But the occupants of the lawn could see no similarity between the two, and abandoned the attempt to discuss technology with the mirror. Humanity could no more comprehend it than an ant could understand the ISS.
Little by little the light in the sky began to dim, giving them the impression that it was moonlight shining on the ocean, not sunlight, and that the supernova was going out.
The secretary general said, “If the mirror hadn’t blocked the energy from the supernova, the Earth would be a dead planet.”
By this point the ripples in the sky were gone, and the Earth’s enormous reflection again occupied most of the sky.
“Where’s the beat?” Clayderman asked. He had left the stage and was sitting among the world leaders.
“Look to the east!” someone shouted, and they saw in the eastern sky a dividing line, ramrod straight, bisecting the heavens into two distinct images. The reflected Earth, partially cut off, remained on the western side, but in the east was a dazzling starfield that many of them knew was the correct one for the northern hemisphere rather than the reflected southern sky. The division line marched west, enlarging the starry sky and wiping out the reflected Earth.
“It’s flying away!” shouted the secretary general. And they realized he was right: the mirror was leaving the space over Earth. Its edge soon vanished beneath the western horizon, leaving them standing beneath the stars of an ordinary sky. It did not reappear—perhaps it had flown off to the vicinity of its sun instrument.
It comforted them somewhat to see the familiar world, the stars and city lights as they had been, and to smell the blossoms wafting over the lawn.
Then came the beat.
Day arrived without warning with a sudden blue sky and blazing sunlight that flooded the land and lit up their surroundings with brilliant light. But daytime lasted but a second before extinguishing into renewed night as stars and city lights returned. And the night lasted only a second before day returned, only for a second, and then it was night again. Day, and then night, then day, then night… like a pulse, or as if the world were a projector switching back and forth between two slides.
A beat formed out of night and day.
They looked up and saw the flashing star, now just a blinding, dimensionless point of light in space. “A pulsar,” said the Chinese president.
The remains of a supernova, a whirling neutron star, the naked hot spot on its dense surface turning it into a cosmic lighthouse, its revolution sweeping the beam emitted by its hot spot through space, and giving Earth a brief moment of daytime as it swept past the solar system.
“I seem to recall,” the secretary general said, “that a pulsar’s frequency is far faster than this. And it doesn’t emit visible light.”
Shielding his eyes with a hand and struggling to adjust to the crazy rhythm of the world, the US president said, “The high frequency is because the neutron star retains the former star’s angular momentum. The mirror may be able to somehow drain that momentum. As for visible light… do you really think that’s something the mirror can’t do?”
“There’s another thing,” the Chinese president said. “There’s no reason to believe that the pace of life for all beings in the universe is like that of humanity. The beat for their music might be on a completely different frequency. The mirror’s normal beat, for example, may be faster than even our fastest computers.”
“Yes,” the US president said, nodding. “And there’s no reason to believe that what they perceive as visible light is the same EM spectrum.”
“So you’re saying that the mirror’s music is benchmarked to human senses?” the secretary general asked in surprise.
The Chinese president shook his head. “I don’t know. But it’s got to be based on something.”
The pulsar’s powerful beam swept across the empty sky like a four-trillion-kilometer-long baton, still growing at the speed of light. At this end, played on the sun by the mirror’s invisible fingers and transmitted to the cosmos at the speed of light, the sun concert began.
SUN MUSIC
A rustle like radio jamming or the endless pounding of waves on sand occasionally offered up hints of a vast desolation within its more abundant chaos and disorder. The sound went on for more than ten minutes without changing.
The Russian president broke the silence: “Like I said, we can’t understand their music.”
“Listen!” Clayderman said, pointing at the sky, but it was a long moment before the rest of them heard the melody his trained ears had picked out at once. A simple structure of just two notes, reminiscent of a clock’s tick-tock. The notes repeated, separated by lengthy gaps. Then another two-note section, and a third, and a fourth… paired tones emerging ceaselessly from the chaos like fireflies in the night.
Then a new melody emerged, four notes. Everyone turned toward Clayderman, who was listening attentively and seemed to have sensed something. The four-note phrases multiplied.
“Here,” he said to the heads of state. “Let’s each of us remember a two-note measure.” And so they all listened carefully, and each found a two-note measure and then focused their energy on committing it to memory. After a while, Clayderman said, “Very well. Now concentrate on a four-note phrase. Quickly, though, or else the music will grow too complex for us to pick them out…. Yes, that one. Does anyone hear that?”
“The first half is the pair of notes I memorized!” called the head of Brazil.
“The second half is my pair!” said the head of Canada.
They realized that every four-note phrase was made up of two of the previous note pairs, and as the four-note phrases multiplied they seemed to be depleting the isolated pairs. Then came eight-note phrases, similarly formed out of sets of four-note phrases.
“What do you hear?” the secretary general asked the people around him.
“A primeval ocean lit by flashes of lightning and volcanoes, and small molecules combining into larger ones… of course, that’s purely my own imagination,” the Chinese president said.
“Don’t constrain your imagination to the Earth,” the US president said. “The clustering of these molecules may be taking place in a nebula glowing with starlight. Or maybe they’re not molecules, but the nuclear vortices inside a star…”
Then came a high-pitched, multi-note phrase that repeated like a bright spark in the dim chaos. “It’s like it’s describing a fundamental transformation,” the Chinese president said.
Then they heard a new instrument, a sustained violin-like string sound that repeated a gentle shadow of the standout melody.
“It’s expressing a kind of duplication,” the Russian president said.
Now came an uninterrupted melody from the violin voice, changing smoothly as if it were light in curvilinear motion. The UK prime minister said to the Chinese president, “To borrow your idea, that ocean has something swimming in it now.”
At some point the background music, which they’d nearly forgotten about, had begun to change. From the sound of waves it had turned into an oscillating rush, like a storm assaulting the bare rock. Then it changed again, into wind-like bleakness. The US president said, “The swimmer has entered a new environment. The land, or perhaps the air.”
Then all the instruments played in unison for a brief moment, a fearsomely loud sound like an enormous physical collapse, then they abruptly dropped out, leaving just the lonely sound of the surf. Then the simple note pairs started up again and turned gradually complex, and everything repeated….
“I can say with certainty that a great extinction was just described, and now we’re listening to the revival afterward.”