the transmitter to 7.40607111 THz. But before the computer will transmit, it requires a signal to modulate over the carrier frequency.
Druyo, you didn't tell me what to send!
On the lower half of the screen is a digital music player. There are thousands of songs to choose, but I pick the one that seems most appropriate. I feed "Hello, Goodbye" by The Beatles through the transmitter, amplitude modulated, and sit back as the signal leaps out from the antenna into deep space.
Then I scream. A terrible pain rips through my abdomen. Water bursts from my uterus and splashes onto the floor. It's time!
A guard slams open the door and says, "Who are you? And how the hell did you - " But I leap away from him into space. I leap past the Moon of Earth and the planets of the Solar System, past swelling stars and collapsing clouds of dust. I hurtle into the balmy heart of the Milky Way, where obese white stars burn angrily and invisible black holes devour all.
One by one, in explosions of pain, I shoot my unfertilized eggs toward the boiling stars. They fall from my body like burning comets, their scintillating tails a million miles long. Caught by the gravity of these monstrous suns, my eggs swing into orbits that will incubate them for one hundred thousand years. Three hundred and twenty-six eggs fall from my body. I name and record the location of every one.
Now I am bereft, exhausted. Alone.
I sleep for a small age, my thoughts a void as dark as the abyss between galaxies. But a bright star racing across the heavens awakens me. I know that brilliance, that irresistible tug.
Druyo, my love!
He dashes over my eggs, spraying them with glittering seed, following my weave through the galactic core. His seed loops around three hundred stars, forming a colossal knot that slowly tightens as gravity compresses it. Then, his sperm spent, his light fades.
We approach each other, our forms flickering, our internal light fading.
"Did we do it, Druyo? Have we saved the children?"
"Yes," he says. "I saw the future."
"How?"
"It began with a signal sent from Earth. A song. It was detected by another sentient race. They replied to the humans on the same frequency. It started a conversation that spread to the other races of the galaxy. But you did it Vanya, all by yourself."
"But without your message I wouldn't have known what to do!"
"My message?"
"The one inside Brahmagupta's text, the tome I carried with me all these years."
"And what did it say?"
I recited the words, and told him how and where I had purchased the book. "You do not remember?" I said.
"I understand now, Vanya. Time is not linear for me. Your past is my future. That hasn't happened to me yet. I have to venture into the past one more time."
I have waited nearly two millennia for this moment. I will not let him leave me again! "No, you're weak, Druyo. Your light is fading. You must rest first."
"If I rest now, I won't be able to travel through time again."
"But what's done is done! Our children are saved! You saw the future!" He cannot leave me again! I am frantic; my body is shaking.
"Vanya, If I don't travel into the past, then you won't send the Tone. Our children will die. I have no choice but to complete the circle. Otherwise, this timeline will cease to exist."
"There has to be a choice!"
"I'm sorry, Vanya. I have to go."
"No..."
"Please, let me save the children."
I look at the glittering knot of his life, weaving through the stars, falling onto my eggs. Will he see them born? "Oh, Druyo, how far back in time will you go?"
"I have to be sure," he says. "I am weak, and there can be no mistakes. I will go as far back as I can. I might not be strong enough to return."
"But if you go back far enough, then you can come visit me! You can stay with me, and we can move through time together!"
"You know I can't do that," he says.
"But why?"
"Because in this timeline, it never happened. And the children are saved. I cannot alter this timeline without endangering the children. I'm sorry, Vanya. All we have is this moment."
My husband merges with me, and I feel him - Oh Druyo! - touching me, his love like a thousand suns.
Then, in a burst of radiation, he's gone as his body stutters back in time.
And something inside me knows I will never see him again. How far has he gone back? To Trento at least, but he said he had to be sure. Did he go all the way back to Bhillamala? Even further? I wonder, was he watching me from behind the scenes all these years, never truly vanishing from behind the curtain? Was he with me all this time? Oh, Druyo, are you still alive, some three millennia older, watching me now, unable to comfort me?
I watch his seed fertilize our children. I think of the future, when the humans will, in the ages to come, take up conversation with the other races of the galaxy. Their expanding electromagnetic bubble will eventually encase this corner of the universe in a shield of radiation whose principal frequency is 7.40607111 trillion cycles per second. It will protect us all.
In the voids beyond the Milky Way, gargantuan monsters swallow stars and galaxies the way whales of Earth swallow krill. And they are coming; they always come. But we have filled the galaxy with the Tone, the one thing in the Cosmos known to repel them.
My children, humanity, and a million other races will not be eaten. They will never know what we have done for them.
What light! the children cry. A hundred thousand eddies, spread about this expanse, each a brilliant vortex, each succulent and sparkling before them. What beautiful, glowing food!
At last! the mother sings. So many dead behind us, but here we are! I told you, my children!
Yet there is an awful scream in these seas, a nauseating note that grows in volume as they approach, threatening madness with each new fathom. To go farther into that sound is to go farther into death.
What a terrible song! the children cry. What is that horrible wail?
I do not know, the mother says.
But that is where our food is, the children moan. How can we go there with that awful sound?
The mother looks at the spread of food across the expanse. So close! How her belly aches for one small taste. Her children huddle around her as the herd slows; they cannot travel any closer to that sound. It is impossible.
What do we do now? the children ask. Where do we go?
The mother scans the seas. Eons away, even farther than their last journey, is another smattering of light, the closest food source. The herd will not survive another trip of that distance.
Quietly, just above the sound of the nauseating Tone, she says to the children, We will go to meet your grandmother.
And with these words, the mother, her children, and ten thousand hungry Beasts turn away.
©Matthew Kressel
Matthew Kressel’s short fiction has appeared (or will be appearing) in Ellen Datlow’s Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Abyss & Apex, Farrago’s Wainscot, Apex Digest, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and other markets. He runs Senses Five Press, which publishes Sybil’s Garage and Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy. In March of 2008, he took over for Gavin Grant as the co-host of the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series in New York with Ellen Datlow. He lives in Brooklyn, and his website is matthewkressel.net.