It was the Emerald Genistine who had requested, with a bellowing note, that an instrument be created for her. One, she said, that was sonorous, firstly, and, of equal value, it must contain within it all possible sounds.

“All possible sounds – universally, that is – sire?” had Humming asked, as he walked between the two great doors of the Genistine’s castle. Three doors had been built, but the middle one was reserved for Emerald Genistine’s stride only.

“Even extra-universally! Beyond this plane. I want no sound left unturned, no rock left unstrummed. It must be thrummable and drummable, harmonic and sardonic, but, of equal value, it must contain within it all possible sounds.

Humming bowed deeply on his two knees until his forehead met the marble floor. “This, sire, will be done, and with haste. I request only of you two things: access to your ship and a the sands of your beaches.”

“Whatever you require you may have!” and the Emerald Genistine cast her hand out before her and it jangled with all the bracelets looped around it.

Humming left soon after with ten satchels of stone granular from the shores of Genistine’s domain. The Emerald had provided Humming with her loyal army too, who packed the sand by the tons into the satchels and hauled them aboard on strong quadracogs.

The ship rattled as Humming drove it through the atmosphere, but it controlled well and its design was minimal: the control room was only a single chair that swivelled and a microphone for voice control.

“Ten degrees posterior, five ticks nautical,” Humming chattered into the microphone, barely missing a small moon that he had not seen in the planet’s orbit on the way in. Finally, free of gravity, Humming asked the ship to take him to a small planet he could not recall the name of but he described the atmospheric composition as best he could, and its periodicity, and this sufficed. The ship found his planet.

With the ship in control, Humming went to inspect his sand in the cargo. He opened each bag one at a time, with a single finger put a small amount on his tongue, and nodded when satisfied. The sands were all the same, but some had a few shells or larger stones inside, these he threw out. His entire collection of tools and gadgets had also been brought aboard, which took up any room that would have been free from the sand haul.

A cacophony of clangs, bangs, rang out and filled the hull from engine to nose. Not even the vacuum outside had an ear to listen, but anyone inside would have certainly been disturbed. Humming had papers folded under and atop three desks, with depictions of machines and mechanisms driven by pulleys, cogs, cognition, or entirely operating under diffusive principles. One had an eye with a joint that allowed it to cast a gaze, another a rare set of sixteen thumbs, the idea that ambidextrous properties were multiplicative. Across all of these designs were flashes of sand, that scratched and itched Humming as it caught in different parts. He was careful to apply generous portions of lubrication to any joints, for he knew the sand would find a way in.

By the time Humming’s orchestra had settled to a dramming rather than a drumming, the ship had come to port on Urv-9. From the atmosphere, Humming verbalized a succession of manoeuvrers for the ship, and a red bottle was filled with hydroxilmethane-B. To finalize his design, Humming poured the volatile gas, carefully into the instrument, then sat back, clapped his hands twice, and fell into a deep slumber. The ship headed back to the planet of Emerald Genistine without stopping for fuel.

“I expect great sound, Humming, for word of your expertise has travelled far through the seven realms,” spoke Emerald Genistine, not holding back on her bellowing one bit. The marble arches of the throne room had even been so designed as to amplify acoustically her guttural demands. “For it is not only your expertise that will be gone should you fail me, but also the very wiring that connects your central control system its appendages.”

Humming, again, went down on his two knees and touched his forehead to the cold marble. He spoke before lifting his head: “Not with my head do I wish to part, for my brain I so much desire the ego that it has conjured up for me in the past few years. For that reason alone I have fabricated an instrument so improbably it is the only one of it ever. It is a guitar, but not a guitar at all, it is a piano but not a key is found – a drum with the best leather, yet not a chamber does it have for beats to echo; too, there is citar, flute, saxaphonic notes, a whole conductor embedded within with gesticulations of the hand – yet look close and squint but no person is inside with which the conduction is originating from.”

“Show me, then! Do not leave me in anticipation, for that I do not like to speak words that begin with the letter ‘a’.” And with this statement the fist of Genistine hammered on the arm of her throne and the walls shook.

Humming lifted himself up from the floor. Behind him, sat on a wooden trolley which it had been wheeled in on, was an object ten times the height of the throne, draped in a purple cloth. It had barely fit through one of the two doors into the castle. Humming walked up the object and grabbed the corner of the cloth. With a twirl he pulled it away. From the twelve windows of the room, the suns of the planet shone through and whatever was underneath that cloth focused their rays that a brightness filled the room. Emerald Genistine could only see white and exclaimed, “I am blinded! Guards! Guards!”

But before the guards had time to pull Humming from the throne room, a cloud passed over and the light was gone. Emerald Genistine was now presented with what was an orb of glass, perfectly spherical, but with long, thin mechanical tentacles protruding from its base. She extracted from her pocket a long-range trigonometric ruler and confirmed her suspicions that what was before her was indeed perfectly round.

“Well, it is certainly a Euclidean marvel – but you have failed entirely, for I requested the most perfect instrument. Instead you have brought me a sculpture. I should not be surprised, my request was improbably – no imposible – from the start. Still, I wished to test the greatest mind I could ask.” Emerald Genistine gestured as if to dispense of the presence of a fly and the guards continued to carry of Humming despite his shouts of protest. To her bishops by her side, Genistine commented that Humming’s glass orb would function nicely in her gallery. They moved it there with haste after she slammed both her fists.

In the dungeon, the walls dripped with green algae, the smell could not be handled by a gaggle of noses alone. Humming sat in a corner, legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed. A polymelodic mantra ran in his head, operated by the parallel functions of his mind which he had divided into twelve even pieces for the chant. It allowed him to focus in times of despair, calmed his sentiment, and brought about wonderful upwellings of positive energy. The dungeon’s drips changed to notes, its oozy greens changed to a lustrous mint, the smells transformed into an appreciation for complex molecular compositions. Settled, he opened his eyes and saw absolutely nothing, for it was dark and the candles were too damp to light.

Then, he sang a song, not from his lungs but from his heart, where he had had installed a small electronic speaker over a century ago now. It was a familiar tune to Humming but far less to others around him and it went like this:

Thump-thump, Thump-thump, thump-thump.

No guard outside the dungeon could help but not hear it, and they came running, rattling the bars and saying things like, “Stop that song at once!” “What a terribly soporific séance – cease it!” And so on. But Humming did not stop the song from his heart until they opened the dungeon gate to get to him. But by then they were so saddened by the tones they let Humming walk past them as they cried. One guard turned to him as he walked by, his cheek glistening with tears: “Oh no, you cannot leave, but – but! Oh woe, my blood has never felt so heavy, my body a giant tissue for my leaking sadness. Please, if you leave, just do it quick – oh woe – for I the great Emerald will be most displeased, but what could I care for I am most shook with sorrow.” To the guard, Humming made the gesture of Bailang Ti-To, emphasizing, unusually, the fourteen corners of the prime star. This was a gesture of peace and love, which the guard did not know, but understood.

The bishops had the perfect glass sphere stuck in one of the two doors into Emerald Genistine’s castle. The third central door would be far less trouble, but Genistine would hear nothing of them using it. One bishop pushed from the back while the other tried to pull by grabbing the glass from the from. But so unblemished was it spherical nature that the pulling bishop could not get a grip. Instead he resorted to chanting words of encouragement to the pushing bishop, who was now visibly sweating through his white robes.

Humming ran up the steps of the castle and found the bishops struggling. With a bow, he offered to take it from here, but both bishops fled, ungracefully flapping their soaked robes, to warn Emerald Genistine promptly. Humming was most disappointed to find a scratch along the top of his glass orb where it had run across the top of the doorway before it had become wedged. The mechanical tentacles, too, had been twisted but not broken. Humming shook his head, shook his fist, and then shook his pocket until a hammer and wrench fell loose and he got to work. No guards came to seize Humming, for they had all been drawn by the thrumping melancholy melody and were recovering down below. Rather, Emerald Genistine herself had to walk up to Humming with mechanical army of quadcogs in tow. When she saw him, she pointed and said, “Consume the escapee!”

Humming did not flinch. He returned his tools to his pocket, pushed a button on the base of the orb, took a few steps back, and assumed an entangled position on the floor, his legs and arms crissed and crossed. The quadcogs made it within ten yaps of Humming before a great note of the deep sea was summoned from somewhere deep in the orb’s core. The note was one to challenge a quake from a giant blue star. Heavy, helmed by a bass, trailed by a tinny tangle of reverberating threads, it delivered itself into every auditorial sensory device within twelve miles. It hung for minutes and, upon inspection, the atom structure of the marble within the castle had been rearranged such that it was now an amorphous fluid – but none around were aware of this because its appearance remained unchanged.

And the Emerald Genistine, what of her? Well this one note was not the universal tone she so requested, but it was a note unheard of before. This was enough to discard from her face a scowl and supplant a gasp. Although Humming was with his head to the floor, and no guards or bishops were in sight, she was deeply embarrassed by this display of weakness and slapped herself thrice over until the pain contorted her into a vision of fury. By now the single note had also resided into more of a low thrum.

She spat in the air, “You’re reputation will never leave these marble mounds of my intergalactic palace, for I am Emerald Genistine – you, you are my prisoner. Certainly, that was some surly note, but one note is not what I requested – your head is mine, the rest will be fed to the quadcogs!” And she lunged with a sceptre in hand that had been concealed by the length of her long red gown. Humming did not move, as she came in close, it was the orb that acted first.