PART I
You Should Have Wished Me Luck
During the following years, Joanni studied the alien contraption. Not really studied, since there was no available information to be gleaned, just deep mysteries and unanswered questions. Perhaps for the following years, she loved it would be a better description. She would sit holding it and trying various motions and fingerings until something was discovered or divined. She became quite skilled in playing it in her own fashion, and the pretty young girl with her musical gizmo became something of a local sensation. Her fame grew with the novelty of it until, to her mother’s everlasting chagrin, Joanni abandoned Mrs. Neiswender’s dream of her daughter touring as a pianist with the great interplanetary orchestras.
And her mother had no one to complain to, because her husband was scarcely around anymore. He had teamed up with another man at work, an astrophysicist and former astronaut as highly credentialed as Mr. Neiswender was not, with impressively high clearance to boot, but with no taste for managerial or administrative duty. The two of them were up to something top secret; no one knew what; but certainly nothing publicly sanctioned by ISEA (the Intragalactic Space Exploration Agency). They were continually spotted in some hangar doing something, or taking off on unlogged flights, or hunched together over a computer screen. Joanni’s mother eventually took comfort in her eldest daughter, Lillian, and the two of them grew closer as Joanni and Mrs. Neiswender grew apart. Joanni felt guilty about this, but the pull of her clesig on her was as strong as the pull of the distant skies on her father.
One issue no one could help Joanni with was what to sing when performing. She approached her neighbor and asked if he had any idea of songs or lyrics associated with the clesig. He didn’t, but later called her back to say he remembered his aunt always singing some unintelligible words as he watched her make tea and cut a slice of cake for him when he visited her as a young boy. He couldn’t remember anything specific. Joanni’s request haunted him, however, and one night, after much searching, and after finally securing the same type of tea and a reasonable approximation of Aunt Edna’s cake, he sat down at his kitchen table with the hope of a Proustian revival of ancient memories. With his eyes closed, he sipped his tea and took small bites of the ginger molasses cake, writing down on a pad any fragment of thought that came into his mind. He then gave these scribbles to Joanni. It was just gibberish to both of them, but it was all they had. Joanni started to sing these mysterious syllables at her performances, rounding them off and making them hers, until they began to make sense to her. They became canon; a canon based on nothing, but the only canon there was. She felt if she could make a connection with these sounds, she might gain some insight into them or some insight into herself.
Just as Joanni was beginning to gain a foothold with one of the musical touring companies that visited starbases and installations, tragedy happened—as if the scales could tip over to the side of happiness for only so long, she thought bitterly. Her father’s colleague-in-adventure, Commander Nelson, had secured research assignments for himself and Engineer Neiswender on an eighteen month mission being undertaken by one of the allied-class spacecraft. About six months into this mission, it was reported back to ISEA Command that the two of them had departed the spaceship in a small auxiliary scout ship, but had never returned. A sensor sweep of the area had been conducted, but neither their vessel nor the two spacemen were ever recovered or accounted for. A year of uncertainty followed, but the ISS Hyperion returned to its base with no answers. The Neiswender family received a formal letter of condolence from ISEA, but no explanation as to why the two airmen took this fatal trip or what had happened to them. Although the ship’s data log did record an explosion out in near space on the day they took off, nothing could be concluded and the case had been closed. Nobody believed this was the full story. Commander Nelson’s family was not helpful. The Neiswenders tried to petition ISEA to get more information, but they were nobodies up against bureaucrats, so appealing on the grounds of reason or empathy was futile.
Joanni’s mother lashed out at her; she was exactly like her father, always ready to push too far for the sake of curiosity; to go up to the edge and over it. It would have served everyone better if they had both reined in their aspirations, even just a little bit, for the sake of propriety. In Joanni’s mind, these had been her father’s finest moments, and hers, too. She blamed her mother for not being more interested in her husband’s dreams. Mrs. Neiswender had not the slightest clue as to what he had been up to, and had not cared to find out. Had she known, she might have dissuaded him. She could offer no greater insight into the motivations of the man she had slept beside for years than of a total stranger. ‘What did you expect?’ Lillian asked her sister. Lillian was always in the middle of these rows between her family’s cautious and gung-ho mentalities, and was sick of it. She was of an open-minded and reasonable nature, Lillian was, and thus never listened to.
Their mother sank deeper and deeper into depression; despite her constant carping, she loved her husband and had depended on him. She became an invalid, unable to leave the house and no longer able to function in her position as a virtual professor of PChem (physical chemistry). Lillian was left stuck caring for her. Joanni’s professional fortunes rose in inverse proportion to her personal woes. She became a more and more popular act on the cultural touring bill, eventually joining a band, attracted to its charming, charismatic frontman; playing keyboards, adding vocals here and there, and soloing on the clesig for a few numbers. She ended up singing one of her songs of made-up Oreanian lyrics on the band’s third recording, and amazingly, it became an interstellar hit. Radio waves of the Earthgirl singing gibberish went out into the universe. It took a year and several months for those vibrations of the clesig and Joanni’s voice to reach Oreana and its inhabitants—sounds garbled and words almost unrecognizable, but unmistakably theirs.
Image: Over the edge. Source: The Half Hour Library of Travel, Nature and Science for Young Readers, London, 1896. Public Domain. Edited by J. Weigley