What the Silence Said

On the gaps in the stream

The stream has holes in it.

Some are damage: dust between the stars, a dish out of alignment, a solar storm that drowned an hour of signal. Those holes are ragged. They fray at the edges, the way paper does.

Other holes are clean.

They begin exactly on a cadence boundary and end exactly on another. The carrier continues through them, perfectly, as if to say: we are still here; this part is simply not for you.

Those are the Accord of Dusk. Somewhere in the last seventy turns before the Encoding, an Ithra who had given a memory to the Choir came back and asked for it again, and the Choir let it go, and left a space exactly its size.

Some of the silence is not damage. It is refusal.

We have catalogued more than nine thousand clean silences so far. We do not try to recover what was in them. We could not, and we would not; the Institute is, in a sense no one planned, a party to the Accord.

But we listen to them. Every year on the fourteenth of March the Array stops decoding for one cadence and simply receives — nine hours, seventeen minutes and twenty-three seconds of their light, with all its gaps. It is the only way we know to honour a civilisation that thought forgetting, freely chosen, was a kind of dignity.

The silences are the most Ithran thing in the signal.