The Horn

Maurai And Kith.

What is the sound that Jong Errifrans thinks that he hears on an unknown planet? It is described as:

"...the distant blowing of a horn. It would begin low, with a pulse that quickened as the notes waxed, until the snarl broke in a brazen scream and sank sobbing away." (p. 215)

That seems to be more than just something that might or might not be there as a background noise. It goes through four stages: a low pulse; quickening, waxing notes; a brazen scream; a sinking sob. And he hears this same sequence several times. 

In his sleeping bag, he thinks that he hears the horn.

He hears it briefly but louder the following day on the beach. It reminds him of a hunter's bugle on a frontier planet. This is just before he sees inhabitants of the planet carrying the body of his friend.

Just before he is lowered into the sea to recover his friend's body, he hears, in the stillness of his helmet, his own breath and pulse and:

"...the hunter's horn, remote and triumphant." (p. 232)

But this last is given three possible explanations:

"- some inner sound, a stray nerve current or mere imagination -" (ibid.)

The first explanation offered for a sound that no one else heard had been:

"'Some trick of the wind...'" (p. 215)

In the concluding paragraph:

"I wonder what that sound was, he thought vaguely. A wind noise, no doubt, as Mons said. But I'll never be sure. For a moment, it seemed to him that he heard it again, in the thrum of energy and metal, in the beat of his own blood, the horn of a hunter that pursued a quarry that wept as it ran." (p. 239)

That was what he had seen on the frontier planet.

In the concluding paragraph, he is inside a spaceboat as it leaves the planet so he cannot possibly hear anything back down on the planetary surface any more than he could have heard anything through his space helmet before he was lowered from the hovering spaceboat.

When he seems to hear the horn in the thrum of energy and the beat of blood, it is clear that at this stage the sound has become part of him. We are left with the mystery of whether there really was any external source of the sound on the planetary surface.