“Here,” he said to the heads of state. “Let’s each of us remember a two-note measure.” And so they all listened carefully, and each found a two-note measure and then focused their energy on committing it to memory. After a while, Clayderman said, “Very well. Now concentrate on a four-note phrase. Quickly, though, or else the music will grow too complex for us to pick them out…. Yes, that one. Does anyone hear that?”

“The first half is the pair of notes I memorized!” called the head of Brazil.

“The second half is my pair!” said the head of Canada.

They realized that every four-note phrase was made up of two of the previous note pairs, and as the four-note phrases multiplied they seemed to be depleting the isolated pairs. Then came eight-note phrases, similarly formed out of sets of four-note phrases.

“What do you hear?” the secretary general asked the people around him.

“A primeval ocean lit by flashes of lightning and volcanoes, and small molecules combining into larger ones … of course, that’s purely my own imagination,” the Chinese president said.

“Don’t constrain your imagination to the Earth,” the US president said. “The clustering of these molecules may be taking place in a nebula glowing with starlight. Or maybe they’re not molecules, but the nuclear vortices inside a star …”

Then came a high-pitched, multi-note phrase that repeated like a bright spark in the dim chaos. “It’s like it’s describing a fundamental transformation,” the Chinese president said.

Then they heard a new instrument, a sustained violin-like string sound that repeated a gentle shadow of the standout melody.

“It’s expressing a kind of duplication,” the Russian president said.

Now came an uninterrupted melody from the violin voice, changing smoothly as if it were light in curvilinear motion. The UK prime minister said to the Chinese president, “To borrow your idea, that ocean has something swimming in it now.”

At some point the background music, which they’d nearly forgotten about, had begun to change. From the sound of waves it had turned into an oscillating rush, like a storm assaulting the bare rock. Then it changed again, into wind-like bleakness. The US president said, “The swimmer has entered a new environment. The land, or perhaps the air.”

Then all the instruments played in unison for a brief moment, a fearsomely loud sound like an enormous physical collapse, then they abruptly dropped out, leaving just the lonely sound of the surf. Then the simple note pairs started up again and turned gradually complex, and everything repeated….

“I can say with certainty that a great extinction was just described, and now we’re listening to the revival afterward.”