After he landed,  Jock activated the blowers to clear the smoke from the bridge.  The ship had shuddered violently during the impact of the small chunk of space debris, and sprung a leak.  Then the wiring that had been exposed to vacuum had supercooled. The ship was so old that some of it was copper. Once it became a perfect conducter, all the guages it fed had slammed to full.  That had changed the auto-feeds to the engine ICUs, and that had fried something aft in the big Sheckley driver.
   He yawned when the blowers cleared the air.  It was psychological.  The natural home for his six foot plus frame, and rebellious brain was a poker game in a frontier planet saloon.  Whiskey and cigar smoke were his diet and his atmosphere..  How could you trust air you couldn't see?

   His eyes went to the thick porthole in the nose.  The atmosphere was a green fog.   He stepped through the bridge slot for a closer look and stared out at the landscape.  A green fog. The land was dark but covered with warm nodules, tiny glowing hills. There was something odd about them, but he couldn't put a finger on it.
   He got to work on the hull breach which, after the pressure had dropped to 6 lbs. per square inch, had been automatically sealed by jets of a rubber-like material that simply followed the breeze to the hole and clung to the edges, then to itself until there was a patch.  It was strange stuff.  Almost alive.  Its structure was phenominally strong for its weight because it traveled in strings and assembled like a spiderweb.

   After putting a permanent patch over the spider stuff, he sent some current through the wiring and found that the guages were all down.  He refused them, and they came up fine.  Then he headed for the engine bay.

There was a dark stain on the aft quarter panel of the Sheckley drive.  He drilled the screws, then removed them with an easy-out.  When the panel came away, he stared at the mess.  What would be the lizard brain in a human was melted into a glob.  It was the least intelligent part of the machine, but the one that reacted most quickly to instrumental readings that threatened the ship's passage through the currents of subspace.  It was a simple machine that didn't have a single moving part, like a fuse made out of a special piece of high resistance wire.  Its original shape was like a bar magnet two feet long.  Even though it was all still there, since its shape and precise dimensions were the regulatory "brain," he was in trouble.  Melting had rearranged the crystalline structure, totally altering the performance qualities.  He was definitely in trouble.

                                          II

   Later, he reclined in his small bunk just aft of the bridge, drinking hundred year old scotch and watching the swirling green fog out the forward porthole.  The violin sonata emerging from the speakers was by Beethoven.  Serious, but with a calming quality.
   The situation as he saw it was as follows.  A sub-space message that could get help would alert authorities as to his location.  These authorities included the IRS, which had recently gone through hell itself after he had exposed an agency plan to subvert the government of the Republic of Earth.  Some outlaw elements of that agency had escaped capture and still cruised the spacelanes in powerful warships.  They would like nothing more than to hear where he was, and to learn that he couldn't move at supra-light speeds.

   Next,  he had about three months supplies on board. This planet was unsuited for normal human habitation and was the only one circling its sun. The closest star to this system was 15 years distant at sub-light speed.  Even if he climbed into the deep sleep chamber and went for it, there was no chance he'd find help, there.  It was a Cepheid variable with a short periodicity.  The nearest sol-type was ten years journey more. The sleep chamber was in good shape, but automatic maintenance functions had their limits.  After five years, the odds of a malfunction shot up dramatically. 
   There was noplace to run to.  Noplace to hide.
   Jock Jarvis, star prospector for the Interstellar Mining Corporation was, it seemed, up Crap Creek without a paddle.

  Two days later, he decided to take his chances with the IRS.  This was a fairly dense sector from an FTL perspective.  There were plenty of inhabited systems within a hundred lightyears.  He had lots of money.  A call for help on a general frequency might get help before the agency could arrive.
   The decision made, he went to the bridge and activated the communications circuits. The general frequencies were occupied by nothing other than background noise. That was not good news.  It meant the closest inhabited systems were not trading centers.  They were local, isolated civilizations that used local bands.  He set the receiver to scan.  After a few minutes it locked onto a signal.

   It was so strong it nearly blasted his speakers.  A local signal?  Here?  There had been no signs of sentient life when he had viewed the planet from space.  No cities, no oceans, no organized energy emissions.  What the hell was going on?
    He checked the circuits.  They were fine.  The transmission was real.  It was local, and it was real.
    He sat there listening to the sound for a long time.  It was rhythmic, but then a lot of things in the universe were rhythmic.  That Cepheid star was like a clock that ticked once every three hours, to the second.
   This was not the natural kind of rhythm.  It was, in fact more like a symphony.  Imagine a whale with a voice like a bassoon, singing a death aria from a tragic opera by Dostoevsky, and you have it. 

   He routed the strange sound through the critter console.  After five minutes, it pinged and the Road Runner came up on the screen.
   There was life on this planet! 
   Was the song like that of a bird's, or that of an intelligent creature? Were the rhythms and melodies instinctive or intentional artistic constructs?  Should it be the former, and should he send it a return signal, it might eat him, ship and all.  Even the IRS was preferable to that.  If it turned out to be the latter, there was no guarantee that it would approve of his presence on its planet.  Beware the stranger and the stranger's ways.  The universe was an unfriendly place, at times.

   He turned the volume down to a background level, then retired to his bunk and his scotch, once more.  After a while, he slept, and while asleep dreamt of British ships of the line, sailing with sheets bellied by a following wind, through a sea of clouds on their way to a battle of leviathans at war in the sky.

                                             III

   It was night when he came from the dream to consciousness.  Outside the ship, only the glowing little mounds were visible.  The symphony still came out of the ship's speakers.  It was more complex, now, and contained some high tones.  A clarinet threading through the bass tones spoke of promise.  As he lay there listening, the porthole begin to turn pale green.  The sun was rising.
   Bird songs changed at times, too.  Some had songs for the morning and songs for the evening. 
   All that day, he listened and thought. 
   The answer came that evening.  Though he wasn't sure of it, and did not have a recording to prove it, the evening phrases seemed different than the previous day's.  He turned on the recorder and waited, filling the time until sleep with the housekeeping chores that on a ship added up until time allowed attention to that kind of duty.

   The next morning, the song sounded different.  He cut and pasted digital segments from the two mornings and compared them.  They were different. 
   The creature was an artist.
   It was intelligent.
   Now what?
   The problem was obvious.  He had to find out what it was.  Could he do that without making it aware of his existence?  After four hours of running its music through the computers he had learned absolutely nothing new.
   It was take a chance with the IRS or try to contact this creature.
   He considered that idea.

   The only way it could be of any use to him is if it had some kind of technology.  Some way of making a piece of hardware.  The Sheckley lizard brain was a bar of metallic salt with its crystalline molecular structure organized in a way that made it into a kind of rheostat that reacted to EMR pulses in a linear fashion.
   Nothing he had seen, or registered with his instruments on the way in indicated there was anything like a machine on this planet.  No street lights, no trains, no production lines, no lathes.
   "Well, hell," he said out loud.  "Maybe it knows some magic words."
   He flipped the radio transmission switch and said, "Hello?"
   No response.  The music went on.
   On an impuse, he linked the Beethoven violin sonata into the radio and sent that out.

   When, after a short musical phrase, he unkeyed, the alien music had stopped.  His heart pounding in his chest, he waited.  The creature sang a few notes and stopped.  Jock sent more of the sonata.  The creature responded, again.
   Jock wondered what they were saying to each other.
   It took three days for the critter console to turn it into language Jock could understand.  The breakthrough came with the sunrise and sunset.  They are Rosetta stones, events whose names can be compared in different tongues. 

   "What is your name?" Jock asked.
   "I am myself," came the response.
   "Well, then, where are you?  What kind of being are you?"
   "I am everywhere, and everything."
   "No, I mean where on this planet are you?  Your signal is quite strong, so you must be close to my ship."
   "Yes, I am close to your ship.  It is resting on me."
   "I landed on you?"
   "Yes."
   "I'm sorry," said Jock. "I can move the ship if I have harmed you."
   "No, you have not harmed me, and moving your ship, except to travel away from me, will not solve the problem I believe you are stating.  I am everywhere, here."

   "Everywhere?" said Jock.  "You mean you cover the surface of the planet?  Those glowing nodules?  Are you a colony creature, then?"
   "Yes, I am what you call a colony creature, but I do not cover the surface of what you call this planet.  I am this planet.  This planet is I."
   "Good Lord," said Jock, softly.
   "Thank you," said the planet.  "I believe that I am good, as well."

                                            IV

   "Why do you sing?" Jock asked two days later. The bar that had emerged from one of the small glowing nodules near the ship was now installed in the Sheckley drive, and he was preparing to depart.
   "Did the component work properly?" said the planet. 
   "Yes, the tests indicate it will do the job.  How did you do it?"
   "I control the elements of my body and arrange them as I wish. What you call my songs are crystalline resonances generated by temperature differences.  Crystals align as desired upon the application of the correct pressures, temperatures and electromagnetic forces. Each shape is a note in the great song."
   Jock sipped his victory scotch and reflected on space and time.
   "Why do you sing?" he asked, again.

   "All is song," said the planet. "All of what you call planets and moons and galaxies, all that you call empty space, all that you call life is made of music. When the music ends, all will end.  I sing for the wonder of all that is, and all that is sings to me." 
   The planet wasn't a bad guy as far as Jock was concerned.  Just a bit too philosophically opaque.  Too flowery for his taste, like a ninetheenth century romantic British poet.  It ought to be wearing a shirt with lace cuffs.
   "Well, then you can answer a small question for me," said Jock  "It is always dawn and dusk on you.  Always noon and midnight.  Why did I hear melodies for each in this one place?"
   "Each is a joy that I feel passing across my body.  I send my songs with them."

   Later, from orbit, Jock watched the day and night pass beneath the ship as he circled at many thousands of miles per hour.  His radio dish caught the music of the living sphere as each theme slid past far below.
   "Farewell," he said into the microphone.
    The planet sang of sailors leaving port, and of the hearts of those left behind.

(C) 2002 Larry Leonard