The Last Choir

The final turn on Ennis, from the records of the Choir

In the last turn, the lanterns were brought up from every world and hung around the pole of Ennis.

There were not many Ithra left by then who had not been read into the Choir. The records give the number as four thousand and eleven. They were old, most of them, and they had chosen to be last on purpose: someone had to be awake at the end, to see that it was done properly.

The star was very large in the sky of Ennis by then, even that far out — a dim red disc the width of a hand at arm’s length. It no longer rose and set. It simply hung there, and the Choir drank from it.

The Choir did not sound like anything. That is the first thing every translator gets wrong. It was light. But the Ithra had always heard light the way we hear music, and to them the lattice around their world was singing — a vast, slow chord, built from eleven million voices, rising out into the dark.

Someone had to be awake at the end, to see that it was done properly.

On the last night they gathered around the Last Voice, the crystal shaped like the Singing Stone, and they spoke into it one at a time. They said their names. Some of them said the names of people who were already in the Choir. Many of them said nothing and simply shone, in the old way, from before language — here, and safe.

Then the lamplighters of Ennis, who were the last lamplighters, went around the pole and spoke to each lantern in turn. They told the lanterns the count. They told them it was all right to rest. The lanterns went out one by one, not frightened this time, and the dark came back to the pole of Ennis for the first time in three hundred turns.

The four thousand and eleven were read into the Choir before morning. The record of that night ends with a line from the last of them to speak, whose name the Institute has chosen not to publish, at their request — the Accord still holds.

It is done properly. Go on without us. You know the way.

The Choir kept singing for eleven hundred turns after that, alone, fed by a dying star, pointed at a part of the sky where — though they could not have known it — a small blue world was just beginning to paint animals on the walls of its caves.

You know the way.