Sklom sat naturally inside the enormous instrument as though it had been designed around him, grasped both bows as if they’d been made to measure, produced recently grown padded finger substitutes from his paws and extended beautiful music from the very first touch of bow on string.

Cossont listened with an expression of growing horror on her face, even as she found herself close to weeping at the beauty of the music – one of those pieces she knew she knew but could not quite recall the name of out of her own head.

“It’s a bit … rich,” QiRia said, glancing at her.

“What?” she asked.

“The tone,” QiRia said. “Overly full.”

“You think?”

“Air pressure. We’re too low down here.”

“It’s a water world,” she said, not looking at the man as the six-limbed creature inhabiting the elevenstring swayed, limbs sawing, creating beauty. “There’s no dry high.”

“They’re supposed to sound better the higher you go, in the atmosphere of your average oxygen/inert rocky world.” QiRia shrugged. “Up to a point.”

“I don’t know,” Cossont said. “There was at least one music critic who said the elevenstring might keep on sounding better the higher up it was played, and it might sound best of all played above the atmosphere altogether, where you couldn’t hear it at all.”

Still watching Sklom play – perfectly, brilliantly, heartbreakingly – Cossont heard QiRia chuckle.

She had always been bad at losing things. Or very good, if you looked at it a different way. According to her mother it was practically a talent. Cossont had lost count of the number of people who’d suggested that – or at least wondered if – the reason she’d taken up the elevenstring (rather than say, the finger flute) was that the instrument would be so hard to leave behind somewhere.

She duly lost the desire to play the elevenstring; misplaced it for about fifteen years following that performance by the carelessly perfect cobbled-together artificial version of an absurd-looking alien. What was the point of taking the time learning to play anything as well as you could, when a machine could use something it would think of as little better than its hand puppet to play so achingly, immaculately, ravishingly well, exactly as though it was the creature that had spent a lifetime studying, understanding and empathising with the instrument and all that it signified and meant?

“That’s how ships settle scores, lass,” QiRia told her when she opened her heart to him during a last, drunken night spent on Perytch IV, on the great raft Apranipryla.