John was grinning. "We arranged for Frans to sample a little of the yasapa shampoo. All of a sudden, Carlo decided to reconsider his business arrangements. It was amazing, Emilio. Danny cut the VaN’Jarri a beautiful deal—"
Resilience now utterly gone, Sandoz shook his head. "No," he said flatly. "Nico can go back, but I gave my word. I told Sofia that I’d stand surety for the Jana’ata—"
"Christ, she told us," Sean said. "Now there’s a woman who’d feel at home in Belfast! She’s a wee hard bitch, but y’can do a deal with her, if she gets what she wants. I’ll be the goat, Sandoz. You go home and see if y’can find that sweet Gina and her Celestina."
It was Danny who broke the silence. "You’re done here, ace," he said quietly. "We got this covered."
"But there’s more," John added excitedly. "Rukuei wants to go back to Earth with you—"
"I tried to talk him out of it," Joseba said. "They need all the breeding pairs they can get, but it turns out he was neutered, so—"
Sandoz frowned, now thoroughly confused. "But why does he want…?"
"Why not?" Sean shrugged, unsurprised by yet another example of wayward sentient willfulness. "He says he needs t’see Earth with his own eyes."
It was all too much. "No puedo pensar," Emilio muttered. Pulling his eyes wide open, he shook his head. "I’ve got to get some sleep."
WAITING FOR SANDOZ IN THE FOREIGNERS’ HUT, RUKUEI KITHERI PACED and paced, helpless against imagination, burdened with possibility, like a pregnant woman who cannot know what she carries within her.
"Go back with them," Isaac had told him. And Rukuei heard in those words an echo of his own yearning.
He feared that Sandoz would refuse him this. All of the foreigners had argued against it, and Sandoz more than anyone had reason to hate the Jana’ata. But everything was different now, and for days, Rukuei had planned the plea he would make to a man he hardly knew and barely hoped to understand.
He would tell the foreigner: I have learned that poetry requires a certain emptiness, as the sounding of a bell requires the space within it. The emptiness of my father’s early life provided the resonance for his songs. I have felt in my heart his restlessness and lurking ambition. I have felt in my own body the violent exuberance, the almost sexual exultation of creation.
He would tell the foreigner: I have learned that a soul’s emptiness can become a place where Truth will dwell—even if it is not made welcome, even when Truth is reviled and fought, doubted and misunderstood and resisted.
He would tell the foreigner: My own hollowed heart has made a space for others’ pain, but I believe there is more—some larger Truth we are all heir to, and I want to be filled with it!
He heard the footsteps then, saw Sandoz rounding the corner of the hut, followed by the others, talking among themselves. Blocking the foreigner’s way into the hut, turning swiftly, Rukuei swept out a circular swath of pebbly dirt. "Hear me, Sandoz," he began, throwing back his head in a gesture that offered battle. "I wish to go back with you to H’earth. I wish to learn your poetry and, perhaps, to teach you ours—"
He stopped, seeing the color leave Sandoz’s face.
"Don Emilio needs rest," Nico said firmly. "You can talk tomorrow."
"I’m fine," Sandoz said, not that anyone had inquired. "I’m fine," he said again. Then his knees buckled.
"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."