The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  “They wanted to send their message to a whole lot of galaxies all at the same time,” Bram said promptly.

  “Exactly right, young Bram,” the director said with a pleased expression. “You were right about him, Voth-shr-voth.” The two mirror eyes aimed in Bram’s direction turned blue again. “That beam of radio waves will keep spreading outward for tens of millions of years, and they wanted it to encounter the greatest possible number of galaxies. Here, I think we can hold this image while I show you the Virgo cluster. It’s in our daytime sky now, on the opposite side of the world, but one of our orbiting telescopes will have it in view.”

  He spoke to his assistant. A moment later, to Bram’s consternation, the wriggly glowworms on the screen snapped out of existence, and the hoop was filled with a spectacular shower of sparks and flares.

  “The richest imaginable target,” the director said. “That one elliptical galaxy in the center alone contains three thousand billion suns, compared to our paltry two hundred billion, in addition to a halo of ten thousand globular clusters. The humans, long ago, would have had much the same view we’re seeing now, but from almost twice as far away. The human radio waves haven’t reached it yet. They won’t for another thirty million years.”

  To Bram’s relief he switched back to the other side of the sky. The human galaxy was still there, one of those bright midges.

  “The larger of the two is the one they called Andromeda,” the director said. “It’s the other one we want.”

  The image centered and grew in swoops, becoming alternately blurred and sharp as the director adjusted his focus. At last it filled the hoop, a jeweled whorl with an incandescent center. Bram remembered that the jewels would be foreground stars, but that did not detract from the splendor of the vision. He drowned himself in it, lost in wonder.

  “We’re seeing their galaxy almost head on, as they must have seen us.” The director’s voice seemed to buzz from a distance. “That was a piece of luck for us. They were very sensibly transmitting in a direction at right angles to the plane of their galaxy, and for our part, we didn’t have to look through our own spiral arms. We were in the early stages of our own project to search for life in the universe. We’d already tried hundreds of individual stars in our own galaxy, without success. The giant radio array on our fourth moon was newly in place. And then the project astronomer suggested that we try listening to whole galaxies instead of eavesdropping on stars one at a time. His reasoning was that an entire galaxy would be within the field of view of the array and could be considered as a single source. If an artificial radio signal was on the right wavelength and powerful enough, it would outshine all other radio energy on that particular frequency. We would be listening, in effect, to two hundred billion stars at once.”

  The director touched Bram, remembered that he was a human child, and withdrew the tentacle. “The human signal was detected almost at once, in the middle of what proved to be a fifty-year cycle,” he went on in a Small Language patois that was heavily laced with Inglex. “Ironically, it was not the human galaxy that the radio telescope was aimed at. It was Andromeda. Andromeda was a more attractive target. It has more stars. But Andromeda proved to be close enough. At thirty-seven million light-years, even the tightest of beams spreads out quite a bit. The energy that would have been required to transmit such a signal was enormous. We think they must have enclosed a star and turned it into a modulated radio emitter. We can’t imagine how they were able to do such a thing, or what motives inspired them to allocate such a wealth of energy to their testament.”

  Voth’s grip tightened on Bram. The director’s voice had pity in it. Bram tore his eyes away from the coiled blob of light on the screen and looked at the director, who stood tiptoe in a quintuple arch, the petals of his upper structure radiating tact.

  “For testament it proved to be,” the director said. “Over the next century, a complete cycle was heard and then half of another repeat with new data added, and then it stopped. Stopped in midsentence, as it were. And in the centuries since, the signal never has resumed.”

  He sighed. “We never found evidence of intelligent life in the universe again. Perhaps it’s an extremely rare event. There’s us and there were the humans, so far away, and now they’re gone.”

  Bram could tell the precise moment when he was seeing the human galaxy by secondhand light. There was a brief winkout and an almost imperceptible change in image brightness, and then the picture of that vortex of stars stood motionless and lifeless within the hoop as some computer downstairs compensated for the bobbing image and held the cheating replica steady in its frame. The director said something to one of the assistants with a brief clasp of tentacles, and the assistant went pinwheeling down the steps.

  “No,” Bram burst out. “We’re not gone, and someday we’re going to go back!”

  “Bram!” Voth said, shocked. “Don’t contradict Pfaf-tlk-pfaf.”

  “It’s all right, Voth-shr-voth,” the director said. “I understand.” To Bram he said kindly, “Didn’t Jun Davd explain about stellar distances? In time, in millions of years if we last that long as a species, we might conceivably explore our galaxy. But we can never cross the gulf between galaxies.”

  “We can,” Bram said, starting to cry. “Yes, we can.”

  “He’s cranky,” Voth apologized. “It’s past his bedtime.” The warm petals caressed Bram. “You must give up these thoughts, little one,” came the soft whisper. “Be happy in your life here.”

  He picked the child up. “Say good-bye to Pfaf-tlk-pfaf,” he said.

  “Good-bye, Pfaf-tlk-pfaf,” Bram said obediently.

  “Good-bye, Bram,” the director said. “Come see us again.”

  As Voth was about to leave, the assistant whom the director had dispatched downstairs returned with a little horny flake smaller than Bram’s fingernail.

  “This is for you, Bram,” the director said. “We thought you might like to have it. It’s a little patch of the charge-coupled surface that was changed by light from the galaxy you saw. Perhaps, just perhaps, one of the photons that crossed that thirty-seven-million-year gulf came from the human sun.”

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  Chapter 2

  The young man and the young woman hurried across the plaza to catch up to the stragglers who were still trickling into the great humped vault of the auditorium. It was a glorious summer evening, with the air so clear and pure that even the lesser sun could not drown out the brighter stars. The Bonfire was visible as a pale wash against the heavens, fed by the gauzy streamer that was Skybridge.

  “We’ll miss the beginning,” Mim said, hauling Bram energetically by the arm. She was a small vivid girl with a tiny waist and choppy black hair and a pale face that made her dark eyes more emphatic.

  “No, we won’t,” Bram said. “They’re still going in.”

  He had almost finished his growth that year; he had turned into a lean, long-boned youth with perhaps another inch or two of height to go. He had kept the slender hands and feet of his childhood and retained a tumble of brown hair that kept falling into his eyes because it was still too fine.

  “Anyway,” he finished, “I got here as soon as I could.”

  “Where were you? At that observatory again?” she asked, her eyes still fixed on the distant goal of the entrance. She gave his arm an impatient tug.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He left it at that. He was not ready to talk about it yet. He had a lot of thinking to do before he made his decision.

  They joined the fringe of the crowd that was climbing the broad spiral ramp. Bram glanced around at the throng. A lot of people had made a special effort to dress up for tonight’s event in bright, festive clothes — multicolored tunics, gaudy jerkins showing puffed sleeves, kirtles with scalloped hems or complicated flounces, slinky gowns beaded with lenticular eyes that winked on and off, and even a few togas inspired by the previous Tenday’s performance of Julius Caesar. Bram felt out of place
in the old mono he had been wearing all day.

  Even some of the Nar who were sprinkled throughout the assemblage had made an attempt to dress in imitation of human styles. Bram saw iridescent kilts draped around decapod waists, belted just below the row of primary eyes, and five-holed ponchos that must have been uncomfortable around the tentacle roots and that certainly must have interfered with intimate conversation.

  “Just think of it!” Mim said, her face glowing. “The first performance of the Ravel quartet! And played on real wooden instruments instead of a synthesizer!”

  Bram smiled weakly, trying to muster a show of enthusiasm for Mim’s benefit. He liked music all right — especially the kind where people got together and sang — though he found it hard to understand some of the reconstructions and experiments the music department came up with. The Ravel quartet, he gathered, fell somewhere within the twentieth-century hiatus or close to it. But he was willing to sit tamely through an evening of cacophony to stay in Mim’s good graces.

  “It’s a joint project with the physics department,” Mim prattled on cheerfully. “We’ve been working on it with them for almost three years now.”

  Mim was a music student and used the possessive “we” in talking about all of her department’s activities, though she could hardly have been more than a novitiate when the Ravel quartet had been unearthed in a mass of unprocessed data. Bram didn’t know whether to envy the music students or feel sorry for them. On the one hand, they had chosen a field of endeavor that the Nar could not dominate. On the other hand, they had forever ghettoized themselves within a synthetic human culture and withdrawn from participation in society as a whole.

  “It sounds very interesting,” he said with careful tact.

  “Interesting?” she teased him. “You’re hopeless! It’s a breakthrough! We’ve got the notation for hundreds and hundreds of musical compositions, of course, and we’ve always been able to use a synthesizer to approximate the sounds of the most common musical instruments from the few recorded samples we’ve analyzed — the two Brandenburg Concertos, for instance, and the Beethoven symphony. We don’t know what a piano looked like, but we know that violins and cellos were hollow resonating bodies made of wood. The physics department worked out the acoustics and made some prototypes on computerized lathes. It’s going to be a whole new era in music. Direct production of sound! No more keyboards between you and the notes. I’m thinking of changing my field of study.”

  “What’s the point?” he said. “Wooden instruments already exist.” Arthe had one that he had carved himself out of vacuum poplar, and he used it to accompany himself in songfests.

  “Those simple strumming things!” she exclaimed impatiently. “You don’t understand. We’ve worked out the physics of the bowed string.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You scrape an abrasive element across a taut string and get a continuous vibration.”

  “Sounds unpleasant. Like a fingernail on slate.”

  “It’s more expressive! Oh, you’re being impossible, Brambram. I’ve heard it at some of the rehearsals. Four of our best virtuosos have been practicing with the new instruments for months now! Just wait till you hear them!”

  Bram retreated hastily. The one thing he did not want to do was get Mim annoyed with him. He thought she was the most exquisite creature he had ever met. She was a year older than he was, and he had hardly been able to believe his good luck when she had shown an interest in him; not when she was surrounded by older fellows who had already chosen their careers and had important things to talk about. He was desperate to impress her. Sometimes, though he had no idea if their gene maps were compatible, he had fantasies that she would choose him to bond with her.

  “Oh, look!” she cried as they spilled through into the inner amphitheater with the mostly human tide. “Isn’t one of those Nar waving at you?”

  Bram looked across at the upper level of curving tiers and saw Tha-tha with a group of older Nar. One of his tentacles was raised in imitation of the human gesture. Bram waved back.

  “Who was that!” Mim said.

  “One of my touch brothers,” he said. He felt embarrassed, and he didn’t know why.

  “I seem to see less and less of my own touch brothers these days,” Mim said. “We try to keep up but — you know!” She shrugged. “They don’t really understand what I’m doing! Oh, they know that music is important to us humans, and they have an abstract grasp of what it’s all about, and they say all the right things. I know they have a sense of pitch — at least they can sing a simple tune on key, sort of. But I always have this feeling that they’re, I don’t know, indulging me. You know, like when you’re a little kid and you take off your clothes and you stretch out on a body reader and you let it tickle you all over. Did you ever do that? And you tell your tutor that you’re reading and you make up a story, and he makes believe you really are reading. That’s what it’s like.”

  Bram nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  Except for Tha-tha, he was no longer close to any of his touch brothers. As their command of adult speech had become surer, they had grown beyond him. They still made an effort to see him occasionally, but more and more they presented their smooth outer surfaces to him and spoke to him in the Small Language as if he were a fingerling. Only Tha-tha, once in a while, still unfolded to him and shared something of his increasingly incomprehensible Nar life with him in the familiar bastard blend of Small Language, inarticulate physical contact, and pidgin Inglex that had served them while they were growing up together.

  Tha-tha, Bram knew, had given his life to the tactile art form that, for the Nar, was poetry, symphony, and saga all rolled into one. Tha-tha’s teachers thought he had talent. He might make a name for himself someday. But there were no words for the things that fired Tha-tha’s imagination in the masterpieces he admired or for what he was trying to accomplish himself, though he tried diligently to find analogies to make Bram understand.

  Bram’s relationship with Voth was growing more formal, too. Voth was still bound to him as tutor and guardian and still took an affectionate interest in him. But the physical signs of his approaching reproductive stage and ultimate dissolution were already beginning to show; the change couldn’t be more than a decade or two away now. Voth was becoming increasingly autumnal, preoccupied and mellow.

  Partly, Bram told himself guiltily when he thought about it at all, it was his own fault. When you got older, there were just so many things to do! Human friends to spend time with, places to go, things to see. And there was Mim.

  “There are two seats over there,” Mim said, pulling him by the hand. “Hurry up before somebody else takes them.”

  They squeezed their way down the rows of extruded benches and sat down. The cavernous space, all bleached undulating surfaces that grew into each other, was crammed with more than two thousand humans — an impressive percentage of the human population of the megacity — and probably two or three hundred Nar. Some dozens of both phyla in the audience had come from other cities on the continent for this premiere performance.

  “Look,” Mim said, her eyes on the raised elliptical stage in the center of the auditorium.

  Bram dutifully followed her gaze. The musicians had not yet arrived, but their instruments had already been set up. Bram saw four unimpressive wooden boxes resting on low tables, with a stool behind each one.

  “The big one’s the cello,” Mim said. “The two small ones are the violins, and the medium-size one is the viola.”

  He and Mim were sitting high enough up so that he could see the tops of the boxes; each had an oval hole in the lid and a couple of dozen wires or strings stretched between a curved bridge at one end of the box and a row of pegs at the other. A peculiar-looking three-toothed metal rake ran on a sliding track over the strings, just forward of the pegged end; it was connected by a system of levers to a set of seven foot-treadles.

  Most puzzling of all was the pair of devices laid out on each stool.
Each consisted of a small wheel mounted in a kind of haft that ended in a trigger grip. A cord snaked from the handle to a power source. The odd object reminded Bram of one of Arthe’s power tools for woodworking.

  “Where are the keyboards?” Bram said. He was thinking of the symphony concerts he had attended, big affairs requiring ten or fifteen musicians. The cello — or cello “section,” as they called it for symphonies — was always controlled by a musician at a synthesizer keyboard, as were the violin and viola “sections.”

  “Didn’t you listen?” she exclaimed in exasperation. “There are no keyboards! This is real music!”

  Bram shrugged. The symphonies had seemed real enough to him, but he was not about to risk an argument with Mim.

  Mollified, she went on. “Each instrument has twenty-one strings — one for each of the seven notes of the diatonic scale over a three-octave range. There are three frets for each string. For naturals, sharps, or flats. So that by pressing the proper foot pedal — with your heel to lower a tone or your toe to raise it — you can get the complete chromatic scale.” She frowned. “In equal-temperament tuning, of course. Actually, for example, an F sharp and a G flat aren’t exactly the same note. We think Original Man must have had some way of getting around the problem. But the department’s working on it.”

  “Sounds awfully complicated. Why not a separate string for each note?”

  She was pleased at his interest. “That was one of the original proposals. But they decided it would make the instruments too cumbersome, too unwieldy to play. You’d be surprised at how nimble a real virtuoso can be at operating those frets. Of course, there are some double and triple stop combinations that are impossible, but we edited the score slightly where those cropped up. I don’t think Ravel would have minded.”