“Bram—we hoped we’d find you here,” she said briskly. “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Sure, Silv.” Bram nodded to the group’s senior member. “Hello, Torm.”
“I’ll come to the point,” Silv said. “We represent a committee that wants you to run for year-captain this term.”
“That’s very flattering,” Bram said warily, “but I haven’t been year-captain for over two hundred years. just a working biologist and part-time astronomy assistant these days. There are plenty of qualified people around.
She set her jaw and drew a breath. “We believe you’re the candidate who’s needed at this time.”
“I thought you were going to throw your weight behind Ploz again. Everyone says he’s doing a good job.”
“He was the sort of year-captain we needed while we were still coasting. With deceleration, we’ve become a migratory society again. And there will be further upheavals as the populations of the outlying branches are assimilated into the annual branch once more. We’re going to undergo a lot of societal stress in the coming years. More important, our goal is in sight now.” She gestured past the crowds toward the overpowering panorama of the Milky Way’s bright center. “We need a renewal of our sense of purpose as a society.”
“What’s it got to do with me? It seems to me that we’ve hung on to our sense of purpose all right—even though the Father World is only a legend to most of the folk who were born between the galaxies. As to adjusting to an annual migration again, I wouldn’t worry. People manage.” He smiled reassuringly. “It might even breathe some life into All-Level Eve and Bobbing Day again.”
Silv was having none of his levity. “You’re a symbol of the old days for a lot of the people who weren’t around then. And for the original embarkees, you’re the leader who started them on this voyage. You were the first year-captain—I looked that up! We’ve run profiles of all the old leaders through the computer, and we believe you’re the one who’s best suited to bring the two moieties together.”
“The two what?”
It sounded like more of the jargon that Silv’s colleagues in the Theoretical Anthropology group were always culling out of the primal Inglex dictionary. They were always creating computer models of imaginary human societies and drawing fanciful conclusions from them. They claimed to use rigorous statistical methods, too, but from what Bram had seen, some of the more overweening practitioners of the arcane speciality had a rather shaky grasp of real math.
Silv metered her words to him carefully. “One-third of the population of the tree had been born within the last hundred and fifty years. Approximately one-fourth consists of the original embarkees and the generation immediately following, who share their values to a large degree. In between is an amorphous group who tend to be polarized in one direction or the other. Thus there has been an evolution toward endogamous moieties which—”
Torm interrupted with a twinkle. “What she’s trying to say is that the older and younger voyagers tend to divide into two groups as defined by their cross-mating practices.” He winked. “Not that I’ve noticed it myself.”
Bram laughed. “Tell that to my great-great-great-granddaughter Ame,” he said. “She’s been trying to fight off Smeth’s attentions for years.”
“Naturally, in an evolving culture the lines aren’t yet rigidly drawn,” Silv said with Signs of annoyance, “but we’ve drawn up charts and applied statistical methods, and we believe there’s a developing pattern of custom and taboo.”
Torm allowed his eyes to glaze, though not enough to be impolite. The lively old fogy of the Bachelors’ Lodge had again become the smallish, dapper young blade he must once have been. Bram would not have put it past him to have cast an eye on Silv herself for a little endogamous tumble.
“What it sublimates down to,” Torm said, “is that Silv’s crowd think I have enough influence with the old-timers to be worth cultivating and that if we can get together behind a candidate with across-the-moieties appeal, we’ll have the votes to win.”
“And that’s me?”
“You’re the only one we can agree on. If you say yes, the votes are guaranteed.”
“Will you accept?” Silv asked.
Bram looked past them at the fiery egg in the holo projection. “I’ll think it over,” he promised.
“A symbol of the old days,” Bram repeated with relish. “That’s what they’re calling me now. They want to dust me off and set me up as year-captain again.”
Mim paused in her work. She was feeding the score of a new string quartet by one of her protégés into her computer and punching in the program that would separate it into players’ parts for next Tenday’s performance. “That might not be such a bad idea,” she said.
“Oh, Mim, you know the job’s nothing but a headache,” he protested.
His daughter, Lydis, said, “What are you going to tell them?”
Lydis had hardly changed at all in the last five hundred years. She was still the same slender, dark-haired edition of her mother that she had been when she reached her final age, without an added ounce, worry line, or shift of body mass. Even her teeth seemed always to come in as identical replicas, not changing the shape of her mouth an iota. Lydis had not inherited Mim’s talent for music, though; she was a gifted and relentlessly practical engineer who had designed the hardware for some of the tree’s most important industrial biosynthesis plants. Currently she had taken an interest in piloting and was spending a lot of her time exploring the hangars where Yggdrasil’s fleet of landers was stored and practicing in the simulators.
“I haven’t decided,” Bram said. He went to the coldall and helped himself to a gourd of sapbrew. “The next few years are going to be very exciting ones for astronomy. We have the chance to study the galaxy we’re going to live in from the inside out, over a real-time frame of tens of thousands of years, so we can observe processes There’s that peculiar feature in the nucleus—the gas arc I mentioned. It suggests a powerful magnetic field, but at right angles to where one ought to be. We may find an answer in the inner parsec of the galaxy. We’ll never have the chance for a close-up view again. Jun Davd’s offered me the chance to be an important part of it. Being year-captain is time-consuming.”
He took a sip from the gourd. “And then there’s my own bioengineering project. Genesis Two. I’d have to shut that down entirely for a while.”
Mim put the string quarter score aside. “The observations will get made whether you’re there or not,” she said. “It will take years—decades—to sort them out and draw conclusions from them. You have all the time in the world. There are still tons of data from the explosion of the old galaxy that are lying there waiting for someone to go through them. Jun Davd can wait. And as for your genetics project, I know it means a lot to you, but that can wait, too. Your assistants can keep it warm. In any case, you couldn’t implement the project until we’re resettled.”
“I don’t know, Mim,” he temporized.
“I’ll tell you this,” she said. “For the last two hundred years we’ve had year-captains who immersed themselves more and more in the housekeeping details of the job. When they weren’t officious busybodies who tried to interfere with people’s lives, that is. Because for at least that long, a majority of the population have been people who think that the human past is a sort of fairy tale. They’ve never lived on a planet, never had a Nar touch brother—never even seen a real Nar, for that matter. They think that babies have always been made by two people in a nest together—not constructed out of nucleotides. They don’t have any real comprehension of the fact that the human species ceased to exist for thirty-seven million years, and that we’re here now by the grace of a wonderful race that’s ceased to exist itself, and that we escaped by the skin of our teeth, and that Yggdrasil is just a temporary habitat to get us back to the original seedbed of humanity.” She paused for breath. “Bram, do you realize that most of the people on this tree have never in their lives seen a real star—only holo projections? Maybe Silv is right. Maybe we do need to remind ourselves of what this trip is all about!”