“I needn’t add, this is the portion of the human brain most closely identified with speech.”

Sara could only blink. Through the glass, she saw the man Ariana referred to, eyes bright and interested, watching the g’Kek doctors prepare their apparatus.

“I’d have thought such damage would kill him,” Bon-ner said, summarizing her own surprise.

“Indeed, he seems to have made a remarkable recovery. Were he not adult and male, with a rigid synaptic structure, perhaps he might have roused speech from the semidormant right temporal lobe, as some children and women do, after suffering damage to the left side. As things stand, there remains one possib—” She paused, noticing a waving of eyestalks in the next room.

“Well, I see our good doctors are ready, so let’s proceed.”

Ariana opened a listening vent under the nearest pane of glass. At almost the same moment, Sara felt a sudden sharp pain on her thigh, and Taine slapped his neck again. “Damn pests!” he muttered, and glanced sideways at Sara. “Things have been going to hell in more ways than one around here.”

Good old, cheerful Taine, she thought, quashing an urge to brush at her own neck. Parrot ticks were generally harmless-another mysterious vestige of Buyur times. Who would ever want the “symbiosis” of a creature who attached itself to one of your veins and repaid you by reiterating every sound you heard? The Buyur must have been strange beings indeed.

In the next room, one of the g’Kek doctors opened a large album whose thick sleeves held several dozen slim black disks. The physician delicately removed one and •laid it on a round platform which began to spin.

“An elenentary sfring action device,” Ulgor explained. “Easily constructed fron scraf netal and slices of voo.”

“A primitive but effective analog storage and retrieval system,” Taine elucidated.

“Safely nondigital,” Bonner added.

“Yesss,” the blue qheuen, Blade, hissed in agreement. “And I hear it plays music. Sort of.”

The g’Kek doctor gently lowered a wooden armature until a slender stylus touched the rim of the spinning disk. Almost at once, low strains of melody began crooning from the machine’s hornlike speaker. A strange tinny melody — accompanied by faint crackling pops — which seemed to tickle the roots of Sara’s hair.

“These disks are originals,” Ariana Foo said, “pressed by the Tabernacle colonists at the same time as the Great Printing. Nowadays, only a few experts play them. Earthly musical forms aren’t popular in the modern Commons, but I’m betting our Stranger won’t agree.”

Sara had heard of the disk-playing device. It seemed bizarre to listen to music with no living performer involved. Almost as bizarre as the music itself, which sounded unlike anything she had heard. Sara quickly recognized some instruments — violins, drums, and horns-which was natural, since string and wind instruments had been introduced to Jijo by Earthlings. But the arrangement of notes was strange, and Sara soon realized — what seemed most eerie was its orderliness.

A modern Jijoan sextet involved the blending of six solo performers, each spontaneously merging with the others. Half the excitement came from waiting for unpredictable, felicitous blendings of harmony, emerging and then vanishing once more, much like life itself. No two performances were ever the same.

But this is purely human music. Complex chords coiled and gyred in sequences that reiterated with utter disciplined precision. As in science, the point is to make something repeatable, verifiable.

She glanced at the others. Ulgor seemed fascinated, twitching her left hand-cluster — the one used for fingering notes on a violus. Blade rocked his heavy carapace in bewilderment, while young Jomah, sitting next to his stolid uncle, seemed twitchy with confused ennui.

Although she’d never heard its like, something felt ineffably familiar about the orderly sweep and flow of harmony. The notes were like… integers, the phrases like geometric figures.

What better evidence that music can be like mathematics?

The Stranger was reacting, as well. He sat forward, flushed, with clear recognition in his squinting eyes. Sara felt a wave of concern. Too much more emotional turbulence might push the poor exhausted man past his limit.

“Ariana, is all of this going somewhere?” she asked.

“In a minute, Sara.” The sage held up her hand once more. “That was just the overture. Here comes the part we’re interested in.”

How does she know? Sara wondered. Apparently, the breadth of Ariana’s eclectic knowledge stretched even to obscure ancient arts.

Sure enough, in moments the instrumental arrangement crescendoed and paused. Then a new element joined in — the unmistakable twang of human voices. After missing the first few stanzas, Sara bent forward, concentrating to make out queerly accented words.

The effect on the Stranger was profound. He stood up, trembling. The emotion spilling across his face was not simply recognition, but joyful surprise.

Then — to his own clear amazement as much as Sara’s — he opened his mouth and sang along!

Sara stood up, too, staring in astonishment. From Ariana Foo came a shout of satisfaction.

“Aha! A hit with the very first try! Even with the cultural cue, I expected to work through many before finding one he knew.”

“But his injury!” objected Taine. “I thought you said—”

“Quite right,” Bonner cut in. “If he can’t speak, how can he sing?”

“Oh, that.” Ariana dismissed the miracle with a wave. “Different functions. Different parts of the brain. There are precedents in the medical references. I’m told it’s even been observed here on Jijo, once or twice.

“No, what startles me is the cultural persistence this experiment demonstrates. It’s been three hundred years. I’d have thought by now Galactic influences would overwhelm all native Earthly—” The old woman paused, as if realizing she was running off on a tangent. “Well, never mind that. Right now what matters is that our off-planet visitor seems to have found a way to communicate, after all.”

Even in the dimness, Ariana’s smile was broad and anything but humble.

Sara laid her hand on the glass, feeling its cool slickness vibrate to the music in the next room, which had passed on to a new song. The cadence slowed and melody changed, though apparently not the topic.

She closed her eyes and listened as the Stranger plunged ahead with throaty joy, outracing the recording in his eagerness to be heard at last.