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clear—Uphyrd was an amateur compared to Holst.
    I’d never heard of Holst until Kharl brought his name to mind, and despite the directness and the brass—I’d always preferred strings over brass—I had no doubts about my reaction. The ancient work left Uphyrd’s Gate of Conquest looking pallid by comparison.
    That brought up another question. Why would that be so? Without an easy answer, I began to think, and one thought led to another until I had the rough outline of another edart piece. Once I had the outline in mind, I began to speak and to throw in ideas and rough visuals to accompany my words.
    Over the past month, all across Noram, the Warsha Symphony has been presenting two symphonies—one almost one thousand years old, and one less than two hundred….
    …You might think that modern is better—I did before I heard the older work, and most of us would. But is it?
    I searched for the clip of the “Mars” section, then fed it in after my next words.
    This is Holst, his music describing Mars….
    The screen filled with a rough and reddish pink image of Mars.
    And here is Uphyrd…with his departure from the inner system….
    After a moment, I keyed in Uphyrd, banal after the Holst, but I let it run a good minute, too long by VR standards, but I could get away with it once.
    Let us hear Holst on Jupiter….
    I used a stock net image of the gas giant. I could refine or replace the images later.
    And now Uphyrd…
    Then I followed with the “Finding the Gate” section of Conquest…and a clip of a SysCon Gate—the supra-ecliptic one, I suspected, from the stellar background.
    We could follow a dozen passages from each composition, but the comparative effect would be similar….
    …Conquest is simple…just like the idea expressed by the word. And so are the melodies.
    I stripped the Uphyrd down to eight simple notes, repeating twice.
    …You can hear how much more Holst expresses in The Planets… .
    It’s not that I am a lover of antique music, or an antiquarian. In fact, Conquest was always one of my favorites…until I heard The Planets… .
    Then I let the concluding section of Holst’s work run, accompanied by an image of the solar system spinning against the spangled darkness of space. When the music ended, I left the solar system spinning silently for a long moment.
    So…from this edart composer…the thought for the day is that modern may not always be better…in fact, modern may not even sound as modern as something written long ago. Modern may not be as advanced as the ancient. Remember, we still don’t know how the forerunner Gates operate…and they were built a long time before we even broke the orbit of our own home planet….
    The piece needed work, a lot of work, and I’d need to figure out the exact net-royalties I’d owe for using the clips, but I liked the idea. I’d let it sit for a day or so, then go back and check it over before it went up on the UniComm net.
    During the time I’d roughed out the edart piece, nothing new had showed up from either Myrto or from Klevyl. So I pulsed an inquiry across the net to Kharl.
    Surprisingly, he was in and appeared, if wearing an off-green singlesuit that was either for lab work or for some other medical effort. He stood before a set of French windows that framed a northern section of the East Mountains. “You caught up on all your work?”
    “Not really, but I wanted to thank you again. I’ve got a little time before I get the input I need from the clients, and I did want to know what you’ve been able to find out.”
    “Not very much. There were some strange nanites in your system…or maybe they were pathogens—the structural differences are getting smaller.”
    “Could it be a version of the pre-select plague? You’d suggested an allergenic off-shoot, but what about some form of the plague itself?”
    “Someone might have used those pathogens as a base, but the symptoms were even more rapid, too rapid in my screen, and they