Short Story: 

The Return of the Ancient Silence 

This is a story from the future.

I remember the day I noticed the first change in my younger daughter, Lindy. It was her usual habit to go with her mother and sister to netball and sometimes she even played a game for one of the beginner teams, while big sister Melissa played more seriously. 

But this Saturday, Lindy chose to stay home and have an easy morning with her dad. 

‘Drive carefully,’ I said to Carla, ‘And Melissa, you have a good game.’ 

Carla smiled and drove off, with Melissa grinning and waving at me from the passenger’s seat. Same as any other Saturday. 

But Lindy lay down on the couch - not normal for her. 

Tiger, our big family tabby, soon curled up beside her. He purred and snuggled, enjoying Lindy’s unusual stillness. The two of them dozed and time passed. I took advantage of the rare quiet to do a bit of reading. 

An hour later Tiger appeared beside my chair and climbed up onto my lap. He kneaded my thighs with none-too-well felted claws, before settling down on his second choice of human company for the morning. 

‘Did Lindy wake up then?’ I asked him and the question was answered by the sound of her piano scales and warm-ups drifting from the music room. 

A car pulled into the driveway. My brother Marcus stepped out. He barged in without knocking, marched to the sink and put the kettle on. I put down my book with a sigh and moved to the kitchen. 

‘Lindy,’ he said, recognising her playing. 

‘Yep. Help yourself to our coffee and don’t hesitate to eat all our food.’ 

‘Thanks. I’ll join her.’ 

He grabbed a plateful of my not-so-secret supply of chocolate chip cookies, made coffee and carried plate and mug through to the music room. 

I returned to my chair and picked up my book. The scales stopped for a moment, I heard voices, then the practice continued, a few favourite easy tunes, a more challenging piece she seemed to be struggling with. More conversation, his deep drone and her high-pitched responses, more music, this time less of a struggle. Clearly, he had given her some useful advice on how to manage the difficult piece. 

There was a brief silence, and the scrape of the piano stool, before the house filled with the sublime sound of Marcus himself playing. Lindy would be loving this. I put down my book and moved closer to listen. He played for five minutes before relinquishing the instrument back to her. Lindy played again. I heard him coaching her, giving tips and encouragement. 

'Lucky kid,'' I thought, 'to get that kind of musical attention at no cost. Marcus steals my food and coffee without remorse, but he repays us beyond count.' A huge understatement, if only I’d known it then. 

But Lindy’s lazy morning led to more tiredness and descended rapidly into serious illness. Doctor’s visits and tests and more doctor’s visits. Lindy was dying of one of the many new forms of cancer. At ten, what had she done to deserve this? They say such sickness can come from buried emotional negativity eating away at human cells from the inside, but Lindy had known only sunshine and love for everything and everyone in her world. 

The doctors doubted she’d live beyond a few months at best and gave us a choice between treatments which might give her more weeks but would spoil every week she had left, or simply allowing her to fade away more quickly but more pleasantly on mere palliative care. It was not a choice Carla and I had ever wanted or even imagined ourselves having to make. In the end, after many sleepless nights of discussion, we chose the shorter pleasanter option for our Lindy. 

‘But she could pass at any time,’ the doctor warned. ‘The illness is unpredictable.’ 

Beyond her own family, music and animals were Lindy’s greatest passions. As the precious weeks rolled by, we tried to lavish our girl with all the music we could give her before the end. I booked seats at a local fund-raising concert. 

Some of Lindy’s favourite local amateur musicians were performing. 

‘Is Marcus playing?’ asked Carla. 

‘He’s the main attraction as usual,’ I said. ‘It’ll be the highlight of the concert for Lindy.’ 

On the night, Carla and I settled into our seats, with the girls between us. Lindy was a little sleepy from her medicine but looking forward to two hours of live music. First was a singer/guitarist who taught an older class at Lindy’s school. The second performance was a new band – teenagers from the high-school who played three rowdy numbers, not so skilfully. I gritted my teeth and endured but Lindy was enthralled. Several more acts followed and she enjoyed them all, though she was increasingly struggling to stay awake and alert. Last up was Marcus. Listed on the programme as the only pianist - he was to be the grand finale of the evening.

Marcus walked to centre stage. Strangely, there was no piano on the stage. The hall fell quickly silent. 

Marcus addressed the crowd. ‘Instead of playing for you tonight,’ he said, ‘I decided to allow you the chance to listen to something I recently discovered.’ Lindy groaned softly. She'd wanted to hear Marcus above all others. This was a blow for her. I read exhaustion throughout her frail body as she sagged against me, no longer capable of holding herself upright in her seat. I put my arms around her, supporting her as her energies faded towards unconsciousness. 

I was shocked at her lightness in my arms. Would this be her last night? Would her little life end with such a disappointment? What did Marcus think he was doing? Carla noticed Lindy’s slide. She focused her attention on our near-comatose child, alarm all over her face, body tensed to rigidity, ignoring the man on the stage. 

Marcus continued speaking. ‘As most of you know, music is not my day job. My real work is scientific research at our world-renowned National Laboratory of Sound. Recently our lab acquired some new equipment which has allowed us to analyse sound in ways previously unknown.’ 

Marcus paused and allowed the silence to stretch out for long moments. 

Lindy’s eyes closed. She relaxed in my arms, and I felt her sweet breath still regular on my forearm. I gave Carla a nod of reassurance. ‘Just sleeping,’ I whispered, and we both made the effort to re-focus on Marcus. 

‘The music you're about to hear,’ he said, ‘is a condensed sound from nature which has been analysed and unzipped by our new machine. I will only tell you the source of the music just before you all leave this hall tonight.’ He then occupied a chair that had been placed on the stage for him. 

The stage around him dimmed and the hall began to shimmer with pulsing blue-green light. The silence deepened and when it was absolute, he nodded to someone in the wings and music drifted from the hall’s hidden sound-systems. 

No violins, no guitars, no drums, nor any other recognisable instrument. Some of the sounds were almost familiar, in an organic way like water or wind or heartbeats. Others were beyond all our ability to recognise, as though they came from other worlds in the universe. As we listened, we forgot everything, every worry was erased from our minds, and even the members of my own stricken family, were transported beyond cares we had believed insurmountable. Every person in that hall sat motionless, enthralled throughout the first playing. 

Lindy awoke in my arms and sat up, listening as though mesmerised. The piece lasted six minutes. 

When it finished, everyone there, including Lindy, came to their feet and shouted, ‘AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN!’ 

Marcus signalled the technicians to replay it. This time, the audience stood and swayed slowly in time to the music. At the end of the second hearing, the audience demanded a third replay and Marcus allowed it. This time almost everyone danced - where they stood, in the aisles, anywhere they had space to move. 

Marcus, Carla and I were the only ones not dancing. Marcus remained seated on the stage, and Carla and I were too busy watching Lindy. She stood and moved with smooth fluidity as though she was in water, steadily making her way through the gyrating mass of people towards the front of the hall. We followed her. She danced her way up the stairs and onto the stage with no trace of the exhaustion she had displayed minutes before. She reached Marcus and held out her frail hand to him. He glanced down at the two of us standing open-mouthed beside the stage. Marcus raised questioning eyebrows towards us. We looked at one another, shrugged in unison and I nodded our permission back to him.  

He stood and danced with her. His movements were like ocean waves, strong and rhythmic. She floated so tiny beside him, the liquid air supporting her effortlessly, as she swooped and leapt and spun like windblown spray on the ocean. Her blonde hair and pale blue dress shimmered around her like sunlit ripples. 

Many in the dancing audience, stopped to watch the dancers on the stage and when it ended, they applauded. Marcus bowed to the applause and bowed to Lindy. She giggled at him, not knowing how to respond. She waved at us in the audience and then ran down to meet us. 

Many in that hall would have danced and listened all night, including I think, our Lindy. But the time was up, and the music played no more. People made their way back to their seats, shaking their heads in amazement at what they had just experienced. 

When everyone was seated, Marcus called for silence and began to speak. 

‘At a time so long ago, few in this hall remember it, the oceans of our planet were home to intelligent warm-blooded mammals who spent their whole lives in the sea. These were the dolphins and whales, who ruled our planet for fifty million years before humans evolved. They survived right up until the time of the great global famine just fifty years ago, when only the fish in the ocean, prevented mass human starvation. All we have left of those magnificent beings are our human audio-visual records. Our new sound-analysis machine processed a two-second dolphin squeak to unlock the music you heard tonight.’ 

He said no more and left the stage. The audience was strangely quiet as it filed from the hall.  

Six years later, we were staying for a week or two at our family’s favourite holiday spot on a nearby island. Lindy, now a beautiful sixteen-year-old, sat beside me one evening on a seat overlooking a still ocean. 

‘Did you ever see dolphins Dad?’ 

‘They were gone before I was born.’ 

‘Did Grandad?’ 

‘He was born well before the famine, so dolphins lived through his childhood. He saw them from here, possibly almost from this very spot. He saw pods of them in the distance and once when he was standing on the beach he saw a lone dolphin swimming, just beyond the surf. He did a little sailing in his teens and remembers them riding the bow wave of the sailboat. Once, he even saw a huge whale and her baby. The mother was bigger than the boat he was sailing on and she was only a few metres away from him.’ 

Lindy absorbed this information in silence and stared over the sea. I wondered what was passing through her mind. Was she imagining dolphins dancing on the sea before her? But her eyes seemed too clouded for such thoughts. 

‘Can you hear the silence?’ she asked suddenly. 

I listened. It was indeed very quiet. Water rippled faintly on the rocks below us. The softest breeze rustled the leaves in the trees behind us. These sounds only magnified a deeper silence. 

‘It scares me,’ said Lindy, ‘The silence is waiting. I feel it waiting in the stars. Waiting in the deep. Only the dolphin music had the magic to keep it away. But now the silence is winning again, as though dolphins had never existed.’ 

Lindy is sixty-five now and I'm ninety-four. Every year they discover another dolphin sound that heals another human disease. 

The dolphins can never return to make more music, but the new diseases keep coming. 

Author's note:
While reading this story, you met my character Marcus Evans, who also inhabits the closing chapter of my first novel, Ripple. That closing chapter is the only part of Ripple that happens in the future, the same future that Marcus shares with Lindy. The rest of the Ripple story plays out among dolphins twenty million years in the past, in the time of the Ancient Silence.