Conducting

When the colonists of a distant space mining compound discover a creature that creates musical sounds in response to human movements, the sport of conducting is born. But one wrong move makes the wrong note, which causes the creature to eat the unlucky conductor. Or so they think.

TW: a bit of gore but it’s not Saw. It’s like, heavily implied gore. Anyway, one of my personal favorites

Today, the pit would be Conducted. 

This had not happened in ten months. 

The seven hundred colonists of Orpheus gathered around the pit, none less than twenty feet from the edge. And they watched in morbid awe as Rooney Belle stepped out onto the shallow pier over the silent void below. 

They waited. 

The landscape of this dwarf planet they’d been deposited on by DaxPac some twelve years ago was that of dust. Thick, powdery, slightly damp from a chilly humid atmosphere so black clumps would stick to whatever warm thing they touched. The land arranged itself in extremes, rolling between hills and craters with hardly any flat between, and the sand made it so there wasn’t much purchase to be found. 

The one place that departed from this norm was the pit out next to the Orpheus Mining Station. 

Sharp black rock cut into tiers, as if the planet itself had anticipated the need for a coliseum of sorts, while the pit itself went straight down. Seven hundred heads, seven hundred faces in the dim bluish light that managed to slip through the thick, overcast atmosphere. It only ever got darker than this, so today was a nice day for Conducting. 

The dwarf planet, also named Orpheus, had oxygen and about a quarter of its rotational cycle allowed for conditions that were not sub-arctic. Beyond that, it was not fit for humans, or anything alive. Except for the thing in the pit. The Symphony, as they called it. 

Joe Morris strained his neck over the sea of dark heads to catch sight of Rooney Belle. He was shorter than he would’ve liked to be at fifteen, though he expected the growth would hit any day now. His father and brother were the tallest colonists on Orpheus Station, his mother and sister too. And it was a well known fact that you’d better make sure a Morris was near when the volatile subject of politics or company benefits or card games came up. 

So the growth would hit. Even if it was supposed to hit at thirteen, and Mother had begun to remark about a grand uncle that had never grown past five feet. Joe was sure. The growth would hit. Any day now. 

He strained his neck even harder, feeling a distinct click in the muscle. Joe needed to watch. It was important. 

Rooney Belle was the last prodigy of the great Conductor Loomis Lee, who had pulled the sweetest sounds from the Symphony to date. Joe still remembered, though he’d been four. And if not for that accidental wrist twitch, Loomis would still be Conducting today. In that time since, eight of his students had created lovely music from the Symphony, but it was a tiny mistake here, a microscopic accident there. Now, only Belle was left. 

Joe watched all of it, he observed and he studied. 

There was no doubt Belle was a master. A small, sturdy little woman who had a quiet way about her. Her theories on how facial movement could pull those pitches so high and so low from the Symphony that human ears couldn’t hear, yet still influenced the plane of emotion, were unmatched. Even by Loomis Lee. 

They’d led Joe’s mind on many a journey through sleepless nights, snowballing through a world of discovery that left him impatient and jittery to test such thoughts. 

Eleven years and Rooney Belle had finally agreed to Conduct the Symphony. 

This would be a remarkable day. A passing of the torch, Joe felt, from the old generation to the new. 

Belle raised her arms, palms up. 

If the crowd was not still before, it was frozen now. Joe held his breath. An open palm start, very traditional. It was the safe option, and Joe would’ve liked something bit more bold, but this was to be expected from Belle. 

For a moment, there was utter silence. That beat after the universe had drawn in breath and filled its lungs. 

Then, the darkness in the pit began to writhe. Like sand, vibrating with the surface it rested on. Joe squinted and found he was clacking his teeth together softly. So hungry, so eager, he chewed on what was not yet to be eaten. 

Belle crossed her arms over her head, palms still open, then sliced her right hand through the air over the pit. The darkness jumped, and the first tentacle rose into the inky blue light. 

Steel scales coating the slender appendage, looking like razors. It looped and arched itself until the end of the tentacle snapped through the air like the end of a whip, a bronze talon at the tip. 

Belle repeated her gesture with her right hand, and the Symphony complied, arching more limbs and talons through the air. 

And the music followed. 

So slow, so sweet. A heavy nostalgia that descended over the heart and squeezed with such a yearning, one could not remember anything else but that unknown piece of the soul that had been lost a long time ago. Joe thought he might wander the fog forever, helpless and forlorn and hollow. 

He blinked, feeling his heavy eyelashes. Ah, tears. His cheeks were wet and salty with them. Joe smiled, running the back of his hand over his face. 

The pit was alive with motion. It looked like a sea of shiny steel scales, low waves rolling and tossing. 

Belle kept her movements slow, and fingers rigid. Interesting. Loomis Lee always advocated the need for soft fingers and Joe was inclined to agree. In fact, some of the best sounds were pulled from the Symphony by the fingers. But, once again, this was to be expected. Belle was a staunch traditionalist. 

Still, Joe smiled. How lovely it was to cry. 

The song swelled, just as the Symphony did. The crescendo, the great answer to the song’s mournful question. Lost forever, lost forever. Such tragedy. There was simply no light. A husk, a shell, a longing for what could not be remembered. Forever wandering. And––

Joe saw it. The hesitation. Belle’s mouth fell open. And she hesitated. Joe expected she hadn’t intended to open it, and now she was stuck as to what to do with it. Her eyes went wide. 

Joe didn’t look away in time. 

A portion of the crowd screamed. 

The music became a screech. 

The talon shot out. 

A squelching. 

A ripping. 

And the limp form of the Conductor disappeared with the Symphony into the darkness below. 

Silence. Specifically, the silence after. 

A horrible horrible nothing. 

Joe’s shoulders slumped. Someone cried while a low murmur swept the colonists, alongside a crushing disappointment. 

Yet another Conductor, swallowed by the Symphony. Another little mistake. Oh, but such sweet sounds, such sweet melodies. Perhaps nobody was perfect enough to finish their song. Maybe they ought to stop Conducting. No no, the music was too important, they knew what they were getting into. Well that was the last of the greats. It would be mediocre from here on out. No, surely not. These up and comers had some good ideas. But it wouldn’t be like it used to be, never again. 

Joe followed his parents back to the Compound, back inside the facility. 

His eldest brother was upset. He’d lost money. 

“The problem is your optimism,” Joe’s sister told his brother. “You always bet on them to live. When have any of them lived?”

“They keep doing the same thing wrong,” Joe spoke up suddenly. He’d had this theory for a long time now, but Rooney Belle had all but cemented it. And even with the heavy rock at the base of his stomach, an invigorating electricity hummed through his limbs. He had the answer.

His sister gave him a skeptical side eye while his brother held the door for the Morris family to file into their little apartment. “Well shoot,” she said, “why didn’t you speak up sooner? Gather ‘round, everyone, Joe knows something seven hundred people and a trained professional were too stupid to realize. Go on, Joe, enlighten us with your brilliance.”

Joe sucked in breath through gritted teeth. “They all panic.”

“Oh, that’s what it is!” His sister slapped a palm against her forehead. “And here I was, assuming it was the alien monster we keep tampering with. Silly me.” 

Joe’s face went hot and he knew it was lit up like a cherry. He opened his mouth to defend Conducting’s dignity, but their father spoke before him. “Maybe we just have dinner. Quietly.”

Joe sat down on his little stool in the corner and crossed his arms bitterly. 

They didn’t understand. Conducting was an art. It was important in a way that words could not quite describe. The stupidest of the colonists regarded it as a sport. ‘Will they survive this time around? I’ll bet ya they won’t’. And the smallest of them thought of it as a waste. ‘What good is it to poke at a monster just outside the compound? For a bit of music? We’ve got a few records the company sent with us, you can listen to that music’. As if they weren’t advertisement jingles. 

Not for the first time, Joe imagined himself on that pier, looking down into the darkness, knowing the Symphony watched and waited. 

To stare down the beast of existence, and make it sing for you. To traverse past the structured into the abstract, those unknowable things on unknowable planes where it all finally began to make sense. To finally understand something you had no hope of comprehending. 

It was true, all the great Conductors panicked. Joe had watched them. They made a small mistake and for that split second of bafflement and shock, they lingered on the mistake. The music strayed into noise, the bull was not redirected in its charge, and the Conductors were eaten alive. 

But if they could just…lean into the mistake. Anticipate the unexpected and include the chaos in the Conducting. That was the great secret. Not perfection. Perfect was a swamp. 

“I’m going to be the next Conductor,” Joe announced. 

His family, all in their separate spots of comfort, stopped and turned to him. Mother leaning over the stove, Father in his chair by the furnace, his sister and brother playing cards at the table. They all stared. 

An awful pause. 

Finally, his father gave a phlegmy exhale. “Perhaps that’s left up to the professionals, huh?”

“I already know how to do it. I know all the theories, I even have my own, and I’ve practiced the movements.” Joe stood up. “Here, test me. Go on.”

“You just want the hero worship,” his brother said. “That’s probably why Belle dragged her feet as long as she did. All pay and no work makes Jack a happy boy.”

“That’s not even the saying,” Joe snapped. “And that’s not why I’m doing it.” He could do it right. He could be the Conductor that finished his song. In fact, he would be. 

“You’re too small for all that ego, Joe,” his sister remarked with a laugh. 

Oh, but the ego was necessary. You had to have a bit of ego to approach the impossible, and even more ego to defeat the ‘im’. Joe stood up a little straighter, cold eyes passing between his elder siblings. His parents would not even meet his gaze.

What was he doing, begging for the validation of small people? They would always be exactly what they were. The hardworking expendables. Never able to rise beyond their physical forms, never able to escape this place. And they’d never be able to understand the reason why seven hundred faces gathered to listen to the Symphony other than ‘fun’. 

They were not worthy of his attention.

So he turned to the Panel. 

Orpheus Station was ruled over by a small group of cranky engineers who were paid an exorbitant amount of money to supervise the drilling and occasionally fix things, though they’d all since realized this was the short end of a bad deal. What were you going to spend all that salary on out here? 

Suffice to say, they were enthusiastic about entertainment. 

Joe imagined they’d jump at his offer. A Conductor died and suddenly everyone was a bit jumpy about the next Conducting. People would disapprove of the Symphony, there’d be some kind of petition to bomb the pit, and it would all eventually pass into oblivion while the Panel went about quietly cultivating the next big event. And nobody else would be eager to Conduct right about now. So Joe offered himself up. 

“No,” the weedy little man hardly looked up from his clipboard. Around them, the station’s cafeteria buzzed with the shift change. 

Joe frowned down at him. 

“Why not? I know how to do it, I even know what Rooney Belle did wrong. She opened her mouth and startled herself––”

“Nobody trained you for this sort of thing,” the man said.

Joe glanced to the next man at the table, and the next, all the way down the line. None of them paid him any mind. All wrapped up in clipboards and rehydrated lasagna. 

“Who’s left to train me?” They had to know how ridiculous it sounded. 

“Listen, my boy,” another man sighed, “I understand. You’ve studied your heroes, you’ve sat for countless hours thinking about the songs they created. But they have lived. Years upon years of experience, and you have, what? Ten years?”

Joe scoffed, though a small part of him drooped. Ten? They thought he was ten? He wasn’t that small. Was he?

“So you’ve studied the great Conductors of before, you can emulate their movement, and yet you have no experience to draw from. Me thinks that is a recipe for what we have already heard, and then you would inevitably die because it is as my good colleague here said, you aren’t trained. Do you know how many morons come crawling to us demanding to be the next Conductor? And they all sound like you.”

“But I have these new ideas––”

“No no, you are denied. That is all.”

And that was all. Because none of the Panel acknowledged his existence after that.

It was a riptide. Training and years of experience to apply, nevermind there was nobody left to do the training and no way to gain experience when one’s life consisted of work your shift, go home, sleep, wake up for your shift, go home, sleep. And for twenty years. Joe’s parents were contracted for two more decades. 

Besides that, create something new but create it using the old ways. 

Even if he were older, Joe doubted they’d let him do anything without proof, but how was he to show proof when they wouldn’t let him try?

The way the whole of Orpheus Station looked at him. Why aren’t you satisfied, Joe? Why do you act all superior, Joe? Why are you so small, Joe? They’d never let him do anything. Not in a million years. 

The Panel wanted proof? Fine. 

Nobody noticed little Joe Morris slip out D-Wing’s side door and trot across the black powder to the little chainlink fence, nor did they notice him dig a hole and slip beneath it. Surveillance only picked him up when he triggered one of the silent alarms they’d installed out by the pit. But by the time colonists came scrambling out after him, he already lingered on the edge of the pier, staring the beast in the face. 

Joe hadn’t anticipated the cold. But he didn’t care. See? That was the secret. Why couldn’t they be fine with trying something different? That didn’t need training. 

The darkness spread across the pit was far thicker than it looked from far away. A sea of ink, and a silence permeating from the depths that, to Joe, seemed to make the universe stand still. 

He flexed his hands. Keep the fingers loose, don’t let anything get rigid. Rigidity was the herald of death. 

Somewhere, he could hear voices. Screaming for him. Shoes stumbling through black dust, swallowed by Orpheus the planet. Joe could feel it smiling at him, could feel the Symphony waiting. 

He inhaled, long and slow. And he raised his arms, palms down. 

It took him. The Flow. Joe didn’t hear the music, he didn’t see the accrual of the faces gathering around, some to listen, others to snatch him away from the Symphony. But he was Conducting and there was nothing they could do now except listen. 

Joe was beyond his body, beyond his mind. He was one with the heart of everything. 

No word could describe the sounds. 

Only that it threaded a single chord through the colonists and pulled it taut, and with a single strum, made them all cry. 

Joe was right. He made countless mistakes and he didn’t panic. He persisted. His song was ongoing. 

But then Joe came back into himself. 

Sweat glistened across his brow, and the beginnings of a stormfront rolled in on a black steed from the west, swallowing the mountains across the horizon. He heard the music, he beheld his crowd, he saw all that was in front of him. And he saw the great tentacles and their razor scales; saw the bronze talons at the tips. How close they were, how they danced. 

The great folly, Joe learned as he Conducted, was not that the others before him had made mistakes and panicked. In fact, it probably wasn’t the mistakes that made them panic. 

It was that they couldn’t stop.