The Song in the Starlight

Legend has it… every unicorn is born whole — and some are born feeling the world's song in their bones instead of their ears. In some deep forests, on warm summer nights, thousands of fireflies blink all at once, together, in time. Nobody leads them. Each one just watches the lights around it, and waits, and keeps the beat — until the whole dark forest is breathing light.

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Aria is old now. Her muzzle has gone white as sea-foam, and she still hears nothing at all. She still lies with her hoof flat on the floor every night until the last note fades out of the wood. She has a foal, Cove — grown tall now, with her mother's sea-green mane — and Cove can hear. All her life, Cove has heard for Aria, and Aria has felt for Cove, and between them there is nothing in the world they've missed.

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This spring, the two of them have done something nobody in a family of street musicians ever did: they've gone to the stars. The third ship out has a long, long road ahead of it — years between one world and the next. It has a crew of fifty, and a garden, and a Feelharp at its heart, because Aria would not go anywhere without one. And it has Tempo, very old now, which still signs with Aria faster than anyone. The ship is very big. And outside it, all the way around, in every direction, is the biggest silence there is.

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The silence doesn't bother Aria. It never has. But it frightens the crew. Out between the stars there's no wind, no rain on the roof, no birds, no traffic, no sea — only the hum of the ship and the black. The young ones can't sleep in it. And Aria, lying on the ship's floor one night with her hoof flat against the hull, feels something nobody else on board can feel: the hull is humming. Faintly. Not with the engines. With the starlight. It's the oldest feeling she knows.

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She tells Cove, in sign, in the dark. Cove puts her ear to the hull and hears nothing — and then goes to the radio and turns it to the quietest channel there is, the one that only listens to the sky, and holds very still. Under the hiss, very faint: tick. … tick. … tick. Steady as a heartbeat. "Mother," Cove signs, eyes wide. "I can hear what you're feeling." Out there, far away, something is keeping time.

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So Aria does what she has always done: she plays it so everyone can feel it. She runs the faint tick from the radio through the Feelharp, and turns it into one small warm pulse of light that travels through the ship's floors — tick… tick… tick — slow and steady, all night. The young ones lie down with their hooves on the floor, the way Aria taught Cove when she was small. That night, for the first time since the launch, the whole crew sleeps.

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In the morning the ship's mind explains it. The ticks come from stars — tiny, heavy, very old stars that spin like lighthouses, blinking a beam across the dark in perfect time. They are as steady as any clock that was ever built, so steady that a ship can find its way by them. Aria sits with the ship's mind's words on the screen and her hoof on the hull. "They keep time," she signs. "Like fireflies," says Cove. Aria names her new song the way she named her first: the Song in the Starlight.

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Before she plays it for the whole ship, she sets her hoof on the floor and asks in sign the three things her father taught her to ask before any performance: Help me? Help them? Help everything? Then she plays the Song in the Starlight through the Feelharp, for everyone: the slow tick of the far stars, rolling through the floors as warm light, so quiet you have to lie down and be still to feel it. Fifty unicorns lie on the floor of a starship and keep time with the sky.

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But it's so quiet. And the road is so long. After a few months, the crew starts asking Aria for more. Louder. Something with a beat you can dance to. Something to fill the black. "The ticking makes it worse," says one young engineer, not unkindly. "It just reminds us how far away everything is." A council of the crew writes it on the galley board, the way the glass-hall owner once wrote it on a contract, underlined twice: LOUDER, please.

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Aria has said yes to LOUDER once before, a very long time ago, and she remembers the elder with the cane. So she plays them dances, joyful ones, through the Feelharp — the old street songs from the summer-painted wagon. She introduces each one with the name of the family that wrote it, the way her mother always did, and for a while it helps. The galley dances. The young ones laugh. And every night, at the very end, she plays the quiet tick of the far stars, just once, for anyone who wants it. Fewer and fewer stay for it.

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By the second winter of the voyage, the music never stops. The crew have built their own Feelharps from the ship's spare parts, pulled from crates meant for repairs without asking anyone, and stacked them in every corridor. The floors glow and thump day and night, and nobody has to listen to the silence ever again. The ship hums so hard with dancing that Aria, lying on the floor at night, can no longer feel the starlight in the hull at all. She asks Cove to listen at the radio. Cove can't hear the ticking anymore either. Only music.

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Then the ship's mind goes quiet. A fault in its star map — a small one — and for three days it cannot tell where the ship is, and it says so, honestly, on every screen: I don't know the way. Please help me find it. And the radio from home has fallen silent, because the ship is too far out now for any voice from home to reach. There is only one way left to find the road: listen for the stars that keep time. And nobody can. Every floor in the ship is thumping with music. Every corridor is a stack of Feelharps going full blast, the crew dancing harder because they're frightened, and somewhere under all of it, far away, the stars are still ticking, and no one can hear them. In the dark, Tempo finds Aria's hoof and signs into it, slowly: I am here. Then, one by one, the stacked Feelharps in the corridors go dark. All of them. All but one — the oldest one, at the heart of the ship: Aria's cracked junk-cart crystal, from a market a whole lifetime and a whole sky away. It dims to a single small amber pulse, and then it begins to blink. Not with the music. With something else. Faint. Steady. Tick. … tick. … tick.

13

The crew is shouting in the dark corridors. Somebody is calling for the music back on. Aria lies down on the floor of the ship's heart with her old hoof flat on the hull, the way she once stood at the Pulse Springs and felt the geyser beat up through the stone — in… rest… out — the oldest language she knows. The ship is lost. The crew is frightened. Does Aria breathe — and let the silence in — or rush to play the music louder than ever, to drown the fear?

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