The Genesis Quest

by Donald Moffitt

  “Yes, you should listen to Btam,” Mim said. “He wants to be a scientist. An astronomer. And he hasn’t given up on his feelings the way you have!”

  “Oh, astronomy,” Smeth said with a condescending smile. “A descriptive science. In physics, we’re doing things. Things that are important even to the Nar.”

  “You can scoff all you want to, Smeth Norv-Tomas Claster,” Mim said with her pert chin thrust out. And then, to Bram’s horror, she began spilling out his most precious dream as if it were an itinerary for a day at the beach. “But Bram said the most beautiful thing to me a moment ago. He showed me the place in the sky where Original Man lived, and he said what if someday the whole human race were to pack up and go home, back to the star we came from. And find our heritage again. What good is science for if it isn’t to give us dreams like that?”

  Smeth gave them a superior smile, full of what seemed to Bram to be more than the normal number of teeth. “In the first place, we didn’t ‘come from’ someplace else. We were created here, right in this solar system, out of laboratory chemicals, from a recipe which may or may not have been identical to the genetic code of the senders. In the second place, the notion of traveling to another galaxy isn’t science, it’s sheer mush-minded fantasy. It’s not exactly the same as traveling to a star a few light-years away. Or even a few tens of light-years away.”

  “Bram didn’t mean it literally,” Mim said with misplaced protectiveness. “It’s just a beautiful thought. And you’re horrid for making fun of it.”

  The smirk on Smeth’s face made Bram throw caution to the winds. He remembered the long discussions with Jun Davd about the wonders of the cosmos, the startling ideas that Jun Davd had stuffed his head with — ideas far beyond the normal curriculum for his age at middle school in the Compound.

  “Maybe you haven’t heard of a little thing called relativity,” he said with a bravado he was not feeling at the moment. He spoke mostly for Mim’s benefit. “The faster an object travels, the more slowly time passes for it. If a spaceship traveled close enough to the speed of light, it could cover any distance in practically no time at all.”

  “Have you worked out the math?” Smeth said.

  “Well, no,” Bram admitted. “Not exactly.”

  Smeth whipped out an inkcap and fitted it over his forefinger. He set his plate of food down on the ground, and from a bulky wallet clipped to his lab frock he produced a note roll and tore off a ragged length.

  “All of the relativistic effects,” he lectured, “depend on something called the gamma factor. It can be expressed as one divided by the square root of one minus the square of velocity divided by the square of the speed of light.” He scribbled rapidly on his knee, using the stray light from the pierced door behind him. “As anyone with even an elementary knowledge of algebra can plainly see, the relativistic effects are insignificant until you get very, very close to the speed of light. At ninety percent of the speed of light — if there were any way of attaining it — the time dilation effect would only be a little more than two to one.” He scribbled some more, then raised a shaggy head. “At ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, the time dilation effect is about seven to one. How far away is this galaxy of yours, Bram, my boy?”

  Bram reddened. “Thirty-seven million light-years.”

  “Congratulations. You’d get there in about five million years of shipboard time.”

  Bram could not look at Mim. “You’d just need a higher speed, that’s all,” he said.

  “Oh, ho, listen to him!” Smeth crowed. “You want a higher speed? Okay.” His long skinny forefinger traced a new set of marks on the scratch scroll. “You’re traveling at ninety-nine and nine-tenths the speed of light. I don’t know how you’re doing it, but you are. And the gamma factor works out to twenty-two point thirty-seven. Which means that you get to your ‘home’ galaxy in a little matter of one million six hundred fifty-four thousand years. But in the meantime, another thirty-seven million years’ve elapsed in this pet galaxy of yours. How long did it take Homo erectus to evolve into Homo sapiens? About a million years? How long did Original Man exist as a species? About one-tenth of a million?”

  “All right,” Mim said. “We get the idea.”

  “I’m not finished yet. Where are we going to get the energy to accelerate Bram here to that close to the speed of light? To say nothing of the rest of the human species. How much do you weigh, Bram?”

  “Knock it off, Smeth,” Bram said, his face burning.

  Smeth was enjoying himself. “And we’d better give you some air to breathe, and some snacks to eat along the way. Call it a million-ton payload. Hmm, we’d better assume that we have a magical space drive that converts matter entirely into energy. And that all that energy goes into moving the ship — no fraction of it wasted for reaction or for cooking the passengers! That’s simple. We’ll just use the energy to push against the universe so that all the energy will appear in the ship.” His finger flew across the page. “At ninety-nine point nine percent the speed of light, figuring the mass ratio at two divided by a factor of one minus the velocity divided by the speed of light, we get a figure of about two thousand times the mass of the payload, and when you convert all that into energy —” He tore off the end of the scroll and raised his head with a friendly sneer. “— you find that Bram’s little excursion would take more than the total amount of energy that the entire Nar civilization has produced in the last thousand years.”

  While Bram shriveled in his seat and wished for the ground to swallow him up, Mim shot a suspicious glance at Smeth and the ribbon of paper he was dangling.

  “Don’t be obnoxious,” she said. “I don’t believe you figured all that out while you were sitting there talking to us.”

  Smeth didn’t have the good grace to be crestfallen. He grinned with delight. “You’re right. My study team’s been splashing the waves on the subject for a couple of days now. None of the ideas that came out of the brain sessions were as wild as Bram’s, though. I’m not supposed to say anything till the official announcement.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Our team’s been chosen to assist in a tremendous new multidiscipline Nar project. We’re going to be attached to one of their physics touch groups.”

  “Oh, Smeth, that’s a tremendous honor,” Mim said, her antagonism forgotten. “And you’re still a junior. What’s it all about?”

  Smeth frowned. “We don’t know ail the details yet. It has something to do with space travel. The Nar have decided to take the next big leap. The project’s going to take fifty thousand years or more to come to fruition, so some of the fellows think they’re planning to reach the center of the galaxy. For some purpose that’s terribly important to them as a race.” He lowered his voice. “About two Tendays ago, they had a world meeting. Millions and millions of them linked, petal to petal, with all the separate assemblies connected to other assemblies all over the planet by body-reader transmissions. All the other planets and moons in the system were linked too, with allowances made for the communications delay. I guess Juxt One won’t get the consensus for almost a year, by laser, and the other stellar settlements even later, but they’re going ahead with the first steps without waiting.”

  “Fifty thousand years!” Mim said. “Even the Nar don’t think that far ahead.”

  Smeth scratched his head. “Even the active phase of the project is going to take half a Nar lifetime. Hundreds of years. At least that’s what they figure.”

  Bram offered his hand to Smeth. “Congratulations,” he said stiffly.

  “Thanks, sprout,” Smeth said.

  “What about the project on the physics of brasses and woodwinds that your team was going to do next for the music department?” Min asked.

  “We won’t have time for silly stuff like that now. The music department’s on its own.”

  “Couldn’t the Nar project wait another year for you to join them? If it’s so long-range, your team’s little contr
ibution couldn’t matter that much. Isn’t human culture more important?”

  Smeth didn’t care for the “little contribution” phrase. “You don’t say no to the Nar,” he said irritably. “Besides, they value human insights. They recognize the fact that we conceptualize differently than they do, and that’s important when you get to abstractions like quantum gravitonics and supersymmetry.”

  “None of it’s going to make the slightest difference to anyone who’s alive now. Even our children won’t live to see any results.”

  “The same goes for some of the Nar who’re going to work on the project. The important thing is that we’re all going to play a part in a major purpose of this civilization.”

  “Which is?”

  Smeth was reduced to sputtering. “I told you! It has something to do with the diffusion of intelligent life throughout the galaxy! At the present rate, that could take thirty million years. That’s according to one computer model, anyway. But if this new Nar project is the signal of a basic commitment to such a goal, it could be done in as little as one or two million!”

  “And you say that Bram’s ideas are farfetched,” Mim said with a toss of her dark hair.

  Smeth recovered his infuriating composure. “Bram isn’t doing anything about his ideas, though, is he?” he said with a toothy smile. “You’re just pedaling water, aren’t you, sprout? You’re already a year past middle school and you haven’t even decided what floater you’re going to swim for, have you?”

  Smeth and Mim were both looking at him. A million wordless images churned round in Bram’s head, but the most satisfying one was the image of punching Smeth right in the middle of his toothy, condescending smile.

  The terrace doors flapped open, emitting a burst of light that contained a small party of humans. A woman was hanging on to a man’s arm and gushing, “Oh, you’re being much too modest, Jorby, darling. Everyone knows you’re the real brains behind the retrogenetics group. Willum may take credit for tomatoes if he wants to, but it’s you we’re all indebted to.” The party swept past, headed toward one of the parapets overlooking the ocean.

  Mim and Smeth were still looking at Bram. He cleared his throat. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’m seeing my foster tutor tomorrow. Voth-shr-voth. I’m sure you know who he is! We’re going to talk about my being taken into his bioengineering touch group, with him as my sponsor.”

  As soon as he got the words out, he felt as if he had been emptied of a flood, a warm tide that had rocked him since babyhood. He squared his shoulders and lifted his chin and looked Smeth straight in the eye.

  “That’s wonderful, Bram,” Mim said. “What a plum! Why didn’t you say something before?”

  Smeth swallowed manfully and stuck out his hand. “My turn to congratulate you, sprout. I knew you had it in you. Of course, it’s applied science, not pure research. But a lot of privilege goes with a billet like that. You’ll be walking on all points, boy. You’re a solid citizen now. They’ll be lining up to compare gene maps with you.”

  Bram blushed and avoided looking at Mim. His gaze wandered to the sky and its handful of stars. He found his little patch of nothingness by the prow of the Boat and weighed it against the real world he was going to play his part in.

  Why, he thought, wasn’t he happier about his decision when every voice of reason said he ought to be envied?

  Voth rose to greet him, laying aside the micromanipulator and feedback glove he had been working with. The attendant who had shown Bram in blossomed respectfully at the top and backed out of the chamber. At least, a human being might have described it as backing out: The Nar never needed to make a fuss about distinguishing front and back, having five choices in the matter at any given time.

  “I am pleased that you have come, Bram,” the venerable decapod vocalized in a deep baritone that seemed to have become more mellow, almost like the wooden cello contraption that Olan Byr had played the night before.

  “I am pleased to be here, Voth-shr-voth,” Bram said in the Small Language, like any deferential fingerling approaching from a distance.

  Without thinking about it, he lifted his arms in a dancerlike movement and rotated them palms outward in the childhood gesture he had acquired in imitation of the touch brothers he had spent so much time with.

  Bram studied his old teacher, noticing with a pang the physiological changes that were overtaking Voth as he hastened toward the final, reproductive stage of his life. The yellow petal-limbs had darkened noticeably at the edges and along the center creases, and the secondary lensless eyes in a row between the walking limbs were turning cloudy. Though he was still male, he would be ready for the mating pools within Bram’s lifetime. That was a hard thought to accept.

  “Come closer, little one,” Voth said. “Though you are not so little anymore.”

  Bram tore at his shirt. With a glad cry, he sprang forward. Voth peeled his tentacles down almost to the waist so that he was not much taller than Bram was. Bram spread his arms wide and felt the frondlike nest close about him. The waves of the Great Language enclosed him, and he could dimly comprehend the broad outline of their meaning, assisted by the muffled voice at his ear.

  “We’ll work together, eh, my boy? You and me and my touch brothers and their protégés, and you they shall treat as my son.”

  | Go to Table of Contents |

  Chapter 3

  The little five-legged transport beast skidded to a stop at the biocenter entrance ramp and lowered its central cup to dismounting height, its stiltlike legs bent into a picket of stiff arches. Bram emerged from the one-man howdah and slid to the ground. The pentangular creature waited for its payment, quivering with expectation. Bram dug into his shoulder pouch and tossed it the three polysugar bars that the distance had called for. It gobbled them up and hung around for more. Bram relented and gave it another one, then slapped its cool flank and sent it trotting back to the central stable.

  He stopped for a moment at the foot of the ramp to gaze upward at the tip of the gleaming white orthocone that housed the main body of the institution. It was over a thousand feet high, a slender unbroken tusk that dominated the district for miles around, and it was still growing at the base. It was awe-inspiring to think of how old it must be.

  Then, conscious of the rising sun, he joined the crowd — mostly Nar — that was hurrying to work across the bridge that curled over the surrounding moat of nutrient solution. The waters were an achingly beautiful blue, garnished with bright ornamental floaters, and Bram had to fight the impulse to loiter for a while at the balustrade.

  Really, he thought, he ought to move closer to his work. There was a small cluster of human housing nearby, mostly young singles who worked in the neighborhood, with adequate vending stations for the basic necessities. If he lived there, he could walk to his job every morning and not have to spend time and allowances riding.

  But then he’d be farther away from Kerthin. She’d never consent to living outside the Compound even if the two of them decided to make their relationship permanent.

  He quickened his step, throwing off the thought. A dignified Nar who was festooned with message bandoliers and carrypods “nodded” to him with a perfunctory flexing of his tentacle tips; Bram recognized him as an affiliated project director from one of the upper septa and returned the greeting with a two-handed spreading of fingers.

  The bridge debouched into the lowest usable septum of the nonliving part of the orthocone. It was an enormous, sweeping chamber with an avenue of clerical pavilions and reception booths around the outer perimeter. A central well looked down through two or three siphuncle holes to the chamber where the orthocone creature now resided, with a stout railing as protection against any random heavings of those thousands of tons of living flesh. Not that there was any danger of the creature breaking through to this level. It had lived here a couple of centuries ago. It would no longer fit through the siphuncle; at most a small hillock of itself might bulge through the opening. When it was feeling
blue or threatened, the best it could do at this stage was to retreat to a larger, more recent septum one or two levels below. Now it was almost finished secreting its latest bottom story, and in a few more decades the bio institute would be able to expand one more chamber downward.

  Bram ascended a ramp to the buttressed gallery that had been erected over the central well and waited with the crowd for an elevator car to come down the spiral. In the dark chasm below he thought he saw a suggestion of gray, oily movement, but it might have been his imagination. One of the cars, a pearly ovoid that matched the biological building material of the chamber interior for esthetic reasons but was actually a manufactured polycarbonate, whirred down on its helical gears. Bram got on with the rest and rose through the spiral from septum to septum until he came to a level about halfway up the orthocone. He stepped off and proceeded through a maze of foamed corridors until he came to Voth’s worksuite, a spacious, sunny series of compartments whose tall oval windows, cut out of the shell material, provided a spectacular view of the city.

  A small subgroup of junior associates was already at work, having an early-morning conference. Three of them were crammed at the entrance of a crescent desk, arms melded, a litter of touch pads scattered over the desk top. Bram waved at them as he walked by and got a frondlike flutter in return — one raised member serving for all three. Voth was not in yet; at least he was not visible in what could be seen of his chamber through the doorway. Bram proceeded to his own cubbyhole, a dusty space cramped by stacks of improvised shelving that contained piles of old records and reference materials that he kept promising himself he would sort out someday. The crescent desk wasn’t really a comfortable height for a human being, but it sat right up against one of the huge airy oval windows, and he enjoyed the openness of it — the feeling, when he turned from his work to take a brief break, of hanging in midair over the bustling, miniature activity of the city below.