Who was it that asked for a Marnie Masterson story? I honestly don’t remember the clever ending to the one I started on thisisby.us and never finished, but this one came to me out of a dream. I’m posting it here because I’m not satisfied with the results of TIBU, and it’s not going to be frequent enough to merit its own site.
THE STARS MY DEVASTATION
My name is Marnie Masterson, and I know magic.
Okay, that’s a bald-faced lie.
My name is actually Grand Marnier Masterson. That’s my mother’s sense of humor for you.
Isn’t she just a gem?
Anyway, the other part is true. I really do know magic. Seriously. I’m not a wizard or anything, but I know more about the supernatural than most people in this crazy modern world of ours. I know enough to get by. I know enough to get myself out of most of the sorts of trouble that I know how to get into, and I know enough to get other people out of the occasional fix for a reasonable fee. Sometimes they even pay me.
I’m also a scientist by training, though there was never any danger of me actually going into a scientific field as a researcher or, God help us, an instructor. I never even finished pursuing my doctorate. I just turned my back and walked away from it.
Okay, so I didn’t really “walk way” so much as I “ran away in mortal terror”. It’s kind of a funny story. Not funny ha-ha. Not funny like a mother who thinks it would be neat to name her daughter after what she was drinking when she got knocked up.
It’s a different kind of funny, and anyway, it’s not the story I want to tell you now.
It sort of relates, though, as this tale has its roots in my college days. I’d just gotten an e-mail from somebody I’d known back in my academic phase, a fellow reprobate named Larry Bahn. We’d known an astrophysics professor named Lee Sandberg. Crazy guy. Good teacher, loved learning and loved teaching.
I’d had so much fun in his undergraduate astronomy lecture that I’d sometimes thought about taking his higher level stuff, not because I was interested in the subject but because he made it interesting. He’d been enthusiastic about the material and laid back about rules, just what I loved in a teacher.
For extra credit, he assigned book reports on classic science fiction stories, only a few of which had anything more to do with astronomy than an improbable moon on the cover.
“The yen for space does not occur in a vacuum,” was his explanation for the assignment.
I’d liked his sense of humor a lot better than my mom’s.
Dr. Sandberg had possessed—or maybe been possessed by—a serious yen for space. He’d been all about colonizing the moon, Mars, Europa… I knew now that Mars was better left alone, but at the time? He’d made it sound so plausible, like it was inevitable that mankind would eventually take its place among the stars.
And when we got there, he expected us to be in good company. He was the sort of dude who’d lug his telescope out to the hilltop every clear night, no matter how cold. Sometimes he had a stated goal, like observing the Pleiades or whatever, but what he was really doing was watching and waiting for a glimpse, for contact, for a sign that we weren’t alone.
He died before SETI@home, but he would have approved.
His death came under mysterious circumstances. I mean, it was obviously a suicide, but it was a mystery how he’d managed to write all those formulae in his own blood on the living room wall when his eyeballs were sitting on the bathroom counter.
Like I said: crazy guy.
The formulae? Not anything terribly esoteric. Most of it was basic stuff. Some simple quadratic equations. Volume of a cylinder. E = M… well, you know how it goes. The sort of stuff people draw on a chalkboard when they want to convey the idea that science is happening.
He’d also drawn a bunch of what everyone had called his “sand dollars”. Even blind and in his dying moments, he’d still managed to draw them.
Dr. Sandberg had had a nervous habit of sorts, you see. Any time he had a pen or marker in his hand, he’d start drawing these lumpy circle things.
I called them “retarded spirographs”.
Actually, I didn’t. That would have been horribly unprofessional of me.
I had actually called them “retarded epicycloids”.
They were always more or less the same: two more-or-less concentric circles, with three or four similar sets of circles floating inside it. I thought they had looked a bit like cells, with the two outside lines looking like some kind of a membrane or cell wall, and the other ones as organelles. While he could draw a pretty smooth curve freehand, none of the circles were perfectly round, and in fact the lines spiked up and down at impressively minute intervals. The inner ring in each pair had its own pattern, separate from the outer one.
My little nickname had never caught on, if only because some anonymous student long before my time had dubbed them “sand dollars”, a play on both their appearance and their creator’s name.
Whenever anybody asked him why he drew them, he always shrugged and said something like “why not?”
They were just doodles.
That was what he’d said, but I was never sure. They’d always unnerved me a little. They were always different, but they were regular enough that I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a pattern to them. If I hadn’t been insanely busy doing actual coursework, I might have sat down and tried to work out what it was, but I’d never had time to do more than fret about it a little.
I hadn’t done more than get my toes wet in the mystical side of things at that point, and I’d still been in pretty serious denial about the existence of what we call the supernatural, but I’d been sensitive, even then. Years later, the first time I saw automatic writing, it reminded me of Dr. Sandberg, absentmindedly drawing his bumpy circles in the corner of the chalkboard.
But whatever they were and whatever they’d meant, he’d taken that secret to the grave. I still had a few he’d drawn on the back of my book report on A Wrinkle In Time, and I got them and stared at them every once in a while, but since I wasn’t going to disturb him to satisfy my curiosity, I’d figured that his death was the end of it.
That was before the email from Larry. It was only one line: “I FIGURED IT OUT.”
I didn’t have to ask what he’d figured out, because there was only one subject on which we still corresponded, usually two or three times a year.
Like me, Larry had been plagued by the unsettling feeling that the sand dollars meant something, and being less of a serious student than I was, he’d devoted himself to figuring it out. Being less of a serious student than I was, he hadn’t really stood a chance. He didn’t do any kind of rigorous mathematical analysis. He just looked at things like Nostradamus and the pop culture version of Qabalah and gematria, shit like that. Crop circles, too.
By the way, Nostradamus? Shitty poet, nothing more. Trust me. There’s a reason why in all the time people have been studying them, nobody has ever looked at one of his quatrains and said, “Well holy shit, according to this, the president’s going to get shot to hell tomorrow!” and been right. They’re always interpreted to have been right after the fact. They aren’t prophecies, they’re Rorschach tests: random and disjointed enough that you can read anything you want into them. You can get better predictions from a fortune cookie.
Anyway, Larry never just had an idea or a theory or a hunch about the sand dollars, either. It was always “I figured it out.” Usually, though, he couldn’t wait to tell me what his latest breakthrough was, but this time he stopped at that one line. I waited for the next email to come, saying that he’d hit send too soon, but a couple of days went by with nothing else. So I sent him a reply back that said, “Well?” and he sent another one that said, “YOU HAVE TO HERE IT”.
I told you he wasn’t the scholarly type, didn’t I?
So I called him, thinking he wanted to lay it out over the phone, but he told me we had to meet.
“Why can’t you just tell me?” I asked him.
“Because I want you to hear it,” he said. “After all these years of searching, you deserve to hear it as much as I do.”
This was when I got the first inkling that it wasn’t just his new pet theory he’d wanted me to “here”.
“Hear what?” I asked, feeling the same creeping tendril of dread I’d felt whenever I looked at one of the sand dollars.
“The music of the spheres,” he said, his voice aglow with awe. Okay, that metaphor’s a little synaesthetic, but it fit. “We were wrong, Marnie. It isn’t something awful at all. It’s wondrous.”
Larry was never the sort of person who said “wondrous”. I’m not sure that kind of person exists. It’s the kind of word that if somebody says it, you can be pretty sure that they’re not quite themselves, one way or another.
So I asked Larry where he wanted to meet me and he gave me an address.
“Is that a coffee shop?” I asked, thinking I recognized it.
“It’s the studio above it,” he said. “I’ll be there all day.”
“I’m not coming to your apartment, Larry,” I said. I’d known the guy once, but it had been a good long while since we’d seen each other. More than that, though, I have a rule never to go somewhere alone with people who aren’t themselves.
At least, not until I’ve worked out who they are instead.
“Not that kind of studio,” he said, and he hung up.
Larry might not have been the scholarly type, but he wasn’t a total idiot. He knew that he could never nag at my brain the way a mystery does. So instead of explaining he got all cryptic and cut me off.
And of course, it worked.
I’d been to the coffee shop dozens, maybe hundreds of times, but I’d never paid much attention to the sign over the stairs next to the door before. It turned out that upstairs from the coffee shop was a joint called “Echo Creek Recording Studios”. I’d been thinking art, but of course that made sense: “the music of the spheres”, Larry had said. I headed upstairs, sparing half a thought for what I’d say to the receptionist.
It ended up being half a thought too many. There was no need to go looking for Larry. He and another chubby, geeky looking guy who I assumed worked for (or probably owned) Echo Creek were right there, working away.
The place was a broom closet, with a glass wall separating it from another broom closet with wood-paneled walls and a microphone. The outer closet had a seriously retro looking sound board and a desk with a couple of Macs on it. Larry’s friend was sitting at the desk with a pair of clunky, FAA-issue-looking headphones on, grooving silently. I don’t know much about computers, but they looked a lot more up to date than the recording equipment. I wondered what the big instrument panel could actually do that they couldn’t.
“What’d I tell you?” Larry said. His back was to me. “When you add in the other tracks, it just gets better.”
d
“Yeeeah,” the sound guy said. He sounded stoned., though if they‘d been lighting up in that tiny place they were better at hiding it than I was. “Yeeeah.”
“And I’ve been hitting the web, the classmate finders, the alumni groups… looking for anybody else who might still have some of them,” Larry said. “So far, all of them are a completely different song, but they’re all… like that.”
“Wondrous,” the other guy said.
I cleared my throat and knocked on the open door. Larry jumped and turned around.
“Marnie!” he said. “That was fast.”
“I was in the neighborhood,” I said. “So what’s the latest Grand Unified Theory of Sand Dollars?”
He smiled.
“No theory, Marnie,” he said. “I cracked it, and it’s going to be huge. Well, it is huge. It‘s enormous. The implications… but, I mean, it‘s going to make us rich.”
“Did you say—”
“That’s right, Marnie,” he said. “Us. You and me. Do you think your old friend Larry would keep this to himself? After all the work we did, together? Anyway, this is too big to belong to one person.”
I’d actually been looking for clarification on the “rich” part. The “us” bit raised some troubling questions, but the truth was being an occult troubleshooter didn’t bring in a lot of money. For one thing, it’s hard to find work, especially when you have to compete with a bunch of frauds and con artists who usually manage to put on a better show with their hoaxes than real magic tends to give you.
Sleight of hand can be done on demand; actual magic responds better to coaxing and pleading. It’s no contest.
Larry moved the mouse and clicked a stylized stop button on the screen. The studio guy actually started to grab for the mouse to stop him before he stopped and shook himself, then pulled off the headphones and turned to look at me.
“Matt, this Marnie Masterson,” Larry said. “Marnie, this is Matt Eckles. He runs the place, and he’s going to produce the first collection.”
“Of?”
“Still working on a title,” Larry said. “But it’s the sand dollars, Marnie… in audio form.”
“You’re going to have to explain that to me,” I said.
“Well, I was looking at the lines and the way they go up and down like waves,” he said. “Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. We’d actually gone over this territory before, and exhausted it.
“And what else is in waves?” he asked.
“Sound,” I said, nodding. This was an old conversation.
“Right,” he said. “I’d tried decoding it a bunch of ways…”
“And nothing worked,” I said. “I remember. You just got a bunch of squealing static.”
“Right,” he said. “But I was doing it wrong. I was tried reading it as variations in pitch, but how do you get a message like that?”
“Message?” I repeated. “What made you think there was a message in it?”
“We both said there had to be some meaning,” he said. “Anyway, it doesn’t give you the actual sounds, it doesn’t give you any words… but then I realized that not all messages have words. It’s music, Marnie. It’s music.”
“Squealing static music?”
“No, you see, I gave up too soon,” he said. “I only ran the outer ring through my tone converter. There’s a reason why all the circles are doubled up, you see… the outer line is volume, the inner one is pitch. As soon as I realized that, I got something a little easier on the ears, something you’d recognize as music… and then I started adjusting the calibration on the tone program, moving the ‘notes’ down into a musical key.”
“And you don’t worry that by changing that, you’re changing the message?” I asked.
“Well, the things didn’t come with a conversion scale or anything,” he said. “I preserved the degree of shift between each ‘note’ and just adjusted things until they sounded the best. The scary thing is how easy it was. I did it by ear… you know I’m tone deaf, but you don’t have to be a musician to know when something sounds a lot better… and when I found the right mix it sounded a lot better. Matt’s done some fine-tuning, so to speak, but I think we’ve got it nailed now.”
“Better than nailed,” Matt said.
“And then we started adding in the inner circles,” Larry said. “The sub-circles. Each sand dollar’s a different song, you see, and each one’s got multiple parts, multiple instruments that weave around the main theme. Matt‘s software here can take them and make them sound like tubular bells or piano or whatever. We‘re doing that by ear, too… finding the right instrument for each part.”
“Some of them are big and brassy, some of them are more… subtle,” Matt said, nodding. “It’s pretty fucking transcendent even when you’ve got all the parts just as a generic electronic tone, but when you get them as a blend of voices, strings and winds and atmospheric sounds, it’s just…” He shook his head. “It’s indescribable.”
“Well, let’s stop trying to describe it,” Larry said. “Put it on main speakers, my man.”
“Wait,” I said, holding up my hand. “So you’re saying that all that time, Dr. Sandberg was composing brilliant little songs in his own made-up notation while it looked like he wasn’t even paying attention?”
“I don’t know if I’d say that,” Larry said. “I don’t think he was composing. I think he was transcribing.”
“Transcribing what?” I asked.
“The music of the spheres,” he said. “Like I said.”
“And this came from where, exactly?” I asked.
“Where else do you think?” Larry asked, jerking a thumb heavenwards. “He was always out there with his telescope. Maybe he picked something up?”
“With his little portable telescope, on a hilltop?” I said. “His little optical telescope, I should add. Even if it were possible that music could be being beamed down at us and every other astronomer somehow missed it, how’s he supposed to pick it up with lenses and mirrors?”
“Maybe it was subconscious?” Matt said, and while I thought he didn’t quite grasp the meat of my objection, the idea resonated with me on an eerie fucking level. The actual habit of drawing the sand dollars had definitely been subconscious.
And while there was no way of picking up an audio signal through space or a radio signal with a conventional telescope, radio waves and x-rays and the other forms of radiation that astronomers the world over combed the skies for hoping to find signs of extraterrestrial life weren’t the only way of sending messages. The good ol’ fashioned visible spectrum had worked just fine for Paul Revere: one if by land, two if by sea.
Fun fact: since none of the scientists involved had known what the fuck they were looking at, only that it pulsed at intervals with the sort of regularity you don’t expect to find in nature, the first pulsar discovered was temporarily denoted as “LGM-1”.
That, of course, stood for Little Green Men.
Of course while the discovery of pulsars had led to all sorts of incredible advances in the field of astronomy (and netted a Nobel Prize for the man who hired the woman responsible), it hadn’t ultimately resulted in any alien contact. E.T. had not been calling collect.
The music of the spheres. Pulsars were usually detected by studying radio waves, but some people claimed to have detected their oscillation while peering through a sufficiently powerful optical telescope. I doubted Sandberg’s little personal model qualified as “sufficiently powerful” to notice that kind of thing, but what if he’d stumbled across something in his surveys that didn’t require conscious notice?
Assuming an extraterrestrial race had evolved to use the same spectrum of electromagnetic radiation for a primary sense that we had—and assuming they made the assumption that some other races elsewhere in the universe would be likely to do the same—wouldn’t that be a more natural medium for communication than radio waves? It would take a much lower technology level for someone to receive the message, especially if it had been designed to act at a subliminal level.
Of course, there was always the chance that Larry had just coincidentally stumbled on some way of making neat-o music out of random squiggles. Hell, it didn’t even have to be that neat-o. Larry was preconditioned to be impressed as all fuck by anything he managed to get out of the sand dollars, and from what I’d heard of the local music scene Matt’s definition of transcendence was probably surprisingly attainable.
“What’s this music sound like?” I asked them. “Apart from transcendent and wonderful, I mean.”
“Well… it’s not the sort of thing I would really listen to, mostly,” Matt admitted. “I mean, if it wasn’t so incredibly good. It’s kind of… a new age, new wave… sort of thing. Very new.”
“But timeless,” Larry said. “Unearthly. Well, it is. Not of this earth, I mean. Probably.”
“It’s got a very… uplifting groove to it, is the thing,” Matt said. “Like, you listen to it, and you just feel better.”
“You want to be better,” Larry said. “A better person. Anyway, I need your help trying to track down as many people you can remember who might have some of the sand dollars, because as near as we can tell each one’s different. Most of the ones I’ve got are the little fucking ones he scrawled in the corners of my papers, and those are no good. Even if you blow them up he was drawing with too thick a pen to make the teeny fucking dips and peaks at that resolution. We’ve got seven good ones with all the interior circles extractable, and a bunch of others where we could get the main melody, but we need more.”
“So I’m supposed to ring up old classmates and tell them we need anything Sandberg doodled on so we can download MP3s from Planet Krypton,” I said. “Right. Because I don‘t spend enough time convincing people I‘m not crazy.”
“Oh, hell no,” Larry said. “You can’t tell them why we want them.”
“Yeah. If this gets out, somebody else might beat us to market,” Matt said.
“Or worse, give them away for free,” Larry said. “Or his estate or whatever could get wind of it and tie us up forever in court.”
“So this whole ‘wanting to be a better person’ thing,” I said. “Kind of an abstract impulse?”
“Hey, we deserve a little compensation,” Larry said. “And anyway, it’ll take money to really get the operation up and running. Matt’s equipment and contacts will let us get the first batches out and get some money coming in, but we’re going to have to upgrade if we‘re going to reach the world. And we’re going to have to get as many of the sand dollar drawings as we can, as quickly as we can, and that’s going to cost money.”
I thought about pointing out the fact that viral distribution didn’t take a lot of money or contacts or equipment to get something out to the world, but I wasn’t sure I wanted Larry thinking in that direction. Music from the stars that made you feel good about it and made you think you should maybe start changing your life? This thing was already a little more viral than I liked.
I took a breath and bit down hard on the right side of my mouth. I had an old filling on the top of my tooth there, and too much pressure drove it down like a wedge, causing me a good half hour of agony at the least. I would have gotten it fixed, but throbbing pain in my head was a great way to keep it clear of external influences. Also, money.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
“Alrighty,” Matt said. “I’m going to play you the best one first, the first one we translated, since it’s got the best instrument tweaks.”
“Okay,” I said.
He loaded up a new file, unplugged his headphones, and then clicked the mouse cursor over the play button.
At first I thought it was just more screechy static, but then I realized it was a synthesized violin. It sounded like it was being played by Jack Benny on crystal meth.
“The strings,” Matt said, smiling vapidly. He said it in the same tone he’d said “transcendant”. “And here comes…”
“Shh!” Larry said.
“Here comes the rest,” Matt whispered.
Sidenote: the word cacophony comes to us from two Greek roots.
The second one, derived from “phonos”, is easily recognizable because it’s everywhere: telephone, microphone, phonetic. It referred to sound. The other one, from “kakos”, isn’t so common in modern English. About the only place the average American was likely to encounter it was if they had been a gamer in the 90s and played a video game where you blew up cacodemons. The root meant “bad” or even “evil”.
If you don’t keep that bit of etymology in mind when you hear the word “cacophony”, you’ll probably just think “a bunch of loud sounds”.
Keep that bit of etymology in mind when I say that what poured out of the speakers was a veritable cacophony, and Matt and Larry sat there, nodding their heads and grooving to it, smiling like zombies.
I bit down harder on my bad tooth.
“What do you think?” Larry asked.
“Are they all this, uh, good?” I asked him.
Another sidenote: some linguists believe that the Greek “kakos” itself derived was derived from a thus-far hypothetical proto-Indo-European language root “kakka“, which means exactly what it sounds like.
That bit of etymology was also apt.
“This is the one that we’ve done the most work on, but they’ve all got this kind of potential,” Matt said. “I can play it for you raw, without the instruments.”
“No thanks, I think I’ve got the idea,” I said. I reached over and turned off the speaker. “Have you, uh, played this for anybody else?”
“No,” Larry said.
“Just a few people,” Matt said. Larry gave him a look. “Before you told me it was secret, dude! Nobody much, anyway. Just some of the people in the scene.”
“What’d they think?” I asked.
“They all dug it,” he said. “Oh, ‘cept for Karen, but she’s kind of a cunt. Always telling us not to light up around her because somehow, the smoke aggravates her migraines. You ever heard of that?”
“Karen gets migraines?”
“That’s what she says,” he said.
“I can’t believe you played this for people,” Larry said.
“Dude, you didn’t say not to,” Matt said. “Anyway, they’re all cool.”
“Yeah, listen, Matt, I think Larry’s got the right idea,” I said. “We should keep this hush-hush for now.”
“I could circulate some samples to try to…”
“No, let’s not,” I said. “What if somebody else works out where they’re from and tries to corner the market on the sand dollars?”
“How would they know where it’s from?” Matt asked, but Larry cut him off.
“She’s right,” he said. Irrational as my objection had been, he was irrational enough to accept it on its face. “It has to be a total secret until we have all of them and we’re ready to give them to the world.”
“Right,” I said, nodding. Don’t argue with the crazy person. If he was going to rely on me to get the rest of the sand dollars together and he was willing to wait until I did before he let anybody else hear the crazy ass star music, that would give me some time to conduct a little investigation. “Can you give me a list of everybody who heard it?”
“Uh, I guess,” Matt said. “But why?”
“Well… if we’re going to keep a lid on this, that’s something we need to know,” I said.
“Good thinking,” Larry said, nodding. “Yeah, definitely.”
“Well, there was Karen,” Matt said. “And…”
“Can you write it down?” I asked. “First and last names, and addresses if you’ve got them.”
“Okay,” he said. “Can I email it to you? I’ll have to make a few phone calls.”
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I said. “Larry’s got my address. Just remember… no more demos, no sneak peaks. Keep it under your hat.”
“Yeah,” Larry said, nodding. “We’ve got to keep this thing sealed up tight.”
He sounded seriously grim about it. At the time I thought I had done good job of playing his greed and paranoia against him. In retrospect, I probably should have seen what was coming next.
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