Still he hesitated. "It’s a long way to the console I use."
She motioned at Symphony Hall. "That building must have public consoles."
He could imagine what she would think of a grown man who could barely log into the web of a city where he had lived for years. He paused for a long time before he finally said, "Can’t use them."
"It has no console room?"
"It has one."
"Can’t you link to your personal console from here?"
His shoulders were so tense, he felt his sweater pulled tight across them. "No personal console."
She blinked. "You don’t have a personal console?"
"No."
"Where do you work?"
"Library."
"We can probably link into the library system from here." She watched his face as if trying to decipher his mood. "I can set it up for you."
So. He had run out of excuses. After another of their awkward pauses, he said, "All right."
He took her to an alcove in Symphony Hall. Blue light filled the room and blue rugs carpeted the floor. The sculpted white shapes of the public consoles made a pleasing design around the perimeter of the room.
Soz sat on a cushioned stool in front of the nearest console. "Open guest account."
When a wash of blue appeared the screen, Jato almost laughed. Only Dreamers would color-coordinate a room’s decor with its web console.
"Welcome to Nightingale," the console said. "What can I do for you?"
"Library access," she said. "Establish a root directory here, standard branch structure and holographics, maximum allowed memory, full paths to available public nodes, and all allowed anonymous transferral options."
"Specify preferred nodes," the console said.
"One to produce a music simulation, given a representation of the score and a mapping algorithm."
A new voice spoke in mellow tones. "Treble here. Please position score and define algorithm."
Soz glanced at Jato. "You can take it from here."
He just looked at her. It had sounded like she was speaking another language. He hadn’t even known the computers she spoke to existed. "Take it where?"
She stood up and moved aside. "Tell Treble how to access your files."
"I don’t have an account."
"Everyone has an account."
He had to make a conscious effort to keep from gritting his teeth. "I guess I’m no one."
Soz winced. "I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way." She started to say more, then stopped. Glancing around the alcove, she said, "This room must be easy to monitor."
"Probably." Did she think the Dreamers were watching them? "The drones keep track of me."
She nodded. Any questions or comments she had intended to make about his lack of computer accounts remained unsaid. Instead she indicated a horizontal screen on the console. "If you put the statue there and give Treble the mapping for the fugue, it will make a hologram of the bird, digitize it, transform the map, and apply the transform to the digitized data."
Jato wished he were somewhere else. This was worse than the business with the door at the Inn. At least then he had been revealing his ignorance to an inanimate object. "I’ve no idea what you just said."
Incredibly, she flushed, as if she were the one making an idiot out of herself rather than him. "Jato, I’m terrible at this. Ask me to calculate engine efficiency, plot a course, plan strategy-I’m a whiz, like you with your art. Put me in front of a handsome man and I’m as clumsy with words as a pole in a pot."
He stared at her. A whiz… like you with your art. She thought he was a "whiz." A handsome whiz, at that.
Jato smiled. "You’re fine." He motioned at the console. "So I put the statue there?"
Her face relaxed. "That’s right. Then tell Treble how to figure out the notes."
He set down the bird, and two laser beams played over it, making the glitter sparkle. When they stopped, he said, "Treble?"
"Attending," the console answered.
"The angle a facet makes with the base of the bird specifies a note. It varies linearly: facets parallel to the base are three octaves below middle C and those perpendicular are three octaves above." He touched the statue, his fingertips on its wings. "Each plane parallel to the base defines a chord and each facet touching the plane is a note in that chord. To play the fugue, start at the bottom and move to the top."
"Is height a discrete or continuous variable?"
"Continuous." Only a computer could do it. Human musicians would have to take planes at discrete heights. If the intervals between the planes were small enough, the human version approached the computer version. But the fugue only truly became what he intended when the distance between planes was so small that for all practical purposes it went to zero.
"Facets with one ridge are played by a spherical-harmonic baritone harp," he said. "Two ridges is tenor, three alto, and four soprano. Loudness is linear with glitter thickness, from pianissimo to fortissimo. Tempo is linear with the frequency of the light corresponding to the glitter color." He tapped a beat on the console. "Red." He increased the tempo. "Violet."
"Data entered," Treble said. "Any other specifications?"
"No." Then, realizing he would have to see Soz’s reaction to the music, Jato said, "Yes. Lower the room lights to fifteen percent."
The lights dimmed, leaving them in dusky blue shadows. It was too dark to see Soz’s face clearly.
A deep note sounded, the rumbling of a baritone harp. After several measures of baritone playing alone, tenor joined in with the same melody, mellow and smooth. Alto came next and soprano last, as sweet as the dawn.
Treble shaped the music far more tenderly than the generic program he used in the library. Yes, that was it, the minor key there, that progression, that arpeggio. Treble had it right. At the bird’s arching neck, soprano soared into a shimmering coloratura. Notes flowed over them, radiant and painful, too bright to endure for long. The other harps came in like an undertow, pulling soprano beneath their deeper melodies. At the head of the bird, soprano burst free again, a fountain of sound.
Yes. Treble had it. Treble knew.
Gradually the music slowed, sliding over the outstretched wings above the bird. Finally only baritone rumbled in the glimmering wake of soprano’s fading glory. The last notes vibrated in the alcove and died.
Jato stood frozen, afraid to move lest it rouse Soz to reveal her reaction. Yet the silence was also unbearable. What did she think? That was him in that music, the vulnerable part, without barriers or protections.
Her head was turned toward the console, so he saw only her profile. A glimmer showed on her cheek. Something was sliding down her face.
He touched the tear. "Why are you crying?"
"It’s so beautiful." She looked up at him. "So utterly sad and utterly beautiful."
Beautiful. She thought his music was beautiful. He tried to answer, make a joke or something, but nothing came out. So he drew her into his arms and laid his cheek on top her head.
She didn’t pull away. Instead she put her arms around his waist and held him. The fresh scent of her newly washed hair wafted around him. Softly she said, "What place do you like best in Nightingale?"
"The Promenade."
"Will you take me there?"
He swallowed. "Yes."
Part III: The Giant’s Rib
Bathed in starlight, the west edge of the plateau dropped into the jagged immensity of the Giant’s Skeleton Mountains. Its crevices cut deep into the planet’s crust, the tormented remains of a planetoid impact that had brutalized Ansatz in a long-vanished eon. Spires jutted up like skeletal fingers on walls between the chasms.
Natural bridge formations tried to span the kilometers-deep fissures, but most spans were incomplete, their broken ends hanging in the air.
The plateau itself claimed one of the few unbroken bridges. The Promenade. It rose up from the plateau’s southern corner, spanned its length, and ended high in the northern cliffs. Two kilometers long and averaging only two meters wide, the bridge curved out from the plateau over a great chasm. Spires on the chasm walls supported it with columns of rock.