Danny faced the piano. They had come to hear an old melody, and he would give it to them. Flee As A Bird To The Mountain. It was a New Orleans funeral march, and that was fitting. It was the end of him as a musician.
He let the first notes roll off his fingers, slow. The music had been buried three hundred years and it was still good. It hadn't been worn out with too much listening.
He got through the first chorus and the audience was listening. They didn't know it, but it was human music they were responding to.
The sonic switch closed and the meta piano took over. Danny had built it and it was to the piano as the piano was to a harpsichord. It was a solitary instrument but an orchestra couldn't compete with it. The sounding board of the original piano was not big enough. It was designed to use the whole building and the air within it as the vibrating medium. He had never used the full force of it before. But he did now. Now was the time; he had nothing to lose.
He finished the New Orleans march on the meta piano and then let them hear what music meant to him. His own compositions, carried around in his memory because it was dangerous to let anyone know he could write music. It was his audience and he was going to show them what previously he had concealed. The technicians wouldn't have enough presence of mind to cut him off the radio hookup.
He played them harmonies no one ever thought of; not only what they heard, but also what they couldn't hear. Overtones piled high on overtones until the last in the series were out of reach of the human ear. Maybe the ears of dogs or bats too, but that didn't matter. It didn't matter either that humans couldn't hear it. It was there and it affected them.
It touched the auditory nerve endings and those nerves that had nothing to do with the perception of sound. It moved with the hush of a comet or shook like an exploding nucleus disrupts an atom. From the big to the little and back again he took them on a musical tour of the universe. No other charge than the price of admission.
It was his first concert and probably his last. When it was over he leaned against the meta piano; it became silent and changed back into the ordinary instrument.
The audience did not move and made no sound. He had expected some reaction, but not this. He had hoped they would like it.