Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

body reader and you let it tickle you all over. Did you ever do that? And you tell your tutor that you’re reading and you make up a story, and he makes believe you really are reading. That’s what it’s like.”
    Bram nodded. “I know what you mean.”
    Except for Tha-tha, he was no longer close to any of his touch brothers. As their command of adult speech had become surer, they had grown beyond him. They still made an effort to see him occasionally, but more and more they presented their smooth outer surfaces to him and spoke to him in the Small Language as if he were a fingerling. Only Tha-tha, once in a while, still unfolded to him and shared something of his increasingly incomprehensible Nar life with him in the familiar bastard blend of Small Language, inarticulate physical contact, and pidgin Inglex that had served them while they were growing up together.
    Tha-tha, Bram knew, had given his life to the tactile art form that, for the Nar, was poetry, symphony, and saga all rolled into one. Tha-tha’s teachers thought he had talent. He might make a name for himself someday. But there were no words for the things that fired Tha-tha’s imagination in the masterpieces he admired or for what he was trying to accomplish himself, though he tried diligently to find analogies to make Bram understand.
    Bram’s relationship with Voth was growing more formal, too. Voth was still bound to him as tutor and guardian and still took an affectionate interest in him. But the physical signs of his approaching reproductive stage and ultimate dissolution were already beginning to show; the change couldn’t be more than a decade or two away now. Voth was becoming increasingly autumnal, preoccupied and mellow.
    Partly, Bram told himself guiltily when he thought about it at all, it was his own fault. When you got older, there were just so many things to do ! Human friends to spend time with, places to go, things to see. And there was Mim.
    “There are two seats over there,” Mim said, pulling him by the hand. “Hurry up before somebody else takes them.”
    They squeezed their way down the rows of extruded benches and sat down. The cavernous space, all bleached undulating surfaces that grew into each other, was crammed with more than two thousand humans—an impressive percentage of the human population of the megacity—and probably two or three hundred Nar. Some dozens of both phyla in the audience had come from other cities on the continent for this premiere performance.
    “Look,” Mim said, her eyes on the raised elliptical stage in the center of the auditorium.
    Bram dutifully followe’d her gaze. The musicians had not yet arrived, but their instruments had already been set up. Bram saw four unimpressive wooden boxes resting on low tables, with a stool behind each one.
    “The big one’s the cello,” Mim said. “The two small ones are the violins, and the medium-size one is the viola.”
    He and Mim were sitting high enough up so that he could see the tops of the boxes; each had an oval hole in the lid and a couple of dozen wires or strings stretched between a curved bridge at one end of the box and a row of pegs at the other. A peculiar-looking three-toothed metal rake ran on a sliding track over the strings, just forward of the pegged end; it was connected by a system of levers to a set of seven foot-treadles.
    Most puzzling of all was the pair of devices laid out on each stool. Each consisted of a small wheel mounted in a kind of haft that ended in a trigger grip. A cord snaked from the handle to a power source. The odd object reminded Bram of one of Arthe’s power tools for woodworking.
    “Where are the keyboards?” Bram said. He was thinking of the symphony concerts he had attended, big affairs requiring ten or fifteen musicians. The cello—or cello “section,” as they called it for symphonies—was always controlled by a musician at a synthesizer keyboard, as were the violin and viola “sections.”
    “Didn’t you listen?” she exclaimed in exasperation. “There are no keyboards! This is real music!”
    Bram shrugged. The symphonies had seemed real enough to him, but he was not about to risk an argument with Mim.
    Mollified, she went on. “Each instrument has twenty-one strings—one for each of the seven notes of the diatonic scale over a three-octave range. There are three frets for each string. For naturals, sharps, or flats. So that by pressing the proper foot pedal—with your heel to lower