“I don’t know,” Wahram said uneasily. “There’s been talk about the conflict between Earth and Mars, how it could even lead to war.”
“Yes,” she said, “but the talk always goes on to declare this impossible, because everyone is so vulnerable. Mutual assured destruction, as always.”
“I’ve always wondered about that,” Wahram admitted. “What if a first strike is made to look like an accident, and is so successful that no one knows who did it, and meanwhile the victim is mostly vaporized? A scenario like that might make one think there is not any certain mutually assured destruction.”
“Who would feel that way?” Swan asked.
“Almost any power on Earth could make the calculation. They’re
safer than any of us. And Mars is notoriously self-absorbed, and also can’t be punctured with a single dart. No, I’m not convinced there can’t be a power out there that harbors a feeling of invulnerability. Or an anger so great they don’t care about consequences.”
“What could that be, though?” Swan said. “What causes that kind of anger?”
“I don’t know… say food, water, land… power… prestige… ideology… differential advantage. Madness. These are the usual motives, aren’t they?”
“I suppose!” She sounded horrified that he could make such a list, as if this were not part of Mercurial discourse, although really it was simply Machiavelli, or Aristotle. Pauline would know the list.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I’ll be very interested to find out what people are saying when we get out of here.”
“Only thirty days to go,” she said grimly.
“One step at a time,” he said gamely.
“Oh please! Take it like that and it’s
eternity
.”
“Not at all. But I will desist.”
After a while he said, “Interesting how a moment comes when you feel hungry. You didn’t before, and then you do.”
“That’s not interesting.”
“My feet are sore.”
“That’s not interesting either.”
“Each step is a little pain, or every other. Plantar fasciitis, I reckon.”
“Would you like to take a rest?”
“No. They’re only sore, not hurt. And they get warmed up. Then tired.”
“I hate this.”
“And yet here we are.”
The hour of walking passed. The rest period passed. The next hour passed. The rest following that passed. The tunnel stayed always the same. The stations every third night were almost the same, but not quite. They ransacked these places, looking for
something different. Up at the top of the elevator shafts in each station lay the surface, exposed to the full Mercurial sun and approaching seven hundred K on surfaces struck by light; there being no air, there was no air temperature. At this point they were under Tolstoi Crater, more or less; Pauline was managing their navigation, such as it was, by a sort of dead reckoning; down here her little radio too was out of touch. The station phones never worked. Swan guessed they were elevator phones only—or else the whole system had broken in the impact, and because of the ongoing situation with Terminator’s population, and the fact that the crushed part of the tunnel was now out in the sun, no one was available to fix it.
H
our after hour they walked. It was easy to lose track of days, particularly since Pauline would keep track. The pseudoiterative was less pseudo than ever. This was the true iterative. Swan walked before Wahram, her shoulders slumped like those of a mime portraying dejection. Minutes dragged until each one felt like ten; it was an exponential expansion of time, a syruping of protraction. They would therefore live ten times as long. He cast about for something to say that would not irritate her. She was muttering at Pauline.
“I used to whistle when I was a kid,” he said, and tried a single tone. His lips felt thicker than they had when he was young. Oh yes—tongue higher against roof of mouth. Very good. “I would whistle the melodies from the symphonies I liked.”
“Whistle, then,” Swan said. “I whistle too.”
“Really!” he said.
“Yes. I told you. But you first. Do you do Beethoven, like what we heard at that concert?”
“I do, kind of. Just some of the tunes.”
“Do that, then.”
There had been a period in Wahram’s youth when every morning had had to begin with Beethoven’s
Eroica
, the breakthrough
Third Symphony, announcement of a new age in music and indeed in the human spirit, written after Beethoven learned that he was going deaf. So Wahram whistled the two commanding notes that started the first movement, and then whistled the main line, at a tempo that fit with his walking pace. That wasn’t so hard to do, somehow. As he whistled along he was never sure he was going to remember the passage that came next, yet by the time he got to the point of change, the next one followed inevitably from it, and flowed from him quite satisfactorily. Somewhere in him these things remained. The sequence of long elaborate melodies flowed one to the next, in just the compelling logic of Beethoven’s own thinking. And this sequence consisted of one stirring inevitable song after another. Most of the passages should have been stranded by counterpoint and polyphonies, and he jumped from one orchestral section to another, depending on which one seemed the main line. But it had to be said that even as single tunes, inexpertly whistled, the magnificence of Beethoven’s music was palpable in the tunnel. The three sunwalkers drifted back, it seemed, to hear it better. After the first movement was over, Wahram found the other three movements came as fully to him as the first, so that by the time he was done, it had taken him about the same forty minutes that an orchestra would have taken with the real thing. The great variations of the finale were so stirring that he almost hyperventilated in the performance of it.
“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.