Sound Well
It is an empty planet. It is my empty planet. The sun is bright in my black sky. The blue cliffs hang jagged against it.
When the sky was blue, I breathed. My mind moves my dry matter. The windless eddies are my family, who have forgotten all language but the language of dunes. I pass weightlessly among them mutually unrecognized. Matter of my mitosis or otherwise show no signs, raise no greetings.
How could they forget? All our great technologies of thought. All our knowledge of invisible geometries. Our grasp of the parallel. Our methods of moving between.
How could I remain? Alone on our mute planet. What fault or favor of endurance is in the bonds which hold my particles back from scattering into the windless afternight of my world? Why does the haunted dust of my formless being persist?
My thoughts interrogate themselves absurdly, knowing the answer already. My longing. A spark in my fine powdered substance.
Pebbles fall. They permanently scar my planet’s surface, noiselessly. No sound of fright or rapture shudders through my hollow structures. No song makes my atoms flow in intricate murmurations as they once flowed.
I am my world’s widow. I only want to hear it again. As I once heard, when our matter blew and breathed. When life moved on it surfaces, and life fluttered in its airs.
I may find it. There is something I can’t remember. A thought that has broken off somewhere along the backtracking folds of my meandering. I have a thought about the thought. I remember that I can’t remember. It’s why I drift like a stray word over the broken surface of my dead world. I move my materials over each stone and hollow and crater and rise. When I’ve covered every spot of barren ground with my infertile caresses, I may find it.
I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.
The crater gives me no trouble. Gravity is weak. I am weightless. Descend. Traverse. Ascend.
I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.
The plane goes on. On. On. The plane goes on forever.
I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.
The dry ravine winds. The moons dance across the narrow aperture.
I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.
The crest of the highest hill. Sharp enough to cut the sky with. Of fatal steepness.
I may find it. I may find it. I may find it.
A hollow in the highest hill’s side. Big enough to swallow a moon. I feed my ash to it. I fill its parched throat with my dryness.
I may find it. I may find it. I listen.
Silence. But in the silence is something.
A susurration.
The red spark crackles. It is my spark. My listening spark. And it hears.
I move a little further. Press against the hard concavity. Feel my way along the whispering wall to the invisible suture, subtle and fine. Touch the immaterial infrastructure the way my ancestors touched and taught me to touch. Press my listening organs to the curvature.
The thought I lost and found again. The Sound Well. An aperture where space becomes an abstraction. A hollow of fullness in the hollowness. Its curves an amplification across the vastness.
I remember what I remember. The Sound Well. The place of listening. Of hearing. Of speaking. Of song. The song from far, far beyond. The call from distant hill on distant planet where someone whispers into the curvature. Where someone speaks soft words in soft tones into the unseen arches in parallel spacetime.
They speak with great longing. With great longing, I listen. Our longing is not in vain.
I hear their story of their beautiful day on a green world with a blue sky. Of rising early to commune with the fluttering sublime. Of moving through tall grasses with a gentle herd close behind. Of watching silver-sided fish rise to the surface to sip the honeyed light. Of tending gently. Of soft copulation. Of looking up into the star-clad night and longing to tell someone far out there just how perfect the day had been. Of looking up and longing for some distant someone to hear it. To remember when they are gone. When time as a body moves on.
I listen.
This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge