He sat down inside his desk and leaned back in the human-style chair that Smeth had helped him lug up here — how long ago?
Seven years.
The first four of those years had been spent mostly in intensive study. Oh, Voth had put him to work from the very first day, giving him little problems to nibble around the edges of — problems that were always just the smallest distance beyond his reach. He’d had to bone up for everything, step by tiny step. But there was always a reward at the end of each step. Nothing was abstract. He was always learning something he needed to know, something he could use.
It was a good way to acquire an education.
Voth himself had been his tutor most of the time. With infinite patience, Voth had given freely of his dwindling life span, when he might have used those thousands of hours in the winding up of his own life’s purpose, in the grand summing up that the Nar set so much store by.
But Voth had also sent him to others, both Nar and human, for some of the specialized knowledge he must have. Mathematics, in particular, had been taught by a succession of human tutors. Nar and human brains were wired differently when it came to numbers. In particular, the Nar had the faculty of perceiving whole orders of mathematical operations directly, by totting up in computer fashion millions of digits at blinding speed on their ciliated undersurfaces. Mathematics was simply another sensory experience for them, generating higher orders of abstraction in the brain. In an analogous manner, a musically talented human might directly perceive the sensory information contained in a sound recording, deduce from it the organizational principles known as musical form, and, if sufficiently talented, even be able to reproduce exactly such details as harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration. The Nar faculty wasn’t precisely a matter of counting on their “fingers,” either. Specific areas of cilia didn’t seem to be involved. A Nar could temporarily remove a tentacle or two to talk, eat, or scratch while the process went on. In the same way, the musical human might hear his symphony on an inferior loudspeaker, with part of the information missing, and still arrive at the same results, note for note. A more serious difference between Nar and human Conceptualization was that imaginary numbers had no meaning for the Nar; instead of the idea of the square root of a negative number, they thought in terms of a sort of inside out number that, in operations involving hybrid complex numbers, made both the imaginary axis and the real axis simultaneously and equally concrete to them.
But Bram, his tutors informed Voth, had a rare talent for Nar conceptual thought. Perhaps it went with a high level of empathy. Bram had a greater affinity for the Great Language than any human Voth had ever known. He could even use the star-shaped touch readers in a primitive fashion — at least to point himself in the right direction for searches of indexed material — and he could plug himself into the periphery of a group conference and get something out of it beyond the shorthand information contained in vocalized talk. By now, Voth’s touch associates had grown used to the human adoptee who sometimes squeezed into a packed meeting, and they often drew him inward with two or three casual tentacles.
Seven years.
For the last three of those seven, Bram increasingly had been doing solid, useful work that was beginning to come to the attention of other touch groups in the institution. Learning never ended, of course, but now he was spending four-fifths of his time on subprojects. Word of his subtle metamorphosis to graduate status had even filtered down to the human community. It was Smeth who had made Bram realize this.
“I hear they’ve given you the responsibility for tailoring one of the synthetic genes in the new viral monofilament project, Smeth had remarked one day when they had bumped into each other in the washroom of the bachelors’ lodge where they were both living at the time. “Keep it up, old son, and you’ll be another Willum-frth-willum by the time you’re thirty.”
“It’s only a modification of one of the genes they’re using now,” Bram had told him. “They want to change an initiation codon to provide an extra loop. Where did you hear about it?”
“Oh, they’re raving about you. You’re a real pet. A shining example of what a human can do despite our limitations.” The breezy inflection didn’t quite come off. “One of the Nar at the biocenter has a touch brother in the physics group our team is assigned to. I’ll tell you this, old son, it’ll be all over the batch house by tomorrow.”
Smeth hadn’t changed much in the seven years except to get a little skinnier and a lot more pedantic. He had tried a beard for a while, but someone had told him it made him look scruffy. He had run twice for the presidency of the physics society and was sanguine about his chances in a third try. He could be heard in the common room evenings, talking about the need for a guild. Bram had grown rather fond of him despite his aptitude for being stuffy. Smeth wasn’t a bad sort, just awkward about people. When Bram had moved out of the lodge, he had even asked Smeth if he wanted to share quarters, but Smeth had declined the invitation; he preferred to live communally with the other bachelors, spending his evenings playing board games with some of the older members and practicing to become an old fogy himself.
Bram didn’t see much of Mim these days — except to make a point of attending her cello recitals whenever he could. They had drifted apart after their first youthful sampling of one another and the glad, glowing year they had spent together after the long interruption that had followed the initial experiment. It had been a comfortable relationship, as easy and natural as breathing, but despite their affinity for one another they had never discussed making it permanent, had never even had their gene maps compared. It was as if each of them had approached their liaison through a long corridor with the doors left open at either end.
Mim was making a name for herself as an interpreter of string music. An explosive renaissance of string writing had been inspired by that landmark performance of the Ravel quartet so long ago. The cello and the other string instruments had been modified and simplified since then. No longer were they ugly rectangular boxes on a table, with an unmanageable number of strings manipulated by foot pedals. Now they were six-string instruments tuned in fifths, and the players held them comfortably on their laps, pressing their fingers directly against the frets. The bow had been simplified, too: It had become little more than a lightweight wand, battery-powered, with an endless-chain friction band moving around it on sprockets.
Mim was living with Olan Byr now, and everyone said they were happy together despite the age difference. Mim had not given birth herself, but Bram had heard that she and Olan had contributed short nucleotide sequences to a genetic construct. He didn’t know if there was anything to the rumor.
Bram wished them well. He himself was caught up in the excitement of his relationship with Kerthin. So far he hadn’t been able to persuade her to move in permanently with him, but that day didn’t seem far off. They’d had an exploratory sequencing done, just for a lark, and while their gene mapping was still incomplete, they had every reason to hope that they would be allowed to contribute a preponderant number of their genes to a composite genome and rear the child as their own.
It was a sobering thought. Was he ready for a serious step like that? He stared out the oval window and told himself he was. Life was like a ride in a bubble car. You chose your car. And then you went to wherever the monofilament cable led to. He had made his choice the day he had gone to Voth and accepted the apprenticeship. He couldn’t complain. The problem was Kerthin. She kept telling him he was too complacent.
Bram sighed. Kerthin was sometimes difficult, but the emotions she stirred in him were a far cry from the placid contentment he had felt with Mim.
The conference across the way was breaking up. Through the chinks in his shelving, Bram could see the three participants taking leave of one another and ambling toward their workplaces. One of the juniors poked a crown into Bram’s niche and hooted at him.
“We’ve decided to apply a dose of colchicine to the meristematic tissue and try to force polyploid
y. How are you coming with that heterochronic gene?”
Bram gave a guilty start. Time to stop daydreaming. He could have it out with Kerthin tonight. There was some sort of political meeting she wanted to go to, but maybe he could talk her out of it.
“I’ve already snipped a piece of the nucleotide sequence,” Bram replied. “I think it will cross species if I can get my nonhistone protein to stick at the end of it. There’s a place where my ribosome-recognition site overlaps your recognition codon. I should have something for you this afternoon.”
“If it takes,” the decapod said, “we’ll have developed a new species out of the bud scales.”
“Don’t count on it,” Bram said.
“It could be a very useful organism,” the decapod said.
“Sure. A tree that lays eggs,” Bram said.
The decapod recognized a human joke, gave a credible imitation of a human laugh through its vocal syrinx, and withdrew. Bram settled down to work.
An hour later he had rescued the fragments of DNA from the buffer medium where he had stored them the day before. He examined a sequence on the little vid screen where it was represented schematically. It couldn’t be looked at directly through a muon scope; not if it was to be used afterward. But the chemical sensors in the tray told the computer what was going on, and the graphics were easier to work with, anyway.
The Nar did the same thing by touch, using a tactile display and feedback glove for the micromanipulators. For humans like Bram, there was a computer interface to supply a visual mode. One system wasn’t basically better than the other; it was just a question of style.
The thing on the screen was a representation of one of the eight genes that made an egg divide before it could become a chicken. Or rather, it was two of the nine genes that accomplished that particular trick. One gene was within the other; it used part of the same nucleotide sequence, but began and ended in a different reading frame. The ends of the snippet of life stuff also contained, respectively, a recognition site and a codon that with a little tinkering, Bram hoped, would be capable of an interspecies masquerade.
Bram did not know what a chicken was, except that it was some kind of animal that had lived in symbiosis with Original Man. A literary friend of Mim’s, long ago, had offered an ancient epigram by way of enlightenment: “A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.”
But the Nar had done away with the intermediate stage several human generations earlier — for ethical reasons. They had been horrified to realize that Original Man had intended his reborn self to eat a near-sentient life form as if it were a potato or a carrot. The Nar themselves ate no form of animal life more complex than a one-celled wriggler. So they had spent a century or two manufacturing a set of artificial heterochronic genes that made possible a self-replicating egg.
Now Bram had a sequence containing two of the heterochronic genes in his sights. On the screen it looked like an orange and blue chain of geometric shapes with blinking labels helpfully supplied by the computer.
Bram slipped his hand into a glove shaped for human fingers. The microscopic events he was manipulating showed up on the screen as abstract tweezers and suction tubes moving three-dimensionally among the abstractions of molecules. But instinct was everything, and Bram had a feeling for what he was actually doing in his invisible arena.
He skipped lunch and stuck with his work. By the time he was finished with his microsurgery, his face was streaked with perspiration and his limbs were stiff. He leaned back and stretched and looked at what he had.
The screen told him that he had successfully manufactured the chimera he wanted. The stretch of material from the heterochronic egg was spliced to the proper segment of embryonic stem tissue DNA from a space poplar. It was a good match. He still had a little patching to do at the joints — the gaps had to be filled with annealing enzymes and sealed with DNA ligase.
But what he had in front of him was a successful first step toward a poplar tree whose embryonic bud scale cells ought to be able to reproduce without maturing further.
Now came the tricky part.
He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. An unexpressed gene was no good to anybody. It would be the task of the Nar team to splice Bram’s fragment into the total poplar genome and get it to work within a cell nucleus. He had to give them a gene that was able to switch itself on.
He increased magnification and examined the sites where the regulatory proteins would operate. He needed a nonhistone fraction whose amino acid sequence would bridge the gap between plant and animal species. It didn’t have to be identical to an existing protein, though it would help if it were close, but it did have to recognize a specific DNA site and elbow aside the repressor histone. A clue to what he wanted might be found in the archives, going back to the design of the original synthetic genes for the heterochronic egg.
He took off his shirt and went over to the big whole-body reader in the center of the atrium. Nobody was using it at the moment. He didn’t feel like going all the way down to the library annex where they kept a few badly maintained human-style readers that interfaced with the Nar system. With luck he could tickle enough information out of the touch reader to narrow down the index search.
He punched in the main entries on the touch pad at the tip of one of the five points of the pentacle, adjusted the tilt of the top surface for comfort, and crucified himself on the machine. He could feel the ghostly tingle of thousands of tiny bristles against his outstretched arras, bare chest, and cheek. The chemical traces that were an integral part of the Great Language’s nuances manifested themselves as a series of ambiguous perfumes and passing astringencies on the surface of his skin, but he closed his eyes and concentrated on the broad recognition factors.
The machine scrolled through a menu of major subject headings. When it reached terrestrial DNA, he slowed it down and let it run through the list of the thirty basic human food crops until it came to eggs. It did not occur to him that there were no more than a dozen human beings in the universe who could do what he was doing now. It was part talent, part practice, part early conditioning, all factoring out to a rather small twig on the probability tree.
But now he was stymied. His fingers fluttered over the touch pad again and again, but he got no further. The broad bands of cilia movement he could feel against his chest kept fragmenting and marching off into a dozen directions, all of them useless. Whatever his adroitness with the machine, he still would never be a Nar. It was a little like a clumsy person using a shod foot to find the right page in a tissue-paged reference book.
Reluctantly, he asked for help. One of the Nar juniors found the information for him in a moment, using no more than a few square inches of tentacle surface.
“You kept wandering into a ‘records not available’ area,” the Nar explained. “The manufacture of those genes goes back a long way. Lots of dead ends, lots of useless stuff thrown out.”
Bram thanked him and took the reference coordinates over to the other side of the atrium for a printout. He got a thick sheaf of holos that would have translated into a series of minute-long, information-packed sessions on the touch reader. With a sigh he began the long, boring task of showing them one by one to the optical scanner of his desk computer and poring through the visual display that the interface program called forth.
It was dark outside by the time he wound up his work for the day. Through the tall oval window, Bram could see the city glowing softly. The biolights inside had come on, too, casting a shadowless illumination over everything. The building was mostly emptied out by now, a silent shell that made audible the faint hollow gurglings from below.
The biocrafting team was still at work, though, one floor down in the big lab with its special equipment. They had told Bram that his construct looked promising, that there was nothing more for him to do today, and that he could go home. But there were still some hundreds of nucleotide combinations in the chimeric stretch that might yet be profitably expl
ored, and Bram had gotten immersed in making a start toward cataloging them.
He thumbed the face of his watch and got a shock. It was 7:85. He had promised Kerthin that he’d be home before the eighth hour. He’d never make it in time, even if he found transport right away.
Guiltily, he stacked the holos and filed them away in his desk. He switched off his visual display and got up to leave. He had to wait a long time for an elevator. At this hour four-fifths of them were out of service, having their low-density flywheels recharged in anticipation of the following day’s traffic — the energy being supplied gratis by random shifts of body mass of the orthocone creature down below.
When he reached ground level, he found that he was in luck. One of the short-range transport beasts was discharging a Nar passenger at the edge of the nutrient lagoon. Bram was out of polysugar bars, but the leggy little pentadactyls carried a supply of them in a locked box that only the passenger could open, with suitable credit transfer.
Bram settled into the howdah and gave the beast its instructions with a few strokes of his fingers. Not being a Nar, he couldn’t give it a door-to-door destination, but when they got to the human quarter he could steer it manually.
The howdah teetered and rose. Bram settled back to enjoy the ride as best he could while he rehearsed an explanation for Kerthin of why he was late.
There were three people he had never seen before in his compartment, sprawled about as if they owned the place. Two of them were bearded, tousle-haired young men wearing aggressively utilitarian monos. The third was an extremely thin young woman showing her ribs and hipbones in a striped stretchshirt, tights, and legsacks. The strangers looked Bram over in bored fashion as he entered, but none of them made a move to get up from their puffseats.
“Where have you been?” Kerthin demanded, coming toward him. “We were just about to leave without you.”
Bram looked at her with pleasure, as always, no matter what her mood. Kerthin was tall, firm-bodied, and gray-eyed, her thick bronze hair braided into a heavy rope. She had strong features and smooth golden skin. She was dressed to go out, in a lightweight overmantle with a ruff collar.
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