Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

doing out here?” Smeth said. “Oh, hello, Bram.” His tone suggested that he was doing them a favor.
    Mim let go of Bram’s hand. “I thought you were too busy to waste time on frivolous things like concerts and parties,” she said with more banter in her voice than Bram thought was necessary.
    “Oh, I thought I might as well hear the result after all the work our team did on it,” he said. He sat down beside them uninvited, the plate of snacks resting precariously on one bony knee.
    Bram regarded Smeth without enthusiasm. He found Smeth insufferable for a number of reasons, not the least of them being that Smeth was three years older than he was, had treated Bram like a kid when they had gone to middle school in the Compound together, and thought he knew everything. Now Smeth was in his first year as a physics intern.
    “How did you like it?” she asked.
    “Lot of scraping,” he said. “But from a scientific point of view, I guess it counts as another success for the physics department.”
    Mim’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Don’t you think that Olan and the other performers might have had something to do with it?”
    Smeth waved a negligent hand, almost upsetting his glass. “Oh, that part of it? Well, sure, we needed competent technicians to carry out the final stages of the project, but all they did was to verify our theoretical findings.” He preened himself. “Do you know that the suggestion about using wound strings for the lower tones was mine? Even though the whole team got credit for it, of course. You see, you can only go so far with composite materials. In using a range of metals and polymers, the coefficient of inharmonicity is proportional to the modulus of elasticity divided by the square of the density. The math can get quite complicated.”
    “Perhaps you’d care to explain it to us,” Mim said, her voice deadly calm.
    Smeth did so, at length. “So you see,” he finished with a flourish, “the problem was one of adjusting the mass of the lowest string to the harmonics based on whole-number multiples of the fundamental component, and the winding solved that quite nicely.” He popped a beanpuff into his mouth and began working on it.
    Mim exploded. “That’s the most arrogant, conceited piece of nonsense I’ve ever heard!” she sputtered. “You think you can reduce everything to—to numbers ! You probably dream in numbers! What about emotion, human feeling, sentiment?”
    Smeth was unruffled. “That’s irrelevant for a scientist,” he said with his mouth full. “We don’t deal in human feelings.”
    “Everybody has feelings,” Bram said, coming feebly to Mini’s defense. “Whether they’re human or Nar.” He thought of Voth taking him to the observatory when he was small, and of the director going out of his way to humor a human hatchling with an inarticulate yearning. “Nar scientists think emotions are important.”
    “Yes, you should listen to Bram,” Mim said. “ He wants to be a scientist. An astronomer. And he hasn’t given up on his feelings the way you have!”
    “Oh, astronomy,” Smeth said with a condescending smile. “A descriptive science. In physics, we’re doing things. Things that are important even to the Nar.”
    “You can scoff all you want to, Smeth Norv-Tomas Claster,” Mim said with her pert chin thrust out. And then, to Bram’s horror, she began spilling out his most precious dream as if it were an itinerary for a day at the beach. “But Bram said the most beautiful thing to me a moment ago. He showed me the place in the sky where Original Man lived, and he said what if someday the whole human race were to pack up and go home, back to the star we came from. And find our heritage again. What good is science for if it isn’t to give us dreams like that?”
    Smeth gave them a superior smile, full of what seemed to Bram to be more than the normal number of teeth. “In the first place, we didn’t ‘come from’ someplace else. We were created here, right in this solar system, out of laboratory chemicals, from a recipe which may or may not have been identical to the genetic code of the senders. In the second place, the notion of traveling to another galaxy isn’t science, it’s sheer mush-minded fantasy. It’s not exactly the same as traveling to a star a few light-years away. Or even a few tens of light-years away.”
    “Bram didn’t mean it literally,” Mim said with misplaced protectiveness. “It’s just a