Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

dull and repetitive sometimes! Not,” she added hastily, “that the bio department hasn’t done wonders during our lifetime!”
    “You must remember,” Willum-frth-willum said rather stiffly, “that my predecessors and I have been limited to the genetic codes for the thirty basic human food crops that were originally transmitted some centuries ago. Thirty, that is, if you want to include bacterial protein and heterochronic eggs. I’d also like to point out that we’ve mostly been on our own in these projects. The Nar regard the human diet as adequate. Adding novelties to it has a low priority for them.”
    “Yes, yes, of course,” the mauve-haired lady agreed. “We’re all very grateful, as I said.”
    About a dozen people had acquired the red globes from the baskets being circulated by the students, and were holding the strange fruits doubtfully.
    “How do you eat it?” a brave soul inquired.
    “Just bite into it,” the overman said. “It’s an acquired taste, I’m afraid, but our culinary experts think it might be useful in cooking.”
    “I’ll get you one,” Bram said to Mim, and plunged into the crowd. He came back a moment later with two of the fruits.
    She took a suspicious bite and made a face. “It tastes a little … I don’t know … acid,” she pronounced. “I was expecting it to be sweet.”
    Bram bit into his own tomato. To his embarrassment, it squirted juice and little seeds that dribbled down his chin. Surreptitiously, he wiped it off with the sleeve of his mono, but Mim didn’t seem to have noticed his clumsiness. She was looking around again for the musicians.
    He got two goblets of some pale fizzy stuff, at the risk of being told by the gray-haired lady who was ladling it out that he was too young for the spiked punch, and he and Mim drifted away from the buffet into the thick of the party. He could hear the arguments about the tomato going on in his wake: “… think they must have made a sort of wine out of it.” And: “… know for a fact from a mid-Inglex reference that they used it in their social rituals, like throwing it at the stage to indicate disapproval of a theatrical performance.”
    Mim, still looking around, collided with someone disengaging himself from another group, but held on to her drink without spilling it.
    “Oops, sorry,” he said, apologizing first. He was a stocky, muscular man with blue-black locks and thick, cursive features.
    “Hello, Dal,” she said. “This is Bram.”
    “Hello, Bram,” the man said without much interest. He turned back to Mim. “Did you get your tomato?”
    “Yes. How about you?”
    “I’m going to wait. Till I see if there are any survivors.”
    Mim laughed, and a jealous stab went through Bram. Dal was older, established, confident-looking, and he seemed to know Mim very well.
    “How did you like the music tonight?” Dal asked her.
    “It was a tremendous success. It’s going to start a craze for Impressionism. I’ll bet all the composers will be writing in that style for months! ”
    “My impression exactly. Why do you suppose it stayed on the shelf for so long?”
    Bram felt ignored. He tried to look knowledgeable and interested as they talked on about music.
    “I suppose they didn’t realize it was music at first, and then it got put aside and lost for a while,” Mim said seriously. “Repetitive patterns and voice imitations wouldn’t have been easy to pick out of all the coloristic effects, would they? That’s why music began with counterpoint. Original Man was clever. The first music he sent was Bach. The Art of the Fugue. Even the Nar recognized it as some kind of art form.” She gave a tinkling laugh that squeezed at Bram’s heart. “I believe they first tried a readout on a touch machine. Then somebody noticed similar patterns of imitation and repetition in the fugal movement of the recorded transmission of the Second Brandenburg, and they assigned pitch and duration to the symbols. After that, decoding Beethoven was easy.”
    “Is that from the music history course, little Mim?” Dal teased her.
    She blushed, and Bram felt younger than ever compared to a rival who could make Mim, with her formidable mettle, do that.
    “Yes,” she admitted.
    Dal let her off the hook, treating her as a grown woman again. “Is there any more Ravel waiting to be reconstituted, do you think?”
    “No, that was the only sample.”
    “Pity. I’m going to need some incidental music for my new verse