The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  The musicians were filing on stage now, four men in roomy drawers and sleeveless singlets that wouldn’t hamper their arm movements, and the audience burst into applause. The Nar in the upper tiers courteously imitated the motions of clapping, though they produced no sound.

  Mim leaned closer to Bram, her mouth next to his ear to make herself heard amidst the tumult, and he could not help thinking about how pleasant it was to have another human body pressed against his. Even though, the bitter thought intruded, it provided only the illusion of communication, not the real thing that the Nar had.

  “Somebody on the committee,” she finished hastily, “even made the suggestion that Original Man might not have used frets at all. That the instrument he called a violin, whatever it looked like, might have had only three or four strings and that he produced the full range of notes by finger action. But that’s ridiculous. How could you produce all the notes accurately in a rapid passage without frets? It would take years of practice.”

  The applause died down as the musicians picked up the little motorized disks and sat down. Bram recognized the cellist. He was Olan Byr, the concerto specialist. Most virtuosi gave a lot of solo concerts, leaning heavily on the ancient piano repertoire interlarded with one-man assaults on orchestral favorites. But not Olan Byr. His trademark was instruments that played only one note at a time, like the flute or the violin or the horn. His public adored him. He had spent hundreds of hours analyzing the sine waves of all the old instrumental samples in the archives and programmed his keyboard to produce sounds that, it was sworn, could be matched by no other living musician. He had disappeared from public view some months ago, and now the mystery was solved. He had been practicing on these queer, new, crude instruments.

  The music began. Bram was pleasantly surprised. After the first gossamer moments he decided that it was going to be pretty, after all, and he settled down to enjoy it. Mim turned an I-told-you-so face toward him and squeezed his hand.

  Partly it was the music itself that stirred him. It was nothing like the robust energy of Beethoven or the simple modal harmonies of the twenty-sixth-century neoteric composer Nakusome — up until now two of Bram’s favorites. Ravel was complex and elusive, full of shifting tone colors and tenuous harmonies that made sprays of pure sound. It had been part of a short-lived movement going by the odd name of Impressionism, Mim had told him. Bram could not understand why it had lain in storage for so long.

  But it was the performance that really astonished him. He could hardly believe that these sweating, athletic men in their singlets, wielding their clumsy motorized disks with two-handed agility, were producing the shimmering fantasy he was listening to. The expression and the loudness, he supposed, could be varied by changing the speed of the spinning wheel and the pressure applied to the strings. In addition, he noticed that Olan Byr in particular had worked out little tricks of technique, like touching the strings with the wheel at an angle or letting the wheel bounce lightly off the string. At several points he and the other players, without letting go of the handles, actually plucked the strings with extended forefingers, then returned smoothly to the “bowed” mode. The few wrong notes or occasional ugly scrapings hardly mattered. The performance was a miracle. There was a life and immediacy to it that could not be matched by computer-generated sound, no matter how perfect.

  The audience shared his perception. At the finish of the quartet’s final section they stood up spontaneously, clapping wildly and cheering. Bram clapped with them till his hands hurt.

  Mim’s face was radiant. “Weren’t they wonderful?” she shouted in his ear. “Didn’t Olan have a marvelous legato?”

  Bram didn’t know what a legato was, but he agreed that the concert had been wonderful. Was this the kind of music the human race had enjoyed thirty-seven million years before? Clearly, human beings were still groping their way toward the legacy of Original Man. How much more still lay neglected in the archives? Tonight’s performance proved that they hadn’t yet assimilated it all.

  At last the audience reluctantly let the musicians go and began to file toward the exits. Mim took Bram by the arm.

  “Come on,” she said. “There’s a reception. The biology department’s supposed to have some sort of surprise. And you’ll have a chance to meet Olan and the others.”

  “The first terrestrial life form was the potato,” the portly man in the green toga was saying. “So of course the Nar had considerable experience working with potato genes before going on to attempt the recreation of other earthly organisms. By the time they got around to resurrecting us, a firm foundation was laid.”

  He was holding forth to a considerable audience. His listeners hung on his every word, clustering closely in a semicircle that blocked the way to the long table with the goodies.

  “So,” he continued loftily, “we had several centuries worth of experience to draw on. To this day our beginning agriengineering students generally start with the potato. It’s extremely easy to clone.”

  Bram and Mim edged through the crowd, trying to reach the table. Mim was distracted. She kept looking for the musicians, but they hadn’t put in an appearance yet.

  “Who’s that?” she whispered.

  Bram was surprised at her ignorance. “Willum-frth-willum,” he said. “The overman of the bio department.”

  “Oh,” she said, impressed. Only a handful of humans could claim Nar honorifics in their names. “I know who he is,” she said defensively. “I just didn’t know that was him.”

  “He was an associate in the Nar touch group that worked out the nucleotide sequence for the synthetic monofilament virus,” Bram said, showing off his knowledge. Voth’s touch group had been part of the same team. “But he gave it all up to run the human department here in the Compound.”

  “Oh,” she said. “He didn’t turn Schismatist, did he?”

  Bram had no interest in politics. “No, he’s a true-blue Partnerite. I guess he just wanted to be a big wiggler in a small pool.”

  Willum-frth-willum had paused to select some kind of biological artifact from a basket proffered by one of the student helpers. The object was a bright red globe with a little cluster of green tentacles on top.

  “There are plenty to go round,” the overman said. “So help yourselves.”

  “Excuse me, but that doesn’t look like any potato variation I’ve ever seen,” said one of Willum-frth-willum’s admirers, a mauve-dyed woman in a five-pointed yellow cape that made her look like a wilted Nar.

  “It’s not,” the portly man said smugly. “We worked backward from potato genes to create another plant in the same family. The nightshade family, as the archives call it.” He paused for dramatic effect. “We believe it’s a ‘tomato,’ or something very close to it.”

  “Excuse me,” said a worried-looking man with the bent shoulders of a scholar, “but isn’t that ‘deadly’ nightshade?”

  “The ripe fruit’s quite safe, I assure you,” Willum-frth-willum said with a condescending smile. “The alkaloids in this particular family are concentrated in the foliage. In fact, we’ve been isolating medically useful alkaloids from altered leaf protoplasts for several generations — things like atropine and scopolamine and the belladonna that some of the ladies use to make their eyes more beautiful. At present, we’re working to duplicate another potato relative — an herb called tobacco, which seems to have disappeared after the twenty-third century but which some of the earlier literature describes as beneficial.”

  “What did you call it?” somebody called out. “A tomato?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, whatever it is, we’re all indebted to the bio department,” the mauve-haired woman said firmly. “Any addition to the human diet is welcome. Food seems so dull and repetitive sometimes! Not,” she added hastily, “that the bio department hasn’t done wonders during our lifetime!”

  “You must remember,” Willum-frth-willum said rather stiffly, “that my predecessors and I have been limited to the genetic co
des for the thirty basic human food crops that were originally transmitted some centuries ago. Thirty, that is, if you want to include bacterial protein and heterochronic eggs. I’d also like to point out that we’ve mostly been on our own in these projects. The Nar regard the human diet as adequate. Adding novelties to it has a low priority for them.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” the mauve-haired lady agreed. “We’re all very grateful, as I said.”

  About a dozen people had acquired the red globes from the baskets being circulated by the students, and were holding the strange fruits doubtfully.

  “How do you eat it?” a brave soul inquired.

  “Just bite into it,” the overman said. “It’s an acquired taste, I’m afraid, but our culinary experts think it might be useful in cooking.”

  “I’ll get you one,” Bram said to Mim, and plunged into the crowd. He came back a moment later with two of the fruits.

  She took a suspicious bite and made a face. “It tastes a little … I don’t know … acid,” she pronounced. “I was expecting it to be sweet.”

  Bram bit into his own tomato. To his embarrassment, it squirted juice and little seeds that dribbled down his chin. Surreptitiously, he wiped it off with the sleeve of his mono, but Mim didn’t seem to have noticed his clumsiness. She was looking around again for the musicians.

  He got two goblets of some pale fizzy stuff, at the risk of being told by the gray-haired lady who was ladling it out that he was too young for the spiked punch, and he and Mim drifted away from the buffet into the thick of the party. He could hear the arguments about the tomato going on in his wake: “… think they must have made a sort of wine out of it.” And: “… know for a fact from a mid-Inglex reference that they used it in their social rituals, like throwing it at the stage to indicate disapproval of a theatrical performance.”

  Mim, still looking around, collided with someone disengaging himself from another group, but held on to her drink without spilling it.

  “Oops, sorry,” he said, apologizing first. He was a stocky, muscular man with blue-black locks and thick, cursive features.

  “Hello, Dal,” she said. “This is Bram.”

  “Hello, Bram,” the man said without much interest. He turned back to Mim. “Did you get your tomato?”

  “Yes. How about you?”

  “I’m going to wait. Till I see if there are any survivors.”

  Mim laughed, and a jealous stab went through Bram. Dal was older, established, confident-looking, and he seemed to know Mim very well.

  “How did you like the music tonight?” Dal asked her.

  “It was a tremendous success. It’s going to start a craze for Impressionism. I’ll bet all the composers will be writing in that style for months!”

  “My impression exactly. Why do you suppose it stayed on the shelf for so long?”

  Bram felt ignored. He tried to look knowledgeable and interested as they talked on about music.

  “I suppose they didn’t realize it was music at first, and then it got put aside and lost for a while,” Mim said seriously. “Repetitive patterns and voice imitations wouldn’t have been easy to pick out of all the coloristic effects, would they? That’s why music began with counterpoint. Original Man was clever. The first music he sent was Bach. The Art of the Fugue. Even the Nar recognized it as some kind of art form.” She gave a tinkling laugh that squeezed at Bram’s heart. “I believe they first tried a readout on a touch machine. Then somebody noticed similar patterns of imitation and repetition in the fugal movement of the recorded transmission of the Second Brandenburg, and they assigned pitch and duration to the symbols. After that, decoding Beethoven was easy.”

  “Is that from the music history course, little Mim?” Dal teased her.

  She blushed, and Bram felt younger than ever compared to a rival who could make Mim, with her formidable mettle, do that.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  Dal let her off the hook, treating her as a grown woman again. “Is there any more Ravel waiting to be reconstituted, do you think?”

  “No, that was the only sample.”

  “Pity. I’m going to need some incidental music for my new verse play. Something novel. A Ravel that no one’s heard yet would have been perfect.”

  “You could arrange with the music department to have something composed in the same style.”

  “Yes, I could do that.” He didn’t seem pleased by the idea.

  A florid man from the adjacent group had been eavesdropping. “What are you going to spring on us this time, Dal? Are you going to try to top Quixote Sobre Las Estrellas?”

  Dal laughed. “No, I’m staying in the mainstream. If Inglex was good enough for Shakespeare and Jarn Anders, it’s good enough for me.”

  Bram thought that Dal sounded piqued. The neo-Cer-vantist play had been the hit of the season. It had been written entirely in Spanish, a proto-Inglex dialect that not more than a few dozen people in the audience understood despite all the twenty-first-century loan words that had given it a second rebirth in mid-Inglex. The play had been a huge success nevertheless; the force of the performance had carried it along even when the meaning was obscure.

  “Glad to see that you’re taking it so well, amigo-san,” the florid man said mockingly.

  “I agree with Dal,” said a thin woman in a long skirt and dickey. “Basically we’re firmly rooted in the mid-Inglex culture, anchored by Shakespeare and Chaucer at one end and Anders and Tsukada at the other. That’s our seedbed. Our own culture — what we’ve produced in the last twenty generations and what we’ll produce in the thirty centuries to come — will flower from the diversity that’s been laid down for us.”

  “I’d hardly call Jarn Anders a mid-Inglex author,” put in a long-nosed, saturnine man in a kilt that did not quite conceal the beginnings of a potbelly. “Properly, he belongs to the beginning of the transitional — Inglex period. And Chaucer? Really, Alis, my dear! He came with a translation, like Beowulf and the rest of the pre-Inglex samples.”

  “You know what I mean, Pers-Morley,” the thin woman said impatiently. “I’m saying that Inglex hardly changed at all after the last great influx of Japanese and Chinese and Arabic and Spanish loan words in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. And that it held onto its roots — because Shakespeare and the King James Bible continued to be the standard for the proselyte Inglex-speakers who were being absorbed into the growing stream. Already by their twentieth century, Inglex was the second most widely spoken language in the human culture, and other speakers accommodated themselves to it rather than the other way around. It was the language of commerce, and even the Sovs, a great rival power of the time, taught their schoolchildren to speak it. And of course, by that time printing and the electronic media had pretty well frozen it into a semipermanent matrix that could have been understood by any Inglex speaker from” — she glared challengingly at the potbellied man —“Chaucer’s time to — to the last centuries we have a record of.”

  Mim nudged Bram. “That’s Alis Tonia Atli. Isn’t she wonderful? She wrote the most beautiful historical romance about early times, the first breeding generation when there were only a few score people in the world. The Fledgling Hearts, it’s called. It’s sort of like Romeo and Juliet, about two lovers with totally incompatible gene maps who aren’t allowed to contribute to the same genome and live on in it. It’s on lit net — you really ought to punch yourself out a copy.” She glanced admiringly at the thin woman. “There are some who say that she’s a militant Resurgist, but I don’t care.”

  “She sounds very brilliant,” Bram said miserably. He could feel himself shrinking into insignificance in this company. But at least the muscular playwright, Dal, had turned his attention away from Mim.

  “What about Chin-pin-yin?” somebody protested to Aris. “Chinese, they called the twentieth-century form. That was the most widely spoken human language. You can’t ignore it. Original Man certainly didn’t when he made it a part of us. All of us speak it t
o some degree.”

  “It may have been the most prevalent human language,” Alis conceded, “but it didn’t travel well. By the time a phonetic notation came along to freeze it into the form we know today, it was already top-heavy with circumlocutions borrowed from western concepts. The grammar’s simple, granted — simpler for us to learn as children than Inglex. It’s marvelous for telling stories and for being ambiguous when you don’t want to come right out and say something. But the number of word roots was too limited for the technological age, even with a lot of ingenious coinage, and with the mass education that came along in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the whole society became bilingual. The second language of choice, of course, being Inglex. Inglex simply swallowed everything up. And with Inglex went the western culture that had produced it.”

  “Alis is right,” a new voice said. Bram recognized Olan Byr. The cellist had changed from his sweaty singlet to a crisp blouse and pantalets. His dark hair was wet. “The same principle holds true for music. The western forms simply absorbed the eastern forms. By the time of the period she’s talking about, Japanese musicians were abandoning gagaku music in favor of Mozart string quartets, committees of Chinese composers were writing piano concertos in the western romantic idiom, and India was contributing symphony conductors to the Inglex-speaking world.”

  “Hold on there a minute, Olan,” said a young man who looked like one of Mim’s music-student friends. “You can’t write off everything else that way. What about Balinese music? Arab music? Indian gita and vadya, for that matter. We don’t have many samples, I admit, but —”

  “My point exactly,” the cellist said. “We don’t have many samples. Oh, our designers made an effort to transmit a broad spectrum of human culture, if only to define the full range of what was human. Just as, for the same reason, all of us contain a panracial assortment of genes. But pentatonic scales and ornamented monody and Arab maqams that stray from the natural harmonics were cultural dead ends. Frozen artifacts.”

  “Hold it right there, Olan,” the young man began hotly. “The number of mathematical combinations possible in a typical maqam —”