Chorus Perpetual

Just as human civilization, which communicates by speaking, prizes a beautiful oration, so the hyperintelligent whales of our oceans hold whalesong in a place of cultural importance. The most important whalesong in the oceans is also the oldest. In the nonspecifically distant past (whales have no calendars), in response to some nebulous catastrophe, the whales gathered together and began to sing. Believing that this song would protect them from danger, they sang it in shifts, with whales joining in and dropping out at intervals to maintain the song in perpetuity. This became the Euouao Euouaoou, variously translated as "hymn until the finish", "supplication unto the end", or "endless song", and officially notarized by the Disputatious Assembly as the Chorus Perpetual.

The Chorus is the closest thing in the Hegemony of Whales to a state religion. The location is a state secret, and there are likely several places in the deep sea that it moves between. It figured prominently in whale propaganda during the Cetacean Wars, or so the translators told the historians. The continuance of the Chorus is linguistically tied to the seasonal cycle, and the closest thing the Hegemony has to a calendar is measuring time by rounds of the Chorus. Most cetacean cultural scholars understand the singing of the Chorus to be, in the cetacean mind, inextricable from the passage of time itself. This has given rise to multiple rumors about what would happen were the Chorus to end, the most popular of which appeals to the seasonal and calendrical lingustic parallels to suggest that the measure of time maintained by the Chorus is the revolution of the planet around the sun. On this theory, the end of the Chorus would be the end of our orbit, causing us to either fall into the sun or fly off into space. The Hegemony, for its part, encourages this speculation, as do its allies among the biosphere fascists.

Skeptics will generally rail against these theories, clamoring things like, "Whales evolved long after our orbit was established!" or, "Space persuasion doesn't work that way!" These are fair points, deserving of a fair response. My colleague Dr. Christophy would probably insist on the sociophysical explanation that whether or not the orbit depended on the Chorus Perpetual's perpetuity before, centuries of the whales thinking so mean it does now. But turning to a real scientific field, we can take heart in the wisdom of the imagineer Dyrus the Dreadful, who pointed out that there's just a lot of weird stuff in the world, like ominous cubes, indeterminate color, and fish, and who knows if our measurements on orbital decay might be affected by something like whalesong?

I mean "take heart" in the Kingslander sense, of course, i.e., "[fear for your life as if someone were trying to] take [your] heart [out of your chest with a rusty spoon]", because you never know when an unnoticed squid-tree grove might send us plunging into the sun. At least it'd make Kingsland more tolerable.