Música Universalis

We walked towards a large asymmetrical tripod with an orange plate hung from its apex. The Moger stopped and pulled a ring-like blade from some pouch hidden within his folds of skin. For a moment he balanced the ring on his extended digit and then with a swift twist of his arm sent it hurtling at the orange disk. As the whining blade struck the tripod a long hum seemed to grow louder around us and the black and orange monolith faded into power lines of electric tension which flashed incredibly for an instant and then delivered us imago-distant on the far side of the tripod.

I found myself staring at a large city where before there had only been a bare plain. Looking quickly over my shoulder I saw the inverted tripod with the orange disk eject the flashing ring that swept into the Moger’s fingers, which he thrust with alacrity back into the folds of his flesh. The whistling hum of the hidden ring and the orange sphincter hole slowly crushed to silence behind us and we found ourselves alone at the foot of the inverted monument.

“What?” my mind beseeched The Moger.

 “We come from Nowhere! We are fully realized manifestation of a civilization that exists elsewhere on the Worldsheet. We popped into your existence a few centuries ago and have been searching your Worldtube to answer a fundamental question.

“Which is?”

But wordlessly, mindlessly, he bid us follow with that unique disinterested persistence that Mogers show by their firm resolve to pursue, execute or finish whatever it is they have at hand. And as he started off towards the city with us in pursuit, I had a chance for the first time to fully take in his appearance from the back. But that didn’t really scan since Mogers weren’t bisymmetrical but radial. His coming was the same cascade of rolling flesh of his going; ruffles of black and purple folds, elements sticking out amoeboid-fashion to form rivulets of flesh in the front which he quickly retracted as streamers pulled in from behind.

Periodically he would stop and draw up all of his mass up into a firm column like a slime mold with a knobby bulb on the top which he twisted about so violently to-and-fro that I thought he would burst and splatter all over us. But the Moger just seemed to be reconnoitering, scanning to the horizon on that wide plain by stretching the opaque translucence of its flesh and exposing the visual organs deep within the internal shell. After a moment of this he would retract his stalked appendage and roll on as uniformly symmetrical as before with no word or explanation or indication of what they had seen.

Meanwhile Eleanor, Jon, and I strode on resolutely behind the mountain of flesh, barely keeping up with his rolling gait. We didn’t know how to deal with these organisms. We knew little enough about Mogers but now we found ourselves having to trust it. And that’s unnerving. Having to follow something so bizarre looking and remote, having no idea how to communicate with it and still having to trust it.

The cattle car for a ship we’d landed on the Planet Moger was on the far side of a great sea and the Borers that initially salvaged us were sunk; crashed on a vacuole anomaly within the Quick. We’d left earth in hope of assistance in dealing with the extreme effects of climate change and global warming. Our home world had cooked itself off after centuries of runaway rampant industrialism and filled the atmosphere with deadly gases that allowed the planet to retain its heat and turn great swaths of the landforms into desert or drowned coastlines due to ice cap melting and erratic weather events.   

If it weren’t for the Moger sailing along on surface tension we’d all be dead. We were all a little skived at first, having to let go of the sinking carrier and to hold on to his slimy flesh. But slime or no, he pulled us ashore. Even though he didn’t slow down in his inexorable course and probably thought no more of us than a dust-mote does as it bumps into some spider mites on its way to the floor.

As we got closer to the city, small pyramidical creatures approached us from its perimeter. There was a slow increase of houses as we neared the metropolis; no sprawl, of citizens coming to meet us; just the round bubble of Moger and its rumble of activity.

I checked my internal weblink to the flagship’s computer off-planet that had sent us down here to reconnoiter, hoping the little data we had would facilitate the meeting we’d sought with the Moger Planetary Council. Moger: Civilization of slime molds. No fixed identity; more than hive-mind; differentiation as needed into types; humanoid to speak with humans; Borer type to trade.  Borers: Transporters through space-time; spooky action at a distance; intelligent wasps. How: The trajectory of a particle in physics or a space ship and its passengers is a Worldline that gives position as a function of time.  But if particles are really quantum vibration of multiple strings of matter, then the trajectory of a string is a surface. The Worldsheet represents the motion of the string surface, whereas a Worldtube represents the motion of a closed string allowing softer interactions between strings. In other words, you can bend spacetime to move amongst the strings.

That’s how the Mogers had found us and how they’d taken us back to their planet for some as of yet unexplained mission. Eventually we were led into the city proper that looked more like a massive beehive than a conventional set of humanoid buildings. The high walls made of some unknown bituminous material pulsed with red and blue lights around us, the walls filled with large hexagonal openings that Mogers flowed in-and-out of like giant Paramecium, creeping up down and sideways in strange patterns then suddenly disappearing into openings while the Borers hopped about like grasshoppers on long legs aided by protuberant wings.

Eventually we were led into a large Amphitheatre with Mogers arrayed above and around us in dizzying heights clinging to the sides of the towering structure like a swarm of bees. The Moger who’d rescued us stopped in the middle of the piazza at the center of the open space and sank into himself like a sea anemone gone to sleep. Suddenly we sensed a muffled multitudinous voice inside our heads without sound like a crowd heard through a long entrance corridor to a stadium; disjointed at first but then louder and progressively coalescing into cogent thoughts without sound.

“Why should there be a chiral world?”

Chiral? What did chirality have to do with it?

I knew that the molecules that make up DNA and RNA have an inherent “handedness.” These molecules can exist in two mirror image forms, however, only the right-handed version is found in living organisms on earth. Handedness serves an essential function in living beings; many of the chemical reactions that drive our cells only work with molecules of the correct handedness. I remembered what one of my biochemistry professors said at university, “There could be a planet somewhere out there which would have the exact opposite chirality.”

“Break the Mirror!” I heard the group mind of the Moger whisper.  

“How?” I thought back.

“Simple!” the Moger beside me intimated as it suddenly expanded back into its normal size and enveloped the three of us into its ectoplasm.

Suffocation, absorption, dissolution, reconstruction; like a phantom limb regenerating; the DNA-RNA of the two Worldstrings vibrated and merged.

The Moger released us and crept up onto the wall of the Amphitheatre touching and sharing the new Worldtube that was us; both right and left-handed: achiral; and we all began to sing, to sing in Música Universalis, the harmony of the spheres; where planets rotated around their sun releasing a thin soprano note into the void, then joined by the basso profundo of their sun’s violent spinning, galaxies whirling, the whole universe created by their gravitas, a choir of heavenly voices replete with meaning and no meaning.     

Thoughts entered, merged in the music, entered our consciousness like sugar in water dissolving; aqueous regenerations of being human; and the Moger a cast-off dynasty of elemental matter turned ectoplasmic, corporeal but dreaming mathematicians, seeking answers to algorithms that no one on our side of the World Web had ever conjured in millennia of existence: entropic visions of destruction and creation rocking back and forth in my head like babies in a universe gone blind.

I watched the past unfold into the present in the song as a dozen spinning Mogers came from the folds of a distant star and transmogrified to angelic forms of light and fluid sheets of energy; singing, singing, always singing; the mathematics of their harmonies a language that encompassed all that we could see and what they could not; the left side of our chiral human brains. We were the gods in their dreams and they the avatars in ours. All the strange creeping thoughts in the night were just the Mogers dreaming of us as we dreamed of them. The Music Universalis a threnody of notes making time one corporal sheet of being.

To what end? I thought.

“Chirality unwound is harmonics,” I heard a voice say so loudly it split the darkness. “Four hands on the same piano, two thoughts at once diverging yet synchronous, prelude and fugue, a quivering viola string and a tempered clavier striking both the tonic and dominant notes simultaneously; a sunburst of flavor and color on the tongue in the darkness.”

And with the problem of climate change and global warming there was a chance for redemption. We saw the Mogers home world a millennia ago in our minds like a mobius strip of data and creature emotions turned into algorithms, solutions, Rube Goldberg entropy devices that sucked the greenhouse gases out of the air and reversed the warming, pulled their home-world free from the brink of destruction with the use of applied technology and universal empathy for a shared cause. Our mind meld with the Mogers was a sonic metaphor; a double-jointed dancer I knew from college gymnastics who could bend her body into pretzel shapes; a navigator from Mars who could pick up a coffee cup with his prehensile toes. Each doing what could not be done by others.

And me?  I could sing in an alien’s dreaming; hear an alien whispering secrets into mine!

THE END

Bio: Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. His professional memoir, “Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State” (Rutgers University Press) won “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. In addition, he has published many short stories including for the journals Fterota Logia, Mystery Tribune, Constellations, South Shore Review, The Satirist, Adelaide, Meet Me at 19th Street, Cicada and Art News. His short story “Seneca Village Arises,” (Meet Me @ 19th Street Journal) was awarded “Best First Chapter” in the journal’s 2021 contest for a Young Adult novel opening dealing with racial inequality.

E-mail: Thomas Belton

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