The Genesis Quest
Page 6
“No, you hold it,” the cellist went on smoothly. “At your age I was convinced that there was an unrealized universe in the Robertsbridge Codex, our only example of primitive organ music. But the point is that the universe was realized by Bach. In the same way, your pet eastern scales and rhythms are already in our mainstream as exotic elements. No, my young friend, our cultural center in music will always hover around Bach and Beethoven, just as in language it will always hover around Shakespeare. That’s why we do have so many samples of them.”
Mim, who had been listening with growing absorption, broke in. “And there’s so much that’s missing, even there! We have only eight Beethoven sonatas! We know there were at least thirty-two. We’ve got twelve preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier. We know there were forty-eight. We —” She broke off as she saw all the eyes looking at her.
“No, go on, Mimsy,” Olan said. He helped her out. “We have only one Beethoven symphony because it takes more data bits to transmit an orchestral score than a piano piece or a string quartet. That’s why I’ve orchestrated all the sonatas.”
Mim might have been a little flustered by the glittering, older company, but she was not shy. Bram felt a thrill of admiration as she held her own.
“I was just thinking,” she said sadly, “of all the treasures we’ll never know.”
“We’ll make new treasures of our own, Mimsy,” Olan said. Bram did not care for the way he smiled at her.
“You musicians think you have reason to feel sorry for yourselves?” The speaker was a weedy red-haired individual who evidently had spent some time around the punch bowl. “How would you like to be a painter? We have nothing to go on except cartoons — about two thousand digital excuses for line drawings to represent fifteen thousand years of art, from the cave paintings on! That comes to about thirteen per century. With digital codes for approximate masses of color, very helpfully keyed to wavelengths of light — never mind what kind of a sun we’re living under! And then, just to break our hearts, the Big Twelve in full color transmission! One Giotto, one Rembrandt, one van Gogh, one Picasso, and so forth. All chosen by committee and guaranteed to be Great! In all the marvelous wealth of detail that a couple of thousand scanning lines can achieve. If you don’t care about small details like brush strokes, that is.”
He touched off another argument. A partisan of Homer started to complain about the fact that the Odyssey had been transmitted only in Inglex translation, though it was possible to read The Divine Comedy, Faust, and Don Quixote in their original languages. “Surely Homer is one of the great engines of our culture, just as Dante, Goethe, and Cervantes are!” he appealed.
Mim took the opportunity to pull Bram closer to Olan Byr. “Olan,” she said, “this is my friend Brambram.”
Olan was gracious. “How do you do, Bram. You’re not a music student. I’m sure I’d know you. What’s your field of interest? You’re not interning in lit, are you?”
“Well, I haven’t exactly settled on anything yet,” Bram said self-consciously.
Olan raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Well, there’s no hurry, of course. Our music students seem to find themselves rather early in life, but Dal Terson, just to take one example, knocked around for years before he decided that he wanted to be a playcrafter.”
“I’m — I’m sort of interested in astronomy,” Bram said with a sidelong glance at Mim.
Olan’s face lost some of its geniality and became merely polite. “Oh, science,” he said. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. The science devotees have made any number of valuable contributions to the human family. The tomato, for instance.”
“Yes, everybody’s talking about those,” Mim said helpfully.
“Just so. If you are interested in science,” Olan said kindly, “why don’t you go in for bioengineering? Astronomy is so
Bram knew what Olan really meant. Astronomy was a Nar science. With its expensive toys and space-based establishment and millennia-long projects, there was no analog for it within the human community. Biology was a Nar science, too. Everything was. It was a Nar world, after all. But human beings were free to build little kingdoms within it, kingdoms in which the Nar were not especially interested. And Willum-frth-willum’s bioengineering sideshow was one of those.
Mim had missed the point. “Bram’s tutor-guardian is Voth-shr-voth,” she said, giving Bram a dig in the ribs. “He thinks very highly of Bram. I’m sure Bram could get a place as a human apprentice to Voth-shr-voth’s touch group if he wanted!”
“Well, there you are!” Olan said with a blinding artificial smile. “A few years or a decade under Voth, an accomplishment or two of your own, and you could come back here with an honorific and have a brilliant career still ahead of you. It’s not unheard of.”
“I suppose not,” Bram said gloomily. The image of Jun Davd had come to him, older and more bent after all these years and still an apprentice at the observatory. Jun Davd had given him much the same advice that afternoon.
“I’m a poor example for you to copy, Bram,” Jun Davd had said. “It’s true enough that you have the aptitude. I’ve watched you since you were a wee wrig, coming here whenever you could get someone to take you on the bubble car and begging for telescope time so that you could have a glimpse of that fuzzy patch in the sky that the protohumans called the Milky Way. And you absorbed everything I taught you. But I haven’t seen much of you the last couple of years, and maybe that’s a sign. You’re getting older, and maybe it’s time for you to put away childish things.” Jun Davd had smiled sadly. “That’s all it is, Bram, this passion for the glory of the heavens, though I’ve given my own life to it. It leads nowhere in the end. A human apprentice is nothing but a helping cilium here, and there are no facilities for humans in orbit. But if you apprenticed yourself to the bioengineering touch group, you’d have your own guardian, Voth-shr-voth, to take you under his mantle. Voth encouraged your interest in astronomy because he thought it would make you happy, and as a Nar he doesn’t see much practical difference between what you can accomplish here during a human lifetime and what you could accomplish with a boost from him. But he’s wrong. The Nar don’t understand everything. A ripple to them is a wave to us. You’ve become a young man. You’ll be thinking about permanent pair-bonding soon, and you’ll want your mate to be proud of you in the human community we all have to live in, like it or not. And you have a chance of accomplishing something more tangible in bioengineering than you do in astronomy — something people can understand. Whatever Voth-shr-voth may have said to you, I know that he would be as pleased as a fingerling with a new touch toy if you’d only go to him and tell him you wanted to be apprenticed to his group.”
And Bram, one hand in a sidepocket fingering the talisman he had saved all these years — the flake of charge-coupled material that once might have been struck by an actual photon from the Milky Way — thought guiltily of Mira and admitted to himself that yes, he did want to impress her.
Now Mim, at his side, was smiling up at Olan Byr, whose attention was wandering as he listened with half an ear to a dialogue a few feet away about the string quartet performance he had given tonight.
“Hey, Olan, come over here and settle this,” a voice called out. “Can you double-stop an interval larger than a minor third with one spin-wheel?”
“Excuse me,” Olan said with a little pat on the arm for Mim. “Nice to have met you, Bram.”
He turned away to join his colleagues. Mim followed his progress with shining eyes. “Olan’s agreed to give me cello lessons,” she said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”
The reception seemed to drag on interminably. Bram trailed faithfully after Mim, enduring all the bright, earnest chatter, saying little, and waiting till he could get her to himself.
Once they were intercepted by a wispy woman who, Mim told him late
r, was one of her minor gene mothers. “Oh Mimsy-mim, you’re growing into quite the beauty, we must get together for a long chat soon, who’s your handsome friend, is he a music student, too?” A number of times they found themselves part of one of the noisy student groups that revolved around centers of mutual babble. A sleek older fellow with experienced eyes, who seemed to know Mim altogether too well, invited them to go with the bunch to the beach for a night swim — though only a bare nod included Bram in the invitation — and Bram was relieved when Mim declined, saying that she wanted to stay a while longer at the reception.
A few Nar prowled through the human crowd, their clustered tops swaying high over the human heads, stopping here and there for conversation and ignoring the refreshment wells that had been set up for them next to the buffet. Tha-tha paused to talk to Bram and to introduce him to one of the older decapods who accompanied him. “This is Chir-prl-chir,” he said in the Small Language, framing the spoken name with a gesture of respect that revealed complex ripples and color changes surging across the inner surfaces of his arms. “He is one of the greatest of living touch composers; it is an honor to serve as his amanuensis. I persuaded him to come to this concert so that he might experience something of the human art of music.”
Mim was magnificent. Not at all awed by Chir-prl-chir’s eminence, she did her best to explain what the Ravel quartet was all about.
“Extraordinary!” that imposing being said when she finally ran out of breath. “To think that a few dozen pages of written notation, filtered through the sensibilities of the performing artists, could result in an aesthetic experience that approximated the intentions of the original composer!”
“Before the technological age,” Tha-tha explained in Inglex, “the great artistic works were preserved by living mnemonic touch readers who passed them on from generation to generation. Now, of course, we have tactile recorders and touch transcriptions. But Chir-prl-chir is old-fashioned. He doesn’t trust a computer to capture all the nuances. That’s why he prefers to rely on the living arm of a scribe.”
“It was the same in the history of human music,” Mim said bravely to the decapod composer. “Until a written notation became universal, music was generally passed on from person to person.”
“The case isn’t the same,” Tha-tha said. “What our tactile recorders do is closer, in essence, to your sound recordings of an actual performance. That still leaves the mystery of how a few scratches on paper can express such emotion.”
Bram sneaked a look at Mim. He hoped she hadn’t thought the remark sounded condescending. She didn’t know Tha-tha as well as he did.
Then Chir-prl-chir, with the kindest intentions, made it worse. “The greater mystery,” he said, “is how such a small amount of sensory input — from a fingerpoint-sized area of cilia within the human ear — can result in the profound subjective impressions that human beings evidently experience when hearing music.”
Bram fidgeted through what remained of the exchange. His discomfort was somewhat offset by the fact that Mim was obviously impressed by the introduction to the great Chir-prl-chir, though it was secondhand through Bram’s childhood touch brother. Now, Bram thought fiercely, she’d have to take him more seriously.
At last Tha-tha excused himself, with a promise to look Bram up soon, and Bram had Mim to himself. With great cunning and deviousness he found the two of them a quiet place to sit: an outdoor bench on one of the upper galleries that overlooked the ocean. Behind them, the rows of filigreed doors threw long oval splashes of light across the semidarkened veranda. A murmur of voices came from strolling groups below. The sky was huge and luminous in the half night, and the bright dot of the lesser sun cast complicated shadows across the rooftops of the human quarter. Beyond, the beach could be seen sloping in serrated planes to the silvered water.
“They can’t really understand,” Mim said.
Neither can we, Bram thought, but he kept it to himself. Instead, he searched awkwardly for something to say that would make him sound knowledgeable.
She gave him the opening. “Isn’t it beautiful tonight?” she sighed. “I’ve never seen so many stars out during a half night. There must be dozens.”
“See that bright one? Shield your eyes from the lesser sun. That’s the prow star of the Boat constellation. If you hold out your other hand at arm’s length, at just about one thumb width above it and a hair to the right, that little patch of sky is where the home of Original Man was. Ravel lived right where you’re looking. So did Bach and Beethoven and the rest of them.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“No, you can’t. But that’s the exact place. You can see the galaxy through a telescope. It’s a beautiful sight. A sort of pinwheel of stars. I’ve seen it lots of times.”
“Is that why you go to the observatory all the time? To look at it?”
He felt his face grow hot. “I don’t go there much anymore. I used to go there a lot when I was a little kid.”
She didn’t make fun of him. “It’s a strange idea, Bram-bram. I never thought of it that way before. That it was a place. I mean, you know they must have been alive and walked around, but it’s always been a sort of, I don’t know, a myth.”
Encouraged, he went on. “What if you could go there? I wonder what you’d find.”
“Oh, Bram-bram, where do you get these ideas?”
“No, I mean it. What if you went there, and some of the human worlds still existed, and you found …” He cast about for a clincher. “And you found some of that missing music you thought was gone from the universe! One shelf and you’d double what you have now! And what if there was just one picture book full of paintings for that artist fellow? And one more Shakespeare play or Milton poem or King James Bible? The whole lost heritage of the human race could be there waiting.”
He had caught her imagination. “Yes!” she breathed. “What a thought!” Then she shook her head. “But it’s no good dwelling on daydreams. We’ve got to be satisfied with what we’ve got here. The god knows, we’ve got enough to keep us busy for lifetimes. And we’ll have our own Bachs, our own Miltons. Maybe some of them are inside at the party right now and we don’t know it yet.”
Bram knew she was thinking about Olan Byr, and it was a dagger in his heart. “No, listen,” he said recklessly. “What if the whole human race just decided to pick itself up and go home?”
“You’re a poet, Bram, and it’s a beautiful vision.” She touched his arm. “But once I saw an old woman who went to Juxt One as a girl and didn’t like it and came back — and her whole life was gone. I want to live, Bram, not just use up my life.”
If Bram had been in a fit state to be analytical, he would have noticed that Mim had stopped using the babyish form of his name at the same moment he had confided his babyish dream to her. As it was, he was aware only of her nearness and warmth and the great dizzy expanse of sky with its smidgen of stars. He took her hand and found it responsive. “Mim,” he began.
The doors behind them flew open, spilling light across the terrace. A lanky shadow fell across them, and Bram turned to see Smeth standing there, balancing a glass of punch and a plate of suncrisps and beanpuffs.
“Hi there, Mim! What are you doing out here?” Smeth said. “Oh, hello, Bram.” His tone suggested that he was doing them a favor.
Mim let go of Bram’s hand. “I thought you were too busy to waste time on frivolous things like concerts and parties,” she said with more banter in her voice than Bram thought was necessary.
“Oh, I thought I might as well hear the result after all the work our team did on it,” he said. He sat down beside them uninvited, the plate of snacks resting precariously on one bony knee.
Bram regarded Smeth without enthusiasm. He found Smeth insufferable for a number of reasons, not the least of them being that Smeth was three years older than he was, had treated Bram like a kid when they had gone to middle school in the Compound together, and thought he knew everything. Now Smeth was in his fi
rst year as a physics intern.
“How did you like it?” she asked.
“Lot of scraping,” he said. “But from a scientific point of view, I guess it counts as another success for the physics department.”
Mim’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Don’t you think that Olan and the other performers might have had something to do with it?”
Smeth waved a negligent hand, almost upsetting his glass. “Oh, that part of it? Well, sure, we needed competent technicians to carry out the final stages of the project, but all they did was to verify our theoretical findings.” He preened himself. “Do you know that the suggestion about using wound strings for the lower tones was mine? Even though the whole team got credit for it, of course. You see, you can only go so far with composite materials. In using a range of metals and polymers, the coefficient of inharmonicity is proportional to the modulus of elasticity divided by the square of the density. The math can get quite complicated.”
“Perhaps you’d care to explain it to us,” Mim said, her voice deadly calm.
Smeth did so, at length. “So you see,” he finished with a flourish, “the problem was one of adjusting the mass of the lowest string to the harmonics based on whole-number multiples of the fundamental component, and the winding solved that quite nicely.” He popped a beanpuff into his mouth and began working on it.
Mim exploded. “That’s the most arrogant, conceited piece of nonsense I’ve ever heard!” she sputtered. “You think you can reduce everything to — to numbers! You probably dream in numbers! What about emotion, human feeling, sentiment?”
Smeth was unruffled. “That’s irrelevant for a scientist,” he said with his mouth full. “We don’t deal in human feelings.”
“Everybody has feelings,” Bram said, coming feebly to Mim’s defense. “Whether they’re human or Nar.” He thought of Voth taking him to the observatory when he was small, and of the director going out of his way to humor a human hatchling with an inarticulate yearning. “Nar scientists think emotions are important.”