The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  “Nonsense,” the director said obligingly in the Small Language after a moment of silence in which he must have been speaking to Voth solely in the tactile mode. “We’re always augmented by your presence, Voth-shr-voth. Is this the young person you spoke to me about?”

  Bram politely presented his palms as the director, without moving physically, shifted his body-face toward Bram. The Nar never actually had to turn around the way humans did, though most of them had a preferential front. Bram, unlike a lot of human grown-ups he knew, could always tell which of the five sides of a Nar was facing “forward.” The eyes in that direction seemed to have more expression, and, of course, there was more limb activity.

  “Yes, this is Bram,” Voth said, again supplementing his speech with words. “Bram, say hello to Pfaf-tlk-pfaf.”

  The director pressed a pair of dry, lifeless tentacle tips against Bram’s palms. Most Nar found it hard to believe that humans got any input from the Great Language and involuntarily held themselves stiff until they got to know an individual human being well.

  “Hello, young Bram,” the director said in stilted Inglex, repeating it unnecessarily in Chin-pin-yin: “Ni hao, Bram-xiao.”

  “I am augmented to mesh, Pfaf-tlk-pfaf,” Bram said respectfully, speaking in the pure Small Language with no human admixtures.

  The director was half a tip shorter than Voth, and his outer skin was a younger yellow. “So you’re the youngling who is interested in galaxies?” he said.

  “Yes, Pfaf-tlk-pfaf,” Bram said.

  “We’ll have something to show you shortly. In the meantime, why don’t you have a look around the place? Jun Davd here will show you around.”

  A very tall human person with white hair and umber skin had appeared at the director’s side. “Hello, Bram,” he said with a nice smile.

  Bram smiled back. He wondered how Jun Davd knew his name. The tall man took him by the hand and led him away. Voth and the director were deep in conversation, their tentacles melded up to what in human beings would have been the elbow, and the bifurcate tips of a second pair of limbs were beginning to quest toward contact.

  “I hope I haven’t disturbed your routines,” Voth was saying, still speaking the Small Language in rough parallel to his real conversation. Nar did that all the time in the first stages of establishing intimacy. It was a throwback to a less civilized epoch of Nar development, when two primitive decapods, meeting for the first time on some tidal flat, would literally have sounded each other out before entrusting their tender inner parts to a stranger.

  The director’s Small Language was full of slips and elisions now that he was no longer vocalizing primarily for Bram’s benefit. “Not in the least, Voth-shr-voth … scheduled anyway optical monitoring … prime interest object after all, first best proof … search intelligent life … universe.”

  Voth replied, still eliding hardly at all: “… still kind of you to indulge us, Director. I am old … soon time to mate and die … I have adopted many human children over the centuries, but none has affected me as deeply as this boy, Bram. Perhaps —” There was the steam whistle sound of a Nar laugh. “Perhaps it is a side effect of beginning endocrine changes … prepare for maternal behavior —”

  He broke off as he realized that Bram was still within earshot. Bram felt a tug on his hand. “Come on,” Jun Davd said gently.

  Bram didn’t exactly understand everything that Voth was saying. He knew that Voth was talking about his own death. But there was no sadness in it. Instead, there was a sort of joy. The Nar didn’t fear death the way human persons did — maybe because they lived for a thousand years or more. Whatever sadness there had been in Voth’s tone had been reserved for Bram. But that was silly, Bram thought. He wasn’t the one who was growing old.

  “Have you ever been in an observatory before?” Jun Davd asked.

  Bram shook his head.

  “Most of the really important work is done in space or on the airless moons,” Jun Davd explained. “But there’s still plenty of work for a planet-based observatory. This is one of the biggest.”

  Bram could believe it. He and Jun Davd were mere specks in the immense perforated ball of the main chamber. It must have taken years to grow. Echoes bounced off the distant walls, and huge, spidery steel and polycarbonate structures rose out of the shadows. There were human figures in white smocks here and there, but most of the personnel were decapod. Jun Davd hurried Bram past a group of scientists having a conference; one of them was stretched out against the tilted star-shaped surface of a body reader, absorbing input from some instrument or other, while three more Nar, two of them wearing optical girdles, linked tentacles with him.

  Jun Davd brought Bram to a halt on a balcony above a tremendous bowl of blue jelly. A great latticework cylinder enclosed them. Suspended high above the center of the bowl, almost close enough to touch, was a silver sphere the size of a young house.

  “This is the big eye, Bram,” Jun Davd said proudly. “With it, we can see far into the universe. There are bigger eyes in space — thin films stretched across thousand-meter hoops out there where gravity can’t make them sag, but even so, they’re not as good in some ways as this one. And they never will be until somebody figures out a way to develop a big bioreflector that will live in vacuum.”

  It really looked like an eye, Bram thought, with the small black circle stating out of the middle like a pupil. He said so to Jun Davd, who laughed.

  “Oh, it’s not an eye like yours or mine, Bram. That round thing in the center isn’t a part of the living stuff. It’s a well to let light through. There’s a sheet of charge-coupled devices growing underneath in a nutrient solution. The eye itself is made of millions of tiny facets built up of alternating layers of cytoplasm and guanine crystals — on the same principle as the mirror optics of the Nar eye and the eyes of the other advanced life forms on this planet. In fact, Nar genetic material was the starting point. The layers have different refractive indexes. They’re built up in stacks, each a given fraction of a particular wavelength of light. The eye responds to external stimuli and looks at what we tell it to.”

  “Could you ask it to show us something now?”

  “Oh, no,” Jun Davd said hastily. “I’m not allowed to touch it. You have to have an apprenticeship of a century or more to reach that level.” He ran a hand ruefully through his white hair. “I’m not old enough to qualify. I’m afraid I never will be.” He gave Bram his nice smile again, white teeth in a dark face, “I can show you something through the small refractor, though.”

  “Can I see Ilf?”

  “Ilf’s already set, I’m afraid. Along with its primary, the lesser sun.”

  “Oh.” Bram was disappointed.

  “You don’t need a telescope to see Ilf, you know. At least, I’m sure you don’t. My old eyes can’t quite manage it anymore, It’s the dimmer of the two stars near the lesser sun. The brighter star is the gas giant. They both shine brighter than they ordinarily would at that distance — almost as bright as some of the planets that belong properly to our own sun — because they reflect the lesser sun’s light. You know they’re planets, not stars, because sometimes they’re on one side of the lesser sun and sometimes on the other. You see, in a double star system like ours, even the smaller sun can hang on to its own planets if their orbits are close enough and the bigger star is far enough away.”

  Bram paid courteous attention. When Jun Davd finished, he said, “I look for Ilf all the time. Voth showed me where it was. But he says that pretty soon I won’t be able to see it anymore. Not till next winter, anyhow, I guess I was too little to remember about that from the year before.”

  “Why do you want to look at Ilf through a telescope, Bram?” Jun Davd asked.

  “I thought maybe I could see people on it.”

  Jun Davd didn’t laugh this time. “It’s too far away to see the people walking around. It would look sort of like a big fuzzy ball.”

  “Could I
see the people on Jumb? Jumb’s closer.”

  “I see you know your subject, Bram,” Jun Davd said gravely. “You’re right, Jumb is closer. It’s one of our own gas giants. Actually, there are no people on Jumb itself. They live on its moons.”

  “Could I?”

  “No, Bram, I’m afraid not. Jumb would look like a fuzzy ball, too. Why are you so interested in seeing the people?”

  Bram shuffled his feet. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, let’s have a look anyway. Jumb’s in the sky tonight, at least.” He took Bram by the hand and led him to a small auxiliary structure growing out of the main ball.

  Bram was somewhat mollified after having a look through Jun Davd’s telescope. It was more like what he thought a telescope ought to be like, with a big long barrel and an eyepiece that you looked through squinty fashion, with one eye closed. Jun Davd showed him how to look through it after clearing away some equipment that, he said, had done enough work for now. “Don’t stare too long, Bram,” he said. “Take short looks. Here, I’ll set it up for you.”

  At first Bram didn’t see anything. Then there was Jumb, no longer the familiar brilliant point of light in the sky but the fuzzy ball that Jun Davd had promised, as plain as anything once he got used to its jumping around like that.

  “Do you see the moons, Bram?”

  Bram caught his breath as he spotted the cluster of bright dots swimming next to the mottled face of the gas giant and realized that they were little worlds, worlds with human and Nar people living on them. There was a round black speck pasted on Jumb. After a moment his eye turned it into the shadow of another moon that he couldn’t see, and in a bright flash of intuition he suddenly could appreciate the scale of what he was seeing.

  “Would you like to see Juxt One, Bram?” Jun Davd asked. “There are people living there, too, almost a light-year away. Next to this world and Ilf, there are more human beings living there than any other place in the universe — thousands of them.”

  Bram tore his gaze away from the eyepiece and nodded dumbly.

  “I’ll have to show it to you on a screen. We can’t see the actual light directly through a telescope like this, of course. I’m going to tap into a relay from the orbiting multiple-mirror telescope. They keep an eye on it all the time for the laser message traffic.”

  Jun Davd busied himself with a terminal that had been fitted out with buttons for human use. “All the mirrors gather photons and combine them into one computer-enhanced image,” he said. “Human engineers contributed a lot to the system. We’re considered to be very mechanical-minded, you know.” There was a hint of the proprietary in his tone.

  The screen lit up with a rather diffuse round glow, but Jun Davd seemed very pleased with it. “Watch,” he said. He manipulated his terminal, and the glow seemed to coalesce and dim. It moved sideways off the screen, and after a moment a tiny irregular blob of light moved to the center of the screen from the other side.

  “There you are, Juxt One!” Jun Davd said triumphantly. “You know, Bram, the Nar were awfully lucky in their choice of a planet to evolve on. They were able to learn star travel by easy steps. First, being part of a double star system with a companion only light-hours away. A companion star with its own habitable planet, Ilf, and a gas giant with seven decent-size moons more or less within the ecosphere. And then, when they were ready for the next big step, being blessed with another star system less than a light-year away. The average stellar distances in this part of the galaxy are four or five times that. But even a human being can get to Juxt within a reasonable fraction of a lifetime.”

  “Jun Davd, are there any human beings farther away than Juxt?”

  “Hmm, yes, we’ve spread with the Nar to four or five of the nearer stars. And I’m sure that future generations of human beings will spread still farther from those foci. The Nar themselves now occupy a volume of space with a diameter of about a hundred light-years, and that’s about the limit for them, even with their longer lifetimes. But as their outposts continue to develop the way Juxt One has, they’ll serve as jumping-off points too. Why, in a million years they could even expand through the entire galaxy! And you can rest assured that wherever they go, they’ll take human beings with them. Or grow a new crop of us.”

  “I’m going to go myself!” Bram exclaimed. He found Jun Davd’s words disturbing, though he could not have said why.

  Jun Davd smiled winningly. “Bram, Voth-shr-voth says you’re very good at arithmetic for your age. Do you know how big a million is?”

  “I guess so,” Bram said unwillingly.

  “Except for Juxt One, and maybe Next, you’d have to spend most of your life journeying even to the nearer inhabited stars, with no company except your ship-brothers. Almost all of the humans who live in those places were born and grew up there.”

  Bram wished he could close his ears and not hear what Jun Davd was saying, but he didn’t want to hurt Jun Davd’s feelings, so he gave him his full attention and said nothing.

  “But the next best thing to going to the stars,” Jun Davd went on, “is studying them. How would you like to be an astronomer when you grow up?”

  “I guess it would be okay,” Bram said.

  “Voth-shr-voth thinks it might be a good profession for you.”

  Bram was surprised to hear that. Voth’s own field was genetics, and if Bram had ever visualized an adult career for himself at all, he would have supposed that Voth would wish to take him under his own arm.

  “Well, think it over,” Jun Davd said. “You’re welcome to come back and visit any time. We can talk, and we can look at the stars together. Would you like that?”

  Bram nodded vigorously. “Yes,” he said, meaning it.

  There must have been some kind of signal then, because Jun Davd raised his head and said, “They’re ready for us.”

  He brought Bram back to the balcony circling the big eye. The director and Voth were waiting there, along with a couple of young Nar assistants. The assistants must have just finished their lunch; one of them was bent over a piece of equipment, and Bram could see down along the insides of his tentacles, where successive waves of cilia marched systematically toward the central maw, brushing crumbs and food particles inward. No Nar would speak in the Great Language until he had finished grooming himself this way; it would be, Tha-tha had once explained, like a human person talking with his mouth full, very impolite. It was surprising, Bram thought, how dry and fluffy a Nar’s inner surfaces could be within a minute or two of eating.

  The director gave Bram a nod — actually a susurrated recognition signal in the Small Language — and said something to the assistant. With a last hasty sweep of food fragments, the assistant pressed a tentacle tip against a ciliated touch bar. There was a rumble of moving machinery overhead. Bram retreated to the shelter of Voth’s folding petals. He looked around for Jun Davd, but the white-haired apprentice had melted away.

  Down below, with shocking suddenness, the great bowl of blue jelly quivered once and turned a silvery white. It seemed to come alive like some kind of a creature trying to climb one side of the bowl to get at them. Bram wondered what would happen if someone fell into it. He shrank closer to Voth, and the soft mantle that wrapped him sent out waves of reassurance.

  “Get me a focus star,” the director said in the Small Language. “Let’s use the point star in the constellation of the Boat.”

  The huge sphere suspended across from Bram seemed to writhe and shimmer. Bram jumped. And then the night sky appeared realistically within a hoop on the balcony. The director touched tips absentmindedly with Voth, and Voth translated: “We’ve put a secondary focus up here for the moment and generated an amplified image on the screen for the lad. But it’s not really suitable for very faint objects. Once we zero in on our target, of course, the real work will go on below.”

  “What does he mean?” Bram whispered.

  “He means that we’ll see what the big eye sees,” Voth whispered back, “but it
will be by secondhand light.”

  The assistant had one of his waistline eyes screwed up against a tube. The bright star in the middle of the hoop bobbed around, then settled down and began to drift off-screen. A collection of indistinct lights swam into view on the screen, and the director took over the controls from the assistant.

  “This was their local group of galaxies,” the director said. “It’s smaller than our own local group. Basically it consists only of two spiral galaxies bound gravitationally to one another, each with its attendant swarm of satellite galaxies.”

  He made a fine adjustment, and the image sharpened. Bram could see the two spirals, like tiny glowing coiled springs, surrounded by hazy dots.

  “They had a name for our own local group, or rather the constellation it appeared in from their point of view,” the director went on. “They called it the Hunting Dogs.”

  Bram whispered to Voth again, and the director said, “That’s all right, youngster. What did you want to know?”

  “What’s a dog?” Bram said in a small voice.

  “It was another life form that the humans bred for companionship and various simple chores. We gather that it was intelligent but not as intelligent as Man.”

  “Did they make them?”

  “We don’t know,” the director said impatiently. “We think they may have been adapted from an existing life form.”

  “There are dogs mentioned in human literature, Bram,” Voth said. “You’ll read about them when you grow older.”

  “The human radio beacon was not aimed at us here in the Dogs,” the director continued. “It was aimed beyond us at a very large cluster of galaxies in a constellation they called Virgo.” He paused. “Virgo was their term for a being who has not yet attained the female reproductive stage.” There must have been some kind of a warning signal from Voth; Bram could feel its echo in the swish of cilia in the arm that enfolded him. The director hurried on. “The Virgo cluster of galaxies consists of well over a thousand galaxies, and we believe it to be the center of a supercluster of which our local group and the human local group are outriders. So the humans did a very intelligent thing. Can you guess what that is?”