Lament of Unfixed Stars

The Lament of Unfixed Stars is the collective designation given to a body of sung and transcribed lamentation attributed to stars classified as unfixed under the Fortysecond Concordance. It is not a work, nor a cycle, but a repertoire: some four hundred and six distinct laments survive in performable form, with a further nine hundred fragmentary. The Observatory of Unfixed Stars maintains that the Lament is not a composition but a symptom, and catalogues it accordingly.

Origin and first recording

The first documented instance occurred in the resonant chamber, though the precise date is disputed, no fewer than three Librarians are named as having been present and none of them agree on the sequence of events. The Log of Stellar Drift records, in an entry later corrected twice, that a class-two unfixed object designated K-112 emitted a sustained tone at 52.1 Hz with an upper harmonic cluster near 211 Hz, and that the attending clerk transcribed the harmonics as words. The transcription, preserved in the Observatory's annex, reads only "not yet, not yet, not yet," repeated.

Whether K-112 was lamenting its own unfixity or whether the tone was a lament for unfixed stars generally has occupied the Observatory for the better part of a millennium. The Atlas of Unfixed Points lists K-112 without comment, and the Atlas is the sort of document that comments on everything.

Structure and notation

Laments are classified by aperture, not by melody. Under the Fortysecond Concordance, Annex 4, an unfixed star is said to sing through whatever aperture fixes it, and the character of the lament is held to derive from the aperture rather than the star. The three classes of unfixed stellar objects recognised by the Concordance produce correspondingly three lament-forms, which the Observatory's scriptorium notates as sustinens, interrogans, and recedens.

The notational system is imperfect. Recedens laments fade below the threshold of the calibration instruments before their closing phrases, and the Observatory's standing instruction is that the final bars be left blank rather than reconstructed. The blank bars are counted. A complete recedens lament is one with three blanks or fewer.

"Nothing is to be supplied where the record fails. A supplied ending is a forged ending, and a forged ending is a fixity."

— Fortysecond Concordance, Annex 9, cl. 2

Relation to the Hum

The 52.1 Hz component of the Hum, the low continuous tone audible throughout the lower archive floors, is a matter of long-standing jurisdictional friction. The Observatory of Unfixed Stars contends that the component aligns precisely with the theoretical resonant frequency of unfixed stellar apertures, and so places the Hum under its purview. The Department of Cartographic Anomalies has never formally conceded the point; its position, restated in a memorandum of uncertain date, is that a frequency is not a phenomenon and that the Observatory may no more claim the Hum than it may claim arithmetic.

The Lament of Unfixed Stars is the strongest evidence the Observatory offers. Lament transcriptions carried out on the Pulse Floor reproduce the 52.1 Hz component regardless of which star is being observed, which the Observatory reads as proof that the component belongs to the aperture, and the aperture belongs to them.

Aperture dispute at the Gallery

In what the Observatory's own minutes call "the regrettable winter," Archivist-Lieutenant M. Kael documented a series of stellar apertures within the Gallery of Unfixed Perspectives and had the laments sung through them transcribed locally, without notice to the Observatory. The resulting transcriptions differ from the Observatory's by up to half a tone, and odder still, the interrogans laments came out as sustinens. The Observatory demanded the Gallery's transcriptions be surrendered for overwriting; the Gallery declined. The dispute is unresolved and is now cited in almost every argument about who owns a frequency. See The Lament of Kael.

Performability and the visiting rule

Laments may not be sung in the stairwells between floors 400 and 412, as the resonant architecture carries from one gallery to the next and the galleries start answering one another. This is not superstition but observation: in a documented instance the Lament Marble samples in the Whispering Stairwell resonated in sympathy with the The Clockwork Lament and produced an echo indistinguishable from a third star.

Visiting scholars granted access to any Observatory chamber are asked to remove their shoes and to refrain from humming. Both rules are enforced by the same clerk, who has, by all accounts, never had to enforce the second.

Copies of the performable repertoire are held in three recensions, of which the Observatory recognises only the third. The other two are catalogued as holdings of the Gallery of Unfixed Shadows and remain, in the words of a marginal note on the Observatory's inventory, "available to anyone who wants them, which is how we know they are wrong."