“Well,” she said. “He’s remembered. That’s something.”

“It still does not … really matter.”

She shook her head. “Better to be remembered for the wrong thing than for nothing at all.”

“No. As well … not to be remembered at all as … that is the … state that will apply to all of us … in time.”

She wanted to say, “So what?” But didn’t.

“You don’t think Vilabier wanted to be remembered?”

“I don’t think it matters … either … whether … he cared or not, or is remembered … or not.”

“Mattered to him,” she said. “Probably,” she added, reminding herself that, according to the convention they were observing here, he had actually known the guy and she hadn’t. Not that she really believed him.

“Tik would have been … appalled to be known for the … Hydrogen Sonata and nothing else,” Isserem/QiRia said, gazing wistfully out to the ocean beyond the foot of the tank. “He hated it.”

“Hated it?”

Isserem/QiRia shrugged, rising and falling in the tank.

“He wrote it as a joke,” he told her, wiping his face again. The old man’s consciousness had only been removed from the leviathid – the giant sea creature he had inhabited – a few days earlier. He had been in there, been that creature, lived as that creature – swimming, mating and fighting with others of its kind – for many decades. He’d circled this vast globe five times, he claimed. He was still getting used to being a bipedal humanoid again, and – for now – found it most comfortable and comforting to lie, floating, in sea water.

“Initially,” he added, glancing at the girl. “Initially he just … hated it. Later … it became more serious, but it … was always a criticism, a … grim joke … an extended grim joke, but … never a labour of love. More labour of hatred. Contempt … very least.”

Words were still coming haltingly to him. His mind was struggling to adapt to speaking again after decades of slow singing and the transmission of thoughts and feelings by singular, though complex, sonic images. Every now and again he would throw his head back and open his mouth as far as it would go, as though yawning, silently. This action would continue for a few days, the medics had told him; the deep, primitive levels of his being were distressed at what they were interpreting as a sort of blindness, and were trying to send out a pulse of underwater sound, to illuminate his surroundings.

The action was, as he’d pointed out, itself an echo.

“… 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.”