A temporary floating sensation, the pop of air pressure, soft, hardly noticeable. Solid ground beneath shoeless feet. Warmth against his soles. The glowing white land. A purple sky, closer now, everywhere, the spray of stars and the planet, heavy and low, half dark half red, bursting with its own weight. Beyond that, far-away moons, twin ice crystals, tiny and bright. The trail he’d seen was of footprints, climbing from where he stood, a dual pattern on the sand, the reversed imprint of trainer soles. They rose, disappearing behind dunes to reappear further, towards what he’d thought were flat mountaintops from the unimaginable distance of his bedroom, but were actually looming structures, white as the sand. Turrets or towers, Max couldn’t tell. He turned to look behind himself. The creature’s silhouette; inside the body, a distant view of posters, the dull wooden foot of his bed, the night workmen’s spotlight reflecting on his white ceiling. Home.

He relocated the trail of footprints, eyes rising upwards. The structures shimmered in half-light piercing the velvet atmosphere, blinking silent reprieve.

NOCTURNE

The vast expanse of space is said to be silent. Vacuum crushes the universal voice, renders it mute, a lambent graveyard haunted with distant ghosts of a long-dead past. And yet, if ears are attuned, they can hear music. The rings of Saturn cry in falsetto chorus, a choir of millions. Neptune chirps and whistles, a gaseous blue rainforest, gentle baritones cascading underneath like the sea. Earth itself is known to have a voice. It rises and falls, a sombre whale song, calming as such music can be. Further beyond our home planet and solar system, out into the unknown, there is the steady bass of pulsars, the crackle of ice giants, the dying roar of colossal red suns. These are not sounds as we know them but electromagnetic vibrations beyond the limited range of human ears. A song of eternal night.

Seldom – almost never – there is something else. Existing far below the competitive thunder of vaster, larger bodies, this sound is minute, barely audible, only heard when the planets, sun and extended bubble of the heliosphere are escaped and nothing is left but pinprick stars, the intemperate swirls of galaxies. One such object can be detected now, releasing its monotone wail into the void. At this unimaginable scale it has all the impact of a microbe, and goes ignored by the universe. For those with an interest in human life it holds significance far greater than its size. Other factions make similar sounds. Not the same, but close. There is no need to elaborate on their species, or nature. Since they are difficult to locate, we remain with what we have: a song composed by human hands. There may never be another to follow.