The Insufferable Silence of the Sun

Despite all efforts to the contrary, his features cracked in a small, knowing smile.

Watching the drama of human weakness unfold had that effect on Manny. Only briefly, though. Stare too long, and you might burn your eyes; it was like looking at the sun. So, shortly, he looked away, concealing his pleasure at the woman’s obvious discomfort, though he continued to track her progress from his peripheral vision.

She was petite, and her cropped, curly black hair bobbed with the rhythm of her exit, her face alternating between expressions of discomfort and pretended humor. Behind her, a boyfriend trailed, begging her to tell him what it had been like, too much of a coward to try the sphere out for himself. She waved the question off with a splay-fingered hand and kept walking, fleeing the exhibit and the public eye.

Casually, Mantula Priscoe glanced up at the overhead sun, whose pale blue face peeked between the towering spires of skyscrapers whose steel skeletons vibrated with its omnipresent hum. Manny’s own bones quivered with it, as did the granite tiles beneath his feet, which he felt only faintly through the crepe soles of his booties. Moreover, the sound was in his ears, nothing less than a miracle of medicine. About two decades ago, the scientific furnace finished burning enough research grant money to fully reverse congenital hearing loss. Granted, it came alongside the other biomechanical enhancements that people quickly adopted for their simple convenience, but to him— to Mantula Priscoe— it represented a change in his perception of the world. Manny could, he’d been told by the doctor who’d installed the hardware alongside his still-intact but still-defective cochlea, now hear to an even more acute degree than his unenhanced peers.

Next to him, Aridites blew out a plume of burgundy-colored vapor which smelled faintly of currant wine. “What do you think?”

Blinking away sunspots, Manny turned to his friend. Well, perhaps ‘friend’ was too strong a word. Cocktail buddy, more like. He took a drag off of his own stylus, giving himself a moment to think. The personalized blend of stimulants— whose individual names he’d never been able to memorize or even pronounce— jolted into his system like that first wallop of high-tension oxygen when boarding a starcruiser. The ache in his joints quieted. “I think it’s pathetic. Deaf for thirty seconds, and they freak out? Give me a break.”

“Well…” Aridites’ voice trailed off.

Manny turned flinty eyes on his vape buddy, who squirmed beneath the scrutiny. On an intellectual level, he understood that he was fighting dirty, but a part of him had always enjoyed confronting people with their ignorance, even if it was no fault of their own. “Well, what?”

“It’s like… more than that, you know?”

“No,” Manny said, pressing. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”

The kid must have missed the sarcasm because he plowed forward. “Siopiumite crystal is supposed to trap all forms of energy. Sound, yes, but light, heat. Everything.”

“So you go deaf and blind and cold?” He shook his head, took another hit, and choked out some cynicism while trying to hold it in, maximize the dose. “Heaven. Might even get some real sleep.” He blew vapor and glanced at the gangly, long-coated man in the broad-brimmed hat and dark, octagonal spectacles. “Who’s the spook?”

“The rich artist. Blackberry.”

The man’s reflection distorted, stretching in the polished steel surface of the sphere that housed the so-called experience he had designed. A man stepped up to the open door and peered inside at the darkness that, disorientingly, seemed untouched by the sunshine. The artist who called himself Blackberry watched silently from behind spectacles that had been obsolete a hundred years. His outfit, his whole persona, struck Manny as an overbearing affectation. He offered neither encouragement nor dissuasion. In the end, the not-quite-brave-enough man giggled like an adolescent, announced that he couldn’t do it, and scampered away into the anonymity of the crowd. The artist’s head tracked the man in his flight. Manny felt as though he could sense disappointment in that blankness, though he could admit to himself that it was likely his 

“You think you could do it? The full three minutes?”

Manny weighed his response as he puffed. “He opens the door before the time’s up,” he sneered. “I’ve been watching. Counting. It’s a scam.”

“Can’t be. Twenty million on the table? He has to follow through, if you can beat it. You could bring a fraud suit against him like that.” His snap cracked the air. “You’re scared, I think.”

Chuckling, he capped his stylus and stowed it in the pocket of his overshirt, unconsciously laying the pad of his finger against the bioreader as he did so. He felt the mild tingling sensation that told him the reader was sampling his genetics, and after a nearly undetectable pause, he felt the tug of the magnetic seals tightening against one another, sealing the pocket. “That’s my natural world in there,” he said.

Aridites scoffed. Manny wouldn’t have thought him capable, but here they were. “You weren’t born deaf. Not blind,” he said. “Besides, you got the augmentation that fixes it, right?”

Cautiously, Manny nodded.

“Ruminate on this, then. Ever since they turned on your implant, you’ve been listening to that thing,” he said, stabbing an accusatory finger at the blue sun, “droning on in the background of your life.” He took another puff on his stylus as if to emphasize the point. “Maybe you’ve got used to it. It’s your normal now. You ain’t been deaf in— what— fifteen years?”

“Twenty,” Manny said, practically feeling the iron-grey hairs crawling from his scalp. “And technically, I’m still deaf. The implant just sends the signals along my nerves to the brain. My biologics still don’t work.”

“Whatever. What I’m driving at is: it might freak you out, too, for the world to go dark and quiet. Perfectly dark and quiet.”

Manny glanced upward again. “They say the one on Earth was silent,” he muttered, not realizing he would say the words aloud until they were tumbling from his brain and out of his mouth.

“Nothing but vacuum in that part of space,” Aridites said. “No aether. Just… nothing.”

“How can there be just nothing? Gotta be something.”

Finally putting his stylus away, Aridites puffed away the last of his downer cocktail, storing it in an open pocket, which struck Manny as the height of foolishness. Any random dip could take it, OD, and then sue for reckless poisoning. Maybe it would serve him right for having the audacity to talk about things he didn’t know. “Maybe that’s the point of the sphere. Experience nothingness.”

At this, Manny laughed; retrospectively, it was the first laugh Aridites had ever provoked from him that wasn’t laced with disdain. “You gonna be an artist, now, too? Make a… a mirror that shows you your true face or something?”

“Coward.”

Manny’s head shot up, eyes wide and glaring, dark brows knitted together.

“An embarrassment to your mother.”

The balled fist almost flew. Manny could see it in every exquisite detail: the arc it would travel, the way blood and teeth would fly from Aridites’ split lips. Then, he remembered himself and checked his wrist. The face implanted there told him they had ten minutes before they had to report back to the monitoring station, where they’d end the day staring at screens that printed lines and graphs of robotic efficiency in the Akulaton lock manufactory. Ten minutes. More than enough time to dose the froggy junior technician with some reality.

Standing, Mantula Priscoe strode up to the sphere and gazed at the darkness within. Even up close, he saw nothing. The darkness was, it seemed, total. Perfect, as Aridites had said. He turned to the costumed, self-important artist who studied him from behind impenetrably dark specs. “I wanna go in,” he announced. He didn’t recall any of the others who’d entered speaking to the Blackberry man, but it somehow still seemed the right thing to do.

The artist did not respond verbally but gestured with an open hand to the interior of the experience he had set up in the central plaza of the Alagapanian Colony’s manufacturing district.

Without allowing himself to think about what he was doing, Manny stepped inside.

Even before the door closed behind him, he felt it. The effect was immediate and arresting.

Yes, the low-frequency drone of the sun suddenly vanished from his hearing, but it was replaced by something simultaneously intimate and yet also alien. A churning, liquid sound that his mind grabbed as if it were primal. As if he had been hearing it his whole life.

Manny hadn’t expected this. Quiet, Aridites had said. This was anything but quiet. It was loud. A loudness he had never known. Somehow, the absence of the sun’s thrum made it worse because there was no physical sensation to accompany this new noise. It simply was. Sourceless, rhythmic, and disconnected from any visual stimulus.

Panic didn’t immediately set in, but he did feel it clawing at the cage of his ribs with ragged fingernails. He gave only a moment’s thought to the jeering he would have to endure from Aridites, if he exited early. Then, his calm reasserted itself, and he held his hands out to the walls. Perhaps he could better anchor himself within its impossibly loud darkness if he could get a feel for the room.

The moment his fingers came into contact with the nodules jutting from the sphere’s light-swallowing interior, the panic tore free, ripping from in pealing screams that he could hear, but distorted, like a child's voice.

It’s because you’re hearing yourself only through your bones. The walls don’t reflect sound. They eat it.

Crystals, Aridites had called these. Siopiumite crystals.

Crystals?  

Tumors.

They were tumors, growing out of the walls in an invisible, grasping cancer that reached for him with knuckly, spiraling fingers that twisted around themselves. Their surface even had the papery quality of dry skin, as though the mummified hands of ancient humans sprouted all around him.

Underpinning his pealing, childlike wails that washing, liquid sound emulsified it all, mixing his mounting terror with darkness and the loudness: the theater of absence. Somehow, the worst was knowing he carried a static white noise with him, always in the background, dampened by the city’s noise and the sun’s normalizing, merciful music. This was a sensation he had never consciously known, even when he had only been able to hear a muted world that came through his natural ears. This was the experience of experiencing silence from external sources, but— and this was the truest foolishness of arrogance— not to those within himself.

Manny gulped air, pushed it out of his throat, felt it catch in the folds of his vocal machinery. He screamed until that meat was raw. At some point, he felt something rupture, and even his terror grew silent. Then, for an interminable, immeasurable interval of agony, there was only the tide within him, filling his mind, blotting out intent, thought, and every carefully curated particle of dignity and unified self-possession.

Manny stumbled out of the sphere in a shambling, directionless run. Later, he would have no memory of consciously stepping or striding or initiating forward movement. It was as though he had disappeared in there and reappeared in the sunshine.

As his senses reasserted themselves, he became conscious of another sound, loud enough to drown the blue sun’s drone, which he had already begun to search for in his thirst for stability and the reassurance that he’d truly emerged from that place of darkness and the deafening loudness of isolation.

“You did it!” Aridites was shouting at him. “Three minutes! I didn’t think you had the sand, but you did it! Manny, you’re rich!”

Cheering. The sun. A whisper of wind in his ears.

Mantula Priscoe’s eyes crawled from the crowd to the artist. Blackberry.

Why didn’t he open the door? Like he did for the others?

A more problematic question came to him.

How did he know to open the door for the others, if he couldn’t see or hear them?

From behind the dark, amethyst spectacles, the artist gave no sign. Said nothing. Gestured nothing. His face, absent any expression.

As Aridites led him away, presumably to quit his mundane job as an overseer of factory robots, he could not help but stare back at the black costumed figure, and his reflective terrible sphere.

Is that a Sevdis lock?

For no reason that he could think of, his mind battened onto this detail, clung to it like a raft. Across the growing distance, as the man who naively believed that they were friends led him away, Manny peered at the mechanism that supposedly secured the now-closed sphere.

The Sevdis lock. Flawed model. Can be opened with carbonized organic material. Fire safety mechanism. Exploit discovered and published. Caused stock prices to plummet. Interplanetary scandal.

The sphere, the artist, and the lock grew smaller, eventually swallowed by the crowd. Beyond that, they were lost in the steel and glass forest of skyscrapers.

2

Despite the womblike cradling of his pod, Manny couldn’t sleep. Really, he doubted if he’d ever be able to sleep again.

His hand at his wrist tapped the interface, turning his audio implant on and off. Deafness. Hearingness. Deafness again.

It was as he remembered. The muted world filtered through his native ears. The churning within, though… that he did not hear. Beyond the walls of the pod, and the dormitory beyond, the sun thrummed. He heard that, too, even in his deafness; low-frequency, it seemed, relayed across his cochlea better than high could do.

Had he really panicked himself so completely that he’d screamed until his voice tore itself apart? His brief visit to the clinic, where a Laserdoc had sutured him up with organic adhesives and advised him in an overly friendly voice of the long healing he could expect before regaining his voice, showed that he had. Somehow, that knowledge obliterated sleep.

How had the hearing people who had entered the sphere come out better than he? He’d been born deaf; they had been thrust into deafness.

Yet, it wasn’t really deafness in there. It was something else.

It was that other that robbed him of rest and dreams.

I’ve got to back in. I’ve got to beat it. It wasn’t… it wasn’t that bad.

So, in the opacity of night, he slipped from pod and pretended sleep. Avoiding the automated people-movers, which would log his entry and exit in their reports to the Colonial Peace Commission, he returned to the plaza.

Overhead, the sun was absent. The planet had turned, and he could hear only a distant echo of its calming music.

From the granite tiles of the plaza, the sphere jutted like a lidless, pupil-less eye. Like a statue. Like an idol.

Approaching the locking mechanism, he plucked a hair from his head. It was grey. From the face on his wrist, he retrieved the survival blastmatch and struck a flame. Distantly, his mind reported that it was only the second time in his life that he’d witnessed fire. Nonetheless, he touched the follicle to the dancing flame and extinguished both when it curled.

Without hesitating— he couldn’t allow it; his mind would catch onto the intention of his hands and wrestle them free of this energizing compulsion— he touched the singed hair to the lock’s reader. With a hiss and a pop, the door slid open.

Manny filled his lungs with aromatic, lavender-scented air. It smelled of tranquility and the night.  

Then, he stepped across the threshold and the waiting, compelling darkness.

3

When Blackberry Winecake— named so by a mother who had not loved him any more than she could love herself— returned to his experiment, he found it as he had left it. Of course, that meant nothing. It was set to close automatically.

The blue sun had just begun to climb above the invisible horizon; he could feel it in his bones.

There was something else there, too. Grinning at him and capering in a gleeful ballet from beyond the microscopic pool of internal light, where the darkness began, stretching across the jungles of unknowable, tangled vines where intertwined thoughts and emotions intermixed, intermarried, breeding psychosis and depravity.

Still, hope was toxic; anticipation, dangerous. He would harbor neither but merely check his trap like any careful hunter.

Blackberry activated the lock. The door hissed, popped, and released an aroma that had not been there before. The magnificent, cronelike crystals he had carefully laid against the sphere’s interior walls ate sound and light but could do nothing about smell. Of course, it was a coppery, vital scent he knew well.

He could no more see inside than peer beyond the sky; he was, after all, blind. He would never consider repairing this gift with the vulgar enhancements to which humanity had become addicted and terminally dependent.

Blackberry’s mind told him what had happened, putting together a picture from available information, blindness notwithstanding.

It had worked, then. Another proof.

Despite all efforts to the contrary, his features cracked in a small, tight smile.