Hold Up the Sky

ODE TO JOY

THE CONCERT

The concert held to close the final session of the United Nations was a depressing one.

A utilitarian attitude toward the body, dating back to bad precedents set at the start of the century, had been on the rise; countries assumed the UN was a tool to achieve their interests, and interpreted its charter to their own benefit. Smaller nations challenged the authority of the permanent members, while each permanent member believed it deserved more authority within the organization, which lost all authority of its own as a result. A decade on, all efforts at a rescue had failed, and everyone agreed that the UN and the idealism it represented no longer applied to the real world. It was time to be rid of it.

All heads of state assembled for the final session, to observe a solemn funeral for the UN. The concert, held on the lawn outside the General Assembly building, was the final item on the program.

It was well after sunset. This was the most bewitching time of day, the handover from day to night when the cares of reality were masked by the growing dusk. The world was still visible under the last light from the setting sun, and on the lawn, the air was thick with the scent of budding flowers.

The secretary general was the last to arrive. On the lawn, she ran across Richard Clayderman,1 one of the evening’s featured performers, and struck up a cheerful conversation.

“Your playing fascinates me,” she told the prince of pianists with a smile.

Clayderman, dressed in his favorite snow-white suit, looked uncomfortable. “If that’s genuine, then I’m overjoyed. But I’ve heard there have been complaints about my appearance at a concert like this.”

Not merely complaints. The head of UNESCO, a noted art theorist, had publicly criticized Clayderman’s playing as “busker-level,” and his performances as “blasphemy against piano artistry.”

The secretary general lifted a hand to stop him. “The UN can have none of classical music’s arrogance. You’ve erected a bridge from classical music to the masses, and so must we bring humanity’s highest ideals directly to the common people. That’s why you were invited here tonight. Believe me, when I first heard your music under the sweltering sun in Africa, I had the feeling of standing in a ditch looking up at the stars. It was intoxicating.”

Clayderman gestured toward the leaders on the lawn. “It feels more like a family gathering than a UN event.”

The secretary general looked over the crowd. “On this lawn, for tonight at least, we have realized a utopia.”

She crossed the lawn and reached the front row. It was a glorious evening. She had planned on switching off her political sixth sense and just relaxing for once, taking her place as an ordinary member of the audience, but this proved impossible. That sense had picked up a situation: The president of China, engaged in conversation with the president of the United States, looked up at the sky for a moment. The act itself was utterly unremarkable, but the secretary general noticed that it was a little on the long side, perhaps just an extra second or two, but she’d noticed it. When the secretary general sat down after shaking hands with the other world leaders in the front row, the Chinese president looked up at the sky again, confirming his perception. Where national leaders are concerned, apparently random actions are in fact highly precise, and under normal circumstances, this act would not have been repeated. The US president also noticed it.

“The lights of New York wash out the stars. The sky’s far brighter than this over DC,” he said.

The Chinese president nodded but said nothing.

The US president went on, “I like looking at the stars, too. In the ever-changing course of history, our profession needs an immovable reference object.”

“That object is an illusion,” the Chinese president said.

“Why do you say that?”

Instead of responding directly, the Chinese president pointed at a cluster of stars that had just come out. “Look, that’s the Southern Cross, and that’s Canis Major.”

The US president smiled. “You’ve proven they’re immovable enough. Ten thousand years ago, primitive man would have seen the same Southern Cross and Canis Major as we do today. They may have even come up with those names.”

“No, Mr. President. In fact, the sky might even have been different just yesterday.” The Chinese president looked up for a third time. He remained calm, but the steel in his eyes made the other two nervous. They looked at the same placid sky they had seen so many times before; nothing seemed wrong. They looked questioningly at the Chinese president.

“The two constellations I just noted should only be visible from the southern hemisphere,” he said without pointing them out or looking upward. He turned thoughtfully toward the horizon.

The secretary general and US president looked questioningly at him.

“We’re looking at the sky from the other side of the Earth,” he said.

The US president yelped, but then restrained himself and said in a voice even lower than before, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Look, what’s that?” the secretary general said, pointing at the sky with a hand raised only to eye level so as not to alarm the others.

“The moon, of course,” the US president said after a brief glance overhead. But when the Chinese president slowly shook his head, he looked up a second time and was less certain. At first, the semicircular shape in the sky looked like the moon in first quarter, but it was bluish, as if a scrap of daytime sky had gotten stuck. The US president looked more closely at the blue semicircle. He held out a finger and measured the blue moon against it. “It’s growing.”

The three politicians stared up at the sky, not caring anymore if they’d startle the others. The heads of state in the surrounding seats noticed their movements, and more people looked upward. The orchestra on the outdoor stage abruptly stopped its warm-up.

By now, it was clear that the blue semicircle was not the moon, because its diameter had grown to twice that, and its darkness-shrouded other half was now visible in dim blue. In its brighter half, details could be made out; its surface was not a uniform blue but had patches of brown.

“God! Isn’t that North America?” someone shouted. They were right. You could distinguish the familiar shape of the continent, which lay smack on the border between the light and dark halves. (It may have occurred to someone that was the very same position they occupied.) Then they found Asia, and the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Strait….

“It’s… Earth!”

The US president drew back his finger. The blue sphere in the sky was now growing at a rate visible without a reference object, and was now at least three times the diameter of the moon. At first, it looked like a balloon rapidly inflating in the sky, but then a shout from the crowd abruptly changed that impression:

“It’s falling!”

The shout provided a reasonable interpretation of the scene before them. Regardless of its accuracy, they immediately had a new sense of what was happening: another Earth was crashing toward them in space! The approaching blue planet now occupied a third of the sky, and surface details could be made out: brown continents covered in mountain wrinkles, cloud coverage looking like unmelted snow, outlined in black from the shadows cast on the ground. There was white at the North Pole, parts of which glittered—ice, rather than clouds. On a blue ocean, a snow-white object spiraled lazily with the delicate beauty of a velvet flower in a blue crystal vase—a newborn hurricane…. But when the huge blue sphere grew to cover half the sky, their perception experienced an almost simultaneous transformation.

“God! We’re falling!”

The feeling of inversion came in an instant. The sphere filling half the sky gave them a feeling of height, or that the ground beneath their feet had vanished and they were now falling toward the other Earth. Its surface was clearer now, and on the dark side, not far from the shadow line, those with keen eyes could see a faint glowing band: the lights of America’s East Coast cities, their own location in New York a somewhat brighter spot within it. The other planet now filled two-thirds of the sky, and it seemed as if the two Earths would collide. There were screams from the crowd, and many of them shut their eyes.

Then all was still. The Earth overhead was no longer falling (or the ground they stood on was no longer falling toward it). The sphere hung motionless covering two-thirds of the sky, bathing the land in its blue glow.

Now sounds of chaos could be heard from the city, but the occupants of the lawn had the strongest nerves on the planet in unstable situations, so they held back their panic at the nightmarish scene and approached it more quietly.

“It’s a hallucination,” the secretary general said.

“Yes,” the Chinese president said. “If it were real, we’d feel the gravity. And this close to the sea, we’d be drowned by the tide.”

“It’s more than just the tides,” the Russian president said. “The two Earths would be torn to pieces by their mutual attraction.”

“The laws of physics don’t permit two Earths to remain motionless,” the Japanese prime minister said, and, turning to the Chinese president, added, “When that Earth first appeared, you were saying that the stars of the southern hemisphere were in the sky above us. Could the two phenomena be connected?” It was a tacit admission of eavesdropping, but they were past caring at this point.

“Perhaps we’re about to find out,” the US president said. He spoke into a mobile phone; the secretary of state, at his elbow, informed the others that he was speaking with the International Space Station. And so they focused their anticipation on the president, who listened attentively to the phone but said only a few words. Silence reigned on the lawn, where in the blue light of that other Earth they looked like a throng of ghosts. After about two minutes, the president set down the phone, climbed onto a chair, and shouted to the expectant crowd:

“It’s simple. A huge mirror has appeared next to the Earth!”

THE MIRROR

There was no way to describe it other than a huge mirror. Its surface perfectly reflected visual light as well as radar with no energy or image loss. Viewed from the right distance, the Earth would look like a stone on a go board ten billion square kilometers in area.

It shouldn’t have been difficult for Endeavor’s astronauts to obtain preliminary data, since an astronomer and a space physicist were on board and had all the necessary equipment available and at their disposal, including the ISS, to conduct observations; however, their momentary panic had nearly sent the orbiter to its doom. The ISS was a fully-equipped observation platform, but its orbit was not conducive to observing an object situated 450 kilometers above the North Pole nearly perpendicular to the Earth’s axis. Endeavor’s orbit sent it over the poles so it could carry out observations of the ozone holes; at a height of 280 kilometers, it was flying right between the Earth and the mirror.

Flying with an Earth on either side was nightmarish, like speeding along a canyon with blue cliffs towering above them. The pilot insisted it was a mirage, like the spatial disorientation he had experienced twice during his three thousand hours in a fighter jet, but the commander was convinced there really were two Earths. He ordered their orbit adjusted to compensate for the gravitational pull of the second one, but the astronomer stopped him in time. Once they got over their initial shock and learned from observations of the shuttle’s orbit that one of the two Earths had no mass, they let out a sigh of relief: if they had made the compensational adjustments, Endeavor would be nothing more than a shooting star over the North Pole.

The astronauts carefully observed the massless Earth. Visual inspection indicated the orbiter was much farther away from it, but its North Pole seemed little different from that of the nearer Earth, if not entirely identical. They saw laser beams emitting from both North Poles, two long, dark red snakes twisting slowly in identical shapes at identical positions. Eventually they discovered one thing that the nearer Earth did not have: an object in flight above the massless Earth. Visually they judged it to be in an orbit roughly three hundred kilometers above its surface, but when they attempted to probe its orbit more precisely using shipboard radar, the radar seemed to bounce back from a solid wall a hundred-odd kilometers away. The massless Earth and the flying object were on the opposite side of that wall. Observing the object through the cockpit window using high-powered binoculars, the commander saw another space shuttle flying in low orbit over the frozen Arctic ice pack like a moth crawling along a blue striped wall. There was a figure behind that shuttle’s cockpit window, looking through binoculars. The commander waved, and the figure waved at the same time.

And so they discovered the mirror.

They altered course to draw closer to the mirror. At a distance of three kilometers, the astronauts could see clearly Endeavor’s reflection six kilometers away, the glow of its aft engines lending it the form of a creeping firefly.

One astronaut took a spacewalk for humanity’s first close encounter with the mirror. Thrusters on the suit spurted streams of white, speeding him across the distance. Carefully, he adjusted the jets to bring himself into position ten meters from the mirror. His reflection was remarkably clear, without any distortion. Since he was in orbit but the mirror was stationary with respect to the Earth, he had a relative speed of ten kilometers per second. He was racing past it, but no motion at all was visible. It was the smoothest, shiniest surface in the universe.

When the astronaut decelerated, his thruster jets had been aimed at the mirror for an extended period, and a white fog of benzene propellant had drifted toward it. During previous space walks, whenever the fog had come into contact with the shuttle or the outside wall of the ISS, it would leave a conspicuous smudge; he imagined it would be the same with the mirror, except that with the high relative velocity, the smudge would be a long stripe, like he used to draw with soap on the bathroom mirror as a child. But he saw nothing. The fog vanished upon contact with the mirror, whose surface remained bright as ever.

The shuttle’s orbital trajectory gave them only a limited amount of time near the mirror, prompting the astronaut to act quickly. In an almost unconscious act the moment the fog disappeared, he took a wrench out of his tool bag and tossed it at the mirror, but once it left his hand, he and the astronauts aboard the shuttle were paralyzed with the realization that the relative velocity between it and the mirror gave it the force of a bomb. In terror they watched the wrench tumble toward the mirror and had a vision of the spiderweb fractures that in just moments would spread like lightning across the surface from the point of impact, and then the enormous mirror shattering into billions of glittering fragments, a sea of silver in the blackness of space…. But when the wrench touched the surface it vanished without a trace, and the mirror remained as smooth as before.

It actually wasn’t hard to see that the mirror was massless, not a physical body, since floating motionless over Earth’s North Pole would be impossible otherwise. (It might be more accurate to state, given their relative sizes, that the Earth was floating in the middle of the mirror.) Rather than a physical entity, the mirror was a field of some sort. Contact with the fog and the wrench proved that.

Delicately manipulating his thrusters and making continual microadjustments of the jets, the astronaut drew within half a meter of the mirror. He stared straight into his reflection, amazed once again at its fidelity: a perfect copy, one perhaps even more finely wrought than the original. He extended a hand toward it until he and his reflected hand were practically touching, separated by less than a centimeter. His earpiece was silent—the commander did not order him to stop—so he pushed forward, and his hand disappeared into the mirror. He and his image were joined at the wrist. There had been no sensation of contact. He retracted his hand and looked at it carefully. The suit glove was perfectly unharmed. No marks whatsoever.

Below the astronaut, the shuttle was gradually drawing away from the mirror and had to constantly run its engines and thrusters to maintain proximity. However, due to its trajectory its drift was accelerating, and before long such adjustments would be impossible. A second encounter would require waiting an entire orbit, but would the mirror still be there? With this in mind, the astronaut made a decision. He switched on his thrusters and headed straight into the mirror.

His reflection loomed large, filling his field of vision with the quicksilver bubble of his helmet’s one-way reflective faceplate. He fought to keep from closing his eyes as his head touched the mirror. At contact he felt nothing, but in that very moment everything vanished before his eyes, replaced by the darkness of space and the familiar Milky Way. He jerked around, and below him was the same view of the galaxy, with one addition: his own reflection receding into the distance, the maneuvering units he and his reflection wore linked by streams of thruster jet fog.

He had crossed the mirror, and the other side of it was a mirror, too.

His earpiece had been chirping with the commander’s voice when he was approaching the mirror, but it had cut out. The mirror blocked radio waves. Worse, the Earth wasn’t visible from this side. Surrounded entirely by stars gave the astronaut the feeling of being isolated in a different world, and he began to panic. He adjusted the jets and arrested his outward motion. He had passed through the first time with his body parallel to the mirror, but now he oriented himself perpendicular, as if diving headfirst into it. Just before contact, he cut his speed. Then the top of his head touched the top of his reflection, and then he passed through and saw with relief the blue Earth below him, and heard the commander’s voice in his ear.

Once his upper torso was through he dropped his drift speed, leaving the remainder of his body on the other side. Then he reversed the direction of his jets and began to back up; fog from the jets on the opposite side of the mirror issued from the surface around him like steam rising from a lake in which he was partially submerged. When the surface reached his nose, he made another startling discovery: The mirror passed through his faceplate and filled the crescent space between it and his face. He looked downward and saw his frightened pupils reflected in the crescent. No doubt the mirror was passing through his entire head, but he felt nothing. He reduced his speed to the absolute minimum, no faster than the tick of a second hand, and advanced millimeter by millimeter until the mirror bisected his pupils and vanished.

Everything was back to normal: Earth’s blue sphere on one side, the glittering Milky Way on the other. But that familiar world persisted only for a second or two. He couldn’t reduce his speed to zero, so before long the mirror was above his eyes, and the Earth vanished, leaving only the Milky Way. Above him, the mirror blocking his view of Earth extending hundreds of thousands of kilometers into the distance. The angle of reflection distorted his view of the stars into a silver halo on the mirror’s surface. He reversed thrusters and drifted back, and the mirror dropped down across his eyes, vanishing momentarily as it passed to reveal both Earth and Milky Way before the galaxy vanished and the halo turned blue on the mirror’s surface. He moved slowly back and forth several times, and as his pupils oscillated on either side, he felt like he was passing across a membrane between two worlds. At last he managed a fairly lengthy pause with the mirror invisible at the center of his pupils. He opened his eyes wide for a glimpse of a line at its position, but he saw nothing.

“The thing’s got no width!” he exclaimed.

“Maybe it’s only a few atoms thick, so you just can’t see it. Maybe it approached Earth edgewise and that’s why it arrived undetected.” That was the assessment of the shuttle crew, who were watching the images sent back.

The astonishing thing was that the mirror, perhaps just atoms thick but over a hundred Pacific Oceans in area, was so flat as to be invisible from a parallel vantage point; in classical geometry, it was an ideal plane.

Its absolute flatness explained its absolute smoothness. It was an ideal mirror.

A sense of isolation replaced the astronauts’ shock and fear. The mirror made the universe strange and rendered them a group of newborn babes abandoned in a new, unfathomable world.

Then the mirror spoke.

THE MUSICIAN

“I am a musician,” it said. “I am a musician.”

The pleasing voice resounding through space was audible to all. In an instant, all sleepers on Earth awoke, and all those already awake froze like statues.

The mirror continued, “Below I see a concert whose audience members are capable of representing the planet’s civilization. Do you wish to speak with me?”

The national leaders looked to the secretary general, who was momentarily at a loss for words.

“I have something to say,” the mirror said.

“Can you hear us?” the secretary general ventured.

The mirror answered immediately, “Of course I can. I could distinguish the voice of every bacterium on the world below me, if I wanted to. I perceive things differently from you. I can observe the rotation of every atom simultaneously. My perception encompasses temporal dimensions: I can witness the entire history of a thing all at once. You only see cross sections, but I see all.”

“How are we hearing your voice?” the US president asked.

“I am emitting superstring waves into your atmosphere.”

“Superstring waves?”

“A strong interactive force released from an atomic nucleus. It excites your atmosphere like a giant hand beating a drum. That’s how you hear me.”

“Where do you come from?” the secretary general asked.

“I am a mirror drifting through the universe. I originate so far away in both time and space it is meaningless to speak of it.”

“How did you learn English?”

“I said that I see all. I should note that I’m speaking English because most of the audience at this concert was conversing in that language, not because I believe any ethnic group on the world below is superior to any other. It’s all I can do when there’s no global common tongue.”

“We do have a world language, but it is little used.”

“Your world language? Less an effort toward world unity than a classic expression of chauvinism. Why should a world language be Latinate rather than based on some other language family?”

This caused a commotion among the world leaders, who whispered nervously to each other.

“We’re surprised at your understanding of Earth culture,” the secretary general said earnestly.

“I see all. Besides, a thorough understanding of a speck of dust isn’t hard.”

The US president looked up at the sky and said, “Are you referring to the Earth? You may be bigger, but on a cosmic scale you’re on the same order as the Earth. You’re a speck of dust, too.”

“You’re less than dust,” the mirror said. “A long, long time ago I used to be dust, but now I’m just a mirror.”

“Are you an individual or a collective?” the Chinese president asked.

“That question is meaningless. When a civilization travels far enough on the road of time, individual and collective both disappear.”

“Is a mirror your intrinsic form, or one of your many expressions?” the UK prime minister asked.

The secretary general added, “In other words, are you deliberately exhibiting this form for our benefit?”

“This question is also meaningless. When a civilization travels far enough on the road of time, form and content both disappear.”

“We don’t understand your answers to the last two questions,” the US president said.

The mirror said nothing.

Then the secretary general asked the key question: “Why have you come to the solar system?”

“I am a musician. A concert is being held here.”

“Excellent,” the secretary general said with a nod. “And humanity is the audience?”

“My audience is the entire universe, even if it will be a century before the nearest civilized world hears my playing.”

“Playing? Where’s your instrument?” Richard Clayderman asked from the stage.

They realized the reflected Earth covering most of the sky had begun to slip swiftly toward the east. The change was frightening, like the sky falling, and a few people on the lawn involuntarily buried their head in their hands. Soon the reflection’s edge dipped below the horizon, but at practically the same time, everything turned hazy in a sudden bright light. When sight returned, they saw the sun sitting smack in the middle of the sky right where the reflected Earth had been. Brilliant sunlight illuminated their surroundings under a brilliant blue sky that had replaced the black night. The oceans of the reflected Earth blended with the blue of the sky so the land seemed like a patch of clouds. They stared in shock at the change, but then a word from the secretary general explained the change that had taken place.

“The mirror tilted.”

Indeed, the huge mirror had tilted in space, drawing the sun into the reflection and casting its light onto the Earth’s nighttime side.

“It rotates fast!” the Chinese president said.

The secretary general nodded. “Yes, and at that size, the edges must be nearing the speed of light!”

“No physical object can tolerate the stresses from that rotation. It’s a field, like our astronaut demonstrated. Near-light-speed motion is entirely normal for a field,” the US president said.

Then the mirror spoke: “This is my instrument. I am a star player. My instrument is the sun!”

These grand words silenced them all, and they stared mutely at the reflected sun for a long while before someone asked, their voice trembling with awe, how it was played.

“You’re all aware that many of the instruments you play have a sound chamber whose thin walls reflect and confine sound waves, allowing them to resonate and produce pleasing sounds. In the case of EM waves, the chamber is a star—it may lack visible walls, but it has a transmission speed gradient that reflects and refracts the waves, confining them to produce EM resonance and play beautiful music.”

“What does this instrument sound like?” Clayderman asked the sky.

“Nine minutes ago, I played tuning notes on the sun. The instrument’s sound is now being transmitted at the speed of light. Of course, it’s in EM form, but I can convert it to sound in your atmosphere through superstring waves. Listen….”

They heard a few delicate, sustained notes, similar to those of a piano, but with a magic that held everyone momentarily under its spell.

“How does the sound make you feel?” the secretary general asked the Chinese president.

“Like the whole universe is a huge palace, one that’s twenty billion light-years tall. And the sound fills it completely.”

“Can you still deny the existence of God after hearing that?” the US president asked.

The Chinese president eyed him, and said, “The sound comes from the real world. If it can produce such a sound, then God is even less essential.”

THE BEAT

“Is the performance about to start?” the secretary general asked.

“Yes. I’m waiting for the beat,” the mirror replied.

“The beat?”

“The beat began four years ago and is being transmitted here at the speed of light.”

Then there was a fearsome change in the sky. The reflected Earth and sun disappeared, replaced by dancing bright silver ripples that filled the sky, making them feel like Earth had been plunged into an enormous ocean and they were looking up at the blazing sun beyond the water’s surface.

The mirror explained: “I’m blocking intense radiation from outer space. I can’t totally reflect it, so what you’re seeing is the small portion that gets through. The radiation comes from a star that went supernova four years ago.”

“Four years ago? That’s Centauri,” someone said.

“That’s right. Proxima Centauri.”

“But that star has none of the necessary conditions for supernova,” the Chinese president said.

“I created the conditions,” the mirror said.

They realized that when the mirror had said it made preparations for this concert four years ago, it was referring to that event; after selecting the sun as its instrument, it had detonated Proxima Centauri. Judging from the audio test of the sun, it was evidently capable of acting through hyperspace and pulsing the sun 1 AU away. But whether it possessed the same ability for a star four light-years away remained unknown. The detonation of Proxima Centauri could have been accomplished in one of two ways: from the solar system via hyperspace, or by teleporting to its vicinity, detonating it, and then teleporting back. Both were godlike power, so far as humanity was concerned, and in any case the light from the supernova would still take four years to reach to the sun. The mirror said that music it played would be transmitted to the cosmos by EM, so was the speed of light for that hypercivilization akin to the speed of sound for humans? And if light waves were their sound waves, what was light for them? Humanity would never know.

“Your ability to manipulate the physical world is alarming,” the US president said.

“Stars are stones in the cosmic desert, the most commonplace of objects in my world. Sometimes I use stars as tools, other times as weapons, and other times as musical instruments…. I’ve turned Proxima Centauri into a metronome, basically the same as the stones used by your ancestors. We both take advantage of ordinary objects in our world to enlarge and extend our abilities.”

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.”

After another long and arduous process, the ocean swimmer ventured again into other parts of the world. Slowly, the melody grew grander and more complicated, and interpretations diversified. Some people thought it was a river rushing downhill, others imagined the advance of a great army across a vast plain, others saw billowing nebulae in the darkness of space caught in the vortex of a black hole, but they all agreed that it was expressing some grand process, an evolutionary process. The movement was long, and an hour had passed before the theme at last began to change. The melody gradually split into two vying parts that smashed wildly into each other or tangled together….

“The classic style of Beethoven,” Clayderman declared, after a long stretch immersed in the grand music.

The secretary general said, “It’s like a fleet smacking across huge waves on the sea.”

“No,” said the US president, shaking his head. “Not that. You can tell that the two forces are not essentially different. I think it’s a battle that spans a world.”

“Wait a moment,” interrupted the Japanese prime minister, breaking a long silence. “Do you really imagine you can comprehend alien art? Your understanding of the music may be no better than a cow’s appreciation for a lyre.”

Clayderman said, “I think our understanding is basically correct. The common languages of the cosmos are mathematics and music.”

The secretary general said, “Proving it won’t be difficult. Can we predict the theme or style of the next movement?”

After a moment’s thought, the Chinese president said, “I’d say next will be an expression of worship, and the melody will possess a strict architectural beauty.”

“You mean like Bach?”

“Yes.”

And so it was. The listeners seemed to hear a great imposing church and the echoes of their footsteps inside that magnificent space, and they were overcome by fear and awe of an all-encompassing power.

Then the complicated melody turned simple again. The background music vanished, and a series of short, clear beats appeared in the infinite stillness: one, then two, then three, then four… and then one, four, nine, and sixteen… and then increasingly complex series.

Someone asked, “Is this describing the emergence of mathematics and abstract thinking?”

Then it turned even stranger. Isolated two- and three-note phrases from the violin, each of identically pitched notes held for different durations; then glissandos, rising, falling, and then rising again. They listened intently, and when the president of Greece said, “It’s… like a description of basic geometric shapes,” they immediately had the sense they were watching triangles and rectangles shoot by through empty space. The glides conjured up images of round objects, ovals and perfect circles…. The melody changed slowly as single-note lines turned into glides, but the previous impression of floating geometric shapes remained, only now they were floating on water and distorted….

“The discovery of the secrets of time,” someone said.

The next movement began with a constant rhythm that repeated along a period resembling a pulsar’s day-night beat. The music seemed to have stopped altogether but for the beat echoing in the silence, but it was soon joined by another constant rhythm, this one slightly faster. Then more rhythms at various frequencies were added, until finally a magnificent chorus emerged. But on the time axis the music was constant as a huge flat wall of sound.

Astonishingly, their interpretation of this movement was unanimous: “A giant machine at work.”

Then came a delicate new melody, a tinkle of crystal, volatile and dreamlike, that contrasted with the thick wall beneath it like a silver fairy flitting over the enormous machine. This tiny drop of a powerful catalyst touched off a wondrous reaction in the iron world: the constant rhythm began to waver, and the machine’s shafts and cogs turned soft and rubbery until the whole chorus turned as light and ethereal as the fairy melody.

They debated it: “The machine has intelligence!” “I think the machine is drawing closer to its creator.”

The sun music progressed into a new movement, the most structurally complicated yet, and the hardest to understand. First the piano voice played a lonely tune, which was then taken up and extended by an increasingly complex group that turned it grander and more magnificent with every repetition.

After it had repeated several times, the Chinese president said, “Here’s my interpretation: A thinker stands on an island in the sea contemplating the cosmos. As the camera pulls back, the thinker shrinks in the field of view, and when the frame encompasses the entire island, the thinker is no more visible than a grain of sand. The island shrinks as the camera pulls back beyond the atmosphere, and now the entire planet is in frame, with the island just a speck within it. As the camera pulls back into space, the entire planetary system is drawn into frame, but now only the star is visible, a lonely, shining billiard ball against the pitch-black sky, and the ocean planet has vanished like a speck….”

Listening intently, the US president picked up the thought: “… The camera pulls back at light speed, and we discover that what from our scale is a vast and boundless cosmos is but glittering star dust, and when the entire galaxy comes into frame, the star and its planetary system vanish like specks. As the camera continues to cross unimaginable distances, a galaxy cluster is pulled into frame. We still see glittering dust, but the dust is formed not of stars but of galaxies…”

The secretary general said, “… And our galaxy has vanished. But where does it end?”

The audience once again immersed themselves in the music as it approached a climax. The musician’s mind had propelled the cosmic camera outside the bounds of known space so its frame captured the entire universe, reducing the Milky Way’s galaxy cluster to a speck of dust. They waited intently for the finale, but the grand chorus suddenly dropped out, leaving behind only a lonely piano-like sound, distant and empty.

“A return to the thinker on the island?” someone asked.

Clayderman shook his head. “No, it’s a completely different melody.”

Then the cosmic chorus struck up again, but after a brief moment gave way to the piano solo. The two melodies alternated like this for a long while.

Clayderman listened intently, and suddenly realized something: “The piano is playing an inversion of the chorus!”

The US president nodded. “Or maybe it’s the mirror of the chorus. A cosmic mirror. That’s what it is.”

The music had clearly reached a denouement, and now the piano’s inverted melody proceeded alongside the chorus, riding conspicuously on its back but gloriously harmonious.

The Chinese president said, “It reminds me of the Silvers style of mid-twentieth-century architecture, in which, in order to avoid impact on the surrounding environment, buildings were clad entirely in mirrors. Reflections were a way of putting them in harmony with their surroundings as well as self-expression.”

“Yes,” the secretary general answered thoughtfully. “When civilization reaches a certain level, it can express itself through its reflection of the cosmos.”

The piano abruptly shifted to the uninverted theme, bringing it into unison with the chorus. The sun music had finished.

ODE TO JOY

“A perfect concert,” the mirror said. “Thank you to all who enjoyed it. And now I will be going.”

“Wait a moment!” shouted Clayderman. “We have one last request. Could you play a human song on the sun?”

“Yes. Which one?”

The heads of state glanced around at each other. “Beethoven’s Fate Symphony?”2 asked the German premier.

“No, not Fate,” said the US president. “It’s been proven that humanity is powerless to strangle fate. Our worth lies in that even knowing that fate can’t be resisted and death will have the final victory, we still devote our limited life span to creating beautiful lives.”

“Then ‘Ode to Joy,’” said the Chinese president.

The mirror said, “You all sing. I’ll use the sun to transmit the song out into the universe. It will be beautiful, I assure you.”

More than two hundred voices joined in “Ode to Joy,” their song passed by the mirror to the sun, which again began vibrating to send powerful EM waves into all reaches of space.

Five hours later, the song would exit the solar system. In four years, it would reach Proxima Centauri; in ten thousand, it would exit the galaxy; in two hundred thousand, it would reach the galaxy’s nearest neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In six million years, their song would have reached the forty-odd galaxies in the cluster, and in a hundred million years, the fifty-odd clusters in the supercluster. In fifteen billion years, the song would have spread throughout the known universe and would continue onward, should the universe still be expanding.

The song concluded, everyone fell silent on the concert lawn. World leaders were lost in thought.

“Maybe things aren’t so hopeless just yet, and we ought to renew our efforts,” the Chinese president said.

The US president nodded. “Yes. The world needs the UN.”

“Concessions and sacrifices are insignificant compared to the future disasters they prevent,” the Russian president said.

“What we’re dealing with amounts to a grain of sand in the cosmos. It ought to be easy,” the UK prime minister said, looking up at the stars.

The other leaders voiced their assent.

“So then, do we all agree to extend the present session of the UN?” the secretary general asked hopefully.

“This will of course require contacting our respective governments, but I believe that won’t be a problem,” the US president said with a smile.

“Then, my friends, today is a day to remember,” the secretary general said, unable to hide his delight. “So let’s join once more in song.”

“Ode to Joy” started up again.

Speeding away from the sun at the speed of light, the mirror knew it would never return. In more than a billion years as a musician it had never held a repeat performance, just as a human shepherd will never toss the same stone twice. As it flew, it listened to the echoes of “Ode to Joy,” and a barely perceptible ripple appeared on its smooth mirror surface.

“Oh, that’s a good song.”

1 The French musician’s 1992 performance in China was the first by a major foreign pianist, and he has remained the most recognized classical musician in the decades since.

2 Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is known as the Fate Symphony in Chinese.

3 “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich Schiller.