The Noise That Would Not Leave

The dish was the size of a small boat and rusted the color of old blood, and it took Maya and Soren three afternoons to figure out that it still worked.

"Listen," Maya said. She had the headphones pressed to one ear. "It's doing the thing again."

Soren took the other side of the headphones. Underneath the buzz of the little amplifier they had wired up, there was a soft, steady hiss. Not a station. Not a voice. Just hiss, even and patient, like the ocean two fields over but without the waves.

"That's static," he said. "Bad connection somewhere."

"We already checked the connections."

"We'll check them again."

They checked them again. They cleaned the contacts with a pencil eraser. They wiggled the cable. The hiss stayed exactly where it was.

"Birds," Soren said finally. He climbed the ladder and looked into the throat of the dish. There was a nest up in the horn, a messy crown of straw, and underneath it the pale scribble of pigeon droppings dried onto the metal.

"That's it," he called down. "Droppings on the horn. It's warm stuff, it gives off a signal. I read about this."

Maya squinted up at him. "You read about pigeon droppings."

"Two engineers in New Jersey, nineteen sixty-five. Their antenna hissed and hissed and they thought it was pigeons. They cleaned the whole thing out."

"So clean it out."

He did. He scraped the horn until it shone. He shooed the pigeons, gently, and moved the nest to a fence post where they would still have it. He climbed down with grey dust on his sleeves and said, "Now."

Maya put the headphones on.

The hiss was still there.

"Exactly the same," she said.

Soren frowned. He took the headphones. Exactly the same. Not one bit softer.

"Okay," he said slowly. "So it wasn't the droppings."

"The New Jersey guys. What did they do when they cleaned it and it kept hissing?"

He pulled his notebook out of his back pocket and turned to a page he had already half filled with the antenna's measurements. He wrote a line. "They didn't know. That was the whole problem. They spent a year trying to make it stop."

Maya was already turning the crank that swung the dish. It groaned and pointed at a new patch of sky, away from the sun, away from the town, away from everything.

"Try it now," she said.

Soren listened. "Same."

She swung it low, toward the empty horizon over the sea. "Now?"

"Same."

Straight up, at the blank blue overhead. "Now?"

"Maya. It's the same. It's the same everywhere I point it."

She stopped cranking. She had that look she got when a thing refused to behave and she liked it for refusing.

"That's wrong," she said. "That's completely wrong."

"Why is it wrong?"

"Because everything in the sky is somewhere. The sun's over there. The town's over there. A station comes from where the station is. If you point away from a thing, the thing gets quieter." She spread her arms at the whole dome of the sky. "But this doesn't get quieter. It's the same from every direction. There's no over there. It's just everywhere."

Soren stood very still and thought about a signal that came from everywhere at once. He tried to picture where you would have to put a transmitter so that it hit you equally hard from the sea and the sun and the dirt straight down under your feet.

You couldn't. There was no such place. Unless the transmitter was the whole sky.

"The New Jersey guys," he said. "When they finally figured it out. What was it?"

Maya shook her head. "You're the one who read it."

He looked at his notebook and did not write anything, because his hand had stopped. "It was the Big Bang," he said. "The leftover heat from the Big Bang. It filled the whole universe when it was young and hot, and the universe stretched it out and cooled it down for fourteen billion years, and it's still here. In every direction. That hiss is the oldest light there is."

They were quiet. The real ocean, two fields over, kept making its noise with waves in it. The other ocean, the one in the headphones, made its noise without any waves at all.

"Wait," Maya said. "Wait. This dish is catching it."

"This dish is catching it."

"This rusty dish we found behind the weather station is catching the light from the start of everything."

"Some of it. A little of it."

Maya took the headphones off one ear and held them out into the air between them, so they could both hear the thin steady hiss leaking out of the little speakers.

"It went straight through us," she said. "To get to the dish. It's been going through us the whole time. Right now. Through your arm."

Soren looked at his arm. Grey dust, one freckle, the sleeve of his shirt. He knew that some tiny fraction of the static on any old television, any radio between stations, was this same afterglow, and that people had been calling it a broken signal for as long as there had been signals to break.

"Everybody's had it their whole life," he said. "Everybody who ever heard static. They thought something was wrong. They thought it was a mistake."

"It's not a mistake." Maya was grinning now, the fierce grin. "It's the loudest thing in the universe and everybody decided it was nothing. Two guys thought it was bird poop."

"They cleaned it off. Same as us."

"Same as us."

She put the headphones flat on the grass between them, both cups facing up, so the hiss went out into the open field. Then she lay down next to them with her ear near the metal, and after a second Soren lay down on the other side, and the dish above them held its blank face up to the sky, catching the same faint warmth from every direction at once.

Maya reached over and turned the crank one notch, so the dish swung a hand's width across the blue, and the hiss in the grass did not change at all.