Blood Vivicanti (9780989878593) (2 page)

By this time, the song of the Great Harmony had adapted and changed so much that the theme of Kharetie life was based on conforming to the standard set by tradition.

The structure of the music began to weaken.

Only older Kharetie and eccentrics possessed the rare ability to make logical counterpoint.

Continents divided and formed into countries with governments that squabbled tunefully about territory and natural resources. They wrote wordy constitutions. They wove flags.

There was a world war or two.

All the songs in the Great Harmony were in minor keys and many Kharetie soon forgot what a major chord sounded like.

Life on Khariton was no longer called the Great Harmony.

It was officially renamed as “the Noise.”

The Noise was the only issue they could harmonize about.

The name Lowen became a curse word.

Kharetie mothers washed their hatchlings’s mouth out with soap whenever they caught them saying things like, “You’re a piece of Lowen,” or “I was so Lowen-faced last night,” or “Lowen!”

The soap industry thrived.

Peace came to the Noise after a lot of violet blood was shed.

Leaders across Khariton formed the Political Chorus. They sang about the legend of Lowen and they wondered how he had created such devastation to the fabled Great Harmony.

They came to the conclusion that he must have invented his note of discord in his scientific laboratory, and they hoped he’d also concocted an antidote.

The Political Chorus put it to a vote and the two-thirds majority won: They would develop a space program, create big space rockets, and they would search space for Lowen’s ghost.

The only problem was that no one really wanted to leave the planet. Some liked the Noise while others hoped for the return of the Great Harmony, and no one had any luggage for a long trip.

So their best scientists decided to hatch a new kind of Kharetie, one that would leave the Great Harmony, travel through space, find the ghost of Lowen, and bring him back to Khariton to fix the cracks in their society.

This new kind of Kharetie would really stand out. Instead of blue skin, he would have red. Instead of red eyes, he would have yellow.

His Kharetie name would be “Silent” because they would not give him a voice.

They didn’t want any more voices adding to the Noise.

They designed him to keep all his memories inside his blood, so that he would never forget his way home – “because space is very big,” sang one song in the Noise.

They also designed him to communicate through blood too. He would drink blood to know what was on someone’s mind. He would share his thoughts through his blood too.

They implanted a needle on the tip of his tongue because biting for blood seemed too barbaric to them. The needle would inject his listener with an aphrodisiac so that they would really enjoy everything he had to share.

The scientists then hatched Silent and they told him he was different and that he could never add anything to the Great Harmony.

Silent never felt welcomed on the planet and he developed a great desire to leave.

Kharetie engineers built a spaceship for him. It was robin’s egg blue. It was in the shape of an egg too.

The Kharetie packed a lunch of blood bags for him. Then they sent him into outer space to look for Lowen’s ghost.

“He’s a violet specter now,” they reminded him in song.

“His eyes glow red,” they chorused.

Silent traveled for a long time through space. He saw many interesting planets and moons, but he never found Lowen.

Life on the spaceship got very lonely.

Silent became nostalgic after a while, he forgot about all the bad times he’d had on Khariton, and he remembered only the good songs in the Noise.

He wondered how the Kharetie were doing and if they’d ever fixed some of the cracks in their society. He hoped they had changed the name of The Noise back to the Great Harmony.

He visited a few galaxies that had about ten billion inhabitable planets and he visited the ones that had developed a world wide web and social media, so he could get the word out about Lowen’s ghost.

Most of the inhabitants of the planets that he visited were very surprised to encounter an alien from another planet. They said in their language, “We thought we were alone in the universe!”

But they were very disappointed when Silent had nothing important to say about the meaning of life.

He communicated by drinking blood and sharing his own with planet inhabitants.

A few didn’t mind at all since they already had similar practices.

Most were frightened by him and they chased him away with torches and pitchforks.

He learned little from the planets he visited.

Several told him that they had never heard of Lowen’s ghost and they sent him on his way.

Very few recalled having seen a violet specter with red glowing eyes. But the ones that did pointed him in the direction of a blue-green planet in a single sun solar system in a distant galaxy.

“Be careful,” they warned. “The natives still think that touch screen devices are pretty nifty.”

Silent followed Lowen’s trail to the Milky Way Galaxy. He parked his spaceship on Titan for a lovely view of Saturn’s rings.

Then he landed on Earth and found Lowen in a few earth days.

The ghost had been haunting an old plantation in New Orleans and he had also become the accidental star of a television show about ghost hunting. The eerie things he did spooked the television crew and boosted ratings.

Silent wished that Lowen the ghost had a body to pierce and blood to drink because then it would have been much easier for them to communicate.

Making signs with his hands, Silent tried to tell Lowen about the Great Harmony and the Noise, but the ghost was not a very good player at charades.

Lowen entertained Silent for a spell in his haunted mansion. He served afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches. He planned to serve scones next, but he insisted that Silent had to leave after that.

The television crew had just returned to start filming the new season and he had a lot of chains to rattle and doors to slam.

The Government realized that a spaceship had landed on earth. So they sent the army to capture Silent.

Tanks and important-looking jeeps parked outside the haunted mansion right when Lowen was taking a tray of scones out of the oven.

A general in aviator sunglasses pointed and shouted. The tanks shelled the mansion. Not a splinter remained.

Silent’s spaceship had protected him with an energy shield that had already endured much more impressive displays of power than earthling fireworks.

Lowen had liked his haunted mansion very much and he was utterly enraged that it was now destroyed. The ghost started making plans to take over the world.

But before Lowen could enact his plans, Silent decided it was time to leave, so his spaceship bound Lowen’s ghost in a repo-beam and pulled him into a compartment that the Kharetie had made especially for capturing ghosts.

Silent was about to fly back to Khariton when he accidently heard a peculiar sound coming out of a small device that earthlings called “a radio.”

Silent had grown up listening to the Noise and to ancient mythological tales about how the Great Harmony had once been paradise. But in his hearts, he had never truly believed anything like that was possible. Harmony was a fairy tale as far as he was concerned.

So he was greatly surprised when the magical counterpoint in Bach’s
Minuet in D Minor
knocked him out cold.

The Government considered this a happy accident. They tied up Silent and then they strapped him down to an operating table.

They hauled him and his spaceship (with Lowen locked inside) to a place that they called “the Cellar.”

The Government then turned off the music for interrogation.

Silent tried to do what he had been programmed to do since his hatching: He tried to express himself by drinking their blood and by sharing some of his own. He longed to tell them all he knew about the Noise, about Lowen, about life on other planets, about everything.

But the Government was now very concerned about no longer being the only intelligence in the universe. And they worried about the sudden collapse of a mystical force that they called “the economy.”

Citizens of earth got wind of this commotion and panic broke out in the cities.

The Government assured them that they were still alone in the cosmos and that the spaceship they heard about was an old satellite looking for life on other planets.

“The alien,” the Government lied on national television, “was a space monkey.”

The Government did not know that he was called Silent, so they labeled him as the “Red Man.”

Next they brought in a team of scientists to euthanize and dissect the Red Man.

One of those scientists was Wyn, before he ever became the first Blood Vivicanti. He was the lead scientist on Team A and his team would study the Red Man’s body and blood.

The leader of Team B was a beautiful woman named Aemilia. She and her team would study the Red Man’s spaceship.

The spaceship was locked in Cellar-6 while the Red Man was locked in Cellar-7, where Bach’s music blared through loud speakers to keep him perfectly motionless.

Wyn and Aemilia did not see one another much – not at first.

The two Cellars were the most impressive laboratories that either had seen.

There was computer equipment so advanced that it did not appear to be from planet Earth. There were hovering spheres of light as large as beach balls illuminating everything, there were cybernetic spiders making repairs and upgrades to a few computer terminals, and there was even a food replicator in a wall like a dumbwaiter.

Google sponsorship was everywhere.

Aemilia and Wyn met once a week over coffee to exchange notes. She talked about the egg-shaped spaceship and its robin’s egg blue color. He talked about the Red Man’s skin and his violet blood.

Their meetings were short at first. But they grew longer in time. And coffee turned into dinner and dancing.

Wyn and Aemilia talked about the things they had in common, like their favorite video games and books and their mutual hobby of collecting double dactyls and their love for triangle sandwiches.

They married under a gazebo at Aemilia’s mansion.

Wyn had come from poverty and scholarships.

Aemilia’s late uncle had willed his fortune to her, his favorite niece. Her uncle had been an oil tycoon. He had swum in the planet’s diminishing fossil fuels and greenbacks.

Now Aemilia was breaststroking in billions.

There came a time when the Government urged Wyn to cut open the Red Man and gut out his offal like a fish.

He spent hours trying to convince them that this was a bad idea and that it would be better to keep the Red Man alive for further study. He presented a good logical argument and he thought that he had won his case because in the end the Government decided to forestall the Red Man’s scientific evisceration.

Wyn laughed later when he realized that his logical arguments had had no bearing whatsoever on the Government’s decision. It turned out that Aemilia had kept the Red Man alive by making a sizeable donation to the campaign fund of the politician spearheading this project.

The project had been called:
Operation Red Man
.

Wyn subsequently dubbed it: “Project Monkeyshines.”

Bach’s music continued to blare through loud speakers while Wyn studied the Red Man’s physiology and Aemilia studied his spaceship.

The Red Man’s body was utterly hairless and totally muscular. His red skin was smooth with natural oils.

The music kept him perfectly motionless, except for his chest, which rose and fell with breath about once every thirty minutes, the way dolphins breathe.

His eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, never shutting, never blinking, just staring.

Wyn had grown a little tired of Bach’s music. More than once he tried to turn it off. But changing the music was impossible: It would have been easier for him to add his beaming visage to the carved portraits on Mount Rushmore.

He was fascinated that music could make the Red Man powerless. Wyn called this phenomenon “auditory anesthetization.” He likened it to inhalational anesthetics – the way earth creatures can be rendered inert by the odor of certain vapors.

People go unconscious by inhaling chloroform, he explained in a report. Predator bugs can be knocked out by one whiff of the bombardier beetle’s projectile flatulence.

It seemed perfectly possible to him that creatures from other planets could go senseless by sound waves.

Aemilia adored Bach’s music. She compared the loveliness of its “multidimensional sounds” to the orderliness of the Golden Ratio.

She had been a great violinist, too. And she would play the violin to help her solve mysteries, the way Sherlock Holmes would do.

Playing her violin now gave her a new idea.

“We should study the Red Man and his spaceship together,” she said to Wyn.

It was a good idea. He wished he had thought of it first.

Cellar-6 did not have loud speakers for playing Bach’s music, and they needed to keep the Red Man inert, so they moved his spaceship from there to Cellar-7.

The Kharetie had programmed the spaceship to defend the Red Man against the harmful effects of combustibles, shock waves, and musical harmony.

So the spaceship detected Bach’s music and extended an iridescent energy shield that bamboozled not only everyone there, but also the electrical field of every piece of equipment.

Everything but the lights shut down.

The music playing through the loud speakers silenced.

The Red Man had been awake that whole time, but he had not understood the goings-on around him.

He had heard every word that Wyn and Aemilia spoke, despite the fact that their utterances sounded like gibberish to his mind, addled by the beautiful music. Yet he had the vague impression that they were much kinder to him than most other earthlings had been. And he had the worrisome sense that the music might never turn off and he might never be able to return to his home beyond this sun and moon and peculiar constellations.