Nature, as Heard in Space

Mars settled down under the Mission Command branded sheets, quite wide awake with anticipation. She had been out of the solar system for thirty-five days now and had at least another 1,292 days to go before she would know if this was a one way trip. Outside of her experiments, there wasn’t much to focus on in the short-term. Not much to think about except the sheer impossibility of distance, of size. What a relief to have something to look forward to tonight. They had agreed, two days ago, that for the next three nights they would pipe a different person’s favorite bedtime-tune through the ship’s intercom system. Tonight was the Captain’s turn.

Mars had been nervous about her own choice: “Albedo 0.39,” by Vangelis. It was so helplessly nerdy she worried it would look like trying too hard. She’d missed the first half of it, cringing in embarrassment, imagining the other ladies laughing in their not-so-distant bunks. But if they had laughed they hadn’t let on. They’d all had a perfectly geeky conversation about it over breakfast earlier that morning. 

Mars was glad she had shared it. 

But what would the Captain share? Something unlikely, doubtless. Something ethnic? Or maybe a heavy metal ballad? Mars could imagine her singing along with Joni Mitchell, a protest song full of longing and sorrow. She slowed her breathing, eager not to miss even the briefest second of music. 

Was that a sound? 

What was it?

The file must have gotten corrupted. Bad.  It sounded like radioactive static. Like half a dozen radio waves all fighting for dominance, colliding into each other, passing through the speakers in shards. Should she get up and turn off the intercom or leave it to the Captain?  

She put her hands over her ears, but the sound was too big. It engulfed her, filling her ears, her mind, even her lungs. She covered her head with her pillow but that barely muffled it. Wasn’t the Captain going to get up and stop it?  Slowly the cacophony wore down Mars’ defenses. Wormed its way into her thoughts. She could see it, how it would look if picked up by the ship’s sensors. The different layers broken out, color coded and separated into an dozen spiky lines. 

The loudest portions of the music was a mechanical, high-pitched “ree-ee-aah, ree-ee-ah, ree-ee-ah,” going on and on and on in an endless loop. Could it simply be playing at the wrong rate? She tried to imagine it slowed down, brought lower. She found herself shaking her head in distaste, nose rubbing against the pillow she still held tightly over her face. The loop was simply too alien to be music in any normal sense of the word.  

Behind it though was a slower, less robotic track. It was almost melodious in comparison, though it was weird to think of melody without a context of harmony. What did it remind her of? 

Suddenly the noise was swept aside by a deep, booming bass.

Riiiiii-biiiit.

The sound trampled the monotonous drone like a french horn drowning out a chorus of kazoos. An image came to Mars’ mind: A pond, glittering in the night under a blanket of fireflies. She, seven years old, crouched silently by the edge with her older sister. Listening to the symphony of the night. Watching those not-so-out-of-reach stars dancing, every dart and undulation mirrored in the water below. 

As the memory faded the unrelenting noise shifted. The tracks merged again; became a song of life, active and abundant. 

She smiled. 

And then she rolled over and reached for her ear plugs.