Chapter Text
You taught me the courage of stars / before you left,
how light carries on endlessly / even after death.
With shortness of breath, / you explained the infinite,
how rare and beautiful it is / to even exist.—Saturn, Sleeping at Last
Ripple-Across-the-Still-Pond spun the record back slowly. It wasn’t often that they misheard or made a mistake—in fact, such things were nearly unheard of, for a person with his level of training—but the strange, disturbing, exciting, astounding news from the Great Wire was just so unprecedented, they felt the need to confirm the facts before they sent for their superiors. Ripple was only λ+λ years old after all, a junior wiretapper only recently permitted to monitor the interstellar communications receiver without oversight. The interstellar communications thrum had quieted, after so many years without hearing from the deep-space-exploration-and-rescue-vessel that the Great Thrum had sent to investigate Not-Dimming-Star, a staggering λII+λ∀+Iλ.∀V+λ soundyears away from home-planet.
And now, when hope had all but been lost, and the last of the food supply sent for a crew of λ∀ would be nearly at its end. Now, they had received a message. A bewildering message, encoded on the secure channel but not originating from from the deep-space-exploration-and-rescue-vessel itself, if Ripple’s calculations were correct. (Ripple’s calculations, they would want noted, were always extremely correct.)
The Great Thrum had pinned the survival of the entire species—the entire planet’s biosphere—on that lonely vessel and its crew of λ∀ brave scientists and specialists. One of the crew, Drag-Path-on-the-Surface, had been part of Ripple’s mate-chain, just thrice removed from their primary. Perhaps that was why they felt the need to listen again…
< Transmission start. This is Resting-on-the-Warm-Stones, former engineer and mission-leader of the deep-space-exploration-and-rescue-vessel, one of fifteen offspring of Song-Travels-Far and Claws-Tilling-the-Soil, soulmate of Land-of-Grain-Waving-Gracefully— >
Here there was a break in the transmission, a strange grinding sound like drawing a claw down over a rock. Per protocol, this should have been the place of the speaker’s soul-song.
< —and secondary mate of Waves-of-the-Great-Sea-Lapping. I am transmitting from the star-rescue-vessel called Final-Hope-Attempt. I am accompanied by Land-of-Grain-Waving-Gracefully, wayward child of distant-soil-planet-third-from-its-sun, mission-leader and science expert of the Final-Hope-Attempt, beloved soulmate of Resting-on-the-Warm-Stones, also known as… (state your name.) (Naoo?) (Yes, into this.) >
The sounds that were recorded at this point on the disc would soon be replayed across the planet to great amazement and fanfare. They were strange and unnatural, startlingly alien in every sense of the word. Phonetically rendered, they were recorded as:
< KAhptn DOhktrr RAIlhnd Grrehss, Pee-Aych-Dee, HYOOmn frhm PLAh-nt Errth, MIHshn-LEEdr ov HAYuhl MAiRee, Sohlmayt ov Rahkee. >
Speech was melodic, a complex layered chord structure of tones and vibrations. But the second set of sounds bleeding through the transmission (a voice?) was completely flat. It was a jarring, monophonic sequence of harsh, rhythmic thuds and rapid, sibilant bursts of air, vaguely wet-sounding, like obscene digestive sounds.
It was not a name. It barely sounded like an attempt at speech. But then it strummed its soul-song, identifying it as the soulmate of Resting-on-the-Warm-Stones, and Ripple knew, with soundblinding clarity, that this was Land-of-Grain-Waving-Gracefully: a person who had not been registered as crew on the deep-space-exploration-and-rescue-vessel. A person who claimed to be from a distant-soil-planet-third-from-its-sun. An alien.
< What the excrement, question!? >
Ripple quickly erased his own reaction from the record when they heard it repeated back to them. Profanity was unbecoming.
The rest of the transmission was less remarkable, though far more devastating. All λ+ other crew had perished before reaching Not-Dimming-Star. The cause of death was proton-sickness, a concept for which Ripple had no frame of reference. Stones had been spared only by coincidence, the vessel’s fuel tanks having shielded the engineering workshop from the invisible, high-velocity atomic particles that traverse the void between planets and stars.
Stones and the alien, who had been sent by its own planet to Not-Dimming-Star for the same reason, had worked together to locate and capture a natural predator of the star-eating-parasites plaguing both home-stars. They were returning with the predator, a unicellular organism, for release on home-star’s third planet.
Oh, and the alien was dying. Stones requested a Great Thrum with utmost haste, calling in every bit of status they had as the savior of home-planet to make this demand:
< Grace and Stones have discovered the solution to save home-planet from extinction at great personal cost. Grace is beloved soulmate to Stones. If Grace dies, Stones may not be inclined to release predators on third-planet. >
The threat was delivered in ultrasonic frequencies ranging from 45 to 150 kilohertz, indicating high stress. In Ripple’s personal opinion, this Stones person sounded like one crazy monostome.
For a moment after the transmission had concluded for the second time, Ripple sat entirely motionless, their five legs locked into a rigid anchor stance against their listening post. To send this up the Wire to a representative of the Great Thrum meant initiating a planet-wide emergency broadcast.
If Ripple was wrong—if this was some bizarre atmospheric interference, or a catastrophic hardware malfunction of the interstellar receiver, or a prank—they would be stripped of their wiretapping-license and relegated to the sulfur mines. Well, probably not. But they weren’t wrong, anyway.
There was an alien lifeform, and it was headed their way on an alien vessel. It was starving to death. Its soulmate was the last survivor of their deep-space-exploration-and-rescue-vessel.
Ripple reached out a trembling claw toward the internal comms wire.
They had two urgent calls to make. First, to a scientist by the name of Waves-of-the-Great-Sea-Lapping. Then, to the local representative of the Great Thrum.
Their claw hovered for λ seconds. Then, they plucked.
Ripple-Across-the-Still-Pond was about to make history.