The Spheres

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

It is also said that the stars keen as they orbit in the firmament, expressing a celestial agony that vibrates at a pitch far higher than any life form can perceive. The imperceptible sound permeates the universe, extending to every corner and calling to all matter. Matter understands these harmonics, this dissonance, at the atomic level even if the conscious mind cannot perceive it. The universe dances in response.

On a planet flung out at the far tip of a string of lights attached to a swirling galaxy known to some as the home of Sagittarius, a person looks up at the night sky – or what they can see of it beyond the thick smoke – and wonders why the treble whine in the back of their mind seems to come into focus when they look at the stars. The constant sound haunts the edge of their consciousness twenty-four hours a day – almost as awful and omnipresent as the acrid smell of the forest fires – making their working day teter on the far edge of bearable and interrupting their sleep at night. The only relief comes from gazing at the twinkling pinpricks that appear above them after sunset, when the sound – the sound they must be imagining – pulls into a melodious chord instead of a grating noise.

Another, in a distant solar system, hears a rumbling bassline. He works in the tunnels, far below his planet's inhospitable surface where the lack of ozone has ushered life underground to find respite in the womb of the rock. The people who call this planet home have created an artificial atmosphere under the surface, landscaping the interior caverns with vegetation that supplements the ventilation system with new oxygen. The breathable air on the ground was questionable, however the lack of protection from the solar winds and radiation caused all but the most hardy plants and ingenious adapted bacterial and animal life to look for respite away from the rays of their star. Living two kilometres underneath the surface, he can hear a constant drone which he can never place. He thought the sound was coming from the air pumps, but when he visited the constantly working machinery the volume didn't change. The company doctor told him it must be a work injury; the cacophony of the drilling machines beating away at his auditory nerves. The sound remains night and day; he never escapes it.

Another planet called Midarian by its inhabitants, swirling inextricably closer to the gaping maw at the centre of Sagittarius, has a name for this: the starfarers. These are the voyagers who can guide themselves – or are led – to reaches beyond the extent of the galaxy, navigating by how the spheres lock into tune. Khalisi of the Midari has heard the old stories. When she was small, her mother told her that that the words for musician and captain have the same root – those who divine their way to a new destination – and she hopes this explains the song she can never get out of her mind. What would she do with it though? She has no ship, she has no instrument. She can only sit on the shoreline looking up at the bright event horizon that dominates the evening sky as it slips into the sea – the light of consumed stars bending around the black abyss at the centre – and hum to herself. The archer has shot his arrow. Midarian's fate is pinned to the tip, its people pulled swirling ever faster toward their dark future.

If only they could find each other.