Storymania - The Music Of The Spheres by Simon King

The Music Of The Spheres
Simon King

I suppose I ought to try and explain what happened, didn’t I? After all, I’m one of the few people who actually know the whole story. Well, maybe not the whole story—after all, who’s to say the story is finished? But I suppose I know more than most. So, I’ll do my best. You’ll have to bear with me, though. I’m no writer, and as you’ll appreciate, I’m not exactly at my rational best at the moment. But here goes.

Probably the first thing I should mention is where I was working—where I will still be working, I hope. If it’s still there. I was at the Drum Hill Observatory. I’ve been there several years. Still studying for my doctorate. We were doing some really interesting work on gravitational lensing…God, I do hope I can get back into it. Anyway, that’s where I was, and that’s what I was doing.

I imagine it was the animals that heard it first. Or maybe even felt it. I seem to vaguely remember there were reports in some of the papers about a worrying increase in the number of attacks by savage dogs. I can’t say I paid very much attention to them; I didn’t have a dog, didn’t know anyone who did, so it didn’t really seem all that relevant. Thinking back now, though, I would say that was probably the start of it. Those poor animals were being driven insane by the sound of which those with less acute hearing were still blessedly unaware. That was a good two weeks before things really began to happen.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve cursed my disability. As disabilities go, it’s fairly minor, really. I can see, I can walk, run, drive a car, really do anything anyone else can. And I have all my mental faculties—well, I think I do, anyway, though some might argue. So my deafness is really not a major handicap; nevertheless, I wouldn’t like to think of the number of times I’ve berated the smug bastard up above who hands out impairments and deformities willy-nilly, and still expects everyone to worship Him. And yet, in a twist the perversity of which only His Supreme Smugness could have devised, in a way it is my very inability to hear that saved me. But I’m jumping ahead, here. There is more to tell. I warned you this would not be a particularly literate account. Okay, I’ll need to back up again.

It was in the second week of September when the first of a series of strange reports began to hit the news media. Really odd stories. Nobody linked them together. Not then. In Nicaragua, there was a “mass insanity,” as it was termed by the newspapers. Seventy-three people from one small town had gone completely ga-ga, all in the space of a week. Naturally, the first thing they suspected was something in the water. No evidence was found. Nothing else could be found that linked them all together. They lived in different parts of the town, came from different families, shopped for food in different stores. Once the scientists had failed to quickly explain the phenomenon, the door was open for the pseuds. It was obviously some Divine retribution, they said. These people had been inflicted with insanity as a sign of God’s wrath. And this was only the beginning, they said. There was more to come. This was the beginning of the end. Oh, how we laughed. Then.

There was another story, this time from somewhere obscure in Nebraska. A whole town had vanished overnight. Well, when I say “vanished”, I don’t mean the buildings. I mean the inhabitants. All the buildings were razed. The inhabitants just went running off into the cornfields. Most haven’t been found yet. The few that have turned up have had to be immediately sedated and incarcerated.

The list of stories goes on, and I won’t go through them all here. It’s unnecessary. Suffice it to say that they all followed pretty much the same pattern: discrete groups of people suddenly succumbing to madness for no apparent reason. It started to get frightening. People began to panic. Governments were concerned. Each, naturally, looked to their enemies for some unknown new weapon, along the lines of the perennially popular “death ray.” After several weeks, though, when incidents of mass insanity had been seen in pretty much every major country, it was realised that whatever was causing the problem was not political or military. This put the politicos in even more of a spin. Hostile acts by unfriendly countries were things they could deal with, or at least understand. There were policies, procedures. But an unknown agent that was creating lunatics like wildfire? Sorry, that isn’t in the manual.

The first time The Noise was actually heard and reported is not easy to define. It is clear now that these isolated groups of people were the first to hear it, through some freak of the acoustic nature of the Earth. The current theory is that these people lived on, or very close to, iron ore deposits, which resonated more strongly than everywhere else. The rest of us had to wait almost a month.

Though I can’t be precise about the first report, I can certainly tell you exactly when I found out about it. I was sitting at home one afternoon, when I saw it on the news. My profession means working many nights, and I was in the middle of an observing run at this particular time. I’d come home around 5am, immediately crashed out, and woken up ravenous just after midday. I fixed myself something meagre. (I don’t remember what it was, but it must have been something fairly unexciting, because I still haven’t mastered the twin talents of shopping and cooking for myself.) I remember being sat in front of the TV, watching the news: the usual selection of death, doom and disaster, slightly watered down from the evening version for the more genteel daytime viewer. Three or four items in was a story about a strange, unexplained noise in, of all places, Nevada.

Well of course, it was obvious what people were going to start saying about it, and sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed. It wasn’t more than two minutes into the report when the phrase “Area 51” was mentioned for the first time. I tell you, if you collected together all the crackpot theories and alleged leaks regarding the activities in that place, not only would you need an underground structure bigger than Nevada itself for it to all happen in, you’d need a workforce ten times the size of the population of the state to do it all.

Anyway, the gist of the report was that a noise had been reported by various people across the state; a low, persistent thumping, kind of like a rock concert heard from a few miles’ distance, so far away that you can’t hear the actual music, but close enough to catch the beat. Apparently the authorities were “taking the matter seriously,” but wished to assure everyone of two things: one, that there was “nothing untoward happening in Area 51,” and two, that there was nothing to worry about, and that the matter would soon be put to rest.

You know how it is when you’re watching the news. After the first couple of major items, you tend to lose concentration and interest. That’s pretty much what happened with me. I paid enough attention to remember the story (and later events were to reinforce the significance of that moment in such a way that I will never again forget it), but not really enough for me to attach any importance to it. The following evening, I drove out again to the observatory, and as far as I can remember, mentioned it to no one.

A few days later, there was another item on the news. This one was the second story in. The Noise (it was the tabloids that started to capitalise the word, sometime later) had been heard again, this time in China. Xuang Province. My first reaction was to be surprised that such a story had found its way out of that country, but the details of the story soon put that thought from my mind. It was exactly the same noise as had been reported in Nevada.

After that, things happened fast. There were more news reports, then the papers picked up the ball and ran with it. Journalists were starting to get their acts together, linking the stories, looking for possible explanations. The Area 51 business soon died down, persistent conspiracy theorists notwithstanding. There was a small group of them who continued to argue that, since The Noise had first been reported in that vicinity, that proved it had something to do with the secret military activity in the area. Very few people took them seriously, and in time even they went quiet.

As near as I can tell you, by about two weeks later, everyone was hearing it. Well, everyone who could hear, that is. Reports poured in from every inhabited corner of the globe. Governments began to hold emergency meetings, first at national level; very quickly, these turned into summit meetings. The scientific community began to focus its attention on the phenomenon. It was quickly established that The Noise had no definable source, the amplitude was, so far as could be tested, equal over the entire planet. Something else was also quickly established: it was getting louder.

Throughout this time, most people carried on their lives as normal, and I was no exception. But then, word came that the Government required all research scientists and engineers working in possibly relevant fields to abandon their current work and concentrate on this unexplainable global oddity. At the Drum Hill Observatory, we decided that we were working in a “relevant field,” so we began to look at the problem. To be honest, I don’t think any of us were really that enthusiastic about it at the time; our work on gravitational lensing was going well, and we postponed it only with reluctance. But we all felt that if the Government were making the request, then a: it must be reasonably serious, and b: it might do us more harm than good to refuse the request, particularly when it came to the thorny area of funding. So, we did our duty.

As I’ve already mentioned, it was observed that the sound seemed to have no source direction, so we began to wonder if the source was extraterrestrial. I don’t mean extraterrestrial in the popular sense; we weren’t interested in alien invasions. We were looking to see if The Noise originated somewhere outside of the Earth. But there was a big problem with that: sound does not propagate through a vacuum. And space is about the best vacuum you can have. So that effectively ruled that one out.

We began to be supplied with data from monitoring stations that were being set up across the globe. My colleagues at the observatory could now hear the sound constantly. It wasn’t yet a problem, just a minor distraction. That would change.

The Noise became the main news item; the newspapers carried daily reports of its volume, measured at different points around the world, the various sensible possibilities being put forward for its original, and some of the not so sensible ones too. There were regular “Noise Bulletins” on the TV. And still The Noise grew louder. Sales of ear plugs increased rapidly, people started wearing them whilst out at work, or shopping. Children who were too young to use them were issued with ear muffs. Those people most prone to panic, panicked. Soon, it wasn’t just them.

It was probably about a week after my colleagues had first heard the noise that I started to feel it. I’m fortunate in a way that although my auditory apparatus is well and truly FUBAR, there are some sounds that I can feel as vibrations, probably due to the particular configuration of the bones in my skull. They have to be at certain pitches, though. Must be the sounds that correspond to the natural resonance of my head. Anyway, The Noise was one of those select group of sounds that I can get some impression of. By this time, it was loud enough to cause sleepless nights and inability to concentrate, in those who did not use ear protection. It was nowhere near as serious for me, but it was there, nevertheless; a deep, slow, somehow insistent booming. Or at least, whatever the equivalent of booming is for a deaf man.

When a more widespread surge in cases of insanity started being reported, that really set the cat amongst the pigeons. There were reports of rioting, fighting, even assaults and rapes. Individuals were setting out on rampages, turned crazy, unable to get away from the sound that was attacking their minds. It came very close to home when one of my friends at the observatory, Patrick Lucas, suddenly lost it as we were working one afternoon. I remember it clearly, and the look on his face is something that will never fade from my mind, even if The Noise itself ever does.

We were looking at the latest set of data just in from a station in Puerto Rico, near the Arecibo radio telescope. They were telling us the same story we had seen for weeks: the sound was sourceless, uniform, and increasing in volume. Suddenly, in the middle of a conversation, Patrick screamed. I couldn’t hear it, of course, but then, when you see a man’s face twisted into a lunatic mask of pain, rage and exasperation, when you see his mouth stretched wide, the veins and tendons of his neck strained taut, when his whole colour approaches that of his crimson shirt as fast as a chameleon, you don’t really assume he’s singing a lullaby. He screamed until his lungs were purged of every molecule, filled them again in fast, raking breaths, then screamed again, clamping his hands over his ears, lurching unsteadily to his feet and staggering round the room. We tried to calm him, tried to get him to sit down, tried basically to stop him losing his mind.

They took him away; to a local hospital first, then later to a “special place.” It was a mental institution, we all knew that. We weren’t encouraged to go and see him. In fact, we weren’t encouraged to even talk about him. But the incident frightened the hell out of everyone that was left. Well, not me, perhaps, but certainly everyone who could hear.

That’s when things got bad. The TV news reports were now showing daily numbers of cases of insanity. Dozens first. Then hundreds. Then thousands. The Noise was slowly turning the population into raving maniacs. Two more from our team went a few days later. The earplugs were no longer working. The earmuffs issued to the children were slightly better, but they too were nowhere near good enough, in the end. I won’t go into too much detail about that. It was terrible, the worst thing you could imagine. I’ll leave it at that.

Other things happened; a national curfew was imposed. Nobody to be out after 9pm. Stronger ear protectors were made, but manufacture was pitifully slow, and by the time they became available, it was too late for a lot of people. The hospitals and other assorted “special places” filled up to and beyond capacity. Old air raid shelters were opened, after it was discovered that The Noise had somewhat less volume underground. Not much, but by this time, there was an air of desperation, even amongst politicians. I think it’s part of the politician’s job description to appear in control at all times, no matter what the crisis, and no matter how little you really know about what’s happening. But by this time, even they were beginning to come unglued. Talking mainly from concrete- and lead-lined bunkers, they tried hard to reassure but, in the end, failed.

And still no solution could be found. Soon, those of us who were left working on the problem were combined into one big team. There were about two hundred of us. Over half were deaf. I have no doubt that without the cross-disciplinary team that resulted, we would not have found the answer. Or at least, it would have taken much longer.

It was a planetary scientist who made the suggestion that eventually lead us to some kind of answer. Malcolm Monteith, his name was. Remember that name. It just might be one of the most important names in history, and I record it here for that purpose. He told us a story about the Greeks and Johannes Kepler. A story, it turned out, that had more truth than had been hitherto ascribed to it.

The Greeks, it turned out, believed that the motion of “heavenly bodies” was governed by music. Rhythm and melody determine the movements of the planets. The planets must harmonise with each other. Everything in Divine Harmony. Kepler perpetuated the idea, even attempting to connect planetary orbits with some kind of harmonic scale. I’ll be honest with you: we thought he’d gone crazy. Though he was profoundly deaf from birth, we truly believed that The Noise had got to him. But by this time, things were so desperate we had to grab on to anything. So we looked for signs. And we found them.

The origins of this whole thing go back a few years. Do you remember Shoemaker-Levy 9? The comet that collided with Jupiter? I bet you do. I bet everyone does. It was a fantastic event, unprecedented in the telescopic era. You remember the thrill, the elation, the awe? That was the start. In a way, comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was a tuning fork.

Not that we discovered it straight away, though. Oh no, it took us a good week or so to spot it, a week that saw around half a million people in this country alone lose their grip on sanity; most of them forever, I guess. Anyway, after looking through reams and reams of data on all the planets, without success, we landed on this event. And once we had it, everything else fit. Recent observations of Mars and Venus reinforced the theory. And two days ago, Sunday, we briefed the Prime Minister and his “Crisis Cabinet” on our ideas.

When Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter in July 1994, it kept an entire planet’s population open-mouthed in fascination. It truly was an incredible astronomical event, one of the most fantastic and awe-inspiring ever observed. The studies that event generated are still going on today. But what no one realised, what not one of those studies focused on, was the fact that the huge impact caused Jupiter to resonate.

Jupiter is a huge planet, over one thousand times the volume of the Earth. So therefore, when it vibrates, it does so at an incredibly low frequency, just like large bells have a much lower tone than smaller ones. But in that amazing summer of 1994, while the whole astronomical community was staring at it, the magnificent gas giant began to ring like the biggest bell in the world.

Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, as I’ve already said. But gravity does. And this is what we think happened. The vibrations in the planet caused a corresponding resonance in its gravitational field, which spread out and away from it in all directions, like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond. They travelled outwards at huge speed, and would have reached Earth a couple of days later, while we were all drooling over the fantastic photographs taken by Hubble of the recently scarred planet. And the effect those ripples had on the Earth was…nothing. Not then. Because the frequency wasn’t related to the Earth’s natural resonance. But when they reached Neptune, it was a different story. Several months after the gravitational ripples washed harmlessly across our planet, they hit Neptune. There, they encountered a sympathetic ear. The planet’s natural resonance, it turns out, is in harmony with that of Jupiter. And as the gravitational sine wave passed through Neptune, it strummed the planet like a guitar string, and Neptune began its song. In the process, of course, Neptune began to vibrate, and created its own gravitational pond-ripples, which spread out across space in exactly the same way. This time, though, they were at a different frequency.

Mars was next. The waves from Neptune rippled through it during the Autumn of 1995, bringing forth the God of War’s battle cry, and eliciting yet another set of gravitational waves. And so it went on. Out to Uranus, then Venus. From Venus to Saturn, out to Pluto, and then right back in to Mercury. And from Mercury, just a few months ago, to Earth. Every planet vibrating, humming, singing its own song into an unhearing space, each one reinforcing the other. The Music Of The Spheres. Kepler was right. The Greeks were right.

We measured the frequencies of all of the planets, multiplied them all up to human range, then reproduced them on a PC. I couldn’t hear it, of course, but the few hearing people present, including the Prime Minister, were stunned. They said it was like nothing they’d ever heard before. Quite literally, alien music. But for the devastating effects on Earth, it would be the most beautiful scientific discovery every made. If you can put to one side for a few moments the horrors that it caused, and continues to cause, it still is.

This is one of those occasions when knowing the reason for the phenomenon gives you no information whatsoever one how to change it. How could we possibly damp down an entire planet? At the moment, we don’t know, although we’re working on huge loudspeakers, hundreds of yards wide, that will emit a sound wave of exactly the same frequency as the one the Earth is resonating at, but phase-shifted, so that each peak corresponds with a trough, each trough with a peak. It is hoped that this might slowly start to damp down the Earth’s monotonous song. We don’t know how long it will take, we don’t even know whether it will work. But it’s something. In the meantime, bunkers are being built that are surrounded by a vacuum, to provide the only possible barrier for The Noise. Actually, that term is now being replaced rapidly by The Music, which sounds nicer, even though the effects are just as disastrous. But I suppose people feel better for knowing what it is, and calling it “The Music” helps them to remember that.

Nobody has any accurate figure yet for the level of insanity caused by the incessant, penetrating tone. We know the figure runs to probably a million or two in this country alone. Worldwide, extrapolating from that, we’re probably looking at a hundred million, probably two. Possibly more. Quite frankly, at the moment it doesn’t do any good to dwell on such things. I wish I could tell you that things will get better, that our phase-shifted tone will solve the problem. But I can’t. I just don’t know. Maybe this is it for the human race. We’ve had a damned good run, nobody would deny that. And we’ve been lucky not to get wiped out several times. Maybe some of us will survive, but future H.Sapiens will all be deaf. For the moment, all we can do here is continue trying to find a solution. Because none of us knows how long this planetary symphony lasts, or even how many movements it has.