“It must be a very different society from the one we grew up in,” she commented.
“We’ll never know,” he said. “The people who stayed behind made their choice and we made ours. Speaking of which…”
He inclined an ear to the noise in the outside corridor. Some drunk was singing a Bobbing Day carol—off key—and his friends were making it worse by attempting harmony. Mim winced.
“Yes, we’re developing our own traditions, aren’t we? How would you like to try to explain All-Level Eve to the folk back home?”
“It’s all very natural to the younger set. Mim, do you realize that there are children who’ve been born on Yggdrasil—who’ve never known anything else? Some day they’ll outnumber us old-timers. By the time we get to the Milky Way—”
She took his arm. “Right now we’d better worry about getting to the Forum. It wouldn’t do for the year-captain to be late.”
He smiled at her and drew her a little closer. Together they stepped out into the corridor and let the crowd carry them along.
CHAPTER 3
The Bob dangled from five hundred feet overhead, its displacement showing just how badly askew the wooden chasm of the Forum was. Its carved onion shape, taller than two men, had been repainted in gaudy green and vermilion stripes by this year’s Bobbing Day committee. Though it was only about twenty degrees out of plumb—Yggdrasil had prematurely swung the bough ten degrees toward the true before being checked—that was enough to hang it above the chalked line at a point that was nearly two hundred feet from the painted bull’s-eye in the center of the floor.
“I don’t like sitting this close to it,” Mim said, taking a sip of her All-Level Eve cocktail. “I always think it’s going to fall and roll right over us.”
“It would roll in a circle,” Orris said. “That’s why it’s that shape.”
“It won’t roll at all because it’s not going to fall,” Marg said firmly. “I won’t allow anything to spoil Bobbing Day.”
Everybody at the table laughed. Marg was still the commanding presence she had always been. She was large, formidable, and matronly at this stage of her youthening, and poor Orris seemed a collection of sticks beside her.
“You’d better have a word with the acrobats, then,” Bram teased her. “If the one on top isn’t careful, he’s liable to get himself brained.”
They all looked across to where the acrobats were forming a human pyramid, no more than thirty feet from their table. There were six of them: five brawny lads in loincloths and a little lightweight fellow in rainbow skin-tights at the apex. They had managed to hoist the little fellow high enough to reach the Bob and set it spinning.
“Who are they?” Trist asked. “I think I recognize the one at the bottom right.”
“They all work together in the glucose-extraction plant. Nice boys. They’ve been practicing for months.”
Next to Trist, who had been holding her hand as if they were still in their early bonding years together, Nen said, “We all have to congratulate you, Marg. This is one of the best All-Level Eves ever. The decorations, the food, the entertainment—everything!”
Marg flushed with pleasure, and Orris beamed proudly. “Everybody on the committee worked very hard,” Marg said.
Bram looked around the Forum at Marg’s handiwork. The immense arena was lit by torches in wall brackets that cast a resinous red glow around the perimeter, where almost the entire population of the tree, with the exception of the few hundred who remained on duty tonight, were seated at tables, each defined by a circle of light cast by a sputtering resin stick. Garlands of silver leaves crisscrossed the walls, making a pattern of reflections.
There was no way to decorate so vast an area as the main floor of the ellipse, so Marg had very wisely left it in darkness, except for a central blaze of illumination where colored spotlights mounted high on the walls picked out the bull’s-eye where the Bob would come to rest. A few reddish glints here and there, where leaf arrangements had been strategically placed, gave an abstract geometric shape to the pool of darkness. More spotlights were aimed at the Bob itself and followed the entertainers.
The final touch, lending a sense of awe and mystery to the annual rite of rotation, was the beam of sullen, red-shifted light from the starbow, filtering down from a lenticel somewhere high above. On past All-Level Eves, the starlight had been jolly, multicolored, but now the surrounding vault of higher frequencies had contracted to a point forward of the direct line of vision from here, leaving only the bloody light that preceded darkness.
“Yes, here’s to the committee,” Bram said, raising his glass. “What else are you going to have in the way of entertainment?”
“Oh, we’ll have pattern dancing—three very talented couples from hydroponics—and some people who sing, and some very clever body puppets.” Marg turned to scold Mim. “And I’m very disappointed in you, Mim. I thought you were going to play the cello for us tonight.”
“Oh, nobody wants to hear concert music tonight,” Mim said. “This is an evening to have fun in. Besides, some of these people have been waiting a whole year for a chance to be on stage.”
The acrobats had given the little fellow a boost that allowed him to do a backflip past the onion bulge of the Bob, and now he hung by one knee from the suspending cord and swung the Bob in greater and greater arcs while the audience clapped and cheered.
Across the table from Bram, Ang dug her fingers into Jao’s beefy arm. “He’s going to swing right over us!” she squealed.
“Somebody pass the poor fellow a drink, then.” Jao belched. He took a mighty gulp from his glass and set it down. He squinted critically at the surface of his. drink. “Still an ellipse,” he said. “You know, it’s an awesome thought. At the very moment the Bob becomes plumb, five thousand ellipses in five thousand glasses are going to become five thousand circles.”
“And we’ll stop being all tipsy,” Ang said.
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” Jao said with a sly wink at the company. “The geometry of alcohol is not the same as the geometry of space. The object of All-Level Eve is for the people to become progressively more tipsy while the environment becomes progressively less so.”
“In that case, you’re doing very well,” Mim said with a laugh.
Out on the floor of the Forum, the rainbow-clad acrobat had dropped lightly to the shoulders of his fellows, to the applause of the surrounding ring of revelers. Noisemakers razzed and rattled. The human pyramid disassembled itself, acknowledged the applause with outflung arms and a curtsy, and tripped offstage. A singing duo took their place—a man and woman in clown costume: she with enormous quilted breasts, he with a braided rag phallus that trailed on the floor—and began singing bawdy songs to the rowdy encouragement of the onlookers.
“Who’s the Momus?” Trist asked.
“Don’t you recognize him?” Marg replied. “It’s Willum-frth-willum.”
“He’s lost considerable dignity.”
“He doesn’t need it anymore. He’s got his youth to look forward to.”
“I didn’t know he had such a good singing voice,” Mim said.
“He’s kept it hidden all these years.”
A lot of table hopping was going on as the time grew near for the swing of the Bob. People made their way across the tilting floor to drop off little Bobbing Day gifts, drink a toast with friends, embrace and kiss.
“It seems as if there’s always been a Bobbing Day,” Mim said, leaning against Bram’s shoulder. “I can hardly remember how it got started. What are we going to do when we leave the galaxy and stop accelerating and there’s no more annual tree turning?”