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[This short-story results
of a partnership with the French Sci-Fi writer Georges Bormand, that
wrote it after watching my VideoArt "Spacey-Noises"]
Spacey-Noises
by Georges Bormand
Who said that in space one doesn’t hear any noise? It’s true for one who
is in the real void, of course, out of the spatial ship. But inside the
ship, when it runs at thousands of kilometers per second, the rubbing of
tiny atoms of hydrogen against the sides of the ship suffices to produce
a permanent whistling which fills the cabin.
Every time the ship accelerates, the noise becomes shriller; not
counting encounters with more or less dense clouds of various atoms. It
is a lancinating music; isn’t it, really, what eulogized Huygens as "the
music of spheres"?
Some astronauts cannot stand it, and they need to mask it with their
favorite music records constantly playing throughout the trip; I love
it, it is the music of my voyages in space, and when I am not in flight
I miss it. Every change in the sound, in the tone or in the loudness,
wakes me up when I am sleeping.
I recorded a few minutes of particularly pretty sounds (it’s my taste,
how do you dare to contest it?), and corresponding images from the
control screens of the ship.
When I play them, some feel sorry for me and ask: « How can you endure
such uproar a whole flight long? »
I feel sorry for them, who are not able to recognize beauty. Poor men.
I must tell that the flight during which I recorded these minutes was
not an easy going one ; the rocket nearly crashed on a large asteroid ;
when I talk of a near miss, I mean that I passed at about 10 kilometers
from the asteroid ; but ten kilometers from the rocky core is a zone
where the concentration in gaseous molecules is already more than one
hundred times that of the ordinary void, and the concert I owed to the
hail of shots against the walls of the ship was proportional to this
increasing. In all, between the actions needed to avoid collision when I
discovered the danger, and the trajectory corrections to compensate for
both deviations, the avoiding moves and the consequences of the meeting,
I needed to work many hours; thus the record reminds me also of the
needed wariness in every flight.
Besides, it is now time that I put all my attention upon the present
flight, before an accident occurs because I am absent-mindedly speaking
to you... |