“Nothing,” Farrell said. “I don’t really give concerts much these days, especially in the good settings. They just make the music feel more dead than it is, and I don’t need that. I already know.”

“Old buddy,” she said. “Childhood sweetheart, moon of my delight, I hate to hurt your feelings, but you aren’t exactly the only Renaissance musician in town. Since I moved back here, I’ve never seen so many classical guitarists, so many countertenors, so many little groups tootling away on their recorders every Tuesday night. You can’t throw a rock and not hit someone playing Dowland on a street corner. How can it all be dead, with everyone going at it like that?”

“Because that world’s gone,” Farrell said, “the world where people walked around whistling that music. All the madrigal singers in the world can’t make that other one real again. It’s like dinosaurs. We can put them back together perfectly, bone for bone, but we don’t know what they smelled like, what kind of sounds they made, or how big they really looked standing in the grass under all those fossil fern trees. Even the sunlight must have been different, and the wind. What can bones tell you about a kind of wind that doesn’t blow anymore?”

A cab turned in from the street, and they stepped aside to let it go by, bumping along the silly drawbridge. The driver looked dour and embarrassed. Julie said, “Worlds are perishable. Do you want people not to play Mozart because they can’t ever hear the music with the ears he meant it for?”

“I don’t mean it just like that,” Farrell began; and then, “No, by God, I think I do mean it like that. Music should be daily. They ought to stop playing a composer’s music as soon as the last one who knows what it means is gone. The last one who knew the noises. The stuff I play has hawkbells in it and mill wheels and pikes all grounding at once. Chamber pots being emptied out of the window, banks of oars rattling into the water. People screaming because the hangman’s just held up somebody’s heart for them to see. I can’t hear the noises, I just play the notes. Shouldn’t be allowed.”