“… a reaction shared by … most listeners,” QiRia said. “I was at the first … performance.” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Oh dear.”

Cossont frowned. “I thought the first performance was a triumph.”

“Audience of … academics,” QiRia said. “And they had each been given … copies of the … score.”

“The score is beautiful.”

“No denying. However, I was at the first … public performance.”

“Oh.”

“The reaction was … mixed. Some people … hated it … others … really hated it.”

Cossont smiled indulgently.

Isserem/QiRia could have been any age, just looking at his skin. It was very smooth but it was still somehow old-looking. His expression was the most unreadable she had ever encountered, though of course they came from different blood-lines; she wouldn’t have expected to be able to read an alien’s expressions, even if they were part of the vast meta-species of humanoid. The genetic inheritance of his body was mammalian; he even had vestigial nipples on his – to her – shallow-seeming chest. They looked like a couple of rather painful insect bites. This was, apparently, the same body he had inhabited before he’d been transferred to the leviathid. It had been Stored on the raft Apranipryla all this time. Now he was back.

He had spent all his life, he claimed, based (his word) in this single humanoid body, wandering throughout the Culture and beyond, especially in the remnants of the civilisations that had given rise to it – including that of the Gzilt, even though they had never quite got round to joining. He’d watched the Gzilt stagnate while the Culture had changed from a fractious, ramshackle collection of wildly disparate societies – some barely on talking terms – to become at once more purposefully homogeneous and more wildly varied as it slowly schismed, developed, diffused and grew towards the prominence it now possessed.

Throughout, he had taken what he called occasional holidays in other forms, again both within the Culture and without: he had been birds, fish, animals, machines, aliens of a dozen different types and genders, in some cases for centuries at a time. Always, though, he returned to the same old, ever-renewing humanoid body, his memories refreshed, his palate and appetites rejuvenated. And always wandering, too; never settling down, never returning to wherever he had grown up – wherever that was; he refused to say.

Then, for the last few decades – pursuing a recently discovered interest in sound above all other senses – he had been a leviathid, here on the water world of Perytch IV, his voice a clamorous, ocean-filling wail; a pulsed, directable blast of underwater sound capable of travelling thousands of kilometres, or pulverising a smaller sea animal to death with the instant crushing pressure of it. Cossont had no idea how any of that must have felt.

“But the Sonata isn’t just Vilabier’s most famous work,” she said. “It’s his most complex. Especially at the time, in fact for long after his death, most critics thought it his best.”