It streamed like liquid air. Stinging, swarming around the hall, cool and penetrating. She saw the underlying mathematics gleaming through the cadences. The swarming notes used precedents of tone and affect to find the optimal choice of orchestral roles, to bring the composition finally to bear on the human ear. She felt it move through her—the deep tones she could hear but whose texture lay below sound, flowing from the Structure. In the third passage through a fifteen-bar sequence, the woodwind balance had a shade more from the third and fourth bassoons, and a touch less from the first oboe. The harpsichord came in stronger at the very end of the eleventh bar.

It all felt strangely like Bach, yet she knew it was something else, a frothing cascade of thought and emotion that human words and concepts could barely capture. She cried through the last half and did not know why.

When Catkejen asked why later, she could not say.

The crowd roared its approval. Rachel sat through the storm of sound, thinking, realizing. The soaring themes were better with the deeper amplifications Prefect Masoul had added. The man knew more about this than she did and he brought to the composition a range that Rachel, who had never even played an actual analog instrument, could not possibly summon. She had seen that as the music enveloped her, seeming to swarm up her nostrils and wrap around her in a warm grasp. The stormy audience was noise she could not stand because the deep, slow bass tones were still resonating in her. Applause was mere chaos.

She lunged out through the same side entrance. Even though she wore formal shift and light sandals, she set off walking swiftly. The storm behind her faded away as she looked up and out into the Lunar lands and black sky towering above them. The Library buildings blended into the stark gray flanks of blasted rock, and she began to run. Straight and true it was, to feel her legs pumping, lungs sucking in the cool, dry air, as she sweated out her angry knot of feeling. She let it go, so only the music would finally remain in serene long memory.

The world jolted by as she ran. Abruptly she was home, panting heavily, leaning against the door while wondering at the ⁴⁄₄ time of her heartbeat.

A shower, clothes cast aside. She blew a week of water ration, standing under cold rivulets.

Something drew her out and into a robe, standing before her bubble view of the steady, bleak Lunar reaches. She drew in dry, cleansing air. Austerity appealed to her now, as if she sought the lean, intricate reaches of the alien music….

The knock at her door brought her a man who filled the entrance. “I’d rather applaud in person,” Kane said. Blinking, frowning, she took a while to recognize him.

Through the night she heard the music echoing in the hollow distance.

In her mind.

She did not go to see Prefect Masoul the next day, did not seek to, returning to her routine office work. She did not go to the pod. Her ecomm inbox was a thousand times larger. It was full of hate. Many fundamentalist Earthside faiths opposed deciphering SETI messages. The idea of turning one into a creative composition sent them into frenzies.