“What did you do that for?”
“Do you see that?”
“I don’t see anything,” Chocky hissed.
“Yes. Of course. But there’s something—hello?” The tourist’s voice raised an octave, increased in volume.
Chocky heard it, then. Shuffling, groaning, the rip and tear of clothing. He grimaced. “Leave them be. Their business. Not ours.”
“What are they doing? There is blood. They’re covered in it.”
“Then they’re almost finished. Whatever it is. Don’t get in the way.”
“I should do something.”
“You should mind your own business.”
“We should alert someone.”
“There’s nobody to alert. Come. We’re almost there.”
Chocky launched himself forward through the netting. He felt no disturbances in the lines. Behind him the tourist quietly said, “They stopped.” And then he waited for the tourist to catch up to him.
Anywhere in the colony, Chocky felt vibrations. It was carried through the rock, barely audible as sound. The timbre of minerals and hollows, oscillations of mining machinery. The loops of the sounders above it all.
The vibrations in the tethers of the web grew stronger. Dense, pulsing patterns built up and multiplied. Harmonies and polyrhythms.
“We should go back,” the tourist said.
“Don’t be dense. We’re here. You feel that?”
The tourist was quiet for a moment, then said, “Yes. Yes, I do.” A hint of excitement, perhaps, in its synthesized voice.
The tunnel opened. The air changed, growing thick, heavy, and damp. The hot smell of bodies. The death smell of rot.
“You’re lucky not to smell it,” Chocky said. “But I don’t envy you having to see it.”
“It is incredible. How many are there?”
“Don’t know.”
“Are there sounders here?”
“Could be. This they call a resonance. The sounders make their own speakers, some of them. Wind copper wire around big magnets, make them thump. Bury them in the rock so they can be felt all over. Others come to be close to it.”
“I see them. Maybe. There are so many. Some are listening. Others are doing—oh no.”
Chocky turned away and put his hand against cool, smooth crystal.
“I’m going to pay my respects.”
“They are doing terrible things,” the tourist said.
Chocky kicked away, drifted for a time, and hit a bare spot in the rocky enclosure. Cool and wet to the touch. He wondered what the tourist saw, the shape of the space, how many dozens, or hundreds, were assembled here. What they did to each other in the dark. He put his hands and face against the rock and felt the heartbeat of his world. The churning of machinery and the feedback of his people, muddied into a constant thrum. He thought about the pasty blur of his face, reflected in the tourist’s visor. It became the face of the virgin, the source of all pain and salvation.
Somewhere in the hum was the beat of her small heart, carried to him through miles of crust. He believed that he could feel it, growing weaker.
He kicked back and returned to the tourist, finding the spot by memory.
“I can hear it,” the tourist said. “But I must transpose the frequency to do so. The audible range is outside of human norms. Some have speculated that the air pressure is too low here for there to be audible sound. That is how little they know.”
“Let’s go. We have to go.”
“I do not want to stay here. But, tell me. Can you hear it?”
“Yes. Hear it here, hear it everywhere. It’s in the rock. Whole damn thing. Now we have to go.”
The tourist was quiet. Listening. Chocky listened too. In the cacophony of the resonance he heard other, closer sounds. Flesh on flesh. Grunting, moaning, crying. When it spoke again, the volume of its voice was very low. “My interest is anthropological.”
“Big space words. Use mole words so I can understand.”
“You said that we should go. The ones who make the music. You call them sounders?”
Chocky thought for a moment and nodded for the tourist.
“You know one?”
“I know lots. You want to meet one?”
“It is important for my thesis.”
“Then we go.”
Chocky drifted in void. An ocean of sound, and him floating on the shimmering surface.
“None of my professors have heard this before. There are no recordings. Not until now. This music has roots going back centuries. Early ritual music. Twentieth century drone, minimalism, musique concrete, electroacoustic. It is communal, spatial, improvisational. Wholly remarkable. But what horror. I’ve never seen anything like—”
Metal clicked on rock. Movement in the dark. Chocky followed cords and tags to a stall in a market wall. “Here, spaceman,” he said. “You want to make good with the sounder? We’ll go to them with gifts. You barter for it.”
Chocky heard the clink of coins and the thanks of the merchant. He could hear the merchant’s smile, a tightness in the voice, for the amount that the tourist overpaid.
“What are these objects? Are they significant?”
“Booze and batteries. Give them to me.”
Chocky felt the objects in his hands: a glass bulb, filled with liquid and sealed on all sides; a short metal tube with a recessed switch along one end. He slipped them into a zippered pocket and kicked away, giving the merchant a slap on the shoulder as he left. The tourist followed directly behind him.
He led the tourist through winding, indirect pathways. He waited for the tourist to question his sense of direction, to ask if he was lost. They did not.
The tourist asked him many questions.
“Are you comfortable with violence?”
“It’s normal.”
“But it seems to be, umm, everywhere. The representative told me, but I didn’t—do you ever try to stop it? Does anyone?”
“If they choose. Most don’t. Why make trouble?”
The tourist was silent for a time.
“Do you ever wish for light? Do you wish to see in the dark?”
“Stupid question.”
“Why is it stupid? The company workers, they use sensors when they enter the tunnels. Infrared. Ultraviolet. Heat maps, depth scans. You don’t see their purpose?”
“I see the purpose. We like it this way.”
There were breaks in the tunnels, wide open space. Places where the company’s machines spun and shook and swarmed, eating away at the flesh of the rock.
“Everywhere else,” the tourist said in a place of relative quiet, “people extend and augment themselves. They see and feel the virtual, the unreal-as-real. They experience broad frequencies of light and sound. Colors never seen before, sounds never heard. Here you do the opposite. You live in darkness and hear only sound that passes through thin air and solid objects.”
“That’s not a question. What is it you want to know?”
“Are you familiar with the means by which the original immigrating biosect was conceived? Substantial augmentation. The naked mole rat, of Earth’s Africa, used as a DNA template.”
Chocky bit the inside of his cheek, tasted blood.
“It is an extraordinary animal. Studied for its unique immunity to cancers. Exceptionally long-lived. Naturally able to survive in environments with low levels of oxygen, high levels of carbon dioxide. And this, a planetoid with similar conditions, containing huge deposits of radioactive ore. Extraordinary ingenuity on the part of your designers, I must admit.”
Words from the tourist. Simple words. Not short blades in the dark. Not that faint pain, something deeper. Chocky felt it, then.