THE SONG OF THE VIOLENT WORLD
a short story by sea-prince
I was on my way back home. I had had a long
day mining the asteroids. It wasn’t an easy
day. The autopilot on my ship was taking me
away when the violet planet caught my eye.
We had been warned. They said it was off-
limits for our safety. I had heard rumors of
the surface, stories from a friend of a friend
who had ventured down into the cloudy world.
One of the stories I remember most was one
of a man who had landed there many years
before I was born. He had been lured into that
purple atmosphere by its beauty. Mesmerized
by it, the man ignored the warnings. No one
knew for sure what it was he experienced, but
the story goes that when he came back, he
came back smiling. The man never went
mining again, and the people who knew him
said he never spoke another word. Not one.
But he always wore a smile. When I was
younger it never seemed to me to be a
warning story. Why be afraid of a place that
would make your world a happy one? The
typical reaction was that he went mad. He
stopped working and he begged in the city
streets, struggling to survive. But to me he
was complete. Whatever it was he saw that
day fulfilled him.
I cannot adequately explain why I decided to
land there, on that day. Thinking about it now,
I suppose you could say I had always wanted
to go. It was the slow accumulation of my
craving for that alien world. Every day I
passed by it and watched its swirling clouds
and lightning and its purple seas. My
imagination took me there some nights, in my
dreams. The cold rain would pour on me and
I’d feel revived by it, and the thunders would
produce a tremor and the tremors would go
through me. At times I wondered if I had
actually taken the decision to land, but then I
would wake up and find myself a little sad, in
the darkness of my bedroom.
So I shut off the auto-pilot and flew my miner
ship towards the purple marble. Into its
atmosphere I dived, and in its clouds I
disappeared. I flew over its mountains and
valleys, and it was then that I first noticed the
trembling of the wind. The thought of a
mulfunction on my ship crossed my mind, but
there was none. I admit I was surprised when I
landed and the ground was a brownish red
color, I was expecting violet.
Checking the outside of my ship was my first
priority. I didn’t want to keep flying if
something was loose or missing, but the
source of the vibration became readily
apparent the instant I opened the hatch. It
was a song. The sound of something like a
thousand thousand violins playing all around
me, across the vast lands, and I knew the
vibration I was feeling was the very song I had
discovered. I didn’t even step outside. I sat on
my seat with the hatch open in awe.
The song had a sorrow in it. It was a melody
of sadness. Perhaps the remnants of a long
gone civilization. The farewell song of its
people, left behind to be experienced by the
visitors to the violet world. The warm and
discordant notes somehow became embedded
in me, and within minutes I found myself
sobbing uncontrollably in my helmet, unable
to wipe the tears off my face. Images of
fleeing people flooded my mind, and I
watched myriad ships taking off into the
purple clouds. “I’m sorry”, I began to say, “I’m
so sorry.” I closed the hatch again and
everything became silent. The only remaining
evidence of what I had experienced was the
slight trembling of the world and wind. I took
off into the purple clouds and I turned the
auto-pilot on.
Every time I close my eyes I hear the song,
and every time I do I cry. Ten years I had been
searching, with tears in my face, for the man
who left the violet world with a smile. I
wanted to know why. I found him yesterday,
and I asked him. He said he found the source
of the song, but that there wasn’t a way back
in. I’m not taking his word for it. If I find it I
may still have a chance to cure myself of
sadness. I may still have a future in which I
close my eyes and feel nothing.
THE END
