Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground

By Robert Lewis Thornton

CE 1927

The blind musician waited in the heat and listened to the automatic fan turn gently in the brand-new Houston hotel room. His penknife was held loosely against the fretboard, and he could feel that his guitar was perfectly positioned next to the microphone.

The label man stepped behind him, then turned off the fan. As soon as the label man tapped him gently on the shoulder, he would begin.

When he felt the tap, the blind man sensed the sorrow blossoming in him. The penknife pulled a brassy blare of strings that fell away to a distant wail — one string that sang of His body hanging limp on the Cross. Then the musician’s voice joined in unison with his guitar’s plea to God, and everybody stared at him in awe, listening in disbelief as his voice carried mankind’s grief to the Gates of Heaven.

Even the most skeptical of the record men could hear the sorrow of a lost and lonely disciple wrapping God’s Beloved in a linen cloth and carrying Him to rest under a dead and starless sky.

CE 1977

“I’ve found a fine tune for your interstellar message in a bottle,” the Archivist said, as he carefully sat down in the vinyl chair and silently cursed the man who invented polyester. “This recording is a true American folk experience.”

The Archivist handed the acetate disc over to the Producer, who scanned the label, sat back in his chair, and looked narrowly at him. The Producer had to personally persuade the Astronomer’s committee that each recording was fit for the project, and the committee was a difficult group to please.

“So what do you have here?”

“Let me play it for you first.” The Archivist took the disc, put it on the player, placed the needle down, and they listened.

After the song was finished, they sat silent for a while. The Producer looked overwhelmed, and the Archivist smiled. He had finally won.

“From my take on the title, it’s about being alone in the dark without a roof over your head, and that’s a universal condition we should share with our friends from outside the solar system.”

The Producer nodded with some relief. “Agreed.” As usual, it was worth putting up with the Archivist.

CE 55,178

Kra’s Watcher submind prodded them to full incandescence, and the infinite expanse of the Null sprang into existence around the Kra.

As Kra’ consciousness made its way to optimal, the Provisioner reminded it of their limited resources. There wasn’t much room for error on this trip, but this stop looked promising.

Kra ignored the warnings and focused on the alien construct nearby. Rigid in the way that deadstuff often is, the construct had a concave shape on the front end and a few spiky protuberances sticking out from behind. Since they had been tracking the intriguing item before this planned encounter, they could draw the construct’s trajectory backward.

The item was probably from a simple yellow hearthfire with a modest gas giant and the usual leftover debris. Kra could not believe that such a bizarre thing could come from such an ordinary place.

Kra consulted with the Provisioner about the fuel reserves, reconfigured its deadstuff manipulators to the least intrusive setting, then matched velocity with the construct. Once Kra was close enough, the Watcher carefully searched the object.

The construct’s rigid matter mechanisms evaded close analysis, and Kra could barely understand how it worked. However, the Watcher discovered a disc-shaped area that was information-rich and full of intriguing patterns.

As its hopes rose, Kra assigned several subminds to process the rich data.

With barely a pause, a torrent of alien knowledge poured through its built-in barriers and translators and overwhelmed Kra’s perception-space. The subminds reeled from the impact, and its basic life controls — under stress from journeys through the Null — fluctuated wildly.

Its own impulses were becoming difficult to control. The bizarre alien signals, simple and insidious, resembled Kra’s mating group’s call  — inviting, thready, thin, and lonely.

All the crazed frequencies swept through its mind. Seething with indefinable impulses, barely holding on, Kra shouted the killing fragment back toward its homefire in a wail of uncertainty and damaged functionality.

CE 56,270

Old Human was being slowly devoured by her workspace. She was paying the price for defying Concordance. Her favourite lookfeel was active: glittering stars hovered above, and the ancient blue-brown curve of New Mars floated below.

A pre-approved analysis of the Outsider interstellar signal suddenly appeared in front of Old Human until she dismissed it with an angry wave of a virtual hand.

Eventually, sickly green infoshapes and angry red signals returned to dance around her tired eyes—warnings of alleged Outsider data poisons, false hostility measures, and other such nonsense pressed into her senses.

She sought comfort by replaying an audio representation of the signal again. This time, dealing with her overloaded sensorium was relatively easy. Concordance had lost much of its subtlety since Old Human had been recruited.

If she listened closely, strange and sombre sounds emerged out of the chaos. At one point, a threadbare trebly wailing sound burst into a jagged almost-melody in her ears until a strange mid-range pitch rose in unison with its companion in sorrow, which was lost again in static until it cycled back, mysterious beyond belief.

The workspace started pulling at Old Human again, unraveling her mind a little bit at a time, and Concordance’s demands for confirmation filled her queue.

Negative and positive reinforcements were offered and withdrawn as hundreds of allied datalines pressured her to follow their anti-Outsider agenda.

All at once, she decided to defy them for the last time and told Them the absolute truth:

“The Outsider signal components are Human.”

The neutral tone of her message held a trace of glee, and she was drowned in a storm of confusion and dismay as Concordance gently drained her consciousness into nothing.

About the Author

Robert Lewis Thornton is an American writer based in North Carolina whose work blends quiet emotion with the strange and the speculative.

He writes for File 770 and Cloud and Ashes Press, and publishes Freakflag, a newsletter exploring fringe music, culture, and creativity.