and huddled with her crewmates.
Elder Kalila retrieved a thin probe, previously sent through a tiny opening in the ship’s airlock chamber into space to test for intergalactic dust. She looked amused by the results. “Not a grain. Perhaps we should seed star dust.”
Ha! It would take ages before enough collected for space travel Earthling style, Zer thought.
Voices buzzed around Zer, voyagers wondering if the elder meant it. Keepers of Harmony talked long before changing reality. The pureblooded, golden-eyed Zenobians studied the occult and metaphysics from childhood. Kalila was greatest of all. By age six, she had controlled her slightest thoughts or impulses with such exquisite sensitivity that she need not fear accidentally setting off a cosmic event. With one trill, some said, she could skip one dust mote across a continent.
The elder finished the ritual, invoking ancestral memory. “Eons ago, elders first crossing the breach heard light beings sing . . .”
Everyone knew about otherworldly Ephemerals. Their original blessing had knocked the elders senseless. They’d come-to knowing how to cast brittle iridium, the waste product of the universe, into chimes and metronomes. Sailing beyond the breach and back, they’d made, aligned, and standardized the quality of the instruments with the pure tones and rhythms of star song. In the casting process, they’d learned nuances of light. Ever since, elders had bent reality as music bent light-space.
But it was the chimes that were known, for the harmony they produced in mind and body. Chimes were traded near and far. To this end, Zenobians mined iridium, and elders kept ongoing records of heat-color vibrations of stars, planets, and other bodies in the two galaxies. They used space music to harmonize with the ceaseless motion in space and study cosmic changes.
Zer wished she'd hear the Ephemerals' song. An echo, some said, lingered in the breach.
“We thank you,” Kalila said, “for joining this mission. Your gifts will be needed during cosmic events, which will mark the end of this fifty thousand-year era.”
Zer blew a kiss. That was all the affirmation she needed for her gift of Exotica.
“We await the closing of the Ways, what many consider myth.”
Zer didn’t see how, if Earthlings used old-fashioned space travel.
“We see far ahead, for we are the Keepers of Harmony throughout Andromeda.” Elder Kalila bowed and reset the prime metronome.
Zer felt the click, clicking like a holy touch tingling down her spine. Although she wasn't pure Zenobian, she valued their evolution and history. She grasped the lure and honor of the voyage, of serving. For a moment, she knew why people willingly set off to collect songs or to help on the other side for the old ones. Many had not returned. Her parents had not.
The click-click grew louder as one pilot after another set and aligned a metronome with the beat of the prime. The volume steadily progressed to fifty synchronized beats . . . one hundred, one fifty, two hundred. . . Three hundred-and-one instruments marking time. The sheer, loud power of rhythm pervaded every nook of the ship, vibrated every cell of Zer’s being. She imagined it shook the universes. The rhythmic power hinted at the elders’ ability to bend reality, or transform things.
All but the prime metronome stopped ticking. Pilots began to ring chimes with lower or higher pitches. The different octaves of hundreds of chimes pealing in harmonic intervals produced their magical effect. Crewmates leaped into dance; Zer whirled among them to keep from exploding or imploding. A tangle of tones and bodies swept round and round the work hall.
Leon brushed against Zer, his fingers sliding up her arm. Cupping her neck, he twirled her and whispered, “Happy new world, I’ll be stalking you, the trees are taboo,” and danced away.
Zer sank into the nearest chair, wishing she’d not come. She’d never worried about taboos in Zenobia. She listened to the chimes and bells wind down ringing softly. Through the bells, she heard the choir singing, and it wasn’t her crewmates. Silken voices wrapped around her, an airy, delicate web, easing her grief at leaving home, and when they had, their music teased her fear into the open: She might not return. Her parents had not. Travelers to Earth often died or lost the way back. Zer shivered.
A high-pitched chord in the sound web tickled her brain. The voices turned velvety and slightly gritty, the texture of seed stirring in soil matrix before erupting into light. When the soothing, leafy crown of an Exotica swept her forehead, Zer surrendered and laughed at the paradox. People got what they needed in the pure, wild breach.
Only it was more mysterious. She’d been honored to hear and feel an echo of the blessing the Ephemerals had sung to the ancient Zenobian voyagers. Zerera thanked the choir and hummed along until the starship emerged from the breach and sailed onto the diamond-shaped routes in alien space. Starlight replaced fading voices.
* * *
Keeping to routine in the energy station, which her father had started, Karen pedaled faster, working up a sweat on a stationary bike, the simplest of three, to stay fit and to recharge devices. At 12 kilometers, she stopped to drink water and wipe salty sweat from her face.
When her breathing slowed, she donned head gear and moved into the old bat chimney, a vertical, broken tunnel, its base on the ledge a meter above the cave floor. It was warm and close though the interior was partly exposed at this end.
Days ago, she’d cracked and broken the chimney rock farther up in this section, using a chemical expanding agent to make the job easier.
Falling into a rhythm, she drilled, rock picked, and chiseled into cracks up the tunnel, stopping when her arms tired and sweat dribbled down her temples. It was even hotter in the narrow confines when she quit. She had less than a meter to go to reach the widened upper opening that her father, working from the top down, had in recent years drilled and blasted and, thankfully, set in a tubular light fixture. Today put her closer to fitting electric conduit to the small, backup windmill and rigging that complex to a mobile platform with photovoltaic cell modules.
She believed in her father’s predictions of bad times coming and furthered his engineering plans with a few additions of her own. Seismic graphs kept her informed of any impending big quake, and older computer sims showed potential for meteoroids or asteroids—preparations for either made worse with aliens coming.
She needed booby traps for their kind. Fist-sized crystals to jail them when they changed to 4D ghostly and 5D invisible. If obsidian worked, a motherlode of Apache tears wasn’t far. Or maybe imprisoned in blown genie glass. She smiled and started cleaning up to visit friends near Tucson, the closest place for fun when she got too lonely. Or when she couldn’t sneak past certain Tuc colony guards to visit her mom. She would find a way to rescue her mom from the rotten mayor.
The Zenobians wended among stars to record Milky Way spectra and search for cosmic anomalies.
Zer had burrowed into a comfortable position, knees tucked to chest, to watch streaming particles. When choreographed, the ceaseless flow of light patterns showing on her viewscreen would provide background melody for leaping, plunging thermal colors. A musical bar displayed translated heat-color into soundless notes. Zer wanted to hear the pulsing frequencies. She pat, tap, patted the display as ribbons of blue and purple wavelengths rose and burst and collapsed.
Zer glanced about the workroom. No one stirred in either direction along the hallway curve. Crewmates sat at four paired stations, spaced along the curve in a compass ring. Those Zer could see had their noses raptly pointed at their displays; Vatta was just as engrossed.
Zer drummed the beat of the pulsing line, waiting. Leon had forgotten to invite her to the pilot's room where sound data flowed in. Pilots transposed celestial landscapes into music; he'd promised a chance to watch him choreograph a composition from raw data. She could change dimensions, sneak in. Suffering Leon’s calm, impersonal wrath beat endless hours tracking data far from home in a big tub in alien