“Wonderful,” Swan said when he was done. “Really good. What tunes. My God. Do more. Can you do more?”
Wahram had to laugh. He thought it over. “Well, I think I could do the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth. Also some bits of the quartets and sonatas, maybe. I’d lose the thread in a lot of those, I’m afraid. Maybe not in the late quartets. I’ve lived to those sweet things. I’d have to try and see how it went.”
“How can you remember so many?”
“For a long time that’s all I listened to.”
“That’s crazy. All right, try the Fourth, then. You can take them in order.”
“Later, please. I have to rest. My lips are already destroyed, I can feel them twice as big. They’re like a big old gasket right now.”
She laughed and let him be. An hour later, however, she brought it back up, and sounded like she would be very discouraged if he didn’t do it.
“All right, but you join me,” he said.
“But I don’t know the tunes. I don’t really remember the stuff I hear people play.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Wahram said. “Just whistle. You said you did.”
“I do, but it sounds like this.”
She whistled for a while: a glorious burble of music, exactly like some kind of songbird.
“Wow, you sound just like a bird,” he said. “Very fluid glissandos, and I-don’t-know-whats, but just like a bird.”
“Yes, that’s right. I have some skylark polyps in me.”
“You mean… in your brain? Bird brains, put into your own?”
“Yes. Alauda arvensis. Also some Sylvia borin, the garden warbler. But you know that birds’ brains are organized on completely different lines than mammal brains?”
“No.”
“I thought everyone knew that. Some qube architecture is based on bird brains, so it got discussed for a while.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, the thinking that we mammals do in layers of cells across our cortex, birds do in clusters of cells, distributed like bunches of grapes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“So you can take some of your own stem cells and introduce skylark song node DNA into them, and then you can introduce it through the nose to the brain, and it makes a little cluster in the limbic system. Then when you whistle, the cluster links into your already existing musical networks. All those are very old parts. They’re almost like bird parts of the brain already. So the new ones get hooked in, and off you go.”
“You did this?”
“Yes.”
“How did it feel?”
For answer she whistled. In the tunnel one liquid glissando led to another: bright birdsong, there in the tunnel with them.
“Amazing,” Wahram said. “I didn’t know you could do that. You should be the one whistling, not me.”
“You don’t mind?”
“On the contrary.”
So she whistled as they walked along, sometimes for the full hour between breaks. Her burble shifted through all kinds of phases and phrases, and it seemed to Wahram these were so various they must be the songs of more than two species of bird. But he wasn’t sure, as it occurred to him also that she might be as vocally limited by her body as any bird, so these could perhaps be just the variety of songs that a real songbird sang. Glorious music! It was somewhat like Debussy at times, and of course there were Messiaen’s specific imitations of birds; but Swan’s whistling was stranger, more repetitive, with endless permutations of little figures, often repeating in insistent ostinato trills that got their hooks into him, sometimes to the point of irritation.
When she stopped, he could still call to mind some of her tunes. Whales had songs, of course, but birds must have been the first musicians. Unless dinosaurs too had made music. He seemed to recall something about big hollows in certain hadrosaur skulls, inexplicable except as sounding devices. The sound one of those would have made was interesting to try to imagine. He even hummed a bit, testing how it would feel in his own big barrel of a chest.
“So was that the bird, or you?” he asked when she took a pause.
“We are the same,” she said.
After a while she said, “Mozart’s pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. ‘That was beautiful!’ he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it. And his next composition, which the publisher called A Musical Joke, had a starling style.”
“Nice,” Wahram said. “It’s true that birds always look intelligent.”
“Not doves,” she said. But then, in a dark tone: “You can either have high specific intelligence or high general intelligence, but not both.”
Wahram didn’t know what to say to that; the thought had turned her suddenly grim. “Well,” he said. “We should whistle together.”
“So we’ll have both?”
“What?”
“Never mind. All right.”
So he went back to the Eroica, and this time she whistled along, in an avian counterpoint or descant to the melodies. Her parts fit his in the manner of internal cadenzas, or jazz improvisations, and at Beethoven’s more heroic moments, which came pretty frequently, her additions rose to a furious pace of invention, sounding as if the bird inside her had been driven into a fit by Beethoven’s audacity.
They whistled some very stirring duets. It definitely passed the time in ways that it hadn’t passed before. You needed the gift of time, he thought, to explore a pleasure like this. He could go through all the Beethoven he knew; and after them, the four symphonies of Brahms, so noble and heartfelt; also the last three symphonies of Tchaikovsky. All the great parts of the soundtrack of his oh-so-romantic youth. Meanwhile Swan was up for anything, and her augmentations added a wild baroque or avant-garde touch to the tunes, additions that often amazed him. The piercing quality of her sound must have carried a long way up and down the tunnel, and sometimes the sunwalkers would slow down and walk just ahead of them, bouncing in time to the music, even whistling themselves, inexpertly but enthusiastically. The finale of Beethoven’s Seventh was particularly successful with them as marching music; and when they got up after a rest to take up their walking again, the sunwalkers often requested the horn cry that began Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, then its first theme, so full of the feeling that there was a fate ruling them now, a fate dark and grand.
At the end of one of their shared performances of Beethoven’s Ninth, they all shook their heads in wonder, and Nar turned back and said, “Sirs, you certainly are good whistlers! What tunes!”
“Well,” Wahram said. “Those are Beethoven.”
“Oh! I thought they called it whistling.”
“We thought you were making them up,” Tron added. “We were impressed.”
Later, when the three youths had gotten ahead, Wahram said, “Are all the sunwalkers like that?”
“No!” Swan said, annoyed. “I told you, I’m a sunwalker myself.”
He did not want her annoyed. “Tell me, do you have anything else interesting added to your brain?”
“I do.” She still sounded sour. “There’s an earlier AI, from when I was a child, put in my corpus callosum to help deal with some convulsions I was having. And a bit of one lover—we thought we’d share some of our sexual responses and see where that led us. Which was nowhere, as it turned out, but I presume that bit is still in there. And there’s other stuff too, but I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh dear. Is it confusing?”
“Not at all.” Grimmer and grimmer she sounded. “What, don’t you have anything in you?”
“In a way. I suppose everyone does,” he said reassuringly, though in fact he had seldom heard of a brain with as many interventions as hers. “I take some vasopressin and some oxytocin, as recommended.”
“Those both come from vasotocin,” she said authoritatively
. “There’s just one amino acid of difference between the three. So I take the vasotocin. It’s very old, so old it controls sex behavior in frogs.”
“My.”
“No, it’s just what you need.”
“I don’t know. I feel fine with the oxytocin and vasopressin.”
“Oxytocin is social memory,” she said. “You don’t notice other people without it. I need more of it. Vasopressin too, I suppose.”
“The monogamy hormone,” Wahram said.
“Monogamy in males. But only three percent of mammals are monogamous. Even birds do better than that, I think.”
“Swans,” Wahram suggested.
“Yes. And I am Swan Second Swan. But I’m not monogamous.”
“No?”
“No. Except I’m faithful to endorphins.”
He frowned, but assumed she was joking and tried to go along. “Isn’t that just like having a dog or something?”
“I like dogs. Dogs are wolves.”
“But wolves are not monogamous.”
“No. But endorphins are.”
He sighed, feeling he had lost her point, or that she had. “It’s the touch of the beloved that stimulates endorphins,” he said, and left it at that. You couldn’t whistle the end of the “Moonlight Sonata.”
That night, as they slept in the tunnel on their little aerogel mattresses under their thin blankets, he awoke to find that Swan had moved, and was sleeping against him back to back. The resulting flood of oxytocin relieved his sore hips a little; this was how one could read it. Of course the urge to sleep with someone, the pleasure in sleeping with someone, was not exactly synonymous with sex. Which was reassuring. Across the floor indeed the three ferals were curled together like kittens. The tunnels were warm, often too warm, but right on the floor it got cold. Very faintly he heard her purring. Feline genes for same—yes, he had heard of it—people said it felt good, very like humming. Feel pleasure, purr, feel better: a positive feedback into more pleasure, loop, loop, loop, all at the pace of breathing, it sounded like when he listened to her. A different kind of music. Although he knew very well that sick cats sometimes purred at a momentary relief, or even as if hoping to feel better, trying to jump-start the loop. He had lived with a cat who had done that near its end. A fifty-year-old cat is an impressive creature. The loss of this ancient eunuch had been one of Wahram’s first losses, so he remembered its purr near the end as particularly pitiful, the sound of some emotion too crowded to name. A good friend of his had died purring. So now this purr from Swan gave him a little shiver of worry.
Down the tunnel after a sleep, groggy and dim. The morning hour. Whistle the slow movement from the Eroica, Beethoven’s funeral music for his sense of hearing, written as it was dying inside him. “ ‘We live an hour and it is always the same,’ ” he recited. Then the slow movement of the first of the late quartets, opus 127, variations on a theme, so rich; as majestic as the funeral march, but more hopeful, more in love with beauty. And then the third movement that followed was so strong and cheerful it could have been a fourth movement.
Swan gave him a black look. “Damn you,” she said, “you’re enjoying this.”
His bass croak of laughter felt good in his chest, a little hadrosauric. “ ‘Danger to him was like wine,’ ” he growled.
“What’s that?”
“The Oxford English Dictionary. Or that’s where I saw it.”
“You like quotations.”
“ ‘We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.’ ”
“Come on, what’s that? A fortune cookie?”
“Reinhold Messner, I believe.”
He really was kind of enjoying it, he had to admit. Only twenty-five more days, more or less; it wasn’t such a big number. He could endure. It was the most iterative pseudoiterative he would ever live, thus interesting, as a kind of limit case of what he supposedly wanted. A reductio ad absurdum. And the tunnel was not so much a matter of sensory deprivation as it was sensory overload, but in very few elements: the walls of the tunnel, the lights running along its ceiling fore and aft for as far as they could see.
But Swan was not enjoying it. This particular day seemed worse than any before, in fact. She even slowed down, something he had never seen before, to the point where he had to slow down a bit to keep from getting well ahead of her.
“Are you all right?” he asked after waiting for her to catch up.
“No. I feel like crap. I guess it’s happening. Do you feel anything?”
In fact Wahram was sore in his hips, knees, and feet. His ankles were all right. His back was all right once he got walking. “I’m sore,” he admitted.
“I’m worried about that last solar flare we saw. By the time you see one of those, there’s faster radiation that’s come off the snap. I’m afraid we might have gotten cooked. I feel shitty.”
“I’m just sore. But then, you covered me at the elevator.”
“It probably hit us differently. I hope so. Let’s ask the ferals how they feel.”
They did at the next stop, where, by the looks on their faces, the sunwalkers had waited long enough to be concerned. Tron said, “How goes it?”
“I’m feeling sick,” Swan said. “How are you three feeling?”
They looked at each other. “All right,” Tron said.
“No nausea or diarrhea? No headaches or muscle soreness? No hair coming out?”
The three sunwalkers looked at each other, shrugged. They had gone down the elevator earlier.
“I’m not very hungry,” Tron said, “but the food isn’t very good.”
“My arm is still sore,” Nar offered.
Swan looked resentfully at them. They were sunwalkers, young and strong; they were doing what they did all the time, except underground and widdershins. She looked at Wahram. “What about you?”
Wahram said, “I’m sore. I can’t go much faster than I already am, or longer, or something will break.”
Swan nodded. “Same for me. I may even have to slow down. I feel bad. So I wonder if the three of you should hurry on ahead, and when you get to the sunset, or run into people, you can tell them about us.”
The sunwalkers nodded. “How will we know when we’re there?” Tron asked.
“In a couple of weeks, when you come to stations, you can go up in the elevator and have a look.”
“All right.” Tron looked at Tor and Nar, and they all nodded. “We’ll go get help.”
“That’s right. Don’t go out so fast you hurt yourselves.”
After that Wahram and Swan walked on their own. An hour walking, a half hour sitting, over and over for nine times; then a long meal and a sleep. An hour was a long time; nine of them, with their rests, felt like a couple of weeks. They whistled from time to time, but Swan was not feeling well, and Wahram did not want to do it on his own, unless she asked him to. She stopped and fell back in the tunnel from time to time to relieve herself; “I’ve got the runs,” she said at one point, “I’ve got to empty my suit.” After that she only would say, “Wait a minute,” and then, after five or ten minutes, catch up to him again, and on they would go. She looked desiccated. She became irritable and often spoke viciously to Pauline, and sometimes to Wahram too. Querulous, disagreeable, unpleasant. Wahram would get annoyed with how unfair she was, how pointless the unpleasantness she created out of nothing, and he would hike along speechlessly, whistling dark little fragments under his breath. In these moments he struggled to remember a lesson from his crèche, which was that with moody people you had to discount the low points in their cycle, or it would not work at all. His crèche had numbered six, and one had been moody to the point of bipolarity, and in the end this had been what caused the group to semi-disband, Wahram believed; he himself had been one of those least able to see that person in their whole amplitude. Six people had thirty relationships in it, and hex wisdom had it that all but one or two of these had to be good for a crèche to endure. They hadn’t even come clos
e to that, but later Wahram had realized that the moody one in the upper half of his cycle was one of the people he most missed out of the group. Had to recall that and learn from it.
Then a time came when ten minutes passed with Swan back down the hall, and she didn’t return; and then he thought he heard a groan.
So he went back and found her sprawled on the floor, semiconscious at best, with her spacesuit down her to ankles and her excretion obviously interrupted midcourse. And she was indeed groaning.
“Oh no!” he said, and crouched by her side. She had her long-sleeved shirt still on, but under it her flesh was blue with cold on the side that had been on the ground. “Swan, can you hear me? Are you hurt?”
He held up her head; her eyes were swimming a little. “Damn,” he said. He didn’t want to pull her spacesuit up over the mess between her legs. “Here,” he said, “I’m going to clean you up.” Like anyone he had done his share of diaper changes, on both babies and elders, and knew the drill. And one pocket of his suit had his toilet tissues; he himself had had to deploy them in a hurry a few times recently, which now worried him more than it had. And he had water, and even some moist pads in foil packets, courtesy of his suit. So he got them out and shifted her legs around and cleaned her up. Even with his eyes averted he could not help seeing in the tangle of her pubic hair a small penis and testicles, about where her clitoris might have been, or just above. A gynandromorph; it did not surprise him. He finished cleaning her up, trying to be meticulous but fast, and then he pulled her arms over his shoulders and lifted her—she was heavier than he would have thought—and pulled up her spacesuit, and got the top part around her waist and sat her back down on the ground. Got the arms of the suit onto her. Happily a suit’s AI worked Jeeveslike to help the occupant into it. He considered her little backpack, there on the ground; it had to be taken. He decided to put it back on her. With all that arranged, he lifted her up and carried her before him in his arms. Her head lolled back too far for his liking and he stopped.
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