“Do you hear that?”
“No…”
“Listen. Close your eyes and listen, pay attention to the silence… Do you hear it?”
Fara closed her eyes as instructed and took a deep breath. She listened to the silence of the night, and she realized the silence was not absolute, it contained sounds. First she heard the most obvious ones, a person walking outside her home, the fluttering of a bird’s wings sitting outside on the tree beside her window, the faint chirping of small insects on her yard. But there was something else within the silence, something close to silence, but no quite complete. The sound of something like a violin too far away to be recorded, the sound of a soft melody that resembled the passage of wind through the cracks in her home.
“Yes! What is it?”
“It’s music… Where do us humans come from Fara, do you remember?”
“Umm… Earf?”
“It’s called Earth. A long time ago, humans only lived in that one lonely planet, of course, now it’s uninhabited and way too far for us to see in the sky. There is a legend Fara that tells us that during those times there was a man who loved music, and not the kind of music people listen to on a daily basis… no. He was dedicated to the art of creating music, sounds so beautiful that it could be considered a universal language to express feelings.”
“Like what?”
“Well, simply with listening to his music, you could feel sad, or happy, or angry, or excited. He was a man that mastered music in every sense. This man lived in a time when humanity was in a technological revolution. His desire to keep playing his music was such that he transferred his mind into an immortal robotic body, so that he could continue to do what he loved for the rest of eternity.”
“So where is he now?”
“Nobody knows for sure. See, after humanity left Earth behind, this man, this immortal man decided to stay. He didn’t want to leave. They say that for thousands of years he played his beautiful music to the stars, to the sun, to the ocean… But it was not enough, he understood that his art could be so much more, and he began to create instruments the size of cities, instruments unknown to humanity. If you were there you could see his instruments expand across the vast terrains of Earth, and it became a music planet, sending out waves of beauty through the solar system.”
“Wow. So is that what I’m hearing?”
“No Fara. This man whose name we don’t know, realizing that his work was incomplete began to colonize other worlds. Thousands of them scattered across the galaxy, each a part of his celestial orchestra, each an addition to his masterpiece. We now call it ‘The Interstellar Orchestra’, and this is what you hear when you listen to the silence. The music of the man who loved his art, the music of the man who never stopped playing. Even now, he is said to still be alive… alone in some part of our galaxy, working tirelessly, pursuing his lifelong dream… creating cities of music, creating worlds of melody.”
This story is related to: What Are You?