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As a child, it had sounded eerily like his mother’s wails. The curdling moans had initially left him rigid with fright, frozen to the ground where he’d been trying to sleep. When they didn’t stop, night after night, he eventually mustered the anger to melt away his fear and he found himself making a nightly pilgrimage to who knew where, creeping warily to what seemed to be the source. Yet night after chilling night, it lay much too far for his small, unshod feet to meet, and the wails remained as distant as they had at his starting point. Until the night his feet carried him to the edges of a new cluster of heavy machinery and a profusion of smartly dressed soldiers that had materialized at the outskirts of his backwater slum, and directly into what he would later learn was the axis of power on which the galaxy spun.
In time, he had learned to forget his mother’s voice and instead drank deeply of the brilliance of human thought and of the work of human hands, and he heard the song more clearly, right as it began to take on more and more the air of a fugue: intercalated calls and responses overwhelming his mind into inversions of the pattern at the precise instant he foolishly thought he’d recaptured the theme.
Then he learned to soldier, and in the pits of combat, he could tell he was right at the song’s threshold. In these times, the call frequently took on a choking roar, all malice and vowels and distortion layered over the noise of varying distributions—white, brown, pink. It did not discriminate, it seemed; the voice took on any and all guises.
By the time his fingers slid along the shimmering iridescence of a finely wrought mask, he had heard what he thought might be the full range of the voice’s teasing, its mocking, its warmth and its sublimity; sometimes whispering one thing, occasionally shrieking another, but always, always, beckoning, calling him forth.
And always, always, he marveled at the deafening silence that a great many others must live in, because never once had he caught out another officer, of any ranking, staring out the airlocks of the ship under his current command for hours at a time as they would if they could hear.
And he would know. He was intimately familiar with the supply corridors all along the ship, largely because they were studded with easily accessible airlocks. He supposed, if he felt the inclination, he could estimate the number of times he’d startled awake from reverie only to realize his gloved fingerpads lightly rested on the hatch that would grant him access to the inky void. But it would be a tediously large quantity, and anyway the number didn’t mean anything. All that mattered was the expanse, and the ultimately thin latticework of metal paneling separating him from the end of all things.
Only once, several Earth-months prior, had he met a woman similarly prowling the airlocks, sight-haunted and distant, as though she were listening to choral strains arranged for her ears only.
Their eyes met. She didn’t react to their differential in status in the least, though her unmarked and muddy-colored suit clearly indicated she must be a sanitation worker, and his uniform and likeness singled him out as the Inspector General. They didn’t exchange any words, and crossed paths for three programmed night-cycles and never again. He later discovered she had signed onto his ship upon her son’s promotion and recruitment; the same son listed as missing in action after deployment to an ultimately inconsequential insurgency at a backwater colony cluster. McGillis didn’t see her again, and he didn’t investigate any further. He would respect her Mystery, such as she kept it.
But her eyes lingered in memory, and he thought of them now, as he considered the mask: it was so passingly rare, to cross paths with those few who understood, the few who could hear the song.
Too many mistakenly imagined that Death stalked them, a steady and silent hunter wielding a scythed blade in fleshless hand. He didn’t know whether it would comfort the misguided to know that in fact, Death had no need to hunt them out; we all sailed on fragile ships in Death’s waters, and Death teased and coaxed and begged and commanded, and waited (patiently, kindly) for our very own feet to carry us to the edge. For our very own muscles to bunch and spring and take the leap, of our very own volition.
No one else need do it for us, though the vagaries and twisted mirrors of chance would make it seem otherwise. Death was a fixed point, not a winnower of possibilities—our own feet discarded the possible paths just fine.
Our ends were always, always ours to choose. Some understood, and others—the incurious, the self-satisfied, the shallowly optimistic—simply didn’t seem to. Of the ones who could clearly hear the song, some madly bound themselves to the mast, twisted themselves into knots, frantically working against the tickle at their feet (to no avail, it would horrify them to learn; no cord of any strength could stand against the call). Others could tell the precise moment when their tread veered them towards the edge and, grim and resigned, steadily marked a beat with the soles of their feet towards the blaring horn of doom.
And a vanishingly smaller fraction still, he’d come to learn, deeply enjoyed walking the length of the edge, delighting all the while in contemplating the inexorability of demise; secretly thrilled to see just how long they could hold out before jumping ship to finally drown in song.