Ramsey nodded slowly. He could barely see Margot, although he held her hand. He could barely see Vardin although they stood hand in hand too. The music was un-Earthly, incapable of repetition, indescribably the loveliest sound he had ever heard. He wanted to sink down into the obscuring gray murk and weep and listen to the haunting, sad, lovely strains of sound forever.
“What can it possibly be?” Margot asked.
Surprisingly, it was Vardin who answered. “Music of the Spheres,” she said. “It’s a legend on Vega III, my world.”
“And on Earth,” Ramsey said.
Vardin told them: “On all worlds. And, like all such legends, it has a basis in reality. This is the basis.”
That didn’t sound like timid little Vardin at all. Ramsey listened in amazement. He thought he heard Vardin laugh.
Music. But didn’t the notes need the medium of time in which to be heard? How could they hear music here at all? Or were they hearing it? Perhaps it merely impinged on their minds, their souls, just as they were able to hear one another’s thoughts as words….
They’d never understand fully, Ramsey knew suddenly. Perhaps they could grasp a little of the nature of this place, a shadow here, the half-suggestion of the substance of reality there, a stillborn thought here, a note of celestial music there, the timeless legacy of proto-man, whatever proto-man was….
“The fog is lifting!” Vardin cried.
The fog was not lifting.