Across the vast four-hundred-pace floor of the Great Silt Plaza, between the base of the sound pulpit and the lowest tier of the tiered arena, the fine grey river settled mud that had settled over the banded limestone slabs began to move.
It was forty-eight tons of tiny quartz, pink rock, and mica dust, washed down from the drowned river deltas during the first week of the cataclysm. For three months, this dust had been a nuisance to the refugees. A dry, powdery grit that soiled their clothing, fouled their food, and stung the eyes of the young children whenever drafts blew from the air-flow grates.
Now, as the ten-part polyphony of the ten thousand statues locked into its third movement, the dust was transformed into an instrument of sacred shape.
The sound shaking rising through the floor slabs reached a gaining speed of nine point eight meters per second squared—the exact gravity threshold needed for sound floating.
Every grain of silt lifted two point four tiny fractions of an inch into the air.
Suspended upon the invisible cushion of sound waves, the forty-eight tons of settled mud separated into nodal and antinodal zones. The specks did not scatter in chaotic clouds. They migrated across the floor with the swift, fluid grace of schooling fish, drawn inexorably toward the zero-pressure nodal lines created by the intersecting sound waves.
