Second Genesis gq-2

by Donald Moffitt

  Bram didn’t need a spectroscope to tell him what he was looking at. “It’s a G-type sun,” he said.

  “Yes, indeed,” Jun Davd said. “Well, we’d better uproot poor Yggdrasil again and go in for a closer look.”

  “It’s embarrassing,” Ame said. “I have as many children as my great-great-great-grandmother.”

  She held up the twins for inspection, one in the crook of each arm. They were beginning to lose the wrinkled, recently boiled look, and it could be seen from their coloring and button features that they were going to take after Ame, not Smeth.

  “Never mind, they’re beautiful babies,” Mim said, nudging Bram in the ribs to keep him quiet. “And dizygotic twins are nobody’s fault.”

  Smeth puttered nearby, a fatuous grin on his face. Ame’s firm stewardship had done wonders for him; the rough edges, if not gone, were ground down a bit, and his friends pronounced him almost civilized. He and Ame had been together for ten Bobbings now. She teased him by telling him that it had simply become too much trouble keeping him at arm’s length and that she had decided that maybe he was salvagable after all, despite five hundred years of bachelordom; to which he responded by swelling with pride and pleasure.

  “I’ve used up my quota on my first try,” Ame said ruefully.

  One child per century was the rule nowadays, enforced by society’s unspoken displeasure. Those who had bred too thoughtlessly during the profligate days of middle-passage now sheepishly waited for the passing years to rehabilitate their reputations.

  “You can have a share of mine or Lydis’s,” Mim said. “We’re not a prolific family. It all averages out.”

  “Yah, you want to talk embarrassed, look at Marg and Orris,” Jao said heartily. “Five children, like clockwork. Hey, I bet they have a cesium clock hanging over their sleeping nest so they can start working on number six the nanosecond it’s licit.”

  “Jao, you’re awful—stop that!” Ang exclaimed. “Excuse him, everybody.”

  “Why? What did I say?” Jao said innocently.

  Bram, suppressing a smile, said to Ame, “Quotas may be a thing of the past sooner than you think. We ought to be ready to leave this system in a few years, and then it’s just a question of time till we hit on a suitable planet.”

  He carefully refrained from specifying the father world of Original Man. He didn’t want to appear to be too much of a visionary to these practical young people like Ame and her friends. It was generally accepted that there ought to be any number of suitable planets of G-type suns in Original Man’s neck of the galaxy that once had been used by the vanished race and that therefore would possess breathable atmospheres and benign ecologies. Any sensible person aboard ought to be ready to settle for one of these. And any one of them would be a treasure trove for the paleontologists and the archeologists and the rest of the practitioners of the new theoretical sciences.

  “Yah, as soon as your cohabitant here starts up the fusion engine, we’ll be on our way,” Jao said. “How’s it going, Smeth?”

  Smeth, startled out of his slack-jawed adoration of his firstborn, replied, “I’ve got a crew aboard the probe overhauling the systems now. The four-wave mirrors need realignment, and there’s been some minor damage to the web of the scoop, but it held up pretty well, considering. I’d say we ought to finish in a two of Tendays, and then we’ll be ready to travel again.”

  “We ought to be able to land on the outside of whatever’s walling off the sun!” Jao said enthusiastically. “The temperature’s a nice comfortable three hundred degrees Absolute. Then we hightail it out of the system and start looking at yellow dwarfs. There’s only eight or nine possibles within a twenty-light-year radius, and I’m betting one of them is the birthplace of Original Man. The stars around him would’ve had different relative motions—the guidepost constellations in the Message are no good to us now—but they’d have the same general orbits around the galactic center, and I’m betting they didn’t drift too far apart. This beacon would’ve been one of the two or three closest.” He showed all this teeth to Ame in a gargantuan grin. “You’ll be able to multiply with a clear conscience by the time the twins are grown.”

  Bram marveled that Jao was able to be so bluff and nonchalant on the subject in the face of his own tragedy. His second child, by some fluke, had proved to be immune to the immorality virus. The boy had grown into a humorous, likable chap with Jao’s talent for physics. He had made some notable contributions and had left offspring himself before dying at the age of a hundred and thirty. That had been two 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 fill-ins 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,” Enyd said. “It wants to spin normally for a while. It can’t go back so soon to the artificial rhythm of adjusting its lateral growth once every Bobbing.”

  Bram looked at Mim. “Go on ahead, Mim. I’ll catch up.” Mim and Ame left after a belated, perfunctory exchange of greetings with the distracted Enyd.

  “How is Yggdrasil’s ice reserve?” Bram asked, before Enyd could resume her complaints.

  She hesitated, then said scrupulously, “Adequate, I suppose. But if we are to resume traveling, I would prefer to achieve satiety.”

  “I’ll tell you what. When we get the fusion drive started, we’ll chase down a few more comets for Yggdrasil before proceeding inward.”

  “Captain, water and trace elements aren’t the only point. Yggdrasill needs a summer season, relief from stress, time for sustained photosynthesis. I wouldn’t mind if you turned on the fusion fire for that; right now, Yggdrasil’s trying to make do with starlight … and the minor portion of infrared that it’s able to convert into the six-hundred-sixty-and seven-hundred-thirty-millimicron range.”

  Her voice was almost tremulous, belying the cool, remote beauty that drove her suitors wild.

  Bram spoke gravely. “I’m confident in your ability to monitor Yggdrasil’s metabolism and do whatever is necessary, Chief Officer Enyd. I’m going to ask you to keep this tree happy for two more years. That’s the time we’ll need to penetrate to the center of this system under one gravity’s acceleration. Then we can let Yggdrasil bask in the light of a real sun for a while, while we explore.”

  Edard sat in the cello section with Mim and the other two cellists, but sometimes in the finicky passages he would leave off playing and beat time for the other musicians. Bram watched the slender, dark-haired figure with pride. The music was first-rate; everybody said so, Mim had told him after the rehearsals. Even the old diehard, Kesper, had said with tears in his eyes, “If Mozart had written another symphony besides the Jupiter, it would have sounded like this!”

  In the seat beside Bram, Smeth was trying to suppress a cough. Jao glared at him fiercely, and Smeth grumbled, “Where’s the tune? Everybody’s playing something different.”

  There were whispers of “Quiet!” from the surrounding seats, and Smeth subsided. Bram looked around the great, carved wooden chamber. Every one of the eight thousand seats was filled, and a repeat performance had been scheduled for those who were unable to get in. Edard had refused to allow a microphone pickup, saying that it would only encourage people to listen in their own chambers.

  The live sound was glorious, Bram had to admit. The acoustics of the wooden cavity, refined over the centuries, helped.

  Stringed instruments had come a long way in five hundred years. The new cello was like a truncated pyramid the height of a child, and the performers played it vertically instead of horizontally on a stand, as before. The bow weighed only a couple of pounds now and could be played without an elbow clamp; it was a lightweight plastic framework with its own power source to keep the continuous friction band running smoothly around its sprockets. Mim was a stickler for proper bow technique. She told her students that the bow should hardly be moved at all—just raised or lowered on the eight strings.

  The music was coming to a climax. The cellos all buzzed in unison; the violins soared; the horn players raised their long, conical instruments and blared in thrilling harmony.

  It was over. Bram stood with the rest and applauded. On the central platform, Edard looked flushed and pleased. Mim went over and kissed him.

  “You’ve got a talented boy, all right,” Jao said. “Too bad he has no head for science.”

  Bram laughed. “Are you trying to sound like Smeth?”

  “I’d never say a thing like that,” Smeth protested indignantly. “I thought it was … very good.”

  The applause rose, swelled. The other musicians were closing around Edard, clapping him on the back, grasping his hands. Edard looked no younger than the others, but Bram could not help reflecting on his age. What will he develop into, he thought, with all eternity ahead of him?

  The audience had settled down again for the encore. Edard had wisely refrained from repeating his own music and was giving them the familiar slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony—deliberately inviting comparison, Bram thought, smiling at the arrogance of youth. He closed his eyes and listened as the long-drawn cello melody gravely climbed its steps while the violins scolded it. The audience held its breath. Even Smeth sat rapt and silent beside him.

  There was a tap on his shoulder, and he turned toward the aisle to find Trist leaning apologetically toward him.

  “I’m sorry,” Trist whispered, “but something’s come up. I think you’d better have a look at it. Jun Davd’s waiting for us.”

  The violins had succeeded in wresting the theme back from the cellos. Bram looked longingly at the communing musicians on the platform. Mim and Edard would expect to see him backstage afterward. He gave a resigned shrug and eased his way out while people glared at him. He followed Trist up the aisle. The heavenly music floated after him. A backward glance had told him that Jao was trailing along behind, prodding a resisting Smeth.

  “Now, what’s this about?” Bram said when they were out of the hall.

  “We’re getting some very strange radio signals,” Trist said.

  Bram stopped in his tracks. Smeth and Jao piled into him. “Intelligent?” he said.

  “Let’s just say they’re nonnatural,” Trist said.

  Jao’s big hand grabbed Trist by the shoulder and spun him around. “Where are they coming from?” he said hoarsely.

  “From everywhere,” Trist said.

  “What do you mean?” Bram said.

  Trist bit his lip. “I mean from half the sky. From every star in a volume of space that—” He broke off. “Best come see for yourself.”

  “But what kind of—”

  “Jun Davd’s still sorting out the data the computer dumped,” Trist said. “He’ll probably have a simulation ready by the time we get there.”

  And that was all they could get out of him during the trip to the Message center. It was a ride of over twenty minutes, even on the high-speed mag-lev tubeway that had finally replaced the outside slingshot pods on eight of the twelve major branches. Bram had to watch Smeth fidget and listen to Jao grumble all the way. He found it hard to contain his own curiosity, but he knew there was no point in pressing Trist.

  The Message center had been gathering dust during the five centuries of coasting between galaxies, and had been reopened only in recent years, as an adjunct of the observatory. It had been thought worthwhile to begin searching for possible evidence of artificial signals as they approached the volume of space that once had held the civilization of Original Man—if they were going to have intelligent neighbors, they had better know about it—and the radio installation still held a lot of specialized equipment and the old programs that Trist had used in monitoring the Nar wavelengths on the way out of the Whirlpool galaxy. But the search program still took a back seat to the long-range radioastronomy programs that Jun Davd had set up using the Message center’s antenna ray, includ
ing the accreting computer model of Jao’s magnetic eight-spoke theory to account for the periodic extinctions of Earth’s life.

  The tremendous cylindrical arcade was darkened and silent as they floated through it; with the fusion drive turned off, the tree was practicing a few small economies in its use of electric power. Far down an avenue of shadowy capacitors, Bram could see the bobbing lights of one of the skeleton maintenance crews that made periodic inspection tours here. Trist led the way in a series of shallow touchdowns. The gravity was almost nil this close to the tree’s center of rotation; they had to wait once for Smeth, who incautiously bounced too high and got himself captured by what had been the ceiling when the tree had been under acceleration.

  “Here we are,” Trist said, letting them into his old office.

  Jun Davd looked up at them from a jumble of printouts and scrawled summaries spread out around him on a variety of work surfaces. Screens and variously organized date windows were fine, but there was nothing like paper when you wanted to see everything at once.

  “Ah, here you are,” he said. “Did you tell them?”

  “Yes,” Trist said.

  “Tell us?” Jao roared. “He told us nothing except that we’d better come have a look for ourselves.”

  Jun Davd said imperturbably, “You know that we have a number of ingenious computer programs written by Trist, designed to search likely wavelengths for patterns of various types, with all sorts of Doppler compensations—for our motion, the motion of stars, the motions of presumed planets orbiting in a variety of presumed planes, shifts in limb brightness along the edges of the presumed planets as the planets themselves rotate around an infinite number of presumed axes … it’s all very complicated, particularly when we ourselves are moving.”

  “Yes, yes,” Jao said impatiently.

  “Some of the data goes back over a year—we’d already spotted the infrared emission of our invisible star and were decelerating toward it. But the computer never sounded the alarm. Neither did the technicians who conducted the occasional random sampling. But that’s not surprising. The data picture didn’t become really interesting till we came to rest.”