Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

own traditions, aren’t we? How would you like to try to explain All-Level Eve to the folk back home?”
    “It’s all very natural to the younger set. Mim, do you realize that there are children who’ve been born on Yggdrasil—who’ve never known anything else? Some day they’ll outnumber us old-timers. By the time we get to the Milky Way—”
    She took his arm. “Right now we’d better worry about getting to the Forum. It wouldn’t do for the year-captain to be late.”
    He smiled at her and drew her a little closer. Together they stepped out into the corridor and let the crowd carry them along.
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
    The Bob dangled from five hundred feet overhead, its displacement showing just how badly askew the wooden chasm of the Forum was. Its carved onion shape, taller than two men, had been repainted in gaudy green and vermilion stripes by this year’s Bobbing Day committee. Though it was only about twenty degrees out of plumb— Yggdrasil had prematurely swung the bough ten degrees toward the true before being checked—that was enough to hang it above the chalked line at a point that was nearly two hundred feet from the painted bull’s-eye in the center of the floor.
    “I don’t like sitting this close to it,” Mim said, taking a sip of her All-Level Eve cocktail. “I always think it’s going to fall and roll right over us.”
    “It would roll in a circle,” Orris said. “That’s why it’s that shape.”
    “It won’t roll at all because it’s not going to fall,” Marg said firmly. “I won’t allow anything to spoil Bobbing Day.”
    Everybody at the table laughed. Marg was still the commanding presence she had always been. She was large, formidable, and matronly at this stage of her youthening, and poor Orris seemed a collection of sticks beside her.
    “You’d better have a word with the acrobats, then,” Bram teased her. “If the one on top isn’t careful, he’s liable to get himself brained.”
    They all looked across to where the acrobats were forming a human pyramid, no more than thirty feet from their table. There were six of them: five brawny lads in loincloths and a little lightweight fellow in rainbow skintights at the apex. They had managed to hoist the little fellow high enough to reach the Bob and set it spinning.
    “Who are they?” Trist asked. “I think I recognize the one at the bottom right.”
    “They all work together in the glucose-extraction plant. Nice boys. They’ve been practicing for months.”
    Next to Trist, who had been holding her hand as if they were still in their early bonding years together, Nen said, “We all have to congratulate you, Marg. This is one of the best All-Level Eves ever. The decorations, the food, the entertainment—everything!”
    Marg flushed with pleasure, and Orris beamed proudly. “Everybody on the committee worked very hard,” Marg said.
    Bram looked around the Forum at Marg’s handiwork. The immense arena was lit by torches in wall brackets that cast a resinous red glow around the perimeter, where almost the entire population of the tree, with the exception of the few hundred who remained on duty tonight, were seated at tables, each defined by a circle of light cast by a sputtering resin stick. Garlands of silver leaves crisscrossed the walls, making a pattern of reflections.
    There was no way to decorate so vast an area as the main floor of the ellipse, so Marg had very wisely left it in darkness, except for a central blaze of illumination where colored spotlights mounted high on the walls picked out the bull’s-eye where the Bob would come to rest. A few reddish glints here and there, where leaf arrangements had been strategically placed, gave an abstract geometric shape to the pool of darkness. More spotlights were aimed at the Bob itself and followed the entertainers.
    The final touch, lending a sense of awe and mystery to the annual rite of rotation, was the beam of sullen, red-shifted light from the starbow, filtering down from a lenticel somewhere high above. On past All-Level Eves, the starlight had been jolly, multicolored, but now the surrounding vault of higher frequencies had contracted to a point forward of the direct line of vision from here, leaving only the bloody light that preceded darkness.
    “Yes, here’s to the committee,” Bram said, raising his glass. “What else are you going to have in the way of entertainment?”
    “Oh, we’ll have pattern dancing—three very talented couples from