Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

centuries ago. Jao and Ang had never had another child after that.
    Bram thought about his own new son, Edard. He and Mim had been lucky. Edard was a fine young man, still in his twenties but already making a contribution to human culture. From the first it had been evident that he had inherited Mim’s musical talent. He had picked out tunes on the keyboard at the age of three, and by five he was well on the way to teaching himself to play Mim’s cello, when Mim had taken a hand and started giving him formal lessons. Now, Edard was devoting himself to composition. He was obsessed by the six old symphonies that had been transmitted in score in the Message of Original Man and had applied himself to the task of recreating a live symphonic texture. He was probably the first composer in the history of the tree who was in a position to do so. With the increase in population, there were now enough first-rate players for an orchestra of thirty-eight people. They gave a concert every Tenday evening. Tonight they were going to introduce Edard’s twenty-second symphony, the first in which he had totally abjured all electronic fillins for missing instruments and had limited himself to what the live players could produce. It promised to start a new, revolutionary trend.
    Thinking of it reminded Bram to check his waistwatch for the time; the newer people might think him an old fuddy-duddy for clinging to habits learned on the Father World, but any honest person would have to admit that it was more polite to unobtrusively feel for the time with your fingertips than to read it off a visual wrist meter.
    “We’d better think about going, Mim,” he said when he had a chance to get her attention. “It’s only two hours till the concert.”
    Mim made the announcement general. “Sorry to rush off,” she said, “but I’m not cellist emeritus yet. I have to do my share with the others. Edard insists on a thick cello sound—he says he needs at least four.”
    “I’d better go, too,” Ang said. She was in the violin section. “No, you stay a while if you like,” she said to Jao.
    “I wish I could hear the concert, Mim-tsu-mu,” Ame said, “but I don’t think I’d be welcome with two yowling babies.”
    “I’ll stay with you,” Smeth said.
    “No, you go,” Ame told him. “Don’t you dare miss Edard’s premiere.”
    “I can hear it later on tape,” he said.
    “ Tape? ” Jao exploded. He put on an indignant expression for Mim’s benefit. “Have you been paying the remotest attention to what Ang and Mim’ve been saying? The whole point is that it’s living, breathing music. If you’re going to hear it through a speaker, Edard might as well’ve done it all on a synthesizer!”
    “Since when are you the great music lover?” Smeth snapped.
    Ame stopped him with a look. “You go on,” she said. “One of us ought to be there.” She apologized to Mim. “Tell Edard -tsu-hsiung I’m sorry. I’ll hear another performance of it.” The punctilious honorific she added to Edard’s name meant something like “ancestor-brother.” Immortality was stretching the language out of shape.
    The door rasp sounded. “I’ll get it,” Smeth said, glad to escape.
    While Mim and Ame said their good-byes, Bram heard raised voices at the door. Someone was wroth with Smeth. When leave-taking was done and Bram accompanied the two musicians to the entry chamber, he saw that the agitated caller was Jao’s granddaughter, Enyd, the tree systems officer.
    “I didn’t expect to find you here, Captain,” Enyd said. “I came here to ask physics supervisor Smeth if it’s true that he plans to put Yggdrasil under acceleration again, and if so to lodge a protest.”
    Smeth blustered, “The decision to reactive the drive is entirely the prerogative of—”
    Bram cut him off. “Yes, it’s true, Officer Enyd. I planned to discuss it with you first thing in the morning. I apologize for the fact that word apparently got to you in a roundabout way before I had that opportunity. You should have been the first to know.”
    “It was one of the technicians working on the overhaul,” Smeth fumed. “That loudmouth Perc, I’ll bet. He must have spread it all over the place. All I did was to flash the workcage to ask how soon they could promise start-up if we decided to go! But I told them to keep their mouths shut.”
    “We’ll have to make an announcement,” Bram said.
    “Captain, Yggdrasil’s barely had time to recover,”