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monitor intently. “Well, there’s no hope for it; I’m
    going to need the full net in place to get any level of detail at all. There’s just too much cloud cover, and so much snow on the ground that I’m not sure my topographical reads are going to be even close to correct.”
    Elizabeth patted his shoulder sympathetically. “I wish I could help,” she replied.
    “Well, I might just as well go to the concert,” he said with a shrug. “There won’t be anything I can do until we get all the satellites in place. At least it’ll give me something to think about, especially if she’s really got a new sound,” he continued.
    “Though so many people have been playing around with synthesizers, and to me they all sound exactly alike anyhow.”
    “Not all that much,” she protested, absently, her attention all on the next weather map. She chewed a hangnail as she frowned over something on the paper she either didn’t like, or didn’t understand.
    Rendered temporarily useless by the same weather that held Elizabeth fascinated, David continued the discussion. “Well, when you come right down to it,” David said,
    “an electronic tone is an electronic tone, and there’s not that much difference between electronic sounds; or what you can do with them.”
    “I don’t agree,” Elizabeth answered, though she didn’t look up from her work.
    They were both used to carrying on conversations that had nothing whatsoever to do with what they were doing. “With the sounds we’ve programmed in—”
    “Sounds,” he said firmly. “Not music.”
    “You’re thinking like a prehistoric,” she teased, glancing up at him for a moment and wrinkling her nose. “I don’t accept that much difference between them. You think you have to bang on something, or blow into it, or scrape on it, to make music. What’s sacred about that?”
    “You modern musicians!” he said resignedly. “Any kind of noise, clatter,
    disharmony—a fine example of folk musician you are! I’m surprised they don’t take away your card in the Authenticity Union!”
    “Folk musicians wouldn’t put up with a union,” she told him. “And I think we’ve
    had this argument before.” She laughed, and went back to her maps, making notations and calling up more data from her terminal, seeming happier than she had in months.
    “You’ve got to admit that randomness—”
    “I haven’t got to admit anything,” he said, laughing. “I have a perfect right, if I want to, to say no real music has been written since Hardesty—or for that matter since Handel. What came afterward was not, by my definition, music at all. Just noise. Don’t they even teach the elementary tone-row any more?”
    “Haven’t you got any work to do?” she asked. At his shrug at the cloud-covered globe in the monitor, she sighed. “Well, I learned it. Granted, it was a small private college, but you’ll be happy to know that Juilliard still requires knowledge of the major and minor scales for admission.”
    “Hooray! The next thing you know, they’ll be expecting people to learn a simple
    ground bass,” murmured David.
    “Next thing you know, someone might expect a cartographer to earn his salary!”
    “I would if I could,” he pointed out. “There’s nothing I can do right now that the computer isn’t doing better.”
    “Well, I’ve got work to do, lots of it, and I’m not going to argue anymore” she
    said. “You’re just one of those primitivists who refuse to accept compositions for electronics, like art schools that insist for graduation, before they submit any modern art, a candidate must submit a male or female nude, a still life, and a landscape done in classical style.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with that,” David said, “at least the artist can’t graduate without learning to draw, or hide a lack of talent under a haze of art-babble and angst.”
    “Drawing isn’t everything, even in art,” she said, “but I’ll leave that argument to