Page 54 of Collision!
they’ll light our way ‘cross all of time,
our promise blazing bright as suns.”
Remy held the last word, the melody one note off of resolving, until Ikaryo completed the harmony with a flowing arpeggio like a synth harp.Then her voice and his accompaniment blended into a perfect balance, each with their own sound but beautifully woven together.
Ikaryo held the final chord far past a human voice, the vibrations attenuating but never weakening, like a fractal made music.
When it finally faded past hearing, Mariah swallowed, tasting tears in the back of her throat.
The feelings button stayed dark, and though Mariah strained her senses, the only sound she heard was the shush of blood in her ears.
“Link me to the salon music system,” Suvan said, his low voice breaking the silence.Ikaryo turned to the console behind the bar.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
“Louder,” Suvan ordered.
And then, so distantly, a lone note.
The whisper of indrawn breaths through the salon, as delicate as spider silk, was like a yearning descant to that pure tone.
The button light shivered almost imperceptibly.
Mariah stared up at the pulsing prismatic light above them.“That isn’t the resonark.”
“It’s what’s at the other end of the quantum entanglement,” Suvan said.“Something in the null cloud is echoing the resonark.”
On the bridge, the captain was pacing, and the tight focus of the hologram made him look like an alien lion in a cage.“The resonark has…a mate?”
Felicity put her hand next to the projection, as if she could soothe his restlessness from across the ship.“During the recital, we felt its longing and displacement, how it had lost…itself?Is this echo what it needs to find?”
“But it’s so quiet,” said someone in the crowd, which responded with fretful murmurs.
“Because the link is fading,” Suvan said.
Mariah stiffened.“I thought quantum entanglements can’t be broken.”
“Not by distance,” he said, “but by decoherence.”
“Still not rocket scientists here,” Remy reminded him.
“Various forms of interference—temperature, chemicals, other particles—can break the bond.Quantum entanglement is fragile.”
Like any dream.
Mariah glanced around the room at the somber faces.They’d come all this way on the belief that love was a power in the universe.
What if they’d been wrong?
Though she feared the answer, she had to ask, “What happens if they detangle?”
“Nothing.”The word was flat.“The bond is gone, as if it never existed.”
From the stone-cold silence in the salon, she thought that simple answer must’ve devastated everyone equally.
“Or,” came a harsh retort from the back of the room, “it could be the end of love in the universe.”
Evens pushed through the brunch crowd, his cane and his anger clearing a wider path than his dapper size warranted.“If I’m right, and the resonark isn’t merely a random wave-particle but a power source of love itself, this loss could sever the bonds of all such connections everywhere.”
