Memory of a Song

Maria

Seadance, she called the water world second out from the Ghost star. The waves rippled gently in complex patterns as they bounced off her bare feet, a pair of interacting concentric circular disturbances meshing, recombining, sending different shapes rippling out to sea. She resisted the urge to interfere, to amplify the waves and blow tsunamis outward from herself. This world had a single island for a landmass, little more than the top lump of a massive, extinct volcano. With the depth of the water and the complexities of the sea floor thirty kilometers below, a tsunami would probably wash over the entire island.

So she stood, on a beach of her own creation, which consisted of a floating matrix of sand hovering half a meter below the surface. All around her was blue-gray water, horizon-to-horizon, so vast, so serene and untainted she could get lost in it.

From the back of her mind came a quiet musical phrase, a song she had heard once, as a child, and never since. The song was one of perhaps twenty total that survived the Devastation and the Fire, which seemed like a lot until one considered that thousands of songs were forever lost. The Cybrids and the aliens before them had stolen something precious from humanity, the art and culture of a thriving world, reduced to ash and rebuilt from scratch.

But she had heard the one song at least.

"I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean," she whispered, gazing out to sea. Small? Against this vastness she barely existed. Perhaps she was capable of boiling the top hundred meters of the planet's oceans, if she didn't mind a bit of a headache afterward, but she was still small. She sat down on her floating island, lifting it a little bit and watching the waves bouncing off the edges. She let her legs dangle in the water, which, since the planet was quite warm, averaged three hundred twenty Kelvin, about equivalent to a hot bath. She smiled faintly: the air temperature was similar and if she had been in her original physical form she'd be roasting. Or dead: the atmosphere was about half carbon dioxide and there was no significant amount of oxygen. The air felt like a blanket, warm and thick, hardly breathable though.

I hope you dance, the song had said. The singer's voice, trained in an eight-note musical system that had disappeared centuries ago, reached across the death and destruction, past the wall of static inflicted by the decay of the data storage system that preserved it, to touch Maria's life six hundred years later. She figured the woman who's name had vanished from record would be delighted to know her song and her message continued so long after her death.

Half the song had been lost in the conversion from the old, old MP3 format to the more recent media-play Zeta that was extant in the twenty-fifth century. Maria felt cold fury at the vanished alien invaders, for stealing that precious two minutes of music from her. She wasn't quite sure where they were, but she knew she would locate them eventually, inflict whatever vengeance came to mind, and search whatever records they kept of the world they destroyed.

In the meantime, she tried to reach back in time and space to locate the song, as it played in some other mind. It was futile, she knew; she wasn't even capable of such a reach, and it was only wishful thinking that made her try.

She failed, and sat there sadly on the sand heap, listening to the quiet waves as if their steady rhythms contained some note to the song she sought.

But no. It was forgotten, lost forever to the darkness of time, darkness even she could not penetrate. Perhaps some day she would be able to, but not yet. If she ever gained the power to see the distant past, the lost words of that song would be the first thing she sought. But not yet.

But as she listened to the waves and wind, she imagined she heard music.

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