Another switchback, shrieking leftward down it, and below this, the last long plunge cross-slope to the wider stretch of water where their other boat waited.
Could this boat survive impact? Would it break up? Would it ship too much water and go straight down?
Belinda threw her last switchback, and there was their final plunge ahead of them, five hundred meters down the ice-face to the embayment she had targeted. Melody embraced the bubble passionately.
A huge mass overleapt them. She felt the atmospheric bow-wave of a soaring giant, and then—as Belinda veered their boat and Melody held on for dear life, every joint crackling—the legs came down like jointed trees of some skeleton forest sudden-planted dead ahead.
Through the wind-shriek Melody heard a dull boom from the cockpit under her—two beats. She took that muffled bellow to be Belinda telling her to
hold on
. What else could she do up here? They plunged like a bomb straight for that thicket of crooked huge legs.
Belinda had decided to dodge past those legs, right? But in an instant she knew otherwise. They thrust right
into
them, missing a front leg by a hair but plunging at a hind one.
The whole bottom joint of that leg blew to splinters as their boat burst through it. One piece slammed down on Melody’s shoulders as it streaked past her, knocking out her breath, but she held on. She looked back at the huge bug.
Though some of its legs were out of commission, it was still moving, turning around and springing down after them, but its pursuit was more staggery. They could beat it to the bottom.
Below them the channel looked like a band of steel. The smooth sweep of the ice down to its shore was broken by frosty black rocks jutting up through it for the last hundred meters of its descent. If they couldn’t slow down …
And then she shrieked a question, knowing Belinda couldn’t hear it. “What the fuck is that?”
For all their switchbacking, the channel was much closer now—they could see the texture of the water, see the sculpting of the ice walls, seamed and graven by the sea.
And see something else. Something big, moving just under the water, creating a turgid zone out in the channel.
In a ceaseless wail of metal-torn ice, Melody and Belinda under her plunged down the steeps, Melody a limpet on the shrieking vehicle.
She screamed—at what was erupting from the channel they plunged toward. A big knot of unrest began to roil the water. A sinewy disturbance grew, the cold sea writhing in a boil of greenish-black tentacles.
Even in the adrenalized distress of their plunge, the
size
of that stir crackled up and down Melody’s spine, and then she saw the body of what thrust those tentacles up toward them.
This huge, mossy fuselage had, near its crown, a colossal eye like an eerie, pallid target. Both women could see this orb, half submerged in the channel, turn its hugeness fractionally and focus precisely on
them
.
A pair of the tentacles came snaking up the slope to meet their rocketing plunge. Evasion seemed as impossible as in nightmares—the tentacles’ tips broadened into suckered pads of a size to seize their sub right off the ice.
But suddenly, it seemed that it was their huge pursuer that had captured that titan’s attention. Those benthic arms thrust past them and gripped their crook-legged pursuer while, down in the channel, the snake-limbed titan regarded them with so huge an eye: a colossus of alien sentience.
It raised the captured beast aloft and snatched it down, while all the crab’s remaining legs clawed the air for the traction they’d lost. The tentacle crushed the crab and conveyed it down to its own kraken’s beak, which engulfed it whole.
But throughout, it seemed to Belinda that the monstrous eye was focused on
them
.
As they hurtled down, the size of its eye seemed to grow like a planet. The immense pupils seemed a gulf of worlds where millennial visions seethed.
And what both Melody and Belinda perceived in that colossal eye, what they afterwards reported to each other in awe and solemn wonder, was a consciousness, a recognition of their own brief being…. Was it more? A glint of sly derision, of irony? The titan, old past reckoning, looked out at them from its millennial eye and knew them for the mayflies that they were.
As they dove toward that colossal eye, both sisters saw themselves
known
. For the rest of their lives (neither one short) they spoke of it together, again and again through the years.
They saw in that vast eye a flood of
their own memories
, so minutely etched and poignant, felt themselves plucked back through years and seasons of their deeds and days, felt warm rain and hot winds on their skin, felt epiphanies of heart and spine on hillsides and freeways, on subways and beaches, saw their own tears in their most secret pain and saw again the starwheels they’d seen blazing through a thousand summer nights gone by.
Within the suckered pads of its two seizing limbs the titan captured their prow, cradled its plunge. Its hugeness began to slide back beneath the waters of the sound as it slowed them gently to a standstill at the channel’s brink.
So slowly it submerged, and last of all its eye sank just beneath the surface and hovered there … how many heartbeats?
And in the course of those heartbeats they absolutely knew the brevity of their own lives before the long endurance of this titan.
And knew as well, incommensurate though they were with this colossus, that it saluted their sentience and their brevity. Performed for them this cosmic courtesy—salvation—and withdrew to the benthos that housed its huger life.
The sisters spoke of it together long, long afterwards. Did not that colossus seem
amused
?
They agreed that immense sly eye saw
all
of them—somehow saw their cluttered world far away and their seething confusion within it, and was frostily lit with an irony.
Surely, inwardly, the titan smiled?
DR. B
LYTHE
A
NDRADE FOUGHT THE RESTRAINTS SHE HERSELF HAD
helped to design and construct, the self-protection she’d fled here into the lab to find. Her throat contorted with the terrible itch to sing and the desperate need to scratch it out. Deep and fierce in her brain, musical passages and unattached notes itched, itched. Above her right ear another place where she’d scraped through her scalp had just begun to scab over and was itching again.
The decoder was going crazy. In English Maheen breathed, “Holy shit.”
Hry scratched himself, briefly and lightly. His itch was superficial, if it was itch at all, and if it was music he wouldn’t know it.
His paltry scratching intensified Blythe’s need to scratch. When her own itching was at its worst, and then incrementally worse again, this whole valley seeped and crackled with incipient music only she, apparently, was aware of. A nasty transposition of how she’d lived her life.
Blythe scratched, scratched, dug, could not reach the itch but could not stop trying. A bald spot spread raw and bleeding under any shield anyone including her had come up with, under the decoder itself. A choker of deep gouges grew and tangled under the high, tight energy collar devised specifically for her with her input and yet penetrable if she put her mind to it, which she did without conscious will.
Melodies, riffs, scales, tones, and half-tones swarmed through her. She couldn’t escape them, couldn’t get them away from her, couldn’t get them out of her head or off the decoder screen Maheen was monitoring. Voices and some kind of low horn fluttered in her brain. Music dripped from the air, bulged up out of the ground through the floor and the soles of her shoes, invaded her body in food and drink and breath.
“I wish I could do something for you.” Maheen patted her shoulder.
Blythe flinched and moved her head back and forth against the chair, meaning, “That’s ridiculous, we both know you can’t,” and, “Shut up,” and just general existential protest.
Hry was fascinated by the images on the decoder screen. “What is that?” In the limited Droyan language, he asked that question more often and more intently than the scientists and explorers whose job was asking questions.
“That’s itching,” Maheen explained again, again incompletely because music could not be mentioned.
“Itch, yes.” Hry’s humanoid appendages scrabbled over his dappled skin, demonstrating that he understood itch. For Droyans as for humans, just thinking about pain didn’t cause pain, but just thinking about itching caused itch. He wasn’t satisfied, though. He knew there was more. “What
is
that?”
Maheen pointed out half a dozen pulses on the screen. “This is a real-time representation of Blythe’s brain. All that brain activity is intense itching,” she repeated, as if she were giving more information but in fact assiduously following the long, dense corporate protocol that boiled down to: No Music. You could be fined for singing in the shower, confined to quarters for whistling on a blade of grass, taken off the project for speaking in a chanting or singsong voice, fired and sent home at your own expense—no small threat, given the remoteness of this site—if caught with external or internal musical contraband devices or for talking about music to the indigenes. When the itch subsided enough that Blythe could think of other things, she sometimes wondered whether self-harm for the purpose of rooting out music would lead to a promotion or get her sent home—where there was nothing, but at least there had not been this itch.
Hry scratched again. “Hry,” she gasped. Her lazier co-workers called him Henry or Harry or Herr or a phoneme in Portuguese or Bantu. He would answer to any of it, but Blythe tried to respect the pronunciation of names in this culture; xenoanthropological evidence suggested that, in addition to ancestors not yet identified, the Droyans were likely descended from forebears common with modern humans, so the physical and mental apparatus to produce the correct sounds ought to be there. His name was all she could say right now, but it was enough to get him to stop scratching, and she groaned it again in thanks that he might or might not understand.
The itch swelled. Between Blythe moaning on the table and the explosive image of Blythe’s brain on the screen, Hry had twisted himself into the Droyan attitude of extreme attentiveness.
Then it stopped. The frenzied struggle to scratch persisted autonomically until Blythe could realize she wasn’t itching anymore. She collapsed in the restraints, wanting only to rest, wanting only for the music not to come back.
Maheen murmured a reverent exclamation like “Wow!” in Farsi. She checked the displays, pressed keys, patted Blythe’s knee. “Two hours forty-seven minutes level 8 or above. This was a bad one.”
Blythe exhaled, “Yeah.”
“We gathered many interesting data, though.”
The only data-cruncher in the minimally funded expedition, Blythe would be analyzing the record of this episode as soon as her mind cleared enough, usually within the hour. She didn’t need Maheen to thank her or flatter her about what a contribution she was making, how she was rising above her own adversity for the greater good of two species, how brave she was not to seek medical intervention or administrative transfer, etc., etc. But Maheen did anyway, while Blythe tried to concentrate on smoothing the insides of her mind and body so she could get out of the lab and away from Maheen’s kindness and Hry’s excessive interest.
Blythe had never liked music. Any form of music, in any genre, produced by any instrument. At first she’d simply been unaware of it. As an infant unsoothed by lullaby, she’d been wrongly suspected of deafness. As a child she’d never sung and had not required accompaniment for expressive and interpretive body movement. That particular adolescent obsession had spared her. Adulthood had finally allowed her to identify what was commonly referred to as music and so to avoid it—if not altogether, at least in her own living spaces where she spent as much of her time alone as possible.
Her aberration had given her the grim pleasure that was the only kind she allowed herself, until as a randomly studious teenager she’d learned there was actually a clinical term for it—meaning that, to her displeasure, she was not the only one. She’d never had any interest in trying to find compatriots.
Discovery that the Droyans had no music of any sort, no word for it, had initially appalled her as much as the others in the expedition, but for different reasons. She’d been insulted that an entire culture, albeit a decimated and shallow one, would presume to share her amusica, while her colleagues regarded the Droyans as if they were defective because of it.
Religion, still full of trappings, had one less here. Birds and cricket noises were not mimicked. Parents rocked their children to sleep without feeling the need to vocalize. Nowhere were there sly references to symphony or harmony or dissonance or rhythm, for the Droyans perceived none of that and so Blythe hadn’t had to, either.
After all this time among them, Blythe wouldn’t say she was anything like charmed, a descriptor that might have been from a defunct language for all it had to do with her. But, having long been scornful of the supposed relationship between the masses and music, she had come to approve of this ancient, isolated, remnant society in this long-lost and now-found deep valley where there was no such symbiosis.
Blythe had also been struck, also for reasons different from those of her more pedestrian colleagues, by subsequent evidence that music had once been strong—she wouldn’t use the popular term “rich”—in the Droyan culture. Computer logarithms from afar and from recent on-site digs and models showed that this civilization had once made music, sung and played and composed and recorded it, spoken of it and represented it in art forms.
Then, somewhere between five and ten thousand years ago, invaders still referred to only as the Sky People had destroyed everything, including all music and, eventually, all cultural memory of it. The tiny band of Droyans’ tinier band of forebears had escaped to this hidden place and gone about creating life from scratch until enough generations had passed that no one remembered it hadn’t always been this way—simple, hemmed in, half-buried, amusical, and without need for music.