"Is that normal?" Kajpin asked, sauntering over with a bowl of twigs, just as Sandoz hit the ground. The foreigners just stood there gawking, so she sat down to eat. After a while, she told them, "We usually lie down before we fall asleep." Which seemed to wake everyone but Sandoz up.
THE FAINT SEGUED SEAMLESSLY INTO A SLEEP THAT WAS VERY NEARLY coma, as he began to pay the toll extracted by weeks on the road, months of strain, years of bewilderment and pain. He slept through the day and into the night, and when he opened his eyes, it was to starlit darkness.
His first thought was, How odd—I’ve never dreamed of music before. Then, listening, he knew that what he heard was real, not dreamt, and that he’d never heard its like—not on Rakhat, not on Earth.
He rose soundlessly, stepping over and around the sleeping forms of Nico and the priests. Emerging from the hut into still night air, he picked his way between stone walls glowing with moonlight and the shimmer of the Milky Way. As if drawn by a thread, he followed the uncanny sound to the very edge of the village, where he found a ragged tent.
Isaac was inside, bent almost double over an antique computer tablet, his face in profile rapt: transfigured by a wordless harmony, as delicate as snowflakes and as mathematically precise, but of astonishing power, at once shattering and sublime. It was, Emilio Sandoz thought, as though "the stars of morning rang out in unison," and when the music ended, he wanted nothing more in all the world than to hear it once again—
"Don’t interrupt. That’s the rule," Isaac said abruptly, his voice in the quiet night as loud and flat and unmodulated as the music had been softly nuanced and chastely melodious. "The Runa drive me crazy."
"Yes," Emilio offered when Isaac fell silent. "They drove me crazy sometimes, too."
Isaac did not care. "Every autistic is an experiment," he announced in his blank and blaring voice. "Nobody like me exists anywhere else." He watched his fingers’ patterning for a while but then glanced briefly at Sandoz.
Not knowing what else to say, Emilio asked, "Are you lonely, Isaac?"
"No. I am who I am." The answer was firm if unemotional. "I can’t be lonely any more than I can have a tail." Isaac began to tap his fingers on the smooth place above his beard. "I know why humans came here," he said. "You came because of the music."
The tapping slowed and then stopped. "Yes, we did," Emilio confirmed, falling into Isaac’s pattern: a burst of talk, perhaps three seconds long, then a silence of thirty seconds before the next burst. A longer pause meant, Your turn. "We came because of Hlavin Kitheri’s songs."
"Not those songs." The tapping started again. "I can remember an entire DNA sequence as music. Do you understand?"
No, Emilio thought, feeling stupid. "You are a savant, then," he suggested, trying to follow this.
Isaac reached up and began to pull a coil of hair straight, over and over, running the tangled rope through his fingers. "Music is how I think," he said finally.
"Then this music is one of your compositions? It is—" Emilio hesitated. "It is glorious, Isaac."
"I didn’t compose it. I discovered it." Isaac turned and, with evident difficulty, looked for a full second into Emilio’s eyes before breaking contact. "Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine: four bases." A pause. "I gave the four bases three notes each, one for each species. Twelve tones."
There was a longer silence, and Emilio realized that he was supposed to draw a conclusion. Out of his depth, he guessed, "So this music is how you think about DNA?"
The words came in a rush. "It’s DNA for humans and for Jana’ata and Runa. Played together." Isaac stopped, gathering himself. "A lot of it is dissonant. " A pause. "I remembered the parts that harmonize." A pause. "Don’t you understand?" Isaac demanded, taking stunned silence for obtuseness. "It’s God’s music. You came here so I would find it." He said this without embarrassment or pride or wonder. It was, in Isaac’s view, a simple fact. "I thought God was just a story Ha’anala liked," he said. "But this music was waiting for me."
The lock of hair stretched and recoiled, over and over. "It’s no good unless you have all three sequences." Again: the glancing look. Blue eyes, so like Jimmy’s. "No one else could have found this. Only me," Isaac said, flat-voiced and insistent. "Do you understand now?"
Dazed, Emilio thought, God was in this place, and I–I did not know it. "Yes," he said after a time. "I think I understand now. Thank you."
There was a kind of numbness. Not the ecstasy, not the oceanic serenity he had once known, a lifetime ago. Just: numbness. When he could speak again, he asked, "May I share this music with others, Isaac?"
"Sure. That’s the point." Isaac yawned and handed Emilio the tablet. "Be careful with it," he said.
LEAVING ISAAC’S TENT, HE STOOD ALONE FOR A WHILE, EYES ON THE sky. The weather on Rakhat was notoriously changeable and the Milky Way was rapidly losing custody of the night to clouds, but he knew that when it was clear, he could look up and, without effort, recognize familiar patterns. Orion, Ursa major, Ursa minor, the Pleiades: arbitrary shapes imposed on random points of light.
"The stars look the same!" he’d exclaimed years earlier, standing with Isaac’s father, seeing Rakhat’s night sky for the first time. "How can all the constellations be the same?"
"It’s a big galaxy in a big universe," the young astronomer had told him, smiling at the linguist’s ignorance. "Four point three light-years aren’t enough to make any difference in how we see the stars back on Earth and here. You’d have to go a lot farther than this to change your perspective."
No, Jimmy, Emilio Sandoz now thought, gazing upward. This was far enough.
Like father, like son, he thought then, realizing that Jimmy Quinn had, like his extraordinary child, discovered an unearthly music that changed one’s perspective. He was pleased by that, and grateful.
EMILIO WOKE JOHN FIRST, AND LED HIM A LITTLE DISTANCE AWAY FROM the settlement to a place where they could listen to the music alone; where they could speak in privacy, where Emilio could study his friend’s face as he listened and see his own astonishment and awe mirrored.
"My God," John breathed, when the last notes faded. "Then this was why…"
"Maybe," Emilio said. "I don’t know. Yes. I think so." Ex corde volo, he thought. From my heart, I wish it…
They listened again to the music, and then for a time to the night noise of Rakhat, so like that of home: wind in the scrub, tiny chitterings and scratchings in nearby weeds, distant hoots, hushed wingbeats overhead.
"There was a poem I found—years ago, just after Jimmy Quinn intercepted that first fragment of music from Rakhat," said Emilio. " ’In all the shrouded heavens anywhere / Not a whisper in the air / Of any living voice but one so far / That I can hear it only as a bar / Of lost, imperial music.’»
"Yes," John said quietly. "Perfect. Who wrote that?"
"Edward Arlington Robinson," Emilio told him, and added, " ’Credo.’»
"Credo: I believe," John repeated, smiling. Clear-eyed and clear-souled, he leaned back, hands locked around a knee. "Tell me, Dr. Sandoz," he asked, "is that the name of the poem, or a statement of faith?"
Emilio looked down, silvered hair spilling over his eyes as he laughed a little and shook his head. "God help me," he said at last. "I’m afraid… I think… it might be both."
"Good," said John. "I’m glad to hear that."
They were quiet for a time, alone with their thoughts, but then John sat up straight, struck by a thought. "There’s a passage in Exodus—God tells Moses, ’No one can see My face, but I will protect you with My hand until I have passed by you, and then I will remove My hand and you will see My back.’ Remember that?"