Summary: By Cat Rambo Read by Elizabeth Musselman Discuss on our forums. Originally appeared in TALES FROM THE FATHOMLESS ABYSS All stories by Cat Rambo All stories read by Elizabeth Musselman Rated 13 and up A Querulous Flute of Bone by Cat Rambo Wherever, whenever wealth accumulates enough to create the idle, one finds those who collect things. Such collections vary. Some catalog every cast off bit of flesh or chitin they shed. Others look outside themselves for art, or titillation, or an oblivion in which they can forget everyday life. Collections may consist of the most mundane objects: string, or chewed up paper, or broken teacups, for example. Or they can take on outré forms: dioramas made of nihlex bone (considered contraband in certain areas), or squares of cloth exposed to the Smog, prized for the oracular patterns of dirt left deposited on the fabric, or the tiny aluminum snowflakes said to have fallen into the world during an Opening over a century ago. Aaben was such a collector. S/he was one of the geniod, whose gender varies according to mood, location, and other private considerations, and who are known, in the face of great trauma, to forget who they are and become entirely different personalities, their old selves never to be resumed or spoken of. Some races adulate them for this, while others mock them. Such excesses of reaction have driven the geniod to keep to themselves, not by law, but preference. Aaben was an oddity in its own preferences, for it was willing to travel, to go farther than most of its race, driven by the desire to augment its collection, choosing to focus only on its quest. The items it sought, ranging up and down the Tube in expeditions funded by two sets of indulgent grandparents and a much less indulgent set of parents, were things that could be considered metaphors for the world and the state of those in it. In this pursuit, it followed the strictures of the philosopher-king Nackle, who described the emotions that such objects evoked in the beholder in one five hundred page monograph, and the intellectual effect of such exposure in a second, even longer work, followed by a six volume set of explanatory footnotes and addendums. Aaben had studied at the knee of an ancient human who had himself been instructed by an uncle who had read thoroughly in the works of Nackle. The teaching had impressed it with a gravity and depth of the sort that scores the soul and directs all its movements in later years. Its search was a tribute to Nackle’s ideas, for it looked for the things that Nackle posited existed, which could only be discovered by matching the emotion they evoked with that described in Nackle’s pages, a task that required the laborious memorization of all of the philosopher’s works. Nackle’s theory, insofar as such a thing can be simplified, was this: Twenty one types of emotion exist in the world. Certain artifacts create emotions in the viewer, emotions unaffected by the viewer’s history or idiosyncrasies of personality, but which are basic to the existence of all intelligent creatures. There are literally hundreds of sub-emotions, ranging from a soul’s regret when it wishes to sing but cannot, to the joy of carrying on one’s ancestral line in the face of tremendous adversity or the anticipatory worry that one might not fully recall an upcoming oracular dream. The perception of these emotions required deep study and meditation. To find the artifacts that replicated the base emotion, the one from which all the smaller sub-emotions sprang, one must move through a progression of refinement of the senses, created by the search for and exposure to artifacts exemplifying the emotions Nackle described. Most of Nackle’s followers would object to this simplification. They would point to subtleties of one kind or another, but truth be told, the theory was relatively uncomplicated. It was the lengthy cataloging of emotions that gave the philosophy intellectual density, rather than any complex thou[...]
