Cardinal Reswell sighed. What a mess. I’m a university administrator, not an information specialist. It serves me right for stirring up this hornet’s nest in the first place.

The Cardinal eyed the reef of field reports and equipment vouchers stacked on his small desk. He had already shuffled the military supply requests into a pile to be transferred to Diocullis, the easiest part. Then he directed his staff to forward him any incoming information as might be useful. The result was this avalanche of paper crowding a usually pristine workspace. He stirred the pile, picking out what looked interesting for inclusion in the mission database. One report, gathered by the hastily dispatched interviewers sent to the New Vatica Space Port, caught his attention.

Field Interview, North Spaceport corridor- Transcribed as recorded:

Respondent: Thomas O'Ryan ('Tippie')

One of the church investigators convinced me to write out a report on an incident that happened on our ship in the Draco sector recently, so here it is, best as I can describe it:

First, I guess I should explain what we do. We find the new songs, Lonnie and I. In twenty standard years, we have sailed the great circuit from Sol to Tam four times. This last trip marked our first quaddy. It was going to be more than just an excuse for a company celebration. It was really a shared Anniversary for us, twenty years together.

It started when we left Procyon Addoradus near the end of our third circuit. Lonnie was proctoring the out-rigging of the photon sails, which would store the packet energy that drove the gravity converters, and the other gear of our ship, "SONG WEAVER". I was seated at the recorder console, pretending to set up the master discs of our popular 'Pent-tonal Music of Procyon,' for another run.

Actually, I was watching Lonnie. Soft lights from the sail console pearled about her open features, webbing the hollows of her cheeks and neck with shadow. I watched her gray eyes, as they flicked back and forth across the setup lights. I could easily get mesmerized this way, watching her. Anyway, it was a quiet, routine run.

Soon, with the rigging set and gravity drives humming, we would be on our way home.

You see, we’re the new breed of Minstrel. We collect and sell songs - songs from all the worlds. We collect and record them. We copy them endless numbers of times, and sell them in lots to one distributor or another, light years away.

See, all inter-world culture importation has a standing like Public Domain to a new world, so we can profit from the copies we import for sale. So what we do, it’s not illegal or anything. We can even collect residuals on our own versions by filing distributor rights on Alcomer, our port of registry

Lonnie says, "We are like bees, Tippe! We fly from star to star, gathering the sweetest nectar, leaving behind seeds of the new. We cross-fertilize the cultures of a hundred systems!"

Actually, it’s quite complicated and requires lots of sophisticated gear. We like it. We were already leaving the Tam system, which is where we usually set the photon sails. The light pressure on the small six-mile area of the screens is just too great any closer to that primary. Lonnie’s hands darted back and forth across the collector’s console as our sails spread further and further out. Our tiny ship uses a hybrid system, different from bigger ships. Our sails were energy collectors, too. They would charge the storage cells that fed the Slip field engines for the long inter-system passages she made.

Under sail, we watched as Tam sung its songs fainter, ever fainter, in our stern viewers. Lonnie sagged back and sighed, her hands falling away from the console.

"Well," says Lonnie,"they’re all out there; one odious chore done."

She pulled back her long red hair, rose and came over to me.

"Let’s see what the compiler has for us this time."

"I’ve already got the disk set," I said, punching up the recorder and linking in the composer banks we had decided to use. "Grab a headset." I fired the digitized load through the console. It took two days to re-audition the original we had culled from Procyon.

We were passing through the Draco, just finishing our edits when it happened. I noticed it first. A flashing red shadow cast over my left shoulder and on to the editing board. I pulled at Lonnie’s shoulder, then she saw it too. We untangled ourselves from the phone sets and padded over to the photon collector console. A red readout winked IMPACT DAMAGE at us. Lonnie ran her fingers over a small keyboard. Immediately, the display lit up, rolling by a long list. A half-dozen of the lines wore green damage flags. Lonnie’s eyes floated over my face sadly.

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"The whole south forty, Tippie, We took damage to the main brace and six cross-spars. I’ll have to release all the spars to replace the main."

We both looked to the remaining charge indicator.

"Half," I said.

There was barely enough juice to complete the repair cycle.

She nodded; I moaned.

I suited up while Lonnie began the cycle. Song weaver is basically a slip field traveler even when under sail with her collectors active. The only difference is, being small, she can’t have the hydro mass converters of the big ships. We run on batteries, you might say.

Anyway, while in faster-than-light, the things that can damage a sail are like, wormholes or plasma manifestations in the field of travel. Things that have a physical presence in the slip field state.

With the main brace snapped, two square miles of collector capacity vanished. We had to stop, run out a spare brace, and trigger a magnetizing mechanism in the butts of the spars, one at a time … by hand. This would attract them to the compatibly charged coupling on the brace.

This takes a lot of effort and a lot of power. I was just checking the last coupling when I noticed a blurring pattern pass across the face of the collector. Kind of like the heat blur you get off the top of a hot fire - a distortion you can watch move. After a few minutes, I realized I was seeing a school of blurs, darting about the plane of the sail. I returned immediately to the airlock of The Song Weaver, and cycled through. I fidgeted, barely able to contain myself as I waited for the frost to melt from my suit. I flung off my gloves and helmet in a rush.

"Lonnie!" I cried, twisting at the sail viewer controls, "Look at this!"

She watched, I watched. Lonnie’s arm, circling my waist, began rhythmically tugging.

"We got to record this," she said.

"Yes," I said. "Let’s try."

Now, in our business, we record some of the most bizarre things you can imagine.

There are people out there into sub-sonics. Whole tunes scored for orchestras of inaudible tympani, felt rather than heard. Others evolved weird multimedia stuff running ultrasonic, heat, sound, even electrical charges into patterned creations.

Whatever presents itself, we have to deal with it, sometimes even transpose it, into stuff that can be appreciated by others. So there was a good chance that if whatever was playing Chutes and Ladders on our collectors issued a vibratory energy, we had the ears to record it. Turned out to be a series of quantum ring vibrations, real basis of the cosmos stuff. We were able to capture it with some junk we rigged up to our Berger slip drive. They were pulses in quanta bands forty-two and forty-seven that transposed into wonderfully complex sonic patterns. It was SONG. Intuitively we recognized it. It was an exciting find. Sensitive and uplifting.

Finally, they left us.

Lonnie and I waited by the display screens, fingers linked, hoping they would return. Eventually, we gave up. Lonnie put the ship back on course, and I finalized a master from the recordings we made. There were no editing decisions to make. The result was the total thing we had managed to capture, transposed into audible sound.

We didn’t even bother to stop on the way to woo a distributor. Any market would take this stuff. We went directly to Alcomer and filed our distributor rights with the Celestial Wave Company. They signed us up for an exclusive edition an hour later.

We hung around for the first release to go out and picked up our first residual. We were just preparing to leave when the College called and set up this interview...."

End of Item.

New Vatica Library, Special Research Division; Liber XXI PP23

Well, thought Reswell, it is unusual, and it did occur in the Draco region.

He added it to the pile.