Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

Whatever Voth-shr-voth may have said to you, I know that he would be as pleased as a fingerling with a new touch toy if you’d only go to him and tell him you wanted to be apprenticed to his group.”
    And Bram, one hand in a sidepocket fingering the talisman he had saved all these years—the flake of charge-coupled material that once might have been struck by an actual photon from the Milky Way—thought guiltily of Mim and admitted to himself that yes, he did want to impress her.
    Now Mim, at his side, was smiling up at Olan Byr, whose attention was wandering as he listened with half an ear to a dialogue a few feet away about the string quartet performance he had given tonight.
    “Hey, Olan, come over here and settle this,” a voice called out. “Can you double-stop an interval larger than a minor third with one spin-wheel?”
    “Excuse me,” Olan said with a little pat on the arm for Mim. “Nice to have met you, Bram.”
    He turned away to join his colleagues. Mim followed his progress with shining eyes. “Olan’s agreed to give me cello lessons,” she said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
     
    The reception seemed to drag on interminably. Bram trailed faithfully after Mim, enduring all the bright, earnest chatter, saying little, and waiting till he could get her to himself.
    Once they were intercepted by a wispy woman who, Mim told him later, was one of her minor gene mothers. “Oh Mimsy-mim, you’re growing into quite the beauty, we must get together for a long chat soon, who’s your handsome friend, is he a music student, too?” A number of times they found themselves part of one of the noisy student groups that revolved around centers of mutual babble. A sleek older fellow with experienced eyes, who seemed to know Mim altogether too well, invited them to go with the bunch to the beach for a night swim— though only a bare nod included Bram in the invitation— and Bram was relieved when Mim declined, saying that she wanted to stay a while longer at the reception.
    A few Nar prowled through the human crowd, their clustered tops swaying high over the human heads, stopping here and there for conversation and ignoring the refreshment wells that had been set up for them next to the buffet. Tha-tha paused to talk to Bram and to introduce him to one of the older decapods who accompanied him. “This is Chir-prl-chir,” he said in the Small Language, framing the spoken name with a gesture of respect that revealed complex ripples and color changes surging across the inner surfaces of his arms. “He is one of the greatest of living touch composers; it is an honor to serve as his amanuensis. I persuaded him to come to this concert so that he might experience something of the human art of music.”
    Mim was magnificent. Not at all awed by Chir-prl-chir’s eminence, she did her best to explain what the Ravel quartet was all about.
    “Extraordinary!” that imposing being said when she finally ran out of breath. “To think that a few dozen pages of written notation, filtered through the sensibilities of the performing artists, could result in an aesthetic experience that approximated the intentions of the original composer!”
    “Before the technological age,” Tha-tha explained in Inglex, “the great artistic works were preserved by living mnemonic touch readers who passed them on from generation to generation. Now, of course, we have tactile recorders and touch transcriptions. But Chir-prl-chir is old-fashioned. He doesn’t trust a computer to capture all the nuances. That’s why he prefers to rely on the living arm of a scribe.”
    “It was the same in the history of human music,” Mim said bravely to the decapod composer. “Until a written notation became universal, music was generally passed on from person to person.”
    “The case isn’t the same,” Tha-tha said. “What our tactile recorders do is closer, in essence, to your sound recordings of an actual performance. That still leaves the mystery of how a few scratches on paper can express such emotion.”
    Bram sneaked a look at Mim. He hoped she hadn’t thought the remark sounded condescending. She didn’t know Tha-tha as well as he did.
    Then Chir-prl-chir, with the kindest intentions, made it worse. “The greater mystery,” he said, “is how such a small amount of sensory input—from a fingerpoint-sized area of cilia within the human ear—can result in the profound subjective impressions that human beings evidently experience