The following is a creative protocol on Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics. It is a fiction piece based on the format and ideas of Calvino's book.

Cosmic Radio

The heavens are full of background noise on nearly all wavelengths: The sputtering of a star's core, the background 'redshift horizon' of creation itself, and all the uncounable sources of energy in the Universe. All except one wavelength, the twenty-one centimeter band, which remains clear, for this is the resonant frequency of the interstellar hydrogen which is everywhere we can see. As a result, any communication between races in the radio spectrum would most likely be found in this narrow 'hydrogen gap' if it were to be found at all.

Well, it's easy now for one to say that it's simple as can be to hail your neighbor a few measly light-years off, or to listen in eagerly on conversations from across the other end of spacetime hundreds of millions of years old. In my day, you see, it wasn't quite as simple. I remember that then, oh, a few million centuries ago, it hadn't even begun. No-one thought of chirping out across the longdark, or even of ringing up their immediate neighbors to invite them over for a cup of coffee. I was all alone still, swinging about in my wanderings. This planet wasn't even here then, really. There was just a large cloud of matter swinging in a vague sort of ring around a slightly thicker bit. One 'day' I was just sort of ambling along humming to myself, and swinging my head in and out of the specturm, up and down, left and right, and listening to the endless crackle of the universe laughing to itself in my ears. Oh, I hummed often- tuneless little nothings that no one might mistake these days for music, but which then kept me amused and contented. As usual, the sound of myself would swing out a bit, poke around the wall of static for a bit and then, shrugging its shoulders, slip in among the electrons dancing frenziedly in from deepspace and be lost to my senses as a distinct pattern. i swung my head right and left, up and down, and finally, I managed to trip over a newly-formed aggregate chunk of matter, and my head fell into the gap. What a feeling! Suddenly, my ears, up until this point used to hearing only the sounds of my voice and the constant murmuring chuckle of creation, went silent. I cried out, and it echoed, bouncing away into the wastes before returning to me in a crazy quilt of returning waves. "Hello!" I said sharply.

"Hell-ll-ll-lo-lo-lllo-l-ol-llo!" the worlds around me replied.

"Yaharloo!" I called out.

"Yaaharlarharlooharloo!loo!loo!" drifted back in.

"What?" came immediately after. I was stunned. I stopped in my tracks, and held my head deathly still, so as to catch the sound of the voice that had replied. And what a voice! A voice so ineffably pure and sweet, its words teasingly slipping between the particles of dust along the slick walls of the corridor that the loving hydrogen atoms had prepared for it.

"Hello!" I shouted in return. The hydrogen obligingly held apart the curtain of noise and my cry slid through, to scatter itself. Hell-ll-lo-lo-o-olo. I waited as it died into silence to hear the reply of before.

"Hello yourself." It laughed in. She was somewhere near. I had never known another, never suspected another, and here she was, yet infinitely far! I called out in response quickly, eager to tell her of myself, to ask her of herself. As the echoes died I bent forward to listen, and as I did so, slipped out of the corridor into the walls of noise that surrounded it. The stars hissed in my head, and I was once again subject to the marital announcements of each fusing pair of hydrogen atoms, and of the squeals of the resulting helium. The noise pounded at me as it never had before. Confusedly, I sought to find the corridor once again, throwing my head from side to side, twisting my neck at impossible angles. Finally, among the least likely of positions, I found it. The silence washed over me, and after breathing a sigh of relief, I shouted for my newfound companion. "Please, where are you?"

"Who, me?me?m-me?ee-e-e" "Me? me mememe?" There were two echoes! Shattered, I groped for a distinguishing sound, or voice, or in fact any distinguishing quality, but could not find one.

"The one I spoke to before!" I shouted.

"Me!" "me?" "Who's that?" "mememe!" came ringing back. And the noise increased as those who had previously hid thrust themselves into the corridor and joined the conversation. Sobbing, I called for many many years, until the suns burned bright in the blue skies, before giving up hope of finding the same person. And now I long for the noise, the noise that shuts me in with my memories, and whenever I do chance to glance into the corridor, there are all sorts of confusing noises flying about- noises that make it impossible to find one's neighbor even if one wanted. I sit in the comforting silence of the roar, and wait for the day when I might find the other one more time, even as I think I hear her in every newfound croak of the small ones padding about my feet, and wish I too could forget what it is to speak once again that I might find her, the first, as I did before.

Calvino was pressed upon me in a class on 'Really Fantastic Fiction,' and the double entendre has been clear to me ever since. This poor imitation was done in lieu of an essay assignment on 'Cosmicomics.'

-The Custodian