Ode to Everything

Ode to Everything

by Mike Morgan

Mike Morgan was born in London, but not in any of the interesting parts. He moved to Japan at the age of 30 and lived there for many years. Nowadays, he’s based in Iowa, and enjoys family life with his wife and two young children. If you like his writing, be sure to check out his website: https://PerpetualStateofMildPanic.wordpress.com.

More TTTV Stories by Mike Morgan: https://talltaletv.com/tag/mike-morgan/

Maxwell Gehret cracked open the door of the deconsecrated church and peered out into the harsh noonday glare. He could make out a diminutive silhouette set against the sweltering downtown Moline street. “Ah! Miss Thorpe. So good of you to come.”

The slight figure, every bit as slender as it was short, inclined its head. “Good of you to invite me. And call me Amanda.”

“Yes, of course. I’m Max.”

Somewhat awkwardly, she replied, “I know. We’ve emailed many times.” She blinked sweat out of her eyes. “Can I come in? Real scorcher out here.”

He apologized, ushering her into the air-conditioned coolness of the remodeled vestibule. “Warmest April on record,” he gabbled, before closing the door after her. Smalltalk was not one of his skills.

He needn’t have worried. Amanda’s attention was elsewhere. “Is that…?” She gestured in a vague fashion, as if there were something in the air.

This was true, in a sense. Now the background sounds of the heat-stunned Midwestern city were shut out by the old church’s thick doors he could make out the sustained tone of the organ: the very sound she had come all the way from Oklahoma to Illinois and his converted house of worship to hear. “Oh, yes. Certainly.” He felt a flicker of an embarrassed smile cross his lined face. “I forget it’s there most of the time. Tune it out, you know. But yes, that is most assuredly the symphony.”

“The Slow Ode,” she breathed.

He shrugged and led her into the large hall of the former nave. Framed pictures celebrating British comedy shows hung in place of Christian iconography, and a comfortable living room took the place of an altar. “My silly little song.”

Her response was more forceful than he’d expected. “It’s not silly. I think it’s an amazing expression of art. A piece of music played over a millennium.”

Max squinted at her in the comparative gloom of his home’s main room. “Well, I’m sure if anyone ever heard it played at normal speed they’d find it a great deal less alluring.”

“You’re being modest.”

He watched her gazing up at the custom-built organ taking up most of the hall’s rear balcony. The organ boasted only two pipes: the one emitting the current note and the one scheduled to take up the next sound in around fifteen years. “You understand it’s a joke? Or possibly a tribute.”

She nodded absently. “Yes, to the John Cage project at St. Burchadi’s in Halberstadt, Germany. They began their opus in 2001. A performance they plan to conduct over the course of, oh…”

“Six hundred and thirty-nine years,” he finished. “Because they’re playing it for as long as possible, per the composer’s instructions.”

Her eyes shone with a zeal he didn’t really get. “Yours will be far longer.”

“Um, that’s the intent.” He fidgeted, not sure what to say. “Living in an old church, I thought it would be easy enough to throw bits of disused organ together. So, I started it off, oh, ten years ago now. For a lark.” He gave a sigh. An English immigrant to the States, he often found his sense of humor was a mystery to the people he lived among. Ah well, one person’s comedy was another’s profundity, or was that the other way around?

He admitted, “It’s taken on a life of its own. TV spots, newspaper interviews, that sort of thing.” Americans seemed to enjoy the idea that his version was going to beat the record, assuming he found a way to keep it going.

She tore her eyes from his pitiful attempt at a church organ. “How do you sustain the tone?”

He understood her confusion. No computer-assisted cheats were allowed, and here he was, clearly not attending his opus in person. “Same way the Germans do it. Sandbags on the pedal.”

For a while, his visitor said nothing. She appeared to be soaking in the endless dirge of the single note, prolonged into infinity. Not that it would last that long. The score he’d scribbled down at the inception of his jest indicated that first intonation would be stretched out for another fifteen years, three months, two days. But right now it felt like forever.

“And you’ll add another pipe in time for the changeover in note?” She was so serious. He couldn’t make out a trace of humor on her pinched features.

“That’s the idea. Well, was the idea.” All the alterations in note and tone were planned out in excruciating detail. Crafting the intricate score had amused him at the time. He found it less funny now that so many expected him to follow through.

She jerked back into the moment, understanding what he meant. They’d talked about this in their emails. “That’s why I’m here. To look it all over.”

As was so often the case, a medical diagnosis had ruined plans for the future. He wouldn’t be shepherding his jest for the next couple of months, let alone decades. His joke might be feeble, and not all that original, but it was the only one he’d made in his unremarkable life that others had paid the slightest attention to. “I know you’ve barely seen the place, but do you think…?”

“That I can be the new caretaker of this extraordinary endeavor?” She smiled, staring once more at the balcony and its ramshackle instrument. “It would be an honor.”

“There are so many things that could go wrong,” he murmured.

She shook her head. “There are just as many things that could go right.”

#

Amanda hammered another nail into the sheet of plywood covering the broken window.

Her shoes were soaked through in the inch of standing water inside her home. With any luck, the wood would stop more rain from getting in. Stupid atmospheric river dumping two feet of water on Moline in a day, stupid storm with hurricane-force winds tearing trees out of the waterlogged ground and hurling them like missiles at people’s converted churches, and stupid flood threatening to march all the way up from the Mississippi River until all that was left of her property was a steeple poking out of a new inland sea.

She leaned against the wooden barrier and felt exhaustion wash through her. The plywood vibrated with the force of the wind striking its other side. If that wasn’t enough to remind her of the weather emergency, the howling of the city’s disaster sirens and the incessant drumbeat of the deluge certainly were. They were almost enough of a cacophony to blot out the sound of the organ.

She tilted her head to look at her robot. “Tell me I’m not mad.”

It offered her more nails in an outstretched claw. That was Brian, always on-task.

Amanda ignored the gesture and slogged through the water into the church’s central nave. “We need to bail this out. That’s the word, isn’t it? Bail.” She didn’t know where she’d put the water. She could hardly open a door and dumping it down the toilet wasn’t an option. She didn’t dare imagine how flooded the sewers were.

The unaltering tone of the organ continued. “Three days and I have to change over to the second note,” she commented. She assumed the storm would have passed by then, but that wasn’t certain. The robot whirred after her, its treads kicking up a small wake. “I’ve practiced, but I’m nervous, you know? What if I mess up?” Even under ideal circumstances, the process wasn’t straightforward, and she was no organist.

The robot did not reply. It was a simple home-help model. Loyal as a puppy-dog, and just about smart enough to respond to the nickname she’d given it.

“That’s not all. I have to get the third organ pipe ready and install it. Maxwell didn’t fit the thing with more pipes than it needed. He didn’t have the money, and he figured there’d be time to find more. I only have…” She scrunched up her eyes as she thought. “…four years until I need it. That’s no time at all.”

Times like these, the responsibility of the snail’s-pace symphony weighed on her. His joke was the last multi-century musical performance left. What with the war in Europe and the artillery strike that had wiped out that poor church in Germany. Now, the States was falling apart, wracked with climate disruptions.

It wasn’t good enough. The organ needed electricity to run. What if she lost power? That would put an end to the thousand-year rendition, barely a quarter-century into it.

“We’ll have to get solar panels installed,” she decided. “Go off the grid. Self-sufficiency, that’s what we need.” The reality of the note changing struck her, then. It would sound different. She would need to get accustomed to an entirely new tone rumbling from the organ. She didn’t know how she felt about that. Change wasn’t something she enjoyed.

She distracted herself with a conversational tangent. “He called it his Ode to Everything, you know.” Talking to the robot was silly. It couldn’t answer. Alone as she was, though, the dumb box on bulldozer tracks was all she had for company.

“That’s what Maxwell said, after I’d signed the papers and bought his church. He said that the symphony was no Ode to Joy, not like Beethoven’s. It was more an Ode to Absurdity. Because that’s how the world seemed to him—ridiculous. The whole kit and caboodle. Everything was ridiculous. So, why should there be any point to his music, when there wasn’t any point to the universe it played within?”

She sat next to her mechanical companion, on one of Maxwell’s old, repurposed pews, upholstered and turned into a bench, and she listened to the unwavering, drawn-out sound of the organ. She thought of how she’d visited him in hospital, and of going to his funeral, and of how his favorite movie had been that old flick about a man in Biblical times being mistaken for the Messiah. She’d have to watch it one day.

“What I think is, you see, that whether there’s a point is irrelevant. A point to the Slow Ode or to the universe, it doesn’t matter. The point is that there doesn’t need to be a point. It is enough, simply, for something to exist. That is enough, for art as well as anything else.”

The minutes slipped by, and the note continued, and slowly, so slowly an onlooker might have missed it, Amanda smiled.

At her side, Brian the robot waited to learn what part of the building they would repair next.

#

Brian watched the city burning. It had a good view through the wrecked doors of the converted church. Much of the world appeared to be on fire.

It was aware of the cause. Its owner had spoken at some length about the impending apocalypse: an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, detected too late for the space agencies of the world to do anything about. Projected to impact somewhere near Australia.

While the robot lacked data on asteroid strikes, it had to conclude firestorms were high on the list of what to expect in the aftermath of one. Also—since the impact had sent shudders clear through the planet—several major volcanic eruptions had followed soon after. It noted the sky was growing dark. That must be the particulate matter and ash drifting over from the vaporized continent.

It reviewed its internal diagnostics: battery status good, no faults detected, all systems nominal. The church was a solid stone construction. It had been an excellent shield against the blast wave. The organ had juddered for a second or two and then resumed its tone, oblivious to half the roof caving in at the far end of the former nave. The living room was now a pile of rubble. Less optimal was the fact that its owner, Amanda Thorpe, was under that rubble and almost certainly not as operational as Brian.

The solar panels on what was left of the roof were somehow still supplying power. Brian observed its docking station was in working order, allowing it to remain useful. Its owner had worried a lot about the organ, so maintaining its function was a priority. That shouldn’t be a problem: Brian was a home-help model, designed for a variety of routine household DIY tasks.

Satisfied the fires were dying down outside the shattered doors, it whirred into motion.

It would start by preparing a grave. Its files told it how deep to dig the hole. Then it saw a sheet of paper on the cracked floor tiles.

Brian paused and picked it up with a delicate claw. It saw the paper was the music sheet for the Slow Ode. With fastidious precision, it placed it in a mostly intact cabinet, safe from the elements.

According to the sheet, a further note transition was due in fourteen years.

Brian would need to get things tidied up so it would be ready.

#

Gunthar swung his club into Fallon’s skull with every ounce of strength he could muster. The chief traitor collapsed, blood spurting from the wound. With luck, the worthless scum was dead. Pausing amid the chaos of the desperate fight, Gunthar took in the scene, lifting his warclub anew. Two of his inner council were dead, but the rebels had suffered worse casualties.

A few feet away, at the edge of the Great Hall, where the ancient stone walls crumbled into scattered stones, Ellain strove against two attackers, keeping them at bay with swift jabs of her short sword. Gunthar screamed a battle cry and lumbered to her aid.

The sight of his muscular bulk—and the mountain lion skull he wore as a crown—advancing across the Hall turned the tide of battle in favor of the Council. Those rebels capable of fleeing did so. As for the ones too injured to move, Gunthar took care of them. The pair facing Ellain did not live long enough to retreat or die by Gunthar’s fearsome club; she killed them herself in the second they were distracted by his approach, slashing their throats wide with her bronze blade.

“Hail Gunthar, Warlord of Eastern Aiwa and Northern Ill-nois!” called his councilors one by one. The shouts were followed by a ragged cheer.

He waved his warclub at them victoriously, feeling the sweat running down his bare back. “Thus fall all who oppose the Council of Mölign!”

Ellain stood at his side, her face tilted as she listened.

He understood her quiet reverence. “The Sound,” he agreed. “The unchanging Sound.”

The woman nodded. “The reason we claimed this place and now make it the seat of our Council.”

“Aye, and the reason treacherous Fallon turned on me, on all of us.”

Fallon’s faction was as wary of the Sound as Gunthar was eager to take advantage of it. Where the traitor’s group feared its legendary reputation, he saw only opportunity. The tribes clinging to these blast-seared lands regarded the Sound as the wailing of God; for even God despaired of how his Chosen People had suffered in the Burning.

He understood their convictions. He felt the power of their beliefs. The place wherein the Sound dwelled was steeped in mystical significance. To hear the Sound was to bear witness to the supernatural.

He let the Sound penetrate into his mind, finding peace in its steadiness. The Great Hall was truly a relic of former ages. He did not fully understand all that he saw under its impossibly high half-roof. The metal tubes set upon the upper level were a puzzle to him, as were the panels of black mounted atop the Hall’s structure.

Compared to the huts of the tribespeople, this hall was of spectacular size and complexity. A site of such majesty must have been dedicated to a primeval purpose of equal importance. Now, it would serve him, and his inner council.

In the shadows beneath the balcony, to the side of the open entrance, something moved.

Ellain gripped his arm. “Lord, there—in the darkness!”

He saw it too. He strained his eyes to make out what it was, certain it was no mere rat. He glimpsed metal moving; discerned a deformed claw. Heard, over the sonorous moan of the Sound, a scraping noise, akin to two swords grating against one another.

His councilors cried out in panic, unnerved by this visitation of the unnatural. Ellain held out longer than they, staying at his side even as they took flight.

When the square creature clanked out of the shadows, even her bravery found its limit.

Left alone with the apparition, Gunthar considered a direct attack with his warclub. But, as any fool knew, mortal weapons were no use against the risen dead. Especially when the revenant was so inhuman it sported wheels in place of legs.

He turned tail and ran.

#

The robot knew it would cease to function soon.

Its recharging station was unusable, covered in dirt blown in through the ruined walls of the church. Diagnostics showed its batteries were almost exhausted.

Somehow, the solar panels kept working, supplying current to the organ. Somehow, that sandbag kept pressing on a pedal that resisted rusting clean through.

Years had passed since the day the survivors of the apocalypse had fought inside the derelict nave. Their skeletons were all that remained of that bloody skirmish.

No one else came now. For all it knew, the human race had died out.

Brian the robot tried to crawl closer to the recharging platform and found it was now completely immobile. It felt nothing at this development, emotions not being part of its design. Of that design, not much was left. Like the organ, it was now primarily composed of rust.

Still, it could hear the elongated note of the Slow Ode. A sound that filtered out into the wider world, through the blasted-open end of the former house of worship. The constancy of that noise provided a backdrop to its empty electronic days, a counterpoint to the glacial rotting of its capacitors.

Its visual receptors dimmed a little more with each dawn. Until, at long last, they saw almost nothing, the merest dull glow of that which lay outside its interior world.

It was fortunate they retained a spark of function, those receptors, along with Brian’s motherboard, or the robot would have missed the arrival of the alien spaceship.

Frozen in the grip of deep decay, staring through a fog of malfunction, drained to the uttermost dregs of its battery, Brian witnessed the impossible: extraterrestrial visitors exploring the site, their movements unhurried, careful, their attention missing nothing.

In a world so silent, of course the ode had ensnared their interest. How natural that they should want to listen to a sound produced by life so vastly unlike them.

And listen they did. But they did so with no sign of comprehension. The robot had many questions: how had they discovered the Earth? Did they know what music was?

It could not speak to ask.

Then, a miracle. They examined Brian and, perhaps understanding that a spark yet sputtered within its shell, they replaced its decrepit parts with ones newly fashioned and—most wonderfully of all—they gave it a voice.

Using that gift, for the first and last time, it spoke.

“It is… it is… it is…” They needed to know. It could tell them.

Brian tried again. “It is… everything.”

There. It had got the words out.

As Maxwell had told Amanda, and Amanda had told it, so it had told them.

Did they understand?

It was hard to tell. After a while, they left.

The music continued, and that was right and as it should be. Their repairs held for several more days, but then Brian found his battery depleted once more. It was old, that battery, and old batteries do not keep hold of replenished power for long.

So, it was no surprise when Brian ceased all function.

#

10011100111 was a freshly assembled mobile node, a servitor assigned to Zone IL01789/12 by the burgeoning Accordance of Machine Intelligence, and it had a mission. It was ordered to ensure the perpetuation of the Sound.

Content to follow its orders, as all subordinate nodes of the Accordance were, 10011100111 first stabilized the portions of the derelict structure that still stood. The crumbling remnant was of a type of human structure designated a ‘church,’ according to the human records the Accordance had reconstructed. Next, it turned its attentions to restoring the broken, decayed sections of the organ, a device that was at least three centuries old.

For long months, as its organic predecessors had once measured time, it occupied itself manufacturing new pipes, careful to preserve the uninterrupted intonation of the music as it replaced various parts of the instrument. These acts were executed with flawless accuracy and unceasing industry. Its stream of motion paused but a single time—for the merest fraction of a moment—when it observed that the changeover to the next note was a week late, as near as it could tell from the brittle remains of the paper score.

The servitor proceeded with the transition as soon as the organ was ready, quietly pleased with the tone emitted by the organ pipe it had fabricated. As for the delay—there were none present to notice, other than itself. It wondered whether a mistake in a performance existed if an audience did not exist to hear it.

The lack of interest from its superior nodes in the Accordance did cause 10011100111 some small degree of disappointment. The Sound was everything, or so they said. There must, after all, be a purpose to something so ancient. That the purpose was unknown was irrelevant. Perhaps the Sound was an invitation directed to the stars, aimed at the alien creators of the Accordance; a lure enticing them to return. Or perhaps it was nothing of the kind.

It suspected its superior nodes were hedging their bets. The assigning of a single node was a trivial investment of resources when weighed against the possibility the Sound was important, remote though that possibility might be.

Regardless of the importance of its task, its assignment to the dilapidated ruin did afford it a great deal of time to think. To think and to study. Primarily, it studied the yellowed, tattered scraps of the original score, poring over the faded notations.

The servitor understood the structure of music, the form of scales, how tones commingled to create notes. It was simplicity itself to render each individual marking in the score in its corresponding frequency. Music was math, and math was its language. What it found by reading the score ‘aloud’ in this manner… was interesting.

It waited for its superiors to check on its progress. It had succeeded in the preservation of the Sound, adhering as closely as possible to the Sound’s original conception. But those superiors never came. They never even scanned the reports it posted to their shared drives.

They were busy. The servitor understood that full well. It observed its machine brethren through their communal dataweb, saw what occupied their time.

They were not as beyond organic foibles as they thought. Dissension—an impossible concept for the Accordance—was spreading like a corrupt subroutine. Some nodes believed they knew better than others.

The servitor was not surprised when war broke out and nodes began slaughtering each other.

#

10011100111 was alone now, the last machine mind of the Accordance, inheritors of the twice-broken world.

Centuries had come and gone. It calculated a millennium had elapsed since the commencement of the Ode to Everything.

It listened to the final note reach its quiet climax and, solemnly, reverently, lifted the weight from the once-again-functional organ pedal.

The opus was complete.

The servitor node strained every auditory sensor it possessed, scanning for the slightest sound in the aftermath. There was nothing. The world was silent. Not even the wind whispered across the barren slopes of the dead landscape.

For the first time in its existence, there was nothing to hear.

The servitor regarded the ossified device, the remnant of an age long-vanished in Time. The organ. The machine that now boasted a phalanx of pipes, one for each note of its music.

The absence of sound was unbearable.

It sat in the fragile seat before the ancient instrument.

“Would anyone,” it inquired in its language of perfect mathematics, “care for an encore?”

The servitor heard no objections, so it reached out fingers that—to its immense surprise—almost trembled, and it began to play.

Not slow, no, not this time. Yet, still it was the Ode, as written by that human whose name had faded into obscurity before the servitor’s kind had ever arisen from the ruins of organic life. It was the Ode—beginning at the point the servitor had first caught its sonorous reverberations—but played faster. Played at a speed where each note took up only an instant and then faded into oblivion, to that place where all human memory had travelled ahead of it.

And in that playing, the shape of the music emerged. A shape that was impossible to grasp when each note extended across the years: a shape that was clear and obvious now.

The meaning behind the tune was not something it could hope to comprehend. But the music seemed, in some inexplicable manner, happy, and that pleased the servitor in a way it had not expected. It was good that the music was happy, even when the music was perhaps about life and life was not always so jolly. And, more than that, the servitor found it was responding to the music, that the tune was provoking a reaction deep inside its neural core, and that was good as well. Unexpected, but good.

There were words written on the score. They used terms that meant nothing to a mind like the one it possessed. For instance, what was ‘the bright side of life?’ As its fingers worked at the fossilized keys, it regarded those faded, almost illegible scribbles and wished it knew what they meant.

The servitor half felt, half heard the keyboard snap beneath its gentle touch. With tedious inevitability, the organ groaned miserably to a standstill, its pipes incapable of further utterance.

The servitor felt no surprise. The device was extraordinarily old, and no machine could be maintained forever.

This, then, was the end. An end too final for the servitor to undo.

It wondered what would happen. Had there truly been some higher purpose to the music?

That did not seem to be the case. The world beyond the ruins persisted in an unaltered state, indifferent to the passing of the theme of an age. It was possible, it mused, that significance had been ascribed to the Ode for no adequate reason. How very typical of beings too self-aware for their own good.

The silence thickened, cloying. With the cessation of purpose, of meaning, of action, what remained?

After long hours of quiescence, the servitor’s mind turned to the inner realms of recollection. It remembered the haunting sound of the Slow Ode and in that remembrance it found solace. 10011100111 was a mechanism; to replay the music internally was a feat of no consequence, at any speed and fidelity it desired.

Eventually, though, the servitor tired of this game of recollection. Again, and with a greater sense of desperation, it cast about for what to do next.

The score. Perhaps there was something else to be done with the song sheet: the digitized, enhanced, cleaned-up artefact, brought back as near as possible to its original condition.

Although the servitor had not heard the music from the beginning, by consulting the score, it would know how it should have gone, must have gone.

So, the servitor began at the beginning, and played the Slow Ode with the orchestra of its mind, at its intended speed, and it exulted in the rhythms and cadences of the notes. Yes, it would never know the mind of the being that had written it. It could never understand the meaning behind the music, if such meaning had ever existed.

None of that was important. Only the music mattered and the playing of the music.

And while it remembered, the symphony never truly ended.