Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

play. Something novel. A Ravel that no one’s heard yet would have been perfect.”
    “You could arrange with the music department to have something composed in the same style.”
    “Yes, I could do that.” He didn’t seem pleased by the idea.
    A florid man from the adjacent group had been eavesdropping. “What are you going to spring on us this time, Dal? Are you going to try to top Quixote Sobre Las Estrellas? ”
    Dal laughed. “No, I’m staying in the mainstream. If Inglex was good enough for Shakespeare and Jam Anders, it’s good enough for me.”
    Bram thought that Dal sounded piqued. The neo-Cervantist play had been the hit of the season. It had been written entirely in Spanish, a proto-Inglex dialect that not more than a few dozen people in the audience understood despite all the twenty-first-century loan words that had given it a second rebirth in mid-Inglex. The play had been a huge success nevertheless; the force of the performance had carried it along even when the meaning was obscure.
    “Glad to see that you’re taking it so well, amigo-san,” the florid man said mockingly.
    “I agree with Dal,” said a thin woman in a long skirt and dickey. “Basically we’re firmly rooted in the mid-Inglex culture, anchored by Shakespeare and Chaucer at one end and Anders and Tsukada at the other. That’s our seedbed. Our own culture—what we’ve produced in the last twenty generations and what we’ll produce in the thirty centuries to come—will flower from the diversity that’s been laid down for us.”
    “I’d hardly call Jam Anders a mid-Inglex author,” put in a long-nosed, saturnine man in a kilt that did not quite conceal the beginnings of a potbelly. “Properly, he belongs to the beginning of the transitional-Inglex period. And Chaucer? Really, Alis, my dear! He came with a translation, like Beowulf and the rest of the pre-Inglex samples.”
    “You know what I mean, Pers-Morley,” the thin woman said impatiently. “I’m saying that Inglex hardly changed at all after the last great influx of Japanese and Chinese and Arabic and Spanish loan words in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. And that it held onto its roots— because Shakespeare and the King James Bible continued to be the standard for the proselyte Inglex-speakers who were being absorbed into the growing stream. Already by their twentieth century, Inglex was the second most widely spoken language in the human culture, and other speakers accommodated themselves to it rather than the other way around. It was the language of commerce, and even the Sovs, a great rival power of the time, taught their schoolchildren to speak it. And of course, by that time printing and the electronic media had pretty well frozen it into a semipermanent matrix that could have been understood by any Inglex speaker from”—she glared challengingly at the potbellied man—“Chaucer’s time to—to the last centuries we have a record of.”
    Mim nudged Bram. “That’s Alis Tonia Atli. Isn’t she wonderful? She wrote the most beautiful historical romance about early times, the first breeding generation when there were only a few score people in the world. The Fledgling Hearts, it’s called. It’s sort of like Romeo and Juliet, about two lovers with totally incompatible gene maps who aren’t allowed to contribute to the same genome and live on in it. It’s on lit net—you really ought to punch yourself out a copy.” She glanced admiringly at the thin woman. “There are some who say that she’s a militant Resurgist, but I don’t care.”
    “She sounds very brilliant,” Bram said miserably. He could feel himself shrinking into insignificance in this company. But at least the muscular playwright, Dal, had turned his attention away from Mim.
    “What about Chin-pin-yin?” somebody protested to Alis. “Chinese, they called the twentieth-century form. That was the most widely spoken human language. You can’t ignore it. Original Man certainly didn’t when he made it a part of us. All of us speak it to some degree.”
    “It may have been the most prevalent human language,” Alis conceded, “but it didn’t travel well. By the time a phonetic notation came along to freeze it into the form we know today, it was already top-heavy with circumlocutions borrowed from western concepts. The grammar’s simple, granted—simpler for us to learn as children than Inglex. It’s marvelous for telling stories and for being ambiguous when