The Toll

The Tonist tuning fork and Da Vinci’s fail-safe together form an important motif as well as serve as key symbols in the novel. As a motif, the fork and the fail-safe illustrate important ideas about The Necessity of Change for Growth. Symbolically, they represent the circular relationship between religion and technology. In the series, Tonists are a religious cult with strange beliefs, partly cobbled from religions of the mortal age (the world before CE 2042). One such borrowed belief is a holy triad, inspired by the Christian Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The most unique of Tonist beliefs is their veneration of sound above all senses, and their doctrine that a divine consciousness exists as a Living Tone. Every Tonist monastery has a two-pronged tuning fork—the symbol of their religion—in its courtyard. A tuning fork, which is traditionally used to tune musical instruments, resonates at a particular frequency when struck, continuing to emit a pure single note when all other notes have faded. The Tonist religion opposes scythes, believing they interfere with the natural order of life and death, and the fail-safe anticipates corruption in scythedom. Since both these objects are anti-scythe, they are tied to the theme of the necessity of changing the world order.

The fail-safe that Faraday finds is in the form of a tuning-fork-like structure with two antennas. When activated, it produces sound as well, though not one that is discernible to human ears. The similarity between these two disparate objects makes sense when one considers Da Vinci’s journal entry, in which he says he will plant the seed of the fail-safe in a fledgling religion. It can be inferred that the Tonists took the idea of the fork from Da Vinci’s stories. Thus, the two objects symbolize the continuum between technology and religion.

Furthermore, in a circular chain of events, the Thunderhead does emit a sound heard the world over, which the Tonists believe is the Living Tone expressing itself. The Thunderhead also does become sentient, or animated by the Tone. Later, the legend of the Toll is established on a far planet, which shows how the process of mythmaking interprets science as magic and religion.