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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 ma

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 tu

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, a

He did not want her a

“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 tu

Down the tu

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.’ ”