Bowman was aware of some changes in his behavior patterns; it would
have been absurd to expect anything else in the circumstances. He could
no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking
over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at
almost painful loudness.
At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened
to classical plays - especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and
Shakespeare - or poetry readings from Discovery's enormous library of
recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed so
remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a
while he lost patience with them.
So he switched to opera - usually in Italian or German, so that he was
not distracted even by the minimal intellectual content that most
operas contained. This phase lasted for two weeks before he realized
that the sound of all these superbly trained voices was only
exacerbating his loneliness. But what finally ended this cycle was
Verdi's Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The
"Dies Irae," roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty
ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday
echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more.
Thereafter, he played only instrumental music. He started with the
romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional
outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz,
lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as
so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach,
occasionally ornamented with Mozart.
And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with
the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that
had been dust for twice a hundred years.
