Playing On
Stephen J. Bush
You’re taking Imogen Giles who, despite the oncoming later decades of your relationship (a regretted peccadillo, debt, habituation, and illness), you’ll love always your life long, on a date — but it’s not a date-date yet, dinner and a show, but an impromptu and unstructured exposure of your heart. Perhaps you should be more anxious, but you’re not.
Having known her only a fortnight, you’re carrying takeaway mochas around the atrium, in the city museum on a Saturday, and you can’t help yourself, steering her — by suggestion, not touch — to the tiny quiet touring gallery which, for eight weeks only, is exhibiting the Golden Record, or, more precisely, its facsimile.
Framed on the wall, it’s a gold-plated copper phonograph disc, ‘The Sounds of Earth’ written in the middle. Around it, eclectic photos blown up to poster size, a god’s eye motley of the planet: mushrooms, a toad, the Taj Mahal, snow. They’re not artistic shots but documentary, as if intended for a textbook about Earth. Precisely that, the exhibit informs you; these are the pictures digitally encoded in the grooves of the record, two copies of which were dispatched to the cosmos, one on Voyager 1 and one on Voyager 2, space probes launched a month apart in 1977. You know all this already, though, and look at Imogen looking at a woman licking ice cream. The caption reads: ‘to demonstrate the function of human mouths.’
The Golden Record was a gift, you say, a summation of us, offered without prospect of reception, comprehension, or reciprocity. “Us?” asks Imogen, but you miss her specificity. “You,” you say, “whoever you are.” Other than photos, the record is a curated ninety minutes of music (fourteen of which Beethoven, eleven Bach), prefaced by a soundscape of the planet: glaciers calving, mudpools bubbling, stridulating crickets and a doleful moan of frogs, their plaintive refrains those of ghosts in a barrow, then a susurrus, another rustle (scree, you think), a tidal whomp, a crack, a crump, and thunder. A pause. Heartbeats are heard. Cordialities follow. In Chinese, a woman asks, “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet?” There’s a wish for their good health in Welsh.
The record shares the optimistic property of a message in a bottle, thrown into the ocean of the solar system. It’s the entire history of Earth, you enthuse to Imogen. Compressed, you concede. You gabble and slop coffee, give animacy to the facts: that these records are the most enduring cultural artefacts humanity has made, that they’ll remain intelligible for billennia, that they’ll (in principle) outlive the planet. You’re unable to explain this without sprawling your hands and so, serendipitously, you gesture.
Your finger finds a listening booth in the corner, unoccupied, its couples of headphones abandoned like shells. As rain starts to wham the room’s skylight, you slide up the volume, coffee and a hushed breath on your lips, listening. Imogen leans into your shoulder, and champagne from your kneecaps froths beyond your neck. You tap your feet, together sway gently. To Javanese gamelans, you dance.
Eventually you leave, and with left arm outstretched run your fingers on the wall, stroking dimples in its whitewashed brick. You don’t know why you had the impulse, but Imogen does. As she leaves, she pauses at the picture by the exit, a representative foetus in a diagrammatic womb.
It takes you years to realise what she learned of you that day: that you wanted to put something into the world without thought of or care for recompense, that in some way other than material you’re ambitious, and that what you’d like to do with life is encapsulate a planet. You wonder on occasion whether you’ve coloured yourself over-favourably. She finds you endearing anyway.
The exhibition finishes, shifts to another city. You take Imogen for tapas and to festivals. You both graduate, get jobs, promotions, a mortgage, and married. You argue on occasion, ignore each other on occasion, talk, touch, spend time, and are tender. In August 2012, Voyager 1 leaves the solar system, the first human-made creation to do so. You raise a son who, in turn, grows out of ‘dad mountain’ (holding your hands and climbing legs, hip, chest, neck), falters respectively in his enthusiasm for the recorder, swimming, and video games, then loses his virginity, attachment to your town, and daily contact, cycling with differential periodicity through friends, hobbies, jobs, and habits, until settling like a stylus in a groove. Signals from Voyager 1 aim your way at light speed still, but yet take a day to reach back to Earth. They arrive weak, a millionth-of-a-billionth of a watt, almost too scant to be captured. You buy knee braces and reading glasses. You dabble in woodwork and home-brew. Imogen gets into fun-runs and learns to make jam. Her parents die, heart disease and stroke. Yours, car-wreck and leukaemia. In the autumn of 2032, the thermoelectric generator on Voyager 1 exceeds its engineered limit and fails gracefully. This doesn’t affect its journey, being already in motion in frictionless space, but it no longer has power to signal back home. Adrift, it’ll take 40,000 years to reach the nearest solar system. If it’s ever intercepted by someone intelligent, there or elsewhere, the cover of the record gives instructions on how to play it. Diagrams etched in aluminium show the right time for its rotation, in units anyone sapient in the universe should recognise, being based on the action of an atom.
Imogen stops breathing. You find her in your staircase, blue as an old bruise. You cremate her, grieve, and on the minor aspects after, unintentionally forget. You’re never tested on your commitment to the principle that it’s a worthy thing to try and compress life, to selectively make of it a relic. You’re never tested because you die in a hospital, stooped and quiet, with the more important things voiced by then if not, in truth, quite forgiven. Your son cremates you and later, later, dies in the night. You share a gravestone with Imogen together, its letters losing lustre, though not all at once. Your data-trail, anonymised, is compiled and parsed, and after your passing you in part contribute commercial insight into the demographic bases of pesto and mouthwash. Your names perpetuate, for a bit, in assorted official records, of interest in aggregate to historians. Climates — political, atmospheric, and economic — alter. Rancorous weaponry whams your town, country, and continent from skyward. Breaths still, and volumes deafen. Crops wilt and networks fail, fisheries, stores, stocks, and birth-rates collapse. You, as a species, launch rockets with at first warheads aboard, then colonists, with sperm in vials and rice seeds in liquid nitrogen. You fail, are forgotten, your cities eaten by trees. You’re without hope of literal recovery, but not wholly yet of recall. After all, something of you, whoever you are, is en route; Imogen too, if only either by inference or degrees of separation, and not that anyone but you really knows it. Henceforth, you’re warping details to accommodate the altered context.
Now you’re accompanying vir to the plaza to witness. You thought vir would like it, so invited. Some magisters have claimed an interpretative breakthrough, and their exhibition – although more technical than a spectacle — is exquisite. Now universal patterns seem apparent in the artefact; inversions, repetitions, and refrains. Mathematics, applied, lets us sense them. You can’t resist explaining what, peculiar though it is, that implies — that it’s not abstruse, but a new world — and vir realises, not that you notice in the bliss of the concept, that you must surely love the notion of making something precious and submitting it to hope. Vir twinges, chromatic and lustrous, but subtly. You’re prismous in chartreuse and sepia. Chiaroscuro scurries, running murklins then harlequin, as within, chemicals swirl about a follicle. Now vir rhythm of limbs is compelling. Coyly, you attend, organs queerly, thrillingly, stirring. Moons’ light makes a plaid of shadows; they curl on vir skin like a snuffed candle’s smoke. You don’t know it, you can’t know it, but to Javanese gamelans, you dance.
