Ex Libris Pavonis

by Brandon Myers

“Frequent contributor and good friend Oz, proprietor of that one and only comessation of anomalies, Ozymandias, recently formed a spin-off following an exclusive tap from last month’s Pavonian visitors. OzymExo promises to be the most outlandish yet, with unmodified Pavonian liner tags and media inlays that will have your mind filliping down the Big Weird. Not for everyone. Hardly for anyone..."
— PJ

The Monj had been soaking in diagnostic lubricant for days and the room smelled like a shipment of colonial bacterials. Oz nudged dust motes from its faceplate with his toe. He knew there was nothing really wrong with his homegrown data chomper. Just a predictable case of the hiccups after getting rocked raw by interfacing with whatever had been on the Pavonian end. The Monj might conjecture, but it didn’t lie.

He swiveled to look at the monograph on the screen one last time, sighed, and went to pack his kit. And as far as that t-box he’d borrowed from Dan went... no. T-boxes were just programs. All the equipment he’d brought in was clean.

For the first few weeks after the score, he’d put off the odd twinge of unease. There had been too much satisfaction in putting down his footprints in a landscape that still had no key or compass. And there had been so much to do. Checking translations. Writing the credo. Organizing the catalog. Oz saw his catalogs as artistic statements and they were always compulsively baroque. OzymExo would be no exception.

But the evening finally came when he knew he was done and the manic din of activity over. And there was still that twinge.

He had found himself looking through the most recent exo bulletins, tagging a handful of Pavonian entries. Most were macrotech and engineering pieces, all very speculative. It seemed amazing how prolific the theories were while the primary source — the Pavonians themselves — was relied upon so little. But then, recalling his own experience, he shrugged. You could never ask them a question, it seemed, without getting an answer that undermined part of the premise.

Nothing new on culture or history, but under physiognomy there was a new monograph, Pavonian Polyscopy: Inadequacies in the Ommatidial Model. He tapped it open.

The diagrams were interesting but too specialized. The text was worse. He was about to turn back when a simple side graph with sense organ schematics caught his eye. He scanned it, pleased finally to see a body drawn without its umbrage. Tiny pads at the base of the digits for picking up vibrations, a kind of olfactory cavity, and those glittery pipe cleaners that waved about — a complex optical system that was not well understood. Then he stopped, and read the graph more slowly. It was all clearly delineated, no ambiguity about it. Something oddly missing though.

Obviously his gear hadn’t spontaneously manufactured the recordings. But if the Pavonians couldn’t even...

* * *

Twenty minutes later he took a stool in a far corner of the Head Stop and dropped his kit on the bar. Dan walked down to him and stared at his blank face.

“Don’t get like that. It’ll be fine.”

“It’s not that. I think I’ve got a big fundamental problem with OzymExo.”

“Like what? I thought it was the best thing ever happened to you.”

“Yeah well, I’m not so sure what it is that happened to me.”

Dan began to intone, “‘Oz’s new label promises pure weird candy for the unhinged and the mutated...’”

“Yeah yeah. Do you remember reading that bit about their audio analogues? Sound storage, all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they might have that kind of tech but whoever wrote that piece was doing a lot of speculating about the application part. They might convert sound to light and back again artificially, but they sure as hell don’t hear things. They don’t have the parts.” Oz jabbed a finger at the side of his head.

Dan put his bar towel down, “But the recordings.”

Oz smacked air with the back of his hand.

“Then what were they doing, playing a joke?”

“If we even share that concept.”

“But they made a trade with you.”

“Did they?”

* * *

Head Stop (for its extremely terminal spot at the north end) was a slightly g-challenged club where Oz was resident spinner. He’d bring in a set — centuries-old artifacts, tracks of nethermost obscurity, untraceable songs in dustbin languages played for human ears for the first time in generations — and the bleary-eyed clientele would ignore him. The rules were timeworn and he gloried in it. At the bar, hunched over his malt he’d say, “Their loss, man. Their loss.” And his friend would do his thing with the towel and glass and say, “You only scared away three of my customers tonight, what’s wrong?”

Oz’s label was the purest of hyperbolic self-extensions. Rare and unheard releases by unknown musicians of uncertain provenance were its trademark. Its library attracted the alienated, the strange, and the penniless, and so was happily unperturbed by commercial success and its attendant woes.

On the night the Pavonians came in, the crowd had been small. Oz sat wearing a sweatshirt embossed with a faded icon worthy of his dj persona: two oversized eyes glaring from beneath a glowing green helmet topped with the furious plumage of an ill-used broom head. A sympathetic bootlegger with skin the color of arctic lichen leaned against his booth.

“Guess what’s coming through the head,” the bootlegger said.

“I heard. Seen any?”

“Some groups wandering around with their human minders. What else? Something in a little mobile tank.”

“Good for you?”

“Probably not. Money’s such a tricky concept.”

Oz blinked and stared through his clutched drink, “Huh, wonder what they listen to.”

“Who?”

“Pavonians.”

“They’re approachable enough. Never heard anything about music though.”

“I was reading something about their audio tech, so I’d think maybe...”

“Why don’t you ask one?”

“Ehh.”

Thirty minutes later his comrade had contrived to lead a contorted black feather duster over and Oz got his first close look at the dominant species of Gamma Pavonis. It was tiny. It sat entirely atop a bar stool for the rest of the set unmoving, iridescent pipe cleaners fronding about the top of its head.

Sort of.

At the end of the last set, one of Dan’s boozy t-boxes was hauled out and an hour’s sharetime charitably allotted to the two.

The Pavonian described itself as a “collector.” Of what? Perspectives, the box finally spat. Psychologist analogue, Oz thought. Clear enough, as far as it went, but things became more interesting when they came around to music. The t-box would make a decent extrapolation, but that didn’t help Oz understand what fatal declensions were, or why most Pavonian interval parsing was unbiased toward them. Something about the yawning potential for misunderstanding was a turn-on.

They came to a loose agreement. A trade. On his end, four days of access to their library. Had any other humans been granted this privilege? Not as far as the Pavonian knew.

The next day he was escorted down a corridor four feet in height to an open space with a ring of deep alcoves in the walls, every surface the greenish umber of river mud.

There were no artifacts, no audio devices that he could see. Only a tiny mop of a Pavonian, already settled just inside the alcove, his allotted facilitator. It sat silently while he ran feeds out of the Monj and Dan’s t-box. He’d kept it simple, knowing that their interface would be the superior one anyway.

It began as it had the night before, the facilitator making cryptic suggestions, Oz forced into carefully re-articulating his questions. Not sure they had agreed upon the same thing, he found himself listening to a Pavonian composition, a muted and monotonous static humming, like a far-off sea of parchment churned by the wind. About as interesting as listening to one of his own hangovers.

He pushed the concept of melody and was surprised with a collection of Eridanian recordings. Deep silvery pipings erupted into absurdly extended phrases which seemed only to go upward. Were the Eridanians avian, he asked? Sometimes, came the reply.

A request for something more rhythmic led him to a seven-minute recording of ethereal raspings punctuated by short cadences of what sounded like small stones dropping into water.

As the cobbled amalgam of communication grew more assured, the Pavonian guided him into a labyrinth that had few wrong turns. From Mu Arae, an ensemble of sharply phrased bodhran-like explosions erupted in eight-second intervals. 41 Arae A’s inhabitants, colonists from an unknown location, offered intricately crafted microtonal whinings whose crescendos approached those of the terrestrial cicada.

The four days passed in a blur.

A week later, the tiny headquarters of Ozymandias resembled an overturned toy box. The Monj simmered with its faceplate off, the diagnostic lubricant gently easing through its interior. Timelines and taxonomies covered one wall. A grid with handwritten stellar coordinates hung from another. Notes and sketches covered the couch. He didn’t sleep for days. When he finally did, he dreamed of Gamma Pavonis. In the dream, he crossed endless catwalks above a murky forest floor. Perched around him, solitary Pavonians rode in the gently tossing branches.

* * *

“Then there’s another thing.”

Dan had by this time poured his own malt and looked sadly at it, “What?”

“Well, the one that came in here said he was a collector of perspectives. I thought I knew what that meant at the time.”

“Like a psychologist," I thought you said.

“Maybe that wasn’t a good translation. I think I was taken to school, as they used to say. Imagine some virtuoso co-opting the theme a novice has been struggling with. He can take those first awkward sketches and turn them into something more... fully developed.”

“But I still don’t...”

“They helped me develop OzymExo. One big wish fulfillment, see?” Oz raised his drink finally and downed it.

“I’m not following you at all.”

“Where did the interface end? Why was it that everything I wanted to discover in that library... well, that’s what I seemed to discover just a second later? My perspective, they were collecting my perspective.”