Music of the Spheres (1)

A Christmas in Selene City story!

This is Part 1 of a 4-part story written as part of the Christmas in Selene City collaborative anthology. Do check out the other stories in the collection!

A thin section of lunar basalt. Source: NASA/ARES

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30th December, 10:34 am

Ev’ry valley… shall be exalted…

The soar and swoop of the tenor’s voice rising and falling, the melody twisting and chasing like a stag on the mountains, stabbed Livia Lamarr as she turned the corner to the cafeteria.

The crooked straight… and the rough places plain…

“Oh, piss off,” muttered Livia, to no-one in particular.

The singing grew louder. It came from the open door of one of the larger meeting rooms a little further down that corridor. Livia felt a shiver in her bones, and hated herself for feeling it. She hurried on.

The walls of the corridor had taken on a seasonally appropriate scene - an Alpine landscape of the mid-20th century, great drifts of snow lying blue-white under silvered conifers to either side of the floor, a village of long-eaved chalets nestling in the middle distance, a white-furred hare of some sort darting between the trees. The open door of the meeting room, the source of the singing, was the only thing to break the illusion; that, and the lightness in her step, even with a weightsuit on, that Livia knew she’d never have on Earth. The door, she thought, looked like a portal. Portal, portent, portend. End port. This is where I end up, wash up, after all. Last port of call. She snorted to herself.

… and the rough places plain.

The voice rang out as Livia passed the doorway, and despite herself she glanced into the room. The tenor was Mattie. She already knew that. She’d recognised his voice from the first bar she’d heard. And of course Maria Celeste was there too, in the alto section. Her sister had always been good at singing. Not much she wasn’t good at. That’s why she was General Director of Selene City, the first truly international lunar base, at the age of forty-seven.

“OK, let’s move on to the chorus,” came the conductor’s voice. “We need this perfect for tomorrow night, yeah?”

“Whatever,” muttered Livia. The Selene City Singers were never less than perfect when they performed at the grand New Year party.

A metallic rattling broke into her thoughts. “Scuse me, coming through!”

Livia had to jump sideways to avoid the janitor’s cart as it whirled down the hallway from the cafeteria.

“Watch it!” She glared at the janitor. It was the new girl. Livia couldn’t remember her name and couldn’t be bothered checking it in her optics. Sabina? Subita? Something like that.

“Sorry, Dr. Lamarr,” said Subira. She glared back at Livia, but Livia had already moved on.

… and all flesh shall see it together…

The sliding door into the cafeteria finally shut out the sound of the chorus.

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30th December, 10:59 am

“Dr. Lamarr! May I join you?”

Livia looked up, startled, from the shapes she’d been watching in the steam from her coffee. She had sought out the quietest corner of the cafeteria to try and avoid her colleagues.

“Oh, Victor, hi,” she said, putting on a smile. “Of course. Although I’m not planning to stay long.”

“Sure.” Victor Cheong, her new Ph.D. student, slid into the seat opposite and slurped the fluffy cream from the top of his hot chocolate.

“What can I do for you?” Livia carved a neat triangle off her mince pie and stabbed it with her fork.

“Excuse me, Dr. Lamarr, what is that?” Victor was looking at her plate.

Despite herself, Livia smiled for the first time that morning. “This? You mean you don’t have mince pies in Malaysia?”

“That’s a mincemeat pie?”

Livia nodded, savouring the crumbly pastry and sweet tang of apple and raisins.

“But I don’t see any meat!”

She grinned then, and gave him the potted history of mince pies that she always ended up giving newcomers to Selene City’s festive traditions. Regional treats from as many of the base’s nationalities as the kitchen team knew how to make, in a rotating selection over the month that marked the festive season.

“You should try one,” she finished, taking a sip of coffee. “But was there something you wanted to talk to me about, Victor?”

“Uh, if you don’t mind,” he replied, his face flushing slightly. “The data from the seismic survey—”

Livia raised her hand in a stop gesture. “Hold on, Victor, hold on. You remember you’re supposed to be on holiday, right? You remember I’m supposed to be on holiday?”

“Oh.” He looked at the table, the flush in his cheeks deepening. “Oh. I’m sorry, Dr. Lamarr.” He twisted his mug in his hands.

Livia blew a puff of air out through her nostrials and shook her head, but at herself rather than at Victor. He reminded her of herself at that age. So keen, so eager to make a mark as a leading exogeologist. Working so many hours, enduring so much dust and pollution and boredom and panic, before she knew it would break her marriage and her health. And before she knew that beauty and connections were as necessary as academic qualifications for those who wanted to get to the very top. The beauty that Maria Celeste had inherited and she hadn’t. The connections that Maria Celeste had married and massaged, and she hadn’t.

“Dr. Lamarr?”

She looked at Victor’s round, acne-scarred face and felt sorry for him. She sighed. “Never mind. You’re here now. Tell me about the seismic data.” She didn’t admit it to herself, but she welcomed the distraction from the guilt of trying to feel festive and failing.

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30th December, 11:40 am

After Victor left, Livia crossed the cafeteria towards the north corridor. She was musing over what he had told her about the new seismic survey data. An anomaly, a large high-density mass deep under the basalt of the Mare Serenitatis. She’d told him not to tell anyone, but to run some further analysis while she checked his work. She knew he’d caught the excitement she’d tried to suppress from her voice.

The cafeteria was crowded. It was always busy at morning coffee time, but with the school closed for the winter break and most of the base’s staff on holiday for the week, there was an extra level of chatter and laughter, clatter of furniture and rattle of tempers. Livia edged round a table where three small children bickered over their snacks while two sets of parents sipped glühwein and complained about the expense of printing the latest Lego sets. One of the mums, a xenobiologist Livia knew slightly, nodded at her as she passed. At the next table, Dmytro Grossman, the Research Director, was huddled in conversation with his deputy. Livia avoided eye contact. Dmytro had been characteristically uncharitable about the Geology Division’s research output at her last review meeting. If Victor had really discovered something, she would have some ammunition for the next budget allocations.

There was a minor bottleneck at the door. A group from Information Services was trying to come in, full of jostle and back-slapping banter. Livia waited behind several others who were trying to get out. Right in front of her was Floriano Cóndor Cruz, the current Artist in Residence. He was wearing a very bright LightWool jumper with ¡FELIZ NAVIDAD! flashing in a rotation of colours, and a matching Peruvian hat over his curly hair, explicating something in his usual excited style to a guy from Cosmology.

“I tell you, this is gonna be fantastic,” he was saying, gesturing with broad sweeps of his hands. “My new piece, you ain’t never seen anything like this before, Alecito. People gonna be talking about this long after the party. Loooong after!”

Livia let the chat wash over her. Behind her, someone else was speculating about Serena Khan’s visit to Selene City. She had visited only once before, when her mother took her to visit her father’s memorial as a teenager, long after it had become clear that whatever had happened to Shijie Heping after the foundation stone ceremony, he wasn’t coming back. Livia hadn’t paid much attention to the plans for the fiftieth anniversary ceremony, though even she had heard of the glamorous Serena and her playboy son Frankie.

“There are some damn weird stories about what happened,” one person was saying. “Have you heard the one about…”

The voice trailed into the background as Livia made her way into the corridor. She had originally decided to leave by that exit simply to avoid passing the Selene City Singers again, but now her feet automatically led her towards her office. She would access Victor’s data from there. Plenty of time before she was due to meet Maria Celeste later in the day.

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30th December, 11:44 am

The office was quiet. Livia shut the door behind her and breathed deeply. She was itching to open a terminal, but took a moment to check her plants and spritz them with water, making a note to repot the aloes soon. Throwing herself into her chair and closing her eyes, she begrudgingly admitted to herself that at this time of year, the office made her feel calmer than anywhere else on the base.

“Galileo, give me a terminal and bring up the report from the last Mare Serenitatis seismic survey.”

“Ready,” replied the bass voice she’d chosen for the AI.

Livia opened her eyes and scanned the first couple of pages.

“OK, focus on the area within 20 square kilometres of latitude 33 degrees north, longitude 14.5 degrees east. Compare the data with the corresponding data from this year’s survey and flag up any differences.”

“Working. This will take a few minutes.”

While she waited for Galileo’s analysis, Livia opened Victor’s log files and began to check his method. She was pleased to see his manual cross-checks at each step, the way she liked it done. She felt her heart rate begin to rise and her mouth dry as she saw what he had seen.

She was rotating the 3D image, looking at the strange ovoid deep beneath the thick layer of frozen lava that formed the Mare Serenitatis, when she became aware of a faint music, a tingle of sound just at the edge of hearing. She frowned. It grew a little louder, but slightly muffled, like something being played several rooms away. She tried to block it out, taking it for another group practising for the New Year party, but it grew a little louder again and somehow sharpened, so she could hear it much more clearly, though it was still faint. Then one phrase of the melody detonated in her consciousness, and she gasped. The melody repeated and rolled on, then repeated again, each iteration as similar and different as waves of the sea, like breakers surging off the Atlantic. Livia closed her eyes, and felt tears swell under her eyelids.

“My analysis is complete.” Galileo’s voice broke in, drowning the music.

“Shh,” said Livia. A tear rolled down each cheek. She listened harder, trying to work out what the music was. Hadn’t the jazz band at her wedding reception played something like that? She could see the polished parquet dancefloor, and Paul’s polished shoes and the rose in his buttonhole, and the shine of his hair and the lustre of his eyes, and the reflections of the lights in everything, and she could smell his cologne like jasmine and feel his hand on the small of her back.

The music went on. Livia shook her head, biting down on her emotions. It now reminded her of something else, something older. She got up and opened the office door, turning her head left and right to try and locate the source. It seemed to come from further down the corridor. She walked towards it. Nonno’s farmhouse, she thought suddenly. Summer evenings in Tuscany, Maria Celeste leading her and Vincenzo on a quest through the olive groves. The smell of lavender.

The music had grown a little louder as she went on, but was further away than she had thought. Livia picked up her pace. The melody shifted again, and the rhythm burst into something exuberant, something that twitched at her feet and made her want to dance. Her heart swelled with joy, her chest so tight she could hardly breathe, and she wondered why no-one else was out listening to it.

She was very nearly at the end of the north corridor now. With a start, Livia realised that the music seemed to be coming from the airlock lobby. The north airlock was one of the least used in Selene City; perhaps the musicians had chosen to use the lobby as a practice space?

The music shifted again, something with eerie beats and the wail of a theremin. It was like, but not exactly like, the theme music to a show she had loved as a teenager, and she felt a prickle down her spine. She opened the door to the lobby.

The room was empty. The field suits hung in a row on their rack as usual, helmets neatly in the cubbyholes. There was no-one at the security desk. The airlock door was closed, and Livia frowned as she realised the light above the door was red. It had cycled to outside.

The music was still going, drifting and swirling from one theme to another. She realised first that her face was wet.

The music was coming from outside. Livia shook her head. Impossible. Sound didn’t carry in vacuum; everyone knew that. But she couldn’t deny her senses. Somehow, it was coming from outside, from the cold of the lunar night.

She knew, objectively, that going outside would be a bad idea. That in the darkness, it was below -150 °C. That the field suits were designed to handle the heat of lunar day better than the cold of night. She knew that it was against protocol to go out alone, and without logging the excursion. But she also knew that she had to go and find the source of the music. She hit the airlock cycle button, and for the first time realised what the red light implied: someone else had gone out before her. She pulled a suit from the rack and began to put it on, cinching the straps with trembling hands, checking the system readouts without really seeing what they said. The music was rolling and soaring like gulls, like eagles.

Livia clicked her helmet into place. Oddly, the music was unaffected. She flexed the gloves and checked the thermostat, and stood impatiently by the airlock door, waiting for the green light.

“Livia!”

Her name was warped and muffled. She ignored it. The music twisted and rollercoastered, on the border between pleasure and pain. It was an aurora, an avalance of sound. It was the single most exquisite sensation she’d ever felt in her life. She saw the light above the airlock turn green, and reached for the door activation button.

She saw his reflection in the inside of her helmet, spectrally elongated, like a wax face melting into fire, like a creature of the void. He was reaching for her. She turned, panicking. He was saying something, she could see his mouth moving, but she could only hear the music. She pushed wildly, shoving him in the chest. The recoil sent her backwards, unbalanced, into the airlock chamber. She landed on the floor, gasping, a crack of pain across the back of her head.

The music stopped.

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Read on…

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Don’t forget to read the other stories in the anthology — click below to get the back story and the full collection by 5 wonderful authors!

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Cover image photo credit: NASA/JSC.