Read Online Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01 by Genesis Quest - Free Book Online

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 Alis. “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 to 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 —”
    “No, you hold it,” the cellist went on smoothly. “At your age I was convinced that there was an unrealized