5 - The Trusci's Tale

"Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,
To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.
I've read, that things inanimate have mov'd,
And, as with living Souls, have been inform'd,
By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound."

-- William Congreve, in The mourning bride, 1697

"Music soothes the savage beast."

-- An amazingly popular misquotation of the above. 85% of all citations of this 17th century lyric are incorrect! But, this corrupt version works as well.

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Chloe was deep into researching her next paper. She was due to get it published in the journal in the next three months. She had better get a move on! In the competitive university world, it was "publish or perish" when it came to getting grant money. The alternative was teaching in a classroom while someone else got to do the fun stuff. Chloe had a tendency to procrastinate. She would really rather be reading a trashy novel.

At least until some new and interesting fact caught her attention!

She had just read the paper, "The magical number 7 +/- 2: Some limits on our capacity to process information," by 20th century professor, George Miller, when she serendipitously recalled another 20th century article she read describing the effect of music on memory. It explain why children remember their ABC's, multiplication tables, or even nursery rhymes better when set to music.

Ask a child to remember their address and it was like pulling teeth. Nearly impossible. Ask a child to remember a spoken version of the poem "Mary had a Little Lamb" and the results were much better. Sing to them the song "Mary had a Little Lamb" and the results were off the charts.

There was a definite relationship between mental retention of information set to music and mental retention of information clustered into groups of 5 to 9 "packets." Chloe's quick scan of published research revealed that, to her amazement, no one has published anything about this amazing and curios pair of phenomena.

Now she was fired up. Her direction was set. Her next grant was a lock when she published this one. Alas, there would be no more trashy novels in her foreseeable future.

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They recognize the signs. They measured the temperature changes of the chromosphere and photosphere. At this point, those changes were miniscule, but continuously increasing. They saw the increase in gaseous emissions. It was just a matter of time now, until Trusca's sun began to shed its outer layer, with catastrophic consequences for life on Trusca.

They knew the memories of the Progenitori Trusci could survive any stellar catastrophe. And, those memories tend to be protected at all costs. But, there would be no one to listen to their operatic refrains, to learn them, sing them, embellish them, as the Trusci have done for all remembered time. The evolution of Progenitori knowledge would end.

Would there be anyone, anywhere to sing the songs of Progenitori memory? Would there be anyone, anywhere to listen.

Something must be done. Soon.

It was unlikely that even the other planets in the nearby celestial neighborhood could be made habitable. First, sentient life would have to escape the ejection of the chromosphere. That was unlikely on any planets with a suitable combination of size and granity. Second, resources were limited. They could either invest in making a planet in the celestial neighborhood habitable, or travel unfathomable distances beyond their local star.

There was only one viable alternative. They must leave. They decided. They would.

They composed more stanzas of their history, describing these recent events, and sang them for the Progenitori, committing them to permanent storage.

In the Trusci mind, they had to work quickly. As humans reckon time, they had perhaps 500 to 1000 years. To an ancient civilization like the long-lived Trusci, who were natural long term thinkers and strategic planners, that was only one to three generations.

From the Trusci perspective, this was a rush job.