Yvonne and Quentin smiled at each other.
"Then this moment is our happiest. Dear?"
"Yes, darling. Our supreme moment. Let it be now, while we feel the joy of hating our destroyer and knowing the destroyer feels the fear of destruction. We have chosen."
The Voice sighed.
"So be it."
The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long
and the Memory Has Gone Flat
by Harlan Ellison
"Taking advantage of what he had heard with one limited pair of ears, in a single and isolated moment of recorded history, in the course of an infinitesimal fraction of conceivable time (which some say is the only time), he came to believe firmly that there was much that he could not hear, much that was constantly being spoken and indeed sung to teach him things he could never otherwise grasp, which if grasped would complete the fragmentary nature of his consciousness until it was whole at last-one tone both pure and entire floating in the silence of the egg, at the same pitch as the silence."
— W. S. meewin, "The Chart"
Ennui was the reason only one hundred and one thousand alien representatives came to the Sonority Gathering. One hundred and one thousand out of six hundred and eleven thousand possible delegates, one each from the inhabited worlds of the stellar community. Even so, counterbalancing the poor turnout was the essential fact that it had been ennui, in the first place, that had caused the Gathering to be organized. Ennui, utter boredom, oppressive worlds-weariness, deep heaving sighs, abstracted vacant stares, familiar thoughts and familiar views.
The dance of entropy was nearing its end.
The orchestration of the universe sounded thick and gravelly, a tune slowing down inexorably, being played at the wrong speed.
Chasm ruts had been worn in the dance floor.
The oscillating universe was fifty billion years old, and it was tired.
And the intelligent races of six hundred and eleven thousand worlds sought mere moments of amusement, pale beads of pastel hues strung on a dreary Moebius strip of dragging time. Mere moments, each one dearer than the last, for there were so few. Everything that could be done, had been done; every effort was ultimately the fuzzed echo of an earlier attempt.
Even the Sonority Gathering had been foreshadowed by the Vulpeculan Quadrivium in '08, the tonal festival hosted by the Saturniidae of Whoung in '76, and the abortive, ludicrous Rigellian Sodality "musical get-together" that had turned out to be merely another fraudulent attempt to purvey the artist Merle's skiagrams to an already disenchanted audience.
Nonetheless (in a phrase exhumed and popularized by the Recidivists of Fornax 993-A), it was "the only game in town." And so, when the esteemed and shimmering DeilBo devised the Gathering, his reputation as an innovator and the crush of ennui combined to stir excitement of a sluggish sort… and one hundred and one thousand delegates came. To Vinde-miatrix 2 in what had long ago been called, in the time of the heliocentric arrogance, the "constellation" of Virgo.
With the reddish-yellow eye of the giant Arcturus forever lighting the azure skies, forever vying with Spica's first magnitude brilliance, 2's deserts and canyons seemed poor enough stage setting for the lesser glow of Vindemiatrix, forever taking third place in prominence to its brawny elders. But 2, devoid of intelligent life, a patchwork-colored world arid and crumbling, had one thing to recommend it that DeilBo found compelling: the finest acoustics of any world in the universe.
The Maelstrom Labyrinth. Remnant of volcanic upheavals and the retreat of oceans and the slow dripping of acid waters, 2 boasted a grand canyon of stalagmites that rose one hundred and sixty kilometers; stalactites that narrowed into spear-tip pendants plunging down over ninety kilometers into bottomless crevasses; caverns and arroyos and tunnels that had never been plotted; the arching, golden stone walls had never been seen by the eyes of intelligent creatures; the
Ephemeris called it the Maelstrom Labyrinth, No matter where one stood in the sixteen-handred-kilometer sprawl of the Labyrinth, one could speak with a perfectly normal tone, never even raise one's voice, and be assured that a listener crouching deep in a cave at the farthest point of the formation could hear what was said as if the speaker were right beside him. DeilBo selected the Maelstrom Labyrinth as the site for the Gathering.
And so they came. One hundred and one thousand alien life-forms. From what the primitives had once called the constellations of Indus and Pavo, from Sad al Bari in Pegasus, from Mizar and Phecda, from all the worlds of the stellar community they came, bearing with them the special sounds they hoped would be judged the most extraordinary, the most stirring, the most memorable: ultimate sounds. They came, because they were bored and there was nowhere else to go; they came, because they wanted to hear what they had never heard before. They came; and they heard.
"… he domesticated the elephant, the cat, the bear, the rat, and kept all the remaining whales in dark stalk, trying to hear through their ears the note made by the rocking of the axle of the earth."
W,S. Merwin, The Chart"
If she had one fear in this endless life, it was that she would be forced to be born again. Yes; of coarse, life was sacred, but how long, how ceaselessly, repetitiously long did it have to go on? Why were such terrible stigmas visited on the relatives and descendants of those who simply, merely, only wished to know the sweet sleep?
Stileen had tried to remember her exact age just a few solstices ago. Periodically she tried to remember; and only when she recognized that it was becoming obsessive did she put it out of her mind. She was very old, even by the standards of immortality of her race. And all she truly hungered to know, after all those times and stars, was the sweet sleep.
A sleep denied her by custom and taboo.
She sought to busy herself with diversions.
She had devised the system of gravity pulse-manipulation that had kept the dense, tiny worlds of the Neer 322 system from falling into their Primary. She had compiled the exhaustive concordance of extinct emotions of all the dead races that had ever existed in the stellar community. She had assumed control of the Red Line Armies in the perpetual Pro-cyon War for over one hundred solstices, and had amassed more confirmed tallies than any other commander-in-chief in the War's long history.
Her insatiable curiosity and her race's longevity had combined to provide the necessary state of mind that would lead her, inevitably, to the sound. And having found it, and having perceived what it was, and being profoundly ready to enjoy the sweet sleep, she had come to the Gathering to share it with the rest of the stellar community.
For the first time in millennia, Stileen was not seeking merely to amuse herself; she was engaged on a mission of significance… and finality.