This was a newer copy, on a reissue label, but still not one that Floyd had seen before. The sleeve was made of an odd, slippery material that felt like wet glass. “You made these?” he asked, rubbing the strange paper between his fingers.
“It was simple enough, given the available information.”
Floyd tipped the sleeve, letting the disc roll out into his hands. It was very light, as if pressed from cuttlefish bone. It felt as if it ought to snap into a thousand pieces at the slightest touch.
“I wasn’t even sure you people still listened to music. Auger didn’t seem very keen on it. Nor did Susan White.”
“Did Auger talk about that at all?”
“I kept meaning to ask her, but events got in the way. What’s the deal, Tunguska? Is music seen as a primitive art form here, like cave painting or bone carving?”
“Not exactly,” Tunguska said. “We still listen to music in the Polities, although it’s a rather different sort of music than any you’re likely to have experienced. But Auger and her compatriots simply don’t have the option of listening to music at all. It was all our fault, you see. We stole music from them.”
“How can you steal music, Tunguska?”
“You engineer a viral weapon. It can’t have escaped your attention what a central role music plays in the morale of a nation at war. Now imagine taking that away, in a single stroke. We’d already designed a viral weapon that could have killed them all, had it been allowed to infect a sufficient number of hosts. But we didn’t want to kill them: we wanted to turn them to our own ideology, so that our own numbers could be strengthened. Besides, a lethal virus is rather difficult to deploy across a wide sphere of battle. As soon as people start dying, quarantines are enforced. Brutal measures are taken to curtail its spread. So our thinkers went away and re-honed their weapon to attack the part of the mind associated with language, thinking that such a virus would have a better chance of spreading before its effects were noticed.”
“Nasty,” Floyd said.
“But still not satisfactory,” Tunguska continued, his voice as measured and untroubled as ever. “Our forecasts showed that the end result would still be tens of millions of deaths, as their habitat-based society unravelled due to lack of communication between key workers. So again our thinkers reworked the weapon. What they came up with was Amusica: a virus keyed to certain areas of the right brain hemisphere, analogous to those left-brain foci associated with the perception and generation of language. It worked beautifully. Victims of Amusica lose all sense of music. They can’t make it, can’t sing it, can’t whistle it, can’t play it. They can’t even listen to it, either. It means nothing to them any more: just a cacophony of sounds. To some it’s actively painful.”
“Then Auger… and Susan White?”
“Amusica spread through Thresher society very rapidly. By the time anyone had noticed what was happening, it was far too late to do anything about it. Even now there are mutant strains of the virus in circulation. And because of the way the weapon was designed, once you have it, you pass it on to your children… and your children’s children. That’s the future, Floyd: a world without music, for most of them.”
“Most of them?”
“It didn’t touch them all. One in a thousand escaped its effects, although we still don’t know why. They consider themselves very fortunate. They’re hated and envied in equal measure.”
“But if you can take music away… can’t you put it back?”
Tunguska smiled tolerantly. “We’ve tried, in a spirit of bridge-mending. But volunteers are naturally reluctant to submit to even more neural intervention. Most Threshers wouldn’t trust us to set a broken leg, let alone rewire their minds. And the few that do volunteer… well, the results haven’t been startlingly successful. If they remember what music once sounded like, they complain that it now sounds pale and unemotional. They might be right.”
“Or they might just be feeling the way we all do,” Floyd said. “No one ever took music away from me, but I’m damned if it ever sounds quite as good as it used to when I was twenty.”
“I confess that was also my suspicion. But given the harm we’ve done, the least we can do is give these people the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps there is something missing after all.”
“What about your people? If this virus is everywhere, shouldn’t you have caught it by now?”
“We would have, except the machines swarming through our bodies and minds keep the virus at bay.” Tunguska hesitated. “Now that the subject has been broached, Floyd, I should warn you that, since you lack these machines yourself—”
“That virus could hop aboard any time it likes.”
“You’re probably safe at the moment,” Tunguska said. “You’d need to be exposed to more than one carrier before the virus has a chance of establishing itself. But if you were to remain in the system—moving freely in Thresher society—then the virus would eventually find you.”
Floyd looked at the disc, his own reflection gleaming back at him. “Then I’d lose music, just the way Auger did?”
“Unless you had the good fortune to be the one in a thousand who can resist the virus… then yes, I’d say it was more or less guaranteed.”
“Thanks,” Floyd said. “I’m glad you told me.”
Tunguska looked a little taken aback. “Thanks wasn’t exactly the reaction I was expecting. Hatred and condemnation, perhaps, but not gratitude.”
“Bit late for condemnation, wouldn’t you say? What’s done is done. I don’t get the impression you’re particularly proud of what you did.”
“No,” Tunguska said, sounding genuinely relieved. “We’re most certainly not proud. And if there was anything we could do to make amends—”
“Maybe once you get this small matter of a war out the way,” Floyd suggested, “then you can think about rebuilding some of those bridges again. But first we have to stop Niagara.”
“There was something in the cargo he needed,” Tunguska said. “But he knew what he was looking for. We don’t. It would be difficult enough trying to find it even if we still had the cargo, or if Cassandra had had enough time to scan the contents at a higher level of resolution.”
“Wait,” Floyd said, turning the record over again. “If she didn’t have time to examine the cargo in detail, where did this copy come from?”
“Cassandra did the best she could, which means that the books and magazines and other journals haven’t been subjected to the kind of scrutiny she might have wished. But the recordings? It was actually a rather simple matter to make a holographic scan of the groove. A lot easier than scanning a paper document at microscopic resolution, looking for some hidden message.”
Floyd tilted the sleeve this way and that. “But if there was a hidden message here, you’d have missed it as well.”
“A hidden message like the co-ordinates of the ALS? Yes. But you already know that it would only take a tiny amount of data to specify that position. A few digits… easily hidden anywhere.”
“Then it’s useless.”
“I just thought the recordings might help the time pass. Given how much you like music—”
“Yes,” Floyd said. “Very much so. And the gesture’s appreciated. But without something to play these on…”
“Come, now,” Tunguska said, with a playful gleam in his eye. “You don’t think I’d have forgotten that, do you?”
He was looking at something behind Floyd, on the bedside table next to the sunrise wireless. Floyd turned around. There stood a phonograph set, a good one, where there had definitely not been one a minute ago.