“Well, yes. We don’t want to eat you or invade you, and if we did, they wouldn’t have sent someone like me. I am not a soldier. I don’t know anything about military defenses—I would not know how to assess those if I saw them. We want to learn about you.”

“About our music?” prodded Ángel.

Oberon paused long enough to make Ángel wonder if he needed to pause the recording. Finally Oberon said, “Think of it this way. We have many species of large and lovely trees, but we don’t have redwood trees. No redwoods live in the Otherworld. Perhaps someday we will find a way to bring redwoods back to the Otherworld, and to plant them there and make them thrive. But until that time, I am the only living fae who has ever seen one in person. The Otherworld has beautiful birds that wade in the water and hunt, but I am the only fae who has ever seen a great blue heron. Which I think is a very beautiful and very strange bird. Strange, because no such thing ever lived in the Otherworld, and never will.”

Ángel waved a hand, encouraging him to keep going.

“So in the same way,” said Oberon, “the Otherworld has many varieties of music, but we do not have jazz. John Coltrane’s music could never have existed on the Otherworld. But I sent recordings home, so now the Otherworld, the people of the Otherworld, have John Coltrane’s music. Now we can listen to jazz, and learn from it. We can play it in our own way, and make a new kind of music that we could never have had without John Coltrane. And that is wonderful to us, as wonderful as redwoods and herons.”

Perfect.

It wasn’t going to get better than that, so he began to wrap up the interview. “We’d like to thank the Department of Otherworld Relations for making this podcast possible. On future episodes, we’re going to discuss specific pieces of music that Oberon has chosen to send home, and why. If you have suggestions for future episodes, or questions for us, please send an email to OberonPodcast-at-DOR-dot-gov. I’m Ángel.”

“And I am Oberon, the cultural envoy from the Otherworld.”

“Thanks for listening,” said Ángel, and killed the recording.

The first episode of The Oberon Podcast went live on October second, edited and hosted and with professional artwork provided by the DOR. It was just over eighteen minutes long, and it ended with a resonant clip of Oberon singing his fae name. That day it got over nine thousand downloads.

The next day the download count was up to nine hundred thousand.

Ángel, bleary-eyed from obsessively refreshing the tablet and watching the numbers climb, said, “I guess we can do episode two.”