Joshua paced the lounge of the CHRISTOS, waiting for Bishop Wile to make his appearance. Wile had been cloistered with the new reports gleaned from the data banks on Alcomer along with Miss Denis, Monsignor Ammens, and Father Logan's recordings for the last twelve bells. The three were even taking their meals in the room.

Father Logan had been gently evicted, and Joshua had been temporarily required to share his quarters with the priest while the three crowded Logan's cabin. The prelate found the spectral specialist's constant whistling distracting, but they had gotten by. Joshua had managed to stay out of quarters and thus out of range, most of the time.

The oscilloscope equipment had been transferred to Logan's usurped quarters, as had the data terminal from Arlyis' room. Except for occasional calls for ordering pencils and such, no word had been forthcoming from the three.

The Monks were taking in the sails again and making ready to jump further inside the Draco constellation group, dangerously close this time to the limits of the 12- 27b phenomena periphery.

Father Logan waddled into the lounge, red faced, to confront Joshua. He stabbed his left hand repeatedly toward the cabin area. "All my recordings and sensitive playback equipment are in there!" Logan moved about in agitation as he talked. "I am sure they are tampering with my things! Unpardonable! Besides, I am the one who discovered the similarities between the Song Weaver recordings and those signals- my discovery! How is it Wile, and my assumed friend, Ernst Ammens, can shut me out of this, using my own room, too!"

Joshua squeezed his eyes shut, and rubbed his temple, reflecting that these people often seemed to need a babysitter more than they did a mission leader.

"I think you are overly concerned Father. Your contribution was very important, and I am sure no one intends to deny you any credit. We have time and space issues aboard this ship. It is important that Wile and the Monsignor have a look at that data. With Arlyis at work on the equipment, and Ammens running calculations for Bishop Wile, it is simply all elbows and knees in there. Let them try to decode the transmissions in peace, Logan. You did your part, found the link to the Song Weaver's encounter. Take this time as a well earned respite. Stay here in the lounge a bit, and cool down. There will be plenty for you to do soon enough."

Joshua did feel compassion for Logan. A doer, Joshua controlled his own inner demons by constantly pressing on to solve away the irritations life threw at him. Waiting for answers interrupted that process. At times like these, he spent a good fraction of his day prowling the lounge and visiting the bridge, grinding back impatience. While the lounge provided library access, card games and other ways to suck up shipboard ennui, these held little interest for most aboard. Like many focused people, the researchers needed to feel in control of their time, and their attention was not easily diverted. Worse for Logan, his primary hobby revolved around his recording collection, access to which was now temporarily suspended.

Father Logan harrumphed."Very well, Joshua. Relegated to lounge duty - Paugh!"

Joshua decided to follow his own advice, and wandering over to the lounge's small juice drink dispenser, scrolled through the available choices. The researchers would fare better left alone, but the waiting was inconvenient and...well, irritating. The situation was tantalizing, he admitted. The SONGWEAVER recordings made by living agents? What if these living agents were here, in the Draco Group? Something attracted to small ships, something damaging....the data comparisons to music seemed to indicate that.

Father Logan sat down at a reader to stare out the lounge view port, one arm draped over the ignored viewer. Sister Victoria Seika, also at large with nothing to do, decided to engage the priest, and approached. The priest had settled, taking in the view, and had begun his unconscious whistling.

"An interesting tune, Father, should I know it?

"Eh? Oh, yes, it's the Annen Polka Opus 117, by Strauss, an old favorite of mine. Sorry, I tend to whistle when irritated."

Which must be all the time , thought Seika

Logan groused on. "I stand evicted from my quarters, you see, as Wile and Ernst fiddle about with my recordings, looking for some sense of intelligence in them, doubtless. Trying to separate wheat from chaff, all that. Perhaps that is not the best analogy, plants not being very musical."

"Not necessarily." Victoria smiled. "Plants and animals both create music, as it happens. Many plants have been found to use sound to attract insects for fertilization, and studies have been performed showing that some types of music affect the growth of plants."

"Really? Now, that's quite interesting." Logan found anything bordering on his hobby an appropriate topic, and became suddenly fascinated.

"Oh yes," continued Victoria, "even the germination cycles of grasses and common garden weeds are often triggered by the presence of vibrations. In the field, I was trained to keep my ears open to all sources of sounds. They can supply quite important clues about plant and animal communities."

Logan looked enthused, saying " I have always thought music to be a universal language. This kind of study, it forms an important part of your specialty?"

"Well, whales for example, were discovered to use song for communication as early as the twentieth century. After all, sound is just a variety of pressure stimuli. Really, audio clues are one of the most basic resources of life in assessing its environment. We would like to think that all music is an expression of our higher cognitive functions, but actually, a lot of it has its basis in the imitation of the natural world."

She tilted her glass, waving her free hand lightly in front of her. "The songs of birds, the pounding of the sea, the rumbling basso of a volcano, would be a few examples."

Sister Seika stabbed at the small glass of fruit juice with the end of her finger, pausing to lift it to her lips, removing the sweetness while making smacking noises. "See? Now you know how yummy this juice is!"

Father Logan's face reflected more annoyance than epiphany, but he nodded politely in response anyway.

"Song," she continued, inspecting the end of her finger, "indicates a well developed sense of the environment, and perhaps an intense striving to cope with it. You shouldn't be too astounded to find it popping up in all sorts of places, even in that dammed obnoxious whistling of yours."

A look of brief astonishment flashed across Sister Seika's face. "I am so sorry Father. I don't know why I said that. I apologize."

Father Logan waved off the apology. "Nothing I have not heard before, my dear. Still, I can't tell you how eerie it was when I realized that the haunting melodies I received from my Celestial Wave music subscription were being played out on the data plotter of our radio telescope."

A strange look spread across Father Logan's face. "Thank you, Sister - you have just been responsible for my next thesis."

Logan grabbed up a blue pen and began scratching at a data copy of the first Draco emission scan, which he had carried about like a Bible every waking moment since it was made. "Let's see. Motif, yes, Ground; repetitive; fortissimo; a bridge. Ah. Here it is again. Yes, ah, a bridge. What if these structures substitute for verbs, or these for conditional operators? Language isn't my forte, but..."

Sister Seika, used to the abrupt swings in attention from the brilliant complement of the CHRISTOS, smiled and shook down her inky habit as she rose. "By your leave, Father?"

Father Logan batted the air with his right hand. "Yes, Yes. Blessings child. We must speak again later. Ah! Another one, a variation on the first, I think. A modifier? Good God! I wonder if the Bishop noticed this? I must tell Bishop Wile immediately!"

Joshua had been partially following the conversation with one ear. Sensing an imminent breakthrough, he followed the agitated priest out of the Lounge and back to his former cabin. Father Logan burst into it waving the copy, and cornered poor Bishop Wile. Joshua squeezed into the room on Logan's heels. Wile bobbed his head, brown eyes brightly scanning Logan's notes as Father Logan chattered, pointing and poking at the document. Joshua let his gaze wander about the room. It was a pigsty of raveled cable and yes, disassembled audio equipment. The quarter's two sleeping pallets were littered with papers, printouts and tables. This, he noticed, no longer seemed to concern the animated Father Logan.

"Arlyis," Bishop Wile asked, not removing his eyes from the copy, barely interrupting Father Logan who continued to run on excitedly, "Do up a program to scan for a template match based on Logan's Ideas. He may be onto something here!"

Dr. Ernst Ammens, hovering over the shoulder of Bishop Wile, scratched a few mathematical algorithms down which he quickly and calmly handed over to Arlyis.

"Try these functions,"he suggested. "I think he is looking for a readout identifying wave clusters in the original transmission tapes. I would run all sixty bands through, and require a percentile of match for each spectra."

"And the frequency of occurrence of each matching type per band, also," added Bishop Wile." Very important to the identity of language elements, you know."

Arlyis, suddenly awash with the three men's attentions, rolled her eyes high in her head and made a flat line of her lips. Referring to the mathematician's notes, she began to modify the program code of the machine, as Wile and Ammens fidgeted further with the printouts, furtively glancing at Arlyis as she worked. Arlyis snorted, aware of their all too evident impatience. "Bathroom's down the hall. Relax. This won't take long; it's just a patch to the stock Rosetta stone program."

Language? The thought surprised Joshua. If the quantum signals they had found, and the New Vatica recordings of Logan's, were not machine controller signals, background radiations, or random music like forms, then the similar transmissions of the machine Diocuilis had found may also have been...

It was time for a meeting.

****

Joshua stood before the lounges one large table, Counting heads. Arlyis and Colonel Colmer sat across from Ammens and Wile, with Logan and Sister Seika huddled together at the opposite end.

"I think we should go over what we know. The cryptic messages out of Revelations came from a stranded missionary, who would have been better off broadcasting a standard distress call. Would anyone like to guess why the missionary was so cryptic?"

Wile looked puzzled for a moment, and then said, "I know something about the missionaries' contemporary to Theomendus. I know they had standard distress beacons on board, and that this man avoided using it. Perhaps he was afraid the message might be intercepted; he certainly rigged his transmitter specifically to avoid broadcasting on any frequency likely to be monitored by anything but a Radio Telescope. Odd that."

"We now know," Arlyis pointed out, "that the sounds the Song Weaver recorded exist here, and are some form of linguistic communication. The elements of language were clearly there. So that's another thing that's different about this, but neither the missionary nor the signals we gathered point to anything that would cause a loss of mass. Both are just congruent events - happened in the same place. By the way, that was spectacular work, Father Logan. You really pulled the rabbit out of the hat with that one."

Logan waved the complement off, but his eyes were smiling. "Tush! Victoria put me in mind of it. I am rather proud of catching on to it though. Watch for my, eh, our," He amended, nodding to Bishop Wile, " paper on it."

Joshua slid a hand into his breast pocket, retrieving one of Arlyis's defunct microchips. "I read your report on these things, and Mendel's as well. As I understand it, the things aren't even proper components; they don't even contain the essentials to function. How can this be?"

Miss Denies reddened. "The damn thing worked before we left! I have no idea why the chip's Gallium Arsenide disappeared. But it did - must have happened on board is all I can say."

Colmer rose immediately to her defense on this. "Here now, you're not suggesting Arlyis ruined her own equipment, are you?"

Joshua raised both hands in denial. "Oh, heavens no. I just don't understand how their ability to function could ... just disappear."

Colmer brightened. "But dear boy, isn't disappearing matter exactly what we are all here to research?"

Bishop Wile chimed in at this point. "Here-here! Quite so. Joshua, Colmer may have something there. You did say the chip malfunction had nothing to do with wear and tear, after all. Perhaps Colmer has uncovered something."

"I will have to look into it. There is one other thing. Diocullis, if you haven't read his report yet, did confirm that a mechanical transmitter operating on the same quantum band as those ah, songs, was apparently involved with Earth's atmospheric losses. So we have a long string of congruent, as Arlyis would say, events. I would like you all to put your thoughts to that. I suppose that's all for now."

However, he realized, the discussion didn't cover all they knew. They had not looked at somethings at all! Joshua rose quickly and raced to the Bridge. On the way he stopped to talk with Brother Mendel briefly, to order some further tests on the deceased Missionary, then hurried on. There was fear in Joshua's eyes. The pieces were finally dropping into place-a horrible, terrible place.