The Sky Trawlers

by Nilakash Roy-Faderman

These are the sky trawlers. They stand, each of them, on the high rooftops of the tallest buildings of the city, wearing headsets and black oilcloth. They are armed with devices that look like radios and spools of thick cable. 

The air above the city is thick, and as it travels, the noises of the city are caught in it. Conversations, traffic, music, radio broadcasts - in the sky they are dissolved and mixed together into a formless sea of sound, out of which emerge the thunder-forms, the noise creatures, massless shapeless entities of sound. These are the catch of the sky trawlers, who dredge for them with electric nets and trap them in their radios, so they can be processed into the raw material of sound, from which new words might be spoken. 

One trawler speaks into her headset, and as one, they extend their cables, which float upwards in the air weightlessly, into the mass of clouds high above. Through the trawlers’ radios comes the static of the sea of sound. In the sky, the cables extend their invisible electric noise-thread into a great net. 

One wire twitches, suddenly. Then one jerks violently. Something has gone wrong. If the sky-trawlers normally trawl for fish, they have caught a whale; no, a kraken. Above them hangs the belly of a great thunder-form, massive, powerful, and ancient. Old radio broadcasts cling to its side like remoras. Deep within are the half-digested noises of a time before the city, the wind in the trees, the cries of long-dead birds. 

The electric net scrapes at its sides and its cries travel down the lines, which crackle and twitch with energy. The radios vibrate with the shrieks of the great thunder-form. One trawler drops their radio, which shatters, spilling sound across the rooftop and cascading down the sides of buildings. Another shrieks as the radio in their hands bursts into invisible flame. 

The eldest trawler, the one who gave the first signal, wrestles with her cable as it tries to pull away from her. The sound, shedding from the fraying cable like fireworks, pulses through her hands and into her skull. Amidst the jumble of words in her head, she hears a long-gone voice, one that she had almost forgotten. She falls to her knees, and the cable drifts away from her slackened hands. 

A storm seethes in the sky above. The trawlers who remain release the net and hurry down from the rooftops, clutching their damaged radios. Tattered cables hang weightlessly in the sky.