The voice of Linda Fox emerged from the strip of drivers mounted above him. As the scope showed, there was no distortion. No noise. No clipping. All channels, in fact, were balanced; his meters indicated that.

Sometimes I could cry myself when I hear her, he thought. Speaking of crying.

Wandering all across this land,

My band.

In the worlds that pass above,

I love.

Play for me you spirits who are weightless.

I believe in drinking to your greatness.

My band.

And, behind Linda Fox's vocal, the vibrolutes which were her trademark. Until Fox no one had ever thought of bringing back that sixteenth-century instrument for which Dowland had written so beautifully and so effectively.

Shall I sue? shall I seek for grace?

Shall I pray? shall I prove?

Shall I strive to a heavenly joy

With an earthly love?

Are there worlds? Are there moons

Where the lost shall endure?

Shall I find for a heart that is pure?

These remasterings of the old lute songs, he said to himself; they bind us. Some new thing, for scattered people as flung as if they had been dropped in haste: here and there, disarranged, in domes, on the backs of miserable worlds and in satellites and arks-victimized by the power of oppressive migration, and with no end in sight.

Now the Fox was singing one of his favorites:

Silly wretch, let me rail

At a voyage that is blind.

Holy hopes do require

A flurry of static. Herb Asher grimaced and cursed; the next line had been effaced. Damn, he thought.

Again the Fox repeated the lines.

Silly wretch, let me rail

At a voyage that is blind.

Holy hopes do require