Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

drink.”
    In the crowd past Smeth’s cozy little coterie, Bram caught sight of Mim. How long had it been since he’d seen her? And even then it had been at one of her concerts; intimidated by the swarm of close friends and admirers around her, he hadn’t gone backstage to talk to her after the performance.
    Her freshness and energy had always been attractive, but the past few years had given her beauty. Cheekbones, wide and explicit, had carved themselves into the roundness of her face. Her eyes were dark and huge and knew more. She had let her choppy black hair grow, and it hung past the line of her jaw, framing her face. Bram thought she looked a little sad.
    Olan Byr was not with her. He had been in poor health lately, so the story went, and his virtuoso concerts were few and far between these days.
    “And Marg’s pregnant, too, did you know that?” Orris was saying in his ear. “They’ve frozen the blastocyst for us, and she’s going to have it reimplanted when we go back down to the surface for the predeparture leave. The pronuclei were three-quarters ours—the rules for Juxt One are a bit more relaxed.”
    “And the baby will be born between the stars,” Marg said. “It’s so poetic.”
    There were coos of approval from two women whom Marg had collected into her orbit while Bram’s attention had wandered. A man with one of them said, “Juxt One needs humans; I’d go myself if I were younger.” When the conversation grew general, Bram slipped away without being noticed.
    Mim was standing alone when Bram came up to her. The young man to whom she had been talking had been pulled away by two people, tree dwellers by the evidence of their bare feet, who wanted to show him something.
    “Hello, Mim,” Bram said.
    She looked up, and her new molded face broke into the old Mim’s unaffected smile, washing away the tired lines he had seen there. “Hello, Bram.”
    “It’s been a long time.”
    “Yes, it has.” They raised hands and touched palms. “What are you doing here?”
    “Orris and Marg invited me. You remember Orris?”
    “Always borrowing things. Yes. I hope Marg is feeding him.”
    “No fear on that score.” They looked at each other’s faces. “You’re not sailing to Juxt One, are you?”
    She laughed. “No, I came to see friends off, too. We’re exporting a whole string quartet. They’ve never seen the real thing with the friction wand out there. They’ve just heard transmissions. The music department there issued an invitation that was hard to resist. Four of our young students decided to take advantage of it. That was one of them you saw me talking to.”
    “How’s Olan?”
    She bit her lip. “Not very well. He wanted to come with me today, but he wasn’t up to it.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that. Please give him my best.”
    “Thank you.” She tossed her head. “Are you still dreaming your magnificent dreams? About sailing between the galaxies and finding the worlds of Original Man?”
    Bram smiled at the memory. “I guess I’ve become more down-to-earth over the years. It seems magnificent enough to be sending a string quartet to a star that’s a whole light-year away.”
    “We’re all getting older,” she said sadly.
    Yes, he thought. That was the crux of the matter. Mortality. That was the true obstacle to dreams like the one he’d had. You never thought about mortality when you were a child. Time and distance had been the enemies then.
    Bram thought of Olan Byr and felt pity for him. And for Mim and himself and everybody else. The string quartet would spend their youth traveling to Juxt One. Marg and Orris would spend their baby’s childhood. They’d decided the bargain was worth it. But in every life there was only so much to spend.
    “The dreams get more practical over the years,” he said lightly. “I’m quite happy to be working on projects that have some chance of being realized during my lifetime without woolgathering about imaginary thirty-seven-million-year journeys. Smeth was perfectly right about it.”
    “Of course! I’m always right,” a voice said loudly at his ear. Bram turned and saw Smeth standing there with a fatuous smile on his face. “What is it I’m right about?”
    “The impossible mass ratios for traveling near the speed of light.”
    “Oh, that.” Smeth waved a negligent hand. “Forget about it. We’re not going to have to carry our fuel anymore.”
    “He’s going to tell you all about using interstellar