“Do you like it?’*
“What?” he mumbled lamely, overpowered, awed.
“Do you like it?’*
“Yeah. Yeah, I like it.” He leaned back against the wall of the cabin and listened, let the new thing shudder and work its way into him, felt the vibrations in the wood wall itself. “I like it a lot It’s . . .” and he finished with a feeling of horrible inadequacy, “… nice.”
“Nice?” she murmured, the one hand still caressing the tree. “It’s glorious, it’s godlike—it’s Bach. The ‘Toccato and Fugue in D Minor,’ of course.”
They listened to the rest of it in silence. After the Jast thundering chord had died away and the last echo had rumbled off the mountainsides, and the forest had resumed its normal chant, he looked at her and asked. “How?”
“Twelve years of experimentation, of developing proper stimulus procedures and designing the hardware and then installing it. The entire forest is weird. You’ve helped me fix some of the older linkages yourself. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response. Try and try and try again, and give up in disgust, and go” back for another try.
“My first successful effort was ‘row, row, row your
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boat.* It took me nine years to get one tree to do that. But from then on response has been phenomenal. I’ve reduced programming time to three months for an hour’s worth of the most complex Terran music. Once a pattern is learned, the forest always responds to the proper stimulus signal. The instrumental equivalents are not the same, of course.”
“They’re better,” Caitland interrupted. She smiled.