“But I don’t know the tunes. I don’t really remember the stuff I hear people play.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Wahram said. “Just whistle. You said you did.”
“I do, but it sounds like this.”
She whistled for a while: a glorious burble of music, exactly like some kind of songbird.
“Wow, you sound just like a bird,” he said. “Very fluid glissandos, and I-don’t-know-whats, but just like a bird.”
“Yes, that’s right. I have some skylark polyps in me.”
“You mean… in your brain? Bird brains, put into your own?”
“Yes. Alauda arvensis. Also some Sylvia borin, the garden warbler. But you know that birds’ brains are organized on completely different lines than mammal brains?”
“No.”
“I thought everyone knew that. Some qube architecture is based on bird brains, so it got discussed for a while.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, the thinking that we mammals do in layers of cells across our cortex, birds do in clusters of cells, distributed like bunches of grapes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“So you can take some of your own stem cells and introduce skylark song node DNA into them, and then you can introduce it through the nose to the brain, and it makes a little cluster in the limbic system. Then when you whistle, the cluster links into your already existing musical networks. All those are very old parts. They’re almost like bird parts of the brain already. So the new ones get hooked in, and off you go.”
“You did this?”
“Yes.”
“How did it feel?”
For answer she whistled. In the tunnel one liquid glissando led to another: bright birdsong, there in the tunnel with them.
“Amazing,” Wahram said. “I didn’t know you could do that. You should be the one whistling, not me.”
“You don’t mind?”
“On the contrary.”
So she whistled as they walked along, sometimes for the full hour between breaks. Her burble shifted through all kinds of phases and phrases, and it seemed to Wahram these were so various they must be the songs of more than two species of bird. But he wasn’t sure, as it occurred to him also that she might be as vocally limited by her body as any bird, so these could perhaps be just the variety of songs that a real songbird sang. Glorious music! It was somewhat like Debussy at times, and of course there were Messiaen’s specific imitations of birds; but Swan’s whistling was stranger, more repetitive, with endless permutations of little figures, often repeating in insistent ostinato trills that got their hooks into him, sometimes to the point of irritation.
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 manner of internal cadenzas, or jazz improvisations, and at Beethoven’s more heroic moments, which came pretty frequently, her additions rose to a furious pace of invention, sounding as if the bird inside her had been driven into a fit by Beethoven’s audacity.
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 tunnel, and sometimes the sunwalkers would slow down and walk just ahead of them, bouncing in time to the music, even whistling themselves, inexpertly but enthusiastically. The finale of Beethoven’s Seventh was particularly successful with them as marching music; and when they got up after a rest to take up their walking again, the sunwalkers often requested the horn cry that began Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, then its first theme, so full of the feeling that there was a fate ruling them now, a fate dark and grand.
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, annoyed. “I told you, I’m a sunwalker myself.”
He did not want her annoyed. “Tell me, do you have anything else interesting added to your brain?”
“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?”
