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“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 tu

Hour 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, a

“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 tu

“Amazing,” Wahram said. “I didn’t know you could do that. Youshould 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.