The sounds continued, each delegate presenting a wonder to match the wonders that had gone before.
The delegate from RR Lyrae IV produced the sound of a dream decaying in the mind of a mouselike creature from Bregga, a creature whose dreams formed its only reality. The delegate from RZ Cephei Beta VI followed with the sound of ghosts in the Mountains of the Hand; they spoke of the future and lamented their ability to see what was to come. The delegate from Ennore came next with the sound of red, magnified till it filled the entire universe. The delegate from Gateway offered the sound of amphibious creatures at the moment of their mutation to fully, land-living living vertebrates; there was a wail of loss at that moment, as their chromosomes begged for return to the warm, salty sea. The delegate from Algol CXXIII gave them the sounds of war, collected from every race in the stellar community, broken down into their component parts, distilled, purified, and recast as one tone; it was numbing. The delegate from Blad presented a triptych of sound: a sun being born, the same sun coasting through its main stage of hydrogen burning, the sun going nova-a shriek of pain that phased in and out of normal space-time with lunatic vibrations. The delegate from lobbaggii played a long and ultimately boring sound that was finally identified as a neutrino passing through the universe; when one of the other delegates suggested that sound, being a vibration in a medium, could not be produced by a neutrino passing through vacuum, the lobbaggiian responded-with pique-that the sound produced had been the sound within the neutrino; the querying delegate then said it must have taken a very tiny microphone to pick up the sound; the Lobbaggiian stalked out of the Gathering on his eleven-meter stilts. When the uproar died away, the agenda was moved and the delegate from Kruger 60B IX delivered up a potpourri of sounds of victory and satisfaction and joy and innocence and pleasure from a gathering of microscopic species inhabiting a grain of sand in the Big Desert region of Catrimani; it was a patchwork quilt of delights that helped knit together the Gathering. Then the delegate from the Opal Cluster (his specific world's native name was taboo and could not be used) assaulted them with a sound none could identify, and when it had faded away into trembling silence, leaving behind only the memory of cacophony, he told the Gathering that it was the sound of chaos; no one doubted his word. The delegate from Mainworld followed with the sound of a celestial choir composed of gases being blown away from a blue' star in a rosette (nebula) ten light-years across; all the angels of antiquity could not have sounded more glorious.
And then it was Stileen's turn, and she readied the sound that would put an end to the Gathering.
"And beyond-and in fact among-the last knowa animals living and extinct, the lines could be drawn through white spaces that had an increasing progression of their own, into regions of hearing that was no longer conceivable, indicating creatures wholly sacrificed or never evolved, hearers of the note at which everything explodes into light, and of the continuum that is the standing still of darkness, drums echoing the last shadow with6ut relinquishing the note of the first light, hearkeners to the unborn overflowing."
W. S, Merwiii, "The Chart"
"There is no pleasure in this," Stileen communicated, by thought and by inflection. "But it is the sound that I have found, the sound I know you would want me to give to you… and you must do with it what you must. I am sorry."
And she played for them the sound.
It was the sound of the death of the universe. The dying gasp of their worlds and their suns and their galaxies and their island universes. The death of all. The final sound.
And when the sound was gone, no one spoke for a long time, and Stileen was at once sad, but content: now the sleep would come, and she would be allowed to rest.
"The delegate is wrong."
The silence hung shrouding the moment. The one who had spoken was a darksmith from Luxann, chief world of the Logomachy, Theologians, pragmatiste, reasoners sans appel, his words fell with the weight of certainty.
"It is an oscillating universe," he said, his cowl shrouding his face, the words emerging from darkness. "It will die, and it will be reborn. It has happened before, it will happen again."
And the tone of the Gathering grew brighter, even as Stileen's mood spiraled down into despair. She was ambivalent-pleased for them, that they eould see an end to their ennui and yet perceive the rebirth of life in the universe- desolate for herself, knowing somehow, some way, she would be recalled from the dead.
And then the creature she had passed in reaching out for her place on the agenda, the creature that had blocked itself to her mental touch, came forward in their minds and said, "There is another sound beyond hers."
This was the sound the creature let them hear, the sound that had always been there, that had existed for time beyond time, that could not be heard though the tone was always with them; and it could be heard now only because it existed as it passed through the instrument the creature made of itself,
It was the sound of reality, and it sang of the end beyond the end, the final and total end that said without possibility of argument, there will be no rebirth because we have never existed.
Whatever they had thought they were, whatever arrogance had brought their dream into being, it was now coming to final moments, and beyond those moments there was nothing.
No space, no time, no life, no thought, no gods, no resurrection and rebirth.
The creature let the tone die away, and those who could reach out with their minds to see what it was, were turned back easily. It would not let itself be seen.
The messenger of eternity had only anonymity to redeem itself…for whom?
And for Stileen, who did not even try to penetrate the barriers, there was no pleasure in the knowledge that it had all been a dream. For if it had been a dream, then the joy had been a dream, as well.
It was not easy to go down to emptiness, never having tasted joy. But there was no appeal.
In the Maelstrom Labyrinth, there was no longer ennui.
Stars, Won't You Hide Me?
by Ben Bova
O sinner-man, where are you going to run to? O sinner-man, where are you going to run to? O sinner-man, where are you going to run to All on that day?
The ship was hurt, and Holman could feel its pain. He lay fetal-like in the contoured couch, his silvery uniform spider-webbed by dozens of contact and probe wires connecting him to the ship so thoroughly that it was hard to tell where his own nervous system ended and the electronic networks of the ship began.
Holman felt the throb of the ship's mighty engines as his own pulse, and the gaping wounds in the generator section., where the enemy beams had struck, were searing his flesh. Breathing was difficult, labored, even though the ship was working hard to repair itself.
They were fleeing, he and the ship; hurtling through the star lanes to a refuge. But where?
The main computer flashed its lights to get his attention. Holman rubbed his eyes wearily and said:
"Okay, what is it?"
YOU HAVE NOT SELECTED A COURSE, the computer said aloud, while printing the words on its viewscreen at the same time.
Holman stared at the screen. "Just away from here," he said at last, "Anyplace, as long as it's far away."