Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

past the crowds toward the overpowering panorama of the Milky Way’s bright center. “We need a renewal of our sense of purpose as a society.”
    “What’s it got to do with me? It seems to me that we’ve hung on to our sense of purpose all right—even though the Father World is only a legend to most of the folk who were born between the galaxies. As to adjusting to an annual migration again, I wouldn’t worry. People manage.” He smiled reassuringly. “It might even breathe some life into All-Level Eve and Bobbing Day again.”
    Silv was having none of his levity. “You’re a symbol of the old days for a lot of the people who weren’t around then. And for the original embarkees, you’re the leader who started them on this voyage. You were the first year-captain—I looked that up! We’ve run profiles of all the old leaders through the computer, and we believe you’re the one who’s best suited to bring the two moieties together.”
    “The two what?”
    It sounded like more of the jargon that Silv’s colleagues in the Theoretical Anthropology group were always culling out of the primal Inglex dictionary. They were always creating computer models of imaginary human societies and drawing fanciful conclusions from them. They claimed to use rigorous statistical methods, too, but from what Bram had seen, some of the more overweening practitioners of the arcane speciality had a rather shaky grasp of real math.
    Silv metered her words to him carefully. “One-third of the population of the tree had been born within the last hundred and fifty years. Approximately one-fourth consists of the original embarkees and the generation immediately following, who share their values to a large degree. In between is an amorphous group who tend to be polarized in one direction or the other. Thus there has been an evolution toward endogamous moieties which—”
    Torm interrupted with a twinkle. “What she’s trying to say is that the older and younger voyagers tend to divide into two groups as defined by their cross-mating practices.” He winked. “Not that I’ve noticed it myself.”
    Bram laughed. “Tell that to my great-great-great-granddaughter Ame,” he said. “She’s been trying to fight off Smeth’s attentions for years.”
    “Naturally, in an evolving culture the lines aren’t yet rigidly drawn,” Silv said with signs of annoyance, “but we’ve drawn up charts and applied statistical methods, and we believe there’s a developing pattern of custom and taboo.”
    Torm allowed his eyes to glaze, though not enough to be impolite. The lively old fogy of the Bachelors’ Lodge had again become the smallish, dapper young blade he must once have been. Bram would not have put it past him to have cast an eye on Silv herself for a little endogamous tumble.
    “What it sublimates down to,” Torm said, “is that Silv’s crowd think I have enough influence with the old-timers to be worth cultivating and that if we can get together behind a candidate with across-the-moieties appeal, we’ll have the votes to win.”
    “And that’s me?”
    “You’re the only one we can agree on. If you say yes, the votes are guaranteed.”
    “Will you accept?” Silv asked.
    Bram looked past them at the fiery egg in the holo projection. “I’ll think it over,” he promised.
     
    “A symbol of the old days,” Bram repeated with relish. “That’s what they’re calling me now. They want to dust me off and set me up as year-captain again.”
    Mim paused in her work. She was feeding the score of a new string quartet by one of her prot é g é s into her computer and punching in the program that would separate it into players’ parts for next Tenday’s performance. “That might not be such a bad idea,” she said.
    “Oh, Mim, you know the job’s nothing but a headache,” he protested.
    His daughter, Lydis, said, “What are you going to tell them?”
    Lydis had hardly changed at all in the last five hundred years. She was still the same slender, dark-haired edition of her mother that she had been when she reached her final age, without an added ounce, worry line, or shift of body mass. Even her teeth seemed always to come in as identical replicas, not changing the shape of her mouth an iota. Lydis had not inherited Mim’s talent for music, though; she was a gifted and relentlessly practical engineer who had designed the hardware for some of the tree’s most important industrial biosynthesis plants. Currently